Green Day At The Garden

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 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.

Frisco Bloody Frisco

I'm in receipt of an email from the legendary Dallas Denery of the even more legendary band Sweet Baby, in which he admonishes me, "Please stop bashing the Bay Area in your blog. I love it and would live there in a heart beat. THE WEST IS THE BEST BABY!"

Well, I don't know if I can completely go along with that sentiment, though it was one I wholeheartedly shared for many years, say from 1968 until at least the early 90s. But since Dallas puts it that way, I do have to acknowledge that perhaps I've been a bit hard on the Bay Area, especially Berkeley and San Francisco. I've often explained that my feelings are not ones of actual loathing or even dislike, but rather more of disappointment that what I once unhesitatingly thought of as the best place on earth to live had become, well, not so much the kind of place I'd want to live at all.

But still, like Dallas, I would live there "in a heartbeat," the only difference being that in my case certain conditions would have to be met, most of them having to do with Baghdad By The Bay becoming a little less like, well, Baghdad. For instance, getting its crime rate down to at least something like New York levels (not too much to ask from what is essentially a small town, is it?) and putting an end to the practice of allowing its main streets to be used as an open-air asylum (and toilet, and shooting gallery) for the desperate and deranged.

Perhaps I gave up on Frisco just a minute too soon, for it seems as though the worm is finally turning and local residents reaching the end of their tethers with regard to the loony fetishization of feral behavior that has gradually transformed the City of Saint Francis from a welcoming bohemian haven to North America's most overpriced (albeit beautiful) slum.

The Chronicle has been running a series of articles on the problem of the "homeless" (the real problem of course being dysfunctional and antisocial people who in many cases do have homes, or could if they chose to). Nothing new there, but what has changed is the volume and vitriol of reader comments, such as these and these. It kind of reminds me of the way New Yorkers were feeling when, after 20 years of spiraling crime rates and a collapsing quality of life, they finally laid aside their traditional ultra-liberalism and tolerance and turned to Rudy Giuliani to sort out the disaster their city had become.

San Francisco's Gavin Newsom is as far from being a Giuliani as Frisco is from Manhattan, though you wouldn't know it from the squawks of the city's dwindling band of far leftists who see every attempt to maintain even the most minimal standards of civil behavior as jackbooted assaults against "the poor" and/or "people of color."

Never mind that it is only in their ideologically skewed world that a shortage of cash or a surfeit of melanin are inextricably linked with criminal and antisocial behavior, and that most poor people don't find it necessary to crap in doorways or roll around in their own drug or alcohol-induced vomit. The far left needs victims to act as poster children for its indictment of capitalism, and if that requires keeping thousands of damaged individuals on the streets and in turn destroying the social fabric that makes community possible, so be it.

My guess, though, is that the nihilists and Guardianistas (I refer, of course, to the SF Bay Guardian, whose scabrous rabble rousers make those of London's traditional left-wing paper look like pillars of the establishment) have finally had their day. Unable even to mount an opposition candidate to Gavin Newsom's re-election bid (whereas four years ago their boy Matt Gonzalez very nearly became mayor), they're swimming against the tide of prevailing political currents and now, it seems, popular opinion as well. I see big changes in store for Frisco in the next couple years, most but not all for the better.

On the downside, I might never be able to afford to live there again, though that might be an upside for certain San Franciscans who were glad to see the back of me. More importantly, I'm cautiously optimistic that sanity is finally returning to the city I once loved so much and - yes, I'll admit it - in my heart of hearts, still do.

Goodbye, California

I haven't really lived here in ten years, but I've always kept this small room, more of a storeroom than a living space, really, but it's still provided me with a base in Berkeley, something I'm now on the verge of finally giving up.

Considering all the awful things I've said about Berkeley in recent years, people could hardly be blamed for wondering why I'd want to maintain any ties to the place, but my reasons were twofold: most of my family is located nearby, and I had way too many things - the accumulated possessions of a California existence that dates back to 1968 - to consider shipping them over to England during the years I was living there. Most of the stuff has mainly sentimental value, but it's value nonetheless, even if it wasn't quite enough to convince me to lay out the thousands it would have cost to bring everything to London.

