The Manhattan apartment building Alwyn Court turned 100 this year. . .

In April 1908, Walter Russell, a New Yorker, filed for bankruptcy. The Tribune listed the man’s assets at nearly $30,000, and his debts at $330,000. They were tabloid figures. Most of Walter Russell’s money was in real estate. Russell was a builder of cooperative studio apartments north of 57 ST in Manhattan, and recognized as an innovator in the field. Investments in his projects had totaled nearly 2 million dollars. These ventures were multiple dwellings located near Central Park with good light and working artist’s quarters. In an era when most New Yorkers whose esteem could afford it preferred a single family home, Russell and his associates marketed to the high-business end of the Art World as first tenants. Popularly, Artists lived freewheeling, communal lives, predisposed to inhabit a room that is surrounded on all sides by other rooms of other inhabitants, in continuation. But the cooperative system engendered a new kind of shareholder, so the buildings were more often occupied by stockbrokers and executives bent on the flair of culture’s forward-guard.

At the time of Russell’s bankruptcy, a new apartment building on the southeast corner of West 58 ST and Seventh AV was being completed; planned as a select, cooperative setting of luxuriant living. Walter Russell, a green man with Van Dyke beard, aesthete’s beret, orator’s pedigree and a stable of Arabian horses in Oyster Bay, had been instrumentally involved in the origins of the co-op, though no sooner were the building’s emblazonments being molded by the Atlantic Terracotta Company in Staten Island, than Russell was listing as a dischargeable creditor Mr. Alywn Ball, the chief broker of the building as well its namesake, Alwyn Court.

As if in a new light zone, no exterior proportion of building Block in town has been as densely assigned an imaginative identity in proportion to its available square footage as has Alwyn Court. Flurries of up-fanned earth grow snarled silhouettes while stalactites of indescribable adornment rhapsodize the entranceway arch; vases disgorge petals like floating majorette boots, in low niches are flagstaffs banded shapeshiftingly to hold the night oracle. Space girth and space use grapple like wrestlers. In such a way, Alwyn Court is an indigenous work of New York City architecture.

As a young man Walter Russell worked as a magazine illustrator and covered the Spanish-American War for Collier’s. His folkloric business acumen combined with a grave penchant for Beauty to move Russell into the city’s real estate market. Manhattan’s potential for development was like the act of railroads through the frontier over bridges where ferries once ran. Wall Street freebooters had forced the city’s environs up the island, and no longer did only immigrants live in appartements.

In 1902, Andrew Carnegie, the steel maven, had built for himself a mansion on East 92 Street and Fifth Avenue. This would be the first house in America to be reinforced with a steel infrastructure, as well as the first single-family dwelling in New York City with a personal passenger elevator, itself reliant on steel cables. Carnegie had made an intergalactic fortune in steel. Steel made skyscrapers, and steel made the cables for the elevators which caused skyscrapers to be actionable. So, as any man would, Carnegie put these innovations into his house, inscribing his own personal space with the two biggest achievements his life investments had yielded.

In comparison to the precepts of Carnegie, Walter Russell operated on the lower sides of Central Park, concerned with elements less joistable than steel. “Elements are not things,” said Russell, “they are conditions.” The man was a sculptor and portraiturist commissioned by Mark Twain, both Presidents Roosevelt, songster Victor Herbert, and the State of Florida, where Russell made a statue of the first American soldier killed in World War II. Rudyard Kipling penned Russell a letter that would be The Great Gamesman’s very last. Russell also wrote music; presided over the Society of Arts and Sciences; founded the New York Ice Skating Club; and taught himself the practice of physics. He supported his formulas with phrases a philosophical steamfitter would use. “Every particle of matter in the universe is separated from its condition of oneness.” He comported the easygoing camaraderie of the motivational speaker with the disturbed conviction of the rocket engineer, and worked out of the studio bowers atop Carnegie Hall, the music emporium which also provided residencies to Artists of acceptable renown. Carnegie Hall is one block south of Alwyn Court, same side of the street, just north of the Times Square fantasy factory where cannonball jugglers, sandhogs, schmeg-meists and hustlers shared seats in the grindhouse. “Say thou to him that his moving is My moving, for without Me he can in no wise move.” Alwyn Court is an architecture of the element Neptunium, which Walter Russell is loosely – as well as Plutonium – credited with having discovered for The Periodic Chart.

