New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, in Israel playing at being an international statesman when he can't even get the 7 train to run on weekends, heard a rocket and hid in a basement.

What is going on with Caroline Kennedy and her magical pony trip to the US Senate? Disarray!!

The bloody and river-scorching New Yorko-Clevelo War has finally ended. And, just as so many wars before it have been, the whole unpleasantness was resolved with the meting out of free threatre tickets.

New York and Cleveland are at war! Well, according to one theatre exec who recently said, when talking about New York theatre audiences, “We’re horrible snobs. We hate tourists from Cleveland." Clevelanders are angry!

Forget cover girl Tina Fey and her scary scar story. The most interesting tale in this month's Vanity Fair is that of Christian Gerhartsreiter aka Christopher Chichester aka Christopher Crowe aka Clark Rockefeller. He's the mystery fellow who was arrested this summer after kidnapping his daughter, Snooks, whom he lost custody of during his messy divorce. Though he's a nefarious conman, he's also a brilliant one, with a fascinating story, as detailed by VF's Mark Seal. And we're kind of obsessed with it. It's a crazy, crazy thing.

Every November 25, New York celebrates its independence from the British. What, you didn't know about Evacuation Day? It is a much more awesome holiday than Thanksgiving, because it involves gunfire, greased flagpoles, and indignities being visited upon English people, one of the fundamental tenets of comedy. The British never made very likely imperialists because, as we all know, they're a fey bunch of ninnies who enjoy dressing in ladies' clothing and tending to their gardens. But they did run United States for a time, and their terrible despotic rule was marked with grievous injustices like asking that we pay an extra ha'penny (which in modern dollars is nearly a tuppence!) to drink our precious tea. So after some mooks in Boston got wasted, dressed in racist costumes, and engaged in some reckless property damage (some things never change, right?) we all decided that meant war, and a couple years later, the rest of the colonies had beaten the British and all that remained was for them to finally leave New York, where we never really minded their presence that much, as they were certainly preferable to those mooks in Boston. Still, the British were a little bitter about having to leave New York and go back to London, where the ladies all had comically screechy voices and sometimes chased you around at high speed while wearing frilly lingerie. So on their way out of town, they acted quite the cads!

Eliot Spitzer, you fool. You could have been a contender! When Spitzer resigned as governor of New York in March, rather than standing and fighting like the stubborn-to-the-point-of-idiocy man that he is, he was ceding his political future to the vagaries of luck. And his luck is not good, obviously, or he would still be sneaking into hotel rooms with Ashley Alexandra Dupre. But what if he had hung on, boldly stood up for his imaginary right to patronize hookers, and stayed in office? He'd be headed to the US Senate in January. Think about it: if Spitzer had decided not to resign (as we advised at the time), he'd now be a scandal-ridden and likely ineffective governor. He would also, however, have the luck to be a high officeholder in New York now that Obama has been elected. Obama is very likely to name Hillary Clinton to a cabinet position. That will mean New York needs its governor to name a new Senator to fill her spot. If Spitzer were still the governor, who better to name than himself? The state Democrats would surely support it, just to be able to clear him the hell out so the party could move on to a slightly more scandal-free future. And nobody in Washington would really mind, because they all fuck whores there, at least metaphorically. So Spitzer could have put himself in Hillary's seat and installed David Paterson as governor, just as he is now. Spitzer's particular skill set—cracking down on corporate profligacy—is looking pretty good right now. Once the Post got off his ass about the scandal, he'd probably be able to do some good. But he resigned, so none of this will happen. It would be kind of nifty if Paterson appointed him to the seat now, as some have suggested. (It would be great for Paterson, who would have neatly gone from being a little-known Lieutenant Governor to having Spitzer owe him a huge favor). But it won't happen, because in America you can screw taxpayers, but not hookers. Live and learn. Spitzer will be back on the scene in two years either way. [pic via LAT]

