Flaming Pablum

Godspeed, Taylor Hawkins

Pressure Drop

It’s been a weird couple of weeks. Work is crazier than it has ever been, and I seem to be losing valuable and beloved colleagues left, right and center. I’m hanging in there, but I don’t remember the last time my calendar was this overwhelming. I’m not complaining, per se — well, I guess I actually am — but it’s a struggle, at the moment.

On other fronts, we’re wrangling with the college-selection process for my daughter (as alluded on these posts) and, on another front, I’ve been plagued by a strange bout of some mysterious malady. I won’t get into it here, just yet, but suffice to say, I’m experiencing something that, thus far, has my primary care physician kinda stumped. That’s not a happy place to be, my friends. In all candor, I'm kinda really stressed out about it. 

In any case, I had a few moments this evening, so I thought I’d check in here. I was saddened to read, earlier this week, that Flaming Pablum-favorite Jon Spencer has evidently officially pulled the plug on the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. The reports were vague, but I gather it has something to do with the apparently failing health of guitarist Judah Bauer. I actually accosted Judah on the street, a couple of years back. I spotted him on the somewhat iconic corner of Thompson and Broome and asked him if he’d be interested in contributing a testimonial to the book I was vainly trying to put together, at the time, about Blues Explosion comrades, Cop Shoot Cop (if you’re curious about what happened to that project, click here). Judah stared at me with a strange glaze to his gaze and gave me a weird response that didn’t really make any sense. I shook his hand and found his grip limp and clammy to the touch. The man was clearly not at all well. I watched him wander strangely out of sight up Thompson street.

If you’re unfamiliar about the greatness of the Blues Explosion, here's an ample reminder of their prowess.

Meanwhile, Jon Spencer is now playing with The Hitmakers (featuring someone from Quasi and Bob Goddamn Bert of Pussy Galore, Sonic Youth, Bewitched, Chrome Cranks, and the mighty Lydia Lunch Retrovirus), who took a trip back in time to revisit a chestnut from Jon’s original combustive band, Pussy Galore. Check that shit out here.

Guerillere Talks 1978

The official description:

Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick helped define New York’s No Wave film scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The No Wave movement embraced a brash guerrilla aesthetic and Dick’s films, shot on Super-8 and starring an unruly cast of artists and musicians, perfectly capture the lo-fi glamour of the scene. Guerrillere Talks is Dick’s first film, it consists of six cartridges of Super-8 footage strung together, each running for three and a half minutes.

Pooper Union

I once spent four days, back in the early `90s, living in Cooper Union's eyesore of a then-brand-new dormitory (above) for the purposes of writing an article about it for the school's alumni magazine (a friend of mine was a contributor there, at the time, and got me the gig). I remember many of the school's own architecture students being abjectly appalled by the building. My piece was edited beyond all recognition, but that was probably more to do with my penchant for including anecdotal asides that were not-entirely-flattering towards the school, coupled with my needlessly "descriptive" verbiage. You can read more about that riveting chapter on this ancient post.

In any case, if Cooper Union is forcing Sunrise Mart and Angel's Share out of the neighborhood, as EV Grieve reports, and out of business, they have earned my eternal fuckin' scorn.

So Then Leave Already, Cash!

Regular readers -– if they exist -– might remember a post I penned here back in 2018 that was basically a curmudgeonly dressing-down of a young “vlogger” named Brett Conti. At the time, Conti was this prolific YouTube personality with his own “channel” who produced an unwieldy amount of videos showcasing his idealized life in New York City and other parts of the globe, offering cloying tips and annoying millennial lingo while not-so-subtly pushing his shamelessly aspirational streetwear brand. That all left a bad taste in my mouth, so I talked a bunch of shit about it, albeit prefaced with the acknowledgment that, as an arguably equally insufferable blogger, I ultimately was not really all that different from him. He just had a wider reach, I guess.

Four years later, I can only assume that Brett Conti is still at it, but I haven’t bothered to check. In any case, this post targets a similarly inclined character, although I doubt I’ll be as charitable and forgiving as I was to Conti. Like anyone cares.

Cash Jordan (above) is another young, presumably transplanted New Yorker (not that that means anything, as I mentioned here) who has made a name for himself, since 2019, posting videos on YouTube and TikTok. A self-described “rental expert,” Jordan devotes most of his content to real estate, highlighting what he considers quirky finds and amazing luxury opportunities amidst New York City’s roiling sea of rentable residences. I have no problem with that, necessarily. Real estate is indeed a hustle – my own mother was a real estate agent for many years – and it really does require a sharp savvy and a spine of steel. I don’t know if Jordan has either, but he does seem to be reaching a good amount of folks – like, in the millions -- with his clips.

