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more New York Stories – Book Review

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Title More New York Stories
Place New York
Publication date 2010
Pages PB 293
Price £14.99
Author various
Publisher New York University Press
Edition  
Special features (maps, etc.)  
ISBN 978-0-8147-7655-1
more New York Stories
more New York Storeis

This month’s book review is ‘more New York stores’ (The Best of the City Section of th New York Times).  For some reason I seem to be drawn to these compendia of stories in books and I found this vignette about New York to be wonderful.

The ‘more New York stores’ are unique, well crafted cameos from authors who love and feel New York as a place, but not just a place, it is a welcoming and living body!  The describe New York as it is, was, and in some cases wonder about what it may become.

There are fifty essays in ‘more New York stores’, gathered together under a series of general collections:-

  • Characters
  • Places in the City’s Heart
  • Rituals Rhythms, and Ruminations
  • Excavating the Past

It is with regret that I found out that the City section of New York Times was published its final issue in May 2009 after 1 years.  It fell foul of economic forces, and the need for a bottom line!

The names of the authors will resonate with some, if not all readers, they are able to write and entice you into their piece of real estate that is New York.

I am only going to quote from one story by Christopher Sorrento “When He Was Seventeen”:

…At 17 my friends and I didn’t partake of sanctioned, homogenized “teen culture.”  We participated in culture, period, meaning that often we made it ourselves.  We were perfectly aware that certain aspects of Western civilization, whether or not they would appear on network television or play on Top 40 radio, had their point of origin in the fertile brains of teenagers…

Amazon Link: more New York Stories

A breakthrough… Irish gay rights group to march in New York Paddy’s Day parade

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By Dan MacGuill | TheJournal.ie

Members of the New York City Police Department march in the St. Patrick's Day parade past protesters, Monday, March 17, 2014 in New York. The banner reads "Boycott Homophobia." The city's St. Patrick's Day parade stepped off Monday without Mayor Bill de Blasio marching along with the crowds of kilted Irish-Americans and bagpipers amid a dispute over whether participants can carry pro-gay signs. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

Members of the New York City Police Department march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade past protesters, Monday, March 17, 2014 in New York. The banner reads “Boycott Homophobia.” The city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade stepped off Monday without Mayor Bill de Blasio marching along with the crowds of kilted Irish-Americans and bagpipers amid a dispute over whether participants can carry pro-gay signs. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)


TheJournal.ie - A break through
 
THE NEW YORK St Patrick’s Day committee has allowed an Irish LGBT group to march in the 2016 parade, carrying a banner, for the first time in the event’s history.
Speaking to TheJournal.ie from Queens this evening, Louth man Brendan Fay called it “a stunning announcement” and a “marvellous moment.”
During a board meeting of the committee, it was decided to accept the application of the Irish LGBT group the Lavender and Green Alliance, of which Fay is a co-founder.

This is it. This is a historic moment. It’s amazing.

The landmark decision appears to bring an end to a 25-year struggle by Irish and Irish-American LGBT activists to openly take part in the world’s largest St Patrick’s Day event.
In a statement, Fay added:

We have been on a long and winding road to equality, a road marked by painful exclusion and years of protests and arrests.

With this decision, we are transformed from cultural outsiders to insiders who can share in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, a vital expression of our heritage and culture

 
TheJournal.ie - blasiopats

The move comes amid increasing pressure on organisers to allow for a fully inclusive parade.

In 2014, Bill deBlasio became the first New York mayor in a generation to boycott the event, due to the ban on openly gay groups.
In March, after Guinness withdrew support from the parade, a group of LGBT employees of TV sponsors NBC were allowed to take part, but some activists regarded this as an unsatisfactory compromise.
In July, John Dunleavy was ousted as chairman of the committee, and replaced by Quinnipiac University president Dr John Lahey, who had been lobbying internally for the inclusion of LGBT participants.
In a statement sent to TheJournal.ie, Lahy said:

Since 2016 marks the 100th Anniversary of the Easter Rising, the birth of Irish independence, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade March 17 is a special opportunity for renewed commitment to Irish values and traditions, and the Irish role in the 21st Century.

We are working with the Irish government in this anniversary year to teach our young people the lessons of sacrifice and heroism, of love and tolerance, embodied in the Irish spirit.

