The grand old families of Long Island — the Buchanans of ‘East Egg’ — and their disdain for the flamboyant nouveau riche of ‘West Egg’ are the kingpin of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As you’ll know if you’ve read the book, or if you see the Baz Luhrmann adaptation — for which he wrote the screenplay in a loft suite at Ace Hotel New York — premiering today, West Egg’s prince of thieves is represented by the Prohibition-era rumrunner with an inferiority complex and a broken heart of gold, Jay Gatsby. Why would generations of Americans below tycoon-status be so drawn to a story in some ways so remote from their own lives, dealing as it does with an obtuse schism between rival factions of the over-privileged? Likely, it’s due to Jay Gatsby’s humble origins, and the shame he felt about them, coupled with his unrequited love — both of which make him universally relatable. He’s a prototype for the conflicted American social climber, most eloquently expressed today in hip hop. We don’t begrudge him his excess because he feels like one of our own. And none of it — the fancy cars, the lavish parties, the jazz orchestras imported from Harlem — can salve the wounded soul of this striver anyway. His hopeless inner struggle humanizes him. Even after the robber barons of the Jazz Age drove the country off a cliff there was still a place in America’s heart for Jay Gatsby.

The Gatsbys and Buchanans of today’s West and East Egg are less nuanced. The rumrunner tycoons are all gone. They’ve been replaced by investment banks that bundle predatory loans and sell them to your grandparents’ pension funds, then short sell against those same loans, to make a killing when families get foreclosed on in Jamaica, Queens or Cleveland, Ohio, and your grandparents lose their life savings. You know the story well — its choose-your-own-misadventure variations are nearly endless.

In our Gilded Age, if you’re more than a few rungs up, there’s little or no social consequence for ethically dubious schemes, as there was for poor Gatsby’s rumrunning. When a Gatsby of 2013 gets busted, he settles for pennies on the dollar and celebrates by treating himself to a Picasso. Our East and West Eggers’ soirées still depend upon the fruits of creative labor. Without artists, the party would be a drag. Even acute protestations end up on the penthouse walls.

As Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby hits screens today, we’ll face an invitation to inquire into how history repeats itself — how are tensions between landed gentry and lottery winners, between philanthropists and studio-squatters, between the desire to be an object of envy and the deep human need to struggle toward our fantasies, ideals and visions — how are these the sheer force by which a developed and developing world orbits? We’re human, imperfect, compassionate, greedy, and full of yearning. It looks good on the big screen — it’s fucking beautiful. Good sugar with a bit of vinegar between the lines of the great American novel.

from Mary Szybist’s Incarnadine released in early February of this year from Greywolf Press.

Szybist is a Portland poet who reads tonight at the Brooklyn Public Library with other Greywolf poets Catherine Barnett and Dobby Gibson at 7pm on the Plaza at the Central branch.

Our longtime friend and collaborator Michael Bullock recently published his first book, Roman Catholic Jacuzzi, to much acclaim. Michael is the American publisher of BUTT Magazine — a community resource for international homosexuals — as well as features editor for Apartamento, contributor and publisher for PIN-UP, and works on the publishing side of Fantastic Man and The Gentlewoman.

Style Guy Glenn O’Brien deems Roman Catholic Jacuzzi “a must read for Catholics and those who love one,” and Bruce Benderson, author of Catching Salinger, calls it “the first honest look at sexuality in the Catholic Church.” The book’s publisher Karma hosts a book launch this evening in New York at Artists Space’s new TriBeCa bookstore with music by Honey Dijon and a special performance by the Harlem-based gay and lesbian gospel choir Lavender Light, tonight from 7 to 9pm at 55 Walker Street.

Photos by Paul Barbera of Where They Create

Untitled #1, from the Freeway Series by Catherine Opie

“Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy I. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”

— Excerpted from Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays

A stained and sun-damaged treasure from The Art of Google Books — The Tale of Reddy Woodpecker by Arthur Scott Bailey kept in original at the New York Public Library.

The Thing Quarterly is an “object-based publication” based in San Francisco, the mindpup of artists Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan. Each issue is some useful thing, as conceived by the nimble imaginations of a shifting line-up of artists — a shower curtain by Dave Eggers, a pull-down window shade by Miranda July, a set of ceramic wine cups by Chris Johanson.

The latest edition of The Thing is the Fabric of Events 2013 Calendar by our esteemed colleague and friend, artist and filmmaker Mike Mills. The edition combines a series of half-toned images of historic persons, things, animals and events culled from Google Image searches and accompanied by text, some more obviously inter-related than others — with a notebook for planning your next calendar year. In Mike’s own words: “The idea of a historical fabric points to a non-hierarchical, non-linear way of understanding how moments, events, laws, things external and ‘real’ and things internal and subjective can shape our present story of who we are and how we love and are alone, how we are controlled and attempt to be free, and our relationship to different kinds of people and plants and animals.” The Mike Mills’s edition of The Thing Quarterly is available starting today at Project No.8 at Ace Hotel New York.

Mementos from the New York Art Book Fair this last weekend at MoMA PS1 in Queens.

We’re very excited for the book launch of Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies: Lafayette Park, Detroit — published by Placement Books — at No. 8a, the Ace New York branch of Project No. 8 and Various Projects, tonight at No. 8a off our lobby from 7-9pm.

Lafayette Park, an affordable middle-class residential area in downtown Detroit, is home to the largest collection of buildings designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the world. Today, it is one of Detroit’s most racially-integrated and economically stable neighborhoods, although it is surrounded by evidence of a city in financial distress. Through interviews with and essays by residents, reproductions of archival material, new photographs by Karin Jobst, Vasco Roma and Corine Vermeulen, and previously unpublished photographs by documentary filmmaker Janine Debanné, Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies examines the way that Lafayette Park residents confront and interact with this unique modernist environment. 

Lafayette Park has not received the level of international attention that other similar projects by Mies have. This may be due in part to its location in Detroit, a city whose most positive qualities and cultural power are often overlooked in the media. 

This book is a reaction against the way that iconic modernist architecture is often represented. Whereas other writers may focus on the design intentions of the architect, authors Aubert, Cavar and Chandani seek to show the organic and idiosyncratic ways that the people who live in Lafayette Park actually use the architecture and how this experience, in turn, affects their everyday lives. While there are many publications about abandoned buildings in Detroit and about the city’s prosperous past, this book is about a remarkable part of the city as it exists today, in the twenty-first century.

We’ll see you tonight for a signing and launch party in one of our favorite shops in the world — we’d live in a glass house with them any day.