🗽 📚 Writers, artists, and visionaries — NYC has always drawn in the misfits and the makers. Tune into my chat with John Strausbaugh about the city's legacy and its fascinating characters on the latest Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast episode as we explore NYC's past, present, and future. Don't miss it! 🎙️
In this episode of the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast, Dian Griesel, also known as Silver Disobedience, sits down with John Strausbaugh, a renowned biographer of New York City. We discuss the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of New York, focusing on its history, iconic neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, and the creative characters that have shaped its legacy. Strausbaugh shares fascinating insights into the changes the city has undergone, the impact of real estate development, and the importance of individuality and self-expression. The conversation also touches on the broader implications of digitalization and AI on creativity and literary arts.
Learn more about John and his books or follow his podcast!
Please SUBSCRIBE! I’m Dian Griesel, Ph.D. aka @SilverDisobedience I am a perception analyst, hypnotherapist, author of books and a Wilhelmina model & creative who works both sides of the camera. For 30 years I have helped my clients to achieve greater understanding as to how perceptions impact everything we do whether personally or professionally. Text to book an appointment: 212-825-3210
I share inspiring and actionable ideas for free via my podcast, on my website: DianGriesel.com and also on my social media accounts which you might like to follow.
SHOW BREAKDOWN:
00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction
00:40 New York's Historical Evolution
01:34 The People of New York
04:47 New York's Cultural Magnetism
07:46 The Impact of Real Estate on New York
15:37 Bohemian Scenes in Greenwich Village
24:30 The Shift in Self-Expression
29:25 The Ever-Changing Landscape of New York City
30:46 Impact of COVID-19 on Social Behavior
33:20 The Shift in New York's Real Estate
37:45 Iconic New York Characters
41:52 The Writing Process and Discipline
48:53 The Future of Writing in the Age of AI
52:31 Conclusion and Farewell
#newyorkcity #newyork #authors #biographers #NYChistory
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello everyone, I'm Diane Grissell.
I'm also known as Silver Disobedience and this is the
Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast.
And I am sitting in iconic Manhattan Center, which is my
collaboration partner on some ofthese podcasts.
And it is a lot of fun to be here because there's a lot of
(00:22):
history. And Speaking of history today,
our guest is John Straussbaugh. He is considered the historian,
the biographer, truly the biographer of New York.
And one of the things we were talking about that we're going
(00:43):
to get right into is how New York evolves yet stays the same.
And we'll talk about all those differences that we experience
in every day in the history of New York.
John, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me. How did New York become this
passion play for you? It's I just, it's such a
(01:06):
fascinating place. If you want to be writing
history, which I do, you could write a million books about New
York City and and die and come back and write a million more.
It's the history is so deep, so layered, so messy, so fractal.
There's a lot of, so there's weird, common, the weird
(01:27):
connections between this person and that person and somebody in
the 18th century and somebody inthe 21st century.
And, and I'm not very interestedin like institutional history or
organizational history or the history of buildings.
I'm interested in people. People are history.
(01:47):
So New York has either birthed or attracted so very, very many
fascinating, interesting movers and shakers, and always forever
since the 17th century. So why not become its
(02:11):
biographer? And you do such a good job about
that. And a theme you, you know, I you
have Victory City and you know, focusing on New York during
World War Two. You wrote about the village, you
know, Greenwich Village and you know, it's, it's starts to more
current time and who it's attracted and what's going on.
(02:34):
You have a book about the Lower East Side and the characters on
the Lower East Side. You know, the big thing that I
found is reading your books. You realize humanity doesn't
change that much. So what do you observe?
Now that is true. People are people.
People have always been people. Things change.
(02:56):
We, we have developed technologically over the
millennia, but I'm not sure we're very different from when
we were, you know, in a cave squatting over a little fire in
the dark. I think humanity is if, if we
change at all, we change very, very slowly over tremendous
(03:20):
amounts of time. So it's, I think one of the
cliches, one of the bad cliches about history is that, oh, it's
about people who dressed funny and, and walked funny and, and,
and we're different from who we are and how we are.
No, they weren't. If you know anything about New
(03:41):
Yorkers in the 19th century, they were the same bustling,
loud, crazy people that they were in the 20th century and
that I guess we still are in the21st.
And I think that's true anywhere.
People are people. And, and again, I don't consider
myself as an historian. I'm not a scholar.
(04:01):
I'm not a professor. I'm an historiographer.
I write about history for everybody else to read, not just
for scholars to read. I think that in that case, the
most interesting kinds of history to be writing about are
are the people, the people history and the characters, the
(04:22):
figures, not always the famous ones.
I, I always, I'm trying to ferret out people that aren't
very well known but are fascinating.
The book I wrote on the Lower East Side, There's no famous
people in that book, but there are a lot of they're all
fascinating people and, and, andvery accomplished, each in his
or her or her own way. So I love people as a subject
(04:45):
and I could keep on doing this forever.
What do you think it is that brings the different characters
and personalities to New York? It's the powerhouse of the
nation. New York has always been, you
know, the not always, but from very early on it was the
largest, busiest, wealthiest, craziest, hardest city in in the
(05:06):
United States. And it's, and it's not the
largest anymore, but it's still all those other things.
I think New York City has definitely changed a lot since I
think it was the old New York upinto maybe the mid 1980s or so.
And then it really began shifting to the new New York,
which a lot of us who remember the old New York aren't very
(05:27):
happy about. But here we are.
It's it's not quite, I don't think it's quite the Dynamo it
used to be, but for centuries itwas the Dynamo.
It was the capital of the UnitedStates in every way except for
politics. Washington, DC was the political
capital. New York was the financial
capital, the shipping capital, the manufacturing capital.
(05:49):
We don't think of it as a factory town.
You know, we think of places like Detroit as or Pittsburgh as
factory towns. But it was in fact the biggest
factory town in America well into the 20th century.
It was the media capital, which is not so much anymore, but
movies, radio, TV, newspapers, book publishing all happened in
(06:09):
New York City and then went out to the rest of the country and
the rest of the world. And it was like what I call a
culture engine, especially New York, downtown New York, NY
below 14th St. which is a special interest for me because
it was I my metaphor for it was that it was a great cultural
brain and there it had two hemispheres like our brains.
(06:33):
One was Greenwich Village and the other was the Lower East
Side. And between those two
hemispheres, they it churned outart and entertainment from the
lowest of the low to the highestof the avant-garde high for
through the 19th and 20th centuries and for the world.
(06:53):
And because of all that, New York was a magnet for people who
wanted to be here and be part ofthat in any way.
Like, as they wanted to be on Wall Street, they wanted to be
in Greenwich Village, they wanted to be making movies, they
wanted to be whatever, you know,in fashion or in the media.
So it was, it was a magnet for people who could make it here.
(07:17):
You know, there's not all that stuff about how, you know, if
you can make it New York, you can make it anywhere.
It's a cliche, but like a lot ofcliches, there's a lot of truth
in it. If you could come here and, and
and put up with all the things you have to put up with to be
here, it was a place of liberation, I think for a lot of
people in a whole lot of ways where they could express
(07:41):
themselves, be themselves, make something of themselves.
What you mentioned earlier that sometime in the 80s things
seemed to have shifted from old New York to New New York kind of
thing. What what was the catalyst
behind that shift, and what are the things you've seen changing?
(08:01):
As most of the stories you can tell about New York City, it
comes down to three things, the price of real estate, the price
of real estate and the price of real estate.
And it really, it had always, you know, it's always been a
very expensive place to be sinceway back.
But it got more and more and more.
That accelerated tremendously inthe 80s, certainly in the 90s.
(08:27):
And then in this century, the 21st century, it is just Zorg
skyrocketing, all these giganticbuildings going up.
One of the impacts of that is that it it really has lost a lot
of its old character. Every city, every town, every
locality in the world, I would say, has its own personality.
(08:50):
New York had its very different personality from Baltimore,
where I'm from. We're from LA, which is another
giant city, but a very differentgiant city, or Dallas, Fort
Worth, which is completely different from any of those
others. They all have their own
character and personality. You can mess with that and
change it if all you're looking to do is having is make money on
(09:16):
it and and have an economic impact in it, which
unfortunately a lot of those kind of people have always been
attracted to New York too. There's a, a lot of, I won't
mention a certain person's name,but a certain person who's done
very well for himself since he was a real estate hustler in New
(09:37):
York City back in the 80s and 90s.
They, they tend to, if you're only in it for the money, if
you're only building to make money on it, it, it's going to
have probably a deleterious effect on the character and, and
the personality of the city. And I think that's definitely
(09:58):
happened in New York City. It's not the New York, even the
New York I moved to in 1990. So just in that amount of time,
30, whatever years it's, it's lost.
Some of its old. The neighborhoods aren't quite
neighborhoods anymore. A lot of them the Greenwich
Village doesn't it looks like Greenwich Village still of
course, because that's you can'tknock all that down or you
(10:19):
wouldn't have Greenwich Village.But this the spirit of it is not
there anymore. A lot of once again, I, I, I'm
mostly in or I had a lot of interest in downtown New York,
NY with low 14th St. And all of that is, is it's
completely changed just in my time in New York City.
(10:40):
But they also seem to be the thelast bastion.
Fight. They're hanging in there.
York all the time in the. Upper West Side, a little is
hanging in there a little. Way Upper West Side.
You've got to get more towards Harlem well.
You know, but even Harlem. Morningside Heights kind of
thing to get some of that vibe, but.
Not much, right? No, no.
And it's, and, and I do think that's almost entirely because
(11:04):
of the, the, the power of real estate development in in
Manhattan and bleeding out into Brooklyn and some point it'll
bleed out in the Queens and brought in the Bronx and
probably never Staten Island, but I don't think so.
So there's been one of the majoreffects that it's had,
(11:26):
especially downtown that, that there since the 80s, there's
been a great diaspora of the kinds of creative types,
artists, writers, intellectuals,political radicals, feminists,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,et cetera, gays, lesbians, et
cetera, et cetera, who used to all be attracted to downtown
(11:48):
Manhattan and came here and created that cultural brain that
I'm, that I'm talking about. And we're churning out
tremendous amounts of culture for the world.
And the whole world sent its creative people here to be a
part of that. The, in the, the 20th century,
nobody who was anybody in the arts in the world did not at
least pass through downtown Manhattan.
