Jonathan Taylor writes:
“DOES anyone remember that, long before Madonna was a zillionairess with a fake British accent, she used to dance at the Roxy with a posse of Latino b-boys?” asked The Times‘s Guy Trebay in his April 7 profile of Paper magazine coeditor Kim Hastreiter. (Hastreiter does.)
Does anyone remember that, since long before becoming a fashion writer at The Times—and turning out some admittedly not-unmockable trend pieces there—Trebay has been a keen collector of the throwaway lines and gestures that take place well out of New York City’s spotlight? I do. His Hastreiter piece is a bit of a puff. But it apparently inaugurated a new rubric for his pieces, The Gimlet Eye, portending, I hope, a resurgence of rangier columns like those I used to cut out from The Village Voice with scissors.
Soon after Trebay joined The Times, a piece on “mopping,” or organized shoplifting of designer clothes—featuring a “transgendered person” named Angie E.—promised to bring to the paper’s ludicrously straight-faced fashion writing a bit of the unruly gentility Trebay had cultivated at the Voice. But as the years passed, I thought the Trebay I followed was slowly fading into the patterned wallpaper of the Sunday striving section.
To be sure, his fashion criticism has kept its zing, as in a recent Fashion Diary from Paris, in which he likens Ingrid Sischy, self-described as “triste” and yapping haplessly for Karl Lagerfeld after the Chanel show, to a baby seal stranded on an ice floe.
But in this past Thursday’s Gimlet Eye, Trebay reprises his Voice role as a one man Walk of the Town, feeling for the worn seams of the city’s public facades that betray its private dilemmas. Trebay gets predictable mileage from the presence of a safari game guide at a party at the Pierre. But it’s the second half of the column’s high society/New York freak dichotomy that showcases his laconic empathy. On an upper-Manhattan stretch of the Hudson shoreline, he talks to “Bridget Polk, who shares a name but little else in common with a famous Warhol actress,” and who makes ephemeral sculptures there by balancing local rocks atop each other [UPDATE: here’s Bridget’s “rock work” at her own site.] As in Trebay’s old collections of scraps of telephone conversations in the Voice, Trebay catches New Yorkers at their most ringingly Beckettian:

“People watch and watch and then they work up the courage to ask a question,” she said. And what do they ask? “They say, ‘Do you do these here?’ ”
The sculptor laughed then, as she does a lot, at the absurdity of other people and her own. “People say, ‘Do you use glue?’ ”
They ask whether she assembles the sculptures first and brings them with her to this stretch of shoreside riprap….
Still, she added, “I get more attention for this than anything I’ve ever done.”

Plus, I learned the word riprap—previously used in the Times only three times according to an archive search, all in connection with bridge collapses (unless you count a star racing horse of 1926–27, Rip Rap).