After the uttering of the above, Woody Allen kissed her over-aged Lolita (17 years old) on a coach striding around the Central Park. See the problem with me is that, I can never spurt out the name of any heroes in a Woody Allen film, especially those played by himself, not even immediately after the viewing. I guess old Woody's mind-spinning pace of speaking and the facial expression on his weirdly attractive potato-shaped, you know, face, are enough hors d'oeuvre to savor on, leaving little room for mundane dessert like “a name”.
See I never got the chance to ride the coach when I was in the Big Apple, and when the chance pop up before me, I mean in Atlanta, I didn't take it. For one thing they charged 20 bucks for 20 minutes' ride around World of Coca-Cola. For another it was kinda pointless to embark on such a journey without a lover at your side. I've seen Big and Carrie riding it in Sex and the Cites, now there comes old Woody, prattling about the tackiness of it all while taking all the advantages. There is this nostalgic thing about two skinny old horses hardly fit to look up dragging a coach around Manhattan. It is almost tragic, and I don't just mean the horses.
Yes, Manhattan is strangely sad. Every skyscraper, town house and tenement hall, antiquated or brand new, is personifying that sadness in various traces, left by their inhabitants who mourn the brevity of life's happiness everyday, starkly exposed in the downtown sunlight. I 'm starting to sound helplessly melodramatic and vehemently dull. Yes I know how dull I can be.
That's the different between old Woody and me. He takes a dull theme (could be an unbelievably dull one, mind you) and makes it otherwise. Just for everybody's information, I don't usually sound so dull. Once I joked a man into orgasm, I really did. But I'm losing the grip lately. I think it has something to do with a detective novel I'm translating. What kind of detective story is it that blabbers along 6 chapters without anyone being killed?—No one even bleeds, for god's sake. Those Viking people really should've made better decision about introducing books to China.
In Manhattan, the highly intelligent woman who nominate George Gershwin, FS Fitzgerald and Ingmar Bergman for Prize of Being Horribly Overrated is always wasting herself with a married man, the stunningly beautiful wife is always leaving her husband for another woman and publishing a book describing every single detail of her empty and meaningless late marriage, Richard Cory is always falling in love with the girl he just dumped, the saintly integrated teenager is always hung up too much to a man older than her father. Let's say Manhattan is the place for these things. Few truly know the desire of their hearts, and those who do know, are in lack of means to secure it.
"He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion. "
"To him, no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin. "
"He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else."
" He thrived on the hustle, bustle of the crowds and the traffic. "
"To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture."
"The same lack of integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning the town of his dreams..."
"He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. "
"Behind his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat."
"New York was his town and it always would be. "
There's never gonna be a perfect way to tell a story about Manhattan, New York. You're either too angry, too preachy, too corny, or of too poor a taste. Our old pal Woody thinks that New Yorkers are constantly creating real ( now that's important), unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves “cos it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.” Well, I think the neurotic problems are results of people's disinterest in “more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe". They just don't give a damn. They're too tired. There's no strategic shrinking here. This is just one more stale fact about existence.
Do you get the moral here? Have fun with and faith in people with whatever might you can summon up, lest the ducks in the lake of Central Park fly away in summer instead of winter.
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