Gotta Love New Yorkers

Recently I blogged about how we should do more to celebrate the people who make our city and our world a better place and not "cancel" them.

So here's a great example: Velmanette Montgomery.

She was a State Senator for 36 years representing Brooklyn until she retired last year. When she was elected, she was one of the only black women in that entire legislative body which, at the time and for years and years afterwards, was a white Republican boys club. In her four decades of public service, Montgomery dealt with the challenges of being a minority in the minority party yet she was an effective representative of her district, city and state. She worked to reform the criminal justice and foster care systems in the state -- including making sure that incarcerated woman couldn't be shackled during childbirth. She pioneered needle exchange programs to help reduce HIV/AIDS. She also strengthened laws against "deed theft" to help people from being tricked out of home ownership. 

Velmanette Montgomery is the kind of public servant and New York who, quietly, makes our city a better place to live. 

Brooklyn Rainbow

Memo from NYC

There's a lot of buzz these days in the media (social and otherwise) about "cancel culture." I honestly don't know what it is and how it's precisely defined -- if it means people getting fired, blacklisted, smeared, or otherwise publicly shamed and made unemployable and friendless, possibly homeless and destitute, then it's nothing new. You can go back to the days of the Salem Witch Trials, or more recently McCarthyism, to see "cancel culture" and its variants in action. 

What's past is present, and so on. I've even blogged about this before. 

Lately, many people who have made names for themselves in the arts, politics, business or other high profile fields, are getting pilloried for failings in their personal lives. They're losing jobs, getting sued, even arrested, or just having their names turned into proverbial mud on the interwebs, their private shortcomings made public to all, for everyone's consumption, their reputations and lives shattered. This kind of gossip mongering used to be the province of tabloids -- in fact, that's why tabloids came into existence -- and this kind of highly private trash used to be considered tasteless to investigate and propagate to the public. Privacy used to be valued, respected, and even sometimes practiced.

No longer. Now private lives, everyone's life, is fair game. No one is safe.

You can delve into the private life of anyone -- famous or not, successful or not, whoever -- and find less than flattering, maybe even criminal, parts of their pasts. You can blare this into the public realm and create a vortex of hate for the person -- if that's your goal. 

But why would you want it to be? What does it ultimately gain you or anyone else to invade and tear apart someone's private life? To paraphrase the great show Yes, Prime Minister, when you interfere in private squabbles you're on a very slippery slope. 

And when you whip up hatred for somethings or someone, it can spill out of control -- as recent events have shown. 

It's easy to destroy, it's easy ruin something or someone. All it takes is the will to do it. Otherwise, it's easier done than said. However ... creating, building, healing, producing something, anything, making things better, is hard -- it takes all your intelligence, skills, emotions, energy, and will to do it. It took years to build the World Trade Centers and only a couple of hours to knock them down.  

That's what Cancel Culture is. Terrorism and ruin, the negation of life and those who choose to improve it.

And I'm worried that the practitioners of "cancel culture" are scaring away people who want to create, who want to build, who want to heal, who want to make the world a better place from doing so, that these people will instead retreat and stop. Why commit yourself to a career, to all this hard work, if some jealous or wounded person from your past is going to emerge from the ooze of time and wreck it? 

That's not a world I think any of us want to live in. 

But I try to take heart -- and so should you. Those who create and build and heal will always win over the nihilists. You can ruin people's reputation, try to negate their work, smear and suppress, but ultimately great work lives on, long after the creators and critics are dead, the former remembered, the latter forgotten as they deserve to be. 

I think about my own family and how those in my family who built and created wonderful things and healed others are still remembered and loved, even years and years after their death. 

Teddy Roosevelt said it best well over a hundred years ago:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Let's be in the arena together and not remove anyone from it. We'll all be removed from it eventually so let's leave as much great stuff behind in it as we can -- and not "cancel it."

How Many Seconds? "Rent" @ 25

It seems like every couple of decades a Broadway musical comes along that not only is good but truly great, and not only great but also so original, so groundbreaking, that it evolves the artistic form of musical theater and pushes it forward into the future. 

In the 1970s it was A Chorus Line. In the 2010s it was Hamilton. And in the 1990s it was Rent. 

Debuting in early 1996, twenty-five years ago, Rent is that rare musical that was not only a big hit but also a cultural phenomenon. People sang the songs in their homes, with their friends, on the streets, and in school choruses. It was on TV, the major media covered. It was parodied, relentlessly. It was everywhere.

