Radical Chic 2.0 → The Kerhamptons

Hey Neighbor. New research from the St. Louis Fed suggests high inflation helps semi-rich Americans build wealth. Over the short term, inflation drives up prices and devalues assets, which is bad for everyone, but over time it decreases the nominal value of mortgages that constitute the bulk of high-earners’ debt. The swing isn’t enough to justify rooting for inflation (dick move anyway), but it’s ever-so-slightly reassuring.

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If we were at a cocktail party, you might hear me say the following....

❝I flunked The Ideological Turing. You will too.❞
....or....
❝Offices aren’t for work.❞
....or....
❝It’s the debt bomb, stupid.❞

A few drinks later, I might add that you should ignore Polymarket completely because non-Americans crypto bros are not the keen-eyed political observers they think they are [1].

I might also try to talk about....

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→ Daniel Post Senning, the heir to the Emily Post etiquette empire, says he has struggled to meet demand for classes focused on office decorum, including “Manners at Work” and “Business Etiquette for Professionals.” Much the demand comes from younger workers who started their careers remotely and don’t know how to behave or dress (maybe you noticed). But older workers have questions too – largely about digital communications and how to respect boundaries that didn’t really exist when they were coming up. Basically, everyone is trying to accommodate everyone else. It’s sweet really. (READ MORE)

→ The City Council of San Clemente, a wealthy seaside SoCal enclave that has spent millions on sand to beautify it’s beaches, can’t find enough grains for two new beach projects. Sounds minor, but this has been a problem for ages in Asia, where Singapore keeps stealing chunks of Indonesia. This is a relatively new pickle for American coastal communities, which lack the wherewithal to commit international crimes or pony up: The price of a tonne of sand imported to Singapore increased from 63x between 1995 and 2005. (READ MORE)

→ The divorce rate among folks older than 65 has tripled from 5% to 15% since 1990 according to new research out of Bowling Green State University. In 2001, the median net worth of an American aged 65-74 was roughly $100K. It’s now north of $400k. The accepted wisdom has long been that rich people get divorced at a lower rate – but there may be a wrinkle in there around age. That should make anyone waiting on an inheritance nervous. (READ MORE)

On June 8, 1970, New York magazine published the feature story that would become the front half of “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” Tom Wolfe’s culturally pornographic sketch of urban progressives’ assignation with the Black Power movement. In the piece, Wolfe (a proto-Barstool reactionary with a New York Review of Books vocabulary) described a party held for Black Panthers at the apartment of Philharmonic conductor Leonard Bernstein, who he loopily caricatured as possessing more schnoz than sense.

Describing what attracted Bernstein to guests so unapologetically uninterested in his bourgeois morality (much less his safety), Wolfe coined a phrase: “Double-track thinking.”

That phrase, more mechanistic than most of Wolfe’s many descriptors, was also more… descriptive. It encapsulated the apparent opposition of the Bernsteins’ decor (“the million-dollar chatchka look”) and their guests. It was a class thing. As Wolfe wrote: “New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated ‘middle class.’ They can take on the trappings of aristocracy… and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact they are always used in combination.”

What’s interesting about “double-track” as a phrase – specifically in the context of Trump speeches about “enemies within” and the current pushback on the excesses of circa 2020 wokeism – is that it’s disrespectful without being dismissive (which is worse, BTW). Even while mocking Bernstein in print, Wolfe assumes good intent.

“Double-track thinking” sniffs of bourgeois pretension, sure, but it’s preferable to single-track thinking, which requires either:

1. An activist with complete moral conviction and no interest in status.
2. An activist with no moral conviction and an all consuming interest in status.

Wolfe understands not only that Bernstein is neither of those people, but also that those people don’t exist. Ted Kaczynski signed his bombs. Leni Riefenstahl really did like Hitler. Even terrible people double-track. But it has become chic to pretend they don’t. In the context of our delinquent politics, we imagine true believers and absolute opportunists.

In the wake of Wolfe’s article, Bernstein credibly accused his lampoonist of journalistic malfeasance: it wasn’t a party for Panthers; it wasn’t planned as a fundraiser; he was actually at a rehearsal for a lot of it. And he was right on the facts (not that it mattered to the FBI [2]), but Wolfe was also correct in some sense: Bernstein was a race-struggle dilettante trying on the dark sunglasses of militantism to see if he could get them to perch just so on his honker.

Not so much. But whatever. We’ve all been there.

Wolfe’s work rankled Bernstein to the end – largely because the writer embarrassed his wife, which was kind of his whole thing – but when a hearse schlepped his still-warm body from Manhattan to Green-Wood Cemetery in 1990, the city stopped to say goodbye. Famously, construction workers took off their helmets. They knew the difference between a bad look and a bad person.

Activism and morality are both sources of heat and light, but one is a torch and the other is the Dog Star, which renders the world navigable. That distinction, clear in Wolfe’s work [3], is worth considering while lost in a labyrinth of yard signs. There are worse things than double-track thinking. There are worse things than a poorly conceived cocktail hour.

