Flaming Pablum

Cop Swap Cop: Another Track from EXCOP

Back in 2016, as discussed here, former members of my beloved Cop Shoot Cop (minus Tod Ashley, who was at home in Turkey, at the time) briefly reconvened for a benefit for Martin Bisi's fabled recording studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn. The gents partook in a jam session of sorts with former SWANS bassist Algis Kyzis filling in for Tod on second bass. Parts of that session were featured on a BC35 commemorative disc, credited to the name EXCOP. 

Some time later, -- around this time last year, really -- the release of that disc was celebrated at Brooklyn's St. Vitus with a live showcase, featuring EXCOP pummeling through an entirely improvisational set -- sort of like a burlier version of Spinal Tap's jazz odyssey without founding guitarist Nigel Tufnel. That's them above. It was a very festive occasion. 

Now, here in 2019, a second disc is surfacing -- BC35 Volume Two -- that features another great track from the original session. To celebrate same, EXCOP even cooked up a frankly disquieting video, replete with footage from the original session, spliced between unsettling snippets of all sorts of stuff. Easy viewing it is not, but what were you really expecting? 

Learn more here, but -- in the interim -- enjoy the video:

Good Friday

Whatever you're celebrating this weekend, ... make it a good one.

Word on The Street

Back to the P&G

I spotted the below photo on the excellent Tumblr, NYC Nostalgia (refreshingly unencumbered with any blogger’s guilt about being unabashedly nostalgic, or “pasturbatory” as Kembra Pfahler of the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black might say), and it put the hook in me.

This is, of course, as shot of the ol’ P&G Bar & Grill, which formerly stood on the northeast corner of West 73rd and Amsterdam Avenue. I’ve mentioned it a few times, notably here, here and here, but it was an excellent spot.

This photo was taken in 1980. I haven't been in that neck of the woods in an age but today, I gather, it’s a Blue Bottle Coffee franchise.

Notre Dame in Flames

I spotted the quote below on the Metropolitan Museum's Facebook page, and I think it pretty much sums it up:

“Notre-Dame Cathedral is the very soul of Paris but so much more—it is a touchstone for all that is the best about the world, and a monument to the highest aspirations of artistic achievement that transcends religion and time. It has survived so much—from the French Revolution to Nazi occupation—to watch its devastation is excruciating.”

– Barbara Drake Boehm, Paul and Jill Ruddock Senior Curator for The Met Cloisters

After Hours AOC

Despite appearances to the contrary, this post is not really about AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but — since I just invoked her — I might as well concede that I think she’s pretty great. Sure, she’s young and probably still has a lot to learn about the office she now holds, but anyone who is capable of speaking truth to power with her level of conviction — to say nothing about causing so much angst and indigestion among key figures on the Right — is a-okay with me. You, of course, may beg to differ. That’s all.

In any case, a friend of mine recently posted the above photo on Facebook of AOC, posing with her signature, unblinking intensity on a weathered New York City stoop, her impeccably sharp, green ensemble creating a striking dichotomy with her otherwise rough-hewn surroundings. At first glance, I found it strangely familiar, but then I realized … there are doubtlessly thousands of stoops just like the one she’s depicted sitting on.

Then I thought back to an evening several weeks back. I was going to meet some out-of-towner friends who now live on the other side of the globe. They were briefly back in the city for a wedding, so we decided to meet up an at age-old favorite haunt, the Ear Inn on the westerly edges of Spring Street.

I’ve mentioned the Ear a few times here. It passively vies for the title “Oldest Bar in New York City” in meaningless competition with joints like Pete’s Tavern and McSorley’s, although — to my mind — it’s way better than either of those over-hyped establishments. Whether it’s genuinely the oldest bar in New York means nothing to me. It’s just a great place to meet friends and have a few beers. Long may it stay that way.

In any case, because I’m deeply neurotic and punctual to a fault, I arrived in the neighborhood ahead of schedule, which left me plenty of time to roam around the surrounding environs before assuming my place at the bar.

Time was when part of the Ear’s charm was that it was in such a remote, desolate backwater of a neighborhood. Apart from a deli or two, a couple of fellow bars (notably McGovern’s and the Emerald Inn) and, later, rock club Don Hill’s, there was practically nothing. The streets were empty and quiet. It’s for this reason that Martin Scorsese chose this patch of SoHo for many of the locations in “After Hours,” because it exuded such an eerily quiet, empty ambiance.

