Meet the First NYC Night Mayor

Finally! After this new job was created by the city government in September, 2017, people were wondering when NYC would get its first "night mayor."

Now we got one. It's a lady!

Her name is Ariel Palitz, a former nightclub owner. She will be a liaison between the city and the nightlife world. I'm sure it'll be a fun -- and exhausting -- job.

Good luck!

Elaine Chao is a B%@#$

Pacino's Way

Al Pacino is one of the greatest actors in history and still going strong -- he has a new movie where he plays Joe Paterno premiering on HBO in April, and he's making his third movie with Robert De Niro -- also his first with Martin Scorsese -- due out in the next year or so. But he has made so many great movies over the last almost 50 years that the time has come for "retrospectives."

And there's going to be a huge one in NYC starting next week! 

If you love movies, love Pacino's acting, then you must go the Quad Cinema from March 14 to 30 where over 30 of his films -- from his 1970s classics to much more recent ones -- will be playing. All the greats, and some of the not so greats, are playing in it, and what's so cool is that Pacino himself was involved in putting this together!

All the movies you love him from are in this: The Godfathers, Scarface, Dog Day Afternoon, and Heat, among many, many others. Even better, a new movie and -- a documentary about the movie -- called Salome and Wilde Salome are premiering on March 30 to conclude this event.

Needless to say, many of Pacino's best movies are set in NYC (again, The Godfathers, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Panic in Needle Park, Sea of Love, The Devil's Advocate, and Carlito's Way). But the Boy from the Bronx also made other cities look cool, bringing his tremendous talent and New York attitude to Los Angeles in Heat, to Baltimore in ... And Justice for All, Miami in Scarface and Any Given Sunday, and Alaska in Insomnia. The man just oozes this city.

No actor I can think of has ever uttered so many memorable lines in film. Among them:

"I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!"

"Attica! Attica! Attica!"

"You're out of order!"

"Say hello to ma' lil' friend!"

"Who-ahhh!"
"You want big time? You gonna die big time!"

"'Cause she's got a greeeattttttt ass!" 

And many more. Pacino is an interesting cat, always discovering himself in the characters he plays. You gotta read this interview he gave about this retrospective -- he really is Wild Pacino. 

Bad Cop, Good Job

Every so often a police officer who commits a crime will go on trial -- and inevitably be acquitted. Juries and judges have shown that they just don't have the internal fortitude to send criminal cops to jail.

And that's just for the cases that go to trial -- as we know, in the case of Eric Garner, the cop who murdered him didn't even face charges.

Very often, after the bad cops beat the legal rap, we hear that they'll face "internal discipline" or "possible termination." The idea being peddled to the public is: Okay, bad cops won't go to jail -- can't do that, it'll kill police morale and harm law enforcement moving forward, cops in jail will be living prey, it's just too dangerous -- but they'll get fired so they won't menace in a badge anymore so we can all -- pun intended -- breath easier. 

But that almost never happens. Bad cops very often stay on the job for a long, long time. Eric Garner's murdered remains on the force nearly four years later.  

Why?

Buzzfeed has just published a long, bombshell report on how the NYPD protects its worst actors. It has designed internal systems and processes to make sure that no bad cops suffer consequences for their actions. 

It's the kind of thing that, depending where you sit, you either find infuriating or reassuring. But it shows that accountability in law enforcement and NYPD practices remain, even in the late second decade of the 21st century, very much stuck in the past. 

What a Tool

So Mayor De Blasio found someone he thought would be great new chancellor for the NYC Public School System -- a man named Alberto Carvalho, who apparently did a great job running the Miami Public School System. De Blasio interviewed him, got to know him, was impressed with his record, and hired him to run the biggest public school system in America.

And then, a day after accepting the job, Mr. Carvalho, live on TV in Miami, announced that he wasn't going to take the job at all and would stay in Miami! He didn't inform the mayor or anyone about this decision -- he just did it spur on the moment, in order to garner kudos from Miami.

What a tool. As the father of the public school student, this man wasted the time of the mayor, the city, and its children by saying he would take this job -- and then backing out. Not cool.

P.S. Mr. Carvalaho apparently lied about taking the job, saying after his dramatic announcement that he never actually accepted the job (even though he did!). He also misled the folks in Miami. As bad at this situation is, a De Blasio spokesperson was quite right in also saying that we probably dodged a bullet.

Sex, Lies, and Harvey: The Dark Side of Success

America worships success -- money, power, fame, the ultimate three-legged stool of achievement.

