Review: "The Great Beauty" & How to Love a City

Can you love a city like you love a person? Can the pure romantic ardor for a particular urban environment replace, or possibly distract from, the complicated and messy entanglements of relationships?

That question, and the quixotic attempt to find the answer, is posed in the brilliant and gorgeous 2013 Italian film The Great Beauty. Set firmly in the calamitous Berlusconi period, the movie follows the sometimes glamorous, sometimes dissolute, often quite empty life of man named Jep. Recently turned 65, Jep works as a celebrity journalist, 40 years removed from his one and only triumph as a novelist. He spends his nights partying or interviewing his article subjects and sleeps away the daytime. He hangs out with his pretentious friends, drinks and smokes, and walks -- a lot -- around the city that entraps him and that he irrationally loves and cannot escape -- Rome. His goal, for too long, was to be the king of the Roman high life, the man who went to every party and could "make them a failure."

Now that phase of his life has left him sad. Jep needs a new purpose.

The film is a series of vignettes, a necklace of tales wrapped about the throat of a city that cages a man trying to find a goal in his rapidly receding life. In walking around and enjoying Rome, Jep is running away from his emotions, from a long and now deceased love, from a past once full of promise that has become a present of aimlessness, hopelessly trying to replace it with a passion for the great beauty of the Eternal City.

The movie's love for Rome, and its wistful meditation on the ravages of time and misplaced priorities, captures exactly what this blog feels about NYC -- and the course of life. Both the film and the blog are about how the love for a city affects and distracts us, and how the simple love for a plac helps us to leaven but also sometimes exacerbates the complexity of human entanglements. You can love a city -- a great city, a great beauty, like Rome or NYC -- but ultimately it cannot fulfill you like the love of a person. It can supplement but not replace that kind of love, enhance but not complete it. In loving a city, there is ultimately a sadness because it cannot really love you back.

But even then, you still can't abandon it.

If the 1974 movie Chinatown is about the corrupt and disturbing undercurrents of a big city -- in that case, Los Angeles -- revealed by private detective Jakes Gittes (one of its more infamous citizens), The Great Beauty is about the unrealistic romantic promise of one -- in this case, Rome -- by one of its obsessive inhabitants. One is about the darkness, the other about the light, of an alluring metropolis. But the two films, along with morose and romantic Issac in 1979's Manhattan, look at the man in the city, about the city, and of the city -- and how the man and their relationships with others are defined and mixed up by the city.

It is both a great and awful thing to have a great beauty in your life -- whether it's Rome, Los Angeles, NYC or someplace else. And yet that love for a city is the seed that can grow into a love for a person, and for life in general, and for something that is forever timeless and can give us true happiness.

In some ways, that's what Mr NYC is all about for me.

P.S. This expression of a complicated and ultimately unknowable love for a place, its people, and life, is best expressed not in words but in music.

The theme of The Great Beauty captures the film's melancholy romance about Rome the same way that the theme to Chinatown expresses that film's sleazy gaze and understanding of Los Angeles or the way that Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in Manhattan perfectly encapsulates the nervous energy and excitement of NYC.

You should listen to all three and you'll see -- or hear -- what I mean.

NYC Plans to Fully Reopen on July 1st, 2021

 

Magic & Loss: Bob Fass RIP and City COVID Stories and ... Start the Presses!

One of Lou Reed's great songs is called "Magic & Loss." He croons:

There's a bit of magic in everything

And some loss to even things out ...

Those words, to me, sum up life: life is magical, people are magical, nature and the world around us are magical, our creations our magical, everything and everyone contains magic ... but loss is magic's constant companion, it's sorrowful sidekick. And the best way to negotiate life is to love both -- the magic of everything and the loss that accompanies. They are both inevitable. If you can appreciate this paradoxical beauty of life, I believe, than you have achieved a simple yet greater kind of wisdom. 

This concept of "magic and loss" occurred to me recently when I read several disparate articles about occurences that, more than anything, have impacted the soul of New York City. As you read and think about them, you appreciate the magic of the people we have in this city, the loss of many of them that this last year has inflicted, while also feeling somewhat optimistic about our future.

There is the loss of the legendary NYC radio host Bob Fass. His show "Radio Unknowable" was broadcast on WBAI for 50 years, where he interviewed Bob Dylan and many other brilliant artists, thinkers, and public figures. He was the closest thing that NYC had to an "underground radio host", as his obituary describes him. His show was part of the gritty Bohemian spirit of the city, the subconscious turned into radio signals. As someone who writes an "underground blog" about NYC, Bob Fass was a weird kind of soul brother for me, a fellow restless spirit who never lost his fascination for the city, its people, and all its crazy undercurrents. Magic & Loss. 

