Just Like Old Times

When I was living/squatting/hiding out from the East Village in 1968, it was not unusual for young hippies like myself to be approached by black panhandlers and/or scam artists who would try to guilt trip us into parting with our cash as, you know, our way of apologizing for slavery and segregation and all that sort of stuff.

Sometimes this would involve the good cop-bad cop approach, where one guy would be all menacing and threatening and then the other would be like, "Hey, don't be messing with him, he's not like most of them white people, I can tell he's cool, ain't that right, brother?" This particular approach once worked well enough (granted, I was very high on LSD at the time) to persuade me to accompany three unsavory characters down E. 11th Street past Avenue B, then generally considered the point at which all hope should be abandoned (and also, not coincidentally, where I lived) to get my head smashed in with the barrel of a gun.

Usually things didn't turn out that badly, though; more often a result satisfactory to all parties was reached with the handing over of a buck or two, sometimes but not always in exchange for some oregano or similar marijuana substitute. Even when they realized they'd been hustled, many white kids who'd only recently arrived in the city from more affluent suburbs felt a certain glow of accomplishment, thinking that they'd assumed their proper position in the urban food chain.

The knock on the head, resulting in my coming close to bleeding to death, disabused me rather more quickly of such romantic notions, and soon - it happened just as often in San Francisco and Berkeley - I could see what was coming before most hustlers could get a "Yo, brother" out of their mouths.

There were times - not often, but occasionally - where I'd hand over some cash, either because the guy's story was exceptionally good or because it seemed like the better part of valor, but even when I did, I rarely pretended to believe what I heard. And gradually people stopped asking. I don't know if that sort of appeal went out of fashion or if it just didn't look like something that would work on me, but until tonight it had been years - decades, more like - since someone tried the race card on me as a means of extracting cash.

It didn't start out that way. The guy followed me into Ray's ice cream and fries shop on Avenue A where I was getting my ritual black and white cone (Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder may have ebony and ivory; the black and white cone is my bit for racial harmony) before heading home for the night.

He was rattling a cup with a few coins in it and asked for some more "so I can get something to eat." The cloud of alcohol fumes enveloping him told a different story and I pointed that out. A lively discussion ensued for quite some time while Ray was refilling the ice cream machine, during which Ray would occasionally shout from the back, "Get a job, panhandling is no good!" Eventually I was almost willing to believe that the guy genuinely wanted something to eat, and though I wasn't going to give him money, offered to buy him some food.

Then things went downhill, when Mr. Beggar started spouting off about how Ray was "rich" and how his daddy must have given him the money to buy his shop, when in fact Ray had worked over 20 years as a dishwasher to earn the money. Then, perhaps even more unwisely, he claimed to be making more money than either Ray or myself and that he begged only "for something to do, to get out of the house."

At this point he whipped out a bottle of vodka and took a large swig, claiming that "I can drink if I want to," which had never been under dispute, only the matter of who was going to pay for it. I said that I wasn't going to, and perhaps unfairly withdrew my offer to buy him some food.

That's when it turned ugly. "I never got my 40 acres and a mule, either. You people enslaved me, you owe me now."

The appropriate reaction to this would have been uproarious laughter, but instead I got mad, pointing out that though he did look the worse for wear, I was pretty sure all the slaves had been freed at least 100 years before he was born and that neither I nor my ancestors were anywhere near this country when that whole slavery thing was going on.

By now the discussion had moved out onto Avenue A, and got uglier. "I don't need to ask for no money," he snarled, "I could just take it, you know." At that point I blew a fuse and started shouting that I was calling the police and for him to get the fuck away from me. This got quite a reaction from the peanut gallery of drunks and occasional spare changers who usually congregate outside the bodega.

At first they laughed at me, thinking I was being way too paranoid. Street robberies are not exactly common on that stretch of Avenue A; in fact, I can't remember the last time I heard of one. So I half yelled at, half reasoned with them, explaining just why the guy had set me off like that, and so impassioned was I that they ended up more or less agreeing with me. Or at least giving a pretty fair impression thereof.

Meanwhile the original beggar had slunk off into the darkness and I headed off for the subway, now only mad at myself for being such a doofus. As messed up as the guy was, I felt I was in the wrong for first promising to buy him food and then going back on the promise, and resolved to apologize to him if/when I see him again. At the same time, that whole reparations/"you owe us" scam really does set me off, whether being worked by street hustlers or professionals of the Sharpton-Jackson ilk.

But trying to reason with a drunk guy about the finer points of racial history or socio-economic theory? That's the kind of thing only other drunk guys have even a shred of an excuse for doing, and I haven't been drunk in over six years. In fact, one of the last times I got into a confrontation of this sort was when I was drunk, sometime in 2000 or 2001, and found myself wrestling with a crackhead on the rain-slicked pavement of Oxford Street over a lighter he'd borrowed and refused to give back.

It was a definite clue that something wasn't quite right with the way I was going about life, and I'm generally pleased to say that since I stopped drinking, voilà, no more wrestling with crackheads. But I found tonight's encounter disturbing for much the same reason: although I wasn't drunk, I was acting and (not) thinking dangerously close to the way a drunk guy acts and thinks. Perhaps it's time to take a hard look at my ice cream cone habit.

"Moral Reasons" Or Just Plain Nuts?

I must admit that while I often lose patience with aging baby boomers (myself included), the ones that most stoke my ire are those who not only seem to have learned nothing from the decade-long plunge into drug-fueled nihilism that tried to pass itself off as a "revolution," but who continue to this day to fuel the flames of ignorance and misinformation by insisting that there was actually something noble and admirable about the 60s generation's flirtation with totalitarianism and violence.

The worst offenders tend to be those who weren't actually there at the height of the "revolution," who for one reason or another didn't make it onto the scene until it was becoming obvious to most sentient observers that as bad at the US government may or may not have been at the time, a bunch of fantasy-driven young terrorists drawing upon the likes of mass murder Mao Zedong for inspiration, were not likely to represent an improvement. Like most kids who show up on the scene when the scene has already evaporated or moved on, they tried desperately to be even more radical, even more outrageous than their big brothers and sisters.

Ward Churchill, the phony Indian who managed to lie his way into a lucrative professorship, was one such; 30 years after the scales had fallen from most people's eyes, he was still lauding mad bombers and bank robbers from the 60s and early 70s as American heroes, and calling for the sort of violent revolution that, in the unlikely event it ever materialized, would spell disaster and death for the people - especially genuine Native Americans - he claimed to be advocating on behalf of.

Another, considerably less well known, but similarly befuddled, is Ron Jacobs, who when not reminiscing wistfully about taking drugs at bad early 70s rock concerts, waxes equally nostalgic about the bomb-planting young fascists and mental cases of the Weather Underground. He's written an entire book extolling their alleged virtues, and regularly submits articles to Counterpunch pushing a similar theme.

In his latest piece, Jacobs muses over why young people who come to hear him speak about the 60s radicals "seem to be looking for some kind of psychological flaw in the members of those movements." Um, possibly because they're not on the same kind of drugs you were, Ron? I mean, we are talking (in this piece, Jacobs cites with some admiration convicted Weather terrorist Cathy Wilkerson, who hosted the Greenwich Village bomb making party that blew three young radicals to smithereens in 1970) about people who, by most accounts, were constructing anti-personnel bombs of the sort that routinely go off in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the West Bank.

Can't kids these days see, Jacobs wonders, that yesterday's terror bombers (does he feel similarly about today's?) were motivated by "moral reasons" and "conscience?" The fact that most of them can't cheers me immensely, and the only reason that I bother writing on this subject is that there are still young people - sometimes, like their 60s counterparts, motivated by the best of intentions - who still idealize or glorify the solipsistic megalomaniacs of the 60s "underground."

As I've noted here before, I knew and was quite fond of one of the Weatherpeople who blew herself up that day in 1970. A couple different forks in the road, a slightly different combination of mind-altering drugs, and it's quite possible I could have come to a similar end. But once the drugs wore off, it was painfully obvious just how tragically stupid the whole business was, and how fortunate I and many other 60s survivors were to have gotten out before the insanity reached a point of no return.

