Gotta Love New Yorkers

A professional dogwalker leading multiple mutts down the street while speaking on her phone headset:

"Her dress had all booty, and it was pokin' out, it was really pokin' out."

Flying Over NYC

Classic Mr NYC

In 2021 I did a short tribute to the great singer, Astoria-native, and one of only three solo women to perform at Woodstock in 1969, Melanie Safka.

Melanie has sadly passed away at the age of 76. 

RIP.

Satchmo in Eternity (in Queens)

You can see it here ...

... and find it here. 

Capote is Coming!

The fall from grace of the late great writer Truman Capote from NYC high society is the subject of a new miniseries. Back in the 1970s he decided that it was a great idea to write nasty short stories about his wealthy and powerful friends.

Naturally, it pissed them off, and they extracted revenge. 

I blogged about this story back in 2012 and now it's the stuff of trashy-fun drama, featuring, amongst others, Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Demi Moore and even Molly Ringwald! 

Basically this miniseries is all about how Capote got "cancelled" -- to use that egreious phrase. I can't wait to see it (don't tell anyone).

Green Day Plays the Subway

When I saw Green Day in 2009, they were performing at Madison Square Garden.

Now they're playing even cooler venues -- like the subway.

The Future of NYC Real Estate

Unless you have some kind of service job that requires an in-person presence, much of the the future of work will either be fully remote or "hybrid" -- some days in the office, some days at home. I know this first-hand since this is my working situation and, I can tell you first-hand, there's no going back. 

The COVID-19 pandemic merely accelerated this trend and proved that, for many companies, they don't really need a physical office to be successful. And even for companies where people go into the office sometime, they are deserted on Mondays and Fridays and half-empty most of the time. 

This is hammering the real estate industry in NYC. The huge office buildings that create the grand skyline are, in fact, largely empty (as is the case in many cities around the world).

The solution seems obvious -- turn them into apartments. 

The demand for office space in NYC might be crashing but the demand for housing here is greater than ever. While it will take money and has all sorts of legal and political and tax implications, this is the obvious solution. It makes no sense for nearly 9 million people to live in mostly cramped circumstances where there are now vast amounts of barren buildings that could house them easily.

As this 60 Minutes report shows, the nature of life and work needs to be reimagined. Increasingly our homes will become our offices and vice versa so repurposing buildings that serve their tenants as both needs to be developed. They should, in many ways, become communities of life and work with in-building services (like grocery stores, gyms, dry cleaners, hardware stores, restaurants, etc). with resources things like IT. And, most of all, they should be affordable -- and that's where it gets tricky. 

But the future of NYC real estate is now!

Hopper - American Master

I've blogged a few times about the great 20th century painter Edward Hopper whose brilliant portraits of every life in NYC are truly timeless.

There was a great exhibit of Hopper's work at the Whitney Museum last year that I reviewed and now there's a new American Masters documentary about his life (and fraught marriage) running on PBS.

I've seen it and its mesmerizing, much like Hopper's work itself. You get the sense that he and his wife (an accomplished painter in her own right) were perhaps a little bit on the spectrum, they were definite oddballs -- but the work they created was amazing.  

Billy Joel - Live at Yankee Stadium, June 1990

Summer, 1990 ...

It was HOT -- and NYC had its first serial killer since Son of Sam back in 1976/77 -- the copycat Zodiac killer who hit a bunch of people in the spring and summer of that year, then vanished before striking again randomingly in 1992, 1993, and 1994 when he got caught.

But the other big thing that happened in the summer of 1990 were the two big shows that Billy Joel did at Yankee Stadium in June. He had recently put out his 11th studio album, Stormfront, and these concerts were a huge promotion for it. They were recorded on film and it's a raucous experience -- Billy Joel singing with joy and gusto, great visuals, an energized audience, and a deep love for the city runs throughout it. 

I distinctly recall that my brother got to go to one of these shows and I was not invited (too young). But he gave me t-shirt for the shows that I wore until it frayed.

Interestingly enough about 13 years later we were in Nobu at sat at a table right next to Billy Joel, his daughter, and her friend. 

Recently Billy Joel announced that his decade-long residency at Madison Square Garden will be coming to any end. He's still performing but he's winding down his career -- but these concerts in the Bronx in the summer of 1990 shows a legendary American singer-songwriter at the top of his game.

NYC Earthquake!