“I’d rather hold
my Irish rose
than handcuffs made of whiskey,
and anyway
I’m outta punts
and Farley’s pub won’t miss me!”

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder(.mp3)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Cat Man

In 1930, competing American car mavens Chrysler and General Motors were directly and indirectly responsible for the two tallest buildings in the world. Walter Chrysler would have the diamond-studded, spear-shot spire of his titanic building designed in the style of the front-grill of a 1928 Chrysler automobile. John Jakob Raskob, the former V.P. of GM (and credit aggravator of the stock exchange) would corral the financing of the Empire State Building.

Today, in consequence of events down at the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Customs House nee’ Southern District Bankruptcy Court, the moguls of these auto behemoths might have thrown themselves from the tops of their own towers and splattered at the foot of the Capitol building – their dismemberments seized and beholden to Union retirees and Canadian taxpayers.

The present discourse has repeated more times than John 3:16 that the world is in financial crisis of such magnitude not felt since the Depression.  The Depression began as the Empire State and Chrysler buildings capped off a major wave of idealistic skyscraper construction in NYC – in the first 30 years of the vertical century NYC built the tallest building in the world every few years, and was the only city enlisted in that race.  Rockefeller Center notwithstanding, new office buildings in the city would abate up through the early 1950s, when Bauhaus refugees were commissioned for glass quadrangles like the seminal United Nations, and the Seagrams Building on Sixth Avenue’s midtown corporate media gulch.

It would seem that the bankruptcy of Chrysler & GM and their assumption by the Federal government, though perhaps unprecedented in United States annals, is the sort of fail-safe by which neoconservative fiscal morality always knew its bloated policies could safely fail – that such a prodigious lack of respect of centralized government should result in the saddling of citizens with the fat limp dick hot potato that these businesses have become.  The Empire State Building had turned to the public, too, but took its cue more from Coney Island than Congress: the infamous “Empty” State Building would compensate for its initial 77% vacancy rate by selling tickets as a tourist attraction, as if its office space were as inconsequentially rentable as the Eiffel Tower.  The observation deck has been visited by everyone from King Kong to Castro.

In the early 20th century, before the buffer of the Depression and World War II wiped out the slang and jargon of the roaring twenties and hobohemiando thirties, skyscrapers were still influenced by old Europe:  The Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower in 1909 modeled upon San Marco in Venice, the Gothic kracken scales of the Woolworth Building in 1913, the Art Decoratif of Empire State and Chrysler.  It might only seem appropriate that, as eighty years ago American industrialists sought Italian stonecutters to adorn their entranceways with grotesques and gargoyles, now Chrysler supplicates for the investment of Fiat – a company whose spoof acronym is the epitome of continental post-WWII devolution – Fix It Again Tony!

Also, regarding Art Deco skyscrapers, the tallest building in Lower Manhattan since 9/11, at 952 ft, is the American International Building at 70 Pine Street.  It is a Machine Age syringe from 1932 that, though the tallest, does not command the skyline and has afforded zero New York mythology.  But insurance fraudster AIG resides here, only a few months ago Bailout Public Enemy #1.  Old President Bush always called the original economic stimulus plan “a shot in the arm.”   Who knew that shot might be the 200 foot antennaes of New York City’s tallest towers?  The AIG building just sold for about a little more than a three-story townhouse on East 64th St. in 2006 – its plush executive observatory newly inhabited by the up-flown polyglot phantom wharf merchants of 1640s Nieuw Amsterdam. . .

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.

Happy Birthday, ya prick ya!

Most vividly did the Inauguration present the landscape architecture of Washington, D.C. Vast tracts of flat Mid-Atlantic coastland ingrained and plotted with figurative visage, “from a cause to a style,” and that style is Federal Government. The environs made room for millions of spectators, the January sun was a revelator of the National Mall and the Capitol grandstand where the U.S. brass emerged, lions and tigresses of the modulor.  If the 1789 Congress first met in New York City, a place infused with French precedents, then of course a Frenchman, L’Enfant, would be commissioned to design the Legislature’s new home, in a superstucture city. Alexander Hamilton assumed the burden of the suckling nation’s debts, and Jefferson took care of the civic engineering.

