Much has been made of the summer of 1977. Whole movies have been centered around it, notably Spike Lee’s ambitious-if-flawed “Summer of Sam” and, to an extent, the excellent Vh1 documentary “NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell” (well worth your time). There was “White Flight,” the blackout, urban decay and ol’ David "Son of Sam” Berkowitz was running around shooting people in parked cars. Culturally, disco, punk rock and hip-hop were all gestating throughout the grittier parts of the city. It was, by most accounts, an equally scary and exciting time.
Personally speaking, I can’t say I was particularly touched by the tumult, but I certainly remember hearing all about Son of Sam and the Blackout (although I was out on Long Island during that particular spell). I was ten years old, besotted with comic books, KISS and “Star Wars” and invariably little else.
Why am I re-exhuming all this? Well, yesterday, the Kinolibrary Archive Film collection published yet another one of those compilations of NYC stock footage. This particular one below is titled “Summer in New York City 1977,” purportedly capturing a taste of Manhattan in those balmy couple of months.
Apart from some seemingly obligatory and inevitable scenes of graffiti-slathered subway trains, however, the Summer of 1977 captured in these silent four minutes don’t really exude an essence of chaos, menace or any sort of badlands-variety lawlessness,….apart from maybe the mustachioed yacht-rocker above who seems intent on not getting out of the camera man’s way at 02:05 into proceedings.
I’ve written way too much about the Mudd Club here for someone who never got to actually got to go to the place. The club closed its doors for good in 1983, when I was a sniveling, desperately unhip 16-year-old. I’d certainly read about the place, but the chances of me darkening its doors while it was still a going concern were slim at best. And while, yes, at the end of the day, it was ultimately just a nightclub -– a place for people to drink, dance, hear music, irresponsibly hook-up with each other, see and be seen -- the place inarguably acted as yet another key cultural flashpoint for a certain era of New York City. Don’t just take my word for it, read all about it.
In any case, some years back I fleetingly had a very strenuously wealthy neighbor -- we’ll call him Moe for the sake of this narrative -- who told me, one morning, that he was leaving the buidling. “Oh yeah?,” I asked … feigning interest, “where are you headed?” “I’m moving to a spot in TriBeCa at 77 White Street,” he responded. My eyes lit up. “You’re moving to The Mudd Club?” Moe looked at me blankly. He had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
While I may indeed be guilty of overromanticizing a place I never actually set foot in, I found it profoundly irritating that an address that held such significance for folks like myself and –- I assume -– a wide swathe of fellow music-fans, local historians, let alone actual former patrons of the establishment in question – was soon to be occupied by an individual with no appreciation, affinity – let alone awareness -- of its comparatively notable legacy. But, as evidenced in the recent backlash on Facebook against the “10 Bands…” meme, clearly not everybody cares about such things.
So, yeah, today, Moe’s doubtlessly well-appointed kitchen is probably the very space that once played host to The Cramps or DNA or The Undead or Tuxedomoon or Black Flag or even Judas Priest (yeah, they played there once), and he neither knows nor cares.
The flip-side of that coin, however, is just as annoying. During a recent Google search, I came upon a post on a blog hosted by Halstead Property, a prominent Manhattan real estate agency. Titled “10 Things You Didn’t Know About 77 White Street” and penned by an “EVP” (executive vice president?) from the agency name Jill Sloane, this oddly uneven list of 10 tenuous factoids features this wince-inducing paragraph…
77 White is a wonderful, tight knit building where everyone knows their neighbors. It’s like “Friends” or something like that. I had the pleasure of selling the 4th floor years ago and I just listed a stunning 2285 square foot full floor for $3,550,000. It is on the 2nd floor, the old VIP room of the Mudd Club… if these walls could talk!
Under normal circumstances, the concept of a video of a guy walking around NYC with a mohawk would sound right up my proverbial street, but this being 2017, the `hawk just doesn’t mean what it used to, I guess.
So, Wattie Buchnan he is not, but Rostam is an erstwhile member of the equally celebrated and maligned Vampire Weekend (themselves no strangers to makingNYC-centricvideos), whose newly unveiled video, “Gwan,” finds the gent strolling around various areas of Manhattan and, I believe, Brooklyn.
Musically, I find it a bit twee (as my lovely wife would say), but to each their own. See what you think….
As I keep moaning, it’s been a busy few weeks. Between mutilple, high-stakes projects at my job and our recent campaign to get our apartment on the market and, simultaneuosly, find a new place to live, I haven’t had that great an amount of mental capacity for much else. Along the way, though, I’ve certainly had a host of ideas for the blog, but I just haven’t really had the time to bring too many of them to fruition. Let’s not even discuss the Cop Shoot Cop book. Totally unsure of that status, at the moment.
