Memo from NYC

There's a lot of buzz these days in the media (social and otherwise) about "cancel culture." I honestly don't know what it is and how it's precisely defined -- if it means people getting fired, blacklisted, smeared, or otherwise publicly shamed and made unemployable and friendless, possibly homeless and destitute, then it's nothing new. You can go back to the days of the Salem Witch Trials, or more recently McCarthyism, to see "cancel culture" and its variants in action. 

What's past is present, and so on. I've even blogged about this before. 

Lately, many people who have made names for themselves in the arts, politics, business or other high profile fields, are getting pilloried for failings in their personal lives. They're losing jobs, getting sued, even arrested, or just having their names turned into proverbial mud on the interwebs, their private shortcomings made public to all, for everyone's consumption, their reputations and lives shattered. This kind of gossip mongering used to be the province of tabloids -- in fact, that's why tabloids came into existence -- and this kind of highly private trash used to be considered tasteless to investigate and propagate to the public. Privacy used to be valued, respected, and even sometimes practiced.

No longer. Now private lives, everyone's life, is fair game. No one is safe.

You can delve into the private life of anyone -- famous or not, successful or not, whoever -- and find less than flattering, maybe even criminal, parts of their pasts. You can blare this into the public realm and create a vortex of hate for the person -- if that's your goal. 

But why would you want it to be? What does it ultimately gain you or anyone else to invade and tear apart someone's private life? To paraphrase the great show Yes, Prime Minister, when you interfere in private squabbles you're on a very slippery slope. 

And when you whip up hatred for somethings or someone, it can spill out of control -- as recent events have shown. 

It's easy to destroy, it's easy ruin something or someone. All it takes is the will to do it. Otherwise, it's easier done than said. However ... creating, building, healing, producing something, anything, making things better, is hard -- it takes all your intelligence, skills, emotions, energy, and will to do it. It took years to build the World Trade Centers and only a couple of hours to knock them down.  

That's what Cancel Culture is. Terrorism and ruin, the negation of life and those who choose to improve it.

And I'm worried that the practitioners of "cancel culture" are scaring away people who want to create, who want to build, who want to heal, who want to make the world a better place from doing so, that these people will instead retreat and stop. Why commit yourself to a career, to all this hard work, if some jealous or wounded person from your past is going to emerge from the ooze of time and wreck it? 

That's not a world I think any of us want to live in. 

But I try to take heart -- and so should you. Those who create and build and heal will always win over the nihilists. You can ruin people's reputation, try to negate their work, smear and suppress, but ultimately great work lives on, long after the creators and critics are dead, the former remembered, the latter forgotten as they deserve to be. 

I think about my own family and how those in my family who built and created wonderful things and healed others are still remembered and loved, even years and years after their death. 

Teddy Roosevelt said it best well over a hundred years ago:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Let's be in the arena together and not remove anyone from it. We'll all be removed from it eventually so let's leave as much great stuff behind in it as we can -- and not "cancel it."

Notes from Undervelt

Like many who lived through the twenty-teens, I was a huge Game of Thrones fan.

Set in a fictional world of seven kingdoms living tenuously under one ruler, the entire premise of the show was that a once great family, a once powerful dynasty (the Targaryens) that had united the kingdoms and ruled for 300 years, have been overthrown -- and the new rulers are still grappling with the problems left in its wake. While the various remaining would-be kings are battling it out for power, the last Targaryen left alive is prowling around distant lands, scheming to return.

The prequel show, House of the Dragon, flashes back to a time when the Targaryens were in power, fighting amongst themselves, their fall distant yet becoming more and more inevitable.

What's brilliant about each show, what draws so many people in, is that both shows are haunted. Both series have a shadow over them, an extra dimension of drama and meaning. In one we are haunted by the now-gone years of power; in the other, we see their power, knowing that it's going away. 

The Targaryens are ghosts as much as people -- and they live forever in a kind of mythical world inside a mythical world.

In GOT, even though the Targaryens are almost completely gone, they haunt the show -- people keep talking about them and obsessing over their impact on the seven kingdoms (gone but not forgotten). They may no longer have literal power but they still have power over the minds and souls of the people. And in House, we can't help but watch with a sense of dread that this family, this dynasty, at the height of its power, no matter what's going on or what they're doing, is inevitably doomeed, destined for ignominy.

