Joe's View

(From March, 2007:) Joshua Ferris has written a funny and horrifying first novel about workplace paranoia, “Then We Came to the End” (Little, Brown).

The book takes place at a Chicago advertising agency in 2001 — when the collapse of the dotcom boom is beginning to have a savage effect on the bottom lines of the marketing and ad firms that fed at the Internet trough in the late 1990s.

Lay-offs start and the workers begin to live in fear that they will be “walking Spanish” any day (the term is derived from a Tom Waits song about pirates who forced their prisoners to walk the plank).

Ferris captures the distinctive atmosphere of office life where casual friendships and alliances change from day to day depending on the mood that filters down from management.

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled,” Ferris writes at the start of the novel’s opening chapter, “You Don’t Know What’s in My Heart.”

Ferris presents most of the story in the first person plural which fits the narrative perfectly; the novel is about the weirdness of spending eight hours a day with a “family” that only exists as long as a corporation continues to fund it.

“Then We Came to the End” charts the feuds and the fears of highly educated, upper-middle class people who have no real sense of their worth to their bosses and assume the ax could fall at any moment.

The novelist’s honesty about working groups pushes us to the edge of tastelessness:

“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”

The book shifts from black comedy to tragedy in a bravura chapter in which the office leader contemplates cancer surgery and realizes she has nothing in her life other than her work.

But, the overall tone of “Then We Came to the End” is the unexpected hilarity and mad scheming of dog-eat-dog business, including a classic bit in which one stressed-out man decides to limit his office speech to dialogue drawn from the first two “Godfather” pictures:

“At the conclusion of a morning meeting, during which he had remained perfectly silent, as everyone was packing up their things, Benny turned to Heidi Savoca and said, ‘I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.’ Heidi’s expression indicated she didn’t know where Benny’s comment was coming from, but more pressing than her confusion was her distaste for the remark itself, ‘That’s a very sexist thing to say, Benny,’ she replied. Later that morning, Seth Keegan stopped by Benny’s cube to ask him a question about some revisions for a project the two had been working on over the course of the previous few weeks. ‘Do you have a minute?’ Seth asked Benny. Benny swiveled in his chair. ‘This one time,’ he said. ‘This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.’”

(From Sept. 2006:) The story of how America went restaurant and gourmet food crazy over the past 40 years is told with great page-turning style by Vanity Fair contributing editor David Kamp in his wonderful book “The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation” (Broadway Books).

“The United States of Arugula” shows us how a few key figures such as cookbook authors James Beard and Julia Child and restaurant innovators like Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters changed the whole American food landscape.

Kamp points out in his introduction that food is now “a cultural pastime, something you can follow the way you follow sports or the movies…the food world has its own ESPN (the Food Network, founded in 1993), its own constellation of marketable stars (Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, etc.)… its own literary lights (Ruth Reichl, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Bourdain)…You can be a non-cook and still be a food obsessive, attending new restaurant openings like a theatergoer, religiously consulting the Zagat guides (launched in 1979) and ordering the finest prepared foods from Whole Foods, Dean & DeLuca, or Williams-Sonoma.”

Clearly, we were long overdue for a book explaining how this all came to pass in a country where TV dinners and Howard Johnson galvanzied the populace only 50 years ago.

Kamp’s book details the huge changes in home cooking brought about by the star food writers (Child et al) and the introduction of devices such as the Cuisinart food processor (created 30 years ago by the Connecticut inventor Carl Sontheimer). The rising interest in food led to greater expectations from restaurant dining as well as the availability of better ingredients from grocers.

Kamp is a great storyteller who starts with the arrival of French chefs for the 1939 New York Worlds Fair — who were soon to establish most of the chic Manhattan restaurants of the 1940s and ’50s — and then leads us through all of the great restaurant trends and introduces us to most of the major players who made us into a nation of food lovers.

The book reminds us that such contemporary home and restaurant staples as salsa, sushi and — yes — arugula were considered revolutionary innovations only a few decades ago.

