Review: "Hair" (1979)

Recently I came upon an article in the Hollywood Reporter listing 47 iconic movie and TV sites in NYC. Read it here. (Why it's not an even 50, I can't say.) 

One location that's obviously cited is Central Park which has been used in too many movies and TV shows to count. But one of movies that's not on this list but that makes great use of nation's most famous urban park is Hair from 1979. 

Based on the late 1960s anti-war, anti-establishment hippie Broadway smash, it's about a young man named Claude from Oklahoma who comes to NYC on his way to enlist in the army before shipping to Vietnam. (Why a guy from Oklahoma would need to travel all the way to NYC to go into the army is odd but, hey, it's a movie). Anyhoo, while roaming around Central Park one afternoon he comes upon a group of hippies who befriend him and rock his world. He also gets close to a young beautiful society lady who is bored by her preppy boyfriend and upper class life. Eventually it all goes haywire and Claude goes into the army -- before his friends head out to Nevada, trying to rescue him from going to Vietnam. There's a big, surprising, ultimately tragic twist at the end about the randomness of friendship and fate.

When the musical Hair hit Broadway in 1968, it was a stunning, crazy, and almost dangerous thing. America was mired in the hopeless Vietnam war and the anti-war, hippie movement was gaining steam (Woodstock would be a year later). This musical rocked the culture, a show that was both highly political and highly entertaining -- plus, at various points, the cast members took their clothes off. Richard Nixon, right after he became President, imagined that he'd go to a show and, as soon as cast got naked, he'd get up and walk out, showing his solidarity with the Silent Majority, the squares in the "real America" (fortunately he never did it although it would have been lit). Like A Chorus Line, Rent and Hamilton later on, this show defined its time. 

But when the movie came in 1979, times had changed. Vietnam was over, Watergate and stagflation had and were traumatized the nation, and this movie already seemed like a museum piece. It was of and about another time. Hair the movie was moderately successfull but didn't have the same resonance as it had had on Broadway 11 years earlier. 

The movie was directed by Milos Forman, who had just won Oscars for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and would, later on, do so again for Amadeus. Hair is somewhat forgotten from his filmography. The cast is amazingly -- especially a young Treat Williams (RIP) as George, the hippie leader, and Beverly D'Angelo, the bored young deb. Claude is played by John Savage who had just had a huge success in The Deer Hunter. He's a good actor but rather miscast -- he's not really believable as a young Okie. The rest of the mostly unknown cast is quite good, including the late, wonderful Nell Carter singing in the park at night.

Still, there's something about the movie that sorta doesn't work -- it reminds me of the Rent musical, a great, brilliant show put to film that somehow, someway, sucks the life out of the story and score. But I still suggest seeing it for the music, the cast, and beautiful shot Central Park. 

The 60 Best Songs Ever Written About New York City ... Well, not really ...

Yours truly missed this back in 2014 when the Village Voice published this list of the 60 best NYC songs but better late than never.

I read it and had several thoughts.

First, sixty is a rather strange number to limit it too -- why not 50? Or 100? Sixty just seems so random.

Second, while a couple of these songs are obviousy, like "New York, New York" by John Kander or "New York State of Mind" by Billy Joel, the vast majority of them are obscure or more "meta" songs than heart and soul ones. 

Third, there are MANY glaring omissions. No "New York City" by They Might Be Giants. No "Empire State of Mind" by Jay Z. And while there are a few Lou Reed songs on the list, there's no or "New York City Man" and nothing, nothing at all, from Lou Reed's classic 1989 New York album, especially no "Dirty Boulevard"! And no show tunes, nothing from "Rent" or "On The Town" and many others.

This is a perfect example of a list created by people who want to seem "alternative" and "different" and super-hip. I guess I'm a big softy -- I like the fun NYC songs. But to each their own.

Remembering My Crazy Great-Great Grandpa

Come and listen to a story about a man named ... my great-great grandpa.

He was an Irish-guy from Brooklyn, living in the nineteenth century when the borough was its own city, and he was a nut.

My great-great-grandpa managed, somehow, to get the money together to buy some property on the Coney Island Boardwalk. He rented out his space to vendors who paid him rent. Only they didn't always pay on time. So he got a cudgel. And he'd walk around his property with the cudgel, asking for the rent money, and if they didn't have his money ... they got the cudgel. I'm not sure if it was the vendors property or the vendors themselves that got the cudgel but, uh, "stuff" went down. 

My great-great-grandpa, being Irish, also liked to drink. A LOT. One day he and his brother were in a bar and got into a dispute that ended in a violent knife fight. His brother was killed, and I don't know what my great-great-grandpa did to the other guy but he decided it would be a good idea to get out of town ... so he got on a ship and hid out in the Old Country (Ireland), Michael Corleone-style, for two years.

After two years it appears no one was looking to kill him anymore, so my great-great-grandpa got on a ship, headed back to Brooklyn. On the trip he met two women. Again, I ain't sure what went down with these two ladies on the ship but, when the ship pulled into port in Brooklyn, he began walking down the gangway with them, one broad with an arm around him on one side, another broad on the other side. Then my great-great-grandpa looked down the gangway and saw his wife and kids ... and he pushed the two women away, telling them to get lost, and he happily reunited with his family.