But now that I've got a new home base in Brooklyn, the time has come to pack up all these memories and move them out to the Right Coast. I flew out here on Monday night, not expecting any great drama to arise around this; if anything, I was annoyed at having to leave New York for a couple weeks at one of my favorite times of year. But as the plane crossed into California airspace, I was seized with sudden spasms of regret and fear: was I doing the right thing after all? Was California really as bad as I'd made it out to be? It certainly didn't look that way from 30,000 feet, with the lights of the cities splayed across the darkened land like so many jewels on velvet (sorry, I know it's a cliché, but it really does look like that).

It became painfully apparent that I couldn't casually cut my ties to the place where I'd had some kind of home or connection for nearly 40 years and not expect to deal with some rather intense feelings. I remembered how I first came here, young, scared, dead broke and wanted by the law, and immediately felt safe and at home. I recognized that despite my best efforts to screw things up, California had been very good to me, providing me with the opportunity to make my fortune and pursue my dreams. Basically, my life had been pretty crap before I got to California, and while there were plenty of crap intervals afterward as well, most of them were of my own making.

For the first day I even toyed with the idea of abandoning this whole Brooklyn thing, settling back into my little room in downtown Berkeley, and living here in quiet obscurity for the rest of my life. I could certainly afford it; the rent here is ridiculously low, with all utilities, even high-speed internet, thrown in. It might not be much of a life, granted; we're talking about a 9'x12' room that's so cramped I have to sleep in a loft up near the ceiling and can reach almost everything without getting out of my single chair. And not much light gets in through the windows, the stairways and common areas haven't been decorated (or, it sometimes seems, cleaned) since the 1970s, and the house in general is a classic example of Berkeley's rent control turning what might be a perfectly normal house into a time capsule hippie hovel.

Still, it's been a comfortable place to hang out, or perhaps more accurately, hide out from the world. I first took this room when my original Berkeley room, a bit larger and in the house next door, was devoured by the monster that became Lookout Records. I and two employees/partners ran the label out of that slightly larger room until the Green Day explosion of 1994-95, when the number of employees expanded to the point where there was no longer room for me to sleep there. When I got this new room in January of 1994, I grabbed a handful of blankets, took them next door and threw them on the floor, followed by myself, and slept for something like 29 hours.

Now, in two or three days if everything goes to plan, I'll be loading the last of this room's contents into a truck and setting off across the country. Normally I'd be looking forward to a transcontinental drive, but I'm kind of already dreading what it will feel like to wave goodbye to California for the last time.

Well, not necessarily the last time; I can always come back, I keep telling myself, if things don't work out in New York. And of course I'll still visit family and friends here as often as possible. But not having a specific place to come back to is going to make that a very different experience. Once upon a time, I would have thought nothing about moving thousands of miles away - in 1970 alone I did it three or four times - but perhaps I'm finally getting too old for this sort of shenanigans.

I try reminding myself that even if I were to stay in California, I wouldn't want to keep living in this room or this neighborhood. Downtown Berkeley was no prize when I first moved here (next door, into what would become the Lookout office) in 1990, and it's been going downhill ever since. Even if there were anywhere to go at night, I no longer feel all that safe on the streets, and the crime stats - almost double the rate of street crime compared with New York City - would seem to indicate I'm not just being paranoid. Today's Berkeley Daily Planet had a story about how a gunman strolled into a cafe directly across the street from the UC campus and robbed six students of their laptops; in New York I've grown used to seeing people sitting out on the sidewalks at two in the morning typing away on their computers without a care in the world.

So I guess I'm going to go, and if my recent experience in leaving other places - specifically Laytonville and London - is any indication, it'll be fine, and you won't catch me looking back or turning into a pillar of salt. But right at this moment, surrounded by the wreckage and detritus of my past waiting to be put into boxes and be carted off to a new home, I'm feeling just a teensy bit anxious. Give me a couple days, though, and I should be cruising up over the Sierra Nevada singing, in the words of Joe King, goodbye, California, it's really been nice, and getting ready for the rest of my life to begin.

