As congestion pricing takes effect in NYC, we may very well be seeing the eclipse of the car in NYC -- or at least in lower Manhattan. Less cars, more money to public transit it music to the ears of any real New Yorker.
Take that Robert Moses!
But people still loves their cars -- I get it.
And even if you don't love cars (like me), you might have enjoyed theSaturday morning NPR show Car Talk (like me) that ran from 1986 to 2012 -- syndicated nationally from Boston and broadcast locally here on WNYC.
If you want to listen to some old Car Talk episodes, WNYC has a massive archive of old shows that are a pleasant diversion from the miseries of our time -- and love letter to the all-American automobile.
"Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives ..."
Thus spake Saint Augustine. Or an old soap opera. Either way time has been passing quickly lately because life has been quite hectic lately and blogging has gotten away from me lately -- until now!
But as I compose my first real post in over a month, the passage of time is very much on my mind -- and a couple recent events and remembrances have focused my mind on how people and things come and go, and either leave a lasting impression ... or don't.
First, a passing: the brilliant screenwriter and movie director Robert Towne recently died at the age of 89. He wrote and directed several films but the movie that catapulted him to cinematic greatness was his script for the 1974 classic Chinatown (which I've blogged about here several times). Besides being the most perfect screenplay ever written, Chinatown is also probably the best American movie ever made about the dark soul of a city and the forces that shape it. While it's about LA and not NYC, the movie has echoes of the real-life works of Robert Moses in NYC and how, to quote Chinatown, "he made this city." Towne understood the giant, secretive, menacing forces that surround and suffocate us, how cities are largely the products of deeply corrupt and powerful men, and how all of us are subject to their will and live within their warped creations. Hence the movie's iconic final line "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown." But we'll never forget Robert Towne, his great legacy, and what "makes" our city.
Second, another passing but one nowhere near as sad. As I've also blogged about several times, one of my favorite shows ever is the early 1990s sci-fic drama Quantum Leap -- about a brilliant scientist who travels back in time, "leaping" into the life of various people and "putting right where once went wrong," changing history "for the better." It had many great episodes, including several in NYC. A couple years ago it had a reboot that I had high hopes for -- only to see them dashed. The show was a mess. Instead of focusing on the humanity of the characters who were to be saved, it chose to be some kind of weird thriller with numerous and confusing storylines, too many poorly developed characters, and no real chemistry between the actors. It failed completely. Now it's been cancelled, put out of its misery, and hopefully it will be forgotten -- while the great original show will hopefully be remembered and rewatched for decades to come.
Third, it's hard to believe but it's been over a quarter of a century since Sex and the City first hit our airwaves. It's now become a part of NYC's culture and identity but, back in 1998, it was just a little show struggling to find an audience. The pilot was directed by Susan Seidelman who also made the funky 1982 NYC movie Smithereens which I reviewed back in 2017. In this recent big interview, Seidelman remembers the making of Smithereens, the S&TC pilot as well as her classic 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan. In many ways these movies and TV shows define late 20th-century NYC -- and Susan Seidelman's vision made them happen.
Fourth, an anniversary, a big one: WNYC radio is 100 years old! Yes, broadcasting in this town has existed for more than a century. Probably the most powerful public radio station in the country, WNYC has had a tremendous legacy -- and present day relevance -- to the life of this city. Besides going back and reading my numerous posts about WNYC, you can also listen to a history of the station here and also a recreation of the station's first July 8th, 1924 broadcast here.
All things and people pass, come and go -- but so much else lasts (like this blog!). And, for that, yours truly is truly grateful.
A few years ago I blogged about the late WNYC-TV which went off the air in 1996 after the city sold it off (WNYC radio still exists and is bigger than ever).
Now the city's Municipal Archives has digitized thousands of hours of tapes from WNYC-TV, from the 1940s to the 1980s. Obviously it's massive and impossible to watch everything but, if you're interested, you can find it and a history of the station here.
New York City is, for the most part, a one-party city -- the Democrats control the three city-wide offices, four of the five borough presidencies, the vast majority of the City Council seats, and most of the city's state legislative and Congressional delegations.
But there are red dots in this blue mess, a handful of Republicans in the council and state/federal delegations -- and, of course, for 20 years, we had two Republican mayors.
One of those red dots was Eric Ulrich.
First elected to the City Council in 2009, representing Howard Beach way out in southeastern Queens, Eric was young, smart, fast-talking, and good on TV. He popped up on NY1 and WNYC radio a lot and he always seemed to know what he was talking about, always had a quick answer to whatever question he was asked, always was engaging. He was seemed like a bright-light of young Republican promise in a sea of dull Democratic hacks. His promise was strong, his future seemed golden.
