In the 1960s, some young writers like Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill, Gay Talese and others began a movement called the "New Jouralism" -- a kind of rock'n'roll writing that was funny, nasty, entertaining, high voltage, and told from a personal perspective but that still skewed to the riguers of the journalistic craft.
They wrote for all the big magazines like Esquire, The New Yorker, New York, and others, and also published big best-selling books.
Most of the New Journalist writers are gone now but Gay Talese, at age 93, is still around. In fact, he's just published a new book about NYC called A Town Without Time, a collection of his writings about the city. I can't wait to read it -- a book about the greatest city by one of its greatest writers.
An NYC legend.
If you want to know more about Gay Talese excellent work, you should read his 1969 about The New York Times called The Kingdom and the Power, his famous 1966 essay "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold"(regarded as one of the greatest single pieces of journalism ever written), and his 1980 about the rise of swinging and sexual liberation called Thy Neighbor's Wife. We'll probably never see his likes again.
Fifty years ago today, one of the most famous headlines in NYC history ran in the Daily News:
The city was on the cusp of bankruptcy and needed a bailout from the Feds. President Ford said no -- until a deal was later reached, a plan for fiscal stability created, and bankruptcy was avoided.
It wasn't the first, or the last time, when NYC seemed doomed -- and all the naysayers in the media were trashing the city, saying it sucked, and destined to go the way of Imperial Rome. But, as always, it recovered -- just as it did later from the crack epidemic of the late 1980s/early 1990s, 9/11/2001, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
People keep betting against NYC, and losing. You weren't dead fifty years ago and we aren't today.
For all of Mr NYC's coverage about the prematurely called "death of NYC" go here. And also read this insightful article into how NYC has changed in the last half-century.
The news that Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman is getting her second divorce made my mind race back to the early 2000s when she divorced movie star Tom Cruise.
In the 1990s "Tom and Nic" were the biggest celebrity couple in the world. Great actors, huge stars, they made lots of big hit movies (A Few Good Men, Jerry McGuire, To Die For, and many others), and they also made three together, including their last and most notable one, Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.
I remember when news of this movie was announced. It was a big deal -- the biggest movie star couple in the world making a movie with one of the greatest directors of his time, the Bronx-born Stanley Kubrick. They were making a weird movie, in secret, in England, and no one knew anything about it. The entertainment media of the day was fascinating by what this movie would be -- and the secrecy of its making and content became its currency.
There was also a lot of other drama surrounding Eyes Wide Shut.
A noted perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick spent almost two full years shooting the movie -- keeping these two huge stars off screens and out of other movies, much to the industry's consternation. Various actors kept getting hired, then fired, or replaced because the open-ended schedule made their continued participation impossible. The movie was supposed to be released in late 1998 -- then was bumped to the summer of 1999 where it would compete with the big action movies.
Then, the biggest dramatic moment of all -- in the Spring of 1999, just a few months before the movie's release, Stanley Kubrick died. Suddenly. So this secret movie with the two biggest starts in the world would be the last movie from the directors of Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket. Wow!
Then, in July 1999, after all the hype, after reams and reams, hours and hours of coverage, the movie comes out and ... no one cares. It dies quickly. And more than 25 years later it's forgotten -- except for being the last hurrah for Tom and Nic. There divorce two years later would be its coda.
So what's Eye's Wide Shut about? I still don't know.
It takes place in Manhattan during Christmas time. Cruise is a wealthy, successful doctor, with a gorgeous, very bored housewife played by Nic. One night they go to a party, flirt with other people, then go home where Nic confesses her fantasies about sleeping with other men. Tom is horrified -- so he goes out walking the strees of wintertime NYC. He meets a friend of his who works in a piano bar and he tells Tom about a masked orgy out of Long Island where the friend plays the piano during all the nooky. Tom decides to go out to Long Island, puts on a Venetian mask, and witnesses all the nooky -- before he's found out, humiliated, ejected from the orgy, and made to fear for his life.
And there's something about hookers in the meantime too.
