Flaming Pablum

Keepin' It Veal

Here's a stirring history lesson from Jim Carroll, regarding adolescence, America and a veal fillet. Enjoy.

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Subway Sketch

It was a wintery twenty-seven degrees this morning. As such, I decided to ignore my "I'm going to walk those forty-three blocks to work" declaration of a few weeks back and boarded an uptown R train at Union Square. I wasn't proud or happy about it, but it seemed like the practical thing to do.

The car I stepped onto was crowded with the usual characters; glum office-drones in various states of half-slumber, less than enthused with the prospect of "hump day". I was struck, however, by an individual across the car from me. Lost in an oversized pea coat, a young woman sat tightly perched between a portly businessman and a slight Asian gentleman. With her head down and bleached blonde hair apostrophed by bulky headphones, this woman sat hunched over a large, unwieldy sketch pad, drawing feverishly with a pencil. In her left hand she clutched a photograph she was evidently trying to studiously replicate. My curiosity piqued, I stepped further into the car to sneak a look.

I moved slightly closer and glanced down at her work. What I saw surprised me. She was sketching a scrupulously detailed portrait of former United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld – right down to his squinty stare and creepy skeleton-like grimace. It wasn't a derisively exaggerated caricature, but rather a studiously lifelike – dare I say lovingly accurate – replication of the man's face.

I can only assume she's designing a wanted poster.

10 Actions That Should Earn You a Date With a Firing Squad

 

1.       Reclining your seat back into the lap of the person behind you

2.       Bad umbrella etiquette

3.       Not cleaning up after your dog

4.       Boarding a subway car before exiting passengers have gotten off

5.       Failing to signal before changing lanes

6.       Answering your cell phone during a movie

7.       Not flushing

8.       Leaving your laundry in a washer or dryer after the cycle is done.

9.       Wearing too much perfume/cologne

10.     Saying "Don't take it personal" instead of "Don't take it personally"

Puddle Break

Splashing in puddles in Union Square Park on Saturday morning.

They'll Take Manhattan

I honestly don't know if anyone really cares about this bullshit apart from myself and EV Grieve, but herewith some more ancient music videos that were shot and/or prominently feature the streets of New York City.

Up first is The Cult's "Star." As I was strolling up 6th Avenue this morning on my way to work, this little nugget from the band's largely ignored, eponymous record from 1994 came bursting through my ear-buds at a richly ill-advised volume, and I was immediately reminded of its rather silly video. Herein, Ian Astbury and the boys throw heroic poses around the Meat Packing District, Wall Street, the East Village, Harlem and Times Square, flanked by a ludicrously silver-painted babe. Still, Billy Duffy remains the consummate guitar badass. Play it loud.

The Cult |MTV Music

For this single from 1989's Violator album, Depeche Mode and noted photographer Anton Corbijn decided to film the video for "Policy of Truth" in good ol' Manhattan. Here, we see the Mode lads flouncing about the near the Central Park Reservoir (when it still boasted the chain-link fence), the Meat Packing District, East River Park and even in the interior of the fabled P&G Bar on the Upper West Side, all the while attempting to imply that they're being cuckolded by the two brunette hotties. While the plot line may be roundly unconvincing, the shots of New York City sure are nice.

Depeche Mode |MTV Music

Lastly, the video for The Church's evocatively spectral hit, "Under the Milky Way" features a decidedly hard-to-follow plot about an ersatz Edie Sedgwick with a fondness for picture frames and egg yolks. Regardless, it was filmed in Manhattan. Enjoy.

The Church |MTV Music

Unseen & Deluca

Last weekend, we found ourselves without any ground coffee on an early Sunday morning, so I blearily stepped out to procure us some, as facing a full day of child-wrangling without the aid of the precious elixir was flatly out of the question. Not wanting to subject myself to the horrors of Gristedes or D'Agostino's at that early hour, I decided to splurge and ducked into the Dean & Deluca on the corner of 11th Street and University Place to purchase a needlessly pricey bag of their fabled "Breakfast Blend."

Now, I'm dead sure my endearingly feisty comrades at similarly-inclined weblogs like Vanishing New York, EV Grieve, Bowery Boogie would sooner gargle from a fetid flask of their own tepid filth that spend a thin red dime at a joint like Dean & Deluca -- and I can't say I really blame them -- but this particular location doesn't really bother me. While I'm prone to break out in hives if I so much as step into their Prince & Broadway store, the University Place branch is a comparatively more user-friendly affair. I'm not quite sure what was previously housed in the spot, but I'm guessing it was a spacious antique outlet. In any case, this corner location is a great place for neighborhood lollygagging and gratuitous people-watching.

