Some 40 or so years ago I wrote a piece titled “Too old to rock.” It questioned whether rock music was a young person’s game that should be abandoned as the years went on. Well, here we are with Madonna, Mike D. (formerly of the Beastie Boys) and the Rolling Stones all coming out with new music. Back then, I was adamantly against it. Today, I’m older, and more forgiving. The creative urge doesn’t die. Even if you’ve passed your expiration date. Good music is good music. (The opposite is also true.)

Madonna’s first studio release since 2019 is out and I can’t avoid the hype and hoopla. Mild curiosity grew when I learned that Confessions II included the song “Danceteria,” named after the club where we both frolicked back in the good old days. My feeds are flooded with Madonna mania. I couldn’t avoid the buzz. Madonna headlined Coachella and the Soccer World Cup Finals half-time show. Her album made it to the top of the charts. My algorithm is in overdrive. I’m drowning in a steady stream of photos, videos and AI-slop. Madonna may have gone off into her own stratosphere far removed from Danceteria, 1982, but we share cherished moments, the longings, memories, triumphs and regrets of people who live into their 60s and beyond.

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A throwback in every way to her 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor, it’s structured like a continuous DJ set, one track seamlessly blending into the next by producer/co-writer Stuart Price, hired to recreate the magic of the original. “Danceteria” is a throwback to the throwback. The French call it nostalgie de la boue — the longing for a more authentic way of life.

Brian Eno came up with the term Scenius — the genius of the scene — to describe the cauldron of creativity that was cooking Downtown when he lived in New York from 1978-1984, worked with David Byrne on a Talking Heads album, produced the no wave classic No New York and helped design the Mudd Club sound system. My forthcoming book, Scenius New York, is about that generation.

When Downtown was the epicenter of the Scenius, I was routinely waved in at the door and showered with drink tickets, a journalist-in-residence, one of the hundred or so in the club the night “the Sire recording artist Madonna” was introduced at Haoui Montaug and Anita Sarko’s arty cabaret No Entiendes. Glenn O’Brien wrote about it in Interview: “Madonna’s voice [on “Everybody”] is elegantly guileless, warm, and breathily sexy without any nasty-girl pretense. The lyrics are not literature, but they may be classic in their lack of ambition, consisting of little more than invitations to dance.”

Well, not much has changed since then. She’s still imploring everyone to get up and dance, but now it includes Madonna’s auto-fiction, recalling the time when she partied with Shafrazzi, Basquiat, Fab Five Freddy, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. Her friend Maripol gets a nod. As do the “Rock Steady Crew and Crazy Legs.” She sings about the time she and Debi Mazur tag-teamed DJ Mark Kamins in the bathroom, plied him with coke and “convinced” him to play her record. Mark was no fool and knew immediately that “Everybody” was hit bound. He helped get her signed and dated her for a time. (Jellybean Benitez was another DJ conquest.) Particularly poignant is the story of Martin Burgoyne who introduced her to the Scenius she won’t — or can’t — forget. Burgoyne was her first roommate and one of her back up dancers. After he was diagnosed with AIDS, she invited him to attend her wedding to Sean Penn in L.A. Burgoyne was diagnosed with AIDS over a year later in the summer of 1986, prompting Madonna to support him in New York during his final months until he passed away at 23. So there’s reasons to remember those glorious and dangerous days.

I’ve long had an ambivalent relationship with Madonna. It was love at first sight, but when she left the hood, physically and psychically, she traded raw underground experimentation for global pop stardom. I felt abandoned, not because she stopped knocking out hits, but because she had moved on and left the Scenius behind. We never had her on a Paper magazine cover. Madonna’s success was immediate; in a few short years, she was a superstar and Paper too small circulation for her blonde ambition.

As far as the rest of the album goes, it’s OK. The Ringer’s Bandsplain podcast claims that the great majority of Madonna’s fan-base is made up of girls and queers. I don’t go out to clubs these days but my bet is that Confessions II is having a moment on the dance floor.

