The basic definition of "fringe" is the border or outer part of an area or group. It's the tassles around the rug, the frame around the picture, the person or thing at the very edge of the photgraph, the inside of something that's almost outside, someone or something peripheral to the main host, the mainsteam.
It's being a part of something -- but barely.
In New York City, all of us probably feel like we're living on the fringe, whether it's our neighborhood, our communities, or our jobs. To live in NYC is to live on the edge, so of speak.
This is a city of, by, and for the fringe.
But when you read these two stories you realize how some people in this city truly live at the fringes of it, both literally and figuratively.
First, this big story about the residents of Broad Channel, a neighborhood of islands in Jaimaca Bay -- between JFK airport and Howard Beach on one side and the Rockaway Peninsula on the other -- where people live in houses on the water, get around in boats, and are devoted to a quiet, simply life while peering across at the skyline of Manhattan, inhabiting a different world. The people of Broad Channel love and are completely devoted to it but climate change is challenging life there. The water levels are rising along with more frequent and nasty storms, and life in Broad Channel is under threat. How people are adapting to it in this "fringe" of NYC will tell us a lot about how much climate change threatens not just Broad Channel but the city as a whole.
Second, this fascinating profile of a young playwrite who is so devoted to his craft that he is literally staging plays in people's living rooms. In a city teaming with talented and creative people, who crave an audience for their work, this writer -- who is well outside of the mainstream of NYC theater -- is willing to go to the people, hunt for an audience. Instead of waiting for them to come to him, he goes to them. It's arguably a "fringy" way of being a playwrite but it shows you how far some people will go for the love of their art.
So I admire and respect those New Yorkers who live and work on the fringe of the city -- in some ways, this is a fringe blog, a weird outlier of the NYC media world. And I think that's cool!
I blogged once before that Mr NYC is an underworld, an underground, a secret thing all its own. This blog remains totally uncorrupted, pure and free from any ties that bind. It floats through time and space, hurtling like ... a basebell .. forever into the infinite. In my mind, I combine the notions of the underground and the underworld into the "underwelt."
Allow me to expound.
Recently I decided to re-read Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a massive novel about the second half of 20th Century America. It follows two people, Nick and Klara, who used to live in the Bronx. After a short affair in 1952, their lives go in dramatically different directions until they meet again, briefly, in the Arizona dessert in 1992. As we follow their paths over five decades and 800+ pages, we also encounter their various friends, lovers, and family members, we hurtle through some of the most dramatic events of the Cold War, and we literally end inside the place that would come to rule the incipient millennium -- the Internet. The novel's various plots and touches with history are held together by one thing -- a baseball, the very homerun ball hit by Bobby Thomson on October 3rd, 1951, the "Shot Heard 'Round the World." Tracking that ball over these decades becomes the thread that holds the whole unwieldy empire of the novel together.
So what's the underworld part? How does that relate?
Throughout the novel there is this recurrent theme of trash, of waste, of buried nuclear weapons and radioactive debris, of discarded objects and people, of loss. The threat of nuclear annihilation hangs over the novel, the Cold War ruling it completely, married to the irony that a baseball is roughly the same size as the uranium found inside a nuclear weapon. This is the "underworld" of the novel, the stuff we want to forget, the stuff that falls away (it is also literalized as an early 1930s German movie called Underwelt that, at one point, Klara watches -- as ominous a piece of media as ever existed).
The underworld, the underground, the underwelt, defines itself in opposition to the above ground, outside world. It is a constant friction, a perennial resistance. Like the aforementioned trash -- we want to forget it, we want it out of our lives, but it never goes away.
Quite simply the underwelt is anything buried, anything like ...
... secret worlds, worlds within worlds, worlds not easily found or accessed, worlds that both tempt and repulse us, worlds that can trap or set us free, worlds with no rules, no laws, no obligations, no reason, no compromise, worlds of pleasure and pain and big messes and invisible orders, worlds free of logic or logics that exist on their own terms, worlds that only a chosen few can see, hear, feel, smell, touch, taste, worlds that we create, that belong to us, at odds with ... the outside world.
