LA Weekly

It's been a rough weekend. I have some severe allergy-induced hack that won't seem to go away or give me any rest, which means, I'm over-tired and overly vulnerable to feelings. So, yes, I watched the Live Earth marathon concert show on CNBC and then switched back and forth between that broadcast and the NBC one. I think the NBC thing was delayed, which would explain why some of the things I saw on CNBC showed up later on NBC. It's either that, or magic. Anyway, not mindblowing lineup of acts, but there were some startling moments and I have to lead with the most: Madonna. Yes, Madonna. It's time we, and by we, I mean I, put aside my prejudices against Madonna's weird English accent and her increaslingly cyborgic body and just praised her like I should. I'm here to say Madonna rocks (am I the first?). She certainly rocked Wembley stadium in London, at which I once attended, and by that I mean drank all day and then rioted, a football match between England and some other country. The year was 1981 and the world was a more friendly place, the kind of place where you could drink all day, fall in with some hooligan-ish types and, well... Ah, but enough reminscing about the good old days. Watching Madonna last night, sleep-deprived and slightly feverish, I was brought to tears, if you can imagine, by her performance. The lady performs. I didn't even know most of the songs she played, but I did know "Ray of Light" which I believe is the title song of an album by the same name (thus making it the title song). She strapped on a Les Paul and jammed it out and rocked completely.

Madonna is amazing. She entered my consciousness that same year, 1981, with two lovely little ditties -- "Borderline" and "Holiday" -- and, as you'd guess, captured the imagination of a 17-year-old boy with her combination of sultriness and innocence. Who would have guessed from those relatively inauspicices beginnings, cute songs as they were, I didn't think of them as much more than pleasant diversions, that a quarter century later Madonna would not only be relevant, but would have become the biggest pop start of our lifetimes. And clearly that's what she is, by just about any measure. She's not just a pop star, she's an icon and now I'm here to say, after seeing her perfrom last night for the first time in ages, she deserves it. It's not fluke, it's no fabrication, it's been earned.

Weirdly, I had several revelations while watching that show, non of which were expected (thus, revelations). The second one involved Dave Matthews. I've always sort of viewed him as a pasty, frat-boyish type of guy who helped usher in a mid-90s jam band revival that kind of blew chunks. But, at least as far as he's concerned, I might have to review that position after having seen him and his band perform "Don't Drink The Water" (I think that's the name of the song). What I saw was this unassuming dude totally go for it in this weird, dark and slightly menacing song. The passion he put into that performance was palpable, and it's a great song, and he was totally lost in the moment -- completley unafraid of how he appeared, how vulnerable he was, and, well, he just went for it, pushign and screaming and selling it like I never would have guessed he was capable. It just goes to show --- something.

Other revelations: Kelly Clarkson isn't half bad. Macy Gray is awesome. Kanye is really good and Bon Jovi doesn't quite suck. At least that bloated, disco-ish looking, fat and shirt unbuttoned to his navel, Richie Samborra doesn't suck at all. Bon Jovi rose to the ocassion and put across a short but inspired set of cheese rock that was perfect for Giants Stadium. The Police, though, playing in Rio De Janeiro kind of blew. And Roger Waters, playing Pink Floyd songs, was as boring as one would guess.

As for TV. Well, I did the trifecta this evening: John From Cincinatti, Entourage and Flight of the Conchords, the new musical comedy on HBO. John is still pretty off, but it might be getting somewhere. Entourage is still entertaining pulp, but Flight of the Conchords rules. If you haven't seen this already, please do yourself a favor and tune in. It's totally hilarious, inventive, weird, completely dry and fun. The song interludes are freakishly amazing and the two stars are wonderful. I hope this show takes because it's the best thing on TV right now.

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Please, please do yourselves a favor and look up Keith Olbermann's special commentary on yesterday's (July 3) Countdown in which Mr. Olbermann, American Hero, himself calls on Bush to do the patriotic thing, the thing that even Richard Nixon was patriotic enough to do, and quit when it had finally become all too clear that his services are detrimental to the country. Of course, had Bush even an ounce of self-recognition, this would have been clear to him a long time ago, but his commutation of Scooter Libby's prison sentence puts in grand relief the degree to which this president has forfeited our democracy to callous politics. As Olbermann said, Bush and Cheney are perilous to our very democracy. Just as when Nixon fired the special prosecutor, Arhcibold Cox, when Cox was digging too deeply into Watergate, now is the time for Congress and us, the citizens, to decide whether we are nation governed by law or by an administration that has cynically viewed itself as above the law. That these guys have seen themselves that way was evident from the start, but a Congress bowed by fear and in the throws of partisan politics had long ago surrendered its duty to hold true the defining principle of our republic -- that no man is above the law and that our citizenry, our soldiers, our wealth and our futures should not be subject to the whims of any man, but should be subject to the rationale of law. As Olbermann said, isn't this what July 4th is meant to celebrate, the fact that we overthrew the rule of man in favor of the rule of law?

If this inexcusable commutation of the rule of law by Bush and Cheney doesn't crystallize Congress and the public to finally hold these guys accountable for the travesty and decades of damage that they've done to our country and the world, then I fear nothing will and we've actually have lost our way, a way that even in the darkest days of Watergate, we found again.

It was spine-tingling to watch Mr. Olberman, American hero, in all his righteous and eloquent indignation call upon these treasonous vipers to summon any shred of decency they might ever have had (I'm willing to suspend disbelief and hold out that Bush might have an ounce somewhere -- I doubt Cheney ever did or ever will) and step down for the good of the country. They won't, of course, because they seem to take a perverse joy in rubbing our noses in our compliance, fear and stupidity when it comes to confronting their many breaches of duty, decency and the spirit and letter of the law, but it's a nice and hopeful thought.

At this point, one is at a loss to explain why these guys haven't been impeached, though one fears the answer is simply fear, cynicism, crass politics and a lack of will. In the end, though, it's up to us, the citizenry to demand accountability and demand better, all around from our president and from our Congress. If we don't, we can only blame ourselves, as we have had only ourselves to blame along time now for this ongoing nightmare.

In the meantime, god bless Keith Olbermann, American Hero.

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You're probably aware by now that Bush, er Cheney, commuted the prison sentence of Scooter Libby, the guy who obstructed justice in the investigation of the Valerie Plame leak. Any further question, idiots who elected these guys twice...and you know who you are.

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I've bagged pretty hard on Mr. Hitchens before -- if not here, then somewhere -- mostly for his hard-to-explain support for the invasion of Iraq. And I was a bit surprised at how much press his new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, garnered. I had one of those sort of weirdly jealous things going on where you think: only Christopher Hitchens could get so many people fawning over a book that, from what I've read in reviews and comments, seems to be the most self-evident thesis one could devise. That religion poisons everything is a revelation??? To whom? It didn't feel like a daring intellectual challenge for someone who's as supposedly brilliant as Mr. Hitches to undertake. However, and you knew there was a however coming, the more I've seen of him discussing the topic, the more I appreciate the fresh perspective he's bringing to this topic. It's not that there's any new data or analysis to bring to bear; it's that he's such a skilled and possesed debater that he's able to elevate the debate over the merits of religion to a level beyond hysteria whereas someone like, say I, who would soon be reduced to emotional ad hominens, could never hope to (to me religion is childish, pure and simple, and if there's anything we suffer from in this country, it's infantilism).

I had the pleasure to see Hitchens on Tim Russert's show last night, paired off against Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, who it must just warm your cockles to know is a bible banger. In fairness to Mr. Meacham, he seemed like a rational and measured human being who would prefer if religion and religions stayed out of people's lives, except for those who walk through its doors seeking it in theirs. Of course, he didn't seem to be able to wrap his head around the fact that most religions simply don't and won't do that. Christianity in particular, is a proselytizing religion whose very mission is to permeate and control every aspect of human life -- social, political, sexual... it wants it all. I believe the same hold true for Islam to a large degree (god bless the Jews for not really wanting any new members!). Thus we have these two dominating religions squaring off against each other -- and to some degrees that's just what's happening, whether by desing or circumstance -- in a place on earth where they've been doing just that for centuries.

Anyway, having come from parents who threw off the shackles of their parents crippling Catholicism, I appreciate very much how religion poisons everything and now that I think about it, I'm glad Mr. Hitchens is out there spreading the word, so to speak.

