shout it out loud!

Whenever a Kiss song pops up on my iPod, I flash on Christopher, a boy I knew in second grade. My home room at school that year was half second graders and half third graders. Chris and I were in the same house, which is what home rooms were called at my school. Christopher was a third grader. For some reason I haven't been able to figure out, I've tended in my life to gravitate toward maladjusted people, the guys nobody else wants to be friends with because there's something wrong with them. Nowadays, Christopher would be on Ritalin and diagnosed with aspergers, if not some other new fangled affliction. Christopher had incredible charisma and knew a lot about Evil Kenevil, rated R movies, and Planet of the Apes. I'll never forget the day he drew a swastika in magic marker on a piece of paper, taped it to his arm, and ran around the classroom screaming Heil Hitler! I didn't know what it meant, but it caused a big ruckus, so I knew instinctively that it had to have been a cool thing to do. I went home and pulled the same act for my parents that night. I couldn't have picked a worse thing to do in front of my dad, and he gave me a very serious and scary talking to about it...

Christopher lived with his mother and her boyfriend in a tall building, on a floor that stank of stewing onions and cabbage. The mom's boyfriend had Oui, Playboy and Viva lying around the house. I bet he had David Hamilton books as well, but I can't remember for sure. ...On play dates at Christopher's house, we would watch the Monkees and Batman in the kitchen with their black housekeeper. Chris' mom let him join the Kiss Army, and I completely lost my mind on the day he played Kiss' Destroyer for me on the hi fi record player in their living room. ...I know now that Gene Simmons is a dickhead, with his dumb spiel about Kiss being a brand as opposed to a band, but this doesn't diminish how completely Kiss was able to capture something so basic and elemental for me when I was a kid. The Beatles and the Beach Boys had already trained my ear by the time Christopher introduced me to Kiss. The memories are blurry now, but I don't think Kiss would have had nearly as much of an impact on me, or on other kids my age for that matter, if not for the great melodies in their music. With everything else that was going on with Kiss - the costumes, the theatricality, the mystery, the danger - it's easy to forget that their music was pretty damn good for about four or five years...

I don't know why more people don't think of Kiss as being in the glam tradition. Maybe it's because Kiss, along with Queen, did things backwards by comparison with the more legitimate glam groups. Sweet and Slade, for example, made pop songs with a hard edge that would sneak up on you. Kiss and Queen, on the other hand, did the opposite, making hard rock songs that were not really as hard as the packaging might lead you to believe. I think the melodic hookiness of Queen, and especially of Kiss, is why young kids liked their music so much. I was forever changed after hearing the driving guitars that open Detroit Rock City. I think of it in the same way as I think of LSD. Even if you're exposed to it just once, you never quite see the world in the same way again.

These days, Destroyer sounds like just one more poorly recorded mid 70s corporate rock album. I can crank it all the way up and still have a very hard time trudging through the murky Bob Ezrin production effects. But back in 1976 Destroyer sounded like nothing else I could have imagined, and yet it was precisely what I wanted and needed from music. I became absolutely obsessed with Kiss. My parents were very concerned about it. Chris' mom was much looser with him. On one play date, she bought us copies of Creem and Circus, which by then had both virtually gone to an all Kiss all the time format. I brought the magazines home with me that night. I can't really remember what I did or said to cause my mom to react the way she did, but she tore both of the magazines up and threw them in the garbage. I must've done something to set her off, or maybe it was the pictures of Gene spitting blood and wagging his tongue like he was about to eat the yummiest twat in the world. Whatever it was, my mom couldn't handle my frenzied enthusiasm for Kiss. And I think the fact that she couldn't handle it stoked the flames of my frenzy all the more. That's the way it works with kids sometimes...

My nanny back in those days was a very peculiar older lady from Belgium. She more or less raised my sister and me, and sometimes she would do the most lovingly generous things for me. I came home from school one day and found a brand new copy of Kiss, the Originals on my bed. It was a repackage of Kiss' first three albums - Kiss, Hotter than Hell, and Dressed to Kill. I'm assuming now that Casablanca records put The Originals out in an attempt to cash in on the mega success of Kiss Alive, the album that made them stars in much the same way as Frampton Comes Alive made Peter Frampton a huge sensation. For my 9th birthday, or Christmas, or some occasion, my nanny got me Kiss Alive and Rock and Roll Over, and a little later on I got Love Gun. ...One of the things I really appreciate about Kiss in retrospect is not just that so many of their songs had ridiculously porny lyrics, but also that as an eight and nine year old I was walking around singing lines like she's been around, but she's young and clean. I don't think you could market stuff like that to kids these days...

Shortly after Kiss Alive II came out, a kid named Andy invited me to the Kiss concert at Madison Square Garden. This must've been sometime in 1978. My parents reluctantly let me go, even though it was on a school night. They didn't approve of Kiss, but they must've known that forbidding me to go would have created a lose-lose situation. They were smart that way. The concert was phenomenal, or at least that's the way I remember it now, but it also strikes me that this was the last gasp of my Kiss obsession. By this time, Christopher's behavioral problems proved to be his undoing and he was kicked out of the school. I slowly moved away from Kiss and on to Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Jimi Hendrix. Perhaps I sensed that the Kiss thing had played itself out after they released four ill-conceived solo albums, one for each member of the band. Actually, I should say that three of the solo albums were ill conceived. Ace Frehley's album is actually quite good and features the only hit to come out of the Kiss solo album experiment, Back in the New York Groove, a great song that gives a nod to the new supremacy of disco, while still packing quite a bit of a rockin' punch. For what it's worth, Ace was always my favorite guy in Kiss. I liked them all, but Ace was the one that fascinated me the most. ...Sometimes I wonder what happened to Christopher. Where is he today and what's he doing? I'd like to tell him how profoundly he changed my life, even if only in an accidental and once-removed kind of way. Then again, people you knew when you were little are rarely as interesting when you meet them again as adults. That's been my experience, anyway. I think I'd rather just have my memories of Christopher as a free spirited boy who could not be contained. I admired this quality in him back then, and I admire the memory I have of it now.

he did what?

