Flaming Pablum

Where's the Fire, Lou? Slight Return

Back in June of this year, you may remember an entry I put up called Where's the Fire, Lou?, which was based around a photo I'd stumbled across of Lou Reed standing in front of an old neighborhood favorite, the garishly painted garage door of the firehouse of West 10th Street, just a few steps to the west of Greenwich Avenue. Here's that photo again.

As I mentioned in that previous post, beyond it being a cool shot of Lou Reed, I have great affection for that firehouse mural. My dad lived across the street from the place back in the 70's, and I remember it from my childhood. As such, I'd taken pictures of my own kids in front of it periodically (see below).

Here's another shot of it I took in 1999. Frankly, I had a hard time not taking pictures of the thing.

Okay, so where am I going with all this? Well, I was out walking around with my kids this afternoon, and we happened to find ourselves walking east on West 10th Street when I was suddenly stopped dead in my tracks by what I saw. The colorful garage door to the firehouse was -- like Lou Reed -- suddenly gone, replaced by a perfectly respectable door, but one that greatly lacked the signature visual panache of it predecessor. Quite simply, I was crushed. 

Here it is now.

 

ADDENDUM: Apparently, it only vanished a week or so ago. Here's the backstory.

Shooting Yourself on East 1st Street between Second and Bowery

Inspired by yesterday's post about Nelson Sullivan's videos, I decided to do a little searching to see if I could find any of "The Church of Shooting Yourself" online. Herewith the fruits of that search.

Like Nelson Sullivan, the guy behind "The Church of Shooting Yourself" -- who went by the name Rik Arithmetic -- ran a bizarre cable access program in the 90's wherein he'd basically walk around New York City (primarily the East Village) with a video camera aimed at himself (hence "shooting" himself), and rant. I was never sure if his content was performance art or paranoia-fueled conspiracy theorist crackpottery or evangelical gobbledigook or high concept shtick or all of the above, but I became something of a fan of it for a little while. In any case, I did a YouTube search, and sure enough, up came the clip below.

Now, what makes this particular clip interesting, if you ask me, isn't Rik's usual bug-eyed exhortation so much as the particular patch of real estate he happens to be spastically striding down. It only takes a fleeting instance to spot that Arithmetic is walking west on East 1st street between Second Avenue and the Bowery. To his left (before he starts spinning like the crazy man he is) is the late, lamented Mars Bar, following swiftly (and sadly) by the hulking edifice of 9 Second Avenue, otherwise known as the Church of All Nations and/or the Taoist Temple of the Ancestral Mother. To Rik's right, you can fleetingly see the entrance to Extra Place before he starts proselytizing to the two gentlemen sojourning on the sidewalk. Take a moment and soak it all in ....

I was always fascinated by this particular strip, tucked just behind the Bowery and CBGB. It was a desolate little sleepy backwater that felt like the veritable edge of civilization.

Today, of course, you'd never recognize it. East 1st between Second Avenue and Bowery is now a gleaming canyon of glass, steel and commerce, although still faltering in that last capacity (no business has really flourished on either side of the street, and especially down Extra Place).

On the south side of the street, the Mars Bar is now gone. 9 Second Avenue is now gone. That vacant lot is now gone. 295 Bowery (or McGurk's Suicide Hall) is gone. On the north side, XOXO is long gone, Extra Place has been re-made into an ersatz "Left Bank" (albeit of largely empty storefronts) and there's now a Chase Bank where the lot on the northeast corner used to be.

I have no idea whatever became of Rik Arithmetic. Perhaps he's still at it...?

Here are a few shots I took back in the mid-90's of East 1st street between Second and Bowery as it was. You may recognize some of them.

 

Today, Extra Place looks like this (looking south from within)...

 

Back to Great Jones Alley

Loyal readers might remember a couple of entries I posted back in 2009 wherein I mentioned discovering Amos Poe's film, "The Foreigner" through Nick Rhombes' excellent book, "A Culture History of Punk." I went into depth about the film on that post, and then returned to it periodically after I was finally able to see it. It's indeed a bizarre cinematic experience, but it really is a must for anyone who shares my fascination with the downtown Manhattan of yesteryear. It can be tough to track down, but seek it out. It's worth it. I don't believe it's available via Netflix, but who knows?

