If you're a fan of the White Lotus series, you'll note that there are lots of scenes of characters lounging by pools or laying in bed, reading. Over three seasons, lots of different books have been used as props -- including Barbra Streisand's phonebook of an autobiography -- and they help to give the characters reading them another dimension.
In this third season of the show one of the characters is reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned -- a book I blogged about back in 2022. And there's a person whose whole job it is to get these books onto White Lotus, a sort of literary props master, that must be a fun job. (People on TikTok are chatting about it).
This remind me of a story -- albeit, a very short, rather underwhelming one. But it involves another noteworthy HBO show.
In early 2001 I was working -- miserably -- at a company that produced trade books. It was an awful job at an awful company with awful people, and I didn't last long there. But there was one fleeting brief moment that catapulted me into cultural relevance.
One afternoon my phone rang and I answered. A cheery voice said to me, "Hi! I'm calling from the HBO show The Sopranos!" I was floored. In early 2001 The Sopranos was, by far, the hottest show on TV. Everyone was watching and talking about it. This was while they were making the third season that included the legendary "Pine Barrens" episode.
Of course, I thought, "Why the hell are they calling this company?" But the friendly guy on the phone informed me that they needed books on real estate for an upcoming episode and could we provide some gratis. I said I thought that was possible, took down the info, informed my bosses, they went nuts, and off the books went to the Sopranos production company.
Months later, I'm out of this job horrible job and, one night, catch the show. And there, at the end of the episode, is Edie Falco herself reading the book I sent. That was weird, and cool, and my only connection to one of the best TV shows ever made.
I don't recall exactly which episode it was but it's towards the end of the third season. So, if you ever see it, remember Mr NYC himself masterminded this epochal contribution to the culture.
The daily weekday soap opera used to be a staple of daytime network television. All My Children, Guiding Light, One Life to Live and so many others entertained housewives, the unemployed and layabouts during the early afternoon hours for decades.
But then, about ten-to-fifteen years ago, they started to vanish. Some of these soaps, like Guiding Light, had started on radio in the 1930s and ran for the better part of 70 to 80 years! -- and then were unceremoniously cancelled. Today there are only about three or four left, as streaming and the Internet and production costs doomed them.
Most soap operas are generally set in some mid-sized fictional city in the midwest somewhere, usually with a name that starts with "Port." They exist in a mystical Everytown USA where everyone is beautiful, sex craved, greedy, venal, dishonest, and unusually prone to car accidents.
One outlier to these kinds of soap operas was Ryan's Hope, which ran from 1975 to 1989 and was set in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan.
Unlike most soaps, it was set in a real neighborhood in NYC with blue collar characters. Ryan's was a bar across the street from the fictional Riverside Hospital (i.e. Columbia Presbyterian) and the show explored the lives of its denizens. It still has the usual soap opera tropes of scandalous affairs and pregnancies and deaths but it was rooted in NYC and real community.
One of the original stars of Ryan's Hope was Kate Mulgrew who went on to greatness as the Captain on Star Trek: Voyager and later as the hilarious Russian prisoner on Orange is the New Black. Guest stars included a young Kelsey Grammer, Dominic Chianese (20 years before The Sopranos) and Christian Slater.
While it had a relatively short life compared to other daytime soaps, Ryan's Hope was an unusual slice of NYC life beamed each afternoon into homes across America -- and there's quite like it that exists today.
In the early 2000s, when George W Bush was president and America was fighting two wars, America entertained itself with two things: The Sopranos and reality shows.
So it was the backdrop of this milieu that HBO, for some inexplicable reason in 2004, produced perhaps its oddest reality shows ever -- Family Bonds.
It was about the professional and personal lives of the Evangelista family from Queens that was in the bail bonds business. The episodes would cut back-and-forth between the domestic lives of the Evangelistas (lead by the patriarch of the family and business Tom, along with his wife who was getting breast implants, his daughter who was getting married and having a baby, and Tom's brother/employee who was a perpetual incompetent) to scenes of them arresting people for breaking their bail.
Much like its fictional HBO sibling of the time about the mafia, Family Bonds was a look at a blue-collar tough guy business (in this case, a real-life legitimate one from NYC) where ordinary family life was contrasted to the rough business that supported it.
