Flaming Pablum

Hipster Hiraeth

Weirdly or perhaps fittingly, Brooklyn started becoming a “hip” thing right as I was exiting that whole realm.

After years of being a beery and sneery Manhattan rock pig, prone to darkening the doors of any number of seedy bars and irresponsibly loud live-music venues in the East Village and Lower East Side, I found myself suddenly married and siring children just as things were kicking off on the other side of the East River.

Prior to all that, I’d certainly been to Williamsburg — where friends in pre-hipster bands like EBN and Cop Shoot Cop had decamped in the name of affordability — but it seemed more like Belfast during the Troubles than the future site of any burgeoning, Pabst Blue Ribbon-fueled subculture. By the time the Mrs. and I had moved from East 12th to East 9th and were picking out baby gear, the great sea change of relevance was well underway, and apart from very occasional sorties across the river to check out the new scene, I was very much not a part of it.

If my previous missives poo-poohing Lizzie Goodman’s sprawling “Meet Me In the Bathroom” didn’t already amplify same, I was largely okay with all that. I’d had my time and my era, and while I didn’t think quite as much of the new bands and the new scene — let alone their somewhat cloying cultural touchstones and sartorial/tonsorial trappings — there was undeniably some amazing music that was spawned from it all. But while it was happening, I really wasn’t there. I was more likely to be found rocking one toddler or another to sleep or blearily wandering the aisles of Buy Buy Baby in a slumber-deprived stupor quite unlike the ones I’d cultivated at Max Fish, The Pyramid or CBGB just scant years prior.

Here in the apocalyptic epoch-eclipse of 2020, meanwhile, Hipster Brooklyn has summarily fallen prey to a neck-snappingly steep level of gentrification, albeit in a seemingly more accelerated manner than what happened here in Manhattan, although that may just be my biased projection. And much as with Jesse Malin’s bars and clubs still strategically positioned around the East Village, while some holdout venues and ventures remain peppered around Williamsburg and Greenpoint, the hipsters are basically all gone.

In turn, that has led to the requisite advent of nostalgia, a word I am certainly no stranger to. And while it seems like only weeks ago to oldsters like myself that McCarren Pool was a cool concert venue or that the first Grizzly Bear album came out, there is now a groundswell of longing by former participants for the bona fide brand of Brooklyn cool that once thrived over there. I call it …. Hipster Hiraeth.

Case in point is this weepy article that came out in Inside Hook yesterday, Dubbed “Remembering the Early-Aughts Hipster Bars That Built Williamsburg As We Know it,” it’s a slavishly detailed run-down of since-vanished concerns that allegedly defined the core of Hipster Brooklyn, and I cannot say I knowingly entered into any of them apart from having a fleeting couple of beers at Enid’s with erstwhile Killing Joke drummer Big Paul Ferguson back in 2004. Beyond that desperate bit of name-dropping, I cannot begin to add anything to this article as it pertains to a world and an era I just wasn’t privy to. Why is that? Because I’m old.

While it’s certainly weird to find oneself steeped in nostalgia, a quandary I frequently weep about here, it’s even weirder to watch younger individuals start to come to grips with it. As someone smart, famous and sadly dead once sagely sang, hey look out, you rock’n’rollers — pretty soon now, you’re gonna get older.

In any case, below is a fleeting snippet of the Hipster Brooklyn I remember best….

Sing This Commendation To Me

Just to close the loop on this, after I reviewed his awesome book, author Trevor Ristow nicely "blurbed" my review on the back of the second printing of "Waiting For Another War," which I got in the mail today. Huzzah!

Get your copy here.

This, meanwhile, is the Sisters of Mercy...

You've Got To Be Kid A'ing Me

As noted as recently as this past June, there’s a certain entry I posted back in the balmy, comparatively carefree days of 2006 that has gone onto become the single-most clicked post in this blog’s fifteen plus years of existence, that being my windy unpacking of Chuck Klosterman’s frivolous theory that Radiohead’s Kid A predicted the events of September 11, 2001. Chuck wasn’t entirely serious when he wrote it. I wasn’t entirely serious when I recapped it. But the clicks flock to that entry like the swallows used to flock to Capistrano. I guess it doesn’t hurt that when I type in “Kid A,” “Klosterman” and “9/11” in Google, that entry is the first that seems to pop up. Results will vary, of course.