(12:10):
And many came and stayed. They're not going to do that
now. That's the IT used to be a
magnet for misfits and and Mystics and visionaries, and now
it's a magnet for millionaires. Fine, OK, But that's a different
city than it was even when I first got here in 1990.
In a, in a really big way. It's where, you know, I, I have
(12:33):
two kids, one's 21 and one's 24 and, you know, the 21 year old
is skateboarder and very attracted to the gritty
underground of New York. You know, the kids who were
putting that graffiti on your building that you're really
pissed off about. But I mean, it's like he, he
reminds me of, you know, when I moved to New York, you wanted
(12:56):
that edge, you wanted that creativity.
You wanted to be around the writer who was working on their
book, the artist who was, you know, trying to, you know, sell
their art, the musician that wasplaying some kind of punk and
they could play 3 chords. But boy, it sounded good and you
banged your head to it. Three chords, yeah.
(13:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the dressing.
You know what everyone would wear?
The Who. Like who came up with the best
thrift shop outfit. I loved it.
I still do. Well, and, and that's
encouraging to me that he's intothat.
I mean, one of the things is, isthat if you, if you look at the
history of, of New York City, people have been counting it out
and, and just say, no, it's over.
(13:38):
It's done for a couple centuriesnow.
You know, the, the, the Greenwich Village was supposedly
done, done, done by 1920. No artist would ever move there
again and that's not true. They there was several more
generations. Now it does appear to be done,
but. I think they've shifted to the
(13:59):
East Village in the lower. East, not even the Lower East
Side anymore. I all, everybody I used to know,
I used to live on the Lower EastSide.
I don't know. I know one.
Yeah, one guy who's still there.Everybody else is left.
They're there in Brooklyn. The part of the diaspora has
been that they forced the artists and the, the thing about
artists in America that has always been a truism is that
(14:23):
it's a terrible way to make money.
Being, being arty and in any sense a writer, a poet, a
dancer, a musician, whatever, it's a terrible way to make
money. Some few do, but most don't.
So they're always looking for, they need to find cheap places
to live and work. They, they have to have those.
Greenwich Village was that for along time, it's not that
anymore. The East Village and Lower East
(14:45):
Side was that for a long time. It's not that anymore.
It's, it's more expensive there now than on the Upper East Side,
the, the traditionally expensiveplaces to be.
So where do they go? They go out to Brooklyn, which
was cheaper for a while, but nowBrooklyn gets more and more.
I was talking to a young man notthat long ago who told me that
he can't afford to be in Bushwick anymore and he's going
(15:06):
to move to East New York. You know, so at some point
they're going to push them out to Coney Island and then push
them out into the Atlantic Ocean.
And, and, and doing the pushing is always the price of real
estate, the price of real estate, the price of real
estate. That's what changes everything
in this city, I think. When you look back on the
history of New York or and the people of New York throughout
(15:28):
the history of New York, do you have a favorite collective time
period or era of people and creativity?
There are a couple that I do like and and they're both in
Greenwich Village. I really like Greenwich Village
in the years in the 19 teens, soyears leading up to our getting
involved in in World War One, which changed everything.
(15:51):
But it was the IT was not the first bohemian scene in the
village that there had been one.The first bohemian scene in
America was in the Village in the 1850s.
How do you define a Bohemian? Scene.
They define themselves. They call themselves bohemians.
Well, the idea of Bohemia had had come out of Paris and then
(16:12):
London and it first started hitting New York in the 18th
like mid 1850s. And this group of like frayed
collar writers and journalists and actresses and actors.
There was 1 great actress, her name was Jane Mcaleny, but she
was from North Carolina. She's a great example of
(16:32):
somebody who did not fit where she was in North Carolina and
made a beeline for New York Cityand knew to come.
Even at that point in the 1850s,she knew that she wanted to be
in Greenwich Village, which mostpeople weren't even calling
Greenwich Village at that time. It was the 9th Ward.
But she knew she wanted to be there.
And she came up here and her stage name was Ada Claire.
(16:57):
Like Ada Claire, I'm sure that'swhy she called her so.
That's a good one, no? That I've never read anybody but
she she had to. I'm jealous.
I didn't think that. Out it's a really good she's.
Really good and. And and that was the and they
were calling themselves bohemians and, and the New York
(17:18):
Times was already writing about,oh, those layabouts, those lazy.
They were writing about them thesame way 100 years later, 100
years later, they'd be writing about beatniks.
All they do is hang around in cafes and they don't work.
And they, well, I don't. Know they said that about
Picasso too, see. Exactly.
You didn't see them getting a whole lot of work done.
(17:40):
They were getting a whole lot ofwork done.
What you saw as a tourist, a hipster tourist coming to to
Greenwich Village was them hanging around in their cafes
and their trattorias and eating spaghetti, which was an exotic
dish like in the 19 teens there were there people like watching
them eat spaghetti. There was APG Woodhouse wrote a
(18:03):
song about it in a Broadway musical about we go to, we we
wear our artist smocks and we even eat spaghetti.
So and that's in the 19 teens and that's the period that I
think would be really cool to have been here.
It's the second wave of bohemianism in in the it's when
(18:24):
people start calling Greenwich Village the Left Bank of
America. It was packed with writers and
artists and and Margaret Sanger was there with the Planned
Parenthood. I just, and, and socialists and
communists and anarchists and itwas just popping and all the
time and they were all bouncing off one another and, and, and I
(18:47):
think inspiring one another to do great stuff.
The word changed all that. Aren't getting involved in the
word changed that in a lot of ways and it kind of died down
for a while. The other period is after World
War 2, late 40s through the 50s,downtown New York was booming.
Everybody, literally everybody who was anybody doing anything
(19:10):
avant-garde ish in any of the art forms was in downtown New
York doing it and they were doing it together.
There was a lot of collaboratinggoing on.
I think it would have been a really exciting time and fun
time to have been here. You know, it's interesting you
talk about the different kinds of people.
And I moved to the city in 1984.And I think what made me
(19:32):
gravitate towards it was becauseI felt like I fit here and I
didn't. I did not feel like I fit in
high school. I didn't feel like I fit through
about 24 anywhere. And my first year in New York,
I'm not sure I think I fit here,but I felt like I was welcomed.
There were so many just characters.
It's the only way I could describe it, that we're just
(19:53):
like, you want to hang out with us.
I mean, it was one thing after another that I was just talking
with a friend the other day. I remember this guy Ingo Thuray,
who was a top. You might even remember him.
He was a big model in the, did alot of the Marlboro stuff, did a
lot of stuff in the 80s, Big, big model.
And one night, I had just met him maybe three nights before
(20:18):
from Claire O'Connor, who was a big publicist at the time, and
she was crazy and she was involved with Atom bomb.
It was like just like nutsiness.And he says.
I'm coming to pick you up and I need you to wear your best black
tuxedo jacket. I'm like, well, I don't have 1.
So I remember running to the thrift shop to get a tuxedo
jacket, and he shows up dressed like Marilyn Monroe.
(20:40):
And we went to Patricia Fields fashion show, which I just saw
her down in the. She's down in the Lower East
Side now. Just opened a store.
Yeah. So it was like so many memories.
It was the characters and there was community within those
(21:01):
characters. Nobody cared what anybody else
was doing. You know, you want to go dress
up like a woman who cares? You know?
It was it was all part of the entertainment and bought the
creative juices, I think, out ofeveryone.
What's happening with that? What?
Where are those shifts? Going on, I, I, I hope that some
of that is still happening out in Brooklyn because there are a
(21:23):
lot of young people and a lot ofartists and, and creative people
out in Brooklyn. I do think it's happening here
in New York is like through the eyes of our children, I can see
they're. Good.
Getting into that. That's encouraging to me because
I, I, I don't see a lot. I still have friends here, but
of course, most of my friends are old timers like me so, and
(21:43):
they're still here and they're still making things happen and
I'm still here and I'm still trying to make things happen.
But it doesn't feel the way. I mean, you're talking about how
you didn't feel like you fit in anywhere until you came here.
That's the theme of my book about the village.
The village was like a magnet for misfits.
Why do you think that is? Because at that time, it's hard
(22:06):
to remember now, but up until let's say the 1970, but into the
60s anyway, there were not nodesof, of hipness and
counterculture and the underground spread out all
around the United States or around the world the way they
are now. Like every town with a College
in it has has some hipsters and some and some culture going on
(22:29):
in it. It was not that way in, say, the
1940's, the 1950s, even into the60s.
If you were an artist or an artytype of any sort, if you were
gay, if you were lesbian, if youwanted to dress up as a woman
and you, you were a man. If you were a dancer, a poet, a
political radical, you were pretty much a lonely misfit, an
(22:52):
outsider everywhere you lived around the United States of
America, except you heard about this one tiny little piece of
real estate in lower Manhattan called Greenwich Village, where
it seemed that if you went there, you would be welcomed and
you'd find a whole lot of other arty misfits.
(23:12):
And it was true. And that's and so it became, it
was a great magnet for people from I, when I was doing the
book, I interviewed some, some older arty types who had been in
the Village for 4050, sixty years when I was interviewing
them. And they all said to me, you
know, I was, I grew up on a farmin Iowa and I was, you know, I
like you putting on my sister's lipstick.
(23:35):
And I would I, if I'd have done that out in public, I I'd be
dead. I wouldn't be talking to you
right now. But I heard that there was this
place where guys could do that and nobody, nobody would care.
And I think that when I talk about how liberating New York
was, that's part of what I mean.It was it was liberating for all
(23:58):
kinds of self-expression in a time when self-expression was
pretty much repressed and sometimes even oppressed.
Pretty much everywhere else around the United States of
America, there were little glimmers of in Chicago there was
a little scene for a while, little arty scene, but that died
out. San Francisco, a little bit of a
(24:18):
scene. Laa little bit of a scene.
But if you were in Houston, TX, boy, and you wanted to be, you
know, a ballet dancer, you movedto New York City as as soon as
you could. You know, you mentioned
self-expression and I think self-expression has taken a
major hit and you have observed more about people than a lot of
(24:45):
people have because you've observed them over the years.
You've studied them over the years to be able to write
extremely deeply and articulately about them.
What do you think's going on with self-expression?
I mean, it used to be like, you know, stick it to the man was
like a theme. You know, now it's well, we're
going to comply with the man. The, you know, we're, we're,
we're in a very much complying state, which not that I want to
(25:08):
start a revolution today or anything, but you know, I and I
don't even want to lose that word because we could get
censored for it, you know, so we're not saying that, but I'm
talking about that sense of comply versus be creative and
uniqueness. What's going on?