In any case, my fascination for "The Foreigner" was revived somewhat recently when Gallery 98 debuted its exhibition of No Wave and Independent Film, which included Poe's film. Among the items on exhibit were some still photographs from the production of "The Foreigner" taken by one Fernando Natalici, who acted as the art director for the film. That's one of his photos above (click on it to enlarge). In the image you see the protagonist Max walking away from a momentary interaction with Debbie Harry (see the clip below). This scene is one of the more haunting and memorable moments from the film.

As I mentioned back in this post, upon my first discovery of "The Foreigner," I became fixated with pinpointing the exact location of that alley. At first, I wrongly suspected that it was Courtlandt Alley down in TriBeCa, then Shinbone Alley in NoHo before finally figuring out that it is Great Jones Alley, which runs parallel to Broadway in between Bond Street and Great Jones Street.

The alley in question is private and gated-off today, although as I said in this post, I actually attended a children's birthday party there unwittingly back in 2009 (prior to seeing the film, alas). As decrepit and desolate it looks in Poe's film, it's now a very enviable slice of real estate (no surprises there).

Ever since then, of course, I've been smitten with it. Later in 2009, I snapped the picture below of my little son Oliver standing in front of the gate.

This evening, however, after being out with my kids for dinner, we found ourselves walking west on Great Jones street, and I was immediately struck with the idea of replicating the still from the film at the top of this post, with my son Oliver posing as Max and my daughter Charlotte serving as Debbie Harry. Without the photo in front of me, this is as close as we were able to get. The action actually took place deeper into the alley, but the gate prevented that level of authenticity.

For closer reference, here's a clip of the scene in question.

Lastly, speaking of Great Jones Street, my blogging comrade Jeremiah Moss of Vanishing New York put up the video below on Facebook this evening of jazz legend Charles Mingus being evicted from his home on suspicion of drug possession. His home? Right adjacent to Great Jones Alley.

East Village `87

My comrade Drew sent me this video recently, and it's worth checking out. Not a native New Yorker by birth, but an avid appreciator of vintage NYHC and the fabled East Village/Lower East Side culture of yore, Drew was a little surprised by this video, having heard of how dangerous and gnarly downtown supposedly was in the late `80s. Drew prefaced this clip with:

This really shatters for me the notion that Ave A in the 80s was this insanely scary place…because it doesn’t look too different to me.

In some respects, that's fair enough. Topographically, the cityscape depicted (mostly East 7th and Avenue A) hasn't really changed all that much, although the businesses have. But, I maintain, it still seems a world away from what's there now.

The clip below was filmed by one Nelson Sullivan. If memory serves, Nelson was a real trailblazer -- essentially a video blogger before such things even existed. Himself and a few other individuals used to show videos like like (little slices of life in NYC) via cable access television (for more on that click here). I remember two other similar programs, like "Dog the Cat" and "The Church of Shooting Yourself."

In any case, Nelson was a mild-mannered gay gentleman who gamely carried what was probably a comparatively bulky video camera around with him everywhere, amassing an incredible amount of footage that now belongs in a veritable time capsule. Some of it is pretty banal (i.e. wandering around Tompkins Square Park with a friend, wondering where they should have lunch, etc.), but as period pieces go, they can still pretty fascinating. One might wonder where the individuals pictured here might be today.

If I'm not mistaken, Nelson Sullivan has since passed away, but I'm not certain. You can see more of his clips here.

Enjoy this little taste of the East Village circa 1987. Things to look out for: flyers advertising a gig by They Might Be Giants (then still an unknown local act) and, I think, Fleshtones guitarist Keith Streng sitting at a neighboring table in the background at 07:26.

Streets of Velvet

I saw this on John Cale's Facebook page (via Tim Broun) this morning, and cannot resist sharing. Here's the immaculately cool pair of John Cale and the late Lou Reed, walking south on Fifth Avenue between 43rd and 42nd. Not sure of photographer or year, unfortunately. 

ADDENDUM: Thanks to the Manhattan Before 1990 Facebook page, I can report that this photograph was taken by Joel Meyerowitz, who writes:

I've been looking for this picture for days, ever since I heard about Lou Reed's death. I shot it in 1968 on 5th ave, just casual shot of an interesting looking guy, only to discover later on that it was Lou Reed and John Cale.

Spiritual Adultery in the East Village: Revisiting False Prophets

As New York City punk bands go, False Prophets never seem to get their due. Led by the charismatic and sartorially adventurous Stephen Ielpi (a CBGB regular ... and possible employee, if memory serves), their name was everywhere at the time, but they don't quite get the same recognition of other bands of their scene and era. They put out one record on Alternative Tentacles in 1986, but things didn't seem to progress beyond that. Kind of a shame, that.

I saw them once or twice, usually opening for another band (I want to say I saw them share a double-bill with the similarly difficult-to-pigeonhole Alice Donut, but that might be purely projection -- although Alice Donut were also on Alternative Tentacles). They counted Flaming Pablum-favorite George Tabb in their ranks for a little while. Their greatest exposure may have come from an old MTV bumper wherein a bunch of punks -- including Tabb -- are lined up in front of CBGB, and Tabb -- wearing a black leather jacket with FALSE PROPHETS scrawled across the back -- bangs a gong with the MTV logo on it.

So, yeah, they were weird, artsy and didn't adhere to strict stylistic genre stipulation (to their credit, I'd suggest), but I'd suggest they're worthy of revisiting.

Herewith a vid from their debut LP. Even if you're not a fan of False Prophets' brand of caterwaul, it's yet another nice slice of since-vanished downtown NYC culture, largely filmed within Avenue A's Pyramid. Crank it.

Laugh Riot: PiL at the Ritz in 1981: I Wasn’t There

I wish I could give a firsthand account of Public Image Limited's fabled “riot show“ at The Ritz in 1981, but unfortunately – I wasn’t there. In fact, I wouldn’t have the pleasure of witnessing Public Image Ltd. on a stage until seeing them in 1986 at the Palladium on the tour supporting the Bill Laswell produced Album. That was indeed a great show (featuring an inexplicable instrumental cover of Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and a surprise airing of “Pretty Vacant”), but it wasn’t destined for the history books.

PiL also played the late, lamented Great Gildersleeve’s on the Bowery (which I wrote about here), but I wasn’t at that not-quite-as-infamous show either. After that Palladium gig, I’d go onto see the band a couple more times – notably at Jones Beach (alongside New Order and the Sugarcubes) and finally at the New Ritz, whilst John Lydon was pushing the comparatively staid That What Is Not album. Both of those gigs were also perfectly fine, but again, quite a lengthy beer-bottle-toss from the stuff of legend.

No, the fabled Ritz riot is the one that people still find themselves talking about all these years later, rife with accounts of an agitated, unruly audience hellbent on revenge. Hard to fathom now. Nowadays, John Lydon seems like a cuddly elder statesman compared to the snarling agitpropagandizer of that era.

Now that I think of it, while I’ve seen hundreds of shows by frowny, violence-friendly punk bands and chaos-courting metal outfits, I think the most unruly I’ve ever seen a crowd become was at a concert by – of all bands – The Wonder Stuff at the Marquee on West 21st street circa 1991. After two lengthy opening sets by Too Much Joy and Pylon (the latter due to a scheduling conflict), the `Stuff came onstage well behind schedule, copped some major attitude and only played two or three songs before vocalist Miles Hunt smarmily announced into the mic, “Buh-bye, New York, that’s all you get,” arguably taking a page from his forebears in PiL. The band left the stage. Miles’ brother Russ Hunt, the band’s roadie, stepped up to the mic and barked, “Congratulations, New York, you fucked it!” With that, a spinning beer bottle came whizzing out of the crowd towards the stage, striking the drum riser and shattering just inches from Russ’ head, prompting him to exit with stage with great stealth. House lights went up and I believe the cops were even called.

So, yeah, I was at that gig, but no one really discusses the Wonder Stuff in any great capacity these days. Though filled with vitriol, it is not in the same league as the PiL riot show at the Ritz.

In any case, if you want a thorough breakdown of what went transpired that evening in that storied room on East 11th Street, check out Dangerous Minds’ relatively recent rumination on the event (complete with a first-hand account).

So, yeah – it’s basically all ancient history. 32 years later, The Ritz is now Webster Hall and Lydon’s fronting a new incarnation of PiL, albeit still without the guitar arsenal of his former foil Keith Levene.

So why I am bothering to discuss any of this bullshit now? Well, earlier today, the mighty Keith Levene himself tweeted (and put up on Facebook) an audio clip from that fabled evening, which prompted the following snippy exchange between Levene and Ted Parsons, former drummer from SWANS, Prong and – briefly – Killing Joke. It's always nice to see two people you admire exchange views.

Anyway, for the rest of us who weren’t there, here it is…

Super8 in the Super 70s

Yep, it’s another one of these (you may remember another Super8 film from a decade later).

Dangerous Minds exhumed this curious, twenty-minute home movie by one Irving Schneider of New York City in the early `70s, pairing it with a somewhat windy rumination about fashion and punk that doesn’t quite gel with the visuals. You can read that here if you want, but it’s really all about the video.

Watching this video doesn’t quite conjure that same feeling of “oh, not much has changed” that some similar clips have done. While, yes, you’ll doubtlessly recognize several key landmarks, the clothes, the fashions, the hairstyles, the cars and, well, just the whole vibe exudes such a sense of otherness. This place doesn't exist anymore.

See if you agree.

Searching for The Blue Willow

Every season comes with its own accompanying soundtrack; certain songs and albums that fit the mood and the climate to a veritable tee. Likewise, there is some music that just does not work in certain seasons, like, for example, reggae in the darkest depths of winter. Now that the splendor of autumn is in full, colorful swing, I find myself returning to certain discs that suit the light and temperature and evoke autumns of decades past.

One such album is Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves, the debut album by Gavin Friday & The Man Seezer. Though he'd found his initial renown in Dublin's Virgin Prunes, an endearingly difficult and artsy gaggle that combined elements of post-punk, goth, glam and experimental theater into a thrilling and often horrifying mix, Gavin Friday largely abandoned the more confrontational aspects of the by-then-defunct `Prunes in 1988 in favor of the dramatic trappings of vintage cabaret music. Hooking up with versatile multi-instrumentalist Maurice "The Man" Seezer and storied cinematic producer Hal Wilner, Each Man Kills... was a striking departure for Gavin Friday.

I'd been a slavish fan of the Virgin Prunes' sophomore LP from 1982, ...If I Die, I Die from a couple of years earlier, after a husky Irish co-worker at an eatery I'd been washing dishes for extolled its demonic merits to me in the summer of 1986 (I wrote at some length about same here back in 2005). After immersing myself in the band's bedraggled dissonance, I started the follow the Virgin Prunes, but wasn't as enthused about their latter efforts, which found them swapping aggression for foppish new romanticism, like so many other bands of the day.

By the fall of 1989, I'd graduated from college and was interning paylessly at SPIN Magazine. In lieu of income, I handily helped myself to stacks of LPs, cassettes and compact discs that were otherwise discarded by the weary, jaded and underpaid editorial staff, along with a handsome amount of SPIN t-shirts and coffee mugs. In any case, one afternoon while doing some menial task like alphabetizing the press releases, I heard the distinctive, immediately recognizable voice of Gavin Friday come warbling out of the cubicle of a senior editor named Christian. I poked my over the divide and politely asked, "Is this the new Gavin Friday?" She looked at me suspiciously (which was pretty much how she always looked at me) and then raised her eyebrows, wondering how this insufferable college brat knew who Gavin Friday was. Probably in an effort to get me to leave her alone, she slammed her finger down on the eject button, restored the cassette to its case and basically thew it at me. Such was my first hearing of Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves.

Light years away from the deliberately unsettling caterwaul of the early Virgin Prunes, Each Man Kills... exuded a stylish sense of elegant decrepitude, like a Christopher Isherwood novella scored by Jacque Brel (whom Friday covers on the album with great, zealous aplomb). Filled with world-weary melodrama and rich atmospherics, the record truly conjured its own sepia-toned realm that seemed a million miles away from my shrill reality (i.e. transcribing dead-on-arrival interviews with go-nowhere bands over the brain-deadening din of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," on seemingly permanent rotation on SPIN's in-office sound system). Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves swiftly became one of my favorite albums of all time, and it remains so to this day. Your life will be enriched for owning it.

