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One of the Canada-linked writers I mentioned this morning, David Brooks, wrote a column dismissing evolutionary psychology for over-explaining every facet of human nature (an overreaching of which some evolutionary psychologists are no doubt guilty, but then, every discipline tends to overreach at times). Though Brooks has said a lot of things I disagree with over the years — and I even had the chance at the last Phillips Foundation gathering to ask him in person about his tendency to defend government (which he defended in faux-Burkean terms as a sometimes-substitute for tradition when other institutions fail) — his attack on e.p. was the first time I actually offered some advice to someone planning to write a letter countering Brooks: a real evolutionary psychology expert, my friend Diana Fleischman. I’m not sure if she or her colleagues followed through, but the response letters the Times actually published are linked here.

It’s interesting that Brooks — who one might imagine loving e.p., given his tendency to adopt some new, often science-based paradigm in almost every column — based his argument mainly on the claim that e.p. makes us sound “hard-wired” whereas we in fact have complex, flexible mental structures, often evolved for one purpose but applicable to many others. I think evolutionary psychologists are well aware of that — indeed, they sometimes alarm conservatives by, for instance, describing human mating strategies as “variable” and contextual rather than one-size-fits-all-circumstances. But then, likable as Brooks is, I get the impression that his mental architecture is probably so wildly flexible that even the loose mental rubrics described by e.p. — or, for that matter, coherent ideology — seem like a straitjacket. Brooks, I suspect, is a nice but anxiety-wracked guy, a bit overwhelmed by this complex world and grateful for new theories that promise to somehow help us navigate the chaos without actually forcing us to take too certain a stand. He wasn’t visibly sweating with nervousness at the Phillips gathering, but somehow it would have seemed in character.

In response to Jacob Levy’s understandable bafflement about what the “Canadacons” (so to speak) who I listed this morning could possibly have in common, I will just say that like Brooks — and unlike the crusading zealots of the U.S. — they all seem to give the impression (for good or ill) of people who are a bit pained by having to juggle multiple competing philosophical principles and a bit angry at more conventional (especially more right-wing) ideologues who think we can move forward deductively from a few rock-solid principles.

This makes them all engaging, sophisticated thinkers but may also contribute to them seeming to be motivated at times — like many liberals and academics in general — by an almost masochistic love of “graceful surrender” (often manifesting as a natural submissiveness to the dominatrices of the left, as it were) — rather than a robust positive philosophy or old-fashioned, unapologetic love of liberty.

If I seem oddly prone to valorize pugnacity and denigrate civility at times, it is out of fear that the smartest and best among us are often drawn to value pleasant dialogue (such as that which dominates academia and the private chambers of the political elite) over the fighting screams that may be necessary to rescue us. It is not literally Canada that I worry about but a Canadianness of spirit, as Nietzsche might have said, that may render us too mild-mannered, eh, to resist ever-expanding tyranny.

I was only able to attend a few minutes of the Tea Party protest in Times Square yesterday before heading downtown to host last night’s debate, but the U2-ish opening band seemed good — and while this rare burst of libertarianism and conservatism may be gone from Times Square now (attendance apparently having been in the hundreds or so instead of the several thousand who swelled the City Hall area for a Tea Party protest back in April), you can certainly find punk in that area on a far more regular basis: I see that the Germs are performing at Nokia Times Square Theatre tonight, for those who are interested. While I should make a point of trying to do conservative things and punk things in close succession just to underscore the m.o., blog slogan, and maybe-someday book, I’m tired and will stay in tonight.

Well, yesterday we learned that America is in fact economically doomed, according to a narrow vote by our audience at Lolita Bar.  It’s a harsh message to receive just before Independence Day but perhaps a fitting one for Canada Day, which was yesterday.

And after all, isn’t Canada the real danger?  We may not become Albania, but as Montreal-dwelling Jacob Levy has noted with some glee, the U.S. no longer ranks ahead of Canada (though it’s a statistical dead heat, really) on the annual Index of Economic Freedom.  And this is not, I’m afraid, because Canada has turned into a laissez-faire capitalist utopia.  We are all Canadians now.  Possibly even Europeans.  Michael Moore should be delighted, but at least we should no longer have to hear compare and contrast stories that treat the U.S. as a model of laissez-faire and Canada or Europe as a sharply dichotomous opposite.  That’s just not the case anymore.

