Remembering "Die Fledermaus" on Live from the Met -- December 31, 1986

In NYC the ultimate New Year's Eve tradition is the ball drop in Times Square. In Europe, there's another grand tradition -- a performance of Johann Strauss's comic operreta Die Fledermaus.

Roughly translated as"The Bat", the operetta is about a Viennese gentlemen who is sentenced to a few days in jail for having insulted a public official. Before going to jail, he sneaks out to party held by a mysterious prince, dressed in a bat costume. Little does he know that his wife and maid are also at this party, disguised. He tries to seduce his own wife at the party and then, after hilarity ensues, winds up where he belongs -- in jail. The operrata is a silly, raucous piece of fun, the perfect New Year's Eve show.

It's also has a really wonderful score, including an overture that is one of the greatest in history.

Even though New Year's Eve performances of Die Fledermaus is a mostly European thing, on occassion the Metropolitan Opera will stage one (most recently, I believe, in 2013). In 1986 the Met unveiled a new production of the operretta that it hadn't performed in 20 years and, on December 31, 1986, it was performed on national television on the PBS show "Live from the Met."

You can see part of it here.

Memories of watching television aren't the most interesting to share but I have one unique memory from that December 31, 1986 -- the first New Year's Eve I can remember celebrating, watching Die Fledermaus with my parents. I was also performing that night, doing the "The Nutracker" at NYCB, across the Lincoln Center plaza from the Metropolitan Opera house where Die Fledermaus was being performed. After my performance, my mother picked me up and took me home -- and I clearly remember our neighborhood being completely shut down, the streets deserted. We got home and my dad was watching and recording -- on the good ol' VCR -- the broadcast of Die Fledermaus. I started watching it with him, and fell in love with the music and gaity of this operreta (marveling that only a couple of hours earlier I was myself performing from just across the plaza where this show was being broadcast). Later, I re-watched Die Fledermaus and loved it all the more. The entire broadcast was a classy, beautiful affair.

Afterwards, midnight struck and I had my first glass of sparkling cider to rin in 1987. Then I went to bed.

A great memory and, to this day, my favorite New Year's ever. 

Into Eternity

As COVID-19 enveloped NYC in 2020, many of us quarantined and worked from home. It hasn't been easy, in fact, it's been totally miserable, but it's a lot better than getting sick and dying.

But for this city's essential workers, they didn't have this luxury. They had to go out and keep the city running -- and 298 paid for it with their lives.

Most of them were black and Hispanic, and most of them, surprisingly enough, worked for the Department of Education. The people trying to help our children succeed in the future were themselves denied a future. The people helping to keep NYC alive during this crises became its victims.

When wars end, it's common for memorials to be built. In NYC, I hope a huge, impressive memorial is built for all this city's essential workers who perished during COVID-19. Their names, their memories, their sacrifices for us all should be, must be remembered -- from now and into eternity. 

The Path to 2021 in NYC

The New Year's Eve "ball drop" in Times Square has long been a beloved traddition in NYC. However, with literally a million-plus people crowding together in one big place, these days we would call it a "super-spreader" event -- and, this year, it will be organized very differently.

As this city has been re-adjusting to life in this new normal, the planners of the ball drop have spent months working to keep the ball drop happening -- and keep it safe. Times Square will be closed to all but a very few people and only VIPs, etc. will be allowed in and around the very modest festivities. However, there will be performances (Jennifer Lopez and Cindy Lauper among them), and the VIPs this years will a select number of frontline workers. 

Hopefully the ball drop this year will be an historic one-time only event -- and next year we'll be back to normal.

Ernst Haas NYC Photos 1952-1962

Right after WW2, a Viennese photographer and refugee named Ernest Haas came to NYC and spent a decade taking photos of the city. These have now been collected and published in a new book. 

His photos are fascinating -- not only because he capture the city, moment at a time almost 70 years ago -- but because he shoots from unusual angles and makes seemingly mundane moments look gorgeous. They're definitely worth checking out. 

Sometimes it takes a person from elsewhere to show NYC at its best. 

The Village Voice Lives!

Two years ago The Village Voice went out of business, a depressingly familiar victim of technological change and indifferent nouveau ownership. Since its demise, the website has been publishing old articles from its massive print and digital archives, a living memory of NYC's past.

Now The Voice has been sold again, this time to a guy who owns a bunch of small news sites, and plans to relaunch not only the news site but also publish quarterly print issues -- and, down the road, even a podcast.

What kind of Voice will arise from its ashes remains to be seen -- a lot of these smaller city newspapers that turned into news sites have become vanity projects for its owners, vehicles for their business and political interests, not worth reading. What's clear is that the new owners thinks of The Voice as a powerful NYC brand and wants to extend it so hopefully it will become a worthy successor/continuation of the old newspaper, a real voice of downtown and offbeat NYC.