In his later years, ruffian that he was, my great-great-grandpa decided to get some stability for himself and his family. So he got an engineering degree and ended up working, for the rest of his life, managing the steam in a burlap factory in Lower Manhattan -- actually, on the same street where I work now. 

And then he died and generations later I slunk out into the world.

So that was my great-great-grandpa. When my mom told me all about him, my instant reaction was "I didn't know I was descended from someone so cool."

They don't make men like him anymore ... and that's probably a good thing.

Mr NYC in Paris: Luxembourg Gardens

Perhaps my single favorite place in all of Paris is the Luxembourg Gardens. Its name is deceptively -- it is in fact a park, a very large one, and it is perhaps the most amazingly manicured park I've ever visited anywhere in the world.

The Luxembourg Gardens, while quintessentially French, was actually the brainchild of an Italian -- Queen Marie de Medici, widow of French King IV. She built this, along with the Luxembourg palace, in the 17th century, and today the palace is where the French Senate meets. 

The highlight of my visit, and for so many others, is the huge pool where you can rent a toy sailboat and float it for half-an-hour. It's so much fun, so innocent and pure, that it was the highlight on my trip. I strongly suggest visiting every time you go to Paris.

Houseboat NYC

So many people want to live in NYC -- close to 9 million of them -- that they'll grab any piece of the it and make a home. This includes the docks and shores of the city where people moor their houseboats.

The idea of living in a houseboat has always seemed rather romantic to me but it's not an easy existence -- as this article points out. You still have to pay rent for your houseboat, you still have to worry about being evicted if your marina or dock closes -- and then there's the waves.

Just another reminder that we are a city of islands, the world's greatest archipelago.

Review: "Face Value: The Marla Hanson Story" (1991)

The hottest thing in American popular culture today isn't superhero movies -- it's hours-long true crime podcasts, documentaries, and TV series.

In the last few years, tabloid scandals from the past about Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrew Cunan, Robert Chambers, OJ, and many others (more recently, the Menendez Brothers) have become massive hits in various multi-episode formats. And all of them seem to be about tabloid stories from the late 20th century.

But before the era of streaming and podcasts, where hours and hours could be devoted to telling these trashy tales, such stories would become network TV movies -- and instead of waiting years, these "ripped from the headlines" events became hastily-made, two-hour flicks. 

One such story that, as far as I know, has yet to become a 21st-century multi-hour podcast/documentary/streaming series is about the June 1986 attack of Marla Hanson.

A Missouri-transplant and aspiring model, Marla Hanson was living in a Manhattan apartment, attending glamorous parties, pursuing romance, living the NYC dream, until one day her landlord, who was obsessed with her, slashed her face, ending her modeling dreams. It was a big, scary story about obsession, beauty, and the "face value" of human worth. Her attackers were eventually sentenced to prison, but not until she was, in her words, badly treated by the criminal justice system. 

And this is why the 1991 TV-movie about the incident was called Face Value: The Marla Hanson Story.

This movie falls squarely into the now gone-and-forgotten sensationalist TV-movie with bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, and bad music. It's amazing to think anything this low-rent would get made today but, thirty-odd years ago, this was the stuff that millions of people watched when the big network TV hits went on hiatus.

There are, however, a few interesting things about this movie that make it worth watching (you can see the trailer and full movie below).

First, it's a real-NYC movie that, in its ways, captures the allure and danger of the late 20th century, pre-911 city. 

Second, the cast.

Marla Hanson is played by an actress named Cheryl Pollack, who "had a moment" in the early 1990s. She was in the 1990 movie Pump Up the Volume, a memorable episode of Quantum Leap, and later on was on another show called The Heights. She continued to pop up in TV shows throughout the 1990s until, it appears, she left acting. 

Marla's landlord/slasher was played by an odd-looking, odd-sounding actor named Kirk Baltz. And ironically, the very next year, he'd make movie history as the victim of a fictional slashing -- he's the guy who played the cop who memorably got his ear cut-off in Quentin Tarantino's directorial-debut Reservoir Dogs (while "Stuck in the Middle With You" played in the background). It must have been ironic for him to go, within a year or so, from playing a slasher in a totally forgettable TV movie to playing the most famous slashing victim in movie history -- and in a cinematic classic.

Then there's Marla's love interest. He's played by a very handsome actor named Dale Midkiff. His career caught fire in the 1980s when he played Elvis in a TV-mini-series, and then was in the 1989 hit movie Pet Semetary. But big screen stardom elluded him and it was back to TV. Not long after making this Marla Hanson TV movie, Dale starred in a very silly but massively entertaining show called Time Trax. It was about a cop from the year 2193 who is sent back in time to 1993 to find criminals who escaped from his time, hiding out the past, and sending them back to the future -- and justice. After Quantum Leap, it was my favorite time-travel show ever (although nowhere as good as QL), and he was really good in it. It only ran for two-years but it was fun to watch (interestingly, Time Trax premiered on January 20th, 1993, the same day that Bill Clinton became president).

As for Marla Hanson, after this horrible incident, she appears to have gone on and lived a nice quiet life. She married, had a child, worked briefly as a screenwirter, and seems to have had no interest in having a public profile in the almost 40-years after she was thrust into the headlines. And good for her! 

