Note to Readers

This blog is signed up to Google Ads so I have no control over the ads that pop up here. Most of them are for products, services, and institutions I have no problem with.

However, some of the ads are for Ashley Madison, the notorious website that facilitates adultery.  I don't know why. 

Please let me make something 100% clear: I don't endorse AM. Not that I'm against "open relationships", polyamory, swinging, etc. I ain't no prude and I know a lot of people who enjoy the libertine lifestyle and, so long as it's all consensual and nobody gets hurt, have it at it! But, you know, AM is all about cheating and deception and I just can't get behind that. 

Just wanted to make that clear -- for da' record. 

Sad Day in Queens

Classic Mr NYC

Recently I re-watched the Coen Brothers' great 2013 movie Inside Llewyn Davis. Oh, how I love this flick!

My original post was an examination of why this is a great NYC movie. (It still is, by the way.) But what I didn't fully appreciate at the time was and is how radical, how subversive, how daring this movie is; how it completely shatters all conventions and norms of storytelling -- it does all the things you're not supposed to do in a movie, it thumbs its nose at "the rules" of a conventional plot and character development, but it does it so seamlessly, so straightforwardly, that you don't notice.

In short, Inside Llewyn Davis is about a folk singer whose career is going nowhere fast. In fact, this is a story about failure. That's it. It's not a tragedy -- Llewyn doesn't die, doesn't go to jail, doesn't lose everything (because he has almost nothing to begin with), doesn't gain the world only to lose his soul, etc. etc., cliche, cliche. No. It's just about a guy who tries and fails, who attempts to succeed and doesn't. He's an honest failure but a failure nonetheless. He doesn't go anywhere, his future is empty. The end.

Why? Because he's a bad guy? Not really. He's not a great guy (he bangs other guy's wives and has a temper problem) but, when he does wrong, he tries to make it right. So he's flawed but not irredeemable. Is he untalented? Not at all, in fact, he's a beautiful singer -- but he's not GREAT. His fate is sealed not because he does anything wrong but because, as he's told by a music producer at one point, there's just not "a lot of money here."

This is one of the only movies, only stories, I've seen that's about how and why people fail. About how random and how unpredictable failure and success is -- and how failure happens just because you fall a little short. We see this in elections all the time -- a few votes short here and there, and dreams of a political career, of public service, are dashed (often permanently so). Score just a little bit below the "mean" or whatever it is on a standardized test, and forget about getting into college or grad school, with all the career implications that implies. This movie shows how careers and lives are forever altered -- often shattered -- just because the powers that be, the umpires of life, the "means", the beancounters, the scorekeepers, the gatekeepers to the future, find you wanting and ... slam the gate. 

This doesn't happen because you're a bad person or a good person. It happens just because something, like money or a few votes or a few points or something, "isn't here."

I've been there. You've been there. We've all been there. And where are our movies? Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the precious few.

And does Llewyn learn anything from his failure? Does he grow as a person? Does he, as the storytelling Gods tell us he's supposed to, "arc." No! Why would he? It's not his character flaws that lead to his failure. His failure happens ... just because ...

You should read this article from a few years ago that brillantly sums up this movie and its message -- or lack thereof -- about failure. 

At the very end of the movie, Llewyn plays his final set at a nightclub and then walks off and the next act is a guy named Bob Dylan. Llewyn goes into an alley and gets beaten up. And this is the point -- one will go onto make music history and win the Nobel Prize while the other ... well, we don't know what happens to him in the long run. We check out on Llewyn at this point. After all, he's a failure, he has no future, he's destined to be forgotten, so we take our leave. 

This is what failure, ultimately, is -- nothing. A void. A blank page. An empty space. A non-memory. Nada zilch zero. 

And that's why this is probably the best movie about failure ever made.

Review: "Russian Doll" on Netflix

Russian Doll is about drugs.

Okay, it's not totally about drugs, but it's somewhat about drugs, and I really wanted to write "Russian Doll is about drugs" so I did. Okay, so that's out of the way now.

Actually, Russian Doll is about a woman who, while supposedly celebrating her 36th birthday, keeps dying in bizarre ways and then keeps reliving the same day over-and-over Groundhog Day style. Frustrated by this eternal recurrence, she ventures to figure out why -- dying again and again in the process -- eventually meeting a mysterious man condemned to the same fate. (And sometimes she does drugs.) 

I'm about half-way through this 8-part series and greatly enjoying it -- it's very funny, and I have no idea where it's going. That's a good thing -- it's completely unpredictable, very original storytelling. Natasha Lyonne plays the lead, and she's great -- fast-talking, wise-cracking, kind when she wants to be, tough when she needs to be, smart as hell, sexy in a dirty kind of way, no nonsense, unfiltered in her opinions, the ultimate NYC broad. The fact that she keeps dying is her only vulnerability. This is Lyonne's show in every way (she co-created it), and she's extremely watchable in every way.  

Obviously, Russian Doll set in NYC -- specifically the East Village, and the show rarely strays from the neighborhood. The show is a murder mystery, social satire, magical realist comedy/horror mash up and, something that is very hard to be these days, a great NYC show. 

Russian Doll is a great ride (especially, at one point, in an elevator but I won't give anything away).

Sesame Street @ 50

The world changes constantly but Sesame Street endures -- the legendary kid's show turned fifty this year and shows no signs of disappearing.

Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert & Ernie, Grover, Elmo, and so many others are still going strong. 

Apparently the show almost did go off the air but HBO and various business decisions saved it. Thank God!

Like everyone my age (even older), and certainly younger, I grew up watching Sesame Street. It helped me learn letters, numbers, and instilled in me a love of learning. No, the show didn't educate me, it didn't raise me, but it remains a happy memory from my childhood, and enriched me as it has so many others.

Now I have kids of my own, and they love Sesame Street too (well, my oldest says she's too old for it now but my youngest still loves it -- she calls it "Sessee"). 

Did you know Sesame Street has won more Emmys than any other show in history? Did you know there will soon be an actualy Sesame Street in NYC?

As a kid, I actually thought there was a real Sesame Street, and took the theme song -- "Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?" -- literally. Now there will be!

Happy birthday, Sesame Street! Here's the first episode from 1969: 

Cuomo's MTA Plan

The NYC Special Election of 1950

Last night there was a lively debate for the Public Advocate special election on February 26th. As previously noted, this is the first city-wide special election since 1950, when Acting Mayor Vincent Impelliteri was elected to complete the term of recently-resigned Mayor William O'Dwyer.

This upcoming special election was triggered when former Public Advocate Tish James was elected as New York State Attorney General last November and subsequently vacated the office. She ran for AG after former NY AG Eric Schneiderman resigned in a scandale.

Not surprisingly, scandale is what triggered the last city-wide special election in 1950. O'Dwyer was under heat for his connections to organized crime so he accepted President Truman's offer to become Ambassador to Mexico and promptly resigned in the summer of that year. City Council President Impelliteri became Acting Mayor and then ran in the special election.

This was at a time when Tammany Hall still exerted a lot of power over NYC politics and, for whatever reason, Tammany and Impelliteri had had a falling out -- so Tammany didn't support him for mayor. So Impelliteri, or Impy as he was popularly known, quickly created and ran on his own party line -- the Experience Party -- and won.

His victory would be short-lived. In 1950, the New York State government was completely controlled by Republicans, under the leadership of Governor Tom Dewey, and they did everything they could to thwart Impy's initiatives to govern the city (it's the opposite today, where the Democrats completely control the New York State government). Robert Moses was another powerful presence, heading various state and city agencies that turned Moses' policy preferences (i.e. building highways) into the mayor's. So Impy was boxed in -- and, in 1953, Tammany got its revenge when it supported Robert Wagner in the 1953 primary and Impy lost.

NYC would then not have another city-wide special election until now -- for almost 69 years. And whoever wins this race for Public Advocate will be in a powerful position to run for mayor either in 2021 or later on. 

Travis Buys a Gun

Learn more about this classic scene, and others, in Martin Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece Taxi Driver. 

Where have you gone, Bloodgood Cutter?

Part of what makes NYC so great (besides, you know, everything) is that this is a city full of "characters" -- real life people who almost seem to have sprung from fiction. Teddy Roosevelt,  Jimmy Breslin, Woody Allen, Howard Stern, Ed Koch, John Gotti, Al Goldstein -- these are just some of the past and present "characters" who have defined the NYC sensibility (for better or worse).

But none of them were named Bloodgood Cutter -- and, if his name wasn't enough, he was a New York City character both in real life and fiction.   

Born in 1817, Bloodgood was something unimaginable in NYC today -- a "poet farmer". He came from a family of farmers on Long Island and eventually cultivated farmland in what today is Little Neck, the easternmost part of Queens. Very religious, he spent a lot of time in Queens, particularly in Flushing, where he would preach about living a virtuous life. And he loved poetry -- particularly his own -- and even self-published his own, apparently very bad, 500 page book of poems called "The Long Island Farmer's Poems." He was also ahead of his time -- apparently, he was very against smoking long before it was fashionable.

I'm sure if he was alive today, Bloodgood would have a lively social media presence.

But Bloodgood did have a "rendezvous with destiny" -- in 1876, he took a trip to the Middle East and one of his shipmates was a certain well-known writer named Mark Twain. The scribe of Huckleberry Finn became quite fond of Mr. Cutter and decided to base a character on him in his subsequent novel Innocents Abroad. And so the eccentric farmer-poet from Queens was enshrined in history.

Talking about being enshrined, Bloodgood Cutter's grave is quite a site to behold -- buried in Zion Episcopal Church in Douglaston, it's a fitting resting place for an NYC character in NYC.



By the way, talking about New York characters, there's currently a new documentary about the two great NYC reporters Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill now on HBO called "Deadline Artists."

Impressionist NYC

Some might call these blurry, but I call them "impressionist", views of NYC from the BQE on Saturday night.