And what brings these underworlds above ground into the outside world? What makes the imperious ... pervious? What kills the resistance, ends the frictions?
The Media. The Law. Money. Time. Mother Nature. Death.
They exist to root out anything buried, to burrow into these undergrounds, to conquer these underworlds -- to corrupt and change them, to make them public and own them, to put them on display, to disrupt the "underwelt."
So where does the underwelt exist? Where do we find it?
Some are literal, physical, or spiritual, or "other": travel, sex, crime, excitement, horror, secrets, memories, trash, fringe culture, back alleys/basements/attics/hallways. Any place where we believe we can go and do and see and feel and touch and taste and hear whatever we want, all personal inhibitions and societal strictures disregarded.
Now more than ever the Internet is the ultimate "underwelt" as well as the ultimate "underwelt" disruptor -- a paradox that our society struggles with every day and that rips it apart.
But those are not the only underwelts we live in. There is one ultimate underwelt one we all wish we could travel to, one that is forever out of reach -- the past.
The final sentence to the prologue of DeLillo's masterpiece is, "It is all falling indelibly into the past." It can't help but remind me of the final sentence of another 20th century American masterpiece, The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." This underwelt exists everywhere, around us and inside us, and yet ... we can't go there. We want to, desperately, we all want to hide away inside it, we all want to, as vernacular of this particular present goes, "quarantine" there.
Yet we can't. We try and fail constantly, it's the most quixotic of quixotic undertakings. Pointless.
The past is everything and nothing, everywhere and nowhere. The past exists but we can't possess it. The past is forever conquered by the future.
This blog explores the underwelt of NYC. It is both within and outside it, both its captor and its hostage. It's part of the present, even the future, and yet ... it is borne back ceaselessly into the indelible past, into the NYC underwelt, both drowning and unable to swim in this empty, overflowing pool.
If you want to explore the Mr NYC underwelt, what it means in general and what it means to me, go here.
As you're doubtless aware, around the country, a small bunch of morons are holding pathetic rallies where they protest the social distancing effots and lockdowns, etc., that are necessary to stop this pandemic in its tracks. However, that isn't stopping some Republicans from demanding -- SHOUTING! -- that the economy must be "reopened" ASAP so that they can back to their normal lives, making money, and hanging out with people. These idots don't seem to realize or care that, by "reopening", more and more people would get sick, meaning this pandemic would continue even longer, and the economy will only continue to suffer.
Logic has never been a Republican strong suit.
While it's an extremely tiny, fringe number of people who are engaging in these dumb rallies, the media is treating it like it's some kind of mass uprising akin to the French Revolution. It's not. It's a freak show. The vast, vast majority of Americans approve the lockdowns and social distancing and don't want to do the stupid and dangerous things these "protesters" are demanding.
Out in the most Republican part of NYC, Staten Island, one of these protests was planned for last Sunday -- only nobody came to it! The cops did, in order to monitor and hopefully break it up, but this turned out to be totally unnecessary. No one showed.
Call it the protest that never was -- and thank you Staten Island for having some sense.
Proves that, in NYC, even our Republicans are better!
Long before YouTube and the Internet allowed everyone to become a "content creator", the only place where you could find oddballs and fringe characters producing weird and uncommercial stuff was on public access TV.
In NYC, on Manhattan Public Access, there was a show that merged the amateur and fringe with the more mainstream -- called Beyond Vaudeville, it ran from 1986 to 1996, and was hosted by an Andy Kaufmanesque guy named Frank Hope. It was a talk/variety show where a number of randomly assorted guests would talk while Frank and his hyper sidekick David would say or do outrageous things that got amazingly cringey reactions from their guests.