These days the network TV movie seems to be a thing of the past. But this movie capture an era of TV, and NYC, that seems both far in the past and very familiar. 

Curse of the Comptroller

In the final season of The Crown, Prince Charles ruminates: "To be Prince of Wales is not a position -- it's a predicament." 

The same is true of the American Vice-Presidency. Much like the Prince of Wales, the job is mainly just to exist, to be ... there ... until the top job opens up ... or not.

Right now the American Vice-Presidency is under a microscope -- as President Biden steps aside, his Vice-President, Kamala Harris, is being vaulted to become the 2024 Democratic nominee for President (and, God willing, will be elected President in November). And President Biden, of course, was Vice-President just a few years ago.

And, yes, two years ago Prince Charles in real life became King Charles. 

Eventually the predicament of being #2, the understudy waiting in the wings, comes to an end, one way or another (for the previous Vice-President, Mike Pence, it almost ended when his President, Donald Trump, sent a violent mob to attack him).

As the 2024 presidential race gets hotter and wilder, the 2025 NYC Mayor's race is being quietly talked about. Mayor Eric Adams is not popular and several people are being spoken about challenging him next year. Amongst the rumored candidates are Scott Stringer and Brad Lander, the former and current Comptrollers of NYC. 

Much like the Prince of Wales or Vice-President, the NYC Comptroller is also a predicament. Now, unlike those jobs, it does have some real substance to it -- the Comptroller is the Chief Fiscal Officer of the city, overseeing the city's accounts, running audits of city agencies, managing the pension system, issuing bonds, reviewing and approving city contracts, etc. It's a very important position, and it's overall job is to make sure NYC tax dollars are spent legally, ethically, and transparently.

However, what makes the job a predicament is that it simply doesn't have the powers or glamour of the mayoralty -- the Comptroller is the CFO, not the CEO of the city, doesn't get to sign or veto legislation, doesn't get to set government policy, doesn't appoint agency heads, and doesn't get to live rent-free in a mansion. It's a job that's so close and yet so far from the top job, existing across a chasm that's a foot wide and a million feet deep.

On paper, the Comptrollership should be the perfect launching pad for the mayoralty. It's a citywide elected position, it has real power, and the comptroller's name is often in the media. And yet the last NYC Comptroller to be elected mayor was Abe Beame back in 1973 -- since then, almost every single Comptroller has run for mayor and lost, often badly. For more than half a century the #2 job, the job that seems like the perfect political stepping-stone to #1, has instead proven to be a political banana peal. 

Not for nothing, NYC political wags have come to believe in "the curse of the comptroller." 

Of course, in every election, there have been various, often forgotten reasons, why these Comptrollers have never become mayor. But it will very interesting to see if, next year, two Comptrollers run and if either of them can actually topple Adams and become mayor. 

If so, then the "curse of the comptroller" will be lifted. If not, it will be doubled. 

What's the Deal with Apple Bank?

New York City is chock full of financial institutions, including many, many banks. There are numerous small banks, mostly clustered in various neighborhoods, but the big ones are JP Morgan Chase and Capital One and TDBank that have branches all over the city and country.

The bank that has always intrigued me, however, although not enough to become a customer, is Apple Bank. I don't know anyone who has ever had an account there, who's ever used it, and there don't seem to be very many branches for it around the city. But it's been in business for over almost 150 years and is a stalwart of the NYC financial community. 

Apple Bank is most notable for two things in my mind. First, it appears to sponsor a large number of events around town -- including the St. John's basketball team (I recently went to a game and saw its logo all over the place). Second, Apple Bank has probably the most impressive headquarters of any financial institution in NYC -- the large, fortress-like building on West 72nd street and Broadway, looming like a stern parent over Verdi Square (known back in the day as "needle park"). It's a formidable structure, military-like, and in a residential neighborhood with many impressive buildings (like the Dakota and the Ansonia), the Apple Bank building is an odd anomaly, a strange and permanent interloper of an edifice.  

The Apple Bank building is not only a financial headquarters -- it's also an apartment building with super-expensive residences therein. If you want to check it out, and can swing $12,500 a month in rent, you might find your next home in this iconic if underappreciated NYC building.

P.S. Apple Bank has nothing to do, it should be obvious, with Apple the computer hardware giant -- obviously Apple Bank is derivative of "the Big Apple." Also, the had a different name for a long time before it became Apple Bank -- it started as Harlem Savings Bank in 1863. In the 1980s Apple Bank even ran TV commercials (see below) but, apparently, no longer. 

The Great Precursor: "The Beautiful and Damned" @ 100

Last year saw the release of two movies based on musicals -- In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and tick ... tick ... BOOM! by Jonathan Larson (the movie of which was actually directed Miranda) -- that would never have been made had their respective creators not then, for their next shows, created arguably the two greatest musicals of the last 25 years -- Rent and Hamilton.  

Call them precursors, forerunners, warm-up-acts, playing in the minors before the majors, what have you -- the small things that came before the big things, the good things before the truly GREAT things. Their first shows got them attention and acclaim. Their next shows vaulted them into cultural history. 

