Flaming Pablum

A Breather

Hey, all. I'm feeling a bit of both acute nostalgia fatigue and a little Imposter's Syndrome, these days, so I think I'm going to take a little break.

Back soon ... maybe. 

Vega's Vista: Downtown Pics from the Eighties

There’s a group on Facebook I’m a member of that I’ve mentioned several times here before called Manhattan Before 1990 which is largely dedicated to,….well, … photos of just that. Obviously, in recent days, it’s been filled with shots of the World Trade Center, but in the days prior to that, I came across several photos by a gentleman named David Vega, who apparently was loitering on the same downtown streets as me back in the 80’s. I asked Mr. Vega if I could re-purpose some of his photos here, and he gamely obliged. Here are just a few of them….

French Kisses was this little spot on St. Marks Place that largely traded in vintage movie posters, the true provenance of which, I believe, being France (hence the name of the shop), so they might have all been in French, but don’t quote me on that. I remember they also sold a robust array of postcards modeled after promotional gig posters. I remember buying fistfuls of them of bands like The Clash, The Cult, The Jesus & Mary Chain and the like, and taping them up all over my walls during high school and college. French Kisses had an ancillary operation over on Bleecker just west of LaGuardia. According to Mr. Vega, this shot was taken in 1985.

Also taken in 85, here’s a shot of the other side of the street. This is, of course, Trash & Vaudeville. By this point, you can see a gate has been put up in front of 4 St. Marks Place (which I wrote about here). Trash was forced to leave this storied space some years back. They decamped to a spot over on East 6th Street. Owner and mastermind Jimmy Webb passed away last year, but the shop soldiers on.

This is, of course, the old Lone Star Cafe. I devoted many posts to this over the years. Suffice to say, the place is long gone. In a nutshell, after the Lone Star closed, it briefly became a bar called Mr. Fuji’s Tropicana (albeit without the lizard on the roof — he went to Texas). After Mr. Fuji’s closed, it became a sort of middling deli. They the space was derelict for quite a while until it was razed and a noxious condo was built in its footprint with a Brandy Melville in its ground floor, a shop I took exception with for their incongruous selling of comparatively rare Ramones ephemera.

It’s been about nine dozen ventures since then, but back in the early-to-mid 80’s, this corner was home to, as the sign says, The St. Marks Bar & Grill. Personally speaking, I was too young to visit the establishment in this incarnation, but it was made famous as a location for both the climax of the video for the Rolling Stones “Waiting on a Friend” and as the bar Wren and Richard Hell hang out at in the film “Smithereens.”

This is the formerly iconic corner of St. Marks Place at Third Avenue. There’s a lot to love about this photo for me, notably the sneery Gringo mural and St. Marks Pizza. Today, this corner is basically a yard of rubble behind plywood walls awaiting construction of yet another new development. Boo hiss.

Further east down St. Marks, this is the exterior of Venus Records. Mr. Vega says he took this in 1984, but I politely beg to differ, as Venus Records was still perched over on West 8th Street until at least 1986. The shop that later became Venus Records on St. Marks circa `88 or so was a bookstore before that. If I’m not mistaken the space in question is a pho joint (Asian broth) today.

This is, of course, CBGB in 1986. I love this shot in that it features the CB's Record Canteen (although I'm still on the hunt for shots of the CB's pizza place on the other side....anyone remember that?).

Big huge thanks to David Vega for his generosity. Check out his Instagram account here.

TWENTY Years Later: Coda

Even before social media, I always took a laborious shitload of photographs. On September 11th, like pretty much everyone else, I grabbed my camera (a comparatively big, bulky thing) when shit started to happen and started snapping. But when I got the ensuing photos back, I didn't really know what to do with them. I didn't really feel like putting them in my unwieldy library of photo albums (remember those?) and I didn't really want to look at them. To my mind, they didn't really reveal anything new about the narrative. I put them in an envelope and have since lost them in the amorphous pile of ephemera that is my home. But even if I knew where they were, I don't think I'd share them here, for pretty much the very same reasons. All they amount to is some ridiculous proof that I saw the events unfurl firsthand, for whatever pittance that's worth.

But in the same way I prefer to celebrate departed loved ones on the days of their birth than on the anniversaries of their passing, I generally tend to prefer to remember New York's cityscape prior to that event. rather than during or afterwards. I snapped the picture above from somewhere on West Broadway in 1999, and I've always loved it. The bird was just a happy accident. The picture below, meanwhile, was snapped somewhere on MacDougal Street in 1998... again with birds unwittingly captured.

