Flaming Pablum

Let's Get Down To It, Boppers: Exhuming "The Warriors"

If you were a pre-adolescent male growing up in the 1970’s, chances are that even the slightest invocation of Walter Hill’s “The Warriors” from 1979 will prompt you to dutifully and emphatically spout off any number of memorable declarations, from “CAN YOU DIG IT?” to “COME OUT TO PLAAYAY!” and beyond. I asserted as much in my typically overwritten review of the inaccurately titled “Ultimate Director’s Cut” from 2005. Put simply, “The Warriors” may be very silly, but it’s a very silly classic, by gosh.

I still remember first spying the movie poster (see below) and practically hyperventilating with anticipation (the next time I’d undergo such a sensation would be upon seeing the full-page ad for Alan Parker’s cinematic adaptation of “Pink Floyd The Wall” a few years later). You have to remember, this was all way before the Internet. Unless you were a dutiful reader of industry tip sheets, you often wouldn’t know about an impending album or movie or whathaveyou until the first run of promotional materials hit the media. As such, upon seeing the poster for “The Warriors” (notably the unmistakably KISS-alluding member of the Baseball Furies), it immediately became the highest of possible priorities to see this movie.

At the time, “The Warriors” seemed impossibly gritty, violent and nightmarish, amplifying the very real brutality of these New York City streets. As I mentioned in that review, these many decades later, the depiction of New York City in “The Warriors” seems surreal, fanciful and, for a lack of a better word, quaint.

Regardless, “The Warriors” remains an all-time favorite of the era. Imagine my glee, then, upon seeing that another one of my favorite blogs, Scouting New York, had turned its laser-precise eye on the locations of “The Warriors.” Ever wonder where Cyrus was actually shot or where the Orphans’ meager turf was or where the Turnbull A.C.s got served? Find those answers and more over the next few days at Scouting New York. Find the first installment here.

More NYC movie stuff? Sure: 

Top Eleven Favorite Movies Filmed In & Depicting NYC
Long After "After Hours"
Back to Woody's SoHo
Stranger Still Than "Stranger Than Paradise"
It's a Shame About "Sam"
Exhuming "The Cruise"

Meet the Meat

Spend enough time on this blog, or on Jeremiah Moss' Vanishing New York or EV Grieve and you'll invariably hear one of us lament about how the Meat Packing District used to be such an endearingly rough & tumble backwater, steeped in its own brand of nightlife and culture. That's all been obliterated today. More so than the East Village or SoHo or even Times Square, the Meat Packing District's radical facelift is easily the most severe of this city's transformation over the last twenty-five years.

Walk around the MPD now, and you're bound to feel either underdressed or underfabulous and inevitably made nauseous by what you see. But back in the late 80's and 90's, it was an indescribably different scene.

I've mentioned the area a few times. Joints like The Village Idiot, The Hog Pit, The Cooler were favorites of mine back in the day. I even darkened the already-very-dark doors of The Vault once or twice. Don't bother looking for any of them now, they've all been shuttered and replaced by posh shops, ritzy restaurants and hoighty-toighty hotels.

But one of my favorite photoblogs, Gregoire Alessandrini's New York City 1990's recently put up a selection of photographs of the Meat Packing District as it looked, well, in the 1990s. If you're only familiar with the neighborhood as it looks today from the byways of the High Line, you're in for a shock. Buckle up, and take a ride through streets that stink of rotting meat (meat often left out on the sidewalk) where the only other individuals you're likely to encounter on the pavement are trannies, prostitutes, bikers, bondage aficionados and real New Yorkers.

Of all of Gregoire's photos, I chose the one up top as I vividly remember that cartoony rendering of Edward G. Robinson. Can't quite pinpoint the address anymore. And I love the below Vault sign (although the entrance the Vault was actually about a block away from there, if memory serves).

SAMO© is Dead

"For this film, rather than making a direct homage to Basquiat's work, the filmmakers decided instead to try to re-create the world, which spawned SAMO."

Previously on Flaming Pablum... as spotted in Courtlandt Alley...

