Renowned photographer Godlis, who I've mentioned here a fewtimes before, is part of a this great new, inventive documentary. Here's the official description:
A 37TH DEGREE ORIGINAL FILM Between 1976 and 1980, young Manhattan photographer David Godlis documented the nightly goings-on at the Bowery’s legendary CBGB, “the undisputed birthplace of punk rock,” with a vividly distinctive style of night photography. Lewie and Noah Kloster bring his photos to life with electrifying immediacy, bolstered by black-and-white watercolor animation, a rollicking soundtrack, and voiceover narration by Godlis himself.
News of the tragic and untimely death of my dear former colleague and friend Eileen last week has had my head swimming in anecdotes about my 12 long years at the TIME Magazine News Desk, a lengthy period of my life that seems like both ancient history and strangely only last week or so. As I may have mentioned when I first left that job back at the tail end of 2005, I learned more there than I ever accrued at any school, and made countless friends that feel more like family than like former colleagues.
In any case, prompted by a Facebook post by a friend from a totally different gig, photographer Pat Blashill (who I interviewed for this old post), I was reminded of another News Desk story that left a big impression on me.
As a News Desk editor – essentially a liaison between the magazine’s senior editorial staff and the network of reporters and correspondents in the field around the world -- I had a somewhat unenviable graveyard shift: I would work a regular business day on Monday, I would have Tuesdays and Wednesdays completely off, I would work on Thursday evenings from 4pm and 4am and then the week would culminate in the all-night, Friday-night shift, from 8pm to 8am, the most crucial evening to man the desk as the magazine was being “put to bed,” as the saying went.
It wasn’t that bad, for a long while. It was great having such sizable swathes of time off in the middle of the week. Obviously, the Friday-night overnight put the kibosh on a lot of social plans, but I more than made up for it on the following Saturday nights (when, having only risen from my slumber in the early afternoon, I had lots of energy for late-night shenanigans). It was rough on my circadian rhythms (probably still re-adjusting to this day), but I made it all work for over a decade.
But being that most of my time in the office was spent during the small hours when no one else was around, I used to dress in a manner that could best be described as “informal.” My rationale was that if I was going to be there at 3am when the rest of the world was asleep, I was going to damn well be comfortable. It made sense, at the time.
One telling Friday evening in 1994 as I was just starting my shift, I checked in with my teammates as they were packing up and passing the baton, so to speak. They briefed me on the stories that were in the works and developments to watch out for. I fully expected yet another quiet night with minimal amounts of actual work in front of me. I’d even brought a book to read during what promised to be a long evening of newsless doldrums.
After a little bit, my fellow News Deskers checked out, leaving me the sole editor on duty for the remainder of the night. As if on cue, the phone rang. My colleague Katie asked with some bemused alarm the following question. “Did O.J. Simpson kill his wife?” I glanced up at the television across the room, always tuned to CNN, to see a strangely slow pursuit of a white Ford Bronco being tailed by a phalanx of Los Angeles police cars.
Like a shot, I leapt from my desk and took a sharp left towards the managing editor’s office, sprinting down the hall. I burst into his office with needlessly dramatic aplomb to dutifully relay news that beloved football legend, erstwhile actor and Hertz rental car pitchman O.J. Simpson was being pursued by police under suspicion of brutally murdering his spouse.
The managing editor calmly peered over his glasses at me from behind his desk. “Mr. Smith, …" he finally spoke, glancing back down at the story mock-ups on his desk. “What exactly is a Butthole Surfer?”
Formed well prior to the Stay Cats, The Rockats were British progenitors of a neo-rockabilly sound that was a little more accessible than the deliciously libidinous horror show of their forebears in The Cramps. The Rockats’ deft amalgam of rockabilly twang with punky panache was inarguably a huge influence on the similarly ambitious Brian Setzer, who later took an admittedly more reverent and arguably more authentic version of the Rockats’ formula right to the friggin’ bank. But as The Stray Cats took off, the Rockats were being persuaded to ditch their initial sound and style in favor of a more polished pop approach as Secret Hearts (this by label boss Tommy Motolla, the same horrible shithead who foisted Mariah Carey on the world). It failed. They broke up. People suck.
