The Intrinsic Ambivalence of Rodeo Songs

The Rodeo inhabits a strange liminal space in Americana.  Much like Pizza, Hamburgers, and other "quintessential" pieces of America, the Rodeo is totally an import from another country; really, the Rodeo is about as American as tacos, burritos, and quesadillas--that is, it is still somehow totally and completely North American now, even as it is simultaneously totally and completely a product of Latin America.

But we didn't exactly make it ours, no--we made some of ours. It is within a very specific subset of white Americans (not even all white Americans) that Rodeo is to be found, a highly rural group that is at once treated as representative and emblematic, but also largely flies under the radar, marginalized, on the peripheries of the majority American experience.  Like all things U.S., it is by its very nature a paradox.

Popular music expresses this odd relationship with rodeo--even among those who most self-identify with its target demographic.  Country music best-seller Garth Brooks, for example, had an early hit called, simply, "Rodeo."

The song is simultaneously a celebration of the event, yet also a lamentation of the irreperable devastation it can wreck upon a man's heart and home (It'll drive a cowboy crazy, it'll drive the man insane/And he'll sell off everything he owns, just to pay to play the game/And a broken home and some broken bones, is all he'll have to show/For all the years that he spent chasin' this dream they call rodeo).  

For the practitioners, rodeo is apparently a jealous god, one that demands all sacrifices whilst offering nothing in return but the glory of being broken by it and consumed whole.

But rodeo lovers are not the only folks with a conflicted relationship towards the same; Rage Against the Machine produced a rodeo song of their own, "Down Rodeo," that lays out their problems with the demographic with the characteristically blunt opener "These people ain't seen a brown skin man/Since their grandparents bought one."  

Frontman Zach de la Rocha is of Mexican-American ancestry, and the complete appropriation (without proper citation, so to speak) of his culture (rodeo, along with mariachi and tequila, are considered the three pillars of Mexico's national identity), clearly doesn't sit well with him--particularly since the cattle rangers and farmers who most sponsor and enjoy rodeo are also those who most exploit and oppress Mexican migrant workers (Locked wit out a wage ya standin' in tha drop zone/The clockers born starin' at an empty plate/Momma's torn hands cover her sunken face/We hungry but them belly full).  

Rodeo for Rage Against the Machine becomes a locus for crystallizing a number of grievances of Mexican-Americans who have been robbed of land, culture, and rights--yet what is strange to also note, but the guitar riff itself for "Down Rodeo" is among the most upbeat and triumphant sounding of all of Evil Empire.  Even when they're raging against rodeo, they can't help but seem to rejoice in it; they have a mighty complex relationship with the spectacle as well.

That complexity is perhaps best explored in "Sad Sweet Heart of the Rodeo", the lead single off Harvey Danger's second album King James Version.

 This song (along with the accompanying video) is written explicitly from the perspective of a band, culture, and entire set of cultural biases and perspectives that is otherwise most hostile and dismissive of the entire rodeo ethos: coastal, liberal, educated, and unapologetically intellectual.  Harvey Danger, which borderline perfected the Gen X smart-alecky sneer of the late-'90s, takes the surprisingly bold move of painting a rather sympathetic portrait of rodeo lovers.

Granted, this particular rodeo lover is a young city-living lady whose connection to not only rodeo but the countryside in general is limited strictly to TV and daydream fantasies.  Her boyfriend openly mocks her infatuations: "The Marlboro Man died of cancer/And he wasn't a rocket scientist when he was alive."  The song's protagonist has the same compulsion as the one in Garth Brook's song, but without any of the access or possibility of participation.  Despite the upbeat melody, the song is ultimately a tragedy.

The song in general quite possibly expresses most of the United States' relationship with the sport: something we both mock and desire, ignore and crave, central and peripheral, part of our identity and no part of our identity.  It is the irresolvable paradox of America personified; to quote Derrida, it is the center that is not the center.  I should expect all rodeo songs to express this same central ambivalence--and I've become interested in this rodeo theme because so few parts of American culture do allow for such intrinsically ambivalent expression.  "I contradict myself" said Whitman--as does American--as it should--as does rodeo.