False notes happen. They don’t distract much from the music.

→ High Point Market, the peak of the interior design calendar, will take place this weekend outside of Greensboro, North Carolina (a manufacturing hub, FWIW). Lots of gossip in the design community about new releases and trends, but expect to hear about the comeback of Old Hickory, the rustic chic company now partnered with decorator and cowboy hat enthusiast Max Humphrey, who recently released Lodge: An Indoorsy Tour of America’s Parks. ( READ MORE )

There’s a backlash to Architectural Digest’s celebrity home tours among people who use coasters when they’re alone. The worry is that shelter magazines can’t prioritize both good design and access and should therefore choose. A reasonable counterpoint would be that the celebrities whose homes are features in shelter mags are almost all trying to sell said homes and staging them accordingly. Ironically, the contrivance and duplicity of the whole exercise resolves the problem. (Read More)

Mark Zuckerberg hosted a disco party for his wife. This does not necessarily mean disco is back, but Zuckerberg’s PR people are the most effective zeitgeist wranglers on Earth right now – stock is up big on the back of a culturally reimaging of both Zuck and his product – so maybe it is? (Read More)

The Park Slope-ification of Accord, a Catskills hamlet in the Rondout Valley two hours north of Manhattan, started with Westwind Orchard, a dizzyingly elevated winery run by a fashion photographer named Fabio [4]. It attracted the sort of people that use the word “artisanal.” Next was Arrowhead Brewery. Then INNESS, now a painfully hip outpost for be-flanneled Brooklyn creatives. At some point Michelle Williams and Willem Dafoe moved in.

Joseph Satto, the proprietor of Fresh Air Realty and developer currently at work on a 117-acre regenerative mixed-use development, bought a home in Accord in 2012 and moved up from Brooklyn in 2020. Upper Middle asked him to make the case for his town (which is pronounced ACK-kord btw).

Who is moving to Accord right now? 
The upper echelon. If you go to INNESS on any given weekend, you see people arriving in Blades. There were always pockets of that, but it was here and there. Now my son goes to school with famous actresses’ kids.

What are the people coming to the area looking for? What’s the appeal?
There are three things. People want to be surrounded by nature. People like the farm-to-table ecosystem: farmer’s markets, the maple syrup guy, and that Napa-ish vibe. And people want community. That’s emerging. On Friday nights there’s the Catskills Cocktail Club. If you go back 15 years, that was the fringe, but now it’s mainstream.

Who is selling and why?
Houses that sold for $800,000 a decade ago are now at $2 million, which is life changing for some people. A few have cashed out and moved south. Beyond that it’s the normal stuff: divorces and underused weekend homes.

What surprises new buyers about the area after they close?
Accord speedway is a dirt racetrack and if you go there on a Friday it does not have a Brooklyn vibe. Also, the short term rental regulations surprise people. The community is trying to protect itself.

What’s your favorite street or pocket neighborhood?
Whitfield Road has farmland and it’s definitely worth a drive, but there are 20 roads like that. The truth is that Accord is just one town. Rondout Valley is really the draw. It’s lovely.

→ People who can afford nice cars are buying cheaper cars again. That’s actually normal, but in 2020 when computer chips became scarce, car companies allocated what chips they had to more expensive cars for obvious reasons. This drove a spike in expensive car sales because… that’s what was available. Things are now getting back to normal.[5] To celebrate, go buy an Accord (which is pronounced uh-kord, btw). (READ MORE)

→ The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has never had a good movie made about it, now requires banks to make it easier for their customers to relocate their assets. Going forward, bank clients will be able to switch institutions at the click of a button without paying a fee or losing their transaction history. Expect a marketing blitz. (Read More)

→ his year’s home sales will be the lowest on record since 1995. For perspective, the most popular song of 1995 was Coolio’s Gangsta's Paradise. In a sense, we’re all “loc’ed out” now. (In another sense, nah.) (READ MORE)

NOTES & FOOTNOTES

[1] Talking to Europeans about American politics remains one of the great joys of life. Feel guilty about not totalling understanding how the Houses of Parliament work? Rest assured half of Whitehall couldn’t find the Washington Memorial with both hands.

[2] Very long story exceedingly short, it turned out that the FBI had an 800-page dossier on Leonard Bernstein and ginned up a lot of the controversy after Wolfe’s article to drive a wedge between liberal Jews and activist Blacks – something WASPs have been doing with (credit where it’s due) a lot of success for a very long time.

[3] It’s a bit unfair to levy accusations of racism at Wolfe posthumously (also cowardly), but I did not know audio blackface was possible until I listened to the Radical Chic audiobook. His “transcription” of hip language is unreal. Also, lots of nose jokes. Like, a lot of nose jokes.

[4] Fabio is such an adept photographer he summed up the whole Accord ethos in one image.

[5] It remains true that a very old Volvo station wagon is the most high-status car a human being can possibly own. It counts double if there’s a folder of CDs in the car. It counts triple if one of the CDs is “Appalachian Spring.” (BTW, Aaron Copland was at the Bernstein place that night.)