Sorry Gothamist it is worse. I've been in love with NYC all my life & hate it for good reason.

We are not a city of landmarks & celebrities we are a tapestry of humanity in all its forms and the heartbeat of NYC they blew off.

This is what set me off. Gothamist had a review that included this quote, “One coworker told me they teared up watching it, while another declared, "if you completely hate this, you hate NYC, probably."

Aside from grammar that makes my punctuation look like a Strunk & White super-star, it gives me a cramp to hear folks make sweeping judgements attached to their opinions. It’s a mindset that’s infected our corporate media culture.

This isn’t a tribute to NYC by a long shot. It will never stir the hearts that feel the city heartbeat of Simon & Garfunkle in Central Park. This is a high profile lament of the lifestyle lost and disconnect from NYC living with crowds in their audience. The audience is still missing.

From a production perspective this is worse than the 1980's MTV videos with tight cropped location spots and singers posing. These people have spent too much time at their vacation homes doing Zoom calls to imagine the city of millions, that works and fights daily to survive, is moved to tears when none of us are included.

The few images of the city are post card shots of landmarks and the tens of millions who walk the streets are totally gone. What hubris to imagine the millions of nameless folks, that are the heartbeat of The Big Apple, should be moved by headliners who are all featured alone, coiffed in couture and spliced together to serenade us.

One of the best parts of NYC is that public name recognition does not confer special status. Media faces are everywhere and just one more face in the crowd, they are not heroes or special here.

We take care of ourselves as we see in one of my lifetime favorite, most censored stories.. lesser known than WTC7 in the “Twin Towers“ legacy. What’s missing in the PR is the heart of NYC that’s here. BOATLIFT - An Untold Tale of 9-11

Tom Hanks narrates the epic story of the 9/11 boat lift that evacuated half a million people from the piers and seawalls of Lower Manhattan. It was greater than the WWII evacuation of Dunkirk that took nine days the NYC evacuation took nine hours.