More Movies b/w Goodbye California

There's been a bunch, so I probably won't remember them all, but here are some:

El Cantante

Complete trash with a good sound track. I've always liked salsa, even though I don't know much about it, and since I've been living in New York, I've become more interested in Puerto Rico as well, so I was already planning on seeing this film even before Luis invited me to come see it with him and his friend Vicente.

As it turned out, I may have been one of the only gringos in the house (Luis is Mexican-American and Vicente is Spanish; pretty much everyone else in the theater seemed to be Puerto Rican), but no matter: even I could tell that apart from the music there was very little authentic about this Jennifer Lopez vehicle, and anyway, it's hard to make a romantic film about a guy (the singer Hector Lavoe) who insists on systematically drugging himself to death. Your basic "Yeah, I know he was a hopeless junkie, but he was a beautiful man" kind of fluff which is never going to ring true with anyone who's known a real junkie or three. But it was fluff with a good salsa beat, and I still enjoyed it. It could have been so much more, though.

King Of Kong

I really only went along to see this because a fair sized delegation from the Pop Punk Message Bored crew was going (if it had been up to me, we would have gone to see Superbad instead), but I enjoyed it anyway, despite nearly falling asleep at the beginning during what seemed like an unnecessarily detailed exposition of the intricacies and inner workings of the video game Donkey Kong. A game which, I might add, I have never played in my life, not even in its 80s heyday, and which I'd heretofore had pretty close to zero interest in.

King Of Kong is a Spinal Tap-type documentary about some truly bizarre characters whose entire existence seems centered around a biter competition to be recognized as the world's greatest Donkey Kong player. The difference being that, unlike Spinal Tap, these characters are apparently real, as is their bitter competition. Admittedly, I wasn't fully convinced by the movie itself, even when Chadd Derkins, who knows a bit about video games himself, assured me that this was not a mockumentary. It wasn't until I got home and did a little internet fact-checking that I had to accept that yes, there really is a parallel universe out there where 1980s arcade games are pretty much the only thing that matters.

Then I started thinking about how my own social set - especially the pop-punk segment of it - would look under the microscope of a competent documentarian. Our weird private language and in-jokes, as well as our internecine battles over the most esoteric minutiae of punk rock dogma would no doubt appear ever bit as bizarre and opaque to the "normal" filmgoer (assuming many or any of those would be interested in watching us in the first place).

And the same thing could be true about a local bowling league, the pigeon fanciers society, or a trainspotters convention (trust me, those of you who haven't lived in England; the latter two actually do exist). For that matter, not to be too flippant about it, many religious groups could quickly become the butt of other people's jokes if their thoroughly honest theological discussions were filmed from a certain angle.

Okay, point taken: we're all weirdos. Entertaining movie, anyway.

This Is England

I saw this on a rainy and chilly, i.e., very English-feeling night, and it brought loads of memories and emotions flooding back. Set in 1983, very near to the time when England started drawing me into its orbit (I'd first visited there in the mid-70s, but it wasn't until the 80s that I began to sense I was destined to live there), I was reminded of the pervading ugliness as well as the discreet charm of workaday English life.

The pebble dash houses, the insta-slum council estates, the droll humor coupled with an undercurrent of menace and violence all rang true: England in the 70s and early 80s felt very much like a failed state, if not a doomed civilization. This tale of young boy befriended by "good" skinheads before being sucked into the orbit of some psycho and racist yobs was chilling but not at all far removed from the realm of possibility. England today may/does have its problems, but they're a far cry from the general despair and disillusion that stalked the land during Maggie's early days. In fact, I found myself having a newfound appreciation for the woman. Not that I think she was a nice person, or that many of her policies weren't pursued in terribly inhumane ways, but that perhaps no other leader could have picked a crumbling and derelict country up by the scruff of the neck and told it to get on with things the way she did.

I also found myself reflecting on my own time in England, what it was all about, why I went there and why I'm not there anymore. I often get very nostalgic when I familiar sights or hear familiar accents on the television or the movies, but this time I wondered if my ten years there had been little more than some lengthy and ultimately pointless detour. No, that couldn't be true, I argued with myself: I learned so much and had so many amazing experiences. But what, my other half shot back, did it all add up to, apart from learning a slightly different dialect and being surrounded by people who appreciated and encouraged the sardonic and sarcastic attitude that was always getting me threatened or beat up in America?