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In case you were just wondering whether or not paranoia had the best of you and whether or not that visceral sense of repulsion you'd get in the pit of your stomach every time you saw the sneering face of white-man's entitled contempt for all that is not he whenever Dick Cheney appeared on TV or in print, or in your nightmares -- rest assured, your feelings were warranted and precise.

Read the series in the Washington Post (part three, today, I believe) about how Cheney, as if we didn't know, is truly calling all the shots, at least all the important ones, and using the vagueness that is the office of vice-president to skirt oversight and/or appeal from staff or beauracrats who may disagree with any of his usually 100 percent disastrous ideas. He'll cry executive privilege when he doesn't want anyone looking, as when he holed up with his buddies in the oil business to fashion an energy policy, or say he's part of the legislature when it suits his need to be above executive oversight. This guy hates anything that smacks of egalitarianism or fairness (like health care) and loves anything that buttresses privilege, like cuts in capital gains, dividends, corporate regulation/taxes....Such a wanton pig of a robber baron we haven't seen the likes of since the turn of the 20th century.

How dinasaurs like this still survive in this day and age is beyond me, but the sooner they become extinct, the sooner the world can move forward.

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It says something about how deeply the horrors of this administration have penetrated that I didn't even have to look up how to spell Abu Ghraib (that is how you spell it, right?), but I did have to look up Olbermann. If you're like me, and you just watched Countdown With Keith Olbermann, American Hero, and then read Sy Hersh's piece with General Antonio Taguba (I won't say retired because he should still be serving, he should be medalled, he should be a hero), the guy who investigated Abu Ghraib and got his career ended for it, then you're really depressed. The level of evil that has taken hold of this administration is still shocking and still warrants disgust, disgrace and recriminations. If there was really justice in the world, Donald Rumsfeld's head would explode. I know that sounds like a childish polemic, but what's really childish is failing to fathom the levels of evil that have been and continue to go on with this administration. That and not demanding better.

Olbermann had as a guest the general who was in charge of Abu Ghraib, Janis Karpinski. She told of attempts to better secure the prison, after a mortar bombing killed nine detainees, most of whom were just civilians, and how she was met with admonishments from higher ups that "they were just Iraqis." She said the words were chilling. Way to win the hearts and minds, guys. It was a chilling report in general.

As for Taguba, he seems pretty clear that not only did the highest levels of the administration know what was going on at Abu Ghraib, but they knowling imported the abuse there by sending the spook in charge of Guantanamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. And then did their best to pin it on the lower level service men and women. Read the piece. This is real SS stuff. Is this what we're about? Is this how we're going to win the battle of cultures?

Let me quote Taguba from the piece: "From the moment a soldier enlists, we inculcate loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, nd selfless service. And yet when we get to the senior officer level we forget those values. I know that my peers in the Army will be mad at me for speaking out, but the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib. We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

Yet we continue to violate those core values, and like parents in denial who childishly refuse to acknowledge that their kids are doing wrong, we make excuses.

Taguba may be in forced retirement, but if this report is accurate he will always be a soldier. The others who played a part in Abu Ghraib and its cover up may still be wearing the uniform, but they stopped being soldiers a long time ago.

Complicit, to a degree that is evil, has been the up until recently overwhelmingly Republican Congress, which simply surrendered its oversight duties, and still haven't properly exerted them - else why has no one in this god forsaken administration been held accoutable for nearly seven years of lies, cover ups and horror? -- preferring partisan power over the Constitution and the values of this country.

One is at a loss, really. Nothing said here is anything new, but that doesn't mean we should surrender our outrage.

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I tuned in again last Sunday, because for some reason I want to believe, but the show, unlike the word Cincinnati, still sucks after two episodes. And despite all the previous ruminations from me and others (see Feelings About John From Cincinnati) on how hard it is for Hollywood to capture the essence of surfing, here's why: it's a false set up. The show is two different ideas, one which is Davild Milch's about an outsider/alien who drops in on a small-time hustler living in a derelict/possibly haunted motel, and another, which is the Fletcher family's (on whom the show's surfing Yost's are based) that HBO foisted upon Milch. The LA Times did a brief bit on this in their near-promo package of the show a few weeks ago. It's a classic case of kooks (HBO) trying to capture the zeitgeist. You can almost picture the suits sitting around conference tables waxing to Milch about how "the kids will love it." But like all disingenuous ideas, the center won't hold, the phoniness comes through and what's possibly good (Milch's idea and writing) gets killed by what's bad: attempt to capitalize on "what's hot."

So you have a situation where the possibly interesting stuff, Milch's metaphysical musings about the dark heart of mankind and the possibilities of and for redemption playing host to the banal concerns of a douche-bag clan of surfers that we're supposed to care about because... they surf? As Dan Rather might say: that dog won't hunt. Maybe as the show proceeds we'll get more of the former and less of the latter. Let's hope so.

Meanwhile, did you catch the excellent Flight of the Conchords, which followed? That was some good shit. Funny, weird, irreverent and fresh.

Okay, enough about that. Let's talk about the greatest rock bands and musicians of all time, inspired by a list done by Rolling Stone a few years ago that I happened to trip upon recently. You can look up RS's list. Here's mine.

1. The Velvet Underground
Almost everything you hear on indepent/alternative radio owes to Lou Reed and these guys.
2. The Beatles
Only number two because my personal taste is a little more toward the dark side, but, jeez, how can they really be number two?
3. The Who
Almost everything you hear on album-oriented rock stations owes to these guys and in particular the album Who's Next. They were the first, really, to turn it up to 11, but they did it with a teenage wasteland's worth of angst, poignancy and vulnerability that endears.
4. The Rolling Stones
It's easy to forget how great this band was because they've been putting out crap for so long, but from 1968 - 1972 they were simply awesome. They made the blues fun and sick and sexy and dark, completely opened up the possibilites of the genre to become rock and roll as we know it.
5. Led Zeppelin
Responsible for the greatest riffs in rock n roll history. Epic and mighty in the truest sense of the words.
6. The Replacements
I know, probably not a lot of support for this one, but I love these beautiful losers. There's something incredibly compelling about the band's refusal to grab the brass ring while self-consciously chronicling their own flameout. The first postmodern band? And Westerberg is a genius songsmith. Not to mention, they were Nirvana before there was Nirvana.
7. Joy Division
The most depressing collection of music ever assembled that's still incredibly beautiful and disturbing at the same time.
8. Bob Dylan
Of course. The lyrics, yes. But the melodies, jeezus. He'd be higher if my personal tastes ran more towards the elegiac.
9. The Kinks, Faces and Gasoline Alley-era Rod Stewart
For that indelible British thing of that era. Wistful and ballsy at the same time.
10. The Sex Pistols
Has any band changed everything the way the first five bands (and Bob Dylan) changed everything since the Sex Pistols? For punk and everything that punk is and ever should be, they belong on the list.

I know, this list doesn't have much of recent vintage to recommend recent vintage, but The White Stripes and The Arcade Fire seem to be the only bands of recent times really swinging for the fences the way these bands did and I think the jury's still out on them. What about Nirvana, you say? Well, Nirvana was seminal, but they have about three songs that will be around forever, which is about seven less than their Creedence Clearwater-esque counterparts, Pearl Jam, and I just don't think they ultimately cut it.

And, finally, if you worry that there are no heroes left in the world, watch Countdown With Keith Olberman.

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It's always Beatles time, but with the 40th Anniversary of Sgt. Peppers upon us and Paul McCartney delivering (from many accounts) his best record in a long time, the Beatles are once again, Here, There, And Everywhere.

So, I'm driving out to Vegas and listening to Revolver. Can you imagine how heads must have been blown straight off of people's shoulders when that bomb dropped. It's so outlandishly amazing that if it came out today it would still melt people's faces away. Sgt. Pepper gets a lot of the hype as the Beatles masterwork, and as a conceptual piece it's groundbreaking and certainly important, but it's one of the least listenable Beatles' records to me -- it's still mindblowing, but it's degrees less mindlbowing than some of their other records. Which is kind of like saying 107 (the temperature today) is hot, but 110 (what the temperature is supposed to be tomorrow) is hotter.

