It’s 3:10 am, and I’m heading for a 5:30 am Newark Airport pickup. But this is funny. I think. I need to wake up first. Mike Myers!

The truly magnificent David Johansen has passed from cancer at age 75. He began coping with the disease last year, it says here. The poor guy fell and “broke his back in two places” last November. Back pain is agony…I’ve been there. I hope a friend or two slipped him some smack.

If anyone hears about a Manhattan memorial gathering or service of any kind, please let me know.

Johansen’s “Not That Much” is one my all-time favorite power-chord tracks.

The original “Hot Hot Hot”, recorded by the late Montserrat musician Arrow (aka Alphonsus Celestine Edmund Cassell), popped in ’82 but it became a bigger hit in ’87 with Johansen’s (aka Buster Poindexter‘s) version.

Posted on 3.16.23: Along with ex-girlfriend Sophie Black, who matured into a respected poet, I co-produced two Save The Whales benefit rock concerts in Wilton, Connecticut. Both were held on a 52-acre property owned by Sophie’s parents, David and Linda Cabot Black. The first happened over the July 4th weekend in ’76; the second (for which Sophie and I were interviewed for a 6.26.77 N.Y. Times piece) happened a year later.

And I was proud and gratified to book the David Johansen band for the ’77 show, as I’d been a fan of the New York Dolls; ditto “Not That Much” and “Funky But Chic.”

A couple of months prior to the ’76 concert Johansen and I chatted in some downtown Manhattan bar, and I really liked his charm, aura, self-deprecating humor, etc. Plus I learned that night that Johansen loves (or loved) to play-act and pretend to be someone else. DJ made bank on play-acting when Buster Poindexter came along in the ’80s, but when I spoke to him that night he was speaking with a working-class British accent. Pretending to be, in a manner of speaking, some Jagger-like rocker from East London or something. It was well known at the time that Johansen was a lifelong New Yorker (raised in Staten Island), and so I was flat-out thrilled and fascinated that he was performing for me — an audience of one. Johansen was dishy in a Jagger-ish way back then, and the accent fit right in. I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live.

The Scorsese-Tedeschi doc is worth the price and the time.

Posted on 4.15.23: Last night I watched Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi‘s Personality Crisis: One Night Only, and I came out of it knowing and caring a bit…okay, a lot more about David Johansen than I had before I sat down.

It’s basically standard documentary portraiture, of course, but primarily a relaxed, low-key lounge concert film, shot in the Carlyle bar in January 2020.

The doc is augmented with recent interview footage (apparently shot in Johansen’s home by his stepdaughter Leah Hennessey, daughter of wife Mara Hennessey) plus some performance footage from the good old days (New York Dolls, ’70s solo career, Buster Poindexter in the ’80s and ’90s).

And the thing that stuck in my head, frankly, is the made-plain fact that Johansen is a free-floating existentialist dancer-singer-performer who’s more or less cool with the fact that he’s not stinking rich. He and his family are living with a certain amount of style, comfort and swagger, but the difference between David Jo’s lifestyle and that of, let’s say, Mick Jagger is apparently considerable or at least noteworthy. (There’s a moment during the Carlyle show when he repeats a famous line from Ira Levin‘s Deathtrap — “Nothing recedes like success”.) I also loved it when Johansen tells his stepdaughter about never having had a grand master plan for his life, and that he’s always considered his journey (Johansen is 73) in five-year increments.

Gene Hackman to director Barry Sonnenfeld immediately after seeing Get Shorty…

Shelley Winters, Marlon Brando during filming of A Streetcar Named Desire (early ’51).

Inebriated George Harrison about to throw contents of a mixed drink at a photographer inside West Hollywood’s Whiskey-a-Go-Go (August ’64).

Basil “Joe” Jagger and sons Chris (l.) and Mick (r.) — fall of ’56.

I’ve searched for years for authentic color snaps taken during the filming of The Young Lions (’58) — this is the only one I’ve ever discovered.

Anyone who would wear this peacock shirt is almost certainly beyond therapy:

“If the Democratic Party has a problem drawing young men who believe that the excesses of wokeness have left them behind, could there be a more appealing figure than the guy they’ve been watching argue about sports for the past decade?

“Over the past three months, Stephen A. Smith has teased a possible run for President in 2028. I have enthusiastically posted about this on social media for a variety of reasons, [although] the details of Smith’s potential run have shifted around a bit: In November, he told the hosts of The View that he was a ‘fiscal conservative and a social liberal,’ and, while he supported a ‘live and let live’ mentality, he wondered why liberals had allowed hot-button issues, like transgender athletes participating in sports, to define their platform.

“He also said that he would run as an independent because he wasn’t going to be ‘bought and paid for.’ Last week, when asked by his friend Sean Hannity about the possibility of a run — a subject that gained steam online after a survey of potential 2028 primary candidates showed him polling at two per cent, just a point behind the former Vice-Presidential candidate Tim Walz and the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro — Smith said that he could beat any Democratic candidate who was under consideration, including Kamala Harris.

“Smith is almost certainly a fiscal conservative, but people reposted a 2009 tweet of his that reads ‘I loved hearing Bernie Sanders. He personifies my views as an Independent.’

“Since the ’24 election, I have written about the need for a ‘hostile takeover’ of the Democratic Party and the potential for new candidates who stand far outside of the establishment’s tepid, catastrophic choices. The policy positions of these candidates, I believe, do not matter as long as they are within reason — which means that everything from full-bore leftist economic populism to staunch, performative centrism is on the table.

“Liberal voters are angry about pretty much everything right now. They’re mad that Joe Biden decided to run again for President; they’re mad at Washington insiders and the media for withholding information about Biden’s decline; they’re mad at some vague entity they usually call ‘the D.N.C.’ for not coming up with a better strategy to defeat Donald Trump; they’re mad that the Democrats have not put up more of a fight against Trump and Elon Musk post-election. All this alarm and losing has made Democratic politics a rather miserable and humorless endeavor.

“What’s required for 2028 is a combative, attention-grabbing candidate who can punch the Democratic establishment squarely in the face.” — The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang, posted on 2.14.25.

“Our sense of shame and regret is, today, immeasurable. Forgive us, President Zelensky, for having inflicted this idiot animal Trump upon you…and for permitting his little worthless idiot bitch Vance to ambush you that way…the human dignity in the White House right now is zero. We will never let Trump forget what he did to you today…we will make him atone…and all those who serve him and do not resign or disassociate themselves from him immediately. We the people of the United States of America will not live in a kleptocracy…in an idiocracy…in a Musk-ocracy.”

Set in Southern California of the mid ’50s and based on Shannon Pfahl’s same-titled novel, On Swift Horses is about a pair of good-looking hunks (Jacob Elordi, Diego Calva) chowing down on each other’s schlongs, and a simultaneous lezzy thing between Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sasha Calle. This is what we all need so badly in our lives right now…. a movie about homosexuals in love in the Eisenhower era!

If you were riveted by Martin Ritt‘s No Down Payment (’57) and were charmed by Olivia Wilde‘s Don’t Worry, Darling (’22), On Swift Horses (Sony Classics, 4.25) is sure to ring your bell, especially if you’re into same-sex saliva droolings…yeah!