Though more rooms were built for personal maids and servants to live and work, the apartments of Alwyn Court, originally, featured music rooms, salons, and a conservatory where private performers of refined, abstruse taste may have played. Who knows what adventures of the subconscious were inspired in the few children who grew up creating Transvaal cavernscapes in its deep arched hallways, who heard voices in the window ledges over which the homunculus giggles and The Sun Man shrieks.

Preeminent to the new-looker of the building are the giant salamanders breathing fire. These salamanders are the largest forms and placed as if according to project housing along expressways: 54 each like a deck of playing cards including the jokers. As noted on the Landmark Preservation Commission plaque at the building’s entrance, the salamander is the royal symbol of King Francis I of France, Court of Angouleme, coronated 1515-1547. The salamander, like a gargoyle, will protect – Builders Rites have accorded a certain shazam. Because the creature is said to live in fire, it staves fire; a whole world that lives in that which destroys it. In 1910, this mythos was exploited when Alwyn Court went up in flames. The exterior was unharmed, and the few residents temporarily displaced by the incident could not in effect call themselves refugees.

A deaf animal, the salamander respires through its skin and responds firstly to ground vibrations. In appearance it is an otherworldly thing, passed over by zoos and toymakers; its own name slick and sinewy. Alwyn Court is a product of an era of New York City regional design, Post-Civil War to pre-WW II, when so many new things were influenced, modeled or inspired by the way France made itself look: the creators of The Statue of Liberty, the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel, the words “apartment” and “vaudeville.” As the emblem of King Francis I – his standard, pendants, drapeaux, sword-hilts and crownwork – it is what the Lion is to Great Britain, the Harp to Ireland, the Beaver to New York State (in prehistoric times beavers stretching six feet in length, like krakens of the Jersey Meadowlands).

Walter Russell was a highly disciplined individual, variously so, who in his many books and writings set forth a mystical belief reflecting both the bootstrap New England childhood and Old World education abroad. “I draw strength from a super-power which is Light,” Russell confides to his readers. Light, guise of Energy, like the cloak of spies in war, and all the presence and absence of human action colludes around the right use of that Energy. The only published biography of the man, by an acolyte, is titled The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe. If published today, fairly, Russell would resemble the spirituality/self-help section of the bookshop rather than occult or philosophy. He would most suitably trigger Discourse online.

In the late 1920s and 30s Russell was an ally of Thomas J. Watson, the prime mover of IBM. Russell lectured that company’s administrative brass on Two-Way Thinking and The Hydrogen Age: “the very secrets of life and death, which have eluded men for ages, lie within a knowledge of space.” Never much of a stylist with words, Russell wrote lengthy, panascopic novels for children’s reading, preciously bound in leather and lavishly illustrated by the author. These books were not liquid assets. Later in life, he and his second wife Lao Russell, whom he married in Reno, Nevada, collaborated on treatises that warned of the effects ozone erosion would have on the new human. Russell, in ways, is the grandfather whose anxious influence is dismissed by your parents but whose self-published books on civic constancy, landscape architecture and necromancy are sitting in trunks in the attic, still unrid of.

Voluminous cups garlanded by swamp-snakes given heads of fey thespians, merman faces gawking at the public, token cherubs clinging to bowl bottoms. The presence of secret sophistication within the living units seduces the potential lessee: that wealth goes hand-in-hand with the imagination of history and that one may gain it. Soon after Alwyn Court was constructed, residential development snowballed up Manhattan island. The prestige of initial northwardness wore out quickly. And the French style by which the building was influenced was not that which would be found en masse in buildings like Grand Central, the Public Library, the Farley Post Office, the Old Police Headquarters, or even the Ansonia Hotel up on West 75 Street & Broadway where a Bohemia of august consequence became legion – Babe Ruth, Theodore Dreiser and Arnold “the Big Fixer” Rothstein never made it to Alwyn Court. The building emptied of tenants by the 1930s and new owners carved the inside into smaller pieces, like when T.G.I.F.’s, originally a swinging East Side singles bar, went franchise offering the same fried fare for the same.

