larrylivermore.com

The Potatomen! First Time Ever In... New Jersey!!!

2011-09-28T15:22:00.002-04:00

The Thing That Ate Larry Livermore

2011-09-18T02:48:00.000-04:00

Okay, here's a quick summary of what's going on: as many of you know, I used to put out records back in the 1980s and 90s. Some of those records were compilations, where I'd get a song or two each from a whole bunch of bands, many of whom were unheard of or barely heard of, but who I thought needed to be heard.

One of those records (and to be fair, I shouldn't be taking full credit for it; half or probably more of the work was done by my onetime partner at Lookout Records, David Hayes) was a double LP called The Thing That Ate Floyd. If you're curious about the name, it came about because David was originally doing a single LP compilation called Floyd. I was planning my own compilation at the same time, and when we decided to merge the two into one, effectively doubling the size of the project, it became "the thing that ate Floyd."

One of the kids listening to The Thing That Ate Floyd back in 1988 was a 16 year old named Billie Joe Armstrong, who was just starting to play shows with his new band. Through it he got introduced to bands from all over Northern California, one of them being the Lookouts, whose 16 year old drummer Tre Cool would himself end up playing a significant role in Billie's musical future.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and now Billie's got a 16 year old kid of his own, Joey, who's playing shows with his first band. In the summer of 2011, Joey's band goes out on tour and plays shows with a bunch of bands up and down the West and East Coasts, and Joey comes home full of excitement for all the great stuff that's happening out there. He talks it over with his dad, and the next thing I know, I'm getting a call from Billie Joe: "Hey Larry, would you be interested in putting together a compilation of your favorite current bands for Adeline Records?"

This sounds like a really excellent thing to do, but at the same time I'm in the middle of trying to finish a book (Spy Rock Memories). I think and I think - can I do the record and the book and do justice to both? - and finally I realize this is too much of an opportunity to pass up, not just for me, but for all the great bands out there who deserve to be heard, and I say, "Hell yes, let's do it."

Thus was born Adeline Records Presents: The Thing That Ate Larry Livermore, featuring 16 bands from the USA and Canada, some of whom you'll have heard of, others not, but all of whom I promise you are awesome and represent some (but by no means all) of the best music being made today. We're about halfway through picking the bands right now. Many if not most of them will be recording brand new songs or previously unheard songs, and I've signed on the inimitable Patrick Hynes, creator of so much classic Lookout art (you might also have seen his work on the lyric booklet for Dookie) to do the cover.

We were hoping for a release at the beginning of 2012, but it might have to be pushed back a month or two to make sure we have time to get the best recordings and the best bands. However long it takes, I promise you it will be worth the wait. This is the first time I'll have been involved with releasing a record (oh, it'll be in vinyl LP and digital form, possibly CD if there's enough demand) since the 1990s, and I'm very excited about it. Hope you will be too!

Spy Rock Memories, Part 9

2011-09-08T05:13:00.000-04:00

Spy Rock Memories, Part 9: Sweet Children grow up, Ben Weasel goes to the rodeo, hippies, homeschoolers, and redwoods. http://larrylivermore.com/?p=2336

Kreayshawn Reconsidered

2011-09-05T05:28:00.002-04:00

http://larrylivermore.com/?p=2321

Kreayshawn: The New Face Of White Racism

2011-09-03T23:31:00.000-04:00

http://larrylivermore.com/?p=2315

Hopefully Productive Doldrums

2011-08-05T19:24:00.000-04:00

That's what's supposed to happen in August, right? The hottest of the weather seems to be over now, and when I was taking the garbage out late last night, I could have sworn I felt a hint of autumn in the air, yet at the same time the calendar says there's more than a month and a half of summer yet to go.

Not that it's making all that much difference to me right now, as I'm mostly locked indoors, spending the day psyching myself up to write, and then, toward evening really getting down to it. I'm determined to finish Spy Rock Memories by the end of summer, and by end of summer, I personally mean by the vicinity of Labor Day, not the equinox. Will I make it? I'm getting close to halfway through Part 8 right now, which I plan on finishing before leaving for Baltimore and the Potatomen show/Insubordination Fest next weekend.

But staying focused is hard: last night I put out a call on the internet, hoping someone could help me figure out when a particular Operation Ivy/Lookouts/Isocracy/Crimpshrine show in Arcata took place, and that expanded into a full-fledged multilateral conference on the state of punk rock in Humboldt County, past and present. Well, mostly past. In the course of researching, I also dug up an old article I wrote about Laytonville for the Anderson Valley Advertiser in the spring of 1989. It's kind of rude and judgmental, but also kind of funny, so I posted it on the other blog: http://larrylivermore.com/?p=2212

Well, that's enough procrastinating for now. Onward and, um, something or other...

Spy Rock Memories

2011-07-30T00:25:00.001-04:00

Well, it's been a lengthy ordeal, er, I mean a rip-roaring good time, polishing off the latest and - for better or worse - longest episode in the Spy Rock story. I'm really starting to get optimistic about finishing by the end of this summer. Three more parts to go, but I've got to interrupt my progress for the time being to write about Greenland and Iceland, and to get ready for the Potatomen's appearance at the 6th annual Insubordination Fest in Baltimore, just two weeks from today, it looks like!

Anyway, if you're interested in checking out the latest installment, you can find it here (over at the more "serious" blog: http://larrylivermore.com/?p=2180

Staying Indoors To Write

2011-07-27T13:11:00.000-04:00

About a third of the way through editing Spy Rock Memories, Part 7. It's the longest chapter yet, and really needs to be cut down by about 2,000 words (why, I ask myself, did I feel the need take several days to write all those words if it's going to take me several more days to throw them out again?).

But the real question is: it's a glorious sunny day in New York City. Summer is fast fading away. There are a million (well, two or three, at least) things I could or should be doing outdoors instead. To stay inside and write or to go outside and do whatever?

I guess it all depends on how important I consider this work, and how urgently I feel it needs to be done. In 2005, London enjoyed the sunniest and warmest summer in almost 30 years (if you're at all familiar with English weather, you'll be aware how remarkable this can be), and I spent all but a couple days of it sequestered in my dimly lit north-facing room frantically trying to finish a 160,000 word story of my life that at the time seemed vitally important "Why?" my friend Paul frequently challenged me, "Have you got publishers camped on your doorstep with bags of money who just can't wait to get their hands on that manuscript?"

As it happened, he was quite right; not only were there no publishers, with or without bags of money, but while I did finish the manuscript, right about the time the chilly winds of autumn began stripping the last leaves from the trees, it never went further than a box under my bed, where I believe it still rests today, unread and unmissed by anyone other than a handful of friends and a couple of agents.

So why, six years later, does it seem similarly important to turn my back on summer in order to complete a still more obscure story, one about a mountain where only a handful of people ever lived, and that only a slightly greater handful of people has ever heard of?

I have no idea, except that maybe I'm six years older, and if it doesn't get done soon, I don't know if I'll ever find the time and energy to do it. Anyway, if you were wondering where I am on this beautiful last Wednesday in July, that's where. If it's any consolation, at least my writing room is now a south-facing one, and a fair bit of sunshine manages to come streaming in.

Pot Country

2011-07-26T12:29:00.005-04:00

While doing some research for Spy Rock Memories I ran across this Emerald Triangle blog by an old-timer who's lived there since long before there was any such thing as the Emerald Triangle, and who has a lot of history and insight to share. He talks about participating in a documentary called Pot Country that's apparently already been shown on San Francisco public television, but which I hadn't heard anything about before. The excerpt looks pretty good.

A Hasty Stroll

2011-07-26T02:49:00.005-04:00

I was rushing and rushing to get through the first draft of Spy Rock Memories, Part 7, and the story kept getting longer and longer. I mean, I knew exactly when and how it was going to end, but it was taking forever to get there.

It wasn't just that I was determined to finish the draft tonight so that I could get started on editing it tomorrow; I also wanted to get over to the city to meet Aaron for one of our patented late night wanders about town. But by the time Part 7 had finally topped out at around 8,200 words (probably 3,000 of which are going to have to be cut right back out of it), I was already supposed to be on the street corner in the West Village where we were meant to begin our walk. I tore down to the subway, knowing it would take me at least 20 minutes to get there, only to find that the ever-deteriorating MTA (you know, we're a poor country, we can't afford things like reliable public transit anymore the way modern, progressive countries like, say, Turkey can) wouldn't be sending a train my way for another 20 minutes.

So some hasty rearrangements had to be made, we met in the East Village instead, and headed more or less straight for the Williamsburg Bridge for the walk back to Brooklyn. Still a very nice walk on the first night this week with normal, almost cool temperatures, but it lacked a certain meandering quality possessed by all the best late night summer strolls. We talked about MRR, circa '77 until now, and related punk rock media, cultural and philosophical issues, and Aaron gave me a copy of his new book, which apparently includes an interview of yours truly and another interview conducted by yours truly with AVA editor Bruce Anderson. Riveting stuff, as I recall, though it's been a few years since I last perused either. Anyway, check out the new book at Last Gasp or on Amazon or any of the other usual outlets; it looks pretty good, and I'd be reading it right now if I weren't busy typing this.

My Life In Black And White (And Occasionally Color)

2011-07-25T20:41:00.004-04:00

A pile of old Lookout magazines that I'm hoping will help me reconstruct those hazy and hectic events of 1987. Memories sure can play tricks on the mind, though I have to consider that it's also possible I was confused or oblivious when I was writing (or living) the original story 24 years ago!

Hello again!

2011-07-25T16:38:00.004-04:00

I think I'm going to resurrect this site for posting quick thoughts or commentaries that are too long for Twitter but too short or too simple for the bigger, fancier, more serious and more literary blog (my description, not anyone else's, to be fair): http://larrylivermore.com/

Having said that, I don't have much else to say today, other than that it's raining, has stopped being over 100 degrees, and I'm madly procrastinating about finishing the rough draft of Spy Rock Memories, Part 7, even though I already know exactly what I want to say, am excited about saying it, and am quite anxious to move on toward finish Parts 8 through 10 (i.e., the rest of the story) before summer's end so I can move on to my next big project, which I'm even more excited about, but which will have to remain a big secret for now!

Moving On

2009-09-25T21:51:00.003-04:00

This site will remain active for the foreseeable future, but most if not all of the action will be migrating over to the new and hopefully improved larrylivermore.com. Please feel free to stop by and check it out!

You Don't Miss The Water...

2009-09-22T01:40:00.005-04:00

Sean Hannity, that crusading champion of the poor but honest workingman, was at it again last night, using an hour of prime time on the Fair and Balanced network to slam the pointy-headed bureaucrats and malicious tree-huggers for turning off the water to California's Central Valley for the sake of "a few fish" and thus throwing thousands of tomato pickers onto the tender mercies of the Food Bank.

Yes, it's true that the Valley is in danger of turning into a desert, not that it was ever far removed from one until the California Aqueduct, one of the 20th century's greater feats of engineering, brought billions of gallons of fresh water cascading down from the North and turned an arid valley into America's Salad Bowl. At one point - and it may still be true - 50% of the country's fresh produce came from a few counties in Central and Southern California.

The story Hannity is peddling is a good one, a touching one, and one that people can and should get angry about, except that it, like most of what Hannity peddles, is a noxious admixture of exaggeration, distortion, and plain old fashioned lies. There is a conflict over how much water should be allowed to flow to the sea in Northern California for the sake of enabling the fish population to survive and how much should be diverted to the Southland for agricultural irrigation and to fill the swimming pools of Greater Los Angeles.

Water, as anyone familiar with California history will know, has been a contentious issue for nearly as long as the state has been in existence. There's no surer way to get a Northern and Southern Californian snarling at each other than to mention some of the machinations that enabled the Southland to get its thirsty tentacles into the North's once-plentiful water supply, and if I betray some bias there, it's understandable; I lived in the North for some 30 years. However, I'm not rigidly ideological about it; I accept that both Los Angeles and Central Valley agriculture are not only established facts, but also that they are fundamental components of the nation's socio-economic structure. The fantasies of some Northern Unabomber types notwithstanding, we can't, nor should we, pull the plug on Southern California's water supply.

But by the same token, even if all the fish were to be left gasping their last in the sort of arid streambed that the Los Angeles "River" has become, it's not simply a matter of opening the taps and delivering all the water needed or wanted by the Southland. It's not simple at all, in fact, which is why Hannity's simplistic demagoguery is so offensive - and so dishonest.

People have been warning that California's water supplies are not limitless - a point which should be obvious to anyone who's lived through one of the state's not infrequent droughts - for decades already. I myself was writing about the coming water crisis in Lookout magazine almost 25 years ago, and I was far from being the first to raise the alarm. When the California State Water Project got underway, the state's population was only slightly more than 10 million and it was probably hard to imagine that the torrents of water cascading through the northern mountains - and often flooding whole towns when too much rain came at once - could ever be insufficient to California's needs.

But now there are 38 million Californians, and the majority of them live in areas of the state that would, if it were not for the importation of water from the North, be straight-up desert. You'd think this would make them conservation-minded, but it's turned out quite the opposite: largely oblivious to where their water comes from or how it's delivered from hundreds of miles away, they tend to take a rather cavalier attitude toward water use, namely, as long as it keeps coming out of the tap, we'll use it.

In addition to the North-South component of the water wars, there's also an urban-rural divide. The farmers feel the city folk are hogging it all for their landscaped gardens, their swimming pools, and now, for those damned fish. The metropolitan types, if they think about it at all, suspect the farmers of wasting vast quantities of the precious resource by emptying it out on the parched and baking Valley.

There's some truth to both views, and room for a great deal more conservation in both camps, but Sean Hannity's fulminations notwithstanding, there isn't enough water - not nearly enough - to sustain present levels of consumption, let alone those that will be demanded by future development. This doesn't mean that agriculture has to come to a halt, or that Los Angelenos need to start showering with a friend, but it does mean that both urban and rural users will have to start using water more sanely and reasonably if California is to avoid becoming a 21st century dust bowl.

Is there enough water to continue producing fruits and vegetables in the Central Valley? Absolutely. But only if big agriculture stops treating water as a limitless resource and squandering it on crops that are completely unsuitable for California's climate. I'm talking mainly about cotton and rice: both require the sort of water supplies you would find in a tropical or semi-tropical region. Yes, you can grow them, and grow them very well in California, as long as the water keeps flowing. By the same token, you could build and maintain an igloo village in Death Valley, provided you're willing to pay astronomical sums for the electricity needed to run a giant freezer compartment in the hottest place on earth.

Cotton also requires massive use of pesticides, which combined with the buildup of selenium and other salts as a result of irrigation, are gradually turning once-fertile Valley soils into a toxic soup. On so many levels, growing cotton in the Central Valley is insane, and yet it's also very profitable. Not, however, because it's meeting the demands of the market, but because the federal government - i.e., our tax dollars - subsidize it. If there were a free market in cotton, there would be little or no cotton grown in California, and it would instead be produced in more suitable climates, Africa being a prime example. However, because big agribusiness and its lobbyists have steamrollered Congress into granting these subsidies, African farmers are being forced out of business and California's - and America's - prime agricultural region is being slowly but surely turned into wasteland.

So there you have the real story: Sean Hannity was not there in "The Valley That Hope Forgot" because of his deep, abiding concern for the hard-pressed tomato pickers of the world; quite the contrary, with his "Drill baby drill" approach to water consumption, he's (as always) shilling for big business and for policies that, if followed to their logical conclusion, will ultimately dispossess those tomato pickers of their land and their livelihood.

Water is like oil in some respects: the world is in danger of running out of both. And just as with oil, the Hannitys and Palins of the world are responding to the looming shortage by urging us to use more of the stuff. But while science will eventually find new sources of energy to replace oil, it's a bit harder to come up with a substitute for water. We can - and ultimately will - learn to live without oil, but insufficient supplies of fresh water have spelled death for past civilizations and will no doubt do the same for ours if we don't change our wasteful ways. "They have made a desert and called it peace," Tacitus famously said; Hannity's Corollary could -should - read, "They have made a desert and called it highly profitable."

The Nerve Of Some People

2009-09-20T19:48:00.006-04:00

The classic illustration of chutzpah is of course the guy who murders his parents and then begs the court for mercy on the grounds that, "I'm an orphan, your honor."

But not far behind in the "have they no shame?" department is the cavalcade of Republicans denouncing Obama's health care proposals (and pretty much anything else the President has tried to do) on the grounds that it will increase the deficit. Particularly odious are the ones who claim, "Well, it would be nice to do something about health care, but we just can't afford it. The country is broke."

They do have a point; by conventional standards, we are broke, or very nearly so. But thanks for noticing now, Republicans; a shame it escaped your notice when you - that's right, YOU - were busily bankrupting us.

Not everybody has such a short attention as to have forgotten that President Clinton handed the federal government over to George Bush with not just a balanced budget, but a surplus that stretched as far into the future as prognosticators could prognosticate. Within two years Republican policies had turned those surpluses into not just a deficit, but, by the time the Republicans had been turned out of office, the biggest deficit in history.

Where was all this talk of fiscal responsibility when the Bush administration pushed through the tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the richest Americans and saddled all Americans with generations of debt? When a lying and/or delusional President led us into a mostly pointless and - even considering the merits of removing Saddam Hussein - an incredibly mismanaged and wasteful war? We can't afford to provide even the most basic health insurance for all Americans? Oh, but you had no problem passing that colossal unfunded liability masquerading as a prescription drug program for seniors but which in reality functions as a means of funneling hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to our poor, struggling pharmaceutical companies.

Now we've even got the teabaggers, rabble rousers and hatemongers attacking Obama for spending or at least lending jaw-dropping amounts of federal money on trying to stabilize the economy, bail out the financial system, and ameliorate the pain of millions of Americans who've been thrown out of work. Never mind that at least half the money involved was committed before Obama even took office, and that it was the loony-tunes wackonomics of a couple generations of right-wing "thinkers" that landed us in the soup in the first place.

I'll be the first to admit that the deficits we're currently running up are making me nervous, not least because it won't be that long before I myself will be at least partially dependent on the fiscal soundness of the Medicare and Social Security programs. But the way I see it, we don't have much of a choice other than to commit the resources, even if they're only borrowed against years of future earnings, to put the country back on a sound footing. Roosevelt had to do it in the 1930s to combat the Great Depression (which the Republicans, just as now, said we couldn't "afford" to do anything about). In the 1940s, virtually nobody questioned the necessity of going massively into debt (even greater debt than today when expressed as a percentage of GDP) because they recognized that having a balanced budget wouldn't do us much good if we lost the Second World War.

We're in a similar situation today. The economy isn't quite as bad as it was in the Depression - yet - and the threat posed to global civilization by a total financial collapse isn't as serious - yet - as that posed by the Nazis, but things could get a whole lot worse in a hurry if those in power miscalculate. I don't have total faith in Obama, and I have considerably less than that in many Congressional Democrats, but considering what the Republicans have done to our economy and what they continue to do to our body politic - i.e., tear it to bits for short-term political gain - I'm far more inclined to trust a rational and idealistic young President over the jabbering idiots and slavering jackals who were running this place before he took office.

And in answer to your next question: yes, even if my taxes have to go up. It's a bit galling, no, strike that, it's very galling indeed to accept that those of us with moderate incomes will almost certainly have to pay more to repair the damage done by those who got incredibly wealthy in the course of looting the American banking and securities systems, but we're the ones who - whether through apathy or insufficient resistance or, in some cases, voting for Ralph Nader - who let the foxes into the henhouse, and whether it seems fair or not, we're going to be paying - probably for quite a long time - to clean up their carnage.

Life, And The Value Thereof

2009-09-19T02:11:00.004-04:00

I was cutting up a pineapple this morning when I suddenly found myself reflecting on the life cycle of said fruit, and the various twists and turns of fate that had brought it to rest on my kitchen counter under the relentless onslaught of my carving knife.

When the pineapple tree first gave birth to her little fruitlet (let's assume for the sake of discussion that the tree was female or at least mother-like), did she envision him journeying across the ocean to be hacked up and devoured by a man she'd never met? As our little pineapple friend ripened and grew under the warm tropical sun, did he have visions for the future, of what destiny life might hold in store? Being brutally ripped from his mother's sheltering arms, thrown into cold storage, and delivered into the hands of someone only interested in the flavor he might contain can't have been foremost among such visions.

Of course when you get down to it, what is the destiny or purpose of a pineapple? No points for those of you who answered "a tasty treat." As with any form of life, the ultimate purpose of a pineapple is preserve its DNA and pass it on to future generations. Being a food source for other species is entirely incidental, and, in the event that pineapples are capable of sentient thought, almost certainly not something any self-respecting pineapple would aspire to.

Of course people, and vegans and vegetarians in particular, prefer not to think in terms of fruits and vegetables having thoughts or feelings, because that would negate one of the major premises of their refusal to eat meat. So they come up with cutesy formulas like "I don't eat anything with a face," completely overlooking the fact that you can discern some fairly complex expressions emanating from a head of broccoli or cauliflower. If you're stoned enough, anyway.

But ok, you can't get too worked up about the widespread slaughter of the planet's fruits, vegetables, roots, seeds, etc. (to tell the truth, neither can I), try this one: I'm about to get in the shower when I notice a smallish spider struggling frantically to escape from the growing pool of water that's gathering on the floor of the stall. Every time he starts to climb up the wall and out of the deathtrap my shower has become, a new ripple of water rolls over him and drags him back down into the maelstrom. I figure it's only a matter of time before he's swept down the drain and into The Great Cobweb In The Sky, but I wait because I don't particularly want to share the shower with him, and I especially don't want him using my leg as an escape route.

Then, against all odds, he makes one last superhuman, er, superarachnid lunge and breaks free of the rising tide. He stops to rest on the rim of the shower stall for a moment, before trundling off in search of a new home somewhere else in my bathroom, and I, still filled with admiration for the little bugger's struggle, suddenly realize that I don't really want him living somewhere else in my bathroom. When I was a hippie, I used to be more tolerant of spiders, until one bit me in my sleep, causing my arm to become so badly infected that I nearly had to have it amputated. I give a quick flick with my fingernail and little Mr. Spider is back in the drink and off into oblivion.

I feel pretty bad about this, though not as bad as I would feel if I were shaving or using the toilet a couple days from now and discovered Mr. Spider crawling on me. I also feel more guilty than I might otherwise because just the other day I watched a friend, confronted with a similar situation, pick up a spider by a strand of his web and gently carry him outside and set him free. Free to get eaten by a bigger predator or to freeze to death in the oncoming winter, the cynic in me argues, but nonetheless, my friend did go to considerable effort to give that spider another chance, whereas I would have been more inclined to swat it with a newspaper or a shoe.

What's that, you say? It's "just" a spider? Very true, but we have no way of knowing what kind of spider he might have gone on to be, what sort of spider destiny might have been cut short. What if, for example, it was this spider who was about to make a breakthrough in webweaving technology that would have revolutionized life and insect catching for his entire species? What if he was the missing link in the next stage of spider evolution? (I will have to note here that if the next stage of spider evolution looks anything like those eight-foot high monstrosities that confronted the hobbits in the last of the Rings trilogy, I'm very glad to have done what I did.)

Or one last example: I was sitting at my computer trying to write, and suddenly a mosquito is buzzing around my face. With Obama-like precision my hands snap out and crush him. I'm completely elated, because in my book, mosquitoes are the embodiment of pure evil in physical form, and killing them is always a Good Thing. This is especially true around here, where the little bastards frequently carry the West Nile virus. Nonetheless, there are those who would condemn me for taking it upon myself to kill any living thing. There are people so devoted to the cause of doing no harm that they breathe through a cloth so as not to inadvertently inhale any small insects, who sweep the path ahead of themselves so as not to step on any such creatures.

But most of humankind unhesitatingly kills for food, for pleasure, for convenience, or just for the hell of it, and as long as none of the creatures being killed are human, little notice is taken of it (apart from PETA and its ilk, of course). Which leads me to wonder: if it is so patently clear to most rational beings that it's impossible to live on this earth without a significant amount of death and destruction, why do the rules undergo an immediate and drastic turnabout for the every-fetus-is-sacred (or the even more fanatical every-sperm-is-sacred Catholics, who would condemn the use of any sort of birth control apart from abstinence.

This is not a pro-abortion argument; I think abortion is violent and ugly and to be avoided if at all possible. Still, only a complete fanatic would argue that it was feasible, let alone desirable, that every zygote should grow to maturity. Were it not for birth control, abortion, disease, war, etc., and in the absence of any effective predators, humans would long since have been crowded every other species off the planet before proceeding to eat themselves out of house and home.

And hey, it still could happen, but this isn't an environmental argument, either, or even an argument at all. I'm just curious as to how we arrived at a world view where every other form of life is disposable while human life is meant to be inviolate. It can't just be the Book of Genesis, with its grant of "dominion over every living thing," because human chauvinism cuts across all cultures and belief systems. And it's not just the normal self-preservation instinct; all species possess that, and will presumably kill and/or eat anything that gets in the way of survival, yet it seems to be only humans who have elevated themselves to the level of the sacrosanct.

At the same time, you've got humans raising money to save the polar bears or the sharks, i.e., animals that prey upon humans, and what other species takes up collections to benefit its natural predators? It's never happened yet - at least not to my knowledge - but I honestly don't think I'll be surprised if one day someone knocks on my door with a pamphlet explaining why we've got to Save The Mosquito. In other words, I don't have any idea how it gets decided which forms of life are sacred and worthy of preservation and which are wholly disposable, and I'm not sure I ever will. I just know that I hate mosquitoes with a passion, spiders are not welcome in my house, I will probably go on eating pineapples, and any polar bears that come prowling around Brooklyn can expect no mercy from me.

That Damned Exclamation Point

2009-09-13T07:15:00.002-04:00

Got my advance copy of Gimme Something Better by Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor. It's a magnificent compendium of information and opinions, delivered in oral history form, covering 30+ years of the San Francisco Bay Area punk rock scene.

I'll have to admit that I preferred the original title, which was to have been Journey To The End Of The East Bay, but the project expanded beyond the authors' original imaginings to include the history of the West Bay scene as well.

Being the crazed egomaniac that I am, I immediately flipped to the pages featuring myself and my friends, and almost as quickly got caught up in the predictable cavils of "Oh no, he didn't say that about me, did he?" and "She's crazy; I was right there when that happened and it was nothing like the way she's describing it." The old saw about the committee of blind men attempting to describe an elephant comes to mind.

But once I took Aaron Cometbus's advice and tried reading the book from the beginning, it became far more compelling and fascinating. I'm only about a quarter of the way through, provided you don't count (and you probably shouldn't) the fairly intense skimming I gave to to the latter chapters covering the Gilman and Lookout scenes.

But speaking of Lookout, there is one glaring error that makes me very sad, and though it will probably seem like a minor detail to most of you, it bothers me every time I see it. And because this book will almost certainly become the definitive guide to Bay Area punk rock history, the error will - hell, it already pretty much is - become the accepted version, despite any and all efforts on my part to correct it.

I'm talking about - how would you say it? the misspelling? the mispunctuation? how about the misrepresentation? - the way Lookout Records, the company I co-founded and ran for ten years, is wrongly rendered as "Lookout! Records." There are not sufficient words to express how much I hate the sight of that usage. It looks really, really stupid, true, but more importantly, to me at least, is that it's just plain wrong.

Think I'm making a big deal about nothing? Suppose you started a magazine, or a business, or, for that matter, gave a name to your firstborn son. And then, despite all your protests to the contrary, people kept insisting on misspelling it. Would Aaron appreciate it if he kept reading about Cometbus! magazine? Although in their current circumstances they might be able to use the extra pizazz, I rather doubt GM would appreciate being renamed General! Motors. And neither you nor your son Jason! would likely be too fond of strangers inserting an exclamation point into the middle of his name.

But that's what's happened to Lookout Records. I'm not blaming Gimme Something Better for starting this trend; they're just following what has increasingly become established usage. If there's a real villain here, it might be Wikipedia. For about a year I fought a hopeless battle with them, going in regularly to edit their entry on Lookout Records by removing the offending punctuation mark, but each time, within days if not hours, it would be changed back, and finally they attached a note stating that "The exclamation point is part of the name and should not be changed."

Oh, really? I tried arguing back that I was the one who NAMED THE COMPANY IN THE FIRST PLACE, but to no avail. I suppose I could have forwarded them copies of our incorporation papers, our tax returns, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, all with the correct spelling, but at that point I gave up.

Which was probably a mistake, as I suspect that whoever did copy editing on Gimme Something Better used Wikipedia as a corroborating source, since they also let slide another Wikipedia-perpetrated error, the misspelling of Tre Cool's name as Tré (although I'm generally credited with naming him as well as Lookout Records, he actually was already nicknamed Tre from early childhood; I just added the Cool).

It's true that we often used an exclamation point in some of our logos, so perhaps the misunderstanding is, er, understandable. Also, the new owners of the label were apparently very keen on the exclamation point, and went to some lengths - apparently successful - to get it established in the public mind. To me, unfortunately, it tarnishes the legacy of a once great label almost as much as some of the crappy bands they signed (sorry if that sounds - is - intemperate; they signed some really good bands, too). Ah well, if I'd wanted things to stay the same, I guess I should have stayed there and run the label myself.

Ok, that's my bit of venting for today. If you're a copy editor or a journalist, please, PLEASE, at least consider dropping that hateful exclamation point next time you write about Lookout Records. For all the rest of you, please don't let my fit of dyspepsia discourage you from checking out Gimme Something Better. And while the book isn't officially out for a couple weeks yet, you can go to their website to read (and comment upon) excerpts, including some that had to be left out of the book because of space constraints. Lots of great photos, too.

I'll be back with more opinions once I've read the whole thing. In the meantime, bear in mind that despite what Jeff Ott says on page 329, I did not get caught "pouring gasoline all over" my school. It was my college, and seriously, there was no gasoline involved; otherwise it might actually have burned down.

Woodstock

2009-08-15T08:43:00.007-04:00

Aaron Cometbus writes to say, "After coveting your copy of Woodstock Nation for two decades (!), I finally found my own at a sale a few weeks back. Also, at a different sale, an original copy of Guitar Army, which I've also always wanted."

Really? Two decades? I remember him remarking on it - and yes, that would have been somewhere around 1989 - at my house up on Spy Rock, where I enjoyed the luxury of an entire room devoted to books, though it sounds a bit grandiose to call it a library (grandiosity was not, however, a quality I lacked in those days). And I remember him making mention of it occasionally - very occasionally - over the ensuing twenty years.

But I don't recall ever getting the sense that he was truly covetous of it, because most likely there are several points at which I'm sure I would have just given it to him. To be quite honest, I'm not even sure, having disposed of large numbers of my personal possessions as I downsized from a six-room house in the mountains to a modest apartment in Brooklyn.

And to be even more honest, although I will, the first chance I get, rummage through my remaining books to see if the hardbound original printing of Abbie Hoffman's acid-drenched (in more than one sense) memoir of the biggest countercultural event of modern times, I'm unlikely to read it again anytime soon. I'll be more motivated by the awareness that if Aaron, an avid and devoted book collector, has had to search that long and hard for it, it's probably worth a fair bit of money.

Oh, I know, that sounds terrible, especially on this 40th anniversary, where every doddering old hippie with half a functioning brain left (actually, I think the bar has been set considerably lower) is joining with youthful romantics who weren't even born in 1969 to weigh in on What It All Means.

Not a heck of a lot, I'd venture to say, and before you accuse me of being one of those doddering old hippies myself (oh, what the heck; go ahead), allow me to point out that I at least have the advantage of having been there. Well, for a little while, anyway. Less than 24 hours, actually, since I'd apparently I'd already formed my lifelong habit of arriving late and leaving early when it comes to rock and roll shows, but enough, I think, to get in the proper spirit of things.

The San Francisco Chronicle (of course) hosted this charming discussion, hosted by The Worst Rock Critic in the History of Rock Criticism (that would be the ever-vapid and unctuous Joel Selvin) among three old-timers who had not just attended Woodstock, but performed there, and while much of it sounded like three cranky old men (it was actually just two cranky old men; the guy from Santana, still in his early 60s, sounded reasonably coherent) whiling away yet another afternoon in the arts and crafts lounge at the retirement home), it did bring up the interesting point that it's very difficult to establish agreement on exactly what happened and when.

In the age of cell phones, blogging, Youtube and ubiquitous handheld videocams, that may sound like a strange notion, but for the Woodstock story we're largely reliant on the pre-modern oral tradition. Oh, there's the movie, of course, which I haven't seen since the 70s and could probably not sit through ever again without the aid of powerful drugs, but that was constructed more as a commercial ("Come Visit Hippieland!") than a documentary, and bears about as much resemblance to reality as the musical Hair.

And with both age and - in many though certainly not all cases - a lifetime of drug use diminishing and distorting the recollections of those Woodstock veterans who remain among us, it's likely that the festival will eventually pass into the realm of pure legend. If it hasn't already. Which it probably has.

