The Saint Patrick's Day From County Hell

My Weekend with the Pogues
By Ben Carlin

It was well after four a.m., when Mikey Palms, the owner of the local rock club told me that he may have an opportunity to book Shane MacGowan, the lead singer for Irish punk band The Pogues, to DJ a party on St. Patrick’s Day. At first I was skeptical as anyone with knowledge of Shane's track record would be. He was going to be in town to play four nights at the Nokia Theater with the Pogues, whom he had recently reunited with and the plan was for him to come to Southpaw, Mikey’s club, after one of the gigs. Shane had been doing a series of successful parties called Death Disco with a man named B.P. Fallon who had proposed the idea to put one on in Brooklyn while he was in town. I had been knocking back a few with Bill Carney when Mikey told us about it. Bill, who knows Mikey well from playing at the club in his various musical aliases, warned him against it. “The guys unreliable. Don’t risk your club’s reputation on him.” He summed it up with an emphatic, “Don’t fucking do it, Mikey!”

I had introduced Mikey to the music of the Pogues when we were kids and he knew that I was a huge fan. My position was, “But what if he does show and on St. Patrick’s Day? That would be a truly special thing for the club, the neighborhood and Brooklyn as a whole.” From the expression on Mikey’s face, I knew my argument had won the day, or the dawn as it were.

After dropping a few not-too-subtle hints that I wanted to be involved, the Death Disco party blossomed from an idea being tossed about to a reality. I was asked by Mike to help out. My job was to pick Shane MacGowan up from the venue in Manhattan and bring him to Brooklyn. Perfect.

The general sentiment in the neighborhood, as I gleefully told anyone who would listen about my assignment, was optimistically doubtful; ‘If anyone can get him there, you can.’ My thoughts exactly. There was no doubt in my mind that I would be successful. My arrogance had served me well in the past. ‘I’m Ben Carlin. I make things happen in this town.

Sit down by the fire and I’ll tell you a story to send you away to your bed, of the things you hear creeping when everyone’s sleeping and you wish you were out here instead - Sit Down by the Fire

In 2006, St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Friday. The first Pogues show was on Thursday. I went to the theater where B.P had left me an all-access pass at will call. The plan was for me to see the show, pass out some flyers for the gig in Brooklyn and, above all, to meet Shane so when I arrived the following night he would know who I was and be comfortable with me. I wandered about the theater getting to know the lay of the land and found B.P. backstage. I was introduced to Spider Stacey, another of my Pogues heroes and then I was pretty much left to my own devices for the duration of the show.

I was on line ordering a Jameson when I heard the Pogues take the stage. Shane’s unmistakable voice roared the lyrics to “Streams of Whiskey” and I took my drink and rushed into the theater. Shane looked remarkably healthy as he belted out song after song, plastic cup filled with gin and cigarette in hand the whole time. He never missed a beat. At one point, I don’t remember what song, Spider made a dedication to everyone in the audience unless their name was Ben. I mused on that for a brief moment but was soon caught up in the performance once again. They were great - it was one fuck of a show.

When the cocert was over, I made my way towards back stage but it was locked down. Even an all-access pass didn’t qualify me for entry. Standing at the stage door, feeling somewhat like an asshole, I ran into a woman friend whom I have known since Junior High School, who happens to be Jem Finer’s (the Pogues' banjo player) first cousin. Apparently family ties weren’t sufficient credentials either so we made our way to the VIP room for the after-party. Before long the members of the band made their way to the party. I met them all; still, no Shane and even more distressing, no sign of B.P Fallon. Ella Finer, Jem’s daughter, who sang “a Fairytale in New York” with Shane during the encore, was nice enough to go backstage to find B.P. for me. He found me and escorted me to Shane’s dressing room.

Entering this room was a truly bizarre experience. I found myself tip-toeing as if one misstep would blow the whole thing. There were several people milling about and it actually took me a moment before I noticed Shane, a pale shade of green, lying on a couch in the center of the room. B.P. introduced us and he invited me to sit. He laughed at me in a good natured way and said, “I know what you’re thinking. You think I won’t come. But me and B.P have done this a hundred times. Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

“I have no doubt,” I said and I started to relax.

Spider Stacey had joined us and I thought it a good opportunity to get to the bottom of the whole "unless-their-name-is-Ben" thing. As it turns out, I was indeed the Ben he was referring to but for no other reason than I was the last person he met before going on stage so the name stuck in his head and he thought it was funny. He apologized, unnecessarily, and asked what my favorite Pogues song was.

“The Boys from County Hell.”

“Tomorrow night, St. Patrick’s Day, I will dedicate the Boys from County Hell to you.” He did. A nicer man than Spider Stacey you’ll rarely meet.

Shane sat up and offered me a drink from the bottle of rose wine he was using to chase his pint of gin. I gladly accepted. We sat there talking while B.P. walked around us snapping pictures with his digital camera.

“Ben,” he asked, “what’s your last name?”

“Carlin,” I replied pronouncing the first syllable like a pirate in a ludicrous attempt to make it sound more than Irish than it actually is.

“Good. Good. So, Ben, I’m a little worried about getting to the gig tomorrow.”

“Which gig?”

“This one. You’re taking me to Brooklyn, yeah?”

“Right. What’s your worry?”

“Saint Patrick’s Day in New York City.” He leaned in. “Making our way across town through the piss and the puke and the blood.”

“It’s been a while you spent a Paddy’s day here. It’s not like it used to be.”

“A bit tamer, yeah?”

“Well, for one thing, the cops aren’t drunk anymore.”

“That’s a good thing, yeah?”

“I guess.” We laughed. We touched glasses and drank. We got along.
I decided to leave with dignity before I got too drunk which, in hindsight seemed silly given the company, but the next night I would be there on official business. Before I left Shane stood up, a feat that seemed remarkable at the time, gave me a hug and looked me the eye.

“We’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

“Absolutely.” I left, elated - not usually the type to get star-struck. After several whiskies in numerous bars in two boroughs, I went home and listened to Pogues records way too loud for my neighbors taste. In the wee hours of the morning, I finally slept.

So drunk to hell, I left the place, sometimes crawling, sometimes walking. A hungry sound came across the breeze so I gave the walls a talking. - A Pair of Brown Eyes

Friday would have been unbearable if not for the adrenaline that coursed through my veins. If I could bottle it and sell it as a hangover cure, I would surely be a millionaire. I arrived at Southpaw around nine in my black suit, black shirt with a black silk pocket square in my breast pocket. Written into the delivery contract was for an off-duty police officer to escort Shane. Through a detective friend of mine I enlisted the services of one of his colleagues, Vic, who met me at the club as we waited for the limo. B.P. was running around like a madman, barking orders at various flunkies and sorting out the bands he had booked to play the early part of the gig. When the limo arrived I asked him if there was anything else I needed to know.

“Just remember, if anyone asks you anything, you don’t know anything,” he said. This confused me as I wasn’t exactly sure what it was that I wasn’t supposed to know. I never found out. “Sean Fay, Shane’s cousin, he isn’t a very nice man. He’s jealous of me and my friendship with Shane, so watch out for him. Also the rest of the band doesn’t want him to do the party. That’s all. Off you go. Good luck to ya.”