As I mentioned back on that June post (and in 2016 and in 2010), that entry has evidently become a de-facto starting point for folks wishing to discuss the matter, usually on message boards and Radiohead fan sites, but also on otherwise quasi-reputable websites like Cracked and Noisey. Last week, though, I noticed a sudden, new spike in traffic on my blog and – sure enough – it was that post, newly picked up by Pitchfork. Curiosity piqued, I went over to check it out.

In this instance, my shoddily written recap and rumination on Klosterman’s original essay were fleetingly alluded to in a review of a new book by one Steven Hyden titled “This Isn’t Happening: Radiohead’s Kid A And The Beginning of The 21st Century.” Fittingly enough, we are but mere days away from the twenty-year anniversary of the release of Kid A, which landed on unsuspecting listeners on October 2, 2000. Seems like yesterday.

The excerpted passage from Hyden’s book in the Pitchfork piece prompted me to go pick up a copy – less intrigued about the actual subject matter than by the fleeting chance that maybe – just maybe -- my stupid blog post would get a mention and/or plug in the text. I’ve gotten lucky like that in the past – earning invocations in Joe Gross’ book about Fugazi, Bryan Waterman’s book about Marquee Moon, Eric Wendell’s “Patti Smith: America’s Punk Rock Rhapsodist” (asserting a frankly misinformed position I’ve since recanted) and on the back cover of Trevor Ristow’s “Waiting For Another War.”

Well, no such luck, this time. Either Hyden bypassed my entry and went right to Klosterman (who gets a single invocation on page 134), or learned about it without any help from me. Oh well. I'm still looking forward to reading the book.

In terms of the premise of my original post and Chuck Klosterman's theory, however, it seems some inventive individual took the time to make ... the video in the link below. Please note, if you are triggered, disturbed or offended by graphic depictions of the events of September 11, 2001 ... which, even this many years after the fact, is entirely understandable ... I strongly advise you against watching.

The Pointless End of Summer 2020 Survey

I know I recently suggested I wasn't going to do one of these, as I didn't really feel it warranted discussion. But, at the moment, it's raining like mad out here in Quogue, and I am, in a word, bored. We're here for three more days before it's back again to the city for good and the kids start their hybridized in-person/virtual learning school year. 

If we collectively consider Labor Day to be the very end of the season, technically, we have about another 9 days before Summer 2020 is officially over. That said, as I mentioned not too long back, Summer 2020 felt like it was over — for me, anyway — upon the arrival of Isaias, which seemed to prematurely snuff out the verdant warmth brought on by June and July. Sure, the calendar still says August, but everything currently feels like it’s in a declining slope towards Autumn. Summer seems pretty much over.

Then again, Summer 2020 hasn’t been like any other summer. It almost seemed like an afterthought while we collectively grappled with the pandemic ... and everything it brought with it. With normal summer activities either sharply compromised or just flat-out cancelled, the usual associations of summertime seemed incidental and ultimately non-applicable. We went though the motions, but we kept reminding ourselves that this wasn’t your average summer. Next year — God friggin’ willing — will be different.

But, y’know, as bizarre and unsettled and muted as it may have been, … it was still summer, so I figured why not dust off the End of Summer Survey, last taken in 2019. I've also augmented it with a host of other stupid questions: 

Defining Moment of Summer 2020:
As mentioned way back in March, when the pandemic turned New York City upside down, my wife, kids and I took my mother up on her offer to let us use her house out on the Eastern End of Long Island, which made for a comparatively more expansive place to remote work and remote school, as opposed to our intimate Manhattan apartment. We stayed there through the end of May, until my mom came back from Florida. When she did, we had to clear out, and ended up basically subletting a cottage in normally rented by some friends of ours from North Carolina. While it was about as roomy as the abandoned bus in which they found the body of Christopher McCandless in Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild,” The Lamb Cottage, as it is called, more than met our needs for the summer in between periodic returns to the city.

A lot has happened in the three months we’ve been here, but if I had to slap a “defining moment” on any of it, I would say our initial mastering of a particular dish called Beer Can Chicken, wherein you coat a whole chicken with the rub of your choice, shove a half-consumed can of beer (we used Stella Artois) up its slimy posterior and then precariously perch it standing upright under a closed grill. This is not as simple as it sounds, but the end results were spectacular each time.

