Driving That Train

Here's a sign of progress that with any luck we'll soon be seeing in our own country: Spain, which spent much of the past half-millennium as a symbol of stodginess and faded glory, has come barreling into the 21st century with a network of high speed trains that put to shame most other rail systems in Europe and make a complete mockery of the United States, where the malign neglect of the past several administrations has seen our transportation infrastructure crumble into desuetude and decay.

President-elect Obama has talked a good game about plowing resources into mass transit, and high speed trains linking major cities would be an outstanding place to start. The distances between Spanish cities is comparable to that between many American cities, and as the article notes, rail travel is quickly taking market share away from the much more wasteful and environmentally destructive airlines. Who in their right mind would subject him or herself to the ordeal of getting to an airport 30 miles out of town, spending an hour or two waiting, being searched, waiting some more, only to be delivered to another airport 30 miles out of town when they had the alternative of boarding a train in the center of town and being transported to the center of town at their destination in more or less the same amount of time a plane would take, minus the strip searches, air traffic delays, and cattle-car-in-the-sky ambiance of modern air travel?

A high speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles has been bandied about for decades, and always ends up getting killed by politicians and/or short-sighted business interests; at present, the voter-approved funds are in place, and the project is close to getting underway, unless of course someone manages to use the current recession/depression as an excuse for postponing it again. You want infrastructure investment? You want stimulus? By putting in high speed rail between California's two major metropolitan areas, you'd be creating a 400 mile long economic opportunity zone. Ditto for the corridor between Boston and Washington; a decent Spanish-style high speed train could cover that distance in not much more than two hours, as opposed to the eight hours (or more, depending on traffic) it takes to drive or the six and a half hours that the fastest existing train, the laughably misnamed and doubly overpriced Acela "Express" takes. Even the airlines couldn't compete with that.

The auto companies will of course, lobby like crazy to kill any such development, claiming instead that we'll need more expressways if they're to be able to continue selling their clunky Detroit behemoths, and arguing that continued government subsidies for the automobiles combined with a starvation diet for railroads is the only way to revive the moribund auto industry. Never mind that the world's most successful auto industry, and the one that has very nearly put our own domestic one out of business, is located in a country that is itself crisscrossed with some of the world's best high speed rail lines. Any of you planning on writing a letter to Obama to congratulate him on his inauguration, why not throw in a little reminder that he promised us more railways and we sure as hell need them.

Looking Through Some Pictures

Many of you will know MURRAY BOWLES as the GILMAN STREET photographer. He's no longer in attendance at every show the way he once was, but during the first few years the club was in operation, he turned out enough photos - invariably black and white - to start his own Gilman museum.

I mean, he could start his own Gilman museum; he hasn't actually done so as far as I know, but my one-time business partner and LOOKOUT RECORDS co-founder DAVID HAYES has compiled a nice little collection that's well worth having a look at if you're at all interested in the early Gilman scene.

Only about half of these were actually taken at Gilman, many of the rest were actually pre-Gilman, from 1985 and 86, but feature many of the same people who would later turn up at Gilman. Most likely David collected these photos the way many of us did: Murray would turn up at shows carrying several boxes of prints - yes, remember those? prints made from actual film? - which he would let everyone rifle through until they saw ones they liked, usually of their band or their friends' bands, which they could then buy from Murray at cost - 25¢ per photo.

The scary thing about looking at these photos - apart from the fact that not everyone pictured here is still alive today - is how young everybody was. I mean, they're practically children, which is weird, because they seemed perfectly grown up at the time, even though almost everybody then - as now - was considerably younger than me. It's strange enough that the stuff going on then - which I guess most of us just thought of as having fun and making some cool music - would become the stuff of legend in the minds of future generations without having to realize that the people making it happen were basically a bunch of kids. Anyway, cool pictures. Especially check out the one - #16 - showing ISOCRACY, JOEL WING, JESSE MICHAELS and Murray piled on top of each in the front room at Gilman, with the notoriously photo-shy TIM YOHANNAN poking his head in for a look-see.

My Mom Thinks You're Hot

Who doesn't appreciate being told that someone thinks they're good-looking? Practically nobody, right? And yet...

Let me back up a bit. This happens to almost everybody, I think; at least it's happened to me enough times to where I have a hard time believing it's mere coincidence: you're in some strange town, or in a strange part of the town where you live, some place that's so random and obscure that before whatever circumstances that brought you there arose, you couldn't ever have imagined a reason for being there. Assuming, of course, that you'd previously even heard of the place.

But there you are, blithely trundling along through this terra incognita and bang, you run into - occasionally quite literally - someone you know or once knew from a time or place completely unconnected to where you are at the moment. It's happened to me in Paris, London, Sydney, and several times in New York City.

Yesterday I found myself, for reasons that don't particularly matter, in the outer reaches of deepest darkest Queens. I'm not even sure what the name of the neighborhood was, or if it even had one, but desirous of returning to civilization as quickly as possible, I was descending the stairs of the nearest subway station when who should come climbing those stairs in the opposite direction but one MICHELLE SHIRELLE.

Michelle, for those of you who don't know her, is the diminutive rock star who plays Gracie Allen to GRATH McGRATH's George Burns in New York City's hottest pop punk combo, the Steinways. She's also, I hope she won't mind me pointing out, a bit of a bombshell, an observation which a quick Google image search should confirm for you.

I've known Michelle for years, at least five, anyway, and though she's no longer the slightly 20 year old I first met, and in fact is now, in addition to her rock star exploits, a quite serious psychology student, she still in many ways seems like a little girl to me. And in relative terms, considering the difference in our ages, I suppose she is.

Despite this, however, we've always gotten along well, and it was a delight to see her. We stood on the corner chatting while she waited for her mother, who was picking her up in her car, and Michelle made the not uncommon joke people her age often make with me, something to the effect of fixing me up with her mother.

Understandable, since most of my younger pop punk friends have mothers in my general age group or younger. The first time I heard something like this from a young friend - and I just remembered that it wasn't always a joke: there was once a teenager at Gilman who sincerely believed I would be an ideal stepdad for him - it was a little disconcerting, but I've grown sufficiently used to this sort of ribbing that I usually play along with it now.

So I told Michelle to say hi to her mom for me; she laughed, jumped in the car, and took off. End of story, until tonight when I saw Michelle again, this time at the JETTY BOYS show in Brooklyn, and she's like, "My mom thinks you're hot!" To be fair, I never got a good look at the woman, as I was busy talking to Michelle when she drove up, so she may well be every bit the looker her daughter is, but there's something about the words "my mom" spoken by a good friend that tend to strip any potential allure from the woman they're describing.

I know not everybody sees it that way; there's a whole cult of Milfdom out there running counter to my own proclivities and prejudices. But let's just say I'm not a subscriber to said cult. Meanwhile, CHADD DERKINS, also in attendance at the show, got wind of this and found it uproariously funny. "If you marry Michelle's mom and move in with them and become Michelle's stepdad," he sputtered, "you have to promise me to put cameras all over the house. It would be the most hilarious thing that ever happened." CARLA MONOXIDE, overhearing this, chimed in, "Yo, you didn't even want to meet my mom, and she's hotter!"

It's true, too (I don't know about the "hotter" part, but I did kind of duck out on meeting Carla's mom when she came to the Cake Shop last year. Can't remember exactly why; I must have been feeling vulnerable or something. Or else I sensed that this was the sort of thing it might lead to. Girls and guys of the New York/New Jersey pop punk scene, I think I can make a pretty definitive declaration here: I probably don't want to marry your moms. Dads either. Sorry if that makes me a stick in the mud or a killjoy, but there it is.

Meanwhile at the show, the Jetty Boys, with a new record out on JONNY RALLY's label, RALLY RECORDS, blazed through an impressive set with machine gun-like swiftness. Their singer-guitarist has got a little bit of that BILLIE JOE thing going on, both vocally and in terms of his manner, and the GREEN DAY comparison is heightened by the fact that we're talking about a power trio who are gifted instrumentalists and sing simple but heartfelt love songs (needless to say, I'm talking about early 90s Green Day, not the more recent vintage).

The guitarist in particular has lightning fingers, capable of unreeling leads and solos of Malmsteenian speed and complexity, and therein lies - at least in my opinion - a weakness, to wit: just because you can do something doesn't mean it's always a good idea to do it. Billie Joe can play that sort of stuff too, but for the most part he reins it in and sticks to the power chords, making the occasional solo all the more effective and powerful when it comes along. When you interject a solo into most of your songs, the impact begins to blur, and when you run it out to 16 bars instead of 8, it's just plain unnecessary.

Minor cavils, of course, and these are things I observed early in the set; as they went along, songs got tighter and better, and for a Monday night in sleepy old New York City, you're not going to find much better entertainment value. I'm kicking myself because I didn't pick up a record from them before I left, but there was a bit of chaos going on with the various people trying to say goodbye to each other and I missed my chance. Looks as though I will have to send my money to Rally Records like the rest of you.

Drat! A quick perusal of the Rally website seems to show no sign of the Jetty Boys album being available yet. Maybe I read it wrong, or maybe label magnate J. Rally is flaking! Write to him and tell him to get on the stick!

