Fest 2008

Another year, another Fest, my voice is shot and my muscles are aching all over. What a weekend. What a life. Yes, I could have done more, talked to more people, seen more bands, helped out more, but hey, I think all things considered, I did my Fest best. There were times – moments, anyway – when exhaustion threatened to overcome exhilaration, and times when I caught myself wishing for the smaller, simpler Fests of yesteryear – 2006 and 2007 seem like ancient history now – but by the time Saturday night spilled over into Sunday morning and several hundred of us had been decanted into the steamy midsummer Baltimore night, where we milled about and began our series of dazed, happy and wistfully exuberant goodbyes, there was no doubt about it: the Fest had worked its inexorable magic again.

Some had carped – and I had quietly thought, though keeping those thoughts to myself – that this year’s lineup of bands was not quite as strong as last year’s, but the absence of an undisputed superstar like Ben Weasel – who for reasons known only to himself declined to play this year’s Fest – seemed to have caused people to overlook just how many insanely great bands were playing. And also to overlook the fact that while the Fest is about the music, it’s also not so much about the music as it is about the fellowship and camaraderie of people from all over this country and half a dozen others whose cooperation and inspiration has created - out of very thin air indeed – an event that has grown into the high holy days of the punk rock universe.

All those sessions at the gym had paid off, I found myself thinking more than once, especially in the waning hours of Saturday’s 14-hour marathon. If I hadn’t been in shape, there’s no way I would have still been dancing like a dervish and singing like a possessed banshee hours – some would say years, or decades - after any sensible person would have taken to his recliner and/or bed. By the time I’d watched a succession of exhausted and sweaty musicians pile off stage and into the cool of the dressing rooms, I caught myself mentally asking them, “What are you looking so tired for? You only had to play one set.”

People kept asking me which bands I was most looking forward to and I kept answering evasively because my experience from Fests past is that the most amazing experiences are often the ones that no one was expecting. But there was no denying – especially since I’d written it in the Fest zine compiled by Jenna and Adam Alive – that I had a very intense personal investment – an emotional rather than a financial one, I hasten to add – in at least two bands whose very appearance on the Fest stage was the realization of a long-cherished dream.

The first was the Zatopeks, who I’ve known since their first days back in London and who I’ve been singing the praises of ever since. While I’ve long thought they’re one of the best bands around these days, they haven’t – yet, anyway – achieved the kind of commercial success that would make transatlantic gigs a viable proposition financially. Yet there were, 3000 miles from, getting a rapturous reception from a crowd that already knew their songs well enough to lustily sing along. I can only imagine what that must have felt like from their point of view, but based on my own experience as a touring musician – when meeting someone two cities away from our own who’d actually heard of us was usually cause for great joy – I think I’ve got some idea.

Then there was Sweet Baby. My band played with them once or twice back in 1986 when they were first starting out; the last time I saw them – or that they played a show at all – was in 1989. “We never considered it before now, singer Dallas Denery told me, “because no one had ever asked us.” It took some convincing, in fact, to persuade him and guitarist/vocalist Matt that in 2008 there’d be more than a handful of people who’d even heard of them, let alone wanted to see them play.

By the time they’d made it through a couple songs, however, when the realization had sunk in that the crowd – some of whom weren’t even born when Sweet Baby last graced a stage – not only knew the songs, but was also prepared to outsing the band if given half a chance, a enormous smile spread across Dallas’s face and he and Matt – joined by old school East Bay luminaries Richie Bucher on bass and Aaron Cometbus on drums – proceeded to give the performance of a lifetime to an audience that could have been, as Matt later surmised, “bigger than the combined total of every audience we ever played to.”

It wouldn’t have been the Fest, of course, without the Steinways, who played just before the Zatopeks, and as much as I was looking forward to them, I’ll admit to being a little fearful about how they’d handle the biggest stage I’d ever seen them on.

No need to fear. Grath, I suspect because he knew he was being filmed for a DVD, swore up a storm, before, after and during pretty much every song (“Try and edit that,” he challenged the sound engineer at one point”), but unless you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, there was nothing not to love about a Steinways set that featured a generous sprinkling of new songs and wound up with an impassioned renderings of “the classics” that had the New York crew in particular beaming like proud mamas and papas over their hometown heroes.

“Best Steinways show yet,” I opined, only to be rather forcefully told, “No, that was last week, when you were out of town.” Well, whatever. I love this band. And another band I love, but who weren’t even on the bill until some last minute string-pulling, is the Max Levine Ensemble, who staged a lightning-quick guerrilla raid on the back bar, aka The Third Stage, thrilling the 100 or so in-the-know Festers who managed to cram in there with one of the most dazzling performances of the day, and were gone again to their next gig before most people even knew they’d been there. By all accounts, they’ll be back for next year’s Fest in a more prominent position on the bill.

Can’t forget the Copyrights, who were undoubtedly one of Friday’s highlights, as were their sister (brother?) band, Dear Landlord, and the Dopamines. I last saw each of these bands in a basement in Indianapolis (“And we’ll be back in the basement next week,” promised the Copyrights’ Adam Fletcher), but they all looked totally at home on the big stage, and to actually hear the music and the vocals through a first class PA left me saying whoa, so this is what it’s meant to sound like.

There were too many, way too many other highlights to mention them all here, and of course a couple dozen that I didn’t get to see it all because of schedule conflicts. Can’t forget the Leftovers and the Guts, of course, nor Short Attention, who at 1 in the afternoon managed to pack the Second Stage to far, far beyond its putative capacity. I got there about five minutes – i.e., about a dozen songs – too late and could barely force my way in the door. But a special tribute needs to go out to the Queers. There’s been plenty of criticism – some of it from me – that their shows had become too samey-samey, catering mainly to the bonehead crew to whom punk rock will always be frozen in the testosterone-fueled, beat-the-hell-out-of-each-other era, and predicting that Joe Queer would never have the balls or the sense to put together a set list that showcased his real talents as a pop punk singer and songwriter.

But the critics – again myself included – were wrong. Augmented by guest appearances from the spectacularly gifted Joel Reader of MTX/Plus Ones/Avengers/Pansy Division fame and longtime if occasional collaborator Lisa Marr (cub/Buck/Lisa Marr Experience), the Queers finally delivered the goods for which their fans have been devoutly praying for lo these many years. Thanks to the idiot/thug contingent, I’d pretty much given up trying to watch the Queers from anywhere near the stage, this was an entirely different crowd, one almost entirely devoted to dancing and singing at the top of its lungs. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that this is where my voice finally reached its limits; my usual dulcet tones have been replaced by a raspy croak ever since.

So the Queers – contrary to quite a few expectations – turned out to be a perfect headliner/Fest closer after all. And as the house lights went up and the realization that it was all over for another year began to sink in, my exhaustion began to be overcome by a much stronger emotion that I can only describe as, well, gratitude. Gratitude that after all these years I can still get so excited over the music and the people associated with it, gratitude that I still have the physical and emotional capacity to throw myself into it with the unbridled enthusiasm of an unabashed adolescent.

I haven’t had a drink in nearly seven years, but I suspect I looked like a drunken lunatic to some people, especially in the milling-about aftermath of the Fest, as I sprinted through the crowd saying goodbyes, breaking into spontaneous dances to no music at all, and screaming like, well, like a person having the time of his life.

And extra-special thanks have to go out to Mark Enoch, Chris Thacker, Pat and Reggie Termite for all their work in creating the Fest and turning it into what it’s become, to Adam and Jenna Alive for putting together the official Fest zine, to Matt Lame for being, despite the attempt by some people to hang the title on me, the real Mr. Fest, and to all the bands and all the people: for three all too brief and shining days, we were friends and we were equals. The Fest is over, long live the Fest. See you in 2009!

That's What I Love About Frisco

The many complaints about San Francisco's declining quality of life notwithstanding, city officials have been taking bold measures to ensure that you'll never have a problem finding a conveniently located crack dealer when you're jonesing for a hit.

Despite the city's best efforts to protect its large population of undocumented street entrepreneurs (in non-SF-speak, illegal immigrant drug dealers), from time to time a few of these enterprising individuals do get caught up in a police sweep (most likely one conducted by the Parking Division, which seems to be the only arm of law enforcement actively seeking out criminal conduct) and are subsequently convicted of selling drugs.

Which in turn not only makes them liable for substantial prison sentences, but also requires that they be deported to their home countries and permanently banned from returning to the USA. Worried that San Francisco's homegrown criminal culture might be unable to generate sufficient numbers of crack dealers to meet demand, the city has spent a small fortune and broken a few laws of its own (hey, it's only money, and everyone knows that normal laws don't apply in SF) to hide its convicted crack dealers from the federal officials who handle deportations.

It's "not fair to bar them from ever becoming citizens," said one San Francisco official, who rather judiciously preferred to remain unnamed. The sheriff of San Bernardino County, where San Francisco had been hiding its fugitive felons in a taxpayer-financed ($7,000 a month per perp) safehouse, was not so sanguine, especially in light of the fact that SF's city-sponsored crims usually end up taking a hike and slanging rocks on his patch.

Farmer Party At The Old Folks Home

We made it down to Detroit in no time at all, stopping only for $5 subs at a Subway that was built into a gas station and truck stop somewhere out in the wilds of the central/northern Lower Peninsula. The piped-in pseudo-country music reminded me of my old stomping grounds in Mendocino County, Willits in particular, and I briefly shed a psychic tear for my own country days, but then we were racing down the highway again and hit Detroit's northern suburbs just as the rush hour (what there is of it in that depressed and depressing city) was winding up.