In short, the Targaryens are doomed but they are forever present in peoples' minds and still meddling, in one way or another, in the kingdoms' business -- even after their doom. 

Doom seems to be on a lot of people's minds these days. Our democracy and our environment are in a precarious place, a downward slide. But doom is not final -- it is simply, in many respects, a new way of being, a new normal called the "undervelt." 

The "undervelt": an undergroud or underworld where (if I can be gauche enough to quote myself), "defines itself in opposition to the above ground, the outside world. It is in constant friction, a perennial resistance. Like ... trash -- we want to forget it, we want it out of our lives, but it never goes away."

Woody Allen used to be one of America, and especially NYC's, most acclaimed filmmakers. For over fifty years, he made fifty movies, some much more successful than others, many getting nominated for and winning multiple Academy Awards (Woody himself won four). But he's been dogged by controversy about his personal life. In the USA and NYC, he's been "cancelled" -- actors won't work with him, financiers won't pay for his movies, and he can't (or barely can) get them distributed in this country. He's been making his last several movies in Europe but in America and NYC he's a pariah.

And yet ...

He's not gone. And even though his latest movie, Coupe de Chance, hasn't been released in NYC or elsewhere in America (at least not yet), apparently there are secret screenings of it around town that have become quite popular. 

In short, Woody's career now exists in the "undervelt."

Woody is no longer a mighty, acclaimed filmmaker. He's fallen hard. But now he's a figure of rebellion, someone people want to ignore but can't -- a perfect denizen of the undervelt. And it shows that his impact and his importance to cinema is so profound that, even though everyone in respectable society says they hate him, they obviously still care enough about his work to go see it -- albeit in secret.

Woody's work is now like the last Targaryen, rattling around in exile but forever messing with the heads of its antagonists.   

I know there are many who bemoan "cancel culture" (I've done so myself in the past). Reading about how the work of a decades-long, Oscar-winning auteur is now being consumed like Western media in North Korea or pre-Internet porn is sad, whatever you think about him. 

However, I view this whole "cancel culture" thing in another perspective.

First, no filmmaker is guarenteed or promised massive distribution. Most movies never get seen, many directors get their movies dumped into barely enough theaters to cover the movie's catering bill. No director, not even a formerly big-time one like Woody, is promised a big audience. A big career is not a right -- it's a privilege, a privilege few get and most eventually lose, one way or another. I really don't feel sorry for him or any of these "cancelled" people. 

Second, even if you become hated, even if you're "cancelled" or ignored, if you do good work, no matter under what conditions or in what environment, it will last. People can try to "cancel" it, suppress it, censor it, belittle it, ignore it, whatever -- but it doesn't matter. It stands firm like the rock of Gibralter. It leaves the haters in the dust. It cannot be erased or ignored. It lives. It thrives. It stands the test of time and, eventually, inevitably, leaves the haters in the dust. The work rides high, even if its creator does not. 

Third, I know what it's like to labor in the shadows, to have your work ignored, to live in the undervelt. But I persist. Because my work has impact and, most importantly, exists. This blog has been read nearly a million times. It's never gotten any kind of big outside attention or attention from the media, but it gets readers -- and always will. 

Thus my message from the undervelt -- don't worry, don't get crazy about "cancel culture". Just do the work. Do it well. No matter what happens to you, good or bad, whether you deserve it or not, your work will last. The impact of your work and your life will outlast everyone and everything else.

So get to work -- there's no time to lose. And, hey, I can tell you first hand, the undervelt ain't that bad.

One Night on the George Washington Bridge

I hate sitting in traffic.

This goes without saying -- everyone hates sitting in traffic. But late one Sunday night, around 10 PM, I was sitting in the cab of a U-Haul truck that my brother was drving, stuck on the George Washington Bridge. The traffic was bumper to bumper, and we inched ... and inched ... and inched ... and innnnnnnnnnnnnnnnched forward, bringing us slowwwwwwwly back home into Manhattan.

This was a transitional moment for both of us.

My brother was moving the last of his stuff home after having lived elsewhere for a few years, and he was driving me back from college after I had graduated two days earlier. All of my stuff, my entire life in a sense, was packed into that truck. My future, the entire rest of my life, was right ahead of me, just across this bridge, just sitting there, waiting to start. This wasn't simply another night in my life, just another traffic jam, just another bridge crossing -- this was a demarcation point, a special and a unique moment, a bridge both literal and figurative, between the past and the future, between being a kid and becoming an adult, between hope and destiny ... 

