Flaming Pablum

Auf Wiedersehen, Club Berlin

It might seem inconceivable that I’ve found yet another reason to write about “After Hours” (the last time, I believe, being this recent post), but here we go.

The reason is the somewhat sad news that 296 Spring Street, the building on the southwest corner of Spring and Hudson Streets that served as the location of Club Berlin in “After Hours” (as lengthily discussed here) is no more. As mentioned in that earlier post, there was an actual Club Berlin in SoHo back in the day, but it was over on West Broadway and Grand Street, I believe. Today, there’s a subterranean club on Second Street and Avenue A called Berlin NYC, but that’s not really related, I don’t believe.

In any case, 296 Spring was originally a bar called JJ’s West. Circa the filming of “After Hours,” Scorsese had its exterior painted in a checkerboard fashion to stay in tune, I guess, with the edgy fashion of the times. In later years, that corner became one of the neighborhood’s few delicatessens. It was seemingly the only spot for miles around to procure sundry items like beer and sandwiches in the dead of night.

My most vivid memory of that deli involves a late night in about 1990 at McGovern’s just down the block on Spring Street. Myself, my friend Sam and a young Australian lady named Madelene had gone to go see age-old noise-rock weirdos Alice Donut play. We stepped into that deli, after the show, and --- for whatever reason – bought three more beers with the intention of consuming them while we walked. We did so, but then just stood outside the deli – awkwardly – drinking those beers. The only reason it was awkward was that, at the time, Sam and I were sort of both courting fetching Aussie Madelene, and it was gradually becoming apparent that Sam had “won” this little competition.

The trouble was that he was having kind of a tough time conveying that information. As something of an ice-breaking punctuation, Sam gave the top of my beer bottle a tap with the bottom of his bottle, an annoying little stunt we were wont to do that usually resulted in the recipient’s beer foaming over. As the suds washed over my fingers, I managed to figure out what he was trying to imply, and I retaliated in kind, unwittingly using too much force as I brought the bottom of my bottle down onto his. The narrow rim at the top of his bottle quietly snapped off, leaving behind a sharply edged shard that no one initially noticed.

I stammered out some anemic comment like, “okay, well, I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow,” leaving them to what I imagined would be doubtlessly amorous shenanigans. As I was turning to walk away, I watched Sam obliviously raise his now-broken bottle back towards his mouth, and time started to move in slow motion. I frantically flung my arm out to intercept the sharp end before it reached Sam’s face, slamming the bottle to the ground where it shattered, and practically tripping over myself in the process. Not knowing that he’d been about to puncture his face (which also would have been entirely my fault), Sam was understandably confused and angry, compounding the already embarrassing circumstances of the whole scenario. I explained the whole sequence of events, which frankly sounded dubious at best, and I’m not entirely sure either of them believed me.

I started skulking in the direction of the subway back to my then-home on the Upper East Side, until I realized that in only a few short hours’ time, I’d have to come back down to SoHo to open up at the art gallery on Mercer Street where I was working, at the time. I ended up drearily walking to the gallery at about four in the morning, unlocking the door and sleeping on a narrow bench behind the rickety metal desk until opening time. It was not a great evening.

Be that as it may, that deli lasted well into the new millennium. I’m not sure when it officially closed up shop, but in the last few years, the façade was all boarded up.

Sure enough, here in late July of 2024, all that remains of the deli and the location of Club Berlin is a hole in the ground.

Today, 296 Spring Street is gone. McGovern's closed at some point and became a club called Sway, although the McGovern's sign still hangs out front. Madelene ended up breezily fooling around with both Sam and I before repairing back to Australia, never to be seen again. Sam moved to Portland, Maine, then to Seattle, got married, had kids and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he still lives today. 

This, meanwhile, was Club Berlin....

Glad to See You Go, Astor Place Starbucks

I'm seeing a surprising amount of weepy teeth-gnashing on social media about the closing of the Astor Place Starbuck's, which -- to my mind -- as a single establishment, almost singularly typified the disemboweling of the original character of the neighborhood (later further eroded by Kmart, CVS, Raising Cane chicken, Wegman’s, etc. etc.). I still lovingly remember the Astor Riviera (which you can see here, courtesy of the amazing Glenn Losack) that held court on that corner well prior to the arrival of the Seattle coffee chain.

Someone commented in response to this same topic on a friend of mine's Facebook page: "Vampire landlords are sucking the blood out of this city." While, true, yes, they are, the notion of a fucking Starbucks being indicative of "the blood" of this city made me wince.

I’ve wrung this rant-rag dry, by now, but New York City used to be comprised of an amazing network of independent mom’n’pop ventures, not plagued with endless fast-food franchises and big-box retail outlets. That shit was for the strip malls and the suburbs.

But, sure enough, largely thanks to the efforts of this fucker, Starbucks moved into town in the mid-`90s, and proceeded to spread faster than a spilled cup of pumpkin spice latte.

My favorite memory of the Astor Riviera involves a friend of mine and I ordering a pair of milkshakes there, once, on a hot summer day. An endearingly surly waiter brought them over and plunked them down on our table, only without straws. When we spoke up about needing straws, he took two out of his apron and blithely tossed them in our direction from about a yard away, which reduced us to hysterics. So, yeah, maybe the service wasn’t exactly top notch, but I’d take the Astor Riviera over a Starbucks every single day of the apocalypse.

ADDENDUM: Someone on what used to be Twitter actually typed this with a presumably straight face:

End of an era. For old NYU grads, Starbucks on Astor place and the Kmart by it felt like forever places. St. Marks is also not what it used to be. 

It almost goes without saying that the next occupant of that stately space will be another bank, a fucking cannabis dispensary or yet another addition to the maddening proliferation of fitness outlets that now define "activewear alley" or the "fitness corridor." Fuck all that.

You can see “coming soon – the Astor Riviera” (misspelled as “reviera”) in this clip from “Downtown `81,” starring Jean-Michel Basquiat and, in this scene, man-from-the-past David McDermott.

Meanwhile, my feelings about the departure of Starbucks are best summed up by this clip of the Brothers Ramone.

Goodbye, Pat Collier

I was saddened to learn, yesterday, that Pat Collier passed away over the weekend. While not at all a household name (certainly not here in the States), Pat Collier first came roaring in *our* household via a crate of records my father had sent my sister and I from London in the summer of 1977. At that stage, Pat was the bass player for an endearingly rude punk band called The Vibrators, and when we pulled a copy of their debut LP, Pure Mania, out of that crate and dropped the needle on “Into the Future,” it was like someone had tossed a live grenade into our living room. I still have that LP today, and it still smokes.

In later years, Pat became a producer, and ended up working on what would become some of my favorite records of all time, including selections by The Wonder Stuff, The House of Love, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Katrina & the Waves, The Soft Boys, Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians, the UK Subs, 999, X-Ray Spex, The Screaming Blue Messiahs, Kingmaker, New Model Army, Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction, Primal Scream, The Soup Dragons, Crazyhead, Angelic Upstarts, Swervedriver, The Inmates and trust me when I say that this is only a small handful of the bands that he worked with.

Pat Collier put in the hours and did some amazing work, and my life as a geeked-out music fan was the richer for it. Respect is due.

Pour one out!

32 Summers Later: Sonic Youth in Central Park

Spotted the clip below, this morning, and it struck me for two reasons. Firstly, it underscored the recent negation of the MTV News archives, which still completely confounds me. Secondly, it reminds me of a period of my life that now seems quite a long, goddamn time ago.

And while, yes, 32 years is indeed a long goddamn time, I can still pretty vividly remember this day. I believe I’ve spoken about it here before (I have), but I attended Sonic Youth’s July 4 performance, with Sun Ra opening, at the Central Park Summerstage in the balmy summer of 1992.

I would have been 25, at the time, and working as an editorial assistant at LIFE Magazine. I want to say I went with my friends Rob D. and Vicky S., and I remember being frankly confused by Sun Ra and, if I’m being honest, kinda bored by most of Sonic Youth’s set as, by this time, they were heading off in a direction that I didn’t find quite as compelling as their weirder, noisier material from just a couple of short years earlier. They played a bunch of stuff that would surface later that month on Dirty, which I wasn’t that into. But, they were still Sonic Youth, thus — still cool. When they launched into favorites like “Teen Age Riot,” “The Burning Spear” and “Expressway to Yr Skull,” I was well enthused, but disappointed that they didn’t bust out “Death Valley `69.”