Think Reservoir Dogs before Pulp Fiction, War of the Worlds before Citizen Kane, Llewyn Davis playing before Bob Dylan at the Gaslight, you get the idea. Before something really great, you have to have something pretty good -- but the pretty good won't get remembered unless followed by something really great. 

Got it?

Between 1919 and 1941, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote four novels (plus one uncompleted one) and numerous short stories. The voice of his generation, doyen of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald would be remembered today as a talented writer who was a product of his era had he not written what is arguably the greatest American novel of the 20th century -- The Great Gatsby. Gatsby's legacy towers over American literature, it's themes of the emptiness of the American dream, the false promise of wealth buying love and happiness, and how we can never recreate our idealized pasts even though we are haunted by them have made it truly timeless.

Every time I read Gatsby I'm just amazed by what a perfect, gorgeous, and powerful story it is -- and how its creation was nothing short of a miracle.

So what came before it? Even Fitzgerald had to have his own warm up act -- in this case, two novels: his youthful 1919 debut, This Side of Paradise, and his 1922 dark satire The Beautiful and Damned.

When Gatsby turns 100 in 2025, there will doubtless be myriad articles, documentaries, think pieces celebrating its greatness. It'll be a Gatsby melee. There will probably be a deluge of analysis of this seminal American work, this forever masterpiece. As well there should be!

But The Beautiful and Damned is being, no surprise, critically overlooked, ignored, on its 100th anniversary. It's like the ugly sibling being slighted for the gorgeous one. 

Thus it's left to yours truly to celebrate the 100 anniversary of Gatsby's precursor -- call it the Great Precursor -- The Beautiful and Damned, the novel you read constantly thinking, "And right after this book, he wrote The Great Gatsby!"

The novel is about married couple living a dissolute life in nineteen-teens NYC. Although Fitzgerald is mostly associated with the 1920s (and this novel was published in March, 1922), it's story is set between 1913 and 1921, bookending the First World War. The orphaned Anthony Patch is the grandson of a wealthy, irascible industrialist who spends his days sleeping and his evening partying -- and waiting for his grandfather to die so that he will inherit tens of millions of dollars (essentially the equivalent of a billion or more today). Anthony meets, through his friends, a debutante named Gloria from Kansas City. They marry and, together, they spend their days drinking and spending money they don't really have, alienating people and getting into trouble -- before Anthony is drafted and heads south for basic training for the First World War. Adultery and hangovers ensue, and a couple ugly twists rob Anthony of his inheritance -- and sanity. The ending is a real shock. 

It's an ugly, tragic tale but it's also a darkly funny book. Where Gatsby is elegiac, Beautiful and Damned is nasty. Fitzgerald does not get sentimental or deep here -- it's almost documentary like in showing and mocking the bad behavior of the ideal, mindless rich (who are never as rich as they think).

When I read this book in college, my professor said, "It's a very bad book." That took me by surprise since, in school, we're supposed to read the great works by the masters -- not one of their minor, or even bad, works. I didn't think the book bad at all -- it's entertaining, amusing, and quite appealing to the sarcastic mind, but it's also overlong and overwritten, clearly the work of a young writer trying to prove himself, favoring verbosity over restraint.

Still, I recommend reading The Beautiful and Damned on its centenary year since, while it's a product of its time, it's a time that reverberates today -- and, yes, because it's the one that came BEFORE, the Great Precursor to The Great Gatsby, the seeds of the timeless greatness that flowered afterwards.

P.S. I hesitated making this comparison earlier but here goes now: another way to put it is, The Beautiful and Damned is like the person you seriously dated before you met your spouse. Barack Obama, who lived in NYC during law school before making his career in Chicago, once called our city "The great love of your life that you never married." 

That's this book in a nutshell.

Take the Cannolis in 525,600 minutes: Creating "The Godfather" and "Rent"

Two vaunted pieces of NYC culture are the 1972 movie The Godfather and the 1996 Broadway musical Rent. This year Rent celebrated its 25th anniversary and, next year, The Godfather will celebrate its 50th.

One is about the mafia in the 1940s and '50s; the other is about young people in the 1990s. While both works couldn't be more different, they remain beloved classics since they are brilliantly crafted stories about the city as a place of great opportunity and great danger. In short, both stories are about NYC as a place where the American dream thrives -- if it doesn't kill you first. 

There is a new genre of info-tainment that's becoming more popular: books, documentaries, podcasts, and movies about the creation of classic works of entertainment. Sometimes, even not that classic.

And this year is no different. There is a new movie coming soon about Jonathan Larson, the creator of Rent, based on a meta-musical he wrote about the making of Rent called tick ... tick ... Boom. It's directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Also, there is a new book called Leave the Gun, Take the Cannolis about the making of The Godfather. You should read this fascinating excerpt about how Marlon Brando came to play -- and discover -- the character of Don Vito Corleone, one of the most iconic performances in cinema history. 

Whenever you encounter a masterpiece, a perfectly realized work of art, it's easy to believe that it somehow grew out of the earth, emerged complete from the ground, like some kind of beautiful plant. But no. There was time when their creators would struggling, working hard, putting the pieces together, re-working and re-writing and re-doing it all, probably fighting feelings of failure and doubt, doing their level best to create something good -- and they had no idea at the time that they were creating something that would resonate across time. They just wanted to get it done and get it done as best they could. History would take it from there. 

