-- A New Yorker's Love Song for NOLA

by Michael Jahn

I've lived in New York City for over 30 years, most of that in Manhattan, and like many Big Apple lifers thought that it was the center of the universe and that I could live nowhere else. I felt that despite the ravages of Wall Street, wealth, and 1,000-percent rent increases, the outward exile of musicians and artists to the point where they can't even afford to live in Brooklyn anymore, that there was nowhere else for me. New York, specifically the jagged Cambrian boulder known as Manhattan, was my forever love.

And then I set foot in NOLA, an acronym that if you haven't heard it stands for New Orleans, Louisiana. Its other names are more familiar - the Big Easy, the Crescent City, the City that Care Forgot, and I might add "the city that can't decide if it's in the southern United States or northern Costa Rica."

I set one foot in the town and said "oh yeah, I can do this." It was the same way I felt on climbing up on the Cambrian boulder in 1966. You know about the music and the voodoo and the jazz funerals and the food and the booze and Dr. John and all that, and you can throw in Coco Robicheaux, who I only missed a few week ago because I couldn't afford to get across the Lake Ponchartrain bridge to Covington to catch his gig. You know all that or can look it up.

Did I mention that annual spring party that instills in so many permanent residents the fervent desire to spend a few days with the relatives in Baton Rouge? You know about that one, too.

I want to talk about NOLA's groove and what's in the air and how people feel about life and their city.

If New York is the capitol of the known universe, as it thinks of itself, New Orleans is capitol of a parallel, antimatter universive that floats just to the left of Andromeda.

Listen to me. New Orleans is the Greenwich Village that I recall from the mid-sixties. It's hip and musical and artistic and friendly and supportive - more like demanding - of eccentricity. There's a mellow groove that anyone possessed of an artistic sensibility will find irresistable. It's friendly and possessed of a terrific civic pride. No one loves their town the way NOLA people love theirs and they're out there every day promoting it, especially now that it was nearly taken away.

You want an emblem that's more to the point than the fleur-de-lis that's so ubiquitous it's on their professional football team's uniforms? (There ain't no apple on the New York Giants' helmets.) Take the streetcar, and I'm thinking here of the Canal Street Streetcar, and if you want to be even more specific, the Red Line.

The streetcar tells you why the town is called "the Big Easy." That title implies that the pace of life is slower in New Orleans than elsewhere, and let's think for the moment of New York. This is true enough. But nearly everywhere is slower than in New York. Even in L.A. it's slower, even in Washington, DC, and even in Chicago, which comes the closest to Manhattan in terms of testosterone frenzy.

I haven't been to Key West, but I imagine that it's slower there than in anyplace where Jimmy Buffett doesn't reside. Resort towns don't count.

The words "the Big Easy" don't mean slow so much as they mean family and caring. And the streetcar is emblematic, far better than the fleur-de-lis or the silhouetted black guy leaning against a lamppost playing the sax. It ambles along slower than any vehicle save for any vehicle save those cruising for parking spots at the mall. It moves along a wide strip of flat concrete in the middle of the street. The tracks are set into the concrete. Police cars sometimes amble down the same path. So do people with shopping carts and baby carriages. The streetcars, built prominently in 1923 and open to the elements, amble along at something like three miles an hour, slow enough that you can cross in front of it on foot, like ten feet in front of it, and not get run over because the streetcar will stop.

There are official stops every few blocks, but you just might get picked up anywhere.

If you cross in front you might get yelled at, but what do you expect? However the yelling will come from the operator, who is sitting in the front looking out a big open window, and he or she will say "what's the matter with you today? What are you doing out here at ten in the morning. What did you, lose your job again. How's your brother?" And the tourists in the car are slack-jawed at the fact that the driver has not only stopped for you but has lapsed into conversation and soon might add "get on and sit down and I'll drive you to work."

Last week the driver of a car I was on stopped to ask a woman pushing a baby carriage how her kid was. And none of the passengers minded, nor would they mind, because they live in the Big Easy where cooing at a baby is more important than getting to work on time.

This don't happen on the avenue, Fifth Avenue, people. Or on Sunset Boulevard or on South Wabash.

Okay, the hurricane. Yes, the hurricane. They survived it and, being entrepreneurs in the traditional art of substance abuse, promote a drink named the Hurricane. There are various recipes, but the one I saw most recently mixed four ounces of dark rum with an equivalent amount of orange and pineapple juice and some grenadine. You don't want to have more than one unless you can take the next day off.

You also don't want to be a young woman flashing her breasts on Bourbon Street in exchange for a string of cheap beads unless you don't mind it being on the Internet forever. Not everything that happens in New Orleans stays in New Orleans, though a goodly amount does.