Welcome back! 

Michael Alig Goes to the Eternal Party

Two-and-a-half years ago I did a short interview with former party promoter/convicted murderer Michael Alig. In the 1980s and early 1990s he was the king of downtown nightlife in NYC, promoting parties and clubs, thinking up and hosting all sorts of outrageous events, and basically just going everyhwere, doing everything (and everyone) and living a wild, crazy life.

Then tragedy.

Alig and a friend murdered someone, a man named Angel Hernandez, in a particularly brutal way. Alig then spent the next almost-20 years in prison. After he was released he tried to reinvent himself back into the mileau of a very different NYC (he called it "more normalized"). This was the subject of our interview and he was very forthcoming about the challenges of it. 

Michael Alig has died, aged 54, of a heroin overdose -- alone, on Christmas Day. 

What's clear about Alig's life, both before and after prison, is that he was a deeply broken, troubled soul and his demons cost someone his life -- and now his own. I felt at the time that I perhaps shouldn't have interviewed him, that I was giving a murdered a voice he didn't deserve, but I realized that he had a story and it deserved to be told (even if such stories shouldn't necessarily generate sympathy for the storyteller).

And now as Alig's life is over, and this hard year comes to an end. You can't remember the life and death of someone who has killed someone else without also remembering the life and death of the victim. I just hope that Alig's family, the family of Angel Hernandez, and everyone who was impacted by their lives, both for better or worse, finds a new peace next year. 

Review: "Night on Earth" (1991)

Jim Jarmusch is one of the most successful independent movie directors of the last forty years with such classics as Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, Broken Flowers and others on his resume. An Ohio native, he came to NYC as a young man and quickly established himself in the city's cultural firmament as one of its best and boldest directors. And although an NYC-archetype, many of Jarmusch's movie's are set on the road, are about characters leaving somewhere and looking for something elsewhere, stories of discovery. And, although an American director, Jarmusch's movies have always had a global flavor and focus.

Night on Earth might be Jarmusch's masterpiece and his most NYC and global film. And it's one of my favorite moves ever. 

Set on one night in five different cities around the world (LA, NYC, Paris, Rome & Helsinki), Night on Earth is about the unique, special, and totally transitory moments that take place between cab drivers and their passengers, between strangers, between people going from one place to another -- both literally and figuratively. Each segment of this film is totally different from the other, some being very sweet and touching, some being extremely funny, and others being quite sad. In fact, each segment manages, brilliantly, to capture all of these different things at once. The point of each segment in each city isn't the story -- it's the journey, the interactions, the characters. 

The movie is about capturing a small moment in the time of each these people's lives in each of these cities -- showing how, around the the world, whatever race we might be, whatever color we might be, whatever we might strive for, we are all basically the same -- human beings.

A truly global phenomenon. 

If you've never seen Night on Earth, I won't ruin the segments for you -- please, go out and watch it now. The only problem with this movie is being denied the pleasure of getting to see it for the first time. The cast is amazing -- Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Espisito, Rosie Perez, Roberto Benigni, and many other international actors I had never heard of before. 

The NYC segment is one of the best -- it involves a guy trying to get home from Times Square to Brooklyn, a cabbie from Germany who can barely drive and used to work as a clown, and a wild profane woman who fights and flirts with both of them. The three actors in this segment -- Esposito, Perez, and Armin Mueller-Stahl -- are wonderful together. And, of course, all three of them would go onto greater career glory in big movies and get Oscar and Emmy nominations, but, for me, this movie is what I'll remember them for.  

Night on Earth is one of a very few movies that makes me happy, makes me feel warm inside. I hope it does the same for you.

NYC Reimagined

You think a person, place or thing is "one thing" (good, bad, or otherwise) and then events ensue or new information comes to light and it makes you think it's "something else." The reality of it or around it changes, and it transforms in your mind, making you imagine it as something else. This reimagination can be for the better, or the worse, or just for the sake of difference. 

Certainly this year has transformed our imagination of the world and how we live our lives. We didn't have any choice, it was a crises forced upon us, and none of us wanted it. But it gives us an opportunity of what we might want our world, and NYC, to be after the crises is over.

During this year, many city planners and urban experts have been reimagining how NYC can evolve in the upcoming years. Imagine this for NYC: free municipal broadband, single-payer healthcare and guarenteed income for all city residents, 15-minute neighborhoods (where all kinds of staple businesses and services are no more than a 15-minute walk from anyone's home), and new zoning policies that allow for more affordable housing. A city that's more equitable, more humanane, more affordable, and easier to navigate. A city that makes NYC fulfill its true promise.

