Silver Jews: "Old New York"

"Old New York" is an obscure track by the amazing Silver Jews released on 7-inch in 1993, filled with plenty of singer Dave Berman's bon mots on living in the ancient ciudade. My favorite line:

The Chrysler Building will never fall down / as long as you frequent the bars in this town

While perhaps not the prescient 9/11 prediction we might expect from Berman's otherwise razor sharp intuition, the sentiment is a compelling one: the more you drink, the more the city stays alive. While at first glance this concept wouldn't seem to bear out in an alcoholic doomtown like Buffalo, New York, where buildings fall down faster than Bills quarterbacks get sacked in the pocket, in other ways it makes sense. Berman is only addressing the skyscrapers, not the city as a whole, and while Buffalo's residential infrastructure rots into the ground, its office towers thrive.

Then again, the Chrysler Building is not your typical soulless 90-degree glass office tower: it is in fact, the stuff of lore, Annie's ultimate symbol of hope, a glittering Art Deco jewel on an otherwise utilitarian skyline. A beacon of art and an older world, the older world supported by the true drinkers in the world, those old men in the neighborhood bars Berman eulogizes. The half-hearted yuppie martinistas just didn't have the liver strength to keep the twin towers standing, but the old whiskey-soaked souls, like Antigones pushing a shotglass-shaped boulder up a barstool every night, toil away, deepening the foundations of the classier towers into the bedrock far underneath.

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