High life
Answers, please
Tato
TNew York his is my last week in the Bagel and although I've said this before, never has New York been more fun and never has the time flown as quickly. They say time flies when one's in love or when one's old, but when one's both, it flies on afterburners.
The beautiful weather hasn't helped. For the last three weeks, ever since the rains came and went, it has been almost impossi- ble to go indoors. New York can be very beautiful at times, especially in spring. There is nothing poky about it. Walking up or down an avenue still leaves me amazed at the grandeur of the place. The Rocke- feller Center, the Empire State Building, the great Fifth and Park Avenue apartment buildings scream moolah well spent.
The hot weather suddenly evokes youth- ful memories; of freshly cut grass in coun- try clubs, the sound of tennis-balls being whacked by wooden tennis-rackets by men in whites, of smiling young girls in one- piece bathing-suits, or a young boy's unending summer pleasures. There is something about the landscape one grew up in that never leaves one. Smells are just as nostalgic. Last week, I went to an artsr fartsy party on lower Fifth Avenue that spilled out on to the roof. It was exactly the way it used to be in the Fifties. Young women back then shared tiny flats and entertained on their roof-tops. The houses were red and had fire-escapes. Edward Hopper was the landscaper. As the shad- ows deepened and the breeze shuffled the leaves, I thought of the time when it ails shifted girls' dresses. No longer. They all wore trousers.
This is the good news. The bad is that the culture has gone completely to hell. III Britain it's the press that is the cancer. In America, it's the cultural elite. Take War," ren Beatty's latest message. In his film Bur worth — Bullshit would have been far more appropriate — Beatty wants us to see the black underclass as superior, morally and otherwise, and socialism as the salvation of our society. Rap is good, classical music phoney; the F-word and all its derivatives, the truth; everything else, baloney. (I didn't realise how easy it is to make bullshit rhyme until I finished this sentence.) The loss of the Soviet dream has hi Beatty and his kind rather hard. What he seems to be saying in his obscenity-fdled message is that the only relief the black community can expect from the jaded world of corrupt white-led politics wills come primarily from those whose chic' intake is the weed and whose chief interest is the nether regions of the human 1,04' Perhaps he's right. Socialism thrives on vic; tims and unattainable goals. On hatred& those who make it. Pseudo-Marxist gob' bledegook permeates the heroine's conver- sation.
The price, of course, is not paid bY War- ren, a notorious cheapskate multi-in1101 aire, but by the blacks themselves who ww recede further and further into a world that has nothing in common with anyone else's world and certainly not Beatty's. Needless to say, the theatre is also ti311 to keep up with the total degeneration 0 America. Playwright Terence McNallY's latest is Corpus Christi, and the Manhatta,t1 Theater Club has decided to produce it. It 5 about a gay Jesus performing fellatio on his disciples, thankfully off stage. A few Chris- tians protested and the odd threat of a bomb has Fat Frank Rich, a columnist fort the Big Bagel Times, in an uproar. eat the hates Christians almost as much as the Ayatoilet used to loathe Amerieansi 'Don't give in to the Christian terrorists. °d the Right,' he squeals hysterically. Mll you, no one did. The play is going to go What the poor little Greek boy 'WI', like to know, just before I depart ti 5c shores for my London season, is the follow; ing: why is it that apartheid South Afilcci received such a drubbing from the so-callee civilised world, but when it comes to th, Catholic Church the civilised phoneys shine up? Why doesn't Catholic-bashing under the all-encompassing discriminaW" taboos of PC? Why is it okay for Frank Rich to bash Christians but not okay for at Buchanan to bash the 'Amen Israel corner in Washington'? How can blacks be aS dumb as to laugh and applaud Beatty's film which makes them look as if they came OVer on the last banana boat from Africa?
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