Ideologically, of course, the U.S. retains a laissez-faire streak in its DNA, though it is not now dominant in the expression of policy, that may yet emerge and rescue the world.  Unfortunately, there too, Canada may be working its mesmeric attraction.  Is it mere coincidence that multiple figures whose ideological mushiness or moderation I’ve noted in the past — and whose very mushiness or moderation seems central to their thinking — are somehow tied to Canada: Jacob Levy himself, his fellow “liberaltarian” Will Wilkinson, Charles Taylor, chief national greatness (!) conservative/big government conservative/Obamacon/cancer David Brooks, and more?

I know what many of you are thinking: that I’ve been too moderate, often too kind — that my blog entries have sometimes been too long, perhaps too thoughtful. Well, that ends today.

Oh, I’m not saying there won’t be the occasional longish essay, but it’s a fast-moving world, and perhaps I can accomplish more with quickly spat-out observations — like snippets of punk lyrics, if you will — several times a day. I’ll try that, anyway (though I’ll dedicate this transitional longish entry to the late Mary Lou Forbes of the Washington Times, who so often helped my co-workers with op-eds done the traditional way).

With tonight (and perhaps you) seeing both a massive Tea Party rally in Times Square against government spending (which is where I think the bulk of our ire and activism has to be focused at this juncture in history, regardless of prior philosophical allegiances and emphases) at 6:30pm — and shortly thereafter at 8pm our Debate at Lolita Bar on the related question “Is America Economically Doomed?” — today is a perfect breakpoint for this necessary stylistic transition.

(It’s not clear I’m unfairly skewing the debate crowd in a “doomed” direction by encouraging Tea Party types to join us, since reminding people about the Tea Party may also draw such people away from our debate toward Times Square, where they may well be trapped for hours, given all the security and barricades that are likely, leaving only Obama supporters to attend the debate.)

If I’ll be spouting more frequent opinions, it’s only fair I encourage more frequent comments — and that I promise not to dismiss or combat every reader comment I disagree with. None of this, by the way, means that I’ve ceased to share Daniel Radosh’s fears — which I’m glad plenty of smart people I know feel — about where this all may be headed, namely Twitter-sized bites being the default communications mode. I worry in particular that no one will ever again change his mind on any important philosophical topics if we are effectively reading essays that could fit on pieces of confetti instead of Read the rest of this entry »

The final rocker to be considered as we close out this “Month of Rock!” is me.

Or rather, I was tickled when humorist and critic Marie Mundaca (at the Get Lit! night of readings that Michele Carlo hosted) recognized me, not from debate-hosting or other places that sprang to my mind but from my performance of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” at a Janice Erlbaum book release party two years ago at Bowery Poetry Club — a book release party that had karaoke and that I recounted in this blog’s first regular entry.

That means we’ve come full circle, faithful readers, and it may be time to alter this blog’s style a bit for the modern era of quick soundbites and tiny Twitter statements — and so I shall, starting the day after tomorrow, tomorrow being the day we do our momentous, epoch-marking Debate at Lolita Bar on the question “Is America Economically Doomed?” — surely a fitting time to try something new and perhaps desperate (like attending another Tea Party protest, which I’ll also do tomorrow, at 6:30 in Times Square before heading to Lolita).

Marie Mundaca’s reading at Get Lit!, by the way, was about the time she scraped together just enough money to see berserk punk GG Allin in concert and got to see things like a male-female couple fighting over which of them would perform oral sex on Allin while he was onstage — until Allin decided the matter by kicking the woman in the head.

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Getting back to the far classier Roxy Music for a moment, though: Helen says Bryan Ferry was perhaps the rocker she found most attractive in her youth, so I have an incentive to keep honing my impression of him. And in case you haven’t noticed, the Sounds song “Rock N’ Roll” contains the line “jump up bubble up what’s in store,” so Sounds singer Maja Ivarsson likes the Roxy Music classic “Love Is the Drug.” On the downside, she also sings in the impromptu supergroup seen and heard during the closing credits of Snakes on a Plane, a terrible, terrible film, as I learned when Jerm Pollet and his pals in the Raspberry Brothers hosted a screening of it recently.

