Hold the Truffles

Perhaps it's what the Grey Lady needs to do to attract high-paying ads such as Stuben glass, Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany's — God knows newspapers need all the help they can get these days — but underneath her respectable hard-news headlines, her soft Dining & Wine and Fashion & Style sections might as well carry the subtitle, "All the news about Marie Antoinette".

Case in point is today's piece on Upper East Side restaurant Sette Mezzo where the likes of George Soros, Si Newhouse and the scions of Ferragamo dine:

...starting in November, when fresh black truffles arrive, they can be added to any item at $50 for the first flurry of shavings (subsequent shavings are discounted). White truffles bring any entree price up to $200. “I always cover the top,” Mr. Mania said, adding that at a certain other Italian restaurant, “they give you three slices.”

Not that there have been many takers lately. “Nobody ordered truffles this year,” Mr. Esposito added. “It must be the economy.”

Ah.  No truffles – ?  That must mean the economy's tanking.

Sette Mezzo is apparently known for simple, unremarkable dishes at ~ $35 /entree (the implication is these are diner-prices for the uber-wealthy) and its exclusive clientele, who keep running tabs going so cash-only payments aren't (gasp) exchanged in public.   

Vico, a sister restaurant, is just a bit further up the street and features virtually the same menu at lower prices and — as the owner gently explains, lacks the 'energy' of the power-players who frequent Sette Mezzo.  Guess value is of no importance to those who have so much money they don't like to handle it.

These details are handled by the NYT with just a hint of satire, a whiff as delicate as the truffle shavings described above.  The writer has to maintain journalistic neutrality, sure.  But where, as with the now-infamous article on the perils of squeaking-by on $500k/year in Manhattan, are the quotes from folks outside the rarefied world of fur-coated tutors and $50 black truffle garnishes?  

And, for once, can the Grey Lady's Dining & Wine staff get with the times and deign to investigate 'Cheap-eats' for the rest of us suffering through this Ponziconomy? Or is that for the ruder tastes of writers over at The Post and The Daily News?

In Japan, Style = Substance

The Atlantic's Alexandra Harney delivers a striking report on the attitudes of the under-25 set in Tokyo's trendy Shibuya shopping district:

Why are young Japanese women, who as recently as a decade ago were sometimes turning to prostitution to finance their Louis Vuitton habits, losing their lust for foreign luxury brands?

“I’ve never bought anything from a luxury brand, so I really wouldn’t know,” laughed Mika Urasawa, a 20-year-old assistant at the 109 shop Rose Fan Fan, as she helped me into a puffy black jacket with fake-fur trim. “If I bought something from one of those brands, I’d probably spend a fortune on it and a year later it’d be out of fashion anyway.”

As those of us obsessively following this Economaggedon have learned, US economists have been scrutinizing Japan's actions in the early 90s when its economy suffered from the collapse of — yep, you guessed it —a bubble of over-inflated real estate and stock prices.  What followed was a ten-year slump that the Japanese economy has yet to recover from. 

The young men and women quoted here would have spent their teens — a crucial time when consumer habits are developed — during this "lost decade" of Japanese stagflation.  It shows. They shop, but instead of brands, they seek out value and individual expression: 

Today, “it’s not about how much money you have,” [Keiko] Sakurai said. “It’s about expressing your own personal style.”

For young Japanese, as for youth everywhere, the more that personal style differs from their parents’, the better.  Junpei Kosaka, a 26-year-old advertising executive, can afford to buy luxury brands but chooses not to. Brands like Armani, he sniffs, are “for rich old dandies.”

Marie Antoinettes of the world, it's time to take a page from the youth of Shibuya's look books: stop hiding behind outrageously-priced labels and start developing a style from true value that will survive any economic tsunami.  

Ruth Madoff's Personal Bailout Stimulus Package

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Ruth Madoff withdrew $15.5 million from hubby, Bernie Madoff's firm in two installments, just before his arrest on December 11th. The Massachusetts Secretary of State is looking into the matter:

A complaint filed Wednesday by Secretary William Galvin's office said Ruth Madoff withdrew $5.5 million on Nov. 25 and $10 million on Dec. 10, according to documents from Cohmad Securities, which was co-owned by Mr. Madoff and which the Massachusetts office is investigating. Mr. Madoff was arrested Dec. 11 on allegations of perpetrating a massive Ponzi scheme.

Maybe the question we should be asking isn't what did she know, but what the hell didn't she know?

More on the fealty of wives, here.

[via Gawker]

Back to Reality

The NYT Fashion & Style Section has done it again.  

