NOTES ON NEW YORK

Dear Friends, 

Thank you for all the years you’ve supported my work here on Tumblr. In July 2018, I launched my own website. It’s a continuation of Notes on New York, so I hope you’ll drop over and see me some time. All your favorites are coming with me, things like “Absurd New York” and “From the Long-Forgotten Archives,” so they’ll buttress the new features I’ve planned. The address is:

 https://www.notesonnewyork.net

As my new site will probably reference the old, this Tumblr will remain live for the time being. I mean, five hundred seventy-two posts--why not, right? When I began here in 2013, that number of entries felt flabbergasting and far beyond the reach of my meager skill set. But now, not so much. I can see doing another five hundred and seventy-two. There’s so much more of New York City to cover, and I’m just getting started. 

Just a perfect day You made me forget myself I thought I was someone else Someone good

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Absurd New York #91: Quotes by Trump Edition

In a world of slogans and soundbites, a brand jingle here and a sales pitch there, with oxymoronic pairings and definitions-be-damned, where search engine optimization is more sought after than content, and “liking” what’s written or uttered more lauded than actually comprehending it, are we becoming more anesthetized to words? Is the overload of all these things making us lazy and less willing to be critical of what passes before us? If so, isn’t that frightening? For all those who have the ability, and all those who still value language, the answer is emphatically YES.

In perhaps the most poignant part of Roger Waters’ current Us + Them Tour, Waters forces the issue. Near the end of Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones),” the show’s massive LED screens flash a few of the things Donald Trump has said around the arena. Whether you care about Trump or not, whether you remember what he’s composed for public consumption or not, no matter: You’re challenged to think. You’re tasked with understanding his words and considering what they mean. Any maybe, just maybe, being detached from the image he cultivates for a moment you’ll be able to take a true measure of the man. Let’s give it a try.

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“Im not schmuck. Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” 

On March 12, 1989, a piece by Glenn Plaskin appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The headline was “Trump: The People’s Billionaire.” Under the subheading “Tiny Trumps,” Plaskin wrote that “For R and R, in between tending to the little Trumps...Daddy raids corporations.” Also, having convinced banks and other investors to lend him money on the strength of his name alone--they gave him “instant credit” lines because they thought he had “unlimited collateral”--Trump went about building the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City for $725 million and purchasing the Plaza Hotel on Central Park South for $400 million. In reality, though, he only spent $50 million of his own money to buy the Taj. The remaining $675 million was “financed with uncollateralized junk bonds.” As far as the Plaza went, most of that $400 million was “borrowed.” 

As Trump “reflected” during the interview, Plaskin recorded his words: “I’m not a schmuck. Even if the world goes to hell in a handbasket, I won’t lose a penny.” And he wouldn’t. When Trump bankrupted the Taj in 1991 and the Plaza too in 1992, he wasn’t left holding the worthless bonds or losing income from missed interest payments, his investors were. As far as the economic losses that got passed down to his employees, well, they weren’t his problem either. None of them did any damage to his bank account. 

“A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall.”

Trump first tweeted it out on July 14, 2015, and then again on July 28th as an attack on Jeb Bush, one of his then opponents in the Republican presidential primary. He’d double down with it again on September 17, 2016, only this time he including the hashtag “#AmericaFirst.” After being elected president, Trump decided to make his Twitter decree a cornerstone of national security policy. “Mexico will pay for the wall!” he tweeted. Of course it will, that’s why he’s spent the past year and a half trying to cajole Congress into giving him the funds. 

So aside from sounding like Pink, the megalomaniac protagonist of Pink Floyd’s album “The Wall”--who, coincidentally, also wanted to barricade himself off from the rest of the world--what gives with Trump’s definition of what makes a nation? If you peruse the nearest map, you’d notice plenty of boundaries drawn around land masses across the globe. Don’t those markings designate countries? Is Canada, for example, somehow less a country because it hasn’t defined its sovereignty with a magnificent wall on the United States’ northern border?

“It’s freezing and snowing in New York--we need global warming!”

Although Trump has offered variations on this theme over the years, the original appeared via Twitter on November 7, 2012. Back then, the high temperature in New York was 41 degrees fahrenheit and the low 34. Sounds like just another pre-winter day in the Northeast, right? 

