The Joneses Are Here

I've been puzzling as to why yunnies hate mom-and-pops so very, very much. I was reading this post by EV Grieve in which he quotes an online review of an Irish pub that came down to make way for a new luxury tower. The reviewer writes:

"I hope places like this close down soon: We are all working on building a better downtown. I bought a 1.5 million dollar condo around the block from this place. I stopped in one weekday during lunch (i was off.) The place had 3 patrons at the bar, all of which looked worse then the other. The decor is lacking, the floors dirty, and the food was just ok. This place may be decent for someone who does not like finer things..."

And I wondered, as I have many times when reading similar commentary, what is this about? Why do yunnies feel such intense hatred of harmless, dumpy old places? The hatred seems deeply personal and expresses itself in a wish to destroy. It's one thing to say, "I don't like this place so I won't go there," yet another to say, "I hope it is eradicated." We hear this sentiment again and again in blog commentary and online reviews. It feels a lot like hysteria.

Then I realized (with thanks to Mr. Grieve): It's all about property values.



The yunnies are like suburban home owners, the Joneses who mow their lawns every Sunday and keep their porches freshly painted. Trimming hedges and weeding gardens, they want their neighbors to do the same--to not damage their property values. When a neighbor chooses to let their lawn grow, display chainsaw stump art in the yard, leave a car up on blocks in the driveway, or allow their paint to peel, oh how Mr. and Mrs. Jones go wild! "We are all working to build a better downtown," they say, "Why aren't you one of us, one of us, one of us?"



It is hysteria. "Burn it down! Run them out of town! A scourge on Elm Street!" the Joneses cry. Terrified by the specter of falling property values, they drag their neighbors into court, ordering them to keep up, keep up, keep up with us Joneses! And if you don't keep up...well, here comes good old blight, good old eminent domain, and didn't we need a new park anyway? Maybe something with cannons and faux piles of cannon balls, symbols of our terror of dirty, smelly natives who don't care about the finer things.

I have nothing against cleanliness. I like to see my elderly, immigrant neighbors sweep their stoops in the morning. This is Old World tidiness, not the same as New New York sterility. A little dirt is good for you--keeps the immune system strong. Today we're besieged by germaphobes. Their fearful suburban parents taught them to slather themselves and everything around them with antibacterial agents. Vongerichtification is their way of cleaning up the city.



The children of suburban Boomers have come back to reclaim the cities their grandparents fled years ago. They bring with them fear and hatred of anything urban. They bring suburban values that don't mesh with the city--and this is different from other, non-yunnie transplants to the city, who yearned to leave suburbia behind. The yunnies refuse to be city people. Dirt, rats, ugly signage? Clean it up, clean it up, clean it up! they say. Or else.

• Grandmother Jailed for Not Mowing Lawn
• Mow Your Lawn or Go to Jail
• Keep Up Your Curb Appeal!
• Form a Lawn-Mowing Task Force
• Disinfect America!
  

Neurotics vs. Narcissists

Smackdown! It's the neurotics vs. the narcissists as two of my favorite celebs, Woody Allen and Larry David, take over the East Village and Lower East Side for Allen's new movie.


See lots more photos by Lorcan Otway

They're at Cafe Mogador. They're at Yonah Schimmel's. They're everywhere! But can this follicly challenged dynamic duo from old-school New York take back the city for the rest of us neurotics?

Or will we lose it forever to the always-a-good-hair-day narcissists who, with the Sex and the City movie juggernaut on their side, aim to make "Lower East-Packing" the site of their "next douchey makeover"?

The tide might be turning as psychoanalysis gets a rennaissance and more and more New Yorkers complain about the deleterious effects of too much SATC.

Go Woody! Go Larry! Yay team!

(And before anybody helpfully informs me that Woody and Larry, like all celebs, are narcissistic, let me say that everybody's narcissistic to some degree--it's good to have healthy narcissism. Again, I am talking about the personality disorder, which is different. For more info, see Yunnies.)