On Hillary, for what it's worth

At the risk of alienating what few friends I have on either the Right or the Left, I just wanted to get off my chest my planned vote for Hillary Clinton next week in the Iowa Democratic Primaries--cause hey, if we can't stay friends after arguing viciously about politics, then what can we stay friends over?

This will primarily be an argument from the Left, inasmuch as I still self-identify as a filthy hippie liberal; to my friends on the Right, my sincerest condolences, cause that current crop of frontrunners...yikes.

As for the Democracts--make no mistake, no matter who else has their hat in the ring right now, this is essentially a two-person horse race, between "Ready for Hillary" and "Feel the Bern."  As you can imagine, being in a graduate English program, I am surrounded by Berninators.  And that's fine; I actually like Bernie Sanders, his stances on health care and college tuition are near and dear to my heart; unlike many of my younger "Feel the Bern" peers I have actually followed his Senate career for awhile and was frankly surprised it took him this long to make a bona fide Presidential run; and my partial-Danish ancestry endears me to his enthusiasm for the Scandinavian model of Democratic Socialism.

Now, whether or not the Scandinavian model is reproducible in or even desirable for the United States--a much larger and more diverse nation that features not just one but multiple states with bigger populations than all Scandinavia combined (New York City alone is more populous than either Denmark or Sweden)--is a different conversation that I am more than willing to have.  But the logistics of reproducing a small-country model here in the U.S. is not why I am hesitant to vote for Senator Sanders.

Because let's say that you are a full-throated supporter of Democratic Socialism and that's why you're voting for Sanders.  Great.  Fine.  Who are you voting for Senate, as well?  Or for House Representative?  Because remember that that's where laws actually get passed.

Remember that when Obama came to office in 2008, not only he but the entire Democratic party was riding a wave of intense anti-war and Bush fatigue--for the first time in nearly 2 decades, they had control of both the House and the Senate.  They got right to work and passed the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act of 2009, a rather milquetoast reform bill that basically just amounted to Romneycare on a national scale.  Yet even making that tiny little step forward cost Obama all of his political capital, favors, and goodwill; by 2010, the Republicans had retaken the House, in a vindictive, self-righteous fury against helping poor people afford health insurance, which they have been trying to repeal ever since.

Not only that, but pretty much the rest of his legislative agenda stalled out as well, because he no longer had the full cooperation of the Legislative branch.  Yes, in these his last days he has attempted to Executive Order his way towards some basic, humane immigration and gun-control reform, but even those are already getting stalled out in the courts--because, again, no matter how well-intentioned, the President simply cannot actually make laws in this country without the Legislature!  And frankly, Bernie Sanders has been awfully lonely up there in the Senate as a Democratic Socialist--there ain't exactly a large contingent of fellow Socialists making up Congress to help him pass his proposed agenda if he was elected.

Also recall that the most withering insult the Republicans consistently lobbed against Obama was that he was a "Socialist."  That he wasn't is largely irrelevant, it was the insult that stuck.  But here Bernie Sanders openly refers to himself as a Socialist.  I mean, good on him for just owning it I suppose, that's usually the first step towards removing a stigma--but does Bernie honestly think he'll get any better cooperation from Congressional Republicans as a self-declared Socialist?

Because the fact of the matter is, even if the Democrats did somehow regain a majority in Congress, there are still significant numbers of Americans who self-identify as Conservative and will still vote Republicans into office.  And as much as there may be alarming numbers of people on both sides of the aisle who might wish it otherwise, in this country we do acknowledge dissenting voices--they are constitutionally protected, and good thing too--and the only way to make changes to laws is by dealing with the dissenters.

