#jay mcinerny

[trikadekaphile]

Carrie Fisher, Jay McInerny and Lauren Hutton at the Hooray for Hollywood benefit in 1988.

[arjanwrites]

It’s six a.m. do you know where you are?

Still iconic.

[pirateapprentice]

Turn On The Bright Lights

You've read an awful lot of books about drugs lately. Do you need them listed out for you? How about Portrait of an Addict: A Memoir, or Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. Why you're drawn to the genre is beyond you, maybe it's because it's so far from your realm of the normal, maybe it lets you live, if only for a moment, in a world 180 degrees away from yours, yet is familiar enough to make it real. Maybe that is why you read in the first place.

You read Jay McInerny's novel Bright Lights, Big City and it brought you to New York City at a time so different from today, yet with many if the same absurdities and vanities of present day New York City. Where it was cocaine and nightclub hopping in the 80's, it is twitter and farm to table restaurants today. Whatever the medium, you see it boiling down to a hyper competitive 'I've been here and you haven't' survival of the coolest. 

NYC character pieces from the '80s seem to follow two playbooks: coked out Wall Streeter competing with Ivy League grads for bigger paychecks, or coked out literary types competing with Ivy Leagers for print space. Bright Lights, Big City falls into the latter camp, but McInerny throws a wrench into it by showing a guy who's so far behind in that competition, it is almost sad. You feel for the guy, especially since on top of that barely off the ground writing career (sadly hits a little to close to home doesn't it), his model wife has recently left him (FYI - remember to tell your wife how much you love her later). You see him succumbing to the failure, staying out until all ungodly hours of the night ("it's 6 am, do you know where you are?"), holding on to the pipe dream that it will all work out, that Amanda will come back, and that somehow, hanging out with argyle's named Tad (before argyle went out, came back, and subsequently went out again) will get him to the top if the journalistic heap. You don't think he stands a chance, do you?

If you haven't read this, maybe because it is from '84 or maybe you've just never heard of it, you should. Maybe you should just make sure you're in a good place before you do.

[seanrrwilkins]

To put it differently, the 1990 would probably count as the best one-night stand you ever had, whereas you'd be inclined to propose marriage to the 1989.

This is why Jay McInerny is my favorite wine author.

Here's the full article on a vertical tasting of Petrus

[wannafightme]

16. John Edwards Ordinarily I wouldn’t include a politician in this group since I work for them occasionally, but John Edwards has as much a chance to return to politics as Sonny Bono.  This charming, hillbilly anti-Christ almost could have snagged the presidential nomination in 2008 all the while sleeping with the main character from Jay McInerney’s  Story of My Life, a novel so full of evil and cocaine that they couldn’t even make a Nic Cage movie out of it.  The lovebirds conceived a secret child of course.  He denied it, lectured the press, then gallantly hid from the press for a year. Even more precious was Edwards’ disregard for his wife’s terminal cancer and how he bravely went about his business. Smacking this piddling, little villain around would be a highlight for any red-blooded American and probably most foreigners.  

  Happy Memorial Day

[lexiphanedotcom]

It came out last summer, but I just got around to reading Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. In the course of writing a blurb review for it, I found this promo video on Amazon. What the hell? Watch the video. Read the book.