Remembering "Die Fledermaus" on Live from the Met -- December 31, 1986

In NYC the ultimate New Year's Eve tradition is the ball drop in Times Square. In Europe, there's another grand tradition -- a performance of Johann Strauss's comic operreta Die Fledermaus.

Roughly translated as"The Bat", the operetta is about a Viennese gentlemen who is sentenced to a few days in jail for having insulted a public official. Before going to jail, he sneaks out to party held by a mysterious prince, dressed in a bat costume. Little does he know that his wife and maid are also at this party, disguised. He tries to seduce his own wife at the party and then, after hilarity ensues, winds up where he belongs -- in jail. The operrata is a silly, raucous piece of fun, the perfect New Year's Eve show.

It's also has a really wonderful score, including an overture that is one of the greatest in history.

Even though New Year's Eve performances of Die Fledermaus is a mostly European thing, on occassion the Metropolitan Opera will stage one (most recently, I believe, in 2013). In 1986 the Met unveiled a new production of the operretta that it hadn't performed in 20 years and, on December 31, 1986, it was performed on national television on the PBS show "Live from the Met."

You can see part of it here.

Memories of watching television aren't the most interesting to share but I have one unique memory from that December 31, 1986 -- the first New Year's Eve I can remember celebrating, watching Die Fledermaus with my parents. I was also performing that night, doing the "The Nutracker" at NYCB, across the Lincoln Center plaza from the Metropolitan Opera house where Die Fledermaus was being performed. After my performance, my mother picked me up and took me home -- and I clearly remember our neighborhood being completely shut down, the streets deserted. We got home and my dad was watching and recording -- on the good ol' VCR -- the broadcast of Die Fledermaus. I started watching it with him, and fell in love with the music and gaity of this operreta (marveling that only a couple of hours earlier I was myself performing from just across the plaza where this show was being broadcast). Later, I re-watched Die Fledermaus and loved it all the more. The entire broadcast was a classy, beautiful affair.

Afterwards, midnight struck and I had my first glass of sparkling cider to rin in 1987. Then I went to bed.

A great memory and, to this day, my favorite New Year's ever. 

Into Eternity

As COVID-19 enveloped NYC in 2020, many of us quarantined and worked from home. It hasn't been easy, in fact, it's been totally miserable, but it's a lot better than getting sick and dying.

But for this city's essential workers, they didn't have this luxury. They had to go out and keep the city running -- and 298 paid for it with their lives.

Most of them were black and Hispanic, and most of them, surprisingly enough, worked for the Department of Education. The people trying to help our children succeed in the future were themselves denied a future. The people helping to keep NYC alive during this crises became its victims.

When wars end, it's common for memorials to be built. In NYC, I hope a huge, impressive memorial is built for all this city's essential workers who perished during COVID-19. Their names, their memories, their sacrifices for us all should be, must be remembered -- from now and into eternity. 

The Path to 2021 in NYC

The New Year's Eve "ball drop" in Times Square has long been a beloved traddition in NYC. However, with literally a million-plus people crowding together in one big place, these days we would call it a "super-spreader" event -- and, this year, it will be organized very differently.

As this city has been re-adjusting to life in this new normal, the planners of the ball drop have spent months working to keep the ball drop happening -- and keep it safe. Times Square will be closed to all but a very few people and only VIPs, etc. will be allowed in and around the very modest festivities. However, there will be performances (Jennifer Lopez and Cindy Lauper among them), and the VIPs this years will a select number of frontline workers. 

Hopefully the ball drop this year will be an historic one-time only event -- and next year we'll be back to normal.

Ernst Haas NYC Photos 1952-1962

Right after WW2, a Viennese photographer and refugee named Ernest Haas came to NYC and spent a decade taking photos of the city. These have now been collected and published in a new book. 

His photos are fascinating -- not only because he capture the city, moment at a time almost 70 years ago -- but because he shoots from unusual angles and makes seemingly mundane moments look gorgeous. They're definitely worth checking out. 

Sometimes it takes a person from elsewhere to show NYC at its best. 

The Village Voice Lives!

Two years ago The Village Voice went out of business, a depressingly familiar victim of technological change and indifferent nouveau ownership. Since its demise, the website has been publishing old articles from its massive print and digital archives, a living memory of NYC's past.

Now The Voice has been sold again, this time to a guy who owns a bunch of small news sites, and plans to relaunch not only the news site but also publish quarterly print issues -- and, down the road, even a podcast.

What kind of Voice will arise from its ashes remains to be seen -- a lot of these smaller city newspapers that turned into news sites have become vanity projects for its owners, vehicles for their business and political interests, not worth reading. What's clear is that the new owners thinks of The Voice as a powerful NYC brand and wants to extend it so hopefully it will become a worthy successor/continuation of the old newspaper, a real voice of downtown and offbeat NYC.

Welcome back! 

Michael Alig Goes to the Eternal Party

Two-and-a-half years ago I did a short interview with former party promoter/convicted murderer Michael Alig. In the 1980s and early 1990s he was the king of downtown nightlife in NYC, promoting parties and clubs, thinking up and hosting all sorts of outrageous events, and basically just going everyhwere, doing everything (and everyone) and living a wild, crazy life.

