Flaming Pablum

'CutTime': East Village 1990

Yeah, I know I've been posting a lot of stuff about videos, lately -- what of it?

Sorry, I've just had a ton of stuff on my plate, of late, and it's frequently easier to let someone else's video do the work in lieu of actual, original content. Such self-deprecation aside, however, I do like to believe that the videos I post here are at least informative, compelling and totally in-line, topically, with the stuff I would otherwise be composing.

Here's another one now..

Like so many other things, I don't actually remember how I stumbled across "CutTime," but it certainly speaks to my preoccupations. Here's the description…

Produced by Sarah Bleakley and edited by Paul Devlin, 'CutTime' is a survey of the independent club music scene in the East Village of New York City in 1990.

Performances by John S. Hall and King Missile, False Prophets, HypnoLoveWheel, Woodpecker, The Gamma Rays, The Reverb Motherfuckers, Two Minutes Hate, Carry Nation, Kirk Kelly, The Holy Cows, and Gregpack.

Sounds promising, right? Well, of the bands profiled, the only two I really know or care about are King Missile and False Prophets. I certainly remember the Reverb Motherfuckers, but never thought too much about them. I cannot say I'm familiar with the other ensembles.

This is just the intro, … featuring some lovely footage of Astor Place when there was significantly more wide-open-space involved. For more about the film, click here.

Where It All Might Be Headed

As much as I am enjoying the heat on the burner being turned up on Trump over the Stormy Daniels imbroglio, augmented by reports that the National Enquirer is trying to silence similar accusations, that's not how I want to see his presidency dismantled.

Make no mistake, Trump is a predatory pig. If you need further evidence to sway you towards affirming that conclusion, might I suggest having a big cup of black coffee and waking the Hell up. It's part of his DNA. Always has been, always will be. That doesn't justify it, but you'd have to really have your head way up your ass, by this point, not to know it's true. His base, by and large, doesn't care about that, of course. They think it's part of his unconventional character, and practically applaud him for it.

Trump is indeed just as much of a priapic scumbag as Harvey Weinstein and the rest of that Legion of Doom that came to light in the last several months. And while guys like Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, Garrison Keilor and Leonard Lopate have all basically paid with their reputations and careers, so should Trump.

But, again, Trump isn't just another oppressive horndog who can't seem to keep it in his pants. He's certainly guilty of that, but that shouldn't be the only reason he's taken to task.

No, I want to see him go down for the things he's done to the nation as a whole, and its standing in the world. I want him to pay for what he's done to the fabric of our democracy. I want him to answer to the ramifications of his ill-informed, xenophobic and self-serving policies. I want him to be charged for perjury, obstruction of justice and gross negligence. I want him to be rightly branded as the avaricious traitor he ultimately is.

Now, not everything plays out the way you want it to. Let's remember, Elliot Ness ultimately managed to stick it to Al Capone not over bootlegging, racketeering or murder, but because of the comparatively unexciting crime of tax evasion. But, ... he still got him locked up.

I'm probably hoping for too much, but I want to see Trump frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs.

And when he gets to the slammer, well, that strikes me as the perfect place for him to pay for being a relentless sexual predator.

We'll see.

Mnemonic Youth: SOLVED

Some quick fruition, then on my quest from earlier in the week. Two readers weighed in with helpful info about the elusive shot of Sonic Youth posing in front of Old St. Patrick's on Mott Street. A reader named Skip tipped me off that the photo in question appears on page 97 of a book/cd package published back in the 90's called "I Dreamed of Noise," a gent named Chris sent me the actual photo. Here it is below. My kids' unwitting tribute to same is above.

Thank you, all! Good to know I didn't just imagine it...

And, just because...

Takin' It to The 'Street'

While I was further searching for that elusive photograph of Sonic Youth, last night, the following film except came up in a Google search, the only commonality with the image I'm looking for being that Thurston Moore provided the soundtrack.

Below is an excerpt from a film called "Street" by one James Nares. Here's the official description, if you -- like me -- were unfamiliar with it.

