Check it Out in DC (if you can find it)

A new hipster district has emerged in DC in the most unlikely of places: H Street NORTHEAST, between about ninth and 12th. There is no public transportation here, but somehow the entrepreneurs (some of whom are responsible of the transformation of 14th/U streets) have come up with a geniune nightlife stretch in the middle of freakin' nowhere.
Don't try to walk here from Union Station, you'll only get mugged, warn the signs inside the clubs. Take a cab.
The only obvious reason that this district is working is one: space. H Street was one of the so-called "riot corridors," a stretch of black businesses that burned in the 1968 riots. That means large department-store type layouts that converts well into nightclubs and whatnot.
The only thing familiar about it is the DC hipster strategy: outflank the preppies and the squares by moving East of them, further into the formerly threatening ghettos.
How this area does remains to be seen, as they say in lame broadcast journalism.

Basketball battle of the lefty schools

Today Cornell plays Wisconsin in the NCAA tournament. Cornell, though an Ivy League school, is quite good. But the similarities in the match-up are actually more socio-political than sporting.

Cornell was founded late (meaning 1860s') for an Ivy. Its founder, the Simpsons-sounding Ezra Cornell, was of course anti-slavery, and pro-womens rights (it was to be the first Ivy to admit women).

My aunt and uncle live up there, near Lake Cayuga, and I've been for a visit. Very much like Madison or Ann Arbor. A little San Francisco in the hills. Crystal shops, new age stores, and all manner of whole earth/natural food co-ops.

But few blacks live there, and that contributed to one of the most notorious incidents of the 1960s.'

Black students decided to take over the student union. A largely while fraternity tried to rush the building and kick them out. Needless to say, they had their butts kicked.

Fearing a further attack, the black students armed themselves, then demanded concessions from the university (ie a black studies department, their own on-campus "house.") The administration caved, and there is that famous photo of black students leaving the building with rifles and bandoleers across their chests.

At Madison, black students had already called for a strike that Winter, in which mostly white students were supposed to block people from going into buildings at all. The National Guard was called, complete with helmets, rifles, and bayonets. The strike eventually ended.

But this is ancient history for the NCAA. Go Badgers, eh?

The Three Coreys

It was sitting outside the Fox in DC when Rambler had a great idea: we would all be Coreys: Corey Rambler, Corey Tourguide, and Corey Dlamini.
If any females actually wandered over to our section, that's what we'd tell them. Corey's all the way.
Haim and Feldman eventually went their separate ways, but the name will live on. I'm planning to name the next dog I have Corey.
Now, with one of the two dead, the world is ripe for more Coreys. In Rambler's LA every day they would have forgetten, since life is lived only in the present and Jimmy Carter is considered a historical feature and thus not worth learning about.
But think of the glory of being a Corey ("no, I'm not the one who's dead"). What are the chances of two teen movie stars named the same name?
So try the Corey thing at the next party in the Hills, Rambler, you just might get lucky (or forgotten.)

Rainbow Party

Has "Rainbow Party" been proven bullshit yet? As you may recall, a recent fiction book claimed that girls would orally please boys while leaving a ring of their lipstick color around the boys' penis'.
"Rainbow Party" raised hackles from coast to coast by claiming our adolescent sweet young things are actually human Hoover 2000s. They leave lipstick traces every time the go down on some guy (which is often).
I am therefore going to have my own Rainbow Party at my place. Plus a grand prize for the winner of a giant stuffed unicorn. AAhhh. What could be sweeter?

Omigod! Teen Girl Party at my Place

Since my father is going to be gone for awhile, I'm taking the opportunity to throw a massive Kegger for the neighborhood's female teens.

Hey! I'm promising them free weed and free beer just for showing up. There's also a hot tub which I hope to get running by Friday. All I ask in return is that they not bring parents or boyfriends.

There's already a group of guys (in their 40s-50s) who'll be glad to welcome them in whatever way possible. I've paid off the local loser cops, but some of them still want in on the action.

I've turned part of the attic into a mattress-floored space which will be called "The Special Room." I had to buy red light bulbs especially for the occasion.

Then there's the house punch which will consist of 90 percent grain alcohol and 10 Tang! Roofies available upon request (shee!).

So spread to the word (and other things). This is going to be the sickest party of the year. Just don't tell where you've been. That's a no-no. And besides, we already have video cameras around the place for when you drunkenly flash us. Wouldn't want that to get around, would we?

