Flaming Pablum

Cop `Til You Drop

Some vintage LIVE Cop Shoot Cop, courtesy of the amazing Cooler Than Jesus. Enjoy...

The Beat of the Street

A number of years back, my buddy Tim B. of Stupefaction fame started a collective blog called The New York Nobody Sings, wherein he, myself and a clutch of other similarly-inclined bloggy types could wax rhapsodic about songs exclusively devoted to our native New York City. It’s a favorite subject of mine, and one I’ve spent several posts ruminating about here as well.

I suppose it’s really not that original of an idea at the end of the day, as Time Out New York recently published their list of “100 best NYC songs.” Their publicist shot me a note about it to evangelize it. I didn’t initially expect to be impressed, but their list does have some left-field stuff contained therein. For every endearingly esoteric choice (like “D Train” by the Unsane) there comes the predictable (“New York State of Mind” by Billy Joel) and the strenuously lamentable (Jennifer Lopez’s “Jenny From the Block”? Really? Fuck you!). I was bored to see that they gave the #1 to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” a song that has yet to earn canonical status (it’s no “Native New Yorker” by Odyssey or “New York Groove” by Ace Frehley, as far as I’m concerned).

Anyway, while I think there were a few key omissions, it’s not a bad list. But see what you think.

Your Time Will Come

I've really got to toughen up, as my day is so easily ruined by very silly things.

I passed by the mannequin at left yesterday morning (click on it to enlarge), spotted in the window of an Urban Outfitters on Fifth Avenue in midtown. You may glance at it and say, "Alex, what's the big deal?," but those with a keen eye for detail will notice that "she" is wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt (specifically one emblazoned with the cover art to the band's 2000 album, Brave New World, which heralded the return of vocalist Bruce Dickinson after a painful, two-album absence), while the rest of her ensemble looks like something Winona Ryder might have sported in "Reality Bites."

Yes, I'm a very ridiculous person with myriad hang-ups about entirely trivial matters, but know this....if I see you sporting this shirt, shoppers ... you'd best be prepared to get grilled on the finer points of Iron Maiden's exhaustive oeuvre.

 

8th & 5th, Then & Now

Just a quick one. Here's another shot from the sprawling NYU archives that caught my eye. There's no date on it, but that's obviously the southeast corner of 8th Street and Fifth Avenue (currently home to Mario Battali's Otto, former location of Clementine and 1/5,...among others, probably). Below it is a shot from (roughly) the same vantage point (with my little boy, Oliver, in the foreground).

Desktop Detritus

Just some random images I'd set aside ... see if you can name them...

The Process of Weeding Out

I was recently notified by the folks at Manhattan Mini Storage that my fees would shortly be escalating to just under $200 a month ... a sum I can no longer blithely justify spending every month. As such, I've begun the grueling task of what Black Flag once called "the process of weeding out." Being by nature both a pack-rat and debilitatingly sentimental, these sorts of chores can be especially complicated for me. But still, it must be done. My goal is to have my pricey space on Vandam Street emptied by the end of April.

I've been forced to exhume ephemera from my geekier past in the process. Today, I brought back home a massive box of comic books. Many were lovingly sheathed in plastic bags with stiff boards behind them to keep them crisp and aligned. Others were less carefully packed and free of any protection, but all were in at least good condition. There are at least six other boxes just like this one still waiting in my storage space (along with four or five crates of vinyl LPs, a couple of cartons of photographs, several framed posters, and countless poster tubes). Some of the boxes are filled with more comics, others are stuffed with rock mags that I either wrote for or slavishly read from the 80s and 90s. Still others are packed with vintage "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" material (some of it autographed by TSR luminaries like Gary Gygax, Brian Blume, Erol Otus and more). I started filling this storage space back in the late 1990s. In all honestly, I've forgotten what's in at least half of these boxes.

The stuff I cannot bear to part with will stay and ideally move to a storage space we keep down in the basement of our apartment building. That space is also packed to the rafters with baby clothes and gear that our kids have long since grown out of. So, while I'm in one room fretting over whether or not to hold onto stacks of comic books, my wife is in the other, fighting back sentimental tears as she puts together bundles of our children's old clothes to give to Goodwill. The whole scene is arduous and emotional.

The big takeaway for me in all this is as follows: NEVER OPEN UP A STORAGE SPACE! Seriously, all it becomes is an expensive purgatory between your home and the trash. Honestly, if something doesn't merit taking up space in your home, you should just part with it. Putting in an adjunct space (that you have to pay for) is complete waste, and one that will swim around and bite you on the wallet like an angry shark at one point.

So, I'm trying to be disciplined and ruthlessly efficient, but it's not easy. It's especially not easy when Manhattan Mini Storage fails to provide a dumpster wherein to dispose of stuff you just can't find a need for anymore. Well, that's not entirely true. They'll help you get rid of stuff, .... for a price. Not wanting to give them any more money, I carted up a bunch of stuff that was inexplicably taking up room in my Vandam spot and spent forty-five minutes wandering around the surrounding neighborhood, fruitlessly looking for a dumpster. I ended up divvying up the detritus between five or six garbage cans. It was an exasperating chore.

