I'm not going to blog about Eric Adams anymore until something definitive happens -- namely, that he ceases to be mayor.
So this will be my last post on the subject until then.
That said, you shoud read this article by the political journalist & three-time Mr NYC-interviewee Ross Barkan about "The Fall of Eric Adams" -- and how we got here. As always, he summarizes the whole thing well.
Over the years I've blogged about my love of Venice, the great Italian city of isles that, in some ways, is the true spiritual sister of NYC.
And like NYC, Venice is a city of beauty and inspiration.
That's why it was fun to read this article about the legendary designer and business Diane von Furstenberg who has recently taken up residence in a Palazzo on the Grand Canal. Like many brilliant people before her, who came to NYC to realize their dreams, she's done the same with Venice. It's a fascinating story.
And, in some ways, she follows in the footsteps of those other great Venetians Marco Polo, Veronica Franco, and Casanova -- as well as countless New Yorkers -- who take their destiny into their own hands.
So it finally happened, even faster than I imagined. Eric Adams is the first NYC mayor to be indicted while in office.
Reincarnation may not exist but sometimes, as the saying goes, "what's old is new again"; people or things from the past are either resurrected, rediscovered, or reimagined for new generations.
Think of every reboot of every old show currently on television.
Well, this blog post is not about TV reboots but about two very seperate, very old, and very NYC things that have, in very different ways, gone from old to new again.
The first, most notably and most infamously, is the World Trade Center. For almost 30 years the Twin Towers glowered over NYC until September 11, 2001. The next several years a battle over rebuilding what was known, for a long time, as Ground Zero until, more than a decade later, One World Trade Center emerged as its replacement. The new tower was obviously a reminder and a replacement of the old World Trade Centers, the past coming back to life in a new way, up from the ashes, into the future.
The man at the center of rebuilding the World Trade Centers, of turning Ground Zero into a gleaming, shining structure, was Larry Silverstein. He has a new memoir about his long career as an NYC builder and what it took to rebuild in Lower Manhattan -- although, as this article points out, while a gorgeous new building was constructed, the thing was a big missed opportunity. Instead of reimagining the area as a mixed-use, residential/commercial, affordable neighborhood, they just built another big office buidling that, nearly a quarter of a century from 9/11, remains largely empty.
But another, more enjoyable rediscovery, is the 1981 movie They All Laughed. Made by NYC director Peter Bogdanovich, it was a mad caper about private detectives hired to follow unfaithful wives -- until the detectives get double-crossed by their prey and hilarity ensues. At the time of its release, it was a critical and commercial flop, and it marked the end of Bogdanovich's time as an A-List director. For decades it wasn't watchable anywhere but now it was reemerged, to great acclaim, on TCM and currently steaming on Max.
It's great to see older, excellent, and underappreciated work rediscovered. Also, directors Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson have said that this film specifically was an influence on them. From the ashes of critical and commercial ignomy to the heights of canon and influence, that is something great to see.
The daily weekday soap opera used to be a staple of daytime network television. All My Children, Guiding Light, One Life to Live and so many others entertained housewives, the unemployed and layabouts during the early afternoon hours for decades.
But then, about ten-to-fifteen years ago, they started to vanish. Some of these soaps, like Guiding Light, had started on radio in the 1930s and ran for the better part of 70 to 80 years! -- and then were unceremoniously cancelled. Today there are only about three or four left, as streaming and the Internet and production costs doomed them.
Most soap operas are generally set in some mid-sized fictional city in the midwest somewhere, usually with a name that starts with "Port." They exist in a mystical Everytown USA where everyone is beautiful, sex craved, greedy, venal, dishonest, and unusually prone to car accidents.
One outlier to these kinds of soap operas was Ryan's Hope, which ran from 1975 to 1989 and was set in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan.
Unlike most soaps, it was set in a real neighborhood in NYC with blue collar characters. Ryan's was a bar across the street from the fictional Riverside Hospital (i.e. Columbia Presbyterian) and the show explored the lives of its denizens. It still has the usual soap opera tropes of scandalous affairs and pregnancies and deaths but it was rooted in NYC and real community.
One of the original stars of Ryan's Hope was Kate Mulgrew who went on to greatness as the Captain on Star Trek: Voyager and later as the hilarious Russian prisoner on Orange is the New Black. Guest stars included a young Kelsey Grammer, Dominic Chianese (20 years before The Sopranos) and Christian Slater.
While it had a relatively short life compared to other daytime soaps, Ryan's Hope was an unusual slice of NYC life beamed each afternoon into homes across America -- and there's quite like it that exists today.
Things haven't been going too great for NYC Mayor Eric Adams, in case you hadn't heard. In fact, the stench of his travails has wafted across the pond.
On the great Rest is Politics podcast from the UK, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair sidekick Allistair Campbell and former UK Member of Parliament Rory Stewart discuss, and take listener questions about, political issues all over the world. Both men are brilliant, knowledgeable, and great broadcasters, and the podcast has become a worldwide hit.
On their latest episode they talk about the US-UK Special Relationship and they also talk Turkey -- the country that is. But for about five minutes, starting around the six minute mark, they talk about Eric Adams and the wierdness that is not only NYC politics but also all American urban politics.
It's a short segment but certainly worth a listen. When classy Brits start talking about what a weirdo you are, it can't be pleasant.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's brilliant book about the career of NYC master builder Robert Moses.
I've blogged A LOT about Robert Moses over the years and you can find it all, including my own review of The Power Broker, right here (there's also a big exhibition about it at the New-York Historical Society).
When Caro wrote in the book in the last 1960s and early 1970s, he was a young man looking to reveal the story behind how Moses built NYC. By this time, Moses himself was an old man, looking back at his controversial legacy.