No, my problem is with the persistent bent of his content. Viewing New York City exclusively through a prism of amenities-&-conveniences and seemingly without any real reverence or curiosity about the back histories or cultural significances of the neighborhoods, places and locales he’s focusing on, Jordan seems to perceive New York City simply as one, amorphous pile of potential revenue opportunity.

Again, he’s a real estate agent, so I understand that that’s his gig. But he couches his videos with such an alarmist, defeatist tone. Typical titles include “NYC May Never Recover,” “New York City is Getting Worse,” “The Worst Part of NYC is…,” “I’m Leaving NYC…,” “NYC is Running Out of Apartments Like This,” “We Had to Leave NYC,” “The Sad Truth About New York City,” etc. etc. etc.

Pardon me, Cash, but if you’re so down on it, why don’t you go on back to whatever rinkydink divot on the map you crawled out of and fuck right off? Here’s a typical example of one of Cash’s video. Let’s watch, shall we?

Now, for a start, this building on the corner or Lafayette & Bleecker is very decidedly not “NYC’s Weirdest Building.” While it may slightly deviate from the norm given the contours of the block it occupies, that doesn’t really make it bizarre or even slightly weird in any meaningful capacity. The narrowest part he alludes to at the northerly end of the block isn’t even technically part of the overall structure, but a separate, enclosed portion unto itself. Formerly housing retail ventures of one sort or another, this chunk has been dormant for over a decade or so, by this point. A million years ago, it was actually a gas station. It’s also made cameos, in the past, in music videos like “Just Got Paid” by Johnny Kemp (which was shot before they put in that narrow, pointed part at the end). Those bits of history aren’t especially difficult to discover, but I guess Cash wasn’t up for any Googling the day he put this together. He’s more interested in its utilization as a placement for ads.

While it’s ostensibly the subject of this video, the allegedly mysterious building is really only window dressing, here. Cash doesn’t really delve into, reveal anything or reward his viewers with any sort of fruition. He just uses it as hollow springboard to remind viewers how difficult it is to make it all work in this city and show you a different apartment that has nothing to do with this corner.

Now, look, he seems like a perfectly nice guy, and he should be congratulated for this lucrative niche he's carved out for himself, but friggin' DO BETTER, Cash. Treat New York City with the respect it deserves. 

That "weird building" back in the day...

 

 

NYC Standard Fare: A Quick List for a Friend

As a director of content and editorial services for the corporate communications department of my company, I was initially hired for my writing abilities. But when our in-house video editor abruptly resigned shortly after I started back in late 2015, I somehow absorbed his duties, despite not being in any real way versed in the realms of video editing. As a result, I swiftly established a network of regular vendors to tackle our needs. One of those vendors is a Nashville-based videographer named Brian who has saved my hide more times than can be quantified. He and his team do rock-solid work and never part with their cool, even under the tightest of deadlines. I remain eternally indebted to him.

So when Brian postulated the query below to me, earlier this week, I felt duty-bound to help him out.

“Hey, my friend! I have a very close friend of mine coming to NYC later this month … they are staying a block off Times Square. Can you recommend…

1. A pizza place

2. A hot dog place

3. Any other “NYC standard” you can think of…”

It looks pretty cut-&-dry, but if you’re a bona fide New Yorker, you know there is rarely ever a single, clear-cut answer to questions like these. Even post-gentrification and post-pandemic, we still live in a city literally teeming with options. Which does one cite?

I’ve done a few posts about this sort stuff before, notably my two Flaming Pablum Grub Guides and the Big City Survey, but I’m always slightly hesitant to use descriptors like “Best,” being that it’s all relative. I prefer to use the term “favorite.”

As such, let’s dig into this….

"A PIZZA PLACE"

As expressed above, cripes …. where does one even begin?

For a start, not to deflect the question, but there are different types of pizza places. There are your standard pizzerias tailored to quick slices on paper plates to be eaten at counters or taken to go. Then there are more formal joints where one orders an entire pie and eats at a table with a table cloth and waiters and the whole nine. There is also a league of high-end, bespoke pizza restaurants, although the fare here is usually a more refined dining experience that owes precious little to the afore-cited, street-side pizzerias. Whatever your preference, budget or social status, there’s a pizza place for you.

