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Hello again, all.
Sorry for yet another cryptically explained disappearance, but I had a couple of issues to attend to. One involved that ongoing problem I've been alluding to for some time, and the other was a mess I unwittingly created that could have -- and should have -- been avoided had I been just a bit more thoughtful. Alas, I am human and thus deeply fallible. But, ideally, we learn from our mistakes -- adopt, adapt and improve.
In any case, look for more new stuff here soonest.
Trying to realign and clean up a few messes.
I'm taking stock and taking a breather.
It’s hard to fathom that it’s already been a month since we collectively learned that David Bowie was dead. It still feels coldly new and shocking to me, and I know other people who are similarly slow to reconcile it. I remember getting all “oh, get over it” to people a month or so after Michael Jackson died. Granted, I never gave the slightest whiff of a good goddamn about Michael Jackson, but I know lots of people who did, and I now feel that was a bit churlish of me. Sorry about that.
By this point, the vigils have stopped, although there are still flowers and mementoes arranged adjacent to the Bowies’ front door on Lafayette Street. There are also a number of tributes around town. Some are cooler than others. I’m particularly fond of the entirely subtle memorials on Bond Street. See below.
My kids and I took a stroll about last week and documented the ones we spotted. I was not able to find the fabled David Bowery sign,
alas.
My own office tribute...
In any case, last weekend, I found myself heading down Mulberry Street, and came to the corner of Mulberry and Jersey Street. I paused, at first, as standing on the corner in front of the library was none other than Jack Natz, former member of the Undead, the Black Snakes, Virus and – wait for it – Cop Shoot Cop. I neglected to bother him, but it suddenly occurred to me that I was basically behind David Bowie’s apartment building, and started to wonder if the widely circulated “last photograph” was taken around it. Unfortunately, however, I didn’t find a matching doorway, which leads me to a new quest….
Where was this photograph taken?
Bloggy types like myself, Jeremiah Moss and EV Grieve frequently get a bit of grief from folks who believe we spend too much time being nostalgic for the past. Personally speaking, I’m fine with that. While the term nostalgist seems just slightly less disparaging than curmudgeon, I’m resigned to the fact that it’s what arguably defines large swathes of my blog. I don’t mind being that guy who says that “things were better in my day” … simply because I know I happen to be right. So be it. And while many pooh-pooh my blog for that particular crime, I know it still speaks to a lot of people who feel the same way. If you don’t like it, well, then you’re cordially invited to fuck right off to your nearest artisinal froyo stand on your Citibike and drop dead.
But, anyway, as I suggested as much in this old post, no matter what lost era I may pine for, there were invariably similarly inclined guys shooting their mouths off at the time about how shitty things had become, and things were better a decade or two earlier. That’s probably just how it all works. I have a hard time imagining how the times we’re currently living in will be seen as some kind of golden age for New York City, but who knows? Compared to whatever’s coming next, these may indeed by the salad days. Pass the dressing.
In any case, the only reason I got to thinking about all this crap is because of the clip below, a video compilation of then-vanishing New York City landmarks put together by The Urban Eye, back in the balmy, carefree days of 1995. Obviously, they had no idea what was in store. I believe some of this footage was re-purposed in the video for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Do the Get Down.”
Enjoy the bittersweet trip back through time….
(Erik Sanko, as photographed by Ian Gittler)
As I’ve been alluding in several recent posts, I’m currently spending large swathes of time way downtown. Essentially, my new office is on the southernmost tip of TriBeCa, bordering Battery Park City to the west and the Financial District to the east (or what some seem to now call Whitehall? Not sure about that). I'd spent a good amount of time in the Triangle Below Canal over the previous decades, but it was pretty rare for me to go further south than Park Row or Barclay Street.
