The Bayonne Bridge turns 77 today! At 5,780 feet, it was the longest steel-arched bridge in the world until bested in 1978 by The New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia. The Bayonne Bridge opened a month after its northern bretheren, the George Washington Bridge, and shares the GW’s architect, Cass Gilbert, who favored the bare steel futurism of the Modern Age over the Gothic panoply of his Woolworth Building back in 1913. The Bayonne Bridge spans the old Kill Van Kull and connects the Peninsula City of Culture with the outland suburbia of Staten Island, and it serves as a companion piece to the Statue of Liberty when viewing the horizon of New York Harbor from any of the three bridges into Brooklyn. A round of clinkers to ye, O maven of Hudson County!

. . . has been decided. The change upon which the fanfare hinges is the change in the idea of leadership, and the vast portrayal of the idea by our Commander-in-Chief, to his citizens and to the rest of the world. Bush 01-08 convinced people that a scarcely intellectual high-noon backyard BBQ sheriff sufficed the people’s needs, and indeed for a stint it did. McMaverick did not offer much otherwise. Obama does, to enlightening psychic effect.

No Campaign has not a Campaign Song! What better way to immortalize the utmost transient spectacle than spectacular choice of anthem? And so far a mixed and giddy bag it has been:

Bill Clinton
At the Convention in Dem-ver this late August a multi-dozen orchestra muzak’d the Pepsi Center, and William Jefferson Clinton made entrance in the throes of Fleetwood Mac, he has in fact not stopped thinking about tomorrow, which is by now as much a constituent of the elder statesman’s canon as Bosniak airstrikes and Oval Office hum jobs. Bill avows that America comports itself most magnanimously by the power of its example over the example of its power. Twas ever thus, U2 ‘It’s A Beautiful Day‘ rang Bubba’s exit.

Hillary Clinton
Hillary’s choice of song took us back to the ol’ early 90s, when a young Newt Gingrich taught us all how to laugh, she bookended her set with Big Head Todd’s ‘Blue Sky’ - low-rung alternarock that seems to HORDE Festival veterans what Woodstock was to 80s stockbrokers. It’s funny how much 21st century country music makes the racket of bad grunge lite – but some good hunker-down moments in this tame Todd tune.

Joe Biden
Biden took the stage to Mellencamp’s re-rehashed ‘Ain’t That America.’ Why would ‘Amtrak Joe’ use a song so resonant of boorish car commercials?  J. Cougar has meekly spoken out against Republicans, but never made a big issue of it, so it is difficult to take Mellencamp otherwise than the annoying soundtrack for Patriot Day.  Joe B. ended his performance with Bruce, ‘C’mon up for the Riiiiiiiisin’!‘ This looked good for Biden, played well to the wig he wears of old-school mayoral swagger. It would be reckless to suggest Bruce Springsteen is a limousine liberal preaching to the converted for the sake of record sales; at least Art exists best in a state of Suppression. In the 80s, ‘Born in the USA‘ was stolen by Ron Reagan, Sr., for presidential sloganeering, Reagan feared the true meaning of the song and its potential as a weapon against him, because Bruce is legion for playing to fans in the back row of an 80,000-seat stadium as if to fans in the front.

Sarah Palin
Old Sarah Palindrome came and went from the RNC podium as she will unfailingly after election season: without music. Controversy lingered over Palin’s previous unauthorized use of Heart’s ‘Barracuda,’ and though Heart fervently lashed out, the Governess has employed the song since. Heart anticipates forking over all royalties to the Obama camp. It was news to this author that ‘Barracuda’ concerns the record industry’s sexist treatment of females. If the song were nukes, and Palin Iran, then. . .