It's hard to fathom all of the things that went right for the Beatles to happen, many have tried and reams have been written. And my colleague, Kate Sullivan, has a great piece coming out this Thursday on Paul and his new record, so I don't want to try to act like I've divined anything new to add to the chronicles, but, man, it sure was a miracle. Think about it, in 1965 these guys came out with "Eleanor Rigby", "She Said, She Said", and, perhaps the most mind-bending of all, "Tommorow Never Knows." I freak when I hear that song. I mean, if it came out today it'd still stop time in its place. I mean, you'd literally be driving down the street, it'd come on the radio and everything would freeze. Traffic lights, traffic, birds in flight, the hands on the clock tower, the breeze would even stop and everything would just wait until it was over and then everything would be like: did you hear that shit?

The beats on that song are precursors to the best electronic music; the crazy effects and sound loops, the staccato fuzzed-out guitar solos laid down the map for almost everything that followed it through psychedelic heyday of rock. It's beyond anything anyone's even able to think of these days. Nuts.

While we're on the subject, I do have to say, it's always tripped me out the way people bag on Ringo. That guy is a fucking unbelievable drummer. To not get this is to be somehow caught up in some Nearl Peart infused layer of hell. Come on now, I can't see how these wildly experimental songs would have held together without Ringo's drumming. He's there all the way propelling the song on and adding amazing dashes of high hat and cymbals and explosions at just the right time and then bringing you back with that steady, fat beat when shit's about to go off the rails. And if you think Keith Moon didn't learn a thing or two from Ringo, you don't know shit.

Here's to you Ringo. And, as always, here's to the Beatles.

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Hilariously bad. Why can't Hollywood ever get the surfing mileau correct? Wait, could it be because the shows are generally done by people with little or no experience in that arena?

I just got done watching the finale of The Sopranos (yawn) and watched with interest, as my friend Arty Nelson would say, the premiere of David Milch's next big thing, John From Cincinnati (what a great name, Cincinnati, just writing it is cool). For weeks people at work have been asking me if I'm excited about it, because, you know, I'm the guy at work who surfs. So, bouyed by great expectations, and the show's pedigree, I watched...with interest.

About 30 seconds in, I realized it was going to suck. Based closely, despite the creators' denials, on the notorious and troubled surfing Fletcher family, it gets just about everything wrong in terms of tone. The biggest problem is the dialogue, and, well, everything else, like creating a show about nothing. The dialogue is expository to a fault, and delivered in the cadence of a New York cops and robbers drama; nothing rings true to the setting. The matriarch of the family, played by Rebecca DeMornay (still hot), speaks in a Brooklyn or North New Jersey (carryover from the Sopranos?) brogue. The drama, or action, such as it is, so dialed up over nothing -- even the heroin addled scion seems like he's on meth -- that you wonder how anyone's lives, even surfers in Southern California, could have so little going on in their lives that the major dramatic point, whether the youngest of the three generations of surfers should enter a harmless contest, causes such a ruckus of in-fighting you'd think they were discussing whether or not the kid should join the Army Rangers and go off to Iraq.

The point being that nothing here resembles real life, not even for a band of surfers. When you enter the room screaming about nothing and keep up the screaming about nothing all show long, what's there for an audience to relate to our or to like? Shit, even Tony is on a more even keel and has something resembling a relatable life than these people, and there's actually something at stake in his drama. This is what happens when people who know nothing about it try to exploit a zeitgeist. About the only thing that rang true in anyway was the ending seqeunce in which the crew goes surfing, and that's probably because real surfers were shot for the footage. Maybe they should have gotten somebody like Stacy Peralta (Lords of Dogtown, Riding Giants) to direct the premiere. Maybe it'll get better. Shouldn't be hard.

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It's been awhile since I've last posted, so I want to apologize to my loyal readers -- and you three know who you are. Didn't feel like I had anything to say about much of anything for awhile, but I've been shaken out of my malaise by something that just can't be ignored any longer, by what can only be regarded as THE STORY OF OUR TIMES. I refer, of course, to the Paris Hilton jail or no jail saga.

I woke up this morning and turned on the TV while while I had my breakfast of two (I'm on a diet) large bowls of colon blow and coffee and the news was all Paris, all the time. There again was the ubiquitious Harvey Levin of TMZ.com, the hardest working infotainter in the biz, breaking it all down for the Good Day LA crew. Harvey never sleeps. I think he was even on CNN doing the Paris the other night, you know, being treated like a journalist. It's truly awesome.

In case you've been living under a rock, or have a life that, unlike most of America it would seem, isn't consumed with triviality, Paris, after having her 40-day sentence to County all but commuted by Sheriff Lee Baca, may be headed back to jail. Seems there's been an uproar in the community -- whatever the hell that is in this case -- about the kid-glove treatment. Also, city attorney Rocky Delgadillo, never missing an opportunity to stand up for truth, justice, and the Los Angeles way, is pissed at Baca for fucking with the judge's sentencing and parole guidelines and is considering filing a contempt of court charge against the entire Sheriff's department. This is awesome. Or, as Paris might say: That's hot. I mean, this is the Los Angeles city attorney who should be spending his time investigating the endemic corruption in city agencies and departments (water and power, buildings dept., the port agencies)... but he's making his big play with Paris.

And what's hot about it, obviously, is the absolute absurdity that it embodies. Of course, using the trials of Penelope Pit Stop (Paris) as a metaphor for the banality of American culture is cheap and easy, but I'm going to do it anyway. This isn't evil, it's banal. And, of course, banality is it's own form of evil. Meanwhile, as I was reminded at a screening of the excellent Michael Winterbottom movie, A Mighty Heart, which is adapted from Mariane Pearl's memoir of the search for her husband, Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, that's there's a whole other narrative playing out beyond most of our comprehension, or desire for comprehension, one that in some ways involves the very future of human relations. Of course, Pearl was beheaded by jihadists. The film is a great, entirely unsentimental, and devastating. It leaves one wondering about how we're ever going to get out of the mess the world finds itself in right now, a mess in which there's enough blame to go around for everyone. Maybe such things as Winterbottom's film can act as a corrective, a splash of cold water in the face of our self-indulgence, but probably not. It's seems we'll always have Paris.

Meanwhile, I can't help but think in the clown parade that is this sad and profoundly stupid drama, Hilton is the one who's coming out looking the best.

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Today I heard Sniff And The Tears great song "Driver's Seat" on the radio. It came out around 1978 and was a minor hit, but one that made an indelible mark on me. I always freak when I hear that song. It has one of the great chord progressions and snaky guitar lines in new wave history, some crazy weird melodies and a blistering guitar solo. It's one of those songs you think is a private pleasure, one that didn't really hit with others the way it hit with you, and then you start hearing it around, like it's having a mini-revival, and you feel pleased. I first noticed this revival on the last Pearl Jam record -- one of the songs subtlely copped its progression and put a different vocal melody over it (I forget which and I'm too lazy to go find out). Then you hear it in a store playing on one of those satellite programmed playlists and then you hear it on the radio and then you think sometimes good taste prevails. It's nice when good taste prevails, 'cause it doesn't happen a lot. Hearing it on the radio on the way back from lunch was the start of a strange and beautiful afternoon and evening. When I returned to work, I sat outside the office having a smoke and looking into the endless blue sky and tried to find my dad up there. I don't believe in heaven or any of that shit, but I really wanted to find him, though I couldn't really, not in a tangible way, not in the way I wished I could. I wasn't overly sad that I couldn't. It was more of an "oh, well" shrug kind of feeling. But sometimes, even as a full-grown man moving into the heart of middle age, I wish he was around. He was great to talk to in a way that was unique to us and I miss that. He was a tough, but sensitive guy. He knew how to deal with things.

Later, I took my dogs for a long walk around the neighborhood and was happy about the longer days and the still cool evenings. A huge moon was hanging over the dusk and it was that magical kind of time. I like walking around the neighborhood and checking out the houses and imagining the different lives lived in them. It was really quiet and peaceful in a way that seems more rare these days. Chaos seemed far away. The war seemed far away. Dissapointments, both personal and universal seemed far away. It was the best kind of evening that summer can offer. I hope your summers are full of them.