Best Purchase of Summer 2020:
I can’t say I did a lot of purchasing this summer, not least because for the most part, most shops were closed. Inspired by a then-impending interview with funk legend Bootsy Collins, I went on a big Parliament kick, which inspired me to buy a t-shirt with the cover art of Mothership Connection on it, which I probably wore more than any other garment, this summer. That’s about it.

Best Book You Read of Summer 2020:
I would say it’s a toss up between Trevor Ristow’s “Waiting For Another War,” which I wrote about here and here, and the memoir of Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz, “Remain in Love.” It's largely a fun, illuminating read, but like so many other rock memoirs, it has a way of poisoning preconceptions about favorite music. While he's obviously a tirelessly nice guy, the sour grapes Frantz feels about David Byrne (and, for that matter, Brian Eno) is unfortunate. I'm not suggesting he's not entitled to feel that way or that any of it is untrue, but there's a dirty laundry aspect to it that's a disservice to the band. I don't think I ever thought of Talking Heads as a perpetually harmonious family, but learning about how frequently weird, callous and inconsiderate Byrne was and how petty and petulant Eno was maybe wasn't something I needed to know. Still, it was an enjoyable read.

Best Movie You Saw During Summer 2020:
Well, obviously, no movie theaters were open this summer, but beyond that — I cannot say I watched too many whole films. I did recently watch “Gimme Danger,” Jim Jarmusch’s documentary about The Stooges, and thought that was pretty amazing.

Best Gift You Received of Summer 2020:
For Father’s Day, my wife gave me some lovely new underwear. That sounds pretty tame, I realize, but they’re genuinely pretty nice.

Biggest Loss of Summer 2020:
Don’t really know where to start with this one. Very mercifully, no one in our family has contracted COVID-19, as yet, although we do know a few folks who had it. There are several local businesses in Manhattan that were forced to close their doors because of the pandemic, and those are all very sad. There’s so much loss going on in the world, at the moment, that it seems petty trying to quantify it all.

Song That Best Sums up Summer 2020:
I can’t say I’ve really latched onto any new music, in the past several months. Sure, I did get the new eponymous long player by Human Impact, which is the supergroup I mentioned (and didn’t go see live) back here that features former members of favorite bands of mine like SWANS, the Unsane and Cop Shoot Cop. As much as I dig that album — its ponderous bleakness fit the world’s circumstances just a little too well. My favorite track from the album is probably “Consequences."

Happiest Memory of Summer 2020:
This will invariably sound like a hokey cliché, but in as much as the pandemic has turned everyone's life upside down, it has afforded us the opportunity -- nay, mandated the requirement -- of spending an inordinate amount of time with our kids. Being that they're both teenagers now, under normal circumstances, they might have both been otherwise loath to spent so much time in our company. That has been our silver lining, during all of this. 

Saddest Memory of Summer 2020:
The state of the world, at the moment, has provided more than enough material for this. Where does one begin?

Scariest Memory of Summer 2020:
Watching some of the video of initial unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd was pretty jarring. 

Word That Best Describes Summer 2020:
Transformative.

BONUS QUESTIONS: 

Single greatest album of all time is …..
Funhouse by The Stooges

3 Books You Read This Year
- "Remain in Love" by Chris Frantz
- "Waiting For Another War" by Trevor Ristow
- "Girl to City" by Amy Rigby

What’s Your Favorite Rolling Stones album?
Today, I'm saying Emotional Rescue, and you can bite me.

3 Last Albums You Purchased:
- Human Impact by Human Impact
- Gymnopedies & Gnosseinnes by Erik Satie
- Live at Goose Lake by The Stooges (which has not arrived, as yet). 

Your favorite James Bond film was
Toughie, but I have a very stubborn affinity for "The Man with The Golden Gun."

3 songs you never want to hear again:
- "Santeria" by Sublime
- "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi
- "American Pie" by Don McLean.

3 albums you own that you wouldn’t want to leave on your coffee table when your in-laws were coming over:
- Scatology by Coil
- Dial 'M' For Motherfucker by Pussy Galore
- Freaks, F_____s, Drunks & Junkies by GG Allin

The most physical pain you have ever experienced:
Kidney stone in 2008.

First Record You Ever Bought With Your Own Money:
Dressed to Kill by Kiss

Notable Moment From This Summer:
I had to bury a dead bird that showed up in the back yard of the Lamb Cottage. It was missing its head.

