Shock Jocks in Winter

To follow up on my previous post about Rising and Falling, I recently saw that someone viewed a post I wrote about Opie and Anthony in 2009. 

O and A were radio shock jocks who bounced around the NYC airwaves and satellite for more than 15 years. They were a sometimes hilarious, sometimes idiotic, and always foul duo who were, after Howard Stern, easily the most popular shock jocks in NYC ever. Unlike Howard, however, who's been dominating NYC radio (both on regular radio and satellite) for nearly 40 years, O and A rose and fell relatively quickly. They actually rose and fell thrice -- once, in 2002, when they sent a couple of dopey fans in St. Patrick's Cathedral to have intercourse, then again 2009 when they were fired due to a station format change, and then they continued on satellite radio until 2014 when Anthony got fired for racist Tweets (and their relationship subsequently fell apart).

When I blogged about their firing in 2009, I wondered if they'd ever hit the NYC airwaves again. A decade later, the answer is clear -- no.

What's most interesting to me, however, is not what happened to Opie and Anthony but that the whole genre of radio they worked in -- shock radio -- is apparently on life support if not dead altogether. After Anthony got fired in 2014, I heard someone else on the radio say "The shock jock thing is dead."  

Once upon a time, radio DJs said outrageous things on the public airwaves, pushing up against the line of decency and often legality, doing crazy stunts with listeners (like the St. Patrick's thing), and getting big ratings and money in the process. Howard, O and A, and others like Tom Leikus were even syndicated, bringing their shtick to cities around the country. 

Oh, and there was lots of public hand wringing by public moralizers and media commentators. Was this the lowering of the bar for decency and cilivilty in society? What did this say about us as a country that so many people loved this naughty radio? Wasn't the fact that it was so profitable just disgusting? And on and on and on and on ...

These days, podcasts and the Internet have content that's WAY more outrageous (and obviously uncensored) than anything a shock jock might say or do. And the current POTUS is almost like a shock jock himself -- how could any guy on the radio compete?

The reign of shock jocks was relatively brief and their fall was due not to any public morality or pressure but technology. Oh sure, Howard's still around but his act is much calmer today than back in the day.

That's why you should listen to this episode from 2002 where Howard talks -- and frankly gloats -- about the firing of O and A after the St. Pat's stunt. He complains about how all of these other shock jocks are ripping off his act, how the whole radio sounds like him today. While his rant is obviously completely dated, it's always a fascinating artifact of history from a moment in time that no longer exists. 

Today, not only does the radio not sound like Howard Stern but Howard Stern doesn't even sound like Howard Stern today!

NYC radio ain't what it used to be.

UPDATE: This post appears to have been prescient -- here's a long analysis about how shock radio has moved from the airwaves to the halls of government. Something that began as entertainment is now shaping public policy. It's scary to realize this but, hey, that's America.

To Rise & Fall in NYC

It's easy to look at the insanity that is Trump's America and to fear that it will always be like this.

It's easy to think that today will also be tomorrow somehow -- and the day after that, ad infinitum.

One of the flaws of the human mind, in my experience and observation, is that many people think that present circumstances will continue forever, that today's situations (whether good or bad) will last indefinitely. We know this isn't true but we feel it so often to be true.

Examples abound of why our feelings are wrong. 

Remember the Cold War? It lasted for almost 50 years, it defined America and the world. If you grew up during that time (I remember the end of it) it seemed permanent and unwinnable -- until, very suddenly, it wasn't. 

Remember the original Law & Order? It was on TV for decades -- until it was cancelled.

Bill Cosby was a respected comedian, actor, author, activist, and cultural icon for 50 years -- and now he's a disgraced prisoner.

Queen Elizabeth II is 92 years old and has ruled the UK for 67 years -- but, one day, she won't be, and in the 1000+ years of the British monarchy, her reign will be but a minuscule part of it.

I remember as a kid when George H.W. Bush was Vice-President and President, it seemed liked he would be in power forever -- until a young Arkansas Governor changed that quite suddenly.

Heck, Game of Thrones has been on for almost a decade and but very soon will be over. And talk about something that show us the precariousness of power and dominance!

That's why it's so important not only to study history but to have a sense of history -- to see how there were once mighty rulers and empires and "influencers" who commanded huge swaths of the world and public who are now only footnotes; how people and things we took for granted as always existing and presumably existing -- like Notre Dame or the old World Trade Centers -- vanished in an instant.

You get the point -- what's here today, who's powerful today, who and what rules and commands our world, who rose yesterday will one day fall tomorrow. It's always been like this. It always will be.

Nothing lasts forever. 

Two totally different but fascinating examples from downtown NYC.

The first is the story of Mary Boone, once the hottest and most important art dealer in town. She knew everyone, sold the work of many famous artists, and hobnobbed with the powerful for 40 years.  She helped build and defined the downtown art scene. Now she's headed to jail for tax evasion, her business gone.