Some day, looking at the whole of my life, those ten years in England might qualify as my years in the wilderness, but then hadn't I previously offered up a whole other decade in the actual wilderness of the Northern California mountains? Could it be that my life is fated to be nothing but a series of wilderness detours? Will New York someday seem like just another of them? It feels very much like home to me now, though, which for all my time there, England never fully did.

Oh, right, movie review, not soul-searching and self-obsession: yeah, good movie, well worth seeing, especially if you care about England or harbor romantic illusions about it. A bit visceral at times, but hey, that's life, innit? Oh, and the experience was heightened by a posse of real skinheads (okay, as "real" as you're likely to see these days outside of a gay fetish bar) who came stalking in and occupied the back row just as the film started.

Based on many experiences at punk gigs back in the 80s, I instantly tensed up, assuming that they were there to wreck the show. They were probably going to throw beer cans at the screen, or demand that all the other patrons shout "Oi oi oi" along with them, but apart from a few giggles, they were good as gold. One of them got so drunk that he staggered out mid-film, taking several minutes to find the exit after literally almost walking into the screen, but that was at a point when the goings-on in the film were so grim that a little comic relief was in order.

Okay, there are more films yet to write about, but it's 3 am. Why am I suddenly seeing so many movies? You might infer that I have no life, and you might indeed be right, but hey, watching movies is sort of like life, isn't it? Anyway, in a couple weeks time I've got another real life-type event: I have to fly to California, pack up all my remaining belongings and furniture stored there, and drive them out to my new apartment in New York.

Despite all my traveling around this country and Canada, it'll be my first time driving all the way from one coast to the other in single trip (I've done California to Michigan and variations on that theme by car many times, and Vancouver to Halifax by train, but never California straight through to New York). I guess I should think of it as a big adventure, but it's also kind of scary, because it means finally and totally saying goodbye to California after almost 40 years of having some connection or home base there.

And why am I doing this? Pursuing my destiny, or continuing to wander like Moses and the Israelites in search of the Promised Land? I guess we'll just have to wait and see about that, but any of you residing in what are usually the flyover states but are about to become the drive-through states for me, feel free to come on down to the highway and wave hello and best wishes as I come rolling by.

Welcome To London

No sooner did I write here that I wouldn't dream of taking a taxi when there was a bus or train available than - oh bitter and expensive irony - I found myself in the back of a taxi watching the meter climb toward the stratosphere as we crawled through the back streets (the expressway was jammed solid, natch) on the way to Kennedy Airport.

It was my own fault, really; I thought I could get some errands done in Greenpoint and still get back home in time to catch the train to the airport, but I got hung up at the bank for an extra half hour. Compounding the irony, as it turned out I still could have made it to the airport on time even if I'd taken the train; as it was, I ended up with almost two hours to kill. Still, the ride out was both enjoyable and instructive, if a bit dizzying.

It started when I complimented the driver on his car (it wasn't an actual taxi, but a guy from the local car service driving his own carefully manicured vehicle), which was obviously the sort of thing he liked to hear, because he immediately went into a half hour disquisition on everything and anything to do with cars, including the price and styles thereof in his native Ecuador as compared with Brooklyn, the new minivan he was going to buy when he finished paying off his wife following their messy divorce, and comparative gas mileages of the leading 50 brands of automobile.

Only thing was that he did nearly all of it in Spanish. We started out in English, albeit on a very rudimentary level, but I only had to utter a couple of Spanish words in an attempt to clarify a point - nothing more elaborate than ¿Que tipos? or ¿De donde vienes? - and any effort at English on his part went right out the window. He seemed to assume that I was fluent or very nearly so in Spanish, and while I've never been anywhere near that level, the amazing thing was that I actually did understand between half and three quarters of what he said. As I said, very instructive. If I weren't too much of a tightwad to consider using his car service unless it's another emergency, I could be speaking Spanish like a pro in no time.