It was early enough that we could have gone on to our destination in Canada, but we'd already decided to stop for the night and cross the border in the morning for a couple reasons. One was that my mother has what could be seen as an irregular status, citizenship-wise. She was born in Canada, but emigrated to the US with her family in 1926, when she was eight years old. She's lived in the USA ever since, has voted in every election since 1940, at one time held a US passport, but for some reason never quite got around to finalizing her naturalization papers (in case you wondered where I got my procrastinating tendencies), having assumed that she had automatically become a citizen when her father did.

Which may or may not be the case, but if we were going to have to argue about it with the border guards, I preferred to do it bright and early in the morning when we'd had a full night's rest rather than at the end of a 450 mile drive. (The whole issue could have been neatly avoided if Mom had only been willing to fork out the $100 for a new passport, but according to her reasoning, which is probably pretty sound, "Chances are I'll never leave the country again? Why should I pay all that money just to cross the border once?")

Both of us, of course, are used to a much more relaxed border regime; the entire time I was growing up, we routinely crossed back and forth from Canada with no more interrogation than a perfunctory "Where were you born?/Where are you going?" and often not even that much.

The other reason for staying on the Detroit side was that the declining value of the American dollar has been turning us into third worlders vis-à-vis the cost of living in Canada. Most Canadian prices were set back in the days when the US dollar was worth 10 or 20% more than the Canadian currency. Now the prices are the same or higher, but our puny greenback has dwindled to a shadow of its former self in terms of purchasing power.

It was readily apparent just how much America has come down in the world as soon as we crossed the border the next morning (with no trouble whatsoever, despite my mother's trepidations). Things were newer, nicer, better kept, and gas was more than five bucks a gallon. Which may seem steep to Americans who are still bitching about the four dollar gallon, but when you see the quality of life that extra dollar (most if not all of it tax) buys for Canadians, it doesn't seem like a bad bargain at all.

For instance, the nursing home where our centenarian cousin was living and would celebrate her birthday: it was like a resort hotel, especially when compared with the squalid slice of bedlam where my father was compelled to spend his last days. And yet the price - totally subsidized by the government, of course - was only a quarter of what my father had to pay. If dad had lived a couple years longer, he would have been bankrupt (as would my mother); our Canadian cousin can live another 100 years secure in the knowledge that she'll always have a comfortable home.

But enough politicking; we're here to party like only a packed house of 80 and 90 year old farmers and farmers' wives can! All right, I exaggerate; although we were celebrating in a very rural community, and although I spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time hearing about tractors, combines, the prospects of rain and the likely effects of said rain on this year's corn crop, there were plenty of non-farmers, too, including the younger cousins (i.e., my age) who organized the shindig. He's part-Newfie, she's farm-born and raised, only a couple miles from where they live today, but in the interim they've been all over the world, first with the Navy and then with the Foreign Service. I didn't have the nerve to ask him straight out if he was a "spy," but have you ever seen Meet The Fokkers? Remember Robert DeNiro's secret room full of electronic devices and monitoring equipment? Cuz has got one just like it.

Cousin Harold, on the other hand, is a lifelong farmer, and only gave up plowing a few years ago, when he was 92. He's 96 now, and apparently isn't supposed to be driving a car any more, but nobody told me about that, so when he asked me to give him a ride to his car, which was parked way out back (there was some major thunderstorm action going on), I readily consented. I dropped him off, then watched, amazed, as he not only drove the wrong way up the road to the nursing home, sending several other cars fleeing for cover, but then mounted the sidewalk and drove to within a few feet of the front door, looking for all the world as though he were going to drive right inside. His wife hardly batted an eye as she stepped outside and into the car; apparently she's well used to this sort of thing.

But driving habits aside, Cousin Harold's a pretty sharp old dude, cracking the dry sort of jokes that leave you never completely sure as to whether he's joking. Cousin Lottie, on the other hand, whose birthday it is, is downright majestic as she presides over the afternoon. Dressed in a long white satin gown and wearing a jewel-bedecked tiara, she resembles a taller, thinner version of the Queen of England, who incidentally has sent her greetings, as has the Governor General and Prime Minister of Canada, the Premier of Ontario, and a host of lesser luminaries. Lottie can no longer walk, so she held court from a wheelchair, but her mind is still sharp as a tack, and we sat talking and gossiping for much of the afternoon. Her hearing is still good, too, but her voice has gone a little wonky in the past couple years, causing her to sound uncannily like Marge Simpson, an effect heightened by Cousin Tom, who when he chortles enthusiastically over something - which he often does - bears a strong resemblance, vocally at least, to Homer.

Tom also rather enthusiastically plays the bagpipes, and did so for us the following morning before we set off down the road to Kitchener. Oh, but first we made our usual detour to the graveyard where we fended off mosquitoes while studying several sets of family headstones dating back to the mid-19th century. I find it strangely restful and only slightly unsettling when I see the names and birthdates carved on as the as yet unused headstones that await our many cousins who are still very much alive. Then we hopped onto the 401, the expressway that lopped off the back end of Uncle Will's farm when they put it in sometime in the 1950s or 60s, and headed east. A whole other passel of city slicker cousins awaited us there, but that will have to be a story for tomorrow. Now it's time to write a few thank you notes and then throw three t-shirts in a bag and call myself packed for Baltimore and the Fest!

With A Song In My Heart

As some of you will know, I used to be in a couple of bands and have tried my hand at songwriting on a few occasions. However, whether it was because I got tired, or just lazy, not a single new song has emanated from my pen, piano, guitar, or vocal cords in nigh on seven years.

Until now, that is. A local band, Short Attention, about whom I must admit I've been the teensiest bit disdainful at times, did me the enormous honor of asking me to write a song for their new record. True, they asked about 23 other people, too, but that's about how many songs it takes them to fill up a (7") record. And it's worth noting that many of them are punk rock celebrities and recognized geniuses in the art of song sculpting, people, for example, like Joe Steinhardt, Christian Tattletale, Zack and Brad from Dear Landlord, The Dopamines, Miranda Hunchback O'Fancy, Jim Testa, James Cahill, Tom Stray, Lucas Festipal, Ace Steinway, Matt Lame, Chris Pierce, Bill Florio, Lauren Measure, John Denery, Ben Weasel, Eric Peabody, Chris Grivet, The Jerkingtons, Bort and Jesse Luscious.

So I'm in some pretty heady company, and I was really nervous about whether my feeble little effort would be accepted. But it was, and now it's been recorded, and is available right here for your listening pleasure (or not, as the case may be). It's the one about the G train, a local mode of transportation about which you may have heard me complain on occasion, and just in case you don't like it, bear in mind that it's only about 19 seconds long, so you won't have wasted too much of your life checking it out. But let me know what you think, and if the response is positive, I just might write another one sometime in the next seven years!

Up Da Yoopers!

Wow, it's been a long time. Hope you missed me. But not too much, because I wouldn't want to be the cause of your life seeming more empty or meaningless than usual.

I've been on hejira with my mom, a pilgrimage to the ancestral lands of Michigan and Ontario, where we mingled and kicked it with a host of bizarre and wonderful (or wonderfully bizarre?) relatives and in-laws. So many, in fact, that it's going to take several posts to tell about them all. And to complicate things further, I'm only back in New York (just got in late tonight) for one day before it's time to take off again on the biggest pilgrimage of all, to Baltimore for The Fest.

Some people thought it was kind of crazy to go on a 1500 mile journey (not counting several thousand miles more of plane riding to get both of us to the Midwest) with a nearly 90 year old lady (not that I'm getting any younger myself, either), but when you consider that the focal point of the trip was a 100th birthday party for Mom's favorite cousin, well, what's the big deal, right?

Last time we went on a trip, Mom and I flew out from the West Coast together, but this time she and I were coming from opposite coasts, so she had to make that part of the trip on her own, which was probably the scariest part of the deal for her, but she came through it like a trooper. We met up in Detroit at about 9 pm and started driving. Yeah, it would have been nicer to spend the night near Metro Airport and get an early start in the morning, but as it happened, we had nearly 600 miles to cover in less than 24 hours, so we had to knock off at least a hundred or so the first night.

Which would have been no trouble if Michigan's highways, at least the ones we were on, didn't bear a striking resemblance to the permanent state of disrepair I found in a trip to East Germany just prior to the fall of Communism. Oh, plus the fact that I got lost three times trying to match Google map directions to actual road signs. The deal was that we had to get to Traverse City, which is in the upper northwest corner (Detroit's in the lower southeast corner) by lunchtime for a flying visit to one of the last remaining cousins from my dad's family, then up to the top of the state, over the mighty Mackinac Bridge, and deep into the heart of Michigan's mysterious Upper Peninsula in time for dinner.

My mom's brother and his wife are not native Yoopers (Upper Peninsula = U.P. = Yoop, etc.), but they migrated up to the Soo (Sault Ste. Marie) back in the mid-50s, when the bridge had yet to be built and you could still travel north via train, but had to hop off and take a ferry when you got to the Straits of Mackinac. After a few years they moved over to Marquette, the U.P.'s principal city (population approximately 25,000, i.e., similar to that of certain city blocks in Manhattan) and have been there ever since. At the time they built their house, it was not uncommon for bears to come wandering through the yard, but apparently it's been a couple years since one has been sighted, which might be just as well, since my aunt and uncle are now in their 80s, and though they've been keen hunters all their lives, she's now nearly blind and he's partially deaf, so you don't necessarily want them whipping out the rifles or shotguns, especially now that a few other houses have been built in the vicinity.