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Why are all the tortured heroes named Jack. There's Jack Bauer (sp? rhymes with power) on 24. And Jack Shepard (get it, he's the taking care of the flock) on Lost. And there's Jack O'Neill, the tortured protagonist of my unpublished, and underappreciated (even I don't really love it) novel, Altitude Sickness. What is it about Jacks? I'll tell you what: it's a strong but not ostentatious name. It inspires confidence, but it's approachable. It's got a little bit more going for it than a John, or Jim or Joe, but not too much.

Anyway, I just watched the two-hour season finale of Lost and I'm glad I did. I had just hours early had a conversation with a colleague about how there's nothing good on TV anymore. I was thinking of how disappointing Lost has been for the past season and half. The show, though, and TV perhaps, reedemed itself with this Holy Shit! two-hour finale. It's one of the episodes of television I've ever seen. Jack, the heart of the show, had a brilliant story line, the script was completely flipped and the ending was completely spooky and powerful. I don't want to spoil for those who've Tivo-ed it, but I'll say Matthew Fox, who plays Jack was truly commanding as an actor in a way I haven't seen since his heyday on the late, great Party of Five. A great TV star. The theme of the finale, like all great TV themes, is ultimately trite, but it was executed in such a way as to win you over to it's message, which is, of course, that you don't have to be stranded on a god forsaken island to be lost, or found. Poor Jack, seems he will remain lost. The feelings evoked will ring true for anyone who has felt the loneliness of losing a love. Now, we viewers are left to hope there's redemption for ol' Jack, because, well, in the end, like the rest of the Jacks, he deserves it.

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Anthems. Often bloated, self-indulgent, histrionic by definition, sometimes overly earnest. They linger in our consciousness and along the radio dials long after they should have been dead and buried. Timeless, often guilty pleasures. Hook-laden, sing-a-long manipulations. Here are some of rock's most majestic moments, I don't care what anyone says, from punk to today.*

1. Do the Strand- Roxy Music
Greatest glam-rock anthem? Glam isn't really epic, indulgent, and self-important in the way Cream taught rock to be all that, but this is epic Glam. Long, weird, funny, sing-alongy. Awesome. I know, you're saying, what about Garry Glitter's "Rock and Roll"? But, being played ad naseum in sports arena's isn't enough... not for me.
2. London Calling - The Clash
Greatest punk anthem? While the Sex Pistol compressed every song into a two-minute anthem, The Clash went old-school here: epic, sprawling, earnest. It's their "White Room" moment as they tried to expand the musical horizons of punk.
2.(tie) Stranglehold and Sweet Emotion -- Ted Nugent and Aerosmith
The kings of the early cock-rock era. Ted, no surpise, is a little more explicit, while Aerosmith might have something more on their minds than erotic asphyxiation, though I'm not entirely sure. I know, you're all saying "What about 'Dream On'?" What about it? That song sucks.
3.Don't Fear The Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
Probably the greatest heavy metal anthem of all time. Sinster, gorgeous, epic. Like a classical music movement. An entire movie in a song. I would have said "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath, but that song is bigger than this. I'll save that for when I do my most important songs of all time list. For pure cheese metal, let's give it to "Run To The Hills" by Iron Maiden.
4. Green Grass And High Tides Forever - The Outlaws
Their homage to Lynard Skynard takes the "Freebird" playbook and goes further, deeper, and outdoes the masters. The intro itself could stand on its own as a masterpiece of histrionics.
5. It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Want To Rock and Roll) - AC/DC
The greatest bar-band anthem of all time? Dude, the bagpipes...the bagpipes.
6. Love Will Tear Us Apart Again - Joy Division
The greatest post-punk/goth anthem of all time? The bleakness envelopes you in stark, nearly dance music and sets an eery transition to New Order and, well, the rest is history.
7. There Is A Light That Never Goes Out -- The Smiths
Does this need explanation?
8. Slipping Into Something - The Feelies
In the early days of modern/indie/alternative rock (circa 1984) there wasn't much you'd call an athem (beause REM didn't do that), except this song. Remember it during Something Wild when Ray Liotta's character is tracking down that other dude (the actor who was in Speed with Keanu) who looks like the other dude (who was in Lost Highway), both of whose names I can't remember, though the second other dude is a better actor.
9. November Rain - Guns N Roses
Probably the greatest hair-metal ballad of all time. Super cheesy, super rockin'; if the coda doesn't get the hairs on the back of your neck raised, you're not alive.
10. Mountain Song - Jane's Addiction
Greatest anthem of the new indie era (born circa 1988) mix of guilty metal pleasures and some other alterna vibe that only Jane's perfected. They kept it perfectly placed just two notches north of cheesy on this one.
11. Alive - Pearl Jam
The grunge era's only true epic? Earnest, histrionic, great bridges, can't help but sing along.
12. Let Forever Be - The Chemical Brothers
Massive hooks, sing along choruses, runs a shade too long. The electronic music anthem? Special nod to DJ Shadow's Entroducing album, which could be read as one long anthemic song, or an opera of samples and beats.
13. Champagne Supernova - Oasis
The superstar of the Britpop mid-90s movement. Long enough to be totally stoned by the end of, which is one of the measures of a good anthem.
14. Rebellion (Lies) - Arcade Fire
Earnest, striving, heartfelt, emotionally pulling....The only real anthem of the new millenial indie-movement?

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but I'm seeing a pattern. The songs tend to deal with death, decay, longing, the end of something, sometimes, literally, a rope. A lot of them seem to evoke a hangover of metaphysical proportions. The kind where you're picking through the ashes, trying to make sense of the wreckage, of a day, a relationships, a life, or an era.

*Were I including the halcyon days of disco, Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" of course, would top the list.

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I've been in New York for the past few days. I've been to New York many times and lived here several times. I came there after college in 1986 and stayed a couple years. Returned around 1990, stayed a shortwhile and did a stint in the summer of '93 with the New York Daily News -- the hottest summer on record at that point. I had poison oak from head to toe and was staying on the 23rd floor of a tenement adjacent to Morningside Park on about 123rd Street. It was the summer one of my heroes, Charles Barkley, nearly singlehandely won the NBA championship but came up a little short against Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen and the rest of the Bulls. It was one of the most epic battles I've ever seen one person wage against great odds. Like the movie 300 epic. I really identified with Charles at the time. He's just 6'4", played power forward, and was relentless, pure will. It was the story of a mortal taking on the gods and the mortal nearly winning. If his bonehead point guard Kevin Johnson wasn't such a bonehead, they might have won. Charles played great in every game.

Something about being here now remind me of that time, maybe it's because I've been reading the tabloids everyday. One of my jobs at the Daily News back then was to track down the blind cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the guy behind the original World Trade Center bombings. He was staying in a safehouse in Jersey City. After plying the buildings superintendent with beers and smokes, I got the license plate of the car he was using (there was some concern he was going to go on the lam during an extradiction process, I think.) and the apartment number he was staying in. I went up and knocked on the door, thinking I'd ask him for an interview or something. I got firmly escorted out of the building by a couple of very large, dark-sunglassed men. No shit. Before they kicked me out, though, I jammed the door with part of my cigarette box so I could get back in -- I think I had forgotten to get the apartment number or something. It was a summer I'll never forget and I have dozen war stories just from those few months -- like illegally purchasing M80s in Chinatown to blow something up so we could recreate the damage Met baseball player Vince Coleman might have caused when he tossed on into a crowd of people at Dodger Stadium. When my internship was done, one in which I managed to get a couple of lede stories in the paper, I always thought I wanted to come back to the Daily News, but life moves on.

But, thank God, the tabloids don't. The stories are all pretty much the same, year after year, and the continuity of the way the tabloids cover the city -- The Post and the Daily News and the Newsday at the time -- provides it with the feel of being a long-running soap opera. In a good way, even. The New York tabloids, sensational though they may be, lend the city a sense of civic urgency that we don't always feel in the diffused environment of Los Angeles.

There always seems to be a story around every corner in New York and the tabloids find a way of elevating what might seem mundane to a heightened level that has the effect of keeping you engaged in the city, like it's a character in a great and never ending novel. I think it's the way they turn every person who makes the news into a player in the city's drama. It's still all about the Donald and Elliot Spitzer and Micheal Bloomberg and there's always a sex-fiend lunatic either on the loose or recently caught. But these aren't pols and business people and criminals in the tabs; they're stars in a show that never gets cancelled (enough analogies yet?). We don't do that in Los Angeles. Nobody really knows the names of our pols and our developers. They don't feel like an integral part of the fabric our lives they way they do here. We don't tune in everyday to the soap opera of our civic life. My friend is always saying it'd be genius to start a tabloid in LA. I wonder if it would work.