Of course for pampered scions of the ruling class like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, there was no such thing as a point of no return; Daddy's money was able to buy their way back into polite society when the "revolution" didn't work out, but working class radicals - yours truly, for example - didn't usually do so well. Considering how much money my dad could have spared for my defense out of his Post Office salary, I might, if I was lucky, be getting out of prison right about now.

Oh, but there I go stirring up class warfare again, so perhaps I'd better cool it before someone mistakes me for a commie.

Frisco Bloody Frisco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Bloody Sunday

My trepidations about incipient senility notwithstanding, Sunday saw me put in a solid 12 hours of rocking and rolling, first at Day Two of the aforementioned Carlapalooza, latterly at the Lost And Found Saloon over in Greenpoint.

I didn't see all the bands at the Cake Shop, but of those I did see, my two favorites were, well, my perennial two favorites, the Leftovers and the Steinways. I know you may suspect me of being a one-man hype machine for these two bands, but I don't hesitate to mention when either of them is on less than top form, and have done so at times this past year.

However, this Sunday was not one of those times. Just off a several-week US tour (and having been kept up past 4 am by man-about-town Frank Unlovable), the Leftovers tore into their set at a whole new level of power and professionalism (the good kind of professionalism; i.e., their instruments were in tune, they didn't waste time in between songs, every song was tightly honed and fit into the set like jewels in a flawless Swiss watch). It's almost frightening to see music played at that level in - with all respect to the Cake Shop - what resembles little more than a basement practice space. I imagine it must have been a bit like this to see the Beatles in their Cavern Club days or the Rolling Stones at Richmond's Crawdaddy Club.

But as sensational as they were, the Leftovers didn't even take top honors on this Sunday. That distinction would have to go to the Steinways, who after a lull earlier this year while they developed new material, have re-entered the fray as - in my decidedly none too humble opinion - the best band in the USA today. Yes, I know the Ergs are far better musicians technically speaking - so are the Leftovers, for that matter - and certainly the Ergs have a bigger following, but as simple and unaffected as the Steinways are, there's something that ineffably sets them apart from and on a different plane from all other bands. Think Ramones in 1975 or Screeching Weasel in 1988: almost nobody grasped the full amazing-ness of those bands at the time, or foresaw the impact they were going to have on pop music and culture.

Am I predicting similar greatness for the Steinways? No, because they've already got similar greatness. Are they going to have a similar impact? Too soon to tell, but barring a breakup or one or more members developing a serious drug problem, there's no reason they shouldn't.

Sunday's show, which got underway when singer/guitarist Grath McGrath made a perfectly timed entry after spending much of the afternoon watching football back in Queens, turned out to be one of those magic moments when everybody simultaneously realized, "Hey, these guys aren't just our friends, they're also like this totally awesome band that I'd love even if I'd never met or heard of them before."

I'd seen something similar happen at the 2006 Baltimore Fest, but now there were new songs, new people, and a new level of ecstasy and excitement as virtually everyone sang along and all but threw themselves onto the stage to smother the Steinways in a great big puppy pile of mutual love and affection. Being in the slightly mopey mood that I described in the previous post, I was standing off to the side of the stage facing the crowd, and it looked exactly like one of those photos you see in books about some classic music scene from the past, be it CBGBs in the late 70s or DC in the early 80s, or Gilman Street later on in that decade. It made me feel pretty cool, too, that I knew about 90% of the people in that crowd. Not only are the Steinways a great band; they have the best fans, too.

A sensible person would have gone home after that, but remember who's talking here. Actually, I did go home, but only to grab my bike and ride over to Greenpoint, where the Modern Machines (yes, named after the song by SoCal's The Crowd) were playing along with three or four other bands (lineups and schedules at this rather louche drinking establishment are nearly always subject to great variation).

I'd already seen the MoMacs at the Cake Shop, but they'd mentioned that they'd be playing again that night with a band they highly recommended, who turned out to be the Thomas Function from Alabama, who with their slippery-slidey organ riffs reminded me of a kudzu-and-Spanish moss-encrusted Del Shannon if he'd had Ray Manzarek playing keyboards for him. The singer was so drunk he could barely stand up (at least that was the case when I talked to him afterward), but it was good jolly fun, even if by now it had gotten on toward one thirty in the morning. I thought surely that the party had to be over now, but yet another band, this one from über-punk Crown Heights, leisurely started setting up.

If I were them, I would have got up and started playing as quickly as possible, before what was left of the audience drifted away, but that's apparently not how things work at the Lost And Found. Just when their equipment seemed to be nearly ready, a couple band members nonchalantly wandered outside to smoke. I'd resolved to stay long enough to catch at least a couple of their songs, but this was getting ridiculous, so I hopped aboard my ragged bicycle and made my wobbly way home.

Too Old To Rock And Roll?

Sunday was pretty much the first time ever that I felt too old to be at a punk rock show.

Now I don't really know what "too old" is supposed to mean. I've had people as young as 20 tell me they felt the same way, but for some reason I never did, even though I didn't attend my first punk rock show (either the Avengers/Nuns or Ramones/Dictators) until I was almost 30, and didn't play in my first punk rock band until I was 37. Hell, by the time most of that Gilman/Lookout/East Bay stuff happened, I was into my 40s.

And yet through all of that, it seldom if ever occurred to me to wonder whether I belonged there at the club or on stage, rocking out with people half my age (or less). Why should I start worrying about it now? One possible explanation is that now that i don't drink, I'm capable of observing social situations more dispassionately and objectively, but while that could be part of it, I've been off the booze for more than six years now, whereas these feelings of being out of place at the punk rock show have only just come up.

Another explanation is that I look (and sometimes feel) older now. Not that I was ever going to pass for one of the teen or twenty-something types who populate most punk rock shows, but until a few years ago, people generally figured me for at least 10 or 15 years younger than my true age. Hell, I was frequently getting asked for ID right up until around the time I turned 50.

No longer the case, however; I've grown used to people calling me "sir," and when I was crossing the country last week, one motel desk clerk asked if I was going to be claiming an AARP discount. And if that's not enough to make a guy feel over the hill, imagine my chagrin on discovering that most of my friends in the New York pop-punk crew have parents who are younger than me.

But there's the crux of the issues: some of these parents come to shows when their kids' - my friends' - bands are playing. They stand there politely, maybe looking a little uncomfortable, grimace slightly when the music gets too loud, and tell their kids, "That was very, um... interesting," before scurrying the hell out of there to do more age-appropriate things.

Whereas I know the music, and love it, find it more enjoyable than almost any other kind of music, and have little or no interest in age-appropriate things,l whatever they might be. STILL... at one point Sunday I caught myself whining about how the in-between-sets music was too loud and abrasive. (Well, it WAS; not only was it turned up to the level where normal conversation was impossible, it was also some kind of awful - albeit trendy - garage music that consisted of pretty much all high-end distortion.)

My complaining got the desired result: out went the garage music, replaced by pop-punk tracks played at a more intelligent volume, but despite this small victory, I felt even more like an old fart. It didn't help that I was wearing my new Ergs shirt, purchased only the day before and therefore not yet washed and not yet shrunk to the appropriate size. Even that wasn't the worst of it: as I should have known (would have known if I weren't too busy being an old fart - oh, and not having any other clean shirts), there were at least three or four other people there wearing the exact same shirt.

What's the big deal, you ask? After all, pop-punkers are renowned for wearing what amounts to a virtual uniform: band shirt, jeans, Converse All-Stars. The one thing they don't wear, though, is matching t-shirts. In fact, although few of them will admit to this, considerable thought goes into coming up with the shirt that will be most obscure and esoteric, and if nothing else, certain to be the only one of its kind at the show.

And while the Ergs, probably Greater New York's most popular band at present, have reached the point where practically everyone has one of the shirts, actually wearing one to a show kind of falls under the heading of the old Yogi Berra-ism about a popular restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore; it's always too crowded."

But having the wrong shirt (only for this particular show; it's a beautiful shirt and suitable for wear almost anywhere else) can't have been enough to set me off into this self-pitying morass of "I'm so old" and "I don't belong here." If that were the case, and considering some of the more unfortunate shirts I've sported over the years, I probably wouldn't have left the house after 1987.