Then there are these individual stories of New Yorkers who have been impacted by COVID-19 over the last year. These are the stories you don't see in the news but they are the quiet stories, the unique experiences, of people in NYC dealing with this global pandemic. It involves illness, death, misery but also survival and hope. It's about as clear an example of the Magic & Loss of and in life that I can think of. 

But then, in the midst of all this, a miracle! Something has come back to life! Specifically the Village Voice. Four years ago it went out of business, totally shuttered. Now it's back and even in print! This long history of the notorious free rag and how it came back to life is worth a read. It's a story of the city, of the press, and how the two inform and shape NYC. The Voice coming back to life after it seemed dead and gone forever is miraculous. It's a bit of magic after the loss that proves how Magic & Loss are forever intertwined, constant companions, and never predictable. 

New York City Is Back!

Actually, it never went away -- just indoors.

Last year was the Springtime of Our Discontent. As the city bloomed, the plagued descended. We weren't able to enjoy Spring in the city as usual, we had to stay inside and and stay away from each other. If March 2020 was the cruelest month, April and May 2020 were easily the most depressing and scary. 

The plague is not over but it's abating. New Yorkers are getting vaccinated in droves and the city is slowly but surely finding its spirit and joie de vivre again.

Yesterday, April 24, 2021, felt like an inflection point of sorts. It was a gorgeous Spring Saturday, and New Yorkers went outside in mostly masked droves. Outdoors I saw couples stroll, kids play, families congregate, people soak up the sun and the city and all their attendant joys. Mourners in Brooklyn turned out for the service of DMX and even though seem to be having fun. And best of all, the city government has announced that all New Yorkers over age 16 can go to walk-in vaccination sites with no appointment! 

Things are feeling slightly more ... optimistic. The city still has a ways to go back but the city is back!

Never count NYC out!

The Fishko Files and the Art of the Radio Essay

Blog posts are, in many ways, a bunch of essays of varying length that are collected, chronologized, and streamlined on this platform called "da blog." In the analog world, essays usually appear in newspapers, magazines, books, or other various tactile media, usually with a similar logic applied to their aggregation.

So where does that leave the radio essay?

For decades the radio essay was ephemeral, existing only for as long as it was broadcast across the airwaves and into the minds of its listeners. Then it vanished into the ether of time. Alistair Cooke, both before and after he hosted Masterpiece Theater on PBS, produced radio essays for the BBC called Letter from America. He broadcast thousands and thousands of them, from 1946 to 2004 (!), commenting on everything from the re-election of Harry Truman to the Second Iraq War. Most of those radio essays no longer exist but more than a thousand have been rescued and now, thanks to the Internet, are easily accessible.

The radio essay is now more lively and powerful than ever!

Which brings me to The Fishko Files, a wonderful oddity in the world of present day New York City radio. Broadcast on WNYC every Friday morning, and freely available online, they are short essays by culture critic Sarah Fishko. She covers the whole swath of culture in NYC and elsewhere, both past and present -- art, architecture, music, movies, TV, even unknown or recently discovered recordings. She "writes" about Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, Woody Guthrie, Scott Joplin, Andy Warhol, the architecture of the Old Penn Station, movies about the Holocaust, the new Whitney Museum, film composers, and many, many more. It's an audio feast of culture, a compendium of cultural essays from the cultural capital of the world.

Sarah Fishko has been producing these essays for WNYC for more than 20 years and you can listen to them all now -- whenever, wherever, however you want.

The radio essay is homeless no longer. 

Need a Wrench?

 

Future Theories

Who will be the next Mayor of New York City?

When will Broadway theater and the city arts scene be 100% back-in-business?

We'll find out at some point in the relatively near future but, right now, we can only guess. We can only ponder. We're currently in a kind of "silly season", when everything great and horrible seems possible, when there are a multitude of possibilities, when there seem to be many roads that NYC could take. What roads will we take?

We can only theorize. 