I hate the Phillies and I especially hate their scuzzy douchebag fans, but how can you not love what Roy Halladay did today, throwing the first post-season no hitter since Don Larsen threw a perfect game for the Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1956 World Series? It was his second no no of the year, the first one being the perfect game he threw against the Marlins back in May. I have been watching baseball since the 1973 World Series and I have never seen a more dominating performance than Doc Halladay turned in today. I know the guy's a fucking Mormon, and it's hard for me to overlook something like that, but I love the guy's game. I love the way he comports himself out on the mound, and I love the way he doesn't waste any time. He just gets the ball and throws it. He faced 28 batters today and threw first-pitch strikes to 25 of them. He pounded the strike zone with such uncanny command of his fastball. Carlos Ruiz set the target, and Halladay hit it all day long The Reds were completely off balance. I can't really recall any of their hitters making solid contact. Everything seemed to be weakly hit ground balls in on the hands of the batters. It was a performance for the ages, the kind that reminds you what a great game baseball is. And if you're a player on the Reds, it ain't gonna get any easier. Roy Oswalt goes in Game 2, and Cole Hamels goes in Game 3. Much as it hurts me to say this, I think the Phillies are gonna win it all this year.

a long distance relationship

In my professional life, such as it is, I conduct research on disadvantaged populations. The very fact that I use the term disadvantaged populations gets to the crux of what I'm thinking about right now. It's like calling retarded people special. I'm sorry if this is a harsh analogy, but I get so damn tired of mincing words all the time and of trying to convince others that I'm more sensitive and kindhearted than I really am. Don't mistake my professional identify for who I really am. I'm not such a nice and caring guy. I stumbled into my job by accident. And now, almost ten years into it, I'm considered an expert on urban poverty within my professional milleux. But I have no real intuitive understanding of poor people on a human level. I deal with poverty strictly from a distance. I know everything about the poor, and I know nothing about the poor. My work reduces poverty to SAS code. In my more reflective moments, I ask myself who these people really are. What kinds of thoughts go through their minds late at night when they lay their heads down on concrete sidewalks, wanting nothing more than for sleep to take them away from their waking misery. I haven't got the slightest fucking idea. Occasionally I do ethnographic analysis that brings me in a little bit closer, and it always leaves me feeling shaken, like I'd rather not know what's going on out there.

This has been my coping strategy more generally for quite some time now. When the banks melted down a few years ago, I melted down with them. I felt on the verge of losing all the security I had worked so hard to create for myself . With every 500 point plunge in the Dow, I became more anxious and depressed. I think I might have mentioned this before, but I'm quite enamored of Gramsci's concept of hegemony, which is the phenomenon wherein ruling class interests are successfully represented as universal interests. It's a kind of false consciousness. My actions, perceptions, and feelings seem to be informed by this form of false consciousness. So with each violent market gyration, I felt like I was mere moments away from losing my job, my house, my savings, my sanity. I pictured myself living in my car until I'd have to sell it in order to be able to eat. I thought I might very well become one of those people I study from a distance. The only way I could escape from the fear was to not know, to essentially become an unaware ignoramus. I stopped reading the papers, stopped watching the news, stopped talking politics with friends. And guess what? It worked! Or, I should say that it's working. I've kept my head in the sand for quite some time now. I'd rather not know. That's the mantra I comfort myself with everyday.

Still, sometimes not knowing isn’t viable. In my line of work there are things that I have to know in order to do my job. I can’t always be completely removed from the life experiences of the poor, for instance. My status as an expert on disadvantaged populations dictates that I know as much as possible, and nothing puts me in a better position to know than ethnographic work. Ethnography forces me to look at all kinds of depressing shit up close. I'm talking about people with serious ailments and physical disabilities who sleep under freeway overpasses. I may be cold and unfeeling in a bunch of different ways, but seeing complete and utter destitution pierces my armour. It makes me feel sad, and it makes me feel paranoid about having it happen to me someday... I interviewed a guy recently who used to own his own business. Then he got divorced, started drinking, started drugging, lost the business, lost his house, lost his kids, lost everything. Now he sleeps in a tent under the 110 freeway in San Pedro. He seemed like a regular guy. He was articulate and cogent. If you met him under different circumstances, you'd never know the guy was homeless. He wasn't mentally ill or anything like that. And if it can happen to him... I felt very bad for him. I told myself I’d go back and check up on him once in awhile, maybe even try to help him, even though he seemed perfectly content, like his life had been stripped of stressful complications and simplified down to the bare minimum. But over time my conversation with him receded further and further into the past. The humane impulses he stirred up in me faded. I got wrapped up in my own shit. The old patterns and tendencies reasserted themselves. I’d rather not know. I’d rather hop in my sports car, drive to my comfortable suburban home, have a few drinks, eat some good food, watch a ball game on TV. Out of sight, out of mind. Roll another number for the road... I don't even know any poor people, except maybe Jesus, the guy who cuts my grass, and Esmerelda, the lady who cleans my house, and Jorge, the dude who shines my shoes while I'm working out at the gym. But I'm an expert. If you need any information on disadvantaged populations, I'm your guy. ...How did I become this expert who knows nothing? The only way I can even begin to answer that question is to say that my life has taken some very strange twists and turns. Some people have a preordained destiny, while others fall into the whirlwind of randomness. I think I'm a little bit of both. I was a jokester who became very serious, and now I'm in the middle between the two. Everything for me seems to take place in the middle of two contradictory things. I'm serious about poverty, but I'm not really all that serious about anything, let alone something that has nothing to do with me...

As a younger man, I embraced Marxism as both a political philosophy and an analytical framework for understanding the world around me. I deluded myself into thinking that I gave a shit about the working class. But it was always the ideas themselves that were the real source of the attraction, much more so than the practical implications of the ideas. I still think Marx’s concepts and theories provide a fundamentally correct interpretation of why things happen, it’s just that the only thing I’m interested in is the interpretation. Marx has that thing about how philosophers interpret the world whereas the point is to change it. Well, what if you’re like me and you don’t really like change? I guess then you side with the philosophers, right? ...A good friend of mine who was always incredulous about the authenticity of my radicalism, with good reason, told me once that I was way too into Derek and the Dominoes to ever be a true revolutionary. It was probably the most insightful thing anybody has ever said about me. Bobby Whitlock’s backing vocals affect me in a much deeper and more visceral way than Das Kapital. ...I was introduced to radical theory by a ‘radical’ English professor. To hear him tell it, reading Donald Barthelme’s short stories through the lens of Marxist literary theory was somehow supposed to bring about a worker’s state, a socialist heaven on earth. That was the pitch, and I greenlighted the script. Never mind that workers in actually existing socialist states produce goods and provide services at the point of a bayonet. I overlooked the facts, so intent was I on rejecting my class origins...

Eventually I lightened up and voted for Clinton. He felt my pain, and he had this phenomenal capacity to be all things to all people. He was constantly triangulating, splitting the difference between the 60s and the 80s. It was cynical, sure, but there's no denying that it was effective politics. I see myself as a bit of a triangulator, actually. I'm an expert who doesn't know shit. I care but I really don't care. Even when I get close, I always make sure to keep my distance. So much of what I do and say and think is deadly serious, and yet it's all a big joke. I'm kind and caring and respectful, but I'm a nasty, mean spirited fucker, too. If you try to pin me down, I'll slide right through your fingers. My friends and family and colleagues see who they want to see when they look at me, and I encourage them in this. But they don't know me, and I'm not so sure I do either...

cleaning house

Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel have been fired by the Mets. It didn't take long for the Wilpons to make the move, just a day after the conclusion of the regular season, but it's been expected for a long time. The writing was on the wall when the team began to falter at the All-Star break back in July. I don't blame Manuel much for the failures of the last three years. A manager is not a magician, and you can't win if there's not enough talent on the roster or if the talent you have is constantly on the DL. Manuel was an OK strategist. Nothing great. Pretty vanilla, really. I get the impression that he's an ok guy and that most of the players liked him, but these are not necessarily traits that qualify somebody to be a big-league manager. Not that Manuel's not qualified. He had some success managing the White Sox in the past. In any case, Omar Minaya is much more responsible for the team's losing ways than Jerry Mnauel. He gave too many hefty contracts to too many guys who didn't perform. He seems to have a hardon for over-the-hill Latin players who break down at the end of their backloaded contracts. I'm thinking in particular of Luis Castillo and Carlos Delgado. I don't fault Minaya for the Carlos Beltran contract. When Beltran has been healthy he's been a five-tool player. It remains to be seen whether he can come back next year and still be productive. Minaya's spendthrift ways will hamstring the Mets next year with Johan Santana, Carlos Beltran, Luis Castillo and Oliver Perez still on the books. One of Minaya's biggest failures, in my opinion, is his notion that New York fans will not tolerate a rebuilding phase. It seems he thinks that all New York fans have the Yankee mentality, which is not true. Met fans are a different breed. We'll accept rebuilding as a natural and cyclical part of the game if there appears to be a long-term game plan for winning. I would love to see the Mets go young next year and begin to rebuild for 2012 and beyond. By then, a lot of the bad Minaya contracts will be gone, and the new guy can make some strategic free agent signings that would help them be a pennant contender by the middle of the decade. A Yankee GM can't do this type of rebuilding thing, true enough, but we're Met fans in large part because we don't wanna be the Yankees. Here's hoping that the Wilpons will hire good people with some vision. I won't hold my breath because I don't think those guys are very smart. But as the players like to say when they're interviewed, "let's just see what happens..."

fragments...

The weekend kind of got away from me. Friday after work I came home eager to listen to some live Grateful Dead. One of my oldest and dearest friends is a GD obsessive and made me a comprehensive list of shows worth hearing. It's easier than ever these days to find live recordings thanks to the internet. No more dealing with undesirable people who want to trade tapes, no more having to buy the mostly so-so shows that are available commercially. There's a part of me that feels nostalgic for having a tangible object, in this case a tape or a cd, but this goes out the window when it becomes clear just how much stuff is readily available for free with the press of a few buttons. ...I decided to get things started with a few shows from 1971. I vacillate depending on my mood, but I do 'objectively' think that '71 was the peak year for live Grateful Dead music. There's still some leftover fumes from the psychedelic 60s, but they get sifted through the tighter roots/folk/rural approach the band moved towards at the dawn of the new decade. I listened very carefully to a show from the Hollywood Palladium from 1971, and I was struck by how much shorter and more compressed a lot of the songs were. I think I like it better in some ways when they get to it more quickly. There are some exceptions to this, of course, like when they started playing Here Comes Sunshine, Eyes of the World, and Mississippi Half Step in the mid 70s, but something about a nice compact version of Loser, Deal or Me and My Uncle, played crisply and without any extra fat on the meat, is very satisfying indeed. I'm sure I'll change my mind as I begin to explore the decade in more depth, but right now I'm liking things when the Dead do things more concisely. This clip is a little bit later, from the Europe '72 tour, but it's in the same stripped-down vein...

...In between dosages of Grateful Dead, I supercharged with some early Fleetwood Mac. In their late 60s and early 70s incarnations, the Dead and the Mac seem to complement each other nicely. It's not that they sound alike. Nobody sounds like the Grateful Dead. I hate it when people find out that I'm a head and assume that I'll also like New Riders of the Purple Sage, or Quicksilver, or Hot Tuna, or Little Feat. I don't like any of that stuff. I don't like 'jam bands' per se. I like bands with great songs, and if they happen to throw some good jamming into the mix then that's great, but the jamming itself is almost never what draws me in to, say, the Allman Brothers or Jefferson Airplane. I don't really get Phish. They sound like muzak to me - stoner muzak for college kids. It's not my thing at all. The Dead are a completely distinct animal, though there are records you can play alongside live Dead music that go really well. Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac would be in this category for me, and maybe even two or three albums after Peter Green left the band. Then Play On, Fleetwood Mac's masterpiece from 1970, might just be the greatest guitar album

ever made, though not in an ostentatious way. The playing is in fact quite understated when it needs to be. Their approach to music is similar in my mind to Richard Thompson. He is a phenomenal guitar player, but he doesn't feel like he has to beat you ever the head with it. Sometimes it's what isn't played or what's left to the listener's imagination that counts just as much as what what is played. Don't mistake what I'm saying. There's furiously slashing interplay between Peter Green and Danny Kirwan throughout the Then Play On, but it's never showy, always just exactly right in setting the proper mood and vibe. I'm fascinated by Fleetwood Mac and want to say more about them at some point when I get my shit together...

I saw The Social Network last night with a friend and found it to be very depressing. I don't think the folks who made the movie were intending to make a depressing movie, but it ends up projecting an image of such ruthless social darwinism, where high-tech hyper-capitalism is as natural and unquestioned as a morning piss. The movie made me feel even more acutely out-of-touch with the way we live now. I was not made for the world of today. I'm an extra and not a principal actor. I don't mind being an extra except that the world depicted in The Social Network is one in which extras are the wretched of the earth. And just to give you a feel for how apparently out-of-touch I am, all the scenes in the movie that made me wince the hardest were the ones that the audience howled with laughter at and applauded most vociferously. It's only a movie, sure but it's never only a movie, and the deeper implications of this one made me feel like finding a big rock to crawl under...

the last champion

It was bittersweet for me to learn yesterday that Scot Shields, the last remaining link on the Angels to the team's 2002 World Championship, is likely to retire after the season ends on Sunday. And even if he doesn't retire, he would almost certainly not be a Halo in 2011. I was reminiscing a few weeks back with a good buddy of mine about the 2002 World Series and the way we clawed back from the brink of elimination, a 5-0 deficit to the Giants with one out in the seventh inning of Game 6, and went on to win the whole damn thing in seven games. It's wonderfully gratifying to be a dog for so long and then to finally have your day. The exhilaration of long deferred glory after it's finally achieved is something Yankee fans will never know. Winning means so much more when you've spent the vast majority of your life losing. The Angels made the playoffs in '79, '82 and '86, but they also had so many horseshit seasons, especially in the 90s, until at last, improbably, they won 99 games in 2002, after starting the season 6-14. They made it into the playoffs for the first time in 15 years as the wild card, and while they definitely were not the best or most talented team in baseball that year, they got hot at exactly the right time. Under-the-radar rookies and youngsters - Chone Figgins, Francisco Rodriguez and, yes, Scot Shields - made unexpectedly important contributions, as did scrappy gamers like David Eckstein, Scott Spiezio, and Adam Kennedy, and big-time vets like Garrett Anderson, Troy Percival, and Tim Salmon. The Angels got past the Yankees in the first round, which would have been enough for me at the time. But the Angels were a Team of Destiny that year, and they finished off the Twins in the ALCS, making it to the World Series for the first time in franchise history. My buddy and I went to Game 1 of the Series at the Big A that year, courtesy of a connection my dad has through the MLBPA. The stadium was still called Edison Field at the time in spite of the recent rolling blackouts that had sullied the reputations of all the major power concerns doing business in California. This was also just one year removed from 9/11. With the OC being what it is, the vibe at the stadium was nauseatingly over-the-top in its belligerence and chauvinism masquerading as love of country: Fighter planes roaring over the stadium during the National Anthem; douchebags waving their flags; the full cavity probe from the Homeland Security workers upon our entry into the stadium...The Angels lost that Game 1 of the 2002 World Series, but the most memorable thing about it was the home run Barry Bonds hit in the second inning off lefty Jarrod Washburn, a shot that had to have traveled at least 525 feet on a high line drive. The ball looked like an missile flying through the air, and it sucked the air and life right out of the Big A when it finally landed toward the back of the right field pavilion. I had never seen, and have not seen since then, a ball hit so far, so fast. Thinking about it now serves as a reminder that the 2002 World Series was the absolute pinnacle of the steroid era in baseball. The rumors I've heard are that the Angels clubhouse that year was like a makeshift PED lab. Exhibit A: Ben Weber always seemed like he was ready to eat your kids and pets alive if you looked at him the wrong way. That's a conversation for another time. This is supposed to be in honor of Shieldsy... Scot Shields survived the steroid era and was arguably the best eighth-inning pitcher in the game for a stretch of about 3 or 4 years. He was an indispensable part of what I like to think of as the new breed of Angels teams that emerged in the naughties, when the organization began to consistently commit itself to winning and making the playoffs every year. It also bears mentioning that Francisco Rodriguez would in all likelihood not have had the amazing success he had, and would not have become the incredibly rich man he is today, if Scot Shields had not been around to set up all those games for him. Shields was a study in gritty durability. He threw a 95mph heater with filthy-dirty movement, and his rubber arm enabled him to do it night after night. He also seemed like a really good teammate. He was a fixture in the Angels dugout long after he was placed on the DL for an extensive period of time last year, imparting knowledge to the youngsters and just being there because that's what you do when you buy into the team concept. I actually hope he does end up retiring. I admire ballplayers who know when they're done and don't try to get one more contract after they're past their sell-by date, particularly if they've already made plenty of money. Why be greedy? It's so much more dignified when a ballplayer recognizes that his time has come and gone and doesn't try desperately to hang on. I suppose this is easy for me to say as no one will ever offer me unimaginable riches to ply my trade. But whatever Shieldsy decides to do, he's been a great Angel. I always felt confident when Sosh gave him the ball, always knew that the game was on the verge of being just another Halo victory. Good luck, Scotie, and thank you...

sore loser

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The Wolf King of LA

The days are becoming shorter and the sunsets are starting to get good. I saw some incredible colors in the sky last night, but I start to feel uneasy this time of year as darkness comes a little earlier everyday. People are dead wrong when they say LA doesn't have seasons. We have winter, it's just a different kind of winter. The wet weather depresses me. I wish I could hibernate through it... The purples and pinks and oranges last night gave me a hankering to hear John, The Wolf King of LA for the first time in a few years. The album feels like an old friend. I don't play it that often anymore because it conjures up a lot of intense emotions and makes me very aware of the passage of time. From a second story window, caught a glimpse of someone's life, and it was mine, and my face was dark and dirty, and I'd been crying. Papa John sings with such casual warmth. There's sympathy in his voice, and generosity, too. There's not many singers who can pull that off. I might be tempted to call it plainspoken singing, except that this somehow detracts from the wisdom it conveys. The only other guy I can think off hand who sings in the same way is Jerry Garcia.

The ugly things I've read about Papa John over the years have never detracted from my love for the Mamas and the Papas. They only had a handful of good songs, but so much of the enjoyment I get from their music comes through the atmosphere it creates. My dad had If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. He was a lot groovier than I ever gave him credit for back then. He straddled the pre and Post WWII generation in a very interesting way. He loves him his Frank Sinatra and Glen Miller, but he also loves the Beatles, Donovan and the Mamas and the Papas. ...I practically wore the grooves out of the Mamas and the Papas record when I was a kid. The sleeve is crazy, with all of them piled in the bathtub, next to the toilet. I used to fixate on that toilet. No shocker there. California Dreamin' in particular always made me feel so good, with its perfect harmonies, Denny's angusihed singing, and the hep cat flute solo. I can picture my dad listening to that song, wearing a red turtleneck sweater and sporting some groovy sideburns. It's amazing to think that I've been listening to the Mamas and the Papas for 35 years, especially since they're such an LA phenomenon, even if they were transplanted from Greenwhich Village. They totally bought into the California Dream. They were outsiders, but they made this place their own and became the ultimate insiders...

Wolf King is about five years after the heyday of the Mamas and the Papas and it evokes its time and place perfectly. I tried to write a novel about the Wolf King world for about six or seven years but eventually I got knocked off course. Any self confidence I've ever had has been extremely fragile. One minute I'm flying high and feeling in control of my creative powers, the next I'm assuming the fetal position in the bathtub. And then when I emerge from the dark corridors of depression and anxiety, I just feel blank. The novel I was writing became so big, with so many characters and so many lurches forwards and backwards time. I didn't feel up to the task. I was - and I am - afraid of failure. But I fail all the time elsewhere, so what's the big deal if there's one more? Failure is an option. Maybe I'll begin to post some excerpts from the novel here as a way of attempting to get some confidence back. I enjoyed writing it until doubt started to creep in. But there's no pressure at all. It's not like I would expect the novel to ever be published, so it's something I should be able to do simply because I love writing...

Wolf King has a lovely sedated vibe, with weepy pedal steel that makes you feel like you're a character in Brewster McCloud, or some other blurry movie from the period. I love the impressionistic imagery of Papa John's observations. And the wine he spilled stained her pillow red. Robbie Robertson once said of Neil Young's After the Gold Rush that the words made him feel like he was in the songs and that they applied to his life, even though he didn't really know what Neil was singing about. That's pretty much the best thing that can be said about a song, that it transcends it's literal meaning takes on a universality. That's exactly how I feel about Wolf King. I used to listen to it a lot when I was first exploring LA and the city was opening up to me. I fell hard for Emma, a woman from New Zealand. Here in the city's heat I'm weeping, keeping a night watch again. That period of my life seems like it was 100 years ago. Where did all the time go?

Pop Rocks

Can I just admit upfront that I'm a big Katy Perry fan? I listen to very little new music these days, but she does it for me. I was waiting on line at my lunch place the first time I heard "I Kissed A Girl (and I liked it)." It cut right through the din. I love when that happens in a grocery store, or if you rent a car and the radio is tuned to a Top 40 station. Some of my sweetest childhood memories are of listening to what at the time was called AM Gold. Brandy what a good wife you'd be. American woman. Alone again, naturally... I know Katy Perry's music is an example of the fetish character in music and the regression of listening. I know those songs are made by evil doctors working in some corporate boardroom overlooking Sunset. I know the songs are focus grouped with 12-year-olds. It doesn't matter. The only thing that counts is that it's good. I love great pop. If a song has a perfect hook or just something somewhere that hits the right note in the right way, I'm putty in your hands. And I like her style. It's brash, but she has a sense of humor about herself. She also gets points for being engaged to Russell Brand.... And have you seen this...

The 2010 All Meth Lab Team

Our dedicated staff here at the Lonely One has been working feverishly around the clock with the Baseball Writers Association of America to elect the 5 MLB players who most embody the essence of what we like to call Skankee Pride. These titans of the tattoo parlor, those white trash whippetsnappers who make more money than god but can't get seated at any restuarant that's not a Denny's or Claim Jumper, comprise your 2010 All Meth Lab Squad. Congratulations oh denizens of the double-wide, and may you go as far in life as your jet skis, snowmobiles and winnebagos will take you...

