lines

As I said to a friend this week, rather in jest: New York City is about being on an even playing field with someone until you’re on a line and they’re on the list, and while you’re still making chitchat they’ve suddenly been waved through an event's entrance. A group of us were standing in the cold for a project “drop”, and though we each had people inside to recruit as our champions, we were wondering whether to abandon the effort, or to what degree this party, of all other possible parties, would be worth the humiliations that preceded it. Such negotiations are common fare for your average townie evening—they are the pre and post-Covid escape-room cinchers, the fun is in their simulation of difficulty, be it getting in or getting out. 

Among what I remember best from Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life (2016), the Real Housewives Reunion in four parts of mother-daughter duo Lauren Graham's Lorelai and Alexis Bledel's Rory, released by Netflix a decade after the original show went off-air, is a gag about hordes of people in Manhattan standing on long lines for seemingly trivial reasons. These lines are explicitly commercial in nature; they are not breadlines or lines for visas and airport security, the kind of lines that are compulsory, charged with mortal anguish; they are lines for Supreme and Apple stores before the launch of a novelty product, or for the next hybrid pastry descended from the "cronut". The kick and kink of lines of this stripe is their very pointlessness. As Steven Philips-Horst has observed, lines in New York are self-selected competitions, and with their overall aura of randomness and interchangeability, their demand on the endurance of a consumer class who is elsewhere shielded from enduring is the only thing which is not vague about them, a basic device to sweeten the summit, the at-last culmination inWe did it. And, look at all those suckers, who didn't stick with the given rules, who lost out because they took back their time and resisted debasement.

Lorelai and Rory, who at their prime emblematize "chatterbox" femininity, known for a zingy, spring-step approach to sentence-finishing conversational intimacy, are aghast that anyone would be patient enough to spend their days waiting to do anything—let alone to acquire trend objects. Their parent-child dynamic was forged through a sui-generis appetite for food, music, film, books, TV, consumed at regular intervals and in huge quantities. Whole wheat against a backdrop of Bush era "post-historical" homogeneity, Lorelai's runaway single mom in perpetual rebellion from her patrician Connecticut family gave ingenue-nerd Rory a wealth of cultural knowledge from which she derives her adult identity: that of girl reporter, investigating the illicit or cheeky behaviors of the elites she grew up resenting and, with her grandparents, also being. So, as a unit, Lorelai and Rory are used to both "sore thumb" living and being indulged by elites and non-elites who treat them sympathetically; they have attained synergy in sticking out, or a momentum that is so codependent it later hampers their ability to live separately. 

When Rory interviews those tired folk for whom the ritual anticipation of a nothing-burger item is itself a main activity, she encounters a material hunger reminiscent of her family dynamic, alongside a groupthink from which she believes they are exempted. That is, until it seems that Lorelai has managed to skirt the laws of lining up and secure those hybrid pastries after all. Every lady has her tricks. If those Supreme or Apple or cronut lines are unifying phenomena, designed to induce conformity, if they are roll-calls for techies or foodies or hype-beasts or any type of person with spare time and change, in nightlife conformity resides in an extreme, honed uniqueness, or existence in surplus or excess of a mean. There are a few strains of luck that will help you bypass a line for a standards-having party: being rich (or rich enough), connected, powerful, beautiful, or else just different and discerning. Another friend and I were once let into a club, having been left to linger for an hour on the curb as people possessing the more obvious of the cited traits streamed in, solely because a host was quizzing our fellow “hoi-polloi” on where he might be from, and my friend told him the correct answer, having heard him mention it earlier, seemingly out of earshot. 

As a fixture of nightlife, lines offer a lesson in noticing and being noticed, and in the ways chance observation can congeal into temporary power. By daylight, this lesson is the same, only grubbier, because in nocturne life the gradations of status encoded in line etiquette are kept more ambiguous, open to haptic intervention. In non-wee hours, we are faced with tourist and residential tourist patronage, the Baedeker-esque beckoning of glossy venues and stores with a story. A Year in the Life coincided with the rise of the gig economy and pop-ups and umami tastebud frivolities that would be further entrenched by a post-covid TikTok-ification of the urban landscape, where any place can be a market, because someone is selling photographs of themselves in front of it. 

Lines are everywhere now for whatever is the latest thing to be had, and you can also pay people to wait in them on your behalf. The exception being contexts where, for better or worse, individuation is in practice, where the list that can't save you saves your experience from being one of flooding en-masse. Moreover—once you are in, is the outside not so easily forgotten?

picture: still from Christian Petzold's adaptation of the Anna Seghers novel, Transit (2018), set in a modern-day wartime.