The Real Nappy-Headed Hos

I have had exactly one experience with the now-fired DJ Don Imus: a year or two I stumbled across the TV broadcast of his show and found myself hypnotized by the sheer, mind-numbing awfulness of it. It made me feel like gouging out my eyes and puncturing my eardrums with knitting needles, but for about five minutes, I couldn't bring myself to shut it off. I kept thinking, "No, nothing can be this bad, this stupid. It's probably a setup for a joke that's going to come along any time now, or maybe it's some kind of high concept art. I'd better keep watching a bit longer to make sure I'm not missing anything."

But no, I wasn't missing anything, and he really was that bad, but even still, I found myself getting annoyed as the clamor about firing him mounted last week. I thought it was hypocritical; the guy didn't say anything that people don't say, or at least think, all the time. But by the time he actually was fired, I realized I didn't care that much, and that while his crime was fairly minor, women who had done nothing more offensive than playing basketball didn't deserve to gratuitously be called "hos."

At the same time, I also realized that the only reason I'd initially felt any sympathy at all for the guy was because I found the leaders of the chorus calling for his ouster, the twin harpies and Madame DeFarges of racial hysteria, so much more offensive.

I'm referring, of course, to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who someone even less politic than me referred to as "a modern-day Amos and Andy show." The idea that a couple of hustling con men, who've trafficked for their entire careers in stirring up racial unrest, could be accusing someone else of racism for an ill-considered remark was bad enough. What really got to me was that THEY KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH IT. Sharpton and Jackson, two of the biggest embarrassments to African-Americans, and who between them have done more to set back the cause of black America than any Ku Klux Klansman could, continue to rake in the big bucks for fanning the flames of ignorance and reducing discussion of racial issues in this country to a phony-baloney, crocodile-teared sob session.

Oh, but how do I really feel about it? If you've been following this case closely, you've probably already heard about sportswriter Jason Whitlock, a black man who's had the courage to speak up - and more articulately than I could hope to - about why it's time for the black community to look elsewhere for its leadership and to turn its attention to issues that really matter. Read what he has to say here, here and here.

On The Radio

Jonnie Whoa Oh, in addition to running one of the nation's cutting-edge independent record labels, has recently launched a podcast series featuring music and interviews with people he figures might have something of interest to say. Unaccountably, he's now chosen to include me in that series, and if you want to listen to me blathering on about the same sort of things you can read me blathering on about here, then have a listen.

Before The Flood

Not the even the biggest New York booster could argue that we've been having much in the way of lovely spring weather. For almost two weeks now the temperature has barely managed to get out of the 40s (single digits, for our Celsius friends), and when it finally did for a few hours, it was merely an atmospheric fluke, a tiny bubble (RIP, Don Ho!) of tepid air driven before an onrushing storm that descended upon us in the wee hours of this morning and as of now, 21 hours later, has dumped 7 1/2 inches (355 mm) of rain on the city.

Not ideal for a Sunday stroll in the park, in other words, and although I finally did venture out in search of food about 9 this evening, most of New York seemed to have hunkered down in as warm and dry a place as could be found, and was waiting out the deluge. When I started down the street the storm seemed to have spent itself, with little more than a lively drizzle still falling. But on my way back lightning and thunder started crashing about Metropolitan Avenue, and the newly energized rain threatened to punch holes in my umbrella. In the midst of it, here comes some bozo blithely riding along on his bike as if it were a bright, sunny day and he was on his way to the beach. I mean, his rear wheel was leaving a wake, the kind of roostertail that you see behind high-powered speedboats. More evidence, if you ask me, that devout bicyclists operate in a different reality zone. And perhaps an explanation for why they're likely to run you down if you dare to set foot into the street (or on the sidewalk) when they're motivating along. Because, basically, like the weather, stop signs, or old blind ladies in wheelchairs, you're not really there, man.

Thankfully the foul weather we've been having lifted long enough on Saturday to allow an afternoon and evening of frenetic social activity. There's a relatively new shop in the neighborhood, Passout Records, that's been putting on afternoon shows, and this weekend it was the turn of the Lost Locker Combo, a 10 or 12-piece aggregation which is the brainchild (using the term in its most generous sense) of longtime scenester Bill Florio and boasts a membership spanning the whole spectrum of New York and New Jersey's vibrant pop-punk scene. They wear sharp red vests and white shirts, except for Bill, who dons a professor's outfit, and Cheerleader/Terrorist Stephanie, who comes as herself, and while they're more sharply dressed and better rehearsed, remind me uncannily of Isocracy, not least because of their predilection for assaulting the audience and dumping trash on them.

Because I was going out to dinner later at a halfway proper restaurant and wouldn't have time to go home and change my clothes, I actually had to duck outside when the trash, silly string and confetti-dumping reached its frenetic height, but I only missed about one and a half songs, and was still able to loll about on the sidewalk while musicians and fans, including peripatetic record mogul Jonnie Whoa Oh, flaneur and boulevardier-about-town Chadd Derkins, flame-haired photoblogger Kelly Lynn, New Jersey Philosopher Laureate and train scholar JoeIII, and that ever-reliable arbiter of cool, Ms. Carla Monoxide hashed out the age old question: "Where do you guys wanna go now?" "I don't know, where do you guys wanna go?"

Then it was off to dinner in the East Village with several of my less flamboyant though possibly more respectable friends, where we found ourselves sharing space with some woman who apparently was one of the contestants on a reality TV show called Project Runway. One of our party - let's just say the really gay one - recognized her immediately and was like, "Oh my God, is that her? I have to go ask her." The rest of us had no idea what he was talking about, but he went over, started a conversation, and apparently she was indeed the celeb in question. Sorry, I don't remember her name.

Then it was time to reunite with the pop-punk posse at Otto's Shrunken Head, a mildly trendy rockabilly bar on 14th Street between B and C, for purposes of celebrating the aforementioned K Lynn's birthday. It was crowded with the sorts of people you'd expect to find in a loud East Village bar on a Saturday night, but there were enough of us to colonize the hallway and annoy everyone who was trying to get to the bathrooms, and while some of our group made merry with the hooch, Otto's Shrunken Head wasn't getting rich off one little sub-group of non-drinkers (yours truly included), who spent not a penny all night. It's not that I'm that much of a penny pincher, and in fact I wouldn't have minded at all buying a soda or a lime-and-seltzer, but I wasn't about to fight my way through that mob at the bar for the privilege of doing so. So I prefer to think that my abstemious friends and I made up for our lack of purchases by adding a certain atmosphere to the joint.

Events and festivities rattled on till about 2 or so, at which point the sensible among us started migrating back to the boroughs, while the other half of our party determined to stay on, probably until closing time. Which means they probably got caught in the rain, which started about 3, and, I note, seems to have stopped now that it's gone past 3 again. Making it Monday morning and way past my bedtime. Remember to send in your tax returns!

Without A Song In My Heart

When I lived in the mountains, I was lucky enough to have a beautiful old piano with rich, ringing tones. It had pride of place in the living room, just across from the stove, and because the house was made entirely of wood, and because the piano was nestled up against one of the main support walls, the whole house seemed to act as a sounding board, bouncing the notes back and forth beneath the cathedral ceiling and resonating right through me until it felt as though the house itself was the instrument.

It was so quiet up there on that mountain that the music seemed to hang in the air for minutes, even hours after I'd stopped playing; sometimes I'd have to step outside into the woods to get away from it, especially if I'd been playing a sad song, and when I'd come back indoors it would still be there waiting for me, to the point where I'd have to start a new song just to dissipate the mood and memories of the one that had lingered on.

I had learned a bit of piano as a kid, a bit more as a teenager, and a bit more yet in my 20s; for some reason, I kept ending up in places where there were pianos. But I learned by far the most about the instrument - still not all that much, granted - in the mid-80s, when I was more or less stranded on the mountain by poverty and depression. With the nearest town almost 20 miles away, half of which had to be driven in second gear, even a simple journey to the store meant a substantial outlay on gas, so I had to limit my trips out into the world, and because I was so depressed (mainly over the end of a relationship, but being broke wasn't helping either), there didn't seem to be much point in going out and mingling with people anyway.

So I sat up there for days and weeks at a time, slowly, painstakingly teaching myself to read music well enough to figure out various pop songs and show tunes dating back to the 1890s. I knew many of the basic notes and chords, but when it came to the more complicated stuff, I would have to spend hours transposing things from the guitar (which I also only knew marginally) or manually counting lines and spaces on my sheet music and then trying to translate it onto the piano keys. Often I'd have to do this by candlelight because my solar power system needed new batteries, batteries which I just couldn't afford.

This went on from the latter part of 1984, through most of 1985 and 1986. Somewhere in the spring of 1985 I started practicing with the Lookouts, which was a rather different kind of music, but that was usually only a few hours a week. I also began to spend more time with my guitar, trying to write songs for the new band, but the piano still got by far the greatest amount of attention. The stuff I was learning was about as far as you could get from punk. As my abilities increased, I began learning things like Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" and "I Get A Kick Out Of You" and Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away From Me," but more than anything, I liked to wallow in the saddest, most tragic songs like "The Party's Over" or "I Get Along Without You Very Well," and these were not the kind of tunes you wanted to whip out on the piano when the guys came over to play some punk rock.

