Julia Reed January 7th, 2010
As 2009 drew to a close, we all listened to the by now too-familiar litany of why the first decade of the new millennium had been so God-awful lousy: 9/11, two wars, Hurricane Katrina, the economic collapse, Bernie Madoff, the implosion of print media as we know it. Toward the very end, even that great multi-cultural hope Tiger Woods had let us down (though I am firmly in the shockingly minuscule camp of folks who think that’s none of my business).
It’s true that as 2000 dawned our biggest fear was the now quaint concern that a Y2K virus would shut down all our computers. That year on New Year’s Eve I put on a cap-sleeved black chiffon Oscar de la Renta gown and went with my now-husband to a black-and-white “Venetian†Ball thrown in New Orleans by my sometime neighbor, a very generous actor and playwright. He’d had black-and-white glass beads hand blown for us in Venice and I wore mine with a white silk mask. Beforehand, I fed fellow revelers a supper that included blini with ossetra caviar and another neighbor brought lots of Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf du Pape to go with the daube. Life was great and full of promise.
This year I was decidedly less dressed up. I wore my favorite ancient gray sweater and we stayed in with the dog to watch The Thin Man marathon on Turner Classic Movies. We still had caviar, but it was American hackleback.
Of course I’m a bit nostalgic for those supposedly innocent days before 9/11, and as a resident of New Orleans, I’m all too aware of Katrina’s damage. Still, we’ve managed to come up with some silver linings in the wake of the latter (an entirely new school system, one that works; a sense, finally, of the need for civic responsibility and government that is not a joke).
The fact is that there are pretty much always silver linings—somewhere—if you search hard enough, and as I sat watching Myrna Loy and William Powell running around being completely charming, I realized once again how lucky most of us are. (And I thanked the ghost of Dashiell Hammett for creating Nick and Nora in the first place—when all else fails they are perfect diversions.) I’d just finished Josephine Hart’s wonderful new novel, The Truth About Love, set in post-World War II Ireland. And I thought, my God, I can only barely grasp what it must have been like to have lived in such a small, small place and to have watched people blow each other up week after week, year after year, until just a couple of short decades ago.
That’s still happening in a great many places in the world, but not here. Yes, things are a bit depressing. Yes, no one knows what’s going to happen (no one ever does). But that doesn’t mean we should wear sackcloth or even old cashmere sweaters every day. Anyway, all kinds of good stuff happened in the last decade. For example: the amazing explosion of the technology that allows me to write this column on this site.
As someone who decided at age eight that she wanted to be the editor of Esquire, what is happening, so fast, to newspapers and magazines is discombobulating to say the least. But I’m old enough to remember when computers first replaced typewriters in the Newsweek Washington bureau, and you would have thought the plague had arrived. We adapt. Something else—something new—always comes and something good is always somehow salvaged.
And there are so many outlets these days through which to create. The decade opened with Tony Soprano and closed with Mad Men—and we can watch them at home any time thanks to the greatest invention ever, Tivo (or whatever Tivo has now morphed into already)! Or we can watch them on the other greatest inventions ever, the iPhone and the iPod! (Speaking of which, some damn fine music was produced in the last ten years—and I listened to it on my iPod and on yet another greatest invention ever, XM radio.) My friend Sara Colleton produces Dexter, a show so well written and acted that a serial killer is truly loveable. Who would have thought? Who would have thought, for that matter, that my friend Jon Meacham would become the youngest editor ever of Newsweek and lead it in a mould-shattering new re-design while simultaneously winning the Pulitzer Prize for his wonderful biography of my hero Andrew Jackson (after writing a really lovely, wonderful, important, book on Roosevelt and my other hero Churchill).
Who would have thought that Jay McInerney, who blazed into our collective consciousness with the era-defining Bright Lights, Big City in 1984, would also become a terrific and respected wine critic and then get the best reviews of his career for a fiction collection a full quarter century after his first success. My friend and wowOwow.com colleague, Joan Buck, a brilliant writer, an incisive critic, and great editor, surprised us all last year with her star turn in “Julie and Julia†as Julia Child’s nemesis, the scary-mean head of the Cordon Bleu. An actress was born!
The list goes on. I bought my first Michael Kors suit in 1986. I watched him go briefly bankrupt and resurrect, and now he’s designing some of the best clothes of his career—great, sporty, exuberant American clothes infused with can-do dash and a tiny hint of healthy nostalgia, just like us.
I love that Scott Fitzgerald was wrong about second acts in America. We have countless acts—along with resilience, and the good sense to know, most of the time, that we are indeed lucky, and that life, whether on happy “innocent†New Year’s Eve nights or pretty much every morning that you decide it does, has promise.
Elusive Fine: Hot Socks
