Yesterday, for the second time this week, Rudy Giuliani’s face came through my mail slot and it was enough to give me the heebie jeebies. First there was NY magazine’s alarming cover story, What America Sees in Rudy and yesterday came Newsweek’s take on the phenomenonThe Real Rudy. Both stories were fueled by polls showing the former mayor winning a primary race against his GOP contenders (as McCain is starting to look like Bogey in The Caine Mutiny and Romney a total chameleon) and even a squeaker against Democratic hopefuls Clinton, Obama and Edwards.

Frightened yet? Maybe it’s because you don’t live here. I’m addressing anyone who reads this space who does not live in NY and has a chance of voting in a primary election that might mean something. The chances of you voting in a Republican primary are slim, granted, given my dyspeptic rants against the evil incompetence of Bush et al, but like the cancer that Rudy successfully fought, the must be dealt with early.

According to Stephen Rodrick’s piece in New York (the better written and reported of the two features), Giuliani has a little trouble in the hinterlands where his native accent and demeanor (fuck you and the cab you came in on) present a hurdle — until he starts invoking 9.11 ad nauseum and then everyone from grannies to truck drivers tear up and start writing checks. I can remember the aftermath of that day quite clearly, thank you: our daughter’s best friend lost her father, some close friends of ours were downtown and severely traumatized. Some of them even left town. And I remember how the rest of the nation felt. In October 2001 I was on assignment in Minnesota and the photographer I was with asked me to stop telling people I was from NY because it made everyone stop and pray and say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Since that moment of heartfelt national unity we have seen unspeakable attrocities committed and an unconscionable war waged, all under the guise of payback. Our rights are being undermined and we have been treated like mushrooms (left in the dark and fed shit) by the media, all in the name of patriotism. After six years and counting of bullying and modern McCarthyism we do not need another tough guy in the White House. I’m no fan of Hillary but I think we could do a lot worse than to have a president who bases her campaign on listening instead of shouting people down.

Aren’t you glad Joni Mitchell is back? ‘Twas she who sang, “What time is this/To trade the handshake for the fist?”

I was driving back from Bay Ridge last Saturday, getting ready to listen to WFMU’s lovably inane Fool’s Paradise — “a two hour excursion to nowhere featuring vintage rockabilly, R&B blues, vocal groups, garage, instrumentals, hillbilly, soul and surf” — when I chanced on an interview with one-time Buddy Holly sideman Sonny Curtis. Sonny missed that last plane ride with Buddy, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens and went on to write an eclectic collection of enduring rock staples. Sonny would be assured a pretty good table in that big club in the sky if he had written nothing other than “I Fought the Law,” but if you throw in “Walk Right Back” and “Love Is All Around” (aka the Mary Tyler Moore theme, famously covered by the Replacements), you’ve got bonafide rock royalty.

Not that you’d know it to listen to him. What struck me most about Sonny (I had no idea he was alive, let alone making phone calls to punk stations in New Jersey) was his humility. We’re not talking phony showbiz without-the-little-people-who-would-I-be kind of cheese; Sonny is a guy who feels fortunate to have eked out a career making the music he loves, and that he arguably helped invent, and sounded authentically flabbergasted to hear DJ Michael Shelley refer to him as a legend. To hear Sonny tell it, he just caught some good breaks. It was all about work, an endless hustle, one that led him down commercial alleys to put processed bread on the table (he wrote jingles for MacDonalds to the “You Deserve a Break Today” theme). He’s playing next month in Connecticut with some semblance of the Crickets. Bring the family.

This is a guy who, as a teenager, wrote “Rockin’ Around with Ollie Vee” for Holly. It’s the first song you hear the Crickets play, at a skating rink, in the Buddy Holly Story, and one of the first old rock songs I discovered in high school, when the Blind Faith version of “Well All Right” led me back to the original, a Holly song that svengali/sleaze bag Norman Petty conveniently claimed to have co-written — and Sonny wouldn’t even say nothing nasty about Norman Petty, which is easier than taking shots at Colonel Tom Parker.

And how can you argue with the logic of lines like “I needed money ’cause I had none”? When Bobby Fuller sang “I Fought the Law” it had a kind of wistful fatalistic quality while the Clash cover ripped the doors off the jail cell as Joe Strummer led a doomed prison break through the joint, Hate and Love tatooed on the knuckles of his hands, taking no prisoners. It was Sonny who gave them — and Tom Petty and the Grateful Dead and who knows how many others who covered that song — the tabula rasa to write their confessions on. And rather than feel resentful for not basking in the glory, Sonny just sounds like he’s happy to be around and playing. He deserves a jail break today. Call him a free man.

We flew to LA via Jet Blue over Presidents’ Day weekend — shouldn’t we just start calling it Presidents’ Weekend? Having a Wild Weekend with Two of Our Better Presidents? — and returned just as the airline was announcing its new passenger bill of rights. Roiled by the disastrous Valentine’s Day snowstorms of last week, which disrupted hundreds of Jet Blue’s flights and left many NY passengers stuck in planes on the tarmac for over eight hours, CEO and founder Dave Neeleman got over the soul searching and beat Congress to the punch by limiting the hours passengers can be stuck on the ground, guaranteeing refunds for cancelled flights and in general promising to treat people better than cargo.

