New Yorkers really truly believe -- because it is so *obvious* -- that their city is the capital of the world. In the part of Connecticut I assume the Rydells moved to NYC is called "The City" -- "I'm going to The City for the weekend; I saw that movie in The City last week; maybe we can get together in The City." No other city is The City.
When he moved to the suburbs everyone was so *white*, so white-bread. Everyone speaks the same language -- in NYC you can hear a dozen languages in a day, easily. You don't get chow mein in a shopping center Chinese restaurant, you go to Chinatown to a place with a line of smoked ducks strung up in the window and live carp in a tank. You go to 6th street & 1st Avenue, where there are 30 Indian restaurants in a single block. New York is filthy and smelly (OMG garbage strike), the snow might as well be yellow when it falls, the reek of a homeless man in a doorway can be enough to knock you backwards -- but the smells seem more *real*. Central Park rises up like a mass of green clouds. NYC kids don't just want to run away to hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0689711816/), they debate whether you could live inside the life-size model of the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. He wouldn't ride the ferry (doesn't know where the East River is, and why leave anyway?) but city kids all ride the subways fearlessly, and may have favorite graffiti artists.
And there were gay men. Around, all the time, unself-conscious, even proud. Well no, not unself-conscious, often strikingly self-conscious, showing off, hookers and millionaires both.
I've put a request for input up in my LJ (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mecurtin/166126.html), because I'm too tired to write more tonight and won't have a chance tomorrow, most likely.
A New York State of Mind
When he moved to the suburbs everyone was so *white*, so white-bread. Everyone speaks the same language -- in NYC you can hear a dozen languages in a day, easily. You don't get chow mein in a shopping center Chinese restaurant, you go to Chinatown to a place with a line of smoked ducks strung up in the window and live carp in a tank. You go to 6th street & 1st Avenue, where there are 30 Indian restaurants in a single block. New York is filthy and smelly (OMG garbage strike), the snow might as well be yellow when it falls, the reek of a homeless man in a doorway can be enough to knock you backwards -- but the smells seem more *real*. Central Park rises up like a mass of green clouds. NYC kids don't just want to run away to hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0689711816/), they debate whether you could live inside the life-size model of the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. He wouldn't ride the ferry (doesn't know where the East River is, and why leave anyway?) but city kids all ride the subways fearlessly, and may have favorite graffiti artists.
And there were gay men. Around, all the time, unself-conscious, even proud. Well no, not unself-conscious, often strikingly self-conscious, showing off, hookers and millionaires both.
I've put a request for input up in my LJ (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mecurtin/166126.html), because I'm too tired to write more tonight and won't have a chance tomorrow, most likely.