In the midst of our tumultuous world, something wonderful just happened -- a snowy owl appeared in Central Park's North Meadow, the first in over 130 years.
Snowy owls live in the artic and winter down in places like New England, Upstate New York, and the upper Midwest -- but rarely do they make it quite this far south. You gotta hand it to this bird -- it not only chose the right city to land in, it also scoped out some of its best real estate.
In these troubled times, seeing something so rare and beautiful reminds me of the final lines of Brideshead Revisited when Charles -- divorced, friendless, lonely and miserable, stuck in the army during the dreariness of WWII -- goes into the little chapel on the Brideshead estate and sees the "beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle." For a long time this flame had been out, the chapel abandoned -- until one day it wasn't. Charles muses that, "the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones."
The message is that Divine Grace, the beauty of faith, has been restored, even during the most troubled of troubled times. And, in some ways, this snowy old returning to Central Park in well over a century, is a reminder that the natural beauty and goodness of our world still exists -- and it always had and always will if we work to make it so.
What's in a bodega -- besides, ya' know, food, candy, beverages, cleaning products, certain electrical items, over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, various prophylactics, newspapers/magazines, and other random stuff?
Perhaps the very soul of this city.
A bodega is something that's not quite a supermarket or a pharmacy but more than a deli or a newstand. It's basically a convenience store but it doesn't sell gas. A bodega almost always sets up shop on the corner of a city street -- the classic "corner store" -- a central organizing spot for any neighborhood.
Bodegas originated in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods but have since migrated all over town and even the richest, whitest, most haughty neighborhoods refer to their corner store as a bodega. Most of them are run down or decidedly no-frills but, wherever they are, whatever they look like, they are a distinctly an NYC phenomenon, a place we love without even realizing it.
- Glenn Frey's 1985 video for his song "You Belong to the City", a sexy and gauzy dreamscape of NYC at night (never mind the screenshots of Miami Vice, it was because this song appeared in the then-hit show).
- An odd commercial starring our favorite NYC DJ Allison Steele who makes me want to go back in time and buy the stereo she's selling.
- And, finally, a behind the scenes look at the making of the 1989 movie Slaves of New York. You can also find a longer look at creation of this clasic NYC flick the here.
We've lost another Brooklyn boy made good recently -- Walter Bernstein, the legendary screenwriter of movies like Fail Safe and Paris Blues, has died at the age of 101.
Bernstein had a long career not only as a screenwriter but also a screenwriting teacher at NYU and as a director. He served the country in World War II and was, most notably, a survivor of the horrible Hollywood Blacklist. He turned his experience of writing scripts and then getting them produced by others in the 1976 he wrote called The Front starring Woody Allen.
As the mayor's race heats up, we're going to be hearing more and more policy proposals from the various candidates. One idea that's made the most news is by Andrew Yang, this guy who came out of nowhere last year to run for president and is now running for mayor on a plaform of supposedly "big ideas."
Mr. Yang seems like a nice enough man and, as something of a self-made rich guy, I'm sure he's plenty smart but his biggest "big" or "bold" idea seems to be letting casinos operate in NYC -- even on Governor's Island.
This proposal is the kind of embarassing mistake that political amateurs and people who know nothing about government or have any business running for high office make. See, Rudy Giuliani proposed this back in 1998 and it never happened. When the US Government transferred control to NYC, casinos and hotels and businesses of this sort were banned.
Mr Yang and all candidates should really do their homework before running for office and proposing things that are simply not possible.
Personally, I don't want a casino there on Governor's Island ever. New York City is the world center of commerce but it'd be nice to keep one part of the city -- ironically, a short boat ride away from Wall Street -- as a non-commercial, non-greed centered, non-money making oasis.
However, there is a big legit debate on whether or not we should have casinos in NYC. The idea of lots of revenue going into the government coffers without needing to raise taxes is tempting but the questions, in my 'umble opinion, that need to be resolved regarding casinos in NYC are: 1) Just how much revenue will it actually generate for the city and what services will this money go to? 2) How will casinos change the character of NYC and impact its citizens, and 3) Do we really want to make NYC another Atlantic City?
This is an issue that won't go away any time soon.