But even when I was loitering around TriBeCa in the late 80’s and into the 90’s, there wasn’t much there. My main reason for initially exploring that neighborhood was my friend Sam, who was “loft-sitting” at this massive space on Vestry Street (as detailed on this ancient post). A couple of years later, my friend Tod (primary songwriter, bass-batterer and mouthpiece for both Cop Shoot Cop and, later, Firewater) set up shop in that very same building on Vestry. The only other person I knew living down there was Erik Sanko, who I’d met through Tod, although I’d already been a fan of his band, Skeleton Key well prior to meeting him. Erik lived over on Greenwich Street in Independence Plaza.
As a result, whenever I’m down in that neck of the woods, I always think back to those three characters. And while Sam now lives in Oregon and Tod now lives in Istanbul, Erik is still firmly rooted in TriBeCa. And right before my first day of work about a month and a half back, who did I run into on Greenwich Street, but Erik Sanko.
As I mentioned above, I’d first heard of Erik by way of his band Skeleton Key, who were easily one of my favorite discoveries of the `90s. Like a hiccupy cross between, say, early Devo and Pussy Galore — or maybe a less scowly Cop Shoot Cop — Skeleton Key made a gloriously skewed-but-tuneful cacophony. Like both C$C and Pussy Galore, the band featured a distinctive percussionist — initially a spiky haired gent named Rick Lee — who smacked the shit out of a variety of found metal implements, among them pots, pans, a fire extinguisher, a child’s red wagon and various other sundry items. In addition to Lee’s clamorous arsenal, the first iteration of the band also featured powerhouse drummer Steve Calhoon. In front of those two were guitarist/vocalist Chris Maxwell and bassist, vocalist, bandleader and former Lounge Lizard Erik Sanko.
That particular line-up of the band recorded an e.p. and one full album — the truly amazing Fantastic Spikes Through Balloon — before attrition started to take its toll, leaving Erik as the only mainstay from the original four. He kept the band going, though, recording two more consistently distinctive albums that retained the band’s signature brand of propulsive rock racket.
I first saw the original line-up of Skeleton Key opening for Man or Astroman at Irving Plaza and was completely blown away. Their sound twitched and jerked and pivoted wildly like some ancient machine affixed with whirring rotors and spewing out steam, only to suddenly plow into torrent of very metal riffage while careening into a wall. I would go on to see them in New York City virtually ever time they performed, from the Westbeth Theatre (gone) in the West Village to the Central Park Bandshell to the Bowery Ballroom to the Village Underground (only a few days after September 11th, 2001) and many spots in between.
Beyond Skeleton Key, though, Erik has a richly impressive musical resume, having played with the Voice of Chunk-era Lounge Lizards, as well as a host of Flaming Pablum favorites like Firewater, Gavin Friday, John Cale, the Melvins and a host of others. When not making music, Erik is a strikingly accomplished artist and puppeteer, specializing in disarmingly lifelike marionettes. Alongside his wife and fellow artist Jessica Grindstaff, Sanko is half of Phantom Limb, a production company devoted to these endeavors.
Here's a little bit about that...
Beyond our timeless mantra of “let’s go get beers,” I asked Erik about submitting — in the tradition of RB Korbet, Fran Powers, Pat Blashill, Chris Egan and Big Paul Ferguson — to a Flaming Pablum interview. Given his status as a native New Yorker, longtime Tribecan, a crazy-cool, badass musician and all-around good guy, he seemed like the perfect subject. Gamely, he obliged.
Here’s how it went....
ALEX: First up, I really want to thank you for doing this. Just to bring your story up to speed, between Skeleton Key, Phantom Limb and your various other projects, you always seem to be up to something interesting (along with being married and a father). What are you up to at the moment, if you’re at liberty to say?
ERIK: Phantom Limb is taking its most recent show "Memory Rings" to UCLA in April so there are both musical and marionette tweaks that need to get done. I start teaching Puppetry at RISD at the end of the month and I'm working with Jeffrey Zeigler (former cellist for the Kronos Quartet) on a series of pieces for solo cello and life-sized marionettes. The pieces are utilizing "numbers stations" and the marionettes will be operated from a balcony over the audience. Surveillance overload.
