Berkeley In Black And White

Apparently they're having a heat wave now, but during the three and a half days I spent in California recently, it was downright cold most of the time. It finally warmed up on Monday, though, enabling me to take a leisurely walk through South Berkeley, Telegraph, and downtown, all of which looked rather tranquil in the morning sun. I might have been less sanguine about my wanderings in light of this or this or this or this, but I figured most criminals couldn't be bothered to get up that early in the morning.

It's obvious that Berkeley is suffering from the same surge in violent street crime that San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond are, though it must be said that at least Berkeley cops have been known to arrest their murderers and robbers, unlike Oakland and Frisco, where the authorities seem to have instituted a catch-and-release program. Street robberies are very common, especially the sort where a carload of thugs rolls up on you as you're blithely strolling down what looks like a quiet and peaceful suburban street. Aaron Cometbus and I witnessed one of these a few years ago when we were walking near my old house just west of downtown Berkeley, but apparently they've become much more prevalent lately.

What's equally obvious, though largely unmentionable in Berkeley's highly charged PC climate, is that the overwhelming majority of street crime is the work of African-American offenders. There was a glaring exception the other week in the case of what has been dubbed the "Fraternity Row Murder," in which both victim and assailant were white (though it's hard in this case to ascertain who exactly was the victim, since both parties, the murdered frat boy and the West Berkeley arrestee who stabbed him seem to have been acting like or at least posing as ghetto thugs), but it's the proverbial exception proving the rule.

In theory, this shouldn't be happening, not in what is arguably the most liberal and "progressive" city in the USA. Berkeley was always ahead of the curve when it came to integrating its schools, using busing programs when demographics wouldn't cooperate, instituting affirmative action programs at all levels of government and education, naming schools after people like Malcom X, abolishing Columbus Day in favor of "Indigenous People's Day, and in general focusing with laser-like intensity on the eradication of racism and injustice.

Granted, there are limits to what one small city, particularly one run by hippies still befogged from the drugs and politics of the 60s, can accomplish in addressing such systemic and society-wide challenges. But you'd think that by now they would have managed something. If they have, however, it's hard to say what; Berkeley's ghettos on the South and West sides are if anything far meaner, and poverty and crime far more entrenched than they were nearly 40 years ago when I lived on a nearly all-black block west of San Pablo.

It was definitely poorer, and no doubt a bit rougher than the rest of Berkeley (which at that time was a very safe city overall), but I never had any hesitation about walking the streets,even late at night, something I wouldn't recommend in most parts of Berkeley nowadays. The whole time I lived there I heard one gunshot, which turned out to have been fired by a night watchman who'd surprised a burglar; friends who've lived in West Berkeley more recently tell me it's not unusual to hear gunfire on a near-daily basis.

Are race relations worse in Berkeley than elsewhere in America? Probably not, but nor are they any better, which is the disappointing part. Berkeley has certainly been far from flawless in both its vision and the execution thereof (see the aforementioned drug-befogged hippies), but I don't think anyone could deny that its intentions were good. I don't know of another city that applied itself so assiduously to the cause of redressing racial injustice, and yet 40, even 50 years on, you've got a two-tier educational system that puts whites and Asians into the nation's best universities and funnels blacks and Hispanics straight into the maw of Santa Rita and San Quentin. I'm not sure I know what the answer is, but it should be pretty obvious by now that the people in charge don't have much of a clue either.

Barack Hussein Obama Is A Long-Legged Pimp

With several months to go before the campaign *really* gets going in earnest, I think it's already safe to say that 2008 will provide us with some of the liveliest and zaniest bits of invective since "Maw, maw, where's my Paw? Gone to the White House, haw haw haw!"

Here we see the Rev. Manning, who is apparently Rev. Wright's doppelgänger from Opposite Land, laying down the truth about the unholy trinity of Oprah Winfrey, the long-legged pimp Barack Obama, and the Rev. Wright, homosexuals all, apparently, and given yesterday's developments in California, perhaps headed for a state-sanctioned ménage-à-trois in the White House.

White Minority

Grath McGrath, lead singer/guitarist for the Steinways and author of such deathless lines as "You're so pretty, you're so Asian, kiss me baby, I'm Caucasian," is a prolific songwriter as it is, but the mind boggles at how much more inspired he might have been had he attended UC Berkeley instead of the considerably whiter Vassar. A stroll through the campus earlier this week had me feeling very much in the minority.

Not in a bad way, I hasten to add; in fact things seemed especially tranquil and pleasant that day, though the beautiful (for the first time in weeks) weather probably contributed to that effect. And even when I was a Berkeley student, Asians made up a disproportionately high percentage of the student body. But now they visibly as well as statistically outnumber white students, by about 42% to 31% by last year's figures.

African-American students? Not doing so well. I believe they're down to about 3% of the student body, and on this particular day, I walked from Sproul Plaza at Bancroft down to the western exit from campus at Oxford and University without seeing a single black student except for those pictured on a series of posters meant to illustrate Berkeley's commitment to "diversity."

So in a sense the hysterics were right when they predicted devastating effects for minority enrollment at the University after California voters put an end to affirmative action programs. But only in a sense, because after all, Asians are also a minority in terms of the general population, and yet they massively outnumber both whites and Latinos in representation at the state's best public university.

So is this a problem, or the result of a true meritocracy? A bit of a problem, perhaps, but also a fair result for people who obviously work harder and/or are blessed with greater intelligence, and I say that as someone who very likely would no longer be able to gain admission to UC Berkeley, whereas I was easily able to do so in the 1970s.

Yes, it's tragic that so few African-Americans are able to attend Berkeley (and a disappointingly small number of Latinos as well), but the role of an elite university is not to redress historical imbalances by lowering its standards for certain ethnic groups (and, by logical extension, refusing admission to students of other ethnic groups who have earned the right to be there). But clearly there's something wrong, not only with the primary and secondary educational systems, but also with cultures that don't sufficiently value education or the work required to obtain it.

Is racism a factor? Undoubtedly it is, though to nowhere near the extent it once was, and to nowhere near the extent race-obsessed ideologues and demagogues would have us believe. If it were, you wouldn't have Asians, another racial minority who have also endured enormous discrimination in the not so distant past, so massively outperforming every other racial group, INCLUDING the non-Hispanic whites who are supposedly running the show.

Britain To Potheads: You're Reclassified

After several years experimenting with quasi-legalization of marijuana (it was still against the law, but you'd have to try really hard to get arrested for it), the UK has decided to reclassify cannabis again, making it more illegal, but, in that characteristically British way, signaling that nothing in particular is going to be done about it (in other words, the police have already said that they're not going to change their mostly hands-off policy).

The Guardian, one of Britain's two principal pothead papers (the other being the Independent, whose editor, Rosie Boycott, used to keep a potted pot plant in her office), writes about this in hurt-child tones ("But... but... all the experts say marijuana is good for you!") while acknowledging some of the data motivating the government's pseudo-crackdown on the devil weed, specifically some rather evidence linking cannabis use, especially among the young with schizophrenia and other forms of mental breakdown.

I myself have mixed feelings. As I've said for some time now, I'm in favor of any approach, legal, educational or otherwise, that reduces the amount of marijuana being smoked and decreases the likelihood of children and teenagers taking up the habit. It's just that there doesn't seem to be much evidence that stricter law enforcement accomplishes that purpose while it does seem to do considerable harm to many young people who might otherwise never enter the criminal justice system.