AJ BURNETT, NEW YORK YANKEES

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RYAN ROBERTS, ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS

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JOSH HAMILTON, TEXAS RANGERS

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PETER MOYLAN, ATLANTA BRAVES

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KYLE FARNSWORTH, ATLANTA BRAVES
*Team Captain*

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And the 2010 Night Train Lifetime Achievement Award goes to who else but...

JASON GIAMBI, COLORADO ROCKIES

wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too?

Let me tell you about Gene and Randy. They don't know each other, and I'll never introduce them because they're from two separate parts and periods of my life. I don't like to mix people who don't know one another, who don't have a shared context beyond knowing me. My sister and I call this 'sphere mixing.' I'm not a good sphere mixer. It makes me nervous, makes me feel like I have to be the one who smoothes things over and makes sure everybody is having a good time. I can't deal with that pressure. So I'll talk about Gene and Randy separately...

Last Saturday night, I had one of the most enjoyable evenings I've had in a long time. I made plans to have dinner and hang out with Gene. Gene is a writer by trade, and he's a damn good one. He's published several excellent books and he's been a journalist for 25 years. He hails from the Midwest and has the burly build to prove it. He speaks with a Midwestern accent. It's not quite as pronounced as what you hear in Fargo, but it's not far from it. His meals invariably involve meat, cheese, and starch. He drinks a lot of beer. His teams are the Cubs and the Tigers. He has an extra special place in his heart for the MC5, the Stooges, and Funkadelic. He's an authentic Midwesterner. ...Gene's physical largeness is not off putting at all. On those rare occasions when I've had a chance to spend time in the Midwest, I've tended to look down my nose at what in my nastier moments I like to call the Fat Slobs of Flyover Country. More class and regional snobbery on my part, I guess. I like telling people that being in the Midwest does wonders for my self-esteem. It makes me feel sexy in a way that I never feel in Body-Beautiful LA. But I never feel like I'm better than Gene. His size is an integral part of his overall cuddliness. When he hugs you hello and goodbye, you feel enveloped in his warmth and good vibes. He's a rotund, pleasure seeking missile. Gene loves him his food, his drink, his doobie wah, his ladies... Yes, that's right, his ladies. He may be overweight, very overweight in fact, but he does well with the ladies. They dig him because he lives the right way. He doesn't give a shit. He doesn't get cheated out of life. He lives well, and you can choose to live well with him or go away. His approach to life is so different from mine. I tend to live scared, rarely taking risks, rarely opening myself up to the possibility of unqualified happiness. I've mentioned before that I don't do in the moment. I'm always worried about what's around the corner. I don't know what Gene's inner demons are, and we all have these demons, but he appears to live with so much more openness than I do, knowing that we all go around just once, knowing that when you die they put you in a box so that you can decompose underground. And that's it. There's no sweet hereafter, so you may as well get all the good stuff in with the life you've been given. I wish I could exist with this kind of abandon, but it just seems I'm constitutionally incapable of it. Still, this doesn't mean I can't at least taste a little of what it's like when I hang out with people like Gene...

Gene knows so much about music, but not in a penis jousting kind of way. Are you familiar with this term, 'penis jousting?' When I was in college, I hung out with a very serious intellectual crowd of mostly men. I had a female friend who was on the outside looking in at these guys, and when they would pontificate on heavy socio-philosophical subjects - the future of capitalism, the relationship between commodity fetishism and alienation, etc. - not hearing one another as they discoursed, raising their voices for the express purpose of having others hear how brilliant they were, dropping all kinds of references to Hegel and and Sartre, my friend would turn to me - she knew I was an imposter/wannabe among these folks - and she'd say, 'there they go again with their penis jousting.' It got to be a running joke. Whenever one of these heavy-duty conversations would start, she and I would look at each other and say, 'prepare for the joust!' Nobody knew what we were talking about, which made the joke that much more satisfying. The term stuck in my mind and is equally applicable to rock geeks who try and one-up each other with their grasp of esoteric rock knowledge. It's depicted with varying degrees of success in High Fidelity. This is a roundabout way of saying that Gene is most definitely not a penis jouster. He loves his music for the sake of the music itself, and he's always open to things he hasn't heard before. Openness of this sort is an important quality to have, in my opinion. I like people who are curious, who ask questions and are enthusiastic, who always believe that there's one more band or singer or song that will just tear the roof off the mother sucker...

Gene lives in a great Bachelor pad in the Angeleno Heights. If you can imagine what Mad Men would look like like if it was set in Palm Springs, that's his apartment. The furniture's mostly white leather, modern design. The place has a groovy fireplace and shaggy rugs. There's even some tiki lamps strategically placed throughout... Gene is a very good host. He makes a mean gin and tonic. He asks you what music you want to hear. It's a tough question because he's got so much of it. I feel like telling him, "I wanna hear it all!" And it's not just music on an iPod. He collects LPs too. They're stacked all over the place. I left the music question up to him. I'm always afraid that my choice will not be just right. I defer the responsibility to others when it comes to choosing music, unless I'm by myself. The other thing I should mention here is that Gene's also a collector of reel-to-reel tapes. Remember them? He's got a Mission Impossible-style reel-to-reel player. A few minutes after I arrived at his house on Saturday, he he said to me, 'get a load of this,' and then proceeded to play me bits of the White Album on reel-to-reel. It did not self destruct after five seconds. It did sound fucking incredible. I've listened t0 the White Album thousands upon thousands of times in my life, and I've never heard such differentiation between the component parts of the songs as I did when Gene played it. I couldn't believe it. The guitar solo in Happiness is a Warm Gun was so low, with just enough fuzz around the smacked-out edges. I asked Gene if we could hear the solo again. He advised against it telling me that you have to let the afterglow of a sound like that settle into your brain. I usually don't have that kind of discipline, but he's right. The fun was just starting...

