Flaming Pablum

Happy Thanksgiving from Flaming Pablum

You Are Not What You Own: Age, Music & Technology in the New Millennium

While a valid argument could be made that I spend my time actively looking for things to get pissed off about (hey, this blog ain’t gonna write itself), I did stumble upon two articles, recently that particularly got my oft-gotten goat.

This first was this report about a documentary in the works about vinyl-collecting music-heads who are opting to sell their records. Says director Danielle Beverly, “It’s not really about how cool records are or the resurgence of vinyl, it’s really about people who are letting go of the things that once defined them."

Now, personally speaking, while I am intrigued by the concept of the film, I feel like Beverly is making some sweeping generalizations about about record collectors. As far as I’m concerned, while I would concede that I am somewhat “defined” (although I do not like this word) by my devotion to my favorite music and slavishly sentimental about my LPs, compact discs and, yes, even cassettes, I do not feel they are an integral part of my identity. The notion of parting with them makes sense on a purely practical level — given the amount of premium real estate they occupy in my home, space that could be arguably better utilized — but the thought of getting rid of them, to me, seems tantamount to throwing away personal photographs. Practically each one is imbued with some particular association or significance beyond simply being an artifact that delivers specific music.

I guess my grievance with Beverly’s point is that these peoples’ lives aren’t necessarily dominated by their physical collections. It’s not like their love of the music contained therein is going to go away when they part with the LPs. It’s just not that black and white, I don’t think. If I had to dispense of my physical collection of music (a scenario that would probably make my wife very happy), I don’t believe the opinions, likes, dislikes and sensibilities that actually define my identity would change. 

Now, again, I haven’t seen the film, so I’m obviously being prejudicial in my assessment. Watch this space.

This other story, however, just completely burnt my toast.

Titled “I use an iPod. Why Should I Be Ashamed?”, this piece — penned by one Robert Shrimsely — recounts the evidently traumatic travails of being “tech-shamed” by colleagues aghast by the author’s insistence on still using an iPod Classic, being that it so brazenly defies the current ubiquity of streaming and suggests some sort of bourgeois adherence to — god forbid — actually owning music, as opposed to merely renting it. To which I say — FUCK YOU!

I still use a goddamn 160 GB iPod Classic, and I have another on standby for when the long-cherished and well-loved one I’m currently enjoying inevitably dies. Do you *honestly* believe I give one single rolling rat fuck about what some dinky millennial or zoomer thinks about my anachronistic tech? Come try to take it from me, and you can expect profanity and pugilism. I'll stream when I'm in the cold, cold fucking ground.

To put it mildly, I vehemently resent the notion that I am to be expected to renounce a life spent lovingly curating my preferred music in long-vanished shrines to less-celebrated aesthetics that, in most instances, endearingly eschewed the tastes and validation of the mainstream (hand me a copy of a Thriller on CD, and you’ve given me a fucking coaster). While my collection does not “define me,” I harbor no regrets about amassing it, let alone supporting the independent shops, artists and record labels that put it out. Oh, it’s unseemly to still own music, is it? Go fuck yourself. As mentioned in my thoughts about the documentary, I can understand the impetus to part with one’s physical collection if it is impeding some other important part of one’s life or if by selling it off, one could facilitate some other necessary activity, but if the reason you choose to ditch or dump or pawn your music is simply to be in step with the times, you are a fucking lemming. “Resistance to new and life-changing devices is the path to atrophy,” Shrimsley asserts towards the end of the piece. Shut up, Robert, and think for yourself. 

You want me to abandon my iPod and join a service to re-enjoy some — but not all — of my music and be reliant on WiFi and a monthly charge? Fuck that and yourself, while you’re at it.

To borrow a line from The Wedding Present, if the world doesn’t understand, then the world has GOT TO LEARN.

I realize this is an unpopular and needlessly thorny opinion on the matter. What’s YOUR take? How do you listen to your music, and do you believe it defines you? 

Discuss. 

"And It's a Hard Fight!": Revisiting "I'm Straight" by The Modern Lovers

I’ve written about the Modern Lovers quite a few times here, but stumbled upon this clip today, and thought I’d re-evangelize it.

Just to allay some fears in this hair-trigger era of zero tolerance, “I’m Straight” is not a homophobic anthem, but rather a proto-straightedge manifesto. In hindsight, Richman might’ve considered titling it “I’m Sober.”

As I explained in this ancient post, lead Modern Lover Jonathan Richman was firmly prosthelytizng an intoxicant-free lifestyle back when Ian MacKaye was still subject to regular nap time. An emphatically declared entreaty to the object of his affections to sever ties with her stoner boyfriend (“Hippie Johnny” in the original studio recording, but “Hippy Ernie” on this live recording, a jab at hirsute Modern Lovers bassist Ernie Brooks), “I’m Straight” packs a lot of self-righteous punch, especially in the tune-in/turn-on/drop-out era when such assertions were the furthest thing from fashionable.