I remember seeing a few episodes of it at the time and wondering why this family and its business was getting a reality show on a prestige network. Some people found it offensive (like this screed) but to me it just looked dull. And after one season it was cancelled -- and completely and totally forgotten (until just now, by me).
I can't find clips of the show on YouTube and it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere. To a certain extent, it's almost like this show never existed. But if you ever see, you'll get a peak into a certain NYC slice-of-life that had very brief moment in the sun.
Read this blog long enough and you'll know that I'm a massive fan of Al Pacino, perhaps America cinema's greatest actor ever. He has given more brilliant performances on stage and screen than anyone can remember. In many ways, all actors live under his shadow, he has defined acting for his and all subsequent generations. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the movie that made Pacino a star, The Godfather, and the great thespian is still working, most recently in House of Gucci.
Godfather is the hallmark of early-era Pacino, Gucci being late-era Pacino. So that's why it's interesting to revisit two NYC-centric movies that Al Pacino made in 1997 -- Donnie Brasco and The Devil's Advocate -- that mark mid-era Pacino.
Both movies are good -- not great -- but both show the huge range of the Bronx born actor.
In Donnie Brasco, Pacino plays Lefty, an aging, low-level NYC mafiso. He is befriended by a jewel thief named Donnie Brasco who, we learn very quickly, is actually an undercover FBI agent named Joe (played by Johnny Depp). Lefty takes Donnie under his wing, teaching him the ways of the mob and giving him lots of advice ("One broad, that's enough"). They try to get a club going in Florida -- yeah, that doesn't work out -- and they become part of a larger power struggle within the mob. These are guys who actually watched The Godfather but it couldn't be farther from their lives. How this ends, you can imagine -- but the bond between Lefty and Donnie is beautiful and tragic to watch.
Unlike many of his performances from this era, Pacino is very understated in this movie. He's mostly quiet except for when he feels offended. Lefty is a sad figure -- after 30 years in the mob, he has little in ways of power or money to show for it. He's scrapping by, still trying to prove himself. What makes Donnie Brasco so unlike most mob movies or TV shows (like Goodfellas, The Sopranos, even The Godfather movies), is that it makes life in the mob seem truly dreary and pressure-filled. Lefty and many of his cohorts aren't rich, they aren't dripping in bling or living in big houses or driving fancy cars, and, as indicated, not a lot of broads. They also spend all their time following orders and doing grunt work. It's a hand-to-mouth existence, and Pacino's deeply sensitive performance makes your heart ache for a man who has wasted his life for nothing -- although, as we realize, he probably didn't have anything else going for him either. This movie, and Pacino's performance, gets under your skin with its sad comment on humanity -- and it's also a master at the top his craft.
Then there's The Devil's Advocate. Long story short, it's a movie about how New York City is Hell and Al Pacino (playing a lawyer) is the Devil. A young hot-shot criminal lawyer from Florida named Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves playing smart for once) is tempted to NYC by Pacino's superlawyer John Milton (Get it? Paradise Lost!) to represent Milton's megafirm clients who get into criminal trouble. Milton assigns Kevin to a murder case involving a billionaire real-estate magnet (there's even a scene that was shot in Donald Trump's apartment before we fully realized that he was actually the Devil), and it sends Kevin down into a personal and moral tailspin that involves his shallow but vulnerable wife (played by a wonderful Charlize Theron in one of her first big movies). It climaxes with fire and brimstone Devil Al Pacino yelling -- A LOT -- especially about why God's prick ("He's a tight ass! ... Worship that? NEVAH'!"), and has a very suprising ending.
No critic will ever call this Pacino's best performance but, along with Big Boy Caprice in Dick Tracy, it's one of his most fun. Pacino is all id, all wildness, all attitude in this movie precisely because his character (El Diablo himself) is nothing but that. Pacino's greatest skill as an actor comes from the great depth of human feeling that he imbues his characters with -- here, because his character is the very anti-thesis of humanity, he make you sympathize, make you like, makes you want to keep hanging with the greatest evil ever. If the Devil existed, and he really was Al Pacino, doubtless we'd all become Satinists.
So I highly recommend these two mid-era Pacinos movie that show the immense range of his talent -- and you'll also be highly entertained.