On another note, I'm staying down in the East Village, way down, neary the Bowery and Alphabet City, areas that used to be considered a little dangerous when I lived here and now it's just coffee shops, bakeries, upscale restaurants and pubs and beautiful young people everywhere. What the hell do they do here? How do they afford it? What are they trying to do with their lives? What are their dreams? These are the things you wonder when you sit on the corner having a coffee and a smoke. Manhattan feels like a millionaires' playground. A place to go out to eat. I don't get the sense that there's anything that vibrant happening culturally here, nothing on the streets. The single most inspiring things I've seen in three days was some young, black dude screaming down Broadway in the middle of traffic doing a wheelie on his skateboard. That was truly epic. The second best thing was the cat in Tompkins Square Park, which was prone to riots when I lived here, but is now a place where dog people and their children hang out (which is cool with me), who was testifying: "You gotta live you're own life, baby, it's not too late. I mean liberties is decreasing, epidemics is on the rise... We need a few good men to serve, who aren't afraid to stand up and speak the truth." And who could argue with that? But, you know, he was preaching to toddler being wheeled past by her nanny.

As far as the age-old New York versus LA debate here it is: New York kicks our ass in the quality and quantity of baked goods available. LA's consistently doing better coffee. The cities could learns something here from each other.

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I'm turning into my mother. Not in a Mike Penner kind of way, but rather in the way that after years of quietly, or not so, making fun of our parent's neuroses, we wake up one day and find that we are but a bundle of those inherited ticks. See, my mom won't fly. I used to think this coincided with banning smoking on airlines, but I now recognize it for what it is: a completely rational aversion to hurtling through the air in tin can. I'm flying to New York tomorrow and I'm dreading it. It's not, however, a fear of dying in a plane that gets to me. I understand the relative safety of flying -- or do I? I'm always interested in those statistics, such as you're more likely to die from a lightning bolt than get attacked by a shark (I surf). Hmm...that wouldn't be because the vast majority of humankind doesn't spend most of its time bobbing in the water, would it? Likewise, we're told flying is exponentially safer than driving. But don't we drive exponentially more often than we fly, thus increasing our chances of having an accident. I know, I'm stunning you with my powers of deduction here. I'm just trying to say, statistics can tell highly subjective stories, despite having the cool veneer of fact about them.

The point is, though, that I don't like to fly in a severe way that I haven't felt until recently. I can't even believe I'm doing it. It has something to do with a lack of trust. Not in the plane or the pilots, but in myself. How will I be able to sit there for five hours and not go bonkers. That's what I'm really afraid of. That'll I'll be THAT guy. The one hyperventillating, breathing into the bag and talking to himself.

Besides that, I have become quite a hypochondriac. My doctor thinks I'm crazy because I inevitably go see him about something only after I've suffered through the worst of it and finally have the stength and will to haul my ass over to the westside to see him about whatever it is that ails me -- and I'm usually fine. Fine enough that he suspects there was nothing wrong with me in the first place (was there?) and almost feels bad about charging his outrageous prices, but understandably justifies it by the fact that I'm probably wasting his time. Like the time I thought I was bleeding out my ass. Turns out I had eaten beets the night before, and coupled with a touch of stomach flu, well, what would you think? I didn't know beets did that, probalby because I'd never eaten them before. They're a vegetable, right?

What seems to be happening, though, and I'm sure this is a function of age, or sobriety, neither of which I recommend if they can be avoided, is that I'm losing trust in my body. I feel mortal and vulnerable in ways I never did before. I used to be the guy would stay up partying all night and then go snowboarding all day and then party more and...well, never really thought water was all that important. I once played in a soccer match, a final in a tournament, with a badly pulled hamstring that had turned most of my leg black and blue. I just popped Advil like candy and soldiered on until I got thrown out for fighting. I played a Rugby match once after staying up all night drinking and doing blow. I scored a try (a touchdown, basically) the first time I touched the ball. I also got thrown out of that one for fighting.

I'm not saying this was a better way to live, but sometimes I miss the trust I had in my physical nature. Or maybe it was just bravado. I'm sure it wasn't attractive, but with age, I often wish I wan't such a baby. I've done Outward Bounds, gnarly portage trips in upper Minnesota and climbed a 14,000 mountain drunk. That was stupid, but I never questioned my capacity to do it. When I was done, I didn't celebrate by hydrating and resting -- I ate a huge hot fudge sundae. I did a marathon on about four weeks of training and finished in the top third. And immediatley had a beer and cigarette. I don't mean this to sound like some form of frat-boy boasting or self-mythologizing. None of this was heroic or even necessarily worthwhile behaviour. I'm just trying to put into context how alien that former being who was me now feels. These days, you couldn't pay me to go camping, unless by camping you mean day hikes in gentle rolling hills with a lush lodge to come back to for a comfortable night's sleep. And the next time I run, I'm sure it'll be because someone is chasing me.

Which isn't to say that by turning into my mom, I mean I'm becoming weak like my mom is. My mom isn't weak at all. She's actually one of the strongest people I know. But she is neurotic and, well, so am I. My wife, on the other, hand, is pretty much utterly fearless and makes fun of me. She tells me to look at these things as adventures. Which is the problem. Disney Land terrifies me. Way too adventurous.

It is what it is. And it ain't all bad. In the sum, I could do a hell of a lot worse than being like me mum, who, despite her neuroses, is a kind and compassionate hero in my eyes. So, stay tuned to the news tomorrow. If you hear about a New York bound jetBlue flight touching down in Salt Lake and some lunatic being led off in cuffs because he freaked out on the plane, well, that'll be me.

My mom'll understand.

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I just came from an event at Skylight Books at which Pleasant and Iris and S.A. Griffith were given certificates of merit and achievement or something like that from the City of Los Angeles. At first it might seem odd that two unrependent doyennes of the undeground would receive formal recognition from the city, but it was entirely right and entirely fitting and somewhat keeping with Eric Garcetti's attempt to keep a veeneer of bohemia about him -- he is the councilman for the Eastside, after all. Full disclosure: I've written about these two before, for last year's People issue (http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/punk-rock-royalty/13243/). Sorry, I don't know how to embed links yet. Anyway, the event was so beautiful and inspiring and again reminds what a treasure these two are (sorry, S.A. I don't really know you, but thought you were great, too). It's not just that they are beautiful and wacky and punk rock in the truest sense, but they are also damn good. Listening to them read from various collections of their poetry, I was struck by how good they were and how poetry, which can seem so anachronistic and useless at times, mostly because we don't make time for it, can be so moving. Theirs is the best sort of poetry, sure it's lyrical, but it's direct, and raw and funny, and makes you go: yes, exactly!

Iris and Pleasant write about an LA that is somewhat nostalgic in its raweness and grittiness, and they often employ a neo-noirish style, but it's an LA that still exists. As Iris said last night, "I don't care what they do to Hollywood Boulevard, it'll still always be Hollywood Boulevard." It's a curious thing for me; I wasn't here for the heyday of LA's punk era in the 80s, but lots of my friends here were fixtures in that scene. I kind of get to relive it vicariously through them, and through the writings of people like Plez and Iris. They make me believe in Los Angeles in ways that we sometimes don't anymore -- as, perhaps, the last truly bohemian city in America. As the city continues to get scrubbed clean, and become more expensive, I hope it holds onto that aspect of its character and doesn't lose its soul. It's hard to imagine it could with people like these gals and that guy still writing about it they way they do and still living it the way they do. They have a weird affect on me. They make me feel mild and inspired at the same time. They make me realize that there are far more valuable things than the brass rings and wealth and security. There is, after all, life. Their readings and their obvious love for each other -- I mean what a wonderful and fruitful relationship they've had with each other -- were so touching my friend, LA Weekly contributor and writer Caroline Ryder, and I, were moved close to tears at times.

Plez and Iris are such a part of the landscape here, like the Hollywood sign or something, that we tend to take them for granted, but please, please, check out their many collections (Skylight has good selections). I recommend Pleasant's "Princess of Hollywood" and Iris's "Two Blocks East of  Vine." And, while you're at it, check out their lives. For a minute even, it could inspire you to be brave.