Okay, so where am I going with all this? Hang in there.

A big part of the album's atmosphere came augmented by the distinctive photography of Anton Corbijn. If you're unfamiliar with the Dutch shutterbug in question, you'd still doubtlessly recognize his dark, moody portraits of bands like Depeche Mode, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and Gavin Friday's bosom buddies in U2. For the Each Man.. sleeve, Corbijn shot Friday and Seezer holed up in what looked like a crumbling speakeasy, lounging wistfully near an antiquated jukebox (doubtlessly trilling something appropriate like Edith Piaf) while an inexplicable nude couple embraces in the corner. Again, C+C Music Factory this was not.

For years, I was curious as to the location of this photograph, assuming it to possibly be a club in Dublin Friday co-owned called The Blue Jaysus. It wasn't until some time later that I bothered to fully read the liner notes to glean that it was actually shot at an establishment right here in New York City called The Blue Willow. Even after I learned that, though, I just sort of took it for granted. This was before everything I found cool about New York City started to vanish on me.

As it turns out, The Blue Willow was a restaurant on the northeast corner at the intersection of Broadway and Bleecker Street, in a building commonly referred to as the Bleecker Tower, a very stately building that you'd probably recognize (it even made a brief cameo in "Ghostbusters", see below).

In any case, by all accounts, The Blue Willow was a pretty stylin' place, although I was unable to find any photographs of the interior outside of Gavin Friday's sleeve. It was evidently only open between 1983 and 1990, about a year after Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves was released. Given that I'm so enraptured with this album, I thought it would be interesting to see what was going on in that room today, twenty-four years after those photographs were taken. So off I went.

I'm not entirely positive what happened at 644 Broadway immediately following the demise of The Blue Willow, but today, it's a rather cloyingly douchey menswear emporium called Atrium. Bohomoth, a website that makes a very dubious claim to being "the quintessential guide to New York City," describes Atrium as being known for its "hip, fashion-forward designer accessories." I stepped into the place this weekend, and it immediately repelled me, but let's face it, despite being male, I'm not exactly their target demographic.

In any case, the liner notes for Each Man Kills cite the album cover photographs as having been taken in "the backroom" at the Blue Willow. Today, sadly, said backroom has been basically split into two chambers that play host to Atrium's shoe department. The floors look pretty much the same, but the endearingly rustic interiors of the old Blue Willow are long gone.

 

If I'm not mistaken, the window box in the right hand half of the cover (where you see Maurice Seezer seated in front of a piano) is now a doorway to the alley behind the building (see below).

The only real visual leftover from the Blue Willow's years that remains is the wide, lustrous marble trim around the two portals that lead to the backroom, one of which having since been plastered up (see below).

I'd originally intended to reproduce my own version of the album cover, but with the room now divvied up as it is, it was nigh on impossible. Moreover, the Atrium staff weren't exactly too pleased to have this weirdo wandering around the shop, not buying anything and taking random pictures.

Epilogue:

In the ensuing decades since the release of Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves, I've continued to follow Gavin Friday. On the tour for that first record, my friend Rob and I saw him perform at CBGB, a venue he seemed somewhat unimpressed by. A little time after that, Friday came back and played a spirited show at the Bottom Line. Like the Blue Willow, both CBGB and The Bottom Line are now gone. A couple of years alter, I had the pleasure of spending a long afternoon interviewing Friday at his manager's office down on White Street in TriBeCa on the eve of the release of his second album, Adam 'n' Eve on 1992, and caught an intimate performance of his later that same evening at Sin-E on St. Mark's Place. Like The Blue Willow, CBGB and The Bottom Line, Sin-E is also now gone. The final time I saw Gavin Friday perform was during his tour for his 1995 album, Shag Tobacco. For that event, he played another intimate gig, this time in the way West Village at the WestBeth Theater. And, yes....like The Blue Willow, CBGB, The Bottom Line and Sin-E, The WestBeth is also gone.

Enjoy what's left of the city while it's still here.

InstagraManhattin'