Flaming Pablum

Fragments of New York'a Punky Past: Exhuming The Testors

In much the same way I described their peers in the Tuff Darts, The Testors were yet another band from the inaugural class of CBGB who — for whatever reason — failed to vault themselves out of anonymity and into the history books in the same manner as compatriots bands like The Cramps, The Dead Boys and their more celebrated ilk.

Why that is remains the case something of a mystery, as the Testors — led by vocalist/guitarist Sonny Vincent — pretty much checked all the right boxes. Boasting a sharp look and a taut, edgy sound, the band was a regular fixture at both Max’s Kansas City and CBGB when both venues would have been in full punky bloom. Regardless, despite regularly performing around town and even cutting their own vinyl, the Testors pulled the plug, in 1981, after seven years. Sonny Vincent went onto other things, and the Testors even fleetingly reunited in 2011 for a gig at the Delancey in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, but they never really got their due, to my mind. In 2024, theirs is a name seemingly shared only by pedantic purists, record collectors and greying punk veterans.

Be that as it may, my excellent comrade Jeremiah Moss (he of Vanishing New York fame and now a rightfully celebrated author) made what I’d consider an incredible discovery. Lifted respectfully from his Instagram page, here’s JW’s preamble…

Sometimes, the past is revealed behind a demolished facade. A gorgeous find, as I came across these vintage 1970s posters stuck to a pair of old doors at NYU. One is for the Testors (a 70s punk band formed by @sonnyvincent77) at Max’s Kansas City (!)…

Check out Jeremiah’s pics below.

I dream of happening upon stuff like this, so hats off to Jeremiah, once again. It should be noted that this isn’t the first time he’s uncovered something like this.

In any case, you can see the full original flyer in the clip below, as well as a slew of other images from the Testors’ brief tenure.

Crank it up.

Leaving So Soon, 2024?

It's hard to fathom that we're here, already, but the end of 2024 is nigh. What lies ahead might look pretty grim, but before we delve into all that, I thought I'd take a final look back at the last 12 months and dust off this old thing. Here we go...

WHAT DID YOU DO IN 2024 THAT YOU’D NEVER DONE BEFORE?
I appeared in a documentary about record collecting and record-store culture produced and directed by the niece of a great friend of mine. You can watch it here.

DID YOU KEEP YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS, AND WILL YOU MAKE MORE FOR 2025?
I don’t believe I made any, thus did not keep any, but this year, I’m sworn to complete Dry January. Watch this space.

DID ANYONE CLOSE TO YOU GIVE BIRTH?
Not that I recall, no.

DID ANYONE CLOSE TO YOU DIE?
The mother of a friend of mine passed away, not too long back.

WHAT COUNTRIES DID YOU VISIT?
France, Scotland, and Ireland.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE IN 2025 THAT YOU LACKED IN 2024?
Greater will-power.

WHAT DATE FROM 2024 WILL REMAIN ETCHED UPON YOUR MEMORY?
Well, let’s face it, Election Day was a swift kick in the groin that most folks aren’t going to forget any time soon.

WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST ACHIEVEMENT OF THE YEAR?
Staying tenuously sane, married, and somewhat gainfully employed.

WHAT WAS YOUR BIGGEST FAILURE?
Again, I feel I am personally undisciplined and am still a slave to bad habits. I am endeavoring to rectify that.

DID YOU SUFFER ILLNESS OR INJURY?
I continue to grapple with foot issues. Adopting Hokas has certainly helped, but I’m still experiencing regular numbness, which is pronouncedly disconcerting.

WHAT WAS THE BEST THING YOU BOUGHT?
Ummm… probably that pair of wide-toe Bondi 8 Hokas. They don’t look especially stylish (to me), but they’ve made walking considerably less uncomfortable.

WHOSE BEHAVIOR MERITED CELEBRATION?
My children continue to thrive at their respective schools. I could not be prouder.

WHOSE BEHAVIOR MADE YOU APPALLED AND DEPRESSED?
The 76.9 million who put Trump back in office.