A child of immigrants, a bookish kid who loved movies that he started writing about them before making them, Peter was one of the brightest lights in the New Hollywood. He started in the late 1960s with a Roger Corman movie called Targets before hitting it big -- really big -- in the early 1970s with The Last Picture Show, What's Up, Doc? and Paper Moon. His directing career was up and down -- mostly down -- after that initial flush of success but he made some interesting movies in the years and decades afterwards including Mask. His last movie was in 2014, a small comedy called She's Funny That Way (one of the few he made in NYC).
Peter also acted occasionally, including as Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos. He also made a big documentary about the late Tom Petty and oversaw the restoration in 2015 of never-before-seen Orson Welles movie The Other Side of the Wind.
Infamously, he turned down the chance to direct Chinatown, something he said was the biggest mistake of his career.
Peter's love life was crazy -- he got married young, dumped his first wife for a very hot Cybill Shephard, dated lots of other gorgeous ladies, then infamously dated a Playboy Playmate named Dorothy Stratton who was then murdered horribly by her ex-husband (it became the story for the controversial Bob Fosse movie Star 80). Peter then married Dorothy's sister. To paraphrase something Howard Stern once said to Warren Beatty, "We could talk about the movies, but the broads get in the way." In later life, Peter resumed his extensive writing about movies and also became something of a protector of Orson Welles' legacy, his Boswell.
Peter was a man of many talents and travails.
Most of all, Peter was a New York City kid who grew up on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. The boy from NYC struck out West to fulfill his manifest destiny. Many of his movies are set in the West (most notably The Last Picture Show), a Jewish-immigrant NYC kid's refracted vision of Americana. No wonder he was considered a genius.
This goes without saying -- everyone hates sitting in traffic. But late one Sunday night, around 10 PM, I was sitting in the cab of a U-Haul truck that my brother was drving, stuck on the George Washington Bridge. The traffic was bumper to bumper, and we inched ... and inched ... and inched ... and innnnnnnnnnnnnnnnched forward, bringing us slowwwwwwwly back home into Manhattan.
This was a transitional moment for both of us.
My brother was moving the last of his stuff home after having lived elsewhere for a few years, and he was driving me back from college after I had graduated two days earlier. All of my stuff, my entire life in a sense, was packed into that truck. My future, the entire rest of my life, was right ahead of me, just across this bridge, just sitting there, waiting to start. This wasn't simply another night in my life, just another traffic jam, just another bridge crossing -- this was a demarcation point, a special and a unique moment, a bridge both literal and figurative, between the past and the future, between being a kid and becoming an adult, between hope and destiny ...
... and it was taking forever!
Sometimes I feel like I'm still stuck in that traffic jam, an extremely young man, getting ready for my life to start, waiting for the promised excitement to begin.
I've thought about that night, that moment, on the GWB a lot lately because it's hard to square that world with the one we're living in now -- a triple whammy of pandemic, economic depression, and deep racial strife. On that night on the GWB, Bill Clinton was president, George Pataki was governor, Rudy Guiliani was mayor, the World Trade Centers still stood, Iraq remained uninvaded, George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator, Donald Trump was a has-been real estate developer, the Internet was brand new and could only be accessed with a phone dial-up, talking about phones, most people still used landlines, very few people had cell phones, smartphones were still almost a decade away from being invented, newspapers were still printed in abundance, Howard Stern was still married to his first wife and and Jackie Martling was still one of his sidekicks, Harvey Weinstein was still running Miramax and was a respected Oscar-winning producer, Bill Cosby was still America's dad, there were no pedestrian plazas or bikeshares on the streets of NYC, lots of old buildings still existed and lots huge fancy ones didn't, there were no streaming shows, no Golden Age of Television (not yet at least, The Sopranos had just hit the air and the "Golden Age" monicker was still not invented yet), Amazon still only sold books, and so much more that existed and was going on then that is gone or that has become unrecognizable today.
Twenty-plus years later it feels like everything is falling apart. These days destruction rules and creation is in retreat.
We live in an age of nihilism, of "disruption", of "creative destruction," of "cancel culture" and neo-McCarthyism, of everyone just wanting just to "burn it down", of people wanting to destroy other people and cultures and businesses and governments and whole industries and whole societies, of ruining and wrecking and "taking down" people while not helping anyone or creating anything, of perpetual rage and ruin.
This is not the future I wanted, for myself or anyone, during that night on the GWB so long ago.
