Beach Week 4ever

The kids worship me. They even call me "Beachweek." and I've been preparing all winter. I've got cases of Natural Light stacked to the rafters in my garage, and I've been making fake ID's, and they're pretty good. Of course, when the kids just can't procure any beer, it's me who they call.
I'm kind of a legend in parts in and around Ocean City, MD. For those of you not from the DC area, Beach Week is like a slightly smaller Spring Break for graduating high school seniors. Some still call it Senior Week, though many who come are not high school seniors. Nonetheless, I've been a fixture around here for about 20 years. The Beach Boys have an album called "Endless Summer." For me, though, it's endless Beach Week.
"Hey, Beachweek, can you get us some Brewsky?" Of course, I say, like a wise and loving Socrates. "How about some weed?" Been growing my own in the basement all winter.
Sometimes I get tired of all the demands, and try and get some sleep. The kids then show a teen girl, legal or not, into my bedroom, where she "convinces" me to go on one last beer run that night.
What do I ask for in return, as well? Well, they need to make or buy their own beer bong. I can still chug with the best of them. There's nothing I like better than showing up some jock by putting that cool brewski down my throat in half the time he does. There's nobody on the beach here who has my experience, my savior-faire and deft chugging technique. I don't know why I'm not on X games.
Sometimes they get out of hand and dis the wrong person, namely me. A couple of meatheads on the beach last year asked whether or not I had any brew. I lied and said no, because there was something obnoxious about them. Sure enough, one guy calls me an "old loser." As they were walking away, I grabbed the sixer I was hiding and poured it all over the guy's head. His friends could do nothing except gape in utter awe.
"Beachweek," they said, lying prostrate, "we are not worthy!"
But let's talk about chicks. They mob me, and who am I to turn them down when they want a pot-bellied,balding, semi-unemployed man to teach them a lesson they won't forget, little minxes.
One time that entrapment show, "to chatch a predater" tried to bust in on me. I showed the cameraman my new carpet up close, real close. I also told the kids that if anyone said anything, well that's the last six-pack they'll see for another three years.
But let's get back to the true spirit of Beach Week. I tell you, there are few things as beautiful as watching a high-schooler get face down in the toilet and spew chunks for the first time. You'd be surprised at the inexperience of some of these 21st century teens. Sometimes I have to hold them down until they've shotgunned an entire six. No wimps allowed in me casa, comprende?
So come on down, and tell them Beachweek sent you. Whooo!

Apologize to those outside the DC area, and wimps who never made it to the real action,
Tourguide
Posted by Sigmund at 12:10 PM 0 comments
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Some Big Mistake (past imperfect)

Go for it. Don't look back. Just keep writing, it's only a blog.
These are the things "experts" and others have been telling me for years, instead of waiting for some big mistake that will ruin everything and everyone, especially me.
Still, going over my posts I immediately see grammatical and other errors all over the place. When I was a reporter, the copy editors would tell me my work "comes in clean," meaning very few or no errors. It was the biggest compliment I could imagine.
So it is now with a very hesitant hand that I do not go back and correct my posts, at least for now. Its better to forge on, especially with so few readers. I do notice however that The Rambler's pieces are pretty precise, but then again he has been at it for awhile now, in print and on the web. I'm as rusty as my pants' zippers. Patience.

Tourguide

Philadelphia Freedom?

A robbery or mugging attack in Philadelphia is often much different than in DC or NY. It is still a working-class city, and many of the delivery men, gas men, and cable men were raised not to take any shit. In their code of the streets, you fought with fists anyone who was attacking you, no matter how they did it.
Unfortunately, many have come up against a more rigid code of the ghetto: you will be shot dead if you don't do exactly what the gunman says. It doesn't matter whether he is 16 and bone-skinny, you can't fight that tiny pistol he has hidden in his waistband.
The attack becomes an assault on their working-class masculinity, against who they are. For this reason, you see a lot more fighting-back killings than elsewhere. It's not DC, NY, or Boston, where the prey is professional class, and they'll quickly recover what they have lost in the attack.
In the Philadelphia cases, an attack on your attacker becomes just dessert. All of us, except for liberals raised in college towns (wait, that's me!) have fantasized about a little payback for loud youths, ghetto youths who curse at everyone, and just simple harassers who should be taught a lesson. Charles Bronson never looked so good.
I don't know the solution, but it has to be portrayed as a kind of mainstreaming. The German Jews of the 1800s established "settlement houses" to get eastern European Jews to acclimate. They did it well, especially in that era of industrial demand tempered by institutional anti-semitism.
The difference in society now is 1) blacks were not meant to be entertainment for the greater culture (think rap, NBA, comedians), and 2) there was a solid demand for labor. It is the second of these that is by far most important, especially in establishing black families and communities. And it has been men who have been not achieving at such a deficit than black women. It is time to lift them no matter what - for the peace and prosperity of a greater nation.

