Birdwatching, Manhattan style -- Pt. 45

After lunching with my Flo today, I spotted Ric Ocasek dodging raindrops on 14th Street, midway between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

The lure of the gleaming city on the hill

Rosie Thomas is a singer-songwriter, a planet in the musical constellation that rotates around the prolific and talented Sufjan Stevens.

On her new album, These Friends Are Mine -- a digital-only release (or so I'm led to understand) that is available only via online outlets like iTunes and emusic.com -- she includes a lovely, simple song whose lyrics so fully evoked my early days in New York City (and the wistful years immediately preceding my move here) that it fairly took my breath away:

All The Way to New York City

I wish I could take you with me
All the way to New York City
We could get an apartment there
Be closer to our families

We could take my station wagon
And fill it to the brim
And wave goodbye to all our lovely friends
Never to return again

You could write for picture shows
And I could get a job
Waiting tables at a restaurant
Where famous people like to go

We could buy old overcoats
And walk through the snow
All the way around Central Park
Our cheeks as pink as wild roses

We could take the subway home
And stare at our reflections
In the window panes of the train
And see how much New York has changed us

The melody -- and Thomas's performance of it -- are every bit as lovely and spare as the lyrics, and the rest of the album is also well worth your consideration.

Rakoff on Allen: Funny on funny

Having only just returned from a trip home for the holidays, I have missed out on most of the Woody Allen films I could have borne to revisit during Film Forum's Essentially Woody festival (I am at best disheartened by his output of recent years -- and that's if one considers 1994 recent -- but I still esteem many of his older pictures).

But I am thoroughly enjoying David Rakoff's dispatches on same at Nextbook.org. It's wonderful stuff, especially Rakoff's piece on Annie Hall, which I particuarly revere (not that I'm exactly in that sentiment). I laughed out loud more than once while reading the piece at the office -- thankfully, it's a slow period here, and no one noticed.

Speaking of Annie Hall, here's just a little tidbit other fans of the film might find interesting: I once read a xerox of a photocopy of a mimeograph of the original script, and was intrigued to learn that the scene that finds Alvy stopping people on the street to discuss the twisting pathways of love and sex originally called for him to also discuss matters of the heart with a mounted policeman's horse. In fact, if you watch closely, it's quite apparent that Alvy is making his way toward the horse as that scene fades out.

I only wish I remembered what exactly he says to the horse (and how the horse responds), but alas, that info, like so much else over the years, has escaped my feeble brain.

A conservative mourns Ford

This column by conservative commentator Bruce Bartlett is well worth a read:

Ford’s Lost Legacy

With the passing of Gerald Ford, we have lost more than a former president who served the nation honorably in trying times. The Republican Party has also lost its last link to a tradition it once embraced. Gone now is any trace of the solid Midwestern ethics that Ford personified — things like not spending more than you take in, being skeptical about the use of force, and not imposing one’s values on others.

Gone also is any trace of the Western-style libertarianism that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan exemplified. Instead, we now have a Republican Party that has imposed vast financial costs on future generations just to win a few votes today, that is hasty and imprudent in the use of force, and that takes a virtually puritanical approach to imposing on everyone the views of evangelical Christians....

I didn't agree with every move Ford made, by any means, but I was struck, while watching the tributes to him following his death, by how he appears a veritable giant -- intellectually, morally, emotionally -- compared to the numbskulls and thugs who are currently in power.

That hold on power finally gets loosened tomorrow, when the Democrats take over the House and Senate. Here's hoping that'll prove to be the first step back toward sanity and a return to an America we can be proud of.

Gaining a little perspective in the new year

I missed this a few days back. Perhaps you did, too:

What To Do With Your Goldman Sachs Bonus
Investment Firm Goldman Sachs Reported the Largest Profit in Wall Street History
by Mary Kathryn Burke and Elizabeth Kolleeny

Dec. 13, 2006 -- It was reported today that Wall Street's famed investment bank Goldman Sachs will be shelling out over $16 billion in bonuses this holiday season -- an average of over $600,000 per employee.

Many of those bonuses will be performance-based, so some of the company's bigwigs are likely to get as much as $100 million.

With all that cash coming in, it's easy to wonder what someone might buy with a $100 million holiday bonus.

You could provide immunizations for more than 40,000 impoverished children for a year ($37.5 million), then throw a birthday party for your daughter and one million of her closest friends ($60 million). You'd still have enough to buy a different color Rolls Royce for each day of the week ($2.5 million).

You could feed about 800,000 children for a year ($60 million), recreate the Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes and Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston weddings four times over ($16 million), buy one of Mel Gibson's private islands ($15 million), and still remain a millionaire nine times over....

Here's the rest, if you can stomach it.

Here's to a safer, saner, more equitable and just 2007. For all of us -- not just Dubya's Chosen People.