“The United States of Arugula” is so well written that you don’t really have to be a foodie to enjoy it: Kamp makes a strong case that the story he tells is as important as the rest of the cultural history of the past half-century.

(From 2007:) Part travelogue, part fashion study, “The Tokyo Look Book” (Kodansha) is one of the most entertaining tomes of the fall — it is quite spectacular to look at and informative on levels that few fashion books approach.

Like that wonderful regular street fashion feature done by veteran New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, the book shows us stylish clothes as they are worn by “real” people, not carefully lit and posed models.

British anthropologist Philomena Keet teamed up with photographer Yuri Manabe to capture the outrageously colorful and culturally diverse fashion scene on the streets of Tokyo. As the cover blurb puts it so well, “Stylish to Spectacular, Goth to Gyaru, Sidewalk to Catwalk.”

I caught up with Keet by phone when she was in New York several weeks ago and she said “The Tokyo Look Book” began as a lucky accident.

“It was a chance meeting with a book editor. I happened to be doing my PhD in street fashion (in Tokyo) and it was just an opportunity too good to miss,” she said.

“Of course, the question then was: How to do it?,” the writer said, with a laugh.

Keet narrowed her work on the book to a very small slice of the Tokyo fashion scene — youth street fashion.

“I met most of the people for the first time on the street,” the writer said of her journey through the various youth street cultures in Tokyo, from the rather conservative look of “young men at work” to kids who dress like their favorite anime characters and others who have adopted wildly theatrical variations on punk and Goth styles.

Reporters often find “man in the street” features to be tough assignments — first you have to get a stranger to talk, then get him or her to agree to be photographed.

Keet said her work was “hard at first but once I got used to it, it was lovely as well.”

The work was aided by the fact that Tokyo street kids often expect to be photographed by friends and tourists.

“They are all readers of fashion magazines and they are used to being asked for photographs…I think in our case, the combination of an English girl and a Japanese girl (photog Manabe) was particularly good…a lot of the people were intrigued by us,” Keet said of walking the streets with the native photographer.

“The Tokyo Look Book” introduces us to top Japanese designers such as Kazuhisa Komura and we also journey into wild boutiques with names like “Dog” and “Sex Pot Revenge.”

Although it often seems that fashion has become one of the top interests of Americans in recent years, Keet says Japan dwarfs the U.S. and the U.K. when it comes to style worship and living to shop.

“There are so many more fashion magazines in Japan than in the U.K. or U.S.,” the writer points out. “What’s in my book is just one tiny niche of the (total Japanese) fashion scene.”

Keet said the Japanese have few of the hang-ups about fashion that persist in England and America: “We tend to think fashion is a trivial and stupid thing to spend money on. There is less guilt in Japanese society in respect to spending money on fashion…you have the phenomenon of young people living at home but doing a part-time job in order to buy clothes.”

When I urged Keet to put together similar books on New York and London — to start with — she laughed and pointed out that she still has to finish the PhD thesis that was interrupted by the Tokyo fashion project.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do next, but I did really enjoy doing this one. I am half thinking about a London book in time for the Olympics,” she said of the 2012 international event.

(Your faithful blogger is off recharging his cultural batteries until Dec. 1. In the meantime, I thought it would be fun to re-examine some of the most interesting books from the four years of “Joe’s View.” First up, a terrific biography from 2008 now available in paperback.)

Biographies tend to fall into one of two categories — trashy cut-and-paste affairs that stress personal scandal over professional accomplishment, or exhaustively footnoted tomes that keep us at a slight remove from important figures.

What makes Julie Kavanagh’s “Nureyev” (Pantheon Books) so special is that the writer gives us a full account of Rudolf Nureyev’s life and career on stage at the same time that she provides an unsparing view of the man’s wildly dramatic — and sometimes sordid — personal life.

