Review: "The Great Beauty" & How to Love a City

Can you love a city like you love a person? Can the pure romantic ardor for a particular urban environment replace, or possibly distract from, the complicated and messy entanglements of relationships?

That question, and the quixotic attempt to find the answer, is posed in the brilliant and gorgeous 2013 Italian film The Great Beauty. Set firmly in the calamitous Berlusconi period, the movie follows the sometimes glamorous, sometimes dissolute, often quite empty life of man named Jep. Recently turned 65, Jep works as a celebrity journalist, 40 years removed from his one and only triumph as a novelist. He spends his nights partying or interviewing his article subjects and sleeps away the daytime. He hangs out with his pretentious friends, drinks and smokes, and walks -- a lot -- around the city that entraps him and that he irrationally loves and cannot escape -- Rome. His goal, for too long, was to be the king of the Roman high life, the man who went to every party and could "make them a failure."

Now that phase of his life has left him sad. Jep needs a new purpose.

The film is a series of vignettes, a necklace of tales wrapped about the throat of a city that cages a man trying to find a goal in his rapidly receding life. In walking around and enjoying Rome, Jep is running away from his emotions, from a long and now deceased love, from a past once full of promise that has become a present of aimlessness, hopelessly trying to replace it with a passion for the great beauty of the Eternal City.

The movie's love for Rome, and its wistful meditation on the ravages of time and misplaced priorities, captures exactly what this blog feels about NYC -- and the course of life. Both the film and the blog are about how the love for a city affects and distracts us, and how the simple love for a plac helps us to leaven but also sometimes exacerbates the complexity of human entanglements. You can love a city -- a great city, a great beauty, like Rome or NYC -- but ultimately it cannot fulfill you like the love of a person. It can supplement but not replace that kind of love, enhance but not complete it. In loving a city, there is ultimately a sadness because it cannot really love you back.

But even then, you still can't abandon it.

If the 1974 movie Chinatown is about the corrupt and disturbing undercurrents of a big city -- in that case, Los Angeles -- revealed by private detective Jakes Gittes (one of its more infamous citizens), The Great Beauty is about the unrealistic romantic promise of one -- in this case, Rome -- by one of its obsessive inhabitants. One is about the darkness, the other about the light, of an alluring metropolis. But the two films, along with morose and romantic Issac in 1979's Manhattan, look at the man in the city, about the city, and of the city -- and how the man and their relationships with others are defined and mixed up by the city.

It is both a great and awful thing to have a great beauty in your life -- whether it's Rome, Los Angeles, NYC or someplace else. And yet that love for a city is the seed that can grow into a love for a person, and for life in general, and for something that is forever timeless and can give us true happiness.

In some ways, that's what Mr NYC is all about for me.

P.S. This expression of a complicated and ultimately unknowable love for a place, its people, and life, is best expressed not in words but in music.

The theme of The Great Beauty captures the film's melancholy romance about Rome the same way that the theme to Chinatown expresses that film's sleazy gaze and understanding of Los Angeles or the way that Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in Manhattan perfectly encapsulates the nervous energy and excitement of NYC.

You should listen to all three and you'll see -- or hear -- what I mean.

NYC Plans to Fully Reopen on July 1st, 2021

 

Magic & Loss: Bob Fass RIP and City COVID Stories and ... Start the Presses!

One of Lou Reed's great songs is called "Magic & Loss." He croons:

There's a bit of magic in everything

And some loss to even things out ...

Those words, to me, sum up life: life is magical, people are magical, nature and the world around us are magical, our creations our magical, everything and everyone contains magic ... but loss is magic's constant companion, it's sorrowful sidekick. And the best way to negotiate life is to love both -- the magic of everything and the loss that accompanies. They are both inevitable. If you can appreciate this paradoxical beauty of life, I believe, than you have achieved a simple yet greater kind of wisdom. 

This concept of "magic and loss" occurred to me recently when I read several disparate articles about occurences that, more than anything, have impacted the soul of New York City. As you read and think about them, you appreciate the magic of the people we have in this city, the loss of many of them that this last year has inflicted, while also feeling somewhat optimistic about our future.