King Francis I was known for his grandiloquent promotion of the Arts. The King persuaded the immigration of Leonardo da Vinci to French domain, where Mona Lisa was given final strokes. Paintings in the halls of Fontainebleau show the Master dying in His Majesty’s arms. Amongst King Francis’ legacy of letters is a correspondence dated 1524 from Giovanni da Verrazzano, the sea-voyager. Da Verrazzano was born near Florence at a time when that city was a capital of the Holy Roman Empire – the publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy having been two hundred years earlier, the rough equivalent in time scheme of today’s U.S. Constitution. Verrazzano is the first European to have sailed into Lower New York Bay, his expedition kickjumped by King Francis I for reasons similar to those of the Dutch East India Co. sending off Henry Hudson: to unsaddle Spain’s ride upon the laurels of Christopher Columbus, whose adventures were already passed down like the tales of The Argonauts and Uncle Remus and the Whirling Dervish. Verrazzano may have been a pirate executed by the Spanish during The Italian Wars, as some records claim, or eaten by tribes in Canada. Either way, the Narrows over which spans the bridge named in the 1960s for Verrazzano lead to New York Harbor, the galaxy’s greatest while territory called New World is still being discovered by water. For unknown reasons, Verrazzano stopped short at the Upper Bay, like “Just the Tip” Tommy at the Elk Hotel most afternoons down in the Glittering Gulch. But Verrazzano named the land his ships encountered as Angouleme, for Francis, like Virginia for the Queen, and the Abbott who rode the sea’s dragon to the isle of St. Brendan.

Alwyn Court is an Upper West Side building in what years later commuters call Midtown. In 1908, immigrant communities in the Lower East Side, by ethnicity count, were often larger than that of their homeland capitals, and, compounded, they lived in Grotesque tenement buildings. The downtown slums were chiefly owned by those New Yorkers bathed in the money of the Mauve Decade, who sought mythology in their own expedition up past 42 Street so that the current peerage did not register them as fugitives. Fifteen years later Russell would propose to the Real Estate Board of New York a six-mile extension of landfill south of Manhattan Island into the bay. His pitch was based on “the law of centralization of the wheel principle and which is immutable as the law which forces water to seek its own level.” He feared that commercial districts would rampage Upper Manhattan, whose re-fertilization was Russell’s own personal concern, and claimed that “nothing in New York is permanent, but that great centers form themselves as nuclei for the time being, live their lives of brief prosperity and move on, ever obeying the law.” Unable to envision the Bowery or Soho scenes in the 1970s, Russell stumped to graft Broadway, already the longest avenue in the state, another 120 blocks toward the Atlantic Ocean.

Whether discussing realty method or The Sex Principle, Russell’s writings grant highest priority to the materialistic maximization of balance. Each May, Russell would retreat from the urban routine and seek “solitude and aloneness in forests.” He admitted that, ever since the age of seven, as Spring set in, he experienced an ineluctable seizure of illumination. In order to foster this flash of deeper realms, mine it for clues upon clues, he must flee the world, out to “checker-ferns, Arbutus leaves, pulpit-jacks.” He published a lyrical recording of these experiences in 1949, The Book of Early Whisperings, “varying lack of body awareness balanced with my ever-increasing cosmic God-consciousness with God and Nature.”

By May Day 1909, Walter Russell’s debts were cleared by the U.S. District Court, after a brief dispute by his most-owed creditor over language regarding equity in land versus cooperative shares: quantifiable air-rights, bought and sold, and, at the time, elusive of the Bankruptcy Code. The way to comprehend all multitudes of things at once, which stillness is a rapid motion through space. The surface of Alwyn Court elicits no mystery to the order of the skybox. Each day dozens of red doubledecker sightseeing buses barrel past the structure, though often enough the Tour Guide is finishing up with facts on Central Park and gearing up to point out the Carnegie Deli, where pastrami sandwiches are made in imitation of prehistoric sizes.

