. . . 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 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

Surely, a person comes the way of New York City to beat sparks from the stones, whether pioneer of psychic outlands, or last member at the fucked-out asshole orgy. . .

This past weekend we went to what might have been a dance party, but once arrived we proved to be the scant few dancing (to the sweeeez sixties soul na-na-na) and we left early, it turned out pretty much a total pud-ass scene.  A friendsome vibe did not exist, it was amateur night on the Lower East Side data page, and upon our departure the “dance floor” was took over like starved bugs to dead food by yappering crawlers of the night, on a different mission than I that evening, though us both humans.

The more the new yorker attaches oneself to the city, the more that new yorker is exposed to riotous disparagement.  In such a way I have unleashed myself unto David’s Bagels, on First Avenue and 14th Street.

I would not be presumptuous of the superlative tendency to claim that David’s Bagels had the best egg & cheese in town (I could not speak equally if asked my favorite bar or favorite skyscraper).  The great bagelry has closed, but word has it another exists on 19 ST & 1 AV, in the Stuy Town perimeter zones…

I did have fun at Fontana’s Subway Soul Club, but I left the neighborhood with a mind to not revisit these streets south of Houston anytime soon (except shop at Ben Freedman Gent’s Furnishing, for shirts, vests and sportjackets).

Routinely, as a person cannot wear eyeglasses other than that person’s own prescription, you cannot go out dancing where no one else has come to dance. Like the werewolf to the full moon, self-possessed, sexually mis-jiggered youths will glamorize a Saturday night.  The girls in fancy-tops, the guys limp and sweaty – in history, New York has never assumed to offer a dearth of such sort. NYC is the most populated city in America but ranked 12 worldwide and after NYC the next most populated US city is LA, at 45, below Wuhan, China. As ever would, unfledged stentoriousness plays on, it’s still the old video game.

This is the old “headhouse” of the first IRT subway that ran from Wall Street to Harlem for a nickel in 1904, designed by Heins & LaFarge, the original architects of The Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue, which is not finished yet.  Across Broadway is the square they used to call Needle Park, when the neighborhood smacked of post-WWII hobos and the rebellious middle-class youth who grew up in the West 60s & 70s, when pro bohemiandos shilled for the grime. It was near this station in 2007 that a woman on the street called Alec Baldwin an “asshole,” in response to the great actor’s widely-publicized, venomous phone message left in the voicebox of his daughter Ireland. Surely, this was an Upper West Side moment.

“Shoulder the curse of sundered parentage,” – Hart Crane

Most major cities in the world are on bodies of water: Cairo, Chicago, Louisville, Galway. New York is a port town, founded by Dutch merchants the way space-men first looked for the right place to put the flag in the moon. Today, there are more jet-skis and kayaks in the river than cargo ships, and for the last fifty years the city has been conducting the sometimes lumbering, sometimes swift process of dismantling the architecture of the waterfront. Over the past year, a significant sector of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal was excised.

Never slack as an innovator, NYC since WWII (or publication of The Recognitions by Gaddis) remains a transmitter of goods, and those goods are ideas, let the cargo unload in Jersey. 

Still helmed by the Financial District – which was the first of all neighborhoods born colonially (and where the early dot-coms utilized cheap office space) – New York has become an intense curator of itself. And the room for curatorship is made by both bearing and sacrificing the dicey effort toward full new ideas.

Think tanks are not often built where the piers once jut, but parks and housing.  This is not to say that creativity of individuals does not abound NYC, but that “creativity of individuals” is the very idea in the employ of an economy for which individuals should do as the DJ who is out to impress the clubgoers of his taste in music rather than to get people to dance.

Tho perhaps where one activist views the acquisition of old industrial space in West Harlem by Columbia University as a theft of property, another activist might champion as land use for the intellect…

Clifford Holland, for whom the Tunnel is named, was an innovator in the field of subaqueous construction, and, the story goes, he would join his workers down deep in the new holes dug under the river.  It was in the unfinished tunnel where he suffered a heart attack, and died, but it could not be said that Holland died in New Jersey, nor that he died in New York, because at his stricken moment Holland stood upon the exact border between the two states.

I dated a girl who lived in the low low eastside of Chinatown, and there was a VFW around the corner on Clinton Street. We would sometimes stop by on our way home and have a couple beers. Mostly men hung out there, and drank and played pool, yet there was always at least one local lady present, and usually the lady was of a commanding constitution. Everybody was very inviting and congenial, real bullshooters. And of course, slurred, guffawing jokes were made about how none of them were veterans. A guy named Randy looked after the place, and in back from behind the small bar with stools Randy served the coldest can of Bud I ever drunk. Nothing ever got out of hand, and we could smoke inside.  Most of the people were locals who had grown up in the neighborhood. Randy’s father was the patriarch of the establishment, an old Jewish Loisada stunt-man kind of a guy, and during the day he sat outside with his elder cohorts and made buzzard noises at the passersby. One night we ended up at the VFW after a long night out. There was more activity than usual, everyone was living it up. There were these Argentinian guys, my friends Gary and Eva and brother Fud and Michi, and these guys who worked for the Dept. of Sanitation. One of New York’s Strongest passed out in his chair.  After all, they haul 13,000 tons of garbage every garbage day.

As a Gray Line tour guide, I can only make reference to this building on Express runs up the West Side Highway, as I did last Fall coming back from Brooklyn to Times Square. A fervent, diagrammatic, dockside Iceberg; an homage to the Age which bore the modern archipelago – it has not yet thawed, reinforced in steel and glass. Given all the grandeur, it is unfortunate that among the company’s primary brands is TicketMaster, who take money where money should not be taken, demanding a fee for your enthusiasm to see a live show – it would be opportune if they should be put through the same abject, bone-breaking interrogation as victims of old witch trials, only that TicketMaster is guilty in the most divine and gruesome sense, and the proof is the lame fee right there on the stub which I would gladly use to fan the burning stake. Still. . . the IAC Building regards its whereabouts marvelously.