Review: "The Gilded Age" (2022)

A decade ago the British TV show Downton Abbey took the world by storm. The tale of a noble family on a huge estate and their servants in the nineteen-teens and twenties -- think Upstairs, Downstairs meets Brideshead Revisited -- became everyone's favorite soap opera, a mix of historical grandeur combined with modern morality.

Downton Abbey was created by Julian Fellowes whose new show, much like his previous one, is a period piece set in the world of the rich and those who serve them. 

Set in New York City in 1882, The Gilded Age concerns two families who live across the street from each other (East 61st Street, precisely) but who live in totally different worlds -- the Old New York, Old Money Brooks vs. the social-climbing, New Money Russells. The story kicks off with Marian, the daughter of the sisters Ada and Agnes Brooks' estranged dead brother, coming to live with them in their NYC townhouse from Pennsylvania. On her way to the city, she meets Peggy who, for a variety of convenient reasons, moves in with Marian and her aunts. Peggy is a child of a black enclave in Brooklyn who wants to become a writer -- and who gets a job as a secretary to Agnes, and who must negotiate life as a black woman in white patriarchal world. Meanwhile, across the street, the railroad-rich but socially-poor Russells move into their newly constructed, Stanford B. White-designed, overly decorated mansion and throw a huge "mansion warming" party (the house is even derisively called "a folly"). It is their attempt to win over New York "society" and it fails completely -- almost no one comes. But when Marian meets Larry, the Russell's oldest son, well ... let's just say that things will get interesting.

I've only seen the pilot for this show so I can't tell if it'll be great or awful. So far the reviews of The Gilded Age have been mixed. It has the potential to be a beautiful, deeply-felt drama exploring the toxic mix of class and race, sex and society, power and submission. Fellowes is a very talented writer who creates great characters, snappy dialogue, and beautifully executed scenes. But, as in Downton, his observations about class and money and society are very heavy-handed and not subtle at all ("You're Old New York, don't forget it" is a real line -- okay then!). If it goes down that road, then the show will be a total bore.

However, what absolutely makes this show worth watching is the cast -- after all, Agnes and Ada are played by Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon and, honestly, I wish the show was just about them and no one else. Marian is played by someone named Louisa Jacobson who is very good (which is not surprising considering that she's Meryl Streep's daughter). The show is littered with Broadway actors like Donna Murphy and my personal favorite Audra McDonald and they are all great. And even Simon Jones, who forty-year ago this month was blazing the screens with Jeremy Irons in Brideshead Revisited, plays the Brooks' long-serving English butler. The cast along will keep me coming back. 

I just hope the storylines are as good as the actors. 

But it is wonderful to see a drama set during a fascinating period of New York City history that isn't often put on the screen. The Gilded Age reminds us that social striving, greed, lust, and all the attendant vagaries thereof, are nothing new. They are as old as Old New York.

And if you want to learn more about the real "gilded age" in NYC, go here and see below. 

James Joyce: Ulysses & NYC

Considered the greatest work of fiction in the English language of the 20th century, James Joyce's Ulysses was published almost exactly 100 years ago (February 2, 1922).

A retelling of Homer's Odyssey, the novel is set on June 16-17, 1904 following the doings-in-Dublin of writer Stephan Dedalus, advertiser Leopold Bloom, and his adulterous wife Molly. Their lives intersect in interesting ways over the course of this single day, 18 episodes corresponding to the 18 episodes of the Odyssey. The final episode is one of the most famous in literary history, a steam-of-consciousness interior monologue by Molly Bloom that runs for 50-pages but is in fact one long continuous sentence, ending with "and yes I said yes I will Yes."

The publication history of Ulysses is almost as complex as the novel itself. Deemed "obscene" by the moralist powers-that-be of the time, the book became the subject of an obscenity trial in NYC, and the book was initially pirated and published serially in magazines. It was published in NYC 1929 and the publisher's office was actually raided! Various censored and altered versions were published over the years before it was finally published in full, unchanged, many years later.

James Joyce never set foot in NYC in his lifetime but the story of his great novel in NYC is enthralling. Read all about it here. It's especially timely since, 100 years later, banning books is still happening in this country.

