In an elegantly-written article in the Times today, Cathy Horyn talks to Christine Baranski, a girl from Buffalo, apparently Polish, who turned herself into an artist–a person of intellect, refinement, passion. She comes across as kind of wonderful, most especially in this passage:
“All this talk about former haunts led Ms. Baranski to observe: “We’re kind of all over-stylized. Did you read the Patti Smith book?” She meant Just Kids, Ms. Smith’s memoir of the ’70s and ’80s. “God, I loved that.” She then mentioned the Fran Lebowitz documentary — had I seen it? “Well, she talks about how New York of the ’70s belonged to artists and intellectuals and people coming with big dreams. Now it’s for people with money and tourists.”
Still in this vein, I told her I’d picked up the recent New York magazine issue about apartments, with a touching piece by Gay Talese.
Ms. Baranski grinned. “I was standing behind Gay Talese last week. I was at a screening of the Jerry Weintraub movie. We were up in the Time Warner building, with that beautiful view. I was standing behind Gay Talese, who was waiting to get his martini. I thought, This is such a New York moment. Everybody dressed in black.”
She paused, brooding. “The city kind of doesn’t belong to them anymore.”
“Oh?” I said, interested.
“Don’t quote me on it,” she said, in a higher key.
Why not? Ms. Baranski and I came to the same New York at round the same time, to be in a place where, in just a few sentences, you would talk about a couple of writers, a couple of films, a book, a magazine. It feels like an era as bygone as Edith Wharton‘s. Sigh.