TLS's Friday Pokey Roll Call

Today is the final workday before we evacuate New York City and hide Upstate for the Fourth of July. I'm going to Livingston Manor, in the Catskills, for an experimental music conference and pool party. Then on Sunday I fly off to Austria and Slovenia to race Toyota rally cars all week.

But before I go, here's a slim tribute to modern America: the Corporate Patriot's Friday Prison Roll Call. Brace yourself, Sheila.

- IN Dennis Kozlowski, disgraced Tyco CEO, convicted tax evader, and neglectful dad (I went to the junior prom with his daughter, Cheryl), is still in prison. I have a great story about how he met his second wife and nearly got himself killed by the Rye, NH, lobstering community. It's a juicy, World, but you'll have to wait.
- OUT Even though he's not a Yank, he's rich enough to matter: Chung Mong-koo, Hyndai's chairman, posted a $1 million bond against charges of defraud Hyndai shareholders and embezzling money. Being of the innocent-until-executed type of corporate victim, Hyndai invited Mong-koo back to run the company until his trial.
- THE SYSTEM WORKS! Bernard Kerik, former NYPD commissioner, NYC Corrections chief, and illicit bedmate to proto-cougar Judyth Regan, is mulling a guilty plea for accepting $200,000 in gifts from the mob while heading Corrections. Should he accept the State's offer, he'll avoid prison altogether. But of course.

Bermuda Is a Race Riot

I'll get the pro forma announcement out of the way: The Dreamcatcher won the race. 265 boats crossed the start line in Newport, and the Dream Team finished first in our class and 9th overall. Our closest competition was the US Naval Academy's Navy 44, Swift. Crewed by the brightest minds in the Navy, Swift shadowed us through the Gulf Stream and along 34 degrees latitude like a ghost frigate, mirroring our tactics and mocking our voyage-made-good. Each time we thought we'd lost them, their sinister masthead light appeared through a malevolent mist on the horizon astern. After 635 miles and 118 hours of brutal sailing, Dreamcatcher beat Swift in a squall by 4 seconds at the finish line. We were so close, we could see the light stubble on the young Navy skipper's chin.

Most significantly, World, and of much more import than Dreamcatcher's victory, is that your unflagging Hero comported himself with strength and courage. In fact, at the crew's celebration dinner in Bermuda Captain Kylander and several other crewmen toasted Hero's bravery, vigor, and seamanship. (I wasn't there; had to fly home early and work. Oh the grind the grind the grind.) In the photo, watch me climb the mast in Newport to check for chafe marks. First test passed with elan, thank you very much.

In the next episode: Horror At Sea; Hero Beats the Odds, Gets Queasy

Fuck you, Al Gore

This may sound fashionable, but so what: Fuck you, Al Gore. Fuck you for Iraq, John Roberts, our 3-0 loss at the World Cup, and for Keith Richards falling out of a coconut tree. You're a boorish Southern queen with a Cindy lisp and a hairflip. You're a meretricious ass-slapper and a patrician prick. You have a repellent personality, and your daughter married a proctologist. You ran a cowardly and dunderheaded campaign in 2000 and conceded too easily. And even though your anti-war speeches in 2002 sound in retrospect like the maniacally concise utterings of Nostradamus II, they required little risk and offered no remedy.

Now there is a groundswell of Draft Goreism. And I suppose that if you announced a candidacy tomorrow, I'd still support you, Al Gore. I would. I would consider it my heroic sacrifice. But know this: If a certain vertically underendowed Jewish billionaire from Boston announced the day after tomorrow, I'd drop you faster than a dead cat in high summer. You jerk-off...

My Lycaon is Horribly Pictus

For some people, talent is like a disease. This is one of my *philosophies*. With that in mind, my lover boys in the paleolithically-named rock band, Lycaon Pictus, are drooling and pustulant, a heartbeat away from a long, long dirt nap.

So there's my Friday Arts Recommendation: Lycaon Pictus.