Although Beyond Vaudeville was on for ten years, it only aired 75 time. The show did not have a regular schedule, it would just pop-up every so often, and its guests were beyond eclectic -- they included the dwarf from Twin Peaks, Barry Williams from The Brady Bunch, NYC talk show host Joe Franklin, WNBC news anchor Sue Simmons, actor Fred Williard, Grandpa Al Lewis, Tom Arnold, Oscar-winners Shirley Jones and Kim Hunter, Tiny Tim, as well as strange comedians, dancers, jugglers, and others. Others who appeared on the show were Mr NYC favorite Alison Steele and as well as Mr NYC interviewee Michael Musto. I've posted a few episodes below -- watch them and take a peak at this memorably weird show at a time when NYC was still memorably weird.
As a pop culture junkie, a podcasting junkie, and an NYC junkie, it was a thrill to discover the Brooklyn Fit Chick blog. This imaginative, dynamic site houses not one, not two, but count 'em five (!) podcasts that cover the gamut of popular culture -- everything from tawdry reality shows, to great music, to classic films, and, as the monicker implies, fitness (which she also teaches). Fitness is perhaps the only thing I'm not a junkie about although my New Year's resolution will be to become one! Teaching fitness and producing five podcasts certainly requires a lot of energy, and Margo D aka. the Brooklyn Fit Chick has more of it than most. She even had enough energy to answer a few questions for Mr NYC readers where she talks about her podcasts, feminism, pop culture, and, naturally, fitness.
Before I ask anything else, why do call your blog the Brooklyn Fit Chick -- and what makes you or anyone else a Fit Bottomed Girl?
I entered the Blogging world ten years ago just to have a hobby from working all of the time. I wanted to talk about health and fitness which I did for years. Now I concentrate more on pop culture. A Fit Bottomed Girl is more of a taste of mind than a physical designation. You seek to be fit in mind, body, and spirit. Because Fit Bottoms come in all shapes and sizes!
Tell us quickly about the different podcasts you host, and what inspired their creation?
I met my "Book Vs Movie" co-host Margo P. at a fitness convention five years ago. We were both fitness Bloggers at the time. She had her own podcast at the time and would have me on as an occasional guest. One time, we spent most of the show talking about the book movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil. I just came up with the idea for a show "Book Vs Movie" on the spot. It's now my longest-running show! I'm really proud of how we have grown!
Other shows?
I was a writer for years for the Fit Bottomed Girls site and pitched them the idea to create a podcast about 3 years ago and happily, they said yes! We have over 150 episodes and our content is super inclusive and welcoming. I'm really proud of it. Since then I have helped create other shows including "The Best Neighbors Podcast" which is a pop culture show with my neighbor Erin. (We also dish about reality TV!) "Not Fade Away" is a music show I occasionally attend. The "Dorking Out" show and "What a Creep" I co-host with my friend Sonia. I'm very busy creating them! It's my form of self-expression.
You really seem to love the highs and lows of popular culture -- great movies and music, "guilty pleasures", trashy reality shows -- and getting into the stories behind them. Do you consider yourself a cross-cultural connoisseur?
Yes! I spent a couple of years at Lucky magazine which combined high and low brands for fashion. I feel the same way about music, books, and movies. I kind of love (and hate!) a little bit of everything. I intensely dislike people who claim to hate reading as much as those who have a snobbish attitude about culture.
Your blog focuses a lot, but not exclusively, on female-oriented pop culture. Would you call your blog a feminist blog?
I identify as feminist but my Blog is not about politics. I do call out misogyny and sexism when I see it. But I also love trashy shows like the Bravo Real Housewives. Feminism is not a fringe group!
In addition to all your podcasts, you also teach fitness. As a very lazy person, what's a good workout routine to get back into shape?
Honestly, try to get a good walking routine going if you can manage that. I hurt my ankle last year and had to cut back which was the worst! As a New Yorker, I love walking. The YMCA is an inexpensive option for a gym and they have some great classes. My best advice is to try different workouts until you find something that resonates with you.
What makes a great workout playlist and what are some of your favorites?
I find mixing up different genres of music to be the best option when you have a variety of ages in your classes. In my heart, 90s music will always be my favorite but it can sound "old" to twenty somethings and younger. I try to listen to current music as much as I can and Spotify offers some great suggestions. On my playlists, you will often find Foo Fighters, Lizzo, Pink, Metric, and Rhianna!