While never a big rockabilly guy one way or the other, I first heard the Rockats on the dancefloor at Danceteria one heady night in 1985, specifically “Make That Move,” as played in a set that also featured “How Soon Is Now” by the Smiths, “Master & Servant” by Depeche Mode,” “Kings & Queens” by Killing Joke, “World Destruction” by Time Zone, the Lords of the New Church’s priapic cover of “Like a Virgin” and “Ball of Confusion” by Love & Rockets -- British indie rock, synth-pop, post-punk, hip-hop, flagrant gothic rock and neo-rockabilly all rubbing elbows and sounding fucking great together.
Underpinned by an urgent pulse and heroically bequiffed Smutty Smiff’s insistent bassline, “Make That Move” came iced with reverberating guitars and a rousing, repeating refrain that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in “West Side Story.” It was a great, fun single that would unfortunately be the Rockats’ first and only brush with chart success.
The only reason I’m bringing The Rockats up now is because of this genuinely extraordinary story in yesterday’s New York Times. As my fried Mac asserted, it’s really a screenpay waiting to be written about New York City, rock’n’roll, theft, mystery and recompense that spans decades and the globe. I won’t give it away, but my feelings are best expressed by the title of this post.
Meanwhile, here’s the suitably bawdy video for “Make That Move,” which – now that I’m watching it again for the first time in eons – is also suitable for inclusion in that last post, although I can’t name any specific NYC landmarks, can you?
This post was started several times over the past four months but was regularly abandoned over the maintenance required to plug in all the links. It was almost aborted entirely in the wake of the week of September 11th, when nostalgia for the way New York used to be reached fever pitch. But since I started it, I figured I might as well finish it. So, here goes. We’ll see if I bring it to fruition this time.
If you’e anything of a regular reader, you might pick up on my frequent allusions to having interned at SPIN Magazine back in the balmy, comparatively carefree days of 1989 (that all started on this post). While entirely true, it should be noted that in the grand scheme of things, I was only at the magazine in its then-grotty office on West 18th Street from about July 1989 until January of 1990, when the managing editor who’d implied that he was going to hire me on full-time was fired. Overall, my tenure at SPIN — while certainly informative for me — didn’t really make too much of an impression on the magazine itself. While formally toiling paylessly under its auspices, I contributed one small news item about Public Enemy. Big whoop.
But prior to my short-lived, star-crossed few months at SPIN, the magazine had been hugely influential on me. I remember picking up its third issue (with Sting on the cover) in July of 1985 under the misapprehension that there was a feature on one of my then-favorite bands, 7 Seconds (there wasn’t), but becoming totally hooked anyway. Unlike shitty Rolling Stone, here was a magazine that dared to discuss and review bands like Scratch Acid, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, the Sisters of Mercy, Squirrel Bait, the nascent Beastie Boys and the Butthole Surfers. The writing was assertive and irreverent. Their approach was fresh and different — they had Pia Zadora interview Joey Ramone and Lydia Lunch interview Pat Benatar. They periodically gave Henry Rollins the back page to talk about his impressions of Madonna or wax rhapsodic about his then-two favorite records (White Light, White Heat by the Velvet Underground and Funhouse by The Stooges). It was amazing stuff, and for many years afterwards, I was a dutifully loyal reader, even after my brief internship.
In time, SPIN started …er…spiraling, shedding long-time staffers left and right and eventually even jettisoning its longtime editor-in-chief and founder, Bob “The Gooch” Guccione Jr. The magazine lost whatever voice and edge it once had and started following the curve as opposed to staying ahead of it. While everyone I’d originally known from my intern days were long gone, certain other people I’d worked alongside from various other outlets came and went through the outlet’s perpetually revolving door. The last physical issue came out on 2012 before it became a strictly online affair.
Here in 2021, the online iteration of SPIN admirably strives to compete in a vastly different landscape from the one it first launched in, but I don’t know anyone who writes for or edits it anymore, as far as I know. I cannot say that I read it often enough to have a credible opinion about whether or not it’s worth checking out, these days, but I somehow doubt that it pushes any envelopes in the way it used to do.
In any case, blah blah blah …. enough of about me and my experience at SPIN. This post ostensibly had nothing to do with all that, but I’m so damn narcissistic that I couldn’t help dredging all that bullshit back up. No, this post was about how friggin’ anaemic much of SPIN’s more recent ….. or, Hell, not even that recent ... content has been.
What triggered it was a listicle they first posted in 2013 called “The 40 Best New York City Music Videos.” Longtime readers know I used to spend an inordinate amount of time and bandwidth documenting same, so I was of course curious to learn which ones made their list. Somewhat predictably, said list was both rife with cliché and pandered strenuously to certain demographics, although still somehow managed to omit some truly obvious choices like, say, “Waiting on a Friend” by ye olde Rolling Stones. I was, of course, appalled, and planned to compose my own, authoritative list to combat SPIN's blinkered myopia at once.
