The Phone

It sat where it always did, by the lamp in the corner of the TV-room/library. It was a new model, but I still wanted to trace that old pattern on it: 723-5288.
That was E's number, and coming into the house on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, it seemed wild with possibility. A re-connection with her and all my friends, especially in college and immediately thereafter. The phone was a portal that transported me away from Princeton and to the new and better life I had created in DC at the time.
I just called it. The number, said the mechanical voice on the phone, has been disconnected.
That could be the title of my memoirs of the hellish years that have passed like a rushing river since the early 1990s. I am a Dorian Gray that, instead of exploiting my static age, has been ravaged by it. I am starting to grow some gray in my now dark blond/light brown hair.
It should be shock white.

Julie Miller

An old ache re-appeared tonight, and despite the lack of outcome (no pun intended), it's good. There was a girl (definitely young) who looked almost like Julie Miller, whom I had a brief and bad affair with years ago. I looked at her and felt a long-dormant excitement in the loins.
Julie was not beautiful, but cute as hell in that New York Jewish girl way that drove a goy like me crazy. She had gone to Wisconsin with me, and was a self-described "little mouse" at the time. We met again sometime after graduation at a party near Columbia, and experienced a passionate cab-ride home.
We met again a week later, me at a cheap hotel downtown. She was living in Seattle, but was visiting her parents in town. We ended up at that hotel, and I ended up disappointing her. In subsequent communication, I did the male thing and hid in shame, though she seemed still interested.
I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that the girls I was interested in years ago are long gone, and have become mature women. That is what the tapering off of the physical symptoms of anxiety will peal back, and hopefully I can adjust to them. Because I talked to the substitute Julie Miller, and you could see her whipping out the mental wheelchair for me in her eyes. Help me out, Rambler or whoever else reads this page. What's the new age limitations (both up and down)?
(Note to a certain dark-haired minx that sometimes reads this: you are hotter now than ever).

Bullets over Broadway

One of the great Rambler quotes of all time came when the city finally decided to make over Times Sq. He was opposed to it. Why? "Scum have to go somewhere."
Scum made an unwelcome return to the Square on Thursday, when a CD Peddler (read: hustler), was stopped by the NYPD for having no license to sell on the street. The peddler, a 25-year-old dirtbag, was duly seen in a photo with Al Sharpton (a bigger hustler cannot be humanly found)in the NY Post.
To sum up the story, the peddler ran through one of the walkways that take you from the Broadway streetside to a kind of cabbie-arcade entrance midblock at the Marriott Marquis hotel.
A plainclothes cop told the peddler to stop. Instead, the guy whips out a submachine gun that later turned out to have a magazine with 17 bullets in it. The guy gets off two shots, then the gun jammed. The cop then shot the man four times in the middle of Times Square tourists (at about noon) and killed him.
Should this story be read as an example of police over-reaction, it is anything but that. The CD peddlers in Times Square are shakedown artists, pure and simple. They play on the fears of tourists, whom New York needs more than ever right now.
Here's the two big hustles. 1) A guy comes up to you and says he's an up and coming rap artist, signs his name on a worthless CD, then he and his homies surround you. Close, real close, in those menacing extra-large puffy black Michelin tire man jackets. Then they demand $10 for the CD.
2) The friendly approach. The CD has all kinds of fake album-cover art and seems professional. A man says that this is your opportunity to catch a rising talent before anyone else. All this can be yours for the low, low price of $10. Catch him before Wal-Mart does.
The man, 25, was definitely in the first camp. His idiotic raps about killing cops were all over the tabloids yesterday. Hey, Rolling Stone (and Nate Brackett, one of my college editors), here's a moron you can hype as "real" and "from the street!"
The truth is that Times Square is always going to be under siege from the various discontented segments of NY society. Gangs used to go there for initiation wherin you as a prospective member go to mug someone and thus be brought into the gang.
The cops were everywhere in the Square last night, mostly to direct traffic, but also to keep order. Whatever you think of the sanitized new Times Square, the city knows a gold mine (in the form of tourists) when it sees it.
A little irony in this case. When the Marriott decided to put up the Marquis, the Square was still more than a little sketchy. It thus put up a kind of berm on the Broadway side of the building, with the entrance to the hotel mid-block or so. This was to protect tourists from marauding no-goodniks populating the street. You simply caught a cab inside the arcade and went.
These arcades or breezeways or whatever were exactly where the violence went down. Next time try razor wire.

The Closed City

There is no greenery, it is enough to make a stone sad - Nikita Kruschev, when visiting New York to attend the UN

She stands like a witch at the gateway to the continent - Not sure the source, about NY.

When I was a kid I read a book called "The Open City," which was about Washington. Essentially, it said that DC was remarkable in that you as an average citizen could enter into high government buildings, including the White House, basically for free.
If DC was the open city in the time before terrorism, New York has always been the closed one. To gain access to its monoliths, one usually needs a few things: money, some kind of card, a name that you are going to, an invitation to an apartment or event, a key or a key-card, or some kind of numerical code.
It is no coincidence that architects refer to Manhattan's "street wall." It is usually as closed off to you as the Mongols were by the Great Wall of China unless you have the proper qualifications.
Thus I always take any chance to penetrate the facade. This usually means parties, but can also mean receptions in places ordinarily off-limits to you. I still regret not going to see a speaker from Georgetown Prep at the Met Life Building a few years ago. Not because I wanted to see the speaker, but because it was in the businessmen's exclusive club at the top of the building that dominates the boulevard. I could have looked at the building from then on and said "I've been to the club on top" and would thus possess it rather than being forever an outsider.
This is also why I always took any excuse to go to the Ivy League clubs clustered in Midtown. I've been to the Penn Club (formerly the Yale Club), the Yale Club (the most impressive, across from Grand Central), and the Princeton club (a modern disappointment).
However, I still must penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of the Eastern Establishment, the Harvard Club, on 44th near Fifth.
This is no mean feat. There are two tailcoated doormen/goons at the door ready to escort you in, or out. It is a historic landmark/McKim, Mead, and White Georgian building, and imposing.
My father went to Harvard as a grad student, but most of the time you need a registered member to allow you passage. Most of my father's acquaintance members are now dead or inactive. Maybe there's a service entrance I could sneak in as a pastry chef.
The NYT ran a feature called "rooms" for awhile. It showed you the inside of these guarded fortresses of the elite. Still, the Metropolitan Club at 5th and 60th refused to allow them to photograph the dining room.
Park Avenue at one point was called "a democracy of millionaires." You cannot tell from the outside the tremendous wealth inside. Harder still is to get a glimpse of the penthouses and terraces usually set back on top.
Hunter College, through an accident of history, actually has one building on Park and 68th. There was one computer lab that was up high, which I used for spying on these hidden terraces with their desperate little gardens in the sky.
I guess the most impressive apartment I've seen is Leslie Stahl's duplex on top of a building that overlooks that strange little park that surrounds the Museum of Natural History (she's married to a rich guy). On the roof deck, if you looked sideways, you could see over Central Park to the east side.
But the best view I've ever gotten was from my Wisconsin roomates parent's rather small and drab place on Central Park West. The Eisenbergs. Ordinary upper-middle class New York Jews. How they got the place is one of those NY real estate mysteries that are better left untouched.
Rachel and I also got a chance to stay at a duplex on top of a building at 57th and Sixth. A rather small (12-14 stories) plain brick number situated on some of the highest-priced real estate in the world. It had a terrace, too, but was dwarfed by the surrounding skyscrapers.
The Times ran a story a few weeks ago about the great NY sport of trying to peer into your neighbors' interiors. The last time I did this, at the back of an ordinary upper east side apartment, I looked into a place that was paneled from top to bottom with Oak or Mahogany or some other expensive wood.
There are ten thousand rooms in the closed city, but I have yet to wrangle entrance to a Park or Fifth Ave duplex palace like in "Metropolitan." Maybe I'll do like that couple in the White House and just wander in. A beautiful woman would help. Contact me at Gatecrashers.com.

There's Pictures of Mirrors on the Wall

I may have misheard him, but I swear this lyric lies in the center of the intro to Bruce Springsteen's "Candy's Room."
I have a bone to pick with Springsteen detractors. This somehow encompasses most friends and hipster types. Springsteen has written in the American vernacular (Woody Guthrie, Bob Seeger, Bob Dylan) for years, yet has been denied hipster cred by the very honesty of his words.
He is a fake, I'm told, a multi-milliniare writing about working-class blues. To which I respond, at least he addresses the facts. Too many hipster types reject the Springer viscerally, thinking his music unprogressive and derivative and sentimental. Good. Tangential, musically abstruse groups like Pavement have their place, but are ultimately a product of their times. The Springer remains. And the emotions of what it means to be a young man in America, like "Badlands," will always need to be addressed.*

*Lights out tonight
trouble in the heartland
there's a head-on collision
smashing in my guts, man
I'm caught in a cross-fire
But I don't understand

Who Killed the Kennedys?

Why are the 1960s' still interesting? I know that when I was at Madison, I eventually couldn't stand the straw-men put up by the left to describe just how great they were compared to our slothful, indolent, and apathetic generation. I eventually wrote a column on it that was probably the best-received article I've ever written.

But the 1960s are still important in one singular way: they showed how a democratic society, once seriously threatened, supposedly acts like any other government regime: repression, police state actions, and quasi-fascist "spy" organizations that bloomed during times of real threat.

My ancient and wise father once said that he thought that 1968 was the one year he thought a revolution was possible in the US. This is understandable: the French revolution of 1968, actually bringing workers and students together, the campus and ghetto uprisings (or riots, depending on your view), and the challenges to America's military power abroad, especially the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which showed Americans Vietnamese guerrillas inside our embassy for a fight we said we were winning in Saigon.

But then there is the question of dissent. How much is possible without the government taking counter-action? In Madison, there were University police, the National Guard, the FBI, and various types of military intelligence on campus. Many supposedly "undercover" (one was denounced when it was found he had a wedding band on).

