Mondo Kim’s on St. Marks Place was a multi-tiered funhouse of geekily esoteric music and cinema that was truly a great place for those inclined towards that sort of stuff (i.e. me and my friends). But, of course, it was not to last. It had to leave that storied space in 2009 and relocate over to smaller plot over on First Avenue, where it lasted for another five years or so. When it was announced that the St. Marks iteration was closing, I wrote a couple of misty posts about it. Since it’s departure, that massive space has become a boozy arcade, if memory serves, but I’ve never stepped inside it as such, nor do I have plans to.
Photographers James and Karla Murray posted the below shot from 2001 on Facebook today, and it sent a jolt of nostalgic reverie right through me. I so miss this place. Click on it to enlarge.
Tumblr is a platform I don’t find myself using, too often (although I do still maintain my own space there, that being Get Back to Work). That said, there are a few specific Tumblr users who cotinue to raise the bar. One of my very favorites is OldNewYorkLandia, which is an astonishing well curated aggregation of archival images from eons past, mostly all responsibly credited. The one below is one such image, taken by Leonard Freed in 1954 or 1955. This is, of course, Jersey Street in what was then technically known as Little Italy but is now perceived more as just part of SoHo. Indie cinema heads might recognize it from the opening scene of Jim Jarmusch’s “Permanent Vacation” or from the video for “Down By Law” by Madball.
For more amazing vintage New York City pics, definitely check out OldNewYorkLandia, but be warned … it’s easy to get sucked in and spend hours scrolling.
Last night was my 36th high school reunion. Technically, the proper milestone would have been *last* year (35th, as we all love tidy increments of five), but because of COVID, that was reduced, last year, to a chaotic zoom call. But probably because COVID is still with us (thanks to the willfully ignorant and vax-reluctant), this 36th wasn’t quite as robustly attended as it might’ve otherwise been. Still, as my son now goes to the same school (and was giving tours to crotchety alumni), I felt obligated to go. Plus, y’know … open bar. Who am I to turn my nose up at that?
In any case, given my heartily cultivated neuroses, I, of course, arrived bang on time. This is a long-standing problem. Throughout my teens and twenties, I used to arrive at parties at the specified times, only to hear the sound of hairdryers still blowing behind front doors, prompting the necessity to walk around the block three or four times before making a more well-timed, fashionably tardy entrance. Not wanting to (still) be that guy, I decided to take a leisurely stroll around the surrounding environs before making the scene, so to speak. To score said stroll, I selected an album that was period-specific to my high school years, that being Welcome To The Pleasuredome by ye olde Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
While ambling south down Fifth Avenue, beneath the magisterial edifice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized I probably hadn’t listened to this record in any real capacity in decades. Richly over-the-top and somewhat ridiculously overproduced (thanks, I believe, to former Buggle/Yes knob-twiddler Trevor Horn) Welcome To The Pleasuredome is a sumptuous and suitably audacious affair, but still kinda completely rocks (that bass!) Heard through the prism of 2021, where songs like “WAP” and “Pu$$y Fairy” win prestigious industry accolades, “Relax” *still* manages to sound uproariously un-nuanced and strenuously inappropriate in its espousal of indiscriminate ejaculation. “Two Tribes” hasn’t aged quite so well, and suffers from a bit of frowny heavy-handedness, considering the libidinous reverie of the rest of the album. But it still has that bass to recommend it, unlike “The Power of Love,” which remains po-faced and ponderous. Who decided to put an earnest Christmas carol on an album otherwise preoccupied with carnal gratification? There are also the covers — The Temptations’ “War” and a cheeky swish through Springsteen’s “Born to Run” — but neither threaten the main attractions here.
For me, though, the real revelation was the title track, a sprawling, thirteen plus minute suite, veering from the wide-screen audio depiction of a verdant garden of abundance into a driving, bass-driven odyssey ripe with lush and surprising sounds and instrumentation -- washes of space-age synthesizers, periodic bursts of clangy guitars, Morricone-cribbed “HOO HAH” chants and even a chugging harmonica subtly buried in the mix. The lyrics may not be the band’s finest work (“there goes a supernova … what a pushover!”), but Frankie never claimed to be profound.