The trouble was, as mentioned earlier, while I had a fever for the subject matter (however ridiculous), it was going to be a labor-intensive post … all that cutting and pasting of links and whatnot. I kept a running list of clips I thought were worthy of citing, and that seemed to stretch on for days. I’d be out running an errand and something I’d see would remind me of, say, the video of “We Want the Airwaves” by the Ramones (shot on Joey’s rooftop on East 9th Street) or the slow trek through Chinatown in “Coming Down” by the Dum Dum Girls. After a while, the list got pretty long, if not unwieldy, completely dwarfing SPIN’s pathetic list of 40.
But when the task seemed too laborious, I set it to one side and then got back to my life, only to fleetingly invoke it a little while back in this post. It seems laughably unlikely, but perhaps SPIN spotted my invocation of it, because now when you go to their link, all that remains is their one-paragraph preamble. Their list is strangely gone.
So, when you go through my list and wonder where, say, “Love is Strong” by the Rolling Stones, "New York, New York" by Ryan Adams, “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson and/or, good lord, “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys are, know that I left them out because they were on SPIN’s list, and I didn’t want to be duplicative. Also, “Empire State of Mind” completely fucking sucks and makes me want to destroy the earth.
Here’s my list. Enjoy it or not. I did it alphabetically by song title. There is no hierarchy, although, personally speaking, I like some of these way, way more than others.
ADDENDUM: Some new clips were added on Tuesday, October 12 and Wednesday, October 13.
“All or Nothin” by Madball - Tompkins Square Park, East Village, Lower East Side
“All That I Wanted” by Belfegore - Pier 25 in TriBeca, West Side Highway
"Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants - Randall's Island
“My Kinda Town” by The Undead - World Trade Center, Times Square, Medical Corridor, East Village
"New York City" by Joey Ramone - Lower East Side, East Village, The Bowery, Chinatown, Cortlandt Alley, TriBeCa, Times Square, Midtown, Central Park, West Village, Flushing, Queens, Brooklyn Bridge, Civic Center
“Where I’m From” by Digable Planets - East Village, TriBeCa
"Why I Drink" by The Candy Snatchers - East Village
"World Order in New York" by World Order - Central Park, Midtown, Grand Central Station, Rockefeller Center, Wall Street, Williamsburg, The Dakota, Times Square, Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Square Park, Flushing Corona Park, Queens,
As recently invoked in this post, I am reviving this sprawling entry, which I originally started … and then summarily abandoned again … back in June….
This is a somewhat irritating post, as I’d already written about a third of it, only to have my MacBook Air experience some sort of inexplicable purge and lose it all. Not that I can’t piece it back together, but I’d been quite pleased with what I’d written, and now I have to start from scratch again. C’est la guerre.
Suffice to say, while on the surface this seems like just another post about yet another vanished spot, it’s really more about my associations with the place than the place itself. I guess all my posts take that approach. Hopefully, that’ll ring true.
In any case, I should preface this all by talking about my friend Shawn. Shawn was a kid I’d known since pre-kindergarten (or, as it was called at the time, “Nursery School”). My mother would be very quick to point out, at this stage, that Shawn was the grandson of a very prominent author whose last name carries an extraordinary legacy, but honestly speaking, when I was friends with him, that never entered into it. I wouldn’t go onto read any of that author’s works until much later in life and, while impressive, they had absolutely no bearing on my friendship with Shawn. We were just two, similarly inclined little boys.
Shawn lived nearby me in the Carnegie Hill section of Upper East Side and, even then, was a profound aficionado of the deeper dive. Where we both harbored interests in nearly identical subject matter, Shawn would cultivate rich understandings in said subjects’ minutia. Never was this more the case than with comic books. We both bought them in maddening bulk, but Shawn’s investment went very deep. I remember going over to his house after school, one day, and noting that he meticulously stored his comics in crisp, thin plastic sheaths with stiff white boards behind each to preserve and protect each issue. Suffice to say, this was in stark contrast to the messy piles of dog-eared comics that lived under my bed. I immediately felt ashamed of this and quickly started to emulate the care with which Shawn looked after his collection. In doing so, I also developed a rich appreciation for the artwork, the narratives and the mythology of the titles I collected. In no time at all, I was a rapturous comic geek, just like Shawn.