Keeping with the theme, my seatmate on the flight over was a big (in that he took up his entire seat and part of mine) old (in that he was only 14 years younger than me) Puerto Rican highway worker from Maspeth, but he'd been in New York for so long that he barely spoke Spanish at all. Apparently much of his social life involves regularly flying over to hang out with his Irish buddies who are spread out all over England, Scotland and, oh yes, Ireland. Nice guy, good sense of humor, and a great story teller. Only downside was that I didn't get any sleep.

We landed early, customs was smooth and no ordeal at all, and then came the real treat: I went to get an Underground ticket for the ride into London and found that out of three available machines, one was out of order, one took coins only and no credit cards (sorry, but I just don't happen to have £23.20 in coins), and the third had a fairly long queue in front of it.

Typical, I said, reverting almost immediately to my long-practiced role of whingeing Pom, but the queue moved relatively quickly until there was just one girl in front of me who - once more, typical - was having trouble getting the machine to accept her money. Instead of huffing and puffing, however, for once I practiced patience and forbearance, and then came my reward.

The out of order machine next to us made a retching sound, almost as if it were vomiting, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a £5 note sticking halfway out of the "insert cash here" slot. I thought about grabbing it, but realized it would look unseemly to the girl still struggling with the machine in front of us. Then came a bit more retching, and the £5 note came out a bit further. There was no one else around now except the girl in front of me (and of course the omnipresent surveillance cameras), but I was still too shy to grab the money, and instead debated whether I should turn it in to the London Underground employee who'd been hanging around a few minutes earlier.

He'd just put it in his own pocket, I reasoned, er, rationalized, but still, what did it matter? One thing that was certain was that it wasn't my money. Just then the machine gave an even bigger shudder and vomited the £5 note out onto the floor, followed closely by a £20 note. The two bills landed virtually at the feet of the girl in front of me, who looked at them with the quizzical eyes of a foreigner who has seen just about enough strange things in this new country for one day, thank you very much, and then looked away as if to say, "It's nothing to do with me."

That did it. I scooped up the £25 and generously offered to trade her my new £5 note for the one she was having no luck getting her machine to accept. That didn't work either, so I traded her £5 in coins, which did, and as she walked away, I finally felt free to put the £25 in my pocket.

Not without a few qualms of conscience, it's true, but I needed only to remind myself of the years of pain and indignity inflicted on me by London Underground and the many thousands of pounds they've charged me for the privilege to feel assured that while I may not have been acting with perfectly scrupulous honesty, I could make a pretty good case for the 25 quid being a dividend earned many times over.

And in fact it was just slightly more than enough to pay for my first week's Travelcard, which of course has gone up in price again since I left London. A month's travel in inner London now works out to about $180 per month, compared with $76 in New York (and that $76 gets you all of New York; a similar deal in London would run closer to $300). Never mind, though, no need for griping, as I'm only here for 12 days and I don't want to mar it by worrying about money.

It's my first time in London as a tourist since the 1970s, and more specifically the first time I haven't had a home to go to. For some reason, that seems to have greatly changed my perspective on the place. I'm staying quite near to my old stomping grounds, and find it rather staggering just how beautiful it is. How did I not notice this as I walked through these same streets through the years? And the air is so brisk and (I know this is an illusion) clean and invigorating compared with the muggy summer soup that was beginning to settle in over New York when I left.

Did I make a mistake by leaving London when I did? No, I don't think so. I still love this place, and it's great to be here for a few days. But it'll be even greater to come back home to New York.

Back Of The Plane

About 15 years ago, I started doing a lot of flying. Well, let's be precise: I started riding in a lot of airplanes. I never actually flew one myself. At first it was largely business related, with my having to jet around the country to meet up with bands and/or scout out bands or just see bands that I liked to see because it was all a tax write-off anyway. And then when I became exhausted from meeting, seeing and hobnobbing with all those bands, I'd have to fly off somewhere else for a vacation. Where I'd usually end up seeing more bands and/or they would see me and chase me around trying to give me demo tapes. Eventually the mound of demo tapes in the corner of my room reached Himalayan proportions (it just seemed wrong to throw them out, even though I could barely bring myself to listen to them, either), one of several reasons why I hailed and continue to hail the advent of the mp3.

