Flaming Pablum

5 Things I'm Thankful For

With the strangest Thanksgiving in recent memory looming, it was a tense day here at Chez Pablum. The kids were bickering about invasions of their respective spaces during Zoom classes. I was on edge in the dining room with several important work projects pending, and playing a frenetic game of beat the clock. I regret to say that at certain points, voices were raised — and not for the purposes of extolling each others’ merits.

But, with the overriding themes of Turkey Day in mind — those being gratitude, family, humility and generosity, not gluttony, sloth and football — I thought it would be prudent to take a moment to reflect on the things I am indeed thankful for this year.

(5) I am very thankful for my network for friends who’ve kept in touch, kept me laughing and kept me arguably sane in the past several months. Whether online, on the phone or over a couple of socially distanced beverages, their counsel, good cheer and friendship has meant the world to me.

(4) I’m very thankful that while we’ve both been crazy busy, my wife and I have remained gainfully employed during this whole experience. We know some folks who haven’t been as fortunate in that capacity, and we genuinely thank our lucky goddamn stars that we’re still working and earning.

(3) Despite my grumblings at the top of this post about how we’re all getting on each others’ nerves, I feel entirely grateful to have been able to spend so much time with my family throughout this whole experience. Being that both of my kids are teenagers now, this would normally be an era wherein they’d be going well out of their way to spend as little time with their annoying parents as possible. Periodic lack of elbow-room notwithstanding, it’s been a lovely period of familial solidarity. I’m also crazy lucky to have the single greatest spouse in the world who puts up with my big-mouthed neuroses and abject idiocy.

(2) I am very grateful that no one in our immediate family has taken ill or worse during this period. I have a few friends who were infected a few months back, and another writer pal of mine who was just diagnosed with a positive. By all accounts, it’s a harrowing ride, and I am very thankful the bug hasn’t paid any of us a visit, as yet. That could all change of course, but so far, so good.

….but most of all, I am thankful that….

(1) DONALD TRUMP LOST THE ELECTION AND WILL SHORTLY BE VACATING THE WHITE HOUSE — POSSIBLY IN HANDCUFFS — ALONG WITH HIS SHITTY FAMILY AND HIS ABJECTLY FATUOUS ADMINISTRATION. IT’S OVER. HE LOST.

But back on the slightly less provocative subject of this coming Thanksgiving, my family and I will simply be celebrating this one at home here in the city. I will be on mashed-potato detail, being that it requires more blunt-force physical maintenance over nuanced culinary finesse.

My friend Dana posted the below on social media earlier this week, and I think it hits all the right notes.

Be safe. Be smarter and have a happy Thanksgiving.

So, I’m going to flip the Thanksgiving narrative, starting now…

...I am thrilled to eat Thanksgiving dinner with my immediate household this year.

We are going to cook the hell out of the meal.

We are going to get dressed up.

We are going to meet up with our families on Zoom.

We are going to talk about gratitude and all that feel-good Thanksgiving crap.

We are going to drink plenty.

We are going to play awesome music that makes us want to sing, and we will sing.

We are going to meet up with our friends on Zoom and play Cards Against Humanity and drink some more if we want.

We are going to eat dessert, and plenty of it.

We are going to go outside and look at the sky, howl at the moon, light a fire and think of all the people we love, looking at this same night sky on this same night.

We are going to shine thanks into every cell of our bodies, and out from there, impossible as it might seem.

We are going to celebrate like we don’t spend every hour of every day in the same household.

We are not going to regret, be sorry, apologize, be upset because we can’t do what we usually do.

We are going to thank the Hell out of this Thanksgiving.

That’s my declaration of Thanksgiving.

So, suck it, COVID. Suck it, 2020.

Farewell to the Fury

I don't believe he spoke a single line of dialogue, and he basically had his ass handed to him entirely by foul-mouthed Ajax, but I was sad to learn that veteran stuntman Jery Hewitt -- who played the lead representative of the Baseball Furies in Walter Hill's 1979 urban combat epic, "The Warriors" -- just passed away. 

