For the first time since -- when? -- a NYC mayor has quit his reelection campaign.
Mayor Eric Adams has said that he won't continue his quixotic bid for a second term. Drenched in scandal, incompetence and unpopularity, he's bowing to the obvious and envitable.
Seriously, it makes no difference. Not only was he not going to win but his remaining support is so infinitesimal that it's not going to improve any other candidates support at all. Also, his name will still be on the ballot -- so people can still vote for him if they want. Oy vey.
Like his entire mayoralty, Adams dropping out is a sad joke. He's destined to be a forgotten failed mayor like Abe Beame or Vincent Impelliteri -- someone who was given the chance to make the city better and failed completely.
Over the years I've blogged a lot about the NYC underground or underworld that I've called the underwelt -- the hidden city, the worlds within worlds of the world's greatest city that we don't see or hear about but that exists all around us.
Here are few stories told by the denizens of the NYC underwelt:
Last year I blogged about how,when Howard Stern talks about bitches, it's funny. And when he talks about bitches with rappers, it's really funny.
In 2005 Howard and 50 Cent talked about bitches and remembering the names of 50's bitches, and then in 2007 they revisited the subject in a wide ranging interview. It's funny and fun. Watch it:
About five years ago I blogged about the quirky 1989 indie movie New Year's Day and the eccentric NYC filmmaker, Henry Jaglom, who made it.
Jaglom made a lot of movies over his long career, and they were usually movies about actors and artists, and the burdens of a creative life. His movies were certainly an acquired taste but they were distinctive, and how cool is that.
“Speech, it ain’t free no more. We’re charging by the word now ... Like if you want to say something nice about the president’s beautiful, thick, yellow hair or how he can do his makeup better than any broad, that’s free. But if you want to do a joke like he’s so fat he needs two seats on the Epstein jet, that’s gonna cost you.”
Back in early 2021, as that year's mayoral race was heating up, the issue of casinos in NYC became a topic. I blogged about it then and shared my lofty thoughts -- I can understand the economic appeal of casinos but worry about the impact they might have on the city.
Since then, three non-tribal casino licenses have been approved for downstate New York and currently community boards around the city are voting on approving several proposals for those licenses.
So far, all of the proposals for casinos in Manhattan -- including one in Times Square, one proposed by Jay-Z, and one around the United Nations -- have been rejected. But it looks like a proposal by Steve Cohen in Willets Point, near Citi Field, will be approved as well as turning the Racino way out in Queens into a full-blown casino.
My 2021 view of casinos remains the same. I find the idea of casinos in Manhattan, well, gross. Manhattan is special, the epicenter of American culture, and inserting casinos into the middle of it would cheapen it. And there are obviously other parts of the city that might benefit from there.
Most of all, I think casinos should not be really easy to get to -- they should be somewhat remote and take time to get to. It's inevitable that they'll be in NYC soon -- just hopefully not too close to where anyone lives.
I'm endlessly fascinated by the Russian Revolution and how it completely capsized the world. In any epochal event -- wars, revolutions, you name it -- there are literally millions of fascinating personal stories that intersect with these world-changing times.
One such story is that of Maria Pavlovna, a Princess of the Russian Imperial family, the Romanovs. She was born into great splendor, wealth and power beyond imagination. She was forced into a an unhappy marriage with a Swedish prince and had a son, divorced him, went back to Russia and remarried -- and then got swept up in the revolution. She escaped to Paris, ran a couture business for a while, then came to NYC -- where she got a job as a fashion consultant at Bergdorf's. She also wrote her autobiography which became a big bestseller. But when WWII started, she was angry that the USA was allied with the Soviet Union, so she moved to Argentina before moving back to Europe, eventually living and dying in Germany.
It's a life of imagine tragedy and triumph and a fascinating example of a disrupted life that had a short but amazing chapter in NYC.
If you can ever call a movie nothing more than an expression of pure joy, it'd have to be the 1982 classic My Favorite Year.
It's impossible to imagine a movie this funny, well-written, heartfelt and wild coming out today. But back in the early 1980s this old-fashioned comedy gem slipped out.
The year in question is 1954, and a young comedy writer named Benjy Stone from Brooklyn is writing for the country's most popular TV variety show, Stan "King" Kaiser. One week a washed up British movie star named Allann Swan visits to guest star on the show -- and he's drunk and unreliable. Benjy is told to take care of him for the week -- and craziness and hijinks and hilarity ensue.