I was deluded enough to think back then that the future ahead, my future, across that bridge, across the new century/millenium due to start in a few short months, would be a glorious place, an exciting world, one surely much better than the century and childhood I was leaving behind me in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "the dark fields of the republic" that "rolled on under the night." The blinking lights of the city ahead, just over this jammed bridge, were my green light, my fresh new world, surely destined to be magical, an arcadia of sorts, where the old problems of the past would vanish and a new pancea of possibilities would emerge. After all, it was a time of great peace and prosperity and the future looked bright -- certainly it was only going to get better.
Right?
Nope. It got worse. A lot worse. And here we are today, living in the hopelessly divided "United" States of America, the future looking grim. If only had someone told me that one night twenty-something years ago on the George Washington Bridge ... I might not have gotten so annoyed at the traffic.
P.S. This is one of the reasons Mr NYC exists -- it's an act of creation, an act of optimism in a pessimisstic place, a place where we "build it up", a place where hope and kindness rule. As always, Mr NYC remain perpetually unfashionable.
There are many great NYC movies. Out for Justice is NOT one of them.
But while it's a very DUMB movie, it's also a very FUN movie. Lemme 'splain why:
Steven Segal, one of our great screen thespians, plays a goomba cop from Dyker Heights, Brooklyn named Gino Felino (yes, that's the fellow's name). Anyway, Gino's from da' neighba-hood and he's determined to bring down a goomba mobster named Richie Madano who's murdered Gino's goomba partner Bobby Lupo. (It's a movie that consists entirely of Goombas, many years before "Jersey Shore" mainstreamed them.) Anyway, the whole movie consists of Gina prowling around Brooklyn, lookin' for Richie, committing much violence along the way. "Anyone know why Richie did Bobby Lupo?" is Gina's constant, unanswered refrain, usually delivered before hurting someone really bad. Then he finds Richie, more violence ensues, and it's over. Complex it is not.
But, you see, Gino's not "out for revenge" -- oh no, he's "out for justice." All of his violence is justified. This was the early 1990s, after all, when crime in NYC and the nation was very high, so the idea of ultra-violent cops delivering punitive justice was a more palatable idea than it is today. Capiche?
The plot of this movie is secondary to the numerous scenes where Segal demonstrates his superior abilities at beating people up. There's a small subplot where Gino gets back together with his estranged wife -- "Are we talkin' reconcilliation, ova' here?" is a real line -- plus we learn that our hero is also an animal lover (the movie ends with his puppy urinating on a man's head which is played for yucks and is one of the more lighthearted moments in the film). Shockingly, this stupid but very entertaining movie boasts a great cast (other than Segal): Jerry Orbach, Gina Gerson, John Leguizamo, a pre-Sopranos Dominic Chianese and a pre-ER Julianna Margulies are all in it. And there's also a great early Beastie Boy's song -- "No Sleep 'Till Brooklyn."
This is a great movie to watch with a bunch of your friends while drinking heavily and yelling at the screen. In fact, there's no other way to watch it.
We live, now and forever, in the "Golden Age of Television." TV shows are better than ever, thanks to cable and streaming. Television is no longer the "boob tube" of yore, the poor relation of movies, but a proud artistic medium in its own right. The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel are just a few of the great "golden age" shows, featuring superior storytelling, acting, and cinematic qualities that capture our imagination and enrich our culture.
So when did the Golden Age of TV start?
Opinions differs, but the general "consensus" (if there can be such a thing) is that it began with two shows from the 1990s: Twin Peaks in 1990 and The Sopranos in 1999. Both shows broke normative TV boundaries, were daring, unsentimental, and nontraditional in their narratives, forcing viewers to watch people and things other shows shied away from -- and were hailed as masterpieces.
I mostly agree but, pour moi, the Golden Age of TV started on March 26, 1989 -- thirty years ago today!
That's when Quantum Leap premiered -- a show about a brilliant scientist named Sam Becket from the (then) future of 1995, who invented a time travel project called "Quantum Leap" where his mind and soul "leapt" into the bodies of people in the past. His time travels were limited to the past of his own lifetime (roughly the early 1950s to the 1980s). Once Sam became someone else, his mission was to "change history for the better", "to make right what once went wrong." He was regularly visited from the future by his friend Al, who "appeared in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and here." Al would give Sam the info about his missions, tell him about the "wrongs" he needed to "right", give him information from the future about the fate of the people Sam saved, and then after Sam accomplished his mission -- and only then -- would Sam leap into another life and point in time i.e. another episode.
