You've Heard it Before

I can't. I won't. I should. It might help. It might be letting the world see the wounds. It's too self-indulgent and pathetic.
Stay away. Go away. I will drive every human contact into a safe area. No peeking behind the blinds.
How weak I've become. How strong I once was. Let the years roll by and serve my life sentence of suffering. For what? Nothing. It's a meaningless nightmare of pain. You've heard it before.
Yet the words salve my wounds for a little while. It's a prison vacation in a walking torture chamber. I hate these words, I hate the weakness and the self-exile. But no one else can see. They won't understand, because neither do I.

Bigot Bingo

I am a shameless lover of the NY Post's Police Blotter. The best thing about it is guessing what the race of the accused perpetrator in a crime.
There is a rule in journalism that one is not supposed to identify the race of the arrested unless it is directly connected with the story. This is why newspapers will name a suspect's clothing, their approximate height and weight, and what neighborhood they are from. The papers can roughly identify physical appearance. But the best way of ID-ing is usually their race.
This is why mothers name their baby's names that make it obvious who they are.
In Hispanic neighborhoods, especially Puerto Ricans, half the last names of suspects seem to be Maldonado. If I could get a San Jose phone books probably half of it would be filled with Maldonados.
The babies names are usually Angel, Miguel, Jose, and of course Jesus. If you ever want to see Christ return, try Jesus in New York. He's everywhere.
Then there are the African-Americans. When I was a kid the black students generally had the same first names as white kids. Paul, Larry, Charles etc. Now it's whatever odd name their mothers can imagine. Lots of D's. D'quan, DuTroy, DeCon roach spray.
Also of course the Ls. LeBron, Lontel, LaQuan etc.
It does make NFL more interesting, with guys named Pac-Man and Antoine Randel-El.
With white guys, look at the Italians busted in police stings. When I was covering police in Trenton, I would go through to arrest docket every day.
Most of them were young and arrested on bullshit possession of a controlled dangerous substance. That meant crack.
Every once in a while, you'd get guys from Philly who were middle aged and had a vowel at the end of their names. Can anybody guess what profession they were in?

But I can't wait until kids now come of age, of crime age. They all have these precious special names that their parents most have gotten from soap operas.
Grant, Harrison, Wesley, Spencer, Brant, Dylan a million times; Lord King Richard the VII.
I don't know when newspapers started the policy of not naming a suspect's color. I guess they thought it would fuel bigotry to do so.
That leaves you the reader with name and address/neighborhood of their homes. TV news often broadcasts pictures of the suspect. But by that time you've usually got a mental picture. Its less than Bingo, more like connect the dots.

Simon Says Stop (second edition since I forgot the earlier post)

Part II - a rewrite of Nov. 18 that's much better than this edition. I can't figure out how to jump stories to where I want them.

The real news in a newspaper is not on the front page; that's pack reporting. But take a good look at P. A17, usually the metro or city beat. What you will see is the end of the American empire, the buried tragedy of the inner-city that usually gets little front-page action.
So said David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who created "Homicide: A Year on the Streets of the Killing Fields." Then his cable series "The Wire," which ran for what? Five years? Its dead-on verisimilitude actually rang true
.
There was a time when groups like the Black Panthers provoked genuine fear, a fear of an uprising. In this scenario, the Panthers would gather in East Harlem and march down Park Avenue. Residents would afraid to leave their condos, but were too afraid to leave it to whatever those doormen do to stay up at three am.
Yet people get killed on public transportation, in openly public places, and of course convenience stores.
If we are ever going to get real jobs in WPA programs, as Obama is talking about, they're going to have to include addiction programs.
The news philosophy in local reporting everywhere seems to be, as Simon said at a meeting at Princeton University, "if we don't acknowledge it, it doesn't exist."
Simon, a squat man in his 40s or so, with a shaved head, looks like a character on the series. He told the distinguished professors and others that the ghetto economy is going to take 30 years to fade away. Do not convict anyone on a non-violent drug charge; it's a complete waste of time and does not not make the punishment fit the crime.
Instead of rookie teachers at the worst schools, pay established teachers "combat pay;" - that is, about double what their peers are getting.
Instead, he said, "statistics are the devil."
Teachers are told to get their numbers down (of violent crime, of rape, armed robbery etc., as well as classroom achievement). The teachers, quite naturally, cheat with their kids numbers.

This is the heart of the ghetto policy: lower what the students have to do for qualifying as to what constitutes major crimes, push the teachers to raise numbers up at the state and national level (like the No Child Left Behind program), anyway they can.

This situation is at the heart of the show; in politics, in police, and in the prisons. The system is rigged: you can't win. Policy and Police commanders, at the point of tears, are interrogated as to why the crime numbers aren't down.
So armed robbery, mugging, and other street crimes are pushed into less serious categories, so major violent offenses are supposedly down.

But simply standing around shaking your head in disbelief at increasingly brazen, open violent crime does no good.

"The question becomes, "Are we one society or are we not?" 'Simon said. "If we're not, let's hire more private security guards and build more gated communities. And let's to terms with the fact that America only works for some of us."

Fordham Road, The Bronx

Fordham Road split the borough in two. North semi-safe, south a hellhole.
I told my friend Keith there were some great Irish bars up there. Instead, there were wizened old-man bars whose sparse occupants told us one main thing: It's all gone to shit.
The hood had turned unequivocally Hispanic. The Irish youth had, believe it or not, decided to stay in the newly emergent Celtic Irish Tiger, and were staying over on their side of the pond.
Before, when I visited the Fordham campus, I was blown away by the hard Bronx landscape giving away instantly to manicured, rolling lawns, tall trees, and mock-Gothic architecture. The bars were cheap, absurdly so, but it was felt that the students were easy marks for mugging.
But I had been to Belmont Ave, Italian-American inspiration to Frankie and The Belmont's doop-wop's of the early 60s. Still a few old birds up those apartments whose existence was to tell you to shut up or leave in the courtyards.
Believe it or not, we did. On to Yankee Stadium, then the Sunnyside area of Queens. An entire world in one place.
After the Irish beat Milan 1-0, the entire bar went outside in the Queens street and jumped around and broke pint glasses.
My partner in crime is not around anymore, at lease not to me; but tell me in NYC, are there no new worlds to conquer?

Fits Right in the Palm of Your Hand

You can now download porn into your cell phone, or another person might send it to you. This may be a little embarrassing, on planes, trains, and buses. Especially when riding next to women, children, the elderly and others who are not sickos like you.
Maybe they'll put in an "adults only" pleasure-yourself train cars or similar areas in the back of planes.
Or you can talk too loudly on your phone, filling in everyone around you to the play-by-play action. "Yeah, she's getting it on with an Aardvark now. This is really hot," you say as you pant along.
And if you think regular cellphones are a menace on the road, think about XXX right on your steering wheel. I wonder what people will tell the cops when they wreck their wheels and maybe themselves at a certain moment; that is, coming and going at the same time.
Its the classic problem of oversexed society: sex and sexual images will become boring. I've already wrote about the news kiosk in Austria where a triple-X magazine, complete with the money shot, was right in the middle of all the other "respectable" rags, and people just walked right on by, paying no attention to it whatsoever.
In the Luke Wilson film Idiocracy, one could go into a mini-Starbucks, get a latte, and get, uh, a happy ending.
Let's get sex at least semi-naughty again, the way it was when you stole Penthouses or paid for Playboys from some kid's dad's collection. It is actually quite easy; you simply make a new domain name, (XXX) for porn.
Otherwise that sound you think is your porno-cell will not be moaning. It will be the yawning from everyone around you.

Hand Over the Ambassador, Jeeves

It definitely wasn't terrorism code red at the British Embassy a few years back. A Christmas party was going on somewhere in the sprawling compound. My neighbor and I were invited and, anyway, we ended up with a semi-automatic rifle pointed at us. Cheerio!
The mini-pub where the party was happening was almost impossible to find unless you know the layout. We definitely didn't.
Anyhow, we ended up knocking on the door of the British Ambassador. Some pointed-faced Jeeves type came to the door. We asked if the party was there. "Most certainly not." he said.
As we were leaving, we looked in the dining room window and there was a candle-lit get together, all of whom were senior types, all of whom had looks of absolute disbelief on their faces as they looked back at us.
Walking back to the new part of the compound, a man dressed in black and with an M-16 commanded us to stop. We did (surpise). We were asked to identify ourselves ("well, I'm a Pisces); I said I was as US citizen and Simon said he was British. He asked for ID, then said we were within a few feet of being blasted unto Kingdom Come.
We were escorted to this rec-room/pub way in the back and enjoyed a good time, and laughed about how simple bone-headedness could now get you killed.
Here's the kicker. My roommate used to go to the embassy mini-pub, which showed British soccer teams. Only he wasn't allowed in. Nobody was allowed in the pub.
When my roommate asked why, someone said "oh, some American Wankers came inside and scared the crap out of the Ambassador."
Mike, my roommate, said nothing. A few weeks later the Brits let the sports fans back in, probably with extra-security

Rebel, Rebel (past tense)

It was in the cult section of the last video store, a "specialty" one, here in Princeton. I found "Suburbia," about a loose gang of vaguely punk kids who had tried to find a home in an abandoned real estate development in the LA outlands.
Here's how you know you are middle-aged. I was concerned about real estate values the entire time. There are, apparently, these semi-abandoned developments in what Angelenos call The Antelope Valley or the Inland Empire.
These areas sprung up to serve the military bases around it, and now serve as the last frontier of affordable housing for people who work "down below;" over the mountains in the LA Basin.
The movie starts out in a very cliche way: punk kids misunderstood, homeowners fascist repressive nazi jackasses.
I won't spoil the end by telling you that the movie ends with the youngest member of the clan (maybe 8 years old)being killed by the suburbo-rednecks. Wait, I just did. That's OK you won't see it anyway.
I saw the movie in Georgetown with Walsh McGuire, about the most punk kid that existed at Georgetown Prep. Afterward, we broke a window or something to show what badasses we were. We hid in the cemetery on Wisconsin below M Street, as though the police actually gave a damn.
Hard to believe that kids actually saw that movie and identified with it. Then again, "Qaudrophenia" made me want to drink, smoke, run from cops and get into fights. The operative word here is impressionable.