Another breakout star of the Scenius, similarly spawned from the Danceteria ether, were the Beastie Boys. A punk hardcore band of 16 year-olds Danceteria regulars (who opened for Madonna on her Virgin Tour before their debut album was even released). The Beasties officially disbanded after the death of Adam Yauch, but Mike D (Diamond) is making new music after 15 years of silence. A few cuts have been released off the forthcoming Thank You album and I’m pleasantly surprised. For Mike D, it’s an opportunity to work with his sons — which dad would pass on an opportunity like that — but also another chance to get on the mic and do what he does like no body else. Combining his punk rap and hard core roots with the indie rock sensibilities of his sons Skyler and Davis of the band Very Nice Person, I like what I’ve heard on this sonic hybrid.

The Rolling Stones are also out with a new album — Foreign Tongues — that’s landed at #1. Some old timers I know like it, and I’m coming around myself thanks to a couple of tracks I’ve been relistening to. “You Know I’m No Good,” their cover of the Amy Winehouse classic, is one. The Stones have covered artists from the ‘50s and ‘60s before — Chuck Berry, Solomon Burke and Irma come to mind — but it’s the first time they’ve recorded a song of such recent vintage. Hmmm.

They sound like they’re having fun on “Covered in You.” Keith shredding, Mick soloing on the harmonica, his voice strong and proud as it is throughout the album. Mick and Keith are not interested in letting their guard down. Still virile, tough guys screwing around, playing with drugs, living the rock ‘n’ roll life they want us to believe will never die.

Why now for Madonna, Mike D and the Stones? Each one has found a way to process the past. For Madonna, it’s on the dance floor, a time and place that lives inside her. Mike D is with his kids, his trademark nasal rap in full effect. And the Stones are doing what they do best, playing familiar chords and dredging up memories of how it used to be.

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I recently attended a screening of Nova 78, a documentary edited from resurfaced footage originally shot by Howard Brookner for Burroughs: The Movie, released in 1983. Long thought lost, the raw footage turned up in “The Bunker” on the Bowery where Burroughs lived and entertained a parade of celebrities and Downtown royalty. Today it is an event space, run under the auspices of GPS (Giorno Poetry Systems) where I saw the film. With Burroughs’ bedroom preserved in its close-to-original state, the intimate screening (the day after the film’s premiere at MoMA) left us all with a tingling sensation as though his Eminence’s ghost hovered nearby while we were watching.

A three day event held in the East Village on Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 1978, the film beautifully captures the discussions, performances and readings by Burroughs, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Glass, Peter Orlovsky, Laurie Anderson, Julia Heyward, Anne Waldman and other avant-garde icons of that era. A panel moderated by the artist Les Levine about the not-yet-here future between Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary and Brion Gysin was another highlight. Keith Richards canceled, but Frank Zappa read from Burroughs’ Naked Lunch instead. Co-directed by Brookner’s nephew Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias, Nova 78 is a cinematic tour de force that captures the cultural ferment of post-punk New York.

What it doesn’t do is tell the story of the Nova Convention, the brainchild of Sylvere Lotringer, a French philosophy professor at Columbia University who saw a connection between Burroughs and the French philosophes Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guatteri and Michel Foucault. Off all the “Beats,” Burroughs stood out as a thinker as well as a writer who intuitively understood ideology and explored his ideas by using the “cut up method” to break through traditional (and restrictive) structures to foster spontaneity. Burroughs showed us in his “fiction” – like Nova Express – that language itself is a virus and a tool of control, with bureaucracy and government acting as a “machine” that controls populations through media, image manipulation, and surveillance.

The New York Times called Lotringer a “P.T. Barnum for postmodernism” for organizing The Schizo-Culture Conference at Columbia in 1975, a precursor to the Nova Convention that introduced the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-’68 France to the American academies and the avant-garde. Seminal papers shared at the event ranged from Deleuze’s first presentation of the concept of the “rhizome,” to Foucault’s introduction of his History of Sexuality project. What began as a peaceful academic conference, “crystallizing an emerging avant-garde of aging Beats, experimental musicians, performance artists, punks and a new generation of philosophers turned into a mini-riot, as exuberant fans watched their heroes’ [including Burroughs] ideological sparring matches followed by walkouts and physical intimidation both at the podium and with hecklers in the crowd,” it reported.