In any case, about two weeks back -– I think, these weeks are all blurring together -– I found myself with three or four items to post about, all loosely connected to Sonic Youth. One was about a song on Daydream Nation that has something to do with a certain New York story I’d never considered (itself begging a larger post that I half-heartedly started composing, only to abandon shortly afterwards). The second was about Thurston Moore’s new album (and its accompanying NYC-centric video), and I honeslty cannot remember when the other items were about. I’d been trying to think of a way to tie them all together in a single post, but I believe I felt they were all too tenuous, so I gave up.
In the course of same, though, I decided to exhume an image from my Instagram page that would’ve fit the bill for the post, that being the one below.
Doubtlessly inspired by information discussed in this post, I went off in search of 84 Eldridge Street, the apartment Thurston Moore formerly shared with Kim Gordon from the late `70s until I’m not sure when (although they split for keeps in 2011). To walk by it in 2015 (when I snapped it), you’d never have looked twice at it (although I typically filtered the shit out of the image for my own enjoyment). I assume it looks no different today.
It's been sitting on my desktop for a few weeks, so I thought I might as well share it.
It’s been another busy patch here at Chez Pablum, so please excuse the relative slowdown in regular service. I have a few smaller items in the works, but finding the time to crank them out hasn’t been that simple. Work has been demanding of late (this is not a complaint, mind you), and my family’s long-in-the-works endeavor to find a new place to live (now that my eldest has officially crossed the perilous Rubicon into teendom) has kicked into a higher gear. While it’s been something I’ve literally been discussing since Day #1 of this blog, we are finally taking steps to find new accommodations.
We’re actively scouting out new apartments all over town, kicking tires and crunching numbers. If you’ve ever tried to secure permanent residence here in New York City, you are doubtlessly aware of how stressful and jaw-dislocatingly expensive the process can be. Suffice to say, as someone with an inherent fear of change, it’s not something I’m exactly relishing. But, it’s something we simply must do. As much as we love our home -– the one we’ve been in since the tail-end of 2002, and the space in which we raised both our children -– we have pronouncedly outgrown it. With an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old of different genders sharing one small room with a bunk-bed, the fragile détente is under some serious pressure. They each need their own rooms, full stop.
The real-estate shuffle is a laborious dance punctuated by brief, frenzied instances of activity. The process of showing your own space and surveying potential new apartments can seem like an interminably ponderous purgatory of uncertainty and disappointment. You have to steel yourself up for let-down after let-down. One apartment you’ve read about fails to live up to your expectations, while the next seems practically perfect, … but just out of your budget’s range. Brokers aren’t always candid, let alone truthful. Parties interested in your apartment, meanwhile, will be cagey, fickle, indecisive, opaque and erratic. If you do happen upon a space you think could actually meet your needs and expectations, you have to snap into stealth mode and pounce before someone else snatches it out from under you. Fairness plays absolutely no role in the proceedings.
On a personal level, while my own feelings on the matter largely take a back seat to those of my wife and children -– their needs come first -– I am not-so-privately conflicted. This past weekend was largely spent putting vast quantities of our collective crap into storage (to make our apartment roomier and more “show”-friendly) and visiting open houses of varying sizes, prices and quality, the lone common thread between them being that none of the four we went to were right for us. The ones we have liked were either too far out of our price range, the maintenances were too high or they were snatched up before we could act.
But, we persevere. And we will eventually find the right place … one that will probably be in a neighborhood not quite as fun/cool/great/lively/interesting as our current one, but Needs Must, as they say.
Sure, Sunday may indeed by "Record Store Day" (for whatever that's worth -- as I've said before, if you're serious about music, EVERYday is Record Store day), but that evidently hasn't stemmed the pervasive tide that dictates that the physical manifestation of music is a cumbersome anachronism.
I spotted this on my way to work this morning .... several crammed crates of vinyl LPs, just left on the street, next to the garbage and in the rain.
If you want them, they were last seen on East 9th Street just a few steps east of University Place.
I don’t know who "cool teen" Luka Sabbat is and, quite frankly, I don’t give the slightest whiff of a good goddamn. But, to crib an observation from a good friend and former colleague of mine, if this kid can’t even grow a proper mustache, he has absolutely ZERO businessusing expressions like “that’s a classic New York statement!”
If I hear any of you using these terms in earnest, I’m going to release the jackals.
I’ve been fielding a few notes from various parties asking about the Cop Shoot Cop book that I first invoked here (with periodic progress reports like this one and that one). Well, as it happens, the endeavor has hit a quiet patch. As discussed in that last official post on the subject, the book was initially tethered to a film project called “Underground Inc.,” conceived as an incentivizing reward for potential investors to pledge their support on that venture’s Kickstarter page. Said page launched, but the campaign failed to meet its intended goal. This doesn’t mean the film isn’t going to get made, it just means that its director has had to go back and re-think his approach.