Purportedly recorded somewhere within NYU in 1971, this line-up of the Modern Lovers was not to last. Legend has it that the band lost confidence and cohesion when Jonathan decided they were getting too loud and potentially hurting the delicate ears of children, prompting him to demand that powerhouse drummer Dave Robinson (later of The Cars) ditch his kit in favor of hitting a rolled up newspaper against his knee. Clearly, that didn’t go over well. Keyboardist Jerry Harrison later joined Talking Heads. Ernie Brooks became a bassist for hire for artists like Gary Lucas and Arthur Russell.

Jonathan Richman, meanwhile, changed tack and started making increasingly more whimsical music. Around 1990, I went to a solo Jonathan Richman show at the Lone Star Roadhouse in midtown, and took a moment to accost the man and ask him to play “I’m Straight.” He just chuckled with “oh, no…I can’t be doin’ that…heh heh heh,” and walked away from me. Oh well.

But here they were … somewhere on NYU’s campus in 1971.

Pinheads in Plimsolls: Parsing the Footwear of the Ramones

I spotted the video below on Facebook this morning and was left on the fence

On the one hand, The Ramones never made a great deal of money when they were a going concern, so I get it, and this clip is certainly cute -- dutifully adhering to the band's familial, one-for-all/all-for-one, cartoony mystique (when, in truth, they were bitterly dysfunctional), but there is still a lingering aftertaste to this.

I am somewhat reminded of an abortive ad campaign for Doc Martens back in 2007 that featured the late Joey Ramone wearing a pair of Docs, when it's universally acknowledged the great man never wore anything but sneakers.

Also, not to totally become Johnny Pedantic, but I don't know that the Ramones actually wore Converse. I mean, yeah, they wore plimsolls (i.e. canvas sneakers), but were they Converse? Might they have actually been Pro-Keds?

I posed this question on Facebook, and my old MTV News colleague Brian Wallace weighed in with a truly exhaustive website devoted to the Ramones' preferred footwear (short answer: While they frequently sported Sperry "boating shoes," they were known to rock the odd pair of Converse). So, there you have it.

Gabba, Gabba...

“Summer of My Wasted Youth”

A video trailer for her book, here’s the video for “Girl to City,” the memoir of downtown chanteuse Amy Rigby. I first encountered Ms. Rigby via black and white photographs of her striking visage (some of the most iconic ones, like the portrait below, taken by Julia Gorton) that lead me to the conclusion that she was some sort of tempestuous No Wave vixen ala Lydia Lunch, Lizzy Mercier Descloux or Anya Philips. This wasn’t entirely the case, as Miss Rigby’s own music owed more to classic pop, folk and country, albeit practiced with the D.I.Y. aesthetic of the era. Suffice it to say, Amy Rigby was punk before the term became so rigidly codified.

In any case, this visual snippet of the great lady’s days on the downtown Manhattan scene – hanging in the East Village, playing at venues like Tier 3 and Folk City, etc. – leads me to believe that her book-- which came out only a couple of months back --  is something worth checking out.

Amoeba Memories

I only went to Amoeba Music once or twice, and that would have been back in about 1995 or so. My good friends Rob D. and Rob C. (though not Rob B.) packed up shop and basically starting squatting in the well-appointed bungalow of Rob D’s stepmother in Costa Mesa in Orange County, CA. This charming corner cottage soon became a base of shady, ill-considered operations for not only the Robs, but also our mutual friends Tim and Adam, and – for a spell – those charmingly louche lotharios in The Unband (more about them here). I cannot remember how long the tenuous Costa Mesa contingent held together, but it was long enough for me to go out and visit the gang at least two or three times. You can read more about that whole chapter here.

In any case, when in the arguably nearby Los Angeles environs, I did make it a point to go check out the fabled Amoeba Music, an airplane-hangar-sized store stacked to the rafters with all enticing variants of music and neighboring ephemera. It was just one of THE places you had to go to, and so …go I did.

The only reason I’m bringing all this up is that I’ve more recenlty become prone to falling down the proverbial K-hole of watching endless installments of “What’s in My Bag?”, Amoeba Records’ long-running YouTube series wherein they feature a notable musician, actor or renowned figure of some pop cultural significance and basically watch them shop and then have them display their spoils. Each subject then regales viewers with items they've picked out. It sounds fairly simple and – I suppose – fairly banal to non-music types, but if – like me – you’re the sort of person who cannot stop scrutinizing other peoples’ purchases at record shops or who frequently provides unsolicited counsel to fellow record-shop patrons, this is the series for you.