No, I think it's more a matter of realizing that as much as I love the New York pop punk scene, my role in it is and always will be somewhat delimited by the age difference. Most of us choose our social scene - or at least try to - because it offers us at least the possibility of meeting ideally not just one, but several of our basic needs in terms of human relationships. We don't go there exclusively in hopes of finding romance or friendship or intellectual stimulation or career opportunities, but the more of these possibilities that we find there, the more appealing a specific social scene is likely to be.

Most of the local pop-punkers are now at the stage (mid to late 20s into the early 30s) where they're settling down into long-term relationships or marriages, in some cases having kids, something I seem to have neglected to do when I was that age (or any other age, for that matter). People of my own generation are more likely to spend Sunday afternoon hanging out with the grandkids than rumbling around in the pit at a punk rock show, but while on some levels I envy them for that, I still don't feel ready to be a granddad, either literally (highly unlikely anyway) or figuratively.

In other words, I seem to be at an awkward age, which is really nothing new, since I seem to have been at one for as long as I can remember, i.e, back to when I was 3 or 4 years old. Too old to hang with the kids; too young (or at least too immature) to run with the grownups. I was trying to explain this to Aaron Cometbus, someone who I've known for more than half his life but who still seems at least partly like a kid to me, and he pooh-poohed the whole notion (to be fair, he does this with many of my notions). I told him I was probably the oldest punk rocker still functioning in North America; he laughed and claimed he could provide me with a list of at least "a thousand" who were older, some of whom would make me look like a snotty-nosed young brat. He could only name three such individuals on the spur of the moment, but promised to have a much longer list next time I see him.

Not that it matters; the way I see it, I can't quit the scene even if I want to. There's just nowhere else to go, at least not anywhere that both would have me and where I'd want to be. And if things go to plan, in a few weeks time I'll be celebrating my 60th birthday in Gainesville, Florida at American's biggest and craziest punk rock fest, surrounded by people half and a third my age. Weird? Kind of, I guess, but it sure beats a Metamucil-laced cake down at the retirement home. Oh, and for those of you who were hoping for an invitation to the big blowout birthday bash featuring Op Ivy, Green Day, Screeching Weasel and a host of other bands who've played a major role in my life, sorry, I guess you're going to have to wait for my 70th.

Let's Hear It For Global Warming

Truth in labeling: I didn't actually take this picture today, but I could have had I thought to bring my camera to Brighton Beach with me. If anything, there were even more people than you see here taking advantage of what might turn out to be the last day of summer. It may be the second week of October, but today the temperature hit 88 degrees (31C), and even now, at 1 o'clock in the morning, it's still 80 (26.5).

It's been like this all week, although today was the hottest day yet. Even out at the beach, where it's generally 10 degrees cooler than in town, even sitting just feet away from the water, it was just plain hot. The weather is supposed to start returning to normal tomorrow, but they've been saying that for days now. Today was supposed to barely hit 80, in fact, when it turned out to be an all-time record breaker, so if they're wrong about tomorrow as well, I'll be straight back to the beach come morning.

But as I went for one last swim this afternoon, I did it with the assumption that it would be many months before my next one, unless of course I manage to slip off to Florida or Hawaii sometime over the winter. And that made it exceptionally hard to drag myself out of the water, even though I was already late and getting later for an appointment in town.

There's something incredibly melancholy about the last swim of the season, and I find this ever more so as I get older. No longer is it just a matter of waving goodbye to the joys of another summer; there's also a growing consciousness of the dwindling supply of summers still remaining, a growing sense that while beach weather will always come around again, one of these years it will do so in my absence.

Of course I've been especially blessed of late by having two summers per year to wax melancholy over. It was only last March that I was saying goodbye to the Southern Hemisphere summer with a last swim at La Perouse outside of Sydney. But this looks like being the first time in four years that I won't get to Australia for some or all of their summer, and the first time in a lot more years that I'll face the full wrath of a North American winter. With that in mind, you won't hear me complaining if these 80 degree temperatures last right into November or December.

I know, it's terrible and selfish and unpatriotic of me to cheer for global warming when the polar ice caps are melting and the sea levels are rising. Rather stupid, too, considering that I live on a low-lying island. But hey, if you don't tell Al Gore, I won't mention it either. In any event, another day or two at the beach sure would be nice.

Carlapalooza

Long one of the mainstays of New York City's burgeoning pop punk scene, Chadd Derkins is also one of its most loved denizens. His slightly more than passing resemblance to Seinfeld's George Costanza may have something to do with it, but his childlike enthusiasm for all things fun and/or funny is no doubt a bigger factor. But first and foremost on the list of Chadd Derkins' most endearing qualities has to be a heart as big as all outdoors, no, bigger than that, as big as all of New York City!

A couple of years ago the lovely Ms. Carla Monoxide, Chadd's longtime companion and sweetheart, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Serious illness can often put a strain on even the strongest of relationships, but while Carla was busy working on getting her health back (she's doing great now, thanks for asking), Chadd was getting busy as well: organizing Carlapalooza, a day-long concert in her honor, with all proceeds benefiting the National MS Society.

The first Carlapalooza took place on Carla's birthday, September 29, 2006; this year it's been pushed back a week so it wouldn't conflict with another local benefit show, and expanded to two days and two states. Today was the first show, and I made the supreme sacrifice of traveling not just out of New York City, but into the wilds of New Jersey for it. Thanks to the generosity of Matt Lame, who's up from Maryland for the weekend, I got a ride right from my doorstep to the front of the American Legion hall in sleepy little Secaucus, and as we pulled up, I kept saying, "You must have the wrong address, this can't be it."

The reason for my doubts was that I'd pictured some kind of cement block warehouse-type structure on some godforsaken industrial backstreets; this American Legion hall looked more like somebody's cute little red brick house, and was set in a nice all-American neighborhood, half-urban/half-suburban, with kids playing and houses decorated for Halloween. "There's no way the neighbors are going to put up with an eight-hour punk rock concert," I said, but as often happens these days, I was dead wrong. There was nary a complaint, the show went off smoothly, starting late but ending right on time, raised - by preliminary count, $1,230, and as we left the geezers (and I say this in the affectionate British sense) from the American Legion smiled, waved and called out, "Thanks for coming, come back any time!"

When I think of all the VFW and American Legion halls I saw wrecked by punk rockers back in the old days, I have to marvel at what punk rock - at least the pop-punk variety thereof - has morphed into today. At one point I was outside having what might be called a spirited discussion with a very nice girl called Melissa who was visiting New York City for the first time and who I'd just found out was not only a card-carrying member, but an active employee of the ACLU.

Okay, so I shouldn't have called her a commie, and I know perfectly well that she's not a commie (she admitted to socialist tendencies, but those are hardly uncommon hereabouts), but it did liven things up a bit. But in mid-argument, er, discussion, it came to light that she had a master's degree in - what else? - social work, which at least in principle meant that she was smarter than me and that I should shut up and listen rather than try to pick fights. But while I was momentarily being taken aback, I glanced around and noticed that I was almost completely surrounded by people with postgraduate degrees. A couple of doctors - chemical engineering and materials engineering, respectively - and several more masters, including - count 'em - three schoolteachers. My puny little bachelor's degree suddenly was looking even tinier, and I more or less had to fall back on the really shabby defense of, "Well, at least my university was better than yours..."

No, I didn't really sink to that level - I was tempted - but I was feeling a little intimidated. Not enough to make me shut up about my opinions, but almost. Anyway, what I'm trying to get at was how it flew in the face of all the assiduously cultivated stereotypes about dumb and nihilistic punk rockers. And to point out that if you want to hang out with some of these high-toned and high-minded people (yes, I'll be there, too, but I'm easily enough avoided), there's still another day of Carlapalooza to come. And this day, Sunday the 7th, offers not only the advantage of what might be arguably a stronger lineup than Saturday's show, but it's also accessible by subway, always a plus in the minds of New Yorkers.

Sunday's (today's) festivities get underway just past noon at the lovely Cake Shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It's only a tenner, you can meet some of the smartest and nicest people in New York City, hear some of the best and liveliest music being made today, help the fight against multiple sclerosis, AND still be home tucked up in front of the TV not too much after the street lights come on.