I it's a really good question and I think it's probably more
(25:31):
complex than we could answer here.
I do think a piece of it is thatthere used to be a sense that
the best thing you could be in America, the best kind of person
you could be in America was an individual, a very individual
individual, even though that wasvery hard to do in a lot of
(25:53):
places, in most anywhere. It's not an easy thing to do.
But I think there was an ethos in America that that was the
best way to be it is to be an individual.
And I think there's much less ofthat now.
We that that social norms have moved much farther towards being
(26:17):
a piece of a group. I'm a member of a group and I
identified by that group. So, so identity politics I think
has said something to do with that with no, you don't want to
be an individual. You want to be a this, you want
to be a that. You want to wear a label and be
that label and then all of you agree with one another.
So and it's not going to be a lot of self-expression in that
(26:40):
context. It's interesting you say that
because, you know, that individualism, I mean, what I
think of when I think of the 1980s, which, you know, the
early, late 70s and early 80s weren't explosively fun for just
playing the character, the character expression.
Just look at the bands of the 19, you know, late 70s and 80s,
(27:03):
you know, from the Ramones to Blondie to, you know, any of
the, even the heavy metal, the hair bands, the everything.
But that individualism of I'm just going to do this for me
versus now it's almost like it shifted.
I'm going to do it and you have to approve it.
Well, there's a lot of that too,like that.
And I think that is part of that.
(27:25):
The identity politics. We don't identify as individuals
anymore. I think pride politics was
became a bit of a problem when you weren't proud about anything
you had done. You were just proud because you
were, you were this or that you,you had, you could wear a label
that you were proud of being that label.
Why don't you do something to beproud of?
(27:45):
And then I'm, I'm all I'm with you.
But it, it's not just that I, I also do think that the, the
digitalization of, of our culture, which which is raced
ahead in ways that even 10 yearsago you wouldn't have pictured
us being this it, it's isolatingit.
(28:07):
And at the same time it, it, it's a, it removes character and
you, you don't have to have character anymore because you're
sitting at home and looking at the screen all the time.
Or you people walking to it justknocks me out that people
walking down the street staring at the, at the thing in their
(28:29):
hands. I, I've never been able to bring
myself to do that. I don't under.
And maybe it's just because I'm I'm too old to know how to do
that, but. But think of all the things
they're missing. When I see a baby in a stroller,
I'm like all the things that kidcould be absorbing around.
Them. Yeah, yeah, I know.
In New York City, of all places to be walking around like that.
(28:50):
I love walking around in Manhattan.
I have from the from before I moved here.
I started coming up here in 1970and was fascinated by it right
away. It's, you know, you could fit
Baltimore into one little cornerof Brooklyn.
I, I was staying with a friend. We had just graduated from high
school and he came up here to goto Columbia and he was in
(29:12):
Morningside Heights. So I came up to visit him that
Christmas time, so Christmas 6970 and he said you got to go
out and see Coney Island. I said, yes, I do.
How do I get there? And he said take the train and
he showed me which and by the time I got there, I thought, am
I in Florida by now that that was the longest subway ride
ever. And when it comes up in Brooklyn
(29:34):
and you're up above stop, it's just and you can say the
Baltimore would be like over here in this little corner.
Let you know before you get to Coney Island.
So the the just the size and thedetail of this city, like if you
walked a block down the street, any St. even with all the new,
not very detailed, not very interesting building that has
(29:56):
gone on, there's still stuff to see.
There's people to see. There's, you know, a rat
dragging a pizza thing. I mean, there's always something
going on and to be walking alongit like that.
I don't understand that. But I do think that's part of
what has happened to our culture.
We've been digitized. And that's why I think
self-expression is is become problematical.
(30:17):
If it, if it, if it has, I thinkthat has a lot to do with it
too. No, I think I couldn't agree
with you more and like when our kids like will express stress
growing up in an AI age, you know, you know, or all the
digital stuff and everything that's happening and how careers
are shifting. I would say just keep thinking
(30:39):
entertainment because eventually, you know, I believe
pendulum swing and you know, obviously in the early twenty
20s we you know, the crap of oh,you can't leave the house, you
know. That didn't help.
No. And, and I think it really has a
(30:59):
huge long tail on how people arebecause I now know people who
just still don't want to go out there for one reason or another.
But I really believe eventually that rubber bands got a snap and
people are going to say I got toget out, I got a party, you
know, like, so anyone who can lead that.
You know. Get that energy going.
(31:19):
And it was, it was certainly, I mean, it's not that long ago
that people were going to raves.Yeah.
And, and, and even that doesn't seem to be happening much
anymore. I don't know.
I, you know, why would I know? I'm 73 years old, but it, it
doesn't seem to be happening as much anymore.
I think. I do think that I I should have
thought that of COVID because I think.
(31:39):
Well, I think they're happening,but we're just not inviting.
I would, I be. Why would they ask me to come to
a rave? So maybe.
They're all so different. I, I, I don't know, I haven't
been to one, but I think you're right about COVID too.
I've thought since then that it was a mistake to quarantine
(32:00):
everybody like that for that long.
I thought it was going to happenfor a couple of weeks and it'll
be sort of interesting. It'd be like you were in the
last Man on Earth movie and thenit dragged on and on and on and
on and on. And the younger they kids were
at that going through that. I think it has damaged their
their social sociability at any rate, if not other things.
(32:23):
How, how are you finding if you were to, you know, Chronicle
2025? Yeah, New York, Yeah.
Where would that book start? Oh, that's a really good idea.
I like the idea. I think with the, the, the fact
that it is the New New York, I think it would start kind of
(32:44):
where I ended the, the Village book where I was saying, you
know, that that was 10 years ago, I guess or so that that we
were in the New New York by then20/13/2012, whenever that book
was and, and the old New York had had definitely passed on.
(33:08):
So I think I would start with that there was a New York City.
It's, that's not the New York City there is now.
Let's, let's look at what's going on now.
And I would have to go out and do a lot more walking around.
I, you know, because what I observe is, first of all,
businesses are having a tough time getting people back into
the office. And even those, even those that
are making it a demand that, youknow, if you want your job, you
(33:31):
have to come, but they're still you Walk on.
Not too long ago, I was walking on 57th St. and I lived on 57th
and 10th one time. But I was walking down 57th St.
which was always bright. Not as bright as Times Square,
but it was bright. And now it's dark because
there's nobody up in those office buildings at night.
(33:51):
So we have the shift in the office space.
You have so empty office places that people found out they could
work from anywhere and then. Another COVID thing.
Yes, and then every building that's going up, I'm always
looking every time I see a some construction going up, you know,
is this an apartment building oris it a hotel?
(34:13):
The amount of hotels that are going up in New York City is
unbelievable. My theory is because what's the
hotel tax? 18.75 S New York can make money
on more hotels, but how does this end up shifting the
landscape? Less people, you know, working
in offices, you know, more hotels than ever?
(34:35):
I really wonder what that shift's going to be like.
And since history kind of repeats itself.
I think it's people stay. The same.
I want to know your thoughts. It's a long wave.
I mean that they were people were first noticing that that
transition, that they were building more and more hotels,
fewer and fewer residential spaces in the city, not the
people not coming into the offices part.
(34:56):
That's that's much more, but hotels versus residential goes
back to Ed Koch. Ed Koch was encouraging for for
exactly the reason you say that,you know, they there was a nice
tax on on hotels and you could make a lot.
The city could make more money off hotels than it could make
off residences residential. Also, he at that point tourism
(35:20):
was really low to, I mean, comparatively speaking, it was
low in New York City because in the 1980's the city was dirty
and screwy and you remember how it was.
It was dangerous and dark and gritty and drugged out and, and
tourists weren't flocking here anymore.
For at that point in the 70s and80s, it was not a tourism, not
(35:40):
the tourism magnet. It has been, It has become
again. And part of that has been
because they knocked a lot of that old stuff down.
They pushed a lot of those old kinds of people out.
They clean. What's has gone up is, is
cleaner, neater, more internationalist.
It's it's less and less that weird, dangerous New York City
(36:03):
that it was back in the 80s or the 70s.
It's more and more parts of it look like San Diego on the
Hudson. Not having, I don't have
anything against San Diego, but it's not New York City.
And some of it looks like Oshkosh on the East River.
It's just amazing how land a lotof the new impact, the new real
(36:29):
estate impact on the city has been and that that blandizing
effect. That's not a right word, but
whatever the right word would be, that's a good.
Word blandizing. I like.
That all right, all right, Well,we just made it up then that
that doesn't it, it, you know, it bleeds out from the buildings
and it has an impact on the people who are here and on the
(36:51):
activities that are here. And, and it makes it a less, I
think it's a less lively, less interesting city than it used to
be. It's also cleaner, neater, less
dangerous and all those things. And that's all good.
That's all to the good. But you, you lose some of the
old New York City every time youknock down a block of old
(37:12):
tenement buildings that people have been in for 150 years and
put up another just bland glass and steel high rise.
And they've been doing that. They that started in the mid 80s
and it has slowed down for a while, but it has really
accelerated over recent years. Every time you turn around,
(37:33):
there's another finger building sticking up out of Midtown
Manhattan. You can go too far with that.
And I think maybe they are and it's it does have an impact.
I want to go back to some New York characters because you've
written about so many. Do you have a few favorite New
York characters that really stand out in your mind?
I have bunches. I have bunches.
(37:56):
I really like. Victoria Woodhull.
Victoria Woodhull was the first woman in the United States to
run for president, like 50 yearsbefore women could even vote.
She did it in the 1870s. She was also a spiritualist, a
sex worker, a con man. She opened the first women run
(38:20):
brokerage on Wall Street. She had the first women owned
and run newspaper in the United States.
She was just as fascinating characters all over the map.
And when she ran for president, she was in jail.
The the on Election Day, she hadbeen jailed by the morality
(38:42):
police in New York City. Fascinating character,
troublesome character. I don't understand why that
movie has never been made. There's been some good
biographies, however. But she started out in this
tiny, little muddy, dirty littletown somewhere in, I think it
was Ohio, somewhere in the Midwest.
But she was one of those people.She like kind of made a beeline
(39:06):
for New York City and right after the Civil War, when New
York City was roiling and it wasfull of money and people not
knowing where to spend their money.