I also like being surprised by left-field selections certain artists make. Like, who would have thought Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L. was a huge fan of The Spinners? To that same end, who’d have imagined that Mayhem bassist Jorn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud would admit to buying Kick by INXS? Or who knew – maybe you did – that the lead kid in “Stranger Things” is a superbig music nerd?

Anyway, I honestly cannot get enough of the series, so I’m recommending it. Find all the episodes --- and there's a LOT of them -- here.

Incidentally, no one asked, but I seem to remember picking three things up during my visit to Amoeba. The first was Sampler, a compilation of tracks by difficult British punk-prog band Cardiacs, the second was a deluxe re-release of the first album by The Undertones, which I bought in the strength of the inclusion of “Mars Bar.” The last was a hilariously rude record called Ad Nausem by Derek & Clive. I’d picked up an earlier album by Derek & Clive – basically Brit comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore drunkenly riffing some astonishingly profane bits of improv after several ill-considered pints – and this one did not dissapoint.

If you’re in Southern California, get yourselves to Amoeba …. while it’s still there.

 

Chowing Down in Chinatown

Chinatown. Invoke its name, and your head is immediately filled with images of winding, narrow streets bustling with activity. To stroll through its storied byways is to encounter countless sights, sounds, scents, flavors and options that are as enticing as they are intimidating. A city within a city, Chinatown makes me feel like a total tourist rube, even as a lifelong, native New Yorker.

Sure, I know a few arguably obvious spots for an evening out in Chinatown. As mentioned elsewhere here, I’ve dined on the dim sum in the magisterial expanse of Jing Fong on Elizabeth Street, I’ve sampled the fare at Wo Hop on Mott Street, although I probably only knew the latter because of the ubiquity of its dragoon-festooned t-shirt, a former sartorial staple of downtown Manhattan hipsters. I remember myself and a group of fellow dads from my kids’ elementary school having dinner at some great place on Bayard Street (name long-since forgotten), although I believe our original mission — one we failed — was to find the eatery Andy Warhol was once photographed in. I do recall repairing to a speakeasy on fabled Doyers Street called Apotheke afterwards. But these pointers and the criteria that informed them are still pretty threadbare. In terms of authoritatively knowing what Chinatown has to offer — and not solely in terms of cuisine — I am fairly clueless. As a side note, the location of the Warhol-preferred spot was later revealed here.

My wife actually hipped me to another great dim sum place, that being Dim Sum A-Go-Go on East Broadway. It may not look fancy or authentic, but its fare is amazing …. and cheap to boot. We’ve taken the kids there a couple of times, and its always a hit for all parties concerned.

But Chinatown still remains largely opaque to me, like a code I’m constantly trying to crack. While I’m more able to find my way around it these days — and not just the well-traveled strips of Bayard, Pell & Mott — it still feels fairly impenetrable.

Seeking out places like Downtown Music Gallery, a few years back, better acquainted me to the topography, however marginally. Obviously not a place to eat or drink, DMG is a hidden-beneath-the-street bunker on far-flung Monroe Street that specializes in uproariously esoteric music. Said music was leant even further mystique by way of the long journey through the streets east of East Broadway in order to acquire it. 

Then there's Mission Chinese on the other end of East Broadway. Eating here — while amazing — always feels like cheating, being that it’s not originally a local NYC concern. But Mission Chinese -- nor Downtown Music Gallery, for that matter --- really seem to belong where they are. They are not of Chinatown. I’ve always wanted to discover a great, authentic, long-established restaurant in Chinatown, but didn’t even begin to credibly know how to find it.

Stumped by the ever-perplexing quandary of what to get me for Christmas (any bits of music I want I usually go out and get myself, and I don't really want/need much else), the wife discovered a great company called Foods of New York, a group that's been conducting culinary tours of various likely neighborhoods for two decades. Now, before you protest, let me stop you right there --- YES, the idea of a food-tour of Chinatown sounds like an UPROARIOUSLY touristy thing to do, and if it's one thing New Yorkers absolutely loathe -- be they native or naturalized -- it's doing anything that may be construed as touristy. I get it. But, as I mentioned a few graphs up, I will be the very first person to concede that in terms of navigating the intricacies of Chinatown, I might as well be from friggin' Ohio. I needed help. Foods of New York were offering it. What's not to like?

Well, without giving too much away, Peg and I took the tour quite recently and it was a total revelation. For a start, our tour guide Raheem, who has being doing this sort of thing since 2007, could not have been cooler, more enthusiastic or more informed. Not only was he entirely versed the finer points of the cuisine that we were sampling from several different locations on the map, but his knack for bits of compelling historical trivia was striking. I feel somewhat remiss, I am sad to say, for having passed on a bit of incorrect trivia onto him, wrongly asserting that the album cover of the Ramones' Halfway to Sanity was shot in a doorway adjacent to one of the restaurants we visited, that being Peking Duck House on Mott Street. Turns out the cover shot of Halfway was actually taken a few hundred steps to the southeast. Ah well.  