Recommend three books:
- "Please Kill Me" by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain
- "Downtown" by the recently late Pete Hammil
- "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris.

Beers on me. What’ll it be?
Almaza (great, albeit hard to find Lebanese beer)

First Concert You Went To:
Devo at Radio City Music Hall, Halloween 1981

Last Concert You Went To:
End of Hope at Niagara's on Avenue A, February 2020

Recline your seat-back on airplanes: Yes or No?
HELL, NO.

3 Favorite words
- Sepulchral
- Vespertine
- Defenestrate

Song That Will Remind You of Summer 2020:
"Bitch" by the Rolling Stones

David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar or Gary Cherone?
DLR without a moment's hesitation.

Recommend 3 TV shows:
- "Ozark"
- "Endeavor"
- "Mad Men" (we're currently re-watching ... it's as good as you remember it).

Last Movie You Saw in a Theatre & Where:
Michael Apted's "63 Up" at the Quad Cinema on West 13th.

My preferred way to listen to music is via:
Vinyl, Cassette, Compact Disc or iPod, but never streaming.

Worst date movie ever:
Toss-up between "Dead Ringers" (about twin psychotic, coke-crazed gynecologists) and/or "Last Tango in Paris" -- Fun fact: I saw both of these on dates. Neither ended well.

Your favorite member of Monty Python?
Michael Palin

3 quintessential summer songs:
- "Shout To the Top" by Style Council
- "Summer's Cauldron/Grass" by XTC
- "Listen" by Tears for Fears

3 Biggest Pet Peeves
- People who order a "cheese pizza."
- People who recline their seat-backs into my lap on public transport.
- The tenacious vernacular of "hate on." One does not require a surface on which to put that verb into action. One does not hate on, hate over, hate alongside or hate under. One just hates.

Fried or Scrambled:
- Fried. Sunny side up.

3 Things You Wish You Could Do:
- Cook with stylish proficiency
- Play guitar
- Credibly speak another language.

3 Things You Miss Right Now:
- Live music
- My friends
- The illusion of certainty.

Amphetamine Logrolling

Some of you might remember a post from way back in June — gosh, remember June? — wherein I discussed the new book by my friend Trevor Ristow about the first few years of a mutually favorite band of ours, The Sisters of Mercy. As something of a connoisseur of this very type of rock bio, I was delighted to discover that Ristow’s book, “Waiting for Another War,” was not the usual half-baked tangle of dubiously executed typing, but rather a thoughtfully composed chronicle of the band’s inception through to the recording of their debut long player, First And Last And Always. I remarked as such in my own review of the book in that June post.

Well, as the saying goes, one good turn deserves another. Unbeknownst to me until just recently, Trevor graciously decided to “blurb” me on the back cover of the second printing of the book. I thought that was jolly nice of him. See it below.

Cool, right? I thought so. In any case, get your copy of the book here.

This, meanwhile, was the Sisters in 1985…

How The Darkness Doubled

This is normally the time of year when I’m posting “And Just Like That, Summer’s Over” entries and filling out summer surveys. While, yes, summer is indeed pretty much over and things happened over said summer that could be addressed in such a survey, none of that feels worth discussing. Very little does, I’m afraid.

This all said, I stumbled upon the video below, earlier this morning, and thought I'd share it here. 

As mentioned back in this old post, I didn’t originally know — despite the very New Yorky sound of his music with Galaxie 500 and Luna — that Dean Wareham had any genuine connection with New York City. I thought he was just a New Zealander ex-pat who settled in Boston. But, as gleaned from his excellent memoir “Black Postcards,” I learned that Dean spent a formidable slice of his youth, like myself, living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Given his bands’ languid sonic allusions to forebears like the Velvet Underground and Television, this made a lot of sense, although that's just projection. Simply living in New York City wouldn't immediately give one a predilection towards those bands. I mean, it might, but it's never that simple. I know plenty of New Yorkers who've never even heard of the Velvets or Television. 

Under normal circumstances, the audacity of anyone attempting to cover “Marquee Moon,” inarguably Television’s signature song, would border on the blasphemous. That said, I am kinda digging Luna's very recent rendition of it below.