References.

. . . we indulged fast foods and drank big gulps and drew pictures of what we believed it looked like down where the S-man lives. . .

Jesus Army

My New New Yorker

. . . bus driver, husband to Ethel, father to Bonnie & Jennie, drummer for the Cootie Band, dutiful gardener, carrier of camera & coffee thermos, Twilight Zone fan, grandpa, the old goat, who liked to guk it all up. . .

At all times is Times Square telling us something. The connection of streets is like a sentence, and the large signs are evidence of a brain working at higher consciousness. Statistics claim that over 350,000 people pass through the neighborhood each day – more foot-traffic than Port Authority Bus Terminal, but less than Penn Station.

For instance, the best spot for electric outdoor advertising, anywhere on earth, is the Times Tower. In 1904, this building on 42nd Street & Broadway was where “all the news that’s fit to print” was made. Today, One Times Sq is vacant but for Walgreen’s, which itself used to be a place in the neighborhood you could sit at the counter and have a milkshake and smoke a cigarette.

The two biggest ads on the north face – the prime face – are for Budweiser and Chevrolet. They want us to drink and drive, especially on New Year’s Eve, when the most numerous of world-citizens gawk at the building.

Budweiser got the Belgian bailout (at least a nod to New York’s original Walloon colonists in the mid-1600s), so its lights have no trouble shining (as they did briefly at Obama’s Beer Summit – the president drank Bud Light). But Chevrolet is on welfare these days, and the delinquency of its energy bill is made a spectacle at the crossroads of the world. Meanwhile, the Virgin Mega Store on 7 Avenue shut down business last month, but its lights still shine on.

When so much signature is clumped together in such commercial flux, the spectator can certainly do much worse than read it, and allow the recognition of grand suggestivity about the human universe. But what tourists do more than shop is take pictures.

Up the Stem btwn 46th & 47th, The Gap is selling the idea of jeans on the spot where the old Howard Johnson’s got recently torn down. One might find fine fantasy in 1969, since it shows up on the adjacent billboard advertising the Recession, a plug for past years similarly hit. Such juxtaposition should only advance the economic-downturn-chic with which Gap Co. now hopes to present itself.

The spectator is also invited to “Lucy’s Legacy,” she the world’s most prime ancestor. The Gap could have just as meaningfully employed the Lucy exhibit’s slogan: “Her story is Your story.” And her bones were in fact discovered in the Ethiopian scrublands of the Afar “Depression”. . .

Sometimes, the jumbotrons in Times Square are in need of tech support. . . .

In New York City there often recurs a phenomenal thing, that when a flag of creativity is stook in an unknown, castaway community, it is soon dispersed and made popular by the those less innovative but just as eager for stimulation, until the system shuts the scene down and the movement chokes dead. These are the last days.

Disco – born as an underground scene in gay black dance clubs in post-industrial Brooklyn outlands – got big. Barnacled by two-tone collared, classically articulate New England collegiates looking for the glamour and edge of nightlife, the scene is kept alive by guys like Bernie, the peppery pony-tailed club owner, who says, indemnifying himself, “I used to be in advertising,” like a shammo music promoter from Woodstock.

Alice and Charlotte find themselves unlikely friends.  Though disparate and awkward at tony rebellious Hampshire College, the girls live together with a third roommate in an Upper East Side railroad apartment. They are always walking through each other’s rooms at inappropriate times, and find asylum at the club, the umbrage of Xenonic strobes, where the girls bounce their own insecurities off one another, under “Doctor’s Orders.”

Charlotte’s idea of sly charm is to say things seriously as if “obviously a joke.” Alice is the character most grounded and humble and eventually the most successful, but she is also the most shamelessly confused. She hooks up with navy-blazer dicko Tom Platt. In the future one imagines Tom writing Op-Ed pieces in the Times which gain him a sociopathic following amongst liberals. Tom sidles up to the dance floor with his pennyloafer lack of rhythm and soul, his late entrance attractively picaresque for Alice, who still believes in novelistic romance. Tom thinks it is a profound thing to collect Scrooge McDuck memorabilia, and it seems as if the situation couldn’t be more lame until poor Alice (too many whiskey sours) tries something she never learned at Hampshire – to talk naughty: “Scrooge McDuck is sexy.”