Overdosed

I got into this argument several times before I realized there was probably no point to it, if only because a preponderance of people on the opposing side are self-acknowledged lunatics.

Okay, "lunatic" is at once an archaic and over-broad term, and even "crazy" is a little too judgment-laden and nonspecific, so let's just say that most of those who disagree with my contention that psychiatric drugs are massively overprescribed and can do more harm than good are, at the very least, suffering from some sort of mental illness.

Not (didn't I just used this Seinfeldism the other day?) that there's anything wrong with that. Perhaps what is wrong is that so many completely understandable and normal human conditions have in recent years been rediagnosed as diseases, and that apart from mental patients, the other main interest group championing the cause of psychopharmacology has been those who develop, manufacture, market and prescribe the plethora of pills being pushed on the American public.

Having seen friends reduced to tears and/or rage by the slightest suggestion that the medications they were convinced had saved their sanity or even their lives were at best superfluous, I also learned to hold my tongue on the far more sensible grounds that I just didn't know enough. I have no medical or scientific background, after all, nor have I ever taken psychiatric drugs, though it's been suggested several times by both doctors and laymen that I ought to.

My antipathy toward such substances, then, was largely a visceral reaction, one which seems especially odd considering how readily I subjected my mental chemistry to massive chemical modification of the illegal sort during the 1960s and 70s. However, by the time psychiatric drugs came fully into vogue, I had kicked nearly all my drug habits of old, reasoning in turn that I should not rush into substituting them with new drug habits, regardless of how legal and socially accepted they might be.

But now comes some powerful evidence that my views may not have been entirely knee-jerk or untutored ones: Marcia Angell, Harvard lecturer and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, provides this devastating critique of how new drugs are tested and approved and diseases discovered - the less charitable might say invented - that make those drugs profitable.

She focuses primarily on psychiatric drugs, though her conclusions are equally valid when it comes to overmedication of somatic disease, and identifies two main problem areas. The first is that the majority of researchers, including staff members of most of our major universities, are making as much or more from drug company stipends as they are from their university salaries, and that this has given the drug companies a controlling interest in most drug testing and approvals.

Secondly, she points out that mental illness is poorly defined and understood, to the point where many "diseases" or conditions lack objective criteria by which researchers can evaluate a treatment's effectiveness or lack thereof. This in turn leads to the phenomenon that I, mystified at how, for example, millions of American children could suddenly have acquired ADHD, a condition that didn't exist when I was a child and still barely exists in many other countries, dubbed "disease du jour." Ms. Angell points out how ADHD, which provided justification for dosing an entire generation with powerful amphetamines, is now giving way to "bipolar disorder, "another condition which didn't even exist a few years ago, but now requires that millions of Americans be treated with powerful mood alterants whose full effects are poorly if at all understood.

She cites Christopher Lane's book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became A Sickness as a case study of how a previously nonexistent mental disorder was brought into being along with powerful (and powerfully expensive) drugs alleged to cure it, pointing out:

Since there are no objective tests for mental illness and the boundaries between normal and abnormal are often uncertain, psychiatry is a particularly fertile field for creating new diagnoses or broadening old ones.=

and quoting a product director for Paxil:

Every marketer's dream is to find an unidentified or unknown market and develop it. That's what we were able to do with social anxiety disorder.

"Social anxiety disorder," if you hadn't guessed, is the new name for shyness, a "disease" that's historically been more likely to be "treated" - and probably no less effectively - with copious self-administration of alcohol.

I don't mean to trivialize the genuine pain endured by those who suffer from depression or shyness or related conditions, particularly since I've been afflicted with them myself. But I feel rather strongly that what is called for in the vast majority of such cases - my own included - is changes in lifestyle, nutrition, exercise and attitude, all of which is unlikely to occur if medication is employed as a first rather than last resort. Once when I was at one of my own lower points, I was mightily annoyed by an AVA contributor who intoned, "Depression is not an illness. It means your life is fucked. Change it."

How dare she, I thought, and very well might have throttled her on the spot if she'd been there in person and/or wasn't bigger and stronger than me. But she was right. Since those days, I've stopped using alcohol and drugs, undergone a course in cognitive behavioral therapy, changed locations and careers, and guess what: though not always brimming over with joy and good cheer, I'm hardly ever depressed. This after battling with the alleged "illness" for most of my life.

But there's one other issue that Ms. Angell doesn't touch on sufficiently in her otherwise excellent article: the disastrous effect that over-reliance on an ever-expanding and ever more expensive pharmacopeia is one of the principal reasons that the American health care system has become so obscenely expensive - and ever more obscenely, why it excludes tens of millions of citizens from obtaining the basic, routine care that they need.

Bush's Medicare prescription drug program, one of the factors most likely to wreck Medicare altogether, was in reality a shocking giveaway to the drug industry, in which the government has agreed to pay for whatever drugs that industry can come up with, at whatever price the industry demands, with virtually no independent oversight into whether those drugs are fairly priced, or for that matter, of any value at all. This is but one of the madnesses of King George that will have to be undone, and quickly, if we're to have any hope of salvaging our health care system or, for that matter, our economy.

The State Of Our State Is Perilous

I was only halfway listening to the radio when Governor Paterson came on to give his State of the State address. I had meant to pay attention, but something or other had distracted me, so I thought I heard him say "The state of our state is terrible."

Wow, I thought, at least he gets points for honesty. In my time I've heard quite a few State of the Union and State of the State speeches, and almost invariably the President or Governor started out by pronouncing that state to be somewhere on a continuum of good, excellent and outstanding. I'd never heard any of them suggest it was "not quite as good as we'd like," let alone "terrible."

So I was a little disappointed to read the text the next day and discover he'd actually said "perilous" rather than "terrible." Not that "perilous" is the sort of word that fills you with confidence either; if anything, it leaves ample room for things to get even worse than "terrible" even while implying that they may not have reached that point just yet.

I grew up hearing stories of the Great Depression from both my parents. My dad had graduated high school in the winter of 1931, when things were just about at their bleakest, the same year my mother and her family lost their home to foreclosure and had to shelter in another family's attic. Being a wiseass kid in the prosperous 1950s, my eyes soon began to glaze over at these tales of woe. Parents always exaggerated things, I figured, for the sake of teaching lessons. By the same token, I suspected World War II must have been a lot more fun and exciting than they made it sound.

Until recently, the closest I ever came to experiencing a stock market crash was in October of 1987, and at the time I thought it was simply hilarious. I had no money in the market; in fact I had almost no money at all, and what little I did have was in cash, buried in the back yard (I was living in the mountains then, and it was a long way to town and the bank). Still in full-fledged youthful nihilist mode (despite turning 40 that year), I practically wallowed in schadenfreude over the thought of all those greedy capitalists getting their comeuppance.

Despite telling anyone who would listen that this clearly marked the final unraveling of capitalist society, I quickly lost interest in the travails of Wall Street, so much so that within weeks after the crash I was investing the last of my meager savings into a new business putting out 7" records for unknown bands. It never occurred to me that the timing might be bad for such a venture, and as it turned out, it wasn't, because the business prospered from the get-go, and within a few years was producing sales in hundreds of thousands and then millions of dollars.

During all those years I took even less notice of Wall Street. I didn't own stock, and my company didn't issue any. Apparently (I read about this much later) the country went through quite a recession in the early 90s and then hurtled forward into boom times for the rest of the decade, but all that seemed to have very little to do with how our business developed. It was only when I retired with not only some time on my hands but also some money to invest that I began to understand why people might make a very big deal indeed out of the market.

Despite risking everything I had on a seemingly unpromising independent record label, I've never been a particularly adventurous investor. In fact, I've been downright cowardly; if I'd plowed most of my savings into stocks and bonds back in the 90s, I would be rich enough today that even the recent crash would not have been able to dent my wealth too badly. As it was, however, I kept most of my money in the bank, only venturing very tentatively into the market in recent years.

As a result, I haven't lost all that much, but on the downside, I never gained that much, either. So while I'm in better shape than those unhappy folks who've lost their jobs and owe more on their houses than the houses are worth, I'm not sitting so pretty that I don't have to worry along with everyone else about what's going to happen next.

On paper, it can seem as though we have little to look forward to except total ruin. The government is promising to save us with trillions of dollars that, as far as anyone can see, it's producing out of thin air and, for all the effect they're having, might as well be disappearing right back into thin air. As much as I'm hoping Obama can rally the country with Rooseveltian measures, I'm aware that for its first several years, the New Deal did little more than assuage the pain and prevent people being thrown into yet greater penury; the full effects of the Depression didn't dissipate until we began arming for World War II.

At least half a dozen people I know have already lost their jobs, and though I devoutly hope that no more will, it's hard to believe it. The mad building boom that had new condos and apartments going up on every other block in Brooklyn has ground nearly to a halt. Within walking distance there are several block-long holes in the ground where there used to be factories and loft space; what was slated to become the next tranche of luxury high-rises looks set to remain holes in the ground for some time to come.