I've caught myself being scornful of those who endowed the story of a few hundred thousand people standing in a muddy field with more significance than it merited, as well as those whose memories of it have gone slip sliding away into la-la-la-we-all-loved-each-other-land, only to discover that my own grasp on matters was by no means as firm as I would have liked to imagine.

In connection with this Guardian article by a lady who presumably wasn't there and thus bemoans how modern rock festivals don't have the same "spirit" (perhaps, but they certainly have better bands, better sound, better facilities, etc.), there's a link to an alleged (hey, it's on Wikipedia) schedule of the bands who played at Woodstock. The first shock was at how many crappy bands were allowed on the bill (Quill? Who the hell were they? Sha Na Fucking Na??), but the real bitchslap to yours truly's grip on reality came in discovering that either I saw a bunch of bands that I don't even remotely remember, or that my recollections of how and when I arrived at the festival are questionable at best.

For years now I believed that the first band I saw on arriving Saturday afternoon (more about that in a minute) was the Grateful Dead. According to the schedule, however, they didn't play until 10 o'clock that night. There should have been four of five bands before that I did see, including a couple that I quite liked and a couple others that I don't think I would have liked at all. Don't remember any of it.

Bear in mind that I hadn't had much if any sleep since the previous Wednesday; on Thursday my friend Jim and I had finished our shifts as University of Michigan janitors at 11 pm, loaded up the VW (naturally) van, and left Ann Arbor at about midnight. With us were Leslie, Jim's long time girlfriend, and Mo, a girl I'd met a week earlier and in a moment of late-night amphetamine-fueled madness, invited to go with us. Jim's van being incapable of more than 50 mph, and that on level surfaces only, we figured the trip would take about 14 hours, providing we didn't waste any precious time sleeping or eating.

There may or may not have been stimulants involved in this cockamamie plan - this being the summer of Nixon's Operation Intercept, marijuana had become almost completely unavailable, with various kinds of speed rushing in to fill the gap - but we did have a glove box full of LSD and what was allegedly mescaline, but could have been anything, including the aforementioned amphetamines. We also had a giant American flag, large enough to cover everything and everybody in the van twice over, which Jim and I had "liberated" from the University flagpole back in Ann Arbor.

I don't recall having packed any other essentials, or perhaps nothing else seemed essential; at any rate, things went smoothly until somewhere in western New York we were pulled over by a state trooper who first threatened to shoot Jim's obstreperous German Shepherd (in retrospect, it's hard to blame him; that dog was truly obnoxious), then accused us of stealing our flag from the University of Michigan (I was truly astounded at his detective skills, which seemed to border on the psychic, until, many years later, it occurred to me that in a university town, there weren't many other places one would be likely to come up with a flag that size), and then announced that he was going to search our van for contraband.

Well, we were ready for that, just about. As designated shotgun-rider, and therefore the one with quickest access to the glove box, it had fallen to me to begin devouring our entire drug supply the minute the red lights had come on behind us. I still had a mouthful of gelatin caps when he knocked on our window, but through subtle but assiduous chewing I was able to get them all down before he asked me to say anything for myself.

How many pills? My guess is about 25, maybe 30. I wasn't that bothered, figuring that I'd just be extra high when we arrived at Woodstock later that day. The cop, having found nothing to arrest us for, then advised us that all roads leading to the festival were backed up "at least 20 miles," that no further traffic was being allowed into the area, and that we'd be best advised to turn around and go back to Michigan.

You can imagine how likely we were to take that advice, and in case you can't, not very. We plowed on, the journey becoming increasingly colorful for me, probably less so for the others, as we hit the mountains and the van's top speed fell precipitously, to the vicinity of 25 mph, which didn't make us too popular on whatever expressway we were traversing. It was already dark, and I think we'd been on the road 19 or 20 hours ("But as near as I can tell, we're no more than 50 or 100 miles away," Jim cheerily declared), when the van's engine gave up the ghost and we drifted over to the shoulder where we sat marooned for the night.

We tried sleeping on the side of the road, but unfortunately it was a little steep for that and I'd no sooner get relaxed than I'd start rolling downhill. Not that there was any way, considering the chemicals coursing through my system, that I was going to sleep anyway. Around midnight it started raining, which meant the four of us, five, counting the German Shepherd, who was nearly as big as I was, spent the rest of the night in the van.

Morning dawned bright and sunny, and we started hitchhiking. I reiterate: four full-grown hippies and an outsized dog. What were our chances? A VW bug pulled over, driven by two college boys. Despite the gravity of our predicament, we laughed. Yeah, sure, that was gonna happen. I recalled that once in high school we'd managed to cram sixteen (maybe it was 13, a lot, anyway) kids into my friend Mike's VW for a stunt that wound up on the front page of the school paper, and the college boys said, "Well, then six people and a dog shouldn't be any problem at all!"

I still have a hard time believing this actually happened, but I don't have any other explanation for how it happened, and by that I'm referring not only to how we all crammed into the car, but also how we managed to thread our way through the epic traffic backups and highway closures that had many attendees abandoning their cars and walking the last 10 or 20 miles (performers had to be brought in by helicopter).

But here's how it seems to have worked: arriving at a little crossroads village, we went into the general store to ask directions. Ever since I've pondered whether the proprietor, fed up with a seemingly unending procession of hippies all wanting the same thing, provided us a with a completely nonsensical route to follow in hopes that we'd drive off a cliff somewhere, or whether he for some reason took pity on us and clued us in on a genuine shortcut.

In any event, after a couple hours of attempting to follow his rather complex and confusing directions, we found ourselves on the side of a mountain, in a field, following two tire tracks that might have qualified as a cowpath but probably not as a road, unable to go any way but forward, since to attempt to turn around would have almost certainly sent us plunging to our doom several hundred feet below.

"Haven't we already driven all the way around this stupid mountain?" someone said, just as we rounded one more bend and saw, splayed across the hills and valleys just below, the festival in all its sodden glory. The "road" widened and turned downhill, and ten minutes later we pulled into the main parking lot immediately adjacent to the stage.

So, we were there, we walked around being awestruck for a bit, discovered there was no food - I was able to buy an orange for what then seemed like the outrageous price of 25 cents; apparently that same fruit stand was later wrecked in a mini-riot provoked by what festival-goers saw as price-gouging - and settled down on a hillside to watch the show.

The ground was muddy from the previous night's rain, but not unmanageably so, and the weather a bit chilly for August, especially once the sun went down. The falling temperature made sitting in mud a lot less pleasant, especially when our blankets began to disappear into it. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I had an unpleasant vision of myself and my erstwhile girlfriend as two pigs rolling in slop, a vision made more vivid by her having one of those unfortunate pug noses that do tend to make one look, well, a little porcine.

I jumped up, mumbled something about going for a walk, and disappeared into the night. I spent the rest of my Woodstock experience on my own, wandering through the crowds, stopping to marvel at the Who's show-stopping hymn to dawn (that one about "Looking at you, I see the glory, etc."), not to mention the rather picturesque sight of Abbie Hoffman getting knocked cold by Pete Townshend's viciously swung guitar, which elicited wild cheering from the peace-and-love hippie crowd.

It was full daylight, maybe 8 or 9 on Sunday morning, by the time the Jefferson Airplane, then one of my favorite bands, took the stage, and after watching them for about 20 minutes, I realized I was completely exhausted, and, like the kid who's just eaten an entire chocolate cake and a gallon of ice cream, just couldn't take anymore. I started walking, in no particular direction at first, but gradually I realized I was wandering further and further away from the music, until I could barely hear it anymore, past dozens, then hundreds of hippie encampments, little and large. Many people slept, others sat glassy-eyed, like displaced persons after a great war, watching their fellow refugees stream past with great resolve but little visible purpose.

Eventually - it must have been midday - I found myself on the side of a four-lane highway and stuck out my thumb. That's the last thing I have any clear memory of. I woke up in my bed back in Ann Arbor sometime Monday afternoon, with no recollection of how I'd got there, though by going through my pockets I was able to piece together some fragmentary idea. I had a receipt for a youth fare ticket from New York to Detroit, a New York City subway token, and a couple other bits of paper that made it pretty evident I'd managed to hitchhike into New York and find my way onto a plane back to Michigan. I even had a very vague, but fairly certain memory, of standing in front of the building on E. 2nd Street near Avenue B where I'd briefly lived the year before which had now been taken over by a new band of squatters.

My brother showed up at the end of the week; although I hadn't even known he'd been there, he'd stuck around not only till the end of the festival, but for a few days more to help clean up. Like many others who'd stuck it out to the end, he was raving about Jimi Hendrix, who'd wound things up on Monday morning, and for a number of years I felt regretful, even resentful, that I'd missed out on the whole third day (not to mention the first day). But while I'd have liked to see Hendrix (as things would turn out, I never would), a quick look at the aforementioned schedule assures me that I didn't miss much else. Okay, maybe Crosby, Stills and Nash would have been interesting, but I couldn't stand their records, so I don't know why I would have liked seeing them live. And a couple others, but oh, what the heck. I'm sure I also needed my sleep.

And what about now? What do I think, forty years on? Woodstock falls neatly under the heading of things that I'm glad I've done but would never want to do again, sort of like my trip through Poland shortly after the fall of Communism. I think there are much better bands around these days, I'm glad that I don't have to take drugs to enjoy them (or to take drugs at all, which just by itself makes our present time greatly superior to the 1960s), and frankly, despite some moments of great excitement that I'll always treasure (as much because they happened to me in my apocalyptic and hyperdramatic youth as because of it being "the 60s"), that whole period, both culturally and musically, strikes me as being a bit boring and overrated.

Every generation has festivals, social movements, wild and wacky fashions; the 60s generation seems to have got a disproportionate amount of attention because a) there were, thanks to the postwar baby boom, so many of us; and b) because its own self-important commentaries have so completely dominated the culture and media for so long that they seem to have taken on the aura of self-evident truth.

So yeah, it was interesting to be there, interesting to be part of, but hey, kids of today: don't let the parents or grandparents fool you into thinking that your own lives can never possibly be imbued with such Importance and Meaning as theirs were. Ultimately it was half a million mostly middle class kids gathering together in a field to take drugs, have sex, and listen to music. Happens dozens of times every summer, all over the world, every year, and probably always will as long as there are kids, fields, drugs, sex and music.

Green Day At The Garden

2009-07-31T02:21:00.009-04:00

It's been a couple days now and I'm still buzzing from the two Green Day shows earlier this week. I feel more like a teenager than I did when I actually was one. Back in May I said that Green Day's Webster Hall show was possibly the best I'd ever seen, but I must admit that it paled into near-insignificance compared with the spectacle I witnessed at Madison Square Garden.

I've never been a big arena rock kind of guy; most of my MSG-type shows were in the 60s and 70s and involved the likes of the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, etc., and as I think I've noted, I'd only been to Madison Square Garden itself once before, on July 28, 1973, the night Led Zeppelin were being filmed for The Song Remains The Same (and, incidentally - though I still maintain I had nothing to do with it - the night they were robbed of their share of the box office receipts, some $300,000, which, believe it or not, was quite a bit of money in those days).

In the 90s I saw Green Day play at Wembley and Oakland Arena, but both experiences left me, if not cold, at best slightly lukewarm. Maybe it was because on both those occasions I was up in the seats looking down on the arena floor, whereas this time I was on the floor, only a few feet from the stage. But to be fair, the floor itself was a very different affair for these shows; in Green Day's early arena-rock days, nearly anyone who wanted to be on the floor could get there, and the result was a seething, swirling maelstrom of flying bodies and - sometimes - flailing fists as thousands of people struggled to cram themselves into a space that could comfortably fit no more than a few hundred.

This time, the standing room near the stage was tightly controlled, accommodating, I would guess, about 500 people and leaving plenty of room to wander around or stand quietly if you weren't among those who simply had to be face-to-face with the band. When I say tightly controlled, put it this way: our way was barred by a snarling MSG security guard even though we were wearing passes that allowed us to go pretty much anywhere backstage. We had to spend the first part of the show a few hundred feet back, until the wonderful Carly intervened. Carly was there to look after the several children who were traveling with the band, and for purposes of getting to where we wanted to be, we became, essentially, three more of her charges. She escorted us up to the front, patiently explained to the security guard that she was responsible for us, and turned us loose into what might have been the ultimate punk rock playpen.

I don't say that disparagingly, either. Oddly enough, it felt a bit like being at Gilman (which also was described as a playpen or "punk rock Romper Room" by those who felt it wasn't truly punk if limbs, teeth and blood weren't at risk). There were almost none of the boneheads whose idea of a fun show involves beating up those smaller than themselves, and almost everyone right up front knew and loved the band's entire catalog, from 1988 to the present, well enough to sing along all the way through, and to cheer ecstatically when some of the long-neglected songs from the first two albums were resurrected.

It wasn't until I got home, till the next day, actually, that it occurred to me that those sitting up in the seats, especially in the upper balconies, would have had a very different experience, and that the almost intimate little concert we enjoyed at the very front was only possible because the vast majority of the audience was barred from being there.

But it really did feel intimate. At times, like when Billie was out at the end of the catwalk that protruded into the crowd, we were actually behind him, looking out at the audience from a very similar perspective to what he was seeing. And I found myself thinking, "This place isn't that big, in fact it feels almost kind of cozy." Of course, a great deal of this is probably down to Billie's ability - whether he's bellowing AY-O and insisting that people put their hands in the air, or singing a heartfelt ballad accompanied only by an acoustic guitar - to connect with people throughout the amphitheater, those marooned far up in the nosebleed sector as much as those standing awestruck at his feet.

I've often spoken and written about how, when I first saw Green Day (then known as Sweet Children) playing for five kids in a candlelit cabin in the Mendocino mountains, Billie performed like "the Beatles at Shea Stadium." Even though he was just 16, and the band was playing only its third or fourth show ever, I could, I thought, easily envision them displaying the same commanding presence on the biggest stages in the world. It seemed like a crazy idea at the time, and most people I told about it laughed at me and/or told their friends that I was losing my mind.

Well, I may not have been right about many things in my life, but I think I nailed this one. I've seen Green Day in bigger venues - headlining the 2004 Reading Festival, for example - but I've never seen them or any other band so thoroughly command a stage and an audience. The Rolling Stones at the LA Forum in 1973 might have come close, and Alice Cooper at Cobo Arena in 1971 made a good stab at it, but... ah, I can think of one performance that might have given Green Day a run for their money: the Who at Woodstock in 1969. But while that performance might have contained moments of grandeur and majesty that surpassed what Green Day produced at the Garden this week, it was also diminished by lulls, longeurs, and the simultaneously satisfying and upsetting spectacle of Abbie Hoffman getting knocked cold by Pete Townshend's guitar.

There have been times in my life when I was enough of an unbearably punk purist to turn my nose up at the elaborately produced and tightly choreographed sort of rock show that Green Day have now honed to a fine art, but that's just one of many ways in which I've succumbed to the prevailing idiocy rather than think and judge for myself. When I went to see La Traviata at the Sydney Opera House, I didn't complain that the production was too ornate or expensive, or that the sound was too slick and clean; instead I marveled at how the talents of the set and costume designers combined with those of the composer, the performers, the sound and lighting engineers, even the ushers and ticket takers, to create a living monument to what was bright and glorious about not just art and civilization, but to the very essence of what it is to be a human being: the desire, no, the need, to constantly transcend oneself.

Okay, before I risk climbing any further into the heights of grandiloquence, let me point out that, yeah, dude, this show also totally rocked and they played (almost) all my favorite songs, etc. I was especially ecstatic to, early on, hear the opening chords of "Holiday", which was noticeably missing from their New York shows in May. In fact, that's exactly when the feeling kicked in, the one that let me know I was in for one of those shows that I would remember and treasure all my life. What more could I have asked for? Well, "Christie Road" would have been a thrill (he did sing a couple bars of it during his "Shout" breakdown near the end, and on Monday night Nate Doyle and I were screaming like crazy for "Dry Ice", a song I've been (mostly unsuccessfully begging them to play ever since they dropped it from their repertoire sometime in the early 90s.

Someone also threw an outsized pair of men's briefs at Billie, on the back of which was emblazoned "No One Knows". It was going to happen, of course, but it was a sentiment I heartily endorsed; for many years I cited it as my favorite Green Day song ever.

But between the two nights we did get to hear "Going To Pasalacqua" (aka "Here We Go Again"), "Who Wrote Holden Caulfield", "2000 Light Years Away", "Welcome To Paradise", "Disappearing Boy", and a not nearly so old, but equally unexpected treat, "Macy's Day Parade", enough to satisfy all the most curmudgeonly old school Green Day fans (there are still some who bristle any time the band plays anything newer than Dookie, but since American Idiot and 21st Century Breakdown are my favorite Green Day albums of all, I had no problem at all with hearing much of the former and most of the latter.

The band played two hours and forty-five minutes on Monday, which cost them quite a bit of money, since they were heavily fined for going past the Garden's curfew. So I halfway expected them to cut things a bit short on Tuesday. Instead, they played almost three full hours. There are not many bands - in fact, of the bands active today, I can't think of any - who could pull this off. I usually get impatient when a band goes over 30 minutes, unless it's one with a lot of history and hits behind it, in which case I can stretch to 45 or 50 minutes. But not since my days of watching the Grateful Dead on seven hits of acid have I voluntarily subjected myself to multiple hours of of one band's music, and yet I could easily have watched at leat another half hour of Green Day. More that that if they'd dug up some of the more obscure gems from 39/Smooth, Slappy, 1,000 Hours and Kerplunk.

I've already commented on the inspiration provided by Stephanie's guitar playing on "Jesus Of Suburbia" (and was totally stoked when she responded to my blog entry!), but her star turn shouldn't obscure the fact that nearly a dozen other kids were invited up on stage over the course of the two nights, and all - all but one, I should say - acquitted themselves magnificently. So much so that many people have expressed suspicion that these little guest spots are planned in advance, but it's just not true: Billie indeed does pick people right out of the audience. His wife was telling me how he's developed a real sense for who is up to the task and won't succumb to crippling stage fright. The boy who looked to be about 12 or so and played bass on "Longview" showed no such tendencies; before he was halfway through the song he was tearing around the stage as if he'd been born on one, and at the end jumped up to the mike and shouted, "Thanks, Madison Square!" He also walked off stage with a brand new bass, courtesy of Mr. Dirnt.
On Tuesday night, my friend Jim Kim was standing more or less behind me for the entire show, and he's posted this portfolio of photos that should give you an idea of what things looked like from where we were. However, the photo above was taken by my 13 year old nephew, Jackson, who, despite it being his first attempt ever at photographing a big rock concert (and using my new camera for the first time ever), produced a number of pictures that totally eclipsed any of my efforts. To be fair, on Monday night, when I had the camera, I wasn't quite close enough to get any really good shots, and on Tuesday night, when I was, Jackson had the camera, but was farther back engaging in kid-type shenanigans with the Armstrong boys and other members of Emily's Army. I never saw any kind of show until I was 16, so I can't even imagine what it was like for him, but as far I was concerned, if there was anything greater than seeing Green Day at the height of their glory, it was being able to share that experience with my completely awesome nephew.

And, late-breaking development: almost as if he'd been reading my blog, Billie busts out his acoustic guitar and delivers a partial (all but the final majestic bridge and chorus) rendition of one of the greatest Green Day songs ever, "Christie Road". It's got to be only a matter of time before the full electric version once again becomes a concert staple. To all of you out there in lands where this Green Day tour hasn't yet arrived, I beseech you: put aside any prejudices you may have against "big" or "commercial" or "arena" type rock shows and do whatever is necessary to witness this one. Miss this and I can virtually guarantee that a couple decades from now your kids will be hitting you with the mid-21st century equivalent of, "Mom/Dad, how could you have been so unbelievably lame?"

The Jersey Beat

2009-07-29T12:41:00.003-04:00

I didn't think I liked the Screaming Females, but it turns out I may have been wrong (yes, imagine that; it does happen from time to time!). Check out this video, directed by Don Giovanni Records' Joe Steinhardt:

Reminds me a bit of the late 70s/early 80s, but in a good way.

Stephanie Rocks Out With Green Day

2009-07-29T11:39:00.003-04:00

Much has been said and written on the subject of empowering young girls to take their rightful place in the traditionally male-dominated rock and roll world. My friend Jessica Hopper has recently published The Girl's Guide To Rocking, which appears to be getting a great reception, and deservedly so.

But Monday night at Madison Square Garden, I saw Green Day and - more importantly - a girl called Stephanie do more for the cause of girls rocking out than all the riot grrrl bands in history laid end to end, and sorry if that sounds like a poor choice of words, but I honestly didn't mean anything salacious by it.

Those of you who follow Green Day will be aware that it's a long-standing tradition to invite audience members up on stage to sing or play instruments on some of the songs. Back in the 90s, most of the invitees would be boys, but nowadays the gender balance tends to be pretty equal. What people may not know is that those invited up are not chosen in advance; Billie picks them out of the audience based on his gut feeling as to whether they'll be up to the task.

Monday night he was looking for someone to play guitar on "Jesus Of Suburbia," a nine-minute rock epic with multiple chord and tempo changes. Much as I - like, no doubt, a million other fans - have occasionally harbored fantasies of jumping on stage with the band (I've actually played guitar with Billie in the studio once, back in the Neolithic era, but never on stage), I found myself ducking behind somebody else when he was recruiting a JOS guitarist, because there's no way I could play that song sitting alone in my room, let alone in front of 20,000 people.

But Stephanie swore she was up to the task, and boy, was she. She was so at ease with her guitar that before long she was wandering the stage just as the Green Day guys do, and singing along with Billie on the lead vocals. At the end, Billie got down on his hands and knees in front of her and did the "I am not worthy" bow, before leading all of Madison Square Garden in a "Steph-a-nie" chant.

I can only imagine what it must have been like for Stephanie, who, with her torn Misfits shirt and matter-of-fact attitude, didn't look like the kind of girl accustomed to being on the receiving end of wild adulation, but she took it in such stride that I'm inclined to think of it as a life-changing experience. Look it this way: from now on, any boy unwise enough to taunt her to the effect that "chicks can't rock as hard as guys" or somesuch similar foolishness can quickly be put in his place with a well-timed, "I had Madison Square Garden in the palm of my hand; what the hell have you done, sucker?"

Here are a couple videos of Stepanie's performance (Green Day were no slouches either):

There's also a nice little blurb about it in today's Times.

Acting Stupidly

2009-07-26T17:25:00.002-04:00

I wasn't there, so I have no way of knowing if, as President Obama claimed, the Cambridge police "acted stupidly" in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, but I feel pretty safe in saying that Obama spoke stupidly in making this apparently off-the-cuff comment. It's the first time I've seen the Prez seriously blow it in terms of both leadership and public relations, and while George Bush could and frequently did manage half a dozen bigger gaffes in the course of a 10 minute press briefing, Obama's shoot-from-the-lip not only gave his opponents a valid talking point with which to lambaste him; it diverted precious time and attention from the far more vital matter of health care reform.

To his credit, the President apologized - well, almost - for speaking out of turn, and will probably, with his invitation to the police officer and the professor involved to meet him at the White House for a beer, end up turning the whole business to his and the nation's advantage. Nonetheless, if I were Obama, I'd have apologized even more forthrightly, or, better yet, not made the remark in the first place. When asked about the controversy at his press conference, an appropriate answer would have been, "I honestly don't know enough about the matter, and what's more, Professor Gates is a friend of mine, so anything I did say would probably be biased." He managed the second part all right, but totally blew it on the first.

I don't personally know much about Professor Gates, either, but from what I've read, his behavior was a throwback to another time, almost another era, and while he may not have created the unhappy situation, his hostility and hauteur (that's a fancy word for "Do you know who I am?" syndrome) almost certainly exacerbated it. Trying to turn a case of mistaken identity into a racial incident (or evidence that we are living "in a police state," as one of the lefter-that-left whiteys on the Counterpunch site had it) would of course come naturally to someone whose entire career revolves around uncovering ubiquitous examples of structural racism, but it's too bad the President had to buy into this 20th century sort of thinking.

Put it simply: anybody, even the most uneducated street bumpkin, should have enough common sense not to hurl verbal abuse at armed police officers, especially when they are there looking after your interests (stopping people from breaking into your home presumably being one such interest). When a Harvard professor, who leads a life far more privileged and comfortable than that of most Americans, regardless of race, behaves like such a bombastic blowhard, it's not necessarily an arrestable offense - okay, not an arrestable offense at all - but it's hard not to sympathize with the police officers, who lay their lives on the line for a fraction of the pay and benefits enjoyed by Professor Gates if they lost their patience with his foolishness.

Well, everyone involved now seems to be saying that this is a "learning opportunity," a "teachable moment," and I'd like to believe that, too. I'm not naive enough to think that racism has entirely vanished from our society just because we have a black President, but neither do we need to continue searching for racism under every rock the way a previous generation did with Communism. For Gates to try and turn his ill-tempered reaction and the police's overreaction into a racial incident (for crying out loud, at least one of the "racist" officers was black) was both dishonest and counter-productive. I'm sorry the President bought into it, glad that he saw and corrected his error, and now can we move on and fix this accursed health care system?

Aaron Cometbus: The Spirit Of St. Louis

2009-07-24T02:13:00.003-04:00

You've probably heard me tell this story before, but it bears repeating: how I encountered my first issue of Cometbus. It was sometime in the winter of 1985-86, and I had been walking and riding buses around San Francisco distributing issues of Lookout magazine to the various stores and hangouts where they were welcomed or at least tolerated.

I had one last stop to make, at Bound Together, the anarchist bookshop over in the Haight, and rather than walk over Buena Vista Hill on what was turning out to be an unpleasantly cold and windy night, I hopped on the bus at 14th and Market, the one that goes straight up 14th and over the hill. Nowadays it's the 37, but I keep thinking it was a different route number back then. Not that it matters in the slightest, but still...

The bus was nearly empty, so I took my time walking down the aisle, deciding which seat I wanted to sit in. The ride only took five or ten minutes, so it was kind of ridiculous making a big production of it, but that's the way I was in those days. About two thirds of the way to the back of the bus, I saw a little xeroxed magazine lying on one of the seats, and immediately knew that that was the seat I had been looking for.

That was my introduction to Cometbus, and it was only a matter of weeks, if that, before I met its creator, also known as Cometbus, first name Aaron, at Violent Coercion/Youth of Today show at the New Method warehouse in Emeryville. I asked him how his magazine might have ended up on a bus seat in San Francisco and he told me, "Oh, I sometimes leave copies lying around in hopes that somebody interesting will find them." This didn't sound at all crazy to me, since I had been doing the same thing with Lookout.

By then Aaron had already been publishing Cometbus for something like five years (he was fond of pointing out that it predated Maximum Rocknroll; if my calculations are correct, it's now only a year or two shy of marking its 30th year in print. In recent years, some issues have taken the form of short novels, and that is the case with the newest one, #52, "The Spirit Of St. Louis".

Having read almost every issue Aaron has published, I can unhesitatingly say that this is one of the best. He returns to the subject matter he's best known and loved for, the trial and travails of a bunch of marginal punks struggling to eke out an existence or an identity or at least a place to hang out and put on shows. While many of Aaron's past efforts in this vein have come across as thinly veiled romans à clef (those of us who knew him could usually pick out who was supposed to be who within the first few pages), this newest one is more clearly fictional and - ironically - more realistic because of it. I'm pretty sure Aaron never spent enough time in St. Louis to have created the world portrayed here out of anything other than his vividly creative imagination. And he'll probably call me tomorrow and say, "What, you didn't know about my St. Louis years?" And I'll have to say, no, Aaron, I really didn't.

Enough of that, however; if you're any kind of Cometbus fan, you'll be wanting to read this straightaway, and if you're not familiar with the Cometbus oeuvre, this would be an excellent place to start. You can order it through No Idea or any number of other distributors; if you're insistent on doing it the old-fashioned way and don't mind waiting a while, you can always write to the official Cometbus address, PO Box 4726, Berkeley CA 94704. Price? It says $3 on the cover, and I'd throw in at least another dollar for postage. It's been a while since I've done mail order, so don't quote me on these prices. But Cometbus #52: it's a winner. Get it.

Sink With California

2009-07-01T13:47:00.002-04:00

The unsurprising news that once again California can't agree on a budget and/or come up with enough money to pay even its most essential bills has Time Magazine wondering if the federal government needs to step in, i.e., if the nation's biggest state is, like AIG and Citibank, "too big to fail."

The article sketches out two grim scenarios: if the feds let the fruit, nut and flake state go its merry way to perdition, i.e., bankruptcy, the failure of the world's eighth largest economy could and probably would endanger the entire global financial system. If, on the other hand, the US does as the wingnuts allegedly governing California are asking and acts as co-signer on the state's outstanding loans, the credit of the entire US could be undermined and possibly wiped out.

California, once one of the most progressive and best-run states in the nation, is largely the author of its own misfortunes; the current troubles had their origins back in the Me Decade, when voters, befuddled by too much dope smoking and/or naked self-interest, used the referendum process to give themselves a big and poorly thought out tax cut.

Actually, it wasn't so much poorly thought out as it was maliciously; Proposition 13, which limited property taxes to 1% of assessed value (not necessarily a bad idea in itself) was the brainchild of right-wing "government is the problem, not the solution" forces, and it did its real damage by a) preventing property values from being reassessed until such time as the property is sold, creating the ludicrous (if it weren't so tragic) situation where billionaires can be paying a couple hundred bucks a year tax on a multi-million dollar property just because they happened to buy it before California's real estate boom. Secondly, Prop 13 required that any significant change to the tax code had to be approved by two thirds of either the Legislature or the voting public, with the result that the anti-government crowd, a perennially strong minority in California politics, can short-circuit just about any kind of tax hike or reform.

But just as it took a coalition of right-wing ideologues, apolitical greedheads, and left wing space cadets to pass Proposition 13 in the first place, a similar logjam of conflicting but mutually oblivious interests has produced the impasse which may soon force California to slash some of its most fundamental services and start issuing IOUs in lieu of cash payments. The Republican dingbat faction has its fingers in its ears while it chants "La la la, no new taxes" and their Democratic counterparts can only respond with, "But you can't cut THAT program, think of the children/illegal immigrants/endangered lemonthroated warblesuckers...etc."

In short, California is burdened, and has been for some time, with a wholly dysfunctional body politic which, if not beyond redemption, is nonetheless unlikely to respond to any conventional remedies. The only way the federal government should even consider becoming involved in this mess is if it effectively nationalizes the state and starts running it direct from Washington. The people of California have demonstrated conclusively and definitively that they're incapable of governing themselves; handing them more money and/or credit would be like furnishing a wild-eyed drunk with another quart of whiskey and a loaded gun.

Fest: Winners And Winners

2009-06-29T09:00:00.004-04:00

Nephew Jackson and I are holed up in a quiet corner of Washington DC after three incredible days in Baltimore, during half of which I was too sick to move but did anyway, albeit with considerably less alacrity than I'm usually known for. Also missed, due to illness, about half the bands I really wanted to see, and half the people I really wanted to talk to, but it still added up to - and I know this refrain, repeated year after year, must get tiresome to you non-believers - Best Fest Ever.

I'll admit I had my doubts, and that they persisted well into the second, maybe even the third day. No real drop-dead headliners, half a dozen competing fests around the country, the absence of some notable Festers from years past, all seemed to conspire to create more of a low-key vibe for this year's event. Or maybe it was just a case of lowered expectations, but at some point it occurred to me that the first Fest, which some still insist was the very best of all, had virtually no expectations at all. It was just a couple hundred (if that) friends getting together in a corner bar in a desolate backstreet in Baltimore to watch each others' bands, most of which were completely unknown to about 99.99% of the American population.

The magic kicked in that time when - maybe it was during Delay, or the Copyrights, or the Steinways - it became obvious to all in attendance that unknown or not, our obscure little bands were at that moment making some of the best music in the world. Three years later the size of the audience, the number of bands, the venues, the stages, all have tripled, quadrupled, even quintupled. Delay, the Copyrights and the Steinways are now old standbys, and might only be unknown to 99.95% of the American public, but otherwise, not much has really changed. Each of those bands, not to mention a dozen or more new arrivals, is still capable of standing the Fest on its collective ear, and that's exactly what happened, again and again again, until any remaining doubts or fears or hesitations were, in the words of old Mr. Dylan, driven deep beneath the waves, until we could forget about today until tomorrow.

There's also those bits about dancing beneath the diamond sky, one hand waving free, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow, etc. etc., but even if we are talking about the pop-punk Woodstock, I'll spare you any more hippie blather (but man, that young Dylan could write a song; how in the hell did he turn into a gnarly tuneless old pseudo-blues grump?): now tomorrow's here and the full magnitude, the full excellence of yesterday's today begins to dawn on us.

Ironically - tragically, even, though not perhaps for those of us wishing to do something else with the next 72 or so hours of our lives - the PPMB, where the Fest would normally be being hashed and rehashed until readers' eyes bled, has crashed, possibly in response to everyone's simultaneous attempts to post their favorite photos, videos and recollections, along with the annual fevered debate over who "won" the Fest. So although I don't have much in the way of photos or videos, I'll have to settle that question for you here.