But my uncle still gets out on a regular basis to deal with the ten or so feet of snow that falls each winter, beginning in October and usually lasting until April (or sometimes May). He used to have his own snowplow, but now he relies on a snowblower, which sends drifts flying over a 20 foot area instead of piling up all in one place. And if you think that's a bit too much physical activity for a man in his 80s, bear in mind that both he and his wife took up long distance running when they were in their 70s (this was after the heart attack he suffered when he was my age.

Although they're passionately devoted to the U.P. and its way of life, they're rather low-key compared with dyed-in-the-wool Yoopers, who can best be described, if at all, as being somewhat akin to... well, actually, I don't think they can be described. Perhaps you'd be better off examining the creative output of Da Yoopers, who also hail from the Greater Marquette area.

But while Da Yoopers take the eccentricities and foibles of the U.P. and turn them into burlesque, Lakenen Land , located not much more than a hop, skip and shuffle down the highway from my uncle's place, showcases the fiercely independent U.P. spirit on a more sublime albeit still reasonably hilarious level. Tom Lakenen is a local ironworker who likes to collect and cut up scraps of iron and other industrial detritus to make giant sculptures that range from whimsical to beautiful to just plain out there in a world of their own.

And feeling that his sculptures not only represented, but also deserved a world of their own, Tom created one, putting them on display on several acres of wooded land he owns along Highway 28 and inviting the public in to explore (for free) his Jurassic (there's a huge green dinosaur clearly visible from the road) Sculpture Park.

Local authorities have been hounding him ever since, outraged at the idea that a citizen could take it upon himself to set up a public park (he's also put in a couple ponds, outhouse facilities, benches and tables, and an information center/shelter) that clearly outdoes most of the efforts of the city and county fathers, but so far Tom has adroitly fended off all efforts to shut him down, thanks to a growing reservoir of support from both locals and tourists. And for the handful of you who may actually journey down M-28 one of these days: don't miss it. 10 or 15 miles east of Marquette; watch for the dinosaur.

What else? We stayed a couple days, went walking on the sand and dipped a toe into Lake Superior while fending off flies (another reason that so few people live in the U.P. is that the place is, as already mentioned, beset by massive amounts of snow for six months of the year, and massive amounts of insects, black flies, mosquitoes and deer flies being among the most pestilential) for another four, leaving the inhabitants approximately one month in the spring and fall respectively to rest up from shoveling and swatting. We dined at what has to be the most amazing and well-appointed Perkins Restaurant (this is the same chain that used to be known as Perkins Pancake House, right?) in the world. Rather than the usual plastic-and-neon dismalness, this place was all hand-hewn lumber with cathedral ceilings and chandeliers made out of antlers, not to mention the elk head the size of a refrigerato and the moose head the size of a Volkswagen that hung over the dual fireplaces. Oh, and the food was good, too.

So yeah, the Upper Peninsula was rad, and it goes without saying that my uncle and aunt are, too, but after two and a half days we had to head back down to the land of the apple knockers and trolls, both of which are derisory names bestowed by the Yoopers on Lower Peninsulans. Apple knockers, I don't know why, except they grow a lot of the fruit down there, but trolls, well, it's because they live below the bridge, get it? Yoopers, by the way, are called stump jumpers, among other less printable things, by those who are less than admiring of their way of life. It was a 450 mile jaunt back to Detroit, but we'll get on to that tomorrow; for now, we'll have to bid a fond farewell to the U.P. and all its weird and wonderful denizens. Next stop: 100th birthday party time!!

Hentoff: An Old Pacifist Comes Around

Nat Hentoff, who's often about as far removed from me on the ideological spectrum as it's possible to be, makes essentially the same point I was about Myanmar, Darfur, and Zimbabwe, and does so more articulately than I could manage. He also addresses the Zimbabwe issue in the previous week's column. Both are well worth reading.

Ironically, Hentoff is one of those Voiceniks I frequently accuse of "liberal racism" when it comes to intervention in the black communities of our own cities.

Liberal Racism

During my years in London I became quite familiar with the plight of Zimbabwe, not only because the British media pay considerable attention to African affairs (particularly when a former colony is involved), but also because I met a number of Zimbabwean exiles, both black and white, who'd been driven from their country by poverty, racism or political repression.

And that was back when Zimbabwe was still a more or less functioning country, before its mad dictator Robert Mugabe turned it into one of the planet's more tragic hellholes in the name of... what? Nobody seems to know if Mugabe is simply drunk with power, completely insane, or still in thrall to the quasi-Marxist ideology acquired in the 1960s and 70s, when Western bien pensants were excitedly cheering on the prospect of guerrilla warfare and communist insurgency all over Africa. True, they might not have wished such a thing on their own countries, but hey, it's only Africa, right? Perfect place to try out all our cockamamie New Left theories.

Unfortunately, Mugabe, not unlike most of Africa's self-styled "liberators," turned out to be far worse than the colonialism he overthrew. 28 years of his disastrous rule have turned Zimbabwe from one of the most successful and prosperous African countries into an absolute basket case. Life expectancy has been cut in half, unemployment is almost universal, a country that once exported food is now literally starving. And now, faced with being driven from office by his long-suffering people, Mugabe is doing away with the last vestiges of democracy in a desperate attempt to rig the election now in progress.

True, it's not the only country facing mass suffering as a result of a tyrant or tyrants run amok. Up at the other end of the continent, we have the ongoing obscenity of Darfur, where wholesale murder has been a matter of government policy for years already. And then there's the recent events in Burma/Myanmar, where the ruling junta has shown itself willing to starve its own people to death rather than allow foreign aid workers into their fiefdom.

In each of these cases - and these are only the most flagrant at the moment - there's a common thread: Western liberals and do-gooders wring their hands and make vague, clucking noises of sympathy, then conclude by saying, "But what can we do? It's their country, after all." Underlying this is an almost transparent unwillingness to suggest that Westerners have a right - let alone and obligation - to interfere with the "sovereignty" of these murderous dictatorships. It's the very antithesis of colonialism, but that doesn't make it any less evil.

One has to wonder if there'd be such reticence to act if similar events were unfolding in a European country. Well, one actually doesn't have to wonder; we have a fairly recent illustration, that of the Balkan wars. There was a lot of hand-wringing over that, too, no doubt because the people involved seemed, well, not quite as European as, say Frenchmen or Germans (the fact that many of them were Muslims may have had even more to do with it). But eventually decisive military action was taken, on the very reasonable grounds that when a people showed itself no longer capable of maintaining a basic civil or social structure, then it was incumbent upon its neighbors in the world to take responsibility for doing so.

Granted, this is disturbingly close to at least one of the reasons used to justify colonialism in the first place, but the fact that things have previously been done for the wrong reason doesn't obviate the need for doing them at a different time and place for the right reason. But what, you might ask, can the West do about Zimbabwe, Darfur or Myanmar? In the case of the latter, there's at least one easy answer: just the other day American troops, who'd been stationed at the border waiting for the OK to truck in food and supplies to cyclone victims, abandoned their positions because, as their commander said, "We just couldn't get permission to enter the country." The mightiest army in the history of the planet has to sit there humbly begging a handful of tinpot generals to allow them to carry out lifesaving missions? The Burmese army is going to seriously be able to prevent them from doing so?

The situation is a little more complicated in Zimbabwe and Darfur. There the only successful course would probably involve occupying the countries, installing new governments, and hanging around for a few years until those governments were able to function on their own. And yes, people, both in neighboring African countries and among our own isolationists on both the left and the right, would scream bloody murder over this alleged "imperialism." But was it imperialism, or simply common sense, when American and European troops occupied Germany and Japan and provided them with new, democratic governments? Is the world not far better off for this having been done?

Ah, but that's different, you say. Those countries had invaded their neighbors and unleashed unspeakable havoc on the world. Cruel as the situations may be in Zimbabwe et al., at least they're keeping it to themselves. And perhaps there's some validity to this point - if, that is, you're prepared to turn a blind eye to the suffering, oppression, and starvation of millions of people.

But it's a slippery slope, you say. What's to stop a Western government from using force to replace any government that's not doing as good a job as we might like it to? Hell, for that matter, some Western governments are not exactly covering themselves with glory at the moment. So where do you - can you - draw the line?

I suppose it really comes down to the democratic consent of the people. As we've seen in the case of both Vietnam and Iraq, even when our government can muster enough support to invade another country, it has a terribly difficult time maintaining that support the minute things don't go so well. And trying to occupy a failing African state is pretty much a guaranteed recipe for things not going well, so chances that we'll actually ever do something about the disasters in Zimbabwe or Darfur are about as great as were those of our doing something to stop the genocide in Rwanda.

But even as I recognize that nothing is likely to be done, that perhaps there's nothing that can be done, it still galls me to hear people dismiss the problem as though it were the natural state of affairs for "those people" and that it's really none of our business. Why do I suspect that there's no small amount of racism involved in this attitude? Because I see a similar hands-off approach to our failing inner cities, where liberal elites are quick to attack the police for attempting to restore order but have little or nothing to say about the thugs who hold the ghettos hostage. Run a successful crackdown on street crime and you'll inevitably have ACLU types - most of whom never set foot in the hood themselves - bellyaching about the "criminalization of black youth," with its insidious implication that common street thuggery is normal behavior for young black people, so normal, in fact, that to attempt to stop it would be attacking the very fabric of the black community.