And I mean "dealing" in the Old West Gambling sense--wherein you deal out the cards and play your respective hands accordingly; your relationship with your opponents may be playful (Kennedy and Hatch had a delightful example of that) or still be fundamentally antagonistic, but you both still know how to play the game--and you both know that it's a game, one where the greatest cheat you can perpetrate on your opponent is to not play as ruthlessly as possible.


Enter Hillary: Republicans on average have no great love for her either, considering her some liberal bogeywoman (with reason: her Senate voting record is just as liberal as Elizabeth Warren's).  Increasing numbers of the Far Left are also deeply suspicious of her, considering her to just be "Republican-lite" (with reason: she did self-identify as one in her youth, and still accepts significant campaign donations from Wall Street).

She also has not shown nearly the same level of enthusiasm for Universal Healthcare as Bernie--but you know what she has for?  Closing the Medicare gap.  Now, I try to maintain my idealism the best I can, too--but Healthcare isn't just about ideology, it's about people's actual lives.  You can elect Bernie and have him bang his head fruitlessly against the wall of Conservative recalcitrance for 4 to 8 years trying to pass Swedish-style healthcare and not make one iota of change...or, you can actually close the Medicare gap (a far more doable proposition that many more Republicans are willing to have a conversation about), and actually save peoples' lives in the meantime.  Ask yourself this: is your ideology more important that human lives?  Do you want it all or nothing?  If so, you are in danger of being no better than any of your opponents.

Now, a President Hillary Clinton would surely face a stiff, general resistance from Congressional Republicans if elected as well, no matter how moderate of a legislative agenda she put forward.  But unlike Bernie Sanders, I actually have much greater faith in her ability to effectively deal with Republicans!  How come?

The recent Benghazi Hearings.  Before Hillary was called into that grueling 11-hour questioning, the conventional wisdom was that she just had to survive--and that even if she wasn't indicted, the Republicans would make this a millstone to hang around her neck from now till Election Day.

But Hillary didn't just survive, no--she made the entire House Committee look ridiculous.  With a professional composure that is frankly staggering, she kept her cool for all 11 hours (I would have flipped a table by hour 2!), quietly biding her time, allowing her inquisitors to make absolute fools of themselves and implode.  Yes, there are still plenty of folks who think she did...something...bad during Benghazi that merits prison--just like there are still plenty of folks who believe 9/11 was an inside job and Bush should be tried for war-crimes by the Hague (I don't like Bush, but I'm not a "Truther," for the record); but since she revealed the Hearings to be the baseless witch-hunt they always were, Benghazi has essentially been a non-issue for her.  And guys?  She's been doing things like this for 30 years.  She is a stone-cold pro.

Because even as this election cycle has featured an unprecedented rage against "establishment" candidates and career politicians, the fact of the matter remains: politicians are like lawyers, everyone hates them until they need one.  And what I need, what I crave more than anything right now is a competent politician, a grown-up, one who knows how to handle and deal with the intrinsic viciousness of law-makers.

I don't want the ACA repealed, I don't want Mexican immigrants to be treated any worse than they are already, I don't want the economy to collapse again, I don't want environmental and financial regulations gutted, and I want gun background checks to be better enforced.  That may sound terribly unambitious to some liberals, but even those basic gains are constantly threatened.  Now, I admire the audacity of Bernie's convictions, but I'm not sold on his ability to dial-back his grander ideals and rhetoric to make the thousand petty, unsexy compromises necessary to push forward incremental but nonetheless real progress; I am, however, persuaded of Hillary's ability to do so.  Whether she's a good person or not is kinda beside the point for me (as though any politician is a good person--as shown by the sheer fact that they are a politician); when I hire a lawyer, I don't generally ask how nice they are.

Because when I was the same age as many of my younger classmates, I watched Obama's high idealism flounder against the reality of Washington politics; now, I think he did eventually learn how to deal with his Republican opponents, but only after a steep learning curve.  But nowadays I like the idea of electing a Democrat who knows how to do that from Day 1.