It even became that rare musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, something that happens maybe once a decade.

Rent was the vision of a man named Jonathan Larson, a young musical fan who spent years writing it (with some help, apparently, that lead to a lawsuit). It was a re-telling of La Boheme, about young people dying of AIDS in NYC in the early 1990s while trying to stay in their building on the Lower East Side. Back then, you didn't see shows about subjects like this, with characters like this, on Broadway. Also, rock musicals weren't really mainstream yet -- in the 1990s, Broadways was still very high on the big opera-like musical spectacles like Cats, Les Miz, and Miss Saigon. Then came along this very offbeat show about very offbeat people living offbeat lives, singing songs about love and death, hope and despair, in a very modern, ultra-recognizable world -- and it blew everything else on Broadway away. 

Just as Rent was opening Off-Broadway, Larson tragically died from an aneurysm and didn't live to see how quickly the show transferred to Broadway and became a Tony-winning megahit, the hottest ticket in town, and eventually a movie. I remember watching the Tony-awards that year and seeing his sister collect his awards, reminding everyone how long it took for her brother to become an overnight success.   

I still listen to the album from time to time, and it never ceases to bring me joy. In 1996 I was in college, living far away from NYC, and listening to the album always me brought home -- NYC on my mind, you might say. 

It still has that transcendant effect. 

I've blogged about Rent and its Bohemian spirit over the years. The show was still running when this blog debuted in 2007, I covered its closure in 2008. So end of the original Broadway and the start of this blog touched in a way. That makes me happy.

And we'll still be listening to, and talking about, Rent 25 years from now.

Carpe Diem NYC

Great must-read article by NYC reporter, and past Mr NYC interviewee, Ross Barkan about the policies the candidates for mayor are proposing vs. the needs of the city.

They are proposing a variety of different policies like guarenteed income, a city-wide health insurance program, and various housing proposals. But none of them are particularly sweeping and grand. For many, it's just about getting NYC back to some semblance of 2019 normality, not a 2022 bright shiny future. 

And a grand and sweeping new vision is what this city needs right now -- the next mayor needs to seize the day, seize the moment, carpe diem etc. so that NYC can remain a great and sustainable city. 

Ross brilliantly compares and contrasts the big social and infrustructure policy achievements of the 1930s to 1960s with the infrastructure and social welfare demands on the city today, noting two big things: as great as social welfare and building policies of that era were, they were warped and unevenly distributed by racism. At the same time, so much of the city's fate is in the hands of the state and federal government. Back then, NYC had a willing partner in Albany and DC. These days, it's a much more complex, fraught, and unpredictable relationship.

Ross makes the point, and it's both extremely important and obvious, that housing is THE issue for the next mayor. He even proposes some solutions like, for example, the city buying out broke and overleveraged landlords. None of the candidates for mayor has a housing vision that's truly bold and innovative. And, in so many ways, everything else is secondary -- if you literally can't live in NYC, nothing else matters.

I hope that all of the candidates for mayor read this article and start thinking hard about what kind of mayor they want to be -- and what kind of city they really want NYC to be. 

Remembering Cicely Tyson

As a hopelessly dopey white boy, I'd heard of Cicely Tyson and knew she was a great actress but I didn't really know that much else about her. Upon her recent death, at the age of 96, I read more about her life and career -- and my jaw dropped. 

What an amazing journey she had over ten decades of life! What a lady!

Imagine the length and scope of her life -- it's hard to comprehend. Imagine being born poor to immigrant parents and going onto a huge career as an in-demand fashion model and award-winning actress on stage and in movies and TV. And imagine starting this career in your twenties and still working into your nineties. Imagine traveling the world, meeting every famous person alive, winning tons of awards and getting all sorts of honors, helping to found the Dance Theather of Harlem, and becoming a beloved icon. 

Imagine being married to another great icon named Miles Davis -- and that not even being the most interesting thing about you. 

Now imagine doing all that as a black woman in America -- and achieving great success in these fields before Civil Rights? And imagine being as successful late in your life and career as you were earlier?

Wow. 

The odds were, to put it mildly, way against her and yet she beat and crushed them. And in addition to all this Cicely Tyson never forgot, never strayed, from where she came from. She was not only a great talent and trailblazer, she was a leading citizen of NYC. 