Eric was supposedly that thing the media and too many Democrats wish existed but really doesn't -- the "good Republican", the "reasonable Republican", the Republican who is conservative, yes, okay, but who you could "work with", someone with whom you could "find common ground" with and come up with "common sense solutions."
That kind of crap.
During the De Blasio years, along with most of the media, Eric would rag on the mayor all the time, even though he voted for most of mayor's policy agenda. I remember seeing Eric on TV once complaining about how the sanitation department hadn't plowed his neighborhood fast enough after a snowstorm (because, you know, some people think their neighborhoods get plowed too quickly) and this was apparently proof-positive that De Blasio was a bad mayor. When pressed that crime was low and the city didn't appear to be in any kind of crises (this was pre-COVID), Eric blithered on about how the city was experiencing "a crises of confidence" which is the kind of thing that's obviously impossible to prove.
But Eric also wasn't a big Trump guy so that obviously made him a "good Republican" in so many people's eyes -- that mythical creature like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
Eric Ulrich stayed in the council until 2021 when he was term-limited out. Then, Republican though he was, he joined the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, a supposed Democrat. At first Eric was a "special advisor", then he got a big job as the city's building commissioner. As you might imagine, in a city with LOTS of buildings, the building department is a very powerful, very important agency -- it has over 1700 employees.
Then, quite suddenly, after less than a year on the job, he resigned in late 2022.
Turns out, Eric was under investigation for participating in a gambling ring. Okay, that's not great -- but it turns out there was more. Eric apparently used his city elected and administrative offices to help himself get a steep discount on an apartment, Mets tickets, art, and repayment of his gambling debts. He's just been indicted for corruption and is looking at jail time.
Over the weekend I stumbled upon an old 1989 documentary made for the now- defunct WNYC TV about the monumental US Supreme Court decision of that year which eliminated the Board of Estimate and triggered a restructuring of how NYC government is run.
It's called Power! Who Wins, Who Loses and, given its subject matter, is a shockingly entertaining look at how this city was run for nearly a century -- before it had to change.
He's the man who saved NYC multiple times -- first, in 1975, he was part of the team that prevented the city from going bankrupt; second, in the early 1980s, when he was the head of the MTA and overhauled how that messy public authority was run; and third, in 2009, when he became the Lieutenant Governor and saved the state (and the city's) finances). Ravitch was never elected to anything, but as a lawyers and developer he understand the mechanics of governor better than anyone and
While politicians, elected officials, may be the ones who make the laws and run things on a day-to-day basis, most of them sadly know little about how the government actually runs, how it works, how it finances itself. When it comes to government, most politicians are amateurs. It's people like Ravitch and Stan Brezenoff who understand this kind of thing deeply, they are the professionals who make it work.
And in a time when expertise is being trashed by the proudly ignorant, people like Ravitch should be appreciated all the more -- and their passing should be deeply mourned. RIP.
It's hard to believe but it's already been two years since the COVID-19 vaccine began rolling out en masse. The world was still reeling although beginning, slowly but surely, to recover as millions of needles jabbed millions of arms.
This was before the dark anti-vax forces began to wield their disinformation weapons, aiming squarely at the ignorant.
No, in this period of time two years ago, brief though it was, most (sane) people were scrambling to get an appointment to get the vaccine. This included, here in NYC, a mass vaccination site at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan.
Beth Fertig, then a reporter for WNYC radio, got her shot there and filed a radio story putting the vaccine and the vaccination effort into historical context, and what a great achievement it was. It was a simple but powerful story, and I blogged about it at the time -- and now, two years since the vaccination rollout and three years since the pandemic hit, it's amazing to see how right she was.
When I was in high school, on those wild and crazy Saturday nights when I was at home, before watching Sisters and Saturday Night Live, I'd listen to a quirky show on WNYC radio called Modern Times, hosted by radio-lifer Larry Josephson.
Despite its august title, Modern Times was a freeform show where Josephson rifted on odd topics, occasionally playing music or comedy bits. Sometimes he'd interview people as well. Josephson's manner was calm, quiet, but funny. I remember that he played Bob & Ray's hilarious rendition of "Do you think I'm sexy?" whose career he was involved in promoting. One time I remember he told a scary but fascinating story about coming home one day and confronting a man with a knife who was going to rob him -- and instead they had a long conversation. I never heard a show like it, before or since.