• See Time Out's guide to hating Sex and the City on more douchification: "With the ladies of SATC came careening tour buses, gaggles of fratboys puking outside Hogs & Heifers and rows of women linked at the elbows mowing down pedestrians."

• Suburbanization and Anti-Semitism
• Plea to SJP
  

No Pecs, No Sex

It's official: Astor Place has traded books for bods. As speculated, the former Barnes & Noble will be a David Barton gym.



Sure, it was a giant chain bookstore--but it does sum up a shift in values, doesn't it? In this one photo we see how much Astor Place has changed very, very recently: The giant luxury condo tower, the glass-box newsstand smothered in billboards, the Starbucks reflected in the glass, and now David Barton and what Michael Musto called "body fascism" in his write-up of a Barton opening where scantily clad boys wore Barton's advertising slogans written on their bare bodies.

We are a city of mirrors within mirrors. Surfaces reflecting onto other surfaces. What depth will be left when all is glass?

Generation O

Everywhere, on payphones and stuck onto sidewalks, we're being forced to "Meet Generation O," the "trenders, spenders, and recommenders." O stands for the Oxygen Network as it aims for the demographic of young women "who consume heavily and influence others' spending patterns."

Look at this image of young womanhood: She's on the cell phone, preoccupied, tuned out. She's got a giant handbag and a giant shopping bag. She is walking. She is about to walk straight into you. She is about to hit you with one of her bags. She is about to hit you with her cell-phone elbow. She will call you a jerk after she hits you. Or she will just ignore you.



Hating this image makes me feel like a misogynist and I hate that it makes me feel that way. But I do hate this image. I don't think this was the idea post-feminism had in mind.

I can hardly express how much it makes me miss the brainy young women of New York City. The ones with funky glasses and clunky shoes. The ones who read books. The ones who think of other things, and talk of other things, besides shopping and real estate. The ones who were pushed to the margins, then pushed out. My heart aches for the return of those nerdy girls.

Get a Pretend Life

This week's New York Magazine takes a look at the high-end fakery behind selling "authenticity" in condos today.


all images from DistrictNY

To sell a property, realtors used to remove "all the individuating elements so buyers can imagine living there with their stuff," but times have changed. Buyers who need to borrow their identity from the outside world might feel alienated and anxious looking at a prospective home stripped bare of other people's selves. It only reflects the narcissist's internal sense of terrifying emptiness. So realtors stuff their model condos with lifestyle markers to say, "This is who you could be."



This trend began with the William Beaver House. Closets stuffed with someone else's wardrobe, cartoon images of sexy model-people, "lifestyle consultants"--all of it serves as a narcissistic parent figure, stuffing the buyers full of false selfhood, like their own parents did throughout their lives. Narcissists were not allowed to develop true selves--they were forced to adopt their parents' wished-for styles, tastes, and personalities. This creates a yawning, painful gap between true self and impossible ideal.

The condo-makers fill that gap--or, at least, they pretend to. It's like feeding pictures of food to a person dying of starvation. Delusional from severe hunger, they only think they're eating.

"I wonder if nowadays people just want to be in a hotel all day,” said architect Annabelle Selldorf in the article, “But if you’re young and you’re not from New York and you have a lot of money and work really hard, maybe it appeals to have a life that’s catered-to and ready-made.”



Take a look at District's marketing film. It bears a strong resemblance to American Psycho. I wrote about this before, but I do believe that Bateman embodies the narcissistic rage that lies deep within yunnies, a rage born from that agonizing gap between true and false self--it's a matricidal/patricidal rage that is barely below the surface in a culture that destroys everything that went before it, replacing it with its own glossy fake-self images.

