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The Pointless End of Summer 2020 Survey

I know I recently suggested I wasn't going to do one of these, as I didn't really feel it warranted discussion. But, at the moment, it's raining like mad out here in Quogue, and I am, in a word, bored. We're here for three more days before it's back again to the city for good and the kids start their hybridized in-person/virtual learning school year. 

If we collectively consider Labor Day to be the very end of the season, technically, we have about another 9 days before Summer 2020 is officially over. That said, as I mentioned not too long back, Summer 2020 felt like it was over — for me, anyway — upon the arrival of Isaias, which seemed to prematurely snuff out the verdant warmth brought on by June and July. Sure, the calendar still says August, but everything currently feels like it’s in a declining slope towards Autumn. Summer seems pretty much over.

Then again, Summer 2020 hasn’t been like any other summer. It almost seemed like an afterthought while we collectively grappled with the pandemic ... and everything it brought with it. With normal summer activities either sharply compromised or just flat-out cancelled, the usual associations of summertime seemed incidental and ultimately non-applicable. We went though the motions, but we kept reminding ourselves that this wasn’t your average summer. Next year — God friggin’ willing — will be different.

But, y’know, as bizarre and unsettled and muted as it may have been, … it was still summer, so I figured why not dust off the End of Summer Survey, last taken in 2019. I've also augmented it with a host of other stupid questions: 

Defining Moment of Summer 2020:
As mentioned way back in March, when the pandemic turned New York City upside down, my wife, kids and I took my mother up on her offer to let us use her house out on the Eastern End of Long Island, which made for a comparatively more expansive place to remote work and remote school, as opposed to our intimate Manhattan apartment. We stayed there through the end of May, until my mom came back from Florida. When she did, we had to clear out, and ended up basically subletting a cottage in normally rented by some friends of ours from North Carolina. While it was about as roomy as the abandoned bus in which they found the body of Christopher McCandless in Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” The Lamb Cottage, as it is called, more than met our needs for the summer in between periodic returns to the city.

A lot has happened in the three months we’ve been here, but if I had to slap a “defining moment” on any of it, I would say our initial mastering of a particular dish called Beer Can Chicken, wherein you coat a whole chicken with the rub of your choice, shove a half-consumed can of beer (we used Stella Artois) up its slimy posterior and then precariously perch it standing upright under a closed grill. This is not as simple as it sounds, but the end results were spectacular each time.

Best Purchase of Summer 2020:
I can’t say I did a lot of purchasing this summer, not least because for the most part, most shops were closed. Inspired by a then-impending interview with funk legend Bootsy Collins, I went on a big Parliament kick, which inspired me to buy a t-shirt with the cover art of Mothership Connection on it, which I probably wore more than any other garment, this summer. That’s about it.

Best Book You Read of Summer 2020:
I would say it’s a toss up between Trevor Ristow’s “Waiting For Another War,” which I wrote about here and here, and the memoir of Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz, “Remain in Love.” It's largely a fun, illuminating read, but like so many other rock memoirs, it has a way of poisoning preconceptions about favorite music. While he's obviously a tirelessly nice guy, the sour grapes Frantz feels about David Byrne (and, for that matter, Brian Eno) is unfortunate. I'm not suggesting he's not entitled to feel that way or that any of it is untrue, but there's a dirty laundry aspect to it that's a disservice to the band. I don't think I ever thought of Talking Heads as a perpetually harmonious family, but learning about how frequently weird, callous and inconsiderate Byrne was and how petty and petulant Eno was maybe wasn't something I needed to know. Still, it was an enjoyable read.

Best Movie You Saw During Summer 2020:
Well, obviously, no movie theaters were open this summer, but beyond that — I cannot say I watched too many whole films. I did recently watch “Gimme Danger,” Jim Jarmusch’s documentary about The Stooges, and thought that was pretty amazing.

Best Gift You Received of Summer 2020:
For Father’s Day, my wife gave me some lovely new underwear. That sounds pretty tame, I realize, but they’re genuinely pretty nice.

