Two idiots on the subway.

I've been way too busy with work to do any blogging lately. It's easy enough to avoid inspiration/temptation to post by shutting out the news for a spell, but real life can still intervene in the form of - in this instance - being subjected to a couple of progressive twerps loudly discussing politics on the subway. I don't suppose I really need to recreate their discussion here since there's more variety rolling along on the conveyor belt at a butt plug factory than there will ever be in the sentiments expressed by proggies. This particular conversation took about thirty seconds to devolve into a diatribe about the South.

Yes, in a city with a 38% high school graduation rate - in a subway car full of the kind of uneducated, shabbily-dressed people who are rounded up each election day to pull the lever for the Democrats who've been selected for them - these beta male sheep naturally felt no compunctions about loudly slandering an entire region of the country as being evil and stupid and blaming them for the current woes of Chocolate Jesus and the Democrats.

I don't feel like offering the South's defense, but I always feel dirty when confronted with New Yorkers caught up in mindless and irony-free bouts of provincialism. So, uh, I'm hereby encouraging a half-assed reverse boycott of the insular douchebags who scurry about Manhattan like rats. Buy some uniquely Southern shit.


Southern Culture On The Skids is one of the most fun live bands ever. They revel in their hillbillyness while plowing through songs with a melange of influences, and even though their music is as much a playful parody of the South as it is an homage, they've long transcended the label of novelty act by virtue of being so fucking awesome.

With a great selection of hand-printed, whimsical art-like posters celebrating Southern culture, Yeehaw is a must for anyone with an empty wallet and walls that need them some pictures. Just ignore the dopey Obama sign they made in '08 and anyone with an affection for country, the blues or assorted other musics of the South is bound to find a few winners for their walls.

To try Aunt Ruby's Peanuts for the first time is to want to find your way to Planter's HQ and punch Mister Peanut in the junk for having wasted your time all these years. I had no idea that every roasted peanut I'd ever had in my life sucked so hard until I experienced the crunchy goodness of these little bastards.

Bread pudding never sounded particularly appetizing to me. Bread? Who gives a shit. Pudding? Meh. Then my brother went on a grotesque shopping orgy at some online Cajun food retailer and I subsequently found myself confronted with a bowl of Blue Magnolia Pumpkin Spice Bread Pudding. They have other flavors, but I wouldn't know what they taste like because the pumpkin is so over the top in deliciousness that I see no reason for my eyes to wander. Just add some raisins, follow the sauce recipe on the package and you've got yourself a crazy good dessert that even an idiot could put together.

And finally, there's Blenheim Ginger Ale. Pretty hard, if not impossible, to find outside of the South, but there are plenty of sites where one can order it online. It's definitely not ginger ale for pussies, and popping open a cold one expecting refreshment on a hot summer day after going for a long run is likely to make your head explode. It's strong stuff and leaves a nice burn in the back of your throat. But as a mixer for booze - especially bourbon - the stuff has no equals that I know of.

So, that's it. This is a little afield of what I typically blog about. But "Fuck you very much" dweeby Manhattanites who can't let me focus on the work that pays the bills because you can't even take a subway ride without pulling the strings behind each other's backs and spouting your pre-programmed brain vomit.

Gangs of New York

This is a fascinating old documentary about a few notorious New York City street gangs during the seventies. A time when World Series cameras at Yankee Stadium would pick up buildings burning and Travis Bickle and "Son of Sam" epitomized the dark and foreboding nature of New York life. The city was bankrupt. The middle class was largely gone. The only remaining hipsters were anarchic squatters and semi-employed CBGB habitues. And people like my parents and their friends in the near suburbs would speak of the city not with reverence or envy as New Yorkers prefer to believe, but as a gaping, gangrenous leg wound. I was just a wee tyke at the time, but aside from the delightful aroma of hot pretzels when dodging bums while going in or out of Madison Square Garden, it was obvious even to a kid that the primary smell in the city was rot.

That's all ancient history now. The Wall Street boom of the eighties and nineties coupled with Giuliani's relentless efforts to tackle crime and quality of life issues put the city on an altogether different footing. So the above documentary would for all intents and purposes be little more than an interesting historical artifact were it not for the growing left wing nostalgia for New York as an open sewer. You'll routinely hear it said that they miss the graffiti. The subway as a pit of vipers. Times Square as a human cesspool. The hookers and street crime. The grit. The anomie.

Like so much of what one hears in New York, I have little doubt that most are simply mindlessly and uncritically regurgitating sentiments they've picked up in the ether. New York is so overwhelming, such an assault on the senses, - less a place than a state of mind imbibed by a steady stream of people coming from elsewhere - that there's a persistent tendency for people to sing from a common hymn book.

But when people have such a tenuous grip on reality it seems rather pointless to accord them the benefit of the doubt. What, really, is the difference between phony posturing and an emotionally-perceived and peer-reinforced truth when they meld together so seamlessly? It makes viewing the documentary all the more eery. Like we're living less on a turned page than in an ebb. And all that's required for a resumption of flood conditions is liberals just being who they are.

Holiday slacking continues

I probably despise New Year's Eve in NYC precisely because I have such a fondness for consuming alcohol and an affection [waning, thank you maturity!] for bringing in the sunrise. That's the nature of the holiday, but when every tri-state retard, teetotaler and nesting homebody is compelled to clog the streets, hog cabs and fill up every stinking establishment they're pissing in my personal oatmeal. It is amateur hour.