As a single piece of music, the suite of “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” is practically as expansive and cinematic as latter-era Pink Floyd, albeit the horniest and gayest Pink Floyd you could ever hope to hear. That aspect really cannot be overstated, though. I would have been a high school junior upon first hearing the whole Welcome to the Pleasuredome album and otherwise slavishly devoted to laughably hyper-masculine punk, hardcore and heavy metal records. While just shy of any brazen bluntness (Holly Johnson’s zealous pronunciation of the present-tense verb/descriptor, “ERECT” while quoting Coleridge notwithstanding), Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut opus was still such a proudly in-your-face celebration of myriad facets of human sexuality. As a result, it felt a thousand times more taboo and dangerous than anything Suicidal Tendencies or Iron Maiden could ever hope to offer.
Even as the pimply and introverted geek that I was, I indeed knew what this album was all about. Much like “Love My Way” by the Psychedelic Furs, it duly fired my imagination about the mysterious realms of intimate physical interaction (a realm I would still be some years away from attaining, not for any lack of trying). It didn’t matter to me that these songs were almost certainly about gay sex — they were about sex, and performed in a manner that addressed the subject in a comparatively more welcoming, healthier and more relatable way than as handled on, say, Shout at the Devil by Motley Crue or Fair Warning by Van Halen, where sexual scenarios were invariably more predatory than celebratory. These songs, like the afore-cited “Love My Way” before them, scored many a fantasy of dancefloor and boudoir escapades with various ladies from my high school who shall remain forever nameless. While those ornate dreams were ultimately never realized, they still vividly exist in three-dimensional technicolor within the grooves of Welcome to The Pleasuredome.
How is this record regarded today? As far as I know, it hasn’t been feted with any critical reappraisal. No one’s penned a 331/3 edition about it (like Annie Zaleski’s excellent recent one on Rio by Duran Duran). ls it perceived as too empty, arch, affected or topically irresponsible? Is it marred by its proudly lavish production? I don’t quite understand it
As the title track came to its preposterous signature climax with Holly Johnson’s campy cackle roaring through my headphones, I glanced at my watch. It was time. I stepped inside my former high school with the impossibly bacchanalian strains of Welcome to the Pleasuredome still ringing in my ears to re-join the ranks of my now middle-aged classmates to reconvene and reminisce.
Just re-surfacing this for no real reason other than a colleague just asked me what I got for my birthday. I told her and she was surprised that there were no items of, as she called it, “dumb rock shit” (as she know that’s the type of stuff I like). I told her, though, that buying “dumb rock shit” presents for me is a perilous endeavor, being that, by and large, nobody really knows what I’m looking for. I mean, yeah, certain key friends of mine might know, but my wife and kids aren’t going to know some weird bit of arcane ephemera from one band or long-lost bootleg recording of another. They wouldn’t even begin to know where to track that kind of thing down. Nor should they, really.
More to the point, at this late stage of the proceedings, if anything, I should be getting rid of my stupid stuff and not accumulating more of it. I did make certain efforts towards that end, recently. I parted with a lovely-albeit-long-neglected Iron Maiden box set, giving it to a friend of mine who’ll doubtlessly appreciate it more than me. I mean, yeah, I still love Iron Maiden, but I hadn’t touched the thing in about twenty years. It’s been largely locked up in my front hall closet, untouched and unplayed. The friend I gave it to just got a fresh Iron Maiden tattoo on his friggin’ back, so he is clearly more deserving of it than I. I’d do well to continue parting with such items.
In any case, though, I conceded to my workmate that there is still one item I’m obsessed with finding. Here’s that backstory (last invoked on this post)…
As first mentioned in this ancient entry, I first became aware of New York City’s own Cop Shoot Cop back at the dawn of the 90’s. I’d initially been assigned to interview the then-notorious ensemble by a free weekly called New York Perspectives (long dead). Contrary to their fearsome reputation, I found the guys in the band to be thoughtful, grounded and funny individuals, and I became a swift and ardent fan of theirs, catching their shows at a variety of since-closed divey music venues. This being back during a more fertile age for music, the East Village and the Lower East Side in general were awash in gig flyers (much like the ones I collected from the Rock Hotel).