Let it Bleed

Bleed. It's something I need to do. Let out your inner Jackson Pollack and spatter your blood and guts everywhere.
Looking over this blog, I notice a kind of journalistic observation, a remove from what I write about.
All I can say is that things have gone so disastrously for me for such a long time, that I often consider myself something like a space alien. You can see and hear me, but have no way of what's going on inside, which can be pure, unadulterated hell. I don't mean mentally, but in terms of the way I physically feel. I am closer to the buck instead of the hunter. It's as though you have to pee very badly, or have diarrhea, yet I have to be "normal" around people. I try as hard as I can (read: drink alcohol so you can feel good at a bar/party). I try to recover the charm I had earlier in my life.
Now I am fat and bearded, which is good because it's a way of distancing people. Feel like shit, look like shit. That should be my motto, since I've done everything I can think of to isolate myself. I've created a surrogate me, a counterfeit human being, a phony existence. I play the part just to get by.

Jealous, Jealous Again

All right, I confess. I just wanted to be Hollywood for a few hours. I could picture it in my mind. The modernist glassy house sticking out from the hills. The lit-up pool looking out over a universe of light down in the LA basin. The women, the drugs, the meaningless sex. A private debauchery that was never busted by the cops.
I had seen it in dozens of TV shows and movies, and I pestered my friend to find one, dammit.
Instead, we toured the "lounges" (rarely bars) that I had seen on "swingers." A line that pops out at me is when the guy from Anaheim pulls out a gun on some other white punks. His entourage asks him if he's crazy. He says that they don't know how it is out here.
Yeah, the east coast newcomers said, here you can avoid trouble, there trouble finds you. And it so true its strange. Everyone goes out far from South Central. Blacks seem hardly noticeable at all.
At some point in this country, it can hopefully be that way everywhere. Now you're considered stupid or not "street smart" if you are victimized.
There needs to be no good reason to be hyper-aware of the presence of young black men. Now,unfortunately, there are good reasons. But those good reasons are almost all bad.

We Love You from Afar, or, Far From the Madding Ghetto

Coming out of the W. 4th St. station in NY, three guns were pointing right at me.
Fortunately they were on the walls, in giant movie posters. Just more murder masquerading as entertainment.
It's hard to decide, at this point, who the biggest phony liberals are - in Hollywood or in Washington.
Hollywood makes so much money on violence that it's hard to find one leading man who hasn't starred in an "action" film. Sometimes it makes their career, as there's never a shortage of mayhem to go around. It also helps - no, its mandated - that the hero utters something really cool before he blasts the bad guy into oblivion.
Indentify the stars by their lines:
"Hasta la Vista, baby; Yippee kay yaye yay, Do you feel lucky today, punk?" "I'm gonna get medeival on you." (OK I don't know the last one, but twentysomething morons were quoting that line for months.)
But, as often, geography is destiny. LA phonies that denounce or sometimes embrace ghetto violence usually live at far remove its consequences. Mostly in the Santa Monica range, in which are some of the richest areas on earth - The Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Bel Air. These golden peaks and canyons are finally capped off with Malibu, a place that is thought of the world over as the embodiment of the California Dream.
So,"Hollywood money" is coveted by liberal political candidates, as are the celebrities that dish it out. This is nothing new about this phenomenon. There are bigger fish to fry. The real big bucks guys are actually running the studios and salivating at their next ultra-violent, explosion-filled "Blockbuster."
Washington is split almost in half by the deeply forested ravine of Rock Creek Park. The park is basically a moat, with most whites living behind it in the Upper Northwest section of the city. With its leafy streets and solidly built brick houses and apartment houses, it is one of the most pleasant urban neighborhoods in the country.
This is where many of our leading pundits live, or possibly in Bethesda or Chevy Chase, which are basically the same in looks and racial mix. Pontificator heaven is lily white and solidly upper-middle class or more. They find it a comfortable place from which to lecture the rest of the country.
Inside the city lines most send their children to private school after grade school. The children that do go to DC public schools find that, because of busing to their ultra-brite neighborhood, they are suddenly the minority.
What is the point of this post? It is to point out that fear of the black underclass does not make you racist. Obama, in his excellent, gutsy speech on race finally came out and said this. If a roofer sits next to you at a bar and starts a verbal attack on blacks, you in Hollywood or Washington are no better. You just defend yourself with geography, security, and privacy
Don't get me going on San Francisco. Suffice to quote the black comedian Chris Rock on a cable TV special.
First he comments that, no matter where he travels, he always finds that San Franciscans get along the best. The self-satisfied audience claps appreciatively.
Then Rock pauses, and says, "that's because you put all the niggers across the bay."