Let’s end this “Month of Rock!” on a more positive note, though: I’ll just say that if tomorrow’s “no” econ-debater had his way (judging by his book), Maja and her girlfriend would be able to marry legally in the U.S., and I will at least do her this service: Instead of thinking about Snakes on a Plane, I will link again to her amazing performance of “Seven Days a Week” on Letterman. It’s punk, it’s pop, it’s Dave, it’s a sexy lesbian or bisexual woman, it’s a reminder that periods of market-leaning thinking and New Wave seem to go together in Sweden as in the U.S., and simple though it looks it may be my favorite live performance clip of the decade. And on that surprising note ends the “Month of Rock!”

Amidst all the playing of “Billie Jean” in honor of the late Michael Jackson, let us not forget the other Billie Jean in pop culture in the 80s, namely The Legend of Billie Jean, from which we get the themesong “Invincible” by Pat Benatar. It’s odd that anyone would use the name Billie Jean just three years after it had become so closely associated with Michael Jackson (unless they were actually hoping to confuse people), but Jackson got a sort of (likely unintended) revenge sixteen years later, with the release of his album and song “Invincible.” What goes around comes around. (Remember to always think twice. Oo!)

Both my musical and romantic tastes may have been shaped by the fact that so many 80s acts I liked as a teen who weren’t robotic androgynes like Annie Lennox were instead (in some sense) impassioned tomboys: Pat Benatar, Kim Wilde, Patty Smyth (not Patti Smith, though she’d probably appear on some people’s list), Lita Ford doing “Kiss Me Deadly” (not necessarily anything else she did), the Motels, Heart, Joan Jett, Exene Cervenka, etc.

(It’s a wonder I didn’t end up a lesbian myself — or did I? Al Franken, who may yet be a senator, joked long ago that he thought of himself as “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.” Whether that means he should have been in the Gay Pride Parade making its way through Manhattan yesterday is debatable — and if you want to see Bryan Harris, who wrote a gay-friendly book mocking sexually-hypocritically politicians, debating the fate of the American economy against paleocon Richard Spencer, remember to join us this Wednesday at Lolita Bar.)

These musical acts at least tended toward the tough-of-demeanor and the husky-of-voice in a way that makes, say, Britney look very wimpy. It does not surprise me to hear of Patty Smyth holding her own in a marriage to notorious hothead John McEnroe, for instance — that’s no role for a wimpy girly-girl. And she is the Warrior, of course.

(A nerd aside: the star of The Legend of Billie Jean also had the title role in the Supergirl movie that you barely remember existed, and it just so happens that an interesting debate about Supergirl’s status as sexual icon cropped up in Read the rest of this entry »

I say this with the utmost love and concern: The following excerpt from the Wikipedia page about Slash seems to sum up what a sad bunch of stupid screw-ups all the parties concerned are (the only thing missing is an official press release headlined “Where Do You, Like, Fucking Get Off and Shit, Man?”):

Feud with Axl Rose:

In 2007, Slash admitted to going to Rose’s home with the intention to settle a long-standing legal dispute and make peace with his former band mate. Slash elaborated on the incident in his autobiography, claiming that what actually occurred was that he simply went to Rose’s house while intoxicated and left a note asking Rose to contact him to settle a pending lawsuit. He also added that he had not actually spoken to Rose in person since leaving Guns N’ Roses in 1996. Slash further stated that incident’s publicity created a rift in Velvet Revolver; as his bandmates were unsure of what Slash had actually done and Slash had confronted Weiland over his scathing reply to Rose, feeling that Weiland did not have the “right” to criticize Rose, not actually knowing him. In March 2009, Slash responded to an interview in which Rose referred to him as “a cancer”, saying that “it doesn’t really affect me at all. The fact that he has anything to say at all it’s like ‘Whatever, dude’.”

They may be grown men with millions of dollars, but it’s hard not to think of them as just ornery, poorly socialized boys who need to spend detention period in separate rooms because they will always find some excuse to take offense.

Makes one long to hear about pleasant, peaceful, consensus-building ladies — but instead, tomorrow it’s a look at one of the most important music-celebrity phenomena of the 80s: tomboys!

As if Michael Jackson — and Phil Spector, with whom we began this “Month of Rock” — weren’t troubling enough figures, morally, there were also the reports this week that not far from where I live the Oscar-winning songwriter behind “You Light Up My Life,” now seventy-one, may have raped some eleven women after luring them to his place with promises of a music career (all three of these guys have a haunted, emaciated look that causes one to instinctively back away as if from a Ringwraith, though I hate to convict them on that basis alone).