In any case, during the three or four hours of the tour, we tasted some amazing food, learned of at least three or four absolutely must-visit-again spots and got a few great pointers for new places to knock back a few drinks. What can I say, I really, really enjoyed it and highly recommend it. 

Find them here. Tell them Flaming Pablum sent you. 

CBGB Express – When It Aboslutely, Postivevly Has To Be There, OMFUG!

©RichAllen

Spotted these two photos on the Facebook group, Manhattan Before 1990, taken by one Rich Allen, who very hopefully does not mind me repurposing them here.

Snapped in 1975, the photographs show two boys – Jeffreny and Fernando, evidently – playing hooky and messing around on the back of a delivery van. Closer scrutiny reveals the van to be apparently part of a new business concern called CBGB.

For those of us still lamenting the painful demise of the storied venue (though I’ve gone on record saying it’s high time to let go and say goodnight), this begs several questions, the most pressing and obvious one being….

If CBGB owned and operated a delivery van, ….what exactly were they delivering?

Cheers to Rich Allen.

©RichAllen

Lost in “New Rock City”

Nostalgia, once again, is a weird thing. For every period or era or, in musical parlance, “scene” that one person laments, there are individuals from before and after that particular passage of time who harbor entirely different affinities and associations. Witness the ongoing dialogue in the comments in some of my posts about NYHC, as one example. Everyone has their own period, their own perceptions of same, obviously, and their own attachments.

I was certainly around for the boom of new New York City bands that manifested around the turn of the millennium and just afterwards, with acts like The Strokes, Interpol, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, The Rapture and genuinely liked a bunch of them (well, not so much The Rapture), but it was clearly no longer my class, so to speak. I was still carrying torches for earlier acts like Skeleton Key, Pussy Galore, Surgery, Barkmarket, Prong, Helmet and, yes indeed, Cop Shoot Cop. One alumnus of the latter -- Tod [A], of course --  formed Firewater, which almost bridged the chasm of those eras, going so far as sharing members with comparative upstarts like Gogol Bordello, but Firewater don’t often get a namecheck when discussing that next generation. I’m biased, of course, but I think that’s an oversight.

I’ve written about my issues with the whole “Meet Me In the Bathroom” generation of bands before, most windily here and also here. If you click on that first post, you’ll notice I appended a post-script to clarify that I didn’t mean to sound so grumpily prejudicial about Lizzie Goodman’s magisterial book on that era, but rather that I’d hoped for acknolwedgement of the continuum of great New York bands – which was actually kinda stupid, as that would have made poor Ms. Goodman’s already-quite-lengthy book much lengthier. What I need to do, simply, is acknowledge what I asserted in the first paragraph here – everyone is entitled to their own period, their own perceptions of same and their own attachements.

All this weighty preamble is to highlight the video below, which I stumbled upon on Vimeo. The clip was uploaded eight years ago, but seems to date back further than that (2004, maybe?). Dubbed "New Rock City,” this thirty-minute documentary attempts to capture the post-millennial/neo-post-punk (how’s that for a complicated descriptor?) generation by profiling bands like the afore-cited Gogol Bordello, FischerSpooner, Le Tigre, Blonde Redhead and some others, augmented by ruminations by rock journos like Sarah “Ultragrrl” Lewitinn and Joe Levy, two fellow (sorta) former SPIN alumni.

I think the thing that struck me about this film, however, is how the city and scene depicted therein already seem so long ago. That may have more to do with my own advancing age and perspective on things, but in the same way I look at books about New York's hardcore scene of the early-to-mid 80's and think “how is this even the same city?”, I get a comparable vibe from this. I am also reminded of “Goodnight Brooklyn” The Story of Death by Audio,” a compelling documentary that essentially told the story of an even more recent dyng scene that makes “New Rock City” look like friggin’ “The Decline of Western Civilization.”

Time passes. Things change. Scenes come and go and get replaced by new ones you won’t be privy to -- let alone endorse or understand -- because you basically get old and in the way.

I guess that’s just the way it is.

In any case, enjoy “New Rock City.”

Band T-Shirt Beatdown

In lieu of actual content of my own (see this post for details), I thought I’d pass this along…

While I don’t know any of the bands cited here, … to say nothing of their songs (well, I guess I do know a Tool track or two), clearly the torch of my dubious preoccupation with encyclopedic pedantry when it comes to band t-shirt etiquette has been passed on to a new generation.

There’s no reason why this video has to be seven minutes long. He proves his point in under two minutes.