Friday Flashback

Back in the nascent days of MTV, I vividly remember getting in a heated debate with my friend Ted about the location of this video. Based on the glitz and glamor of the setting, I remember asserting that the ritzy New York City hotel wherein the narrative of this videos plays out in must be the fabled Plaza on 59th Street. Ted, meanwhile, was ADAMANT -- despite being from New Jersey and never spending huge amounts of time in Manhattan himself -- that the Plaza Hotel did not have big floral planters outside its entrance. I'm not quite sure why this was all such a huge deal to us as the time, but I think it almost came to fisticuffs at one point. We were little hot-tempered kids back then.

Decades later, Wikipedia asserts that Ted was right. The hotel in question is the St. Regis on East 55th.

Ted, I owe you a milkshake.

The Search for the SoHo Stencil: I FOUND IT!

Okay, here's one that probably matters to only three or four people (I being one of them) at most, but I just thought I'd close the circle on it

This past February, some of you may remember a selection of posts wherein I discussed the screengrab above, a still from the late Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia." Originally, I posted this as a quiz to see if anyone could correctly identify the corner upon which ol' Spalding was waiting. In characteristically detailed fashion, Bob Egan of Popspots weighed in in March and pinpointed the spot (largely thanks to its cracked pavements) to be the northeast corner where Grand intersects with Wooster (in SoHo, obviously).

While that riddle was solved, I was positively vexed by a more elusive one that the picture boasted, that being the street art depicted behind Spalding. Back in the 80's, I vividly remember that stenciled image of an Asian man's head with slightly spiky hair to be everywhere around the streets of SoHo. I have no idea what it meant (an ambitious artist's self-portrait?), but it was all over the place. In addition, I recalled a parody of the image that was also everywhere at the time, that being a depiction of the same guy after being shot in the head.

I spent a couple more posts moaning about them, trying to find someone else who remembered them, but no one bit. I combed through veritable tomes of SoHo street art, reached out to friends of mine who are more street-art-savvy than I, but kept coming up empty. I was starting to think it was all just some unattainable fragment of the past I'd never find further evidence of.

Until last night!

I went back to a entry I'd published back in July of 2010 for no readily apparent reason. I'd brazenly lifted a photo from one Leo London's Flickr feed because it invoked a seemingly long-forgotten NYC punk band (that being Falafel Mafia). London was nice enough to weigh in and express gratitude that I'd appreciated the pic. But then, I started re-investigating his collection, and was I was practically blown out of my chair when I stumbled upon a single image that had everything I needed. That image is below.

London says that this photo was taken in October of 1990, but doesn't specify the address. Check out the selection of stencil's on the wall behind the blurry-faced figure, and you'll see that same original stencil, the mock, ominous shot-in-the-head ("End the Joke - Die For Your Art") stencil and even a second parody featuring a face that I'm interpreting as Keith Haring.

Wherever this location is, I'm dead sure these images have long since been washed off in the ensuing twenty-four years. But there they were.

Down On The Street

“Look out, honey, `cos I’m usin’ technology!”

The other day on Get Back to Work, I put up a fun little shot that I’d spotted on Tumblr of Iggy Pop sitting on what looked like it might be the Bowery or 14th Street. In turn, the mighty J. Yuenger re-posted it, but also tracked down another photo presumably from the same shoot, that being the one above.

Taken by the late Ken Regan in 1984, here we see Ig composing on a primitive word-processor, perhaps hashing out some lyrics that would later appear on 1986’s Blah Blah Blah. Glance twice and you’ll notice that his Igness is seated just around the corner from the Bowery on Houston, in front of the frequently re-tooled mural wall that was formerly adjacent to Billy’s Antiques. It being 1984, Iggy’s looking comparatively young and spry, while the world around him looks to be in some disrepair. Stroll down that block today and it’s markedly different.

These days, you might be more likely to see Mr. Pop slumming around this neighborhood with fatuous fashionista and rocker-wannabe, John Varvatos.

Can anyone name the location in this shot, though?