Here’s the recording’s backstory…

During the current pandemic, with Luna members spread around the globe, our former bassist Justin Harwood suggested that we record Television’s epic track “Marquee Moon." We recorded the song one instrument at a time in four different locations; Lee Wall recorded his drum track in Austin, Sean Eden tracked the guitars in San Francisco, Justin played the Fender bass in Auckland, New Zealand, and Dean Wareham sang and added guitar in Los Angeles. Britta Phillips sat this one out but does appear in the video. Justin Harwood mixed the song and assembled the video from iPhone footage made by the band members.

Moments With Moby

I find it kind of striking that in the fifteen years — jeezus — that I’ve been composing this silly blog, I don’t seem to have ever mentioned the artist Moby beyond a passing invocation. I mean, it’s not like I was ever a massive fan of the guy, but I certainly had nothing against him. The most notable aspect of Moby with respect to the usual thrust of this blog is that he was formerly the upstairs neighbor of my friend Sean when they both lived on Mott Street just south of Houston. They’ve both moved on since (Sean went to Brooklyn, Moby went … somewhere else), but Sean did have one kinda dreadful anecdote about living beneath the man, that being a genuinely unfortunate plumbing mishap wherein Sean’s furniture became splattered with Moby’s …um… sewage in the wake of a burst pipe. Hey, this is what happens when you decide to live in a rustic old SoHo loft space, I guess.

In terms of Moby as a musician, I certainly own a few of his records, among them, of course, Play, the album that made him a household name — I believe my mother-in-law actually owned her own copy of that disc. It was Play that transformed him from a nebbishy underground electronic wunderkind into a bona fide celebrity — however awkwardly. It was then that the worm turned, so to speak, and Moby became a weird kind of irritant for a lot of folks. He seemed to develop a knack for putting his foot in it.

One example of this was when Moby asserted in Steven Blush’s strangely divisive documentary “American Hardcore” that he fleetingly sang for sludgy hardcore legends Flipper. Suffice to say, Flipper denied the claim, and the fallout from same seemed to cost Moby a deal of credibility (although, to be fair, there is video). This episode, however, was small potatoes compared to the brouhaha that ensued when Moby published a memoir — his second — in 2019, wherein he alleged a lurid involvement with actress Natalie Portman. Like Flipper before her, Portman shot down that claim, and the backlash was swift and brutal.

In the wake of that, Moby understandably went a bit quiet. I cannot say I’ve followed his professional trajectory too closely, but I was bemused to find he recently taped an episode of “Turned Out a Punk,” the podcast of erstwhile Fucked Up lead singer Damien Abraham (you may remember I mentioned this podcast when they interviewed Lydia Lunch). Given Moby’s pre-fame/pre-notoriety days in punk rock (he played in Connecticut bands AWOL and The Vatican Commandoes, back in the day), he was certainly a good “get” for Damien’s program. Discovering, this morning, that my trusty-if-anachronisic iPod was out of juice, I opted to listen to Damien interview Moby on my iPhone.

If you’re curious to hear more bits about Moby’s priapic entanglements, you won’t find those there, but Moby does delve into his days as a nascent suburban punk rocker, and discusses visiting some notable Manhattan record stores this blog holds dear like Rocks In Your Head, Bleecker Bob’s, Sounds etc., along with his experiences as some hardcore shows at the Ritz, The Mudd Club and some others. If you’re a fan of that sort of stuff, as I am, it’s worth your time.

Check it out here.

Julian & The C-Word

I love Julian Cope. He’s a singular talent who admirably does not do what is expected of him. Despite possessing a dazzling knack for crafting perfectly realized pop (evident on singles like “World Shut Your Mouth,” “Trampoline,” “Charlotte Anne,” “ Beautiful Love,” “Try Try Try” and countless others), he’s often way more prone to indulging his adoration for the pointedly inaccessible and wildly esoteric.

After about twenty years of writing, recording and performing more conventional post-punky pop with both his original band The Teardrop Explodes and via his solo career, Julian pulled out all the stops and started releasing music that owed precious little to those earlier records, opting instead to dabble in a wide amalgam of styles including drone-laden experimental post-rock, ironic ersatz heavy metal, metronomic Krautrock homages and the like. It was like he was going out of his way to distance himself from that which had won him his initial success and renown.

I tried to keep up, but after a few unwieldy and — sorry, Jules — frankly unlistenable projects, I kinda fell off. I’d pick up a new single or album of his every now and then (I’ve been meaning to check out his 2017 album, Drunken Songs, which he composed after discovering the joys of alcohol years and years after the fact), but his signature magic was often sorely missing — although I did quite enjoy the pugnacious title track to 2007’s You’ve Got a Problem With Me.