What survived the hurricane (the storm, not the drink)? If you are a tourist, businessman, or casual visitor, just about everything. As an older white man said, uncharitably, "everything that matters survived." Which is to say that many of the poorer neighborhoods did not. But just walking around the Central Business District, the French Quarter, the waterfront (ironically enough), and the Garden District you might say "what hurricane?"

But in the pages of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, every third story is about picking up debris or rebuilding, and it's been over two years. And if you wander away from "the Quarter" and over to the Warehouse Arts District and look at some of the warehouses that really are warehouses, you might notice that many of them have been painted up to about five or six feet off the ground. This is a bit creepy once you have figured out the owners are covering up high water marks.

And the hurricane remains in the form of tee shirts, the inevitable tee shirts - "FEMA: Fix Everything My Ass," "NOPD: Not Our Problem, Dude," "I was in New Orleans During Katrina and all I Got was a Plasma TV," and, more elegantly, "Make Levees, Not War."

And the word "rebuild" is everywhere.

This is necessary, of course. A lot remains to be done. The poor are hurting. The musicians are hurting. The real estate market is way constricted and getting uncomfortably New Yorkish. A year before the hurricane someone told me about a two-bedroom apartment in the French Quarter that rented for $600 a month. Telling this to a cabbie on the way to the airport, my discovery was scoffed at and I was told that I could get one for $250 in a different neighborhood, one that doubtless has since washed out into the Gulf of Mexico.

As for the one in the Quarter, as of last week it was $1800 a month, the shortage of housing is so acute. And in October I dropped in on an outdoor party/street fair and a developer showed me fancy color brochures for a condo he is putting up in the middle of the Warehouse Arts District. He showed me the floor plan of a two-bedroom apartment for $350,000. "You might want to pick up one of these," he said, as if suggesting I buy a beignet at Café du Monde.

Go ahead and do it, buy a condo. Get something on the second floor or higher. The levees are still a question mark.

By the way, and the reputation notwithstanding, beignets are overrated. They are heavy plain donuts with confectioner's sugar thrown on them.

There is no snappy ending to this story except to say that NOLA is a gem among world cities, proof that you can have artistry, imagination, family, friendliness, and pride in the middle of a major American city. Or northern Costa Rican city. Go there. Throw a couple of bucks at a street musician (better than at one of the horrid rock bands you will hear on Bourbon Street), get sick on beignets and hurricanes oh, and, what the hell, flash your boobs and get immortalized on YouTube. Buy one of the really classy tourist tee shirts, like the one that reads "I got Bourbon-faced on Shit Street." Maybe don't.

Go to the Market Café at Decatur and St. Philip and nab a catfish po'boy for $10 and listen to the free music. Volunteer to build houses and clean up. Try out the streaming audio at the Rajun' Cajun (http://www.klrzfm.com), and get a room at the Day's Inn French Quarter, which may stay at $59 a night six blocks from Bourbon Street at least until it is renovated following Katrina, renamed the Canal Street Hotel, at which point I presume the room rate will at least double. So what if the phones don't work and there's plaster dust in the room and nowhere to hang your clothes and, like me, you may have to scavenge a wastebasket out of an even-more-unfinished room.

You're on the streetcar line, the Red Line, and the car ambles by every fifteen minutes and the conductor will stop for you and take you for a ride, stop and coo at babies, and point out the restaurant where Bill Clinton eats (second floor, last table on the right by the window).

And you'll understand what they mean by "the Big Easy."

--'Wait a second, Honey, while I put Putin on hold'

by Michael Jahn

Those who were paying attention during Rudy Giuliani's 1994 inauguration as New York's mayor will recall his then-seven-year-old son Andrew running wild onstage, imitating his father, mugging for the cameras and stealing Dad's thunder.

If a man can't control his children, some wondered, how can he control a city?

Well, he sure can't control them now, for both Andrew and his sister Caroline appear to hate their Dad. But that's not the point.

Last month Giuliani interrupted a speech to take a cell phone call from his current wife.

If a man can't convince his wife not to call him while he's giving a presidential campaign speech, some wonder, how can he convince Iran to give up developing that Death Ray?

For once, the old standby "I told you never to call me here" makes sense.

Imagine, if you will, President Giuliani talking to the Russian President on the Hotline, when the wife calls from Rodeo Drive.

"Wait a second, Honey, while I put Putin on hold."

-- It's Candy-Christ Time Again in New York

IT’S CANDY-CHRIST TIME IN NEW YORK AGAIN
by Michael Jahn


Artist Cosimo Cavallaro's life-size chocolate Jesus is back!