Not to be a downer, but as expressed elsewhere on this blog, as far as I’m concerned, the heyday of grab-n-go Manhattan slices is lamentably behind us. When I was a kid, it seemed like there was a credible pizza joint every three blocks, or so. Every neighborhood had at least one, and they were usually all pretty decent. Today, for whatever reason, this is no longer the case. I mean, sure, there are still droves of middling-to-dismal places wherein to get a quick slice. Just this week, I ruefully ducked into one on Cortlandt Street (not to be confused with Cortlandt Alley) in the Financial District and had a perfunctory slice that, while still technically “pizza,” lacked pretty much everything that the dish is supposed to embody. Then, of course, there is also the more recent trend of “one-dollar pizza” places which I’ve bemoaned here before. While I respect that people need to be able to eat on the cheap, “one-dollar pizza” is a strenuous affront to the rich culinary heritage of New York City and should be duly shunned with an extra topping of contempt.

So, yeah, anyway….

For the purposes of my friend Brian’s query, I would steer his friend to John’s Pizza of Times Square. This is a sit-down establishment of deserving renown. I personally prefer the original John’s down near me on Bleecker Street, but the Times Square location is roomy and atmospheric and the pies are still pretty goddamn great. It’s also nearby where this guy is staying, so everyone wins.

Beyond that, though, I would also cite Lombardi’s Pizza on Spring Street in SoHo, although they’ve become a bit touristy, it has to be acknowledged. Their brick-oven pizza remains fucking outstanding. A nice place to go without so much fuss would be Numero 28 Pizza on Carmine Street. They don’t come out in conventional pie shapes so much as gooey rectangles, but their pizza is simply delicious.

A recent addition to my favorite pizza joints is right here on my own University Place, that being Simo Pizza. They don’t serve slices, but their pies are light with amazing, soft crusts. You cannot go wrong with this place. Ribalta Pizza, for a similar sit-down situation, on East 12th between Broadway and University Place is also mighty nice.

With regards to quick and greasy slices, most of the favorite places from my youth are long gone, but you can still get a great slice at Joe’s Pizza, also on Carmine Street, but they, too, have been discovered.

I’m also partial to the slices at Champion Pizza in Soho on Cleveland Place.

Begrudgingly, I also truly have to give it up for Little Italy III on University Place, which is the favorite pizzeria-du-jour of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. I wrote about how I thought he had his head up his ass about this, but I went shortly afterwards, and despite the place still being something of a depressing bus-station-without-the-bussses, the slices are indeed pretty goddamn good.

Do not, under any circumstances, go to a Domino’s Pizza when you are in NYC.

“A HOT DOG PLACE”

This may sound weird, but I’ve never really considered New York City that much of a hot dog town. I mean, yeah, they’re everywhere, and while the “dirty-water dogs” you get from the Sabrett carts may seem iconic — and they kind of are — they’re really the sort of food you eat only when you have no other alternatives. No time to stop for lunch? Grab a street-side dog, and you’ll at least have something in your system, so to speak. Don’t expect it to make a huge, flavorful impression on you. I’m just being honest.

When I was kid, the Papaya King on the corner of East 86th Street & Third Avenue was a way better bet for hot dogs, even if it meant standing in that narrow chamber to consume them (best with a tall cup of papaya juice). Amazingly, Papaya King is still there, as are a few of the similarly inclined Gray’s Papaya places, albeit not the storied one on the corner of West 8th and Sixth Avenue (which turned into Liquiteria before closing during the pandemic). It has been said that this Gray’s Papaya was Lou Reed’s favorite place to eat in New York City.

There is also Crif Dogs on the eastern end of St. Marks Place for a higher-end variant of the hot dog, if that’s your thing. I like Crif because there’s a secret speakeasy bar tucked in its rear interior.

Lastly, of course, there’s the famous Nathan’s, but that involves going way the Hell out to Coney Island. That’s fun, but that’s a day in itself.

“ANY OTHER ’NYC STANDARD’ YOU CAN THINK OF…”

Okay, this is the one that really does my head in, because I can think of quite a lot.

But, if we’re simply talking about food, I’d say….

Get a five-dollar order of the fried dumplings from the scary fried dumpling closet on Mosco Street in Chinatown.

Get a big, fuckoff steak at Keen’s Chophouse on West 36th Street

If you can afford it — and I generally can’t — treat yourself to sushi at Nobu on 195 Broadway

Get the Korean barbecue at Dons Bogam on East 32nd Street. Yeah, it’s still Korean BBQ, but they still do the cooking for you, so no one feels like throwing up the next day, if you know what I mean.

Get the dim-sum at Dim Sum Go-Go on East Broadway. It is fucking special.

Get a burger at the Corner Bistro on West 4th Street.

Have the pierogis at timeless Ukrainian eatery Veselka on East 9th, and raise a middle-finger to Mother Russia.

