Read Online Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell - Free Book Online

most devastating portrait of sadness. Punk is female, which is why the bravest punks are either women or womanly men. Would there have been a Kurt Cobain wearing his ball gown on MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball if there had been no Sinatra, who, Steve Erickson wrote, “made America accept the idea of a man singing like a woman without sounding like one”? Best of all, punk comes out of nowhere. Punk is a torch that’s passed around, a rumor that spreads from one nowhere to another that guts and perseverance mean more than anything else.
    My American punk top ten in no particular order: Jerry Lee Lewis from Nowhere, Louisiana; Richard Hell from Nowhere, Kentucky; Bob Dylan from Nowhere, Minnesota; the Fastbacks, Nirvana, and Sleater-Kinney from Nowhere, Washington; Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank Sinatra from Nowhere, New Jersey. Perhaps it’s coincidence that forty percent of my list are Garden State flowers, but I don’t think so. Punk comes out of nowhere and where’s more no than there? This is the state Paterson native Ginsberg called “nowhere Zen New Jersey”; the place Freehold homeboy Springsteen referred to as a “dump”; the place South Jerseyan Smithdescribed in her song “Piss Factory”; the place, it is said, that even Sinatra has called a “sewer.” Or, as my guidebook puts it, the state “has a superb interstate highway system for a reason.”
    Hoboken, New Jersey, Sinatra’s hometown, doesn’t feel like a place. It feels like a symbol. To be in Hoboken is to experience in three-dimensional form America’s admiration of and alienation from New York. If you grow up in any other Nowhere, U.S.A., you might be aware that New Yorkers look down their noses at you, but at least out there in the dark fields of the republic you don’t have to stare straight up their nostrils every time you walk outside. Because the first thing you notice about Hoboken is Manhattan. If you look across the Hudson from downtown Hoboken, New York City’s sharp-toothed skyline bites you in the neck. To your immediate New Jersey right is a humble little old joint called the Clam Broth House. To your left is the World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, and all the other big-shot towers of babble assembled in a united front of taunting: What are YOU looking at?
    Facing Manhattan from Hoboken is reminiscent of one other American vantage point: the view from Alcatraz. As on the Rock, you stand and gaze across the water at a glittering city-on-a-hill and feel like trash, like they’re good and you’re not, like if you had any guts at all you’d risk death and swim across that river right now.
    â€œI want to be a part of it,” proclaims Hoboken’s most famous son in the theme from New York New York. “Those little town blues are melting away,” he swaggers. It’s not Frank’s best song, but it’s a very old, very satisfying story. He made it there. He made it everywhere.
    You would like to think that Hoboken, New Jersey, brags about Frank Sinatra at sickening length. You would like to imagine that every last site where the forming Frank spit his gum out would be marked with a plaque. You would like walking tours and history. You would like to stand before the nondescript brown row house at 841 Garden Street, where Frank lived between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, and read some sort of fanciful marker with a speculative text gushing, “This is the place where our beloved Frank Sinatra spent his late adolescence and young-adult years. And since this period is the incubator of desire, this is the stoop where the young man must have plotted his escape. Push the button to hear ‘Street of Dreams.’ “You want the drama of Graceland, but you don’t even get the tragedy of Tupelo. Just a normal, unmarked house with a baby stroller in the entry and recycling bins downstairs