Culture Shock

Walking everywhere is fine. The noise, the weather, the shopping, all fine. Even the entitled superiority of New Yorkers everywhere is surprisingly easy to get used to, once you learn to drift along with the zen acceptance that we employed when friends from eastern Europe once insisted that they had a much better Grand Canyon in their own country. (N.B., wine helps.)

The culture shock is in the advertising. It still makes me laugh hysterically and snort at inappropriate moments. (Don't look at me like that. There are moments when a good loud snort is entirely appropriate. But I find that if you snort near a particularly superior New Yorker, you begin to feel threatened--like the guest of honor at a cannibal picnic.)

A fiesta of examples greets me in my Sunday Times, a gift from my mother. I don't know what an ad in the Times costs, but I don't think it could be exaggerating to say it's got to be gobs and gobs of cash. Naturally if you're going to throw that sort of money around, you're probably not advertising the topsy tail. You're not even advertising products of any kind. ("Products" are so commercial. How crass that would be.)

No, you are advertising wackadoo items for people with more money than sense. Frippery. Lifestyle. And, oh yes, ludicrously expensive real estate. I don't mean the 200 square foot apartment that costs half a million dollars. That part of the culture shock is over--that's no longer ludicrous. I mean the kind of real estate where the luxury is so over the top that you couldn't successfully satirize it.

The frippery isn't especially funny. It's a little revolting, like a horror movie that's all blood and no good scare. But it does convince you that Forrest Gump could write a really high-end ad. Your average high-end frippery ad (for, say, a watch that costs more than a home would cost out west) is a big photo of the frip in all its sexy hedonism, and then tiny, tiny text that tells where you'd go to buy it. Never the price (perish the thought--there you go being all crass again). But you see what I mean? All Forrest needs is your business card and a glossy photo and he's done.

The real estate ads, however, are hysterical. My favorite is an artist's rendering of a building that looks like Sims live there. It's plastered against a blue sky drawn with the sky blue crayon, and the only other buildings in the picture flank it diminuitively like the maiden aunts standing next to the graduate in a photo taken by an over-proud mother. The caption promises that the building (and therefore the lifestyle that it affords you) is "Stylishly Proper."

The part of my brain that presents me with a running commentary of everything I read and watch trips all over itself when I read that. "Are you serious?" one part of it asks. "You can't be serious" another part guffaws. "What would the building be doing in the picture if it were improper?" asks another, conjuring up a picture of the building getting into the back of a limo with its vestibule riding up over a skimpy thong. Then I start to imagine the target audience of this ad, and imagine a day during which a bunch of women prance into the building dressed like the Queen Mother, with wide brimmed hats and perfectly coordinated outfits and white gloves. My brain sort of wants them to burst into song, ideally the sort of song that ends with one of them being popped into a hamper and sold into white slavery like Mary Tyler Moore in "Thoroughly Modern Millie," but that would be very undignified.

I know that this part of my brain is going to get me into big trouble. I think the only questions are "how big" and "how soon?"