The Pleasures of Walking

In a Times article this past summer, Alex Marshall discussed a resurgence of walking in New York, which he credits, in part, to the city's becoming "cleaner, safer and more prosperous." In the same issue, novelist Nicole Krauss sang the praises of walking in our city. She wrote, "I like to walk to be alone with the world, not to be alone. In this way, walking is a lot like writing. Both writing and walking (as I know it) are fueled by a desire to put oneself in relation to others. Not in direct contact — some aloneness wishes to be preserved — but contact through the mediation of language or shared atmosphere of a city street."

I echo Ms. Krauss' sentiments, but wish I could live in whatever city she is walking in. It sounds like New York circa 1990.


from t-squared's flickr: this is a parody

Throughout my first several years in New York, I loved nothing more than to walk the streets. Like Ms. Krauss, I enjoyed the sensation of being alone with the world, engaged in a "freewheeling thoughtfulness" or free association, one idea leading to another, blossoming and unfolding. When I felt like writing, I would go out hunting and gathering. The cobbler standing in his doorway with black-stained apron, the talcum powder smells coming out of barbershops, the old ladies leaning with elbows on windowsills. All of it fed my work--the way it did for city writers and artists like Frank O'Hara and Edward Hopper.

But the streets have changed. The little shops and the people who were once so emblematic of the city are vanishing. And the pleasures of walking are vanishing, too.


from t-squared's flickr: this is also a parody

Cleanliness and prosperity have brought sterility and narcissistic obliviousness to the streets. When once my fellow pedestrians generally walked on the right and passed on the left, paying attention to the crowd, now they weave and careen, distracted by cell-phone calls and text messages. They stop short. They clog the sidewalks to chat with friends. They use their baby strollers like battering rams. They exit buildings blindly and don't yield to the flow of traffic.

Just this week, a man with an iPod bud in one ear and a cellphone in the other came flying out of a Starbucks and landed on top of me. As I shoved him off, he only looked at me with disgust. Whatever train of thought I had been following was lost, swallowed up in a fantasy of beating this man unconscious.

In this environment, our aloneness with the world is not preserved. The small gestures of relatedness are disappearing, replaced by the rage engendered by alienation and invisibility. What would Frank O'Hara or Edward Hopper make of this new city where the flaneur's stream of consciousness is constantly being invaded and disrupted by phone calls and body slams? What can be created in a city that no longer permits "freewheeling thoughtfulness"? What art will be made from condos, cell phones, and the endless succession of carbon-copy chain stores?


from ebay: this is not a parody

Maybe one day, when I sell a couple bestselling novels and can afford to keep author's hours, I will spend the quiet middays strolling and will see the city I used to know. But I doubt it. The barbershops and cobbler shops are closing. The old ladies who leaned on windowsills are dying one by one. The people and the buildings that are replacing them don't feel like New York to me.

I rarely go out walking anymore.

Post Script:
Maybe future art will all refer to Starbucks and condos: Starbucks Gossip reports that a "very rare 1994 Starbucks coffee mug was just sold on eBay for $1,283.65."

American Psychos

If you have watched American Psycho lately, as I have, you may have noticed that the film and the main character bear a striking resemblance to today's New York. In 1991, when the book was published, and 2000, when the film came out, Patrick Bateman was a caricature of the 1980s Wall Street yuppie with a sleek condo on the Upper East Side. He was specific to a certain time and place.

Watching the movie today, his specificity washes away. In 2008, Bateman's condo could be anywhere in Manhattan (and many places in Brooklyn), he could work in an office in Times Square or Soho, and his malignant narcissism is no longer a pathology of the few.

In today's New York, the American Psycho is an everyman.

1.


Bateman's kitchen is an orgy of stainless steel and overperforming appliances, features greatly fetishized in today's popular condos. Below is the gleaming metallic kitchen from Blue:



2.


Bateman's condo shows off the cold emptiness of luxe condo aesthetic. But his windows are small compared to the floor-to-ceiling "oculi" enjoyed by 21st-century yunnies and seen here at 459 18th Street:



3.


