Flaming Pablum

Back to `Werk: Exhuming "Heavy Metal Kids"

As first mentioned in this ancient post from 2008, I first latched onto the music of Kraftwerk around 1981, after first hearing The Man-Machine and Computer World via the record collection of an older, intimidatingly punky, teenaged daughter of a friend of my mom’s. Seamlessly meshing the crisp precision of chilly, cutting-edge electronics with warm, instantly memorable melodies, Kraftwerk’s music was truly unlike anything I’d ever heard. Paired with their carefully cultivated image of sharp, Teutonic uniformity, they seemed to be this entirely unique entity.

I’d later learn that they didn’t arrive as a fully-formed squad of nattily-dressed robots, but had evolved into this vision from their roots as forward-thinking, experimental Krautrock band. This all said, a friend of mine unearthed this very early track of theirs from 1971, when they were still a foursome of hirsute dudes, and it sounds like full-tilt Black Sabbath. Paired with some frankly disquieting stock footage of children dressed as apes getting into grisly bike accidents, it’s bound to leave you scarred.

ADDENDUM: Turns out that genuinely weird footage is from a 1963 bicycle safety film called, ...er.... "One Got Fat." Read all about that here. 

Enjoy… “Heavy Metal Kids.”

Notes From The Ghost Walk

So, as recently mentioned, we flew to Ohio, this past weekend, to look at Denison University, my alma mater, for my daughter Charlotte. The specifics of the visit are of a very niche and ultimately private concern, but suffice to say, it was a great trip. Charlotte seemed to be engaged by what she saw, had a couple of great interviews and came away with a better understanding of the school as a possible target destination for her impending college years. Mission accomplished.

For me, that was the ultimate goal, but I also had a side interest in experiencing the place again for the first time in 32 years.

As is strenuously evident from even a casual perusal of this weblog, I am a laboriously sentimental nostalgist of the highest order. I assign massive emotional significance to certain periods of my past that, for whatever reason, I consider to have been crucially informative. For better or worse, I have always been this way.

While I had a great experience at Denison back in the distant `80s, I wasn’t exactly indicative of the typical Denison student, at the time. I did not join a fraternity. I didn’t give a single crap about the football team. I was not an econ major. I largely abhorred the ubiquitous reverence for the Grateful Dead. But, I found my tribe, so to speak. I immersed myself in the English and Art programs. I became a disc jockey on the college radio station and staffer on the school newspaper. But I was still a somewhat sneery kid from New York City, at heart. The otherwise preternaturally beautiful ranks of the student body didn’t really know what to make of me, nor I of them. At the same time, I managed to forge several meaningful friendships that carry on to this day. I had my heart broken by various girls along the way, but those dalliances usually fell apart more because of my myopic idiocy than any cruelty or indifference on their part. I don’t know that I was always that easy to hang around with, at the time.

In any case, my four years there were still a seismic experience for me. Having not been back on the campus apart from a brief, four-day visit in 1990, I was genuinely moved by the notion of going back.

We spent Saturday morning doing an information session, walking tour and interviews, and then broke for lunch, after which I was let off my leash so to speak, to go back and wander around the campus by myself.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to find. I was reminded of several entries on this blog I’ve posted over the year about searching for that elusive “sense of place.” I’ve combed through the streets of New York City and stood in front of key addresses trying to feel some faint, fleeting semblance of various former concerns. Often times, I’ve come away with nothing, trying to evoke some intangible character from a chunk of real estate that bears no resemblance to some former iteration.

But back there at Denison, it was different. Sure, there was lots of new development, but a lot of the stuff was relatively unchanged. Here were the exact rooms and buildings more or less just as I’d left them. Once again, I’ve assigned so much significance to certain places in my memory, but often times the places themselves simply refuse to reciprocate. Sometimes a room just feels like a room – yeah, it’s a room you might have been in before, but not necessarily the same room you had all these indelible experiences in. It felt a bit like running into someone you used to date, but having them not recognize or remember you at all.

So, yeah, I wandered around to various spots (finding many of them locked), but ultimately felt like a bit of a ghost. The people I knew were no longer in any of them, nor was there any indication that they – or I – had ever been there.

At one instance, I snuck into my freshman year dormitory -- I realize this is invariably frowned upon, but I couldn’t resist. I climbed to the second floor and searched out my old room, amazingly finding the door open. Inside were two disgruntled juniors. I blabbed out a quick explanation of being an alumnus and asked if they would mind terribly if I just took a quick picture. They blearily looked at me, shrugged and acquiesced. I quickly stepped in and tried to replicate a shot I’d taken of the room back in the winter of 1985. I thanked them and ducked back out of the building.

