In these deeply troubled, confusing, weird times, there's nothing like the soothing, calming voice and wisdom of the late, great Alison Steele -- proof that humanity is better than we think, and that the world is, in fact, a great place we should be grateful to be alive in.
We miss you Alison - but your voice and kindness will live forever.
Believe it or not, I haven't been watching much TV during this pandemic -- I spend so much time working at my job, taking care of my kids, keeping my house in order, cooking, and occasionally blogging, that my TV time is severely limited. When I do watch something, it's usually for only an hour or so before bed, usually some show that I've recorded or get off a streaming service.
But on the rare occasion when I do catch the news, I've noticed a trend: people who are broadcasting or being interviewed from home, a bookcase behind them, with a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker prominently displayed on a top shelf. Just last night I caught two minutes of Erroll Louis on NY1, and there was the mighty tome looming over his shoulder.
I'm not the only one who's noticed this -- today there's a big article about how numerous politicians, journalists, and other assorted NYC bigwigs who appear on TV regularly are making sure that The Power Broker can be seen by the audience. Some politicians, like Congressman Max Rose of Staten Island, downright admit that they put it there just be seen. Displaying this book so clearly to the public is an perfect example of what we might call "intelligence signaling" -- it says, "look how smart, informed, sophisticated, and New York I am. Oh, and I really, really like to read."
Unlike many of these people who've probably never actually read The Power Broker, yours truly has -- I even blogged about it twelve yearss ago. So there! Other suggested big NYC books to have on your bookshelf to show what a super-sophisticated New Yorker you are: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Underworld by Don DeLillo (might want to throw in White Noise or Mao ii for good measure), maybe some older books like The Great Gatsby, Sister Carrie, and The Age of Innocence, and anything by Vonnegut. And here's 1977 interview with the "power broker" himself, Robert Moses!
There are so many NYC movies that reviewing the famous ones is pointless because they've been written about ad nauseum (and much better) elsewhere. That's why I like, here at Mr NYC, to review some of the forgotten NYC films, as I've been doing recently. Here are three very, very different NYC movies that are probably forgotten but worth checking out:
Welcome to New York (2014): This movie is a collaboration between legendary NYC director Abel Ferrera and French superstar Gerard Depardieu. A chamberpiece of a film, it is based on the 2011 incident involving former World Bank head Dominique Strauss-Kahn and a black maid in a Manhattan hotel room. Depardieu plays a world famous economist who has just left his big job in DC and, before heading back to France to run for president in an election he seems certain to win, goes to NYC to visit his daughter. While staying at a fancy hotel, he rapes a black maid and is soon arrested and confined to imprisonment in a Greenwich Village townhouse with his wife. While there, he ponders his life, his ambitions, thinks about how no matter how powerful he has become he is actually quite miserable, and how life is meaningless and only lust seems real to him. Eventually the charges against him are dropped -- but his repuation and life are ruined.
Exiled: A Law & Order Movies (1998): This is an old TV movie from back in the day when the major networks still did TV movies. It stars Chris Noth (just before he became Mr Big) reprising his Law & Order character Mike Logan. Logan (and Noth) left the show in 1995 when, in the season finale, he hit a politician in the face on the steps of a courthouse. Logan isn't fired from the force but he exiled from detective work in Manhattan -- the patroling the streets of NYC's Sibera, Staten Island. The movie is about how Logan is trying to break a big case, while romancing a young lady, in the hopes that it will revive his career and bring him back into Manhattan.
Parting Glances (1986): set over a 24-hour period, mostly at a farewell party, it was one of the first movies to directly address the AIDS crises. It stars Steven Buscemi in his first movie role as a gay man dying of AIDS. This movie was part of the rough and tumble independent NYC movie scene of the 1980s, before such movies became big business in the 1990s. The director, Bill Sherwood, never made another movie because, shortly after this movie was released, he also died of AIDS. But this movie was well ahead of its time and gave us one my generation's greatest actors -- recently profiled here for GQ.
As NYC remains in lockdown, the normal multitude of sounds that we hear when we're out and about are missing from our ears. The noise that we took for granted, and often found irritating, is suddenly gone and making us sad and nostalgic.
So The New York Public Library has made an "auditory love letter" to the city that compiles various sounds like traffic and street noise that seem both all too familiar and all too distance.
Gosh darn it, those Bowery Boys have done it again -- another great podcast episode (two this time) called At Home in New York City, about what it's actually like to live in NYC, and about what makes it home for the millions of different people that live here.
This story captures what makes every New Yorker's story of living here both unique and universal, both personal and public -- about the city we all see and the city we all feel inside us all. It's heartwarming and uplighting to listen to, especially in this dark time. These episodes also read from E.B. White's famous 1949 essay Here is New York where is writes about the three types of New Yorkers and also how NYC gives people both a great sense of privacy and a great sense of belonging. Enjoy both the podcasts and the essay, and you'll remember why we all love this town.