Also, I'm old enough to remember Election 2000, when a few staunch, unyielding liberal purists in Florida decided to cast their protest votes for Nader instead of left-of-center Gore, throwing the election into enough confusion that, though Gore won the popular vote, Bush wrangled away the electoral victory with an assist from the Supreme Court (which is still 5-4 Republican, btw).  We all know what happened next--and the naive protests that there was no functional difference between those twin "corporate stooges" Bush and Gore rang bitterly hollow ever after.  Guys, don't ever do that again.

The Anti-Radio Songs

I quit listening to any sort of Pop or Modern Rock radio somewhere around 10 years ago (some occasional public access Classical on short trips is about all I allow myself anymore).  I had gotten one of those new-fangled ipods for Christmas, and was playing it through the cassette-tape adapter in my car at college.  When I then promptly lost said ipod and was forced to return to the radio, it was with a sort of revulsion that I realized how utterly irritating it is to have someone else to decide what music I should be listening to!

I mean, seriously, why on earth do we put up with that?   Why do so many of us allow some payola'd curator to control this one small part our lives--and that interspersed with long, obnoxious commercials that tell us in turn what to buy?  I had been away from radio for scarcely anytime at all, yet when I returned the patent ridiculousness of it became immediately obvious to me.  And when I recovered my ipod, it was with a sigh of relief, with a real feeling of freedom, that I realized how easily I would never have to listen to the radio again.

(And I think that part of my resistance to streaming services nowadays isn't just the unethical way they screw over the artists, but the simple principle of the fact that, once again, someone else gets to control which music I have access to--even if it is in the most uber-generous set-up possible, yet still am I paying some corporation to access all the music that they control, without ever letting me lay claim to it for myself, independent of all their counters, trackers, data plans, wifi connections, and marketing.  Oh, and if you think their algorithms don't wield some influence over which songs you get steered towards, then you're more naive than you'd like to think).

It's not like you even need the radio anyways--you make the right friends, read the right books, check out the right websites, you'll uncover all the hidden music you will ever need anyways.  For all these reasons and more, I've taken a keen interest in what I term the Anti-Radio Songs--for of course I was never alone in being weary of the dull, homogenizing mediocrity of the radio.

Ground zero of this surprisingly robust sub-genre is of course Elvis Costello's "Radio, Radio":

Lest you consider all this Anti-Radio nonsense to be a tad too paranoid for your tastes, remember that Costello was banned from Saturday Night Live for over 10 years when he abruptly performed this instead of "Less Than Zero"--it had been explicitly proscribed by the TV execs.

He anticipates any lecturing that hating on radio is really biting the hand that feeds aspiring pop artists with that killer bridge: "I wanna bite the hand that feeds me/I wanna bite that hand so badly/I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me."  And biting he is indeed: radio "doesn't give you any choice because they think that it's treason," radio says "you had better do as you are told," radio "is in the hands of such a lot of fools/tryin' to anesthetize the way that you feel."  When the Sex Pistols couldn't get U.S. visas to New York, SNL doubtless thought that Elvis Costello was the safe replacement--but he may in fact have provided the most Punk show of all.

Honestly, Elvis Costello is a hard act to follow on this theme, and very few people have tried to (wisely)--besides, if your goal is to become free from the radio, the way to express that liberation is not by constantly attacking the radio (thus revealing you to still be in its thrall--just as disgust is actually sublimated attraction) but by continuing as though it didn't exist at all (for the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference).  Nevertheless, it does occasionally help to have a little extra cheer-leading available to help you make the choice to shut it off once and for all, and within a generation of Costello other artists were rising to join his ranks.

