Flaming Pablum

Back to the Bowery: Then & Now

I’ve written about Matt Weber’s photographs here a few times. His work frequently acts as a good jumping-off point, in terms of posts. It was a photo of Matt’s that prompted me to reach out to Pat Blashil to talk about the bad old days of the Meat Packing District. In any case, he recently put up another image that’s prompted me to want to expound, inadvertently resulting in the fifth post sort of about CBGB since late July. Oh well.

Here’s the Weber photo in question (originally found here). This was taken just south of East 1st Street, on the Bowery, in 1989.

As period pics go, this one does a very nice job of summing up a time and a place. Even a good decade and change after playing host to Television, Blondie, the Ramones, etc., CBGB was still essentially a skid row dive, perched on a precarious strip of urban badlands largely roamed by those down on their luck. That would all change, of course, but at the tail-end of the 80’s, the Bowery was still basically the end of the line.

A few years back, I posted a few “then & now” entries that juxtaposed certain locations between their iterations in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and their more recent incarnations. I almost mimicked Weber’s vantage point (albeit 13 years later), but from a spot closer to the northern side of the street. You can find those pictures here.

Prompted by discovering Weber’s photo, though, I thought I’d try it again.

1989:

2016:

Quite a difference, eh?

Incidentally, at the risk of beating a dead horse into a painfully laborious pulp, just a few steps to the east of this spot was where Joe Dilworth shot that elusive photograph of the Lunachicks that drove me insane for several weeks.

Here’s little snippet of what might have been goin’ down in CBGB while Weber was taking that original picture, featuring the Senders (who I wrote about back here).

Back to Black 'n' White City

Here’s a strange one.

Prompted by my fondness for their lovingly compiled box sets (like the Ork Records collection and their archival White Zombie cache), I recently started following The Numero Group on Instagram. While they do indeed release an awful lot of music that I’m just not-at-all familiar with, I have tremendous respect for their attention to detail and shared affinity for the physical manifestations of music. I consider them kindred souls.

Anyway, earlier today they put up a post (see below) focussing on the mid-90’s indie band, Blonde Redhead. Those who’ve stuck with this blog for a while might remember a post I composed about a long-vanished live music venue in the Meat Packing District called The Cooler. I saw Blonde Redhead at the Cooler a couple of times. I’m not sure I’d be crass enough to call it a gimmick, but Blonde Redhead (named after a suitably skronky song by No Wave pioneers, DNA) did boast a distinguishing characteristic in that they featured a pair of identical twins in the band. While certainly not the first ensemble to boast this feature (hello, Gene Loves Jezebel, The Connesls, The Breeders), it did lend them a sort of rarified mystique. Here’s their post now…

 

Blonde Redhead, Manhattan, 1995. 📸 Michael Ackerman.

A video posted by Numero Group (@thenumerogroup) on Aug 30, 2016 at 7:54am PDT

I was struck by this post for a number of reasons. For a start, it’s a cool little slice of vintage Blonde Redhead. I don’t know if they’re still active today, but I have indeed spotted one or both of twins around town (although I’ve never accosted them). There were a compelling live band, to be sure

Secondly, I love this snippet — which dates back to 1995 — as it retains a whiff of the old Canal Street (which I spoke of quite recently here). While I tenuously asserted in that recent post that Canal hasn’t visually changed that much when compared to its neighboring SoHo and TriBeCa, this clip does feature the interior and exterior of the since-vanished Industrial Plastics, an old surplus fixture on that strip that is long gone. When I worked as a gopher for a graphic designer in the mid-to-late 80’s, I was regularly sent down to Industrial Plastics to procure any number of weird items for her. Here’s a nice shot of it (photo courtesy of this blog).

The third reason this post sunk its hooks into me is that it features the photography of a gent named Michael Ackerman, a name I’d not heard in ages.