Weasel Radio

You'll need to have at least a passing interest in sports to get the full effect, but even if you don't know your Bears from your Cubs or your Packers from your Brewers, you should still tune into Ben Weasel's new radio show. As I noted before when Ben appeared as a guest on a local sports talk show, the man is a natural. I'm reluctant to wish him too much success in the world of radio for fear that he'll lose interest in at least occasionally coming out to play music for his fans (Insubordination Fest 2008: we're counting on you, Ben!), but it doesn't really matter what I think; Ben's got the perfect personality and presentation to go as far as he chooses as a radio star. And even if the sports angle puts you off, there's plenty of talk about music as well, and even a few tunes thrown in. Check it out.

"Kafkaesque" Is A Greatly Overused Term, But Still...

A few months ago I accompanied my friend Brian, who'd recently lost his wallet, as he dropped into the DMV's "License X-Press" and walked out with a new driver's license in no more than ten minutes.

Seeking to emulate him, I'd turned up with my own paperwork: a California license to be turned in for a New York one, a passport to buttress claims to my identity, and my Social Security card. Well, half my Social Security card, actually; when I got it in 1963 it came stapled to a government pamphlet extolling the wonders of Social Security, and the idea was that you could detach one half the card to show to prospective employers and keep the other half in a safe place so you'd always have a record of your number.

Well, apparently it's the wrong half when it comes to the DMV: although it clearly displays my number and my signature (albeit in the painful chickenscratchings of 16 year old me), which are the two items the DMV claims it needs, they insisted on having the other half. Which, evidently, disappeared from my possession along with almost everything else I owned at one time or another in the 60s or 70s.

No problem, the cheery examiner assured me: you can simply nip up to 48th Street and get yourself a new Social Security card and probably be back here before we close at 4 pm (it was now about 1:30). Fine, I said; I'd already earmarked the day for dealing with bureaucracy, so might as well take a tour of the federal as well as the state branch thereof.

The entrance to the building on 48th Street was unremarkable, as was the elevator trip to the designated floor. It was only when I exited the elevator and strolled down the corridor that I realized I had blithely wandered into the anteroom of hell.

About 100 people sat disconsolately, some much more so than others, on rows of seats that all faced forward, much like the economy section of a jumbo airliner, only far less comfortable. I figured I'd stand instead, at least for a while, but quickly found that wasn't allowed. The guards were especially insistent that no one loiter near a window, possibly because they were concerned about people throwing themselves out in despair.

Although we were in midtown Manhattan, less than a block from the glitz, glamor, bustle and squalor of Times Square, I wouldn't say my fellow sufferers represented a cross section of New Yorkers. About 90% of the people present were black and/or foreign born, which led me to ponder whether there was some parallel Social Security system located elsewhere for white middle-class people, or whether the aforementioned WMC people are just so together that they never lose their Social Security cards or have a question about their benefits or are simply so rich and carefree that they don't even bother with Social Security.

Such was not the case with the people in attendance today. A few of them, like me, merely needed to replace their cards, usually for the same reason, i.e., the DMV, but almost everyone else had some Major Problem which needed to be talked about at great length, often at considerable volume as well. Bulletproof glass separated all the clerks from the clients, and I can't say that I blame anyone for thinking that necessary. In the two and a half hours or so that I waited, I'm sure at least a couple of clerks would have been strangled, bludgeoned, or otherwise damaged if anybody had been able to get their hands on them.

Not that they deserved it; in fact, considering what they had to deal with, the clerks were remarkably patient and obliging, putting up, for example, with one apparently retarded woman who repeated, "Can I ax you a question?" at least 100 times in the space of a half hour, every question being some variation of, "Can you give me some money right now?""

She was far from the only one trying, against all odds, for a quick loan or advance against their disability checks. It was kind of like watching a horde of dysfunctional children hitting their not especially sympathetic dad up for a boost in their allowances. The other main theme was people trying to get Social Security cards or benefits for their immigrant or convict husbands. It was, as the alternatively tearful and angry women insisted, tremendously important that this be done, but this begged the question of why the husbands themselves couldn't be bothered to come in. One woman, asked to explain this anomaly, indignantly responded, "He's with our dog."

At about hour two, I overheard some bad news: the guy who'd been sitting nearby and was, like me, there for a replacement card, was told that he'd be receiving it in the mail in "about two weeks." So much for rushing back to the DMV today, which by now was about to close anyway. Oh well, I'd waited this long; might as well at least get what I came for. Right about then, a pretty blonde Eastern European girl managed to miss her number being called while she was outside smoking or eating or something, which led to a screaming, crying, cursing contretemps with both security guards as she demanded to be let back into line. All to no avail, to the quiet satisfaction of the 50 or so clients still waiting to be seen, and at least she didn't get tasered, though it looked touch and go there for a bit.

That drama occupied most of the final half hour before I was finally called for my turn. "ID please," I was told, and handed it over; she typed a few vigorous keystrokes before saying, "Oh, you're from Brooklyn. You can't get a card at this office. You've got to go to the Brooklyn office."

I'd seen a sign downstairs cheerily advising, "Hey, Brooklyn, we've opened a brand new Social Security office just for YOU!" But nowhere on it had it said that we had to go to that office, just letting us know in the most friendly of ways, that we could if we wanted to. It wasn't until I was getting on the elevator to leave that I noticed some new signs on this floor that did in fact say, "You MUST go to Brooklyn." Hmm.

Oh well, one day shot; tomorrow I'd go to the Brooklyn office and that would be that. I went to the Social Security website, clicked on "Find your local office," and was directed to a relatively nearby facility not far off Bedford Avenue in the heart of Hipsterville.

Marched in, showed my paperwork and said what I wanted, only to be told, "Oh, for a new card, you've got to go to downtown Brooklyn." Resisting any temptations to ask just what they did do at this office apart from filing their nails while the usual clients sat in mute awful despair, I headed for downtown, only to find that I couldn't get there in time, bringing me to Day Three of my Big Social Security Adventure, today.

I showed up early this time, with not one but two books, prepared to wait as long as it took, only to discover that downtown Brooklyn had a different setup. No chairs, comfortable or uncomfortable, to sit and read while I waited my turn; here I was greeted by a long line of very unhappy people standing behind a metal detector and X-ray machine. Bad enough that it was a long line; it was also a line that wasn't moving. At all. Two guards stood there, apparently waiting for someone or several someones to exit before anyone else would be allowed in.

Assuming that once we got in, we'd then have several hours to wait, just as in Manhattan, I very nearly left, with the intention of coming back even earlier the next day, but before I could, a young man borrowed my pen to fill out his application, which was taking him a very long time, since he showed every sign of being unable to read. I didn't want to leave without my pen, so I stuck around while he got into a lengthy conversation with the guy behind me, who he'd recognized from their recent stay in the Brooklyn House of Detention.

Their chat about charges, outstanding warrants, and "those two crazy niggas" who'd apparently almost killed each other and/or some guards dragged on for so long that our group actually got called to go through the X-ray machine. "Get your belts off, jackets off, everything out of your pockets," the guards barked, leading someone else in line to comment, "Man, this is just like prison." A number of heads nodded in agreement. This was clearly a crowd who knew whereof he spoke.

After that ordeal, it was quite a shock to arrive on the sixth floor to find a nicely carpeted, clean and brightly lighted room where far fewer people waited to be seen than had been lined up behind the security checkpoint downstairs. We still had to wait in line for a while longer, but the man next to me helped the time pass quickly with a lively discussion about which types of weapons would be most effective in shattering the bulletproof glass in the event a guy wanted to take out a few of the clerks.

Bottom line: I've got a piece of paper that says I "should" be getting my new Social Security card in about two weeks, which means I can then go through the whole driver's license rigamarole again, and maybe, just maybe, I'll have a new driver's license in time for my planned trip to Florida at the end of the month. No driver's license, no trip, as my old one expires halfway through the trip, and unfortunately, the subway doesn't go to Gainesville. However, it's out of my hands now, and into the hands of those who may or may not make the right things happen. At least I've got a more comfortable chair to do the rest of my waiting in.

And I don't have to go through a metal detector to get to it.

All Across The USA: Coast To Coast In 4.5 Days

The plan was to blog my way across America, but unreliable internet access, unexpectedly long drive times, and a lack of sleep put paid to that.

