Today we protest, tomorrow we vote.
Social media is a tool, meaning it can be used for good and ill. When someone celebrates a milestone, or someone passes away, it can be beautiful to see the outpouring of support and condolensces from people and strangers far away.
But more often than not social media is used to bully people.
Such is the case with Kelly Clarkson the singer/talk show host who visited an art store in Brooklyn, asked about buying an item on the wall that wasn't for sale, and then bullied the store on social media saying she was treated like a hooker. Now the store is getting threats and harrassed online -- ugly stuff.
Being a celebrity bestows many benefits -- perhaps the biggest one of all is that the public and the media pays attention to the stuff you say or post online, no matter how inane. In short, being a celebrity gives you power, and how you use it is important.
We appear to be living in a period of wontonness, where people with power and wealth are using it to abuse. And Ms. Clarkson, one would think, would be better than that. But apparently not. She's no ... idol.
Recently I was reading a long article about the 10-year "anniversary" of the fall of Gawker -- the early 2000s and 2010s NYC gossip blog that was known for being nasty, funny, and totally no-holds-barred in whom it covered and lampooned (including reporting on Harvey Weinstein's predations long before the rest of the media). As Chatgtp summarizes Gawker's history:
"Gawker.com was a highly influential American gossip and media blog founded in 2002 by Nick Denton. It became known for sharp, sarcastic coverage of media, politics, technology, and celebrity culture, especially focused on New York media insiders and internet culture.
Key things about Gawker:
The site effectively ended after a major lawsuit involving wrestler Hulk Hogan. In 2012, Gawker published excerpts of a private sex tape involving Hogan. He sued for invasion of privacy and won a $140 million judgment in 2016. The lawsuit was secretly funded by billionaire Peter Thiel, who had longstanding grievances against Gawker after it publicly outed him as gay years earlier.
The verdict forced Gawker Media into bankruptcy, and its assets were sold to Univision. The original Gawker site shut down in 2016."
When it shut down, Nick Denton wrote its last post called "How Things Work" about how wealthy and powerful people can abuse, lie, and destroy -- and get away with it. It's not unconincidental that a few months later Trump was elected president and the reign of the oligarchs -- Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Eillisons, and others -- began. And not since the Gilded Age has American government, media, and life been this corrupt and cruel, acting with impunity, treating everyone as either an employee or an enemy, absorbing or ruining everything and everyone in its way.
Ronnie Elgridge has died at the age of 95. She was a staple of Manhattan politics for decades as an activist, adviser, government staffer, broadcaster, and NYC Councilwoman for a dozen years. She was smart, tireless, and deeply beloved. Her career spanned decades and she never stopped caring about, or working for, her city.
Oh, and Ronnie was married to the brilliant columnist Jimmy Breslin for 25 years, a New York City legend in his own right. They were easily my favorite, and NYC's cutest and most admirabe, power couple.
RIP.
On this date 47 years ago, the 41st Vice-President of the United States, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, died of a heart attack. He was 70.
"Rocky", as he was known, was the scion of one of the richest families on Earth, and had been the governor of New York State from 1959 to 1973. His legacy in this city and state was significant, as I blogged about many years ago. In 1974 he became Vice-President after President Nixon had resigned and Gerald Ford became president. Rockefeller left office in 1977 and returned to NYC.
Two years later he was dead.
On the night of January 26, 1979, it was announced, as you'll see below, that he had died in his office at Rockefeller Center while working on a book in the presence of his bodyguard.
Ehhh ... not really.
Actually Rocky was in an East Side townhouse that he owned with his secretary Megan Marshack. This townhouse appears to have been a very classy love nest. Rocky and Megan were banging on the floor -- apparently she was riding him cowgirl when the old man had a heart attack. Now she obviously should have called 911 right away as that might have saved his life. But no. Instead she made a series of phone calls to her psychiatrist and her friend who rushed over to the townhouse. Together, apparently, they got Rocky dressed and then the friend called 911. But it was too late. The mighty Rocky -- billionaire, governor, Vice-President, titan of his times -- had died in the most tawdry way possible.
For days and weeks afterwards the scandal fascinated the NYC tabloids. But then ... it just kind of petered out.
The Rockefeller's used their wealth and power to cover it up quite effectively. Rocky was creamated the very next day so no autopsy was performed. Megan Marshak, and presumably her friend, signed NDAs and were probably paid off. Also, it helped that at the same time this scandal was unfolding there was a revolution going on in Iran and that grabbed the headlines. And, of course, Rocky was out of office so this incident had no real political implications.
There were no criminal charges. No arrests. No lawsuits. No legal actions of any kind. No tell-all books or teary interviews or multi-part true crime documentaries.
Amazingly, Megan Marshak remained quiet until her death in October 2024. She lived a relatively productive, and regular life. She worked at CBS News in NYC for almost 20 years before moving to Calfornia and living there until her death. She married later in life, had no children, and died in relative obscurity. Interestingly she was also 70 years old when she died, the same age as the great man she shtupped to death.