There is the loss of the legendary NYC radio host Bob Fass. His show "Radio Unknowable" was broadcast on WBAI for 50 years, where he interviewed Bob Dylan and many other brilliant artists, thinkers, and public figures. He was the closest thing that NYC had to an "underground radio host", as his obituary describes him. His show was part of the gritty Bohemian spirit of the city, the subconscious turned into radio signals. As someone who writes an "underground blog" about NYC, Bob Fass was a weird kind of soul brother for me, a fellow restless spirit who never lost his fascination for the city, its people, and all its crazy undercurrents. Magic & Loss. 

Then there are these individual stories of New Yorkers who have been impacted by COVID-19 over the last year. These are the stories you don't see in the news but they are the quiet stories, the unique experiences, of people in NYC dealing with this global pandemic. It involves illness, death, misery but also survival and hope. It's about as clear an example of the Magic & Loss of and in life that I can think of. 

But then, in the midst of all this, a miracle! Something has come back to life! Specifically the Village Voice. Four years ago it went out of business, totally shuttered. Now it's back and even in print! This long history of the notorious free rag and how it came back to life is worth a read. It's a story of the city, of the press, and how the two inform and shape NYC. The Voice coming back to life after it seemed dead and gone forever is miraculous. It's a bit of magic after the loss that proves how Magic & Loss are forever intertwined, constant companions, and never predictable. 

New York City Is Back!

Actually, it never went away -- just indoors.

Last year was the Springtime of Our Discontent. As the city bloomed, the plagued descended. We weren't able to enjoy Spring in the city as usual, we had to stay inside and and stay away from each other. If March 2020 was the cruelest month, April and May 2020 were easily the most depressing and scary. 

The plague is not over but it's abating. New Yorkers are getting vaccinated in droves and the city is slowly but surely finding its spirit and joie de vivre again.

Yesterday, April 24, 2021, felt like an inflection point of sorts. It was a gorgeous Spring Saturday, and New Yorkers went outside in mostly masked droves. Outdoors I saw couples stroll, kids play, families congregate, people soak up the sun and the city and all their attendant joys. Mourners in Brooklyn turned out for the service of DMX and even though seem to be having fun. And best of all, the city government has announced that all New Yorkers over age 16 can go to walk-in vaccination sites with no appointment! 

Things are feeling slightly more ... optimistic. The city still has a ways to go back but the city is back!

Never count NYC out!

The Fishko Files and the Art of the Radio Essay

Blog posts are, in many ways, a bunch of essays of varying length that are collected, chronologized, and streamlined on this platform called "da blog." In the analog world, essays usually appear in newspapers, magazines, books, or other various tactile media, usually with a similar logic applied to their aggregation.

So where does that leave the radio essay?

For decades the radio essay was ephemeral, existing only for as long as it was broadcast across the airwaves and into the minds of its listeners. Then it vanished into the ether of time. Alistair Cooke, both before and after he hosted Masterpiece Theater on PBS, produced radio essays for the BBC called Letter from America. He broadcast thousands and thousands of them, from 1946 to 2004 (!), commenting on everything from the re-election of Harry Truman to the Second Iraq War. Most of those radio essays no longer exist but more than a thousand have been rescued and now, thanks to the Internet, are easily accessible.

The radio essay is now more lively and powerful than ever!

Which brings me to The Fishko Files, a wonderful oddity in the world of present day New York City radio. Broadcast on WNYC every Friday morning, and freely available online, they are short essays by culture critic Sarah Fishko. She covers the whole swath of culture in NYC and elsewhere, both past and present -- art, architecture, music, movies, TV, even unknown or recently discovered recordings. She "writes" about Leonard Bernstein, James Dean, Woody Guthrie, Scott Joplin, Andy Warhol, the architecture of the Old Penn Station, movies about the Holocaust, the new Whitney Museum, film composers, and many, many more. It's an audio feast of culture, a compendium of cultural essays from the cultural capital of the world.

Sarah Fishko has been producing these essays for WNYC for more than 20 years and you can listen to them all now -- whenever, wherever, however you want.

