But wait, you might be asking, how exactly is everything alright in the world? Well first off, I said that all is right in the world, not everything is alright. Huge diff. Everything being "alright" would mean exactly that: all war has been called off, the various and sundry assholes who govern the planet have decided to not run the place into the ground and we've all somehow just learned to get along. That never happens, and I'm rather glad about that as it would really dry up the endlessly bubbling font of materiel I write about on my shoddy little blog. Truly a loss to civilization.
I use the phrase "all is right in the world" to rather hyperbolicly note that yet another facet of human ugliness has finally passed on into the undiscovered country. Look forward to seeing me use this term when Donald Trump goes bald or Crocs goes out of business or George Bush finally finds that pretzel that gets the better of him. The reason I make this call today, however, would be the recent announcement that the Sex and the City franchise is indeed dead. Glory hallelujah, let me hear you SING children! The damage done to my fair city by that show and it's cinematic spawn pales only in comparison the the exponential growth of NYU. Countless housewives the world over watched this steaming pile of dreck and then descended upon the NYC as packs of screeching, cosmo-swilling harpies in knock-off Prada over the years and their voracious appetites have turned whole swaths of the city into smoking rubble (in a cultural sense of course). I would like to lay the rapid decline of TriBeCa and Soho and Chelsea at the feet of this episodic monstrosity but I can find to hard evidence of this being the case. In the fine journalistic tradition of Fox News and the NY Post, however, I will do it anyways.
Sex and the City killed Lower Manhattan. And now, we have killed it back. Or New York Magazine killed it at least. Some guy who used to be on the show whose name I can't be bothered to run through a search engine because then I'd have to drag my browser cache behind the digital equivalent of a shed and put it out of it's misery, had this to say in an interview with the gorgon-slaying magazine:
"The press killed it. Your magazine fucking killed it. New York Magazine. It's like all the critics got together and said 'This franchise must die.' " -some failed actor
Woah, there hoss! Let's not drop all the blame on the critics now. This was really more of a joint effort between (cue up "We Are the World") critics, editors, studio heads, the SAG, the NYC Better Business Bureau, any waiter who's ever worked a brunch shift, department store clerks, cabbies, women with high self-esteem, feminists, musicians, artists, artisans, hair stylists, nail stylists, hot dog vendors, firemen, police officers, paramedics, hobos both with and without shotguns, and anyone currently on the planet who was born with a penis except for that lone, failed actor. Pretty much anyone who isn't either a rapidly aging, self-conscious bitch with more money than sense or a gay man was killed this franchise. We all brought it down with a gut-shot to the box office and for that, New York thanks you.
Make no mistake, though, this poor city's culture and identity are far from safe. For years it was argued that immigrants from abroad were the root of NYC's many failures but find this to be untrue. It is exactly those immigrants that raised this city up to become one of the foremost cultural powerhouses on the planet. It's as if the entire world condensed itself here with all of it's respective strengths and weaknesses and the end result was a multicultural dynamo the likes of which hadn't existed since the height of the Ottoman Empire.
The real threat turned out to be our fellow countrymen.It has always been a harsh mistress, but ultimately a fair one. For the last hundred years, stories and fables of New York have spread far and wide, enticing those who would test themselves and repulsing those who wish for an easy ride.
With the rise of the Internet Age and the ability to separate fact from fiction (well, theoretically at least) at the whole world's fingertips, people who, before, might not have made the leap to New York, started to think that this was indeed the place for them and began arriving in droves. When they got here, they elected Rudy Giuliani as their mayor and the Great Unraveling began.
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| I am death and I have been visited upon thee. |
Times Square was cleaned up, the homeless were thrown out and west Brooklyn was rezoned with an eye toward development. Only the Village remained. It was NYU that brought it all together. NYU had been nesting like a parasitic larva in the heart of The Village for decades and in the early 2000's it began eating it's way out. Several years later, the damage was permanent. The East Village and Alphabet City, once bastions of underground NYC culture had been laid to waste by frat bars and novelty t-shirt shops as every year it played host to an ever-increasing crowd of entitled little pricks from all over the country.
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| NYU and The Village circa 2008 |
Underground culture isn't the only endangered species in NYC today. A couple days ago I mimicked the classic Brooklyn patois which I rarely hear these days. In fact, I rarely hear any of New York's accents. Here's a quick rundown, borough by borough:
Listening to that woman talk almost makes you glad these accents are dying off. Of course, everyone is going to have an opinion on which accent comes from where so I'm not backing up her assertions in any way. After all, when she's talking about Brooklyn, the screen is showing a map of Queens, so how accurate can she be? She also fails to include my two favorite New York accents. Lucky for you they have both been preserved for posterity in one of my favorite Bad Old New York movies ever: The Taking of Pelham 123. We're talking the original starring Walter Matthau not that dogshit Travolta movie that came out last year. Here's a clip:
Figured out which two I love? First, Matthau is just killing it. "We call it the noive centah." "Robbarry, assawlt, moidah..." Every sentence just drips with the long-suffering weariness that was probably standard issue in 1970's New York. But he pales in comparison to the walking ball of stress and agitation that is Tom Pedi as Caz Dolowicz, who makes his thunderous entrance at the 5:30 mark. Holy shit, that accent is amazing. I can't even type it properly because it misses all the cadence of the delivery. I don't know from whence it came or where it has disappeared to, but I think it ought to me mandatory for any male living in New York who's over the age of 50 to have to speak like that. God knows I wish I could.
The fire has gone, my friends. We are still an amazing city but certain hallmarks of NYC have receded into obscurity, perhaps never to return. It's a difficult thing to put into words, the love/hate I feel towards a time that I never knew and probably wouldn't have been able to survive in. The closest I can get is to link you over to Thomas Wolfe's seminal short work, Only the Dead Know Brooklyn. Sure things ain't like they used to be, but for right now, I gotta say, I sure is glad ta be heah.
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