New York City Man: A Lou Reed Tribute

Lou Reed is dead.

After 71 years of agitation, defying expectations, spitting in the face of politeness and conformity, producing music that influenced musicians who went on to influence other musicians, Lou Reed did something rather conventional -- he died. But even that he did in a cool way -- on his Twitter page, he left a simple message and image: The Door.
 

Show's over. He's outta here.

The easy way to sum up Lou Reed's legacy is to rattle off the number of good, great, and holy songs that he composed and performed -- both with the Velvet Underground and as a solo artist -- over his decades-long career: "Sunday Morning", "All Tomorrow's Parties", "I'll Be Your Mirror", "Venus in Furs", "Pale Blue Eyes", "Sweet Jane", "Rock'n'Roll", "Perfect Day", "Walk on the Wild Side", "Sally Can't Dance", "Dirty Boulevard" -- the list is endless, and I know I've forgotten a couple dozen or two.

Most of these songs weren't hits in their day but people still listen to them and re-discover them all the time. I remember back in college in the 1990s, when I discovered his music, being amazed at how fresh sounding it was -- and most of it was over thirty-years old.

He did things with music and lyrics that no one else did -- and few have dared to do since.

"Heroin" is about the experience of doing heroin. That's it. Nothing more. It's just about what it's like shooting up and how "it makes me feel like I'm a man." And, original that he was, Lou Reed used words like "nullify ("nullify my life") in the lyrics. How brilliant -- and risky -- to write a nearly 7-minute song about doing drugs while using highfalutin words to boot.

Another song isn't really a song at all. Called "The Gift", it's a bizarre short-story set to music about a young man who literally ships himself in the mail to his girlfriend. Its ending is, to say the least, interesting.

Lou Reed only had one Top 40 hit in his lifetime -- "Walk on the Wide Side -- and it's probably the only Top 40 song ever about transvestites and to talk literally about "giving head."

And when he formed the Velvet Underground in the mid-sixties, Lou Reed and his band mates did something that few bands in the hyper-macho, testosterone-drenched, girl-chasing, boys club of rock'n'roll had ever done, then or since -- they hired a woman, Maureen "Mo" Tucker, to be the drummer.   

Lou Reed endlessly innovated. He released a two-album deal called "Metal Machine Music" that was just guitar feedback. No one, not even Reed, has ever listened to all of it but it was original, to say the least. Late in his career, Reed produced an album called "The Raven" based on the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. And he collaborated with everyone from David Bowie to Suzanne Vega to Metallica.

His influence is unbelievable. U2 and REM and many more have all claimed Lou Reed as an inspiration and have covered his songs. As the tributes poured in after his death, everyone from Nikki Six to LL Cool J to Weezer to Miley Cyrus hailed him. By being a musical iconoclast, by ignoring the mainstream and pursuing his own unique vision, Lou Reed's appeal became universal.

It's often said that not many people bought a Velvet Underground album but those who did all started bands. 

Yet Lou Reed's influence went beyond the musical. He was a revolutionary -- literally. The playwright Vaclev Havel was a huge VU fan who found freedom and a call to dissent in the music during the age of Communist oppression. Havel would eventually work to overthrow Communism in Eastern Europe and, when he became president of the Czech Republic in the 1990s, he called it the Velvet Revolution. (The 2006 play Rock'n'Roll by Tom Stoppard is largely about this.) 

Even the Vatican -- the  Vatican! that 2000 year old institution of conformity! -- Tweeted out a tribute to Lou Reed. God, apparently, is a fan, and now He has him all to himself.      

Of course, Lou Reed wasn't just a great musician -- he was also a great New Yorker. Like Woody Allen, he was one the artistic geniuses of this city, its spirit infusing his music. One of his great albums is simply called "New York", an album dedicated to the crazy life of his beloved town. One of his best late career songs is the jazzy tune "New York City Man", another is the soulful "Coney Island Baby", and many of his songs are peppered with illusions to the city -- particularly St Marks Place (like in "Sally Can't Dance"). If Woody Allen's New York is a city of museums, beautiful apartments, fancy restaurants, old movie houses, and yuppies, Lou Reed's New York is a city of the downtown scene and the underground (velvet and otherwise), of dive bars and back alleys, parties that go on all night in cheap apartments, kinky sex and misunderstood artists (and kinky sex with misunderstood artists), addiction and redemption, loving everything in life except the bourgeois. His New York City was the naughty place that years of gentrification have been washing clean but that people like us will never forget, thanks to Lou Reed.  

