When my dad turned 60 I took him to New York. Showed him the places where I'd lived, worked and gone drinking when I was younger. Took him to museums.
He loved every minute, but something he said as we were wandering round stuck with me.
"This is like being on the TV. I never thought I'd be here."
He loved every minute, but something he said as we were wandering round stuck with me.
"This is like being on the TV. I never thought I'd be here."
Reposted from
Marie Le Conte
in this week's newsletter! I ask: how do you mourn a cultural hegemon? youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/how-do-you...
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That, and weirdly, seeing number plates. They are so different in Europe than US/Canada plates.
Being on the Staten Island Ferry and seeing the Statue of Liberty with her own eyes was properly magical, because that's something most people have seen hundreds of times in films and TV
When we got to the hotel, it turned out one had pillows and bedding in.
Then i realised he wasn't used to staying in hotels that provided that stuff (or at least stuff as good as he had at home)
“Of course it could happen in America. Anything could happen there.”
Happened again last year in Sydney as well...
Still, the more of America I saw over the years the less I realised I knew about it, as we had seen a sanitised version through the media.
It does contain corruption and Bitcoin though
(OHF just did better, because the baddie was the Evil North Koreans, rather than WHD's domestic military industrial complex villains...)
I'm sure some native heard this and rolled their eyes.
A cultural imprint in his brain from 50 years of music, TV and cinema. They were an ideal.
To be there, for him, was simply unforgettable.
Even recently I've had a standing offer to visit my wife's uncle.
And I feel that unless things change really fast that chance is all gone now.
(Seeing rural intersections with those big yellow traffic lights swinging in the air on their cables, and thinking "I *know* here.")
The urban queerness of Sydney was no more real to me than Rivendell. I can't speak to the feeling that I got, the home coming of moving for university and realizing I knew that bar.