Review: "Furious" (2026)

I'm happy to say that my life has been so busy lately that I haven't been able to watch much television. However, after returning from vacation, I caught up on the new Hulu show Furious and, damn, it's crazy.

It's rare that you see an NYC show set in NYC that crosses between the high and low of the city, that goes from domestic violence shelters to high rise luxury apartment buildings, and devles into a subject matter that we'd all rather look away from -- the horrors of sex trafficking.

This series is clearly based on the Epstein case since, at the center of Furious, is a wealthy man named Jay Easton. The story involves a young ex-NYPD cop/current FBI agent named Alice (the amazing Emmy Rossum) who pairs up with a cranky middle-aged agent named Nora (the even more amazing Quincy Tyler Bernstine) and her best guy-friend Danny (Scott McNair), a sad-sack cop, as they investigate a series of murders involving wealthy men. Their work leads to a realization that all of these men were attackhed to a sex trafficking ring, and are meeting their doom at the hands of a young woman named Catherine (played by an insanely talented actress named Lola Pettigrew), a former victim of the ring. Alice, Nora, and Danny's work is greatly complicated by their messy personal lives along with colleagues and supervisors who are interfering their work. 

Furious is a show about corruption, greed, sick lust, buried secrets, and how the misbehavior of wealthy and powerful people can leave a massive trail of broken lives and human destruction. This show is not for the faint of heart but it's incredible, stunning drama.

This show was created by Liz Merriweather which is a suprise since her previous hit was the sitcom New Girl. The cast is incredible, and it includes the always wonderful Hope Davis as Jay Easton's Ghislaine Maxwell-like daughter, Jake Lacey as Alice's abusive ex-boyfriend, and Campbell Scott as Easton's lawyer (and one of Catherine's victim). There's also an actor named Steve Wray who plays a disabled friend of Alice's and he is so good, so funny, I hope he gets an Emmy.

So watch this show. Then remember to keep your love ones close.

 

The American Rasputin's Home -- March 21st, 2026, 4:14 PM

Russia's Grigori Rasputin lived at Gorokhovaya Street, Apt. 20 in St. Petersburg, Russia:

America's Rasputin, Jeffrey Epstein, lived at 9 East 71st Street in New York, NY:

Two buildings on opposite sides of the world -- a century apart -- sitting quietly on city streets wherein the course of history was changed and two great empires were shaken to their foundations.

The Epstein Mansion in NYC History

As the world continues to grapple with fallout from the Epstein Files -- and the horrible system of abuse that he enabled and that society ignored for too long -- the issue of the 21st-century Rasputin's real estate (in which so much ugly stuff happened) continues. 

Epstein's Island in the Carribean as well as his house in Palm Beach are the most notable places. As was his townhouse -- the largest in Manhattan -- on the Upper East Side. (See the video below for more.)

The house has a long and varied history, like any piece of NYC real estate, and the story behind it is an interesting as it is sordid. One thing that has been noted is that the house used to be a school -- which is deeply, darkly ironic considering the man's crimes.

And here's the  thing: I remember it as a school!

The Epstein mansion used to be the home for the Birch Wathen School. It was one of those fancy townhouses on both the Upper East and West Sides that were converted into apartments or schools or various business & non-profit headquarters in the 20th century. In 1989 Birth Wathen merged with the Lenox school and it moved ... leaving the mansion vacant. The Victoria Secret founder Lex Wexner bought it and, so it seems, turned it back into a home. He eventually gifted it to Epstein who then made it into his headquarters for foul deeds.

The fact that a townhouse that was turned into a school was eventually turned back into a home is one of those regressive things like a republic becoming a monarchy that's really depressing.

Anyhoo, when I was a kid I went to another private school nearby -- also in a converted townhouse. And one year I took a private school bus service to school that my parents paid for (one of my fellow bus-mates was Cameron Douglas, son of Michael, who was a nice kid but sadly whose life went awry). But the other school that used this service was, you guesed it, Birch Wathen. And every day we would stop first at Birch Wathen -- and the mansion that would, decades later, fall into infamy.