Rumors abound of greatly reduced real estate prices and apartment rents, but there's little tangible evidence thus far. I'm very happy where I'm living now, but like many New Yorkers I keep my eye on Craigslist "just in case" I should have to move, and neighborhood rents remain at levels that would seem stratospheric in boom times, let alone the (now officially declared) perilous ones we now inhabit. I wonder what will happen if things continue to deteriorate, if the young and well-to-do who came flooding into this area fresh out of college will be able to sustain their lives here, perhaps even prospering under the new conditions, or if they will have to retreat to their ancestral homes, heralding a rollback of gentrification and possibly even the re-slumification of many reclaimed areas of the city.

I have a recurring fantasy and/or nightmare, and I suspect I'm not alone in this one - where I relocate to some small town in Pennsylvania or Michigan, where you can buy a house for pocket change and everything costs a fraction of what it does in New York City. If I were to do that now, I could probably ride out even the worst sort of Great Depression II in some style and comfort, but at the same time, as I keep reminding myself, I'd be in some small town in Pennsylvania or Michigan. Not, I hasten to add, that there's anything wrong with that, but somehow it just doesn't feel right for me.

So I expect I'll stick around and see what happens. I had a professor at Berkeley named Jerry Cavanagh - my favorite professor, I might add - who used to get practically rhapsodic when extolling the virtues of life in New York City during the original Great Depression. "We didn't have any money," he'd tell us, "but we more than made up for it with the sense of community and shared values that kept us going." He made it sound like a lovely time, all for one and one for all, at least on your particular block, anyway.

If I were a bit younger - or if my friends hadn't already signed up all the good bands - I might even try defying the odds a second time and start another record label, but I think once is enough for that particular adventure. Better I should write a book about it, but I just read today that half the publishers look in danger of going out of business, and don't even get me started on the fate of independent - or even not so independent - bookstores.

"If you have a job, hang on to it, and if you don't have one, get one," is the advice from one colleague who's been pretty accurate thus far in his predictions for how this economic catastrophe would unfold, and I'd like to take his advice except that I suddenly seem to have few if any marketable skills. Thankfully the internet bill is paid in advance, as well as the cable TV, and I found several varieties of dried peas and beans on sale today, so I won't be starving or bored for at least another month. I know it's foolish and childish to expect Obama Claus to solve everything within a week or two of taking office, but I sure do wish Bush had gotten out of there a couple months ago and let him get on with trying. Whatever happens, I keep reminding myself, millions upon millions of people have survived worse, and so I continue to look to the future, quietly, almost implausibly confident that somehow we'll muddle through.

Ron Asheton

The news of the Stooges guitarist's passing sent minor ripples through my community, though I'm sure if I'd maintained my hometown ties to Ann Arbor and Detroit I would have heard a far bigger deal being made of it (a quick perusal of the Detroit Free Press and Ann Arbor News produces this touching tribute and this rather squalid one).

Naturally, the news had more of an impact on me than on many of my younger contemporaries to whom Asheton and the Stooges existed mainly as historical relics, not least because it always gets your attention when someone your own age (a bit younger, actually) suddenly drops dead, but also because I knew him slightly, not just from seeing him perform with the Stooges, but also from hanging out with him occasionally during his Destroy All Monsters days in the early 80s.

I wouldn't claim to know him well or even to be more than a casual acquaintance; our principal connection was that I was friends with his girlfriend, which can always put a strain on a relationship. Even though my interest in her was not in the slightest romantic, he never seemed totally convinced of that, and tended to keep his distance when I was around. On top of that, I was typically that guy who's hanging around with the band but doesn't have any real reason other than social for being there. So he was always having to make room for me in the van and listen to my opinions about how to run the band (yes, I was just as bad in 1981; worse, actually, since I knew far less and talked even more).

Even then, not quite into his mid-30s, he showed signs of turning into a bit of a rock dinosaur. Time hadn't diminished his talents at all; if anything, he'd grown far more technically adept than he'd been in the Stooges era. But he was already at the point of not having much interest in the punk rock and new wave bands that had sprung up more recently. As far as he was concerned, they didn't have anything to show him, nor did he see any reason to abandon the lengthy guitar solos that by then had gone totally out of fashion.

In fact, the main attraction of Destroy All Monsters was not the fact that it featured a former Stooge on guitar (or Michael Davis of the MC5 on bass), but their singer, Niagara, a tiny girl with a phenomenal voice, who absolutely mesmerized the largely male crowd who would flock to the front at Monsters shows. Ron showed no sign of understanding this - though on reflection, he must have - and would almost literally push her out of the spotlight so he cold take center stage for his guitar pyrotechnics.

That being said, I didn't think he was a bad guy at all, just a little stuck in his ways, something which seems to be an occupational hazard for Ann Arbor musicians. I note that he died in his home "on Ann Arbor's West Side," and though accounts didn't give the exact address, I'd wager it was either the same house or one not far removed from the one where he was living the last time I saw him some 35 years ago. I thought it a little sad that he'd been dead for several days before anyone noticed, before it occurred to me that the same thing could easily happen in my case: I don't have a lot of company at home, and my habits are irregular enough that it might be quite a few days before anyone started wondering why they hadn't seen or heard from me for a while.

We all die alone ultimately, of course, even if we're surrounded by family and friends, so the precise circumstances of our departure are probably not as important as people make them out to be (unless you're convinced that the nature of your death has some bearing on your progress through the afterlife). Still, it felt sad to think of him going that way, and made me wonder what it would be like to meet a similar fate.

There's only been one time in my life that I genuinely thought I might be dying, when I was taken to the emergency room with what turned out to be an attack of kidney stones. I was in my early 40s and the memory that stays with me most vividly, even more than the excruciating pain, was the breathtaking pang of sorrow that seized me at the thought of all those things I would never do, all those places I would never go, all those people I would never meet or see again. I sometimes wonder if, having done, been, seen so many more of those people, places and things, I would feel the same way if death came upon me now.

I guess there's only one way of finding out, and I'm not quite ready for that yet, and I don't know if any of us ever is. My father died at 91, after several years of a debilitating illness that eventually left him unable to walk, speak or even eat except through a stomach tube, and still he seemed in no particular hurry to close his eyes and be done with it. Surely he no longer harbored fantasies about getting up from his deathbed to conquer new worlds and perform great feats... or did he?

I've kind of given up on being President, a professional baseball player, a male model and - this is the hardest one - a rock star - but there are quite a few other life goals, some of them nearly as implausible, that I'd like to manage before I go shuffling off. Ron Asheton at least got to be a rock star, though maybe prefixed with a "semi." He was part of what turned out to be a very important and precedent-setting band, but which in its heyday was taken seriously by only a few prescient rock critics and a bunch of us Ann Arbor stoners. None of his subsequent bands achieved much more than local success, but then in the last few years he was reunited with all but one of the Stooges and finally received the kind of adulation that he'd deserved all along.

It must have been intense, after all those lean and semi-forgotten years, to suddenly be playing in front of the huge crowds that the Stooges only occasionally drew in their prime, and I wonder if his principal reaction was one of gratification or of wondering "Where the hell were all these people when I was young and beautiful?"

Because the Stooges were a beautiful band, perhaps not in most conventional senses of the word, but in the way that they rose unbidden and unanticipated from an environment where you'd least expect beauty of any kind. They were like a storm that rises up out of a sweltering and stinking Midwestern afternoon, leaving you awestruck at its magnificence until that moment just before it hits and you realize that it just might have the power to totally destroy you.

And once it's past - provided it didn't in fact turn into a tornado and demolish your whole existence - you laugh and joke and go back to whatever stupid thing you were doing with a whole new sense about what's out there and what it might mean. No, I never thought I was going to die from seeing the Stooges, but they sure made me wonder what the hell I was doing with my life.

I never saw any of the Stooges reunion shows - I'm not big on reunions, the only exception being when I never saw the band in its original incarnation, and even then I'm hesitant - but most who did came away raving about them. At 60, Ron could conceivably have played many more of them, which is a loss both for himself and many current and potential fans. But at the same time, I have to acknowledge that I wasn't surprised by his death: even many years ago he didn't strike me as a particularly healthy kind of guy. Lots of junk food, not too big on exercise. I'll refrain from commenting on drugs and alcohol because I frankly don't remember, not least because at the time I was pretty well wrapped up in my own drug and alcohol abuse.

I made a remark to that effect on the PPMB and got criticized by at least one person for in effect pissing on his grave and/or trying to make a moral lesson out of his death at a relatively young age. Not so, but at this point in my life, it's becoming an ever more common occurrence for people my own age or younger to drop dead, and I think it's only natural to try and make some sense out of it. Once upon a time - almost within my memory - it was not at all unusual for people in their 60s or younger to die. In fact one of the reasons the Social Security system is in danger of going bankrupt is that it was originally designed with the premise that most people would only collect benefits for three or four years after retiring at 65.