I've written about my love for "The Warriors" a few times here (find those links here), but suffice to say, if you are of a certain age, let alone a New Yorker, it's a pivotal film for a lot of people. 

Here's Hewitt's big scene on the mean streets of the Upper West Side. Pour one out for the great man. 

Looking for the Lost Luncheonette

Back in June, I posted a vaguely convoluted post about a gig poster from one of the final shows at The Cooler. In an attempt to tie several disparate elements together, I wrote this paragraph:

As it happened, that weird Ukranian disco was actually a weird Bulgarian disco called Mehanata. You can see snippets of the interior of that place in the video for “Start Wearing Purple” by Gogol Bordello. Gogol Bordello, incidentally, then counted guitarist Eugene Kaplan in its ranks, although Eugene also played for both Firewater and Botanica. Mehanata, meanwhile, was located directly over the former location of Dave’s Luncheonette, a fabled diner for the Mudd Club set which briefly made a cameo in the video for “Jukebox Baby" by Alan Vega of Suicide. See? It’s all related

I invariably patted myself on the back for connecting all those dots. But, alas, I had one detail wrong.

While it’s completely true that Mehanata then occupied the same building as the former Dave’s Luncheonette, the fabled all-night diner that was indeed a regular haunt of the Mudd Club crowd, the diner depicted in Alan Vega’s “Jukebox Baby” was not, in fact Dave’s. How do I know that? Well, for a start, let’s watch that video again.

How do I know that’s not Dave’s? Well, on one Facbook group I’m a member of, someone posted the below photograph of mid-80’s British pop combo, JoBoxers, standing manfully in front of Dave’s. See that picture below.

Okay, so on both the north-facing facade (“Luncheonette”) and westerly-facing facade (“Restaurant”) of Dave’s, the neon signage is very distinctive. Look again at the eatery Vega’s in, and you get totally different signage — much less ornate.

Put simply, it’s not the same place. But it still looked so familiar.

And then it hit me.

The luncheonette Vega’s depicted in is the same luncheonette depicted on the sleeve of the first 8 Eyed Spy record.

…..which begs the question: Where is that luncheonette? Does it even exist anymore? 

Have at it, sleuths. 

Thanks, But No Thanks ... giving

As Turkey Day looms, the CDC bluntly suggested that no one should travel this particular holiday. Is that a bummer? Certainly, but think about it. We essentially cancelled Halloween, right? No one went — or no one should have went — to parties, parades or trick or treating. It sucked, but it’s what had to happen. Thanksgiving? Same deal. Yeah, it’s no fun, but have your turkey at home and tell Aunt Jean you’ll see her next year. It’s not that complicated, nor is it really that much of a sacrifice.

But, no. If the last nine months have demonstrated anything, it’s that a vast swath of the American populace is stupid, obstinate, arrogant and weak, and determined to fuck it up for the rest of us. It’s poised to make the outbreak after Sturgis seem like a damp fart.

I, of course, would love to blithely assert that we here in New York have it all figured out, but of course we don’t. The infection rate is climbing here, too, which is wholly dispiriting. Schools are reverting back to all-remote learning plans and some small businesses already struggling to keep up with the changing topography are just throwing in the towel entirely. Restaurants across town that have been building, re-building and customizing their sidewalk sheds with heat lamps are feeling the two-pronged pinch of earlier closing-time mandates and the inevitable patron-scaring power of the winter chill, which will put the kibosh on just about any al-fresco dining scenario. When that option is curtailed, there will be more places shuttering for good.

Sure, there is good news on the vaccine front, but effective distribution of same will still take time. And with lame-duck Donald doing pretty much everything he can to sabotage any proactive attempts by the rightfully incoming administration to address the problem Trump has long neglected, downplayed and flat-out abandoned — at the expense of thousands of American lives, let’s remember — the prospects of “rounding the curve” any time soon are not exactly within reach. We still have a ways to go.

Bottom line: Things fucking suck. And they suck because lots of people didn’t listen. They should be listening now. But, some still won’t.