What's your favorite thing about Brooklyn and New York City?
The people! New Yorkers are super fun and have a great attitude about life. I love the culture and history here. New Yorker is a wonderful mix of high and low brow entertainment and fashion. The best restaurants are only a subway ride away. What is better than that?
I don't want to be rich, famous, or even that good-looking. I just want to be remembered -- fondly.
Fondly remembered by those who knew me -- and perhaps by some who wish they had.
To me, being fondly remembered is the only measure of a life well-lived. Everything else is puffery, nonsense. A person's real legacy exists in the hearts and minds of those who remember.
I never knew or heard of a man named Hassan Heiserman during his lifetime, but I wish I had. He was one of the last people to come of age during the "Beat Generation" and he knew them all -- he was Allan Ginsburg's roommate, Jack Kerouac created a character in his novel Big Sur after him, and he was Miles Davis' drug dealer. More than that, Hassan was a man on the move, living (squatting really) mostly in NYC but also wandering the country, meeting interesting people, having adventures, and experiencing life to the fullest. He was a man of his times who observed and lived them, he was a walking chronicler of his age. He was "groovy", a real "beat", in the very best meaning of the terms. And, after his recent death, he was very fondly remembered.
Hassan wasn't rich -- far, far from it. Most of his life he was homeless, crashing on people's couches, he never really had a real career except for driving a cab, he lived on the edge, on the fringe, in perpetual movement. Up until the end of his life.
And even though I and many of the people I know have many more material, earthly goods than he did, I envy him. He saw and experienced it all. He lived a full life. Nothing groovier.
I probably won't be remembered. This blog will probably won't be remembered. But I'll try to live a full life -- and maybe, like Hassan, be remembered a little bit fondly by someone.
Okay, so here at Mr NYC, we're gonna get all ghetto for a minute, layin' our smack down and hookin' with da' jive (I have no idea what that means but it sounds "funky").
Anyway, have any of you noticed in the last few weeks that New Yorker extraordinaire, our city's very own fine court jester, Mr. Donald Trump (of real estate and reality TV show fame), blitzing up a media storm, blabbing about running for president? Trump has even joined the lunatic fringe, going all "birther", screaming about President Obama's supposedly non-existent birth certificate (which in fact exists and has been proven multiple times to exist).
Trump is clearly having a good time. And why shouldn't he be? He's been doing this crap for decades, mugging to the camera and the press, saying outrageous stuff, promoting his various corny businesses, all in an attempt to shore up his shallow, narcissistic ego.
Personally, I love the guy. He's a real character, he's never boring, and he's an only in New York type of guy. But the idea of him as a serious presidential candidate is clearly nonsense, and he knows it and we all know it. What's surprising to me, and probably surprising to Trump, is that the media seems to be taking him seriously.
As in, fo' real.
You would like to believe that, in the richest and most powerful country on earth, we would have a sophisticated and shrewd media. That the "playas" in the media world would check and balance the "playas" in the political, business, and entertainment universe. But they don't. They fail miserably. The media in this country continues to get played and made to look foolish.
Think back to when the Bush administration played the media into hyping the threat of non-existent Iraqi WMD that led to one of the longest and most disastrous wars in our nation's history.
Think about the cast of the "Jersey Shore" and all the attention they get for ... doing what exactly?
Think about Charlie Sheen and his insane rants ... and all the attention he gets.
And think about Donald Trump, a bored rich guy, a veteran self-promoter, talking emptily running for president ... and getting all this attention.
I don't blame Trump. He's a playa'. I blame the media -- for letting him play them again and again and again. As foolish as he is, the media is just as foolish for paying him all this attention and taking this clown even semi-seriously. He's an object of ridicule ridiculing the press -- and the press, in its masochistic manner, seems to be enjoying it. As unbelievable as the idea of Donald Trump as President is, the press going gaga over him is equally unbelievable -- and depressingly real.