Stuff You Might Have Missed

Just a truly random assortment of music stuff that caught my interest.

• An interesting documentary about the late Malcolm McLaren and another really cool one about Iggy Pop. 
• A cool clip from a few years back by a band called The Coathangers, who kick a bit of ass.
• A brand new video by the mighty Queens of the Stone Age.
• A great quality, vintage clip of the Boomtown Rats doing “Someone’s Lookin’ At You” for a TV spot.
• A nice piece from The Quietus circa 2011 wherein Alan Wilder of Depeche Mode/Recoil cites his favorite albums, including some nice ruminations about the sorely under-praised, latter-era albums by Talk Talk.
• A  nice video profile on John Joseph of the Cro-Mags, hosted by L.E.S. legend Clayton Patterson.
• I can’t remember if I’d pointed to this before or not, but Jim Coleman (a.k.a Phylr or Cripple Jim from Cop Shoot Cop) has an excellent blog worth your perusal.
• Speaking of Cop Shoot Cop, check out ZNo’s very metal cover of the band’s classic “Shine On, Elizabeth.”
• A super-rare (or super-rare in that I’ve never seen it) clip of XTC ripping through “Science Friction.”
• Joe Jackson talks emphatically about how not being able to smoke in bars is what drove him out of New York City.
• From Cracked.com, 5 True Stories that Shatter Your Image of Famous Rock Icons. Brutal, but really hilariously written.

Word on the Street

Spotted in Chinatown this afternoon...

The Last Word

Coffee Table Anarchy Deux: Punk Rock, Mom & Me

A sequel-of-sorts to this post from last year.

From the much-ballyhooed Metropolitan Museum exhibit on "Punk Couture" to the Bloomingdale’s thing to the CBGB movie, I’m getting a little tired of hearing about what Punk supposedly is/was from people who wouldn’t know the Dickies from the Dead Boys. When crucial landmarks like CBGB and, for that matter, Bleecker Bob’s can no longer exist, Punk is fucking dead in New York City, regardless of what Anna Wintour might be trying to tell you. And you’ll never find punk – sonically, aesthetically, attitudinally --- if you’re searching at places like the Metropolitan Museum or friggin’ Bloomingdales.

But in keeping with this tenor of the times (granted, punk nostalgia is pretty much a constant here on Flaming Pablum, although I do strive for pedantic accuracy) and being that this Sunday is Mother’s Day, I thought I’d dust off a little anecdote that involves both Punk Rock and … my mom.

Let’s go back to 1979…

By 1979, “Punk” was an established term, but it was an amorphous one. The Sex Pistols had flamed out messily, but the floodgates had been thoroughly kicked open and things were happening all over the map. All the same, while your average guy on the street knew the word, "Punk" still packed something of a scary, negative punch. The notion that, decades later, it would be the subject of a pricey fashion gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art would probably have prompted hysterics along the Bowery. As I mentioned in this post, in 1979, the very word “Punk” was still used as a shadowy pejorative.

Now, I’d love to say that while all this was going on, I was insouciantly hanging out at the Mudd Club with Lux Interior and Lydia Lunch, but the fact of the matter is that in 1979, I was a little twelve-year-old, seventh grade twit living with my family on the Upper East Side. As I mentioned in that earlier post, I was gradually nurturing my music fandom and exploring Punk Rock via comparatively established touchstones like the Ramones, The Clash, Devo and `Pistols, but things were now happening at a rapid rate, new scenes were developing and the term itself was mutating. But that was all happening outside of our apartment on East 93rd Street.

Up until that point, my mother had never been especially sympathetic to my musical tastes. While she certainly didn’t mind the Beatle records that my older sister Vicky and I had appropriated from her (I still find it hard to believe that my mother bought her own copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), she pretty much had zero tolerance for -- much less interest in -- my beloved KISS. Vicky had brought some early, crucial records by Blondie, the B-52s and The Police into the house, but what my mother knew of “Punk” all came straight from the headlines, and none of it was positive. She equated “PUNK ROCK” with safety-pins through the nostrils, talentless caterwauling, projectile vomiting and rampant, indiscriminate defecation (almost as if she’d willed GG Allin’s act into existence sheerly by the power of her imagination). “PUNK” was pointedly not something my mother was ever going to enjoy, endorse or ever try to understand.