You know, my mother always thought there was something horribly wrong with “You Light Up My Life.” Who sings about shining joy in such a dreary-sounding fashion? Rightly seeing as part of a much larger problem of wimpy, soft 1970s non-rock, Mom christened such numbers “shit-rock” and, like Dad, waxed (ha!) nostalgic for the 50s and 60s. In retrospect, they were right and of course influenced me greatly in this as in so many other things.

My negative reaction to the overly-mellow radio fare of my earliest years probably helped ensure a lifelong allegiance to fairly energetic or dramatic rock, including a lot of postpunk stuff (leading to resentment of anyone like Sting, much as I admire the Police, who insists on turning driving, powerful songs into lazy calypso variations or whatever.

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Occasionally, though, tempering big scary songs can yield interesting results. I only recently heard for the first time the live version of “Monkey Gone to Heaven” from Pixies at the BBC, which has Frank Black doing much more Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t expect this blog’s “Month of Rock” to include the death of the King of Pop — and let me hasten to add that easy as it is to make fun, I liked several of his songs and was quick to point out that Thriller had the most top ten hits of any album when that question was raised among some of my friends.

I know exactly where I was when I heard Michael Jackson was dead: getting a drink at swanky little Quantino Bottega Organica, where bartender Lareesa (sp?) said that her childhood was dying along with Jackson.  Of course, I’d had my suspicions earlier, a few blocks away, when I saw a punkish guy in a mortician-like black tophat blasting Jackson hits on his boombox around 7pm.  An hour later, at a Bowery Poetry Club event hosted by Opium magazine, not only did Lisa Carver dare criticize her fellow bohemians for knuckling under when faced with threats such as the Secret Service’s apparent interrogation of her boyfriend (Carver can pick ’em, as noted yesterday), but the evening’s co-hostess dared say of Jackson that “Somewhere tonight, a little Guatemalan boy is safe because that man is dead.”

I’ve long said that if Jackson were a movie character, he’d have long since reached the point where death was the cleanest next move, like a mad scientist so transformed that the explosion of his lab seems like a mercy-killing.  So long ago, it seemed like time for the amusement park full of molested children to burn down, possibly after the mad leader’s chimpanzee sidekick accidentally started a fire or tore his master’s artificial face off.

Let us not forget, though, that one of the things that kept Jackson rich and able to afford things like moving to a mansion in Brunei toward the end was his ownership, for a time, of the music of the Beatles — and we might do well to think of John Lennon (subject of next year’s Nowhere Boy biopic), revered by so many leftists and neo-hippies, as an even greater monster than Jackson.  Jackson may have had Read the rest of this entry »

Wed., July 1 (8pm): “Is America Economically Doomed?” with:

Managing editor of TakiMag Richard Spencer arguing yes.

Journalist and political author Bryan Harris arguing no.

Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.

Free admission, cash bar.  Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.

With a trillion being spent on banks, another trillion or so on healthcare (per Obama’s big plans from yesterday), and the usual 3 trillion or so on old people, sick people, foreign foes, and miscellaneous ludicrous projects — plus a national debt about the size of the GDP, a financial sector about as trustworthy as a Survivor contestant, and more sclerotic institutions than you can shake a calcified index finger-bone at — you might be a bit worried about the economy.  But is it hopeless?

“No,” says Bryan Harris.  “Yes,” says Richard Spencer.  “I had better attend and find out for myself,” says you.

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And if you’re also saying to yourself, “I do worry that we’re doomed, but I’m not sure I want to attend a debate about it featuring someone from that radical right-wing TakiMag,” let me just observe that even the most left-wing and hippie-like among you would probably be comfortable joining me tonight (Thursday the 25th, 7pm at Bowery Poetry Club) for a completely unrelated event, Read the rest of this entry »

You know, I’m not currently planning to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (out today) even if it does have forty different robots in it, but I’d be sorely tempted if they actually used the cool song “Deceptacon” [sic] by the band Le Tigre (and let me add that tigers are the most beautiful non-human animals, don’t let anyone tell you different).

