Today, if this movie were remade – verbatim – it would bomb. Even with production values improved to what is capable now, with location shots instead of set pieces – but the original script, plot and pacing intact – the film would be an utter failure, a snoozefest that stretches disbelief beyond any credulous boundary.

The film’s most egregious offense is perhaps its crux, when Mr. Grant’s Roger Thornhill grabs the knife handle sticking out of poor Mr. Townsend’s back. Now, I’ve never been faced with a dropping corpse, felled by a thrown blade, so I can’t claim to know for certain whether I’d grab the murder weapon in shock (it had no blood on it, by the way) … but I seriously doubt it. I want to believe that, even in the midst of bemusement, there remains enough Reason to think: “Don’t put your prints on the knife, stupid.”

Shortly thereafter, while Thornhill is on the lam, we encounter Ms. Saint’s Eve Kendall, an insultingly ordinary bottle-blonde with bad teeth. The film tries to pass her off as a bombshell. It fails.

We don’t know yet that she’s both a U.S. government agent (!) AND the girlfriend of the villain, Phillip Vandamm – played by James Mason – so we have no motive for why she helps Thornhill evade the police. We are thus forced to believe that this purported 26-year-old is so overwhelmingly aroused by a man twice her age that she’ll help him flout the law, despite being told by detectives that Thornhill is wanted for murder.

So, she is either reckless or stupid. It’s hard to want to believe a woman like that, since we’ve no context for her actions. It might have worked if we were shown a behavioral reason (Unstable? Into kinky/risky sex with older men, all the result of daddy issues?) for what she does, but we’re not. Her performance is so tepid. It is not credible; Ms. Saint’s wooden “acting” robs her character of anything compelling.

On the train, while Thornhill is secreted away by Kendall, they are shown to have a tryst … but this is only evinced through awkward kissing. In one especially ridiculous scene, Mr. Grant has his hands absurdly splayed behind Ms. Saint’s head, as if to wholly avoid touching her in a manner that could be construed as natural. He kisses her as though she smells like rotten cabbage drenched in sewer water.

Maybe Mr. Grant is to blame for the sheer lack of electricity; he notoriously strains on film when expressing affection toward women. Leslie Caron in “Father Goose” and Audrey Hepburn in “Charade” come to mind. The good-looking man portrayed as a caddish lothario fails miserably at exuding that persona when it comes time to actually kiss the girl. It happens often enough in his films to suggest that Mr. Grant wasn’t terribly fond of women.

But onward … to the dusty prairie where took place that famous scene of our old hero running from the crop duster. As he dives into a ditch to avoid the hanging wheels of the prop plane, I think “Why don’t they just shoot him?” I was, by that point, annoyed by the elaborate ploys to dispatch Thornhill. Forced drunk driving, framed for murder. Why not just shoot him in the head and dump him in a ditch?

Well, sure enough, bullets ring out from the plane … but they miss him, of course. They miss him twice. They have a goddamned machine gun. And they miss him. Yeah.

And then an oil tanker conveniently pulls up so the plane can crash into it. And a convenient crowd assembles on this dusty road to nowhere, which is shown to be used by barely a soul – obviously to impress upon us its perfection as a locale to dispense (in arcane fashion) with a troublemaker – but its bywater nature is contradicted when the spectacle requires an audience, which materializes on cue.

Thornhill steals a spectator’s truck and drives off the wrong way. He winds up back in Chicago that same evening, but anyone who’s ever driven through Indiana knows that a quick trip is not facilitated by making two lefts to head back in the direction you came.

Even more absurd is that we are shown a newspaper in Kendall’s apartment that night. Its headline describes the crop duster’s crash into the oil tanker — which happened that same day, around 3:30 p.m.

Now, maybe Chicago had an evening paper in 1959 … maybe that, in itself, is not so preposterous … but would a crash in the hinterlands of another state make the front page of a big city broadsheet?

Maybe this is all nitpicking. Shit, of course it is … but who the fuck ignores a nit? You’re a lousy lice-ridden dumbfuck, if you do.