Hero Re-Wets his Feet

It's a white pursuit, offshore racing, and I'm a soul brother. But that's how strange life gets sometimes. Last week, a set of astral dominoes fell all in a line and landed at my feet: One minute I'm a rap star and street hustler, the next I'm a crewman on board a race boat. The race is the 100th Bermuda Race, 630-something miles from Newport to St. David's Head, Bermuda, starting next Wednesday, June 16 - Bloomsday, to you fellow alumni of Prof. Terence Dewsnap's course, Ulysses .

I'm chaff on board this vessel, a 48-foot lightnin' titan named Dreamcatcher. My older brother is the watch captain (that's how I got aboard), and I'm very much the new guy: Chaff, as I said. That's fine. Hero needs a touch of humbling after a high-flying Spring of seemingly Limitless Success. When will the easy days ever end? I've lately wondered, aloud to myself, while I cried in the shower.

Into the ineluctable reality of the visible...

Hard Lesson, Vol. IV

Never set glue traps in the nude.

Countdown to futbol

Brazilians pronounce restaurant, "Hesss-to-raunch". Ronaldinho has a fierce overbite and wets his bed on occasion. I can't look away.

Bike attack, unredacted

Full disclosure. There's a coda to the bike attack. The coda retells the ending, wherein I don't pedal past the sons-of-bitches. In the real ending there is no popcorn, either. Nor is it a still midnight. In the real ending I'm dragged off my bike like a bag of spuds and two guys beat my head into the macadam. While it's happening commuters are beginning their trudge to the G train, and all day I thought I was one lucky bastard for not getting more hurt than I was. After a day spent filling out forms, having my head examined, and whining to unresponsive NYPD detectives, I go home and sulk and soak in the bathtub as blood pounds in my ears and my skull and nose throb.I'm not as charitable. I want to excoriate my fucking neighbors and beat Hispanics senseless. But I went to sleep listening to Mahmoud Ahmed's Ethopieste. Never do anything enraged. Let anger simmer and see what it tastes like in the morning.

Mira los Chicos Malos

I was biking up my street tonight to get a box of popcorn. It was midnight, and the street was empty. Then two guys in white wife-beaters walked onto the street in front of me. At first I thought they were crossing, then I realized they were steering toward me. They lead guy was unsteady on his feet, and he had a weird, wild look in his eyes. He and his pal approached fast, like a couple of drunken Dominican guided missiles. I'm fast, World, and I'm wily. A tough target to hit. So I quickly weaved my bike left, over a piece of lumber lying on the street (where the heck did... Lumber?), and then made a quick right to avoid the second guy. Both were hispanics, with those queer manicured hairlines that are in style. Both lost balance trying to grab me, and each one tripped over the lumber in the road and fell. As I cleared them, I noticed a third man on the sidewalk, a white dude. Instead of lunging for me, he started laughing at his buddies lying on street. The funniest part of this very surreal moment was my reaction. As I was pedaling furiously, I said, in a conversational voice, "Easy, dudes."

BBQ Joint Closes; South Loses Charm, Appeal

Charleston, Spring 1998. I'm on tour with my formerly famous rock band. We play a show in a filthy mechanic's garage on Spring Street, on the black side of town. The cracked wooden doors of the garage are open, and the traffic passes slowly by.

It's a poor neighborhood, and the paint on the row houses has peeled down to bare, bleached pine slats. Across the street from the garage, a parking lot serves a small row of businesses, including a wig store and a little family-run joint the New Orleans Connection, home of the Best Barbecue Ribs Ever Made.

The meat eaters in my band had loitered in the parking lot all afternoon, eating pork ribs as fast and James and Mabel Cumberland, the NOC owners, could cook them. The ribs were perfectly rubbed and slathered in NOC sauce, sticky with molasses. They crumbled in our hands and dissolved in our mouths. We dedicated every song of our show to them. Although the night ended badly for me, per usual - in a pile of junk on the floor of the van, bracing for a hideous hangover - I've been talking about the New Orleans Connection for 10 years. There is still BBQ sauce on my guitar.