Plus ca change. 

The New York Lottery Queen Retires

The queen of the New York Lottery, Yolanda Vega, is retiring after 32 years on the air. That's an incredible run! Good luck!

NYC Ferry Routes

My previous blog post about the repurposing of an old Staten Island Ferry boat turning into a party boat, reminded yours truly that NYC actually has LOTS of ferries darting around the city's waterways.

As a city of island, how could we not have a full fleet of ferries? 

The Staten Island Ferry is just one of the oldest, and best known, ferry routes but there are others that serve each borough of the city: the East River Route, the Rockaway Route, the South Brooklyn Route, the Astoria Route, the Soundview Route, the St. George Route (i.e. the other Staten Island Ferry), the soon-to-be Coney Island Route, and the Governor's Island Route.

Here's all the info you need to find your closest ferry route and where it will take you. Also, there's a great map that shows you all these routes and their various ports of call, presented here:

Party -- or P***y? -- Ferry

Recently the oldest ferry in the fleet of the Staten Island Ferry was decommissioned and put up for sale. The initial asking price by the city was for less than $200K but, shockingly, a bidding war broke out and it was finally purchased for closer to $300K. (Just further proof that all NYC real estate is valuable, even if it's an old frail boat that has to be docked somewhere). 

The reason that this purchase is making news is because two of the buyers (in the consortium that funded the acquisition) are Colin Jost and Pete Davidson. Both men are sons of the Forgotten Borough, cast members of Saturday Night Live, and lovers of super hot and successful woman -- Scarlett Johansson for Mr. Jost, Kim Kardashian and various other beauties for Mr. Davidson; considering their busy jobs and amorous duties, it's amazing they had time to buy a boat! 

Their plans for this ferry are unclear but tentatively it will be some kind of "entertainment venue." It might be an event space, or a performance space, or just some kind of floating nightclub. Millions of dollars will doubtless be needed to turn it into something cool but, whenever it opens to the public, it's certain to become quite a hot spot (my wife has already said she wants us to check it out which of course seals the importance of that excursion). 

I have to say I'm a big fan of this project because I love the repurposing of old and useless NYC infrastructure into something new and artistic (like the Highline or the TWA Terminal). It gives the city a sense of renewal and reimagination. In this case, this ferry that used to shlep New Yorkers back and forth between Staten Island and Manhattan, mostly people commuting to and from work, will now be a destination party boat, where people can let loose and get wild.

Considering that two if its owners are renowned swordsmen, much like Studio 54 before it, it will probably become a place where ladies and gents (and ladies and ladies and gents and gents) will engage in all kinds of coitus. In fact, my guess is that soon people will stop calling it a "party ferry" and it will become known as a "p***y ferry." And if another ferry is decommissioned, sold and turned into a party boat, we may have more than one of these floating around the waters of NYC. 

Who knows? We might have two p***y ferries passing in the night! 

(I wrote this whole blog post just to make that joke, forgive me.)

Bill Murray Sings in Washington Square

Classic Mr NYC

In the summer of 2020, during the depths of COVID, one of the few bright spots of that dark time was interviewing Jean-Pierre Dorleac, a legendary Hollywood costumer designer. He worked on numerous movies and TV shows over the decades but easily one of the highlights of his career was as the costumer for the early 1990s TV show Quantum Leap.

Even though there are now a billion shows on TV and streaming, Quantum Leap remains one of my favorite shows ever. The story of Sam Beckett (Scott Bakula), a brilliant scientist who "leaps" into the lives of other people throughout his own lifetime (roughly 1953-1995), making right where once went wrong, was one of the most imaginative, best written, funny, and emotionally wrenching shows ever on TV. (He was accompanied on his journey by Al, a holographic sidekick appearing from the Imaging Chamber back in the future). Each week Sam leaped into the a new time and place, on a new mission -- and Jean-Pierre Dorleac was the costume design genius who had to dress the characters from different times and places each week, along with designing Al's funky 1990s costumes.

It was a wild, fascinating interview, and I'm grateful to this day that Jean-Pierre agreed to do this interview.