STREET is an unscripted 61-minute high definition video filmed by artist James Nares over one week in September 2011. The final video is a mesmerizing experiment in the nuance and beauty of everyday people and people-watching; providing a global view that extends beyond the streets of New York where it was filmed: from Battery Park to the furthest reaches of Upper Broadway, and West Side to East Side in Nares' personal homage to actualité films.

In Nares' words, "I wanted the film to be about people. All it needed were magical moments, and there are enough of those happening every moment of any given day."

The soundtrack for the film was composed and performed by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore.

Here's a sample…

As the description above explains, the finished product is 61 minutes. I was able to find a couple of other excerpts from it on YouTube. I find it pretty mesmerizing.

Enjoy.

Below is a music video, meanwhile, by a band called Neue York, who repurposed Nares' footage in black n' white...

Back to NYC `83

Long-time readers might remember an entry I posted back in 2016 about another mini-documentary about the New York hardcore scene I'd found online. A great swathe of that post was dedicated to trying to pinpoint the year in question. I guessed 1982 or 1983. Well, I was more or less right, as I just unearthed the whole documentary, and it's titled …. wait for it …. Greetings From New York (1983). Get excited.

While that earlier post only featured about seven minutes, this cleaner, crisper version is a full hall-hour, and extends beyond the Bowery hardcore scene, and gets into graffiti, some fashion crap (shops on what looks like East 9th, maybe?) and some other stuff like a bit of early hip-hop and breakdancing.

From the prism of 2018, it's becoming harder to reconcile the Manhattan captured in this clip with the iteration of today, but hey….35 years is a long time.

Anyway, enjoy.

Mnemonic Youth

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Say what you want about their music, but you must give Sonic Youth credit for one thing --- they photographed well. Like the Velvet Underground and The Clash before them, for whatever reason, Sonic Youth had a real knack for striking compelling poses and/or just exuding an aura of punky insouciance in many a photo. Not to take anything away from myriad photographers who worked with the band, back in the day, but I largely credit Sonic Youth's own compelling visual aesthetic to the dichotomy between Thurston Moore's gangly height and boyish visage and Kim Gordon's signature, icy cool. Don't take my word for it, do a Google image search, and you'll doubtlessly see what I mean.

As I'm wont to do, I was struck reasonably recently by just such a photograph. I'm not talking about the one above -- that was snapped by one Alan Reevel for a 1986 issue of England's Melody Maker. No, the picture I'm discussing was a portrait of the band standing in front of the gates of a church. What made it significant, to me, at least, is that the church in question was Old St. Patrick's on Mott Street. Back in the early 90's, my friend Sean lived across the street, and we delighted to find that not only was Moby a neighbor of his, at the time, but that both the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth kept practice spaces in the building's basement. You can actually see that basement in the clip for "Three MC's and One DJ" by the Beasties. In any case, that explains why Sonic Youth might've been photographed on that particular strip. As a side note, that patch of Mott Street also plays heavily in Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets," as well as the intro for the enjoyable ludicrous video for "Jump Around" by House of Pain.

Anyway, at one point doing during my travels around the web, I came across the photo of Sonic Youth on Mott Street and set it to one side, so to speak. This past weekend, meanwhile, while out walking around Manhattan with my kids, we passed by the very spot in the picture and, as I am prone to doing, I asked my kids to replicate the shot. That they still play long, at this late stage of the proceedings, is a testament to their patience -- witness comparable incidents here, here and here.

The trouble is, when I came back to whichever desktop I thought I'd reserved that original photo of Sonic Youth posing on Mott Street in front of Old St. Patrick's -- I couldn't find it. Did I misfile it? It wasn't on my desktop, it wasn't in my trash. It wasn't in my download folder. Where did I originally spot it? Tumblr? Flickr? Instagram? Facebook? Pinterest? A random Google search? I tried re-Googling, but the image in question never came up. I tried variations like "Sonic Youth" "SoHo," or "Sonic Youth," "Mott Street," or "Sonic Youth" "Old St. Patrick's." I went further down that rabbit hole, Googling "Sonic Youth" "Downtown," "Sonic Youth" "East Village," "Sonic Youth, Lower East Side." Lots of images came up, but not that one. I plugged in years 1986 through 1995. Nothing. I scoured other likely sites. Zip. As is so often the case -- I started to wonder if I imagined it.

