Alcohol Ad Lib • Speaking of housing, I noticed something curious this afternoon as I researched real-estate pricing for an upcoming AT HOME column. As I perused this Wikipedia entry for a quick primer on per-square-foot pricing, my eyes alighted on a photo caption:
"Declining real estate prices are often identified as a driving force behind urban decay, as seen here in Harlem in New York City near 125th Street."
Maybe it was just a cognitive artifact, the result of a day spent listening to my fellow editors plot out the next style section (perhaps I would've been primed differently had I been reading Urban Review all afternoon), but it was actually jarring to see the phrase "urban decay" in its original context, rather than pushing product.
Turning that moment over in my mind makes me feel strangely nostalgic for 1996, when the newly minted Urban Decay line of cosmetics still seemed like a subversive blow to "pretty in pink" notions of femininity, rather than yet another example of commerce's insatiable will to co-opt the color wheel. The name was perfectly fin-de-grunge, and the company's founding myth—that of the renegade female chemist who used her smarts to cook up oil-slick shades of nail polish, then impossible to find in stores, in her spare time—deeply resonated with my 12-year-old soul. That was cool.
Ah, for the days before I learned to deconstruct even that single syllable. (Or is it two? Kew-ul. Whatev.) For the days when "innocent consumerism" seemed plausible. —Margaret Bauer, Associate Editor