Disco’s characters are all somewhat obsessed with the camaraderie and excuse for melodrama that a “scene” provides, though their emotions and intellect have been bred to expect the higher sanction of inimitable status without proof of action. Once they arrive in New York, expectations warp, and they pick up a modicum of survival skills – as when Jimmy Steinway has his elder WASP boss from the ad company take Jimmy’s raincoat, “Here, put this on,” so they won’t get rejected by Van, the Blade Runneresque head bouncer. Jimmy is on thin ice anyhow, Van doesn’t let them past the velvet ropes, and instead Jimmy sneaks his party in through the back.

At the end of the night, after the hermeneutics of a “gay mouth” and Lady and the Tramp exegesis, it is shack-up time, the “ferocious pairing off.” Alice falls into a lingering fling with Des, a lovably loquacious lech and Ivy League grad slumming the after-hours with an attuned coke habit. For Des, the new openness of gay-rights serves as a useful masquerade to extract himself from female relationships that become too real for his stunted ideology. When he is suitably disinterested in a woman, he confesses a new-fangled lust for the host of Wild Kingdom. Des is bewildered at the implications of being called a “yuppie” – a fresh catchy term – since he regards himself, though young, as neither upwardly-mobile nor professional. “Those are good things.” But it is because Des is decidedly not good that Alice starts hooking up with him. Des’ fidelity to Alice is brief, though he seems to believe that he has truly changed, unlike Tramp. Alice turns her sensibilities to Josh Neff, a spy for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

Disco was always comprised of a motley assemblage – trannies and Bay Ridge gavones rubbing polyester shoulders; Broadway dancers and anti-hippie rejects; the Andy Warhol hodgepodge of Brooke Shields and Dali and Schwarzeneggar and Halston; Dolly Parton’s birthday when they decked out Studio like a barnyard. Such pop eclecticism hits the American imagination as it would have (among canonical others) at the last turn of the century, over Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, who assaulted San Juan Hill in Cuba as aggressively as Jimmy Steinway marshals his entourage past the club door (at one point disguised in Wizard of Oz costumes). In the ranks of these heroes of the Spanish-American War were Yalies and Comanches and gold prospectors and bison-hunters. Indeed, the most deliriously enlightened scene in Disco occurs near the U.S.S. Maine monument at Columbus Circle. Josh and Alice step delicately along the Park and Josh confides to Alice his own history of madness. These 59th Street environs, from the Plaza Hotel west to Broadway, is favored territory of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and this scene in Disco near Merchant’s Gate is pregnant of that author’s intimations of epic youth and deep loss. “You think I’m a wacko?” asks Josh. Alice first shakes her head no before she nods yes. Josh is the paranoiac lyrical artist-type with blueblooded learning and a quick pedigree in seersucker espionage – the vocalizer for both the ecstasy of Disco and the glorious trauma of skittish love. He is also the agent of the club’s closing, which puts Van on welfare and Bernie in jail.

“The very early eighties,” as Disco’s opening titles indicate, are a time when New York is backlashing from the zombie vigilante midnight-movie reputation caused by the 1970s. Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau’s office is mobilized to prosecute the disco business, with Josh acting as the Elliot Ness. One might fantasize that a co-worker of Josh in Morgenthau’s office is future Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor, chain-smoking and equally forward-thinking. Morgenthau went after disco clubs as he did underground cinema in the 60s, impounding prints of Jack Smith’s glitzy gender-bender Flaming Creatures; and in the early 2000s, taking down the toga-clad CEO embezzlers of global manufactures conglomerate Tyco, International. The rest of the country despises Disco as the ultimate curse of good taste – the tripped-out crowd at a Chicago White Sox game burns piles of LPs as if books at a Hitler rally and take to the fields with baseball bats like mobsters. New Yorkers are still too unhinged from the Death Wish decade and don’t deal with things by ratiocinating. Soon enough a new neon decadence sets in, and the preppy ties and shaggy-flared hairstyles will devolve into hairspray flips and 80s womens jumpers.

