If there is any residual doubt that modern politics in America is a fractured and dysfunctional blind date, just take note of the blackout of local coverage of the recent Romney campaign’s Republican fundraising blitz that swooped into town for a 3-hit whirlwind on Sunday, July 8th. Raising over $3 million dollars in a matter of hours, the Romney visit was a well-calculated checkbook booster intended to reach into the ready cash of the uber-elite who have carved up prime ocean-front real estate in The Hamptons these the last 20 years.
The resulting press draught is sad yet not surprising in a region where fundraisers of every ilk are tantamount to exhaling during the summer months. Among the non-invited, the most concerted refrain was exasperation over the traffic bottle-neck that stalled the already untenable driving conditions we have become accustomed to morning, noon and night getting in and out of our villages.
Other than the headline-grabbing pre-arrival press coverage which found its way onto the front pages of all our broadsheet weeklies and Internet news blogs, actual real-time reporting on the three fundraisers, from either inside or outside the Secret Service-flanked estate bounds of Ron Perelman’s 56-acre Georgica Pond compound, Julia and David Koch’s Meadow Lane residence and Clifford Sobel’s Southampton beach home just down the lane, was relegated to sound bites snatched from the $5000-lunch plate and $50,000-dinner plate donors as they entered the gated drives.
The 100-plus protestors who were bused in from Manhattan to flank the beachhead off Cooper’s and trek their way to the high-tide line in front of the Koch estate were effectively marginalized in their outrage, equally tempted to take a dip in the 67-degree ocean while chanting “Romney Has A Koch Problem.”
Political ideologies aside, this snatch and run campaign stop was a cynical affair, engineered to buffer the presidential candidate among his devotees long enough for a few choice handshakes while bolstering campaign coffers for the four-and-a-half month presidential sprint ahead. Only the New York Times managed to report from the sidelines on Romney’s remarks which attempted to bridge the vast divide between the accumulated wealth of the attendees and the relative depravity of the voting masses:
“If you are here, by and large, you are doing just fine,” he said, his voice audible to a reporter standing on a public street not far away. “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about those here. I spend a lot of time worrying about those that are poor and those in the middle class that are finding it hard to make a bright future for themselves.” (New York Times, July 8, 2012)
Mother Jones, the progressive political national watchdog magazine, and locally, The East Hampton Press, attempted to capture the view from the ground, collecting push-back mainly from the bused-in protestors who rallied at Cooper’s Beach and a cadre of local Occupy supporters who gathered in the Meadow Lane neighborhood. Fewer than a dozen protestors showed up in East Hampton and the arrests of David Fink and Simon Kinsella made the next week’s edition of The East Hampton Star for reportedly colliding their sailboat “with a marine patrol boat stationed along the shoreline of the Creeks, Ron Perelman’s 56-acre estate. In a release, police said the pair had ignored directions to turn away.”
All said and done, raising cash was the clear purpose and the sole local message of Romney’s Hampton’s visit. After decades of over-the-top fundraising summer events, for the lion’s share of what comprises the daily consensus of The Hamptons as its’ multitudes forage from farm stand to surfside, the campaign stop was remote, elite and quickly forgettable.
A presidential candidate came to town and only the power-elite who ponied up for the $25,000 ticket heard what he had to say. The rest of us heard nothing — other than the off- hand accounts of local notables Andew Sabin, Ted Conklin and police officials patrolling errant protestors off the shoreline.
Brace yourselves for round two. Word is out the Democrats are coming in August.
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Forgive Us Our Daily Read
It may have been the Matt Lauer cover story in Hampton’s Magazine’s season opener, uncovering his penchant for cleaning up debris from neighborhood back roads, a garbage bag in his rubber glove clad hand and pre-teen daughter in tow, that tipped the scales for me.
Kudos to Lauer for his civic duty and sense of place. He’s spent his summers in Amagansett for the better part of his life and has lived in Sag Harbor full time long enough now to garner headlines for normalcy – suffering a separated shoulder from a bicycling accident (2009) to recently winding his way through planning board approval - albeit for a 40-acre horse farm off Deerfield Road in Water Mill.
Is the celebrity news cycle so under nourished that a Huffington Post headline, flashing a ‘scruffy’ Matt attends a recent Hamptons bash, is actually newsworthy? News flash: The ‘weekend’ Matt Lauer actually likes to unbutton his collar and, drum roll please, chillax a bit. Hurry, ink up the presses.
It’s the Johnny-come-lately celebrity reporter that does us all a huge disservice by making news out of ordinary life witnessed in arms reach of ordinary folk. Why, I saw Edie Falco choosing lamps and placemats at Sylvester and Co. but you don’t see me running home to post. We can’t expect her to eat by candlelight forever.
Coming of age in The Hamptons, you get to witness a great many ordinary moments of extraordinary personalities. Truman Capote and Jim Jones in rousing debate at the old Bobby Vans; DiNero sitting quietly on a bench outside of Book Hampton Southampton on a late fall afternoon (circa 1975), Bill Bradlee (post Pentagon Papers) parking his car in the Reutershan lot in East Hampton Village on his way to the liquor store; Fran Lebowitz exiting a Woody Allen movie (circa 1980); Craig Claiborne picking up his order from the butcher counter at Dreesen’s — ordinary moments nobody wrote about at a time when you were recognized for your talents and achievements, not your ability to be like the rest of us.