The Brooklyn kid who became an international renowned interviewer of world leaders and cultural icons has died at the age of 87 from COVID-19. He started out on the radio and then, for a quarter of a century, on CNN. He was the original cable news star, at a time when cable news was actually about, you know, the news and not propaganda. His appeal was universal and non-controversial.
Larry King was not like Mike Wallace and his shows were not like 60 Minutes -- he wasn't there to nail his guests with "gotcha" questions, he was there to hold court and let them speak. In many ways, he was the original podcaster -- his interviews were more discussions than question and answer sessions. They might for light infotainment.
Some of his most memorable interviews are from the 1990s and include his very bizarre talk with Marlon Brando and the debate he moderated between then-Vice-President Al Gore and Texas billionaire Ross Perot about NAFTA. He also, one time, went on his radio show less than sober and rested and the results were interesting ...
RIP to a broadcasting and NYC legend.
And here's my tribute to Larry's newspaper feature ItsMy2Cents.
So Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been sworn-in as the next President and Vice-President of the United States. New York City had a big presence in this historic transfer of power.
First, a Bronx girl, US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, swore-in the first female Vice-President in history ...
... and second, another Bronx girl, Jennifer Lopez, and a Manhattan girl, Lady Gaga, sang to celebrate the occassion ...
.. and then, third, later in the day, a Brooklyn boy became the first New Yorker and the first Jewish Majority Leader of the United States Senate in American history ...
What a remarkable moment in the history of our city and this country!
The Muppet Show, the original 1976-1918 series and one of the greatest sketch comedy shows of all time, is coming to Disney Plus in February.
In 2011 I blogged about the exhibit about Jim Henson that I had just seen at MOMA -- a brilliant exhibit about a brilliant and world-changing figure.
I cannot WAIT to show the original classic series to my kids -- it's some of the most original, inventive comedy ever produced. The "Mana mana" and "Fever" sketches are two of the most hilarious and perfect pieces of comedy ever made!
New York City video street art used to be the most fringy thing you could ever create and it couldn't be found anywhere else except in the small hours on public access television.
In 2009, shortly after Barack Obama became president, I did a short blog post about the two presidents who were sworn into office in NYC -- George Washington in 1789 and Chester A. Arthur in 1881.
Everyone knows that Washington was sworn-in here but few probably knew about Arthur -- and I thought it would be cool to commemorate that.
Well, once again, Mr NYC was ahead of his time -- way ahead of his time. NY1 has just done a short story about Arthur's impromptu swearing in on Lexington Avenue and 28th Street. You can see it here.
A bunch of people! Here's a list which is certain to grow as the year progresses. Here's also my previous "making of the mayor" coverage from the previous almost-fourteen years as well as a bunch of "declaration" videos of the candidates.
Private corruption leads to public corruption -- the personal venality of those in power is inflicted upon the masses in terrible ways. We are seeing this in extremis with the morally rotten and massively corrupt presidency of Donald Trump. Although this reality horror show will end a week from today, its stench will linger over us for a long time afterwards.
And that's the overarching problem -- even when bad powerful men go away, we the people remain stuck with their corrupt works for years and decades to come.
If you've ever read The Power Broker, Robert Caro's biography of NYC "master builder" Robert Moses, or seen the movie Chinatown, a fictional retelling of engineer William Mulholland bringing water to Los Angeles, the central concept within both is that the personal corruption of these powerful men fueled and warped the development of our nation's two biggest cities -- and, even now, decades after their deaths, we are literally living in the crime scenes i.e. the cities they made.
And that's the basic idea behind Edward Norton's 2019 movie Motherless Brooklyn: the city is a crime.
A very liberal adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn is Norton's attempt to take the basic framework of Chinatown (a private detective investigating a weird crime) and marry it with the facts in The Power Broker (an unelected master planner who builds in NYC with dictatorial power) to make a 21st-century fable about the corrupt shaping of our city.