Half a century later, most New Yorkers probably haven't heard of Nelson Rockefeller much less the scandalous way that he left this mortal coil.
The world of NYC real estate is cut-throat and, in the new Netflix series The Beast In Me, it's both metaphorical and literal.
The plot to this series is pure sensationalist thriller yarn -- dead wives! dead kids! trophy wives! domineering parents! broken families! horny FBI agents! and money, money, money!
It's total nonsense. But it's really well done and quite entertaining.
The plot involves a woman named Aggie, played by the always amazing Claire Daines, who is the author of a hugely successful book that got her a Pulitzer Prize and a big house in Oyster Bay ... but is now grieving her dead son, her failed marriage, and a horrible case of writer's block on her follow up book. She then meets her creepy neighbor Niles Jarvis, scion of a powerful NYC real estate family, who many suspect killed his wife (but was never charged criminally) and whose family is trying build a massive projects in Manhattan called Jarvis yards -- that is facing stiff community and political resistance. Niles is played by Matthew Rhys and man, oh man, he was is one scary dude in this series.
Events and intrigues ensue, secrets are hidden and revealed, and it's all a lot of pulpy fun.
The reason I'm reviewing this show is that while The Beast In Me is pure sensationalist thriller, it also has a Power Broker-Chinatown angle that is quite intriguing -- namely, it makes us ponder who rules and controls the fate of great cities, how and why are these rich and powerful and murderous people allowed to control the future of millions, and how it impacts us all.
In that way, it's a great NYC story,
It's impossible to imagine a time when the United States and Russia were strong allies. Since the rise of the Soviet Union more than 100 years ago, the relationship between the US and Russia has been fraught, to say the least.
But in the 19th century, Russia was America's best friend in the world.
Both countries, both great continent-spanning collosuses, were at odds with the then-greatest power in the world: Great Britain. Britain, still smarting from the loss of the America, wanted to kneecap the young republic by supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War. In fact, most of Western Europe at the time wanted to support the South -- they wanted access to Southern markets, particularly its cotton, and, like Britain, the other European powers wanted to keep America divided and weak.
Not Russia.
Russia wanted to check the Western European neighbors by keeping America strong. So in 1863, as the Civil War raged, and to prevent the Confederate Navy from attacking Union ports, sent its Atlantic Squadron to New York Harbor. They were welcomed as friends, Russian sailors were the toast of the town, the bond between the two great nations deep and strong.
So strong, believe it or not, that when President Lincoln was killed the next year, the Russian Tsar Alexander II made all of the empire mourn. Lincoln and the Tsar, though they never met, had a lengthy correspondence and both were liberators of their people (Lincoln, the slaves, the Tsar, the serfs). And then, in 1867, the US and Russia did a little real estate -- the Russian sale of Alaska to the US. Oh, and Russia had a naval base in California.
That's how close the two countries were. And then, in the 20th century, it all fell apart.
But at least in 1863, when the Russian navy hit NYC, there was nothing by bonhomie.
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.
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!
I'm endlessly fascinated by the Russian Revolution and how it completely capsized the world. In any epochal event -- wars, revolutions, you name it -- there are literally millions of fascinating personal stories that intersect with these world-changing times.
One such story is that of Maria Pavlovna, a Princess of the Russian Imperial family, the Romanovs. She was born into great splendor, wealth and power beyond imagination. She was forced into a an unhappy marriage with a Swedish prince and had a son, divorced him, went back to Russia and remarried -- and then got swept up in the revolution. She escaped to Paris, ran a couture business for a while, then came to NYC -- where she got a job as a fashion consultant at Bergdorf's. She also wrote her autobiography which became a big bestseller. But when WWII started, she was angry that the USA was allied with the Soviet Union, so she moved to Argentina before moving back to Europe, eventually living and dying in Germany.
It's a life of imagine tragedy and triumph and a fascinating example of a disrupted life that had a short but amazing chapter in NYC.
As we head into the last two months of the NYC mayor's race, the media and his opponents keep calling Assemblyman and current frontrunner Zohran Mamdani a "communist."
The Republicans, the media and so-called "centrist" Democrats (they're all the same thing really) love calling regular Democrats communists. They've been doing it for decades. Quite frankly, it's boring and unoriginal -- and, if Democrats really were Communists, then the GOP/media/centrist Dems would have suffered the same fate as the Romanovs whenever Clinton or Obama or Biden got into power.
But if Zohran is a Communist, then he's in good company.
I'm currently reading a book about Fiorello LaGuardia, widely regarded as the greatest NYC mayor of all time. And whaddya know -- in reading about the 1933 campaign, the year LaGuardia was elected, the Heart media and Tammany Hall CALLED LAGUARDIA A COMMUNIST!
Take a look at the excerpt below: "... the little red flower of Communism ..." and so much more. So when you keep hearing this crap about Zohran, just say "Well, they said the same thing about Fiorello and he turned out to be pretty great."
