“The `80s were the last identifiable period. If you see a picture from that era, you know it instantly. The art, the clothes, the hair; they were unique. After that, everything started to look and feel the same.”
That’s what the author Jay McInerney said (or something close to it) when I saw him at a book reading here in La Jolla. He seemed wistful. And why he wouldn’t he be, having hurdled like a latter day F. Scott Fitzgerald into the New York literary scene with his 1984 bestseller, Bright Lights, Big City? As he spoke, I too waxed nostalgic for the time, the scene, and recalled a woman who once leaned against the bar of the Surf Club on the Upper East Side. It was 1988, and I thought it was her birthday.
The Surf Club’s preppy, Wall Street trader vibe wasn’t for me – I preferred the scruffier downtown scene – but there she was: button nose, sneakers, shoulder-length blonde hair and looking like she knew something the rest of us didn’t. Continue reading “An Elegy to the New York City Club Scene of the late 1980s”
david hogan 