So, for the last eight years or so — apart from during COVID — I’ve been lucky enough to attend the annual Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremonies at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.
Basically, the organization I work for volunteers its services to capture video of the inductees and presenters, so I go with a small crew and set-up in the “production corridor,” hoping to catch various luminaries as they’re coming offstage to try to get them to share a few words about the honor and the experience, and all that. It’s usually a very long night, but it’s quite fun and I’ve gotten to meet and talk with a pretty wide array of songwriters.
Last night was this year’s ceremony, and —as you may have read — among this year’s class of inductees came R.E.M. There were other names on the list, of course, like Donald Fagan of Steely Dan, SZA, Timbaland, Hillary Lyndsey, Dianne Warren and Dean Pitchford, but R.E.M.was the big fish I was looking to reel in.
We did pretty well, although Donald Fagan blew us off, as did SZA. But, pretty much everyone else came down, including the fellas in R.E.M., who truly couldn’t have been nicer. After asking my requisite questions, I broke from the script and mentioned how much their music had meant to me, over the years, and each of them broke into a wide smile and shook my hand. Bill Berry took it a step further and complemented my tie. So, yeah, that happened.
Meanwhile, on Monday, I was incredibly flattered by my fellow writer/music journalist/bug-eyed rock freak Joel Gausten for having me on his YouTube channel on Monday to discuss our respective professional trajectories, some mutual favorite bands whose names I probably don’t even have to invoke (you can probably guess) and other geeky fanboy minutia.
Personally, I have a very hard time watching/hearing myself speak, but if you can tolerate my seemingly constant fidgeting, strange hair and ponderous bloviation, there’s a chance you might enjoy….
They cleaned up its exterior, in more recent years, but Billymark’s West on 9th Avenue at West 29th Street was both a storied -- and deceptively intimidating -- dive bar and a veritable canvas for eye-catching street art, for many years. I can’t say I was in any credible way a regular, but I do remember stopping in for beers, a few times, throughout the `90s.
Prior to its more recent makeover, the interior of the bar exuded a pointedly frill-free aesthetic. The only demographic it really catered to seemed to be local, unabashed day-drinkers from the westerly Chelsea environs. It was by no means a place to see and be seen, so to speak. It always struck me as the type of dive that the Westies (i.e. the Irish mob that formerly reigned in neighboring Hell’s Kitchen) might have held court in.
Again, in later years, it got kind of a facelift and then they put in a bunch of flat-screen televisions to make it more of a sports bar, unwittingly diluting much of its former character, to my mind, but what do I know?
In any case, this morning, I was sad to note that my friend Robert posted the pic below. Billymark’s West is evidently no more.
I've mentioned him a few times before, but Jesse Rifkin is an excellent young writer and a friend of mine whose work routinely blows me right off the fuckin' porch. His lovingly researched book, "This Must Be the Place: Music, Community And Vanished Spaces in New York City" is something I completely consider fucking required reading, right up there with "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain and "Our Band Could Be Your Life" by Michael Azerrad.
In any case, Jesse just recently landed an interview with Peter Missing of Missing Foundation. I've you've been paying any attention at all to regular proceedings on this stupid blog, you'll know that Missing Foundation is something of an obsession of mine. So, while I am privately seething with envy (I've interviewed former members Chris Egan and RB Korbet, but never got to Missing, despite some near-misses), I have to say that that Jesse did an AMAZING job. Another piece of the puzzle is in place.
Even if you're unfamiliar with the music and the minutia of Missing Foundation (click here for some of that), it's a great read.
Both filmed six years before my birth, “Invisible City” and “Wonderful New York” are two more examples of those odd travel films I’ve posted here before. Both capturing the New York City of 1961, these films paint a leisurely portrait of Manhattan that, while topographically recognizable, owe precious little to today’s iteration.
First up is “Invisible City.” Hosted by the inimitable Eddie Albert (you might remember him as Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband from “Green Acres” - CORRECTION: EVA GABOR, not Zsa Zsa), scored with some loopy jazz and presented in stately black & white, this film zones in on various locals to portray a wide spectrum of the city’s different walks of life. Many of the sentiments expressed by Albert’s lulling, poetic voiceover (“New York is a great machine….powerful and intrictate”) reflect some pretty antiquated sensibilities, but that shouldn’t be surprising for a document from 62 years ago. Those looking for things to get angry about might single out the section lionizing the statue of Teddy Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History or Albert’s cheeky description of the female bargain-hunters at Macy’s (“they’re splendid to watch”).
There are also the requisite visits to Washington Square Park, Wall Street and Times Square, but there’s a surprise visit of Katz’s on East Houston Street which I didn’t see coming.