Well, according to the folks at Custom Weather, not exactly. From 1985 to 2015, the average November day posted a high of 54 and a low of 41. Now, granted that particular November 7th was colder than normal, but it’s not as if the recorded high were zero and the low -15 as Trump would have had Twitter believe. Besides, his conclusion was wrong anyway. Given that November 7th’s readings were outliers, perhaps they were actually the predicted effect of a climate in flux. If so, he needn’t have clamored for global warming at all. It had already arrived. 

“I was down there and I watched our police and our fireman, down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down.”

On April 18, 2016, that’s what Trump said at a presidential campaign stop at the First Niagara Center--today’s KeyBank Center--in Buffalo, NY. Yes, he inexplicably confused 9-11 with the Japanese-based chain store, sure, and didn’t bother to correct his mistake, but the core of what he proclaimed wasn’t true anyway. 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Trump actually called into the live broadcast on WWOR-TV Fox 5 Local News. (Although the station’s antenna was destroyed with the Twin Towers, its signal was being transmitted by other conduits.) He told anchors Alan Marcus and Brenda Blackmon that he saw the tragedy unfold from his apartment in Trump Tower at 5th Avenue and 56th Street--several miles from ground zero. Moreover, when Marcus asked “Did you have any damage, or did you--what’s happened down there?” he replied:

“40 Wall Street [a 71-story building he owned under the guise of “40 Wall Street, LLC”] actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest--and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

Despite the horrific circumstances, he apparently couldn't resist promoting his interests. He even threw in an extra hyperbole. According to city property records, the 66-story building at 70 Pine Street--formerly known as the American International Building and the Cities Service Building--was actually 25 feet higher than his 40 Wall Street at the time. And still is. 

Now 40 Wall Street didn’t suffer any damage in the terrorist attack, but the Trump Organization still applied for a $150,000 grant being offered to help small businesses in the aftermath. Known as World Trade Center Business Recovery Grants, they were given to businesses in Lower Manhattan with less than $8 million in annual revenue. However, in spite of generating $16.8 million that year, 40 Wall Street was still awarded a grant by the Empire State Development Corporation. 

“You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful piece of ass.”

While researching a story printed in the May 1991 edition of Esquire called “Donald Trump Gets Small,” Harry Hurt III was expertly entertained by the man himself. Trump took him on a VIP tour of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and that apparently had the desired effect. When Hurt began his story, he scribed, “Given the kind of year he has had, Donald J. Trump might be forgiven a little ego candy.” What? Even then, the media seemed unfazed by what was happening under his shiny veneer. 

At the time, the very casino Trump was showing to Hurt, the Taj Mahal, was going bankrupt. The Trump Castle, another Atlantic City casino, was destined for a similar fate until his father forestalled the inevitable. In December 1990, Fred Trump bought $3 million worth of chips at the Castle and left them in the casino cage so his son could use them pay off a bond payment on the property. Meanwhile, as Ivana Trump argued for more money from their divorce settlement, Marla Maples, the woman with whom Trump committed adultery while married to Ivana, was “pressuring him to propose in the wake of his highly publicized dalliance with model Rowanne Brewer.” But all that was seemingly of little consequence. Hurt remarked:

“One might think that the chill breath of potential collapse and enough tacky publicity to shame Pia Zadora might have taken the swagger out of Donald J. Trump. One would be wrong.

‘You know,’ [Trump] muses philosophically as we return to our ringside seats [in the Taj Mahal for the Ray Mercer-Frabcesci Damiani heavyweight fight], “it really doesn’t matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.

‘But,’ he adds after a pause that suggests this is a distinction with a difference, ‘she’s got to be young and beautiful.’”

In other words, he’d never be held accountable by the media, by investors, by anyone if he could razzle-dazzle them with the women he attracted. Case and point: Hurt’s profile reads like a breezy apology for the economic havoc Trump was soon to unleash on Atlantic City. Something like “Give him a break, he’s too nice a guy to punish. After all, he gave me ringside seats, a few fun girls, and a comped penthouse suite for the night.”

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So how did you do? Did you measure the man by his words, or were you dumbfounded again by the show?