Porn vs. the Nazis

The first thing you notice is the color. No comfortable black and white that you can assure yourself was long ago and far away. Instead, a pile of still white and pinkish bodies, a mountain of them.
All of it colored footage of the death camps, all of which makes the horror so pedestrian. It is like a bonfire at a Big Ten college. Kindling wood.
I switch to an, ahem, item of adult entertainment. It's an orgy scene, and the similarity of the pile-em up on each other is more than disturbing after watching the scenes of the holocaust.
One is pleasure, the other pain, or so it seems. As I've always said, the problem with orgies is that you can never tell where one person ends and the other begins. What's that William Dafoe pic where he confesses that he might have stroked another heterosexual because it was really hard to figure it out who was who?
I guess the only way to know is to everyone wear one of those Army dog tags.
It's like that old joke. "Why don't WASP's like Orgies? "Too many thank you notes."

Spoiled Milk

I've seen the trailers for and reviews for "Milk," about the flamboyantly gay city supervisor who was killed in office. Let me make myself clear in my profound disgust and protest.

Like we can identify with such a limp-wristed, fruity fairy. The moment I saw him on the screen I wanted to get the old baseball bat out of the garage and bash him with it. Unfortunately, it was only an actor up there on screen there, Sean Penn.
Penn, being from fag-friendly Hollywood, probably didn't realize what a terrible role-model he was making.

Now, bus-loads of children will be forced to watch this disgusting piece of homo-propaganda. The school board wherever they are will probably think that they are helping the kids into being more accepting, and to treat such sissies just like they would with normal people.

I've had it with such trashy filth like the one that Heath Ledger was in. We can all see how totally pissed off God was when the divine one, in his fierce judgment, took that actor away.

Why aren't there other movies that show the apostles living together, but without so much as a "love that robe" between them? I'll tell you. God was watching them at all times, and struck down everything down to your everyday erection in his fierce righteousness. As quoted in Mark II, part 3, "if a sheep doest wander before the holy men, neither man nor beast should find themselves in unholy congress."

In other words, fruitcakes, watch out, because the greatest fag-basher of all time is coming. And by your limp wrist he shall identify you, and send you down below, which I can assure you is tacky as hell and will play no thumping bass music, ever.

Long Island Trampling and The Office

The Office's Dwight Schrute's cornering of the unicorn princess market in Scranton may shed some light on that bizarre and disturbing trampling to death of the man who opened a Long Island Wal-Mart's doors on Black Friday morning.
If you saw the show December 11, you know that Dwight bought every one of these ridiculous dolls in the area, then sold them to desperate parents at a huge profit. The parents' children all wanted them so badly for Christmas that the adults didn't want to disappoint their little darlings and would pay practically anything.
This might explain the crazed rush in the pre-dawn hours on Long Island. I can imagine the conversation at Christmas. Parent: "Does my little princess like her present?" Child: "It's just what I wanted!" Parent: "Good, because I had to trample a guy to death to get it, just for you."

NYPD Black, Blue, and Trigger-Happy

Is the NYPD hiring only sado-masochistic repressed homosexuals? Some Tatoo artist (allegedly) got partially reamed by a nightstick in a Brooklyn subway station recently, and of course there was the Abner Louima case when, late 90s?
Also, New York must be the biggest market for Louisville Sluggers in the country. Some guy supposedly tried to take a whack at a female cop this week and was shot by her. Bats seem to be involved in an unusually disproportionate amount of group/gang attacks at least since the 80s.
This seems to be a long-loved tradition, as my brother is reading a book on Victorian New York and the thugs used "clubs" pretty often to keep things in line.
I normally blame police very little, because they are usually simply following the said or unsaid tacit orders of society's establishment.
In Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which borders Detroit on two sides and is home to the city's Old Money, cops cars are continuously run up and down the border with the city. Hence they are labeled racist.
But no cop can afford to live in Grosse Point, at least on salary only. That salary is paid by the people who once went to the point of trying to establish a "drainage canal" (ie a moat) on the Detroit border.
But the NYPD is getting carried away, it seems. They shot and killed a man in Coney Island for swinging a chair at them. Recently they shot an obviously disturbed man on a second story outside precipice, I can't remember if the cops said they felt menaced by him.
In any case, the police clearly need better training when it comes to the mentally unbalanced. And I wonder how bat sales are doing lately (maybe they come with rent controlled units).

Hate Poetry

there are some things that can only be hinted at in poetry. Here's my shot

The morning sun starts to creep around the ray-blocking shades on the window.
keeping it off me like a toxic ocean in which I don't want to swim
Who hates the sun?
Wake up! Another day of pain, another of pretending.
That I am a real human being, just like you.

But it is different, a silent scream in which
If I let it go
could rattle the windows and pull up the shades
travel to the far regions of the world
combine it with the wail of Africa, the suffering continent

A compromised existence in which
I have to play pretend
If I let it go
would it put me in the hospital for good
would lose the friends who stood beside me

Even though they could not understand

A cripple for all my life?
The days, months, years and decades pile up
All feeling the same
With each therapist a brief hope
Maybe it will go away

Maybe it will go away

But for now I'm afraid
I cannot let out the fear
the sorrow
the pain

pain beyond explanation
beyond comprehension
my companion for 17 years
I give it full attention

Physician, heal thyself
Poet, hate yourself
A scared scarecrow
A screaming skull

There must be some kind of explanation
Why a just God would send to me
the worst kind of isolation

Too afraid to let out the real anguish
Don't want to send the reader
Flying to the light
I'm gone and best forgotten

Gone and best forgot

isolation chamber

No one can tell me what's wrong
As I fall between the cracks
trying desperately to crack whats in my back
The day is long and the night is black

Annoying Blog Part III

A bit of wisdom/humor about Generation X.
One was a quote somewhere in which some slacker-type guy said "retreating in disgust is not the same as apathy."
The other was in Gen-X's enduring big accomplishment, The Onion. With all the ridiculous "where will the next Seattle be?" questions in the media, the Onion had a great story called "Harrisburg is Starting to Happen." It complemented an earlier story on "The TH scene." TH was Terre Haute, Indiana.

Generation Hex

From what I remember, there were only two movies made about Generation X, during about the only time the media actually feigned an interest in us. That would be roughly circa 1991-1994.
If "Reality Bites" is any indication of that interest, be glad that we were quickly trampled by the children of the boomers (Gen Y?) and went back to being roundly ignored, which was the way we liked it.
The main question I had about "Bites" is why would anyone set a film about any kind of trend (besides "Urban Cowboy")in Houston? Did some guy pitching movies say "Houston is the next Seattle" and some kind of producers, uh, bit?
Seattle was indeed featured in "Singles," a movie I have little memory of, except for "Touch Me I'm Dick," which Matt Dillon's band did, and is a great takeoff of Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick."
But the cliche winner went to the first season of "Melrose Place," in which they actually tried to make it a sincere twentysomething show.
One character approached the other, a temp receptionist or something, and she told him "Hey, do you think this McJob's my Nirvana?"
Douglas Copeland wept.

Living Large with The Dog Whisperer

God help me. With everyone gone from the Thanksgiving party yesterday I'm alone, with a car, with at least some pathetic amount of cash, and I am rocking out.
I'm watching "The Dog Whisperer Marathon."
The question now is if I had a gun, would I blow away the TV or me?

The World Leader Pretend

It's gotten to the point where so many pundits are so sick of Bush that they are calling for a change in the date for the presidential inauguration.
At this point, many figure, Obama has appointed so many Washington insiders (a smart move away from radicals at the community level), that what's the point of waiting another two months for the coronation ceremony?
The lag between election and actual power is one which those groovy founders must of held upon, because at that time there were constant changes in European governments. The lag enabled everyone to cool off.
In the end, it's a smart move, ensuring that nutballs don't immediately take power in a fluke election.
As for Bush and his legacy ... he's ressurected the policy of preemtive military strikes, which is not bad so long as he (and we) know exactly what is being struck.
But let's allow Bush the last hurrah, as well as members of the totally confused and panicky Republican party.

Before the Box-Office Knows You're Dead

It was difficult to watch "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Mainly because I have either known or met the two principal actors. Phllip Seymour Hoffman was part of an off-Broadway show called "Shopping and Fucking," in which he performed with Justin Theroux, son of my late mother's best friend.
Ethan Hawke, later in "The Devil Knows You're Dead," would come around the ice cream store I helped tend in downtown Princeton. My co-worker was a fake-blond haired English tart. Quite attractive if you're into the slutty look (I was).
Ethan, in his Hun School blazer and pulled-down tie, would talk about how he wanted to come in sometime and see me boning the tart right over the ice cream counters (he was 15 at the time, I was 20). No such luck.
Nobody at the time could be considered a star. I shook Hoffman's hand quick and emotionless at Marion's across the street. I had no idea who he was.
I was watching the play with Justin's sister, who was beautiful but married. I sweated whenever she was around and alone and by her married-self because, like George Costanza, I didn't want to be an accessory to adultery. It probably was just my overactive mind.
It all worked all in the end, it seems. Justin became a big star, as did Hawke, and Seymour Hoffman; and Ms. Theroux moved to Carmel, CA.
Just keeping score.

Simon Says Its Time to Move

Don't look for the news on page A1, look for it on page A17. Don't send non-violent drug offenders to prison. In the best-case scenario, it will take 20-30 years of nonstop attention to the ghettos to bring them into the mainstream economy.

These were the words of David Simon, creator and producer of the critically acclaimed, often brutal series "The Wire;" on Baltimore street life on cable, who spoke last week at Princeton.

Simon is not uttering these prophesies from the Hollywood Hills. He started as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote a book called "Homicide: a year in the streets of the Killing Fields," which NBC picked up briefly, then the last five years have been spent drawing together the streets, the mayor's office, and law enforcement working together on the drug war (brought to you by the people who fought the war on drugs; as the Onion has written, "Drugs win Drug War.")

"What we were striving for was a tragedy, like a Greek tragedy in which even the good get victimized." As someone noted before, in terms of the killing fields, "deserve ain't got nothin' to do with it."

It is a portrait, he said, of the end of an empire, meaning the US.
Simon said if you want the real news, don't follow the pack journalism of the front page. Again, look on page A17.