Next up is “Wonderful New York,” produced by Pan Am, which is a bit more formal and travelogue-y, as should probably be expected. Jettisoning the black & white for “technirama and technicolor,” this film also flits all about Manhattan, but with more of an accent on getting around and less about “local color.” That said, you do get some nice scenes of the Village and the Central Park Children’s Zoo.
Back on this post, I spoke at great length about a pivotal cinema class I took in college, helmed by an amazing character named Dr. Elliott Stout. He showed us the film below, one day, and -- to borrow a line from "Apocalypse Now" -- it really put the zap on my head.
This is Maya Deren's meisterwerk, "Meshes of the Afternoon." It still puts the zap on my head
This excellent documentary about one of my very favorite bands was originally released in 2017 on Showtime, but I seem to remember not being able to find it, last time I went looking for it. Lucky, then, that some enterprising should saw fit to slap it up on YouTube.
As lazily invoked in this old post, I used to have an embarrassingly robust collection of arguably offensive t-shirts, most of which devoted to extolling the merits of any number of objectionably monikered ensembles like the Circle Jerks, Butthole Surfers, Pussy Galore, Cop Shoot Cop, Nashville Pussy, MDC (aka Millions of Dead Cops) and a few others. As a disagreeable teen, I was evidently far less concerned with ruffling the feathers of the easily riled or possibly just plain oblivious as to why certain juvenile slogans, images and/or invocations might be perceived as problematic or insensitive.
In more recent years, said collection has largely been whittled down not so much by a newfound influx of maturity so much as by the rigors of age (i.e. the garments in question quite often no longer fit my fifty-something frame or just look ridiculously unflattering when I do squeeze into them). Then, of course, there have been a few that I’ve just come to terms with as being indefensibly provocative. One such example of this was a pair of t-shirts my friend Howard made and sent me in exchange for a large-sized print of a photograph of mine. The shirts in question featured a familiar portrait of an unblinking Charles Manson, surrounded by choice quotes from the man as if they were pithy bon mots one might parrot at a cocktail party. While I was profoundly tickled by Howard’s signature blend of macabre humor, I rightly deduced that I could never wear either iteration (one white, one black). I handed one off to a videographer-turned-dubious-importer/exporter friend of mine and the other lived in the bottom of a drawer for a while before it found its way into a bag destined for my local Goodwill outlet. I wonder if they’ve managed to sell it.
But there’s one t-shirt I’ve since parted with that I thought of the other day, and I can’t for the life of me think of why I no longer possess it, not least in that I remember it being oversized (which means it would have fit well today). I wrongly identified its legend in that earlier post, but it was a shirt designed by Don of Terror Worldwide – who did a series of shirts “back in the day,” so to speak, and possibly one or two for my beloved Cop Shoot Cop – for the original Ludlow Street iteration of Max Fish. The design looked like a bit of art appropriated from communist Chinese propaganda, but manipulated to fit the irreverent sensibility of the Lower East side bar it was advertising. Featuring a smiling, kerchiefed proletariat woman – albeit with a third eye in the middle of her forehead – brandishing a can emblazoned with the name of the bar over the commanding legend “SURF SATAN!”
I don’t remember the circumstances of buying the shirt – probably a decision I emphatically realized while markedly inebriated on my way out of the bar, one evening – but for a spell in the mid-`90s, I remember wearing the Hell out of it, usually prompting a wide variety of reactions in others, from consternation to outrage and all points in between. It was never immediately clear that it was a shirt espousing a bar, but that probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Personally speaking, after fourteen years of Catholic education, there are few things I find more amusing than needless invocations of Satan. The fact that otherwise seemingly enlightened individuals can be so effortlessly disturbed by the mention of the name or accompanying blasphemous iconography continues to fascinate me. Longtime readers might remember a similar post wherein I unspooled a yarn about breaking up with a girl I’d been briefly dating because she was shocked into speechlessness by the cover of a record she’d found on my shelves, that being To Mega Therion by Celtic Frost. We broke up on the spot. Sorry, but I’ll take Satan over the fear of divine retribution every time.
Anyway, either it was lost in a move between apartments, poached by friend or surreptitiously thrown down the garbage shoot by the woman who’d become my wife, the “SURF SATAN!” shirt hasn’t seen the inside of any drawer or closet of mine in decades. The pics of it above are not mine, but rather lifted from the internet, where the shirt in question is now something of a collector’s item. Go figure.
As for Max Fish, as I discussed back on this post, I gradually aged out of it, so to speak, and then it closed and moved to Orchard Street in 2010, but I never went to that iteration, and it closed shortly afterwards, anyway.
If you never went to the original one, here’s a brief taste of its interior…
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