As I understand it, you’ve lived in Independence Plaza in TriBeCa for many years. How did you end up there? Are you a native New Yorker?
I am indeed a proud native New Yorker. I grew up in Staten Island which when I was a kid made the South Bronx look like fucking Paris. I moved to Tribeca in 1979 when it was still called Hudson Market. It was seedy and desolate then and there wasn't a stroller within a hundred block radius.
When I first started going to TriBeCa circa 1989, it seemed like the most desolate neighborhood in town. Apart from Wetlands Preserve (gone, of course – replaced by a bespoke bedding emporium) and a sorta grungy deli on the corner of Vestry and Hudson (still there, I believe), there didn’t seem to be anything there. I’m reminded of a great photo of your particular strip circa 1975 by Allen Tannenbaum (above). TriBeCa used to seem like the very edge of the city, and now… obviously…things have changed. As a longtime TriBeCa resident, how do you reconcile the changes? Have you ever thought of decamping?
We talk about moving on a regular basis, but only if we were going to move to the country or Denmark. Having said that, it;s easy to be the old guy who complains endlessly saying "When I was a kid it was like this…..!" and I refuse to be that guy. Tribeca has clearly changed, perhaps more than any neighborhood I can think of, but of all the ways it could've gone, this is really pretty great. Sure it has it;s fair share of brain dead, pilates clad trophy brides and their 12 year-old frat boy husbands in "finance" (whatever the fuck that means) but there are still plenty of lovely people, loads of parks, it's clean and safe and it has amazing public schools.
You have a pretty storied musical resume, having served time in the fabled ranks of the Lounge Lizards and played with everyone from James Chance to Gavin Friday to Suzanne Vega to the Melvins to fellow erstwhile TriBeCan Tod [A] in Firewater. Then, of course, there’s the mighty Skeleton Key. Is there are particular chapter you are most proud of?
I was just rewriting my resumé for a grant proposal and I noted that I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone else who can boast playing with Yoko Ono and Run-DMC. Of course I proudest of some of the things we did with Skeleton Key. We were really trying not to be guided by anything other than what we thought was amazing. There was a show The Contortions played in Brighton as part of ATP and somehow the planets aligned that night. I got to play "People Who Died" with Jim Carroll and I shared a mike with Lenny Kaye and I got to play "Give Peace a Chance" with Yoko in front of 10,000 Norwegians.
Do you still stay in touch with the former members of The Lounge Lizards? How about the original line-up of Skeleton Key?
I am still in touch with many former Lizards, it's hard not to, there were over forty people in that band over the years! - I just had lunch with the lovely and talented Billy Martin and I played Gavin Friday's 50 birthday party (with U2 at Carnegie Hall no less!) with Steve Bernstein and Jane Scarpantoni and it was wonderful to see them both.
Kind of a loaded question, but – to your mind - is the New York music scene that you cut your teeth in still here? If you were a younger, aspiring musician looking to get involved with something today, do you think you could still find the opportunities here?
No, not even close. When I was young rents were cheap and people moved here to be creative. Jim Jarmusch, James Nares, Richard Edson, all these guys were in bands, making movies, painting etc., and doing them all amazingly well! I don't think people can afford to do that here anymore.
Name three things you miss that have vanished in TriBeCa?
All the spice and dairy warehouses. You couldn't walk down Franklin Street without getting a little woozy from all the different smells. We used to buy 5 pound blocks of cheese for nothing. The pier at the end of Harrison Street. There is still a pier there and it's terrific but the old one was dangerous and full of mystery, There was the original Purple Barge where the Lizards played a gig. It sank the next month. Puffy's Tavern before it got renovated. They kind of squeezed all the idiosyncrasies out of it.
Name three things about TriBeCa that are still here that you cherish?
The Square Diner, Richard Serra and The Ear Inn (though it is technically part of soho)
I want to preface this question by saying that I grew up in the city, and am currently raising my own kids in the city. How do you feel about raising your child in Manhattan?
I am a super proud New Yorker and I hope to raise my daughter with the same sense of curiosity, compassion and cultural awareness my mother raised me and my brother with.
