Flaming Pablum

PiL on the Bowery: I wasn't there

Hey again, all. Sorry for the relative slowdown in activity here. Without delving too deeply into it, I've been having to iron out an unwieldy pile of vocational logistics recently, which hasn't left me lots of time to attend to my normal routine of tirelessly posting largely meaningless bits of fluff, trivia and bile here on the good ship Flaming Pablum. Been hit with a bit of a torpedo and am trying to remain sea-worthy, so to speak. Once ballast is restored, you can bet the flow of content will resume its regularly robust gush, but until such time, posts may come fewer and further between. Apologies. C'est la guerre.

In any case, I stumbled across the video below on YouTube not too long back, and it conjured in me the same impetus to post as inspired my relatively recent entry about the Ukrainian National Home. I never actually got to go to Great Gildersleeve's, but I remember hearing its name bandied about. Many people forget that CBGB wasn't the only club on the Bowery back in the day. Great Gildersleeve's stood a couple of blocks to the north of CB's at 331 Bowery. Don't bother looking for any plaque or anything there now -- any evidence of its existence has long been wiped clean. But in its brief window of operation, the club played host to a clutch of noteworthy artists ranging from (again) Elvis Costello through luminaries like the Circle Jerks, Black Flag, the nascent Beastie Boys and ... er... The J. Geils Band. Sadly, I can't say I ever darkened its door. I did manage to visit many a venue of the era -- from CB's though Danceteria and beyond -- but I never made it to Great Gildersleeve's. And now it's (long, long) gone.

Arguably, the most famous performance at the club came courtesy of a then still-fledgling incarnation of Public Image Ltd. (with Martin Atkins on drums). I wouldn't get to witness Public Image Ltd. live until about 1986 at the Palladium (with Lu Edmonds and John McGeogh sharing guitar duties). The PiL that played Great Gildersleeve's was essentially an entirely different beast. To walk past 331 Bowery today, you'd never known it would have played host to such a gaggle.

If you're at all interested, here's a ridiculously better-researched piece on the club. And below is a clip from PiL's brief stint there just over thirty (!!!!) years ago. Play it loud.

Joey's On the Street Again

Curious news item of the day: Turns out the sign on the corner of East 2nd and Bowery (i.e. Joey Ramone Place) is the most-stolen New York City street sign, having been reinstalled four times since 2003. Jokes aside, I’d have sooner assumed the most-stolen sign was Gay Street in the West Village, but go know. Gabba Gabba Hey.

Love Hate Goes to a Building On Fire

My friend Ally found this and put it up on Facebook a little while back and I thought it was curious enough to put up here. Check out this New York magazine article from the summer of 1987 dubbed "The Buildings New Yorkers Love To Hate." Sure, many of the choices are predictable and some of these buildings are already gone (or completely unrecognizable today), but it's amazing how history has softened some of ire in the ensuing 23 years.

Isn't Wines

 Spotted this on my way home from work this evening. Evidently the enigmatically-named Is Wines on West 8th Street (occupying the space that originally housed the rock t-shirt emporium Butterfly back in the 80's and 90s') has got a big notice of eviction taped to its front door and big "to lease" signs in its window. Oddly, the shop remains chock full o' stock. Is Wines was one of the first new businesses to bloom during West 8th Street's steep and treacherous uphill climb towards being a "new restaurant row"-style destination.... a transformation that is still quite a long way from complete.

Disneyslammed

My friend Drew sent me this on Facebook, and I felt immediately compelled to share it here. In a heroic post on his own Loom of Ruin blog, former Born Against vocalist Sam McPheeters deduces that the average length of the typical ride at Disneyland is almost preternaturally timed to the average duration of the typical vintage hardcore song. As such, he and a like-minded comrade journey to the "happiest place on Earth" with earbuds in hand to put their hypothesis to the test.

Scooting Through The Empire of Light

That's my little girl Charlotte, zipping down Minetta Lane in the Village on her trusty scooter today. Not to butter my own muffin, but something about the disparity between light and dark in this photograph reminded me of one of the paintings from the Magritte series I allude to in the post title. Humor me.

Stuff You Might Have Missed

Fret not, readers, I haven't fallen down a well. I've moaned about it at length previously, but I'm in the throes of a transitionary state at the moment. Between grappling with the complexities of a new job situation and my kids going back to school, it's been quite a hectic, stressful time here at Pablum Towers. I'm hoping the stress lightens up soon. In the interim, here are just a few tiny items I thought were worth passing on.

My post on the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11th got picked up and summarily bounced through the ceiling by Boing Boing. In the span of two days, the traffic here on Flaming Pablum rapidly quadrupled and I suddenly fielded a volley of comments from all over the interweb. Not all of them were charitable, unsurprisingly, and I actually wrote a fairly lengthy retort to one of them (who referred to this weblog as a "liberal memory hole" -- liberal? Absolutely. Memory hole? Go fuck yourself!), but decided that it was too needlessly maudlin and pointless to fully engage in, so let's leave it there, shall we?

The lovely photo at the top of this post -- from a West Village street corner during a thunder storm in the summer of 1969 -- was taken by one Ed Yourdon. I happened upon a cache of his photos from that same year on Flickr, and they're well worth checking out. Click right here to do just that.

