"The Bonfire of the Vanities" at 20

It's hard to believe, but 20 years ago this month, that enfant terrible of American letters, Tom Wolfe, published his first novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. It tells the story of rich Wall Street trader Sherman McCoy who has it all - lovely wife, lovely daughter, Yale pedigree, and a huge Park Avenue apartment - but who loses it all when he gets involved in a hit and run in the Bronx. Throw in an awful mistress, a media-starved DA, his career hungry ADA, plus a British alcoholic reporter looking to redeem himself, and the story becomes, as Mr Wolfe would call it, "a real rhubarb."

The defining document of the 1980s, Bonfire presents a nightmarish NYC - where greed, vanity, crime, narcissism, recklessness, and plain old nastiness reigned. It was, fortuitously enough, published around the same time as the big Wall Street crash of 1987 and it became the morality tale of its times. Amazingly, this novel has aged little - it's still funny, fresh, and timely. In many ways, Bonfire was prophetic: pre-OJ, pre-Monica, pre-Paris, pre-Anna Nicole, this book understood what made a story sensational and gave it legs. And if anything, the "vanity" of NYC in 1987 was, by today's standards, quite tame. The world of Masters of the Universe and Social X-rays is more outrageous than ever.

Always a fun read, revisiting Bonfire on its 20th is a good idea. And if you haven't read it, please note: while not a roman a clef, more than one or two characters is based on real people still alive and famous today. Most notably:

Peter Fallow = Christopher Hitchens
Sir Gerald Steiner = Rupert Murdoch
Reverend Bacon = Al Sharpton

A couple of more notes:

1. Do not watch the 1990 movie of Bonfire starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. It's a travesty.

2. Check out Wikipedia's entry on where the title The Bonfire of the Vanities came from.

Tom Wolfe RIP

Just the other night I was looking over my bookcase and pulled out a book I bought a long time ago called The Devil's Candy, about the making of the disastrous movie version of Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. 

How ironic then, that, very next day, Tom Wolfe died here in NYC, aged 87.

Starting in the 1960s, along with writers like Gay Talese and others, Wolfe was an originator of the "New Journalism", a style of non-fiction where reporters would embed themselves with their subjects and write long, probing articles and books in a highly personal, provocative, almost literary way. Wolfe became the most popular New Journalist of all, writing about the heroes and anti-heroes of American life, from hippies to astronauts like Ken Kesey and the Yippies in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the Black Panthers in Radical Chic (a term he coined), the Mercury astronauts in The Right Stuff (his most acclaimed work). 

Wolfe's observations were always satirical, never sentimental; always honest, no puffery. He was "politically incorrect" but never offensive -- he held the mirror up to nature, oftentimes brutally, and did so in wild, hyperbolic prose. Wolfe loved periods and italicizes and fast, whirling sentences -- there was a rock'n'roll sensibility to his words, an energy that hit your "solar plexus" (to use a term Wolfe repeated ad nauseum in his writing).

In the 1980s, Wolfe switched from journalism to fiction, publishing his legendary NYC novel The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987. I've written a lot about this book over the years -- a novel that presents NYC as hellish landscape of greed, crime, and yes, vanity -- so I won't say any more except that it serves both as a piece of great entertainment and a lacerating commentary of this city at that time. Wolfe wrote a few more novels, most notably A Man in Full in 1998, but none equaled Bonfire -- his last few novels received poor reviews and sales -- and he became a relic of the 20th century. But he influenced endures.

Wolfe also became famous for his trademark white suit that he always wore in public. I saw him speak several times over the years and he always donned the suit with complimentary white reading glasses. 

And I ever spoke to him once. 

Once, at a book signing, I mentioned that he had been a big influence to me and that I wanted to write as well. "What kind of things do you like to write?" he asked. I said fiction. He wished me luck -- and, years later, I published my first novel Leaving New York (which you can look to and purchase on the right-hand of this blog). 