So for a long time no one heard the stuff I was learning, unless you count my dogs and cats and the various wildlife - skunks, snakes and raccoons in particular - that kept taking up residence under my house. Then somehow I wound up playing piano in a roadside restaurant down on Highway 101, an elegant little place, really, at least by North County hippie standards. It was called the Mad Creek Inn, dated back to the 1920s, and its biggest claim to fame was that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard had holed up there when dodging the Jazz Age version of the paparazzi.

I still wasn't all that good, but by combining some Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young and Beatles songs with the old standards I'd been learning, I developed enough of a repertoire to last me through the evening, and the dim, mostly candlelit atmosphere of the restaurant seemed to soak up most of my mistakes, to the point where I was able to collect a fair few tips from the patrons. It ended badly, of course, when Lookout magazine got involved in a rancorous dispute with the good old boys down in town, and word got around that the piano player up at Mad Creek was the much-loathed publisher of said magazine. Mad Mary, as the restaurant's proprietress was generally known, gave me the push - understandably, I guess, since in such a small town, you can't afford to alienate half your potential clientele - and that was more or less the end of my piano-playing career. By the following year, I was mainly annoying people with my electric guitar, and when, a couple years later, I moved down to the Bay Area, there was no room for the piano to come along with me.

Eventually I got an electric digital piano, but it wasn't quite the same, and even that, for one reason or another, didn't make the trip with me to London, so for many years now, I've had only a handful of opportunities to get my hands on a keyboard. Until last week, that is, when my digital piano, which had been in storage all this time in California, finally arrived here in Brooklyn. It's still no concert grand, but has the advantage of being able to be played with headphones, invaluable when living in a small apartment with neighbors that might want to do silly things like sleeping now and then.

So here I am, right back where I was in 1984 or 85 - though thankfully neither as broke nor depressed - trying to re-learn all those songs I so painfully mastered during those long Mendocino County nights, and finding it's almost harder the second time around. Maybe my fingers are less dexterous now that I'm older, or maybe my desire to play music lacks the same passionate intensity that I had back then. It might help if I were as broken-hearted and depressed as I was in the mid-80s, when music was my principal lifeline to sanity, but I'm not sure I'd be resilient enough to handle that level of desperation today.

Which brings me to what I've been musing about lately: since I'm just getting started on relearning the old songs I used to play, about the only tunes I can play competently are those that I originally wrote on guitar for the Lookouts or the Potatomen. Some of the Potatomen songs, especially the slower ones, actually sound quite stately on the piano - well, to me, anyway - but there's only so long you can sit around playing the same 10 or 20 songs that you wrote a decade or more ago.

So why not write some new ones? That's what's driving me crazy. It used to be so easy. There were times I wrote an entire song, words and music (and if you know the Potatomen stuff, many of those songs had a lot of words) entirely in my head while driving from one place to another. I wrote "The Loneliest Boy In The World" en route from Berkeley to Santa Rosa, jumping out of the truck immediately on arriving to grab my guitar and see if those chords I'd imagined in my head actually worked. They did, and something similar happened with "The Train Song," which came about entirely as a result of getting stuck behind a slow-moving semi on the twisting mountain route from Grant's Pass to Crescent City. I made up "That Girl" while walking down to Gilman via the bike path, and "The Green Hills of England" (Lookouts song, that one) when I was forced off the highway by a blinding rainstorm somewhere out in Wiltshire or Devon.

But now? I don't hear tunes in my head, I don't find rhyming couplets spilling from my lips, I don't even think in musical terms most of the time, and I wonder why that is. Is it because songwriting, like poetry (really not much difference, ultimately) is a young man's game? I mean, I was no spring chicken when I wrote most of my favorite songs so far. Maybe it's not so much a matter of chronology, though, as it is of contentment: most of my songs - much of my writing as well - came about in times when I was being buffeted by mad moods of anger, depression, agitation, fear, loneliness and passion. Nowadays I seem to live life on a much more even keel. Nothing too dramatically exciting happens, but nothing particularly bad, either. Life is mostly pleasant if slightly uneventful; I'm not in love, I'm not brokenhearted, I don't particularly want to kill or save anyone or anything.

Does that mean I'm unlikely to come up with anything new in the way of songs or stories? I do wonder, and also wonder whether I'd even want to if it meant having to return to the tumultuous emotional state in which I spent much of my earlier life. I'd like to think there's still a song or two in me waiting to come out, but I'm not sure what extremes I'm willing to go to in order to make that happen.

In the meantime, I'll be brushing up on my Cole Porter, my Gershwin, my Rodgers and Hart, and now that I think about it, those couple years of assiduously learning how to play those classic 20th century pop songs directly preceded the burst of inspiration that produced a couple dozen of my own songs. Maybe that's the key: just start playing music, any music, on a regular basis, and sooner or later some of it will become my own.

Wish I Were Going To This

Just got a note about the Núna(now) Festival up in Winnipeg, advertised as "an eight-day convergence between two faraway but not dissimilar places," and featuring, among other things, performances by the Weakerthans and Weakerthans leader John K. Samson doing his solo singer-songwriter thing.

I've been to both places several times, and while it's true that Manitoba and Iceland are "not dissimilar," they're not all that similar, either. For one thing, Manitoba, as desolate and lonesome as it can seem anytime you get more than a couple miles outside of Winnipeg (and sometimes in the middle of Winnipeg, for that matter), is practically Manhattan-like compared with the vast emptiness that constitutes about 97% of Iceland.

But they both have that haunting and haunted quality that seems to accrue to far-flung northern places, suffused with a grim melancholia that teeters on the edge of heartbreaking beauty. You can feel it, too, riding past the miles of failing or abandoned farmsteads in North Dakota, or past the decaying grain elevators of Saskatchewan, or even to a degree in the ruined industrial centers in the north of England; the first time I felt its full effect was in the sad old streets of Eureka, California, back in the days when Old Town meant Skid Row rather than multi-colored Victorian boutiques and the acrid, billowing clouds of pulp mill smoke would block out the sun for weeks at a time.

There's an air of futility and defeat in such places that heightens the sweetness of small victories - starting a band, writing a song, finding a furtive moment of connection or joy - making what might be the stuff of everyday mundanity in New York or London or LA seem downright triumphant. Not everyone can see or feel it, but I've met a fair smattering of people who knew exactly what I was talking about when I referred to the feelings of exultation and just plain ecstasy I've experienced from simply standing on some utterly drab street corner in Regina or Akureyri, or looking out over a few thousand miles of the Northern Prairies under a sky darkening with the promise of floods, tornadoes, blizzards, a plague of locusts, or very possibly all of the above in the space of an hour or two.

I once flew up to Winnipeg in the middle of February to see a series of Weakerthans shows, and when asked by the customs agent what the purpose of my visit was, I breezily answered, "I'm here for a holiday." She was so incredulous at that idea that I got to spend an hour getting my luggage taken apart and assiduously gone over. Even when she didn't find anything and had to let me go, she was still shaking her head at the idea that someone would spend a week in Winnipeg in the dead of winter with no purpose other than pleasure. "I can't prove it, but I know you're up to something," her eyes said as I left the airport.

It was during that trip that I first learned about the Iceland-Manitoba connection, that there were probably more Icelanders or people of Icelandic descent living in the Greater Winnipeg area than in all of Iceland. John Samson took me for a tour of his home town and gave me a crash course in its history, how it had once been slated to be "The Chicago of the North," before it occurred to people that the Chicago of the South served the same function much better and in a comparatively far more benign climate. He also told me how his immigrant grandfather had founded one of Winnipeg's two daily newspapers published in Icelandic, something I still marvel over today, when most large cities barely manage to support one daily paper in English.

So anyway, I love Iceland, I love Winnipeg, and I love the Weakerthans; why am I not even now booking my tickets for this affair? Well, it's too soon. I'm still getting settled into Brooklyn, and frankly, I don't feel much motivation to travel anywhere outside the five boroughs for a good little while yet. Maybe it's me getting old, maybe I've just been out on the road too often and for too long, but for now, I just want to pick a place, call it home, and stay there for a while. Any of the rest of you, though, whether you've got itchy feet or are crazy for the Weakerthans, or want to spend some time soaking up Icelandic culture in a city that's not quite like any other in North America, well, there are worse places you could spend a week at the end of April.

A Not So Bad Friday

After so much time off - I guess it's been a couple of weeks now - it's kind of hard to get started on this bloggy thing again. First the excuses, I guess: aside from the usual chaos and confusion to be expected when setting up shop in a new city, I've completely failed to make the chronological adjustment from Australia to New York. In other words, I seem to still be on Sydney time, which was simultaneously eight hours earlier and a day later than the East Coast of America.

That's the only explanation I can offer for being up most of the night and sleeping for large parts of the day, not to mention constant confusion as to what day it is and what if anything I'm supposed to be doing. Adding to the disorientation was the fact that for the first week and a half I was essentially living out of a suitcase, as most of my clothes and belongings were marooned somewhere out there in UPS Land. And when the boxes finally did arrive, they created a traffic jam in what had been a living room during the several days it took me to get them unpacked and find some place to put everything.

Want more excuses? For at least a week my internet access was limited to whatever unpredictable hours the upstairs neighbors chose to turn on their wireless. Sometimes they'd leave it on all night, which meant of course that I had to stay up checking email, bulletin boards, my bank balance, and the daily newspapers from several continents. Yes, I could have used this time more productively, if blogging could be so dignified, but I came to learn that attempting to post something on my blog sent a psychic signal through the ceiling that told the neighbors it was time to shut off their wireless for a day or so. Net result being that I decided I was meant to use the internet for frivolous purposes only.

