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It's been a while since I've posted one of these, but I'm still doing my weekly contributing to the "Goings On About Town" section of The New Yorker. In this week's ish, I penned the blurbs regarding upcoming shows by The English Beat, Dead Kennedys, the Raconteurs, Queensryche and Kasabian. If you're at all curious, feel free to click here.
Feeling stilted and unfulfilled in your veal-fattening pen-like cubicle? Why not release your inner abstract expressionist and click here to get your Pollock on! Then go be obstinately drunk and needlessly start fights at the Cedar Tavern on University Place! Yeah!
Because I'm again feeling entirely bereft of ideas, I'm-a go ahead and rip one off. This time, it's from my friend and estimable colleague, Jonathan. In a recent post on his weblog, Jonathan cited his various favorite things. I am thus following suit. Enjoy.
WORDS: Stentorian, Behemoth, Zinjanthropus, Concretize, Spectral, Lycanthropy
FOODS: Succulently rare Prime Rib, Ebi Tempura Rolls, Stella D'oro Swiss Fudge Cookies, Insalata Caprese and Sausage McMuffin w/ Egg....although not all together.
THING: This is kinda tough, as I have a lot of silly things that I'm inexplicably really attached to, but the first item that comes to mind is a lovingly framed illustration of Cop Shoot Cop and Iggy Pop by endearingly transgressive cartoonist, Danny Hellman. The illustration originally accompanied a 1993 review in New York Press of Iggy's performance at the since-demolished Academy on 43rd street circa his album, American Caeser. Cop Shoot Cop were the opening act. In any case, I'd reached out to Hellman to see if I could buy a print of it from him, but he was in the process of being sued by Ted Rall at the time, and rewarded my patience and understanding by selling me the original piece, for which I was most grateful. It's awesome. It depicts the Igster as Caeser giving a royal thumbs down while Cop Shoot Cop do battle with a pair of lions in a colliseum as a bomber drops its payload of devastation in the background. Clearly, it's the coolest thing ever.
PLACES: Certain areas of the Upper East Side and Central Park and everything south of 14th St. in Manhattan. And the far end of Barker Lane in Quogue.
SONG: "Eighties" by Killing Joke. Then, now and forever.
TIME: Life seemed especially grand in 1987.
POSITION: I'm just happy to be nominated, usually.
MOVIE: There are several, but ultimately.....
TV SHOWS: "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," "Countdown with Keith Olberman," "The Daily Show," "The Twillight Zone," "Get Smart!," "Foyle's War," "Prime Suspect"
PEOPLE: Peggy, Charlotte & Oliver. And Lemmy.
Our six-month-old son is an exceptionally light sleeper. Our daughter, Charlotte, was never this way. A fleet of fire engines could furiously plough down our street, followed by a Mardi Gras float carrying Judas Priest performing "Screaming for Vengeance" at full, shrieky tilt, and she wouldn't so much as flinch. Oddly, the only thing that can (and often does) wake her from her deep slumber is the piercing expressions of anguish from her little sibling, Oliver, even from rooms away.
As I've mentioned in recent posts, the little fella is currently grappling with both teething and being weaned, and he's not especially pleased with either. As such, he's perpetually hungry, irritable and very easily riled (much like his father). Around 12:45 this morning came his first nightly assault on our senses. Though he's graduated out of the Moses basket we were originally having him sleep in, he's still in our room at night, albeit now in a roomier "pack'n'play." The trouble always starts with a short, staccato series of alarmed hums that gradually builds in volume and intensity. His little head summarily pops up and starts bobbing, like a miniature, unhappy sphinx. This is normally our cue to intervene. Sometimes he's placated by the bottle. Other times not. Last night was one of those latter times. So began my Bataan Death March-like endeavor to lull him back to sleep. This is sometimes accomplished by putting him on my shoulder and undertaking a slow, bouncy plod around the apartment while gently singing the "ABC" song and "The Itzy Bitsy Spider" in ever alternating cycles. Sometimes, it works.
It's in these instances when the clock seems to inexplicably accelerate. Before I know it, forty-five minutes have elapsed and I'm still waiting for his tensed-up little limbs to relax. Once I have achieved that (usually accompanied by his snoring), getting him back into his pack'n'play without waking him back up demands the type of facile agility, stealth and precision demonstrated by Indiana Jones in the opening segment of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The slightest accidental sniff, fumble or even gesture could trigger catastrophe.