WHAT DID YOU GET REALLY, REALLY EXCITED ABOUT?
In a bad way, the election.

WHERE DID MOST OF YOUR MONEY GO?
This year, probably airfare.

WHAT SONG WILL ALWAYS REMIND YOU OF 2024?
Probably “The Silence That Remains” by The Horrors.

COMPARED TO THIS TIME LAST YEAR, ARE YOU HAPPIER OR SADDER?
Now that we’re empty nesters, I’d say I’m melancholier than I normally am, but I’m sure I’ll adjust to it, in time.

THINNER OR FATTER?
Undoubtedly fatter.

RICHER OR POORER?
Our building’s debilitating assessment came to an end, so I’m doing slightly better than I was at this time, last year.

WHAT DO YOU WISH YOU’D DONE MORE OF?
Being of more attentive, loving assistance to my tirelessly fantastic wife.

WHAT DO YOU WISH YOU’D DONE LESS OF?
Eating, drinking, and spending irresponsibly.

HOW DID YOU SPEND CHRISTMAS?
Hasn’t happened yet, but I expect it will be Christmas Eve at home with the kids, then we head off to my Mom’s place in Quogue for two days. Then we come back and board a train to Pennsylvania to my sister-in-law’s place for another couple of days.

WHO DID YOU SPEND THE MOST TIME ON THE PHONE WITH?
I’ve absolutely no clue.

DID YOU FALL IN LOVE IN 2024?
Only fleetingly with the concept of a brighter tomorrow without a certain public figure impeding everyone’s lives and ruining everything in sight, but unfortunately that individual was re-elected.

HOW MANY ONE-NIGHT STANDS IN THE LAST YEAR?
I’ve been very happily married since 2001, thanks.

WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TV PROGRAM?
“Slow Horses” continues to be the best goddamn thing on television since the criminally cancelled “Mindhunter.” I was also pleasantly surprised by “Bad Monkey.”

DO YOU HATE ANYONE NOW THAT YOU DIDN’T HATE AT THIS TIME LAST YEAR?
No one new, no.

WHAT WAS THE BEST BOOK YOU READ?
I greatly enjoyed Griffin Dunne’s family memoir, “The Friday Afternoon Club.”

WHAT WAS YOUR GREATEST MUSICAL DISCOVERY?
While most of my favorite music of this year was made by comparatively established names like Gavin Friday, The Horrors, The Cure and Light of Eternity (they’re a new band, but comprised of Big Paul Ferguson of my beloved Killing Joke, Fred Schreck of the Ancients and Pauly Williams of Chaos 8), I did indeed “discover” some brand new bands (or new to me, at least) like Lawns, SPRINTS and the excellently named We Hate You Please Die.

WHAT DID YOU WANT AND GET?
In the wake of the election, I became singularly preoccupied with being able to see my kids and was able to do that when my wife and I flew over at Thanksgiving to spend several days with them at their respective schools.

WHAT DID YOU WANT AND NOT GET?
A markedly different election outcome.

WHAT WERE YOUR FAVORITE FILMS OF THIS YEAR?
If you had suggested that, given the subject matter, I would have been half as engrossed as I was with “Conclave,” I’d have scoffed. Beyond that, I can’t say I watched that many.

WHAT DID YOU DO ON YOUR BIRTHDAY AND HOW OLD WERE YOU?
My wife insisted on us having a few friends over for my birthday, which was nice. I turned 57.

WHAT’S ONE THING THAT WOULD HAVE MADE YOUR YEAR IMMEASURABLY MORE SATISFYING?
Trump’s loss and imprisonment.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONAL FASHION CONCEPT IN 2024?
Non-existent.

WHAT KEPT YOU SANE?
The wife and kids.

WHAT CELEBRITY/PUBLIC FIGURE DID YOU FANCY MOST?
I always find this question kind of inappropriate, but the wife and I both concur that CNN’s Abby Philip is quite striking.