So, there you have it. I'd like to thank Erik for accommodating this silly project. The beers are indeed on me next time.
I was given a $50 Amex gift card over Christmas that’s been burning a hole on my desk for the last month and a half, so I finally decided I’d go blow it this morning. I’d originally planned on making fast work of it at Other Music, but they weren’t open yet, so I found myself at McNally Jackson Books over in SoHo, wherein I decided to treat myself to a handsome coffee table book (`cos ya know … one needs more of those) of photographs by one Catherine Ceresole.
“Beauty Lies in the Eye” (the book’s title is taken from a Sonic Youth song, pedants) is essentially a stunning collection of pics from the downtown music scene circa the very early `80s. Here’s the official explanation…
In 1979 Catherine Ceresole and her husband Nicolas moved to New York, where he was to begin training as an audio engineer. In truth, however, the couple went there because they were captivated by the city’s underground music scene. They soon became friendly with a number of musicians who Catherine began to photograph at concerts and in intimate settings. The result was a unique photographic documentary of the New York punk, no-wave and avant-garde music scene during its heyday. With her keen eye for dramatic moments, she captured them all on film: Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, Glenn Branca, Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay, the Beastie Boys and many others. After they returned to Switzerland, Catherine Ceresole continued to photograph musicians and their bands — with an unfailing ear and keen eye. The book is a visual music history of the last decades, presenting the work of this unique photographer to a broad public for the first time.
Texts by Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Rhys Chatham, Mark Cunningham, Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, and a conversation between Catherine Ceresole and Emmanuel Grandjean, along with Nicolas Ceresole and Francis Baudevin.
Cool, right? The book came out, evidently, in 2013. If, like me, you’re into this sort of thing, it’s well worth your time. For me, it was a shot of DNA playing in the truly unlikely environs of Folk City (a venue I wrote about here) that really hooked me in. Find out more here.
Anyway, here’s a little video teaser…enjoy.
Catherine Ceresole | Other Music from Musée de l'Elysée on Vimeo.
I first wrote about the Hot Corn Girls here in 2005, but being that I don’t recommend digging that far back on this blog (lest you discover how directionless and slavishly unedited my posts were, at the time), I’m going to re-purpose the crucial bits for you now. You’re welcome.
Today's song comes from the Hot Corn Girls, an endearingly amateurish quartet of Lower East Siders who date back to the mid-90's. Being friends with Joanne their bass player and Dean Rispler their drummer (a punk rock renaissance man who'd later go onto play for bands like The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Murphy's Law, Tiger Mountain and the Brought Low, as well as becoming a sought-after producer in his own right), I was fortunate enough to catch the band performing live a couple of times (notably at the Pyramid on Avenue A and again at Under Acme on Great Jones Street). Rounded out by one Bob Limp on vocals and the enigmatic Squeaky on guitar (an erstwhile member of the similarly inclined Japanese band, The Chimpanzees, despite not being Japanese himself), the Hot Corn Girls were both hilarious and surprisingly catchy, as this tune handily demonstrates.
Through the beneficent affiliation with the Chimpanzees (whose lead singer, Naoko Nozawa a.k.a Diarreah Naoko, was -- evidently -- a hugely popular television comedienne in her native Japan and Bob Limp's girlfriend), the HCG were fleetingly financially solvent enough to be able to go into the studio and cut an album. Look at My Bum came out in 1994 on Stingy Banana records, graced with a suitably pervy cover photograph by transgressive shutterbug extraordinaire, Richard Kern, and fifteen luridly surreal tracks with largely improvised, unintelligible lyrics. Despite their willfully challenged aesthetic, the sound (produced, once again, by budding knob-twiddler Dean Rispler) absolutely crackles with depth and definition (not things normally associated with humble East Village bands).