Hate Your Friends

When do black boys find out that they're scary?
This provacative question, posed in Jonathan Lethem's "Fortress of Solitude," was never answered in the text. It was just laid out there like a giant pinata, ready for "pundits" of every stripe to take a whack at it.
Lethem grew up in the area now called Boerum Hill (though it is in fact a valley). With semi-hippy dippy parents, he and the other white kids would hide their lunch money from black bullies any place they could, like inside their socks and shoes.
Lethem nonetheless got "yolked." Being yolked involved getting your head put in a headlock and then asked whether you had any money. A quick "no" didn't seem to satisfy one's attackers. Meanwhile, the kids at the private schools in Brooklyn Heights, so close at hand, walked mostly without fear.
The public elementary I walked to was next to my town's small ghetto. As little kids we would visit their houses, but as they got older and into Middle School, a few of course turned menacing and tried to "get you" after school. As kids, we didn't understand. Why were they doing this? What did we do to them?
The most embarrassing thing to me was I was being tormented by a black nerd. "Yo, you gonna give me some money," he said. He was skinny and the black kids thought he was a gawky geek. Nonetheless, I was small and skinny until adolescence. The daily round of extortion was over when my younger brother heard about it and told my mother. I grew up in a medium-sized town, so when my mother heard about it she said she would call the boy's mother. I told the bully about it and that was the end of the lunch surcharge (social observers can now add something about black culture being matriarchal etc.)
I couldn't help thinking I wouldn't have to put up with this crap if I went to PDS, the biggest private school in the area.
Why don't the black kids take a bus there and threaten those kids, an easy target if there ever was one? Our parents were the one's with liberal values who kept us in public schools. Our parents were the good white people, who wanted to integrate us into a bi-racial society. The kids were the ones that were paying for their parents high ideals.
In DC it must have been even harder, though I remember going to the rich black kids parties off 16th Street, known as the Gold Coast. No problems there.
By HS the races had typically settled into an understood though unspoken pact. Tbe school let them have "the funk room" next to the cafeteria. Bi-racial friendships were by and large OK, especially if there was something uniting black and white students, like the football team.
So Lethem's question goes unanswered. All I can remember was facing the biggest black player on the team and blocking him as hard as I could, trying to prove he didn't scare me. It usually took him about a second more to shed me than otherwise.
As I wrote before, it was that racial quicksand of Middle School/Junior High that was much worse. The sense even among the tough white Italians ("Guido's")was that blacks didn't fight fair. They observed no limits. They wern't satisfied with kicking your ass, they wanted to send you to a hospital.
Believe it or not, what often makes blacks seem scary is their hair. Who are the whites that seem scariest? Skinheads. A lot of blacks are essentially skinheads in cutting their hair so closes. And when do they look most peaceful? When they grow dreadlocks. Ya mon.

