THE PATTERN

SATC + AND JUST LIKE THAT + CAMPY OLD NEW YORK + SMOKING + JUXTAPOSITION + Y2K + GINGHAM

Hi! Welcome :) BEFORE I REALLY BEGIN

I want to mention a couple things. The first is that I am going to be writing about Sex and The City – mostly the original show, which ran from 1998-2004. I will mention a bit about And Just Like That… its insane little revival. I will be talking about plot points, so spoiler alert I guess? Yes, spoiler alert.

If you have never seen an episode and you truly ‘do not care about SATC’ or something like that, honestly I encourage you to do a fun self-investigation into why you may be inclined to dismiss a show like it :)

Second, I am going to be talking about the character of Mr. Big. Big is Carrie’s main love, Big is complicated and timeless, Big dies in And Just Like That… upon a Pelaton. Big is played by Chris Noth, who has recently had numerous allegations of sexual assault emerge against him. They span thirty years. When I talk about Mr. Big, know that I am talking about the fictional character that he plays and not Chris Noth the human man. I know that this is something that we all generally understand, but I always think it’s worth saying anyway.

Ok GREAT LET’S BEGIN!

Obviously, And Just Like That is happening. I personally think that it is a hilarious show – campy and surreal. Wooo!!!

As I watch And Just Like That, I am also on the third round of watching the original Sex and the City. I enjoying it an entirely new way – grabbing as much pleasure from it as I did the first time, while understanding it more because now I am a literal woman. Watching the original side-by-side with this new show is decidedly surreal. It’s CGI to see faces change back and forth in real time.

I’ve read before that the producers and writers often referred to New York as the 5th Lady of the group. This kind of checks out, but recently my BF posited a theory that may push this idea further (he rocks <3). He couldn’t help but wonder… did all of Carrie’s boyfriends represent different parts of the city?

If we think about this, it starts to check out. Aidan is Soho (not Soho now, but Soho then – chic vaguely industrial/artisinal). Berger is Brooklyn (or something? There’s the noise machine etc), but I do remember that his bedroom has a bridge out the window. The Russian represents the distance of an ex-pat, to whom the city offers much but not everything.

But Big… ugh. Though I think Big is supposed to live on the Upper West Side, and I know that he works on Wall Street, Big isn’t quite a neighborhood – he’s an era. Big is Old New York.

The phrase Old New York actually is incredibly vague.

I’ll specify. Big’s old New York is towncars and cigars, big reds for wine, Wall Street comfort, big jazz, Sinatra energy, wearing a suit all the time. He calls Carrie ‘kid’. His and Carrie’s dynamic itself is pretty Old Fashioned. He’s Big and she is… well… quite small. He is over a decade older than she is, but neither of them ever say their exact ages. He’s something of a cad, but not forever, and she does a lot of prancing away in heels when she gets upset with him.

I’m from New York, and I’m often Over It. But I get a lot of pleasure in seeing the city through Carrie’s eyes. An artist’s gaze gravitates naturally toward muse. Her Gaze is on Big. The pursuit of Big is, in so many ways, a pursuit of understanding this city and of capturing it. Elusive, but worth it; aloof, elegant and often cruel. Throughout the seasons, Big leaves for Paris and then Napa. He always comes back.

And for awhile, he drinks his Big Reds and makes More Money, and Carrie is happy. And then he dies. I won’t go far into the Peleton stuff, because it fatigues me just to think about, but I do think there’s something to the symbology of him dying from a piece of extremely contemporary, aspirational technology. His death is dramatic and absurd. It feels clear that whatever Big represents – in embodied form as well as cultural era—is unsustainable.

This is all to say

If Big is Old New York… and Old New York was captivating and compelling … what do we do with that vibe now? The Old Sinatra, speakeasy, martini vibe? If the businessmen who wore suits, smoking, are no longer in the corner booth—then who is?

The answer, I think, is in a red checkered tablecloth.

^ this is the scene where Big sings a little song to an entire Italian restaurant, which apparently he does biweekly or so, despite his generally normal voice. It makes me think about this scene in Anchorman lol.

This type of tablecloth is so ubiquitous. The red was chosen so that spills would be disguised. These tablecothes are almost always reversible! We can also recognize them re- picnics, so there’s almost a cottagecore element to them.

One also recalls this scene in Mad Men, where they go for a nice little picnic and then dump all their trash off their checkered cloth onto the ground. Thereby ruining the planet that we now inhabit :) hehe!

