The Old New York Tumblr, which I’m quite fond of, posted the below picture today, and it struck a chord for a couple of reasons.
Snapped, evidently, in 1968, the image begs a few questions, foremost among them being what the Hell is that on the back of that motorcycle?
Is it a mannequin? A terrified mime? A cadaver? An evil clown? The little kids in the middle ground seem fairly unfazed, but maybe it’s happening too fast for them to really take stock. I fear we’ll never know the answers, here.
Beyond that, though, I really feel like I know this corner, but can’t slap a location on it. I’m assuming it’s the Lower East Side, but I suppose it could also be Brooklyn. It’s obviously somewhere in the vicinity of the Manhattan Bridge (note sign in center of photograph), but I cannot name that intersection.
At the risk of lapsing into just the sort of needlessly florid hyperbole I’m arguably renowned for, IDLES showed up in Brooklyn last night and completely brought the fucking house down. For about the past seven months, I’ve been bleating about the immense greatness of this band to anyone with a pair of ears and a pulse, but have too often been met with blank stares and indifference — even among certain circles who should know better. Months ago, when tickets first went on sale for this gig — at Brooklyn Steel, a cavernous converted warehouse somewhere between Williamsburg and Greenpoint, I believe — I immediately snapped up two, thinking I’d be able to credibly evangelize them to the extent that I’d find a taker for the second ticket in no time. But, no dice. Despite my best, bug-eyed efforts, I couldn’t seem to convince anyone in my immediate orbit of similarly inclined rock heads to take the bait. I ended up selling my second ticket to a grateful fan outside the venue.
Seeing the capacity crowd fill out Brooklyn Steel’s expanse with rapturous zeal was true vindication, and the gig was absolutely nothing short of victorious, finding IDLES ripping through most of their more recent album, the excellent Joy As an Act of Resistance, along with tracks from their incendiary debut, Brutalism, and even a bash through “Queens” from their early EP. No one went home disappointed.
In previous posts, I’ve described IDLES’ live aesthetic as “bananas,” and that does indeed fit the bill, but there’s also a degree of flailing rambunctiousness that crosses the border into strenuous athleticism, personified in dueling guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, who both seem hellbent on giving themselves cranial contusions. How members of the band don’t regularly collide with one another during these frenetic sets somewhat boggles the mind.
But the sheer joy, pardon the pun, with which this band executes its mission is entirely infectious, cribbing elements of virtually all my favorite variants into a burly, clangy, ferocious amalgam of catharsis that is both high-volume and high-spirited. When robustly bearded bass player Dev — who I’d met moments earlier at the merch stand — started lazily playing the bass line for “Peaches” by The Stranglers while the rest of the band assumed the stage, I knew I was right where I was supposed to be. My voice is hoarse from singing along and my face hurts from smiling so damn hard.
So yeah, stop fucking sleeping on IDLES. They are going to rule the world shortly. Get on board or take cover. They come back in October.
Over the course of this silly blog’s almost …. Jesus … 14-year existence, I’ve posted multiple entries about doings over on West 8th Street, specifically the strip between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Time was when this little patch of Greenwich Village covered a vast array of my needs and interests. From amazing record stores like It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll and the original Venus Records to mediocre ones like Revolution Records and Record Factory, there was no shortage of places to procure music. You also had Butterfly’s, should you ever be in search of just-the-right Iron Maiden or Black Flag t-shirt. Across the way was Postermat, which featured a dizzying array of crap --- poster, buttons, badges, décor – aimed squarely at teenage music jerks. There was also the suitably surreal art gallery, Psychedelic Solution and Flip, for all of your New Wavey fashion needs, the 8th Street Playhouse – which was the first place I ever saw “Repo Man” -- and the seemingly ageless Gray’s Papaya, once touted as Lou Reed’s favorite restaurant in New York City, at the end of the block. You also had the amazing video store TLA, and a massive B. Dalton Books (later Barnes & Noble) on the corner, across from Gray’s Papaya. There were also numerous places to buy shoes of every possible description.
In later years, when fortunes started to change for this once-busy byway, there were still places like Disc-O-Rama and Sleep of Reason Comics, but somewhat gradually, West 8th Street had less and less to offer me.
All of the concerns listed above, of course, are long, long gone here in 2019.
More recently, my kids became very fond of The Burger Joint (which left us about two years back), while I enjoy both the odd visit to endeavors like the 8th Street Wine Cellar, Arts & Crafts Beer Parlor and nouvelle-Italian eatery, Aunt Jake’s. My wife quite enjoys cocktails at the Marlton Hotel, every now and then, but I wouldn’t call that a particular favorite of mine.
In any case, blah blah blah… Who cares what I like, right? Fine. Regardless, as happened on University Place, and as is happening on the other side of town at St. Marks Place, West Eight Street is about to be blighted with its own enormous new luxury tower, slated to be plonked right down on the southeast corner of Eighth & MacDougal, finally putting to rest speculation of why that particular row of storefronts has been vacant for so long.
Whatever your memories of West Eighth Street are, get ready for this formerly signature byway of olde Greenwich Village to (further) decimated. Incidentally, the lovingly rendered painting of the intersection of MacDougal and West Eighth above comes courtesy of the great Ephemeral New York blog, and was painted by Alfred S. Mira in 1942. Below, meanwhile, as covered here a few times before, is Lowell Bodger's walk down West Eighth Street from the early 1970s.