At the same time, I don't think it can any longer be disputed that marijuana does serve as an entry-level drug, not just for harder drugs, but also for other forms of more serious criminal activity. The bien pensant liberal left laughs solipsistically at such a notion, damning it as a throwback to the Reefer Madness era of drug education on the grounds that all their friends react to marijuana with nothing more than an increased interest in hobbits or fudge brownies or cod philosophy. They can't seem to get it through their heads that smoking blunts has a rather different effect on young gangbangers, dulling if not eliminating any inclination toward education or work while simultaneously extirpating any remaining vestiges of moral inhibition. Many a bong-sucking hippie has gotten it into his head that he's some form of god; these cats can get similar ideas, but more along the Old Testament avenging angel, drowning whole cities in blood fire sort of line.

But what are you gonna do? Locking as many of them up as possible doesn't seem to have accomplished any more than the "Let the people smoke all the herb they want, man, it's medicine" line. Personally, what I'd like to see (or at least what I think might be most effective) is for marijuana to be treated like cigarettes, i.e., legal for adults, but with strict limitations on where it can be used, with copious amounts of social opprobrium attached to the sad losers who can't seem to kick the habit. It seems to be working with tobacco: whereas at one time half of all adults smoked, it's now down below 20%, especially in those areas which strictly enforce public smoking bans and heavily tax tobacco sales with at least part of the money being used for education and programs to help people quit.

Under the present system, there's still a certain amount of glamor and raciness attached to marijuana use. The pothead has managed to get himself portrayed as a sort of adventurer or rebel rather than as a drug addict and retro-hippie burnout, and as long as this remains the case, kids will inevitably find it necessary to demonstrate their individuality and independence by going along with the pot-smoking herd. When we stop treating potheads as criminals and turn them into laughingstocks instead, we might finally make some progress.

Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

Regardless of how one might feel about the writing of Michel Houellebecq, I think most people would agree that he's not the cuddliest of characters. He's been accused of everything from gratuitous misogyny to generic and pedestrian attempts at shocking the bourgeoisie (actually, he sounds - and reads - rather like a Gallic Howard Stern), but there is a certain morbid fascination to his emotional trainwreck prose, and now that his mother has gotten in on the act by publishing her own equally scathing memoir, we can see a lot more clearly why.

She damns her famous offspring as an "evil, stupid little bastard," not to mention a "liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all - above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame," before telling an interviewer she'll "cane him round the face, that'll knock his teeth out, that's for sure. And [his publishers] won't stop me." When not hurling invective at his literary output, she's complaining about the quality of his baby poo. Still, having read (and partially enjoyed a couple of Houellebecq's books, I can't help thinking how thoroughly these two would appear to deserve each other.

I'm Not Angry

I'm not much of a fan anymore, but I'll always remember the first time I saw Elvis Costello. It was in 1978, I think, and he was still in his full-on new wave phase, skinny tie, narrow-lapel suit and all, basically as though he'd just stepped off the cover of My Aim Is True.

In keeping with the new wave theme, the lighting was stark and featured all those ugly colors so in vogue at the time, like lime green, hot pink, chartreuse, etc., and when he sang "I'm Not Angry," the lights changed color in time with the music so that every time he spat out another repetition of the title phrase, his face would turn a different color. They were not happy colors, either, so that in combination with the sneer on his lip and the snarl in his voice set up a direct contradiction every time he protested that no, he wasn't angry at all. No sir, not in the least bit, in fact, I've never been so not angry in my life, he insisted, all the while looking as though every blood vessel in his face was about to erupt into a gusher of Vesuvian rage.

I thought of that when I noticed that Peter of Quincy Mass, responding to last week's half-hearted diatribe about pandering politicians and their idiotic gas tax "holiday", had said, "Finally some sense of outrage with the status quo in your writing!! Come back Larry as a voice of dissent. Your voice is needed and has been absent far too long."

Peter, my good man, I would love to accommodate you, not just for your own satisfaction, but my own as well. And I suspect many of my readers from the old days feel much the same way. One thing you could pretty much count on when you picked up a copy of Lookout or Maximum Rocknroll magazines was that I would be angry, outraged, indignant and infuriated about something. Probably several somethings, and if I wasn't trumpeting some cause or other I'd just dreamed up, I was viciously refuting any reader who'd had the temerity to question my anger, outrage, etc., from the previous issue.

Most of the time it didn't even matter whether I was right or (as more often than I'd like to admit was the case) wrong: if I'd had accused the government or the power structure or the local bourgeoisie of some crime that proved to be little more than bad research on my part or a figment of my imagination, I'd change the subject or point out that even if they weren't technically guilty this time, it was more important to remember that they were guilty of far more serious things that hadn't been uncovered yet.

Yes, I was quite an angry fellow, although if you'd identified me as such, I would have vehemently denied it, claiming instead to be a lover of all humankind (except, of course, for Republicans, Christians, capitalists, hippies, stupid people, people who didn't listen to the right kind of music, people who wore the wrong kind of clothes and a few thousand other exceptions) whose sole purpose in writing was to bring enlightenment and salvation to the suffering masses.

Did I mention that I smoked a lot of pot in those days? Well, not as much as some of my neighbors, true, but enough nonetheless to furnish me with a more or less permanent bad attitude cloaked in a passive-aggressive messiah complex. Like most potheads, I had come to believe that the world not only revolved around me, but was actually an extension of my needs, desires and prejudices. If I was infuriated by preachers and religious people (and I was), it was because I figured they were drumming up business for the competition.

If I had a God-complex, you might ask, how could I get so outraged at the state of the world? Shouldn't I have seen it as merely a reflection or extension of my own creative energies? If I were being logical, sure, but remember, I was a pothead. And as such, I thought that my world was just fine. Peachy, in fact. It was just that all those damn people insisted on screwing it up by doing things their way instead of mine. And even after I'd gone to great trouble and effort to explain to them exactly how things really were.

Fast forward to the 21st century, and my perspective on the world has rather radically altered. When things aren't going the way I'd like them to, oddly enough the first place I look for a problem is in myself. And most of the time, that's exactly where I find it. I'm not saying nobody else ever does dumb or destructive things, but that's a given as long as you're dealing with human beings. I don't have a lot of power over what the president or the guy sitting next to me on the subway does, but I do have considerable power over how I choose to react to it.

And most of the time, maybe even always, I find that not being angry works a lot better for me. It's often been said that nursing a resentment toward someone is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. I don't avoid anger because I think my enemies deserve a break, but because I do.

But aren't there times when things are simply so wrong that they have to be pointed out, where we'd be doing a disservice to ourselves and our fellows if we didn't? Undoubtedly, but even then, I think it's better to do so without giving vent to undue amounts of anger. I used to rationalize that by getting people mad at me, I was forcing them to think about the issues I was raising, but eventually it dawned on me that just the opposite was happening: they were so wrapped up in being mad at me that there wouldn't have been room in their hearts for a rational examination of the idea even if one were knocking at the door and begging to be let in.

And, of course, there's also the fact that, contrary to some opinions, I'm no longer the know-it-all that I was in my younger days. It's a shame, George Burns once observed, that the only people who know how to run the country are all driving cabs and cutting hair, but made those cabbies and barbers look like rank amateurs when it came to telling the people in charge how they ought to be running things. You say you're President of the United States? CEO of IBM? Chancellor of the university with a string of Ph.Ds to your name? Never mind that, listen to Livermore if you want to know how to do your job the way it should be done!