I believe the song titles were assigned to their respective tracks with Burroughsian arbitrariness, so don't bother listening for the song's title in the already indecipherable and quite-possibly-not-sung-in-any-language-known-to-man chorus. Incidentally, I'd have posted a picture of the band or the sleeve if I could find one on the `net, but I was unsuccessful in that pursuit and have yet to purchase a scanner for such things. Suffice it to say, a Google search for "the Hot Corn Girls" didn't turn up anything I could re-produce here (especially if you have your Google filters turned off) without offending a whole lot of people. So, without further ado, herewith "My Pile of Leaves" by the Hot Corn Girls.
Incidentally, the name "Hot Corn Girls" itself does not refer to any deviant sexual practice but rather to a book by Solon Rovinson called "Hot Corn - Life Scenes in New York" from 1854. The Hot Corn Girls themselves were Irish-American immigrants who peddled hot corn in the streets. There's also the arguable theory that the Hot Corn Girls doubled as murderous prostitutes who slew their johns. I'll defer to the historians over that one. If you're as smitten with this track as I am, you can still find copies of Look at My Bum if you're willing to search for it. The Hot Corn Girls went onto record another 7" single before splitting. Dean Rispler went onto work with dozens of other great bands. Joanne got married and left NYC. Bob went off to Japan with Nozawa where they perform as the tastefully named Ass Baboons of Venus. No idea what happened to Squeaky.
Just to bring this saga up to the present day, the great Dean Rispler continued to play with a host of great bands before becoming a full-time member of the legendary Dictators (for whom he plays bass, unlike the Hot Corn Girls, for whom he bashed the shit out of a drum kit). He is still a tireless champion of great music and big-hearted, gregarious soul.
Joanne H. (above) said goodbye to all things East Village some time ago, and now lives in Connecticut, where she is a teacher, a mother and a wife. Despite this placidly domestic veneer, she is, was and remains way more Punk Rock than you, I and/or anyone we know will ever be.
I’m honestly not sure what happened to Bob.
I closed that piece in 2005 with “No idea what happened to Squeaky.” I’m happy to say this is no longer the case. Through the magic of Facebook (hey, it does have its benefits), David – his actual name – and I are back in touch. As such, I couldn't help noticing recently when he posted some vintage Hot Corn Girls to his page, leading me to discover that several of the band’s tracks (including such perennial favorites as “Maggot Fiesta,” “Twit,” “Crackhead Bit My Dick,” “Angry Crouton” and, of course, the unforgettable “My Boner, Your Fish Tank”) were ready to be slavishly re-enjoyed.
Twenty-plus years after the fact, it’s still hard to reconcile the East Village as the same place that used to be home to lesser-celebrated bands like The Hot Corn Girls, let alone bands of any kind. That piece of downtown just doesn’t seem to exist anymore, despite valiant efforts by luminaries like Handsome Dick Manitoba and Jesse Malin to keep that spirit alive. To be fair, both the clubs where I saw the Hot Corn Girls play live – the Pyramid and Under Acme – are technically still there, although the Pyramid is barely recognizable and Under Acme is now called Acme Downstairs, “a storied and time-worn rock ‘n’ roll club [that] has been renovated into a cocktail bar, ideal for pre-dinner drinks, large party dining and private events.”
How genteel.
Once upon a time, though, it sounded like this….
A week or so back, I stumbled upon a video of a live recording of storied NYC punk pioneer, notorious crank and Television mainstay Tom Verlaine performing a blistering live rendition of “Always” from the Dreamtime album onstage at the Ritz in 1982. Sadly, it’s only an audio recording, and the visuals are just what looks like some surreal home movies (not too different from that live Lou Reed clip from the other week). In any event, that got me ruminating about the greatness of this song all over again. In doing so, I had another revelation.
I’ve talked about Verlaine’s “Always” a couple of time here already (notably here and here). Put simply, it’s just a great goddamn song, full stop, and a good deal more in-your-face than most of Television’s more celebrated work. For the sake of this post, herewith the studio version, once again…
Awesome, right? Well, I told ya so. In any case, I immediately thought the live video was worth posting here, so I started to sniff around for other pertinent information. In doing so, I was reminded of the sleeve to the single, a somewhat-dated shot of our Tom posing somewhere down near the bottom of Manhattan. Here’s that full sleeve now.
