Well, a long while since I rapped at ya as Jim Anchower would say. My life has been a hectic dance of English teaching between two schools, one in Midtown, the other in the Empire State Building. Twixt these two, I have an hour long lunch break and the din of Times Square in prime tourist season when the heat causes all the critters to go wild. I've seen three Spidermen--one selling handbags, one riding on the handlebars of a penny-farthing and this guy. Where are these critter people when it's cold out? Are they wearing Spiderman suits under layers of wool? Anyways, I've been doing a lot of singing myself lately. I've always been impressed by the guys freestyling on the train. Most of them keep their ears plugged into bass tracks. I've always seen rap as this primarily urban art form excreted from the human rhythms and concrete textures of the city. Most freestylers draw inspiration from their environment as evidenced by Mr. Def here. Hip-hop has always been a hijacking a someone else's music, filing the serial numbers off, and restyling it as your own. Very po-mo.
Anyways, I've always had this habit of singing to myself. Lately, I've had Dion's "The Wanderer" rolling through my noggin. This especially happens when I go through Time Square and am awash amidst people, texts, and surfaces on everything. Now, I've never been very good at freestyling, but I love rockabilly rhythms. Today on the subway platforrm, I listened to a young African-American fella strumming acoustic and singing Garth Brooks "Rodeo." I began to think about the invention of rock and roll as a fusion between black bluesmen and white country singers. I was thinking why can't white peckerwoods start laying hip stream-of-consciousness beat poetry over gospel, rockabilly, and doowop tracks? I've been described by many people as being corny, which I read defined as overly-sentimental. Well, what's more sentimental than allt that white music from Statler Brothers to Porter Wagone?
I'm going to be the first person to label this fusion and we'll call it "corn rap." Hillbillies remixing tracks. But not Kid Rock because he's a douche. I'm talking about acoustic sincerity. See it's already sort of happening and it sounds pretty good.

I've come to prefer taking the train over any other mode of travel, and I love my bicycle as well as my saintly '94 Altima which I took for 10 years without dinging out too badly (and doing my damn share of drunk driving mind you.) I grew up on Rte 4. Povo Road and commuting as a child consisted of tearing through a quartermile rut of mud, stone, and two dogs trailing by just to get to your mailbox. From that, you'd spin out onto the improved road dropping little bits of gravel onto TVA graytop. Then it was over 4 miles of Cherokee bones and two creeks to get to C&R market where Robin (God bless her) would give me a carrot cake or moon pie pro bono.
Later as a teenager, I commuted to school in Athens, where the smart kids, pretty girls, and good drugs were. This usually involved a ferrying of minivans between me and the brothers Donegan and 30 minutes on I-75. Don't tell me I wasn't a little spoilt.
I liked St. Andrews and Bennington because I could walk to class. Through 3 feet of goddamn snow, tho. I ain't even trying to sound like your grandfather. I choose to learn at high altitudes which makes me a candidate for the European Graduate School. (Why are all the amazing schools on mountains? It's like Hogwarts, fer real.
I used to commute an hour from the ethnically diverse Northwest Chicago to the far Northwest Suburbs of Chicago to work at a public relations firm which chose to locate itself in the most drab and anonymous office space in total suburbia. The most harrowing commutes I ever took were through exhaust-clogged blizzards on the Dan Ryan Expressway--thank God for WBEZ. How's that for a waltz of reverse white flight, white collar poverty, and gas waste?
When I finally began to work AND live in Chicago, I was introduced to the CTA, the second-largest public transportation system in our country, yet woefully inadequate by a magnitude. I never understood how Brazil could one up the U.S. on public transportation. Despite her delays and breakneck whoop-te-doos, the El always delivered her packages on time.
Despite Europeans complaints of it, I find the MTA to be pretty much a world class means of transportation. It's safe, comfortable, and blessed with spectacles and entertainments various. Though I usually prefer to read. Most magnificent though is when she comes out of the tunnel and alights majestically on that spangled bridge and I view get to view Manhattan as an open book, that I really begin to appreciate the joys of a good train ride.

Now some of you know that I work at the Empire State Building teaching English to foreigners. The coolest aspect of this job is that when things get tilted and hot in the classroom I often get a free moment to poke my head out of the windows of the 63rd floor and have a little moment with gravity. Anyone who's climbed a high rock or incline knows what I'm talking about when I say that I can actually feel the weight of the earth pulling me down. When I stick my head out that window I'm always reminded of that scene in Star Wars where Luke dangles from that t-bar in Bespin . Is anything scarier than dangling over a precipice overlooking a void? My mother posted an article on Facebook recently about gravity as a sort of swirly, quantum agreed upon illusion. If you can grok this academic paper, I've got a home for you here.

