By Stuart Mitchner

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.

—Ernest Hemingway, from The Old Man and the Sea

Don’t give up, don’t let it get you down,” my 48-year-old son told me when he saw that I was depressed by the post-Biden-debate news cycle. That was before Sunday when the president finally did what he had to do. If nothing else, maybe the media will shut up about how old he is, stop gaslighting his every move, and give him some breathing room.

I’ve been thinking about “don’t” songs. When I promised my son not to let the polls get me down, I thought of John Lennon singing “Don’t Let Me Down.” A friend says “Don’t forget to write,” and my inner jukebox clicks into action, playing “Don’t Forget to Dance,” a song from the early 1980s by the Kinks. Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” would make a great campaign anthem for either party this year except that it’s forever associated with the blackout finale of The Sopranos. Which reminds me of the 1992 Democratic convention and one of the most effective presidential campaign songs ever, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).”

The Big Hug

“Don’t Give Up” sends me to YouTube for the Peter Gabriel-Kate Bush video duet recorded in 1986. Watching it for the first time in decades, I felt the way I did when I had a crush on Kate Bush and envied Gabriel that lovely, revolving, six-minute-long hug. What impressed me most this time was how powerfully Gabriel sang and how resonant the words are today, especially if you’re thinking about what the president and the first lady must have been going through. In the ad preceding the video I found myself face to face with Joe Biden asking for a $5 campaign contribution, which helped make what followed into a first couple duet, Joe singing that he was “taught to fight, taught to win, never thought he could fall,” Jill giving him unconditional support, “Don’t give up on yourself, I’m with you” as she hugs the message into him, “I know you can make it good.”

And “guess what,” as the president might say, “Peter Gabriel’s wife at the time was named Jill, who when asked about the song replied, “When he gets into very deep depressions, I am always saying don’t give up.”

“Don’t Forget to Dance”

Ray Davies’s “Don’t Forget to Dance” is a moving variation on the “Don’t give up” message addressed to a woman on the lonely far side of youth, whose friends and lovers are either married or “vanished.” For admirers of Ray’s 1967 classic “Waterloo Sunset” (“Every day I look at the world from my window”), the opening line has emotional resonance: “You look out of your window into the night, could be rain, could be snow, but it can’t feel as cold as you’re feeling inside.” The title line, sung with great effect (“no, no, no, don’t forget to dance”) becomes “don’t forget to smile,” and “don’t give in to a sad and lonely heart.”

When Ray sings “Darling, darling, I bet you danced a good one in your time,” Kinks fans may hear “Chilly, chilly is the evening time, Waterloo sunset’s fine.” And as Ray has Waterloo’s couple Terry and Julie “cross over the river,” he imagines the woman at the window going to a party where the next dance would be his, and when she walks down the street and “all the young punks” whistle at her, “a nice bit of old,” she “gives them the eye” even though “she knows she could be their mother.”

Ray was 42 when he recorded “Don’t Forget to Dance.” In the video he plays a double role: singing on the bandstand with the Kinks and cruising the dance floor as a mustached rogue. Imagine him singing this song now, having turned 80 a month ago, and looking it, with his ever-extraordinary Shakespearean face (think Richard the Third) resembling a topographic map of the slings and arrows, nooks and crannies of a lifetime. But I know he’d sing it better than ever now, even if he had to whisper the words. It was his song in 1986 and it’s his song in 2024. So here I am, an old man remembering old songs by old singers when Kamala Harris shows up on the ad before the video asking for a $10 contribution, already raising money and looking young and dashing and eager for the biggest dance of her life.

