“Hipless” Mets Theme Song Detractors Call For Replacement

The updated Mets theme song “Our Team. Our Time” has received terrible reviews:

The new Mets theme song, “Our Team. Our Time,” is so bad that fans are petitioning online to have it killed, the creators are getting death threats and it has been banned to only pregame playtime.

Fans of Pedro Martinez and the first-place Amazin’s compare it to the Chicago Bears’ “Super Bowl Shuffle” or “a bad rip-off of Run-D.M.C. circa 1985.” One fan even insinuated that Britney Spears’ talentless hip-hop hubby, Kevin Federline, could’ve done a better job.

“As a Mets fan, I’m truly embarrassed by this horrible excuse for a song the Mets have anointed the ‘song of 2006,'” one writes.

“Aside from the embarrassingly bad lyrics, cheesy dated ‘Vanilla Ice’-style music and lack of melody, it’s stereotyping the team as tasteless, hipless, and classless . . . it’s just stupid.”

How About Taking Some Of That $300 Million You Made Off Of Corporatizing Graffiti And Putting It Into New Subway Windows?

Not to sound like a fuddy-duddy, but I think most reasonable people agree that using acid to vandalize subway windows is not a form of free speech:

“I’ve seen it on every line, on almost every train,” said Andrew B. Albert, chairman of the New York City Riders Council, a state-sponsored advocacy group, who said the acid-based graffiti first appeared on subway windows about six months ago. Mr. Albert is a nonvoting member of the Transit Committee, which met yesterday.

He said the most common material used by the new breed of graffiti vandals is Armor Etch-All, an etching acid sold in art supply stores that is used by craftspeople to etch into glass or other materials. To create graffiti with the acid, it is mixed with paint or shoe polish, Mr. Albert said. And when applied to subway windows, it most commonly leaves broad, sweeping, indelible marks, which subway crews cannot remove in subway yards, as they do with painted graffiti.

Transit officials said that most subway windows are vulnerable and pose an expensive problem because they cost up to $130 each to replace. Only the newest of subway cars, acquired since about 2000, are resistant to the new generation of graffiti, because their windows are protected with Mylar, a plastic coating that can be peeled off and replaced.

. . .

The city’s resurgent graffiti problem, on buildings as well as subways, has not escaped the notice of City Hall. In December, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed into law a ban on possession of “graffiti instruments,” including etching acid, by anyone under 21. Besides etching acid, the ban covers such things as aerosol paint and broad-tipped indelible markers, which are used by graffiti vandals on buildings.

Opponents of the city ban have said it infringes on freedom of speech. Yesterday, according to The Associated Press, a lawyer said he would file suit today in federal court in Manhattan to challenge the ban as “overly broad.” The lawyer, Daniel Perez, said he was representing seven high school and college students who are supported by Marc Ecko, a fashion designer.

I’m sure Ecko cares about civil liberties and not, say — just thinking out loud here — his “full-scale global fashion and lifestyle company that reported billings of over $300 million in its men’s sportswear division alone in 2002,” but no matter — the suit must go on:

. . . imagine if, during the days when seditious libel was regarded as unprotected expression, the government, in order to deter seditious publications, made possession of a printing press unlawfulunless the possessor of the printing press could affirmatively prove at trial that the printing device would be used for a lawful purpose.

More Treatment Than Trial, Alan Feuer, Your Agent Is Calling

The jury’s verdict is in! This means Alan Feuer can begin working on his book and/or filmscript.

First, note the obvious literary pretensions:

The verdict, coming 20 years after their first victim, Israel Greenwald, was gunned down in a parking garage and 13 months after both defendants, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, were arrested at the coat check of a Nevada restaurant, brought to a close a trial that stretched from the gangland prefectures of southern Brooklyn to the palm-lined subdivisions of Las Vegas.

. . .

The verdict was delivered after lunch. As the Federal District Court jury filed into the fourth-floor courtroom, Mr. Eppolito’s daughter Andrea fought back tears and clutched a rosary. Seventy times, one for each of the specific crimes in the indictment, June Lowe, courtroom deputy for Judge Jack B. Weinstein, asked the foreman, “Proved or not proved?” to which, 70 times, the answer came back, “Proved.”

The process of rendering the verdict, reading it aloud, then polling jurors one by one, took 18 minutes, 5 minutes longer than the best case the defense could mount on Mr. Eppolito’s behalf. The fleshy bags beneath his eyes seemed to deepen as the toll of “Proved, proved, proved” cut through the room. Mr. Caracappa sat back in his chair, shook his head ever so slightly and placed his left hand on his chin in a pensive gesture.