Today it's possible for those who in a previous generation would have been confined to old age homes to thrive as rock stars, politicians, novelists, or even 24 hour party people, but it takes a little more effort than it did at 20 or 30. A lot more, actually, and not everyone considers it an effort worth making. Did he get tired or did he just get lazy is a question I often find myself asking about those who don't stick around for the long run, and yes, I realize it borders on blasphemy to paraphrase the Eagles in a tribute to one of the Stooges, but I've stuck around long enough myself that I no longer have to worry about that sort of thing. Well, not so much, anyway. God bless you, Ron, and all of those who knew and loved you.

Flashes Of You Were Everywhere

It's not something I freely advertise, but I once actually considered living in Hoboken, New Jersey.

It was only for an afternoon, granted, and I was under some duress at the time, as my Brooklyn sublet was coming to an end and I needed to find some place, any place. As long as it was in the Greater New York area, I reasoned, it couldn't be that bad, so one sunny afternoon I boarded the PATH train for the journey under the Hudson, to have a look around at what might lie on the mysterious other side.

I'd actually been to New Jersey before - not just driving through, as I'd done many times, though that's all many New Yorkers ever see of the Garden State. Way back in 1986 some friends and I drove out to Rutgers to see the Ramones (it was free, too!), and twice I'd been to downtown Jersey City, back in the days when Uncle Joe's still hosted shows.

But both of those trips had been in midwinter, so my JC sightseeing had been limited to the walk from the PATH station on one occasion and from the car, parked all of one block away, on the other. And frankly, if you've been downtown Jersey City, I think you'll agree that's plenty.

This time, however, it was a beautiful summer's day, and I was going to the more poetically named (I assume it has something to do with poetry; why else would you name your town "Hoboken?") and picturesque town situated right on the river, offering more spectacular views of Manhattan than you'd be likely to get most places in New York itself. Why, it's practically the same as living in Manhattan, people kept telling me. You can even get there on the subway.

Well, sort of. The PATH bears enough of a superficial resemblance to the subway - it even accepts MetroCards - to possibly fool the non-discerning rider, but it's not the same thing. Granted, I have an unnatural degree of sympathy for the New York City subway, even when, as at present, the MTA goes berserk and all but shuts down the L train late nights and weekends for nearly a month (one creepy-crawly shuttle between Bedford Avenue and Union Square every 16-20 minutes, leaving mobs of befuddled and disgruntled hipsters practically spilling off the platforms), but even at its worst the subway has a certain je ne sais quoi that PATH trains completely and utterly lack. Put it this way: if the subway traveled to Bizzaro World, it would come out the other end as a PATH train. There's just something, if not wrong, then not quite right about it.

But I knew nothing of this on that summer day I first ventured out to Hoboken. As far as I was concerned, the PATH was just an extension (and a cheaper one at that!) of the subway that was going to take me on an adventure to a new, strange, and possibly very delightful land. My train arrived almost immediately, there were plenty of empty seats - in fact I had a whole car nearly to myself - and in no more than ten minutes I was climbing the stairs into the dazzling sunshine of beautiful downtown Hoboken.

It was beautiful, too. I took a right turn and headed down to the river, where the view was indeed spectacular. Children played, fishermen fished, and the whole scene was so tranquil and harmonious that the illusion of Manhattan being almost within touching distance seemed especially profound.

I wandered along Frank Sinatra Drive - another plus for Hoboken; most towns insist on naming their streets after boring dead people or letters and numbers - and through the parklike setting of Stevens Institute of Technology before getting down to the serious business of checking out neighborhoods to see if they felt like the kinds of places I might like to live.

Apparently Hoboken was somewhat of a slum at one time, but today it's anything but, at least on the north end of town along Washington Street and environs. The red flat-fronted brick apartment buildings, mostly four stories high, looked like an almost Disney-esque replication of old-timey urban America. They bore a certain kinship to New York City tenements of a similar vintage, but maintained their own unique style - one immediately noticeable distinction being that they lacked the ubiquitous fire escapes of Manhattan. Another difference was that whole blocks, or strings of blocks, had maintained a more or less uniform architecture, unlike the chaotic mishmash you encounter on so many New York blocks. It was pleasing to the eye, true, but almost too pleasing. By the time I'd walked a mile or two it was all looking a bit samey, even though styles did change - but in a gradual and uniform way - as I passed from one neighborhood to another.

Still, I kept telling myself, I could live here. In some ways it's even nicer than New York, quieter, cleaner, and, if my trip on the PATH had been any indication, just as convenient to Manhattan as Brooklyn. My trip on the PATH hadn't, however, been a reliable indicator, as nearly every subsequent trip would demonstrate. Not only was almost anywhere of interest in Hoboken a 10 or 20 block walk from the (only) PATH station, but once there, I might wait another 20 or 30 minutes for a train that would still take me no further than the West Side, which was not always where I wanted to be.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here; in fact, my main reason for focusing on the PATH being like the subway without actually being the subway is to illustrate how the same is true of Hoboken: it's like New York, enough so to fool many people into thinking it's practically the same thing, but there's always a subtly jarring, slightly discordant note letting you know that it's not and never will be.

Since that time I've traveled to Hoboken on perhaps half a dozen occasions, each time hoping - even expecting - to discover some of the charms that had eluded me on previous visits. I'm still impressed by the architecture, still, in my childlike way, thrilled at the idea of being in a whole different state, still wide-eyed, wondering, and wanting to ask every stranger I meet, "What's it all about, Hoboken?"

But let's be honest: the only thing that has gotten me across the river and into Hoboken in recent months has been the prospect of some bands I knew or liked playing at Maxwell's. Maxwell's, for those of you who don't keep up with these things, is or was supposed to be some kind of rock and punk rock mecca dating way back into the 90s or possibly even earlier. Lookout bands who played there on tour came home raving about how great it was, better, supposedly, than anything in New York. I'd been hearing the hype for years from JIM JERSEY BEAT as well, not to mention many of the Queens pop punkers, so I was surprised to be distinctly underwhelmed by the place.

There wasn't anything particularly wrong about it; it just seemed like a typical rock club-cum-restaurant and bar, nothing more nor less. I didn't appreciate the crowd that gathered in the restaurant-bar side of things; they weren't vile or disgusting by any means, just more like what I'd expect to find in some cornfed Midwestern university town. In the music room itself, the sound was spotty at best, due, I guessed, more to lackadaisical sound men than any deficiencies in the equipment itself. And the two previous times I was there, the air conditioning was kept on so high that it was necessary to go outside to get warm, and I use the term "warm" loosely, since it was only in the low 60s. Why, you quite reasonably ask, was the air conditioning on at all then? Well, we asked the same question, also quite reasonably, of the Maxwell's staff. "We always have it on and we're not going to turn it off," was the gist of their reply.

So it was with some trepidation that I set out for Maxwell's once more on Saturday night. With the temperature in the high 20s or low 30s, I reasoned, they at least wouldn't have the air conditioning on, and in this I was correct. The sound was better than usual, too, but - it's always something - the sound person had one microphone at a noticeably lower volume than the other. A reasonably setup when you've got a lead singer and a backup, but several of tonight's bands had dual singers, one of whom got to be heard loud and clear and the other, not so much.

I was there mainly to see the DOPAMINES from Cincinnati, Ohio, and the boys didn't disappoint, except possibly by playing a song or two too few in their 20-minute set. Still, there's nothing wrong with a band refusing to overstay its welcome, and they left me looking forward to seeing them again, something that many bands distinctly fail to do. I'm thinking specifically of SHELLSHAG, who closed out the evening's proceedings.

A very impressive outfit they are, too, with the two of them producing a bigger and fuller sound than I've seen coming out of many three- and even four-pieces. And although I'm not usually a fan of bassless, quirky duos, they completely won me over. I completely overlooked their half-artsy, half-hippie costumes, even the jingle bells attached to JEN SHAG's waist and ankles (in fact I might not have even noticed the latter if CHELSEA hadn't pointed them out, and I completely understood why the crowd was going crackers for them.

Until, that is, they kept on playing when it was time not to play anymore. Maybe I was wrong, because most of the audience seemed willing to hear more songs, but in any show there comes a time where it either ends or I'm checking my watch, and I don't even wear a watch. And Shellshag passed this point and still played two or three more songs. And they were good songs, too, and the crowd cheered, and cheered more when they closed with the ritual destruction of the instruments (I know, you're thinking "Do bands still think there's something remotely original about this?" but actually, they put enough of a twist into it that they (just about) pulled it off). But will I jump at my next chance to see Shellshag with the same alacrity that I'll rush to the next Dopamines show? Eh, probably not. Less is almost always more in underground music.

There were other bands, notably FULL OF FANCY, who are garnering quite a following among the local pop-punkers, and TENEMENT, who I caught just a few songs by, who had long hair and were compared by some who know about these things to DINOSAUR, JR. (not the sort of comparison likely to elicit any excitement from yours truly). I guess there were more bands, too, before I arrived, including the aforementioned Jim Jersey Beat doing his folk (actually, I guess it's now called anti-folk) thing, but frankly, by the time I psyched myself up to leave Manhattan, there was no way I was going to catch the first two or three acts.