The controversial work of art is scheduled be mounted at the Proposition Gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea. Its title is "My Sweet Jesus." Christ is depicted as anatomically correct and bereft of loincloth. The sculpture will be on display along with chocolate sculptures of eight Catholic saints. They're dressed. Invitations to the exhibition will feature a Virgin Mary with scratch-and-sniff breasts.

Censorers please note -- this could be much worse.

Conservatives are already in protest, against not only the exhibition but its confluence with All Saints Day. Earlier this year, a similar attempt to display "My Sweet Jesus" in conjunction with Holy Week (that's the one before Easter), was killed by the resulting uproar.

If all this sounds familiar, it is. In 1989, photographer Andres Serrano exhibited "Piss Christ," a photo of a plastic crucifix in a jar of his own urine, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. A scandal ensued

Ten years later a painting, "The Holy Virgin Mary," by British artist Chris Ofili, also exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, showed a black Mary surrounded by elephant dung and clippings of female genitals. Cementing his legend as a patron of the arts as well a fan of the First Amendment, "America's Mayor" Rudy Giuliani tried to evict the museum from the city-owned building it leased. He also sued the museum. A United States Federal Court judge ruled against him.

Shortly thereafter artist Renee Cox exhibited "Yo Mama's Last Supper," an image of the famous feast with the artist herself, nude, as Jesus. It too was shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and again Giuliani's critique was scathing. He threatened to cut off the museum's funding.

Ya gotta wonder how President Giuliani will show his appreciation for the arts and his respect for the First Amendment.

Safe to say that there will be no chocolate Jesus at a Washington gallery, no marzipan Mary at a Federal Court building, and as for that Jujyfruit fresco of the conservative members of the Supreme Court ...

--Marion Jones, George Bush, and Giving it Back

by Michael Jahn

Anybody else out there think it's bizarre that Marion Jones might get thrown in jail for lying to the authorities about using steroids but Bush won't get thrown in jail for lying to us about starting a war?

isn't there something basically weird that it's okay for the cops to lie to us but we can't lie to them?

And what about fleeing to evade prosecution. That's illegal too. You knock over a 7-11 and what are you supposed to do, stand there and wait for the cops to come and then tell them exactly what you did?

Why not just deputize criminals and let them arrest themselves?

Marion Jones may have to give back her gold medals. How about having George Bush give back the 2004 election?

-- O.J. Simpson Was Looking for 'the Real Cutlery'

O.J. Simpson Was Looking for 'the Real Cutlery'

by Michael Jahn

Reliable sources say that, rather than looking to retrieve such sports memorabilia as signed jerseys and helmets, when O.J. burst into a hotel room in Las Vegas he was looking for "the real cutlery."

For years after being acquited in his criminal trial but convicted in a civil trial, Simpson said he would look for "the real killers."

In fact, sources say, he was looking for the knife that he is alleged to have used in the murders of his wife and her friend that famous night in 1994. The 12-inch stiletto was missing until a week ago, when it turned up on eBay.

According to sources close to the Las Vegas police who questioned him after the robbery, Simpson believed that a sports memorabilia broker had purchased the knife and planned to sell it in Las Vegas. That turned out not to be true, as Simpson discovered. The dealer is said to have been trying to sell such other Simpson collectables as a framed photo of the Hall of Fame football star alongside FBI tough guy and reported drag queen J. Edgar Hoover.

--Hollywood Star and Rich Arab Boyfriend Die in Drunken High-Speed Crash

Hollywood Star and Rich Arab Boyfriend Die in Drunken High-Speed Crash

by Michael Jahn

If you followed the Princess Di anniversary hoopla -- and if you managed to avoid it please share your secret -- you would think that Joan of Arc, not the former Diana Spencer, was killed in that Parisian wreck.

Diana seems like she was a decent sort who suffered at the hands of a caddish husband. That makes her like every other chick-flick heroine. You know, the wife is upstairs caring for her dying mother while the husband is in the basement banging the babysitter. She began her public life as inoffensive arm candy and ended it in a flurry of noblesse oblige. That is what royals do, and noblesse oblige is better than no oblige, but she did it particularly well.

That does not, however, qualify her for canonization.

Which is exactly what's on the mind on the hordes of writers, actors, and other hacks who are living off her memory and what they would like people to believe is her memory. They want to sell books, magazines, and the commercial space within their soap opera documentaries.

Imagine what the headline might read should a beloved blonde American icon - hold on, I'm trying to think of one - okay, let's go with Jennifer Aniston, flame out while fleeing surveillance by going 80 miles an hour through a tunnel with a rich Arab she was courting after being abandoned by the caddish husband.

