Point-Counterpoints

In this year of our Lord 2018, NYC is faced with two massive dilemmas that could have ripple effects on the city's economy and population for years, even decades, to come. 

First, will NYC aggressively try to win the bid for a second Amazon headquarters?

Second, will NYC and the state impose congestion pricing on drivers into Manhattan?

There are massive pros and cons for each proposal and I, for one, am stumped. Should we pursue either? It basically comes down to this:

Amazon headquarters 

Pros: 50,000 high-paying jobs resulting in residual benefits to small businesses and consumers in NYC.

Cons: more gentrification, more population growth, ever higher rents and home prices, more squeezing out of the middle class. 

Congestion Pricing
Pros: reduces unbearable traffic in Manhattan, creates an MTA revenue stream for improvements to public transit.

Cons: a regressive tax on outer-borough residents who need to drive into the city.

(There's an entire site dedicated to just this very subject.) 

So what do you think? All readers are invited to comment (respectfully) in a good old-fashioned Point-Counterpoint.

Staying Power

This is an historic week, of sorts, in NYC.

History isn't always made by loud events like elections, big marches, terrorist attacks, etc., but sometimes it's just noting the passage of time, and of comings and going, that makes history.

This week there are two historic moments in NYC culture: the 30th anniversary of the Broadway musical The Phantom of the Opera and the departure of editor Graydon Carter from Vanity Fair after a 25-year tenure. 

When Phantom premiered in January, 1988, it was a very different city, a very different time. So much changed here since then (as this blog has extensively chronicled), it's almost impossible to describe accurately. Yet this odd musical about a masked man haunting a Paris house, and falling in love and nurturing the talent of a young singer, has endured as the city around it has changed so dramatically. No matter what's going on in NYC at any given moment, night after night, people have gone to see this show. No other Broadway show has come close to it in longevity, even other historic long-running musicals (like Cats, A Chorus Line, Chicago, Rent, Les Miserables) haven't matched Phantom's staying power. (I was a kid when Phantom began it's run and, if it's still running 30 years from now when I'm an old man, I won't be shocked.)

To hold a job for 25-years is an achievement any way you look at it -- particularly when it's a high-profile, high-powered job in the tumultuous world of NYC media. Just look at what's going on right now, with all sorts of media types being felled nearly every day, and you realize how tenuous any gig is. And media jobs have always been unstable, due to the vicissitudes of the market, ownership, technology, financing, all sorts of reasons. But Graydon Carter has piloted the ship of Vanity Fair for a quarter of a century, with boundless success. He inherited the magazine at a time when most people didn't know what the Internet was and when magazines made fortunes through advertising. All that -- and lots more -- has changed, and yet Graydon Carter brought this historic magazine into the 21st-century and made it more relevant than ever. Now he's doing something that, as we know, it almost unprecedented in the media business (among others): leaving of his accord, at a time of his choosing, with his reputation intact and his legacy secure. That's an historic achievement as much as the accomplishment of the magazine during his editorship.

Phantom and Vanity Fair, two NYC institutions, will continue -- and hopefully make more history in the future.

The Grammys in NYC

This Sunday, January 28, the Grammy Awards will be held at Madison Square Garden. It'll be the first time in 15 years that the Grammy ceremony has taken place here.

The area around MSG will be almost completely closed so, if you're going to be in the area for any reason on Sunday night, be prepared. 

Weed is Coming ... Maybe

In November I blogged about how recreational marijuana is probably going to be legalized in New Jersey sometime in 2018 -- and the brand-new governor has openly declared it's a priority for his agenda. 

Until now our supposedly "progressive" Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, was against legal weed (calling it a "gateway" drug and all that crap) but now says he wants to "study" possibly legalizing it sometime in the future. Heading into a reelection this year, he doesn't want to be seen as either for or against it -- he wants to be sorta for it, sorta against it, we'll see, maybe, let's just get all the facts first, not going to say either way -- until after he's reelected. 

Call it the Curse of Cuomo. He won't take a position on an issue until it's either super-popular or he won't face any political repercussions for it. He dithers. He prevaricates. And lies.

Want to find out if legal weed is a good idea? Easy. Just call the governor of Colorado -- where weed has been legal for five years! -- and ask him how it's working out. That'll save a lot of time and money on a "study." In fact, Cuomo doesn't even have to call him because the answer is obvious -- yes, it's working! It's popular! It's making lots of money for the state! It's driving down crime! There's your answer! Study over. 

But Cuomo wants to punt the issue. And he's exactly what's wrong with lots of Democratic politicians like him today -- he doesn't want to take a hard stand on an issue, draw a line, and lead on it. He wants to wait on public opinion and try to be on both sides of an issue. Donald Trump takes hard positions -- and it put him in the White House! Why can't politicians like Cuomo?

The Curse of Cuomo also means Taxation Without Representation. Currently there are over a dozen vacant state legislative seats but Cuomo refuses to call special elections for them. So right now there are almost two million citizens of this state not getting 100% representation. This is totally un-American.

No Cuomo isn't as bad as Trump but still ... is someone like Cuomo really the alternative? Let's hope not! 

Macaulay Culkin and Me

So color me surprised when I checked my daily podcast downloads this morning and saw that Macaulay Culkin was featured on the latest episode of WTF with Marc Maron.

For those of you under thirty, allow me to provide some background: back in the early 1990s, Macaulay (or Mac as he's generally known by) was the biggest child movie star in the world and perhaps the biggest one since Shirley Temple. In 1990 he was in a Christmas movie called Home Alone and it was one of the biggest hits of that decade. It made him a movie star -- for a while -- and he appeared in the movie's successful sequel a couple years later plus another successful movie called My Girl. Then he made a bunch of other movies that most people didn't see. And then, by the late 1990s, he vanished.