I successfully suppressed the unmistakable feeling of impending doom. I had a job to do. Vic and I got in the black SUV limo and headed for Times Square. I had secured two all-access passes the previous night so getting into the club wasn’t a problem. Our timing couldn’t have been better. The band was playing the last song of the encore, “Fiesta,” as we approached the stage door. I called the road manager on his UK cell which seemed to be the only phone in the world that got service in the venue - slightly ironic in a place called the Nokia Theater. He let us in and told us to wait in the family room. He was extremely helpful. I saw Spider, the Finer girls, the rest of the band and they all greeted me warmly but kept their distance. This I attributed to two things - the imposing cop figure I was with, who clearly had no interest in the Pogues or anyone else in the room, and, more likely, the job I was there to do. I felt like an invader; an unwanted disruption in an otherwise tranquil camp; a saboteur. I felt like Yoko Ono.

I was receiving mixed signals from different people - some who said he was going to Brooklyn and some who said he wasn’t. A story came out about paramedics having to come backstage after I had left the previous night. I was consistently prevented from going into Shane’s room but when faced with an un-monitored opportunity, I slipped in. Shane was sitting upright on his couch talking with a woman. I sat in a chair across from him.

“Hello, Shane. Remember me?”

“Of course I do. You’re the fella’s taking me to Brooklyn, yeah? Ben. You’re looking a bit sharper than you did last night. But I think you need a tie. You want a tie?” He took the green tie that was draped from around his neck and handed it to me. I thanked him and draped it around my own neck, concealing the thrill and maintaining my focus.

“So we are going to Brooklyn, then?”

“I said I was going, yeah? I’m going. Just have to go back to the hotel first and have a bit of lie down.” I didn’t like the sound of that.

I was discovered and ushered from the room. Everyone who had seemed so forthcoming previously suddenly ceased to be helpful in any way. While I was being given all sorts of contradictory information and told where to go and what to do they managed to get Shane out of the theater. I had been duped. I felt conflicted. I understood the opposition to Shane’s trip to King’s County and I couldn’t completely disagree with it. But I had made a commitment. Vic and I rushed to the limo and recalling a hazy conversation I had had with Jem Finer the previous night, I told the driver where to go. “Downtown. The Rivington Hotel.”

“Where is it exactly?”

“On Rivington. I’ll find out.” I tried to call information but apparently, the hotel is actually called Hotel Thor on Rivington. Who knew? We raced downtown, the hilarity of being in an SUV limo chasing Shane MacGowan’s bus through the streets of New York on St. Patrick’s not lost on me. Luckily enough we found the hotel without difficulty. When we got out, the doorman assumed we were the band.

“Welcome back, Gentlemen.”

On the ground floor of the hotel, there is an awfully pretentious bar and we had to go one flight up for reception.

“Shane MacGowan’s room,” I said to the woman behind the desk.

“How do you spell it?” I told her. “Room 1426. Fourteenth floor.”

We got in the elevator. That was when I took stock in our appearance - me in my black suit and Vic in his three quarter leather trench coat, tight black t-shirt, slicked back slightly receding black hair. Needless to say, the security at the Hotel Thor was not wielding a mighty hammer. We looked like move hit men and we could have easily whacked the Pogues.

When I knocked on the door of Shane’s room, his cousin Sean answered and he was not happy to see us. “Wait downstairs. We’re just getting some food in him. He’ll be down.” There was nothing to do but comply with his instructions.

“This guy ain’t coming down,” Vic said. “Did you see how fucked up he was?” I tried to explain that, yes he was indeed extremely fucked up but he does function on that level more often than not. There was still a chance.

When I got downstairs I saw various members of the band and crew heading out for a nightcap or a bite to eat. They were all friendly though clearly surprised to see me there. The doorman asked me if I could put in a good word with the band to visit his friend’s bar around the corner. I told him I would see what I could do. I waited downstairs for almost two hours during which time I tried a variety of things including sending the woman I had seen him talking to in his room up for him and most notably, calling B.P. at the club and giving him Shane’s room number. He told me he thought calling him at that point would only aggravate the situation. Some partner. This little leprechaun’s credibility with me was dwindling at an alarming rate. It was almost three in the morning. I had to take immediate action so I went into the bar and knocked back two whiskies.

I tried to go back up to the room but the elevator wouldn’t go upstairs. The manager told me that after hours if I didn’t have a key card I was not allowed upstairs. The doorman, who I had been chatting with, rushed to my aid.

“Do you have any idea who this guy is? He’s with the band. You have to let him up to fourteen.” The manager apologized, used his card and I was off. I knocked on Shane’s door loudly. I was pissed.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Ben from downstairs.”

“Who?”

“Ben from the Death Disco party.”

“Who?”

“I’m wearing your fucking tie!” A moment later, Shane MacGowan came to the door.

“I’m sorry, Ben. I can’t go.”

“With all due respect, Shane, I’ve been downstairs for over two fucking hours. Exactly when were you planning on telling me that?”

“I’m sorry.” He hung his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Can you at least invite me in and give me a moment of your time?” He opened the door and stood aside, gesturing for me to come in. When I walked in the room, it was just him and Sean. On the table was a bottle of gin, a bottle of wine, a barely-touched bowl of pasta and an untouched bowl of soup. I lit a cigarette and sat next to Shane on the arm of the couch.

“Shane, I want you to know something, whether you come to the gig or not, you’ve been a huge inspiration to me. I’m a playwright. Last year I had my first play produced four blocks from the Nokia Theater. I never would’ve become a writer if not for you.” He dismissed this notion with a wave of his hand. “It’s true. Kids listen to your music because it’s cool and there you are singing about James Joyce, Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, Frederica Garcia fucking Lorca, and they want to know who these people are. You’ve gotten Irish kids all over the world to read books. You’re more than a rock star to a lot of people. There are a lot of those people in Brooklyn tonight - working people who shelled out a bunch of money that they can’t afford and spent their entire Irish holiday waiting for you, just to get a glimpse of their hero. I’ve got a car downstairs. I’ve got your wine in the car. It’s a ten minute drive. Get in the car, get on stage, say happy St. Patrick’s day, play a song, get back in the car and I’ll have you back here in a half hour. Please, Shane, show these people that you care.” I was proud of this speech. Had I known it was going to come to that moment and had taken the time to prepare a speech, I don’t think it would’ve been much different. I think I saw a tear well up in Shane’s eyes but it was hard to tell as they were fairly glazed over to begin with.

“I gotta do the gigs, Ben - the big gigs at the theater. I’m sorry, Ben. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I had done all I could do. “Tell B.P. I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to him. I’ll tell him myself.”

“I can make that happen right now.” I took out my cell phone and called the club. “Put B.P. on the phone. Shane MacGowan wants to talk to him.” The following phone conversation was slightly less amicable than I expected.

“I’ll do it tomorrow… fuck you, B.P. You want me to die? I could fucking die!...” When the conversation was over, he handed back my phone, looked me in the eye and said, “So, do you have a play up in the city that I can see while I’m here?”

“No,” I said. I had never felt so defeated in my life.

“You wanna come see the show tomorrow?”

“I gotta work at the pub tomorrow. But maybe there is something you can do. Maybe you can get me a few tickets for Sunday so I can bring a couple of the folks involved in the party tonight, maybe soften the blow a bit. Bring them backstage to meet you.”

“Sean, make that happen. Give him your number, yeah.” Sean, who had sat quietly the whole time and let us talk gave me his number and told me to call him the next day. I thanked them both and left the room, sick to my stomach with disbelief that I was leaving alone. During the ride home, I tried to convince myself that I had gotten further than anyone else could have. To this day I believe that’s true but it was small consolation. I was on my way to tell a nightclub full of people that I had failed them.