TWENTY Years Later

As previously observed mutiple times here around this time of year, I never quite understand why certain anniversaires take on more meaning than others. I’m not sure why the 20th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 should be any more significant than the 19th or the 14th or the 6th, other than to underscore that we like to group years in tidy sets of ten.

The sentiments I’ve expressed about the specifics of that day remain unchanged. I still remember it all pretty vividly. I don’t need to visit a museum or view a documentary to bring it all back. I’m relatively certain anyone who was in Manhattan (and/or Washington D.C. and Shanksville, PA) that day feels the same.

This all said, when viewed through the prism of the pandemic, as I noted last year, the legacy of September 11th seems a bit muted. As far as tragedies go, while COVID-19 lacks the spectacle of September 11th, its death-toll dwarfs Al Qaeda’s best efforts by leaps and bounds (not that it’s a competition). Moreover, given the tumult currently unfurling in the wake of the U.S. forces’ departure from Afghanistan, the notion that said country may soon revert to just as much of a safe haven for those who’d seek to harm us as it was in September of 2001 is a pretty bitter pill. But lest this get into Biden-bashing, let’s remember that it was George W. Bush who put us there, only later to deceptively use September 11th as a rationale for invading Iraq. It was on Obama’s watch that we finally got Osama Bin Laden. As for Trump, let’s remember that he released 5,000 Taliban prisoners and wanted to invite their leaders to Camp David, so don’t even go there.

Back here in New York, while my recollections of September 11th and its aftermath are, once again, fairly indelible, it no longer feels like it happened yesterday. I was a newlywed on September 11th, and we’d only been home from our honeymoon for two days by that fateful morning. We moved apartments – albeit only three blocks away – in 2002. My first child was born in 2004, followed by a second in 2006, and my life took on a whole different trajectory. I’ve held five different jobs since September of 2001. Life was markedly different than it is today on both a personal level and on a grander scale. It’s a different era.

I cannot help wondering, however, if anything has been learned.

Word On The Street

For more information, visit: SAVESOHONOHO.COM

Back to Downtown Music Gallery on East 5th

I’ve written about Downtown Music Gallery a few times here. In the wake of one of those posts, one Stephen Popkin, the founder of the place, got in touch and we started an email exchange that has lasted years.

This morning, he sent me a clutch of photos from the iteration of the shop when it was on East 5th Street, just steps from Cooper Square, right next to my beloved Scratcher, and also the street on which Dead Boys drummer Johnny Blitz was stabbed, back in the day, as mentioned on this ancient post. 

Here’s what he had to say about them…

Hi i just found these . Thought you might want to take a look . Photographer is Scott Hiller 1992 For this we got DGC to pay the stores rent for a month plus boxes of product.

And Thurston was one of our best customers! Those were the days!

I want to say this was the first iteration of the shop I ever went into. Today, this space is a veterinarian’s clinic.

More about DMG on Flaming Pablum....

Downtown Music Gallery in the Line of Fire (2008)

Back to Downtown Music Gallery (2012)

Downtown Music Gallery Needs Your Help (2018)

Steppin' Out Again

I stepped out of my office, last Friday afternoon, into that fleeting, end-of-summer heat and started my walk back uptown, weaving northwards through the streets of TriBeCa. Ever wanting to keep my commutes varied and interesting, I took a random turn towards the east on Franklin Street. About halfway between Church Street and Broadway, I spied a familiar character walking in my direction. Though disguised with a pair of shades and an incongruous baseball cap, I knew instantly that it was singer/songwriter Joe Jackson (the man responsible for such classics as “Look Sharp,” “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” and several others, and NOT shitty Michael Jackson’s dead father). Despite being an avowed fan of the man’s music, I decided to not say anything and let him pass in peace. Longtime readers may remember an exchange I instigated with him many years ago that did not go so well. As I learned firsthand that day, and later confimed in his biography, Joe Jackson has never felt entirely comfortable fraternizing with his public, so to speak.

That, in turn, brought my thoughts back to the clip below, which acts as a handy teaser for a (hopefully) upcoming and seemingly long-in-the-works post.

C$C at CBGB, 7/12/1989

Oh sure, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “holy crap, is he really posting yet another clip of archival footage of Cop Shoot Cop performing?” You’re damn right, I am. If you haven’t gleaned as much by now, Cop Shoot Cop were and remain one of my all-time favorite bands. To my mind, their seamless blend of abrassive noise, New York City attitude and wilful antagonism made them the perfect band. Don’t like it? Fine. Fuck right off over to YouTube to watch Cardi B. videos and go suck yourself off.