I was obsessed with this show as a kid. I love time travel stories and history so this show was made for me. All my friends were fans too, and we talked about it practically every day. Quantum Leap was also, as a piece of pure TV art, stunningly good -- great writing, acting, and very original storytelling. So much of TV drama in the late 1980s/early 1990s was crime shows, lawyer shows, soap operas -- and here was this inventive, completely original show that exploded the hour-long drama narrative and did it amazingly well.
There wasn't another show like it on TV then and there hasn't been a show quite like it since.
Sam didn't just leap into lives but touched history, and the show was about the (then) recent past that America in the late 1980s/early 1990s was still grappling with. At times the show could be serious, at time it could be heart-wrenching, and at other times it could be hilariously funny. It tackled everything -- Vietnam, civil rights, Watergate, the women's movement, pop culture, you name it – Quantum Leap was a history lesson and drama wrapped into science fiction. Brilliant.
Quantum Leap starred Scott Bakula as Sam and Dean Stockwell as Al. Their chemistry, their repartee, their banter, the ups and downs of their buddy-dom is the stuff of legend, fascinating to behold -- they were funny, emotional, witty, and compulsively watchable together. They were and remain one of the great duos in TV history.
And each week there was a huge new cast of guest stars, including some actors who went on to have brilliant careers: Jennifer Aniston, Joseph Gorden-Levitt, Teri Hatcher, Diedrich Baeder, Michael Madsen, Bruce McGill, Jason Priestley, Patricia Richardson, Carla Gugino, and others. They all did memorable work.
One thing that was so much fun about this show was that each week Sam not only leapt into another time (one week it was the mid-1950s, another it was the late 1970s, then the '60s, the '80s, and so forth) but also different places including the South, the Midwest, California -- and, naturally, NYC.
There were many great NYC Quantum Leap episodes -- Sam became a cab driver, an actor, a butler, a fashion photographer, a gangster, amongst others. However, my favorite NYC Quantum Leap episode was when he leapt into the life of a Chip'N'Dale's dancer named "Rod the Bod" in 1979. The episode begins with Sam leaping into Rod's life while he is literally dancing in mid-air, crashing to the ground in front a bunch of horny and screeching women, Cool and the Gang's "Ladies Night" blaring. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen and was the kind of comedy (and drama) that only Quantum Leap could provide.
You can find old episodes of Quantum Leap on Amazon and behold the birth of the Golden Age of TV, and see NYC portrayed in a way that's never been done before or since.
Wherever you grow up, wherever you spend your formative years from birth to adulthood, it stamps you forever -- no matter how far you may run away from it.
Think of Gatsby. The Long Island millionaire bootlegger is revealed to be, at the end of The Great Gatsby, what he always really was -- a poor boy from North Dakota trying to make good. Think of Ronald Reagan -- yes, he was a Hollywood movie star and US President but he never really stopped being the poor boy from small town Illinois whose dad was a drunk. It haunted him and his years in power, informing his dark view of the world.
You might not be able to "go home again" but your childhood home never leaves you -- no matter how old you get, no matter where you move to.
Being a kid in New York City is something special -- this city is so unique, so weird, so crazy, that growing up here defines you forever. You may move far away, you may grow old -- but NYC kids are always NYC kids no matter where they live or whatever age they are.
Here are two amazing examples of kids from NYC who grew up to define the culture: the movie director and author Peter Bogdanovich and the writer Diane di Prima.
Bogdanovich grew up on Riverside Drive (like me), fell in love with the movies as a kid and spent his childhood and young adulthood in the NYC art house movie scene. Eventually he moved to Hollywood and became a successful (and then not so successful) director of movies like The Last Picture Show and Mask. He had a wild life, dating Cybill Shepherd and Playboy playmates, being best buddies with Orson Welles, acting on The Sopranos -- just an amazing ride. He's an old man now but, as this big interview shows, despite all his successes and failures, despite all his adventures, he's still just the kid from NYC who wanted to be in the movies. And he did it.
I had never heard of Diane di Prima until now but I wish I had: she was the leading female member of the Beat generation. A child of Greenwich Village, she wrote books and poems, taught school and college, and was an innovator in what today we'd call "confessional memoir." She's over 80 now and has had a crazy life but, you get the sense from this article, that Diane is still a young girl from the Village who just wanted to write.