On the way back to Southpaw I teetered between rage and depression. I called Mikey, in Austin promoting events for the South by Southwest Festival, to break the news to him. Unbeknownst to me, his headliner out there, hip hop legend Big Daddy Kane, had just bailed on him. This news coming on top of that was too much for him. He broke down in tears and locked himself in his hotel room for a day while having a self-described nervous breakdown.

By the time I got back to the club, there weren’t many people left, as most folks had gotten wind of what was happening or had figured it out for themselves. I went on stage with B.P. who said something (I wasn’t really listening) and then I apologized on Shane’s behalf and told everyone that the club was refunding all their money and buying everyone a shot of Jameson’s. Everyone was very supportive and no one blamed me for the debacle,but it was impossible not to feel like I had let them all down. I then sat at the bar and after that another bar and drank myself into a stupor.

I took the jeers and drank the beers and crawled back home at dawn and I ended up a barman in the morning - Sally Maclennane

I spoke with Sean the following evening and as promised, he extended me every courtesy. My tickets and VIP passes awaited me at will call. At the show, my friends and I went into the VIP area, ordered drinks and waited for the show to start. Sean came up before the band went on to make sure we were all sorted out. Again, it was one fuck of a show. As drained as I felt, it was nice to not have to worry about anything other than having a good time. After the show, we went into the VIP room and drank with the band and their families and friends. The entire Pogues organization treated me with a great deal of respect, especially Sean Fay - the man B.P. Fallon had told me wasn’t a very nice man.

As the party dwindled down, Sean came and said that I could go back and see him with one other person. He chose my friend Jody for no other reason than her gender. I needed to look in the man’s face and know that he knew who I was. He did. Lying on his couch, I thanked him for everything. I introduced him to Jody (it took him four attempts to pronounce her name correctly) and told him she was the woman who had produced my play.

“But you said you didn’t have a play going on right now.”

“I don’t. It was the... Never mind. Cheers.” We had a drink and Sean took some pictures. We then rejoined our group and went out drinking. I awoke the next morning with a PM tattoo on my ankle (the symbol for their Pogue Mahone record label) and a hangover for the ages. In the end it was all worth it. I related this tale to a friend who remarked at how sad it is when one loses a hero. But I didn’t. I knew who the man was before I ever met him. I had heard the stories. Everything that he had done for me with his music and his words still held up - even more so.

I got an email from Sean Fay a few days ago announcing the Pogues upcoming U.S. tour. They’ll be in New York (you guessed it) Saint Patrick’s Day weekend. I’m getting tickets. I think I’ll just go as fan this time. Unless, of course, someone asks me to be something more.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Phenomenon

By Russell Shorto

Anger, like heat, has the power to sterilize. Of course, it also burns. Anger is a defining force: you might say that what you choose to do with your anger, or what it does to you, shapes who you are.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has annealed her anger into so sharp and hard a blade that it has not only chiseled the features of her life but has cut a swath right around the earth, from Africa, where she was born and raised, to Europe, where she came of age and made history, to, now, the U.S. Her autobiography, Infidel, was published here in February and became a bestseller. As the title suggests, she has an almost pathalogical need to draw the ire of the Islamic world.

If Dickens had lived in the 21st century he would have lifted the trajectory of Hirsi Ali’s life for one of his characters. It starts under a talal tree in Somalia, where, shaded from the desert sun, her grandmother, who could make a basket from dried grass tight enough to carry water in, had her recite the lineage of their clan going back 300 years. At age five she was hoisted onto the kitchen table, her legs pulled apart, and a man who was probably “an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan” snipped out her clitoris and inner labia with a pair of scissors. As the family traveled from Mogadishu to Nairobi and then back to Somalia in the 1970s and 1980s, it was against a background of resurgent Islam. Hirsi Ali has nothing good to say about the faith into which she was born. Quran school was “mostly about Hell” and the torments there: “boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh dissolving bowels…. These details overpower you, ensuring that you will obey.” Girls were taught that when they married “we must be sexually available at any time outside our periods, ‘even on the saddle of a camel,’ as the hadith says.” Her ma’alim, or teacher, beat her so hard that at one point he fractured her skull.

Her family arranged a marriage for her with a man who had emigrated to Canada, and shipped her off to him. Instead of changing planes in Frankfurt, she hopped onto a train bound for Amsterdam, and so began what she terms “my freedom.” As it happened, she stepped, in the summer of 1992, into about as different a world from Somalia as was probably possible to find. Green lawns and trimmed hedges were as freaky as Amsterdam’s red light district. Dutch tolerance was still operative. Refugees and pretend refugees (Hirsi Ali lied and told the authorities she was fleeing political oppression) lived in a bungalow village with a swimming pool and volleyball court, free medical care, even laundry service.

Continuing her knife-like movement through the late twentieth century, she quickly learned Dutch and enrolled in Leiden University, the Harvard of the Netherlands, where she got a live-in boyfriend and immersed herself in Voltaire, Rousseau and Marx, and felt her old self dying and a new one being born. “Meeting Freud,” she writes, with the clean declarative simplicity of a children’s book author, “put me in contact with an alternative moral system.”

She became a Somali interpreter for the Dutch government, and in this capacity became aware of a blind spot in the liberal European social consciousness. The Dutch had tried to fashion a system that gave refugees the protections of their vaunted social welfare system, but their zeal to protect the newcomers’ rights and customs had unintended consequences. African Muslims who had formed communities in Holland were performing ritual female circumcision on their daughters. The Dutch fulminated against the barbarity of the practice in Africa and the Middle East, Hirsi Ali noted, but it was happening all over their own country. Her writings and TV appearances on the topic, and on the broader situation of Muslim women, resulted in a leader of the Liberal Party (which is actually rather conservative in Holland) asking her to stand for parliament.

From the moment she won, she became a lightning rod for the fury of many Muslims in Europe. Far from watering down her notions in the time-honored manner of politicians, she forged a relationship with the controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and wrote a ten-minute film that he produced that gave graphic vent to her feminist rage at Islam (a woman who has been raped and beaten has her body covered with verses from the Quran). Then, in 2004, as a result of this little piece of outrage, came the act that brought Hirsi Ali to an international stage: a Moroccan man who lived in Amsterdam killed Van Gogh and, with a knife, pinned a letter onto his chest that said Hirsi Ali would be next. The murder of Theo Van Gogh became one of the signal events of post 9/11 Europe, which focused attention on a whole welter of interconnected issues: terrorism, resurgent Islam, American hegemony, secularism-versus-fundamentalism, third world immigration, European-style multiculturalism, national identity, tolerance, and fear.

Hirsi Ali stood right at the center. “60 Minutes” did a fawning profile of her. “Time” listed her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The Dutch government issued her round-the-clock bodyguards. Her Dutch venture came to a head in 2006, when the immigration minister suddenly “discovered” that Hirsi Ali had lied in requesting refugee status (in fact, Hirsi Ali had been open about the lies she told for years) and declared that, as a result, she was never a Dutch citizen at all. The action sent the little country atwitter, with seemingly half of the population feeling embarrassed and bullied by her tirades against their traditions and taking a “we’ve had enough of Hirsi Ali’s crap” position, and the other half defending her right to speak her mind on issues that affected their country and, for that matter, the planet. Proving that Dutch politics is incomprehensible to the rest of the world, the event actually brought down the government.

