New York City has been a notorious basket case for longer than I've been alive. How much longer is up for debate. A symbol of American industriousness since around the time of independence, and the financial and cultural capital since the nineteenth century, yes. But for decades it's been beset by varying combinations of crumbling infrastructure, pervasive street crime, runaway expenses, and terrible leadership.
Through all that, though, the city has maintained a kind of allure. In part it's the traffic accident rubbernecking thing. But aspects of it remain beautiful. It's a real place, and an instantly identifiable one.
I enjoyed the first season of Evil. It's a paranormal horror show that gets a lot of mileage out of keeping plausible deniability about its supernatural aspect. Having a drama about possession assessors from the Catholic Church where one of them is an atheist from a Muslim family is counterintuitive. Anyway, production went on hiatus when everything went on hiatus. When it came back it had switched from CBS to Paramount +. While there have been three seasons now I only recently started watching the second one now after purchasing it from Vudu. (Could have watched it on Amazon Prime but only by subscribing to their Paramount stream. No thanks.)
While the overall tone is consistent with season one, there are a few changes. For one, being out of FCC jurisdiction means characters can swear. What's weird about this is that in the first half of the season, every episode seems to have people shouting "fuck." Then in the back half it stops, like they'd filled their quota. More interestingly Andrea Martin has joined the cast on a recurring basis as a nun. A heroic nun. As a non-Catholic Catholic school attendee I'd rate her performance eerily accurate.
Again, it's a very New York show. The New York of Rosemary's Baby, after all these years.
I've also started re-reading Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, a novel set you can guess where. Freewheeling in a deadpan way, it's not one of the DeLillo books that has garnered a lot of mainstream praise. It probably won't join the two novels that have been made into movies. Yet it is one of my favorites.
The book centers on and is narrated by Bucky Wunderlick, a rock star taking an open-ended break after everything spins out of control. Which it continues to do. DeLillo clearly based Bucky on Bob Dylan, but kept a free hand by not doing so too closely. For one thing Bucky is actually a native New Yorker, while Dylan is an émigré from You Betcha country. There's a narrative motion of power slipping into unaccountable places, one which seems prophetic although I think the author was looking around rather than forward.
"Nobody knows me from shit," he said. "But I'm a two-time Laszlo Platakoff Murder Mystery Award nominee. My one-acters get produced without exception at a very hip agricultural college in Arkansas. I'm in my middle years but I'm going stronger than ever. I've been anthologized in hard cover, paperback, and goddamn vellum. I know the writer's market like few people know it. The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism. It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It's a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills."
2 comments:
Reading about NYC on any given day at this point in the city's history is a frightening process, never mind actually gong there. I watched a video this morning of people riding in filthy junk filled subway cars, some actually travelling and others stretched out asleep. Then there are all the push incidents.
The NYC I mostly enjoy remembering was the place that features in Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels between 1934 and 1975. The stories are always good but it's the city that intrigues me, most especially in those novels written in the 30s when the roadster was conveniently parked in front of Wolfe's brownstone on West 35th St. It was simplicity itself to travel around the city and park anywhere, or one could walk as Archie often preferred.
The program you've been watching sounds interesting enough - possession assessors, eh? That's definitely a unique concept and the cast must be interesting. I like the idea of an heroic nun (probably not much like Sister Margaret). I remember Rosemary' Baby well enough not to want to repeat the experience of watching it again.. The Exorcist too, but that wasn't set in New York. Speaking of horror showa we watched two episodes of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities one evening this week. It was okay but I find monsters boring and I don't like gore even if it is composed of offal from a meat packing place.
You make Don DeLillo's book Great Jones Street sound compelling. Did you catch Greer's article last week about genres in literature? That paragraph reminded me of it - anthologized in hardback, paperback, and vellum..
I wonder too about an author's prophesies being a little too close to daily reality. Maybe that's why I prefer looking back even if that's no more realistic a fantasy.
Push incidents are certainly very disturbing. They tend to be committed by people who should have been imprisoned or hospitalized--depending on the causes--a long time previously, but were just cycled out onto the street. Something involving a woman pushing a child onto the tracks recently. Sad to say there are cities where you'd be well advised to avoid the rails.
In some ways the New York of the Nero Wolfe books isn't very far, as the last one was published less than 50 years ago. In another way it was a distant time indeed. This was when America had a strong working class and a strong industrial economy. The country hadn't started to cannibalize its own prosperity. There are always winners and losers but the New York of their time seemed to have more share space between the two.
There is a bit of Rosemary's Baby to Evil. I guess you could take that as a warning. Sister Andrea reminds me more of Sister Cathleen than anyone else I've known. Not sure if she has a background as a math teacher. Everyone on the show keeps weird hours as well. The whole "city that never sleeps" thing maybe. Before reading your comment I'm not sure I'd heard of del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. It might be popular, although with Netflix and the like it's hard to tell how much of an audience they have. Guillermo de Toro can probably get things greenlit by having his name attached to them whether he's closely involved or not, much like Spielberg.
The character I quoted is an eccentric feature of the novel and comes up with quite a few weird tangents. Which can also come from having a wide perspective. I did read that Greer article, and I'd attribute the latter to him.
I can understand the appeal of looking back. Mind you, I'm sure there are still exciting stories to tell. It's just that at the moment we've forgotten what's important.
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