No change there, you snarkily point out? Well, all right, but then about a week ago I was finally able to get hold of one of those elusive humans who reputedly work for the cable company but who of course can't be expected to actually answer the phone in person, and get my internet sorted out. So I could have been blogging for this whole past week, true, but most of that time, the part that wasn't devoted to unpacking and breaking up cardboard for recycling and figuring out how to dispose of 37 cubic feet of styrofoam peanuts that UPS felt it necessary to encase my guitar and keyboard with, sadly had to be spent catching up on all the internet business I'd fallen behind on during the previous week.

Oh, and along with the cable internet comes cable TV, something I've rarely had the benefit (or not) of; those of you who are familiar with this convenience (or not) will know of its ability to consume large amounts of otherwise useful time. Which brings me up to yesterday.

Awakening late in the morning as usual, I was confronted with a dilemma. I wanted to go to church for at least part of the Good Friday observances, which usually go on between 12 and 3 in the afternoon, the hours during which Jesus was reputedly hanging on the cross (yes, I too occasionally wonder how exactly this was determined, given the paucity of reliable wristwatches in those days). Trouble was, my many-channeled cable TV was offering a live broadcast of the Everton v. Fulham football match.

Blasphemous as it may sound, I found myself rationalizing that while Good Friday comes around every year, it's not that often that we see Fulham matches in the USA. Well, if I'm going to be honest, we see them more often than Good Friday comes around, but still... We certainly wouldn't see Everton v. Fulham more than once a year, which, as things would turn out, is probably just as well. But I digress...

I then came up with an even better rationalization: Good Friday is more or less the climactic point of Lent, a time during which we're meant to engage in sacrifice and self-mortification. As any long-suffering Fulham fan will tell you, there are few activities more likely to produce mortification of the spirit than watching our boys trying to avert another humiliating defeat.

Still, 12 years of Catholic education, not to mention Mel Gibson's valentine to violence aka The Thrashin' Of The Christ, made me all too aware that Jesus's sufferings were of a rather higher order than those endured by followers of a crap football team, so I was still wracked with guilt and indecision. Football or church, church or football? Fortunately, fortuitously even, at that moment church solved my problem by coming to me.

There was a great racket outside my window consisting of horns blowing (musical horns, that is), people chanting, and the shuffling of feet (well, that last was largely psychic, but I swear I could feel it). I looked out to discover a few hundred people conducting a Stations Of The Cross procession that wound its way for a couple miles up and down the streets of the neighborhood. We used to have this at my boyhood church, but only up and down the aisles inside the church.

For those of you unfamiliar with the ritual, there are 14 Stations, representing an aspect of the Crucifixion, at each of which the congregation stops and meditates and prays. This particular procession had small boys dressed up as Roman soldiers and who took what seemed to be inordinate pleasure in whipping the young man portraying Jesus at the appropriate intervals. Then a brass band would play some mournful tune, to which someone would sing along over a bullhorn, first in Italian, then English, then Spanish, before the crowd would move a block or two to the next Station.

Traffic was blocked off, and a police escort ensured that even irreligious drivers couldn't get overwrought and try to drive through what was essentially a funeral procession. Bemused hipsters pointed, gawked and photographed the faithful as we made our way up Bedford Avenue, and I wondered what sort of explanation I would offer if I saw anyone I knew, until I remembered that no explanation was necessary. I was quite glad to be able to participate in this neighborhood ritual, for community reasons as well as spiritual, but then I noticed that it was nearly time for the kickoff of the football match.

Since I'd put in almost an hour and a half walking the Stations of the Cross, I didn't feel too bad about leaving just a bit early to see the start of the game. As it happened, I'd sort of forgotten that there were 14 Stations rather than the 12 I'd been thinking there were, so when we passed No. 12 and headed for No. 13, I couldn't help feeling I'd done my duty.

Which was terribly self-indulgent of me, of course, and naturally I paid the price, watching Fulham, after teasingly (and uncharacteristically) get off to a 1-0 lead, go down to a rather humiliating 4-1 defeat. Still, it was an exciting match: lots of goals, anyway, even if they were for the wrong side. And the knowledge that href="http://www.kendrak.com/blog">Kendra K, just out of hospital after her surgery, would probably be watching and cheering on Everton, brightehttp://beta.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifned matters a bit. Well, heck, I never thought we were going to win anyway.

And Good Friday evening, I headed into the city to see my old pal Tim Barry (you'll know him from his years of fronting the band Avail) doing his solo act at a place called Rebel on W. 30 St. I ran into Tim out front and got to talking, which meant that I missed the opening band, locals The Challenged, who I'd intended to see, having met one of them, Mr. Rob Suss, the week before last. Regrettably, that'll have to wait till next time. I did see another band called Fifth Hour Hero, who I'd never heard of before, but were really rather good, even if they did all have beards (well, except the girl, and you got the feeling she might have grown one too if she could, if only out of solidarity). I guess it's lucky I got to see them when I did, too, because apparently they're and this was their last NYC show ever.

I had been expecting Tim to just show up with his acoustic guitar, but instead he had a whole band of truly impressive country and honky-tonk style musicians, including his very talented (and pretty!) sister Caitlin on the fiddle, and one Josh Small, whose masterful licks on the electric guitar reminded me at points of some vintage Grateful Dead (circa Workingman's Dead/American Beauty era) sounds, and I hope I don't get into too much trouble for saying that.

Tim always had the crowd in the palm of his hand when singing with Avail, and if anything, it was even more true at this little hootenanny/shindig/hoedown/Friday night beer blast. I was surrounded by people who apparently knew the words to the songs just as well as Tim did, and were determined to sing them just as loud, if not louder. The only other times I've experienced that, where the singer could have taken a break if he'd been so inclined and the crowd would have happily carried on without him, has been at Weakerthans shows. This was a bit more rowdy and raucous than a typical Weakerthans show, but every bit as much fun.

I only stayed for about half of the headlining band, Smoke Or Fire. They were very loud and very tight, a bit Avail/Hot Water Music-ish, but nothing really seemed to jump out about them. Their singer bragged that he had been "drunk for the past two weeks" and that his wife was none too pleased about it, but I'm not sure if that's the kind of thing I'd want to be wearing as a badge of honor. Really, they're quite good at what they do, but I think I was all hootenannied out by the time Tim and the gang had finished playing. So I grabbed a slice of pizza and made my way through the freezing streets (seriously, it's like 30 degrees here, and it was snowing tonight!) back to my warm bed in Brooklyn.

Welcome To The Bronx

So declaimed Grath McGrath, lead singer and guitarist for the Steinways, midway through their set at the Bruckner Bar and Grill, tucked away under the Willis Avenue Bridge in an obscure (well, to me, anyway, and to most of the people with me) corner of the Bronx.

I didn't get the impression - though I could be wrong; it has been known to happen - that Grath himself was a habitué of the Bronx, so I'm assuming his "Welcome to the Bronx" crack as meant to be ironic, spoken as it was to an almost entirely white and middle-class crowd of pop-punkers. But then it's always dangerous to assume, so I'll just say, "Thanks, Grath, it's good to be here in the Bronx tonight," even though it's now a few hours later and I'm not anymore.

The show was put on by one Dan Crafty, of Crafty Records, himself a Bronx boy, though of the City Island variety, i.e., not the Bronx of incinerated housing projects and feral crack gangs, if indeed that Bronx exists anymore. I wouldn't know; I'm a bit ashamed to admit that my entire experience in the Bronx, apart from driving through it once on my way down from New England, has consisted of one flying visit almost 40 years ago, where I got off the subway at the Grand Concourse station, jumping back on the train before the doors closed, just so that I'd be able to say that I'd set foot in all five boroughs.

Taking advantage of our ignorance, Crafty Dan put out what could be construed as a slightly misleading flyer, claiming that the Bruckner Bar and Grill, a lone outpost of gentrification in a neighborhood that could probably do with a fair bit more gentrification before anyone noticed it had happened, was practically within sight of the "first subway stop in the Bronx." In other words, it was hardly like going to the Bronx at all, more like a neat little corner of Manhattan North that had by some accident of geography been left on the wrong side of the Bronx divide.

Well, Mr. Crafty was indeed being economical with the truth; the bar was nowhere in sight from the subway, and we (I started out alone, but accumulated Bill Moon and Jim Jersey Beat at various points on the 6 train; nothing to make a guy feel at home in the big city like friends randomly getting on the same train he's on) wandered the streets in a befuddled fog, at one point soliciting directions from a genial policemen, and when even that didn't deliver results, from a local girl who gave us the once-over and said, "Oh, you looking for the bar?" as though there were nowhere else in the neighborhood that a pack of clueless-looking gringos would be going.

So it turned out to be more like five blocks than one from the subway; as Crafty Man freely admitted afterward, nobody would have come if he'd put the actual directions. Never mind; we were there now, and got to watch Project 27's Weaselcore, the Steinways' punk rock classics in the making, Phrank Martian's Nancy, down from Binghamton (I always want to remind him that Binghamton is the place where our van broke down on the way to Woodstock in 1969, but that veers rather precipitously into old codger territory, nay, old hippie codger territory, which is far worse), and finally, playing their second show of the evening, the Unlovables, who were celebrating the release of their new album and who were in top form.