Anyway, around the release of their second album, White Noise, Cop Shoot Cop played a gig at CBGB. The band was renowned for their eye-catching, provocative gig posters — often utilizing bits of striking, inflammatory imagery, and the poster for this particular show was no different. I remember a tattered copy of it being pasted up on a disused notice board outside the forbidding edifice of that since-condemned public school on East 4th between First Avenue and Avenue A. The art utilized a bit of an Anime/Manga cartoon of a screaming, angry face behind bars, with COP SHOOT COP and CBGB displayed in a bold, angular font. It was quite a striking bit of art, and I coveted it.
The trouble was, they were gone almost overnight, either ripped down or covered up by other posters. That shredded one on East 4th Street was impossible to prize (and actually stayed up for several years before the notice board itself was dismantled for whatever reason).
I became friends with the guys in Cop Shoot Cop, and former vocalist/bassist Tod [A] even gave me an armful of old posters and flyers of theirs at one point, but this one was not among them, frustratingly.
In the ensuing years, that single Cop Shoot Cop poster became something of a holy grail for me, but I simply never saw it again. Tod [A] didn’t even remember it (and he did most if not all of the poster designs).
Maybe I’d dreamt it??
But then, as I’m watching “Sound and Chaos: The Story of BC Studio,” there comes a discussion of a particular happening at the studio wherein Cop Shoot Cop and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion partook in some sort of jam session. In a bit of archival footage from the event, they show a snippet of an interview with Spencer, and what’s on the wall behind the couch they’re sitting on?? THAT GODDAMN POSTER!!
The jam session in question (filmed in Martin Bisi's Brooklyn studio on the Gowanus) was later released as its own DVD entitled The New York Post-Punk/Noise Series Volume 1. Regular readers might remember me alluding to same in last summer's piece about annoying one's neighbors with loud music. In any case, that DVD even features the members of the band being interviewed underneath same. The shot above is actually members of the Blues Explosion and the program's host, not any of the C$C boys.
Anyway, that really blew a new part in my hair. If you have a copy of this poster — get in touch, `COS I WANT IT AND WILL PAY HANDSOMELY FOR IT!
Renowned photographer Godlis, who I've mentioned here a fewtimes before, is part of a this great new, inventive documentary. Here's the official description:
A 37TH DEGREE ORIGINAL FILM Between 1976 and 1980, young Manhattan photographer David Godlis documented the nightly goings-on at the Bowery’s legendary CBGB, “the undisputed birthplace of punk rock,” with a vividly distinctive style of night photography. Lewie and Noah Kloster bring his photos to life with electrifying immediacy, bolstered by black-and-white watercolor animation, a rollicking soundtrack, and voiceover narration by Godlis himself.
News of the tragic and untimely death of my dear former colleague and friend Eileen last week has had my head swimming in anecdotes about my 12 long years at the TIME Magazine News Desk, a lengthy period of my life that seems like both ancient history and strangely only last week or so. As I may have mentioned when I first left that job back at the tail end of 2005, I learned more there than I ever accrued at any school, and made countless friends that feel more like family than like former colleagues.
In any case, prompted by a Facebook post by a friend from a totally different gig, photographer Pat Blashill (who I interviewed for this old post), I was reminded of another News Desk story that left a big impression on me.
As a News Desk editor – essentially a liaison between the magazine’s senior editorial staff and the network of reporters and correspondents in the field around the world -- I had a somewhat unenviable graveyard shift: I would work a regular business day on Monday, I would have Tuesdays and Wednesdays completely off, I would work on Thursday evenings from 4pm and 4am and then the week would culminate in the all-night, Friday-night shift, from 8pm to 8am, the most crucial evening to man the desk as the magazine was being “put to bed,” as the saying went.
It wasn’t that bad, for a long while. It was great having such sizable swathes of time off in the middle of the week. Obviously, the Friday-night overnight put the kibosh on a lot of social plans, but I more than made up for it on the following Saturday nights (when, having only risen from my slumber in the early afternoon, I had lots of energy for late-night shenanigans). It was rough on my circadian rhythms (probably still re-adjusting to this day), but I made it all work for over a decade.