Kavanagh trained in ballet before she turned to journalism, so she has a special appreciation of Nureyev’s devotion to dance and the excitement he generated in the West after his defection from the Soviet Union in 1961.
Nureyev had already established himself as one of the great young dancers in Russia when he decided to bolt in Paris, from a state-sanctioned tour.
Because this happened at the height of the Cold War, the decision made headlines all over the world and gave Nureyev instant international celebrity.

What Kavanagh makes clear is that the young man’s decision was a purely aesthetic one — he was desperate to break out of the classical tradition of Russian ballet and to explore what was happening in the world of modern dance and to connect with innovators such as his fellow Russian George Balanchine (whose mixture of classical technique and innovative choreography made New York City Ballet into what was perhaps the greatest dance troupe of that time).

Nureyev’s explosive entry into the West raised the profile of dance and made the Russian a household name, what one chronicler quoted by Kavanagh called “ballet’s first pop star, the long-haired icon for the decade’s spirit of rebellion and sexual freedom.”

The dancer was on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” was photographed by Richard Avedon and hobnobbed with the international jet set.

Behind the scenes, Nureyev became infamous for his explosive temper and often whimsical demands, but Kavanagh presents him as a phenomenal work horse, maintaining a punishing schedule that kept him traveling almost constantly for 30 years.

Even the man’s critics admit he brought new life to the ballet, sparking a personal renaissance in the career of his superstar partner Margot Fonteyn (who seemed to be nearing the end of her distinguished career when Nureyev pushed her to a new plateau).

Kavanagh writes of Fonteyn: “She claimed that it was her belief that the audience was looking at him, not her, that had allowed her to relax, and ‘really dance for the first time.’”

Nureyev and Fonteyn were swept into the 1960s lifestyle revolutions along with pop stars, generating page one news when they attended a San Francisco party that ended with a drug bust.

The book delves into Nureyev’s apparently insatiable sex drive, but in a way that makes it clear that hedonism was one of the dancer’s few personal outlets. Kavanagh separates the many one night (one hour?) stands in the artist’s life from his great love for fellow dancer Erik Bruhn and other attachments that were nearly as intense.

The sadness of any dancer’s limited time on stage was intensified by Nureyev finding out in the early 1980s that he was HIV positive. He spent the subsequent decade filling his schedule with as many jobs as he could find, with sidetracks into theater (a disastrous tour of “The King and I”) and conducting classical music. The way that he kept going right to the bitter end (in 1993) is both poignant and inspiring.

Kavanagh tells Nureyev’s story so dramatically — and tells us so much about the world of dance beyond her subject’s life — that few readers will complain about the 698-page length of her account.

I enjoyed the documentary “Every Little Step” when it opened in theaters last spring, but I was very disappointed by the film’s account of the creation of the original landmark production of “A Chorus Line” in 1975.

The movie was subtitled “The Journey of ‘A Chorus Line’” but it devoted more of its 93 minute running time to the audition process for the mediocre 2006 Broadway revival than it did to the creation of the original.

Producer-directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo dug up tons of archival material on the original show — including the long informal dancer rap sessions that inspired Michael Bennett (below, with Marvin Hamlisch) to want to do a show on Broadway chorus dancers — but it was brutally trimmed to make way for reality TV-style stuff on the young dancers who hoped to be cast in the revival.

Some of the audition footage is interesting — the producers were very lucky to get a first-ever waiver from Actors Equity allowing cameras into auditions — but too much of it is the standard self-dramatizing of people who know they are being filmed.

Fortunately, the extras on the just-released DVD version of “Every Little Step” serve as a corrective to the theatrical cut by including nearly an hour of material on Bennett and the original show.

There’s a wonderful 20-minute mini-documentary on Donna McKechnie (above, with Robert LuPone) who won a Tony for playing Cassie in the original production (and who came up from the chorus line with Bennett in the shows he did before becoming a behind-the-scenes talent).

McKechnie is honest about the complex and troubled relationship she had with Bennett after “A Chorus Line” became a blockbuster.

Although Bennett was gay, he decided to marry his star and the result was a disaster for both parties — they weren’t speaking when the director-choreographer died from complications of AIDS in 1987.

