All posts by Steve Stern

Mamdani & The NY Mayoral Race

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics
Doctored picture used by the Cuomo campaign of Mamdan with a heavier and darker beard.

Those Democrats who think Mamdani will hurt their party are right to be concerned, but they’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. It’s not the skeptics they need to worry about. It’s the fans. Those Democrats who think Mamdani will hurt their party are right to be concerned, but they’re thinking about the problem the wrong way. It’s not the skeptics they need to worry about. It’s the fans. Ramesh Ponnuru, the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in an editorial in the Washington Post entitled How Zohran Mamdani is teaching Democrats to lose.

I can’t speak to how other people feel, but I can say that as a Jewish New Yorker and as a member of a Jewish organization, I think that Zohran has done an incredible job of demonstrating care and concern and shown a real commitment to ensuring the safety of Jewish New Yorkers, of all New Yorkers. Sophie Ellman-Golan, director of strategic communications at Jews For Racial & Economic Justice

I’m not going to let this Communist Lunatic destroy New York, President Donald Trump, after Mamdani’s primary win (and was repeated in August).

Your dedication to an affordable, welcoming, and safe New York City where working families can have a shot has inspired people across the city. Billionaires and lobbyists poured millions against you and our public finance system. And you won. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US representative for New York’s 14th congressional district

The Anti-Mamdani Movement Is Fizzling New York Magazine

Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor of New York City. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America – which is the largest Socialist group in the United States – is 33 years old, a practising Muslim, and, surprisingly, he will probably be the next mayor of New York City. And those are not the most surprising parts of the story. He was born in Kampala, Africa, and moved here when he was seven with his parents,  Mahmood Mamdani, a professor at Columbia University and Mira Nair. The same Mira Nair who is the director of  Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and the Amelia Earhart biopic, Amelia, starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere.

Mamdani holds political positions that Conventional Wisdom, and a big hunk of the Democratic Party’s leadership, think – maybe hope is more accurate – it should be impossible for him to win anything, even a Municipal Dogcatcher Position. As a short aside, about 12% of people in New York City are Jewish, and 2.4% are Indian, and Mamdani has said both Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are war criminals and would be jailed if they came to New York if he were mayor. End aside. And he most probably will be the next mayor of New York City.

Mamdani is running on a platform that includes free city buses and a rent freeze in rent-stabilized housing; he advocates for universal childcare and pre-kindergarten childcare, as well as the construction of 200,000 new affordable housing units and five city-owned grocery stores—one in each borough—to drive down grocery prices. He was also an early supporter of Defund the Police and continues to support public safety reform. He supports a $30 minimum wage by 2030 and proposed giving all new New York City families baby baskets containing diapers and nursing supplies. Mamdani’s platform calls for tax increases on corporations and those earning above $1 million annually. He is running against a lot of very powerful special interests, and I am thrilled that he will probably be the next mayor of New York City.

While I am admittedly biased, the biggest reason I say he will be the next mayor of New York City is that the polls say that. Still, I have other reasons he is likely to become the mayor of New York City: he is young, personable, and, most importantly, authentic; the populace is tired of dour old men running the country for themselves, and Mamdani is running on ideas that are popular even though the conventional wisdom says they are loony tunes.

There is another reason, besides the City of New York’s—and the country’s—general discontent with the status quo, that I think Zohran Mamdani will win, and it is very similar to why Trump won in both 2016 and 2024. To back up a little, there are three ways the Main Stream Media covers elections, and the New York Times and CNN in 2016 are the best examples of that. If they like a candidate, like Hillary Clinton, they give them lots of good, thoughtful – or seemingly thoughtful – coverage. BTW, lots is the operative word in the previous sentence. If they don’t like the candidate, like Bernie Sanders, they ignore him. Just ignore him, and people will forget that the candidate is even running. Or, if they dislike the candidate, like Donald Trump, they will constantly badmouth him. The last way is counterproductive; it ended up keeping Trump in the public’s conscience, and that is what is happening to Zohran Mamdani right now.

Ireland (or The Ireland Around Baltimore, Anyway)

Travel

From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced, that while it lasted this country would never be free or happy. Wolfe Tone, 1798

When you are lying drunk at the airport you’re Irish. When you win an Oscar you’re British. Brenda Fricker, first Irish actress to win an Academy Award, while earning the award.

For the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown, Patrick Freyne quoting an unnamed Irish journakist asked about the British monarchy from an Irish perspective.

