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Springing off from this post, whilst walking around SoHo with the kids on this beautifully sunny day, I decided to pay homage to two of my favorite SoHo movies...."After Hours" (as recently discussed here), and Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia." Time to take the kids for some ice cream after indulging me.
Crosby & Howard Streets....
Wooster & Grand Streets....(read more about the search for this corner here).
Based on what I knew about her -- which is admittedly very little -- I was never a fan of Betsey Johnson. I mean, there's pretty little reason why I should've been a fan of a pointedly "wacky" clothing designer, but I just found her shtick to be a little cloying. But, y'know, whatever. I'm not really her target demographic. She now has a reality show of her own, which looks somewhat insufferable. But, the woman's got to make a living, I suppose.
But earlier this week, courtesy of what I'd consider probably the coolest blog on the Web, Dangerous Minds, I had my own mind blown by a post they did about Johnson's fleeting marriage to John Cale of the Velvet Underground. Who knew? Well, I'm sure lots of people knew, but I sure wasn't one of them. Turns out Betsey Johnson's a good deal cooler than I'd ever assumed. Evidently, she was heavily involved with the Velvets, and outfitted them during Cale's years with the band. Again -- go know!
While wed, the Cales apparently had an apartment on LaGuardia Place (see pic above, prized from the article). In 2013, it's hard to fathom the idea of an incredibly hip couple living on that particular strip, but back in 1968, that portion of the Village was a very different place, obviously.
Today being Father's Day, I was out with my kids walking around and taking pics, and I remembered this article as we started walking south on LaGuardia Place. As such, here is my homage to Betsy Johnson and John Cale, snapped at roughly the same spot.
And, strictly for laughs, here's my favorite John Cale track...
For the next two years, or so, I quickly developed something of a serious PlayStation habit. While, yes, I was now into my thirties, I still dove right in, snapping up each successive chapter in the “Tomb Raider” series, and also becoming quite proficient at games like “Tenchu: Stealth Assassin,” the “Medal of Honor” series, “Bushido Blade” and various iterations of the slackjawed “Doom” series.
I was basically cured of the habit, though, when I started dating Peggy, the woman who’d later become my wife. It wasn’t her conscious doing, necessarily (while she didn’t share my love for video games, she certainly didn’t suggest I should stop), but spending hours on my PlayStation suddenly started to reveal itself as a deeply silly waste of time.
What it might have been, however, was one particular portion of one of the “Tomb Raider” games. At a certain point in the proceedings, Lara has to shoot a bunch of marauding gorillas in some underground lair. After she deals with the primates, she has to leap across a chasm. But she has to leap across that chasm just so and land in a specific spot, otherwise, she slips, twists around, and falls to her disarmingly convincing death -- with a spine-snapping “clunk” -- at the bottom of the chasm.
For one reason or another, I had the hardest time mastering that particular leap. I feverishly attempted it from any number of conceivable angles, but I continually let lovely Miss Croft down, letting her spiral repeatedly to an awful demise. It was doubtlessly exasperating for both of us. One late evening, after more failed attempts at same, I seriously considered yanking the PlayStation out of its tether to my crappy TV and DEFENESTRATING it, sending it plummeting onto East 12th Street in much the same manner Lara kept falling down that chasm.
Wisely, I decided against that, however satisfying it might have been. I sat there, red-faced, hoarse from shouting profanities and twitchy – squinting angrily at Lara’s crumpled remains at the bottom of the chasm once again and thought….”what am I doing with my life?”
I couldn’t fathom how I’d been driven into a blind, frothy-mouthed rage over something that was the quintessence of a trivial pastime. I had a moment of clarity. I didn’t quit automatically, but I gradually played with it less and less. By the time we moved apartments, I packed the PlayStation and my games into a crate. That was 2003, and I haven’t unpacked it yet.