The answer, of course, is that we all won, the only losers being those who couldn't, due to obligations or financial hardship, or wouldn't, due to sheer oblivious bloody-mindedness, make it to Baltimore. But I said no more hippie blather, and I almost meant it, so here's a few of the high points; apart from my illness, I don't think there were any lows, though some of the walking wounded I saw staggering away late Saturday night may feel differently.

Thursday night undeniably belonged to The Max Levine Ensemble, whose Weasel-skewering antics won over even that portion of the crowd that was completely unaware of the band's feud with/vendetta against the Godfather of Pop-Punk himself. The background is that sometime last year, Mr. Weasel, apparently in response to hearing me praise TMLE so highly, checked them out and found them, shall we say, not to his liking. Among his more colorful remarks, delivered on his popular Weasel Radio broadcast, was, "If this band was a horse, I'd take it out and shoot it."

Most of us working in the genre would be, at the least, crestfallen at being so definitively damned by one of our idols, but the Max Levine boys managed to recover sufficiently from their depression to kick off their appearance on the Ottobar stage with a deadly medley of Screeching Weasel classics ("Hey Suburbia", "Cool Kids", and "I Wanna Be A Homosexual") that, despite the TMLE's being only a three-piece (OG Weasel had four members), managed to capture almost perfectly the sound and spirit of the Weasels' late-80s/early 90s heyday. They followed that up with the announcement of their "split single" with Ben Weasel, the cover of which featured a cartoon rendition of the Weaselmeister himself sporting an "I heart Max Levine" t-shirt. "Are we gonna get sued?" they wondered privately, but considering that the net worth of the band would barely pay for pressing up 300 copies of the limited edition 7", probably not.

TMLE were followed immediately by their brother band Delay, and at the close of Delay's set came back to join them for a finale that, even though both bands are firmly rooted in the 21st century stripped-down DIY punk rock mode, could teach a thing or three to the 1970s Dinosaurs of Rock generation about how to put on an arena show. If the Fest had ended Thursday night, it would have been Max Delay FTW hands down and no questions asked.

But technically speaking, that was only the "pre-show," and about 25 hours and 75 bands still lay ahead. Friday belonged to the Steinways and the Copyrights from what I saw, but an awful lot of people whose opinions I trust swear it was the Dopamines who ruled the day, if not the entire Fest (this was one of the many moments I missed due to my tragic illness). I had to drag myself back from my deathbed just before the Steinways to do my own turn on stage with SUCIDIE, during which Matt Lame's eyes bulged out further than ever before seen in public (see the photographic evidence here) and I managed to sing an old Lookouts song without falling over, dropping my guitar, or having a nervous breakdown, all of which could be expected to happen when I actually was in the Lookouts.

By Saturday I was mostly recovered, thankfully, because this was the day that really delivered the goods. I mean, nothing, really nothing could be said to have gone wrong with that day, the bands kept getting better and better, and I witnessed some performances that I'm pretty sure will be emblazoned on my memory till the day I die. Dear Landlord set the bar pretty high early on, but then came the Leftovers, four-Fest veterans who spanned at least four generations in their 60s-meet-the-2000s rock and roll sweatfest-cum-tent-show-revival. I first saw these kids when they were skipping school to come down and play house shows in New York and marveling at the wonders of Ikea ("We don't have anything like that up in Maine"); now, at 21 or 22 frontman Kurt Baker can work a room with the likes of James Brown up in heaven. I went crazy. Everybody did.

That should have been it, with the rest of the Fest being anticlimax, but then I walked in on the Kepi show. This longtime Ghoulie, now solo and/or with-whatever-band happens-to-turn-up act has been getting better and better these past couple years, but Saturday night was just completely sublime and transcendent, closing with about half a dozen (maybe it was a whole dozen) guest artists joining in for a finale that collapsed time and broke down all the barriers. I was laughing, I was crying, I was dancing like crazy: these are the moments when you not only want to live forever, but see no plausible reason why you can't. Kepi FTW. I don't think any further discussion is necessary or possible.

Not that there wouldn't be hours more of brilliance to come, and if I had hours more to write about it, I'd say tons more. But we're here visiting in Washington for the day, and Jackson and I want to get out and see stuff, so let me just quickly mention a few other highlights, like Squirtgun's cover of "The Science of Myth" featuring several former Weasels and at least one present-day one, Pansy Division doing a straight-up rock set that completely won over the pop-punkers, the Methadones doing one of their best sets ever, Lost Locker Combo with pushbrooms cleaning up their own mess before the club could even notice it was there, Sick Sick Burgers, my nephew and Tre Uncool (both at their first Fest ever) attacking and thrashing Matt Lame, the parking lot congregation that seems to be one of the best parts of every Fest, and one of my personal favorites: Paddy from Dillinger 4, with whom I've exchanged a few less than flattering words, seeking me out after the Fest to mend fences, bury the hatchet, and in general comport himself like the gentleman I should never have doubted he was. Prince of a fellow. Okay, that's it for now; I'm off to see the nation's capital. If you want to see DeutschMarc's incredible gallery of FestFotos, look here. Have a great day!

Fest '09

2009-06-28T23:04:00.002-04:00

Photo courtesy of A. McGee

The Last Fest?

2009-06-27T11:01:00.005-04:00

Admittedly it wasn't the best of planning, but my nephew really wanted to go to England, and the only time available was right before the Fest. Time was still so tight that I arranged for us to have only a few hours between arriving back in New York and setting off for Baltimore. No great strain for a 13 year old, apparently, but a little more hectic than I might have liked.

Still, it shouldn't have been a problem - there were at least a few hours available for rest in between Fest activities - except that I seemed to have picked up some sort of bug in England - well, Wales, to be specific - that followed me home. Or perhaps it was food poisoning, which I'd prefer, since I'd hate to think I infected any of the hundreds of people I've come in contact with these past two days with some version of Limey Flu.

But whatever the cause, the result was that I was unable to keep any food down or get much in the way of sleep for three days, and when I took my first steps out into the blast furnace heat of midsummer Baltimore, I might as well have asked the powers that be to take a cosmic sledge hammer to my midsection.

Thankfully, most of this town is air conditioned, the Fest venues included, so I was able to maintain some equilibrium - if only just. And if I were here to quietly spectate from a comfortable bench at the back of the room, I should have been fine.

But the Fest, more than being one of the biggest pop punk/punk rock/rock and roll shows of the year, is also kind of like an annual convention for the fans, musicians, scenesters, makers and shakers of the genre, and it's virtually impossible to shake the proverbial stick, let alone walk 20 feet in downtown Baltimore without banging into someone or several someones who need to be met and gret (?!) with an appropriate degree of enthusiasm.

And let's face it: as much as I love these people, it required a real effort on my part to show any evidence of it. Usually at these events I'm jumping around like a hyperactive monkey, shouting encouraging if sometimes nonsensical words at everyone I encounter, but for the first two days it was all I could do to manage a weak, "Good to see you! Me? Oh, I'm all right."

Even that wouldn't have been unmanageable, but greater duties loomed: in a fit of madness I'd accepted the responsibilities as second guitarist and vocalist for the hardcore combo SUCIDIE, scheduled to play a fast and furious eight minute set on the main stage in what was arguably the primest of prime time Friday night slots, just before Fest favorites, the Steinways.

Thanks to SUCIDIE's leader and resident genius MATT FAME living in another state, we were only able to practice his intricate musical compositions twice in advance of the show, once in May and once in early June. Of course we could also practice on our own, but I wasn't able - okay, wasn't willing - to haul a guitar around England and Wales with me, so during the last couple weeks before the show, I hadn't had a chance even to run quickly through the set list.

I figured I could make up for that by practicing by myself the night before leaving for Baltimore, and then with the band on Friday morning, but neither proved feasible, and I found myself, as showtime approached, feeling much like the student who has recurring dreams of showing up for an exam only to realize that he's totally forgotten to read the book the exam is based on. Oh, and that he's also managed to come to school completely naked.

I was even having trouble with the one song that I'd written myself, albeit some 21 years ago. My illness had left me not just physically weak, but mentally deficient, to the point where, even if I could remember what the chords were and where they were located, my brain couldn't get a message to my fingers fast enough to find them. It was a little like what I've always imagined senility would be.

I ended up having to miss most of the afternoon's bands in an effort to get some rest (I'd barely slept at all the night before), and when I showed up back at the venue with my borrowed black and gold GPC Weaselrite guitar in tow, I was far from ready to take the stage. In fact, what little brain activity I was capable of was mainly directed at figuring a way out of this. For instance, when Pansy Division broke the kick drum and a 10-minute delay was announced, I volunteered that by giving up our slot, we could put the show back on schedule.

No such luck, however, and anyway, by that point I'd become a little charged up, both from the Copyrights' exceedingly powerful set and from being repeatedly attacked by a youth coalition consisting of my nephew and (almost) 10 year old Tre Uncool teaming up to try and knock me to the floor (they never succeeded). So I did my duty, jumped on stage, bounced around, grinned probably a bit too much, at least for a hardcore band, and only made two or three flagrant mistakes (actually, it might have been someone else making some of them). It was, after all, as people kept pointing out, "only eight minutes."

We didn't get a resounding ovation, but neither did we get booed off stage. The only blatantly acerbic reaction came from Jon Pansy Division, who greeted me with, "Whose idea was THAT?" I refrained from pointing out that we had headlined over his band.

Then it was into the pit for the Steinways' Last Show Ever, and it was here that it all caught up with me. The adrenaline was still coursing through my system, and being further amped up by the band and the crowd, but by the time the set was halfway through, I had to retreat to the sidelines. I genuinely felt in danger of collapsing, and though my heart ached as I saw all my friends still thrashing like mad to the final strains of "Carrie Goldberg", I wasn't about to try to make my way back into the frenzied throng.

It was then that I thought, "Maybe I finally am getting a bit too old for all this." I mean, in principle, sure, I could keep coming to this for quite a few years to come, even if only in a diminished capacity, but wouldn't I rather go out in a blaze of glory (by which, no, I don't mean dying of a heart attack in the middle of the pit)? The chances of getting asked again to play on the main stage are at best minimal, and I've already been dubbed "Mr. Fest" and "the mayor of Fest-town," so maybe now would be the time to bow out gracefully, to retreat to my rocking chair and internet message boards.

Well, maybe. Today I feel considerably better; I've been able to eat two meals, one late last night and one this morning, without unfortunate results, and a whole day of Festing still lies ahead. I'm sitting here in my shorts and my classic sleeveless Crimpshrine shirt, getting ready to rock out to, let's count them, 42 (?!?!) bands between now and sometime after midnight, and I don't feel that overly daunted by the prospect. Maybe I've got another Fest or three in me after all!

What Else Was He Going To Do For An Encore?

2009-06-27T00:53:00.002-04:00

Though I was never a huge fan of the man or his music, there's no denying that Michael Jackson was prodigiously talented, and if I didn't enjoy his classic work as much as a few hundred million others did, that's probably more a matter of my having spent the 80s rather monomaniacally wrapped up in punk rock than with any shortcoming on his part.

Still, by the time he passed away this week, even the most charitable apologist would have to acknowledge that his best days as a performer and/or recording artist were far behind him. That's sad in itself, since under the right circumstances - the right circumstances being his not turning into a circus freak - he could have carried on for many more years. A bit of the spring might have gone out of his dance steps, but it could have been more than made up for by the experience and wisdom gained from a life well lived.

That didn't seem to happen, either, though it's also dangerous to make assumptions about people whose only presence in our lives is via the media. But in this case, one could make an exception, because, based on all available evidence, there doesn't seem to have been much to Michael Jackson beyond a media image.

That's an unhappy thing to say about someone recently deceased, and I'm not even sure why I felt compelled to say it, except that his life and death seems like such a valuable object lesson into not just the cult of modern American celebrity, but also the dangers of choosing an insular and self-absorbed existence just because you're able to. You don't have to be famous or fabulously successful to do this, either, but if the unfortunate death and even more unfortunate life of Michael Jackson teaches us anything, it's that no matter how rich you are, you can't afford it.

I've been on TV a couple times and had some stuff written about me in magazines and newspapers; even that minimal level of "fame" made it evident how quickly one's view of oneself and objective reality can be distended and distorted by the looking glass eye of a voyeuristic world. When I was a young hippie on acid, I would sometimes spend hours staring into a mirror watching myself morph into unrecognizable shapes and personas at the rate of millions per millisecond, simultaneously believing myself to be in possession of infinite creative power and wondering why, with the entire universe seemingly at my feet, I still felt so terribly, ineluctably lonely.

Is that anything what Michael Jackson might have felt like in his declining years? If, in the face of what may have been chronic drug abuse, he felt much at all, I'm guessing yes. One report has him being regularly injected with the powerful synthetic narcotic Demerol. I was given that stuff once, in a hospital emergency room, and it was just awful. Yes, it's effective at temporarily taking away the pain, but it takes everything else with it. If you're familiar with the Harry Potter books, think of the Dementors, who suck all the hope and joy out of life. Yeah, it's like that. If I were having my leg amputated, I could see where something like Demerol could come in handy. But to live like that on a daily basis? You could forgive somebody for asking, "Why bother?"

That, ultimately, may well be what happened to Michael Jackson. 20 years ago he was the most famous and possibly one of the richest performers in the history of show business; everything since then has involved a sometimes slow, sometimes precipitous decline. Some people, especially those who've had to struggle with the conventional vicissitudes of life, can adjust and even thrive in the face of diminished circumstances, but to others it's a fate worse than death itself.

Face it, the man was never going to recapture more than a modicum of the brilliance he once possessed as a performer, and if he was as doped up as current rumor has it, his attempt at a comeback would have more likely become a study in unrivaled bathos. What else was he supposed to do? Someone possessing normal social skills and moral perspective might have downsized, given up the trappings (and isolation) of megastardom in favor of the simple joys of family and friends. But Michael Jackson, whether through his own poor choices or - more likely - the misguidance of the sycophants and leeches who inevitably attempt to attach themselves to any star, no longer seemed to have that choice. That being the case, his death, even at the relatively premature age of 50, probably comes as a blessing, not only for the man himself, but for his children, who might still be young enough to have a chance at a normal life.

Harsh words? Perhaps, but they needed to be said. I've made - perhaps most of us have - some of the same mistakes, albeit on a far smaller scale, and I've also known the kind of loneliness and depression where my only desire was to die. Thankfully life is not like that for me anymore, and hasn't been for quite a while. Michael Jackson, it seems, was not so fortunate.

I don't rejoice in his death, but neither is there much to mourn in this passing. He was, in Claude Brown's phrase, a manchild in the promised land, perpetually hamstrung between youth and senescence, capable of manifesting all and touching or enjoying none of it. May his soul finally find some rest, and those he has left behind, some joy and some peace.

Green Day And Wal-mart: "There's Nothing Dirty About Our Record"

2009-05-22T11:52:00.002-04:00

News that Wal-mart has been using its immense commercial power in an attempt to influence or control popular culture shouldn't come as a shock; the giant retail chain has been doing that all along. Nor should it come as a surprise that Green Day feel confident enough in their ability to move copies of their new album that they can afford to tell Wal-mart to go do something unprintable with themselves.

While I commend Green Day for sticking to their guns and insisting that their album be sold as it was intended to be heard, I don't go along with the notion that Wal-mart has some sort of obligation to sell records that deviate from their company policy. No matter how big and powerful they are, after all, they're still a private business, and as such, it's their privilege to sell or not sell whatever products they want. It's a shame that many people who live in the American hinterlands where Wal-mart is often the only record shopping option will have greater difficulty obtaining the new record, but hey, that's why God invented the internet.

No, what really bugs me about this brouhaha is the notion that somehow there is something wrong or obscene about Green Day's record whereas Wal-mart is, while perhaps a little old-fashioned, merely acting as the guardian of "decent" American values. Singer Billie Joe Armstrong put it best: "There's nothing dirty about our record," despite Wal-mart's attempts to brand it as such.

What exactly is wrong with 21st Century Breakdown in Wal-mart's view? Presumably, it's that it uses vulgar language, i.e., swear words, i.e., the exact same language that practically every American - no, wait, every human being - including, most likely, Wal-mart executives, uses from time to time. Swearing may not always be the most elegant or effective use of language, but it's nearly universal and sometimes the most powerful if not the only way to get a certain point of view across. To pretend otherwise is either blinkered or hypocritical.

America has a funny relationship with language: while most modern countries have little problem television programs or movies that portray people talking and acting as they normally talk and act, in this country a broadcaster can be removed from the airwaves or forced out of business by enormous fines for letting an errant expletive or nipple be heard or seen by the public. Yet most of those same countries would never dream of routinely executing criminals or allowing poor people to die for want of health insurance. Different strokes, you might say, but which, if any, is the greater obscenity?

I might be a bit more sympathetic to Wal-mart if their lyrical oversight were limited to those records - and there are quite a few - that promote or glorify violence or sexism or rape - but Green Day records don't even remotely fit that description. The sole objection to their content is that they use real language to talk about real feelings and situations. Some of their punk rock fans might bristle at the description, but it's art, just as surely as anything that hangs on the walls of a museum, and any attempt to bowdlerize the lyrical content is just as stupid as those religious fanatics who at one time insisted on fig leaves being placed over the "dirty" bits of classic paintings.

No, if anyone involved in this controversy is obscene - and I use that word in its true sense (from the dictionary: "disgusting to the senses, abhorrent to morality or virtue"), it's Wal-mart itself. This is a company that has laid waste to the economies and cultures of hundreds, if not thousands of American towns, forcing long-established local businesses into bankruptcy, turning downtowns into dead zones and promoting a suburban-sprawl, automobile-based design model that has littered the landscape surrounding nearly every town with mile upon mile of garish neon strip malls and fast food franchises.

No, of course Wal-mart is not solely responsible for this development, but its entire business model is one that promotes its continued spread. If, instead of its big box stores surrounded by hundreds of acres of parking, Wal-mart would locate new stores in the heart of town, accessible on foot and by public transit, it could single-handedly revitalize many moribund cities, but because that might slightly diminish profit margins, executives continue to insist on gobbling up farmland, creating endless traffic nightmares, and perpetuating the way of life that virtually guarantees continued oil shortages (and the wars that they provoke), destruction of the environment, and disastrous climate change. Compare that to a punk rocker saying a naughty word on a record and then tell me who's the real dirty bastard here.

I don't even need to get into the devastating effect Wal-mart's horribly hypocritical and phony "Buy American" policies have had on our economy; suffice it to say that by "Buy American," Wal-mart means, "Spend your money in our stores." They certainly don't mean it to apply to themselves, since even a cursory examination will reveal that almost everything Wal-mart sells is made in China or some other developing country. Yes, it produces cheap prices for the American consumer, but simultaneously destroys the industries that used to employ those consumers. Obscene, disgusting, or just not very nice? Do you think the guy who has been outsourced out of a job and can't earn a living wage or provide health insurance for his family is more upset about that, or the fact that Billie Joe said a "bad" word on a record album?

Perspective, people, perspective! We got the same crap that Wal-mart is dishing out all through the Bush years: obsessive concern with private morality, riling up the rubes over stem cells or birth control, while at the same time destroying our economy, waging idiotic and mindlessly destructive wars, and giving bankers and corporate executives carte blanche to loot our wealth and resources on a scale probably unprecedented in history. Oh, but at least our precious little children didn't hear anybody say "shit" on TV. No, for that they'd have to walk into the next room where Daddy is looking at his unpaid credit card bills, reading his pink slip, or just watching the home team blow another lead. As Yakov Smirnoff used to say, what a country!

Maybe The Best Show I've Ever Seen

2009-05-21T00:48:00.003-04:00

Not words to be tossed around lightly, especially by someone who's been going to shows for almost 45 years now, and has been lucky enough to see, oh, just for starters, the Supremes, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, the Ramones, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Dead Kennedys, Avengers, the Stooges, the MC5, Alice Cooper, Operation Ivy, Screeching Weasel and dozens - hell, probably hundreds - more, either in their prime or when they were just starting out, or both.

But having arrived home a couple hours ago from seeing Green Day at Webster Hall and still unable to sleep because of the sheer euphoria of it all, I may just have to elevate this show from my top 5 right into the all-time best show ever spot. I'd thought last night at the Bowery Ballroom was as spectacular as I was likely to see in a relatively small club, and indeed, Billie had told me ahead of time that the Bowery show was the one to watch if I had to pick one or the other.

But this time his normally unerring show business instincts weren't as finely attuned as usual, because as good at the Bowery show was, Webster Hall blew it right out of the water. It might have been the superior sound system, or the bigger, more enthusiastic crowd, or the set list that expanded just enough to allow room for a couple more classics from the early days, but whatever it was, the Green Day that we saw Tuesday night was Green Day at their absolute finest, and I think it's been pretty well established by now that it doesn't get much better than that.

A couple purists - well, Grumpy Chris Grivet, for one - were complaining that the crowd didn't get sufficiently excited when the band dug into their back - way back - catalog for such Lookout-era gems as "At The Library" and "80", but I don't know what he expected; although the audience was almost elderly by Green Day standards - average age might have been late 20s/early 30s - most of them were still children when those records were released. This was a Dookie/American Idiot generation, and naturally songs from those albums got the biggest response (still no "Holiday", however, darn it!).

But there was plenty of singing along to the brand new songs from 21st Century Breakdown, despite their only having officially been released four days earlier. A couple more weeks and they'll already be classics, as was more or less predicted in this very space a week or two ago!

I didn't stick around nearly as long at the requisite after-party as I'd done the night before, partly because I was tired, partly because this "party" was mostly a bunch of people standing around (and two or three, including, most notably, Brooklyn's own Jackie O. and Cristy Road, doing some crazy dancing). There was also the usual open bar, but to a non-drinker like myself, that rates little more than a big meh (except of course that it ensures plenty of sloppy drunks to keep me entertained and amused).

Even more so, though, I was pretty exhausted by the time the show was over - a good kind of exhaustion, I should note, the kind that comes from total physical and emotional involvement... Oh, wait, all I did was watch; it was the band who did the total physical and emotional thing, and came off stage practically glowing with the knowledge that the night had been one of those very rare and special ones.

It might have had at least something to do with the fact that keyboardist/saxophonist/accordionist/vocalist Jason Freese had received the news just before showtime that he was a father; on Monday night he was practically beside himself with worry because his wife had gone into labor, but on Tuesday, the worry was replaced by a beatific smile and a performance that had jaws dropping even among his bandmates.

But most of all, I think, it was just one of those nights when everything gelled. The band was relaxed without being sloppy, adventurous without overextending themselves, finding the perfect middle ground between promoting the new record and having a great time with a bunch of old friends. One of the many images that will stay with me was that of Billie, having borrowed a pair of outsized pink sunglasses from an audience member ("What, you're from Oklahoma? My mom's from Oklahoma!") and wrapped a white silk scarf (no idea where that came from) around his neck that left him looking like Snoopy vs. the Red Baron by way of Edith Piaf. I really do hope there's video of that somewhere out on the interweb.

Although they'll still be in town for a couple more days, it was the last I'll see of Green Day for a while, as I'm headed out to the seaside first thing in the morning. Those of you in the New York area still have a chance to see them play, provided you're willing to get up early enough (or stay up late enough) to be in Central Park by 6 am Friday when they'll be performing for Good Morning America. I know I promised to find out whether they would be playing a full set or just a song or two, but, well, I forgot. My offhand guess is that while only one or two songs will be broadcast, they'll probably play more than that. Sue me if I'm wrong. Anyway, it's supposed to be a beautiful, warm, early summer morning, so it'll do you good to be out in the park regardless.

There will also be appearances on the Letterman and Colbert shows, so don't come crying to me if you end up not seeing Green Day at all, because if you didn't, you weren't even half trying. And with that I'll bid adieu to a pretty amazing week, in which I learned what it's like to be, as it were, king for a day. Okay, maybe not king, but at least a fairly advanced prince. It's really fascinating to see how life operates inside the inner circle: I'm tempted to say I could get used to that kind of treatment, but I'm note sure I could. It's great for a few days, but I seriously have to wonder if I would like it if my life were like that all the time, or at least all the time that I was on tour.

On the plus side, you get to eat and drink very well, attend all the best parties, and meet some truly fascinating people (more than I could possibly list here, but some of my favorites were Bob Gruen, who's been photographing rock royalty for more than 40 years, and Tony-winning director Michael Mayer, whose next big project is the stage version of American Idiot, premiering in Berkeley this September. And set designer (and crazy dancer) Christine and musical arranger Carmel, both awesome!). On the not so plus side, it's difficult to step outside the bubble without people swarming on you demanding, well, just about anything. There was a tense moment on the Lower East Side Monday night when some autograph-hunters who were clearly in it for the money rather than love of the band got kind of abusive when they didn't get what they wanted. And as pleasant and fun as it is hanging out every night with what ultimately feels like a great big extended family, I wonder if sometimes you wouldn't wish that you could just go hop on the subway or wander around the East Village like a regular person.

Well, I don't know. We all make accommodations to suit the demands of our particular jobs or lifestyles, and despite its various drawbacks, there are probably worse jobs to be had than that of rock star. I will say that Billie, Mike and Tre seem to be having every bit as much fun - albeit of a slightly different nature - as they did back in the days of driving around the country in a rattletrap old van and playing any basement, garage, two-bit bar or living room that presented itself. And anyway, it's not as though they could easily resign their positions: as long as they keep making the best music of their lives, fame and fortune are going to keep piling on, invited or not. It's a tough job, but they seem to be handling it better than anyone else I know could.

Shoutouts also to Jason White, who I've known almost as long as the Big Three, and Jeff Matika, who I just met. This is Jeff's first tour with Green Day, and he represents the latest in a long line of Little Rock-East Bay connections. I drove through that town in 1970, liked it so much that I swore I'd come back one day for a proper visit, and never have. If nothing else, I'd like to find out why everyone I've ever met from there seems so goshdarned nice. Well, almost everyone. I'm still not completely sure about that Bill Clinton guy.

Okay, bedtime now, and I realize that even though I'm having my first quiet night at home in a while, it's late enough that I could have just as well been at another after-show party instead of sitting in this quiet room with only the clack-clack of the computer keys keeping me company. But that's just how it should be; writing is this thing I do, and even though it's frequently a great big pain in the ass (I imagine some of you have similar feelings about having to read it), if I don't do it, I get pretty crazy. So that's it for now. As soon as the sun comes up, I'm off to the beach.

Small, Rabbitlike, Eyelinered

2009-05-19T16:52:00.002-04:00

That's what the critic from the New York Times had to say about Billie Joe Armstrong, who last night led Green Day through a triumphant return to New York City in the more or less intimate surroundings of the Bowery Ballroom. My first reaction on reading that description was to say, "Oh, good, I'm going to torment Billie mercilessly about being rabbitlike," until I remembered that I had turned over a new leaf after my bad behavior with Tre on Saturday (I apologized profusely, because I really did feel bad about it) and was not going to tease people anymore, even when they deserved it, which Billie, after his stunning performance of last night, certainly does not.

On top of that, I recalled that there was a period in my own life when I was frequently described as resembling a rabbit, not that this has anything at all to do with the subject at hand, but when did I ever let that stop me? It was in the 60s, when I somehow emerged as the first among equals (I think because I had the biggest mouth and was the least incoherent) in this particularly demented and vaguely Mansonian (fortunately for the local villagers, our pursuits ran more along the lines of sex, drugs, and deconstructing the latest Donovan album than the ritual slaughter and evisceration of the bourgeoisie) Midwestern hippie commune.

Having remarked often enough on my alleged leporinity (okay, rabbit-ness), my colleagues took it upon themselves to cut out a picture of a rabbit and paste it above my bed (okay, my mat and/or pile of rags) with the legend, "Our Leader." As it happened, however, they were so stoned that all they could come up with was a National Geographic photo of a kangaroo. And if you can see where I'm going with this, you have a more incisive mind than I.

Oh yes, the Bowery Ballroom. Well, as it happens, I was fortunate enough to be there (my first full-fledged Green Day show in almost five years!), and if this is any indication of what the summer tour is going to be like, audiences have something pretty spectacular to look forward to. It's not always easy to extrapolate from a club-sized show to an arena or stadium-sized one, and it's also quite challenging to shrink the sound and performance geared to Madison Square Garden into a 550-capacity Lower East Side club, but apart from a few mid-show glitches with the guitar sound, the band and their astonishingly adept crew pulled it off seamlessly.

For the first 10 or 15 minutes and the last 20 or 25 minutes I'm just about prepared to say it was the best show I've ever seen (some competitors for that title: the Supremes at the Michigan State Fair in 1965, the GoGos in San Francisco in 1980, and the Ramones at UC's Pauley Ballroom that same year). In fact, about 10 minutes in I loudly declared that to be fact, which might have been premature, since one of the most vital criteria for "best show ever" is that all through the show there's never a doubt in your mind, not even for a millisecond, that what you are witnessing/participating in is perfection itself. Never once do you stop to think, "I wonder how much longer they're going to play," or "Oh, I wish they'd play such-and-such song instead of this one."

And while Green Day never played any songs I didn't want to hear, I could compile a substantial list of the songs I wish they did. I know, hideously ungrateful of me, especially since they'd already torn through a dazzling set that would have left most bands gasping for air by the midway point. The trouble is that when you've been a band for as long as Green Day have (21 years, as Billie proudly pointed out), and have written so many of outstanding songs, it's just not possible to play them all in one show.

That's what the more reasonable part of me says. The unreasonable part says, yeah, but if only I could have heard "Holiday", "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams", "Whatshername", and maybe a couple more from "the old days." But hey, we did get to hear "Going to Pasalacqua" (!), (and with a personal dedication to me, no less; if I hadn't been so startled, I would have been able to scream a lot louder), "Who Wrote Holden Caulfield?", and "Dominated Love Slave". "No!" I shouted "Don't let him play guitar," thinking back to Lookouts practices when Tre would abandon his drums and start jamming on my guitar the minute I left it unguarded. When Billie had to remind Tre of how the chords went, the girl next to me said, "I see what you mean," but actually, I had to admit to her, Tre's a very good guitarist. Probably better than me, which was the real reason I didn't like him playing mine.

Oof. There's much more to tell, but I've got to be off to the city. Here, read Bill Moon's review on the PPMB for the set list and some further mostly cogent ravings about how awesome it all was, and I'll be back later with (hopefully) some more stories about last night's show and maybe tonight's as well.

Saturday Night Live

2009-05-17T15:31:00.003-04:00

Most of you who have mothers have probably at one time or another heard some version of "Wear clean underwear because you never know when you might get hit by a car and taken to the hospital." I can't remember if my mother also told me about not letting the laundry pile up because you never know when you might need clean clothes, but if she didn't, she should have. When I got back from London last week (who am I kidding, it's getting closer to two weeks now), it was my intention to go down to the laundromat my first night back, but being pleasantly surprised to find several clean t-shirts and an extra pair of jeans in my dresser drawer, I decided it could wait.

The result being that when I unexpectedly got an invitation to come watch Green Day appearing on Saturday Night Live, I had almost nothing to wear except some ratty old things that made me look even more than usual like some bewildered tramp who'd wandered in off the street. If I'd only been sitting in the audience, this wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world (and, on reflection, it's still pretty far from the worst thing in the world regardless of how you slice it), but as it happened, I spent most of the night backstage, cheek-by-jowl with more TV and movie stars than I could shake a stick at (or name, for that matter; I kept having encounters with people where'd I'd be like, "Oh yeah, it's that wacky guy from Forgetting Sarah Marshall), but even weirder was running into people who seemed so familiar that I was sure I'd known them half my life before realizing that while I had indeed known them half my life, it was from the movies, not real life.

Which is better than I did with Tom Hanks: standing right next to him and didn't even recognize him. Wait, it gets worse: I didn't even realize he was there, let alone on the show, until someone else mentioned having a conversation with him. At least I recognized Will Ferrell, but then I must have seen a dozen of his films and I'll admit I'm kind of a fan. Did I meet him? No, not really, but he came bounding into Green Day's dressing room (his was next door) after the show to discuss the song he'd jammed on with the band (more about that in a minute), and then a bit later reappeared wearing a rather astounding two-piece orange velour lounging suit that in color and texture was straight out of a 70s blaxploitation flick and munching on a banana. He easily got the award for most costume changes over the course of the evening, and that's without counting the show itself.

Speaking of which: not only was it the first time I'd ever visited an SNL broadcast; it was also the first time I'd even watched it in quite a few years (nothing against it, just that I'm usually out on Saturday nights, and then there were the 10 years I spent in England where, if it was shown at all, was generally only in reruns). So I was pretty unaware as to who most of the cast members were, and many of the in jokes sailed right over my head. But most of it seemed pretty hilarious to me, and SNL connoisseurs seemed to concur that it was an especially good episode, particularly in terms of Will Ferrell's contribution.

