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Came upon this Vanity Fair piece this ayem, and, here
in San Miguel, it almost (!) made me yearn to be back
in the West Village to smack some of these blokes and
blokesses down. I know who they are--and where they
hang out.
Hal
Today's Special
"The Wordless Life"
http://xstream.xpressed.org/11hal.html
Halvard Johnson
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http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/04/brits200704?
currentPage=2
Letter from New York
Brits Behaving Badly
A tour of such New York British hangouts as Soho House, the Red Lion,
and Tea & Sympathy left the author, an Englishman, blushing: what
makes his fellow expats such a thoroughly annoying lot?
by A. A. Gill April 2007
Illustrations by André Carrilho.
This is a true story. A friend of mine, an English girl, moved to New
York and, soon after arriving, romantically acquired a local
boyfriend. Shortly after that they were both invited to a party. It
would be, she was told, fancy-dress. Fancy-dress parties, unlike
emotional openness, child care, and pedicures, are one of those
inconsequential and nebulous little things that the English take with
an infinite, furrowed-browed, death-or-glory seriousness. After many
sleepless hours, my friend decided on witty outfits for herself and
the boyfriend. After days of construction, they turned up resplendent
and a little sweaty as a pair of tomatoes. She had coutured a
Gershwin lyric. She was a tomato, he a tomato. (This doesn't really
work in print.) It was a tongue-in-taffeta pun. The English simply
adore little puns. They were shown into the grand residence and
waddled into a room full of Americans wearing black-tie, cocktail
frocks, and diamonds. My friend had misunderstood. "Fancy-dress" had
meant dress fancy. For any Englishman reading this, stitching a Robin
Hood outfit, the American for "fancy-dress" is "costume party." What
did you do? I asked my friend. "I laughed and got drunk." That was
very British of you. What did the boyfriend do? "He had a bit of a
sense-of-humor failure. But we're still friends."
The British have colonized Manhattan, acquiring minute rent-
stabilized apartments in the West Village that they pass on to each
other like hereditary titles. It's hard to spot the women—unless they
open their mouths. But the British men can be identified by their
cropped hair, which they shave to obscure their genetically endemic
premature hair loss. They imagine it gives them a street-hard look.
Most Americans think they look like gay Marines with deformed ears.
They wear their blue jeans like their school shorts—too high and too
tight, leaving them with severe moose knuckle. They will occasionally
wear items of indigenous clothing—a baseball cap, a plaid work shirt—
just to show that they're not tourists. But they wear them with
irony. Indeed, Brits are rarely seen in New York without their magic
cloaks of invisible irony—they think that, on a fundamental level,
their calling here is as irony missionaries. They bless everything
and everyone with the little flick quotation marks, that rabbit-ear
genuflection of cool, ironic sterility. How often their mocking
conversations about the natives return to the amusing truth that New
Yorkers have an unbelievable, ridiculous irony deficiency, which
ignores the fact that a city that produced Dorothy Parker, Robert
Mapplethorpe, Abstract Expressionism, Woody Allen, and Woody Allen's
love life has quite enough irony to build the Brooklyn Bridge.
Why is it that the English continue to get it all so wrong in New
York? There is something particularly, peculiarly irritating about
the Brits over here. This is a city that's wide open to strangers,
lumpy with a homogeneity of schemers and immigrants, yet the Brits
manage to remain aloof and apart, the grit in the Vaseline. Those
with the voices like broken crockery, the book-at-bedtime accent,
have a lot to answer for. The Brits believe that they have a birth-
given sincerity and that it's not what you say but how you say it
that matters. And that all silly, gullible Yanks, from policemen to
society hostesses, will wave us ahead on life's road when we open our
euphonious mouth. In fact, most Americans can't tell the difference
between Billy Connolly and Russell Crowe, and why on earth should
they? If you really, really want to disjoint an Englishman—ruin his
day—then just ask him which bit of Australia he's from.
And then there is the air of patronage, combined with an odor of
neediness and a thick-skinned, unembarrassable meanness. "Oh God,
have you eaten with the Brits here?" a friend asked me. "They'll book
a table for six, and then nine of them turn up. Ask for the check and
they'll all have to go to the bathroom or smoke a cigarette or make a
phone call, and there'll be one guy left at the table. That'll be the
D.A.S.—the Designated American Sucker, who through sheer naked
embarrassment will pick up the tab, and suddenly they'll all be back
at the table, thanking him with their impeccable manners. This will
be the only time they've actually spoken to him, because for the rest
of the meal they'll be talking about people who they were at school
with, who all have the names of small dogs. If there's no D.A.S.,
they'll hold an auction over who had the steak and two beers. I'm not
kidding. You know what gets me? It's not like they're poor. Not
really poor, like lots of immigrants. They just think we're lucky to
have them. They walk into a room and imagine it just got classier."