Biggest Loss of Summer 2020:
Don’t really know where to start with this one. Very mercifully, no one in our family has contracted COVID-19, as yet, although we do know a few folks who had it. There are several local businesses in Manhattan that were forced to close their doors because of the pandemic, and those are all very sad. There’s so much loss going on in the world, at the moment, that it seems petty trying to quantify it all.

Song That Best Sums up Summer 2020:
I can’t say I’ve really latched onto any new music, in the past several months. Sure, I did get the new eponymous long player by Human Impact, which is the supergroup I mentioned (and didn’t go see live) back here that features former members of favorite bands of mine like SWANS, the Unsane and Cop Shoot Cop. As much as I dig that album — its ponderous bleakness fit the world’s circumstances just a little too well. My favorite track from the album is probably “Consequences."

Happiest Memory of Summer 2020:
This will invariably sound like a hokey cliché, but in as much as the pandemic has turned everyone's life upside down, it has afforded us the opportunity -- nay, mandated the requirement -- of spending an inordinate amount of time with our kids. Being that they're both teenagers now, under normal circumstances, they might have both been otherwise loath to spent so much time in our company. That has been our silver lining, during all of this. 

Saddest Memory of Summer 2020:
The state of the world, at the moment, has provided more than enough material for this. Where does one begin?

Scariest Memory of Summer 2020:
Watching some of the video of initial unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd was pretty jarring. 

Word That Best Describes Summer 2020:
Transformative.

BONUS QUESTIONS: 

Single greatest album of all time is …..
Funhouse by The Stooges

3 Books You Read This Year
- "Remain in Love" by Chris Frantz
- "Waiting For Another War" by Trevor Ristow
- "Girl to City" by Amy Rigby

What’s Your Favorite Rolling Stones album?
Today, I'm saying Emotional Rescue, and you can bite me.

3 Last Albums You Purchased:
- Human Impact by Human Impact
- Gymnopedies & Gnosseinnes by Erik Satie
- Live at Goose Lake by The Stooges (which has not arrived, as yet). 

Your favorite James Bond film was
Toughie, but I have a very stubborn affinity for "The Man with The Golden Gun."

3 songs you never want to hear again:
- "Santeria" by Sublime
- "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi
- "American Pie" by Don McLean.

3 albums you own that you wouldn’t want to leave on your coffee table when your in-laws were coming over:
- Scatology by Coil
- Dial 'M' For Motherfucker by Pussy Galore
- Freaks, F_____s, Drunks & Junkies by GG Allin

The most physical pain you have ever experienced:
Kidney stone in 2008.

First Record You Ever Bought With Your Own Money:
Dressed to Kill by Kiss

Notable Moment From This Summer:
I had to bury a dead bird that showed up in the back yard of the Lamb Cottage. It was missing its head.

Recommend three books:
- "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain
- "Downtown" by the recently late Pete Hammil
- "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris.

Beers on me. What’ll it be?
Almaza (great, albeit hard to find Lebanese beer)

First Concert You Went To:
Devo at Radio City Music Hall, Halloween 1981

Last Concert You Went To:
End of Hope at Niagara's on Avenue A, February 2020

Recline your seat-back on airplanes: Yes or No?
HELL, NO.

3 Favorite words
- Sepulchral
- Vespertine
- Defenestrate

Song That Will Remind You of Summer 2020:
"Bitch" by the Rolling Stones

David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar or Gary Cherone?
DLR without a moment's hesitation.

Recommend 3 TV shows:
- "Ozark"
- "Endeavor"
- "Mad Men" (we're currently re-watching ... it's as good as you remember it).

Last Movie You Saw in a Theatre & Where:
Michael Apted's "63 Up" at the Quad Cinema on West 13th.

My preferred way to listen to music is via:
Vinyl, Cassette, Compact Disc or iPod, but never streaming.

Worst date movie ever:
Toss-up between "Dead Ringers" (about twin psychotic, coke-crazed gynecologists) and/or "Last Tango in Paris" -- Fun fact: I saw both of these on dates. Neither ended well.