The plot for this movie is slight -- it's more about the characters, their romances, their hopes, and their fears. And it's about a culture clash, two very different worlds smashing together -- the world of Jewish New York City comedians clashing with the world of a British master thespian, all told through a loving 1950s nostalgia lense.
Benjy is played by a very young Mark Lin-Baker, a few years before his long run on Perfect Strangers and then on Broadway. He's charming, and I don't know why he didn't make more movies, especially since My Favorite Year was a big hit. Alan Swann is played magnificently by Peter O'Toole, a truly titanic performance (he also got an Oscar nomination for it). Joe Bologna, the great character actor, plays a Stan Kaiser and the rest of the supporting cast includes a gorgeous Jessica Harper as Benjy's love interest, Lanie Kazain, and many others. You can tell they all had a lot of fun making this picture.
My Favorite Year is very loosely based on something that happened in the early 1950s when a young Mel Brooks was a writer on Sid Ceasar's variety show. The guest one week was Errol Flynn, the great British movie star of the 1930s and '40s who was also a hopeless drunk. Brooks was tasked with making sure he made it to rehearsals and the show, and that wasn't always easy. Nothing as crazy happened in real life as in in the movie, but it's great premise for a movie -- which is obviously why they made one.
The movie is also a look at a special moment in time when NYC was still the heart of television, and shows like Sid Ceasar's reigned supreme. While they never say what network the fictional Stan Kaiser show is on, most of the movie takes place at 30 Rock so it's obviously supposed to be NBC.
In these dark times, My Favorite Year is a little piece of light.
He was a kid, just like I was. Now, he's not a real person -- he's a cartoon characters from the series Bloom County -- but Milo was smart, funny, insightful, and, most of all, droll. Even though he was a kid, he worked as a reporter and he seemed to know everything.
Milo was the kid I wanted to be -- and, even as a grown up, he's still who I kinda want to be.
Such was my Milo devotion that, as a kid, I drew a picture of him. Now my artistic talent is less than zero but, for one inspired moment, I drew a half-way decent picture of my hero. I share it with you now:
And here's how the "real" Milo looks. Not bad, right?
Thirty years ago this month we lost the brilliant radio DJ Allison Steele.
It's hard to think that the NYC airwaves have been without her soothing voice and gentle wisdom for so long. Since 1995 to be precise. I listened to her in high school and she died just after I started college. There was something about her death that marked for me, in a away, the end of my childhood.
But let's not dwell on that. Let's remember how long we had her. Let's go back in time to when Allison was at her height.
It was another September just like this, in the fall of 1972. Like in 2025 or 1995, summer was ending. The leafs and moods were changing, the autumnal equinox was nigh, and Allison, in her wonderful way, helped us say goodbye to summer.
So as we say goodbye to summer now, let's remember when Allison did it for us 53 years ago this month.
Allison, like summer, may be gone but will always be remembered.
Few filmmakers capture the life and spirit of NYC like Spike Lee. He's been making movies for forty years and he makes movies like no other -- movies that make you think, movies that sometimes make you angry, sometimes make you laugh loudly, but that you never forget.
Spike and his movies have been part of my life since I was kid -- Do the Right Thing blew we away as a teenager. And then he started his fruitful collaboratoin with Denzel Washington and they have made some modern classics -- Mo' Better Blues, Malcolm X, Inside Man and, now, after working together for more than 30 years, Highest 2 Lowest.
Denzel plays a music executive who is the midst of trying to save his business when his kid gets kidnapped -- only for a huge twist when its not his kid but his assistants. This awful situation leads him into a huge moral dillemma and leads to wild, unpredictable outcome.
Spike's approach to storytelling is unconventional -- he does not make predictably, standardly told narratives. And he really goes all out with that approach here. But, always, his visual flair is on full display, and Denzel just eats up the screen with a wild, fun performance -- a great actor, a master thespian, at the time of his craft. Also, Jeffrey Wright plays his assistant and, as always, he's great.
Late in the movies the rapper ASAP Rocky appears and, damn, he's got some real acting chops. There's a scene between him and Denzel that is so good, so intense, so amazing and mesmerizing that you have to watch the movies just for that. It's just two guys talking -- and its riveting.
Finally, this is a great NYC movie and it really goes from "highest to lowest", from the penthouses of highrises of gentrified Brooklyn, to the streets of Manhattan, to the subways and back alleys of the Bronx.
They don't make a lot of movies like Highest 2 Lowest these days so you gotta appreciate it when you can.
You can also listen to Spike talk about the movies with Marc Maron here.