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There is a conspiracy to keep me from sleeping. It's widespread, it's deep-rooted, it involves man and animial, and I have my theories about it. Where to begin?

Let's start with some general background. I live in Silver Lake, the other Silver Lake, the one that's still more like Highland Park than Pacific Palisades, the one way east of the Junction and south of Sunset. My immediate neighborhood is one of those places people who write such things would use as an example of the amazing polyglot harmony that can sometimes exist, against all odds, in this factured city, etc., etc., yawn, yawn. That aside, it's kind of true. On my small block are several Asian households, many Latino households, a smattering of gay households, a couple of young, hipstery type of renters who seem to be the types that are in bands you've proably heard about, and a few standard-issue white folk like me (like I am, to be grammatical).

We all seem to have one thing in common: dogs. This is a dog-loving neighborhood. Everybody, it seems has them, often, like me (or, like I do, to be grammatical) in multiples. There are a couple differences between me and my neighbors, though, when it comes to our dogs. They tend to have small, yappy ones; I have medium-to-large ones. Oh, and here's the main difference: I don't leave my fucking dogs out barking and yapping all...night...long. You know why? In the close quarters in which we all live (this is the densest precint east of New York City, I'm told), I'm afraid it'll keep people up. I know a crazy, quantum leap in logic and judgment there, huh?

Alright, so there's the general background. Now, let's get specific. Because it isn't just the neighbors with the dogs; it's the universe that doesn't want me to sleep. Here's how it happens -- and I'm going to switch now to the royal "you" for the purposes of, hopefully, greater reader empathy.

You're fighting off a cold, so you get yourself in bed relatively early, around 11 p.m. You take Joan Didion's The White Album with you, because you're just, at this late date, discovering her, and it's pretty mind-blowing how good she is. Unfortunately, despite one eye nodding off, you can't put it down and you've already missed your optimum fall-asleep window -- if you are awake past midnight, might as well stay up all night. You drift off, but then, at just around midnight, a persistent beeping sounds from another room. You follow the sound to the guest bedroom and discover a fire alarm going off. You've never noticed the alarm, up there on the ceiling next to the ceiling fan, before. Since there's no fire, you figure the battery must be running down. You follow the "turn this way" directions to open the damn thing, but all that does is pull the entire contraption out of the ceiling -- turns out it's electrical and not battery run. Now, of course, the entire house was wired by folks currently loitering about The Home Depot, so what's making the thing go off is anyone's guess. You finally manage to quiet the beeping, but now have a fire alarm dangling from the ceiling and a nice hole where it once was.

You go back to bed, read a little more Joan, and finally drift into an uneasy sleep, worried that the house's jerry-rigged wiring is going to spark up at any minute. Then, about an hour or so in it starts, the yappy-dog yapping. It starts slowly and builds to a crescendo of yap, yappity, yappity, yap. You find yourself surrounded on all sides by little yapping, not even real (those toy dogs are an abomination in the eyes of god) dogs. Fucking yapping and trying to howl, not quite making it, and yapping. It's driving you nuts, because it happens way too much and you can't believe people are so fucking self-absorbed and inconsiderate, and, yes, you wonder why they can't be more like you. Why can't the world be more like you? It really would be a better place, no doubt.

You lay there for awhile, wondering when it will stop. You contemplate putting on your shorts and searching for the source yapper, picking it up, knocking on the source yapper's owner's house and hurling the fuzz ball into said owner's face. You've done this type of thing before, when you were younger and, hard to believe, angrier. As you lay there, not quite summoning the energy or the anger to take aforementioned punitive action, the yapping reaches what you believe must be a climax, because it seems as if the yappers have cloned themselves and now are a Mormon Tabernacle Choir of yapping, or else other yappers have come from distant parts to join in the yapping. It's like a drum circle of yappers.

You're going to get up now and do something. You contemplate the pamphlet you're going to circulate around the 'hood that will raise conciousness about this scourge, but first you're going to find the source yapper... maybe kidnap him or her and not return it until the owners meet your demands: fluffy comes inside no later than 11 p.m.

But you don't have to get up this time, because nature has a way of sorting things out. Not always, but sometimes. For there, in the background of the similarly pitched yaps, you hear an intruding sound, one that's a little more yippie than yappy. You recognize the sound; it's the sound of reckoning; it's the sound of nature's revenge for man's abominable meddling; it's the sound of coyotes; and, finally, and dare I say, thankfully, it's the sound of death.

You lay there fully awake. You know what's going to happen, you even consider intervening -- but still, those shorts are way over there -- and then you hear it; the yips turn to frenzied laughter and the yaps turn into blood-curdling yelps. Soon, it's over. Quiet. And you lay there darkly, your daytime veneer of goodwill towards all turning into a seething morass of misanthropy, because, you know, people are exceptionally stupid and selfish... like my one neighbor who continually leaves town for weeks at a time, surrenders her house to derelict house-sitters who inevitably get arrested while her poor dog is left to fend for itself -- shitting all over the house, eating god knows what, and going slowly crazy. (Just an aside there).

Finally you drift back to sleep for a couple blessed hours until... until... those confounded squirrels that nest in the huge pine tree that looms over your house start their morning routine of knocking pine cones and all kinds of shit down onto your uninsulated roof (think of pennies dropping into a coffee can). You contemplate going online to see if there's anything under: What to do about squirrels who keep reigning the detritus of giant pine trees down onto your roof, thus preventing you from sleeping. Or, maybe just a BB-gun will do. But, finally, they stop and you slip back again into a light sleep, going a bit deeper, finally some rest and then.... the phone rings. It's 8 a.m. and your friend wants to know if you're ready to take the dogs to Elysian Park and you get up and greet your dogs, who are exceptionally glad to see you after the previous night's adventures, and, well, everything's basically okay.

It's day again.

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Lost of feelings to get to.

First off, Jim Ladd. Jim Ladd is a true American cornball. God bless him. Sure, his musical tastes haven't grown past Tom Petty, but he still believes, you know what I mean? He believes in the power of music to affect the atmosphere and the other night, when I was driving home from a friend's house, a friend who is undergoing a gnarly procedure to hopefully help his Hep C, I was feeling really bad about the atmosphere. I have another friend on the other coast who is undergoing heavy chemo and radiation to deal with a really bad cancer situation, and, of course, there was the Virginia Tech situation, and shit just feels really bad. It feels like a classic Didionesque time of paranoia and fear and bad tidings, and there was Jim Ladd. He seemed to be feeling the same way, but he was trying to do what he could about the situation, playing music he believed to be transformational. I caught a couple of songs, songs that seemed only tangentially related to the sickness in the air, Bruce Springsteen's dark and erotic "Candy's Room" and the Cult's epic "She Sells Sanctuary" and while nothing in the songs' lyrics could be tied back to what I, or maybe even he, was feeling, both songs were perfect salves at the moment. They helped me feel a little defiant, a little steeled, a little hopeful that as long as there is meaningful music, music with heart and committment, no matter what the content of the songs themselves, there's reason to believe, or at least a source from which to gain strength. And that's what music can do, still.

Which brings me, sort of, to American Idol. I hate American Idol. Not because I'm some snob who thinks the music is tripe and that the whole thing is some corporate-engineered hoax, which it is, of course -- if you aks me, nobody has come from American Idol and contributed much of anything except commerce to the world -- but because the show sucks. It's an overlong, boring, mediocre beauty pageant set to Muzak. More importantly, it often pre empts good shows on Fox, like Bones and House, two of the only shows I look forward to watching.

As for Alec Baldwin, and the call to his daughter that's currently taking over the talk shows, a call in which he seemed really pissed at her for some phone-related nonsense, and the content of which was leaked in some kind of divorce or custody hearing (I don't know, or don't care). What's the big deal? He sounded like a pissed off dad to me and as far as I know, he had reason to be pissed. Who knows what nonsense the kid was up to? I know, people are going to say the call was abusive (he called her a pig, or something) and mean and bad parenting, etc., and she was just a kid, etc. You know what? Twelve-olds are kids, sure, but they're also quite capable of getting up to a lot of nonsense and sometimes they'll piss off a dad, or a mom. My mom decked me once. My dad was always, as Baldwin did, threatening to fly, drive or molecularly transfer to wherever I was at the time to straighten me out (as Baldwin did to his daughter). You know what? I was scared he would, because he often did, and he didn't give a fuck how badly he embarassed me in front of whomever I was getting up to nonsense or mischief with. What kind of nonsense is a 12 or 13 year old kid capable of? Well, plenty. And fear of repercussions probably kept me from getting in any more than I did, which was plenty.