Oh, wonderful. Democrats took control of the New York State Senate yesterday, by the way, which is great news, if you like the Gay Marriage and repealing the heinous Rockefeller Drug Laws, two things the Dems are set to address now that they control both legislative bodies in Albany. Or, uh, two things Dems were set to do, until this they decided to immediately separate into splinter groups and begin a war for the Senate leadership, with a group of anti-gay marriage conservative Dems leading the charge. Ha ha ha, Albany will always suck, forever, and the gays just can't catch a break. [NYT]

First stop, 7pm, at the hallway-shaped Milano's on East Houston. There was a hair in my beer. I settled next to a stoic old man. Despite the crowd, however, the only political discussions were coming from the TV. Second stop, Mars Bar, 8pm. There are exactly two bare lightbulbs lit, and exactly three people in the bar: a middle-aged guy who looks like a Bowery bum, a young blonde guy who looks like a junkie, and a black lady from Oregon who "lives here now." With a tubercular cough left over from a cold, I fit right in. The older guy, Mike, asks if I'm reading Freud. "Believe it or not Interpretations of Dreams was one of the first books I read when I was a kid because I was having nightmares. Say, have you ever read Jung? No?" "You vote?" Mike asks the pretty brunette bartender, who barely looks of voting age. She sighs. "No, because I fucked up my registration. I just... fucked it up." "Tell you what, we're having going to have our first black President," Mike offers. Two laborers from Connecticut come in, the younger of which didn't bother to vote. "I think we're going to have McCain," he says. "It's all rigged up anyway." The payphone rings and the bartender answers: "No, Benny, I'm sorry. I told you before I'm not going on a date with you," she says before slamming it down. With that, we sit and wait for the night bartender, who is a half an hour late for her shift. [Photo courtesy psych101]

Terrible news: if Obama wins, you have to love America! That's right, New Yorkers have given the game away—all the hipster Obama gear and unconcealed excitement at his candidacy means no longer can we hide behind our secret glee at the utter rejection of our values and lifestyle by "Real America." If it's a landslide, we're screwed. Do we really want our smirking appropriation of the gung-ho patriotic vernacular (America—fuck yeah!) to suddenly become... sincere? As Doree Shafrir writes in today's Observer, some New Yorkers are becoming dangerously proud of their country.

Goddammit. Mike Bloomberg is going to be mayor again, forever. He will pay lip service to the poor and raise the cigarette tax to $400 dollars and ban watching too much tv and give the entire Bronx to some developers and the NYPD will continue to shoot black people, tase crazies, and arrest hippies. But we need him, now, because he is a Serious Nonpartisan Grownup Expert Business Manager, and the City is in a Crisis. [NYT]

Hey, is this Mitch McConnell campaign ad a little odd, or is it just us? Mitch is a Senator running for reelection. Schumer is a Senator too. So far, so good. But the thing is, McConnell is running in Kentucky, and Schumer is not running in Kentucky. So it's just weird that McConnell's ad would be all about how this NEW YORK Senator is spending all this MONEY on building museums for hippies, and illegal immigrants, and also presumably shining his diamond collection. Also the voice over guy... his accent is a bit... ethnic. Just what is Mitch McConnell trying to suggest, exactly? Can anyone enlighten us??? Full ad after the jump.

Joergen Geerds' epic New York panoramas are on display this Friday in Newark. For those who prefer to look at the Hudson than cross the river, more modest versions of the photographer's immaculately stitched nighttime vistas are on the web. Check New York Panorama and Luminous New York-or click through on the image above.

It is understandable that film makers prefer to set the apocalypse in the only American conurbation that is recognizable—to international cinema-goers at least—as a city. (The original I Am Legend was set in Los Angeles, but the last year's movie was improved with Will Smith, computer-generated imagery and a Manhattan setting.) But New York has been destroyed so often recently that the suspense is draining from these plots. As soon as one sees the familiar profile of the Empire State Building, one knows something bad is going to happen. And one more thing: the city is in a delicate condition right now. We could have done without this trailer for The Day The Earth Stood Still, which shows bad things happening to Central Park, the Giants stadium, St. Patrick's Cathedral—and the city as a whole. More stills after the jump.

