The Adventures of Mr NYC

Mets, Movies, Cookies, the Japanese & Fireworks!

Last night I went to the Mets-Dodgers game and, yeah, the Mets lost. 

Still, it was one of the more interesting games I've gone to because there was a lot of "extra."

First, it was "Japansese Heritage Night" so there were lots of Japanese people there. And there were also a ton of Dodgers fans. I've never been to a New York home baseball game with that many fans from the other city's team. I didn't realize there were that many Angelinos in NYC but apparently there are. It was weird.

Second, they were shooting a movie at this game. This announcement greeted us as we made our way into Citi Field:

This movie, The Catch, stars Emma Stone and Chris Pine and is slated for release next year. I don't know if the double Oscar-winning and pretty boy were at the game but apparently they shot some of it at the stadium earlier that day. 

And we saw some movie camera guys shooting during the game:

Also, upon our arriving we were given this wristbands. Stay tuned to find out why!

Then we sat down to watch the game. It sucked. But I did manage to get a cookie bucket and record one of two Mets' homeruns.

And once the game was over, we were treated to a East Coast-West Coast Hip Hop fireworks show -- presumably in honor of the East Coast-West Coast baseball game we'd just witnessed. 

And the lights in our wristbands began to glow and yours truly got to be part of a massive rap fireworks lightshow. I managed to keep it real, get jiggy with it, and illuminate the NYC night sky. Yeah boyeeeeeee!

So I got to be part of Japanese heritage, appear in a movie, eat out of a bucket, and partake in a bad-ass fireworks show. Aww yeahhhhhh!

Robin Byrd Bangs Again!

Damn, never though I'd see this: there's an upcoming HBO documentary about naughty NYC late-night cable TV host Robin Byrd who ran her stripper/adult star-filled show from the late 1970s to the late 1990s.

And it's called, haha, Bang My Box.

Robin was an "Only in New York" type, a former adult star who appeared in Debbie Does Dallas and who, along with Al Goldstein, brought "the sexy" and scandalous to NYC week-after-week in those pre-Internet/social media days. I remember watching Robin regularly during my high school years (and then in repeats for years afterwards) and she was truly a, uh, needed night cap.

I've blogged about Robin over the years, including back in 2009! And I interviewed former Robin Byrd guest, former adult star Hyapatia Lee, back in 2019. And now ... mainstream culture has caught up with Mr NYC, giving us this documentary about this NYC icon (believe it or not, it's produced by Sarah Jessica Parker), and proving, yet again, that Mr NYC is Ahead of His Time.

I'm looking forward to seeing this doc and also feel, quite smugly, that I recognized Robin's cultural significance much earlier than anyone else! 

Postscript: Robin's show ended in April, 1999, just weeks before I graduated from college and two years before 9/11. It felt like, feels like, the end of old NYC and my childhood. Le sigh. 

While the City Sleeps

 

Review: "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999)

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.  

America's Gateway

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. 

Union Square -- October 11, 2025, 9:01 PM

Tales of the NYC Underground

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:

Flying Home to NYC @ Night

Late Night in Winter

Late night television was born in NYC.

When the Tonight Show with Steve Allen premiered in 1954, it created a whole new world, not only for television, but for the entire culture. Late night TV was a America's bedtime story. During his 30-year reign as host of the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson was the nation's comforter-in-chief. In the years and decades since, so many other late night shows and hosts have come and gone that it's hard to keep track. And, of course, late night TV extended for beyond NYC, into "beautiful downtown Burbank" and the West Coast.

But late night TV has always been, at heart, a New York City thing. Like the city itself, it's always been a little edgy, a little nasty, a little smartass, a little offbeat, and yet always had a big welcoming heart.

Think Letterman. Think Jon Stewart. 

So it's a sad occasion that the Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been cancelled. In May 2026 it will end completely. Its network, CBS, is getting out of the late night business altogether. The reasons for this cancellation are, according to CBS, purely financial. But it's entirely possible that it was done to help grease the wheels of a huge merger that is taking place between CBS and Skydance. Skydance is owned by ultra-Republican billionaire Larry Ellison and Colbert used his show daily to bash Trump. Ending the show not only saves CBS money but also appeases the FTC to approve the merger, as well as Larry Ellison's ego (it's rumored that he'll turn CBS into another Fox News).