So is the US just like any other ultimately repressive state? Will it kill (like at Kent State) when it finds it necessary to preserve its stature? Are we a democratic state or a thinly disguised republic of lies?

The Chinese present a conundrum in this case: free-market capitalism within a quasi-Stalinist government. No one, it seems, will complain unless the spigot of international commerce is somehow turned off. The state as leader in a pro-capitalist state is difficult to reconcile to its objective of repressing any dissent.

The Kennedy I regret passing is not John, but his brother Robert, or Bobby. Here was a man that was equally attractive to both worker and student, black and white. In an election, he would have easily beat Nixon, who after all barely beat back party hack Hubert Humphrey.

So capitalism is not the great balm of repressive government as advertised. It can bloom without a sound. It is up to us to make some noise.

Fatherhood

A second generation. A mini-me, a little person to carry on your family name and history. A slice of immortality, that you will not be instantly forgotten the moment of your death.
I've heard all the arguments, yet cannot get beyond the one that concerns me most: I cannot subject another human being to the suffering that I've been through.
My parents no doubt thought that their combination of genes would produce supermen (or women). And that's the way it should have been. Unfortunately, they did not account for factor X. That's the wild card in fertilization that produces unplanned problems.
I have a cousin in Park Slope with a child that has an autism-like syndrome that makes their child a permanent infant, though he is much older chronologically now. The doctors can't figure the child out, and get at what the problem is.
Mind you, these are hyper-educated Park Slope parents, yet the mystery of exactly what is plaguing their physically-beautiful son continues to elude them and the best minds of New York health care.
This is the central conundrum: what we know is still, despite modern science etc., much less than what we do not know. The breakthroughs in anti-depressants in recent years (Zoloft, Prozac et. al.)haven't helped me, nor a certain anguished acquaintance. A little modesty on medical science's part would go a long way - not all problems have a ready-made solution. Not then, not now.

Communication Breakdown

The average readership on a blog is something like 1.3 readers. This is what I'm told by the roomer in our house, Dan, who worked for the Miami Herald online edition and is teaching new media at Princeton for a semester.
This is where you hit the wall. I've said mostly what I've wanted to say back when the blog was a novelty and fun. At this point, I should go back to the ancient art of e-mailing.
I look at the prodigious prolific put-out of Rambler, and think I can keep up. But he had the advantage of a geographic divide, which shouldn't matter but does, at least at first. Novelty can carry you a respectable distance. As an outsider, what the insiders do is strange and notable. I'm just sick of my situation, and hence don't feel like writing about it and making others sick.
But I know that some others are occasionally checking the output, so I'll talk about somebody else. A woman. Named after Ireland. And not the one married to one of my former best friends.
She called yesterday and said she had come back from New Orleans to NY. Then started to utter the scariest two-syllables in the language for single men: ba-by.
The horror! I knew she was half-kidding, but the idea of a six-fingered little mutant conceived by me, with my screwed up DNA, sent me packing for the hills.
I should have known. I was watching "Chucky" on On-Demand. My kid would make Chucky look like Mother Theresa. An adult lifetime spent too often in hospitals and institutions is not a qualification for fatherhood. I know heredity is a crapshoot, but for now it looks like the dice was loaded from the start.

Bayonne

Surrounded on three sides by water, Bayonne could certainly be called insulated, even given its position at the heart of the New York metro area. But a new light-rail line from Hoboken and Jersey City has made this affordable, tight-knit city accessible, and if I ever move back to the area I might actually live there.

Bayonne is also where my uncle, the writer and journalist Steve Roberts grew up, and he wrote a book about it. I decided to check it out.

The light-rail let me off at 34th Street. The houses generally all looked the same; wood or aluminum three story houses, right next to each other but not touching. In other words, not the row houses one associates with Northeastern cities, but still close to the street and defining it.

I ended up on Steve Roberts' street, 31st between Avenue A and Newark Bay. As a boy, it was filled with Russian and Eastern European Jews and their children. Knocking on the door of the house that resembled his description of his boyhood home, I picked the right one, with a small Marine Corps flag in the tiny yard. A woman named (if I remember correctly) Cindy Callahan answered the door (so much for the shtetl). Two of her kids were at the Gothic-style Bayonne High School three blocks away; one was learning to be a teacher.

We chatted about the book, though what I really wanted to know was how much renting one of third floor rooms under the rooftops in the city would cost. I've gotten to the point where I will gladly give up hipness for a real room with a bathroom.

At the end of the street, much-maligned Newark Bay looked oddly beautiful with the giant containerized-cargo cranes all in a line on the other side, the rectangular cargo boxes piling up on the docks that destroyed Manhattan's (you need a lot of "upland" storage areas for containers. Not much of that in Manhattan).

Going back to the light-rail, I was struck by the beauty of the library, complete with the name of some of the great thinkers engraved on it, like the one at Columbia University. The High School and the Library were from the era when people took pride in civic buildings and built them to last, to provide immigrants and others a sense of what was important in a democratic society.

One wide street contained the most desirable properties, actual two-story brick with real lawns around them. Many were being used as Doctor's offices.

But on to the entertainment. A building with a giant carved wooden beer keg on top of the entrance. This was Hendricksons, a bar/restaurant from the 1870s that was hand-redesigned in the 1930s by a Bavarian architect. The place was small but beautiful, with stained-glass windows, intricate wood carvings, painted scenes of the old country, and barrel-vaulted ceilings.

But the tight-knit city is not lost in a time warp, no matter how much I'd like that. Snatches of Spanish could be heard on the main street, as well as on some signs. A city built by immigrants continuing the tradition.

It was only about a ten-minute ride to Exchange Place, where one can get the PATH train to downtown Manhattan. It's a little more to Hoboken, where the lines run to Midtown.

Better check Craigslist for rents soon.

Behind the Wall of Words

It's taken me years to construct the wall. Word by word, brick by brick, you think I am communicating with you when I am really shutting you out.

The ruse looks like this: I write on many subjects, from many points of view. I am then established as normal.

Then my opinions and observations don't seem so odd. Just another unread guy in the blogospere. I project cosmopolitanism through references in many cities when the truth is I am an unemployed loser striking out at the world through a computer in New Jersey.

I can't accept this person as me, especially since I used to be all those good things in the paragraph above. I am a scarecrow, a hollow man, a vessel for pain in motion. Come, invite me into your pain. I can sympathize.

How do I do it? How long can I pull this off? I drag my hunched form across the landscape,transporting not brain but wretched body from here to there, but as they say in AA, it's only a geographical move. My body haunts me, seizes me, cloaks me into what you might say is carrying the weight of the world.

It is heavier than you will ever know.

Eating My Words

A horrible news clip from one of the NY TV stations showing an elongated gay-bashing scene in Norwalk, Conn.
The amazing thing was the two guys doing the beating were not content to simply beat the man to the ground and stomp him, but that they kept doing it when he was down and defenseless. They wanted to kill him.
I know I have joked about gay-bashing in the past, but this was sickening. The practice is still far more rare than gay advocates claim now; it's not like it was in the 1960s and 1970s. But it looks like it still happens, and the absolute intention of severe bodily harm, if not death, was scary.
Norwalk is an odd place. Parts of it have been successfully developed as a nightlife center ("SoNo") for affluent Fairfield County young professionals. Parts of it, though, remain rough. When the two cultures collide, it isn't always positive.

Long-Distance Fag Bashing

Should any of you doubt my commitment to fag bashing, let me tell you about this past weekend and my righteous response to young teens who want to "come out."

Some 13-year-old kid appeared on the cover of the NYT magazine, declaring he was openly gay. That really got my blood up (and soon his blood up).

I flew to Oklahoma City, rented a car, then went to his podunk town. I knocked on the door. Soon the kid himself opened the door. I asked "are you Austin." When he said yes, I took his head in my hands and smashed it into the door as I closed it. There was a big smear of blood as he went down and crumpled.

"Awesome," I thought; one down and who knows how many to go?

It's safe to say, though, that "Austin" will not be advertising his sick, perverted, and twisted "lifestyle" anytime soon. All I need is a few good (hetero) men to kick his kind back in closet where they belong.

After the Revolution (Really)

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After the Revolution

Up against the wall, Redneck mother

As Princeton's lone redneck (and I say it with pride), I was saddened and dissapointed that I somehow missed NY's Gay Pride Day this past summer. Thousands of fags, and I overlooked the opportunity to punch and kick even one of them into complete unconsciousness.
I'm really getting annoyed at the lack of support I'm getting from the Heteros (meaning normal people). Some say that senseless violence and boneheadism is no way to win people over politically. To them I say look at the last true American who had the cojones to heckle Obama in his health care speech. We need more people with the kind of guts to act completely out-of-line and idiotically at a major national function.
I do not lie! Take your pick: idiocy and the totally broken status quo or socialism?
I'll tell you how I handle foreigners. I ask for some gas in NJ, where they still have (often) Auslander pump jockeys. I wait for them to start pumping, then take my own gas can, pour the contents over give-them-a-chance and they'll be Osama's bodies, then watch them flare up like a Roman Candle.
This is usually pretty effective at scaring their friends and families, but for some reason (probably terrorist infiltration) the police usually come along and arrest me and put me in the slam.
All I can think about is what the Michigan Militia would think of this, and they are just what this country needs. Balding middle-aged men with paunches could save us all, if we just armed them with the latest and most advanced military technology that they have no idea how to use.
Don't tread on me, at least not before dinner.

Burn, Hollywood, Burn!