WHAT POLITIAL ISSUE STIRRED YOU THE MOST?
Just one? How about the fact that everything across the board is now fucked up beyond repair, and the proposed clown car of Dick Tracy villains vying for cabinet positions doesn’t bode at all well for any semblance of a manageable future devoid of chaos and conflict. But hey, you know best, America.

WHO DID YOU MISS?
Wayne Kramer, Steve Albini, Pat Collier and James Chance.

WHO WAS THE BEST NEW PERSON YOU MET?
I met our daughter’s boyfriend for the first time. He seems like quite a nice kid, much to my relief.

TELL US A VALUABLE LIFE LESSON YOU LEARNED IN 2024?
H.L. Mencken was right. No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

SONG LYRIC THAT SUMS UP 2024.
Meek & obedient shall follow the leader down well-trodden corridors into the valley of steel – Pink Floyd

Reheated Pablum: Updates on Some Past Posts

I thought I’d take a moment to aggregate some updates regarding stuff I’ve written about here before. Here we go…

Some of you might remember this post from 2023, which documented the quiet closing of Miyabi, the frankly not-that-amazing Japanese restaurant that moved into Bleecker Bob’s former space at 118 West Third Street following the slow demise of that storied record shop in 2013. Well, after another period of dormancy – during which time the neighboring business to the west morphed from a dubious foot-rub/happy-ending joint into a frozen yogurt purveyor – it seems 118 is getting ready for a new tenant … one that involves, evidently, a “hibachi lab.” See the interior above.

Back in 2013, meanwhile, I wrote an entry about See/Hear, the furtive hive of zine culture, music-geek literature and underground comics that formerly held count in a basement-level space on East 7th Street. As you can see from the comments on that post, the mere invocation of the shop touched a nerve, for a lot of people. Well, for those folks, I’d like to highlight a new, comparatively exhaustive oral history that was just posted on Animal about the place that really goes into its back-history. Check that out here.

Lastly, some of you might remember a series of posts from 2017 wherein I became preoccupied with identifying a certain Manhattan corner upon which the fabled Misfits had once posed for a series of photos that had become relatively iconic (well, for Misfits fans, at least).

As detailed in those posts, I stalked the streets of Lower Manhattan trying to pinpoint the exact spot. At the same time, I reached out to the photographer, one Roxanne Lowit, to see if she could provide the answer, or at least some clues. Her assistant got back to me with some vague intel about where the location might be, and – in turn – I asked if I might reproduce some her photos for my posts. Unfortunately, the response was an emphatic NO, I could not. I got around that by linking to other sites who’d posted them, including photos of Lowit’s images on various bootleg singles and via some illustrations by my daughter, who was about 12 years old at the time. Here’s one of those illustrations now. This is Charlotte's interpretation of the print-out I'm holding in the shot above. 

Initially, I was surprised that Lowit – who’d gone on to do many, many other higher profile projects and is now a celebrated fashion photographer -- should have given that much of a damn that some rinkydink little blog like mine wanted to host her pics, but hey, I do understand. That’s her goddamn work. Those images are no one else’s. Respect is due.

Cut to 2024, and someone has evidently convinced Lowit to revisit her evening in the company of Jerry Only, Glen Danzig, Bobby Steele and Joey Image by way of a new photo book called, “We Walk the Streets at Night.” Documenting the full shoot wherein Lowit led the Lodi, New Jersey quartet around the then desolate streets of the West Village (the corner in question, incidentally, was West 11th at Washington Street), the book is frustratingly spare on details (not even a preamble from the photographer). Moreover, the images themselves are presented in their original form as blown-up slides. It’s a nice effect, I suppose, but I would have liked to see some of the pictures in a larger format – and with a bit of anecdotal augmentation, although if you’re curious as to the doings of the Misfits during that era, I would recommend the excellent book,“This Music Leaves Stains” by James Green Jr.

If you’re curious about “We Walk the Streets at Night,” meanwhile, you can pick a copy up at Generation Records on Thompson Street. Tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.