... and it was taking forever!  

Sometimes I feel like I'm still stuck in that traffic jam, an extremely young man, getting ready for my life to start, waiting for the promised excitement to begin.

I've thought about that night, that moment, on the GWB a lot lately because it's hard to square that world with the one we're living in now -- a triple whammy of pandemic, economic depression, and deep racial strife. On that night on the GWB, Bill Clinton was president, George Pataki was governor, Rudy Guiliani was mayor, the World Trade Centers still stood, Iraq remained uninvaded, George W. Bush was Governor of Texas, Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator, Donald Trump was a has-been real estate developer, the Internet was brand new and could only be accessed with a phone dial-up, talking about phones, most people still used landlines, very few people had cell phones, smartphones were still almost a decade away from being invented, newspapers were still printed in abundance, Howard Stern was still married to his first wife and and Jackie Martling was still one of his sidekicks, Harvey Weinstein was still running Miramax and was a respected Oscar-winning producer, Bill Cosby was still America's dad, there were no pedestrian plazas or bikeshares on the streets of NYC, lots of old buildings still existed and lots huge fancy ones didn't, there were no streaming shows, no Golden Age of Television (not yet at least, The Sopranos had just hit the air and the "Golden Age" monicker was still not invented yet), Amazon still only sold books, and so much more that existed and was going on then that is gone or that has become unrecognizable today. 

Twenty-plus years later it feels like everything is falling apart. These days destruction rules and creation is in retreat.

We live in an age of nihilism, of "disruption", of "creative destruction," of "cancel culture" and neo-McCarthyism, of everyone just wanting just to "burn it down", of people wanting to destroy other people and cultures and businesses and governments and whole industries and whole societies, of ruining and wrecking and "taking down" people while not helping anyone or creating anything, of perpetual rage and ruin. 

This is not the future I wanted, for myself or anyone, during that night on the GWB so long ago.

I was deluded enough to think back then that the future ahead, my future, across that bridge, across the new century/millenium due to start in a few short months, would be a glorious place, an exciting world, one surely much better than the century and childhood I was leaving behind me in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "the dark fields of the republic" that "rolled on under the night." The blinking lights of the city ahead, just over this jammed bridge, were my green light, my fresh new world, surely destined to be magical, an arcadia of sorts, where the old problems of the past would vanish and a new pancea of possibilities would emerge. After all, it was a time of great peace and prosperity and the future looked bright -- certainly it was only going to get better.

Right?

Nope. It got worse. A lot worse. And here we are today, living in the hopelessly divided "United" States of America, the future looking grim. If only had someone told me that one night twenty-something years ago on the George Washington Bridge ... I might not have gotten so annoyed at the traffic. 

P.S. This is one of the reasons Mr NYC exists -- it's an act of creation, an act of optimism in a pessimisstic place, a place where we "build it up", a place where hope and kindness rule. As always, Mr NYC remain perpetually unfashionable.

Mozart in the Jungle, RIP

I just finished the fourth season of the Amazon show Mozart in the Jungle -- a wonderful comedy about the classical music world of NYC -- and was saddened to find out that this season is the last.

Amazon cancelled the show last month -- along with lots of others.

I didn't blog a lot about this show but it was an incredibly funny and warmhearted look at an industry (classical music) struggling to survive in the crazy world of 21st century culture and NYC. The characters were wonderfully realized, the writing was sharp, the stories were heartfelt, and it was a great look at a slice of life, a little world, in NYC. It was a show about artists, people who love what they do, and are willing sacrifice for it. It was a show about triumphs, disappointments, love, and everything else. It was wonderful.  

Most of all, it featured Bernadette Peters and Malcom McDowell, still going strong after decades in show business. It had a great cast. 

And now it's gone. 

It's gone because Amazon, after firing its previous programming chief in a #MeToo moment, hired a new person who's decided to cancel shows like Mozart (small, sophisticated boutique shows about real people and their struggles) in order to  spend  roughly a $1 billion to re-imagine Lord of the Rings. Apparently, Amazon wants its own Game of Thrones, its own Stranger Things, it's own big-time cultural buzzy hit. It wants a blockbuster.

Le sigh.

