Two years ago The Village Voicewent out of business, a depressingly familiar victim of technological change and indifferent nouveau ownership. Since its demise, the website has been publishing old articles from its massive print and digital archives, a living memory of NYC's past.
Now The Voice has been sold again, this time to a guy who owns a bunch of small news sites, and plans to relaunch not only the news site but also publish quarterly print issues -- and, down the road, even a podcast.
What kind of Voice will arise from its ashes remains to be seen -- a lot of these smaller city newspapers that turned into news sites have become vanity projects for its owners, vehicles for their business and political interests, not worth reading. What's clear is that the new owners thinks of The Voice as a powerful NYC brand and wants to extend it so hopefully it will become a worthy successor/continuation of the old newspaper, a real voice of downtown and offbeat NYC.
Two-and-a-half years ago I did a short interview with former party promoter/convicted murderer Michael Alig. In the 1980s and early 1990s he was the king of downtown nightlife in NYC, promoting parties and clubs, thinking up and hosting all sorts of outrageous events, and basically just going everyhwere, doing everything (and everyone) and living a wild, crazy life.
Then tragedy.
Alig and a friend murdered someone, a man named Angel Hernandez, in a particularly brutal way. Alig then spent the next almost-20 years in prison. After he was released he tried to reinvent himself back into the mileau of a very different NYC (he called it "more normalized"). This was the subject of our interview and he was very forthcoming about the challenges of it.
Michael Alig has died, aged 54, of a heroin overdose -- alone, on Christmas Day.
What's clear about Alig's life, both before and after prison, is that he was a deeply broken, troubled soul and his demons cost someone his life -- and now his own. I felt at the time that I perhaps shouldn't have interviewed him, that I was giving a murdered a voice he didn't deserve, but I realized that he had a story and it deserved to be told (even if such stories shouldn't necessarily generate sympathy for the storyteller).
And now as Alig's life is over, and this hard year comes to an end. You can't remember the life and death of someone who has killed someone else without also remembering the life and death of the victim. I just hope that Alig's family, the family of Angel Hernandez, and everyone who was impacted by their lives, both for better or worse, finds a new peace next year.
Jim Jarmusch is one of the most successful independent movie directors of the last forty years with such classics as Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, Broken Flowers and others on his resume. An Ohio native, he came to NYC as a young man and quickly established himself in the city's cultural firmament as one of its best and boldest directors. And although an NYC-archetype, many of Jarmusch's movie's are set on the road, are about characters leaving somewhere and looking for something elsewhere, stories of discovery. And, although an American director, Jarmusch's movies have always had a global flavor and focus.
Night on Earth might be Jarmusch's masterpiece and his most NYC and global film. And it's one of my favorite moves ever.
Set on one night in five different cities around the world (LA, NYC, Paris, Rome & Helsinki), Night on Earth is about the unique, special, and totally transitory moments that take place between cab drivers and their passengers, between strangers, between people going from one place to another -- both literally and figuratively. Each segment of this film is totally different from the other, some being very sweet and touching, some being extremely funny, and others being quite sad. In fact, each segment manages, brilliantly, to capture all of these different things at once. The point of each segment in each city isn't the story -- it's the journey, the interactions, the characters.
The movie is about capturing a small moment in the time of each these people's lives in each of these cities -- showing how, around the the world, whatever race we might be, whatever color we might be, whatever we might strive for, we are all basically the same -- human beings.
A truly global phenomenon.
If you've never seen Night on Earth, I won't ruin the segments for you -- please, go out and watch it now. The only problem with this movie is being denied the pleasure of getting to see it for the first time. The cast is amazing -- Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Espisito, Rosie Perez, Roberto Benigni, and many other international actors I had never heard of before.
The NYC segment is one of the best -- it involves a guy trying to get home from Times Square to Brooklyn, a cabbie from Germany who can barely drive and used to work as a clown, and a wild profane woman who fights and flirts with both of them. The three actors in this segment -- Esposito, Perez, and Armin Mueller-Stahl -- are wonderful together. And, of course, all three of them would go onto greater career glory in big movies and get Oscar and Emmy nominations, but, for me, this movie is what I'll remember them for.
Night on Earth is one of a very few movies that makes me happy, makes me feel warm inside. I hope it does the same for you.
You think a person, place or thing is "one thing" (good, bad, or otherwise) and then events ensue or new information comes to light and it makes you think it's "something else." The reality of it or around it changes, and it transforms in your mind, making you imagine it as something else. This reimagination can be for the better, or the worse, or just for the sake of difference.
Certainly this year has transformed our imagination of the world and how we live our lives. We didn't have any choice, it was a crises forced upon us, and none of us wanted it. But it gives us an opportunity of what we might want our world, and NYC, to be after the crises is over.
During this year, many city planners and urban experts have been reimagining how NYC can evolve in the upcoming years. Imagine this for NYC: free municipal broadband, single-payer healthcare and guarenteed income for all city residents, 15-minute neighborhoods (where all kinds of staple businesses and services are no more than a 15-minute walk from anyone's home), and new zoning policies that allow for more affordable housing. A city that's more equitable, more humanane, more affordable, and easier to navigate. A city that makes NYC fulfill its true promise.
A city reimagined.
