This F@&%$#g Guy!

Yep, he's still in business after more than 20 years!

He even has his own Wikipedia page! 

My only questions is: can he still make a living doing this and does it help him score chick?

Something Important to Remember

Blizzard '26

 'Twas a a doozy. 

Jesse Jackson RIP

The long-time civil right activist Jesse Jackson has died. He was, in many ways, the bridge between the activism of Martin Luther King and the Presidency of Barack Obama.

Jackson kept his civil rights fight going for his whole life -- and he had lots of controversies and lots of successes. He was an American original, a man who burnished his way into history, a legend.

And he was funny. 

In the early 1990s I remember when he popped up on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" and he did a brilliatly hilarious telling of "Green Eggs & Ham." In fact, it was so funny that In Living Color felt the need to match it -- and did, also hilariously. This was back in the day when comedy was edgy, slightly dangerous, and so much more relevant than it is today. 

A much younger Jesse Jackson also appeared in 2021 documentary Summer of Soul about the musical festival in Harlem in 1969. Jesse Jackson's life was truly mult-varied, and epic. RIP.

Memo from NYC

So today a member of the British Royal family was arrested for public corruption.

And the former president of South Korea was sentenced to life imprisonment for leading a coup against his own government.

The former presidents of Brazil and France have gone to jail for treason and corruption too.

But not here. Not in the USA. Not in a country where we say that all men are created equal. Nope. If you're a Donald Trump or one of his associates, you float above the law -- and the media and half of the public are okay with it.

You can engage in blatent corruption and violence and get away with it.

This is a shameful, dark chapter in American history that we're living through. One day I hope it might end.

NYC 101

New York City isn't one city -- it's many, as this video explains. That's NYC 101! 

The Epstein Mansion in NYC History

As the world continues to grapple with fallout from the Epstein Files -- and the horrible system of abuse that he enabled and that society ignored for too long -- the issue of the 21st-century Rasputin's real estate (in which so much ugly stuff happened) continues. 

Epstein's Island in the Carribean as well as his house in Palm Beach are the most notable places. As was his townhouse -- the largest in Manhattan -- on the Upper East Side. (See the video below for more.)

The house has a long and varied history, like any piece of NYC real estate, and the story behind it is an interesting as it is sordid. One thing that has been noted is that the house used to be a school -- which is deeply, darkly ironic considering the man's crimes.

And here's the  thing: I remember it as a school!

The Epstein mansion used to be the home for the Birch Wathen School. It was one of those fancy townhouses on both the Upper East and West Sides that were converted into apartments or schools or various business & non-profit headquarters in the 20th century. In 1989 Birth Wathen merged with the Lenox school and it moved ... leaving the mansion vacant. The Victoria Secret founder Lex Wexner bought it and, so it seems, turned it back into a home. He eventually gifted it to Epstein who then made it into his headquarters for foul deeds.

The fact that a townhouse that was turned into a school was eventually turned back into a home is one of those regressive things like a republic becoming a monarchy that's really depressing.

Anyhoo, when I was a kid I went to another private school nearby -- also in a converted townhouse. And one year I took a private school bus service to school that my parents paid for (one of my fellow bus-mates was Cameron Douglas, son of Michael, who was a nice kid but sadly whose life went awry). But the other school that used this service was, you guesed it, Birch Wathen. And every day we would stop first at Birch Wathen -- and the mansion that would, decades later, fall into infamy.

I never went to the school nor was in the mansion so it's interesting to hear stories of those who did. But I was close to it back in the day, a creepy thing to realize now.

Postscript: about three years ago I walked by the mansion on a cold weekday morning. No one was there thankfully, no voyeurs or people taking pictures -- at least not as far as I could tell. Epstein was dead, the FBI had taken whatever they had needed back in 2019, and it was just sitting there, forelorn.

But there was one clear sign that something was amiss, that something was wrong with this place: the huge double-doors where Prince Andrew was seen poking his head out of and where lots of young women of various ages were seen going in and out -- was covered up by a big ugly wood plank. It was a decidedly weird thing (I assume that it was boarded up because the cops didn't want people breaking into the mansion but who knows). I thought about taking a picture of it and posting it on the blog but I didn't ... it just felt wrong and exploitative and voyeuristic of a tragic situation. So I let it be. 

But this story is far, far from over. 

Andrew Corsa & Corsa Avenue & CorsaAveTV

Recently I discovered that I'm a descendant of Andrew Corsa.

