Sometimes the four women in Sex and the City rushed through it. Sometimes, in those all-gal pow wows over those endless brunches, they whined about it. Sometimes they reported that it was delightful. Sometimes they said it was, well, a letdown. The city, not the sex.
It was the city that was the constant companion on Sex and the City, the HBO series that is ending after six seasons of filming in Greenwich Village, on the Upper West Side, in SoHo, on Fifth Avenue.
The four main characters ran through men -- Samantha more than the others. Sometimes they swore off men -- Samantha less than the others. But they never swore off the city. One episode was actually titled "I Heart NY," and the cityscape was almost a character in Sex and the City.
PHOTO: AP
"People have said it was the fifth character," said Michael Patrick King, one of the show's executive producers. "We've been East Side, West Side, all around the town, literally. We filmed so much in the city that I can walk down a street and say, in one block, `This is the place where Steve married Miranda,' or, `This is where Samantha met Mr. Cocky."'
Sex and the City became a kind of weekly Valentine to the city, from the bus that splashed Sarah Jessica Parker during the opening sequence to the close-ups in streets, stores, restaurants and parks. Remember that carriage ride with Mr. Big in Central Park, that brunch in Bryant Park? Remember the time Samantha showed up after finding, on the sidewalk, a pamphlet describing 1,001 sex positions? The things those women picked up on the sidewalks in the city of Sex and the City.
"If you make it into the show, you're somehow a staple of New York City life," said Julie Benavides, the general manager of Cafeteria, a diner on Seventh Avenue at 17th Street that made it into the show last summer. "Everybody said they saw us."
Sex and the City was anything but monogamous about restaurants, and as Benavides discovered, if a restaurant was good enough for Carrie Bradshaw, it was good enough for the show's fans. Consider what Sex and the City meant to Jefferson, the restaurant on West 10th Street where Samantha announced she had breast cancer during Miranda's wedding reception (not to make the plot twists of Sex and the City sound like those of a soap opera or anything).
"It put us on the map," said Simpson Wong, the chef and owner. "We're quote-unquote this fabulous place to be now."
Michel Boyer, the manager of Brasserie 8 1/2, at 9 West 57th Street, remembers the arrival of the Sex and the City crew 11 months ago. "The decor was what they were looking for," he said, sitting in one of the restaurant's off-white armchairs. Cosmopolitan-craving Sex and the City fans soon followed.
And of course there were the Manolo Blahnik shoes.
"It was amazing how the five seconds on the show took a whole day with 200 workers," said the manager, Abby Askari-Bennet of the Manolo Blahnik store, at 31 West 54th Street. "Manolo Blahnik became a household name."
And not just in the city. Sex and the City was, in the words of Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University, "the best New York cultural delivery system to come along in a long time."
"This truly is a show that is about a place and set in a place," he said. "The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis, but with the exception of a couple of episodes, it was not about Minneapolis. But on Sex and the City, the best relationship in all the seasons of the show has been the relationship between these women and the city, not between these women and their various men friends."
So, as with any romance, six seasons of on-location shooting left behind six seasons of on-location memories.
In love or in television, six years is a long time -- long enough for there to be people out there who had encounters with Sex and the City and felt burned. Betty Rinckwitz, the president of a block association on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, said the end of Sex and the City will mean the end of "a terrible nuisance" -- filming on her block.
The front of the brownstone that viewers know as Carrie's building is on her block. Never mind that Carrie lives on the Upper East Side. The show turned the block into a no-parking zone for days at a time and disrupted residents rhythms and routines, she said.
Still, she gave the crew good marks. "They're very nice, they come when they say they'll come, leave when they say they'll leave, and they leave the place clean." And they paid her block association about US$500 for each shoot, Rinckwitz said -- about US$4,000 last year alone.
"My treasurer's really happy," she said, "but my feeling is, it should be more."
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist