Images of Allen Ginsberg and his family in the Gagosian Gallery in New York shot by Richard Avedon. The city's self-importance is vertiginous – so too the way it venerates those with power and clout.Ĭonsider the case of Truman Capote, who squandered his considerable literary talents by playing court jester to a gaggle of Upper East Side society grande dames (his swans, as he called them), who then cast him out into social Siberia when he dared share their whispered confessions in print (did they really expect such an entrenched metropolitan gossip to maintain Jesuitical silence when presented with hot material?). It's called the A-list.Īnd given how that vertical playpen of ambition is obsessed with winning and all its material trappings, finding your place within the upper reaches of the New York scene remains an ongoing obsession of the hyper-ambitious. In that most imperial and imperious of cities, New York, there is a new variation of the cursus honorum theme. The ancient Romans called it the cursus honorum: the system by which you moved up the social ranking to get the top positions within the imperial pecking order.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |