Bike Gang

Way back on Wednesday, no, actually Tuesday B.F. (Before the Flood), Aaron Cometbus showed up in my neighborhood. We met at the corner cafe and sat there drinking coffee for a while, but then he invited me along to pick up his bike from the repair shop. Aaron has a habit of inviting me on exciting errands. Last time I saw him, practically the first words out of his mouth were, "Dude, come with me to the UPS store!"

I suspected Aaron of having an agenda, which is generally a safe assumption, and in this case, it turned out that he had decided it was time I bought a bike. The thought has crossed my mind numerous times this summer, especially when waiting in vain for recalcitrant trains or wishing I could whip silently and swiftly through the late night streets to Greenpoint instead of slogging along on foot for the better part of half an hour.

But I kept putting off on the grounds that a) bikes are too expensive in NYC; b) I already have a perfectly good bike in California which one of these days I'll theoretically manage to get shipped out here. But Aaron was keen on this bike repairman/dealer who operates out of his garage on Lorimer. "I think he's the real deal," he says, which is about as full-on an endorsement as you're ever going to get from Aaron.

And sure enough, before I'd been there five minutes, I was being sold a not particularly lovely but perfectly functional bicycle for $50, which included a quick clean-up and spruce-up, a new (well, only slightly used) back tire, new handle grips) and a heavy duty (albeit slightly rusty) chain for locking it to lampposts thrown in. No, it's not quite as nice as my OG bike, purchased in Willits, California for $75 in 1993, but it's coming in a lot more handy.

Like tonight, for example, when I was tied up on the phone for quite a while, making me rather later for the Gravy Train show over on the North Side. No problem: onto the bike I went, and was there in maybe five minutes, ten minutes max. True, in my bike riding clothes consisting of baggy shorts and muscle T, I was a bit out of place in the finely kempt and coiffed crowd of rather glossy hipsters who half filled Studio B (the rest of the audience consisted of, if you believe Jackie O. gay boys and their fag hags, or if you trust my impession, lots of little lesbians and a sprinkling of young men of indeterminate orientation).

For there allegedly being no lesbians there, Jackie O. sure got chatted up a lot, which was more than you could say for myself or Unlovable Frank, who stood morosely around the edge of the stage and greeted me on my arrival with, "Great drummer, eh?" He was referring to the woman playing drums for the first band, Love Or Perish, who turned out to be one Molly Neuman, late of Lookout Records, Pee Chees, Bratmobile, riot grrrl, etc. etc.

She is a very good drummer indeed, and seems to have gotten even better since the last time I saw her. The rest of the band? They were very good, too, or rather they played very well and looked good. The songs were a bit forgettable, though, and the last one went on for an unforgivable five or six minutes.

That crime paled, however, compared with what was at least an hour's wait for the next band. This being Williamsburg, of course, nobody in the crowd had to go to work the next morning (except Jackie O. and Unlovable Frank, and yes, I'm being sarcastic about the rest of the audience, too). Jackie explained that the reason we'd been subjected to this seemingly interminable barrage of cheesy dance music (which actually started out good but plummeted rather precipitously downhill for a very long time before it finally stopped) was that we were being graced with a "celebrity" DJ, namely J.D. Samson from the band Le Tigre. Why someone supposedly knows how to be a DJ because they play in a band has always baffled me, but I'm giving J.D. the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she was responsible for the good dance music in the first half of the hour rather than the reprehensible codswallop in the latter.

I also discovered, lurking in the front row, the long-presumed-vanished Rop, also formerly of Rice, the Pee Chees, Lookout Records Mail Order, and a host of other activities. The last time I saw him, in Park Slope in the year 2000, he was leaving for New Mexico, and most people I knew assumed he was still there. "Actually, I never left Brooklyn," he breezily informed me. "I just didn't come out much for a while." Unlovable Frank introduced me to the writer/illustrator Cristy Road, who I'd been hearing and seeing so much about, and we had a nice chat about Florida and books and all sorts, and STILL there was no sign of another band playing.

Okay, they finally did come on, "they" being something called VIP, which turned out to be three manic gay white rappers, two of them sounding as though they'd swallowed helium balloons in the vein of MC Chris. The gay disco Beastie Boys, I opined, whereupon Unlovable Frank responded with, "A high school talent show in Chelsea." I found them a lot more amusing than Frank did, and he eventually sulked off to the bar to wait them out.

He waited in vain, however, as they were back to share the stage with Gravy Train in the night's big production number, and also appeared in a music video/short film which aired in between bands and during the entire time Gravy Train were playing. At least Gravy Train didn't make us wait for hours; they came clattering on to the stage rather quickly, in fact, led by a rubber-limbed and gurning Brontez, who as usual was the life of the party. Seth (Hunx) and the ladies lurked behind the keyboard at the back of the stage while Brontez hectored and harangued the crowd into a frenzy, and both boys were down to not much more than their underwear (well, Brontez was down to his tighty-whities and nothing more) well before the set was finished.

Although Jackie O., Unlovable Frank and I had all arrived separately, we left together and simultaneously discovered that we'd all come on our bikes. Off we went, through the back streets of Williamsburg, like an incredibly diverse (in terms of ages, genders and orientations) bike gang with a total membership of three. It was a relatively short journey before Frank had to peel off for the bridge and Manhattan, and Jackie left me in her dust and headed off to Bushwick.

But for about ten minutes it was one of those timeless rides, mostly in silence, where we seemed to fly in formation and the streets and sidewalks belonged to no one but us, a few moments when biking through the back streets on a warm summer night seems like the best - hell, like the only - thing in the world to do. Earlier in the evening I'd been talking to a different kind of biker - his Harley was parked out in front of my house - and he told me how he and two buddies had, on the spur of the moment, ridden off to Philadelphia to get cheese steaks one Sunday night. And that's how it felt on my bike tonight: I just wanted to keep riding and riding until nothing short of the ocean or the Continental Divide put a stop to my meanderings.

But instead I came home and wrote about it just for you.

The Downside Of Living On A Low-Lying Island

I woke this morning to the sound of thunder, and no, I'm not about to go all Bob Seger on you. But there is something especially spooky about a storm that comes crashing in on you at dawn, especially when it parks itself directly overhead and rolls balls and well of bolts of lightning down your street accompanied by window-rattling bursts of thunder minus the usual delayed reaction that you get when the lighting is striking a few blocks or miles away.

I'd only slept fitfully all night anyway, and now there was no way I was going to sleep at all; even with the blinds closed the lightning was still illuminating the room like some satanic strobe light, and the thunder was so loud that even when I turned on the radio to see what time it was and to find out if Armageddon had been declared without my knowledge, I couldn't hear anything but static.

I turned it up louder, but there was still nothing but static, and there for some reason picked up the phone - I don't know why; when I was a boy I was constantly fed horror stories about lightning striking your house and coming out the receiver of the phone and blasting away the brains of whoever was foolish enough to be talking on it - but it was dead. The sound of the rain smashing on the window and roaring down the street in a newly formed river was now almost as loud as the thunder.

Ever since I moved into this basement apartment, I've had a gnawing fear of hurricanes - not everyone knows it, but they do strike New York from time to time - and the possibility that if one did hit I'd be put through my own mini-New Orleans. And apparently I wasn't the only one this had occurred to; the landlord had installed two heavy duty pumps under the bedroom floor after the last bout of high water sometime in the 1990s.

And so far they'd worked. Any time water begins to rise underneath the house, the pumps are set in motion by a float device not unlike the one inside your toilet tank. But in order to operate, they need electric power, something which seldom is in ready supply during times of hurricane.

But it's not hurricane season for a couple months yet, and the electricity was working just fine, so there was no reason I couldn't lie back and enjoy the celestial pyrotechnics. Or so I thought until the voices on the radio, which had inexplicably started to work, were nearly drowned out by a deep gurgling sound.

At first I couldn't tell if it was on the radio or outside or from the pumps under the house. Eventually I decided that it must be the pumps, but decided to get out of bed and investigate, at which point I stepped into a pool of fast-rising water. The bedroom, which is slightly higher than the rest of the apartment, was just beginning to go under; in the living room and kitchen, rugs, waste baskets and shoes were beginning to float away.

I tried to call the super; oops, phone's dead, remember? The cell phone worked, but guess what, no answer. Meanwhile the water is starting to rise over the numerous power cords that run this computer and the host of other machines and gadgets one finds in the modern home. I yanked one set of plugs out of the socket, but my foot got a distinct little electric shock before I could get near the cord powering the TV, and I retreated.