Again it has given ironic-sympathic voice to the complaints of the Masters/Mistresses of the Universe here in NYC who are serving up Marie Antoinettish quotes by the truckloads as to how it is simply, humanly impossible for anyone (who is anyone) to live on a salary of $500,000 a year — half a mil being the draconian pay cap Barack Obama and Congressional co-horts will place on bank executives who accept funding from the government's stimulus package.

The outrage it has raised among Manhattan's wealthy is akin to the temper tantrums of a child having their pacifier taken away.  What, no more private school educations for the children? And, I have to give up the armed driver/bodyguard — and take the subway? 

Aside from Bernie Madoff and his family, who are now in serious need protection from all the rich and famous they've fleeced — who in Manhattan needs an armed bodyguard??  In post-Giuliani New York, crime has been at an all-time low over the past decade, and yet it seems there are those who consider the city to be as dangerous as Kabul or Baghdad.  

This is pure, paranoid, solipsistic fantasy.  This and the other "can't possibly live without" items detailed in Allen Sorkin's article reveals a depressing fact: that the attitudes of those leading our financial institutions has been akin to those of feudal lords — entitled individuals who live in castles and require protection and layers separating themselves from the teeming masses. 

This outlook is unrealistic, and delivers some insight into how we ended up in the massive banking crises we're now struggling to dig ourselves out of.   Sure, it's not all the Masters of the Universe's fault.  But they need to wake up and see reality for what it now is.  

If they cannot recognize this, and if they cannot rebalance their personal budgets to accommodate a $500,000/annum paycheck (which is not rocket science), then maybe they do not qualify to lead our financial institutions either.

Penney Dreadful

In five interminable installments of The Bag Lady Papers for The Daily Beast, Alexandra Penney recounts her experience as one of Bernard Madoff's victims. She chronicles the horrors of maintaining a rich woman's life, now beyond her means.

Some examples of her plight:

Ironing her own shirts
Fearing not traveling abroad
Eating at the Four Seasons on a developing nation's dime
Figuring out how to get to her friend's private jet, when she doesn't have the cab fare.

Even she acknowledges that her Marie Antoinette antics have provoked outrage, but the fact is, despite the initial knee-jerk reaction, her story, as she tells it, just isn't all that compelling.

It doesn't help that her writing is distractingly craptacular. It's an outpouring of pure id, a kind of Diary of a Mad White Woman. She has an unfortunate weakness for cutesy faux-French phrases ("J'Refuse to obsess about him") and insipid acronyms ("When you become a PORC (Person of Reduced Circumstances) with major bag-lady fears, you grab any freebie advice you can get"). Her thoughts exist in a binary state between unctuous shout-outs to her rich friends and anger at Madoff. A typical example:

Two nights ago, I was slurping Cristal—probably $200 a bottle—and having a fabuloso dinner with my seriously brilliant and dearest friend Richard, who is editor of a major magazine, and his marvelous wife Jennifer. Several years ago, he called and offered me a commercial-photography job—my first ever. We've been blood-close ever since. We talk or email at least once a day.

With writing this bad, it's hard not to judge. Penney is a former editor-in-chief of Self magazine, so one expects that the bar might be raised slightly higher than the average Adult Ed course. Ok, so Self isn't exactly Granta, but they couldn't find someone who could schmooze AND compose a decent paragraph about exercise or whatever?

As someone who's biggest gripe about losing her shirt, is figuring out who is now going to iron her shirts, Penney is inflamed by injustice only when it happens to her. If she still had her millions, would she really be calling the SEC "disgusting, cowardly, and arrogant"? Or disparaging Linda Thomsen for having a "weird crooked-mouth grin." No, she'd probably be toasting Cristal with them, just as she is now with the remaining jet-set friends she so desperately clings to. Who knows whom they've screwed over? As long as someone else is footing the bill, does she really care?

Penney is noteworthy not because of what Bernie Madoff did to her, but because she illustrates how someone can be professionally successful, taken seriously by media brahmins (lookin' at you, Tina Brown), hobnob with movers and shakers... and still be completely, mind-blowingly inane. We're not shocked that she fell, but that she ever rose at all. It's amazing how an abundant sense of entitlement, a total lack of self awareness and a penchant for kissing rich ass can so thoroughly compensate for absence of talent or substantive skill. She may be self-made, but in reality, she's just an isotope of the George W. Bush brand of plutocracy, and she's doing everything she can to clamber back on the bus. Or private jet.

If she makes it, good for her. The world has a place for strivers. But listening to her keen at full volume, one wonders if Madoff wasn't exacting a kind of moral justice by preying upon some of the people who kinda sorta deserved it.

Read it here, if you must.

