They took Kerik's name off the jail? Bugger. I had this nice little image of him sitting in a cell in his own jail. The warm glow from that little bit of schadenfreude could have cut my heating bills this winter by at least 20-30%
LM, I understand that the leadership that killed off the New York you loved came from outside Manhattan but didn't their ascendence also require the complicity of fellow New Yorkers too?
I was only a child in the eighties so my memories only include highlights and lowlights of things not happening immediately around me but I seem to remember New York in those days as a horribly racially polarized city with seething whites like Bernhard Goetz and the media pumping up stories of blacks out of control and needing to be if not exterminated, reigned in.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there had to be an undercurrent of rensentment and terror amongst native white Manhattanites for that troika to do their work.
Am I wrong?
It's not necessarily about being an outsider physically. It's really about being a mental outsider and having been unwilling to accept the greater city on its “everybody rub shoulders terms”.
These people wanted to remake the central city as a private enclave akin to the balkanized pockets they came from.
It very nearly worked.
And yes, the ascendant yuppies in town wanted “the city” very much wiped clean and to themselves, so they did their major part in “pill-boxing” the city.
Somebody tell Rudy?
Fuck him. The little mamzer never listens anyway.
The ones who couldn't find “the two and the four” if you spotted them the one and the fucking three.
LOL - hey no fair slinging around the arcane musicians' humor outside the shed, brother!
sadly, the "one and three" people are everywhere, to this very day. they run the country at the moment. say what you will about the disappointments of the Big Dog; his moment with a saxophone was our dog whistle. big time. i can't see ANY of the people up there giving us anything of the kind. unless barack has a musicmaster and an ampeg hiding in his basement.
I almost skipped the video...glad I didn't. Hysterical. And that was a fine piece of passionate writing. Thank you. I'm not a New Yorker so can't comment on the rest.
LM,
That was not only great, but very much how I remember those times too. I was an outer boroughs teenager then and places like Xenon, Studio 54 and the like were like the magic kingdom to me where the currency was not so much money, but as you said the sense of "cool". Then there was Plato's Retreat. LM, do you have any stories about that place ? 
“Then there was Plato's Retreat. LM, do you have any stories about that place ?”
Ohhh-hhhhoo-nooooooo! Was too young and damn sure not daring enough to fuck around with Plato's.
However, a classmate who totally devolved into the worst excesses of drugs and club-kid-dom was rumored to be a zonked out regular. Her dealer supposedly got her into it.
And some classmates did see a literature teacher of ours coming out of the place waaaaaay over near the old Market Diner where one friend waitressed evenings. Creepy.
LM, I know nothing of those times or NY but damn you write so well, you make my teacher's heart sing.
One day I want to see that book published, sir, and I'll hand over my hard earned cash to buy a copy with pleasure -just to read writing that can move me, make me think and entertain at the same time.
Never lived in NY but, reading you makes me wish I had.
By the way, anyone reading this would kind of think you didn't like Rudy.
FANTASTIC story, Lowermanhattanite!
This tells the rise and fall of the house of Giuliani from a very different, but uniquely NYC view. Thank you!
LM wrote (eloquently, as always
And some classmates did see a literature teacher of ours coming out of the place waaaaaay over near the old Market Diner where one friend waitressed evenings. Creepy.
Ooooh, you mean Edelweiss, that tranny/GBLQwhateverthefuckgoes disco/bar? The one with the dance space downstairs? Man, they had an awesome DJ.
Erm from what I heard that is....not that I'd ever, um, gone there or, uh, anything....
Whoops, that's the Normality Gestapo kicking down my door, gotta run....
PS--LM, gimmie an email one of these days! I sent ya a couple...
Hey Jen!
I'll drop ya a line later tonight.
The Market Diner I'm talking about was the little one that became the Cheyenne Diner in the mid 80's at the corner of 33rd & 9th just a block and a half away from Plato's Retreat—BRRRR! I get a chill just mentioning that place!— where I saw my teacher was about a block and a half away.
Edelweiss though...man, I saw the denizens of that place many a late night bubbling out of that place on those nights I sat at the BIG Market Diner at the corner of 44th and 11th. The music would thoomp through the floor (Edelweiss was in the basement on the 11th Ave. side) and in between bites of Lemon Meringue Pie i'd see “the girls” come in all the time—totally outré!
They had a bangin' DJ though. I was in there one night with a bunch of friends after a pier party (The big enclosed one—88 I think next to the Intrepid dock) and the group Levert (featuring the late Gerald Levert) came in, apparently after a show in town as they were talking about the drive back to Philly (their home base) when they were sitting down near us.
It was the three of them, two bodyguards and a chauffeur.
We're all eating back and a couple of “girls” came up into the place. Big, stratospheric girls with the deepish voices.
You could see a couple of the Levert guys look up at the spectacle with a “WTF?” look
One of the bodyguards said—too loudly— “Where the fuck are we?”
And one of the ladies hissed at him “Not fucking Kansas, honey!”
And everybody broke the fuck up.
