The words of Frank Gehry:

“Architecture in the Age of Gehry,” Matt Trynauer.

On the Guggenheim Bilbao (voted “the greatest building of the last 30 years” by 50 architects including Sir Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, and Jean Nouvel, for Vanity Fair): “I went there just before the opening and looked at it and said, ‘Oh my God, what have I done to these people?’”

(As the article describes, Philip Johnson stood in the Guggenheim in 1998, burst into tears, and compared the experience to standing in the Chartres Cathedral.)

On his profession: “I was different from the architects, who called me an artist, which was their way of marginalizing me.  And then the artists got competitive and said, No, you’re still an architect, because you’re putting toilets in your buildings, in your art.  Richard Serra dismissed me as a plumber.”

On Romanesque cathedrals: “…when I saw Chartres Cathedral, I peed in my pants.”

On postmodernism: “I got angry with it - all the historical stuff, the pastiche.  I said to myself, If you have to go backward, why not go back 300 million years before man, to fish?”

Despite these golden quotes from Gehry, what makes this article is the picture of architect Peter Eisenman’s ballot, which reads: “FIRMINY LE CORBUSIER NOTHING ELSE ALL PM JUNK”

The whole issue is a gold mine, actually, with Maureen Dowd visiting Saudi Arabia, a piece on the turmoil in LA’s art scene which just happens to include Dennis Hopper’s last interview, the story of how a con man blackmailed and tortured a noble family (I’m saving this gem for last), an interview with 100 year-old reclusive socialite and fantastic gardener “Bunny” Mellon, a look at Cary Grant’s therapeutic LSD use in the 1950’s, and oh right, an interview with Angelina Jolie in Venice.

Playing Grown-Up: Transcending Adolescence in Contemporary Urban Nightlife

In On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, David Grazian examines contemporary urban nightlife as a social experiment in which affluent youth attempt to prove themselves as competitive adults through engagement in a series of power plays.  Throughout the book, Grazian examines nightlife through the discourse of “the hustle” and confidence games between young men and women, restaurateurs and the staff of the service industry, as well as other actors such as the marketing and public relations industry.  In addition to focusing on the varying degrees of manipulation in urban nightlife, he compares the method operations of bars and restaurants to the staging of the theater, the nature of service to performance, and the atmosphere of dining rooms to set designs.  Grazian elaborates his analysis of the competitive nature of urban nightlife through his assessment of the role of “sporting rituals,” from underage students bluffing their way into bars, to homosocial bonding and the “sport” of “the girl hunt.”  In his evaluation of “the girl hunt” itself, he demonstrates how both players are actively conning each other, effectively illustrating the multi-dimensional aspect of deception and manipulation in nightlife social interaction.  Grazian is also concerned with the use of anecdotes and narrative form as a mode of validation of engaging in nightlife activities imagined as “risky” or “dangerous.”  He concludes with a summation of the “smoke and mirrors” utilized by all participants in the nightlife culture of the new anonymous city.  Grazian’s focus on the anonymity and competitive atmosphere of contemporary urban nightlife allows him to articulate the effects of a new “extended adolescence” on urban social life and how maturity is more often than not associated with depersonalization and consumption.

Grazian sets up his analysis of the contemporary urban “coming-of-age” story through a framework of anonymity, confidence games, and performance.  The concept of the isolating effect of urban life has a remarkable precedent in Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life, which Grazian cites in his work.  According to Grazian, “the anonymity of the city emancipates the metropolitan individual by providing limitless opportunities for self-expression and reinvention,” effectively allowing the individual to mask their identity and “perform” a new one.   Because Grazian focuses on suburban college-aged youth, his study reflects a certain kind of experience of urban life – in which the subjects cope with their unfamiliarity with their new surroundings.  The injection of young affluent visitors heightens the sense of anonymity in the city, “particularly given that they mostly represent a highly mobile population lacking in familial or neighborhood ties to the city’s more traditional residential communities.”   Possessing a one-dimensional understanding of the city, college-aged youth seek and experience only a one-dimensional part of urban life.  To pursue this experience, these young men and women engage in “elaborate games of strategy and chance” in order to reshape their own self-image as well as to prove their social savvy, often articulated through “the experience of risk…framed as an adventure, and played as if something were at stake.”   Part of this performance involves a mastering of sporting rituals, which Grazian defines as “cultural scripts oriented around competitive gamesmanship and strategic interaction.”  That one sliver of experience, however, represents an attempt by these visitors to escape the shackles of adolescent ineptitude and presents the opportunity to perform “adulthood.”

The rearticulating of one’s self-image can be linked to historical shifts in the state’s perception of the individual.  As part of his central argument on the changing nature of urban life, Grazian examines the changes in the post-1970’s American city, in which the self-centered philosophy of neoliberal politics and economics has dominated and commodity fetishism has reached a fever pitch.  As a result, urban life itself has faced a process of commodification, and the detached nature of contemporary urban nightlife runs counter to a preconceived notion of camaraderie and intimacy in social spaces.  Grazian laments this process, as “even neighborly fellowship and conviviality represents little more than a purchased consumer experience.”   In fact, Grazian characterizes “downtown entertainment zones” as “an upscale playground where affluent young adults prepare for the post-adolescent life by learning, practicing, and refining a set of nocturnal selves.”   By navigating the city at night, these young adults accrue a set of social skills through trial and error.  The errors often prove to be more valuable, as they can translate to “social status signified by ownership over an entertaining story,” another example of the commodification of nightlife through storytelling.

Grazian’s ethnography is process-based as a matter of course, as his central argument proposes that urban life in general is undergoing a process of homogenization.  He frequently references New York City, despite the fact that his fieldwork is focused exclusively on Philadelphia.  Through methods of participant observation, formal interviews with restaurant staff and servers, and narrative accounts of nightlife participation as submitted by UPenn students, Grazian has compiled a comprehensive review of how young adults experience urban nightlife, and how the nightlife industry accepts and manipulates these new patrons.  Undergraduate students, who are becoming acculturated to urban life through processes of isolation and performance, which concern Grazian’s study, write the narrative accounts.   As a comprehensive report, On the Make offers an articulate evaluation of youth culture in both the college setting and within the new urban nightlife as well as a thorough analysis of the different players engaging in this cultural exchange.  Grazian expertly links the depersonalized nature of urban nightlife in the neoliberal city to processes of social development and maturity.  However, of additional interest would be an evaluation of how older age groups are adjusting to the shifts in the focus of urban downtown areas.  Grazian’s book lacks a clear illustration of how urban nightlife was experienced by previous generations.  How are other demographics accepting and using this shift as a way to perform “youth” as youth perform “adulthood?” The characters of the popular TV show Sex and the City, which Grazian frequently references, were thirty and forty-something women who indulged in urban nightlife and consumption much like college-aged youth do now – so how has this pattern of behavior affected the age groups depicted in this program?  In other words, how are other age groups affected by this new “extended adolescence?”

David Grazian, On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.