Hirsi Ali, meanwhile, made another exit. This time she took the offer of a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing thinktank in Washington, where she is now installed.

I happen to have met her for lunch in New York one day in January, a few months after she had begun the American portion of her odyssey. (I had asked for a phone interview for a magazine article; she had read a book of mine and suggested a face-to-face meeting.) Spending time with her gave me the chance to size up someone who, for better or worse, has actually altered the landscape through which we all move. Hirsi Ali cuts across political types. Her hard line on immigration (she believes Euro-style multiculturalism is a disaster that allows Muslim radicals to infiltrate Europe) charms the right wingers she now works among. But she has also become a virulent atheist of the Karl Marx, religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses school, and she told me with a satisfied laugh, of her AEI comrades, “They don’t like my views on religion.”

In person Hirsi Ali is striking to say the least: tall, thin as a knife, coal-dark, with sharp high cheekbones. She is also a fashionista, who wears designer labels with arrogant panache. The arrogance is offset somewhat by a vivid sense of humor: she giggles, she likes a good time.

In the U.S. she has been lionized, but the Dutch have a more nuanced view of her. There, she was seen as an opportunist, who advanced herself as much as she did her cause of making the world take note of the plight of women in Muslim Africa. And it has often been noted that for a champion of Muslim women, very few of her enthusiasts are Muslim women. So who are her enthusiasts? Mostly Americans, it seems, and of both political stripes: if there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats agree on, it is that genital mutilation isn’t cool. Europeans, meanwhile, who are scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to live with millions of recent Muslim immigrants, are more guarded.

There is a deep inconsistency in Hirsi Ali’s views, of which she herself is aware. Her experience of the laxity and moral flabbiness of the European welfare state has led her to adopt an American-style “let them pick themselves up by their bootstraps” approach to the less fortunate. She prefers privatizing over government intervention. “Yes,” she agreed with a dark chuckle when I noted that all that she has today-fame, wealth, opportunity-is thanks to the Dutch welfare state, which she despises for its softness and for the way it allowed injustice to flourish. But she sees herself as an exception: not one of the many who were content to wallow at the state trough but one of the few who burned to excel.

Some in Europe refer to Hirsi Ali as an Enlightenment Fundamentalist: part of a subcategory of Muslims in Europe who have replaced the hardcore Islam of their upbringing with a radical belief in science, reason, and “progress,” western-style. As she said to me, “The West was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason. The only way to stand up to radical Islam is to revive the message of the Enlightenment, to make Europeans and Americans remember that their modern society didn’t just fall out of the sky. There is a long history of struggle that led to this complex functioning society. And religion, including Christianity, has most of the time hindered that.”

There are problems with this perspective of hers. One is that the Islam in which Hirsi Ali was reared doesn’t necessarily apply across the board. The other is that we westerners aren’t all marching down the boulevards of our respective enlightened capitals bearing placards with the images of Voltaire and John Locke. Some of us are eating Cool Ranch Doritos and watching “American Idol.”

Still, anger can be so pure. Hirsi Ali is the most persuasive right winger I’ve ever met-not because the right is right but because the left has been so pathetically, programmatically wrong. The most vital part of the Hirsi Ali phenomenon is her role as global gadfly. Buckets of ink get spilled repeating the same news stories and analyses while important subjects remain invisible. Why should a tolerant and open society tolerate groups that are officially intolerant of open societies? And, come on, polygamy? Hirsi Ali says some necessary things that others, especially leftists, don’t want to say or hear.

Of course, it’s easier for Americans to nod in agreement with much of her tirade because we aren’t caught in the same immigration stream that is flowing through western Europe. And from her perspective it’s probably smarter for Hirsi Ali to be in the U.S. now. She may be a bit naïve about the country (she suggested to me that when her book came out here she assumed she would have the same superstar, on-the-sidewalk recognizability in America that she had in Holland), but she knows where the power is: even before the Dutch immigration minister racheted up the heat on her, she was in talks with AEI, planning to make the jump.

And while she is certainly an exotic presence on Washington’s insipid sidewalks, in a way the U.S. is now the perfect place for her. Where else can one mix it up with policy wonks by day and then do Bill Maher and The Colbert Report? Here she can fill pages in both The American Spectator and US Weekly; she can stand, photographically, next to Bush or Britney, and outshine either (admittedly not very hard to do). Rather appropriately, as I left the hotel in Chelsea where we had met for lunch, I literally bumped into Rod Stewart getting into the elevator. From the Somali desert to the celebrity wasteland: the journey may not be so vast after all.

March 26, 2007

Who Will Survive the Shopocalypse?

(Dispatches from the struggle against consumerism)
By Reverend Billy



It Didn’t Feel Like A Starbucks Anymore

I walked into the Starbucks on the corner of 67th and Columbus, around the corner from the Lincoln Center. It was after dark, but still early. I sat next to the window. The place was filling up, maybe a performance let out or something. I was in that slow mood you can get into in the city, just staring at a newspaper I picked up from a chair. There’s all the violence in the papers these days, and I was doing that thing of reading the heaviest news very lightly. I’d look up from my massacres, glance around.

A guy next to me had a nice laugh, small fair black man with lively eyes. He didn’t have a computer or a coffee. He was talking to a tall laughing white woman with a strong face, with the bearing of a statue in the park. What were they up to? They didn’t look like students. The two weren’t on a date. The windows with the darkness on the other side mirrored back everyone sitting every which way. The cappuccino machine hissed, the baristas efficiently placing the lattes on the high counter.

I returned to my paper, to some eastern European country with separatists and innocents in shock. The usual official statements gathering around the bloodied bodies. The statements never change at all - same words. Regret and resoluteness. Then I looked up again. The tableau of customers was like a picture of life. People sitting at tables. A couple coffees here and there, but mostly just people sitting talking quietly and then returning to a pre-occupation. Something on everyone’s mind.

Then I heard a very out of place thing - so much so that at first I assumed it was an iPod with volume problems, but no, it was a woman, who was, no doubt about it - she was singing - from across the room. Now there was a lot of chatter and droney sounds in here - so her voice almost felt like a memory of a sound. But I found her, standing there like a diva with her mouth WIDE open. She was over to my left, she had black hair and a dress with a fish on it, she was singing with happy abandon. I think I actually looked back at my massacre at that point, the way you do, because I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was happening. The two at the table near me looked at each other and turned back toward the singer - and now there was second woman singing.

Now, this songbird was closer to me and I could hear some of the words. “Start stopping, get ready, start stopping.” I want to stop a lot of things, but what are they talking about? The coffeeshop is a big one, and loud sound has that echoey quality, and most of the people were not noticing, or were refusing to register, that these surreal words were coming through us. There was a slow motion quality. Most of the customers did not look up from books, iBooks, magazines, date’s faces or whatever. The body positions stayed put. This is that first wave of embarrassment, or is it hipness - you don’t want to respond. Am I about to have an experience?

By now a good six or eight people are standing, and I can tell they are a group because they are singing the same words. “Stop Shopping! Stop Shopping!” It sounds like an anthem. It has a triumphant quality, and our cafe socialites are coiling into their own fetal positions because this is all just too happy for a New Yorker to accept easily. This enthusiasm! What’s the problem? Are these Christians or what? -- But now there were, I counted, fifteen singers and they were singing harmonies, with insistent chord changes. The Starbucks’ manager can’t help himself - he’s out in the tables trying to talk to first one singer, then another and the tall girl from the next table over, with her friend who was swooping his back and arms to the rhythm - oh they’re in this cult too. The tall woman began to solo in an obviously trained voice, “We’re gonna put those Nikes down and we’ll Stop Shopping, Stop Shopping!” It was an over-the-top, Broadway type delivery. The choir was now up to a couple dozen, the whole place milling around, four part harmonies, and an electric piano was now out on a table with a musician at the keys, he’s beaming like Stevie Wonder.