Cicely Tyson's incredible voyage began and ended in the same place -- Harlem, where she was born on December 19, 1924 and died on January 28, 2021. She truly came full circle.

RIP.

NYC Cacophony: The Voices that Command Us

When you have a city of more than 8.5 million people, you're going to have a lot of different voices speaking in a lot of different languages. (In fact there are 637 languages spoken in NYC, as blogged about here). Anywho, for all the different tongues and babble that occurs simultaneously every day in this town, very few voices get the honor of being amplified above the din, of being given the chance to rise and communicate with the rest of the city.

Those voices are the few, the happy few.

Some of these chosen voices are obvious: politicians get a big public voice, as do radio and TV broadcasters, as well as rich and famous and notable people around town. They get the honor and the rare chance to talk directly to us, to share their ideas and opinions to the rest of us, to influence how this town thinks and feels about things, to permeate the consciousness of the city.

A few offbeat exampples:

It was just announced by the MTA that a variety of NYC celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, Awkwafina, even Judakiss (!) and several others will start making the routine announcements you hear on the subways and buses every day -- but with a funky, distinct, NYC personality-driven twist. This is a big, new, fun project to lighten up and uplift the citizens of NYC as they commute from place to place. These are a bunch of creative NYC voices that will be telling us to do routine things like watch our step, stand clear of the closing doors, socially distance, etc. 

Then there are the politicians: did you know that NYC has a cable channel and livestream devoted to the City Council? You can watch Councilmembers speak on the floor of the Council at City Hall or watch their hearings all day, every day. These are the voices that make the laws that we all live under, the voices that decide how much and on what the city's monies get spent. These are the real voices that command us -- and, if you so choose, you can listen in.

But not all the voices that command us do so to tell us what to do or what they are going to do to us. Sometimes the voices that command us do so by moving our spirit, inspiring our souls. For example, Allison Steele, the late great briliant radio DJ that I've blogged about several times. You can just go and listen to some of her old clips, from back in the days when she ruled the overnight NYC airwaves, and her gorgeous voices married to her kind words and gentle messages, forced people, in a good way, to feel better about themselves and their fellow human beings. Now that is a part of the NYC cacophony that we should cherish, always and forever. 

These are but a very select few examples of the NYC cacophony, the voices that command us but that can also inform, help, educate, and sometimes even soothe us.

Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "Perchance to dream." In NYC there is no greater honor than "Perchance to speak, perchance to be heard."

P.S. I'm not really using the word "cacophony" correctly here (it means a mixture of harsh, discordant sounds) but it's one of those fancy sounding SAT words that I learned in days of yore so I'm shamelessly using it here. 

NYPD Horses Breaks Loose in Brooklyn!!!!!!!!!!!

Joe Allen RIP

Founder and proprietor of the eponymous Theater District restaurant, Joe Allen has died at the age of 87. Shows would come and go but his joint regularly served actors, actresses, directors, writers, agents, crew members, and theatergoers for over 50 years. He had another successful restaurant next door, Orso, that wound up opening locations around the world.

Joe Allen was from Brooklyn and, when he opened his restaurant in 1965, it was something of a leap of faith. Right off Times Square, at that time a seedy and squalid den of sin, his place started a rennaissance of sorts for restaurants in the area that eventually led to the creation of what today we call Restaurant Row. Joe understood that food and theater were inseperable twins, two parts of a night-on-the-town whole. He was, in many ways, a visionary, a man who saw what the Times Square area and NYC would become in later decades.

He built it and they came.

RIP Joe. I'll take an order to go in your memory. 

The Children's Aid Society of New York City

Aren't you really, really glad they made ...

Review: "Bright Lights, Big City" (1988)

Continuing my catalogue of oft-forgotten NYC movies, my latest is Bright Lights, Big City from 1988. It's based on the 1984 debut novel by Jay McInerney who was one of the era's "brat pack" authors like Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz who published popular novels that were quickly made into movies.