I love, love, love Stanley Kubrick's films but this one was boring, and his weakest effort. There's really no story, and you're not made to care about any of the characters. It's visually amazingly and it's more like an early-sound European movie than a modern organic film.
When this movie was being made, and stories about it kept appearing, I was in college, and remember being super excited to see it. Then I graduated, came home, saw the movie that summer ... and left totally underwhelmed. Looking at the movie decades later, it's still lifeless -- and even more depressing considering the horrors we've learned about sexual abuse by rich people in the wake of Jeffrey Epstein.
Still, Eyes Wide Shut is an interesting look at a filmmaker at the end of his life, making his oddest movie ever, in a make-believe NYC at night, with two huge movie stars whose marriage would soon end -- and would gone on to other great movies, as well as more divorces.
The Republican candidate for mayor and founder of the vigilante group Guardian Angels Curtis Sliwa has only ever had one real job in his life -- radio talk show host on WABC 770 AM. I've blogged a lot about this only in NYC figure and you should read my archive on him.
Anyway, now he's running for mayor a second time and he's being bullied to drop out on the belief that this will transfer his support to former Governor Andrew Cuomo and get him elected instead of the scary brown Muslim Socialist.
Sliwa was on the air the other day and wasn't taking the ball breaking lightly so he declared that he has formally quite WABC and will never be heard on its air again.
Well, it'll be interesting to see if he makes this pledge -- the assumption is he'll lose the mayor's race and I'm sure he'll need a job but I'll give him a little bit more respect if he actually keeps his word.
On the edge of NYC -- the gateway, the doorstep of America -- the deck, the plants, the railing, the river, the cliffs and lights and landscape of the mainland, the rest of the America rolling out beyond them, vanishing into the night and the future.
On this night at the end of 1972, just months after The Godfather and Play It Again, Sam had been released, and The Tonight Show had moved to the West Coast, a very young, very nervous, very funny Diane Keaton spoke with Johnny Carson.
They talked about a lot of things, including living in NYC. What a golden moment!
In the legend of the American West and cowboy culture, few people loom larger than Wyatt Earp. A lawman who roamed in 19th century America, his legend was enshirined at the Shout Out at the Ok Corrall, portrayed in many movies, a key moment in the wild history of the American story.
And his third wife, Josephine, had an amazing life too.
She was the daughter of a baker -- and was Jewish! Raised mostly in San Francisco, she ran away at age 14 and headed to Arizona. Allegedly she worked as a prostitute under the name of Sadie, got married, and eventually moved to the notorious Tombstone. Eventually she got rid of her husband and hooked up the frontier marshall Wyatt Earp -- they married in 1892 and stayed together until his death in 1929. After the infamous shootout, the couple moved around from Colorado, Nevada, even Alaska, prospecting for gold, until settling in Los Angeles. She died in 1944.
Josephine's life story is somewhat mysterious and controversial. In 1967 her supposed autobiography was published called I Married Wyatt Earp -- and it turns out most of it was made up. Also, Josephine was cagey about much of her past, mostly about the hooker part, so she remains something of a fascinating mystery.
That said, one thing is certain -- this legendary lady of the wild American West, this icon of the frontier was native New Yorker. Josephine was born in NYC in 1861 before her Polish immigrant baker father took the family west. Her life is a example of how NYC is not only the great American city but it's the great American entry point, the mother city, the seed from which the rest of the nation grows.
In a city where things change constantly, there's one place that has managed to hang on for over forty years -- the comics and pop culture store Forbidden Planet.
Located between 12th and 13th streets on Broadway, it's one of the last old school comic book stores left in NYC. It was opened in 1981, a spinoff location of a similar store in London, but it quickly became a much beloved, NYC landmark, a place where teenagers and comic geeks congregated to get the latest installments of their favorite series, meet and get autographs from their favorite cartoonists, and meet similar people.
I recently took my kid who loves graphic arts and comics and she liked it. Although the current Forbidden Planet is much smaller than it used to be, I'm so thankful that it's still there -- and that NYC kids like mine can still get lost into a world of fantasy.