The night was supposed to be a battle between New York and New Jersey bands to mark the release on Crafty Records of a new CD based on that theme, but none of the Jersey bands showed up (unless you count Mikey Erg as a one-man band, which probably wouldn't be inaccurate, but tonight he was playing for the New York-based Unlovables and not the mighty Ergs, the other two of whom, I understand, were off bowling or something. On one level it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a good, all-round pop-punk show, but on the other hand, it was interesting and gratifying to see how many more people were turning out than would have for a similar show a year or two ago, even though it took place slightly outside the bounds and comfort zone of the usual pop-punk scene.

I remember haranguing Jonnie Whoa Oh a few years back about how the then-dire state of the New York scene was entirely down to him: if he and a couple of his friends didn't take things in hand and make them happen, it would just shrivel up and disappear. Not to take a thing away from Mr. Whoa Oh; he's done a great deal first to keep things alive and later to keep them growing, but it was significant in a way that Jonnie wasn't even there tonight - due to illness, apparently - and the show was still a whopping success. There was a time, not so long ago, when if Jonnie Whoa Oh wasn't there, not only would the party be missing much of its life, it would also be missing about 10% of its audience.

Things have changed, if not enormously, at least significantly for the better. Now for the first time since the glory days of the late 70s, people are starting to look at New York as the place where great punk rock and pop-punk comes from. People are even moving here to be near and/or part of the scene. I remember being amazed when kids started showing up in Berkeley back in the late 80s, attracted by the whole Gilman thing, and now I get the feeling it's happening here. Tonight the pop-punk revolution raised its flag, however tentatively, over one small corner of the Bronx; a rush and a push into Staten Island and it will be proudly unfurled over all the five boroughs, and once that's happened, what distant outposts will be left to conquer? On to Yonkers and Poughkeepsie!

Back To Brooklyn

I apologize for leaving you all in the lurch this past week, assuming, that is, that there are at least some of you out there who are actually intrigued or at least mildly interested by the latest twists and turns taken by my topsy-turvy life.

When we last met, I was about to board a plane in Sydney, which I subsequently did, at the cost of missing out on another week of what looks to have been splendid beach weather, and of winding up in San Francisco/Berkeley where the weather was not, shall we say, quite up to beach standards.

In fact, it was diabolically cold for most of the time I was there, with the exception of a couple afternoons when it was warm and sunny enough to stroll around jacket-less. I saw the doctor who operated on my big toe last year and he assured me that it looked in remarkably good shape, and I saw the dentist, who told me that much to his surprise, my teeth didn't appear to be falling out quite as rapidly as they had been. But mostly I was engaged in taking things out of boxes and putting them back into other boxes, sorting out which of my belongings - some of which had been shipped over from England, others of which had been stored in California - would make the cut and be shipped on again to my new home on the East Coast.

It was remarkably upsetting, especially since I thought I was used to this sort of thing, having emptied out two different houses in recent years with the knowledge that I wouldn't be coming back. And considering that I've had little to say about Berkeley apart from bitching and moaning for some years now, you'd think that the faster I got the job done and got the hell out of there, the happier I'd be.

But such wasn't the case; in fact I was seized by such an overwhelming fit of melancholy that for several days I could barely do anything. But then I had six whole days to get ready, I told myself, practically an eternity when it comes to spending time in the black hole Dementor-nest that is downtown Berkeley. So my first night I went to Gilman, missing all but half of the last band, of course, and the second night I went to Kendra K's Cancerous Vegan Donut Party in the wilds of Emeryville and/or Oakland. Kendra, who many of you will know as one of my favorite bloggers and people, has been diagnosed with cancer and is going on for surgery and chemo next week, so to commemorate the occasion, she and her musical partner Elbert, backed by all-round indie kid Aaron, staged a performance of Hello, It's a Lumberjack Again, the Brent's TV/Sweet Baby/MTX tribute band that very nicely, though without excessive verisimilitude, captures the spirit of the originals.

The party went on till 1:30 or 2, and combined with my already excessive jet lag (as you may know, flying from Sydney to Frisco entails leaving in the afternoon and arriving the morning before you left, albeit after 14 hours in the air, thanks to the international date line. In the past I'd been able to sleep or at least relax on this flight, but not this time; I was wide awake the entire time, and would remain that way for the next several nights, catching up (partially) on sleep only in the mornings.

That, combined with my worse than usual procrastination, ate up most of the week, leaving me with only a couple days to pack and prepare everything for what's intended to be a permanent move to New York City. And at several points in the wee small hours, I'd find myself blearily staring at a couple of half-full (or half-empty?) boxes, a couple items of clothing or bric-a-brac in my hands, and wonder, "Was I putting this in the box or taking it out?"

And on a couple occasions I was wracked with an involuntary sigh, or maybe even spasm, one that asked, "What the hell are you doing? Moving off to a whole new city at your age? You should be settling down in old familiar places and getting ready for senility and death, not rushing off to the biggest city in the world with some vague idea of making a new start and having the kinds of adventures all the 20-somethings come flocking to New York for."

In short, I was thinking, why not just stay in California? Sure, I hate it, sure, it depresses the hell out of me, but hey, it's cheap, unchallenging, and besides, I get free internet there, whereas in New York I'll have to pay through the nose for it. And suddenly I got nostalgic, almost painfully so, for the good old days when I did love California, when it seemed like the only place to be, and when New York was this cold, distant, frenetic and mercenary madhouse where only fast-talking hustlers, swindlers and conmen could hope to thrive.

I fought off these dark thoughts, and some not-so-dark ones as well, the ones that were saying, "But wouldn't it be nicer to be near your mother and your brothers and your niece and nephew as they grow up? And what about your friends, Joe and Kendra, Patrick and Erika, wouldn't you like to see them more than a couple times a year?"

And yes, I would, but just as there was a time was California was the only place for me to be, this is surely not that time. I don't fully know why I'm so hell-bent on putting myself to the enormous expense and inconvenience of relocating myself to New York - well, apart from it being the greatest, most exciting, most creative and amazing city on earth, there is that - but it feels as though that's where I'm being called, and so, as of this morning, here I am.

In keeping with my theme of sleepless nights, I left Frisco at 10pm yesterday, arrived at Newark at 6:30 in the morning, and three train rides left me practically at the door of the Brooklyn apartment I left last September 1. The street looks a lot grayer and more barren now, with all the summer leaves gone and a few piles of dirty snow left over from last week's storm. And my gym, the one that was so conveniently situated and was open 24 hours, has shut its doors and apparently vanished, which was seriously depressing, as I was dying to get in there and work off some of the inertia and fat that must have built up during my brooding-filled week in Berkeley.

And it doesn't feel quite like home yet, and although the temperature is still only in the 50s outdoors, there doesn't seem to be any heat to warm the apartment significantly above that level, and most of my belongings are still stuck in a UPS office somewhere on the West Coast instead of barreling across the country as I had expected them to be, which means I've got to live out of one poorly packed suitcase for another week or more. Never mind, though; whether it feels like it or not, it is home now, and it's up to me to make the most and the best out of it.

The one thing that's always put me off moving to New York City is kind of an inverse of that, "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere" syndrome. It's along the lines of, "If New York is the greatest city in the world and it still leaves you unsatisfied and wanting more, where else is left for you to go?" For years I mouldered along in London telling myself, "Well, of course you're not completely happy here because London is only a sort of runner-up to New York in the World's Most Important City sweepstakes. If you were in New York, things would be different."

Well, now I am. And are things different? I suspect not all that greatly. What really matters, I've come to learn, is whether I'm different, and for that, I suspect, we shall have to stay tuned.

The Last Day Of Summer

I see from the internet that spring, or at least a foretaste thereof, has arrived in New York, which was good news, considering that I'll be there in little more than a week's time, but for me, today was all about saying goodbye to summer.

And what a day for it, too, with blazing sunshine, not a cloud in the sky, and temperatures in the upper 20s/mid 80s. I made my way out to the beach for one last time, and everything about it was stupendous, from the colour to water to the size and power of the waves, something you don't normally see in this sheltered and secluded corner of Botany Bay. I suspect it might have something to do with this giant eddy, aka "The Cyclone of the Deep," that's suddenly appeared just off the coast, and which is also making the water a bit chillier, all the way down to 21C/70F, whereas at this time last year it was more like 24C/75F. Which means you can only swim and splash around in it for an hour or two instead of all day, but I wasn't staying in too long anyway, as it occurred to me that it would be most inconvenient to be the victim of a savage shark attack the day before I'm meant to leave Sydney. I think the airlines have policies about passengers with great gouges leaking blood all over the place.

Not that there were any sharks to be seen, although a big glop of seaweed swirling around just beneath the surface had me worried for a bit. This time tomorrow I'll be somewhere over the Pacific Ocean rather than in it (well, hopefully, anyway), and not too much after that, touching down for a brief visit in California before moving on to my new East Coast home. Am I nervous about all these changes? You bet. Not that I haven't moved around before; in fact I've barely stopped. But this seems more serious, because this time I'm meaning to stay.

Maybe I'll change my tune after a few months, or when the New York winter starts to kick in and I'll be wondering what I'm doing slogging through the ice and snow when I could be lying on a sunlit Sydney beach. But I don't think so. This feels like the real thing, and as those of you who've attempted to do real things will know, that can be scary. Or so I've been told.

So it's goodbye to Sydney, goodbye to summer, it's really been grand, and even if I have little more than a suntan and lots of memories to show for it, that's plenty for now. And in a few days it will be hello to Brooklyn and, I expect, a very different sort of adventures. Less sharks, sting rays and sunburn, more... well, I don't want to jinx anything, so I think I'll just wait and see. In the meantime, let me say one last time, so long, Sydney, despite all my griping, you've really been fabulous.

