Word: bensonhurst
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Tricarico traces the mainstreaming of the term Guido to what he frames as a "moral panic" racing through the media in relation to a 1989 racial incident in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. But he pinpoints the real birth of the Guido subculture to the 1970s. If the movement has any guiding icon, it's young John Travolta and his many incarnations: Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever, Vinnie Barbarino in Welcome Back, Kotter and Danny Zuko in Grease. Today, there are message boards for self-described Guidos and Guidettes to chatter (www.njguido.com...
Amid the chaos and crowds of Coney Island, Ed Zander learned an early lesson in the value of hustle and patience. The son of a furrier in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Zander loved the Parachute Jump, the Silver Streak and, of course, the Cyclone. After school he and his brother would stand at the exit to Steeplechase Park for hours and charm people out of unused ride tickets, hoarding them in a rented locker. "We had, like, 3,000 free rides," Zander says. By summertime, they could spend all day in the park without ever buying a ticket...
...long day's journey into night, and day again, Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) launches into a rant against New York: "F___ you and this city and everyone in it!" He spreads his venom ecumenically--to the Pakistani cab drivers and the black schoolyard studs and the Soprano wannabes in Bensonhurst, and to the Irish-American boyos of whom Monty is one. It's a swell swill of gutter poetry--written by novelist-screenwriter David Benioff and vigorously illustrated in a tabloid-surrealist style by director Spike Lee--that touches on everything New Yorkers, and Americans, love to hate about...
...Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. His dad (who died in 1988) worked as a truck driver for the New York Daily News; his mom was a schoolteacher (she now runs a day-care center). Rock was bused from his black neighborhood in Bed-Stuy to a white high school in Bensonhurst. He says the students there were "worse than white trash--they were white toxic waste," and would beat him up regularly. Funny thing was, even though he was a misfit in Bensonhurst, after a while he didn't fit in back in Bed-Stuy either. And nobody in either place...
These out-of-hand dismissals pervade the book, stealing weight from other provocative, thoughtful ideas. In the Thernstroms' view, black protest in New York City after well-known racial episodes--in Crown Heights, Bensonhurst and Howard Beach--is evidence that paranoid blacks blame society at large for the nasty work of individuals. (Yet the high number of whites who supported Bernhard Goetz after he shot four black teenagers on the subway is attributed not to white paranoia but to white awareness of high black-crime rates...