More than that, we love "success stories", people born into humble circumstances who, through hard work and smarts, through good ol' fashioned grit, gain that aforementioned stool. ("Jenny from the Block", etc.)

Nobody in NYC personified that success story more than Harvey Weinstein.

Born to the children of Jewish immigrants escaping European anti-semitism, Harvey grew up in a housing project in Queens. He went to college in Buffalo and did something brilliant: in the 1970s, he got into the music scene there and brought acts like the Rolling Stones to perform. He learned the nitty-gritty of show business, how to market, how to promote, how to woo talent, how to produce, how to get stuff done. He then moved back to NYC in the early 1980s and got into the movie business with his brother Bob. Their company, MiraMax (sweetly named after their parents, Miriam and Max) became a powerhouse of independent cinema. Harvey was a genius at recognizing talent, cultivating it, and getting the world to see and reward it.

Remember all those great movies? sex, lies, and videotape? My Left Foot? The Crying Game? The Piano? Pulp Fiction? The English Patient? Good Will Hunting? Chicago? The King's Speech? (Among many others.) Harvey Weinstein made them happen.

He built the careers of great directors and actors (there'd be no Quentin Tarantino or Gwenyth Paltrow without him), his movies won Oscars, and, of course, he made money -- tons of money. At a time when the movie business was becoming more corporate, more boring, more "safe", more about sequels and franchises and figuring out how to generate theme park rides or toys to be included with fast food deals, Weinstein was saying "No! We stand for quality! Originality! Artistry! Groundbreaking films! And we can get rich at the same time!" In many ways, Harvey Weinstein saved the commercial viability and artistic integrity of cinema at a time when it was under threat. He made movies matter again. For that, we owe him a debt.

Of course, now we all know that it came at a price -- a horrible one. While Harvey was producing great movies, he was also terrorizing women. He harassed them, raped them, demeaned them, and, if they didn't submit to his desires, he ruined their lives. He used his power and wealth to shield himself from the consequences of his behavior for decades. His awfulness was an "open secret" but it didn't matter -- his success let him get away with it. (I know someone who worked at MiraMax in the 1990s, and Harvey's yelling and screaming was, like Trump's daily Tweet awfulness, such a daily occurrence that it became normal. Harvey would explode at people for the simplest, smallest things -- things most normal people wouldn't even get upset about it).

Harvey Weinstein epitomized the success that America worships and that NYC facilitates. And he personified its dark side. The grandson of people escaping terror became a terrorist himself.

One of the reasons people strongly desire success -- and will go to great lengths to achieve it -- is because they believe that success means, "I can do anything I want! I can have anyone I want! Nothing will stop me! I am invincible!" It is, they believe, the ultimate freedom, the ultimate promise of America.

Sex and revenge have always been the phantom legs of the three-legged success stool. Yes, money means a wonderful material quality of life, fame means getting invited to any party, and power means getting stuff done -- but what's the point of all that, a lot of people (i.e. men) think, "If I don't also get laid? A lot! With lots of people! Lots of different hot people! And if I can't get even with the people who done me wrong?"

Women, and lots of them, are the ultimate prize, the ultimate accomplishment, the ultimate fuel for ambition, the ultimate reward for great success  -- especially for guys like Harvey who couldn't get them based on their looks or personality alone.

But here's the catch: women still don't want these guys. These guys may have scaled the heights, they may have transcended their humble origins into great success, they may have "made it" -- but not really. They're still ugly and gross, they're still "Jennys from the block", the kids who got bullied in the schoolyard.

These guys know it -- and it fills them with rage. It fills them with hatred towards women. Everything's worthless if all their success can't buy them genuine desirability. And the dark side in them, their demons, are unleashed to horrifying effect. They want revenge, they want to hurt these women who will never want them. And everyone suffers for it.

It's so sad that it's come to this. Harvey Weinstein is, in many ways, an extreme and high-profile example of this problem. Success means everything but it's nothing if it doesn't make you the kind of person you always wanted to be. And that's a humbleness you can never transcend or buy your way out of. You never stop being who you really are, no matter how much you achieve.

There are so many interrelated tragedies to this whole thing. There's Harvey's victims, first and foremost. There's Harvey, the man, a man who reached the heights only to fall back down to earth hard. There's the movies, the great movies he brought into the world, forever tainted now by their association with him. And this man, once upon a time one of NYC's favorite sons, is now its greatest villain since Bernie Madoff.

