Chicken of the Street

For some reason last week I just suddenly thought of “city chicken” for the first time in four or five decades. And turns out I apparently did not dream it — as a matter of fact, city chicken even has its own Wikipedia page, which defines it thusly: “An American entrée consisting of cubes of…

Leaning In or Out or On Me

Less than a minute into the video to “Brass in Pocket,” the Pretenders’ #14 pop hit from 1980 – one of the first clips ever aired on MTV — we see teddy-boy-coifed bassist Pete Farndon maneuvering a pink whale of a gas-guzzler toward the diner where Chrissie Hynde is waitressing. All three male Pretenders are…

The North is the South

If you’ve been startled by the Confederate flags at Reopen Michigan rallies and unable to rectify the cognitive dissonance of seeing them in such a Northern state, remember that in the mid to late 20th Century, thousands of Southerners moved to the Detroit area to work in auto plants. Which means lots of Michiganders’ ancestors,…

First The Good News, Then…

Since everybody seems to agree that hush-money-for-Stormy-coverup is the weakest of all potential cases against the disgraced and disgraceful former president, I can’t help but think the trial not happening until 2024 is a good thing. Opens floodgates for Georgia election tampering and classified document and January 6 indictments without quickly closing them with a…

Kid Rock review, 2012

I’ve written about him as much as any musical performer out there starting in the late ’90s, including an extremely long Village Voice piece on Eminem and him that was re-printed in my third book. I was even asked to write his authorized biography (can’t say that about any other artist) when I was a…