Bateman is obsessed with his looks. He wants his body to be hard. So do the people who will live in The Platinum, according to their advertising images of steely cyborgs:

• Slate's review

Panopticon Metropolis

photo: NY Times

The Times recently published an enlightening article that attempts to answer the question of why we have this proliferation of giant glass condos. It's all about primitive narcissistic woundings -- and the subsequent desperation to be seen. Says psychologist Sherry Turkle, "people are no longer certain where the self resides."

Narcissism is not mentioned in the article, but Professor Turkle is a Lacanian scholar, so she surely knows a thing or two about The Gaze.


my flickr

The windows in these condos--sold as "oversized" and "monolithic"--enable the people inside to be seen. At night, they also operate as gigantic two-way mirrors: the occupant sees himself and is simultaneously seen by others. This is what good-enough mothers do for their babies--they mirror the baby so the baby sees herself and is also seen. This helps the baby to develop a strong sense of self. Narcissistic mothers fail to mirror their children.



Such children will forever seek out mother's eyes. And the bigger, the better. What big eyes you have! The better to see you with, my dear. Note the popularity of oversized sunglasses. They not only mimic the large eyes of mothers, they also reflect the object's image to the self. Viewer and viewed, both in giant sunglasses, mirror each other when face to face. I see you, you see me. And yet their actual eyes are hidden, protected from the possibility of true connection, which feels frightening, perhaps because this deep need will be denied.

We all long to be seen, recognized.

The longing to be seen and mirrored is also leading us deeper into a surveillance society. Not only are we surrounded by cameras and RFID tracking devices, every glass-covered condo is, in a sense, a panopticon. But it's a prison chosen and beloved by its residents.



The real-estate machine seems to know this and condos are sold as "eye candy" with "high visibility." The newly rising Oculus condo gets right to the point. The word Oculus is Latin for "eye." It also refers to a motif in prehistoric art that Wikipedia says "may represent the watchful gaze of a god or goddess." This is like the watchful, protective gaze of the mother or father--the gaze that was missing from the early childhoods of people with narcissistic personality disorder.

Why do these young narcissists flood into New York? Naturally, anyone seeking the Gaze would be attracted to a place where there are 8 million pairs of eyes by which to be seen.

Generation Y(unnie)

Update: Yahoo provides a handy guide to Millennials.



Last night, 60 Minutes had a story about Millennials, the generation of 80 million kids born between 1980 and 1995. Morley Safer asks "who's to blame for the narcissistic praise hounds now taking over the office," and, I must add, the streets, the movie theaters, the subways, the media, everything.

From the 60 Minutes story, here are a few nuggets about Gen Y (Generation Yunnie?):

• They believe anyone over 30 is "old, redundant, should be retired." This is their attitude not only about human beings, but also about mom-and-pop businesses, old buildings, and ways of life. They value only the young and the new.

• Helicopter parents actually call their children's bosses and HR departments to complain about Junior's bad performance evaluations, the same way they complained to teachers about unsatisfactory grades.

• Says one of these kids, he wants lots of praise from his boss: "We want to hear it and truly we'd love for our parents to know. There's nothing better than Mom getting that letter saying, 'You know, Ryan did a great job. Yeah, I just wanted to let you know you raised a fantastic son.'"
  

• They cannot tolerate being told what to do or how to do it. Millions of dollars are being spent on consultants who tell bosses, basically, "Sweet talk these kids. Don't express disappointment in them. Praise them, let them arrange work around their yoga schedules, and give them lots of rewards--just for showing up."

As 60 Minutes says, these kids were "raised by doting parents who told them they are special" and "They are laden with trophies just for participating." Now, consultants to companies are telling managers to continue this same enabling behavior.

This does nothing to actually support a person's true self. People with narcissistic personalities may appear to be "shiny, happy" people, but, truly, they are empty people. They spent their entire lives being puffed up with empty praise and empty rewards, while their true selves were ignored or shut down. Consequently, they do not feel connected to themselves and have great difficulty connecting with others.

The extreme end of narcissism is sociopathy. What will our city, and our world, look like when it is controlled by 100 million sociopaths?