A Commie by any other name ...
After nearly 34-years in office, Manhattan Congressman Jerry Nadler is retiring.
He's an older guy, and this is the right move -- the next generation of leaders needs to come to power and it's great that Nadler recognizes this fact. He's not going to stay in office until he's almost dead and hold the future back.
That said, he was and is a Giant of Manhattan and we won't see his likes again for a long time.
Let's take a little trip. Let's travel from one end of Manhattan to the other.
Let's traverse this narrow thirteen-mile island that fascinates and captures the imaginations of peoples around the world.
And let's do it via the #1 subway line, noting the most signficant stops along the way, subway stations that are more than just various gateways into Manhttan -- they are portals into American culture, history, and power.
Now there's something important to remember: Manhattan technically extends beyond Manhattan Island. There is a small neighborhood just north of the island called Marble Hill that is legally part of the Borough of Manhattan. So as we look north from the bottom of Marble Hill, we can look north towards the Bronx.
Now the train has rattled into the station, we get on and sit down, and we're off!
After a few stops we hit 181th street street. This is where we'll find the George Washington Bridge. Dubbed "the world's busiest bridge," this northern-most expanse connects the city to the rest of America, with cars flowing in and out of NYC and the rest of the continent. It's also, apparently, a popular place for some lost souls to end their lives -- sometimes to dark, comic effect.
Few more stops and we hit 137th street and City College.
This public college in the heart of Harlem is one of the great institutions for American learning. For over a century, poor kids from all over NYC could go to City College and pursue the American dream. The students and graduates of City are extraordinary: ten Nobel Prize winners, mayors, Supreme Court justices, US Senators and Secretaries of State, Oscar-winners, Emmy-winners, Pulitzer Prize-winners, astronauts and founders of big companies, and so many more! Heck, even fictional people have gone to City College: Gordon Gekko from Wall Street and Don Draper from Mad Men most notably.
Also, it's where both of my parents worked for almost 40 years, met, fell in love, and produced Mr NYC.
One more stop and we're in Harlem, above ground, at 125th Street.
What else can I say about Harlem, the capital of the black American experience, where great black artists and pioneers lived and worked. Also, it's also one of the hearts of American culture with Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club.
Now we chug down past several stops on the Upper West Side to 66th street and Lincoln Center.
One more stop and we're all 59th Street and Columbus Circle.
The site of the big memorial to Christopher Columbus, it is one of the crossroads of Manhattan, with different avenues intersecting and hugging the lower southwest portion of Central Park. It is also, to my knowledge, the only traffic circle in all over NYC. And these days it is now home to the massive Time Warner building that looms over it.
One of things that I enjoy watching on YouTube are short videos about the "Scandalous Life" of this, that or another historical character. Usually these "scandalous" people are just women who dared to have sex with more than one man.
Hadly scandalous.
But as I've progressed through this badly written dark comedy called life, I have either encountered -- or been adjacent to -- people who might be called Infamous. People whose names have became synonymous with scandal, disgrace, and overall moral turpitude. Truly scandalous people.
Let me be clear: I never knew these people, never was intimate. I just happened to be either in their presences, shook their hand, or knew someone who knew someone.
I briefly met Anthony Weiner, the once-brilliant Congressman who was brought down by texting his nasty bits to ladies. Before all that I shook his hand at a fundraiser when he was running for mayor. Yes, I know what you're thinking: "You shoook his hand? Ewwwww!"
But wait! That's not the only congressman with a nasty sexting habit whose gross hand I shook: in 1997, when I was interning in DC, I briefly met Mark Foley. This was years before he was exposed as another gross sexter (this time to underage kids, really vile stuff).
So yes, I had the (dis)honor of shaking the hands of America's most famous, infamous Congressional sexters -- one a Democrat, the other a Republican.
And yes, I've scrubbed my hands thoroughly.
Also, in 1997, I was part of a team that was showing Japansese politicians around DC. And in that exercise I got to be in the office of Strom Thurmond. (If you're under the age of 75 you might not know that name but he was an evil, racist segregationist Senator from South Carolina.) Ol' Strom was about 95 years old at the time, and I saw him sitting behind his huge desk, a gorgeous view of the Capitol building behind him. He looked like an animated corpse. His staff was telling him everything he had to to, he was totally out of it. But he did say that he loved Japan because it was a great "military" power. Yeah, that wasn't weird -- and the Japanese folks were polite enough not to correct him. Btw Strom served in the Senate for 48 years, a quite damning thing to say about our country.
Finally, Heidi Fleiss (she's back in the news because a new movie is being made about her). The Madame to the Stars, in the early 1990s it was revealed that she was pimping women to half of Hollywood. I never met her but my mom worked on a project with her father (a pediatrician) around the same time her daughter was going to jail. So that's my "adjacent" story to that particular scandal.
So those are my somewhat close encounters to the truly scandalous, people whose names will live in infamy.
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.