Remembering "Diff'rent Strokes": 1978-1986

How exactly does it take "diff'rent strokes" to move the world? 

What are these strokes?

Who's doing the stroking?

And how in God's name does stroking, different or otherwise, move the world?

Lots of people stroke and the world keeps spinning on its axis!

Remembering "Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark" @ 10

Every few years, Broadway theater permeates the culture -- usually a with a big megahit or two. Most recently, obviously, was Hamilton in 2015/2016 (it had some good company that year with Waitress); twenty-odd years ago, at the turn of the century, it was The Producers and, a few years before that in the 1990s, it was The Lion King and Rent (which had a great companion in 1996 with Bring in Da' Noise, Bring in Da' Funk and the reboot of Chicago) which followed other megahits from the 1980s like Cats, Lez Miz, and Miss Saigon. 

2011 was another of those years but it was unique in that it saw one of Broadway's biggest megahits and megaflops -- The Book of Mormon and Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. 

Of the two, Spiderman held all the promise of being the bigger hit -- after all, it was based on one of the most popular comic book franchises of all time, it had music by Bono and The Edge of U2, and it was directed by Juliette Taymor who had achieved greatness with The Lion King. Spiderman had BIG HIT written all over it, a pre-sold sure-fire success.

Eh, not so much.

The book and music had problems, lots of problems (Bono and The Edge were rarely available because they had to tour, etc.) and Taymor's budget grew so out of control that she was ultimately fired. The show went into previews, the word-of-mouth was awful, and eventually the show closed and was re-worked before officially premiering. Due to advance ticket sales the show actually ran for a while but eventually it closed with no Tony glory and millions of lost dollars and lawsuits (even inspiring a brilliant SNL skit). Today, people are remembering it for the disaster that it was -- and even Mr NYC chronicled its troubles at the time (yes, the blog has been around that long that it's remembering, as history, events it wrote about at the time). 

Meanwhile The Book of Mormon, written by the South Park guys and Bobby Lopez of Avenue Q (this was pre-Frozen, etc.) was being quietly developed but, when it opened -- WHAM! It became a megahit instantly, the biggest one since The Producers and before Hamilton, and it continues its sucessful run to this day (COVID-19 interruption excepted). I saw and raved about it back in 2012 -- and could listen to its soundtrack forever. In fact, think I'll go do that right now ...

But here's to Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark at ten -- it may have been a bad show and a big flop but it certainly wrote a colorful chapter in the history of the Great White Way.

Remembering "Chess" on Broadway

Recently I blogged about a failed Broadway musical called Teddy & Alice. It ran for about two months in late 1987 and early 1988 and has been forgotten and never revived since. Another show that also had a brief run around that time has had a more interesting afterlife -- Chess.

Chess was the brainchild of the musical savant Tim Rice (former partner of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the scribes of Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita) who wrote it with Bjorn Ulvaeus, the genius who wrote most of ABBA's big hit songs. The concept of Chess was certainly of its time: set in the depths of the 1980s Cold War, it's about American and Soviet chess masters, facing each other down in world-wide competitions, with money, women, and international politics getting in their way. 

Summarizing the plot is hard because originally the musical started out as a concept album in 1984 and, once staged, apparently the 1986 London stage show in the West End had a different story than the 1988 Broadway version. The plot was constantly being re-written and revised. In its original previews on Broadway in 1988, Chess had running time of 4 hours and then was cut-down to 3 hours 15 minutes when it finally opened in late April. Needless to say the length made it less than appealing to ticket-buyers. Chess also failed quickly because it cost a fortune to stage, full of fancy lighting and special effects and moving stages. It needed to gross a ton of money each week to stay afloat -- and didn't. The 1980s was the era of spectacle musicals like Starlight Express that aimed to dazzle the auidences' eyes as much as satisfy their ears. Chess was another entry in this genre that has mostly faded away -- people just didn't want to spend their time seeing a show of German opera-like legnth that assaulted their senses all night long. 

The reviews in London in '86 had been mixed but the reviews in NYC in 1988 were scathing -- Frank Rich in the Times said it had an "ostensible story ... the evening has the threatrical consistency of quicksand", and that the show just hammers home the analogy that the world is basically one big chess game and we are all its pawns. The show-stopping song is called "Nobody's Side" where the heroic lady chessmaster manager, who works for the American player but is in love with the Russian player (c'est la guerre!), croons away "And when he gives me reasons/To justify each move ... Everbody's playing the games/But nobody's rules are the same/Nobody's on nobody's side."

Ya' dig?

Some other deep meaning, powerful lyrics: "I cross over borders but I'm still there now ... Let man's petty nations tear themselves apart/My land's only borders lie around my heart." 

Huh? (Still, you get chills when you actually hear it sung.)

In the 30+ years since Chess bombed on Broadway, it has actually had a rich afterlife with revivals and "concert musicals" done around the world. In 2009 I saw a concert version on TV that had been recorded in London in 2008, featuring Idina Menzel, Josh Groban and Adam Pascal from Rent. They were brilliant but my impression, even from this version, was that while the show had some powerful, beautiful, really great songs, the story was a confusing boring mess. 

