My truly excellent friend Drew sent me the below video with only the cryptic preamble of “truly worth your time.”
The title of the video is “1980s New York Loft Party,” and the description is as follows….
Party guests, people chatting. New York art scene. Party GVs. Party, people greeting each other, shaking hands. Pan across party scenes, nice WS of crowds, 1980s fashion. party and party guests, bartenders serving drinks. Pan across crowds, people chatting in groups. GVs of party. WS of road outside window, ZI to road. West Side highway, city skyline visible in distance. GVs of party and guests.
What music do you think was playing while this was transpiring?
WEIRD ADDENDUM: In this follow-up video from presumably the same party, former Sex Pistols svengali Malcolm McLaren is in attendance....
The photo above is, I believe, the first photograph I shared here of my daughter Charlotte, appended with the following caption…
Here's a fleeting glimpse of my daughter, engaging in one of her very favorite activities, turning the stereo on.....and off. And on. And off. And on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off. If the thing survives another month, it'll be a miracle.
This was probably snapped in the summer of 2005, when she was all of a year old.
It’s now the summer of 2022, and she is 18 years old, and in a scant four days, we board a plane to the bonnie highlands of Scotland to drop her off at her chosen university.
As I discussed this past January, we’d been looking at a host of great, liberal arts colleges scattered around the northeast and Midwest (you might remember my account of taking her to look at my alma mater, which prompted this surreal stroll down memory lane). As much as I was covertly pushing for Charlotte to select that school, her heart lay elsewhere. She wanted to challenge herself and carve her own path (as opposed to ensconcing herself in her father’s nostalgia trip). She ended up choosing a further-flung school over in the UK, albeit realistically no further than had she selected a school on the West Coast. It just feels further because it’s in another nation on the other side of an ocean.
In earlier, somewhat panicky attempts to stem the direction the tide seemed to be flowing, I kept repeating the mantra that “you can’t fly home from Scotland for a weekend.” While, no, you technically can’t really fly home from Scotland to New York City for a weekend, I kept thinking about all the times I’d flown home from college, and could really only remember one occurrence during the early part of my senior year when I jetted home to catch The Mission UK performing at The Ritz. Adjusting to college as a freshman was tough and all that, but I just got on with it. I have all faith that my daughter Charlotte will be just fine and do the same.
But even once she made her decision, it still seemed like this abstract concept that I was more or less in denial about. I was and remain incredibly proud of her. She’s gained entry into this prestigious institution and it’s going to be a remarkable, broadening experience for her, but I’m still finding it so hard to reconcile that we’re here already. Where did those 18 years go? How is she this old already?
After months of planning and preparation and packing and logistical red-tape-unspooling (setting up bank accounts and phone plans, etc.) it’s all happening next week.
Every now and again, someone will latch onto an old post of mine and share it on social media. It’s rare that I’m able to track down how the post is being framed or re-purposed, but I’m also curious as to which posts garner such second winds. I noticed one such post get a re-discovery boost today, and felt compelled to bring proceedings up to speed.
Regular readers might remember an entry I posted here back in 2015 about an arguably obscure British band from the early `70s called Dr. Feelgood (not to be confused with the Motley Crue album of the same name). In a nutshell, Dr. Feelgood was a “pub rock” band who played a taut, hardscrabble brand of R&B (and by that I mean guitar-based rhythm and blues, not schmaltzy loverman ballads) in an era when the pervading tastes were more inclined towards mellow, Laurel Canyon-styled singer/songwriters and the more indulgent aspects of shaggy prog rock. They were loud, bawdy and aggressive and played songs that were comparatively short, sharp and shocking. Basically, Dr. Feelgood were out-of-step punks before punk was punk.
In any case, this particular post of mine concentrated on a tiny aspect of a documentary made about them by filmmaker Julien Temple called “Oil City Confidential.” In one fleeting seqeunce therein, Temple divulges that former lead singer Lee Brilleaux (above) had passed away in 1994 from cancer. While recounting same, Temple showed strangely incongruous footage of a tiny memorial plaque in Brilleaux’s honor on a park bench in my own Manhattan’s West Village. Acting on a hunch, I tracked down the actual bench and plaque, as documented in that post, in Jackson Square. On the surface, it made absolutely zero sense to have a memorial plaque to Lee Brilleaux in the West Village of Manhattan, given that the fabled frontman never lived on these shores, nor had any tangible connection to New York City.