But usually, we can find these checkered tablecloths at ‘Red Sauce Restaurants’

which are Italian-American restaurants that typically feature Southern Italian tomato-based sauces. The restaurant above that Big takes Carrie to, for example, is a red-sauce restaurant. I am neither Italian American, nor really a red-sauce connoisseur, so I decided to look for some more specific definitions.

^Buca di Beppo in L.A.

First, I somehow came across a chatroom thread on the topic from 2002. It ended up being not terribly helpful, but very amazing. Don Pepe and Ellen, as they say, Get Into It:

And then Topper adds in a relatable and thought-provoking:

Fourteen years later, Bon Appétit defined ‘red sauce’ further, and differently.

“Ask any editor at Bon Appétit for his or her restaurant short list, and I guarantee you there’s an Italian spot on there. By Italian, I do not mean a place that serves ‘regional Italian’ or ‘authentic Italian’ or ‘modern Italian’ food. I mean Italian American. Tony Soprano Italian… The Red Sauce Restaurant … has the ability to soothe even the most overfed and jaded among us. It’s marinara as an antidote to food-world ennui.”

This is a very different conversation. We all want to soothe our overfed ennui, at the end of the day. The contrast between the fun little spat in the comments, and this nuanced but precious description, feels compelling. And I am allowed to say nuanced but precious because much of the time, that is what I myself am!!

So I started thinking about contrast,

Between the 2002 chatroom and the Bon Appétit blurb.

And recalled this 2018 Times article about the restaurant Forlini’s. We are gifted the tagline: “If there’s anything worse than an old-school restaurant being uncool, it’s an old-school restaurant suddenly becoming hot.”

We learn that Forlini’s, founded in 1943, typically only used to host long-term regulars, often those who came from work at the nearby courthouse for chicken parm at lunchtime. Recently, however, it’s gotten overwhelmed by hot, vaguely-ironic clientele. Forlini’s is undoubtedly somewhere that Big would go. It’s also somewhere that Carrie would go.

“The locust descent of the young and beautiful, the skateboarders and the models, upon this Old World restaurant is also part of a grand and subversive New York tradition. In a city whose famed grit is being sanded away, a certain young romantic chases authenticity. And this purity tends to be found in holdouts like Forlini’s.”

The Locust Descent feels a bit much. Is this really a plague? It is definitely strange and kind of random, surely voyeuristic, the mismatching of cultural spheres and dining at places that feel surprising. But as Manhattan becomes ‘in’ again, with more real estate going to younger people, it makes sense that the Manhattan crowd would actually go out in Manhattan.

I can’t help thinking about the children’s book, Are You My Mother, in which a baby bird, his parents gone from nest, goes around asking everything and everyone he comes across if they are his mom. This sounds condescending, but I actually really mean it in earnest. So much of going out is a search for alignment and familiarity. Is this it? Is this the place that feels right for me? Is this the place I can have fun? Is this New York? 

Another underlying theme of this article is that preference of these people of visual over sensory, i. e. phone over food.

Though there’s a short moment in the piece where a young man taking a food pic rudely says he doesn’t plan on actually eating the pasta, we mostly are shown a preference of visual over sensory through the piece’s photos. Here, ^ we aren’t allowed access focal point without having to look through a phone. To me, a photo of a photo always feels sad. I agree that taking a photo of food instead of eating it is something to be made fun of. If I made a plate of food, especially in a restaurant, that someone would never intend on eating it would feel insulting to my labor. Food should not be wasted, a body made that food for you, you’re paying money for it etc. But after we disapprove of something, it’s often important to ask a little about why it might be happening in the first place.

I wonder if people have their phones out for pictures at Forlini’s because it is like a museum. The experience economy means that we get to treat all of the things that we do, especially if they engage the multi-sensory, as pieces of art to be documented. The city has changed so much, is always changing so much, that there’s an implicit urgency in trying to capture it before it shifts again. Of course, in social signifiers, it’s a flex; surplus of necessity (food), leads to fetishization of excess (glamour). But also it may be that in a technological era that involves so much dissolution of boundaries between reality and phone, food is something of a souvenir.

In this contrast of Old New York versus those who are young and searching, I think about

The juxtaposition of Carrie and Big.

Carrie and Big often look random! Not in age or beauty, but in how weirdly-dressed their pairing can be. She is always in an insane outfit, and he is always dressed like Don Draper. I guess this is supposed to be the charm, that mismatch, but I famously cannot wear colors and sometimes it really gives me anxiety. Like here:

^Just not right! That’s something of the point, because this scene shows two people who cannot even literally hold onto a leash for a poor doggy. But still.