But you don't only need to look to the future or public policies to reimagine NYC. You can reimagine it by looking at aspects of its past that were long overlooked. For example, reading about the photography collective in Harlem called Kamoinge that started in 1960 and is still going today. It was and remains a breeding ground for talented black photographers and has quietly impacted this city and nation's culture. Like most white folks, I had never heard of it before but it was fascinating to learn about it because it made me reimagine part of the black experience in NYC.
In this historic year, reimagining NYC has never been more important, more vital, and more amazing.
In the early 2000s, New York City was recovering from 9/11, the twelve years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's reign were just starting, and the turbocharged gentrification of the city was on its way. It was a turning point in NYC and also for me personally -- I was a couple of years out of college and still finding my way, personally and professionally. It's also when a small, very offbeat, extremely local cable channel hit the air that was destined to be short-lived but was, at least for me at the time, a fun diversion.
It was called MetroTV, and it was an odd child of both New York magazine and the Dolan-family owned MSG networks.
Like its parentage, its content was a mashup of programming from the MSG networks. During the day it broadcast weather, traffic, educational programming, and, on the weekends, sports.
It had these very NYC-centered shows about dating, sex, love, and being single in NYC. There were shows like Naked New York where relationship "experts", book authors and magazine writers, adult start, and various other experts in the excercise of Venus would be interviewed by a middle-aged guy and his very hot younger female sidekick. There was To Live and Date in New York, a reality show about single people. There was The Radio Chick on the Prowl where a oddball radio host Leslie Gold would talk with people about -- guess what? -- dating! And there was, most originally, a show called Strictly Personal where people would record themselves talking about why they were great dating prospects and then they would direct people to a dating website to contact them. A friend of mine even appeared on this! (Yours truly did not.) This was in the early years of online dating, before the IPhone and dating apps completely changed the game.
In a way MetrTV reminded me of the old WNYC TV -- lots of dull programming and some really wacky stuff.
MetroTV started in 2002 and ended in 2005. By then most of this programming had been cancelled. I don't know why it didn't last -- shows about love/sex/dating might get boring after a while and also this channel was so far down on the dial that people probably didn't find it. MSG seems to have realized that sports programming was probably cheaper and more popular.
I tried to find old clips of MetroTV shows on YouTube but none were to be found -- seems like it's all been memory-holed, locked in vaults somewhere. But it was a moment in time, gone but not totally forgotten.
The legendary NYC gossip columnist and man-about-town Michael Musto has a big new article in The Daily Beast about what he predicts will be "New York City's Marvelously Messy Comeback."
His basic theory is that NYC will, as it always does, once again become a popular destination for people to live and visit and it'll be better than ever -- more exciting and, hopefully, more afforable. He also hopes that some of the grit that has been bleached out of the city's identity in the last several years will return. I hope he's right!
I actually interviewed Michael Musto 13 years ago, one of the earliest interviews I ever did for this blog. Read it here. He really is one of the wise-men of NYC.
The very first movie I ever saw in a theater when I was a kid was Annie, the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical and I immeadiately developed a lifelong crush on the character of Grace Farrell, played by Ann Reinking.
Of course, it wasn't Grace I loved -- it was Ann, and for good reason: she was a gorgeous, blazing talent, a great actress and amazing dancer, a brilliant musical star.
And although she made very few movies (her other big one was All That Jazz where she played a fictional version of herself), Ann Reinking had a long and huge career on the Broadway stage. Her resume is a catalogue of classic: Caberet, Pippin, A Chrous Line, Chicago (the orginal and the revival) and others. In addition to appearing onstage, Reinking was also a Broadway choreographer, designing the dance moves for the (still running) revival of Chicago and, later on, the Broadway revue Fosse, a tribute to her late mentor and romantic partner, the mythic Bob Fosse. She also taught and mentored young dancers at Steps.
Ann Reinking was a classic NYC story -- a girl from elsewhere (Seattle) who moved to NYC to make it big and did. For years she was an icon of this city's culture. Even though she had retired and moved to Arizona a few years ago, he legacy continued -- on stage at Chicago and in last year's mini-series Fosse/Verdon. She died recently at age 71 and will be deeply missed. RIP.
Being a New York City resident, being a denizen of this town, is such an identity unto itself that the debate over what makes someone a "real New Yorker" has and will continue to rage ad infinitum.
For me, however, you never feel more like a New Yorker then when you leave it. And you REALLY don't feel more like a New Yorker until you start living somewhere else.
I lived elsewhere for four years in college and I never identified more as a New Yorker than in those years where I was in exile from the city. And apparently this is a common phenomenon: many born-and-bred citizens of NYC who have moved elsewhere, who are "in exile" for reasons good and bad, have made it clear that they feel the same way.
Some famous exiles are people like Larry David, the brilliant comic-mind and co-creator of Seinfeld. If you watch him on Curb Your Enthusiam, you see the rich Brooklyn-native bumbling his way around Los Angeles, a New Yorker to his core. This reminds me, in a very different way, of what I wrote about the movie Heat, a great crime movie set in LA but starring two great New Yorkers (Pacino & De Niro) -- they never seemed more like New Yorkers to me than watching them in this movie where they are both in exile in a strange wild place, far from home.
It reminds me that no "real New Yorker" ever leaves NYC -- you take the city with you, its ghosts and memories exist within you, its roots to your identity gets stronger, and it makes you New Yorker wherever you go.