The second is a great story about the Old St. Patrick's Cathedral and its catacombs. This used to be the seat of Catholic power in NYC and one of the most powerful churches in the country. Many once-famous, once-powerful people are buried there. Now it's a tourist attraction but it's days of power and influence are long, long gone.

In NYC and the world, people and things rise and fall all the time. We shouldn't be surprised by it. Everything changes -- and understanding that makes us wiser.

One World Trade Center Tribute to Notre Dame

Please Boycott the New York Post

I've removed the link for it from this blog.

This is not censorship, this is not an attack on free-speech -- this is MORE speech, this is citizen action. The government is not going to put the Post out of business, this is simply Americans flexing their economic power in service of their values. THIS is what makes America great!

By the way, the Post is not a newspaper or a business -- it's a racist propaganda machine that's been subsidized by Rupert Murdoch for 40 years, it's never turned a cent of profit.

Don't worry, Republicans, the Post won't go out of business but it will feel real pain. We know how much love Republicans inflicting pain so it's only just they feel a little bit of it themselves.   

The Delusion of Art

Whenever I see a great or terrible work of art in any medium, a question recurs in my mind: "Why exactly did the artist want to create this? How and why did this come into the world?"

If you think about it, there's no compelling reason why any work of art should exist. As great as, say, Hamilton or the Mona Lisa or Game of Thrones are, they aren't curing diseases, providing shelter, winning wars, or generally improving the general welfare. They simply exist, for better or worse, to elevate culture.

A work of art is like a tree house: it has no real reason, no requirement to exist -- it doesn't fill any societal need at all -- except that someone at some point in time got the idea for it and then went about the difficult, delicate, sometimes exilerating, often frustrating work of creating it, hoping that people will like the finished product, and very often recruiting others along the way for assistance. Often, this assistance is financial.

One of my favorite books, as I've blogged about before, is Final Cut, about the movie debacle Heaven's Gate that destroyed United Artists. What's fascinating about it is that it's a keyhole view into the miserable, decidedly non-glamorous work of making a movie -- and how and why things can go so wrong. When you read it, you are mesmerized by the egomania and irresponsibility of the director, the bad decisions of the studio executives, the viciousness of the press, the careers and relationships made and destroyed, the complete delusion involved -- and for what? For a movie that, hopefully, a few people would pay a few bucks to see and spend a few hours at before going back about their lives. 

I just read a story about a massive Broadway musical debacle: three years ago, there was a new musical called Nerds about the early years of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Many thought it would be another Book of Mormon and it had been in the works for years -- work shopped, cast and rehearsed, and was just weeks away from debuting. And then? The money vanished, the show was cancelled, careers were deeply impacted -- and now there are lawsuits and all sorts of legal miseries. It's what happens when all of that effort fails and is for nought. It's about the dark side of creativity, the emptiness of failure. And for what? For something that didn't even need to exist in the first place.

As you read this story, you read about everything that goes into making not just this show but any piece of art: the hopes and dreams of the creators, their hard work to bring it into the world, the money and people who are needed to help it along the way -- and, most importantly, the delusion that everyone involved is required to have.

You have to be somewhat delusional to be an artist of any kind because, if you aren't, if you are strictly logical, no one would work on any show or big piece of art because ... why should anyone care? Why should this exist? Turning Victor Hugo's massive and depressing novel about failed French revolutionaries into a musical? Making a hip-hop musical about the Founding Fathers? Taking TS Eliot's book about cats and making that into a musical? The fact that people thought those were good ideas and turned them into brilliant shows still amazes me. Their creators were totally delusional enough to think that anyone would care to see these works of art -- and yet they were totally right. 

In the end, a successful show, a successful work of art, comes down to execution -- how it's actually made. If a tree house is well-built, it's a thrilling and fun place to go. No one can wait to clamour up it. But if it's badly made, it's creaky and quickly falls to earth and might really hurt someone. Then people avoid it like the plague. And you can never guess how well or badly something is executed until you try to do it.

If you think about it, turning George RR Martin's massive Song of Ice and Fire books into a TV series was a bold, really delusional thing to do -- the books are long, the plots complex and depressing, beloved characters are killed, they're kind of a mess. And yet ... it's one of the greatest shows ever, thanks to the people who created it, who executed it. Or this person, who makes sure that Scorsese's NYC movies get made just the way he wants.   

That's the mystery of art -- how a combination of pie-in-the-sky delusion and real-world hard work can either create something memorable or something that can lead to ruin. 

NYC Turns, Turns, Turns ...

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and Pete Seegar taught us well: "To everything there is a season ... a time to live, and a time to die ... a time to break down, and a time to build up ... a time to mourn, and a time to dance ... a time to keep, and a time to cast away ... and a time to every purpose ... turn, turn, turn ..."