The top shot below is my room in 1985. The shot beneath it is the same room from the same vantage point in 2021. Evidently, these guys aren’t big on decorating. One odd detail: If you look hard at the back of my door in the 1985 picture, you can see a THRASHER sticker (over a photograph of Agnostic Front I cut out of SPIN Magazine). Beneath it, in the 2021 shot, the kid with his back to the camera is wearing a THRASHER sweatshirt in almost the exact same spot.

I thought that was weird. Click on each to enlarge. 

Back to School: A Playlist

Surreally enough, my daughter is now a senior in high school. This means that our lives are currently ruled by the looming prospect of college. Our downtime is largely spent discussing the finer points of the application process, unspooling that tangled ball of red tape that is financial aid and visiting as many college campuses on my daughter’s list of “Likelies,” “Targets” and “Reaches” that we can get to. To say that this is an intimidating process is a herculean understatement.

This coming weekend, the four of us (we’re bringing Charlotte’s little brother Oliver along, as he’ll be in this same position before we know it) to go visit my alma mater, Denison University out in Central Ohio. We made the plan some months ago after the school reached out to my daughter about her fencing. In a strange coincidence, the weekend we planned to visit also turned out to be my reunion weekend. Being that I was already going to be there, how could I NOT go to that? It was turning out to be quite a point on my calendar to look forward to.

But, as fate would have it, much like the Devo show I was all excited about last night, my reunion ended up getting cancelled over COVID-19 concerns.

We’re still going, of course. Actually, the more I think about it, it’s probably for the best. We can now focus on my daughter’s visit and keep our eyes on the prize, so to speak. I’ll still get to wander around the campus and probably freak out.

In any case, while I don’t normally use Spotify, for the purposes of beefing up this post, I made a needlessly sprawling playlist of the music I concerned myself with during my four years at Denison as a gormless, chicken-chested college dork. Enjoy.

Wherewuzzat? Back Once More to SoHoZat

I’ve twice written here about SoHoZat, an odd sort of magazine/comic eporium on West Broadway just above Canal Street in SoHo. Back in the `80s, it was a joint I’d regularly pop into for copies of various curious periodicals. They had a wide-if-frenetic selection of reading material, and you were always bound to stumble across something new and different. It was also a great hangout. No one was chasing you out the door for not buying something. It was a safe haven for freaks, geeks, artists, weirdos, artists and the like.

As mentioned in those older posts, SoHoZat’s rent took a steep climb and they were forced to close their doors in about 1992 (now amost 30 years ago, …. jeezus). Following SoHoZat’s departure, the space it formerly occupied became a deli for a while. The surrounding strip also became significantly gentirified and built up to the extent that it’s incredibly hard to fathom that a cool, relaxed, bohemian concern like SoHoZat ever existed on that block, considering it’s now populated by pricey bistros, lavish hotels, exclusive haberdasheries and their ilk. The only real remnant of SoHoZat is their sister concern across the street, that being the graffitti emporium Scrap Yard (formerlly called Bomb The System, in less sensitive years).

There’s much more hustle and bustle on this patch of West Broadway than there ever was, although the pandemic has taken a bit of the shine off. The space that had been the deli following the depature of SoHoZat is now an animal shelter/hospital, oddly enough.

In any event, whilst trawling around the internet today, I came across this image of the old SoHoZat, taken by one Susan Kleckner in 1987. Click on it to enlarge. 

 

For Those Not About To Rock ... Redux

About five days ago, there were reports that in the wake of a music festival on Randall’s Island – something called Electric Zoo – a cluster of at least 16 confirmed cases of COVID-19 had surfaced, and attendees were being advised to go get tested immediately, regardless of their vaccination status. This event happened outside and was attended by tens of thousands of people with deplorably bad taste in music EDM fans. According to the festival’s official website, attendees had to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test before they would be allowed to enter. Those with neither had the option of taking an on-site test (for a tidy $99.00). It had appeared that the organizers were being responsible, proactive, were all buttoned up and ready to … uhh …rock (well, not really).

But, alas, not so.

As weepily reported yesterday, my beloved DEVO – despite having themselves played the Riot Festival in Chicago just last weekend – cancelled their grand return to Radio City Music Hall this evening over COVID-19 concerns, although bitter rumors persist that it was more about poor ticket sales. People are also actually wagering as to whether this coming weekend’s Governors Ball -- another Lollapalooza-styled annual music festival also on Randall’s Island -- will get a similar last-minute plug-pulling.

If you go to the official websites of both Radio City Music Hall and the Governors Ball, both operations plainly lay out their COVID-19 protocols, just as the organizers of the Electric Zoo did.

While I’m still super bummed about the DEVO postponement/cancellation (the band is saying they’ll reschedule, but Ticketmaster are already saying I’m getting a refund), there was another gig I was planning on going to tomorrow night, that being Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus at St. Vitus in Brooklyn.

Neither a stately, art-decco Manhattan institution nor an airy, outdoor festival ground, St. Vitus is a comparatively intimate, grotty rock club. Its walls are painted black and it has no windows. It plays host to an endearingly unsavory amalgam of heavy metal, punk, industrial and gratuitous noise rock. In other words, it’s fucking perfect. I’ve seen a handful of shows within its forbidding confines, and I’ve always had a fucking marvelous time.

But while entirely unlike the other concerns invoked in this post in every conceivable fashion, St. Vitus also has a proactive and starkly worded COVID-19 policy, just like Radio City Music Hall, Governors Ball and Electric Zoo. If you want to darken the already-dark doors of St. Vitus, you have to observe the protocol – proof of full vaccination in order to gain entry. It’s reassuringly worded and suggests a heightened awareness that this struggle is about the collective, not the individual.

Regardless, I’ve decided that I’m not going.

I wrestled with it for a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn’t seem prudent. As has been alluded to in the graphs above, even the best-laid plans and intentions have gotten this wrong. While I may be encouraged by St. Vitus’ precautions and would be super keyed-up to see Retrovirus play, I regret to say that it’s just not worth the risk for me, right now. This will actually be the second show at St. Vitus I’ll be opting out of since the arrival of the pandemic, the first being Human Impact’s gig there in March of 2020, which I wrote about here. That performance indeed happened, but was an odd evening out, by all reports.

Look, everyone has their own comfort level with this situation. I don’t mean to dissuade anyone from going, nor am I shaming the venue for hosting the event nor the band from performing. Given my responsibilities and schedule of activities, it just doesn’t seem like the right move for me to make at this time. If you want to go, by all means do and have a great fucking time.

While I’m absolutely always game to see Lydia Lunch speak/read/perform/castigate in any permutation, I am especially bummed to be missing this particular iteration of Retrovirus, which features Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore/Bewitched drummer Bob Bert, rock-solid bassist Tim Dahl and explosive guitarist Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers. Flanked by these accomplished players, Lydia delves into her sprawling back catalog to reinterpret old works with strenuously muscular results. It’s damn hard to imagine ANYone being able to upstage Lydia Lunch, but Weasel Walter comes really damn close in the clip below. These motherfuckers can really play.

Here’s hoping they’ll be back.

ADDENDUM: For those of you, like myself, who opted out of attending last night's Retrovirus show (for whatever reason), they've since hosted the whole thing on YouTube. Enjoy ....

Ecstatic Pizza! Thurston Moore’s Favorite Slice

A bunch of years back, I posted a windy little entry that sought to debunk the arguable cache of being a native New Yorker. I mean, yeah, being originally from here certainly comes with myriad inherent advantages, but being born here is something that only happens out of a combination of wildly uncontrollable circumstances and pure luck. Having been born in New York City doesn’t immediately imbue an individual with some supernatural arsenal of weapons-grade street smarts, urbane sophistication and/or some greater power of cognition. It’s nurture that does that, not nature. To buffer my point, I appended a laundry list of names I considered consummate New Yorkers – individuals that, to my mind, personified all the attributes of the city – but that weren’t actually born here. Thurston Moore was one of those names.

Wrongly cited by me as having been born in Connecticut, Thurston Moore was actually born in Coral Gables, Florida, which is very approximately 1,284 miles from East 14th Street, give or take. Moore moved to the East Village in Manhattan in 1979, romanced here by the music of Patti Smith. Following stints in proto-hardcore band Even Worse, Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra and a band called The Coachmen, Moore formed Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon (herself from Rochester) around 1981. The rest, as they say, is history. In relatively short order, Sonic Youth became a kind of a quintessential New York band in the same vein as their forebears in the Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, The Ramones, etc. A concussive amalgam of art, noise and attitude, the very name Sonic Youth became synonymous with downtown New York City.

All this laborious preamble is all to underscore the point that, in my estimation, Thurston Moore is very much still a bona fide New Yorker, even if he currently lives in London.