Josephson had a long career in NYC radio, mostly at WBAI, and was part of the freeform radio-generation that included Joe Frank, Bob Fast and Steve Post. In many way, they were podcasters before podcasters, making radio interesting and showing what was possible with the medium of air, uncorrupted by commercial interests. He was a pioneer, and we won't see his likes on the radio ever again. RIP.
In late 2020 I blogged about my memories of WNYC TV, the long defunct public television station that was owned by the city and was the sister broadcaster of WNYC radio.
The programming, as I indicated, was a weird cross between PBS and public access, with lots of international programming along with local shows. In the evening they would mostly show half-hour comedy and drama shows from the UK, much of it very offbeat stuff.
One exception to the British stuff on WNYC TV (although still quite "offbeat") were repeats of a late 1980s series called Trying Times. This was, unusually, an American show and it was actually created for PBS. Today we would call it an "anthology show" -- every episode was a stand-alone story with a totally different cast and characters. It could also be described as a "dramedy" -- the stories had a comic tone but there was a serious current underneath all of them. The episodes weren't laugh-out loud funny but there certainly weren't intensely dramatic. They were, well, weird.
Each episode chronicled painfully ordinary Americans (almost all white, let's face it, it was the '80) as they dealt with the trials and tribulations of life. A young lady goes home with her boyfriend to meet his family and it ends up with the father getting his hand caught in a food disposal in the sink. A woman gets divorced and experiences a miserable moving day. A guy who's been writing his thesis for 10 years has to get a job. I remember one odd episode where woman breaks into the house of a man to sleep with him because she's setting him up for a mob hit -- only to discover later that he's the wrong target.
And on and on. In many ways it was Seinfeld right before Seinfeld -- normal people who get into odd situations that escalate beyond anyone's control.
There were only about 12 episodes of Trying Times broadcast in 1987 and 1989. It's mostly (okay, completely) forgotten today but it was, in retrospect, way ahead of its time -- a single camera comedy/drama anthology series about wacky people. But what is memorable are the actors and talents who appeared on this show: Rosanna Arquette, Gina Davis, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Stockard Channing, Griffin Dunne, Robert Klein, Jean Stapleton, Steven Wright -- even Corey Feldman! Many were at the heights of their careers at the time these episodes were made. Some of the directors, also flying high at the time, were Buck Henry, Michael Lindsay-Hogg (currently getting some attention in the epic Beatles documentary), Christopher Guest, and even Jonathan Demme. There was a murderers row of talent in this series -- and one of the producers was, of all people, David Byrne.
You can find episodes of Trying Times on YouTube and watch the Golden Age of Television in its nascent form since you can't time-travel 30+ years and watch it on WNYC TV.
So you can tell how big of a sports fan Mr NYC is by the fact that I failed to mention earlier that the Knicks made it to the NBA playoffs this year -- and won their first playoff game since 2013.
Unlike the Giants and Yankees who dominate NYC and national football and baseball -- with the Jets and the Mets always showing promise early in their seasons before flaming out -- the Knicks have rarely come close to the ultimate in basketball glory. As a youngster I remember the strong Patrick Ewing years and, more recently, "Linsanity", but otherwise the Knicks have been mediocre or worse. Their ownership and coaching have also, over the years, generated lots of drama and attracted much negative attention.
So, as you might imagine, it's great to see the Knicks doing so well this year even if they fail to advance in the playoffs. It's a reminder of the city's spirit -- never quitting.
And whether or not the Knicks are doing well or not, you can be sure that Oscar-winning filmmaker and #1 Knicks fan Spike Lee will be on the sidelines cheering them on ... and occasionally offering his own commentary of the team's performance. Recently he gave a big interview on WNYC about his love of the Knicks as well as his upcoming multi-part documentary about NYC since 9/11. I can't wait for this.
Lest anyone thought otherwise, the spirit of this city is very much alive -- and never went away.
Blog posts are, in many ways, a bunch of essays of varying length that are collected, chronologized, and streamlined on this platform called "da blog." In the analog world, essays usually appear in newspapers, magazines, books, or other various tactile media, usually with a similar logic applied to their aggregation.
So where does that leave the radio essay?
For decades the radio essay was ephemeral, existing only for as long as it was broadcast across the airwaves and into the minds of its listeners. Then it vanished into the ether of time. Alistair Cooke, both before and after he hosted Masterpiece Theater on PBS, produced radio essays for the BBC called Letter from America. He broadcast thousands and thousands of them, from 1946 to 2004 (!), commenting on everything from the re-election of Harry Truman to the Second Iraq War. Most of those radio essays no longer exist but more than a thousand have been rescued and now, thanks to the Internet, are easily accessible.