Since there are so many "arsonists" maliciously burning mountains in the San Gabriels around LA, why doesn't someone start a tasty blaze right next to the famous "Hollywood" sign above Griffith Park?
The symbolism of that sign turning to toast would be the greatest photo-op since the WTC in NY. Because, when you think about it, it wasn't America's business practices that so offends Al-Queda and other groups; it's disgusting American culture.
Who is at the head of the juggernaut of violent and sexual images around the globe? Hollyweird. Who destroys local culture and cultural restraint? The same. Whose work product knows no boundaries, not national or moral? Guess. What is America's greatest export? Images, many of them non-traditional and a threat to those who hold those traditions.
So if you want to strike at the heart of the debased American lifestyle, I'll show you what to burn. I'm all for it, so long as no one gets killed.

Time Stands Still in Southern California

As summer fades into autumn in the Northeast, I have to wonder how people in Southern California know that time is passing.
Time for a new face-lift? Time to trade-up on your car? Time for yet another divorcee to move to Marina Del Rey? Time for a celebrity divorce after their dog-and-porney show Hollywood "marriages" that are lucky to last a year?
I hate what I love about LA, which is its constant social experimentation. But experimentation seems to devolve into naked narcissism. To which the inhabitants of Lotus-Land say "so what?". The cult of you has only been reinforced by Facebook et. al., where your life becomes distilled into a greeting card. Hallmark is being blown away by millions of people's advertisements for themselves.
The word I want to avoid, since it's been used by so many social observers, is "phoney." Is it phoney if you believe it yourself? Is the new you so oppositional to the old one that it amounts to putting on a Halloween mask for the rest of your life? Or does the mask become you? (apologies to Jim Carrey).
The Venice boardwalk is a wondrous thing, but it's also absurd. So many people trying to be different and special that they become a parody of themselves. Self-absorbed LA narcissists! How unusual! Then again, it's a supposed response to the social conformity of the places many of the boulevardiers came from, a chance to open your wings. Just try not to hit the next guy doing the same thing.
I'm obviously conflicted about the place and American society in general. Think I'll rebel against mainstream mores by walking up and down my street in a man-thong.

I am an Arizona Republican

I am an Arizona Republican. I live in the Phoenix area, where the average temp in summer is about 110 degrees, but we like it just fine here, thanks to:
1) Water supplied by damming the Colorado River, by the federal government
2) Relatively cheap electricity, from the feds again, to run our AC's at a frigid 68 degrees year-round.
3) The interstate highway system. Ninety percent paid for by the federal government. Otherwise, we'd be on rutted dirt roads.

Now the government is proposing spending it's money on the health-care uninsured, among others. Now our government-created city would face "socialized" medicine. Mobilize! Spend money on golf courses, not on the uninsured. I am a disgusting parody of the ugly American; help me fan the flames of absolute ignorance.

Thanks for your silence, which amounts to do-nothing acquiescence. All that evil requires to triumph, as someone said, is that good men do nothing.

Not Harvard, Hervard

I have come up with a plan to upend the American metritocracy on it's sacred ass. I'm starting a university. In Cambridge, MA. Called Hervard.
How to compete with the legendary college down the street? Easy; I allow absolutely no one get in. That's right. A rejection rate of 100 percent.
Famous scholars and world leaders would be invited, at an obscene rate, to lecture before absolutely empty lecture halls. The graduation speech would be determined by a mixure of People magazine covers and National Enquirer articles. Thinking of applying? Who the hell do you think you are?
Our campus would be run by Resorts International, and students would be spared no comfort. Bad feet at 2 am? We'll have someone there in a jiff. Far be it that even Freshman are consigned roommates. We have one-bedroom suites with a masseuse on call.
The catch? You'll never get in here. Not if you score 1600 on your SAT's. Our faculty spend their time suntanning, boozing, and writing terrible obscure scholarly papers that end up in Reader's Digest.
So remember. Down the street is America's oldest university. But in our high-rise condo campus, exclusion is everything. Harvard has an acceptance rate of under 10 percent, but let's see them top ours: 0 percent. Maybe the busboy's son would get in.
Yours in telling the meritocracy to shove it up their collective asses,

Tourguide,
Sept. 5, 2009

Absurd LA wildfire "arson" lies and myths

So the hills around LA are burning again. What a surprise! The Indians only called them the Fire Hills for a reason.
Every time fires start in the hills, there is a shadowy arsonist/homicidal maniac to blame. The only problem? This mythical person is never found, no matter what the ransom.
The people at fault are obviously the real estate industry, who keep building "view lot" houses deeper and deeper into the hills. The occupants of these dwellings then expect the government to bail them out with fire control measures like fire-dousing water and powder from helicopters.
The only thing that turns the fires around, though, is a lessening of the Santa Ana winds that blow fire on everything in range and are literally uncontrollable. The Indians set fires every fall to cut down the chaparral so that the fires would be controlled.
Instead, you have real estate-connected politicians insisting that there is not enough fire retardation being done. In hills that are built to burn.
Mark my words. No legitimate "arsonist" will be caught. They've tried the bribe (excuse me "reward") before, and came up with a whole lot of nothing. Here's betting on the same.

Local News as told by Bushy Mustaches

Philadelphia news was hilarious through the 1970s and 1980s, especially if you lived where I did, between the Philly market (largely ignored) and the New York market (where many locals commuted to for its high salaries).
First of all was (were?) the mustaches, and the cheap sets. And the yellow blazers. It sounds like something out of that Will Ferrell movie, but it was true. Action News. Cue the sound.
This was during the period in which Philly lost a quarter of it's population, and Frank Rizzo was mayor. Rizzo basically had one commandment: keep the (Italian word for black) in line. Nonetheless the city kept losing it's manufacturing jobs (it was "the workshop of the world").
New York liberals at the same time decided that it was a racist society that accounted for black underclass crime. As a result of their heartfelt understanding, they got mugged numerous times and privatized their schools, transportation, and housing.
The local TV stations were the networks' flagship stations: WCBS. WNBC, and WABC. The anchormen seemed sophisticated and worldly. Crime was, in retrospect, played down, leaving the subject open for the Daily News and the Post.
A confession. I love the NY Post. It is truly local, and as a former reporter, totally biased. The first thing they teach you in journalism classes is the danger of editorializing. This means putting your opinion into a piece. The Post does this routinely, calling various accused people "scum," "pervert", "dirtbag" and other insults. This would be really fun writing.
My favorite section of the Post is the Police Blotter. It tells you what crimes have taken place in various far-flung areas of the city. Often there is videotape footage attached.
If not, there are suspect's names. Since you can't identify the race of a suspect in your article, unless it is relevant (check out the AP stylebook) to the attack, you get to guess the race by the accused names.
This is a piece of cake with Latinos, who all seem to be named Jesus and have the last name Martinez. With blacks, black parents have now decided to give their children names that are obviously black, which is good. Except if you get arrested, in which case readers can easily identify your race by their strangely Africanized names (Ju-won this, Latrelle that, D-Shawn, Shaquille O'Neal). Don't get me wrong. This is a terrible developement, but if the papers don't identify the race of an assailant, then TV news will take over with their artist sketchists (yes I know it's misspelled).
Face the music, America. You're only as multi-culti as to the degree that you include American blacks. No matter how many people of another race prosper here, the country's original sin of slavery has not been wiped out. Keep trying.

Philadelphia

Always in the shadow of NY and DC, Philly has an inferiority complex that is entirely undeserved. I decided to take Lux on a tour of the city's fine, and cheap bars.
McGuillens, the oldest bar in the city. Bob and Barbara's, who serve only PBR in cans, the punk rock bar that's aging, just like punk. Dirty Frank's, where it's always midnight, thanks to the total lack of windows (it was closed unfortunately on Sunday). Philly and Baltimore are the best bar towns on the East Coast.
Why? They're still essentially working class burgs, and no one worries about appearing drunk on the 11 o'clock news because no one knows them, aside from friends and family.
If you live in DC, you owe it to yourself to go to Fell's Point or (now) Canton in Baltimore. It would do your uptight ass some good, and you can be shitfaced at 1 pm and no one cares.
The classic DC posture was best brought to light by John Riggins, former Redskins running back, who passed out under a table at some event where Justice Sandra Day O'Conner was attending. "Sandy, baby," he said. "Loosen up, you're too tight." The whole town could benefit from that advice.
Heil to the Redskins.

The Silence

Sorry for the silence, but I've been off the web and into the real world too much. Awful last week, with my brother Paul's legs almost being amputated between a train and a platform on New Jersey Transit. He is still in the hospital where they did a great job on him. But it will be a long, residential recovery just as he was getting his life together after some tough times.
Otherwise my sometime-girlfriend and always soul-mate Rachel had her mother die so quickly it was unreal. Her mother was diagnosed with a fatal disease, on top of the one she had before, on a Saturday. By Friday she was gone, at age 63.
When my own mother died back in 1990 I remember thinking that there was going to be some kind of climactic scene where I would say goodbye to her just before she died. It happened too fast for that for me, and unfortunately for Rachel as well, nothing like it happened. It's what Hollywood has conditioned us to expect, but it rarely happens that way.
So I've been playing games with Fugazi videos instead. By the way, if you are feeling melancholy about fate, try to rent Ingmar Bergman's The Silence . Literally, there are about five lines of dialogue in it, but the title is in reference to the silence of God in the world and its affairs and random cruelty. There is a constant wind-in-the-plains whishing-whistling sound, but no words from above to comfort the characters. A real laff-fest, but more on the mark about the human (and divine) condition than 10 Hollywood feel-gooders.

Fugazi - Waiting Room Wilson Center 1988

Fugazi Long Division

Fugazi Waiting Room Wilson Center DC 1988

Fugazi Video Dallas 1995

The Flying None

There is nothing more foreign and antithetical to Hollywood than Nuns. That's why they dress the women up in totally dated penguin suits that no one has worn for forty years. It highlights the supposed absurdity of the whole idea of, uh, Nunnery, Nunhood? Whatever.

What is truly bizarre to Hollywood is that a young woman would want to cover her physical self in obeisance to the life of the spirit. You're throwing it all away! They say, in ways that are painfully obvious. The only life a young woman should have should revolve around her physical attractiveness. To do otherwise is truly weird, almost like joining Jim Jones in Guyana.