Back in the early 90’s, both Michael and I contributed to a freebie weekly paper called New York Perspectives. I used to write for their music page, while Michael leant his burgeoning photography skills to their features and covers. Springing off my association with the New York Review of Records (which I spoke in greater detail of here), Perspectives was kind of a knock-off of New York Press, albeit slightly less snarky. Regardless, I was hugely happy to be a part of it, and met some great people through it, many of whom I’m still friends with today, although Perspectives stopped publishing at some point in the mid-90’s, I believe. Sadly, today there is precious little evidence out there that the paper ever existed, although I still have a yellowing pile of them in my front hall closet.

In any case, Michael and I got to know each other a little circa 1991-1993, usually fraternizing around the Perspectives office or at parties thrown by the managing editor, Jon, at his cavernous shared-apartment over on a then-troubled strip of East 14th Street (over what is today the Beauty Bar). But we worked together specifically on a cover story I did on Cop Shoot Cop (who, again, I’ve discussed innumerable times here, but most recently here). Michael shot some suitably stark, ominous black n’ white shots of the band for the cover and the inner spread that I was quite taken with.

Anyway, I can’t remember why or when I stopped contributing to Perspectives, but it was invariably due to getting another job somewhere or possibly the operation folding, but by the tail end of the 90’s, it was done and dusted. I stayed in touch with several of its folks (and have since re-kindled some friendships via Facebook), but fell out of touch with Michael Ackerman entirely.

In the ensuing years, however, Michael has become a photographer of some renown, revered for his genuinely haunting, black n’ white images. He even had a book of his work published not too long back.

With all this in mind, I decided to reach out to Michael and see if he might (a) even remember me and (b) maybe share those old Cop Shoot Cop photographs.

We shall see. Stay tuned. Check out some of Michael's work here and also here. 

Addendum: Here's a nice interview Michael did not too long back, rife with lots of his images...

It’s Been Seen Where Gene Had Been on The Scene

As is so often the case, the great Bob Egan of PopSpots (whose Facebook page you really need to follow, and who just posted a truly exhaustive expose on the cover of Sandinista by the Clash) put the pieces together on this quiz with the stealth of a goddamn professional.

I’d originally postulated that the Dynasty-era Demon was photographed on possibly Duane or Reade Streets down in TriBeCa. Turns out I wasn’t too far off.

While, yes, this exchange between Simmons, a young fan and — presumably — that young fan’s mother (one wonders what they were discussing, moreover if Gene managed to get the fan’s mother’s number, as was his M.O.) did indeed transpire in the Triangle Below Canal, but I was off by four or five blocks. It turns out that Dr. Love -- the Almost Human God of Thunder with X-Ray Eyes whose Love is Larger than Life, etc. --  exchanged words with these mere mortals in front of the entrance of 76 Franklin Street. Here's Bob Egan's typically scrupulous detective work below....

I actually have a personal history with 76 Franklin myself. Y’see, the apartment my family and I have been living in since the ass-end of 2002 came equipped with a seemingly then-state-of-the-art thermostatic shower valve. What that basically means is that the temperature of said shower is controlled with a mechanism comparable to a volume knob. As it happens, however, these devices go out of calibration if you blink at them the wrong away, and — in my particular case — can only be kept in check with special Perrin & Rowe ROHL thermostatic shower cartridges. Suffice to say, these items don’t grow on goddamn trees. As such, I would (and, conceivably, still will) need to periodically replace the cartridge, and — wouldn't you know it — there are a precious, fleeting few outlets around this great city of ours wherein to procure just such an item. For me, the go-to place to prize this maddeningly rarified artifact of bathing technology was George Taylor Specialities, located at — WAIT FOR IT — 76 Franklin Street. I bitched about it most recently here, all the way back in 2010, which invariably means I'm shortly due for a new one. 

This all said, George Taylor Specialties closed up shop on Franklin Street earlier this year. So, next time my shower goes out of whack and it’s left with nothing but either skin-immolating heat or sub-arctic cold, I may be shit out of luck.

