Tom Watson

Redeemed Through Pain

For a bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York...check that...for a Catholic bridge and tunnel kid in 1980 New York, Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy was canonical, a bass-charged liturgy of the word - if the word descended from the Beats and Allen Ginsberg, its bearer transfigured into a poetry-pouting punk rocker with an angry hit record. The record's cover hangs framed in my basement rec room, near the Rock Band video game set-up and my 14-year-old's drum kit. Nearly 30 years ago, it was always in the stack on the turntable and the Jim Carroll Band's shows at the Ritz always brought out the punk royalty, from Patti Smith to Stiv Bators to Richard Hell. At least in my (somewhat gauze-wrapped) memory, they were real events and Carroll - who couldn't really sing per se, but still knew how to sell the story - was treated like an archbishop.

And based on that one record, it didn't seem too much to bend and kiss the ring. It was great, from the iconic People Who Died to the title track (which I quoted in a Lenten post earlier this year).

I was a Catholic boy
Redeemed through pain
And not through joy

Carroll died of a heart attack at 60 last week, and my friend Gerry Howard has a moving tribute in Slate (via Jim Wolcott):

Cognoscenti of downtown culture knew Jim as a literary prodigy who was publishing his poems and diaries in the Paris Review in his teens. He was a fully paid-up member of New York's hip aristocracy, Lou Reed's peer, Patti Smith's lover, Allen Ginsberg's acolyte, Robert Smithson's friend, permanently welcome in the Valhalla of Max's Kansas City's back room. And I had the pleasure of publishing most of his work when I was an editor at Penguin in the '80s.

Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is. The line of succession runs from Jimmy Cagney and Jimmy Walker through Emmett Grogan and Al McGuire. In the '30s they would have cast him immediately as a Dead End Kid—he certainly had the unreconstructed accent for the part, an urban rasp that was sweet music to my aboriginal ears. He came up athletically in an era when New York produced the best basketball players in the country—and a lot of them were white. Despite playing his high-school ball for a Manhattan prep school, Jim could more than hold his own on some of the toughest playgrounds in the city against the likes of Lew Alcindor and Dean "the Dream" Meminger. But his street-kid affect never quite hid his essentially generous and vulnerable nature and his poetic soul.

I love that line about the Dead End Kids and Carroll's place in their ranks. Though a literary darling as welcome in the back room of Max's as any of the downtown cognoscenti, Carroll's work covered a different New York entirely. Still, his death does mark yet another great name leaving a city that used to house voices that stirred many a poetic soul. As Wolcott says:

"With his passing, another link to the Beats and the St. Marks poetry scene and the Warhol Factory joins the posthumous fraternity of the starry Kerouac night."

Here's a video of the Jim Carroll Band hammering through People Who Died on Friday's (h/t Dennis Perrin):

And the Moon Rose Over an Open Field

Here's David Bowie opening the incredible Concert for New York in October, 2001 with one of my favorite Paul Simon songs. One of the things that struck me about this show (which was the moving cultural experience of my life) was deep appreciation of New York City and its position and role in the world by British musicians like Bowie, Jagger and Richards, Townshend and Daltrey, Elton John, Clapton, and Paul McCartney, who organized the concert. In some ways, their emotion and empathy drove the entire evening - and provided a release to the cops and firefighters who packed the Garden. It's almost as if - like the Queen, who ordered the Star-Spangled Banner played at Buckingham Palace - these British rockers really took the meaning of "America" (as they call call it) to heart. Anyway, Bowie:

Labor Daze

The last time Americans celebrated this long holiday weekend - first convened in 1882 to publicly applaud "the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations" - Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee and trailing after a long, drifting summer that knocked his impressive, disciplined campaign off message and off kilter. Then September dawned, Lehman Brothers died, the swirl of the world economy began its grand flush, the electorate took a longer look at Sarah Palin, and John McCain opened his mouth to say the country's financial structures remained strong.

Obama counter-punched on the economy and didn't stop hitting till McCain was on TV thanking his supporters and (rather deliciously, from a spectator's view) freezing out Palin.

In truth, that's mainly who Obama is as a politician: a man who sees an opening, who doesn't panic against the ropes, who occasionally works the clock. Writers who resort to boxing metaphors should spend a term of no less than a year in re-education camps, but I'll risk it just this once and date myself at the same time: the President's always been more Ali than Frazier, a synthetic blend of talent and tactics.