Having the best band in the world (sorry if you disagree, but I'm sticking with it) as musical guests couldn't have hurt, either, and it was only when Billie started strumming his acoustic guitar during the rehearsal of "21 Guns" that I realized just how long it had been since I'd seen the band close up in a small room (the SNL studio is not even as big as many bars and clubs where I've watched bands play), which was exciting enough, but when the whole band kicked in with sound quality that would have been at home in an enormous arena, it gave me shivers. I must have seen Green Day, oh, I don't know, 100 times? Probably more than that, but most of them were many years ago, often in basements or backyards where pro sound quality - or any sound quality - was, shall we say, not the first priority. If it was even an issue at all. Hey, there were shows where the entire production crew was yours truly, in that I plugged their microphones into my Peavey 600 Mixer and cranked it as loud as it would go without feeding back.

Today they have production values that are as good as if not better than any band in the world - no, more than that, that are simply breathtaking, and that's before you even get to the music itself. On one hand it's staggering to see how far they've come these past couple decades - I continue to maintain that they're making the best music of their career right now - but backstage, you can sometimes forget that anything has changed at all: the goofing around, the jokes, the conversations that spin from silly to deadly serious and back again in the blink of an eyelid could make you think 1989 never went away at all.

Or maybe it's just me. Especially with Tre, who I've known seven years longer than Billie and Mike, i.e., since he was a small child - I'm likely to regress to old behavior, and at one point - I feel really bad about this now - I started picking on him by making fun of a painting he'd bought and which he was very proud of. He got me back pretty good, however, by accusing me of "blogging with 12 year olds," and though I'd swear at least some of you reading this are a bit older, I didn't have a decent comeback. I thought of a couple good ones once I got home; isn't that always the way it is? On the other hand, at a party the night before, Tre kept trying to wrestle me and I'm pleased to report that after all this time, and with me only a few years away from Social Security, he STILL can't take me down. And he's got some serious muscles now, folks. I assumed he must have been hitting the gym, but he swears he never sets foot in one. It's all just from drumming, but from the way he hits (the drums, not me), it shouldn't be surprising.

I got to the NBC studios when the pre-show rehearsal was about halfway through, and we watched that on a TV monitor in the dressing room, except for when Green Day played, when we went out into the studio and watched from the side of the stage. Then when the actual show started, I, along with the WAGS (English football-speak for "Wives And Girlfriends") went up into the balcony to watch. They weren't ideal seats, but at least they were seats; next to us a huge knot of celebrities, including what looked like half the cast of 30 Rock, had to stand for the whole show.

It was surprising how much of the show was cut out or changed between the rehearsal and the actual broadcast. The swear words, for example, but one thing I wished they'd kept was Amy Poeler and Seth Myers trading (well, actually it was mostly Amy) Chewbacca imitations during the Weekend Update. And the part where Green Day joined in on the Saigon singalong was thrown in at the last minute and hadn't been rehearsed at all.

But possibly the very best segment of the whole show came after the finale and was not broadcast at all: Green Day came back out and played two more songs, "She" and "East Jesus Nowhere." A minute or so into EJN, Will Ferrell suddenly appeared on stage banging on a cowbell (in reasonably good time with the music, it must be said), and generally hamming it up to hilarious effect. At first the band were kind of unsure what was going on, but then they rolled with it, even when Ferrell took up a position behind Billie for a shameless bit of monkey-faced mugging that while putting the audience in danger of falling out of their chairs with laughter, somehow didn't detract from the song at all.

When the song went into a kind of breakdown, Ferrell was temporarily at a loss for what to do, since there was no clear cut rhythm to bang his cowbell to, but he recovered any lost aplomb and then some when the band went back into the power finale by sticking his head in front of Billie at the microphone and inquiring loudly, "Is this song still going on?"

After it was all over, the party started, and I'm not just talking some little intimate encounter where the cast sits around and hashes over the episode concluded, but some pretty glitzy do (recession? not here?) for one or two thousand people on the ground floor of the building and spilling out into what I just now realized was the Rockefeller Center ice rink (which explains all those puddles of water I found myself wading through). But mostly we just sat and talked about, well, stuff, until I realized it was getting on toward 4 am. I hopped aboard my pumpkin to Brooklyn, in the form of the F and the L trains, and returned to normal life, or at least the life where my shabby old clothes would fit right in. That being said, I swear I'm doing laundry tonight, and maybe even finally breaking down and buying a new jacket. Just in case, because as Mom may or should have said, you never know.

Attention All Geeks

2009-05-15T12:55:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, but like most things I think about, it never quite got done. This particular project involves developing a full-fledged website instead of just a blog, where I could host not only these occasional words of wisdom (or words of occasional wisdom), but also a selection of my past writing (columns from MRR, Punk Planet, Lookout, Zippo, Cometbus, Homocore, etc.), music and photos.

I've got the domain name, I even bought a couple books about how to write html and build websites, etc., but this has been dragging on for years now and either I'm just too thick or too lazy (or both and more) to make any progress. So, I'm putting out the call for anyone who might be interested in helping me get this thing up and going. Preferably it would be someone in the New York City area, and someone with some patience, since I'm not always the brightest guy in the room when it comes to understanding technical stuff. Although once I figure it out, I'm usually pretty good at building on that knowledge, so basically all I'm asking is that you get me started and show me how to upload new items, and I think from then on I'd probably be all right on my own. Together we could make internet history! Or pile a few more bundles of drivel onto the great sprawling heap of banality that is the Worldwide Web (do people still call it that? I was going to make an information superhighway traffic jam metaphor, but that seemed even more dated). Oh yeah, Web 2.0, that's the ticket, whatever it is. We'll be, like, interactive! Let me know if you think you might be able to help. Thanks!

Band Practice!

2009-05-15T12:15:00.003-04:00

It's been a long time - way too long, I realize now - since I could write about band practice. But this past Sunday all the current members of SUCIDIE got together for the first time in a tastefully appointed (well, you should see some of the places I'm used to practicing in!) rehearsal studio in Astoria to prepare for our appearance at Baltimore's Insubordination Fest next month.

I'm actually pretty serious about the studio being a nice place. It was clean, for starters, which right away sets it apart from nearly every rehearsal studio I've set foot in. Most of my practice days were spent in this dive on 19th or 20th Street in downtown Oakland. It's not that the place didn't have some ambiance and history - practically all the East Bay bands practiced there at one time or another. Actually, I'm not sure if Green Day ever did, but Operation Ivy, Crimpshrine... I don't even want to start naming bands because I'll leave somebody out or claim someone who wasn't really there. But man, that place was filthy. Or maybe that was just our individual practice space? We shared with about four other bands, so I'm sure it was all their fault, but I can remember when you almost needed a shovel to clear a path through the beer cans and other assorted garbage just to get to your amps.

But I digress, as usual. The place in Astoria was nothing like that; we just walked in, plugged in, and started rocking! To be honest, I was pretty nervous, not having played with a band in quite a few years, and having only just learned the songs in the past couple weeks. All the songs except one, or did I tell you about this? It seems I've been prevailed upon to sing an old Lookouts song, which hasn't been played performed since, well, July 10, 1990, to be exact, which was the date of the last Lookouts recording session and show (we went straight to the show, which was in Jake Filth's basement, from recording at Andy Ernst's Art of Ears, which was then located in Frisco, near the Haight.

And again I'm in danger of digressing, but here's the deal: although I wasn't worried about remembering how to play my own song, I was concerned about how well it would fit in with the SUCIDIE songs (they're, um, kind of different) and also about how the band would handle playing a song that I'd never heard played by anyone but the Lookouts.

Well, I needn't have worried. It went great, right from the start, maybe because we have such an outstanding lineup of seasoned musicians (Matt Lame, Atom Lame, Carla Monoxide, Ace (from Houseboat! and the Steinways!) and yours truly). I didn't even make that many mistakes, even though I could barely sing (what's new about that, you ask?) thanks to having come down with the swine flu over the weekend.

So, I'm pretty excited about playing a show again, and especially in the slot where we're scheduled: right in between Pansy Division and the Steinways! (This may very well be the Steinways' last show ever, I'm very sad to say.) And while we're only playing a very short set (hey, our songs are fast, and at least you're virtually guaranteed not to get bored), I hope you'll all come out and see us and about 729 other bands. If you want to buy tickets to the Fest and haven't done so already, you can do it here, and while you're at it, don't forget the Thursday night pre-show, which is usually kind of an afterthought (okay, a pre-thought) to the Fest itself, but this year features one of the best lineups of all three nights, including appearances by both the Max Levine Ensemble and Delay, two of my very favorite (and therefore two of the very best) bands in the country today. Pre-show tickets are available here, and I look forward to seeing all of you, yes, all ten million or however many people are reading this, on all three nights. Oh, and make sure to check out the snazzy new guitar I'll be playing! It's not mine, sadly; it's sort of like I'm being sponsored except I don't get to keep the guitar. But it sure looks and sounds cool. Pics to follow (maybe)!

Information In

2009-05-14T16:17:00.002-04:00

When I first moved here, I used to make fun of my friend Michael for the way he almost religiously read The New Yorker, and vowed never to fall prey to what I saw as the cliché of being the new guy in town who immediately took out a subscription to it.

And I resisted for a while, just as I resisted the incessant pledge drive imprecations of WNYC, the local NPR outlet. But seeing as how I listened pretty much exclusively to WNYC (all the while complaining how pathetic it was when compared with my beloved BBC), I finally started feeling guilty about being a mooch. When I realized that you could get a "free" New Yorker subscription for donating to WNYC, I said what the hell; as long as I was getting two things for the price of one (I could have done them both separately for less money, but never mind), and I bit the bullet.

Now I'd had a New Yorker subscription once before, way back in the 70s, during that brief interval between glam rock and punk rock when, for want of any other way to justify my existence, tried to re-invent myself as a tortured intellectual. But I found that I couldn't keep up with it; there was just too much to read, and the issues would pile up on the cabinet in my bathroom until they seemed to begin leering at me for being such a lazy, inattentive bastard, and I'd toss another batch out into... well, I don't think they had recycling yet, so probably into the trash, which adds to the shame. About the time the Dead Kennedys formed I let my subscription lapse and never gave the magazine much more thought until, as I say, my friend Michael began annoying me with it.

But something had apparently changed over the years (okay, decades), because I now found The New Yorker much more interesting, and was even able to make my way - on occasion - through an entire issue before next week's copy showed up. Until, that is, I began receiving offers from other magazines who apparently inferred from my presence on the New Yorker subscription list that I was their type of reader. You know, thoughtful, concerned, intellectual, involved (they actually said things in their pitches; I didn't make them up).

Well, let me admit right here: I was flattered. Perhaps my re-invention as an intellectual had taken hold after all, a mere 30-some years after the fact. And before I knew it, I had also become a subscriber to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. And of course I still had my weekly copy of the good old Anderson Valley Advertiser to keep me apprised of the goings-on in Boonville and Mendocino County.

Result: on one hand, I feel rather clever most days. Reading this sort of publication on a regular basis, especially the New York and London Reviews, is a bit like being enrolled in university, maybe even at the graduate level. I'm constantly being exposed to people, events and concepts whose existence (or reason for existing) had never occurred to me. On the other hand, I also felt like a university student because of the way I could never get caught up with my reading assignments. I could maybe get through one of the magazines in a week, plus my AVA, but that's about it, leaving me to wonder, in the case of the New York or London Review of Books, who, by the time they'd read all the reviews, could possibly have any time to read any actual books? I further wondered how anyone who had an actual job could even come close to absorbing this much reading material, but then the question of how people with jobs find time to do anything at all is a frequent source of perplexity to me.

I think a big part of my problem is my approach to reading, however. I suspect normal people leaf through these magazines until they find articles that interest them and then read them. Not me. No, I have to start at the beginning and read it cover to cover, including the small ads at the back. Doesn't matter if it's a 12-page article on the provenance of the thread used in medieval wall hangings in western Belgium, I feel it's my duty to absorb all this information that's being proffered up to me. And, I note, that I've paid cold, hard cash for, even though all my subscriptions are relatively cheap.

This, I fear, is the result of being raised by a couple of Depression-era parents, who instilled in from infancy a horror of wasting anything. No, it's more than horror, it's a sense of enormous moral failure if I don't happily and gratefully consume everything that is put in front of me. Those children starving in China and Africa, should they have somehow managed to survive, will be grateful to know that I seldom let a pea or a carrot go astray, gag as I may have done while forcing them down so I could join "The Clean Plate Club" and earn my dessert, and if today somewhere there are children desperate for the knowledge to be gleaned from upper-middlebrow periodicals, I hope they'll rest comfortably tonight knowing that I'm making a valiant effort to absorb it for them.

But while doing some housecleaning today, I finally had to toss out a few issues dating back to December or January that appeared to have some unread articles (sometimes it's hard to tell, as I've certain pieces so dense that by the time I've finished them I have no idea what I've just learned, except that it feels really heavy). Believe me, it was painful, and I'm still not convinced I won't do time in literary purgatory for having done so. In the meantime, I've got to get to the city, which means stuffing a some recent issues into my backpack and frantically trying to get through an article or two in the seven stops from my house to 6th Avenue. Yes, I have also become that other New York cliché, the guy who does all his reading on the subway. But boy will I have a lot of interesting stuff to talk about if I ever find a spare minute to talk to somebody.

Two Hours Of My Life That I'll Never Get Back

2009-05-14T00:30:00.003-04:00

One of the few negative effects of living in England for as long as I did was an irrational antipathy toward the French. I'd never thought badly of the French before; in fact, I'd been quite fond of both them and their country before I moved to London, where contempt for les grenouilles is almost universal. It's the one form of ethnic prejudice that's still considered completely respectable in most circles, and I must shamefully admit that to some extent I succumbed to it as well.

Granted, that whole cheese-eating surrender monkeys business in the wake of 9-11 didn't help either, but the net result was that during the 10 years I lived in London, I never once bothered to make the quick (2 1/2 hours by Eurostar) journey over to Paris, which, now that I'm quite a few more hours removed, even by plane, seems absolutely mental.

Never mind, though; now that I've started visiting Paris again, I've warmed right up to the French, come to appreciate their way of life, their food, even their manners, which I don't find anywhere near as atrocious as some people would have you believe. In fact, apart from being more soft-spoken (generally) and better at holding their liquor (or not drinking nearly so much of it in the first place), they're actually quite similar to the English, which might in itself explain a lot of the hostility.

But my recently declared entente cordiale with the French was put into serious jeopardy tonight when I was invited over to a warehouse by some friends for an informal "movie night." A little pizza, some laughs and conversation, a movie projected onto a bedsheet on the wall, what could possibly go wrong with a scenario like that?

I'll tell you what: La cité des enfants perdu (The City Of Lost Children), that's what. Almost two hours (I would have sworn it was at least two and a half) of pure French, pseudo-artsy gobbledygook, replete with corny costumes, nonsensical plot, and agonizing longeurs during which nothing seems so sweet as falling into a deep, deep sleep or, alternatively, having a bullet put through one's head.

Maybe, just maybe I could find this sort of melodramatic crapola interesting were I on the right combination of psychedelic drugs. During the 70s I watched a wide variety of French films while on LSD, marijuana, and a few less salubrious substances, none of which I can recall a single salient feature about apart from the fact that they seemed profound at the time. But it's been a long, long time since I've taken drugs, and as a result, I found The City Of Lost Children nothing short of torturous. Before we were half an hour into the movie I found myself regularly checking the time to see how much more of it I'd have to endure, and contemplating how I might be able to sneak out of there without anyone noticing.

Unfortunately, with there being only one door and its being located so that I'd have to walk through or in front of all the other guests to make my escape, I resigned myself to sitting through the whole dismal spectacle. When it (finally) ended I nearly ran out of there, not even waiting for the ride I could have had, just so I could avoid having to offer an opinion about the movie.

Because, you see, everyone else was raving about it. "So beautiful," "amazing," "gets better every time I see it," were some of the capsule reviews. Hang on, I said to myself; these are my friends. Have they taken leave of their senses? Or am I just that far removed from Brooklyn's artistic gestalt?

Since none of my friends were on drugs either, it's probably the latter. And I'm all right with that, I guess. My recent experiences in the City of Light have shown me that the vast majority of French people have no interest in such merde de chien, and if a few of my Brooklyn friends do, well, God bless their artsy little souls. I'm sure they feel similarly about my love for Green Day and Lady Gaga.

Then Again, What Do I Know?

2009-05-12T16:48:00.001-04:00

It was suggested by a couple PPMB carpers that I was kind of over the top in my review of 21st Century Breakdown, or that I was giving the band special treatment because they were friends of mine.

I'll take the second charge first: anyone who's known me very long will be aware that I'm absolutely hopeless when it comes to schmoozing with musicians, because I can't help letting my opinions be known, no matter how positive or negative they might be. Doesn't matter if the band in question are close friends or if I've just met them. I learned long ago that when bands ask you, "So, what did you think of the album (or show)?", most of them are not looking for or expecting a detailed critique. Nine times out of ten they want to hear some version of "Awesome, man, you guys are geniuses."

Even when the band are very close friends and genuinely care about your opinions or your criticisms, it can be pretty awkward if you actually come right out and say what they are. Which I know because I've done it. Many, many times. It's actually a miracle that many musicians still want to talk to me at all. Assuming they do, of course.

After all, these guys have been working for months or years to create the record or performance you're commenting on, and they wouldn't have put it before the public if they didn't in their heart of hearts think it was just about as good as it can be. And chances are, especially if they've got a record label or a manager or a fan club telling them how great they are, they've come to at least partly believe it. So when someone, even if it's someone like me, with considerable experience in the music business, starts explaining how the song's too long and they should have left off that second chorus or how they missed a golden opportunity to insert an extra harmony on the bridge, they're not usually that thrilled.

And I've tried, believe me, I've tried, to keep my opinions to myself, especially when I haven't been asked for them, but hey, old habits die hard. During the years I ran a record label, at least part of my job was to tell bands what I thought was good and bad about the music they were producing, and even though I wasn't always right, I was right enough of the time to compile a pretty enviable track record when it came to picking bands and albums that would be popular.

All well and good, as long as it was my job (and even then, some of the bands were known to get pretty irritated with me), but once it stopped being my job, I unfortunately didn't lose the habit. It's been over 12 years since I released a record, and yet I still have to bite my tongue to keep from unleashing a full-scale deconstruction of the band who just played at a local bar show.

So if you should ask me what I thought of your band and I get this strange, screwed-up look on my face (more than usual, I mean), chances are that I'm striving manfully not to tell you that your band either sucked, delivered a bad show, or should seriously consider shifting to a career in carpet installation. If I tell you that you were good, you almost certainly are good (at least in my opinion), and if I start offering detailed advice about arrangements, harmonies, tempos, etc., it probably means that I'm taking your music quite seriously and am encouraging you to do the necessary work to make it as good as it can possibly be.

But never mind, because you'll probably just be annoyed, so I'll shut up about that now. As for my extremely enthusiastic review of the new Green Day album, well, I've also had a lot of experience in predicting great success (or lack thereof) for a band or a record and being laughed at for it. My favorite example (and sorry to those of you who've heard this story before) was when in 1988 I predicted that Operation Ivy would be one of those bands who would become punk rock classics, who would continue to grow more popular for years and decades after they ceased to be a band. Like Minor Threat and the Dead Kennedys, I said, those being the classic punk rock bands of that era.

When I said that to Tommy Strange, who was in charge of the warehouse at Mordam Records (our distributor), he laughed and laughed, and then insisted on going around to every other person in the warehouse to tell them the ridiculous thing that Larry had just said. For the next few years of his life, he would spend an ever-increasing amount of his time piling crates upon crates of Op Ivy CDs onto trucks for shipment around the world; I don't know for sure, but I would guess that Op Ivy have long since outsold the Dead Kennedys, and probably Minor Threat as well.

I was reminded of that the other day when being interviewed by a British magazine about the history of Lookout Records. Asked if I had any idea of how big Green Day would become when I first saw them, I said, very truthfully, that I'd almost instantly thought they could be as big as the Beatles. Note: I didn't say I expected that to happen, but I saw them as being good enough that it could happen.

If you've been around the music biz very long in any capacity, even if only as a fan, you'll know that many bands who have the potential to make it really big don't end up doing so. This happens for a variety of reasons, most involving some form of self-sabotage. Drugs and/or alcohol are a perennial favorite, but so is giving up too soon, or changing your sound because some promoter or manager convinced you "that's what all the kids are listening to this year." Often, too, a band will fail to take care of some of the boring fundamentals: getting good people and labels to work with, signing favorable contracts, in short, just taking care of business. Result: they get ripped off or at least feel ripped off, become disheartened and cynical, and either give up altogether or start focusing on transparent cash grabs instead of whatever it was that made their music special in the first place.

That's why, as I've said several times, it's a miracle when a band manages to hold it together long enough to make more than two or three really good albums. It might also help explain why thoroughly mediocre bands seem to be able to stick around at the top of the charts longer than the truly great bands: if all you're producing is formulaic pap, the pressure is considerably less.

UPDATE: Back at the PPMB, resident curmudgeon Chris Grivet just called me "a raving lunatic" for my 21st Century Breakdown review and goes on to claim that if any Green Day record goes down in history for its social/cultural impact, it will be Dookie. Bear in mind, of course, that Mr. Grivet is the same gentleman who, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, claimed to have seen "Longview", the first video from Dookie, in 1993, before it had even been made, let alone shown on TV. His "proof" of this assertion: well, in the video, the band were all wearing summer clothes, so it must have been made in the summer of 93, and that when he, Chris Grivet, saw it, he was wearing fall clothes, so it must have been the fall of 93.

Not that I want to bag on Grivet, who is generally, despite his personality quirks, an all-around great guy. But, it needs to be said, an all-around great guy who is frequently, even belligerently wrong about certain musical issues. Like his frequently propounded theory that Nirvana were largely responsible for Green Day's success. Evidence for this? Well, he, Chris Grivet, liked Nirvana a lot when he was 12, and after that he liked Green Day, so obviously one thing led to another, and he, Chris Grivet, turned out to be the bellwether of a generation!

Well, looks like we've come full circle here. 20 years ago it was Tommy Strange calling me a raving lunatic for my musical predictions, and now it's Chris Grivet, who is undeniably strange in his own lovable fashion. We already know who was right the last time. Why not bookmark this page and come back in 20 more years to see if yet another carping critic has bitten the dust?

Talent Borrows, Genius Steals?

2009-05-12T11:16:00.004-04:00

Not everyone is raving about the new Green Day album; at least some of the folks over at the perennially cooler-than-everything (though they would go as one to their graves denying it) PPMB have some downright snarky and even hostile comments, complaining in this rapidly growing thread about everything from the album's length to its classic rock influences to the band's alleged tendency to borrow or "rip off" riffs and melodies from everyone who's made a record in the past 30 years, including themselves.

Personally, I don't take the rip off claims seriously at all. The majority of them involve someone claiming that the new album "sounds like" (insert name of famous and/or obscure band/rock star from the past). Are their echoes of sounds, themes, even melodies that others have previously worked with? Of course; that's the nature of popular music, of all music, in fact. Many of the most widely known bits from classical symphonies and operas had their origins in some popular but unrecorded peasant melody that the composer happened to overhear being whistled by the gardener or the washerwoman.

It's always tempting to drag out the old "Talent borrows, genius steals" refrain in discussions of this nature, but it would only muddy the issue. To suggest that Green Day, after a couple decades of producing hit records powered by incredibly infectious melodies and harmonies, would suddenly feel the need to rely for inspiration on the output of other, mostly less successful bands, kind of beggars belief. One also wonders why, if it's so "obvious" (at least according to some of the PPMB critics) that Green Day have stolen songs from other writers, nobody has ever successfully sued them for this alleged plagiarism. It's not as though superstars are invulnerable to this sort of thing; even the Beatles' George Harrison got nailed for plundering the "My Sweet Lord" riff from the earlier Chiffons hit, "He's So Fine." But apart from some English guy claiming (and failing) to prove that the song "Warning" (from the album of the same name) was copied from something he wrote, nobody has even tried it with Green Day.

In an era where practically everything that's ever been recorded is becoming easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection, it would seem crazy for songwriters even to try and get away with ripping off someone else's work, especially songwriters so famous that everything they create is under the public microscope. That's not to say that there aren't going to be inevitable similarities, whether conscious or not, between new songs and existing ones. The very nature of the medium, the finite number of chords, notes and lyrical themes virtually guarantees it. In my own songwriting, I've several times surprised myself by finding melodic or lyrical bits in one of my songs that would seem to have come straight out of someone else's song, in most cases one that I grew up listening to. Did I intend to borrow or steal that riff? Not at all; it's just that it was so ingrained in me that it had become part of my musical consciousness. And, to be fair, nobody else ever noticed it unless I pointed it out to them.

There have also been times that I deliberately tried to write a song in the style of a particular artist or genre. Again, not to rip anyone off, but for artistic purposes: typically I wanted to evoke something from that era, as in the case of a song called "1973", where I was telling a story of something that had happened to me in the fading days of the glam-rock era, or to tip my hat and pay some homage, as with what some deemed my excessive Smiths-worship in the later Potatomen era.

Speaking of the Potatomen, I just remembered a time when I was working on a new song while driving up north to Arcata to meet Green Day, and when I got there, I quite excitedly said, "Hey, guys, listen to this riff I made up." Within about 20 seconds, Mike said, "Dude, that's 'Freebird'."

And it was, if you only looked at the chords from the first couple lines. The thing was, I barely knew the song "Freebird" (I mean, sure, I'd heard it, but I was more familiar with wiseasses shouting out requests for it at concerts than with actually listening to it), didn't know how the chords went (at least not until Mike pointed this out), and had absolutely no intention of copying it for my song, which in any event was a totally different type of song ("The Loneliest Boy In The World", which only real Potatomen connoisseurs will recognize, since it was never released on a record).

So was I guilty of ripping off "Freebird"? Should I have changed something about the chords or the arrangement? No, of course not, and we played the song for the next several years without a single person apart from Mike ever commenting on the similarity. Which should prove at least two things: as long as you're working in the field of three or four-chord pop songs, there's going to be a certain amount of duplication (and triplication and quadruplication), and that you shouldn't try to slip any purloined melodies or riffs past Mike from Green Day.

21st Century Breakdown

2009-05-08T15:02:00.003-04:00

The first time I ever saw Green Day (then called Sweet Children), somewhere around September or October of 1988, I thought to myself, "These guys could be the next Beatles."

Of course I'm dating myself by saying that; even in 1988 the Beatles were awfully old news, and most teenage punk rock bands (Billie Joe and Mike were 16 at the time) wouldn't have taken kindly to being compared in any way to the music their parents or grandparents had listened to.

But the fact that early Green Day not only had a more than passing resemblance to the early Fab Four, but also wouldn't at all have minded hearing that comparison made, was one of the things that set them apart from (and head and shoulders above) their contemporaries. Even though their subject matter on the early albums seldom ventured far afield from perennial favorites like girls and teenage boredom, you knew within minutes of meeting them that this was a band that wasn't half-assing it. Their songs might have been light-hearted, even a little silly at times, but they were dead serious about them in the ways that mattered: craftsmanship, artistry, respect for themselves and their audiences. And while every other teenager in America at one time or another harbors dreams of being some kind of pop star, you knew that it wasn't some sort of phase or rite of passage for these guys. They were down for life. Billie described the feeling of those early days in a 2001 interview:

There's a side of you that feels you're kind of dying or something, and you're scared of that, but then there's the question of what's going to happen with this music, this work we're gonna do? Is it only going to be cool right now to the punk rock scene, or uncool to the punk rock scene at the time, depending who you talk to? Or is it just going to be forgotten, and another group of guys is going to come along and take our place? You really start to think about your potential as a musician and an artist and as a human being, for that matter. You don't want it to be all for nothing, and I think that's one thing that was different with us than with other bands, that we lived for our music a lot more than other bands did. Other bands seemed more set on things like going to school and playing music on the side, or having a job and playing music on the side, where we wanted to fully live and breathe our music...

Fair enough, but most bands give at least lip service to an idea like that; most bands don't, on the other hand, ascend from humble origins to become the biggest band in the world, something which Green Day have now undeniably accomplished. As one of their Gilman Street compatriots put it, "Man, no premonition could have seen this."

And if there were any doubts that Green Day were now the biggest and most important band on the planet - I've been saying it for years, but there were those who stubbornly insisted on holding contrary views - the release of their latest album, 21st Century Breakdown, will have swept them away. Very few bands manage to maintain much of an edge past their second or third record; eight albums (not counting compilations and B-side collections) and 21 years into their career, and Green Day are still getting stronger, more creative, and, well, more vital.

This is an epoch-defining record, the kind you could be forgiven for thinking they didn't make anymore. Despite my early prognostications about Green Day, by the turn of the century I'd pretty much given up on the idea that there'd ever be another Beatles or band of similar importance. It wasn't just that pretenders to the throne - U2? Oasis?? - were so laughably inadequate, it was, more importantly, that there was no longer a monolithic culture centered around guitar rock. For kids growing up in my era, it was impossible to escape the influence of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, etc.; children of the 90s and 00s could and often did locate their experience in hip hop or dance pop and dismiss rock and roll as something exclusively for the oldsters.

I don't think that Green Day are going to single-handedly restore guitar rock to the position of pre-eminence it once enjoyed, but at the very least, they've ensured that neither is it going to fade away into the irrelevance gleefully predicted by some commentators. Whatever else you might think of it, 21st Century Breakdown is not just a collection of catchy tunes with some stunningly artistic interludes; it's a very important document of our times and our culture, one to which people will still be referring to tens and hundreds of years from now. It's not just going to provide the soundtrack for the summer and autumn of 2009, it's going to color how people perceive and remember this time in history. And I'm not just talking about weedy teenagers or nostalgic 20-somethings; I wouldn't be at all surprised at some point to hear President Obama bust out with a quote or reference from this album.

I say all this while freely admitting that I'm not normally a classic rock kind of guy while this album is unmistakably classic rock in the conventional as well as the literal sense. People are falling all over themselves to point out the influences and in some cases accuse Green Day of outright theft of riffs and sounds from the 60s, 70s and 80s, but as is usually the case with genius, nobody can point to what or where exactly the band has supposedly been stealing from. "It sounds like, you know, that song by Queen, or Pink Floyd, or the Beatles, you know which one I mean," but are never able to get much more precise than that. Personally, I heard one bit that put me in mind of Neil Young's "Heart Of Gold" and another where I was almost certain Billie Joe was going to bust out with "All The Young Dudes," but for the most part it's impossible to point out just where you've heard that song before, because however familiar it may sound, you haven't.

That's part of what being a classical - as opposed to a classic - rock band is about. This is music for the ages. People who bemoan the distance Green Day have traveled from their East Bay pop punk roots are missing the point: all the songs about girls are still out there, and will be as thrilling and enjoyable to listen to as they always were, but this is a band who have grown up without growing old, who positively inspire me with their ability to transcend all the depressing and corrupting influences of pop culture in general and the music business in particular to produce far and away the best work of their career.

Responsibility

2009-05-08T14:39:00.002-04:00

In all my griping about hipster snobs yesterday, I might have lost sight of the fact that ultimately the failure to sell a book proposal has to fall on the guy who wrote it, namely me. Yes, maybe it's not right or fair that a band like Operation Ivy isn't as widely known or appreciated as they should be, but ultimately it's not up to people to accept that simply because I say so. If I want recognition for a band, an idea, a political philosophy, even for a laundry detergent, I have to make the case. Apparently when it comes to this Operation Ivy proposal, I didn't do it well enough, and for that, well, there's no one else to blame but me.

Damn it.

Disappointment

2009-05-07T18:33:00.002-04:00

I haven't mentioned it here before because I didn't want to jinx anything, but last year I put in a proposal to do a book for the 33 1/3 series. My subject was to be Operation Ivy's Energy, and my proposal made it to the last stage of the selection process before finally getting a thumbs down (they started out with some 650 proposals, of which 12 to 15 will ultimately be published).

Naturally I'm disappointed, not just for myself (I think I would have done a very good job on it, and could have used the work), but also for the band, who deserve to have their story told, and even, oddly enough, for the publisher, who I think would have been pleasantly surprised at how many copies this book would sell.

Because of current economic conditions, I think they were picking titles with a bit more of an eye on potential sales figures than they might normally, and I suspect this was at least part of the reason Operation Ivy didn't make the cut. To those of us familiar with the band, this might seem bizarre: having sold, almost purely by word of mouth, around a million copies of their album (and done it all posthumously, i.e., after the band broke up in May 1989, it's obvious that there'd be a market for anything written about them. Especially when you consider that there's never been one, and that the band's members have been notoriously close-mouthed when it comes to talking to journalists about their history.

But in the course of reading the 33 1/3 message board comments as the various proposals worked their way through the selection process, it gradually sank in that however massive Op Ivy were in our East Bay/pop-punk scene, they were very nearly off the radar for many indie music fans, and that those who were aware of them often dismissed them with characteristic hipster snobbery for being too "popular" or for having an insufficient number of minor or diminished chords in their songs.