I also remember milling around before hand in the park outside the Summerstage area, chatting briefly with R.E.M’s Pete Buck, who was just kinda hanging out, and getting in a strange argument with some dude about the politics of Laibach. He was adamant that they were nazis, while I was countering that their aesthetic was archly ironic … he walked away unconvinced.

In any case, in the eras since this clip was shot, Sonic Youth would release nine more studio albums before splitting up over the sad dissolution of the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. The rising wave of “Alternative Rock” — as a mainstream concern, at least — would shortly crest and summarily crash, paving the way for flatly indefensible garbage like Blink-182, Creed, Linkin Park and Avril Lavigne, not to mention the inevitable return of glossily slick teen pop ala Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and the like. Hip-Hop — then in the throes of what many largely consider its “golden era” — would continue to rise, mutate, and shortly completely overtake all things rock in terms of the music of popular youth culture. Sun Ra, meanwhile, would die less than a year after this show.

In the weeks that followed this afternoon, I embarked on a dubious office romance with a young lady from LIFE’s production department that — not unlike “Alternative Rock” — would crest and crash in remarkably short order, leaving me shaking my fist at the notion of a beneficent god for honestly far longer than I should’ve. I got laid off from LIFE in 1993, but got picked up by TIME and stayed there for 12 years before splitting for — wait for it — MTV News, who’d, in turn, lay me off two summers after that. I’d then kill time at MSN for two years before joining the website of the TODAY Show (what was I thinking?) for about four and half years before unceremoniously getting the keys to the street, again, and floundering for several months before landing the job I have now, where I’ve been for eight years and a little bit.

Oh, I also got married in 2001 and had two kids.

But back in July of 1992, none of that had happened yet….

Exhuming The Stencil

I’m always amazed when someone writes in about something I posted eons ago. I mean, I am still routinely fielding comments about the whole Radiohead/Chuck Kolsterman thing (a story that will seemingly never go away), but when someone zeroes in on something a little more fleeting, I always get a tiny jolt of validation.

Case in point: In 2013, I posted a trio of entries speculating on the origins of a specific pair of stenciled depictions of an artist that were formerly spray-painted virtually all over SoHo. The original featured the head of an Asian man with spiky hair, framed by the legend, “There’s a New Kid Town.” In due course, meanwhile, someone started spray-painting a morbid parody of that, featuring a replication of the head, but with smoking gun next to it under the unfortunate declaration, “End the Joke!”

I did eventually track down photographic evidence of each, but never really got the whole backstory. Eleven years later, meanwhile, I just fielded a note from a reader named Uli, who is a – wait for it – “ stencil graffiti researcher.” In response to those two posts, Uli wrote:

"I got some news for you. Did you find the artist yet? I found a good photo where you can read the slogan next to the portrait: “There's a new kid in Town.”

He then linked to a frankly remarkable trove of street-art photographs, which you can see here, saying:

“Those photos were shot by late stencil Polish artist Tomaz Sikorski on his visits in NYC in the mid 1980s. Here is the one. I think you did not mention that yet. Also interesting: In a French book, “Pochoir a la Une,” Paris 1986 on page 99. There is an illustration of that very stencil. Another photo of the suicide parody of it is here, and a nearly untouched version of the suicide version is in David Robinson's book SoHo Walls from 1990 on page 72.”

So, there’s a little more information about those stencils. Below are just a couple of shots from Sikorski’s amazing street-art page, though. Check them out!

The shot captured above is almost undoubtedly the work of the late Fran Powers of Modern Clix. The figure with the oddly pointed head was his de facto insignia, as can seen on this post. 

I couldn't begin to tell you with the stoop above is (somewhere in the East Village, I'm assuming), but it's the same stairs that served as the location for this MTV News spot on the great Lydia Lunch. 

The above is, of course, the former exterior wall of The Gas Station, aka the Space 2B Art Yard, where GG Allin gave his final performance. 