Lotringer wanted to bring that energy Downtown, outside the academy, where the artists were. “When I arrived in New York, I was very struck talking to people like John Cage and Merce Cunningham,” Lotringer told me. “I discovered that they were the real thinkers in America, but they were not thinking in exactly a systematic fashion. I was very struck by the fact that Cage was coming up with something that was very close to what French post-’68 theory had come up with, especially Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, something loose, active and anarchical. But instead of being so forbidding, he did it in much more imaginative or imagistic ways, so you could always relate to something concrete.” Deleuze, who loathed to travel, was so in awe of Burroughs that Lotringer used the conference as bait to lure him to New York.

“I tried to make myself available to American art and the New York art world, and I hoped that by talking to them, they would express in their own artistic language some sort of theoretical statement,” he continued. “I always liked it when different things enter some sort of deliberate resonance without losing their own identity. It was a way of establishing a bridge between Europe and the States; between the conceptualization that they were developing in France, and the kind of much more energetic and experimental activity that American artists had.”

I dwell on this not only because I was a friend of the French-born literary critic and founder of the publisher Semiotext(e) who died in 2021, but also because other than an opening credit there’s no acknowledgement of his contributions or that the event was his idea. A short statement to set up the story and answer the question – Why Burroughs? – is all that was needed. Why was Burroughs, a relatively obscure, scandal ridden writer who had been living abroad for nearly 25 year before moving to New York to be crowned The Godfather of Punk, chosen for this honor. Aaron Brookner edited a concert film that incorporates intimate moments with Burroughs with public events that attracted thousands to Entermedia in the East Village over its three days. What’s missing is the context.

So now that you have the back story of Nova 78, see it. It’s really great.

A New York Times headline -- “Conviction Reversed in Etan Patz Case That Put Focus on Missing Children” -- immediately caught my eye and brought me back to another era, a lost but not forgotten time.

I covered the story of Etan Partz’s disappearance when I was working at the Soho News, a weekly focused on the up-and-coming artist neighborhood in transition. As families moved into the recently landmarked cast iron buildings, the one-time desolate streets teemed with mommies and nannies pushing strollers, their older kids running alongside them. Given the overall sorry state of the city rife with crime, drugs and burned-out buildings, Soho was thriving as bars, boutiques and galleries offered the potential of a brighter future.

In May, 1979, a 6-year-old local boy named Etan Patz went missing, never seen again after leaving home to go to school on the city bus, the very first time he had been allowed to do so. The disappearance set off a community-wide search party and postering campaign that grew into a national news story. The posters were everywhere, a recurring nightmare that changed New York parenting guidelines forever. He was the first “lost boy” to have his picture on the side of a milk carton. After years of investigation with no progress, in 2012, Pedro Hernandez was convicted of the murder. Now a Federal Appeals Court has overturned his conviction based on a violation of his Miranda Rights.

I remember visiting the Patz family SoHo loft on Prince Street, climbing the long staircase, dreading a meeting with grieving parents who were also under suspicion because… well, they were his parents, and the police must begin somewhere. There were no clues and apparently no one had seen anything unexpected that day. Two cops logged phone calls coming into the house, the parents already too worn out to answer themselves. It was hard for all of us, for them to repeat what they had been telling a stream of investigators and reporters and for me to hear the sad story told through their tear-streaked faces. A boy matching Etan’s description was seen in a playground at LeRoy Street and Seventh avenue in the Village. The police want the boy’s father, Stanley, to go to the park with them. I tag along and we drive over in a police car.

I’ve never been in a police car. I’ve run from police, hid my weed from police, protested police brutality and generally associated them with all things Nixon. I assumed that cops were human too, but this was the first time I’d ever seen them genuinely concerned and empathetic. They’d been around long enough to smell tragedy in the air

.At the park, we spread out. I investigated its dark corners and shadows looking for anything that might provide a clue to his whereabouts. A blue shirt near a broken bat in the baseball field caught my eye. The detective asked me to show the shirt to his father, Stan, who held it up, trying to imagine it on Etan, though it was several sizes too large and unlike anything the boy had at home.

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At Third Street and MacDougal, we spotted a young boy at a pizza stand who matched Etan’s description. We pulled over and the cops jumped out. “He doesn’t eat pizza,’” says Stan after they returned. “Pizza has cheese on it. Cheese is something adults eat.”