Anyways, at 63 stories up when one puts one's head out the window there is an inevitable feeling of a force being pushed down and one becomes briefly terrified that a small bit of detritus, say a penny, might hurtle to the ground and slice through my neck artery. According to this article, air resistance prevents this from happening, but it's still up for debate, so why doesn't somebody take a bumpkin off death row and FIGURE IT OUT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD?

Anyways, one's heart races when you poke your head outside of a skyscraper. Even bringing out my head and arms, there's an incredible fear that one will be suddenly propelled downwards. A carpenter who fell off a barn once told me that 50% of drops over 20 feet are fatal. That always seemed a matter of heads or tails to me. But 63 stories!? Not even the cleanest executed Parkour roll would prevent you from being tomato paste. There's an off-chance you could survive being shot in the brain or being hit by a bus, yet falling off the Empire State Building or being run over by a train is going to kill you even if you're Bruce Willis.

Only one person has committed suicide in the two years I've worked there by jumping off. He was a brainy young man of privilege and the general temper amongst the street throng was a sort immigrant's righteous confusion that a kid who went to Deerfield and Yale could actually be unhappy. People were incensed. I heard one woman say, "Why didn't he jump off the Brooklyn Bridge? It's a nice view and he wouldn't have hurt anybody." There is actually a history in New York City of entitled young men jumping out of buildings. I remember reading a story in my literary journalism class taught by the late, great Steven Bach about a 26-year-old man who stood out on the ledge of the Gotham Hotel for 11 hours before leaping to his death back in 1938. He became upset after a remark made by his sister and stepped upon the ledge. Of course, he was clinically depressed. I'm sure the New York Post macho media probably painted it as a Look-at-Me everybody, Poor Little Rich Boy death same as Andy Rooney dissed Kurt Cobain after his suicide. But, apparently that whole story garnered enough of the cultural interest at the moment to justify Joel Sayre's New Yorker article and a movie. Well, depression strikes those in Yale and jail, say I.

Most terrifying about this whole experience is the rear animal in your brain that teases you to make the front page of the New York Post. I've often suspected that most people's fear of heights is a fear that they'll jump. I don't think I own this idea, but an understanding of one's balance--both physical and mental is crucial. I always marvel at the nimble assuredness of the men who built this 102 story skyscraper in THIRTEEN FREAKING MONTHS AFTER THE STOCK MARKET COLLAPSE. Ah, they just don't build them Ford Tough anymore.

The best part, of course, is returning to class-secure, happy, and grounded- while my students look at me as though I'm crazy.

Remember in The Great Gatsby how there's the valley of ashes midway between the rural West Egg and New York City? It's a lonely, null-zone meridian with a gas station perfect for Tom's affair with Myrtle. Remember the billboard with the watchful Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg?. Remember how George Wilson refers to the eyes as God after his wife's death? The billboard was a terrific symbol for a post-industrial American concept of God. God speaks to us through billboards and Christians know this.

I remember that my mom and granddaddy's picture were featured on a billboard for Wood Presbyterian Home which had a quote from my mother "Dad Couldn't Be Any Happier." Granddaddy passed away that summer and the billboard was imbued with a spiritual aura.

Well, here in the post-modern era, in the oxygen-strangling flanks of Manhattan I have discovered the Javits Center Jumbotron. Yes, Jumbotron is the actual term for those large ad screens composed of teeming reefs of miniscule light-emitting diodes.
. I took this video at around 11 p.m. I had an awareness that I was the only viewer of all these turgid hot gigawatts shot out to entertain and grab only ME. It was like that awful scene in any science fiction movie where the suddenly aware machine addressed the protagonist via a screenhead of some sort. And when I left, it would continue to show its spiraling animation to absolutely no one save the insects wedded to its gleam. When the screen lit up and said "ASK," I actually felt as though I beheld the Great Burning Bush itself. Like the Deus Ex Machina Babyhead at the end of Matrix Revolutions (God, did anyone even watch that movie?) You know, I would say this city needs to shut off some lights at night. Might feed a small village somewhere.





Although for pure Blade Runner cuteness, you just can't beat these 4 little pixies I found in Chinatown at midnight to keep a lonely pedestrian company.