During the course of that indoctrination, Shawn and I — still both in our grade school years — turned our fandom for comics into an excuse to explore our native New York City. Whereas prior to this I’d simply been blowing my allowance on comic books at a local newspaper joint on Madison Avenue called Epstein’s (long, long gone), I was now accompanying Shawn on treks to further-flung concerns like Supersnipe on Second Avenue and 84th Street, a tiny corner shop that catered to the more discerning comic book fan. That was alright, for a while, until Shawn learned of another venture a little further downtown. As I’d go onto remember it for the next several decades, that place was called the Comic Art Gallery.
That’s where we need to pause in the preamble.
I’ve alluded to the Comic Art Gallery on this blog more than a few times. For a start, it was located on the relatively nondescript strip of East 58th Street between Lexington Avenue and the magisterial sprawl of Park Avenue. As it happened, it was located directly across the street from the office of my family’s dentist, Dr. Herman J. Bossboom (now presumably long dead). By this point, I would have been in about seventh grade and only about twelve years old. While my mom was not entirely keen on me wandering around parts of town that were thirty-plus blocks away from our neighborhood, she trusted me enough to be able to navigate the mass transit system (usually via bus, at this stage) to get to and from Dr. Bossboom’s office, and was actively relieved that I could get myself there and back on my own. I was already sporting a retainer by this point (which I was sorely derelict in regularly wearing), so I was frequently going to East 58th Street, ….which means I was also frequently going to the Comic Art Gallery.
Had my mom ever seen the place, however, I doubt she’d have been very enthused. Through a nondescript front door and tucked onto the second floor of a frankly seedy looking building, the Comic Art Gallery was up two flights of dark, seriously dodgy, graffiti-slathered stairs that looked like a great place to be jumped, mugged, stabbed and/or abducted. Upon entering the space — a somewhat spartan couple of rooms outfitted with boxes and boxes of comics and framed prints by noted comic illustrators — Shawn and I would immediately start rifling through the boxes, looking for our favorite titles.
Strenuously low on frills and amenities, the space didn’t exactly exude an air of permanence. In the winter months, I seem to remember the staff — a gaggle of beardy, ashen-faced gents usually looking strung-out and embittered — all wearing down vests to keep warm.
…
It was at this point where the original post stopped. Like I said, I don’t recall why I left it there, as there are other things that need to be said and show, so let’s try and do that now, shall we?
…
I cannot say how long the Comic Art Gallery lasted, as I knew it, on East 58th Street, but it seemed like a fairly lengthy amount of time. Then again, all time spent as a youngster seems lengthy. At the very least, I certainly remember the place still being open beyond November of 1979. I only know that, as I would have been deeply ensconced in my fixation with Pink Floyd The Wall (still only an album, at that point, not a film), and I seem to remember the place selling some ephemera from same (tour program, maybe?) I remember it being out of my price range, in any event.
At some point, however, the endeavor shut up shop. I cannot remember the last time I went, but Shawn and his family moved out of New York City around the same time and decamped to the wide-open spaces of Bozeman, Montana, of all places. I can’t remember if I stopped going to the Comic Art Gallery because Shawn was no longer around or because the place shut, but regardless, that was the end of it. I kept going to Disc-O-Mat around one corner and Fiorucci around the other, and even kept going to Dr. Bossboom’s office well into my college years, but comics were no longer an item to be had on that street.
From there, specifics get fuzzy, but I believe some or at least one of the dudes from that iteration of the gallery later opened a sprawling new comic shop on Sullivan Street, just down the ways a little from my beloved Second Coming Records. That operation was a much more expansive, bright, airy and presumably lucrative affair that lasted at least into the late `90s, but — again — I’m not quite sure of the specific affiliation to the East 58th Street spot.
The frustrating thing about all this was, given my pronounced penchant for nostalgic rumination on the pivotal landmarks of my distant youth, for the longest time, I could never find any semblance of any indication at all that, once again, a venture called the Comic Art Gallery ever existed on East 58th Street. I mean, sure — everybody remembers Supersnipe or the original Forbidden Planet — but I found zero evidence to support that this place I’d spent so much time traveling back and forth with Shawn to in the late `70s ever actually being there.
… until this past summer.
I don’t remember what I was actively searching for, at the time, but I stumbled upon a video clip with a gent named Mark Rindner, who was disclosed to be the founder and owner of the … FUCKING WAIT FOR IT…NEW YORK COMIC ARTSGALLERY!