Irish politicians have traditionally taken part in the parade during annual St Patrick’s Day trips to the United States, with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan marching in 2014 and 2015.
Last year, however, Minister for Social Protection Joan Burton publicly vowed not to participate, “unless progress was forthcoming” in adding LGBT groups to the fold.
Brendan Fay, who has been arrested several times while picketing the parade, and 15 years ago helped set up the alternative St Pat’s For All event, concluded:

It will be a great day for the Irish diaspora and for all New Yorkers as we will honor the centenary of 1916 Rising together.

The words from the 1916 proclamation, ”cherishing all the children of the nation equally” will be real and meaningful

The Happy Gordons

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The Happy Gordons

Lakme Productions

This video documentary sets out to examine Gay life in Ireland, and gives most of its 26 minutes to Irish lesbians and gay men in New York.  These include Anne Maguire of the ILGO (Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation) taking being arrested and hassled by Noo Yoicks Finest (the polis) calmly in her stride, Billy Quinn a Dublin-born artist and Tariach MacNaillais.
Tariach came to Gay politics by way of the Hunger Strikes agitation and says he was told than an out Gay man was not going to be employed in his field of Youth and Community Work.  The other person from Northern Ireland who spoke, Cherry Smyth, lives in London (England, UK).  She is of middle-class, liberal Protestant origin.  Her parents had she makes clear, no insuperable problems with her sexuality.  She also said things about “being Irish” which I found difficult to grasp.  You don’t have to be Catholic and Gaelic to be Irish.  Who said you did?  Why does “being Irish” matter?
Billy Quinn is a working class Dubliner who was sexually abused in his childhood and has worked in bars from a very yong age.  Where he acquired his rather plummy accent is a mystery.  He compared Molly Bloom unfavourably with Jane Austen’s heroines.  The latter were prissy and repressed but James Joyce’s Molly was a great sexual Earth-Mother.  This proves he hasn’t read either Joyce or Austen.  Compared, for example, with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Molly is positively south.  Jane Austen, a great comic writer, is central to English, even British culture.  Joyce is not central to modern Irish culture.  Billy Quinn’s paintings, founded, so far as one could see, in a culture of “wee holy pictures” and fold Catholicism seems far more relevant to what one could almost call a post-Catholic Republic than Joyce, the middle-European intellectual.
Quinn says that many of his friends found the news that Ireland had abandoned practically all of the laws criminalising Gay sexuality almost impossible to believe.  Kieran Rose explained why it was not impossible in the rather short amount of time he was allowed.  Mike Quinlan said that ten years ago a Pride demo “ran down Grafton Street”, implying that this was nervousness on the part of the marchers – rather than the fact that a decision was taken to hurry us up with fantastic disco tracks.  In 1992, GLEN (the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network) decided on a Pride for Dublin: the fact that Galway was organising its third and Belfast its second Pride[s] was neither here nor there of course … not.
The video looks very good.  You can’t really miss with the New York skyline and the Irish scenery, and the excitement of a big public ceremony, namely St Patrick’s Day parade.  A flash of wit was a group of red-necks carrying an AOH banner marked ‘Orange County’.  There was a flash of Belfat Pride with a bible-0thumper given more time to talk than the locals.  There was a cut to Catholic objectors to Dublin Pride, which appeared to be saying that one was as bad as the other.  But the Paisleyites put up a bigger (if not a better) show.
The Sin Fein banner was shown at the Dublin Pride demo (it was the one which came days after the change in the law).  Why, one wonders?  There were a dozen – at least – ‘straight’ political groups there, including Democratic Left and its leader De Rossa.  There was also the Socialist Workers Movement, which has been assiduous in it support of Gay groups – to the point of being irritating.  Why were they not shown?
There did seem to be a rather simple-minded (straight) political agenda behind these images or lack of the, including the non-appearance of people who actually live in Northern Ireland (not to mention the rest of the island).
This sort of thing is not inherently a bad thing artistically – it can give a certain flavour to a work.  But the special flavour of the place (Ireland-in-general and Northern Ireland in particular) leached away, mainly because most of the people talking had lived outside of the island for the greater part of their short lives.
There were really two videos fighting to get out of this one.  Maybe Paula Crickard, the director, should re-splice the material and produce one on New York and one (possibly even two) on Ireland – there are plenty of tales worth the telling.
 
Reviewer; Sean McGouran  Reprinted from upstart print edition

Should the YouTube copy of this documentary stop working, then it can also be viewed at the Northern Visions Archive