Maslow's Penthouse: A Preview

The recently departed Tom Wolfe helped usher in The New Journalism of the 1960s.
GSL just loved the way his always beautifully tailored ice cream suit sneered at convention. In addition to writing the decade defining blockbuster, Bonfire of the Vanities, Mr Wolfe introduced Radical Chic.
pic by Getty Images

I've been meaning to introduce this segment for months with a false start only hours after that Las Vegas Mandalay Bay massacre that still hasn't produced a motive or convinced us skeptics that something very significant isn't kept hidden. I titled that post, that I deleted once I heard about the massacre, The Keen Zest inspired by The Den's Senior Artistic Adviser, Anthony Blanche, from Brideshead in that unforgettable scene with Charles Ryder in The Blue Grotto:

                                         Relevant subject matter occurs in first 5 minutes.

In The Blue Grotto, Anthony Blanche gave his withering assessment of Charles Ryder's pictures...and life. I was thunderstruck at how author Evelyn Waugh, no doubt speaking about, and to, his clever and talented aristocratic friends thru Blanche, touched on something that is killing far more than Art & Love in contemporary society.  This uniquely Anglo Affectation later crossed the Atlantic (The Den's Investigative Team suspects in a case of Pimms) mutating into a Puritanical Strain noticed quite famously by Tom Wolfe in his iconic essay: Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's.

The New York Magazine pic for Tom Wolfe's essay Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's. Sitting is Leonard Bernstein flanked by his wife and Black Panther Donald Cox aka Field Marshall DC. Cloaked in cute black outfit and somber earnestness, can't you just feel Lenny's  high minded rectitude oozing from his every pore?

The Radical Chic strain found eager hosts in Ivy League Faculty Lounges, UES and Georgetown Salons manifesting in a dogma infecting today's Ruling Elite not just in America but wherever The Well Bred wish to preen in a setting The Den identifies as Maslow's Penthouse. Often referred to as Political Correctness, and derided as silly and ridiculous, which it is, but if examined closely, is far more malignant.

Those stylish, shapely. and fluffy female habitues of Maslow's Penthouse GSL refers to as Bergdorf Blondes/Brunettes/Redheads or collectively as B3/R

Glamour is their False Prophet.