I could go on. Blah, blah, blah. This movie sucked because [further evidence]. (Fine, I’ll continue.)

Such as: the insulting, we-have-to-get-this-information-into-the-movie-somehow exposition at FBI headquarters, the avuncular “professor” following his agent around the country despite his protestations that she mustn’t be discovered. His confidence in and recruitment of the hapless Thornhill, who’s proven himself to be a class-A schmuck. The concocted “murder” of Thornhill, intended to allay the villain’s suspicions about his U.S. Agent girlfriend’s loyalties … but only just long enough for the dumb bitch to keep the blanks-loaded gun in her luggage for Martin Landau’s Leonard to discover it, outing her at a moment more convenient to the plot. And how about Thornhill inexplicably escaping two bullets fired from a gun, which was pointed at him from just beyond point-blank range.

The list goes on … but here’s one final example, and perhaps the most ridiculous: Agent Kendall’s “yoink” moment where she pulls a statuette full of Mr. Hitchcock’s MacGuffin (microfilm, of course … the quintessential prop in any espionage film) from Vandamm’s arms, who watches agape as Thornhill make his escape in a car – a car in which some buffoon was stupid enough to leave the keys. Or, perhaps Thornhill retrieved the keys on the way out the door while he dodged those two bullets with the notorious physical prowess of a senior citizen.

You know what? Fuck this movie.

I know I said I enjoyed it and, sadly, I did. I bought into the cult of awe and reverence for all things Hitchcock and all things Grant. I adhered to the tenet of forgiving old movies their fatal flaws because of the illogic that they are not, in fact, flaws … but quaint charms of a bygone era of … of what?

Let’s be honest: A bygone era of bullshit and stupidity.

In my dejection over the red and black Strat not turning out, I re-purchased the guitar I’d ordered in November. It came at the end of February and I’ve had it about a week.

At first glance, she’s a beauty. Nice, glossy black finish, black fret-board, pearloid inlays there and in the headstock, which is uniquely shaped to give the axe some nice character. The knobs are a combination clear- and goldish-acrylic, the pick-guard and pickup cradles are somewhat cream colored…

But the pick-guard and the cradles are not exactly the same color and that was my first gripe. I decided to shrug it off. Then I noticed a white speck on the body and tried to rub it off. I couldn’t. It’s under the acrylic body coating. Then I noticed that one of my tone knobs looks like it lost a fight with a belt-sander. And today I noticed that the plastic plate around the jack looks to have lost that same battle … oh, and the neck pick-up rocks back and forth in its cradle; it’s not snug.

To add to my woes, the action was too high … so I lowered it and the fat E started to buzz, so I raised the action and the buzz went away again, but the G-string intones sharply … and I can’t get at the saddle screws because the bridge pickup cradle is in the way.

Cosmetic flaws aside, the rocking pickup (in a literal sense, not a figurative one) and sharp-at-the-12th-fret G-string need to be addressed. A professional setup could also result in lower action sans buzz, the result of an expert truss-rod adjustment … oh, this reminds me that the fret job on the first fret looks a bit like shit.

But what should I expect? I notice flaws. And nothing is flawless.

Granted, I feel as though I am always dealt the shittiest, most flaw-filled hand there is, but that could easily be my obsession with flaws making it feel that way. Still, why can’t I get the pristine axe delivered to me? Why can’t my adventurous purchase be paydirt instead of plain dirt?

I will likely obsess about these flaws for a while. Worse yet, I took a deal from where I purchased the guitar, they agreed to compensate me marginally for the defects (5% of the cost of the guitar) … but the caveat was that it will preclude me from returning the thing. Does it make me feel any better that I got it for $190 less than their asking price and now, with the credit, have paid even less for the guitar that any other left-handed schmuck forced to buy their instruments sight-unseen?

No.

Because the flaws stick in my mind, and so displeasure twists in my gut like a cancer eating me alive from the inside out.