later,
Tourguide

Defending Ft. Reno

Fort Reno never saw much action in the Civil War (read:never), but it became for me and others one of the greatest teen hangouts in the country.
First, there was the height advantage. From the top of the underground reservoir there you could see whoever was coming way before they had a chance to ruin whatever you were doing. If the cops showed up, you could simply chuck your beer in the undergrowth or over the fence. If you were up there making out, you could see any jackasses that, for no other reason than jealously, thought it was hilarious to shout at and otherwise hassle you.
Then there were the blinking lights. Reno was on or around the highest point in DC (400 something feet). The television towers were all around you, each crowned by a blinking red light. They reminded me of the green light at the end of Daisy's dock in "The Great Gatsby." The future that seemed so close you could touch it, yet year by year recedes before you. Gatsby believed in that light, and so did I.
There also were other lights in the distance. Miniature skyscrapers, which turned out to be Tyson's Corner, on the horizon. They sat out there gleaming in a sea of darkness, the trees so lush they seem like a vast cushioned dark ocean. THe smell of thousands of them in summer like breathing in the Congo.
Wilkerson took us, for Sheehan's going away (to Iraq's) party to a cemetery on Wisconsin Avenue, with views out over the the lit up monuments and the bowl of light in which they were centered.
It was a much better view than Reno, he said. And that was objectively true. But Reno looked out over OUR Washington, not the tourist postcards. And I must admit, as a horny teenager, I would sit up on top of Reno and think of all the girls lying in their pink bedrooms out there, lush and fragrant as the trees that hid them under their thick canopy.
I've been told that the Reno music scene had mellowed considerably before I got there. In the 70s, people said, you could bring coolers of beer and drink right there in front of the stage. It was grit heaven, they said.
Nevertheless, all you had to do was go drink someplace at least semi-hidden. Like underneath the Wilson pool, or on top of the reservoir. Easy enough, and plus you could feel like a badass for flouting the rules.
The bands were a kind of secondary reason to come. Most of the time all you wanted to do was hang out with halfway cool people. It was always surprising to me that, at G'town Prep, very few knew of the dischord scene, though it was so close. But the 80s were a triumph of emotionless synth pop, and pure schmaltz like "I guess that's why they call it the blues" (or, in Kreisberg's version "I guess that's why they call him the Boog." ("smoking Bronx killer, raping those sophomores...").
THe roses covering my eyes came off, though, when I was briefly working for a community newspaper out near Tysons.
I hated Tysons. I hated almost all of Northern Virginia's centerless and souless sprawl. Just before I quit, I looked to the east from a Tyson's parking lot. There was the fake Norman castle at Ft. Reno. I was looking at the opposite of the view I had loved for years. Like the main character in James Joyce's short story "Araby," the scales dropped from my eyes, and I realized what a fool, what a deluded romantic I had been. The world was glass buildings and parking lots, not the grassy expanses of Ft. Reno. Take your frisbee and throw it in the Potomac. Hope it makes it out to the sea.

More irresistable than Axe body spray

Before I forget, I must pass on my closely-guarded chick-action knowledge to a new generation of guys hoping to score big time.
What you need to know I call the rule of three. Using one of these sure-fire lines on a girl will have her in your bed faster than you can say "more roofies, please."
The lines are in no particular order. Try one or try all three.
1) "I'm trying to put together the broken pieces of my shattered life, and you could be a really big part of that."
2) "I have thick, downy hair covering almost the entirety of my body."
3) "Hi. You don't know me, but I have giant blow-up telephoto pictures of you all over my bedroom walls."
See now, those aren't too hard, are they? But just as a caution, you might want to slip the staff some cold hard green not to kick you out if some neurotic baby-cakes gets it into her birdbrain that you are "bothering" her. Pay no mind.

Happy hunting,
Tourguide

The Death of All Mankind

I really need to do laundry today, and what I good today to do it: overcast, too much pollen in the air. I'm thinking of putting up another blog that would update everyone on the state of my laundry every hour, on the hour. Laundry.com would have a staff of three, providing 24-hour coverage.
We'd also include a "state of my socks" streaming video for free, and debate, with no holds barred, on whether Febreeze is really worth it.
But hold on to your hats, because this blog's investigation into the true identity of Chef Boyardee is coming up. His name sounds vaguely French, though his signature Italian -influenced cuisine has delighted the most discriminating gourmands the world over. Plus, my dog really likes it.
I'm thinking of switching over to a new kind of Doritos, but at the grocery store I'm suddenly paralyzed by indecision and can't go through with it.
I'll tell you, sometimes it really makes me wonder.