Stay home this Thanksgiving. Cook your own turkey and have a Zoom call with your far-flung relatives. That doesn’t mean you’re “living in fear,” it means you’re demonstrating compassionate consideration for your loved ones.

And wear a fucking mask.

The Schmoo, The Mish & Tim the Buddhist Bootist

I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about downtown Manhattan’s once-thriving network of independent record shops in several weepy, sepia-toned posts about stores like Rebel Rebel, Rocks in Your Head, Second Coming Records, Bleecker Bob’s, Venus Records, St. Marks Sounds, Subterranean Records, Other Music, Bleecker Street Records, Disc-O-Rama and It’s Only Rock N’ Roll and several others. From the mid-80’s until about into the early 2000’s, my best friend from high school, Rob D. and I used to routinely hit these shops on a circuit we inexplicably referred to as “the Schmoo.” If we were “out schmooing,” that meant we were invariably rifling through the bins at any of these above spots — or other’s like Route 66, Rockit Scientist, Kim’s, Golden Disc, Record Factory or Freebeing — trying to meet our insatiable need for new music.

But there were other stops on our circuit, a crucial one being at the Pizza Box on Bleecker Street to wolf down slices while examining our spoils. As with all of the concerns cited above, that — too — is gone. To be fair, a paltry handful of our former regular haunts still hang on today, those being Record Runner, Generation Records, Academy Records and Downtown Music Gallery, but one would be remiss to suggest that their respective prospects were especially promising in 2020. That’s just the way it is.

But from around 1987 to late 1988, we had another regular stop.

If you stand on the southeast corner of West 8th Street on Sixth Avenue — basically right in front of the hulking space that formerly housed a Barnes & Noble and a B. Dalton books before that — and look south, you’ll probably still see a bunch of folks selling dubious shit on the sidewalks. Old magazines, DVDs, vinyl LPs, books and other largely weathered ephemera are periodically up for sale along this strip even today. But back in the 80’s, it was a much more robust ersatz marketplace, one that stretched as far down as the basketball courts on West 3rd.

I don’t remember how we first happened upon him, but Rob and I came to know a young merchant on this strip named Tim. An unassuming kid from somewhere on the Upper West Side — usually sporting a mammoth pair of headphones — Tim was in the business of selling bootleg cassettes. For the layperson, this means illegal live recordings of the same variety that got nearby Second Coming Records in trouble (as discussed at greater length here). We’d show up about once a week and check out Tim’s little briefcase of offerings, immaculately presented in alphabetical order and all marked with the inky font of a thick black sharpie. Like ourselves, Tim was especially besotted with a few specific bands, and his stock leaned heavily in those directions. For whatever reason, his two favorite bands were the Minutemen and the Sisters of Mercy, but he also had tapes by ancillary acts like fIREHOSE and my then-faves in The Mission, along with sundry recordings by bands like U2, The Cult and The Cure. We were very clearly his target demographic, and frequently availed ourselves to his wares.

In the middle of penning this post, I heard from Rob and he informed me that we once went to Tim’s evidently sprawling townhouse on the Upper West Side, but I have absolutely no recollection of that whatsoever. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I just don’t remember it.

In any case, the one specific tape I remember buying off our Tim in May or June of 1987 was a pristine, soundboard recording of The Mission playing a gig I very bitterly missed at The Ritz on East 11th Street in just that previous April. I’d missed the show in question being that I was away at school when the band drunkenly plowed into town. Capturing the Mish at the hoary height of their powers, it featured roaring runs through their early singles, a few odd covers and tracks from their debut LP, God’s Own Medicine, including a lungful reading of “Wake,” a throaty middle-finger to their former taskmaster Andrew Eldritch of The Sisters of Mercy. I played the absolute shit out of that tape, taking it with me a bike trip across Western Europe, managing not to lose it in any number of grotty youth hostels along the way. I absolutely cherished it. Much like the XTC tape I discussed the other day, I still have it, although nothing to play it on. But sadly, unlike the XTC tape, I’ve never found a recording of the Mission at The Ritz in April of 1987 anywhere else. Not on disc. Not on YouTube. Nothing.