But maybe that’s the answer!

Maybe Gene was popping out in between deflowering nubile groupies, recording high volume odes to his own sexual prowess and meeting with his financial advisers in order to mend a fixture in the doubtlessly well-appointed Simmons master-bathroom (possibly the fearsome chamber wherein he allegedly invented the disquieting practice of “the blumpie”). We shall probably never know … and probably don’t want to.

In any case, 37 years later, George Taylor Specialities is gone. To the east, further up Franklin Street can be found the entrance to Corlandt Alley, the narrow canyon which once led to the Mudd Club at 77 White Street (a venue KISS assuredly never played which, at the time of this photo, was still in its heyday). To the west, just a block towards West Broadway, is where Zbigniew Rybczynski shot the bizarrely entertaining video for 1986's “Original Wrapper” by Lou Reed (who unfathomably collaborated with KISS on their arguably abortive concept album from 1981, Music from the Elder). The less said about the latter, the better. 

Back to the original photo above, the little chid has presumably grown up, and probably regales people today at cocktail parties with his anecdote about the time he and his mother chatted with Gene Simmons in full, made-up regalia on a TriBeCa side-street. Meanwhile, here's me standing in that very spot last night ... looking somewhat like a corpulent milkman.

Lastly, Gene Simmons — somewhat lamentably — is still at it.

The Shirt Hits the Fan: Redux

About 7 years ago, I wrote a surprisingly contentious little piece here about people buying CBGB shirts that weren’t actually procured at the venue in question (which, by that point, had already been closed for a few years, gutted and turned into John Varvatos' bespoke haberdashery of ludicrous revisionism). Honestly speaking, I ultimately don’t see anything wrong with folks buying CBGB shirts despite not having purchased them there. By this stage of the proceedings, the iconography of CBGB is shorthand for a whole swathe of popular culture. And as much as I’m easily riled by folks wearing band t-shirts who aren’t actually fans (let alone familiar) with the bands they’re espousing, CBGB could conceivably mean different things to different people. Sure, the Dead Boys and the Cro-Mags played there, but so did Binky Philips and Phoebe Legere. Its name may specifically connote “punk” and “underground,” but — as a venue — it played host to a deceptively wide array of artists (in the same way that Wetlands Preserve in TriBeCa didn’t just play host to hippie jam bands). It’s not simply ‘one thing’ (i.e. like a band t-shirt). In any case, the bands, the music, the culture and that sensibility spawned by the place arguably continue — for better or worse — to inform popular culture. As such, why not celebrate the place with a t-shirt … even if you never got to go?

Shocking as it may sound, that part doesn’t bother me. No, what bothers me is bullshit like this.

I’ve already gone on record a few times about my disdain for John Varvatos’ exclusive appropriation of CBGB’s legacy (most specifically here). When the venue was forced to close after a heated dispute with the building’s owner, Varvatos seized the opportunity to open up shop in the club’s footprint. But his attempts to pay homage to his boutique’s former occupant is brazenly undermined and rendered entirely moot by the fatuously overstated avarice of his operation. CBGB had never been about glitz and glamor. As a former skid row biker bar on the Bowery, it blossomed into a hotbed of creative opportunity because it wasn’t exclusive. It may have later cultivated its own brand of elitism (and you’d be fooling yourselves to think otherwise), but it was assuredly never fancy. The folks who came to lose teeth at the hardcore matinees, get unsolicitedly slapped by James Chance, berated by Lydia Lunch or pants-soakingly deafened at SWANS gigs didn’t always feel a need to dress to the nines. Maybe they did at certain other venues, but CBGB just wasn’t that place.

Here’s the thing, though. Whether you’re a preciously pedantic punk-rock-purist or you’re just a schlub who thinks a CBGB shirt would look cool, THERE IS NO REASON ON THIS EARTH OR ANY OTHER TO PAY $100.00 FOR IT.

