Wall Street Crashes, London Burns

As always, fascinating thoughts from Frank Rich…

And I saw the McQueen show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in June  and I was amazed at the crowds.  People waited hours to get in.  I’m a member of the Met so I skipped the lines and that’s the only reason I saw it.  I don’t do lines of more than a reasonable duration…It was fascinating and totally theatrical, but I could not understand why so many people were fascinated.

Now I know.  It was a sign of the end approaching…

And, I always knew “The Phantom of the Opera” would lead to the downfall of civilization…

Frank Rich in New York Magazine (Emphasis is mine) :

I think I’m moving from anger to dread, too. We pay attention to the market because it feels like a sport (scored in clear-cut numbers) and because one way or the other we know we will be affected by it, whether we own shares or not. I am completely unprescient about the market — though no less so than, say, S&P, Geithner, Bernanke, Greenspan, and all the others who failed to see the last crash and/or this one coming — but last Thursday, the morning just before the big drop began, I had a premonition. (And I am not by and large superstitious.) I was catching up (at the last minute) with the McQueen extravaganza at the Met. That same morning the Times had a front-page story about the rebound in luxury retailing. Once I entered the McQueen show, I was struck by how the installation, with its smoke and mirrors and S&M touches, looked like a cross between Phantom of the Opera**  and the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut** . Whatever else the McQueen show was about, it’s about decadence — and about luxury goods beyond the reach of 99.9 percent of the throngs gawking at them. Something about the discrepancy between the opulence and the masses thronging barricades to get in gave me a premonition that a crash was on its way. Maybe it’s because I associate the crash of 1987 with the opening of Phantom on Broadway in early 1988. Conspicuous over-the-top decadence in America always seems to lead to a bad end.

via Wall Street Crashes, London Burns: Frank Rich and Adam Moss Discuss Downgrades, Riots, and the Portents of McQueen — Daily Intel.