I never went to the school nor was in the mansion so it's interesting to hear stories of those who did. But I was close to it back in the day, a creepy thing to realize now.

Postscript: about three years ago I walked by the mansion on a cold weekday morning. No one was there thankfully, no voyeurs or people taking pictures -- at least not as far as I could tell. Epstein was dead, the FBI had taken whatever they had needed back in 2019, and it was just sitting there, forelorn.

But there was one clear sign that something was amiss, that something was wrong with this place: the huge double-doors where Prince Andrew was seen poking his head out of and where lots of young women of various ages were seen going in and out -- was covered up by a big ugly wood plank. It was a decidedly weird thing (I assume that it was boarded up because the cops didn't want people breaking into the mansion but who knows). I thought about taking a picture of it and posting it on the blog but I didn't ... it just felt wrong and exploitative and voyeuristic of a tragic situation. So I let it be. 

But this story is far, far from over. 

Remembering Francis Ellen Work: Princess Diana's NYC Great-Grandma

There are, and have been, royal scandals galore -- Mrs Fitzherbert! Mayerling! Rasputin! Wallis Simpson! Epstein! Megxit! 

And, of course, Diana.

Her notoriously failed 1980s marriage to the then-Prince of Wales/now King Charles III has become the stuff of legend. 

The irony is that, while the marriage itself was a failure, as a royal union it was a huge success: Diana produced an heir and a spare, and they've now produced heirs and spares. The marriage of Charles and Diana may not have lasted but its legacy has kept the dynastic royal line for the House of Windsor secure for the rest of this century.

But did you know that the future Monarchs of the United Kingdom have not only American but also NYC blood?

See, Princess Diana's great-grandma was a New York-native named Frances Ellen Work. She was a classic "dollar bride", a rich new money American who married a broke English bloke with a title.

The marriage was as big a disaster as Frances Ellen's great-granddaughter's -- and Frances' father forced them to get divorced and bring her two sons back to America (much like Queen Elizabeth would force her son to divorce Diana and hand over their two sons). Frances Ellen's rich American father not only hated his British ex-son-in-law but gnerally hated the lust of Britain's nobility for American women and money. 

And here we get to a hinge of history.

Frances Ellen's father stipulated in his will that his sons must never go back to England. They must agree never to set foot in the UK or forfeit their $14 million inheritance. But, when the old man died, the sons appealed to their relatives -- who had also inherited money -- to see if they would agree to waive this clause and let them get their cash without the travel restriction. They agreed. And then one of the sons, Edmund, moved to the UK, married a woman named Ruth, and they had a daughter named Frances. This Frances then married Viscount Spencer and their daughter Diana would then go into history.

Imagine, for moment, if Edmund's relative's had so no. Imagine if they had enforced this clause. Edmund wouldn't have moved to the UK, married, and fathered Princess Diana's mother. And the course of British and world history would be very different.

But it's not. And one day the crown of the UK will be worn by someone with NYC lineage. 

Listen to this great podcast about the life and legacy of Frances Ellen Work. It's a story of booze, bucks, broads, gambling, divorce, and glittering crown.

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.  

The FCC Goes Goodfellas

“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.”

Jeffrey Epstein: The 21st-Century Rasputin

The Jeffrey Epstein saga never ends.

The mysteries around this dead pedo -- gone but not forgotten (nor mourned) -- seems to become bigger and bigger as time goes on. We appear to know so much more yet so much less at the same time.  

It's been hopelessly politicized, and I won't get into that miserable drama here. But what fascinates me about this whole saga is who Epstein was -- and why the media and public hunger for him can never be sated. 

Then it hit me: he's Rasputin!

Epstein is a 21st-century American version of the shadowy, sexually devious early-20th century Russian figure who seemed to come out of nowhere and became a friend and corruptor of the rich, powerful, and famous.

And like Rasputin, Epstein died under bizarre and shocking circumstances. 