So Southern California is open and receptive. To all who obey the law of the land, which is Hedonism. Kicks, baby, get them while you can. It's only later that faded starlets realize that the code is a trap. After they get beyond a certain age, it's out with the old, in with the new. As some rock band said, "They will never forget you 'til somebody new comes along." (I think the name of the song was "Shooting Star.")

Al-Queda criticized the US for spreading this kind of amoral philosophy around the world through movies, TV, and radio. This may be the one thing they had right: there is something deeply sickening about American culture.

Superficiality is a moral good, stupidity about the public interest is the wisdom of the masses, and being an uncomplaining smiling birdbrain is valued above all (especially if you do it in front of cameras: look, I'm famous!)

This is why Hollywood still makes movies about nuns in penguin suits. Can't you see the absurdity of it all? Mellow out, put on a bikini, and soak up the rays. Life is good, and when it's not, get plastic surgery.

You've Heard it Before

Can't let you behind the curtain
Can't let you see the mundane
Tricks behind the golden door
Trajectory of my life a long stain

What a freak!
Already feeling like a geek
Don't need more to pour
Into the crushed and innocent soul

Very oblique, very untold
No one to purchase if and when it's sold
Like a spaceman, an alien amongst you.
Thought I was through, thought I didn't have to be told.

Stay away. I am not like you.
Stay and pray. I do not like the things you do.
In a body like a torture chamber, like a dungeon.
Too many thoughts to fill without a blugeon

I can only feel the hate
I can only feel the hate
Coursing, burning through me
Just the way it's been
Since 1993

Reach out and receive, the unarmed arm
God's finger, a wishing singer
Don't let me infect you
I am a disease thorough and through
And I don't want to talk about it with you

Wish

I wish she could see
How deep it all cuts to me
I wish I was a real boy
Then I wouldn't have to treat you like a toy

It's not so easy
Finding someone who understands
And the many times
That you for me took a stand

I just need some connection
So cut off and cast off
A long time since my inauguration
Into the world of pain and isolation.

I wish I could tell you
All the things you did for me
But all I really want
Is for someone else to be he

Who will heal your wounds
Who would dry your eyes
I can't stand thinking about what you're thinking about
And the tears to hold back you would try

Sir Galahad, rescue you from the world
Shelter you, protect you from what's real
And what it is with which we make a deal
Into my body I make a curl.

Sent as though from above
You gave me tears you gave me love
But I could not feel
With my compromised life, I could only make a deal

In panic, I cannot let you drift away
You're the only thing that makes it worth my day
Would that I could be what you want
And you to be what shall not haunt

Who else to understand?
Who else to make a man?
Who else to make me feel?
Who else is so surreal?

Take your body
Take your head
I want to lay you on a bed
Of roses and everything that's bled

The Rape Room

Apparently Saddam Hussein had "Rape Rooms" included in every palace he had constructed, which were legion.

What I want to know is, who were his architects?

Imagine walking one of his palaces with Hussein. He would rub his beard in deep thought, and then say "where should I put the Rape Room?" Being that the palaces had dozens of rooms, this was not an inconsequential decision. One mistake and off with your head.

Or did he simply decree "bring me the finest Rape Room architects in the land!"
This may well have been a course of study at Iraqi university, being that there was a constant demand for them.

The position of the Rape Room was a serious matter. Right off your regular bedroom, or in a dank cellar where no one could hear the, er, guests?

I tried this with some local architects ("and this would be the Rape Room"), and they recoiled. You can't get good sexual assault help these days, I swear.

In a massive palace, it must have been confusing. Was the door unmarked, or, to avoid a mix-up, was there a simple placard outside reading "Rape Room." Much easier.

Before someone accuses me of misogyny, I will have to note that Rape Room architecture has come a long way. There is usually a full DVD-HDTV set-up in there, as well as the usual pillow-strewn genie-bottle room. Slaves from Kurdistan would be at their beck and call. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.

My place went south as soon as I hit the bars. I'd get into a conversation with a woman, then say "My Rape Room or your place, baby?" This somehow seemed to turn them off. Guess what I need are armed security ready to break some bones when the negotiations get to that point.

Sincerely,
Tourguide

Radio Free Europe

It sounded unlike anything I had heard before. From the echoing buried chorus to the bell-tone hi-hat cymbals at the end, it was way cooler than what I had heard before.

The Boog had it going on. Besides "college music" (REM in this case), there was a wall-lining shelf full of beer cans, many of which were defunct, surrounding his room at just above eye-level.

If coolness could radiate, it would have done so towards me. The album (REMs' "Murmur") was so far beyond what my friends knew that I started worshiping College Rock. I felt like I was in some kind of secret society just knowing about it.

When I got to actual college (Tulane) I was shocked to find most of my classmates still listed to high-school oriented Top-40. I can remember talking about some crap Duran Duran song, trashing it, then having the other people in the room ask me what was wrong with it? I was so flustered that anyone at that level could enjoy that pap all I could offer was "it would take too log to explain."

The college had a perfectly good radio station, one that suffered from the hipper-than-thou syndrome. The challenge among the DJs was to find a song that was so obscure than no one had ever heard it. Usually for good reason. As a friend said, they were so avant-garde that they sucked.

At Madison, my second (and better) university, some in-state schmuck wrote an us-vs.-them article in the Badger-Herald, the competition for our left-wing rag The Daily Cardinal.

First, you have to understand that the out-of-state people ran everything. The student government, the student union programming, the film society, the two (!) student newspapers; and practically everything worthwhile, though we constituted about one-third of all undergrads.

Anyhow, this columnist talked about how "they" listed to Natalie Merchant and REM, while "we" listed to various god-awful bands like Styx and Journey. This was doubly amusing since those two bands (REM and Merchant) had long ago been picked up by major labels.

There was a certain Deer-in-the-Lights quality to rural or even suburban Wisconsinites. They couldn't believe what you did, whether it was putting together a piece like this or a Fellini movie in an unused classroom.

I can vividly remember going to a free preview of a terrible Kevin Costner movie at Social Sciences hall. I fully expected that maybe 20-30 people would show up, like in the film society flicks. Instead, the place was packed.

Who were these people? The answer was that they were the two-thirds of the campus population that never appeared in the papers, and didn't hang out at the student union at all hours like everyone else we knew.

My belief in my cultural superiority was reinforced by a scene where Costner jumps off the Whitehurst Freeway in DC and into the Georgetown metro subway station. Besides the logistics involved, there was one great problem in the scene: Georgetown does not have a metro subway stop.

Back to the Boog. I can live without him, but I cannot forget the good times we had: going to the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and Montreal. Searching NYC for the last German neighborhood (somewhere in Queens), traveling by ferry and Staten Island Transit to Killmayers, a beerhall on the southern end of that benighted borough.

We conquered the North Bronx, Woodlawn and the rest, and partied with the immigrants when Ireland won a certain round in the world cup. One to nothing, and the crowd took over the streets in pint-smashing celebration.

You don't need to know that I miss those times, only I don't resent anything. I have frustrated multiple mental health professionals: I don't expect you to be any different (just don't charge me as much).

Almost

I almost had you
I almost achieved transcendence
I almost loved
I almost satisfied my lust
For living

I really let you get away
I really am gone today
I could smell you
I could feel only a part of you
The rest still out of bounds

Heaven and Earth
Linked together in your flesh
If only I had acted earlier
Then I wouldn't wish I had
One chance and it never comes back

The top of Reno hill
You said I was different
Hoping it was a compliment
Jack and Jill
But only I fell down the hill
Oblique and Cryptic in a life Dyspeptic

Too many lines for beauty
Too many years to recover
Once over it's over
Never could find a four-leaf clover
One shot and the rifle kicked back at me

But now it's way past 1993, or 1985
Far more than five times five.
I've lost a life, more than twice.
Don't want to think about my body and the lice.
Never having felt anyone, only everyone's pain

I apologize, to all of you
So ready to give yourselves
Away, away to a black hole
I've got nothing but sorrow and pain in my soul
Keep Away, the sign reads in front, seconds from a subway train.

Baseball and America

The players were only about 20 years old. The stands were half-empty. The ads on the wall were the biggest thing in the place. Still, seeing the class AA Trenton Thunder on a sunny Sunday afternoon in mid-summer was about the most American thing I have done in a long time, and not just because my cousin's four-year-old boy got a real bat from a player at the end of the game.
I know baseball is mythologized to the hilt, but there is something purer about the game than football, our real national pastime. Football represents all things modern American: speed,action, violence and the celebration and deification of all those things. Baseball may be "a picnic for retards," but it is a picnic in its timeless pace and pure enjoyment of environment and company. Especially at the minor league level.
There is something better about the American spirit in that game at that level. No one's rooting for someone to be "killed," as I sometimes say in football games. Instead it is slow strategy, and the ballet of fielding, and the tension and release at the end of the best games.
Bottom of the ninth. Two outs, two strikes and two balls. Game tied 1-1. Trenton batter hits a shot to left, and it falls just before the fielder's glove. Game over, celebration at the plate, and a real Louisville Slugger for my cousin's boy. Pine Tar all over it and everything. Like few things in Digitalized Life, it felt real.

"About Cars and Baseball"

This was possibly the greatest headline for a story I have ever seen. It appeared in a bar-rag newspaper in DC, and was actually the most sexist article I have ever seen; about picking up girls, use-and-abusing them, then throwing them away. The title of the piece was deliberatly intended so that actual females would never read it.
The Onion would later become masters at the non-sequiter school of headlines, but this one might have beat them all. When I started this blog, I used the Onion's inspiration in titleing a piece about nothing (doing laundry, surfing mindless cable) "The Death of All Mankind.". The portetiousness of the title, as you can see, had nothing to do with its contents.
Headline juxtiposition can also be hilarious. In high school, there was a story in the student paper about the Russian play "The Idiot." The same headline about the show ran right over a picture of the math teacher.
I'm waiting for an article skewering men called something like "about fashion (or babies) and weddings." It wasn't too long ago that they called the wedding pages of the NYT "The Women's Sports Section."