So, now -- while not quite as feverish as my search for the location of that Lunachicks photograph, we have an inverted photo quandary. I don't know who took the picture or when, nor where I found it, but I vividly remember a photograph of the -- I think --  Steve Shelley-line-up of Sonic Youth posing in front of Old St. Patrick's on Mott Street in SoHo, relatively similar to the photo of my children below.

Can YOU find it?

Go!

ADDENDUM: The mystery has been solved. Click here.

Beastie Borrowing

Just a bit of fun while walking around with the kids, this morning...

'Kick the Clockface': Tracking Down the Cover Star of Cop Shoot Cop's Ask Questions Later

Back when I was still firing on all cylinders on the now otherwise dormant Cop Shoot Cop coffeetable book (hey, it might still happen), I managed to track down the "cover star," if you will, from 1993's Ask Questions Later album (that being the screaming, stick-wielding kid). Through intel provided by Jack Natz, it turns out that the child in question -- named Crosby -- was the progeny of some particularly noteworthy Lower East Siders and artists who were friends of the band. "He loved it," said Natz, back in November of 2016, of young Crosby's time during the album-cover shoot, "he absolutely fucking loved it. But, at the time he was doing it, he didn't realize he was up for hours of grueling work. He thought it was just going to be one photograph. So, when he's swinging that stick, he was all 'get this over with!'"

Turns out it was also Crosby who reprised his role as the feral, the stick-wielding moppet in the video for "Room 429," directed by transgressive cinema titan, Richard Kern. I managed to track Crosby down shortly afterwards. Today, he's an artist in his own right. A self-described "Surrealist Clockmaker," Crosby designs and makes by hand some truly striking clocks of a variety that you're sure as shit not about to find at your local Basics Plus. In his own words, these works of art both tell the time and "challenge ideas about disposability, longevity and reputation, while exploring the consumption of celebrity." Cool stuff. 

In our protracted correspondence, I asked Crosby if it ever occurred to him to make a clock out of his own face circa Ask Questions Later.

Et voila….

Find more of Crosby's clocks here.

'Fake Views!': Mystery Spike Debunked?

Just a quick update on this post. While I was quite impressed by the 1668 pageview count from the other day, imagine my surprise when I checked today to see the number below...

That's quite something, eh? 

Well, hold the phone. It's probably not actually even remotely accurate.

Evidently, TypePad -- my blogging service-provider -- is again experiencing some technical anomalies. This is not the first time this has happened. In any case, they're going to be checking under the hood and presumably doing some overhauling next week, so if this blog goes away from a minute, please don't panic. 

Again, it's probably the Russians. 

Dead Bait

Was sad to learn, this morning, that long-standing bar/restaurant Live Bait on East 23rd Street has closed up shop after 31 years on that strip. It naively seemed to me like one of those places that was always going to be there. Evidently not.

I first started going back in 1989, whilst interning paylessly at SPIN Magazine just over on West 18th Street, Live Bait being one point in a triangle of arguably cheap, irresponsible inebriation that also included the Old Town Bar & Grill (still there) and 119 Bar on East 15th (now a theme-belabored douche-factory called Headless Horseman). I also remember noting that Live Bait's signature neon signage could always be clearly seen from the observation deck of the Empire State building that loomed over it from ten blocks away.

The last time I was in Live Bait would have been 2016, when I was knocking back beers before joining other grizzled, greying punk dads to go see OFF! at the Gramercy Theatre just down the road a piece.

Sad.

Picture courtesy of my lovely former colleague, C-Monstah.