Flaming Pablum

Is The Party Back On?

On my way home from work, this evening, I took a circuitous route through the eastern end of SoHo, largely heading north from Canal Street on Lafayette Street. Along the way, I spotted several invocations of the stencil below on various building facades, and it immediately struck a familiar chord. I have no idea what it’s about, but I couldn’t help thinking it was maybe something of a knowing dig at Missing Foundation’s old “The Party’s Over” tag, an overturned cocktail glass over three slashed tines.

For those who might be unfamiliar, Missing Foundation was — and still is — the creative outlet of artist/musician/multi-hyphenate Peter Missing. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, one used to frequently see his cryptic insignia scrawled on many an edifice in downtown Manhattan. What ostensibly started as a symbol of the band quickly evolved into a demarkation of squatter’s rights and an ominous warning to potential gentrifiers.

From a musical standpoint, Missing Foundation formerly occupied a volatile middle-ground between bare-bones industrial clamor and deliberately rudimentary, post-No Wave noise. Their confrontational gigs were the stuff of anarchic legend, frequently resulting in mayhem, property damage and alleged riot-incitement. As an entity, Missing Foundation represented an extreme, and their antics and austere lore garnered colorful rumors and sensationalist news stories. In later years, Missing decamped to Europe, changed his sound and started espousing a less aggressive sentiment.

Here are a couple of examples of some vintage Missing Foundation.

More on Missing Foundation on Flaming Pablum...

Missing to Be Clever
Missing in Action
Still Missing After All These Years
Missing Pieces
Cocktails for Two: In Conversation with Missing Foundation's Chris Egan
Maron Misses Missing Foundation
A Missing Link
'I Will Destroy You'

Back, One More Time, to Freebeing on Second Avenue

I’ve pretty much said all I have to say about late, lamented Freebeing Records, by this point. What can I say? They were great, but they’re long gone. In any case, my friend Loizos G. posted the picture below on Facebook, recently, and I feel compelled to add it to the mix, so to speak.

Today, Freebeing’s old perch at 129 Second Avenue is a venture named Taqueria Diana. The space wherein I procured LP’s by bands like Kraut, Sonic Youth and the Cro-Mags is now a place wherein to purchase quesadillas. I mean, I do love me a good quesadilla, but I’d love to have Freebeing back.

Breath not held.

Back to Freebeing
Back Again to Freebeing in `86
Back to Freebeing on Carmine
Back Again to St. Marks & Second Avenue

Back to Canal Street

You might have seen the article from last week in the New York Times that applauded the gentrification happening on Canal Street, rife with strenuously objectionable quotes about how it’s suddenly “coming to life.” I’m relatively certain everyone who read it in my little circle felt the same way, but leave it to Jeremiah Moss to craft the perfect response to it. You can find that here.

In my own experience, my fascination with Canal Street dates back to my grade school years, when my late friend Danny and I used to make the trek there for army/navy ephemera at The Trader (long gone… see below as captured below by a Dutch tourist in the late 70’s) and contraband martial arts gear (as documented here). I always felt Canal Street – kinda like 14th Street to its north – was a neighborhood unto itself, separate from the West Village, SoHo, TriBeCa, Chinatown, Lower East Side etc. that it runs through. From end to end, it’s always retained its own flavor, … its own vibe. As I mentioned on another post, Canal Street seemed like one third industrial depot, one third casbah and one third Mos Eisley spaceport, a veritable hive of scum and villainy.

I was also reminded, this morning, by my comrade Yuki Ohta from the SoHo Memory Project of the old Canal Street Jean Co. For its time, Canal Jeans was just an amazing resource for one’s burgeoning fashion sense. Circa 1985, I remember going there and prizing this great, repurposed security-guard shirt – complete with a shield-shaped patch on the left arm just below the shoulder and epaulets. The compelling aspect of the garment was that it was looked vaguely militaristic and was all jet black. It sounds absolutely ridiculous in 2018, but you just could not find black clothing so readily back then. You weren’t about to walk into The Gap and find that sorta thing. Paired with a black Stranglers t-shirt procured from the flea market across Canal on the corner of Greene Street, I remember wearing said ensemble to Danceteria later that evening. Again, this sounds abjectly silly and trivial – and it was --- but for my 18-year-old self, it was a big deal, at the time.

These days, I’d imagine one would be significantly hard pressed to find any army/navy gear or contraband martial arts weaponry on Canal. In 2018, the Canal Street Jean Co. (on Canal Street or otherwise … there was a second one on Broadway) no longer exists. The space it occupied on Canal Street is currently vacant, I believe. The space the Trader occupied, meanwhile, is now a newspaper/espresso joint. There are still shady joints hawking goods of dubious origin lining the long byway, but much of the whiff of the casbah-like quality of old is gone. Even Cortlandt Alley, which I’ve devoted time to here before, is getting something of a makeover. Sure, it’s still caked in grime and graffiti and often smells like an open sewer, but its tall facades are now pockmarked with scaffolding, hinting at a major cosmetic alteration coming to the once-forbidding, narrow passage to the former Mudd Club.