The radio essay is now more lively and powerful than ever!
Which brings me to The Fishko Files, a wonderful oddity in the world of present day New York City radio. Broadcast on WNYC every Friday morning, and freely available online, they are short essays by culture critic Sarah Fishko. She covers the whole swath of culture in NYC and elsewhere, both past and present -- art, architecture, music, movies, TV, even unknown or recently discovered recordings. She "writes" about Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, Woody Guthrie, Scott Joplin, Andy Warhol, the architecture of the Old Penn Station, movies about the Holocaust, the new Whitney Museum, film composers, and many, many more. It's an audio feast of culture, a compendium of cultural essays from the cultural capital of the world.
Sarah Fishko has been producing these essays for WNYC for more than 20 years and you can listen to them all now -- whenever, wherever, however you want.
This morning I heard what may be one of the best pieces of radio commentary I've ever heard. It's by the WNYC reporter Beth Fertig recounting her experience getting her COVID-19 vaccine shot at the Javits Center.
What happily surprises me, however, is how much it reverberates with my previous blog post about how, in these seemingly nihilistic times, we must look to and celebrate the helpers, the healers, the creators, the builders, people who seek to improve and enrich our world in time when so many others seems determined to ruin it. How the vaccines and their distribution is, in many ways, a monument to humanity's great ability to hope for a better future.
And that this is why NYC has changed and thrived for over 400 years --- and will for another 400 years.
If you scan the NYC radio dial and hit 105.9 FM, you'll land on the city's only classical music station WQXR 105.9 FM. But for nearly 80 years its home was a little further down at 96.3 FM. Back in 2009, when this blog was about 2 1/2 years old, I chronicled the station's historic move up the dial due to its change in ownership.
Between 1944 and 2009 WQXR was owned by The New York Times as a commercial entity. Not only did the station play classical music but it was, as you might imagine, heavy with news. In between the sonatas and interludes, symphonies and overtures, concertos and chamber music -- the whole array of the classical music cannon -- there would be news delivered directly by Times reporters. The station was a high-class, uber-sophisticate mixture of beautiful music and substantive infotainment.
My dad used to listen to this station all the time, and I was introduced to all sorts of great music that a kid my age might otherwise not be exposed to. The hosts were amazing as well: amongst them, Robert Sherman, June LaBelle, and the afternoon guy, a very funny man called Lloyd Moss stood out (he used to joke, during traffic reports, how there was always some overturned tractor trailer in the report that someone must be moving it around the city). There were also lots of special music programs like "First Hearing" (where original recordings of classical music would be played) or "Woody's Children" (which Sherman hosted and that played folk music) or live broadcasts from Symphony Space and the Metropolitan Operas on Saturday afternoons.
As a commercial station, WQXR played ads but they were ads made especially for WQXR. They were very well-produced, and I remember ads for champagne like Veuve Cliquot or B. Smith's or Broadways shows like "Six Degrees of Seperation" or "On Borrowed Time" or high-class restaurants like the long-gone Le 1900.
Then there was the news.
I remember that every morning before I went to school, my dad would be listening to the news on WQXR and there was a special segment called "The Washington Report", a phoned-in segment by R.W. Apple Jr., the Times' long-serving Washington correspondent. (I remember right after the 1992 election, Apple talking about how the Republicans now had "re-find" themselves after their defeat, much like the Democrats in the 1980s.) At 6 PM every night there was a 45-minute news show called "New York At 6" where there would be a 10 minute national report, a 10 minute "metropolitan report" (i.e. local report), and then various Times' critics would do reports on things like theater (Frank Rich), restaurants (Brian Miller), movies (Janet Maslin) and others. My mom would usually be making dinner during "New York At 6" so I'll always associate this program with the smells of cooking. I also remember that each program would start with the announcer stating very proudly, "THIS ... IS ... NEW YORK ... AT SIX!" followed by swelling and soaring music. At 9 PM each night a reporter would then read the headlines from the front page of the next day's Times, a few hours before the paper would hit the streets. Remember, this was before the Internet or social media so broadcasting the next's days headlines was actually a big deal.
WQXR also had an AM station. During the week WQXR AM would split off and broadcast a cooking show, a story hour, and a odd comedy show form the BBC called "My Music." You can hear all about that here:
The station was a real jewel.
But then, in 2009, as the financial crises and vagaries of the newspaper business bore down on the Times, the "paper of record" decided to sell WQXR. The powerhouse public radio station WNYC decided to buy it and then turned it into the non-commercial entity it is today, moving it up the dial to 105.9 FM. So the good news is that WQXR still exists and NYC has a thriving classical music station. But the old WQXR 96.3, the WQXR of my childhood that was so great, is long-gone. Here you can listen to its sign-off and remind yourself that, in NYC, everything always changes eventually.
