In New York City, the Tour Guide Union has raised the flint to strike.

After a one-week deadline extension, negotiations for the new 3-year contract ended on Friday. This early eve, downstairs at McQuaid’s Pub on 11th Avenue and 44th Street, the contract discrepancies were given a rundown by Carlos Padilla, Transport Workers Local 225 President, to an audience of about 85 Union members “in good standing,” though many were stuck in the corner and ill-positioned on the steps and couldn’t hear over the racket of chuggers upstairs.

It was a cramped and chintz-lit space, a beefsteak room in the old parlance, a low gathering place, and New York City has always been a grand aged venue for public and private gatherings – even the Dutch sat colonial judges and merchants and patroonmen in taverns for the most civilized and grandiloquent of policymaking.  So McQuaid’s Pub – in the waterfront outland where once bustled Paddy’s Market – fit the bill for the brothers and sisters to caucus their wages and morals.

The contract technics are unprofound. Lunch money and bonus hours are being withdrawn.

And the claim that a guide’s pay will decrease by “$90 a week” rings like the phantom numbers cast upon the tax gap by candidates at political debates: a pragmatic argument only as drama, not as crux. Gray Line surely prioritizes not the welfare of its tour lecturers. This is one of the perks of the job! Responsible independence from authority! (most guides do not adhere to the dictates of the above number 12 – Gray Line knows it and so tinkers with the uniform vouchers).  If there was ever a company that merited a strike against, it is Gray Line, and if there is anything sinister in these mediations, it is not the attitude over lunch money and bonus hours, but the intimation of demobilizing the Union.

Gray Line tour guides need our Union. Perhaps solidarity among brothers and sisters is found just as proudly standoffish in the acceptance of slightly lesser terms than by walking off the job, taking the bus drivers and dispatchers along for the ride. Surely even the worst tour guide is more articulate holding a microphone on the Downtown Loop than when mumbling with a picket sign in a circle on the corner of 47th and 8 AV? Better for his or her tips. Depending on which news article one reads (there are nearly an infinite), we are in the worst economic downfall since either the Great Depression or 1981. Let it be mandated that this author loathes the commercialization of fear-mongering which the bailout has engendered just as much as the next average enlightened American galoot (they have been playing Christmas music in city-wide pharmacies since before I knew what I was going to be for Halloween, what the frig!) But one must weigh a tad gravely between relinquishing one’s job at a shysty rumbuckle of a company – in effect condemning that company for the skullduggery upon which one has either meekly or stoutly prospered – or taking a paycheck with a few more frillies than when tendered the duration of the last contract. This Black Friday an “Information Picket” is tentatively scheduled for conduction in Times Square, with the requisite boostering and bantering and flicking of flyers. At least for Local TWU 225, the Big Rat Balloon won’t float by Macy’s this Thursday for Thanksgivingsback – though the hullabaloo tonight at McQuaid’s would make a perfect exhibit sometime in the future at the New York Historical Society, where the hot air is first blasted.  .  .   and where the Uptown Loop so majestically makes an early hop-on/hop-off stop for the Museum of Natural History, ripe for jokes regarding Roosevelt and Republicans and Dinosaurs.  Upward and Onward, fightin’ the War On Tourism!

Meanwhile the Screen Actors Guild are strong-arming a new contract, and talks have broken down nigh Internal Combustion City. But puhleeeeease… these potential walk-outers pose themselves as performers under the duress of Labor’s bad faith? Do Saggers administer ponchos to rain-soaked bus passengers at 35 MPH while elucidating the Gothic mysterioso of West 72nd Street? Can they dash malarkey under the August scorch to unwizened Italians and bedraggled Wisconsinites?  The Hollywood actor is a knock-kneed nambypamb when juxtaposed with the NYC doubledecker fact-slinger!  The Saggers start and end their day in the trailer.  We tour guides begin and end in Times Square, the supreme fantasy factory. . . .

Casino Royale ended under the burning sweat-sucked Mediterranean sun, as Quantum ends under the frozen back alley snows of Moscow. This James Bond, not so unlike his predecessors, forms punchlines by locale (the Italian horse race, the gambling motif moved from the baccarat table to the metaphysical racetrack) cut-and-pasted to violence (the chase after the embedded QUANTUM agent through a jungle of an old city which Bond masterfully lopes about, spiralling upside-down from ropes and I-beams and yet a bullseye shooter in the brutal dance of Special Branch agents). The Daniel Craig Bond movies enjoy construction-site set pieces, reflecting a world not intact, in the state of regaining structure, and 007, seeming roguish to M.(om) who longs for the Cold War (frightened by but veteranly faithful in Bond), knows how to navigate this world, by Aston Martin, jalopy boat and cargo plane. The violence is then crosscut to opera (the silent montage lobby and kitchen shootout, the intelligence snatched by Bond’s only gadget – digital camera – amidst the vast Moonrakerish theater). Still, it was not so appropriate that the one-liners, the attempts at quick Bond wry schtick, were meager. And if the dramatic sweep of Giancarlo Gianni’s sacrificial lamb was not as tidal as his character’s initial re-introduction purports to suggest, Bond ends up leaving his corpse in the dumpster. It would seem that Felix Leiter, as employed in this movie, would do the same for Bond if in a similar predicament. The initial revenge plot does transcend its made-for-cable histrionics, largely inspired by the Euro-crat villain, Dominic Greene, a sly froggy entrepreneur of the axis of evil, whose justifications lie in the pragmatism of geopolitics, and who dispatches innocent “Strawberry (according to the credits) Fields” with a full-body cast of oil, as if the ill-developed sexpot were an installation by Damien Hirst. This was the most blatant of Bond homages, as equally clunky as the more subtler (For Yr Eyes VW, Spy Who Loved Me performance scene, the Astin Martin). These are brutal lean times, M despairs of Bond’s emotional motivations, and so Bond himself becomes the gadget, his body a work of today’s advanced technology, given the mystic moral stance by which 007 barrels and stomps and careens and fires. Greene should have been much more exotic, with at least a deformity or grotesque proclivity, and the Bolivian dictator could have walked out of a Vin Diesel movie. And this Bond fan still prefers the Chris Cornell song for Casino Royale, of which a bit Jack White lifted. Perhaps Marc Forster is more a fake artist than genuine crafter (Monster’s Ball notwithstanding, his pedigree proves such) and the script is co-credited to the all-time contemporary Hollywood fake artist, Paul Haggis. High Bond marks though to the Le Corbu styled desert compound, the plastic visible reality of the Quantum of Solace, where Bond and Cam have their most perverse and intimate moment, at the brink of double-suicide, Bond about to turn the gun on himself. Thematically, this is a good gritty touch of the arc landing again where it began, and Bond has traditionally got the death wish, however it seems that, besides the graceful intensity of the early Italian chase/fistfight sequence, one is never giddy about Quantum of Solace. And a Bond movie must, ultimately, be more giddy than grave. J.Bauer and J.Bourne are grave enough supersoldier Bond-children for the 00s. Not enough of the prodigious charm of the first line of Ian Fleming’s original short story, nor the evidence of the second paragraph’s second line (though Bond does compel his foe to imbibe motor oil in the desert as if the mezcal).

Check baronial rum-slinger Alexander Cockburn’s breakdown of the 007 mythos upon Commander Bond’s 50th anniversary.

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.