A maroon-haired woman with bangs swung a saxophone into the air and now a man a tambourine, and the bravura soprano just a few feet from me, after appeals to stop buying SUV’s, smart bombs, GAP shirts, finally lit into “We’re going to put that Starbucks down!” and now, clearly, the manager’s center was not holding. Chaos was loosed upon his world. He ran to the phone shouting and gesticulating back at not only the singers but the mayhem of laughter and regular customers standing up to wiggle their hips and shout. You couldn’t hear the manager. He mimed calling the cops, I guess, then ran through the room to the front door and began to lock it - only to be stopped by one of the singers, who looked like Jesus Christ. This baritone was putting the voodoo on the manager, morally overwhelming him. The poor manager, when he realized that of course he can’t lock people in, started shouting even more vehemently. All I could hear was “I WILL…” “I WILL…”

The singers were now reaching high harmonies, passionately dancing to the song. “We will never shop again, forever and Amen! Allelujah! Allelujah!” The non-singing customers had made their decisions, consciously or not. Some were trying to join the choir, trying to catch the words. Some were angry, refuse-niks back at the seemingly de-legimitized cappuccino machine. I realized that the shiny sort-of-European coffee apparatus was an altar, and now a new church was grabbing the congregation. And that’s when something very interesting took place. Suddenly it didn’t feel like a Starbucks anymore. I remember the moment that happened. We were now a group of people creating a quality in the room, an edgy circus. The colors were vividly shifting and the air itself seemed like a liquid waiting for its wave. I sensed that there was a sense of recognition, as if we had done this before. There was even a kind of calm authority. No-one would leave, even those angry ones. Customers were dancing alone. The organ was pounding. We all stayed because this was like unexpected sex. But it was time for me to leave.

I ducked out the front door and into the lobby of a dot-com motel. I shed my raincoat. Got the high sign from the Action Manager. I snapped on my priest’s collar and vestment and donned a white tux coat. I tested my bullhorn, made sure the batteries had power. Looking at the big Starbucks from the outside, it resembled some post-modern version of the Cotton Club, the gyrating and sailing sounds. Time to open this door and preach.


The Commons

Our stage is “contested space,” a commons that has been privatized. It is a place where the First Amendment's rights of speech and assembly were exercised but in the era of the transnational corporation are seized by pre-emptive architecture or by corrupted law enforcement. You made our Main Street into a mall? -- OK so we go into your mall shouting.

We come from the traditional performance arts of theater, dance, spoken word - but we find that the stages where things happen that might change our lives - such experience rarely takes place before the usual footlights. Mostly the scripts of the traditional arts are depoliticized by Consumerism. So -- we go to sidewalks and streets, parks and subways, and we counter-invade into the endless spatial offensive of the transnational cookie-cutter stores, their cash register altars, their lobbies and advertising frames. Now that’s a charged stage.

The 24/7 activity of American Consumerism is a highly specific set of gestures, phrases, and reward-and-punishment patterns. The consumers proceed through a formal choreography. The much-heralded American prosperity sends most folks from bed to highway to desk to hallway to elevator back to the car to the evening sitcom-sports-reality of TV. The maze of repetitions is re-created from medicated sleep to medicated sleep. Is this hypnosis or happiness? We’re too hyped to be make the distinction.

The charged stage that we seek interrupts all this like homages to the lives of Rosa Parks or Abbie Hoffman or Subcommandante Marcos - all we can call these scenes are actions. The stages in the case of these three teachers? There is Rosa’s famous bus; with Abbie - the streets and parks and courts of the sixties and; in the case of the ski-masked and piped Chiapas leader -- the air force attack on the Mexican government’s army, but with paper airplanes and laughter. The three re-entered the grand bluff of entrenched power in public space. The three re-took their “Commons.”

Time was that there was a field in the center of town, where people dismounted and loafed, hitched wagons, fools and music yawped, vision uncles winced, cads seduced, traders saved, and everyone but the tax collector cursed the King. Most importantly, there was a kind of talk and a kind of hearing that took place outside of power. Nowadays, we catch our culture-making on the run, because a hologram of the King sits in the center of the park covered with surveillance cameras. The King can’t be alone! He’s copped The Commons.

But The Commons keeps coming back - we have seen, for example, the community come to life in times of extreme joy or tragedy. Ever meet everyone in your neighborhood at the three alarm fire? Those of us at 9/11 remember how downtown Manhattan that September was a promenade, no cars. It was breathtakingly radical that neighbors could slump into their bodies and approach each other. The variety of emotion in the foreground, the weeping and laughing, the ad-hoc help that was offered. It was a heady experiment for those of us in the business of neighborhood-defense. Suddenly we were taking care of each other, no money down. It would have made Rosa and Abbie and Marcos smile.

The Commons can re-assert itself very quickly. The air can be cleared of cars, advertising and other corporate distractions in the exhale of a “What is this?” and some laughter. It can happen in a moment. Suddenly, right there, in the anything-can-happen moment we might be able to ask basic questions about our hypnotizers the corporations. And we should be able to do this on purpose. We should be able to create an instant, portable commons. We just have to be crazy enough to ask these questions on our own, and not wait for geniuses or tsunamis or some self-help God.

If all the Commons has been tortured into boxes, into pixels, into share-price... if the parks are over-policed and the community gardens bulldozed and anything not tied down purchased by the transnationals -- then we are not commons-less, because we carry The Commons inside us. That’s where the courage to commit actions comes from. Memories of Rosa and Abbie and Marcos, yes - how they reclaimed public space helps us. I think they would tell us, though, that we should look away from their biographies and we might find our own commons. We carry it around as we go about our daily lives,

In the Church of Stop Shopping we sometimes cross into contested space as fierce clowns, singing and waving signs. Often we go into transnational chain stores incognito, disguised as consumers, ready to buy. Most of our actions proceed from that simple premise. They want our money. They want us to approach their product. They will surveil us as we walk in; they’ll limit our gestures and talk; they’ll ask us to leave the moment we break out of the Consumer’s Choreography - but they will let us in for a moment as they eye our wallets. When they hear our unsupervised conversation (our guerilla commons is showing) they will run toward us with their uniforms, but we will have disappeared, as they say, into the civilian population. The Commons will hang in the air, witnesses carry it in their memory.

There never was a revolution where those in power didn’t squawk “Trespassing!” Real social change was never accomplished without the force of an unexpected performance. Do I have a witness?



Beatitudes of Buylessness

Blessed are the Consumers, for you shall be free from Living By Products.

Blessed are the Lonely Believers, for you shall transcend all media and dance in the streets.

Blessed are those stumbling out of branded Main Streets, for you shall find lovers not downloaded and oceans not rising.

Blessed is the ordinary citizen who holds onto a patch of public commons, for you are the New World.

Blessed is the artist who isn’t corporate sponsored, for you shall give birth to warm fronts of emotion and breakthroughs of Peace.

Blessed are those who confuse “Consumerism” with “Freedom,” for you shall be delighted to discover the difference.