The parallels are not exact: Rasputin was a staretz, a spiritual guide. Epstein was financier, a finance guy. Rasputin came from poverty in Siberia. Epstein came from a lower middle-class background in Brooklyn. He also became super-rich and was deeply vain, while Rasputin, for all his notoriety, did not seek riches, dressed like a slob, and smelled. And while Rasputin actually attained more direct power -- becoming so close to the last Russian Imperial family that he was eventually running the government -- Epstein's proximity to power was much more transactional and opaque.

Yet there is one big, overarching similarity of Rasputin and Epstein -- namely,  they beg the question WHO THE HELL WAS THIS GUY?

Rapsutin was a charlatan, he wasn't even a real priest. He said he spoke to God and could cure diseases when all he really did was utter platitudes, prayed with people, and "laid hands" on them. And yet it led him into the heart of late-Russian nobility and monarchy -- and, with that, he got power and influence and a place in history.

Epstein now has a place in history too, and its all the more remarkable considering that he wasn't really anybody important. He was rich, yes, and that got him access to the famous and powerful (although when you splash around cash its not hard to get doors opened to those kinds of people). But Epstein had no real institutional power nor public-facing career. He wasn't the CEO of a publicly traded or financial company, he didn't run a media or entertainment or real estate empire or any kind of big business, he wasn't a politician nor served in government, and he didn't run or manage or own anything big or well-known. All he did (supposedly) was manage money for rich people. 

And yet Rasputin and Epstein managed to work their ways into the heighest echelons of society and power in two of the most powerful empires on earth.

To a certain extent there's a degree of snobbishness in how people regard them: who are (or were) these people to think they could come from places like Siberia or Coney Island and rub shoulders with the mighty? They were climbers, upstarts, wannabes, who crashed the gates and should have been kicked out by their betters.

That's one way of looking at them.

But another way to view them is as examples of rot -- and how great countries wither and die from the inside. 

In the history of the Russian Revolution, Rasputin and his power and influence have become examples of how delusional, corrupt, and stupid late Imperial Russia had become. And Epstein -- with his private plane, Carribean island, big houses and weird artifacts and pedophilia -- is an example of late-stage capitalism, and how morally bankrupt, debauched, and nihilistic American society is today, fueled by greed, and abandoning the common good.

And in early-20th century Russian and early-21th century America, the public and the powerful allowed themselves to be controlled by gross con artists -- and we have (and will) rue the day.

Rasputin and Epstein are now no longer simply creepy wannabes who died -- they are myths, dark haunting figures that say something damning about our lives and times, about our societies, and what we have all, one way or another,  sadly become.

They are the stench left behind of dead and dying empires.  

Vote Harvey Epstein!

In Search of Exiles

One-hundred years ago tonight Prince Edward of the United Kingdom was honored with a big dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He was concluding a long North American tour, previously visiting Canada and Washington DC, and was closing it out in grand style in NYC. At this moment in time, Edward was at the center of the world -- the handsome young star of the royal family, icon of the British Empire, and a future King. The world genuflected to him, he was beloved and  feted everywhere he went -- and it was impossible to imagine on this night 100 years ago that, less than 20 years later, he would become one of the most famous exiles in history.

1919 was a turning point in world history -- a year after the end of the War to End All Wars, WWI,  known then as the Great War. The world was putting itself back to together, trying to pick up the spiritual and literal rubble of the most useless, insane act of violence in world history. The culture was changing too, casting off the crusty old world Edwardian culture and embracing the world of Dadaism and post-structuralism. This brilliant podcast from WNYC is all about how the "shell shock" of the war changed the culture of the world forever.

