Arthur D. Hlavaty

Newark Airport is opening a restaurant called CBGB, and a number of my friends are offended. My first reaction, I’m afraid, was an unwholesome snicker. The original CBGB opened some years after the music died, or more precisely some years after I hit the stage of musical senility where the reactionary oppressor music my elders liked was starting to sound better than the noise those kids listen to, and I had no love for CBGB and no objection to seeing it commercially mocked.

I had seen it happening in my formative years when otherwise reasonable grownups thought that Little Richard was some kind of tiny dick, and I knew there had been a similar phenomenon in the previous generation: Robertson Davies, in his younger years (yes, he had younger years), had written a piece about how swing was not some barbarous animalistic noise and the lyrics of its stupider songs were no stupider than those of the previous generation.

It happened to me anyway, but in my more lucid moments I remember that it’s about me and not about the music, so let me pass along the words of two of those who want to put a jinx on it:

If Newark Airport really wants to offer the CBGB experience they better let me piss and puke on people and allow people to shoot up in the bathroom.–Bart Calendar

It makes perfect sense. CBGB was opened in a squalid, hellish, rundown place that nobody sane would want to go to.

That's a reasonable description of Newark Airport.-Dave Weingart