'When I Was' Reviewed by Publishers Weekly

So I wrote this novel, When I Was Punk, and Publishers Weekly, which may be the most influential reviewer of books out there, reviewed it.

They called the novel, which is set in and around Tompkins Square Park in 2001, "comical" (in a good way, I presume) and "scrappy" (also in a good way, I presume). 

Majorly psyched to get a review in P-Dubs.
Here it is in full:
This comical, scrappy second book from Malone in his Tomkins Square Trilogy (after No Never No More) takes place in 2001, two years after the first book. A recovering coke addict from Manhattan's East Village, Conrad, 39, finishes his court-ordered one-year drug rehab treatment and discovers his girlfriend of 10 years Anna-Jane ("AJ") has fallen in love with rockabilly musician Ethan. She decides to breakup with Conrad. He takes solace in working as a bartender, writing in his life journal, and reading Jack Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. Meantime, the cavalier Fluke Crowley, 18, has chosen to hang out and experience the punk scene for a year before entering Princeton to study art or business. After becoming a petty criminal to support his carefree lifestyle, Fluke steals Conrad's knapsack containing his life journal, which Fluke reads with interest. While Fluke's family is looking for him (they've hired a private investagtor to bring him home), he run a scam concerning a new fictitious street aphrodisiac called "Jackrabbit." Eventually, Fluke and Conrad cross paths and reconcile their differences just when things are turning too hot for Fluke to stick around town. He plans a hasty exit for warmer climates and sets the stage for the last book to complete Malone's literary project. (Sept.)

And So Fourth...Holiday at the Brewery

July 4th...actually July 6th...at Captain Lawrence Brewing.

I met a pretty cool veteran who was very psyched to be enjoying beers with family, and not in Afghanistan.

Charlie Menendez of White Plains is enjoying quality time with his family. If anyone deserves a relaxing Fourth of July weekend, it’s Charlie, back from a two year stint fighting in Afghanistan. He’s digging the Red Herring. “Usually I’m an IPA guy,” he says. “This is a sweet twist on an IPA.”
Charlie is with his mother, Luz Mary, his brother, Christian Lasso, and his stepfather, Peter Gonzalez. Luz Mary is from Colombia, and the family rabidly watched Colombia’s World Cup campaign, which ended a few days earlier in a bruising match with Brazil. “I barely cried in Afghanistan,” says Charlie. “But that was…emotional.”

Luz Mary is emotional too, tearing up when Charlie speaks of phone calls from Afghanistan with his mom that were cut short when the bombing started. But that is all behind him now.
“We haven’t had many Fourth of Julys together—it’s always nice,” the proud veteran says. “Beer, barbecue, relax with family…that’s it.”

Elizabeth, Rich and a Boat Ride to Rye

I had a first person essay in the Journal News, the major daily serving Westchester County, NY, June 29 about my grandparents first meeting on a boat trip to this exotic future-world known as Rye Playland. They set foot in Westchester a full 73 years before my family and I arrived in the Land of the High Taxes.

I interviewed my father and my aunt to get some details on how my grandfather and grandmother met, and imagined the rest.

It's neat to have a piece of my family's history now on record, and it's fun to get some people who were alive during World War I--both grandparents are deceased--into the Google world and internet bloodstream. For instance, googling "Richard Malone" and "firefighter" has my grandfather in the Top 10 today.

It was Assumption Day – Aug. 15, 1933 – and Richard Malone, a 19-year-old factory worker in Elizabeth, N.J., was on a Rye Playland-bound excursion with his pals, a rickety steamship pushing off from Port Elizabeth, crawling through the inky Arthur Kill, into New York Harbor, up the East River and, finally, onto the expansive Long Island Sound. How Playland, five years young at the time, must've looked to the sweaty castaways, an Emerald City off in the shrinking distance.

Stocky and sincere, Rich approached a shy teen girl – also from Elizabeth, and sharing a name with the blue-collar city. Elizabeth saw some good under Rich's gruff exterior, and agreed to spend the day with him.

I had originally intended for the essay to run on the back page of Westchester Magazine, for a new department the mag calls "My Westchester." Alas, they had already greenlighted an essay about a couple falling in love at Rye Playland. But I was able to get it onto the Journal News' Opinion pages. For the record, I don't get paid for the essay. But once in a blue moon, some things are more important than payment.

Snitches Get Ditches: Crime Reporting in the Inner City

This was a very interesting story I did in 2008 that ended up as the cover story on the trade mag Broadcasting & Cable; I believe it was the first time a controversial topic was tackled from this particular angle, which is always gratifying.

"See No Evil" is about how people in the inner-city abide quite strictly by the "stop snitching" code--you don't rat out the bad guys even if they've done really bad things--and how that affects reporting on crime in these areas.

Reporters spoke of youths walking by, making the sound of a gun cocking, while they worked their beats on a local crime story, or having their vehicles vandalized to send a message to back the f*** off.

I don't get to do a lot of investigative reporting, but this one did take on a tough issue and hopefully shone a bit of light on it. 

Here are a few grafs. 

So goes investigative reporting in Kansas City and several other markets in America, as the Stop Snitching movement gains momentum and leaves residents scared to death of anyone with a badge—or a microphone or notepad. “To this day, the question remains: How could two people get gunned down in front of so many people, and two years later, no one’s been charged?” [KCTV Kansas City anchor Craig] Nigrelli wonders. “The answer is, no one will talk. ‘No Snitch’ is loud and powerful here.”