How SATC Killed NYC

Huffington Post: Bloomie in Pink

Yesterday, SI Live broke the news that Mayor Bloomberg will have a cameo appearance in the Sex and the City movie. How perfect that the billionaire mayor who is burying New York should have a role in the franchise that helped strangle it to death.


SATC fans pinking it up on tour

I know a lot of people just adore this show, but I believe that Sex and the City lifted New York's once-fledgling, minority yunnie culture to its current position of near-total dominance. And, right or wrong, I blame SATC (at least in part) for the demise of this city. Let's take a look at how it all began...


bratz: SATC spawn in condo sidewalk tunnel

1994:
In November, Bowery Bar opens on the site of an old gas station and the yunnies strike their first major blow against everything good about the Lower East Side, much to the chagrin of the neighbors. I remember a handmade, red flashing sign in the window of an apartment next door that said, "Cooper Union, how could you do this to us?" with an arrow pointing straight at Bowery Bar’s entrance.

The opening of “BBar” sets off a firestorm of opposition: "The NoHo Neighborhood Association and some members of Community Board 2 argue that the bar, and others they believe would open in its wake, will erode the character of the area by changing it from a haven for light industry and artists into a trendy night spot." Of course, that prediction was correct.

Shortly after the opening of Bowery Bar, Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” column premieres in The Observer. In her first story, she describes a dinner she attended for Karl Lagerfeld at BBar.



1995:
In February, after a brief fight, Bowery Bar’s opponents settle with the owners and the bar is allowed to operate without a special zoning permit, thereby opening up the area for future development.

In the same year, Bushnell meets Beverly Hills 90210/Melrose Place TV producer Darren Star for the first time at -- you guessed it -- the Bowery Bar. He will later approach her with the idea to turn "Sex and the City" into a television show.

Unlike Community Board 2, the NoHo Neighborhood Association, and the SoHo Alliance, the person who made that flashing red sign didn't settle. It kept flashing its angry, plaintive message for years and would no doubt have been beaming right in the faces of Star and Bushnell when they entered BBar and East met West -- over cosmos. It was the beginning of the end. The Californication of New York City had officially begun.


Avalon Bowery gigantic condo/apt complex

Today:
I usually avoid that block, but I happened to walk by recently. The lone iconoclast who made that beseeching, blinking sign is long gone. The tenement building he or she lived in now looks like a luxury townhouse. Sex and the City the movie is filming all over town. Its fashion designs have turned “every woman into a clone of Carrie-fucking-Bradshaw." And the mayor eats it up with a silver spoon.

As for the Bowery, well, the Bowery gasps and trembles from the tremors of its own agonizing death rattle. Just like the rest of New York, it has become a world dominated by gossip girls and boys -- "and what an ugly, boring world it is."

Autumn in New York

It's warm again. 74 degrees today. It's mid-October and the air ought to be crisp, but it's muggy. With global warming ramping up, what will happen to autumn in New York?



Diesel answers that question with their image of a vanished city -- and a vanished world -- in their new ad campaign. Gothamist comments on Wired's open question: Are these ads evil or fun? I think the answer to that is obvious.

The campaign's website features a video that outlines the dire consequences of global warming then says, "Hold on! Global warming cannot stop our lives." Cue the party music. Just like George Bush's hideous insistence that if Americans stop shopping and going to Disneyland then "the terrorists win." Now Diesel tells us: If you stop partying (e.g., burning fossil fuels) then you're letting global warming win.

This ad campaign gives us further insight into the minds of young urban narcissists. They have no desire to co-exist with anyone or anything that differs from them. Mono-culture must rule. And the way to ensure domination of their mono-culture is to destroy all other cultures, what a recent commenter to this blog rightly called "sociocide."

The evidence of this is clear in the block-by-block destruction of New York and is beautifully illustrated in the disturbing images on Diesel's website. They show a collection of androids frolicking in a ruined world where only the rich and narcissistic have survived.