Blessed are the advertisers and commercial celebrities, for you have been waiting for the remarkable restfulness of honesty.

Blessed are the neighborhoods flown from and shuttered, for you children shall illuminate the dark economy.

Blessed are the workers in the supermalls, for you shall no longer be surrounded and domed, the town your employers’ killed will come back to life full of memories of you, jobs for you and love by you.

Blessed is the breadwinner with out-sourced dreams who sits wondering in stopped traffic, for you shall find inside your own mind more stories than Hollywood, Bollywood and Babel.

Blessed are the teenage girls in sweatshops, for the real value of what you make will fly you in magic evening gowns to the City of Light.

Blessed are those of us who are pinned under the gaze of supermodels, for we shall escape to accept the radical freedom and infinite responsibility of making love without buying it.

Blessed are those who disturb the customers, for you might be loving your neighbor.

MySpace and MyPod

by Bill Carney

Both of my bands (the Jug Addicts and Les Sans Culottes) have had MySpace.com pages for a couple of years now. While I appreciate that it allows rather small-time outfits to engage in the self-promotional Ponzi scheme that is MySpace, it is mind boggling to see the number of bands and individuals that have customized (or “pimped” in MySpace parlance) their MySpace sites with almost completely unreadable graphics. It is the visual equivalent of the music that our nation’s torture experts use, along with stress positions, targeted humiliation, and sleep deprivation, to break down the will of their prisoners. I can’t recall if blasting “Welcome to the Jungle” was sufficient in itself to ferret out Manuel Noriega from his place of sanctuary in the Panamanian Papal Nuncio, but I feel fairly certain that some of these MySpace pages would have done the job. If Bush and Attorney General Gonzalez start surfing MySpace, I am sure it is only a short matter of time before the torture plan for our myriad Guanatanamos includes these brain scrambling and punishing MySpace pages. I knew that once Rupert Murdoch got hold of MySpace it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.

I got my IPOD (MyPod one year ago. Quite frankly, I was intent upon rocking my Sony Walkman until they came back into fashion again as part of the 80's retro craze. I was content to be totally behind the times knowing that I was ahead of the next wave. Sometimes you have to be willing to pay the price to be cutting edge and fashion forward. I pictured myself as the musical equivalent of one of those Japanese Imperial Army guys, crawling out of the jungle 50 years after the war. Death before dishonor. But now I got an IPOD so another brilliant plan has been blown to Hell.

With the IPOD (which I think stand for InterPersonal Oneupsmanship Device), I initially organized my library into playlists with names such as “Rock,” “Totally Rockin” and “Awesome Rawk,” simply to distinguish them from one another. As a longtime, obsessive compiler of mixed tapes (see Sony Walkman para., ante) I organized my playlists into a play order, as a musician might try to pace the set of music for a performance. My preferred modus operandi is to have pretty sharp contrasts from one song to another, mixing genres and tempos. I realized, however, that my lists compiled for the IPOD were simply no match for the cassette collections. They suffered from having been compiled too easily, through the magic of click and drag and without the necessity of recording them in real time. I once heard Godard complaining about digital film editing versus analog in much the same way. My new click and drag playlists lacked the sturm and drang of the analog playlists.

So I succumbed to the IPOD’s infamous “shuffle” setting. I say infamous because of all the ridiculous hyperbole that has been put forward in the media about how this function supposedly revolutionized way people listen to music. The proponents of this theory claimed that listeners suddenly had much broader tastes in music because they were now shuffling their playlists. Of course, for years before the IPOD, many people had cd players with a shuffle function, and those CD players allowed the listener to load in dozens or even hundreds of CDs. Personally, I always liked the five CD shuffle because I felt it allowed one to be selective about the five CD and the ultimate playlist universe so it was keyed into whatever mood I was in, but also allowed for interesting contrasts within those five CDs.

In my experience the feature was far from foolproof. It had some secret formula for weighing the five CDs, and in fact seemed to favor certain songs on each CD. So if, for instance, “Some Girls” by the Rolling Stones was in the mix, inevitably the first track played from that disc was “The Girl with Far Away Eyes.” Truly, there was a ghost in the machine. Also, I will make a deal with Mick Jagger. He doesn’t have to listen to Roger Miller sing “London Swings Like a Pendulum Do” ever again if I don’t have to hear him try and sing another country song.

In addition, if there were five CDs in rotation, the shuffle feature focused on four of them and did not play one of them. I guess the feature was truly random since it did not distribute the music from various records equally. It would eventually play every song if you played all of the CDs to completion but did so unevenly, almost radically so through some secret, yet annoying principle of selection. And if, God Forbid, you decided that one of the CDs in rotation was not really playing nicely with the others and opened the CD exchange feature, the shuffle was back to square one. You then were likely to hear most of the songs you had already heard before, in fact, the aforementioned shuffle “favorites.”

The IPOD seems to recreate the shuffle favorite feature. Or it seems to be focusing on just one section of the playlist instead of moving up and down all of the 1000 songs in the potential playlist. Recently, in pressing my “next” feature as part of a quiz someone sent me, five of the fifteen selections were from the Dirtbombs. While their music is well representd on my IPOD, it was frustrating that the IPOD was not offering me the variety of music that the company and the media trumpeted as part of the device’s purported revolutionary impact on music listening.

So I was driven back to the playlists. A recent solution for me was to listen to all of the songs on my playlist alphabetically. This approach, much more so than the “shuffle” feature was in fact a revolutionary way for me to listen to music. I was pleased to see that there were no clunkers among the Number Songs on my IPOD. Since the alphabetical system starts with all the songs beginning with numbers (or other symbols before the A through Z alphabetical sequence starts), I discovered the first song on my “alphabetical” playlist was in fact “$1000 Wedding” by Gram Parsons. The IPOD, appropriately, respects the dollar sign before all else. Next, come the songs that begin with parentheticals such as “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” and “(I Don’t Want to go to) Chelsea. That got me thinking about how much I like this convention of titling songs. (Perhaps The Whole World Would Be) Better If (This convention Were) More Widespread. Because as things stand now (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

After the parade of parenthetical titles, I have a Spanish language song that starts with the upside down ! mark they use in Spanish (and which I also think English would do well to employ). And then there are 13 number songs. These include, “16 with a Bullet” by Scott Morgan, “1970” by the Stooges, “2012” by SSM, “25 Hours a Day” by Kim Fowley, and “7 and 7 is” by Love. And then it’s on to the alphabet. There are a good number of songs starting with “Country,” a decent showing by “Dead” or “Death,” and “Don’t” is a very popular sentiment in song titles, I have discovered. “Get” is represented by “Get Down Tonight,” “Get It Together,” “Get It While You Can,” “Get Out Of Denver,” and the wonderful “Get You Off” by the Go. “Hey” would also do well on Family Feud because there is ‘Hey Joe,” “Hey Linda,” “Hey Sailor” and “Hey Teacher,” and finally “Hey! Little Boy” (the only one to use an exclamation form of “Hey”). Perhaps, the top title starter is “I’m,” “I am” or “I” which makes sense to me, and I can hardly say I am surprised although somewhat saddened that it beats out the titles beginning with “Love.” The last song is “Zero Point,” and there is only one Zero.