Towards the end of that post, meanwhile, I disclosed that a compatriot of mine had solved the riddle, sharing that a nearby art gallery, White Columns, had done a whole installation about Dr. Feelgood, one aspect of which was affixng Lee’s small plaque to a bench in Jackson Square. The link I posted in that orignal entry no longer goes to the explainer page, but I found another page with the full story (and pictures) still available here. Apparently, the plaque was put up at some point in 2005, a decade before I discovered it through Julien Temple’s film.
Noting that my post was being re-circulated, however, I thought it was prudent, once again, to bring things up to date. If you go looking for Lee Brilleaux’s memorial plaque here in 2022, I am sad to relay that you will not find it. For whatever reason, what started off as the only memorial park-bench plaque in Jackson Square has been replaced by a slew of new ones commemorating since-deceased figures who, more than likely, actually have some genuine connection to the park, unlike dear, departed Lee. That makes sense, of course, but I miss the strange little anomaly of that furtive tribute.
Meanwhile, for those curious, here’s some great footage of Dr. Feelgood in action, taken from a French television program from 1976 called “Beau Fixe Sur Pithiviers.” The band shows up in a vintage blue convertible in the beginning, then plug in and rock your face off starting at around 01:59.
Having grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the `70s and `80s, I feel reasonably confident in suggesting that, like most of my fellow UES residents, I probably took the Metropolitan Museum of Art for granted. Here was this truly monolithic cultural institution of almost incalculable significance, but it was right there for us at all times – virtually at our beck and call. My mother started bringing my sister and I there as tiny children – primarily as a time-filling activity, probably, more than as a means of broadening our little minds. It was an affordable, educational and versatile destination. Sure, it housed priceless antiquities and rarified works of art, but it was also this giant, labyrinthine palace filled with stately galleries, towering ceilings, grandiose vistas and sweeping staircases, to say nothing of all its hidden nooks, secluded chambers and clandestine meeting spots. Not only was it home to countless items of ravishing beauty, the building in itself was an astonishing work of art. Once ensconced inside, we were let off our little leashes and set free to explore it. And explore we did.
As a child, it was a place of genuine wonderment. I remember regularly spending hours in the Arms & Armor wing, marveling at the gleaming knights on horseback and feeling creeped out and claustrophobic in the narrow corridor of the tomb at the entrance of the Egyptian Wing (technically the Mataba Tomb of Perneb). I remember being taken to see the gigantic tree, every Christmas, and staring at all the Renaissance filigree arranged all over the boughs and the Neapolitan Baroque creche at its base. I remember being taken to “luncheons” with my grandmother in the (long-since vanished) restaurant in the southern wing (just beyond the Greek and Roman statuary). The tables were organized around an elaborate fountain, if memory serves, wherein many a coin was tossed. In later years, I remember the much-feted openings of the American Wing, the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing filled with oddities from far-flung islands and, of course, the acquisition of the iconic Temple of Dendur.
There was also a great deal of fun in simply getting lost in the museum – willfully charging as deep and as far into the massive building to see how disoriented you could actually get. I remember “discovering” whole new exhibits and comparatively under-celebrated galleries this way. That sheer, disorienting vastness of the museum is also a recurring theme in its lore, as documented in films like “Dressed to Kill” and “The Thomas Crown Affair” and in an iconic children’s book called “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiller,” wherein two kids (not at all unlike my older sister and I) carefully manage to elude security and spend several, painstakingly strategized nights within the museum. I’m also reminded of a passage in my (cheap plug) friend Dave Gilbert’s novel “& Sons” wherein the protagonist is informed by the girl he is romantically pursuing that she is hiding “somewhere” within the sprawling confines of the museum. She offers a beguiling challenge in that if he manages to find her before an appointed time, he gets to sleep with her. I won’t ruin it for you by telling you how that ends.
By the time I got to high school in the early `80s, I knew the ins and outs of the museum like the back of my hand. At this stage of the proceedings, while we might still stroll around within the giant building, we’d become more inclined to hang out on, around and literally on the very edifice of it. The iconic front steps were frequently a spot for gratuitous loitering. The sloped rear lawn directly behind the glassed-in courtyard of the American Wing was a particularly favorite plot of grass whereupon certain friends of mine would regularly convene and waste time over several spring and early summer afternoons. Less salubriously, in the summer of 1986, one Jennifer Levin met her grisly end at the hands of a former grammar schoolmate of mine just steps away from that favorite plot, but that’s a post for another day. During that same era, a certain friend of mine and I discovered a handy little alcove tucked just behind and underneath the southernmost pedestal on the front façade, a hidden little perch that became the perfect locale for surreptitious, evening get-togethers. I’m not sure when they closed it off, but that covert little spot cannot be accessed today. Just as well, though, as the outdoor security has invariably been beefed up since those days.
