Vertigo

I am obsessed with 390 Park Avenue (Lever House). I pass the building almost everyday on my way to the E train at E. 53rd Street. The International Style glass box skyscraper feels like an appropriate hub for the shoe-shined foot traffic of Park Avenue bankers striding to-and-fro. The courtyard’s plein air art gallery is alive and white with the bloated Hello Kitty sculptures that are divine in their kitsch lewdness.

Lever House resembles the green glass skyscraper in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, but the actual office of the wrongfully accused and endlessly dapper Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is the CIT building at 650 Madison Avenue.

I snapped the above photo of the Lever House first-floor exhibition space during the opening gala of Liza Lou’s new installation, “Maximum Security.” The piece consists of two long corridors of chain link fencing swathed in reflective glass beads that give it a diamante effect. The suspicious man standing in the center of the photo looks just like Alfred Hitchcock, overseeing the art in his usual fashion of pimp omniscience.

Speaking of the H bomb, the horrendous screenplay I read today (at my film internship) was an LA-Mexican-drug-bust-sex-colony-blood-bath spin on Hitchcock’s Vertigo.