In all seriousness, if you spend $100 on a t-shirt, you’re a complete idiot — regardless of what’s on it.

Don’t even get me started on the accompanying text…

If there's one thing the John Varvatos brand is known for, it's rocking out. We're keeping this theme alive and well with our newest set of rock-inspired tees. Wear them with Converse to see your favorite band, or pair them with a blazer and dark-wash jeans for a JV-approved office look.

I mean, sweet jeezy creezy, … where does one even begin?

Listen, if you really want a CBGB shirt, you can invariably skip down to your local shopping mall or visit one of literally thousands of places online and get yourself one. But if you spend more than twenty bucks on it — unless, of course, the garment in question happened to be fashioned out of the Shroud of Turin — you’re getting fucking ripped off. Hell even twenty bucks is pretty steep, when ya think about it.

Missing Weeks

If you take a look at the column on the left-hand side of this page (which I haven’t updated, admittedly, in some time) and scroll down a ways, you’ll eventually find an unwieldy blogroll (or list of fellow blogs) that I clunkily titled, back in 2005, For Those About to Blog, … We Salute You (it seemed funny, at the time). These were blogs that I regularly read, or figured were thematically aligned with the content on my own blog. If I slotted your blog in there, it usually meant I was both a follower and an enthusiastic proponent of your work. Lucky you.

After eleven years of blogging here on Flaming Pablum, however, I seem to no longer necessarily be in step with the times (if I ever was to begin with). In the wake of more readily digestible social media, blogging itself has almost become a cute little anachronism, … just like still still using a 160 GB iPod or still collecting compact discs and other arguably ridiculous practices I’m loathe to give up. As such, many — if not most — of the blogs cited in that blogroll are long dead.

People give this stuff up for any number of reasons. My comrades Tim from Stupefaction and Bryan from This Ain’t the Summer of Love both recently ceased and desisted further blogging, as they felt they had other projects in their respective lives to attend to. I don’t know what happened to Hunter-Gatherer — he just seemed to stop, one day. Bob Arihood of Neither More Nor Less passed away, of course. Some other bloggers just sort of … drifted away, I guess.

But there is one blogger, or photo-blogger, I guess I should say, that I’m still curious about, even years after his content left the internet. As you may remember from this old post in 2011, there used to be a pair of sites called Street Views 1982 and Posterous, a gallery and a blog maintained by a gentleman named Dan Weeks.

Here’s how I described his work back then…

Dan Weeks' Street View New York 1982 (and its accompanying blog, Posterous) document the efforts of a photographer who sought to preserve the topography of Manhattan via incredibly detailed, panoramic photographs of its many avenues. It was an incredibly demanding, unwieldy and financially-crippling project for Weeks -- sort of the analog version of what Google Maps does today. I can't imagine how exhausting it must have been for the man.

In any case, decades later, Weeks has exhumed the ambitious project for the internet and is gradually presenting the photographs on the site. If, like me, you're a native New Yorker who walked the street of Manhattan in the early 1980s, looking at Weeks' website is like discovering a lost family photo album. The contrast between the streets captured in his pictures and their contemporary incarnations is striking.

Sounds cool, right?

Well, for whatever reason, Mr. Weeks threw up his hands and aborted the project, but not before wiping the `net clean, as much as he could, of his content. If you go to either of his pages’ URLs today, you’ll find nothing. It’s as if they never existed.

That said, while his stuff was live, he garnered a fair amount of attention. As such, there are still bits of his work around, if you look for it. All the images on this entry are from his pages.

Personally speaking, I keep periodically checking for some new presence of his around the blogosphere, as I am still very captivated by his project, and would love to see the rest of his work. I'm particularly miffed I didn't save one of his images -- the afore-cited shot of the old Disc-O-Mat on the corner of East 58th Street and Lexington Avenue where I spent large swathes of my teenage allowance. 

