for many of his films (like this one). Eventually he migrated to LA and, a gay man, died of AIDS in 1991. He apparently suffered from bi-polar disorder, had drug and alchohol problems, could be insufferable and difficult, and yet was beloved by many. Like Mozart, he would up in a pauper's grave. And yet, here we are, 30 years after his death, and his movies are being shown on TV, folks like yours truly are writing about him, and his influence, and the influence of grindhouse cinema, has only blossomed since then. One of the biggest casualties in this time of pestilence is the party. People can't party. They can't go to parties. They can't organize parties. They can't congregate to make merriment or "get down" or do whatever people like to do at parties.
If they do, they're breakin' da' law. You may like the nightlife, you may like to boogie, but right now it'll get you arrested.
So people are making withdrawals from their party memory banks, remembering times and places before the plague when they had carefree fun with their fellow homo sapiens en masse.
I recently read a big article where a variety of famous and glamorous people were recalling the very best parties they ever went to. Most of these fetes were big bashes thrown by wealthy and famous and powerful people for other wealthy and famous and powerful people -- the kinds of parties that yours truly has never been, and never will be, invited to.
However ... I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of the folks in this article was previous Mr NYC interviewee Tama Janowitz, where she recalls going to an "after-party" of sorts for Andy Warhol's funeral. It's a touching, beautiful vignette of a time, place, and event celebrating the life of a unique and memorable figure.
You can read all about it, as well as Tama's interview with this blog, here and here.
"Reality TV" has so taken over our culture that we even elected a president because he starred on a reality show. As we know, there's precious little "reality" in "Reality TV" -- it's as manufactured and edited and manipulated as anything fictional, a subversion of reality -- but good reality TV, like any good fiction, doesn't need to be literally, factionally true to capture an essential, emotional, revealing truth.
Such is the case of The Real World.
Back in 1992, when the genre was in its infancy, MTV stuck a bunch of twentysomethings in an NYC loft, filmed their comings and goings and interactions, and crafted what became a cultral phenomenon that reverberates in many interations today. Many Real Worlds ensued, in many different cities, but The Real World: New York was the OG, the one that started it all -- and now it's back! The new Paramount streaming service rounded up the original Real World NYC cast and stuck them back in the same loft and is basically doing the same show over again. But doing it again almost 30 years later is revealing a great essential truth -- you can't recapture, repeat, revive, or "do over" the past. It's over. It's done. You can remember the past but never relive it -- as Fitzgerald wrote, it's a boat against the current, a dark field rolling out under the night.
The 1971 movie Shaft, about black NYC cop John Shaft, is considered the greatest blaxploitation movie ever made and a cultural touchstone. Made less than a decade after the passage of the Civil Rights Bill, a just a few years after the murders of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, Shaft was a defiant, in-your-face cinematic masterpiece of black empowerment, of black pride, of black power, a middle-finger to The Man. It was a revelation.
Shaft was bad mutha -- shut yo' mouth! A personal kind of man, and nobody understood him but his wo-man.
The movie resonanted -- big time. Shaft was a huge hit at the box office and its memorable theme song by Isaac Hayes won an Oscar. And in a trend of what the movie business was to become, it generated two sequels -- 1972's Shaft's Big Score and 1973's Shaft in Africa.
The first sequel was another big hit but the third one ... not so much. Its lack of critical and commercial success ended the Shaft series until it was resurrected in the 2000s with Samuel L. Jackson.
So what's Shaft in Africa about? John Shaft gets kidnapped, thrown into a car, and driven to a secret location where he is tortured by hot lights -- "Yo man! I already got a sun tan!" he yells at his captors who then tell him that he's actually been recruited to go to Ethiopia and break up a modern day slave ring. He is told that he must lose his American attitude and fit amongst the Ethiopians. He must also learn how to fight like the Ethiopians, without guns -- in fact, he is asked if he knows how to fight with a stick to which Shaft replies, "Don't be telling the Shaft how to use his stick."
Then it's off to Africa and lots of fighting and badass stuff and action ensues.
While not a great movie, Shaft in Africa firmly falls into the genre of NYC movie where a New Yorker travels far from home and gets tangled up into something crazy. It's about culture clash and people understanding each other. It's also about a problem -- human trafficking -- that remains a scourge today.
