From Ralph

11/09/03

AGE & the CULT of NEW YORK

Oh! That I should consider a typical New yorker to be any more important than life itself. Did you know that the average New Yorker has a rib cage four storeys higher than say the Mayor of Deluth, or even the Librarian at York Public Library, in Yorkshire, England.

Many people from all over, go on holiday, but there are none so self important as the New Yorker who considers him/herself so important, that when they go on holiday, they believe that they are noticed, and worse, so much better than those Old Yorkers who go on holiday without due ceremony. The Old Yorkers, as we call them, just patter on down to the beach in Scarborough, Hornsea, Whitby. or if they are adventurous, Redcar, or even Spurn Head, to the South. 'There's now't so queer as folk, eeeh,aye!' you hear them opine in their own vernacular, as they don their handkerchief hats, knotted at the four corners, to fend off the weak sun. Old Yorkers are careful folk who don't take kindly to new-fangled Pizza Huts and fast food outlet chains. They take exception to chains of any kind and long for the old days when life was a bare thread and a jam butty, and maybe, a half-empty boat, that would take them away from Hull and out to sea to the New World of promise and streets paved with gold.

Can you identify a New Yorker by the cut of his knotted handkerchief? Never! The difference between chalk and Camembert cheese. Though there was a time when all New Yorkers wore pork pie hats, even the women! French Connection was the last time I saw a pork pie hat, or indeed, crinoline knickers, which, 30 years ago, you could see just peeping out from beneath the scantiest mini-skirt. 'She's from New York', you would mutter to yourself through the crumbs of the knadel you had purchased from a kosher stand on Hester Street. 'New Yorkers are Meshuggenah', you would stutter, in your best Jewish dialect, hunching your shoulders and spreading your hands. You even felt like a New Yorker, though you had been there only two days. It's taste is so infectious.

Whereas, the origins of Old York are so ancient as to be lost in fable. Under the Romans it became their principal seat of power in the north of Britain, if not in the whole country, and after their departure it so far retained its importance as to become the capital of Northumbria and archiepiscopal see. It features in all the great epochs and events of English history. Roman Emperors lived and died in York. York Cathedral is one of the finest examples of Early English aspirational religion, begun in the 7th century, but not finished until 1472, being, as it was, massively behind schedule, on account of internal struggles in management. Not to mention its near total destruction by fire, at the hands of an incendiary lunatic in 1829, and a damn fool mishap, when a drunken workman set the chancel on fire with his flaming brazier in 1840. But there is really no comparison with New York, or the religious St. Patrick's hut, the catholic citizens of the New World built on 5th Avenue, in an attempt to match anything in the Old World.(St, Peter's, St. Thomas', Trinity on Broadway, St. John's Chapel, the Congregational Church of the Puritans in white marble, and others, but New York's cathedrals are mainly skyscrapers and built, apart from lack of space, more as monuments to new wealth and worldly inhumanity, in an age that founded its own harsh, fantastic chaos. York Cathedral and its ilk, stand as mute reproof to the excesses of materialism; age old comparisons between an age of faith and an age of greed.

Not that this has anything to do with a New Yorker on holiday, or New York. New York occupies a somewhat low but most advantageous position on the southern aspect of Manhattan Island, about 14 miles long by 2 miles wide. The island is separated from the mainland by an arm of the Hudson River known as Haarlem River, which joins the East River or Long Island Sound at Hell Gate. It gained prominence as an important site for a commercial city, primarily because of its deep inner harbour, which allowed access to the largest ships bringing immigrants from the Old World, now part of America's 'history'.

For nearly 100 years, the New Yorkers didn't take holidays, couldn't afford them, or were too busy making money and suits. If you got as far as Coney Island you were getting exotic and far-flung. So a New Yorker on holiday is a human being wasting time.

That's as far as I got and figured that you people really loved your smoke-filled nooky bars and historic hotels, the brash confidence of Times Square, and the risque squalor of 42nd Street- now Disneyland! Mayor Bloomberg has put a stop to all your easy going ways and rich use of the English language. With a stick up his ass, he has cleaned up your act and made you feel something you haven't felt since you were citizens of the Old World- GUILTY!