Really, REALLY great story from the New York Times. It has SOME trivialities in it but the sentiments I think are fascinating. <i>SEP 16, 2001 When Trivial Pursuits Aren't So By JOHN LELAND IN Raymond Carver's short story "A Small, Good Thing," the parents of a young boy reel after their son is hit by an automobile. Almost against their will, they find themselves taking comfort in an offering of fresh cinnamon rolls. They are embarrassed by their behavior: how can they even think of food? Yet the eating, and the homey pleasures it brings, are the couple's tie to humanity, their respite from unfathomable despair. In its incidental savor, eating is a small, good thing. The story is a reminder of a basic human truth. In times of high emotion, the unspeakable, even the unimaginable, often finds expression not in grand gestures but in offhand or ostensibly trivial pursuits. This is true of personal crises as well as collective ones. The fear of the atomic bomb or the destructive anguish of Vietnam, for example, were communicated not just in news coverage but in seemingly vacuous manifestations like dance styles or hair. The full dimensions of the wounds left by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are likely to remain unknowable for years. Yet in the coming weeks and months some of the contours of the abyss will begin to appear on the thin surfaces of society: in the ways we dress and socialize, the choices we make in our homes and at our tables, the faces and silhouettes we construct to meet the day. A handwritten sign outside the nightclub Spa last week said it all: "We are closed until Thursday due to the tragedy." After which, needless to say, it will reopen, because of the public's need to gather and to respond. In this gesture lies frivolous escapism but also an early stirring toward meaning. From a style perspective, the first thing missing last week was anomic detachment: the sense that you were remote from the event, that it was something — like, say, the presidential election — in which people like you were not implicated. This attack was your problem. Even for New Yorkers, it was hard to be on the margins, harder still to feel superior there. At public gatherings like the vigil in Union Square, punks, old radicals, skateboarders, hip-hoppers, academics, nurses, queer theorists and blue-collar workers mixed fluidly in passionate debate and catharsis. They brought different ideologies and clothing but a common engagement. This is just the beginning of the inevitable realignments, said Mark Crispin Miller, a social critic and professor of media studies at New York University, who predicts an end to reflexive irony as we know it. Such "hipness unto death," perhaps the era's signature voice, "becomes offensive when you're in the trenches," Mr. Miller said. "That ironic posture just won't work any longer in a world where one's very survival is at risk. It's going to seem dangerously inadequate and immature." The biggest cultural changes will arise from an almost religious sense of vulnerability, said Mark C. Taylor, a professor of humanities at Williams College, who has written about topics as diverse as religion and body piercing. The popular culture of just a week ago was a monument to personal indestructibility: fashion that celebrated exposed skin; gangsta music and clothes that imported vicarious thrills to the suburbs; restaurants and design studios manufacturing eccentricity and novelty for their own sake; nightclubs and Web sites flaunting transgression as a neat lifestyle choice. This "fantasy of mastery," Mr. Taylor said, extended to cloning and the Human Genome Project, which promised a victory, metaphoric at least, even over mortality. You could be whoever you could afford to be; you didn't worry about someone blowing your playhouse down. A restaurant in San Francisco could attract customers with the name Blowfish Sushi to Die For. But by 8:48 a.m. Tuesday the fantasy was ripped apart by men armed apparently with nothing more sophisticated than box cutters and primitive religious zeal. And with the fantasy went the culture built around it. What was left is "a confrontation with the ineradicable insecurity that has always been there," Mr. Taylor said. "It will have radical consequences." The arts will take a while to reflect this insecurity, said Arthur Danto, a retired philosophy professor at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. It took decades before the Vietnam War found its cathartic expression in Maya Ying Lin's memorial, Mr. Danto said. Art Spiegelman's comic books "Maus: A Survivor's Tale," or Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No. 3, two of the most profoundly moving works about the Holocaust, did not emerge for almost half a century. Our recreations, though, will adjust more spontaneously. Dining, which acquired an erotic zeal in the last decade, will now have to serve other needs, several restaurant operators said. Danny Meyer, an owner of Union Square Cafe, 11 Madison Park and Tabla, said he was initially offended to see restaurants packed in the first days of the disaster (his reopened on Thursday). Then he realized that New Yorkers "need a place to be with each other to mourn their collective losses, just as families get together when a loved one dies," Mr. Meyer said. As their function changes, the restaurants' menus will change as well, said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant. Prices will drop; high-wire cooking will lose its frisson. "In the 90's it was `comfort food,' " Mr. Wolf said. Now, "I think people are going to be wanting comforting foods with no quotes around them." Gabriel Aiello of Gabriel's speculates that people will stop coming out for late-night meals: they will want to be home with their families. Staffs will adjust as well, he added. "I was telling waiters today, `Be patient and be good listeners,' " he said. "We're going to put more emphasis on being accommodating." Fashion will find a similarly dual voice, at the same time toned-down and defiantly celebratory, several designers said. Yeohlee Teng, a New York designer known for minimalist women's clothing, predicted a streamlined silhouette with no frippery. "You want to be able to move quickly, you want to feel ready to bolt," she said. Cynthia Rowley, on the other hand, saw a need for fashion to be diverting, now more than ever. "Maybe it won't seem important or as interesting to as many people as it would have before," Ms. Rowley said. "But it's like a Broadway show. It's there to entertain, and no one accuses some frothy musical of being frivolous." Icons of Americana and strength — like the Marlboro Man or the patriotic imagery used by Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren — may return, while those of lassitude, like casual Fridays, will continue to fade. The photographer David LaChapelle, whose images of campy excess help fashion in its habitual suspension of disbelief, found himself suddenly grounded in reality. The images in his work did not reconcile with those now in his head. "A couple weeks ago I took pictures of Pamela Anderson at this incredibly decadent party in the Hollywood Hills," he said. "Now I look at them and I feel like they were taken a lifetime ago. I don't know what I was thinking. Now I feel so removed from them." The priorities of home design will also subtly alter, from showplace to shelter, several decorators said. "More and more people think and talk about home as a retreat, a place to feel safe," said Victoria Hagan, a high-end decorator. "They talk about needing a cocoon, and all that takes on a new meaning." In the shelter of a home, it is possible to rekindle the fantasy of mastery. Architects, needless to say, will no longer wish to etch their profiles on the skyline. Small is beautiful, inconspicuous even better. Night life may see the most disruptive changes, and the most unpredictable. Clubgoers must feel safe to be sexual, to let loose. But nightclubs can also be targets. Owners interviewed said they would reopen cautiously, but none mentioned adding metal detectors or guards. One club owner alluded to the 21 people killed by a suicide bomber at a Tel Aviv disco in June. Another club executive, Scott Sartiano, the director of Spa (which did not reopen after all, because the city was still closed below 14th Street), said the club would scrutinize all deliveries during the day. By night, he added, "If we don't know you and you're not a regular, you might get patted down." Like most clubs, Spa has had occasional friction with the Police and Fire Departments, but Mr. Sartiano said he invited organizations to use the club for benefit events, "especially for the families of police and firemen — we work with them and we feel for them." In the 1987 movie "River's Edge," about the death of a high school student, a character berates herself because she cried over "Brian's Song" yet cannot cry over her dead classmate. But this paradox is natural. Movies stage-manage our emotional response; real tragedy blows us in diverse, often contradictory directions. These emotions will take a while to marshal into coherence. In the meantime, our frivolous recreations, however superficial, are early steps in that process. They can be seen as preliminary stage directions, as we begin to construct a narrative of meaning around last week's events. Additional reporting by Marian Burros and David Colman.</i>