The financial and the political are, let's face it, one and the same. One hand washes the other. Power speaks to power. 

Also, the economics of late night TV awful: the Tonight Show is down to four nights a week, Late Night lost its band, other late night shows have been cancelled and not replaced, it's a shrinking, dying breed. People would rather watch streaming or YouTube or watch their phones. Who needs late night TV?

But it's a sad moment for late television, for the culture, and for NYC. Something has been lost, never to be replaced. We'll remember late night TV the same way some people remember cigarette ads on TV or other cultural ephemera. Gone, but not forgotten.

P.S. the Colbert show is the only late night show that I went to a taping of, and I wrote about it briefly in 2018. 

Mr NYC in Paris: Le Grande Finale

And so now we come to the end. This will be the last post about my Paris trip and my personal favorite -- pictures from the nighttime bus tour we took.

It whizzed us around the city as darkness fell and the city of lights began to shine. So many of the places we had seen looked different, and even more beautiful, in the evening lights (even my oldest kid, who likes to be grouchy all the time, broke out into a smile). 

In addition to all the famous sights we also saw places like the L'Olympia Theater (where the Velvet Underground reunited in 1993 and recorded their big double live album) and the original Moulin Rouge. An incredible, memorable night!

Remembering "Night After Night with Allan Havey" (1989-1992)

The late night television talk show has been a staple of American life ever since Steve Allen launched The Tonight Show in NYC in 1954. Over the decades the names of late night hosts became staples of American culture: Carson, Letterman, Leno, and Stewart ruled the late night airways collectively for over half a century, and their replacements -- Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, and ... Stewart -- have all dominated late night TV for over a decade now. 

In those same decades there have been lots of other talk shows that have come and gone -- Merve Griffen, Dick Cavett, Conan, Corden, and many others. Up until a few years ago there was a glut of late night shows until economic pressures led to many of them being cancelled. Even the big late night shows are in decline -- their ratings are way down, their doing fewer shows per week, their losing their bands, and they no longer have the kind of agenda-setting, social currency that they used to have.

But thirty-odd years ago, the late night landscape was very different. It was the time of the big transition from the 30-plus year reign of Johnny Carson to the duopoy of Leno and Letterman.

It was also the time when Arsenio Hall -- young, loud, black, and wild -- challenged the white-guy late night establishment and created memorable TV moments, including then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton playing the saxaphone and then getting elected president. Late night TV was a hot place, and it seemed like it was the pulse of American culture.

One totally forgotten late night show from that time was Night After Night with Allan Havey. It ran on Comedy Central (first called the Comedy Channel) from 1989 to 1992 and was really different and quite original. 

Coming several years before the start of The Daily Show, Night After Night was a largely tradditional talk show except for some big differences. Allen would begin each show sitting at his desk and, instead of the regular monologue, he'd just talk and riff. It was more like the opening to a radio show than a TV show but he did it really well and was very funny. Then he'd interview his guests and the conversations were much more interesting than anything you'd hear on the late night shows. This show obviously ran many years before podcasts but his interviews were more in-depth and podcast-like than anything else at the time. Also, he played a constant gag on the audience -- his studio audience literally consisted of one person, his "audience of one", usually someone visiting NYC.

Night After Night was a calm, smart, funny show that was, quite frankly, a relief from the raucous, loud, and sometimes quite dumb late night shows. And it was really New York, almost like a late-night Manhattan cable access show brought into the mainstream. 

I remembering watching this show in high school and enjoyed it a lot. I remember on the night that Johnny Carson retired in 1992, they simply paused the show so that everyone else could watch it, and instead just showed an advertisement for Tabasco the whole time. I remember he interviewed the lady who played (and still plays) Lisa Simpson who talked about how many times she had turned eight on the show. And I remember this episode from 1992 when he interviewed an actress/comedien named Stephanie Hodge who was the star of a Saturday night sitcom on NBC called Nurses (a spinoff of another show called Emptyness that was itself a spinoff of The Golden Girls). It aired in the summer of that year, just before I started 10th grade -- and just months before Night After Night was cancelled, and Stephanie Hodges was fired from Nurses. 

