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Omm-Bama

Here's a great way to celebrate America on inauguration day: yoga!

Tuesday morning in Bryant Park, from 8 to 8:30, New Yorkers are invited to "send a wave of good karma and positive vibrations" to the new president by participating in a public yoga session in the middle of Manhattan.

This "up with people" event will take place on the ice rink and mats will be provided. Considering that it will be only 28 degrees on Tuesday, I would suggest wearing the thermal underwear and drinking lots of cocoa.

So get the good karma flowing and the positive vibes popping! Start this amazing new chapter in our history by letting the light in you honor the light in others!

Namaste!

Menace(s) to Society

Geese Pose Big Risk at Airports in Region

Sorry guys, you may be adorable but it's time to back to Canada. You may have done wonders for Tony Soprano's psyche but now you're bringing down airplanes. Go home.

Video of US Airways Descent into Hudson River

This is a ten minute video of the plane that splashed down into the Hudson River on Thursday.

It's in real time and shows the plane zipping into the water and then floating. You see how quickly the rescue came and how orderly the passengers got off the plane. It's really surreal.

The plane doesn't appear until about two minutes into the video so you should probably fast-forward to that. At first you can't tell what it is, it's just a moving white speck on the screen but then the camera zooms in and you see everything clearly. There's no sound in this video which is it's only drawback but it's still really cool to see.

Thank God everyone survived!

The Mark of Robert Moses

Yesterday I went to the first of Robert Caro's three lectures on "The Shapers of New York" at the New-York Historical Society. This one was called "The Mark of Robert Moses." Caro talked generally about the power Moses amassed between 1924 and 1968, how his building projects and highways and bridges altered the physical landscape of New York City, and what affect he had on the lives of New Yorkers then and now. A lot of what Caro talked about, unsurprisingly, came right of his book The Power Broker.

Caro also talked about what made him want to write The Power Broker. He said that when he was a young reporter at Newsday in the 1960s, he would write about how City Parks Commissioner Moses was planning to build the Long Island Expressway. Why would the Parks Commissioner of New York City be building a highway out on Long Island? This was something Caro wanted to investigate at length and what inspired him to write about this man and his awesome power.

About the human impact of Moses on this city, Caro gave several tragic examples, particularly about how the Cross Bronx Expressway basically destroyed the only New York City borough attached to the mainland.

But there was another example Caro gave that was just as sad. When he was Mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia wanted to build street-front clinics for poor pregnant women. Every year he would propose several millions dollars to the city budget for these clinics. Yet as the Board of Estimate was reviewing the budget, about to approve them, a fleet of limousines would roar up to City Hall. Out would pop Moses and his engineers, brandishing their blueprints for some highway or another, and they would head into the Board of Estimate meeting. Moses would tell them that he could get $90 million in Federal money for his project just so long as the city could kick, oh, about $10 million or so. Moses influence was so great at the time that the Board of Estimate would relent ... and slash the money for the clinics. This went on year after year and the clinics never got built. But the highways did.

Moses' power was, as Caro said in the lecture, not only in the things he built in the city but in the priorities he set for it. Cars over people. Highways instead of public transportation. Housing projects instead of communities.

"What is a city?" Caro asked at the end of the lecture. "If Rome is power and Greece is glory, then New York City," Caro said, "is home." And he's right. New York is not only my home and the home to more than eight million people, but it's a place where anyone from anywhere can come and be accepted. New York embraces all, rejects no one, says that no matter where you come from, you can have a life here. This city can be anyone's refuge. Anyone's "home."

By destroying and warping the city's priorities, Robert Moses worked to undermine that sense of "home." He didn't destroy it completely obviously -- NYC will always be resilient and will always be "home" -- but he lessened this city's sense of community, sense of home. And we've been paying the price ever since.

Thank God!!

All 155 safe after pilot ditches jet in NYC river

This plane took off from La Guardia, headed to North Carolina, and flew into a flock of birds that were swarming around (Alfred Hitckcock must be smiling up in heaven). This caused the plane to almost crash and the pilot smart ditched the plane into the Hudson River -- on the coldest day of the year! -- and miraculously everyone survived unharmed. Too bad this had to happen but let's be glad it had a happy ending.

Save the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium! PSA

You can sign the petition here.

Bronx Zoo funding endangered by budget cuts

Bronx Zoo

.... and (some) of the winners are ...

If the fact that a black man will become President next week isn't miraculous enough, something almost as miraculous happened last night: a Woody Allen movie won a major award for the first time in more than a decade.

His 2008 movie Vicky Christina Barcelona won the Golden Globe for Best Picture Musical/Comedy. Granted it's not a movie set in New York but is there any filmmaker more identified with our fair city than the Woodster? Congratulations are in order for this most nebbishy of directors although Woody famously shuns awards and awards shows like the plague.

In fact, last nights Globes were a very good night for New York-centric entertainment.

30 Rock, the great New York show of the moment, won Best Comedy Series and Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey won Best Comedy Actor and Actress for a TV Show, respectively.

Also, the hot new show of the year, Mad Men, won Best Dramatic Series for a second year in a row.

Personally I think the Golden Globes are, like most awards, total nonsense but it's nice for our city to get a little love -- and 30 Rock most certainly deserved it. And it's nice to have some good news to chew on for a change.