But I digress more radically than usual: I'm actually here today to talk about air travel, and how my decade and a half of profligate travel led to the accumulation of hundreds of thousands of frequent flyer miles (yes, I know I am a villainous scoundrel for contributing to global warming, but a) most places I have lived could do with a little warming; b) I at least partially made up for my excess flying by doing little or no driving; and c) on the day that my energy consumption and greenhouse gas output reaches 10% - hell, even 5% - of what gasbag Al Gore is pumping out, I'll take your criticisms under serious consideration).

And nearly all of those miles were on United Airlines, partly because it flew to all the places I most often visited, and partly because once you start accumulating miles on one carrier, you tend to stick with it whenever possible because of the perks that start to come your way. Not just the free flights, but the upgrades to a better class of service, and the special treatment you get even when you're flying on a bargain basement fare.

For example, it's been years since I've had to stand in line with the normal folks to check in or board the plane. At many airports, they even have a separate security gate for "elite" flyers, meaning you can stroll right past the hoi polloi who might have already been standing there for hours waiting their turn.

Yes, those were the days, but no more, I'm afraid. For one thing, now that I'm finally settled in New York, I feel much less inclined to travel, and secondly, United Airlines, once my favorite airline, have steadily made themselves less pleasant and less affordable, to the point where I've finally had to give up on them altogether.

It's bad enough that their fares have steadily gone up, and that they're now usually among the most expensive rather than the most affordable, or that anytime you try to book a flight with with them, they try to send you on some route that takes you from New York to Chicago by way of Phoenix, Arizona and only leaves at 6'oclock in the morning. You want a normal flight that goes directly there at a normal time of the day? Fine, you can do that, but the fare just quadrupled.

But the last straw was when, possibly in an attempt to claw its way out of bankruptcy, United sold its landing rights for the lucrative New York to London route to another airline. You want to fly United between Kennedy and Heathrow now, you'll have to go by way of Washington or Chicago (hint: it's in the opposite direction), adding 3-5 hours to your travel time and taking nothing off your fare. In fact, other airlines like American or Virgin will usually take you directly to London for a few hundred bucks less than United is charging for its round-the-houses route.

So after several years of trying, United has finally destroyed my hard-won customer loyalty, and on my most recent trip to San Francisco, I had the unnerving experience of flying a different airline, leaving from a different terminal that I had never seen before, and if that weren't unsettling enough (it almost felt as though I were cheating on my wife, or that the president of United Airlines would suddenly pop up on the Airtrain and give me a pained look and a "How could you" as we rolled past his terminal).

And, of course, I had to wait until the last group to be boarded, and be squished into the cheap seats at the back of the plane where they don't even give you a full can of soda and a packet of M&Ms or some appalling-looking trail mix (the woman two seats over vomited repeatedly all the way across country after consuming some) retails for $3.

Yes, I suppose I could have paid more to ride up front, but if you think I would, you'd be forgetting that I'm the kind of guy who'd wait hours for a bus or a train - or walk 10 miles - rather than plunk down a few extra dollars for a taxi. At least my many years of flying experience have given me a little insight in how to obtain the best (of a bad lot) seats available, and to slither on board ahead of the people hoping to stash their goats and chickens in the overhead bins. And possibly if I stick with my new carrier (all right, it's American Airlines, but it hurts to say it, almost as though by pronouncing the name of the third party, I'm compounding my unfaithfulness) long enough, I'll eventually accumulate enough miles that they'll move me back up to whatever passes for "elite" status in their program.

But in a way, I kind of hope not, because in order for that to happen, I'd have to spend a lot more time on airplanes and in cities other than New York, and right now, I'm none too enthusiastic about being anyplace but here. That being said, I'm off to London tomorrow for 12 days, and yes, I'll be riding at the back of the plane. So this is how the other half, erm, I mean, the other 90% lives. Shocking, I tell you, simply shocking.

Can't Pass That Test? It Must Be Racist!

I don't know which annoys me more: this lawsuit alleging that New York City is systematically excluding blacks and Hispanics from becoming firefighters by requiring them to pass a written exam that, apparently, most of them can't pass, or the fact that the media and the federal government are taking such a spurious case so seriously.