Things are a sloppy mess of aggression, grilled veggies, and bad plumbing at ABC No Rio, and have probably been so for 20 years, “a collectively-run center for art and activism” (read: Aimless Punk Collective) in the Lower East Side on this blistering heat of the day before July 4th, a humid wave that tests any punk’s commitment to latex and leather. As the bands set up, there’s an obnoxious class struggle in the backyard between the dirt poor kids trying to put on a Saturday Matinee Blowout and their tony soccer apparel hawking neighbors at the Alife Rivington Club trying to watch the World Cup. There’s a big cock-strutting gravel scratch over who threw a brick over the fence or dumped a bunch of green paint on blah-blah-blah, though one of the ABC kids later tells me that the paint was dumped from another building and the brick was thrown by someone from another collective who just happened to be hanging out in the backyard of this particular collective (Wonder how the complex autonomies of self-organizing post-Yippies holds up in the civil courtrooms of Centre Street?)
36 years after The Ramones screamed “Judy is a Punk” at CBGB’s and introduced the world to the power of three chords, Punk (at least this New York punk, not hardcore, nor metal) still seems to come mostly in two varieties--Quoth Lester Bangs in 1982-- Hardcore: “Rolling clods of lumpy excrement with broken bones sticking out” and Oi: “Craters of dribbly gruel with patchy tufts of straw poking up.”
The kids are still handing out buttons that say “Extinct Government” and “Fear is Control” in a rubbled courtyard that plays up to a 90’s era Belgrade aesthetic, but I don’t the hear the biofueled throttle of actual revolution (although they do want to get some photovoltaics, gray water recycling, and a planted green roof if you can spot them $2.6 million, brah). This scene is a cultural favela for millenial Indigo children and people with hyperactive thyroids who need to work out their mondo daddy issues by trapping oneself in a particular decade, sort of like the 40 year-old stoner who still surfs within the confines of AOL because he’s afraid someone will show him, like, a Robotic Pig Heart Jellyfish on Youtube. If you think I’m being hard on the creative output of ABC No Rio, I submit as evidence this stanza from Hobo Bob printed in their zine Stained Sheets (ew).
I have the oil black heart of New York
beating in my breast
I am covered with her street grime
the fuel stench of her yellow cabs
I stopped recording to stop the fight. How's that for gonzo?

Living in New York can be a drag because of too many rats in the box--a good half of them terminally insane. I consider myself to be a scene washout after 3 years of beer, bad art, and noise rock when I was living in Chicago. I'm rarely out past midnight because of the poor train service and drunken assholery. Williamsburg gives me an anxiety attack. I'm more comfortable living amongst the Carribeans and Hasidic Jews of Crown Heights where I'm certain I'm not part of its scene.
However, occasionally I stumble on a spectacle as I did last night at Galapagos where The Hungry March Band(A Brooklyn-based marching band and Texas Couscous from France vie it out in a battle of two marching bands. The performers outnumbered the audience, but the line between the two blurred fantastically in a phantasmagoria Moulin Rouge sort of scene. Briefly, my life was a musical last night. I was entranced by the wonderful shadowplay taking place on the walls.
Only in a cosmopolitan megacity such as London, New York, Paris, or Hong Kong could you get this huge consensus of performers. Thanks Josie and Tessa!

I thought it would be really cool to walk up to straight up to Sting at the premiere and shake his hand and record it on my I-Pod. After all I'm a plain Tennessean made somewhat good (but mostly broke) in the awful, big city. A complete shiny-eyed bohunk with one strap of his overhauls unbutt' come up here like Sister Carrie, Madame Bovary, Tom Jones, and that little French critter from Balzac's Lost Illusions. I've got a democratic feeling of equality like the Tennessee farmer who, after hearing Martin Van Buren speak, stepped up, shook the President's hand, and invited him "to come out and r'ar around with the boys." Why not videorecord the whole experience?
Well, first you'll notice that the presence of celebrity causes me to giggle like Butthead, but come on dude's name is Sting.
Second, I completely lose the gumption to stick the camera to the man's face so the screen goes all Stan Brakhage to the inside of my cuff and I sidle up to him as he's talking to Paul Stamets about a revolutionary cardboardbox that not only biodegrades but is laced with tree seeds and fungal spores so it will literally sprout a forest after it decomposes. I actually had this thought in my head, "Wow, I'm going to rescue Sting from this weird shroomy sociopath." Turns out dude is a genius in the movie.
I walk up to him, shake his hand and say, "I will always remember you as Feyd Rautha." He said, "Yes, you remember those flying underpants." What you don't see is Sting gesturing to his bodyguard tremendously. I then started going about Baron Harkonnen and the image being stuck in the basal ganglia, when I realized I was the lunatic he was trying to be rescued from. Well, I had terrible breath anyway.
Then, I read on the Internet that Sting was schoolteatcher at St. Paul's Middle School from 1971 to 1974 before starting a band called The Police and recording "Don't Stand So Close To Me." Now listen to that song and you tell me who you think is the creepy guy.

I said I would make a movie one these days. Here it is. R-Rated language in the vain of total political incorrectness, I'll warn you.