• The Washington Post mocks, "You can't be too well-dressed for the apocalypse."
• Torontoist calls the images "vomit-inducing adverts for the masses."

Car-Vator

Although I've talked about this already, I seem to have more to say about the condo going up at 200 11th Avenue with its En Suite Sky Garage, an elevator that carries your car home with you, straight into your apartment where you can snuggle with it all night. Now Curbed reports that the City Council has granted the developers a permit to go ahead and build this contraption. Says Curbed, "we're that much closer to robots taking over the world."


200 11th rises from the riff-raff

Ah yes, robots. We are fighting the Clone Wars every day in this city. For another glimpse into clone life, take a look at the video for the Sky Garage. It shows a man driving into his condo building's car-vator, then stepping out of his car and into his apartment where his blonde wife greets him not with a kiss or an embrace. No hi-honey-I'm-home relating occurs between these two. He simply passes her the car key and she takes it. She then goes down in the car-vator and drives away (looking sort of like Martha Stewart). No one could ever accuse these two powerhouses of being co-dependent.


a cool clone-mate greeting

Of course I understand that the developers were simply trying to show how the car goes up and then comes down. But in the process they have shown us something far more illuminating. It may even be a selling feature of this condo and other developments like it. Namely, it's the idea that you don't ever have to get close to other people. Not only do you live high above them -- buffered by your 24-hour attendants, your glass balustrades, your tax abatements -- you also don't really live with them. You can simply pass each other, like two ships in the night, in the vast ocean of your luxury triplex.

• Suburbia in the sky
• Suburbanization & Anti-Semitism
• Clone Wars, part 1
• Clone Wars, part 2
  

Adam & Yves

Yesterday, a worker was stapling up these lovely shrouds of self-promotional advertecture on Yves, one of the many, many condo buildings currently rising from the ashes of what was Chelsea.


photo: my flickr

Here I see a fantasy of the primordial, prototypical yunnies posing in their post-lapsarian world. Expelled from Paradise, they seek a return to the blue waters of mother's chilly womb. They look towards but not at each other. Separate, they can't touch. Like Narcissus, they may gaze at their own reflections in the pool, but human connection remains out of their reach.

Here is a portrait of the alienation that is washing over our city, an alienation that has somehow become admired and longed for, rather than critiqued. How long before there's no one here but these robots?

The Clone Wars, Part II

bionic fembot shares ad space with pod-person

The Times reviewed Bionic Woman this week, saying the show is "more about fembot martial arts and slick 'Matrix'-ish special effects than about character development." The main cyborg is described as sullen, ungrateful, dumb, unpleasant, and basically anti-feminist.

Yes, the robotification continues. Tipster KingofNYCabbies turned me on to this Visa ad, which I later found plastered up on a condo-construction wall. Shown below, it portrays our city as completely digitized, gadgetized, and pod-ified. He writes, "To do another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers would merely require a camera and a few hours shooting in contemporary Manhattan."



I covered the subject pretty thoroughly in this post on the Clone Wars of New York. As the clones continue their hostile takeover of our city, their methods are insidious and often show up in advertising. I'll let the visuals speak for themselves. But here's a question: Why so many fem-bots, yet no man-bots? Is this all the collective sexual fantasy of under-30 males who were creeping towards puberty during the time when Weird Science would have been showing repetitively on cable TV? And do women of that same generation aspire to be like robots? The images shown here are most certainly aspirational.


bionic condos: ipod docks in every home


svedka fembot sells bionics alongside soulless
sociopathic techno-girl


the next top models looking so very cyborgy

Fighting Phallus with Phallus

trump soho ad: got narcissism?

Against laws both moral and civic, against the protests of citizens, and with blessings from our government, the Trumps are erecting their massive tower for affluent part-time residents who want to "possess" our city. Celebrating his most recent triumph yesterday, Trump looked down at the people protesting his plans and said, "The Trump SoHo is a very, very special building. It’s by far the tallest building in SoHo."