Since then, video games have only gotten more intense, more dazzling, more engrossing and more ubiquitous. Next time you’re on the subway, take a look around you and see how many people are playing games on their handheld gadgets.
If this post is starting to sound like an alarmist rant ala “What are video games doing to us? What are they doing to our children?”, let me reassure you, it’s not. I’m not looking to take anyone’s games away.
But take a look at the clip below (which I spotted on the ever excellent page of JYuenger). Really. Press play and sit back and watch.
Now, personally speaking, upon watching that, my paternal instincts kicked in with weapons-grade potency and I started vowing up and down that I was never -- NEVER -- going to let my kids so much as think about touching a video game, lest they turn into one of these demonic, bug-eyed freaks. I mean, seriously, how fucked up is this?
Stirred by this video, I shared it with some of my colleagues. One of them, an ardent gamer and columnist, suggested that these clips were staged and that such extreme behavior was in no was indicative of the gamer norm.
Granted, this video is designed to be shocking –- invariably concocted to either promote hysteria or assert some sweeping statement (witness that it’s titled “My Generation”). But, as I’ve stated above, while I didn’t go quite as bugfuck ballistic as some of the kids in this video, I was brought to a razor-sharp edge by a video game.
What about you? Do you play video games? Do your kids play video games? Have you ever been pushed to the brink of madness by a video game? What are your thoughts?
I've written about Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" several times here (see below). For me, it's just the perfect movie. It's funny, it's dark, it's about downtown New York and frustration with a bit of Punk Rock and a bit of transgression. Really, it's got everything.
For the longest time, for any friend of mine who was moving to NYC after college, I would DEMAND that they watch the film, just so they knew what it was like and what they were getting into. That may have been a bit of a surreal advice, given the film's bleak, Kafka-esque narrative, but for a while, it did really capture the vibe of downtown Manhattan.
That vibe is gone now, of course. Even if you walk around the streets of SoHo in the dead of a rainy summer night, you're not going to experience that frontier atmosphere of desolation that oozed out of "After Hours." That SoHo is long vanished.
I start to think of "After Hours" pretty much at the start of ever summer here in NYC, when the air gets heavy, hot and thick and the nights seem to wind on forever, and after those last two posts about SoHo, it seemed fitting to re-address it.
I've mentioned it in other posts on the subject, but for the longest time, "After Hours" wasn't available on DVD, and I could never quite fathom why. As it happened, in the mid-90's, Griffin Dunne (the film's protagonist) actually lived down the street from me. I drunkenly accosted him one night in front of the Cedar Tavern and demanded an explanation as to why that was the case. He politely talked his way out of that confrontation, but always looked the other way from that point on when we passed on the street.
When the movie finally came out on DVD in 2004, I was elated, but ultimately let down. I had such high hopes for a trove of illuminating extras, but it was pretty standard. I suppose Criterion could still release their deluxe edition of it, but I'm not holding my breath for that.
In any case, if you haven't seen it and you're a fan of this weblog, go check it out at once. Virtually everything this blog holds dear is embedded within.
Meanwhile, here is one of the extras that came with the DVD...
More about "After Hours" from me...
The Sounds of "After Hours"
Long After "After Hours"
Kiki Bridges Revisited
SoHoliloquy
One Year Later & the Terminal Emerald
Top 11 Favorite Movies Filmed In and Depicting NYC
No More Moondancing
About a year ago, though I was walking east on 4th Street, and passed by a tiny, storefront photography gallery just off the Bowery. It was closed at the time, but behind the glass I spied a print of a graffiti tableaux that I vividly remembered. The most striking aspect about it was the depiction of an anguished face, painted behind bars. I KNEW I'd remembered that from years earlier, but couldn't place it. I went back to the gallery some weeks later, but the print was gone.
This morning, whilst looking for a suitable image to put atop this last post about SoHoZat on West Broadway, I happened upon the photo below via Tumblr and gasped. There, again, was the anguished face behind the bars. There was precious little info with it, other than it was taken on West Broadway in 1993.
