T-Rex Rides the Subway on Halloween

Peter Luger in Winter

The hottest news buzzing around town has nothing to do with politics or media or the usual headline-grabbing subjects. No, the hottest news sizzlingly -- pun totally intended -- in our city is that the universally acclaimed Peter Luger's Steakhouse got a zero star rating in The New York Times. 

Ouch! That's like Einstein teaching at Harvard and saying that all of his students are morons. It is, what we would call these days, a sick burn.

Peter Luger's, for decades, has been considered the best steakhouse in NYC bar none. But people and places can only coast on a strong reputation for so long. You have to keep making a sustained case of your continued excellence, for your continued relevance, and you have to keep delivering the goods or, after a while, you'll get called out as an exhausted volcano, an emperor with no clothes, a has-been. That sadly, is Peter Luger's fate. However, I'm sure they'll be able to turn it around.  

Here's the truth: you can get a great porterhouse just about anywhere in this town or country these days. For a long, long time Luger's has not had a monopoly on that. And the best part of Luger's wasn't even the steak: it was the ambiance, the service, the incredible bacon appetizer, and the strudel with generous amounts of shlag. 

For my money, Christos Steakhouse in Astoria is the best one I've gone to NYC: great service and meat, very fresh and perfectly cooked, plus they've got oysters and a great wine list. It's small, initmate, and not a tourist trap. A real NYC steakhouse.

Also, let this be a lesson to us all of the dangers of "drift", of slow decay, of gradual decline. We must be ever vigilant to sustain our personal springs -- or else fall into winter and get frozen out.

1986 Redux

In the first year of this blog, I wrote about Robert Chambers -- the notorious "preppy murderer" who strangled a woman named Jennifer Levin to death one night in Central Park in 1986.

Before Lorena Bobbit, before OJ, before #MeToo, this was the big scandal that provoked the subject of violence towards women into the American conversation. The whole story was grotesque and sad. It was also an example of how men, especially handsome white men, who had committed horrific violence towards women (in this case, actual murder), got shockingly sympathetic treatment in the media and culture while the female victim became largely forgotten. 

Chambers even claimed -- like so many predators do -- that he was the real victim in this case!  He said that the slime petite Levin had actually tried to rape the massive, statuesque Chambers and that he was only acting in self-defence -- and some morons actually bought this BS. Chambers did some time, got out of jail, promptly became a drug dealer, and went back to prison. He's there now -- gone but not totally forgotten.

Now this case is the subject of an upcoming true-crime documentary -- revisiting 30+ year old scandals and stories seems to be all the rage these days. However, I'm curious to see how this case will be handled from a 2019 perspective -- and hopefully we'll learn less about Robert and more about Jennifer.

Talking about 1986, the final episode of The Deuce aired last night -- it ends in 1986 and then jumps ahead to 2019, showing in dramatic detail how Times Square and the city transformed in the 33-year interim but is still haunted by ghosts of the past. 

1986 is a year I remember well -- I turned 10, debuted in The Nutcracker at City Ballet, went away to sleep away camp for the first time, visited England with my mom, and saw the Aerosmith/Run DMC "Walk This Way" video for the first time. I was blissfully naive about things like the Chambers chase at the time -- and wish I still was.

"All broads, please call" - Howard Stern's Divorce @ 20

Ah, I remember this well.

Twenty-years ago today, a Monday morning, Howard hit the air. But it wasn't a typical Monday morning, and Howard was not at his usual wild rise'n'shine best. Instead, he was announcing something many of his fans thought previously unthinkable -- he had separated from, and was headed towards divorce with, his wife of 20+ years, Allison.

Only two years earlier he'd made a whole movie that was about his love her. She seemed to be his constant companion, his North Star, the person who grounded him, the better woman behind the flawed man. Howard's wife was a big part of his image -- yes, he was wild and crazy and raunchy on the air, but his fans took comfort that, at the end of the day, he went home to his wife and kids and lived a typical suburban life.

No more. Now Howard was single and living in the city and ready for action -- or, as he announced at the start of this show, "All broads, please call."

For some, this was unforgivable. Howard couldn't split with Allison! Who was he without her? Shortly after this, perhaps not surprisingly, his ratings dropped. For others, though, his separation promised wild times ahead that would be turned into great radio -- and, for a while, this was true. Until it wasn't (about a year later Howard met his current wife, Beth, and went back to being a boring married guy).

So this show, this moment, was an inflection point in the long history of Howard Stern in NYC radio. 

So Harvey Weinstein Walks into a Bar ...

... and gets his predatory balls broke by a lady. Good for her!

Much deserved. But what's even crazier about this is that he was invited to this event! People actually requested his presence! Who in God's name invites a notorious serial rapist anywhere? He should be in jail -- and probably will be soon.

No wonder Trump is president -- morality appears to be non-existent for, well, a lot of people. Egads. 

The City Beneath Our Feet

Late last year I blogged about the romantic allure of life "underground", of living at a remove from  polite society, of residing in a netherworld where the squares and scolds and scoundrels of The Real World dare not intrude. In some way, I mused, this very blog is an underground itself -- a totally obscure yet really cool little world within the vast universe of the Internet.

But only a privileged dude like moi could ever find the idea of underground life truly exciting -- or something that would make for a bearable way of life.

This massive journalistic photo project shows the literal underground life of New Yorkers in Queens who sweep our floors, clean our offices and homes, serve and deliver us our food, stock our shelves, and do all the brutal, nasty, boring work that most of us New Yorkers won't and don't have to do. They live in basements and basement apartments -- many of them illegal conversions -- often in bunks or with roommates. They have very little personal room or light, these places smell, and these underground lives are, to put it simply, rough. This is whole other city beneath our feet, a world most of us know nothing about but that keeps our city humming. 