As it happens, I walk through SoHo every weekday on my treks to and from my office. During same, I cannot stop myself from taking pictures. Even though the neighborhood and its surrounding environs have dramatically changed over the last few decades, I am still moved by its singular architectural character, its vibe and the sense of history – both personal and civic --- it continues to exude. That above image of Broome Street I shot just this morning.
I haven’t mentioned her excellent blog in a little while (or not since 2017, I guess), but Yuki Ohta revamped her SoHo Memory Project not too long back, and it’s a wonderful trove of pictures and anecdotes for those who pine for the SoHo that was prior to it being a hotbed of prohibitively expensive real estate and luxury retail outlets.
At periodic points throughout the year, work at my place of employment ramps up to a hectic degree. I’m reasonably sure it’s the same where you work. There are some seasons that just don’t seem to let up. We are in the throes of one of those seasons right now.
As laboriously bemoaned in some earlier posts, I’ve got multiple projects on the burner that should come to fruition within the next couple of weeks. But, until they do, it’s a delicate dance of beat-the-clock and keep-everybody-happy, the latter being an exceptionally difficult task.
On the home front, things are busy as well. The Blowout is coming along well (new update soon … like anyone cares), and we’re hoping to sink our fangs into other long neglected projects, leftover funds permitting.
In the midst of all this, however, both my favorite-ever band and my new favorite band -- Killing Joke and IDLES -– are both slated to perform shows here in NYC in the next couple weeks (IDLES play this FRIDAY!), and I have tickets for each. I’m hoping I’ll be in the right headspace to enjoy these gigs, as I seem to be worried all the time, of late.
In any case, while it’s up, enjoy this blistering new track by IDLES. They rock.
Evidently, yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Disintegration by The Cure. News of that stately milestone sent a bit of a chill down my spine, given that the sprawling album in question was released only six days before I graduated from college. As such, the songs of Disintegration and my immediate post-collegiate experience are inexorably linked, in my memory. More to the point, that means I’ve been out of college for three goddamn decades, and still do not wholly feel like a functioning adult.
To commemorate this album’s young adulthood, scribes of all stripes have been posting think-pieces about the significance of Disintegration across the spectrum, from the monolithic space it occupies in the gestalt of The Cure’s sizable discography to the raft of personal anecdotes that wrap around such a work like ivy. Given the album’s deep wellspring of melancholy, it’s a collection of songs that seamlessly adhere themselves to listeners predisposed to melodrama.
When I first immersed myself in the album’s twelve tracks, I was a wide-eyed naif, nursing a wounded heart in the wake of what I considered an epic romance and what a newly former classmate considered a fleeting dalliance, a crucial difference in perspectives that she and I would never fully reconcile. Fittingly, the soggy sentimentality and brooding bittersweetness of Disintegration fit my overwrought emotional headspace like finely tailored funeral attire. I wallowed floridly in songs like “Last Dance,” “Plainsong,” “Closedown” and “Pictures of You,” finding dubious solace in Robert Smith’s anguish. Repeatedly revealing himself to be impulsive, tempestuous, smothering and conflicted, Smith’s lyrics have always been a riddle I’ve wrestled with. To what extent are they autobiographical? Or are they simply the inner monologue of a tortured protagonist? Smith himself, as far as I know, has been happily married to the enigmatic Mary Poole since the year before Disintegration was released. Regardless, if the target demographic of Robert Smith’s songwriting was dopily lovelorn twentysomethings, he certainly had my number.
Three decades later, Disintegration is still interwoven with my memories of being a dopey 22 year old, but its emotional resonance remains colossal. While my young self may have thought the stentorian thunderhead of sound that follows the deceptively placid windchimes of “Plainsong” summed up my heartbroken circumstances, I had not yet truly experienced all the tribulations life throws one’s way. The languid despair telegraphed in that song and the songs that follow can still evoke a windswept woe worthy of Emily Bronte or TS Eliot, robbed of their wrathful weight by those who’d reduce The Cure to simply doomy goths. Subtract the eyeliner, lipstick and morbid haystacks of hair, and these songs still come drenched in a variant of emphatically expressed remorse that is hard to match. Disintegration is frequently cited in tandem with its stylistic precursor from seven years earlier, Pornography, but ponderous bleakness aside, I’ve never really thought of them as that similar. There is a cold, roiling core of cruelty to 1982’s Pornography, but there is little heart. Conversely, while certainly damp with gloom, Disintegration is practically all heart.
So, while here I am, just as self-indulgently reminiscing about Disintegration like the rest of them, I feel eager to point out that, in certain instances, the live recordings of some of the album’s twelve songs that later surfaced on the bootleg-turned-limited-release Entreat actually better their studio iterations in both performance and cathartic emotional exorcism. Never is this more true, to my mind, than on the rendition of “Pictures of You” on Entreat, which finds the band further fleshing out the piece, particularly the guitar parts. Recorded in the gigantic expanse of Wembley Stadium, there’s a moment around six minutes and ten seconds into the song where you can hear Robert’s voice plaintively echo off the curves of that giant arena in a manner that suggests that even such a sizable venue cannot contain his mourning.
Is that hyperbole? Maybe so, but it’s still a gorgeous moment, to my ears.
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