Be there or b L7 (square).

In a Frozen Lake

I wish I could be a chocolate cake. Every one would want to eat me. It's clean its mean it surreal a career. Can't put them together nouns, verbs, adjectives. How could it be what did I do? Punisment forever for no reason, no cause, no reason. Someone tell me what I did to deserve this?

I can't get this thing for one more Spring.

Flowers in the Desert

I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered
Big Country

The Suburbanization of New York?

The second half of the title is "Is the World's Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town?"

I have just dipped into this book so far, but it is almost completely Manhattan-centric. Chain stores, fast food, and Starbucks replacing everything that was unique about the island, which was especially its intense and next-door close mixture of low-and-high end stores, bars, and restaurants; and the rich, middle-class (emphasis) and poor living in close proximity. Every three blocks or so, wrote EB White in his famous "Here is New York" essay, was like an entire town elsewhere in the country.

Living in the outer New Jersey suburbs, but connected by both frequent rail and bus, I grew up vicariously in New York in the late 70s and early 80s. (This included being threatened by various Ratso Rizzzo dirtbags when my teen friends and I went to get fake ID's in Times Square).

One of my favorite places was a magazine store on 43rd just off of Eighth Ave. that sold old "National Lampoons" from the early 70s that were absolutely hilarious and dirty as hell. Their fake news section was a precursor to "the Onion" and helped me construct an entirely bogus and funny newspaper for my fraternity at Tulane (before leaving for Madison, where the uber-serious lefty Daily Cardinal wouldn't even print an April Fool's paper).

The last time I took the misnamed "New York Express" bus into the Port Authority, the New York Times had replaced the "massage parlors (read whorehouses) on Eighth.

But this is begging the question: to be authentic, does a city have to cater to vice, crime, and the needs of the poor and working class? No, the point of most of the essays in the book is that blocks that used to contain a local business squeezed into every doorway now have been taken over by block-long Duane Reade's.

But everything else in the world has been changed by technology and the global economy, so why not Manhattan's mom-and-pop businesses? A city is organic, constantly changing, especially in world economy command-and-control centers like Manhattan, London, and Tokyo.

What needs to happen is for western Brooklyn to congeal. Hipster Williamsburg needs to connect to yuppieish Park Slope, Carroll Gardens et. al. There needs to be a new center of youthful discontent, a square that served the purpose of Tompkins Sq. Park in the 1980s.

One last note, to Rambler especially, is that 75 percent of Harlem is either rent controlled, regulated, or public housing. 125 St. will never be upper Madison Ave.

Looking out from the top of the bluff of Morningside Park in the 1980s (when a cousin and a friend were at adjacent Columbia), you saw below you a cityscape of abandoned buildings. When I went back about 7 years ago, everything was occupied. Is this so bad? Is Harlem not "real" unless it's black and poor?
More later when I've actually read and digested the book.

A Romantic Gets His Due

Do you remember that movie ("Say Anything?") where John Cusak goes after beauty n brains Ione Skye? He held up a boombox and plays "In Your Eyes" outside her house. Well, I learned the hard way that kind of "romantic" move usually gets you labeled a stalker or worse.
Some magazine I was reading had a list of these kind of bold, heart-full-of-soul maneuvers in movies. The girl is invariably persuaded to love the seemingly hopeless, out-of-his league protagonist. The magazine (and me) have some advice,: the girl will not be won over; she'll run to the hills and maybe get a restraining order on your scary, addle-brained ass.
Nevertheless, Hollywood keeps pumping out this wish-fullfillment pablum, much to the detriment of suckers who believe it. If they're male, they'll think that red-hot passion and soulful devotion are the ticket to finally get their unrequited love. If they're female, they'll believe that most boys and men actually behave that way. Both are in for big dissapointments.
So what's the ticket? Patience, complete casualness, joking, and never letting on how much you like a woman until you've landed your personal big one (not quite the old the more you ignore them the more they want you, but close). For women, put your respective money where your mouth is. You don't want passion, you want the opposite: responsibility, dependability, respectability and emotional and financial security. Daddy will take care of it.
(See the Onion story on "World's Most Emotionally Strong Man" and how he knows exactly how and when to comfort his mate).
As Jimi H. said "Oh, well I've still got my guitar."