My best memories are of playing it by ear in the college years and immediately afterward. It usually involved us ambivalently drinking in an apartment past midnight, dragging our asses to random house parties and then hitting up our staple EV dive bars like 7B and the Village Idiot. There was a [very] old blues band from Alabama we happened upon one year and proceeded to have a blast sitting with their elderly wives while they were playing. The freezing NYE some heroin-addict-looking chick came into the Idiot and announced that she'd fuck anyone for a jacket. A nutbag who came in to eat at Kiev dragging a large tree branch. You know, the kind of golden memories that annoying $400/couple forced fun New Year's events just can't deliver.

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Among the innocuous things I remember was a smallish group of us slumming at a friend's apartment playing beer pong - the pussy Dartmouth variety as opposed to the much cooler Lehigh "Beirut" - while blasting MTV's live NYE Nirvana concert. I was a total Nirvana fantard, but I've been to so many live shows that I find TV concerts to be pretty much unwatchable. This one, however, was really mesmerizing. That less than six months later Kurt Cobain put the barrel of a shotgun in his piehole probably intensified my memory too. I loved that band like very few others.

My lovely neighborhood.

Tommy Tool and the future Vicky Clueless-Tool enjoy cocktails after a fabulous dinner at home. Their kitteh Trotsky ambles across the $10,000 area rug in the living room as he makes his way toward the organic food scraps which lay beside the Viking range. Kitteh scores big on nesting nights, as the Guatemalan help won't get to the kitchen floor until morning. Vicky could grab the broom herself, but Lupe can clearly use the exercise. Her repulsive saturated fat diet has left quite the bloated figure on her stumpy frame. Being poor and oppressed - by rednecks? - is no excuse for bad taste and worse eating habits. If only she'd leaf through the back issues of Bon Apetit Vicky discreetly left on the credenza. They are in English, but the pictures are divine and surely the absence of starch and grease would have a subliminal impact on Lupe's epicurean vulgarity.

Stupidity is too simple a a characterization for the delusional notion that the high-living fairy left mid century modern furniture in their living room while moral superiority occupied their REM sleep. Eames and revolution go together like cock and a chainsaw. But they bought carbon credits for their trip to St. Barts and if it's yellow they let it mellow (unless company is there). Cognitive dissonance, Manhattan-style. Fee thinkers in a conga line of self-parody.

Love and hate for the Upper West Side

I have pretty fond memories of the Upper West Side. We practically lived in the Dublin House Bar on 79th Street my senior year in high school. And we whiled away many a blackout night in our underage years bouncing between the Amsterdam strip and their less Jappy, more preppy, UES equivalents. But even in the midst of debauchery and drunken runs to H&H Bagels, my apolitical under 21 years found something palpably nauseating about the street vibe on the Upper West Side, even if I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

While the young bar habitues were of a markedly different stripe, the neighborhood seemed to be characterized by an overabundance of ugly people, poorly dressed - in a studied way - all effecting an air of self-importance. Parisians without style. Possessing a joyless essence, as though their souls had been sucked, not by world-weariness but by their own dirty neurotic existence. The retail aesthetics featured nary a trace of bohemia either. Its nobody's idea of a hip, let alone edgy, neighborhood. More like a repository of fourth generation red diaper baby rent-controlled gloom bunnies. And if downtown is epitomized by the inner turmoil that has art as its end result, the Upper West Side comes off as a place that welcomes or cultivates art critics and insufferable know-it-all douchebags.

So even as we flocked to the divey collegiate bars like cheap whores there was a growing sense that I wouldn't be caught dead living there. And it grew into an intense desire to spend no time there for any reason at all. And this, just from silent observation! Even if I didn't intellectualize it thusly at the time, it had none of the energy or vibrance of other predictably politicized environs like Williamsburg, the village or the Lower East Side. Places I love even if I'd sooner get my balls pierced than admit my political leanings to their inhabitants. The UWS by contrast is just grim, self-satisfied progressives in a suck hole of nothingness.

Watching this video was to have all those visceral impressions surge back into my consciousness with the hilarious recognition that yes, of course, where could all those lugubrious cretins have been headed but to confabs like this? And how, pray tell, could they possibly conduct themselves other than in this manner?



Of course, that's how they deal with each other, but how they deal with differing viewpoints is even more amusing.

Sisyphus thou art a Manhattan Republican

I don't know if I'd call a pro-McCain march on the Upper West Side of Manhattan brave exactly. It is funny to watch the unbridled hostility they encounter but its hard to fear a neighborhood that probably has the largest concentration of neurotic pussies on the planet. For all the haughty pretensions their politics are a strange, angry, insular, knee-jerk kind of liberalism that is rarely challenged in their circles.

It wasn't a year ago that I was reading David Mamet's book of [phoned in] essays about the movie business Bambi vs. Godzilla and it was suffused with so many gratuitous and idiotic liberal platitudes that reading it felt like being gang-raped by a West End Avenue co-op board. Of course, it was made all the weirder when some months later he had bucked the long odds and published an essay in the Village Voice about why he was no longer a brain-dead liberal. So maybe wisdom can strike anywhere, even on line at H&H Bagels.

Hat tip: The People's Cube