Tom Wolfe inspired me to do it and, for that, I thank him  -- and for everything he ever wrote.

Trump's "Bedtime for Bonzo": Remembering "I'll Take Manhattan" (1987)

Before the 21st century Golden Age of Television, the 1970s through the 1990s was the Golden Age of the Television Mini-Series.

Whenever regular TV shows went on vacation, the networks would broadcast these multi-episodes series that were a little less than a movie but a little more than a regular TV show. Some of these mini-series, like Roots from 1977 or the 1980s civil war drama North & South, were great, classic TV. But a lot of it was stuff like the 1987 soapy mini-series I'll Take Manhattan, based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Judith Krantz (who wrote a lot of these kinds of books that then became mini-series).

The show's IMDB description tells you everything you need to know about it: "Maxi Amberville tries to save the magazine empire her father built, but her treacherous uncle stands in the way." The Amberville's are supposed to be a Murdoch-like, more like Sy Hersch-like, family running a magazine company very much like Conde Nast. The spirit of this show -- family members battle for control of a media empire -- is basically Succession thiry-years earlier, although nowhere near as funny, well-written, well-acted or well ... everything ... as the HBO show. The story is formulaic, the acting hammy, the dialogue stupid, everything's predictable and dopey.

So why does Mr NYC choose to remember it?

Because it's a relic,a time-stamp, of its age -- the Go-Go 1980s Reagan-era business drama that was very popular at the time. And because it's a very NYC story -- Money! Sex! Publishing! Betrayal! Donald Trump! Lots of shots of the World Trade Centers! Lots of music with saxapohones! Secretative calls being made in phone booths in the pouring rain in at nighttime! It's all there.

The most interesting thing about it is the cast -- it's truly a time capsule of actors and actresses whose careers were either on the way up or on the way down. 

Valerie Bertinelli plays the heroic Maxi. She had just finished her long run on the hit TV show One Day At A Time and this show, one gueses, was supposed to demonstrate her great acting chops. She is a great actress but this show was clearly not the right vehicle in which to do so.

The always wonderful Barry Bostwick plays her father, the company's founder, and he's probably the best thing in it. A just-about-to-be James Bond Timothy Dalton is in it as are veteran TV actors Jack Scalia and Perry King who plays the no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle as a no-good rotten scheming villanous uncle.

There's also a few actors who went on to greatness: Jane Kaczmarek, thirteen years before Macolm in the Middle, Chris Noth a few years before Law & Order and Sex and the City, a pre-My Two Dads/Step-by-Step Staci Keanan, and, most notably, future Oscar-winner Julianne Moore ten years before Boogie Nights. 

Also, future President and aspiring fascist dictator Donald Trump has a cameo because they filmed some of it at Trump Tower and gave him an obligatory cameo. You might otherwise call this show Trump's Bedtime for Bonzo. 

It has to be seen to believed. But I'll give this show credit -- 1987 was the era of Bonfire of the Vanities NYC, the start of the crack epidemic, when people loved to hate this city -- and this show, at that time, dared to celebrate it. 

Here are a couple of episodes (you can find the rest on YouTube) as well as some clips and promos. It was truly part of a TV era we probably will never see again. 

The Best Outer Borough Movies

My previous post on Working Girl got me thinking about movies set in the boroughs outside of Manhattan. There are a number of films -- some old, some more recent, some great, some not -- set in places where the vast majority of New Yorkers actually live. Here are a few of the most memorable. Please let me know if I'm missing any really great ones. I'm sure there are some I missed that'll make me smack my head and shout "D'OH!"

The Bronx

Marty (1955): A beautiful movie about a lonely butcher looking for love. Ernest Borgnine creates one of the greatest characters ever etched on film. It swept the 1955 Oscars, including Best Picture, Actor, Director and Original Screenplay.

A Bronx Tale (1993): Robert De Niro's directorial debut about a boy in the Bronx trying to live honestly in a world of crime.

Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981): Cops in a war zone, led by Paul Newman. Very controversial at the time.

Awakenings (1991): One of De Niro's best performances about catatonic patients brought back (briefly) to life. Based on the story of Dr. Oliver Sacks.

Finding Forrester (2000): Not a great movie by any means but it does have Sean Connery saying "You're the man now dog!"

The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990): Awful movie based on a great book. One of the great bombs of all times. It does, however, give you a very good idea of what the Bronx was like the late 1980s -- namely, scary.

Brooklyn

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944): A Cary Grant classic about old ladies in Brooklyn Heights who murder people. Ronald Reagan was actually considered for the Cary Grant part at one time.

The Squid and the Whale (2005): Very funny, very sad movie about a miserable family in Park Slope. The best performance Jeff Daniels has ever given.

Moonstruck (1987): Cher's Oscar (Olympia Dukakis got one to). A beautiful film about Italians, baking, opera, and the insanity of love. Classic lines: "Where are you taking me?" "To da' bed!"

Radio Days (1987): Perhaps Woody Allen's sweetest movie. A tribute to childhood in the 1940s, classic radio, and growing up Jewish.

Saturday Night Fever (1977): Gave us John Travolta, the Bee Gees, and polyester. Best line: "You know I work on my hair 'long time and he hits it ... he hits my hair!"

She's Gotta Have It (1986): Spike Lee's first movie.

Do The Right Thing (1989): Spike Lee's best movie.

Smoke/Blue in the Face (1995): Dual movies about the lives of people who frequent a smoke shop. Harvey Keitel was never so sweet.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975): "Attica! Attica! Attica!" Al Pacino's greatest performance ever. Based on a real bank robbery gone very wrong.

Queens

Goodfellas (1990): The life of Henry Hill, a great movie about a very bad man. The best mob movie ever, Scorsese's masterpiece, and the immortal lines, "Funny? Funny how? Like I'm a clown, I amuse you, I make you laugh?"

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006): Strange but touching little movie about life in lower-class Astoria in the 1980s. Robert Downey Jr. gives a lovely performance.

Queens Logic (1991): Never saw it, no one did apparently, but it's an ensemble piece about Queens and it should really help you with that "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game.

Coming to America (1988): Eddie Murphy's funniest movies about an African prince looking for a wife in, well ... Queens! His best comic performance ever.

The Wrong Man (1956): True story about an innocent man accused of murder. Alfred Hitchcock and Henry Fonda -- need I say more?

Staten Island

Working Girl (1988): A "goil" named Tess with big dreams who gets it all.

Sisters (1973): One of Brian De Palma's pre-Carrie movies. Before she was Lois Lane, Margot Kidder starred in this psychological thriller.

School of Rock (2003): Jack Black comedy about teaching kids how to rock. It was completely filmed in this borough.

Summary

It looks like Brooklyn's got most of the best movies made about it, followed by Queens, followed by The Bronx, followed by Staten Island. But who really cares about pecking order. These movies show that some of the most interesting New York characters in movie history were from the outer boroughs.

Next up -- the best outer borough novels and TV shows.

"The Plot Thickens" Podcast: "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and a Look-Back at a Very Different NYC

Last year I blogged about the 1990 movie The Bonfire of the Vanities based on the 1987 bestselling novel of the same name by Tom Wolfe. The book was a big success -- the defining 1980s novel about greed, ego, lust, institutional corruption, etc., every cardinal sin -- but the movie was an historic flop, so historic that a book was even written about it.

The book was called The Devil's Candy, written by journalist Julie Salamon, and this book has now been turned into a mutli-part podcast, hosted by Salamon and produced by Turner Classic Movies, as part of a series called "The Plot Thickens."

While I made clear in my review that the movie is bad -- really bad -- I also indicated that it was worth seeing because, visually, it captured NYC in very original, beautiful ways. And this podcast is very much worth listening to because it not only tells the story of the making of this classic bomb but it also vividly brings back to life what NYC was like 30-odd years ago -- a very different city from today. 