The yin and yang, the ups and downs, the hopes and dreams realized and dashed, the constant churn -- or turn -- of existence is something that you only begin to fully appreciate as you age. Life is never a permanent up or down escalator. In fact, as we get older, accepting this constant "to everything there is a season" fact of life -- and not just accepting but cherishing it -- is what makes the craziness and vicissitudes of aging bearable. It's a basic tenet of survival -- things happen, things change, sometimes for better, often for worst, but they are inevitable. Accepting them with grace is a greater part of wisdom.

Of course, in this day and age, there are lots of people who either can't or won't accept what the Bible and our greatest folk singer taught us. They go in the opposite direction -- trying hopelessly, miserably, quixotically to reclaim their youths, reclaim their pasts, reclaim times gone by. They express this in both harmless and harmful ways, like reveling in cultural nostalgia (harmless) or voting for Trump (harmful). F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about this yearn for regression in his last, brilliant line of The Great Gatsby: "So beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

In NYC, we see this "turn" all the time, in ways both big and small. Concurrently, we also see the desire, in varying ways, to recapture the city's past.

For example, the neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn: this area has a rather bi-polar identity, as both the ultimate liberal hipster mecca and the home to the very conservative Orthodox Jewish community. But did you know there is highly Italian part of it? It's fading away, and the people there seem to accept that their neighborhood and the times have changed, as this article and its amazing photographs demonstrate.

Two recent deaths also show how people in our past made the city's present and future turn for the better. I love reading about New Yorkers like this because, without them, our city and its culture would be poorer. Genevieve Oswald created and curated the dance archive at the public library for more than 40 years. And Henry Stern was the Parks Commissions off and on for almost 20 years (from 1983-2001), the longest serving and probably most imaginative commissioner since Robert Moses. 

*Side note: I tried interviewing Henry Stern for this blog several years ago. I emailed him at an organization he ran, and got a rather weird message in reply that I didn't understand -- it wasn't an outright rejection but it certainly didn't read like an acceptance. It was more like, "If you call this number, something might happen but don't expect it." I never did call. His was one of a few interviews that just never quite happened.

Anyway, they were both great New Yorkers, they made it "turn" for the better. May they RIP.

Moving on ... I was a teenager in NYC in the 1990s. As much as I'd like to say it was a special time and place to be young, it sure didn't feel that way at the time. Honestly, I was a complete loser (unlike now, where I'm only a partial loser), and back then I had no money, no girlfriends, few real friends, and lots of school work. Le ugh. However, as the 21st century so far has given us 9/11, two endless wars, more and more mass shootings, more and more man-made natural disasters, the financial crises, and Trump, it's easy to look at the last decade of the 20th century as some of kind of "end of innocence" even though it really wasn't. In recent years, there have been movies about being a teenager in the 1990s, both in NYC and elsewhere, including The Wackness from 2008 and more recently one called Landline (I actually went to high school with the person who made it but didn't know her). This article is about these movies and their 1990s nostalgia is both misplaced and yet totally understandable (also, this year is the 30th anniversary of the classic NYC romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally which, in many ways, was a '90s movie even though it came out in the last year of the 1980s).

Things in NYC and the world have "turned" since the 1990s -- in some ways for better (the smartphone, the smoking ban, lower crime, Barack Obama) and, obviously, for worse. I know for me things have actually "turned" for the better, but even I sometimes looked back misty-eyed at the Clinton era.

And in understanding how the times "turn", no New Yorker explains not only history but power -- and how people in power made history -- than Robert Caro. Author of the Robert Moses tome The Power Broker and the Lyndon Johnson series, Caro has just published a book about his working life (literally titled Working). His advice to aspiring historians? "Turn every page." Turn over the pages, the materials, the people, the metaphorical rocks of the past to understand how our present was formed and how we are forming our future. 

NYC, like the world it exists in, turns forever -- and it is we who do the turning.

AOC Cracks it Open

When AOC beat Queens political boss Joe Crowley in last year Congressional Democratic primary, the national media took note. Wow! they said. A young Latina newcomer beat a massively powerful 20-year incumbent! She's more progressive than he is! Younger than he is! Browner than he is! A much more telegenic and better social media communicator than he is! 

All true. But that's not what, here in NYC, was most notable about her victory.

As this article notes, as international and dynamic and exciting as NYC is, it's political culture is "sclerotic." It's old-fashioned, boring, extremely hierarchical and quite small-D "un-democratic", a legacy of Tammany Hall. Politicians in NYC are expected to start their careers as staffers and operatives, working their way up the ladder precinct by precinct, clubhouse by clubhouse, lousy political and government job after lousy political and government job, hoping and waiting to be "next in line" when, eventually some Assembly member, State Senator, or Congressperson retires -- or dies, or gets indicted -- and machine bosses like Crowley handpick them to run in same districts.