Tensing Up with the Jim Carroll Band

Cruelly, even in proper punk rock circles, the Jim Carroll Band seem relegated to “one-hit-wonder” status. And while, yes, that one “hit” – the ecstatic “People Who Died” – is a stone-cold classic by every concievble standard (unless you talk to my brother-in-law), it’s true that the JCB never really meaningfully bothered “the charts” (it made it to No. 103 on Billboard’s “Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart … for whatever that’s worth) a second time. The public can be fickle.

Of course, music was really never more than a dalliance for Jim Carroll, whose primary passion was as a writer and a poet, having penned “The Basketball Diaries,” a gripping memoir about growing up in New York City amidst drugs and prostitution, when he was still in his teens. I believe he was lured into rock’n’roll via his friendship with folks like Patti Smith, Keith Richards and the Max’s Kansas City crew, but I’m ultimately just projecting. He always seemed more comfortable behind the pen than the mic stand.

Regardless, Carroll formed a band, signed with Atlantic Records and released three LPs of music, the first being Catholic Boy in 1980, which featured the classic “People Who Died” as well as equally incendiary (if lesser celebrated) songs like “Three Sisters,” “It’s Too Late” and the title track. As a taste of the era, Catholic Boy is required reading, so to speak.

The JCB’s other two records, meanwhile, seem to be rarely discussed. 1982’s Dry Dreams (and how’s that for a title?) didn’t produce any comparably notable numbers -- although I still quite dig “Lorraine.” Those expecting another grim novelty number (although “People Who Died” was so much more than that) didn’t get it.

When I Write Your Name followed in 1983, the world seemed to have moved on. Even the inclusion of a cover of “Sweet Jane” by the Velvet Underground failed to move the needle (although Lenny Kaye and Lou Reed made a nice cameos in the video for same). In the wake of that record, while Jim Caroll would continue to write and even record, his days fronting a band were over.

I never got to see the Jim Carroll Band perform, but I did go to a couple of readings by the great man before he sadly passed away in 2009. “People Who Died” continues to inspire, finding placment in countless films, and getting covered by everyone from my friend’s band The Cryer Brothers to the Hollywood Vampires (the less said about that, the better). Suffice to say, you’re best off sticking with the original.

As mentioned in some earlier, ancient post, I first heard the Jim Carroll Band back in grade school via the preternaturally hippper taste of my classmate Zach. I dutifully ran out and bought myself a copy of Catholic Boy, and the whole album swiftly becme a favorite. That said, it was years before I bothered to snap up Dry Dreams and I Write Your Name to get the whole picture.

More recently, however, a lost studio track of the band’s surfaced. As recounted here, the studio rendition of “Tension” was prized out of the closet of some dude named Earl McGrath, and it’s genuinely revelatory slice of the Jim Carroll Band at the peak of their powers. I believe the track was later re-arranged/re-written as the track “Voices” that appeared on the final LP, I Write Your Name, but I am uncertain of the chronology.

You can here the studio versioh of “Tension” here, but some time ago, a former founding member of the Jim Carroll Band put up this live clip from their final ever appearnace. This is what bassist Steve Linsley said about this…

I am a founding member & the bass player. This is The Jim Carroll Band, playing the last gig, ever. This is the original band, with founding members. Brian Linsley, Terrell Winn, Wayne Woods, Stevie Linsley, and Jim Carroll. This final gig followed the final tour of what was the second incarnation of the Jim Carroll Band with Stevie and Wayne still on bass and drums and Lenny Kaye and Paul Sanchez on Guitars. Anyone else claiming to be a Jim Carroll Band member is fucking looking to open a can of asswhoop!

Asswhoop!!!

Anyway, here’s the clip in question. Also check out Legs McNeil’s epic-length interview with Jim from his days interviewing for “Please Kill Me.”

"Great Bars of New York City"

While I do not know them personally, James & Karla Murray are renowned in the amorphous community of NYC-centric bloggers, vloggers, photographers, nostalgists and digital storytellers of which I am also a member. Over the 19 (jeezus!) years I’ve been “keeping” this silly blog, I’ve doubtlessly mentioned their name, evangelized their work and re-purposed their striking images countless times.

