Yesterday marked the 100th year since the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
If you want to know the whole history of how this NYC -- and now American -- tradition started, listen to this great episode of the Bowery Boys.
Also, did you know that back in the 19th century -- before the parade -- there used to be a Thanksgiving tradition called Ragamuffin Day? Apparently it involved people dressing like homeless people and knocking on people's doors asking for treats -- something that morphed into Halloween in the 20th century.
And here are some Mr NYC-exclusive photos of the parade taken at an exclusive vantage point:
Recently I crossed the pond for a few days of work in Dordrecht, Holland. I had very little time, and it's not a very big city or tourist destination, but I did manage to find out a few interesting things about it and take a some nice pictures.
Dordrecht is the oldest city in Holland, older than the current capital and better-known Amsterdam. Its was founded around 1120 and it still retains a medieval look and flavor. Like most of Holland and its cities, its full of canals and water, and highly walkable. And even though it has a population of only 119,000, nearly 20% of it is foreign-born -- it's a really multicultural place.
There are numerous medieval monuments in town but the most notable of them is Grote Kerk, or Church of Our Lady, that was built between 1284 and 1470. It's a very impressive structure, and even though it was an old Catholic, re-Reformation church, today it is very much a Protestant cathedral.
Finally, I saw this sign about a woman I never heard of before named Lenie Dicke who was an active member of the Resistance in Dordrecht during World War II. At one point she was captured and, in a moment of brilliance and bravery, actually ate a book listing the names of other Resistance members, sparing their lives. She's a Dordrecht hero and actually lived until the year 2000.
Again, it's a small city, not big and glamorous like Amsterdam, but worth seeing for its charm and history.
WNBC-TV news anchor Chuck Scarborough has announced his retirement after 50 years.
Chuck is an absolute legend in NYC, someone who made local news cool. Mayors, governors, presidents, all kinds of other famous and powerful people have come and gone in this last half-century but Chuck remained, reporting on it all. The city won't quite be the same without his steadying, calming presence on our airwaves every night.
Here's Chuck announcing his departure, and some notable past stories he reported on.
Greetings! I haven't been blogging for the last couple of weeks because I've been super busy and also traveling internationally -- more to come on that later.
And yes, the results of the election this month also deflated my desire to blog. But if you want to know more about how I feel about this country's descent into fascism, please read this column by Elie Mystal that perfectly sums up my views on it.
I'll just add: we are living in the upside down, through the looking-glass, in bizarro-world, a banana republic. The abnormal is normal, the unacceptable is accepted, the gross has been made palatable, sickness is considered healthy.
It's "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" time -- the darkness is bigger and badder than we thought, and beyond our ability to defeat it. We simply have to find someway to survive in it, lighting a candle -- or many -- in order to see our way thru it.
Listen to this brilliant British guy -- and his funny impressions of an American accent -- talk about the 2024 election:
He confesses that there's a lot about the United States that he doesn't understand and wishes that some Americans would enlighten him about how half the country could support a felon/rapist/traitor.
They don't make movies like this anymore -- well, okay, they do, but they don't play in movie theaters anymore; instead, they pop up on streaming.
But it's always great to see a fast-paced, character-centered flick with great movie stars -- especially when it involves them running around NYC.
Wolves stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt -- thirty-years removed from their starmaking roles on the TV show ER and in the movie Interview With the Vampire, respectively -- as two "cleaners" or "wolves" (like the one Harvey Keitel played in that other 194 classic Pulp Fiction), whose job is to mop up crime scenes, dispose of bodies and evidence, and make sure that the guilty get away with it and justice is denied to the victim. In Wolves, this crime scene involves a dead kid, a backpack full of drugs, and a hysterical female District Attorney (played by the wonderful Amy Ryan) who is running for reelection and needs this problem solved pronto.
The twist in this movie is that these two now middle-aged wolves are called to clean up the same crime scene unbenowst two each other. And when they clean up the scene and get the dead kid's body out of the downtown Manhattan hotel they were called to -- well, it all goes sideways and mayhem ensues when it turns out the kid really isn't dead.
Wolves then turns into a very fun, almost two hour yarn of car chases, shootouts, sleazy nightclubs, oddball characters, snappy dialogue, chowing down in diners, and everything that makes a good pulpy story. Most of all, it's great to see Clooney and Pitt act their hearts out, their chemistry palpable, in an original story not based on IP. It's just an entertaining movie. Remember those?
But other big thing I love about Wolves, as you might guess, its that it's a real NYC and a real NYC night movie. The story starts downtown but before you know it our heroes are zooming around Chinatown and Lower Manhattan, then they're out in the wilds of Queens. It's a movie that gives you a sense of the whole city.
And the whole thing takes place at night, when the city falls into a sense of sexy mystery, a place of danger and excitement, a whole other NYC. I think it's fair to say that Wolves joins the company of other brilliant NYC night movies like After Hours, Taxi Driver, Night on Earth, While the City Sleeps, the Whit Stillman classics Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, The Warriors, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist -- heck, I'll even throw in Eyes Wide Shut.
