It’s only a month later and that has turned out to not be true, except in my imagination. The shoe stores remain stubbornly unshuttered. The rest, however, yes.

nplusonemag:

It wasn’t novels or movies but television—which, like gentrification, came of age in the postwar era—that gave us the most powerful visions of the new form of city life: Sex and the City, which ran from 1998 to 2004 (with a belated and untimely film in 2008), and The Wire, 2002-08.

Sex and the City, the greatest paean to credit card debt ever produced, gave us four professional, “third-wave” women who consumed men and products with equal abandon. It should have been a surprise—though for most it wasn’t—that all the “urban” women were white, along with nearly the entire supporting cast. The camera dwelt approvingly on the busy sexual lives of these women in gentrified New York, never mind that the neoconservatives of a generation before had pointed to the supposed sexual indiscipline of blacks as the source of their economic failure: they could not postpone gratification (or children). And yet for all its frivolousness, Sex and the City was marked by the terrible acedia of a diminished world. It constantly reminded you, without meaning to, that the expense of spirit in a waste of shopping does not prevent aging and death. And the viewer had the constant feeling that someone somewhere was always about to pull the carpet out from under the women’s feet, as when Carrie Bradshaw’s rent-controlled Upper East Side apartment (not intended for people like her) went co-op (because of people like her with slightly more money, or better credit), and she discovered that her total assets came to $1,700.

The Wire saw city life from the other side. Set in Baltimore—a post-industrial hulk of a city, which could barely aspire to gentrification—it used the genre of the police procedural to examine the declining state of institutions (schools, courts, city hall, the docks) under what creator David Simon called “raw, unfettered capitalism.” As devoted to the city’s black residents as Sex and the City was studiously oblivious, The Wire showed gentrifying urbanites (the show’s primary audience) their bleak dialectical opposite number: a population devastated by greed and racism. To optimists, it offered no future. The only resistance anyone could put up was individual, and doomed: Officer Howard “Bunny” Colvin undertook a failed drug legalization campaign; journalist Augustus “Gus” Haynes made a quixotic attempt to save the Baltimore Sun. No collective effort existed in Simon’s imagination (or, to be fair, in the observable world) to combat capitalism. This was the most cynical vision of cities that television, that sunny medium, had ever produced.

From Issue 8 and here.