James & Karla's lovingly composed photographs of New York City corner shops, bistros, pizzerias, record stores, taverns and mom’n’pop concerns of all stripes have become a crucial part of the documentation of our ever-(d)evolving city, and their magisterial books like “Store Front: The Disappearing Face of New York,” “New York Nights,” and “Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC” make any coffee table they are placed on that much goddamn cooler. I’ve frequently spied them out and about — Karla’s signature shock of punky, bleach-blonde hair is hard to miss. On the occasions in which I’ve accosted them (“hey, it’s James & Karla!”), they seem to be in a constant state of buoyant, infectious joy. They clearly live their entwined lives like one long, curious adventure, and are insatiable in their quest to see, go, do, experience, capture and create. I find them quite inspiring, in that way. 

Imagine my own joy, then, when I was contacted out of the proverbial blue by a publicist representing a new project for Prestel Publishing, that being the forthcoming book by James & Karla titled “Great Bars of New York City.” I relayed an enthusiastic “yes” to the publicist before I’d even finished reading the pitch.

Beyond my tireless affinity for waxing rhapsodic about the New York City of my growingly distant youth and/or my favorite willfully obnoxious, listener-hostile music, I am somewhat sheepishly notorious for my penchant for putting away many a pint of beer, and I quite relish doing so in any number of establishments — from the endearingly seedy to the stuffily stately — across the five boroughs (yes, dear readers, I have consumed beers on Staten Island). “Great Bars of New York City” speaks directly to that ….uhh…. unquenchable thirst with 239 pages of James & Karla’s brilliant photographs, augmented with text by food & culture scribe, Dan Q. Dao. The pictures are crisp, colorful and packed with nuanced detail, matched by Dao’s meticulous historical research and illustrative prose. It’s entirely splendid. If you harbor any of the same predilections as myself, you will not be able to put this book down, as I haven’t.

“Great Bars of New York City” is available on September 10th. Click here for more information. Also, don’t sleep on James & Karla’s Instagram page.

What's Your Hurry, Now? The End of Summer Survey for 2024

Yes, I know – technically, the summer has another whole month left to it (the official end of summer is September 22, I am told), but most folks sort of chalk up Memorial Day Weekend as the last gasp. Personally speaking, as noted in the previous post, now that my daughter has left and we’re leaving in about ten days to drop Oliver off for his first year of college, Summer 2024 certainly feels over and done with. As such, I guess it’s time to dust this off. Here we go…

Defining Moment of Summer 2024

This is going to sound super boring, but I can’t really say that there was one. I’d suggest it was either my son’s graduation from high school, signaling the next big step for him or possibly meeting my daughter’s new(ish) boyfriend from London (he turned out to be a nice kid). That’s about it, really.

Best Purchase of Summer 2024

Time for another super boring answer, but I bought a Mag Charger for my iPhone at ye olde Apple Store, and it’s been a complete delight. On a slightly less practical level, I bought myself a new coffee mug I’m quite fond of.

Best Meal of Summer 2024

On the evening of July 13, the same day that someone took a shot at Trump, the wife and I were out at my mom’s place on Long Island and repaired to nearby Baby Moon Pizza in Westhampton for a late-night meal (where Marky Ramone is a regular). We sat at the bar – under a widescreen television endlessly repeating the news of the day – and ate some truly excellent pizza … while politely refraining from any audible commentary about the big story.

Best Concert of Summer 2024

I don’t know if mid-May counts as the summer (I’m pretty sure it doesn’t), but the last show I saw was the mighty Part Chimp at Bowery Electric. They put on an endearingly loud and slovenly performance, and I was very pleased to run into various similarly inclined friends of mine also in attendance.

Best Book You Read During Summer 2024

I didn’t plow through as many books, this summer, as I normally do, but I very much enjoyed Robyn Hitchcock’s memoir, “1967: How I Got There & Why I Never Left,” and I’m currently three-quarters of the way through Griffin Dunne’s “The Friday Afternoon Club.” I also re-read Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain’s magisterial “Please Kill Me” over the course of a weekend, … just because.

