Flaming Pablum

Sample Sale at God's House

At my office, there is a series of small conference rooms all inexplicably named after live concert venues and night clubs here in the city. It's not at all out of the ordinary to get an e-mail saying "noon conference in the Roxy" or "bi-annual re-org meeting in the Palladium." I've made personal calls in "Crash Mansion" and had a quiet chat with a confused colleague in "Culture Club." If I worked at, say, Rolling Stone or Blender, such a thing might make sense to me, but it just doesn't.

In any case, some of my colleagues had a meeting in "Limelight" today. Predictably, this sparked off a discussion about the actual old Limelight down on 6th Avenue, and we all traded war stories about our respective misadventures within the old converted-church-turned-nightclub's notorious walls. I mentioned a rumor I'd heard quite a while back that they were turning the formerly hallowed space into a shopping mall of sorts. After work, I decided to walk downtown on 6th Avenue for a change. As I made my way into the lower 20's, I passed the old church and coincidentally enough, the space has just opened up as an ersatz flea market of sorts. Unable to contain my curiosity I walked in and gazed around in incredulous awe. Back in the late 80's and early-to-mid 90's, I'd frequented the club. In its lofty apse, I'd seen favorite bands like Killing Joke, Swans, Gang of Four, New Model Army and Cop Shoot Cop perform (see above). I'd drank and danced and gotten lost within its twisty passages and done irresponsible things in its darker hallways. But that was all a long time ago.

As I stared around the main chamber -- now clogged with tables full of chintzy crap -- I could still recognize the room but had a hard time reconciling it. It looked smaller somehow. I snapped a few pictures (see below) while merchants eyed me suspiciously. I sighed and walked back out into the rain.

I've never been particularly religious, but on my way home I wondered which was more sacrilegious -- using a former church as a nightclub and live music venue, or using it as an ersatz flea market to sell gaudy $30 dollar t-shirts?

To see some shots of the Limelight as a performance space, check out Cop Shoot Cop's page. Below is how it looks today.

The Morning Roar

TITLE: "Tupelo"
ARTIST: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
ALBUM: Live Seeds
RELEASE: DATE: 1995

A common complaint among tinnitus-sufferers like myself is that the irritating sensation (in my case, a ceaseless ringing in my right ear) seems much worse in the morning just as you're waking up. This is arguably due to the fact that in one's supine position, there is greater blood flow to the brain, the central part of the nervous system responsible for enforcing the condition's symptoms. Lately, I've been experiencing "the morning roar" with somewhat of a vengeance. I'd love to chalk it up to the supine-brain theory or on my tireless intake of caffeine, salt, sugar, alcohol, red meat, oxygen or any number of purported culprits, but if I'm being honest, I think the real blame rests on the shoulders of Nick Cave.

These days, my only real opportunity to enjoy listening to music is during my morning walk to work. While I try to be responsible with my headphones (arguably impossible for someone with tinnitus), I do find old habits hard to break. After years of feeling that music was simply never loud enough, my fingers still scramble to escalate the volume when the less-practical side of my brain so dictates. And when Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds happen to be making the music in question, this inclination is nigh on irresistible.

I've been on a big Nick Cave kick lately. When life starts to suck – as it's been doing so pretty proficiently lately – I find few things as righteously cathartic as the timeless sturm und drang that Mr. Cave and his darkly merry ensemble effortlessly put forth. I've rattled on about my fandom for the Bad Seeds before, but recent news that they're re-releasing Cave's back catalog (along with a fleeting and unfounded blip that The Birthday Party were reforming) prompted me to re-visit some of that stuff, and I'm wallowing in it like a sharp-tusked warthog in viscous, black tar.

To pinpoint a single favorite track is impossible for me. As much as I often cite Cave's 1989 effort, The Good Son as my preferred disc, I generally find myself resorting to Live Seeds, a storming – wait for it – live album from 1995. I could have chosen any number of tracks here. The performances of "Papa Won't Leave You, Henry" and "John Finn's Wife" are especially feral. But it's "Tupelo" that really gets my blood racing.

Originally released by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds on their blues-drenched 1985 album The Firstborn is Dead, "Tupelo" exhumes John Lee Hooker's tragic song about the devastating flood of the Mississippi Delta in 1927 as a birthday paean to Elvis Presley (himself born in the titular town) . There's a twist, of course, in that Cave casts the infant Elvis, who arrived just a day after his twin brother Jesse Garon Presley, as the antichrist. Jesse's fate is explained in the album's title. "Don't Be Cruel" this is not.