That point is precisely why this one specific afternoon in 1979 sticks out in my head as so significant.

I walked in from school on some random Tuesday or Wednesday to find my mother in the living room in her usual spot. At the time, my mom had a nifty little sideline in painting ties. She painted other stuff too – like hats and belts and pillows and shit like that, but her big thing was ties. This being the heyday of the preppy (Lisa Birnbach’s jokey “Official Preppy Handbook” would be published a year later), Mom would paint things like little tennis-playing frogs or Canada geese with Christmas wreaths around their necks on neckties and sell them through a few insufferably precious little shops around the Upper East Side with names like The Wicker Garden and the like. Sure, it sounds awfully twee, but Mom made a nice little pile doing it for a while.

In any case, there was Mom with all her stuff set up. She'd sit at a little card table in the center of the room with a selection of brushes and paints and a mason jar filled with water. Around the room were ties and sun-hats and pillow cases all whimsically designed with frogs playing golf, mice drinking martinis, pigs playing tennis, etc., all drying. Directly in front of her was the television. Under normal circumstances, Mom would watch some Channel 13 stuff or a talk show (admirably, she was never into the soap opera scene). We had cable, but this was prior to the era of CNN and twenty-four hour news channels.

As I walked into the room, I was struck by the sound of the Boomtown Rats' "I Don't Like Mondays." On the screen in front of us, Bob Geldof, Johnny Fingers and the rest of the `Rats were sneerily lip-synching to their signature anthem in what looked like a classroom. In retrospect, this may have been my very first viewing of a proper music video ... a good year or so before the launch of MTV.

"Mom?" I asked with some trepidation, worried that I might prompt her to turn the channel, "what are you watching?" Mom was only half-paying attention to the screen while painting the outline of a frolicking piglet on a necktie. "This is some program about Punk Rock," she said with wobbly, dramatically derisive emphasis. Admirably, Mom's intellectual curiosity was overriding her already-established prejudices.

As if on cue, the cable channel presenting said selection cued up a new clip of a band dressed like court jesters, ripping with comical velocity through a clangy cover the Moody Blues' stodgy, classic-rock warhorse, "Nights in White Satin." I plunked down my bookbag and assumed the floor about a foot away from the screen, amazed that I was seeing this stuff and doubly-amazed that I was watching it with my mom, of all people. When it was revealed that the the ensemble in question were called "The Dickies," I believe Mom let out an emphatic "Oh, for God's sake."

I didn't want the show to stop. Here was this amazing portal into a new world I'd already started discovering, but with all these new names and new sounds I hadn't yet heard of. The next clip in the rotation was by a band out of Philadelphia called The A's. Mom immediately chimed in with a "I bet I know what the A stands for!", seeming to suggest that these comparatively innocuous Philly power-popsters really wanted to call themselves "The Anuses." This insinuation coupled with the band's pouty preening firmly solidified The A's as my mother's least favorite act of the broadcast, and in retrospect, she was pretty spot-on. The A's never really amounted to much.

But it was what turned out to be the final video of the show (or at least the final video that my mother could tolerate) that really made the biggest impression. Against a black backdrop, this strangely solitary figure dressed in a shiny, radioactive suit started strutting around to a halting, staccato guitar riff. "I'M BORED... I'M THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BORED!" announced the singer, with a bug-eyed, pugnacious ferocity, his twitchy dancing and elastic writhing getting more spastic as the song built up steam. This, of course, was my first real taste of the force of supernature that is Iggy Pop. It was truly unlike anything I'd ever seen, and I couldn't take my eyes off of it.

Between Ig's menacing glare and the song's nihilistic message, however, my mom decided she'd had her fill and turned it off, invariably feeling that her initial hunches had been correct all along.

I, meanwhile, was newly hooked. And it would only get more severe from there.