My friend, former TIME Magazine colleague and inexplicable gun nut, Nathan Thornburgh has recently started contributing to a roundly amusing parenting blog called Dadwagon. It rocks. Read it.

Ya think we got off light and everything is okay in the wake of the summer's BP oil spill in the Gulf? Think again.

Sk8r beats Hater: This story is just entirely awesome.

Jeremiah Moss posted a really lovely rumination about one of my favorite places in the city, The Old Town Bar & Grill on East 18th Street.

I was shocked, appalled, horrified and incredulous to learn that the East Village incarnation of Ruben's Empanadas has closed for good. There is no God.

My favorite new music website is The Quietus. It's smart, insightful, well-written and they devote space to bands that I happen to give a great goddamn about like Killing Joke and SWANS. What's not to like?

Speaking of Killing Joke -- something I'm wont to do -- the new album is in on the verge of being released -- and it's brilliant. Herewith one of my favorite tracks... play it really fucking loud.

Sit Tight

Nine Years Later

You may remember a little while back that I mentioned that I'd happened across a box of photographs I'd put in my storage space on Vandam street sometime back in 2003. I put a few of them up not too long back. Well, along with those shots, I came across an envelope of images from the week of September 11th, 2001. Like many other folks on that day, as the events were unfolding, I reached for my camera and took several shots of the towers as they burned. At the time, I don't believe I was sure why; it just seemed like the thing to do. It seemed like something to document. It was, after all, history in the making.

I've never known really what to do with the photos. I certainly never put them in a photo album, and the notion of posting them here always seemed a bit needless or tasteless. In the last nine years, most of the times I've seen images of that day, they've usually been misappropriated to drive home some political point. As I said way back when, the folks who seem the most obstreperous about the events of September 11th, 2001 usually tend to live nowhere near New York City.

In any case, upon re-discovering these pics, I thought about finally putting them up. Then, of course, all this business of the proposed Islamic community center -- the wrongly-described "Ground Zero Mosque" -- and the brouhaha regarding the burning of Qurans down in Florida transpired. Just so we're clear on these issues, I think there's no reason why that community center shouldn't be built and there's no reason to burn fucking anything this fucking Saturday. As Slate elegantly asserted in this article, those responsible for the events of September 11th, 2001 are no more representative of the whole of Islam than the Reverend Terry Jones' pig-ignorant fundamentalist sect of fatuous slackjaws are indicative of the whole of Christianity. But it seems like those points are a little too nuanced for people who'd rather get in a self-righteous froth about it and push us further towards an irreparable state of disharmony.

So, yeah, in light of this, I figured that pictures of the burning towers would be poorly-timed and counter-productive. The pictures I did see fit to put up, however, are images that I find to be a great deal more powerful. Shot in the days shortly after, I snapped a few shots of the makeshift tributes, shrines and memorials to the fallen. Closer scrutiny of these pictures reveals some recurring messages that are worth mulling over; "Respect life," "Peace is Possible," "We Stand for Peace," etc. What's happened to those sentiments?

Everybody Out of the Water: Reprise

My lovely wife jetted off to a surprise party for her father’s 80th birthday this past weekend, leaving me to wrangle my two little ones through their last weekend of the summer out at my mom’s place in Quogue (where they’ve been since early July). At the risk of beating a well-worn cliche into ground, it's hard to believe the summer's already over. Seems like only yesterday it was July 4th weekend. Where does the time go?

Charlotte, my eldest, had been dreading Labor Day for weeks -- frequently informing anyone within ear shot that she was going to hide on Labor Day so that we couldn't drive her back to the city. She'd also recently taken to vociferously bemoaning the concept of homework which, as a budding first grader, she's soon to have her first interaction with this year. I can't say I blame her very much on that one.

Oliver, my littlest, has been a bit more stoic on the notion of the coming school year. While Charlotte starts school tomorrow (Wednesday), Oliver doesn't begin his new semester of pre-K until next Monday, giving he and my wife a few more precious days together before he starts a brand new regimen that will have him out of the house all day for the first time. It's a milestone that makes both Peggy and I quite misty.

There was a moment this weekend, though, that really stuck the point home for me. I used to hate going to playgrounds with my kids. If you read back to some of my earlier posts on The Dad Zone, you can read screed after screed about how I lamented the dependably irritating elements of the playground experience, chief among them being the plague of "bigger kids" who thoughtlessly run roughshod around areas clearly meant for littler folk. I used to stand like a salivating hyena, poised to pounce at any point on an offending older child that dared to sully the proximity of my tiny two. It used to really set me teeth on edge.

In any event, this past weekend, I brought Charlotte and Oliver to a newly-discovered playground in Westhampton Beach. At one point in the proceedings, Oliver was happily scampering up and down over a large jungle gym. Quite nearby stood a fellow father, watching over his son, who was probably about two years old. At one point, my little boy hopped off the bars, prompting this other father to mention to his little boy, "Look out for the big kid, now, Danny."

It was bound to happen, of course. But it really broke my heart. While still only aged 4 and 6, my little children are growing up. 

To my fellow parents and new parents out there, I implore you; enjoy them while they're little. They sadly just don't stay that way.