I had steeled myself for yet another new adventure: taking the bus, which stops right outside Maxwell's, back to New York instead of walking the mile or so to the PATH station (somehow leaving New York via bus is far more disturbing to my equilibrium than doing so by the more natural means of underground train), but I was rescued from that uncertain fate by the illustrious MATT LAME, who chauffeured me straight back to Brooklyn, enabling me to bypass the L train clusterfuck as well, and leaving me vowing to cross no more rivers, even to Manhattan, for a while.

Oh, but hey, Hoboken, you weren't so bad this time. I actually pretty much enjoyed myself. In New Jersey, no less!

00s vs. 90s

This was a topic raised on the ever-verdant PPMB, and lest there be any confusion, they were talking specifically about music; considering that our current decade has been characterized largely by terrorism, war and now depression, I don't think you'll find too many people touting its merits over the complacent and oblivious, but also quite comfortable 90s.

Unsurprisingly, PPMB sentiment also leaned heavily in favor of the 90s being the better musical decade. I say unsurprisingly for two reasons: 1) the 90s are generally known as the glory years for pop punk, ostensibly the whole raison d'être behind the PPMB; and 2) the prime PPMB demographic consists of people in their mid to late 20s, i.e., people who came of age in the 90s.

I don't know if I'd consciously thought of this before I read it an article somewhere, but it only stands to reason: the music that has the most profound impact on a person's life, and tends to remain a indelible part of that person's life tends to be, first and foremost, whatever happened to be playing at the time they reached puberty and were thrust into the maelstrom of emotion and hormones that is teenagehood.

For instance, I can never hear the opening organ riff to Del Shannon's "Runaway," or the stately yet lugubrious intro to Roy Orbison's "Crying," or the plangent moan at the start of Dion's "Runaround Sue" without instantly being transported back to 1961 and the swirling welter of excitement, anticipation, nervousness and downright terror that came with being 13, and I imagine it's much the same with those who were a similar age the first time they heard the guitar riff to "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Throughout the 1960s I was never far from a radio or a record player, which is probably why, more than 40 years on, I could easily list several hundred absolutely crucial songs from that decade and tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing the first time I heard them. But I generally choose not to, and in fact put more energy into inveighing against the 1960s and very little into singing their praises, musical or otherwise, because, I tell myself, somebody needs to act as a counterweight against my contemporaries from The Most Boring And Annoying Generation (pace Frank Portman), who left unchecked will pursue us till the end of our days with tales of how they invented sex, rock and roll, civil rights, freedom, justice and marijuana.

"Nostalgia is a powerful drug," commented one of the PPMBers, and like all powerful drugs, is to be indulged in sparingly if at all. For years I thought the 60s veterans were uniquely guilty of apotheosizing their own history, but I've watched successive generations attempting to do the same for the 70s, the 80s and now the 90s. The 00s must have their champions, too, but they're probably mostly still in middle school. No doubt we'll be hearing from them soon, but in the interim I'll be happy to stand up on behalf of our current decade.

Musically, that is. I'll reserve judgment on whether Obama can salvage anything from the political and economic disaster of the past eight years, but grim as things may look on the world's front pages and streaming videos, I think we're living in a time when more and better music is available than ever before in history.

Part of this is simply logic and technology at work: when I was growing up, my access to music from my parents' day was limited to scratchy old 78s that provided about as much fidelity as one of those cheap transistor radios that were just starting to come flooding into the country. Today, from the moment a piece of music comes into existence a digital copy will preserve its integrity for as long as there is electromagnetism and a means of harnessing it.

It used to be that if a record didn't catch on with the public at the time it was released, it would soon disappear into the cutout bins of history, possibly - but only just - to be rediscovered by the occasional bargain hunter or hipster, but otherwise forgotten. But now every band with a laptop and an input jack has a permanent record of its work in the electronic age's equivalent of the Library of Congress, and while it's as hard as ever to get people to pay attention to your music - maybe harder, since there's just so damn much of it out there - you can no longer claim it's because the evil corporations and the clueless DJs stopped them from having access to it.

And it's not just that almost every band's output gets permanently archived these days, but also that the quality - at least with regard to production values - is so much better than was available to amateur performers even a decade or two ago. I almost exclusively listen to my music on shuffle, so I'm frequently startled at the difference between what was considered state of the art DIY production back around 1990 - Bad Religion comes to mind - compared with almost any of the pop punk bands coming up today. While BR had big money behind them and access to major label-quality recording studios, today's bands are getting as good as or better sound out of their bedrooms and basements. And when you compare them to indie records done on the cheap - all the early Lookout stuff, for example - the difference is mind boggling.

The best recording in the world won't make up for a lack of quality in the writing and performance, of course, and that will be where old school purists can continue turning up their noses, though I think they'd be wrong to. "These kids today..." the mantra always begins, the conclusion inexorably being some version of "they don't know beans about what it was like back in the day."

Which is great, as far as I'm concerned. An overarching concern with how things used to be done has always been the surest way to undermine creativity, and I'm not just talking about punk rock: Chinese art and science went into a thousand year tailspin which it's only now pulling out of (well, science, anyway) precisely because the guiding principle of all culture became, "How closely does it hew to the work of the masters?"

Anyway, one of the few redeeming features of my recent stay in the Bay Area was listening to the radio (as already noted, it was so damn cold there, both inside and out, that driving around in my mom's car was one of the few places I could be assured of being warm). Mostly I tuned into my favorite dance station, Energy 92.7, which, even though every song is not necessarily prime material, rarely plays anything so bad that you feel compelled to switch stations, a rare property indeed in the world of modern broadcasting.

But one night, en route from 102.1, my mom's classical station, to 92.7, I got waylaid by WiLD 94.9, which as I recall used to be an all hip hop station, but now seems to have gone way poppier. Either that or hip hop has gotten a whole lot better than it used to be, because I ended up listening to it all night.

Oh no, I can hear you saying, he's going on one of his "open-minded" kicks again, and maybe you're right, and maybe it's time. I've been noticing that my iPod delivers a pretty much nonstop barrage of pop punk, oldies, and country (as long as it doesn't stray much beyond Hank Williams and Roy Acuff), and that's about it. Time for some changes, I thought, but I didn't want to hear any more of that indie crap that's forever being pushed as "edgy" and "adventurous" and "challenging" (the only challenge is to listen to it for more than a couple minutes without getting annoyed and/or a headache).

So I rushed out and downloaded two of my favorite new songs, Pink's "So What" and Katy Perry's "Hot'n'Cold," followed up by a few Beyoncé and Rihanna tracks, and a smattering of Lady GaGa and some hip hop. I feel very with it at the moment, even though most of my "new" songs are at least six months to a year old, but hey, at my age, that's like yesterday, right? I would have downloaded a ton more stuff, except that, curious dinosaur that I am, I was actually paying for my music. I can't really afford to be as open-minded as I was back in the days when I got everything for free.

Conclusion, for now anyway: there is an awful lot of awesome music out there, and about 99% (well, 90%, anyway) is not coming out of Brooklyn. Okay, I take that back. There are probably dozens of great bands within walking distance of my apartment. It's just that so far I've only heard the other dozen or so that kind of really suck.

What I Don't Get

About this whole Gaza thing... Now it's obviously horrible to be dropping bombs on inhabited areas, and I can't imagine anyone but the most extreme Israeli nationalist being gratified at what's been happening in the Gaza Strip these past two days.

Nearly 300 dead and God knows how many wounded, and it makes you kind of sick even to think about what it must be like living under such an onslaught, but at the same time, I can't help wondering just what Israel is supposed to do. Well, not drop bombs on civilian areas might be a good first step, of course, but overlooked in the understandable abhorrence and outrage over the massive casualties now occurring is the fact that the Hamas government is essentially using its own people as pawns in what's now turned into a very deadly propaganda battle. They've been regularly trying to provoke Israel into attacking them precisely so they can play the victim - to be sure, with this many dead and injured, it's no longer exactly "playing" - but if you're Israel and you have an overtly hostile failed state on your doorstep, from which rockets are regularly being launched into your own civilian areas, just what do you do?

It's not like anyone's accusing Israel of being over-liberal with Gaza and its 1.4 million residents. It wouldn't be too great a stretch to describe the enclave as a prison-state, rather like the Manhattan portrayed in Escape From New York. But another way - actually, not all that different a way - of looking at it is a giant welfare colony in which the occupants are only kept alive by constant infusions of outside aid, aid which they repay in bombs, missiles, and suicide attacks.

Granted, Gaza might be able to support itself, at least partially, if it had access to the jobs and trade outside its borders, but we're not likely ever to find out if this would be the case, since every time Israel relaxes its border restrictions even slightly, Hamas hardliners take advantage of the opportunity to launch new attacks on Israel. The only thing that might possibly appease them would be for Israel to close up shop and disappear, along with its 5.3 million Jewish citizens.

I know several militantly anti-Zionist and anti-Israel people who wouldn't be at all displeased with that outcome, but they're largely the sort who can also be seen calling for the USA to get out of North America. More common, though, are the well-intentioned liberals who only want everyone in the Middle East to live in peace, who can't understand why this doesn't seem to be possible, and refuse to believe that a substantial cross-section of the Arab world will do whatever it takes to make sure this never happens.