Yesterday:

I had a duffel in which I’d brought both my pairs of hockey skates to be sharpened. After dropping them off, I had a more-or-less empty duffel. While walking down Nostrand Avenue, two middle-aged dudes in conversation stopped talking as I passed. I noticed one of them sizing me up, his jaundiced eyes standing starkly out against his Special Dark complexion … and I laughed.

Neither one of them said a word to me. Maybe they were put off by my laughter; it was of the mildly insane variety. Mirth did not inspire it, rather the recognition of absurdity and a general sense of just not caring.

I imagined what they might have said, and my responses, and the conversation as it played out in my head is what caused the outburst.

Dude: “Yo, whitey, what’s in the bag?”

Me: “Nothing you’d want.”

Dude: “How would you know?”

Me: “Because I seriously doubt anyone would want a used stick of deodorant, a never-washed wool scarf and a hoodie in desperate need of washing.”

***

Today, my morning still very young, I had the great misfortune to sit next to a lummox with serious post-nasal drip. I wanted to collapse his runny skull every time he snorted down a viscous dram of snot. You know the sound. Every fucking few seconds. Absolutely brutal.

Worse yet, the train was so quiet … so peaceful aside from the rumbling noise of vibrating tonsils / adenoids / whatever-the-hell else.

I didn’t want to turn on my iPod, but I had no choice. It was either say something regrettable to a guy that Diane Fossey might have studied, or blot him out. So, I listened to my music and it was more or less fine — except that he seemed to know to snort every time there was a lull or a track ended — but I kept ignoring him, and eventually I stopped noticing.

And then he breathed on me.

He breathed and it was like being smacked in the face by a tsunami of shit and dead bodies; the foul sewer that spewed forth from his rank maw was an affront to all of mankind and I was right there on the front line.

I wanted to say: “Could you, maybe, not breathe in my face since it smells like you got your asshole confused with your mouth?”

***

And finally, while walking through the rainy, depressing expanse of red-painted asphalt and shimmering bullshit that is Times Square, I was joined in my stroll at 45th Street by some singing jackass. Maybe he got the cold effusion from the sky confused with his shower at home.

He was atonal and, even if he were not, his choice of tune — whatever it was (rendered unrecognizable, had it even been, by his tunelessness) — was awful.

I wanted to say: “Hey! Spare me the fucking serenade!”

***

The only thing I said to anyone this morning was to a cabbie blocking the box at 46th Street, who wanted so desperately to continue on his way he looked poised to mow down all pedestrians, despite their right of way. So I stopped, to avoid winding up in his path … and he wouldn’t go.

His windows were up, but I still said: “Well, are you going to go or what?”

He waved at me.

If something no longer works for you the way it once did then get rid of it. Yes, you may have a sentimental attachment to it, but sentiment cannot be allowed to come between you and the kind of life you are striving to create for yourself.

Today, I looked at Aries:

If you want a better tomorrow you are going to have to sacrifice something today. You can be remarkably ruthless when the need arises, so cut out of your life anything that no longer serves a useful purpose. That includes friendships too.

I was born on the cusp. It means that both of the above horoscopes may pertain to me. Now, I really try to be objective (let’s all have a hearty laugh about that) and logical when I can, but I am usually taken aback by the accuracy of horoscopes on the rare occasions I look at them. It really isn’t in my nature, I think, to be either objective or logical; which speaks volumes over how those two methods have controverted my actual nature.

The world would be very easily navigated if everything were black or white, but very, very few things are either and nearly everything is gray. It’s not easy to excise something that may be so overwhelmingly positive in some very crucial ways yet disappointing in other, perhaps equally, important ways.

