Flaming Pablum

What Isn’t and What Never Was

I made the arguable mistake of buying a t-shirt online for my son, not too long back. For whatever reason, he’s taken an interest in vexillology, which is the study of the history, symbolism and usage of flags. Don’t ask me how or why he’s gotten into this stuff, but hey — better vexillology than vaping, right? In any case, I spied this t-shirt with a cool flags-of-all-nations design on it, which seemed right up his alley, so I bought it for him. He loved it and now wears it all the time. Yay, Dad! 

The only problem, however, is now the social media algorithms have figured out that I like t-shirts. They already knew I liked bands. And because I paused at a knockoff XTC shirt on the same site I bought Oliver’s flag shirt on, I have been duly sussed out as a potential band-t-shirt customer. As such, whenever I’m whining about my sorry lot in life over on Facebook, I am besotted by ads and images of t-shirts to buy. Fair enough, I guess. I brought it on myself.

None of this is especially extraordinary, but one particular shirt keeps coming up, and it stirs my inner pedant no end. It looks like this…

Sure, Led Zeppelin were super-dupe keen on American blues, allegedly helping themselves rather liberally to whole songs by legendary bluesmen who, by comparison, never enjoyed the same variety of financial fruit from their creative labors as them Zepsters did. Led Zeppelin cannily adopted the swagger of the American blues, peppered their songs with lyrical allusions to Chicago, California, Honolulu and certainly made very emphatic whoopee with many a comely American girl during their legendarily decadent world tours. Whole books have been written about that … some involving fish.

But here's the thing -- Led Zeppelin were British. British to the BONE. The surviving members all live in England. They’re not an American band. They’ve never been an American band. They’ve always been British. 

Put simply, this shirt's design is vexillologically compromised. Like so many other things here in 2020, it's a goddamn lie.

Cue Don Henley

Summer 2020 was already a strenuously iffy prospect, but it feels like Isaias effectively broke its already flimsy back. It happens around this point in every summer -- the light changes. The air feels different. The weight of the day become thinner.

Back out here in on Long Island, Isaias ripped down a bunch of trees, threw branches all over the place and littered every patch of ground with a premature patina of dead leaves. The summery sense of "we still have time to do these fun things" now feels more like a resigned countdown to whatever's coming next.

Cue Don Henley.

Unstuck

As long as we’re talking about things being defaced, herewith a meaningless update.

Some folks might remember a post from back in February wherein I disclosed the details of a frankly ridiculous experiment in which I had a bunch of stickers printed and went around slapping them up in likely spots around downtown Manhattan. My aim was not necessarily to achieve any particular notoriety in street-art sticker circles, but rather to see if I could leave a lasting mark, so to speak, and have my stickers ideally stay put. I had an initial run of 300 stickers printed up and pretty much stuck them all up out there. As a lark, I had a secondary run of stickers — same dumb design but smaller, but with a sort of holographic finish — printed up, but never had much time to stick up many of those.

As I mentioned in that first post, I effectively disseminated my first run of stickers around neighborhoods more, shall we say, “susceptible” to such things. In many instances, certain stickers I’d placed barely lasted a week. For any number of possible reasons, certain spots were just harder to sustain than others, whether because of competition (for want of a better term), diligent sanitation or, y’know, maybe “haters” like this guy. After a while, though, I got reasonably crafty about my application, and managed to cover a lot of turf.

Then, of course, the pandemic arrived, and life as we knew it came to a grinding halt.

Unbelievably, it’s been about five months since then. This past weekend, I had some time on my hands, so I went out for a long walk downtown, trying to remember some of the spots where I’d put up my silly stickers. A lot has changed in the city writ large, so I was wondering if that had trickled down to the granular sticker level.

As it turns out, despite my lofty aspirations to still be able to see my stickers affixed to furtive spots “five or six years from now,” I am bemused to report that, well, only about 25% of them can still be spotted where I stuck them. Most were simply pulled down, peeled off, covered over or scratched out. A couple were amusingly defaced — my favorite being the one around NYU that featured the word “Pablum” crossed out with “Scrotum” written in its place. By and large, though, most of them were just plain ol' gone.

That said, there are several still out there, some surprisingly in comparatively prominent locations. While I still have a many of the secondary run, I’m not sure i’m going to go to any great lengths to put those up just yet.

None of this matters.

Disrespecting Debbie

It should go without saying, at this point, that we're living in some genuinely difficult times on a variety of fronts. As such, comparatively trivial bullshit should really not be the priority while bigger fish are being fried.  But being that this stupid blog largely concerns itself almost exclusively with comparatively trivial bullshit, I thought I might as well address it.

The bloom is evidently off the rose in regards to Shepard Fairey's portrait of Deborah Harry on the southwest corner of Bleecker & Bowery. Back in February -- when life deceptively seemed significantly simpler -- you might remember I noted that someone had tagged up lovely Debbie's neck. Well, someone else took that baton and ran with it, as the mural has pretty much been wholly defaced, at this stage. 

Once again, people are grappling with real problems, these days, so the sullying of some fetching street art doesn't really rank that highly on the unspeakable crime ladder.

But it's still a damn shame. 

 

Beirut

Back in 2018, My wife and I took the trip of a lifetime to Beirut.

Beyond its rich history and beauty, we were continually struck by the warmth of the Lebanese people. When I'd stop and ask for directions (which happened a lot) and they found out that I was there not on business but as a tourist, they would light up with pride and regale me with sights I needed to see and foods I needed to try. It was truly an incomparable experience, which is why news of the port explosion is so abjectly horrifying.

Mercifully, my wife's wonderful cousins are all okay, but the footage of the blast and the pictures of the resulting devastation are absolutely heartbreaking.

Hasn't this city suffered enough?

 

Where We Are

Astonishing

Watch all of it. Fucking pathetic. I kept waiting for all the portraits around him to burst into flames and start bleeding at the end of it.

They Had The Beat

In lieu of discussing any depressing and/or divisive news story about the dystopian Hellscape that is our current reality, here's a vintage photograph of The Go-Go's, featuring Jane Wiedlin rocking a Motorhead shirt.

Not EVERYTHING has to suck.

Back to the Cedar Tavern ... Kinda

After 16 posts on the subject, you’d think I’d be done, right? Nope.

When last I discussed the late, lamented Cedar Tavern in 2017, it was to relay the news that the actual old mahogany bar had been installed in a new space in Austin, TX. You can read that post here.

The video below, meanwhile, tells the backstory of how and why it ended up back there. Check it out.

Freedom `20