But being that most of my time in the office was spent during the small hours when no one else was around, I used to dress in a manner that could best be described as “informal.” My rationale was that if I was going to be there at 3am when the rest of the world was asleep, I was going to damn well be comfortable. It made sense, at the time.
One telling Friday evening in 1994 as I was just starting my shift, I checked in with my teammates as they were packing up and passing the baton, so to speak. They briefed me on the stories that were in the works and developments to watch out for. I fully expected yet another quiet night with minimal amounts of actual work in front of me. I’d even brought a book to read during what promised to be a long evening of newsless doldrums.
After a little bit, my fellow News Deskers checked out, leaving me the sole editor on duty for the remainder of the night. As if on cue, the phone rang. My colleague Katie asked with some bemused alarm the following question. “Did O.J. Simpson kill his wife?” I glanced up at the television across the room, always tuned to CNN, to see a strangely slow pursuit of a white Ford Bronco being tailed by a phalanx of Los Angeles police cars.
Like a shot, I leapt from my desk and took a sharp left towards the managing editor’s office, sprinting down the hall. I burst into his office with needlessly dramatic aplomb to dutifully relay news that beloved football legend, erstwhile actor and Hertz rental car pitchman O.J. Simpson was being pursued by police under suspicion of brutally murdering his spouse.
The managing editor calmly peered over his glasses at me from behind his desk. “Mr. Smith, …" he finally spoke, glancing back down at the story mock-ups on his desk. “What exactly is a Butthole Surfer?”
Formed well prior to the Stay Cats, The Rockats were British progenitors of a neo-rockabilly sound that was a little more accessible than the deliciously libidinous horror show of their forebears in The Cramps. The Rockats’ deft amalgam of rockabilly twang with punky panache was inarguably a huge influence on the similarly ambitious Brian Setzer, who later took an admittedly more reverent and arguably more authentic version of the Rockats’ formula right to the friggin’ bank. But as The Stray Cats took off, the Rockats were being persuaded to ditch their initial sound and style in favor of a more polished pop approach as Secret Hearts (this by label boss Tommy Motolla, the same horrible shithead who foisted Mariah Carey on the world). It failed. They broke up. People suck.
While never a big rockabilly guy one way or the other, I first heard the Rockats on the dancefloor at Danceteria one heady night in 1985, specifically “Make That Move,” as played in a set that also featured “How Soon Is Now” by the Smiths, “Master & Servant” by Depeche Mode,” “Kings & Queens” by Killing Joke, “World Destruction” by Time Zone, the Lords of the New Church’s priapic cover of “Like a Virgin” and “Ball of Confusion” by Love & Rockets -- British indie rock, synth-pop, post-punk, hip-hop, flagrant gothic rock and neo-rockabilly all rubbing elbows and sounding fucking great together.
Underpinned by an urgent pulse and heroically bequiffed Smutty Smiff’s insistent bassline, “Make That Move” came iced with reverberating guitars and a rousing, repeating refrain that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in “West Side Story.” It was a great, fun single that would unfortunately be the Rockats’ first and only brush with chart success.
The only reason I’m bringing The Rockats up now is because of this genuinely extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. As my fried Mac asserted, it’s really a screenpay waiting to be written about New York City, rock’n’roll, theft, mystery and recompense that spans decades and the globe. I won’t give it away, but my feelings are best expressed by the title of this post.
Meanwhile, here’s the suitably bawdy video for “Make That Move,” which – now that I’m watching it again for the first time in eons – is also suitable for inclusion in that last post, although I can’t name any specific NYC landmarks, can you?
This post was started several times over the past four months but was regularly abandoned over the maintenance required to plug in all the links. It was almost aborted entirely in the wake of the week of September 11th, when nostalgia for the way New York used to be reached fever pitch. But since I started it, I figured I might as well finish it. So, here goes. We’ll see if I bring it to fruition this time.