I am ceaselessly frustrated by the lesson, repeatedly imparted, that you can’t have it both ways — at least in this self-flagellating, Puritan society. You have to be all in or all out, whether in work or relationships, or even signing a lease. Yes, leases expire, but they are incredibly binding for the term of the contract. Yes, relationships expire, but they aren’t like milk that you just dump down the drain once the expiration date is reached … it isn’t a rare occurrence for a couple to persist long past the peak of a union because, I feel, there are ALWAYS mitigating circumstances. There is always some fundamental, essential element that makes an intimate relationship the diametric opposite of milk. And, yes, jobs can be left. Everything in life can be quit upon but quitting has a toll and, at nearly every chance I could to quit, there has been an argument to stay.

It would be rash, impulsive and illogical to make any life choices based upon the advice in a horoscope, which would certainly contradict my tenets of logic and objectivity. How unreasonable. Yet being reasonable, I think, is the crux of my misery. Everything is weighed and plotted to a T, nothing spontaneous, nothing impulsive. Orderly, predictable, undramatic and, frankly, boring.

But I’m not going to take a horoscope’s advice. I’d first have to tear down all the reason the prevails my decision-making process and that would probably take more than a magnitude 7 earthquake.

They aren’t hiking the fares again, not just yet, but jacking up the price of a Metrocard is but one way to deplete the ridership’s funds. By curbing essential bus and train service, the MTA is denying New Yorkers the opportunity to easily travel to where is the best (perhaps this should be in quotes … read: highest paying) — or only — available job.

I know people who commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx because the latter borough is where they found work, despite that they already lived in Kings County and therefore could not easily relocate closer to work; nothing locally or in Manhattan availed itself to them, so they took what did.

To take a job in Queens is truly a last-ditch desperation move for anyone in Brooklyn because of the near-impossibility of travel between the two boroughs. The MTA’s infrastructure is woefully inadequate to provide a conduit between the two Long Island counties in the Greater City of New York. The G-train is a pathetic joke.

While it is already vexing to travel hither and yon in New York, the loss of mass transit services highlights an even greater concern: by stranding people in their own locality, it makes apparent the dearth there of viable employment and satisfactory grocery stores, and exposes the woeful lack of the most rudimentary elements of a functional community — schools, Post Offices, pharmacies, hardware stores, etc.

New York City may occupy a relatively small square-mileage of land, but it is a dauntingly expansive metropolis … particularly when one is forced to travel for miles — without the aid of a car — just to find the one place that offers the appliance, foodstuff or service one seeks. If a person has to first walk a mile to get to a bus to take to a train that will take them to another borough where they will then have to walk to reach their destination, it is hardly a sign of laziness for such a trek to be dissuasive.

But when the only other option is to fester in one’s own community where the local grocery is woefully understocked and offers only rank, unfortunate produce and suspect meats … where there is no Post Office or annex … where there is no pharmacy … where the local school is a violent trap full of underachieving miscreants bound for nowhere (I hate to oversimplify, in this case, because none of the kids in NY public schools deserve to be forsaken, but neither do I have room to expound without lengthy digression) … what choice does anyone — who isn’t willing to settle for the pathetic offerings at their fingertips — have but to travel far to get what they need?

Exorbitantly inflated rent is already a massive disservice to community well-being. Massive rents marginalize people to fringe areas — with inadequate public transportation — where there is no local investment because no one has money to invest. And there is no investment in these areas by people with money or by the rich politicians who are in a position to divert funds to building the community. Instead, the marginalized are placated in their poverty with welfare and subsidized subsistence.

If the MTA is going to hog-tie the people who depend most on its service, it is well past-due that the communities in which these people will be stranded are given some real relief. No one should have to walk more than a mile for good produce, quality meat and other essential groceries. Ideally, in a city so replete with avenues for employment, very few people should need to walk more than a mile to get to work. Obviously certain circumstances thwart that mentality, like the desire for exorbitant wealth that puts people on the corporate track, although vast riches elude all but very few of the people toiling at nothing concrete or measurable in the corporate world.

Imagine if specialized laborers were permitted only to work where they live. It would increase the quality of their work because how well they do affects them, their loved ones and neighbors … and it would increase demanded for more skilled workers in every community. (Sure, the argument could be made that there wouldn’t be enough work to sustain the workforce, but New York is infrastructurally decrepit enough that this idea could sustain a large workforce for a good while.)