This is Cop Shoot Cop back at CBGB in July of 1989. Sadly, I was not at this show. The recording is also crazy notable in that it’s the same performance as captured on their unofficial bootleg cassette, Live at CBGB, so those elite among you familiar with that recording can now match visuals with the audio. You're welcome. 

It’s crucial viewing. Do so now. There will be a quiz later.

"What Is The City But The People?"

A friend of mine shared this on social media, recently, and I thought it was pretty extraordinary, if not for some of the accents alone.  Here's the official description....

In 1969, The Department of City Planning in New York City developed a new city-wide plan. This documentary, produced and written by John Peer Nugent and narrated by notable urbanist William H. Whyte, was released on public television to provide a behind-the-scenes peak on the planning process. There's a lot is gone from contemporary New York in this documentary: a gritty Hell's Kitchen, a robust Model Cities program, acres of slums in Bedford Stuyvesant. But there's a lot that, for better or worse, is still the same: poverty and prosperity, diversity and wealth, greed and good intentions.

Check it out. 

Suck It Up: Re-Exhuming Sucking In The Seventies

For whatever reason, my mother always had a tremendous problem with the Rolling Stones. She considered them the lowest of the low, which really is, in restospect, a bit rich, considering that Mick Jagger was friggin’ knighted in 2003. I would continually cite hundreds of more richly reviled characters – from Alice Cooper to Gene Simmons to Sid Vicious to GG Allin – as being a thousand times more worthy of her disgust and contempt, but as with so many things, once my mom had made her mind up about something, there was precious little hope in shifting it. In her world, Mick Jagger and his cohorts were essentially slovenly subhumans entirely beyond redemption.

Suffice to say, I begged to differ, and I pretty much immediately warmed to the music of the Rolling Stones as a wee lad upon first hearing an elder cousin’s copy of the fabled Hot Rocks: 1964-1971 compilation, their mystique only enhanced by my mother’s strenuous disdain for them. Their seamless ability to craft countless, genre-blurring, pop-culture-informing songs that went onto basically comprise the firmament of popular music was still (and remains) lost on my mother. Oh well.

When I was in eighth grade in 1981, the Stones released what was essentially yet another cash-in compilation of select songs and odds and ends, a revenue-generating practice they’d continue to perfect for several decades. While not a proper album by any stretch, this particular slab of wax featured a clutch of heretofore unavailable live tracks and alternate versions of some of their more recent material. Seemingly in an effort to provoke the easily offended, enhance their image as decadent lotharios and cheekily acknowledge their detractors who felt their best work was well behind them, the Stones titled this record Sucking In The Seventies.

While I don’t really remember my mom being anything of a regular shopper in any record stores, she somehow came across a copy of Sucking in The Seventies in her travels, one day, and if the title of the LP didn’t confirm everything she already perceived about the Rolling Stones, the album cover brought everything down to a whole new, unspeakable depth for her. If you’re not familiar with it, the sleeve of Sucking in The Seventies is essentially a highly stylized representation of the numerals for seven and zero, but rendered in a thick, inky font that almost resembles a Robert Motherwell painting. But over that image came a giant decal on the shrinkwrapping of the fabled Stones insignia, a plump, exaggerated pair of lips with a fulsome tongue extended. The tongue basically obscures the numerals, revealing only bulbous black curves poking out from behind the slick, salivating mouth.

When my mother came home, that day, she was practically vibrating with repulsion about it, describing the record cover in a manner that was even more gratuitously lurid than possibly the band’s original intentions. Upon hearing my poor mom’s vehement renunciation of it, I, of course, had to have it, and trotted pretty much immediately out to my local King Karol on 86th and Third to fetch my own copy, half-expecting to have my doe-eyed innocence decimated by the primal libidinous fury and Caligurlarian moral decay of the dangerous sleeve art. To say that I was let down by what I found, in that capactiy, would be a heroic understatment. I mean, I supose I could see what had been suggested, but it seemed pretty abstract and tame, to me. The image on the advertising for the record (above), meanwhile, is an entirely different story. Regardless, I bought it anyway.

Here in 2021, Suckng In The Seventies is, at best, a footnote in the gestalt of the Stones’ august discography, but it does feature an enjoyably feral reading of “When the Whip Comes Down,” which I still love to play. I have long since stopped trying to change my mom’s mind about the band.

Rest in peace, Charlie Watts.