New York Shitty??
I used to love this place. In fact I wanted to live here, but didn't have the balls or skills to get a job/sponsorship...Yeah I'm a coward! Second time here, and I'm not so sure..Maybe it's the global Internerd that has made everything available in Real Time
so YOU KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON NOW! Geographically there isn't much chop about New York. It's Hong Kong with everyone speaking English.
Sure there is alot of entertainment here, but not all of it is good. Restriction, lack of choice, isolation brings out more me thinks. The only things of any real architectural beauty is the Empire State,
Chrysler Building and Statue of Liberty, compared to nearly any European City, New York is chopped liver, there's just more people in the one place is all.
This trip seems to have taught me one thing. The English speaking Empires are finished. I felt like a real fucken idiot in France and Spain, two sophisticated, cultured countries, groping
with my lame French and retarded Spanish. I didn't feel in any way culturally superior or sophisticated. I felt like a vulgar English speaking git.
England is a fucking shithole. If Mick Jagger felt Australia was the 'arsehole of the universe' why did he kick off his pathetic solo career there, or did he realise then that he was a piece of shit? Maybe he was addicted to the smell or arseholes. Stupid Limey fuck-knuckle.
Besides the castles and chirpy people England is the dullest country on the planet. A living festering cold turd. The weather is constantly shit. They get sun for 15 minutes, then it's cloudy. England lives in a constant state of overcast humdrum. No wonder they went out and created an empire. The Poms are obsessed with supermarkets, something they do well in the modern age. Supermarkets and Airport terminals! Hail Britannia!
France is maybe 20% more interesting/cooler, but at least the climate changes as you go down south. For a sophisticated country, everything seems invariably simple. And I'm not sure about 'beautiful French women', maybe it's my gay side coming out, but I found the bulk of French women to be invariably ugly, and at least the English scrubs had bigger tits! But if you like movies and books and can speak French you will be in nirvana. Books on heavy deep shit everywhere, small press, big press, English, French, Chinese, Cambodian, Iranian, Eastern Euro - whatever, they got books on it. And the films are also from all over the world. Retarded ex-convict settlements like Australia have to have film festivals to pump up the jams, but in Paris it's a film festival all year. The Gaulic architecture of efficient compacted suburbs is nice as well; the 'chalet' style houses give everything communal, village type feel.
Spain kicks arse. Well I was in Catalunya, which is half of my ancestry, so I might be only speaking of a portion. I always had this impression of Spain being full of hot bloody, Spico morons. Blame fucking John Cleese and Fawlty Towers (and my crazy mother for that!) These English should make more fun of their own lack of culture than everyone else’s. Maybe I should do it, as it’s funnier than them making fun of everyone. Barcelona is probably the coolest city in Europe. You have the Mediterranean and its climate (though I think I may have got a rash from the dirty (???) water), an ancient, middle ages based city, mashed right up against the crux of modernism. Slightly similar to Israel (other distant half of my ancestry, Poland may make me want to suicide), w/o the warlord obsessed Arabs and the moronic-vulgar Israelis. The labyrinthine streets literally teem with stores, bars, apartments, people hanging out, music and hot women wearing not much clothes. Especially at the beaches. Boobs. Unfortunately I couldn't touch any. Their art scene is right out there, their politics currently totally progressive, interesting as I thought they were a Catholic banana republic mafia-racket like Italy....Maybe Catalonia is the exception not the norm......
So now I am in America, New York City to be exact. It still has that dense population, big-city-I-always-see- in-the-movies-but-now-it's-real-feel when I arrive here. But it's changed. Everywhere you go they try to sell you shit, like EVERYWHERE. I go to the Empire state where temporary ropes force you to line up a particular way so they can offer you tours you don't want, gifts you don't need and when they made us take photos - which I though were for security/terrorist profiling(you now have airport security on all the tourist sites, thanks terrorists - it was for shitty ChromaKeys tourist photos! I coulda vomited. And the food here isn't as good as I thought it was. Matzo ball soup is sloppy and soft, but the chopped liver is good. And the haute culture food is over-rated. The pizza isn’t much better. Overall American food doesn't taste as 'fresh' as in Australia. And they don't have decent beer.