In re-examining it, I suddenly realized that the building in the background is 140 West Street (now referred t as 100 Barclay Street), and the only reason I know that is because I now work in the building directly behind it. That got me kind of excited.
Honestly, I’d already been thinking about penning a post about 100 Barclay, if only because it’s kind of an insane building. A truly splendid bit of vintage art deco architecture, this stately tower is rife with needless stony filigree and flourish. From the west-facing windows of my office, you can spy bas-relief elephants adoring its corners several stories above the street. Surrounded by modern shafts of glass and steel, it’s a gorgeous relic of a vanished age.
There’s a whole sordid backstory, but while the building (still?) houses several floors that belong to Verizon, it is currently in the process of being converted --- by the notorious Ben Shaoul – into ridiculously opulent condos. As if the fleeting notion of living in such a plush hotbed of ritzy exclusivity isn’t ridiculous enough, Shaol has re-christened the venture the Ralph Walker TriBeCa (named after the deserving architect) and curiously advertising the apartments therein as – wait for it – “collectible.”
Really? Collectible??
I mean, is this to imply that prospective tenants are encouraged to consider buying more than one? Who’s got that kinda dough?
So, yeah, the whole thing is a vulgar display of affluence, and all parties concerned should be deeply ashamed of themselves. I suppose I should at least be thankful the building hasn’t been torn down. Click here for the whole miserable experience.
Anyway, back to the sleeve of “Always.”
As you can see above, back in 1981 (when the single and Dreamtime were released), there wasn’t as much going on around 140 West Street. Its immediate neighbors (not including, obviously, the original twin towers of the World Trade Center) were dwarfed by its majestic height and rococo intricacies, and it perched precariously on the edge of a field of derelict landfill (where Tom is seen standing probably still looked like this at the time, courtesy of the great Allan Tannenbaum). Suffice to say, it’s not really like that anymore.
Honestly speaking, prior to taking the job I now have, I never spent a great deal of time in this part of the city, rarely venturing south of TriBeCa. I mean, I went to the original World Trade Center a couple of times, but there really wasn’t much else to do down there. Obviously, in the wake of September 11, 2001, everyone became more aware of the lowest part of the island. We all have images of the clouds of toxic dust and debris overtaking everything. We can all still remember the smoke and the tangled wreckage.
That, however, was over fourteen years ago. And in that fourteen years, development in Lower Manhattan has come roaring back (see this promotional clip, for example). It is verily a whole new city down there, and – frankly – a city I don’t really recognize or know very well. So, as I’m spending more time in it these days, I’m gradually familiarizing myself with it.
Today, the plot of land Tom Verlaine was pictured standing on is a very busy and very populated little piece of real estate indeed. And behind him, the surrounding environs have risen up around what had been 140 West Street, dimming a bit of its former glory (to my mind, anyway).
By my calculations, Tom is seen standing on what these days is the western end of Vesey Street, just west of the West Side Highway, and roughly just in front of what today is somewhat inexplicably called Brookfield Place (formerly known as the World Financial Center). I am sometimes known to procure my lunch in the teeming clusterfuck that is the Brookfield Place’s posh food court, that being Hudson Eats, although it’s not at all a place I can picture Tom Verlaine venturing, at least not without doling out a few withering sneers.
While thinking about all this crap, I was in Hudson Eats yesterday, and ran into my cousin Deirdre. I neglected to go into the whole song and dance, but I asked her to take the picture below, and she gamely obliged. It’s not as anal-retentively-precise a replication as I’d like, but you still get the basic gist.
Here, meanwhile, is that live recording…captured at the late, great Ritz (now Webster Hall) on East 11th Street. Crank it.
Spotted over the weekend on Extra Place (around the corner from the Howl Gallery on East 1st Street).
More stuff coming here shortly, just as soon as life calms the Hell down.
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