You might want to check out a song on Steve Earle’s new record, Washington Square Serenade for its expression of a tension between nostalgia and counternostalgia. (Earle recently moved to the Village from Nashville.)

The song is “Down Here Below,” and opens with an image of a red tail hawk circling over NYC, looking for breakfast. The bird settles on a building and looks up and down Fifth Ave. “from the top of the food chain” and says to himself, “God, I love this town.”

After the chorus, comes this

I saw Joe Mitchell`s ghost on a downtown `A` train
He just rides on forever now that the Fulton fish market`s shut down
He said `they ain`t never gonna get that smell out of the water
I don`t give a damn how much of that new money they burn`

Now hell`s kitchen`s Clinton and the bowery`s Nolita
And the east village`s creepin` `cross the Williamsburg bridge
And hey, whatever happened to alphabet city?
Ain`t no place left in this town that a poor boy can go

There’s a lot to parse here, because it’s hard to say (from my perspective) where this song falls along the divide you have set up. The image of the hawk suggests a deeper natural order that simultaneously defies and reinforces the human order. Just like the food chain in nature, there’s an economic food chain, but it exists independently and in spite of the city. The hawks will outlive any changes in real estate prices.

The invocation of Joe Mitchell (a New Yorker writer who glorified ‘old NY’ in articles about McSorley’s and the fish market in the 1940s) as a ghost on the subway is interesting, too. Mitchell is gone in body, but not spirit, and the ghost declares the same for the fish market.

From what seems to be counternostalgic, the song moves into listing the name changes brought on by real estate agents and claims that there’s no place left for the poor in NYC, seemingly flipping over to an expression of nostalgia.

Despite this, Earle states in the liner notes, “The city hasn’t changed as much as real estate agents would have you believe.”

Anyway, I just thought of you and this post when I heard this song for the first time last night and thought you might want to check it out.

So, wait, what’s the opposite of nostalgia? I think I tend to romanticize my future much moreso than I wax nostalgic about the past, and in fact I tend to forget about the good old days–unless, actually, you mean the alternate-reality past that I’ve constructed in my head, the one in which I go back to junior high school as a smarter, less-terrified version of myself and become the coolest kid in the school. Is that mistalgia or some combination of being pathetic, delusional, and nostalgic (pathelugia?)?