A couple of interesting facts you'll discover among many others in this fascinating video: if NYC was it's own country, it would have 2 million more people than Singapore (a real city-state), and NYC would have the 19th biggest economy in the world.
In many ways, in terms of population and economics and cultural power, NYC really is its own country, a mini super-state all its own.
Recently, during an Uber ride, my driver's phone rang and up popped the picture of a pretty young lady with the name "Mybaby."
Awww. He didn't take the call but I should have told him to do so. I'm sure "Mybaby" would have appreciated it.
Sad news: the Loeb Boathouse Restaurant in Central Park is schedule to close in October.
Originally built by Calvert Vaux in the 19th century, the boathouse has been rebuilt a few times, most recently in the 1950s. The restaurant has been a favorite of New Yorkers and tourists, and there's nothing more enjoyable than having an admittedly high-priced meal on a beautiful day in front of the lake, the park and skyline of the city surrounding you.
The restaurant, like all of them in NYC, got hit hard by COVID in 2020 but it recovered. However, rising costs have apparently hollowed out its finances, even with record patronage. The Parks Department, which leases out the restaurant space, is looking for another vendor but I don't know how any other vendor could make it profitable. It'll be interesting to see what replaces it -- if anything. It's an invaluable location and a great space. I could see it becoming some kind sandwich or grill stand with lots of tables, or maybe a bar. But a full service sit-down restaurant with a kitchen staff and waiters and bus boys everything might not be economically viable anymore.
I have a special memory of the Loeb Boathouse Restaurant -- it's where my wife and I treated ourselves to lunch after learning that our first child would be a girl. It was a gorgeous summer day and we couldn't think of a more enjoyable place to celebrate this life-changing news.
The Loeb Boathouse Restaurant was also immortalized in popular culture in a scene from the 1989 classic movie When Harry Met Sally ... While not as notorious as the Katz's Deli scene, I can't think of a more beautiful restaurant scene set in NYC in any movie ever.
I hope the restaurant comes back one day but, for now, enjoy this clip from its glory years. Farewell for now:
Fourteen years ago, in the first year of this blog, I reviewed August: Osage County, a brilliant epic Broadway play about a dysfunctional family in Oklahoma. It was a coup for its playwright, Tracy Letts, whose career subsequently exploded as a writer and actor -- he popped up on shows like Homeland and in other Broadway plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf? There was even a big movie version of August with Meryl Streep and Julian Roberts (and produced, darkly, by Harvey Weinstein).
Now Letts is back on Broadway, as a playwright and actor, with The Minutes which I just saw this past weekend.
Like August, The Minutes is an intense experience but it's not a family melodrama -- it's more in the vein of 12 Angry Men or God of Carnage where a bunch of people get together to resolve a simple problem and, before you know it, all hell breaks loose, derailing into insanity. The Minutes is about an otherwise routine council meeting in a mid-size town called Big Cherry (its location in the United States is left purposely unclear). The meeting goes sideways when a young, impressionable councilman asks about the disappearance of one of their colleagues who, we soon learn, dug into the history of Big Cherry and discovered, well, something unpalatable.
I'll leave the plot at that -- you have to see it to experience its shocking revelations. But the play is a brilliant example of pure talent at work. The writing, acting, and stagecraft are perfect, making for an enthralling if quite disturbing experience.
Letts plays the frightening mayor of this town and his polar opposite is played by Noah Reid, recently seen in the show Schitt's Creek. Reid is excellent in what is arguably the toughest role in the show, and he makes for a great emotional entry point and center in a play that is about the savagery of human corruption. Also in the cast are Jessie Mueller (who mostly does musicals), the legendary Austin Pendleton, my personal favorite Blair Brown, and others. Everyone in the cast is giving a chance to shine but it's ultimately Letts and Reid's show -- they are the duality of humanity, the darkness and the light, and represent the competing forces that have shaped the country and society we live in today.
I really want to read the text of The Minutes since its writing is quite intricate and brutal -- but, as a theatrical experience, you won't soon forget it.
PS. I was originally going to see this play when it was scheduled to open in April, 2020. Obviously events intervened so I was glad to finally see it two years and three months later.
