I'M OFF
So I'm off to Toronto to basically for a few days. Let me know if you need anything (indie CDs, bowling shirts, bagels, booze, special candy, whatever).

I'll be back Tuesday night to play a gig in Mineola, NY.

CIGARS ALL AROUND
This piece on the East Village antifolk scene is fantastic. It is lovely that the Pro-Anti & Olive Juice cliques got a (reasonably) glowing endorsement from the Village Voice, whose entirely requited love for the Moldy Peaches continues apace.

One thing they didn't mention in the article is that all these people getting shout outs (who were part of the newish A/F compilation put out by Olive Juice) are going to piss off a lot of people.

There's a reason I don't play at the Sidewalk anymore, and it has nothing to do with the quality of my stuff or the increasing popularity of the Monday night anthoot and the Sidewalk scene in general. The level of jealousy and playa-hatred is crazy there. I know for a fact that next Monday, the back room will be full of bitter lifers whining loudly about how they didn't get mentioned in the Voice piece, and how the people that did get mentioned suck and should have their instruments taken away from them.

Sure, griping is a natural part of any scene where some people succeed. But I've been in many different scenes all over the world, and it is worse there, and I'm not sure why. I wouldn't dare blame it completely on the fact that there are more junkies and recovering addicts there than anywhere else, and that hustler's attitude of stab-your-friends-before-they-stab-you has been the attitude of more than a few people in that scene. When the sniping and bitching became too much, I left. I'm not enough of a whiner to stand the scene for too long, I guess.

So it's triply nice to see that Kimya and Adam, and Major Matt and Nan and Jeff Lewis and everyone are doing well. They're very good, and a lot of fun. See them when they come to your town, and give them my unconditional love.

SPRING CLEANING
I'm getting sloppy. I can feel it in my bones, which are somewhere in my body, bending where they should be holding strong, and I'm wondering if I'm not getting enough vitamins or something. But no, it's not that, it's not even old age. It's just the anticipation of getting out of town.

I haven't been off the island of Manhattan for more than a day at a time in almost two years. The time just catches up with you, makes you think in terms that have nothing to do with the rest of the world, turn you provincial and make you angry at the ever-increasing list of things about the world you no longer understand. It's fine until you notice it.

Well, I started feeling it around Christmas, and since then I've tried to clean up my life a little bit. Last night I did some Spring Cleaning (it's amazing what can be accumulated in a three-room apartment in eight months, and I moved in there on Kate's & my back in pretty much one trip, my point being that I had no material possessions barely at all), and I left for work this morning having to climb over piles of papers and assorted crud that I'll have to put back before those organized piles of 2002 get paved over with the already-accumulating detritus of 2003.

I couldn't wait to start Spring Cleaning until I could actually open the windows to let out the lemon and pine smells of all the environmentally hostile industrial cleansers I had left over from my temp job at Union Carbide*, so I'll be dreaming of chemically reconstituted tropical forests for the next few nights, little Gollums leaving vainly through my little pile of loose possessions in vain search for whatever Preciouses they may seek.

*To clarify: I never worked at Union Carbide. And if I did, I would never take chemicals from them. And if I did, I wouldn't use them in my apartment without being able to open the windows.

PROOF POSITIVE THAT PUNK IS REALLY AND TRULY DEAD DEAD DEAD

Quiz: How Punk Are You?, from (of all places) that total punk bastion, MSN Kidz.

MSN. Frikken. Kidz.

The very fact that this exists tells me that punk has finally become completely assimilated, and now it's little more than a quaint ethical concept, utterly dated and meaningless to anyone who wasn't there. Euch.

How can I have forgotten
the words of Johnny Rotten
"Don't understand this bit at all?"
[de Archipelapogo]

TONY HAS A HEADACHE AFTER TYPING THIS ENTRY.
It's kind of funny. I'd almost completely stepped out from behind the whole Chico Bangs thing, except as an occasional handle at my periodic online hangouts. But recently I've made some new (and, in most cases, awfully cool) friends, and suddenly there's a whole mess of people who think of me as Chico and only Chico again.

And really, Chico's thrilled with all the attention, and will happily service all his loyal followers deep into the next century, and the one after that, should any of y'all live that long. In fact, when I refer to myself in the third person, Chico will talk about Chico's needs first, because if Chico doesn't speak out for Chico, then who will?