Tourguide

The Uses and Limits of Non-Violence

The Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday (5/6) actually pulled off a thoroughly peaceful and effective protest of the Sean Bell case, where 50 police bullets were shot at Bell and others outside a Queens club. The police were acquitted last week.
Just as I had weighed in (bring the war home ...etc) on the possibility of a new form of non-violent protest at the NRA building, Sharpton's group blocked bridges and tunnels out of Manhattan.
It brought traffic to a stand-still in a lot of places at once.
Naturally everyone who was simply trying to commute in vehicles hated Sharpton. But if you want to make a point in this car-worshiping culture, you need to get in the faces behind the windshield glass. If only someone a little less of a grandstanding charlatan than Sharpton (who has never been elected anything, even dog-catcher) had led it.
Interesting, though, some of the quotes from those witnessing the trial. They wouldn't riot and torch their own neighborhoods in protest. Instead, some said, civil rights groups would have smaller demonstrations, but over a long period, so that the Sean Bell case wouldn't be forgotten.
All of which leads to the conundrum of media coverage. I haven't seen the tabloids today, while the Times put pictures on the front page of the metro section and didn't play the story until page B3. You can bet that if there were rioting, it would make the front page.
As PJ O'Rourke noted, violence is interesting. But it's also a trap. I just started a book called "RADS," about the 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin.
The blast was the largest home-made bomb in recent history except Oklahoma City. Though it was done at 3:30 am on a Saturday during the summer, a post-doctoral student was killed, while over 20 buildings around it were damaged. It turned most people against such anti-Vietnam violent acts, and sent the four planners into hiding in Canada. One is still at large, believe it or not.
It's frustrating, because one of my fantasies is to drive-by and "air-out" the NRA offices (ghetto-speak for driving by and riddling the place with bullet-holes). See how they like dozens of rounds filling the place where they work on defending cases just like theirs. I'll bet they can dish it out, but they can't take it. Either that or let Robocop take over security.
As for blocking I-66 next to their offices, raise your hand if you want to sit in on a major interstate. But there has to be a way, like having a car in each lane slow way down beforehand then come to a complete stop.
In the meantime, I have a message for the NRA. "Yo, yo office look a little stuffy. Someone need to air it out."

I'm glad that J. Edgar Hoover is dead or I could get in trouble. But words are not bombs. Most of the time, they're more effective.

Comrade Dave

Help! I am a 42-year-old man who has been stuffed in a remote gym locker since high school. Can't anybody hear me out there?! I remember their ruse of showing me "something really cool" that was supposedly in the back of the locker. Then some big guy slammed my skin-and-bones body inside, and I've been here ever since. I've lived off of old "Spirit Club" candy wrappers and the paper from a box of Zepplin albums I found. There are also roaches (both the insects and kind to wrap pot in), bongwater, and water from the leaky ceiling. The janitor was in on the whole thing from the beginning, so he just laughs and calls me the spanish word for "geek" when I cry out at all hours. I'm not sure where I am, since I havn't been able to move more than six inches for 20 years. They've apparently built a whole new wing around me without anyone noticing. I try to call out to the few kids that come by here, but they just turn up their I-Pods. Plus, nobody reads my blog, since all my cultural references end with Styx. One of the jocks that put me here is now chief of police in my suburban town, and I suspect that he's ordered everything hushed up. No use rocking the boat when an emaciated man that looks like one of "The Mole People" suddenly turns up after being declared missing in the first Reagan adminnistration. If you receive this missive, please call my Mom, though she might be dead by now. In that case, try my old D+D buddy Billy McCheever.

__________________________________________________

Keith Campbell <keith.maclean@gmail.com> wrote:

Bring the War Home to the Warmakers

As the Philly police department scrambles to find the last of three men who shot and killed an officer during a robbery, the NRA has already come out against any restrictions on the bullet-proof vest piercing semi-automatic rifle with which he was shot.
I have one piece of advice for citizens who are outraged as this country becomes a coast-to-coast shooting gallery: Bring the War Home to the Warmakers.
The Warmakers are the NRA and the weapons manufacturers that support them. Home is their offices, gun-manufacturing plants, and the gutless state and federal lawmakers who supposedly "support the second amendment."
But in a video and computer age, simply marching, holding signs and lobbying legislators isn't enough. Instead, new avenues of protest need to be explored. They involve disrupting day-to-day activities.
I take some of my ideas from Rutgers University students in New Jersey. In response to a racial incident, a few students sat-in center-court at a nationally televised basketball game. In response to the Iraq War, some decided to block the four-lane highway that leads in and out of New Brunswick, where the main campus is located.
The response and media coverage was much greater than if they had, 60s-style, simply occupied the Administration building. That response was of course greeted partially by booing from the stands from people who wanted to see a basketball game. And blocking traffic is never popular with people simply trying to get somewhere.
Nevertheless, they got attention.
I recommend, therefore, a few strategies to deal with with the NRA, a death-cult organization to which even liberal politicians must now bow and scrape before.
1) Blockade the entrance to their shiny offices in suburban Virginia.
2) Somehow block eastbound traffic on Interstate 66, which runs next to NRA headquarters. To counter angry motorists cries (and middle-fingers), simply point at the massive building that's been paid for by blood and murder.
3)Non-violent resistance to arrest, though violence unfortunately gets more media attention.
4) A photo-collage of those killed, like the AIDS quilt. But it is hard to find public land in the suburbs for demonstrations. This also might not be a good idea since so many pictured would be black and Hispanic.
5) Hypocrite-baring. Bring guns to the Capitol. When the police say that guns are illegal in the halls of Congress, have a list of pro-gun lawmakers and ask why such controls are enforced in their offices and workplaces, but not for other people.
6) I don't know much about gun-manufacturers in the US, but each plant could conceivably be blockaded all at once across the country.
7) Symbolic gestures. On the Washington mall, carry toy guns en masse together to see what people's response would be. Then burn the fake guns. You could also build a memorial with bullets, for everyone shot in the last year. Notice I said shot, not killed, because the numbers would be much higher.
8) After much protest, become the voice of compromise. Call for an end to handguns, but allow people to keep hunting guns for, well, hunting, and for defending their homes. These guns are much less easy to disguise than a handgun.

That's all for now. Viva la revolution!

I shoot, therefore I am (not)

It's not OK to shoot anyone once late at night anymore - it's not enough.
In Newark, a gun battle between a teenager and a man broke out this Sunday in broad daylight. A total of 18 shots were exchanged between the two, with the teenager running and cradling his wounded arm while continuing to pursue and shoot at the man. The teenager, incredibly, fell to the street right next to his assailant, but kept right on firing, 12 shots in all, before staggering to his feet and collapsing again a few feet away. Both of the the shooters died.
I know what some people are thinking (if you're out there at all): Let them rot in hell together. It was in Newark, both guys were into the drug economy somehow, and both had long criminal records. It's a societally-designated free-fire zone, though only three blocks from the mayor's home.
But while I was in Boston last summer, a teenager got up from his seat one afternoon on a subway car, walked out to the platform at a stop, then turned around and fired at the teen he had been seated next to. In Philly someone was shot on a crowded bus, and deliverymen and utility men have been shot and killed as well. All in front of sometimes dozens of witnesses.
Some Penn professor explained that the shooters are exacting revenge, in 60s-style language, on "the establishment" or something like "the social order."
Since when are delivery and utility men anybody's idea of the top of the socio-political pyramid? They bring delivery of the basics to people who can't afford them. At least Obama, in his remarkable speech on race, acknowledged that legitimate fear of the underclass should not be labeled racist.
But it is the intimidation of witnesses that is most worrisome. At least The Times got a witness employed by a grocery store to give a description of the scene. The reporter also got "'a resident" to comment without his name. "If you open your mouth around here, someone will shut it for you," the nameless man said.
If this kind of urban terrorism is allowed to go unchecked, it ultimately results in a severe diminution of the very idea of democratic law enforcement, as people barricade themselves in apartments and profess to have seen nothing about a crime to police, though it obviously happened right in front of them. People living in constant fear will understandably accept any kind of law, so long as it frees "decent people" to live and go about their business unafraid. I've often wondered what people who call police fascist or racist would do if they encountered real state-sponsored terrorism. Drug dealers would be shot on site by police or the army, with no questions asked. Addicts would be rounded up and sent to concentrations camps, they way the Nazi's did.
Ultimately, as Jane Jacobs noted, it is not for the p0lice to truly control disorder. In a functioning urban area, the shopkeepers patrol and clean the area in front of their stores. Tenants look out their windows and upbraid rowdy or disruptive people (like I was in college), with the sense that police will back them up. Jacobs called this self-policing system "eyes on the street' in close-knit urban neighborhoods.
As for the police, they must get out of their air-conditioned or heated cars and walk the beat on foot, so that they get to be a known, benign presence. This is in contrast to what is called "stranger policing," where the cops only respond to emergencies and success is measured in response time to a crime, not on preventing it in the first place.
It's difficult not to lay some blame at the feet of video-game makers, and games like Grand Theft Auto. Most people can simply call it fantasy, but in the inner-city it's more like target-shooting practice.