John McCain
McCain, at the gates of St. Paul, was introduced, not by music, but by the buck whiskerando voice of ex-Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson, like Hollywood on Judgment Day, unto a dark arena booms this lapsed prose-poem, about “When you live in a Box,” as if misregarding the works of Jung, sounding The Stranger from The Big Lebowski narrating Apocalypse Now (had Garth Brooks had written that movie). McCain later ended his speech the old-fashion way of the Campaign Song: write your own! Behold paunchy jowled John Rich and ‘Raisin’ McCain,’ a ripsnorting honk-tonk which asserts that “You can get on the train or get out of the way, we’re all just raisin’ McCain.” We are, are we? The video is credibly filled with skank chicks and guitar solos. Perhaps it harks back to the days when balladeers Chas B. Lawlor and Jimmy Blake wrote ‘The Sidewalks of New York,’ in the interest of Dem. New York Governor Al Smith, who lost the Big Race in 1928 (of course in Al’s day it was also commonplace to countersign the discourse with songs mocking “Alcohol Al for President / I stand for whiskey and bad government / My platform is wet and I am too / And I get my votes from Catholic and Jew”). And though it could not exactly be supposed a pre-emptive strike (tho a bogie targeted), on the Trail just days before the Town Hall Debate, McMaverick mixed-metaphorically invoked “Barracuda” while ‘Danger Zone’ kicked in. 

Barack Obama
No such originality did Barack exhibit, who cornerstoned his remarks with a vague simplistic corporate promo score, and then encored with not only the same Brooks & Dunn “country” tune as John Koko Kerry used in 2004, but the very same ‘Only In America’ GW Bush thumped in 2000 (the song even hailed Dick Cheney off the stage at the last RNC in Madison Square Garden, which was New York City’s first Convention, and the next year the same venue hosted the first Country Music Awards not in Nashville, where Brooks & Dunn both hosted and won Best Vocal Duo, again). If this grotesquerie be the only trace of maladjustment in Obama’s operation, then no sweat. It is wise, even. The song opens up with a New York City school bus driver glancing the Promised Land in his rear-view mirror.  Apparently it has been proven that a vast group of Americans find such wonky-tonk an inducer of the synapes rather than a headache. It only becomes the more lamentable that Obama dropped the use of Stevie’s ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered,’ if only we could have heard that one in Nashville (perhaps we did).

Each candidate has released an unofficial list of their top ten favorite pop songs. It baffles the psyche that McCain swears so heartily by Abba, and though it would be an epic move for Obama to inject his campaign with ‘Gimme Shelter,’ it might only evoke a Scorsese mob montage. Plenty of artists this year have voiced displeasure over each campaign exploiting their songs, and, for an election season, it is nothing new. Tom Petty wasn’t happy about GW Bush using ‘Won’t Back Down,’ – a song which Petty played for Al Gore after that prez loser DID back down in 2000; and, perhaps most inconsequentially, Boston opposed Mike Huckabee using “More Than a Feeling” in the primaries. But it can be assumed that, in 1968, American Independence Party candidate and John Birch-backed Gov. George Wallace had no objection to The Crusader’s archaic rockabilly “Wallace For President.”

McCain has Bocephus rumbling the heroic lay jams, while Obama wants out the toronado. 

Let us then pay heed to the greatest use of music in a modern day election, when Phil Angelides, runner of a losing bid for Governor of California against Arnie in 2006, exhorted voters to ‘Let Your Love Flow,’ thank you The Bellamy Brothers.

“The warm, dark places into which one would have crawled, into which a whole nation of silent fugitives (guided by a rainbow or an oracle) would have crept hauling baskets and infants, are turned inside out.” – Geoffrey O’Brien, ‘Suburbs’

It was at the hinge of late 1950s/early 1960s that a shift of paradigm occurred in America, ineluctably, when hierarchies of WASP socio-economy gave way to multiculturalism, sexual awakening, Pop Irony and a refashioning of the means and ends of power.  It is an era abundant with ideas of the regression and sublimation of consciousness.  Of the artifice of surroundings.

On Mad Men, drama relies very little on exterior settings. The story unfolds inside offices, houses, department stores, bars, hotel rooms. Occasionally, a park scene is depicted, replete with frivolous but timely environmental dispossession, or a furtive departure from curb to taxi out front the Hotel Pierre.