Now if it’s one thing New Yorkers – native or otherwise – have strong opinions about, it’s pizza.

While originally an Italian dish dating back to the 10th century, pizza as we know it is essentially a New York City thing. Sure, different cities have tried to put their spin on it, but it’s still inarguably New York’s great culinary contribution. That’s not just my opinion, it’s just a fucking fact.

Personally speaking, I think Manhattan, with regard to pizza, is in steep decline. Once upon a time … and not even that long ago … pizza parlors were as plentiful as Manhattan’s ….er… bookstores and record shops. I used to be able to rattle off seven or eight worthy locales wherein to procure a respectable-to-exemplary slice in practically each and every neighborhood I frequented. Back then, it seems a decent pizzeria could be found within only a couple of blocks’ walk. Here in 2021, I’m afraid that’s just not the case.

Sure, there are plenty of higher-end pizza places around. I have nothing against those, but I’m speaking more about the street-food variety. Slightly more revered than the hot dog (and invariably healthier), a good slice has become perilously hard to put one’s hand to, although mediocrity is always in great supply. Then, of course, there is the somewhat new trend of “$1 pizza” which is a deplorable, function-over-form disservice to the city’s legacy and traditions.

For my money, while former favorites like St. Marks Pizza on St. Marks Place, The Pizza Box on Bleecker Street and several joints peppered around the Upper East Side of my now-distant youth are all long, long gone, you can still get yourself a slice to be proud of at Joe’s on Carmine just off Bleecker Street, although they’ve assuredly been discovered, by this point. I’m also quite fond of Village Pizza on 8th Avenue, just north of West 13th Street. My wife is a longtime supporter of Pizza Mercato on Waverly Place, but I’m afraid I have to part with her on that front. In terms of our immediate neighborhood, I used to regularly haunt the Stromboli’s on University Place between 12th and 13th Streets. That whole block was razed several years back (taking Bowlmor Lanes with it), and that pizzeria is no more. I used to laboriously point out how I once ducked in out the rain there one night and found myself sharing a slice in silence with notoriously thorny Television front-man and New York Punk Rock pioneer, Tom Verlaine. I wonder where he gets his slices these days.

Every New Yorker has their go-to, even in these comparatively dark times. It’s for this reason that I was somewhat shocked to spy on Thurston Moore’s Instagram page the below declaration. Of the establishment Little Italy Pizza III on my own University Place, he writes….

My go to cheese slice in nyc these days. Not in Little Italy but on University between 13/14th west side of street. The crust w just the right crunch appeal and slice thickness neither too thin too fat, the sauce etc on the money, downed w a fountain iced coke - boom yr off.

Now, again, far be it from me to doubt the tastes of Thurston Goddamn Moore of Sonic Fucking Youth, but the eyebrow-raise this post prompted has left creases in my forehead. Also, not for nothing, it's not "a cheese slice," it's just a slice. The cheese goes without saying. Without cheese, it ceases being proper pizza, goddammit.

But as far as this place is concerned, as Thurston even concedes, so-called Little Italy III is fucking Hell and gone from actual Little Italy. For this ruse alone, I think I’ve always shunned the place. Secondly, it’s like a bus station with a pizza oven. It looks like a Five Guys’ men’s room. I’m not saying a proper pizzeria has to be aesthetically pleasing (Village Pizza, by way of comparison, is frill-free in absolutely every conceivable way), but there’s a garishly over-lit, antiseptic quality to the interior of Little Italy III that has always driven me away from it. It looks just as uninviting as the 99 Cent Pizza closet on Sixth Avenue adjacent to the West 4th Street-Washington Square subway station – which always looks like a fine place to get stabbed. Never once have I considered grabbing a slice at this place. Nothing about it says “come sample our fare.” Nothing at all. To me it looks like a chapel of heartburn and regret.

But hey … fuck do I know? I didn’t write Daydream Nation.

What's your favorite pizzeria? 

Jerked Back N’ Forth: Devo at Radio City Gets Nixed

The road to get to this one was long and fraught, but the outcome could have probably been predicted.

Upon first learning that DEVO were returning to Radio City Music Hall for the first time in 40 (!!!) years, I immediately purchased tickets. You have to remember, this was in, what, May? At the time, hopes and expectations were skyrocketing. People here in New York City were getting their second vaccination shots. A long, miserable winter under the dark cloud of COVID-19 seemed to be abating. People were making plans again. Things were opening up.