That's hardly meant to absolve Israeli hardliners of responsibility; they've kept liberal elements hamstrung for decades with the necessity for coalition politics (worth considering, Naderites and other fans of third parties and proportional representation!), and honestly, it's hard to see where the impetus for peace and/or a two-state solution is going to come from. Here in America, where we're laboring through the final weeks of our own failed state, there doesn't seem to be much we can do except look toward January 20 in hopes that, as with nearly everything else wrong today, Obama is somehow going to fix it.

Home Again

24 days. Three and one half weeks. 576 hours. 34,560 minutes. 2,073,600 seconds. That's how long I spent in California, and I was painfully aware of every one of those units of time as they were subtracted from my life. By the last couple days, it didn't seem to matter anymore, as I had lost the will to live as well.

Perhaps I exaggerate just a bit? After all, although Northern California is not my favorite place to be, particularly not in winter, it's hardly the Gobi Desert or the battlefields of Darfur. It's not even blizzard-wracked Wisconsin or, heaven forfend, the stinkier parts of New Jersey.

And in fact, quite a few joys and blessings were bestowed on me during my time on the Wrong Coast: I got to spend time with my lovely family, I saw friends like Janelle, Kristina, Patrick and Erika, who I only get to see occasionally, and other friends like 327 Dave, Jesse Michaels, Michael Donnelly, and the world-famous Kamala, who I almost never see.

The trip cost me almost nothing, as I stayed with my mother the entire time, which meant I was also able to be with her not only for Christmas, but for her 90th birthday party, which was pretty awesome (I spent most of it sitting at the table with the 80-something mostly Jewish ladies, kvetching about public transportation and/or the lack of it in most American cities. One of them had spent the first part of her life in Brownsville and Canarsie, and we were able to fill a good half hour just reminiscing about the names and routes of the old subway lines in the days before they were folded into the MTA.

The fact that I was waxing nostalgic, almost to the point of teary-eyed wistfulness, about the New York City subway system might give you some idea of how out of place I felt in California, despite having lived there for some 30 years of my life. I couldn't travel two minutes on BART, the Bay Area's laughable (to the point of making you want to cry) excuse for a transit system (the old ladies of course remembered the Key System, which for the first half of the 20th century served the same areas as BART now dis-serves at a fraction of the cost and, believe it or not, with greater efficiency, until it was bought and demolished by a subsidiary of the auto industry) without thinking fondly of far happier times spent on the subway.

Yes, it might be a bit noisy, dirty (though not nearly so much as it used to be) and occasionally chaotic, but the New York subway is also far more likely to get you where you're going (and, not nearly so often the case with BART, which was designed with suburban auto drivers in mind), someplace where you'd actually like to be, in a timely and affordable manner. For instance, if I want to hop across the water to Manhattan, I'll walk a couple minutes to the subway stop, and either pay $4 for a round trip ticket, or, far more likely, use my monthly unlimited ride ticket, which makes the average cost of a round trip to the city something like $2.25.

Not so if I want to go to Frisco. First it's a 10 or 12 minute walk to the station (and my mom lives CLOSE; many people in the East Bay suburbs might have a half hour journey before they can even get on a train). Then it's $7.50 for the fare, with no discounts, no monthly tickets, nothing. You have a quick errand downtown, or just want to meet a friend for coffee in the Mission? You're $7.50 in the hole before you even start. And don't even mention wanting to stay out after midnight. Jesse Michaels, Kevin Seconds and Mike Park were playing a show in Frisco a couple nights before Christmas that I might have liked to go to (fortunately I'd seen the same combo at Gilman earlier in the month), but in addition to the club (Bottom of the Hill) being located a half hour's walk from the nearest BART station, I would have had to leave before the second act was halfway over to avoid being marooned in the crappy streets of San Francisco for the night.

And are they crappy? Yes indeed. Not quite, it's only fair to say, as crappy as they were a couple years ago. The heroin sellers at 16th and Mission are not quite as ubiquitous as they used to be, and in fact I walked through quite a few neighborhoods I once would have qiven a wide berth after dark without feeling particularly insecure. I found myself wondering if a couple years of the rough and tumble street life of New York City hadn't inured me to the less than stellar quality of San Francisco hoodlums, but it's more likely that because New York is in general much safer than San Francisco (let alone Oakland, Berkeley or Richmond), that I'd grown accustomed to being able to walk the streets without being constantly vigilant.

Which may not have been the best idea in some of the places I visited, but as I said, nothing untoward happened. Unless, of course, you count the nagging, low grade squalor that seems to accumulate everywhere - or, I should say, in the handful of places that more than a handful of people gather. Most of San Francisco, especially after dark, is practically deserted, and in those few spots with a semblance of night life - the 16th Street and Valencia corridors being a notable example - have a rather desperate Third World ambience, replete with beggars and junkies and other street people trying to flog bits of scavenged and/or stolen merchandise that they spread across the sidewalks. I found myself wondering who on earth was going to buy a pair of stained green trousers that had been lying - all night? for several nights? - on a 16th Street sidewalk in the on-again, off-again rain mingled with the spittle, footsteps, and tossed cigarette butt of the several hundred drunken roisterers who'd passed that way one or several times (several times being the likelier number, since once you stroll more than a couple blocks, there's nowhere to go but to turn around and walk back again; it's the same in the Castro, Union Street, and whatever else passes for a nightlife district). I mean, not just who's going to buy them, but who would then follow up by putting such a pair of pants on? In fact, I never saw any of the street vendors sell anything, but they seemed quite content to sit there and do their bit to bring a little bit of Kinshasa to Baghdad by the Bay (Herb Caen's old encomium seems far more prescient now than it ever could have in the long-ago decade - probably the 30s or 40s - when he coined it).

Speaking, if only parenthetically, of old San Francisco, I happened to watch The Maltese Falcon on the plane ride back to New York. I hadn't seen it in, oh, at least 20 years, and while I remembered it as a delightful throwback to the classy kind of town Caen was always singing paeans to, Sam Spade's San Francisco revisited in 2008 looked darker and sketchier than I remembered. Not a place I'd be all that keen on visiting, though still a notable improvement over what it is today; if nothing else, the villains were better dressed and spoke far more colorfully.

But before I turn this into a one-dimensional Frisco-bashing session (as if I hadn't already, you might riposte), I want to note a couple curious matters. The first, as I've noted before, is that for many years, I thought Frisco and environs were the bee's knees. They possessed, I'd swear to anyone who listened, the best weather, the best culture, the best food, the best scenery. Why, it even smelled better, I'd insist. So, it's only fair to query, as did Morrissey, has the world changed or have I changed?

Secondly, I know quite a few people, my family included who are very happy living in the Bay Area and are not on drugs (well, most of my family, anyway). I could explain that away by saying that the poor dears aren't well traveled and have never lived anywhere sensible (Detroit and San Francisco, mostly, if that tells you anything). But it wouldn't be as easy to explain two former New Yorkers who had relocated (to Frisco in one case and Berkeley in the other) and never doubted for a minute that they'd done the right thing. New York was too crowded, too harsh, too demanding, they said, though it's worth noting that in both cases their idea of "demanding" was the notion that they should have to get jobs and/or otherwise obtain money to pay for rent, transportation and the like.

Rather than continue with the sniping and the cheap shots, I'll just say that I had to accept that much of this must clearly be a matter of individual perception. California quite literally made me sick - I spent two of my last three days there in bed, unable to eat or even move to any great extent, a mysterious illness that vanished completely the minute I set foot in New York City again - but at one time, it invigorated me and filled me with the desire to do great things (while at the same time promoting the sort of emotional - and yes, often drug-induced - lassitude that made it very unlikely I would ever get around to it). But it is also home to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of happy, productive people, quite a few of whom, hard as it may be for me to believe, are former New Yorkers.

And if I needed further confirmation that at least part of this is all in the mind, I point to the most saliently unpleasant aspect of my time in California: the damp, miserable, all-pervading cold. I swear, to every one of you who emailed or sent a Christmas card with some variation of "Hope you're enjoying your time in sunny California," just be grateful that you were far away at the time, because you might have been throttled on the spot had I been able to reach you.

Yes, the sun did shine occasionally, and I was not unhappy when it rained (they're in the third year of a drought and need the water badly; see, even after all that's happened, I still have a certain bio-loyalty to my old home state), but the one constant factor was the cold. Yes, as many of you pointed out, it gets much colder in New York, but New York is a sensible city where you have winter clothes for when you need them, and once you get home, provided you're not unlucky enough to live in some slum tenement, you will have a warm, heated, well-insulated environment to relax in.

Not so in the Bay Area, where it was a constant (and expensive, for those stuck paying the utility bills) to ever escape the cold. I felt terrible cranking my mother's thermostat up to anything like acceptable levels - enough so that I'll probably have to send her money to pay the extra gas bills I helped run up - but even at 68 or 70 degrees - what is thought of in the civilized world as room temperature - all that's accomplished is that the furnace stays on pretty much constantly and the cold air leaking in from every window and right through the walls creates bone-chilling drafts.