I can't resist: musically, Chess is great; plotwise, Chess is ... a mess!

So far Chess has never been revived on Broadway -- besides its story problems, the show became immeadiately and painfully dated in the 1990s when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Maybe one day it'll come back to Broadway, if the plot can be brought under control and if there is interest in a show about something that clearly is now a historical era.

And it does have some great songs that stand the test of time so, in many ways, Chess will continue playing (haha get it?) for decades to come.  

P.S. The big opening song to the second act, "One Night in Bangkok" was actually turned into a music video that got some play on MTV and as a radio single. That was always the problem with the show -- it was a bunch of singles strung together to tell some kind of story ... that no one understands to this day. 

Wild Times at The Chelsea Hotel

Currently I'm reading the Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel by Sherill Tippins.

Published in 2013, the book is an absorbing saga about how this one building, this distinctive residential hotel on West 23rd Street, became a mecca for some of the most brilliant and important artists (American and otherwise) who ever lived. Founded in 1884, and for more than a century afterwards, it has provided a communal haven for those who pursue a life of the mind, a life in the arts and culture, a life at odds with mainstream society. Inspired by the 19th-century socialist Fourierism movement that emphaized self-sufficient communinal living, the Chelsea Hotel was a place that embraced and accepted anyone -- all for a very cheap rent. 

The list of people who lived and worked at the Chelsea over the generations is mind-boggling. To name just a very few: Mark Twain, O. Henry, Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams, Alan Ginsburg, Arthur C. Clarke (who wrote 2001 there) as well as his collaborator Stanley Kubrick, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious (who infamously killed his girlfriend Nancy there in 1978), Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin (who hooked up there), Willem de Kooning, the notorious Robert Mapplethorpe, Diego Rivera, even the Divine Miss M (Bette Midler for you ignoramouses). And that's barely scratching the surface of the great talents that resided there many different times in the last 130+ year. 

The Chelsea Hotel has also been the subject of art itself: the groundbreaking Portrait of Jason was shot there in 1966 as well as part of the first-ever reality show, An American Family. Andy Warhol probably made it famous for the rest of the world with the movie he made there, Chelsea Girls. 

The cultural impact and legacy of the Chelsea Hotel cannot be overstated.

But, at the end of the day, it's a piece of NYC real estate, which means its had lots of different owners and been subject to various legal battles over the decades. And there still are to this day with the current owners and developers fighting the tenants who wish to maintain its Bohemian glory. It's a classic case of money vs. culture, the future vs. the past, crass taste vs. good taste, people who want to live in the past vs. people who could care less. Reading about it, you don't know whether to laugh or cry. 

Sounds like a drama that could have written at the Chelsea Hotel back in its hayday!

You can read the previous posts about the Chelsea Hotel here. 

How Many Seconds? "Rent" @ 25

It seems like every couple of decades a Broadway musical comes along that not only is good but truly great, and not only great but also so original, so groundbreaking, that it evolves the artistic form of musical theater and pushes it forward into the future. 

In the 1970s it was A Chorus Line. In the 2010s it was Hamilton. And in the 1990s it was Rent. 

Debuting in early 1996, twenty-five years ago, Rent is that rare musical that was not only a big hit but also a cultural phenomenon. People sang the songs in their homes, with their friends, on the streets, and in school choruses. It was on TV, the major media covered. It was parodied, relentlessly. It was everywhere.

It even became that rare musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, something that happens maybe once a decade.

Rent was the vision of a man named Jonathan Larson, a young musical fan who spent years writing it (with some help, apparently, that lead to a lawsuit). It was a re-telling of La Boheme, about young people dying of AIDS in NYC in the early 1990s while trying to stay in their building on the Lower East Side. Back then, you didn't see shows about subjects like this, with characters like this, on Broadway. Also, rock musicals weren't really mainstream yet -- in the 1990s, Broadways was still very high on the big opera-like musical spectacles like Cats, Les Miz, and Miss Saigon. Then came along this very offbeat show about very offbeat people living offbeat lives, singing songs about love and death, hope and despair, in a very modern, ultra-recognizable world -- and it blew everything else on Broadway away. 

Just as Rent was opening Off-Broadway, Larson tragically died from an aneurysm and didn't live to see how quickly the show transferred to Broadway and became a Tony-winning megahit, the hottest ticket in town, and eventually a movie. I remember watching the Tony-awards that year and seeing his sister collect his awards, reminding everyone how long it took for her brother to become an overnight success.   

I still listen to the album from time to time, and it never ceases to bring me joy. In 1996 I was in college, living far away from NYC, and listening to the album always me brought home -- NYC on my mind, you might say. 

It still has that transcendant effect. 

I've blogged about Rent and its Bohemian spirit over the years. The show was still running when this blog debuted in 2007, I covered its closure in 2008. So end of the original Broadway and the start of this blog touched in a way. That makes me happy.

And we'll still be listening to, and talking about, Rent 25 years from now.

La Vie Boheme Forever

I've blogged about the concept of "bohemia" before, a gathering or community of unconventional people, ususally artists, who live and support and love one another.