My visits to the Metropolitan Museum largely tapered off again until I had kids of my own. When they were still delightfully small, I replicated my mother’s methods and frequently took them there to while away an afternoon or resourcefully defy a rainy day. I remember being struck by how – when met with certain works of art – they assumed the same comedic poses my sister and I used to when we first encountered them. Much as evoked in this post about Holden Caulfield and the Museum of Natural History, I love the feeling of (relative) permanence at the Metropolitan. Times, trends, circumstances and chapters come and go, but most of the familiar items at the Metropolitan tirelessly remain right where you left them. There is comfort in that constancy.
In more recent years, my daughter attended high school at Marymount directly across the street from the Museum. As a result, she, too, spent hours inside and out of it in much the same way I’d done years earlier. She now knows it in a manner that is both parallel to mine but still entirely her own. I love that.
My reason for writing this weepy entry stem from two discoveries, the first being the photo at the top of this post, which I brazenly purloined off of the New York Times’ excellent Tumblr, The Lively Morgue. Snapped by one Neil Boenzi on a hot June day in 1976 (I’d have been in Fourth Grade, at the time), it shows a group of kids frolicking in one of the (old) iconic fountains. Even back then, this sort of activity was frowned upon, but hey … a hot day is a hot day. Today, those fountains have been replaced by new ones that put on the sort of hydraulic….ummm…. aquabatics one might expect to see in the fountain of a Las Vegas hotel. That they were donated by the noxious Koch Brothers makes them even more lamentable.
The other discovery is this weird little video below. Also shot in 1976, this details a day in the life of one Ray Cusie, a faithful employee of the museum, at the time (might he be still?), wherein he recounts his duties in the audiovisual department. It’s a telling little glimpse back in time to a seemingly simpler era of New York City (does anyone have accents like this anymore?) and a love-letter to the institution in question.
I’m also quite amused by the incongruous workout scene, wherein our Ray takes a breather from his daily schedule, puts on a “heavy metal” record (a strangely instrumental cover of “Radar Love” by Golden Earring) and demonstrates his weight-lifting prowess.
Prompted by a regularly re-circulated photograph of Pussy Galore and its invocation on the most recent episode of the podcast I recently discussed, Desperately Seeking the `80s, I did some blithe YouTube-searching this AM and came across this relatively new documentary about the Rivington School. I posted about same back in 2015, and like the videos on that post, this one was put together by Rik Little, the figure behind The Church of Shooting Yourself (more about him here).
These days, nothing so interesting really transpires on Rivington Street, but suffice to say …. `twas not always thus. Photo above courtesy of Toyo Tsuchiya/Gallery 98.
Is #ThrowbackThursday still a thing? Probably not, right? Well, whatever....
I worked for the website of the TODAY Show from the summer of 2010 until, well, the summer of 2014. Ostensibly, it was a good gig, but ultimately, it was never the perfect fit, for me. Suffice to say, my personal predilections and sensibilities were frequently at pointed odds with the overall bent of the endeavor. You may very well have gleaned as much from allusions on this blog, from time to time during that era. I was a sharply square & thorny peg in a bullpen of round holes. That all said, however, I learned quite a bit (albeit not all of it good) and made several very good friends and contacts that I am thankful to maintain to this day. This is a shot from June of 2011, when the organization was saying a fond farewell to longtime anchor, Meredith V. We were tasked with performing some comparatively ornate choreography whilst lip-synching “Don’t Stop Believing” by ye olde Journey for an elaborate “lip-dub.”
My body language in this photo is very telling and prescient. Click on it to enlarge. See if you can find me. I'm the one that looks a bit like I'm about to be executed by a firing squad (something that would pretty much happen a few years later).
Earlier this summer, iconic Teutonic electronic combo, Kraftwerk, brought their signature robotic schtick to Radio City Music Hall (in 3D, no less) for an evening of crystaline meccanik reverie. Sadly, I was not able to attend. More to the tragic point, I’ve never witnessed Kraftwerk live (although I’ve scribbled about them here several times, notably here, here and more recently here). I love their records, but the opportunities to see them perform are usually rare, exclusive and often expensive. C’est la guerre, I suppose.
Time was, however, when the band was less of a revered institution and more of an ascendent anomaly. As such, when the Deutscher droids came to New York City in 1981, they played a now-legendary show at the Ritz on East 11th Street (now Webster Hall). I was actually already aware of the band, by this point (having picked up a copy of Computer World on the strength of covertly hearing Man-Machine courtesy of the record collection of the enimatic teenage daughter of a friend of my mother’s, as recounted here), but I was still only 14 years old, at the time, and not able to attend. True to the tagline on the ad below, I missed the show and was summarily less-the-cooler for it.