A Good Walk Spoiled

You know what it's like when you get righteously indignant, outraged even, and in the midst of your fuming, mentally compose a scathing blog entry that bitterly denounces all the idiots responsible for your frustration, which cheers you up almost to the point of the inconvenience/insult/injury seeming worthwhile? Only to find that you were totally mistaken, and the whole mess was actually your own stupid fault?

Well, maybe you don't, but I do. Today I did the Manly to Spit walk, which is about 10km/6mi of mostly harbourside paths and trails through a variety of terrains and bioregions and which is absolutely stunning, easily the best walk I've taken in Greater Sydney ever, only to come out at the Spit Bridge with hopes of hopping on a bus back into the city in time for dinner and a movie.

Instead, I found a road that was more like a freeway and, while there were buses galore zooming past me, no bus stop. I walked across the bridge, carried on for another 500m or so before the road turned into a real freeway with no pedestrians allowed. I tramped back across the bridge, assuming the bus stop must be on the other side, but no, not only was there no bus stop, that side of the road also turned into a no-pedestrians motorway.

The only remedy seemed to be to take a bus going in the wrong direction, i.e., back to Manly, which was exactly where I didn't want to go, or at least far enough in that direction so as to be able to find a bus stop going in the right direction. So, cursing all the while, I stood at the Manly-bound stop while five, count 'em, five buses zoomed by me without stopping. They were all express buses, which apparently didn't consider the Spit Bridge a worthwhile stopping point.

Back across the bridge again, seriously considering hiking up the side of the semi-mountain where the road led, pedestrian ban or no pedestrian ban, and thinking of all the exquisite tortures I would inflict on Transport Minister John Watkins if I ever caught him outside of his chauffeured limo when, tucked away among some parked cars, I discovered the bus stop I'd somehow overlooked my first and second time around. So, not only had I wasted the better part of an hour, but my blog topic for the evening had been demolished as well. Oh, yeah, and I'd revealed myself once more as an idiot. Well, a doofus, anyway.

But thankfully, Sydney Transport or whatever those yo-yos are calling themselves this week, still had more insults and injuries in store for me, so I got my topic back. First the bus got stuck in a gargantuan traffic jam to the point where I might as well have been walking, then when I got off to do just that, I discovered I was in the wrong suburb (okay, that's not really Sydney Transport's fault). It was then that I discovered that the entire North Shore railway system (which I was planning on using to get across the bridge) was shut down because a train was stuck on the track. In a sane city, they would have moved the broken-down train. Might have taken a half hour or so, but that was fine with me, since I wanted to get dinner first anyway. But no, it was shut down for the night, and after already walking the 10k through forests and rocky cliffs and across the tiny hidden beaches where I really should have stopped to go swimming, plus 2 or 3k more looking for the bus stop, plus 1k more from North Sydney to Milson's Point, I also had to walk across the Harbour Bridge into downtown Sydney.

Which, come to think of it, isn't such a terrible fate after all. It was completely dark by now, the breeze was gentle and warm, and the lights spread out across the city and the harbour were absolutely spectacular. I forgave everything and everybody, but my feet still hurt. Even still, despite all my bitching, the walk wasn't spoiled at all, just extended far beyond expectations. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up a good blog title, however, so, with apologies to Mark Twain and the game of golf, there you are.

Blood In The Streets

I came out my front door onto the street to find a) the sun shining for the first time all day; and b) our building's handyman/cleaner/jack of all trades standing idly, apparently gaping off into space.

Normally when he sees me he launches into a harangue about either a) how hard he works for so little money; or b) George Bush and/or "the Jews" (he's a Lebanese Muslim, not that all Lebanese Muslims rant about that subject, but this one does), so having caught him unawares, I greeted him with, "Aha, goofing off again!" Not that I particularly care about his work habits, but in hopes of sidetracking him onto another subject.

But he quickly shushed me and pointed across the street. "Look, they stabbed that woman. See the blood all over the street?" An ambulance was just closing up its doors and driving away while several policemen stood around desultorily questioning a knot of onlookers.

I didn't have to ask who "they" were; we both knew he was talking about the random collection of junkies, drunkards, pimps, prostitutes and other assorted ne'er-do-wells who seem to have adopted our little street corner as their semi-permanent home. I didn't personally know the woman who'd been stabbed, but the cleaner did: "She's a hell of a thief, always robbing everything, I got her on film breaking into cars in the garage under the other building where I work."

I had a feeling I'd seen her, and probably her attacker as well, last night when I got home around 2 am from a blogging mission. There was a godawful uproar underneath my window, consisting of three or four hookers and a couple of what could have been pimps or just hangers-on. One of the men looked about 70, and not more than about five feet tall, but boy did he have a mouth on him. The guy didn't stop shouting - about God knows what; even with my window wide open I could barely understand a word he was saying - for the next hour. When the cops arrived at around 2:30 he just just switched his shouting to them while his hooker waited patiently off to the side for him to get back to her.

Both of the cops were smaller than me, and the one who was taking the brunt of the yelling looked like a little girl. In fact, I'm pretty sure she was a little girl. In any event, she barely said a word, just stood there patiently listening to this cranky old clown yelling his head off at her about what I presumed was some hideous injustice like not collecting his full 90% of the hooker's take for the evening.

I'm not sure I'd ever seen anything like it. In most other cities where I've lived, even traffic wardens or meter maids wouldn't put up with this kind of abuse, and in many American cities the meat wagons would have been pulling up to collect the corpses if anyone showed that little respect for the cops, but they do things differently in Sydney, which is why, I suppose, nobody is all that surprised when a woman gets stabbed in the middle of the afternoon on what is supposedly a very nice street in a very nice neighbourhood.

Although this part of town has been moving steadily upmarket for a few years now, it has a history of prostitution and petty (and not so petty) crime that seems to linger on even as property prices have rocketed into the stratosphere. Some of the would-be bohemian millionaires who've moved into the mid-19th century Victorian terraces that are among some of Sydney's oldest habitable buildings actually like the idea of prostitutes continuing to work the streets and back lanes. "It keeps the neighbourhood real, you know, stops it being too bourgeois." I'm reminded of an unholy brawl I witnessed a few years ago in New York City, between residents of one of the wealthier stretches of Greenwich Village and advocates for the prostitutes who were in the habit of plying their trade there.

"The prostitutes (excuse me, I think the correct term is 'sex workers') were here first. They shouldn't have to move just because a bunch of rich assholes moved in and bought all the houses," was the gist of the argument being posed by one side, whereas the local residents pleaded, "How would you like it if you couldn't get in or out of your own door because people are having sex in front of it?"

One of the prostitute advocates, whose group also provided the working girls (and trannies) with condoms, hot coffee, and a place to warm up and kick back between tricks, had brought me along to witness this hearing, and while she was used to my typically tactless way of putting things, her friends, fervent NYU activists all, were rather shocked to hear my cat analogy.

"Theres was this lady downstairs where I used to live in Berkeley, and she felt it was her duty to look after all the stray cats in the neighbourhood, so she'd put out buckets of food and leave her window open all the time, summer or winter, so the cats could get in. And sure enough, word got around the cat community that there was this place to hang out with unlimited free food, so pretty soon there were cats coming from blocks if not miles around. It was like, them more generous she was in trying to save the stray cats, the more stray cats there were. And then when she wasn't home and the food ran out, they'd all sit around under her window and yowl and wake up the whole neighbourhood. But if anyone complained to her, she'd get all indignant and say, 'Well, somebody has to look after the poor cats. I don't see how you can all sit in your nice warm houses and be so selfish.'"

Okay, a bit drawn out of an analogy at that, but my point was that in catering to the street prostitutes, my friend and her pals were encouraging them to continue to hang around the streets where the residents had made it clear they didn't want them, and maybe even making it likely that more prostitutes from other parts of town would gather there, even after the NYU activists had all graduated and moved on to their prostitute-free enclaves in suburbia or Williamsburg.

"These are women (or transexuals), not cats," someone hissed at me, to which I agreed while insisting that the principle was still more or less the same. Which is all neither here nor there, except that often on these past summer nights, my street has sounded an awful lot like the playground for a boatload of especially vocal alley cats, as the girls call back and forth to each other from under their various streetlights. Sometimes when business is slow - as you would expect it to be at 7 in the morning when the sun's already up but the bedraggled girls, makeup running, faces drooping, and clothes hanging despondently off their emaciated frames, still hang on in hopes of one last trick and/or fix - it's almost like a scene from Les Miserables out there, though hardly as tuneful.

Where am I going with this? Oh, I don't know; I guess the gist of what I'm wondering is whether prostitution, at least the unregulated, street hustling kind (brothels, i.e., licenced whorehouses, are legal here, but that doesn't seem to have cut into the street trade; if anything, there's more of it here than most places I've been) is as victimless a crime as some people make it out to be. I mean, the neighbourhood suffers, not just from the noise and the mess and the constant string of kerb-crawlers, but even more so from the pimps, muggers, and drug dealers the trade seems to attract. But most of all, the girls suffer, and if you've ever looked into one of those completely weary and beaten-down faces in the cruel light of dawn - or watched one of them get hauled away in an ambulance, possibly for the last time - it's hard to believe some of that feminist rhetoric about sex work being an "empowering" choice that women make for themselves.