Anyway, sometime after all this, we again happened upon Tim on Sixth Avenue again while schmooing. At this stage, he mentioned that he was considering giving up the whole bootleg cassette venture. We earnestly tried to urge him to stick with it, but he informed us of a growing spiritual investment in Tibetan Buddhism. In short order, Tim fully renounced his materialistic endeavors, and stopped showing up to ply his cassettes.

We never saw him again.

No More Egg Creams

The space that was once Gem Spa, as photographed yesterday evening. 

Just a Moment, Please...

Apologies for the lull in activity here. I’m having some persistent trouble with broken images on the page, which probably vexes me more than it does you. But I’m disinclined to put more stuff up if it’s not going to look as it should.

 

Once that issue is fixed, it’ll be back to business as usual.

 

Thanks for your patience & understanding,

- The Management

Take a Moment...

..to enjoy the season. 

A Helpful Reminder

Martin Says

The first time I ever saw Martin Atkins was probably via the video for Public Image Ltd.’s “Bad Life,” wherein he was fleetingly depicted dancing disjointedly behind John Lydon’s insistent mugging. Who he was in the grand scheme of things, at the time, probably didn’t occur to me, as by that point, PiL had basically become the John Lydon show, despite the fact that Atkins had essentially become the main musical force behind the operation in the wake of the inevitably acrimonious departures of PiL alumni Jeanette Lee, Keith LeVene, Jah Wobble and Jim Walker. Shortly after that, Atkins and Lydon hastily assembled a new iteration of the band and toured Japan, which spawned their perfunctorily titled live album, Live in Tokyo.

While both that particular line-up of the band and the ensuing live album were roundly derided by music critics and Public Image acolytes alike — not to mention the band themselves — Live in Tokyo was something of a crucial release for me. I have very vivid memories of a laborious car trip to the Berkshires with a cousin one snowy January weekend, and we only had two cassettes — one was my “well-loved” (read: battered) copy of Live in Tokyo, and the other was my cousin’s incongruous selection, Tales from The Topographic Ocean by proggy stalwarts, Yes, a fractious sonic dichotomy to be sure (although, somewhat ironically, original PiL guitarist Keith LeVene is purportedly a massive Yes fan). To be fair, I, too, am a sizable Yes fan, but decidedly not of that particularly ponderous record. My repeated airings of PiL’s scathing romp through “Analisa” — to say nothing of my insistence on singing along — did little to make the trip any smoother.

Some time after that, Martin Atkins also jumped ship from the ranks of Public Image Ltd., joining a growingly august legion of musicians who found working in close proximity with John Lydon an untenable scenario. Apart from a single or two by his own band, Brian Brain, Martin Atkins didn’t pop back onto my radar until news broke that he was joining my favorite band, Killing Joke. Despite having previously atrophied into a duo of vocalist Jaz Coleman and guitarist Geordie Walker for the divisive Outside the Gate, Killing Joke had geared up for a bracing return to their feral former sound and recruited Atkins to replace the burly rhythmic battery of Big Paul Ferguson. While Martin’s frenetic drumming style was markedly different from Ferguson’s tribal whallop, the injection of the PiL veteran’s aggressive approach and manic energy reinvigorated Killing Joke, and the ensuing recorded results remain some of the band’s finest work.

I just realized that this post is turning into a sprawling re-telling to the great man's bio, which is not what I intended it to be. I actually interviewed Martin a couple of times (the first detailed here), and went onto meet him in Killing Joke circles over the years. He's an exceptionally knowledgable and affable gent. In case you're curious as to what he did after his tenure in Killing Joke, let me wrap that up by saying he formed several impactful bands like Murder Inc., Pigface and The Damage Manual, when not lending his percussive prowess to bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. 

In any case, Martin just recently hooked up with my comrade Drew Stone of New York Hardcore Chronicles fame and had an amazing and informative chat this afternoon, touching on much of the above and so much more. Stick around for the anecdote about a physical altercation with GG Allin. 

Check it out below!!!