Come Wednesday night and the Confab on Capitol Hill, Obama attempts to shift away from the ropes on healthcare reform and go on the offensive once again - really, the first time he's attempted this pivot since coming to power. The odds aren't great: last year, he was allowed six months between turning to embrace the half of the Democratic Party that fought for Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the electorate. This time, he has to fire the combo in rapid succession.

And he doesn't exactly have the collective wisdom on Angelo Dundee in his party's corner, either. Let's listen in on Howard Cosell, uh, that is to say, James Wolcott:

There are times when Democrats remind me of the episode of Seinfeld where, after a slapstick chain of mishaps, Kramer finds himself pinned against the wall like a soldier about to be executed as a tennis-ball machine bops one ball after another off of his head, until he groggily collapses and slides out of frame. The history and velocity and modus operandi of conservative attacks on elected Democrats are out there in the screaming daylight open and yet time and again they find themselves in a passive, stationary, unprepared position, getting pounded into mush, going down in - well, it's too early and wimpy to talk about defeat. But stale defeatism is definitely loose in the air.

To borrow a word Democrats generally shrink from - the word that launched Ted Kennedy's 1980 campaign - there is general malaise settling over town these days, a kind of wimpy (to borrow Wolcott's invective) deflation in expectations from Democratic Washington, beginning with the White House. At Obama's urging, thousands of Facebook users posted this as their status last week:

No one should die because they cannot afford healthcare. No one should go broke because they get sick, and no one should be tied to a job because of pre-existing condition. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

What's remarkable isn't the clarity of the language, or the fact that it became so instantly widespread. No, what's remarkable is that it comes so late in the game. If the White House - and its obsession with avoiding the mistakes of '93-94 - was really on the kind of A-plus game plan that defeated Clinton and McCain, this message mastery would have been in evidence during the over-hyped "first 100 days." Or even the second. Or even during the summer. But as I wrote a month ago, the Democrats surrendered the narrative to the opposition - the canny, strategic, money-wielding insurance lobby and the crazy, throw any insanity against the wall right wing.

For an issues that's supposed to represent the Administration's top domestic initiative, the slow and seemingly ad hoc nature of Obama's healthcare plan has been painful to watch unfold. For a politician renowned for "organizing the Presidency," it has all been spectacularly disorganized. And, frankly, unorganized - at least so far. At TechPresident, Colin Delaney voices the tactical despair many Democrats now feel, after watching (and taking part in) Obama's spectacular success last year:

The enemies may be somewhat different this time around, even if their tactics feel familiar, but the biggest gap is between Obama's grassroots politicking then and now.

The ability of the townhallers and death panelists to grab the attention of the media and chattering class caught many by surprise, but that kind of surprise didn't seem to matter so much to the Obamans a year ago. Remember Sarah Palin's VP nomination acceptance speech? The next day, Obama's fundraisers played their list like a musical instrument, ginning up more political donations in a 24-hour-period than anyone, ever.

By contrast, Obama for America has struggled to get into the health care debate in any meaningful way over the past few weeks. In that time, Obama has been punched from all sides -- from conservatives, of course, using both legitimate arguments and the made-up fantasies of the right-wing fringe, but also from the Left, as activists and bloggers try to hold his feet to the liberal fire.

The Organizer-in-Chief hasn't done much organizing, and the choir's getting smaller. And the lineup of bouts after healthcare isn't exactly the last bus from Palookaville either: Afghanistan, the employment crisis, a looming flu epidemic, market regulation. Well, Obama's turned things quickly before. And he's done it with major speeches. Sure, his kidneys must be aching from a thousand rabbit punches, but Wednesday night is clearly the start of the late rounds in the healthcare battle.

And here's the question: do we get a towel in the center of the bi-partisan ring - or some stinging counter-punches?

What's Wrong with You ... You Stupid Child?

I've always been a total sucker for Squeezing Out Sparks, the hook-filled 1979 release from Graham Parker and the Rumour. It wasn't punk and it wasn't really New Wave (Parker being a hair older than those dudes), but it fit the times as perfectly as this record's eight-track fit the ride out to Jones Beach. Here's Local Girls, a wry commentary on man's innate (and ultimately unsuccessful) drive to remain cool and aloof, and a spiffy old school music video besides.