Hell, I don't know the answer, and I certainly don't think there's much of a chance that any laws will ever succeed in eliminating prostitution. I don't even know if there's any point in trying to regulate it, but it does seem that the laisser-faire attitudes that have replaced the old repressive ones haven't done anyone any favours. Unless, of course, you see the "right" to be an abused, pimped-out street junkie and whore to be one of those inalienable freedoms that woman (and trannies) just can't live without.

The Dead Leaves

We've been suffering a cockroach infestation in the apartment, to the point where I've had to endure the nasty little creatures darting out of places like my shoe (as I was about to put it on) and my (thankfully unused at the time) toothbrush holder. So when I saw what looked like it could be a dead rat (or perhaps a baby wombat) sprawled in front of the door downstairs in the lobby, I was no more than slightly disturbed.

It turned out to have been a trick of the light, however, or of my failing vision, because as I drew near, I realised that it was only a large and crumpled leaf that had drifted in from off the street. Not entirely prepared to trust my senses, I stepped on it to make sure it was a) definitely a leaf and b) definitely dead, and it disintegrated into a pile of dull brown fragments. As I walked out the door, I thought, "Now where did that come from?"

The answer was there at my feet: the pavement was, well, not exactly littered, but definitely sprinkled with similarly dead leaves, and as if to emphasise the point, another one came drifting down in response to an ever-so-slight breeze and hit me in the face. But things still didn't compute. Why were the leaves falling off the trees? Sydney just doesn't seem like the kind of place that does autumn. Besides, it was 86 degrees (30C) and I was headed for the beach.

Eventually, on more careful reflection, I had to accept that yes, very possibly autumn did exist here and was actually starting to happen. Come to think of it, I've been here once when it was winter, so it's a fairly safe bet that autumn at some point intervened. But regardless, it doesn't seem as though it should be happening now.

In fact, it's officially been autumn for a couple weeks already. The Australians have this strange custom where they ignore the equinoxes and solstices and start their seasons on the first of the month. So autumn begins on March 1, winter on June 1, spring on September 1, etc. I've tried explaining how ridiculous and out of sync with nature that is, but they mostly seem to think that's how it's done everywhere else. And of course they're still flocking to the beach in March and even April, when it's definitely autumn (and in October, when it's still early spring), so I guess it's understandable if the lines get a little blurred.

But for me personally, summer ends on the 16th of March, when I'll be bidding goodbye to the beach and heading back to the still rather chilly USA. Up until about a week ago, I was fine with that, and was looking forward to settling back into Brooklyn, even if it'll be a few months yet before I get to enjoy my second summer of 2007. But this week, I'm suddenly conscious of everything I didn't get round to doing, and of just how pleasant it can be to live in a town where two of the most strenuous activities are going to the beach and going to the cafe, and where even on a lousy, cold, windy and drizzly day like today, it's still nicer than the average summer day in London or Frisco.

Never mind, though, I'll accept my fate gladly, as New York has its charms, too, even if the weather is only occasionally one of them. For one thing, I'll be glad to get back to a sensible subway system. I know it's not often that you hear a New Yorker or anyone else waxing nostalgic over that city's subways, but after enduring three months of Sydney's ridiculous Toonerville Trolley that moves along - when it shows up at all - at a pace only slightly greater than that of a fast trot, and still charges 50% more than New York does, it'll be a while before I complain about the L train. At least two or three days, if past experience is any indicator.

My latest adventure in mass transit: my Travelpass (the local version of a Metrocard) stopped working in the fare gates a couple weeks ago. In any marginally competent city, that's no big deal; you take your defective ticket to the ticket agent and he issues you a new one. But not Sydney. "Well, it'll take about two weeks to send that into the city and have it replaced, and since it's only good for another two weeks, there's no point. You'll just have to find show it to the guard and have him let you in."

"But what if there's no guard around?" (Which is generally the case.)

"Well, he'll be around somewhere. You'll just have to find him."

"So how come you can't just issue another ticket? I know you've got a machine in there that can issue electronic tickets, because that's how I got this one in the first place."

"That's not the way we do it. I've got to mail it downtown. Takes a couple weeks."

"But we're downtown now."

"Different office, mate."

And so forth. I don't know why I'm so touchy about the whole thing; half the population of Sydney doesn't pay to ride the railway anyhow, and on any given day you can see dozens of people pushing their way past the ticket inspectors without even bothering to show them a fake ticket. In the interest of "avoiding trouble," ticket inspectors have now been told not to challenge fare dodgers, and they've responded by simply leaving many of the gates open to make it easier for them. So even though I've got a legitimate ticket (and a very expensive one, too, I might point out), there I am among the mobs of disreputable Sydneysiders strolling blithely past the ticket barriers and contributing to the general decline in civility and public morals.

Speaking of which, I knew that the bus I regularly rode to the beach travelled through some fairly disreputable territory, judging from the graffiti, boarded or bricked-up windows, and the high proportion of youthful gangbangers who barged their way onto the bus without paying and proceeded to entertain the rest of us with their hiphop boom boxes, but I had no idea it got this bad. I can't remember if the story specified this or not, but the police are not actually trying to catch the brick-throwers in most cases, again probably for the sake of "avoiding trouble."

I first discovered the beach at La Perouse when I was out hiking, a trek that took me right through the middle of Maroubra, a slightly down-at-the-heels suburb that put me a bit in mind of the banlieue slums that ring much of Paris. It's also the home of the Bra Boys, not, as the name might lead you to believe, a bunch of breast-centric transvestites, but a rather violent and unpleasant surf gang that has branched out into drug dealing. After beating what should have been an ironclad murder rap, the Abberton brothers have managed to turn themselves into celebrities with help from the film that launches here this week and from genial dupe (and himself part-time thug and bully) Russell Crowe.

People here in Sydney often look at me strangely when I say that one reason I'll be glad to get back to New York is that it feels a lot safer there. I'm exaggerating a little for the sake of making a point, but not by that much. Sydney has the feel of a city that's beginning to come apart at the seams. It reminds me of New York back in the 60s or 70s, when the politicians and citizens alike were beginning to give up on it, to believe it was simply ungovernable. As if to underline that point, policing in New South Wales (Sydney, a city of 4.5 million, doesn't even have its own police department, which is a big problem in itself) is handled by John Watkins, the same government minister who's in charge of the collapsing transport system.

Not everybody agrees, of course, that sky-high crime rates and failing public transport are a bad thing, whether in New York or Sydney. Those of you who are or were MRR readers will remember that magazine's Mykel Board. He was here in town this past weekend promoting his book I, A Me-ist, and holding forth on his theory that high crime is "a good thing" because "it keeps rents down." I half-heartedly tried countering his argument by pointing out that this method of rent control might be fine for the young, strong and fleet of foot, but for poor old grannies (or even gentlemen of a certain age like, for instance him and myself), it could be disastrous or even fatal.

But I've known Mykel long enough (20 years!) to know that reason or logic were not likely to carry the day when they stood in the way of a good sound byte, so I let him carry on with his theorising, and we adjourned to a nearby bar where even the voluble Mr Board was cowed into semi-submission by what may easily have been the world's biggest band and record nerd.

This guy was a bottomless fount of information, facts and trivia, all of it, as near as I could tell, true, and about 90% of it, except to other band and record nerds, useless. Okay, maybe I'm being too harsh, no, really, I am. The guy could easily write an encylopaedia of 70s, 80s and 90s punk rock bands (with separate sections for England, New York, Washington, Texas, SoCal, SF-East Bay, and probably a lot more) and the minutiae surrounding them, and it would come in handy for decades of resolving barroom and internet message board arguments. But in person, it's just a little exhausting, especially when it takes the nonstop form of, "Hey, let me ask you about [obscure 1979 SoCal band]" and before you can answer, being interrupted with, "Let's talk about [even more obscure deceased members of Austin TX punk band circa 1982" followed up with "Don't you think that [completely unknown founder of completely unknown UK band] should have put [completely unknown re-recording of completely unknown in the first place song] on the B-side of his second single on [completely unknown indie record label]? Hey, what's up with you guys anyway, I thought you were into punk rock?"

Anyway, time to wrap this up before my run-on posts become as maddening as the run-on dialogue of TWBBARN (what's that you say, it already happened at least a year ago?). I just wanted to point out that "The Dead Leaves" is not the name of yet another justly obscure punk rock band (well, actually, I don't know that; it very well could be), but in my case it's meant more as a tribute to one of my favourite songs for this time of the year, "The Autumn Leaves" (drift by the window, etc, etc.), which has been coursing through my memory, and which the French, with characteristic mordancy and/or to-the-pointness, render as "Les Feuilles Mortes." With that, I'm just about of here, "here" meaning both blogland for today and Sydney for this summer. I'll probably have a couple more things to say before I board that big old jet airliner and set out for the north, but if not, I guess I'll catch you on the flip-flop.

The Sedition Barbershop Cabaret

You'll no doubt remember hearing about The World's Grumpiest Barber, who I think for future purposes I'm going to refer to as simply Mike The Barber, as he seemed a little hurt when I told him how I'd described him on the World Wide Interweb. He's still grumpy, true, but considering all that the man does for the arts and culture here in Sydney, I don't want to stereotype him as a one-dimensional ball of rage and frustration because, well, he's not.