Say what you will about Rudy Giuliani - and I know many of you will take me up on that offer and say some very vile things indeed - one area where he undeniably deserves praise is the way he wasn't willing to write off any area of the city, regardless of its racial composition, as a no-go zone. Under previous mayors, "difficult" neighborhoods were virtually abandoned, to the point where the police only ventured in for major emergencies. "Let those people kill each other, it's not our problem," seemed to be the prevailing philosophy. Even today, despite vast swathes of the city having been reclaimed from decay and anarchy, despite a 75% fall in the murder rate that's saved literally thousands of lives, the majority of them nonwhite, there are still voices - much of the editorial staff of the Village Voice, for example - accusing the NYPD of racism for simply enforcing the law, and demanding that we return to a policy of accepting and tolerating the unacceptable and intolerable.

From Zimbabwe to the backstreets of Brooklyn: too big a stretch? I don't think so; the principle remains the same. Justice needs to be colorblind, yet there are always those who, for their own personal or ideological grounds, are so determined to stop it being so that they are willing to visit untold suffering and misery on the very people they claim to care for.

Money, Time, Life, Teeth

Propped up in the dentist's chair a couple weeks ago as he began chopping and sawing away at a couple of my back teeth, my mental calculator, as it's wont to do, began adding up the total cost of all the work that was being undertaken. When I reached the end of my sums and realized that the price of my new and/or improved teeth was only slightly less than my parents paid for their two-bedroom house back in 1951, I came close to jumping out of my seat and tearing down the street with the various accoutrements of the dentist's trade trailing behind me.

I may have mentioned it here at one time or another, but in case you weren't aware, I've been missing an upper right molar, tooth #3 in dental parlance, for some 36 years, ever since it split in half as I bit into a piece of especially rough hippie bread in April of 1972. At the time I barely had enough money to have the remains of the broken tooth excavated and the fissure left behind sewn up, so I never gave much thought to how or if it should be replaced. After all, I still had plenty of other teeth, so how much difference could one missing one make?

Well, quite a bit, as it happened. Oh, it was no big problem to accustom myself to chewing with other parts of my mouth, to the point where for a long time I barely even remembered that one blank spot was there. But unbeknown to me, stuff was happening in there: without the missing molar to hold them in place, other teeth started drifting, leaving gaps that trapped bits of food and became a happy breeding ground for tooth decay-causing bacteria. Eventually both of my back teeth reached the end of their useful lives and had to be capped and in one case root canaled, and, recognizing that I was going to continue to have problems until the missing tooth was replaced, I was faced with choosing between a temporary fix (good for 10-20 years, but still...) that would involve destroying part of a good tooth and would cost about three grand, or a permanent implant that would cost even more.

It was going over these numbers that caused me so much disquiet: what, I wondered, if I invested all this money in my teeth only to walk out of the dentist's office and in front of a truck? At my age, I wondered, could I be sure that I'd get enough usage out of my new teeth to justify the expenditure?

It didn't take too long - no more than a couple minutes, at any rate - for the countervailing proposition to assert itself: while it might seem like a waste of money to get my teeth fixed and then die shortly thereafter, the money I'd save by not getting them fixed would be of little use since I'd be, as it were, dead. For some reason I found this hilarious enough that I almost burst out laughing at a most inopportune moment, and then in an effort to restrain myself, nearly bit down on the hammer and chisel the dentist was using to rearrange or disassemble my pearly whites (actually, do they make yellow pearls? because that would be a more accurate metaphor).

Having had this realization, I came away feeling a bit more light-hearted, but still not free from worry. What if, for example, I lived another 40 years, i.e., getting full use of my new teeth, but because of the money I'd spent on them, had to go without eating for the last year or two? A lot of good my top-of-the-line teeth would do me then! Apparently I'm not the only one with worries like this: my mother, who's nearly 90 and has enough savings and pension benefits to live comfortably until she's at least 120, still agonizes about spending $59 on a new coat (she lives near San Francisco, where you need a coat, even in June, even, sometimes, when you stay indoors).

No matter how many times I add up her assets for her and point out that unless she were to take up gambling or cocaine it would be almost impossible to run out of money before she dies, she continues to worry, and now I catch myself doing the same thing. It's bizarre: apart from a brief stint of homelessness and dire poverty in my late teens/early 20s, I've always had a place to live, food to eat, and more often than not, a few luxuries as well, but let me go more than a few weeks without earning any money and I'm right back to being convinced - as I was during most of my adolescence and early adulthood - that I'll never be able to support myself, that I have absolutely no marketable skills, that there's no point even in applying for a job because nobody would ever want me working for them.

Well, the latter part might be true: apart from a few years on the assembly line and in the steel mills, I never have worked for anyone other than myself, leaving me rather lacking in items to put on my nonexistent résumé. It's true; apart from a mock résumé that I had to do as part of a class in high school, I've never written or had one. To some, this might appear as one of life's minor victories, and for a long time I saw it that way, too, but of late I've been feeling as though I'd like to be a little more, oh, I don't know, normal?

A bit late for that now, you say? I fear you're right, and barring anyone else being willing to take responsibility for my career and/or creative life, I suppose I'm stuck with it. No, I still have no idea what I can or ought to be doing with myself, which, with occasional brief exceptions, has been my default position since I was about 16, but at least (provided I can come up with enough cash to pay the remainder of the bill) I'll be facing the future with a snappy set of teeth. Never again will anybody guess that I used to live in England.

Later Thursday Afternoon

The "Onward, Christian Soldiers" marching band came past my window again, still playing the same tune, albeit a bit more bedraggledly after an hour's trek through the streets of Williamsburg.

This time I was able to catch sight of their trailing banner, desultorily held aloft by two adolescents who looked as though, all things being equal, they'd have rather been somewhere else. Apparently I was witnessing the "Brooklyn Sunday School Anniversary Day Parade," a very Protestant-sounding operation for our very Catholic neighborhood. I should have known; usually religious parades in these parts involve flower-bedecked statues of the Blessed Virgin and/or substantial crucifixes. Still a catchy tune, though, that "Onward, Christian Soldiers." Definitely added a bit of pizazz to an otherwise torpid afternoon.

Obama And The Dead Kennedys

I generally think of myself as a relatively new Brooklynite, but 40 years ago I briefly lived on State Street, not far from downtown. I don't remember when I moved there, though I think it must have been in May, or when exactly I left, though I know it was before the end of June, or even why I moved there, since I'd been living rent-free in an abandoned Lower East Side building that was quite comfortable - with electricity and running water, no less - by abandoned building standards.

I do recall why I left: I was unceremoniously booted out, with about ten minutes notice, by the landlord, a previously pleasant queen who took rather violent exception to the discovery that I had brought a girl onto the premises. Not having a lot of possessions, I bundled what I did have into a bedsheet - belonging, I'm pretty sure, to the irate landlord - and returned to the squat, where my friends and I marveled anew at the weird ways of bourgeois homeowners.

I'd stayed up late the night before, listening to the election results from the California primary; although this was deep in my waiting-for-the-revolution phase (the revolution being my anticipated salvation from the drug and interstate flight charges that had me holed up in New York in the first place), I still had an avid - ok, let's be straightforward here: geeklike - interest in all things political. Having heard that McCarthy, my favorite - or least unfavorite, anyway - had lost, I drifted disconsolately off to sleep with the radio still on in the background, only to be awakened by the news that the winner, Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated.

I didn't sleep any more after that, so when I drifted downstairs around 9 am to receive my summary eviction notice, I was looking and feeling especially bleary-eyed. Although I understood that the real villain of the piece was my capriciously vindictive landlord, I couldn't help attaching a bit of the blame to Bobby Kennedy as well; if, I reasoned, he'd stayed out of the presidential race as he should have, then there'd have been no assassination, I'd have got a decent night's sleep, and I'd be far better equipped to deal with the present crisis.

And there you have an reasonably incisive insight into the workings of my 20 year old mind. Not the prettiest of pictures, I'll concede, but all silliness aside, I must confess to never having been particularly enamored of the middle Kennedy brother. I was not impressed with the way he crashed the party and snatched the presidential nomination away from Eugene McCarthy, I was not impressed with his specious and fatuous reasoning for doing so, and I'm bewildered at how he seems with the passage of time to acquire an ever nobler stature in the rear-view memories of my fellow baby boomers.

I was and continue to be a great admirer of John F. Kennedy, but Robert did little or nothing for me. He came across as a pale shadow of his older brother in nearly every respect, yet many of today's dewy-eyed aging lefties have canonized Bobby as the true standard-bearer of the Kennedy legacy (whatever that may be). Never mind that for all his pretty rhetoric, Bobby Kennedy's ambitions and ego very possibly lost the 1968 election for the Democrats and opened the door for another 7 years of war in Vietnam. There was no need - apart from the aforementioned ambition and ego - for him to enter the presidential race at all; McCarthy was doing just fine on his own. And what exactly did Kennedy have to offer apart from conventional lefty platitudes delivered in a thinner, more nasal version of JFK's legendarily evocative accent?

Maybe I'm missing something, but RFK's main appeal seems both then and now to have been a matter of image over substance. In looks as well as accent and manner, he provided the voters with an adequate simulacrum of his fallen brother. An adequate simulacrum, but not much else.

Am I missing something? Perhaps; it's hard to imagine that so many could see such merit in the man without there being something to it. And perhaps the 40th anniversary of his assassination is the wrong time to question his character or importance. It's just that the weeping and wailing seems to get louder each year, to the point where substantive analysis of his worth as a political leader becomes all but impossible.