But these aesthetics – young, modern, experimental, revealing, contrasted with this sort of chic old man casual – define Big and Carrie’s bond. A classic type of stylized chaos, an undeniable attraction. Neither of them is ever going to change. A juxtaposition of old and new, a relishing in these visuals that are so wrong that they may be right.

A flame alights

If we’re talking Old NYC vs New NYC, we also have to think about this piece in the Times about the revival of smoking. The first shot made me think about “The Creation of Adam”.

I honestly am not sure if this article is really worth reading. Most of it consisted of pretty insufferable commentary from artists assistants standing outside “cool dives” describing smoking, saying things like “Beautiful people do it” and “It is a joy to be contemporarily atypical.” I think the most fascinating part of the article is how no one actually talks about the physical sensation of smoking, zero comment on the chemical reaction inside brain and body.

Mostly, it made me think of when Carrie and Big light up a cig when they first start their illicit affair.

The stills above encompass relief. Though Carrie had quit smoking for Aidan, she smokes with Big after they have sex because the struggle is over. What is the point in virtue and feeling well, when things have veered so absurdly off-track?

This article suggests something similar to the Forlini’s piece: young people cosplaying embodied moments of nighttime, of romance, of what is bad. One recognizes an unmoored fatality as a connection between Carrie, Big, these young people outside, smoking together, not sure why.

Bob Dylan said, “chaos is a friend of mine”. I imagine Chaos taking pictures of a plate of food and glass of wine at Forlini’s, eating three bites of pasta, and then going outside to smoke a cigarette.

I’M GOING TO TIE IT ALL TOGETHER

I promise it will make sense! Please stick with. It will be worth it!

Me ^^ smugly about to reveal my point ;)

Sex and the City

Is trending not only for its precedence of And Just Like That… but also because early aughts style has returned. Y2K is happening – bright colors, flares, cigarette as accessory. According to Rachel Seville Tashjian, GQ fashion critic, “when we’re thinking about post-trauma fashion, there’s definitely this renewed sense of everyone’s body and everyone’s individuality and physicality”. Carrie Bradshaw over-accessorized, wore insane things, showed her body, was ostentatious. She smoked. She fell in love with Big at the red-sauce restaurant.

One dominant element of Y2K fashion is gingham. Gingham is whimsical, retro, keeps coming back. Wendy Wurtzburger, the designer of Anthroplogie, said that “the pattern exudes both youthful optimism and nostalgia at the same time… it feeds into that landscape of Y2K nostalgia mixed with cottagecore.”

^^ Michael Kors

^^ I miss Samantha :’(

^^ Carrie smoking a cigarette, outside of her old apartment, IN GINGHAM, in And Just Like That. I told you it would make sense!!

I was shocked to discover

when I was interning at NYMag one summer, a pattern in the archives. The archive room was small and fascinating, and I would spend hours going through the old issues, looking at covers, documenting what was there. I started to realize that once every seven or so years, there would be a headline like “The Kids are Not All Right”. Over and over, probably 1.5 times a decade, we would be struck by some sort of audacious thing that the younger generation was up to. I was a teenager myself then, deeply confused at this weird rhythm, annoyed that grown-ups kept repeating themselves. Now I understand it more and think about it often: the consistency of shock, the predictability of our culture seeming destabilized, the forever-presence of misunderstanding, and how much pleasure we all seem to take in talking about it.

GINGHAM

Ties it all together. Is a familiar pattern, which is an emotional relief. It is forgiving how one can spill, and there’s only a 50% chance that anyone else will know. It goes red/white/red/white, the boxes repeat themselves. For such a simple pattern, the aesthetic contrast to any object beside it gives the effect of movement and business. The closer you look at it, the more dizzying it becomes. This makes it wonderful for Instagram.

Gingham is marvelous for how we can predict it: this/that/this/that/this/that. There will always be this crowd that comes here, and then that crowd that takes it over. There will always be this cigarette, then nothing, this cigarette, then nothing. Mr. Big, no Mr. Big, Mr. Big, no Mr. Big. Red and white, red white, back and forth, back forth, 2000s 2020s 2000s 2020s. A friend group in their 30s a friend group in their 50s, NYC NYC NYC NYC.

It’s funny that gingham feels so playful when actually as a design there’s a real seriousness to it. It will always be the same oscillation, reminding us as we forget and remember and forget and remember, that nothing can exist without its contrast.