A thumbnail of the plot: a private detective with Tourette's syndrome named Lionel Essrog investigates the murder of one his partners. His investigation leads him to Harlem where he meets a woman named Laura Rose who works with someone named Gabby Horowitz (based on Jane Jacobs) who is fighting the redevelopment plans of city commisioner Moses Randolph (based on you-know-who). Essrog eventually meets up with a man named Paul, another brilliant but failed city planner, who turns out to be Randolph's brother and who knows a dark secret that could bring him down. Essrog discovers that Randolph's redevelopment plan is just a scam to kick poor black people out of their homes and sell their property to private developers. Paul explains to Essrog how Randolph's power is beyond anyone else's in government and how, as the head of an unelected public authority, he is totally unaccountable to anyone. Events ensue and Essrog comes to realize that Laura's life is in danger -- unless he can somehow get to Randolph and blackmail him with his secret. There's lots of double-crossing and complexity that makes this a very noirish yarn.
It's a story about the power behind the power, the secret history of NYC, and the darkness behind it all. Also, it's a tale about the basic evils of gentrification and how the "public good" is often a cover for private greed.
The cast is excellent: Norton is compelling as Essrog, Alec Baldwin is ominous as Randolph, and Willem Dafoe is the standout as the tortured Paul. The cast includes Michael K. Wiliams, Bobby Cannavale, a cameo by Bruce Willis, Cherry Jones as Gabby, and a very good actress named Gugu Mbatha-Raw plays Laura.
Norton is a fine director and the movie holds your attention to a point but, ultimately, the story feels slight in relation to the heights of its ambition. You can tell, in a way, that Norton is suffering from the classic "anxiety of influence" -- he is cleary in awe of, and has great reverence for, Chinatown and The Power Broker and the original novel, that his efforts with this film feel stunted, as much as influenced, by them. Also, I think there's an inherit problem when you're trying to make a movie that's partly inspired by a novel but also trying to incorporate plot lines and factoids from another movie and another book. It's just too much -- and while a noble attempt it makes the story and its themes feel more jumbled than inspired.
Still, it's an interesting concept for a movie -- and it's more of a concept than a movie in my opinion -- but that's why I recommend people see Motherless Brooklyn along with enjoying it's wonderful cast.
If you were something less than a writer but more than a stand-up comedian you'd be Fran Lebowitz.
Lebowitz has spent decades famously NOT writing and NOT performing stand up comedy but she's somehow managed to have a long career as a professional raconteur. She wrote two brilliant books of essays in the late 1970s and early 1980s (her book Metropolitan Life is one of the funniest things I've ever read) but since then she's made a career just talking in public as a professional crank.
Lots of people like to talk but few enjoyed being listened to more than Fran Lebowitz.
Lebowitz is full of opinions about everything and is extremely funny. She "performs" i.e. talks at numerous staged events, on TV, and now on Netflix. She loves to talk about everything and anything but her main subject, the one she's most expert on, is New York City itself.
Her new documentary series is called Pretend It's a City, a seven part look at what's happened to NYC in the last several decades since Lebowitz moved here in the 1970s (it was shot before COVID-19 so it's what you might call a "normal times" look at the city). Her subjects are the evolution of NYC over the years, including episodes devoted to how life in the city is impacted culture, transportation, money, health, history, and libraries.
It's a holistic look at a city that's almost impossible to ever fully understand.
The series just dropped on Netflix and I haven't watched it yet but it appears to mainly involve Lebowitz walking around the city, speaking at recorded live events, and chatting with her sidekick, some guy named ... Martin Scorsese (and yes, he directed it).
I can't wait to see it! Listen to her interview about on NPR here.
In the 1980s a South Carolina-migrant named Nelson Sullivan recorded over 1900 hours of footage of NYC streetlife. He videotaped every kind of New Yorker in every type of location. After he died of a heart attack in 1989, at the age of 41, his friends catalogued these videotapes into the 5ninthavenue project which now has its own channel on YouTube.
The videos are very raw, slice-of-life moments in time captured for eternity. They are unvarnished, unsentimental, totally fascinating "you-are-there" recordings that trigger both nostalgia and wonder about a city both familiar and long-gone.
These two recordings are from 1987 on the subway and the last video Nelson made in July 1989 but you should check out the rest if you want to see more of NYC as it once was.
In the midst of the fascist melee down at the US Capitol yesterday, something quietly notable happened -- New York State's senior senator, and a guy from Brooklyn, became the Majority Leader to-be (or designate or elect, I don't friggin' know) after the run-off elections in Georgia.
He will also be the first Jewish Majority Leader, the most powerful Jew in American history.