Recently I heard Alec Baldwin on his podcast talk with Robert Wankel, the head of the Schubert Organization. Wankel is one of the most powerful figures on the Great White Way, the man who makes many of the shows we love possible. He says that, at the moment, plans are to reopen in December but, obviously, this will depend on "herd immunity", infection rates, etc. that we can only theorize about ... at the moment. What's most interesting to learn from this podcast are some of the statistics that Wankel presents that make you understand just how much COVID-19 has devastated Broadway and the city's arts business. Along with finance and real estate, the arts business is in the top five of the city's economic engines. Did you know that the Times Square area alone is responsible for the employment of 96,000 people? The arts isn't just some sideshow in NYC, some economic add-on -- it's an essential part of the city's economy and identity, it drives tourism, and its recovery is vital to the future of NYC.

Then there's who will be running the city next year.

Right now there's a bunch of candidates running for mayor but Andrew Yang, for reasons that defy logic, is currently leading in the polls and getting all the media attention. He has no experience in government and, based on his public statements, no real understanding of the city, its people, or public policy. Many people, including yours truly, are sounding the alarm -- remember the last time the public bestowed great executive power on an inexperienced but media-savvy neophyte? The good news is that there's still time for another candidate to emerge and, at the moment, it looks like it might be City Comptroller Scott Stringer. He might, just might, overwhelm Yang and win the primary if he's able to make clear how his quiet competence and experience is much better than Yang's empty media spectacle. Stringer has been elected to city-wide office twice before and is well known to the voters. The primary isn't until June. I theorize that either Stringer, or possibly Brooklyn BP Eric Adams, will overwhelm Yang -- or Yang's support will just collapse anyway -- that one of them will be the next mayor (assuming victory in the general election). But if Yang keeps up his momentum, and wins the primary and general election ... then the city will then be in real trouble.

Fingers crossed the former scenario, the first theory prevails. 

This post will be an interesting one to read again a year -- or several from now -- to see if these theories are correct or totally wrong. 

Hotels in 1970s NYC

Remembering Paula Gloria

If you ever want to understand the true subconcious of NYC, then public access television is where you'll find it. Ordinary people -- by which I mean the bizarre characters who not only live amongst us but are us -- get the chance to create and host their own shows and allow their imaginations to connect the public.

The results are often, uh, unconventional. 

Perhaps no one was more successful in the history of NYC public access than Paula Gloria who was part mystic, part spiritual healer, part conspiracy theorist, part commentator, and total eccentric. She appeared on public access for years, hosting a show called "Farther Down the Rabbit Hole", doing both live call-ins shows and recorded interviews and talks. She also had a lively presence on YouTube and even appeared several times on Howard Stern. They loved to goof on her common refrain, "Mantra and tantra creates yantra", an expression of the yogi-like power she wanted to share with her audience.

Apparently Paula has died from undisclosed reasons at the age of 68 but I hope she has not gone down the rabbit hole but gone to find her permanent inner bliss. 

Art Blooms in the Bronx

In this time, where death is literally in the air, it's always gratifying to find something that is very much alive -- something not only living but thriving, bursting with vitality ... blooming.

As the second Spring of our COVID discontent unfolds, some contentment can be found in the Bronx. The New York Botanical Garden is unveiling a huge new exhibition by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama called Cosmic Nature. A series of sculptures, some old and new, are set around the gardens and are "twists", multi-dimensional interpretations of the natural world -- pumpkins, lakes, and other parts of nature are re-imagined, intertwined with the real thing. The imaginative scale of this exhibit is ... cosmic!

If you ever wonder if NYC and art are worht it, this is it!

Big "What Ifs": "Popeye Doyle" & Peter Manso RIP

In 1981 New York City Mayor Ed Koch was overwhelming re-elected to a second term. He was so popular that he received the nomination of both the Republican and Democratic parties. His landslide win established him as a formidable political figure and higher office called. 

Koch answered it by running for Governor of New York State -- and failed spectacularly. 

He gave an interview to a journalist named Peter Manso -- who has just died at the age of 84 -- in Playboy magazine. With his deft interviewing skills, Manso got Koch to admit what he thought about upstate New York, and the same thing that made Koch so popular in NYC -- his brashness, his "tell-it-like-it-is", no-holds-barred instinct to speak his mind -- terminated his campaign for governor. Koch told Manso about upstate, "It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life … a joke … you have to drive 20 miles to buy a gingham dress or a Sears Roebuck suit … [Albany is] small town life at its worst.”

Even in an age before social media, these comments sparked widespread outrage -- and Koch ended up losing the Democratic primary to then-Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo. The history speaks for itself -- Cuomo wound up serving as governor for three terms, from 1983 to 1995, and now his son Andrew Cuomo is governor, having been in office since 2011 (whether he'll make it to the end of his term in 2022 remains to be seen). 