From the get-go, however, this event seemed star-crossed. Regular readers might remember a bizzarre episode in June wherein a package mysteriously showed up for me at the address of my former apartment on East 12th Street, … a place I hadn’t lived for about twenty years. When I went over to retrieve the enigmatic package, it ended up being my Devo tickets. Ticketmaster had sent them to the only address they had for me on file. It was only by sheer luck that the guy who took the apartment after me had the good will and consideration to hold onto my phone number. Those tickets could very easily have gone completely astray.

When I got home, my wife obliviously threw the FedEx envelope containing those tickets down the garbage shoot, thinking it was just an empty mailer I’d absent-mindedly left on my bureau. Upon learning that, while I descended into a foamy-mouth depression/rage spiral, my intrepid son Oliver went splelunking in our building’s trash compactor and actually RETRIEVED THE TICKETS!

The fates were playing with me.

As we soldiered on through the summer, however, a bigger problem was brewing. Despite the few highs and many lows of everything that had transpired since March of 2020 – the harrowing death toll, the upending of our normal routines, the crippling inefficacy and duplicitous bullshit of the Trump Administration’s mishandling of the crisis, the promsie of medical science delivering effective vaccines, the inevitable arrival of a more-transmitable mutation of the virus dubbed the Delta Variant – it suddenly became apparent that a staggering number of Americans were skeptical and/or reluctant to get vaccinated, opting instead to espouse conspiracy theories and even champion frankly ludicrous alternatives like horse dewormer to flaunt what they’re now calling “medical tyranny.”

Long story short: Because too many Americans are simply too fucking stupid, COVID-19 is still very much here. As they saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice things.

That means that contrary to our hopes and expectations from back in the Spring, we are very much NOT out of the woods, as yet. As a result, folks responsible for staging and producing events, concerts, festivals and the like are now all questioning whether to go ahead as planned.

DEVO posted this morning – the day before the scheduled performance -- on their Instagram account the following missive:

NYC! We are very sorry to announce that due to circumstances beyond our control and the current state of the world due to Covid 19, we had to postpone our upcoming show at Radio City Music Hall this Tuesday.

We will be announcing a new NYC date for 2022 very shortly. Stay tuned.

Refunds are available from point of purchase and we look forward to seeing you again in NYC soon.

The comments started flowing immediately. Pulling the plug on the event the day before seems like an especially harsh blow, especially for folks who were traveling here, but it’s more than likely that the said decision was made by the global entertainment promoter, Live Nation, and not the band (who have been regularly touting the upcoming date). Some embittered spuds went so far as to suggest that the real reason was low ticket sales, but that doesn’t quite add up. Were that the case, the event would probably have been re-designated to a smaller venue as opposed to being postponed entirely.

Personally speaking, I am pretty goddamned disappointed. As invoked numerous times here, Devo’s 1981 show at Radio City Music Hall was my first-ever concert and verily a life-changing and trajectory-informing experience. The thought of seeing them again in that amazing room was genuinely thrilling for me.

But, … I get it. I’m not happy about it, but because we collectively are too fucking slackjawed to get our shit together, it’s not safe or prudent to hold this event right now. So be it. If ever it becomes safe again, … I’ll be ready.

Get vaxxed or get fucked.

Shot Down

Today in silly news that really doesn’t matter,....I am once again in "Facebook Jail."

A friend of mine posted that he’d landed tickets for a performance by Scottish post-punk funkateers APB. In turn, I responded to his enthusiasm by quoting a line from their signature single and WLIR staple, “I WOULD LIKE TA SHOOOT YA DOWN-UH!” Now, for apparently "violating community standards," I am barred from posting on the platform for a week.

This is, of course, not the first time I've been behind Facebook's virtual bars. I was once banned for 24 hours for re-posting a picture of the January 6 insurrectionists. On another occasion, when a dear friend of mine made a jocular comment disparaging the merits of my beloved Killing Joke, I responded in kind that I knew where he lived and could murder him in his sleep. That got my restricted for three days. This past July, meanwhile, upon answering the query: "GIVE THE VERY BEST ADICE USING ONLY FOUR WORDS," I submitted: "Love Trump? Kill Yourself!"  That cost me three more days for "bullying."

Do better, Facebook. 

This, incidentally, is "Shoot You Down" by APB.

Word on The Street

Truth bomb on St. Marks Place...

A Breather

Hey, all. I'm feeling a bit of both acute nostalgia fatigue and a little Imposter's Syndrome, these days, so I think I'm going to take a little break.

Back soon ... maybe.