Diane Keaton was more than just a great actress, she was a cultural icon and a cinematic legend, an actress who could deeply impact you with her dramatic work, and make you laugh out loud with her comedica performances.
Diane Keaton's acting showed that she could do anything -- and it didn't look like she was acting at all.
Her filmography is oustanding: all three Godfather movies; many Woody Allen classics like Sleeper, Love & Death, Annie Hall (her Oscar), Manhattan; other movies like Looking for Mr Goodbar, Shoot the Moon, Marvin's Room, Father of the Bride, Something's Gotta Give, and, more recently, bizarre and brilliant The Young Pope series.
Keaton was from and mostly lived in California but her 1970s classics -- The Godfather, Annie Hall and Manhattan -- remain something of the greatest movies and New York City movies ever made. One is the most classic NYC crime story ever told and the others are the two most classic NYC romantic comedies ever made. Her leading men were Al Pacino and Woody Allen -- how cool is that?
RIP Diane. We'll never see your like again. La di da.
I'm really digging the series House of Guinness about the infamous Irish brewery dynasty. It's set in the 1860s, and it's a King Lear/Succession-like drama about the children of a great, powerful, and wealthy man grappling with the immense legacy they've been left.
Because I'm lazy, and don't want to spoil it for you, I won't review the whole show now but the writing, acting, and production values of the show are outstanding. It's like a soap opera with lots of history and cool Irish accents.
Best of all, while most of the show it set in Dublic, part of the show is set in NYC.
One of the characters named Byron, who's an illegitimate member of the family, goes to NYC to expand the Guinness business into America. He has to deal with lots of anti-Irish, anti-Catholic prejudice, working with the Irish disapora and others to get them drinking the brew.
Also, Byron is played by Jack Gleeson who portrayed the monstrous King Joffrey on Game of Thrones more than a decade ago. He's now all grown up and here he's not crazy, just ambitious and fast-talking. He's great in this show, as is everyone else.
New York City is not the capital of the United States (at least not for more than 200 hundred years). Amongst all the great real estate that exists in this town, it possess no buildings or centers of national power.
It goes without saying that it has no royal palaces or castles -- royalty has never originated in NYC. Quite the opposite, actually -- this city is where royalty was fought and defeated and caste off, giving birth to the American nation.
And yet ... royalty sure does love coming to NYC!
Even more, they like living here. The former King Edward VIII and his American wife Wallis Simpson used to live for three months of each year at the Waldforf Towers. And just a few years ago a Japanese princess and her commoner husband moved to NYC, living in all places, Hell's Kitchen. This fascinating article tells her story and how she seemed just to vanish seamlessly into the lifeblood of Manhattan.
There's something about NYC, part of its paradox, where you can both live in the center of the world and yet hide from it (like Greta Garbo). The stories these streets could tell!
Although a child of New Orleans -- and a Man of the World -- Armstrong spent the last thirty years of his life with his third wife Lucille in a small cozy house in the heart of Corona, Queens.
Lucille was a native of Corona, and Armstrong fell in love with the neighborhood and her in the late 1930s. Even though he was a rich man, he had good but humble taste, and was perfectly happy living his modest house in a working class neighborhood of NYC. That said, it's beautifully decorated with gifts he received during his extensive tours -- he was on the road for 10 months of the year -- as well as other collectibles. And his bathrooms are, to put it simply, lit.
Borin 1901, Louis Armstrong died in 1971.
We were not allowed to take any photos of the house during our visit but you should check out the home's website or, better yet, visit it yourself. Across the street from the house is a small museum dedicated to the man's life. During our visit, one of the people on our tour was someone who had came all the way from Japan -- a country where they love jazz.
It's a reminder that, in this town, you can find cultural history in the most unlikely places.
Sidenote: my wife's father used to deliver groceries to the Armstrong house when he was a kid. He never met the great man himself (he was usually away or upstairs) but Armstrong's wife and housekeeper would give him pancakes.
You can read more about Louis Armstrong on Mr NYC here as well as my earlier picture of his grave here.