In fact, I've been spending considerable time down at his Sedition Barbershop Cabaret, and although Mike disclaims any responsibility for the flourishing little scene that is developing there ("Hey, I don't do anything man, it just happens"), the place is developing an edge and a centre that seems wildly out of place in complacent old Sydney town, but is also exactly what's needed around here.

I hate even mentioning that much-maligned (and understandably so) decade, the 60s, but something about Sedition reminds me of the early, pre-hippie days when people used to stage "happenings," which meant basically that anyone could show up and express themselves in any way that suited their fancy, without, in most cases, getting laughed at or having pies thrown at them. Poetry, weird music, not-so-weird music, whatever: the point was more to create a free space in which ideas could flourish and people with something to say or questions to ask could get together and bounce off each other or the walls as the occasion might indicate.

Anyway, that's exactly what's been happening lately at Mike's place, and whereas he started out with just poetry/spoken word events on Tuesday nights, he's not got things going on several days a week. Tuesday I wandered in for the poetry gig and found a collection of people even older than myself sitting around listening to each other read. It looked kind of like an outing from the Old Hippies' Retirement Home, though as Mike informed me after they'd gone, it turned out to be the Old Gay Hippies' Retirement Home, and they'd all been reading poems about how great it was to be gay and/or old and/or a hippie. I didn't catch that bit, so when I jumped up to read my hastily composed thing about what an asshole I was when I was a gay hippie LSD dealer, I didn't get, shall we say, the most receptive of responses. Polite but tepid applause was all. Very tepid, actually.

Of course it also confirmed my long-held prejudice that it's never a good idea to write about drugs, and apparently it's an even worse idea to write about drugs in an uncomplimentary fashion when your audience thinks drugs are just peachy-keen. Or maybe there just wasn't enough gay stuff, but never mind; I came back again on Thursday for experimental music night, and this time the barbershop was packed out with youngish hipsters, the sort who would be equally at home in the Mission or Williamsburg, but because I'm so open-minded these days, I didn't even hold that against them.

There were two performers, both of which were a little deep and/or avant-garde for my fusty old self to grasp the full implications of, but who I nonetheless liked and enjoyed. The first fellow, one Matthew Philip Hopkins, reminded me a bit of the SF combo I Am Spoonbender, albeit in a way more low-tech way, with lots of bleeps and echoes. He told me he'd post a link to his Myspace via his blog, but as of now, nothing but blog there. Check it out anyway, if you're interested. The next guy, whose given name is Alex but who performs as "Always," did nothing but voices and echoes, sort of chanting himself into a ritual frenzy. Apparently there is a deeply gay sub or supertext to his work that I missed completely until I looked at his Myspace, but because these guys are so almost painfully hip, I have no idea whether it was gay or "gay." This being Gay Mardi Gras Weekend here in Sydney made it all the more confusing. Bear in mind that this is all taking place in what normally functions as very manly (and I mean manly in the sense of not particularly gay manly) barbershop.

A good crowd turned out, enough to pretty much fill the shop, even after the two barber chairs had been dragged off to the side and all available boxes, speaker cabinets, rubbish bins, etc., had been converted into seating. In between sets, Mike played DJ, and I had that very privileged feeling you get when you know beyond a doubt that whatever else might be going on in town or in the world at that moment, you're right where it's at and don't need to be anywhere else. Another night or two like that and I might be pegging my own trousers and declaring myself a full-on hipster. Not actually.

As a result, I missed going to see Ian Mackaye and his own experimental music duo, the Evens, who were performing across town, but though I would have really liked to see Ian, I'm not a huge Evens fan. Okay, enough of a fan to pay the $15, but just barely, and Mike's Sedition Barbershop Cabaret admission fee of $0 was a lot closer to my liking. So I reckon I'll be back there again Sunday for more experimental music, this time apparently played on more conventional instruments, though, and at Mike's urging, may make it a multi-media event by reading some story I have yet to write about being a pinhead. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. But right now internet-land is closing down and I'm being kicked out into the sultry Sydney streets. Oh, and hey, I'll be back in the USA soon: two weeks from today, in fact.

Aaron Cometbus Interview

A few years ago I did a lengthy interview with Aaron Cometbus, about two thirds of which was published in Punk Planet. Someone recently went to the trouble of transcribing and posting it online, so if you missed the interview the first time around or are interested in re-reading it, you can find it here.

Black Enough?

I first ran across an article exploring this particular brand of idiocy right where I would have expected it, in the San Francisco Chronicle, but now the paper of idiotic record has inflated it into a Serious Issue. I'm referring, of course, to the Guardian's take on "Is Obama Black Enough?"

While I don't think they ever get around to specifying just how black is "enough," what I found fascinating was the article's implication - nay, assumption - that having an Ivy League education, being well-spoken, and actually liking America makes him somehow not "authentically" black. The author goes on to list further strikes against Obama's blackness: he's "articulate" and "clean." You'd think such an assessment was compiled by an unrepentant redneck, but this being Guardian-land, of course it's not; the writer is the newspaper's American correspondent and resident race-baiter, Garry Younge, who himself is black.

Well, not quite black; like Obama, Younge is actually half-white, and, if I'm not mistaken, suffers the further embarrassment of having some American roots, but he's made a valiant effort to overcome these liabilities by becoming a strident proponent of black identity politics and a default America-basher. You get the idea from his article that he actually would like to support Obama, but feels the need to apologise to his "genuinely" black readership for doing so. Life would be so much easier for Garry if racist America would only embrace a "real" black candidate, i.e., a fast-talking, lying, cheating hustler of the Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson ilk. Ah well, life's full of difficult choices, isn't it.

P.S. As someone who's more or less inclined to support Obama myself, I was saddened to learn that he's "a vocal supporter of affirmative action." That, coupled with his lack of a realistic solution to the Iraqi debacle (apart from recycling a Vietnam-era "Bring The Boys Home Now" mantra) makes me a lot less inclined in his direction. I'll still choose him in a heartbeat over the odious Hillary Clinton when it comes to primary time, but it might be a bit harder to pull the lever for him when the national election comes around.

Flogging, Ritual Amputation, Or A Good Old-Fashioned Stretch In The Pen?

I found myself quietly cheering as I read this article about a serial graffiti tagger being sent to jail. Then of course I felt slightly guilty, since the whole thrust of the article was a variation on the whole "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?" theme pioneered by William Rees-Mogg in response to two members of the Rolling Stones being sentenced to prison for drugs in 1967 (the ensuing hue and cry resulted in the Stones being set free to take lots more drugs with relative impunity).

Do graffiti artists (or vandals, take your pick) belong in jail? The author of this article thinks not, and makes repeated appeals to sentiment, citing the offender's drug and alcohol problems (which apparently made him, in a blackout and/or stupour, pick up the spray can again even though he was on probation for previous offences and had been warned that getting caught again meant prison time), the relatively minor nature of the offence (true of an individual instance of graffiti, but what about when someone does thousands of tags, at a cost to the city and/or property owners of $100,000 or more?), the alleged fact that the more the cops crack down on graffiti, the more prevalent it becomes, and the notion that this particular miscreant is simply a misunderstood "would-be Basquiat."

Bringing in the Basquiat factor is certainly not a way to win my sympathy: I thought Basquiat's paintings (and I'm being generous with the term "painting") were ugly as sin, and the guy himself, if his biopic is to be believed, comes across as a lead-plated asshole. Be that it may, some people obviously had a high regard for Basquiat, who was essentially a glorified graffiti artist (vandal, take your pick), and the fact that some graffiti writers actually do end up as successful artists is one of the most prevalent arguments in favour of leaving them alone.

But what about the 95% or more of graffiti taggers who are clearly not artists by any conventional definition of the word, who are apparently motivated by little more than the desire to see their tag (or that of their gang) splashed all over town? Having lived in several heavily graffitied areas (most notably London and New York), I've gotten throroughly sick of the stuff, not to mention the people who do it. Still, it's worth asking: isn't it overkill to send someone to prison for an act of vandalism, especially when prisons are overflowing with more serious violent criminals?

As an abstract principle, yes. Public flogging, or, for you fans of sharia law, ritual amputation, would probably be far cheaper and more effective graffiti prevention measures. But assuming that's not going to happen (the implementation of sharia law, I mean) for at least a few more years, what can or should you do with graffiti-sraying assholes who show no inclination to stop, no matter how many times they're caught? Put them on probation once again and tell them, "This time we really mean it"?

The trouble is that no "community punishment" like probation or public service works unless there's something meaner and tougher to back it up. And short of the aforementioned flogging and amputation, what else is there besides locking someone up to reinforce the, "If you do that again, you'll be sorry" message that juvenile court judges and frustrated parents have been peddling since the dawn of time?

I guess the only other alternative is to declare cities free-fire zones (I mean for spray cans, that is) and let the graffiti writers have at it. I know some people see a certain beauty in a heavily graffitied cityscape, though it's always managed to elude me. And before you ask, yes, I probably have done some graffiti myself at some point or other in my many-chequered criminal career, but I can't remember any specific instances at the moment. And if you still think jail is too harsh for a graffiti tagger, bear in mind that you're talking to one of the only people in history who managed to get tossed in the slammer for littering.

Cheney At The Beach

Not really, but maybe. Who knows; his convoy was heading in the direction of Bondi. I know people have a variety of issues with VP Dick Cheney, to which you can add the one that is burning me up today: Deadeye Dick interfered with my God-given Australian right to go to the beach.