Until the early 2000s when he came back -- sort of. He did an off-Broadway play and some indie movies. Then ... he vanished again. And, since then, he's basically been absent from popular culture. 

What's Mac been doing? That's what he talks about in this podcast episode. It seems that he just lives on his movie money and travels and hangs out. He talks about his complicated family life and the fall-out with his father who used to manage his career. It's a fascinating, if somewhat sad, story.

And, bizarrely, yours truly, yes Mr NYC himself (i.e. ME) is a small, very small, part of Mac's story.

Back in the late 1980s, as a young child, I was a student at the School of American Ballet (SAB). I was one of small cadre of boy students. I was there for about four years and appeared in the New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center for three years. My last year there, and the last time I was in The Nutcracker, Mac had just joined SAB and we were in the same Nutcracker cast. We "worked" together for about three months. We didn't become friends (I found him annoying, he was always running around, seemed completely unable to focus) but we muddled through. I strongly remember his very large family hanging around as well as his father who, later on, he had an epic falling out with. They all seemed very noisy. 

After that Nutcracker year, I left SAB and didn't give this kid (like the others) a second thought. So, as you might imagine, it shocked me when, a couple years later, he popped up in this movie Home Alone (I didn't realize he acted and danced) and overnight became a sensation. It was a surreal, fun-house experience to see this. And, this morning, listening to this podcast, it was  equally surreal to hear him talk about his time in The Nutcracker of which I was a part.

I certainly hope Mac is happy and wish him well. I'm also so glad that I never got into show business and walked away from the mentally and emotionally punishing world of of child performing. It's not a surprise that he hasn't had a normal life when he certainly didn't have a normal child hood. It'd be interesting to talk with him again and, who knows, maybe I will. 

But it's strange when a small part of your childhood literally pops up one morning on your phone. 

Oh the times we live in. 

Don Imus Retires

Actually, he's been fired. 

The longtime morning radio host has been told that his contract on WABC 77 AM radio won't be renewed. On March 29, according to his Twitter, "the party's over." 

Some party. The Imus show is "un-listenable." Imus is barely audible, his blithers on about nonsense, he's well-known to be a racist, and he's ... just ... so ... boring. College radio is more entertaining. As his rival Howard Stern once said, "You can't listen to it! I defy you!" 

The most amazing thing is that someone so untalented lasted so long on the number one radio market in the country. How he did it I don't know. We should all be so lucky. 

This is truly a great city. 

Better than a Cuckoo Clock

If there's one silver lining to living in troubled times, it's that great (or at least interesting) art seems to flourish in its wake. Think of the Renaissance: the Protestant Reformation was tearing the Christian world apart, there were constant wars and invasions -- and yet the greatest art ever was produced (Orson Welles had a great speech about this very subject in The Third Man). 

Living in this awful age of Trump has similarly led to an explosion of art and now you can go see it: in Tribeca there's a new exhibit of Trump-era inspired art called One Year of Resistance. As you might imagine, it's a critique of the current gasbag presidency but one that also offers a glimmer of hope for a better future.

See it now. You can say you were present at the creations. 

P.S. Here's the classic quote from The Third Man: 

"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." 

The Women's March in NYC 2.0

Last year I wrote a short post about the remarkable Women's March in NYC and around the country -- and how it signaled the start of the Resistance and the beginning of the end of the Trump Presidency.

What a difference a year makes.

Today, the Trump presidency is circling the drain, the Republican party is falling apart, and the progress of women's and progressive rights is stronger than ever -- and another Women's March happening today.

Justice takes time -- but it always wins in the end.

See you next year! 

Onwards. 

NYC & Crime - It's Complicated

The popular imagination holds that NYC has always been some sort of crime-ridden miasma that only recently cleaned up its act. 

Book, movies, TV shows, documentaries -- whatever -- have perpetuated the belief that criminals are lurking behind every corner of this city; that crime is just a part of the price that New Yorkers pay for living here; that we accept, even celebrate, the city as a place where outlaws thrive.

"Fear City" the media called it. Crime and NYC went hand-in-hand, apparently.

Actually, this isn't true. In fact, it's quite the opposite.

The truth is that for over a hundred years, from roughly the 1860s until the 1960s, crime in NYC was below average than other cities in the country (crime statistics don't go back much farther than then). NYC was actually a very safe city for more than century until the 1960s when the crime rate spiked dramatically, continuing until roughly the mid-1990s. Since then, of course, crime rates have plunged and NYC is, once again, one of the safest big cities in America. The late 20th century era of high crime in NYC was actually an aberration; an exception, not the rule.

So what happened? Why was crime so low for so long, why it go up so far so fast, and why did it fall again so dramatically? 

Lots of theories -- social, political, economic, etc. -- have been proffered and abound but the honest answer is no one knows.

Apparently, according to research, there are no clear, identifiable reasons for this bizarro bell-curve of crime. Whatever anyone tells you about why crime in NYC rose and fell like it did is either wrong or incomplete. No one wants to admit it but the reasons for the biggest societal changes in NYC in the last half-century -- one that led to decades of "white flight" followed by decades of gentrification -- are unknown, unknowable, and impossible to conclude definitavely. The only thing we know is that we don't know.

So whenever you hear fear mongers try to convince you that NYC is just one election, one policy change, one-thing-or-another away from the return to high crime, tell them they have no idea what they're talking about. That's one thing we know for sure.   

January 12, 2017 - Foggy Friday in Central Park