I'm also just curious as to why he snapped and took it all down. Was it just too demanding a task? Did he experience some sort of epiphany about not wanting to dwell solely in the past (as I keep ruminating about)? Was it too emotionally harrowing for him? 

We'll probably never know. In the interim, however, here are a few of his photos from 34 years back....

Gene on the Scene

As I’m prone to do, I joined another slavishly nostalgic Facebook group, recently, that calls itself 1970’s Filthy New York. Much like some other similarly inclined collectives, this particular group — which is closed, you have to petition for inclusion — hosts a sprawling slew of vintage photographs from the period in question, all seemingly uploaded over the past couple of years by a gentleman named David, who — oddly — is apparently based somewhere in the UK. Many of said images are very familiar (quite of few of them could also be found on this mysterious cache from a few weeks back). Few are credited, sadly, which is the case with the one I’m highlighting below.

Amidst this unwieldy array of photographs, I stumbled upon a curious one of Gene Simmons. Like myself, the enigmatic David seems to harbor a reverence for 70’s-era KISS, and allegiance that, personally speaking, frequently finds me at odds with many of my peers.

In any case, the photo finds our Gene in full, ridiculous regalia out on the mean streets of Manhattan. The layperson may not be able to discern as much, but any card-carrying member of the KISS Army could readily tell you that this photo was taken circa 1979, given the fact that Gene is sporting the suitably over-the-top togs he wore for the Dynasty era (you read more about that particular album here).

Here's the photo in question now...

I haven’t had that much time to devote to pinpointing this spot, but at first glance, I’d suggest this exchange transpired somewhere down in TriBeCa, possibly between Church Street and West Broadway. Reade Street? Duane Street, maybe? Weigh in, shot-spotters.

What the Hell he was doing there is another question, the answer to which we’ll probably never learn.

Bonus bit: Also scattered amidst the Filthy New York photo page was this alternate shot of the KISS boys atop the observation deck of the Empire State Building. The only reason I'm including it here is because of the poster -- recognize that ape? Of course you do, it's that same gorilla I talked about recently from the Museum of Natural History! SEE? IT'S ALL CONNECTED!!!!

Some period perspective on the Gene shot...

Sumner in SoHo

Here’s a post that sprang out of another entry I’ve been slowly composing. While the latter is intended to extoll the merits of a certain album, this former was inspired by the recollection of a photograph first spied in an ancient issue of SPIN. I flirted with the idea of making it another ‘photo quiz,’ but being that I’m 99% certain the location in question simply does not exist anymore, it seemed like a futile concept. Here, then, is that post.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, prior to its current incarnation as a pricey shopping district and hotbed of exceedingly exclusive real estate opportunities, SoHo used to have a lot more light and space. Back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, between its signature, old industrial buildings, there were gaps, lots, passages and alleys. While obviously ideal for parking, these spaces also handily acted as destinations for flea markets, courts for impromptu sporting events, wildly convenient short-cuts and, as everywhere else in the neighborhood at the time, giant, outdoor canvases for rampant street art.

Here in 2016, most of the lots have been gobbled up by real estate developers looking to squeeze in a new, “tony" (god I hate that fucking adjective) condo. Formerly wide open corners that allowed the sun to stream in between SoHo’s famously narrow byways are now occupied by imposing glass fortresses. But, again, `twas not always this way.

To my recollection, there were two distinctive, mid-block passages, just south of Houston Street, that survived at least into the 90’s. One was between Mercer and Broadway (which, just prior to becoming the home of the Scholastic building, looked like this). The second one was between West Broadway and Wooster, just above Prince Street. These weren’t proper “alleys,” mind you (they were not named), but rather simple, brick-facaded gaps between buildings that came into being after previous structures had been razed or simply collapsed. The photo below, I believe, is of this second gap between West Broadway and Wooster, taken circa 1986.

