2008 Woodie Awards
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The Scene
The Random Tip...Moving to New York: an isolating experience
By Benjamin Lozovsky on 3/29/07
Oh boy! Did you read the news today? I hope you did, because I sure didn't. I missed what Eurasian pan-epidemic was stirring the global marketplace, didn't seem to catch the newest allegations against the Revenge Department (I'm sorry, did I say revenge? I meant Justice), didn't even examine the latest ex-starlet toxicology screen or wade chest-deep through any month-old, drug-ridden stomach contents.
How could someone like myself, so devoted to divulging the dirt and dissecting down-low doings, find themselves so completely out of the loop?
The same way I found myself brunching on scrambled tofu and soy bacon next to an equal parts transvestite, Egyptian pharaoh and black Jesus-esque personal stylist named Andre J. I went to New York City.
It's really the only place I know that can be so disinterested in the general happenings of the globe, despite being so instrumental in influencing, shaping and relaying these events to everyone else outside the five boroughs.
Coming from Washington, D.C., a city where local news constantly blurs into or is transcended by national matters, it's confounding to imagine a locale where endless diatribes about insignificant socialites or stories like "NYPD Jew," a crack investigative piece about New York's first Hassidic police officer, can take up the entire front page of one of the self-proclaimed greatest city in the world's most widely-read newspapers.
And yet I can't fully blame the city for its isolationist tendencies, its fanatical embrace of some sort of downsized and repackaged neo-Monroe Doctrine, because what's falling off the tree in the Big Apple is often just too delectable to not readily devour.
All these world-class goings ons, filled with promises of instant intellectual and cultural enlightenment, all these cracked canals of concrete, paved in golden opportunities, leading to emerald-tinged midtown towers and winding their way toward relative immortality, all of which categorize this self-aggrandizing and endlessly narcissistic megalopolis, have rendered me utterly hypnotized.
How could someone like myself, so devoted to divulging the dirt and dissecting down-low doings, find themselves so completely out of the loop?
The same way I found myself brunching on scrambled tofu and soy bacon next to an equal parts transvestite, Egyptian pharaoh and black Jesus-esque personal stylist named Andre J. I went to New York City.
It's really the only place I know that can be so disinterested in the general happenings of the globe, despite being so instrumental in influencing, shaping and relaying these events to everyone else outside the five boroughs.
Coming from Washington, D.C., a city where local news constantly blurs into or is transcended by national matters, it's confounding to imagine a locale where endless diatribes about insignificant socialites or stories like "NYPD Jew," a crack investigative piece about New York's first Hassidic police officer, can take up the entire front page of one of the self-proclaimed greatest city in the world's most widely-read newspapers.
And yet I can't fully blame the city for its isolationist tendencies, its fanatical embrace of some sort of downsized and repackaged neo-Monroe Doctrine, because what's falling off the tree in the Big Apple is often just too delectable to not readily devour.
All these world-class goings ons, filled with promises of instant intellectual and cultural enlightenment, all these cracked canals of concrete, paved in golden opportunities, leading to emerald-tinged midtown towers and winding their way toward relative immortality, all of which categorize this self-aggrandizing and endlessly narcissistic megalopolis, have rendered me utterly hypnotized.
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