The real menace to civilization today, though, is the deceptive transformation of ABC News into a platform for advertising Obama’s healthcare plan, in a broadcast hosted by Charlie Gibson tonight — though the truth will be presented today at noon at the Harvard Club, in a Manhattan-Institute-hosted luncheon speech criticizing Obamacare given by ACSH Trustee and former New York lieutenant governor Betsy McCaughey (whose copy of Atlas Shrugged I’ve seen beside her bed — would that she were governor). It’ll be interesting to compare her complaints to the seven-point list of objections recently published by the Cato Institute — and it will be interesting to see if the American Medical Association sticks to its guns and continues to oppose the plan as well.

One film transformation we will not be seeing after all, alas, is that of Sean Penn into Larry Fine of the Three Stooges in the Stooges biopic by the Farrelly Brothers — and that puts the whole project in doubt, reportedly, after the Farrelly Brothers went to such great effort to secure Jim Carrey as Curly and, even more strangely, Benicio Del Toro as Moe. We live in an odd world.

Todd Seavey.com Book Selection of the Month (June 2009): The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle, or Gold Diggers of ’77 by Michael Moorcock (and judging by the prices for used copies on Amazon, perhaps I should sell mine — OR BURN IT!)

Like me, British “New Wave” science fiction author Michael Moorcock enjoys juxtaposing several related texts or ideas — unlike me, he doesn’t waste any time concocting segues. So today, neither will I:

•Julien Temple made a documentary about the Sex Pistols — two actually, the more recent one being The Filth and the Fury and the far earlier one being The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle, for which Moorcock, oddly enough, wrote the official companion book in novel form, depicting his already-existing sci-fi mod/punk character Jerry Cornelius (not to mention Cornelius’s evil brother Frank and other associates) interacting with the Sex Pistols. The Pistols are depicted as despising their manager and record label, something you don’t normally see in official companion books.

Thanks to time travel and various ghostly apparitions (and wiseman Lemmy from Motorhead), London and reality itself unravel, with the Pistols repeating their Queen’s Jubilee boat performance but this time with actual accompanying aerial assault and widespread bloodshed. That Moorcock makes all this seem sexy and right and does so with an amoral smirk shows he’s an anarchist in a much broader sense than I am — and that he was a big influence on comics writer Grant Morrison, as I’ve noted before.

(And from there, if I were doing segues today, how easily we’d glide from Morrison to the comic Godland and its use of the chant “IBOGA” and thus to Morrison-lookalike Hunter S. Thompson’s groundless claims about drug use during the Muskey campaign, but we don’t have time for that or for an analysis of the prince in Hellboy 2, so do your own research for a change.)

•Moorcock himself would probably look with great suspicion upon my philosophy of “conservatism for punks” — but I have always found his godson, who is really named Elric and unlike his namesake character is a swarthy Brazilian and a friend of Reid Mihalko (rather than an albino swordsman), very pleasant, and Elric informed me of this new, definitive collection of Moorcock’s best short stories — the Best of Michael Moorcock, just out last month, so check that out, too.

•Was it Moorcock, the ungrateful bastard, who likened the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to Winnie the Pooh because of their conservatism and warmth? (Has he really watched the suicidally-dark Winnie the Pooh: A Day for Eeyore, as Helen and I have been planning to do, maybe along with the director’s cut DVD of Surf Nazis Must Die, which I just realized I Read the rest of this entry »

If Boomer hippies tended toward socially-libertarian and economically-statist views, where does grunge lead? It would seem to lead logically (like a lot of Gen X thinking) to great cynicism about “the whole system,” and indeed former Nirvana member Krist Novoselic is now running for local office, as explained by libertarian columnist Paul Jacob, on a voting-system-reform platform. Jacob approves — and has himself fought for term limits and even faced criminal charges in Oklahoma for petitioning there for ballot initiatives despite being from out of state.

I’m increasingly anarchist in my outlook, I think, and while I’m delighted to see numerous avenues to limiting the power of the state pursued simultaneously, I wish people would focus very directly on getting spending cuts and deregulation passed. Reforming campaign and referendum processes smacks a bit of Progressive efforts to make government “good,” a contradiction in terms and a potential distraction from the more appropriate cause of simply disposing of government. But that’s not going to happen anytime soon, so in the interim every little bit helps.

For a less compromising dose of anarchism, though, check out my Book Selection of the Month entry tomorrow, examining a Michael Moorcock novel that mixes anarchism and the Sex Pistols.

