"Comparative Noise" [by Santa Frere-Jockstrap]

One day last week I spent the afternoon with my colleague Luke Malaise, downtown maven of the marvelously new and ugly. Wearing a black shirt buttoned to the top without a tie in his case, and sporting a black Underarmor t-shirt in mine, we were strolling along Horatio Street thinking about death in the afternoon. Check that. Scratch "strolling," substitute the hipper "hoofing." And along comes our friend Sal Marada, a person of smoke, with whom we like to associate becuse it gives us cachet and separates us as "punks" from the "punks" who are "punks" in the dreary old-fashioned sense of immature youngsters who need a good whack in the backside from father figures who aren't decked out in aprons like milquetoast Jim Backus in "Rebel without a Cause." We have no cause, either, just like Brando and Dean, but we are punks not because we are young and presumptuous and getting ready to be slugged by a tall Irish cop who says, "I've frisked a hundred young punks like him, he's clean," en route to geting shot at a Bronx restaurant that serves the best veal in New York. No way, Giuseppe. We are punks in the classy sense of being declasse rockers who rock like Johnny Rotten or even better the vicious kid named Sid for whom we feel a plaque at the Chelsea Hotel is in order, and you may wonder why there has been no reference to music in this piece when ostensibly I am the music critic and that is because we were hoofing down Hudson Street and whom should we run into but David Lehman wearing a gray Cavanagh fedora that I am sure he bought at Housing Works, a tweed sports coat (Paul Stuart), a J. Press shirt (red and blue checks), burgundy silk tie (Dior), and black loafers (Prada) and we decided hey this guy is fucking not hip!  We are hip and he likes "Blue Moon" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Too Marvelous for Words" and "Isn't it Romantic?" and "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" (which we believe should be reserved strictly for Margaret Thatcher) and "Change Partners" and "Begin the Beguine" and "The Surrey with the Fringe on Top" and even worse "Ol' Man River," which has been something of a joke, a racist joke for decades, no matter what Paul Robeson may think, and that gave us an idea. Why don't we write a book called "Punks of New York": about the three of us plus certified hipsters of our choosing? Like why Paul McCartney ("simply having wonderful Christmas time") could never be hop or punk, while Lou Reed is effortlessly both even when dead. When we brought the idea to a publisher, she said "you need a thesis" so Luke thought quickly. "OK," he said. "Our thesis is that we who are hip in a punk way, or punk in a hip way, but not definitely not in a hippy way, are deep down the least hip kids in the high school of our lives," and the publisher ate it up, and then we smoked this blunt that Sal gave Luke, had a couple slices of pizza in a place only four other people know about, and I sat down to write about the noise scene in New York today compared to the noise of the five other cities worth talking about, Los Angeles, Tokyo, the London of the clubs, the Paris of the Seine, and the rows of linden trees you walk under in Berlin. Meanwhile the suckers from the New York Times keep writing about who is hip and who isn't, not realizing that writing about who is hip and who isn't is the first sign that you isn't.  -- SFJ

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[Walter Carey]

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