And here's something that all kids in NYC and their parents have to struggle with: at what age can they be allowed to ride the subway alone? Believe it or not, this is a matter of great debate. Honestly, I don't recall how old I was when I started riding the subway by myself (I was 10 when I started riding the bus by myself) but it's one of the "only in NYC" things that defines being a kid in NYC.
During my final winter break from college, walking around a recently New Year's Eve'd Times Square, I looked up and saw a giant billboard for a new show about to debut on HBO: The Sopranos.
The billboard featured, if memory serves, several men and women (plus a couple of children) standing around and looking menacing. I didn't recognize any of the actors in this new series except for two -- the guy who beat up that girl in True Romance, and the wife from Goodfellas. I had no idea what the show was about but, from the looks of it (including the gun substituting for the "r" in title), I guessed it wasn't about opera singers. I also figured that I'd never watch this show (heck, I didn't even have HBO at the time) and it would probably get cancelled quickly. The Sopranos, as advertised, looked dumb and hammy. Who cared?
How wrong I was. It turned out to be a groundbreaking, brilliant show -- a dark satire about American life wrapped up in a traditional mafia drama. A middle aged man, under pressure at work and home, goes to therapy to get cured of his recurrent panic attacks and tries to understand his life and existential dread. The fact that this man is also a mafia boss and killer only made it more compelling.
And how appropriate that the show began in 1999 -- The Sopranos brought television, and really American culture, into the 21st century. It was post-modernist, destructive, and it re-invented the serial TV drama with cinematic storytelling and production values. Today, most of TV looks like The Sopranos (dark, profane, violent, extremely funny, nonlinear plots) but, back then, NYPD Blue and ER were considered edgy TV. The Sopranos, pun fully intended, whacked that idea.
The Sopranos was set in New Jersey and created, at least in its time, a sort of "Jersey Chic" (before Jersey Shore would have that honor). NYC was the place where mobsters and their family and friends would go to do business, have fun, and commit various crimes before going back to their suburban homes and lives. In the opening credits, Tony Soprano drives through the Holland Tunnel and we see the city fade away in his side-view mirror -- this is a show that exists nexts to and in the shadow of NYC. In that way, The Sopranos was and wasn't a NYC show.
HBO is currently re-airing the show and you can also find it on HBO Go and On Demand. It's worth re-watching and this handy guide can help direct you to its best episodes.
Gentrification isn't just happening to the NYC streets, skyline, and pocket books -- now it's hit our TV.
Specifically HBO.
Like most legacy premium cable channels, HBO has featured uncut, uncensored, commercial-free movies, big-time sporting events (like boxing), as well as original programming (e.g. The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, as well as documentaries). They also featured "adult" fare, including shows like Cathouse, Real Sex, and others.
One HBO show, however, defied easy categorization.
It was called Taxicab Confessions. It started on HBO in the mid-1990s and ran, off and on, for another decade or so. Taxicab was a brilliant, innovative program, an early "reality show", where regular people were filmed in the backseats of cabs, talking with their fellow passengers and the "drivers" (who worked for the show). These cab ride vignettes were usually filmed in the middle of the night, and all sorts of wacky characters and behavior would be revealed. It was an amazing "keyhole" into a moment in time, into simple interactions and conversations among people, a literal rolling revelation of human behavior. At the end of each show you'd see the drivers reveal to the passengers that they'd be filmed for Taxicab Confessions, and they'd freak out and then happily sign a release form. The show invented the whole genre of people talking in cars (Jerry Seinfeld even ripped it off!).
The show originated in NYC, and most of the early shows were filmed here (before moving to Las Vegas for a while, and then returning to NYC). As you might imagine, the people featured in the cab rides were often dirty -- dirty mouthed, dirty minded, dirty moving. They were funny, weird, sometimes delightful, sometimes sad, sometimes confused and confusing, sometimes shockingly normal, but they were always interesting. Always.
Why? Because even though a new episode of Taxicab Confessions hasn't been produced in a while, up until recently, the past episodes were available to watch on HBO On Demand and HBO Go. You could go back in time to the 1990s and early 2000s, and see these parade of lovable freak shows in cabs. You could see NYC (and, yes, Vegas) in the middle of the night, for real. You could see a whole other strange, sometimes dangerous, sometimes sexy, sometimes just odd, world. But no longer. HBO has removed it from these streaming services, along with the rest of their "adult" programming.