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Do I dare 
Disturb the universe? 
In a minute there is time 
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
 Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

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Absurd New York #90

WTF indeed. The Center for Union Facts, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that claims to “fight for transparency and accountability in America’s labor movement,” recently began posting these huge billboards around Times Square. According to both Politico and NY1, however, the Washington, DC-based organization is actually a “shadowy...anti-labor advocacy group.” It’s run by Richard Berman, a wealthy lobbyist who WNYC reported is “known for creating non-profit organizations that have attacked groups as varied as the Humane Society, Mother's Against Drunk Driving, and ACORN on behalf of corporate interests.” 

So who’s really paying for all these “Subway Scam” ads? Well, the Center’s non-profit status redacts the names of its patrons, but WNYC revealed that “recent tax filings show Long Island billionaire Robert Mercer and his family have been a big backer of the group.” Moreover, “another non-profit his family funds, Reclaim New York, which was started by [President Trump’s] former [White House chief] adviser Steve Bannon, also publishes articles critical of the MTA's union labor.” In fact, Luka Landa, spokesperson for the “Subway Scam” campaign, just penned an Op-Ed for Crain’s New York that singled out Gary LaBarbera, President of the Building and Construction Trades Council, for negotiating “wasteful project labor agreements with construction companies” and “scoring lucrative contracts at the expense of long-overdue subway improvements.”

Haha what? Since when do construction unions determine the operating budget for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and, by consequence, the subways belonging to the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA)? Since 1968, that’s been the job of the Governor and State Legislature. Say what you will Mr. Landa, Mr. Berman, dear Center for Union Facts, and all you ghostly apparitions behind the colorful new adverts, but let’s get real here for a minute: The unions haven’t been choosing to cut funds for track repairs, signal replacements, and train upgrades the past 30 years. As the recent New York Times investigation “How Politics and Bad Decisions Starved New York’s Subways” [November 18, 2017] so eloquently presented, our elected officials have. They created today’s “dirty, delayed, and dangerous” subway system:

Both Republican and Democratic politicians...governors from George E. Pataki to Mr. Cuomo and mayors from Rudolph W. Giuliani to Bill de Blasio...cut the subway’s budget or co-opted it for their own priorities.

They stripped a combined $1.5 billion from the M.T.A. by repeatedly diverting tax revenues earmarked for the subways and also by demanding large payments for financial advice, I.T. help, and other services that transit leaders say the authority could have done without.

They pressured the M.T.A. to spend billions of dollars on opulent station makeovers and other projects that did nothing to boost service or reliability, while leaving the actual movement of trains to rely on a 1930s-era signal system with fraying, cloth-covered cables.

They saddled the M.T.A. with debt and engineered a deal with creditors that brought in quick cash but locked the authority into paying $5 billion in interest that it otherwise never would have had to pay....

At the same time, public officials who have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from M.T.A. unions and contractors have pressured the authority into signing agreements with labor groups and construction companies that obligated the authority to pay far more than it had planned.

So take down your billboards. They’re misleading and disingenuous. Go back to wherever it is you belong. 

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(Photo by Riff Chorusriff. As displayed overhead on the northeast corner of 8th Avenue and West 38th Street. April 18, 2018. Previously:

Blade Runner (Part 8)

“You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.”

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(Words by Rick Deckard taken from Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner,” 1982. Photo by Riff Chorusriff. April 26, 2018....

I could say day, and you’d say night Tell me it’s black, when I know that it’s white It’s always the same, it’s just a shame, that’s all

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So take a good look at my face You’ll see my smile looks out of place If you look closer, it’s easy to trace The tracks of my tears

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New York by Numbers (2)

If you forced the street grid upon Central Park’s 843 acres, you’d have chopped it into some 34,000 tax lots. But, no need to try it at home, the State of New York already did. Back in 1853, after the Legislature used eminent domain to acquire the land that would become Central Park, its Commission of Estimate and Assessment (CEA) sent out surveyors to perform the feat. Two years later, they not only beveled the ground into all those tax lots, they also determined that 561 proprietors held the expanse. Needless to say, according to historians Mike Wallace and Edwin G. Burrows, “the 1,600 or so Irish, German, and [free] blacks who lived on the land...were evicted by 1857,” but how did the CEA deal with all those property owners?