As for Edward himself, he would return to the Waldorf many years after 1919. He had abdicated the throne, a fallen man, exiled from his country and family, shacking up with his twice-divorced American wife, uninvited to his niece's wedding and coronation. In the new season of The Crown, Edward is shown at the end of his life in 1972, still showing a great, almost masochistic love for the family and monarchy that had doomed him into exile. (Right now, 100 years later, that niece, Queen Elizabeth II, would surely love to exile her son Prince Andrew after his bizarre TV interview where he spoke, badly, about his friendship with the late NYC financier/predator Jeffrey Epstein. While he probably won't be forced into literal exile like Edward was, Andrew probably will be in a kind of functional exile from now on. He shamed himself, and now his family and his country want little to do with him. So into the wasteland of exile he goes.)

But exile isn't just for royalty! In the era of #MeToo, any number of formerly prominent men are being exiled from their careers and social lives, banished from their professional circles and polite society. Liked Prince Edward 100 years, they used to exist at the center of things, they were the honored guests in powerful worlds -- only to be cast out, shunned, told to take a physical and reputational hike.

What does it mean to be an exile? To be banished from a place or a group of people? It means, most simply, to occupy a negative space -- not to live but simply to exist in a place far away (literally and otherwise)  from where you want to be. It means your invitation has been rescinded, your credentials revoked, your entry badge confiscated -- you're persona non grata in a place where you were once very ... persona grata. In short: it means you go from being wanted to unwanted.

What's more painful than that?

Here's another great example of a famous exile.

The great NYC journalist Pete Hamill, in late 1974, visited San Clemente, California in search of Richard Nixon. Two years earlier Nixon had won the biggest landslide in American presidential history -- he carried 49 states! -- and was as popular and powerful as any president had ever been. Nixon strode the world stage like a colossus, opening diplomatic relations with China, limiting nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union, and winding down the war in Vietnam. And then ... in 1973 and 1974, the Watergate scandal consumed him, forcing him to resign in August 1974 and into exile in California. In this article, Hamill roams around the area near Nixon's home, talking to people there about whether or not they have seen America's most famous exile (they hadn't), wondering about the state of mind of a man who very recently had not only lived in the White House but who also seemed to have the literal world at his feet -- and was now a hermit in a small Southern California town, hidden not only from the world he used to dominate but from his very own neighbors.

Later on Nixon would move to NYC (he died here in 1994), not quite as reviled as he had once been but still an exile from the world -- the political world -- that he had once ruled.

But being exile isn't just an existential state, it's more a state of mind. Being an exile is defined by a never-ending "wanting", a non-stop desire to have or be something you once had or were, now gone and locked away from you. It's defined by the aforementioned negative space, by a perennial emotional and mental sense of absence.

Being an exile is like being a living void, a sort of real-life zombie.  

Right now, there are hearings going on in DC about whether or not Donald Trump, the most vile president in US history, should be impeached. Maybe he will be, maybe he won't. But we can only hope that this modern day monster will be one day become an exile too, banned not only from the White House and political world but from the America's consciousness. Hopefully he will suffer a poitical and reputional fate, a total and complete exile, as bad as the ones Edward VIII and Richard Nixon and many others have suffered.

Searching for Mojo

Sincere apologies for the lack of blogging, my job/life has gotten extra busy lately -- in a good way, but still time and energy consming. Also, quite frankly, there hasn't been anything especially too fun blog about -- Jeffrey Epstein, the vile summer weather, and the current socio-political environment is so depressing that it's killed by mojo.

But I'm going on vacation soon and Fall is Coming so hopefully the mojo -- and more frequent blogging -- will return!

Also, this (this man, the bro of the Guv, sure has his mojo!):

Blame it on the Rain

The biggest news story in NYC right now -- besides Jeffery Epstein -- is the weather.

This past weekend it was scorching, brutally hot. If you went outside you became drenched in sweat within minutes. Well, the heat went away but now we're still getting drenched --  literally. For the past two days, the city has been pummelled with downpours, the heavens opening up and dumping water on us all. There have been floods and washouts galore across the five boroughs. It's wrecking havoc!

Global warming is truly having its fun with NYC -- massive storms are the new norm.

Oh Milli Vanilli, you tried to warn us!

Jeffrey Epstein Faces Justice

It's about damn time!