I've often thought, and suggested, that one reason the right wing has been so successful in recent years is that they've completely outsmarted the lefties who, as we all know (at least according to what it says in the Times and the New Yorker and on NPR and all those other bastions of sophistication and learning) are supposed to be the smart ones. But it worked with Reagan and it's working again with Bush: put up a candidate who the educated lefties can sneer at and feel superior to, and said lefties will while away the decades sneering and feeling superior while "dumb" Ronald Reagan and George Bush are happily dismantling every cherished social structure and disemboweling every cherished sacred cow of liberalism.

But we don't want to start down that road, do we? Somebody might get peeved. A little bit cross, perhaps, or even slightly annoyed. So I'll just point out before signing off that I've been as guilty of this as any pointy-headed liberal ever was: looking down on the people who were running things (and running away with things), dismissing them with sarcastic comments and patronizing disdain was little more than an admission of complete and utter defeat. No matter how clever the putdowns I could come up with, they were in charge and all I could do was snipe from the sidelines.

Well, they're still in charge and I'm still not, but now that I've come to accept that while George Bush and Co. may not be geniuses, chances are that I'm not one either, and when it comes down to it, I'm not so sure I could do a better job then they could. Okay, I'd like to think I could, and the bar is set fairly low (not being snide, just an observation!), but honestly, I just don't know, and for maybe the first time in my life, I'm able to admit it. And that, my friends, while humbling, also comes as an enormous relief.

A Walk In The Sun

Today was as beautiful as yesterday was ugly, the only drawback being that after the foul weather that's been hurled at us all this past week, I didn't have sufficient trust in the "sunny and warmer" forecast. So when I left the house this morning I took, in addition to my usual bag of books, papers, etc., a jacket, a hoodie and an umbrella. It still wouldn't have been enough to keep me warm yesterday, but by midday the hoodie was in the bag, followed shortly afterward by the jacket.

It was around this time that I decided to walk to Greenpoint from the West Village, which as the crow flies is no more than a mile or so, but on foot across the Williamsburg Bridge is considerably further. Hopstop claims it's only 2.61 miles, but it also tells you to turn left on Kent off the Williamsburg Bridge, which from the side I was walking on, you can't do without a parachute.

My reasons for walking instead of training it partly involved it being a warm, sunny day, but were more about teaching the MTA a lesson For two consecutive weekends the L train from Brooklyn to Manhattan has been an utter nightmare, as they're only running a shuttle between Union Square and Bedford Avenue every 16 minutes. Any more than 6 or 8 minutes between trains and the platforms begin to fill up with dangerous numbers of people, which is bad enough, but what's really annoying is the MTA's spurious claim that they're using the shutdown to "make track improvements."

Now I'm no engineer or railroad man, but even my untutored ass knows that by now (this is either the third or fourth weekend they've done this) they could easily have replaced every bit of track from Union Square to Eighth Avenue. Anyway, sick of waiting in the subterranean equivalent of a cattle pen while sadistic MTA employees bellowed the obvious ("There are no trains etc.") at us through megaphones, I figured it made more sense to walk. Granted it took me twice as long and I got a blister on one foot, but I console myself by thinking of the president of the MTA losing sleep in his mansion tonight over my absence from his trains. "That Larry Livermore, why, he's one of our most devoted customers, and now he's deserted the L train. I think we'd better have a serious re-think about our customer service strategy." Or something like that.

It's been a couple months since I've been in South Williamsburg (well, it's really Central Williamsburg, but I confess that I don't give a lot of thought to what goes on south of Broadway), and quite longer since I've been there in daylight, so I had the opportunity to see some of the new glass condo boxes that have erupted in the vicinity since then. As you may know, I don't share the violent antipathy many of my fellow Williamsburgers exhibit toward all new construction higher than two stories or more modern than the earlier 20th century (or in some cases, toward any new construction at all). I actually like some of the glass boxes, others not so much, and there are even a handful that I would consider living in. In fact I saw one advertised today, a three-story, four-bedroom, six-car garage affair (I have absolutely no plans to acquire a car, but I do own two bicycles, total value approximately $125) just a couple blocks over from where I'm living now. Price? Why, a mere $1,250,000, which may sound a lot, but when you consider that it's only 10,000 times the value of my bicycle collection, it begins to sound a bit more manageable.

Anyway, one of the old timers on my block told me that one of the neighbors recently tried to sell his three-story house, which was not nearly as nice - is actually kind of tacky, if you must know, and had several feet of water in the basement apartment during last summer's floods - for $1.4 million. Didn't get it, though, and has installed several new sets of hipsters in the various apartments as a fallback strategy, but so the neighborhood goes. A friend turned up tonight wearing a t-shirt featuring a line drawing of an archetypal glass condo box with the legend: "My parents went to Brooklyn and all they got me was this lousy condo."

Speaking of hipsters and class resentment, my journey to Greenpoint took me through the Bedford Avenue side of McCarren Park, the section which, if the 30-something artsy type showing his parents around is to be believed, is known as "the hipster beach." Apart from the absence of sand and swim suits, it certainly looked the part, as the lawn was virtually carpeted with lounging hipster bodies in various states of disarray and déshabillée (yes, I know how much it annoys them to be called hipsters; why do you think I say it so much?).

I also saw, and you may find this hard to believe of someone who's lived in Brooklyn for going on two years now, my first kickball game (hey, I've never seen anyone taking cocaine, either). Several kickball games, in fact, being conducted simultaneously on every square foot of grass and field that wasn't already being lounged upon. The Ausländer among you may be unfamiliar with this sport, which is often spoken of (usually in derisory terms) as the ultimate stereotype of Hipster Brooklyn, but it actually looked like good fun, and certainly a lot less challenging and far more rewarding than yesterday's PPMB softball tourney played on the sub-Arctic tundras of North Central Park.

And in another touch that was notably missing from PPMB softball, the hipsters had brought in a club-sized set of PA speakers and a DJ to entertain the assembled kickballers with music that was - well, how about I avoid employing the H-word yet again and just acknowledge that it was no doubt very cutting edge and not entirely unpleasant. Oh, and the kickballers even had spiffy uniforms, indicating that they might take this business rather seriously, even if almost no one else does. Seriously, I support it, and find it infinitely less annoying than the clutch of hipsters who have taken up bocce ball to the point of pretty much driving the last of the old Italian men clear out of the park.

No shortage of old Polish men and women at the north end of the park, though, and they seemed to be having a great old time holding up a metaphorical "Welcome To Greenpoint" sign for me as my journey neared its end. I probably should have moved to Greenpoint a couple years ago when it was still "cheap" and "undiscovered;" now it looks better every time I wander over that way (which, truth be told, is several times a week, far more often than I set foot on the Hipster Strip over on Bedford).

But it's too late for that now, I fear, and the travails of the L notwithstanding, I'm not prepared to subject myself to the far less tender ministrations of the G train. But it's a great place for a walk, as was just about every nook and cranny of New York City on this stunningly beautiful day. It's still too early to say summer's finally here without jinxing the whole affair, but it's getting close, I tell you. And like a great yet gentle beast awaking languorously and luxuriously from a long winter's nap, the city stretches out in the sun and waits.

"I Guess They Have A Problem With People Who Go Out And Free Ourselves With Our Music"

Quite a few of my younger friends live in Astoria, and one of the surest ways to get their collective goat is to suggest that their neighborhood is becoming "the new Williamsburg." It's not, really; Greenpoint has already definitively and irrefutably claimed that title, with Bushwick and Bed-Stuy are much likelier candidates to be the new new Williamsburg.