Many other late night shows have obviously come and gone since Night After Night was cancelled -- and Allan Havey has gone on to have a great career as an actor, including appearing on Mad Men. But there's never quite been another late night show like this, a really funky NYC show, and so Mr NYC is happy to remember this little piece of NYC late-night culture from a very different time.

Classic Mr NYC

Five years ago, on New Year's Eve 2019, I did a big interview with former adult film start, and current Native American activist, Hyapatia Lee. She talked freely about her amazing life and career, including about the times she visited NYC and appeared on the Robin Byrd Show.

Well, Hyapatia also has a great YouTube channel and, in her most recent post, she talks more about her time in NYC, her visits to Robin's show, and her experiences in the business. Enjoy! Love you Hyapatia!

And, again, Mr NYC is ahead of his time!

Review: "The Warriors" (1979) & "Warriors" (2024)

If there was ever a movie that epitomized the idea of a scary NYC-at-night hellscape, then it's The Warriors. Released in 1979 and directed by Walter Hill (a few years before his big Eddie Murphy star-making hit 48 Hours), The Warriors looks and feels almost as if aliens had invaded Earth and are fighting their intergalactic battle on the streets and subways of NYC.  

The movie takes place over the course of one night -- firmly, almost definitively placing itself in the realm of great NYC night movies.

The plot involves various gangs that have convened in Van Cortland park in the Bronx for a massive gang summit. One of them, the Warriors, has made the long trek from Coney Island to attend. The biggest gang leader in the city, Cyrus, announces to the amassed gangs that they should work together, respect each others turf, not kill each other, and use their collective power to overwhelm the police and control the city. He lays out his plan while, every so often, yelling "Can you dig it"? Dig it they do -- until a rival gang to the Warriors shoots Cyrus dead, turns around and blames the Warriors for the murder, and all hell breaks loose.

From there, the Warriors escape and start a long, violent trip back to Coney Island, chased by other gangs and the cops.

Knives and guns and mellees and Molotov cocktails frustrate their journey as they escape into Tremont, then 96th street and Broadway, in and out of Riverside Park, arriving later at Union Square, before finally making it back to Coney Island at early dawn -- only to find that they were still being persued by their rivals. Along the way they hook up with a hot chick (because, well, of course) and a radio DJ narrates their journey along the way. There's even a scene in the park that features a future Oscar-winner (but I won't give it away).

Can you dig it?

The Warriors had a completely unknown cast (some of whom went onto other movies but none who became huge stars) and was a modest box office hit at the time before becoming a cult classic. (Apparently at screenings in the early weeks of its release resulted in violent incidents from people trying to live out the action they were watching on screen.) Even though the book was based on a novel, the heart of the story comes from the Greek legend of the Odyssey, about how the path of humanity is just to go home. 

The Warriors is a wild, fun, and bizarre movie -- some of the fight scenes drag but they're never boring. The cast is young and colorful and full of energy. Most of all, it's the kind of dangerous, subversive movie that no major studio would dare make today. It's a movie in and of its time -- but its themes of youthful alienation and the allure of violence resonants into our day.

In fact, The Warriors resonates so much that Lin-Manuel Miranda himself decided to give it a musical adaptation.

Recently he released a "concept album" simply called Warriors, retelling the story of the movie with an all-female gang (there may be a stage version but that hasn't come to fruition yet). On the album, amongst others, are the featured voices are Marc Anthony, Billy Porter, Lauryn Hill, Hamilton's Phillipa Soo, Busta Rhymes, and Colman Domingo. I've only heard the album once but obviously it's good -- if not entirely memorable like Hamilton. 

So I highly suggest watching the movie and listening to the album and just be grateful that, in our day and age, if you get lost in NYC late at night you can just use your phone to get a cab.