I tried the super again and got him; he'd be right there, he said, but when he arrived, all he could say was, "Everybody on the block's flooded. What can I do?"

He did a lot, actually, once the water started to recede, helping to mop out the whole place, pick up stuff off the floor, etc., and even offering to pay for my computer power adapter, which had been destroyed. A few books and magazines were lost causes, one or two items of clothing, and a whole lot of tax and bank records which I'd unwisely spread out on the floor in preparation for working on them.

Probably a bit more damage will make itself known in the days to come, but so far it's nothing too drastic, just a rude reminder of what havoc nature can wreak when it gets a mind do, and a rather more sobering illustration that if a real hurricane should ever land on us, this place is likely to be filled to the ceiling, and everything I own and can't get out of here in time will probably be destroyed. Good thing I don't own a lot of stuff, isn't it?

But I'd miss this little computer and all the info that's on it, not to mention my electric piano and my guitar. The prospect of having to swim out of here in the dark is less than heartening as well. Not to mention the fact that every time it starts to rain - which it did several times today - I risk going into full-on panic mode. Oh well, at least I've got a better than average excuse for not getting anything done today.

The Last Night Of The Fest

I just sat down for the first time in what seems like about 16 hours. Upon more careful reflection I realize I'm probably engaging in hyperbole: I recall briefly parking myself in a chair in the upstairs bar somewhere around 7 pm, and of course I had to sit down to drive the car back here to the hotel, but apart from that I've been not just on my feet, but pretty constantly in motion for over 14 hours now.

I remember at one point someone asking what time it was and how many more bands still had to play, and realizing that even though we'd already put in a pretty full day of rocking and rolling, that it was only 5 o'clock and there were still eight (in the end it turned out to be nine) more hours to go. "If this were a job," I said, "We'd already be collecting overtime." It wasn't a job of course, though right now I'm feeling like I just put in a double shift at the steel mill; what it was - and no hyperbole here either - was one of the best days of my life.

A bit over the top, you ask? I don't blame you; it sounds that way to me, too, and when the phrase first popped into my head around the time the Mr. T Experience tore into "I Fell For You," I thought I'd better check with a few other festgoers before dropping it on the public. But the first five people I asked instantly agreed that it was one of the best days of their lives as well, and Jackie O. unhesitatingly pronounced it THE best day of hers.

I pooh-poohed that notion at first on the ground that her life hadn't been much more than a third as long as mine, but then accepted that both of our opinions were quite valid. Still, I hadn't fallen in love or won the lottery, or even done much at all apart from watch bands, dance, and run around talking to a couple hundred people. So what made it so special then?

The only answer I can come up with is: everything. Every single blessed thing, even the minor and major annoyances like getting clumped in the head by the flailing feet of a couple stagedivers or the power going out last night and shutting down Friday's fest session about four hours early. The latter was a disaster that would have sent lesser men (like, say, yours truly) running for cover, but faced with the likes of Chris Thacker, Pat Termite and Mark Enoch, the disaster quickly turned into no more than in a minor hiccup. The power was back up and running this morning, and with a few quick adjustments to the schedule, it was possible for nearly every band to play, and because set times were shortened (in most cases) to half an hour (strictly enforced by Mr. Termite, one of the best stage managers in the business), the bands wound up turning in tighter shows and better thought out sets than we would have dared hope for if they'd had 45 minutes or an hour to screw around in.

One exception to the half hour rule was Ben Weasel. The organizers wanted him to play for an hour, at least twice as long as most Weasel extravaganzas I'd ever seen, and in this case they turned out to be correct. Backed by New Hampshire's Guts and opening with a trio of songs from My Brain Hurts, Ben then proceeded to whip through a selection of Riverdales, Ramones, and Ben Weasel tunes, topped with a Queers cover ("Love Love Love." Ben then came back as guest vocalist with the Steinways, who've been known to insert the odd Weasel cover into their set list. The look on Chris Grivet's face as he played drums behind the man who'd been a punk rock god to him for 13 or 14 years was priceless.

"Grivet, back when you were a kid listening to Screeching Weasel, did you ever think..."

"No! Not in a million years."

"...that you'd be sitting there staring at Ben Weasel's ass while you and he played some of the favorite songs of your life?"

But the day was full of priceless moments like that. In fact, I'm tempted to say that's all the day was: an unbroken string of priceless moments that people will still be talking about 20 years from now, the same way they still talk about Gilman Street in 1987, or the first time they saw Operation Ivy or Screeching Weasel or Green Day.

I know, I said something like that about last year's fest, and I don't take any of it back. The thing is, this year's fest was just like last year's except for being bigger, better and even more amazing. I couldn't even begin to list all the highlights, musical or otherwise, especially not tonight when I'm desperate to get a few hours sleep before an early morning wakeup call for the trip back to New York, but let me just mention the Ergs, who were about as sensational as I've ever seen them, the Methadones, with Dan Vapid singing sans guitar for the first time I've ever noticed and topping off their set with a blistering version of "What We Hate," which, sadly, Ben didn't get round to doing, and the Copyrights, one of last year's sensations who have clearly upped the ante since then.

Also upping the ante were the Parasites and the Beatnik Termites, who to be honest haven't always impressed me in the past, but who each turned in the set of their lives tonight. It was as though bands were feeding off the incredible energy of the crowd and sending it winging right back at them. That, coupled with the excellent sound system and an audience fully prepared to sing along with every line, meant that were to be no bad performances, at least not that i saw. The Guts were sensational, both backing Ben Weasel and maybe even more so on their own (not to mention when Wimpy joined them for a mini-set of classic Queers songs). Hell, I don't know anyone who wasn't sensational, to the point where I was worried whether enough of the crowd would still be on its feet by the time the Mr. T Experience took the stage in the very nearly wee hours to wrap up the fest.

I needn't have concerned myself. Despite having spent much of the earlier evening propping up the front bar and possibly attempting to drink it dry, Dr. Frank demonstrated once again why show business is his life, treating a frenzied audience to exactly what I hoped he would: a delicately balanced admixture of mid-90s pop-punk classics and more contemporary stuff that should be classic, even if it isn't yet. He even threw in MTX's big "hit" from the 1980s, "Danny Partridge Got Busted," which pleased the purists and completists no end, but seemed to leave the younger end of the audience looking a bit bewildered. Roach and Scampi from the recently defunct Groovie Ghoulies, jumped on stage to do a number with Frank and the boys, and when I saw him heading in that direction, I figured B-Face, himself a former Ghoulie, was going to get in on the action, too.

Sadly he didn't. I guess you can't have everything after all, though the one wish I wasn't granted was for MTX to finish up their set with "Dumb Little Band," the song that probably sums up as succinctly as it can be summed up the whole pop-punk experience of the past 10 or 20 years. But such was not to be the case, so... maybe next year.

And there will be a next year, probably twice as big again as this year's model, and they're also talking about taking the show on the road. Just in case there was any doubt about it, today's/this weekend's events proved pretty definitively that this pop-punk thing isn't going away any time soon.

But I am: geez, I really have to get some sleep. Don't worry, much more fest coverage is sure to come to your way soon, and if you have a spare week or two to read it all, hop on over to the PPMB for what's likely to be some of the most exhaustive and exhausting discussion ever. Just don't mention the donuts.

Out Went The Lights

No three part harmony versions of the Star Spangled Banner, even though six of us ended up making the trip to Fort McHenry (in a four-seater car, just to add spice to the journey) through a typically Baltimorean morass of badly or not at all signposted backstreets. Coming back I ignored what signs there were altogether and simply traveled in the direction that seemed to make sense. The trip took less than half the time as it did going out.

Maybe it's just me growing thickheaded with age, but I've spent an awful lot of time getting lost in Baltimore, or trying to find the most basic services - like restaurants or stores that sell food. It's hard not to think that whoever's in charge around here - if anyone actually is - doesn't have much of an idea what they are doing. It's disappointing, because the place has the potential to be a beautiful city. Miles and miles of period buildings, a friendly and good-natured population, outstanding music scene, and yet Baltimore is kind of a mess.

A genial mess, true, and that has its advantages. For example, with about a hundred people hanging out on the sidewalk and spilling into the street in front of the Charm City Art Space, many of them drinking, including a few that might not have been legally old enough to do so, and a cop car comes rolling by just as the guy next to me takes an ostentatious swig of beer. Uh oh, he says, but the cop doesn't bat an eye or even slow down to see what's going on. In New York they would have called out the riot squad.

But what, you might wonder, were we doing at the Charm City Art Space when the Fest Of The Century was taking place about a mile up the road at the Ottobar? Well, funny you should ask. Although the Insubordination folks had been running a more or less perfect fest, with nearly every eventuality anticipated and prepared for, they fell victim to something they couldn't possibly have prepared for. Somewhere around 8 or 8:30, with the sun still out but sinking blood red in the western sky, the whole club suddenly went dark and quiet. Ben Weasel and I had been talking in a corner of the upstairs bar, and Dan Vapid had just joined us when the lights went out and the music stopped. "Too bad Even In Blackouts aren't here," quipped Vapid, the first of about 500 festgoers to make that joke.

We figured - well, I did, anyway - it was a blown fuse or circuit breaker, and that someone would change it or flick it back on in minute or two. But as the minutes accumulated into the better part of an hour, we started wondering if it was just the Ottobar that was blacked out or if it was the whole neighborhood or city. As it turned out, it was just one block, but unfortunately it was the block that the Ottobar sat in the middle of.

The local electricity people finally showed up around 10:15 pm with their cherry picker truck that hoisted a workman up to the top of the nearest power pole, which happened to be in the middle of an enormous overgrown tree. He spent another half hour clipping away branches and unhooking wires only to hook them back up again, but still nothing happened. Even the ice cream truck which had parked out back shortly after the blackout began and regaled the neighborhood with an hour's worth of "Turkey In The Straw" (meanwhile selling out most of its inventory to bored and famished festgoers) had cleared out, and the impromptu acoustic singalongs by the likes of the Ergs had died down, and still the electric man poked around in the branches with classic Baltimorean efficiency.

Around 11 he announced there was "no way" the power would be coming back on tonight - blown transform, apparently - beginning a mass exodus. Some went home or to their hotels, some to a local bar called the Rendezvous, and a hundred or two set off on the ten-block trek down to the Charm City Art Space, which had hastily been pressed into service as an alternative venue. Less than half of them could actually fit into the CCAS, so the rest of us stood out on the sidewalk, which you could hear perfectly well, even through locked doors, all except for the vocals, which you couldn't hear at all. It was a bit depressing to notice how alike all the bands sounded when you eliminated the singing.

About half of today's bands had already played before the blackout, but thanks to arriving late and spending so much time upstairs with Mr. Weasel and others, I only saw the Unlovables and about half of the Riptides, who finished up with a raucous audience participation version of "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg," which made me think, "Wow, thirty years after the Ramones burst upon the scene, twenty years after Gilman and Lookout came into being: who could have imagined that this kind of music would still exist, let alone be enjoying yet another renaissance?"

And now, provided the power's back on, the entire schedule will have to be chopped and changed to allow the bands who missed out on playing tonight to have their moment on stage tomorrow. By the time I'd gotten back to my hotel (lost AGAIN, thanks to some tricky business where all Baltimore streets change shape and direction after midnight), the Insubordination had done just that, and posted it on their website. All it really means is starting an hour early and cutting most of the bands' sets back to 20 or 25 minutes.Piece of cake. Well, for them, anyway. I wouldn't have wanted to touch it with a bargepople.

To my own way of thinking, shorter sets usually equal a good thing. It forces bands to concentrate on their best material and prevents the audience from getting bored. Will I be there for the 11 am start tomorrow morning? Very possibly not, but I won't be much later. Hopefully the lights will be back on and the pop-punk universe will return to its normally awesome and flawless functioning. But even if it doesn't, even if somehow not another note gets played, it's still the best fest ever. Music is great, but people are even greater, and we've got about 500 of the greatest ones hunkered down here in Baltimore for the duration.

Friday Morning Update

All predictions to the contrary, the day has dawned sunny and hot here in "The Greatest City In America" (the latest of a thousand slogans aimed at rebranding Baltimore as something more than a haven for murder and pop punk festivals. I feel like I failed to report numerous details of last night's events, like Christian being pelted with little girl's panties during the acoustic Tattletales set, one pair of which ended up on the head of Grath McGrath as he joined Team Stray onstage to sing a song that was great apart from Grath's apparent inability to stop yelling "Pop punk!" every few seconds. Let's hope he can do a better job of restraining himself when backing up Ben Weasel at tomorrow's show. Somehow I don't think Ben would find it quite as amusing.

Today P Smith, Jesse Blatz and I are off to do patriotic things, namely visit the Fort McHenry and record a three part harmony version of the Star Spangled Banner. Speaking of which, I'd better get going! More tonight, if I'm not too exhausted.

Report From The Front

Baltimore - There was some stress getting here, and I didn't choose my means of transport or lodging wisely, but I won't bore you with those details: the only important thing is that I got here on time - barely - and got the all-important wristband that would gain me entrance to the Sidebar for the first night of The Fest.

I wasn't at all sure that I would make it. When I arrived at about a quarter to five (doors were set to open at 5, the music to start at 6) there was already a line down the block and around the corner. It reminded me of the first time I showed up at Gilman to find a line waiting for the doors to open. That was for the Operation Ivy homecoming show after their first and only tour; before the tour, Op Ivy were just one of those bands that you saw at Gilman all the time. Great, sure, but kind of the personal secret of the couple hundred people that regularly showed up at Gilman no matter who was playing. But suddenly it seemed like the world had discovered them, and we Gilman regulars went wandering up and down the line gawking and wondering aloud: "Who ARE all these people?"

It wasn't quite like that in Baltimore tonight. Not yet, anyway, but it's getting that way. I could still pick out about three quarters of the crowd by either name or face, but plainly the Insubordination Fest (this is the second annual) has caught a buzz. Last year Sebby Zatopek and I were the only people who had come from overseas (well, the Apers, too, but they were performing, and were already on a US tour anyway). This year people flew in from England, Australia, Germany, Canada and Puerto Rico, not to mention a couple dozen states as far-flung as California, Washington, Arizona and Texas, to name a few.

Now that I'm permanently ensconced in New York (come to think of it, I actually only came down from New York last year, but I was still living in England at the time), I don't get any special cred for long distance travel (I did fly over from London for Pop Punk Softball last year, so I'm pretty sure I still hold the record for that event), but I tried to make up for lack of distance by upping the enthusiasm. Egged on by Matt Lame and Johnny B ("I heard you were ruling the pit last year; why don't you get something started here?"), I leapt into the fray as Delay took the stage, and while I can't claim credit for the good-natured mayhem that ensued, it was great to be right up front for what was arguably the high point of Fest Night 1.

As you may have read here, I've managed to miss Delay twice already, despite having met and talked with them at length last year, but now that I've finally seen them, I'm here to report that they lived up to all the hype. Incredible energy, incredible band. Fellow Ohioans Team Stray were right up there, too, and yet another highlight was Backseat Virgins, who, like the narrator of "Oh Susannah," come from Alabama, though sadly without banjos on their knees. Two girls, including one wielding a crazy pop keyboard, and two guys, adding up to what for me was the surprise hit of Day One (I'd not only never heard them; I'd never even heard of them before today).

Mike Blackandgold, one of the Pop Punk Message Bored's most inveterate carpers, dismissed tonight's lineup as "Kind of like the Special Olympics," featuring all the "bands who aren't talented to play the actual Fest." It may be funny, but it's totally not true. About the worst you could say of Thursday's lineup is that most of the bands aren't quite as well known as the Friday and Saturday bands. And...? Part of the excitement of the Fest is knowing that certain bands are going to break out of obscurity and set the world (well, at least our little corner of it) on fire in ways that neither the audience nor the artist ever imagined they were capable of. Two such examples last year were the Steinways and the Copyrights; who knows who or when it will be this year?

But what some don't understand - including perhaps some of those people who inexplicably passed up a chance to attend this year's Fest - is that as great as the music can be (and let's be honest: not every band is stupendous or even anywhere near it), the even greater point of the Fest is the camaraderie and fellowship, meeting up with old friends and new. Some of my fondest memories of the early Gilman days come not from inside the club itself, but from nights spent hanging out on the sidewalk out front, where gossip was traded, plots were hatched, and bands were born and died. I don't think I ever expected to feel that way again, but tonight it could have been 1987 all over, especially when Ben Weasel came striding up the street, looking tan, fit, and as though he'd barely aged in 20 years.

I could go on... and on, and on, but if I don't get to bed soon, I'll miss the start of tomorrow's Fest-ivities, not to mention our (P Smith, Jesse Blatz/Luscious and yours truly, anyway) to visit Fort McHenry before the rock and rolling starts all over again. Did I mention that tonight's show featured an utterly insane lineup of 12 (twelve) bands?!? Normally a show featuring more than three is enough to send me fleeing into catatonia, but tonight's spectacle virtually flew by, thanks to the flawless management and organizational skills of Insubordination impresarios Chris I. and Pat Termite. I think it actually ran ahead of schedule and ended a bit early, and when was the last time you could say THAT about a 12-band show? Okay, that's it for tonight, I'm over and out, and sorry to any bands, people, or legendary incidents I didn't get round to covering tonight. You were all fabulous, even when you weren't.

Hounds On The Hudson

My writer's block, aka procrastination, aka bone idle laziness continues. I can barely drag myself to the keyboard these days... Well, actually, that's not true; I'm plopped down in front of the computer as much as ever, but all I manage to do is vacantly flip from one website to another, occasionally mustering up enough energy to compile lists of all the things I need to write about and then filing them away until they are hopelessly obsolete.

I'm not sure what's brought on this flagrant mopery, but there you have it. I'm not even sure why I'm bothering to tell you about it, since there hasn't exactly been an upwelling of anguish from the internet when I've absented myself from blogging for a few days or more. Which I guess proves that I'm doing this more for myself than for an audience, though sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.

Certainly I'm no 327 Dave, who's just completed the self-posed challenge of writing blog entries on 327 consecutive days, each consisting of exactly 327 words (bear in mind that he's a professional philosopher, and if you ever wondered just what it is that sets philosophers apart from the less lettered masses of humankind, now you know). For one thing, I rather doubt I could muster the discipline to limit myself to 327 words (though if I used the same formula as Dave, i.e., based on his birthday, I'd have to crank out 1,028 words), and more to the point, my life is not sufficiently structured or consistent to do much of anything on a daily basis.

A sad commentary, some might say, and I'm often tempted to agree with them. Dave, of course, is gainfully employed and a family man to boot, both of which require a structure and consistency which have largely eluded me even during those occasional (and rare) years when I did have an actual job. Bear in mind that the only time I ever worked at one place for more than a year was when I was the boss, and even then I ended up firing myself. Several friends, knowing that I'm at least semi-looking for a job these days, have helpfully suggested that I put together a résumé (I've never had one, seriously, except when they made us write pretend ones in high school), but while I'd like to think of myself as a creative fellow, I doubt I'm creative enough to make a record like that look good.

So, no job and no responsibilities apart from coming up with an occasional blog entry, and now even that is becoming too burdensome? If this were the Old West and I were a horse, they would have taken me out and shot me long ago. But this being New York City in the no longer quite so early years of the 21st century, I got some pizza and went to a punk rock show.

Rotterdam's Apers were ostensibly the headliners, but technical difficulties prevented the boys from being at the top of their game. Even Kevin, their diminutive motormouth pothead frontman, seemed unusually subdued; normally he spends at least as much time talking (and hilariously so) as the band does playing. The Apers were still frighteningly tight and powerful - if they were an American band, they would have sold hundreds of thousands of records by now, but tonight the show was stolen by the Steinways, a last-minute replacement for New Hampshire's Guts.

It was a triumphant return to form for the Queens pop-punkers, whose last couple shows have been a bit desultory and lackluster. Elfin-eared Michelle Shirelle may be no virtuoso on the bass guitar (singer-guitarist Grath McGrath frequently had to coach her on how a particular song went, e.g., "This one's in the key of 6"), but she gets the job done, and deserves to be front and center if for no other reason than her delightful line of gibberish. And Grath, as I've said before and will no doubt say again, is a genius.

The Steinways, also consisted of Handsome Ace and internet celebrity Chris Grivet, are rumored to be backing Ben Weasel for at least part of Baltimore's Insubordination Fest later this week. Longtime readers of this blog will know that last year's fest was the most amazing cultural event thus far in the 21st century, and this year's threatens to massively surpass it. Normally you have to drag me kicking and screaming to get me out of New York City, but I'm eagerly packing my bags for Baltimore already.

After the show (New York's other faves, the Unlovables, and Florida's Hi-Life also played), I jumped into the Apers' van, piloted by roadie Sebby Zatopek, for the journey from the Knitting Factory up to the East Village. Thanks to Friday night traffic, it would have been faster to walk, but that would have meant missing out on the rapid-fire commentary of four Dutchmen on the current state of Nieuw Amsterdam. You thought Americans had an attitude and didn't hesitate to express it? They're shrinking violets by comparison.

Our destination was Manitoba's Bar on Avenue B. I've walked people there, I've hung out on the sidewalk in front, but I'd never been in the joint before, assuming it would be little more than elephant's graveyard for old punk rockers (and no, I don't think that necessarily means I'd feel right at home there, Mr. Smartypants). But as it turns out, it's a fairly pleasant place as bars go, crowded but still negotiable, and with a decent blend of ages and cultural affiliations.

About 10 or 15 of us were there, mostly habitués of the Pop Punk Message Bored, and while some busily occupied themselves with getting shit-faced, I had the privilege of hearing a baleful tale recounted by Chadd Derkins, who's an even bigger internet celebrity than Chris Grivet, if such a thing is possible. Chadd, it seems, regularly has to go out to New Jersey to house-sit his parents' apartment. I'd always thought that a bit strange, not understanding how much sitting a high-rise could possibly need.

As it turns out, the real job involves looking after his parents' dog, which has to be taken every morning to a doggie day care center called "Hounds On The Hudson." Affable guy that he is, Chadd takes this in this stride, but he admitted to being a little put out by the doggie report card that little Foo Foo or Fifi or whatever it's called, brings home each night.

"It's not so much the idea of the report card that gets to me," he said, "but for some reason I'm supposed to believe that it was actually written by the dog. I'll get this card that says, 'Today I had a very good day. I ran around a lot and played with Sasha and Fred (I'm assuming these are dogs, not people) and had a delicious bowl of kibbles.'"

Does it always say positive things, or does he get a bad report sometimes, I wanted to know? "Well, they put it diplomatically, yes, but sometimes it will say, 'I was really very lively today,' which I'm assuming means 'I was a holy terror.'"

Always intrigued by these slice-of-life tales from mysterious New Jersey, I asked Chadd if he thought his parents' rather intense relationship with their dog mirrored or was an attempt to replicate the relationship with Chadd himself. He was, after all, the last child to leave home, and not all that many years ago, either.

"Well, let me just tell you this," he said. "In the living room my parents have a frame with spaces for four photos. My parents have four kids. In the frame are pictures of my three sisters and..."

"Their dog?" I asked. It seemed the most obvious answer but apparently nothing is obvious in the Derkins family.

"No! It's a picture of Dr. House!"

"The guy from the TV show?"

"That's the one."

"Don't they have a picture of you?"

"They must have thousands of pictures of me. But in the frame is Dr. House. It's cut out from some magazine."

At this point I was left speechless, as I often am when attempting to plumb the depths of the ever-amazing Chadd Derkins and the world from which he emanated. Chadd and his band Short Attention will be in Baltimore this week too, so I suspect you haven't heard the last of him just yet.

The End Of The World

No, I'm not feeling especially apocalyptic today; it's just that on my way home from the gym, the old Skeeter Davis tune "The End Of The World" popped up on my iPod. For those of you who don't know the song, it's a particularly plangent tearjerker (Why does my heart go on beating? Why do these eyes of mine cry? Don't they know it's the end of the world? It ended when you said goodbye.) that struck a chord with me when I was a young teenager and which I've loved ever since.

I discovered it, as I did many of my favorite pop songs from the early 60s, while walking my paper route with a primitive transistor radio (twenty times the size of an iPod Nano and delivering only the local AM radio stations through a tinny speaker that somehow managed to sound like Carnegie Hall to my impressionable young senses) stuffed in my bag as I languidly wandered the mostly deserted streets flinging the unloved and unwanted Detroit Shopping News at porches and/or bushes depending on my mood.

I don't know why that song resonated so strongly with me. When I first heard it I'd never been in love or anything resembling it, so it would have been hard for me to identify with the notion that life wouldn't be worth living if some special someone walked out of my life. Star-crossed romance, or romance of any kind, seemed as abstract a concept as traveling to Greenland or Mars; I was much more concerned with getting my hair to stand up the right way and finding the right pair of sharkskin iridescent trousers to wear when hanging out with my gang on Friday night.

But the song stuck with me; when I got my first guitar, I learned to play it and often inflicted it upon anyone unwise enough to remain in the vicinity. Eventually I collected a suitable set of heartbreaks and doomed loves for which it could serve as a soundtrack, but ultimately it was supplanted in the misery department by the more artsy plaints of the Smiths and Joy Division, and became more of a private nostalgia thing for me.

Which was how I took it today, until for some reason I started calculating and discovered that it had been almost 45 years since Skeeter Davis and "The End Of the World" entered my life. I've been having an increasing number of these disconcerting moments lately, wherein I come face to face with a memory that for the majority of people alive today is practically ancient history.

And that in turn gets me ruminating on how much - and how little - has changed. Ipods and cell phones and the internet would have been completely unimaginable to the 15 year old Larry who sang along with Skeeter's heartbreak without having any real idea what it was about, but the feelings of sadness and desperation were as timeless then as they are today. It's odd: in the past, my memories have tended to be vague and romanticized things, subject to much editing and rewriting as the moment or the emotion necessitated, but lately they've been vivid sense memories, including things like how my first cigarette smelled and tasted, or what the sun felt like as it beat down on my back that first day of summer vacation as I headed for the railroad tracks to meet up with the gang.

And most of these memories, the vivid ones, anyway, are coming from those early teen years, just before alcohol and drugs drew a curtain over many of my darkest maunderings, when I was still clear-headed enough to get the full effect of the world I was being cut loose in, and still sufficiently bamboozled by hope to understand the true meaning of desperation.

Frisco Potheads Hate The Disabled

San Francisco marijuana dealers look to be hoist on their own petard: having, in the wake of Proposition 215, set up numerous quasi-legal dope houses masquerading as "medical dispensaries," they're now facing a city requirement to make those facilities accessible to the disabled.

It's nothing that wouldn't be required of any other new business, and seems particularly appropriate considering that Frisco's potheads have been peddling the line that they are engaged in a humanitarian - albeit highly profitable - mission to provide "medicine" to the sick and suffering, many of whom we'd have to assume would have limited mobility. In reality, of course, most patrons of the "marijuana clubs" are afflicted with no ailment more serious than terminal hippie-itis, and you can't expect them to sit there smoking their "medicine" while surrounded by a bunch of cripples in wheelchairs. I mean, that would be such a bringdown, maan!

(Almost) Missed The Boat

No, this is not about the Steinways; it's about what almost happened to me on Friday night when I unwisely relied upon New York City's public transportation network to get me to the Weakerthans boat cruise/gig on time.

Not that I had a lot of alternatives: driving/cabbing it would probably have taken twice as long, being that it was the height of rush hour, and apart from persuading a helicopter to pick me up at my house, walking was about the only other choice.

So I trustingly showed up at my local station, allowing 45 minutes to make a trip that might amount to three miles or so. At that hour of the day, trains usually come every 2-4 minutes, so I wasn't anticipating any difficulty until I noticed that the entire platform was clogged with people, many of whom looked as though they'd been standing there for a very long time. The overhead indicator said the next train wouldn't be for another 14 minutes, by which time I figured members of the crowd would be getting shoved onto the tracks by new arrivals trying to force their way onto the platform. Which of course would only delay things further as the train would have to wait while they scraped up the bodies.

On top of that, I reckoned, if every station along the line had a similar number of people waiting to board, the train would be so full by the time it got to us that nobody would be able to get on anyway (this happens quite often during the morning commute, which, thankfully, I don't participate in). But, lo and behold, the train showed up a mere 12 minutes later, rather than 14, and even more wondrously, was only about half full. In fact there were even a few seats available.

Not that they'd do us (or the cause of getting to the Weakerthans show before the ship sailed) any good: the train just ROLLED ON THROUGH THE STATION WITHOUT STOPPING. I suppose the reasoning (assuming any was involved) was that they needed to get trains to Manhattan as quickly as possible so evening commuters could get home. Fine for them, but now there was serious doubt about whether I was going to see the Weakerthans. A few hours earlier, disconsolate because I hadn't been able to find anyone to go with me, I'd been grousing that I might not bother going myself, but suddenly I was filled with rage and regret at the image of the boat fully of happy revelers sailing away while I stood on the dock with my mouth hanging open at the injustice of it all.

When a train finally did show up that also deigned to stop for us, it was completely packed, but I forced my way on board nonetheless. But then it proceeded to crawl into Manhattan, and because there were so many people entering and exiting, each station stop took a small lifetime. I reckoned that at this rate the only way I'd have even a remote chance of making it on time was if the uptown A train arrived almost in the same instant that my train arrived at 8th Avenue, and even then, I'd have somewhere between five and seven minutes to make it from the Port Authority at 8th and 42nd down to the river. Possibly doable if I ran all the way.

Amazingly enough, the A did show up just as I hit the platform, and got me to the Port Authority with a couple extra minutes to spare. But I'd overestimated my running skills, with respect to both endurance and to what amounted to broken field running through rush hour pedestrian and vehicular traffic. By the time I'd got to 10th Avenue I had come close to knocking two people over and being knocked over myself by a speeding cab, and was panting with exhaustion. I got out my phone and tried to dial while running, thinking if I could reach Frank Unlovable, who was waiting in line, that perhaps I could get him to beg the ship's captain to hold back the sailing time for a few more minutes.

But for the longest time nothing came through on my phone except static, and when Frank finally did answer, I was in sight of my destination. A few stragglers were still boarding, and after all my panic and frustration, the boat didn't end up leaving till something like a quarter to seven anyway.

I had been looking forward to watching the skylines of New York and New Jersey (all right, I'm taking some poetic license in the latter case) glide by as I enjoyed the music of the Weakerthans, but the way things were set up, you pretty much had to be confined to a cramped indoor space if you wanted a good look at the band. Oh well, I said to Frank, if it was just a boat ride I was after, there was always the Staten Island Ferry.

The Weakerthans were as sensational as ever, not perhaps in quite the same lean and hungry way they were when I first chanced upon them (actually I was dragged to see them by Grant Lawrence) some nine years ago this month, but what they may have lost in youthful spontaneity was more than made up for by supremely self-assured musicianship and John Samson's inimitable way of combining passion, grace and profundity with his down home/aw shucks manner.

I'd never seen John enjoying himself so much on stage before, and he seemed equally relaxed when he stopped by for a chat afterwards, despite having to field requests for autographs or photos on an average of every 15 seconds. This feeding frenzy of fandom only intensified a few minutes later when Blake Schwarzenbach joined the party. Because of the East Bay/Gilman Street connection, people always assume I know Blake, but in actuality I've only met him twice previous to this, and only briefly at that. So it was a real treat getting a chance to talk with him in a little greater depth, and to discover our mutual love for the Weakerthans.

The one thing about the show that struck a slightly discordant note (literally) was the way the fans tended to drown out the band on some of the quieter songs. I've often remarked at how I've never seen another band where the fans not only know the lyrics so thoroughly (and in the case of the Weakerthans, there are rather a lot of lyrics to know), but also sing them so loudly that at times John could go out for a beer and many people wouldn't even notice. In the past I've found this quite charming, but this time the fans, at least where I stood, resembled a pack of drunken frat boys baying somewhat tunelessly at the moon, which tended to clash with the delicate imagery and melody of songs like "My Favorite Chords" or "Left And Leaving."

Oh well, no live show is ever perfect, and if I want flawless harmonies, I'll just put the records on at home and sing along by myself. No doubt those beer-sozzled vocalists surrounding me at the show felt similarly about their own efforts.

Anyway, that's the Weakerthans, and that was my Friday night. Too bad it took me until late Tuesday to write about it. They're back in New York this autumn, with a brand new record to follow shortly.

Summer's Always Gone Too Soon

The first full day of summer (the solstice was yesterday afternoon), the longest day of the year, and already there's an autumnal nip in the air.

Actually, summer hasn't gotten properly started so far. There've been a few days here and there when it was genuinely hot (usually days I was stuck indoors for some reason or another), but we still haven't got to the point where I can safely throw all my jackets and sweaters and even long sleeve shirts in a cupboard and forget about them for a few months.

Today, in fact, is genuinely cool, with a stiff wind blowing down from Connecticut or some place similarly chilly; not the best conditions for tonight's boat cruise featuring the Weakerthans, which it looks as though I'll be attending solo, despite having bought an extra ticket for an unspecified someone who I was sure would be thrilled to come along.