By 10 pm, we were back in the loft, a radio playing opera softly in the background. A cop talked on the phone and wrote in his log. Etan’s mom, Julie, made coffee and light conversation. “We have to think positively,” she smiled.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed May 25 as National Missing Children’s Day in honor of Etan’s memory.­

One example according to Grynbaum:

“As the longtime editor in chief of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter was accustomed to big expenses: chauffeured town cars, five-star hotel stays, writer salaries that stretched into the mid six-figures. But in early 2001, he wondered if he had gone too far.

Annie Leibovitz, the magazine’s chief photographer, had run up a $475,000 bill on a cover shoot involving 10 world-famous actresses — Nicole Kidman, Penélope Cruz, Sophia Loren — and an elaborate stage set, complete with a mantelpiece and a genuine John Singer Sargent painting, which was flown from Los Angeles to New York to London. (“It was like Vietnam, the expenses,” Mr. Carter recalled.) Now, he needed to tell his boss, S.I. Newhouse Jr., the billionaire owner and patron of Condé Nast, about the latest line item on his tab.

“I do have to talk to you about something,” Mr. Carter said as the men sat down for lunch. “It’s a good-news-bad-news situation.”

“What’s the bad news?” Mr. Newhouse asked.

A pause. “Well, I think we just shot the most expensive cover in magazine history.”

“What’s the good news?”

“It looks like a $475,000 cover.”

It was the equivalent of roughly $850,000 today. Mr. Newhouse was fine with it.

Simultaneously outraged and jealous at the re$ource$ squandered uptown while Paper magazine (launched in June, 1984) struggled to get off the ground, I took solace at the fact that in a roundabout way we benefited from the spendthrift ways of corporate America. Paper’s survival is partly due to the unwitting good graces and lack of oversight in the corporate world that we exploited.

Our art directors, who also worked at the Times, would sneak us in on the weekends and we’d work out of Carrie Donovan’s office in the style department. I’d sit in the cafeteria proofreading as though I belonged, another cog in the machine at work.

I’d ride my bike around town and meet writers on streetcorners who’d hand me their copy. At CBS a typesetter did our job on the side at a sweet discount while I used the house Xerox machine along with the assistants patiently waiting for their turn. Conde Nast also contributed to Paper, functioning as an off-site production company we’d use to size and resize photos. After each issue was printed, we’d rent a car to distribute Paper at newsstands and boutiques. One of our stops was the newsstand in the lobby of the Conde Nast Building where Paper sold like hot cakes to the editors who perused its pages for ideas to recycle.

Reading about the hey day of magazines reminds me of how we boasted that – “We can put out an entire year’s worth of Paper for what it cost Vanity Fair to do a cover shoot.” We thought we were exaggerating. It was even worse than we thought.

“To sell his magazines’ upper-class fantasies to the masses, Mr. Newhouse — a mercurial connoisseur who collected Rothkos and wore sweatshirts to the office — bankrolled a kind of dream life for the workers in his employ. When Art Cooper, the editor of GQ, hosted dinners in Milan in the 1990s, he flew out his food critic for the sole purpose of selecting the wine pairings. Ron Galotti, the Condé adman who inspired Mr. Big from “Sex and the City,” shipped his Ferrari Testarossa to Colorado to impress an advertiser. The photographer Irving Penn smashed 100 Cartier glasses in pursuit of the perfect shard.

There was more to our differences with Conde Nast than mere financial resources as is made clear in The Vanity Fair Diaries, 1983-1992, Tina Brown’s cheeky account of her years as the magazine’s editor.

Our worlds ran parallel, but couldn’t have been further apart. A subway ride away, we may as well have been living on different planets. Moving from London to New York, Brown found the pulse of the city on Park Avenue and the Hamptons, drinking the Kool Aid with Henry Kissinger, Jackie O, Donald Trump, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton and Dominick Dunne. Brown’s triumph, she noted, occurred when she convinced President Ronald Reagan and the first lady Nancy Reagan to pose for the magazine’s cover in 1989. In the midst of the AIDS epidemic that was killing our friends and eviscerating our vibrant community, she was celebrating the life of downtown’s Public Enemy Number 1. Reagan had ignored the growing death toll and delayed the government’s response to the plague. But there they were – Ronnie and Nancy – blithely dancing on the cover of Vanity Fair.