So Peter Manso changed the course of New York City and New York State history. But for him -- and it's a big "what if" -- Ed Koch might have wound up as governor and the Cuomo dynasty that has ruled New York off-and-on for 40 years might never have gotten off the ground. 

Then there's Doyle, Popeye Doyle.

You might recognize the name if you've ever seen the 1971 classic The French Connection and the 1975 sequel. Doyle is the quintessential OG rough-and-gruff police detective, a sort of NYC Dirty Harry -- he doesn't play-by-the-rules or conform in order to deliver justice to his benighted city. In the mid-1980s, a decade of so after the second movie, someone got the idea that a TV show about Popeye Doyle might be a idea -- so a pilot was made starring Ed O'Neill called, quite brilliantly, Popeye Doyle. The plot is fairly basic -- a model is murdered, and Doyle tracks the case which gets him involved with a drug cartel and terrorists. 

But only the pilot was made -- the TV show, to quote Pulp Fiction, "became nothing." It was broadcast in the fall of 1986 and shortly thereafter Ed O'Neill went on to star in Married ... with Children for a decade and then, years later, the great Modern Family for another decade. So another big "what if" is that had Popeye Doyle been picked up and run for even one season, O'Neill probably would never have done Married ... or Modern Family and the history of television would be very different. 

Both "what ifs" are reminders that the course of history -- whether political or cultural -- is made by the decisions we make, by seemingly random choices and transient events or desires, or by unforced errors (like Koch's) or aesthetic judgments (like Popeye Doyle). We live with the results, for better or worse, of the decisions that we and others make that affect our lives and those of us around us. 

Life in NYC and everywhere is determined and altered by people's choices, and everything else lives on in the realm of the "what ifs." 

Gracie Mansion in Bloom - Friday, April 9th, 2021

"All In The Family" @ 50 -- The Very First Episode, 1971

A Monument for Our Time

This morning I heard what may be one of the best pieces of radio commentary I've ever heard. It's by the WNYC reporter Beth Fertig recounting her experience getting her COVID-19 vaccine shot at the Javits Center. 

I won't try to summarize or explain it because that would ruin it -- you must simply listen to or read it to appreciate its power.

What happily surprises me, however, is how much it reverberates with my previous blog post about how, in these seemingly nihilistic times, we must look to and celebrate the helpers, the healers, the creators, the builders, people who seek to improve and enrich our world in time when so many others seems determined to ruin it. How the vaccines and their distribution is, in many ways, a monument to humanity's great ability to hope for a better future.

And that this is why NYC has changed and thrived for over 400 years --- and will for another 400 years. 

Remembering "Teddy & Alice"

I recently watched the 1955 movie The Night of the Hunter, a gothic thriller directed by the great actor Charles Laughton, about a psycho preacher terrorizing two kids. At the time of its release it was a critical and commercial failure but, since then, it has come to be regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made -- and highly influential on directors like David Lynch, Spike Lee, and the Coen Brothers.

This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the Stephen Sondheim musical Follies. Produced between his signature hits Company in 1970 and A Little Night Music in 1973, Follies was an odd and unconventional show about old-school entertainers reflecting on their broken lives. It was so unusual that, at the time, the critics hated it and audiences ignored it. But, in the intervening fifty years, Follies it has come to be seen as a classic, a proud entry in the Sondheim canon, with some brilliant songs like "I'm Still Here."

Sometimes something or someone is a failure in its or the person's time but becomes a great success later on. (Hopefully this blog will enjoy that same trajectory!)

This unusual fate has not befallen the Broadway musical Teddy & Alice. Produced in late 1987, it ran for two months before closing, an utter failure. Unlike some shows -- i.e. Chicago -- that failed in its original run but then was restaged to great success decades later, Teddy & Alice has never been revived on Broadway and remains totally forgotten.

So the ever-contrarian Mr NYC is going to remember it.

Recently I was strolling through Times Square and passed by the Minskoff Theater. I strained to remember that I saw a show there once, a long time ago, but couldn't remember it and then ... LIGHT BULB. I remembered the show! Teddy & Alice! It's a silly musical about President Theodore Roosevelt and his wild daughter Alice. The songs were adapted from John Philip Sousa and most of them are, well, forgettable. I don't really remember anything about the show itself but I remember that I saw it for two reasons: 1) A kid in my class was in it, playing one of Teddy's many children. He was telling everyone the show was about to close, and the tickets were super cheap, so my mom got two tickets and we went the night before it cloesd. 2) It was the first time I had ever heard of President Teddy Roosevelt and my impression of him was actually formed by this show. 