Last Stop for Moynihan Station?

Haven't seen anything in the news (meaning the NYT) about the long-delayed Moynihan Station, conceived of and basically half-financed by my ex-boss, the political and scholarly genius (formerly) Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), who's seat Hillary took over when he passed away.
The idea seemed so simple that it might actually get done in post-Robert Moses NY. Convert McKim, Mead, & White's 33rd and Eighth Ave. monumental post office into a replacement for the city's greatest act of civic vandalism, the 1960s criminal destruction of their original Neo-Classical masterpiece, the old Pennsylvania Station, where the already completely dated Madison Square Garden and underground hellhole replacement station are now.
The PO was moving to new quarters. Why not use the space for something beautiful and uplifting for the hundreds of thousands of commuters and others who use the station now (ever been to the LIRR platform? Like Dante's vision of Hell, only more crowded and with less light)?
This was 1996. Anyone see anything recently in the news? I know the Dolan's want to replace MSG (it needs it) but nothing recently.

Moynihan was someone who got into trouble because he told people uncomfortable truths that happened to be, well, true. We know how far that gets you in Washington.
Most famous was his 1965 report on the "Negro Family" that said that black men were abandoning their children at truly alarming rates, leaving behind furious fatherless boys that inevitably came to a bad end. Though this turned out to be unfortunately right on the mark, the left at the time accused him of "blaming the victim."

Even more ridiculous was the brou-ha-ha over what became to be known as "the benign neglect memo," which said that racial rhetoric (this was 1970) could "benifit from a period of benign neglect." This somehow got translated in the press as "Moynihan Says Ignore Black Complaints." Moynihan was working as a special advisor to Nixon (yes, Nixon).

Moynihan was a brilliant scholar who was sometimes regarded, (and he humorously acknowledged this)as not being entirely serious by New York Intellectuals because he was not Jewish. Worse, he was an Irish Catholic, just like the kids that beat them up on the way to Schul.

At the same time, he was misunderstood by the civil rights era black leadership because he was so blunt and seemingly unapologetic and unsympathetic to the plight of blacks. This couldn't have been more off the mark, as he often sympathetically compared them to the unwanted and often vilified Irish immigrants of the 19th Century.

He is buried in an unremarkable grave in Arlington Cemetery. Like my father, he barely missed WWII. When I collected his military medals for him (I was putting together an-all inclusive biographical resume for him, the job I was hired for), he said, with characteristic humor, "Oh, they gave you those for just showing up."

I can't stand it anymore

What's real?
What's new?
I ain't turning my back on you
It might be simple it might be true
I might be overwhelmed by you
You might be empty
In spite of everything you do
It's such a mess now anyway
Wish fulfillment everyday
I don't believe you
Don't you know you know it's true?

"Wish Fulfillment," Sonic Youth

Kreisberg - Our Dead Homie Found

Found Kreisberg's tree in Lafayette Park in DC the other day. It is in the corner closest to Quesada and Broadbranch. It is a sapling, with a little rectangular plate that says "In memory of Robin Kreisberg."

Me, Keith and Karin(his German girlfriend)made it with a pack of Milwaukee's Best. We drank to his spirit and poured Best on the tree (and probably killed it). Karin was a good sport, being attacked by mosquitoes as she took photos. Hint to Lux: this is the one.

We felt kind of ridiculous in this neighborhood of little children and small animals to be hanging and drinking at pale evening in Lafayette Park. We thought of how funny it would be if the DC cops told "us kids" to get moving, then seeing our rapidly graying hair and being confused.

I can remember when I came down from NJ with Tony Rotelli. We were driving down to New Orleans for fall semester. We stopped at DC and went to a party that backed onto the park. I asked Tony later if he liked my friends.

"How could anyone not like those guys?" he said. He had been given the Brewski Brothers reception, which was essentially brewski brotherhood for all, almost all the time.

I also remember one stupid time drinking up there where there were a group of younger guys there as well. We traded insults until I heard a voice I knew. It was Christian Therouex, brother of the now film-actor Justin Theroeux.

The Boog had somehow got the idea that he was a tough guy in the face of totally peaceful, overeducated Upper Northwest youth. After I left, he apparently egged them on in his weird and completely unfounded and manifestly absurd belief (try Foxhall Road next time).

Not that it matters now. So long as he treats Erin right.

Back to the present. We came down the hill and into the alley between Quesada and Patterson to show Karina the wonders of Supercanning. We ran right into Scott McLeod's mother. Keith and her bantered a bit. Kreisberg's mother's light was on, but we were being eaten alive by mosquitoes and so split.

Karin asked how the neighborhood produced so many writers, actors, musicians, and designers. Keith said we were just too stupid to know that investment banking was the ticket.

But it was a good question. I lived just over the Western Ave. border where everyone did go into investment banking. In just a few blocks, everything changed to Chevy Chase, DC liberalism.

Interesting question. Maybe the foundation for an article.

Dissendent Part II

I don't care what the news says: this country is more deeply in trouble than it has been since WWII.
We have an acceptance of a criminal culture that sends 13-year-olds to death. We have another quote "inner city" country within us that we won't or can't acknowledge. We have a government that will gladly bail out Wall St., but will argue on and on about "choice" in any government health plan, which are so obviously better than the private insurers it is unreal.
Here's the choice: we either accept higher taxation specifically tailored to health care or people die in emergency rooms. Every other westernized nation has accepted this; it takes Bob Dole in arguing that GM would be competitive in the world market if it does not have to pay enormous health care and pension bills to make it almost hit home here.
As for "a nameless bureaucrat" deciding who gets to decide who gets which care, well, how is that different from a Humana Health Care drone deciding the same thing? Stop being babies and face up to health care as part of your cost of living. Even if it means higher taxes (an NYT poll concluded that people would, or at least they might.)
My father says that the US has been arguing about universal health care since the 1940s. Are we ready yet?

The Berg in Ashes

Kreisberg was never buried in Wichita. There was a service in the local Unitarian Church, then his ashes were scattered.
This is according to his brother Roderick, aka Guen. I found him serving an internship in Gastroentology and Hepatology at the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore County.
There is a Robin Kreisberg award in Wichita for budding radio announcers. It's given out there, though there is both a Robin Kreisberg award or scholarship at Wilson HS as well, and a memorial tree in Lafayette Park in Chevy Chase.
Still thinking of going out to KC to interview my Catholic-radical guru, Charles Carney, who recently got a 12-month suspended sentence and a $500 fine for his protest activities around the School of the Americas.
For anyone who doesn't know what this is, it has been called the "School for Torture," at the Ft. Benning Army Base in Georgia. It's official aim is (or was) to teach Latin American dictatorships how to be democratic. That was the official line. Lefties accused it of actually teaching new methods of torture to use against Communist and Socialist (and maybe Populist) opposition members.
Charles set up my PLM year in Detroit, as well as programs in Chicago and Cincinnati.
He is hardcore in a pleasant way, never blowing his own horn. His wife does not believe in private property (property is theft, remember?). Hopefully I can get him some ink in Commonweal or America or the other Catholic lefty mags. Still hope to make it out there and then to Wichita, where hopefully some of his collegues remember him.
Guen cautioned, though, that many members of the radio industry move around a lot, so we will see.

I'm So Not There

Apparently the word's gotten around that I'm not at Beachweek this summer. An from what I've read, it's just not the same.
The Baltimore Sun ran a series of interviews with local teens. Almost to a man (or chick) they said some variation of the below:
"All our lives we hear about Beachweek, both the person and the event. Well now we're finally here, but where is the legendary Beachweek?" A tear rolled slowly down her face.
The answer is I'm keeping a low profile because of some ridiculous statutory-rape charge last summer. Like that little fourteen-year-old minx didn't totally want it!
It has been quite the difference between years past, when youth far and wide gathered round myself on the beach late at night to hear tales of Beachweek past.
I played Plato to the various Phadreus' arrayed around the sand fire. "Tell us about Beachweek before 21 (year-old drinking age)," they would invariably beg.
"Many butt-head moons ago," I would tell them, "Beachweek was far more adored by the partying Gods than now."
But there were always a few wiseacres who called me "old man," and did not respect the ultimate in sacrifices I made for the nation's youth: without when,then: a case of Milwaukee's Best.
My various acolytes would always mysteriously vanish when the liquor stores closed. Occasionally I would find myself in a very cozy sleeping bag, if you understand my meaning, but more often I slept like a wolf in the dunes. I would greet the new day's dawn with a freshly cracked Best.
Shaking the sand from my hair, I would raise one to the new day. "Hey bud," I said to the rising sun, "let's Beachweek."

GM Sold for Scrap

It was the one symbol left that Detroit Still Mattered. The GM sign on the circular 70-story-plus central building of the Renaissance Center. Though the RenCen got a lot of criticism for its fortress architecture, that sign and building could be seen for miles across the city's low-rise and often decaying landscape.

The RenCen was finally remodeled to make it a little more pedestrian-friendly from its surrounding streetscape. If you know nothing of the center, it was Fort Whitey to the extreme. Seven towers placed on a parking garage and an interior bomb-shelter-like superstructure that contained an inscrutibly laid-out shopping mall.

The whole structure was placed right on the Detroit River, and could be driven into directly from a freeway. Where it faced the city, in one direction only, there was what was called an "air-conditioning berm" that made it almost impossible to get to from the street. It looked for all the world like a deliberately-placed high fortress wall. The whole thing connected to Detroit's bizarre People-Mover, the fully automated and often empty monorail that loops around the city's often deserted downtown.

(When my younger brother first took a look at the place, he went into a tour-guide voice and said "this was built in the 1970s to repel the invading Negroes.")