Speak for Chico, that is?

More better later, I promise.

* * *
[Edit: This unrelated story came into my inbox this evening: Looking for Chico, by Robert Guskind (via the long-running and always-interesting Cherry Bleeds)]

X-RAIDED
Also, I try not to gloat. It's bad form, and I'm clumsy when it comes to the Superiority Dance. But.

It was lovely to watch the ever-sucky Bucs smack the facepaint off the Oakland Raiders yesterday, even if all my plans fell through and I wound up watching the thing at home drinking and cooking (which works quite well, actually, as long as you don't burn anything, which there's no danger of at my place because the elements on my stove only get about as warm as a functional electric blanket, so the stew I was cooking took two awfully-slowly-nursed beers to complete) and alternately cheering every little bounce that went the Bucs' way and trying to figure out which genii thought the commercials that made it to the broadcast were worth 2 mil to air.

The game, as always, didn't matter. I hadn't bet enough on the outcome for either side to be able to break my heart, or even the veneer of my anger at my inability to write anything coherent.

It was the typical Super Bowl one-sided over-early capital-exchanging exercise, and I muted through the musical acts except for the Dixie Chicks and No Doubt. The Chicks were fine, an acceptably bluegrassy national anthem which was kind of sweet in its uncharacteristic understatement, and after Shania Twain's Cruella De Ville-from-a-can getup, it was a pleasure to hear Gwen Stefani actually sing off-key. Let's hear it for live performance; every time might be the last time they let that happen with a billion people watching, especially these days.

At the end, I was drunker (after only two beers; my blood has definitely thinned since I moved here) than I usually get alone, but not so far gone that I wasn't able to call up a couple of old friends from Toronto and coherently talk small about matters other than football or writer's block. Which lifted the black cloud I had been carrying around all weekend just this much, which was enough.

YOU'RE LOOKING MIGHTY FINE IN THAT ANORAK THIS MORNING, BABY

At 8:30 this morning, I went out to grab some quick breakfast and hit the supermarket (it wasn't open yet, and what's with that? I pay through the nose to live here for 24-hour convenience, among other things, and I want what I want when I want it, and I'll tantrum my bad self all over Manhattan if the doors ain't open). It's a lovely morning, still chilly but not nearly as cold as the last week, and it's always a pleasure to walk the streets of New York when they're not brimming with quasi-autistic knuckleheads running about as if the streets were some big romper room.

I have no idea why I was surprised to see three guys just hanging out on the corner, looking cool, shooting the shit, scoping the honeys, hogging the pay phones, playing hoodlum, doing their thing. At eight-thirty on a Sunday morning. Did these guys call each other at seven and say, "Hey guys, what say we get some corner time in before the wife wakes up?" They were not waiting to be picked up, they weren't dressed for day labor or anything, not a paper coffee cup in the bunch. Their catcalls to the parka'd chiquitas were ignored (of course, what woman goes out at that time of day looking to hook up with someone? Oh, alright, I'm sure there's an answer to that.)

They weren't hurting nobody. It was kind of funny, is all.

SONG (2)
I was trying to write a chapter for the book, and this came out instead. Which happens a lot.

Look at them out there. They have no clue, do they? They have no idea how, how sheltered they are. None of these people extends themselves. None of them. Shit. The world is full of people who do just enough, and then complain when something goes wrong and they can't deal. Set yourselves up for failure is what you're doing. What the hell do you think you're doing over there, hey? You got some concept in your head about the skies are gonna open and the gods are gonna rain riches and heaven on your head while you stand there on that corner in the middle of the goddamned night holding up that lamppost?

That's not how it works, big fella. I can't believe you don't know that. I can't believe none of you know that. The world is a gift, and it's given to those who go get something out of it. If you want comfort, you have to go get it, you have to achieve it, it needs to be maintained like anything else.

The problem is, you never grew up. You never took the time to actually learn enough about the world outside of your own head to actually care about it. You celebrated the little kid in yourself, the childlike qualities in others. You're so cute when you're angry, so feral, so wild and crazy, so devil-may-care, good god, no one's asking you to be responsible all the time, but what about just this much maturity, how about you develop just a freaking hint of perspective on what the world is and how you deal with it, what about maybe looking up from whatever porn you're into to just maybe see a slightly bigger picture than the one you've got your little snout into?