Instead, we have droves of people squandering their potential, staring at computer monitors, sitting in cubicles amidst a drab, gray office, producing nothing remotely tangible. Perhaps producing nothing at all.

The misguided belief that a corporate job is the pinnacle of employment is a very fundamental part of what causes moribund local communities. If more people strove instead to better their own environments by working within them … instead of vying for material excess … they could live well, albeit modestly, and the demand to leave the community would diminish, and so too would the demand for mass transit to carry them to other, “better” opportunities.

I walked to the train at 10 p.m. last night, huge bag of hockey equipment over my shoulder, it’s cold and raining out … but not until I get to the station, three blocks away, and DOWN the STAIRS, do I realize I don’t have my fucking wallet. Yeah.

So, I walked home with all my equipment, got my damned wallet and walked back to the station. When I got to 23rd Street, there were no buses in sight, so I then had to walk the four avenue blocks to Chelsea Piers and then the rest of the way into the complex to the end of the pier, which comprises about another city avenue block.

I’m fit. I’m in good shape. It wasn’t a problem, but it did start to nag at me as the game wore on. My knee isn’t quite back to 100%, though it’s pretty damned close. My team played like shit. I couldn’t score despite a bevvy of great chances … I even got stoned on a sliding two-pad stack save. That was some old school goaltending … but, fuck, did I feel snake bitten; I got great wood on the shot, lifted it too, but all it hit were the pillows. Fuck my life.

We lost. 2-0. One of the goals came off the stick of a guy way too good to play at our shitty ass level. No one in our league should be able to crank a rising slapper from the blueline that is in the net before the goalie even thinks to react.

I planned on staying for the scrimmage afterward, but my knee wasn’t up to it. Some guy on the other team had actually raked his skate blade across the back of my bad knee — I’ve got a nice bloody patch to show for it — and I had thrown everything I had into the game and simply had nothing else left.

So, me and my lady — who came from a bourgeois gathering on the Upper East Side to watch the game — headed back to my place. We waited forever for the train, the MTA purports to run 24/7 but at 1:30, it’s pretty poor. When the train did finally come, it was nearly empty and we sat down across from a homeless couple. Yeah, you read that right. If I had an ounce of humanity left to spare anyone, I might have been moved by their sad, drunken / retarded, dirty coupling.

And maybe it’s my perception of the pitifulness of their station instead of the touching parts of it that caused their lice to crawl across the train car and up onto my hockey bag to say hello.

Fuck my life.

Two lice were crawling on my bag that we could see. We found a third one too and then we moved. Skeeved out, neither me nor my girl could sit at ease and I obsessively checked my bag for more of the crawling, tiny, translucent little crabs. I didn’t see any, but I still didn’t feel at ease … so I lifted up my forearm, which was resting against my thigh and, lo, there’s another one. Or maybe it was one of the others I’d already divested of my bag … either way, disgusting. Fucking hell, we were besieged by fucking lice.

I’ve heard horror stories about how people have brought home bedbugs, unbeknowst to them until the bastards are entrenched in their mattress, but now I really understand how easily that could happen. Thank goodness for our eagle eyes and our obsessive compulsion to check and recheck and check again for the tiny bloodsucking pieces of shit … I’ve had the creeps all day today because of that experience last night. Thank god I’ve got a shaved head.

Today was marginally better, but it was no great shakes. Just another hash mark on the wall of the prison of mediocrity.

It’s disappointing.

As it is, I’m glad I managed the three tunes. I took a decent chunk of time to tab out “Down and Out in New York City” … it’s been bugging me for so long that no one else in the world has tabbed the song.

It isn’t laziness that kept me from doing myself, though. I can pick out a song, find the notes, figure out the riffs and fills, the chords and the melody … but it’s such an arduous, harrowing process. It doesn’t come easily for me. I don’t pick the correct notes right off and blaze through a tune in minutes. I have to painstakingly dissect it, find a sequence of notes and then use that to determine the key and, from there, I start to learn the song.