The berm came down, and GM moved to the place from their former Midtown offices. If you've ever seen "Roger and Me" by Michael Moore, you could see that the former headquarters of the world's largest auto company was located in a collection of odd, musty, and completely unimpressive 1920s buildings.

Love it or hate it, the RenCen's bulk does make an impression of power. That's why the TV cameras all focused on it while the company was going down the tubes. It could end up just like the rest of Detroit: disposible, throwaway, outdated. This has become the way we treat older cities now. As the Onion wrote: "Detroit Sold For Scrap."

The Tyranny of Equality

Two pieces on my Yahoo! news service. First one: "Best Hairstyles to Fit Your Face." Second, and underneath it: "Air France Jet Carrying 228 Feared Lost."

There is obviously something very very wrong with the way the internet presents news, and the example above is probably one of the worst. Some newspapers are trying to present a layout like a newspaper, with larger type and bigger presentation to the important instead of the trivial (yes, unless you are a mid-1960s Beatle your hairstyle is trivial).

Believe it or not, there is still power in a headline. When I went to the Newseam in DC they featured the headlines of leading papers after 9/11. When Obama won the presidency, newspapers sold out, because the everyone knew the headlines were history.

By the way, the New York Times.1) AMERICA ATTACKED. 2) OBAMA

The Great Pizza War

It started over a piece of pizza and ended with people screaming at each other so loudly that the staff had to come over to ask them to calm down.

This was with my friend Allan, a brilliant physicist who has remained close to his working class Glasgow roots. He knows on a first-name basis all the campus police and staff, the people everyone else largely ignores.

We were awaiting the return of family friends, the Brumbaughs, to return to the class of 59 tent. A female friend Allan had once met on a dating web site was hungry and wanted a slice of pizza. She had no arm band to get her in and out, though she had somehow gotten in and didn't want to risk being kept out next time.

Govinda, Allan's girlfriend, had come down from New York, and nicely went out to get a slice from a place almost right outside. Allan explodes at the other girl, who is with a date. The date leaves and hides or something.

Meanwhile, the entire party, there by a tent offering unlimited beer as long as you want, breaks up and leaves after taking sides on who should have gotten the pizza. There were fireworks (real ones) briefly later, but the night had been ruined. Over pizza. In New Jersey.

Even the Golden Ones

In the movies an acceptance to Princeton is like being conferred knighthood. For the rest of your life, you will be above the common serfs, and you will now cruise through life utterly untroubled, with every golden door held open just for you.

I picked up a slim booklet on a table after a party. The next group to use the space was the class of 1984, for a memorial service. 29 members of that class and the others near it were now dead.

There has been no major war since the now departed were 22 years-old. Just life's ordinary casualties. Though you wouldn't know it from TV, not everyone makes it to their 70s.

It reminded me of when Alison Fraker, the most beautiful girl in my high school class, died in a car accident while still in college. An earthly angel had somehow departed. Beauty is fragile, though we connote it with strength of character and will and even with immortality. Think of JFK Jr. or Princess Diana.

So are the deaths of these people, the supposedly best and the brightest, more tragic than that of inner-city teenagers? More than 30 died in just the last school year in Chicago. The common refrain that was doubtlessly said of the Princetonians was that "they had so much to live for."

I learned from the booklet that there is now a class of 1984 stone placed on Nassau Hall, the 1755 main building of campus. Ashes to ashes, dust to stone.

TIger Anthropology

Now I know why they call it "The Orange Dome." The Princeton campus is so self-contained that the rest of the world just drops away when you are there, especially at night. You walk through endless courtyards, walkways, and arches and really never have to leave for much. It's like an academic theme-park that seems to go on forever.

I had this ridiculous spangled wrist-band that let me into any reunion. The reunions take place inside these hastily-assembled fenced-in areas that make the campus look like Fort Ticonderoga. They are divided by year or years of graduations. You are supposed to come back every five years or so.

First, with my young friend and former Evelyn Place roomer Christian (Princeton 03)as a guide, we tried the 20th, since my one Princeton townie friend to go to the university was in that class. No luck among the returnees, half of whom looked as though they had dropped tousle-haired off a sailboat in a Land's End catalog.

Then to the 25th, which had terrible music, but through Christian I met a fascinating girl from New Orleans (too bad she was there with her boyfriend). I stayed, shouting fruitlessly into my cell to try to connect with a friend on staff at the Physics Department. All I got as a response was, not surprisingly, music and crowd noise from somewhere. The next day I found him and the Great Pizza War commenced(more on that later).

Went briefly to try to find Christian among the youngsters at the 5th and 10th reunion. No luck, but a great band with four black female singers and seemingly 10 musicians of various stripes. I was reminded of how much I miss good live music since I don't go into Philly or NY much anymore.

Since I never feel the compulsion to stay out till very late much anymore, I left and hobbled on home.

A Reunion Blur Remembered

The euro-tunes blasting from the DJ booth were wretched. This was inside the Princeton class of 1984's 25th reunion tent on the campus. The songs made me remember why I hated the soulless, powerless and emotionless techno-boing boing music of that era. How I turned to 1960s rock for something that sounded real.

Suddenly clean, simple guitar chords cut through everything else, and the Ramones started singing "I Wanna Be Sedated." I was immediately brought back to the thrill of first hearing this song back in high school, it's three-chord power, drive, and joy. I even started dancing on my still half-broken ankle. So did everyone else.

Just like then, the Ramones rocked.

Someday You Will Ache Like I Ache

Salt my tears and salt my wounds
I think that I can fly
and though it's not worth remembering
I'd rather forget why

"June," by Will Croxton

Anybody out there looking for me?

I saw on one of those find-someone web-sites that two women are looking for me. That's OK, unless one or more is schlepping along someone who calls me Daddy.
The one who's from Westlake HS is obviously Nancy V., from Thousand Oaks, CA, though she now lives in London. Another, A., is from Luton, the dumpy London suburban ring town where her husband lives.
What confuses me is who is in their 50s and from Asheville, NC, and who is also in their 50s and from Gaithersburg (I have an idea about this).

The North Shall Rise Again

I stand corrected. Detroit and Chicago are playing each other in a real Central division line-up. This is about all the city can root for at this point. On the bright side, the "Carolin" Hurricanes are being destroyed by Pittsburgh, thus keeping hockey a northern sport as its supposed to be.

IN b-ball, the Lakers, a bunch of pansy-ass celebrities, will probably defeat Denver. In closely watched contests, both Cleveland and Orlando (die, die) have won one apiece in closely fought contests.

Remember, root for real cities. The other places are just locations for McMansions.

Cat's in the Cradle

Should playing "Cat's in the Cradle," willingly, be grounds for justifiable homicide? Someone corrected me when I said it was by Jim Croce, not Harry Chapin. Thanks.

"American Pie," on the other hand, should be destroyed by whomever touches it. Best thing about it were the movies it inspired.

The roofers and painters are gone now, so hopefully I'll never have to hear either one of these wretched sing-a-longs ever again.

Cities that should never have championship teams

Somebody correct me. The Detroit Red Wings are playing the Pittsburgh Penguins in some kind of hockey semi-final. So too, God help Me, are the Anaheim Mighty Ducks.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that nobody in Southern California cares about hockey. Unfortunately, with the expansion of the league teams like the Mighty Ducks (I'm told that the name comes from a movie: how Southern Cal apropos) now have enough baksheesh to purchase expensive foreign players and win.

Any hockey team that competes with surfing for attention shouldn't win. It is an act of God against God.

Who should win? Some kind of wretched place like Ottowa. Failing that, a real working class place like Detroit or Pittsburgh. These are cities that have almost no in-migration for jobs for years, and are made up of people who have been there for generations. They actually care about Hockey!

Last year was almost perfect in that it shut out trashy nouveu-rich Sunbelt "cities" like God help me Orlando (even more spread out than Atlanta). Detroit won in Hockey, and Boston in basketball. LA looks like they're going to win in b-ball, but that's OK, since LA has now become a real city through two of the most destructive riots in the nation's history.

Its joke-ass "places" like Carolina that should properly be hated. The football team and I guess basketball team (the Hurricanes?) should whither and die, because of this: since when is "Carolina" a place? North or South? East or West? They play in Charlotte, which bizarrely hopes to be the next Atlanta, which to me connotes that they mean to capture the ugly and worthless crown among the nation's cities.

So let's hear it for the places that care, for the places that generation on generation root for the same team: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and of course tiny Green Bay.

NOTE:

The non-performance of the Washington Nationals is of serious consequence. If another baseball team leaves the DC area it will be said, stupidly, that DC is "not a baseball town." But even with the new stadium, the team constantly ranks as (often) the worst team in baseball. The old saying was "Washington; first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League East."
But we're talking about a place that went from just over two million people when the Senators left in 1971 to a market of over five million now. That's right, the DC area is over twice the size it was then. It's the eighth largest media market in the nation. It's also, by some estimates, the wealthiest metro area in the nation: will area residents again have to make the pilgrimage to much smaller but protalitarian Baltimore for baseball?

"Schlockorama 09"

"You blown it all sky high," and "Grease." I want to kill.

You can't hide

I found your site, cabron. 3000 miles cannot hide, rambler

Philly History 102

The director of Philadelphia's tourism agency wants all guides to pass a basic proficiency exam (have I written on this before?).
As the Tourguide, I have taken and passed in a breeze the tests in New York and Washington. The questions are on the order of: what borough is Manhattan a part of?

In NY, the bureaucrat came out and said I'd scored about a 98 percent. So what? Its pass-fail. I didn't command any higher a salary than the guy who scored 71 percent.

The tourism director in Philly wrote down the real howlers that he heard. My favorite was that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln used to dine together at City Tavern.
First of all, that would have made Washington about 160 years old. Secondly, the circa 1773 tavern had been destroyed, only to be rebuilt as a tourist attraction about 100 years later.

All I can say is that it's a shame that the guide didn't note that Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius broke bread there as well. What an orgy followed.