JEN AND RICH ARAB BOYFRIEND DIE IN DRUNKEN HIGH-SPEED CRASH

There would be no canonization. Instead, we would hear a lot of talk about blondes and rehab and she would be compared with Lindsay Lohan and the rest of that lot. Now we're hearing Di being compared with every saintly, misunderstood and eventually martyred woman in history.

And can you just IMAGINE what Fox News would say about the rich Arab boyfriend?

www.myspace.com/michaeljahn

-- Bush Would Outsource 9-1-1- Calls to India

Bush Would Outsource 9-1-1 Calls to India

by Michael Jahn

Sources within the White House have revealed that the Bush Administration is pushing a plan to outsource emergency 9-1-1 calls to India.

Right now almost the entire United States is serviced by the 9-1-1 emergency network. Most 9-1-1 called are directed to one of 6,200 Public Safety Answering Points nationwide. Those are in places like New York, Chicago, Chattanooga and Baton Rouge. If the Bush plan were approved, the calls would be answered in places like Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Thiruvananthapuram.

Depending on who you believe, from one-half to two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies outsource to India. Why, to thank them for ministering to spiritually bankrupt rock stars and providing staff for our convenience stores?

No, because in Portland a typical salary for a 9-1-1 call taker is $36,995. In
Thiruvananthapuram it is about 170,000 rupees - around $4000.

Okay, so ghee is cheaper in Thiruvananthapuram.

One White House insider, who wished to remain anonymous, defended the president's plan. "If the Indians can explain Windows 2000 they can manage to send a paddywagon to Hollywood and Vine," he said.

Or send a District of Columbia Mental Health Crisis Intervention Team to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

www.geocities.com/michaeljahn

-- Obama Would Invade Cambo ... Oops, Pakistan

by Michael Jahn

I hear an American President speaking to the nation:

"This is not an invasion of Pakistan. ... Our purpose is not to occupy the areas. Once enemy forces are driven out of these sanctuaries and once their military supplies are destroyed, we will withdraw.... We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Pakistan but for the purpose of ending the war in Afghanistan and winning the just peace we all desire."

Actually, I was speaking not of a President but of a Presidential candidate and, in the true spirit of scurrilous journalism on everyone's minds following the purchase of the Wall Street Journal by Rupert Murdock, I changed two words.

I changed the word "Cambodia" to "Pakistan" and the word "Vietnam" to "Afghanistan." What you read up there is part of Nixon's 1970 speech announcing that we were invading Cambodia.

Which brings us, you have guessed, to Barack Obama. I applaud his plan to invade Pakistan to protect American servicemen in Afghanistan. I think we should go even further with this America-as-the-world's cop. We must, for example, invade Jamaica to end the blight of indigestion caused by jerked beef.

And India, India must be smashed and occupied -- to put an end to those outsourced computer help desks that have been confirming our suspicion that the Microsoft manuals really ARE written in Aramaic. Coming soon -- the commissioning of the Geek Squad commandos.

And Canada, Canada, PLEASE do something about Bill Shatner's waistline before we have to send in a Delta Force of pilates instructors!

-- Fred Thompson, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Jar Jar Bush

by Michael Jahn

Fred Thompson is running for President of the United States. At 6'6" and with an authoritarian demeanor, he at least looks presidential.

That's unlike George W. "Jar Jar" Bush, who looks like a cocker spaniel trying to get of out being whupped for leaving a pile on the carpet.

Thompson is more likely to be elected President than he was to have been elected Manhattan District Attorney, as was his character, Arthur Branch, in "Law & Order." A Southern senator with a drawl getting elected district attorney in New York City? How about Sacha Baron Cohen being elected president of the Southern Baptist Coalition?

Robert Morgenthau, who at last sighting was not a Southernor with a drawl, has been the real-life Manhattan DA since 1974. He was supposedly the model for the first "Law & Order" DA, Aaron Schiff, played by Arthur Hill.

Fred Thompson as Manhattan DA is not the only bizarre notion on "Law & Order." Another is their constantly threatening suspects with the death penalty and, further, the suspects and their attorneys keeping straight faces about it. The last time that the death penalty was carried out in New York State, the man in the White House was John F. Kennedy, not Fred Thompson. It's not likely to be carried out again until another Kennedy is in the White House, and we've kind of run out of them, haven't we?

If Thompson is elected President, it will be just the latest in a series of strongmen he has played, including presidents. I'm not counting his role in the 2005 Albert Brooks comedy, "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World."

Unable to find weapons of mass destruction, the United States sends someone out looking for laughs. But we already know what makes Muslims laugh -- what makes Al Queda laugh, anyway -- George W. Bush.

www.myspace.com/michael_jahn

-- War, Peace, and the Summer of Love

War, Peace, and the Summer of Love
by Michael Jahn

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, slightly more than one-quarter of the American population is crazy.* In other words, at any given moment roughly 75 million Americans are two meatballs short of a hero.

With that in mind, let's discuss the Summer of Love and the current celebration of its 40th anniversary.

The year 1967 is the year when it is generally accepted that a large number of the young - I would guess at 19 years being the average - turned on, tuned in, and became entranced with fashion and music that, with a number of famous exceptions, now is the just a tad on the cringeful side. Are you about 60 and want to feel older than you were made by seeing Paul McCartney's Irish mug on the cover of Modern Maturity? Put on a tie-dye tee shirt and listen Brian Wilson's should-have-stayed-unfinished "masterpiece" Smile.

If you survive his rendition of "My Favorite Vegetable," you are ready for the Nixon nostalgia that is sweeping the land. I never thought that HE would start to look good. At least old Tricky Dick KNEW that he was a crook -- and he never started a war.

Consider this. A bit more than a year ago Louis Menand wrote the following in The New Yorker about the late Timothy Leary, the greatest hippie guru:

"Leary belonged to what we reverently refer to as the Greatest Generation, that cohort of Americans who eluded most of the deprivations of the Depression, grew fat in the affluence of the postwar years, and then preached hedonism and truancy to the baby-boom generation, which has taken the blame ever since."

Roger that.

Menand further wrote:

"Because of the spike in the birth rate that began in 1946, the number of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in the United States grew from fifteen million in 1955 to twenty-five million in 1970; during the sixties, college enrollment more than doubled, from three and a half million students to just under eight million. Times were prosperous; these were the "go-go" years on Wall Street, the era of guns and butter, Vietnam and the Great Society. Government spending primed the pump. Young people dropped out because dropping out was economically sustainable, and because there were more of them in the pipeline than the system could absorb. The phenomenon was more complicated, of course -- social systems don't self-regulate quite so tidily -- but young people found it natural to renounce grownup ambitions in the nineteen-sixties, and they got their mantras from grownups like Leary."

In other words, in 1967 there were lots of kids with enough money to allow them to indulge themselves and a big justification for so doing -- to escape for a while their apparent options: death in nuclear holocaust or death in Vietnam. And they could afford to be nonchalant about money. One night that year I was with Abbie Hoffman in his apartment on St. Mark's Place in the then-dangerous East Village of Manhattan. He told me how he had just refused to participate in a lawsuit that was a sure win for him. "All I would have to do it put on a suit and I would get $10,000," he said. "You can live forever in the Haight on $10,000." He refused to put on a suit.

He put on an American flag shirt instead. Using the American flag as an item of clothing was seriously illegal in 1967. Now it adorns the backside of every other cheerleader.

The fact that the Haight is now dangerous and the East Village is yuppie paradise is interesting.

For those kids who DID land some of the money that was floating around, there were, as Menand wrote, a number of slightly unhinged grownups running around to give them pointers. Such as Timothy Leary. During the Summer of Love I was walking through the East Village with Richie Havens. We were talking about dropping acid. And he said of Leary, "the problem with old guys dropping acid is that they've never FELT before" and they can't handle it.

By "old guys" Richie meant those aged 40, which right now as I stare down a looming 64th birthday hurts more than listening to "Smile." Brian Wilson should have stayed in that sandbox he built in his living room and kept until Mrs. Wilson discovered that the dogs had discovered it.

By the way, I never, not once, wore tye dye. I hated the hippies. The entire bunch of what I call the New York Rock Critics Circle, the professional writers whose job it was to cover the counterculture, hated the hippies. We hated them for trivializing some really important concerns, mainly ending the Vietnam War. And we hated them for making it easy for "the straights" to make fun of everone under 30.

There was the same problem with the revered John Lennon, by the way. It was hard to sell peace to mass America when you had Lennon doing his press-conference-in-bed thing with Yoko.

Who is pretty cool, no matter what you have heard.

Of course, we were all 25 and the hippies were 19. When you are 25 the last person you want to have anything to do with is a 19-year-old.

I couldn't take the hippies then. I despise them now because so many people today who hear that you were a young person in 1967 assume you were a hippie and, therefore, in a position to give them drug advice. Nope, sorry ma'am. I worked for the New York Times during that era. When you work for the New York Times the heroin gets put away before you get in the door.

Also, I hate the hippies for tonsorial reasons. I'm losing hair down the middle of my head. Soon I will look as if my scalp were landscaped with parallel hedges. I have been telling people that I am planning to shave my head and get hair tatooed on. But what I would really like to do is have a ponytail. But I can't do it because people would think I'm an old hippie.