[Daily Beast]

All about Recessionista

Lest more Marie Antoinettes contract hypothermia wandering Madison Avenue in fruitless search of their favorite stores, it's time for them to go home, warm up, and dial their therapists. Their worst nightmare has hit, in the form of this Reuters headline:

Recessionistas In, Fashionistas Out in Bad Economy

So it seems that Recessionistas — or, those who enjoy being fashionable on a budget — are replacing Fashionistas as the "It" Girls of our economically-beleaguered moment.  

While Fashionistas have been pouting and wingeing about the major cramp the Economaggedon has put in their outrageous lifestyles, Recessionistas have been quietly emerging from the wings, hunting down online bargains, picking up Fashionista cast-offs at their local Goodwill branch, and (gasp) nourishing themselves with home cooking. 

Now, armed with their very own blog and a growing list of articles detailing the tenets of their cause, Recessionistas are taking center stage. 

Here's a choice quote from the Reuters piece about how Fashionista habits are now passé:

"There is something grotesque about paying full price -- $2,500 - $3,500 on a handbag. It is such a dumb thing to do," said Mandi Norwood, former editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle magazines. "It is very chic to save and very chic to get a deal. Any girl wants to look stylish but also be perceived as smart." 

So, then, it took nothing less than a global economic meltdown to make being "a smart girl" hip.  Fine, we'll take it.

Gonzo Journalism

Like 11 million other Americans, helmet-haired amnesiac, Alberto Gonzales is looking for a job.

But he has a little situation, see, that makes it much more difficult -- the economy, being one... oh and "ongoing investigations" being another.

It takes a very special man to be able to release loose stools all over the Constitution on command, and the fact that he is neither recognized nor appreciated for this bit of virtuosity, frustrates him. The disgraced, former Attorney General of the United States is really just a tender-hearted, war casualty.

In a range of interviews for his I Need A Job Tour, kicked-off with NPR's Michelle Martin, Gonzales dismisses the torture thing, the firing thing, and the warrantless wiretapping thing, as totally blown out of proportion. On Tuesday, he told CNN's Campbell Brown: "we did a tremendous job... and so many people are focused on the little negatives that occurred."

The plan hatched by Gonzo and Turd Blossom that lead to the politically-motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys? Nonsense. They sucked at their jobs. The visit to pressure his predecessor, Songbird Ashcroft, into reauthorizing the domestic surveillance program -- while Ashcroft lay on a hospital bed, seriously ill after emergency gall bladder surgery? Waaay overblown. Contrary to first-hand accounts, the man was totally fine!

And so on.

All he's looking for is some high-paid, do-nothing consultant position in the private sector as thanks for years of unimpeachable service. And why not? So many cronies before him fell upwards. But now, thanks to the economy, he has to go on the teevee and shill for himself. Where's the dignity in that?

[TPM]

A Penny Saved for Tom Daschle...

Here is an '80s campaign ad extolling the virtues of Tom Daschle's then-modest tastes:



So then, was it just Tom's instinctual tight-fistedness which caused him to omit reporting the use of the car and driver (an earnings equivalent of $255,000 over three years) provided for him by the InterMedia Advisors, a private equity firm he was consulting for?

Query why Tom needed (needs?) to be driven around at all, or why he'd agree to it, since he once took such pride in puttering around DC in his beat-up 1971 Pontiac.  Guess all that quaint South Dakotan "sentimentality and cheapness" went out the window the second those special interest groups offered him the wheels and chauffeur — and, let's not forget — some very healthy compensation.

How did Team Obama miss the glaring inappropriateness of Daschle's tax evasions and ties to numerous interest relationships?  Never mind - we got our apology today.  In fact, we almost fell over when we heard the words, "I screwed up" come out of a standing US President's mouth.  

Between this and his shirt-sleeves in the Oval Office, you might just think that Obama is under the crazy impression that he works for the citizenry, rather than rules over it.

Hat tip: The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan; Eclectic Dialectics

Senator Thune Explains the Stimulus to Dumb America

Now that we've bailed out so many fat cats, do we really need to be spending more money to help the American people? The GOP would like everyone to know that a trillion dollars is a lot of money! And lest we forget, there are still ballparks in need of names. Priorities, people.

Fear not, America's non-reading, visual learners: Senator John Thune (R-SD) is here to help. If you, like I, do not understand the concept of money, and can only absorb the most rudimentary ideas if they come in the form of the amazing facts vade mecum variety, then his show-me-don't-tell-me explanation of the stimulus bill will bring all relevant facts to light. He gives this kid a run for his money.

Senator, to your point, how many hamburgers (lettuce, tomato, no cheese) to reach the moon?