I saw my bus coming when I turned into Oxford Street, but I let it pass because I had to run across the street and buy a stamp for a letter to Aaron Cometbus (so I suppose he's just as much to blame as Cheney). No prob, I figured; this time of day buses to my favourite beach go every 15 minutes (give or take 20 minutes, as is the wont of Sydney's delightful transport system).

So I posted the letter and strolled on to the next stop, just off Oxford Street, where I started reading today's paper. When I'd read the entire paper (the Sydney Morning Herald is no New York Times, but it's got at least a bit more heft than the SF Chronicle), it seemed about time to start wondering why no buses - not even to other destinations - had shown up for almost half an hour, I strolled back over to Oxford Street to have a look.

Just as I got there, about 7 million police officers on motorcycles, in cars, and even in some trucks that looked more like tanks came rolling by. Dozens more cars, an ambulance, and in the midst of it, not one but two Presidential-style limos with American flags on them, separated by a couple Secret Service cars. I figured one of them must have a dummy Cheney in it and the other the real dummy, but I don't know how these things work; anyway, the limos were followed by 7 million more police and assorted vehicles. The motorcade as a whole was so wretchedly excessive: I mean to have to go through all that to take one guy to the beach or a hotel where he was giving a speech or sightseeing makes you think somebody ought to be asking himself either, "Why am I so unpopular?" or "Who the hell do I think I am?" if not both. It reminded me of a scene in the film Being There, in which an even longer and more preposterous Presidential motorcade seemed to make a point (in my mind, possibly pot-addled at the time) of how far American democracy had strayed, nay, mutated from its humble and maybe even heartfelt origins.

Enough of that sentimental whingeing, however; the main point is that I was more than a half hour late getting to the beach! And even after the Bald Buzzard has long since passed by, and the police had started letting cars drive through again, the buses were still being held back? Why? I can only assume that Australian intelligence services have determined that any terrorists longing to lob bombs at visiting dignitaries would of course hop on a Sydney bus for the quickest and most reliable of getaways.

Well, the hell with him, I say; I still got to spend most of my day at the beach, and he had to go around all day being Dick Cheney. I reckon I got by far the better end of the deal.

P.S. In the interest of adding some balance to this account, let it be noted that both Mrs Cheney and his daughter Mary have spoken very highly of the Vice-President, and a local journalist who has met him several times swears the man is witty, charming and personable in real life. All of which may be true, of course, but I fear we might be straying into "Even Hitler had a girlfriend" territory here. Bring back Spiro Agnew, I say! At least the man could make a speech.

Twilight Of The Donnas?

I've never been in a band that threatened to be the next big anything, so I suppose I should consider it a blessing that I also never had to be the subject of those "Whatever happened to...?" articles that get written about bands that might appear to be past their sell-by date. Like this one, for example, where the Bay Guardian tries to put as positive a spin as possible on the Donnas having been either dropped by or voluntarily left Atlantic Records (I will say that I've never heard of a major label allowing an under-contract band to leave if they thought there was any money to be made from them) and, after several years of playing arenas, being back to venues like San Francisco's 300-capacity Bottom Of The Hill.

It sounds like a sad story, though to be fair, the Donnas did have a pretty good run there, getting a chance to live out far more of a rock and roll dream that most of us ever get to witness close up, let alone be at the centre of. Personally I've never been a big fan of the Donnas' music, not because there's anything wrong with it - they're prodigiously talented musicians, and have worked incredibly hard for many years to achieve the success that they got - but because it's just not really my cup of tea. Too much rock and not enough punk would be the simplest way of putting it, I guess, but I will say that I liked them a lot better earlier in their career. Not, as it's popular among purists to say, in their pre-Lookout days, because I'm not even very familiar with their material from that time, but I thought their first couple records for Lookout showed promise.

People often ask me about the Donnas, assuming that I signed them to Lookout, but of course I didn't; they were brought to the label by the then-husband-and-wife team of Christopher Appelgren and Molly Neuman, somewhere around the time I was getting ready to leave the label (no connection, I assure you!). Would I have signed the Donnas myself? Probably not, but not because I didn't think they were good enough, just that I made it a general policy not to work with bands, no matter how great their potential to be popular, if their music wasn't something I could get fully enthusiastic about. Bands and managers were forever approaching me with charts and statistics telling me how many records they were sure to sell and/or that they sounded "just like" Green Day or Operation Ivy or Screeching Weasel, and I was forever knocking them back because if I couldn't a) enjoy working with the people involved on a personal level and b) genuinely love the music, it just wasn't worth it to me.

As far as getting along with the Donnas, I only met them once - no, not true, I met them two or three times, but only hung out with them once - and found them charming, pleasant, and fully committed to their music and the label, so (a) wouldn't have been a problem. But (b) would have been, and I've often wondered why, because many of my friends like or even love the Donnas' music. But then a lot of the same friends love Joan Jett and/or the Runaways, and I've never really got into them, either. My take on this, simplistic as it may be, is that the harder the Donnas tried to "rock" (perhaps I should render that as the corny and clichéd "rawk"), the less effective they got.

I've often explained this to those who asked as seeming as though the Donnas were trying to prove that they could rock out just like the boys (or better than the boys, for that matter), and while that's not an unworthy goal in itself, I feel it stopped them from reaching their full potential. I'd contrast them with my favourite all-girl band of all time, the Go-Gos, but the same principle would hold true for a couple other great but less commercially successful all-female outfits like Tiger Trap or Frightwig: although these latter groups couldn't have been unaware that by virtue of being all women they were an oddity in the male-dominated world of rock, they didn't bother making that an issue. They simply played their own music to the best of their ability, expressing themselves not in opposition or reaction to any kind of pre-existing dynamic or male-dominance paradigm, but as the unique human beings and artists they were. There's never been another band like the Go-Gos (or Tiger Trap or Frightwig), and this can't help partially being an expression of their female-ness, but far more importantly, it's an expression of their musician-ness and and their artist-ness.

Now the Donnas may be techically more adept than any of the aforementioned groups (though I find it hard to believe that anybody could be much better than the Go-Gos), but it always felt as though they were letting themselves be driven (in the sense of reacting to/against the male rock dynamic) too much by outside forces to fully be themselves. Or maybe it's that the specific male dynamic they were reacting to - the bombastic, butt-rock, shagging-groupies genre of rock-metal - is to me a largely worthless and uninteresting social phenomenon, certainly not one worth reacting to except to diss and ridicule it. Unfortunately, the Donnas seemed to want to emulate it, not just in their music and lyrics, but in their interviews, where they seemed to want to portray themselves as sexual predators every bit as voracious as the frat-boys-in-leather-trousers who've been dished up to us as rock idols ever since the 1970s and 80s.

It never rang true with me, either; unless I was completely hornswoggled by the Donnas' manner on the occasion I hung out with them, they weren't like that at all in real life. True, they did insist on being taken to Vancouver's rather tame version of Hooters, mainly because two of them weren't yet 21 and thus couldn't get inside an American one, but nonetheless they came across as anything but the sex and party monsters they seem bent on portraying themselves as in the media. In fact they talked mostly - in very demure terms, too - about their various boyfriends and fiancés. So I always had a problem reconciling their onstage and on-record personas with what I knew of them - or at least thought I knew - in real life. And while that sort of dichotomy or image-mongering may be quite common with mainstream bands, I've always had a problem with it when it reared its head on the punk rock scene.

Anyway, the article says that despite having left their label, the Donnas are moving ahead with making a new record, and maybe they'll surprise me with this one. Especially now that the pressure to deliver a big major-label-style hit is off, they might be able to get back to basics and make the kind of music that made them want to play rock and roll in the first place. Of course if it was always their goal to be the female equivalent of 70s butt-rockers or 80s hair-metal, I'm afraid I can't offer them much encouragement or advice, because I never understood or felt at home in those worlds. If I were their manager or producer (and I imagine they're thanking their lucky stars I'm not), I'd be urging them to think more Ramones, more Go-Gos, more Spazzys. But girls have to do what girls have to do, and despite my reservations and regrets about the way things have gone so far, I wish them all the best.

Mr Cheney Comes To Town

It's hard to get Sydneysiders agitated about much of anything apart from traffic, public transport, or their favourite TV show being pre-empted by the cricket (or, more likely, vice-versa). It wouldn't be at all unfair to portray them as having more than a bit of the lotus-eater in them, and given the 300 days a year of sunny weather, the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of delightful beaches, and the general lack of truly serious problems, who can blame them.

Thus it wasn't surprising that a rather desultory crowd of some 200 turned up to protest against the visit of one of America's least attractive and personable Vice-Presidents in recent memory, that being of course Deadeye Dick Cheney. In fact, I'd expect the folks of Sydney to be more exercised about his decided lack of charisma (anti-charisma might be the better word for it) and charm than his policies on Iraq, which are what usually get the protesters going.

I was surprised, however, that the Sydney-style protesters got themselves sufficiently worked up that 10 of them actually managed to get themselves arrested. Honestly, it's pretty hard to get yourself arrested around here, even when you're doing serious crimes, let alone standing around yelling at visiting politicians or pushing and shoving the generally ineffectual New South Wales police.

It could be that the goverment had to arrest somebody to justify the somewhat over-the-top counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist manoeuvres they've been engaged in all week in preparation for the Cheney visit, many of which involved running unlighted helicopters up and down our street at rooftop level for half the night. Or perhaps the whole night, for all I know; I eventually fell asleep dreaming that I was either in Vietnam or back in the Mendocino mountains at pot harvest time.