And no, my mother's house is not particularly bad; it was like that in almost every house I visited. The only times during my three and a half weeks that I felt fully warm were a) on the BART, provided I didn't sit near the doors; b) in the shower; and c) in bed, provided I had the full complement of four blankets.

But here's the kicker: when I got back to New York, the temperature was exactly the same - 46 degrees - as it had been in San Francisco when I left. Except in New York, I was warm. I went out wearing my spring jacket with a hoodie underneath and was completely comfortable; in Frisco, I'd worn my heavy winter jacket with the same hoodie underneath, and sometimes an additional thermal fleece - actually, I rarely took the fleece off, even when I was indoors. I may have looked like the Michelin Man, but that's what it took to fight off the cold (even though, as I noted in an earlier post, some of the local nuts and/or drunks were out in t-shirts and shorts).

I mentioned this to my friend Rob, and he said, "Yeah, everyone says that cold affects you way more in San Francisco. Maybe it's because they're surrounded by water." "And we're not?" I asked. Rob, who's lived in Queens, within sniffing distance of the Atlantic Ocean for 50 of his 53 years, just shrugged. "Maybe it's a different kind of water?"

Oh well, here's to everyone being happy on their respective coasts, and here's to me being not just happy, but ecstatic, to be back on mine. Tonight I walked across town and then all the way up from the Village to Times Square just for the sheer joy of seeing people and lights and life and sanity again, and my heart was singing with every footstep. It was noisy as hell, the crowds were - well, they weren't really "crowds," though they would have been seen as such in almost any other "city" in the land - just full of life and energy and - no, actually, they were probably just going to a movie or to grab a late night coffee. What can I say? It just looked like a city is supposed to look, and functioned like a city is supposed to function. I must have been insane to stay away so long, and I am so, so happy to be back home.

Hunx, Runx, And The Rest Of The Punx

I did manage to get out over the weekend, just as the rain and cold set in with a vengeance, but thanks to having the use of a Zipcar for a few hours, I stayed warmer than I'd been in a while. I looked in on PATRICK HYNES, celebrating his - well, I guess he's getting to the age where I don't need to give an exact number - birthday with his lovely wife ERIKA (the two of them together run LITTLE TYPE MAIL ORDER, and of course many of you will know Patrick from his days as the magnificently pompadoured guitarist of THE POTATOMEN, or, if you can't forgive him for that, as one third of LOOKOUT RECORDS during the 90s glory years.

Patrick was in fine fettle, apart from nursing a sore head as a result of getting beaned during his afternoon soccer match. I stayed longer than I'd intended, which meant I arrived at my next destination, JANELLE BLARG's holiday party, just as everyone was leaving (at least that's what they said, i.e., they swore they weren't leaving just because I'd arrived.

And it wasn't really just Janelle's party, although she gets top billing because she was the one who invited me. Dozens of prestigious East Bay scenesters were also in attendance, and a few even stayed to visit after I'd arrived, though mostly, I suspect, because they lived there. There was, for example, the inimitable HUNX, of GRAVY TRAIN fame, and now fronting his own fast-rising combo, HUNX AND HIS PUNX. Hunx was clad in an authentic 1970s dashiki, of the sort once favored by full-figured African-American women; on Hunx's skinny frame, it looked more like priestly vestments, though perhaps not from any church you'd want your son attending.

Hunx also shared with us his spectacular new video. Here, have a look for yourself:

It's worth noting that the video's awesome animation segments were the work of none other than Miss Janelle herself! This is a multi-talented house party we're talking about, as further evidenced when the elusive RICHIE BUCHER came strolling in. Richie, who you'll know from a long line of East Bay bands, including the immortal SWEET BABY and his artwork on, among other things, the cover of Dookie, is often heard of but seldom seen; his appearance at last summer's INSUBORDINATION FEST in Baltimore providing the first evidence to many of his admirers that he actually existed!

Then, as if Hunx weren't enough, in came RUNX! Otherwise known as MATT RUNKLE, he's the author and artist behind a really cool comic called Runx Tales, which you'd be well advised to pick up first chance you get. Then there was this lady whose name I tragically can't remember just now, but who I'm sure must be a prestigious designer, or will be soon. She had this amazing purse she'd made which I can't really do justice to with words: it was decorated with a series of hanging rings that turned out to have been fashioned from zippers, and that was only the pièce de résistance of her ensemble. I had to pinch myself to remember that we were hobnobbing not in the hallowed precincts of Fifth Avenue but in the nondescript backstreets of Oakland!

Well, there were lots more names and faces I could wow you with, but some of them demand anonymity and others, well, they'll just have to wait because it's really past my bedtime now, even out here on the three-hours-behind West Coast. Oh, but before I go, let me give a further shout-out to my friend KRISTINA (yay!) who was up from Los Angeles and to the new CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (boo! - mostly for the shockingly exorbitant price of admission) that we visited. I seem to recall that at the old CAAS, you could just walk in from the park and stroll around looking at the fish, etc. At this one, they fleece you for 25 bucks (three bucks off if you're an AAA member or came on public transportation, but still) to look at some fish, etc. Ask yourself how many kids from the ghetto are ever going to see the inside of this joint. Museums should be free for all, all the time. On that sour note, good night.

Notes From Siberia

It's probably my karma (now I know I've been in California too long) for complaining about the weather last week, when it was at least getting up near 60F (15C) during the daytime. It was still too cold, of course, getting down into the 30s and 40s at night, but now we're in the second or third day of a typical - at least it's happened most Decembers I can remember - California cold wave where we'd be thrilled if the temperature managed to make it out of the 40s.

This may seem like a minor inconvenience, or even a tropical heat wave, to those coping with blizzards and sub-zero temps out East or in the Great Plains, but what people often don't appreciate about the cold in California is a) it's a very damp, especially bone-chilling variety; and b) because Californians refuse to believe that they don't live on a perpetually sunlit Baywatch set, most houses are paper-thin, poorly insulated (if at all) and heated (if at all) by furnaces that are about as effective as an outsized hair dryer.

So while the cold back East can be wretched, even terrifying and life-threatening, it's usually only a matter of making it from the car or the subway back to your house or apartment where you can be snug and warm again. Whereas in California, you can do for days - weeks or months, even - never really getting warm.

Oh, it's not as though people of dying of exposure in their homes, although I suspect a fair few frail and elderly folks have been hastened to their demise by chronically underheated living conditions. It's more a case of chronic, low-grade misery from which there are few escapes. Some public buildings are adequately heated, of course, and if you've got the price of a ticket you can ride around all day on a warm BART train, but if for some reason you're stuck in the house, multiple sweaters and long underwear are the order of the day, and even then the cold air manages to creep in somehow.

Because of a project I'm working on, I've been shivering in front of the computer for most of the past week and a half, only occasionally venturing out to marvel at the nutty, no, let's be more precise, insane Californians who stroll the streets in t-shirts and shorts despite icicles threatening to form on their bright red ears and noses. I don't know if they are brazening things out for macho purposes, or if they are truly in denial - one such fellow that I saw at BART the other night was clearly drunk out of his mind, but this explanation can't apply to all of them - but they seem blithely unaware that everyone else around them is wrapped up in scarves, hats and winter jackets.

I know that if I stayed here long enough I would adapt to the weather, as I did when I previously lived in California. It took me about two years from the time I first moved here before I no longer felt it necessary to wear a heavy coat in June, and after a couple more years, I could be heard swearing that California weather, and specifically Bay Area weather, was the best in the world.

But ten years in England and two in New York have thoroughly disabused me of that notion. It's true that in New York we're far less likely to get those 70-degrees-in-January days that the Bay Area (very) occasionally enjoys, but on the other hand, we're far more likely to get summers where you can actually strip down to a swimming suit and jump in the ocean without risking hypothermia.

And more vitally, the East Coast seems to have a more realistic relationship with the weather. People know that it gets very cold in winter and very hot in summer, so they and the buildings they inhabit are prepared to cope. In California, they prefer to pretend that it's always good weather and when - as is often the case - it's not, to pretend harder.

Adding insult to injury, by the way, I note that at present it's a full 20 degrees warmer in New York than it is in San Francisco. An anomaly, true, and most likely it will be snowing or worse by tomorrow, but for right now, what I wouldn't give for an extra 20 degrees. Or just a steaming radiator and some snug-fitting storm windows.

Milk

Saw the film Milk the other day and must say that while I've never been keen on Sean Penn and haven't been impressed by anything Gus Van Sant's done in the last ten years or so, both of them deserve Oscars. Penn, especially. I guess I haven't been paying that much attention to his career since, oh, Fast Times at Ridgemont High (and his Madonna period was a spectacle best left completely unwatched), but the guy really can act. Or has learned to do so along the way. Respect.