For years and years, my failure to append an “s” to the word “art” made searching for details about the, ahem, New York Comic Arts Gallery moot.
In any case, you can find that video below, but ready thyself. Shot in January of this year, it's yet another laborious interminable zoom-chat interview. Suffice to say, if you're not super-invested in the subject matter, it might be a bit of a chore. And poor, self-effacing Mr. Rindner doesn't exactly discuss the era of the New York Comic Arts Gallery with a pronounced amount of glee, despite the significance the place had on impressionable young snotnoses like myself and Shawn, at the time.
For the sake of context, here's what the former site of the New York Comic Arts Gallery looks like today. Exciting, right? `Twas not alway thus. And for the full, authoritative story about the back history of the New York Comic Arts Gallery, I defer to the video below.
I am crestfallen to learn that a dear friend and longtime colleague from my days at the TIME Magazine News Desk, Eileen (the redhead on the far right), has suddenly passed away.
Eileen was quite literally the very first person I met at the magazine, and her warmth, professional dedication, propensity for kindness and impossibly convivial nature were brilliant enough to power an entire city. I am shocked and heartbroken.
I, of course, remember the big-event news cycles — the slow O.J. car chase to the Oklahoma City bombing to the death of Princess Diana to September 11th to the Iraq War to the tsunami and countless other stressful, busy nights. Eileen was a rock-solid part of each and every one of those experiences when we were all working shoulder-to-shoulder to support and facilitate the crucial exchange or reporting between the editors and the correspondents and reporters in the field around the world. But more than anything, I remember the quiet days and nights when broken news didn’t need to be attended to, when we’d sit around going well out of our may to make each other laugh, and no one was more rewarding to make laugh than Eileen. The long hours were meaningless when you were spending them with such good friends.
The picture above was taken on the eve of TIME's 75th Anniversary party in 1998, snapped in the hallway outside the News Desk at 1271 Sixth Avenue, just across the street from the party's location, Radio City Music Hall. Our department was sort of half-heartedly invited at the eleventh hour (practically with a "now don't feel you have to come...") and we jumped on it with gusto. In attendance that evening was every living individual that had ever appeared on the cover of the magazine. During the course of the evening, I saw F. Lee Bailey and Lee Iacocca embrace, I clinked glasses with George Plimpton (unsolicitedly), saw David Copperfield and then-girlfriend Claudia Schiffer have a heated argument in the downstairs lounge and squeezed behind Dr. Jack Kevorkian on the stairs (a "brush with death," as it were). I remember relaying this to Eileen and seeing her beaming from having a chatty exchange with Tom Hanks. It was that kind of evening.
Goodnight & god bless, Eileen Harkin. You were the soul of the TIME Magzine News Desk and your big, familial heart was beloved by friends & colleagues both near and scattered across the globe, from Kansas to Kandahar.
Ostensibly, 1997 doesn’t *sound* that long ago, to me, but when you do the math, it’s actually a long goddamn time ago. In 1997, my kids had not been born yet, I was not married and I had not even met the woman I was going to marry, yet. I was living on East 12th Street, working two overnight shifts a week at the TIME Magazine News Desk. I was still young, fleetingly solvent, single and indeed ready to mingle. On my days and nights off, I was likely found darkening the doors of many an establishment on Avenue A and its surrounding environs, many of which pictured on that post (including the noxious Korova Bar, which I re-invoked not too long back). It was a different age.
Accidental CD’s was a tiny little hole in the wall just to the north of St. Marks on the westerly side of the expanse of Avenue A. If I’m being honest, it was not a regular stop of mine. I mean, sure, I was routinely to be found rummaging around in any number of the once-numerous record and disc shops downtown, but true to its name, Accidental CD’s never seemed especially concerned with presentation. Titles (used and otherwise) were simply put in boxes haphazzardly and put out front for your perusal. If you came across something you were actually looking for, it was something of a miraculous accident – hence the name, I guess.
But beging the fastidious and exacting music consumer I was (and remain), I usually wanted a bit more attention to care and detail, so rarely stopped by to examine Accidental’s wares, such as they were. If they couldn't be bothered to do some rudimentary organization of their stock, I thought, why should I bother spending my money there?