So read the books (both the original novel and the making-of book), listen the podcast, and, if you're brave, watch the movie -- and, while you'll eventually be "Bonfired"-out -- you'll also be brought back to a New York City that is both quite familiar and very distant. 

Greed is (Still) Good: "Wall Street" at 20

Right on the heels of the two decade anniversary of The Bonfire of the Vanities comes the 20th anniversary of Oliver Stone's ode to 1980s New York capitalist excess, Wall Street.

Wall Street's plot has become legendary, both on Wall Street and in the American capitalist system in general: young trader Bud Fox comes under the wing of money titan Gordon Gekko. Together they annex the competition and make more money than anyone would ever dare dream. Of course it turns out that Gordon is crook, in fact - GASP!!!! - the whole Wall Street/American capitalist thing is a giant con game where the rich get richer, the poor get screwed, and lots of people end up in jail. Throw in a woman, a hot designer Darien, and you gots yourself lots of excitement while learning deep values. In fact, in that regard, Wall Street is - pun totally intended - quite a deal.

This movie was the cause celebre of 1987 for it was in many ways the ultimate indictment of its time. "Greed is good" seemed the perfect motto of the era, a time some people look back on today with odd nostalgia. But in many ways Wall Street now is a bit quaint. The go-go 1980s was more than super-seeded by the go-go-go 1990s. Also, the real-life corporate scandals of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken were just warm up acts for Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers, et al. Plus ca change, I guess.

And while NYC would go on to thrive in the 1990s and 21st century more than it had in the 1980s, Wall Street itself, at least its image as the ultimate financial powerhouse, has diminished. Today, places like Silicon Valley, China, India, not to mention the dorm rooms of college students inventing things like YouTube and Facebook, are the new frontiers of money. Most of all, New York has changed a lot since 1987. In one scene, Bud is embarrassed to admit he lives on the Upper West Side, insisting he plans to move to the Upper East Side as soon as his ship comes in. Today, the old East Side/West Side rivalry is gone: you have to big rich to live in either of those neighborhoods so that class tension just doesn't exist anymore. Also, the East Side today has lost of a lot of its snobby, elitist cache. Today's new wealth wants to live in Soho or Tribeca, in big hipster lofts, not snotty high rises.

Wall Street was a petty big hit when it came out and Michael Douglas won the 1987 Oscar for Best Actor. This was Stone's follow up from Platoon and it cemented his reputation as an important director. It was also one of his last conventional-type movies. He would go on to make make hyper kinetic visual ballasts like Natural Born Killers.

But as a movie and social commentary Wall Street still holds up after 20 years. And in many ways, quaint though it may be in the aforementioned ways, its lesson are more timely than ever.

Da' Bronx

Interesting article from NY Mag online about the only NYC borough grafted to the American mainland: the Bronx. Titled "What is the Bronx Anyway?", it's a meditation about the borough, by a native, about what makes the Bronx both fascinating and yet, at the same time, so elusive to New Yorkers who live outside it.

The author raises some interesting points, and the article is worth a read, but I think there's more to what makes the Bronx such a difficult place to describe and understandd. Three main points I'd include:

1. Other than Staten Island, the Bronx is very isolated from the rest of NYC. In fact, it's even more isolated: you can ferry it from Staten Island to lower Manhattan very easily or drive across the Verrazano bridge into Brooklyn. The Bronx, on the other hand, is only attached to the city by a few bridges and subway lines to upper Manhattan. So, for the rest of the city, the Bronx might as well be Westchester. Out of easy reach, out of mind.

2. The Bronx is not, shockingly enough, geographically homogeneous. Yes, the South Bronx is popularly thought of as a Bonfire of the Vanities-like urban hell hole, and other parts of it are very citified too. But remember, the Bronx is also home to the super-suburban area of Riverdale. Also, huge swaths of it are covered by park land: Van Cortland Park, Pelham Bay Park, Ferry Point Park, not to mention all of the space that the Bronx Zoo takes up (it's huge!). So the Bronx is hard to define since it's a patchwork of urban landscapes, suburbs, parks, and islands (like City Island).