Tin Pan Alley, the stretch of West 28th Street (between Broadway and 5th) where songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Scott Joplin worked and published over the decades, creating some of the best pieces of the American songbook, is now up for sale. It's being hawked at some $44 million, ending an era that, well, really ended in the 1950's. But whatever, chronological semantics aside, it's a significant group of buildings that are essential pieces of the city's cultural history and now, well, they'll probably be condos. A listing recommends that the buildings be torn down, and that some sort of awful high-rise be erected in their place. Probably all steel and glass. No soul.

Michael Bloomberg, the man who we'll freely admit is the least bad man to have run New York in a long time, is seeking a third term as mayor of this great city, which is not actually legal. But, you know, people all like him, even (well-off white) Democrats! So unlike when vicious rat-faced monster Rudy Giuliani tried this, after 9/11, everyone will basically get behind this repeal of term limits thing. Because we need a rich old technocrat independent in this time of great strife! By "everyone" we mean the Times and the Post and the Daily News because the alternatives—what the hell are the alternatives? Some stupid Democrats from the City Council whom no one has ever heard of, and also Marty Markowitz—are lousy and unknown and scary. It has been a peaceful and mostly prosperous couple years for New York, yes. It was, overall, a nice change of pace from the Giuliani years, for everyone. We all got along, there was "consensus." But you know his NYPD are just as miserable and free from accountability as Giuliani's! He recently (admirably) changed the way New York measures poverty, revealing that he has not done very much until now to, like, alleviate any of this poverty. The race and class divisions are basically as bad as they have ever been in New York, right now, after two full terms of Bloomberg. And he wanted the Olympics! Remember that bullshit? So, like, maybe this third term is his desperate last shot at becoming some sort of crusader for the little people? Except he's never seemed vaguely interested in that, until now, sort of. So maybe he just wants to run again to finally ban salt. (Because, hah, that is his real legacy: New York is not allowed to be gross anymore!) All of his advisors advise against a campaign to overturn term limits, because even tho Mayor Mike is quite popular, term limits are even more popular, and seeking to get out them after years of supporting them rubs voters the wrong way. So then who is advising Mike to try this stunt? You will never guess!

Hip hop music was formally unveiled on an August night in 1973, when DJ Kool Herc started cutting two identical records back and forth to keep the freshest part playing, making the world's first break beat. It was only a matter of a few short years until the "up jump the boogie to the bang bang boogie," and another few years to "Sucker MCs call me sire," and then things really started rolling, and within a decade there was Puffy rapping about money while dressed in money driving a money car made of money. And who lost out? Kool Herc himself. The man is the walking embodiment of hip hop's shunning of its quasi-spiritual roots:

Woody Allen doesn't get the kids today. Or, rather, he gets them, he just doesn't see that much value in their taste level. The prolific filmmaker sat down with New York magazine recently, for their 40th Anniversary issue, to discuss the changing city—and, you know, how it relates to the changing world, etc, etc, navel-gaze, navel-gaze. Basically he thinks culture has "coarsened," as evidenced by good smart kids, from schools like Yale and Columbia, who don't understand Fellini:

Even before the Wall Street meltdown, New York's traditional media and advertising companies faced serious sales declines as internet competitors, including West Coast companies like Google, ate into margins. With financial services in freefall, a second pillar of the city economy has seriously weakened. Cue the Gotham press' anxious soul-searching and visions of a return to the weary days of the 1970s. "It's going to be very severe for New York City," a Manhattan College finance professor said in Tuesday morning's Times. New York magazined mused in this week's issue about the global financial center shifting from Wall Street to London, Dubai and Hong Kong, "like the decline of New York’s manufacturing base in the seventies." And the New Yorker is already racing to find the upside of financial armageddon, which as you know turns out to be creative ferment:

Window washers cleaning the glass skin of a skyscraper on 56th Street in Midtown Manhattan just had a terrifying scare. The cable slipped and left their basket at an angle of 45 degrees—and hundreds of feet from the ground.