And in other political news, my friend and fellow Brown alum Kristen Mulvihill’s husband, New York Times reporter David Rohde, who she just married nine months ago, has escaped from militants after a (largely unreported) seven-month captivity in Afghanistan. So congratulations to them all over again, needless to say.

I hosted a debate dealing with the Middle East this month and partied with a departing Commentary staffer this weekend, and I admit that’s about as close to the Middle East conflict as I want to get personally. Good thing we have some intrepid David Rohdes out there, though. (At the same time, I’m guessing Kristen wouldn’t much mind seeing him switch to a desk job.)

I realize there’s that software now that enables you to use your cell phone to record and thus identify songs you overhear while walking around.  But I would imagine most music nerds these days are using my default method — trying to overhear one distinctive snippet of the lyrics for later Googling purposes (or Binging purposes, I should perhaps now say — though I think for people to convert from Google to Bing, one’s first impression of Bing can’t simply be that it works about as well — which is what you’re likely to think unless you happen to be vacation-planning or doing one of the other things for which Bing is designed to be superior — but rather that you have been blown away and converted on the spot away from use of an old reliable search engine that has become second-nature for most of us already).

Anyway, the snippet/Googling method works surprisingly well but of course does lead to moments of great frustration when none of the lyrics are audible — save perhaps something near-useless like “love, baby” — and your friends are starting to notice that you’re craning your neck in a funny way to try to hear the song better while everyone else is eating a meal or otherwise going on with their lives.

I had a hard time hearing the psychedelic rock lyrics playing in the dress shop Beacon’s (Helen’s idea, not mine) one week ago today until suddenly hitting a garagey-sounding cover of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” sandwiched between psychedelic instrumentals and preceded by what I now take it was not actually a Zombies song but, yes, Vanilla Fudge covering Zombies (mmmm — vanilla fudge covering zombies), as some Googling and checking of track lists revealed.  And the real music nerds will now be appalled, convinced that I should already own Vanilla Fudge’s self-titled first album.  (Or they may fear that what I heard was really Tea Company’s cover of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”)

Music nerds may be less persuaded that I needed to purchase from Beacon’s hyper-hip CD section one Ennio Morricone experimental album (Crime and Dissonance) and one impassioned but not terribly catchy MC5 CD (Kick Out the Jams).  Just knowing I finally own the song containing the immortal spoken intro “Kick out the jams, motherfucker” is nice, though.  And I bought a rainbow ice across the street at Pizza Town.

But speaking of getting to know the neighborhood: tomorrow, an ex-Nirvana member’s foray into local politics.

Mark your keeping-track-of-progress calendars: On June 10, 2009, I saw a comfortably-ambling dog with a (jointed!) prosthetic leg near the veterinarian’s office on West 67th St., just hours before (and a few hundred yards away from) the Lincoln Center event honoring evolution expert E.O. Wilson that Gerry Ohrstrom was nice enough to get a few of us into.

I imagine animal prostheses will become more common — especially in Manhattan, where a lot of people (a) are rich and (b) opt for leashless freedom — and the car collisions that frequently come with it — for their dogs.  I remember once watching in horror, along with all the other patrons of a restaurant, as a guy played rather long-distance fetch with his dog right near traffic in Union Square.  I said the guy didn’t seem competent to have a dog, to which my friend Laura Zito said, “And he’s probably got kids.”

My parents were very good about exercising the late Uber’s back leg after she had an operation on it, but I remember being angered by the vet’s comment, reported by my parents, about the surprising number of pet owners who ignore instructions to exercise post-op dog legs and end up with a dog with one “frozen” leg.  Perhaps (though I have no idea) that’s the story behind the stiff-legged literal junkyard dog I used to see down on the Lower East Side (yes, even swanky Manhattan had at least one junkyard dog!), not far from scary Mars Bar.

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Mars Bar, like much of Manhattan, has mellowed but still has a bit of the old air of a place (much like St. Mark’s and Tompkins Square a few blocks north, back in the day) where the line between “punk” and “homeless” blurs just a bit too much for comfort (much as “heavy metal fan” and “homeless” seemed to meld on Market St. in San Francisco back when I first saw that area).

That reminds me of a mix-up that gave me a moment of terror years ago: Back at ABC News, one of the video editors said he had to take care of some young kids for a day and thought he might take them to “Mars Bar” — but Read the rest of this entry »