The NRA, whoever they are, must be the most selfish people on earth. They value their right to hollow-point bullets, like the VA Tech killer used, over the safety of their children... or at least other people's children. Talk about eating your young. Give me Alec Baldwin any day.

...Okay, I just heard the voicemail message to his daughter in full. He's not going to win father of the year, or at least not on that day, but still, I'll take him over the NRA.

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Words can't express the sorrow and horror and the fact that it happend just days before the anniversary of Columbine only makes it that much more depressing. Deepest sympathies to the victims, their families, the school and our country. Very near the top of the white house's statement was a defense of our country's easy access to guns -- a spokesperson saying that while the president defends the right to bear arms, he thinks it should be borne lawfully. Good one, guys. The fact that the white house feels the need to defend plentiful guns n ammo for everyone right after this tragedy is a fine reminder of the sickening place our culture is at. Thanks for that. It's an obvious thing to do, but it's really hard not to view this in context of the overall degradation of our culture, you know movies like Saw, etc., video games that try to top each other for gore and violence. That kind of thing. Sad stuff.

Here's what my colleague, Rena, wrote about her surreal experience of this tragedy.

At 8:30am Monday morning, on the way to photograph a suspected serial killer at L.A.’s Criminal Justice building, I heard an NPR reporter say that one person was killed by gunfire at Virginia Tech, and that the assailant hadn’t been found.

One person?  I thought to myself.  It was probably a crime of passion. Someone got mad. Someone cheated on someone else, someone stole their roommate’s guitar.  Maybe there was a kid on too much PCP cramming for finals.  Then the reporter said the shooting had happened a day after a campus bomb threat, and that the students were fleeing their classes in panic.

Those lucky slackers, I thought.  I used to love milking bomb threats in college—they were consistently a perfect excuse to play hooky.

Inside the People vs. Chester Turner courtroom, I waited around to take a fetching portrait of a monster.  As he was walked in, I searched for a good angle, and observed the defense lawyer smile with his client, laugh with him, pat him on the back.  Such is the occupation of a Criminal Defense Attorney.  I rolled my eyes quietly.

On the elevator ride down I got a call from my father.  “Did you hear about Viriginia Tech?  Ten students were killed.”  “Ten?”   I asked, “I thought it was one.  What happened to the gunman?”  “They haven’t found him,” Dad said.  “I can’t believe it but they haven’t found him yet.”

Down on the lobby patio I managed to join the mob of paparazzi snapping pictures of Phil Spector waltzing slowly up from the parking lot for his first day of trial.  I sneaked down the ramp past the large media group to get a closer look, which caused the other photographers to get a little grumpy.

“Hey you, lady, you can’t go down there!”  I ignored them.  Eventually it progressed to, “You bitch!  Get the fuck out of the way!”  I walked back up and told them to relax.  A woman beside me asked what the “crazy looking white guy” was on trial for.  “Murder,” I replied.

Back at the office around 11am, I opened my gmail account and saw a message from a friend. “VIRGINIA TECH!  18 people dead!”  I hit reply.  “18?  I thought it was 10.” I clicked on the ABCNEWS.com link that was forwarded to me, and saw SWAT Team members carrying injured students to emergency vehicles.  I wrote again.  “WTF is goin on over there?  This has been happening since 8:30 in the morning!  It’s only one guy, right?”

Getting down to hard work, I sorted though images of my Saturday night at the drive-in movie theater seeing Grindhouse, “A great movie,” I told my co-worker, “because it’s so over-the-top violent.”

At 11:45am I clicked the Refresh button on my browser window.  “29 People Confirmed Dead.”  Then my face started to get hot.  I saw more and more photos of limp students being haphazardly rushed out of their dormitory, hoisted up by their wrists and ankles.  I saw panicked looks on the face of policemen. Moisture stung my eyes and clouded my glasses.  I went outside to have a smoke because I needed to calm down and it’s embarrassing to cry at work.

Once back in my office, I stared at my mouse pointer sitting poised for action on that terrible button.  I didn’t really want to, but I clicked on Refresh again.  “33 people confirmed dead at Virginia Tech.  Worst Shooting Rampage in United States History. Gunman Dead, Motive Unclear.”

Then the hot tears let loose.  I wish I could just learn when to stop clicking.

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I read DeLillo's short story in the latest New Yorker last night. I could have stopped at just I read last night and that would have been impressive enough since I usually just go home and cry, unless Bones or House is on, in which case I'll go home, watch Bones or House, eat a half box of Wheat Thins...and cry. Anyhoo...back to DeLillo. His story is called "Still Life" and it was inspired by the iconic image seen in just about every publication following the 9/11 attacks in New York of that guy who was walking away from the towers in a business suit with a briefcase, covered in ash. In fact, it takes up his story where that image leaves off, imagining him going home to his estranged wife and reconnecting with her and his son. I'm not sure what, if any, research DeLillo put into the effort - did he make contact with the fella? Is any of it grounded in truth, or is it a complete imagining? I imagine it was the latter. It felt a little invasive to me. After all, that guy in the photo was a real person and now there's a alternative narrative out there that's inextricably related to him because everybody has that image seared in their minds. Clever. But just? Worthwhile? I'm not sure. The story itself is pretty trite. One of the subplots revolves around the reforming couple's son, who spends time at his friends' (a brother and sister) house secreted away in a room in their high-rise apartment peering out a window with binoculars. Of course, you see the big reveal coming a mile away: they're keeping watch for the next attack. I guess my question is why now, six years later?

Reading, I kept asking: what's new here? What's helpful? What further understanding does this story bring? What's the point...? Except as a creative excercise in imagining the real life of a still life, i.e., the iconic image of that man. Even that feels a little too facile towards the story's end of reminding us that innocence had been lost on that day, that everything changed. Whose innocence? The childrens'? The country's? Really?

This tendency to look at 9/11 in this way, as it's own entity -- the thing that changed everything -- also tends to separate it from us and imbue the nature of the change it brought with some sort of inevitability. Yes, everything did change, and plenty of nothing did, too. Maybe not enough and too much did at the same time. The story is still being written and we have a part to play in how it is, but I'm a bit tired of the almost nostalgic looking-backs of this sort of literary grave-dancing. Here DeLillo gives us a 9/11 romance: girl meets boy, boy leaves girl, planes crash into towers, girl gets boy back. It would be utterly banal, except for his use of the backdrop of 9/11, which doesn't make it any more profound, just sort of exploitative, to me anyway. Not to mention a day late and a dollar short. Or is not enough days late? Maybe metaphysical context isn't possble yet, and all we can do is continue to sift through the ashes of that bad minute.

On the other hand, we look to masters like DeLillo to grapple with our societal and historic narratives and I shouldn't begrudge him for trying -- wait a minute, that's exactly what I'm doing, but you know what I mean. I'm not sure, though, that we look to Mike Binder and Adam Sandler. Binder is the director of the bereft Reign Over Me (the mildly charming Upside of Anger previously), a movie that, like DeLillo's story, has nothing new to add to the 9/11 narrative and not much more on its mind than a mawkish seduction aimed at setting us up for the kill: the cry moment when Sandler's Charlie finally talks about the family he lost in one of the planes. Talk about low-hanging fruit. I mean, of course I cried (see title of blog), but without out the movie having anything real to say (not sure of its tone, the film bordered at times on a comedy of manners -- almost like Woody Allen does 9/11), the tears were cheap and the movie left my wife and our friend with almost nothing to discuss afterward. It was like a piece of sugar-coated pain candy - easy to swallow but worth nothing inside.