It's true that young people are flocking to Astoria, which isn't surprising, as it's one of the few neighborhoods that offers somewhat reasonable rents while still being both safe and relatively convenient to Manhattan. Wrong end of Manhattan, true, and the N train, which incidentally just derailed this afternoon, is a rather tenuous lifeline, but that's also one of the reasons why Astoria is unlikely to be the next Hipsterville. Not only do bona fide hipsters not like to travel to inconvenient places, they also prefer to move into neighborhoods that appear to be somewhat down at the heels and which can confer a little street cred, at least in the eyes of friends and family back in Westchester or wherever.

Astoria, on the other hand, is just so darn wholesome, replete with families, clean streets, "normal" businesses, and a relative dearth of vegan tofu coffee bars. I'm willing to bet that if you took measurements, you'd find that the sun shines substantially more often there as well.

That's why this Daily News article about saving Astoria from the hipsters seems so ludicrous, like something you'd be more likely to run across in the Onion than in New York's second largest daily. In fact, upon noting that the group who supposedly launched this campaign are all Fordham students or alumni, I immediately thought of one P Smith, Astorian, devout Onion reader, and graduate of that very university.

I'm also curious how Jonnie Whoa Oh, native Astorian, (relatively) young person, and huge booster of guitar-based pop punk music feels about this. Granted that "Whoa Oh" may not sound like the Greekest surname around, but trust me, the man knows his choriatiki salata from his kolokithikia vrasta. Well, don't trust me, because I can barely pronounce them, but in addition to being Greek through and through, Jonnie is a borderline hipster (even had a beard last year) and has been seen in various locales around town banging away at a guitar.

I once seriously considered moving to Astoria myself, but I think that moment has passed, especially if the neighborhood is going to be riven by cultural conflict and, for all we know, ethnic cleansing. I think I'll just stay over here in my corner of Williamsburg and see if I can organize a movement to protect the Italians from the influx of people like, um, me.

Like Some Ravening Hyrcanian Tiger...

A taste of what London may be in for under its new mayor, Boris Johnson: this Daily Mail story also tells how Boris had his first drink in three months and promptly promised to have any Livingstone loyalists who threaten to gum up the works "humanely euthanized."

NYC Bike City? Not Quite

In theory New York City should be one of the best places in America to be a bike rider. No unduly severe hills, because of the population density things tend to be close enough together to make bike commuting realistic for most people, there are bridges with dedicated bike paths connecting most of the boroughs, and you can take your bike on trains and ferries when there aren't.

There are two big factors mitigating against the city being a biker's paradise, however, the first being the weather, which makes bicycling downright unpleasant if not completely impractical for several months of the year, and the second being the ungodly car traffic, bad enough in its own right, but even worse when frustrated drivers react to the constant snarl-ups by bending, breaking and shattering not only the highway code but the basic premises of civilized decorum.

Despite New York's much-vaunted and mostly merited reputation as one of the most pleasant and polite cities of its size, most of this civility goes straight out the window when people get behind the wheels of their cars and try to navigate them through streets that were already overcrowded back in the days of horses and buggies. It's always puzzled me why Giuliani's zero-tolerance campaign was never extended to include automobile drivers, who are among the most anti-social and dangerous offenders still at large in this city.

But it wasn't, and while a culture of tolerance and patience has in large measure replaced the culture of aggression and hostility that used to characterize pedestrian and public transit life, the culture of the horn-honking, corner-cutting, red light-ignoring motorist seems as strong as ever. True, cars usually will wait for pedestrians if they have the right of way - albeit grudgingly and IF they see them - whereas they used to aim for them, but even that measure of patience vanishes when it comes to bicyclists.

It's sometimes hard to have sympathy for bicyclists, since their own arrogant disregard for traffic laws or even common sense often makes them as big a threat to pedestrians as cars are, but based on the few times I've ridden in Manhattan and the many times in Brooklyn, I understand why bicyclists might have a mindset so defensive that it threatens to spill over into the offensive at times. This NY Times article illustrates just one of the problems; another, that keeps me constantly in terror when riding busy streets, is that of parked drivers obliviously opening car doors, leaving me the choice of crashing headlong into them or veering wildly into the traffic lane without having had the opportunity to check whether it's already occupied.

The ideal solution would of course be dedicated bicycle lanes all over the city, separated Dutch-style by barriers that keep cars from impinging on them. And given my feelings about cars in the city, I wouldn't mind closing off all sorts of streets to cars altogether and putting in a round-the-clock congestion charge that would REALLY discourage suburbanite/outer borough people from needlessly driving into town.

But the unfortunate reality is that because of the weather, bike lanes, no matter how well and safely constructed, would be woefully under-utilized during the winter months, and I could hardly blame car drivers for being angry and frustrated at the sight of so much concrete going to waste while they sit in horrendous traffic. I suppose the only equitable solution would involve removable barriers that could allow cars to use the bike lanes during the winter or a dome over the city that would provide us with perfect bike-riding weather all year round. Personally, I'd vote for the latter, and if any of you have the ear of the Mayor, I'd appreciate you giving this plan a mention.

Fulham On The Brink

I know that the majority of my readers are American and barely if at all interested in the goings-on of English football, so I've tried to limit my posts on that subject to the occasional piss and moan about the travails of being a Fulham supporter.

And indeed it's been a dismal season, more dismal than even I had realized until today when I heard a BBC commentator note that Fulham had just won back-to-back victories for the first time since September 2006. But note the operative word: "won." Fulham has, after a stomach-churning freefall toward oblivion that has been in effect since before Christmas, have suddenly come to life. All but the most rosy-spectacled fans had already mentally prepared themselves for life in the First Division (which in the bizarre argot of the Football Association is now called the "Championship" but is actually the Second Division), and suddenly Fulham is winning on a regular basis. In fact, if they win just one more - next Sunday's season finale - they're guaranteed to stay in the Premiership (which is actually the First Division).

Unfortunately, that game is against Portsmouth, who are always tough, and away at Fratton Park, making things even tougher. But after Fulham came back from 2-0 down at the City of Manchester Stadium to win 3-2 in the final minute of stoppage time, following it up with today's 2-0 dismantling of Birmingham, almost anything seems possible. Still, it's almost painful to have hope which had all but vanished suddenly resurrected with, however, the knowledge that it could still be cruelly snatched away again. Worse, come next Sunday I'll be in Frisco with, as far as I know, no access to a television to keep track of the proceedings. Which might be for the better: I'm not sure I have the stomach to watch, considering the stakes, and besides, every one of Fulham's recent victories have come on a day when I was unable to watch, whereas nearly every time I have watched, they've lost, often ignominiously so.

So perhaps I'm a jinx, even though all this time, I'd thought Fulham's misfortunes stemmed from their being brokenhearted over my leaving England and no longer being a season ticket-holding regular in the Riverside Stand. Jinx or not, though, my nephew and I will be there come late August to see the mighty (okay, perhaps that's stretching a point) Whites roll out a new season, regardless of what division they're in. But maybe, just maybe, against all odds, it's going to be the Premiership after all.

Frisco Weather

For almost a month now I've been telling myself I needed to get up to Central Park one of these days and witness spring in all its carefully groomed glory, but somehow the time, as it's wont to do, kept slipping away, and it was only as I disembarked from the subway at 96th Street today, en route to the 5th Annual PPMB Softball Tournament that I realized I was in fact going to set foot in Central Park at least once before full-fledged summer had arrived.

It was immediately evident, however, that I'd missed spring in its prime: while many trees were still in bloom, the majority of their blossoms had already fallen to earth, carpeting the ground with what looked uncannily like pink snow. And while leaves on most of the shrubs and trees weren't fully formed yet, they'd already gone well past that ethereal, delicate shade that you only see in the first week or two, when everything looks as though it had been lightly dipped in a lemon-lime Italian ice.