Regardless of wherever his musical muse might be leading him, I will always remain a fan. He’s also a tirelessly entertaining author.

I was fortunate enough to see Julian perform twice — once on the tour for the watershed opus Peggy Suicide and then again, some years later, at a solo-acoustic show circa 1995’s 20 Mothers. In both instances, not only did he fucking rock — as that’s what he does — but he was a hilarious raconteur. Which leads me to the clip below.

While I don’t believe he’s ever officially released it, Julian Cope has been performing a song called “Cunts Can Fuck Off” for some years now. I managed to track down this live video — filmed at London’s legendary Roundhouse in 2017 — that finds him explaining the backstory of the song.

Enjoy. 

"Through The Night"

Brooklyn at night during the peak of New York City's coronavirus outbreak, captured on bike rides throughout the borough. Set to Pat Irwin's haunting recording of the U.S. national anthem performed at the Never Records installation at The Rudin Family Gallery at BAM Strong on January 23, 2020.

Companion photo book Keep This Far Apart: Nighttime in Brooklyn, Spring 2020 available for purchase, with all proceeds going to Brooklyn Rescue Mission: https://sampolcer.com/store/keep-this...

Filmmaker statement: "On April 6th, New York City reached what turned out to be its highest number of daily COVID-19 hospitalizations (1,719) and cases (6,376), and third-highest number of daily deaths (565); the city had firmly established itself as the world’s coronavirus epicenter, gripped by fear, uncertainty and loneliness. That night, I began going on bike rides throughout the borough after dark for exercise and a taste of freedom sorely lacking in locked-down isolation. Out on the streets, I was struck by an overwhelming quiet overlaid with the constant wail of distant ambulance sirens, and decided immediately to document what I saw, from shuttered theaters and garbage-strewn sidewalks to the occasional cyclist or couple out for an evening stroll. For seven weeks, when the city that never sleeps tucked itself in, I’d embark from my home in the Kensington neighborhood with camera and tripod in tow. I felt compelled to document this moment, and to capture the feeling of isolation experienced by millions in close proximity to each other.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the city reclaimed some of its vitality, with more New Yorkers leaving their homes to socialize, and I stopped shooting. The next day, George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin—a second bookend to the project as horrifying as the first.

When it came time to assemble the footage, I remembered a somber rendition of the national anthem performed by the composer and musician Pat Irwin in January as a part of Never Records, a recording studio/record store art installation that took place at the new Rudin Gallery at BAM Strong. (I'm a content strategist at BAM.) I just had this sense that the country was about as low as it could go, spiritually, and in nearly all other ways—thousands of people were dying, and our leaders were asleep at the wheel—and Irwin’s deeply affecting ‘Anthem’ resonated with that sentiment. It's probably the somberest, least patriotic version of the tune you've ever heard. And as an instrumental that leaves out the lyrics, it's appropriate considering current conversations around racial inequality: the song's lyricist, Francis Scott Key, was a slaveowner.

As NYC reopens and much of the country grapples with virus surges, the film is a meditative portrait of the city at its most locked-down. Is this what it means to be patriotic during a pandemic?"

Bios: Sam Polcer is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time Out New York, Hemispheres, Brooklyn Magazine, Spin.com, Esquire.com, Travel+Leisure.com, and many other websites and publications, as well as at the Museum of the City of New York. He is also a content strategist at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). His first book, New York Bike Style, was published by Prestel in 2014. Previously, he was the communications director at Bike New York and an editor (of both text and photography) at Hemispheres. https://www.sampolcer.com

Patrick Irwin is a composer and musician who was a founding member of two bands that grew out of New York City's No Wave scene in the late 1970s, the Raybeats and 8-Eyed Spy. He joined The B-52s from 1989 through 2008. He has composed scores for numerous independent films including My New Gun, But I'm A Cheerleader, and Bam Bam and Celeste as well as hundreds of cartoons including Rocko's Modern Life, Pepper Ann, A Little Curious, and Class of 3000. He composed the scores for HBO's Bored to Death and Showtime's Nurse Jackie and most recently for the Netflix show, The Good Cop. https://www.patirwinmusic.com

Whole Lotta Lunch

I think the first time I ever encountered Lydia Lunch was via her contribution to Sonic Youth’s Bad Moon Rising album in 1985, wherein she duetted with Thurston Moore on “Death Valley `69,” a little off-kilter ditty about the Manson Family that, when played, used to make my freshman-year roommate in college leave the room with a look of concerned agitation on his face … always a sign of quality. In fact, fuck it, here it is now….duck & cover….