If you've read this blog over the years, you know how much I loved Lou Reed's music. This blog, for better or worse, wouldn't exist without him. If you like this blog, credit him; if you hate it, blame him. As I try to do in each post, I try to capture that spirit and psyche of NYC on this blog, and Lou Reed was doing that in music (and, of course, doing it WAY better) decades earlier. 

So now Lou Reed is gone and our city is a little poorer for it. But we won't forget him and his legacy is enduring. 

Farewell, bard of New York. As you take your last walk on the wide, may your trail be lined with heavenly wine and roses, into an eternal perfect day.  

Or as Lou Reed once was sang, "I'm a New York City man, blink your eyes and I'll be gone ..."

Hurricane Sandy: One Year Later

One year ago tonight the worst hurricane in our city's history slammed our shores. With the innocent, almost friendly name of Sandy, this storm pummeled our town, wrecking havoc to our beaches, laying waste to property, killing over a hundred people, and shutting down our city for a whole week.

A year later, we're still recovering. One place that is struggling to survive is the 219-year old Bridge Cafe in lower Manhattan. This historic watering hole's story is just one of the thousands in this ahttp://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/29/new-york-s-oldest-bar-stays-afloat.htmlrea still trying to come back.

Yours truly blogged constantly about the storm last year. If you want to revisit it, click here.

Let's hope that all those who were affected have either recovered or do so soon.

Lou Reed RIP

Queens: The Ohio of NYC

When people ask why New York City has elected Republican mayors for the past twenty years, the answer is to be found in Queens. In their tight victories in 1993 and 2001/2009, Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg owed their wins to getting a large chunk of votes in the borough. According to the last Census, Queens has a population almost 2.5 million, a close second to Brooklyn. 

If Staten Island is the Alabama of NYC and the Bronx is the Massachusetts, Queens is the city's Ohio -- the swing borough, the place where mayors are made. Unlike the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn, which are highly urban and Democratic, or Staten Island, which is nearly highly suburban and Republican, Queens is a mixture of urban and suburban, Democrat and Republican. In a diverse city, Queens is its most diverse borough -- ethnically, racially, economically, and politically.

Most of our city's mayors have been Manhattanites or were living there when elected. After all, Manhattan was home to Tammany Hall, the political machine that controlled the city's government for close to two centuries. But Tammany Hall is long gone; Manhattan is no longer "the center of it all." These days, if you believe the hype, New York City is experiencing a Brooklyn Moment. From Girls to food co-ops, Brooklyn is on the rise -- heck, it's become a brand. If Brooklyn-resident Bill De Blasio is elected our 109th mayor on November 5th, the Brooklyn Moment will be complete. 

But his margin of victory and the depth of his support will be determined in Queens.

Assuming he wins, De Blasio will rack up huge margins in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Joe Lhota will probably win Staten Island and still lose the election overwhelmingly (much as Fernando Ferrer won the Bronx in 2005 and still lost the mayoralty by twenty points). Wealthy Manhattan may be more friendly to Lhota, as it was to Bloomberg and Giuliani, but De Blasio should still do well there. But if the middle-class white ethnic vote in Queens turns out for Lhota, and the minority voters in borough don't do the same for De Blasio, De Blasio's margin of victory might not be as huge as most polls predict. While De Blasio will certainly do better in Queens than previous (losing) Democratic candidates, he won't necessarily sweep the borough this year.

Also, Queens is the only borough to feature competitive city council races between Democrats and Republicans -- in areas like Bayside, Howard Beach, and Middle Village. Currently, two of these seats are held by Republicans. The Bayside seat is held by indicted Republican Dan Halloran (who is not running for reelection) and the race to replace him, between Democrat Paul Vallone and Republican Dennis Saffran, is fierce. In Howard Beach, Councilman Erich Ulrich is running for reelection against Democrat Lew Simon, who lost a close special election to Ulrich in 2009. The Middle Village race has Democrat Elizabeth Crowley running for reelection in a seat previously held by Republicans. If either Saffran or Ulrich wins, or if Crowley loses, in the face of a De Blasio landslide, it will show that even in a deeply Democratic city, these conservative pockets in Queens remain strong -- now and in the future.

However, if De Blasio triumphs in the borough and the Republicans lose these council seats, not only will De Blasio's margin of victory be enormous but it will show that the city has most definitively swung in a Democratic direction. His unapologetic progressive agenda will have the people's blessing. Like Ohio in presidential election, Queens will have the final word. 