Though I applaud their efforts, I'm not sure that clever signs from 50 angry New Yorkers can stop such a force of phallic competitiveness.

Maybe they should fight fire with fire and whip out their own members as this gentleman did yesterday in a very personal "protest" of mega-condo One Jackson Square. Here is a photo of the lone activist zipping up after making an impressive puddle on the condo's property.



While workers were setting up the scaffolding around the site and continuing to chop up the asphalt, cops hassled the homeless guys who've made the scruffy park across the street their home for years. As predicted, now that the money's coming in, the current residents of Jackson Square are being forced to hit the road.


more pics on my flickr

The Clone Wars of New York

A couple of recent commenters to a NYT's City Room post discussed the new type of New Yorker thusly:

"What once were streets filled with people who actually spoke to each other, now replaced by androids."

"I only wish whatever laboratory that is manufacturing these creatures would install a chip in them that would make them a bit more, well, human...there should be a massive recall."

I like this android idea and after writing this post on the Randian, Nazified-Nietzschean uber-urbanites, I am seeing this android imagery everywhere. In the Svedka vodka ads. In the mannequins in windows of high-end boutiques. In the undulating, silvery chill of the new condo buildings shooting up all over town. And in the Borg-like way people wander the streets symbiotically attached to technology -- strapped into headsets, clinging to handheld devices, plugged into wires as if they were life-giving IVs.


wired

This is all emblematic of what I think of as the Age of Narcissism. According to a recent study by professor and author Jean Twenge, "young people born after 1982 are the most narcissistic generation in recent history." Years ago, the slogan was "Don't trust anyone over 30." Now it's the under-30s we worry about trusting.

The android imagery suits the narcissists very well. They have no empathy for others. They see people as interchangeable, one the same as another. They throw items of value away, believing they can always get more. Here we can see how narcissists are attracted to disposability, easy access to objects of desire, and cloning in their environment. Sameness, uniformity, and countless xerox copies feel safe to them.


the repetition of steely perfection fences the site of a condo-to-be

Narcissists are created by other narcissists, parents who use their children to inflate their own grandiosity, and who fail to provide empathic mirroring. Their true selves ignored and unseen by self-absorbed parents, without a mirror to reflect one's authenticity, the narcissist does not develop a secure sense of self.



Without this sense of self, the narcissist goes through life hungry for mirrors. Unfortunately, our narcissistic culture fails them, just like their parents did, and provides only more warped mirroring filled with fluff fantasies of unachievable, superhuman ideals -- images that feed the corporation, not the consumer, who must continue to consume without ever feeling full. The superhuman ideal is pushed to extreme, where it becomes inhuman, mechanized, sleek as glass, invulnerable as steel, clean and vacant as ipod whiteness.

And there's our android image -- a self-replicating bot that multiplies and spreads like a virus. More narcissists equals more and more narcissists.





It's no wonder those condo buildings are sheathed in reflective surfaces. Like the android-style mannequins in shop windows, you can see your own image, however carnivalesque, in their silvery skins.



Is this the chilly home and the cool mother that the Yunnies recall in their most primitive memories? Is the Svedka fembot, with her icy titanium tits, the uber-mama for this new generation of New Yorkers? There is a solution. We must bring back another New York tradition that has been steadily vanishing from our city: Psychoanalysis.


svedka fembot: metal carved into ice, by gawker

McHale's Sign Salvaged

photo from aboutmattlaw

I posted on McHale's when I began this blog, but recently stumbled upon its signage, thanks to this flickr stream. Apparently, the vintage neon sign was up for sale (a couple grand) somewhere on 26th Street. I'm not sure if it's still there. If anyone knows the fate of this sign, please let me know.