Is Canal Street getting the Meat Packing District treatment? Time will tell.

ADDENDUM: A regular reader reminded me of another longstanding establishment just a few steps to the south of Canal on Church Street wherein you can still, by god, buy army/navy gear. I'm talking, of course, about the great Church Street Surplus (as captured below this very morning)..

'And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth ...'

I wrote at great, needless length about my fandom for Rush on this ancient post, so I shan't bother rehashing same now, although I will reprise my recollection of beers in the cold dark of night with select, likely high school classmates at "Club 79" (basically, the park benches tucked just behind the entrance to Central Park at East 79th Street & Fifth Avenue). While furtively sipping our contraband beverages under the cover of night, we'd accompany our imbibing with high volume boombox airings of various favorite artists, the go-to's being AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Run-DMC, Houdini, Kurtis Blow and -- at the behest of our since-fallen friend Mike -- robust airings of side one of 2112 by Rush. To this day, I cannot hear it without thinking of those evenings.

Here, meanwhile, is the "Peanuts" gang tackling same...

Crank it, you blockheads! 

Stiv & Let Die

Just a quickie to point you towards this cool piece in the Daily Mail, of all places. On Friday, they posted a really nice collection of photographs by Meryl Meisler of the early days of CBGB, including the delightful portrait of the late Stiv Bator above, he of the Dead Boys and Lords of the New Church fame. It's a really remarkable array of photos that capture the club in the era prior it to becoming (more like) the dank, squalid, graffiti-scrawled den of high-decibel shenanigans it was in later years.

I singled out the photo above not just because I remain a massive Stiv Bator fan (I spoke about him here not too long back), but also because I love the detail of the ketchup bottle on the table, giving credence to the legend that once upon a time, CBGB actually had a functioning kitchen. One wonders what the fare was like. Anyone? 

Speaking of ol' Stiv, a friend of mine recently brought this film project to my attention. Not sure of its status today...

STIV - TRAILER from Chip Baker Films on Vimeo.

Happy Birthday, Joey

Punk Justice

I treated myself to this large, signed print of John Holmstrom’s first cover for PUNK Magazine when I learned I’d gotten the job I now hold, and I proudly framed it and hung it in my office. It managed to come into my possession after I asked about it at a 2015 PUNK retrospective at the Howl Gallery off the Bowery on 1st street, and they had it signed for me and sold it to me for a way more manageable price than I probably deserved.

In a single image, it celebrates so many things I’m besotted with –- Lou Reed, the Ramones, CBGB, Legs McNeil’s writing, John Holmstrom’s artwork, NYC punk rock -– to my mind, it is a perfect encapsulation of that cultural moment and that era.

Earlier this week, a colleague of mine was standing in my doorway, staring at it. After a long pause, she delivered a line that I somehow cannot unhear, suggesting it didn’t so much resemble the former leader of the Velvet Underground so much as another notable Brooklyn native.

“I’m getting a really heavy Ruth Bader Ginsberg vibe from this.”

Exhuming 'New York Is'

Spend sixteen silent minutes in the New York City of 1968, courtesy of Japanese photojournalist Takayuki Ogawa.

'Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side'

Here’s a clue. If you’re noticing a preponderance of video-driven posts here, that usually means that I’m swamped and juggling a bunch of stuff. That isn’t to say that the videos I post aren’t entirely worth your viewing, just that they’re an easier way of providing a steady stream of consistent, topically-appropriate content. Hell, some of you might prefer the videos to my idiotic ramblings. In any case, that’s the reason, but fear not -– I do have some meatier stuff on the burner which I hope to bring to fruition soon.

But in the interim…

“Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side” -- not to be confused with Eden Bower’s excellent blog, Slum Goddess, presumably named after the same song -– isn’t so much a music video as it is a snippet of a longer, full-length film by one Jacob Burckhardt called “Landlord Blues.” I’d never heard of it, but here’s what IMDB has to say about it…

A greedy landlord wants to evict a bicycle shop from his property and replace it with a high-rent-paying art gallery. The environment-conscious owner of the bike shop outwits the avaricious landlord in a high-speed bike chase.

I honestly don’t know how any of that narrative plays into the linked clip below. The film was initially released in 1988. The song in question, “Slum Goddess,” was originally written and recorded by The Fugs (who I fleetingly spoke about here and elsewhere). This version, meanwhile, features a gent named Paola Pace on vocals, and no less than Marc Ribot (who has also collaborated with John Lurie, John Zorn, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits and several others) on guitar. I know nothing else about this, alas, but would love to.

Anyway, enjoy this fleeting glimpse of the Lower East Side of thirty years ago…find it here (the clip is unfortunately un-embeddable):

Slum Goddess from the Lower East Side (Landlord Blues) 

And, just for laughs, here’s the original version of the song…

Rest in Blissful, Untethered Guitar Noise, Glenn Branca

I wrote more extensively about Branca here, but the great man left us today. Fuck Cancer. Turn it up.