Best Movie of Summer 2023

Not a big movie summer, for me, but if I had to pick one, I’d suggest that I quite enjoyed finally seeing “Have You Got It Yet?,” the documentary about Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, and his slow descent into oblivion.

Best Gift You Received of Summer 2024

For Father’s Day, my wife put a recent New Yorker cover in a frame for me that features an iconic neighborhood fixture.

Biggest Loss of Summer 2024

The passing of musical iconoclasts like James Chance, Pat Collier and Steve Albini knocked the wind out of my sails, especially Albini. I was crestfallen to learn of the incredibly myopic dissolution of the MTV News archives, and I was depressed and disappointed (but not surprised) to learn just recently that St. Vitus in Brooklyn is shuttered for good.

Song That Sums Up the Summer of Summer 2024

I don’t have a grand explanation for either of these, but it’s either “Adrenaline” by the excellently named French trio, We Hate You Please Die, or possibly “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend,” by John Cale. I mostly slept on Cale’s solo career after he was ousted from the Velvet Underground, and lemme tell ya – that was a big mistake. Cale provided the lion’s share of the sneery abrasion and overall weirdness to the Velvets, and they were absolutely never the same without him. He went onto produce fucking crucial records by The Stooges, The Modern Lovers, Nico and Patti Smith, among many others. I’ve only started exploring his sprawling solo catalog, and there is some real gold therein. A friend of mine posted the clip below on Facebook, earlier this summer and it blew me away. Flanked by storied Womble/erstwhile Sex Pistol producer/guitarist Chris Spedding, Cale – dressed like a mid-`70s tennis pro – delivers an emphatic rendition of the title track to his 1974 album that starts off reasonably and slowly becomes droolingly unhinged. Wait for it.

Happiest Memory of Summer 2024

Beyond just spending loads of time with my excellent little family (it’s becoming rarer for us all to be together for very long), I got to meet and chat with R.E.M. at the Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony back in June. That was fun. I was also super pleased to appear in Catherine Araimo’s award-winning “B Sides” documentary.

Saddest Memory of Summer 2024

It hasn’t happened just yet, but I’m expecting to be quite verklempt when we have to say goodbye to Oliver in two weeks.

Scariest Moment of Summer 2024

For a while — not that we’re out of the woods just yet — it was seeming like a fucking given that Trump would be our 47th President. It remains to be seen, but it’s no longer in cement, I’d suggest.

Word That Best Describes of Summer 2024

Stealthy.

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. 

 

 

Release The Brats

It wasn’t something I was going to address here, but since Meg and Jessica of Desperately Seeking the `80s are devoting two episodes to it, I thought I might as well weigh in, as well.

The topic, of course, is “Brats,” the new(ish) documentary by Andrew McCarthy that seemingly seeks to reconcile the revered actor/author/director’s roiling misgivings about being branded, during his `80s heyday, a member of the celebrated “Hollywood Brat Pack,” a term somewhat unimaginatively coined by New York Magazine journalist David Blum. As floridly expressed throughout the film, McCarthy feels that the tenacious tag ultimately undermined his credibility as an actor, painted him (and his amorphous cabal of famous peers) as undeserving upstarts and torpedoed the promise of a longer, more expansive career. In this documentary, he strives to find empathy among his contemporaries and … in a thinly veiled way … exact a bit of revenge on Blum.

As you may have gleaned from the tone of that description, I didn’t really think too much of “Brats.” Frankly, I found it insufferably self-indulgent and lazy. The burdensome umbrage that McCarthy has been practically fondling since :::gasp, shock, horror::: being tarred a “brat” has practically rendered him incapable of entertaining any other possible perspectives on the matter.