It took me back to the mid to late 80s, around the time when Lookout Records and Operation Ivy were both getting started, and the denizens of what was then an extremely insular punk and indie scene turned their noses up at us because, well, because a) they'd never heard of us; b) we weren't by any stretch of the conventional imagination "cool"; and c) we were liked by all those annoying young teenagers.

I'll admit it was childish of me, but seeing our scene and our label completely eclipse the 1980s naysayers was one of the more satisfying aspects of the runaway success we enjoyed in the 1990s. Not that the snarky comments from 20-somethings desperate to distance themselves from the music listened to by their younger siblings (or themselves in the not so remote past) ever died down, as illustrated by the comments posted in response to Brooklyn Vegan's announcement of an upcoming Green Day show. Some of them were at least witty ("Excellent news, now to restart my Myspace account after years of inactivity"), but others were just sad, like, "1995 called and said NOBODY CARES ABOUT POP PUNK ANYMORE."

Sad because of the ignorance (Green Day's ability to fill Giants Stadium or Madison Square Garden must indicate that somebody is at least mildly interested in pop punk, though obviously not the sort of people who count in this little hipster's world), but even sadder, I think, because this kid (I'd bet dollars to donuts that he - almost certainly a "he" - was an enthralled little teenybopper in the Dookie) is already so stupidly old.

Far be it from me to suggest that someone should go on listening to the same music throughout their lives. I certainly don't listen to some of the hippie music I thought was so brilliant back in the 60s. But Green Day didn't stop being a brilliant band because you got 10 or 15 years older and started reading Pitchfork, and you didn't get any cleverer by disdainfully dismissing any form of music that has more than a couple hundred painfully pretentious fans.

Before I say anything else, I should make it clear that I'm not by any means accusing the publishers who chose not to accept the Op Ivy book of this sort of hipsterish know-nothingism; they treated me with complete respect and professionalism, and, as I say, the proposal did make it to the final round. No, I'm talking exclusively about the sort of indie snobs who sneered all along at the idea that Operation Ivy even deserved a book, apparently on the grounds that they were simultaneously too "mainstream" and "obscure."

I'm not sure where to go from here. It's already been suggested to me that I publish the book elsewhere, but I would really prefer to see it as part of the 33 1/3 series. However, that might entail waiting a couple years or more for the next round of selections. In the meantime, I've got a couple other projects in mind, one non-fiction and one fiction, which, in hindsight, I should have been working on these past six months while waiting for an answer on the Op Ivy book. But any excuse for procrastination, right?

In the long run, I'm sure something better will come up; I'm just too busy being disappointed right now to see it. I think I'll give it a day or two to sink in and then get started in earnest on Plans B and/or C.

More London and Paris

2009-05-07T00:58:00.003-04:00

What else happened in Paris? Lots of stuff, or maybe nothing. All I seem to remember at the moment was a fair bit of eating French food, which they seem to serve in quite a few of the restaurants, though not nearly as many as you'd imagine.

Oh! I went to, of all places, the Louvre. Yes, I know this is a fairly common tourist destination, and indeed a large number of fairly common tourists were already there when I arrived. But it was my first time in the old joint since the 1980s, as I generally avoid such places, especially when there's an admission charge involved.

It's not that I'm against museums; in fact, I love them, at least in principle, and in practice as well, when, as in Britain, they're free to enter and you can just stroll in randomly when you happen to be passing by and take in a few pictures or statues or simply get a coffee in surroundings more salubrious than your local Starbucks.

But when you have to pay a hefty fee, you're inclined to want to take in the whole museum in an afternoon (in the case of the Louvre, a reasonably thorough tour would probably require a couple weeks), which, as a friend pointed out, is like gorging yourself on wedding cake. There's only so much culture a guy can take in one sitting - or standing - and by the time I'd been there three hours, my eyes had either glazed over completely or rolled upward in their sockets, because I just wasn't seeing it or feeling it any longer.

I did get into one rumination piqued by the ancient (or apparently so) stone floor tiles in one section of the museum. They'd obviously been walked on quite a bit, to the point where there'd been some significant wear and tear on them, and that prompted me to wonder how many sets of feet over how many centuries would be required to reduce these stone tiles to a dusty oblivion. And if, at some point, people should be stopped from walking on them in order to preserve some portion of their original appearance for posterity.

That in turn set me off on another train of thought about the value of culture per se. What if, for example, an invading army threatened to destroy a museum like the Louvre? Should armies be deployed to protect it, even though it has no strategic military value? How many human lives could you justify losing in order to protect an ultimately ephemeral (even if we're talking about millennia, ultimately all the earth's museums will be reduced to rubble by nature and time) repository of culture? I was tempted to say quite a few, until I realized I was only referring to generic lives of unseen and unknown people, not those of people I know personally, or, for that matter, my own.

Well, so much for art. My last day in Paris, May 1, was a holiday, marked by a huge protest march culminating at the Hotel de Ville, where it was met by the largest riot squad deployment I have ever seen in any time or country. Criminals all over the rest of the capital could have had a field day if they'd been prepared. The following morning I set off for London, arriving just in time to follow our beloved Fulham over to neighboring Stamford Bridge, where they were rather systematically demolished by an awe-inspiring Chelsea team. With several of our players out injured, and almost no ready-for-prime-time substitutes on the bench, our best hope was that Chelsea, in between legs of a bruising Champions League battle with Barcelona, would rest some of their top players and field an average-strength team.

It was not to be; Chelsea, who we've had some luck against in the past, and who are still dreaming - dreaming of being the operative word - of catching up to league-leading Man United - brought out the same players they'd put out for a Cup final, and one of them, Nicolas Anelka, put the first ball into the Fulham net with only 56 seconds on the clock. Pessimists - another word for "Fulham supporters" - would have given up then and there, as visiting teams have a notoriously difficult time scoring against Chelsea on their home ground, but before ten minutes Erik Nevland had put Fulham level, and hopes rose anew.

But though the lads fought valiantly, there was no repelling the Chelsea onslaught, and, once the scorer Nevland had been hauled off injured, hope pretty much vanished. The Fulham predicament was best illustrated when Chelsea brought on two substitutes who, as my seatmate Dave pointed out, "cost more than the entire Fulham starting team."

We had enjoyed our week-long stay in 7th place, but the defeat knocked us back down to 9th, still a respectable finish for Fulham, and anyway, it was time for Dave and I to be off to Camden to see the Classics Of Love, the new band featuring Operation Ivy singer Jesse Michaels. It was inspiring to see Jesse up on stage again, and looking as though he were thoroughly enjoying it. The crowd was enthusiastic all the way through, but absolute mayhem ensued when the band broke into an Operation Ivy cover ("The Crowd," probably my - and apparently a lot of other people's - favorite Op Ivy song ever).

Post-show schmoozing ensued, featuring the likes of Sebby Zatopek and Tahoe Jeff, Germany-based denizen of the famous PPMB, over for his first visit ever to London. Sunday I mostly stayed in, and on Monday, Green Day, who were over to do some recording and some publicity for their upcoming new album, invited me out to dinner with them. We had a great old time at the restaurant and back at the hotel, where we were joined by Jesse Michaels after his West London (Kingston, actually) gig. It was Mike's birthday, and Tre's girlfriend's birthday as well, prompting many musings and recollections about "the old days" (it's amazing what we choose to remember, and perhaps even more amazing what we choose to forget). The party looked as though it might carry on well into the morning, but with an early flight to New York to catch, I had no choice but to, after a bit of posing for pictures and hugs all around, disappear into the misty London night.

Home Again

2009-05-06T23:07:00.002-04:00

Sitting here in Brooklyn practicing my guitar riffs for the SUCIDIE concert coming up in, oh, only about six or seven weeks from now. For those of you not familiar with their work, SUCIDIE employ very complex musical structures, and learning their songs has proved quite demanding. Demanding enough, in fact, that I've decided I have to take a break from this arduous work and fill you in on recent events, including my semi-whirlwind trip to London and Paris. Yes, a repeat, albeit with slightly better weather, of last autumn's adventure, and this time containing 50% more football, French stuff, and consorting with rock royalty.

First things first: I arrived in London in time for a visit to Craven Cottage where I witnessed Fulham, by dint of a hard-fought but not especially suspenseful victory over Stoke City, ascend to the vertiginous and unprecedented heights of 7th place in the Premiership. Champions League, here we come! Well, not quite, but the UEFA Cup remains a slight possibility.

The night before I'd been out till 3 am - actually later, now that I think about it, once you count the Night Bus ride from the West End out to Bayswater, where I was staying. It had started out as simply a night of dancing but turned rather unexpectedly into, well, I guess, a date, something with which I've had no familiarity whatsoever for lo, these many years. I felt like a teenager again - okay, maybe a twenty-something, that being the prevailing demographic of the club we were at - and hearing Lady Gaga on a mega-club-style sound system removed any doubts I might have had about her awesomeness. The new Madonna, people have been saying about her, and apparently Madonna herself has heard the buzz, because she turned up at Gaga's New York show last week to see for herself what the fuss was about. She looked slightly grim and discomfited, witnesses report.

It's true that my interest in Lady Gaga was initially stimulated by little more than the fact that so many otherwise reasonable people seemed to hate her - any performer capable of alienating large swathes of the population is off to a good start, especially if the irked ones come disproportionately from the bien-pensant classes among whom I so often find myself. But after seeing her videos a few times and dancing to her songs a few more, not to mention reading Sasha Frere-Jones's mini-profile in the New Yorker - the first time I have ever agreed with Frere-Jones about anything, I've become convinced the woman is a genius. Or at least a lot smarter than me, anyway. I'm also appreciative of how her wigs grow more brazenly opulent and expensive with each successive video, surely as reliable an indicator as any of her rapid ascent up the ladder of artistic and commercial success.

Then it was off to Paris. Only hours after arriving, I attended a dinner party where I knew almost no one, but where nearly everyone spoke English (increasingly true all over Paris, which is why I despair of ever improving my French beyond the rudimentary level where it's been for the past 30 years). I had a nice time chatting to various Canadians, Americans, Colombians and the like, all of whom seemed to have lived in all the same places where I've tended to knock about, basically San Francisco/Los Angeles, New York, London. I mean seriously, we'd mostly lived not just in the same neighborhoods, but often on the same streets. Ever feel like you're living in a cliché? Or are one?

Then at some point I got introduced to a pleasant, similarly pedigreed woman in her 40s or 50s who, almost before we'd exchanged pleasantries like our names asked whether I was married or in a relationship. When I said that I was neither, she beamed. "Excellent! I told our host to introduce me to single men!" she said, and then set about planning our week together in Paris. I swear I gave her no encouragement whatsoever, and in fact any of you who know me in real life or tried to hit me up for a record deal will be aware of just how noncommittal I can be. But I got the impression that my opinions and/or feelings were not the issue here, as she adroitly steered me away from the crowd and into a back corner of the garden.

The maddening thing - apart from losing the opportunity to talk to any of the other interesting people there - was that while I didn't want to marry her or go canoodling down some romantic Parisian backstreet in the manner she apparently envisioned, I found her company interesting and was even able to muster some sympathy for her recent breakup with old Whatshisface, who apparently had been no fun at all and never once took her out dancing in the five years they'd been together.

But while I knew that was as far as this relationship was going, my opinion seemed of little import in the matter, and I finally took the coward's way out. In fact, I'm almost - I say almost, because longtime readers will be aware that I'll say practically anything here and that discretion and decorum are not always my strong suits - ashamed to recount how I dealt with the situation: when word went out that dessert was being served in the kitchen and she made a beeline for it (see, there are some advantages to my no-sweets diet plan), I simply slipped away into the night.

Yes, I know, disgraceful behavior. I didn't even say goodbye or thanks to the host or to any of the other people I'd met, and felt about as mature as a 12 year old trying to figure out how to deal with overly aggressive girls at his first school dance, but when I made it out the gate and onto the street without being spotted, what a wave of relief washed over me. Only downside: well, there were two, actually. One was that I genuinely did feel bad about my disappearance might have left her feeling; I have been ditched myself on a few occasions, so I have some idea of what it's like. The other was that with Paris - the part that matters, anyway - being ultimately such a small town, I had to keep my eyes peeled constantly for the next six days lest I run into her on the streets and have to come up on the spot with a plausible explanation for my vanishing act. Oh yes, I forgot to mention she was rich, too, so I may have done incalculable damage to my hopes of starting a new career as an international gigolo.

Overheard In McCarren Park

2009-04-20T05:16:00.002-04:00

A faux-hawked black-clad youngish dad/uncle/babysitter, sporting a skull and crossbones hoodie and shepherding a trio of rambunctious 5-7 year olds across the play field: "Hey, c'mon now, at least one of you has to be the good guy. You can't all be bad guys."

A Good Death?

2009-04-08T00:00:00.008-04:00

A couple years ago, around this same time of year, a friend of mine's mother died, and I rode three trains and a bus out into one of those far-flung districts of Queens that, to those of us not from Queens, will always remain a mystery, to attend the funeral.

Despite being conducted entirely in Spanish, of which I could pick out maybe one word in four, the service was quite moving, but the real drama was reserved for the cemetery, where all the mourners joined in helping to refill the grave once the casket had been lowered into it. There was a great deal of weeping and wailing, and a couple people had to be at least symbolically restrained from throwing themselves in along with their shovefuls of dirt.

But before this all got underway, there was a delay of about half an hour, for reasons I can no longer recall. Something to do with the gravediggers being on their lunch break, I believe, but whatever it was, a couple dozen of us were left standing around with nothing much to say to each other apart from the one thing we were least likely to say, "Nice day for a funeral." Which it was; in fact, it was a spectacular day, the first really warm day of spring, not a cloud in the sky, the newly green cemetery lawn rolling gently away toward the distant spires of Manhattan, and the just-burst-into-bloom trees lining the horizon like so many vanilla ice cream balls.

It was a little too warm to be wearing a dark suit, but that was what I was wearing, and I stood there periodically wiping my brow and wondering if God wasn't adding insult to injury by unleashing such glorious weather on such a sad occasion. Wouldn't some dark, brooding skies and a bone-chilling breeze be more apropos?

Come to think of it, nearly all the funerals I've attended in recent years have taken place on beautiful sunny days. And, strange as it may seem, the funerals themselves have been beautiful, even - dare I say it? - joyous in their own funereal way. I don't mean laugh-out-loud, dance-among-the-headstones kind of joyous, but rather in the quiet yet powerful sense of shared emotion and understanding that at least briefly overtakes participants who, were it not for the death being mourned, might have little inclination or reason to speak or interact with one another.

Back when I was a regular attendee at Fulham football matches, we had a player by the name of Luis Boa Morte, who became quite a crowd favorite, at least until he started collecting more red cards than goals. The fans, with their blithe and characteristic English disregard for the bizarre and unwieldy tongues spoken by Johnny Foreigner, decided that "Boa Morte" must translate as "Dead Snake," and that became his nickname. Occasionally someone - myself for example - would try to explain that "Boa Morte" actually meant "Good Death," but usually without success. Once when I pointed this out to the stroppy gent who sat behind me, I was interrupted with a bleat of derision. "Geroff," he exclaimed, "There's nothing good about death. You're talking rubbish, mate."

Well, there isn't, is there? At least not when it comes to someone we love, and especially when that someone is cut down far short of the time we might have expected them to live. And yet every one of the world's religions or spiritual disciplines - at least insofar as I am aware - seems to have a fairly upbeat outlook on death, comforting the bereaved with some version of "They're in a better place now."

Not to be impertinent, but I'm not sure how, short of blind faith or a visit (round trip) to the shadow world, anyone's supposed to know that. Yet I'm inclined to believe it anyway. Last week I sat with my friend Erika, and held her hand as she died, and although outwardly it was a horrible thing - her body wracked with a lengthy and painful illness, her husband and family devastated, her many friends in various stages of shock and despair - something strangely peaceful and comforting seemed to fill the room as she made her exit.

Only fifteen or twenty minutes earlier, we'd been clowning around with her friends on the internet. She couldn't speak, and though her fingers made a valiant - or perhaps it was merely habitual - effort to stretch across the keyboard one last time, she lacked the strength to type even a single letter. But I was able to read her friends' comments to her, and she would respond with thumbs up for good news or an eye roll at a doofish joke. She seemed brighter of spirit and more aware of her surroundings than she'd been in weeks, and it was difficult to believe what the doctors had told us, that she most likely had no more than a few hours to live.

It turned out to be not even that much. She closed her eyes, as if to take a brief rest from her internet exertions, and never opened them again. The end, though it came swiftly, was not instant; it was more as though she were slipping away from us, like a boat released from its mooring or an autumn leaf detached and carried to the ground by an imperceptible yet inexorable breeze.

Yes, of course there were tears, lots of them, and some of them were my own. Yet there was relief, too. Erika's suffering was over, no small thing for those of us who had seen her in its worst throes, but there was also something profound about having participated, as witness and companion, in one of life's most fundamental moments. She was far too young to die, of course, and because she was so well thought of, it was doubly hard for people to get their heads around her passing. Ben Weasel, in a tribute played at her memorial service, said, "In 18 years I’ve never heard anyone say a word against her. Not once." I knew Erika as long as Ben did - we both met her on a Screeching Weasel tour in 1991 - and I could and would echo exactly what he said.

I feel very fortunate to have had Erika in my life for as long as I did, feel very fortunate to have worked with her, hung out with her, laughed and cried and played goofy games with her. I feel even more grateful that she found and married my very dear friend Patrick, and that though their time together would prove to be shorter than might have been expected, that while it lasted it was a love story for the ages, the sort that many if not most of us can only dream of.

But most of all, I suppose, I feel grateful for life itself, in all its rich, tawdry, shabby, wonderful, heartwarming and heartbreaking splendor, grateful to be a part of it, to be able to show up for the sorrows as well as the joys, to witness the way human beings rise to the occasion, be strong and take care of one another when logic might dictate they should be falling to pieces. Erika Hynes, my life was made better and more meaningful by your presence in it, and in the past few days, I've heard from dozens of people who felt the same way. What I didn't expect was how even the manner of your leaving would touch and enrich the lives of those you left behind.

That might sound strange, even perverse, to those still in the throes of grieving, but in time I think it will become clear that by gathering to celebrate Erika's life and mourn its passing, we gained a better appreciation of what it is to be a human being living in this world, and a better understanding of just how awesome and fleeting a gift life truly is. Rest in peace, Erika, and may those of us who remain be worthy of your legacy.

What Ever Happened To That Larry Livermore Guy?

2009-04-07T23:12:00.002-04:00

It's funny feeling that I owe an apology to a bunch of people, many if not most of whom I've never met, and none of whom is paying me in other than interest and good wishes (if that) for my efforts, but nonetheless I do feel bad when I don't keep up with the blog.

Maybe that's it: it's not so much that I'm apologizing to you, but to myself, because I'm the one who's feeling bad. I suspect that most of you out there in blogland, even if you might be mildly disappointed when day after day you check in here and there's nothing new to read, still manage to lead fulfilling and happy lives in the absence of new "content."

Whereas me, on the other hand... Well, as you probably know, I have little to live for apart from my occasional outpourings here, so you can imagine how bleak my life must have grown when you don't hear from me for weeks at a time.

Not exactly true, actually; occasionally things do happen in my life, though I'm usually hard pressed to remember exactly what they are, especially when asked point blank, as I was several times during my most recent visit to California: "So, um, what exactly do you do with yourself out there in New York?"

I suppose I could explain that I'm kept quite busy monitoring the internet for important developments, but that sounds both unconvincing and sad, and is only about half the truth anyway. One thing I can tell you is that I've embarked on a major push to get more serious about my writing. A strange approach, I can hear you surmising, to get serious about writing by not writing (sounds terribly Zen, doesn't it?), but actually, I have been writing. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to see any of it.

Yes, all right, I'll explain before you lose any remaining patience with me. See, I've been doing this program that promises to get blocked writers unblocked, and yes, I know, there are many writers whom one is tempted to say should remain permanently blocked on humanitarian grounds, but hopefully I'm not one of them. As part of this program, I'm supposed to do a few pages of writing every morning, writing that's not meant for publication or even to be shown to anyone, and writing that doesn't necessarily focus on any particular subject or purpose. Free association, more or less; even gobbledygook is acceptable as long as it flows naturally from the pen (oh yes, another stipulation: no computers; it has to be done in longhand).

Having never covered myself with glory on the self-discipline front, I had my doubts whether I'd be able to keep up a consistent regimen of daily writing, but surprisingly enough, I have, only missing one day thus far since starting the program. And I also had my doubts as to its efficacy, since I've been periodically writing gobbledygook and free association for at least 40 years now without it having turned me into any sort of highly accomplished writer.

But strangely enough, it does seem to be having an effect, a couple of effects, actually. First, I've been coming up with new ideas for the first time in a long while: at least two cracking good plots for short stories, plus I took my long-dormant concept for a novel down off the mental shelf and started outlining chapters. Second, and this was wholly unexpected: I've been having incredibly vivid dreams, some of which could also end up as short stories, but which even if they don't, are providing me with a generally entertaining and occasionally scary window into the nether realms of my soul.

Downside of all this: by the time I do my morning writing and related exercises, I don't seem to have much time or energy left over for the sort of writing I'd publish on, oh, a blog, for example. That, combined with some pretty heavy-duty stuff that's been happening in the real (or realer) world of late, has left me out of the blog loop for a month or so, something I greatly regret, but which, I guess, couldn't be helped. Never mind, I'm back now, and everything will be better. Or at least not any worse.

More Exciting Fest News... No, This Is REALLY Exciting

2009-03-06T14:42:00.003-05:00

Despite what I said yesterday about the Fest lineup having to stay secret for the time being, I have been authorized to tell you about one of the most exciting bands that definitely will be appearing. Appearing? No, a word like that that hardly encompasses the magnitude of an event like this.

How about manifesting? Yeah, that's the ticket: MANIFESTING on stage for the biggest event yet in their meteoric (actually, it's meteoric in the sense of being white hot and evanescent, but it's the opposite of meteoric if you consider that a meteor is actually a falling star whereas this band is constantly on the RISE).

Who could I be talking about? None other than *S*U*C*I*D*I*E*, the genius brainchild of MATT LAME, CARLA MONOXIDE, and PAUL SQUARE. The international hype machine has been running overtime on these guys, but only a very privileged few have heard their recorded work, fewer still have been lucky enough to see them in the flesh.

This summer that will change forever, as a thousand punk rock lovers will at last get the chance to witness that rarest of phenomena, a full-on, no holds barred *S*U*C*I*D*I*E* show. This makes it all the more likely that Fest tickets will sell out almost instantly, so keep your eyes peeled for the on-sale date.

But wait, there's more! Apparently they need a stand-in guitarist for this show, and after a rigorous vetting and audition process, they've chosen one. And, I'm flabbergasted to say, it's turned out to be ME. Yes, folks, it's true; after all these years in show business exile, I'll be back on stage again, playing awesome shredding punk rock guitar of the sort I haven't attempted since THE LOOKOUTS broke up back in 1990. I've even dragged the old Marshall out of the cupboard and cranked it up to get ready. It took a whole five minutes for the police to show up with complaints from 14 different neighbors, so I know I've still got it.

Wow. To be a part of *S*U*C*I*D*I*E*, even if just for one day. What an incredible honor. I'm all but speechless. But I can't say any more for now. I've got some cataclysmically cacophonous guitar riffs to learn!

Mr. Fest

2009-03-05T21:53:00.002-05:00

With the first hint of spring in the air (well, the temperature got above freezing today for the first time this week) comes news of this year's Insubordination Fest, better known as simply The Fest, now definitely set for June 25 through 28 in lovely downtown Baltimore.

I've been accused (or maybe I should regard it more as an honor than an accusation) of being "Mr. Fest" for my unabashed and unqualified boosting of this event, ever since its humble origins at a corner bar in the summer of 2006. That year it was essentially a get-together for a bunch of friends, at least half of whom were probably in one or more of the bands that was playing, but some sort of magic was in the air, and it's more or less doubled in size each year since.

I don't think it will double again this year, if only because there's not enough room in the venue for twice as many people as attended in 2008, but I've just had a look at the lineup and found myself coming down with Fest fever all over again. Many of the crowd favorites from past years will be there, of course, along with plenty of new names, some of the household variety, and some right out of left field. And there are still at least half a dozen more to be added!

Tickets aren't on sale yet, and probably won't be for a few weeks yet, but now might be a good time to set aside the last weekend in June and to start keeping your eyes peeled for an announcement. If you're a PPMB member, you'll know about the on-sale date in plenty of time. If not, well, I'll try to keep you posted about things here as well. The one thing I will not tell you is who is and who isn't playing, so don't bother asking. Just think how much more fun you'll have trying to guess!

I Lock The Door To My Own Cell

2009-03-05T01:12:00.002-05:00

I was reading this New York Times article about the alleged malaise or "crisis of the mind" currently besetting Japan when I came across the term "hikikomori."

I'd seen the word before, possibly even heard an explanation of the phenomenon, but it hadn't stuck with me, so I looked it up and read a few articles about it, the whole time thinking, "Wow, that sounds a little bit like me."

Only a little, thankfully. As any regular readers will know, I not only leave the house, but also the city, state or country, on a pretty frequent basis. Age-wise, I'm pretty far removed from the hikikomori demographic, and I haven't been supported by my parents since I was 17 (for which I give them a great deal of credit; I'll never understand how parents rationalize allowing their adult children to hang around indefinitely without at least making a contribution to household expenses).

But like the hikikomori, I'm in a position where I don't have to leave the house if I don't want to, and too often I'm finding myself not wanting to. Part of this is because it's winter, of course, and also because I like my (still relatively) new apartment so much. But I've noticed this tendency for a while; even in my last apartment, which I hated, I sometimes found it hard to make it down the stairs and out into the streets of New York City, which I love.

I also catch myself lingering around the hotel room way too much of the time when I visit other cities or countries, and it's not just because I can't tear myself away from the internet, though that's a problem in itself. But if there's no internet, I'll watch television, or read, or try on different clothes until I've decided that I can't go out because I don't have anything to wear. Even when I fully intend to go out, whether at home or away, I often dilly-dally around so long that I end up being late or missing an event altogether.

In fact, thanks to a combination of dilly-dallying, dithering over what to wear, checking my email one or two last times, and a recalcitrant subway train, I came dangerously close to missing the New York premiere of my niece Gabrielle Bell's new film, Tokyo!. Well, perhaps I'm being guilty of nepotism (niece-ism?) in crediting it that way; you'll generally see it listed as being a film by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and Bong Joon-ho, the three of whom did actually direct it. But the Gondry segment, "Interior Design," is based on "Cecil And Jordan In New York," a comic written and drawn by Gabrielle, and she also co-wrote the screenplay, so that's enough to make it her movie in this uncle's eyes.

At the after-party I got to hang out with Cecil (it's taken me a couple years to sort out whether she was Cecil or Jordan, but I've finally got it straight now), who in real life (such as it was) is Sadie Hales, from, of all places, lovely Laytonville, California, proving once again that we Northern California mountain hicks actually do get about in the world. Gabrielle also served her time in Laytonville, of course, as did Green Day drummer Tre Cool, and I'm still hoping to amount to something myself one of these days. In interviews like this one, Gabrielle assures us that Cecil isn't literally Sadie but in fact merely represents one aspect of her character, but that still leaves her only one or two removes from being a movie star, doesn't it?

Anyway, Gabrielle and Sadie were friends back in their Laytonville days, and I still remember seeing the two of them together in a high school version of A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by the indefatigable Paula Mulligan (she was also Tre Cool's music teacher), one of those rare and priceless individuals that small towns are occasionally blessed with, so in love with their particular field of the arts (in Paula's case, it was practically every field) that they inspire several generations to imagine themselves capable of something more than the quiet desperation of little town life.

But getting back to our boring old New York City movie premiere, I was taken aback by Bong Joon-ho's segment of the film, "Shaking Tokyo", which turned out to be centered around the precise phenomenon I had discovered and researched only that afternoon, the hikikomori. The synchronicity of it was a little too weird, but not unlike the sort of thing that seems to happen to me quite often.

I don't suppose there's anything all that mysterious about it. For one thing, I've most likely come across the term hikikomori and possibly even seen it defined while failing to register it in my conscious memory. And is it possible that I knew - if only subliminally, because I don't recall ever hearing anything about it previously - what Bong Joon-ho's subject matter was going to be?

Prosaic explanations like this, I've found, are most often behind "amazing" coincidences and "psychic" or "paranormal" phenomena, though of course I'd prefer to believe that God or one of his emissaries is sending me personal messages (though I wish that while he was at it, he would have passed along the message that I didn't need to get dressed up as much as I did; even the directors wore blue jeans, and about the only other people wearing suits were the catering help). Being over or underdressed for one of these affairs is the sort of thing that could make a guy want to go home, lock the door behind himself, and not come out again for a very long time.

Fortunately, I had a series of events and meetings today that led me all the way to the far-flung Upper West Side (Seinfeld country, really) and to the mysterious and brooding backstreets of Long Island City, so that's one more day I haven't become a full-fledged hikikomori. I think I may go outside again tomorrow, which will make four days running that I've left not only the house but the island. And ventured (far) above 23rd Street, no less. Maybe there's hope for me yet.

Where The Money Is

2009-03-03T16:34:00.002-05:00

"That's where the money is" was what Willie Sutton was famously supposed to have said when asked why he persisted in robbing banks. Now that banks apparently have little or no money left, one is left to wonder where, in fact the money is these days.

And this question becomes all the more vital now that the federal government is proposing to spend (and in fact already has spent) a few trillion dollars of nonexistent money in what looks like an increasingly frantic attempt to stave off complete economic collapse.

It all seems a bit touch and go at the moment as to whether they will succeed, but I don't really see a lot of alternatives. If invading armies were poised on our borders, I don't think there'd be too much anguished debate about whether we could afford the weapons necessary to repel them, and the current economic crisis is probably as much a threat to our survival as a nation as any of the wars we've waged in recent memory.

When I was at Berkeley, our Political Economy class had a guest speaker in the person of former Navy Secretary John Lehman, who lectured us on the microeconomics of military spending. This was at the time when there was much (understandable) outrage over the $200 hammers and gold-plated toilets the Pentagon was continually being caught wasting taxpayers' money on, and I didn't expect him to be able to provide any credible defense for this kind of waste.

But to some extent he did: military spending, he argued, exists in a different context altogether, in that - at least or especially in times of war - it's the sort of spending where saving money is necessarily one of the lowest priorities. A lot of good it will do you, he pointed out, to have got those bullets at a knockdown price from an off-brand supplier if in the course of searching out bargains you have been overrun and conquered by the enemy.

In war, he claimed, there is one standard of success and one only: victory. Any other outcome and the cost, whether exorbitant or economical, becomes irrelevant. Hence the question: does our present predicament constitute the fiscal equivalent of war? If so, then the Obama administration is undoubtedly justified in throwing everything, kitchen sink included, at the problem. As enormous as the national debt we've run up already is, it still hasn't approached the levels - as a percentage of GDP - that it did in World War II, and yet rather than leaving us indebted and struggling for decades afterward, the war's end set off one of the longest and biggest economic expansions in history. Isn't it possible that a sufficiently large investment in infrastructure, no matter how heavily mortgaged, could do the same again?

It's been pointed out to me, however, that the difference between the post-WWII era and our present condition is that following the war, most other developed countries apart from the USA were in ruins, with their working-age population decimated, and that this in turn gave the USA an enormous advantage. And yet, many of the countries which suffered most - Germany and Japan in particular - not only recovered quickly, they soon came to rival the United States itself in economic terms.

Much of Europe and Asia's success following the war seems, then, to have gotten a kickstart from the USA's generous (or canny, depending how you look at it) aid (or investment), which not only helped those countries to rebuild their infrastructures, but produced a fast-growing market for US goods and services. Ultimately, everybody benefited, and it's not clear to me why a similar principle couldn't apply even if we don't blow everything up first.

So barring any other obvious possibilities, I'm very much in support of Obama's budget, and would in fact like to see even more spent on vast public works projects, with high speed rail and renewable (especially solar) energy sources being near the top of my own wish list. But where does the money come to pay for it?

Well, as a general rule, I'm not in favor of raising taxes, especially not in a time of straitened economic circumstances, but again it looks as though Obama has got it just about right. There are quite a few Americans who grew extremely prosperous during the recent boom years. Whether you feel they did so honestly - I think in most cases the answer is yes - or through bubble financing and corporate gouging - there's been a fair bit of that as well - doesn't so much matter: the grim fact is that that's where the money is.

You can't raise taxes on the middle or working classes, not just because it wouldn't be fair, but because they simply haven't got the money to pay them, but as for the upper and upper middle classes, well, they may not have nearly as much as they had a couple years ago, but they've still got plenty, enough so that a relatively minor tax increase isn't going to greatly inconvenience them, let alone impinge on their ability to enjoy life. If this was a war, everybody's taxes would be going up, and goods would be rationed as well.