Here's a timeline to consider in light of Menand's obversations:

--1960. Introduction of the birth control pill. And John F. Kennedy, a young man with what at the time was considered long hair, is elected president. You will probably not see those two events as related, unless you are related to Marilyn Monroe.

--1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis and its consequent, very real possibility of nuclear war, scares the living shit out of everyone, especially young people, who worry that they will be sautéed before getting to enjoy the fruits of birth control pills. I organized an end-of-the-world party in the college parking lot. We drank beer and awaited the fireball. Our concern was mainly that we got to finish the case first.

--1963. John F. Kennedy is assassinated. So much for young person running the country. It was the death of whatever hope remained for the future after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

--1964, three months after the Kennedy Assassination to be precise, the Beatles arrive in America. They are fun. They are hip. They have long hair. They are from a country that has never dropped a nuclear bomb on anyone. They are smart. One of them, asked by a reporter how he finds America, replies "turn left at Greenland." Does anyone old enough to remember who Frankie Valli is think of him as either smart or funny? Three out of every four persons in America goes ape over the Beatles. The other 25%, as we now know, is crazy.

--1965. President Lyndon Johnson vastly escalates the Vietnam War. Those who didn't have the shit scared out of them by the the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy Assassination have the shit scared out of them by Vietnam.

Incidently, Johnson also is starting to look pretty good in retrospect. At least he had the decency and smarts to quit his job (by deciding not to run for a second term), when it became apparent that people didn't like having the shit scared out of them. This was long before "Nightmare on Elm Street." This was "Nightmare on Pennsylvania Avenue."

And at various points along this timeline, more so toward the end of it, young people discover that they don't have to take it anyone. Examples: the Free Speech Movement in Berkley, the Civil Rights Movement, and the antiwar movement. Especially, in my case, at Columbia, where I was double-parked at the time, where I only escaped a TPF (tactical police force) officer who was chasing me with a club, by diving over a hedge and landing on my ass looking up at the statue of Alexander Hamilton.

To the point we are considering here, in 1967 a number of young people discovered that a fun thing to do while waiting to get fried in nuclear holocaust, shot to death in Vietnam, or forced to remain celebate until marriage, was to turn on, tune in, and drop out.

Thus was born the Summer of Love. And just off the top of my head, I guess that somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 kids went to San Francisco with flowers in their hair. This is nothing compared with the number of crazy people in America, but enough to show just HOW crazy a certain portion of the population was made.

They made the headlines. Still, 40 years later, they are making the headlines.

My point, at long last reached. Was the Summer of Love a mass movement, a wonderful and watershed moment in world history? Maybe. All in all, peace trumps war and we'd all be much better off with the hippies' goofy optimism than we are with the two Sith Lords currently running the country.

But viewed from another point of view, the Summer of Love was the equivalent of a bunch of guys today getting pissed off by this, that, and the other thing -- the war in Iraq, for example -- by taking a year off from their jobs to follow the NASCAR circuit. Or by taking a semester off to bicycle around Europe. In 1967 it was a bunch of people going crazy because the world was making them crazy and they took advantage of ready money and cheap rents -- or, in the case of the legendary crash pads, no rent -- to spend a summer doing drugs, having sex, and listening to "Sgt. Peppers" until they wore out their neighbors.

Better than spending it at Da Nang or Disneyland, wouldn't you say?

By the way, the hippie's much-celebrated "be-in" was not invented in California. It was invented by my old buddy Jean Shepherd, the New York based radio raconteur. In the late 1950s or early 1960s he created "the Mill," wherein a crowd of listeners would gather at a designated street corner to mill around with nothing in mind other than freaking out the straights.

Which often happened.

Did the Summer of Love illustrate a mass movement? No, it was small by all reasonable standards but got a lot of press because, like celebrity journalism and rock journalism today, it was fun, newspapers never had the excuse to publish photos of half-naked women before, and it gave reporters the excuse to try smoking pot. Did it accomplish anything in the long run?

Yes, actually, quite a bit. You didn't think I was going to say that, did you? It fostered opposition to unjust wars. And it promoted openness to sexual freedom and alternative lifestyles. Nobody lived together "out of wedlock" in 1966. After 1967, it seemed like everyone did. Also coming out of 1967 was the desire for healthy living and, before too long, organic food. And willingness to question the basic premises of our lives.

The Summer of Love also fostered some silly notions, such as levitating the Pentagon and as the rumor that reality doesn't exit. There was circulating the story that reality is an illusion and that everything is run by computers against which a small band of rebels is fighting. Think you invented the Matrix, Wachowski brothers? I first heard that yarn in 1967. In the East Village, come to think of it.