Before it became a broadcasting and podcasting powerhouse, WNYC was just the local city-owned radio station that reported on the news and events of the day. And every so often notable people would drop by the station for a chat -- and a moment in history would be captured forever.
That's why it's fascinating to hear the following legendary people getting brilliantly interviewed by a lady named Patricia Marx on WNYC in the 1960s:
- A 1960 interview with recently deceased journalist Neil Sheehan, talking about the situation in Vietnam -- almost thirty years before he wrote the definitive book on the war, A Bright Shining Lie.
- A 1961 interview with Lorraine Hansberry talking about her recently produced hit play A Raisin in the Sun. A black woman playwright having success on Broadway is still a rarity, even more so 60 years ago.
- A 1963 interview with Bob Hope, right after the release of the final Road movie.
- A two-part 1963 interview with New York City Ballet founder George Balanchine.
- Two seperate interviews from 1964 with groundbreaking comedians Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl.
- A 1964 interview with a very young Woody Allen, talking about his comedy act and how he's getting ready to appear in his first movie, What's New, Pussycat? The idea that this kid comic would eventually become a great director isn't even mentioned.
- A 1968 interview with David Halberstam about the war in Vietnam, years before he would publish The Best and the Brightest.
And many more.
History is being made all the time, we just don't realize it. When people are interviewed, they're simply sharing their thoughts and feelings about what's going in their lives and the world at that moment. Of course their lives and time moves on, things change, and that's how we make history. So that's why it's amazing to peak into or, in this case, listen, to a moment in history.
In the early 2000s, New York City was recovering from 9/11, the twelve years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reign were just starting, and the turbocharged gentrification of the city was on its way. It was a turning point in NYC and also for me personally -- I was a couple of years out of college and still finding my way, personally and professionally. It's also when a small, very offbeat, extremely local cable channel hit the air that was destined to be short-lived but was, at least for me at the time, a fun diversion.
It was called MetroTV, and it was an odd child of both New York magazine and the Dolan-family owned MSG networks.
Like its parentage, its content was a mashup of programming from the MSG networks. During the day it broadcast weather, traffic, educational programming, and, on the weekends, sports.
It had these very NYC-centered shows about dating, sex, love, and being single in NYC. There were shows like Naked New York where relationship "experts", book authors and magazine writers, adult start, and various other experts in the excercise of Venus would be interviewed by a middle-aged guy and his very hot younger female sidekick. There was To Live and Date in New York, a reality show about single people. There was The Radio Chick on the Prowl where a oddball radio host Leslie Gold would talk with people about -- guess what? -- dating! And there was, most originally, a show called Strictly Personal where people would record themselves talking about why they were great dating prospects and then they would direct people to a dating website to contact them. A friend of mine even appeared on this! (Yours truly did not.) This was in the early years of online dating, before the IPhone and dating apps completely changed the game.
In a way MetrTV reminded me of the old WNYC TV -- lots of dull programming and some really wacky stuff.
MetroTV started in 2002 and ended in 2005. By then most of this programming had been cancelled. I don't know why it didn't last -- shows about love/sex/dating might get boring after a while and also this channel was so far down on the dial that people probably didn't find it. MSG seems to have realized that sports programming was probably cheaper and more popular.
I tried to find old clips of MetroTV shows on YouTube but none were to be found -- seems like it's all been memory-holed, locked in vaults somewhere. But it was a moment in time, gone but not totally forgotten.
New York City has changed in many ways during my lifetime, much of it in the physical infrastructure of the city itself: old buildings torn down and new shiny ones put up, neighborhoods gentrified from poor to rich, pedestrian plazas and new parks, bike lanes -- you name it, this town has transformed dramatically since the turn of this century. If a time-traveller from thirty years ago was to stroll the city streets today, he or she would be like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II, looking in wonder at how the old town had become techy and neon.
And they'd also discover that the city's old public TV station, WNYC-TV, is no longer around.
Today we live in the age of the Internet, streaming shows, and literally thousands of cable channels. We drown in content from all over the world. But it wasn't always like this. Once upon a time, and not so long ago, television was three and a half-networks, local stations, and a bunch of cable channels showing repeats, old movies, and news. Here in NYC any "alternative" programming was reserved for public television stations like Channel 13 which, then and now, mostly showed documentaries, British TV, and children's shows.
WNYC-TV was different.
