What I meant was that living in Paris—which is, incidentally, the center of the universe to the minds of most Parisians—had taught me that the universe has no center. During my years there, I subscribed to The New York Observer and scanned its party pages with fascination. There were parties I would have attended and probably enjoyed, parties I didn’t mind missing, and parties to which, had I been living in New York at the time, I would have wished I’d been invited. And large as these events might have loomed at close range, none seemed to matter in the slightest when viewed from the terrace of my local café.
2. NEW YORK IS THE CAPITAL OF AMERICAN CULTURE. Forty years ago, if you were a painter, a choreographer, a dancer, a theater director, a playwright, or an opera singer, and you wanted to pursue a career at the top of your field, you had no choice but to do it in New York, which hosted the country’s—maybe the world’s—largest community of people practicing your art. Today New York is the capital of cultural consumption—not the place where most artists make their work but the marketplace where they sell it. You might think this is yet another one of those seismic shifts made possible by the Internet, which enables artists to participate in a community, no matter where they live. In fact, the creative urge to escape goes back much further and found its Pied Piper in Donald Judd, who proved by example that it’s possible to leave SoHo for a whistle-stop in the middle of the desert, buy up the town, and thrive.
3. IF YOU CAN MAKE IT THERE, YOU CAN MAKE IT ANYWHERE. New York is overpopulated with alpha types for whom the greatest achievement seems to be outdoing one another, but the stiff competition is largely confined to certain fields, like Wall Street and the media. You don’t see aerospace engineers, oceanographers, or golfers flocking to New York to prove themselves.
There’s a corollary assumption: Just because you’ve made it someplace else doesn’t mean you could make it in New York. But let’s face it, there are a lot of successful New Yorkers, particularly those whose careers are built on that local virtue—chutzpah—whom it would be hard to imagine making it anywhere else. Picture Donald Trump in Europe. Or Boston. Or any town in Ohio.
4. NEW YORK IS NOT AMERICA. You hear this every election year, when New Yorkers, who have a hard time believing that the rest of the country can take the likes of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin seriously, fulminate at cocktail parties and reiterate their periodic threat to secede from the Union. You also hear it when New Yorkers caution foreigners who claim to love America but have never ventured beyond the confines of Manhattan. Because someone needs to warn them that the rest of the country is a right-wing paradise paved with strip malls and buzzed on Coke Zero. (Never mind that the New York State Theater, paid for by the state and built for the people, has been renamed for a billionaire underwriter of the Tea Party.) In fact, New York is a city full of go-getters on a make-or-break quest for the jackpot every American considers his constitutional birthright: celebrity, wealth, and happiness ever after. What other city, with the possible exception of Las Vegas, so perfectly captures what this country stands for?