When I looked at a page 20 story in last Sunday's (or Monday's) NYT, it was about a 15-year-old girl who had been shot at her school by another girl. The school was not in the ghetto, and had no guards or weapons-checks at the door. The girl was black. I don't know about her assailant.

In other words, America, coming soon to a suburb like yours.

I'll return to this subject later. At this point, it is remarkable and probably necessary that Obama not throw the problems of the inner-city at mainstream America. Would have sent them running for their hunting rifles. We still don't know who the secretary of HUD and HHS are going to be, but I'd bet on a black or a woman, or perhaps both.

In summation, Simon said, "The question is are we one society or are we not? If we're not, let's hire more private security guards and build more gated communities. And let's come to terms with the fact that America only works for some of us."

Califantasyization.

Does anyone else think that "Californication" is bizarre, a kind of wish fulfillment for writers? The Hank Moody character is seen as glamourous and cool, and every female, from teenagers to fortysomethings, practically drops to her knees when meeting him (often literally).
The worst example was when a beautiful blonde in a convertible pulls up to Hank's battered Porshe at a red light and asks him what he does. He responds by telling her he's a writer.
The girl then writes down her phone number, says "read this," and kites the piece of paper over to Hank.
You would think that Hank is Justin Timberlake, or at least John Grisham, or somebody famous. He is not, except by a small group of fans (hey, wait a minute, that must sound familiar to some of you reader(s)). Instead, he's the Fonzie of writers, and I've heard that like the Fonz would have it, there is an episode featuring twins or sisters or something.
Wait, there's a group of co-eds at my door. They're constantly harassing me, asking me to sign various parts of their pert bodies. The writing life is tough.

Heather Has Two Mommies Golden Anniversary

The book was supposed to teach children about tolerance, accepting difference, and how all kinds of lifestyles are equal.
In the late 1980s The New York School Board was slated to buy "Heather Has Two Mommies" and distribute it to every public elementary school. Naturally, the idea of a mandatory book about lesbian parents set off a shitstorm among parents and pundits.
Pair that book with another then under serious consideration: "Daddy's Roommate," about a boy with two absolutely fantastic male role-models in Daddy's room. Let's just say The Post had itself a field day.
The way to sell these books would have been to combine them into pornography. "Daddy's Roommate has Two Heathers." "Two MILFs have Daddy's Roommate, "Heather's Daddy has Two Mommies and an Orgy."
The possibilities are endless, if it weren't for a few blue-noses. I have a dream that someday gay-themed childrens books will escape San Francisco and fly off the shelves from coast to coast. Then the space will be free for bestiality

Got a Free T-Shirt

The Democratic National Committee is wasting no time in their constant haranguing of people to support the organization. Here it is not even a week from the party's triumph, they have just put out an e-mail that offers anyone contributing $30 or more a 2008 commemorative election T-Shirt.

Hey, the Chinese and other countries that still actually produce real things need the labor.

Don't underestimate the lure such a seemingly humble garment. I was walking through Times Square a few years ago, and there was a line of muttonheads stretching around the block for a free premiere of some wretched and long-forgotten movie.

The crowd was getting restless, so whatever firm that was handling the circus decided to give away, that's right, the ultimate gift - free T-Shirts

The crowd went wild, with people in line shouting out and flailing their arms. "Oooh, free T-shirt, over here, over here!" You would have thought that they were giving away bricks of gold bullion.

As for the DNC, go back to pumping Hollywood and Upper East Side socialites for money. Their nannies might look good in those shirts.

By Order of Mayor McCheese

I realize that I made a mistake in my last post: Philadelphia Mayor Nutter is not named McNutter. I blame the goof squarely on McDonalds and their Mayor McCheese character.

McCheese has been fading from public view for a long time now. Once high and mighty, he's been reduced to hanging out with Ogre, the "Cookie" Monster and other sexual deviants.

For their part, McCheese's lawyers are denying any involvement. The copious amount of cheese around rape scenes could easily be attributable to Quarter Pounders (what exactly is it pounding?), Big Mac's and other raw meat fried for human consumption. This is despite the fact that Mac showed the world just how "big" he really is in a Playgirl full-color pictorial.

Don't get me going on Ronald. For God's sake, stop cruising the highway rest stops where McDonald's has a restaurant. All that white greasepaint must "come" in handy (or simply come in handy, usually his right hand).

McCheese wasted no time after the elections. He called for an end of the oppression
of Peoples of Burger. He spoke candidly of his tormented childhood, when other students would constantly try to take a bite out of him during recess.

Then there are the balance issues. McCheese and other people of burger have found themselves constantly tripping and falling because 70 percent of their body mass is in their heads.

They called for federal legislation, the Americans with Burger Head Act of 2008. In it elevators would have to install another steel bar where such people could lay their weary heads to rest on the journey.

The McCheese forces are meeting strong resistance from the Arthur Treacher's Fish and Chips company. Treacher's product advertisment claims that it is the meal one cannot make at home, so, said a spokesman, eat your damn meal there.

Fast-food competitors Domino's Pizza has been surprisingly lobbying against the Burger Head Act.

A spokesman explained yesterday: once people realize that McDonald's is not actually food, they will quickly realize that Domino's product bears no resemblance whatsoever to actual pizza.

Role Model-in-Chief

This is the largely unspoken question in the campaign: would the election of a black president actually change the behavoir of ghetto black boys and young men?

When I posed the question to Mayor Micheal McNutter of Philadelphia, he said essentially and honestly that he simply didn't know. Not everyone can go to Columbia and Harvard Law, and for many dealers the four-block or so area around their houses is all that they know.

Ghetto boys on election day kept asking us, the almost lily-white volunteers from New Jersey, if we had any extra buttons. The older boys and young men stayed on their stoops, too cool for that, but certainly did not harass us in any way.

For decades, the media and profesoriat have been lamenting the rise of illegitimate babies in the inner city and the gangs of fatherless boys that would later result. The cure, most thought, would be male role models in areas other than sports or entertainment.

Now you have just such a model in the highest office in the land. It's definitely wrong to think that he can substitute for all the absent fathers in the inner-city, or the quick money of the drug market, but at least it gives boys a path they had never dreamed of.

My cousin worked another area of Philadelphia. There, he said, Obama was at least making some dent in the terrrible self-crippling notion that academic achievement is "acting white."

After the inauguration, you will simply be acting like Obama.

A Democratic Springtime

The House. The Senate. And the Presidency.
Watching the results come in last night on the Princeton campus, there was no way to stop my jaw from hitting the ground. First Pennsylvania, where I had hit city streets and suburban lawns for the campaign. Then, incredibly, Ohio.
You know the rest of the story.
Democrats may be inheriting the worst foreign and domestic situation since the Great Depression this Autumn, but for now, at least - at last - it is Springtime.

Running for Obama

Wearing three Obama buttons, I raced through the streets of Philadelphia, trying to get to the Broad Street subway. I couln't help thinking that it would have been twistedly funny and Philly-typical if I got mugged with all that flair on.
Instead, I got kids sincerely asking for them. Maybe there's hope for the future after all, or at least until they get to junior high.
I had spent hours knocking on doors, putting voting information on people's doors, and exhorting them to vote. But truthfully, my assigned north of North Philly neighborhood was a cakewalk. Working class black. By the afternoon, many who worked early shifts had come home, and said they had voted just after dawn that day when the polls opened.
The voting was so lopsided that I began to fear that I was operating in a bubble, that in the suburbs all around the city everyone was voting McCain. I'd probably get a big surprise when I turned on the TV.
Instead I made it to my cousin's field office to support him; he had been up since four am along with a lot of young mostly white volunteers. I missed the bus to Princeton we volunteers came on, so I ran 14 blocks to the subway, caught a train downtown to Trenton, a train to Princeton Junction, and finally a cab to the polls where I finally voted at 7:20 pm.
The polls closed at eight. I had just helped make history - by 40 minutes.

Get a guy named Burger

The Donald Draper character in "Mad Men" is an actor named John Hamm. Mmmm, Hamm.

Democracy for the Wretched

If anyone out there wants to test his or her small-d democratic ideals, take a bus trip in a crowded city, or even a medium-sized town.
I guarantee that you will start to hate the people that you profess to want to help: the handicapped, the elderly, and the immigrant mothers with their 10 children.
Don't think me unkind. I rode the 42 bus from Dupont Circle to Mt. Pleasant in DC for two years. Think of this post as letting go of post-traumatic stress.

The buses were almost always late, and they usually would arrive stacked up one behind the other in groups of three. Even though waiting passengers could see that there were other buses available and a lot less crowded, they nonetheless would all try to push into the front one.
Many times at rush hour the bus would take almost an hour (it took about 10 minutes by car; non-rush hour) I would watch the cars swoosh by us, and sit there and hate. In no particular order, here's some hateful advice:

1)To the immigrant mother, put your kids on all in front of you, instead of having them squirm and squall all around you at the fare box, blocking everyone else from entering.

2)To the Fare Box Stars, who seemed to think that taking forever to pay the fare up front was their moment in the limelight. Be ready with the money, pay up and sit down ASAP or move to the back.

3) To the handicapped. There's little they can do themselves because the law requires that cumbersome and time-intensive process of moving the stairs into a platform and then strapping the wheelchair-bound onto the bus like it's the Space Shuttle. They aren't at fault, but nonetheless when I saw a wheelchair trying to board and I was in a hurry, I would often leave the bus and just start walking.

4)To the elderly. They got the lowered stair treatment too, although many certainly looked healthy enough to climb three stairs. And of course the bus emitted that ear-splitting beeping whenever the stairs were in motion. Why? Is someone going to get trapped under the bus otherwise?

In Brazil there is a city that employs what is called Bus Rapid Transit. Yes, I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but essentially what they do is have a dedicated lane that is physically separated from the others. Passengers pay a fare to get onto a raised platform by the lane, then simply get right on when the bus arrives.

There. I've re-established myself as a "concerned liberal."

