March 4, 2001 New York Times

Earnhardt's Popularity Leaves New York in the Dust

By RICK MARIN

The nation mourns the death of a stock car racing hero. A city reputed to be the media and information capital of that nation is dumbfounded.

Dale who?

I got an e-mail message from a writer friend whose husband is in the merchant marine. When news of Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash in the Daytona 500 two weeks ago reached her husband's ship, a sailor on his watch chewed on his home-cured deer jerky and said, "I feel like Superman has died."

Had my friend, a pop-culture sponge, ever heard of Dale Earnhardt before?

"Of course not," she said.

Talk about behind the curve. Nascar racing is the No. 2 sport on television (after National Football League games) and most New Yorkers don't know from it. So who's the rube? We think we're the center of the universe, hip to everything that's hip.

Upper West Side sophisticates come back from a Costco, and it's as if they've just seen the Colosseum? Hello! America has been buying toilet paper in bulk from discount megastores for at least 10 years. Whole Foods Market, the organic supermarket chain, finally opened a New York branch, in Chelsea, two weeks ago — 20 years and 120 stores after everywhere else.

Reba McEntire. That name mean anything to anyone? Her credits include 40 million records, two Grammys and 10 movies. New York discovered her only when she took over the lead in "Annie Get Your Gun" in January.

"I guess most theater critics are not exactly country-and-western aficionados," said Fran Weissler, one of the show's producers. Their raves were weirdly unanimous, though. Michael Kors called for house seats.

Saul Steinberg's famous New Yorker cover showing Manhattan hogging a map of the United States could now be reversed, with what used to be called "fly-over country" in the foreground and the New York skyline an insignificant speck on the horizon. If you can make it here, chances are you've already made it everywhere else.

The Southern thing is sort of understandable. New Yorkers take a certain provincial pride in not knowing what goes on below the Mason- Dixon line, unless you mean C. Vernon Mason and Dixon Boardman. But name just about anything that's big here and it probably started somewhere else. Raves? Europe. Two-way pagers? Silicon Valley. Chai latte? Seattle. The Brazilian bikini wax? Enough said. Wallpaper magazine, the retro dιcor bible on every loft coffee table, was started by a Canadian, in London. New York's big "quality of life" innovations — MetroCards, E-ZPasses, Krispy Kreme — are old news in other, more advanced cities.

Don't even get me started on yoga, organic food, spas, gyms, John Gray, nutraceuticals and all the other things Woody Allen used to be able to mock about Los Angeles — the city whose only cultural advantage used to be that you could make a right on red.

"The West Coast is way ahead of New York in terms of cocktails," said Julie Reiner, the bar manager at the C3 lounge in the Village. "They were drinking apple martinis in L.A. two years ago."

O.K.: fashion. New York still owns that, right?

Not if you believe Katherine Betts, the editor of Harper's Bazaar.

"I have this weird theory that a lot of fashion ideas come from California," she said. "They're free of the Ping-Ponging back and forth of New York: this season it's punk, then it's preppy. There, it's a completely free zone. They have no preconceived notions. Anything goes."

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 06, 2001

Answers

Earnhardt's Popularity Leaves New York in the Dust

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Liberated from everything but a little passive Scientology smoke, stylish Angelenos started the mania for "dirty denim" and women's jeans cut so low as to render underwear impossible or redundant.

Ms. Betts said she was in Fred Segal, the Barneys of Melrose Avenue, and saw a display of survivalist- military gear — the camouflage look — "when everyone in New York was wearing ladylike clothes and saying no way was this going to come back."

"They were already on to it," she said.

New York is late on just about everything. But New Yorkers will never admit it. They are the Columbus of trends. Nothing really exists until they discover it. Regular bars all over America have karaoke machines, many now gathering dust. In New York, the arrogance of discovery turns singing bad 70's songs while drunk into superhip camp conducted in superchic downtown dives.

Madison Avenue was once shorthand for the most creative, sophisticated consumer manipulation. What happened? One tee many martoonis?

You want cutting-edge advertising, you leave town. Nike put Wieden & Kennedy, a Portland agency, on the map. Target's smart, youthful ads come from its own home office in Minneapolis. Nothing in advertising generated more buzz in the past year than the "Whassup" commercials for Budweiser. Spike Lee? No, this campaign for Anheuser-Busch (based in St. Louis) was created in the Chicago office of DDB Worldwide and inspired by a short film made in Philadelphia.

Ask most New Yorkers "Whassup?" and chances are they won't have a clue.

Twenty years ago, this city did originate trends. Rap, for example. Or Studio 54, and its archenemy, punk. More recently, you could argue that "Seinfeld" was a New York phenomenon, but remember that it was imported from Los Angeles.

How did we lose the upper hand? Why did the center of gravity shift? I know Manhattan is surrounded by water, but there are bridges and tunnels to the rest of the world. And shouldn't the Internet make us more plugged-in, not less? Come to think of it, another tiny island was once eclipsed by its vast empire. But at least it was first on the Burberry thing.

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-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), March 06, 2001.