Henry Hill's Last Day of Freedom in "Goodfellas"

 

The Code of Mr NYC

As defined by ChatGPT:

Based on the blog’s recurring themes, tone, judgments, nostalgia, and observations over many years, The Code of Mr NYC can be understood as an informal moral philosophy of urban life: love your city fiercely, pay attention to the world around you, preserve what is worth preserving, distrust pomposity, and try to live with curiosity, humor, memory, and a certain New York toughness. 

• Love New York without pretending it is perfect. New York is complicated, contradictory, beautiful, vulgar, historic, changing, and occasionally absurd. Its flaws are part of its character.
  
  
• Pay attention. Notice buildings, streets, neighborhoods, people, restaurants, music, movies, politics, history, and the strange little events that everyone else walks past. A meaningful life requires actually looking at the world.
  
  
• Know your city's history. Today's New York is built on yesterday's New York. Remember the people, places, disasters, triumphs, eccentrics, artists, politicians, and ordinary citizens who created it.
  
  
• Preserve what deserves to survive. Progress is not automatically improvement. New buildings, new money, new technology, and changing tastes should not erase everything distinctive about the city. 
  
  
• Accept that change is inevitable—but judge it honestly. Nostalgia has value, but the past wasn't necessarily better. One person's golden age can be another person's nightmare.
  
  
• Be skeptical of power, wealth, and self-importance. Money and status do not automatically confer wisdom, taste, virtue, or legitimacy. Watch what powerful people actually do rather than what they claim to represent.
  
  
• Respect competence. Good institutions depend on capable people doing their jobs well. Leadership is not merely about the person at the top; it is also about choosing good people and giving them responsibility. 
  
  
• Don't take politics—or politicians—too seriously. Politics matters, but political rhetoric can become theater. Look for facts, consequences, hypocrisy, and the gap between promises and reality.  
  
  
• Keep your sense of humor. The world is frequently ridiculous. The proper response is sometimes outrage, sometimes sadness, and sometimes simply: You have got to be kidding me.
  
  
• Have opinions, but remain capable of changing them. Love and dislike need not be absolute. A person can admire one work by an artist while disliking the rest of their career, or appreciate an era while recognizing its ugliness.
  
  
• Remember people who mattered. Death does not make someone's cultural contribution disappear. Remembering artists, neighbors, public figures, friends, and ordinary New Yorkers is a form of gratitude.
  
  
• Take pleasure seriously. Good food, music, movies, books, travel, beautiful places, baseball, architecture, nightlife, and simple experiences are not distractions from life. They are life.
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• Have some basic civic manners. You don't have to become polite in the suburban sense. But don't make life unnecessarily difficult for everyone around you: move right on the sidewalk, don't block subway doors, and recognize that public space belongs to other people too. 
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• Be yourself, even when you're a little weird. New York's greatness comes partly from its tolerance for eccentricity. Conformity is not a virtue merely because it is conventional.
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• Don't confuse sophistication with cynicism. You can see corruption, stupidity, hypocrisy, commercialization, and decline without becoming incapable of appreciating beauty or goodness. 
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• Stay curious until the end. The city keeps producing new stories. Keep investigating them. Keep wandering. Keep learning. Keep finding things worth writing about. In one sentence Love the city, remember its past, question its present, enjoy its pleasures, resist its bullshit, respect other people, and never stop paying attention.
  
  

That, more than any particular political or cultural position, seems to be the underlying ethical worldview of Mr NYC: a stubborn belief that paying attention to the world—and caring enough to remember it—is itself a moral act.

Satanicide Sings About Snakes and Ice Cream in Brooklyn, 2011

 

Mamdani's Leadership Masterclass

In just three days Mayor Z managed to make the President of the United States his little bitch, forced DoorDash to cough up over $100 million in wages that it stole from NYC delivery folks, and then hosted an international conference of mayors.

He's practicing realpolitick, the art of the possible, a exemplar of maturity, iron will, and focus. 

This guy is 34 years old -- I have pimples older than him -- but he seems to be a leader wise beyond his years and those of other much older elected officials. Damn.

This is leadership, a masterclass in what a leader can and should be. I sure hope he keeps it up!

Gracie Mansion Summit

This is not normal -- and, for once, it's a good thing.

The most right-wing president in American history just visted the most left-wing mayor in NYC history, and had a great meeting at Gracie Mansion! And the POTUS went to Hizzoner! It seems that, for some reason, Trump is super-charmed by Mamdani and they work well together.

And that's a great thing for the city.

The usual boring subjects are breaking the POTUS' and Hizzoner's respective balls over this meeting but here's the thing: this is called governing, realpolitick, dealing with what is and not what you want it to be, getting stuff done, engaging in politics as the art of the possible, not just winning elections. 

Sadly this should be normal but isn't much these days. But, as a New Yorker, I'll take it!