Street-Fighting Women

It looked for all the world like one of those fat-suit wrestling competitions. Two rather large Puerto Rican women in a roly-poly catfight on a sidewalk on Broadway in the 30s. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, but maybe 10 bored people looked on when me and a friend passed by. Even the cops treated it like a joke.
I never quite know what to do in those situations, and I hate gawkers looking on for cheap entertainment, yet of course have to fight my remaining journalistic instincts to witness violence.
In DC once some moronic kid in Mt. Pleasant was firing a gun northward at the end of the street. Instead of ducking back in to my bar, I started following the kid. A restaurant owner in his entryway looked at me like a was a lunatic and said "are you crazy?" and told me to stand back.
As PJ O'Rourke once said, violence is interesting. Unfortunately, he's right. The question is what is the moral thing to do in such situations? Do you have a moral obligation to do something?
It is like the case of people rescuing drowning swimmers even though it places them in harm's way. I think way back to the jet that hit the 14th Street bridge in DC in the early 80s. As you might remember, a man on the banks of the Potomac jumped out and saved a passenger in freezing, ice-choked water.
Then there's the guy who rescued someone on the subway tracks in NY by leaping onto the tracks and pinning both under the undercarriage of the cars.
They say that people do these kind of things because they want others to react the same way if they were in trouble. The question comes down to more than guts. As the subway savior said, he just didn't think about it, he just did it.

Everyday is Like Monday (Night Football)

Yes, it was an in ad for the NFL yesterday , and it is a song about Nuclear Armageddon. Morrisey's song "Everyday is Like Sunday." They just played that line over and over again on TV.
Mainly because the rest of the lyrics go "everyday is silent and gray," and "come Armageddon come Armageddon come."
Let's wait for the refrain for "God Save the Queen," to be played incessantly,in an incessant loop, without the accompanying lyrics to give it meaning.
This is like what's known in media as a "pull quote" for a movie. The film in a review could be something like "so horrible it sets a new standard for wretchedness" and the ads for it would be that it "sets a new standard."
And what do Englishmen know about football anyway?

PS. The Skins actually beat Dallas at their stadium. Is that a signal of the coming of the Antichrist?

A Snail's Pace in a Horserace

CNN brought participatory democracy to an unexpected low when they constantly ran an asinine graph at the bottom of its screen during Friday's debate. The graph, if I have this correctly, was supposed to instantly measure the reaction to what the debaters were saying. It included, I think, only politically declared viewers, be they Republican, Democrats, or Independents.
What happened? Surprise! The candidate whose turn it was to talk always came out on top. When they would switch to the other party, "the lead" would switch as well.
Apparently running election coverage up to two years before the actual election is not good enough for the Horseracers. They need to know everything about viewers the very second one of the candidates opens (or closes) his mouth.
Political Scientists have long thought that truly participatory democracy ends up being the tyranny of the majority. What's up for the next debate, attaching sensors to viewers about who, in their gut feeling, is instantly right or wrong? It just becomes a measure of visceral reaction, completely undermining what is meant by a well-informed electorate.
OK, The graph was excruciatingly dull and slow. Hopefully it stays that way and drops from the bottom of the screen into the dustbin of media history. I'm attached to sensors too much already.

Backwards into the Future

They put his baseball hat on backwards to make him look stupid. The kid was a little slow mentally, and the others in his high school hangout-gang thought the look fitting.

The scenes are from "The Last Picture Show" (early 1970s). And it was right about one thing. Wearing a cap in general looks stupid, especially backwards, or, as it now seems, too big and cocked to one side. That looks like someone put a saucepot on your head and forgot about it

Tony Soprano at least had some taste. Dining out at a mid-to-high level NJ restaurant, Tony is bothered by a guy at the next table wearing a baseball cap. He comes over and says, "excuse me, I don't see any bleachers in here."

The guy initially protests, and says that no one tells him what he can wear anywhere. Tony stands next to him, without a word and with a small smile on his face. The guy takes off his cap.

My almost-80-year old father liked that, as well as anything against the relentless slobbification of America.

All I can say is guilty. I don't have one single suit. Otherwise, there is one courderoy academic guy jacket, and crappy neckties I bought on the street in NY.

I call any group of guys all sporting the cap fashion Duckheads. They look like Ducks or Geese, all in a gaggle of bills going front, back, sideways and noways.

This is all valid if you are actually working in a job that shoots burning rays into your face, like construction.

Otherwise, it is what a friend called, "The Village Idiot Look." The producers of "The Last Picture Show" would agree.

As a Known Enemy

"Definitely, Maybe," a mid-level romantic comedy came across the screen last night. It detailed the life of a guy who came to New York for the Clinton campaign in 1992. He now has a 10-year-old daughter who asks him one night to tell her about his past, mostly his romantic relationships.
A running joke in the movie is that the character, a political nerd, has never heard of Kurt Cobain. Finally, he hears "Come as You Are," and relates, sort of.
Will this be the first of Nirvana's songs to become a commercial jingle? There is still a fight between Courtney Love and the members of Nirvana as to who owns Kurt's songs. I did notice that no Nirvana song was actually played.
It seems inevitable, but then again the Beatles never really sold their catalog, not yet at least(hear me Micheal Jackson).
In a way, that's too bad. I want to play Strawberry Fields on guitar for my five-year-old niece. It's the kind of thing you settle for by being unattached.

A Wall of Words

I am constructing a wall of words. Keep out until it's done. No one is allowed behind the steel curtain.

Two versions of the same thing (my mistake):

Throwaway Youth, (A New Year's Eve)

My father threw out the photo album containing my and others youth when I was away, aah, "vacationing," at Silver Hill Hospital. It wasn't deliberate; the book was stored with a lot of junk at Moishe's storage in Queens, so out it went too.
The most important photos in there were of a New Year's Eve at Vicky Rappaport's house in DC in the horrible Reagan Youth mid-1980s. I was a sophomore in college, which would make it the turn of 85-86. I knew that that night was going to be the last time I would see most of these people together, or at all. So I did some photojournalism of the night.
Now I can only describe what I remember of the pictures, in words before I lose the memory:
John Huddle holding a half-eaten Fudgesickle at his house on Rittenhouse Street
Me with longish hair holding out two Milwaukee's Best in the living room. I am wearing a dark blue T-shirt with the name "Hudson Explorers" on it. I had stolen it from my college roommate, Jeff Mack.
Robin Kreisberg outside Circle Liquors, posing as being comically confused at the cheap champagne bottle he had just bought.
Scott Wilkerson smiling broadly, leaning forward from the back set in the car going to the party. Naturally, he is holding a can of Best.
A wide shot showing partiers in the kitchen at Vicky's. Scott McLeod is in the forefront, with hair dyed blond on top. Keith Campbell is looking nonchalantly towards the camera. There is also some guy in glasses named Paul something. There are way too many guys in the photo, though I don't remember it being a sausage fest.
Jeff "Swaz" Dlimini wearing a wide-striped blue and black sweater. He had a kind of boxy haircut, making him look the part of the African. Kenny Kiron, looking swarthy but without a beard, is standing next to him. He is wearing a black and white flannel-type shirt open over a white T-shirt.
Joe Flint, in a close-up, is looking up and out at the camera, his face in a a transparent plastic kegger beer cup. His hair is dyed orangy on top, and is wearing a Ramones-type black leather jacket (he wins the fashion award for the night).
Martin Yancy, in a pink polo shirt, of course. From the pictures, it looks like maybe a quarter or a little less of the crowd is black.

I don't think I took any direct shots of girls for the album. This is part of why my brother Paul said of my friends "those guys don't really like girls." Not meaning that we were gay, but didn't really like them hanging around us. Remember, we were the Brewski Brothers (emphasis on last word).
Most people have a group or gang that they hung around with when young. What was so good for a certain period of time was that ours was extraordinarily friendly and good-natured for the most part. I remember driving down from Jersey to Tulane at the start of sophomore year. Me and my Tulane friend Tony Rotelli stopped in DC for a party in Upper Northwest somewhere. He was welcomed by everyone of "the brothers" and others.
Afterwards, I asked him if he liked my friends. "How could anyone not like those guys?" he said.
Now if I could only get the girlfriend photos somehow (mostly Erin A. and Lynne Bowers).
Didn't Billy Bragg sing of middle-class England " where nostalgia is the opium of the masses?" Wait, that album was from the 80s. This is nostalgia over nostalgia.

New Year's Eve (Photo Version)

My father had my photos thrown away when I was in the Cukoo's Nest. They were sitting there in a Moishe's storage room in Queens. It wasn't deliberate. But the photos I took for that photo album I knew could never be recreated.
The party was at Vicky Rappoport's New Year's Eve party in the mid-1980s. I knew I would probably never or hardly ever see any of these people. I was either a freshman or sophomore in college.
I have to describe what I remember, or else the memories will fade.
Here's the photo album, in words.

John Huddle, in his father's living room on Rittenhouse. Huddle is eating a fudge popsicle (hey, no wise comments on that).
Robin Kreisberg, looking quizzically at a bottle of the cheap champagne he had just bought outside Circle Liquor in Chevy Chase DC.
Scott Wilkerson laughing, in a car going to the party, with a Milwaukee's Best can next to his face.
A crowd shot in Vicky's kitchen, with too many guys and not enough girls. Scott McLeod is looking at the camera, with his hair tinted a Sting-like blond. Some of the heads in the photo are black, so at least it was an integrated gig.
Jeff "Swaz" Dlemini in a blue and black sweater, with a boxy haircut that makes him look authentically African.
The other identifiable black guy, Martin Yancey, in a pink polo shirt, in a different shot. I think Kenny Kiron, looking hirsute, was in this shot too. If not, he was in another shot.
Joe Flint, with his face buried in a transparent beer cup. He is wearing a black Ramones-style jacket. His hair is wanna-be orange on top, not quite there.
Another crowd shot in the kitchen, this one with Keith Campbell in it, but just Huddle otherwise identifiable.

In retrospect, what was remarkable in the photos was a lack of girls. Now I know they were there, but my prejudices came through. I wanted shots of the Brewski Brothers in action.
It's like my brother (older) said. "Those guys don't like girls." Not meaning sexually, but that the Brothership admitted no females. Jesus, it was the Hoog who poured a beer over my head to christen me.