The 'hipster' scene here is execrable. Everyone fucken looks the same and talks the same shit! It's incredible! Talk about fucken GROUPTHINK!! Where are people that you can have a conversation with like an ordinary mentsch?? I've tried to talk to women, and while I can engage in small talk, most are too busy sending SMS's to their other boyfriend or whatever. So I don't really expect to make any really meaningful relationships while I'm here.
But New York’s funky/fashionable/artistic ‘cutting edginess’ is based on dogshit. Fashion magazines, wannabes, fucking status seekers, poseurs, rubbish. Though they have lots of book, almost as many as France and Spain, and way more than England. And people here read more, unlike Australia, where people can't actually read... The most interesting thing in New York are the migrants, and black people definitely not the WHITE PEOPLE getting paid big money in fucking fashion/lifestyle ‘image creating’ magazines. They sell so many fucking shmattas here is insane. I can’t even buy a pair of durable sandals around here!! New Yorkers just wish they were European.
Me and my ex-pat Aussie mate I'm staying with went and saw ESG at this place called Santos Music House, which is owned by that Andrew WK guy who seems to have taken his money from his record advance and started a hip and trendy club, it's like Revolver in Melbourne. ESG were good, I also saw Vernon Reid & Masque at a 'free' show, where I ultimately dropped 50bucks on drinks and they pass around a 'band donation' hat, so it wasn't really free. New York stuff. But the gig was great, small; club with about 40 'hipsters' shame they started at 1am on a Monday night, I was nodding off around the 2 mark. I need sleep ya know I'm not 25!!!
That's probably the kicker, I'm getting old. I'm single. I have a kid. I still want to go out and boogie, but 25 year old preppies and hipsters won't talk to a 38 y.o curmudgeon (well I’m more that way on paper, or HTML). I don't look like fucking Heath Ledger and I'm not rich! Then the 'older set' are all uber rich and have dinner parties on the upper west side, so what the fuck am I supposed to do? Sit on the Internet? Watch CNN all day? I’m just another ‘tourist’ I suppose… (Actually I went to the Statue of Liberty yesterday and queued up with these Germans that had peculiar moustaches)
Anyway I bought some culture:
CD's : Mars CD, Sonics Rendezvous Band, Reigning Sound, RVNG presents Justine D - all good
BOOKS : Night of the Living Dead BFI, Chomsky on Anarchism, The Urban Homestead and Evil Paradises
MAGS : Ugly Things, Wax Poetics (black rock issue), Cinemascope, Neural.it
and too many pairs of shoes!!
So I been watching the Presidential Race, it's very similar to what was gong on in Australia, except John Howard didn't stand down and his party got thumped. The Repubs were smart to lock Dubya in the cupboard (Closet??) but McCain, oh is he a first class shmendrick! And then they put in that Palin shickser (I mean she empitomises the word for those have that no idea what I'm talking about.) McCain quite literally talks about nothing, he's a cypher. Palin YACKS LOUDLY, she reminds me of a more sophisticated Pauline Hanson. I figure that when the Republican's lose, she will quickly appear on a really camp and gay reality TV show like Hanson does in Australia (‘dancing with the stars’ or some diarrhea)..I love how Americans throw up all these pseudo ideas like 'feminism' etc to give her gravitas. She's a nothing. Now Obama has alot of integrity on the surface, he speaks well, thing is, I don't see anyone running with him, its just OBAMA, OBAMA, OBAMA, where is his fucken posse? (OK I only been here two weeks!) Really the way I see it, is that if all the people (esp. black, hispanic, Indians, biafrans etc) get off their arses and vote, Obama should win this election. The economy is getting trennered in the shitter every second. But I don't feel threatened. If the Americans can't see the potzes in power have fucked things up so bigtime, they have sent America back 30 years, they have made the USA a laughing stock outside it's own protective cyber-bubble or whatever, well you Americans can accept more shithouse rock bands, you can accept more fucking Paris Hiltons, and you can accept more Mel Gibson and Ridley Scott movies, coz that’s what you fucking well want! But don’t expect a silver bullet, if Obama and the Invisibles win, things will be *slightly* different if THEY DON’T HAVE A VISIONARY PLAN AND STICK TO IT! Then in 4 years time, and if Palin doesn’t get her lucrative reality TV show, you might have your FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT!!!! Now where are those 'American thighs' that that not-actually-born-in-Australia band once sang about?
..and also time to get off the Internerd…………OFF!
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