If you’e anything of a regular reader, you might pick up on my frequent allusions to having interned at SPIN Magazine back in the balmy, comparatively carefree days of 1989 (that all started on this post). While entirely true, it should be noted that in the grand scheme of things, I was only at the magazine in its then-grotty office on West 18th Street from about July 1989 until January of 1990, when the managing editor who’d implied that he was going to hire me on full-time was fired. Overall, my tenure at SPIN — while certainly informative for me — didn’t really make too much of an impression on the magazine itself. While formerly toiling paylessly under its auspices, I contributed one small news item about Public Enemy. Big whoop.
But prior to my short-lived, star-crossed few months at SPIN, the magazine had been hugely influential on me. I remember picking up its third issue (with Sting on the cover) in July of 1985 under the misapprehension that there was a feature on one of my then-favorite bands, 7 Seconds (there wasn’t), but becoming totally hooked anyway. Unlike shitty Rolling Stone, here was a magazine that dared to discuss and review bands like Scratch Acid, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the Sisters of Mercy, Squirrel Bait, the nascent Beastie Boys and the Butthole Surfers. The writing was assertive and irreverent. Their approach was fresh and different — they had Pia Zadora interview Joey Ramone and Lydia Lunch interview Pat Benatar. They periodically gave Henry Rollins the back page to talk about his impressions of Madonna or wax rhapsodic about his then-two favorite records (White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground and Funhouse by The Stooges). It was amazing stuff, and for many years afterwards, I was a dutifully loyal reader, even after my brief internship.
In time, SPIN started …er…spiraling, shedding long-time staffers left and right and eventually even jettisoning its longtime editor-in-chief and founder, Bob “The Gooch” Guccione Jr. The magazine lost whatever voice and edge it once had and started following the curve as opposed to staying ahead of it. While everyone I’d originally known from my intern days were long gone, certain other people I’d worked alongside from various other outlets came and went through the outlet’s perpetually revolving door. The last physical issue came out on 2012 before it became a strictly online affair.
Here in 2021, the online iteration of SPIN admirably strives to compete in a vastly different landscape from the one it first launched in, but I don’t know anyone who writes for or edits it anymore, as far as I know. I cannot say that I read it often enough to have a credible opinion about whether or not it’s worth checking out, these days, but I somehow doubt that it pushes any envelopes in the way it used to do.
In any case, blah blah blah …. enough of about me and my experience at SPIN. This post ostensibly had nothing to do with all that, but I’m so damn narcissistic that I couldn’t help dredging all that bullshit back up. No, this post was about how friggin’ anaemic much of SPIN’s more recent ….. or, Hell, not even that recent ... content has been.
What triggered it was a listicle they first posted in 2013 called “The 40 Best New York City Music Videos.” Longtime readers know I used to spend an inordinate amount of time and bandwidth documenting same, so I was of course curious to learn which ones made their list. Somewhat predictably, said list was both rife with cliché and pandered strenuously to certain demographics, although still somehow managed to omit some truly obvious choices like, say, “Waiting on a Friend” by ye olde Rolling Stones. I was, of course, appalled, and planned to compose my own, authoritative list to combat SPIN's blinkered myopia at once.
The trouble was, as mentioned earlier, while I had a fever for the subject matter (however ridiculous), it was going to be a labor-intensive post … all that cutting and pasting of links and whatnot. I kept a running list of clips I thought were worthy of citing, and that seemed to stretch on for days. I’d be out running an errand and something I’d see would remind me of, say, the video of “We Want the Airwaves” by the Ramones (shot on Joey’s rooftop on East 9th Street) or the slow trek through Chinatown in “Coming Down” by the Dum Dum Girls. After a while, the list got pretty long, if not unwieldy, completely dwarfing SPIN’s pathetic list of 40.
But when the task seemed too laborious, I set it to one side and then got back to my life, only to fleetingly invoke it a little while back in this post. It seems laughably unlikely, but perhaps SPIN spotted my invocation of it, because now when you go to their link, all that remains is their one-paragraph preamble. Their list is strangely gone.
So, when you go through my list and wonder where, say, “Love is Strong” by the Rolling Stones, "New York, New York" by Ryan Adams, “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson and/or, good lord, “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys are, know that I left them out because they were on SPIN’s list, and I didn’t want to be duplicative. Also, “Empire State of Mind” completely fucking sucks and makes me want to destroy the earth.