Sometime around 2 am, I had achieved fruition, gingerly laying little Oliver back into his bed. Wincing from the type of headache that feels like someone's been using a wrong-headed screwdriver to adjust the connection between my skull and my spine, I carefully tiptoed into the bathroom, closed the door ever so quietly, flicked on the light and grappled for the bottle of Excedrin to help soothe my aching brain.
A maddeningly sleepless hour & a half later -- wherein I took great pains not to rustle the sheets too loudly -- Oliver's tell-tale whimper started again. Leaving this session to my wife, I grabbed my pillow and repaired to the couch. Regardless, the sleep never returned.
I know things will get better. They did with Charlotte when she went through this. But if they don't get better soon, Oliver won't be the only member of the household regularly breaking into crying fits
Charlotte in Soho, 9/10/06.
Tomorrow will be Monday, September 11th, 2006. Personally speaking, I'm not quite sure why five years is any more significant that four years or six years, but I've been told that's a question for the ages. In any event, here we are five years on after the events of September 11th, 2001. I have precious little to add to what I wrote last year (paraphrased and updated below), other than that I've never felt a greater contempt for the current administration and those who support it.
Being a native New Yorker, I feel compelled to address the anniversary of September 11th here, but honestly speaking, what can one really say to do it justice? It's been five years without any real semblance of closure. The "War on Terror", to paraphrase the New York Times Magazine, has lost its direction with no real fruition in sight. Recent events suggest that we are just as vulnerable and unprepared today as we were back then (regardless of how many times I've had to take my sneakers off before boarding a plane). I can't say I feel that there have really been great strides towards making this country safer. You may beg to differ, but hey....start your own weblog then.
I took a whole roll of film on the fateful day, but I'm not putting any of those pictures up here. With a single Google search, one can easily access pictures of the event from countless, horrific angles. And I could tell the story of where I was and what I was doing when it all happened, but there are millions of stories to that same effect out there. Mine isn't especially different. People seem to wear September 11th like a shiny badge on their lapel, and I find the people who are the most righteously indignant about it tend to live nowhere near New York City. These also tend to be the same sort of folks who invarialby denounced the entirety of New York City as a hotbed of immoral carnality and effete liberalism on September 10th, but I digress.
What strikes me the most about September 11th (I really don't like bandying the term "9/11" around, incidentally....why must everything been encapsulated into a soundbyte?), is that a friend of mine from high school died that day. His name was Mike Armstrong, and as clichéd as it sounds, he really was the nicest of possible people. Mike greeted all and sundry with a big smile and a kind word, from the most popular kids in school to the lowliest of hapless geeks (like...umm...myself). He had a remarkable ability to remember names and had the most inclusive, gregarious and thoughtful manner imaginable. Mike and I initially bonded over a mutual love of metal (we went to see AC/DC together at Madison Square Garden on the Flick of the Switch tour in 1983), but he swiftly became a friend and the perfect "goto" guy (as he was for many people). Mike was always available for help, advice or simply a joke. After everyone graduated, Mike remained the glue that held our class together, constantly organizing get-togethers. Mike would painstakingly seek out far-flung members of the class years after we'd all left high school just to remind them of upcoming class events. I still have the letter he sent me reminding me of our fifteenth reunion. That letter was dated September 11th, 2000. A year later, he would die in unimaginable circumstances.
Mike became a vice president of sales at Cantor Fitzgerald. His office was among the upper floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Since that day, some buddies of Mike's who owned a bar that Mike used to moonlight/bartend at in midtown opened up a new bar on 19th street and 1st Avenue, and named it in his honor. MJ Armstrong's. Go have a beer there and raise a toast to my friend. You can read more about Mike Armstrong here.
Michael Armstrong & me, circa 1983 (yes, that gormless dork in the down jacket and headphones is me).
As initially detailed in this post, the Missus & I have been fruitlessly applying the full court press on little Oliver this weekend to adopt the bottle. Many screamy hours and headaches have summarily ensued. Below we see the culprit being apprehended after posting some insurrectionist propaganda. At the time of this posting, no realistic compromise had been reached. With no peaceful fruition in sight, prospects look dim for restful nights ahead. Watch this space.