Owned by the city, a sister broadcaster to WNYC radio (which is bigger and more popular than ever today), and located on Channel 3, WNYC-TV was a bizarre hodgepodge of programming. It was a cross between PBS and public access, a true oddity. WNYC-TV would show local public affairs shows, coverage of the United Nations General Assembly, foreign news from Japan and Italy, soccer games, and music videos.
Like the city itself, the station had a gritty, street-level vibe but also an international flavor. It was intensely local and extremely global.
It also showed a lot of very weird and off-beat British TV, the kind of stuff you didn't see on Masterpiece Theater. During the week, the station would show episodes of the working class British soap opera EastEnders. Very popular in the UK (and still on), the show basically consisted of lots of cocky-accented people yelling at each other in pubs and dreary houses. On Saturday nights, there was The Diary of Adrian Mole, about an English teenager dealing with the miseries of his home life and school (being a teenager at the time, I identified with him except that he had a cute girlfriend named Pandora and, uh ... well, anyway). There was The Fall and Rise of Reginal Perrin, about a food company executive who hated his life so much that in basically every scene he was trying to kill himself, only to get interrupted. There was The Young Ones, an extremely raunchy show about a bunch of university pals living together in a messy house. And there was Shelley, about an overeducated and unemployed man living in London, spending the entire time making fun of people who are more sucessful than him. It's also where I discovered Blackadder!
These shows were like nothing else on regular American TV at the time, and they did quite a number on my impressionable teenage mind. I felt lucky to live in a city where we had a station like this.
And then I went to college. And WNYC-TV vanished.
In 1996, the city sold off WNYC-TV and radio. A foundation was started to buy and run the radio station, and today it's a broadcasting and podcasting powerhouse. But WNYC-TV was sold off to some commercial broadcaster who just leased out its airwaves. Any trace or connection to the city was gone. All that is left of WNYC-TV are various clips on YouTube, some of which you can see below, including the final signoff in 1996.
This is a part of the city that is gone today but whose spirit still lives on.
I love a good Latin turn-of-phrase. Thinking about, and planning, this blog post, my first substantial one in several weeks, I thought about not only what I'd write but about what its theme would be. You see, living in NYC during this pandemic, it feels like the city we love is so close and yet so far. It's there, right out our windows, the concrete and steel and parks and everything we love exists but ... not really. We're here, it's there, we live in it and we love it, but so many of the things we love to do and enjoy in NYC are either closed, cancelled, or, if they are open, extrememly burdensome, not to mention potentially dangerous, to enjoy. So much of NYC right now feels in absentia -- its there but not here, its in our minds and memories and hopes and dreams but currently unavailable in our reality, our daily lives. Scanning the media these last several weeks, these stories defined for me this peculiar sense of absence. What makes it peculiar is that some of these absences are most definately permament but others either aren't permament but ... they might be ... we don't know ... they exist in a kind of purgatory ... in absentia ... forever for or (at least) for now. But some of these things also give me hope that a better day, Annie's "Tomorrow", is only a day (or few) away. Here goes, Mr NYC's peculiar feelings about COVID-19 in NYC, the feeling of being "in absentia": - There's the great musician Johnny Mandel, a child of NYC, who wrote many great songs including "Suicide is Painless" from the classic movie MASH. He died last month at the age of 94. - There's the memory of the legendary "Black and White Ball" that occurred on November 28, 1966 at the Plaza Hotel. This was the party of the century thrown by the great writer Truman Capote for Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. It was also Capote's re-entry into New York society after he had spent years researching and writing his masterpiece In Cold Blood, living mostly in the mid-west. Everyone who was anyone went to this party, a list of legends. This oral history gives a full account of what was, in many ways, the last time high society was openly celebrated by the world. In captured a moment in time before the horrors of Vietnam, riots, Watergate, and so many other body blows would hit the American spirit and psyche -- the legacies of which we still grapple with today. - Then there's the funky world of NYC theater. Who knows when it will ever live again? Live performances will be the last thing that can "reopen" for obvious reasons, so it may be a year or more before not only Broadway but theaters and shows and performance spaces of all stripes will be able to come back. That's why this other oral history, written in 1985 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Off-Broadway, is both a joy and also sad a thing to read. It reminds you of another NYC, a NYC that lives and breathes and performs and explores creativity. That NYC is on hold for the moment but we can always remember and honor it -- and that it returns ASAP. - And then we come to the present moment. Many New Yorkers have left the city, quarantining in the country. An estimated 400,000 plus people fled. Some have already returned, some hope to soon -- but others think