The only entry I even got started on was titled The Streets Of Laramie, and recounted how I discovered that I'd never actually set foot in Laramie, Wyoming, despite having crisscrossed that state numerous times over the years.

In fact, there were a couple times that I fully planned on stopping there, and once where I even put on my blinker for the exit before changing my mind at the last minute and pushing on to the next town, but ultimately I passed the place by so many times that I forgot it was even on Interstate 80 (the semi-boring coast-to-coast freeway that passes through what has got to be one of the least picturesque sectors of what is otherwise an extremely picturesque state).

I'd somehow got it into my head that Laramie was off somewhere to the north, probably up in the vicinity of where Casper actually is. I'm fairly sure I've never visited Casper, either, but I could be wrong about that. Many of my Wyoming crossings were done in the rather bleary and drug-imbued 1970s.

But this was definitely my first time in Laramie, and it's my new favorite town in Wyoming, not that there was a profusion of contenders for that crown. I used to think it was Cheyenne, but on reflection, realized that I didn't care very much for Cheyenne after all, being infatuated mainly with the name and the fact that it was the closest thing to a genuine urban agglomeration between Salt Lake City and Omaha (okay, maybe Lincoln).

Maybe it's just that I once bought a pair of cowboy boots in Cheyenne that hurt my feet for several years afterward, and if you ask why I didn't simply stop wearing them, it's just that I figured that people from Cheyenne were sure to know more about cowboy boots than I did, that it was most likely my feet that were the problem rather than the boots, and that eventually they (my feet, that is) would adjust themselves.

Didn't happen, however, nor did my appreciation for Cheyenne ever increase, so even though I was running behind schedule on my cross-country hejira, I opted to stop in Laramie this time, mindful, too, of the time when I resisted all portents, including dire warnings from the I Ching, and pushed on past Laramie into the teeth of a winter gale and ended up nose down in a snowdrift at the bottom of a 30-foot cliff.

No snowdrifts this time (though there had been a light dusting a day or two earlier on the higher peaks), but there had been, I found the following morning, some horrendous wind gusts over the 8,640 foot pass that separates Cheyenne from Laramie, and considering how susceptible my rented 12 foot Penske truck was to wind - especially since I'd managed to ignore instructions and pack most of the heavy stuff on one side - chances are I would have ended up over another cliff only this time without the soft snow landing.

So downtown Laramie had a lot of bars, none of which I ventured near, but it also had Grounds, an excellent little cafe catering to hipsters, students, and the occasional punk rocker, offering wireless internet access and staying open till midnight, something you don't that often find in such allegedly cosmopolitan centers as London or SF/Berkeley. Not having arrived in town until after 11 pm, however, I didn't have time to finish a blog post, but I did manage to get a pretty decent meal, again something hard to find at that hour in those aforementioned faux-cities.

I'd hoped to have six days to cross America, allowing me plenty of time for sightseeing and visiting folks along the way, but the packing and - especially - the throwing out of many years' worth of accumulated junk took much longer than expected, so by the time I pulled out of Berkeley, I was a day and a half late, and a visit to my mother's house and the recycling center in El Cerrito (two separate locations, let it be noted) lopped another couple hours off my first day's travel.

So I only made it as far as Elko, Nevada when I'd been hoping for the Utah state line, and from then on it was a game of catch-up all the way. I considered skipping my visit to Hanny, my internet buddy in Lincoln, Nebraska, but fortunately I decided not to, and we had a pleasant walk through downtown and the state capitol, topped off by a pretty darn good Mexican dinner. Yeah, it put me another couple hours behind, but was well worth it.

And just what was the hurry? Well, I'd recruited a posse of van unloaders - Oliver, P Smith and JoeIII - who were expecting to meet me at 10 am Saturday morning, and if I missed that time slot, they'd all be off to the afternoon Steinways show at the mall - yes, at the mall, in Urban Outfitters, if you must know - and I'd be faced with trying to carry things that weighed considerably more than me up three flights of narrow, sagging stairs, and, face it, it wasn't going to happen. Half my furniture would have ended up on the street.

I fully expected that posse or no posse, my ridiculously big desk was never going to make the stairway cut, but with the aid of three strong men and an inch to spare (after I took the drawers out and removed the apartment door), it practically glided into place. In fact, I'm typing on it now. Whether it will ever leave this apartment again is rather another question. The wood matches the floors quite nicely in terms of color, though not in terms of sagginess: in the entire apartment there's hardly more than a few feet of level flooring, and given the number of creaks and other strange noises I keep hearing, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this whole house collapses at some point. It shakes just like a California earthquake whenever a large truck passes by or someone slams the door downstairs. At least I'm on the top floor, so there's not quite so much of it to fall on me.

I had another pleasant rendezvous en route, with Pete Repellent and his lovely partner Simple (formerly Simple81), outside a mini-mall Starbucks in Portage, Indiana, where Pete also insisted on buying me not only a coffee, but my dinner as well. The two of them, the punk rock counterparts to George Burns and Gracie Allen or Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, then provided me with a full-on cavalcade of comic bickering as I dined. Only two people who are truly devoted to each other can be that hilariously vicious.

Then it was back in the Penske saddle for one last marathon day that took me from the Indiana-Ohio state line back home to Brooklyn in about 13 or 14 hours. Northern Ohio looked far prettier than I ever remembered it being (it's still no Michigan, however), and Pennsylvania looked to be even more spectacular, especially at the higher altitudes, where the autumn leaves were approaching their peak. Unfortunately, a rather fearsome storm - the first hint of rain or even clouds all the way across - blew in on me, followed closely by a dramatically sudden nightfall, and I spent the rest of the way - and a rather long way it is, too - across Pennsylvania trying to navigate curves and dodge speeding semis. At one point we reached "the highest point on Interstate 80 east of the Mississippi," some 2800 feet, I believe it was, and were warned of a steep descent ahead. What they didn't tell me was that we'd be going downhill for the next 280 miles, something which I suspect is a physical impossibility, but which nonetheless seemed very much like reality.

The road didn't flatten out until halfway across New Jersey, but now I could see the lights of New York City ahead, and though I'd originally planned to stay outside of town and drive in early in the morning, I thought why waste the money on a motel when I was no more than an hour or two from home?

In principle, anyway; as it turned out I took the wrong exit in Newark and spent a nervous half hour or two blundering through ghetto streets at midnight with pretty much everything I owned metaphorically strapped across my back. After bouncing over some of the worst back roads and collapsing bridges this side of the Third World, I finally made it to the Holland Tunnel - thankfully there was no three-mile-long line like the last time I used the tunnel - only to be told by less than welcoming tolltaker: "No trucks!"

I tried protesting that I'd checked on the internet and that trucks were supposed to be allowed now, though they had indeed been banned for several years after 9/11. I was told to go to the Lincoln Tunnel, without being offered an explanation about why - assuming I was a terrorist with an enormous bomb rather than a bemused middle aged man with a truckload of household goods - it would be preferable for me to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel instead of the Holland.

Oh well; at least the Lincoln Tunnel wasn't far off, and there were signs clearly delineating the route to it. Signs which promptly disappeared, leaving me driving aimlessly but ever more frustratedly through the streets of downtown Hoboken, at one point getting caught up in the proliferation of drunken 20-something car and foot traffic in what is apparently a rather happening nightlife scene, and at another point getting stuck on some long drive along the river that offered no exits and took me nearly as far north as the George Washington Bridge, which I would have crossed except that the radio was warning of one to two hour delays going into the city.

So, finally found the Lincoln Tunnel, got charged double toll even though my (relatively) small truck had been paying the equivalent of auto tolls all across the country, and quickly found myself tied up in the jampacked streets of Chelsea and then the Village. At one point, owing to some spectacularly bad luck and/or judgment, I found myself trying to navigate through what was barely one lane of traffic on Bleecker at MacDougal, which, trust me, is not the most ideal route at 1:30 in the morning when the frat boys, rappers, drunken NYUers, and every other yahoo within 50 miles of the five boroughs is staggering and/or attempting to drive, albeit to no particular destination.