It's a short hop from the Angeleno Heights to Chinatown. For some reason, you can now get Vietnamese food in Chinatown, so we went and had Pho. I usually don't love Pho. To me it tastes like dishwater with noodles. But this place Gene took me to, buried in an obscure strip mall off Broadway, was great. I had a bowl of Pho with thin slices of steak and brisket. We shared some sumptuous spring rolls. We drank Vietnamese beer. But the best part of the dinner was the conversation. He talked about his divorce, I talked about my ambivalence about relationships. Both of us are coming around to the conclusion that we probably don't want to have kids. He told me that he's always thought of me as the type of guy that would definitely have kids. I told him that my juvenilia doesn't necessarily mean I'd be a good parent, but I thanked him for the compliment all the same. We talked about women, the kind we like, the kind we dislike, the kind we have no feeling for one way or the other. He agreed with me that a woman doesn't really begin to come into her true beauty until she turns 40. We talked baseball and how one's approach to watching the game changes when your team is completely out of the race. You wait for the roster expansion in September and hope that one of the kids in the farm system might be the next Pujols or Lincecum. You can watch the game in a more detached manner, the absence of emotion in some ways making the viewing experience more pleasant... About half way through the meal I remember thinking that I was really enjoying myself and felt happy and content. I wondered why all my relationships with other people, men and women alike, couldn't be this satisfying, where I feel like I'm getting as much out of it as I give. It's not even that it was an unusually special evening. It's more that Gene was present and engaged. He asked me questions and took an interest in what and how I was doing. He drew on his experiences not simply to talk about himself, but to shed light on things that I go through, anxieties and doubts I have, as well as faint hopes. And we hadn't even gotten to the best part of the evening yet.

Back at Gene's apartment, he poured us some cognac and rolled a big fat bomber. The shit was strong. I've built up an ok tolerance at this point in my life, but goddamn! Sometimes the Green Cross can throw a monkey wrench into an otherwise pleasant evening if it hits you the wrong way and you get overly self conscious, or if the person you're with starts getting weird and you see a side of them that you wish you hadn't seen. We've all been through this. The freak out. The buzz kill. The bummer. Wavy Gravy calming you down in the bad trip tent. I've learned to control this over the years, but it still happens now and then if I get my hands on a speedy strain. There's nothing worse than a speedy strain. Nothing. It's why I'm an indica guy. Leave the sativa to the plebeians and the college kids. Gene's J was a perfect indica. I didn't confirm this because not everybody is as detail oriented (read: anal retentive) about their tea as I am, and I don't want to give people the impression that I'm some kind of wake 'n bake aficionado, even if I do occasionally fantasize about traveling to Amsterdam one of these years for the Cannabis Cup, but I knew from the way the stuff affected me that it was a high-grade indica. And then Gene said, "I have just the thing." He ambled over to one of his many mountains of LPs and pulled out a mono copy of Notorious Byrd Brothers. It's one of my two or three favorite albums of all time, but I'd never heard it in glorious mono. ...I don't want to come off like one of those characters in High Fidelity, but the simple truth is that most of the 60s records I love sound much, much better in mono. I don't really understand why. The word I like to use in describing the difference between mono and stereo is that mono sounds more differentiated, which is strange because the common understanding of stereo is that it separates the tracks into channels and then divides them between left and right. Every kid who grows up listening to rock can remember playing around with the balance knob on their stereo. On one side you might have rhythm guitar, backing vocals, and drums, and on the other you have lead guitar, lead vocals and bass. I can remember listening to songs like 'Day Tripper' and 'Satisfaction' when I was a kid, and loving listening to the channel with the rhythm guitar and no lead vocals. But I came of age after the mono period, so these were all stereo recordings, for the most part. Anyway, it turns out that with mono recordings, you hear all the instruments much more clearly. You even hear bits that you can't hear on the stereo versions because they get buried under something that's more prominent in the mix. ...OK, I'm sounding like a penis jouster now... Notorious Byrd Brothers sounds so goddamn good in mono. You can hear everything. You can hear the mandolin in Draft Morning. You can hear the xylophone so clearly on Goin' Back. Those great Byrds harmonies are perfectly crystalline. At one point, Gene and I were blissed out, listening to Change is Now. There's a very weird LSD guitar break in the middle. Whenever I hear it, I think of hippies getting all freaky at an Elysian Park Love-In. This time, I noticed the bass during the guitar break. It gets completely lost on the CD/stereo version of the album.

"Listen to that fucking bass!" I said to Gene. "It's so..."

"I think propulsive is the word you're looking for," he said.

Gene has this notion of every band having its Pepper. A band's Pepper is not necessarily its best album, but it's the album that's the most conceptually expansive. Notorious Byrd Brothers is definitely the Byrds' Pepper. Considerable portions even sound a lot like Sgt. Pepper. A much lesser known band from the 60s is England's Pretty Things. When we were done with Notorious Byrd Brothers, I asked Gene if he owned the Pretty Things' psychedelic classic. S.F. Sorrow on vinyl. I've been really immersed in British psychedelia over the past few weeks. Gene had it, of course, and as he located the record in his stacks he said, "SF Sorrow is definitely their Pepper." Indeed it is, and again it sounded great. About half way through Side 2, I noticed that Gene had drifted off to sleep. It was past midnight. I listened to the last few few tracks, left Gene a note thanking him for the lovely evening, and left his pad feeling a little better about my ability to relate to other people.

