Quick Hits

• Back in my New York days, it seemed that every time you turned around, someone was praising the independent, gritty spirit of 1970s-80s New York, the culture that produced hip-hop, tagging, Reggie Jackson, Taxi Driver, CBGB-OMFUG, The Warriors and other art inspired by the city’s crushing, nigh-bankrupt bleakness. While I acknowledge the period as one of the truly great creative eras in the American scene, one that I think I can explore forever, the nostalgia to me seems to overlook the big, fat suckitude of crime, urban decay, poverty and a general pessimism that pervaded New York in the 1970s and 80s. Does anybody really miss this? John Carpenter didn’t make Escape From New York because it was a great logical leap from reality. People suffered greatly in those days.

  But let’s assume that you believe despair breeds the greatest art (I tend to agree), and you’re an urban hipster who craves the dangerous, anything-goes spirit of the 1970s. There’s another town out there for you long past its mid-century glory days; one with miles of burnt-out dwellings, a suburban population that’s afraid to go downtown, weak political leadership and an economic death spiral to boot. Plus, it’s been this way for a good three decades, so it’s not likely to have changed by the time you arrive.

  So what I really want to know is, why isn’t Detroit seeing a nostalgia-driven hipster influx?

• Esquire magazine (to which I have a subscription; I hit my news/business base with The Economist, my sports base with SI, and my man-of-the-world, well-read, how-to-buy-suits-I-will-never-afford base with the big E) had the cover line this month “Can a white man still be elected President?”

  Sometimes, one can take provocative cover taglines a little too far from reality, to the point that the reader says, “Man, they are trying way too hard to get my attention.” Then, to take a journey of rhetorical absurdity that’s hemispheres beyond that, one can write, “Can a white man still be elected President?”

• The more President Bush’s approval ratings drop, the more I fear what the government might do in the name of “Hey, we’re hated lame ducks anyway.”

Out.