bicoastal March 10th, 2007
The NYT Magazine ran a photo spread last week called “Coast Lines: For These Up-and-Coming Men’s-Wear Designers, Los Angeles and New York Are More Than Just Points of Departure.” Maybe I’m not patient enough to tease out what the headline has to do with the spread, or maybe I’m too fashion-blind to understand why this is a bicoastal story, but there it is. The bicoastal trope in all its glory.
bicoastal November 12th, 2006
The NY Times must be monitoring my mind, because this week’s online wedding section features the most bicoastal couple ever. In fact, their bicoastality is just so out there that it makes a mockery of this entire enterprise. No subtlety!
Some choice bits:
THREE years ago, Dr. Kevin McAbee was different from the man he is today, really different. Back then, he said, he was a cautious, unemotional, even automated veterinary surgeon at the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan.“I left as few things up to chance as possible,†he said, sounding like the uptight Ben Stiller character in the film “Along Came Polly.†“I planned everything I could. I wore clothes buttoned up to the top button. My shoes were laced properly, no loose ends. I always walked the same way to work every day. I never took a different route. I never got coffee at a different spot. Then, all of a sudden my life changed.â€In December 2003, Carley Wellman, a slim woman with an offbeat pixie spirit like Jennifer Aniston’s “Polly†character, arrived at the center with her cat Ursula, which she likes to describe as being purple. (Ms. Wellman, who tends to imbue everything with extra color, poetry and significance, concedes that most people would call Ursula gray.)
Ms. Wellman lived in a tiny Queens apartment with green floors and a collection of four-leaf clovers she had found in the neighborhood and was working as the assistant director of fund-raising at CARE, the humanitarian organization. She was very emotional, basing most of her major life decisions on feelings, “signs from the universe†and consultations with her psychic. Some hinged on whether she had seen any shooting stars recently.