Around 1996 or so, I became consumed with finding a copy of a live album by Husker Du called The Living End, mostly because of its feral airing of “Divide and Conquer” and a blistering cover of the Ramones’ “Sheena is a Punk Rocker.” While the disc had only been released a couple of years prior, it had become something of a strangely elusive item. I honestly can’t remember if Amazon was selling music, at this point, but that wouldn’t have been one of my usual channels anyway. Finding nothing amidst the, again, still-plentiful network of downtown disc shops, I reparied to the still burgeoning eBay to see if the disc could be had there.
Sure enough, in no time at all, I found a seller, placed my bid and won the disc for a relatively modest sum. Upon completion of the auction, the seller reached out over email, noting that we were both in the same neighborhood, and suggested I just come and pick up my disc instead of getting the post office involved. I said fine, and mindlessly trotted out my front door to go fetch my copy of The Living End, a stroll that led me directly to the address of …. Accidental CD’s. Turns out they were quite aware, thank you very much, of what they had in stock. I started to give them way more consideration and business after that.
Today, the space that had been Accidental CD’s in a entirely shun-worthy 99-cent pizza joint.
Now, as I understand it, there really was a Club Berlin somewhere in Manhattan in the `80s, although it was invariably before the era wherein I was nocturnally out and about, roaming these New York City streets. The first time I’d ever heard about a nightclub called Berlin was, of course, via my laboriously over-cited favorite film of all time, that being “After Hours.” I’ve devoted more space on this stupid blog to the minutia of that film, so if you genuinely care, please just do a Google search.
In any case, in the film, insouciant, topless sculptress Kiki Bridges asserts that Berlin is on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street. Today, that particular corner is a douchey restaurant called the Sola Pasta Bar, but back in the `80s, I honestly don’t remember it being anything other than a wall whereupon fabled SoHo artist Renee extolled the merits of his own work (see below as captured by photographer Leo London). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. More to the point, I’m lazily assuming for no discernible reason that we’re talking about the southwest corner of that particular intersection, and who knows if that’s even accurate?
In 2015, meanwhile, I interviewed my friend Fran Power, who had a memorable cameo in “After Hours” during the scene in which protagonist Paul Hackett gains brusque entry to Club Berlin and almost gets his head shaved. Here’s what Fran had to say about that.
Where was it filmed?
It was filmed in an empty space that they had made into a club in what is now Tribeca. It was a really dead neighborhood at the time …not a real club.
Wasn't there an actual Club Berlin?
Yes there was a real Berlin club…a girl from one of my bands worked there but it wasn't where we filmed at.
Here it in the film, as spotted from looking south from Spring Street, just a few steps to the west of Hudson.
From at least the early `90s on, that space had become a deli. I took a shot of my kids in front of this same strip pictured above in 2013.
And, as resourced from the great new cinema blog NYC in Film (which I discussed here), here’s a shot of the exterior from 1984, taken from across Hudson Street, looking southwest. Note the checkerboard paintjob. Was that simply during Scorsese’s filming?
Today, my friend Chung Wong posted a great photo on Facebook from 1976 by a photographer named Bevan Davis. This is that same space that would later play host to Scorsese’s location of Club Berlin and that deli, then a bar called JJ’s West, as looked at from Hudson Street looking West.
Today, that particular space is all boarded up with a sidewalk shed. Something in in the works, but not sure what.
For a really great, recent breakdown of the "After Hours" locations, check out NYC in FILM.
ADDENDUM:I did a little further searching around, and came up with some information from this site. For a start, it seems JJ's West was a topless bar (back when New York had such establishments), but prior to that, it was a storied jazz club called The Half Note Club. Says the archives site....
The Half Note Club was one of the premier places to hear jazz in the 1960s, and at least a half-dozen records were “live from the Half Note.” John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderly, Billie Holiday, and Judy Garland all performed here before it became a topless bar in 1974. It’s now a deli.
Over the past several months, there have been a few posts that I'd started composing that, for whatever reason, I abandoned. Either because I was distracted by other commitments at the time or simply because I lost the momentum, each of the posts below failed to reach fruition. In their dormant limbo state, they are as follows…
1. Back to the New York Comic ArtSGallery - A trip back in time to my days as a sniveling, comic-collecting grade schooler scouring the less salubrious corners of New York City for vintage comic books.
2. Spinning Out: Updating SPIN’s “40 Best New York City Videos” List - a needlessly lengthy and link-heavy aggregation of the best music videos shot in New York City.
3. Revisiting the 84th Street Bombers - A further rumination on a notorious gang of Yorkville toughs from the early `80s.
I actually made a fair amount of headway in each of these.
Given the option, which of these would YOU actually want to read … if any?
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