they might never come back. Others did stay (like yours truly) because the idea of abandoning their city in its deepest moment of need felt wrong. But I shall not cast any stones. In a difficult situation like COVID-19, there's no right answer to any of this, no right thing to do, no perfect solution to a problem that persists and endures for the world. Should I stay or should I go? That's a question in a time and situation like this that only individuals can answer for themselves -- and we should all reserve our judgements of whatever decisions others have made. - And yet ... whatever you're doing during this pandemic, wherever you are, it's probably involving a lot of TV, particularly streaming shows. The wife got me watching this ridiculous show on Netflix called The Politician about a young man who aspires to one day become president and plots out his climb. In the first season he ran and (sorta) won the student presidency of his high school in California. In the second season, he and his friends move to NYC and take aim at unseating a powerful New York State Senator (most of which involves this young man giving speeches next to bridges in freezing cold weather). The plot is absurd but the acting, the writing, and the production values are first-rate (it also has Gwenyth Paltrow). It's a total guilty pleasure. Also, it's a total NYC love-fest, with numerous scenes filmed in restaurants and places that we love -- the kind of places that we can't go to right now. If you've seen or plan to see the second season of this show, you can find more about the glorious places where they filmed it in NYC here. - And yet, into the absence, into the void, comes some pure joy: a new show called Central Park on Apple TV. It's an animated musical show, pure fantasy, about a family that lives in Central Park and is trying to savev their home from a developer. The voice talent on this show is insane: Kirsten Bell, Daveed Diggs, Tony Shalhoub, Fred Armisen, even Ed Asner! And so many more! It's a wonderful new edition to the culture, an act of creation in a time of so much loss, that reminds us of why we eternally love NYC, even in the worst of times. - Finally, there are the saviors. There are the front line workers healing the sick and keeping our city running at a time when it feels like it's frozen. They are saviors all. These saviors include the people at The Public Theater and WNYC radio who, for four nights, broadcast Shakespeare's Richard II in lieu of Shakespeare in the Park that was obviously cancelled. It's an amazing, beautiful experience hearing this great old play read by today's top talent. My family and I listened to it every night and loved it. You can listen to it here. Hopefully, in this time of destruction, Shakespeare on the radio becomes a new creation, a new light in the darkness, that lasts and shines on brightly. NYC is in absentia for now ... but never forever, and never totally.
The public radio show "Live From Here" has been cancelled.
For those of you who aren't public radio buffs, "Live From Here" was the successor to "A Prairie Home Companion", a similar variety show hosted by Garrison Keillor for nearly 40 years. Lots of music, lots of comedy, it was a fun and wacky hipster version of the Grand Old Opry. "Live" was hosted by the singer Chris Thile, and the show had recently re-located from St. Paul, MN (where "Prairie" and then "Live" originated from) to NYC.
The whole point of bringing the show here was so that it could attract lots of big name guests (it did!) but the financial impact COVID-19 was apparently too much for it to bare. It depended, in part, on ticket sales, and it's unlikely that live shows like this will return anytime soon. So now "Live From Here" is gone.
This is really, really sad. I loved the show. It ran on Saturday nights from 6-8 PM on WNYC, and was a staple of its Saturday night schedule. I'd listen to it either in the kitchen while making dinner or with my wife and kids in the car if we were going to or coming from someplace. It was a relief to turn it on and listen to some fun people having fun, being creative, singing and joking to their hearts content, giving us all a temporary reprieve from the horror-show of the world. "Live", like "Prairie" before it, was sort of an inverse to "Saturday Night Live" -- it was on radio early in the evening and had more music than comedy. It was a real treat.
A treat that has now been snatched away from us. It's another part of the cultural fabric of NYC that's unravelled and I hope that, maybe some day when this is all over, it can be resurrected.
The longtime WNYC reporter and local "Morning Edition" host Richard Hake died this weekend at the age of 51. His kind yet authoritive voice was a constant morning companion, an audio balm of sorts.
Like many a great radio host, you felt like you knew him. I'm really sad that he's gone so suddenly, far too soon, and I'll miss listening to him.
The great cultural radio show Studio 360 (hosted by Mr NYC interviewee Kurt Anderson) has a recurring segment called American Icons that reviews important works from our nation's culture. These include things like the classic novels The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick, special moments like Jimmy Hendrix's performance of the "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, the Harley Davidson motorcycle, even the old TV soap Dallas. The segments look at why these various creations, from different points in American history and in radically different art forms, made a lasting impact on not only American culture but also the American psyche. These American Icon segments are some of my favorite things to listen to.
But wait, 'dere's more!