When the book came out it made quite a splash due to the youth of the author, the zeitgeisti-iness of the story (a young man, like the author, navigating the world of NYC media, money, club culture, and drugs), and the fact that it was written in the second person (the narrator refers to "you" instead of the first-person "I" or third-person "he/she"). The plot concerns a guy named Jamie who lives in NYC and works as a fact-checker at a magazine that's basically supposed to be the stodgy and boring pre-Tina Brown/David Remnick version of The New Yorker (it had yet to transform itself into a media powerhouse). Jamie is trying to write a novel and live out his fantasies of being a literary star but he's been side-tracked by the recent death of his mother, his wife who has suddenly and inexplicably left him, and his growing drug addiction fueled by a sleazy guy named Tad. When not working and struggling to write, he spends his time snorting drugs and hanging out in clubs with Tad, processing his anguish over his marriage and mother. Eventually a series of events leads him to realize that he needs to change. And that's basically the whole story.

So is it a good movie?

Eh ... it's okay. The main problem is that Michael J. Fox, who plays Jamie, is totally miscast. Don't get me wrong, I love Fox in just about anything but he simply wasn't the right choice for this part. He was cast, I assume, because he was a massive star at the time, still riding the success of Back to the Future (this movie actually came out just before the two sequels and was part of Fox's dramatic interregnum) and he was still being watched by tens of millions of people a week on TV in Family Ties. (Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jr. were considered for the part at the time and would have been much more believable as cokeheads because, well ...). Actually the best and most compelling performance is by Keifer Sutherland as Tad -- he's perfectly cast -- and you almost wish the movie was about him! The rest of the cast -- Swoozie Kurtz, Phoebe Cates, the late great John Houseman and Jason Robards -- are fine but they have little to do (Robards is only in a couple of scenes and is drunk in both of them). The movie was directed by a man named James Bridges (who died in the early 1990s) and who had earlier directed the classics The Paper Chase and Urban Cowboy. This did not have the same success as those. 

But it's still worth seeing for a couple of reasons.

First, flawed as this movie is, it's interesting to see because it's the kind of earnest, humane, character-driven sort of movie that the big studios hardly make anymore. It's an attempt to do something more interior, more emotionally complex, even if it doesn't entirely succeed and the result is mostly just depressing. Second, it's a fascianting piece of late 1980s NYC slife-of-life, of a world that's both recent and hopelessly in the past, of a city that feels so close but also so far away. 

If you want to know what NYC in the 1980s was like, this is the movie to watch. 

P.S. It's hard to remember now but, at the time, the author of the book, Jay McInerney, was being heralded as a 1980s F. Scott Fitzgerald. The big success of "Bright Lights, Big City" led many to believe that literary greatness awaited him, that this novel was a solid start and that even better ones would come along ... Yeah, not so much. He wrote several more novels, some better received than others, but none had the success or acclaim of his first one. These days he's better known as a Man-About-Town (he married a Hearst) and a wine critic. But who knows ... maybe one day he will produce his Gatsby but we're still waiting. 

Gotta Love New Yorkers

New Yorkers are a such a diverse and crazy bunch that calling anyone the "quintessential" or "ultimate" New Yorker is a quixotic exercise in futility. If you live here, and certainly if you've lived here all or most of your life, you are a salt-of-the-earth New Yorker full stop. 

Yet many still try. Many still try to affix this adjective to some of our citizens.

The most famous example, at the moment, is Fran Lebowitz. I've been watching her hilarious if also very skewed show Pretend It's a City on Netflix (already blogged about it) and, while she's brilliant, Fran's NYC is that of a literary affluent type, a denizen of Manhattan and cocktail parties and cultural institutions. She's certainly a great New Yorker but not the ultimate New Yorker -- just one of a bunch.

Another ultimate New Yorker would be a guy liked Ricky Powell who recently died. He spent years as a photographer for bands in the city, most famously for the Beastie Boys in the late 1980s and early 1990s as they were rising to fame. He knew Warhol, Basquiat, even a young Cindy Crawford, and he photographed them all. He was a New Yorker of the streets and downtown and the funky culture -- another one of the bunch.

But perhaps the ultimate of ultimate of New Yorkers are the mayors. For better or worse they define the id and intellect of the city -- at least for their times in office. Right now a whole bunch of New Yorkers are running for the job and, starting on January 1, 2022, one of them will wear the mantel of defining the city and trying to manage it. You've gotta love anyone whole looks at a city that's bigger and richer and more complex than most countries and says, "Yeah, let me run it!" 

See? New Yorkers are so varied, so all over the place, so different, than no one person can embody the city. But hey, it's fun to try!

Times Square Transformed by the Blizzard

And the Rockaways and the Bronx too!