Enough complaining; I eventually made it to Brooklyn, found a parking place right outside my building, and the rest is history. I haven't even unpacked half my stuff, and I still haven't found a way to stop some of my furniture from sliding into the middle of the room, but the cable TV and the internet are working, my desk is in operation and looking every bit as messy as it did in its last home, and one of these days I might even plug in the refrigerator and go grocery shopping. I'm already thinking of moving again, maybe - if necessary - out of the immediate neighborhood this time, but for now I'm home, and quite happy and content to be so.

Punk Rock? Are You Guys STILL Talking About That?

I meant to mention this a while back - maybe even before the event actually happened so that some of my friends might attend if they wanted - but last Monday, September 10, I was part of a panel discussion on the past, present and future of punk rock.

I know, I know, it's all been said 20 or 30 years ago, and if you really wanted to rehash the question, you'd just head over to the PPMB, but hey, it's hard to turn down an invitation where you can talk at length about your opinions and people not only won't interrupt you, they'll actually applaud when you've finished. Try getting that kind of reaction out of your average barroom conversation.

My fellow panelists were Liz Nord, who's done a documentary film on the Israeli punk scene featuring, among others, the band Useless ID, who I'd actually met a few years back when they first visited the US, Jon Vafiadis, better known as Jonny Whoa Oh of up and coming indie conglomerate Whoa Oh Records, and the legendary Danny Fields, renowned for his associations with the Ramones, MC5 and Stooges among other things.

Danny was the "moderator," though there was little moderate about his approach. He expressed befuddlement about the current state of punk rock ("How do you find out about these shows and bands?" he asked at one point), but happily told stories of adventures stretching back to the 1950s, only some of which were directly related to punk rock, but most of which - including those about his years hanging with the Warhol crowd - were fascinating.

He was a bit reluctant to relinquish the microphone to the other panelists. At one point, an audience member prefaced a query about why '77 punk got so much more attention than its later incarnations by saying, "This is for Larry," only to have Danny go on rambling discursively about talking dirty with Andy Warhol and follow it up with, "Next question." But I was happy to let him take the lead; I'm not sure I would have been a good moderator, not being a particularly moderate person by nature.

Anyway, apparently there are videos of this (thanks to the assiduous efforts of JoeIII) and some bits may or may not have made their way onto YouTube. And, I've just discovered, someone over at The Film Panel Note Taker has gone to the trouble of taking notes on the discussion and posting them on his/her blog. It's a very truncated version, and not that true to how we actually sounded, but you get the general flavor of things. So if you're curious about the past, present and future of punk rock, you're welcome to have a look.

Goodbye, California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somehow I Don't Think This Is What Dr. King Had In Mind

I haven't been keeping too close a watch on the news in recent weeks, but the past couple days I've been cooped up in this room in Berkeley, California sorting through papers and packing things for my upcoming moving van trip back to Brooklyn, with my only company being the none too tender ministrations of AM talk radio.

Normally that would mean being subjected to an unrelenting barrage of rabid right-wing ranting, but this being the Bay Area, we're also offered a similarly demented and hate-ridden outpouring of left-wing lunacy. Tonight I've endured three hours of the grotesquely obese race baiter Bernie Ward (a defrocked Catholic priest, who woulda thunk!) and half an hour of Ray Taliaferro, who's been spewing venom, often but not always race-tinged, at all things American for at least four decades now. It was in June of 1968 when, newly arrived in San Francisco, I first heard Taliaferro raving about how Richard Nixon was a madman, a criminal, and, if I'm not mistaken, a "son of a bitch."

Being a rather hateful little hippie myself at the time, I thought this Taliaferro character was just one more part of what made San Francisco great, but over the years I became considerably less fond of him, even on occasions when I agreed with him, because of his tendency to browbeat listeners and dishonestly distort what callers said in response to his inflammatory rhetoric. Example: Caller says, "Ray, I basically agree with you that racism is a problem in our community, but I'm not sure rounding up all white people and interning them in re-education camps is the way to go about solving it." Taliaferro responds: "Well, of course you'd say that, you rotten, good-for-nothing, Ku Klux Klan-supporting, inbred little cracker. Why, I bet you're just sitting there in your log cabin or your trailer park macraméing a rope to take to your next lynching, you low-life, worthless piece of scum. And what have you got to say for yourself? Nothing? I thought so (because Ray has turned off the guy's phone line)! See, folks, you confront these racists with the truth and they just turn tail and run like the cowards they are!"

Actually, Bernie Ward uses almost exactly the same technique, and tonight he, even more than Taliaferro, was obsessed with this Jena, Louisiana case. I'd just heard of it earlier today, and as far as I could see, the main thing it illustrated was the depths of depravity to which the so-called "civil rights" movement has sunk. We've got Mack Daddy Al Sharpton flying in to scoop up some publicity and no doubt some cash, we've got Jive-Ass Jesse Jackson accusing Barack Obama of being "white" for not having a sufficiently knee-jerk reaction to the case, and Bernie Ward doing a solid three hours of fulminating over how this proves America is a completely racist nation.

So what's the great injustice these crusaders are rushing to denounce? Well, apparently six young African-Americans are being denied their God-given right to rat-pack and savagely beat one white teenager as a means of addressing their hurt feelings over some racial tension and turf warfare that's been going on at a small-town high school in the Deep South.

Ward, Sharpton, Jackson et al. are comparing this to the freedom rides and heroic marches of civil rights activists in the 1960s, but as I recall, those protests were demanding the right to attend schools and ride at the front of the bus. I don't remember Martin Luther King declaiming about a dream in which one day gangs of young men would be allowed to attack and beat other young men based on the color of their skin.

Okay, am I being one-sided here by ignoring the initial provocation by white students, who apparently told black students they couldn't hang out under a certain tree and later decorated that tree with nooses to reinforce that point? Well, I'm not ignoring it, and of course I think it's vile to evoke, whether intentionally or not, painful memories of a time when black people were routinely lynched in the Deep South.

But what seems to be overlooked here is that however vile and hateful the white students were being, they were still engaging only in speech and symbolic actions. You know, sticks and stones and all that...? Calling people names, especially racially charged ones, or making it clear that you don't think very much of their skin color or their culture, is the mark of small-minded and ignorant people. But a gang beating someone black and blue and bloody is a whole other order of injustice.

Martin Luther King knew that, and struggled mightily and mostly successfully to persuade his followers to restrain their understandable anger and instead employ nonviolent tactics. The charlatans who claim to be carrying on his legacy are doing just the opposite: charging that the arrest and prosecution of the black teenagers for their gang assault is a violation of their civil rights.

If there was even a shred of logic to this position, you'd have to also accept that women were merely exercising their own civil rights if they attacked and beat every moronic misogynistic rapper who's making a living slagging off bitches and hos. White kids who get robbed for their lunch money or suffer gratuitous beatdowns by black kids in liberal bastions like Berkeley or Oakland should be immune from prosecution if they brought in their own posses to administer some street justice. I say if there was any logic to this position, which of course there isn't, but nonetheless the media are falling all over themselves to present the hatemongering of Sharpton, Jackson et al. as if it were a perfectly reasonable response to an obvious injustice.

Combine this with the usual suspects hopping on the "OJ's only being persecuted because he's black" bandwagon and I very nearly want to despair about the possibility of Dr. King's true dream ever being realized. He dared to speak of a day when people would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; 44 years later we seem to have arrived at a point where the color of a man's skin is all we're allowed to see.

At The Dark End Of My Street

This is what I see tonight when I look down my street in the direction of Manhattan. Not the buildings - there are too many houses and trees in the way, and anyway, I think this photo was taken from Jersey - just the lights.

And they're playing on the clouds in almost exactly the same way. It's very eerie. I didn't even know what it was when I first stepped outside. I thought maybe an airplane was coming in toward Kennedy and for some reason had put on its landing lights early, and then fell back on the equally plausible explanation of it being a UFO.

Then I remembered hearing about the Tower of Light that's been displayed every September 11 as a memorial, and realized simultaneously that this is the first September 11 I've actually spent in New York. Having such a close emotional involvement with this town for such a long time had somehow made it possible for me to forget how little time I'd actually spent here.

Surprisingly few people actually said anything about what day it was today, but they didn't have to; though they talked of everything but, their eyes told a different tale. And tonight along my block, many of the neighbors are out on the stoops or the sidewalks basking in the autumnal but still relatively mild breeze. Their eyes are fixed on each other, or on the beers that they're drinking, or on Joe-across-the-street dragging the garbage can out for tomorrow's pickup, but their glance and their attention keeps drifting back to the tower of light at the dark end of my street.