Last weekend, as the remnants of "tropical depression" Ernesto pelted Long Island with rain and blew enough mangled branchs, leaves and other detritus into my Mom's pool to make it resemble a miniature Loch Ness, I found myself cooped up inside the house with my restless children. As my wife sparred with Oliver over the bottle (see this post for those grizzly details), I repaired to the make-shift playroom in my mother's basement with Charlotte. As my two year old sifted through baskets of old toys that used to belong to my nephews (and my sister and myself before them), I started going through some of the crates I'd unsolicitedly stored there when I moved apartments back in the mid-90's. Without a working turntable at my immediate disposal, I'd packed away all my vinyl into flight cases in the hopes of exhuming them one day when I'd finally procured the suitable stereo equipment (let alone a big enough home) with which to re-visit them. That day hasn't happened yet, but I couldn't resist cracking those cases open to examine my old records.
I'd gone onto to acquire compact disc versions of most of the crucial ones in the ensuing years, but there are still several LPs in there that never made the transition or went out of print before I could get them. One such album that has criminally never seen release as a proper compact disc is Let Them Eat Jellybeans. A compilation of Hardcore Punk and underground noise put out by Jello Biafra's storied independent label, Alternative Tentacles, Let Them Eat Jellybeans was an ear-&-mind opening record. Released in 1981, the album featured a clutch of tracks from (most of ) the preeminent bands of the hardcore scene -- D.O.A., Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Flipper and the Circle Jerks. As a primer to hardcore, it was simply essential, but It also boasted some lesser known acts as Geza X & the Mommymen, the Offs, Half Japanese, Voice Farm, the excellentely named Christian Lunch and the entirely offensive Feederz (whose "Jesus Entering from the Rear" has grown only more ridiculously rude with age). There were a couple of clunkers (I always skipped over "Prostitution" by Really Red), but overall, it was a hugely exciting collection.
I'd only started really getting into Punk Rock a year or so earlier, via bands like the Ramones, Devo, the 'Pistols, Generation X, 999, the Clash, the Vibrators, the Jim Carroll Band and…er...Adam & the Ants. But this stuff was entirely different. First played at me by my friend Brad (a reformed Beatles fan and tobacco-chewin' jock turned unrepentant Punk), the music on Let Them Eat Jellybeans practically leapt off the turntable and grabbed me by the larynx. Harder, faster and decidedlly angrier than their predecessors, these bands didn't play this music because they wanted to entertain you, they played it because they HAD TO GET IT OUT. This was music that sounded -- and largely still sounds -- legitimately dangerous. They might've cribbed a few notes from their Punk forebearers, but this music was bracingly original. It sounded like nothing else in my record collection and certainly unlike anything you'd ever hear on the radio. It even made records by the Sex Pistols and the Clash sound ploddingly conventional. For me, Hardcore started right here. In turn, this record led me to Group Sex by the Circle Jerks, Damaged by Black Flag, the eponymous ROIR cassette by the Bad Brains and the first few records by the almighty Dead Kennnedys (and summarily onto bands like Minor Threat, Fear, the Germs, 7 Seconds, Kraut, Naked Raygun, the Vandals, T.S.O.L, etc. etc. etc.).
In other words, Let Them Eat Jellybeans was, is and ever shall be a favorite of mine. Even now that Punk has been de-fanged, subsumed by the very institution it once sought to destroy and re-packaged as just another fashion statement for rinky-dink bands like Fall Out Boy and A.F.I., Let Them Eat Jellybeans still sounds like positively vital music, which is why it's such a heinous crime that it's so hard to find. I did a bit of snooping around and found the following explanation on the Alternative Tentacles site's F.A.Q. page....
Q. How come you idiots don't re-issue the best punk rock compilation of all time LET THEM EAT JELLYBEANS which you originally released in the early 80's?
A. Because Black Flag will not give us permission to include their track. Also, there has been a falling-out between Jello and one of the other bands on the compilation. Due to those 2 omissions, Jello has decided that it wouldn't really be a true "re-issue" and hence has decided not to re-issue it.
There you have it. Failing the entirely unlikely reconcilliation of those matters, might I heartily suggest tracking down each and every one of these tracks (yes, even "Jesus Entering From the Rear") via whatever means available to you. THIS is Punk Rock!
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