The brilliant, visionary director David Lynch has died.
He was one of those artists, during both my youth and adulthood, who just always seemed to be ... there ... working ... doing something ... almost always weird. Loved his movies Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Lost Highway, and Twin Peaks is a milestone not only in television but in all of American culture.
Now David Lynch and his unique, wonderful mind have gone into the Red Room (if you know Twin Peaks, you know what I'm talking about). We'll never see his likes again.
Amazingly, when Lynch was at the height of his career (with Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart big successes), he created this PSA for the NYC Department of Sanitation in 1991. Wasn't that just like the guy -- doing something totally unexpected, bizarre, and fun.
RIP, David. Say hello to Laura Palmer for us. And that chewing gum you like is really coming back into style.
I've written extensively about the book and movie Slaves of New York over the years. The book by Tama Janowitz came out in 1986 and the movie version in 1989.
If you want to find the complete Mr NYC Slaves of New York archive, go here.
And even though I can't find a full version of the movie available anywhere, you can watch the end credits, with wonderful shots of late 1980s downtown Manhattan -- a place both very familiar and quite distant.
End credits for movies usually aren't that interesting but I suggest you read these for a few reasons:
1) The cast inludes, in minor roles, actors who would go on to big careers: Steve Buscemi, Stanley Tucci, Mercedes Ruehl, and Anthony LaPaglia. It's odd to see them next to people who ... wouldn't go on to big careers.
2) At the end of the credits, they thank Mayor Ed Koch -- and this movie came out just a few short months before he was bounced out of office.
3) You will notice that two future Mr NYC interviewees are in these credits: Tama Janowitz herself and Barbara Nitke who served as an on-set photographer.
Enjoy! Watch these credits, go into the archive, and revisit the world of bohemian NYC!
I thought Americans voted for lower grocery prices and the cost of living but really it was to free Greenland from 700 years of Danish oppression and turn Canada into the 51st state. And invading Panama.
And if you didn't realize that's what the election was all about, then it proves that you're just a part of the Globalist Transgender DEI Deep State Fake News Media!
Let Seth Meyers put this into perspective for you:
As congestion pricing takes effect in NYC, we may very well be seeing the eclipse of the car in NYC -- or at least in lower Manhattan. Less cars, more money to public transit it music to the ears of any real New Yorker.
Take that Robert Moses!
But people still loves their cars -- I get it.
And even if you don't love cars (like me), you might have enjoyed theSaturday morning NPR show Car Talk (like me) that ran from 1986 to 2012 -- syndicated nationally from Boston and broadcast locally here on WNYC.
If you want to listen to some old Car Talk episodes, WNYC has a massive archive of old shows that are a pleasant diversion from the miseries of our time -- and love letter to the all-American automobile.
In 2008, when this blog was less than two years old, I made a trip to China that I blogged about here.
It was the second time in my life that I'd gone to China and, for literally years afterwards, I've been meaning to do another post about my first visit.
The problem is that my first visit was in 1985 when I was eight years old and we were there for a month. So I don't remember everything about it and couldn't, I feel, do a post justice.
But, finally, I will do a post -- picking up random shards of memories from long ago, providing impressions, of my first trip to China 40 years ago with my dad.
What I remember is that, back then, China was still coming out of its first years of hardline Communism. Mao had been dead for less than a decade, and the country had yet to experience the massive economic growth and wealth that defines it today. I remember everyone riding around on ringing bicycles, most people living in small thatched houses like huts, and lots of people walking down the street eating out of rice bowls.
It was, obviously, a very different world from 1980s NYC. Whe started our trip in Shanghai and I don't remember much about it except that, in the hotel lobby, they were playing Madonna's "Like a Virgin" in Chinese and that there was the first of several-to-be-encountered pitchers of boiled water in our room.
Later on we visited cities like Chongqing and also saw the amazing, historic Terracota Warriors that had only been discovered 11 years earlier in 1974.
I remember we went to Beijing and saw the Forbidden City for the first time -- and then one night ate Peking Duck and went to the Chinese circus.
I remember walking around Tiananmen Square, four years before the exploded in deadly riots.
I remember seeing pandas in the zoo for the first time, also the Summer Palace.
I remember we stayed somewhere at a hotel by the river and they would catch fresh fish from the river and serve it in the hotel dining room -- and I'd mash it up into rice and cover it in soy sauce and it was delicious.