I'm now sitting in the living room with piles of my old comics and vainly trying to teach my little son Oliver to handle them with restraint and respect. It's a lovely trip down memory lane, examining titles prized at comic shops like Super Snipe on East 84th and Second Avenue (gone), The Comic Art Gallery on East 58th Street (gone), SohoZat on West Broadway (gone), Action Comics on East 81st Street (gone), etc. etc. But my friend and former boss Michael made a really cogent point on my Facebook page. I can get rid of them now, or I can get rid of them ten years from now, but I'm going to have to ditch them at some point. He said he had yet to make the mistake of giving away or dumping something that he found himself wanting later. When in doubt, get it out.

But until I summon the fortitude to part with my past, I'm enjoying this last (maybe?) perusal through the pulpy pages.

Back to Upper Broadway

My little boy had a birthday party to attend on the northern reaches of the Upper West Side this afternoon. As it happens, the party turned out to be a "drop off" party (meaning I wasn't required to stick around), so I suddenly found myself with two hours to kill north of 96th Street. I took full advantage of it.

Back in the 1990's, I spent quite a large amount of time in that neck of the woods. As I weepily detailed in this post for the New York Nobody Sings, I fleetingly dated a girl who lived on 102nd street. I also had a friend who lived across Broadway from her, and another just a few blocks up on 105th. Later on, another friend moved around the corner from her place on 101st and Amsterdam. Years after that, I started dating Peggy (who later became my wife), and she lived on 91st between Central Park West and Columbus. As such, I was something of a regular around those parts for a while.

Years prior to all that stuff, I remember my family making semi-regular pilgrimages to a Chinese restaurant on Broadway north of 96th Street (not too far from the ol' Symphony Space) called Hunan Balcony. I also vividly recall that adjacent to Hunan Balcony, there was a small, funky --- WAIT FOR IT -- record shop. I have a strange memory of my step-father going in there once to purchase an Abba album (1978's The Album -- which had just come out, featuring "Take a Chance on Me" and "The Name of the Game," if you must know), before shuffling us into Hunan Balcony for a meal. We sat on the second floor (the "balcony" in question), and I looked out the window as a trio of malt liquor-swiggin' dudes leaned against our car, which we'd parked just across Broadway.

In any case, prior to today, I probably hadn't spent any significant amount of time in that neighborhood since around 1999, so to be walking those streets again was a bit of a trip. Certain friends' old addresses looked unchanged, while others were barely recognizable. In some instances, storefronts that formerly housed regular haunts were completely missing (not unlike back downtown), replaced by hopeful new businesses. The comic shops, bookstores and record stores I used to visit were all gone of course, although -- mercifully -- I noticed some favorite old bars like The Abbey Pub (105th Street), the Broadway Dive (102nd Street) and Cannon's (108th street) all still looked to be open for business.

Even the Hunan Balcony is still there. I was saddened to notice, however, that a few blocks north of there, the fabled Metro Movie theatre remains not only closed, but in a deteriorating state of tragic disrepair (see pic at top). I don't remember going to too many movies back in the day, but I'll forever associate it with the scene below from Woody Allen's "Hannah & Her Sisters."

Fifth Avenue Vinyl

Here's a really quick one. I know I spend inordinate amounts of time waxing rhapsodic about old, iconic downtown record shops that have gone missing in recent decades, but as I mentioned in this windy post of a few years back, those places weren't the only places I patronized. Once upon a time, there were records shops literally all over Manhattan. It's hard to fathom now, but back in the 70s, 80s and 90's, music shopping was still about tactile software. If you had to go get a compact disc today that wasn't a brand new release and absolutely had to have it by this afternoon, where would you go? You might be shit out of luck. It wasn't always this way.

In any case, below is a photograph I spied on Etsy of an old record shop whose doors I used to darken on Fifth Avenue between 36th and 37th streets. Don't bother looking for it, it's long, long gone. There's a big fuckoff hotel where it used to stand today, alas.

It wasn't the greatest shop in the world, but I remember buying several heavy metal albums there back in the day. As you can see from the shot, it had remarkably high ceilings, and they covered the walls with records.... which must have been something of a bitch for the shop assistants if you needed to fetch a high-perched one. I remember first spotting the album cover of Prince's Dirty Mind there and sniffing derisively.

A block to the south of this spot was another record store called Record Explosion which had a superior selection, but I still blew plenty of cash in both joints. There was also Record Hunter on the north side of 42nd and Fifth (which is now a cultural center for the Chabad Lubavitch) and a totally great record store on Madison between 43rd and 44th. Needless to say, all of those places are gone.

Requiem for a Monkee

In the wake of the sad news of the premature death of Davy Jones, I thought I'd exhume this truly inspired bit of audio tomfoolerly (which I originally crowed about here in 2009), now augmented with some visuals. 

Pour one out for Davy.