But like I said, I knew. This group would never be together all as one as in a long time, probably never.
Driving down to Tulane for Sophomore year with a college friend to go to the beginning of the semester, me and my college buddy Anthony Rotelli stopped in DC for a party before leaving again.
After the party was over, I asked him how he liked my friends. "How could anybody not like those guys?" he said. Kreisberg would be proud.

Chuck it, Tourguide

I just chucked it. Threw up, booted, ralphed, heaved, did the technicolor yawn, prayed to the porcelain god etc.
It would seem to be a personal moment, but barfing and depictions thereof become a serious court case at Wisconsin the year after I left.
It seems that the new chancellor, the inimitable Donna Shalala, did not like the depictions of the university mascot being displayed and shown on State St., the street that connected the state capitol and the campus.
My personal favorite showed Bucky Badger spewing chunks all over the place. The legend below was "we ain't leavin' till we're heavin'."
Then there was the straight-ahead "fuck 'em, Bucky." This showed the perpetually scowling face of the the Buckmeister with his middle finger raised to the observer.
Who cares about a few cheesy (get it) T-shirt shops on the street leading to the campus? My friends and I thought it was funny because it showed such a total lack of class and pride, two traits we detested.
Donna didn't see it this way, and sued the stores. Not on freedom of speech, but on copyright infringement. And she won! (This is probably why Clinton hired her).
But think again. Have you ever seen a USC Trojan actually projectile vomit? They're too busy fitting into wallets of kids that never get laid. For shame!

David Foster Wallace RIP

"Infinite Jest" it was called, and infinite is what it seemed. Filled with asides and footnotes, I swore I would never write a book so indulgent and in serious need of a serious editor.
Foster Wallace died at 46 about a week ago by hanging himself. Like Kurt Cobain, he left a good-looking corpse, with luxuriant long hair hanging in his face in most shots.
His death left the literary world twisting in its own hypocrisies Wallace's book sales will most certainly skyrocket, at least for a while.
One is immediately reminded of Chuck Klosterman's book "Killing Yourself to Live," which is about rock and roll, but can be applied to almost any creative endeavor.
On the face of it, "Infinite Jest (1996)," is unreadable. It did not put you into that trance-like state that good writing normally does. Instead, it is full of reminders to other things. The restless postmodern world, where concentration is impossible, and the more asides one has, the wiser and more thoughtful.
Lift a glass to the creative process, and scream.

Hope (Despite the Times)

What would an Obama presidency mean to the ghetto poor? Would teenage dealers suddenly drop their weapons and apply en mass to Harvard Law? Would the lure of making serious money just outside your door be dumped in favor of serious deferred gratification?
I doubted it too. But in the Philadelphia neighborhood (black and Puerto Rican) where my cousin has taught, one thing at least happens.
Academic achievement, while never cool, may at least seen in a better light with Obama. We need to get to the point where scholastic efforts are respected by kids, and are not seen as "acting white."
It's difficult to ask Obama to carry history's burden. He might be seen as neglecting whites (Oh God help us). We've been looking at myriad problems of the ghetto since blacks moved from farm to factory in the 1940s-1980s. No one has come up with a magic wand to solve them.
But maybe one black man's presence at the top can mean a start, a start to the end of all that.

Extreme Irratation

Have to respond to The Rambler's pox on the term "extreme." Just to set the record straight, I bought a tube of Crest marked "Extreme." Upon finishing my brushing I fashioned my own Bungee cord out of old clothes and rubber tires and jumped into the Grand Canyon, climbed a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur, and skydived out of a satellite reached by a hang glider.
I can't wait for Ultimate Extreme.

Bukowski, the Ultimate Aphrodisiac

I never used to believe those letters in Penthouse Forum. Until one day, something incredible happened to me. Walking across campus back in college, tattered volume of Bukowski in my back pocket, I was stopped in my tracks by the most beautiful girl in my English class.
"You like Bukowski?" she said. I nervously said that I did.
Suddenly she let out a low moan and closed her eyes in ecstasy. Then she ran her tongue along her lush lips. I thought she might be coming right there. "Bukkie makes me so hot. Come back to my dorm with me, right now."
Our lovemaking was intense, what with my shouting out verses and lines, as she squealed with delight. Then she made me cover my face with a Bukowski poster on her wall.
Afterwards,we shared a bottle of something. She finally passed out just like her literary hero.
I walked back across campus on a cloud. I told my roomates about it, but they just called me a total bullshitter. I resolved to meet her someplace so that they could see that she dug my badass rebel intellectul stance.
Finally, I saw her in a cafe. My roommates went in with me.
Overnight, it seems, she had forgotten about me. She was cold and uninterested. "What about all we had," I said? "What about my "Bukowski Comes Alive" album?
"Oh yeah," she said with a bored expression. "I've moved on to John Grisham."

Ratso Rizzo Doesn't Live Here Anymore

We might as well has had targets on our clothes. Three suburban teenagers just off the Port Authority bus from Princeton.
As soon as we hit the street, the incantations started. "Smoke, ID, switchblade," they said as we passed by. Finally, a Ratso Rizzo type pulls us aside and said he could make the best fake ID's around.
We stopped in front of a porn theater on 8th Avenue. Ratso dissapears into the building. He comes back and says, "everything is cool. You just need to give me twenty each (The rough equilalent of fifty now)."
Even we weren't that stupid. We rejected his offer, then he asked us who we thought we were fucking with. We said we didn't know.
"You're fucking with the Mafia, man," he said. Even we knew that no one goes around talking about how he was in the Mafia.
We ditched Ratso and walked along the Deuce, 42nd between Seventh and Eighth ave. The guys approaching us became funny to us. Until one time a black man of a large build responded to our laughing.
He went up to Will, the most demonstrative, and said to him, "you a wise-ass motherfucker. I should get my boys on you."
At this point we gave up on quality fake ID's and went to Playland, an amusement parlor in the heart of the square. They simply asked how old we'd like to be, then gave us these absurd "college" ID's. I think mine was from North Central Southern Baptist College of the Holy Angels.
I tried that ID once, in DC, and the liquor store manager gave me a sincere "I'm sorry" look. Hey, I was a student in one of the most prestigious fake institutions in the country.

The best part of 42nd Street's clean-up was when they shut the porn theatres down, and replaced their street signs with odd bits of haiku and poetry on the marquees.
Scum couldn't figure out the street's new avant garde artistic direction, and largely went elsewhere.
I kind of wish they would have kept the poetry. Very New York. But commerce marches on.

Worse than Godzilla?

Remembering a National Geographic from the 1980s. An article on New York. A photo of Japanese tourists peering out from behind a glass wall, with expressions of awe and fear at the spectacle of Times Square.
The caption explained that the tourists were safely behind glass, because the Japanese were "unaccustomed to urban crime" in their country.
The city has now expanded the sidewalks and the areas in the middle of the square because so many tourists now encroach on the street. They pose for pictures there, which is good because it gets them out of the way of others not lurching along like elephants.
For me, and many others, the area is now basically a blank space given over to tourists. When thinking of a decent bar or restaurant, the mind passes right over the square, until you hit the gastronomic (and generally cheap) jackpot of multi-ethnic food on Ninth Avenue.
When I was a tour guide, unless asked I would generally not tell the tourists about how you could travel over a block from 8th Ave. and easily find a decently priced and flavorful restaurant. The city needs the suckers to patronize the bullshit theme places. Good for the economy.

"The Rotting of the Big Apple"

It was these words that were splashed all over the front cover of Time magazine in the late summer of 1990. Brian Watkins, a twentysomething tourist from Utah, was with his family on a 7th Ave. subway station when a gang set upon his mother. Like any other son, he tried to defend her. For this, he was stabbed fatally in the chest.
It marked a nadir for the city's self-image and its reality. Murders were peaking in the crack wars, and public spaces had been taken over by the homeless and illegal and illicit activity. Bryant Park was impassible for most, and it was hidden from the street by high hedges and walls.
That's why the most impressive things to happen in the past 20 years has been the reclamation of parks and public places in general.
Last week, having been semi-stood up at a bar in Flatiron (The Olde Town), I encountered a beautiful evening in August.
I had walked from Washington Square Park, three-quarters of which are under a renovation. Union Square was redoing the northern half of the park. Madison Square featured a huge line to the improbably hip Shake Shack in it.
Bryant Park is now a great public space, having taken the playbook for great spaces from the urbanist William Whyte and applied them - movable chairs, concessions, a running fountain, and a well-patronized restaurant and bar at the base of the library.
It was dark by this time, yet no one seemed afraid. Instead, it felt like a European public space.
The biggest fight, of course, was Tompkins Square Park. In the late 80s it had been the scene of rioting between police and occupants of the park that did not observe the new closing hours.
I must admit I felt like a badass just going there in college, what with the self-styled anarchists and punkers and the like. I used to freely drink there and get in loud, drunken political arguments with a friend. At about 2 or 3 in the morning.
Later, in Guiliani's crackdown, I literally got caught with my pants down pissing in the bushes. The cops let me off with a warning, instead of an enforced $50 ticket.
So Tompkins Square is now more a sunning spot than a hotbed of dissent. The only rotting going on in the Big Apple now is in unsold super-luxury condos.
But I always felt that there should be a discreet memorial where Brian Watkins breathed his last while defending his mother. Far away in Utah, there probably is.

A River Drowned

The names of the places where the civil rights movement in Alabama mounted anti-segregation protests, to the point where sometimes it meant death, have become standard High School history in this country: Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham.
Yet the northern Alabama hill country where I stayed there is little of this haunted period in evidence. Instead, they drowned a river.
The Tennessee Valley Authority blocked up the Tennessee River with dams to provide electricity to areas so poor people lived in unlighted shacks. Now the river is split into artificial lakes. On the weekends they are filled with people jet-skiing, boating, and catching Bass.
Wealth has come to the South. No surprise there. The lake houses stand empty most of the time, as Huntsville, 20 miles away, has prospered after the US rocket program was stationed there. There is a huge tower that was used somehow in launching the Saturn spacecraft.
The only reminder of segregation is the courthouse square in the center of Scottsboro. Like most other towns of its size, the square is practically empty most of the time, the commerce having spread out to the highways.
The Scottsboro Boys case was initially tried there. This was a series of trials of black young men that were accused of raping two white women. This was aboard a boxcar, yet somehow the conducter was summoned by some white youths that had been beaten up by the black men.
There was a lynch mob already forming in the next town. The governor of the state calmed them down by saying, essentially, let the state kill the boys (the penalty for rape of a white woman was death).
The case went on and on in the 1930s into the 1940s when, incredibly (with the behind the scenes aid of a New York Jewish lawyer), everyone was found innocent.
But look around today, there are not many blacks around, there in the heart of Dixie. The hill folk had little interest in defending the plantation owners to the south in a civil war. They had no slaves. Now the best evidence that you are in the rural South is the number of structures that are some kind of church (Christian, of course. Even Papists are suspicious).
On the up side, you can buy alcohol and guns at Wal-Mart, in one easy trip. And if traveling through nearby Ft. Payne, you must stop and pose with the larger-than-life statues of the 1970s country band Alabama.

