Joe Flaherty invokes the gravely droll figurative acuity of Henry James and the sweepingly intellectual semantics of Edith Wharton in reconvocating the experience of running the Mailer/Breslin Democratic primary ticket for New York City Mayor in 1968. Such a traditionally imaginative manner of prose is an effective inversion of the riotous Situationalism of the Mailer/Breslin campaign – student takeovers of Queen College; chic Fitzgeraldian post-populuxe cocktail parties at Gloria Steinem’s silk stocking district apartment; Jimmy Breslin’s typically macho Irish fragile alcholic sensitivity breakdown and almost abandoning the cause for good when Mailer wins the Pulitzer Prize; fundraising bashes at the hippie dippie Village Gate where Mailer treats the staid psychedelic stage like a dingy Southern front porch and tirades in his favored blowzy redneck Sheriff voice against liberal youths and Jews and uses un-idioms strictly from the old barracks like “up your screw.”

The book is a rare document of the mid-Lindsay era, when WWII and Korea vets grew thick sideburns and styled their hairs as do the caricatures on the paperback cover art. It is a time when American identity might have been at its most uproariously confused since the 19-oughts, and the nexus of that absorption of beinghoods was New York City, the turf clubs of Right & Left, the 50% polyester suits and 3/4 leather boots, the Forty Deuce grindhouses and Fun City Ivy Leaguers on the City payroll, when a novelist persona might exalt as a controversial media lark and command the resources to formulize a platform. It is of course absurd and totally inaccurate to future thinking that the platform is reduced to transforming New York City into “The 51st State,” but a radical idea by a radical personality during radical times. And Mailer does act like a brute hamfisted jester, with his orotund full-page ads and silly radio jingles and profanity-splotched zingers (the campaign slogan: “No More Bullshit”).

Flaherty keeps his hero continually sincere – Mailer may appear a dadaist but only because on stage he debates a bunch of dry stiffs. For all Mailer’s theatrics, he seems to perform best in quiet settings, like the Union Theological Seminary, and before NYPD administrators in a classroom on East 20th Street. Mailer is least sardonic about the idea of city neighborhoods put in charge of themselves, where communities are enabled to answer to their own cultural infrastructures, set-up with their own City Halls, rather than the usual Big Apple methodology of all areas hovering in on the grand nub of Manhattan like the last open bunker before the bomb drops. Mailer is much more articulate by way of rambunctiously nuanced rhetoric than about how particular philosophy might be executed (though Flaherty claims various position papers drafted by the campaign were later mined for bullet points by other U.S. cities). Just after Mailer was pushing for City statehood, Leon Panetta – Obama’s CIA director – would intimate the same proposition from Lindsay’s camp, but without also pushing for free interborough bikes and Sweet Sundays when city-wide electricity is turned off for a spate.

The Casino Walk-Off(.mp3)

Old Bar Sign, Cypress Avenue & Stockholm Street.

Underpass Storefronts, Wyckoff Avenue & Broadway.

Liquor Store, closed, Onderdonk Avenue.

Liquor Store Holiday Display, Onderdonk Avenue.

Madonna Collage, bodega, Wyckoff Avenue.

Grotesque, front hallway, 426 Himrod Street.

Cafe Europa, closed, Cypress Avenue.

Conjoined, Roxy Paine, 2007-08 & The Metropolitan Life Tower, Napoleon LeBrun & Sons, 1909. Take a guess which of the two installations was created by the same designer of Schuylkill County Prison?

Tree Huts, Tadashi Kawamata, 2008-09 & the Flatiron Building, Daniel Burnham, 1902.

The Croisic Building, Frederick C. Browne, 1910.

Wisdom, Frederick Wellington Ruckstull, NY Supreme Court Appellate Division,
the late Mauve Years.

Clock, Fifth Avenue Building, green light.

Conjoined & Fifth Avenue.

Public Bathroom, Madison Sq. Park Conservancy, 2008.

Clock, Fifth Avenue Building, red light.

MetLife Tower, 17th Floor of The Croisic Building.

Happy Birthday, ya prick ya!

Campbell Dome, Queens College, Flushing, NY.

The Theme Building, LAX Airport, Los Angeles, CA.

In the summer of 2008, a video store in Hell’s Kitchen was having a VHS sale, 3 tapes for $10.  Not the best deal for a near-fossilized modal of entertainment, but still your author participated during lunch break in between lecturing atop bus tours of Manhattan Island.

Frequent visitations were made to Video Cafe, where the premises hark way back to the hoary likes of Palmer Video & Joe’s Video on Bloomfield Avenue in Verona, New Jersey, where as a lad your author first engaged the aesthetics of the VCR – the goofy staff, the chintzy wire racks, the bizarro consciousness-insinuating early box art, the chemic fragrance of outdated plastic packaging, the random sounds of whatever movie screened that hour from the monitors perched off the ceiling: maybe Stallone, maybe a stray disciple of the Brat Pack, maybe French, maybe the Resident Evil film.

The sale at Video Cafe was limited to drama, comedy and horror, which your author was not apprised of until after making picks from the classics and foreign section.  Stalker and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? had to be put back on the shelf.

And so a memoir of watching that stack of movies bought. . . .

Mickey Rourke portrays a small-time New Orleans bank robber blessed with a saint’s soul but disavowed by the congenital facial deformity of a warlock – even surpassing as an iconograph that which the actor in “real life” would later wreak both surgically and pugilistically upon his own countenance. The ironic “Johnny Handsome” is double-crossed on a bank job and ends up in prison, where an ambitious pointdexter surgeon (Forest Whitaker) attempts to perform radical Face-Off-esque treatment to restore Johnny with a humanable face – which turns out to be that of Mickey Rourke post-9½ Weeks. Johnny then returns to society, and though his face reforms his soul does not: he fails at innocent romance and takes revenge on those who betrayed him – scuzzbag maestro Lance Henrickson and marvelous pulp-bitch Ellen Barkin. Morgan Freeman plays a dapper folksy Bayou-cosmopolite detective, the one character who knows that Johnny ain’t really so Handsome. Walter Hill draws his metaphysics from the French but his colors from brute American precedents. And where to begin placing Johnny Handsome in the current hagiography of Mickey in The Wrestler? Johnny shows a man bounding back his new face into the old universe; Randy The Ram seizes an old face in an old place and causes it to transmogrify.

Hal Ashby so elegantly draws forth Jack’s genius at the physicality of madness (Five Easy Pieces spazz-out in the front seat, axe work in The Shining ), Jack’s raunch eloquence (Cuckoo’s Nest hobohemian, camp bigotry of The Departed), and the cool, composed manner of ease when stuck with the insuperable condition of the world (varsity sweatshirt lawyer in Easy Rider, identity thief media agent in The Passenger, King of Marvin Gardens maverick literati).  Which is also to suggest the sheer understated depth of Jack’s character, “Bad Ass” Buddusky.  Finely juxtaposed measures of scene, dialogue, attitude, irony, gravity.  A true counterculture movie, where the subject of rebellion, alienation, the bare urge to uprise, is traced from the inside-out – three Navy guys who have each chosen their own imprisonment in order to cope with a choatic universe.  And where is the ecstasy found in beating back those prison walls as if they were not the only choice for these guys?  Buddy existentialism, just enough profound and just enough hilarious – On The Town by Robert Towne.