Not that such subjects are verbotten (United 93!). And in a world that seems on the verge of lunacy, I often find myself wondering what the hell the hot, young generation of writers, the McSweenyites if you will, are doing. They seem so detached from the big questions and so focused on minutie and the arcane and the ironic (excepting Eggers himself) that I get frustrated with them. I mean when was the last time a publication like The Believer or McSweeney's itself wasn't an excercise in trivia? A breeze through the archives renders titles like: "The Personal Journal of Zan, The Male Half of the Wonder Twins", and something about someone's journal entry indicating a need to stop watching porn, and "My Rejected Design Theme For J.Crew's Summer Catalog.", etc. I'm sure a lot of this shit is funny, and one of the funniest things I ever read, an essay about how many 12-year-olds the writer could take in a fight, was in either McSweeneys' or The Believer... but c'mon, isn't there more to life?

Life, however, goes on and much of life is trivial and small. Until, of course, it isn't. And then we yearn for the time when it was so.

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Just a quickie here (I'm really not sure how blogs work since I don't read many, or any, except my own, and that's only because I write it, and because I'm really, really self-absorbed, which would be a bad thing if I wasn't so worth it; in fact i'm so worth it, I'm thinking of switching to L'Oreal shampoo.). This post is more or less an update on More Feelings particularly as it concerns Pearl Jam and its lame cover of the Who's "Love Reign O'er Me." Basically, i said they fell flat on that one, sucking the life out of an epic, which surprised me because, if you've ever seen Pearl Jam live, they're very epic. Now yesterday, I heard on indie 103 the band's cover of another warhorse anthem, Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son." In this case, they turned a minor-epic into a major epic. "Fortunate Son's" always been a great song with a great punk ethos, despite issuing from a rather americana-oriented group, and, more importantly, it's a song that my mid-90s band, Burnt Toast (if you were ever in a girl's softball league in Edwards, Colorado - near Vail - and stopped by Curtis's Kitchen for a pitcher or ten on a Tuesday evening, you may have seen us) covered, with me switching over to bass for that one. Speaking of Burnt Toast, I smashed my guitar during our cover of "Hey, Joe" during our very first gig. Smashed it to smithereens after playing a three-note guitar solo for abot five minutes to climax the song and the gig. I wasn't sure if we'd ever play again, because we sucked, so I wanted to go out right. Must have been okay, because people gathered pieces of my guitar and took them home with them, and by people I mean girl softball players. One of them asked me to sign a piece of my guitar for her. It's weird how much that piece of guitar looked like her breasts.

Where was I??? Oh, PJ's cover of "Fortunate Son." Yeah, they did this one right. The song feels like a tsunami rumbling in from far away, undulating on waves of heavy-bottom bass and thick, fuzzy guitars (I imagine all three were in play) and Eddie's oaken-voice is perfect. It builds and gains momentum and finally just swamps you and you sit there and drown in it, even if you're late for work and sitting in the B of A parking lot wating to deposit your work check because direct deposit feels like some weird sci-fi shit to me. Anyway, what they did here that they didn't do with "Love" was find the missing ingredient -- a fat bottom to give the rather tinny original version of "Son" a heaviness that makes it sound thoroughly of now and of them. It's an updating of a classic and not just a tentative homage.

I'm not wearing pants.

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The next hoaxster who tries to perpetrate on me the con that cafe americanos, the undead of the coffee world, are "just like a regular coffee" is going to learn the difference between a sandwich (good to eat) and a knuckle sandwich (not so good to eat).

Feeling me?

I just had another bad feeling. It's about bunnies. Not so much bunnies, but bunnies as the au currant (sp?) metaphor among irony-striving hipsters. You see them everywhere -- in lowbrow art, graf, youtube videos, on t-shirts, in band names, in bands. Multiplying like wabbitz (see how easy it is).  It's both hilarious and fraught with hidden meaning, because of, like, the incongruity of the bunny factor. No, actually, it's not. It's boring and played out.Enough already. I'm sick of your ironic bunnies, artistes, move on to your next big idea...like rayguns or something.

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The picture on page A5 of the LA Times featuring Ian Paisley - it's hard for me to call such horrible demagogue a Reverend - sitting with Gerry Adams on the ocassion of their first-ever direct talks borders on the surreal. Paisley is the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Gerry Adams is the leader of Sinn Fein. These, historically, are the political arms of the two warring factions in Northern Ireland, eventhough Paisley doesn't have direct links to the loyalist (pro-British) paramiltary organizations. His incendiary speeches over the years, however, and his obvious bigotry towards Catholics (not to mention homosexuals and anything else that doesn't fit within the strident paramaters of his fire-and-brimstone Protestant evangelicism -- it's a bassackwards world when the Catholics are the progressives!) and even the Republic of Ireland, have been viewed by many as encouraging violence in Northern Ireland. He has been stalwart in his opposition to any kind of movement in Northern Ireland that would lead to any realistic chance of peace, progress that could only be realized if the Catholics in Northern Ireland gained a true stake in the governing of their lives. The Catholics in Northern Ireland have been second-class citizens - socially, economically, judicially, politically -- there forever and that's the way Paisley liked it. Now, his agreement to a power-sharing government with Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland makes a step toward equality not only possible, but probable. You've come a long way, baby. Not that Adams and Sinn Fein are wearing snow-white hats. The IRA got enough blood on its hands to lose a great deal of sympathy from those whose sympathy has been critical to its relevance - those in the Republic of Ireland and the Irish diaspora in America. Even so, the IRA atrocities were always given much more publicity than the equally, or even more, blood-thirsty Protestant paramilitaries. In the end, though, everyone got sick of the shit a long time ago. It's taken the leaders of the warring parties this long to catch up with the public.

This is but another chapter in the long history of Irish independence. There will eventually be a referendum in Northern Ireland on unifying with the Republic of Ireland. This referendum will come more than 85 years after a de facto version of such was negotiated in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which officially ended Ireland's war of independence from Britain. Back then, a commission was supposed to redraw the borders between loyalist Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, with the Catholic majorities counties - four of the six comprising Northern Ireland - expected to come under the rule of Southern Ireland. The two remaining loyalist counties would have probably succumbed soon after. But, due to complications of war debt and the ensuing civil war in the Republic, that commission never redrew the boundaries, and Northern Ireland was left to stew in a cauldron of sectarian strife.

The divisions of Catholic and Protestant, Republican and Loyalist, though, have been increasingly anachronistic in the modern world. Southern Ireland, the Republic, once an economic stepchild compared to Northern Ireland, is booming. The long-feared Papists in the south are increasingly prosperous and secular, and the people in Northern Ireland, with their economy and prospects looking bleak by comparison, are tired of the pathologies that have come with the strife - pathologies that mirror any region beset by decades of social and economic blight: gang warfare, racketeering, drug-trade, drug-trade patronage, corruption and general bullshit. What does it mean to be a loyalist in the era of the European Union? It's a cultural identitification that's been colored by base triumphalism, blood and primal prejudice for too long and its time seems to have passed - even a dinasaur like Paisley appears to get it. Will Ireland eventually be united? Not sure it really matters. It probably hasn't for a long time, but what does matter is that the people there are closer than ever to gaining the prospects of a hopeful life.

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Lauren Weedman is doing a one-woman show at the Redcat called Bust. I think there are only a couple more performances. I hope some of you can get to see it. She's a amazing and unique talent. This is the kind of shit you just don't get to see a lot of around here. Funny, poignant, satirical and real at the same time. The performance revolves around a mildly self-absorbed, fairly neurotic character, probably close to Weedman's caricature of herself, who is both navigating the loopy and more than mildly self-absorbed world of Hollywood -- filled with characters and subplots that involve familiar personages like her dog-rescuing friend Rachel (hilarious send up) and an editor at Glamour who wants to publsh the true-life account of how Weedman's character (and one would suspect Weedman herself) lied about being raped during her freshman year in college to get attention, who decides to volunteer at LA's county jail with a program called Behind Bars. The arc of the story is fairly simple -- naive, self-absorbed Hollywood chick discovers things about the bigger world and herself. Weedman is a genius at character, doing everyone from the other volunteers to the innmates, and her writing is razor-sharp. The laughs come from how mercilessly she pillories everyone and everything from the horrifying prison bureaucracy to herself, but it's only hilarious because she's never cruel or condescending and colors everything with a right and light stroke of humanity. The comedy is driven by character and situation at the highest and most absurd levels. I first saw her in performances with Hassan Christopher's equally brilliant Company of Strangers dance and performance troupe several years ago. Why this woma