Hope that helps!! Bon appetit!!!

Sit Tight

Hey again, all…. I have some meatier stuff in the works, but as lamented earlier, work is crazy busy. After interminable months of virtual online shenanigans, the performance rights organization I work for is staging its first live events in two years next week, and in very swift succession, starting with the Latin Music Awards on Tuesday, followed by three separate events at SXSW and then culminating in a Gospel music event in short order after that. As a director of content and editorial services, I’m up to my eyeballs orchestrating coverage and bossing videographers around and worrying my scalp silver about expectations and budget constraints. It’s stressful, but exciting.

On the home front, both my kids have birthdays in the next two weeks (turning 16 and 18, respectively). My daughter is starting to hear back from colleges, which is a whole other source of anxiety. On top of that, I might treat myself to seeing Gary Numan on Sunday, but we'll see.

In any case, I’ll have more stuff here soon. In the interim, this is about as close to Gospel music as I get…..

Crank it….

Two Years

Hey there, all. Sorry for the relative slowdown, but it’s been crazy busy on the work front. I promise to have more inane crap for you to bitch about here soon.

That all said, I was struck today by something when I glanced at my calendar. This coming Saturday, it will be two years to the day my office, my wife’s office and both my kids’ schools sent us all home to work and study remotely. The advisory at my office was appended with a sort of “it’ll probably only be for, like, two weeks, tops!”

We all know what happened next, of course.

According to my phone, I took three photos on that day. One on the way to work, one of my office as I was about to exit, and then one on my way home from work … of what I thought looked like a an aptly broken planet in a garbage can.

Bemoaned Pleasures

Unlike certain other bands that would become favorites of mine, I cannot say I remember exactly when or where I first heard Joy Division. It was very probably via a mixtape from my friend Rich, who’d already championed (arguably) similarly gloomy bands like Theatre of Hate to me (although, compared to Joy Division, Theater of Hate sound positively peppy). I believe I succumbed to the austere allure of Joy Division’s debut LP, Unknown Pleasures in about 1983. Ian Curtis had already been dead for three years.

Listening to that first LP was an immediately immersive and affecting experience. For a start, it genuinely sounded like nothing else. It lacked the feral abandon of the punk rock that had obviously inspired it, but retained the genre’s minimal, spartan aesthetic — applied with a clipped, bone-dry precision. Within the album’s 10 original tracks, there are no warm splashes of color beyond bleached, blinding white, frigid grey and ponderously funereal black. There is no camp, no arch wryness or anything cheeky. Topically, Ian Curtis’ lyrics burrow into the realms of despair, degradation, hopelessness, self-loathing and existential dread. In both sound and sentiment, Unknown Pleasures offers a narrow menu that — while entirely singular and elegiac — offers little solace or relief. While frequently draped in overused descriptors like “bleak,” “claustrophobic,” “haunted,” “elegiac,” “grim,” and “sepulchral,” the best adjective to describe Joy Division’s iconic first album has always been the straightforward one — it’s depressing.

Joy Division certainly weren’t alone, in damp Cold War-era England, in mining this particular vein, but few accomplished it with such an aura of authenticity. There was precious little doubt that Ian Curtis wrestled with a lot of issues. While some of their foppish contemporaries could credibly be accused of hamming up the heartache, no one could ever call Joy Division posers. The music on Unknown Pleasures never sounded calculated or contrived. The emotional dislocation woven into that music was genuine, which is entirely what made it so distinctive, leant further permanent poignance by Ian Curtis’ tragic, early exit from this mortal coil in 1980. He wasn’t bluffing.

Unlike the band that the remnants of the original foursome would shortly become, Joy Division didn’t make party music. Sure, you could certainly dance to a lot of it, but no one was going to slot Unknown Pleasures alongside records by Kool & the Gang, Chic and Donna Summer for rump-shaking spins at their next block party. Tempo-wise, it was either nervous twitch, adrenalized sprint or deliberate plod. It is weighty, but without an ounce of fat — pure, opaque and unwaveringly dark.

Despite the status it would enjoy in later decades, Unknown Pleasures doesn’t even have any of Joy Division’s “big singles” on it, the poppiest moments probably being the frenetic opener “Disorder,” the driving snarl of “Interzone" and “She’s Lost Control,” a sobering rumination on a friend’s descent into the indignity and powerlessness of epilepsy. “Rock Lobster” it ain’t.