Charlotte ends up hospitalized with “back spasms” when Jimmy ends their relationship (“she got her period” he explicates), and her recovery is fraught with self-consumption, blaming everything on Alice. She seeks new life in TV, “where my interests truly lie.” By now, Alice is over Charlotte’s continual berating co-dependency, and gains success in the book publishing industry. She has already admitted to Departmental Dan that her “dream book” would be to publish “anything that might become a best-seller.” Only aside from that might she hope for a shot at Salinger’s unpublished short stories. So it is not a surprise, but a heartwarming familiarity, that with her breakout book she “shifts the category from nonfiction to self-actualization,” staking her own light flag in America’s new consciousness-fad. Alice now offers lunch invites at Lutesse while the rest of the old gang picks up checks at the unemployment office. It takes slick bouncer Van to fess up the final reality, before heading to Florida: “Disco’s over. It’s dead. People aren’t just going out like they used to. They’re tired. . .”

Josh and Alice, on the subway love train, can only dance, and all New York City straphangers dance with them – like an Ed Koch-era Lotto ad or ’86 Mets promo on WPIX. Whit Stillman hallmarks unto the living American memory what only 20 years later is revealed as so richly spotlit, so vivacious of meaning.

Watch here: The Last Days of Disco.

Crank 1 & 2 are loosely conceptual action movies that reflect, orgiastically, their own times. The newly familiar objects of U.S.A 2000 are accorded X/treme cybernetic special effects which draw from the amped-up template of The Matrix but dispense with the ideas, mystic philosophy, and costly sci-fi premise. Instead, the violence in Crank, which would have only previously seemed buyable in a sci-fi flick, is played out in the present-day and the patterns are sequenced against the same backdrops as tabloid snapshots and pre-gentrified industrial neighborhoods.

Chev Chelios, our hero – an aggrieved and persecuted Los Angeles gangland strong-armsman – plays the existential video game for an audience inundated by compulsive GPS locution, hyperdrive fitness fashion, Abu Ghraib-style sadism, and a deep precipitation of stylized movie violence from the late 70s onward. Chev is injected with a vague serum, referred to in occupational terms as “The Beijing Cocktail,” that will kill him if his heart rate slows down. Of course, Chev gains this knowledge by watching a video on TV recorded by his uppity rival, Verona, a Chicano jangsta with a goombah name. Chev is poisoned, the chemical nature of which is explained as “that Chinese shit,” temporarily counter-activated by a substance given him by a Haitian cabbie, “some hardcore shit made from plant shit.”

Chev is aided by his personal physician, Doc Miles, a source of the movie’s pan-fried biological information, played Method-style by Dwight Yoakam as a burnout crackhead heart-surgeon/pimp-daddy, less Dr. Oz than Dr. Benway from Naked Lunch. To keep his adrenaline up, Chev does cocaine off the floor and fucks his girlfriend in public before an audience of gawking L.A. Chinatownees. These are very good twists on the trials and tribulations of the One Man Army action hero, but seem to come from a directing team who never did blow and rarely got laid. Still, Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor treat drug-kingpin movie tropes the way Kenneth Anger did biker dudes in Scorpio Rising. Chev Chelios is naturally a man who takes life at mach speed, and his survivalist street nack gains him Puma sneaks, a retro tracksuit, and the ability to raid Kwik-E-Mart for limitless hi-energy drinks and neuro-enhancing pills. He is on the cannonball binge we all fantasize we were on, too.

Crank 1 and C:2 embellish scenes with a cookie jar of hypertext: pop-up style addendums; gratuituous, faux-explicative subtitles; and a super-RAM’d Google maps-app that guides the viewer through Chev’s vengeance journey. The controlling nihilism is a joke – at one point Chev’s desperation causes him to point his mammoth handgun at an innocent, gurney-stricken patient rushed to the emergency room – but we want to see Chev Chelios succeed. Don’t we all imagine ourselves in a race against time terrorized by grade-Z stock scumatorium bad guys? It is mildly amusing that Chelios spends a chunk of screen-time in a hospital gown with his bum hanging out, and there is a nice gag about an Epenephrine-induced boner. Jason Statham tactfully plays the hard-ass deadpan that made Arnold Schwarzeneggar, in his day, so compelling and hilarious and iconic, and Chev’s East End limey accent is a helpful tinge, as J.C. Van Damme’s Belgian inflections were fitfully Borat-esque.