This movie is an oddity -- both a relic of the blaxploitation era and, in some ways, way ahead of its time.
Meet Stacey Plaskett. The duly elected Congressional Delegate from the Virgin Islands came into prominence during the second Trump Impeachment trial earlier this year. She was an effective, excellent prosecutor of the now former President's misdeed.
And she's originally from NYC. Grew up in Queens and Brooklyn. The best that this city has to offer -- and our loss is the Virgin Island's gain.
Read more about her and get even more impressed!
It's simple yet mind-boggling in its ambition: a guy decides to walk on every block in NYC.
This great undertaking was the project of a guy named Matt Green who spent 6 years doing just that. And it was captured in a documentary called The World Before Your Feet, released in 2018, and recently watched by yours truly on Amazon Prime.
The cameras and viewers tag along with Green, an amiable former engineer, on his grand trek. It cuts across the months and years, the seasons and weather, the neighborhoods and streets, as Matt simply walks and observes the five boroughs, a whole diverse world before his feet.
As Green criss-crosses the entire city, he makes us look at it in ways we might not have done before. For example, he notes that there are roughly 300 9/11 homemade memorials all over town. He points out "churchagues", old synogogues that were converted into primarily Catholic churches as the Jewish populations moved out and the Latino populations moved in (you see the crosses atop of the buildings but can also see Stars of David engraved in the marble). He notes blocks where history was made, like Margaret Sanger's first birth control dispensary or the sites of various old forgotten crimes. He points out buildings that were abadoned halfway through their construction when the 2008 financial crises hit and the money vanished. Green's also ventures beyond the streets, into the parks and massive greenspaces of NYC, reminding us that a city isn't just concrete and buildings and masses of people but a complex topography where nature is a close sibling.
In short, Green's journey and this documentary is a street-level panoroma of NYC, an urban kaleidoscope captured on film. His project and this film makes the city a living animal, a pulsating creature. I don't think I've ever seen NYC presented on filme this way before -- it's not fetished, it's not put on a pedestal, there aren't great shots of the cityscapes, no loving postcard-like images. Quite the opposite. This movie explores NYC literally from the ground up, from the streets, from the outerparts of the outerboroughs to the center of the it all. It's NYC from the inside out, an intimate and almost sensual experience.
Green didn't do this projects for money or fame or glory. He did it just to do it. Just to have a great and unique experience. He wrote about it constantly on his blog I'm Just Walkin', noting that he clocked nearly 9,300 miles on the streets of NYC.
I strongly suggest you watch this film, and read this blog, and rediscover NYC all over again.
Before it became a broadcasting and podcasting powerhouse, WNYC was just the local city-owned radio station that reported on the news and events of the day. And every so often notable people would drop by the station for a chat -- and a moment in history would be captured forever.
That's why it's fascinating to hear the following legendary people getting brilliantly interviewed by a lady named Patricia Marx on WNYC in the 1960s:
- A 1960 interview with recently deceased journalist Neil Sheehan, talking about the situation in Vietnam -- almost thirty years before he wrote the definitive book on the war, A Bright Shining Lie.
- A 1961 interview with Lorraine Hansberry talking about her recently produced hit play A Raisin in the Sun. A black woman playwright having success on Broadway is still a rarity, even more so 60 years ago.
- A 1963 interview with Bob Hope, right after the release of the final Road movie.
- A two-part 1963 interview with New York City Ballet founder George Balanchine.
- Two seperate interviews from 1964 with groundbreaking comedians Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl.
- A 1964 interview with a very young Woody Allen, talking about his comedy act and how he's getting ready to appear in his first movie, What's New, Pussycat? The idea that this kid comic would eventually become a great director isn't even mentioned.
- A 1968 interview with David Halberstam about the war in Vietnam, years before he would publish The Best and the Brightest.
And many more.
History is being made all the time, we just don't realize it. When people are interviewed, they're simply sharing their thoughts and feelings about what's going in their lives and the world at that moment. Of course their lives and time moves on, things change, and that's how we make history. So that's why it's amazing to peak into or, in this case, listen, to a moment in history.
On Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street sits an elegant building, a mixture of Italian Rennaissance and Late Gothic Revival architecture that, today, is expensive high-rise condominiums but, once upon a time, was a place that housed dreamers.