The Reagans were the precursors of the Trumps and downtown was not having it. The drawing rooms that welcomed Trump because he was one of them -- white, privileged, rich, powerful yet in awe of power -- was not Paper’s vibe. While Brown was organizing dinner parties and charity events with guest lists made up of the moneyed old guard, we were out dancing.

Vanity Fair had a great run, but the Conde Nast brand is in tatters. No more black town cars on disposal 24-7 nor aristocrats on the payroll. The house account at the Four Seasons closed out. No more Fed Exing your luggage to foreign destinations. What remains are a few magazines (The New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ the flagships) and Anna Wintour. Wintour announced her intention to step down from Vogue but remain Conde Nast’s global editorial director, the last link of a fading magazine empire. She was there for the boom and the bust and deserves credit for standing tall while her world crumbles.

As for Paper magazine? Perhaps best remembered today for proving that a print magazine could “Break the Internet” when it put Kim Kardashian on the cover that launched a million memes. Some 40 years later it survives as papermag.com.

You confront the artist’s role in British culture in the late 20th century, mainly as a pawn for property developers. What function do you think artists should play in society, and do you think they’ve failed us to some extent?

Adam Curtis: To be fair to artists, I wasn’t criticising any of their work. Some of their work is great and some of it is not great. But what I think they failed to recognise is that, from the late 1980s onwards, they also became scouts for the property developing world... and I think they know this in their hearts. In fact, I remember meeting some big property developer in New York who had redeveloped a giant area, and he was just very blank with me. He said: ‘We get the artists in, we give them cheap studios, then the coffee shops come, and then the apartments start to be built, and we chuck them out, we find them somewhere else.’ And he would say, I’m sure, that some of them produce amazingly good work, but they were performing another function in society as well.

The thing that I always get in trouble with is that I do think artists retreated in the face of the rise of the right like Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 80s, into the idea that culture would be the opposition, as they called it, to this right wing takeover. I’ve always been very dubious about this idea that art can actually change the world. If you look at it historically, art tends to come along after.

What art is absolutely brilliant at doing is describing what is happening and showing you how power works. That’s what artists are really brilliant at. They’ve got this skill to intuit the mood of a new kind of society emerging. They give you a heightened version of what people were living through at the time. What they don’t do is create these revolutions. That’s done by hard money and power.

Artists get very angry when you say this, but this idea that somehow they are the opposition... I’m dubious about it. I feel, actually, that they’re missing a trick, that they should be dramatising where the power is. I want to know. And I think everyone wants to know. But they’re not telling us. And people like me, journalists, can’t get into that world. They don’t let us in. There’s a lot in our present world that’s invisible because it hides behind money and anonymity and the law.

I spoke to him on the phone on the occasion of the book’s publication in 2015 for an article I was writing for Paper magazine. The erudite author of a dozen non-fiction books, including biographies of Burroughs, Blondie, Warhol, Keith Richard and Lou Reed, is the foremost chronicler of that golden era, a life he lived as well as recorded.

When Brian Eno moved to New York to produce the Talking Heads’ My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he encountered a thriving eco-system of creative geniuses in the lofts and tenements below 14th Street. He called it the Scenius – the “genius of the scene” that he found in the drug-drenched clubs, streets and alternative spaces where Bad Boys and Bad Girls splashed paint on walls and called it art; made noise they called music; acted crazy and called it performance. To capture the moment, Eno produced No New York, a live compilation album with James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (Lydia Lunch), Mars and DNA. This was Marcia Resnick’s New York.

Well, those days are over for the fading generation of the Mudd Club, Danceteria, The Roxy and the Pyramid. Facebook is our virtual downtown, where we reminisce and extend condolences. Facebook is where we go to remember GOD – the Good Old Days. What remain are memories – and memoirs – reliving the glorious nights that changed pop culture forever. May it rest in peace. Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end… But here we are typing into a box that asks “What’s on your mind, David?”

I look at FB and sure enough, there it is, on the top of my page a post from A.L. Bardach.