That's why, quite frankly, there are lots of mediocrities in elected office.

The political world in NYC is a closed-world and insular -- and its devilishly hard to crack-open. Machine-picked candidates almost always win because they can either kick outsider candidates off the ballot with petition challenges, bribe them off the ballot with jobs or promises of future office, or resort to smear campaigns and blackmail. Often it's just a case of the candidates leaving office endorsing the machine-picked candidates, sending all kinds of mailers and flyers showing the aging outgoing office holder smiling with and shaking the hand of his or her chosen replacement -- and the message to voters is clear, and the so the machine-backed transition to power is completed.

It's neat, orderly, organized, controlled -- everything that democracy, in its purest form, is not supposed to be. 

AOC busted that. She didn't wait her turn, didn't work in the weeds of the NYC political culture, and challenged not only an incumbent but also one of the most powerful in NYC. And she won. Big time, becoming an international political star. 

And it's made her lots of enemies.

Not just amongst Republicans who, naturally hate her politics, her gender, and her ethnicity. AOC's victory also enraged lots of local Democrats, people who have been playing by the rules, working and waiting their turn so that maybe, just maybe, some day down the line, they might become an Assembly-member -- and here's this much younger, complete outsider who took on the machine, beat it, and is now member of Congress. It's gotta sting.

In next year's Congressional primaries, all over NYC, there will be lots of AOC-inspired challengers to incumbents. It'll be interesting to see if she's really created a groundswell, a movement, to crack open the sclerotic political system in NYC -- or if she was just a big, notable exception.

Fosse, Fosse, Fosse! ... And Marriage

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Bob Fosse directed Broadway shows and movies that reverberated in American culture: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Pippin, Caberet, Chicago, Lenny, All That Jazz, and lots more (most of his shows were, perhaps not surprisingly, about showbiz itself). He was a brilliant choreographer, got great performances from actors, and had an amazing visual sensibility. He was also a tyrant, a philanderer, and he died of a heart attack in 1988 after a lifetime of living on the edge.

Fosse lives again in the upcoming "warts-and-all" miniseries Fosse/Verdon premiering on TV next week. It covers his decades long career and his stormy marriage to Broadway star Gwen Verdon, a titanic talent in her own right.

It's interesting to see that this series is premiering at the same time as New York magazine has a huge special issue, an "investigation", about modern day marriage -- and if it really works. In a time and country of fierce independence and dating apps and the re-definition of gender relations and identities -- even amongst royals! -- is this ancient institution still relevant today? 

There seems to be a general consensus that, today, a marriage needs to be a mutual beneficial partnership. But how do we define such a thing, how do we know what it is, and why does it so often fail?

The Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon marriage was a partnership in life and art -- and, although they separated after 11 years, they never divorced and kept working together. Their marriage was not based around fidelity or even living together -- it was based around the amazing careers and work they produced. They understood what their marriage was really about -- business.  

You see, marriage is business. It always has been. Love used not to be the primary reason for getting married -- it was about two families aligning themselves for economic or political reasons. It was also about having children, keeping the family going into the future. That's why so many married men and women used to have spouses and lovers -- there was the person you went into business and built a life with, and then there was the person you actually loved. They could be mutually exclusive -- until modern "enlightened" sensibilities insisted they be one and the same. That's why so many marriages fail today 

That said, I'm married and I love my wife. She's a great partner in every sense of the word! Best of all, we understand marriage in all its complex facets. Every marriage is unique and should be built and understood on its own terms, not held up against some kind of "ideal" or "rules." 

That's something that Fosse and Verdon did, and something that every married couple should do, in my opinion, for themselves.

P.S. If there's one Bob Fosse movie you should see, it's All That Jazz, his highly autobiographical story of surviving a heart attack. The ending of it is one of the most brilliant, disturbing, sick and twisted, macabre, and purely artistic things I've ever seen. 

Ben Stiller in the Subway & GOT Premiere - Just Another Day in NYC!

The Iron Throne in NYC

The final season of Game of Thrones is upon us and, like many a nerd across the globe, I'm irrationally excited. 

And, speaking of across the globe, this past weekend six Iron Thrones were scattered at various worldwide locations: England, Canada, Sweden, Spain, Brazil -- and, yes, here in NYC. Specifically, Fort Totten Park, Queens.

We went out there on Saturday to try and sit on it, but the line was five hours long. When you have two little kids, such a task is impossible. However, we did catch a peak of it so our nerdy hearts were satisfied.

By the way, Fort Totten is a very cool place to go anyway, a (until recently) secret park in Queens. There are beautiful views of the water and NYC skyline in the background. Definitely worth checking out, Iron Throne or no.