In all fairness, the filmmakers don’t really save Chev at the end of C:1, though his eyes blink and nostrils flare after falling thousands of feet from a helicopter, on his cell phone no less, leaving a remorseful message for his girlfriend, to the placid yacht rock of “Miracles” by Jefferson Airplane. Chev bounces off the top of a car into the middle of L.A. traffic, back on his old turf. But the staggering implausibility shouldn’t exactly be mistaken for innovation in the genre.

“My strawberry tart!” Crank 2: High Voltage keeps the gags and zingers going with a few but not enough fresh twists. C:2 ups the Opti-Man conceit – once Chev’s superhuman heart is extracted by sicko ghetto doctors, they next prioritize the disjunction of his One Man Army dick. Amy Smart is back again as Chev’s ditzy, harangued ladyfriend (boned again in public, this time on the turf of Hollywood Park Race Track). In the climactic blinged-out rooftop showdown, it is revealed that Chev’s old enemy, Verona, is not quite dead. Verona’s fall from the sky was supposed to have killed him at the end of C:1 as it did not Chev Chelios – Verona exists now as a decapitated head floating in a jar of electron-induced fluid, a warped version of the New Human, gurgling trash-talk from a Creature Shop noggin with the equal wrath New Yorker readers regard Sarah Palin. But Crank: High Voltage is too much the “part 2” in a trilogy, with neither a satisfied cliffhanger nor any rounding out of the installment’s story. Instead, C:2 juices up the obsession with defacement of sex organs, including chopped-off male nipples and silicone that bleeds from a stripper’s shot-up fake tits. An egregious Bai Ling (herself a walking & talking mutant sex object) is thankfully whammed in the air by a speeding car.

Spoiler: Chev never gets back his strawberry tart. C:2 ends with Chev cowled in flame after a peculiarly invigorating electric shock. One can only assume that the current holder of Chev‘s heart, Poondong, played with cheap inconsequential camp by David Carradine – the B-movie guru’s final role – will feature more prominently in Crank 3. Did they cast Mr. Carradine as the arch-villain only after Warren Beatty backed out? Who will next play the mad and giggly Poondong? This author suggests a career-bending Ben Affleck. As the inimitable biblionaut Q.R. Markham postulates, Chev Chelios may very well return transcendentally in Crank 3 as “pure energy riding the power lines like a datastream lawnmower man.”

We should enjoy the Crank movies now, because their inferior spawn will be glutting the multiplexes and online cable channels without psychic mercy in the not-at-all-distant future – no matter that Obama might intone a different paradigm than had before. The sensibility is already straight from a Cold War, Art Brut pulp paperback – Chev is directly incarnate of Mack Bolan, The Executioner, a Vietnam Vet vigilante, and Nick Carter, the inviolable Killmaster, an American grindhouse 007. These testosteronovels are innately descriptive by the name-dropping of luxey brands and gun jargon. John Rourke, ex-CIA survivor of a nuclear holocaust in the early-80s Survivalist paperback series, is armed with “Detonics stainless under his right armpit in the double Alessi rig.” Sunglasses and motorcycles are given similar schmancy cataloguing. In Crank, the placed products are things any urbo-buzzhead can find at Duane Reade, the Apple Store or on Ebay. Too bad though, that the old Anco Theater on 42nd Street wasn’t around anymore for 2AM screenings of these depraved extravaganzoids. . .

Teenage MJ holds his own with the legendary tap gurus The Nicholas Brothers:

McCartney & Michael do the flash act:

Apollo Theater, 6/27/09

To reflect upon a past age is to cast that age in innocence. “It was thus… that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.”