Taxicab Confessions is not only over but now it's gone, totally gone, a blatant garbage-canning of part of the city's past, a kind of digital gentrification. It's another dirty part of NYC that's been sacrificed to "taste" and cleanliness.
And it's wrong! While it certainly had "adult" moments (people removing clothing or getting frisky in the back of the cab), Taxicab Confessions was not necessarily an "adult" show like its other shows -- 99.9% of the time it was people just talking. It was a great show, a wonderful time capsule of humanity and NYC, and now it's vanished into the electronic ether.
Farewell Taxicab Confessions. This one New Yorker will remember you fondly.
Twenty years ago this week marked a key moment in the history of television.
And it happened on HBO.
On May 31, 1998, the comedy The Larry Sanders Show aired its final episode. The creation of brilliant comedian Garry Shandling about a narcissistic talk show host, Larry Sanders was one of the great, defining shows if the 1990s. More than that, it looked more like what is on TV now than then: it broke down the barrier between reality and fiction, it was single camera, its humor had more "cringe" and less punchlines, it was funny but also dark, it was deeply human. Today, most comedies on TV are like this but, in a time when wild, hyper sitcoms like Seinfeld and Home Improvement were ruling the air, Larry Sanders was quietly revolutionary -- and influential.
Then, on June 6, 1998, along came Sex and the City.
The show about four female NYC friends -- a sort of East Coast, female-centric Larry Sanders -- easily became one of the most popular shows about NYC but, more importantly, one of the first great "Golden Age of Television" cable shows. Six months later The Sopranos hit the air and the "Golden Age" had officially begun.
As this article indicates, without SATC, the culture as we know it today would be quite different. Think about everything that SATC influenced. There would have been no Girls, no Broad City, and a whole universe of shows and culture dedicated to the professional and romantic lives of women. It was a cultural trailblazer. Also, without SATC, there's be no Cynthia Nixon for Governor, no cupcake culture -- and, arguably, less gentrification in NYC.
TV as we know it was largely shaped in that week back in the spring of 1998 -- and, today, we live in its wake -- as does NYC.
Really.
Hard to believe it's been two months since I last blogged but a
daughter, house and busy life have kept me away from the keyboard.
Nonetheless, the city keeps grinding along, not caring a
wit whether I blog about it or not. (How dare it.)
Well, I won't try to re-hash all the events the last two months but here are a few things that have been going on in NYC recently.
1. The
death of James Gandolfini. The great actor died a few weeks ago in
Rome from a heart attack at age 51. His funeral last week
was a big event.
Of course he was great on "The Sopranos" and
in movies like True Romance and In The Loop. His death is a big
loss. He was so talented and compulsively watchable on screen. Like most
great actors, you could feel the complex emotions and thoughts that
were boiling under the surface of his characters. He made Tony Soprano
so real that at times it's hard to remember that Tony didn't even really
exist! Truly great. I was fortunate to see Gandolfini on Broadway in the play
"God of Carnage" in 2009. My review of this play and his performance are
here.
So long, Jim. You will definately be missed.
Interesting
side note: Gandolfini's funeral was at the Cathedral of St. John the
Divine's which is also where my grandmother's funeral was many years
ago. Small world.
2. After Sandy. There has been much
discussion about how to protect NYC from another hurricane or natural
disaster. The big proposal is the construction of storm barriers along
the NYC waterfront, particularly in the areas most vulnerable to
flooding. This New York Magazine article explores Mayor
Bloomberg's exhaustive proposal for building various storm barriers as
well as ceding various low lying areas back to nature (i.e. not building
on them again). This project will take years, decades even, to
complete, and cost billions of greenbacks. But we probably can't afford not to do it -- the city might not otherwise survive.
What's
great about this article is not only its exploration of Bloomberg's
ambitious plan but also putting it in the historical context of NYC's
waterfront -- and our relationship to it. It's so easy to forget that
NYC is unique because it is truly a city of islands -- over 40 of them!