The extras also include long excerpts from the original dancer interview tapes that Bennett used to create the show.

One of my disappointments with “Every Little Step” was the absence of any interview footage with Kelly Bishop who won a Tony for playing Sheila (the extras don’t include new interview footage with Bishop but there is a long and fascinating segment from the interview tape she made before the show went into production).

The historic importance of “A Chorus Line” is also explained on the extras in an expanded interview from former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich who went to an early preview of the show when he was still a young aspiring critic in New York (he joined the Times five years later).

DVD extras are often not worth watching — let alone talking about — but in this case they make “Every Little Step” into a major documentary about Broadway history, as well as an account of the casting of the 2006 revival.

You can’t really blame Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart for the unvaryingly annoying magazine and newspaper feature stories (tied in to today’s opening of “New Moon”) that have been burying all of us the past few weeks.

The gist of every story I scanned — from Harper’s Bazaar to The New York Times to Vanity Fair (I didn’t see anything in the current AARP Magazine) — was the exquisite agony suffered by these two young actors in the wake of last fall’s debut of “Twilight.”

One might think that Pattinson and Stewart knew what they were getting into after the who-knows-how-long-and-grueling audition process for the two leads in a series of movies based on some of the most popular novels of our time, but they and their journalistic profilers act as if the teen girl hysteria was a surprise.

Pattinson and Stewart (or their handlers) agreed to a tour of Middle American malls last fall designed specifically to whip the fans into a pre-release frenzy (and generate photos that would be printed all over the world).

Signing on to “Twilight” was not like agreeing to be in a new Gus Van Sant film or joining the ensemble of a Paul Thomas Anderson epic. It was a lead pipe cinch move to become love objects to every teen girl (and everyone with the sensibility of a teen girl) in the nation.

This time last year, the stories about Pattinson and Stewart were much more upbeat – stars-are-born charm pieces about these two winning and natural young actors achieving fame in a profession where 90 percent of the practitioners are out of work at any given time.

What a difference 12 months makes! To hear Pattinson and Stewart tell it, fame is, at best, a drag (you can’t frequent that old grocery store anymore) and, at worst,  a personal violation (strangers want to know who you’re sleeping with).

As a result of post-“Twilight” traumas, most of the interviews for “New Moon” were conducted in bunker-like, high-floor, hotel rooms — in New York and Vancouver (where the third film in the vampire series is being shot) — because of the dangers the actors (and their chroniclers) might face if they ventured out into a lobby or city street.

“I’m trying not to drown…I guess I’m not cut out to do a franchise…I’m not a crowd person,” Pattinson tells Vanity Fair scribe Evgenia Peretz in the December cover story that comes with more than a dozen glamour shots of the actor lounging in Montauk with the photographer Bruce Weber (several dozen more of the pictures from the shoot are available on the VF.com Website).

It might have been instructive for Pattinson to have visited the Vanity Fair archives and looked up the July, 1992, cover story on Luke Perry before he sat down with Peretz. 

Most magazines and journals have highs and lows, but n + 1 can always be counted on for substantive and provocative reading. The eight issues so far have been keepers.

Twice a year, from their offices in Brooklyn, the editors and writers of n + 1 put together a dozen or so essays, reviews and interviews that are hard to beat for clarity and originality.

Editors Keith Gessen (left) and Mark Greif and their associates, who include the novelist and essayist — and journal co-founder — Benjamin Kunkel, take nothing on the pop cultural or political scenes for granted.

The writers have an uncanny way of printing pieces that make you rethink Marx, gay marriage, the “Neuronovel,” and “Sex and the City.” You can’t guess what you might see in the next issue, but you can be pretty sure it will be well worth reading.