For the poorer classes, rationing is already in effect by virtue of their inability to pay for many of life's necessities, let alone luxuries. The well-to-do can not only afford to pitch in, it's their duty - and should be considered a privilege and an honor - to do so. In fact, as Biden was unjustly maligned for saying during the campaign, it's downright patriotic. If Bush hadn't put his ill-conceived and ineptly waged war - not to mention his equally ill-conceived and ineptly applied tax cuts - on the national credit card, chances are we wouldn't be in this predicament today, but he did, we're broke, and somebody has to pay the bill.

Let's Go To Fucking Hawaii

2009-03-02T17:06:00.002-05:00

You'd have to be of a certain age, from Vancouver, or unnaturally well versed in the ancient history of regional punk scenes to remember the Young Canadians' greatest (only) hit, a snarling, sarcastic slam at the "fun in the sun" mentality. When I first heard "Hawaii" a few decades ago, I was right on board with the sentiment, believing there to be something clearly decadent if not vaguely obscene about lounging around on some sunny beach when one could be engaging in more substantial and significant activities like staying up all night on drugs and pogoing like a cracked-out jack-in-the-box at the local punk show.

Well, well, how times have changed: now I think I could quite happily while away the rest of my life on or near a beach, and sometimes it's only my hope that global warming will eventually turn New York City into the tropical paradise it was clearly meant to be that keeps me clinging to life on these East Coast islands.

But while I may have become a full-fledged beach bum in principle and theory, there's enough of the black-clad, night-loving, artificial-light-craving punk rocker in me to be a little embarrassed by the public image a sybaritic, sunseeking lifestyle might create for me. Which might be why I didn't post anything here about my trip to Hawaii either before or during. Or, more likely, I was just too lazy, but we can take that up on another occasion.

And then I also worried about the feelings of people who were stuck back in the ice and snow, or just simply couldn't afford to take off for a weekend in New Jersey, let alone a week in a tropical paradise. Well, if it's any consolation - and I'm sure it will be to many of you schadenfreudists - not only was the weather in New York pretty darn mild for February the whole time I was gone, the weather in Hawaii was not all that great, either.

It is, as Mr. Einstein was constantly saying, all relative, of course. To someone scraping ice off his windshield, 60 or 70 (15 or 21C) degrees sounds mighty inviting. But to someone who has packed little more than a swimming suit, some shorts and a few t-shirts under the impression that Hawaii was one place you could count on it always being summer, not so much.

It's not as though I was in danger of imminent frostbite, true, and I actually did get to go swimming in the Pacific Ocean - incredibly clear, with exotic blue and green colors, just like on the postcards - one day and lie on the beach a couple others, but to be quite honest, if it were summer in New York, I would have waited for a nicer day.

It barely rained at all, but of the time I was there, it was cloudy about half the time, and windy most of the time, sometimes ridiculously so. 75 degrees (24C), which was about as warm as it ever got in the daytime, can be quite comfortable under normal circumstances, but not with a 25 mph (40kph) wind dragging the chill factor down by a dozen degrees or so. Put it this way: while tourists were schlepping around in tank tops and shorts (they kind of have to, if only to justify their vacation investment to themselves and to produce photos to make their friends back on the mainland jealous), the locals were bundled up in hoodies and jackets (I'll admit, I rather naively thought that people in Hawaii didn't even own jackets, but once again it looks as though I was wrong).

All that aside, however, it was still very nice to be able to visit our 50th state (and the 48th on my list of states visited; now only Alaska and Louisiana remain), and I could see where it would be a very nice place to live, albeit with a couple caveats, the first of which would be to have a nice hoodie and a second being to not live on the windward side of the islands.

Each island, as I learned, has a windward side and a leeward side (even some of the buses use this for their directional signs), with the windy side also being the rainy side, and while it's very pretty over there in all the overgrown jungle type vegetation, I can't imagine why somebody would want to live there year round. Honolulu is sheltered from the worst of the wind and rain by some rather spectacular mountains (not much higher than the California coastal mountains, actually, but looking more dramatic because they rise straight up from sea level), and generally has better and sunnier weather, but at times the trade winds manage to climb right over the mountains and swoop down upon the beaches of Waikiki.

Another factor that might render longterm life in Hawaii a bit onerous is that, well, there's not a whole lot going on there. Lots of outdoorsy things, true; if you're mainly about beaching it, or hiking, golfing, boating, fishing, paragliding, etc., etc., then you should be fine. But if you're at least partly a city person, well, be advised that the nearest city of any consequence is several thousand miles away.

That's not to diss Honolulu; it's a pleasant enough place, and offers at least some of the advantages of most modern cities: for example, if you want to shop for top-end designer goods, there will be no shortage of opportunities. But it's probably best suited for old people with lots of money and kids who are happy splashing in the water; teenagers and young adults seem to be quietly going crazy.

And not always so quietly, either, judging from the hot rods and the cars that go boom up and down Ala Moana Boulevard, but as one local told me, "A lot of these guys come down with rock fever," and when I queried about what "rock fever" might be, he said, "You know, going crazy from the feeling of clinging to a rock out in the middle of the ocean."

So a lot - maybe a majority - of ambitious young people end up leaving for the mainland, and those who remain can often be found passed out in one of the many parks, where it's apparently possible to live pretty much year round without much hassle. One notable difference, however, from some of the mainland cities with large homeless populations: most of the Hawaiian tramps seem remarkably non-aggressive and non-psycho, unlike those in, say, San Francisco. The whole time I was there, I only got spare-changed once, by some tweaked-out hippie on Kalakaua Avenue, and even he didn't seem particularly bothered by the whole business.

There is something distinctly feral about the place, though, which generally seems to be the case in tropical locations. You could easily picture - say if the financial meltdown continued to even more disastrous levels - Hawaii reverting to some sort of Heart Of Darkness-cum-Lord Of The Flies scenario, with the rich and previously well-fed providing sustenance to the younger, more vigorous residents, at least until the population had been reduced to more manageable levels, i.e., about 10% of what it is now.

Leave it to me, of course, to detect the rudiments of anarchy and cannibalism in one of the friendliest, most relaxed places I have ever visited. It's just how I roll, I guess. Will I go back again? Most likely, but at a warmer time of the year, which, from what I've been told, comes around the same time as it does in the rest of the country. That kind of defeats the purpose, though, doesn't it? If it's already hot and humid in New York, why would I need to go to Hawaii? Somebody should have thought this through a little more carefully. Perhaps me.

Meanwhile back home, it's 20 degrees outside (-6C), with half a foot or so of snow on the ground, and a cold draft permeating even my normally snug and warm apartment. Never mind, it'll be spring soon, and even if it wasn't, I still love New York the best.

Leaving Lookout

2009-02-16T19:28:00.003-05:00

Over at the PPMB somebody started a thread asking people to name the five best Lookout Records releases. It's actually part of a spate of "Five best..." silliness, but it elicited quite a few comments to the effect of, "There's no way I could name just 5" and "What a great label this used to be," and I felt, well, kind of touched.

And then reading through the lists of records set off a wave of nostalgia as well. Could it really have been true that we unleashed so many great records (yes, I know there were a few turkeys too, but that's not really the point here) in such a fleeting handful of years? The thing is, you're never fully aware of the magnitude of what you're doing when you're right in the middle of it, whether it be a business or artistic enterprise, a love affair, or even something seemingly mundane like going to college or moving to a new city.

In fact most things we do, even the ones we most remember or are remembered by, are pretty mundane at the time. I know that during what some people, myself included, now refer to as Lookout's "golden years," I didn't jump out of bed brimming over with excitement at the prospect of making punk rock history or releasing classic records by the most exciting young artists of the day. On the contrary, I was more likely to drag myself out of bed (or, more accurately, the crumpled morass of blankets on the floor in the corner of our "office") thinking, "Hoo boy, another day of adding up interminable rows of numbers and arguing with people over whose names go first on the album credits."

And no, it wasn't all like that, either, and yes, there were moments of genuine magic and excitement, instances where it suddenly occurred to me that I was going to remember this show or conversation or recording session for the rest of my life. But they were just moments, too, interspersed with yawning gaps of tedium and time-killing, and, not quite occasionally enough, redemptive bits of leavening: a new, non-jaded band, a heart-quickening (or heart-stopping) crush, the sudden, albeit ephemeral release from care as we hit the road at the beginning of a new tour.

I hardly ever meet anyone from the music scene who doesn't ask me some version of "Why did you leave Lookout?" and I don't think I've yet succeeded in delivering a reasonable answer, either to them or myself. At times it represent one of the greatest regrets of my life, especially in light of what was to happen to the label and especially to the bands who were left holding the bag. On the other hand, I've often thought that if I hadn't left when I did, I probably wouldn't be here today.

That might sound a little melodramatic, even - at this remove - to myself. There's no denying that I was morbidly depressed and stressed out at the time I jumped ship, but really, what was the problem? We were making money hand over fist, virtually every record we put out was successful enough to make a profit just on the strength of being a Lookout release, I could go to just about any party or show I wanted to, anywhere in North America or Europe, just for the asking, and hardly a day went by without somebody or several somebodies telling me how wonderful I was.

Yet it wasn't enough. Or it was too much. Or it was something: all I knew was that I could no longer cope with it, and I felt deeply ashamed to have to admit it. In retrospect, there were other, less drastic measures I could have taken. Quitting drinking, for example - which I would ultimately do anyway - or seeking some kind of therapy or counseling. I could - and should - also have taken more responsibility for dealing with people and situations, both inside and outside the label, who were causing me grief.

But talk is cheap and hindsight 20-20 all these years after the fact. Just as I had no idea how big and how rapidly Lookout would grow when we started it in 1987, I had no idea how quickly those magic moments would pass and how much I would miss them when they were gone. I have no idea if I'll ever be involved with anything again that's that successful or that exciting, but I'd like to imagine that if it should come to pass, I'll be better prepared to both safeguard and savor my good fortune. On the other hand, I can't help remembering the plaque my grandfather had on his wall: "We grow too soon old and too late smart." Hegel more famously opined that it was only in the gathering twilight that the owl of wisdom began its flight, but either way you slice it, we live and learn, too quickly in the first instance, and far too slowly in the latter.

Mad Max In Suburbia

2009-02-16T12:55:00.002-05:00

How times change. Only a couple decades ago people had all but written off the city as a viable living arrangement. The prevailing view was typified by films like Escape From New York, which portrayed New York City as having so far descended the ladder of human depravity that the only solution was to seal it off and turn the entire place into a maximum security prison.

Today, astronomical rents and financial crises notwithstanding, people are queuing up at the gates, or at least the bridges and tunnels, to live in New York, and it's the suburbs that we're afraid are going to rack and ruin. This article in the Atlantic laid out the scenario a year ago, and that was before sky-high energy prices followed by collapsing housing values made it plain just how unsustainable the once rampant suburban mindset was becoming.

Now comes a spate of stories about the virtual abandonment of some of suburbia's farther-flung outcroppings, including this Times piece, complete with a slide show of yesterday's massively overpriced tract homes, now virtually unsalable and being rapidly reclaimed by Florida's subtropical version of the jungle, or the more in-depth treatment of the issue by George Packer in the February 9 New Yorker (unfortunately available online only to subscribers, and I left my copy on the train yesterday, or I'd invite you over to read it).

Of course people have always fled into the cities during times of decline and disorder, whether we're talking about pioneers on the prairie when there was an upsurge of Indian attacks, or the ancient British gentry abandoning their villas and retreating into what proved to be the illusory safety of Londinium when Roman troops were no longer able to keep a handle on rampaging bands of Saxons. Isn't is possible a similar fate could await emptied-out suburban communities once they're no longer able to raise enough tax revenue to maintain an effective police force or other basic service?

Apocalyptic fantasies are all the rage these days anyway, but America's shabbier suburbs had a Mad Max edge to them even before the current troubles kicked in. There's something particularly unsettling about abandoned buildings and cracked, overgrown pavements in the wide open spaces of suburbia; they feel more portentous and doom-laden than in big city slums, where we expect to encounter such things. And while a couple conscientious beat cops can keep a lid on a densely populated urban neighborhood, the same two cops, no matter how well equipped or mobile, are going to be hard pressed to maintain any meaningful order on several square miles of suburban wasteland.

The big problem facing suburban communities is money, i.e., the lack thereof, a problem which is only likely to get worse in at least the near term. Declining property values and rising unemployment will wreak havoc on tax revenues, and both these conditions will only be exacerbated by the suburbs' biggest long term problem: transportation. Or again, the lack thereof.

As long as a booming economy and cheap energy made it possible for even poorly paid working people to own their own cars and travel many miles to earn a living, the suburban lifestyle made a certain perverse sense. But as money and jobs dry up, and with little economic infrastructure accessible via walking or public transportation, those no longer able to afford cars will increasingly be cut off from society, leaving them with little choice but to either abandon the suburbs or go feral.

On the (perhaps too hopeful) assumption that our current economic troubles don't morph into the Great Depression II (or worse), we'll still get a chance to redesign and reconfigure our suburbs into a more realistic living environment. This will require increased density, greatly improved public transportation, and a diminution of the role played by the private automobile; one such scenario is outlined here. It will also require time and money, which, depending on the success or failure of Obama's stimulus program, we may or may not have.

Tight Pants

2009-02-12T01:51:00.002-05:00

When I first was old enough to pick out my own clothes, the style was, at least for the "bad" kids that I aspired to run with, to wear skintight jeans, sometimes, depending how much flair you were prepared to show (this was a delicate matter, since there was no hard and fast rule against flamboyance, but if you didn't edge it just so, you'd be forever branded as a sexual and social deviant), with the cuffs turned up slightly.

The following year the blue jeans gave way to black ones, and then to my favorites, sharkskin iridescent trousers that were mainly available in the "colored" (yes, they still said that in those days) sections of Detroit, but one factor remained constant: they were always as tight as was humanly possible, the better to shock parents and teachers and offend the bourgeoisie.

Ever since then, I've always preferred my trousers to be on the tight side. It just seemed natural. I thought the late 60s fad for bell bottoms was both heinous and vile, even though I briefly succumbed to it after discovering that people from my psychedelic crowd were wary of getting too close to me - or sometimes even talking to me - as long as I persisted in wearing my old school greaser jeans.

Then in the 70s things really went awry, with wacky wide lapels, bizarrely cut jackets, all seemingly meant to disguise rather than highlight the shape of one's body. But what really did it for me, as in put me over the edge, was when Levi's started deliberately marketing their jeans for fatasses.

Well, that's not exactly how they put it; the commercial, as I recall it, was touting "Levi's for men, with just a skosh (thank God that word didn't catch on) more room where it counts." In other words, I railed to anyone who would listen, they were equating being "a man" with acquiring a middle-aged paunch. Let the fatties graduate into pleated-front polyester slacks, I fumed, but don't tamper with my beloved Levi's.

Well, as you probably know, my pleadings were in vain. Not only did Levi's spend the next couple decades making and selling ever more enormous jeans to accommodate ever more enormous rear ends, but they also farmed the manufacturing out to the Third World and started using cheap, flimsy denim that turned their once-rugged jeans into disposable crap.

And it wasn't just Levi's, anyway, it was all pants. Even if you didn't want to be a rapper, unless you were willing to spend endless hours trolling the retro shops for recycled 50s and 60s stuff, you were pretty much condemned to go around with enormous parachute-like garments flapping embarrassingly about your nether regions.

So at last, as the new century dawned, tight pants began to come back into style. The hipsters and emo freaks, bless their souls, were the first to embrace them, at the cost of being scorned as "sissies" and "wearing girls' clothes," but now the trend has spread to where even the benighted Levi's corporation has resumed manufacturing skinny, old-school jeans again (out of shitty, new-school denim that wears out after a few months, true, but you can't have everything).

So naturally I rushed right out and bought a couple pairs, but now I'm faced with a dilemma: unlike most men of my age I can still fit into the same tight jeans I wore several decades ago, but the question remains, should I? I'm sure there'd be quite a bit of sentiment to the effect that nobody my age, regardless of what kind of physical shape he's in, should be wearing skintight jeans, but does that seem fair? Especially when nobody seems to complain about the overweight 20-something who stuffs himself into the same sort of jeans and compound the crime by wearing a too-short t-shirt, thus revealing a highly unsightly muffin top spilling over his belt.

And to be fair, although I can still comfortably wear the tightest jeans being sold, I don't have exactly the same figure I did as a teenager, and I do have to do a little extra work if I want to avoid developing my own muffin top. But that's a good thing, right? At least a much better thing than what most people my age do, which is to buy everything a size or two too large and then not worry at all about what they look like underneath their clothes.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into this. I still like my tight pants, and I think I'm going to keep wearing them. If, however, you the readers feel strongly enough against this, you're free to write in and tell me so, attaching your explanations if necessary. I mean, I'll probably ignore you and keep wearing them anyway, but it's always good to know what's on the public's mind, I guess. Though I think I'm already past the age where I should have to give a damn.

Tropical Island

2009-02-12T01:32:00.002-05:00

As I think I mentioned in my lengthy inauguration report, a few years ago I went to see a well-known psychic. I was acting as an undercover agent for my friend Danny, the journalist, and I remember being a bit nervous at the time, thinking that if she really was psychic, she'd know right away that I was not who I claimed to be. What might then ensue - being thrown out of her house, having evil spells cast upon me, possibly being sold into slavery - was the subject of some fevered speculation.

As it was, if she could tell that I was anything other than a typical customer, she never let on, and one of the predictions she made for me was that within a few years I would find myself living on an island. "As in Manhattan?" I asked, since at the time I was just beginning to contemplate leaving London for New York.

No, she said, she saw me in a somewhat more tropical setting, near a beach where I could swim every day, and since I was also vaguely considering emigrating to Australia, I figured that must be what she meant. But when it came time to fill in my papers for Australia, I chickened out, missed the deadline, and since then the program under which I would have been accepted has expired, probably never to be reinstated. So instead of languishing on the beach in the Australian mid-summer, here I am on one of the New York islands - not Manhattan after all, as it turned out - in the depths of February.

Except that today was, while not quite tropical yet, warmer than almost everywhere else I might have been. Warmer, I gleefully noted, than even Los Angeles, where this morning it was 36 (4C) degrees while here in New York it was 63 (17C). Much, much warmer than San Francisco or London, of course, but even, for a few moments, a degree or two ahead of Sydney!

There's something disorienting but also delightful about seeing New Yorkers lounging at sidewalk cafes on a mild February night, and equally odd about walking into the gym to find all the windows thrown open to let the fresh air in. I'm sure it won't last much longer - some rain has already started to move in, and they're predicting snow by the weekend - but it's also not the first day this month that's been like this. I know that one needs to be careful what one wishes for, and that if the earth warmed up enough to turn New York into the tropical island I secretly would love it to be, we actually wouldn't be an island, because we'd be underwater. But still, I can't help having visions of Brighton Beach lined with palm trees and a year-round summertime in which down jackets and hats and scarves and gloves, not to mention coughs and sniffles and frostbitten faces, would be a thing of the past.

Hey, it could happen, right?

Jersey And The Steinways

2009-02-09T02:12:00.002-05:00

Over to Hoboken yet again the other night, the journey this time made less onerous by MATT FAME's inimitable chauffeur service, which took us from Brooklyn to New Jersey in no time at all, which was good, because we then needed all the time we had saved (and more) to find a place to park. Man, Hoboken is a mess that way, though to be fair, we got what we deserved for not taking the train.

The occasion was a massive (and sold out) show at MAXWELL'S put on by the DON GIOVANNI record label and featuring the last ever FOR SCIENCE show and the possibly next to last ever STEINWAYS show. Although For Science were a good band and much loved by most of my friends, they never quite caught on with me. Well, they did once I heard their recorded material, but by that time my impression of them had already been colored by their shambolic live performances, which, unless they were putting on a Dean Martin-style (way to date myself, eh, kids?!) burlesque, were usually occasioned by at least some of them being drunk off their asses.

When they finally played a show stone cold sober at the Cake Shop last year, I realized just how good they could be, but by then it was hard to undo my earlier impressions, so I just kind of didn't bother to get too excited about them one way or the other. They seemed to be in relatively good shape for Saturday night's valedictory show, although the performance was a bit desultory, especially the ending, when, rather than engage in the usual sentimental mucking about and endless encores that characterize a band's farewell show, they just sort of shuffled off stage with barely a "so long," let alone an encore. Actually, one of the highlights came before their set, when all three members of the also-defunct ERGS took the stage, began pottering around as if they might be about to play an impromptu reunion show, and then said, "Hi, we're the Ergs, and we'd like to introduce you to For Science."

But for me at least, this show was mainly about the Steinways, and they were in rare form, especially for New Jersey, or more particularly, Maxwell's, where, as boy genius GRATH McGRATH confided later, "We always sucked before." The sound was unusually good, but so was the playing, helped along in no small part by CHRIS PIERCE, who sat in on drums for the ailing CHRIS GRIVET. Chris, whose own band, the GROUCHO MARXISTS, also played, has engineered most of the Steinways' recorded stuff and made it sound awesome, did much the same for their live performance, and though there was a festive crowd of friends in the pit loving every minute of it, there was a real bittersweet feeling to the proceedings as well. Of all the bands that have been breaking up lately, this is the one that really got to me. In fact, I almost never get sentimental about band breakups, and I'm not sure I am about the Steinways, either. No, my feelings are more like... well, I'm mad. Angry. Resentful. Not at anybody in particular, just at the cruel heartlessness of a world that would take away the Steinways and leave us with ten kajillion downright crappy bands.

It's also frustrating that they're breaking up just as they're really hitting their stride and starting to get some widespread (and well-deserved) recognition. There's still (most likely) a Steinways set in the offing for this summer's Baltimore Fest, and very possibly one more official goodbye show in New York, but if there's any justice, some deus ex machina will intervene and make the Steinways whole again.

In other news, I made it back from Hoboken without incident (thanks again to Matt Fame!) and without catching Jersey cooties! I'm beginning to become an old hand at this interstate travel thing. Next time I might even dare to venture as far afield as Jersey City or Weehawken!

A Walk In The Park

2009-02-09T01:29:00.002-05:00

This weekend has provided a little foretaste of spring, with temperatures briefly reaching close to 60F (15C) today. It didn't take long for New Yorkers to prove they could be just as nutty as Californians by stripping down to t-shirts and shorts and prancing around in the unusually bright sunshine.

But by the time I got out of the house (there was English football to be watched and something else which seemed important at the time, though I can no longer remember what it was), the temperature was dropping and I thought it best to wear my winter jacket, a decision that turned out to have been a wise one, as it was back down in the 30s by the time I got home.

It may have been that the unusual weather inspired me with some sort of wanderlust, because I ventured far north of my usual downtown haunts, all the way to 72nd Street, in fact, though once I was there I immediately found myself suffering from what might be thought of as existential vertigo and had to jump on a train, any train, as long as it was headed in the general direction of 14th Street.

But en route I made some useful discoveries, among them being:
1) The financial crisis may be grim indeed in most parts of the country and indeed in many parts of the city, but it seems to have had little if any impact on the Apple Store at 5th Avenue and 59th Street. You could hardly walk around in the place, it was so crowded, and it wasn't just gawkers; the line of people waiting to pay for the largely overpriced merchandise was at least 20 or 30 deep.
2) Central Park looks a lot smaller in the winter when you can see through the bare trees and realize that no matter where you are, there are buildings and streets not all that far away.
3) Although I've never been a fan of roller blades (don't ask me why; it's just one of those irrational, instinctive loathings that crop up from time to time, like mustaches or smelly chewing gum), it was really nice to see (and hear) the DJ sound system playing for a couple dozen roller disco types (and quite a few dancing in their street shoes as well) and the crowd of spectators they attracted. If I hadn't been wearing my winter jacket and carrying a fairly heavy backpack, I might have joined in.
4) I always thought "Strawberry Fields," the section of the park set aside to memorialize John Lennon, was a bit hokey, but while passing through I happened upon a group of people playing and singing nothing but Beatles songs with a proficiency that leads one to believe they have been out there for a long time doing the same thing for a couple decades' worth of Sundays.
5) While stopping to listen for a while, I made a shocking yet gratifying discovery: the first flowers of spring! With February barely a week old! They weren't fully in bloom yet, in fact, weren't really in bloom at all, but you could distinctly see the white flowers-to-be protruding from the unmistakably green shoots. I believe they were snowdrops. Definitely not crocuses, which are usually the first spring flowers I notice around here.
6) Central Park is sure an awful lot nicer when it's closed to automobile traffic.
7) No matter how beautiful a day it's been, or how springlike, a stiff north wind kicking up just as darkness begins to settle over the city can drag you right back into winter and make you not only glad you wore your winter coat, but also a little sorry you didn't wear you hoodie as well.
8) I've heard many negative critiques of the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle, but every time I visit the shops there, even if (as is usually the case) I'm just doing so to get out of the cold, I find some new perspective or point of view to be fascinated by. Plus they have better quality restrooms than most shopping centers.
9) Times Square seems unnaturally quiet these days, and I don't think it's just the weather.
10) The building that used to house Barnes and Noble on 6th Ave around 21st Street is still vacant after a couple years. A bookstore and cafe were a nicer accoutrement to that part of town than an empty storefront.
11) There are more empty storefronts in New York than I've seen at any time in the last 10 or 15 years. But things still look more prosperous than most of the rest of the country.
12) If nobody can afford anything, why don't they lower the prices and rents already?
13) It was a good day. And soon it really will be spring.

How Bad Are Things In Oakland?

2009-02-07T04:55:00.002-05:00

Bad enough that in addition to the hopelessly inept police chief taking a powder, the city manager has also pulled up stakes in search of a less stressful position in... wait for it... Detroit??

Why San Francisco Will Remain An Overpriced Slum

2009-02-07T03:22:00.003-05:00

You don't need to be a fan of American Apparel to appreciate how bonkers this bunch of Frisco nutters sounds. Frankly, it's hard to imagine why anyone would care enough about American Apparel one way or the other to be exercised over the prospect of them moving into your neighborhood, especially if the neighborhood is a slightly dumpy borderline slum with a fair sprinkling of empty or underused storefronts.

This would seem to be even more true at a time when businesses and jobs are evaporating like what's left of the Sierra snowpack, but not in the kneejerk, reactionary world of the San Francisco "activist" community, which strives at any cost to preserve the status quo even when (especially when) the status quo is just plain crappy. And after all, why do they need new businesses in the Valencia Corridor when right around the corner on 16th Street there's already a thriving trade in heroin, stolen goods, and muggings? That's the "real" Frisco that these nutbags romanticize, and as long as they hold sway, it's the only Frisco you're ever likely to get.

P.S. Here's another example: a group of activists, many of whom don't even live in the neighborhood, fighting to maintain the Tenderloin as a containment area/wildlife preserve for crackheads, beggars and lunatics, despite the fervent protests of local residents, many of whom are hardworking immigrants trying to raise families in the area. Particularly obnoxious are the comments from rich bitch (rich by Tenderloin standards, anyway) lawyer Sue Hestor who dismissed local residents trying to improve the neighborhood as "yuppies" who "moved into a low-income area and want it to be a high-income area" and the actions of left-wing fratboy-cum-thug Chris Daly, who much to San Francisco's embarrassment is a City and County Supervisor who "represents" his constituents by stifling any efforts to enforce quality of life laws or to maintain minimal standards of civil behavior on the streets. An architect's proposal to plant 400 trees was shot down because, activists claimed, she was trying to "sanitize" the area.

My Kind Of Corporate Executive

2009-02-06T17:18:00.002-05:00

Reed Hastings, head of Netflix, contributes an op-ed piece to today's Times entitled "Please Raise My Taxes." His premise, in essence, is that limiting executive salaries at companies receiving federal bailout funds, while satisfying the public's understandable thirst for vengeance, is ultimately self-defeating, in that it puts those companies at a competitive disadvantage at just the time when their competitive ability, indeed their ability to survive at all, is already severely compromised.

Much more effective, Hastings argues, would be to let companies pay whatever they want, but to tax high earners - his suggestion is anyone earning over a million dollars a year - at 50% rather than the current rate of 33%. The logic behind this is so impeccable that I'm annoyed it hadn't previously occurred to me. At a time when the economic system is so imperiled and millions of people are being put out of work, we obviously can't raise taxes on ordinary workers, let alone the unemployed, yet at the same time, the government is going to need vast amounts of new income to even begin to cover the massive deficits we are now rolling up.

We are entering a period where anyone who's still employed will be counting him or herself lucky; how much more so the executive who's pulling down a few million? Only the most churlish or greed-crazed could complain about having to scrape by on five million instead of ten at a time of national crisis like this one, and at the same time, the public would get the satisfaction that of any bailout money being used to pay executive bonuses or salaries, at least half would be coming straight back to the Treasury.

I had an uncle, now deceased, who, at least until I came along, was the only member of our family to have ever made any significant amount of money. When Reagan cut taxes for the well-to-do, he was outraged, and wrote to his Congressman: "I don't want a tax cut. I don't need a tax cut. I've got plenty of money. Take my taxes and use them to help people who aren't as well off as me."

He was ignored, of course, and the dire straits in which our country now finds itself are at least partially the result of the massive deficits run by ideologically-driven tax cutters (the same sort of Congressional screwballs, incidentally, are busily attempting to sabotage the economic stimulus program even as we speak). "Where are the dollar a year men?" more than one commentator has asked, referring to the many corporate executives, already fabulously rich, who volunteered to work for the government for that princely sum during a previous time of national crisis, namely the Second World War. It's clear now where the era of greed and personal irresponsibility has led us; it's time that those who have benefited disproportionately from the boom years show their gratitude and civic-mindedness by giving something back, and for that I salute Mr. Hastings and hope that others will follow his example.

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

2009-02-06T17:17:00.002-05:00

When I was 19 or 20 I briefly lived above a drug store on one of the more heavily trafficked streets of Ypsilanti, Michigan. What exactly I was doing at the time or how I came to be living in that apartment - it was at one of those points in my life when I had little money and fewer prospects - I do not know, but I do remember my routine of stepping downstairs each morning and helping myself to a copy of the Detroit Free Press from the rack in front of the store.

In those halcyon days, newspapers were not sold in machines; there was simply a rack with a coin slot on the side. It operated completely on the honor system; there was nothing to stop you from carrying off all the papers, or, for that matter, the rack itself. Many people today would, I imagine, be touched by this vestige of a simpler, more trusting era, but to my callow late adolescent self, it meant only one thing: free newspapers.

I don't know how long it was, maybe a month or two at most, before I came downstairs on morning to find that the news rack had been replaced by one of the coin-operated machines which you still see in in use today. It hadn't previously occurred to me that others besides myself would have helped themselves to newspapers without paying; I assumed that the free papers had been provided for me alone, and that everyone else would continue to be bound by the honor system. I felt vaguely indignant about this, tut-tutting to myself over society's declining moral values, and at the same time, feeling a sense of power and personal significance for having been on the cutting edge of the Zeitgeist.

I felt something similar when I started reading stories about newspapers going out of business, or having to drastically cut back on staff and print runs to avoid doing so. I was raised in an inveterate newspaper-reading family, and literally taught myself to read at ages 3 and 4 by poring over pages of the Detroit News and asking (to the point where I'm grateful they didn't strangle me) my mom or dad to explain the meaning of every other word I encountered.

In all the years I lived in California, I seldom missed an issue of the San Francisco Chronicle, and one of my several reasons for wanting to live in England involved the profusion and quality of newspapers available there. During my first several years in London, I routinely purchased the Guardian, the Times and the Independent and harshly chastised myself for failing to get through all of them on a daily basis.

Before I lived in England full time, I spent a small fortune buying copies of those same papers that had been air freighted over to the USA (at $3 to $5 a pop, considerably more on Sundays), so you can imagine what a great idea I thought it was when they began publishing internet editions. Now I can and do on a daily basis look at least three British papers (I've replaced the Independent with the Daily Mail), the SF Chronicle, the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald, and look in somewhat less frequently on the Detroit Free Press and half a dozen freebies like the Berkeley Daily Planet, SF Bay Guardian, Village Voice, etc.

But how often do I actually pick up a physical copy of one of these papers, much less pay for one? Answer: almost never, and when I do, usually only under special circumstances, like having some time to kill in a cafe or an airport waiting lounge, and even then I'm usually more likely to have a book or magazine with me. So once again I see the results of my individual (in)action being writ large: if current trends continue, experts are predicting, most newspapers as we have known them will be extinct in a few years.

True, more people than ever are reading online editions of these same papers, but nobody has yet figured out a way to "monetize," as they put it, this readership. In the early days of online publishing, some papers tried charging subscription fees for digital access and got nowhere; almost all of them now offer free access. Advertising is in a tailspin already due to the economic crisis, but even if it weren't, I'd be dubious of the real value of online advertising. I know I personally take little or no notice of online ads unless they are of the obtrusive popup or rollover variety, and my reaction then is not so much one of "Hmm, that looks interesting, I should check it out" as "Damn it, I'm trying to read here, get that crap out of my way."

