The news that Tower Records will have to auction off its assetshits me in a personal place. As a California native, the original Tower Records store in Sacramento was a touchstone of my musical education. The first LP I ever bought with my own money (Beatles for Sale) came from Tower, as did my first 45 (the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” b/w “Stupid Girl”) and I can still recall the expression on my mother’s face when she looked at the Stones in their Carnaby Street finery. “I suppose that’s how you would like to look?” she asked, rhetorically I suppose. I was only eleven but the answer was: of course!

And how she gloated when I brought home my next single by the Stones, “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadows?” which featured a picture of them in forties style drag, the ugliest bunch of queens any of us had ever seen. Not that we saw that many in Auburn, California. But you get the point.

The other Tower stores I encountered were paragons of haughtiness. Security guards stood at the doors of the one in San Francisco as if guarding Fort Knox. The employees always viewed my purchases with disdain if not contempt (searching for a Fred Neil import at the Tower on Sunset in LA I made the mistake of asking the man behind the counter if he knew anything about folk music) and even at its flagship store on Broadway in NYC they treated me like a thief. Didn’t I realize that Keith Richards lived upstairs? Why should they bother with me?

O how the mighty etc. Brought low by Napster and all that followed — a whole generation of kids who would sooner go to WalMart than a “record store” — Tower found itself in the sad position of begging for business lately. No one asked me to check my bag the last time I went to the store here; I was looking for a last minute birthday present for my friend Bob Roe and what I found were a bunch of gray haired white guys like me, pawing over the Bob Marley boxed sets. The sad thing is that we also bought new music — from Ali Farka Toure (RIP) to the New Pornographers to the Fiery Furnaces — to keep our ears happy and the record companies in business. Now I guess we’ll have to steal our music, like everybody else.

All ye Brooklynites who have watched in silent horror as Bruce Ratner and the forces of evil have rolled steadily forward with their plan to build a little midtown Manhattan — complete with traffic congestion, dusk-like shadows from the skyscrapers above and absolutely no place to park — in the middle of our fair borough, now is your time to speak. Or shriek. Or at the very least let your voice be heard on the hateful Atlantic Yards Development this benighted son of Cleveland is prepared to shove down our throats.

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday, August 23rd) the Empire State Development Coporation will hold its only public hearing on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement and all public comments will become part of the record of this fiasco. It is our best, and perhaps last, chance to slow down this behemoth. Even if you have sat on the sidelines until now, even if you were not swayed by Chris Smith’s excellent New York magazine story, or the stories in the New York Times, the Daily News, the Village Voice, the Brooklyn Papers et al that have painted this land grab as the biggest violation of public trust since the invasion or Iraq, surely the facts of the DEIS itself has made you queasy.

Say what? Haven’t had time to read the 2000 page report? Funny, you would think that Ratner and his political cronies would allow more time to digest such an important document. By cutting off all comment in September (and having the only public session at the end of August when even Brooklynites head for the beach) you would think they were afraid of a little give and take.

Don’t take it. Give them a piece of your mind. Show up early at Metrotech tomorrow (Kitgord Auditorium, 285 Jay Street) before the 4:30 kick off to sign up to speak or just cheer the speakers on. Even though you may send comments via email or snail mail after that (look at the Develop Don’t Destory Brooklyn website for addresses and links) a HUGE TURNOUT IS ESSENTIAL. The media will be in attendance and a groundswell of opposition has to be visible to counter the union types, ACORN whores and friends of Ratfink who will be sure to make a lot of noise themselves. To the barricades, people. The neighborhood you save may be your own.

All immigrants have the same dream: Come to America, see the Statue of Liberty and head for Hazleton, Pennsylvania, The Crusted Jewel of the Rust Belt. Sadly, illegal immigrants flocking to this bucolic paradise will find that their plans of moving in and living off the fat of the land — not to mention partaking of the city’s school system and public hospitals — will find themselves thwarted, proverbial grooms left standing at the altar. For the city fathers looked at the rising tide of immigrants and declared them unwelcome. A new law fines landlords and employers for renting to or hiring illegal immigrants who, according to Mayor Lou Barletta, are destroying the fabric of the small town (pop. 22,000).

It may be a little late for that. I spent a few days in Hazleton in 2004, canvassing the local Democrats for John Kerry, and my impression was of a town that time, or certainly modern time, had forgot. Knocking on the doors of registered Dems to Get Out the Vote I met a number of middle-class voters looking forward to election day (we won that county, btw, as well as the state of PA — guess we should have mosied on over to Ohio) but I also saw a lot of beat neighborhoods on the fringes of a town that was dying from the inside out. Downtown businesses were shuttered and the liveliest scene was to be found at Jimmy’s Quick Lunch, home of the loaded hot dog and a proud member of the PA Hot Dog Hall of Fame.

But what if Jimmy’s started serving burritos or tamales? Where would locals gather then to discuss the absence of job opportunities? My friend Bill and I stopped at a local internet cafe that was hanging by a thread itself. We fueled ourselves on caffeine for the trip up to Wilkes-Barre and another day of GOTV and spoke with the owner, a pleasant woman more concerned with the lack of local support than the influx of immigrants. The week we were there Hazleton was hosting a Hell House, one of those born-again haunted houses filled with living tableaux of human depravity: abortion, drug abuse, loaded hot dogs… She said that the guy playing Satan had come in one day in full regalia, trailed by two demons, but had not broken character. Nor did he buy anything.