While the show itself was forgettable, the star of it was not -- Teddy was played by Len Cariou, a veteran stage and TV actor who was in the original run of Sweeney Todd. These days he's best known for being on the show Blue Bloods that's been running for about a decade. He was amazing as Teddy, he carried the show brilliantly, and it's too bad that he never got the recognition for it that he deserved. 

I doubt that Teddy & Alice will ever be revived -- it's one of those shows that came and went so quickly, that failed so quietly, that was not a "notorious" or controversial failure (like the musical version of Carrie that closed after one night), that it's just slipped out of the collective Broadway memory. So, in a way, having seen the show, puts me in a small and select circle of people who had an experience that was unique, a brief moment in time, and that will never be repeated. 

New York City's Next Steps

The COVID-19 pandemic has raged for a year. While we're by no means out of the tunnel yet, the light at the end of it is getting brighter. Vaccination rates are soaring and infection rates are dropping (although, here in NYC we've seen some regression in infection rates which will hopefully end soon). But one day, if all goes right, in the next year or so, this thing will be over and we'll all go back to -- well, no ... we won't -- we won't go back to "normal." First, "normal" was never normal to begin with. Second, whatever comes next will be a "new normal", an aftermath, as we deal with the social, economic, political, and human impact fallout of the pandemic.

Here in NYC this is already happening -- we're already thinking about the city's future and the next steps it will be taking to get there.

For many, as this heartrendering article demonstrates in several personal stories, the city will never be the same. There lives have changed and their place in the city has changed, both personally and professionally. Jobs are lost and gone forever, some still have jobs but the nature and demands of them have changed, friends and family members have died, and relationships have been permanently altered, for better or worse. Their NYC is not the old one and never will be again.

Then there's the city's economic future. The pandemic hammered businesses and the tourism industry that the city depends on for tax revenue. The fiscal situation is dire. But two things will improve this -- and soon. First, as more people get vaccinated, more businesses will open up and more tourists will visit and tax collections will increase. Second, the last election yielded a president and a congress that, unusually, actually cares about NYC. Lots of stimulus money is headed our way! So the city's economy will recover but it will take almost five years until the city gets back to the employment and economic level it had before the pandemic. We're working hard to get back simply to where we were.

Finally, there's the matter of who will actually be overseeing the city's recovery from COVID-19. This is a big election year in NYC, with a new mayor, comptroller, several borough presidents, and a city council to be chosen. The class of '21 taking control of NYC will have a big, tough job ahead of it -- sorting out the finances and managing a strained and exhausted government. Much like Michael Bloomberg was elected twenty-years ago on the heels of 9/11, with this first term defined by handling the fallout from it, the new mayor's term will be defined by how the city recovers from the pandemic. There are some good candidates running -- former Housing and Sanitation Commissioners Shaun Donovan and Kathryn Garcia, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, and City Comptroller Scott Stinger. There are also some really lousy ones ...

... and this is where I get scared. Andrew Yang, for reasons that defy logic, is currently leading in the polls and has a good (certainly not bulletproof, but good enough) chance of getting elected mayor. As I've blogged about before, he is totally unqualified to be mayor -- not only has he never served in government, either in elected or appointed office, but he hasn't even voted in past mayoral elections! Unlike Bloomberg, who built a Fortune 500 company, Yang's biggest acoomplishment was running a non-profit. That's it. His policy ideas are shallow and meaningless -- like a $1,000 basic universal income and a casino on Governor's Island, totally unserious proposals. Appparently, his lack of seriousness is what's charming the press into giving him good coverage and getting him ahead in the polls. He plays basketball with the press! He releaeses rap videos! He performs stunts when handing in his petitions! He knows how to play the PR game but HE. IS. NOT. QUALIFIED. TO. BE. MAYOR. I'm scared that this totally unqualified guy will wind up as mayor at a time when we need a very smart, very competent, and very skilled political and governmental operator to help the city recover. We had an unqualified and unserious president for the last four years -- and we saw how that turned out. Just because Yang isn't as personally vile as Trump doesn't mean he'd be a much better as mayor as Trump was as president. 

Please, NYC, choose wisely. The next steps into the future for a better city depends on it!

Two Views from Above Times Square

At 8:35 PM ...

... and 6:47 AM ...