Those of you who know Chris, he seems to be getting into the lifestyle there. We shot air rifles at cans, and went bass fishing a lot (Chris eventually caught a two-and-a-half pound one, which put up a hell of a fight). His mother is living with her (second? third?) husband.
In a scene out of Vonnegut, me, Chris, and his mother drove up this heavily wooded small mountain in Huntsville. At the top was a "golf community." This means that the houses are right by the painstakingly maintained immaculate course.
We had lunch at the hill-top mountain clubhouse, looking down at the sprawl of Huntsville. Peasants.

Alabama Getaway

Off to visit a friend in distress, in the heart of Dixie itself, Alabama. This is a great guy whose life imploded on him: lost job, lost wife, lost house. A few days there, then Saturday in Atlanta, which I hate, but where one of my best friends from college (Tulane, not Wisconsin)lives.
I've already weighed in on how the north completely funded the south so these go-go business cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte could actually be considered habitable. But for now, I'm southbound.

I could smash your head open like a melon, but nice shoes

It's the biggest cliche around, but I have to say "only in New York" to a truly weird incident last Friday night.
Navigating through the huge theatre crowds in Times Square just before 11, I wound up behind two fairly short middle-aged white guys and a woman. Ahead of them was a tall black youth with a shaved head.
I don't know what set the scene, but the kid turned around and said to one of them, "I could knock you out, but I like that polo shirt." The scared whiteys say nothing. The kid turns and said to stop talking about him, because, again, "I could knock you out, but that's a cool polo."
Where does this kind of thinking end? "I could axe-murder you, then chainsaw your remains and feed it to my dog, but love the socks." In the heart of the great consumerist machine, it was consumerism that stopped the kid and saved the whiteys.
Some one should put up a sign now. "Polo: Stops Threatening Negroes Every Time."

What's the Matter with Newark?

It's location could be picked as ideal in an urban planning text. Newark; 20 minutes from Midtown by train, a little more time on the PATH train to Wall St. Like Stamford, Conn. it should by all measurements be a booming satellite city.
Yet Newark, more than 40 years after the worst rioting in the nation in the 1960s' (along with Detroit) is constantly the Phoenix trying to rise out of ashes, and failing.
The former mayor is under indictment on a number of charges, and the drug markets are still running strong near the interstates. Newark last summer (07) even managed a triple murder of three college students that actually got airtime on major networks.
But the real question is how the city somehow cannot cash-in on its location and advantages.
They have built a lux arena for the NJ Devils, which is great, except it should be keeping the Nets, the basketball team. Twice the events in that case, and Brooklyners largely don't want an arena in the overcrowded heart of the borough. The new residents in the borough are largely culture snob types, which is fine, but are not constant fans the way bored suburban kids and middle=of-the-road type homeowners (with giant wall-mounted plasma screens!) are in in NJ.
Like Detroit, Newark built for itself a Blade Runner office complex around the railroad station. The buildings are connected by skywalks over the street grid for suburban commuters. The affluent scurrying above, the rest below, on the god-help-us sidewalks.
But, there are projects underway to lure Manhattanite types with much lower rents and bigger spaces. This is great, but may only last, as one city councilman said, "until the first white boy comes off the PATH at 3 am and is robbed and killed."
Our urban planning decisions, like so much else, are driven by race and crime. It has long since become tiresome. But . . . safety first.

The New South, Brought to You by the Old North

The reason the South has boomed since WWII can be distilled into three main forces.
1) Air Conditoning. The Carrier Corporation, historically based out of Syracuse (think of the Carrier Dome) made air-conditioning cheap enough for everyone. It changed the classic slow-lethargic southern towns and manners. It made possible the go-go business oriented cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte.
2) Cheap electricity. The Tennessee Valley Authority damned up the Tennessee River all the way from Alabama to Tennessee, generating cheap electricity to a region whos poor inhabitants sometimes lived in lightless shacks.
3) The Interstate Highway system. Unlike legitimately wealthy states like NY, NJ, PA, and Mass., the South built no four-lane throughways. The federally-funded interstate highways took care of that, on our dime.

This is why Southern voters and politicians are fundamentally phony. They rail about taxes, then end up reaping the reward for what the programs have done (and I didn't even get into the build-up of military bases and contractors). Some of it is simply semantics. You say taxes, they say welfare-dependent population. It is a dependent population - on government and military programs that benefit them.

The New South and Us

Last week's Newsweek cover on "The New South" featured one of Louisiana's most beautiful plantations, with an alley of live oaks framing a white-columned, immaculately maintained white house at its end.
It is hard not to think of the house my grandfather had built on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, just outside of Washington. It is a two-story (without attic) painted-white brick house with four columns in the front. It looks impressive from the road, but in reality it was originally only one room wide.
As a child we (my bothers and I)loved who now might be called "the help." Jimmy, the light-skinned driver for my grandfather, and Arbell, the cook.
As I look back on it, I can see how people could say my grandfather was running a modern-day plantation, and that Jimmy and Arbell were the house n--grs. But they had in a way a nice situation.
After my grandfather died, Jimmy was able to purchase his dream house in Winchester, VA. Arbell's fate I can't remember, but she certainly wasn't exploited in any way.
People that criticize this arrangement have got to think a minute: what would have become of them otherwise?
For too many, the answer is to abandon blacks to their own devices. We've formed separate societies: they go their way, we go ours. That's why in the South one may not believe in racial equality, but share roughly the same place as blacks. There is a natural vibe there that doesn't come off as patronizing.
Before Obama, I worked for a black owned company (Tourmobile Sightseeing). Blacks there used to always say that Bill Clinton is the closest America is ever going to get to a black president. His kinship with blacks never looked forced. It was just natural in the way he presented himself (especially, sterotypically with food). He was, in a way, blacker, or more african american in background than Obama.
The man in the middle has a jagged line to follow - or to make.

All that is Solid Melts into a Traffic Jam

Speaking of Madison, it has been difficult to avoid the publicity surrounding former Daily Cardinal entertainment editor Tom Vanderbilt's "Traffic." This book got perhaps the most coveted space in the East Coast literary establishment: the front of the New York Times book review last Sunday.
Vanderbilt surprised everyone in the book world by getting an advance of about $500,000 from Knopf. Such a figure is usually unheard of except for established airport novels by Tom Clancy, John Grisham etc. Would the hoi polloi really shell out $25 for a tome on "why we drive the way we do, and what is says about us?"
Tom is an excellent writer who has written very cleverly about some unusual subjects. He wrote a book about sneakers; how the modest gym shoe became a multibillion dollar industry and icon. His other is called Survival City, wherein he tours underground cities and bunker complexes made to withstand nuclear war and its aftermath.
The new book is surprisingly interesting, with boring statistics kept to a minimum. He explains such mysteries as why the other lane is always moving faster, whether women or men create more traffic, and how being an asshole aggresive "late merger" at construction sites etc is actually good for traffic.
Tom is on a media tour, and has a blog ("traffic signals")that monitors his progress (like other young writers, he has been seemingly mandated to live in Brooklyn). Even if you're not a would-be nerd urban planner like me, it's worth reading.

The War at Home

Speaking of black and white film, I bought a movie called "The War at Home," which chronicled the Vietnam protests at my alma mater, The University of Wisconsin in Madison. The protests start out peacefully and are attended by a committed few in the mid-1960s, but by the summer of 1970 (after the Kent State protests had killed four students) culminated in the bombing of the Army Math Research Center, in which one man was killed, although it was four am on a Saturday in the summer.
It was the largest home-made bomb to explode in the US until the Oklahoma City bomb in the 90s.
The footage in the movie was, again, a mixture of b and w and color. It of course started to be in color after the real violence kicked in after Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm, came to one of the buildings to interview interested students in fall 1967, and were being blockaded in one of the campus buildings.
Ralph Hansen, chief of campus security and improbably one of the mellowest cops ever (he was still there when I was) called Madison police (now a bunch of lesbians and whatever). They cleared the building brutally, with billy clubs to the head. Classes were then letting out and thousands of students were outraged when they saw what was going on and were shouting at and pushing the cops. Finally, the first tear-gassing of a college campus cleared people away, and Madison become famously (or infamously) violent and out of control for the next few years.
Just like then, I want to confront the warmakers at home. By this I mean the NRA, who are Unpatriotic and Unamerican in that they defend the murder of its citizens. Thousand of Americans each year are killed by handguns. I don't know for sure, but I will bet that the number of Americans killed by firearms each year is more than the toll of Vietnam deaths (55,000 plus).
My young friend Christian, though, has said (and I agree) that you cannot rely on the old tactics. The way to get publicity on your side is not to sit in at a university or capitol building. No one cares. Disrupt their transportation and communication.
What does this mean? Either preventing people from getting to work at the NRA building in jackass Northern Virginia (where they moved after finding DC none too welcoming and too close to the people they were killing) or not letting them out of the parking lots.
Then there would be blockading I-66, from which the NRA building, with its letters atop it (steal this sign and burn it!), are clearly visible. Drive heavy trucks in tandem down the interstate, then have them slow down and finally stop where the NRA building is. Get people to occupy the road, and when outraged drivers started to threaten them, have them point to the building.
Next would be to take out their communications. Get some computer nerd to completly cut off their computers and telephones.
This would definitely attract the attention of the press. It would also lead to the arrest of many of those involved, including (for conspiracy) myself. These are the stakes. With four-year olds being killed by gun crossfire, and a chickenshit Supreme Court only encouraging gun nuts, its time to take on the real killers, and not like OJ said. It is the war at home, and it's civilization versus barbarism, where every man fights for himself. It's also the only way to end racism, by disarming ghetto kids. And then they wouldn't be able to find a replacement so easily.
I always find it amusing that gun advocates (what, the guns can't speak for themselves?) talk about removing "illegal guns" from our streets.
Where do they think the weapons are made and sold? Are people stealing guns right from some assembly line somewhere. Somewhere, sometime, those guns are purchased legally.