I know, I'm acting childish myself right now. I know, I know. But the people I know are kids, they refuse to grow up, and Never Never Land is a shallow and imperfect place, and I want off this island. I want to see the rest of the world now. I want something more than the people I have known are giving me.

I have made my decision. There is only now, now. There is only the present, the great here. The future opens up like the canyons of this glorious city, even at night the past and future are compressed into the now. Tomorrow is two blocks away from wherever I am, the streets are full of walking dead, cops & cabs run silently through the streets like sharks chasing nothing, the world is a decaying piece of shit swarming with this virus, this human virus, doing no good, choking the world with apathy and ignorance, but not me, not anymore, me, I'm alive, fuck work, fuck rock and roll, fuck everything, I'm alive, I'm ALIVE, more than I've been maybe ever, and anyone that isn't on this bus, this bus going to the next world, the better, smarter, more constructive, happier world that's just around the next corner, the world that sits right on top of this one, shares the same space and time with it and yet is just plain better in every meaningful way, anyone not on the bus to that glorious same-but-better planet will fall away from my life like an old skin.

Hello, brand new day.

SONG
You know, I was mortally afraid of being the guy who would quote Replacements lyrics as advice to my friends.

I never wanted to be the guy talk about my high school years as if it were Shangri La, and it predated the Pleistocene Era.

You know that guy. That guy.

I never wanted to really know what 'post ironic' meant. I got called it a couple of times, in some reviews, and it seemed like I could have been called way worse, so I let it slide. I still don't know what it means.

I'm back to working on the novel, for a couple of reasons. I'm rotating the crops. The music doesn't work, I go back to the book.

Nose on the grindstone. God bless. Good morning.

INFANTE'S INFERNO
I found the best book this weekend. Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote one of my favoritest books ever, Three Trapped Tigers, a kind of American-Graffiti-set-in-pre-revolutionary-Cuba, filtered through a healthy amount of Joycean wordplay and bawdy wit. It's in and out of print (far as I can tell it's currently in, so if you have a notion, go get it), and I liked it so much I named my first real band for it.

Anyway, he now lives in London, an exile disillusioned by the totalitarian turns Castro's made in the past few decades. He continues to write, both journalistic pieces and fictions, mostly Calvino-esque exercises in wordplay instead of narrative, but his early stuff continues to amaze me.

And on my last trip to the library, I found Writes Of Passage, his first published book, a collection of short stories in which you can really see him stretching his voice in all kinds of different directions, from the breathless and then this happened and oh yeah this was going on and then she said that of the opening piece through a suffocatingly sophisticated discussion about jazz with an effete bad artiste, with stops at bordellos and cantinas all along the Havana coast. I'm about two thirds of the way through it, and I'm enjoying it like a five fucking dollar milkshake.

DR. KING AND THE BUCCANEERS
I don't often back winners.

It seems the people I'm most interested in are not the eternal invincibles, the capos de tutti cappi of society. Not that they're terribly compelling, I mean, what's the story in win-win-win-win, of starting life with a head start and pulling away from there? No one can follow that, except for EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER CONTROLLED THE WORLD. But you know, aside from that.

So the losers I'm most interested in don't always transcend their inherent losertude. Or rather, sometimes transcendence is not their bag. (I did vote for Nader, for ex, and I would again.) No one with a sane molecule in their craniums would debate the importance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his influence on how Americans treat each other, and look what happened to him. And there was no way he was going to become the President or CEO of Time Warner or Head of the IOC or Johnny Carson's replacement if he'd lived. He had a job to do, and his job was the struggle, not the summit. There is no summit in his battle. La lucha sigue.

Which brings me, and I've done this all backward I know (sorry), to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. If you care about the NFL (and I know, billions don't), the Bucs have been a laughingstock, a punchline, for basically my entire life. When they went 0-26 to start their existence, I was fresh out of pullups and had just learned enough about the world (like, how to read, how to get beer from the fridge for the grownups, how to sit still and not run in front of the TV, you know, vital steps in the growth process) to start watching the games on Sundays with my Dad or whoever.

So remembering that, it was great to fade in & out of consciousness yesterday (also I was doing a lot of reading, so I had the game on mute, but still) and watch those same Bucs absolutely dismantle the Eagles on their crappy shag-rug-on-concrete field in front of their asshole fans who piss on cripples and drink like Scottish soccer hooligans. I feel for Donovan McNabb -- he seems like a decent chap, and he's too good to not return to the Championship -- but the Bucs were simply due.