And she said, I'm going there because she was a con man, among
many other things that she was. So I love Victoria.
She's a great character. And, you know, and there's
(39:27):
bunches of those. There's just tons of those kinds
of characters in New York that you know, when it would be
difficult to be the historian ofa lot of other cities in new in
the country. The way I can be the an
historian of New York City because it's just packed with
(39:48):
interesting people like that. And from the 16th cent 1600s on,
there's always been fascinating people doing interesting things,
good, bad and indifferent. Well, not indifferent.
Good and bad in New York City, where that's a little harder to
say about other places. If you had a a book today and
new a couple of New York characters you'd focus on, where
(40:10):
would you start? Well, actually I am getting
ready to start on the book, a little 1A slim one about Marcel
Duchamp coming to to New York City and his impact, his impact
on New York City and New York City's impact on him.
He's an amazing character. He was turning the New York art
scene upside down before he evengot here.
(40:32):
Because that painting is the famous nude Descending of
staircase #2 show was here in ina night in the 1913 Armory Show,
the famous Armory Show where modern art came to New York
City. And he was part of modern art.
But he was for whatever reason, New Yorkers just keyed on that
one painting that they thought was either amazing or stupid or
(40:55):
or ridiculously. There was a lot of jokes about
it. Every newspaper had cartoonists
doing parodies of it, and he hadno idea any of that was going
on. And he wasn't even being an
artist at that point. He was working in a library in
France, Came to New York like 2-3 years later, three years
later, I think, and was amazed to find out that he was this.
(41:15):
Everybody knew who he was. He was infamous in New York City
and he loved it because he lovedbeing famous or infamous.
And then he went on to keep altering New York City's art
scene, which in the 20th centurymeant you were altering the art
scene for the world. The whole time.
You say he was here, he laughed,he came back, he laughed.
(41:37):
And then he came here and stayed.
And he's a great character. And I'm going to have a lot of
fun writing his book. Oh, that sounds like a good one.
How do you decide who you're going to write or what you're
going to write, and how do you tie it?
That New York story in there. It's different every time.
My my most recent book is about the Soviet space industry.
Yes, it's just a lot of it's just I'm interested in a lot of
(42:02):
things. I'm not there are writers who
like they write the one book andthen they spend the rest of
their lives talking about that book in one way or another, and
that's fine. But I, I, I, I couldn't do that.
I I'm interested in too much stuff and if I get to write
about one, one out of 50 things that I'm interested in every now
and again, I'm, I'm a happy man.So I've always been interested
(42:25):
in that. So and, and I talked to the
publisher and to let me do that one.
So and that's how it usually happens.
I, I, I want to do, I actually, I wanted to do my, my 2 lobes of
downtown as one giant book. And I got talked out of that.
Then people were like, no, that would be a really, really giant
book. So I did the village 1st and
then later I've done this littleone with my pal Clayton
(42:48):
Patterson, who live still lives on the Lower East Side about
some of the characters that we have written about before.
But I would love to do the giantLower East Side history too.
That's it's It's a great book, waiting for me to write it,
frankly. What's your writing style?
Because you are the guy to writethat book on the Lower East
Side. What's your writing style?
I read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read.
(43:10):
And as I'm doing it, I'm taking notes and I'm writing.
I'm writing, writing, and I build it up into a book.
Sometimes I know, like with the Soviet book, I knew what that
book was about before I even started it because it I had been
thinking about it for a long time.
But a lot of the others, I have a vague notion of what it's
going to be about. But it's as I'm writing it that
(43:30):
I figure out what the book is, what it is ultimately going to
say about whatever the the topicis.
How would you define your writing discipline?
I I I have done. Oh, I don't believe it.
You can't have this many books and the stack is actually much
higher than. It is higher than.
Much, much higher than this. It's like, ridiculous.
(43:51):
You know, so you do have a discipline.
OK, what is it? I write every day, OK, That's I.
I'm not. I don't know that I'm
disciplined about it. It's more like I'm driven to do
it. I have to do it.
I've been writing since I was like 12 years old and I just, I,
I have to do it. I get start to get really crazy
if I'm not writing for a couple of days Even so that's really
(44:13):
the answer. I'm just do.
You keep a lot of notebooks. No, no, some notes, but no, I, I
grad. I actually went digital.
I, it's all on the computer now.I and A lot of the books I read
are on the computer now. There's really good digital
archives online now so that you don't have to.
I, when I moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan last year, I had
(44:39):
I, it's a shame, but I couldn't figure out what else to do with
it. I, my library basically got
thrown away. I know, I know, but kind of
nobody was interested in taking it.
So I said, I mean, I had a couple of friends who came and
picked what they wanted out of it, but I had thousands of books
lying around. The house was, my apartment was
(44:59):
ridiculous. It looked like a book bomb had
gone off in it. And I just, and I, I couldn't
see myself not having them around me all the time.
But I, I moved into a much smaller space because I moved to
Manhattan and I just, you know, it, they're gone.
They're gone. It's all online.
I'll find it again if I need to find it online.
(45:22):
I love the Internet. I hated the Internet for a
while. I was an old, old fashioned
type, but I think the internet'sa great thing.
The Internet is a great thing, but it's so funny every time we
talk about, you know, downsizing.
And some I have those days when I'm like, I just want to go live
in an Airstream. And, and the first reaction from
my family is, oh, yeah. And are we allowed to come?
(45:45):
Or is it just you and your books?
Because I love books. I sort of feel liberated from
them. When I got rid of them, it
looked like Fahrenheit 451. The guys were like throwing them
out the window, literally throwing them out the window
into a bin that they were hauling off somewhere, you know,
I guess to the to the trash. And there were some great books
(46:06):
in there, but they're online somewhere.
I'll find them if I need them. Do you wake up in the middle of
the night with ideas and have toget up and jot them down?
Yes, all the time. All the time, yeah.
And do you actually get up or doyou just like keep a little
notepad next? To you.
No, I get up because I don't have notepads anymore.
I have to go over to the computer and do that.
Can you about go back to sleep after that or does it set you on
(46:27):
the? Mode.
Yeah, it depends. Yeah.
Yeah, it depends. When you said you write every
day, do you do it as like a discipline where you say I'm
going to write for 15 minutes orI'm just going?
The urge strikes. It just sometimes I get up and
I'm I'm, I'm almost always sitting there right away, but
sometimes takes a long time to crank myself up in it.
(46:49):
But by the end of the day, I have done something.
I I when I am asked to go talk to writing students, I always
say two things. A had a second career, like be a
dental hygienist or something, because being a writer is a
ridiculous way to make money in America.
But two, if you want to be a writer, write every day.
(47:10):
Write every day. Even if you're just writing a
letter, even you're just writingnotes.
And people I know, writers who write, it's like they're,
they're carving it in stone and they write one word and then
they walk away from it and they're unhappy with it and, and
come back three days later and write the next word.
That's a very bad way to be a writer, I think, and just write.
(47:32):
Just write, write, write, write,write.
Musicians play every day. Dancers dance every day.
Writers should write every day. How do you find the define the
difference between writing and editing?
Well, that's a good one. I've done both.
I've done a lot of both. Not just editing my own stuff,
but a lot of I edited a newspaper for 12 years.
(47:57):
It is very different. They're they're they're
different experiences. I love editing other people's
work. If if they're especially if
they're good writers, because then you don't have to do much,
but you get to read their stuff.And and in that case, as an
editor, you're just kind of an encourager.
You're just saying, yeah, this is I love this.
This is good. Keep going.
(48:19):
It's, you know, it's different, it's lonelier being when you're
doing the writing. And I don't particularly like
being edited. I always think I'm a better
editor than whoever my editor is.
Almost always. I've had a couple good ones.
I never liked being edited. No and.
Nobody does. Probably because, you know, the
editor's job is to tell you cut that, shut that, shut up.
(48:42):
No, I don't. That could move better if you
you think shut up. Where do you think literature
writing is going to go in the future?
We, we've only got about 5 minutes left and I'm looking for
your take on the landscape of AI, the hit it's going to how
it's impacting everything. What do you think's going to be
(49:04):
the future of writing? Which I mean, I, I'm just going
to say I, I can't think of who said it might have been.
Peter Thiel said we need books because books are time stamped
in history. The Internet is not.
And that scares me when I think about that.
(49:25):
That's probably one of the reasons I love books.
You can't change it. You know, Gone with the Wind was
written as Gone with the Wind and it's going to be Gone with
the Wind. Now we've got Snow White that
crashed at the box office. Somebody's going to rewrite it.
What do you think? It's, it's a really good point
and I have dealt some, I have a good friend out in Hollywood and
I've and I've watched him dealing with all that, how that
(49:48):
stuff happens out there. And I think it has as writing
became like a, a wing of the entertainment industry, which
also started happening in the 1980s.
I don't know if that's coincidental.
It has become more and more it'sharder for it to be the art form
(50:10):
it was back in the day. You know, for instance,
literature in American, Americanliterature is it peaked in 1970,
something it hasn't been there hasn't been great new literary
writing in America for a long time now.
I'm, I'm sure people would hate to hear me say that, but I, I
(50:31):
think it's true. So AI that's not a good thing
for writing. Obviously.
The more that that I just, there's an ad and I almost just
out of curiosity, responded to it where they say, you know,
having trouble writing that book, Just push this button and
it'll write it for you. I'll say no, no, no, but they're
(50:54):
going to teach it to write pretty good books.
I think at some point. It's certainly the kind of
novels that that are we used to call airport novels that, you
know, it's just they're just thespy did this.
The girl fell in love with that.Those kind of books, those kind
of novels. AI probably could be writing
those kind of, I probably could have been writing those kind of
novels 50 years ago. So but literature, literature,
(51:17):
honest to God, writing, writing.I know there are people doing
it. I think it's harder and harder
and harder for them to get it seen by anyone.
It was never that easy, but I think nowadays, where are the
venues where they can get their work seen?
There are still, I guess, some small literary magazines,
literary online literary magazines.
(51:40):
I know some people, but AI is not a good thing.
I think for writing, for creativity in general.
Who do you want to see a movie that AI generated?
No, as a tool, fine. As a tool to help that movie
maker make something happen on screen that they couldn't make
happen on screen, fine. But then it's just like CGI or
(52:04):
something or or the old special effects when you had to build
the model of King Kong and move him around one, one thing at a
time. That's all.