I'm trying to remember where on W. Broadway this might have been. Does anyone else recognize it? Weigh in.
Back before SoHo was gentrified beyond all semblance of recognition and all my favorite places were brutally chased away with coffers-syphoned and orifices bleeding, there was actually a lot of cool stuff to be found down there for a guy with my tastes.
Along with several great bars (some of which are even still there), there were record and disc shops like Lunch for Your Ears and Rocks In Your Head (both of which I’ve waxed rhapsodic about several times on this blog). There were, of course, several cool galleries and book stores (I used to love A Photographer’s Place, which was a great book shop devoted to – wait for it – photography on Mercer Street). If you were looking for camo gear or bullet-belts or, hell, even actual weapons, there was The Trader on Canal, just around the corner from West Broadway. For more conventional duds, there was the ever-reliable Canal Jeans Co. Neat-o stuff was all over the place.
Of course, in 2013, just about all of those businesses are gone, replaced by bigger, brighter, shinier, more pointedly populist and expensive ventures. And unless you enjoy wading through battalions of shoppers and tourists, there’s really precious little reason to walk into SoHo these days. If you’re looking for the gritty, bohemian, street-art-slathered SoHo of old, you’re better off Netflixin’ “Downtown `81” or “After Hours,” `cos that incarnation is long, long gone.
But there was another joint in SoHo that I used to frequent back in the day that I think I’ve fleetingly mentioned here on occasion. Compared to today, West Broadway between Canal Street and Grand Street used to be pretty desolate. There was a large, fenced-in gravel lot (where the SoHo Grand sits today) on the west side, and a parking lot on the east. Down towards the end of the block, there was Scrap Yard (which, I want to say, used to be called Bomb the System), a graffiti emporium that is amazingly –- last I checked, anyway -– still there. Across the way from that, however, there was SoHoZat.
SoHoZat was this freaky comic and magazine space that had all sorts of bizarre stuff. I used to procure underground comics, zines and British music periodicals there, along with weird strains of other, anything-goes type of crap. Don’t bother looking for it today. In 2013, the space that SoHoZat formerly occupied is now a deli, if memory serves.
In any case, for the longest time, the only record of SoHoZat’s existence I could ever find was this post on the excellent Ephemeral New York (which is where the ad above comes from). But earlier this week, I stumbled upon this longer article which tells the back history. If you’re interested in reading the whole piece, you can click here, but here’s the bit about SoHoZat…
The comics – and underground comix – inventory at Monkeys Retreat was influenced in no small part by Bobrof and Darryl Mendelson’s store, SohoZat, which opened in 1978 in Manhattan’s then authentically bohemian SoHo district. While in New York for a boutique merchandise show, Bobrof and Mendelson found some retail space on the cheap and decided to start another business.
SohoZat specialized in reading material, especially underground and foreign newspapers and mainstream comics and underground comix.
The store’s location in the heart of New York’s artists’ district made it a go-to place for an up-and-coming artistic elite. Neil Martinson, co-producer of San Francisco’s Mission Creek Music Festival and publisher of the online magazine PROOF worked (underage) at SohoZat in the late 1970s and recalls rubbing shoulders there with the likes of the now legendary John Belushi and Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novelist Art Spiegelman. Martinson also remembers the day Spiegelman hand-delivered the first issue of his radical graphics magazine Raw to SohoZat, which became the first place to sell it.
“It was a magical experience to find this store, because it was kind of a dream store for me,” Martinson said. “You walk in and right away there’s the biggest offering of international and domestic and local magazines and newspapers that was available in the city. And to be in an environment where I was constantly meeting cool people. My friends would work in their mom’s office or they’d work in a deli, but this was like a cultural hub. From the late ’70s to the early ’80s SohoZat was probably the hippest store in the history of the world. Everybody went there.
SohoZat’s rent hit $6,000 in 1992, and they were forced to close up shop. Below is a shot of the guys circa 1978.
