The Adventures of Mr NYC

Bret Easton Ellis's NYC

I've always had a love-hate opinion of the novelist Bret Easton Ellis. For the most part I don't think he's really that talented, most of his books are boring, and, in the interviews I've heard with him, he sounds like a massive asshole.

However, I do think his 1991 novel American Psycho is absoutely brilliant and, in a depressing way, it seems more relevant than ever. It's a classic.

Ellis is from LA and lives there now but, in the late 1980s and 1990s, he lived in NYC. He recently returned to the city after a long absence to promote his new TV show and, in this interview, he talks about his life in NYC.

What's funny is that, for many, the NYC of the '80s and '90s was a rough, terrible time of crime, crack, AIDS, and decay. But for Ellis it was a golden age, a wonderful fun time that he misses. Apparently he doesn't know how anyone could live in 2020s NYC!

It's a reminder than one person's paradise can be another person's hell -- and vice versa. 

Building the NYC Empire

Part of what makes New York City fascinating -- but also sometimes tough to talk about and understand -- is that this "city" isn't really a city in the traddional sense. The Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries define a city simply as a "large or important municipality in the U.S. governed under a charter granted by the state." 

That's it. And NYC certainly fits that definition.

But its size and geography and population make it unlike most other cities, both in the United States and the world at large. (This list gives 10 examples of the differences between NYC and just about every other city in the world.) As I've blogged about before, NYC isn't a single city -- its several cities joined up together. 

And that's what makes NYC not a city but an empire -- dozens of islands containing several different cites and towns and villages and arable land stiched together to become a whole greater than the sum of its parts. 

The size and scope and unwieldy nature of the five boroughs is so complex, so various, so wild and huge that the best way to understand NYC is not as a city but as an urban empire -- or, as the poet Emma Lazarus famously called it, a collossus. 

Empires don't just spring to life out of nowhere, they are built over time. And here's the story of building the NYC empire -- past, present, and future:

Review: "Sterling Point" (2026)

Over the years I've enjoyed posting short reviews of movies and TV shows about New Yorkers who travel far from the city and get into wild adventures.

Most recently, it was the show Tulsa King, and earlier it was movies like The Ninth Gate, Shaft In Africa, Angel Heart, Road House, Black Rain, even Ishtar. 

A new entry into this genre is the Amazon Prime show Sterling Point. 

It's about a prim and proper Brooklyn teenager named Annie and her dopey but funny brother Connor who inherit an island in Canada from their estranged grandfather -- and go to check it out.

Lots happens. Friends and lovers are made and lost and made again, buried family secrets are revealed, some pot is smoked, some sex is had, and some silly and serious situations ensue.

It's a great time. The main cast is young, gorgeous, and talented, the adult actors are excellent, and the show manages to be both very funny and emotionally dramatic at once. Really good.

I'll admit I'm biased because, yes, it's a show about displaced New Yorkers but it also takes place somewhere I know and love very well.

Sterling Point is a gorgeous, fun end-of-summer treat. 

Naked Man Jumps from Brooklyn Bridge -- and Lives!

Damn, I love writing these tabloid-like headlines, fun stuff. 

And now he's in trouble for a lot of stuff including lewdness and, even worse, messing up traffic when the cops had to close the bridge.

Considering how crazy this city is, it's amazing that things like this don't happen every day. And to quote The Wire, this is some Spiderman shit.

City of Islands

NYC Cigarette Commercials

Growing up in the 1980's and '90s I saw a lot of cigarette ads in magazines, on top of taxicabs, and various other places all over NYC. The most memorable one of which was this:

As old as I am, however, I grew up too late to see cigarette commercials on TV. But there used to be some interesting ones, includes some set in NYC. And even though cigarette commercials have been banned in the USA for over 50 years, that hasn't stopped foreign countries from using NYC for their TV cigarette commercials. 

Fascinating stuff.

But NYC was actually one of the leaders in anti-smoking commercials and, don't forget, this was the first big city in the world to ban public smoking. Now that's ... Kool.

Jean-Pierre Dorleac RIP

In the depths of COVID back in 2020 I had the luck of finding the Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated costume designer Jean-Pierre Dorleac on social media. He was an funny, outrageous "shit poster", telling stories of his Hollywood past and his raw, unfiltered opinions of the various people he knew and worked with.

Most of all, Dorleac was the costume designer on the early-1990s show Quantum Leap which was, and remains, one of my favorite shows ever.

When I contacted Dorleac in those dark days to see if he would do an interview for Mr NYC, I was happily shocked when he agreed. And he gave a lively one for this little blog and for that I'm eternally grateful. Most of all, I was interested in how he costumed the Quantum Leap characters in different decades, especially bringing NYC to life in the 1950s, 60's and '70s.

Sadly Dorleac has passed away at the age of 83. He certainly had an interesting life and he made a great contribution to the culture. Heck, just the costumes he designed for Dean Stockwell on Quantum Leap were enough to burn him into legend! 

RIP.

NYC Crime Spot

I recently came across this YouTube channel called NYC Crime Spot that tells (or retells) the stories of the city's most infamous crimes and criminals. 

For example you can learn about the real Stacks from Goodfellas or about the Mafia Cops. Fascinating, old-school stuff.

Even though NYC is safer than ever with crime at record lows, it's always fascinating to learn more about the sometimes sordid underbelly of the worls' greatest city.

"Saturday Night Fever": Watch Da' Hair!