I had to work on Sunday. A few days earlier, I made plans to see Randy for drinks and dinner. We agreed that I'd stop by his house at 6:30, perfect timing because that's when I'd be leaving the office. At about 4pm on Sunday, Randy texted me and said that he'd rather stop by my house and eat in my neck of the woods. When you make a date with Randy, it's inevitable that the plans will change multiple times, usually after you've already structured your day around the plans as they were initially made. It annoys me, but it's one of those things that you have to accept if you're gonna be friends with Randy. He's not organized, and he doesn't seem to grasp that his inability to stick to a plan inconveniences the other person. But I'm flexible. I'm always the pliant one, always the one that puts myself out to accommodate the other. ...I also knew that the reason Randy wanted to come to my house instead is because his wife doesn't like him to partake of the Green Cross, which is pretty funny since he's an even bigger worshipper than I am. He turns me into his enabler, a position I'm not comfortable with because I like his wife. It seems disrespectful to her, and I don't want her to think that I'm a bad person who encourages Randy to do things she won't tolerate in their house. ....So things got off to a rocky start. He changed the plans on me at the last minute and did so only to evade his wife...

I grew up with Randy. I became friends with him in middle school, and then we remained in touch with each other for the first few years of college before falling off each other's radars for about 20 years. About two years ago, I ran into Randy at a grocery store in Los Feliz. It was good to see him. He had clearly changed a lot, mostly for the better, I thought, and we started hanging out again. But while he's changed, a lot of the old patterns remain in modified form. When we were growing up together, he was among the most popular kids in our school, and for good reason. He's always been very charismatic. He has a way of drawing you into his orbit and giving you just enough validation so that you think you can be part of the crowd of popular snake charmers as well. He uses his charisma to manipulate others into doing things they really don't want to do. He likes to cut corners, to outsmart the array of barriers and limitations life places in front of all of us. I have a very vivid memory of him on the day we were taking our SATs. During the break between sections of the test, he wandered over to one of the smartest kids in the school and just brazenly looked at the guy's answer sheet, and then he wandered back to his desk and changed a few of his answers. He did it so openly, right in front of the adults who were monitoring us, so confident that he wouldn't get caught, so sure that he wouldn't get in trouble even if he was caught because he was such an integral part of the social fabric of the school. And the rest of us admired him so much for doing these kinds of things. I remember thinking that it was funny but that I would never, ever have the balls to do something like that. Maybe I could have gotten away with a lot more if I had only had more chutzpa, and if I didn't live scared. Randy definitely had chutzpa. He brought it to bear on everything in his life. No boundaries. No constraints. If he wanted something he'd just go out there and fucking take it. He was also an excellent athlete, and girls adored him. He would regale us all with tales of his conquests, leaving out none of the details - the color of her panties, the sounds she would make while his finger was in her twat, and what that twat's juices smelled like on his finger afterwards. He reminds me of one of the boys in Larry Clark's creepy movie, Kids...

Randy's riverboat gambling ways eventually caught up with him. I don't want to get into all the details because they're boring and I'm not even all that clear on them anymore, but he more or less got kicked out of school. In my opinion, it was for the best. He's a much gentler person these days. I think the experience taught him some humility and made him much nicer than he otherwise would have been. Still, these things are relative. He's continues to br very self involved, and while he's nicer than he was when we were 17, he's still not an especially considerate dude...

I got home from the office on Sunday at 6:15 thinking that I wanted to have a few minutes to decompress before Randy came at 6:30. I don't know why I thought he'd be on time. He's never on time. It's my own damn fault. There are some lessons I just refuse to learn, and then I feel angry when the same thing happens as has always happened before. It's that old definition of insanity... At 7:15 I received a text message from Randy telling me he was running a little late, as if I hadn't noticed. At 8:00 the doorbell finally rang. Without my even having a chance to say hello, he pulled out his little Green Cross implement and showed it to me, his way of saying that he wanted to partake right away...

With old friends it's interesting how the same patterns that were in place when you were kids together reassert themselves years later, even though you're now both adults and have presumably lived enough life so that those old ways and assumptions would no longer hold any weight. With Randy and me, I find that there's still a part of me that wants to please him, that wants to gain his approval, and that wants for him to like me, as if we were back in 11th grade, with him as the mega-star and me as the one who's just grateful to get a little whiff of what it's like to be on the inside. I felt it very strongly on Sunday night, at least at first. I was pissed that he changed the plans. I was pissed that he was late, so late in fact that I had decided to eat on my own before he arrived. I was pissed that the only reason he seemed to want to hang out with me was so he could have some tea. But I didn't say anything about it, didn't stick up for myself. I basically fell in line with everything he wanted.

And then the strangest thing happened. People who are not true believers think that tea distorts your ability to think clearly, and maybe sometimes it does. But on this night, the tea made everything tranparently clear. I sat on my living room couch and Randy sat on a chair across the room from me. He pulled out his iPhone and began texting, emailing, playing with aps, and whatever the hell else a cell phone addict does with their drug of choice. It was as if I wasn't even in the room. He occasionally broke the silences with boring information about some business venture he is pursuing. But he never asked me any questions about me. At first I began to feel bad about myself. I'm boring. I don't have anything to say. He's not gonna wanna hang out with me anymore becuase I'm just too dull. And then I thought back to the great time I had had the night before, and I realized that Randy's the one who's boring. He has no interests outside of himself, no curiosity about music, or people, or ideas. There's no propulsive bass line in his life. He's just a narsissitic dullard with nothing to offer me. We've got nothing in common with one another, no shared syntax, nothing bonding us, except our past, and there's no way that this shared past will ever be brought into the present in a deep and meaningful way. We're acquainted with each other, and that's about it. In the midst of another long silence, I decided that I would not be the first one to speak. I wanted to see how long he could keep texting and emailing withoutany awareness that I was in the room with him. I really don't remember what happened after that, and the great thing is that I really don't care...