“In the late 1970s, we joined forces - Marcia's exquisite eye and camera, me with my tape recorder - and set out to film and record a series we called Bad Boys. There were dozens of sittings:  Johnny Lydon, Kenneth Anger, Terry Southern, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Tim Hardin, Paul Morrissey, Nicholas Ray, Christopher Isherwood, John Simon, Kenneth Tynan, Larry Rivers, jewel thief Albie Baker, jockey Billy Pearson, Nicholas Roeg...well, too many to recall. It wasn't an easy collaboration  - we were both trouble and had our issues (ok, she passed out with Johnny Thunders during one sitting).

“But never did I doubt Marcia's unique gifts. Her work - from her stunning Re-visions book straight through the Bad Boys and beyond  - were singular images, typically served with a slice of  irony or her wacky humor.”

My Marcia memories date back to the Soho News as well. We clicked after discovering our Brooklyn roots, a Mill Basin girl whose father had a print shop on Brighton Beach Avenue around the corner from where I lived. When space opened up on the back page next to the horoscope and Tom Hachtman’s Gertrude’s Follies comix, she proposed a weekly column that would consist of a photo and an extended caption that showed a surrealistic aspect of her persona. We called it “Resnick’s Believe it Or Not,” but had to change it to “Resnick’s Believe-it-or-Else” when Ripley’s came calling with a cease and desist.

Our friendship came in handy when I was assigned to write about John Belushi’s long night on the town, his drug-fueled binge before leaving New York for L.A’s. Chateau Marmont where he ODed six months later. Marcia’s photo of Belushi in a ski mask is perhaps her most famous. My hunch was confirmed in the Washington Post obituary (by Anusha Mathur) that refers to “the last studio images of John Belushi …before his fatal drug overdose in 1982” — in the very first sentence. (Though for me , nothing beats her paparazzi pic of Studio 54’s Steve Rubell embracing evil Roy Cohn, the McCarthy hearings prosecutor and consigliere to Donald Trump, both stoned out of their minds).

Of her meeting with Belushi, Resnick wrote:

In early September 1981 I spotted John Belushi in the New York after hours club AM PM. I asked him when he was going to do a photo session with me for my series Bad Boys: A Compendium of Punks, Poets and Politicians. He said, “Now”. I didn’t believe him, until upon returning home at six am I saw a limousine waiting in front of my building. I turned on the music as John and his entourage filed into my loft. I then directed John to an area lit by strobe lights and I began shooting.

John paced around like a caged animal, fidgeting incessantly. He seemed unable to sit still for my camera, uncanny for someone known for being deliberate and fluid when performing. “Where are the props?”, he queried. I first gave him sunglasses, then a scarf. He requested a beer, then a glass. After donning a black wool ski mask that he took off a nearby mannequin, he settled into a chair. Only his eyes and mouth peeked through the openings in the mask. The large, ominous and anonymous ‘executioner’ had finally reached his comfort zone.” http://www.thislongcentury.com/marcia-resnick

We met in the same Canal Street loft where her Belushi portraits were shot and she told me about the night they hung out before he flew to L.A.

Of that evening I wrote: “Belushi had been carrying a tape of Fear, the California punk band, around with him all day, and he played some of it for her on the phone. One of their songs is called ‘I Love Living in the City,’ and it goes something like this.

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My house smells just like a zoo

It’s chock full of shit and puke

Cockroaches on the walls

Crabs are drawling on my balls

Oh, but I’m so clean-cut

I just want to fuck some slut.

I love living in the city

I love living in the city

Spend my whole life in the city

Where junk’s king and the air smells shitty

Belushi’s haunts included The Odeon at 4 a.m., the after hours Club AM-PM, The Nursery in the East Village and The Russian Baths on E. 10th Street where he’d sweat out the toxins before starting all over again. 

Belushi greeted her with a bear hug. He looked better than she had remembered. They talked about an idea for a script that Belushi had been kicking around, something about a young man who comes from Italy to make it in New York. Everybody seemed so “hopeful” that day, she said. 

When I saw him on a recent trip to Los Angeles, he was in the middle of composing a film score for a movie directed by Alexander Rockwell. I asked him about his photography practice and he shrugged, as if it was of little importance. I begged to differ and urged him to keep shooting.

Little did I know that a few days after my return to New York, Downtown L.A. would become the focus of Trump’s latest criminal act — sending in the National Guard under false pretenses. Overreaching seems too modest a word to describe his continued assault on Democracy.