The British in New York are not good mixers. We hunker together,
forming bitchy old boys' and girls' clubs where we complain about and
giggle over Americans like nannies talking about difficult, stupid
children. An English girl, newly arrived, has been picked up by the
expat coven and asked for tea. And rather nonplussed, she says, "It's
sad and sort of weird. This is the way our grandparents used to
behave in Africa and India."
New York's grand British club, the social embassy, is Soho House. Go
up to the bar on any Thursday night and see the serried, slouched,
braying, bitten-nailed ranks of them, all in need of a toothbrush, a
cotton bud, and a dermatologist. Nursing beers and a well-thumbed
ragged project. They're all here not making a film, not writing a
book, not selling a sitcom. Don't tell me about your latest script.
You're not a film writer. You're a handyman. You've never made so
much as a wedding video. You do a bit of decorating, some plumbing,
and you house-sit plants. There's no shame in it. It's what
immigrants do.
In the Red Lion, a bar on Bleecker Street, half a dozen televisions
pump out the Rugby match between England and Scotland. It's 9:30 in
the morning and the place is packed with geezers and a few chubby-
cheeked, ruddy rugger-bugger girls. They're a particularly big-boned,
docile, good-natured type, who look like members of some alternative
royal-family-pedigree breeding farm. The blokes are necking pints of
Guinness and projectile bellowing. It's uncannily like being back in
London. The only difference is that half of them are England fans,
and half Scotland. If anyone walked into a Scottish bar back home
wearing an English accent during this match, they'd leave wearing
their nose as an earring. And it strikes me that there's something
unreal about this. It looks right and smells right. It even sounds
right. But it's not right. They're all playing extras in their own me-
in-New-York movie. They're putting on the Britishness as a show.
They're going through the motions only because they're here.
As we kick back into the street, I notice a man in a kilt. For
Chrissake, who moves to America and brings a kilt? Did his mother
say, "Farewell, son. Make something of yourself in the New World.
Have you packed your native costume, just in case?" Just in case of
what? Just in case we decide to re-invade Canada? Just in case he
finds a girl with a thing for men in frocks with no knickers? Just in
case there's an England-versus-Scotland match on the satellite
television in some fake pub? Other countries keep their quaint ethnic
customs, their special days. But somehow Diwali, Panamanian Martyrs'
Day, or Jewish Family Friday Dinner seem quaint and diverse, while a
drunk Scots banker in a skirt in the early morning is actually
pathetically annoying.
There is a little parade of adjoining storefronts in the West
Village. One sells fish-and-chips. Another is a little café called
Tea & Sympathy. The third specializes in English comestibles, the
sort of thing that Englishmen abroad are supposed to yearn for:
Bird's custard, Marmite, Bovril, Jammie Dodgers. The window looks
like a pre-war Ealing Studios film set. Nowhere in Britain has looked
remotely like this in living memory. Inside, four young Englishmen
from the Midlands are reminiscing over lists of Edwardian boiled
sweets, like a spoof of High Fidelity. With an intense reverie, they
fold me into the conversation for a balming moment of confectionery
nostalgia. "So, Victory V's or aniseed balls? We were just discussing
Curlywurly versus Caramac." After we've all had a suck on the humbug
of Blighty's tuck box, one of them asks, "Ever tried an American
sweet? First time I ate a Hershey's bar, saddest day of my life." I
managed to get out just before I turned into Oliver Twist.
If it were just you that the Brits annoyed, I wouldn't really care.
What I mind is that they've re-created this Disney, Dick Van Dyke, um-
diddle-diddle-um-diddle-I, merry Britain of childish grub and movie
clichés, this Jeeves-and-Wooster place of mockery and snobbery, and
I'm implicated, by mouth. Made complicit in this hideous retro-
vintage place of Spam, Jam lyrics, bow ties, and buggery. These ex-
Brits who have settled in the rent-stabilized margins of Manhattan
aren't our brightest and our best—they are our remittance men, paid
to leave. Not like the other immigrants, who made it here as the
cleverest, most adventurous in the village. What you get are our
failures and fantasists. The freshly redundant. The exposed and
embittered. No matter how long they stay here, they don't mellow,
their consonants don't soften. They don't relax into being another
local. They become ever more English. Über-Brits. Spiteful, prickly
things in worn tweed, clutching crossword puzzles, gritting their
Elizabethan teeth, soup-spotted, tomb-breathed, loud and deaf. The
most reprehensible and disgusting of all human things; the self-made,
knowing English eccentric. Eccentricity is the last resort of the
expat. The petit fou excuse for rudeness, hopelessness, self-
obsession, failure, and never, ever picking up the check.
A.A. Gill is a V.F. contributing editor and author of A.A. Gill Is
Away (Simon & Schuster)
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