Okay, this one is really irking the shite out of me.
I KNOW I’ve seen this spot. I feel like David Hemmings’ character in Antonioni’s “Blow-Up,” trying to piece together a possible murder. I just need to find that one clue that gives it all away.
It’s plaguing me, as I’m a walker. There’s really nothing I enjoy doing more than simply walking around New York City, usually with headphones in, and just soaking it all in. I love visually scouring the surrounding cityscape for tiny minutia left over from eras past. I love looking at a minute flourish of architectural detail and thinking that it’s been there in that same spot while lives around it have come and gone as the years have rolled on. I love spotting a tattered, ancient flyer from some forgotten gig that the combined forces of time, weather and graffiti have not managed to scrape away and wondering how long ago someone pasted it up, and whether that person is aware that it’s still there, eons after the event has come and gone.
For example, I was walking through TriBeCa the other morning and I spotted a fading sticker for an old local band called The Valentine Six stuck high on a street lamp. I vividly recall seeing the Valentine Six perform at Brownie’s a couple of times back in the `90s, playing their brand of sorta Noir-Swing (imagine mournful, whiskey-soaked saxophones and spy-movie guitars scoring a pulpy drama, and you’re in the right crime scene). That all said, the Valentine Six only managed to release a single album in 1997 before calling it a night. As far as I know, the band is no more. Likewise, Brownie’s closed quite some time ago. But over on that street lamp on Leonard Street, the flag still flies for the Valentine Six. I kinda love that.
Anyway, the trouble in the instance of this Lunachicks photograph is that I walk a lot and routinely cover a helluva lot of territory. As such, while I genuinely believe that I’ve spotted this exact location (the two-layered wall behind drummer Becky Wreck in the back, specifically), I’ve walked around so many different parts of downtown recently — from Chelsea to SoHo to TriBeCa to the East Village to Chinatown — that it still could pretty much be ANYwhere.
I’ve shared my quandary with likely communities on Facebook and with my similarly inclined sleuthy bloggers, but maybe it’s because the Lunachicks aren’t Bob Dylan or Patti Smith, no one else seems as hell-bent on solving the puzzle.
WHERE ARE THEY STANDING?
And since I invoked them....
Recent Comments