“Don’t Give It Up”

As much as I resent the New York Times for playing Javert to Biden’s Jean Valjean, and even though I do my best to ignore it at breakfast, there’s no denying how often the paper puts something useful or usefully upsetting on my plate. Sunday it was a towering, almost full page image of the ever-extraordinary spire of the Chrysler Building, the news being that this “Jewel of the Manhattan Skyline” is losing “its luster” and “showing its age.” Not unlike the besieged 81-year-old president, who has cognition problems, moves haltingly, and sometimes gets his words mixed up, the 77-story building has bad cell service, elevator troubles, and lacks natural sunlight, plus the revolving entrance doors sometimes jam and there are cracks in the ceiling of the “majestic lobby.”

Given the documented history of the Chrysler’s owners and occupiers, I’m not optimistic about the future of this metropolitan treasure. Will the immensity of its charisma be enough to save it? In 2019, according to Anna Kodé’s excellent in-depth story, the building sold for around $150 million to “Signa, an Austrian real estate company, and RFR, a New York-based development firm.” About a decade earlier, “a 90 percent stake in the building was sold to the government of Abu Dhabi for $800 million. Late last year, after Signa filed for insolvency, “an Austrian court ruled that it would have to sell its share of the building, throwing the Chrysler’s future into question.” Kodé received an email from a representative for Signa’s liquidator, saying that the company’s stake in the building has been “transferred to the sale process” and that talks are “ongoing.” A representative for RFR “declined to comment” for the story.

What’s the worst that could happen? Surely no one’s going to do a Penn Station and tear down the most beautiful skyscraper in the world. But what if the man who’s running for president bought the Chrysler Building and renamed it after himself? Don’t go there. Don’t even think about it.

Never Give Up

I don’t know how many times over the years my baseball wife has watched me hanging on when the St. Louis Cardinals are behind by as many as eight runs. “How can you stand it?” she says. “You never give up, it’s crazy.” Sunday the Cardinals ended the first series of the season’s second half with a win set in motion when their slumping best hitter Paul Goldschmidt hit his 14th home run, a hopeful sign after what had been the roughest first half of his illustrious career. Two years ago he was the “great Goldschmidt,” the National League’s Most Valuable Player. So far this year he’s hitting .225 with just 37 RBIs and had been moved down to the seventh spot in the batting order when he slammed that home run and brought his team to life.

Hemingway’s Birthday

Sunday’s game coincided with Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday, which is why I referred to “the great Goldschmidt,” echoing the old fisherman Santiago’s references to “the great DiMaggio” in The Old Man and the Sea. Goldschmidt is 36, not exactly an old man but if you measure your life in hits and homeruns, it’s hard to ignore the writing on the wall. Assuming Goldy finally hits his stride in the second half of the season, Cardinal fans could be in for an exciting ride even as the country careens toward election day.

I think Hemingway would admire Goldschmidt. He goes about his business quietly and with dignity. He fields the first base position brilliantly, with grace, and if there’s a prose to hitting, Goldschmidt at his best hits the way Hemingway writes at his best.

In an article by John Denton on mlb.com, Goldschmidt’s manager Oliver Marmol recalls a game during his 2022 MVP season: “He hits a ball to left field for a double and he comes into the dugout and he’s shaking his head. He sits next to me, and I said, ‘You don’t like that?’ And he said, ‘That ball needs to be in the stands; I can’t miss that pitch.’” He “goes into the next at-bat and he gets the same pitch and hits it into the stands and sits down next to me and says, ‘That’s where that pitch needs to land.’ When he’s feeling good, that’s how the game is to him. He knows what he needs to do, and he does it.”

56 Million Views

The “Don’t Give Up” video made by Peter Gabriel (now 74) and Kate Bush (now 65) has, so far, 56 million views and 25,000 comments on YouTube. The song’s enduring power has been recognized by celebrities like Elton John, who said it played “a big part in his rebirth” and by actor Matthew Perry, who wrote “Don’t give up” when signing copies of his autobiography and apparently asked that the song be played at his funeral. The video appeared on MTV soon after my son entered the school system and needed to hear those three words at least once a week until he graduated. Now he needs to hear “Don’t give up” almost every day of his life. Some days so do we all.