While I adore the studio version, I think this live version trumps it. Rife with thunderclaps, dark Biblical imagery, Blixa Bargeld's unearthly wails, a suitably malevolent bass line and Cave's own hellbent exhortation, "Tupelo" writhes and roils here with palpable fervor. There are a lot of punctuating exclamations of "huh!" and "ha!" here, sounding like Cave's whipping his band mates like a Roman centurion on a slave-ship. For the last week or so, I've listened to it every morning while trudging up Fifth Avenue, and I can't stop myself from roaring along with Cave, invariably to the alarm and derision of innocent bystanders.

So, anyway, that might explain the spike in my tinnitus this week. But whatever. Play it loud.

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Happy Birthday, Jaz Coleman

Recession? What Recession?

Lord & Taylor on 5th Avenue this morning, valiantly trying the Bobby McFerrin approach to drumming up new business.

Seeyabye, DKNY

I read today on Curbed that the 'iconic' DKNY painting that looms over the corner of Broadway at Houston Street is soon to be painted over. While I normally get bent out of shape about these things, I can't really say that this one bothers me that much. I mean, it's a cool enough mural and all, but as I said back in 2006, it's a geographically unsound depiction of the city, being that it inexplicably situates the Statue of Liberty as being on the actual island of Manhattan (and partially translucent) and secondly, fuck Donna Karan.

Someone Fly Me to England

 

It's happening in May. I won't be going, of course, because I have two kids and no money, but Killing Joke, Devo & The Jesus Lizard on the same stage? Are you kidding? Holy crap!

Snippet

As is quite often the case, Peggy glanced in the fridge this evening around 8:30 pm to find that the kids had managed to entirely deplete our milk supply. Dutifully, I slipped on my Chuck Taylors, grabbed my jacket and headed out to our corner Korean deli for a late evening errand I've run a thousand times before.

The cold hit me before I'd even left the lobby, but the visuals didn't match up. As I peered outside, I suddenly saw huge, ping-pong ball-sized snowflakes that I clearly hadn't noticed from our windows upstairs. I stepped out into the deep chill and observed a spastic, wriggling galaxy of small white projectiles spiraling around me. Under closer momentary scrutiny, I found that this wasn't snow at all. Someone had evidently taken a full box of white packing peanuts and shredded paper and blithely tossed it into the trajectory of oncoming traffic. The contents of same -- liberated from their cardboard confinement by a speeding cab -- now swirled around in the brusque February wind, creating a strange ersatz blizzard. It seemed oddly fitting being that it certainly felt cold enough for a snow storm.

As the winds picked up the little styrofoam bits and spewed them into the air like a plume of tiny sparks, people actually stopped in the street to marvel at this strangely graceful shower of litter. One block to the west, a trio of fire-engines completed the surreal scene by sending their warm, flashing red lights streaking across the facades of the brownstones of East 9th Street, creating an improvised facsimile of the holiday glow of two months past. A shredded plastic garbage bag was swept up in the wind and joined the frantic dance as I ducked into our deli.

Seconds later, as I stepped back out into the street with a newly procured half-gallon of milk, only scattered bits of styrofoam remained from the impromptu display, the rest of which having blown north up University Place. I zipped my jacket up and jogged back to our front door and back out of the blustery cold.

Goin' to The Dogs

I've never been a dog person. I've never been a cat person either, for that matter. In fact, I'm basically just not really a pet person (and don't get me started on plants). I mean, dogs can be perfectly nice and all, but they can also be smelly, messy, loud, obnoxious and often dangerous. Of course, the same could be said about certain people, but to each their own. I also think that owning a dog – or at least a big one – in New York City is a fairly cruel thing to do, unless of course you have an inordinately wicked huge courtyard to runaround in.

At the end of the day, though, it's not really the dogs I have a problem with but rather the dog-owners. I mean, dogs are going to do what dogs do. There's no stopping them. Sure, you can train them not to leap and slobber on people or bite the mailman or jump on the couch, but they're still dogs. One thing you cannot train them to do, crucially, is poop. All the discipline in the world won't alter the fact that your pooch is going to defecate. This is where dog owners come in.

Sure, I can overlook dog owners who let their dogs off their leashes or allow them to beg at the dinner table or even let them chase cars. I wouldn't allow that stuff myself, but I'm uptight like that. But when it comes to poop-scooping, there is no gray area. If a dog is in your care, it's up to you to clean up after it. Don't like it? Well, tough SHIT! That's what you signed-up for. If you're not prepared for it, perhaps you should re-think the commitment you made to owning a dog in the first place. And the mere fact that New York City is caked in a brown, viscous and pungent icing of dogshit is ample evidence that a whole nation of dog-owners weren't prepared for it. And EVERYone suffers for that.

This particular rant was prompted by this article today detailing the neighborhoods of the city that are hit the worst by this problem. Ring any bells?

Stop giving dog-owners a bad name. Clean up after your damn pet!

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The City After That September

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