Your favorite member of Monty Python?
Michael Palin

3 quintessential summer songs:
- "Shout To the Top" by Style Council
- "Summer's Cauldron/Grass" by XTC
- "Listen" by Tears for Fears

3 Biggest Pet Peeves
- People who order a "cheese pizza."
- People who recline their seat-backs into my lap on public transport.
- The tenacious vernacular of "hate on." One does not require a surface on which to put that verb into action. One does not hate on, hate over, hate alongside or hate under. One just hates.

Fried or Scrambled:
- Fried. Sunny side up.

3 Things You Wish You Could Do:
- Cook with stylish proficiency
- Play guitar
- Credibly speak another language.

3 Things You Miss Right Now:
- Live music
- My friends
- The illusion of certainty.

Amphetamine Logrolling

Some of you might remember a post from way back in June — gosh, remember June? — wherein I discussed the new book by my friend Trevor Ristow about the first few years of a mutually favorite band of ours, The Sisters of Mercy. As something of a connoisseur of this very type of rock bio, I was delighted to discover that Ristow’s book, “Waiting for Another War,” was not the usual half-baked tangle of dubiously executed typing, but rather a thoughtfully composed chronicle of the band’s inception through to the recording of their debut long player, First And Last And Always. I remarked as such in my own review of the book in that June post.

Well, as the saying goes, one good turn deserves another. Unbeknownst to me until just recently, Trevor graciously decided to “blurb” me on the back cover of the second printing of the book. I thought that was jolly nice of him. See it below.

Cool, right? I thought so. In any case, get your copy of the book here.

This, meanwhile, was the Sisters in 1985…

How The Darkness Doubled

This is normally the time of year when I’m posting “And Just Like That, Summer’s Over” entries and filling out summer surveys. While, yes, summer is indeed pretty much over and things happened over said summer that could be addressed in such a survey, none of that feels worth discussing. Very little does, I’m afraid.

This all said, I stumbled upon the video below, earlier this morning, and thought I'd share it here. 

As mentioned back in this old post, I didn’t originally know — despite the very New Yorky sound of his music with Galaxie 500 and Luna — that Dean Wareham had any genuine connection with New York City. I thought he was just a New Zealander ex-pat who settled in Boston. But, as gleaned from his excellent memoir “Black Postcards,” I learned that Dean spent a formidable slice of his youth, like myself, living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Given his bands’ languid sonic allusions to forebears like the Velvet Underground and Television, this made a lot of sense, although that's just projection. Simply living in New York City wouldn't immediately give one a predilection towards those bands. I mean, it might, but it's never that simple. I know plenty of New Yorkers who've never even heard of the Velvets or Television. 

Under normal circumstances, the audacity of anyone attempting to cover “Marquee Moon,” inarguably Television’s signature song, would border on the blasphemous. That said, I am kinda digging Luna's very recent rendition of it below.

Here’s the recording’s backstory…

During the current pandemic, with Luna members spread around the globe, our former bassist Justin Harwood suggested that we record Television’s epic track “Marquee Moon." We recorded the song one instrument at a time in four different locations; Lee Wall recorded his drum track in Austin, Sean Eden tracked the guitars in San Francisco, Justin played the Fender bass in Auckland, New Zealand, and Dean Wareham sang and added guitar in Los Angeles. Britta Phillips sat this one out but does appear in the video. Justin Harwood mixed the song and assembled the video from iPhone footage made by the band members.

Where We Are

August, Die She Must

Apologies for the slowdown in regular activity, here. Among other things, with the school year looming, there's lots to be prepared for at our end. The end of summer will usher in a new phase of all this. It remains to be seen how that will all go. 

Stay tuned. 

Designed Obsolescence Strikes Back: First World Problem for An Anti-Streaming Luddite

I am resistant to change.

I am reluctant to embrace the newfangled. Sure, that’s frequently symptomatic of advancing age, but I have pretty much always been this way. I was late to buy a CD player, having sworn allegiance, back in the day, to vinyl LPs. I was equally late to the table in procuring an iPod, but I eventually caved there, too.