Semi-Obligatory 9/11 Post

Originally posted on the PPMB, reposted here by request:

I was living in London at the time, and my first awareness of it was my aunt calling downstairs saying, "You might want to turn on the telly, there seems to be some business about a plane and a skyscraper over in America." Then I spent about the next three days parked in front of the TV with a bottle of Jameson's feeling sorry for myself (why? nothing at all had happened to me personally) and angry that this had been allowed to happen, and confused and bewildered about what I was doing or should be doing with my life.

The thing was that at this time and for the year or two previous I'd been doing more and more drinking and more and more feeling sorry for myself, and the thought that kept coming into my head as I watched the New Yorkers risking their lives and pitching in to take care of one another was, "What if this happened here in London? Would I be able to help my neighbors the way those New Yorkers are doing? What possible use would my drunken ass be?"

It was actually those feelings that prompted me into finally giving up drinking and trying to become a more responsible human being. Remember, at that time there was a real sense that there were likely to be more attacks, and that they could come anywhere (London eventually was attacked, and very close to where I lived, in 2005), and I felt that if or when that happened, I wanted to be strong and clearheaded enough to be able to do whatever was needed of me.

A couple weeks later, I was in New York City. The planes had just started flying again, though they were almost empty, as were the airports, except for the machine-gun toting soldiers. It was the way flying looks in those airline commercials, where you never have to stand in line and everybody gets a good seat and has three stewardesses to wait on him. I got on the subway near JFK and that's when it first hit me in a way that it never could have on TV. The first thing I noticed was all the flags. Pretty much every house in Howard Beach had one flying. But the really amazing thing was the feel of camaraderie on the subway. It was like every time someone got on, everyone in the car would turn to him or her, check them out to make sure they didn't look like trouble, and then sort of silently say, "Ok, you're all right now, you're one of us, we're all looking out for each other here." I imagine it might have felt very different to a person who looked Middle Eastern - but to me it felt very safe and comforting.

I spent the next 10 days in Manhattan, and the smoke - and that horrible smell, which others have mentioned, and which I don't think anyone will ever be able to forget - was still hanging over the city. Some days the wind would blow it out to sea and the air would feel fresh and clean again, but then the wind would shift back and just like that the mood would change. People would be in the middle of a conversation and suddenly get a whiff of charred concrete and incinerated bodies and the looks on their faces would turn grim and desperate and the conversation trail off into non sequiturs.

I was running around with this girl at the time, and she was one of those people who saw the whole thing as America's fault. We were up in Central Park on an incredibly beautiful day in early October - even then you could still see a thin column of smoke rising downtown - and she got really mad at me for suggesting otherwise, capping it off with, "And I don't give a damn about those people who died in the World Trade Center," implying that it was their own fault for being there in the first place. That started a raging two-day argument in which we called each other every name under the sun, and guaranteed that our relationship, which had always been tempestuous at best, was never going to go much further.

By the time I went back to London, though, there was no longer any doubt in my mind that sooner or later I was going to live in this great city. Thinking of other places where I'd lived, especially London and San Francisco, where a large percentage of the people thought exactly like this girl did, made me especially keen to live in a place where people were grown up enough to take responsibility for themselves and others. Perhaps it was wrong of me, but I pictured Londoners or San Franciscans, if they'd faced a similar disaster, running around like headless chickens and looking for someone - probably the government or "capitalism" or "the corporations" - to blame.

And six years later, here I am, a proud New Yorker myself and feeling very honored and privileged to live in what I don't doubt is the greatest city on earth. The events of September 11, 2001 had a very large impact on me personally, in that they led pretty directly to two major changes in my life, stopping drinking and moving to New York City, but I suspect I'm just one of millions who had their lives permanently altered that day, and unfortunately - for those who lost loved ones or livelihoods, not always for the better. But I think the net effect for New Yorkers in particular and Americans in general has been a wake-up call, one that said essentially, "It's time to stop living in la-la land and to start thinking about what life and liberty and your place in the community of humankind are all about." A lot of stupid and excessive and overreactive crap has come down as a result of 9/11, but I'd say that overall we're a better and stronger people as a result of the lessons learned that day. Let's hope so, anyway, because I have a feeling that there are times yet to come when we'll need to be.

Bottomfest 2007 - God, I Love These Guys

What is a Bottomfest? And whatever it is, doesn't it sound vaguely unappealing? If not slightly salacious?

That's what I thought when I first heard of it, but as it turns out the "Bottom" in the fest came only from Dr. Drew Peabottom, Ph.D., who despite his passing resemblance to Harry Potter and his childlike obsession with obscure Queers vinyl, is not only a genuine scientist (who studies, you know, science), but also is turning 30 years old this month.

Which prompted his devoted consort Ms. Sarah Peabottom to organize a two-day fest in his honor in a remote corner of northeastern Pennsylvania where about a dozen pop-punk bands could wail away to their hearts' content and the usual fest-related tomfoolery could ensue, all without any risk of alienating the neighbors or incurring the wrath of the authorities.

The first night's event actually took place in not-so-nearby Wilkes-Barre, and I managed to miss most of it, but things kicked off again before noon on Saturday with solo performances by Rapid Randy (of the Backseat Virgins) and Pat Termite (Beatnik Termites) before the full-fledged bands took over. It's always seemed a bit weird to me to see bands whose natural environment seems to be dimly lit night clubs and bars playing on green grass in broad daylight, but by the time New Hampshire's Guts, Maine's Leftovers, and New York's Steinways finished tearing things up, things like stage lights and walls and ceilings seemed thoroughly superfluous.

Some of the sets were sloppy and good-natured fun - especially the Guts' runthrough of a dozen or so punk classics in addition to their own songs. These guys are just so, so good, even missing vocals from Geoff, who had mysteriously mislaid his voice somewhere that weekend and could only croak along in the background. Others were more straight-ahead, like the Steinways, who debuted some of their best new songs yet. Who else? Project 27, Be My Doppelganger, Nancy, Dead Mechanical among others: a veritable treasure trove of pop punk circa 2007. Oh, and a "surprise" (Dr. Peabottom was one of the only people there who appeared to be genuinely surprised) appearance by the mysterious Jerkingtons, who first rocketed to prominence in 2005 with their merciless lyrical scourings of some of the PPMB's leading personalities (I hope I'm not being too vain in using that description, since I myself have been the subject of one of the Jerkingtons' verbal brickbats: "Larry Livermore Is 80 Years Old").

Unsurprisingly, given the participants, the locale and the nature of the occasion, there was a fair bit of drunkenness, though none so flamboyant and flagrant as that exhibited by Matt Lame, who seems to specialize in this sort of thing at fests of all sorts. Sporting a fishing hat of the style featured by Wilson on Home Improvement and wielding, among other implements of destruction, a purple air mattress, Matt wreaked several strands of havoc on festgoers for pretty much the entire 24 hours he was on the premises. Apparently he passed out at one point inside the tent that had been set up for him by less inebriated companions, but for reasons as yet unexplained, the tent proceeded to collapse and envelop him, as Chadd Derkins put it, "like a cocoon."

"It was awesome watching him struggle to find his way out of the collapsed tent this morning," observed Doctoracula, another attendee, "It was like he was being born." If, of course, being born entails being greeted with a cream pie to the face, which was Pete Repellent's payback for Matt's antics of the previous day.

Pete, who journeyed all the way from Chicago with his devoted partner Simple 81 (he actually refers to and addresses her as "Simple," and she occasionally even answers, though not infrequently with vulgarities or obscenities) also helped orchestrate one of the fest's other highlight when he dressed up in a yellow Peep costume (you didn't know there was such a thing? Neither did I) to confront Chadd Derkins over the latter's thoughtless boast that he could "probably" match the world record for Peep-eating (103 in half an hour). Chadd got through 30 before staggering out behind the garage to vomit; his orange (these were special Halloween pumpkin Peeps) puke pile proved to be a popular tourist spectacle for the rest of the weekend.