It might be tackier still to challenge the RFK mystique at a time when the last of the Kennedys is facing a terminal illness, but with the accession of Barack Obama, easily the most Kennedy-esque politician we've seen since the 1960s, I can't help but wonder which Kennedy Obama is channeling: Jack or Bobby? If the former, I'm cautiously optimistic; if the latter, well, I'd almost rather see McCain win.

Thursday Afternoon

A marching band, with police escort, just passed by under my window while playing "Onward, Christian Soldiers." This sort of thing is not at all as unusual as you might expect, though it's the first time I've heard that particular tune.

Integrate The Prisons? What Year Is This, Anyway?

Apparently I'm pretty naive, because I had no idea that in 2008, California prisons were still racially segregated. Oh, I'd heard about the gangs, and the way that the prisoners stuck to themselves and punished one another if they talked to or hung out with members of another race. But I never dreamed that the State of California enforced systematic segregation by race. I mean, isn't that, like, illegal? And hasn't it been illegal for the past half century or more?

Now there's some controversy because the State is finally getting around to integrating its prisons. Some predict that forcing prisoners of different races to share cells will lead to a bloodbath. Always possible, I suppose, but isn't it equally possible that prisoners will acquire a perhaps uncomfortable but nonetheless necessary lesson about what it's like to live in the real world, where coming into contact with people you don't necessarily know or like is a routine part of everyday life?

And isn't is also possible that for every unreconstructed racist inmate, there's another who would like to get to know people from other ethnic groups but is prevented from doing so under pain of violence or death, thanks to restrictions laid down by racially aligned prison gangs? State-sanctioned and enabled prison gangs, as it turns out.

I was particularly intrigued by the Department of Corrections official who said that prisoners who "refuse" to participate in the program of integration "will face discipline ranging from loss of privileges to solitary confinement." Color me naive once more, but I was under the impression that once you get sentenced to prison, you lose most if not all your options when it comes to where and how you will be housed.

But such is not the case, apparently; at the weekend I had a long conversation with an Indiana state prison guard who painted such a bleak picture of life inside that I found myself wondering whether there's a viable method - short of mass executions or eliminating half the laws under which people are currently sentenced - of reforming America's vastly overcrowded and apparently hopelessly ineffectual penal system.

He told me many stories illustrating the pointless brutality and callous lack of concern on the part of inmates for anything other than their own interests, but for me the clincher was hearing how one of the more tedious aspects of being a prison guard was being called to cells with complaints like, "My cable's not working."

I'm not in favor of instituting gulags or concentration camps, but something seemed terribly wrong here. Half my friends in New York City can't afford or can barely afford cable; why on earth is the state furnishing it to inmates who are supposedly being punished? Isn't taking away TV privileges one of the first resorts of parents faced with recalcitrant children? Isn't it possible that better results might be achieved by locking a prisoner up with only a good book for company? Sure, it might piss him off at first, but society's purpose in locking him up was not, as far as I can tell, to cater to his preferences in entertainment or companionship.

Of course maybe I'm being too harsh, and would change my tune if I were the one being sentenced to prison. Having come fairly close on a couple of occasions to doing hard time, the prospect doesn't seem as farfetched to me as it might to others; in fact, I still experience moments of paranoia where I'm convinced that it's only a matter of time before "they" catch up to me and haul me away, even though my lawbreaking for the past few decades has largely been confined to the jaywalking and running stop signs on my bike department.

But I do know that if by some bizarre concatenation of circumstances I were to wind up in prison, I'd want to be able to associate freely with people regardless of race, and not be pressured into associating with the sort of yobbos who form prison gangs just because they happen to be the same color as me. And while it would be tempting to while away my years of confinement by watching endless reruns of Law And Order and Seinfeld, I suspect I'd be far better off with some good books and lots of time for reflection on how and why I happened to be there. As I say, I might change my tune if I were the one inside, but as a general rule, people don't get to sent to prison for making sensible life choices, so I'm not sure how much - if any - attention needs to be paid to what the average prisoner *thinks* he or she would like.

Weaselfest '08: Back Where He Belongs

It must have been around 1987 when people first started talking about the smartassed and hilarious Maximum Rocknroll scene reports emanating from Chicago and authored by a kid calling himself Ben Weasel. He combined a passionate belief in the music that he and his friends were making with a mercilessly skewering of Chicago punk rock's sacred cows, and before long it would be a rare copy of MRR that didn't contain at least one or two letters praising or (more often) denouncing the irascible Mr. Weasel.

I first met Ben in 1988 when he brought his band Screeching Weasel to Berkeley to play with Operation Ivy at Gilman Street. He was staying at Matt and Lint's house, and I'd barely walked in the door when he baited me into an argument, something which admittedly didn't take much effort in those days. It was probably something to do with the relative superiority of California vs. Chicago and/or his opinion that despite my punk rock trappings, I was too much of a mushbrained, sproutheaded hippie at heart, and it was an argument that would continue in one form or another over much of the following decade.

Screeching Weasel were not yet in their prime, but there was something special enough about them that I immediately wanted to put out records by them. But as it happened, their latest record was already set to come out on another label, and though we talked about it when they came back to California the following year, the band broke up before anything could come of it.

By now I'd become a huge Screeching Weasel fan, but between the breakup and the fact that despite their album selling quite well, he had very little to show it, Ben was pretty discouraged with the band. During the next couple years, we kept in touch by phone and talked a lot about what he might do next. I urged him to reunite Screeching Weasel in some form or another; Ben was of the opinion that it would be better to start fresh with a whole new band called the Gore Gore Girls.

Finally in 1991 Screeching Weasel was reborn and came to San Francisco to record My Brain Hurts. It wouldn't be their biggest-selling album, not by a long shot, but it was an absolutely seminal moment, not just for the band and for Lookout Records, but also for a whole generation (or two) of pop-punk bands. People argue to this day whether My Brain Hurts is the best Weasel album (Anthem For A New Tomorrow is the most frequently cited alternative), but few would deny how vital it was. Sales exceeded any expectations either the label or the band had had, and Ben, who'd written or co-written virtually everything the band had done, and who ran the S.S. Screeching Weasel as a very tight ship indeed, was for the first time faced with the semi-plausible prospect of making a decent career out of music.

For the next few years it was onward and upward. Each successive Screeching Weasel album met with instant success - at least by the pre-Dookie standards of what was still a relatively underground scene, the shows were getting bigger and bigger, and apart from the band, Ben was gaining a reputation as a powerful and incisive writer through his columns in MRR and other magazines.

And this is where I'd like to be able to say that everyone lived happily after, but it wasn't going to be quite that simple. As he began to reveal in his columns, Ben was suffering from increasing anxiety about playing shows and the pressures of being, at least within the relatively insular punk scene, more or less a superstar. At times, he said, it was difficult enough just to leave his house to journey to the corner store, let alone appear on stage before hundreds or thousands of maniacal fans.

It was during that same time that Ben and I began to fall out, our long-running but mostly good-natured arguments finally escalating into a vicious feud that lasted ten years and during which we never spoke directly to each other, though we did occasionally trade insults and accusations via the media. Although I didn't keep up as closely as I once had with his music and writing, I never stopped being a fan and never stopped listening to my Weasel records during those years.

When we finally met again at last year's Insubordination Fest in Baltimore, where Ben was giving a rare performance and resurrecting a number of Screeching Weasel classics, it was almost as though the bad years had never happened. Almost, I say, because Ben still felt conflicted about the whole idea of playing music for people. Actually, it wasn't so much the playing music part that bothered him - backed up by two of today's most exciting pop-punk bands, the Guts and the Steinways, and welcomed back by an adoring and rapturous crowd, Ben thoroughly enjoyed the experience. But within days the backbiting and criticism, often from people who weren't even there, started bubbling up through the internet, and on at least a couple occasions, Ben told me that he was pretty sure he was finished with playing music and was ready to move on to some other way of life.

Fast forward to May 25, 2008, and Ben strode confidently - and, from all appearances, happily - onto the stage in front of a sold-out crowd at Reggie's Rock Club on Chicago's South Side. The audience was going mental before he could say a word, and after thanking them for coming and explaining a little about the set he was going to play, he launched into "Acknowledge," the declaration and cri de coeur that had heralded Ben's turn toward the personal and introspective on the Weasel album Emo: "I am alive, I am here, I am now, I acknowledge the fact of my life."

Almost 20 years to the day after I first saw Screeching Weasel in California, I felt like I was watching Ben's triumphant homecoming. It had to be especially poignant for him, looking out at a fanatical crowd, members of which had come from a dozen or more states and a couple other countries to witness this moment, and knowing that he was doing so in the town where it had all started and where, face it, he hadn't always received such unanimous approbation. "When's the last time you saw Screeching Weasel?" I asked Patrick Hynes, my longstanding friend and partner in Lookout Records, who'd come out from California for the show.

"1993 at Gilman Street," he unhesitatingly told me, and I knew instantly which show he was talking about, because I'd been there too. Before we could say another word, Ben and the band tore into "Dingbat," the opening song from 1988's Boogada Boogada Boogada, the years fell away, and we along with everybody in the house were going crazy. There was barely a pause for breath before "Cindy's On Methadone" from My Brain Hurts, and there was no longer any doubt that this was going to be a truly magical experience.