The Carnegie Deli Returns!

It went away "noin" years ago ...

... and now it's back! 

Duncan Sheik RIP

"Barely Breathing" was a staple song of my late 1990s college days.

"On a High" kept my spirits up during some rough times.

And Spring Awakening was an important Broadway musical.

RIP Duncan Sheik.

Remembering "Six Degrees" (2006-2007)

Twenty-years ago, before they'd be on Furious, Hope Davis and Campbell Scott appeared together on another show, the short-lived Six Degrees.

Based on the premise first introduced in Six Degrees of Seperation, it's about six different New Yorkers whose lives intersect in various odd ways. They are: Carlos, a public defender struggling with his job; Mae, a recent NYC-transplant with a mysterious past; Laura, an interior designer mourning her husband killed in Iraq (very 2006); Damien, a limo driver and ex-con, trying to live a straight-edge life; Whitney, a high-powered PR woman, Laura's best friend, and with a cheating finance; and Steven, a photographer who just came back to town and who is struggling to reestablish a relationship with his ex-wife and son.

If you're an NYC-junky, this show was for you. But with a premise like this, it needed to be great and it just ... wasn't. It was okay. The main problem is that for a show centered around six people, they needed to be more interesting and their problems needed to be more dramatic. They weren't. The premise was cool but sadly the show didn't really make it compelling. The characters and their storylines were rather boring.

So why am I remembering it?

Well, obviously, because it was a very intensely NYC-show and, naturally, it caught my interesting. Even though the show's drama was underwhelming, it was one of the few shows that really made you feel like you were in the city, and that was unusual (outside of the Law & Order franchise).

Also, it had a great cast: the aforementioned Campbell Scott, Hope Davis, along with Bridget Moynahan (someone also nice to look at) as well as Erika Christiansen (who had been really good in Traffic a few years earlier), and other. They'd all go on to do better stuff.

Another thing is a little more personal: first, one of the creators was a guy named Raven Metzner who I actually went to school with. I also remember one day, leaving my house and walking to work, when I walked by this show being shot on the street early one morning -- and I saw Hope Davis and Bridget drinking coffee and waiting to shoot between setups.

Finally, another reason I remember this odd, long-gone and forgotten show: besides the fact that this show came out preceisely 20 years go, but it was also on just before I started this blog and moved in with my girlfriend.

Six Degrees ran for a few episodes between September and November of 2006, then was pulled from ABC's schedule, then came back in March 2007 and was finally cancelled for good (in fact its last episode airs on March 30, 2007, three days after this blog began). So I remember it here not because it was a great show but because it was truly NYC show and that it was on during an inflection point in my life -- and this was a show all about that!

Review: "Furious" (2026)

I'm happy to say that my life has been so busy lately that I haven't been able to watch much television. However, after returning from vacation, I caught up on the new Hulu show Furious and, damn, it's crazy.

It's rare that you see an NYC show set in NYC that crosses between the high and low of the city, that goes from domestic violence shelters to high rise luxury apartment buildings, and devles into a subject matter that we'd all rather look away from -- the horrors of sex trafficking.

This series is clearly based on the Epstein case since, at the center of Furious, is a wealthy man named Jay Easton. The story involves a young ex-NYPD cop/current FBI agent named Alice (the amazing Emmy Rossum) who pairs up with a cranky middle-aged agent named Nora (the even more amazing Quincy Tyler Bernstine) and her best guy-friend Danny (Scott McNair), a sad-sack cop, as they investigate a series of murders involving wealthy men. Their work leads to a realization that all of these men were attackhed to a sex trafficking ring, and are meeting their doom at the hands of a young woman named Catherine (played by an insanely talented actress named Lola Pettigrew), a former victim of the ring. Alice, Nora, and Danny's work is greatly complicated by their messy personal lives along with colleagues and supervisors who are interfering their work. 

Furious is a show about corruption, greed, sick lust, buried secrets, and how the misbehavior of wealthy and powerful people can leave a massive trail of broken lives and human destruction. This show is not for the faint of heart but it's incredible, stunning drama.

This show was created by Liz Merriweather which is a suprise since her previous hit was the sitcom New Girl. The cast is incredible, and it includes the always wonderful Hope Davis as Jay Easton's Ghislaine Maxwell-like daughter, Jake Lacey as Alice's abusive ex-boyfriend, and Campbell Scott as Easton's lawyer (and one of Catherine's victim). There's also an actor named Steve Wray who plays a disabled friend of Alice's and he is so good, so funny, I hope he gets an Emmy.

So watch this show. Then remember to keep your love ones close.

 

3 Million Plus

As they say, the first million is the hardest. It took 18 years to get a million clicks on Mr NYC but then, within a year, it got to two million. 

And now, just a few months later, here we are: three million clicks! 

Not bad. Onwards. Upwards!