So if De Blasio wins big, this Brooklyn Moment will have been brought to you courtesy of Queens.

Stephen Colbert at the Al Smith Dinner

Tavern on the Green Lives!

In 2009, the legendary Central Park restaurant Tavern on the Green closed, after almost 75 years in business. It was built in the 1930s by that grandaddy of New York City building, Robert Moses, and over the decades had become a bridge-and-tunnel destination and tourist trap. It was also a popular place for private events. For years, it was the highest-grossing non-chain restaurant in America.

And it still went out of businesss!

Like many places, it was a victim of the financial crises. Bad food and high prices and poor management sealed its fate. The Warner family, which had run it for decades, lost their lease and then restaurateur Dean Poll took it over and then walked away when he couldn't make a deal with the kitchen workers union. Since then, the big restaurant on Central Park West has sat empty, populated with food trucks out front. It was a modern-day relic, a burgeoning ruin in its own time. To say you had once eaten at Tavern on the Green was almost becoming like saying you had once gone to Woodstock (although not as cool).

Well, it's back. Two guys from Philadelphia have taken it over and plan to re-open it in December. The new Tavern will be half the size of the old one with less cheesy glitzy interior design. How good the food will be remains to be seen.

Some New York restaurant types predict it will fail. It's not haute cuisine but it's also not down-home cooking. It's sorta middle of the road. Also, it's not exactly a place for the hip foody crowd in this city and knows if it will pack-in enough tourists and B&Ters to make up its high overhead. But I wouldn't be surprised if it succeeds -- after all, it's a legendary place and has one of the best locations for any business in NYC. 

I doubt I'll go there myself anytime soon but, as the new owners said, it'll be a great place to take your grandmother for her 90th birthday so who knows?

P.S. I went to the old Tavern once back in the 1990s for my high school prom. Not all that memorable. I'm sure the new version will be better. 

Banksy takes NYC

Banksy is in New York! 

Yes, the secretive, elusive British graffiti artist has taken up residence in our fair city, spray painting buildings nearly every day. If you're unfamiliar with him and his work, basically he's this artist that no one knows or has ever seen, putting museum-quality art in public spaces. Examples of his work:

Many in the city are thrilled to see his work appear around town while others, like our fair mayor, call him a vandal and want to catch him an put him in jail. Anyway, this artist that no one knows anything about and whose work can't be seen in any museum, is currently the talking of the town, getting immense press coverage.

Here's a review of his NYC "residency."

Here's a map tracking his "work" around NYC. 

Here's some coverage of the controversy that Banksy is causing.  

And here's an interview with the artist

How long will Banksy stay in NYC? Will he be caught? Will he get away? Will he come back?

We shall literally see. 

Five is Really a Crowd

One of the things I love about New York magazine is how they run articles in the regular magazine that are very well-written, high-minded, and informative -- and then, on the website, how they run articles that are a little ... less so.

To whit: this interesting web-only piece by a young lady who talks about her experience arranging, and then being the focal-point of that exercise routine known as a ... gangbang ... For those of you unfamiliar with the practice, it's when a woman engages in coitus at the same time with multiple men, manipulating multiple male genatalia while manuevering her body masterfully. Multi-tasking at its finest.
 
Sounds exhausting!

And this article confirms it. At least it's exhausting for the lady involved. For the men, the experience must be similar to that of trying to get through a crowded subway door -- only with bodily fluids involved.

Gross.

The other interesting thing about this article is that it demonstrates the existential divide between men and women. Only a woman could advertise (like this one did) for men to join her in a gangbang and actually expect to get serious replies -- and for the event really to happen. Any man who advertised for a similar experience -- with women -- would get either joke replies or none at all. Also, this article shows the influence that porn has had on our culture -- I don't think most people would even think about doing something like this unless they'd seen it in a dirty movie first. And what this article also makes clear is that, as a sexual experience, gangbangs don't seem particularly pleasurable for either the men or the woman. In a gangbang, it sounds like there's not much actual bang from the bucks (sorry, couldn't resist).

So what's the point?

However, it sounds like it probably burns off a few calories, at least for the woman. But I think there are probably less disgusting and more comfortable forms of exercise. 

P.S. I indicated that this article was an example of one that wasn't high-minded, well-written or informative. While it was certainly not the former, it was the latter two. So I humbly apologize to the writer.