Essentially, minority (actually, that's a misnomer; in New York City, whites are in the minority) candidates have been doing considerably worse on the exam than whites. Ergo, in the minds of race-obsessed attorneys and activists, the test must be racist. Well, how about this: when as a teenager I was rejected by the college I most wanted to attend, I didn't call a lawyer and demand that he file suit on grounds that the University of Michigan systematically discriminated against white working class youth from downriver Detroit. I accepted (albeit reluctantly) that I had spent too much of my high school years goofing off instead of studying.

Similarly, if large numbers of black candidates are failing to do well on the firefighters exam, why does this prove something is wrong with the system? Wouldn't it be more helpful to look at what it is about the black community that continues to produce inordinate numbers of young people who can't or won't acquire the basic level of education necessary to function well and prosper in society?

The argument being made is that the skills being tested by the exam are "not relevant" to what a good firefighter needs to know. This may or may not be true. But all things being equal, when the fire department shows up at your house, would you prefer that the firemen (or women) be the smartest men and women or available? Or would you prefer to have a number of them be dumber as long as they make a good poster for racial and cultural diversity?

Yes, I agree it's unfortunate that in a city more than half black and brown, the fire department is overwhelmingly white. But there's a solution that doesn't involve lawsuits and dumbing down of standards: it entails parents in minority communities making sure their kids get to school and do their homework, which is exactly how every other minority community in the past has advanced itself. While we're at it, I note that whites are greatly overrepresented in the fields of medicine and aviation. Would you like the doctor who operates on you or the pilot who flies you on your next journey to be awarded his or her accreditation based on skin color rather than on being the best qualified for the job?

Perhaps we should turn things around and look at fields in which black people are overrepresented. Take professional basketball, for instance: shouldn't more white players be encouraged to join the NBA even if they can't jump quite as high or run quite as fast as some black players? After all, it's only a game, right? Which is more important, winning, or reflecting America's multi-racial character on the basketball court? (P.S. South Africa and Zimbabwe have already instituted this kind of affirmative action to put an end to white dominance of their cricket teams.)

What about rap music? Is it fair that one of the most popular and lucrative music genres should be overwhelmingly dominated by members of one race? Nitpickers and quibblers might argue that most whites don't have the same feel for rhythm and rhyme that blacks do, but that's hardly an excuse for setting standards that systematically exclude a large portion of the population from the fun and profits of being a successful rap artist. Why, think what it does to a young white boy's self-esteem when he sees his African-American classmates welcomed into the hip hop fraternity while he remains cruelly excluded?

Hey, all I'm asking for here is a little consistency. If we're going to assign positions and honors based on skin color, then let's just say so and apply it across the board. But if we're supposed to be a true meritocracy, where everyone has an equal opportunity for success but no one has a guarantee of it, can we please put an end to this obsession with race that ends up being just another variant - and perhaps a more pernicious form at that - of racism?

A New York State Of Mind

I was standing in what was beginning to look like an interminable line at Duane Reade near Times Square. For you out-of-towners, Duane Reade is a chain that has pretty much cornered the drugstore market in New York City (and possibly beyond, but I can't speak to that as I still haven't left the five boroughs since arriving here). Duane Reade stores vary in size and layout, but they're pretty uniformly depressing, with their sole redeeming feature being that many of them keep late hours and a fair few are open 24-7.

So if you're out and about at some ungodly hour and feel the need for, say, ball point pens and some toothpicks (don't ask), you too may find yourself in a situation like mine: wishing you'd never come in there, tired, annoyed and frustrated from traipsing through the labyrinthine aisles in search of whatever it was you thought you needed, standing in an impatient queue of similarly despairing folks thinking, "Do I really want this?" and seriously considering putting your stuff back on the shelf and walking out.

