City Desk: The Cutting Edge

So much of New York life revolves around gratifying the appetites of people who do not care. That is one of the definitions of a trendsetter -- being impervious to the trends one sets. "There's nothing in the world so fashionable," wrote the English novelist Fanny Burney, "as taking no notice of things, and never seeing people, and saying nothing at all, and never hearing a word, and not knowing one's own acquaintance, and always finding fault; all the ton [the best people] do so." The world of the trendsetters is filled with the iconography of blankness: the stare of runway models, the hue of formal wear, the glare of flashbulbs that coats the photographed faces of hip and famous party-goers like leprosy. Indifference is a sign of confidence in one's social position, and in one's self. To make small and arbitrary, yet momentous, choices about things that fundamentally do not interest one -- what greater sign of security, of freedom from ordinary want and care and worry could there be?

When Fanny Burney wrote (the end of the 18th century), trendsetters were a tiny coterie at the pinnacle of English society. One of America's many gifts to the world has been to make trendsetting depend on money rather than rank, and then to shower money on the populace like ash in a volcanic eruption. Cool is the democratizing of aristocratic attitude. Here you don't have to be a viscountess to set trends; you can be a black criminal. Or at least, a black entertainer pretending to be a criminal. Check out the average rap video. The mise- en-scene would be the envy of a sultan: Approximately-naked girls grind the rapper's lap; his SUV gleams like a monstrous ice cube. Does the rapper look happy? No way -- he flashes gang signs and nods his head with all the energy of an expiring fish. Cast a cold eye on hos, on death; gangsta, pass by.

Yet here is the irony of modern trendsetting: All the appurtenances of life at the top, all the necessary but disregarded signs of success, are supplied by people who care about them passionately. The consumer must be cold; the creator must be hot with the love of his work. Creators are simultaneously Platonists and particularists: They have a vision of a perfect form, and an intimate affection for the muck of their craft. They come to New York in shoals because they can make money here; but they also come because here, and not upstate, or the Upper Peninsula, or the Boot-heel, they can do what they love.

A burgeoning Manhattan neighborhood is Clinton, formerly known as Hell's Kitchen. It was once the haunt of the Westies, a psychotic gang of Irish killers; it still attracts the wretched hookers who work the Lincoln Tunnel. But the bodegas are being sown with yupscale shops. I looked into a florist's shop, where the owner was busily at work on a phalanx of small boxes, each bursting with short-stemmed flowers of colors that God does not combine in the temperate zone: red, orange, blue. The blue flower was German romanticism's symbol of an unattainable ideal. Now boxes of them had been attained to brighten some gala, and be thrown away; but the magician of this display was the florist, who had seen red, orange, and blue blossoms in his heart's eye.

The Museum of Modern Art is being rebuilt, so the permanent collection has been shipped to Queens. When Manhattanites go to Queens, they take maps decorated with dragons, sea serpents, and warnings: "Here Be Ethnics." Now that MoMA is hosting a Picasso/Matisse slap-down, the Manhattanites getting off the 7 train at Queens Blvd. look around at all the short unfamiliar buildings and think, "How bold we are!" The curator of the show, interviewed in the Times, admitted that as he hung the goldfish and the guitars and the odalisques, he imagined that they were all his. So you must, to hang them well. By doing his job properly, he sips, for a moment, from the artists' well of inspiration.

Sometimes a product can win the world's notice; then we depend on the dedication of businessmen. Maybe it will be green oil. I don't know the formal name; the label is in Chinese. It is clear, green liquid that comes in a small bottle shaped like an Art Deco wall sconce; when you rub it in, it burns, then your tension abates. We get it at a pharmacy on Canal Street where the other customers are generally Chinese men buying lottery tickets. If the trendsetters deign to notice/not notice it, then its manufacturers in Singapore and its distributors here will be busy.

Ice cream is ubiquitous. The Vermont peaceniks and the pseudo- Scandinavians have made even creamy ice cream a daily item. But there are still those who want to make even better stuff. There is a hole-in- the-wall selling Italian-style ice cream in the neighborhood of Old St. Patrick's Church (the Clinton/Hell's Kitchen of three or four years ago) that was open for business, even at the shank end of the most tenacious winter of recent memory. My wife and I bought our cups and sat outside on a bench in our hats and gloves, willing the warm weather to come by behaving as if we were warm.