Reading this excellent essay was one part nostalgia movie and one part horror flick... the excellence of your prose absolutely TOOK me in the wayback machine to those dancin days, those boogie nights. And then your depiction of the ME ME ME era that Reagan ushered in, with which the unholy trinity used to climb the ladder with their shit encrusted wingtips. So brilliantly presented. Well done, LM. You are definitely one of the absolute best here on the intertubes.
That video might've been as disturbing s the Karl Rove dance act.
Your portrait of Rudy reminds me of reading Molly Ivins and her portrayal of the Texas mafia that Bush and Rove came out of. Outsiders that basically ended up creating a huge corrupt racket and running the place. We lost her and Steve in the same year but damned if we still don't have the very best writers around.
One of your best LM.
"(...)and one of the GOP's latest models off the pundit assembly line—from the compact, wet-behind-the-ears, dweeb-boy coupe series, one Matthew Continetti."
I am in awe of how these people are groomed, trained, and then slipped into the TV as some kind of an subject expert.
And they are repeatedly invited to talk shows, "news" shows, entertainment shows, despite being wrong about... well, pretty much everything!
Just an AWESOME post. You're a genius, everyone should worship you (THis is an old joke from a dear friend of mine who was a writer--flattery with a teasing edge. She passed in 2001 from kidney cancer. The essay reminded me of her writing. THANKS!).
The Cheyenne Diner was near Plato's Retreat? Damn, the things you learn...
BTW, LM, last year when I was in New York, I went to the Diner for a late dinner on your recommendation. Buffalo burger, fries, and an egg cream. Great value for money.
Ahhhh LoLo - the days of wine and roses and buddah and blow and salsa and "P" Funk and the hippest of the hop and them after hours joints and the rucker and the street fairs and the pre-AIDS booty bazaar and the limelight and... then sherm' and his big brotha Zootie hit town and that "He got dat skinny shit" disease crept out of the gay naybs into da hoodz and then it got real dark and quiet outside...then Rudy & Bernie and The Mulunyan Marauders (aka NYPD) hit the city like hot, steaming melena hitting an Air King 9218 Industrial and all bets were off 'cause it wuz Guiliani Time.
(punkass lil muthafuka who cheats on the golf course...Rudy Guiliani)
Oooo. I let my daughter finally watch "Boogie Nights" -- the uncut version -- the other night.
Yes, my sweet girl. That's what my LA was like back in the late 70s and early 80s. The clothes. The guys. The cars. The easy sex, the pools, the house parties, the blow, the nights that turned into days that turned into weekends, the sad and unexpectedly kind people who harbored kinks and hurts and habits your mama's small-town brain couldn't imagine until she looked into their eyes and saw it all.
I've been telling you since you were a baby girl that I lived through some strange times. Now, you know.
I'm kinda wishing now I'd applied to Columbia j-school instead.
Rudy is toast. ,The best thing to come out of this election is Rudy being humbled.I spent years watching artists in soho getting arested for showing their art on the street. The reason I moved to New York twenty years ago was because art and culture was accessible to everyone, streetlevel.This city was vibrant with creativity and wasn't for millionares. at least south of Houston was ours.I now am stuck in a city I love bit has lost all the artists and musicians to the burrows and beyond . P.S., I love watching Chris mathews eat crow after every Hillary win. Karma is a bitch.
A great city with a lousy taste in Mayors.
Mrs. R.,
Don't worry about not having gone to j-school. A retired friend of mine who once was a well known reporter both in the UK and Australia told me that j-school can't teach you the important stuff since she considered journalism more like a craft than an academic subject. Another friend dropped out of a journalism degree after finding out that more time would have been spent studying French deconstructionists than on writing and reporting.
Studio 54. I know that a movie was made about that particular venue in 1998, and the central feature of its plot was a bisexual love triangle. Test-audiences in Flyover Country balked at seeing leading man Ryan Phillippe make out with his real-life best friend Breckin Meyer, so they gutted the movie of that crucial plot element and what remained was a bland, boring slab of cinematic Velveeta. Kind of symbolic of the effect that "The Outsiders" had on the NYC of old, don't you think?
One more thing. I have some sense of what you mean about the rise of The Outsiders being a big victory parade for the squares. When I started going to school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, there were three big parties that made the school the envy of the Midwest. The Great Midwest Harvest Fest, where cannabis was consumed openly and unabashedly, the Mifflin Street Block Party where a certain co-op would openly sell pot-laced brownies, and the Halloween Party from which people came from far and wide to attend. But something happened. That something was the arrival of the year 1989, the first year of Bush the Elder's presidency.
Cops started busting people at the Harvest Fest. The pot-brownies at the Mifflin Street Block Party were gone. The Halloween party was cancelled (that actually happened in 1988, but October 31 of that year was pretty close to 1989). Those party-hearty days had passed into memory to become "The Good Old Days". And on the social level, Madison become a colder, crueler, more excluding place. And of course this cusp of this change would coincide with the time I spent there. I left for a while and came back to live between the tail end of 1992 and the tail end of 1997. It really felt as if it had become quite the grey and dismal place during that period. I'm sure it's vastly worse now.
Rock on, Civilization, rock on.
word.
...& great community here.
:>
...& ftfy!
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