Newland Archer is an impassioned man ensnared by the age that bred him, and however advanced in mind he engages his own age, he fails to transcend it.  The Countess Olenska enchants his innermost being, but the shared attraction which evolves between them is only consummated by a few desperate clutches and kisses in the outlands of a West 23rd Street salon and winter carriage-ride from Jersey City.

Were the “early seventies” so innocent?  Janey Archer, Newland’s unmarriageable sister, is a congenital shut-in, but the girl harbors an imagination easily incited to luridness by the merest table gossip.  The family withholds scandal from Janey and have grown to politely ignore her strange exclamations apropos of nothing.

And Edith Wharton is unmerciful in the girth of naiveté she affords May Welland, Newland’s betrothed.  Newland is somewhat in awe of May’s prodigious ignorance of human despair and corruption, likening her perception to a certain eyelessness. “’And all the while, I suppose,’ he thought, ‘real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them…’” Only when May is near death does Newland sympathetically recognize the nuance of her untouched vision, and the force of an ancient sexism of manners, wondering “how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault?” There is something Absolute regarding May’s existence within the old Fifth Avenue habitat, as if the high fabrication of tradition which she is the corporal ideal is only its most realistic foundation, surviving by fittest falsehood.

Society is not without its interlopers, usually imported from Europe, like the decadently principled Olenski, and Julius Beaufort, who “passed for an Englishman” and lives with his wife (a South Carolina belle) in a stupendously opulent mansion.  The Beauforts are the first to roll a red velvet carpet down their steps for invitees come from the opera house, and the guests are tended by footmen in silk-stockings.  Newland is ingratiated by the site of Beaufort’s “library hung with Spanish leather and furnished with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on their dancing-gloves.”

Newland knows well that scandal is vital to this world, and with Madame Olenska he commits a subterfuge of appearances, heated but unwilling.   But “there was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable?“  Beaufort carries on an affair with Madame Olenska that disgusts Newland however much to him it makes sense – Beaufort is bohemian in ways that Newland is not: “his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious.” For the Countess these Eurosleaze qualities are akin to those of Olenski, her “abominable husband.”

Beaufort may be a Madoffesque lech, but at least he is a liver of life among a community of naysayers to the human species.  This community is most severely exampled by Mr. Henry van der Luyden, whose New York genealogy, now “faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight,” is one of several family histories described by Edith in vivid circuitous colors.  The van der Luydens are “direct descendants of the first Dutch governor of Manhattan,” and Mrs. Louisa van der Luyden’s “mother had been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Island family, who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland, after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter of the Earl of St. Austrey.” Even in this esteemed lineage there is treason.

When Mrs. Archer arrives to the van der Luyden house Upstate seeking the help of Henry on behalf of Countess Olenska, Louisa is hesitant to disturb him – he is in his room upstairs reading the newspaper.  “She said ‘reading the newspaper’ in the tone in which a Minister’s wife might have said ‘Presiding at a Cabinet meeting’ not from any arrogance of mind, but because the habit of a lifetime, and the attitude of her friends and relations, had led her to consider Mr. van der Luyden’s least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.”  Of course, Henry van der Luyden is charmed, too, by the Countess, as chastely as Beaufort is beastly, and his sanction gains Madame Olenska her re-introduction to Society.

Newland is a cerebral libertine, leanly heroic in his insistence to hold fast to a society which caused him, no matter how loathsome he grows of it. He dips eagerly into the books of Herbert Spencer, and Edith uses figurative language that evokes terms of evolutionary theory and molecular science.  Newland broods, “And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?”  And when faced with a certain alienation from his wife, “he shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?”

Newland’s acts of self-denial are steadfast, hurtful, complex. As a literary figure, Newland assumes mammoth sociological weight – the embodiment of a bridge between eras and the experience of being a first, lone walker of that bridge, while the dark and windy vistas of the old world recede in relevance, in reality. As a story character, Newland bears such weight with the artistry of one who equivocates the world’s pain at major psychic cost. In the end, a refusal to enter a French appartement summates Newland’s test in which the final turn of the key locks the experience of memory forever.