The origin of this photo is the January 1987 issue of SPIN. It was featured (and strangely uncredited) in tandem with a review of New Order’s fourth studio LP, Brotherhood. Still a devout reader at the time, I remember cutting this photograph out of the magazine during my sophomore year at college and taping it to my wall. It resonated not only because it was a stylish photograph of New Order (that’s lead singer/guitarist Bernard Sumner in the foreground), but because I recognized the brick facade he’s pictured in front of. That facade — complete with painted silhouettes — was within the passage between Wooster and West Broadway in SoHo.

SPIN’s photographers frequently shot their subjects around NYC. As such, my dorm walls were covered with similar pics of bands like the Cro-Mags, the Pogues, Sonic Youth, Robyn Hitchcock and the Butthole Surfers, all snapped in photogenic Manhattan locations.

Anyway, the frustrating thing about this is that, honestly, there’s really no way to prove my postulation that this photo was shot where I say it was. I do know some photographers and bloggers with an equal zeal for the SoHo of yesteryear that may be able to corroborate, but it seems unlikely that we’d be able to definitively verify the assertion. Until I find more evidence to back it up, you may just have to take my word for it, alas.

Today, that brick-faced passage between Wooster Street and West Broadway is occupied -- on the Wooster side -- by a new building with the address of 139, which hosts a North Face outlet on its ground floor. On the West Broadway side, it's 455 ... home, I believe, to a nail spa called Think Pink. 

This isn’t the first time, by the way, I’ve zeroed in on a photograph of New Order’s Bernard Sumner walking about New York. Witness this series of posts from 2014.

Here, meanwhile, is New Order from the same era....

Hardcore, Henry & Hoboken

I’ve already penned a few posts about Henry Rollins, Black Flag and Maxwell’s in Hoboken, respectively, so I won’t bother re-hashing those here, but a certain Dangerous Minds entry resurfaced on Facebook recently, and it begged further extrapolation.

Back last December, DM put up a trio of live Black Flag clips that remain notable inasmuch as that band’s guitarist/founder Greg Ginn is notorious for keeping something of a stranglehold on any video content of the band. Nine months later, however, the three clips are still live. While they’re all worth your time (if you’re a fan), I’m focusing on the one shot in Hoboken’s Maxwell’s in October of 1984.

For a start, I appreciate this clip in that it provides a fairly telling glimpse inside the since-vanished club in question. I haven’t been back to Hoboken in veritable eons, so I don’t know what transpires in that particular space now (ping-pong tables? Karaoke?), but this is a great document of what the experience of a full-throttled live show in that room was like.

The other thing that strikes me about the video, however, is how it underlines how iconoclastic a band Black Flag really was. By 1984, hardcore punk had seemingly started to both calcify and mutate. Some primary bands had already quit, flamed out or seemingly lost their way entirely. Many were happy to reinforce by-then-established formulas, creatively running themselves aground. But not Black Flag.

Unwilling and potentially incapable of staying stylistically static (as many of their fans may have preferred), the Black Flag making the rounds in `84 was a wholly different beast from the one that had recorded the iconic Damaged album. Giving sway to their penchant for lengthy, free-jazz-inspired jams (as opposed to the taut, splenetic sprints on their early recordings), Black Flag was evolving into something else entirely, and not everyone was necessarily onboard.

Their sound had become defiantly sludgy and turgid, defying the speedy mores of the hardcore community. When they felt like stepping on the gas, they could still whip a crowd up into a frenzy, but Black Flag were no one’s performing monkeys.

Two other things I love about this. Note the bouncy punk with the Mohawk at about 0:28 into, earnestly pogoing, trying to get a pit going and dutifully adhering to all his chosen subculture’s then-patented practices, willfully oblivious that Black Flag have clearly moved on. It’s also striking to see such a po-faced Henry, looking like an impossibly youthful hybrid of Jim Morrison and Charles Manson.