In short, I can't remember a single instance where I bought a product or service based on an online ad, but can remember several where I vowed never to deal with certain companies again because of the annoyance factor of their ads. So, what's the solution? And if subscription fees or advertising won't pay the bills, who's going to produce the content, staff the overseas bureaus, maintain the websites, etc.? In other words, it won't be just the physical newspaper that goes missing.

Others claim that the big news organizations are a thing of the past, and that their function will be taken over by smaller, more efficient units like, for example, blogs. Given, however, that most bloggers are hugely dependent on the mass media for their source material and that very few bloggers are in a position to devote themselves to fulltime news coverage or investigative reporting, I'm not sure I see how that could work.

So what's the answer? I don't have one. Somebody - hopefully - may think of one, but so far, at least, it's not me. Even though one of my ongoing daily struggles is finding enough time to read all the various media sources available to me, I'd feel greatly impoverished if they were no longer there. One of you geniuses out there, please sort this one out, and quickly.

MCMYS Gilman Street

2009-02-03T00:25:00.005-05:00

If you've been reading this blog very long, you'll have noticed that I do this with almost predictable regularity: make a trip back to Gilman Street and then proceed to sing the praises of what what, if it isn't the longest-lived volunteer-owned and operated music and cultural center in the world, most certainly has to be one of the best.

Much of the joy has gone out of seeing live music in recent years, at least at all but the most grass-roots and DIY levels. Even the undeniable talents of today's or yesterday's megastars are seldom sufficient to compensate for the double whammy of insult and injury dished up to fans: music is most often presented in a sterile, soulless environment, completely deracinated from the passions and cultures that gave it birth, and is packaged and resold at prices obscenely inflated by monopolies like Tickemaster and its imitators, whose rapacious tentacles may well end up choking the last remaining life from the "entertainment" they purport to traffic in.

I swore off corporate rock shows after my last experience seeing one of my longtime favorites, MORRISSEY. While the substantial gouge effected by Ticketmaster on my wallet was bad enough, I don't absolve Morrissey himself of blame for his part in this dispiriting spectacle. As many of you will know, the Mozzer inspires a level of adulation among his fans that verges on religious dementia. As a result, his shows have historically been nearly as remarkable for the performances of his audiences as for what transpired on stage.

But by the time Morrissey put in an appearance at New York's Hammerstein Ballroom in October 2007, commercial considerations - a factor the Mournful Manc has never been oblivious to, as witnessed by various lawsuits and bitter band infighting - had drained much of the life from the experience. An incompetent and unpleasant opening act, chosen, it's hard not to suspect, for no other reason than that they would work cheap, ticket prices high enough to ensure banks of empty seats and the absence of some of his most devoted fans, all combined to cast a pall over the proceedings that Morrissey's assiduous prancing and posturing could never completely dispel. A more reasonable ticket price and an exciting opening act would not only have filled the hall with an impassioned audience rather than a stultified one; it also, ironically, would most likely have produced just as much income for performer and promoters alike.

Since that time, I've been to a couple of what might be called corporate shows, but only as a guest, when friends' bands were playing, and only in small to mid-size venues. I've stuck to my resolution to never again pay a Ticketmaster "service" charge or to see rock and roll (or soul, hiphop, or for that matter, hillbilly) music in a venue dominated by tables and chairs. I've missed seeing some artists who at one time I very much would have liked to see, but the way I figure it, the songs they're singing these days say, as Morrissey himself once put it, nothing to me about my life.

Contrast that with the many small shows in bars and basements and living rooms that I've been privileged to attend the past couple years, and I feel as though I haven't missed anything at all. Only a handful - if that - of the musicians I've seen are likely ever to the fame and fortune attained by friends from "back in the day" at Gilman, but I just may have reached that point in life - reached long ago, it must be acknowledged, by kids half my age - that in the overall scheme of things, it just doesn't matter.

It might not be evident to those who weren't there that Gilman in its early days was very much the granddaddy to the vast network of independent shows, bands, labels and promoters that spans the globe today, while simultaneously burrowing deep within the decaying skeleton of the Ticketmaster/Live Nation octopus. What's even more remarkable is that Gilman itself is still going strong, after more than 22 years. For newer bands that grew up in its far-reaching shadow, a chance to play Gilman is akin to making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

And you know, I still feel a little like that myself even when I'm there only as a fan. This past Saturday night was especially meaningful for me because I took my 13 year old nephew to his first Gilman show. When we were constructing its hallowed walls back in 1986, I don't think any of us in our wildest imaginings would have thought that Gilman would still be there by the time a kid who wouldn't even be born for another ten years was old enough to go there.

The occasion was PUNK ROCK JOEL's annual birthday extravaganza, a two-day affair that has been one of the highlights of the Gilman calendar for quite a few years now. In hindsight, I kind of wish I'd taken my nephew on Friday night rather than Saturday; there were more kids his own age there, and while it was a very good crowd, there was still room to dance around and do all the goofy things kids have been doing at Gilman for a couple generations now.

But for reasons I can't remember now, I wanted him to see Gilman on a very big night, with a very big crowd, and that was what was in evidence Saturday for none other than THE THORNS OF LIFE, playing the kind of openly advertised show that they have yet to play in their home town of New York. Sure enough, people were lined up down the block - WAY down the block - long before the doors opened, but somehow everybody squeezed in. I don't know how crowded it was at the back of the club, but up front the density compared favorably with that of a New York City subway car at rush hour, albeit in the days before air conditioning.

Having previously only seen the band in a living room and with a rudimentary sound system, it was a revelation to hear the music and the vocals clearly. Also, since TTOL had been playing somewhere nearly every night that week, they'd approached a level of tightness that was, well, almost frightening in a band so young. Given the excitement level and expectations of the crowd, it would have been difficult for the band to be anything but great. And surprise, surprise; that's exactly what they were: great.

Gilman emptied out considerably after TTOL, which was a shame, because it left HUNX AND HIS PUNX playing to a half-empty house, not that that bothered the dance-crazed Hunx loyalists who quickly turned the old punk rock club into a cracked-out (referring to the magazine and the mental condition, NOT the drug) disco. Earlier in the evening we saw some inspired hardcore from a youngish band called COMADRE, who insisted on playing on the floor in front of the stage instead of on the stage, not that there's anything wrong with THAT (says the guy whose own band used to pull similar stunts), and for only their second time at Gilman, the rollicking Midwestern sea shanties of OFF WITH THEIR HEADS.

I'm liking this band more and more, and even though friends who know them better keep telling me that OWTH are all about gloom and despair and doom, something I'd understand if I'd only read their lyrics, I can't help thinking what a rollickingly happy band they seem like. And I still don't know the lyrics, but they're one of those bands you can always sing along to even if you don't know a single one of their words. Confession: even though I'd put out their records, I was doing this for YEARS with GREEN DAY. I was actually kind of surprised when I finally did get around to reading their lyrics. There was all sorts of stuff going on there that I had no idea about!

There was one other band called the RE-VOLTS. Quite a few people enjoyed them. I was not one of them. Which was all right, because it gave me time to run around the club and be mind-boggled by some of the people who'd crawled out from whatever they'd been hiding under to put in appearances at the club. There were people who I only see at Gilman every couple years, like the fabulous JANELLE and the equally fabulous KAMALA, people I haven't seen there in five or ten years, like PEPITO PEA, and people that I quite literally haven't seen in 20 years, like WALTER GLASER (co-creator, along with yours truly, of the legendary SPIKE ANARKIE) and SOUTH BAY WAYNE, who I think originally showed up with the STIKKY crew circa 1987.

This no doubt had something to do with The Thorns Of Life, all three of whom have Gilman pedigrees dating back to near or (in Aaron's case, anyway) before the beginning. But I think it was also just one of those nights when the stars aligned and people just somehow knew it was time for what in essence was a family reunion. I don't know if my nephew got the full impact of it - for all I know, it might have seemed like a lot of old people slapping each other on the back and talking about incomprehensible things - but wow, what a feeling it was for me to be able to say, "Here's this thing that my friends and I helped build, and now it's yours, too."

Don't want to give short shrift to the Friday night show, which, as I said, was in some ways even more fun. Perennial favorites PANSY DIVISION and KEPI put in their more or less annual (in PD's case) or semi-annual (Kepi) appearances and the crowd went wild. Kepi, who's been sans Ghoulies for a couple years now, has put together a new band with himself on (standup) drums as well as lead vocals. The guy is a pro, there's no denying that. He just loves the music, just loves working the crowd, and they love him right back. He'll still be doing this when he's 80, and be better than ever at, if I don't miss my bet.

And Pansy Division just might be sharing a bill with him, because they're getting pretty timeless themselves. 15 years and God only knows how many records later, and they're not only still getting better, they've also managed, despite the four members living in four totally different corners of the country, to put together a new album that will be coming out in a couple months, with tour to follow. AND a DVD documentary, AND a book, also with tour to follow, by lead singer JON GINOLI, documenting his life in Pansy Division.

San Francisco's legendary AVENGERS, who share two members with Pansy Division, finished off the night with a smaller but no less enthusiastic crowd, made up in no small part by a bunch of hyper-enthusiastic 10 to 14 year olds who were tearing around the pit as though this were the Mabuhay circa 1978. That's the part I think my nephew would have liked best. Friday night also featured THE SECRETIONS, who I enjoyed, and THE BOATS, who apparently were great but who finished playing about two minutes before I arrived. I think they're both from Sacramento, and I know I'll be quickly corrected if I'm wrong.

Ah well, Gilman. What more can I say. Except that as great as the weekend was, I'm sorry I missed the social event of the winter thus far, CHADD DERKINS' birthday party on the 29th floor of New Jersey. Everyone was still buzzing about it when I got back. I really need to figure out a way I can be more places at once.

An Unmediated Inauguration Redux

2009-02-02T23:03:00.003-05:00

The New Yorker's always witty and often erudite TV critic Nancy Franklin gives an account of watching the Obama inauguration from the comfort of her living room, and by the time I'd got halfway through it, I was feeling as though I'd missed out by traveling to Washington to see what (very little) I could in person. In fact I've seriously considered buying one of those DVDs of the coverage that all the networks are hawking.

But even though I missed seeing the event from every angle, in constant replays, and with copious commentary, I'm still convinced that there was no substitute for being there. True, if I'd had more wits about me, I could most likely have wangled my way more into the thick of things, like, for example, budding rock star Matt Fame (né Matt Lame), who at the Neighborhood Ball found himself close enough to both the Prez and Beyoncé to be heard telling the latter "Good job!" as she left the stage following her performance. He wisely refrained from reinforcing the point with a pat to her passing derrière (and even more wisely refrained from giving the President a similar treatment), but you know, he could have.

Several other friends parlayed work or family connections into spots that were at the very least within sight and sound of the swearing-in ceremonies, while I had to be content with an out-of-sync Jumbotron at the backside of the Washington Monument. Still, the memories of being caught up in that wave of exuberant humanity, of seeing flags waving in hands where I never before would have pictured them, of patriotic songs rising from the throats of those who'd presumably never before had much to be patriotic about, of tears streaming unashamedly down faces of all ages, classes and colors, leave me in no doubt that I was right where I needed to be, and will likely treasure for the rest of my days the fact of having been there.

Or as Ms. Franklin somewhat poignantly put it: "I should have put the remote down and got myself to Washington and stood in the crowd, freezing and cheering, maybe even, for the first time, waving a flag. January 20th might have been the greatest day in my lifetime. By watching it on TV, I’d missed it."

Bad Habits

2009-02-01T10:59:00.001-05:00

As mentioned a week or so ago, I picked up a copy of Cristy Road's new novel Bad Habits when I saw her reading at that fancypants Brooklyn literary event a week or two ago. I promised to report back once I read it, and here I am to say that it is very good indeed.

It's hard to say just how autobiographical the story is. It almost always is, especially since authors tend to get very touchy about this sort of thing, so I've pretty much given up trying, but let's just say there are some interesting parallels between the protagonist, who grew up in Florida of Cuban ancestry before moving to Brooklyn, and Cristy, who, well, yeah, who also sort of did that. But whether it's a straight-up memoir with some literary touches or a full-fledged novel that simply draws on some of her experiences, it's an outstanding story in every regard. I stand in awe.

I'm especially impressed because the book is shot through with drug scenes, to the point where drugs themselves practically become one of the characters, and while I normally don't enjoy that sort of literature - not least because I've already lived that scene myself - I was not only able to take it in stride, but actually got quite a bit out of it. Even if it did make me a bit queasy at times - or maybe because of it - I felt myself being transported back to the bleary hopelessness charged with ever-receding dreams and possibilities that I recall from my own drug days. Not with any trace of nostalgia, I might add; more with a shudder of recognition and a wave of gratitude that life on those terms no longer makes the slightest bit of sense to me.

If you're a fan of Cometbus, you'll probably find this book similarly enjoyable. Cometbus rarely gets this explicit, true, but there's the same fascinating interplay between external action (or sometimes the lack thereof) and internal reflection. I'd also say this book is a bit less romantic than Cometbus stories in general, in that I don't think it will inspire too many starry-eyed teenagers to move into a squat and shovel drugs into their system (though you never know how those teenagers will respond, do you?).

Another nice - and unique, at least in my experience - touch is the way that Cristy, who as you probably know is already a successful artist and illustrator - works drawings into the text. They're not just adornments, in the way that illustrations were typically used in novels in bygone days, but a brief (usually no more than a page or so) foray into the realm of the graphic novel. In other words, if you skip the pictures, you'll miss part of the plot. I wouldn't be shocked if somebody has done this before, but I don't recall ever seeing it.

Sum total: read this book. Tell your friends to read it. It's an inspiration.

Bret Michaels And His Hair

2009-01-27T19:55:00.004-05:00

Ever since I started this blog - and long before that, when I used to publish my magazine - I always struggled to find and maintain the right balance between "serious" commentary and the more frivolous side of life and pop culture.

The people who are mainly interested in politics would complain when I wrote about some "silly" punk rock band, and the music fans would bitch at me if I had too much of that "boring" politics. And of course nobody ever bothered to tell me when, at least in their opinion, I had gotten it just right.

But quite a few people read this blog, so I figured I couldn't be doing too badly. Until, that is, I did a little research and found out exactly what people were reading when they stopped by here.

Well, as it turns out, THE most popular topic, BY FAR, on a scale of about 50-1, is an item I wrote nearly a year ago called Does Bret Michaels Wear Hair Extensions? In fact, not only is it the most popular item on this site, it also comes up as one of the top ten sites on THE WHOLE INTERNET if you do a search for "Bret Michaels Hair." "Bret Michaels Hair Extensions?" Numero Uno.

So, not that I want to put on airs or anything, but it is a bit humbling to be regarded as one of the world's leading experts on Mr. Michaels' hair (or, if the overriding weight of public opinion is taken at face value, the lack thereof) when a) I've never met the guy or even seen him in person; b) I've only seen his TV show one and a half times ever; c) All I did was ask a single innocent question, namely, what was he keeping hidden under that do-rag of his?

But looking back at how the Bret Michaels hair saga has played out, it seems as though my innocent question may have snowballed into an internet-wide wave of public inquiry that finally forced Mr. Michaels, less than a month later, to acknowledge that his bandana concealed a mixture of "my hair and the finest extensions Europe has to offer." Which was a great relief to his many fans who'd been living in fear that the over-the-hill rocker might have been sporting tacky American extensions.

Naturally, there were those who weren't willing to let Bret's forthright admission stand, instead insisting that those weren't extensions at all, but a full-fledged wig. I personally stayed out of this controversy, having lost all interest in Bret Michaels, his hair and/or his television show shortly after making my original post.

However, once it came to my attention what a vital role I had played in uncovering one of the great cultural mysteries of our time, I found it incumbent on me to check up on Mr. Michaels' progress by tuning into an episode of his new series, which seems to be operating on the same premise as last year except that this year he and the skanky hos are, for reasons that haven't become clear to me yet, traveling around the country on a big ugly tour bus.

But Bret is still supposedly hot stuff, and the "girls" are still as willing as ever to demean themselves for the dubious privilege of being pawed by him, and the only other thing I noticed before fast forwarding to Sober House was Bret rejecting a gift as being insufficiently flash. "Doesn't she realize I'm a rock star?" he mused aloud, and I'm like dude, that was 20 years ago! At least! Nowadays I think you'll have to settle for being a novelty act with a extensive line of do-rags. And the finest extensions Europe has to offer.

What A Difference A Week Makes

2009-01-27T19:07:00.002-05:00

Seven days and little of the euphoria has dissipated. Despite the predictions of cynics and McCain supporters, both of whom I number among my friends, President Obama has thus far done little to disappoint and a great deal to enthrall.

I think what impresses people most - even among those who had their doubts about Obama or did not support him at all - is the dramatic difference, visible from Day One, between his Presidency and that of his predecessor. Whether you agree with the new President or not, it's hard not to appreciate hearing thoughts and views expressed in clear, coherent sentences and paragraphs. And again whether you agree with him or not, it's comforting to feel that he has given some serious reflection to what he's saying and doing, and that this whole being President thing is not just some frat boy lark to be skated through on the strength of a few slogans and a lot of jokes.

Obama has let me down in one way, at least potentially: my initial understanding of the giant $825 billion stimulus bill leads me to believe that a large part of this immense deficit we're running up will be relatively ineffective or downright squandered. Perhaps he needs to deliver hundreds of billions of tax cuts in order to get the Republicans on side (not that it seems to be working, as they seem to be continuing to spout the same ideological gobbledygook that got us into this mess in the first place), but even the spending portion of the stimulus package seems too heavily geared toward old-fashioned giveaways and social spending and way too little toward the genuine job-producing infrastructure investment we were promised.

Personally, I don't see much benefit to the proposed tax cuts. Sure, it'll be nice for people to have an extra $500 or $1,000 in their pockets, but the effect this will have on the economy is negligible. In the first place, the people who will benefit most from it are those who are still employed rather than those who have lost their jobs and are already paying few if any taxes. Secondly, the amount of money it gives back is chump change, relatively speaking, in that most people are not going to use it to rush out and buy a new wide screen TV and thus jump start the (Asian) economy, they're going to put it toward a mortgage or rent payment, or pay down some of their credit card bill. Laudable actions, sure, but about as likely to have any lasting effect on the economy as those few hundred billion in public funds already poured down the banking system rathole.

Remember, it was George Bush's lunatic idea (supported by many Democrats, to be fair) that we could massively increase spending, especially military spending, while massively cutting taxes, that put this country so far in debt that national bankruptcy is not completely out of the realm of possibility. The logic of cutting taxes still further at a time when we are running up bills the size of which are completely unprecedented in the history of the Republic has thus far managed to elude me.

But let's leave that alone for the time being and question instead why more of the $450 billion not being devoted to tax cuts isn't being spent on the major - and long overdue projects - that will not only create jobs, but also lay the foundations for future development and growth once this financial crisis is past. Things like high speed rail linking our major cities, a 21st century broadband network for the entire country, construction of new schools, rehabilitation and re-use of foreclosed and abandoned housing. Yes, there are provisions for all of this within the bill, but pathetically small provisions in the overall scale of things. And, one has to wonder, once this much money has been spent, where on earth will any money at all be found to rework the health care system or pursue many of the other laudable aims of the Obama administration?

But one hesitates to question or criticize too much, because Obama is riding such a wave of good will and good faith that it seems preferable to assume that he knows what he's doing and that the answers to these and other questions will come in good time. And certainly he's barely put a foot wrong anywhere else during his first week in office: the swiftness with which he's moved to reverse some of the more idiotic and self-destructive Bush executive orders impresses, but so too do his diplomatic skills. Beginning with his inaugural address overture to the Muslim world, and continuing with yesterday's interview with Al Arabiya, he has taken the first vital steps toward repairing the immense damage done by the Bush administration's bull-in-a-china-shop approach to international relations.

And not content with reaching out to one set of seemingly intractable foes, today he went marching into a still more pernicious lion's den, the Republican Congressional caucus. I halfway expect him to show up at Guantanamo one of these days to personally interview the prisoners there and convince them that America's not their enemy after all.

Dramatic gestures aside, though, perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the Obama administration thus far is the feeling, so long absent, that someone both competent and caring is in charge. This may be pure delusion on my part, of course, and for all I know, Obama could be every bit as confused and frightened as I am by the magnitude of the problems facing our country and the world today. But if he is, he's doing an outstanding job of not showing it, and since politics, like finance and virtually everything else, ultimately involves the ability to inspire confidence in others and oneself, I'd say he's off to an outstanding start.

An Unmediated Inauguration, Part 1

2009-01-24T04:32:00.002-05:00

Jan 19 12:06 pm
Chinatown/NYC

It’s been a while – maybe a few decades – since I’ve been on an intercity bus in America. A few Greyhound rides across the country and up and down the West Coast have left their mark on me, to the point where I expect any bus trip lasting longer than a few blocks across town to be more of an ordeal than an adventure.

But with the alternatives offered by Amtrak being almost nonexistent – there were a couple trains leaving between 3 and 5 am that I could have caught – and shockingly expensive, I opted for a $35 round trip on the semi-legendary Chinatown buses. Semi-legendary in the sense that while I’ve been hearing about them for years, I’ve never actually seen one, and also with regard to the rather gray area, legally speaking, in which they appear to operate.

There’s no bus station, for example; passengers are instructed to gather at a vaguely designated corner – the actual street address doesn’t appear to exist – in the lee of the Manhattan Bridge. After 20 minutes or so of milling around, we are led by a woman shouting indecipherably to another spot a block away where a bus – presumably ours, but bearing no destination markers – sits waiting.

It’s neither worse nor better than I expected. With the exception of the TV screens – non-operational, as it turns out – dangling at intervals from the ceiling, little has changed from the bare-bones standards of Greyhound buses of yore. Though it’s impossible to say at first glance how many of the passengers are, like me, headed to Washington for the inauguration, it looks like an Obama crowd: a lot of 20-something whites and African-Americans from a somewhat broader age range. The one demographic curiously lacking on a Chinatown bus? Asians; apart from the driver, I count only one or possibly two.

We’re underway now, headed uptown, whether to pick up more passengers or toward one of the tunnels, I do not know. Looks like the former, though, as we’ve already passed up our opportunity to turn off for the Holland Tunnel, and I can’t picture an operation like heading south with empty seats.

Trying to fit all my necessities into a small day pack, I wore several layers of the clothing I’m counting on to keep me warm on the Mall tomorrow, which may end up keeping me more than comfortably warm on today’s bus ride. The one exception is my toes, which despite the rugged, waterproof, all-weather and terrain boots I’ve encased them in, feel unaccountably cold. I hope that’s not a bad omen for tomorrow.

We’ve turned onto 42nd Street and have just passed Grand Central. Memories come flooding back from some of my first trips to New York City as a teenager, one visit in particular that involved an all-night bus ride from Detroit to attend a march and rally against the Vietnam War in April of 1967. I was a new convert to the antiwar cause, having only a few days earlier undergone a Damascene conversion from bellicose patriot to bleeding heart hippie, and so intimidated by the apparent sophistication and worldliness of my fellow travelers that as near as I can remember, I spoke to no one the entire way there or back.

Still, I never for a moment regretted making the journey. I marched at the back of a crowd variously estimated at between 150,000 and 400,000, and by the time we arrived at the United Nations, I was so far removed from the stage that I could only just make out what the speakers were saying, and could see so little of them that I had to take on faith that they were who they were purported to be.

There was Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor turned antiwar activist, and unless I’m mistaken, Stokely Carmichael, who sounded pretty angry, not just about the war, but almost everything. Then came Martin Luther King, already internationally renowned as a civil rights leader, but having recently lost some of the general approbation he’d enjoyed since coming out so strongly against the war.

I don’t know if it was one of Dr. King’s less memorable speeches or if being a callow, self-absorbed 19 year-old left me unable to grasp the full import of what was being said. But it made no great impression on me other than that, as I kept having to remind myself, I was in the presence of a very great man. I had no way of knowing that less than a year later he’d be dead of an assassin’s bullet; still less could I have imagined that 42 years later, on a national holiday dedicated to his memory, I’d be traveling from New York City to Washington to celebrate the inauguration of the first African-American president.

As we passed the Port Authority, great Ivory-sized flakes of snow began to fall. To this day I can never see or hear mention made of that building without thinking of Sharyn. The Good Witch of the Lower East Side, I’d called her, and looked up to her almost as though she really did have supernatural powers. In reality – something which by 1968 I had only a tenuous grasp on – she was a frightened, vulnerable kid who at 15 had run away from her home in South Jersey and who, upon arriving at the Port Authority, was met – seized upon, really – by a friendly stranger who offered her an apartment and a job.

The apartment turned out to be one of the many abandoned buildings in Alphabet City, the job turning tricks for businessmen uptown. Throw in a budding heroin habit and you might say she was all set for life in the big city.

That’s where I came in. As messed up as she might have been, by April 1968 I was worse: penniless, homeless, and, should the police or FBI catch up with me, facing a long stretch in prison. A year earlier I’d come to New York convinced it was up to me to save the world; now I couldn’t begin to see how I was going to save myself.

Sharyn took me in and took care of me, though I would never admit it at the time. It was her prostitution earnings, what little of them she was able to hang onto, that kept us alive, and it was her compassion and street smarts that gave me my first lessons in how to navigate the urban jungle we inhabited.

But the idea that I could count on her was severely shaken the night she almost died of an overdose, and though I tried to keep in touch with her after I left for California, she never wrote back. 41 years later, as I roll through the South Jersey farmland of her childhood, I find it almost inconceivable that she’d still be alive today.

An Unmediated Inauguration, Part 2

2009-01-24T04:27:00.002-05:00

3:02 pm
Pennsylvania/New Jersey

Now, like Washington, we’re crossing the Delaware, its sullen, steely waters flecked with ice sheets and black birds that from above look implausibly like the heads of human swimmers. I don’t know if we’re supposed to stop at Philadelphia. Mostly, I suppose, I’d prefer not to, for the sake of saving time, but part of me wouldn’t mind. For all my travels, it’s one of the few big American cities I barely know at all. I’ve passed through several times on the train, but apart from that my only Philly experience was in the dead of winter and the dead of night, that time Darrell, Eric and I tried hitchhiking from New York City to Michigan.

We’d been sitting around in the Ypsilanti hippie hovel from which we were about to be evicted, bored, alienated, and desperate for something to happen.

“We should go somewhere,” I said. “New York would be cool.”

We didn’t even have money for food and been relying on the free pizzas furnished by a friend working at the nearby Domino’s, but I had a checking account. A checking account with no money in it, true, but in those trusting days, it was no problem for threee disheveled and unkempt young men to turn up at Detroit Metropolitan Airport and pay with a check for three youth fare tickets out of there.

Friends often asked me afterward why, if I was bouncing checks anyway, I didn’t spring for round-trip tickets instead of one-way, or why I didn’t take any extra checks in case it became necessary to pay for other things like, say, a place to stay or, you know, food.

The short answer was that I simply didn’t know, the slightly longer one that somewhere in the back of my befuddled mind I harbored the fantasy that we wouldn’t be coming back, that we’d be starting a new life in New York, one in which money, the lack thereof, or the need to work to obtain it, would somehow no longer be a factor.

What happened instead was that the preternaturally warm December day that had encouraged such optimism gave way to a sudden cold snap, the rough-hewn street freaks who’d offered us a place to crash morphed, at least in our fervid reckoning, into drug-crazed killers, and by nightfall we were shivering in doorways along Second Avenue, feeding on the day-old bread we’d cadged from a couple of bakeries.

There wasn’t much to go back to in Michigan. Our landlord had turned off our heat several weeks earlier in retaliation for our refusal to pay rent, but as long as the kitchen stove still worked, we could at least warm ourselves by huddling around the oven. Compared with the very real possibility that we could freeze to death on the streets of New York City, that kitchen began to look downright attractive.

We left as soon as it got light, but a day’s worth of hitchhiking took us no more than 20 miles into New Jersey. As it got dark again, and the temperature dropped toward 0, we ignored the posted warnings and tried hitching on the turnpike itself instead of at the entrance ramp, reasoning that if we didn’t get a ride, at least we could count on being arrested and carted off to what would hopefully be a nice warm jail.

When after an hour or two neither of these eventualities had come to pass, we opted for what we’d been discussing as our last resort. A few hundred yards up the road sat a police car, its idling engine filling the air with great clouds of steam. We walked up to it, knocked on the window, and offered to turn ourselves in.

“For what?” the cop asked, seeming slightly annoyed at being disturbed.

“Well, for hitchhiking on the turnpike,” said Darrell.

The trooper took a few seconds to process this information before replying. “Oh. Then get off the turnpike.”

Actually, we told him, we’d much rather go to jail, but the harder we tried to convince him, the less inclined he was to take us there. He finally drove away, leaving us to contemplate the likelihood of being found dead on the shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike, a fate lacking even the modicum of glamour afforded by meeting our demise in a New York City doorway.

That’s when the hippies saw us. They pulled off the road and said, “We’ll take you to Philadelphia.”

“That’s not even on the way to Michigan, is it?” protested Eric, and the hippies said no, it wasn’t, but at least it would be warm there, and there’d be food. “You can stay with us tonight and make a fresh tomorrow.”

So began my only real visit to Philadelphia, and even then I saw little and remember less. They drove us through deserted, late night streets to their converted warehouse loft, a concept none of us had heard of, let alone seen in 1967, fed us huge steaming bowls of hippie stew, and after some sort of tribal confab, decided that $80 in communal funds should be used to put us on a bus to Michigan in the morning.

Most of my experiences with hippies up to that point had been with people like ourselves: broke, hustling, eking out a mean, hardscrabble existence on the margins of society. These were the first hippies I’d encountered who not only appeared to have plenty of money, but were also willing to share it.

“We get a good feeling from you guys,” they said. “We know you’ll pay us back when you can, one way or another.” I was touched, deeply touched. All three of us were. And all the way back to Michigan we talked about how far out the hippies had been, and how repaying them would have to come before anything, anything at all we might have planned for when we got back.

But we never did. Other, more pressing needs intervened, mainly involving food and/or drugs. A week later I was homeless, a month later, running from the law as well. 1968 would be a tough year, not just for me, but for the country. We lost Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and, some would argue, our innocence. My last, best hope, at least the way I saw it, was that American society would collapse to the point where the charges against me might be overlooked or forgotten.

Things have a way of working themselves out in the long run, and eventually they did, though not without attendant measures of gloom, despair and disillusionment. As my legal troubles receded and my material prospects brightened, I often regretted – indeed, was ashamed – that I hadn’t paid the hippies their money, or at least kept in touch with them until a time that I could afford to. I can only hope that they didn’t suffer unduly for want of that $80, and note that because of their generosity, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Philadelphia.

An Unmediated Inauguration, Part 3

2009-01-24T04:24:00.001-05:00

5:01 pm
Passing Baltimore

As it turned out, our bus never gave so much as a glance in Philadelphia’s direction, instead speeding southward through a remarkably placid countryside, at times awash in dappled sunlight, at others pummeled by driving snow squalls. Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, none made more than a passing impression until we approached the outskirts of Baltimore, a city where I’ve actually spent some time and was curious, almost anxious, to see again.

Obama had been here three days earlier, following a similar route to ours, only by train, and stopping at each of the major cities to address the crowds. My Baltimore friends had spent much of the day waiting in the cold for the President-to-be and cheering wildly for the speech they finally got to hear. I wished I had been there, wished I could have seen how Obama’s message of hope and change had played in a city so desperate for either of those things.

Baltimore could serve as a poster child for urban decay, but could serve equally well to illustrate the indomitability of the human spirit. Against a backdrop of a ruined economy, endemic crime, and corrupt and incompetent administration, there were those still who loved this place, who proclaimed it by way of park bench logos to be “the greatest city in America.” Young artists and musicians enthused about the cheap rents, but also about the sense of endless possibility.

Obama spoke their language but then upped the ante, not asking in so many words as JFK had what they were going to do for their country, but essentially delivering that precise challenge. This new government, he seemed to say, will not be about the benefits you might hope to receive but about the contributions you will have the opportunity to make, not about patting ourselves on the back for our brilliant accomplishment in having been born or become Americans, but about what we will do to show ourselves worthy of that legacy.

In my life I’ve never seen an American political leader receive the adulation Obama has. Kennedy came close, but even then only by dying. I suppose Lincoln or FDR in their day might have inspired equal or greater devotion, but in my own time I’ve mainly witnessed a succession of mediocrities occasionally interrupted by an ephemeral flash of competence and respectability. If America were Rome, might this be akin to the string of venal and half-witted rulers, with an average shelf life of about 18 months, who sleepwalked the Empire through its final days?

Where might Obama fit into this equation? As a Trajan or Hadrian, who restored good governance to Rome after a shaky half century that had seen the likes of Caligula and Nero? As a Diocletian or Constantine, who brought a fading Empire back from the brink and postponed its demise by at least another century? I resolved to ask Bella’s opinion at the first opportunity.