Recently Studio 360 launched a new New York Icons series that does the same thing for distinctly NYC-centric works. So far: the classic salsa album Siembra, Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar", and the musical West Side Story. There are lots of classic movies and books and shows that could qualify as New York Icons, as well as moments like 1951 "Shot Heard 'Round the World", or Mayor LaGuardia reading the comics on WNYC radio, or Studio 54. The possibilities are endless. May I make one suggestion to the creators of the New York Icons series? Maybe you should include blogs. And, if you're including blogs, maybe you could include, oh, I don't know, Mr NYC!
One-hundred years ago tonight Prince Edward of the United Kingdom was honored with a big dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. He was concluding a long North American tour, previously visiting Canada and Washington DC, and was closing it out in grand style in NYC. At this moment in time, Edward was at the center of the world -- the handsome young star of the royal family, icon of the British Empire, and a future King. The world genuflected to him, he was beloved and feted everywhere he went -- and it was impossible to imagine on this night 100 years ago that, less than 20 years later, he would become one of the most famous exiles in history. 1919 was a turning point in world history -- a year after the end of the War to End All Wars, WWI, known then as the Great War. The world was putting itself back to together, trying to pick up the spiritual and literal rubble of the most useless, insane act of violence in world history. The culture was changing too, casting off the crusty old world Edwardian culture and embracing the world of Dadaism and post-structuralism. This brilliant podcast from WNYC is all about how the "shell shock" of the war changed the culture of the world forever.
As for Edward himself, he would return to the Waldorf many years after 1919. He had abdicated the throne, a fallen man, exiled from his country and family, shacking up with his twice-divorced American wife, uninvited to his niece's wedding and coronation. In the new season of The Crown, Edward is shown at the end of his life in 1972, still showing a great, almost masochistic love for the family and monarchy that had doomed him into exile. (Right now, 100 years later, that niece, Queen Elizabeth II, would surely love to exile her son Prince Andrew after his bizarre TV interview where he spoke, badly, about his friendship with the late NYC financier/predator Jeffrey Epstein. While he probably won't be forced into literal exile like Edward was, Andrew probably will be in a kind of functional exile from now on. He shamed himself, and now his family and his country want little to do with him. So into the wasteland of exile he goes.) But exile isn't just for royalty! In the era of #MeToo, any number of formerly prominent men are being exiled from their careers and social lives, banished from their professional circles and polite society. Liked Prince Edward 100 years, they used to exist at the center of things, they were the honored guests in powerful worlds -- only to be cast out, shunned, told to take a physical and reputational hike. What does it mean to be an exile? To be banished from a place or a group of people? It means, most simply, to occupy a negative space -- not to live but simply to exist in a place far away (literally and otherwise) from where you want to be. It means your invitation has been rescinded, your credentials revoked, your entry badge confiscated -- you're persona non grata in a place where you were once very ... persona grata. In short: it means you go from being wanted to unwanted. What's more painful than that?
Here's another great example of a famous exile. The great NYC journalist Pete Hamill, in late 1974, visited San Clemente, California in search of Richard Nixon. Two years earlier Nixon had won the biggest landslide in American presidential history -- he carried 49 states! -- and was as popular and powerful as any president had ever been. Nixon strode the world stage like a colossus, opening diplomatic relations with China, limiting nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union, and winding down the war in Vietnam. And then ... in 1973 and 1974, the Watergate scandal consumed him, forcing him to resign in August 1974 and into exile in California. In this article, Hamill roams around the area near Nixon's home, talking to people there about whether or not they have seen America's most famous exile (they hadn't), wondering about the state of mind of a man who very recently had not only lived in the White House but who also seemed to have the literal world at his feet -- and was now a hermit in a small Southern California town, hidden not only from the world he used to dominate but from his very own neighbors. Later on Nixon would move to NYC (he died here in 1994), not quite as reviled as he had once been but still an exile from the world -- the political world -- that he had once ruled. But being exile isn't just an existential state, it's more a state of mind. Being an exile is defined by a never-ending "wanting", a non-stop desire to have or be something you once had or were, now gone and locked away from you. It's defined by the aforementioned negative space, by a perennial emotional and mental sense of absence. Being an exile is like being a living void, a sort of real-life zombie. Right now, there are hearings going on in DC about whether or not Donald Trump, the most vile president in US history, should be impeached. Maybe he will be, maybe he won't. But we can only hope that this modern day monster will be one day become an exile too, banned not only from the White House and political world but from the America's consciousness. Hopefully he will suffer a poitical and reputional fate, a total and complete exile, as bad as the ones Edward VIII and Richard Nixon and many others have suffered.