A city reimagined.

But you don't only need to look to the future or public policies to reimagine NYC. You can reimagine it by looking at aspects of its past that were long overlooked. For example, reading about the photography collective in Harlem called Kamoinge that started in 1960 and is still going today. It was and remains a breeding ground for talented black photographers and has quietly impacted this city and nation's culture. Like most white folks, I had never heard of it before but it was fascinating to learn about it because it made me reimagine part of the black experience in NYC.

In this historic year, reimagining NYC has never been more important, more vital, and more amazing.

Remembering MetroTV

In the early 2000s, New York City was recovering from 9/11, the twelve years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reign were just starting, and the turbocharged gentrification of the city was on its way. It was a turning point in NYC and also for me personally -- I was a couple of years out of college and still finding my way, personally and professionally. It's also when a small, very offbeat, extremely local cable channel hit the air that was destined to be short-lived but was, at least for me at the time, a fun diversion.

It was called MetroTV, and it was an odd child of both New York magazine and the Dolan-family owned MSG networks.

Like its parentage, its content was a mashup of programming from the MSG networks. During the day it broadcast weather, traffic, educational programming, and, on the weekends, sports.

But at night, MetroTV got ... sexy!

It had these very NYC-centered shows about dating, sex, love, and being single in NYC. There were shows like Naked New York where relationship "experts", book authors and magazine writers, adult start, and various other experts in the excercise of Venus would be interviewed by a middle-aged guy and his very hot younger female sidekick. There was To Live and Date in New York, a reality show about single people. There was The Radio Chick on the Prowl where a oddball radio host Leslie Gold would talk with people about -- guess what? -- dating! And there was, most originally, a show called Strictly Personal where people would record themselves talking about why they were great dating prospects and then they would direct people to a dating website to contact them. A friend of mine even appeared on this! (Yours truly did not.) This was in the early years of online dating, before the IPhone and dating apps completely changed the game. 

In a way MetrTV reminded me of the old WNYC TV -- lots of dull programming and some really wacky stuff. 

MetroTV started in 2002 and ended in 2005. By then most of this programming had been cancelled. I don't know why it didn't last -- shows about love/sex/dating might get boring after a while and also this channel was so far down on the dial that people probably didn't find it. MSG seems to have realized that sports programming was probably cheaper and more popular.

I tried to find old clips of MetroTV shows on YouTube but none were to be found -- seems like it's all been memory-holed, locked in vaults somewhere. But it was a moment in time, gone but not totally forgotten. 

NYC Gets into the Holiday Spirit in the Age of COVID-19

Classic Mr NYC

The legendary NYC gossip columnist and man-about-town Michael Musto has a big new article in The Daily Beast about what he predicts will be "New York City's Marvelously Messy Comeback."

His basic theory is that NYC will, as it always does, once again become a popular destination for people to live and visit and it'll be better than ever -- more exciting and, hopefully, more afforable. He also hopes that some of the grit that has been bleached out of the city's identity in the last several years will return. I hope he's right!

I actually interviewed Michael Musto 13 years ago, one of the earliest interviews I ever did for this blog. Read it here. He really is one of the wise-men of NYC.

NYC Nurse Gets First COVID-19 Vaccine

Ann Reinking RIP

The very first movie I ever saw in a theater when I was a kid was Annie, the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical and I immeadiately developed a lifelong crush on the character of Grace Farrell, played by Ann Reinking.

Of course, it wasn't Grace I loved -- it was Ann, and for good reason: she was a gorgeous, blazing talent, a great actress and amazing dancer, a brilliant musical star.

And although she made very few movies (her other big one was All That Jazz where she played a fictional version of herself), Ann Reinking had a long and huge career on the Broadway stage. Her resume is a catalogue of classic: Caberet, Pippin, A Chrous Line, Chicago (the orginal and the revival) and others. In addition to appearing onstage, Reinking was also a Broadway choreographer, designing the dance moves for the (still running) revival of Chicago and, later on, the Broadway revue Fosse, a tribute to her late mentor and romantic partner, the mythic Bob Fosse. She also taught and mentored young dancers at Steps.

Ann Reinking was a classic NYC story -- a girl from elsewhere (Seattle) who moved to NYC to make it big and did. For years she was an icon of this city's culture. Even though she had retired and moved to Arizona a few years ago, he legacy continued -- on stage at Chicago and in last year's mini-series Fosse/Verdon. She died recently at age 71 and will be deeply missed. RIP.