Above the former entrance to 9 Second Avenue, otherwise known as The Church of All Nations and/or the Taoist Temple of the Ancestral Mother, which there was an excellent documentary about. See that here. 

 

 

Downtown & East in Pictures

I've shared several of these before, but herewith a clutch of photos of mine of the East Village and Lower East Side in the mid-to-late `90s and early 2000's.

Click on each to enlarge.

Enjoy. 

Some Refreshing Perspective from New Jersey

Back to Strangelove

It’s not very often that I go drinking in east Midtown, but when I do, … you might just find me at Strangelove, located just a few steps to the east of East 53rd and Third Avenue.

Insufferable music geeks of a certain stripe will doubtlessly recognize that address as the location of one of the Ramones’ more infamous songs. Back in the mid-to-late 70’s, 53rd & Third was a notorious strip of real estate for male, teenaged hustlers looking to turn tricks for quick cash from a very specific demographic. As documented in the prose of late junkie-turned-poet-turned-author-turned-punk rocker Jim Carroll and in song by Dee Dee Ramone, the furtive business transactions of 53rd and Third provided them both with the financial wherewithall to feed their respective drug habits and the inspiration for their art, so to speak, although while Carroll was quite candid about his doings with the cruisers, Dee Dee couched his with a bit of poetic license. While he expresed in Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s “Please Kill Me” that he could only write songs through personal experience, the protagonist of “53rd & Third” claims to be a Green Beret that served in Vietnam before he stabs his John to prove he’s not a “sissy.” I can’t honestly say if Dee Dee ever stabbed anyone, but he certainly never served in Vietnam. But anyway…

To stand on the corner of 53rd and Third Avenue today, you’d never know such activities ever took place there. But continue walking towards Second Avenue, and you will eventually pass the stoop of Strangelove. I can’t honestly remember when they first opened their doors, but they’ve probably been open for about ten years, maybe? (If you know, do write in). Taking their name, presumably, from either the Depeche Mode single or Stanley Kubrick’s fabled anti-war satire (or possibly both), Strangelove has a raison d'être that is pretty straightforward – “Cheap Beer/Punk Rock.” Being that I’m an avowed connoisseur of both, you can imagine why the place might be a favorite of mine, albeit in a neighborhood I’m less likely to be hanging around in.

I actually drove past Strangelove earlier this week during a woefully expensive yellow cab ride (learn from my mistakes, people), and was suddenly struck by something.

Back in 2012, I’d come across a photograph of the legendary Johnny Thunders, the former guitarist of the New York Dolls and The Heartbreakers, (whose birthday it was yesterday), stepping off of a stoop on a midtown street (although the original source material wrongly identified that street as St. Marks Place). After my initial post, my comrade Bob Egan of PopSpots weighed in with usual authoritative aplomb and extensive photo documentation to support his declaration that the building Thunders was depicted exiting was 229 East 53rd Street. See that post here.

In 2012, 229 East 53rd Street was a wine bar called Cello. Here in 2024, however, Cello has since moved across the street, and 229 East 53rd Street is now … wait for it … Strangelove.

If they don’t already, I’m pretty sure the folks at Strangelove would love to know that. Here’s that picture now:

Meanwhile....

About Last Saturday

Just because someone took a shot at him, that doesn’t absolve him of his crimes, undo his previous actions or change the fact that he wants to completely upend our democracy. He’s still a deeply horrible, avaricious scumbag.

It’s unfortunate that someone tried to put a bullet in him (let alone someone who was a registered Republican with a legally purchased firearm), but that doesn’t make him a goddamn saint.

Flaming Pablum is 19

Today marks the 19th year of Flaming Pablum. If you told me back in the comparatively carefree summer of 2005 that I’d still be doing this 19 years later, I invariably would have laughed in your face. But, here we are.

Here's a shot of me taken the same week I started this blog...

Today, the little girl in the stroller is a 20-year-old college student. I no longer have that Richard Hell t-shirt (and I miss it), and I really can't wear Chuck Taylors with any regularity anymore (avascular necrosis never goes away, evidently), but that same expression of incredulous cluelessness persists. 

Anyway, ... thanks for continuing to read this stuff.