I spent a bad week in Tampa once. The Cuban breakfasts were sublime, but I got the impression that the city is a dank creepy place where even the happy people don't smile, and the humidity just hangs in the air like nervous armpit funk. Even on the party-strips of Ybor City and St. Pete, the perfectly tanned and toned coeds and meat-jocks looked somehow anxious, ready to shrivel up before their time. Those people need something to cheer about.

I'm glad the Raiders are back too -- it should be a real killer game next weekend -- but I'm looking for Mike Alstott to run A-Train-sized lines through those behemoths in black, and I suspect the Super Bowl will be won Vinatieri-style on the foot of my favorite little munchkin, Martin Gramatica.

Anyway. Happy Dr. King Day, y'all. Do something good for someone else today in his honor.

THIS RAY OF HOPE FOR SOCIETY'S FOR YOU
Overheard on a Bud-ad-bedecked subway train ride home tonight by one guy among four pairs of all-made-up college age kids out on the town, about 2:30 am:

"You know, there is no number of pictures of pretty girls holding bottles of Budweiser that would convince me that it's a good tasting beer. Really. It's not happening.

Now. Stella Artois, on the other hand, could have pictures of old men touching themselves and I'd be convinced enough to drink the stuff."

This statement was followed by a round of ewww and yuck, but ultimately no one disagreed.

THIS COLD IS KINDA HOT, ACTUALLY.
Given that I come from a place where winter is the native tongue, and I haven't moved all that far south, it does surprise some people when I tell them that I hate the cold weather. But I do. I hate it with the flaming rage of a thousand suns. (I know that said flaming suns would warm things up, and really, that's my hope. But I digress.)

Now, given that this week has been the coldest week I have witnessed in the three years since I moved to New York, and given the cruddy brown snowfall that might make my admittedly short bicycle commute this morning a little treacherous, given all that, this 'worst day of the season' isn't so bad. I have heard people whine and kvetch about this coldness as if the sled dogs had all died of exposure, and we were actually on the surface of the planet Saturn, the Kelvin-scale temperatures falling into the single digits, so removed from warmth that our molecules were about to stop moving, time slowing to a glacial creep.

Piffle. Our breeding stock is hardier than this. There's not even any wind out there, and we've had, what, a inch of snow in Manhattan?

Gawd. New Yorkers are such wusses. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going back inside for a warm toddy or three and a steaming bath with selected members of my imaginary harem.

And then I'm off to work.

STAND IN THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE
And despite the fact that today is the coldest day New York has seen since I moved here back in what feels like just before the Renaissance, I walked to work this morning with my jacket open like some careless eight year old, and I became aware that the chip on my shoulder has gotten pretty big this week. The flaps of my jacket waved at the cabs and the brooding head-down walkers as they bumped into me not watching where they were going, and I smiled and didn't give a fuck, wondering each time if these people were really so unable to focus on the stretch of pavement directly in front of them that they'd walk into lampposts, buildings and other people as if we were all random swinging pendulums on some mini golf course.

(They are. Watching people walk straight at a brick wall and then sneer like it's the wall's fault for getting in their way is a sight of which I'll never get bored.)

Maybe I was occupying too much space, or walking too straight. That can be a problem, I know, and it's probably wrong for one to feel entitled to the twenty-odd yards of sidewalk ahead of wherever one is. But my last couple of weeks have had more than my RDA of needy and uncommunicative people, and I needed the confidence of a good don't-mess-with-me style constitutional.

I hate my meek self. Part of why I moved to NYC was to take that passive doormat part of me off like some ugly gray shirt from my childhood that doesn't fit and I never want to wear again. I'm not as bad as I used to be, but the part of me lingers. I've been feeling it a lot lately; one of the working titles for the new CD is The Boy Who Took No For An Answer.

PEOPLE DIE.

When I was growing up, and really ever since, people I've known used to make fun of the Bee Gees all the time. And yeah, I guess there was a lot to make fun of, on the face of it. There's the high-higher-&-dogpitched harmonies, their Eurovision hair, and the fact that while lots of people tried to sound like them, no one actually could do it with any authority.