Black and White in Color

Watching a home-made copy of "Swingers" in which the film for some reason constantly switches from color to black and white. It struck me by how dated those parts of the movie appear, with even the multicolored lights of Vegas made simply bright and white. At the same time, I was thinking of color footage of the Nazis I'd seen on public television. It made the war appear much more real and fairly modern, which it is.
Black and white TV and movies look not only far away in time, but in another place, another world. Planet B&W, which you have no connection to and can't really relate to.
It's no coincidence that football was becoming the prime national sport right at the time that people started buying color sets. It was fast and colorful, and established a de facto new national holiday, the Super Bowl.
As a kid, of course, you thought that the past was very prim and proper, with everyone dressed well and never swearing. Thirty years ago was an eternity, and everything had changed due to the sexual and racial revolutions and looser moral standards of the 1960s. In contrast, kids now can find 1970s films and programs that are actually more explicit in many senses than now. In repeats it doesn't look or feel that old anymore, mostly because it is in color. Sometimes I'll watch a TV program and can't readily tell when it was filmed.
The post-modern condition, oddly, means that things never go away. Somewhere, always, TV and radio from much earlier eras are played over and over again. I often can't tell whether I actually saw public events or just the footage later. I swear I saw the fall of Saigon in 1975, when it actually happened, when I was nine, but I can't really be sure.
On the computer, things hang around forever on Google, with no differentiation in their initial presentation (in the text maybe more photos, video and sound now). I found a little newsletter on-line that I had done for the National Building Museum. In 1996.
A few things should stay black and white, like art films or anything by famous directors in which the use of black and white light is crucial to the film (Hitchcock, Truffaut, Goddard, Bunuel, Bergman, Fellini etc).
But ordinarily, I love colorized movies. They're history come alive, although the actors in far too many still talk in that overly scripted, unnatural, stilted way --Saaay, a wise-guy huuunh?

Four Divorces and Your Funeral

Let's start up a web site for Hollywood wedding altar scenes. There's plenty of material to mine: the Graduate, Wedding Crashers, Four Weddings and a Funeral etc etc. etc.
I understand that the cliched drama factor of everyone watching the vows in action is a natural for last-minute confessions of true love, but in terms of confrontations, let's have some more good divorce scenes. Half of all marriages end up splitting up; the bride and groom should have some practice before their frequently ill-advised unions implode on them. They should at least have a movie about it.
I'm already way behind everyone in terms of getting the old ball and chain, but now there seems to be a plague of divorces among those who know me. I'd love to say "I told you so" but I didn't.
I can imagine the pull-quotes on my my movie's ads. "Heart-Warming" could be "Heartless." "No One in the Audience Stood Up and Clapped," "Love Conquers One Guy, the rest Back-Stab each other and Call Their Lawyers." "The children blame themselves, as they probably should." "It will leave you weeping inconsolably - for months, possibly years"
Then again, how would you get the drama of the altar scenes? All Hollywood has given us is jilted women throwing mens clothes out the window. We can do better.

Keith hips out

The greatest finder of just-about-to-be hip neighborhoods is my friend Keith. He lived on Clinton Street on the LES when it was bodagas. Then he moved to N. Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg when it was pierogi city. Both areas are now of course filled with cafes, bars, and clubs.
Keith finally bought a place in a semi-industrial zone where S. Willimsburg (the Hasidic part) and Clinton Hill/Bed-Stuy converged. Nice apartment, but the area was only served by the infamous G (the ghost train, the gangster local) train that doesn't go into Manhattan at all.
Article today in NYT says that the area's gentrification, embodied in a building one of the residents called "The Yuppie Spaceship," is faltering. THe one hipster cafe failed. Some condo prices have come down, and some blacks have yelled epithets at whites and others.
Still, some residents think gentrification will happen, but in fits and starts. Maybe.

Mr. Jefferson regrets that he cannot atttend

Unlike New York, Philadelphia requires no test and license before becoming a tour guide. The head of the tourism board decided that he would take the various tour services (horse-drawn carriage, amphibious craft, and plain buses.)
I should have saved the article he wrote in the Inquirer, but suffice to say there were more than a few howlers.
The best was City Tavern. This is a reconstructed 1773 tavern/restaurant near Independence Hall. A tour guide told his captive audience that Lincoln and Washington used to dine there together. This of course would have made Washington about 150 years old, if the tavern was actually active at the time.
I took the test in New York, which is ridiculously easy ("what borough is Manhattan a part of?") A bureaucrat came out and told me that I had scores in the 90-plus range. This did no good for me, because a license is granted for simply passing. My high score didn't make much difference(what did I expect, Phi Beta Kappa?).
The money, what there is of it, is in foreign language tours (not counting Spanish because too many people know it). I did manage to convince a driver to come pick up my brother on Lexington in the 30s, for his birthday, far from our official route. He took the microphone and made up complete BS for the tourists.
The only thing tour companies should emphasize is keeping your head down. Literally. The double-decker buses can come right below electric wiring and trees. I guy I knew in Philadelphia got whacked so hard by a tree branch that he got a concussion. We need to make a documentary on this dangerous job that would be like that deadly snow crab-catching show on cable ("the deadliest tour").

Ed Kaufman, tourguide of the stars

Ed Kaufman trained new tourguides at New York Apple Tours (since defunct, since they ran over too many old ladies). Ed had one of those guides to stars homes that is out of date as soon as it is released.
Nevertheless, Ed loved to point at buildings on Central Park West and tell you who lives there. (I cannot replicate his Queens accent on paper.) People would be left looking at the blank brick facades of the buildings.
The odd thing about living in New York is that you pass famous people on the streets fairly often. It is now hip to complain about the movie trucks blocking your street and taking all the parking.
It is true that Manhattan is used as a film location too often. Try Philly, for God's sake!
Philly has an elevated line, the Frankford El, which would prove a compelling location for a film noir-type flick. Most of the buildings upper stories are bricked-in or concreted-in on the shopping street atop which rest the el tracks.
There are a few with open windows. I try to imagine living there and invariably think of the Woody Allen film in which his family lives under a roller coaster in Coney Island.
Still, the top floors of those buildings would make a great location for either an illicit love scene or a murder, with the lights and the sound providing serious atmosphere.
So, filmmakers, try Philly. It even has alleys.

Jew Watch

It sounds like something Borat would come up with, but Jew Watch is a real web site. It purports to be "a scholarly resource" into Zionism. It attracted the ire of the Jewish community, since it comes immediately up when you simply punch "Jew" into Google. For their part Google has a disclaimer above it, saying that the site disturbs them, but it is a free speech issue.
The site is of course unintentially hilarious, with all the usual "conspiracies and lies" - like the Holocaust (didn't happen), the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and their secret plan to rule the earth, and of course that 9/11 was planned by Jews.
I'm putting up a "Swede Watch" site, in which I not only prove that the Vikings never existed, but the Minnesota Vikings football team doesn't exist, nor has it ever.
The "games" were all staged by Minnesota's famously liberal politicians to get more money for their wasteful social programs from the federal government, by making it seem like people actually live up there. Welfare recipients were hired to fill the Metrodome's seats, making the stadium appear full.
Jew Watch should be an East Coast version of Baywatch. It would be set in the 1970s, when Macy's and Gimbel's were still competing for the shopper's dollar. Specially-trained lifeguards would be positioned in high chairs in Herald Square. Whenever they saw someone about to pay full price, the guards would leap into action and "save" the him or her. They would then point the grateful shopper the way to a real bargain nearby.

Up against the Wall, 12-Letter Compound Expletive

What is it about a certain 12-letter compound expletive that is, or used be, strongly associated with the black lower class? I know this might seem silly to most people, but it is worth a half-ass exploration, motherfucker.
There have actually been books published that surmised that the word's popularity had something to do with actual reality in the South. So many of a servant's brothers and sisters had been conceived with a white landowner that they indeed were motherfuckers. Or so the explanation goes.
Of course, it is now used in so many ways that the genesis of the word is hard to come by (pun unintended). The word can be used as much in admiration (that's one bad-ass motherfucker) as in revulsion (that's one bad-ass motherfucker).
Let's take a look at the white landowner thesis. According to it, blacks under sharecropping were worse off than during slavery. At least a slaveowner had an interest in his slaves' physical health. The owner of a plantation had little; if one black sharecropper dies, another will quickly replace him. If the owner takes a sexual interest in the sharecropper's wife, she had better be compliant with his demands.
All of this undercover hanky-panky revealed itself in light-skinned babies. Who later became the black upper-class by virtue of their skin color. In and around New Orleans, the racial mixing bowl was further complicated by the Creoles, who were usually of French/Spanish and black background (though not always). In the end, though, the Southern standard of being a Negro or black or whatever was one drop. Meaning if you had one drop of black blood in you, you were black.
There was a time, of course, that the word motherfucker could still shock. Maybe it was at first a way of separating yourself from mainstream white culture and "signifying" a certain derision for it. That's how long-time Detroit Mayor Coleman Young used it, referring to even high state officials as motherfuckers. He was showing he was still real or down or whatever you want to call it.
I don't think Obama's going to start tossing the word around anytime soon. Hopefully, he'll come up with what this country really needs, which are new obscenities, since the old ones don't shock anyone anymore. Believe in change!