3. The Bronx has a very sad history. In the 1950s, wonderful middle class, largely Jewish, neighborhoods like Tremont were destroyed and blighted by the Cross Bronx Expressway. When Robert Moses rammed this enormous highway straight across the borough, the wonderful Marty-like ccommunities housed in the Bronx were wrecked and scattered. No one wanted to live next to a big noisy highway and neighborhoods were literallyy gashed apart. Abandoned buildings turned into drug dens. Filth and grime took root. People who could afford to live elsewhere did. Read the chapter "One Mile" from Robert Caro's The Power Broker to learn about how an entire borough of this great town was basically ruined by this evil highway. The Bronx has never fully recovered.

What Would Sherman McCoy Say?

In the 1980s, the Tom Wolfe novel The Bonfire of the Vanities coined the term Masters of the Universe -- Wall Street wheelers and dealers who moved billions of dollars around the world, making economies and businesses shake, all the while taking home millions for themselves, funding their lavish lifestyles.

For the last three decades, being a Master of the Universe was something that everyone on Wall Street aspired to. Not even the tragic tale of Wolfe's hero, Sherman McCoy, could dissuade a generation of young men and women from flocking to Wall Street, dollar bill signs glowing in their well educated eyes.

But the last few years have been unkind to Wall Street. The economic crises, new regulations, the evaporation of credit, the collapse of the housing market, the Occupy movement -- a perfect storm within a perfect storm has emerged to knock Wall Street down. Bonuses are being slashed, jobs are gone and aren't coming back, and a new ethos that making money off money probably isn't the most stable of business models. 

So what does this mean for NYC?

After all, Wall Street is a core of the city's identity and huge engine of our economy. This big article in New York magazine offers some insights. Among the tidbits:

- The housing boom led to a credit bubble. When it burst, it became harder for banks to get money. Banks make money off money. Go figure out the rest.

- It's a big question whether less pay and smaller bonuses will hammer the NYC economy. Hopefully not but only if the city's economy diversifies. 

- One banker laments that, without Wall Street, NYC will turn into Philadelphia.

On this last point I disagree. NYC has more than Wall Street. We have Broadway, movies and TV,  fashion, publishing, Silicon Alley -- and much, much more. We also have 8 million great, hard working citizens.

Even if Wall Street withers, I think NYC will be just fine.

And so will the Sherman McCoys.

Review: "Ishtar" (1987)

A few months ago I blogged about movies about New Yorkers who travel to strange lands and get into trouble. Now you can add another such movie to your list, and this one's notorious, the 1987 bomb Ishtar.

When it was released more than 30 years ago, Ishtar become one of those movies that everyone loves to hate. You get them every few years: Heaven's Gate, Howard the Duck, Bonfire of the Vanities, Battlefield Earth, Gigli, and many others. They cost a fortune to make, stories of production problems and strife get into the press before release, the critics trash them, the movies tank at the box office, studio executives get fired, the directors and actors involved go into hiding, and the only ones who benefit are late night comedians (and, these days, social media folks).

It's a kind of sick thrill for those of us in the general public to see the people involved -- rich and famous and glamorous movie stars and power brokers who have more success, money and sex then we'll ever have -- suffer a massive public embarrassment. It's schadenfreude for the great unwashed.  

But what about the movie? Well, that's were it gets interesting. 

Ishtar is about two extremely untalented and clueless NYC musicians played by Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty who get a gig playing in Ishtar -- a country near the Moroccan border -- and who bumble their way into getting involved with the CIA, terrorists, archaeologists, and a hot chick. It's an extremely silly movie, totally ludicrous, and sometimes the storytelling is clunky and the tone of the movie inconsistent.