At the Movies with Mike

-- Mike Morgan

Santa Fe Trail (1940)

Whenever Hollywood attempts to portray history, especially American history, and doubly especially American history that deals with racism, it’s like taking a ride on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island. Every now and again you get a glimpse of the real world at some ridiculous speed, except you’re not too sure what you saw because your entire focus is on not throwing up your lunch all over your shoes. Such is the experience of watching Santa Fe Trail, which aspires to tell the story of John Brown, the infamous anti-slavery activist and revolutionary. John Brown, played by Raymond Massey, fits the usual bill, a bearded, wild-eyed, gun-running, bible-quoting terrorist, but he’s not the main character. Unh-unh, Errol Flynn is, and he portrays Jeb Stuart, the notorious Confederate cavalry leader. It all begins at West Point a few years before the Civil War (the American one), where Van Heflin, a fifth column abolitionist, is among the class of Plebes that includes the old Swashbuckler Flynn himself, and none other than Ronald Reagan as George Armstrong Custer. The major domo at the academy is Robert E. Lee, so the class of 1858 is full of war criminals of some description or another. Well, Van Heflin starts yanking Jeb Stuart’s chain by making all of these derogatory statements about slave-owners to which the standard response is “the South will sort out its own problems.” Reagan meanwhile, true to form, is confused by the whole debate and peppers the discussions with such classic comments such as “I dunno” or “It’s all too complicated for me,” making the screen writers seers of what was to come forty years later in non-movie life. Everything moves out to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where both Errol and Ron vie for the hand of the Oberstumfurher’s daughter Olivia De Havilland, and Raymond Massey is burning down barns, transporting runaways through the underground railroad, and smuggling rifles in crates marked “Bibles - Do Not Touch.” There are actual black people playing black people, and naturally there’s tons of eye-rolling and a solid dose of “lawdy mamas” all over the place. But Jeb prevails, and when posted back East, he leads the army column to bushwhack and capture John Brown at the botched Harper’s Ferry arsenal raid, saving the day for the slavers. The film ends with John Brown swaying from the gallows, and some Hallmark Card pronouncement about fire engulfing the land. Hard to swallow you might surmise, but then if you saw Mel Gibson’s happy North Carolina slaves in the diabolical “Patriot,” then you’d realize how far it’s all regressed in the last sixty years. Not since Victor Mature played the Sioux chief Crazy Horse have we been treated to such a history lesson.



The Good Shepherd (2006)

The moral of the story here is that it’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it. The job, being a founding mover and shaker in the OSS and later the CIA. The somebody is Matt Damon, surrounded by fellow Skull and Boners from Yale, and an aging Wild Bill Donovan type played by the director, Robert De Niro, a diabetic fast losing his extremities, but unfortunately not his mind. Now the CIA has wrecked havoc around the world for the latter half of the last century and will do so well into this one, but one wouldn’t think so in this ponderous no-risk tell-all or rather tell-what-you-already-know-very-slowly saga of American intelligence cloak and dagger work. Not since Mahatma Gandhi shuffled off the screen into the Ganges and the good books of Lord Mountbatten, has such ponderousness prevailed. Skipping back and forth from the Bay of Pigs debacle to WWII, cold war carrying-ons, and banana republic CIA-induced coups, this film takes forever (it’s three fucking hours long) to hit you with the bleeding obvious. Why is it so long? Because this a serious topic boyo, you better believe it. It’s so serious that the script writers did not insert one humorous line, nor one ironic utterance in the entire one hundred and eighty minutes. It’s so serious that we need to have a serious classical music soundtrack. Kind of an endurance test, you might think, but you’ll stay in your seat and not slip out for a fag to catch the plot twist, which becomes apparent way too long before it’s revealed, although you’re not quite sure, so your suffering is prolonged. Angelina Jolie plays the Matt Damon wife, a blue-blooded sot-artist named Clover, who is wronged by the Company, to whom Matt Damon is really married. John Tuturro is his stooge, Alex Baldwin is some big-shot G-Man, and the only one worth any kudos is Michael Gambon, the former Singing Detective, who gets snuffed too early on. Matt Damon soldiers on, he’s a real decent chap you know. He doesn’t take advantage of deaf girls, he marries his wife cos he knocked her up before she was his wife, and he cares about his son, even changing the brat’s pants when he pees on Santa’s leg at a CIA Christmas party. But the toll of being a dirty tricks maven grinds him down, as we witness the obligatory torture session over which he presides, and see him sacrifice his family for the greater good. It’s hard to swallow if you know anything about the ruthlessness of the CIA. In 2006, with the war on terror, Iraq, homeland security, Guantanamo, renditions and all of the other deadly atrocities that this lot is up to at full throttle Aristotle, you’d think that Robert De Niro might come up with something a wee bit more challenging and critical than this somnolent tale. George Clooney certainly does. De Niro should stick to what he seems to do best these days, namely spending his American Express card downtown and advertising so. What I ultimately got out of this movie is that my back hurt and my bladder ain’t as strong as it used to be, especially when I yawn.

Bar Band Supreme: Les Sans Culottes

- by Mike Morgan

When I was a young upstart back in South Africa, I had three wall posters in my bedroom at our family flat on Essenwood Road, Durban. One depicted John Carlos giving the Panther salute from the winner’s podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Another was of Julie Christie, all togged out in her Saturday night git-up a la the film “Billy Liar.” The third was a large photograph of an early manifestation of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. At the bottom of that poster, printed in large letters was the following, “The World’s Greatest Bar Band.” This was in 1975 and the album “Born to Run” was shaking up the rock and roll world, even in Durban. There was something very striking about that piece; it wasn’t just the attitude and pose of the band, arms folded, no smiles, the usual tough boy look...but it was the sheer audacity of the statement. The image and all that it conjured up never left me. What balls!

This led me to the big philosophical question that most greasers face, but hardly ever bother to answer, namely what makes a band a great bar band? Here’s my elementary take on philosophy. There are four kinds of questions in life. One would be “How do you boil water?” Another would be “How much money do you have in your pocket?” That’s the formal or empirical stuff. The third category is the what’s right and wrong dilemma, which sometimes doesn’t provide answers but instead stokes more fuel for thought. Finally, when one has grappled long and hard with number three, which is the bailiwick of philosophers, then one is prepared to answer question number four, which is the bar band poser. After all, some issues hold more gravitas than others. Accessability, relationship to the audience, showmanship, honesty, work ethics, soul and taste are all necessary criteria. The bottom line is that a good bar band entertains the stuffing out of working stiffs at a price they can afford.

Since those South African days, I have always been on the prowl to discover others who would contend for the title. Living in America for now almost thirty years, I have seen Bruce Springsteen and his entourage rule themselves out as a bar band. His music, as good and consistent as it always is, has nothing to do with this sad state of affairs. He is far too popular to play in a bar venue, and if he occasionally does, it’s always unannounced, something that most people find out about after the fact. So I had to look elsewhere. And for years, I knew I had the answer, not right for everyone, but right enough for me. The Iron City Houserockers, born out of Pittsburgh PA were it. Led by Joe Grushecky, himself a personal friend of Bruce Springsteen, the Iron City lads approached music with the same guts and bravado as their famous counterpart, but with one significant difference. They never moved out of the bar. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I and my pals saw them countless times, often traveling to the Pittsburgh area and the Rust Belt. A typical posting for a Joe Grushecky show would read something like this, “Live, Saturday Night...The Steelyard Inn...Route 3, Youngstown, Ohio...next to the Waterbed Store...8pm to 3 am...$5.” The Iron City Houserockers had won my award. They still might claim it, since they’re not dead yet. On those nights, the bar would be full of people that didn’t have much at all, but the music and a chance to have a few shots. The unpretentiousness of the environment was downright liberating. During that period, I was into the Egyptian Disco phase of ensemble wearing. At the Iron City Houserockers’ gigs, decked out like a pinball machine, I must have looked like the village blacksmith at the opening night of the big-city opera, so alien was my attire to the working uniform of plaid shirts and John Deere hats. It didn’t matter. We were all there for the same reason.