It paid them a total of $5,127,637.30, or $150.81 per lot. As tallied to the penny in the state comptroller’s report for the period from July 1857 to July 1858, the New York Times also discovered that the CEA spent $275,000.00 to obtain the Arsenal and its lot at 5th Avenue and 64th Street. All told, that brought the initial expenditure on Central Park to $5,402,637.30; or, if you prefer, $161,642,432.51 in today’s terms. So how did the CEA pay for it?

Well, for one, as Richard E. Foglesong attested in his book Planning the Capitalist City [1986], the CEA assessed a total of $1,657,590 on the new park’s adjacent landowners for the “benefit” of its proximity. The rest, well, that was left for the City’s Common Council to collect from its other citizens. At this point in New York history, the State Legislature managed almost all of the city’s finances, surely placing the Council in an unenviable position. As if to remind its readers where not to direct their percolating anger, the Times wrote “The Common Council and the Departments are sometimes held responsible for seemingly excessive increases in taxes, over which they can exercise no control.” 

Additionally, since the CEA borrowed money to purchase Central Park, the interest on that debt was also passed along to city taxpayers. In 1858 alone, the state comptroller doled out a $255,760 levy. But that wasn’t all. Before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Greensward Plan for the park was initiated, buildings, rubble, animals, and other unmentionable debris had to be cleared from the land. To make that happen, the Common Council appointed a Board of Commissioners to manage the operation. As of 1858, it had borrowed $600,000 to pay laborers and procure the necessary equipment. Now neither the comptroller’s report nor the Times is clear on the interest involved, so suffice it to say that preparing the future Central Park to be landscaped required an expenditure of at least $6,533,397.30--aka $187,938,007.11 by today’s accounting. And what unfathomable sum was needed to complete the whole of Olmsted and Vaux’s vision? Well, that’s an investigation for another post. 

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“You fight, you miserable bastard; fight for that bench; fight for your parakeets; fight for you cats; fight for your two daughters; fight for you wife; fight for your manhood, you pathetic little vegetable!”

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(Jerry to Peter in “The Zoo Story” by Edward Albee, 1958. Photo by Riff Chorusriff. The stage of the Signature Theatre between Act One and Act Two of Albee’s “At Home at the Zoo: Homelife & The Zoo Story.” February 17, 2018....

Seeing the show before didn’t prepare me for its stabbing finale. Even having played Jerry once was nothing compared to the punch I incurred while sitting in the audience. As he succumbed to his wound thanking Peter for delivering the blade, Jerry made me wonder if Albee wrote Peter as a closeted gay man.

Now that “The Zoo Story” is performed with “Homelife”--something Albee wrote in 2004--there’s more evidence for the idea. In “Homelife,” we meet Peter before his “Zoo Story” encounter with Jerry in Central Park. As he speaks with his wife Ann, Peter reveals that their twenty-year marriage is a “pleasant voyage on a safe ship.” But Ann wants something more: chaos. Although they made a “pact” to live an uneventful life together, Ann worries that they have become too civil. Moreover, Peter’s reluctance or inability to “hurt” her is the most worrying. Why? Well, after a sexual experience in college where he became “animalistic” and took a woman from behind, Peter vowed never to act that way again. In other words, he “tamed” himself for Ann, but she can sense his uneasy restraint. She tells him plainly, “You’re good at making love, but terrible at f**king.” 

A sweet love song, a melody that I still can recall Two young hearts filled with dreams to walk away with it all

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I can make you dance, I can make you sing I can make you dance, I can make you sing If you want me to-- 

Oh, I can make you dance, I can make you sing I can make you dance, I can make you sing If you want me to--

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(Lyrics taken from “In the Mood” by Robert Plant,1983. Photo by Riff Chorusriff. On West 52nd Street between 8th Avenue and Broadway, this is all that remains of the old Roseland Ballroom. February 28, 2018. Previously:

"The Spaghetti Incident?” (A Second Helping)

Are they as scorching as the Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones, their most comparable ancestor? Well, at the very least, this version of Guns N’ Roses is more of a hearth than the one we grew up with over 30 years ago. With a musicianship now flourishing in the wake of jettisoned addictions, feuds, and bad habits, this band is dangerous. Like Prince ripping through “Proud Mary” (Credence Clearwater Revival), “All Along the Watchtower” (Bob Dylan), and “Best of You” (Foo Fighters) at the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2007, these guys can play just about anything. And they’ll do it on a dime. 