The radio essay is homeless no longer. 

Need a Wrench?

 

Future Theories

Who will be the next Mayor of New York City?

When will Broadway theater and the city arts scene be 100% back-in-business?

We'll find out at some point in the relatively near future but, right now, we can only guess. We can only ponder. We're currently in a kind of "silly season", when everything great and horrible seems possible, when there are a multitude of possibilities, when there seem to be many roads that NYC could take. What roads will we take?

We can only theorize. 

Recently I heard Alec Baldwin on his podcast talk with Robert Wankel, the head of the Schubert Organization. Wankel is one of the most powerful figures on the Great White Way, the man who makes many of the shows we love possible. He says that, at the moment, plans are to reopen in December but, obviously, this will depend on "herd immunity", infection rates, etc. that we can only theorize about ... at the moment. What's most interesting to learn from this podcast are some of the statistics that Wankel presents that make you understand just how much COVID-19 has devastated Broadway and the city's arts business. Along with finance and real estate, the arts business is in the top five of the city's economic engines. Did you know that the Times Square area alone is responsible for the employment of 96,000 people? The arts isn't just some sideshow in NYC, some economic add-on -- it's an essential part of the city's economy and identity, it drives tourism, and its recovery is vital to the future of NYC.

Then there's who will be running the city next year.

Right now there's a bunch of candidates running for mayor but Andrew Yang, for reasons that defy logic, is currently leading in the polls and getting all the media attention. He has no experience in government and, based on his public statements, no real understanding of the city, its people, or public policy. Many people, including yours truly, are sounding the alarm -- remember the last time the public bestowed great executive power on an inexperienced but media-savvy neophyte? The good news is that there's still time for another candidate to emerge and, at the moment, it looks like it might be City Comptroller Scott Stringer. He might, just might, overwhelm Yang and win the primary if he's able to make clear how his quiet competence and experience is much better than Yang's empty media spectacle. Stringer has been elected to city-wide office twice before and is well known to the voters. The primary isn't until June. I theorize that either Stringer, or possibly Brooklyn BP Eric Adams, will overwhelm Yang -- or Yang's support will just collapse anyway -- that one of them will be the next mayor (assuming victory in the general election). But if Yang keeps up his momentum, and wins the primary and general election ... then the city will then be in real trouble.

Fingers crossed the former scenario, the first theory prevails. 

This post will be an interesting one to read again a year -- or several from now -- to see if these theories are correct or totally wrong. 

Hotels in 1970s NYC

Remembering Paula Gloria

If you ever want to understand the true subconcious of NYC, then public access television is where you'll find it. Ordinary people -- by which I mean the bizarre characters who not only live amongst us but are us -- get the chance to create and host their own shows and allow their imaginations to connect the public.

The results are often, uh, unconventional. 

Perhaps no one was more successful in the history of NYC public access than Paula Gloria who was part mystic, part spiritual healer, part conspiracy theorist, part commentator, and total eccentric. She appeared on public access for years, hosting a show called "Farther Down the Rabbit Hole", doing both live call-ins shows and recorded interviews and talks. She also had a lively presence on YouTube and even appeared several times on Howard Stern. They loved to goof on her common refrain, "Mantra and tantra creates yantra", an expression of the yogi-like power she wanted to share with her audience.

Apparently Paula has died from undisclosed reasons at the age of 68 but I hope she has not gone down the rabbit hole but gone to find her permanent inner bliss. 

Art Blooms in the Bronx

In this time, where death is literally in the air, it's always gratifying to find something that is very much alive -- something not only living but thriving, bursting with vitality ... blooming.

As the second Spring of our COVID discontent unfolds, some contentment can be found in the Bronx. The New York Botanical Garden is unveiling a huge new exhibition by the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama called Cosmic Nature. A series of sculptures, some old and new, are set around the gardens and are "twists", multi-dimensional interpretations of the natural world -- pumpkins, lakes, and other parts of nature are re-imagined, intertwined with the real thing. The imaginative scale of this exhibit is ... cosmic!

If you ever wonder if NYC and art are worht it, this is it!