But with the waning of youth comes the search for things a little closer to the home front. In 1997, Lurch Magazine cohort, Jug Band crooner and close friend Bill Carney informed us in our local that he was going to start a French rock band. Inspired by Serge Gainsbourg, and all of the cool that came with that stuff, Bill was on a mission. His band was to be called Les San Culottes, the people without knee breeches, a Jacobin term to describe the activists during the French Revolution. A year later, he had it together and LSC played their first gig at Freddy’s Bar, Brooklyn, USA. Almost ten years later, with six albums and so many bar gigs to their credit that they are too numerous to chronicle, they are still at it. In my little universe of checks and balances, they have a shot at the title. In fact, I believe they are my new champions. So I’ll go out on a limb and say it. Les San Culottes is my world’s greatest bar band. Here’s why and a few yarns to along with it too.

Firstly, LSC always had a vision, important in any artistic endeavor. Given that there have never been any band members who are fluent French speakers, the project always had a lampoonish side. But it is also committed to putting out a high quality product. The combination of not taking oneself seriously enough to become pompous and self-righteous, together with the chutzpah and nerve to produce clever rocking songs is a winning one in the bar band competitive stakes. At first, the group was just plain funny to see, all gussied up in frilly shirts, ridiculous sequined outfits with berets and black and white swag tops (do you have a license for this minkee?), the women singers dressed to the nines cooing and shakin’ all over up on stage, Bill mugging it up in the middle of it all, and each band member with a ludicrous moniker such as Clermont Ferrand, Kit Kat Le Noir, Johnny Dieppe, Julius Orange, Edith Pissoff and Max Gauche. But it didn’t take too long before all of this schtick, still extremely rib-tickling and entertaining to this day, was surpassed by the music itself, which in the words of the immortal critic is “fucking good mate.” Les Sans Culottes had morphed into something quite unexpected. They were no longer a cartoon and a cover band. They had become the real thing.


Bill writes most of the songs, and the band contributes to that process. He is the lead singer, there are two women singers, who either provide background harmonies or are featured as solo singers on certain songs. The music is supplied by a rhythm section of bass and drums, a guitarist or two, and a keyboard player. There is a continuous turnover of personnel, itself a story of epic proportions and malarkey. But central to the operation is Bill Carney, who has kept the ship afloat. He even had to take former band members with stupid axes to grind to court for attempting to steal the name, start a second faux-French rock and roll band, and claim ownership of the idea, which is and always has been Bill’s. Bill won the day and the spoilers were relegated to tribute band status, without being allowed to use the name Les Sans Culottes. Thus, the group’s history is not without it’s own soap opera high-jinks. This merely adds to its infamy and growing mythical status. Crikey, how many combos have had a bass player whose stepfather actually walked on the moon.

The music draws heavily from the sixties, a kind of French response to the British invasion. Listening to LSC one can hear the influence of the Kinks, and the big girl group operations of that era a la Dusty Springfield, and the Ronettes, in a sort of stripped down Phil Spector wall-of-sound arrangement. The guitar rockers bring back memories of Detroit’s MC5, the Motor City Five, whose notorious live album “Kick Out The Jams, Motherfuckers!” still plays often on this writer’s turntable. There’s even a touch of Parliament Funkadelic to round it all off. It’s a veritable mish-mash of the sound that used to make listening to the radio an enjoyable exercise, when the Top Ten was actually comprised of decent music, not codswallop.

The songs themselves are riotously hilarious, skewed digs at the French take on the world. “Ecole du Merde” (the School of Shit) speaks for itself. “S.O.S. Elefants” is borrowed from an idea by the French folk, political songwriter, Georges Brassens. He was France’s answer to Phil Ochs. He used gorillas, but Bill and company sing about a herd of elephants who bust out of the zoo and roam the city in search of corrupt politicians and hacks, an anthem to rogue justice, Hannibal style. “No Merci, Oncle Sam” is the French rejection of U.S. political hegemony and cultural imperialism, with reference to the U.S. being the “Economic Taliban” of the globe. This has always been a favorite starter for the band, especially during the Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld junta years. This ain’t just shake your booty nonsense. It’s clever enough that the frat boys won’t understand it but still tap their feet, the hipsters will feel like their getting their geld’s worth, whilst the more astute members of the audience will dig the joke and rattle their walkers.

Bill is also a master of repartee, delivering one-liners and sarcastic barbs from the stage in-between songs in his broken French patois. One memory was at the “Celebrate Back to Brooklyn Festival” in the summer of 2001. Arlo Guthrie was to be crowned the King of Brooklyn that day, and Les Sans Culottes performed earlier in an outdoor park in Dumbo, in-between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges down on the river front. Dead pan, Bill announced that upward of a million people were expected and that “the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway was closed man,” evoking Arlo’s famous comment, memorialized at Woodstock thirty-two years earlier. All seven of us who were old enough to remember were thoroughly amused. Another was a passing reference to shopping on the Rue De Chanal (Canal street in Chinatown, which is actually full of imitation luxury items), hardly the top-shelf answer to gold card consumerism on the Champs Elysee or uptown on Fifth Avenue. LSC gigs are packed with these sorts of quips and swipes, and if you blink or have to go the can, you miss ‘em, but they’re part of the whole sublime package.

Les Sans Culottes have come a long way. I remember back in 1997, when Bill brought in their first demo-tape to O’Connor’s bar, one quiet Sunday afternoon. Patrick O’Connor, the publican, dutifully played it and everybody tutted politely with comments like “not bad,” “hmmm,” or “how about that.” At the end of the bar was George M (now passed on), an extraordinary old punisher, himself a wealthy gin-swilling coot, who would rattle off these high-falutin’ non-sequiturs of gothic insufferability, in short a gigantic pain-in-the-ass. In his memory adorned in the men’s room of Freddy’s Bar, there is an arrow above the toilet pointing down to the bowl with the wall graffiti that reads “The George M Memorial Library.” Anyway, George M was his usual verbose, imposing self that afternoon, and, as he swayed on his seat and stirred his martini, he pontificated the following: “Ah, the French...The French. They seduced Eisenhower you know. The wine, the women, the food, Eisenhower was completely duped by the French.” This, of course, prompted Pat O’Connor, whose hero was always General Douglas MacArthur, to enquire as to whether Eisenhower himself was a spy. From such humble yet earth-shattering gibberish was Les Sans Culottes introduced to the masses.

And they are still doing it, which is not just testimony to their staying-power, but also a recognition that they are getting the job done. If you live around NYC, look up the local music press, you’ll see their name appear regularly in the listings. And get on down to the establishment that night. They play in bars, music clubs, outside French restaurants on Bastille Day, they’ve even played a few times at the Windows Of The World on the 107th floor of the vaporized skyscraper (before that happened, naturally). You’ll get your Euros worth and hell, you might even wind up agreeing with me that they deserve to join the ranks of former Black Panther athletes, beautiful English movie stars and Jersey song smiths, all of whom festooned my wall way down south a long time ago. Viva Les Sans Culottes!

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January, 2007

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