As if an open vein through which courses the Great Rock N’ Roll Songbook, Guns N’ Roses is the rarest of vessels that can both contain its ebb and flow and excoriate its nerves to siphon off something new. Who else could turn a reading of “Speak Softy, Love (Love Theme from the Godfather)” (Nino Rota) into “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” or parse sweet “Melissa” (Allman Brothers Band) into “Patience”? They can perform the reverse trick too. “Civil War” resolved neatly into a few riffs from “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” (The Jimi Hendrix Experience) while “November Rain” dripped into final strains of “Layla” (Derek & The Dominoes) like those associations were always meant to be. And, as if to relieve the vaguest hint of boredom, they can go about vivisecting other people’s songs as well. “Attitude” (The Misfits) was diced in favor of “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory” (Johnny Thunders) and the gospel remains of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (Bob Dylan) were defibrillated by the stark musings in “Only Women Bleed” (Alice Cooper). 

Like the Stones reinterpreting “Just My Imagination” (The Temptations), “Not Fade Away” (Buddy Holly & The Crickets), or “Shake Your Hips” (Slim Harpo), Guns N’ Roses are often at the height of their powers rehabilitating classic songs. Slash and Richard Fortus dueled so elegantly on their acoustic guitars during “Wish You Were Here” (Pink Floyd) that the supposedly indelible mark of David Gilmour and Roger Waters was evanesced. “Live and Let Die” (Wings) was such a purge of pyrotechnic bloodletting that even Paul McCartney has had to admit to tinkering with his original to match the updated tenor these days. Later, in Slash’s suddenly power-chording hands, “The Seeker” (The Who) became freshly anthemic. “Black Hole Sun” (Soundgarden) was a crater, a slow-burning requiem hoisted to the ghost of Chris Cornell that moved the lips of even the most hardened fan in the crowd. And then there was Roise. A “Whole Lotta Roise” (AC/DC) is the song Guns N’ Roses should have written. Thumping, sneering, and almost combustible, it ought to have been on “Use Your Illusion I” between “Bad Obsession” and “Back Off B--”. The band tossed their way through it twirling and posing as if they were having the time of their lives. 

So what if they just did a set of covers? They certainly could. They have the special bloodline and extant stamina to pull off such a feat. What would they choose though? My money would be on things like “Tie Your Mother Down” (Queen), “Monkey Man” (The Rolling Stones), “Romeo’s Delight” (Van Halen), “Johnny B. Goode” (Chuck Berry), and “Why Does Love Got To Be So Bad?” (Derek & The Dominoes). Maybe even “Black Dog” (Led Zeppelin), “Love, Reign O’er Me” (The Who), “Helter Skelter” (The Beatles), or “Train Kept A-Rollin’” (The Yardbirds). But, then again, this Guns N’ Roses is too locked in right now to neglect its own catalog. While Axl’s voice is still waiting to yowl, Slash’s fingers still flailing to shred, and the two still willing to direct the ensemble with Duff’s support, let there be rock. We might not see another touring band like this in our lifetime. 

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(With Guns N’ Roses at Madison Square Garden. Photos by Riff Chorusriff. October 16, 2017. Previously, with GNR:

Said, sugar, take the time ‘cause the lights are shinin’ bright...you and I’ve got what it takes to make it...

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Sometimes it’s easy to forget  where you’re going Sometimes it’s harder to leave

And every time you think you know  just what you’re doing That’s when your troubles exceed

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“And in this corner...weighing in at 850 pounds...Guns N’ Roses!”

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“Get in the Ring”

When you get off the nightrain in Paradise City it’s so easy to get pretty tied up for 14 years when anything goes right next door to hell but don’t you cry tonight, my rocket queen, yesterdays weren’t no garden of eden and you ain’t the first to bite a bad apple so don't damn me with your double talkin’ jive-- that’s the perils of rock n’ roll decadence--I live and let die, sweet child o’ mine, like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door ‘cause us nice boys lead a reckless life, move to the city, and get in the ring. You can take that one to heart!

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