“Transparency and the rule of  law. . .” The first principle adapts to new conditions, the second pays allegiance to old ways.

Gatherings of public figures as found on Inauguration Day resemble the cast of a big-budget movie. Onscreen, in the movie, the characters play out a drama: opposite sides wielded, the avenging of bicameral principles, heroic clashes of wits. But then, offscreen, at the Awards party, the cast is all hanging out all smiles and gladhanding and sweet-kissing. They are now behind-the-scenes, and for the audience, who knew these people as imaginative characters, it shouldn’t be as comforting to watch the actors cavort as the experience ineluctably is. America loves spectacle and likes to wink knowingly and drunkenly at the camera, but however contextualized by superstardom the election year has been, Obama’s poise of first confidence is as a Statesman.

And if there is one thing the Election made clear, it is that America does not want a Baby Boomer as president: Obama just under, and McCain just above. Like all generations, Boomers have been both grave pioneers and spectacular foisters of truth. This is a generation that would riot against after voting for the Bush soundtrack of terror. The current culture is bent over, one that takes whatever is ready to be given, with only a cheap, half glance over the shoulder to what is about to be shoved up – people take it and then spew the behavior all out again as if they made it up themselves, the simulacrum of an imagination where no imagination exists. The country is still inspired by the Judeo-Christian orthodox holding that one must pay dearly for good things, a whipping for glory, where there is no nuance, no in-between, only severe stark contrasts, as if it were a time when The Canterbury Tales had not yet been written. So from Bush, comes Obama, and a bandwagonnery of hope not seen since world war.

In 2008, the Brooklyn Bridge turned 125 years-old, a modern age marvel of engineering most prime, and in its day the largest suspension bridge in the world. Fascinated and terrified of it were the People. . .

It was 150 years ago that St. Patrick’s Cathedral laid its cornerstone on 5 AV, across from Rock Center’s art decoid Atlassolini; Macy’s Department Store turned 150, the old whale-trapper R.H. Macy staggering arch consumers with the Moby Dick of U.S. retail; King Kong turned 75; and the Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue turned 80, the Oz of NYC Germano-Judaic benchmarks, the Germans having bestowed NYC with the Brooklyn Bridge, the NY Times, Belmont Racetrack, beer hall kulchur pre-the Irish, the Headless Horseman and the pretzel.  .  .  .  And WFMU, the epochal razzmatazz free form radio station of inland urbo New Jersey, turned a stand-out, bucked-up, class-act 50 years-old.

In 08, the restaurant Florent closed. . .

Burritoville closed, and David’s Bagels closed but reopened up 1 AV at 19 ST, which as yet the author has not tried. Scores closed, the famed swankskank, ladmaggy strip club, which event is incomparably non-tragic to the sad day in the 1990s when Billy’s Topless on 6 AV in Chelsea shuttered its superb NYU co-ed boo-tay.

Folk crooner Odetta Holmes died; and arabesque Yma Sumac; bravura Hollywood leading man and philanthropic culinarian Paul Newman; bibliognost H.N. Friedlaender, 70s country-fried songwriter/actor Jerry Reed, and muckraspy cross-dressing NYC sightseeing guide Stan Thomashaw, who, after forbidden by the company to wear his dress on the tour bus, always swore that the grungy pink shorts that became his costume were really a “cut skirt;” Lollipop Building schmancer Huntington Hartford, the A&P supermarket heir who spent his fortune bombastically, once advised against building an arena for chariot races at his Bahamas resort; and George Carlin, the Master.

Obama was elected President without precedent, in a campaign that seized the American imago like no other has in recent past, political action has been granted an infusion of esteem, glamor, class and an ingratiating sense of steadfastness.

And Bergdorf Goodman in the grand tradition showed its finest of holiday windows:

. . . . readers are urged to comment else upon any birthdays or bygones hereto. . . .

Cafe Edison, 47th & Broadway

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!