The Park was still exquisitely beautiful, as ever, and as I approached the reservoir, the sun, after several days' absence, suddenly burst into unexpected (they'd been predicted clouds and showers for the whole weekend) sight, prompting the myriad joggers, runners, strollers, and loungers to, almost as one, throw off their coats and sweaters and smile as though it were the first day of summer.

But it was not. Even in full sun, a vicious northeast wind quickly whipped away any such delusions, and also made it difficult to make myself heard on the phone when I started calling people to ask why, for the second (or third?) year in a row, I was completely unable to find the ballfield where they were playing.

I'd taken a wrong turn at the reservoir, it turned out, giving me the opportunity to savor the sights for about an hour and visit approximately 15 other ballfields before finally rolling up to the correct one, where about 40 or 45 PPMB fanatics were already embarked on their second game of the day. Well, not all of them at once; I think they limited it to 10 or 12 to a side, but there seemed to be a great deal of beer drinking and candy bar eating taking place on the sidelines, so everyone had some part to play.

Except for yours truly; as a non-ball playing, non-beer drinking, non-candy bar eating bystander I truly was a bit left out. There were plenty of conversations to be had, but unfortunately, the weather didn't create the best atmosphere for plopping oneself down behind home plate and whiling away the hours. In fact, most people stayed on their feet and kept shuffling around in what I presume was an attempt to keep their circulation going, especially once the sky clouded over and the cold set in in earnest. People lucky enough to have them pulled their hoods up; I personally was wearing two jackets and a hoodie and was still cold.

It was about that time that Frank Unlovable sidled up to me and said, "I can't deal with this Frisco weather," and while I hadn't thought of it up till then (I was thinking more along of the lines of some grim days out in London), Frank had nailed it. This was exactly the kind of San Francisco weather I'd been bitching about for years: not completely frigid, just cold, damp and miserable, with a wind that cuts right through to the bone. I thought back to numerous times I'd been abroad in Golden Gate Park in almost identical conditions, but at the time still being brainwashed by the hippie contention that "It's always beautiful here, man," I'd accepted it as the way things were supposed to be, even standing out in for hours to watch terrible bands playing terrible free concerts and thinking how lucky I was to be there.

Well, at least some element of sanity has been introduced into my life since moving to the East Coast: while accepting that sometimes New York has lousy weather, too (actually, it has lousy weather quite often), at least I now have sense enough to know when it's lousy, and concomitantly, to truly appreciate it when it's great. Which, I'm trusting, it will be just about all of the time in only a couple (few?) more weeks.

Weather gripes aside, Punk Rock Softball V was of course a smashing success. Lots of home runs were hit - I witnessed two notable ones, by Bill Moon, who had nine month old baby Ella in tow, and Rich Grech, who's expecting *triplets*, lots of spectacular catches and equally spectacular errors were made, and the mighty Chris Grivet demonstrated a skill few of us knew he had, that of JUGGLING. He also appeared to get beaned by a throw from center, but it turned out he had blocked it with his hand in the nick of time. From a distance, though, it looked as though it had landed smack in the middle of his forehead, which would have qualified it for any highlight reel of PPMB bloopers.

In past years, the softball has continued well into the evening until the last diehards and stragglers had their fill, but this year another team had reserved the field for 5 on the dot, so things ended relatively early with, no doubt again due to the weather, few complaints from the peanut gallery. Most of the "athletes" then adjourned to the Lost and Found tavern over in Greenpoint for further celebratory sessions, but I had business (and more shivering in the very un-Maylike weather) downtown. Next time I see many of them will be at the Fest in Baltimore on the last weekend of June, and if it's not blazing hot by then, somebody (most likely you) is going to hear about it.

LSD Then And Now

327 Dave gives us this slightly sentimental take on the death (at age 102!) of LSD pioneer/discoverer Albert Hoffman. The hippies used to make a big deal about LSD entering the world at the same time the atom was first split, the implication being that the two events were similarly momentous, but on opposite sides of the moral and ethical spectrum.

Being as impressionable a hippie as any, I parroted this line myself for years, only to learn more recently that the atom was not first split in 1943 as per hippie dogma, nor even in 1942, as was more commonly supposed, but in 1938, putting it on a parallel timeline with Hitler's Austrian Anschluss and the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, whereas LSD's appearance on the world stage shares equal billing with the Warsaw ghetto rising and the Russian victory at Stalingrad.

Enough with the glib and tenuous analogies, then; apparently LSD must rise or fall on its own merits, which seem to be more apparent to Dave than yours truly. It's not for lack of trying: between 1967 and 1980 I took LSD approximately a thousand times, though I'm beginning to suspect that figure of being inflated by the hippie hyperbole in which I regularly trafficked during those years. A quick calculation reveals that I would have had to drop acid almost 77 times annually to reach that total, and while I certainly managed that feat some years, particularly in the late 60s/early 70s, it's highly doubtful that I kept up the pace in the later 70s, once I'd discovered punk rock and harder drugs.

Nonetheless, my experience with LSD is substantial, not only in terms of how many times I took it, but also with regard to the size of some doses I consumed. Once the initial shock of the new drug wore off - around 1969, as I recall - I took to gobbling 10 or 20 tablets in one sitting, and my most intense trips, including my last, terrifying one on the night Darby Crash and John Lennon died, involved more like 30-5- hits.

And my conclusion, now that I've had a quarter century or so to reflect: it ain't all that. Granted, its effects are dramatic, not only on the mind of the person ingesting it, but also, as we saw in the 60s and 70s, on the larger society. Music, art, public morals, all underwent some dramatic transformations as an outgrowth of rampant acid consumption, but did LSD deliver in the area which its champions held up as its strongest suit, that of consciousness expansion and heightened spiritual awareness?

I think not. At its best, the acid trip provided a tawdry simulation or simulacrum of a true spiritual experience; at its not so best, it fueled the homicidal and megalomaniacal fantasies of the Manson family and the Weather Underground. Of course, you might justly ask, who am I to judge what is or isn't a "real" spiritual experience? Well, nobody, I guess, but considering where chemically induced "spirituality" left me, I'm inclined to stick with the natural variety.

My criticism of LSD-based spirituality is the same that I have of marijuana: both drugs can produce a sort of God-consciousness, but unfortunately the "God" in question tends to bear an uncanny resemblance to the person imagining him/her/it. Annoying but not necessarily harmful if the tripper/smoker in question is a typically befuddled hippie; potentially quite dangerous if he or she is ambitious, aggressive, or in possession of heavy weaponry.

By all accounts Albert Hoffman himself was a very nice man who had nothing but the best hopes and intentions for what he called his "problem child," but he may have been like many parents who mean well but still manage to inflict some seriously awful children on the world. Perhaps that sounds like too harsh a judgment; surely Dr. Hoffman never dreamed his accidental invention would lead to jam bands, tie-dyes, and convocations of smelly self-obsessed anarchists. And for that reason, I pass no judgment on Hoffman himself and find it pleasing and comforting to think that he enjoyed such a long and fruitful life.

But LSD itself? It's yet another modern genie that can't be put back in the bottle, but knowing what we do today, mightn't it be a good idea if it could? Even if the hippie parallel between LSD and nuclear energy proved to be spurious, would the world be better or worse off today if scientists had never discovered how to make atomic bombs? If LSD, as some of my hippie compatriots used to gleefully proclaim, is "the atomic bomb of the mind," wouldn't much the same be true?