The legend himself talks about the plight of a tree that his father planted in Bayside, Queens on the day he was born. The parks department wants to knock it down and chop it up but Ron wants to save it.
The jokes for this situation are obvious: we must save Ron's wood, keep Ron's wood erect, don't let Ron's wood get chopped up, and on and on.
Ron now has a second famous big wood he wants to show the world.
I can totally understand Ron's desire to keep this wood ... up ... but, in all seriousness, the park's department does this with trees around the city all the time -- if they're dead or diseased or the roots are rotting, etc. they became a public health and safety hazard.
Maybe Ron should plant another tree in tribute to his father. Surely Ron would have no problem making more wood rise!
It's not exactly news that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown people out of work and shuttered businesses across the globe. Some might assume, and certainly everyone hopes, that most of these businesses will come back after it is over -- maybe, fingers crossed, one day soon.
But it seems that some businesses will be gone for good, even in the aftermath. In NYC some businesses that were already faces economic challenges appear to be headed for extinction. Some examples: the Tenement Museum, Upright Citizen's Brigade, Forbidden Planet, the Lucky Strike pub in Soho, Eleven Madison Park, and many others. What's most mind-boggling of all, however, isn't that some famous NYC businesses might disapear (COVID-19 or no, that happens all the time) but that the commercial real estate market in this town might shrink dramatically -- forever. Many businesses, like my own company, have smoothly and successfully transitioned to work-from-home situations. Now many companies are wondering if they really need to have vast office spaces at all -- and the huge rents they incur -- in order to thrive. Some of these companies are thinking about having drastically smaller offices (just some meeting rooms and maybe some support staff) and otherwise keep their workers at home, toiling remotely. This would be a dramatic acceleration of a trend that's been going on for a long time -- people at home fully "plugged-in" to their companies and jobs. Obviously this could potentially reduce the cost of overhead for many businesses and boost profits -- and might even lead to more people getting jobs since there might be more money to hire. But all the ancillary businesses and people who depend on serving workers who come into office buildings each day would be absolutely devastated. That would be a tragedy. Obviously the commercial landlords are FREAKING out! They insist that, oh no, this won't happen, but let me tell you -- it will. I'm working from home now and doing my job just fine, as are all of my colleagues. Honestly I'd prefer still going into the office but, if working from home is the price I have to pay for staying employed, I'll happily take it (plus I won't have to pay for a monthly Metro Card or spend almost 2 hours a day commuting). At the start of this quarantine thing, I was hating working from home -- but now I'm starting to dig (especially if I can do it in peace with the kids back in school). And there will be lots and lots of (mostly) empty building populating the NYC skyline. This will be the new NYC normal.
There are many cities within NYC -- the public housing projects, jails, hospitals, public schools, ports, airports -- that, along with NYC's 300 neighborhoods, make you realize that we are many cities joined and commingling together.
But there's one city within NYC teaming with residents that they literally do not live in -- the cemeteries.
The five boroughs are replete with them. Every borough is full of dead bodies under the ground or within the tombs of these places. There's even a big article and new book about these "cities of the dead" in NYC -- and the fascinating stories these corpses tell, the history of their lives, the places they lived, and their final resting places. These people may be dead, they may populate the cemeteries across the city, but their history and impact and legacies are very much alive and well in NYC today. At the moment the cemeteries of NYC are getting a great deal of attention -- but the dead have always been with us and always will be. And the dead don't "only know Brooklyn" -- they also know the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each borough has multiple cemeteries with a large number of people permanently taking up valuable NYC real estate -- forever. Here's a list of NYC's cemeteries and some of the notable people who are resting for eternity here. In fact, if there's one borough that the dead probably "know" best, it's the Bronx. Woodlawn Cemetary is practically a rioutous party scene of famous dead people, a green carpet for deceased celebrities throughout history -- Herman Melville, Irving Berline, George M. Cohan, Fiorello LaGuardia, Robert Moses, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Lionel Hampton, Max Roach, Charles Evan Hughes, Joseph Pulitzer, FW Woolworth, and many more. They, and everyone buried in NYC, are all equal now.
You can now find all of the episodes of the classic NYC show The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd that ran from 1987 to 1991 right here. I've blogged about this show before -- it really is one of the best shows ever and was a forerunner to so many of the "Golden Age of Television" shows of today.
If you're stuck in quarantine and looking for something different to watch, I highly, highly, highly recommend this show.
So it just snowed in NYC -- in May, 2020. Snow. In May. That's normal, right?