Well, whaddya know? Quantum Leap is back! A reboot pilot has been greenlit for NBC and show "leap" to our screens sometime later this year or next. I'm cautiously excited -- these reboots can be wonderful or a disaster. But it's exciting to know that Quantum Leap remains beloved almost 30 years since it left the air and that the interest exists to re-imagine it and bring it back. I hope it's great. Sadly, Dean Stockwell, who brilliantly played the sidekick Al, won't be a part of it because he passed away late last year. 

Anyway, I hope you'll read my interview with Jean-Pierre and also sign the Change.org petition to bring him back as the costume designer for the reboot. His costumes on that show stood out and it would be great to see him apply his genius to the next generation of this show. You should also read the beautiful tribute that Jean-Pierre wrote about Dean Stockwell last year after his death. 

"Mayor Eric Adams" on Saturday Night Live

Sydney Poitier & Michael Lang RIP

Two titans of the 1960s have died, and their lives and careers are a reminder of an era that was both troubled and exciting, where the world was being reshaped, and the repercussions of which we are still living with today. 

Sydney Poitier was a not just a brilliant actor but also a great movie star. He was the first black man to win the Best Actor Oscar, and movies like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and In the Heat of the Night forced white America to see the power of the black voice and experience. Poitier was a boy when he escaped to NYC to start his life that would lead him to cinematic and cultural greatness. In fact, so potent was his reputation that a play called Six Degrees of Separation was written based on the bizarre cob job of a man named David Hampton who claimed to be his son (I blogged about it a while ago; Poitier doesn't appear in the play as a character because he doesn't need to -- his image was so powerful and famous that anyone who saw the play knew who he was and why someone would want to be his son). Poitier has died at the age of 94 and his legacy will on.  

Michael Lang was one of the co-creators of the 1969 Woodstock Festival that made history as one of the greatest and most important cultural events in American history. A kid from Brooklyn, in his early 20s Lang and his colleagues threw together the three (actually four) days of "peace, love, and music" that captured that imagination of the world and is still talked about endlessly to this day. Lang was involved in other musical festivals and music management, and oversaw the 1994 and ill-fated 1999 revivals of Woodstock. He had a reputation, and an affect, of someone for whom the 1960s never ended, who kept the "groovy man" spirit of that decade alive -- right up until the end. Lang has died at the age of 77. For all of Mr NYC's Woodstock coverage over the year's, go here. 

Grant's Tomb at Twilight -- January 11th, 5:20 PM

Sad Day in the Bronx

Peter Bogdanovich RIP

No one in the history of Hollywood had a more Hollywood-like life and career than Peter Bogdanovich.

He has died at age 82. 

A child of immigrants, a bookish kid who loved movies that he started writing about them before making them, Peter was one of the brightest lights in the New Hollywood. He started in the late 1960s with a Roger Corman movie called Targets before hitting it big -- really big -- in the early 1970s with The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. His directing career was up and down -- mostly down -- after that initial flush of success but he made some interesting movies in the years and decades afterwards including Mask. His last movie was in 2014, a small comedy called She's Funny That Way (one of the few he made in NYC).

Peter also acted occasionally, including as Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos. He also made a big documentary about the late Tom Petty and oversaw the restoration in 2015 of never-before-seen Orson Welles movie The Other Side of the Wind. 

Infamously, he turned down the chance to direct Chinatown, something he said was the biggest mistake of his career. 

Peter's love life was crazy -- he got married young, dumped his first wife for a very hot Cybill Shephard, dated lots of other gorgeous ladies, then infamously dated a Playboy Playmate named Dorothy Stratton who was then murdered horribly by her ex-husband (it became the story for the controversial Bob Fosse movie Star 80). Peter then married Dorothy's sister. To paraphrase something Howard Stern once said to Warren Beatty, "We could talk about the movies, but the broads get in the way." In later life, Peter resumed his extensive writing about movies and also became something of a protector of Orson Welles' legacy, his Boswell.

Peter was a man of many talents and travails. 

