am i the only one who didn’t know that woody allen and francis ford coppolla and martin scorsese and richard prince made a three-part film about new york in the eighties? i think i might be. in any case, it’s one of those movies that should fall into a box set with basquiat and bright lights, big city — or at least scorsese’s part about the art world (with nick nolte as an impasto expressionist and steve buscemi as a performance artist)—and that box set would be called, “sentimental nostalgia for things that happened before i was born, part 8.”
a lot of the movie was filmed in and around odeon, keith mcnally’s first big hit that went through all the requisite stages of nyc hype (first the broke artists, then the gentrifiers, then the wall street financiers, then the tourists, soon to close down). along with after hours, this comes from the phase when scorsese was enchanted with soho as a mythical place where anything could happen and you could fall into rabbit holes around every corner. i wonder if anywhere in the city is like that now, or if it ever really was in the first place. i’m sure if i was around then i probably would have complained about missing highball hours and wearing foxfur gloves like a young shirley maclaine. the truth is, i’m very into the current moment in nyc —there has never been a time like now, when the city is interconnected not only through word of mouth or the media, but through the hundreds of electric sparks racing through the internet. we know more today about everything than we ever have. wiki-nyc. we just have to figure out how to harness that energy, i suppose.
the new museum reopens on the bowery next week, in an effort to bring the art world back below houston in earnest for the first time in twenty years. but even though they’ve built it, will they come? it’s open all night long on december 1. who wants to go with me after hours?
ps-i am soon starting a new project where i am working on stories about old new york for the city’s office. more details tk, but the above sappery is good evidence as to why.
