Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell Page B

lines brightened by cheerful, childlike squares of red, yellow, and blue. They symbolized a real kinder, gentler country—Holland—a place of universal health care, efficient public transportation, a well-educated citizenry, and merry villages crammed with bicycles and flowers and canals. I wanted out of the huge Jackson Pollockcanvas that is the U.S.A., vast, murky, splotched, and slapped together by a drunk.
    I got to do my Mondrian research all right, but when I showed up in Leiden I was told the art history courses I came to take “happened last semester.” Not speaking Dutch, in order to stay—and keep my financial aid—I had to sign up for some random classes in the languages I do speak, English and French. The low point was registering for a literature course called Vision on America During the ’80s. Great. Like I crossed the Atlantic to pay nineteen dollars for a Jay McInerney paperback. I came all this way to the land of bread-for-breakfast for the grand purpose of explaining to my classmates that this thing called Count Chocula in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is a chocolate-flavored cereal with a vampire theme. Luckily, I loved the teacher, Professor d’Haen, who glowed a little when recalling his student days in some—to him—romantic place like Ohio or Pennsylvania.
    Just before the riots we’d read Don DeLillo’s White Noise from 1985, a book I had liked mainly because a character in it had a thing for Elvis. But the morning after I heard about Los Angeles, I dove into that book as a talisman of truth, rereading it in a single sitting, eerily noticing the claim that “we need catastrophe” and that “this is where California comes in.” I relived its “airborne toxic event,” its insistence that “all plots tend to move deathward,” its fixation on a thousand cheap American details—the supermarket shelves and the cars we drive and the food we eat in the cars we drive.
    And I wept. I tossed all my Mondrian books on the floor and hugged that apocalyptic American novel to my chest and rocked back and forth, missing all of it, death and Elvis and California and catastrophe. I wanted Jackson Pollock. And I wanted to go home. I got on my bike and rode to McDonald’s and read the book again, smearing its pages with fries.

These Little Town Blues
    People used to tell me that to be a success I should say I was from New York City.
    â€”B RUCE S PRINGSTEEN
    AN ACQUAINTANCE OF MINE HAS convinced himself that American popular music ends with Frank Sinatra. To him, Sinatra is the apogee of adult cool, and all the pop stars après Frank are kid stuff—scraggly, talentless, unformed. I don’t agree, but I can see his point. No one, not even Beck, ever looked that good in a suit.
    Apart from Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra is the most towering musical figure this century, and this country, have produced. His complicated, love-him/hate-him persona and his twisting, turning road map of a voice are nearly as large as America itself. Which is why one Sinatra fan can decide he’s the end of an era and another can argue he’s where it all begins. And so in my bible, Frank Sinatra is not Revelation; he’s Genesis, where pop starts. Frank Sinatra is the first punk.
    Punk is rhythm, style, poetry, comedy, defiance, and, above all, ambition. Punk is wounded. It’s what happened to Frank Sinatra’s voiceafter Ava Gardner broke his heart. Punk means moral indignation. It’s the way Frank Sinatra, tired of getting screwed by Capitol Records, told its president, “Fuck you, and fuck your building.” Punk means the self-determination required to start your own record company, Reprise, as in reprisal, so that you can do what you want. Punk means getting all worked up. It’s being able to make the shockingly simple line in “Angel Eyes” about how “the laugh’s on me” into the world’s