Date-Rape: A How-To Guide

I'd never get away with this.

Squirrly

A squirrel who would not leave the third floor bathroom. When approached, it would make a sound as much as possible like a dog growling.
Finally pushed it out with a broom. It kept squirrel-growling even outside. It guess it's flight-or-fight. What an entrenched behavior.

Eight Miles High

Item in the NYT today (?) on how Anise (absinthe) is making a comback, since it is now legal again, despite the mildly hallucinogenic worm inside it.
I first had it in a dumpy, small Manhattan tenement apartment that nonetheless had access to a backyard on (about) E. 40th between 2nd and 3rd.
Some substance had to be burned through a sugar cube and a spoon with holes in it, then drank. It was also 70 proof.
I went out to the backyard, which was ringed by 40-story apartment buildings. They were massive, like redwoods. Pretty soon I found myself drifting upwards outside their balconies.
I must be a lightweight, because I felt pretty out of body. But it can't be that good if they are now selling it legally. And the high was over pretty damn quick.
Any experiences/recommendations out there in blogland?

schlock-o-rama

Help! I'm being surrounded by bad songs from thirty years ago. The house painters have a boom-box from which issues: the Bee Gees, Don Henley, bad Rod Stewart, and various and sundry awful songs of all stripes. It is like when I listened to WABC 77 New York when growing up.
Only a few more days. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the songs, as long as they're schlock. Today or from 30 years ago. They are different from each other only in their titles and year of issue: they have in common one thing; they suck. A lot.
On the other hand, there are songs which you thought you'd never hear again, and don't mind hearing since you haven't heard them in years: Summer of 69, Boys of Summer, Forever Jung (I mean young).
On the other hand, there are tunes which should be banned by the Geneva Convention on torture, like the one playing now. Jim Croce's mind-bendingly awful "Cat's in the Cradle." If I hear American Pie I'm going to start pulling down their ladders.
The unifying characteristic of all the tunes is this: you've heard it before, over and over again. A new tune is greeted like the Black Death.
"She Drives Me Crazy" (me too), then a (comparitively) new song! "you found me" (I don't know the band, weird that it's semi-new though cornballish). Have to admire the guy's work ethic, since last week was so rainy, it's now 6:45 eastern time.
The painter's truck is parked right in our front yard, so he can get the lift up to the third floor. Give me Sanctuary!
I guess the whole idea is to sing along to music you've heard so many times before. NTT snob David Brooks says that one difference between the middle and upper-middle class is that the latter is always looking for new experience, whereas the former is looking for what is familiar.
"I can dream about you (if I can't hold you tonight)" is playing. Please help me from jumping off the third floor balcony.

A Dissedent is Here

The USA is the greatest country in the world. Why? Because we tolerate dissent in the pursuit of a democratic society.
You don't have to be Borat to poke holes in everything written above. So far, we are a chickenshit society in two ways: limiting big money in Washington, and curtailing manifestly stupid peoples' idea that freedom translates into shooting everyone around them.
Family friend Fred Werthemier devoted his entire professional life to limiting the influence of big money on Washington. Werthemier edited "Common Cause" for years trying to restrict big bux in DC. Unfortunately, he and the rest of us failed (by not coming to see how important the issue is) in a supposedly representative democracy.
I write fairly often of my Alma Mater in this space, and some might think it strange or weird to harp on the University of Wisconsin's role in the anti-Vietnam war movement. But the reason is this: students at my college helped stop an anti-democratic war that was forced on it by the executive branch. Sound familiar, Iraq vets?
In my time there, in a footnote to history, the largest demonstration occurred after Reagan decided, briefly, to put American troops in Honduras, just outside the Nicaragua border. Two thousand students immediately marched on the state capitol building (a convenient eight blocks from the campus).
There's still the question of what such a government would do if really threatened (say a demonstration that aimed at taking over the White House and Congress). All I know right now is that my grandmother, the 93-year-old Lindy Boggs, would be shot dead if she came out in favor of gun control.
She would be on her best behavior, as always, but some courageous second amendment (second clause) defender would kill her before she said "darlin, I like huntin the same as anyone else, but I don't think you need an AK-47 to do it."
As Bob Herbert said in the (communist) NYT a few weeks ago "this country is both too irresponsible and immature to pass real gun control measures."
Kill him, he might be right.
Do anything to undermine this threat to representative democracy. Lie down in front of their (Fairfax, Va.) Headquarters. Stop traffic in and out. Throw red paint on vehicles coming in and out. Eggs, turds whatever. These people work for an organization that is worse than communist Russia in the Gulag.
It might take a long time (it will) but no matter the repression, no matter who is killed by a decent asshole citizen just tryin to make a livin, block them. I will probably be killed in the process, and so will you.
Defend America, and bring the war to the warmakers. For many Americans, that means you.

Kegsy McKensie

Yeah, yeah I've heard it all: Scott Wilkerson had a great gig Saturday night. Here's the spoiler: I had an even better one.
First of all, I got a full half keg. Then I invited the neighborhood teens to come over. Though I heard them saying my name and using the words "Geek" and "Total Loser," they came anyhow, because they knew I had the goods.
Anyone familiar with my past posts know how the craziness started. I had a couple of dudes lift the keg, then aim a blowtorch through the bottom. After they had blown a hole through the bottom, I did what I do best: I shotgunned the entire half-keg while the teens lifted the container over my mouth.
Let's see Wilkie compared to that. Let's see that wimp take on even a Heineken Pony-Keg. Although maybe five dudes showed up (no chicks, no way) they still worshipped me, even after the five of them took the keg back to their places. Soon I will send out a photo. It's of me and the keg. It says "Dave and Friend." I can't think of a cooler representation, can you?

Yours in kegliness,
Dave

Enemy on the Road

If you have every walked along a busy suburban road that has no sidewalk, you'll identify with this post.
I was dropped off by a public bus in the suburban area north of Princeton at a shelter. When I tried to come back the other way, there were no signs for a stop, much less a structure.
Trying to keep yourself as close to the curb as possible, you are acutely aware of the fact that traffic weighing many tons going 50 mph is passing with no obstacle between it and your puny body. Only a white stripe is there, painted as a breakdown lane, which is about eight feet across and can be violated as easily as when a driver swerves trying to change radio stations.

The American suburbs are not only indifferent to pedestrians, they are actively hostile towards them. Many areas have seen immigrants killed while walking along these high-speed routes, as they are guilty of being un-American by being poor and not driving while servicing areas where people are and do neither.

The strange thing is the role-reversal you go through when on the other side of the windshield. Pedestrians do look strange and cast-out in the highway environment. Bicyclists speak of people yelling at them to get off the road.

Put two tons of aluminum and steel around you or get out of the way! A pedestrian, meaning simply a human being, is demonized because it is foreign to the whole landscape. It is too real, too small and too soft in a fake plastic and metal environment. How dare it get in the way of what you have become, which is a heavy and fast machine.
The convenience of cars is unbeatable, but put in sidewalks and bus stops that are not miles between.

But Everyone Calls Me Psycho

Sad story but a weird twist. A beautiful student at Wesleyan, 20 or 21, is shot to death at a bookstore by campus. The guy, 29, is the son of a prominent businessman and had briefly dated and was totally obsessed with her; a million e-mails, calls etc. A sailor who had served with him said that some people called him, during a hitch in the Navy, "Psycho Steve."

I can't even remember whether I have shared my idea for a great nightmare date for a magazine article, though it might be better in video.

Here's the gist: get a single woman who is perhaps co-workers with friends of yours. Have them tell her that there's a really nice guy they know who's looking to date. Tell the woman only that he's good looking and successful, but is "kind of shy."

Have the woman meet you at a coffee shop or a diner for lunch.

Here's the crucial part: seat her facing out toward the restaurant. Beforehand, you will have told everyone in the diner that you are staging a prank, and that they should act "normal" when you come in.

Well, after she's seated, you come in; wearing a ski mask.

"Hi, you must be Susie; I'm John (or whatever)." Sit down quickly, so she can't immediately escape. For extra points, have the staff greet you familiarly, as in "Hi, John, what's up?" You behave totally normally, as if nothing is remiss.

Here's the question: would most women go out (and stay out) on a date with a guy wearing a ski mask? More extra points if you wrap the mask around your neck with electrical tape.
If not, try one of those swine-flu masks people were wearing in Mexico. It could be the next cool thing.

Be Careful of What You Wish Fer

I ego-searched myself on Google and came away with one guy on facebook (the lead) in LA. Since I don't belong to that ridiculous high-school popularity contest, that's as far as I got. There is still the indie-filmmaker in Canada, ironically the same guy whom I thought that I thought would make a great film about tracking down and killing (see "Killing my Doppelganger" way back in the past somewhere).
Then again, there was the same-name guy who was run down in a Wal-Mart parking lot in PA. Sorry, pal.

Hidden in a Corner

It's a black iron statue of two figures set in a little-trafficked alcove outside the Princeton University Chapel, which is really a huge cathedral where my mother's funeral service was held: Abraham about to slay a kneeling, bound Isaac, to show his obedience to God by sacrificing his only son. In the Old Testament, an angel stops Abraham at the last moment.

You have to look at the wall on the mighty stone edifice to see why the sculpture is there. It says "In memory of the four students killed at Kent State University on May 4, 1970."
Why it's at Princeton I don't know. Some say it was too controversial for the Ohio campus.

It is supposed to be symbolic of the older generation sacrificing the younger, of the 58,000 mostly very young dead American soldiers in Vietnam. But the national guardsmen who did the shooting were just like those in southeast Asia, young themselves, and scared and confused.

There are those who say that incident proves that the American government is no different from any other state; that when threatened it will react with repression and violence.

It was during this period that my grandfather, House Majority Leader at the time, suspected his phone was being tapped by the FBI. He had been critical of the agency and especially Hoover for infiltrating student and left-wing groups with spies and informants.