He’s lightened up a bit since then.

Happy Not Happy

I fielded a note from a regular reader named Dr. Bop, recently, in response to my Summer 2016 survey. The good doctor writes…

I was gonna do a whole bit about you writing better and more humorously when you were miserable; but now that you have returned to the city, I think things will improve.....by going downhill fast. ;^) (Sorry, I'm just not sure exactly what to do with feeling happy that you're a lot happier.....to paraphrase, "Are you happy? Are you happy? There's NO happy in rock/cultural criticism!"

He’s being facetious, of course, but it does raise a few points.

I wouldn’t imagine anyone regularly reads this blog with an eye for my state of well-being. I mean, that will almost always be reflected in the tone of the content, whether I mean for it to or not. I compose all this stuff from a specific point of personal reference (as I’ve said, if I don’t have a personal association or some anecdotal connection to a specific topic, I’m probably not going to post about it here), but I don’t necessarily mean the blog to be about me. It’s about other things -– music, New York City, idiotic pop culture, shoddy attempts at proper parenting, etc. -– albeit all through my perspective. While I may frame the posts with stories about my experience or interaction with whatever persons, places or things, those are just intended as launching points. The blog is still meant to be about those things, not just my arguably egocentric, self-indulgent perceptions of them. But, I guess they’re all intertwined.

In any case, while I am indeed happier in my domestic and vocational circumstances, that doesn’t necessarily mean my outlook is suddenly universally sunny. And, just to be clear, when I was genuinely miserable, I didn’t post at all (witness my fraught hiatus from a little while back).

Given the pervading, primary subject matter of the blog (the steady dissolution of everything I love about NYC, pretty much), things still look pretty goddamn dire. Which, of course, brings me back to a quandary I’ve wrestled with before (most notably here): Is it healthy to spend so much time dwelling on the past? Is it wise to carry a torch for an iteration of New York City that is never coming back?

This blog is sometimes lumped in with a few select others and tagged with the epithet “nostalgist,” usually employed as a dismissive pejorative. I have no problem with being branded as such –- I mean, by definition, most of this stuff is exactly that: nostalgia. How could I argue?

I’d like to believe, however, that by highlighting the material I do, I’m not simply wallowing in nostalgia -- although you may beg to differ -- so much as shining a light on some lesser-celebrated elements* that get washed over in the grand continuum of things. Given the feedback I get, as trivial as most of my posts are, I gather they’re resonating with some folks. Other folks, maybe not so much, but whatever.

In any case, whether I’m happy or not about the state of proceedings -- be it my personal life, my professional situation, the state of the world or the dwindling doings of interest here in NYC –- I never really have a plan about what I’m going to post. Inspiration strikes when it strikes. Luckily, that usually happens a lot. When it runs out -– regardless of my mood -- I guess I’ll stop.

*Mea culpa: I realize that the arguably hackneyed ghost of CBGB could hardly be counted as “lesser-celebrated,” and but that’s an easy exception.

The Summer 2016 Survey

I realize that it’s only August 21, and that most people consider Labor Day weekend the official end of summer, but my week-long vacation comes to a jarring halt tomorrow morning, my kids finished up their day-camp on Saturday, and we all came back to NYC this afternoon. Sure, we have a couple of weekends left, but for all intents and purposes, Summer 2016 is a sweaty, humidity-labored breath away from being done and dusted.

As such, I thought I’d revive this survey from the balmy days of Summer 2009…

Defining Moment of Summer 2016:

This is actually pretty tough to answer. Last summer, I was a jobless bum, but this summer found me working through all of June, July and most of August (apart from my afore-cited week of vacation). The wife and I did have one fairly action-packed evening about three weekends ago wherein we attended a book reading by Jay “Bright Lights, Big City” McInneny, had drinks with the author afterwards and then attended a friend’s birthday party wherein even your humble narrator felt compelled to part from his studiously cultivated cool and assume the dance floor (when the deejay decided to spin “Flashlight” by Parliament). That was a fun night.