Bella was the main reason this trip was possible. Though I’d contemplated coming to DC for the inauguration from the moment Obama claimed victory in November, the cost and unavailability of hotel rooms alone had seemed sufficient to put the kibosh on any such plan. It was only last week when I remembered that Bella, a university lecturer in ancient history would be coming to Washington about this time to take up a research fellowship, accompanied by her partner Danny, one of my oldest and best English friends.

A quick email interchange revealed that they’d be arriving the night before the inauguration and produced an unsolicited invitation to stay with them at the Georgetown flat the university had provided for them. I hesitated, thinking it might be a bit much to pop in on them during their first night in a new city and country, but then reasoned on the other hand that I could help them get their bearings and act as a sort of guide to the events about to unfold, the likes of which, I felt quite sure, they would never have witnessed in their native land.

The English as a general rule just don’t do great outpourings of patriotism, or collective emotion of any kind, which is why the dramatic displays of public grief over the death of Princess Diana had come as such a shock to the national psyche. When a British Prime Minister, even a much loved or hated one, is unseated, there’s no great hubbub about it. He or she simply packs their bags and vacates the premises, while the new PM, following a ritual visit to the Queen, simply shows up the following morning and goes to work.

I was living in London in 1997 when the election of Tony Blair put an end to 18 years of Conservative rule. While many households, ours included, stayed up most of the night to exult and toast the election results, there was nothing to compare with the exuberant street scenes that greeted Obama’s victory. The next morning dawned warm and sunny – statistical anomaly at any time of year in Britain – and as we waited for a bus we joked about Labour already having sorted out the notoriously unreliable weather.

But then the bus didn’t turn up when it should have, and within ten minutes we were back to more characteristic carping about how this new lot were probably no better than the old lot, and that bus service, like the weather , would only continue to get worse, never better. Ten years later, bus service had against all odds improved, but not much else; the weather was if anything worse than ever, and the voters seemed poised to vote Labour out of power every bit as ignominiously as they had the Tories.

“But this time things will be different” seems to be a mantra for Americans, one that will perennially distinguish them from the British, and which regularly crops up in the American part of my sensibilities, only to butt up uncomfortably against the layers of cynicism, irony and detachment acquired during my years in London. Like, I suspected, any sane person, I wanted to believe that Obama marked not just a new beginning, but a total departure from the paths of noisy desperation trod by my country these past – God, how many years had it been now since hope or optimism of any kind were seen as anything but a sucker’s game?

With a start I realized that our anticipated stop at Baltimore had amounted to no more than a flying visit to a travel plaza by the side of an expressway, many miles from anything resembling the Baltimore I knew, and that we were already speeding along toward the outskirts of Washington.

An Unmediated Inauguration, Part 4

2009-01-24T04:21:00.001-05:00

5:47 pm
Entering Washington

Just like that the sylvan stateliness of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway gave way to the first strip malls and parking lots of the nation’s capital. The twilight settling in took the harshest edges off what by any measure was not the prettiest part of town. At the first major intersection, a cluster of floodlit white tents proclaimed itself an “Inauguration Welcome Center.” On closer examination, it proved to be an open-air souvenir shop staffed entirely by African-Americans and offering ever form of Obama memorabilia imaginable. Similar roadside stands – or, more often, single individuals clutching a handful of pennants, balloons, or badges – cropped up with increasing frequency as we neared the city center.

The last block and a half of our trip proved to be the longest, or at least the most tedious. So smoothly had traffic flowed for most of our journey that the driver had seldom needed to touch his foot to the brake pedal, but with our destination on H Street in tantalizing sight, we succumbed to the long-predicted inaugural gridlock.

I lost count of how many times the lights changed before we were able to move at all. Like a child unable to sit still, I stood up in my seat waiting to be discharged into the chaotic streets, but to no avail.. Did we really have to wait until the bus had turned that seemingly impassable corner? Couldn’t the driver simply open the door where we stood and set us free?

Then at last I was on the pavement, assailed on all sides by the cacophony of a street bazaar with only one product: Obama, stamped in words and pictures on every possible surface. Did you want Obama earrings, belts, sneakers, notepads, hoodies, binoculars, whistles, bells, sunglasses, hats, track suits? All were not only available but being hawked passionately by almost exclusively African-American salespeople. Anyone still clinging to racist stereotypes of blacks as work-shy or unmotivated would, I thought, have a difficult time explaining this phenomenon.

I’ve been in cities before where great crowds were gathering in anticipation of vital or life-changing events, but never before had I experienced the extent of the electricity coursing though the veins and arteries of Washington’s body politic. The vendors – and many of their customers – may have been African-American, but the celebrants came in all shapes and colors, and, judging form their accents and regalia, from all corners and classes of the nation.

Torn between reveling in the spirit of the streets and hurrying out to Georgetown where I could relieve myself of my backpack and make plans with Danny and Bella for the morrow’s adventures, I did a bit of both, and even toyed briefly with the idea of paying a flying visit to the still-open Smithsonian. But ultimately I opted for the longish trek out Massachusetts Avenue, past embassies and hotels and apartment buildings of varying degrees of pomp and grandeur. It was not an uninteresting journey, but nonetheless tended to drag a little, owing to the lengthy blocks and the unnecessarily large spaces between things. I was reminded of the similar row of stately yet a trifle too ponderous buildings lining the southern flank of London’s Kensington Palace Gardens.

A couple of the hotels I passed were hosting black tie celebrations for white people. A considerably more mixed and less formal do was in full swing at the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) hall, but even that resolutely working class affair didn’t look like one I could successfully crash. The sound of a chanting crowd in the distance heralded the first gathering at which I would be unhesitatingly welcomed, or at least not turned away.

Somewhere on the order of a thousand people had gathered in the center of Dupont Circle. From the noise they were making, it was clear that they were agitated about something, whether for or against it was impossible to tell. I cut across lanes of stopped traffic intending to find out; the first thing I saw was a tent adorned with a sign advocating medical marijuana, followed by a great cloud of strange-smelling smoke rising up from the crowd and rolling lazily in my direction.

It was unlike any marijuana smoke I had ever smelled, though, and I recognized it as the scent of burning sage in the same moment that a voice from the stage informed me that we were participating in a ceremony to cleanse the capital of the evil spirits which were meant to have infested it of late. A shaman – who, as it turned out, was a woman, leading me to wonder why she hadn’t been introduced as a sha-person or sha-woman until I hypothesized that she probably got round the problem by spelling it “shamyn” – was brought forth to lead the incantation.

Mama Dada, she was called, from Brooklyn, NY, and with the accent to prove it. She spoke with the rising rousing tones but none of the mellifluousness of a deep-fried Southern preacher as she urged – hectored might be more accurate – her audience to “shake it out, shake it out, shake those feelings out.” Listening to her was neither inspiring nor pleasant, so I moved on, stopping only at the Metro station to buy a ticket in case I needed to take a train in the next two days. Though I’d read that you’d only get a commemorative Barack Obama ticket if you bought it on Inauguration Day, mine came out emblazoned with the 44th president’s likeness, and I counted that as a score.

An Unmediated Inauguration, Part 5

2009-01-24T04:18:00.001-05:00

Jan. 20
10:30 am

Though this was my third or possibly fourth visit to Washington, I’d never seen Georgetown before, and it was quite a revelation. No less so to Danny and Bella, who found it compared favorably with their familiar haunts in the West of England. “This is not at all how I pictured America,” Danny kept saying, and to be frank, neither had I. A rarefied haven for the wealthy and well-connected it may be, but on the surface it resembles nothing so much as a tastefully understated village of the sort you might encounter in a Disney World replication of Ye Good Olde Days.

By the time I awoke people were already streaming down our normally quiet street, bundled up against the cold and headed in only one direction. We were about two miles from the National Mall and anxious to set off ourselves, but Bella sensibly and/or schoolmarmishly insisted that we stop for breakfast, a decision that may or may not have cost us our chance of obtaining a vantage point in front of the Washington Monument rather than slightly behind and to the left of it.

Even if we had made it out front, we wouldn’t have seen much of the actual event. True, we would have had an only partially obscured view of the Capitol, though even a good pair of binoculars wouldn’t reveal much of the action on its steps 1.2 miles away. In exchange, we would have lost our opportunity to watch the proceedings on the giant television screens lining the sides of the Mall. Another five, maybe even three minutes and we wouldn’t even have been able to claim the spot we did, far enough up the hill to see over the heads of people in front of us, all but one very tall fellow who compounded that crime by wearing a ridiculous hat that added another four inches to his height, and his partner, who insisted on holding a camera aloft during most of the ceremony.

“It’s a television screen, you ninny,” I kept wanting to tell her. “You’re taking pictures of a television screen.” But this was neither the time nor the place for snide or unpleasant words, and if anybody beside myself was thinking them, they remained unspoken. All of us were still reeling from the spectacle we had become part of, streams, rivers, oceanic tides of people pouring forth from every available street to fill every available corner of the 309 acre Mall.

I marveled at Danny and Bella’s willingness to endure the cramped conditions, the 28 degree temperatures – probably in the teens if you factor in wind chill – for the sake of observing this alien ritual, but they seemed nearly as excited as I was. Periodically a brass band would strike up somewhere, playing the Sousa or Sousa-esque marches that called to mind some 19th century extravaganza of bombast, oratory and patriotism, at which William Jennings Bryan might have bloviated against the mankind’s crucifixion on a cross of gold.

The TV showed us various dignitaries arriving at the Capitol, and since there was no commentary, the crowd added its own. Ted Kennedy received a rousing cheer, as did Bill Clinton; Jimmy Carter’s ovation, while warm, was slightly more subdued. The first President Bush, hobbling on a cane and looking shockingly older than anyone seemed to remember him being, was greeted with a restrained – or simply strained – silence, while a wheelchair-bound Dick Cheney, resembling a defeated Darth Vader or, as Danny observed, one of Satan’s minions from whom the Dark Lord had abruptly removed his powers, got a resounding chorus of boos.

That was nothing, of course, compared with the reception awaiting President Bush. I doubt any President in history, especially in the course of a solemn state occasion, has had to endure such a dramatic and vociferous rejection of all that he has stood for. “Everyone throw your shoes at him,” one man yelled, and if the weather had been even slightly milder, he might have had quite a few takers.

“I almost feel sorry for him,” said one woman, but she was quickly shushed by her neighbors. Bush himself was clearly not taken by surprise; he had steeled himself in advance and maintained a stern but unruffled mien that betrayed little hint of hurt, uneasiness or anger as his successor and anyone remotely related to his successor enjoyed an ecstatic, rapturous welcome.

At last Senator Dianne Feinstein launched the ceremony itself, to shouts of approval of the woman in front of us, who had come from San Francisco by way of Austin, Texas. The same woman hissed viciously at the introduction of Pastor Rick Warren (“He’s very right wing,” she explained), but Obama’s choice as Designated Preacher proved to have been a wise if impolitic one. Warren delivered an invocation that was sufficiently Jaysus-fraught to satisfy all but the most strident Bible-bashers (the sort, for example, who had set up shot at the entrance to the Mall with banners reading, “Obama is not the way; Jesus is”) without alienating the tentatively or blatantly irreligious. I snuck a peak at Danny and Bella, whose experience with impassioned public prayer is nearly nonexistent, and detected nary an eye roll.

Then came Aretha Franklin, with whom I have a little bit of history. As a boy I’d heard her singing with the choir on her father’s – the Rev. C.L. Franklin – weekly radio broadcast, as a young man I’d bought and sung along to her pop and soul hits, and now here we both were, many years down the line, she as a national institution, and I – well, on more than one occasion it’s been suggested that I belonged in one.

“Oowee, look at that hat,” squealed several members of the crowd, I being one of them, and indeed it was a wondrous, multi-cornered hat of which, it turned out, much more could be written but will not be here. She sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in a goose bump-inducing soul style, straying sufficiently from the original melody that when I asked Danny and Bella what they thought of this remaking of their national anthem, they both looked blank.

“It’s ‘God Save The Queen,’” I pointed out, “with American lyrics.” “Dreadful song, I completely loathe it,” Danny offered. “Absolutely dire,” Bella chimed in, before both acknowledged that the American version was a considerable improvement. An all-star quartet performed something called “Air and Simple Gifts,” prompting me to observe that this was somewhat classier than I would have expected to hear at any recent inauguration.

“These are educated people,” Ms. Austin-cum-San Francisco informed me, and indeed, that was the impression being conveyed. Then Barack Obama, having taken the oath of office, began to speak and removed any doubt of that assertion.

John Kennedy is the only other President I have heard who could so effortlessly and naturally wield such stately and measured tones, but Kennedy’s rhetoric was more ethereal, almost airy-fairy. No less thrilling because of it, but Obama’s eloquence is more of the hands-on, down-to-earth variety. It too thrills and inspires in more than adequate measure, but goes a step or three beyond in its ability to command a full measure of devotion from his listeners. Right now, I swear Obama could lead these assembled multitudes headlong into the sea, or headlong into the all-consuming maw of an invading army.

It’s a little frightening, almost: who is this man who in the space of a couple years has come from near-obscurity to stand Colossus-like astride the world? How could the clunky, leaden banalities of our recent leader so suddenly give way to such lofty Ciceronian discourse? And yet, in this moment, who else is there? Who else could attract the trust not just of Americans but of long-alienated allies and even some implacable foes?

Cheers and exultations and “amens” resonated across the Mall when the new President told us it was time to put away childish things, promised to restore science to its rightful place, assured us that no matter how weighty or daunting the challenges confronting us, they would be met. At various times the camera would cut away from Obama to show George Bush looking grim and befuddled or Bill Clinton watching in transparent wonder at the complete and utter mastery displayed by the man he had only last year claimed wasn’t qualified to be President.

It was odd that they saved the poet until after the main event. As a boy I watched the venerable Robert Frost, then in his late 80s, reading at President Kennedy’s inauguration, struggling manfully on even when his lectern caught fire. But even Frost, at the time arguably the nation’s greatest living poet, wouldn’t have been foolish enough to go on after the President. This poet was no Frost, and the crowds quickly began to melt away, with many people shaking their heads in bewilderment.

We took a brief detour to the base of the Washington Monument to see what we might have been able to see had we arrived earlier, then joined the queue to exit the Mall. With only a handful of exit points, it was taking far longer to leave than it had to get there, and we ended up walking all the way to the Lincoln Memorial. I took a penny from my pocket to show Bella Lincoln’s portrait on one side and the Memorial we stood in front of on the other. “Ah, like a Roman coin,” she offered. “They often had monuments on them as well.”

Later that night I told her about my Obama-as-Roman-emperor theory and asked where she thought he would fit in the lineage.

“I see what you’re getting at with some of the later emperors,” she said, “but I think a better analogy might be with Augustus, who pretty much created and defined the institution.”

Normally this would not constitute high praise coming from Bella, who despite having devoted her life’s work to the study of Rome, is almost overtly anti-Roman when it comes to matters of the Empire. But for the sake of our discussion, she was willing to temporarily suspend her disbelief. For this moment, at least, we could agree that the ability of an Augustine Obama to reinvigorate and reshape the American dream might not be an entirely bad thing.

“But what about the potential for abuse?” I asked. “Right now Obama could probably declare himself Emperor-for-life without encountering a whole lot of resistance.”

“I think at this point we might just have to trust him,” she said, her voice trailing off. “He seems like a good man…”

An Unmediated Inauguration, Part 6

2009-01-24T04:09:00.003-05:00

Jan. 21
9 am

Bella had to report bright and early for her first day at the research institute, leaving Danny and I to our own devices. I had only a few hours before having to be in Chinatown to catch the bus home, so we meandered through Georgetown, following Wisconsin Avenue down to the banks of the Potomac before discovering the delightfully picturesque Chesapeake and Ohio Canal walk that led us halfway into town.

Danny and I had forged our friendship over the course of a dozen years of walks that took us all over London and, in more recent years, an ever-widening swath of Southwest England. Sometimes the walk is its own point, more often it’s merely the backdrop to an ongoing conversation covering politics, philosophy, economics, science, and most things in between. Danny holds a doctorate in biochemistry but makes his living as a journalist with one of Britain’s leading dailies, where his beat consists mainly of animal stories and the paranormal.

Not the cutesy-wutesy sort of animal stories, though he is not above the occasional two-headed dog feature; his primary stock in trade consists of ferreting out animal abuse in all its forms, as when he recently risked life and limb to expose the factory farming of pigs on the Polish-Russian border. Another time he used me and a couple other friends as undercover agents to investigate the claims of a renowned London psychic. She predicted that within a couple years I’d be living on an island, and before you point out that by moving to New York City, I effectively fulfilled that prophecy, you should know that I asked her myself if that would qualify, only to be told that she was thinking more along the lines of something with palm trees.

Right now, Danny told me, he’s working on a project studying the interface between science and religion (“…are not mutually exclusive,” I started to sing, before telling him about the Screeching Weasel song whose chorus begins with that line), and by the time we’re done talking about that and Richard Dawkins, toward whom we share a similar degree of disdain, we were walking up to the front of the White House.

Workers were just beginning to dismantle the reviewing stands from yesterday’s parade, and in the meantime, we had the opportunity to get a look at the President’s home from a much better vantage point than that normally afforded tourists. The first time I came to Washington in October 1967 – I was with that bunch who were going to levitate the Pentagon, if you must know – I took a stroll up to the front gates and saw, or at least thought I did – LBJ at an upstairs window, staring disconsolately out into the night.

But on my more recent visit, I’d discovered that visitors were no longer allowed on that side of the street, and had to observe the White House from considerably farther away. However, that rule did not seem to be in effect today, and our only obstacle to an unobstructed view was the steady stream of African-American parents bringing their children to see where President Obama lived.

And even the little two and three year olds seemed to understand that this was a very big deal, asking where the President slept, and if he ever came out to play out in the yard. One tiny boy looked up at his mom and said, “Pres’ent ‘Bama’s nice, isn’t he?”

I marveled at what a different world these children would be growing up in, one in which the world’s most powerful and – at least for now – most-loved man was someone who looked like them, and how different, too, it would be for the parents who would be raising them, who could now in all earnestness say, “Eat your vegetables, study your lessons, and you can grow up to be anything in this world that you can dream of being.”

The President had reminded us in yesterday’s speech that not so long ago – within memory of some of us – a black man could legally be refused service in many restaurants. For the most part, you couldn’t even see a black person on TV, except for the occasional servant or clown. Millions of people were told, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly, that it didn’t matter what they said or thought or did, that their contributions to the national gestalt were neither needed nor wanted.

It’s tempting to say that everything has now changed, and of course on one hand it hasn’t – black men still rot in prison and beg on street corners in horribly dispiriting numbers – but on the other hand, it has. It seems silly now, but in 1960 there was a real question about whether a Catholic could or should ever be elected President. Once it finally happened, it became a complete non-issue, and I think the same thing is about to happen with African-Americans. A few years from now – or sooner – it will become hard to remember or understand how or why this country nearly tore itself to pieces over the non-issue of race.

When I got to Chinatown chaos reigned supreme. You couldn’t get down the sidewalk for all the backpack and sleeping bag-toting people who hoped to climb aboard the next bus north. I stood in line anyway, even after I’d been told I’d probably have to wait till the next bus or the one after that, and to my surprise, managed to snag one of the last couple seats, right up near the front.

Our driver coming down had been a quiet, middle-aged Chinese man, but our driver going home was a youngish African-American man and not very quiet at all. Well, he could be, and was at times, but when he had something he wanted to communicate, you heard about it.

“Yo, listen up!” he said, before we pulled away from the curb. “I want you all to know that this is my bus and on my bus I am the captain. There is only one authority on this bus, and I am it.

“Now rule number one on my bus is that there will be no trash or garbage left on the floor, under the seats, on the seats, or in the overhead bins. You will take all your trash and garbage with you. I know it’s a shame I have to speak this way to grown up people who should know better, but that’s just what it is. You got me?”

When a few people nodded their assent, he demanded to hear from everybody, and once he had, shouted, “Okay then, let’s roll. OBAMA!”

Obama was invoked at several points of the journey: when in our Baltimore stop, a young woman tried to push her way on to the bus without a ticket, he demanded, “Are you related to Obama?” Before she could answer, he added, “Cuz I don’t care if you are, you ain’t getting on this bus.” When a young Frenchman tried a similar tactic, the driver turned to and asked, “Any of you speak French? Tell this guy oui-oui-Obama, no bus!”

When a couple were late getting back to the bus after a rest stop, he started to drive away without them, declaring, “They can get a ride with Obama, cuz I sure as hell ain’t waitin’ for ‘em.” But his greatest ire was reserved for Maxine, a fur coat-clad 70-something Jewish lady who sat directly behind him and talked pretty much nonstop on her cell phone for five hours.

She first ran foul of him by propping her foot up on top of the ledge in front of her, leaving it dangling a foot or two from his face. He said not a word, just turned and glowered at her for a lot longer than he should have, considering that were traveling up Interstate 95 at 70 mph in the opposite direction. She was slow to grasp his meaning, but when she finally did, gave no ground.

“What? That’s not bothering you, is it? My foot’s clean. It doesn’t smell. It’s not in your way.” He glowered and glowered some more, and when she got up to go to the bathroom, announced to the whole front of the bus, “She says her foot don’t smell, but it does, it smells like old lady perfume mixed with stinky old lady feet smell.”

When Maxine continued jawing loudly on her phone, he called out loudly, “Can I have everybody be quiet for a minute?” Such was the authority in his voice that the bus went dead silent – except for Maxine, who after a couple minutes started looking around uneasily trying to figure out why everybody was laughing at her. Then the driver put the radio back on twice as loud, which of course meant that Maxine had to talk twice as loud, and more or less genial chaos ensued.

The radio was tuned to an R&B station, and many of the riders, about two thirds of whom were African-American, would sing along with the more popular songs. In between, the DJs played and replayed excerpts from Obama’s inaugural address and gently ribbed the President about his dancing prowess. “We need y’all to send your CDs and videos to the White House so the man can learn how to step,” they said, before going on to announce that Hillary Clinton had been confirmed as Secretary of State and launching a segment for people to call in and describe how they were going to respond to Barack Obama’s challenge to better themselves and the world around them.

All the way back from Washington I’d been writing in this journal – by hand, as for the first time in years I’d chosen to travel without a computer. And the R&B station on the bus ride home was the only contact I’d had with the mass media since starting this trip, Danny and Bella’s new flat being without radio and TV. So for the first time since, well, ever, I’d experienced a major public event without the help of commentators telling me what I should be thinking or how I should be feeling, or for that matter, what anyone else in the country was supposedly thinking or feeling.

And you know what? I kind of liked it that way. I think I may try it more in the future. But most of all I liked the bus rides, the street scenes, the crowds on the mall, the gentle camaraderie, the shared sense of promise and purpose that seemed to be washing through the streets of DC and all the way back to New York City. It’s starting to look more like the America I always wished I could live in. I wouldn't mind getting used to this sort of thing.

He Had A Dream

2009-01-19T10:36:00.002-05:00

Pete Seeger is almost 90 years old, just a few months younger than my mother, and like anyone his age, has seen quite a bit of history.

However, because of his lifelong political activism, we can safely infer that he's seen a bit more than your average 90 year old, and when he took the stage at yesterday's Lincoln Memorial concert - in the rather singular situation of having had soon-to-be President Obama open for him - to lead half a million people in a stirring rendition of "This Land Is Your Land," I couldn't help marveling at what must have been going through his mind.

Here was a man who was already getting along in years when he marched with Martin Luther King on the day of the "I Have A Dream" speech; could he have ever in his wildest imaginings pictured a day like this? I'm 30 years younger and I'm pretty sure I never did.

It was a day when, as Dr. King said, "all of God's children could sing with a new meaning," and sing they did. When half million people raised their voices on "America The Beautiful," is was no longer an ideal or aspiration; for that shining moment, it was self-evident fact.

Martin Luther King predicted that the events of August 28, 1963 would "go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." Thanks to his vision, his genius and immense personal courage, we may now have now lived to see a still greater one. Thank you, Dr. King, thank you to all the lesser known but similarly brave souls who walked with him, and thank you, America, for being worthy of his dream.

Literary Notes

2009-01-18T01:15:00.003-05:00

You know things are about to take a turn for the surreal when you look around at a poetry reading and see CHRIS GRIVET standing behind you.

But there the former STEINWAYS drummer was, looking studious and thoughtful as could be, and all I could think was, "Wow, dude really was serious about pursuing interests beyond pop-punk."

"Whadda ya talkin' about?" Grivet protests when his presence at such an august literary gathering is challenged, "I got plenty of culcha." He also informs us that he's actually in three new bands, not two as previously reported, including a rap group and a hardcore outfit, none of which involves him playing drums.

But before going any further, it's only fair to note that I'm guilty of embellishing a decent story for the sake of making it an outstanding one, that the august literary gathering actually took place in the back room of a bar on the Greenpoint/Williamsburg divide, and that while quite a lot reading was done, only a little of it was poetry. Or none, perhaps; it's not always easy to distinguish between poetry and prose now that poets can't be bothered to use rhymes and you're not looking at it in a book (general rule: if the words are arranged funnily on the page, it's probably poetry and there's a better than average chance that it sucks).

If you think that marks me out as a narrow-minded philistine, you're probably right, and if the truth be told, I'm probably a more unlikely sight at a literary event than Chris Grivet. I don't know why, either, because if they're anywhere near as good as this one, I've been missing out. Let me reiterate, though: this event featured little or no poetry. I'm not ready to become that broadminded yet.

My friend Michael was supposed to meet me there and periodically texted to say he'd be there soon, but then stopped texting and wasn't. One reason I'd hoped he'd come was that I was afraid I wouldn't know anybody there, but as it turned out I did; in addition to the aformeentioned Grivet we had JONNIE WHOA OH, JACKIE O, FRANK UNLOVABLE, and, in a real surprise, JOEY PERALES, who connoisseurs of old school East Bay punk will recognized from his work with BLATZ and DEAD AND GONE.

I knew two of the featured performers as well, CRISTY C. ROAD, author (and illustrator!) of the recently published Bad Habits, and BLAKE SCHWARZENBACH, noted English instructor who's also been in a bunch of bands you might have heard of. I had been under the impression that since this was a "reading," Blake was going to read. So, apparently, had he, coming prepared with some newly written material, only to discover that he was expected to sing a few songs, which he did, masterfully, adding an ex tempore tale about the tundra, which for reasons that were never satisfactorily explained, was the theme of the night. Cristy, who, she revealed, once interviewed me for her zine sometime back in the 90s when she was about 15, read a blazing bit of rhetoric about several New Year's Eves including her most recent one in Brooklyn, and though she (unnecessarily) apologized in advance that it might be too long, it was mesmerizing. I got a copy of her new novel, on which I will report back in a couple weeks time.

I also enjoyed the work of ZACK LIPEZ, who read - hilariously - about a cloned woolly mammoth coming to live in Williamsburg, and RYAN DODGE, who created a portrait of a self-obsessed 20-something who at first made you nearly cringe (one woman actually left the room because she didn't want to hear about this presumably fictional character shaving his pubic hair), but who gradually drew you past his outer bravado and posturing into an inner world where you actually began to feel rather touched by his rawness and vulnerability.

Actually, there wasn't a bad reader out of the batch. Even the MC, who, if he's not already pursuing a standup career, has clearly missed his calling, was a delight. And in a turnabout from the normal state of affairs, it was fascinating to see the room packed for the reading and then empty out the minute a band started. Shame, too; it seemed like a pretty decent band, with a banjo, even, but everybody seemed anxious to adjourn to the bar and talk about, well, literary things, I guess. By the time I walked home, the sky had clouded over and the temperature had risen into the low 20s for the first time in a couple days, and it felt almost luxuriously warm. A good night. I'll have to keep an eye on this literary racket, especially now that all my favorite bands are breaking up. Watch for Grivet and me trading rhymes at your next poetry slam.

Waiting For Obama

2009-01-17T16:12:00.003-05:00

Way back in November I started grousing about why, having elected a new President, we had to wait two and a half months for him to take office. In Britain, and in most other countries with a parliamentary system, the new Prime Minister goes straight to work the morning after the election.

It's tradition, of course; our lengthy interregnum (it used to be considerably longer, as some of you will know; until halfway through FDR's Presidency, Inauguration Day wasn't until the 4th of March) was established at a time when our newly elected leaders had to make their way to Washington on horseback over uncertain roads in the dead of winter. And of course there was (and still is) that ridiculous rigmarole with the Electoral College: regardless of what happened the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, a new President isn't actually elected until the middle of December.

Never mind, though, the waiting is nearly over now, waiting that has been especially frustrating and fraught with anxiety this time around as a leaderless and seemingly rudderless country has continued to stagger toward financial Armageddon. Outgoing Presidents understandably diminish in significance as the time for their departure nears, but Bush has plumbed new depths in the lame duck Olympics, presiding over what might be more properly dubbed a zombie administration. Dead as a doornail yet still twitching, still capable of running amok and wreaking havoc.

In contrast to the unholy presence still stalking the White House, we have a President in waiting who, for the first time in many people's memory, looks, acts and speaks like a President. I know some of you felt that Clinton fit this bill, but while he was more adequate to the task than most, he never fully convinced me. The first Bush, while downright statesmanlike when compared with his son, was still a bumbling martinet that someone memorably described as the human equivalent of post-nasal drip. And as for the present Bush, well, the best that can be said for him is that he's lowered the standards of governance to a point where a Kang and Kodos duumvirate could look appealing.

I've had the TV on in the background all afternoon as Obama's train journeyed down the Eastern Seaboard on its way to Washington, and I stopped writing to listen to his speech in Baltimore. I don't mind admitting that the man had me in tears. Maybe I'm entering my second childhood, but I haven't been so inspired, so filled with hope and anticipation, since as a starstruck 13 year old I waited for John F. Kennedy to mount the Capitol steps.

If anything, I'm more impressed with Obama. If he hasn't quite reached the rhetorical heights that JFK soared to, he's getting very close, and I find his overall message more consistent and substantive. Watching him pull together a governing coalition when, at least on paper, none is needed has been a wonder to behold; it's getting harder by the day to find even a Republican who has much bad to say about the man.

With the exception, of course, of right wing talk radio. "The radicals have taken over," Sean Hannity bellows, but he barely seems to have his heart in it. Even Rush Limbaugh sounds resigned to a near-term future of growing irrelevance. This could all change, and quickly, if Obama makes a spectacular mistake early on, but so far the man has barely put a foot wrong. It's almost scary, in fact, to see the awe and devotion he commands. I don't think there's been an American politician in my lifetime, any and all of the Kennedys included, who came close. I suppose one can't help wondering what would happen should he choose to use that power for evil purposes, but part of his strength is that on one wants to think of him as being capable of such a thing.

Obama has done a superb job of convincing us that he plans to be President of all America, and that being the First Black President is almost incidental to him. As it may well be, but it's hardly incidental to the tens of thousands of African-Americans who turned out to watch his train come through or to hear him speak in Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore. Or who are already gathering on the Mall in anticipation of Tuesday's swearing-in. An enduring image for me will be the husky black man who stood alongside the train tracks somewhere in Maryland as the President-elect's train came rolling through with Obama and Biden waving to the cheering crowds.

Slightly rough-hewn and wearing a peacoat and watch cap, he could have been a warehouseman or a dock worker, or the slightly menacing character you might consider crossing the street to avoid if you're out alone late at night. He stood watching impassively until just before Obama came level with him, and then suddenly, somewhat awkwardly, pulled off his watch cap and stood there bareheaded in the January chill until the train had passed.

What I'm getting at is that this man did not look like someone in the habit of taking his hat off for anyone, had probably not planned on taking it off for Obama, and yet was caught up in the moment just as so many of us, of all colors and communities and religions and parties, were caught up and lifted up by a President-to-be who, rather than pander to our base self-interest, spoke to what is noble and admirable in us as a people, who rather than offer us a chance to line our pockets and feather our nests, challenged us to look more deeply into ourselves and what we are capable of offering to one another.

I normally avoid like the plague any reference, other than caustic, to the hippie songs and sentiments of my youth, but it's hard not to be reminded of that line advising writers and critics to "keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again." Something momentous is happening in America, something potentially more momentous than anything I can recall, and where it will end is anybody's guess ("Don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin"), but it's impossible to deny that the times indeed are a-changing. Six months, a year or several from now we may be moaning that it was not at all the sort of change we'd bargained for, but for the moment I'd prefer to suspend disbelief and cynicism and let myself get caught up in this great national (and worldwide, really) outpouring of hope and faith.

With that in mind, I'll be leaving for Washington myself on Monday, intent on somehow being a part of it all. I don't have tickets to any of the events, and chances are I'll never get close enough even to see the new President in the flesh, but I want to be there nonetheless, to be in my own small way part of history. 41 years ago, acting on a similar impulse, I jumped into a friend's car and rode 16 hours so I could be there for the siege of the Pentagon in October 1967. At the time I was part of a ragtag army of disaffected youth who openly espoused the destruction of America; today I travel with a far mightier army, one far more representative of the true nature and spirit of this nation, come to celebrate and save it.