These days it’ll wind up on more than one celebrity page if Billy Joel parks his BSA motorcycle outside The American Hotel while stopping in for lunch. Alec Baldwin makes headlines going to yoga class with Lorne Michaels and Paul McCartney in Amagansett. If Kelly Ripa takes her kids to Bay Burger the blogosphere lights up in awe.
However, it gives me great pleasure to find John C. White, of the resolute Bridgehampton farm family, on Hamptons Magazine’s “Power List: The Hamptons 100” — the only native to make the grade, commended for doing what his family has done for generations, farm an oceanfront plot of land in Bridgehampton. Though, the heart saddens when it is for having to defend his rights to ownership in court — a genuine news worthy battle was provocatively reported in the July 2011 issue Vanity Fair, in an installment of “Letters From The Hamptons” by Michael Shnayerson, titled “Betting the Farm.”
I think it was Russell Baker’s coining of ‘the white wine and Volvo set’ in his New York Times Observer column (circa 1978) which first fueled my appetite for a keen essay treatment which shines a light on our very human vulnerabilities. His was a wry and satirical grace, having the effect of walking you into a room and introducing you to the dinner guests, winking from the corner of his eye as he sits you down beside the social climber who inadvertently offers up delightfully quotable faux pas right on through cocktail hour.
It is not that The Hamptons, this year’s Fab 100, and the rest of us simple folk are not up to something newsworthy — it’s the competitive laziness of glossy page editors and reporters who serve up thinly drawn snippets of the mundane. With such a rich and fertile landscape of personality, intrigue and creativity afoot from The Crow’s Nest to Red Bar, the Montauk Bluffs to Conscience Point, this is our daily read? Oh — Did I fail to mention that I saw Jon Stewart at the dump, Angelica Houston ordering tacos at La Fondita, Jerry Seinfeld watching a Whaler’s baseball game, Donald Sultan drinking coffee and Jason Epstein out walking his dog?
Kudos to Lauer for his civic duty and sense of place. He’s spent his summers in Amagansett for the better part of his life and has lived in Sag Harbor full time long enough now to garner headlines for normalcy – suffering a separated shoulder from a bicycling accident (2009) to recently winding his way through planning board approval - albeit for a 40-acre horse farm off Deerfield Road in Water Mill.
Is the celebrity news cycle so under nourished that a Huffington Post headline, flashing a ‘scruffy’ Matt attends a recent Hamptons bash, is actually newsworthy? News flash: The ‘weekend’ Matt Lauer actually likes to unbutton his collar and, drum roll please, chillax a bit. Hurry, ink up the presses.
It’s the Johnny-come-lately celebrity reporter that does us all a huge disservice by making news out of ordinary life witnessed in arms reach of ordinary folk. Why, I saw Edie Falco choosing lamps and placemats at Sylvester and Co. but you don’t see me running home to post. We can’t expect her to eat by candlelight forever.
Coming of age in The Hamptons, you get to witness a great many ordinary moments of extraordinary personalities. Truman Capote and Jim Jones in rousing debate at the old Bobby Vans; DiNero sitting quietly on a bench outside of Book Hampton Southampton on a late fall afternoon (circa 1975), Bill Bradlee (post Pentagon Papers) parking his car in the Reutershan lot in East Hampton Village on his way to the liquor store; Fran Lebowitz exiting a Woody Allen movie (circa 1980); Craig Claiborne picking up his order from the butcher counter at Dreesen’s — ordinary moments nobody wrote about at a time when you were recognized for your talents and achievements, not your ability to be like the rest of us.
These days it’ll wind up on more than one celebrity page if Billy Joel parks his BSA motorcycle outside The American Hotel while stopping in for lunch. Alec Baldwin makes headlines going to yoga class with Lorne Michaels and Paul McCartney in Amagansett. If Kelly Ripa takes her kids to Bay Burger the blogosphere lights up in awe.
However, it gives me great pleasure to find John C. White, of the resolute Bridgehampton farm family, on Hamptons Magazine’s “Power List: The Hamptons 100” — the only native to make the grade, commended for doing what his family has done for generations, farm an oceanfront plot of land in Bridgehampton. Though, the heart saddens when it is for having to defend his rights to ownership in court — a genuine news worthy battle was provocatively reported in the July 2011 issue Vanity Fair, in an installment of “Letters From The Hamptons” by Michael Shnayerson, titled “Betting the Farm.”
I think it was Russell Baker’s coining of ‘the white wine and Volvo set’ in his New York Times Observer column (circa 1978) which first fueled my appetite for a keen essay treatment which shines a light on our very human vulnerabilities. His was a wry and satirical grace, having the effect of walking you into a room and introducing you to the dinner guests, winking from the corner of his eye as he sits you down beside the social climber who inadvertently offers up delightfully quotable faux pas right on through cocktail hour.
It is not that The Hamptons, this year’s Fab 100, and the rest of us simple folk are not up to something newsworthy — it’s the competitive laziness of glossy page editors and reporters who serve up thinly drawn snippets of the mundane. With such a rich and fertile landscape of personality, intrigue and creativity afoot from The Crow’s Nest to Red Bar, the Montauk Bluffs to Conscience Point, this is our daily read? Oh — Did I fail to mention that I saw Jon Stewart at the dump, Angelica Houston ordering tacos at La Fondita, Jerry Seinfeld watching a Whaler’s baseball game, Donald Sultan drinking coffee and Jason Epstein out walking his dog?
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