A Bronx Tail
At 8.45am my journalism colleagues and I gathered at 116th and Amsterdam for a bus tour of the Bronx. This neighbourhood has appeared in films such as "A Bronx Tale" with Chazz Palminteri, "Rumble In The Bronx" with Jackie Chan and "The Bronx Executioner", a bizarre Italian sci-fi film involving a soldier getting raped by female androids. I've given up trying to remember the demographic that best sums up the various parts of New York City, there's pretty much everything in the Bronx anyway. Hispanics make up about half of it, the rest mostly Black, Asian and 'other'. Before our first stop, I chatted to a nice guy from the West Coast who's actually my next door neighbour. He will also be covering Bushwick, so I made him promise that we'd go out there together for the first time at least. I wasn't like 'Promise...PROMISE!' or anything, but I think we understood each other.
Our tour guide was Gary, a journalist from the Bronx, whose talk show on local television had just been cancelled after seven years. He evidently seemed depressed about it, and kept mentioning that he had been taken off the air for being subversive and outspoken about development in the Bronx. When we arrived at the site where the new Yankee stadium was being built, he became more active and introduced us to Councilwoman Helen Foster. Helen had voted 'no' (along with only two others) to the project, arguing that it made life hell for those living nearby and did not guarantee any jobs or economic improvement. The unions had the site stitched up, effectively cutting off any unrepresented jobhunters. Before going to the next place of interest, a security guard asked Gary what we were up to. Gary told us later that this interrogation was typical of the corporatisation of New York, and added that a certain talk show had been taken off the air after a seven-year run for the same reason.
At this point it began to rain hard, and the shabby streets and run-down shops took on a more glum appearance. We were driven to a development project by SoBro, a non-profit organisation that valiantly searched for unused or run-down real estate and turned it into affordable residential/office space. Though living space is scarce in New York, some run-down apartment blocks are left empty to serve some other purpose, most often to serve as a prop-up for a huge television channel billboard. We got off the bus and walked round an office block that had once been an empty factory. In the midst of the SoBro representative's description, my friend Ayub (a Kurd from Iraq) sarcastically whispered, "Oh wow, so amazing. There are people starving all over the world and we're being told about an old building that was renovated."
Ayub is an interesting guy. You can read his profile and his articles on OpenDemocracy. He speaks six languages and has a repertoire of bizarre jokes. One of them is: "an elephant and an ant go into the shower together. The elephant comes out five minutes later. What happened to the ant? HE'S STUCK TO THE SOAP!" Another one, which is good in a sort of weird macabre I-see-death-every-day-in-my-life way, goes: 'a man dies and his family and friends come out to bury him. His son digs a grave and places the coffin inside the hole, but suddenly the man wakes up and gets to his feet. All the mourners scream in fear and run away. The son, however, takes out a knife and stabs his father. He then calls to the fleeing crowd, "Come back! It's okay! I 've killed him!"'
After getting home, I watched a charming French classic called "Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob".
It's an utterly ridiculous film about an anti-Semitic old French guy who is forced to disguise himself as an Orthodox rabbi to hide from an armed group of Arab nationalists. There is a funny scene at the start of the film that really gets to the heart of what being French is like. The French guy is being driven home by his Jewish chauffeur, ranting about all the foreigners on the road. "Look, Solomon, an English car! I hate the English. And a Belgian one too! The Belgians are flooding this country." The man even stops at a mixed race marriage to scream about the fact that the bride is black and the groom white. He is then shocked upon finding out that his chauffer is Jewish, and fumes before saying, "Well, I'm keeping you anyway." After all this, the chauffeur goes, "Sir, might you not be a tiny bit racist?" The guy's reaction is classic, brilliant French hypocrisy. "ME? RACIST? Ah no, Solomon, you're going too far! Never!"
Here is the scene in question, on Youtube. There is also another a clip from the movie, in which a bunch of Ashkenazis do a dance routine. Any similarities to Iranian propaganda are entirely coincidental. Click here.
Another clip featuring the same actor is worth pointing out, because it precedes the Father Ted Hitler moustache by a few decades.
Our tour guide was Gary, a journalist from the Bronx, whose talk show on local television had just been cancelled after seven years. He evidently seemed depressed about it, and kept mentioning that he had been taken off the air for being subversive and outspoken about development in the Bronx. When we arrived at the site where the new Yankee stadium was being built, he became more active and introduced us to Councilwoman Helen Foster. Helen had voted 'no' (along with only two others) to the project, arguing that it made life hell for those living nearby and did not guarantee any jobs or economic improvement. The unions had the site stitched up, effectively cutting off any unrepresented jobhunters. Before going to the next place of interest, a security guard asked Gary what we were up to. Gary told us later that this interrogation was typical of the corporatisation of New York, and added that a certain talk show had been taken off the air after a seven-year run for the same reason.
At this point it began to rain hard, and the shabby streets and run-down shops took on a more glum appearance. We were driven to a development project by SoBro, a non-profit organisation that valiantly searched for unused or run-down real estate and turned it into affordable residential/office space. Though living space is scarce in New York, some run-down apartment blocks are left empty to serve some other purpose, most often to serve as a prop-up for a huge television channel billboard. We got off the bus and walked round an office block that had once been an empty factory. In the midst of the SoBro representative's description, my friend Ayub (a Kurd from Iraq) sarcastically whispered, "Oh wow, so amazing. There are people starving all over the world and we're being told about an old building that was renovated."
Ayub is an interesting guy. You can read his profile and his articles on OpenDemocracy. He speaks six languages and has a repertoire of bizarre jokes. One of them is: "an elephant and an ant go into the shower together. The elephant comes out five minutes later. What happened to the ant? HE'S STUCK TO THE SOAP!" Another one, which is good in a sort of weird macabre I-see-death-every-day-in-my-life way, goes: 'a man dies and his family and friends come out to bury him. His son digs a grave and places the coffin inside the hole, but suddenly the man wakes up and gets to his feet. All the mourners scream in fear and run away. The son, however, takes out a knife and stabs his father. He then calls to the fleeing crowd, "Come back! It's okay! I 've killed him!"'
After getting home, I watched a charming French classic called "Les Aventures de Rabbi Jacob".
It's an utterly ridiculous film about an anti-Semitic old French guy who is forced to disguise himself as an Orthodox rabbi to hide from an armed group of Arab nationalists. There is a funny scene at the start of the film that really gets to the heart of what being French is like. The French guy is being driven home by his Jewish chauffeur, ranting about all the foreigners on the road. "Look, Solomon, an English car! I hate the English. And a Belgian one too! The Belgians are flooding this country." The man even stops at a mixed race marriage to scream about the fact that the bride is black and the groom white. He is then shocked upon finding out that his chauffer is Jewish, and fumes before saying, "Well, I'm keeping you anyway." After all this, the chauffeur goes, "Sir, might you not be a tiny bit racist?" The guy's reaction is classic, brilliant French hypocrisy. "ME? RACIST? Ah no, Solomon, you're going too far! Never!"
Here is the scene in question, on Youtube. There is also another a clip from the movie, in which a bunch of Ashkenazis do a dance routine. Any similarities to Iranian propaganda are entirely coincidental. Click here.
Another clip featuring the same actor is worth pointing out, because it precedes the Father Ted Hitler moustache by a few decades.
posted by L.R.A. Laurent at 7:06 PM
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