The Icepick Cometh

As property continues to be eaten in Dutchess County, the sell-off continues. In my post-graduate (lower case) years, political and civic leaders used to gnash their teeth with worry about how to keep from exporting their "most precious commodity" — their children, who, seeing the double rising tide of the increasing costs of housing and the continued job drain in the aftermath of IBM's early ’90s purge, essentially left for college and never looked back.

What did they expect? The county sold out long ago and IBM's downsizing dovetailed quite nicely with my generation's high school and college graduations. But the Dutchess that has since arisen from those ashes more resembles an extension of Westchester — it is still unaffordable for their children, unless those children moved to New York and earned the means to move back, joining the march of downstaters who discovered their money went further upstate, either as commutable homes (in Southern Dutchess) or as second-homes and "estates" (in Nothern Dutchess).

What saddens me is the continued land rape that goes on in Dutchess. I saw it while visiting during the holidays, driving north on Route 9 in Hyde Park. It's to the point where there is no more land to violate south of the Route 44/55 arterial. And still, proud hard-working families can't afford more than an apartment, a condo with no yard, or a home without a basement, untethered to the earth.

The obvious suspects in this are the politicians and the land barrons feeding a frantic real-estate market. But I see an additional guilty party — the Poughkeepsie Journal. Where was the voice for those without one in the civic realm when the Great Land Sale was (and continues to be) underway? The Journal benefits greatly from the "new" money pouring into Dutchess. The Journal was happy to accept advertisers who benefited from new customers — no problem there, who wouldn't? But at the same time, the Journal essentially wrote off the long-time residents and those younger workers who had stuck around, toiling and waiting for their chance to buy a home when their time came.

Instead, the PoJo subtly updated its editorial policy to be more inclusive of newcomers, essentially dumbing down the already dumbed-down paper, all in the name of "context." There was a transparent push in publishing more stories on outlying communities, places where population had been low but was now booming with new residents. Nothing wrong with that, either, except their bread-and-butter communities of Poughkeepsie and the "older" suburbs were sacrificed — coverage there was greatly diminished. The issues that mattered to those who lived there the longest (or at least, longer than the newcomers) disappeared from the shrinking pages of the paper.

But the PoJournal was all too happy to line the pockets of their corporate masters in Virginia with this new money. With no real competition for local news, dedicated existing readers have had no where else to turn. In the meantime, downstate transplants are slow to give up on their old (and superior) papers from the city. And everyone in the newspaper industry still wonders why circulation is down.

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Watched, for some reason, the Kennedy Center Awards show on the TV after Christmas. I don't know what it is, but Baby Boomers love Baby Boomers soooo much; this was much in evidence. They did what they do best: celebrate themselves.

I really don't mean to denigrate the Botox Generation's artists (well, OK). They honored Scorsese, after all. Can't argue this, even if, in The Departed, he ripped off both himself and Japanese crime flicks. I still loved The Departed, despite the rat final shot and even though Goodfellas was 1,000 times better.

See, I can give credit (grudgingly) where credit is due. Good things the Boomers gave us: Scorsese, Coppola (for I & II), Spielberg (batting about .800), Lucas (pre-1982), The Stones, Dr. Thompson (for the most part), and the '70s Yankees. Probably have to give them credit for The Ramones, too, though I feel like they belong to a later generation. That's about it.

OK, Back to the award show. They honored Leon Fleischer. I don't know anything about him, but prodigees with a tragic story and a touch of a comeback work for me. And classical piano virtuosos seem to be exactly what this type of award show should honor (rather than the MTV-style preality awards and how-much-crap-can-we-stuff-in-someone's-cunt-vagina show typically splattered on the TV these days).

They honored Diana Ross. Well, OK I guess. Never saw Lady Sings the Blues, but The Wiz rocked and gave us hints of Michael's, well, changes, to come.

Then we got iffy. Steve Martin? I know he's done a lot of stuff since he had that ole arrow-through-the-head bit on SNL and The Jerk, but he's up there with a piano virtuoso and Scorsese.

But wait. Brian Wilson? From the Beach Boys? Um. For me, it was just a little too sad watching the decked out Botoxers in the audience rocking out and trying to avoid a few broken hips as Hootie & the Blowfish (perfect) played "California Girls." That was just before Lyle Lovett actually did a nice, bittersweet cover of "God Only Knows" — it was almost better than the original. (By the way, the original version is forever embedded in my mind as the song played near the end of Boogie Nights, when we catch up to all the characters, and Robert Ridgley is taking a beating in his prison cell from his roommate shouting "Shut Up, Colonel!" Good stuff.)

(And while we're digressing — What was better than the original was David Lee Roth's cover of "California Girls," though that's probably because I watched the video about 5,000 times as a 14-year-old.)

OK, back on topic. Even Pops was shocked that Brian Wilson was up in the balcony with Scorsese and the piano guy. Diana Ross kinda surprised him too. I think he missed Steve Martin entirely, but Pops was soon back to thinking about bowling.

The story of Wilson's later years, when he apparently battled depression, proved to be the most compelling part of his vignette. But that was hard to compete with the boomer-perfect child-of-the-suburbs backstory with Art Garfunkel droning on about Wilson as a young Church choir soprano merging his talents with Chuck Berry rock-n-roll — another thing the Boomers were happy to take credit for. And, of course, cash in.

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To quote McNulty in the preview for the new season of "The Wire" … "What the fuck is wrong with this city?"

Displaced tenants return to find Madison Avenue apartments burglarized

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Norman Mailer died last month. I have very little appreciation for him, maybe a little more after reading Kriegel's column. Assigned to read "Why Are We in Vietnam?" in college, I couldn't get past D.J. and the first chapter.

He also had some weird propensities linking sex to everything, and it sounds like that got weirder as he got older (check out this link to Gawker, which references the London Literary Review). Oh, he also stabbed one of his wives (she lives on).

But on Kriegel's recommendation, I picked up "The Fight" and "The Presidential Papers" (the latter I bought used on Amazon — it's out of print). "The Fight" has a great first chapter, and I skipped ahead to the boxing chapters, which are great. The lead-up stuff is worth reading, too. But, as Mailer is wont to do, he bogs his writing down in writing about himself. I can't stand the narcissism in print — it's why I'm skipping around.

Still, as Kriegel puts it, he was right-on about the press, even way back in 1963, in "Ten Thousand Words a Minute." And, from the same piece, even the master narcissist hits it on writing:

"Writing is of use to the psyche only if the writer discovers something he did not know in the act of writing. That is why a few men will go through hell in order to keep writing. … Being a writer can save one from insanity or cancer; being a bad writer can drive one smack into the center of the plague. Think of the poor reporter who does not have the leisure of the novelist or the poet to discover what he thinks. The unconscious gives up, buries itself, leaves the writer to his cliché, and saves the truth, or that part of it the reporter is yet privileged to find, for his colleagues and his friends. A good reporter is a man who must still tell you the truth privately; he has harsh bright eyes and can relate ten good stories in a row standing at a bar."

Does it make any sense or is more coils of excrement? I'd like to think part of it is True. But maybe it depends on the depth of your hangover.

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