Incidentally, the angry brunette lady gnashing her teeth throughout that clip is not Lydia Lunch. Lydia make a blink-&-you’ll-miss-her cameo, but the “star” of this clip is one Lung Leg, a fellow alumnus of the cinema of transgression (which I spoke about back here).

In any case, a little while after I latched onto “Death Valley `69," I picked up an issue of Byron Coley’s underground `zine, Forced Exposure, based on its inclusion of articles about Die Kreuzen — who I’d only witnessed play live for the first time some short months earlier — and those old idiotic favorites in The Meatmen. The cover-girl, for want of a better term, of that issue was none other than Lydia Lunch, enabling me to match a comely, slightly intimidating face to the pouty purr on “Death Valley `69.”

Duly intrigued by the fittingly pugnacious interview therein, imagine my glee upon finding out that my college radio station, WDUB 91.1,— where I’d only just started DJ’ing — actually had a long-neglected copy of No New York in a dusty archive otherwise overrun with The Allman Brothers, Little Feat and the soggy flaccidity of Pure Prairie League. For those unfamiliar, No New York was Brian Eno’s seminal No Wave compilation that culled together select bands from that scene, foremost among them being Lydia Lunch’s first band, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. I vividly remember cueing up “The Closet” from same — on the air, having never heard it before — and letting her rip for WDUB’s audience. The phone summarily lit up at the sound of the discordant guitar, lurching staccato “rhythm” and Lydia’s fraught mewling. I believe we might have fielded some death threats. Pure Prairie League this was not.

I’ve spoken numerous times here about my fandom for Lydia Lunch. Not only do I love all manifestations of her unsettling music, I just find her whole aesthetic — willfully confrontational, whip-smart and unapologetic — so refreshing. It’s no pose. It’s no act. She will fuck you up.

It was for this very reason that, while left to our own devices in quarantine, I decided to, at long last, order Lydia’s cook book.

You read that right.

Indeed, along with being a tireless voice of confrontational provocation and — as she’s put it — irritainment, Ms. Lunch is also an accomplished epicurean.

The thing is, though, I don’t cook. Like, at all. Sure, I can make spaghetti or a burger. I can scramble an egg — although don’t ask me to fry one with any semblance of prowess. I can grill a steak on an outdoor grill, but any moron can do that. When it comes to the nuances of cooking, however, I am a total moron. I took a cooking class in 2001, but didn’t retain any of it. I’m also slavishly spoiled, as I married a resourceful and innovative chef. Peg is roundly capable of turning a haphazard array of leftovers into a strikingly flavorful meal.

Anyway, about three months back, when the realities of the overarching life-hiatus brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic were unfurling, I thought it would be a swell time to get ahold of Lydia’s cook book and give a few of her recipes a try. While my wife had absolutely no idea about Lydia Lunch or her music or deliberately thorny spoken-word stuff — this is probably for the best — she was indeed intrigued by the book and snatched it out of my hands upon arrival, seizing upon Lydia’s recommendations about the myriad nutritional benefits of bee pollen. In case you’ve never sampled same, bee pollen is a frankly pungent amalgam of flower pollen, nectar, enzymes honey, wax and — wait for it — “bee secretions” that tastes exactly like something described with the word “secretions” probably should. When we tried it, suffice to say, it chilled our enthusiasm for venturing further into the gaping maw of Lydia’s pantry, but there are indeed several dishes we’ve earmarked to attempt. Watch this space

Until then, however, if you’re intrigued about Ms. Lunch, you should definitely check out the latest episode of Damian Abraham’s podcast “Turned Out a Punk,” which finds the tirelessly enthusiastic lead singer of Fucked Up chatting with Lydia, who gamely expounds on her musical exploits. Given Lydia’s pronounced disdain for the very word “punk,” it’s no small feat that Damian charmed her into discussing so much stuff here. If you’re a fan, it’s well worth your time.

Also, do stick around for Lydia's rant (taken from her own podcast, which I spoke about a couple of times here not too long back) about the myriad failings of the Trump Administration. Typically, she pulls no punches and takes no prisoners. 

Check it out...