As he flailingly reaches out to peers like Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, he somewhat laboriously tries to goad them into validating his persecution complex, but none of them really take the bait. The whole segment with Emilio evokes an uncomfortable “let’s wrap this up” vibe. Similarly, Sheedy, Lowe and Moore politely indulge McCarthy, but each fellow Brat Packer seems to stop short of corroborating his take on the whole thing. I also think each other those actors, unlike McCarthy, is acutely aware of the uncomfortable dichotomy of lamenting perceived slights and vocational ruin while sitting at the poolside bar of a palatial home. Kind of a bad look, that.

But McCarthy presses on. Unable to land choice targets like Molly Ringwald and the elusive Judd Nelson (probably the Brat Pack alumnus most likely to resonate with McCarthy’s premise), the director goes after Blum, showing up at the scribe’s home to put him on the spot for birthing the albatross that’s hung from McCarthy’s neck for the last forty years. This whole scene seems a bit stiltedly performative – culminating with a not-especially-convincing hug – and comes across like an unsuccessful ambush. Suffice to say … spoiler alert, by the way… Blum doesn’t really apologize.

By the end of the piece, while McCarthy sort of dresses up proceedings to suggest that he’s resolved a few issues, one doesn’t really come away with any grand revelation. He fields a final phone call allegedly from Judd Nelson, but the viewer gets no insight into what is imparted. The credits roll.

So yeah, I kinda wanted my hour and 32 minutes back, after that.

Let’s clear up a few things, shall we? Firstly, McCarthy should thank his lucky goddamn stars to have been fortunate enough to bask in the serendipity of that particular moment of pop culture, and I’m sure tens of thousands of actors of the same generation would have killed to have accomplished as much. He’s a veritable household name that, comparatively speaking, has done pretty well for himself. Not to sound callous, but, fuckin’ get over it, Andrew!

Secondly, McCarthy seems to weather the term “brat” as a pejorative that cuts his very soul, diminishing his talent and mocking his youth, when – let’s face it – it was simply a lazy and not especially clever allusion to the Rat Pack ala Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. In fact, beyond the fact that “brat” rhymes with “rat,” the two respective “packs” don’t really have that much in common. It was a lucky play on words by Blum that simply stuck, not some sort of grand, Machiavellian scheme to vanquish anyone’s career. Again … do please get over it.

Two voices you don’t hear from in “Brats” include the aforementioned Molly Ringwald and, to my mind, a much more prominent member of the Brat Pack, that being Anthony Michael Hall. Both of these actors have appeared on podcasts -- specifically Marc Maron’s WTF podcast and Dana Carvey & David Spade's Fly on the Wall --  in recent weeks, and harbor significantly different feelings about the whole experience. Hear those respective episodes here and here.

As for “Brats”? I wouldn’t call it essential in the slightest.

Holiday in Hell's Kitchen

In about 1997, one of my best friends, Rob D. – then still a freshly-minted husband to my friend Joanne (I unwittingly introduced them, some years prior), decided that he and his new bride were swiftly outgrowing the five-story walk-up in the East Village they’d been renting. Technically, Rob had moved into Joanne’s apartment on East 9th Street after hopscotching around between Manhattan and his original home turf in Pleasantville (where, we were fond of pointing out, Ace Frehley had allegedly lived). Prior to all this, Joanne had lived in an apartment on East 4th Street that, we learned well after the fact, had also played host, at an earlier point, to unlikely neighbors Madonna and Peter Missing of Missing Foundation.

Regardless, they needed more space, so Rob & Joanne said goodbye to the East Village and decamped to Hell’s Kitchen, right off the “The Deuce” at 303 West 42nd Street, just a few steps to the west of 8th Avenue. The building’s biggest claim to … er … fame was that it played host to the notorious Show World Center, an age-old “sex emporium” from the neighborhood’s fabled bad old days.

Circa `97, while the surrounding area was sharply in the throes of some seriously intense gentrification (largely courtesy of the authoritarian reign of Mayor Giuliani), I believe Show World was still conducting its usual business, which largely consisted of live-sex shows (I shouldn’t have to explain to you what this entails) and floors lined with these strange adjoining booths (see pic below, courtesy of Jeremiah Moss' Vanishing NY).

