Ten musical impressions of Hudson County.
Rain; intoxication on the job. Claustrophobia in wide-open spaces, the asymmetry of one smashed headlight. A small young woman in a huge black Buick. Pulled by radio signals, old HAM operators in Hoboken basements, a chat show host pinched through a transistor radio. Always talk, talk, talk, talk; 'til you lose your patience. Dislocation, hallucination; the hot white mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, its unerring speech-acts.
If Robert Moses had had his way, Greenwich Village would now be a cloverleaf intersection. Here in the Garden State, home rule and property taxes compel us to shoehorn big box retailers into every vacant lot, and the bounty of the nation's best farmland is lawns, strip-malls, and condominium complexes. In twenty years, will we feel nostalgia for parking lots and the plate glass windows of the J.C. Penney? Moonlight refracted off bone-white cornices, a thick spring wind whistling through a tight alleyway. Red brick and posterboard, cigarette smoke, chalk lines on sidewalks and the little girls jumping over cracks in the pavement.
Jimmy Walker famously said he'd rather be a lamppost in New York City than Mayor of Chicago. Alison would rather be a lamppost in New Jersey than a person in New Jersey. Mirrors and penlights, windows sealed, the inexorable logic of the built environment. We love the city and remanufacture ourselves in its image; brick, iron, and asphalt, the binary stutter and pulse of computer and telephone networks replace the circulatory system, blood and sinew. Stay indoors, turn on the blue light, breathe in electricity.
It's really not a question of what you're going to do with that brick there; build or destroy, put up a wall or put it through the plate glass of the harborside Houlihans. The ferries are disembarking, look!, everybody's got the potential to walk over to the slag pile, the brick pile left by the construction crews, pick up a stone, make it their own. It doesn't make them special. There are circular saws running all day here. They're carving lines in the map with unvexed assurance. See that you're not straddling one when the blade comes through.
The rows of houses stretch in hooked lines along the ridge of the hill, conforming not to the grid but to the gentle coercion of the landscape. Two-faced, they stare down the western slope and back toward the arc of the Manhattan skyline. Sunset throws patterns of lemon, tangerine, and brushed steel on Anderson windows and aluminum siding. The bridges and tunnels spit out red brakelights like berserk arteries. A rush home, away from scars and memories, toward warm incandescent lights on little city streets. Avert your eyes, whistle into the wind, get out of the auto, lock the door.
The leadership is not the Party. We are the Party. Every crime bill creates new excuses for hassling those who can't work the system. If we throw together a means of resistance, remember that we weren't given a choice.
So Tim rents a place on the Palisade, cramped quarters, sure, but a spectacular panoramic view of Manhattan. He'd like to hang out on the small faux-terrace, but he can't figure out how to get the window open; besides, the Building Association frowns on anything that might let out the central air. The Company found the flat for him, Human Resources even furnished it and stocked the refrigerator. Yuck, smoked salmon spread. Ah, well, maybe it wouldn't be so bad on these bagel chips. Blue suits hang in the closet; they fit okay, but they still itch at his neck and thighs. There are really good-looking women out on the street. Twenty-three stories down; that's a long fall.
Low summer sunlight on a broad avenue, kids throwing pink rubber balls at passing cyclists. A sport-utility vehicle with Pennsylvania plates, double-parked and laying on the horn. Three bb gun holes in the sliding glass door of the Food Mart; Marisol leans on it, idly, hair in a bun, apartment-hunting in El Diario. A truck backfires, the doppler effect tortures the whine of the ice cream truck jingle. A limousine searches for the Holland Tunnel entrance. It turns the wrong way - just as the hydrants open, sluicing detritus and decapitated action figures into the curbside sewer.
The canvassers come nightly. In the morning, the street is festooned with ribbons and banners, posters of the candidate, blocky advertisements for the Democratic slate. Old men in the American Legion Hall slowly thumbing through registries, janitors, lifers. How could machines make you feel good? A march past the bodegas and salsa clubs on Bergenline Avenue, a child holding a pinwheel, a man shouting on a street corner. Energy channeled, steel girders and wooden frames, the salt and grease of the new light rail station. Park benches, drunks, family men, flacks in black suits.
Yes, it's another drawbridge over the Hackensack, a web of iron girders, asphalt fingers crisscrossed in a cat's cradle. You, restless behind your red-and-white candy striped lever. I face you behind mine. It's shouting distance, but a transport's coming through. Just you wait until the road yawns open, swallows me, folds back poised at an apogee, then knits together and gives me back to you. The city bends this way always - we shape it together. Be patient and this grand apparatus will bring us together, arms open and desirous like the jaws of a crane.
Explicit tracklisting here.