When circumstances draw Don and Pete to Los Angeles, suddenly the exteriors are exposed, and when Don takes to the Palm Beach poolside in his Madison Avenue suit, he naturally passes out from sunstroke. L.A. triggers the eruption of Don’s inner life. The job is abandoned (trusted to the green hands of a displaced Campbell), the hat and suit are shed in favor of sunglasses and cabana shorts. It is Draper’s Hour of the Wolf, where the Artist, at a psychic crossroads in coastal lands, finds a luxuriant abode of arabesque people, and these people, who introduce exotic things (like Mexican food and incestual family mores), both venerate Don and cackle at him, and they are silly and frightening in their nonchalant disdain of ordinary means. Don is called on to reimagine his “career,” delve its invisible affects and realities. The Count and his expatriate entourage are only desperate idlers, and must ever dissimulate with flash and taboo their own Euro-tragic demise.

Don retreats to his nebulous roots in San Pedro, the exurb of the Port of Los Angeles (where Art Pepper, the lapsed St. Augustine of So Cal jazz, chronicled a riotous recurrence of rebirth). Intimations of the Opti-Man post-human project are made, a California brand, (which Campbell relates with the same enthusiasm of spotting Tony Curtis in the men’s room). Don transgresses the space-hole, fresh from the Pacific Ocean’s primordial soup, and returns to autumn New York in his camelskin topcoat and adventuresomely removed brown fedora. When challenged to defend his craft by Duck Phillips - the booze besting Duck’s comportment at the merger meeting – Draper (Whitman, mystic poet) is steadfast in his allegiance to the Art.

Having attended a conference in the deep-freeze subterranean presentation room where bullet points of nuclear warfare were illustrated, Don is prepared for the apocalyptic headlines of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most citizens are not - Father John Gill seems a bit of obsessed with the scientific insinuations of hell-bent disaster. His sermon uses metaphors of Final “summit meetings,” and he warns Peggy of the judgment fires no less than he warns himself.

Charitable acts are undertaken – Duck to Pete as new head of Accounts; Pete’s secret information of the merger to Don; the flashback “divorce” of Don and Anna. Up to now Peggy has applied her church-going only to business interests (her consultation on the parish social, The Last Supper thematics reflected when she eponymously bestows plastic cups of whiskey to Cosgrove and Salvatore in advance of the Popsicle presentation). Peggy (since given a makeover by her new gay European friend, fortuitously arrived) is begged by Father Gill to reconcile her breach with the Absolute, and so she does, perhaps engaging an act of charity upon herself, by revealing to Pete the bygone calamity of his orphaned sire. Pete responds, “Why would you tell me this?”

Various characters question the motivation of those who extend a truth to them. “What are you doing?” asks Betty’s modish quickie, a proto-Mayor John V. Lindsay from the dim, scarlet shadows of the midtown cocktail lounge at the end of the earth. Betty never seems to fully enjoy herself during this assignation, but assuredly emerges satisfied. Betty, earlier in the ob-gyn office, contemplates the framed needlework of fawn and mother deer as gravely as Campbell later poses his hunting rifle in the office after the rest of Sterling Cooper has fled. And Joan, last of the Sabine Women but first as practitioner of the Women’s Lib, doesn’t like French cuisine (epitome of the old florid New York), but willing to try the new chef’s menu at La Cote Basque. . .

The Alphabet Meme

Movies A-Z:
All That Jazz
Brighton Beach Memoirs
Cruising
Divorce, Italian Style
Eye of the Needle
For A Few Dollars More
Goodfellas
Highlander
In A Lonely Place
The Jerk
Krull
The Lonely Guy
Mister Lonely
Never Say Never Again
O Lucky Man
Prizzi’s Honor
Q, The Winged Serpent
Romancing the Stone
State and Main
Trouble in Paradise
Used Cars
Videodrome
Witches of Eastwick
The X Files
Yor, the Hunter From the Future
Zardoz