Downtown, has been Edson’s home base since he left the East Village some 30 years ago. Given the course of recent events, he couldn’t help himself, getting back on his bike and onto the streets to see what he would see.

While the media reported Trumps claims of riots, Edson saw bored members of the police and National Guard wondering why they were there.

Better known as Waymo, these Google (Ok Alphabet)-owned cars now compete with Uber and Lyft as alternatives to taxis and car services with a critical difference: They are autonomous driving vehicles. Which means it takes you where you want to go without the benefit of a driver.

As I learned from my overly solicitous ChaptGPT bot, Waymo “uses lasers to create detailed 3D maps of the surroundings by bouncing light off objects and measuring the return time.” It’s also got cameras and sensors and lasers to create 3D maps and other wonders of techno-geekdom that make it a viable alternative already at work in San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and likely to magically materialize in a city near you before too long.

Most people I spoke to about Waymo had one story or another about why they didn’t trust it. People sometimes got locked inside. It’s slow, rigorously following speed limits and taking its sweet time at Stop signs before entering an intersection. Waymos also had difficulty negotiating broken traffic lights. Dumbfounded and still, they wait and wait and wait for a green light while backed up cars honk in annoyance..

And the deal breaker for me: it cost as much or more than an Uber. So why use one at all. Is there a benefit to be had for the passenger that I was missing.

In an Uber one day, I asked my driver what she thought of Waymo. I was expecting a tirade about taking jobs from drivers and other horror stories — of which she had many — designed to dissuade me from crossing over to driverless. Taking advantage of Uber’s unique selling proposition — in this case a human driver — I asked her the question that had been nagging at me: Why take a driverless car that cost the same or more than an Uber when you also had the added value of a driver.

A deservedly five star driver she was not gabby, but if engaged she was happy to talk. We went over the cons, but there were a few positives that I had not considered. Turns out people are having parties in their Waymos, ranging from taking drugs to drinking and having sex. This type of behavior is officially verboten, but when there’s a will there’s a hack. The worst they can do I’ve been told is close your account. Which I don’t find much of a deterrence since there are so many other options.

One point she made does stand out. The night time is peak time for Waymo, the streets of LA around Hollywood and Beverly Hills teeming with robots on wheels transporting women home after a night on the town. Why take the risk of riding in a car with a man — even one that has been supposedly vetted — when you can avoid boozy conversation and get home safely?

Will Waymo come to Manhattan? No plans have yet to be announced but it’s in the cards, the moment we’ve all been waiting for, an alternative to hotels and restaurants where we can have a quiet meal and a quickie while taking in the sights of the world’s greatest city.

If you’ve landed here, you probably already know: downtown isn’t just a location. It’s a sensibility. A state of mind. A way of seeing.

I’m not just launching a newsletter — I’m starting a conversation, and hopefully a community. Planet Downtown is a space for people who still care where things come from, how they connect, and what they mean now. I’ll be sharing what I’ve seen, what I’ve saved, and what I’m noticing in the present — and I want to hear from you, too.

This isn’t about nostalgia. It’s a lens — shaped by decades in the underground, and filtered through the perspective of someone who’s been in the thick of it and still knows how to see through the clutter.

I started reporting on downtown NYC in the late ’70s — when the city was broke and boiling with creativity. I cut my teeth at SoHo News, then co-founded Paper Magazine to capture the New New York that was emerging all around us. I’ve spent my life writing from the intersections of art, style, rebellion, and politics. That kind of perspective feels more essential than ever — not to glorify the past, but to make sense of the present.

I covered hip hop when it was still local, fashion before it became content, and art that didn’t ask permission. Along the way, I interviewed, partied with, and profiled some of the defining voices of our time — from Jim Jarmusch and Jean-Michel Basquiat to RuPaul, Cindy Sherman, Deborah Harry, Willem Dafoe, Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite, Lydia Lunch, and yes, Kim Kardashian.

But more important than who I met is what I kept: a deep archive of interviews, articles, photos, recordings, and raw footage — fragments of time that still speak to where we are now.

The culture’s changed. So has the media. But my lens hasn’t.

If you still look for meaning beneath the noise — and want to be part of a space where that kind of seeing is shared — then you’re already part of Planet Downtown.

— David Hershkovits

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