In that sense, AI is just the newest version of King Kong.
But when it's actually creating and, and, and nobody's involved
in it, in it writing that movie or writing that book, that's I
(52:27):
think that is a problem. I agree, I agree.
We need, we need, we need more people like you writing good
books, John. Thank you very much.
These You're a spectacular writer.
Thank you. You know, I really want to thank
you for joining me and I, I could talk to you for another
hour, but we're out of time. So we might have to do this
(52:47):
again because we have a lot of your books we could still cover.
That's true. So thank you very much.
Thank you. I'm Diane Grissel.
This has been the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics
podcast. My guest was John Strauss Baugh
and I really recommend you checkout his books.
Below this podcast, you'll be able to find all links to his
(53:07):
Amazon page to his website. I highly recommend his books.
Buy them, share them, subscribe to this podcast and share it as
well. See you soon.
Thanks a lot. Thank you, John.
Thank you.
Hello everyone, I'm Diane Grissell.
I'm also known as Silver Disobedience and this is the
Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast.
And I am sitting in iconic Manhattan Center, which is my
collaboration partner on some ofthese podcasts.
And it is a lot of fun to be here because there's a lot of
(00:22):
history. And Speaking of history today,
our guest is John Straussbaugh. He is considered the historian,
the biographer, truly the biographer of New York.
And one of the things we were talking about that we're going
(00:43):
to get right into is how New York evolves yet stays the same.
And we'll talk about all those differences that we experience
in every day in the history of New York.
John, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me. How did New York become this
passion play for you? It's I just, it's such a
(01:06):
fascinating place. If you want to be writing
history, which I do, you could write a million books about New
York City and and die and come back and write a million more.
It's the history is so deep, so layered, so messy, so fractal.
There's a lot of, so there's weird, common, the weird
(01:27):
connections between this person and that person and somebody in
the 18th century and somebody inthe 21st century.
And, and I'm not very interestedin like institutional history or
organizational history or the history of buildings.
I'm interested in people. People are history.
(01:47):
So New York has either birthed or attracted so very, very many
fascinating, interesting movers and shakers, and always forever
since the 17th century. So why not become its
(02:11):
biographer? And you do such a good job about
that. And a theme you, you know, I you
have Victory City and you know, focusing on New York during
World War Two. You wrote about the village, you
know, Greenwich Village and you know, it's, it's starts to more
current time and who it's attracted and what's going on.
(02:34):
You have a book about the Lower East Side and the characters on
the Lower East Side. You know, the big thing that I
found is reading your books. You realize humanity doesn't
change that much. So what do you observe?
Now that is true. People are people.
People have always been people. Things change.
(02:56):
We, we have developed technologically over the
millennia, but I'm not sure we're very different from when
we were, you know, in a cave squatting over a little fire in
the dark. I think humanity is if, if we
change at all, we change very, very slowly over tremendous
(03:20):
amounts of time. So it's, I think one of the
cliches, one of the bad cliches about history is that, oh, it's
about people who dressed funny and, and walked funny and, and,
and we're different from who we are and how we are.
No, they weren't. If you know anything about New
(03:41):
Yorkers in the 19th century, they were the same bustling,
loud, crazy people that they were in the 20th century and
that I guess we still are in the21st.
And I think that's true anywhere.
People are people. And, and again, I don't consider
myself as an historian. I'm not a scholar.
(04:01):
I'm not a professor. I'm an historiographer.
I write about history for everybody else to read, not just
for scholars to read. I think that in that case, the
most interesting kinds of history to be writing about are
are the people, the people history and the characters, the
(04:22):
figures, not always the famous ones.
I, I always, I'm trying to ferret out people that aren't
very well known but are fascinating.
The book I wrote on the Lower East Side, There's no famous
people in that book, but there are a lot of they're all
fascinating people and, and, andvery accomplished, each in his
or her or her own way. So I love people as a subject
(04:45):
and I could keep on doing this forever.
What do you think it is that brings the different characters
and personalities to New York? It's the powerhouse of the
nation. New York has always been, you
know, the not always, but from very early on it was the
largest, busiest, wealthiest, craziest, hardest city in in the
(05:06):
United States. And it's, and it's not the
largest anymore, but it's still all those other things.
I think New York City has definitely changed a lot since I
think it was the old New York upinto maybe the mid 1980s or so.
And then it really began shifting to the new New York,
which a lot of us who remember the old New York aren't very
(05:27):
happy about. But here we are.
It's it's not quite, I don't think it's quite the Dynamo it
used to be, but for centuries itwas the Dynamo.
It was the capital of the UnitedStates in every way except for
politics. Washington, DC was the political
capital. New York was the financial
capital, the shipping capital, the manufacturing capital.
(05:49):
We don't think of it as a factory town.
You know, we think of places like Detroit as or Pittsburgh as
factory towns. But it was in fact the biggest
factory town in America well into the 20th century.
It was the media capital, which is not so much anymore, but
movies, radio, TV, newspapers, book publishing all happened in
(06:09):
New York City and then went out to the rest of the country and
the rest of the world. And it was like what I call a
culture engine, especially New York, downtown New York, NY
below 14th St. which is a special interest for me because
it was I my metaphor for it was that it was a great cultural
brain and there it had two hemispheres like our brains.
(06:33):
One was Greenwich Village and the other was the Lower East
Side. And between those two
hemispheres, they it churned outart and entertainment from the
lowest of the low to the highestof the avant-garde high for
through the 19th and 20th centuries and for the world.
(06:53):
And because of all that, New York was a magnet for people who
wanted to be here and be part ofthat in any way.
Like, as they wanted to be on Wall Street, they wanted to be
in Greenwich Village, they wanted to be making movies, they
wanted to be whatever, you know,in fashion or in the media.
So it was, it was a magnet for people who could make it here.
(07:17):
You know, there's not all that stuff about how, you know, if
you can make it New York, you can make it anywhere.
It's a cliche, but like a lot ofcliches, there's a lot of truth
in it. If you could come here and, and
and put up with all the things you have to put up with to be
here, it was a place of liberation, I think for a lot of
people in a whole lot of ways where they could express
(07:41):
themselves, be themselves, make something of themselves.
What you mentioned earlier that sometime in the 80s things
seemed to have shifted from old New York to New New York kind of
thing. What what was the catalyst
behind that shift, and what are the things you've seen changing?
(08:01):
As most of the stories you can tell about New York City, it
comes down to three things, the price of real estate, the price
of real estate and the price of real estate.
And it really, it had always, you know, it's always been a
very expensive place to be sinceway back.
But it got more and more and more.
That accelerated tremendously inthe 80s, certainly in the 90s.
(08:27):
And then in this century, the 21st century, it is just Zorg
skyrocketing, all these giganticbuildings going up.
One of the impacts of that is that it it really has lost a lot
of its old character. Every city, every town, every
locality in the world, I would say, has its own personality.
(08:50):
New York had its very different personality from Baltimore,
where I'm from. We're from LA, which is another
giant city, but a very differentgiant city, or Dallas, Fort
Worth, which is completely different from any of those
others. They all have their own
character and personality. You can mess with that and
change it if all you're looking to do is having is make money on
(09:16):
it and and have an economic impact in it, which
unfortunately a lot of those kind of people have always been
attracted to New York too. There's a, a lot of, I won't
mention a certain person's name,but a certain person who's done
very well for himself since he was a real estate hustler in New
(09:37):
York City back in the 80s and 90s.
They, they tend to, if you're only in it for the money, if
you're only building to make money on it, it, it's going to
have probably a deleterious effect on the character and, and
the personality of the city. And I think that's definitely
(09:58):
happened in New York City. It's not the New York, even the
New York I moved to in 1990. So just in that amount of time,
30, whatever years it's, it's lost.
Some of its old. The neighborhoods aren't quite
neighborhoods anymore. A lot of them the Greenwich
Village doesn't it looks like Greenwich Village still of
course, because that's you can'tknock all that down or you
(10:19):
wouldn't have Greenwich Village.But this the spirit of it is not
there anymore. A lot of once again, I, I, I'm
mostly in or I had a lot of interest in downtown New York,
NY with low 14th St. And all of that is, is it's
completely changed just in my time in New York City.
(10:40):
But they also seem to be the thelast bastion.
Fight. They're hanging in there.
York all the time in the. Upper West Side, a little is
hanging in there a little. Way Upper West Side.
You've got to get more towards Harlem well.
You know, but even Harlem. Morningside Heights kind of
thing to get some of that vibe, but.
Not much, right? No, no.
And it's, and, and I do think that's almost entirely because
(11:04):
of the, the, the power of real estate development in in
Manhattan and bleeding out into Brooklyn and some point it'll
bleed out in the Queens and brought in the Bronx and
probably never Staten Island, but I don't think so.
So there's been one of the majoreffects that it's had,
(11:26):
especially downtown that, that there since the 80s, there's
been a great diaspora of the kinds of creative types,
artists, writers, intellectuals,political radicals, feminists,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,et cetera, gays, lesbians, et
cetera, et cetera, who used to all be attracted to downtown
(11:48):
Manhattan and came here and created that cultural brain that
I'm, that I'm talking about. And we're churning out
tremendous amounts of culture for the world.
And the whole world sent its creative people here to be a
part of that. The, in the, the 20th century,
nobody who was anybody in the arts in the world did not at
least pass through downtown Manhattan.
(12:10):
And many came and stayed. They're not going to do that
now. That's the IT used to be a
magnet for misfits and and Mystics and visionaries, and now
it's a magnet for millionaires. Fine, OK, But that's a different
city than it was even when I first got here in 1990.
In a, in a really big way. It's where, you know, I, I have
(12:33):
two kids, one's 21 and one's 24 and, you know, the 21 year old
is skateboarder and very attracted to the gritty
underground of New York. You know, the kids who were
putting that graffiti on your building that you're really
pissed off about. But I mean, it's like he, he
reminds me of, you know, when I moved to New York, you wanted
(12:56):
that edge, you wanted that creativity.
You wanted to be around the writer who was working on their
book, the artist who was, you know, trying to, you know, sell
their art, the musician that wasplaying some kind of punk and
they could play 3 chords. But boy, it sounded good and you
banged your head to it. Three chords, yeah.
(13:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the dressing.
You know what everyone would wear?
The Who. Like who came up with the best
thrift shop outfit. I loved it.
