I haven't been to Manhattan since 2018, and even that was a visit
cut short by a hurricane. So much has changed. The Lincoln theaters
on Broadway and W60 closed. The Upper East Side was hit hard
by COVID and many shops are closed (entire buildings are for sale).
But that was nothing compared to the Wall Street area, which was a ghost
during a Friday lunch hour. On the other hand the new World Trade
Center area has been built up nicely. (I have never been to the old WTC,
come to think of it.) And in terms of cultural events, no city remotely compares to New York. I caught the retrospective of Claire Denis'
_Chocolat_ (not well attended) and Lou Ye's _Suzhou River_ (almost
a full house at Film Forum). The events that I missed (the entire
Rendezvous with French Cinema, with two films starring Sandrine
Kiberlain; the entire Jeanne Moreau series, especially _The Lovers_;
the play with Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan in BAM; Hilary
Hahn playing Bach ... would each have been the event of the year
in most cities.

This was my _Return to Montauk_ tour, but I had to skip the main
event (drive to Montauk) due to the miserable weather. I did make
it to the New York Public Library on 42 St, the Algonquin hotel, and
the Gramecy Park/Irving Place sites which were prime attractions
in Volker Schlondorff's film.

Ob movies: I tried to watch _Mank_ on Netflix and could barely
make it to the halfway point. Almost every character in every scene
is backlit so you can see at most a tenth of his/her face. It is almost
as if David Fincher wants to dare to critics to finally call him on his technical ineptitude. (He is already guilty of all those ugly yellow-green lighting in recent films because every film school wants to imitate his
ugly look.) He has been going downhill for many, many years, but
few critics have the nerve to speak up.

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