Schumer was elected to Congress in 1980 after serving in the New York State Legislature so this is the culmination of a more than-40 year journey to the pinnacle, the summit, the very top of American legislative power.
So while some may try to burn American down, its democracy is hanging tight, Brooklyn-strong.
UPDATE: Read more about what this might mean for NYC.
In 1947 there was a small pox epidemic in NYC and 5 million New Yorkers got vaccinated in two weeks. The COVID-19 vaccines have been available for almost two months and, so far, less than 200,000 New Yorkers have gotten the shot.
How did we go from being able to vaccinate nearly the entire city's population in less than a month seventy-four years ago to a tiny fraction of that today in almost two months?
The answer is, quite simply, outsourcing.
Back in 1947, the vaccines were distributed at clinics set up by the Department of Health. New Yorkers went to one in their neighborhood, got the shot, and life went on. It was centralized and efficient -- and fast. But today it's been outsourced to hospitals and medical centers -- i.e. private profit-seekers -- and so it's become a giant strategic and inefficient mess.
It's really quite tragic -- and yet another example of how the so-called "free market" has failed the public.
As lockdown has gone on ... and on ... my mind has been wandering back to places I've traveled over the years. While I haven't gone to that many places, I've gone to enough that I don't always recall them. And, shockingly, it wasn't until last week when I read an article about the State of Minnesota that I even remember that, oh yeah, I spent two summers there in the early 1990s.
Minnesota has been in the news a lot lately. Its biggest city, Minneapolis, was the site of the terrible police murder of George Floyd last year that rocked American race relations and led to coast-to-coast protests. The writer of this article, someone who has traveled and vacationed a lot in the state, indicates that death of George Floyd emphasized that there really two Minnesotas in the same way there are two Americas -- there's the Minnesota of A Prairie Home Campanion, the land of lakes and picturesque small towns, canoe trips and hikes in the forest, highway diners and friendly Scandavian immigrants, pure Americana, pure American myth (white America). Then there's the other Minnesota, the other America, the dark side of this Americana, the one we don't eulogize, the one we try to ignore -- the land of poverty and violence and drugs, the land of racism and police brutality, the land of lives of quiet desperation. The Floyd murder forced Minnesota and white Minnesotans, those in love with the myth, to see this in the nearly 10 minutes that that police officer kept his knee on Mr. Floyd's neck, killing him.
Americana laid bare.
My Minnesota ventures certainly fell into the myth bucket -- sorta. In the summers after my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I went to a French language camp in northern Minnesota. There are these massive language camps there, run by Concordia University, where American teenagers go, live, speak, and embrace the culture of other countries. The biggest of all the camps was the German camp but they also had French, Chinese, and others. Not only did I go and speak French at this camp for a few weeks each time but it was also my first time meeting kids from other parts of the country. They were so different from kids in NYC, in many ways nicer, in many ways weirder, and the fact that I was from NYC made me strange and exotic to them. It was the first time I realized that most of the people in the rest of the country were both mesmerized and curious about their nation's biggest city. They would ask me lots of questions about it that I, at that young tender age, was incapable of answering.
Otherwise, besides the language part, it was a standard summer camp. Lots of camp fires, lots of sing-alongs, lots of sports, some truth-or-dare games, the whole deal. Honestly, it was second and last summer camp I ever attended -- for the most part summer camp wasn't my thing. I made friends with some kids and we promised that we'd stay in touch and be friends forever -- and now I don't even remember their names. It was typical teenage stuff.
I'd like to go back to Minnesota one day, maybe even venture back to the northern part of the state, to rediscover the myth of the state while also understanding its reality.
P.S. On a short flight from Minneapolis to northern Minnesota I looked back and saw Chelsea Clinton sitting in a seat. She attended one of the other language camps and, needless to say, a lot of people made a fuss over her. Her dad had been president for about six months at that time and the Secret Service agents were around but inconspicous. I didn't talk to her but I did overhear her tell someone about how much effort her mom made in making sure she had packed everything she needed. I remember seeing her drive off from the airport with a scary-looking official car behind the bus.
P.P.S. Minnesota has produced some brilliant artists, many of whome came to NYC. Bob Dylan. F. Scott Fitzegerald. The Coen Brothers. Something must be in the water there!