Who's he?

He was a farmer born in 1762, and he owned property in what is today the Bronx where Fordham University now stands. 

Most notably he was a "Westchester Guide" (the Bronx being part of Westchester back then) during the Revolutionary War. In July 1781, he helped General George Washington and Count Rochambeau navigate the Bronx, doing reconnaisance with them about British troop locations and movements. It burnished his legend. 

Corsa also had two wives and 13 children, and some untold number of great and great-great and great-great-great and beyond grandchildren.

And Mr NYC is one of them.

Also, the Corsas are on the map! In the Bronx there is an avenue named after Andrew Corsa called ... Cosa Avenue! Here it is:

And in doing some more Corsa research I found ... this ... apparently 14 years ago the was a YouTube channel (and perhaps a public access show as well) called CorsaAveTV. It's something! Enjoy.

Review: "The Ice Storm" (1994 & 1997)

As a young, overeducated man who grew up with lots of books in the house, I will confess that I had literary pretensions. I dreamed about writing a great book that would be critically acclaimed and would sell big and would be turned into a hit Oscar-winning movie and that I would be rich and famous and happy for the rest of my life.

Yeah, so that didn't happen. I became Mr NYC instead. 

But I will confess that, when I was operating under such a delusion, I wanted to write like Rick Moody whose 1994 novel The Ice Storm became a great movie in 1997.

As I write this post, ice has consumed the life of NYC ergo my thoughts are turning to the meaning of ice, of what ice can represent -- beyond the expanding molecules of H2O. 

The Ice Storm is a very funny, very dark story about two families in New Canaan, CT, a wealthy suburb of NYC. The story takes places over Thanksgiving, 1973 where the fates of two families tragically collide while an ice storm bears down on them. Interspersed with the domestic drama -- focused on adultery, alchoholism, teen sex & "swapping", drugs, and lives held together by lies -- are wry commentaries about the popular and political culture of early 1970s America. The country is enjoying movies like The Exorcist and books like Breakfast of Champions while the Watergate scandal envolopes the nation -- the idea that darkness and corruption are endemic to the very soul of the country that the characters live in (the October 1973 Saturday Night Massacre had just occurred, as shown below). 

In a sense, they and us are already doomed.

The novel is a great read although you'll want to take a breather every so often. Moody's writing is funny but also deeply sarcastic and cynical, very "in quotes", often mocking and derisive in tone. The best word to describe the novel is "acerbic." But the humanity in the darkness of these characters' lives cuts through, and that's what makes it a powerful read. And it has an interesting twist at the end. 

The movie is also powerful although a bit more overtly emotional. It was directed by Ang Lee who would later go on to make big hits like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. The cast is amazing -- Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Sigourney Weaver along with a young Christina Ricci and Elijah Wood. Even more interesting is that this was the film that brought Tobey Magiure, pre-Spiderman, and Katie Holmes, pre-Dawson's Creek/Tom Cruise, into prominence. And it's beautifully directed and shot, the beauty clearly at odds with the ugly lives portrayed.

It also is something of an NYC movie -- this is a story about the commuters, the people who live comfortably outside the city but whose jobs and identities exist there. And at one point the Tobey Maguire character flees to a night of booze and drugs and a failed attempt at sex at an Upper East Side apartment before he flees to Grand Central Terminal before the very real "ice storm" prevents him getting home. 

What The Ice Storm reminds us is that darkness and corruption in the personal and political lives of America is nothing new -- it seems to be our constant, perenial existential state. I'm personally interested in this story because it's set just a few short years before I was actually born -- given me a sort of window into the world that I was soon to join.

And given the current weather both real and political, it's a book and a movie more timely than ever.

Highly recommended. 

The Snow Sculptures of Riverside Drive

Since the snowstorm two weeks ago, New York City has entered into a deep freeze. 

The snow remains on the ground and various surfaces of the city, literally frozen in place. There are mountains and rocks and fields and valleys of solid snow, glacier-like, making the whole of NYC look like the surface of the moon.

But out of Mother Nature's icy dump on NYC, something else has emerged -- art.

Walking along Riverside Drive recently, I came upon these snow sculptures. What's intriguing about them is that it's impossible to tell if they were man-made or nature-made. Either guess might be correct. But these snow sculptures are a reminder that beautiful things can come out of mess -- and that the natural world and the city have a magical fusion.