I. Round one: Z Zegna

Like ants in a colony, the men and women in town for Fashion Week have thin black exoskeletons, specialized social functions and valuable cargo to transport. A swarm of these people has formed on a September afternoon in front of the West Village showroom where Z Zegna will exhibit its Spring-Summer 2009 collection. I don't know what Z Zegna is, apart from an Italian menswear line whose website has an alphabet theme. Words that begin with "S" scoot across the introduction page and fade into a photograph of a guy on a motorcycle—Seduction. Sporty. Style. A press release I downloaded opened with a paean to the expected letter Z: "The ultimate letter, the most distinguished of the alphabet." An invitation to the show is sandwiched between two candy bars in my purse, like a boarding pass. In terms of Fashion Week hierarchies, I get the feeling that Z Zegna is Greyhound to Zac Posen's Amtrak and Marc Jacobs's Concorde. Read More

Many students at Pomona College had Dave Wallace as a professor. (He insisted we call him "Dave"; we always called him "DFW" when he wasn't around.) And many students also considered him a friend—even if being a friend meant dealing with his byzantine yet internally consistent and fair network of rules for social contact with the world. I came to think that this interface was necessary for him as a teacher, that it acted as a sort of membrane to let students in and keep critics and literary paparazzi out. In any case, I'm thankful he made this effort with my classmates and me. What follows here is exactly the sort of thing he hated. He couldn't stand being the center of attention. He'd found that even praise could be harmful, and so he'd brush it off as if it was beside the point, or as if he wasn't worth it. Of course he was worth it. But if a workshop got particularly warm and congratulatory, Dave would say, "Let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs." Read More

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of "dignity." She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn't think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels. We were endlessly self-reflexive individuals who had been marked by dabbling in drugs and semiotics; the media world we inhabited made life feel squalid, disposable, and fearful; we could hear, when we opened our mouths, the culture industry's language and not always our own. We were trapped inside ourselves—and in there wasn't even a "self." More like an empty lot crisscrossed by gusts of addictive compulsion, and littered with cultural debris. The situation made you feel ashamed. It bankrupted concepts like "dignity." Read More

If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.
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How can Barack Obama, a man who only recently paid off his student loans and who lives a relatively modest life in Chicago's Hyde Park, a few blocks from one of America's poorest neighborhoods, be more "elitist" than John McCain, the son of an admiral (not to mention the husband of a beer heiress), or more "elitist" than Hillary and Bill Clinton, a couple whose joint earnings since 2000 top 100 million dollars? Yet the E-word, and the charge that Obama is out of touch with the experiences of white, blue-collar workers, first leveled against Obama by the Clintons during the primary race, still hang heavy over his otherwise charmed campaign.

These charges stick around not because of the working-class credentials or commitments of Obama's opponents, but because of a problem inherent in contemporary politics that neither party ever addresses, that highly educated professionals are the driving force, financially and politically, behind both major parties. The Democratic leadership particularly continues to present itself as the best hope for the working class, while sharing few economic interests and fewer cultural experiences (now rebranded as "values") with the people it claims to represent. Read More