Not surprisingly, the classics from the early 90s got the biggest response, and it would have been easy for Ben to put together a set of nothing but "greatest hits" (though perhaps at the risk of a few cardiac arrests among the no-longer-quite-so-young segment of the audience). But he seemed determined to provide an overview of his entire career, including tracks from last year's well-received solo effort These Ones Are Bitter and some Riverdales songs from the upcoming re-release of Phase 3. It all flowed together beautifully, and the pacing made it all the more effective when he unleashed some of my (and, I suspect, quite a few other people's) all time favorites like "What We Hate," "Teenage Freakshow," and, in one of the very few times I've actually seen it performed live (I was fortunate enough to be there when it was first recorded), "The Science Of Myth."

I've always been a My Brain Hurts man myself, but Anthem is a close second, and there was an ample helping of songs from it as well: "Peter Brady," "I'm Gonna Strangle You," and one of my personal favorites, "Falling Apart." After a brief interlude in which Mamma Weasel, Erika Crumbly, Weasel Radio's Owen Murphy, Matt Lame and several others took over the stage to hurl 500 donuts at the audience (don't ask; like many of the things being shouted back and forth and even the backdrop of a wizened old sailor on the USS Intrepid, it's a bit of a PPMB in-joke), Ben wrapped up what he later acknowledged as "the longest show I've ever played in my life" with a blinding five-song encore that finished with "Cool Kids" and had everyone in the room feeling like they were one.

I'm a big fan of redemption narratives, and for me that was exactly what I was privileged to witness. It felt as though Ben's years in the wilderness were over, that at last he was at peace with his gifts as a singer, writer and performer, and was able to share in the joy that they've brought to so many people over the years. It often seems that the longest and hardest, but ultimately most rewarding road is the one that takes us back home to where we've belonged all along. It would be presumptuous of me to suggest that I know - or indeed have any idea - what the future holds for Ben in terms of his career, but I will note that he's already talking about doing a couple - maybe even three or four - more shows later this summer. Based on what I saw Sunday night, he'll never be short of an audience. Nor should he be. The man is a genius and a treasure. Long may he run.

Report From The Front

The pop punk traveling circus has moved on to Chicago, though presently we (Carla Monoxide, Matt Lame, Ryan Coldfeet, JA and yours t.) are holed up at the lovely townhouse of Pete and Simple Repellent in semi-rural (as in there's a semblance of a cornfield across the road from one of the mini-malls we visited) Indiana.

The occasion is a weekend of shows at Reggies Rock Club, an excellent, relatively new entertainment complex (two stages, restaurant and bar, record store) near Chinatown. Last night saw Kepi Ghoulie, Andrew Jackson Jihad, Bomb The Music Industry, Lemuria and the Queers, all part of an Asian Man Records tour that's currently rolling around the Midwest, and tonight the club will be taken over by Ben Weasel, the Guts, the Leftovers and Shot Baker. Yesterday afternoon Reggie's also played host to a two hour version of Weasel Radio, the sports-talk-punk rock show hosted by Ben and Owen and normally emanating from Madison, WI.

I was one of the guests; we talked about crucial issues like visiting the Vancouver Hooters with the Donnas and, oh, probably not much else. The other guests were much more interesting. Carla Monoxide also claimed that my face was flaming red the whole time I was on the radio, allegedly because I was embarrassed. I don't know if that's true (many photos were taken, so I'll probably find out eventually), but if it is, it makes me wonder if the same was the case during the two or three years I was co-hosting my own show on KMUD back in Garberville. We were late for the show anyway because somebody (nobody will admit ownership) had the idea that we needed to drive over to the far side of Chicago to wait in line at some trendy hamburger joint and then wait another hour for our food to actually arrive. Actually, calm soul that I am, I didn't mind that much except for the truly awful hesher music that served as backdrop to the tattoo convention that passed for a clientele.

Speaking of awful music, I will say that one flaw at Reggie's (which tends to be true of the majority of places these days) is that in the bar-restaurant, there is nonstop music, mostly of the cheese-rock variety, that makes all but the most perfunctory or trivial conversation impossible. When the overhead stereo wasn't blaring 35 year old Who records, a particularly bad rock band set up the stage ten feet away, inducing several people at our table to put in earplugs. Okay, so I'm old, but Sebby Zatopek (one of the earplug people) is less than half my age. I realize that in every bar or restaurant there is a certain number of people who indeed have absolutely nothing of interest to say, but it does seem unfair that most clubs choose to cater to that crowd at the expense of people who genuinely enjoy and benefit from talking with each other.

Some of the pop punk purists were offended by the Andrew Jackson Jihad, a two piece (acoustic guitar and standup bass), but I thought they were awesome, combining a folk/hillbilly/old timey esthetic with the kind of raw, unbridled punk energy I've come to associate with the Delay/Max Levine Ensemble/Spoonboy/basement/bike punk ethos. Bomb The Music Industry had a more conventional instrumental lineup, but a similarly frantic and uproarious energy that had their crowd (which seemed distinctly different from the Queers crowd and more, as C Monoxide pointed out, like a Gainesville crowd) going utterly mental. I loved both bands.

It was my first time really seeing Lemuria (I looked in on them briefly on a couple of previous occasions) and I think I could grow to really like them, though they didn't grab me as instantaneously as the previous two. Kepi, well, the man is unstoppable. The dissolution of his long-running Groovie Ghoulies barely slowed him down, and he's back with two new albums and a dual-pronged acoustic and electric, duo and full band attack. Wherever I see him - and where I see him tends to be practically anywhere music is played - he inspires with his nonstop devotion to the cause of rock and roll fun.

The Queers, well, the Queers did what they've been doing for longer than some of their fans have been alive, and without varying the set list much, either. God knows I love Joe King and whatever incarnation his band takes, but I really feel he's letting himself (and his audiences) down by sticking so fanatically to 80s bonehead anthems and, even when he does perform a few of his far superior pop tunes (the man is one of the best writers of pop songs working in the business today), speeding them up to the point where they're barely distinguishable from said bonehead anthems. The old school approach is tried and true, always guaranteed to get a response, even if that response tends to be dominated by the lowest common denominator, testosterone overload segment of the punk scene, but he could be playing to and for so many more people if he only was willing to take the risk of showing his more sensitive and talented side. We're being promised a pure pop version of the Queers, augmented by Cub's Lisa Marr and MTX/Plus Ones/Pansy Division guitarist Joel Reader, at this year's Baltimore Fest. It will be amazing if it happens, but I remain fearful that at the first sign of a less than frantic audience reaction, Joe will slip back into default This Place Sucks/Want Cunt/We'd Have A Riot Doing Heroin mode.

Ah well, enough carping. Great show nonetheless, lots of friendly and fascinating faces, and more people than there possibly could have been time to talk to. Today there's a barbecue, something I don't get to a lot of in Brooklyn, and then back to Reggie's for the Ben Weasel Experience (provided he didn't blow his voice out of the water by taking the lead vocals on the Queers' "Love Love Love" last night). Should be great, and Chicago is great, but I'm also enthusiastic about getting back to Brooklyn tomorrow. Traveling's a blast, but when you really love the place you live, coming home can be the best part of all.

Little Al And Jello B

I thought for sure I'd told this story here before, but a quick search turns up no evidence of it, so here goes. If you've heard it already, sorry. Maybe you shouldn't pay such close attention to what I say; that way it'll still sound semi-fresh when I repeat myself.

I first met Little Al near the end of the summer of '69 (laugh all you want; I've actually never heard more than a brief snippet of the song), just after I got back from Woodstock. He, his girlfriend Val, and about 32 other hippies, one of whom was my younger brother, lived in a ramshackle two bedroom house just up the street from me in Ann Arbor. They called themselves the Congolian Maulers, and were meant to be Ann Arbor's "other" revolutionary commune, the White Panthers/Trans Love Energies house being of course the first.

Despite their fierce-sounding name, I never knew the Maulers to do any mauling or much of anything else apart from get stoned and talk a lot, i.e., just like pretty much all the hippies I knew, myself included. Little Al, who'd been one of my brother's best friends since high school, was particularly disdainful of the revolutionary rhetoric floating around, and was far more interested in music. Shortly afterward I took off for California and didn't see Little Al again till I came back for a visit in the summer of 1970. Walking up Oakland Street in search of the most recent address I had for my brother, I heard a deafening cacophony emerging from the tower room of an old rambling house. It sounded like half a dozen chimpanzees were committing mayhem on a kid's drum set, but Little Al stuck his head out the window and shouted, "Hey Larry! I'm learning to play the drums!"

The learning process was slow and painful, especially for those of us living downstairs, but eventually Little Al got good enough to play in bands, and eventually he hooked up with a semi-professional (as in they apparently made some money at times) outfit in Colorado called the Ravers. I never saw them, but I knew they toured a lot, and even had a roadie, so I reckoned that made them bigger time than most bands I knew.

That was in the mid-70s; by 1977 or 78 Al had turned up in San Francisco, where he joined an excellent new wave/power pop band called the Pushups, who came very close to making it big before they broke up over the usual issues of conflicting ambitions/egos/drugs type issues. But I think the Pushups were still together that fateful day when my brother, who was crashing at Al's apartment in the Mission District, answered the door and found the Ravers' old roadie from Colorado, a skinny kid named Eric. He'd just dropped out of college, he informed my brother, and hitchhiked up to San Francisco with the intention of starting a punk rock band.