Investigative reporters in all corners of the country are increasingly encountering the Stop Snitching campaign—spread through word of mouth, DVDs and T-shirts—that makes their jobs that much more difficult. And as digital media means that testimony on the evening news can exist on the Web forever—and be distributed virally to an array of devices—many believe it won’t be getting easier to produce eyewitnesses.

WCAU Philadelphia investigative reporter Harry Hairston knows about such hostility firsthand. While reporting a story a few years ago about a white man who’d moved to a mostly black neighborhood in Chester, Pa., and was being harassed by neighbors who did not want him there, Hairston returned to the station van after doing his reporting to the jarring sight of a cinderblock that had been thrown through his windshield. “Their message was, leave us alone,” he says. “They did not want the media reporting on what was going on.”

Bellying Up to the Bard: A Chat With Shane MacGowan

Perhaps once in a career, you get to interview someone who's inspired you.

I got to sit with Shane MacGowan, poet and punk icon, in 2001. 

I'd already wanted to be a writer, but he inspired me to write something good that may just stuck around after I'm dead and gone. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it did help me get my first novel done and out the door.

Shane, former singer in the iconic Irish trad/punk band the Pogues, was performing with his new outfit, the Popes, at Webster Hall. Employed at the time by Playboy.com, I was to meet with him after.

Like that teen scribe in Almost Famous, I lugged a large, heavy digital recorder--cutting edge technology at the time--to Webster Hall. We'd planned to feature an audio file on the Playboy site that people could click on, and hear a bit of Shane's boozy rasp themselves. I don't fully recall what happened that night, but when the show ended, MacGowan was nowhere to be found.

Fairly typical Shane MacGowan stuff. I once stood under a packed tent on Randalls Island, waiting for Shane to take the stage. Someone knew someone who had a line in to Shane, who apparently was drinking in some hole in the wall in Woodside, Queens, resisting the efforts of his handlers to pull him out.

So I never got actual face time with Shane, but we did do a phoner a few days later while he was still in New York. I recall he'd been kicked out of his hotel, and was holed up in a Best Western in Hells Kitchen. He was in bed when he spoke.

The rock star life.

Here's a snippet of our chat.

Do you ever have to pay for a drink anymore?
SM: I very rarely have to pay for a drink these days. D’ya know what I mean? The bars I go to, there are so many people there who will buy me a drink, or it’s on the house. If we’re in Ireland, people buy me drinks, and when we’re on the road, a lot of times fans will see me and buy me a drink. Occasionally, I’ll buy myself a drink, or I’ll buy other people drinks, ya know? Yeah? But I do get a lot of drinks bought for me, if that’s what you mean. That’s how I get a reputation as such a big drinker — I always have these glasses in front of me, people always putting them on the table, know what I mean?

I guess your fans feel like it’s an affirmation for them, buying you a drink.
SM: Yeah, and that’s very nice of them. I’m not complaining at all.

All the Brews That's Fit to Print

I do a little writing for a local craft brewery.

It gives me an emotional connection to a cool business in my area.

It also teaches me a lot about beer, and keeps my fridge well stocked with excellent brews--IPA, Liquid Gold, the summer ale known as Sun Block--as part of my remuneration is, shall we say, liquid.

Here's the latest "Notes From the Captain Lawrence Tasting Room", on fathers and sons and daughters spending a beautiful Father's Day down at the local brewery.

And here are the 108 "Notes From the..." stories I did before the Father's Day one.

A Visit to the Funny Farm

One of the funner, if you will, stories I've ever written was a piece for my employer, the television trade mag Broadcasting & Cable, about how writers from the satirical paper The Onion were starting to rival the longtime primary source of TV writing talent--the Harvard Lampoon.

So you've got these preppy and connected Harvard guys on one end, and these flannel-wearing state school dudes with honkin' Midwestern accents on the other, if we can speak in broad stereotypes that are probably not far from the truth.

It was a cover story in 2006. The cover said "The Funny Farm". 

The story itself was called "Wisconsin Wise Guys Plot TV Takeover."

The sources were quite funny.

Here's a taste:

While alumni of both the Onion and the Lampoon make up a small percentage of working comedy writers, they wield disproportionate influence, with high-ranking staffers producing influential shows. Onion humor drives programs that mine current events for wit, like The Daily Show and Colbert Report, while Lampoon humor—described by The Office producer and former Lampoon President Schur as “very odd, dry, abstract and mostly unreadable if you're not on the staff”—seems best-suited for sitcoms and sketch comedy.

It's not hard to see the Onion's influence on its alumni's shows. There's the tongue-way-in-cheek satirical bite of Daily Show (a Zagat-style review of Guantanamo called it a “hip Hussein loyalist hangout,” albeit one with a “limited menu”) and Colbert Report (bombastic host Stephen Colbert teased a recent episode with “So-called separation of church and state—if a father and son can be president, why not the Holy Spirit?”).

There are the “Onion-esque” newspaper headlines, as American Dad executive producer Mike Barker describes them, that start each episode of the Fox program. “The satirical bent that the Onion writers have lends itself perfectly to the satirical nature of American Dad,” says Barker. His favorite Dan Vebber headline on Dad: “Britney Spears' Baby To Enter Pre-Hab.”