I was watching Brian Williams break the news on my seat-back TV when a Jet Blue flight attendant stopped to ask me about it. She had been at JFK last Wednesday and had sat on the tarmac for four hours with stranded passengers, seen the anger and frustration up close. “Do you think people will forgive us?” she wanted to know and (speaking for Jet Blue loyalists everywhere) I said I thought people would be impressed at how quickly the company reacted…after blowing it for several news cycles. And it might just shame the rest of the airlines to take similar measures (something consumer advocacy groups have been suggesting for years).

“That will just give them another reason to hate us,” she said. In her opinion, and she had apparently been with the company for a while, Jet Blue had grown too fast, adding hundreds of flights and new destinations without any regard for the impact that expansion would have on the airline’s infrastructure. “A lot of us were warning them this would happen on the Speak Up cards they give us,” she said — but she blamed middle management, a sea of bureaucrats that separated Neeleman from his once satisfied customers.

Maybe he was just distracted, I told her; I had read he was ADD. “He’s just like a little boy,” she said. “But sometimes he needs to take his Ritalin.” Nothing like a multi-million dollar PR disaster to get you back on your meds.

I received my spring issue of Tricycle and was surprised to find the Buddhist quarterly playing the numbers game on the cover. But instead of promises to take off 20 Pounds in 30 Days or 143 Ways to Please 7 Girls, this issue presents “Tricycle’s 28-Day Meditation Challenge.”

Sound anomalous? Challenge, meditation — kind of like military music? Well, Buddhism didn’t just spread across India and Asia by itself and I think it’s fair to say that Tricycle sees itself as part of the vanguard of the Vipassana, or “mindfulness,” school that has gained in popularity over the last few decades. In fact the principal author of the challenge is the venerable Sharon Salzberg, who has almost single-handedly warmed up Americans rather cool picture of Buddhism with her writings about Lovingkindness and Faith.

Though Tricycle is written for practicing Buddhists, and its advertisers include the makers of Zen clocks (“Shouldn’t you be asking what time isn’t it?”) and services like Dharma Match (“Where spiritual singles meet”), its editors are savvy enough to know that most of us are wannabes. We’ve meditated, probably been to a few retreats, read a few books — but who has time for the daily dose, aside from say Jon Stewart’s nightly Moment of Zen? By challenging readers to join her in a week-by-week program (and even answering questions online from participants), Salzberg is acknowledging our basic laziness and tendency to stray. As the editors note, “It’s the coming back that deepens our practice.”

So what have you got to lose — except those unsightly attachments? The challenge begins with the Five Precepts (who did some great stuff with Gene Chandler) and those include a commitment to refrain from intoxicants and use speech in an ethical way. If you get started now, you can be finished by St. Patrick’s Day. Talk about starting over.

This week’s Newsweek tackles the timely topic of The Girl’s Gone Wild Effect. (Caveat emptor: If you’re using Safari, the MSN site often crashes my browser, which I can only conclude is due to Microsoft’s inherent evil.) You know, Lindsey, Paris and Britney bringing civilization to its knees by going out sans underpants.

There’s a sexist joke there that I won’t even bother with. The topic is as timeless as the girls in question are ephemeral and the magazine includes a sidebar of bad girls of the past (Marilyn, Mae West). I only regret that they did not turn the wayback machine dial a little further to remind readers of the scandalous Jean Harlow, who also famously forewent bra and panties on public occasions. The difference was, she used her real-life reputation to enhance her screen image. “Dissembling innocence was not Harlow’s way,” David Thomson wrote in his invaluable, nutty Biographical Dictionary of Film. “She was too candid. She winked, she liked her nipples to pout as if to say, ‘Get a load of this.'”

Harlow died when she was 26, but not from sex — and not from anorexia. I had originally written that she drank herself to death but received an outraged riposte from Kathryn Sweeney, president of the Sacramento chapter of the Jean Harlow Fan Club: “As a child she had strep throat –before antibiotics–resulting in scarlet fever which damaged her kidneys. (Often the heart valves are wrecked as well but I don’t know if that happened to her.) Later on her kidneys failed and she died. Because her mom was a Christian Scientist there has always been a theory that she might have recovered given better medical care. I’m not saying she didn’t drink plenty, but it didn’t kill her.” Point taken, Kathy.

Harlow’s life and death helped usher in the censorious Hays Code in Hollywood and a lot of young women saw her tale as a cautionary one. The crucial difference between her influence and that of today’s Bad Girls is that Harlow was an idol to young women of legal age. The Newsweek story, by Kathleen Deveny with Raina Kelley, focuses on the adoration bestowed upon the decidedly less talented trouble trio of today by tween and young teenage girls — girls my daughter’s age.

Franny recently got in some trouble, at school and at home, for some obscene email she had a hand in, and the whole incident has caused some soul searching on the part of her parents. Topics considered included her interest in the kind of brat/slut culture Paris et al represent. But just as Deveny concludes that the fascination many girls have with this outre behavior falls short of admiration (a middle-school teacher in Illinois is quoted saying her students “can’t understand why Britney would wear no underwear” and ultimately brand her a “hootch,” ie skank, ho etc.), we have found Franny doesn’t think much of these girls, either.

“What’s it going to say on her grave, that she partied a lot?” she once asked of Paris, and while she may have heard some version of that line from her parents, there is nothing wrong with having your voice in your child’s head. Consider all the others competing in there — including the one that tried to defend her dirty email as the kind of humor “kids my age think is funny.” You want to have a vote. Let’s hope that she keeps giving us air time.