I still do. Well, and, and that's
encouraging to me that he's intothat.
I mean, one of the things is, isthat if you, if you look at the
history of, of New York City, people have been counting it out
and, and just say, no, it's over.
(13:38):
It's done for a couple centuriesnow.
You know, the, the, the Greenwich Village was supposedly
done, done, done by 1920. No artist would ever move there
again and that's not true. They there was several more
generations. Now it does appear to be done,
but. I think they've shifted to the
(13:59):
East Village in the lower. East, not even the Lower East
Side anymore. I all, everybody I used to know,
I used to live on the Lower EastSide.
I don't know. I know one.
Yeah, one guy who's still there.Everybody else is left.
They're there in Brooklyn. The part of the diaspora has
been that they forced the artists and the, the thing about
artists in America that has always been a truism is that
(14:23):
it's a terrible way to make money.
Being, being arty and in any sense a writer, a poet, a
dancer, a musician, whatever, it's a terrible way to make
money. Some few do, but most don't.
So they're always looking for, they need to find cheap places
to live and work. They, they have to have those.
Greenwich Village was that for along time, it's not that
anymore. The East Village and Lower East
(14:45):
Side was that for a long time. It's not that anymore.
It's, it's more expensive there now than on the Upper East Side,
the, the traditionally expensiveplaces to be.
So where do they go? They go out to Brooklyn, which
was cheaper for a while, but nowBrooklyn gets more and more.
I was talking to a young man notthat long ago who told me that
he can't afford to be in Bushwick anymore and he's going
(15:06):
to move to East New York. You know, so at some point
they're going to push them out to Coney Island and then push
them out into the Atlantic Ocean.
And, and, and doing the pushing is always the price of real
estate, the price of real estate, the price of real
estate. That's what changes everything
in this city, I think. When you look back on the
history of New York or and the people of New York throughout
(15:28):
the history of New York, do you have a favorite collective time
period or era of people and creativity?
There are a couple that I do like and and they're both in
Greenwich Village. I really like Greenwich Village
in the years in the 19 teens, soyears leading up to our getting
involved in in World War One, which changed everything.
(15:51):
But it was the IT was not the first bohemian scene in the
village that there had been one.The first bohemian scene in
America was in the Village in the 1850s.
How do you define a Bohemian? Scene.
They define themselves. They call themselves bohemians.
Well, the idea of Bohemia had had come out of Paris and then
(16:12):
London and it first started hitting New York in the 18th
like mid 1850s. And this group of like frayed
collar writers and journalists and actresses and actors.
There was 1 great actress, her name was Jane Mcaleny, but she
was from North Carolina. She's a great example of
(16:32):
somebody who did not fit where she was in North Carolina and
made a beeline for New York Cityand knew to come.
Even at that point in the 1850s,she knew that she wanted to be
in Greenwich Village, which mostpeople weren't even calling
Greenwich Village at that time. It was the 9th Ward.
But she knew she wanted to be there.
And she came up here and her stage name was Ada Claire.
(16:57):
Like Ada Claire, I'm sure that'swhy she called her so.
That's a good one, no? That I've never read anybody but
she she had to. I'm jealous.
I didn't think that. Out it's a really good she's.
Really good and. And and that was the and they
were calling themselves bohemians and, and the New York
(17:18):
Times was already writing about,oh, those layabouts, those lazy.
They were writing about them thesame way 100 years later, 100
years later, they'd be writing about beatniks.
All they do is hang around in cafes and they don't work.
And they, well, I don't. Know they said that about
Picasso too, see. Exactly.
You didn't see them getting a whole lot of work done.
(17:40):
They were getting a whole lot ofwork done.
What you saw as a tourist, a hipster tourist coming to to
Greenwich Village was them hanging around in their cafes
and their trattorias and eating spaghetti, which was an exotic
dish like in the 19 teens there were there people like watching
them eat spaghetti. There was APG Woodhouse wrote a
(18:03):
song about it in a Broadway musical about we go to, we we
wear our artist smocks and we even eat spaghetti.
So and that's in the 19 teens and that's the period that I
think would be really cool to have been here.
It's the second wave of bohemianism in in the it's when
(18:24):
people start calling Greenwich Village the Left Bank of
America. It was packed with writers and
artists and and Margaret Sanger was there with the Planned
Parenthood. I just, and, and socialists and
communists and anarchists and itwas just popping and all the
time and they were all bouncing off one another and, and, and I
(18:47):
think inspiring one another to do great stuff.
The word changed all that. Aren't getting involved in the
word changed that in a lot of ways and it kind of died down
for a while. The other period is after World
War 2, late 40s through the 50s,downtown New York was booming.
Everybody, literally everybody who was anybody doing anything
(19:10):
avant-garde ish in any of the art forms was in downtown New
York doing it and they were doing it together.
There was a lot of collaboratinggoing on.
I think it would have been a really exciting time and fun
time to have been here. You know, it's interesting you
talk about the different kinds of people.
And I moved to the city in 1984.And I think what made me
(19:32):
gravitate towards it was becauseI felt like I fit here and I
didn't. I did not feel like I fit in
high school. I didn't feel like I fit through
about 24 anywhere. And my first year in New York,
I'm not sure I think I fit here,but I felt like I was welcomed.
There were so many just characters.
It's the only way I could describe it, that we're just
(19:53):
like, you want to hang out with us.
I mean, it was one thing after another that I was just talking
with a friend the other day. I remember this guy Ingo Thuray,
who was a top. You might even remember him.
He was a big model in the, did alot of the Marlboro stuff, did a
lot of stuff in the 80s, Big, big model.
And one night, I had just met him maybe three nights before
(20:18):
from Claire O'Connor, who was a big publicist at the time, and
she was crazy and she was involved with Atom bomb.
It was like just like nutsiness.And he says.
I'm coming to pick you up and I need you to wear your best black
tuxedo jacket. I'm like, well, I don't have 1.
So I remember running to the thrift shop to get a tuxedo
jacket, and he shows up dressed like Marilyn Monroe.
(20:40):
And we went to Patricia Fields fashion show, which I just saw
her down in the. She's down in the Lower East
Side now. Just opened a store.
Yeah. So it was like so many memories.
It was the characters and there was community within those
(21:01):
characters. Nobody cared what anybody else
was doing. You know, you want to go dress
up like a woman who cares? You know?
It was it was all part of the entertainment and bought the
creative juices, I think, out ofeveryone.
What's happening with that? What?
Where are those shifts? Going on, I, I, I hope that some
of that is still happening out in Brooklyn because there are a
(21:23):
lot of young people and a lot ofartists and, and creative people
out in Brooklyn. I do think it's happening here
in New York is like through the eyes of our children, I can see
they're. Good.
Getting into that. That's encouraging to me because
I, I, I don't see a lot. I still have friends here, but
of course, most of my friends are old timers like me so, and
(21:43):
they're still here and they're still making things happen and
I'm still here and I'm still trying to make things happen.
But it doesn't feel the way. I mean, you're talking about how
you didn't feel like you fit in anywhere until you came here.
That's the theme of my book about the village.
The village was like a magnet for misfits.
Why do you think that is? Because at that time, it's hard
(22:06):
to remember now, but up until let's say the 1970, but into the
60s anyway, there were not nodesof, of hipness and
counterculture and the underground spread out all
around the United States or around the world the way they
are now. Like every town with a College
in it has has some hipsters and some and some culture going on
(22:29):
in it. It was not that way in, say, the
1940's, the 1950s, even into the60s.
If you were an artist or an artytype of any sort, if you were
gay, if you were lesbian, if youwanted to dress up as a woman
and you, you were a man. If you were a dancer, a poet, a
political radical, you were pretty much a lonely misfit, an
(22:52):
outsider everywhere you lived around the United States of
America, except you heard about this one tiny little piece of
real estate in lower Manhattan called Greenwich Village, where
it seemed that if you went there, you would be welcomed and
you'd find a whole lot of other arty misfits.
(23:12):
And it was true. And that's and so it became, it
was a great magnet for people from I, when I was doing the
book, I interviewed some, some older arty types who had been in
the Village for 4050, sixty years when I was interviewing
them. And they all said to me, you
know, I was, I grew up on a farmin Iowa and I was, you know, I
like you putting on my sister's lipstick.
(23:35):
And I would I, if I'd have done that out in public, I I'd be
dead. I wouldn't be talking to you
right now. But I heard that there was this
place where guys could do that and nobody, nobody would care.
And I think that when I talk about how liberating New York
was, that's part of what I mean.It was it was liberating for all
(23:58):
kinds of self-expression in a time when self-expression was
pretty much repressed and sometimes even oppressed.
Pretty much everywhere else around the United States of
America, there were little glimmers of in Chicago there was
a little scene for a while, little arty scene, but that died
out. San Francisco, a little bit of a
(24:18):
scene. Laa little bit of a scene.
But if you were in Houston, TX, boy, and you wanted to be, you
know, a ballet dancer, you movedto New York City as as soon as
you could. You know, you mentioned
self-expression and I think self-expression has taken a
major hit and you have observed more about people than a lot of
(24:45):
people have because you've observed them over the years.
You've studied them over the years to be able to write
extremely deeply and articulately about them.
What do you think's going on with self-expression?
I mean, it used to be like, you know, stick it to the man was
like a theme. You know, now it's well, we're
going to comply with the man. The, you know, we're, we're,
we're in a very much complying state, which not that I want to
(25:08):
start a revolution today or anything, but you know, I and I
don't even want to lose that word because we could get
censored for it, you know, so we're not saying that, but I'm
talking about that sense of comply versus be creative and
uniqueness. What's going on?
I it's a really good question and I think it's probably more
(25:31):
complex than we could answer here.
I do think a piece of it is thatthere used to be a sense that
the best thing you could be in America, the best kind of person
you could be in America was an individual, a very individual
individual, even though that wasvery hard to do in a lot of
(25:53):
places, in most anywhere. It's not an easy thing to do.
But I think there was an ethos in America that that was the
best way to be it is to be an individual.
And I think there's much less ofthat now.
We that that social norms have moved much farther towards being
(26:17):
a piece of a group. I'm a member of a group and I
identified by that group. So, so identity politics I think
has said something to do with that with no, you don't want to
be an individual. You want to be a this, you want
to be a that. You want to wear a label and be
that label and then all of you agree with one another.