But here's the thing: Ishtar is FUNNY! Like, REALLY funny. Like, tears in the eyes funny. Ultimately, that's what a comedy is about: making people laugh, and this movie made my wife and I laugh a lot. So, in my view, Ishtar is a sucessful comedy, and I'm not the only one who, 30+ years later, has seen it and thinks this.

Ishtar bombed for several reasons: first, there was a behind the scenes smear campaign launched by the studio that produced it since a new regime has come in after production had started -- and the new regime wanted to embarrass the old regime by making it fail, and also to embarrass Beatty and Hoffman who had difficult reputations. Also, the director, Elaine May, had a difficult reputation, and the studio wanted to embarrass her. Second, the movie suffered from the fact that it was an extremely silly movie (it was based on the old 1940's Hope & Crosby "Road" movies) starring two "serious" actors whose previous movies had been Reds and Death of a Salesman -- seeing Beatty and Hoffman in this zany comedy was probably disorienting for critics and audiences (as it was for me). Third, and finally, the comedy in Ishtar is way ahead of it's time. It's cringe humor, its existentiallist humor, it's not the kind of Police Academy comedy that was popular at the time. Audiences weren't ready for it yet.

So you should give Ishtar a chance -- it's not the greatest comedy by a long shot but it's very funny and lighthearted. These days, we need that comedy more now than ever.

Review: "The Bonfire of the Vanities" (1990)

This is a bad movie -- a legendarily bad one. I've blogged about it incidently over the years.

But the story behind its creation is fascinating. There's even an entire behind-the-scenes book about it called The Devil's Candy which is way better than the movie. 

"Bonfire" is based on Tom Wolfe's massive 1987 novel of the same name about how greed and, obviously, vanity corrupt not only people but an entire city. A high-living Wall Street trader named Sherman McCoy and his mistress get into a hit-and-run accident with a young black man in the Bronx -- and his life becomes a media storm that inflames the entire city's media, judicial, and political worlds.

Because the book was so successful, a movie version seemed inevitable. And then every decision the producers made was wrong.

Who do you get to play the to-the-manor-born, aristocratic Sherman? Why Mr. Middle America himself, Tom Hanks!

Who do you get to play Peter Farrow, the emaciated British tabloid reporter who turns the hit-and-run into a media sensation? Why Mr. Die Hard action movie hero himself, Bruce Willis!

Who do you get to play the 21-year old Maria, a Southerner, Sherman's mistress? Why thirty-something year old Melanie Griffith!

Who do you get to direct this social satire? Why horror/gangster movie director Brian De Palma!

What do you with material that's been highly acclaimed for its smart humor and biting wit? Why you turn it into a raunchy, gross, Animal House-like romp.

As one reviewer said at the time, "You've got to be a genius to make a movie this bad."

The movie really is a mess. It's not funny, not insightful, and doesn't work. 

But, as an NYC movie, it actually works strangely well. De Palma is a great visual stylist. The movie starts with a stop-motion view from the Chrysler Building, to making JFK Airport look positively cinematic, to making the South Bronx look truly menacing, to making Park Avenue and Wall Street look both properly gorgeous and monstrous at the same time, to all sorts of weird camera angles, it's worth see just for its imagery if for nothing else. 

I remember when this movie came out late in 1990. This is a now legendary movie season where lots of big movies with big stars, like "Bonfire", came out and bombed at the box office. Havana with Robert Redford, The Russia House with Sean Connery, and others just all tanked. The Godfather Part III came out and got a decidely mixed reception. 

No, the winners at the box office that winter were a snotty unknown ten-year old in a silly family comedy called Home Alone and an unknown theater actress named Kathy Bates in a horror movie called Misery (that got her an Oscar). 

Ah, memories ...

"The Power Broker" on TV!

Believe it or not, I haven't been watching much TV during this pandemic -- I spend so much time working at my job, taking care of my kids, keeping my house in order, cooking, and occasionally blogging, that my TV time is severely limited. When I do watch something, it's usually for only an hour or so before bed, usually some show that I've recorded or get off a streaming service.