As for the former McHale's site, this monster condo rises from the rubble, a 43-story "power residence." The advertising imagery makes me think of Randian heroes, titanic John Galts who view free-market capitalism as the way to individual triumph. This isn't the only place Ayn Rand pops up these days. Are we in a new Randian age? Or is it the Nazified Nietzschean ideal of the Ubermensch that is overtaking our city? I am thinking here also of Thor Equities, named after the Norse warrior god celebrated by the Aryan Nation. I'm not the only one who sees the Uber-Nazi imagery here, Lost City takes an earlier look.



What world is this where power-hungry, hard-muscled men and women stride out of sportscars to ascend into flaming Babelian towers of steel? According to the Platinum website, it's a "rarified world etched in water and fire, stone and glass...and power." Who wants to live like this?

Young Urban Narcissists

VANISHING? Unfortunately not.

New York City is being destroyed, block by block, building by building. Who are the people responsible for this? What do they want and what do they fear? The following helps us to begin answering these important questions:

- Racked cites a poll from blog Harlem Fur where many of the readers are desperate for familiar, fast-food chains like Chipotle to open up in the neighborhood. Says one: "What we need [is] actually a Starbucks on 116th and Lenox...[but] I guess I will have to hoof it on up to 125th to get my Starbucks as opposed to other neighborhoods where there is a Starbucks on every other block."

- This screed from Gawker provides a great amount of insight into the psychopathology of these types. Writes one commenter: "I'm all for gentrification. There's a big kerfuffle in my neighborhood about a new Starbucks and I'd like to tell all the self-important tools lecturing us about mom-n-pop perfection to eat a dick."



From the information in these links (*especially in the comments sections), and from experiences in the streets, we can see that these types are terrified of the unfamiliar and cling to the known. When in unfamiliar settings, separated from their soothing cellular phones and forced to stand in line with nothing to do but think, they become extremely anxious. This anxiety, an irrational fear of annihilation, sends them into a primitive, infantile rage.

These people are Young Urban Narcissists, or Yunnies. A narcissistic personality is essentially created by inconsistent, frustrating parents. It makes sense that Yunnies would be attracted to the consistent and the gratifying. Chain stores like Starbucks and Walgreens promise both--the Yunnies always know what to expect and are rarely disappointed. The giant condo complexes they live in offer round-the-clock services and gratify their infantile needs.



Yunnies are the perfect neighborhood destruction machines due to their lack of empathy, sense of entitlement, and contempt for those "beneath" them. Their rage against mom-&-pop shops, I believe, comes in part from the very name "mom & pop," which arouses their envy, reminding them of the "bad object" parents of their infancy. The fallible humanity of these shops inevitably disappoints and frustrates the Yunnies. "What do you mean you're out of skim milk?" they tantrum, and "I can take my dog wherever I want!"

Watch out. Arm yourself with the facts about Yunnies:
- They feel cut off from real human connection so they create constant pseudo-connections via cell phones or Blackberries.
- They feel empty and express their aggression through oral rage, shopping compulsively and consuming aggressively.
- They are grandiose and believe the world revolves around them.
- They demand constant attention--shouting into cell phones and making dramatic scenes is a favorite way to draw attention to themselves.
- Their hidden, deep belief in their own worthlessness makes them strive for high-status jobs and condo lifestyles, where a false sense of power temporarily lifts them up.
- At the extreme end, Yunnies are sociopathic, without conscience and without remorse--these are the most dangerous and, I believe, the fastest growing subgroup.



As for advice on how to deal with Yunnies, all you can do is protect yourself and the neighborhood you love. Every chance you get, let them know that New York is not their personal playground. Maintain strong boundaries and enforce social rules:

1. Say no to their demands and don't give in. Don't argue, don't debate. Just say no.
2. Don't allow them to get away with antisocial behavior: i.e., not picking up their dogshit, cutting in line, texting at the movies, yelling at cashiers, running people over with their giant baby strollers, etc.
3. When most frustrated by Yunnies, glare at them or laugh at them. Your contempt will cut straight to the core of their abysmal self esteem.

FURTHER READING:

• Clone Wars of NY
• The Art of Losing
• Autumn in NY
• Panopticon Metropolis