The Worm Begins To Turn For The Big Apple?

Brooklyn Love, one of my inveterate correspondents/commenters, brings up a point I'd been meaning to make myself for a few weeks now, predicting that the long, dramatic decline in crime that has made New York City the safest big city in America is about to come to an end.

In point of fact, it's already happening: crime rates, especially for robbery and murder, are up significantly so far in 2008, the first time that's happened in 15 years. It's probably no coincidence that the police force has lost thousands of officers and is unable to attract sufficient numbers of new recruits, not least because of, as Brooklyn Love points out, the ludicrous and insulting 25k starting pay being offered, a figure which prospective police officers can easily double by moving to another city.

Opponents of zero tolerance policing may disagree with me, of course, but I regularly see signs that standards are slipping back toward those of the bad old days. No, it's nothing like the South African-style chaos which appears to be overtaking provincial cities like Oakland or San Francisco; by comparison, New York City still seems eminently safe and civilized. But increasingly I'm seeing people openly drinking on the subway - not even bothering with the traditional brown bag - a phenomenon which had all but disappeared since the Giuliani era.

A small thing in itself, granted, but the underlying message is that people no longer expect the subways to be patrolled by police, and when I stopped to think about it, I realized it had been months since I'd seen an officer on a train, whereas it used to be a regular occurrence. Yes, we're still a long way from the 1980s, when the Warriors-style graffiti that covered every subway car sent the message that nobody cares and anything goes, but it can still be the beginning of a slippery slope.

One of the biggest problems in policing New York has long been the unhappy fact that vigorous enforcement of the law almost inevitably seems to impact disproportionately on certain groups, most notably in the African-American community. That the effects of this are not entirely negative - i.e., for every Sean Bell tragedy, there are thousands of African-Americans able to walk the streets safely in what were once no-go neighborhoods - seems lost on race-obsessed cop haters like Al Sharpton or the Voice's Sean Gardiner and Nat Hentoff. But it's an unfortunate reality that in New York, as in nearly every large urban area, a large majority of the kind of street crimes that most threaten public safety and security are committed by young African-American and Latino men. For the police to focus their crime prevention efforts elsewhere in some misguided feelgood public relations exercise would be both counterintuitive and counterproductive.

One of the biggest advances of the Giuliani-Bloomberg era has been the departure from the PC tokenism and introduction of realism into police practices, which makes it all the more bewildering that Mayor Mike would retreat into wishful thinking and mealy-mouthed pol-speak when it comes to the current personnel crisis on the NYPD. The mayor is massively successful and experienced businessman; he couldn't possibly fail to be aware that you can't maintain an effective police force on the cheap, and that even if the city is in financial difficulties (which it most manifestly is not; the new budget projects a $4 billion surplus), public safety is the last place to be cutting corners.

Could it be that Bloomberg, his presidential ambitions now extinguished, is also losing interest in the day-to-day running of New York City? One hopes not, but instead of coming up with concrete proposals to beef up police numbers, the mayor has confined himself to sniping at the PBA, contending it's "their fault" for insisting on an inequitable labor contract. Not the kind of leadership I'd like to expect of Bloomberg, but maybe Brooklyn Love was right all along and the mayor has thus far been the beneficiary of little more than "luck and timing." For all of our sakes, though, I hope not.

Let The Sun Shine In

I'm not normally a big Friedman fan, but the mustachioed one has it exactly right with this NY Times piece about the idiocy of current American energy policy (or lack thereof), especially with regard to the way we're falling behind in a field we once led, that of solar power. As someone who lived in a solar-powered house for 10 years, I know the technology is not only feasible, but eminently sensible (and this was during the 1980s, when photovoltaic systems were downright primitive compared with today). I find it maddeningly frustrating every time I see a new building going up whose roof does not consist of solar panels, which, sadly, is the case in about 99.9% of new construction. The country that makes the next big breakthrough in the solar field, particularly with respect to battery/storage systems, will be in pole position for the 21st century. Given the dismal state of America's national leadership, both present and prospective, it looks highly unlikely to be us.

Back In The UK

Having spent the evening getting wound up and fulminating about American politics, I tried to relax by listening to BBC coverage of the British local elections, with particular interest in the outcome of the race for mayor of London, a rather colorful affair pitting Trotskyite newt-fancier Ken Livingstone against unreconstructed Tory toff Boris Johnson, who one imagines had to be dragged away from a bunfight down at the Drones Club in order to make this race. (Calvin Trillin, in the April 14 issue of the New Yorker, gives a very good account, but apparently you can only access an abstract online.)

The Labour Party is getting skunked, though the mayoral results, determined by one of those first choice/second choice preferential voting systems, won't be available for several hours yet. In light of the choice between Livingstone and Johnson, I'm rather glad not to be living there any longer, as I'm thus able to observe from a bemused distance rather than fearing for the future of my beloved London.

The choice confronting Londoners is a bit like that posed by the American presidential election. Livingstone is on most levels an odious little creep with authoritarian tendencies and a venal entourage (though Ken himself seems to have refrained from any overt looting) who has nonetheless done some great things for London, especially with regard to public transport and pedestrianizing public spaces like Trafalgar Square which almost but not quite enable one to forgive him his predilection for Islamist fanatics and race-based demagogues. Johnson, on the other hand, is infinitely more charming, albeit in a buffoonish, self-deprecating way, but you get the feeling that given control of London's transport system (one of the mayor's chief remits), his attitude would me akin to that of the 19th century lord who tried to block construction of Britain's railway system on the grounds that it would "only encourage the laboring classes to travel about needlessly."

Livingstone's rigidly PC identity politics have made it difficult to impossible for him to put a dent in London's rapidly growing crime and violence problem, but it's hard to imagine Johnson getting much of a handle on things, either, being the sort of fellow more likely to be nicking policemen's helmets on Boat Race Night than leading the constabulary into battle against the forces of disorder.

There is a third candidate, the Liberal Democrat Brian Paddick, who Trillin not inaccurately describes as "the gay policeman." Paddick, backed by Elton John and probably someone else as well, originally rose to fame as the Brixton police commander who ordered his officers to stop enforcing the cannabis laws on the grounds that their time could better be used to investigate "more serious" crimes. Hailed at the time as the sort of courageous and innovative policing that Britain would need for the 21st century, Paddick's initiative ultimately had the effect of turning much of central Brixton into an open air drugs market and an even greater hotbed of violent crime than it had already been. A corollary effect was that local schoolteachers began complaining that a whole tranche of 12-14 year olds had become virtually uneducable by virtue of arriving at school stoned out of their minds on more mornings than not.

I don't want to be too smug, as we could be facing a similarly unappealing choice here in New York come 2009, but for now at least, I can take comfort in our relatively colorless but far more efficient billionaire mayor. Meanwhile, Labour have been pushed into third place nationwide by the Conservatives and the LibDems, and things are looking (sorry, Kendra!) especially grim for Gordon Brown, who this morning might well be asking himself, "I waited ten years for this?"

Boring Old Politics

I haven't had much to say about politics for a while now, perhaps operating under the theory that everyone and his dyslexic uncle have been weighing in nonstop for the past year on the never-ending presidential campaign and - occasionally - its attendant issues. Therefore, I reasoned, it would be unlikely that I'd have anything to offer that hadn't already been rehashed to death.