I love that tickets for it were available at Fiorucci. Below the ad is the recoding of said gig. The photo above, meanwhile, also comes from that Ritz show, catpured by Laura Levine.
Invoke the word “gang” in a conversation about New York City, and any number of different names, pictures and associations might come up. Some might make allusions to films like Walter Hill’s classic “The Warriors,” Philip Kaufman’s “The Wanderers” (based on the Richard Price novel) or even Martin Scorsese’s flawed-but-entertaining “Gangs of New York.” Others will invariably cite the gritty, black-&-white photographs of 70’s-era organizations with ominous names like The Savage Skulls, The Black Assassins, and the Imperial Bachelors, their affiliations and colors boldly sported on the backs of their denim vests while standing amidst the rubble of the South Bronx. New York City obviously has a rich, robust history of this lower-tiered variant of organized crime. But one particular patch of the wide, varied tapestry of the five boroughs that will probably not be invoked is the Upper East Side.
To mention the Upper East Side is to immediately conjure images of palatial apartments, stately townhouses, leafy, tree-lined streets, posh shops, ritzy restaurants, haughty museums and snooty private schools. By all accounts, the U.E.S. is perceived as an exclusive enclave of affluence and privilege.
Fair enough, I suppose, but it should be remembered that not all of the entirety of the sizable plot of real estate that constitutes the Upper East Side is Carnegie Hill. Large swathes of the streets that make up this part of Manhattan (largely east of Lexington Avenue) were home to working-class families of largely Irish and German descent. As the jack-booked march of gentrification gradually encroached on the micro-neighborhoods their respective cultures and sensibilities had shaped, you can well imagine there was a sizable bit of resentment.
I should preface the rest of this post with what is probably an assertion of the very obvious, that being that I was never a street-fighting tough guy nor ever a member of any gang. I can count the instances wherein I was involved in fisticuffs on pretty much one hand with a few fingers to spare. By and large, while periodically opinionated and even needlessly argumentative, I have normally tended to strive for reasonable compromise and diplomacy as my go-to means of conflict-resolution. Any impressions I may have given to the contrary have been entirely unintentional.
I mentioned the organization in question in some detail in this sprawling, windy post from 2015, but I believe I *first* invoked their name back in 2008 on this post. I’m talking, of course, about the 84th Street Gang, mistakenly referred to in that afore-cited 2008 post as “the 86th Street Gang.” In the wake of that longer post from 2015, meanwhile, a former member thoughtfully wrote in to my blog to correct me that the actual name of the fearsome collective was the 84th Street Bombers, as I later addressed in this post.
In response to all those entries, meanwhile, I fielded several comments – both online and off – from fellow former Upper East Siders for whom those allusions resonated. While information about the 84th Street boys remains largely based in personal recollection, hearsay and neighborhood lore, as I repeatedly asserted, they were no joke. If you were a high schooler living in the U.E.S., or more specifically, Yorkville, at the time of their reign, you knew their name, and you knew to look out for them, ... or you learned the hard way.
But after hearing from (relatively) so many readers about it, I always meant to post a follow-up entry, sharing more information that I’d gleaned from that former member and from other ancillary characters who had more to share about them. But, for whatever reason, I kept having second thoughts -– not wanting to compromise the privacy of certain sources who’d reached out to me in confidence.
As such, that's pretty much where I'd left it, although I have kept an eye out for another reason to invoke them or find out more.
Well, this week, that reason arrived.
A few days back, I started noticing that the ridiculous name of my silly blog was being repeatedly tagged on Instagram by a pair of podcasters. I engaged with them and learned that the crux of their endeavor closely mirrors my own. Dubbed "Desperately Seeking the 80's," the podcast of Jessica and Meg deals primarily with all things NYC in the 1980s. I mean, HELLO!
In any case, these two somehow stumbled upon a few of the posts cited above and started discussing it all. If you're curious, you can hear that episode here. Tell them Flaming Pablum sent you.
In any case, as a result, I'm thinking it might be time to open the case files once again on the Bombers. Watch this space.
Hello again, all. I have returned from the cerulean splendor of Greece.
I, of course, have loads of anecdotes, observations, cheeky asides and ruminations to share about our vacation to that beautiful place, but I’m still quite jetlagged, scrambled and tryikng to manage re-entry with a minimum of turbulence, so I think I’m just going to let some photos tell the story, for now. Suffice to say, it is indeed a magical destination that is well worth your time. We spend four or five days on Paros Island and four or five days in Athens.
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