I’ve mined a few nuggets from the latest issue, a couple of graphs from “Gentrify, Gentrify” (or “Whose fault was Park Slope?”) on the way that the work of urban renewal icon Jane Jacobs has been misunderstood:

“The bible of gentrification was a book that would come to be assigned in every urban history course in the country: Jane Jacobs’s brilliant ‘The Death and Life of American Cities.’ But in the new urban context, it seemed lost on everyone that Jacobs was writing about the lingeringly industrial, racially mixed (if not exactly integrated) city of 1961…She had not imagined white collars replacing blue ones, and white people driving out black neighbors…Jacobs’s vision of self-regulated communities and small neighborhoods (has given) ideological cover to a vision of city life she had explicitly rejected: white-collar, service-economy cities oriented almost entirely toward consumption.”

“…Everywhere, skilled manual work had vanished, and the old factories and warehouses were turned into yet more condos. But now the ‘back to the city’ movement buckled under a terrible irony: the children of the pioneer gentrifiers could not afford to live in the neighborhoods their parents had ‘cleaned up.’”

“…But the mailrooms of the white-collar cities could employ only so many recent college graduates; and not even the metropolis dreamed of by the most Panglossian of gentrifiers could consist exclusively of bike-riding, cupcake-eating financial analysts. Gentrification had no jobs to offer — only Jane Jacobs-style ‘neighborhoods.’”

The n + 1 people are accessible as well as smart and hold public forums on a fairly regular basis. Tomorrow at 7 p.m., Gessen, Greif and other contributors will be talking about Issue 8 in a free gathering at lower Manhattan’s McNally Jackson Bookstore, 52 Prince St.

For more details go to www.nplusonemag.com/n-1-events

Whenever I read something as entertaining — and as insightful — as “Set Up in Soho” (St. Martin’s Griffin) by Dee Davis, I’m left wondering how many other good books I’ve missed just because they fall into the much maligned “chick lit” genre.

The label is condescending and too broad to be of much value.
Just about any contemporary story told by a woman — particularly one set in New York City — will be slapped with the label (unless she is published by Knopf with a Chip Kidd cover).

I’ve read forgettable trash in the genre and terrific stuff that is more like the novels of Anne Tyler or Laurie Colwin than the work of Candace Bushnell (I sometimes wonder if Tyler came along now with her warm and zany tales of family life if she might end up with a pink cover in the chick lit section of bookstores).

“Set Up in Soho” does touch on the relationship and career concerns of all the “Sex and the City” spin-offs, but Davis seems more interested in family life and basic trust issues between men and women than in the idea of taking us on vicarious shopping sprees in the more gilded sections of Manhattan.

The book’s heroine, Andrea Sevalas, is not a naive striver new to the city. She’s a native who comes from money and is already a minor celebrity due to her cable food show, “What’s Cooking in the City.”

The show mixes cooking segments with foodie news about celebrity chefs and the latest restaurant openings (Andrea describes it as “Martha Stewart meets ‘Entertainment Tonight’”).

Andrea’s playgirl mother ran off when she was young, leaving much of her day-to-day upbringing to a grandmother with a busy social schedule of her own and Aunt Althea (whose matchmaking business is an embarrassment to her niece).

“Set Up in Soho” introduces us to Andi at a crucial moment in her life and career — she’s dumped by her longtime beau in chapter one, injures herself falling into one of those double door openings you see on almost every New York sidewalk, and is given a make-or-break assignment at work to land a cooking segment with a reclusive chef who is about to open a much-anticipated new eatery.

Andi is not a chick lit sweetie pie. She’s opinionated, knows what she wants and has survived in the shark tank of cable television. If you were her enemy, you could see many reasons to dislike this woman. But Davis shows us Andi’s hidden soft spots; her troubled relationship with Aunt Althea makes her appealingly vulnerable.

Davis also knows Manhattan like the back of her hand, so that there is nothing generic about the book’s backdrop. On an early date with a new romantic possibility, Andi meets the guy in Madison Square Park for a burger at the Shake Shack and later in the book we find out that the TV host is a fan of Norbert Leo Butz.

Davis doesn’t write down to her readers (or her characters) and the result is what you might call a serious romantic comedy.