Donald Trump is an obvious fraud, a con man (Trump University, anyone?) to everyone and anyone who either isn't a complete moron or a racist supporter. He lies and cheats and steals. But one thing a lot of people, even those who detest him, is that, because he's so crass, he's not a snob. How can he be? He loves the "poorly educated", he's personally gross, and promotes himself as a savior to middle America.
This is, of course, nonsense. He cuts the taxes of rich people while the factories he promised to save keep closing. But he's also a snob! Apparently, he doesn't want to hire anyone except Ivy League graduates -- and only those who graduate from the top, top Ivies. He apparently loathes his AG Jeff Sessions, not only because he refuses to un-recuse himself from the Russia investigation, but because he went to the University of Alabama Law School and not, say, Harvard.
As this article points out, Trump is the exact kind of coastal elitist that so many of his supporters claim to detest -- he looks down on the poor, the poorly educated, the non-elite. He's everything that this supporters accuse his opponents of being.
He's a snob! Of course, he says he's not because he's a con man. But really, for everything else you might call him (narcissist, racist, liar, etc. etc.) he's just a big fat snob.
Gentrification isn't just happening to the NYC streets, skyline, and pocket books -- now it's hit our TV.
Specifically HBO.
Like most legacy premium cable channels, HBO has featured uncut, uncensored, commercial-free movies, big-time sporting events (like boxing), as well as original programming (e.g. The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, as well as documentaries). They also featured "adult" fare, including shows like Cathouse, Real Sex, and others.
One HBO show, however, defied easy categorization.
It was called Taxicab Confessions. It started on HBO in the mid-1990s and ran, off and on, for another decade or so. Taxicab was a brilliant, innovative program, an early "reality show", where regular people were filmed in the backseats of cabs, talking with their fellow passengers and the "drivers" (who worked for the show). These cab ride vignettes were usually filmed in the middle of the night, and all sorts of wacky characters and behavior would be revealed. It was an amazing "keyhole" into a moment in time, into simple interactions and conversations among people, a literal rolling revelation of human behavior. At the end of each show you'd see the drivers reveal to the passengers that they'd be filmed for Taxicab Confessions, and they'd freak out and then happily sign a release form. The show invented the whole genre of people talking in cars (Jerry Seinfeld even ripped it off!).
The show originated in NYC, and most of the early shows were filmed here (before moving to Las Vegas for a while, and then returning to NYC). As you might imagine, the people featured in the cab rides were often dirty -- dirty mouthed, dirty minded, dirty moving. They were funny, weird, sometimes delightful, sometimes sad, sometimes confused and confusing, sometimes shockingly normal, but they were always interesting. Always.
Why? Because even though a new episode of Taxicab Confessions hasn't been produced in a while, up until recently, the past episodes were available to watch on HBO On Demand and HBO Go. You could go back in time to the 1990s and early 2000s, and see these parade of lovable freak shows in cabs. You could see NYC (and, yes, Vegas) in the middle of the night, for real. You could see a whole other strange, sometimes dangerous, sometimes sexy, sometimes just odd, world. But no longer. HBO has removed it from these streaming services, along with the rest of their "adult" programming.
Taxicab Confessions is not only over but now it's gone, totally gone, a blatant garbage-canning of part of the city's past, a kind of digital gentrification. It's another dirty part of NYC that's been sacrificed to "taste" and cleanliness.
And it's wrong! While it certainly had "adult" moments (people removing clothing or getting frisky in the back of the cab), Taxicab Confessions was not necessarily an "adult" show like its other shows -- 99.9% of the time it was people just talking. It was a great show, a wonderful time capsule of humanity and NYC, and now it's vanished into the electronic ether.
Farewell Taxicab Confessions. This one New Yorker will remember you fondly.
Few playwrights were as prolific, successful, and intrinsically New York as Neil Simon.
His plays were funny, moving, and exposed the jumbled mess of nerves, anger, humility, vanity, greed, hope, and love that makes up the human experience.
A boy from the Bronx, Simon's plays were NYC to their core. His most famous play was The Odd Couple (it became multiple movies and TV series), and his most acclaimed one was Lost in Yonkers (it won him a Pulitzer Prize) but other plays like Brighton Beach Memoirs, Prisoner of Second Avenue, and Plaza Suite (part of an unofficial trilogy of plays that told different stories in the same hotel suites), his plays were about the people that make this city the bizarre, difficult, and wonderful place to live.
Rest in peace Neil Simon. An American master. Heaven just got a little funnier.
So much of NYC and New York State politics is crazy but a lot of it has nothing to do with politicians but the structural forces they operate under.
Namely, Wilson-Pakula.
This is a law that allows "fusion" tickets in elections, where candidates can run for the same office on multiple ballot lines. It creates confusion, opportunism, and all sorts of other bizarre goings on in our elections -- and most people, even the politicians themselves, understand it.
Here's a handy primer about the history and current workings of this law and other oddities about elections in New York. It's a fascinating, if also depressing, read.