Too heady, monochromatic, jagged and — again — inescapably depressing for most, despite what certain retrophiles might try to sell you these days, Unknown Pleasures was not exactly a staple around college hi-fis throughout the `80s. At Denison University, any dorm room that contained a copy of the record was probably occupied by a shy and/or disaffected adolescent with a healthy amount of contempt for the perpetually Grateful Dead-scored shenanigans of the frat scene.

But there was (and remains) one special element to Unknown Pleasures that has belied and almost betrayed its cold, unrelentingly desolate core. While fittingly sheathed in a pitch black sleeve, the front cover of Joy Division’s debut came stamped with a striking, enigmatic image that graphic designer Peter Saville plucked from an esoteric book about astronomy. Depicting the fluctuating frequencies of a pulsar signal, the design portrays a succession of crooked, angular lines that strangely mirror the stark, disciplined pulse of the music contained on the record. I cannot speak to the veracity of the legend, but it might have been a luckily prescient design choice, as it has been said that Saville selected the image for the cover without ever actually first hearing the record.

So beyond obviously being an blowhardy, silver-scalped Gen-X’r waxing laboriously about the music of his youth that he quite obviously feels is incalculably superior to the weedy piffle that kids listen to nowadays, why exactly am I bothering to drudge all this up about a now-universally-acknowledged post-punk milestone?

Well, it’s invariably very late in the day to be harping on about this, I am still struck by how Unknown Pleasures has become strangely adopted by mainstream popular culture. For a start, according to Peter Hook’s excellent memoirs, Joy Division never sold “merch.” I certainly remember dutifully buying an Unknown Pleasures shirt around 1984 at Butterfly’s on West 8th Street (now hardware store), but the band initially eschewed all variants of conventional marketing. New Order followed suit up until about 1985’s Low-Life, wherein they did the unthinkable of put their faces on the sleeve. From that point on, I guess, it was off to the races, and one could suddenly buy official Joy Division/New Order gear in much the same manner as Iron Maiden or Kiss.

But, at some point, the cryptic iconography of Joy Division became more than just a sharp t-shirt for precious music geeks in the know and followed the Ramones, Motorhead and CBGB logos into simply the surface-patina of “cool,” whether those sporting said designs knew about the underlying meanings or not. Some folks, like, say, myself, still think this is strenuously unfortunate.

This has obviously been the case for quite a while, here in 2022, but I was slammed in the face by it again, today, while out clothes-shopping with my daughter. Evidently perilously low on certain crucial items, Charlotte asked if we could pop into American Eagle (a clothiers I would normally be loathe to enter based on its name alone) to see if they had a particular cut of blue-jean she preferred. I accompanied my daughter into the place and spent an interminable eternity wandering around while Char emphatically scrutinized their denim selection. While Char sequestered herself in the changing room, I caught sight of something that sort of ruined my afternoon. Surrounded by miles of pre-distressed outerwear, numbing pastels and midriff-exposing crop tops for every climate, there were the jagged pulsar strands from the cover of Unknown Pleasures, incongruously grafted onto a sun-bleached yellow t-shirt to pair with a denim-on-denim ensemble.

Now, obviously, appropriation of the images associated with Joy Division's seminal work for the purposes of a t-shirt ultimately does nothing to diminish the significance of the album in question. Whether the clientele of American Eagle knows it or not, the music of Unknown Pleasures remains as impactful, stirring and important (yeah, I said it) in 2022 as it did in 1979. It has lost none of its power. 

I realize it’s a trivial thing, but … is this what Ian would’ve wanted?

Goodbye to Davey's

I am frequently heard to lament the deterioration of the East Village I used to love -- my favorite seedy bars like Downtown Beirut, Alcatraz, Manitoba’s and Mars Bar, live-music venues like Brownie’s and the Pyramid and record/disc shops like Sounds, Freebeing and Kim’s have mostly all gone the way of the woolly mammoth. Over the last couple of decades, storefronts that were formerly storied haunts or atmospheric dives became bespoke boutiques, exotic noodle parlors, vaping emporiums or brunch destinations. The punkers were largely replaced by brunchers. Cronuts became strangely way more important than Cro-Mags. The edge went missing.

But I read today via my comrade E.V. Grieve that one of those “newer” places is vacating today. Davey’s Ice Cream on First Avenue only opened up 8 years ago. I honestly can’t remember what is was prior to Davey’s, but in the past 8 years, it has been an all-time favorite with my now-no-longer-especially-little kids (below circa 2018). There may have been a whiff of trendy/foodie about the venture, but they served a particular flavor called Speculoos that – while it sounded like an unsavory surgical instrument – truly rivaled unmentionable pleasures. We shall bitterly rue Davey’s departure.

Pour one out.