New Yorkers in Exile

Being a New York City resident, being a denizen of this town, is such an identity unto itself that the debate over what makes someone a "real New Yorker" has and will continue to rage ad infinitum. 

For me, however, you never feel more like a New Yorker then when you leave it. And you REALLY don't feel more like a New Yorker until you start living somewhere else.

I lived elsewhere for four years in college and I never identified more as a New Yorker than in those years where I was in exile from the city. And apparently this is a common phenomenon: many born-and-bred citizens of NYC who have moved elsewhere, who are "in exile" for reasons good and bad, have made it clear that they feel the same way.

Some famous exiles are people like Larry David, the brilliant comic-mind and co-creator of Seinfeld. If you watch him on Curb Your Enthusiam, you see the rich Brooklyn-native bumbling his way around Los Angeles, a New Yorker to his core. This reminds me, in a very different way, of what I wrote about the movie Heat, a great crime movie set in LA but starring two great New Yorkers (Pacino & De Niro) -- they never seemed more like New Yorkers to me than watching them in this movie where they are both in exile in a strange wild place, far from home.

It reminds me that  no "real New Yorker" ever leaves NYC -- you take the city with you, its ghosts and memories exist within you, its roots to your identity gets stronger, and it makes you New Yorker wherever you go.

"The Godfather Part III" @ 30

Yours truly had yet to be born when the first two Godfather movies were released in 1972 and 1974. However, I clearly remember when, early in my teenage years, The Godfather Part III came out in December 1990.

The first two movies were huge critical and commercial successes, became cultural phenomena, and are widely regarded as some of the greatest movies ever made. Obviously the third movie had A LOT to live up to, with expectations nearly impossible to meet. The movie's production received lots of press attention and controversy -- actors were cast and then uncast, it cost a lot to make, etc. etc. I remember wondering why this particular movie was such a big deal but then my brother showed me the first two movies on videotape (remember videotape?) and then I was as excited as anyone to see this one. 

Godfather III received a mixed reception from critics and audience upon its release -- some liked it a lot more than others -- but almost everyone agreed that it was nowhere near as good as its illustrious predecessors. I basically agree but, unlike some, I don't think this movie is as bad as some believe.

Normally when a classic film hits a big anniversary date, its gets some media attention and then that's that. But this year, this December, The Godfather Part III has been resurrected in a new form -- director Francis Ford Coppolla has recut the movie and is releasing it this month. It's basically a brand new movie and it even has a brand new title: The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. The reception for this new version has been great and, much like thirty years ago, I can't wait to see it ... all over again.

And while The Godfather story is sprawling -- across decades, across countries -- it's fundamentally a New York City story. It's a story of immigrants, of strivers, of people wanting a better life, of people turning to crime so that their children can live the American dream. It's a story of how this city is a place of both great opportunity and great danger, of great possibilities and great pitfalls. It's a quiteseential NYC story, spiritally capturing this town as any story told before or since. 

A City of Neighborhoods

 

We Remember

Nightlife and the Nuyorican Cafe

Nightlife is a quintessential part of the NYC identity, especially the clubs -- from the Stork Club and the Copa to Tunnel and Limelight to 1Oak and Butter, this town has always been the defining capital of American nightlife.

It goes without saying that COVID-19 has been a huge hit on the nightlife industry in NYC. The waiters, bartenders, managers, bus boys, hostesses, etc. have seen their jobs vanish, their professions decimated. Bars, clubs, lounges, restaurants, you name it, have been crippled and some may never recover. But some will. Like everything in post-COVID NYC, some things will survive, some won't.

This city has been transformed by the pandemic, and so will the nightlife business. 

One NYC nightlife impressario who won't be part of post-COVID nightlife is Miguel Algarin, founder of the Nuyorican Cafe, who died recently. Unlike many nightlife hotspots that come and go, his place has stayed in business since 1973. And unlike many places that are devoted to drinking, dancing, drugging, debauchery, the Nuyorican Cafe is devoted to poetry. It hosts poets reading their work or "poetry slams" where random people get in front of a mike and read their self-composed poems. The Nuyorican Cafe was and is a vital part of the NYC culture scene, and Miguel Algarin was a great visionary. He will be missed.

I've gone to the Nuyorican Cafe twice in my life. About a week or so after I moved back to NYC from college, a relative took me to my first slam where an excitable guy named Flaco read some wild stuff. Then, a few years later, I went with my then-fiance and her sister, where a friend of ours engaged in a slam and another guy did a very funny poem about Fox News. Both visits were quite memorable.

As soon as this pandemic is over and the Nuyorican Cafe reopens, I'll go again -- in tribute to Miguel and his vision, in tribute to the great culture of NYC, and in tribute to the great nightlife of NYC.