When the musical Rent came out in 1996, it glamorized and popularized the concept of NYC (especially the Lower East Side) as a great bohemian landscape, a place where people could congregate and let their various freak flags fly. Of course, the musical, set in the early 1990s, was about how bohemia was also being pushed out of NYC by the forces of money and gentrification, the coldly impersonal disrupting the highly personal.

But just like NYC is not just a city but a state of mind (hence this blog) bohemia exists in the imagination as much as in concrete and steel, and the flesh and bones of its denizens. Even as  bohemia has been shoved out and marginalized in modern NYC, its has and will always exist in the minds and souls of those who consider themselves unconventional, artistic, different, weird, outlandish, etc. etc. etc. As this article from 1992 demonstrates, bohemia exists within anyone who considers himself or herself a bohemian.

Bohemia is everywhere and will live forever.

La vie boheme is more like la boheme vivra pour toujours (although that's obviously a bit of a mouthful for a song title or refrain).

Review: "Six Degrees of Separation" and Its Legacy

In 1981 a deeply disturbed black seventeen year-old named David Hampton ran away from Buffalo to NYC to start a career as a con man. He had nothing, knew no one, and was lost in the big city. But he was determined, in his own scary way, to "make it there."

He did -- sort of. 

A decade later his bizarre story resulted in a hit play, a movie, and the popularization of the "six degrees of separation" concept into American culture.

In 1983 David Hampton showed up at the home of a wealthy Upper East Side couple, claiming that he had just been mugged in Central Park. He said that he was friends with their children at an Ivy League college and that he was also the son of Sidney Poitier. David "Poitier" was extremely charming, funny, insightful, and he won over the couple instantly. They allowed him to stay the night at their apartment -- only to wake up the next morning to find him in bed with a gay hustler.  David vanished before the police arrived and soon the couple found out that David was a con man who had infilitrated their lives. The playright John Guare knew the couple and, after learning their story, wrote a great play about it -- Six Degrees of Separation -- that eventually became a so-so movie.

The fictional drama expands upon the real story. In the play, David's name is Paul and, after he escapes, the couple try to help the police to find him -- meanwhile he continues to seduce men and con them and others out of money (Paul/David had found this couple in the first place after he had, earlier, randomly seduced a troubled rich kid who really did know this couple's children). But Paul's interuption of this wealthy couple's life makes them realize how fragile, how fake, and how empty their existence truly is. They realize that Paul has, in a strange way, made them examine their lives, their marriage, their relationships with their children, and the whole world that surrounds them -- a world that people like David covet without truly understanding, a world that this couple comes to realize doesn't give them any real happiness. The couple comes to understand the pain that motivates Paul and the pain that they feel but can't acknowledge to themselves -- until Paul forces them to. They come to realize that everybody in the world feels pain, and that randomness, that chance meetings between people, plays a huge role in everyone's lives, and changes their fates. The climax of the play is a monologue that the wife gives. It concludes with:

"I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice. Fill in the names. I find that A) tremendously comforting that we're so close and B) like Chinese water torture that we're so close. Because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It's not just big names. It's anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It's a profound thought. How Paul found us. How to find the man whose son he pretends to be. Or perhaps is his son, although I doubt it. How every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds. Six degrees of separation between me and everyone else on this planet. But to find the right six people."

Heavy.

The play takes the always uncomfortable issues of race, class, privilege, socioeconomic advantage and envy, and puts them front and center. It makes people look at themselves, think about themselves, in ways that are both uncomfortable and illuminating. And thirty years ago, this was an even bolder thing to do than now -- John Guare was ahead of his time. 

I remember as a kid when this play was being staged at Lincoln Center. I was going to school near there and remember seeing the enormous banner for it on the street every day. I also heard ads for it on WQXR -- "See ... Six Degrees of Separation" -- and on TV. It ran from the fall of 1990 to early 1992 -- and a straight play that runs for more than a year is a big hit. The movie came out in 1993 and wasn't a big hit -- but the legacy of Six Degrees of Separation is immense. 

The success of the play caused David Hampton to threaten John Guare with violence, try to get a cut of the play's profits, and eventually sue the playright (unsuccessfully) for $100 million. And Hampton continued his con man life well after the play and movie were produced, using his newfound celebrity as well as new identities to con people. Eventually he migrated, at least for a time, to Seattle but wound up back East, dying in New Jersey in 2003 from AIDS. His life was tragic, obviously, and ironic -- the most legitimate and successful thing he was ever a part of was something he didn't create, wasn't actually involved in, and didn't get to enjoy the money from. He was like the gangster Henry Hill -- a truly bad guy who's life inspired a truly great work of drama. 

The original 1990-1992 NYC run also inspired a lot of careers from actors I love and who found great success afterwards. The most famous person in the cast at the time was Stockard Channing who had already done Grease and would later be on The West Wing. She was one of the only people from the play to do the movie -- and got an Oscar nomination for it. Courtney B. Vance originated Paul, and others in the cast included Anthony Rapp (Rent), John Cameron Mitchell (a huge actor and playright), Evan Handler (Sex and the City, Californication), David Eigenberg (Sex and the City), and Robert Duncan McNeill (Star Trek: Voyager). Later on Kelly Bishop (pre-Gilmore Girls) replaced Stockard Channing, James McDaniel (pre-NYPD Blue) became Paul, and a very young and totally unknown actress named Laura Linney also joined the cast. Another replacement actress was Deidre Lovejoy would later be on The Wire. In the movie, a young actor nameed JJ Abrams had a small part -- and now he's one of the biggest directors in the world. 