Here’s my list. Enjoy it or not. I did it alphabetically by song title. There is no hierarchy, although, personally speaking, I like some of these way, way more than others.
ADDENDUM: Some new clips were added on Tuesday, October 12 and Wednesday, October 13.
“All or Nothin” by Madball - Tompkins Square Park, East Village, Lower East Side
“All That I Wanted” by Belfegore - Pier 25 in TriBeca, West Side Highway
"Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants - Randall's Island
“My Kinda Town” by The Undead - World Trade Center, Times Square, Medical Corridor, East Village
"New York City" by Joey Ramone - Lower East Side, East Village, The Bowery, Chinatown, Cortlandt Alley, TriBeCa, Times Square, Midtown, Central Park, West Village, Flushing, Queens, Brooklyn Bridge, Civic Center
“Where I’m From” by Digable Planets - East Village, TriBeCa
"Why I Drink" by The Candy Snatchers - East Village
"World Order in New York" by World Order - Central Park, Midtown, Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, Wall Street, Williamsburg, The Dakota, Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square Park, Flushing Corona Park, Queens,
As recently invoked in this post, I am reviving this sprawling entry, which I originally started … and then summarily abandoned again … back in June….
This is a somewhat irritating post, as I’d already written about a third of it, only to have my MacBook Air experience some sort of inexplicable purge and lose it all. Not that I can’t piece it back together, but I’d been quite pleased with what I’d written, and now I have to start from scratch again. C’est la guerre.
Suffice to say, while on the surface this seems like just another post about yet another vanished spot, it’s really more about my associations with the place than the place itself. I guess all my posts take that approach. Hopefully, that’ll ring true.
In any case, I should preface this all by talking about my friend Shawn. Shawn was a kid I’d known since pre-kindergarten (or, as it was called at the time, “Nursery School”). My mother would be very quick to point out, at this stage, that Shawn was the grandson of a very prominent author whose last name carries an extraordinary legacy, but honestly speaking, when I was friends with him, that never entered into it. I wouldn’t go onto read any of that author’s works until much later in life and, while impressive, they had absolutely no bearing on my friendship with Shawn. We were just two, similarly inclined little boys.
Shawn lived nearby me in the Carnegie Hill section of Upper East Side and, even then, was a profound aficionado of the deeper dive. Where we both harbored interests in nearly identical subject matter, Shawn would cultivate rich understandings in said subjects’ minutia. Never was this more the case than with comic books. We both bought them in maddening bulk, but Shawn’s investment went very deep. I remember going over to his house after school, one day, and noting that he meticulously stored his comics in crisp, thin plastic sheaths with stiff white boards behind each to preserve and protect each issue. Suffice to say, this was in stark contrast to the messy piles of dog-eared comics that lived under my bed. I immediately felt ashamed of this and quickly started to emulate the care with which Shawn looked after his collection. In doing so, I also developed a rich appreciation for the artwork, the narratives and the mythology of the titles I collected. In no time at all, I was a rapturous comic geek, just like Shawn.
During the course of that indoctrination, Shawn and I — still both in our grade school years — turned our fandom for comics into an excuse to explore our native New York City. Whereas prior to this I’d simply been blowing my allowance on comic books at a local newspaper joint on Madison Avenue called Epstein’s (long, long gone), I was now accompanying Shawn on treks to further-flung concerns like Supersnipe on Second Avenue and 84th Street, a tiny corner shop that catered to the more discerning comic book fan. That was alright, for a while, until Shawn learned of another venture a little further downtown. As I’d go onto remember it for the next several decades, that place was called the Comic Art Gallery.
That’s where we need to pause in the preamble.
I’ve alluded to the Comic Art Gallery on this blog more than a few times. For a start, it was located on the relatively nondescript strip of East 58th Street between Lexington Avenue and the magisterial sprawl of Park Avenue. As it happened, it was located directly across the street from the office of my family’s dentist, Dr. Herman J. Bossboom (now presumably long dead). By this point, I would have been in about seventh grade and only about twelve years old. While my mom was not entirely keen on me wandering around parts of town that were thirty-plus blocks away from our neighborhood, she trusted me enough to be able to navigate the mass transit system (usually via bus, at this stage) to get to and from Dr. Bossboom’s office, and was actively relieved that I could get myself there and back on my own. I was already sporting a retainer by this point (which I was sorely derelict in regularly wearing), so I was frequently going to East 58th Street, ….which means I was also frequently going to the Comic Art Gallery.