Suffice to say, this is no longer the case in 2019. These days, the westerly edges of Spring Street are a densely populated Emerald City of exclusive condos and monied luxury. Somehow, the Ear Inn has managed to hold on, but the days of it being a remote outpost are decidedly over.

This all said, there are still whispery elements of the neighborhood’s old vibe, if you look hard enough for them. As I circumnavigated the area on foot, I snapped a few pictures, trying to capture that rarified essence of place.

Circling the block on Renwick Street, just a street to the east of the Ear Inn, I came upon a certain stoop at the tail end of the building that formerly housed the Emerald Inn, the bar Scorsese re-cast as the Terminal Bar for “After Hours” (which I wrote about back here). I was struck by how grim and forbidding the stoop in question looked, so, I took a picture.

Sure enough, it’s the same stoop AOC was photographed on. Now, what was she doing there?

Hell if I know.

The Blowout: Renovation Complete

For those of you following along with this epic saga,...

Renovation has concluded on the kids' room blowout, successfully widening their chamber by a few, crucial feet. Things have been plastered and painted and now look more or less finished. This is not to say, however, that we're all done.

Our next task involves dismantling the bunkbed (still in use, as seen above), settling on new furniture (the wife is pushing for two elevated loft beds, while I'm pushing for one elevated loft bed and one "captain's bed," with drawers underneath) and divining the most advantageous configuration thereof.

After that, out will go the remnants of my desk (also still there) and the re-imagining of the living room space will commence, ideally accommodating our stuff in a practical and intuitive fashion within the newly-diminished space.

Should you care about such things, please stay tuned. 

 

Scrutinizing "Punk Lust" at the Museum of Sex

I wasn’t going to post about it, originally, but since a few people keep invoking it, I might as well throw in my two cents.

I’m talking, of course, about the Museum of Sex’s sorta-new “Punk Lust” retrospective.

I’d seen the posters advertising it for weeks, featuring a gratuitously cleavage-heavy shot of Alice Bag of storied L.A. punk bad, The Bags. Given my interest in the subject matter -– Punk Rock, not cleavage, although I do technically enjoy both -– I figured I should eventually go check it out. Four or five weeks back, I had an afternoon to myself, so I strolled up to 27th street and Fifth to have a look at “Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985.”

Obviously, Punk Rock means many different things to many different people. A movement and a subculture predicated on renunciation, Punk smeared itself across a wide spectrum that extends far beyond simply music and fashion. While I’d sooner associate wanton carnality with certain other musical and/or cultural movements -– specifically disco and some of the less salubrious aspects of heavy metal -– sex, sexual politics, sexual identity and sexual expression all played their part within the much-ballyhooed parameters of all things Punk.

As such, this exhibit focusses on what I’d consider more of the obvious touchstones (although why they settled on this rather arbitrary time-span -- `71 to `85 –- pretty much eludes me). In a nutshell, while there were fleeting things I’d never seen before (details below), I didn’t really encounter anything too surprising.

This was my first trip to Manhattan’s Museum of Sex. While, sure, I’d been mildly curious, the whole endeavor has always seemed pretty silly. I couldn’t imagine myself paying an admission fee to go see an exhibit of “Dildos Through the Ages,” or some such. But slap the label “PUNK” on something, and I’m sure to show up, sooner or later.

Up three flights of stairs, you enter a reasonably large room adorned with myriad posters, photographs, record sleeves and other period-specific ephemera underscoring sexually-charged elements of Punk Rock both obvious and comparatively nuanced. Of course, there’s a whole big focus on Malcolm McLaren’s SEX shop, the very name “Sex Pistols” and the British scene’s strangely anemic associations with bondage gear (the `Pistols famously penned “Submission” at the behest of McLaren, but the lyrics were all about a submarine expedition). There are a few of Vivian Westwood’s naughty t-shirts, a giant-sized poster of the Cut album cover by the Slits (featuring the band topless and slathered in mud, in case you're unfamiliar), plus invocations of stuff like "Pay to Cum" by Bad Brains, “Love Comes in Spurts” by Richard Hell, “Orgasm Addict” by Buzzcocks, “Whip in My Valise” by Adam & the Ants, etc.

This all said, it’s all pretty obvious. I didn’t really need a museum to inform me about the sexual connotations of “Can Your Pussy Do The Dog?” by the Cramps.