Is there take-home message on the Summer of Love and the ongoing celebration of its 40th anniversary? Yes, and you will love this, it's the familiar Republican refrain that market forces work. The second the gas consumption of an SUV became outrageous, the Prius became popular. That's the market operating -- If you threaten peoples' lives they will find new and perhaps revolutionary things to do. Sometimes it means sex, drugs, rock and roll, and really bad fashion ideas. Other times it means antiwar riots in the streets.

Are you listening, Washington? With or without flowers in your hair.

-------------

*The National Institute of Mental Health-sponsored National Comorbidity Survay found a few years ago that 28% of Americans had experienced psychotic symptoms at some point in their lives. European studies placed the percentage between 6% and 18%. Which does not explain the British obsession with hedgehogs and the French obsession with eating anything that walks, crawls, or flies.

-- Bush Plans to Pardon 'Dog the Bounty Hunter'

By Michael Jahn

An informed source has revealed that President Bush plans to pardon Duane "Dog the Bounty Hunter" Chapman, who was arrested for snatching someone off the street in Mexico.

It's illegal to snatch someone off the street in Mexico. Snatching a bag of weed and making haste for the border apparently isn't, however.

President Bush also was behind the early release of Paris Hilton and is reported working on a commuted sentence for Joe "Girls Gone Wild" Francis, who is in the cooler in Reno for tax evasion.

Regarding the early release of Hilton, "The President wanted to help someone widely regarded as being his intellectual equal," the source added.

-30-

www.myspace.com/michael_jahn

-- 'Armada' Screenplay In the Offing

Young Hollywood screenwriter Will Wallace is taking around his screenplay of "Armada," my 1982 cult science fiction thriller.

Says the SF website "Stainless Steel Droppings:"

"Though television and film planted the seeds, the birthplace of my love for science fiction was a small farmhouse in rural Nebraska. The vastness of space and time opened up to me on the floor in front of my uncles’ small, four-shelf book case. On the uppermost two shelves sat my passports to other worlds; my introduction to heroes beyond, but including, Captain James T. Kirk and Han Solo. As silly as it sounds, those two shelves were a whole universe to me, the influence of the books no doubt enhanced by the fact that this was my ‘cool’ uncle who did not loan his books out to just anyone. I used to go out to my grandmother’s house and sit in his room and look at those books over and over again, deciding which to choose to read next, mesmerized by the fantastic images that graced the covers of those books. It was at that shrine to the final frontier that I was introduced to Han Solo’s pre-Star Wars adventures; where I read my first sex and swearing in Michael Jahn’s "Armada" ..."

He neglected to mention that it was the first zero gravity sex. As I recall, there also was zero gravity soccer. The swearing was earthbound.

"Armada" was the Battle of Britain set between the Earth and the moon. A giantic alien ship that sprouted weapons and emitted boomerang-shaped fighter craft had come to eliminate life hereabouts. After a lot of marginally effective dogfights, it was destroyed in a spectacular explosion engineered by a white man who was forced by circumstance to become an amateur warrior and a NASA pilot who was person of color, using an improvised technological solution. One of the alien ships was shot down and its nasty alien pilot was beaten to death during interrogation and and if all that reminds you of a certain blockbuster movie that hit the theaters a decade or so on, I can't be held accountable for your conspiracy theories.

Sigh.

It was a good movie. But given the advanced state of computer graphics and a masterful adaptation of my book, Will's will be better.

Somebody, in Hollywood, buy it, please, and let me retire.

-- Spanish Men Go Behind Trees

by Michael Jahn

For reasons best left unsaid, having been humiliated enough in my life, I found myself on a local bus rolling through the wilds of northern New Jersey at night.

Let me fix that sentence. The bus was rolling the way a slug rolls after you lay a kilo of kosher salt on it. It was struggling down the east bank of the lovely Hackensack River through Teaneck, current or former home to Placido Domingo; Pat Boone; the Isley Brothers (who were proud enough of the 'burb to name their T-Neck Records after it); Ozzie, Harriet and Ricky Nelson, who was born there; Paul A. Volker Jr., chairman of the Federal Reserve; and Notorious B.I.G.

At least I think it was the east bank of the lovely Hackensack River. I don't pay attention to where places are in Jersey. Because every place in Jersey makes me think of every place that isn't in Jersey.

The bus was packed with Chinese and Mexican women on their way home from jobs at malls. They were hot to get home, so when the driver pulled the bus to a halt alongside a park forged from the wetlands on the riverbank, they were appropriately pissed. Once the place in which George Washington parked the Continental Army while it was on the lam from the Brits, it had become by 2007 a good place to relieve yourself.