Several unspecified someones, actually; I think at this point I've asked at least seven people if they wanted to go and all had "other plans." New York is a city awash in and replete with plans, it's true, but in the darker recesses of my soul I still can't help wondering whether it's me or the Weakerthans that's the offputting factor.

It's up early tomorrow morning, too, for the first day of the MoCCA convention, featuring - at the ungodly hour of 11 am - a Drawn and Quarterly showcase of Anders Nilsen, Kevin Huizenga, and the ever-fabulous Gabrielle Bell. A host of other events await this weekend as well, leaving me little breathing space between now and Monday morning, but I'm still feeling a little flat and melancholic at the thought of summer rushing by so fast and leaving me with nothing to show for it.

What are you supposed to have to show for summer anyway, the rational side of me asks, apart from a suntan and some happy memories (and even the suntan should be dispensed with these days if your dermatologist is to be believed)? At any rate, my angst, my Weltschmerz is more than seasonally related, I suspect, having been building up for some weeks or even months now.

One symptom of it has been a disinclination to write anything here (or anywhere). As many of you no doubt already know, Punk Planet magazine, which I've written a column for since it first launched in 1994, has announced it was shutting down, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit that my first reaction was, "Well, there's one less deadline to worry about." Not my only reaction, true, but my first, almost instinctive one. And it's not as though I've overwhelmed with deadlines, either; the bimonthly one for Punk Planet was one of only a handful I've had to contend with in recent years.

But having had a few weeks to think about it, it finally occurred to me (I'm a slow thinker) that this is the first time in over 20 years that I haven't a commitment to write for some publication or other on a regular basis. And, distressingly enough, the question that insinuates itself into my mind is: does it matter? Do I really have anything to say that isn't already being said and re-said by millions of writers and bloggers and drunks falling off barstools across the land?

I know that when I first published Lookout magazine back in the mid-80s, producing that amateurish little mess of stapled-together xeroxes felt vitally important, as though I had some absolutely essential message that might never get out to the world except through my efforts. What exactly that message was supposed to be, apart from some cobbled-together rehashes of some Dead Kennedys lyrics and Earth First propaganda, I'm not sure, but I never doubted that people needed to hear it.

Now here I am with a good deal more experience and education, and hopefully with some more developed writing skills, wondering if there's anything I can tell you that isn't already being told just as well or better by someone else. Or several someone elses.

I guess the certitude of youth - not that I was exactly a kid in the 80s, either - lends itself nicely to the output of polemics and vituperation which seemed to be what my readers most appreciated in those days (I even got a note from the late great Herb Caen complimenting me on my abundance of vitriol, which he contended journalism needed more of), and I just don't possess that certitude today.

Opinionated, I may be, but my opinions are subject to constant and rapid change in response to new information, whereas during my time as a firebrand and rabble-rouser, I was more wont to follow the old journalist's dictum of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. "Your articles are this crazy mix of truth and made-up stuff, and it's almost impossible to tell which is which," one admirer wrote to Lookout. "It's just like Time magazine!"

Anyway, I've got a pile of stuff on my desk that I've been intending to write about for the last week or two. The usual stuff: hippies, transportation, the Middle East, blah blah blah. I had all sorts of things I wanted to say about them, but not, apparently, enough to actually say it. Maybe I've got to take some time off to really reflect on just what the point of my writing is, or even if there is a point. I mean, it's not as though there's a shortage of writers, is it?

Enough of that; I'm off to see the Weakerthans now on a boat sailing around New York harbor. Despite all my misgivings and self-doubt, don't be surprised if I'm back in a few hours to tell you all about it.

P.S. The title "Summer's Always Gone Too Soon," while having its own appropriateness and pertinence to the subject matter, is also a nod to the song of that name on the new Ben Weasel album, which I believe is coming out in the next few days. Last time I checked, it was being streamed here.

In The Darkest Depths Of Mordor

One of the things I've missed most about England has been my monthly outings with the West Country Walking Society, and yesterday all six of us were reunited for the first time since last summer, meeting up in a car park in Shaftesbury, Wiltshire, and setting off on a meandering odyssey that took us over hill and dale (following a lengthy ridgetop discussion and a subsequent visit to the internet, I FINALLY - after a lifetime of wondering, learned what a "dale" is), past hundreds of hopelessly beautiful stone cottages and English country gardens, through some stone gateways and tunnels that looked as though they had been there since, well, the Stone Age, past a number of markers and walls with mysterious Latin engravings, including one milepost pointing the way to Sarum, which I momentarily mistook for someplace or someone out of Tolkien until I remembered that it was the original name for the settlement that eventually grew into the town of Salisbury.

Which probably explains why I kept thinking I heard people talking about "Mordor" when in fact it turned out to be Wardour, as in the ruined castle pictured above. It suddenly appeared on the horizon at about five miles into our walk, and loomed larger and larger as the trail wound its way down into the valley until we were face to face with its rather spooky remains. The illusion was slightly dented, however, when we rounded the bend and discovered a large car park packed with tourists and their squalling offspring, many of them clutching wooden swords or bows and arrows (the castle was used a backdrop in Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves and apparently does a brisk business in associated memorabilia).

We'd been looking forward to exploring the ruins, but that was before we discovered it a) was already crawling with visitors; and b) cost £3.40 ($6.80) to enter. So we had a picnic on the front lawn instead and discussed cricket and motor racing, each of which had one adherent among us and varying degrees of ignorance or disinterest among the rest. Several miles later and a potentially perilous trek through a field clogged with cows and the attendant cow muck, we arrived at the Royal Oak pub in the village of Swallowcliffe, where I kept trying to initiate a conversation about chavs and Richard kept - to my bewilderment - shushing me, until I realized the group at the next table were prime specimens - albeit rather well-dressed ones - of the genre.

Our next animal adventure came when a troupe of enormous and very muscular horses surrounded us demanding tribute. Bella passed out carrots, but there weren't nearly enough to go round, and things looked as though they could get ugly, especially with Richard warning that, "At any moment they could decide to take a huge bite out of you." But we escaped over the fence and carried on, Bella's whingeing ("Wouldn't it be much more pleasant and sensible just to drive to somewhere nice and have a picnic?"), back to our starting point near Shaftesbury, arriving eight hours and 13 1/2 miles after we'd started out.

It was a quintessentially English day out, and one of the highlights of my trip. Today I'm sitting under more traditionally gloomy skies (yesterday featured loads of sunshine and almost American-style summer temperatures) here in Bristol, and tomorrow I'll be on my way back to New York. It's also worth noting that yesterdays 13 1/2 miles was the farthest I've done since last year's foot operation, and I did it virtually without pain, so that was a hopeful sign. Today, if Danny gets his journalism work (he writes for one of the national dailies) done, we're off to either the Wye Valley or South Wales. If not, I'll be knocking around the house and looking at the internet, in other words, just like home. Either way, a fine day, and a fine way to conclude my first English holiday as a born-again American.

Oakland: Going Nowhere Faster As Mayor Remains MIA

Apparently I'm not the only one who sees the parallels between David Dinkins and Ron Dellums: the East Bay Express's Chris Thompson delivers a damning portrait of the new Oakland mayor's disappearing act.

One connection he makes that I'd failed to remark upon was the tendency of both Dinkins and Dellums to flounder about helplessly while looking to state and federal government to come and save their bacon: it's the "look pitiful and hope people will feel sorry for you" tactic which rarely works well for street beggars either, unless they happen to be a lot cuter than the mean and pathetic city of Oakland is ever likely to manage.

While it's always possible to dredge up some forms of financial aid, it will never be enough to effect real change, especially when bureaucracy and corruption will always swallow up the bulk of it. But as Thompson points out, the worst thing about this approach is that it sends a stentorian message to investors and developers that this town has no future, can't guarantee the security of their enterprises, and is best left to the government to run as a semi-permanent underclass reservation.

Back To The Old House

I didn't want to go, but I kind of had to. All this week I've been putting off going past or near my old flat, even taking a circuitous route when I went to Portobello Market so I wouldn't even walk on any of the streets that ultimately led there.

It's been a long-standing tradition/habit/compulsion with me that when I visit a town where I used to live, I walk past not just any houses I lived in, but houses or shops or hangouts where anything of significance happened to me. But for whatever reason, I didn't want to do that during this week in London. Maybe it's too soon, maybe I didn't want to be turned into a pillar of salt, maybe I just wanted to experience London in a different way than I did during all the years I lived here.

