New York - New Torque - 2-13-10

“Money has been here so long its a little decrepit. If one of money’s laws is that it can never buy taste, here is where it went after it failed, and here’s what it bought instead.” Chase Insteadman, the hero of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City

Cat Power achieves the nigh on impossible, take a stone cold classic and make it your own and she does it with a song so old, so storied, so cliched, so peripatetic that even I have been known to karaoke it to a terrified room full of Singaporeans. Most people identify New York or New York, New York with Hoboken’s own little sicilian or his duet partner the perennially 45 year old Lisa Minelli, even Phish have had a go at this song. 

Cat Power’s New York is grubby, thrusting and ultimately the club you want to be a member of, she sings her way out of the little town blues and into the greatest city there is. London is a great collection of villages thrust side by side like a collection of strangers in a tube train on Monday morning, its not a city. Tokyo is the conurbation, the greatest continuous anonymous collection of concrete, glass and neon but its not a city. New York was built as a city and it is quintessentially American. To be at home in this city you must be drinking something equally Yankee, and its not Budweiser and its not Jack and Coke; it might be a Manhattan but really? Italian vermouth and Scotch whisky is hardly what you would call a natural marriage.

So it has to be a Zinfandel, like New York a unique expression of italian roots in the new world and for that extra zaftig how about we blend it with Morvedre and Syrah? The French may have paid for the Statue of Liberty but they would never give you the liberty to screw with the noble grapes like that, only the new world libertarians would do that. So what would Cat hold in her elbow length gloves as she whips you with wanting to be in the very heart of it, and remember this is a gal who lived in bars?

Linne Calodo’s 2007 Problem Child is what she would spill on her vagabond shoes, very rich, lush, expensive and a little brash like the Upper East Side.

As Chase says she must “ abide with the life of Manhattan as it slakes itself on sundown pleasures, as it dines and it boozes, then.. tuck it in for the night and go on”.