Best Purchase of Summer 2016:

I don’t recall buying a lot of significant items, but we did go pretty whole hogfish on the seafood this summer, the best being a roundly spectacular lobster roll at a Hampton Bays eatery called Hamlet that I strenuously enjoyed.

Best Book You Read of Summer 2016:

I am somewhat deeply ashamed to report this, but I didn’t finish one damn book this summer. Sure, I picked up John Doe’s oral history on the nascent days of the L.A. Punk scene, but it somehow failed to fully engage me. Speaking of oral histories, I also picked up the arguably needless 20th Anniversary Edition of Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s legitimately iconic “Please Kill Me,” but having already read the thing a couple of times, I didn’t feel the need to do so again.

Best Movie You Saw During Summer 2016:

Not once this summer did I — or any member of the family, to my knowledge -- enter a movie theatre. That said, I did catch some good, older stuff on Netflix, etc., notably “Charlie Wilson’s War” (way better than I’d have ever expected, despite Julia Roberts’ woeful miscasting) and “The Mayor of Sunset Strip” (surprisingly poignant documentary about fabled L.A. rock scenester/deejay, Rodney Bingenheimer).

Best Gift You Received of Summer 2016:

I had drinks some weeks back with my friend Jason, who bequeathed me with a fetching black baseball cap, emblazoned with the logo of his band, The Crier Brothers.

Biggest Loss of Summer 2016:

For music fans, the entirety of 2016 has already been indelibly marked as year rife with incalculable loss. In terms of the summer, the final day of operation of Other Music on 4th Street was something of a devastating blow. See also Rebel Rebel.

Song That Best Sums Up Summer 2016:

This is actually a toughie. The last genuinely new album I bought was The Glowing Man by SWANS. As much as I dig that album, I cannot say it came with any readily hummable “song of the summer.” It’s more an immersive, interior journey than a tuneful summer soundtrack. I did fortify the CD player in my mom’s shitty Ford Taurus with some re-issues of Metallica’s Ride the Lightning, a compilation of Rush hits dubbed Rush: Gold and a super-duper fuckoff deluxe edition of Rio by Duran Duran, but it’s not like there was a single song of any of those that defined my summer. Old standbys like “Southern Cross” by CSN, “New Life” by Depeche Mode and the entirety of the discography of Bahamanian Blind Blake were still kid-approved favorites in the Ford Taurus rotation. My daughter is now fully ensconced in fervent fandom for the soundtrack to “Hamilton,” and my son is largely mum on whatever favorite songs he may be harboring, so there was — alas — no single song that summed up our summer. That makes me kinda sad.

Happiest Memory of Summer 2016:

After what started off as a frankly grueling year for my little boy (for reasons I won’t go into), he was awarded by his summer camp a handsome silver cup emblazoned with the legend, “Best Sportsmanship” of the entirety of his junior class. Watching his little face light up with surprise and become speechless as he went up to collect his award truly made my heart soar to new heights.

Saddest Memory of Summer 2016:

He’s been gone for two years now, but not being able to see my dear step-father share the moment above made me sad, but I know he probably had a hand in it, some way.

Scariest Memory of Summer 2016:

Some dear friends of ours have a house in Greenport on the North Fork of Long Island, and they invited us up. The drive from Quogue to Greenport isn’t necessarily that difficult, but we managed to overshoot some crucial turnoffs. We finally got there, had a lovely afternoon with them, and ended up staying much longer than expected. The drive back to Quogue at around 10:00 pm — in the impenetrable blackness of night, down a succession of long, winding roads choked with oncoming traffic — felt like braving the fucking Death Star trench. We made it home alright, but I was white-knuckling it behind the wheel the entire time. Ugh.

Word That Best Describes Summer 2016:

Fleeting.