No Borough for Old Men

It is, above all else, a hard landscape. Hard stone ridges and valleys between. Seven-story yellow-brick apartment buildings scaling the heights, like faded rock mesas in the Southwest, overwhelming their narrow streetscapes.
Taking the elevated number 6 train to Fordham Road, the city had decided to paste stickers over the windows of the many abandoned buildings. A flowerpot and other domesticated emblems hiding the gaping holes behind them for commuters in both rail and car.
Getting off at Fordham Road. Thousands of shoppers moving up and down the wide street, which at the time was considered the borderline between the South Bronx and the better districts to the north. Noise, insults, and come-ons in Spanish for both consumer and merchants. Nobody paid me the slightest bit of attention.
I turn off the road and past a security guard. Immediately greeted by rolling green lawns and lush, leafy trees, a mostly Gothic campus so shockingly and immediately bucolic it is used as a stand-in for an Ivy League university in car ads, or so my friend told me.
Our adventures usually took us to the neighborhood just north of the campus where many young Irish lived. Crowded, lively bars, immediately friendly to you, especially if you were associated with Fordham, at the time a buffer zone between south and north Bronx.
Fast-forward about 10 years, and those bars had become isolated Gaelic outposts, ready to be taken over by the relentless tide of Hispanic migration.
"It's all gone to shit," said one of the few older men in one of these taverns. Only real Irish place left in the Bronx was Woodlawn, past the subway's end. Ireland, as we now know, has become "The Celtic Tiger," actually drawing in many more migrants than it churns out, for once in its sad, ever-gloried-in-song history.
A last memory of my friend at Fordham. We went to Sunnyside in Queens, also an Irish haven. The Irish were playing heavily-favored Italy in the World Cup in soccer that afternoon. Much to everyone's astonishment, the Irish won, 1-0. The crowd rushed outside and took over the street in pint-smashing celebration.
It's too bad to remember too much just yet.

A Drunken Coney Island of the MInd

There were just two of us, or maybe three. All around 20 years old, and addled with Testosterone. We charged out of the Corner Bistro and started running all over the parked cars on Jane St. Few car alarms around then. Nonetheless, a woman raised her second-floor window and told us to shut up. The shock was too much for even desultury, mandated "fuck you's."
You mean that the West Village was not our drunken Disneyland? That real people actually lived here? The best parts of the West Village look like a stage-set, with perfectly proportioned townhouses and angled streets. It never entered into my drunken mind that actual human beings lived there, instead of actors playing a role.
Later, you would spot a bunch of rowdies being loud and stupid, and figure that they were the equivalent of white trash who had come from Jersey on the PATH train. You couldn't believe that you had once been like them.
We never, though, participated in the wooos! That seemed to be the call of the meathead. Check out Hoboken near the train terminal and you will hear, far and wide, this buttheaded screaming into the night. How something so obviously dumb have any attraction to it?
If there was a Wikipedia entry on it, it might read something like this:
wooo! or alternately whoo! is a commonly expressed cry of the weekend night by young men who have drank too much alcohol. Whether this barking idiocy actually attracts women is unknown, but everyone in the partiers general area hates their guts while they grow their beer guts. Whoo! is commonly found in Cancun on Spring Break, financial service workers in New Jersey and the eastern Upper East Side, and all areas near frat houses.
Wait! Someone just tossed me a Coors Light. I too can have a good time now, since as every sports ad will tell you, or strongly suggest, you can't have fun without beer. Whoo!

Harlem: 2 Tough 4U?