Now that COVID-19 vaccinations are available, the effort has moved on to making sure everyone gets it. In New York City, this means that 8.6 million people will need to get the shot in the arm in order for life to return, somewhat, to normal ASAP.
But, right now, it's taking far too long.
Most of the people getting vaccinated are getting their shots on Mondays to Fridays during business hours. This simply isn't going to work. New Yorkers need to be getting vaccinated 24/7 -- yes, at night, on weekends, during holidays, whenever or wherever they can. That means that if some of us, including yours truly, need to get vaccinated at 3 AM on a Saturday morning, so be it!
The city really needs to expands its imagination and ramp up its efforts and, as some in the city council have said, take on a war-like mentality and effort in beating this thing with overwhelming force.
The virus does not go away at night, take weekends or holidays off, and doesn't operate only during business hours. It's here, invading and fighting the city, 24/7 so now that we have the artillery to defeat it we must be fighting it 24/7.
Happy New Year! This is when we make resolutions and forge plans to achieve great success in the coming twelve months. That's why, contrarian that I am, this first post of 2021 will be about failure.
After the 2020 we all had, can you blame me?
I love stories about failure. They prove that the universe is a random, weird, mostly cruel, sometimes kind, totally unpredictable place. I'm a connoiseur of the genre.
Let's paraphrase Leo Tolstoy who wrote that all happy families are basically the same while all unhappy families are unhappy in unique and different ways. So it is with success and failure: all roads to success are basically the same and straightforward (the idea, the struggle, the setback, the breakthrough, the triumph) but the roads to failure are much more bizarre and interesting.
I've chronicles my share of failure stories on here over the years -- this blog being perhaps a prime example of failure.
So here's another one: the story of a musical version of Frankenstein that premiered exactly 40 years ago today -- and closed after one night. Hopes were high that this show, the most expensive musical of all time at the time, would start 1981 on Broadway with a creative and financial bang. Instead, it failed -- the reviews were terrible, there was no advance box office sales, it was a disaster by every metric. The producers saw that this show had no future except red ink and empty seats so they killed it that night. Interestingly, this show had a notable cast (some of whom were fired before the show actually played its one offiicial show) including future Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest, the late great David Dukes (not to be confused with the white supremicist), and a guy named William Converse-Roberts who would go on to be the ex-husband on The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. The creators would go on to have decent careers but no big Broadways triumphs. But on the night of January 4, 1981, a month after John Lennon's murder and Ronald Reagan's inaugeration, the future for everyone on the show looked dark.
But even though this showed was a bad flop, it makes for a great -- and successful -- story.
P.S. The whole horror genre has had a lousy history on Broadway. Whereasa it's a staple of the movies, theater audiences aren't interested. Fascinating how a whole genre can work in one medium but not in another.
There's another big change coming to NYC on this New Year's Day -- this time on our TV screens. Five female reporters at NY1 are leaving the station after settling a gender discrimination lawsuit. It's too bad -- they are all very talented and, after having seen them day-and-day, year-after-year, on NY1, it feels like losing some friends. But here we are. Everything changes -- especially these days.
New York City has a major new transportation hub -- out with the old Penn Station, in with the new Moynihan Station!
As Governor Cuomo dubbed it, the new station is "a work of art" -- a vast skylight ceiling, a huge Art deco clock, modern art, waiting areas that resemble hotel lobbies, it's a big new addition to the NYC firmament. It's named after the late great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who dreamed of this project long ago.
This station is also, in many ways, the correction of a massive error in the city's history -- the tearing down of the original gorgeous Penn Station in the early 1960s. It's a remakable achievement, particularly in this day and a age of dysfunction, to complete something like this -- especially in the middle of a pandemic.
Of course, a shiny new thing is not a substitute for a much more fundamental need -- the need for more public transit overall. We still need the Gateway Project -- more tunnels, more trains, much more capacity to handle the strain of ridership. This station, while making the experience of boarding and exiting the train more enjoyable, does not fix this massive problem. After all, it took almost 50 years to build three new subway stops on the Upper East Side -- how soon can we expect to give in and out and around NYC a whole lot faster?
So when it comes to meeting the needs for transportation in NYC, new station or no, we have a longgggggggggggg way to go. We have this great new station -- now lets have a transportation system for the whole city that's worthy of it.