What Makes a Mayor?

New York City will be electing a whole new swath of municipal office-holders next year, thanks to term limits. Most of the city council, the borough presidents, and the city-wide office holders will change -- including, first and formost, the mayor.

The mayor of any city is a real-life human being and human beings, as we know, aren't perfect. Yet New Yorkers love the idea of a "perfect mayor", someone who not only runs the city but also embodies it.

The mayor of New York City is expected to be many things: a day-to-day manager ensuring the smooth delivery of government services as well as taking charge in an emergency; a long-term visionary and leader who moves the city into a better place (less crime, more affordable housing, better schools, cleaner streets, etc., anything that improves the quality life and experience of living here); an advocate and cheerleader who promotes the city's image and interests to the rest of the country and the world; and a big personality, a larger-than-life character who is as much a showman (or showwoman), a performer, as much as a politician or a leader. 

The qualities that New Yorkers want in mayor are many -- it's a tall order to be come Hizzoner. The perfect mayoral DNA hasn't been generated yet. 

Fiorello LaGuardia is, for many, the model of a modern NYC mayor and many of his successors (like Koch and Giuliani) have aped his big personality style if not his decency and competence. Others have been a conscious reaction to that type of mayor -- Lindsay, Dinkins, and, in their way, Bloomberg and De Blasio have shown that this city can sometimes elect a more genteel and down-to-earth mayor. 

It's also axiomatic that mayors are destined never to rise to higher office (governor, senate, president) and that they better not show that they are anything less than 200% focused on just being mayor (leaving town, running for another office, brings mayors a cropper).

It's impossible to tell what makes for a successful mayor because the times they govern in, and the challanges they face, are so different. But it's almost inevitable that, after years of controversy, tough decisions, bad luck, whatever, NYC mayors often leave office unpopular. History can sometimes, however, be much kinder to them in the long run. And their personality, their mascot role, become less important -- it's what they left their successors to build on that's deemed most important.

The recent death of Mayor David Dinkins is a huge case in point. When he left office in 1993, and for years afterwards, the common wisdom is that he left the city crime-ridden broken down mess that Rudy Giuliani came in and fixed. But a closer look at the record shows that Dinkins bequeathed the man destined to become an adulterous, bankrupt, impeached one-term loser president's lawyer a much stronger city than was previously appreciated: under Dinkins the police force increased, crime was actually falling greatly, Times Square was alreay changing, the city was improving. But the perception of it hadn't yet changed, and Rudy sucked up all the credit.

Thus it has been and will always be so. Life isn't fair, politics is less than fair, and being mayor of this town is both the greatest honor and one of the most unfair jobs any New Yorker can possibly get.

A (Virtual) Walk Around NYC

As COVID-19 has made enjoying NYC more difficult, The New York Times has taken upon itself to create virtual walking tours around town. These tours are curated by the chief architecture critic Michael Kimmelman who provides each tour with beautiful photos of the area he's exploring plus short histories and information about the streets, businesses, and attractions of the neighborhoods being shown.

This is a continuing series but, so far, Kimmelman has provided tours of Chinatown, Harlem, the Financial District, Jackson Heights, the East River, and more. I hope that he also explores some of the more remote parts of the city like City Island, the Rockaways, Bayridge, and many others. This is a project that I hope has a long life.

Gotta Love New Yorkers

History Will Decide

When the history of COVID-19 in NYC is written, there will be lots of stories about how people broke the rules of quarantining and social distancing to keep doing the two things that were most miserably impacted by it -- making money and partying.

Back in the 19th century, in the horrific days of slavery, there was the Underground Railroad; a hundred years ago, back in the days of Prohibition in the 1920s, there were speakeasies and bathtub gin. Now, in 2020, in the year of the plague, there are secret parties where people hang, dance, rage, do drugs, hook up, and act like nothing has changed since last year. Sure, these are "superspreader events" (another word added to the popular vernacular this year) but these people don't care if they get sick or get anyone else sick. 

They're partying -- and no one will stop them!

History will, of course, have the final word. The Underground Railroad is now properly celebrated as the great act of rebellion, of liberation, against the evil institution of slavery. The legacy of prohobition is more mixed -- the speakeasies are romanticized as places where people escaped the moralistic tyranny and stupidity of prohibition, who showed how dumb and unworkable it was, even though doing so unwittingly led to the rise of organized crime in America. 

But how in the hell are people engaging in risky behavior that spreads a virus, blatently ignoring medical and pubilc health advice, going to be viewed by history? Probably the same way it looks at the people in black and white photographs protesting the racial integration of public schools in the South -- shameful and stupid.