That said, the failure of the “Underground Inc.” Kickstarter drive to meet its intended target did somewhat yank the infrastructure out from under the Cop Shoot Cop book project. In the wake of that, I reached out to the respective Cop lads -– now somewhat scattered around the city and the globe -– to see what the next step was. To my relief, having already done a good amount of work on the project, commanding officer Tod [A] suggested that we carry on, but that it would now be our project. We would shop it around and such.
While, on the one hand, that was a bit of a relief (as there is still lots of work to be done on the thing), the departure of the “Underground Inc” affiliation did sort of let a lot of the air out of the tires, so to speak. In the ensuing weeks, life has gotten busy for all parties concerned, and now without a hard n’ fast deadline (something “Underground Inc” had been holding over our heads), there has been a bit of a recession of momentum.
Be that as it may, we are soldiering on. There are still anecdotes I need to verify, interviews to conduct, ancillary characters I have to corner and summarily shake down for info and a slew of testimonials to wrangle for a rogues gallery of sneery, aging and embittered noise-rock types. I also have to finish writing the friggin’ thing.
So, long story short, while it’s not gonna be like it was first described (and, really, do things of this nature ever turn out like how they were originally described?), it is still coming.
Just to keep you interested, in my snooping around the less-traveled tributaries of the internet, I did manage to unearth a lost Cop Shoot Cop track that even insufferable superfanboy I had never encountered. Let me share it with you here…
In the wake of posting this on Facebook and Instagram, my dear comrade from the rock geek wars, Brian O'Neill concocted the playlist below for you streaming music service types. Find it here and PLAY IT LOUD!
As is so often the case, however, Spotify didn't have all the tracks from the mix in question. Those missing selections are...
At one of my previous places of employment, I was moved to start compiling a list of cloyingly ubiquitous office lingo that used to set my teeth on edge. As discussed way back here, such terms included corporate douchebag favorites like “wheelhouse,” “iterative,” “granular,” “learning” (used as a fucking noun) and the ever-present “low-hanging fruit.” But being that I worked alongside an ever-growing legion of chirpy millennials, my list of irritating office lingo beceame contaminated by an influx of equally annoying slang used by that particular demographic, the most memorable of which being the epithet “baller.”
Now, while the folks in this particular scenario had probably adopted the term by way of either professional sports or Hip-Hop or a messy amalgam of both, the term always struck my comparatively ancient ears in a completely different way, and -- suffice to say -- not in a manner that would have rendered the term “office-friendly.” Maybe this is me just being an old man, but when I hear “baller,” I think “to ball,” that being a somewhat coarse and clinical way of describing sex. Regardless, I’d constantly hear things like “that new scrolling functionality is totally baller!” or “our affiliate just released a truly baller app, yo!” It made me kind of crazy, after a while.
For the most part, I kept my otherwise very big mouth shut on the subject, although I was entirely unable to silence my vitriol about the flagrant dropping of T’s that seems to be the new millennial calling card – ala Manha’an instead of ManhaTTan, but that’s another matter.
In any case, in time I was somewhat ruthlessly laid off from said spot, the seemingly solitary silver-lining being that I no longer had to subject my ears to such affronts. Time passed and, I believe, even the usage of “baller” in its more contemporary application (i.e. meaning something excellent, impressive, formidable or talented) became passé, although –- for all I really know –- perhaps it was already passé when my former colleagues were throwing it around, and they were just oblivious … or using it ironically.
So, if it’s indeed a passé term, why am I bothering to invoke it now? Well, NYC blogger (and now author!) extraordinaire Jeremiah Moss put up a New York Post article on his Facebook page this week that painted an irksomely accurate portrait of the current NYC dating scene. If you’re keen on making your own soul vomit, click here to read Why I Won’t Date Hot Women Anymore.
But beyond its depiction of genuinely dreadful, vacuous people engaging in a variety of shallow courtship rituals, there came this choice passage describing the changing priorities of one eligible young aspirational.
Chitre, an environmental lawyer and the founder of Priyamvada Sustainability Consulting, considers herself “a 9 or a 10,” but she says she’s done with gorgeous guys. Now, she’s more interested in “superballer” men with high-paying careers.
We’ll get to the “superballer” invocation in a second, but riddle me this -– how is eschewing guys who are obsessed with their own great looks in favor of guys who are obsessed with their own wealth really that much of a shift for the better? I digress.
But yeah, there it is…. “superballer.” Now, again, I assume she’s using this term as a means of describing an individual of prodigious skills and/or savvy, but to my ears … “supeballer” just sounds like a priapic lothario of indiscriminate loyalty, singularly hell-bent on sexual congress at all costs!
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