On our way home from France, we stopped by Michele’s second family home in Baltimore, Ireland. Baltimore is a picturesque, small, former fishing village and current home to a couple of sailing schools and two ferry hubs. Michele’s family has had a small home overlooking the Baltimore harbor for about forty years, long enough so they consider themselves locals. The home is a converted garage and is about ten feet wide and three stories high (the picture, above, was taken from in front of the family home, and the picture, below, was taken from their second-story window). The closest bar is about a hundred and fifty feet away, and a two-star Michelin restaurant is about 500 feet down the road.

Ireland was England’s first colony, and the country is still trying to deal with that. It is a little disconcerting because the Irish are White, probably very close genetically to their conquerors, and they all speak English. English with a brogue, true, but English as their primary language. As a short aside, all the street signs are in both Irish and English, but I never heard two Irish people talking to each other in Irish (although Michele says that she has). End short aside.

From everything I read, the national narrative still seems to be one of imperial victimhood, although it seems as if this is changing. A 1972 amendment of the Irish constitution, for example, removed the “special position” of the Catholic Church, which the oppressor brought with them, as “guardian of the Faith” and the recognition of other named religious denominations in Ireland, and in 2018, the Irish repealed, by referendum, the constitutional prohibition of abortion.

There are ruins or restored stone buildings everywhere, in this part of Ireland, anyway, and they seem like a fading image of the old imperialism. There are also a lot of new manors, as the Irish call the new big houses built by a new rich class, presumably – by me, at least – from Cork and Dublin. Sometimes, it is easy to tell the new imperialism from the old imperialism. Sometimes it isn’t.

At the end of Michele’s street is a restored castle, O’Driscoll Castle, which was reputed to be a sanctuary for druids in the “ancient days” and less than 30 kilometers away is Drombeg Stone Circle, a site sacred to the druids.

Above all, Ireland is beautiful, and this is an especially beautiful part of Ireland. There is not much topography, which is to be expected after the long time Ireland had been under ice during the last glaciation. The countryside is riotously green and meticulously maintained, giving everything a look of a very nice park or an expensive estate. Meticulously maintained is the operative phrase here. Everyplace is clean and neat. It reminds me of my mother, who constantly told us, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

Every day that we were there, the weather was lovely, but that is unusual; Ireland is beautiful because, on average, it rains 146 days per year. Still, whatever the reason, Ireland is beautiful and very photogenic.

Thinking About Creativity While Seeing An Art Extravaganza

Architecture, Art, Travel

Every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist. John Lennon

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. Pablo Picasso

Creativity is intelligence having fun. Albert Einstein

On our last day in Paris, we went to the David Hockney show at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in a building designed by Frank Gehry. It was a major show by Britain’s most influential contemporary artist, in a building by, arguably, the most influential architect of our time, but for me, our lunch was the artistic high point. Before we saw the show, we had lunch at Le Frank, the museum’s cafe, run by Jean-Louis Nomicos.

Much, maybe most, food is a combination of ingredients. Not usually, but often, I would prefer the ingredients separately. I don’t want a great tomato buried in a hamburger; I would rather have it on the side. The same goes for pickles. Once, maybe twenty years ago, at a Chinese restaurant in the old Westfield Center in San Francisco – I’m pretty sure it was M.Y. China – I had a Kung Pow Chicken that had been deconstructed into its component parts. It was delicious and I still remember it.

I had my second deconstructed dish at Jean-Louis Nomicos’ Le Frank, a Caesar salad, with caramelized chicken with a hat of fried parmesan cheese. I loved it. It was delicious, especially the solid core of the Romaine lettuce slathered with a very thick Ceaser dressing. Sitting outside with Michele on a warm afternoon, next to a garden overlooked by a golden Takashi Murakami sculpture, eating this deconstructed Ceaser salad, it is hard to ignore that I am extraordinarily fortunate.

I’ve already said that Frank Gehry designed the Fondation Louis Vuitton building, but I want to emphasize that because the building influences a large part of the museum experience, including my deconstructed salad. The Fondation Louis Vuitton says the structure is characterized by a combination of solid “iceberg” volumes and expansive, glass “sails”. According to several sources, the sails are glass to get around Parisian height-restricting zoning laws, but the basic deconstructed motif goes back to, at least, Gehry’s early days in Southern California.

Frank Gehry’s house, designed in 1977. Photo by IK’s World Trip.

We all have watched athletes degrade, but it is harder to see mental degradation, including creativity, but the degradation is there. I still remember a study on age and creativity done by the University of California – Berkeley in the very late 1950s, while I was in college, majoring in Industrial Psychology. I don’t remember all the creative fields that were in the study, but I do remember that Chemistry was the field that its practitioners peaked earliest at about 28, and Architects peaked the latest at about 46. Frank Gehry has peaked.