Within a few months Eric had morphed into Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. I saw them play a few times in 1978 and 79, but never actually met him until the autumn of 1980, when Little Al asked me to drive him and his drums down to a warehouse in Hunters Point, where he was going to try out as the Dead Kennedys' new drummer. I'd been up on a three or four day coke binge, so I immediately fell asleep behind Klaus Fluoride's bass amp while they ran through a few songs. Maybe not totally asleep, but I remember it being very restful.

Then they brought in the other contender for the job, Darren Peligro, who'd been turning up at a lot of the same shows and parties my girlfriend and I were at. I later came to realize that this was no coincidence, but that's neither here nor there: the relevant point is that it was instantly obvious that Little Al was not going to get this gig. He was a good solid drummer, albeit a bit pedestrian - but in a good way; he often reminded me of Ringo Starr - but Darren was a raging powerhouse and a perfect fit for the DKs. Afterwards I talked to Biafra for a while, and was surprised to find that despite all the screaming and ranting I'd seen him do on stage, he was pleasant, personable, witty, and an all-around nice guy to shoot the shit with.

The 80s weren't kind to Little Al. He never got another solid musical gig, and drugs, which had always been around, started to play a bigger and bigger role in his life. I wasn't exactly a poster boy for clean living myself, but I remember being shocked and a little frightened the first time I saw him cooking up free base in a dingy little flat on Waller Street. I only saw him a few times after that. He put on a lot of weight, spent much of his time hanging out drinking in bars, and finally dropped dead of a heart attack.

Meanwhile I was getting more involved in the music scene myself, first with my band and then with a record label as well, which meant crossing paths with Biafra more frequently. His label, mine, and Maximum Rocknroll magazine were all distributed through Mordam Records, and this produced some, shall we say, lively discussions, often with Biafra and myself on one side and MRR's Tim Yohannan in vociferous opposition. Once I left the record business and California, I no longer saw much of Biafra; the last lengthy conversation I had with him must have been sometime in the late 90s when Trust magazine's Dolf Hermannstädter and I ran into him on Valencia Street right about the time that whole lawsuit business with the other three Dead Kennedys was erupting.

Biafra seemed saddened and outraged in equal measure. He wasn't even going to consider compromising with his old bandmates; when I (and, I think, Dolf) pointed out that there was a fair chance he might lose the lawsuit if it went to court, he said, "Well, then I'll write an article for the local papers exposing them for what they really are." I didn't want to point out that this wasn't the old days, where an indignant letter or column in MRR could play havoc with a band's career, so I wished him luck, and apart from brief hellos at a couple of shows, I haven't really seen him since.

The lawsuit did end badly, and my impression was that Biafra was pretty upset over it, but he seems to have recovered pretty well, and has kept busy with a host of projects in addition to his long-running record label, Alternative Tentacles. And now I see, thanks to the Bay Guardian, that he's about to turn 50, and will be celebrating with a couple of shows at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall.

And it may not come under the heading of best birthday surprise ever, but today's Chronicle brings the news that talk show host Michael Savage (né Michael Weiner) is apparently a closet DKs fan. Savage/Weiner, who's about as far right wing as Biafra is left, plays the Dead Kennedys track "California Über Alles" and enthusiastically recites all the lyrics. The point, apparently, was to mock Senator Ted Kennedy's most likely fatal brain tumor, but Savage got in a few kicks at the "Zen fascists" as well. Which just goes to show... Well, I'm sure it shows something, but I'm too sleepy to think of what it might be just now. Happy half century, Jello B!!!

Most Annoying Hipster Affectation

Jim Jersey Beat started a thread by this same name over at the PPMB, and soon had everyone and his irate mama chiming in to enumerate what they most disliked about those pesky hipsters.

If there's anyone more judgmental than hipsters, it's got to be the punks, but alas, the punks are not always as keenly attuned to the shifting vagaries of fashion as they might be, so a great deal of hot air was expended in denouncing things like trucker hats, white belts and "girl pants," all very 2-5 years ago, if not downright last century. But considerable vitriol was also unleashed toward "ironic" beards and mustaches, phony jihad scarves (well, apparently the scarves are the real deal; the people wearing them, not so much), not to mention "ascots and neckerchiefs" ("Who are we," demands one poster, "Fred from Scooby Doo?").

As someone who's done his fair share of fulminating, especially about the scruffy beards and clothes that have been giving me horrific flashbacks to the 70s, I was surprised, pleasantly surprised, in fact, to discover that most of these things no longer bothered me. I've made my peace with the hipsters, apparently, not that any of them ever showed any indication whatsoever of caring what I thought. But even the beards, which for a year or two had been my bête noire, have become so much white noise to me as I wend my way through the Williamsburg streets.

Well, perhaps not completely... Last night as I was coming home I walked past the Metropolitan, reputed to be our neighborhood gay bar, but which I had always suspected of being merely another hipster hangout for boys and girls of tenuous or conflicted sexuality. I was quite surprised to see a couple guys rather passionately making out just outside the front door. Surprised, I say, because it's the first overtly gay activity I've ever noticed emanating from the place; previously I'd only ever seen the usual hipster suspects standing around smoking cigarettes and looking angst-ridden.

As it happened, one of the making-out dudes was smooth-cheeked or at least closely shaven, and actually kind of cute, whereas his osculatory partner was a standard-issue beardo. And some of the old revulsion came rushing back: how, I heard myself demanding, could you rub your face up against that?

But I digress. For the most part I no longer find myself thinking badly of hipsters based on facial hair or clothes or even that jaundiced view of the non-hipster world they wear along with their carefully sculpted Weltschmerz and anomie. Live and let live, I say, and as long as I'm living here in the heart of postgraduate sleepaway camp, it's about all I can say, if I want to keep my sanity.

Then Jenna Alive weighed in with one hipster affectation I truly can not abide: smoking. True, not all hipsters smoke, but a wildly disproportionate number do, and when you consider that these are not exactly unsophisticated or ignorant people, but have come from mostly well-to-do families and colleges that the vast majority of Americans could neither afford nor be accepted to, you have to believe that the conspicuous - and highly mannered - consumption of tobacco is indeed a fashion statement. A particularly stupid one, granted, but fashion nonetheless.

Even then, I could stretch my tolerance to include 20-somethings frantically smoking because they're hoping for an early death (and need to cling to something) were it not for the fact that they're inflicting their stink on everyone else around them. Ah, but you've heard me railing in that vein before, so I'll stop right there and reveal that while thinking about smoking, it dawned me that the one thing that really annoys me about hipsters is when they deny being hipsters.

Which they pretty much all do. In fact, serious hipsters actually get outraged and indignant if you so much as hint at the H-word in their presence. "What's a hipster?" they'll snarl, "just some ridiculous stereotype that means nothing at all in the real world."

"So it's just a complete and utter coincidence that you wear the same clothes and have the same facial fair and see the same movies and read the same books as every other 20-something in the neighborhood?"

"People can have common values and ideas without being lumped into stupid media characterizations. Calling someone a hipster, well, that's abusive, it's practically like a form of racism."

I have actually had several conversations with self-denying hipsters than ran along almost exactly those lines, and none ended satisfactorily. After the first or second, I learned that there was no point in pursuing this line of questioning, so I'd just nod my head sagely and let them go on disclaiming their hipsterness. But quietly I'd think to myself, "Other subcultures don't seem to have such a problem saying who they are - punk, hippies, hiphoppers, even emo kids wear their status almost like a badge of honor - so what is the hipsters' problem?

You know what, though? I actually don't care anymore. Or maybe I do, but I'm sleepy and want to go to bed. Tomorrow perhaps I'll find a hipster on the street and ask him to explain this to me, but more likely I'll stay in and watch the Champions League final between Man United and Chelsea. Maybe I'll even start growing a scruffy beard and claim that it's not a beard at all, just the result of my being so preoccupied with vital artistic concerns that I forgot to shave. As Chris Grivet would say, "Ha. No."

Guilt Tripped By The G Train

"The Ghost Train" is one of the less unkind epithets applied to the G train by Williamsburgers and Greenpointers (the latter, in particular, since it's the only subway "service" at all in their neighborhood. It's also called the Ghetto train, the Good-For-Nothing or the Goes Nowhere train, and no doubt a few others that slip my mind at the moment.

There's no denying that it's the unwanted stepchild of the New York subway system, ranking only slightly above the Staten Island Railway in the gets no respect sweepstakes. There are frequently rumors that the MTA is deliberately making the G train as useless, inconvenient and unreliable as possible so that people won't notice or complain when they finally shut it down altogether.

I have a hard time believing that to be true, as a smoothly functioning G train would be invaluable for the many people who have to travel between Brooklyn and Queens and would prefer not going by way of Manhattan to do so. And one doesn't really want to think that the MTA isn't trying to make public transit as convenient and user-friendly as possible, despite copious evidence to the contrary.

But for one reason or another, the G runs "normally" (i.e., from Forest Hills to downtown Brooklyn) so seldom that soon a whole generation may soon have grown up believing that it always came to a dead end just two stops into Queens and two (or more) short of its destination in Brooklyn. Or that there's really no reason to expect a train more often than every 20 minutes, or that one would ever have a reasonable expectation of what track it will be on.

It was with this in mind that I trepidatiously boarded the G Sunday evening for a return trip to Queens (second in one weekend!). The reason I say trepidatiously is that I was on my way to Astoria to record a demo of a song I'd written for my friends' band Short Attention (they specialize in - nay, they only do songs of 20 seconds or less in length). When Short Attention first burst onto the scene, I wrote somewhere (probably here, actually) that they were "clever, maddening and annoying." Not only did the band not hold a grudge against me (not a visible one, anyway), but they used my words as the title for the first EP of, oh, I don't know, about 127 songs. And now they've asked me to contribute to their next EP, which is actually a concept EP, the concept being that all the songs will have been written by friends of the band.