Most of the time the topless double-decker tour bus chugged its way along 125th Street without incident. We passed peacefully through Harlem's main street and then it was down Fifth Avenue, crossing the great sociological divide of E. 96th Street, where luxury condo owners can look right into the public housing projects smack up against them (and vice-versa).
Then there was the black Isrealites and the mooning.
For anyone who hasn't encountered these loons (they used to be around Times Square all the time), the black Israelites are a textbook example of mass psychosis. They believe (I think) that they were the original Jews, the original chosen people. Since they are always shouting into a bullhorn, I could never tell what exactly they wanted. Israel back to its "original" owners? A land where they could get paid for shouting at people? Government money for them to shut up, for chrissakes?
Anyway, the bus stopped at the corner of 8th and 125th and they unloaded on the tourists, shouting "Crackers" and "Uncle Toms" and various other garbled epithets.
The tourists were terrified, while I tried to explain that everyone in New York knows these guys are deluded and basically harmless.
As we pulled up to out stop at the Apollo Theater, a quiet Southern black couple asked me if it was OK to get out there. "We're from Virginia, we're not used to this," they said. So it fell on me, blond-haired and blue-eyed, to assure them that the "Capital of Black America," was perfectly safe for black people. The Israelites were a few blocks back by then, and so was the guy that mooned us from his window.
In the paper today I saw that the City Council has voted yes to "upzoning" 125. This is despite the shouting from the balcony of protesters who fear the strip will become another Duane Reade-infested Condo-land. The strip is ugly but lively now, but the pressures on Manhattan real estate are just too much for nothing to change.
When Grey Line began running bus tours through Haight-Ashbury in the 60s, the residents would sometimes run alongside holding up mirrors. This is of course what you try to avoid as a guide: turning a neighborhood into a human zoo. My solution is usually to bore the tourists with architecture and planning instead of pointing at people. Most of the time.

MLK - Boulevard of Broken Screams

Found back in the vaults:

A lot of people know the comedian Chris Rock's joke about the Martin Luther King Boulevards that inevitably seem to run through the worst part of whatever city's ghetto where they've changed the street signs and little else.
In the joke, a friend who's lost calls Rock and says he's on Martin Luther King Boulevard, and what should he do? "Run!" shouts Rock.
This week was the 40th anniversary of MLK's death, and TV obligingly played clips from the civil rights movement in the South. No diminishing this man's accomplishments and the role he played in finally desegregating the South: he is truly up there with Gandhi in actually living the philosophy of non-violent resistance. His legacy brought the South into the 20th century, and a nation closer to its ideals of freedom and justice for all.
But:
It sometimes seems that King is white America's token Negro. His memory is invoked constantly by the media, who rightly believe that King speaks to our best selves as a nation. However, it often seems like there were no other black men of consequence in American history or society.
No W.E.B Dubois. No Frederick Douglass. No Marcus Garvey. No Richard Wright (author of Invisible Man) or Langston Hughes. And certainly no Black Panthers or Eldridge Cleaver ("Soul on Ice").
This generation of ghetto youth seem to care little of civil rights icons or anyone else but the present of rap, sports, and movie stars. In Washington, everyone has long gotten over the terrible irony of teenagers shooting each other at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Boulevards in the Anacostia section of the city.
To today's inner-city youth, who are Malcolm X and MLK but some old guys in a distant, black-and-white TV past who dressed in coat and tie, like a white businessman? What do they matter when one is constantly in fear of lethal violence?
King himself had problems relating to young ghetto black men when he came up to Chicago for a 1968 march that featured bottle-throwing white youths telling him to go home. They didn't want to integrate with what they saw as ghetto dysfunction: drugs, crime, random violence etc.
Northern black youths were already so disaffected that Malcolm X at his most radical, if anyone, appeared to be a better fit to them.
So the second part of King's dream, for a society of economic equals, has never been realized. Young inner city black males have never been brought into the mainstream, both culturally and economically. There is hope that an Obama presidency would have the moral high-ground to finally begin to address the nation's biggest social problem. However, the mere presence of a black president would do little to to convince those in gangs and protecting their turf with weapons to throw them down.
Constantly invoking a civil-rights icon like King is not likely to do anything for them either. Society needs to make some tough decisions, like banning most handgun sales (rifles and other weapons permitted because they can protect a homeowners property and are difficult to conceal).
It also needs some kind of program for those without a high-school education, to open up pathways to economic independence, independent from the drug trade. My mother always said that public policy should imitate what rich people do, since they have the financial freedom to do exactly what they want. In the case of ghetto teens, that would mean sending them away to a prep school, just like the rich. These institutions would have to have strict controls, because otherwise they would become simply juvenile halls, with all the intimidation, gangs, and violence that these teens are supposedly getting away from. A few demonstration programs in the 1960's during the summers became basically that and were quickly de-funded.
Just a suggestion.







....you might see me, as a tour guide in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. Take a sometimes twisted ride through these three cities and elsewhere. Life in the Northeast Corridor at the turn of the century, complete with observations on the serious, the idiotic and the mind-numbingly mundane. Plus excruciating naval-gazing and suicidal tendencies (read my blog or I'll kill myself).
So climb aboard, and mind your head.