Don’t forget the clearly defined good vs. evil framework:

Moments later, at the same microphones, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, read from a statement accusing the detectives of perverting “the shield of good” and turning it into a “sword of evil.”

Plus, it’s obvious where Feuer will go with this with his discussion of the trial’s “drama,” “cast” and “characters”:

The trial itself was not immune to a certain level of absurdity. The case, with its “eight bodies,” occupied a three-week federal trial, with insult-laden arguments, subpoenaed book deals and a wildly extravagant cast. The characters ranged from an illiterate sixth-grade dropout who kept secret for nearly 20 years that he had buried Mr. Greenwald’s body at his business, to a Connecticut accountant who stole $5 million and then made amends to the government by secretly recording everyone from the defendants to exotic dancers at a strip club called the Crazy Horse Too.

Indeed, from the very moment when, freed on bail last summer, Mr. Eppolito strolled from the courthouse in a guayabera and diamond-patterned lounge pants, then lifted his hem to show reporters the monitoring anklet clamped to his leg, it was clear that the trial would be no ordinary drama.

Backstory: And When You’re Pitching This Script, Make It Clear That Brooklyn Itself Is A Character; “Nothing Has Hurt People More In This Country Than Wanting To Be In The Movies”.

You Can Feel It When You Touch A Playa’s Hand

Hizzoner announced that VH1 will host its annual Hip Hop Honors in New York, providing a convenient opportunity to front with his homeboys Ice-T and Russell Simmons:

“That’s c-o-o-l,” Mayor Bloomberg told reporters at City Hall yesterday after he was given the title by rapper/actor Ice-T.

Bloomberg, surrounded by Ice-T and hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons, announced New York City will once again host VH1’s Hip Hop Honors. He tried his best to fit in as just another homeboy from the ‘hood — albeit one with a few billion dollars.

“Welcome to City Hall, or my crib, as I like to call it,” Bloomberg said to laughter. “Not everybody here understands our language.”

Groan.

“Where else could you have Hip-Hop Week but in New York City,” Bloomberg said, rattling off a list of local notables, ranging from Simmons, of Hollis, Queens, to “me, Mike B,” from Manhattan.

He got high praise from Simmons, who endorsed his 2005 mayoral reelection, and Ice-T, a star of “Law and Order: SVU,” who said he was surprised by the invite to City Hall.

“My people said Bloomberg’s cool,” Ice-T said as Bloomberg smiled and blushed.

“On the street, I think that’s the highest accolade he could ever achieve. When we showed up and I met him, I felt it too. You can feel it when you touch a playa’s hand.”

No! Please make it stop!

Backstory: It Could Be Just Me, But The Mayor Is Probably The Last Person I’d Want To Rap About; Mayor Mike: Rockin’ the Mic Left and Right.

And When You’re Pitching This Script, Make It Clear That Brooklyn Itself Is A Character

In the literary free-for-all that the “mafia cop” trial has become, Brooklyn itself becomes a character:

It could be argued that one of the most intriguing characters in the trial of Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa is not a person, but a place. As absorbing as the witnesses, the lawyers and the two defendants is the borough of Brooklyn, which has arisen in the trial as something like an empire of the ill-fated and often illicitly employed.

Countless times, Brooklyn — or specifically southern Brooklyn — has been painted as a universe of two-bit deals and three-time losers, of gangster bars and catering halls and auto-body shops. It has come to seem in testimony like a world where people are forever swapping envelopes of cash and owing money to their loan sharks and their mothers — a world of which a witness could say, without a whiff of irony, “I was having some bad times and I committed bank robbery,” or “a few times back in the 80’s people paid me to make their cars disappear.”

. . .

Countless times, Brooklyn — or specifically southern Brooklyn — has been painted as a universe of two-bit deals and three-time losers, of gangster bars and catering halls and auto-body shops. It has come to seem in testimony like a world where people are forever swapping envelopes of cash and owing money to their loan sharks and their mothers — a world of which a witness could say, without a whiff of irony, “I was having some bad times and I committed bank robbery,” or “a few times back in the 80’s people paid me to make their cars disappear.”

Backstory: Alan Feuer’s other article about the literary flavor in a murder trial; Feuer is obviously making notes for a wonderful script and/or novel.