Review: "Wolfs" & the NYC Night Movie

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. 

NYC Christmas @ Night

Scorsese & Lebowitz Talk "After Hours"

If you love the movies of Martin Scorsese and the comedy of Fran Lebowitz, then check out their conversation from 2022 about what might be Marty's least known NYC movie -- After Hours from 1985 (I blogged about it very briefly in 2008).

Even hardcore Scorsese fans might have missed this one -- unlike his crime movies or period pieces, this is a wacky surreal comedy about a guy who gets lost in Soho at night because of some broad.

That's it, that's the movie.

But it's still worth seeing -- even though you should expect it to be a typical Scorsese movies. I love it, not only because it's a Scorsese movie or an NYC movie but because it's a night movie, a movie set in world of NYC all its own.

As I said in my 2008 post, Mary made this movie after his early Golden Age (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) and before his platinum age (Goodfellas, The Departed, etc.). He had just made King of Comedy which was a big flop and he was on the outs with the big studios -- so he made this little independent movie (without regular star Robert De Niro) to show that he was still in the game, still a great talent.

And the rest his movie history. He ended up winning Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this and soon it was onto The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, etc. 

After Hours might not be Scorsese's best or most beloved movie, but it's certainly one of his best NYC movies and it's the movie that saved his career. 

Blood Moon NYC

Random Visions of 1980s NYC

In order, they are:

- Glenn Frey's 1985 video for his song "You Belong to the City", a sexy and gauzy dreamscape of NYC at night (never mind the screenshots of Miami Vice, it was because this song appeared in the then-hit show).

- An odd commercial starring our favorite NYC DJ Allison Steele who makes me want to go back in time and buy the stereo she's selling.

- And, finally, a behind the scenes look at the making of the 1989 movie Slaves of New York. You can also find a longer look at creation of this clasic NYC flick the here. 

Review: "Night on Earth" (1991)

Jim Jarmusch is one of the most successful independent movie directors of the last forty years with such classics as Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, Broken Flowers and others on his resume. An Ohio native, he came to NYC as a young man and quickly established himself in the city's cultural firmament as one of its best and boldest directors. And although an NYC-archetype, many of Jarmusch's movie's are set on the road, are about characters leaving somewhere and looking for something elsewhere, stories of discovery. And, although an American director, Jarmusch's movies have always had a global flavor and focus.

Night on Earth might be Jarmusch's masterpiece and his most NYC and global film. And it's one of my favorite moves ever. 

Set on one night in five different cities around the world (LA, NYC, Paris, Rome & Helsinki), Night on Earth is about the unique, special, and totally transitory moments that take place between cab drivers and their passengers, between strangers, between people going from one place to another -- both literally and figuratively. Each segment of this film is totally different from the other, some being very sweet and touching, some being extremely funny, and others being quite sad. In fact, each segment manages, brilliantly, to capture all of these different things at once. The point of each segment in each city isn't the story -- it's the journey, the interactions, the characters. 

The movie is about capturing a small moment in the time of each these people's lives in each of these cities -- showing how, around the the world, whatever race we might be, whatever color we might be, whatever we might strive for, we are all basically the same -- human beings.

A truly global phenomenon. 

If you've never seen Night on Earth, I won't ruin the segments for you -- please, go out and watch it now. The only problem with this movie is being denied the pleasure of getting to see it for the first time. The cast is amazing -- Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Espisito, Rosie Perez, Roberto Benigni, and many other international actors I had never heard of before. 

The NYC segment is one of the best -- it involves a guy trying to get home from Times Square to Brooklyn, a cabbie from Germany who can barely drive and used to work as a clown, and a wild profane woman who fights and flirts with both of them. The three actors in this segment -- Esposito, Perez, and Armin Mueller-Stahl -- are wonderful together. And, of course, all three of them would go onto greater career glory in big movies and get Oscar and Emmy nominations, but, for me, this movie is what I'll remember them for.  

Night on Earth is one of a very few movies that makes me happy, makes me feel warm inside. I hope it does the same for you.