Flaming Pablum

Shadowplaymobil

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook, and I can't resist sharing it. Enjoy.

For some reference, here's the original...

And Now It's a Dorm

Following up on this post of a while back, I spotted the artifact below in my perusing of old SPIN magazines earlier this weekend. Ancient history.

Spinning in the Streets

I was up fairly early this AM (despite it being Saturday .... hey, thanks, kids!). While Charlotte & Oliver were munching on their breakfast, I started wasting a bit of time on my Tumblr, Get Back To Work. For some reason, I was fixated on finding on finding an old photograph from SPIN. Once upon a time (way before I fleetingly interned there), SPIN had actually been a hugely cool magazine; a mainstream glossy that was genuinely ahead of the curve, putting folks like Nick Cave, Glen Danzig and LL Cool J on their front cover way before any of those artists had graduated out of their respective minor leagues (to use a ham-fisted sports analogy). In any case, I'd been remembering this old interview they'd published wherein No Wave enfant terrible Lydia Lunch posed a series of thornily provocative questions at Pat Benatar, appended with a great shot of the ladies in question standing back to back. Thanks to Google, I managed to track it down (see it here, if you're curious). That, of course, spun me onto a trajectory of virtually thumbing through the back issues of SPIN I'd feverishly paged through during my college days. Ahh, misty, water-colored memories.....

Anyway, in the course of same, I came across a couple of shots that I figured were ripe to put up here for a bit of "spot the address" fun, notably the two below. The first finds Texan heroes The Butthole Surfers taken in the summer of 1986 by one Monica Dee. From the look of it, the band seems to be standing somewhere in between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in the teens, but I'm purely projecting (the SPIN offices at the time were on 18th between 5th and 6th). Any guesses? I bet the vacant lot behind their van is no longer a lot today.

Next up is a typically iconic shot of Keith from October of 1985 (by photographer David Gahr). He could, of course, be anywhere (East Village? West Village? SoHo? Hell's Kitchen?) Any guesses?

 

Have a Coke and a Smile

Photo of Astor Place in 1947 by the great Rudy Burckhardt 

Candid Manhattan

Another batch of Flickr goodness. I stumbled upon this truly awesome set of black & white NYC photographs from the 1980s by one Michael Cinque. See the whole set by clicking right here.

Batman's Carol

Over this past weekend, Oliver my almost-five-year-old kept repeating an all-too-familiar mantra that bordered on the maddening. Jingle Bells, Batman Smells, Robin Laid an Egg!..... recited giddily between bursts of giggles .... the Batmobile lost its wheel and The Joker got away! Oliver would then improvise new lyrics or assumed/misheard variations over same and repeat ad nauseum. It made for a lengthy forty-eight hours.

It got me thinking, though. I certainly remember being similarly amused by roughly the same inane ditty when I was five years old myself, and that point really struck me. How do these songs keep perpetuating? It's not like anyone's writing them down or anything. Obviously, they're being passed down by word-of-mouth from generation to generation like fables, myths or, say, druidic spells. To this same end, I found this compelling discussion thread devoted to divining the origin of "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells." If I had to guess myself, I'd suggest the 1960s. Any ideas?