Most of all, Peter was a New York City kid who grew up on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. The boy from NYC struck out West to fulfill his manifest destiny. Many of his movies are set in the West (most notably The Last Picture Show), a Jewish-immigrant NYC kid's refracted vision of Americana. No wonder he was considered a genius.

RIP Peter. Say "Hi" to Orson for us. 

Classic Mr NYC

In late 2020 I blogged about my memories of WNYC TV, the long defunct public television station that was owned by the city and was the sister broadcaster of WNYC radio.

The programming, as I indicated, was a weird cross between PBS and public access, with lots of international programming along with local shows. In the evening they would mostly show half-hour comedy and drama shows from the UK, much of it very offbeat stuff.

One exception to the British stuff on WNYC TV (although still quite "offbeat") were repeats of a late 1980s series called Trying Times. This was, unusually, an American show and it was actually created for PBS. Today we would call it an "anthology show" -- every episode was a stand-alone story with a totally different cast and characters. It could also be described as a "dramedy" -- the stories had a comic tone but there was a serious current underneath all of them. The episodes weren't laugh-out loud funny but there certainly weren't intensely dramatic. They were, well, weird.

Each episode chronicled painfully ordinary Americans (almost all white, let's face it, it was the '80) as they dealt with the trials and tribulations of life. A young lady goes home with her boyfriend to meet his family and it ends up with the father getting his hand caught in a food disposal in the sink. A woman gets divorced and experiences a miserable moving day. A guy who's been writing his thesis for 10 years has to get a job. I remember one odd episode where woman breaks into the house of a man to sleep with him because she's setting him up for a mob hit -- only to discover later that he's the wrong target.

And on and on. In many ways it was Seinfeld right before Seinfeld -- normal people who get into odd situations that escalate beyond anyone's control. 

There were only about 12 episodes of Trying Times broadcast in 1987 and 1989. It's mostly (okay, completely) forgotten today but it was, in retrospect, way ahead of its time -- a single camera comedy/drama anthology series about wacky people. But what is memorable are the actors and talents who appeared on this show: Rosanna Arquette, Gina Davis, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Stockard Channing, Griffin Dunne, Robert Klein, Jean Stapleton, Steven Wright -- even Corey Feldman! Many were at the heights of their careers at the time these episodes were made. Some of the directors, also flying high at the time, were Buck Henry, Michael Lindsay-Hogg (currently getting some attention in the epic Beatles documentary), Christopher Guest, and even Jonathan Demme. There was a murderers row of talent in this series -- and one of the producers was, of all people, David Byrne.

You can find episodes of Trying Times on YouTube and watch the Golden Age of Television in its nascent form since you can't time-travel 30+ years and watch it on WNYC TV.

NYC From Space

Strong & Unique

As 2022 unfurls -- and COVID rages on -- here are some reminders that the endurance and uniqueness of New York City is forever.

First, after slumping in the dark first COVID year of 2020, the NYC real estate market rebounded in 2021. People started buy lots more property, boosting the prices and numbers of sales dramatically -- even as the pandemic continues with no real end in sight. This comes as an addendum to the news over the summer that the population of NYC boomed during the last decade by more than 600,000 people making this city, by far, the largest in the country along with the highest growth rate. The strength of the NYC property market, and the continued growth of the population, truly proves that betting against this town, its people, and its future, is just a loser's bet. It's a stark contrast to the wailing you hear in the media, and on social media, with "Oh, New York City is over", "People are leaving in droves", "It's scary there," blah blah blah. The fearmongering, the negativity, the predictions of doom-- all lies! This town is stronger than ever before!

Second, another reminder that NYC is truly a city of islands, a beautiful archipelago, a unique place -- there's a guy who's job is clearing the NYC shorelines of abandoned boats. He works for the Parks Department and is head of "water and marine operations" and makes sure that any "derelict" or discarded vessels are removed -- he and his teams are basically trash collectors of the city's waterways. It's the kind of thing you never thought about before -- what happens in a city of islands like NYC when boats are orphaned and who takes care of them? -- but you then realize it makes total sense. How many other city's have a job like this? Again, one of the great, special things about NYC.   

Mayor Eric Adams