If local businesses would be happy for paying customers from the netherworld, let alone the Prince of Darkness himself, I suspect they are feeling the pinch as undocumented workers take their business elsewhere. That the national hysteria over immigration seeps down to communities like Hazleton, where there ain’t nothing shaking but the leaves on the trees, says plenty about this issue. Though Mayor Barletta, whose ancestors came here from Italy and who were doubtless greeted with the same scorn as they headed westward from Ellis Island, has pointed to rising crime as the impetus for this new law, I see something much simpler. It is a search for a new Satan. You’ve got to blame someone.

The news that Arthur Lee had died last week was not exactly a shocker. The former Love front man had been cheating death for nearly 40 years it seems, and word last year that he had been diagnosed with leukemia was followed by a number of benefit concerts, including one here headlined by Robert Plant, which were meant to defray the costs of his treatment.

I wrote about Love for Salon back in 1999 and judging by the responses I got at the time, a lot of people already thought he was dead. Since the disintegration of the band in 1968, following the release of Forever Changes, Lee had haunted Sunset Boulevard, hitting up strangers for spare change and then explaining that he was off to jam with Jimi (no one believed him then, though the recordings survive — unlike Arthur and Jimi). As the prototype for the “black hippie,” Lee carried several grudges: he didn’t get enough respect from blacks or hippes, he felt, in part because he and his band were so unmellow. “They should have called themselves Hate,” Peter Albin of Big Brother and the Holding Company said at the time and for years Lee seemed determined to live up to that reputation. His last arrest, in 1996, came after he fired a gun off and kept him off the streets until 2001.

But in the mid-sixties, Love was a sensation, at least in LA. The Doors were seen as but pale imitators of their love-and-death trip music, without all the weird jazz-pop friction. A former colleague of mine wrote to say that as a kid in LA at the time, she made up a song about him to the tune of “Mr. Lee” by the Bobbettes: “One, two, three/Look at Arthur Lee/Three, four, five/Look at that man jive.” He swung when hippies were starting to twirl to endless raga like solos — though at its worst the band could sound lame and defanged (Dave Marsh said Love sounded like the soundtrack to a porn film).

My friend Stephanie Zacharek took me to see Lee and a reconstituted Love at Town Hall in 2003. Though it was billed as the Forever Changes tour, a recreation of the album ala Brian Wilson’s Smile concerts, Lee took the stage (after a long wait, and with his leg in a cast) and began with an obscure number from an earlier album, Da Capo. Steph and I looked at each other with concern, which iturned to alarm when Lee chatted incoherently with the audience. But when the band finally kicked in with the album’s opener, Alone Again Or, Tex-Mex horns colliding with classical guitar and a string quartet and the song’s oddly lovelorn lyrics, we were all transported. The string section looked like it had been pulled from the student body at Juilliard and I recall one long haired cellist, dressed in a formal black dress, rocking out as Lee wheeled about on stage swinging his cane.

“Served my time,” he sang later, his voice sending chills through the crowd, “served it well/I made my world/a cell.” You’re free now, Arthur. God rest you, scary gentleman.

I guess NBC and PBS have been reading my blog. After suggesting below that perhaps the networks were shy of saying “global warming” when talking about the hotter-than-hell week that was in the US, both newscasts came back with the sort of second look stories that aim to expand our understanding of the issue, even if they often yield little more than hot air. Friday night PBS’s News Hour featured a debate of sorts, moderated by Jeffrey Brown, with the New Yorker’s Betsy Kolbert and the Atlantic’s Gregg Easterbrook. Kolbert, who has been sounding the alarm on this issue for some time (and whose reporting on climate change garnered her a National Magazine Award) was less optimistic than Easterbrook who, echoing a commentary in this month’s Atlantic, said we can tackle global warming the same way we whipped smog in cities like Los Angeles, via law and public demand for greater fuel efficiency etc. “I certainly hope he’s right,” said Kolbert, which is about as close to rancor as the “debate” came. (A third participant, Ronald Bailey of the Libertarian magazine Reason, would surely have added a more contrarian POV had he not been muted by technical difficulties — caused no doubt by global warming.)

No credible science writer disagrees with the premise of Al Gore’s book and film, An Inconvenient Truth — that global warming is accelerating at an alarming rate and we have about ten years to fix it — and neither does any credible scientist. I doubt even the addition of Bailey would have turned the decorous News Hour studio into a food fight. But the press seems invested in making it seem like there is some controversy, or at least disagreement, here. Wednesday night, Brian Williams teased a report on the Nightly News by saying, “It’s hotter than ever — but is it global warming?” What followed were sound bites from scientists from Pew Research etc. all basically saying, yes, these sorts of weather events (scorching summers, apocalyptic hurricanes, melting glaciers) are indeed all consistent with a trend toward global warming. So why the note of doubt in the presentation? To keep viewers glued to the screen — or to appease the flat-earth types and energy lobbyists who insist on calling global warming a theory?

I suspect the latter, though I detect a note of panic in the recent outreach efforts of the oil companies. On Thursday the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the origins of an Al Gore parody that appeared on YouTube. “Al Gore’s Penguin Army” portrays the former VP as the Penguin of Batman fame, hypnotizing hapless penguins into thinking climate change is man-made and affecting everything — including Lindsey Lohan’s weight loss. Haha, that silly Gore. Turns out, though, that the parody was created by someone in the employ of the Washington DC media and lobbying firm DCI, whose clients include — Exxon Mobil! What a coinkydink! By trying to harness this most democratic of mediums (which Gore invented, remember?) and portray corporate propaganda as the free speech of the people, energy companies may be admitting that they have lost the fight, that truth has them scared and on the run and even the lame-duck Bush White House can’t save them from a popular uprising over this issue. We won’t be fooled by cheap graphics of the Jib-Jab sort into thinking this is not an issue to get all het up about. We’re not that stupid and easily distracted.

Are we?