I didn't really see the need to make a professional quality recording of the demo, but that's what we were being offered, including the services of part time recording engineer, full time record magnate Jonnie Whoa Oh of Whoa Oh Records, whose studio is located way out near the end of the N line in exotic Astoria. And the most direct route to the N, albeit with an intermittent flying one-stop visit to the 7, is the much maligned G train. And the reason I was nervous about using the route...

Well, let me backtrack (speaking of the G, hardy har har) a bit: you see, I have this, I don't know if you'd call it anthropomorphic or animistic tendency to believe that everything is not only alive, but also thinks something like I do. In other words, the G train has thoughts and feelings, too, and if it should be aware that the name of the song I was on my way to record was "What The Fuck Is The Point Of The G Train?" well, heaven only knows what might happen.

But lo and behold, the G showed up after no more than a two or three minute wait. This must be a trap, I thought, any minute now there's going to be an announcement that we're being diverted to South Ozone Park. Not the case, however; my trip went smoothly as could be, as did the recording session. No thanks to me; having not been in a studio for quite a few years, I managed all sorts of false starts, cracking voices, and general befuddlement before the ever-efficient Jonnie got a decent version down on tape. Then after a brief visit and a spirited discussion of world issues - Jonnie is one of the few people who has even more opinions than I do, and is even surer that he is always right - I reversed course and was ferried quickly and safely back to Brooklyn, once again via the N, the 7 and the G.

All the way there, the chorus of my song - which is the same as the title - echoed in my head, and I felt ever more regretful that I'd said such unkind things about the G train, which, as the only subway line that doesn't go to Manhattan, is no doubt already suffering serious self-esteem issues. I wondered if there was any way I could change the lyrics to something along the lines of, "The G train's really not all that bad, you know," but it didn't have the same ring to it. I was walking home when it suddenly hit me: the G train was guilt tripping me. It knew all along that its performance typically wasn't up to snuff, but rather than mend its ways, it decided to give me really good service just that once, guaranteeing that I'd feel bad every time I heard Short Attention sing that rather hostile (to the G train, that is) song of mine.

Well, the hell with it, I finally said, and decided to offer the G train a deal: you start running on the right track, going to the places you're supposed to go, and showing up at least every ten minutes or so, and I'll personally record a public recantation of my song. Chances of that happening = slim to none, I'd say, which is just as well, since I have not a clue how I'd go about writing a positive, upbeat song about New York City's most unwanted subway line.

But I was also kind of excited to have written a song again, however short (it actually clocked in over 20 seconds, a virtual rock opera by Short Attention standards), for the first time in at least seven years. And I've got a couple more in the works, just melodies so far, no words. I was beginning to think that would never happen again.

Crossing The Border

Yesterday I helped a friend move from Astoria to Jackson Heights (sorry, I can't hear the latter name without thinking of the line from the Car 54, Where Are You? theme that goes, "There's a traffic jam in Harlem that's backed up to Jackson Heights," and if anything shows my age, that should be it). My job entailed picking up a rental truck near my house and navigating it onto the BQE and across Newtown Creek via the mighty Kosciuszko Bridge, the concrete and steel span that leads us out of all that is safe and familiar here in Brooklyn and into the trackless wilds of Queens.

"Queens," my friend Dan opines, and he should know, having spent much of his life there, "is New York City's junk drawer." Not in any disparaging sense, i.e., he's not implying that people, place and things in Queens are actually, you know, junk, just that Queens is the kind of place where you put everything that's too good to throw away but that you don't know what else to do with.

My trip over went pretty smoothly, no thanks to the dilapidated terror ride that is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (I think someone is having an especially ironic chuckle over including the word "express" in the name of this crumbling edifice). New York City is looking mighty spiffy in many quarters these days, what with all the building and rebuilding that's been going on, but the BQE, despite being a perennial construction site, appears to be the Winchester Mystery House of highway projects, always in upheaval, never completed. That plus the way lanes tend to appear and disappear (or suddenly dwindle in size to half the width of your vehicle) keeps travel on it a constantly invigorating and entertaining experience.

Soon after entering Astoria, I found myself driving down a street lined with hundreds - and I don't think this is even slightly an exaggeration - of Central and South American men who began whistling and gesturing wildly at me. I found this bewildering until I realized they were under the impression that I, being the driver of a truck that looked like it meant serious business, would be in the market for some bargain basement employees to load and unload it.

They all - well, except for the handful who tried the opposite strategy of looking cool and disinterested - seemed so eager and even desperate that I felt truly sorry I didn't have any work to offer them, there already being a full complement of PPMBers waiting at my destination to do the heavy lifting. I found myself searching my mind for any kind of work I could offer them, only to be brought up short by the realization that I have enough trouble finding work for myself to do.

And besides, there were so many of them. What if, I couldn't help wondering, the economy really did get as bad as the alarmists are predicting - or even as bad as it apparently already is in some parts of the country? What would become of these men then? Which in turn led me to wonder, while feeling no less sympathetic toward their plight, if this is any kind of way to run an economy or a country. I suppose similar things must have gone on during the last great wave of immigration around the turn of the 20th century, but it seems so backward and, yes, even a little barbaric today. On the bright side, by the time I made my second pass through the illegal immigrant zone (having taken a wrong turn the first time around), I was pleased to see that at least some of them were actually picking up work, as quite a few trucks and cars were pulling up to negotiate with them. I still felt compelled to put up my hands in a gesture of helplessness while mouthing the words, "No, gracias," especially to those who, having seen me come around the block twice, assumed that I had to be looking for some good workers.

The move itself went swiftly and smoothly, despite it being down three flights and up four others. At the new place, the fourth floor one, there was an elevator, but it being Saturday morning and this being a very large building, there were a few dozen other residents who felt they ought to have a right to use the elevator, too. After waiting about ten minutes for it to show up, we were quickly cramming it with as much stuff as would fit when a, shall we say, rather stout lady emerged puffing and panting from the staircase and immediately launched into a denunciation of yours truly.

"Thanks for holding up the elevator, buddy!" she barked. "You made me miss my ride, now who's gonna pay me $7 for my cab fare?" There was a time when I might have been cowed by this outburst of fury, but apparently New York has begun to rub off on me, because without even waiting for her to finish, I was already firing back: "Whattaya talking about, the elevator just got here this minute, we're waiting here forever for it to show up while somebody screwed around with it up on the fifth floor, you got a problem, go talk to your neighbors up there!"

She nodded her head as though we'd just greeted each other with a matter-of-fact "How are you, lovely day today, isn't it?" and heaved her way out on to the sidewalk to yell at some young people who happened to be standing there and looked as though they could have recently been riding in an elevator. We finished our moving in near-record time - the less stuff was left to carry, the more people showed up to help - and while everyone else set out to celebrate a morning's successful work with lunch at a local Indian restaurant, I turned the truck around and headed back to Brooklyn. Nothing against Indian food, which I quite enjoy, nor the company, which I enjoy even more, but there were no legal parking spots for the truck anywhere in sight (at least we'd only been blocking a crosswalk while unloading, not double parking and tying up traffic for blocks as any number of other trucks were doing), and I had, you know, important stuff that needed doing. Stuff whose importance or even nature seems to elude me at the moment, but serious stuff nonetheless.

Thanks to yet more construction work, I had a meandering journey through the backstreets of Queens before finding my way onto the BQE again, during the course of which I stopped to replace the gas we'd used, all 1.9 gallons worth. I know I've generally expressed enthusiasm for higher gasoline prices on the grounds that they'll discourage people from so much needless driving about, but I must admit that paying $4.15 a gallon dampened my ardor just a bit. Then it was down some rathole and up some decrepit roller coaster of a ramp and there I was flying high in the sky with all of Manhattan spread out before me in the dazzling late spring sunshine.

The reason this particular stretch of the highway offers such a spectacular view of the skyline is that the immediate foreground is occupied by a vast cemetery, containing nothing higher than the occasionally overreaching mausoleum. I remembered riding on this same route sometime back in the 1970s, when New York wasn't quite the bejeweled Emerald City we see it as today, and in my yearning-for-the-apocalypse drug-fucked hippie mind seeing the city's spires and towers as extensions of the graveyard, hollow-eyed Brobdingnagian tombstones crowding to the ends of the horizon.

But New York never looked more alive than it did this morning, and $4.15 a gallon gas had done nothing to dissuade everybody and his mother-in-law from piling into the car and onto the upper reaches of the BQE, making my trip a bit stop-and-start, or, on the bright side, affording me greater opportunity to savor the view of what has been called "the most polluted waterway in America."

Midway across Newtown Creek, as at every border crossing, there's a sign, placed by the irrepressible Borough President Marty Markowitz, welcoming you to Brooklyn. Each has a different slogan; the one on the Kosciuszko Bridge reads, "Welcome To Brooklyn: Believe the Hype." Some others include: "Brooklyn: Like No Other Place In The World," "Name It... We Got It," "How Sweet It Is!" and "Brooklyn's In The House!" A little over-the-top, you say? Well, yeah, but basically, it's all true. I'd genuinely enjoyed my trip into Queens - it kind of reminded me of when, as a boy in Detroit, we'd cross the bridge over into Canada for a little bit of foreign adventure and maybe to smuggle back some illegal fireworks - but gee, it was good to be back home.