NP - New Speedway

[Matthew Cissell]

Michael,
 
    I believe it was less a response to Altamonte than it was a response to Ralph J. Gleason's article "Aqaurius Wept", I reckon he must be "Jack. Of course it is hard to imagine what was going through Robert Hunter's head when he wrote the lyrics. And to be fair, Jack is asked not to dominate the rap if he has nothing new to say; like "get out of the way if ya can't lend a hand". I don't think they wanted to suggest some "constructive action", just get people thinking. 
    But yes there are songs with better lyrics (what would you vote for?) I suppose (maybe that's why they dropped it for so long) however that melody gets ya.
 
    And now Greece. profligate governance? ok, yeh. the politicians have run up bills they can't pay. But there is also the fact that tax collection is at least a part of Greece's problem (from what i've read). 
 
    As for Goldman Sachs... "some folks rob with a knife, others with a pen" Who gets more? Check out "How GS killed AIG" by William Cohan. Robber barons have nothing on these elect sobs.
 
peace
mcc
 

From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 2, 2011 9:04 AM
Subject: Re: NP - Euroland: it's about money


amazing, the clip plays right from google mail!

New Speedway Boogie -
good tune, supposedly about Altamonte, but not one of my favorite GD tunes, for the following reasons:

- who is this Jack who is supposedly dominating the rap? oter than being told to shut up, his issues are not addressed.  Does the lyric intend Jack as "everybody else" or some specific person or sector?

- no love interest


- it sets up an opposition of the weight of gold and the weight of lead, when in fact the accumulation of either implies the active presence of the other

- I find the extended metaphor minimally helpful in terms of understanding the objective correlative (which again would be Altamont, right? - a murder at a rock fest (as deep a sacrilege as murder in a cathedral to a different societal sector...) - or if they are writing for the ages, any "Altamont-like" situation), and completely un-helpful in terms of suggesting a constructive action of any sort, so that the lesson or message from the song seems to me to be kind of a same-old same-old mishmash of the type that the singer is asking "Jack" to refrain from -- isn't it? If not, how not?


anyway, not my favorite GD song, lyric wise, but cool sounding jam like all of their stuff...

but my respectful question is this, or something like it:

Greece, using the Euro, had its own gov't budget, right?

So the representatives created financial obligations beyond their power to immediately pay, and at that point the nice man from Goldman Sachs said, like he did to the sewer commission in Alabama, let me help you with that.

so now the sewer commission owes a billion or so on a hundred million dollar sewer system - what I was wondering is, is what GS did with greek debt as "helpful" to them as their work with municipal sewers?

were they W&TF (well and truly failed) at that point already, or if some, like, nice and ethical international banking company had stepped in, not necessarily having Greece's best interests in 1st place, but at least having a place on their list for that factor......could they have fixed them?