Which is what about nine million Canada Geese do often enough to make the hardiest of animal rights activists petition the gun-friendly administration of Bush the Lesser to lift the ban on hunting it. That it doubtless would do, perhaps even naming Vice President Cheney to head the beer-and-birdshot wetlands-remediation project.

The bus driver parked the bus and fled into the woods. He battled his way down a slight incline and through a bunch of scrub thick enough to block the view of 20 or 30 witnesses. Then he logically whipped it out and peed, although you never know, given the bus's destination of New York's legendary bus terminal.

"He has to pee," a Chinese woman said with a laugh.

"He went behind a tree," another added.

"Spanish men go behind trees," said a Hispanic woman.

That was the point at which any word-conscious soul would jump into the conversation, and I did.

"Is that to imply that non-Spanish men pee in front of trees?" I asked.

I was rewarded with a quizzical look.

"Huh?" someone asked.

I repeated myself. My reward that time was a look that suggested this man could be trouble. I bet he's against immigrants.

"I'm part Spanish and I pee in front of trees," I said quickly.

"You're part Spanish?" asked the woman who started the tree conversation.

I don't look it. At least I don't look like Antonio Banderas. My father didn't look like Antonio Banderas either.

"Yes," I said.

It's true that I'm part Spanish. My Spaniards moved from Spain to Brooklyn in the mid-1800s, where they became barbers, for the most part. But one was a career U.S. Navy man who sailed with Perry to Japan and was a gunner aboard the U.S.S. Brooklyn during the Civil War. It's long been my contention that great-great-Uncle John (presumably "Juan" at birth in Spain) couldn't hit the broad side of a barge, inspiring his commander, Admiral Farragut, to make his famous proclamation, "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead." Which instead of referring to mines as commonly believed, meant "let's get outta here before Juan gets us killed."

The part about his being a gunner aboard the U.S.S. Brooklyn is true. Google the keywords "John Quevedo" and "Brooklyn" if you don't believe me.

"My great-grandmother was from Spain," I said.

"Where?"

"Her parents were from Barcelona and Port Mahon," I replied.

"Port Where?"

"On Menorca, in the Baleiric Islands." It's the poorer, less famous cousin of Majorca. It's famous for cheese, Queso de Mahon.

"Barcelona, oooh," a different Latina said, implying that the city is ritzy. I don't know if that's true or not. My amiga from Argentina maintains that residents of Barcelona are full of themselves. I don't know about that either. I've never been to Spain. But I kinda like the fact that their men go behind trees.

I added a bit of math, unwisely, since my last experience with math was a D in high school algebra. I said, "everyone has eight great-grandparents, so I go behind trees one-eighth of the time."

That was not true. That was made up. Sometimes I don't go behind trees at all. Sometimes I just want to cause trouble on buses.

This man could be trouble, another look suggested.

Fortunately by that time the bus driver had finished doing what he did behind that tree, doubtless acquiring in the process an embarassing case of poison ivy, a bit of flora that along the Hackensack River is even more prevalent than Canada geese.

Without a word, he started the bus again and as it hobbled off it occurred to me that I had not the faintest bit of independent evidence if he was Spanish or not.

-30-

-- Look Like ZZ Top and Still Cross-Dress in Bagdad

by Michael Jahn

There was a report on National Public Radio this morning about a soon-to-be suicide bomber in Iraq. The reporter made it clear that the young man wished to remain anonymous. Then she pointed out that he

*Has a degree in accounting

*Attended Iraq’s National Security College

*Was a member of Saddam’s Secret Police

*Was injured fighting American troops during the invasion and walks on crutches

*Has vowed not to shave or cut his hair until the Americans leave Iraq, as a result of which his beard goes down to the middle of his chest and his pony tail goes way down his back

*Plans to dress up like a woman so he can hide the bomb beneath the robes. (I suppose that looking like ZZ Top won’t stop a guy planning to cross-dress in Bagdad.)

*Left behind a string of witnesses to all of the above.

Hells bells, Harriet, Inspector Clouseau could find this guy! A blind boy scout with a hearing aid could find this guy. Even the CIA could track him down in five minutes, and that’s even if he doesn’t get caught on the security camera while going into the 7-11 to get matches for the fuse.

Why, finding this man is so simple even a caveman can do it.

Jeez, you can start by keeping an eye out for the bearded lady on crutches with a bulge under her burka.

You say, he can shave off the beard? No, because he vowed not to cut it until American troops leave Iraq. So if he cuts it now he’s breaking a solemn vow and THAT can’t sit too well with the heavenly host that hands out virgins.

Of course, he could wait to blow something up until we leave – but imagine what his beard will look like then.

-30-

-- It's Time to Create Trump Devil's Island

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.