So often we like to say that successful people's lives have had "fairy tales endings" -- but it's never that simple. It never ends until, you know, the end. And sometimes the fairy tale is very, very dark.

Harvey Weinstein's story would make a good movie that he probably would've produced.

Postscript: I remember the summer of 1998. I was spending the summer at college, far from NYC, dreaming about coming home as soon as I graduated the next year. Fortuitously I found a copy of New York magazine at the place I was working, a special 30 anniversary issue, that featured interviews with prominent New Yorkers. One of the interviews was with Bob and Harvey Weinstein. They recounted their humble origins, what made them become such big successes, their love of movies, and why they'd never leave NYC. Their short interview was memorable because it reminded me of why I desperately wanted to come home and what the city was all about.

Harvey said in the interview: "I love New York. We can go to the grocery store and not bump into guys who want to do a three-picture deal." That's what I loved about NYC too, then and now: we can be anyone and do anything and yet have another life completely. (Harvey had another life, as we discovered, another scary one). So perhaps it's not surprising that Harvey also said, "there are no limits. If you follow your heart instead of your head, you can do incredible things."

 Harvey didn't believe in limits, as we know all too well now, but he did incredible things and horrible things at the same time (thus the duality of man). And the humble kid from Queens has been humbled once again.  

Nasty Nor'easter NYC

Hudson Yards, the Vessel, and the Future of NYC

The far west side of Manhattan has always been the ugly ducking of the mighty borough: it doesn't have the cosmopolitan grace of Uptown, the funky hipster cred of Downtown, or the commercial excitement of Midtown. The far west side is just ... there ... In the past it was mostly home to car dealerships, ugly buildings, and strip clubs. It was ... ugh ...

That's changing, of course. 

What used to be one of the most forgettable parts of an otherwise unforgettable borough is being rapidly developed into a massive project called Hudson Yards: it'll contain huge apartment buildings, stores, restaurants, parks, and public spaces, the whole deal. It'll essentially be a brand-new neighborhood, a whole new town, within the big city itself. It'll be expensive, of course, not just to build but also to patronize.

One thing will be free, however. 

The developers of Hudson Yards are also, to quote The Big Lebowski, "gonna pull the room together." At the heart of this new neighborhood will be the Vessel, designed by British star architeht Thomas Heatherwick. The Vessel is an "interactive" sculpture that resembles an upside-down honeycomb. By "interactive" it means that it's just a massive bunch of interconnected staircases that descend in the shape of an inverted triangle and, if I understand correctly, it'll connect to the Highline. Doubtless it'll be the next big tourist trap and place to be seen.

The far west side used to get, to quote Rodney, "no respect." Soon it'll be the new center of excitement in NYC. I'm sure Robert Moses would approve. 

Belvedere Castle

Plunked in the middle of Central Park, rising sphinx-like out of the boulders, sits Belvedere Castle.

Growing up, I always wondered, in my most Seinfeldian, "What's the deal with Belvedere Castle? Why's it there? Why's it called that? Is it even really a castle?"

Well, no, it's not a castle, not really -- it's a place where you can walk up to its big terrace and get great views of the city and park.

In fact, that's why it's called "Belvedere", which is Italian for "beautiful view."

It was built in 1869, back when the city did cool things like big huge parks and structures just to make life more pleasant for its citizens. You know, the public good.

Anyway, the public good is being served somewhat now as Belvedere Castle is being closed until 2019 for structural repairs.  So, until then, enjoy the "bella" view from here:

The Re-Purposing of NYC

It's a cliche to say that NYC is always re-inventing itself. 

Just walk around any neighborhood and you'll see old buildings being torn down and new ones being built, you'll see old businesses vanishing and new ones opening, you'll see old people and young people walking around -- the past receding, the future proceding.

But the city also recycles itself. It takes the old and, instead of replacing it, re-purposes it to make it new while also preserving it perennial qualities. The past remains and the future remakes it.

Take, for example, the turrets of old buildings and houses -- once decorative rooms for the wealthy, now they're apartments.

Or the old coffee houses of Greenwich Village -- they remain but either they've become more upscale and restaurant-like or they've become living shrines to the past.

Even the media gets re-purposed -- the hyper-local newspapers Gothamist and DNA Info closed a few months ago due to a union-busting owner but, thanks to the benevolence of WNYC Radio, they've re-emerged as non-profit news sites.

So while it's easy to mourn the lost, vanishing NYC, it's also important to remember that the city isn't always erasing its past -- it's simply re-working it.