Someone, apparently relations to Ms. Peabottom, thought it would be a good idea to order 15 pizzas, which arrived sometime around 9pm, a few hours after dinner and just before a massive birthday cake was served. Then came the campfire singalong and marshmallow roast, though I suspect more marshmallows were thrown than roasted, especially once the aforementioned Mr. Lame arrived on the scene.

The singalong turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the day, not so much for its quality - it was a rare song where anyone could remember all of the words - but for its enthusiasm and the realization that the last couple decades of pop-punk songs had turned into - at least among this group - genuine classics. The group went through pretty much the entire Queers catalog, and large segments of Screeching Weasel, the Riverdales, Weston, MTX, and, of course, the Ramones. At one point there were competing singalongs, with the larger group carrying on with "Punk Rock Girls" while Oliver Poopsounds and I unaccountably tried to drown them out with our own version of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out." Oliver was rather drunk; I had no such excuse.

Chadd and Oliver also serenaded me with their own ribald renderings of several Potatomen classics, apparently in an attempt to persuade me to pick up the guitar and do a few tunes myself, but I wouldn't fall for it. I'd seen Matt Lame dodging enough marshmallows to not want to take his place as the principal object of the crowd's ire. Afterwards, of course, I regretted my reticence; it's not often in 2007 that I'm likely to encounter people - drunk or not - bellowing for Potatomen songs. Maybe next fest.

It wasn't all goofing around - well, yes, actually that's pretty much exactly what it was - but the whole weekend just left me positively glowing. It wasn't a massive fest on the scale of Baltimore; probably no more than 50 or 75 people were there at any given time. And although some of the best bands of our time were in attendance, it wasn't primarily a musical event. The crucial element was just a lot of good friends getting together and having the time of their lives, and while I'm sure your friends and their friends and everybody's friends are just as nice and just as fun, these are my friends, and they're the best, and right now I feel so lucky and privileged and blessed to know them all.

My Mustard Colored Mustang

One of the joys - for me at least - of living in New York City is being able not just to exist, but to live very well without owning or driving a car. In fact, unless you live in the outer boroughs or are rich enough to pay for private garage space (which in Manhattan costs as much as or more than an apartment or house in most cities), owning a car has got to be far more trouble than not owning one.

But sooner or later, one feels the need or desire to get out of town for a couple days, and unless you're going to one of the cities or towns served by rail (i.e., much of Eastern New Jersey, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, etc., driving becomes a necessity, as does a visit to those extortionate vampires known as rental car companies.

I know, everything's more expensive in New York, but rent a car hereabouts and your per day price can easily equal what you'd pay for a week in other parts of the country. Nevertheless, they can and do get away with it because, especially at weekends, there's what seems to be an almost limitless demand for their services.

In my case I wanted to go to Eastern Pennyslvania for Bottomfest (about which more later). In principle I could have hitched a ride with someone else who was going or even taken a bus to nearby Scranton, but that would have meant having to camp out at the fest, something I'm sure I would have enjoyed immensely when I was in the Boy Scouts or drunk (or, as was often the case, both), but something I now seem to be thoroughly over.

So I bit the bullet and booked a rental from the Avis location - basically, a parking garage - in downtown Brooklyn. I'd requested the cheapest compact available and assumed I'd be driving one of Detroit's dorkiest little clunkers, something along the lines of the Neon I rented in Seattle a few years ago, only to have to pull off the road at one point because it wasn't capable of maintaining freeway speeds in the face of a stiff wind.

But quite the contrary. "Would you like to upgrade your rental today?" asked the clerk, "A nice convertible, maybe? Only an extra $100 a day." Unsure whether she was just playing with me or seriously thought I looked like enough of a doofus to lay out that kind of money for the privilege of getting defecated on by passing pigeons, I laughed and said, "No, I'm all right with the el cheapo model."

With that, she pointed behind me and said, "Your car's right there waiting for you, then." I turned to discover possibly the most garish automobile I've ever seen at close range: a brand new Ford Mustang in a color which can only be described as a particularly efflorescent and flamboyant variety of New York City taxicab. Not quite yellow, not quite orange, and not exactly, though it was my favorite comparison, the hue of mustard that has sat out in the sun too long. But close.

Somewhere, I supposed, there was an individual prepared to pay $25,000 for a car whose paint job was virtually guaranteed to offend every neighbor on the block, so I could comprehend why the Ford Motor Company might produce such a vehicle. But why on earth would Avis Rent-a-Car, presumably in the business of catering to public preferences, buy one? Before I could ruminate further along these lines, I had eased out into the traffic of Atlantic Avenue, nearly running over a man who had stopped in mid-street to gawk, his obvious desire to deliver a stinging insult stymied only by his jaw having dropped so precipitously as to render speech awkward if not impossible.

"Hey," I said, "at least if I get in an accident the other guy's not going to be able to claim he didn't see me coming."

And perhaps there was something in that, because despite it being the Friday afternoon before Labor Day with the highways being clogged by escaping urbanites, not only were there no accidents, but other drivers seemed to give me a wide berth. I cruised through the suburban wastelands and Mafia burial grounds of Eastern Jersey and then suddenly found myself at what looked like the entrance to the Oregon Trail: who knew that once you get away from the greater New York area, New Jersey suddenly becomes a verdant wilderness? Well, New Jerseyans, maybe, but I'm not even sure many of them travel this far west. I mean, we're talking at least 75 miles from Manhattan.

Things continued in this vein until Pennsylvania, which consisted of even more wilderness, except for the long lines of cars apparently headed for "the lake" or wherever people go on these holiday weekends, and I had to wonder why the pioneers felt it necessary to push westward all the way to California when it seemed like there was still plenty of frontier to explore within a day's wagon train ride of Wall Street. I also had a scare when it seemed as though I might run out of gas, towns and villages having suddenly become exceedingly scarce and those that could be found seemingly having shut down for the night by 6 pm.

But I made it - only just - to my destination in not especially lovely Wilkes-Barre (I asked if it were named for the same Barre in Guillain-Barre Syndrome, but nobody seemed to know), which apparently was a thriving industrial city at some point, but now looks to be suffering the long-term aftereffects of a zombie invasion. Between traffic, getting lost, and general lollygagging, I arrived at 11:30 pm, about three and a half hours later than planned, and got to see about ten minutes of the show I'd come for, before hopping back into the chariot for a half hour ride over the mountains to the slighly more lively town of Clarks Summit.

It was there that I found some people actually appreciated my mustard-colored Mustang. It caused a bit of a stir when I arrived at Bottomfest (of which, again I say, more later), with Stephanie and Michelle Shirelle jumping into the front seat and demanding to be taken for a ride. Who knew pop-punk girls' heads were so easily turned?

Leaving town on Sunday, I stopped to fill the tank once more. "Nice car," pronounced the attendant, with nary a trace of irony, which they didn't appear to speak in these parts. "It's full serve only," he said, stopping me from getting out to pump my own gas.

"Oh, sorry," I told him, "I'll just go to that station across the street then, I don't want to pay extra for full serve."

"Nope, it's not extra, same price here as there," he said, going about his business without waiting for my assent, casting an appraising eye back and forth as he did. "We only ask for a couple bucks tip," he informed me as he screwed the gas cap back on."

In an unguarded moment, I might even have fallen for this one, but hey, I was driving a brand new mustard colored Mustang, so I just laughed out loud at this notion. "Hey, that's the way they did it back in the 1950s," he protested.

"No they didn't, pal. I was there in the 50s, and if this was the 50s, you'd be checking my oil, washing my windows and offering to vacuum out my car, all for a buck an hour and not even a chance of a tip."

"Oh well, doesn't hurt to try, does it?" It was 11 am on a Sunday morning, but it suddenly occurred to me that he'd probably been up all night on crystal meth. Maybe not, though; he was still smiling and friendly as I drove away, something you don't often see in cranked-up small town boys. I drove back to New York City, made the unwise choice of trying to drive across Manhattan instead of going the long way around via Staten Island, and was home in Brooklyn before the afternoon was too far gone. I was completely happy to be out of the driver's seat, out of traffic, and back on the subway, even if it was only the lowly G train, but there have been a couple moments since then that I actually almost kind of miss my mustard colored Mustang. If you see it (and believe me, you'd notice it if you did), wave hi for me.