New York City neighborhoods are world famous -- Wall Street, Harlem, Park Slope, Flushing, Greenwich Village, and many others. They have identities all their own, little cities within the big city. These neighborhoods have been around and evolved and changed for centuries.
But there's one neighborhood that only lasted for about eight years -- a fleeting few blocks that had a big moment before it vanished (not literally but figuratively) completely.
In the 1990s, as the Internet and tech sector conquered the world, the capital of it was (and is) Silicon Valley in Northern California. Here in NYC a mini-tech sector sprang up at the same time on Broadway between the Flatiron Building on 23rd Street and Union Square on 14th Street.
Most of the businesses there were "dotcoms", burgeoning Internet companies that helped new users do things like buy groceries and pay bills and other stuff. Their business plans were dubious but held promise. The Internet then was still very disorganized, you didn't have an "everything store" like Amazon yet -- and these new companies were trying to claim the parts of the Internet that Amazon would eventually conquer.
But then, between 2000 and 2003, the original "dotcom bubble" burst. Many of these companies, turning no profits, vanished, and the buildings they occupied fell vacate (for a while) -- and Silicon Alley ceased to exist.
Silicon Alley RIP, 1995-2003.
I hadn't thought about Sililcon Alley for a long time until I discovered that the great author Thomas Pynchon wrote a book in 2013 called Bleeding Edge about Silicon Alley circa 2001 and during the events of 9/11. (There's a new movie based on another book by Pynchon that's opening soon called One Battle After Another that I can't wait to see.)
You see, yours truly actually worked on Silicon Alley for about nine months, from the Summer of 2000 to the Spring 2001. I blogged a little about it back in March, and it was, hands down, the WORST job I ever had. It was such a horrible place with such loathsome people that I'm shocked that I lasted there for almost a year. And not long after I vanished from the job, Silicon Alley vanished as well -- altough the company seems to have been bought by some other company later on so I guess it did okay.
What's interesting to me is to realize that my time in Silicon Alley corresponded to the same time as Pynchon's novel -- and to the same time when Silicon Alley was starting to fall. Believe me, it did not feel like I was living through a historical epoch at the time (I had left before 9/11 happened). And I hated working there so much that I just wanted to get out ASAP. But it seems that I was a part of a fleeting moment of Manhattan history, I was there, I was a witness ... even if I didn't want to be.
And it's a reminder that today's torment is tomorrow's anecdote, yesterday's misery is today's good story. Life is truly strange.
American politics has gotten ugly -- and, as we know, quite violent -- in the last few years. And especially yesterday.
It's easy to point a finger at you-know-who but really that's the wrong person.
Point it not at the clown in the White House but at his forerunner, the person who set the stage and made him possible -- Newt Gingrich. The former Georgia Congressman who masterminded the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress is the one who created the ugly political atmosphere that chokes us -- and sometimes kills us -- today.
Believe it or not, I blogged about all this back in ... drumroll ... 2008. The year 1994 was a transformative year in American culture and politics ... and, arguably, not for the better.
You should listen to Mr NYC interviewee Kurt Anderson (also from 2008) talk about the lasting impact of 1994 on our politics in a recent podcast with Molly Jong-Fast. As always, Kurt is very smart and incisive. And, as always, Mr NYC was and is Ahead of His Time.
As we head into the last two months of the NYC mayor's race, the media and his opponents keep calling Assemblyman and current frontrunner Zohran Mamdani a "communist."
The Republicans, the media and so-called "centrist" Democrats (they're all the same thing really) love calling regular Democrats communists. They've been doing it for decades. Quite frankly, it's boring and unoriginal -- and, if Democrats really were Communists, then the GOP/media/centrist Dems would have suffered the same fate as the Romanovs whenever Clinton or Obama or Biden got into power.
But if Zohran is a Communist, then he's in good company.
I'm currently reading a book about Fiorello LaGuardia, widely regarded as the greatest NYC mayor of all time. And whaddya know -- in reading about the 1933 campaign, the year LaGuardia was elected, the Heart media and Tammany Hall CALLED LAGUARDIA A COMMUNIST!
Take a look at the excerpt below: "... the little red flower of Communism ..." and so much more. So when you keep hearing this crap about Zohran, just say "Well, they said the same thing about Fiorello and he turned out to be pretty great."
He's an older guy, and this is the right move -- the next generation of leaders needs to come to power and it's great that Nadler recognizes this fact. He's not going to stay in office until he's almost dead and hold the future back.
That said, he was and is a Giant of Manhattan and we won't see his likes again for a long time.