There is for starters '90s mainstay (and Middle School t-shirt) Rage Against the Machine's "Vietnow" that, with characteristic bluntness and lack of nuance, expresses the disgust that young radio-resisters feel upon turning the radio back on, only to then immediately turn it back off:

With a little more texture (though still lacking the flair of Elvis Costello), with an adolescent angst that makes the songs on the radio seem like a source of profound emotional misery (as only Emo could ever sell), Jimmy Eat World on 1999's Clarity makes a similar kiss-off with "Your New Aesthetic":

Then just a few years later on So Long, Astoria, the Ataris take a similar stand against radio with "Radio #2", albeit with a little more joie de vivre than Rage or Jimmy--they actually sound happy for a change to be switching off the radio for good--they sound not just childish but childlike in their infectious energy, rather than merely whiny:

Curious: what other Anti-Radio songs are out there?  Is this list exhaustive, or did I at some point simply no longer need the extra encouragement to keep me off the dial, so I've missed out on all the other radio songs abroad in the land?  It is a sub-genre with the serious potential to get real insufferable real fast--not to mention hypocritical, given how all the artists listed above have had massive radio hits over the years.  It's like a multi-millionaire singing "Imagine"--you kinda just go "the nerve!"  It's a tricky balance to strike--you either come off as sour grapes, or entitled and lacking in self-awareness.  Maybe that's what makes Costello's still the best after all these years: he at least acknowledges that he "bites the hand that feeds me."  May we go and do likewise.

The Familiar Vol. 1: One Rainy Day in May

Mark Z. Danielewski may never be able to top his stunning debut House of Leaves in terms of sheer inventiveness and pathos--but boy is it sure fun to watch him try!  Supposedly this massive 800+ page tome, wherein each of the 9 interweaving characters are rendered not only in a unique font but in their own typographical layout, is but the first in a staggering 27 volumes (3 cubed, which will likely have some sort of numerological significance or other).

On a certain meta level, it will be fascinating just to find out if he even finishes the series at all--if he dies first--or grows bored with it and wonders away--or if Random House loses patience and drops the whole project if sales aren't robust enough.  These aren't cheap books, after all--the pages have a fine sheen and gloss to them, so as to accommodate the hi-def color images of spheres, abstractions, and the cosmos printed throughout.  Danielewski likewise makes generous use of minimalist, empty space on many of these pages, such that there's almost a sense of outright decadence to how some of these expensive pages are seemingly wasted.  

The Familiar is best approached perhaps as an artifact of book-art, as opposed to a straight narrative (the Kindle version of this novel is impossible, in other words).  Doubtless The Familiar will keep both the critics and the cranks busy for years; I myself can scarcely scratch the surface.

But there is one small element--idle speculation, really--that preoccupies me about The Familiar; namely that Mark Danielewski is the son of Polish avant-garde film-maker Tad Danielewski (which explains in part House of Leaves' infatuation with movies), who himself was a professor of cinema at Brigham Young University from 1975 to 1989--which is when Mark was a teenager and young adult.  That is, Mark Danielewski's formative years were spent in Provo, Utah.

Now, neither Utah nor Mormonism receive any mention whatsoever, explicit or otherwise, in the works of Danielewski (this will not be a rehash of my post on the Implicit Mormonism of Arcade Fire, in other words); his bio's all cite New York as his birthplace and L.A. as his current home.  BYU, Provo, the LDS Church, the whole shebang, leave no apparent mark on Danielewski's artistic development.

Or does it?  I wonder out loud, because early in The Familiar, Vol. 1 we get a description of a distant, Mars-like planet--paradoxically neither real nor a dream--one utterly inhospitable to all possible life, yet one nevertheless that uncannily contains a "temple...strange yet intimately familiar" (and of course the limits of this blog's html script cannot hope to reproduce the literally-orb-like typography of this chapter).  Needless to say, there are many Temples in the red, Martian-like deserts of Utah. Now, one obviously need not fly all the way to Utah to find Temples; Danielewski himself relies more on ancient Greek references, as he describes said Temple as "Similar perhaps to what remains now of the sanctuary of Athena Pronania at Delphi."  An ancient Greek Temple on an abandoned planet is almost more a touchstone of old Star Trek reruns than anything Utahan specifically.