But listening to motormouth Adriana Huffington being interviewed on WNYC this morning reminded me that there's always room for one more dingbat in the ring. If she can hype her current wackadoodle lefty gospel with the same blithe certitude she once backed her wackadoodle Republican husband's senatorial campaign, why on earth should I bother holding back?

It wasn't just that, though; it's also a growing sense of exasperation as the three presidential candidates, all of whom I once thought of as adequate, at least to the extent that they'd represent an improvement over the present state of affairs, dwindle in stature as their campaigns devolve into farce and ignominy.

Although he still looks the most presidential of the contending trio, Obama is proving to be the biggest disappointment: despite having had the nation's highest office virtually presented to him on a silver platter some months ago, he has managed to fumble away his substantial advantage through a combination of Hamlet-like dithering and the relentless unraveling of his once-Olympian image courtesy of the race-baiting Rev. Wright.

Speaking of relentless, Hillary Clinton has shown all the tenacity if little of the charm of a pit bull in her pursuit of the front runner who, until recent events, looked to have left her in the dust. Now, if I were a betting man, I'd be slightly more inclined to put my money on her than Obama, who even if he manages to shake off the latest Rev. Wright fallout (and somehow contrives a way to shut the meddlesome preacher up for good), may have been terminally damaged by his inability to win primaries in the big and reliably Democratic states.

And McCain? Well, perhaps he's capable of looking presidential by today's greatly diminished standards, but while there's a fair chance he could beat either Obama or Clinton (neither of which looked likely a couple months back), he seems a bit of a dullard when it comes to anything more complex or demanding than threatening to rain down vengeance on America's foes (not to imply that this isn't part of the job description, but in light of the, shall we say, much more variegated problems facing us, one would hope for a president with more arrows in his quiver than the garden variety military one).

Perhaps I'm being unduly negative? After all, we've survived mediocre and just plain awful presidents before, and it's also possible that someone who looks substandard at first blush can rise to the occasion once in office. But the recent level of discourse - if that's not too grandiose a word to apply to what looks more like straight-up pandering - does not fill one with hope.

Last week's proposal, endorsed by both Clinton and McCain, to tackle our current economic difficulties by, among other things, suspending the federal gas tax this summer, was the final straw. We, both as a nation and as individuals have overspent ourselves into near penury, simultaneously squandering a million years worth of fossil fuels in little more than a century while befouling the entire planet to boot, and the solution being proposed is to go even deeper in debt so that people can have another three months of wasting gas as though there were no tomorrow?

As one astute observer pointed out, it's like having a loved one who's addicted to heroin, and instead of pointing him to the nearest rehab, you "help" him by arranging for him to get a discount at the local drug dealer. Contrary to appearances, the price of gas is not going up; it's the value of your dollars that are going down, and what's driving them down is eight years of insane deficit spending and tax cuts while simultaneously trying to conduct one of the most expensive wars in history.

Any reasonably competent politician knows that we've been running the economy on credit cards for years now, juggling balances between accounts and hoping against hope that all our creditors won't show up on the same day, and any reasonably honest politician would unhesitatingly say so, followed by some tough, realistic talk about how we as a people need to pull our horns in for a while, make some sacrifices, and start paying down our massive debt.

But am I hearing any of this from the three would-be presidents? No, I'm seeing them falling all over themselves and each other in their haste to promise still more tax cuts and government giveaways and unsecured deficit spending. In other words, still more of what got us into the potentially disastrous state we're already in.

Kids These Days

I like trains, and I'd been meaning to take one up the Hudson River as soon as the weather got nicer. I didn't have any particular destination in mind, but I guessed I might as well ride on out to the end of the line to Poughkeepsie and see what was there.

Well, I finally got round to it, but ended up a good deal further north and never got more than a passing glimpse of Poughkeepsie. My friend The Spoonboy (some of you might also know him as the singer/guitarist of the very talented and exciting Max Levine Ensemble) was playing a show in conjunction with a "Zine Symposium" at Bard College, a rather exclusive, expensive (a girl told me that tuition currently runs "about 49 grand," but further research revealed the true figure to be only 47 grand) and privileged enclave nestled in the woods along the Hudson.

Apparently (I did not know this previously) Bard is also one of the most left-leaning colleges in the country and home to a substantial vegan/vegetarian/anarchist contingent, much of which seems to cluster around the Root Cellar, a vegan cafe/hangout/zine library which at first glance had more in common with the kitchen-cum-basement of your garden variety punk house than a food service facility at one of the nation's more elite institutions of higher learning. Outside the Root Cellar, the Zine Symposium was in full swing when we arrived. Unfortunately we were about three hours late due to inefficient bumbling around on our part back in the big city, so we missed the first few workshops, including one led by Sascha Scatter of the Icarus Project, who I hadn't seen since sometime in the early to mid 90s back in Berkeley and was looking forward to meeting up with again.

But by the time we strolled in Sascha was gone and a chilly breeze had set in, making the outdoor gathering less than ideally comfortable. Participants sat around on blankets that looked as though they'd been salvaged from some hippie love-in circa 1967 while an earnest young man from a collective called "Longing For Collapse" (collapse of what, you ask? presumably everything) explained the principles of insurrectionary anarchism and, asked how he'd come to be involved with a project advocating the destruction of society as we know it, answered as though it were self-evident: "This world sucks." Most of his audience nodded in agreement, and there was no sign that anyone harbored a contrary opinion.

I was momentarily tempted to ask for further evidence that this world did indeed suck to the extent that such drastic measures were the only remaining options, but on the grounds that I was a guest of the uninvited variety, I chose to shut up, listen and possibly learn something. Unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot new on offer, nothing, that is, that I hadn't heard previously at anarchist conventions in the 80s or New Left teach-ins in the 60s, but it was fascinating to hear yet another generation of students nearly young enough to be my grandchildren carrying on the tradition of all-round antipathy for the system. And to give them their due, many if not most of them were more articulate and reasoned than I ever was during my own destroy-civilization phase.

They were also very friendly and open, sharing their vegan potluck food and ready to talk about all sorts of issues, political and non, with an openness and interest too often lacking in their elders. I was a bit self-conscious turning up at an event where I was twice the age of the next oldest person there, and even more so in the company of The Spoonboy, who though he's in his mid-20s, is often mistaken for a high school student. But if anyone thought we were an odd pair, they kept their opinions to themselves, and I got the same treatment as I imagine any vagabond lefty/anarchist comrade in arms would have gotten, including a mattress to crash on following a late night vegan stirfry at a student co-op where 10 or 15 giddy girls were celebrating a birthday with copious amounts of liquor and You Tube videos of R&B hits and Queen in concert.

Speaking of liquor, as someone who was expelled from his first university for being caught drinking in the dorm, I was slightly shocked to see students casually wandering around campus clutching (sometimes for dear life) whiskey bottles and 40-ouncers with casual élan and evidently no concern whatsoever for what the authorities (assuming there were any) might think. I mean, I haven't led a sheltered life, and I know that attitudes toward alcohol and drugs on campus have been greatly liberalized since my own teenage years. Visiting a friend at Tufts a few years ago, I was bemused to discover that the university had assigned a campus cop to guard the front porch of a housing co-op so that the largely underage students inside could drink and carouse in safety. And I'll never forget stepping inside a dorm room at Harvard to find half a dozen of America's best and brightest nodding out on heroin.