But on the rare occasion when I do catch the news, I've noticed a trend: people who are broadcasting or being interviewed from home, a bookcase behind them, with a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker prominently displayed on a top shelf. Just last night I caught two minutes of Erroll Louis on NY1, and there was the mighty tome looming over his shoulder. 

I'm not the only one who's noticed this -- today there's a big article about how numerous politicians, journalists, and other assorted NYC bigwigs who appear on TV regularly are making sure that The Power Broker can be seen by the audience. Some politicians, like Congressman Max Rose of Staten Island, downright admit that they put it there just be seen. Displaying this book so clearly to the public is an perfect example of what we might call "intelligence signaling" -- it says, "look how smart, informed, sophisticated, and New York I am. Oh, and I really, really like to read." 

Unlike many of these people who've probably never actually read The Power Broker, yours truly has -- I even blogged about it twelve yearss ago. So there!

Other suggested big NYC books to have on your bookshelf to show what a super-sophisticated New Yorker you are: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, Underworld by Don DeLillo (might want to throw in White Noise or Mao ii for good measure), maybe some older books like The Great Gatsby, Sister Carrie, and The Age of Innocence, and anything by Vonnegut. 

And here's 1977 interview with the "power broker" himself, Robert Moses!

The Lions of New York

In Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, the father of main character Sherman McCoy is a partner at a prestigious New York law firm, hilariously called Dunning Sponget. The father is semi-retired but he still shows up to the office most days, does some work and makes some rain. He is called the Lion of Dunning Sponget, a man of sterling character and a lawyer of unquestionable reputation, who can never be fired and never quite retire.

These Lions are real. The New York Times has a short list of them, including recently retired Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau.

Right after I graduated college I briefly worked at a law firm where I saw, roaming the halls every so often, a very elderly man. I didn't know what he did at the firm and he only seemed to show up there once or twice a week. Everyone seemed to ignore him and he seemed to ignore everyone else so I had no idea who he was but he had an absolutely huge office filled with an immense amount of paper and pictures and junk. Later I learned that he was an old partner who had represented kings, queens, vice-presidents, Fortune 500 CEOs, famous Old New York families, and was in fact the son (hard to think of him as anyone's son) who had served in FDR's cabinet.

Wow.

They may be lions in winter but they are certainly keeping warm in some very lucrative cages. And they are links to our history who we should appreciate while they're still here.

Ghosts of NYC Past

As we hurl towards Christmas Day with colored lights and wreaths displayed everywhere, perfumed trees for sale on every other block, Sidewalk Santas ringings bells for charity, we reminisce on the year coming to a close (what a bizarre year it's been!) and think about the year to come, that big blank slate ahead. 

I don't know about you but, whenever a New Year begins, I think "I made it. Another year! Another year added to my headstone!" Such lovely thoughts I have.   

But ghosts haunt us. Memories of people and places gone by. They're gone, in some cases long gone, but they imbue our thoughts and souls, never fully leaving. We remember, not always because we want to, but because we can never forget.

This is all a big fancy way of saying that you should really check out these two big articles that summon up the Ghosts of NYC Past.

One is about the relationship between the great pop artist Andy Warhol (who died 30 years ago this year) and his "Factory Girl" muse Edie Sedgwick. Was it love? Sort of. It was complicated. And sad. Very sad. One thing is sure: in these politically correct times, we shan't see their likes again.

The other is a 30-year retrospective on the great Tom Wolfe novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Set in a nightmarish NYC, it's a tale and a document about another city in another time. Some things are still relevant (racial tensions) but the idea of this city being a boiling cauldron of rage seems totally dated. I shared my thoughts about this book ten (10!) years ago and it seems more distant than other.

NYC will always have these ghosts and, in my opinion, they are a crucial part of our identity and our future.