-- and so much of the city is literally water. Since I can't put it any
better, I'll quote the article: "Glance at a map of New York, and what
you see is a lot of blue, ringed by a piecrust of boroughs. This is a
largely liquid city, a stunningly obvious fact that for decades was
almost forgotten and that we’re only just beginning to remember ... New
York’s relationship with its waters is a long and crazy romance, fueled
by manic energy, gilded dreams, violence, abandonment, and elated
rediscovery."
New Yorkers just don't live around water but also
under it and in it. Water defines this city as much as buildings and
parks, Wall Street and Broadway, the Mets and Yankees, delis and
department stores. We've always had a complex relationship with our
waterfront -- either ignoring it completely or trying to redeem it
somehow. For decades, Robert Moses cut us off from the waterfront
with highways and it's taken us decades to fix this with parks and
places like Chelsea Piers and the South Street Seaport. Now with the
explosion of ferries, we can get to places like Governor's Island which
opens us the city even more. Reclaiming our waterfront for the people is
a great thing but water can also be dangerous, as Sandy showed. Build
to close to the water and it can literally be deadly. "[T]he water is
beautiful, alluring, and vicious. The storm demonstrated that we can’t
get away, we can’t confine it, and we can’t beat it back. As the
Bloomberg report makes clear, the only option is a cautious love."
3. Whither Manhattan? Ever since the the City of New York (i.e.
Manhattan), the City of Brooklyn, and the counties of the Bronx, Queens
and Richmond (i.e Staten Island) consolidated in 1898 to
become Greater New York, the identity of NYC has always been more or
less defined by Manhattan.
The other boroughs, "the outer
boroughs", were simply satellites of the mighty central isle, provinces
of a great metropolitan empire. But the city, times, and the culture are
a'changin'. Sure, Manhattan plays a big part in NYC culture -- still
the center of fashion, theater, food, museums, etc. -- but these days
the outer boroughs are stealing its crown.
Brooklyn is now considered the cultural hub of NYC. Look at the big hit TV shows set here -- like Girls and Two Broke Girls, plus other shows like the late Bored to Death and
others -- and they're proudly set in Brooklyn, not Manhattan, In fact,
Manhattan is now being influenced by the culture of Brooklyn!
And Queens is getting in the game too. In fact, amongst
the biggest mucky mucks in the food world many believe the borough is
one of the greatest and most exciting food destinations in the world.
Not just the city but -- bang! zoom! -- the world! Having lived in Queens
for six years, I can attest that this is a great, great place to eat.
The cultural inferiority complex of the outer boroughs is clearly waning. And that's a great thing.
4. Woody Allen. How's he doing? When Ed Koch died earlier this year, NYC lost one of its great mascots. But, thankfully, we still have one of
our greatest alive and thriving.
Woody Allen, the legendary film auteur, is still making movies. He's produced almost 50 of them, including great ones like Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters and the recent Midnight in Paris.
Woody's been directing for forty-four years now, ever since the first
year of the Nixon presidency, and he just keeps going and going -- and
going and going and going and going and going -- winning a few Oscars
along the way and writing a chapter in film history.
What's
amazing is that while the film business -- not to mention the city and
country in which he lives and works -- has changed in so many ways,
Woody's approach to movie making remains the same. He just keeps making
his small, personal films on low budgets but with big names. He even
still types his film scripts on the same small manual typewriter that
he's been using for decades. He doesn't Tweet or use any social media --
he just makes films and enjoys life. And at almost 80, he keeps going
strong.
5. Jean Georges. Wow! What a great restaurant! Recently
the wife and I got a baby sitter and headed out to celebrate our
anniversary. We decided to try to try this place and had one of the best
meals of our life. There were two prix fixe menus -- a regular plus a
Spring menu -- and she got one and I got the other. Many of the dishes
included fish, chicken, plus egg dishes that included caviar. The food
was unbelievable. We also got excellent cocktails that were, to put it
mildly, damn strong. Best of all, the service was incredible. When the
restaurant found out that it was our anniversary, they gave us a
surprise anniversary cake, as you can see here. This great restaurant
made for a memorable anniversary.
6. NYC domain name. Hey, if they can do it for porn, why not for NYC? This headline says it all: New York City gets its own .nyc Domain Name 7. Mayor's Race. I was going to do a post about this but I realize that it's gotten so crazy and complicated that it deserves its own post. To be continued.
So there are my updates -- for now. More will be coming -- in less than two months.