But any debauchery I'd witnessed at other colleges had largely been conducted behind closed doors; Bard was the first place I'd seen where no one could be bothered making even a pretense of trying to conceal it. Or perhaps I misstate the case: after all, I never saw anything more drastic than loopy teenagers stumbling around trying to stay vertical, some of whom came loudly crashing in to the show shortly after The Spoonboy had performed his acoustic set to a rapturously silent and reverent audience seated at his feet. But he was followed by a couple hippie-punk-funk bands who seemed to combine the influences of 90s college rock (Built to Spill, Pavement, that sort of thing) with 60s Grateful Dead jamming, and that brought the drunken masses spilling in. One young man, despite it having grown quite chilly, stripped off his shirt and did an Iggy-Mick Jagger rock star routine minus the rhythm and grace, and I know I'm showing my age, but I couldn't help wondering how the lad's parents would react if they could see what they were getting for their 47 grand.

Anyway, a rowdy booze-up on a Saturday night is hardly groundbreaking stuff on any college campus, but a girl who rode back to the city on the train with us said that Bard also had a "huge" drug problem, and that a kid at the party she'd attended had to be taken to the hospital after an OD. I suggested that Bard sounded a bit like Bennington College as portrayed by Bret Easton Ellis in The Rules Of Attraction, but she hadn't heard of it.

If I were in a more reflective mood, I might go on to ponder why some of the smartest and most privileged kids in America would be either drinking or drugging themselves into oblivion or plotting to destroy society, but I'm not and anyway it's been done to death already, hasn't it? So I'll confine myself to saying that most of the students I actually interacted with were nice as could be and a real delight to talk with, even the ones that might have been forced to put me before the firing squad if the revolution had come about this weekend. And that the Hudson Valley is stunningly beautiful, especially with the first blush of spring sweeping across it. The one thing I regret is not speaking up when Melody Berger, of The F-Word zine asked during her workshop if anyone in the audience had tried to publish their own zine.

A few tentative hands went up, but nobody had actually done much beyond planning or considering starting a zine. A voice in my head said, "Go on, say something, you published your own zine for 11 years, 40 issues worth, surely somebody would be interested in that." But I kept quiet, reasoning (or rationalizing) that my own efforts were ancient history now and that this was their zine scene now, not mine. I also didn't say that Aaron Cometbus has been quietly urging me to restart Lookout zine or something like it, and that from time to time I actually consider doing just that, because really, in today's world, I can't imagine what I'd do with it if I did. But who knows, maybe one of these days Lookout will come back to life, and maybe next time - if there is one - that I turn up at a zine symposium, I'll actually have something to show for myself.

Running

When I had my foot surgery in October 2006, the doctor told me I shouldn't even consider running for at least a year or two.

Which was fine with me, as I was never that keen on running in the first place. I took a few stabs at it back in my 30s, and managed to get up to three miles on a couple occasions, but my efforts were at best sporadic, and were all but abandoned once I moved up into the mountains, where the closest things to roads were dirt tracks at vertiginous angles.

Since then I've made half-hearted attempt at getting back into it once in a while, especially when I was in Australia, but found I didn't have a lot of endurance and that the whole thing seemed more of a pain that it was worth. But since I found a spot to do my t'ai chi that happens to be right next to a running track, I've been looking almost enviously at the people zipping past me (and looking bewilderedly at the people who get on a running track and walk - I mean, if you're only going to walk, why not use the sidewalks and go someplace more interesting, or at least someplace where the view doesn't repeat itself every quarter mile?).

And because my foot has been feeling noticeably better this past month, maybe because of reflexology treatments, maybe because of the warm(er) weather, maybe because of the 21 pounds I've lost since January, I decided it was finally time to give running a retry. So yesterday, the first truly summerlike day of the year, I slipped onto the track and ran, well, not much, only half a mile, but considerably farther than I have in a long, long while. It wasn't bad at all, and I repeated the exercise again today. I think I'll take tomorrow off and then try increasing my distance bit by bit.

I'm still a bit dubious about this whole running around in circles (ovals, whatever) business, but since you never know when New York might be invaded by wild beasts or zombies, it's probably best to cultivate enough endurance to give oneself a fighting chance of escaping. Also, I seem to be becoming a bit of a physical fitness nut, what with t'ai chi, the gym, now running, and probably back to swimming before long as well. Quite a change for someone who spent the first half of his life assiduously avoiding physical activity of almost any kind, and typical, too: why, I keep asking myself, didn't I get into this sort of stuff when I had not only the energy to do it, but the youthful body that could have really benefited from it? Well, I guess I'm still in reasonably good shape now, but still...

Stories

I had a nice note from someone called Anthony, asking about some of the short stories I used to write and publish in Lookout magazine and also occasionally in Punk Planet (I guess there was also "My Adventure With Green Day" by Laurie L., originally printed in Tales of Blarg fanzine, but later included in a million copies of Kerplunk, making it by far the most widely circulated piece of writing I've ever had a hand in).

Anthony was specifically asking about "Once Upon A Time In The Mountains," a somewhat melodramatic tearjerker whose action bounced back and forth between the mountains of Mendocino County and the punk scene centered around Gilman Street in the early 90s, much as my own life did, though its protagonists were teenagers and the story itself was aimed mainly at my younger readers. Because it was serialized over six issues of Lookout, Anthony had missed a couple installments and never found out how it ended.

I searched through my files to find a copy of the story for him, and as soon as I did, started rewriting it - well, editing it, anyway, until I realized that to do a thorough job could take weeks, and that anyway, he was probably more interested in the story as he had read it when he was a kid rather than a polished-up modern version of it. I corrected a few of my more egregious errors and sent it off to him, for which I today received a thank you note and some gentle prodding as to why I didn't do something with my old stories, for instance publish a collection of them.

He'd asked me the same question in his first note, to which I'd responded that in the first place I'd all but forgotten ever writing the stories, and in the second, more important place, nobody had ever shown the slightest interest in publishing them. When I stopped to reflect on it, I was kind of amazed to think that I had written quite a few of them, since I don't often think of myself these days as a short story-writing kind of guy, and even more so because at the time I was simultaneously enrolled as a full-time student at Berkeley, running a record label, publishing a magazine and playing in a band. How in the hell did I ever time for something so frivolous as short fiction, I mused?

But as for nobody wanting to publish them, Anthony had the sort of response that I would have offered to anyone who'd said something similar to me: "Who needs a publisher! This coming from the man who founded Lookout. You could do a self-released collection. Sell copies on your blog. It would be a great thing!"

Fair enough, I thought, but are the stories worth chopping down any more trees for? Or should I just post them electronically here on the blog (when/if I ever finally get around to mastering a level of bloggery somewhat more advanced than the bog-standard Blogger format)? Well, I guess I'll have to dig up some more of them and see how well they've stood the test of time, and also make a decision as to whether I'd want to do a serious edit before re-publishing them. My inclination is to say yes to the latter question, and "I haven't got a clue" to the former.

That being said, I just dug up "Satan Lives At The End Of My Street," a first-person tale by a smart-assed and perhaps overly sensitive young man living in the shadow of the Eureka pulp mill. The pulp mill is no longer operating, and Eureka is even undergoing a little bit of gentrification these days (by Eureka standards, anyway, which were never too high to begin with), but otherwise, the story does hold up pretty well, apart from the narrators gratuitous slams on Christians and consumer society, but hey, he's 17 or 18 years old, what can you expect? (Please don't ask how old I was when I wrote the thing.)

Tentative verdict: yeah, maybe it's time to resurrect some of those old stories and make them available again. Or even write a new one or two? Well, first things first; I think I'll do an edit on "Satan Lives At The End Of My Street" and post it somewhere around here. If there's any interest, maybe I'll take this story-writing lark a bit further. If not, well, I've played to tough crowds before. I'll get over it.