But as it happened, it was only my old flat that I ended up avoiding. The rest of the time I trod familiar paths, going to the same gym, the same restaurants and cafes, the same backstreets of Soho, and hanging out with most of the same people. And finally, today, came the day when I could no longer avoid Westbourne Park and the yellow brick semi-brutalist modern block of council flats that I first saw in 1975 when it was practically brand new (and, under the astute management of the council, already beginning to fall to bits), lived in on a part-time basis from the 70s through the mid-90s, and lived in full time (well, apart from my peripatetic globetrottings) since I left Lookout Records in 1997.

I was hoping the new owner would bring me the mail that's accumulated there these past few months, but he lives way out of the way in South London and wasn't up for making a special trip, so it was down to me. I boarded the dodgy old Hammersmith and City Line - also for the first time during this trip - and exited at what used to be my station, only to find that the tenant at the flat hadn't made it home in time after all, and that I would have to kill an hour or two waiting for her.

I spent the first half hour outside the door, making phone calls and musing over just how strange it was that I no longer had a key to the comforts of home on the other side, and what's more, that I had now become one of those mysterious, vaguely threatening characters who sometimes hung around the corridors for no apparent purpose. Several people walked past looking dubiously at me, and a foul little fat girl from the other end of the building started riding her bike up and down the hallway while her mother looked on obliviously.

When I lived there I was forever telling kids off for riding bikes and skateboards in the halls; not only did it destroy the floors, but it made a lot of racket, occasionally knocked over old ladies, and was just plain annoying in that there was acres of pavement right out front for any normal kid to ride on. Plus I was a member of the tenants management committee, and it was kind of my job to remonstrate with people when they ignored the rules and/or damaged the building.

Out of habit I very nearly spoke to the brat, then spent ten minutes debating whether I should, each time getting more incensed as she smugly rode past me, to the point where I was afraid I might deliver a swift kick to her hind end if she came close enough again. I decided - rationally enough, I suppose - that it was no longer my business, and thought it best to get out of the building before irrationality intruded on the scene once more.

I walked down to Portobello Road and strolled slowly from one end to the other of the main drag - the part you'll have seen Hugh Grant striding back and forth over if you happened to watch the film Notting Hill - and grew exceedingly depressed. A little angry, too, though why I should take personally the failings of a neighborhood I no longer live in, I have no idea.

It was just after 8 pm and the place was closed up tight as a drum. Apart from a few pubs and restaurants, mostly colonized by the just-off-work suit-and-tie brigades, the street was deserted. If you're not sure why this should be remarkable, consider New York's Greenwich Village, a rough counterpart to Notting Hill in that both are one-time bohemian enclaves now primarily owned and occupied by the extraordinarily rich and privileged. Would you see all the shops in the Village closed and the streets empty at 8 am? Or 4 am, for that matter? Perhaps if a hurricane or World War III were on its way, but not bloody likely otherwise.

So just what is London's/Notting Hill's problem? I have no idea, but I felt immensely glad that I no longer live there, and made a firm resolution that if I should ever move back to London, it won't be anywhere near W11. Walking back toward my old flat, I saw three teenagers apparently trying to break into the front window of one of the million-pound flats in full view of several passersby and what was more or less full daylight (it doesn't get dark till around 10 pm this time of year). No one seemed to care, so I didn't either.

The tenant at what used to be my flat finally got home and invited me in, despite my initial intention to simply collect my mail and get out of there. I recognized the carpeting I'd installed downstairs and the one or two pieces of furniture I'd left behind, but that was about it: a new paint job, new flooring, furniture, artwork made the place look positively elegant, something I never achieved in all my years there.

She was a fabulously beautiful and incredibly friendly Spanish violinist; we ended up talking for almost an hour, and agreeing that it was ridiculous that the neighborhood should close down even before darkness fell. In Spain, as in New York, street life barely gets started until long after dark, and in fact, she'd finally made up her mind to move away to Berlin, where she could enjoy twice the action at half the price.

That made me sad; the idea of my not living in the flat any longer was made easier by the thought of someone so elegant having taken my place. But I understood her motives and wished her well. She gave me the loveliest hug goodbye despite never having met or seen me before, and I walked down the hall, out the door, and into the Tube station without ever looking back again.

Ben Weasel, The Leftovers, And The Fest

It's only a month away now, and while I haven't been going out of my way to hype it - not least because it's been sold out pretty much since the day it was announced - the second annual Insubordination Fest celebrating all things pop-punk and wonderful looks to be the event of the year, if not the decade.

Once again situated in the unlikely (and, some might argue, unlovely) locale of Baltimore, this year's event features appearances by more bands than I can easily count, including some that few among us believed might ever grace a stage again. Foremost among these must be the Mr. T Experience and - believe it or not - Ben Weasel, who this month will also be releasing his first record in - well, I could look it up, but you probably know better than I do. Let's just say it's quite a while.

And now the official Fest page has put up a track from the upcoming album, and if you've ever been a fan of any Weasel-related enterprise, you're probably going to want to rush over here and check it out. Along with it you can hear an equally sensational track from the Leftovers' new record and another from the Retarded, a band I'd never heard before but look forward to hearing again. For those of you not lucky enough to be going to Baltimore, my sympathies (though word is that at least you'll be able to savor the entire event on a DVD to be released shortly thereafter); to those of you who are: can't hardly wait!

This Is England?

I'm sure it's just a sign of encroaching age, but I'll have to align myself with the tens of thousands of appalled Brits who are in an uproar over the new logo for the 2012 Olympics as seen at left, for which the taxpayers forked over a not insubstantial £400,000 ($800,000) and which has shown itself capable of driving epileptics (and, I suspect, some non-epileptics as well) into fits.

Cue the usual outrage to the effect of "My eight year old kid could draw something better than that," but in this case, it's very possibly true. Well, not my eight year old kid, as I don't have one, but certainly almost any of the numerous graphic designers I number among my friends could have come up with something better. I've found that as a general rule, the quality of logos is inversely proportional to the amount spent on them, and it will probably be a long time, if ever, before I come to understand how someone can throw a few squiggles on a piece of paper and then say with a straight face, "Here's your professionally prepared graphic design, that'll be 20 squillion bucks, please."

On second thought, I can understand that bit, as there is a never-ending supply of chutzpah in this world, especially in the "artistic" sector thereof, but I'm not so clear on how there can be so many people in possession of so much money and so little sense that such demands of cash for trash actually get paid. Oh, but wait: we're not talking about real money here, we're talking about taxpayers' money, which of course is very real to the people who had to earn and pay it, but completely unreal and unaccountable to those charged with spending it.

Which reminds me of one of the reasons I was glad to get out of England when I did: the enormous boondoggle that is the 2012 Olympics is going to end up costing London taxpayers thousands, probably many thousands of pounds over the next 10 or 20 years, and the bulk of that will be due to the quango and consultant-ridden style of management that maximizes costs, minimizes productivity, evades all forms of responsibility, and which has become inexorably entrenched in this country over the last couple decades.

A similar process can be seen in Tony Blair's much-vaunted "reform" of the NHS: billions spent on talking shops, "blue-sky thinking," and NASA-scaled computer programs that so far haven't even been shown to work. And in much else that is done or attempted in post-modern Britain: the new Wembley Stadium, that came in two years late and £200 million ($400 million) over budget, the Millennium Dome, £750 million ($1.5 billion) worth of nothing that the government couldn't even give away when it reached almost instant obsolescence and ultimately had to pay someone to take it off its hands.

Then there's the national rail network: the country that invented the railroad and installed excellent, still-functioning systems in many of its colonies, can't manage to keep its own trains on the tracks without charging the highest fares in the world for a service that frequently compares unfavorably with the 19th century, and the similar ongoing fiasco of the London Underground. In every one of these cases, the same pattern can be seen: enormous, obscenely wasteful outlays of public money with virtually no accountability, a barrage of bureaucratic bafflegab from the officials meant to oversee these projects, and a blithely British "mustn't grumble" on the part of the long-suffering public.

Nowhere were this nation's diminishing-to-the-point-of-nonexistence expectations more clearly visible than in watching tonight's Euro 2008 qualifier against lowly Estonia. If England failed to win this match (as it has failed to win nearly every other qualifier thus far), it would be out of the competition, going down what onetime manager Graham Taylor called "the same road as Scotland and becoming a second division team in world football." And this the country that invented the game.