The dreamers were women, most newly arrived transplants to NYC, who had come to pursue careers in the city. And the place they stayed on 63rd and Lex was called the Barbizon Hotel.
This hotel was more than just a place to stay. It was a community of aspiring actresses, models, dancers, and professionals of all stripes. Built in 1927, the Barbizon's glory days were in the immediate post-World War II years when a plethora of future big names would check-in on their journeys to greatness.
Part of the hotel's allure was its strict rules -- no men, no booze, curfews. Is enforced discipline and protected these ladies who had come to the city to start new lives. It helped them to avoid the temptations and distractions and diversions that could thwart their professional paths. And it provided a sisterhood, a sorority of support for these young ladies, many of whom didn't know any one else in town.
Some of the people who stayed at the Barbizon back in the day: Lauren Bacall, Ali McGraw, Grace Kelly, Joan Didion, Liza Minnelli, Sylvia Plath, Elaine Stritch, Cloris Leachman, Joan Crawford, even Nancy Reagan!
The Barbizon is the subject of a new book that examines its place in the culture of America and NYC. And its history and lore is a reminder that, once upon a time, the people who make and define our culture were just a bunch of dreamers like the rest of us.
Many eons ago, in a time more peaceful and innocent than now, yours truly spent a summer interning at a non-profit in D.C. One sunny Sunday afternoon, I accompanied a group of visiting Japenese politicians (don't ask) to visit the White House -- only we didn't do the standard tour, we got to check out the West Wing ... years before The West Wing hit the tee-vee airwaves.
I recall that we had to send in our credentials a few days ahead so that we could be vetted by the Secret Service. Then we waited outside the West Gate and were allowed in, walking up a hill towards the West Wing.
One of the guys on the tour told me to look upwards and I saw a man staring down at us through thick black binoculars holding a rifle. He was a Secret Service sharpshooter and, I was told, he could legally kill any of us at any second.
Naturally that did wonders for my self-esteem.
Then we went inside. What suprised me, and apparently surprises everyone, who visits the West Wing is how small it is. The halls are very narrow, the offices small and cramped. The floors are plush with thick carpeting and the walls are full of pictures of the President at various events -- in this case it was Mr. Clinton.
We were escorted around to look at various meeting rooms -- lots and lots of oak furniture and gorgeous portraiture. They explained how the West Wing has all these rituals, almost Masonic-like, where various flags and stripes are displayed based on certain days or if various dignataries are visiting, etc.
At one point we went to the White House briefing room and I got to stand before the Press Secretary's lecturn. I even have a picture of my goofy self standing behind it, the grand "The White House" sign right behind me. Again, I was surprised how small this extremely important room was -- and how it was apparently built over a swimming pool making the room shockingly humid.
Then, of course, the coup de grace of sorts -- the Oval Office. We didn't get to actually go in, we just stood by the door, staring into the seat of power, the most powerful work space in the world. What struck me about the Oval, however, and perhaps it was because it was summer and the air conditioning was blasting, was how impersonal and institutional it seemed, it felt sort of unpleasant and, yes, cold. The most notable thing was a chair backed up in front of the Resolute Desk -- with a variety of golf clubs in a row leaning against the chair. Apparently the President himself was just outside on the putting green.
And at one point the security guard told us to move away and go into a hallway and wait -- before we were called back to the Oval Office door. Apparently the most powerful man in the world needed a putter.
But I'll always remember how the guard standing outside of the Oval told us how much he loved President Clinton, how he worked day and night. It was striking how much personal affection this otherwise tough dude had for his boss.
Then we left. About a year later we'd learn that Mr. Clinton and an intern had been having some fun in these same premises. Needless to say, I saw nuttin'.
Another time, however, we visited the Old Exective Office Building and got to visit the Vice-President's office. That was a much more fun visit. Not only did we get to go inside the Veep's formal office but I even got to sit in this chair at his desk. Again, there's another dopey picture of yours truly sitting at then-VP Gore's formal desk. None of the VPs actually use this office to work in but we were shown a draw where every previous VP carves in their initials. Obviously it's been added to a few times from now.
So that's Mr NYC's tour into the very heart of American power. Who knows, maybe one day, I'll return.