But the legacy of Six Degrees of Separation goes beyond the life of this man and the real and fictional drama he inspired: the concept of "six degrees" became popularized, it became conversation fodder, it became an idea, a meme, part of the popular lexicon -- that we're all seperated in this world, in this life, by only six people. It gripped the public imagination. So much so that a popular game called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" was created (finding actors who worked with him or worked with other actors who worked with him) that has saved many an awkward conversation. There was even a bad TV show called "Six Degrees" several years ago (that had nothing to do with the play).

Before social media and COVID-19, Six Degress of Separation reminded us that we're all connected to each other, directly and indirectly, one way or another.

I'm pretty sure David Hampton didn't realize, in 1983, that so many great careers would be spawned, and American culture altered, by his one-night con. 

The world truly is a random place. 

Postscript: I never saw the play when it ran in NYC but I saw it a couple of years later in Washington, DC with Marlo Thomas in the lead role. She was great but sadly I don't remember much else about the production.

You can read all of the various articles The New York Times wrote about Six Degrees of Separation here. 

Locations, Locations

In NYC real estate is king. As big as this city is, there are so many people who want to live and work here that every inch of the 5 boroughs is in demand.

Location, location, location is the constant refrain. Or is it?

In a city of 8.6 million people -- a city brimming with people who want to buy things and use services -- there is more vacant commercial property than ever before. That means lots of stores and places where people could shop and get services don't exist! don't This segment from WNYC radio yesterday explores the alarming rise of empty commercial space in NYC but I don't need the media tell me this -- just walk down any commercial street in this city, in an neighborhood in any borough, and you'll see lots of vacant store fronts. It's stunning to think that, at a time when the city's population is bigger than ever, there are fewer and fewer places for New Yorkers to shop. 

The reasons are obvious: rising rents, online shopping. Also: tax write-offs -- some commercial landlords can actually make more money writing-off empty space than getting rent. That's depressing -- and hopefully the tax law will be changed. What's awful about retail stores closing in neighborhoods that they help give neighborhoods a sense of identity, a sense of individuality, a sense of self. Take them away and you ruin the neighborhoods.

Vacant store fronts are the blight of NYC today. 

One thing, however, we don't want in NYC is a Trump Presidential Library. Hopefully that'll never happen although a Staten Island City Councilman wants it here (in Staten Island of course) and some nitwit journalist thinks it's a great idea. 

How can I put this? UGH!

The idea that we would build a monument to this evil man in this city, a monument of hate and division, is horrifying. I hope, when the time comes (sooner hopefully rather  than later), any proposal for a Trump Library in NYC will be stopped. It will be the last, great triumph of the Resistance.

Gotta Love New Yorkers

I grew up in a house full of books. In fact, you might say it was lousy with books -- there were shelves in every room (except the bathroom), floor to ceiling, full to the brim. We didn't really have walls, just bookshelves. My parents collected roughly 3000 books, including some that were over 500 years old.

You might say, they literally lived and breathed books.

So that's why I loved reading this obituary about a guy who literally turned a whole apartment into a bookstore. He used to own real bookstores in Brooklyn and Manhattan but, once he lost his leases and got sick of selling at book fairs and such, he literally set up shop in a rent controlled apartment. His domestic bookstore became popular for "those in the know", a "secret haunt" for the beautiful people as you might say. People would make appointments to go buy books, groups would congregate in this place to drink and talk about literature. It was a real-life salon, a throwback to another time.

The place went under in 2015 from eviction and the owner just died. But he was another kind of NYC hustler, the kind of person this blog loves and celebrates. Rest in peace.

NYC Renters Catch a Break

For decades the real estate industry has controlled NYC by controlling its politicans -- both at the city and state levels.

Campaign contributions and cynical pressure groups (like "Jobs for New York") have made politicians cower and give landlords and big real estate companies whatever they wanted at the expense of renters and ordinary people. For years they have tried -- and, in some cases almost succeeded -- in getting rent control and stabilization abolished. Renter protections have been systemically weakened over the years, most notably back in 1994 and 1997 (read all about it here).

So when the state legislature this week passed massive new tenant protections it was a huge  historic victory for renters and ordinary New Yorkers after decades of being trampled on: security deposits will be limited to one month, tenant blacklisting and illegal evictions are criminalized, rents regulations are no longer tied to income, more apartments will remained rent regulated. 

These are amazing, great changes -- and show, now more than ever, how elections have consequences.

Ironically, bizarrely, we have an extremely greedy NYC real estate monster to thank for these new laws: Donald Trump. If that psycho hadn't been elected president in 2016, it's quite possible that the Democratic grassroots wouldn't have turned out as strongly as they did in the 2018 elections, leaving the Republicans/IDC corrupt coalition in power in the state senate.

Thanks Donald!