Inigo Thomas

Saturday

Inigo Thomas

A smooth passage

From our UK edition

Jonathan Raban left Britain and moved to Seattle in 1990, when he was 47. He sold his Volkswagen on his way to Heathrow airport. He bought a Dodge with Washington state plates the next day, and in this second-hand car he would, over the years, travel through and write about his new country. ‘The Pacific Northwest continues to be a magnet — the strongest regional magnet in the country, I would guess — for hopefuls and newlifers of every imaginable cast,’ Raban wrote in the summer of 1993, in a piece that’s now republished in Driving Home: It feels like the last surviving corner of the United States to be widely promoted … as the one green spot in the moral sand-waste of the world.

Saturday

Inigo Thomas

When the Eighties had to stop

From our UK edition

The Eighties, you might say, didn’t end on time. The speculative financial boom in the United States and elsewhere, which became synonymous with the price of reputation and the importance of money, which began with the Ronald Reagan tax cut and the gloss of Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, which rode out a crash in 1987 and rolled on through the soaring Nineties, the decade of Clinton, the Internet and the first billion-dollar movie, began to unravel only after the millennium, when share prices fell, when the US Department of Justice took two leading art auction houses to court, and when it was discovered that executives of a Texan company few people had ever heard of had committed an absolutely massive fraud, or around about then.

Inigo Thomas

Life in the bus lane

From our UK edition

New York I forgot: you need coins or a pre-paid Metrocard for the New York buses, and one morning several weeks ago, as I stood at the eastbound stop on the corner of Broadway and 125th Street, I realised I had neither. Only notes. Two other men were waiting for the M60, the cross-town bus — the one I was to take to the Harlem railway station — and there was no time to go in search of change. Through the broad arch of the iron bridge over 125th Street, which supports an elevated section of the Broadway subway line, I saw a bus coming from the Hudson, and I turned to the more together-looking of the two men and asked him if he had change for a couple of dollar bills.

Saturday

Inigo Thomas

Public relations disaster

From our UK edition

Private lives of the rich or celebrated or infamous kinds in New York often resemble one of those inside-out buildings designed by the architect Richard Rogers in the 1970s; like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its exterior escalators and air-conditioning ducts, or the Lloyd's building in London, where lifts and pipes are part of the facade, what one expects to be private in New York is public discourse. An entire book could be written on the spectacle and politics of emotional display in New York, and if Tom Barbash's On Top of the World is not that volume, it is an addition to the extensive raw material, as well as another contribution to that burgeoning subcategory known as 'Nine Eleven'.