Jump cut: Last week, I went to Charleston to revisit Spring Street and check up on the New Orleans Connection for a magazine article. The garage is still there, though there are no babbling, drooling punk rockers writhing inside. Sadly, the Connection is gone. All that remains is a flaking sign on the roof, the letters barely discernible. I stood for some time in the parking lot, sweating and feeling old and bland. I thought about going to the white part of town and eat at one of the new Charleston yuppie feed-troughs that have cracker food writers slobbering. But why bother? They're no better or worse than the new cuisine in Savannah to the south or even New York City way up north.

So the Hero poured a little Gatorade out on the parking lot in memory of James and Mabel Cumberland's pork ribs, then climbed into his Maserati QP Sport GT (that's another story). He programmed his GPS navigation system for the tiny coastal village of Darien, GA, where a new greasy plate ribs awaited.

I am not a Crackhead. I'm Futbol Fan.

I restored my cable service this morning. And you're thinking, "How very unheroic, Mikey. More disaster television and tween reality while your tiny tower of underachievement topples." Actually, World, this time it's different. This time my cable subscription is a global statement. The World Cup is here, the matches start soon, and I ain't no filthy isolationist. I'm a global Doer, I'm a child of open borders and Airhitch. I root for poor countries and poor people and all their minor achievements. Hell, I am a poor person of minor achievement. Some say the British invented soccer and the Brazilians perfected it. Here's my amendment: the Americans broadcast it on four different cable channels. So here I am, World, doing my part. Now please leave me be.

Made by Frenchmen, but essential nonetheless

This past winter, during the only decent blizzard of the season, I hunkered down and watched all 8 hours of the documentary mini-series, "The Staircase". In the pantheon of cinema which explores whether or not the effeminate husband beat his wife to death over the head, The Staircase is a shocking entry. The husband in question is Michael Peterson, an inelegant best-selling writer of historico-battle novels set in Vietnam depicting army buddies confiding brotherliness as VC bullets whiz past. One night, Peterson's wife, a chirpy VP at Nortel, ends up dead at the bottom of the staircase in their North Carolina McMansion. Police arrest Peterson, who is also a muckraking columnist in the local rag, and the DA charges him with Murder One. The wily French filmmakers manage to insinuate their cameras into every aspect of the proceeding investigation and the trial. The result is a very intimate and hypnotic document of a trial - and the upper-crust of the New South - that gets weirder by the day. Is he guilty? Is the DA getting sweet revenge? Will his children turn on him? What about the corpse in faraway Germany? What about the fireplace poker?

Thus ends the first installment of my Friday cinema recommendation: The Staircase, by some Frenchmen.

Look Out, Bubba: Here Comes The New Me.

How's this for a friggin blog entry: I canceled my cable today. Yesterday I was writing a story for Poker Life magazine...

That's right. I said Poker Life. You got a problem with that?

.. Anyway, I was trying to write a story for Poker Life when I found myself unable to think of a synonym for the word "threatening". I sat and pondered this for some time. I turned the word over in my mind, I cogitated.

Then, suddenly, before I knew it really, I was prone on the couch, the dark wood shades drawn, the TV flipping between Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch" and the new "Laguna Beach" sequel, "The Hills". I was at ease, the contour of my fat ass blending with the lumpy couch. Now there's that reassuring crick in my neck, the one I get when I turn my head slightly to starboard - that's the best angle toward the TV. That's it. Yes, that's it... right there. Now I'm placing my thumb on that "last channel" button, the one with the aureole of dirt smudged around it. I press and press late into the night, ignoring the vibrating phone and my next-door neighbors' marital spat (her credit card bill irks him; he's a screamer). An opportunistic mouse scratches at a pasta box in the cupboard (R.i.p. Kimchee). I don't care. I'm at peace, watching a crab fisherman weep over a dead shipmate, swept overboard into the frigid water of the Bering Sea. I am no longer worrying over bothersome matters such as whether "apocalyptic" is a good synonym for "threatening". I have cable TV.

Or I did. It's gone now, and I'm on fire. A creative explosion of titanic proportions (maybe that's the wrong word). Baneful. That's a good synonym for "threatening". See how easy it is without cable TV? I feel better already.