Now, fifty years later, Moses is long dead and Caro himself is an old man, looking back on the legacy of his book about the man and what he did to NYC.
Below you can see a 1977 interview that Moses gave to publica television about his career and the book that made him infamous. And then you can watch a very recent 2024 interview with Care reflecting how his great book came to be.
I'm a big fan of the author Rachel Kushner -- her 2013 novel The Flamethrowers a personal favorite. She also has a new novel coming out called Creation Lake that I'm looking forward to reading and that's just been nominated for the Booker Prize.
Kushner is a California-native and -based writer but she spent about a decade in NYC in the 1990s. She recently wrote about her experiences living in the city as a transient resident and how, although she's neither from here nor stayed here, her memories of NYC remain close to her heart.
For us NYC natives, this is and will always be home -- no matter how far we may stray from it.
But for people who were born and grew up elsewhere, then lived here for a while before moving home or moving on, experiencing NYC as a chapter in life is always a fascinating story. It's like they were dropped into the stream of a continuing soap opera, played their part, and then left while the storyline continued. Their time in NYC is finite, tied to a particular time in their and the city's life, and they are forever intertwined in a unique, unreproduceable way. What they remember about a city that's always changing but fixed in their minds is always something worth learning about.
The brilliant actor James Earl Jones recently died at the age of 93.
Yes, I know, he's best known as the voice of Darth Vader and the Lion King, and he appeared in many classic films like Field of Dreams, Conan the Barbarian, Coming to America, The Hunt for Red October, Matewan and others.
But James Earl Jones was also a great Broadway actor, appearing in numerous plays between the 1950s and 2010s -- including The Iceman Cometh, Of Mice and Men, Fences (a legendary performance), Driving Ms. Daisy and finally You Can't Take It With You. Even if he hadn't made any movies, his theater resume would enshrine him in acting immortality.
Yet not only did he make the aforementioned movies but James Earl Jones' very first movie was the Stanley Kubrick 1964 classic Dr. Strangelove. Jones was cast as one of the bombers that's been sent to attack Russia, faithfully executing his orders and mission while unaware that they're about to destory humanity.
If you want to understand the greatness of James Earl Jones' acting talent, just watch and listen to him flip switches, turns nobs, and repeat tactical orders -- and make it mesmerizing. And how amazing was it that, in the early 1960s, when black Americans were being terrorized by southern police and fighting for civil rights, the Bronx-born genius director Kubrick cast a brilliant young black actor in such an important role?
Such is the stuff as legend. Watch this great sequence from Dr. Strangelove below and an interview that James Earl Jones gave decades later about how he ended up in one of the greatest movie's ever made.
So the FBI just raided the homes of the First Deputy Mayor, the Schools Chancellor (on the first day of school no less!), the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, and, oh, the police commissioner!
This is, uh, not good. But, if you've been following this blog and its musings on Hizzoner, it's not exactly a surprise. At this rate, Adams heading to be another Jimmy Walker or William O'Dwyer.
We live in interestinging times ... and it's so boring!
More than once or twice I've blogged about the oddity that is Mayor Eric Adams -- you can read all about it here, no need to rehash it.
This new article elaborates more on this oddness, calling him the "chaos mayor."
But more than cataloguing the mayor's chaotic reign, it also shows how Adams, like other prominent politicians of this era, simply have no idea whatsoever of what it means to be a leader. They spend their time blaming others for their problems, they use overheated crises-ridden rhetoric, they constantly attack the press as being out to get them, and they openly engage in self-pity.
Poor me! Poor me! Everyone's mean to me, I'm a victim, all these conspiracies and dark forces are out to get me!
It's not like they have power or something.
In Adams' case, it comes down to his handling of the migrant problem. When they started coming into NYC, Adams showed that he was overwhelmed and unable to handle it. He said this problem was a "crises" that would "destroy New York City" and that we were about to "lose" the city. When the press asked him how he plans to handle this problem, he told others that they had to provide the answers about how to handle the problem. He demanded severe budget cuts in order to handle the problem -- even though the city is running surplus. Instead of projecting confidence in his skills and in his administration's ability to handle this problem, he basically said "I can't handle it! Oh my god, the city is going down, you tell me how to fix it!"
Real leaders rush into a crises, come up with a plan, handle it in a pragmatic and confident manner, restore order, and fix it. Like that old guy in Godfather II, leaders say "This is the business we've chosen!" and get on with the job, showing that they're in charge and getting things under control. They don't whine and complain, attack their critics and demand pity. They work -- and the positive results speak for themselves and their leadership abilities.
You see this same problem with Trump --- the constant consipiracies, the constant attacks on critics, the constant self-pity. The former British Prime Minster Liz Truss, who managed to the screw up the UK economy in six weeks so badly that her own party kicked her out of office, is now out complaining that the Bank of England and the "blob" that is the UK Civil Service is responsible for her fall -- and not her own decisions. She was Prime Minister when the Queen died in 2022 and apparently Ms. Truss's reaction to this was "Why me?" Can you friggin' believe that?
It wasn't always like this. Leaders led and did the job. Jimmy Carter didn't complain, deflect, or demand pity during the Iran Hostage Crises. Reagan didn't either during Iran Contra. My God, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton got impeached and still worked hard!
Eric Adams, like Trump and Truss and others, doesn't seem to get this. They think serving in high office is an excuse either to live the high life or execute ideological agendas -- not govern, not serve the public. And when things don't go their way, instead of sucking it up and getting to work, they WAAAAAHHHHH!
The thing is, the public is much smarter than these folks. Trump lost the presidency (and hopefully will again), Truss was kicked out, and Adams looks like he'll lose next year.
The people want leaders and problem solvers -- not showboating, self-pitying egomaniacs. You chose this business, get it done.
