Observer » Jonathan van Meter

‘I Hate Brooklyn’ Writer Has Warmed To The Borough. A Little.

Kim Velsey — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 12:08:29 -0400

Do Not Cross!

The Awl interviewed Jonathan Van Meter, the man who penned the much beloved/much maligned New York Magazine essay "I Hate Brooklyn" back in 2005. Mr. Van Meter's essay included a multitude of wonderful zingers, including his thoughts on a visit to Brooklyn Heights: "You can see the entirety of Manhattan across the river, a fact I found both oddly comforting and deeply disturbing. Why can’t we just be over there, in actual Manhattan?"

Seven years later, Mr. Van Meter admits that much has changed. Mostly, though, it's that Manhattan sucks more. So much so that he even—gasp!—admits to having "seriously looked at some real estate" in Prospect Heights and Fort Greene. But not to worry, Mr. Van Meter and his partner decided that they'd rather buy a vacation place in Woodstock than move to the dreaded borough.

Among the more delightful things that Mr. Van Meter says—and there are many, read the whole interview!—are that he came to Manhattan "to escape the dreariness of that hoagies-and-sewda existence" that was a hallmark of his blue collar childhood in Philadelphia (implication being that Brooklyn is still all about hoagies-and-sewda dreariness).

Except for the parts that are still are twerpily twee, like the practitioners of foodstuffs trends whom so finds so self-parodying that it is redundant to make fun of them. But then adds: "to be fair to my own point of view on this topic, that is the part of Brooklyn that I loathe the most: the whole twee/hipster/foodie aspect."

He also nails the desire and the fear that lies at the heart of many a considered relocation to Brooklyn: "I did not want to risk finding myself, up and alone in the middle of the night and on deadline, living in a beautiful townhouse filled with beautiful things on a beautiful tree-lined block—that is utterly dead by 11 p.m.—obsessing over whether it was my night to move the car."

Then he quotes Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of The Ring Two to emphasize that he didn't want to move across the river into "a howling wasteland of intolerable fear."

In any event, he's now living in Alphabet City and considering the Upper East Side—apparently following the advice of the friend who he quoted in his original essay: "I’d rather live on the friggin’ anodyne Upper East Side than live in Brooklyn!”

A few other gems from the original essay:

"Most of the people who are moving to Brooklyn these days are couples with kids who treat Brooklyn as the new, hip suburbia, or artists and rich kids without the class issues that my friend Joe and I are saddled with. Now that rent control is effectively over, it makes me wonder who will be left in Manhattan once the Brooklyn exodus is complete. My prediction? Old-money families, Eurotrash, newly minted millionaire bankers, and stubborn, overleveraged, delusional, middle-class strivers like me clinging just a little too tightly to their fast-lane fantasies and 212 area codes."

"It’s not that I don’t like the culturati hipsters, but the last time I was in an environment where people only wanted to be with people exactly like themselves was in a fucking mall in Minnesota, which is why I left there twenty years ago.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Vogue’s September Issue, Reviewed: The Magazine That Mistook a Pop Star for a Hat

Daniel D'Addario — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 17:15:12 -0400

September’s 916-page Vogue induced in us a medical crisis (two crises, if you count the hernia we sustained while carrying it from the mailbox). After reading contributor Lynn Yaeger’s piece on her prosopagnosia, commonly known as face blindness, we began to fret that we, too, were afflicted. Ms. Yaeger admits that she didn’t even recognize Gisele Bundchen in person—imagine! She also wrote that she gets particularly perplexed when her friends tuck their hair into big fur hats, a mere 78 pages before we noted some unrecognizable model posing with her hair tucked into one big fur hat after another. Hey, wait, that’s Lady Gaga, as styled by the clever Grace Coddington! Ms. Coddington furthered our face-blindness in a spread based on the life of Edith Wharton, with Ms. Wharton played by model Natalia Vodianova, in Nina Ricci and Rochas, and Henry James played by—we were sure our eyes deceived us!—Jeffrey Eugenides. The Marriage Plot author looks familiar only because he sports a series of vests not dissimilar to the one he wore on a Times Square billboard last year. Finally, there’s the profile of a sporty young graduate student in a metallic Marc Jacobs gown—hey, that’s Chelsea Clinton! And while America was shocked by her hinting to writer Jonathan Van Meter that she might run for office, we were shocked by Mr. Van Meter’s declaration that Ms. Clinton has a fashion sense similar to Beyoncé’s. Turns out prosopagnosia is no impediment to writing for Vogue. Just ask Ms. Yaeger, who, in a separate piece this month on the history of models, writes, “For years nobody knew their names.” She should know.