As the rappers and the pimps might say: either you're a playa or you get played. Donald Trump is a big time playa playin' the playas and they're getting played while he gets paid and gets laid and they don't get paid and probably not laid as much as him.
Last week, former NYC Mayor Koch, former State Comptroller McCall, and former US Senator Al D'Amato released the following letter:
"The victory of Carl Paladino in the Republican Primary was a disappointing day for all New Yorkers. This state has a long history of electing highly qualified, forward-looking statewide candidates - both Democrats and Republicans. Yesterday, however, anger overcame reason and enabled a fringe element to choose the Republican nominee. The end result was the selection of Mr. Paladino, a divisive figure simply not fit to lead this great state. At a time when we need leaders who can bring New Yorkers together, Mr. Paladino practices a destructive brand of politics that will divide our state. He first came to the attention of most New Yorkers when it was revealed that, for years, he has shared racially offensive emails with associates. Including videos popular with white supremacists, these emails are beneath the dignity of a candidate for high office. This, however, was merely a preview of what we have seen along the campaign trail. Mr. Paladino was justifiably condemned by the AntiDefamation League and editorial boards alike for referring to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver - a prominent Jewish leader - as the closest thing New York has to an anti-Christ or a Hitler. Most recently, Mr. Paladino offended basic New York values when he suggested that low income New Yorkers should be sent to prison work camps for lessons in "personal hygiene." That type of hateful comment has no place in our discourse, dehumanizing the poor and playing off of despicable racist ideas. Mr. Paladino is also running a disingenuous campaign. He has portrayed himself as an anti-government crusader, while embodying the very worst of Albany's pay-to-play culture. To quote his own slogan, he is the reason that New Yorkers are "Mad as Hell." He has personally distributed close to a half a million dollars to federal and state candidates, bankrolling the campaigns of numerous allies. This has allowed him to pocket millions of dollars in tax incentives, sweetheart deals, and scores of government contracts. Paladino's real estate empire takes in over $10 million each year in government rents alone. There's a reason why even the chairmen of the Republican and Conservative parties disavowed Mr. Paladino's candidacy, noting that he "stands in stark contrast to what the Republican party stands for," that Paladino is a "dangerous candidate," and that he "tries to appeal to the mean spiritedness" of people. We need a governor who can take on the special interests, not one who is a special interest. We also need a governor who will bring New Yorkers together to take on our common challenges, not drive us apart. Through his own words and actions Carl Paladino has proven himself unfit to serve as Governor - he is exactly the wrong person to lead our state." ALFONSE D'AMATO EDWARD I. KOCH H.CARL MCCALL
A while back Mr NYC blogged about Richard Bey and how influential and entertaining his 1990s talk show was. I finally got the chance to interview him and get his thoughts on his old show, his new show on UBATV, and on media and politics today. So without further ado, here is he, Richard Bey!
You've had a very interesting media career, ranging from Yale Drama School to influential TV talk show personality to radio and web host to appearing in the movie Bruno. How did you manage to have (and survive) such a unique career?
Sheer luck and a significant degree of determination. I was on the waiting list the first year I applied to Yale Drama School. I didn't get in that year so I applied again the next year and was successful. Television was never my ambition (except as an actor) but I had a girlfriend who had an audition for CBS. She asked me to audition with her. They hired me and didn't hire her and I began a career as a television host. After that job ended I replaced Maury Povich in Philadelphia on a live morning show called People Are Talking. I got the audition when a friend, Nancy Glass, recommended me to the program director. I was always auditioning against, replacing or being replaced by Matt Lauer through the late eighties and early nineties. Strangely he replaced me and then I replaced him at Channel 9 at one point. I'm sure, considering how things ended up he certainly doesn't mind.
Really a more relevant question might be 'Why have I not survived?" I think the answer is that I'm always driven to test the medium, push it in a new direction, try something different, mock it's pomposity and artificiality.
The medium doesn't like that! LOL
Tell us about your new show on UBATV.com? What are its biggest challenges and what do you love about it?