Cum as you are

One of the last of Hollywood's taboos has come tumbling down, at least in terms of bodily fluids.
It started with the scene in "There's Something About Mary," in which Ben Stiller masturbated and couldn't find where "it" went. His date then looks at his ear and asks "is that hair gel? I could use some." She then takes the ejaculate and puts it into her hair. She's seen a bit later at a restaurant, with her bangs sticking up straight from her head.
Alright, the scene is pretty funny. But it opened the floodgates to imitation, and Hollywood is beating it (no pun intended) into the ground as usual, resulting in a desensitized public. What's next, projectile vomiting on each other?
I rented a dumb collegiate comedy (I don't recall the name) in which one of the main characters has refrained from release (by self or others) until his new girlfriend is in his room. She or he then helps him achieve such satisfaction to the point where his gentleman's relish flies across the girl's room and lands on one of her stuffed animals. His man mayo is followed across the room in slow-mo, like an Olympic performance.
Not bad, but when did come shots become R-rated materials, in fact and not in speech?
That's supposed to be the last redoubt of the X-rating.
Once again I am thrust into the odd role of the blue-nosed puritan, but not because I think the material is too graphic, but that some things should actually be considered graphic or people get quickly bored of them. With no forbidden fruits left, we will all starve. Where's the Catholic League of Decency when we need it?
The answer is of course, dead. Mike Myers new movie apparently contains gallons of goo jokes, none of them particularly funny.
Not to say I don't have a twisted sense of humor about these things. When I was 20, I worked at an ice cream place famous for its blend-ins. A blend-in meant that if you, say, ordered vanilla, you could select oreos or Reese's to blend in with a machine.
Lots of cute little 15 year olds patronized this place, and I thought a few times how I'd make them my own "special" blend-ins in a quick visit to the bathrooms ("mmm, it's so salty!") Like the ad used to say, "makes its own sauce."

Out with the old

The news coverage of Jesse Jackson's under-his-breath attacks on Obama, meant half-seriously or not, further illustrates that his generation of black leaders have got to go.
These are politicians that feel it is their god-given right to be consulted by the white media and politicians as "Professional Blacks." They are black for a living, with Sharpton of course the most obvious example. I can't help thinking of ex-Detroit Czar/Mayor-for-Life Coleman Young's quote that "Jesse don't want to run nothing but his mouth."
Being quoted for "the black opinion," is in fact a kind of racism. Did someone appoint Jackson et al. as world spokesmen for millions of black people? Yet it is the Jacksons of the world that are raising the question of whether Obama is really black, like he has to pass a test. Theirs.
We've seen what happens when Harlem was basically given as a fiefdom to a few politicians. When Charles Rangel (no matter his immense personal appeal) and company ran the Harlem redevelopment authority, guess how many large projects were built there? Zero. It was only when the authority was de facto dissolved that development started. The neighborhood was, as someone said about Detroit until Young stepped down, "a black plantation run by blacks."

Role-Model-in-Chief?

What is wrong with inner-city black boys? Ever since the great migration to the north, one answer has been some variant of this: black men. They are absent fathers, are unmarriageable both because of their lack of earning power and wayward ways, and often violent and abusive toward the mothers of their children.
All of these answers are of course tied up in one tangled ball. If it could only be unraveled some way, black men could be what their children need: a positive male role model.
What role model could be more influential than President of the United States? Enter Barak Obama. A great tide of black boys, it is hoped, would want to be like him, rather than sports, music, or entertainment stars - or "gangstas."
Yet we already know that naming streets after black leaders certainly does nothing to curb ghetto violence. Washington, DC residents are already used to the constant carnage at the intersection of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards in the Anacostia section of the city.
One response is that these two great figures are already ancient history to today's youth: old guys in old black-and-white pictures wearing suits and ties. Obama is here and now.
But it is the lure of the here and now, sociologists have said, that differentiates the poor from the middle class. The middle class will defer immediate gratification for future reward, like graduating from school or getting the necessary training for jobs.
The reward of the drug trade is instantaneous, and requires little formal training or travel. With profit margins of about 300 percent, would impoverished boys really deny it for some nebulous promised future?
And it is the ever-present neighborhood, project, or street corner that is almost the definition of a ghetto. The president of the country is a lot less important than those who rule the gangs. It's hard to study in a free-fire zone. Any perceived lack of attention to clear and present danger could easily get you killed.
Middle-class black men clearly want to do something about the lure of "out there;" running the streets. In Philadelphia, these men turned out in the thousands to fill the Temple University arena. Their slogan called for "10,000 men" to do, well, something, like patrolling the neighborhoods as a kind of auxiliary police force. Months later, no one has signed up for anything, which the organizers blamed on lack of funds.
The terrible frustration that so many black men feel, as demonstrated in this and the Million Man March in 1995, is painfully evident. They haven't figured out what to do. Neither, really, has anyone else. Sen. Obama, your answer, please?

Killing My Doppelganger

Fans and non-fans (playa hatas),

It seems there is a indie flimaker in Canada - Winnepeg, Calgery etc, who has my name, the bastard.
This wouldn't be such a pisser but that he's way above me in the Google Bowl. Punch in my name and the first entry on my part is a letter to the editor of the NY times about the 9/11 memorial. It's about a page and a half back so it's easy to ignore.
How did this guy pull so far ahead of me? Documentaries about moose mating? Ice fishing on Lake Ontario? I'm going to launch a KKK-type terror campagn to drive these northernerners, to become, well, even more northern.
I'm not exactly sure what these people do for entertainment. Tormenting Polar Bears? Seal beating? Seals are pretty easy to bag, since they are by and large peaceful animals, which helps when it comes to beating their brains in with a club.
Is this what passes for outrage in Canada? We need some good upright citizens to go up there and shoot up malls, schools, and government buildings.
God Bless America.

Buy me some pate de foie gras and crackerjack

Hello reader(s),

It was only a matter of time. The Mets announced that they would have shiny new expensive restaurants lining their "concourses,"(never just hallways)at the Citifield replacing Shea.
One is going to be the everybody-raves-about-it Shake Shack, oddly known for their burgers. The other will be run by celebrity restaranteur Danny Meyer. Meyer brought the Union Square area to hip life with Gramercy Tavern and other places I'm too poor and unhip to know about.
The trend toward expense-account food at the ballgame has been going on as long as these "retro" ballparks have been established (Camden Yards in the early 1990s). While these parks are a huge leap forward from the astroturf-lined multipurpuse (basball and football) concrete donuts that took over baseball in the early 1970s, they are really designed for one purpose: keeping your butt out of your seat and spending money at stores and restaurants on "concourses," which are difficult to tell from shopping malls.
In Philly, for example, there are concessions for cheesesteaks (no surprise here), but also for "crab fries," which are just like the regular item, except they have Old Bay seasoning all over them. The most interesting one (and I do recommend it to outsiders) is the Schmitter. The Schmitter is otherwise only served at one place in the city, right along the suburban line.
The Schmitter is possibly responsible for most of the heart atttacks on any given day. Let's just say that it is huge, and comes with a glutinous sauce that is guaranteed to clog your arteries in no time flat.
But back to NY. One thing the new stadia have is that the proletariat sits not only up high, but way back from the field. This is because people in luxury boxes do not want their views marred by overhanging decks. You can't even see a decent home run.
So the society becomes more stratified, as usual.
I'm trying to think of New York themed bars and restaurants, especially in the Bronx. You could of course get a knish (potato I hope). You could get giant pastrami sandwiches, courtesy of total ripoffs like the Carnegie. You could also get the last Italian pizzeria to give you something that doesn't taste like a cheese wheel.
The best NY option would be something like Danny Meyer. You could pay outrageous prices for tiny plates of nouvelle cuisine, with a bonus for snotty service.
So kids today, and tomorrow, can say they're going shopping. At Yankee Stadium and Citifield.

E is for Eunuch

It seems my last post elicited an accusation of misogyny. For the record, no one is a bigger crusader for gender-neutrality in absolutely everything than me. I defy, flout, and undermine suffocating social convention all the time. I attend wedding showers constantly, even if not invited, and love to make and wear penis-shaped balloons at bachelorette parties, where I scream with transgressive delight.
I am, you see, a Eunuch. I have been since the first Clinton administration, when I was forced to guard his harem in the White House basement. Bill must have slipped me a roofie. I passed out, and when I woke up I noticed that I sounded like a ten year-old boy. I looked down, and sure enough, I had been permanently modified. (I was told that Hillary, after downing multiple shots, tried to do this herself to Bill.)
After getting over the immediate shock, I embraced my Eunicity. I fought for a third bathroom in public places, marked neither M or W, but E. Same thing with forms that ask you for your gender; an additional "E" circle to fill in (I am also satisfied with a simple "neither"). I demanded admittance to the American Boychoir School, though I was far beyond the age of the so-called "normal" student.
Still, I must continue fighting the stigma attached those like me (we prefer "people of alteration"). It is an outrage that department stores have no Eunuch section, nor Eunuch dressing rooms, nor helpful Eunuch salespeople. And just how women like to shop for underwear that makes them feel sexy; I'd love to find just one pair that makes me feel deliciously sex-less.
So Eunuchs of the World Unite: You have Nothing to Lose.

I can't believe no one got worked up about real misanthropy in "Surf's Up." Even the Onion passed on the Tsunami. At least with this new one you can tell me I might as well be E.

...and stay out!

God help me, I was somehow watching MTV's "The Real World" at a gym, with subtitles, the sound off. It seems one of the girls wanted to go on a guys night out to a strip club. Now I've seen increasing numbers of young women at such clubs recently in DC. They almost ruin the whole thing. There on a great "fun" adventure to expand their sexuality or knowledge thereof. They shouldn't be there. All they do is remind you of what a shmuck you are for being there yourself and not with a "real" woman. Plus, by making it less of a "forbidden" pleasure they take away the whole naughtiness factor. Go see Tom Jones! (is he still performing?)
It's all part of the mainstreaming of porn, dirty talk, and formerly "guy talk." It's everywhere and it's boring the shit out of me.
It's like when I first went to a topless beach in the South of France. After a while, most of the time you didn't even look. You're numb to it. The Onion of course got the phenomenon right in their story "Americans demand another orifice to look at."
The most extreme example I saw of the numbing process gone mild was in Salzburg, Austria, in college. There was a magazine kiosk downtown, exhibiting the various rags' covers in the windows. Right up there with the German Frau Home Journal and Golf in Easily Intimidated Small Countries was a full page cover photo of a "comely" fraulein. With semen all over her face. Nobody seemed to stop and notice except me. Ho Hum, how's the Scnitzel?
So America, let's keep some things dirty and secret, for the love of the verboten.