I have a propensity to label a note as sharp if it’s not A B C D E F or G … in the case of “Down and Out” I realized my error pretty quickly; the sequence of notes didn’t make sense so I changed the sharps to flats and pretty quickly figured out the key was Bb minor.

Still, I’m disappointed I didn’t get more done. It’s midnight now and I’ve been at the task of recording for most of the past 12 hours. In addition to what I mentioned above, I also wrote lyrics for music I’d written ages ago. I’d written lyrics for it when I’d originally composed the song, but the tune didn’t sit right with me and my bandmate. Musically, I think the song is killer … but it’s been a bitch to match with lyrics. I wrote four distinct sets of lyrics for the tune and I think I finally nailed it.

My upstairs neighbor is creepy. He wears boots all the time, never takes them off … I know this because he follows me around my apartment. If I go to the bathroom … clomp, clomp, clomp — he follows. Living room …. clomp, clomp, clomp — and when he’s put himself in the same room of his that I occupy on the floor below, he just stands there in absolute quiet. It is unendingly, unnervingly creepy.

So the fourth set I wrote are lyrics about my psycho neighbor.

The problem is that I’m too afraid to sing it; he’ll probably come down and murder me if he overheard.

There are a few fills missing. I didn’t feel like tabbing them out since they’re all based on the key, which I’ve provided. Just noodling in the minor / relative major scale will do the trick.

There are probably mistakes. I’m fairly sure the verses don’t ever go [ Ab Gb ], but I liked the variation so I transcribed it that way.

###

[ Bb minor / Db Major (Bb C Db Eb F Gb Ab) ]

Yeah, man, like you know…

[ Verse riff: ]

[ Verse 1: Ab Bb | Ab Bb | Ab Gb | Ab Bb ]

I was born in New York City, on a Monday
Seems I was out shinin’ shoes by Tuesday noon
All the fat cats in the bad hats doing me a really big favor
Got the fat cats in the bad hats laying it on real good

[Chorus: Bb Ab Gb ]

Here’s a dime, boy
Gimme a shine, boy

Horn and Flute riff:

[ Verse 2 ]

When the cold wind come, it lives in New York City
And the street’s no place to be, but there you are
So you try hard or you die hard, no one really gives a good damn
You try hard and you die hard, no one gives a damn

[ Chorus ]

Here’s a dime, boy
Gimme a shine, boy
When you’re down and out
in New York City

Ain’t no way to be
but where can you go?
When you’re down and out
in New York City

[Strum (w/ fills): Db ]

I never, never, never gonna get that way again, ho!

[ Horn and Flute riff w/ Ab Bb progression ]

No, no, no
No, no, not me

When you need a friend
you never have one
When you want a friend…

[ Verse 3 ]

Gonna get myself together in the morning
gonna leave it all like one bad dream
All the fat cats in the bad hats doing me a really big favor
You got the fat cats in the bad hats, laying it on real good

[ Chorus ]

Here’s a dime, boy
Gimme a shine, boy, hoo!
Hoo!
Haa … yeah!

Gimme a shine, boy
Whoo!
Eh, give me a shine
Yeah, ha!

Hah, nah, nah
Whoo!

[ Breakdown ]

Shh, ha! Ugn…

[ Horn and Flute riff w/ Ab Bb progression to end... ]

Down and out in New York City
Ain’t no where to be, but where can you go?
When you’re down and out
in New York City

Said I’m never, never, never
gonna get that way
No, no
No, no, not me…

When you need a friend
Troubled mind
When you need a friend
and got a troubled mind

Ain’t nobody
gonna give you one thin dime
Ha

A friend can be cruel
sometimes
they can be sweet

but what,
what bugs a man
what hurts a man
when you give him a drink, huh

Just can’t
get nothing to eat
that’s New York City
that’s New York City

New York City

Harlem, 125 Street

The Bricks

8th Avenue…