Personally speaking, when I think of the Roseland Ballroom on West 52nd Street, it usually comes with a weary sigh. It's never been my favorite venue.
Oh sure, I've seen tons of significant shows there (or at least shows that I would consider significant). I saw Fugazi, The Cult, Cocteau Twins, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Blur, Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers and ... er ... even Motley Crue on that stage. I withstood the sensory-engulfing return of My Bloody Valentine, the frankly underwhelming Porno For Pyros (with a nascent Flaming Lips opening), and even AC/DC after their induction into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. I saw a Kerplunk-era Green Day warm up for Bad Religion. I watched my beloved Cop Shoot Cop grimace and grind as they opened for EMF and Carter USM. I rolled my eyes in abject ennui as the Inspiral Carpets noodled away on their organs.
But, here's the thing, virtually every one of those gigs was marred by the crappy layout of the venue, usually manifesting itself as a ludicrously crowded, unwieldy glut of sweaty elbows and poor sight lines. I realize the Roseland Ballroom has an august place in the city's pantheon of rooms for live music, but I'm sorry, I just think it just kinda sucks, or for my purposes, anyway.
It's easy to forget, however, that long before the ballroom played host to hordes of petulant youths with wallet-chains, tattoos and hairstyles courtesy of disreputable barbers, it was a proper venue for elegant ballroom dancing.
I've linked to her page before, but check out artist/photographer Elaine Norman's loving tribute to Roseland Ballroom, replete with lovely photographs like the one beneath, which serve as quite a contrast to the Roseland I'm more familiar with (as depicted in the picture above of the Descendents rocking a capactiy crowd, courtesy of TheHundreds).
For some reason, the Trans-Lux holds a particular place in my memory from childhood. As I probably mentioned in those older posts, I vividly recall being taken there as a very small boy to see any number of children’s movies. The Trans-Lux isn’t alone in that capacity – there are countless other places that are no longer there that resonate with my childhood memories. But, there’s something specific about the Trans-Lux that I can’t put my finger on.
In any case, I’m only bring it up again because of the photograph below. Thoughtfully sent in by a reader named David Cox, here’s another fleeting glimpse of Trans-Lux from some point in the mid-70s, with an extra peek around the corner of 85th. I want to say I remember being taken to that Luncheonette for some cinnamon toast at one point.
Beyond my personal associations, I just think this is an amazing photograph. I love that tiny hint of the checker cab’s taillights in the bottom-righ hand corner, and that orange VW Beetle parked on the corner. I love the lunceonette’s stately neon signage and the Whitman’s chocolate samplers in its front window. Check out the ridiculous pink flares the woman at the door is sporting. And I love the figure waiting just inside the Trans-Lux’s alcove, next to the rustic lamppost. What is she waiting for? It’s like a painting that I just want to climb into and explore. Click on it to enlarge.
Thanks again to David Cox for sending it in.
I was shocked and saddened to learn via Facebook this afternoon of the death of Arturo Vega. For those who might not recognize the name, Vega was essentially the fifth Ramone and primary design strategist for the band.`Twas Arturo who came up with the iconic seal below, that you see on countless t-shirts (and lamentably on several One Direction fans).
I actually met the man at the gym once (yes, I used to go to gymns). Thing was, I didn't even recognize him at first, but I was wearing a Ramones shirt at the time. "Where'd you get that?" he asked. It was black shirt with the cover art of PUNK Magazine's Ramones issue (with Joey on the street corner -- see below), and we started chatting. When he disclosed his identity, I practically had to pick my jaw up off the floor and assumed the "I'm not worthy" crouch. In any case, he was incredibly cool, humble and chatty. Just a great, stand-up guy who had plenty of time to discuss his time with the Ramones.
Circumstances surrounding his death are still uncertain, but he wasn't that old a gent. It's sad news, regardless. Pour one out for the man.
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