But these folks, most of them immigrants (legal or not), persevere and keep working each day, sending money home, believing that better days for them and their families are ahead of them, that one day they will be able to emerge from this underground life and into the light of the good life. 

They're not oppressed -- they're optimistic. They don't complain -- they just work. 

And they are, truly, the best kinds of New Yorkers we have.

"The Deuce" - An Appreciation

Very soon the final episode of the three-season series The Deuce will air. Created by David Simon, whose previous shows The Wire and Treme examined the criminal underworld of early-2000s Baltimore and the cultural scene of post-Katrina New Orleans (respectively), The Deuce was about NYC. 

Unlike those shows, however, it was a period piece set in the 1970s and '80s. Ostensibly The Deuce was about the adult business and how it quickly rose into an almost respected art form ("porno chic") in the '70s until AIDS and videotape ruined it in the '80s. But The Deuce wasn't really about the adult business, it was about NYC -- specifically the Times Square area, and how it turned from a sleazy cease pool into a developer's wonderland. It's about how the forces of big money, real estate, law enforcement, and politicians came together to transform this part of NYC -- and, eventually, the city as a whole. In The Deuce, the adult business is an exemplar of this time in the city's history -- a beneficiary of the old NYC, a victim of the new NYC. It shows how, in detail, through the stories of its various interrelated characters, the city changed into the gentrified, clean-cut jewel-box it is today.

As I blogged about almost exactly two years ago -- two years before this show even hit the air! -- so goes Times Square, so goes NYC. The Deuce dramatized this fact brilliantly.

I'm sorry that The Deuce is going off the air after three great seasons -- each one jumped ahead several years from the previous season (1971 to 1978 to 1985) showing how the adult business and the city had changed in the interim. It'd be cool to see this show jump ahead to 2000 or 2001 -- just as the Internet was changing adult film yet again and 9/11 would change the city forever. Maybe one day David Simon will make a reunion movie.

Many thanks for this brilliant, one of a kind, only-in-NYC show!

NYC's Worst Bro-mance

Currently the greatest country in the world is being stunk up by Donald Trump, a wannabe presidential Lone Ranger, and his bizarro Tonto/lawyer, the former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani. They seem to be having American history's most destructive bro-mance -- a criminal president being aided by a pathetic has-been henchman.

How did this happen? How the hell did we get here?

In NYC, for decades, Trump was a goofy real estate guy and media character, Giuliani a respected "law and order" prosecutor and mayor. It was hard to think, back then, that they would transmogrify into a neo-fascist buddy horror show, threatening to undermine our democracy and national security, pushing us to the brink of the biggest Constitutional crises since Watergate. Oh no. It seemed unimaginable just a few short years ago.

But here we are, and America is reaping the foul whirlwind. You should read this massive article that explores the Donald/Rudy tango, going back decades. The truth is that they were never particularly close and never really liked each other very much. However, at this perilous moment, they seem to need each other -- Trump thinks Rudy will save him from impeachment and historical disgrace, and Rudy is just happy that Trump is giving him a great last gasp of relevance, keeping him in the public eye. 

Politics is a cruel business which is why so few decent people get into it. You have to fight like hell to get elected to office and, once you do, work like a dog just to keep it. All the while you have people actively conspiring to get you thrown out, you have the press breaking your balls, you have to spend lots of time raising money, and it's very hard to actually get anything in government done -- it's just part of the job. And what's worse is that once you do leave office, for whatever reason, you immediately become irrelevant, a nothing. As the saying goes, all political careers end in failure. 

So this whole nightmare with Trump and Rudy is about two old guys who have been around forever, who understand that their time on the public stage is coming to and end, fighting like hell to stave off irrelevancy, to ward off the inevitable failure. They are drowning, gasping men, trying not to get swallowed by the tides of time and history.

And it all started here in NYC more 40 years ago.

By the way, there's currently a proposal in Albany to end what's called fusion voting (candidates runing for office on multiple party lines). Without fusion voting, Rudy would never have even become mayor more than a quarter century ago. We are always living in interesting times. 

Lou Reed (Literally) Hangs in the Subway

Budapest Cafe on 2nd Avenue

It's easy to bemoan all the great stuff that's vanishing from NYC so that's why it was so wonderful, this weekend, to discover the Budapest Cafe up on 2nd Avenue and 85th Street.

The family had one of the best meals we've had in long time. 

This is the kind of down-home, hearty-fair joint that I love. Great big portions of comfort food -- in this case, Hungarian comfort food -- that'll make you happy. The wife and kids had some savoury crepes which you can get with cheese or ham and cheese. She also enjoyed a delicious bowl of cucumber soup that I sampled and loved. Yours truly consumed a huge serving of veal goulash, absolutely delicious and very filling, and it was served with something I'd never had before -- Hungarian pasta, something called Nokedli. These are handmade noodles that are somewhat gnocchi-like but squiggly in appearance and don't have any kind of sauce on them (you mix it with the goulash, in case you were wondering). If and when I go back, however, I'll make sure to get the Chicken Paprikash which appears to be a customer favorite (everyone else there was eating it)

However, the real star at this place is the pastries. The restaurant is basically a bakery with a few tables in the back. The baked goods were amazing -- we had the massive, dense chocolate mouse, the delicious cookies and my personal favorite, strudel. Strudel is one of the hardest pastries to make, the dough and filling are complex and arduous to create, and most places give you substandard, non-flaky strudel. Not this place. This is hard core, multi-layered dough, fresh apple strudel with whip cream that puts you in pasty nirvana. My wife took me there precisely because she knows of my long love for strudel and she was, as usual, right!

So this is a great place to go, the kind of place that still makes NYC the greatest city in the world.