I remember we took a cruise down the Yangtze River for more than week, and I'd stand at the prow, pretending to pilot the boat like any eight year old boy would.
I remember long, long train rides where we'd stare out the windows at farmers with huge water buffalo worked the land.
I remember visiting the house that my family built in a city on the sea back in the early 20th century -- and lots of Chinese school kids doing exericess on the beach.
I remember lots of rescheduled Chinese domestic flights on CAAC, the official Chinese airline, that everyone joke stands for "China Airlines Always Cancels."
I remember long drives where I would listen to tapes of "The Chronicles of Narnia."
I remember ending our trip in Hong Kong which was still a British colony at the time. The streets were even narrower than NYC, the wealth of the city fully on display. One day we went to the Royal Yacht Club for a drink -- that was cool! And I remember the huge, gorgeous harbor and the huge boats on it, glowing on the water at night.
I remember that, on our trip home, we flew from Hong Kong to Tokyo and then, flying westward, I remember that my last view of Asia was the gorgeous Mount Fuji shining bright in the night sky.
I remeber that Beverly Hills Cop was the movie being shown on the flight and, after it was over, that another movie called Iceman started but then I fell asleep and, when I awoke, we were back in NYC.
And I remember when I got back that I told everyone about this amazing trip I took -- and no one really cared.
China really is just amazing -- and it's more than a country, it's a civilization with a history we can't even begin to understand. You should go.
And if you want to understand the 20th century history of China, you should watch the 1987 Best Picture Oscar winner The Last Emperor about how the long, long, long reigning Chinese monarchy fell and it led to decades of war, leading to the Communist revolution and country that exists today.
I hope to go back to China one day -- and blog about it better then!
I barely remember it -- I think I caught five minutes of it on TV once when I was in college and turned it off because it was so dumb and offensive. But I'm "remembering" it now because it was and is a weird NYC-related artifact of late 1990s Ameriacn pop culture -- i.e. of my long ago, lost, misspent youth.
To wit: two New York City teenagers go to the same high school. One is a rich white kid, the other a poor black kid, but they are friends and engage in hilarious high jinks together while learning important life lessons and developing strong values, the racial and economic iniquities and divide between them be damned. Together, this "ebony and ivory" fantasia demonstrates that racism is a thing of the past.
In the last 1990s, we wanted to believe that. Okay, so that's the show. So why am I remembering?
Well, kids, there used to be a sitcom in the early 1990s called Save by the Bell about a bunch of wise-cracking high school kids. It aired on NBC on Saturday mornings and was one of the only things on TV that wasn't a cartoon or an infomercial. It was a real "tween" show and was very popular. Saved by the Bell ended in 1993 but it spawned a bunch of similar shows -- also on NBC on Saturday mornings -- about wise-cracking teenagers in various high school settings including Hang Time and California Dreaming and several others (I actually knew one of the girls on Hang Time but never mind). Anyway, City Guys was the "urban" version of these otherwise lily white shows -- it actually had black people! -- and instead of being set in a cookie-cutter high school in a cookie-cutter suburb it was set in NYC! And had black people!
By the late 1990s, NYC was in the middle of its renaissance so a teenage show set in the city probably made sense to the suits at NBC. At the time the Saturday morning "tween" sitcoms were at their height (there was even another Saved by the Bell show called Saved by the Bell: The New Class), and City Guys, though a little different, fit right in.
The show ran from 1997 to 2001 and was one of the last NBC Saturday morning tween sitcom to air. By 2002 these shows were gone -- its teenage audience (i.e. people like me) had aged out, ratings plunged, and the new teenage audience now had things like the Internet to distract them on Saturday mornings.
City Guys is an otherwise forgotten part of the NYC-set TV sitcome pantheon but, as mediocre as the show was, it had a very funky, very memorable, opening credits -- even though it was a laughbly dumb:
My recent review of the movie Anora cited the fact that it's largely about people who live and work in the "unknown, outerborough underbelly" of NYC -- and it's a great NYC adventure movie, buzzing around the city.
Five years ago, on New Year's Eve 2019, I did a big interview with former adult film start, and current Native American activist, Hyapatia Lee. She talked freely about her amazing life and career, including about the times she visited NYC and appeared on the Robin Byrd Show.
Well, Hyapatia also has a great YouTube channel and, in her most recent post, she talks more about her time in NYC, her visits to Robin's show, and her experiences in the business. Enjoy! Love you Hyapatia!
