Last week I was on a commercial advertising shoot in New York with my wife to make some magic. Despite having worked many times together over the years, it was our first shoot and only our second time together in New York. The first time was when we met in the lobby of the W Hotel on Lexington Ave. That location closed a few years ago.
The shoot was in The East Village on 13th St., a block from 14th St.’s permanent stench of urine and desperation. And so much weed. It was everywhere, a Big Apple Bong. It wafted through every doorway, car window, and apartment in the city. I say this as someone who lived near Venice Beach for a decade.
The city had an unnerving edge to it I hadn’t felt in years. On X, I kept seeing the same clip of a brawl right outside the see-and-be-seen Soho fixture Balthazar. Nancy Rommelmann (one of the last great journalists) shared a video depicting activist agitators jumping the subway turnstile en masse to protest the cops shooting a fare evader in Brooklyn who was left In critical condition. She questioned the effectiveness of the protest asking, “What exactly was accomplished?”
The shoot location wasn’t far from Tompkins Square Park, and I can’t think of its name without hearing a lyric from Lou Reed’s “Hold on,” off his last great album New York. “You better hold on, there's a riot in Tompkins Square.” The city’s rioted on and off since 1712. There was only a slight break during the Giuliani years when cops were on every corner and New Yorkers lamented that Times Square had turned into Disney World.
They must be cheering that New York has become a nightmare once again. In CVS, 80 percent of the products were behind lock and key to deter shoplifting. On the plus side, there were more employees working than I ever see at my local CVS in Nashville, where rampant theft isn’t as much of an issue.
Beyond pervasive violence, the other topic of conversation concerned the laughably outrageous prices for everything. A lot higher than the “Hey what are you gonna do it’s New York,” prices one gets used to. The Uber from LaGuardia to our hotel was $125, inflated in part due to five or six different surcharges. A simple lunch (sandwiches and water) for our small production crew cost $130. The hotel tacked on a $35 surcharge because we had the audacity to book it through Expedia.
I walked down 45th St. wondering how many New Yorkers are 30 seconds away from having a conniption fit. There’s always a constant low-key anxiety in the background; it goes with the territory. But sometimes the tension is more palpable and this was one of those times. Everyone from the cast to the crew to my wife’s nephew, who lives in Queens, shared the same angst.
I wonder whether my nephew represents a growing number of young men who’ve been red-pilled or no-pilled thanks to Covid, lawfare and the media’s eight years of casting a presidential candidate as Hitler. Once a proud Bernie Bro with a tattoo to show it, he was now warning that if the Democrats won the presidency, House and Senate that Democracy as we know it would end for good. It’s hard to say what YouTube channels and internet posts led him to this conclusion. But he wasn’t afraid to say it out loud in an Irish bar where FOX news beamed from the flatscreen TVs. That might’ve been the biggest surprise of all. In deep-blue New York, the right-leaning network was omnipresent. This is obviously anecdotal, but as a snapshot of the city it makes me wonder if it’s a harbinger that something akin to a quiet riot is going to happen.