Well, it hasn't snowed in May in NYC since 1977 -- 43 years ago. And it was the coldest day in record in NYC since 1947 -- 73 years ago.
Along with the COVID-19 crises, and the Donald Trump presidential nightmare,the snow in May makes it's easy to ask, "WTF is going on?!" Right now life in NYC feels like the first few minutes of the 2001 Tom Cruise movie Vanilla Sky -- I think we'd all like to stand in the middle of an empty Times Square and yell.
Man I love The Bowery Boys! The only good thing about this COVID-19 situation is that they have been dropping lots of great episodes of their podcast lately, including their newest one -- The Staten Island Quarantine War. It is a must listen and a must read (their web page for this episode includes lots of great pictures and info behind this big "war").
Who would have thought that something that happened more than 160 years ago on Staten Island of all places would be so relevant today?
Long story short: there used to be a big quarantine hospital on the northern St. George's tip of Staten Island that the residents hated, petitioned against, rioted against, and eventually burned down, in 1858. When you see all these people protesting against quarantine orders today, it's both depressing but also somehow historically satisfying to know that we've been here before, this is actually nothing new.
People hate quarantines -- whether it's something they are forced to live in or with. Being quarantined is barbaric. It's like being in jail or dealing with kids confined to their rooms -- it totally goes against the human spirit that years for freedom. But sometimes, both for the people being quarantined and for the greater good, it's necessary. But learning about this moment in NYC history, you learn that pandemics and quarantines -- like wars, depressions, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc. -- or any great events that traumatize an entire populace, are not a new experience in human history. To paraphrase the end of the first chapter of Brideshead Revisited, we've been here before, we know all about it -- and some day it will end. To quote Queen Elizabeth II's recent remarks about COVID-19, reminding us more than 80 years after she comforted her fellow children during World War II, "we'll meet again."
As the world drifts through this weird, new normal of COVID-19, we know that life "after this" (whenever that is) will be different -- some way, some how, at least for a while.
So we embrace the familiar. We embrace the things and people that we recognize, that give us comfort, that possess some kind of predictability and order in a world thrown into unpredictable chaos.
Like the virus, it's chaos we cannot see -- at least not on the streets of NYC. It exists behind closed doors and in the minds and souls of our citizens. The world's greatest place has turned into a ghost town, an empty shell, its scared residents hunkered down. Yet the city persists, its iron will stronger than anything holding up any of the city's eddifices. That strength can be seen -- literally -- in the hospitals treating those inflicted by this horror, and this profile of the city's first responders is both a scary and enouraging testimate to that strength. And while doctors, nurses, paramedics, and all "essential workers" are keeping our city going, we can also appreciate the people who bring us another kind of comfort -- laughter. Who's more New York, and more of a comedian, than Jerry Seinfeld? This lengthy interview with him about how the original funny guys who's "about nothing" is dealing, like all of us, with something very real and very serious -- call it "Jerry in Real Life." Oh, and he has a new Netflix special coming up -- something that we could all use right about now. But not only do our essential workers and entertainers give us comfort. Sometimes, at least for me at least, it's comforting to remember what made this afflicted city so fascinating in the first place. That's why I LOVED reading this wild story about the gorgeous building on Madison and 72nd Street built over 100 years ago to resemble a French Chateau and that the eccentric heiress who built it never actually lived in! It's this kind of history, this kind of New York Story, that makes me think about the longevity of this town -- and how the story of NYC is by no means finished yet.
I love Lidia Bastianich, the mega-successful celebrity chef and entrepreneur. I don't know why -- I personally find the whole celebrity chef thing kind of boring. But there's something about Lidia, like Julia Child before her, that makes me a fan.
My fandom comes, I imagine, from a pure and genuine love of food and the connection that both of them exude. They're in this business for the food, for the art of cooking -- not for the money or the fame. Lidia spent decades as a succesful chef and restaurant owner, long before fame found her, and that hard work and learned expertise shines through in her TV shows and cook books.
Lidia's life story if amazing -- born in Istria which was actually part of the old Yugoslavia, her family moved to Italy and eventually America. They settled in Astoria, and her first job was at Walken's bakery -- where she became friends with the owner's kid Christopher, who grew up to be a famous actor. She worked at and opened restaurants in NYC, eventually becoming the rich and famous celebrity that she is today.
She's a real American success story.
I remember the first time I saw Lidia on TV -- it was one of her PBS cooking shows and she was casually making a veal scallopini. Inspired, I decided to make it for my mom and her friend -- the recipe I followed was great, my mom and her friend loved it (I also served it with a penne vodka which Lidia recommended). However, making veal scallopini is exhausting, it's required lots of fancy maneurvering with hot pans and I also burned the kitchen down.
