High life

28 May 2011

Taki lives the High life

New York

In that wonderful old Broadway musical Guys and Dolls, gambler Sky Masterson is romancing Sister Sarah Brown of the Salvation Army after an all-nighter of boozing it up in Havana. Walking her home to her mission in New York, he tells her that the only place in the world where ‘the dawn is turned on by an electrician’ is Times Square. She swoons. That, of course, was the good old days, when Runyonesque characters like Nathan Detroit, Nicely-Nicely, Harry the Horse, Big Jule from Chicago and Liver Lips Louis ruled Broadway and its environs.

In that magical make-believe world, Nathan married Miss Adelaide (after a 14-year engagement) and Sky got hitched to Sarah. The play had a very happy ending, although if there is a revival any time soon, Nathan will most likely marry Sky and Miss Adelaide Sister Sarah. (The clapped-out NY Times had a long story last Sunday about a transgender’s sex life, and an editorial by a gay man on why people like himself should boycott straight marriages. No wonder the Wall Street Journal is wiping the floor with the old bag. Saturation coverage of queenly matters.)

Many people my age wish to have lived in another era, and I do often get lost in pipe dreams of times past, but New York does this to me more than any other city because the place has changed so radically. Whites are now in the minority, cops are no longer polite or Irish, men no longer wear suits and hats, and Times Square’s perfect combination of seediness and glamour has been lost for ever to a blur of moving electric surfaces advertising junk. Worse, the Sky Mastersons and Nathan Detroits have been pushed aside by dusky drug dealers and pimps, not to mention the marauding groups of young black toughs who appear out of nowhere and help themselves to any available goods.

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Tom B

May 30th, 2011 3:56pm Report this comment

I thought that New York had, since the improvements in policing in the 1990s, become safer. People may no longer walk around like extras in Mad Men, but the place is a great improvement on what was the position in the 1970s and 80s, although Bloomberg's intolerant rule has its downsides.

As for the fact that NYC is no longer dominated by white people, does it actually matter so long as the city remains a vibrant, relatively crime-free place?

alkan kizildel

June 2nd, 2011 11:23am Report this comment

"Now it’s only money that counts"

Sure! It was always so and it will be...
Was there ever anything else that mattered?

Doz

June 5th, 2011 8:27pm Report this comment

"Now it's only the money that counts..."

This is Taki's coda? I read his column because his skill at writing and determination to cock a snook at the world with his breathtakingly awful flirts with racism and Jew hatred is kind of entertaining when taken in small shots as the singularity that it is.

But, really, Taki, complaining that the New York art scene is all about the money. Well, who wouldn't have said that with the exact same sincerity in Henry James' day? Ca plus change.

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