“Dancers” – for want of a better term – would wait outside of these closet-sized booths, and when a patron expressed an interest, they would each enter their respective halves (kind of like confessionals in a church). The patron would summarily enter tokens he’d have procured upon entry to the premises into a slot, and a hatch would ascend like a curtain between the two halves of the booth, revealing the “dancer” on the other side of a doubtlessly smeary windowpane. To keep the hatch from descending and obscuring full view of whatever the “dancer” might be doing, the patron would have to keep pumping tokens into the slot. Eventually, he’d either run out of tokens … or steam, so to speak, … and the hatch would slam shut. End of show.

Here's a great shot of the 8th Avenue entrance, as captured by Gregoire Alessandrini.

While all that was going on, meanwhile, Rob and Joanne were setting up their new home in a comparatively spacious and bright one-bedroom several flights above. Right off the living room/open-kitchen area, there was a wide fire-escape, where we’d often hang out for hours, drinking beers and talking nonsense. If you climbed those fire escape stairs, you were treated to an amazing roof-top with a full, birds-eye view of the entirety of the surrounding Hell’s Kitchen. That part of it was legitimately magickal.

Newly enamored of Hell’s Kitchen, I picked up a copy of “The Westies” by T.J. English, an exhaustive -- but truly excellent -- history of Hell’s Kitchen’s era under the reign of the titular Irish mob, led by colorful figures like Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Spillane and their bloodthirsty cohort. That book loosely served as the inspiration for the similarly inclined 1990 film “State of Grace,” starring Sean Penn, Gary Oldman and Ed Harris. Like a pair of green-gilled dilettantes, Rob and I started exploring many of the neighborhood’s less salubrious drinking establishments like Mr. Biggs (formerly owned by mobster Jimmy Coonan as the 596 Bar, where Coonan had rival mobster and loan shark Carles “Ruby” Stein murdered and beheaded), The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia Bar, The Bellvue Bar, Druids, Rudy’s, The Holland Bar and several others, grimly romanced by the neighborhood’s already swiftly eroding character.

As it happened, however, Rob & Joanne’s stay in their adopted Hell’s Kitchen ended up being pretty short. After only about a year and a half, they decamped to City Island in the Bronx (right across the water from haunted Hart Island) and then, very shortly after that, to New London, CT, the former stomping grounds of Rob’s literary hero, Eugene O’Neill. In the grand scheme of things, Rob & Joanne had only been in Hell’s Kitchen for barely an instant, but the changes to that neighborhood (from a grimy sleaze Mecca in a lawless badlands into a Disneyfied tourist trap) during their brief tenure were pronounced.

Once R&J had split, my journeys into the heart of Hell’s Kitchen decreased in frequency until I took a job – briefly, as it would turn out – at MTV News Online in neighboring Times Square in the mid-to-late 2000’s. Now, almost two decades later, I barely recognize Hell’s Kitchen when I’m back in it. The very name itself – Hell’s Kitchen – has come under fire, in more recent years, from real estate developers trying to re-christen the neighborhood in an arguably more inviting/less inflammatory manner.

Since those days in the `90s, most of the bars I cited have vanished, notably The Savoy, McHale’s, Siberia, The Bellevue Bar and Druids. I believe the Holland Bar might also have closed but am not sure. Rudy’s and Mr. Biggs are still there, last I checked. In the summer of 1998, just prior to meeting the lady who I’d later marry, I had a truly surreal and disastrously Kafka-esque blind date that culminated in Mr. Biggs. Suffice to say, that ridiculous experience left me disinclined to ever want to return to that undoubtedly cursed space (even though, today, it’s just another douchy sports bar). Bad vibes, to say the least.

But, again, this is just my experience. For a more nuanced, detailed and authoritative take on Hell’s Kitchen, check out this documentary below…

Whoops,That's Not Jim

Well, the answer to this one came quickly for master-sleuth Bob Egan of PopSpotsNYC. 

He found it in the very book I'd been looking for but had given away to Goodwill -- "High on Rebellion."

I don't know who this is, ... but it ain't Jim Carroll.