Since I lived in or near the Castro during several (1972-73 and 1976-77) of the years covered by the film (1972-73 and 1976-77), I was interested to see how accurately it was portrayed. When Van Sant was shooting, I saw some flyers asking for extras to re-enact a couple of the marches and protest rallies, complete with instructions of what not to wear (no designer or brand logos, for example; I'd forgotten that such things barely existed in the 70s and would have been considered mightily outré if they had). And the answer is: yes, they pulled it off pretty well. For some reason I found it especially poignant to see the Diesel outlet at the corner of Castro and Market restored to its original (at least as far back as my memory goes) incarnation as the Bank of America.

I did spot one glaring anachronism: as the marchers in one scene set off down Market Street they pass (and disable) a green and yellow F Market streetcar. The streetcar itself was the right style, albeit unnaturally clean, but in 1978 there was no F Market line. What's more, the spot on 17th Street where the marchers passed it is actually the end of the line, so there would have been no point in disabling the car; the track ends right there, so it wouldn't have been going anywhere.

Minor quibble, I guess. If I were going to quarrel with anything else, it might be with the film's idealization of early-to-mid 70s Castro Street as a romantic, halcyon age, more or less the gay equivalent to the hippie free love 60s, marred only by interference from the nasty old San Francisco Police Department. I guess such harassment did take place from time to time, though I had very little personal experience with it; what really felt like a time warp was the film's portrayal of San Francisco cops taking aggressive action of any kind, even if it was wrong-headed and mean-spirited. The SFPD riot squad charging in to stop some mustachioed hunks from dancing together? It's been decades since I've seen them get that excited about mayhem and murder.

But I think I'm in a tiny minority in feeling that the Castro wasn't all that. Most guys my age who have any experience with or recollection of the pre-AIDS Castro share Van Sant's rose-colored view, and telling them that I personally found it a little sordid, squalid, and tacky elicits blank stares at best and outright derision and hostility from those less inclined to listen to my nay-saying.

Maybe it was the mustaches, and the Marlboro Man clone look that overtook the street by 1974 or so: I found that style singularly unattractive (still do, in fact, despite periodic attempts, not least right here in Williamsburg, to revive it), and as a result spent less and less time there. Castro Street was the main shopping street for the neighborhood, and I also had a post office box at 18th and Diamond, so I had to go there on a pretty regular basis, but I didn't linger or socialize all that much. Some of my roommates did, so I heard plenty of stories, few of them appealing.

Probably because of that I never actually met Harvey Milk, though I'd see him around the neighborhood from time to time. I voted for him, too, though probably more out of left-wing political considerations than gay cultural ones. Revisiting that era by way of the movie brought up mixed feelings: while it was touching to see the difference that it made for young people to have somewhere to go and an ideal for living when they'd been repressed and ostracized in their own families and communities, I felt the same difficulty I'd felt in the 70s with seeing a political movement, identity, or culture constructed largely around who one happened to have sex with.

Very possibly this says more about me than about the gay movement, but while we're on the topic, I have to point out that I feel similarly ambivalent about the whole Proposition 8/gay marriage imbroglio. I have friends who ready to secede from the United States of America over last month's vote in California, or at least to withhold all support from Barack Obama, despite agreeing with him on 90% of the issues, because he didn't embrace the cause of gay marriage.

I, on the other hand, found myself respecting Obama more as a result of that decision. The incoming Prez clearly learned from history: before his Presidency ahd really gotten underway, Bill Clinton had squandered much of his hard-won political capital on the ill-starred gays in the military issue. It's not that I in any way support banning gays from the military, just that it was clear at the time that America was not ready for it (it would hardly be an issue if it were introduced today). Similarly, there will almost certainly come a time, and probably not too far in the future, when some form of gay marriage is unquestioningly accepted.

But that time is not here yet, and the aggressive push for marriage as opposed to the more innocuous-sounding (while accomplishing almost exactly the same purpose) civil unions has actually - at least in my opinion - set the cause back. If California had instituted civil unions instead of gay marriage, it's almost certain that the Mormons and Christian right wouldn't have been able to mobilize enough support for Proposition 8, and a prohibition against gay marriage would not now be part of the California constitution.

The same is true of at least some if not all the other states that have now passed laws specifically banning gay marriage. Sure, these laws can and no doubt eventually will be undone eventually, but it will make things that much harder, and why? All because - again, in my opinion - a few hardcore activists felt it necessary to tweak the noses of traditional Christians by appropriating a ritual that religious people felt - whether rightly or wrongly - to be part and parcel of their own belief system. It struck me as being kind of like the kid who's not satisfied just to come out to his parents as gay, but insists on doing so by showing up at their church in drag on Easter Sunday.

Oh well, what do I know? I'm not in line to get married to anyone of either gender, so it's kind of a non-issue to me. Sure, I would have voted against Prop 8 had I been a California resident, but mainly because nearly all of the wrong people were on the other side. In the meantime, go see Milk if you haven't already and be thankful it's not the 1970s anymore.

MCMYS East Bay Report

There's got to be an upside to being stranded in the East Bay for three and a half weeks, I kept telling myself, and sure enough, I'd been here barely a day when I discovered that my old friend JESSE MICHAELS was going to be performing down the legendary GILMAN STREET along with fellow legends KEVIN SECONDS and MIKE PARK.

I'm guessing, though I don't know for sure, that Jesse must have played at Gilman during his days with COMMON RIDER, but if so, I wasn't there, so this marked the first time I'd seen him on the Gilman stage since the last OPERATION IVY show almost 20 years ago. As you'd expect, some fellow old-timers showed up to see him, including PAT WRIGHT, who's been a part of Gilman since pretty much the beginning, and could barely contain his delight at having, at age 65, started collecting his Social Security. While others, including the lovely KAMALA, of the KARNIVORES et al., assured me (there were a lot of similar assurances going on among the Gilman old-schoolers) that I "hadn't changed a bit," Pat wanted to know if I too had signed up for Social Security, rather abruptly undoing all the good work by the numerous flatterers.

Also in attendance was AARON THORNS OF LIFE, who's taken up residence on the West Coast for a while, so Next Big Thing seeker-afters can relax for a while when it comes to finding out about that next top-secret show that they're not invited to. Meanwhile, what was happening up on the stage? Well, Jesse, who told me beforehand that his main goal in doing these shows is to "learn how to sing and play guitar at the same time so I can join a band," ran through about an album's worth of brand new songs (new to me, anyway, and I think to the crowd at large) with just himself on vocals and electric guitar. "But Jesse," I'd said, "you've already managed to be in a few bands and do, um, reasonably well..." "Yes," he said, but I want to be able to use the guitar as a composing tool for writing songs." "But it seems like you've managed to write a few songs in your time, too..." But at that point I uncharacteristically shut up, it having occurred to me that there was probably not much point in my trying to tell one of the greatest performers I've ever seen how to conduct his business.

The new songs do sound good, though they seem as though they're not fully developed yet, and would probably benefit from being performed by a full band. Jesse also seemed a little nervous on stage, at least during the opening songs, but relaxed noticeably once he realized that the crowd was totally supportive and was going to let him do whatever he wanted (i.e., no one yelling for Operation Ivy songs, etc.). As it happened, though, there was one magical moment at the close of Mike Park's set, when he came down into the audience to pose for a picture at the end of his set and then suddenly broke into a rendition of what was arguably Op Ivy's most anthemic number, "The Crowd." Jesse was standing just a few feet away, and eyes kept straying toward him to see how he would react, but then just as it came time for the second verse, he edged up to the microphone and started singing, "Drink drink in the badlands..."

Those of you who know the song will be aware that just as he kicks into that lyric there's an inadvertent (or perhaps not) catch in his voice that catapults things into another dimension, and not only did chills resonate up and down my body, but my eyes rolled heavenward until I was staring at the ceiling of Gilman Street. There's something about Jesse's voice when he really nails a lyric that does that to you, and I was reminded of the way DAVID HAYES described the feeling of another Op Ivy song, "Bad Town," where LINT (very creditably handles the vocals until the last chorus, when Jesse comes in with a "No, no no, no" that, as David said back then, was "almost scary."

But last night's magical Gilman moment was short-lived, at least for me: while everyone around me started singing along (just like Op Ivy shows of yore), the guy behind me sang so loud that even without a microphone, he completely drowned out Jesse. I hope it was a very enjoyable experience for him, singing along with his hero that way, but frankly, just for those couple of minutes, I would have rather heard his hero. Oh well. My feeling is that Jesse's headed in a good direction with the new stuff and that there will be more chances to hear him in the coming months.

Kevin Seconds also did his acoustic thingie and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Not sure how much he liked me reminding him that the first time I saw him with his old band 7 SECONDS was more than 28 years ago, but hey, we're all getting along in years, and the far more important thing is that he's still getting out there and playing and making things happen, and from all appearances, enjoying the heck out of it. From the stage, Jesse told a story that I'd never heard, and which I'll have to assume is legit: that back in the late 70s, Kevin and his brother started an American Sex Pistols fan club while, Jesse made sure to point out, "the Sex Pistols were still a band."

Anyway, good spirits and high times all around on a chilly California night. Gilman Street will be 22 years old in a few weeks time. It's an ongoing miracle, and almost singlehandedly makes up for much that is wrong with the world today.