Truth was, the Bee Gees were really, really good. They were genuinely great songwriters, and when you hear other people cover their songs, that fact becomes clear. Sure, they sounded fey and geeky. They paved the way for thousands of hours of crappy disco and techno to see the light of the glitter ball. But talk about creating a genre and filling it completely. The death of Maurice Gibb ends a legendary run. These guys had basically free passes to the top of the world's pop charts for more than three decades, and their place in the pantheon of popular music was assured long before the great cash-in that was Saturday Night Fever came down the pike.

So it's kind of sad that, upon Maurice's death, the surviving brothers are taking their grief public with questions about the care that their brother got. The guy was a rock star. He lived hard. It comes with the business. He also got the best care money could buy. But it sounds like he didn't ask for it as often as he could have.

Read Sue's excellent rant about this stuff. I've not been coherent lately, not like she has.

CAPRICORN GASTRO-PORN
This cupcake shot is from my birthday party yesterday at work. The cupcakes were lovely, and thanks to our Tara, our lovely (if zealous) receptionist, I got serenaded with Happy Birthday enough times to burn that damn song into my cerebellum until long after I shall never again be able to feed myself. (So, like, next week.)

(Yes, that's my desk. I barely recognized it, it being visible and not covered by crud and papers and files and the other usual detritus of office wonkdom, not to mention two computers, both blazing away all day. But why go into that. I'd much rather talk about rock and roll.)

So. If by some catastrophe you missed this party, then why not come down this Saturday to the Baggot Inn? I'm going to crank out some new toons from 8:00 to 9:00 (there'll be more cupcakes, and I'll be taping the show because I think I'm pretty up to speed with a lot of these songs now), and then we're going over to a friend's place, where there's a bit of a born-under-Capricorn fiesta gonna be happening.

Like Frankie says, Come! Come! Come! Huh!

THIS WEEKEND IN FOOTBALL (part 3)
I've moved the overlong piece that was here to its own page. I thought it would be fun to write a little gonzo-type recap of a screwy weekend, and then I woke up with 1500 words on Martha and the Muffins, the Giants' meltdown, Roy Jones, Jr., and how I couldn't find a brunch partner on Sunday morning. I don't know about you, but things like this happen to me all the damned time.

THIS WEEKEND IN FOOTBALL (part 2)
Check here. I really like the first third of it, especially. After that, well, hey.

THIS WEEKEND IN FOOTBALL (part 1)
Check here. I was gonna call this piece "The Coronation of Chad," just because it sounded so goofy to say, but I want to save that headline for later. If Oakland can't beat the Jets this weekend, I don't think anybody can.

Also, I know the page there looks like shite, but I just haven't gotten to the redesign yet. It's coming, it's coming, and when it does, hoo boy, won't you be proud of me! (Yes, you will. No, really.)

OVER/UNDER
If you haven't seen these two lists (workingforchange.com: The Most Overrated and Underrated Stories of 2002) yet, you might want to familiarize yourself with any of these news items you somehow missed because of something allegedly more important happening at some point this year, that the 24-hour news channels and major media sites somehow ran out of time or webspace to mention.

If one's memory was short enough, one might have come to believe that Iraq and Iran are no longer mortal enemies, and have in fact formed an axis with North Korea (what do those three countries have in common? Anything?), and that it turns out it wasn't really the Taliban (a name already fading into footnotehood) or Osama B. Laden who orchestrated 9/11 (let alone some other group, like, say, a cadre of Saudi extremists, wink wink) but Saddam Hussein himself! Who knew! (And here I figured on 9/11, Saddam was, oh I don't know, watching a smuggled videotape of "Friends" and eating hummus out of some concubine's navel or something, instead of working the phones.)

Uh, yeah. I'll believe that when I believe that the corporate corruption scandals are now all fixed and the stock market crisis is over.

On the up side (there's an up side!), it's nice to be reminded that not everyone in the rest of the world hates all Americans, though:

Sure, much of the world does [hate the USA] (for good reason), but a substantial number simply think our government is run by certifiable lunatics. That perspective almost never shows up in US media.

This rant is a bit cranky and way cynical, I know. But these are cranky and cynical times.

A COOL WAY TO TALK OUT A VERY BIG IDEA
Good New Year, y'all!

I just have to say: this work is way cool. A very hard idea to show in such base type, with nary a big word in view. To put such a yoke on how one says what E=mc² is can't be all that easy to put out in full, and yet he's done it real well.

[This was the best link to come from Fark in ages, I must say.]