The Sympathizer
One of my best friend's parents immigrated to the United States during the Vietnam War. Her father barely got out during the fall of Saigon. And the thing is, not many people cover this time in history from a Vietnamese perspective. I mean, there had to be a reason for the book winning the Pulitzer right? Some reviews likened the show to getting your dissertation in Vietnamese studies. And for that little slice of history the show captured something interesting, something unique, a look into my friend and her family's past, until it went off the freakin' rails. I know we're fully in the Robert Downey Jr. renaissance but that doesn't mean the dude can't make a mistake or two or five in his artfully heightened shoes. Whomever suggested to him that all the prominant American men in the Captain's life be played by him needs to be taken to a reeducation camp. I really thought we had moved beyond Robert Downey Jr. playing culturally inappropriate roles after the Tropic Thunder blackface debacle. And the thing there is while it was so wrong it was being used to show how wrong it was. Here it's just Robert Downey Jr. being so racially offensive that even justifying that he's all these characters because he plays the Captain's father feels like it's a bandaid for a limb being hacked off. I mean, why is Professor Robert Hammer literally Robert Downey Jr. camping it up as John Waters? If you wanted John Waters just hire John Waters! As for Congressman Ned Godwin... Sure, be some weird amalgam of a Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Film director Niko Damianos who is supposedly inspired by Francis Ford Coppola and John Landis should have led the two of them to sue for defamation if you were actually able to figure out it was supposed to be them. But the kicker is Bradley Cooper got a whole bunch of shit heaped on him for supposedly anti-Semitic prosthetics in his portrayal of Leonard Bernstein. While you could point to the long and horrible tradition of Jewface, what Bradley Cooper was doing was trying to make himself look just like a very specific person, which he succeeded in spectacularly, he WAS Bernstein. It's too bad the movie just wasn't any good. But where was the outcry for Robert Downey Jr. having a prosthetic nose for his character of Niko Damianos? Not a peep. That, my friends, is a double standard. At least people are calling him out on Doctor Doom because he's not Romani. I bet those people watched this show. Oh, and let's not forget the scene where all the characters he plays meet and have an orgy! I mean, I can't believe that this level of ego and narcissism was on a scene in this day and age. It's made me completely rethink my ever having liked him. How did he think this was a good idea? Seriously, how!?! If it wasn't for Queenie and her vaginal tears this would have been the worst show I watched this year. It will easily rank as one of the worst shows I've ever watched. Moreso because after seven episode there isn't even an ending.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
A Backward Glance: An Autobiography by Edith Wharton
The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins
When one thinks of old New York and the literary scene you can't help but instantly think of Edith Wharton. Wharton was a writer of great note, she was not only repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence. Friends with many of the literary elite of the day, she was able to combine her insider's view of America's privileged classes with her own insights to create works with depth and a social and psychological conscience. Her books captured New York at the turning of the last century for all readers. What better way to step into the past then to pick up The Age of Innocence and be lost in the doomed affair of Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska? But what is truly amazing about New York is that there are pockets within the city that have barely changed in a hundred years. There are houses and parks that remain just as they are, like they are trapped in a little time bubble. It is just as easy to get lost on a side street and end up in Wharton's world as it is to turn the pages of a book.
Washington Square Park was the epicenter of literature and wealth at the end of the 1800s, before everyone fled uptown. Being in the heart of Greenwich Village, it is still a center for culture, only a little less affluent. Aside from a lack of gallows, this park located at the end of 5th Avenue could easily be the same as it was when Wharton looked out her windows. A few years back when I was visiting New York I was in search of the old city and was on my way to the 
Anyway, back to Washington Square. While yes, the arch does dominate the scene, I found myself entranced by the luscious red brick buildings that surround the park. Of course it was one of these buildings that Wharton lived in. Before leaving the city of her birth and building The Mount up in Massachusetts, she lived at 7 Washington Square North. As Wharton sat in her house she could look out and see Robert Lewis Stevenson talking to Mark Twain, as they met there in 1888. Many artists from the Hudson River School might have dropped by the park to paint it. At the nearby Hotel Albert, 23 East 10th Street, three blocks away from the park on the corner of University Place and East 10th Street, everyone from Walt Whitman to William Faulkner were mingling. Wharton had the cream of the literary crop always a moment away. 
There is a feeling in the park that I can't describe, an old and a new coming together to form that ineffable feeling that is what makes New York so unique and indescribable all at the same time. This painting captures for me that feeling in a way my words will always fail. Looking at this gorgeous painting Wharton's house would be that building on the right of the arc. She was there. She was in the center of it all. She is, in my mind, what true Literary New York is and always will be.