Nevertheless, there is also a cosmology of LDS Temples, one that embraces the full, wide, incomprehensibly massive breadth of the Universe ("For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me" Moses 1:35).  The chapter's narrator, Cas, further reports: "If she wanted, she could go back to before the planet took shape.  Fear keeps her from going that far, to where she knows with a shudder the temple will still wait, unchanged, even as far back as when this universe first came into being, all the time there, still remembering all the bloody sacrifices yet to come" (pg. 137).  Eternal temples at the edge of the outer space, with ordinances that predate the universe itself, while certainly not exclusively LDS per se, are nonetheless very comfortable within an LDS cosmology--and given Danielewski's youth in Provo, I can't help but shake the feeling that the place must have rubbed off on him some how, that here may be a moment where it makes manifest.

But then, the there are only two Cas chapters in the whole volume (I eagerly await volumes 2 and 3, to hopefully give 'em her due); most the chapters are dominated instead by L.A. gangbangers, cops, taxi-drivers, and video game designers--it is Danielewski's current California home, not the distant site of his awkward and likely-justifiably-forgotten High School years, that serve as the main setting for this novel.  But there is a main character of sorts, in Xanther, a 12-year-old girl.  Danielewski even cheekily describes the novel as simply the story of "a little girl who finds a kitten", though that of course does it no justice.

Especially given the manner in which she finds the kitten, which again circles me back to the fact that he was raised in Provo--for in the closest thing that this volume has to a climax, Xanther is riding with her adoptive father Anwar (surnamed Ibrahim, the Arabic word for "Abraham", into whose family, in LDS Theology, all converts to the Church must be adopted into), to pick her up a dog in the midst of a massive rain storm.  But then, all of a sudden, Xanther jumps out of the car without warning, runs several blocks (leaving poor Anwar panic-stricken) through the nigh-Biblical flooding, all to find a tiny kitten mewing pathetically in a storm drain.

That's the uncanny thing, that even Anwar has difficulty wrapping his mind around--how on Earth, amidst that thunderous storm, did she hone in on a single kitten mewing for its pathetic little life literally blocks away? And did she revive the kitten, or did Anwar, or did she actually bring it back to life (which Father Abraham could not even do)?  And did her parents relent and bring the kitten up stairs to sleep in her bed with her after all later that night, or did this kitten mystically reappear beside her of its own accord?  Have we been witness to a resurrection?  What strange supernatural divinity is contained in this contact between Xanther and the kitten?

Or, if this were some LDS Sunday School lesson, could we reframe the experience thusly: "a great and strong wind rent the mountain, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:11-12).  Amongst all the tumult and natural catastrophe, divinity is made manifest not in the noise but in the still small voice.

Again, there is nothing unique to LDS theology about a quiet, divine voice piercing the noise--but LDS theology sure is comfortable, even at home, with the idea.  As is The Familiar.  And its author was raised in Provo by a BYU professor--even if his family shared zero of the faith of their neighbors, still they had contact with them.

I almost, kinda, want to meet Mark Z. Danielewski in person, and just ask him informally if those awkward teen years in Provo left any sort of lingering mark on him at all, or have any trace influence upon The Familiar as I'm reading it--but then again, Danielewski is notorious for giving contradictory answers in different interviews, shutting down all hope of getting a straight answer from the source.  He could just laugh in my face and accuse me of the standard LDS fallacy of reading every favorite author as some sort of proto-Mormon incognito (as we do all too embarrassingly often with Wordsworth, Milton, and CS Lewis)--or he could enthusiastically confirm my reading, perhaps just to please me and amuse himself--and I would have no way of knowing if either or neither is the sincere answer.

