Notes on Fran Lebowitz

• I started writing this almost a year ago. Now I am looking at the calendar and seeing that it’s 2022 and thus long past time to finish writing my book notes from 2021.
• As always, I refer to my book posts as “book notes” and not “book reviews” because who am I to review anything, and because I seldom stay on topic; and thus a book note could meander off in any and all directions. Consider yourself warned.
• Why bullet points? I don’t know. I don’t know.
• Anyway, the rest of these bullets are what I started writing about Fran Lebowitz back in early 2021.
• I’m always on trend, you know. I’m always doing the thing that’s the thing to do at any given moment. So of course, I watched “Pretend it’s a City,” the Netflix limited series of one-one-one conversations between Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz. I hadn’t thought about Fran Lebowitz in absolutely forever, and it was delightful to make her acquaintance again.
• I’m not a huge fan of Mr. Scorsese. I do like some of his movies, especially “Goodfellas.” I also liked “The Departed” quite a bit; although I have to say, the rat scurrying along the balcony railing at the end was the sort of bludgeon-subtle imagery that I would expect from a high school film class. But “The Wolf of Wall Street” (in which Fran Lebowitz had a cameo, which I had forgotten all about) really bothered me. I get that the movie had to depict the excess and sexual license that Jordan Belfort and his Wall Street bros indulged in, but it could have done that without turning into a veritable porn film. I got the sense, watching the party scenes, that these were young, aspiring, vulnerable actresses who would have done anything to please Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, and I really hated them for taking advantage of that situation. Oh, and Leonardo, here’s another review for you: ”The Revenant” was stupid.
• But I digress. Leonardo still retains some goodwill from “The Departed” (and “Titanic,” I guess. Whatever.) and Scorsese redeemed himself with “Pretend it’s a City,” which was definitely my favorite streaming experience in a long time.
• One of my favorite parts of “Pretend it’s a City” was the scenes of Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz walking carefully through the Panorama of the City of New York, an enormous art installation that is just a giant 3-D map and architectural model of New York City, complete with streets, rivers, and scale models of every building in the city at the time of the Panorama’s construction in 1964. I read that the Panorama was updated in 1992, and that there have been a few additions since then, but no more comprehensive updates are planned, and so most of the buildings and streets will remain as they stood in 1992. Maeve Brennan would approve. I’m sure that most visitors to the Queens Museum are not allowed to traipse through the Panorama, but Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz aren’t most visitors, and even they had to take off their shoes.
• When I was young, I really liked reading Fran Lebowitz’s columns and notes in “Interview.” Reading “Interview,” and reading anything written by Fran Lebowitz, seemed to me to be the pinnacle of New York cool in the 1980s, when I liked that sort of thing. But I had never read her books, so I joined the bandwagon of people who watched “Pretend it’s a City” and then immediately bought or borrowed The Fran Lebowitz Reader, a compilation of her humor and critical essays (actually two books of essays–Metropolitan Life and Social Studies).
• Not long ago, I discovered Poshmark, which is an online selling platform and application that is supposed to be focused on fashion. I say “supposed to” because people sell everything on Poshmark. I have seen toys and books and bobbleheads and antique hair dryers and wedding china and artwork and electronics and who knows what else on Poshmark. I shop on Poshmark because I like to buy pre-owned things, but even better than shopping is just looking through people’s listings and seeing a glimpse into their lives and their aesthetics. People write their own descriptions (sometimes hilarious) and take their own pictures, and it’s like a giant virtual estate sale catalog. I imagine the homes that these objects reside in, and the people who wear them or use them or carry them around. I never tire of seeing and reading about and thinking about people and the things they choose to own and use and live with.
• This is why my favorite essay from the Fran Lebowitz Reader was “The Frances Ann Lebowitz Collection,” because it’s hilarious and because it’s about this very subject. “Collection” is a send-up of a Sotheby’s-style auction catalog of Fran Lebowitz’s “estate,” with curatorial descriptions of her poor-person household junk, complete with badly framed poorly lit pictures, probably snapped with a Kodak Instamatic or some other relic of the pre-digital photography age. The pictures, especially the picture of a 1970s toaster oven and the picture of not one nor two but three Westclox alarm clocks, made me laugh out loud. Yes, it was partially a laugh of recognition, but those pictures and descriptions would be funny even to a person who didn’t grow up with a giant toaster oven on the kitchen counter and a Westclox alarm clock in every bedroom. Tune in again, and I’ll have posted my own Sotheby’s catalog page complete with poorly framed and badly lit pictures of books, Washington Capitals memorabilia, Fiestaware dishes, and Longchamp Le Pliage tote bags, along with droll descriptions. What did I tell you? That’s right, don’t come back here complaining that you weren’t warned.
• As I mentioned, I hadn’t read Fran Lebowitz in many years. I remembered some of these pieces, but others I had never read at all. People wonder why Fran Lebowitz hasn’t published a book in a long time, but it’s pretty clear why. Most of these essays will put you in mind of two things, assuming you’re familiar with both of those things: One is Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners. Like Miss Manners, Fran Lebowitz issues wittily dictatorial (or maybe dictatorially witty) pronouncements about how people should and should not behave, with liberal use of the impersonal pronoun. The other thing is blogs, circa 2007 or so. Many of Fran’s bulleted lists of what one may and may not do, or what one should and should not wear or read or buy, read very much like blog entries from that era. Many of those bloggers were probably inspired by Fran, in fact. But now everyone can write bulleted lists of their own quirky pet-peevy observations, and we all do, and no one is going to buy a book of the same for $27.95, not even one authored by Fran Lebowitz.
• A-ha! Now I remember why I wrote this as a bunch of bullet points. I’d forgotten. It’s been a year, for crying out loud.
• Reading old Fran Lebowitz is like watching a 1980s movie comedy. Some of these essays or at least parts of them, are as funny and relevant now as they were 30-plus years ago. Some bits, on the other hand; some whole essays, in fact, are more than a little “problematic,” as the young people say on the Twitter. Consider “Notes on ‘Trick,’” for example, an essay about lopsided relationships between rich older people (usually men, but not always) and beautiful but impecunious young people (both men and women). The beautiful young people, who are presumed to bring nothing to the relationship other than sexual attractiveness and availability, are called “tricks.” The main idea is that in entertainment or high fashion or high society circles, one person in any relationship is always a “trick.” This idea is meant to come across as witty and sophisticated in a jaded haute New York kind of way, and maybe that’s how it came across in the pre-Weinstein and pre-Epstein age. Now it reads as predatory and creepy. But to be fair, I’m sure that many of the relationships that inspired this essay were actually predatory and creepy. Fran doesn’t seem to acknowledge this, though. In fact, her sympathies seem to lie squarely with the non-trick half of the relationship; i.e., the person with the money and the power.
• So yes, I enjoyed “Pretend it’s a City” very much, and I was happy to rediscover some of Fran Lebowitz’s work. But if you ever needed a reminder that not everything stands the proverbial test of time, this book would be that reminder.