The pubs were packed tonight, so much so that I couldn't even get inside and had to watch from out on the pavement, and to see so many Englishmen absolutely desperate for victory in a match that should have been the equivalent of Man United playing a local pub team - and fearful that they might not get it - really put into sharp relief just how substandard a performance people have come to expect - and accept. When a goal finally went in just before halftime, the cheering and celebrating practically blew the windows out into Shaftesbury Avenue, when you'd think fans would have been indignant that it took almost 45 minutes for a several hundred million pounds worth of soccer talent to break down a side ranked #110 in the world.

But never mind, England survived comfortably in the end, and may even struggle though to the quarterfinals again before being handed its semi-annual humiliation, and you know what? For all my griping, and that of the great, grumbling British public, this is still a great and amazing country. The fact that it still thrives and prospers under such incompetent and bumbling leadership should be evidence enough of that; ten years of New Labour doublethink following hard upon 16 years of Tory vindictiveness and malfeasance may have helped turn Britain into one of the drunkest and most violent countries in the developed world, but it's barely dented the basic decency and optimism of what is ultimately and still a green and very pleasant land. I'll be glad to get back to New York next week, not least because I'll be able to wear summer clothes again instead of lugging around several layers of outerwear to be applied and removed at various times of the day, but just as in the old poem, there remains in my heart a corner that will be forever England.

P.S. For those of you who inferred from the header that this post would have something to do with the newish film This Is England, I fully intend to see it and will report back as soon as I do.

No Sleep Till Brixton

I left New York Wednesday evening, flew all night and landed in London just past 6 in the morning. Wandered around for a few hours, checked into my hotel, poked around on the internet and the cable TV for a while, and finally nodded off for about two hours before rushing out to meet some friends and check out what I guess would qualify as a literary event in the Borders shop in Charing Cross Road.

I don't know why I'm equivocating about it; it took place in a bookshop, involved the selling/promoting/hyping of books, and featured two long-established authors. I guess it's just that the subject was music, or rather the analysis and criticism of music, and it just seemed a bit, oh, I don't know, foofy.

To be perfectly honest, I was expecting a complete load of rubbish, balderdash, codswallop and bollocks, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear some interesting ideas sprinkled in among the usual fare. And to be quite fair, the R, B, C and B ended up emanating more from the audience than the authors, who were Don Letts, who's probably best known for his film documentary of the Clash, Westway To The World or his work with Big Audio Dynamite, and Simon Reynolds, one of those Oxford-educated British music journos who periodically reduce me to teeth-gnashing catatonia with their overegged litcrit theories about pop music (the New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, who's probably the most heinous example of the genre, proves that the Yanks can pull it off too, even without the posh accents).

I was prepared to be more annoyed by Letts for reasons I can't even recall now. Oh, yes I do: it was the way his otherwise excellent documentary Punk Attitude lost the plot in the mid-80s and veered off into Sonic Youth and Nirvana as if they had anything to do with punk rock (read my thoughts on that here). But Letts, who was plugging his book Culture Clash: Dread Meets Punk Rockers, turned out to be unpretentious, down to earth, and quite likable, despite his occasional tendency to echo my former brother-in-law in rabbiting on about 1970s Notting Hill in highly romanticized terms.

Reynolds, on the other hand, who resembled a 30-something Harry Potter (not bad, since his bio reveals him to be a 40-something Harry Potter), stammered and stumbled through a reading of his own text, Bring The Noise. It seemed odd, considering that on the printed page he can toss off page after page of glib theory with the same cocksure élan that a freeform jazz guitarist tosses off notes, and is only slightly less expansive when speaking off the cuff. I couldn't help but wonder - uncharitably, I'll admit - if the reason he found it difficult to read his own material was that hearing it spoken aloud made him a bit too painfully aware of what utter rot he was talking.

It's not that he's unintelligent - far from it - and I didn't doubt for a moment his sincerity, either. He really, really wants to believe in the power of music to change everything, and like many people who've grown up in some ways and not others (if you're looking at me as you read that, I plead no contest), he tends to oscillate between a desperate desire to prove he didn't waste his youth at all those gigs and a bitterly cynical suspicion that he may indeed have done just that. Also like many muso-journos of a certain age (see again the aforementioned Sasha Frere-Jones), he's all but given up on white people and conflated Rousseau's Noble Savage with the Great Black Hope.

Letts, who's black himself, had a far more reasoned and balanced view: although he's a big partisan of old school Jamaican music in particular, he freely admitted to being a huge fan of overwhelmingly white 60s rock, and unhesitatingly criticized the racism, sexism, homophobia and violence endemic in modern dance hall culture. Reynolds, on the other hand, sheepishly but with a naughty little boy smirk playing across his features, admitted to having a vast collection just that sort of music. Perhaps I'm too quick to judge - after all, the event only lasted an hour - but it seemed that Reynolds was doing that typical overeager white boy thing that starts out saying, "Now we mustn't judge black people's music by the same standards we apply to our own because they're coming from a culture of oppression" and eventually devolves into an Orwellian mantra of "Black music good, white music lame."

Meanwhile Letts was saying that, "In the 70s we knew where Babylon was, it was in the coppers stopping and searching young black men all over London. But today it's not so clear; we've got all this black-on-black crime, so it's like we're getting hit from both sides." It's a good point, only slightly weakened by the fact that there was a lot of black crime in the 1970s too: in fact the 1976 Notting Hill Carnival riot that Joe Strummer so idealized was triggered by a police crackdown on widespread pickpocketings and muggings by the black youth in attendance.

Then the audience was invited to ask questions, and that's where the real lunacy ensued, with one bedsit philosopher after another ranting about the "commodification of the culture" and how music "really meant something" back during whatever his/her favored period was (ranging from the 50/60s up to the early 80s; unsurprisingly, no one offered the opinion that modern music was anything but rubbish. At this point you'd have thought you were at a convention of old granddads, but most of them were in their 20s or 30s and might not even have been born when the "real" music was being made. Whenever I run into that phenomenon, which these days is rather often, I wonder why during the 1960s there wasn't a cult of wild-eyed young people championing the music of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, but whatever. Strangely enough, I still enjoyed the event quite a lot, and not just because I was punch drunk from lack of sleep. Contrary to what some of you may think, I actually do enjoy hearing other people's opinions.

Then it was off for more hanging out; I got back to the hotel at midnight and stayed up all night reading the PPMB, writing some emails, and, I don't know, listening to the radio or something. I finally fell asleep for a couple hours at about 10 am, and then I was up and about again. Friday night I ran into a whole passel of friends down the West End, ditched them temporarily to watch England play football and almost (but of course not quite) recover some of their long hoped for form by coming within a minute of beating Brazil. My friend Patrick, who both hates football and is Irish (so even if he did care about football he'd be cheering against England) observed, "Why, you're going to have a perfect English weekend. Whatever happens, you'll have something to whinge about."

He was right. Like a lot of people I was half wishing England would be humiliated so they'd finally get a new manager, but at the same time, I was aware that no suitable replacement for Steve McClaren seems to be on the horizon. A victory for England, on the other hand, would mean we'd be stuck with the dire mediocrity that has hung over the national team like a soppy blanket for longer than many fans can remember. So I guess a draw was about right; now we can whinge about how England typically stuffed it up at the last minute again.

Then it was off clubbing, something I rarely do these days, but I went along with an excellent group of friends who, like most of the other excellent groups of friends there, huddled off in a corner talking amongst themselves as if they were the only people there that mattered. But in a very nice and stylish way, of course.

The club was or at least appeared to be a converted whorehouse, with red velvet flocking on the walls and mirrors and chandeliers everywhere. The crowd were a bit more elegant - I mean that in a glammy rather than posh way - than I've been used to lately, but one of our group opined that "Clubs like this are ten a penny in New York," which surprised me, since I'd never seen one. Turns out he'd never been to New York himself, but no reason that should stop someone from having an opinion.

Got home from there at 3am after a battle with Adrian and Phillip over whether to take a cab or wait for the night bus (at £12/$24 for a cab, you can guess which side I was on) (I won, by the way, but only because no cabs showed up and the night bus finally did), and stayed up all night again. At about 8:30 this morning I put my head down and tried to go to sleep, but just couldn't, and shortly before 10, someone underneath my window started what sounds like either a gospel service or a rave, which has now been going for nearly an hour. Anyway, the sun is shining, it's a gorgeous day, and I want to get out and take advantage of it. Hopefully, despite the title of this piece, almost anywhere but Brixton.

Welcome To London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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