Congrats again.

Memo from NYC

"Why weren't they grateful?"

That's the last sentence of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, the book I've been obsessing about all year. Late in his life, a retired and angry Robert Moses would give speeches and carp to friends about how New Yorkers were ungrateful to him for working so unselfishly on their behalf. Moses was baffled. He couldn't understand why the people had rejected him. Caro ironically writes, just before that last sentence, “Couldn't people see what he had done?”

They did -- and that's why they turned on Moses. His ill-conceived highways caused traffic jams to choke the city, he starved public transportation of funds and prevented it from serving all parts of the city, he built ugly and depressing public housing, he botched the city's waterfront, and he destroyed neighborhoods that led to huge increases in crime. People were supposed to be grateful for this?

America's own power broker is leaving the Presidency soon and, to be cliche, it's deja vu all over again. Bush and his fellow Republicans are screaming about people's ingratitude to him. Americans are ungrateful to him for "keeping us safe." Iraqis are ungrateful to him for "liberating" their country." This whining has been going on for some time now. A few examples:

• On 60 Minutes last year, Bush said, "I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude." The American people, "wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that's significant enough in Iraq."
  
  
• Andrew McCarthy from National Review wrote "Thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds have been expended to provide Iraqis the opportunity to live freely ... Yet, to be blunt, the Iraqis remain ingrates."
  
  
• After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana State Republican Party Chairman Roger Villere, Jr. called Louisiana Democrats "ungrateful" for everything Bush had done for their state (!)

This blather goes on and on. The case -- or narrative, or spin, or whatever you want to call it -- that Bush and his few remaining acolytes are fashioning goes like this:

"George W Bush is a courageous, deeply moral and principled man, a natural leader, the right man at the right time, who did everything he could to protect and strengthen America and didn't care what popular or elite opinion thought about it. He didn't care what anyone thought about it! And in being so bold and so brave, he made unpopular decisions that history will ultimately deem were the right decisions. You see, George W is like Harry Truman, another president who left office unpopular but has since been reevaluated by history as a great one. We're so lucky to have had Bush for these last eight years. We're just too stupid to realize it right now."

This "Bush-will-be-redeemed-by-history-and-he's-like-Harry Truman" stuff has become accepted dogma in the right-wing intelligentsia. Even a former Mayor of NYC not named Rudy buys this crap. In an article called "History Will Redeem Bush", Ed Koch wrote:

His position can be compared with that of Harry Truman who left Washington unpopular and alone in 1953 … Like Truman, George W. Bush, in my view, will be seen as one of the few world leaders who recognized the danger of Islamic terrorism ... We will recognize his worth long after he is gone."

Truman recognized the danger of Islamic terrorism? Silly me, me thoughts it was Communism. Oy vey. Hiding behind the skirt of history is the ultimate sign of failure. As for this Bush-as-Truman myth, the late great David Halberstam debunked it beautifully with words and wisdom I’ll certainly never be able to muster as well.

In The Power Broker, pondering the Moses legacy, Caro quotes Sophocles who said, "One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”

In the evening of the Bush presidency, how splendid has “the day” been?

He turned the largest budget surplus in US history into the largest deficit, he trashed environmental rules and regulations and did nothing to address global warming or our nation's addiction to foreign oil, he let an already broken health care system worsen and placed impediments on scientific research, he appointed hacks and incompetents all over the government and tried to put one of them on the Supreme Court, he politicized and undermined the credibility of the US Justice Department, he botched the government's response to one of the worst natural disasters in US history, he totally ignored warnings of the terrorist threat prior to 9/11, he invaded and screwed up the occupation of a country that never attacked us and posed no threat to us, and he spent almost four years telling us that this invasion was going just dandy when reality showed it to be a disaster. Oh, and he spied on Americans without warrants, tortured people, and increased government secrecy to a level not seen since Nixon. His government failed to properly regulate the financial industry that led to one of the worst economic calamities since the Great Depression.

And where the hell is Osama Bin Laden?

This is his record. This is the reality of his presidency.

History is going to redeem that? For this we should be … grateful?

"But don't you see," most Bush supporters say, especially when it comes to the economic crises, "most of this wasn’t his fault. A lot of it was out of his control."

So even though Bush has been a great president, he never really was in charge …

Ma'done.

Caro wrote in The Power Broker that Moses “believes he will be justified by history, that his works will endure and be blessed by generations not yet born.”

Well, history hasn't redeemed Robert Moses. Today, generations later, New Yorkers are still living in, and trying to grapple with, the mess that he made of our city. The best Bush can hope for is that Barack Obama fixes the disaster he's leaving behind so that Americans years from now aren't still living in it and blame him. Maybe history will be kinder to Bush then. Who knows? That's a big, unknowable maybe ...

... but then again, Bush and his supporters already know what history is going to say. You see, we're not as smart as they are, we’re just too stupid to understand his greatness …

Can't people see what he's done?

Why aren't we grateful?

Staten Island Girl

Mr NYC tries to wrap its loving arms around the whole city -- and that includes Staten Island. I plugged in Staten Island on YouTube to see what might pop up and this rather bizarre video called "Staten Island Girl" topped the list.

This young "guidette" talks about her life, guys, her ambitions, guys, Staten Island, guys ... you get the idea. It's a hoot.