Since moving downtown in 1996, I've always gravitated to the decidedly more utilitarian News Bar between 12th and 13th streets, but I still appreciate the bright, openness of Dean & Deluca's spacious dining room. Every time I walk by (which is pretty much daily), I see a colorful coterie of regulars -- grizzled intellectuals immersed in their reading, chatty NYU co-eds, eccentric old ladies laboring over sudoku puzzles, bespectacled web warriors hammering away at their laptops -- all within its stately ballroom-like interior. I admire the ornate tiled floor and lofty, decorated ceiling. For some reason, however, I never feel quite comfortable in there. Is it too bright? Too spacious? Too crowded? I can't say, but for whatever reason, it's never been my spot. But, clearly, lots of people love it.

About a year or so ago, they inexplicably decided to paint over the welcoming white of their walls with a dour coat of battleship grey. While its big picture windows still flood the room with light, it's a decidedly gloomier affair as a result. I'll never understand why they did that. In any event, I walked in last Sunday morning and asked the barista behind the counter to kindly grind my "breakfast blend" beans for our long-suffering electric drip machine. As she was doing so, I took the liberty of asking her why the management decided to paint the walls gray. She didn't know, but this morphed into a discussion about the aesthetics of the afore-mentioned dining room. I cited my fondness for the tiled floor and the filigree-laden ceiling and she agreed, suggesting that the room cries out for a garish chandelier. Then she said something that woke me right up.

"It's haunted, you know."

Huh? Yes, apparently neither she nor the rest of the staff look forward to spending any time in that room after they've closed up shop for the evening, as they've all evidently felt a "presence" there at one point or another. Even more intriguingly, there are evidently faces carved into the bricks down in the basement (I'd love to go check those out). My imagination captured, I mused that the room was probably the parlor of a private home at one distant point, so the notion that some former occupant from the spirit realm takes exception to a bunch of irritating yuppie douchebags sipping espresso within their walls undoubtedly prompts a bit of spiteful paranormal tomfoolery.

I paid for my bag of coffee grounds and repaired back to the apartment, but I doubt I'll ever look at that room the same way again. 

Let's Raise Our Standards, Shall We?

Look, I love the Sundance Channel. I think their programs are great. And I love their 'Iconoclasts' series especially, but riddle me this, Batman: On WHAT FREAKIN' PLANET can Cameron Diaz be legitimately considered an 'iconoclast'? Ooh yeah -- pretty blonde girl with a nice figure becomes major Hollywood star. Yeah, she really bucked the system there, didn't she. A real trailblazer.

Do give me one break.

Missing to be Clever

With each passing day of dire news on Wall Street, the housing market and in the auto industry, many have been swift to point out that the country is plunging headlong into spiraling recession. The lifestyles of the urban "aspirational" (one who seeks to live a more luxurious life) is in grave peril, to put it rather mildly. Is New York City going to regress to the fabled, destitute days of the 70's and 80's? The indicators are everywhere, but the one that I've seen most recently that hearkens to that not-too-distant past is the return of Missing Foundation's cryptic graffito, the upside-down cocktail glass over three slashed tines, the message being that "the party is over."  This symbol was formerly splashed, sprayed and carved on innumerable facades around the East Village and Lower East Side when it was still considered a badlands comparable to the lawless terrain of Afghanistan. While ostensibly to connote Missing Foundation the band – an amorphous, highly volatile and discordant industrial collective fronted by an enigmatic agitator named Peter Missing – the "party's over" scrawl arguably came to signify squatter's rights and was used as a means of scaring off real estate developers and other would-be gentrifiers. Is its re-appearance a sign of the times?

Missing himself, I gather, has re-located to Germany (the band even has its own MySpace page these days, which somewhat defangs its notorious insurrectionist mystique just a wee bit). But I'm now seeing the graffito newly appearing on ATM machines, phone booths and brick walls. Inspired by same, I pulled out my old copies of MF releases like Demise and Ignore the White Culture (their best album, however '1933' remains seemingly unattainable on compact disc) – and found them to be just as thrillingly (If disturbingly) unlistenable as they were back then. For a fleeting moment, Missing Foundation captured the neurosis-fueled imagination of the city when some newscaster cast the band as a Satanic cult of riot-starting squatters. While parts of that colorful mythology are rooted in fact (they did instigate the odd riot), I doubt Missing Foundation really posed that much of a viable threat to the fabric of society. I'm sure they'd bitterly disagree with me on that point. Perhaps to Missing's mind, his prophecies are coming true.

All I Wanted was a Pepsi

Suicidal Tendencies |MTV Music

Word on the Street