Which may also perhaps be a reaction against his growing years in Provo--he could perhaps have found Mormons, we of the monthly testimony meetings that all begin with "I know...", to possess just a tad too much epistemological self-assurance for his taste.  That experience could maybe have imbued him with a desire to undermine any sense of Cartesian certainty in his readers--hence, House of Leaves.  As well as The Familiar, perhaps.  As with all things Danielewski (or the Universe, for that matter), the only honest answer one can give is, "Who knows?"

New Years in Times Square: New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down

The general steps towards celebrating New Years in Times Square consist of:
1. Don't.
2. Do something else.

But let's say your fiancee specifically has a midnight kiss on New Years as the ball drops on Times Square on her bucket list, firmly and irrevocably; well, you can't exactly let some other guy give her that kiss, now can you!  Plus, she works in the airline industry and so can fly you into JFK for dirt cheap, and it's just churlish to turn you nose up at a deal like that.  In which case, a slightly-revised list of steps are required:

1. If you fly a red eye there New Years Eve morning, and if you got any movie gift cards for Christmas, consider using them the morning of: specifically, get a ticket to some inoffensive film in Midtown Manhattan you don't care about and sit in very back of the theater, with an eye-mask and ear-plugs, and take a good long nap.  You will have needed it later, trust me.
2.  Do not, I repeat, do not drink anything throughout the day.  There is no food besides what you carry, no water except in what bottles you bring in, and no restrooms save those self-same bottles.  Make no mistake, people use 'em--and if you have to use 'em too, it is much harder to get past the socially-conditioned mental block against peeing in front of literally a million people (and I am using "literally" correct here) than you might suspect.
3. Start finding lines to stand in around noon.  (Or pay $800 a head to reserve a seat at an Olive Garden or Bubba Gump Shrimp Factory or any of the other sub-par chain-restaurants that line Times Square--you are either paying in time or in money).
4. Do not bring a backpack; post-Paris, the NYPD ain't pullin' no punches, and you will be forced to abandon it to the streets, never to be seen again. 
5. By about 3pm, you will be herded into your pen (accurately named), in which you will be angrily discouraged from sitting down by an overworked NYPD that most certainly did not get into this business to babysit a bunch of tourists (for you will be surrounded by nothing but tourists who have no clearer idea as to what is going on than you; actual New Yorkers avoid Times Square like the plague come New Years).
6.  6pm they actually raise the ball up.  Cheer.  It's long past the time to start finding reasons to cheer yourself up, and you still have 6 hours to go.
7.  Cheer on the various performers, even during their sound checks--yeah, I'm not a huge Carrie Underwood fan either, but she's way better than listening to nothing.
8.  The actual program starts at 8pm.  Start slow-dancing with your partner within what little space you have; actually let yourself enjoy the cheesy-pop blaring over the loud-speakers; get your body moving and your body-heat up, because even layering up may not be enough.
9.  Take turns surreptitiously sitting on the tiny camp-stool you brought (because the NYPD only cares about the bombs that could be hidden in backpacks, they couldn't care less about camp stools).
10.  Memorize all the ads running on Times Square; you'll see them all at least 1,000 times.  This may have the added side-benefit of inoculating you against advertising in general, as you will henceforth have a visceral reaction against any and all of them.
11. Post pics to social media. If you're gonna freeze your butt off out there, you might as well at least make people jealous of it.
12.  Come 11:59, you better start shouting out that countdown as loudly as you can; it's not just the end of this last year but the end of the last 12 hours of your life specifically that you are celebrating.  You made it, endured it, did it.  You now have bragging rights forever.  Let yourself get excited.  Give your lover a big, wet, sloppy kiss at the stroke of midnight.  Slow-dance to Sinatra's "New York, New York" while the confetti rains down all around you.  Live in this moment, treasure it, ensure that this is the scene that is engraved into your memory for the rest of your life, the one you can recall with good-humor and a wry smile for decades to come and tell your kids about, rather than the 12-hour human-rights violation that preceded it.

 And when your fiancee exclaims in ecstasy "It was all worth it!" you sure better respond with, "Yes, dear."