Had my mom ever seen the place, however, I doubt she’d have been very enthused. Through a nondescript front door and tucked onto the second floor of a frankly seedy looking building, the Comic Art Gallery was up two flights of dark, seriously dodgy, graffiti-slathered stairs that looked like a great place to be jumped, mugged, stabbed and/or abducted. Upon entering the space — a somewhat spartan couple of rooms outfitted with boxes and boxes of comics and framed prints by noted comic illustrators — Shawn and I would immediately start rifling through the boxes, looking for our favorite titles.
Strenuously low on frills and amenities, the space didn’t exactly exude an air of permanence. In the winter months, I seem to remember the staff — a gaggle of beardy, ashen-faced gents usually looking strung-out and embittered — all wearing down vests to keep warm.
…
It was at this point where the original post stopped. Like I said, I don’t recall why I left it there, as there are other things that need to be said and show, so let’s try and do that now, shall we?
…
I cannot say how long the Comic Art Gallery lasted, as I knew it, on East 58th Street, but it seemed like a fairly lengthy amount of time. Then again, all time spent as a youngster seems lengthy. At the very least, I certainly remember the place still being open beyond November of 1979. I only know that, as I would have been deeply ensconced in my fixation with Pink Floyd The Wall (still only an album, at that point, not a film), and I seem to remember the place selling some ephemera from same (tour program, maybe?) I remember it being out of my price range, in any event.
At some point, however, the endeavor shut up shop. I cannot remember the last time I went, but Shawn and his family moved out of New York City around the same time and decamped to the wide-open spaces of Bozeman, Montana, of all places. I can’t remember if I stopped going to the Comic Art Gallery because Shawn was no longer around or because the place shut, but regardless, that was the end of it. I kept going to Disc-O-Mat around one corner and Fiorucci around the other, and even kept going to Dr. Bossboom’s office well into my college years, but comics were no longer an item to be had on that street.
From there, specifics get fuzzy, but I believe some or at least one of the dudes from that iteration of the gallery later opened a sprawling new comic shop on Sullivan Street, just down the ways a little from my beloved Second Coming Records. That operation was a much more expansive, bright, airy and presumably lucrative affair that lasted at least into the late `90s, but — again — I’m not quite sure of the specific affiliation to the East 58th Street spot.
The frustrating thing about all this was, given my pronounced penchant for nostalgic rumination on the pivotal landmarks of my distant youth, for the longest time, I could never find any semblance of any indication at all that, once again, a venture called the Comic Art Gallery ever existed on East 58th Street. I mean, sure — everybody remembers Supersnipe or the original Forbidden Planet — but I found zero evidence to support that this place I’d spent so much time traveling back and forth with Shawn to in the late `70s ever actually being there.
… until this past summer.
I don’t remember what I was actively searching for, at the time, but I stumbled upon a video clip with a gent named Mark Rindner, who was disclosed to be the founder and owner of the … FUCKING WAIT FOR IT…NEW YORK COMIC ARTSGALLERY!
For years and years, my failure to append an “s” to the word “art” made searching for details about the, ahem, New York Comic Arts Gallery moot.
In any case, you can find that video below, but ready thyself. Shot in January of this year, it's yet another laborious interminable zoom-chat interview. Suffice to say, if you're not super-invested in the subject matter, it might be a bit of a chore. And poor, self-effacing Mr. Rindner doesn't exactly discuss the era of the New York Comic Arts Gallery with a pronounced amount of glee, despite the significance the place had on impressionable young snotnoses like myself and Shawn, at the time.
For the sake of context, here's what the former site of the New York Comic Arts Gallery looks like today. Exciting, right? `Twas not alway thus. And for the full, authoritative story about the back history of the New York Comic Arts Gallery, I defer to the video below.
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