The design process for Fondation Louis Vuitton started about 2001, which means that Gehry was about 72. Wandering through this Frank Gehry building, it is hard to think this is the high point of Frank Gehry’s career. Outside, the iceberg and sail motif is fairly easy to read, but inside, it gets very confusing. But more germane, the building does not seem that original. It just seems like a less coherent rehash of what Frank Gehry has been doing repeatedly for the last fifty years.

That is not to say that this Gehry building isn’t interesting; it is. It just isn’t as interesting – or as influential – as buildings he designed forty years ago. One nice touch, though, is that we tourists are allowed on the roof, where we can get a view of tourist Paris one way and business Paris the other way, although neither view is unrestricted.

I think of David Hockney as an LA artist, partially because he was painting in LA when I first became aware of him, and partially because his colors seem so LAish. LA is also where Hockney first got interested in photography, and I think his photography, with its manipulation of perspective, is fabulous.

As an aside, about twenty years ago – plus or minus – Michele was taking a photography class in which she did a photo collage of Point Lobos. During the critique of the class, the teacher mentioned that Michele’s photograph was like David Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway. When she told me she had been compared to David Hockney, I was sooo jealous. End aside.

The David Hockney show is billed as a retrospective of the last twenty-five years of his work, and it is exuberant and accessible (and the galleries were full of art aficionados, making it hard to see the huge pieces). Wandering the show, which was huge, I was reminded of a Dorothy Parker quote: First you write for yourself, then you write for your friends, then you write for money. Much of the show seemed to fall into the third category. Again, that is not to say that the later Hockney works were not terrific; they are, they just seem a little perfunctory.

What I especially liked were Hockney’s portraits, which I hadn’t seen before, and it also gave me the chance to take my own portrait of a very bored guard. All in all, it was a great show and a great way to end our stay in Paris.

An Interlude

No category

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.– Franz Kafka

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. George Bernard Shaw

I turned Eighty-Five in June of 2025 CE, and it was my roughest birthday yet. For years, I’ve thought of myself as a much younger person than my actual age. If I had a physical problem – and I’ve had a lot of physical problems – I sort of thought about it as something that could be fixed, a repair like a leaking radiator on a car. Fix the leak and zoom away. Even then, when I really think about it, I knew I was getting old, but not really…old.

A couple of months before my birthday, I fell on a wet flight of stairs, breaking a little bone in my hand, from which my hand is still numb. At about the same time as my birthday, I had my first of two cancer surgeries, two cataract surgeries, which made it difficult to read, and a major problem with my jaw that is probably arthritis related. All this over a background of arthritis that is getting worse. It is not the first time that I’ve felt old, but the first time I’ve felt chronically old. I feel like I’ve become obsessed with ageing and its associated degradation of my body and mind.

To add to that, I lost, left really, my phone in a cab in Paris, and it is now tied up in French Customs. I don’t consider myself a big phone user, but I really miss it. Then our house phone battery failed, so I felt completely isolated. I thought I did, that is, until my computer’s hard drive started freezing and I lost my email connection.

I probably will not find out if I’m cancer-free for a while, and even if I am now cancer-free, I will have six weeks of chemotherapy to be sure. On the plus side, I passed my driver’s vision test, and I can now read the New Yorker’s cartoons without glasses. We have a new house phone with the same number but no saved numbers of other people. I now have a new 2-TWO-terabyte hard drive, which is pitched as being faster and more reliable than my old drive.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, we went to a David Hockney show in a museum designed by Frank Gehry.

Arc de Triomphe

Architecture, Travel, War

No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. Muhammad Ali

After much of the day wandering around the area, we ended up at the Arc de Triomphe. The Arc de Triomphe was built – well, started, anyway – by Napoleon Bonaparte to honor the French Army and to celebrate French military victories. It was intended as a grand monument to celebrate the glory of France and its soldiers during the Napoleonic era. 

It made me sad. I half expected to be angry, if anything, but this impressive monument just made me sad. France was not bigger or stronger after its love afair with Napoleon, its borders were the same as they had been in 1792, but it had lost about half a million soldiers (estimates vary wildly). That’s about half a million dead people, mostly young men, for nothing. Well, a little man’s ego, I guess, but other than that, nothing.

By way of disclosure and to be fair, over the years, France has added other sections? items? memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with an eternal flame, to the Arc de Triomphe.

But, in the end, the Arc de Triomphe is still a memorial to war, to killing, to death. And today, with Russia and Israel trying to kill as many people as they can, it seems especially gruesome.