To its credit, the show does display the original magazine photo-spreads of Gaye Advert (of The Adverts …. duh!) and Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle, two suitably provocative punk luminaries who posed nude for men’s magazines, back in the day. I had legitimately never seen those before, although to look at them preserved under glass like artifacts from ancient Egypt was a somewhat strange experience.

I will say this, though -– and here’s where my laboriously-well-established penchant for being insufferably pedantic rears its ugly head once more. If you’re going to invoke the particulars of Punk Rock -– even if historical minutia isn’t the thrust of your exhibit -– it’s in your best interest to get your facts right.

FOR EXAMPLE….

In their inevitable invocation of the Plasmatics -– a longtime favorite of this here blog and a band for whom sex obviously played a very big role -– while the emphasis may understandably be on the late Wendy Orlean Williams and her singular aesthetic of spot-welding an overt, defiant sexuality with suitably punky pugnacity, it’s important to remember that the Plasmatics -– for better or worse -– were still very much a band. There were other individuals involved beyond the late Ms. Williams. My beef here is that the Plasmatics’ Ivy-league Svengali Rod Swenson was their manager. He was not their bass player. While the band had a Spinal-Tap-like roster of members, bass detail was limited to Chosei Funahara, Michael David, Greg Smith, Jean Beauvoir and Chris “Junior” Romanelli. Swenson never played bass for them, or any other band. Ultimately, is this an important point? No, but facts are fucking facts. Get them right.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE…

There was a performer in the late 70’s named Cherry Vanilla, who’d originally emerged from the Warhol scene to reinvent herself as a sexually assertive chanteuse of New York City Punk. Through the auspices of IRS Records’ Miles Copeland, Cherry Vanilla decamped from the big splash she’d been making in NYC to London, where she was paired with a new band to help break into the British scene… only to ultimately fail at making much of a dent.

Cherry Vanilla’s forays into overtly aggressive, sexually-charged antics (most photos of her find her with tongue extended, groping herself and/or sporting a shirt with sequins that spell out “Lick Me”) are obviously the reason the Museum of Sex sought to highlight her in this exhibit. While she didn’t quite make the same impact as many of her peers, the nature of her approach makes her indeed suitable for inclusion. Fair enough.

In their treatment of her story, however, the Museum of Sex’s curators made what I would consider a rather huge omission. While Cherry Vanilla never became what anyone would consider a household name, she did inadvertently serve as something of a crucial stepping-stone for the nascent line-up of a little band called The Police. To fill out the London iteration of her act, Miles Copeland drafted original Police guitarist Henri Padovani along with Stewart Copeland and fucking STING as both her backup band and opening act, helping the rookie ersatz-punk trio further find their footing.

In “Punk Lust,” there’s even a sizable photo of Cherry with Sting playing right fucking next to her (above, just over her right shoulder), and he isn’t even identified.

Sorry, but shit like that is inexcusable. Do your damn homework.

Unsurprisingly, at the end of the exhibit, you’re invited to exit through the gift shop …. where you can buy a neon-yellow Nevermind The Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols shirt … for fifty bucks.

Skip it.

Iggy, Me & XTC

Birds of a feather? 

The Blowout Continues

After another day of demolition and construction that I was mercifully not privy to (I am up and out of the house before they arrive), we now have more of a tangible semblance of a new wall than we did on Wednesday. It still seems fairly surreal, but we are getting closer to a more clearly defined new space, and can start thinking about how everything’s going to fit.

That said, having largely removed and re-located everything from that side of the apartment, our home now looks like something that would make Marie Kondo angrily incontinent. They are stacks and mounds and piles of stuff just EVERYWHERE. There’s a stack of books messily assembled in this corner. There’s a pile of important papers hastily stowed in that corner. The rugs are all half-rolled up, askew and trampled upon. There’s a formless aggregation of kids’ clothes strewn in the front room. There’s a herd of half-empty boxes arranged like Stonehenge in the master bedroom. The closets have become makeshift storage facilities, with contents tenuously sardined into too-small compartments. The whole apartment feels like an overstuffed burrito of needless crap. I find myself swearily vowing to completely blitz the place of any non-joy-sparking deadwood once we’ve finished with the renovation.

Before that can happen, we still have to paint, disassemble the kids’ trusty bunkbed and divine the new configuration of their sleeping arrangements.

Again, watch this re-formulating space.