Kent State was and is not known for being radical or even liberal, but Nixon had just invaded an area known as "The Parrot's Beak" for the way it sticks into Vietnam only 20 miles or so from Saigon. People thought the war was spreading.

Actually, that area should have been invaded at the beginning of the war, just the way the Ho Chi Mihn Trail should have been cut. I'm sure at any war college, they'd pretty much tell you that allowing an enemy sanctuary 20 miles from your capital is not a good idea militarily, just as allowing them an undisturbed supply line (except for bombing) in Laos was ludicrous (as was the total fallacy that Laos was neutral).

But the question remains: how free is the US government? Would it lash out violently at its citizens if really threatened? Without newspapers, would we be too busy watching "American Idol" to care?

Splendor in the Sod

Walked by the fenced-off northwest corner of Washington Square Park in NY. Actual deep-green sod planted in the formerly threadbare hard-baked surface. Remembering rolling around laughing my ass off in that needle-and-piss stained earth with Rambler back in college.

The Hoog was questioning us about, uh, self-abuse. Did we do it a lot? Every day, at least. Sometimes out of pure boredom. The Hoog innocent and surprised, though he'd later deny it and say he was joking. Only someone without brothers or a present father (sorry) would be so taken-aback.

The Hoog would later come into his own (sorry again)in sampling the female portions of various nations and ethnicities in Bklyn. He said he was trying to make up for high-school lameness. Rambler would finally tell him "you've made up for all the way back to second-grade."

Here were some of Hoog's status reports: black girls - exactly the same as white ones, no matter what the legends. Hispanics or Latinas - dedicated to your enjoyment, especially in Cuba, which I must credit he visited even though Americans were not supposed to.

As he said at the time "color in another country on the atlas."

I bear him no ill will. I just hope he is making his wife, whom I guess I can say I am acquainted, happy.

Dirt Behind the Daydream

More plotting on how to bring the war to the warmakers. Anyone who's read this space before knows I mean the NRA. What's left to illustrate the carnage that this lobby glorifies as the ultimate democratic freedom; the ability to end someone's life with a gun?

Watching the War at Home documentary for tips in the Vietnam-era protests in Madison, where protesters put a huge coffin on the steps of the Army Math Research Center (later blown up with a huge homemade bomb) and planted a field of fake World War I-style cemetery crosses on the hill in the center of campus to mark the war dead.

How to choke the entrance of the NRA with homemade coffins for all the gun-murders of a certain year? How to make their immaculately manicured grass spring thousands of grave markers? The NRA property is doubtless private, unlike a state university in Wisconsin.

Then the exhibit at the Woodrow Wilson school of public policy at Princeton. Photos of what was claimed to be the 39 percent (!) of the population that has guns in their households. NRA members are only 1.5 percent of the population, so I need to double-check this statistic (it may be 39 percent of households, but that's still a huge number).

What got me were these kind of punk-rock dudes that enjoyed owning and brandishing guns for the camera. Here's a communique to you, assholes. You are not being a rebel by owning a gun in America, you are being the worst kind of conformist jackass.

Right, I get it, when the squares want to crack down on your "lifestyle," you'll be able to respond in kind. You and the middle-aged, pot-bellied Michigan militia. Real hip dudes.

The other thing that struck me was how many people (often women) who got turned on by being brought to a shooting range. It's the feeling of power that surges through you, I know.

The (gay) reporter who sat next to me at the Trenton Times told me he felt like God when he fired a gun at a range. This was a guy that suffered HIV symptoms and was as gentle and funny a soul as you can imagine. Still, even him.

May God strike us down for stealing his fire, just like the ancient Greeks and their Gods. See the ruins of their civilization on top of the Acropolis. Looks just like Capitol Hill.

Swayze 'n Sheen Slaughter the Commies

In what may one day be an entry the Ronnie Reagan Ridiculous Cold War Film Fest, I watched the beginning of "Red Dawn" (1987) for free on cable last night. For anyone unfamiliar with truly wretched 80s Cinema or has thankfully forgotten, the movie centers around a group of teenagers who save America after World War III breaks out and the Soviets (wait, first the Cubans!)take over most of the country.

The first scene takes place in a high school on the Colorado plains, where a teacher is lecturing on the martial prowess of Gengis Khan. He looks out the window and there is suddenly a rain of parachutes falling from the sky. These turn out to be armed Cubans, who proceed to shoot up the teacher and the school building.

Ironically, of course, it was American teenagers who shot up a high school with American weapons in Columbine about 10 years ago, and they seemed to be much better shots than the Cubans.

A group of teens (including Charlie Sheen) somehow escapes in a pickup truck, driven by the inimitable, slightly older Patrick Swayze. They hide out in the mountains, and when they come down the town is covered with Lenin posters and Russian movies at the theater (hopefully better ones than this). The citizens were put into re-education camps. I went to bed when some Soviet soldiers came up to the mountains for a little R and R and were easily dispatched of by the kids. The ideologically-impaired soldiers, of course, couldn't hit the side of a barn with their automatic weapons (not enough Second Amendment practice).

How did this horror come about? Easy. El Salvador and Nicaragua invaded Honduras, Mexico went into revolution, and those Euro-wimps at NATO gave up to the Russians with hardly a shot.

It's again a hilarous irony that two years after this jingoistic fantasy was released, the entire Soviet Union fell apart with practically nary a shot. Still, I can't wait for the righteous, bloody all-American commie-slaughter spectacular ending. The red of American blood will conquer the Reds anytime (except for North Korea, where the Dear Leader would kick our butts single-handedly, all while revising the 3000 books he wrote in college).

An LA state of mind

Near the beginning of "Easy Rider," a man at a gas station in the rural American west asks Peter Fonda, on his motorcycle, where he was from.

"LA," Fonda says. "El Lay?" says the man. "Los Angeles," Fonda explains.
Who in this era would not know what LA is? The question is, what it means.
If you look around mall-America, what do you see? LA Fitness. Hollywood Tans. West Coast Video (now defunct, I think.)

All reflect the common perception that the place is all about, essentially, superficiality. Perfect bodies. Winter tans. Video uber alles, over print, traditionally New York's bailiwick (publishing, magazines, newspapers. All threatened with extinction in the brave new Internet age.)

The question right now is whether Southern California remains the last frontier, America's America, where you can go and make a whole new existence and identity for yourself. To be someone else, not dictated by family, home, education, town, state or country.

I have been fascinated by the place ever since I read my uncle's collection of magazine articles on it in the late 60s and early 70s compiled in a book called "Eureka!" the California state motto. It means, "I have found it."

Found what? That remains unanswered. But there is no question that the place gives one an intoxicating sense of freedom. Just get a car, somehow, some way.

Southern California seems, from the east and midwest, not just a different state, but a different country. The land looks different, the light looks different, as are the trees and vegetation, more like the Mediterranean than the US. Even the smog gives it an otherworldly character, like being on Venus.

The city itself, though sprawling, is only a small part of it. You can go to the beach, go to the mountains, go to the desert, all in a single day if you want. Close-by destinations abound: Vegas, Palm Springs, Tijuana and Baja California. Up the spectacular coast to San Fran.

The British love the place, especially Santa Monica, chock full of English pubs. Totally different than what they're used to (probably the same reason they flock to the Costa Del Sol in Spain).

Then there is the dark side, so thoroughly examined by noir writers (are you reading, Rambler?). Would-be starlets jumping off the Hollywood sign (you can't actually get to it now). Teen girls exploited and thrown out for the next piece of ass on the porn-flick assembly line. Aging rockers, former film and TV stars and other has-beens pathetically trying to hold on to some semblance of fame, glamor, and youth beautiful youth. The plastic-surgery capital for plastic people.

The whole place is fake. Sustained only by stealing water from the entire American west. Ready to fall into the sea when "The Big One" comes along. Multi-million dollar castles built on land that burns in one season and slides away in another. A mass-manufactured Garden of Eden whose inhabitants have long since eaten the forbidden fruit. Tinseltown, Land of the Lotus eaters, Hell-A.

But the stereotypes of LA represent only a small part of it. Usually the wealthy and celebrity-laden Westside and Malibu, or, conversely, the theatric violence of gangs in South Central and East LA.

Last time I checked, Southern California contained the largest number of manufacturers in the US. It also faces the growth area of the world; China and the Pacific Rim. Metropolitan LA's population is growing ever closer to that of metro New York, and there's lots of empty desert left to subdivide and conquer.

There is now, of course, a tarnish on the Golden State, with 10 percent unemployment. The frontier has washed backwards toward the mountain states: Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and sometimes Utah. Housing is cheaper (Cal. has the highest home prices in the US). The air is cleaner, the traffic less hectic, fewer social problems, less hassle. Americans always want to go somewhere newer and somehow better. We are like children who play with a toy for a certain period, then leave it a mess and abandon it for something, anything else. Greener pastures in a rain-starved place.

All that freedom can certainly be liberating, but it can be atomizing too. The absence of social restraints can lead to a kind of ridiculous narcissism personified in Hollywood excess and deified by the rest of the population. California is home to the religion of you. Be your own God.

This can be healthy and self-fulfilling, or it can be empty, lonely and leave one with a distinct feeling of foolishness. Much of California remains vacant. Some of the population can be cartoonized as the same. Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" bit, where he asks Californians (and tourists)about current events and they display a snicker-inducing ignorance of anything in the public realm besides celebrity hanky-panky underlines this stereotype in bold letters.

But the fact that Southern California is artificial is part of its attraction. What do people in a free country do when given maximum freedom? Is it inspiring or dispiriting? The fact that a kind of fake civilization collides with a real environment that is breathtaking but often hostile to it (mudslides, wildfires, earthquakes) adds to the place's strange allure. Anyone with a remote interest in sociology, politics, journalism or anthropology has got to be attracted to it.
Obviously I am, but I leave it to the Rambler to channel it for the rest of us for now.