I love that I have an hour of television (or Internet vision) to do anything I want! The people I work with are all young, totally supportive and work their butts off to help me make a good show. There is a real feeling of community working together as in the theater which is something you don't find often in broadcast TV (although we did have it for quite a long time on People Are Talking and The Richard Bey Show on channel 9). The biggest challenge is that I have to produce all the elements myself. At 7:30 AM I am scouring the Internet for clips, fotos and stories to use for that day's show. Since it is live I feel it must be current and spontaneous if it is to be compelling so there is a lot of pressure and never enough time to send the crew at UBA everything I want...but we do get enough together to create something interesting, intimate and fun. And Jessica Tallerico is wonderful to work with...I am lucky to have her their with me!
I remember watching the Richard Bey Show in high school and college and thought it was the most hilarious, offensive, strange, and brilliant thing on TV. It was really ahead of its time. You held contests like "Queen of the Trailer Park", interviewed strippers and drag queens and people cheating on each other. You really cast an unsentimental spotlight on fringe America. Nowadays there are variations of your show all over network and cable TV. How does it feel to have been a trailblazer?
Trailblazers don't get residuals!! Well, lets not make too much of it....its television not Mick Jagger or Picasso. What is frustrating is to see how much of TV is just Velveeta Cheeze... its non stop in daytime...everything is so derivative, unimaginative and generic. 'Regis and Kelly' is the most spontaneous show in daytime...that tells you something.
I listened to you on the radio in 2002-2003, and you were wisely against the Iraq war and President Bush at a time when those weren't exactly popular positions to hold. Both the war and that presidency proved to be total disasters -- again, you were ahead of your time. Do you feel vindicated?
I feel there is a price to pay for speaking an unpopular truth. I'm not bitter about it...its just a fact of the business. All the radio pundits who hollered about WMD, Saddam's nuclear program and MohammedAtta's link with Iraq are still making millions coming up with more bullshit. Is that a vindication?
As someone who's worked in both pop culture and politically commentary, what are your thoughts on the state media today as well as the state of American politics?
Go to Blockbuster and rent IDIOCRACY. It will answer that question better than I can. And its funny too!
Are you trying to be trailblazer yet again in growing field of niche media -- or are you just doing what you do best?
I'm not the trailblazer in this endeavor. John Tobacco who created, owns and runs UBATV is the guy who put all this together and that's where the trailblazing occurred. I'm just trying to find a way to create a show on a daily basis that suits the medium and the viewers.
Have you lived in New York all your life? Does being a New Yorker affect what you do? Could you ever seeing yourself moving out to LA?
I grew up in Queens went to college in California and then Connecticut, came back to NYC, lived in Philly for four years then back to NY.
I consider myself a native New Yorker but I really loved Philly when I worked there. I have lots of friends in LA from my acting days and if I had a good, creative job there I could live there. I would prefer NY but if a job is good enough (challenging, creative) I could go anywhere. I've toured for months when I was in the theater and had a great time.
Tell us something about Richard Bey that we don't know.
Here's a bonus. How about 3 things:
I cry at movies. I miss my parents every day. I want Kyle, the 10 year old boy I look after as a son to have a good, productive and happy life so deeply that sometimes it hurts when I worry that he won't.
8 out of 10 people want to move from wherever they live. This poll doesn't say how many New Yorkers wish to flee our fair city but I guess I'm one of those fringe 2 out of 10 folks who's happy where he is.
... since Howard Stern hit the airways here in NYC. September 19, 1982, is when he signed on at the now defunct WNBC and radio - and media - has never been the same since. His quarter century of outrageousness has brought the fringe into the mainstream, brought the weird into the ordinary. Love him (as many do) or hate him (as lots do), he's one of the most important people in broadcasting history. Before he was the King of All Media, a movie star, a bestselling author, and now a satellite radio entrepreneur, he was just a local afternoon DJ at a music station. But this Channel 2 News story about Howard from the early 1980's, however, shows just how much he was shaking things back then.