Then tragedy.

Alig and a friend murdered someone, a man named Angel Hernandez, in a particularly brutal way. Alig then spent the next almost-20 years in prison. After he was released he tried to reinvent himself back into the mileau of a very different NYC (he called it "more normalized"). This was the subject of our interview and he was very forthcoming about the challenges of it. 

Michael Alig has died, aged 54, of a heroin overdose -- alone, on Christmas Day. 

What's clear about Alig's life, both before and after prison, is that he was a deeply broken, troubled soul and his demons cost someone his life -- and now his own. I felt at the time that I perhaps shouldn't have interviewed him, that I was giving a murdered a voice he didn't deserve, but I realized that he had a story and it deserved to be told (even if such stories shouldn't necessarily generate sympathy for the storyteller).

And now as Alig's life is over, and this hard year comes to an end. You can't remember the life and death of someone who has killed someone else without also remembering the life and death of the victim. I just hope that Alig's family, the family of Angel Hernandez, and everyone who was impacted by their lives, both for better or worse, finds a new peace next year. 

Review: "Night on Earth" (1991)

Jim Jarmusch is one of the most successful independent movie directors of the last forty years with such classics as Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, Broken Flowers and others on his resume. An Ohio native, he came to NYC as a young man and quickly established himself in the city's cultural firmament as one of its best and boldest directors. And although an NYC-archetype, many of Jarmusch's movie's are set on the road, are about characters leaving somewhere and looking for something elsewhere, stories of discovery. And, although an American director, Jarmusch's movies have always had a global flavor and focus.

Night on Earth might be Jarmusch's masterpiece and his most NYC and global film. And it's one of my favorite moves ever. 

Set on one night in five different cities around the world (LA, NYC, Paris, Rome & Helsinki), Night on Earth is about the unique, special, and totally transitory moments that take place between cab drivers and their passengers, between strangers, between people going from one place to another -- both literally and figuratively. Each segment of this film is totally different from the other, some being very sweet and touching, some being extremely funny, and others being quite sad. In fact, each segment manages, brilliantly, to capture all of these different things at once. The point of each segment in each city isn't the story -- it's the journey, the interactions, the characters. 

The movie is about capturing a small moment in the time of each these people's lives in each of these cities -- showing how, around the the world, whatever race we might be, whatever color we might be, whatever we might strive for, we are all basically the same -- human beings.

A truly global phenomenon. 

If you've never seen Night on Earth, I won't ruin the segments for you -- please, go out and watch it now. The only problem with this movie is being denied the pleasure of getting to see it for the first time. The cast is amazing -- Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Espisito, Rosie Perez, Roberto Benigni, and many other international actors I had never heard of before. 

The NYC segment is one of the best -- it involves a guy trying to get home from Times Square to Brooklyn, a cabbie from Germany who can barely drive and used to work as a clown, and a wild profane woman who fights and flirts with both of them. The three actors in this segment -- Esposito, Perez, and Armin Mueller-Stahl -- are wonderful together. And, of course, all three of them would go onto greater career glory in big movies and get Oscar and Emmy nominations, but, for me, this movie is what I'll remember them for.  

Night on Earth is one of a very few movies that makes me happy, makes me feel warm inside. I hope it does the same for you.

NYC Reimagined

You think a person, place or thing is "one thing" (good, bad, or otherwise) and then events ensue or new information comes to light and it makes you think it's "something else." The reality of it or around it changes, and it transforms in your mind, making you imagine it as something else. This reimagination can be for the better, or the worse, or just for the sake of difference. 

Certainly this year has transformed our imagination of the world and how we live our lives. We didn't have any choice, it was a crises forced upon us, and none of us wanted it. But it gives us an opportunity of what we might want our world, and NYC, to be after the crises is over.

During this year, many city planners and urban experts have been reimagining how NYC can evolve in the upcoming years. Imagine this for NYC: free municipal broadband, single-payer healthcare and guarenteed income for all city residents, 15-minute neighborhoods (where all kinds of staple businesses and services are no more than a 15-minute walk from anyone's home), and new zoning policies that allow for more affordable housing. A city that's more equitable, more humanane, more affordable, and easier to navigate. A city that makes NYC fulfill its true promise.

A city reimagined.

But you don't only need to look to the future or public policies to reimagine NYC. You can reimagine it by looking at aspects of its past that were long overlooked. For example, reading about the photography collective in Harlem called Kamoinge that started in 1960 and is still going today. It was and remains a breeding ground for talented black photographers and has quietly impacted this city and nation's culture. Like most white folks, I had never heard of it before but it was fascinating to learn about it because it made me reimagine part of the black experience in NYC.

In this historic year, reimagining NYC has never been more important, more vital, and more amazing.

Remembering MetroTV

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.

But at night, MetroTV got ... sexy!

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. 

NYC Gets into the Holiday Spirit in the Age of COVID-19