PPS. The character played by Noah Reid was originally to be played, in April 2020, by Armie Hammer but he got into some personal trouble and was subsequently "cancelled" -- and obviously his role was recast.
PPPS. I saw this play at the Studio 54. Interestingly, I saw the revival of Cabaret at Studio 54 in 1999 and that show also featured Blair Brown -- so, for me, Studio 54 is now the Blair Brown Theater.
The New York Times recently published a big article about ... how people are feeling.
About how they feel about NYC and their lives in it.
The "paper of record" wanted to gauge the "mood" of a city of 8.8 million people by speaking to a number of folks you could literally count on your hands and, from their anecdotes, come to a striking broad-based conclusion about the "mood" of all the residents of the nation's biggest metropolis. (Oh, they spoke to people in each of the five boroughs so I guess that makes it more "broad-based.")
The "mood" appears to be that everyone is freaking out about crime, everything is terrible, and no one can afford to live here. This attitude is so completely at odds with the reality of the evidence and facts on the ground -- crime remains at historic lows and more people live here than ever before -- that I'm stumped at the most respected paper in the city and country passing this off as journalism.
This kind of journalism is weird -- you never saw it before until the age of the Internet and social media. But perhaps there is something in the air in NYC that's making everything feel a little ... off.
Take, for example, our wacky mayor.
It turns out that he has a secret office in Brooklyn, right across the bridge from City Hall in Manhattan. This is honestly no big deal, mayor's have had hideout offices before (heck, Nixon famously didn't work in the Oval Office but in a little one off the Old Executive Office Building), but for some reason Mayor Adams kept it a secret for reasons that make no sense at all. Adams does a lot of weird things like hiring ethically dubious people, insulting low-skilled workers, lying about being a vegan, not being clear about where he lives, reiterating that crime is at historic highs when it's NOT ... and now this.
Adams is just a very weird dude and the city must be feeling very weird to have elected him. When you're the mayor of New York City, you are one of the most covered and criticized public officials in the country but the reality of this part of the job seems to have caught him entirely be surprise. He's secretive and ellusive and, honestly, I have no problem with wanting to maintain your privacy but, well, when you decide you want to be the mayor this isn't really going to be possible. But don't tell him that.
So the mood in NYC right now is, in my humble opinion, contradictory -- people hate it here but more people than ever want to live here, the mayor doesn't want the press to cover him but wants to be seen everywhere, and day is night, up is down, and left is right.
So, honestly, my mood, the mood of this particular New Yorker, is confused and exhausted.
Here's a fascinating historical artifact -- a music video from 1983 (back in the days when MTV was riding high and actually showing videos) by the rather forgotten pop singer Jeffrey Osborne from his big hit "Stay with Me Tonight."
It's one of those videos that actually has a little bit of plot -- long story short, Osborne is walking around NYC, singing, then goes to a bar to scope out chicks, still stinging, then meets an Asian-looking woman, sing some more, and hilarity ensues.
This song is one of those 1980s ditties that you hear today in dentist offices and fast-food joints but the video is fascinating -- it perfectly captures the early '80s NYC nightlife, the Bright Lights Big City scene, with neon and bad hair in abundance. No one snorts any coke but they probably did that off-camera.
Enjoy.
This past week I was in Germany for a work BUT I did get to do two side trips -- one to the Rhine River Valley and another to the city of Heidelberg. Both are located in the State of Hesse and are beautiful and fascinating. they gave me a new appreciation for Germanic culture (the good kind, not the obvious scary kind).
One of the first things we saw (after a scary by amazing cable car ride) was this huge statue erected right after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, a monument to the triumph of Kaiser Wilhelm 1 in that war, uniting Prussian and various German principalities into the mighty German Empire (it lasted until 1918 after World War I, the country then turning into a socialist republic, followed by the Nazi-era Third Reich, followed by the Federal Republic of West Germany/Communist-era German Democratic Republic, followed by the present-day re-united Federal Republic of Germany -- I know, it's exhausting).
Anyway, this statue is of Germania, the Goddess or Godmother of Germany, dating from the time of the Holy Roman Emperor -- she's Germany's Romulus, its spiritual founding mother and the personification of its people. Beneath her are figurines of Kaiser Wilhem and his generals and information about the great victors that made the Empire.