Forgive me, but can Amazon really do a better job with LOTR than Peter Jackson did with his movies? Does the culture really need or want this? And while I'm a HUGE fan of GOT and enjoy Stranger Things, I loved that Amazon had all these funky, small, literate shows -- like Mozart, Transparent and One Mississippi. These were original, groundbreaking, history-making shows, shows that truly pushed the art of television forward. 

But business is business, and this was probably inevitable. Still, it's disappointing. So let's just appreciate that for a brief, shining moment there was a place where shows like this could thrive. 

And, like all good things, like all great moments, they come to an end. 

Memo from NYC

In just under two weeks, we Americans will head to the polls to elect a new President and Congress. Notice that I had the chutzpah to say "we Americans" because, according to some people, folks like me in Blue States aren't real Americans.

Recently Sarah Palin has said that she will campaign only in "pro-American" states. This past Friday some wackjob Republican congresswoman named Michelle Bachmann talked about how the media should "launch an investigation" into members of Congress who were "anti-American." Apparently people who are "anti-American" or insufficiently "pro-American" are people who disagree with the likes of Madames Palin and Bachmann. Joe McCarthy is alive and well and, strangely enough, wears high heels and a skirt! Who knew he was a transvestite?

As a native New Yorker, I take exception with these self-appointed guardians of "Americanism". According to these people, your Americanism boils down to where you live or how you vote. It does not, however, have anything to do with how you or your family lives or contributes to American society.

Never mind that my father and grandfather fought in two of our nation's wars.

Never mind that one of my great uncles, a guy from Brooklyn, got blown up in WWII.

Never mind that it was NYC and Washington, DC, towns infested with liberal Democrats, that got attacked on 9.11.2001.

If you don't vote Republican or live in a Red State, that stuff still doesn't make you or members of your family "real Americans."

How does this work anyway? One side of my family is from "anti-America" NYC, the other side is from Western Pennsylvania, which John McCain just called the "most patriotic part of America." Does that make me half pro-, half anti-American? Do the pro and anti halves cancel each other out? Please clarify this for me, it's so confusing.

And what of the "real America" anyway? What is life like out there in those "pro-American" Red states?

If you read this 2006 article from Vanity Fair, Red State Babylon by James Walcott, it's ain't a pretty site. If fact, it's a creepy, grotesque, moral cesspool. Compared to Red States, Blue States are law-abiding bastions of squareness. The Red State narcissism of the likes of Palin and Bachmann -- that feeling of down home, Joe Six pack, hockey mom cultural superiority to their Blue State brethren -- appears to exist in inverse proportion to reality.

Did you know that Red States have the highest rates of violent crime and suicide? And the biggest numbers of obese people and pregnant teenagers (I can't think of any of our political leaders mentioned here who might know something about that). And when they aren't busy killing themselves or each other, or overeating and knocking up their teenagers, they're busy dodging exploding crystal meth labs on their way to losing money in Indian and riverboat casinos.

And talking about money, Red Staters have no business complaining about high taxes. Ohhhhhhhhh no. (Heck no, as Ms. Palin might say.) According to the blogger TaxProf, Blue States are a giant feed bag of tax dollars for Red States. All those "pro-America" Red States would have third-world economies if not for the financial largess of the "anti-American" Blue States. We New Yorkers send close to $10 billion a year in extra tax dollars to the federal coffers that gets sent to build pork barrel projects in the Red States. That's money that never comes back home here and doesn't go into improving our schools and public transportation or paying our cops and firefighters more. I agree with the Republican: taxes should be lower -- for Blue Staters. Red Staters should either pay their fare share or give us back our money. Now!

Most of all, these right wing nuts do a great disservice to their fellow Red Staters. I have relatives and friends in places like Tennessee, Missouri, and North Carolina who are some of the most progressive, open minded, kind hearted, generous people you'd ever want to meet (some of my best friends are Red Staters, ha ha ha). And what nitwits like Palin and Bachmann, et al do is make people in Blue States think that all Red Staters are mean-spirited lunatics which, I can personally attest to, they most certainly are not. But this is how the Republicans try to divide and conquer -- and it's disgusting.

If all goes well, these culture warriors will feel the pain on November 4th. It won't end this "anti" and "pro" America stuff forever but if they see that it's a loser politically, maybe they'll try something a little more productive for change. And then, maybe, just maybe, America can heal itself.