So and it's not going to be a lot of self-expression in that
(26:40):
context. It's interesting you say that
because, you know, that individualism, I mean, what I
think of when I think of the 1980s, which, you know, the
early, late 70s and early 80s weren't explosively fun for just
playing the character, the character expression.
Just look at the bands of the 19, you know, late 70s and 80s,
(27:03):
you know, from the Ramones to Blondie to, you know, any of
the, even the heavy metal, the hair bands, the everything.
But that individualism of I'm just going to do this for me
versus now it's almost like it shifted.
I'm going to do it and you have to approve it.
Well, there's a lot of that too,like that.
And I think that is part of that.
(27:25):
The identity politics. We don't identify as individuals
anymore. I think pride politics was
became a bit of a problem when you weren't proud about anything
you had done. You were just proud because you
were, you were this or that you,you had, you could wear a label
that you were proud of being that label.
Why don't you do something to beproud of?
(27:45):
And then I'm, I'm all I'm with you.
But it, it's not just that I, I also do think that the, the
digitalization of, of our culture, which which is raced
ahead in ways that even 10 yearsago you wouldn't have pictured
us being this it, it's isolatingit.
(28:07):
And at the same time it, it, it's a, it removes character and
you, you don't have to have character anymore because you're
sitting at home and looking at the screen all the time.
Or you people walking to it justknocks me out that people
walking down the street staring at the, at the thing in their
(28:29):
hands. I, I've never been able to bring
myself to do that. I don't under.
And maybe it's just because I'm I'm too old to know how to do
that, but. But think of all the things
they're missing. When I see a baby in a stroller,
I'm like all the things that kidcould be absorbing around.
Them. Yeah, yeah, I know.
In New York City, of all places to be walking around like that.
(28:50):
I love walking around in Manhattan.
I have from the from before I moved here.
I started coming up here in 1970and was fascinated by it right
away. It's, you know, you could fit
Baltimore into one little cornerof Brooklyn.
I, I was staying with a friend. We had just graduated from high
school and he came up here to goto Columbia and he was in
(29:12):
Morningside Heights. So I came up to visit him that
Christmas time, so Christmas 6970 and he said you got to go
out and see Coney Island. I said, yes, I do.
How do I get there? And he said take the train and
he showed me which and by the time I got there, I thought, am
I in Florida by now that that was the longest subway ride
ever. And when it comes up in Brooklyn
(29:34):
and you're up above stop, it's just and you can say the
Baltimore would be like over here in this little corner.
Let you know before you get to Coney Island.
So the the just the size and thedetail of this city, like if you
walked a block down the street, any St. even with all the new,
not very detailed, not very interesting building that has
(29:56):
gone on, there's still stuff to see.
There's people to see. There's, you know, a rat
dragging a pizza thing. I mean, there's always something
going on and to be walking alongit like that.
I don't understand that. But I do think that's part of
what has happened to our culture.
We've been digitized. And that's why I think
self-expression is is become problematical.
(30:17):
If it, if it, if it has, I thinkthat has a lot to do with it
too. No, I think I couldn't agree
with you more and like when our kids like will express stress
growing up in an AI age, you know, you know, or all the
digital stuff and everything that's happening and how careers
are shifting. I would say just keep thinking
(30:39):
entertainment because eventually, you know, I believe
pendulum swing and you know, obviously in the early twenty
20s we you know, the crap of oh,you can't leave the house, you
know. That didn't help.
No. And, and I think it really has a
(30:59):
huge long tail on how people arebecause I now know people who
just still don't want to go out there for one reason or another.
But I really believe eventually that rubber bands got a snap and
people are going to say I got toget out, I got a party, you
know, like, so anyone who can lead that.
You know. Get that energy going.
(31:19):
And it was, it was certainly, I mean, it's not that long ago
that people were going to raves.Yeah.
And, and, and even that doesn't seem to be happening much
anymore. I don't know.
I, you know, why would I know? I'm 73 years old, but it, it
doesn't seem to be happening as much anymore.
I think. I do think that I I should have
thought that of COVID because I think.
(31:39):
Well, I think they're happening,but we're just not inviting.
I would, I be. Why would they ask me to come to
a rave? So maybe.
They're all so different. I, I, I don't know, I haven't
been to one, but I think you're right about COVID too.
I've thought since then that it was a mistake to quarantine
(32:00):
everybody like that for that long.
I thought it was going to happenfor a couple of weeks and it'll
be sort of interesting. It'd be like you were in the
last Man on Earth movie and thenit dragged on and on and on and
on and on. And the younger they kids were
at that going through that. I think it has damaged their
their social sociability at any rate, if not other things.
(32:23):
How, how are you finding if you were to, you know, Chronicle
2025? Yeah, New York, Yeah.
Where would that book start? Oh, that's a really good idea.
I like the idea. I think with the, the, the fact
that it is the New New York, I think it would start kind of
(32:44):
where I ended the, the Village book where I was saying, you
know, that that was 10 years ago, I guess or so that that we
were in the New New York by then20/13/2012, whenever that book
was and, and the old New York had had definitely passed on.
(33:08):
So I think I would start with that there was a New York City.
It's, that's not the New York City there is now.
Let's, let's look at what's going on now.
And I would have to go out and do a lot more walking around.
I, you know, because what I observe is, first of all,
businesses are having a tough time getting people back into
the office. And even those, even those that
are making it a demand that, youknow, if you want your job, you
(33:31):
have to come, but they're still you Walk on.
Not too long ago, I was walking on 57th St. and I lived on 57th
and 10th one time. But I was walking down 57th St.
which was always bright. Not as bright as Times Square,
but it was bright. And now it's dark because
there's nobody up in those office buildings at night.
(33:51):
So we have the shift in the office space.
You have so empty office places that people found out they could
work from anywhere and then. Another COVID thing.
Yes, and then every building that's going up, I'm always
looking every time I see a some construction going up, you know,
is this an apartment building oris it a hotel?
(34:13):
The amount of hotels that are going up in New York City is
unbelievable. My theory is because what's the
hotel tax? 18.75 S New York can make money
on more hotels, but how does this end up shifting the
landscape? Less people, you know, working
in offices, you know, more hotels than ever?
(34:35):
I really wonder what that shift's going to be like.
And since history kind of repeats itself.
I think it's people stay. The same.
I want to know your thoughts. It's a long wave.
I mean that they were people were first noticing that that
transition, that they were building more and more hotels,
fewer and fewer residential spaces in the city, not the
people not coming into the offices part.
(34:56):
That's that's much more, but hotels versus residential goes
back to Ed Koch. Ed Koch was encouraging for for
exactly the reason you say that,you know, they there was a nice
tax on on hotels and you could make a lot.
The city could make more money off hotels than it could make
off residences residential. Also, he at that point tourism
(35:20):
was really low to, I mean, comparatively speaking, it was
low in New York City because in the 1980's the city was dirty
and screwy and you remember how it was.
It was dangerous and dark and gritty and drugged out and, and
tourists weren't flocking here anymore.
For at that point in the 70s and80s, it was not a tourism, not
(35:40):
the tourism magnet. It has been, It has become
again. And part of that has been
because they knocked a lot of that old stuff down.
They pushed a lot of those old kinds of people out.
They clean. What's has gone up is, is
cleaner, neater, more internationalist.
It's it's less and less that weird, dangerous New York City
(36:03):
that it was back in the 80s or the 70s.
It's more and more parts of it look like San Diego on the
Hudson. Not having, I don't have
anything against San Diego, but it's not New York City.
And some of it looks like Oshkosh on the East River.
It's just amazing how land a lotof the new impact, the new real
(36:29):
estate impact on the city has been and that that blandizing
effect. That's not a right word, but
whatever the right word would be, that's a good.
Word blandizing. I like.
That all right, all right, Well,we just made it up then that
that doesn't it, it, you know, it bleeds out from the buildings
and it has an impact on the people who are here and on the
(36:51):
activities that are here. And, and it makes it a less, I
think it's a less lively, less interesting city than it used to
be. It's also cleaner, neater, less
dangerous and all those things. And that's all good.
That's all to the good. But you, you lose some of the
old New York City every time youknock down a block of old
(37:12):
tenement buildings that people have been in for 150 years and
put up another just bland glass and steel high rise.
And they've been doing that. They that started in the mid 80s
and it has slowed down for a while, but it has really
accelerated over recent years. Every time you turn around,
(37:33):
there's another finger building sticking up out of Midtown
Manhattan. You can go too far with that.
And I think maybe they are and it's it does have an impact.
I want to go back to some New York characters because you've
written about so many. Do you have a few favorite New
York characters that really stand out in your mind?
I have bunches. I have bunches.
(37:56):
I really like. Victoria Woodhull.
Victoria Woodhull was the first woman in the United States to
run for president, like 50 yearsbefore women could even vote.
She did it in the 1870s. She was also a spiritualist, a
sex worker, a con man. She opened the first women run
(38:20):
brokerage on Wall Street. She had the first women owned
and run newspaper in the United States.
She was just as fascinating characters all over the map.
And when she ran for president, she was in jail.
The the on Election Day, she hadbeen jailed by the morality
(38:42):
police in New York City. Fascinating character,
troublesome character. I don't understand why that
movie has never been made. There's been some good
biographies, however. But she started out in this
tiny, little muddy, dirty littletown somewhere in, I think it
was Ohio, somewhere in the Midwest.
But she was one of those people.She like kind of made a beeline
(39:06):
for New York City and right after the Civil War, when New
York City was roiling and it wasfull of money and people not
knowing where to spend their money.
And she said, I'm going there because she was a con man, among
many other things that she was. So I love Victoria.
She's a great character. And, you know, and there's
(39:27):
bunches of those. There's just tons of those kinds
of characters in New York that you know, when it would be
difficult to be the historian ofa lot of other cities in new in
the country. The way I can be the an
historian of New York City because it's just packed with
(39:48):
interesting people like that. And from the 16th cent 1600s on,
there's always been fascinating people doing interesting things,
good, bad and indifferent. Well, not indifferent.
Good and bad in New York City, where that's a little harder to
say about other places. If you had a a book today and
new a couple of New York characters you'd focus on, where
(40:10):
would you start? Well, actually I am getting
ready to start on the book, a little 1A slim one about Marcel
Duchamp coming to to New York City and his impact, his impact
on New York City and New York City's impact on him.
He's an amazing character. He was turning the New York art
scene upside down before he evengot here.