But having already invested so much time and effort, I wasn't about to give up, even if I was in by far the slowest line, a line made much, much slower by the antics of a woman and the three tween-aged girls accompanying her. The woman was paying for a small mountain of hair care products, enough to fill two bags, but as if that wasn't enough, the three girls fanned out through the store and one at a time came dashing back to the counter with a few more items, again all hair-related. The cashier filled up a third bag, and still the little girls kept arriving with more junk, and when I say "junk," I do not use the term loosely. Nearly all of it was the nonsensical kind of rubbish that only a vast, overweening system of capitalism run amok could produce, and don't get me started on what kind of system must have produced the people who voluntarily consume it. I was almost getting nostalgic for the command economy of the old Soviet Union.

Finally the girls ran out of hunter-gatherer steam, allowing the cashier to ring up the grand total, something like $158.14 (it could have been $1,058.14; my eyes were glazing over by this point). Fine, I thought, the line is finally going to start moving, and with only three or four more people ahead of me, I should be out of this hellhole in half an hour, tops.

But nooooo. First the lady pulls out a wad of cash, and I even thought pleasant thoughts about her: bless you, my dear, for not using a credit card that will inevitably have some kind of glitch that necessitates calling the store manager to sort out. And indeed, the cashier quickly made change and handed it to her along with her four or five bags, which she in turn passed to the little girls. Then, with everyone in the line behind her silently willing her to move on so the next customer could be served, she just stood there. And stood there. And STOOD THERE.

First she carefully counted her change. Then she counted it again. Then she arranged all the bills so they were facing the same way, then rearranged them to face the other way. Then she scooped up her coins and dropped them, one by one, into one of the pockets of her purse. Next she opened another purse pocket and considered putting her bills into it. Reconsidered, opened another pocket, and studied both of them, apparently weighing the question of which would be the more suitable home for her newly obtained currency. Finally, reaching a decision, she deposited the bills, again ONE by ONE, and carefully snapped the pocket shut, then the other pocket, and finally the purse itself.

An audible sigh went up from all of us. At last she was going to move. Or was she? What was she doing now? She was opening her purse again. Checking, apparently, to see if the money she'd put in was still there, or perhaps inquiring whether it was comfortable. What's this? Oh, she's having a look at her mirror, checking out her hair, perhaps wondering if she should pull out one of the myriad hair care products she'd just purchased and give them a tryout.

I'd had it. I was within seconds of saying, "Yo, lady, could you move off to the side and do that, we got people waiting here!" I didn't, though it took some resisting, and the only thing that stopped me in the end was the thought that she might be a foreign tourist or a visitor from some place like California where everything moves at a slower pace, and that it might be very unpleasant and embarrassing for her to be shouted at like that.

It startled me, though, that I came even that close to acting like a stereotypically obnoxious New Yorker. Especially since most New Yorkers don't act that way anymore, haven't for quite a few years. Well, at least not in Manhattan; the practice of being loud and outspoken does still persist in some of the outer boroughs. But for the most part, New York these days is polite, possibly the politest big city in the world, or at least the parts of it that I've seen.

But New York or no New York, I'm not like that. Yeah, I may think all sorts of horrible things when people don't move on or off the subway with suitable alacrity, may seethe with a burning inner rage when they don't stand to the right on the escalator, but I don't speak up. It's not my personality anyway, and years of living in England ensured that my indignation seldom extended beyond muffled tutting and harrumphing (that man wasn't exaggerating when he sang that hanging on in quiet desperation was the English way).

Or maybe I am like that, and my inner id, chomping at the bit all these years to get out and snarl at people in the streets, suddenly feels liberated by an outdated image of what it means to be a New Yorker (think Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, and come to think of it, that was set near Times Square, too).

Yeah, that must have been it: a lethal confluence of Eighth Avenue, 42nd Street and Duane Reade. As soon as I traveled downtown, I was restored to my usual serene self, and by the time I got back to Brooklyn, I was positively brimming over with good cheer. Not enough good cheer, it's true, to stop me thinking dark thoughts about the bozos who schedule late night L trains along the same principles as Duane Reade assigns its cashiers: i.e., frequently enough to keep people waiting in teeth-gnashing despair instead of throwing themselves into the East River and attempting to swim to Brooklyn, but only just.

And while I was mistaken to think my being ready to snap at the hapless customer in Duane Reade meant I was acquiring a New York attitude, bitching - albeit helplessly - about the subway is a far surer sign that I'm beginning to feel right at home.