That, however, was where I drew the line. Disinclined to hop on the streaming bandwagon, I decided I was perfectly content to still buy CD’s and rip their contents to my iTunes and go on like that. The music industry -- for a little while, at least -- was more or less willing to accommodate me until fairly recently, when iPods were discontinued and iTunes was no longer supported by Mac operating systems. I unwittingly updated my iMac some months back, and iTunes was systematically dismantled in an instant — prompting much consternation from yours truly. A little creative Googling, however, allowed to me figure out how to re-load and update music files for my long-suffering (but still tenuously functioning) iPod Classic (160 GB). There was a bit more maintenance involved, but it was feasible, so that’s how I was continuing.

Back out here on Long Island for the last gasp of Summer 2020, I grabbed my iPod this morning for my long AM walk, only to discover that it was perilously low on juice. I plugged it into a charger, but when I returned later to retrieve it, its contents had been WIPED CLEAN.

Now, I believe all I have to do is plug it back into my iMac — back in the city — to effectively “rebuild” its music library. But Apple’s subtle tortures are not lost on me. Apple does not want me to use this particular product anymore, and one day — it will probably win this stand-off.

Moments With Moby

I find it kind of striking that in the fifteen years — jeezus — that I’ve been composing this silly blog, I don’t seem to have ever mentioned the artist Moby beyond a passing invocation. I mean, it’s not like I was ever a massive fan of the guy, but I certainly had nothing against him. The most notable aspect of Moby with respect to the usual thrust of this blog is that he was formerly the upstairs neighbor of my friend Sean when they both lived on Mott Street just south of Houston. They’ve both moved on since (Sean went to Brooklyn, Moby went … somewhere else), but Sean did have one kinda dreadful anecdote about living beneath the man, that being a genuinely unfortunate plumbing mishap wherein Sean’s furniture became splattered with Moby’s …um… sewage in the wake of a burst pipe. Hey, this is what happens when you decide to live in a rustic old SoHo loft space, I guess.

In terms of Moby as a musician, I certainly own a few of his records, among them, of course, Play, the album that made him a household name — I believe my mother-in-law actually owned her own copy of that disc. It was Play that transformed him from a nebbishy underground electronic wunderkind into a bona fide celebrity — however awkwardly. It was then that the worm turned, so to speak, and Moby became a weird kind of irritant for a lot of folks. He seemed to develop a knack for putting his foot in it.

One example of this was when Moby asserted in Steven Blush’s strangely divisive documentary “American Hardcore” that he fleetingly sang for sludgy hardcore legends Flipper. Suffice to say, Flipper denied the claim, and the fallout from same seemed to cost Moby a deal of credibility (although, to be fair, there is video). This episode, however, was small potatoes compared to the brouhaha that ensued when Moby published a memoir — his second — in 2019, wherein he alleged a lurid involvement with actress Natalie Portman. Like Flipper before her, Portman shot down that claim, and the backlash was swift and brutal.

In the wake of that, Moby understandably went a bit quiet. I cannot say I’ve followed his professional trajectory too closely, but I was bemused to find he recently taped an episode of “Turned Out a Punk,” the podcast of erstwhile Fucked Up lead singer Damien Abraham (you may remember I mentioned this podcast when they interviewed Lydia Lunch). Given Moby’s pre-fame/pre-notoriety days in punk rock (he played in Connecticut bands AWOL and The Vatican Commandoes, back in the day), he was certainly a good “get” for Damien’s program. Discovering, this morning, that my trusty-if-anachronisic iPod was out of juice, I opted to listen to Damien interview Moby on my iPhone.

If you’re curious to hear more bits about Moby’s priapic entanglements, you won’t find those there, but Moby does delve into his days as a nascent suburban punk rocker, and discusses visiting some notable Manhattan record stores this blog holds dear like Rocks In Your Head, Bleecker Bob’s, Sounds etc., along with his experiences as some hardcore shows at the Ritz, The Mudd Club and some others. If you’re a fan of that sort of stuff, as I am, it’s worth your time.

Check it out here.

Word on The Street

The Feast of Fools