(40:32):
Because that painting is the famous nude Descending of
staircase #2 show was here in ina night in the 1913 Armory Show,
the famous Armory Show where modern art came to New York
City. And he was part of modern art.
But he was for whatever reason, New Yorkers just keyed on that
one painting that they thought was either amazing or stupid or
(40:55):
or ridiculously. There was a lot of jokes about
it. Every newspaper had cartoonists
doing parodies of it, and he hadno idea any of that was going
on. And he wasn't even being an
artist at that point. He was working in a library in
France, Came to New York like 2-3 years later, three years
later, I think, and was amazed to find out that he was this.
(41:15):
Everybody knew who he was. He was infamous in New York City
and he loved it because he lovedbeing famous or infamous.
And then he went on to keep altering New York City's art
scene, which in the 20th centurymeant you were altering the art
scene for the world. The whole time.
You say he was here, he laughed,he came back, he laughed.
(41:37):
And then he came here and stayed.
And he's a great character. And I'm going to have a lot of
fun writing his book. Oh, that sounds like a good one.
How do you decide who you're going to write or what you're
going to write, and how do you tie it?
That New York story in there. It's different every time.
My my most recent book is about the Soviet space industry.
Yes, it's just a lot of it's just I'm interested in a lot of
(42:02):
things. I'm not there are writers who
like they write the one book andthen they spend the rest of
their lives talking about that book in one way or another, and
that's fine. But I, I, I, I couldn't do that.
I I'm interested in too much stuff and if I get to write
about one, one out of 50 things that I'm interested in every now
and again, I'm, I'm a happy man.So I've always been interested
(42:25):
in that. So and, and I talked to the
publisher and to let me do that one.
So and that's how it usually happens.
I, I, I want to do, I actually, I wanted to do my, my 2 lobes of
downtown as one giant book. And I got talked out of that.
Then people were like, no, that would be a really, really giant
book. So I did the village 1st and
then later I've done this littleone with my pal Clayton
(42:48):
Patterson, who live still lives on the Lower East Side about
some of the characters that we have written about before.
But I would love to do the giantLower East Side history too.
That's it's It's a great book, waiting for me to write it,
frankly. What's your writing style?
Because you are the guy to writethat book on the Lower East
Side. What's your writing style?
I read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read.
(43:10):
And as I'm doing it, I'm taking notes and I'm writing.
I'm writing, writing, and I build it up into a book.
Sometimes I know, like with the Soviet book, I knew what that
book was about before I even started it because it I had been
thinking about it for a long time.
But a lot of the others, I have a vague notion of what it's
going to be about. But it's as I'm writing it that
(43:30):
I figure out what the book is, what it is ultimately going to
say about whatever the the topicis.
How would you define your writing discipline?
I I I have done. Oh, I don't believe it.
You can't have this many books and the stack is actually much
higher than. It is higher than.
Much, much higher than this. It's like, ridiculous.
(43:51):
You know, so you do have a discipline.
OK, what is it? I write every day, OK, That's I.
I'm not. I don't know that I'm
disciplined about it. It's more like I'm driven to do
it. I have to do it.
I've been writing since I was like 12 years old and I just, I,
I have to do it. I get start to get really crazy
if I'm not writing for a couple of days Even so that's really
(44:13):
the answer. I'm just do.
You keep a lot of notebooks. No, no, some notes, but no, I, I
grad. I actually went digital.
I, it's all on the computer now.I and A lot of the books I read
are on the computer now. There's really good digital
archives online now so that you don't have to.
I, when I moved from Brooklyn into Manhattan last year, I had
(44:39):
I, it's a shame, but I couldn't figure out what else to do with
it. I, my library basically got
thrown away. I know, I know, but kind of
nobody was interested in taking it.
So I said, I mean, I had a couple of friends who came and
picked what they wanted out of it, but I had thousands of books
lying around. The house was, my apartment was
(44:59):
ridiculous. It looked like a book bomb had
gone off in it. And I just, and I, I couldn't
see myself not having them around me all the time.
But I, I moved into a much smaller space because I moved to
Manhattan and I just, you know, it, they're gone.
They're gone. It's all online.
I'll find it again if I need to find it online.
(45:22):
I love the Internet. I hated the Internet for a
while. I was an old, old fashioned
type, but I think the internet'sa great thing.
The Internet is a great thing, but it's so funny every time we
talk about, you know, downsizing.
And some I have those days when I'm like, I just want to go live
in an Airstream. And, and the first reaction from
my family is, oh, yeah. And are we allowed to come?
(45:45):
Or is it just you and your books?
Because I love books. I sort of feel liberated from
them. When I got rid of them, it
looked like Fahrenheit 451. The guys were like throwing them
out the window, literally throwing them out the window
into a bin that they were hauling off somewhere, you know,
I guess to the to the trash. And there were some great books
(46:06):
in there, but they're online somewhere.
I'll find them if I need them. Do you wake up in the middle of
the night with ideas and have toget up and jot them down?
Yes, all the time. All the time, yeah.
And do you actually get up or doyou just like keep a little
notepad next? To you.
No, I get up because I don't have notepads anymore.
I have to go over to the computer and do that.
Can you about go back to sleep after that or does it set you on
(46:27):
the? Mode.
Yeah, it depends. Yeah.
Yeah, it depends. When you said you write every
day, do you do it as like a discipline where you say I'm
going to write for 15 minutes orI'm just going?
The urge strikes. It just sometimes I get up and
I'm I'm, I'm almost always sitting there right away, but
sometimes takes a long time to crank myself up in it.
(46:49):
But by the end of the day, I have done something.
I I when I am asked to go talk to writing students, I always
say two things. A had a second career, like be a
dental hygienist or something, because being a writer is a
ridiculous way to make money in America.
But two, if you want to be a writer, write every day.
(47:10):
Write every day. Even if you're just writing a
letter, even you're just writingnotes.
And people I know, writers who write, it's like they're,
they're carving it in stone and they write one word and then
they walk away from it and they're unhappy with it and, and
come back three days later and write the next word.
That's a very bad way to be a writer, I think, and just write.
(47:32):
Just write, write, write, write,write.
Musicians play every day. Dancers dance every day.
Writers should write every day. How do you find the define the
difference between writing and editing?
Well, that's a good one. I've done both.
I've done a lot of both. Not just editing my own stuff,
but a lot of I edited a newspaper for 12 years.
(47:57):
It is very different. They're they're they're
different experiences. I love editing other people's
work. If if they're especially if
they're good writers, because then you don't have to do much,
but you get to read their stuff.And and in that case, as an
editor, you're just kind of an encourager.
You're just saying, yeah, this is I love this.
This is good. Keep going.
(48:19):
It's, you know, it's different, it's lonelier being when you're
doing the writing. And I don't particularly like
being edited. I always think I'm a better
editor than whoever my editor is.
Almost always. I've had a couple good ones.
I never liked being edited. No and.
Nobody does. Probably because, you know, the
editor's job is to tell you cut that, shut that, shut up.
(48:42):
No, I don't. That could move better if you
you think shut up. Where do you think literature
writing is going to go in the future?
We, we've only got about 5 minutes left and I'm looking for
your take on the landscape of AI, the hit it's going to how
it's impacting everything. What do you think's going to be
(49:04):
the future of writing? Which I mean, I, I'm just going
to say I, I can't think of who said it might have been.
Peter Thiel said we need books because books are time stamped
in history. The Internet is not.
And that scares me when I think about that.
(49:25):
That's probably one of the reasons I love books.
You can't change it. You know, Gone with the Wind was
written as Gone with the Wind and it's going to be Gone with
the Wind. Now we've got Snow White that
crashed at the box office. Somebody's going to rewrite it.
What do you think? It's, it's a really good point
and I have dealt some, I have a good friend out in Hollywood and
I've and I've watched him dealing with all that, how that
(49:48):
stuff happens out there. And I think it has as writing
became like a, a wing of the entertainment industry, which
also started happening in the 1980s.
I don't know if that's coincidental.
It has become more and more it'sharder for it to be the art form
(50:10):
it was back in the day. You know, for instance,
literature in American, Americanliterature is it peaked in 1970,
something it hasn't been there hasn't been great new literary
writing in America for a long time now.
I'm, I'm sure people would hate to hear me say that, but I, I
(50:31):
think it's true. So AI that's not a good thing
for writing. Obviously.
The more that that I just, there's an ad and I almost just
out of curiosity, responded to it where they say, you know,
having trouble writing that book, Just push this button and
it'll write it for you. I'll say no, no, no, but they're
(50:54):
going to teach it to write pretty good books.
I think at some point. It's certainly the kind of
novels that that are we used to call airport novels that, you
know, it's just they're just thespy did this.
The girl fell in love with that.Those kind of books, those kind
of novels. AI probably could be writing
those kind of, I probably could have been writing those kind of
novels 50 years ago. So but literature, literature,
(51:17):
honest to God, writing, writing.I know there are people doing
it. I think it's harder and harder
and harder for them to get it seen by anyone.
It was never that easy, but I think nowadays, where are the
venues where they can get their work seen?
There are still, I guess, some small literary magazines,
literary online literary magazines.
(51:40):
I know some people, but AI is not a good thing.
I think for writing, for creativity in general.
Who do you want to see a movie that AI generated?
No, as a tool, fine. As a tool to help that movie
maker make something happen on screen that they couldn't make
happen on screen, fine. But then it's just like CGI or
(52:04):
something or or the old special effects when you had to build
the model of King Kong and move him around one, one thing at a
time. That's all.
In that sense, AI is just the newest version of King Kong.
But when it's actually creating and, and, and nobody's involved
in it, in it writing that movie or writing that book, that's I
(52:27):
think that is a problem. I agree, I agree.
We need, we need, we need more people like you writing good
books, John. Thank you very much.
These You're a spectacular writer.
Thank you. You know, I really want to thank
you for joining me and I, I could talk to you for another
hour, but we're out of time. So we might have to do this
(52:47):
again because we have a lot of your books we could still cover.
That's true. So thank you very much.
Thank you. I'm Diane Grissel.
This has been the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics
podcast. My guest was John Strauss Baugh
and I really recommend you checkout his books.
Below this podcast, you'll be able to find all links to his
(53:07):
Amazon page to his website. I highly recommend his books.
Buy them, share them, subscribe to this podcast and share it as
well. See you soon.
Thanks a lot. Thank you, John.
Thank you.
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