Adele Not ‘Too Fat’ For Vogue

Kat Stoeffel — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:24:34 -0400

In a rare moment of web savvy, Conde Nast fashion flagship Vogue posted its March cover story about Adele this morning at midnight, just a few hours after the British singer swept the six Grammy awards for which she was nominated.

Unfortunately, the profile delivers little in the way of revelation (much less than Anderson Cooper's 60 Minutes piece) unless you count the very original theory that Adele's personal life and lyrics can be explained by her absentee father.

Jonathan van Meter wrote:

"Perhaps it’s too easy to assume that Adele’s compulsion to find and keep a man, not to mention her attraction to older men, is all part of a daddy complex, but it is tempting nonetheless. The fact that she so exquisitely expresses her heartbreak over the loss and betrayal of men in her life through her music may very well be because she’s been feeling that loss and betrayal since she was a child."

To her credit, the 23 year-old singer handled the allegation with charming self-effacement:

“I have no idea where it comes from. I don’t read literature. I don’t have a very big capacity for language and words. I’m quite limited when it comes to just chatting. But my head comes alive when I’m writing music, and I start using words and describing emotions I had no idea existed in me.”

More disturbing to us is the fact that Adele spends the profile hanging out in riding boots made by Chanel. Last week, Chanel designer and Metro guest editor Karl Lagerfeld declared Adele "the thing at the moment"--this despite the fact that "she is a little too fat."

"I lost over 30 kilos over 10 years ago and have kept it off," Mr. Lagerfeld later offered, by way of apology. "I know how it feels when the press is mean to you in regards to your appearance."

Of course, after one has sat for her first Vogue cover (and without being ordered by editor Anna Wintour to lose weight for it, no less), a dig from the free subway newspaper has little impact.

"I've never wanted to look like models on the cover of magazines," Adele told People magazine in response to his comments. "I represent the majority of women and I'm very proud of that."

In 2009, Ms. Wintour styled Adele for the Grammys, and she was escorted by Hamish Bowles.

We hope Adele loses the boots and writes Mr. Lagerfeld off as free material for the next album. Who needs ex-boyfriends when there are fashion fascists?

In Deed! John Paul II’s Agent and Vogue Profiler Buy

Chloe Malle — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:01:09 -0400

Our daily roundup of the most notable high-end residential transactions from the past 24 hours.

-- Former Vibe editor and high-profiler profiler for magazines such as Vogue and New York, Jonathan van Meter, and his partner, editor and photographer Andrew Young, bought the third-floor unit at 209 East 2nd Street for $1,405,189. The new East Village development offers six full-floor lofts. Mr. Van Meter and Mr. Young scooped up a sponsor unit in the building, featuring a wood-burning fireplace and exposed brick walls giving the space, "that sense of pre-war elegance" contrasted with finishes that are "sleek and modern." The keypad elevator-accessed loft, which is "sun-filled" throughout and boasts wide plank hardwood floors, was listed by Douglas Elliman's Shawn Felker. Filed: 5.4.10

--Controversial literary agent David Vigliano bought a high-floor two-bedroom at 1020 Park Avenue for $1.275 million from Steven Brecher and Christin Shanahan (the two were married in 1999, but the deed lists both "Christin Shanahan" and "Christin Brecher," leaving the state of their union unclear). The literary agent, whose client list ranges from Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and Courtney Love to magic man David Blaine to Times plagiarist Jayson Blair to the late Pope John Paull II, is known to have lived at One Union Square South, the same building as legendary art director George Lois. His new "sun-flooded Park Avenue home" was listed by Brown Harris Stevens' Cordelia Robb who assures in the listing, "downsizing? upsizing? This is the place for you." Filed: 5.5.10

cmalle@observer.com