Flaming Pablum

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.

 

A Max’s Kansas City Mystery

Over the weekend, I took a stroll down to Fulton and Water Streets, i.e. the Seaport, to check out an outdoor retrospective entitled “Punk’s Not Dead,” featuring several iconic (and some not-so-iconic) photographs of all things punk by fabled shutterbugs like Roberta Bayley, Godlis, Bob Gruen, Ebet Roberts and a few others. Honestly speaking, most of the images in question are widely celebrated and circulated, so I wasn’t really expecting to see anything I’d never seen before, but several of them were blown up to maximum size, so I wanted to check that out. Also, it was a lovely, early summer day wherein I had nothing to do, so, it was a fun excursion.

In any case, after snapping a few pics of my own (and asking a Polish tourist to capture a shot of me standing in front of Godlis’ famous portrait of Joey Ramone on St. Marks Place), I ambled around the seaport and then eventually walked back home to Greenwich Village.

When I was going over my pictures back at home, however, I started to examine a legendary photograph that I’d never really studied that closely before, and I suddenly noticed a detail I’d never spied. But now, I have a suspicion, and I can’t seem to be able to solve it.

Despite being named after the arguably preeminent flash point of all things Punk Rock, the 1976 compilation album, Max’s Kansas City, was rife with significant omission. That same year, that storied club’s biggest rival, CBGB, also put out its own compilation record that also largely dropped the ball, in that very same respect. While both LP’s remain great, period-specific documents of the gestating New York City punk scene of the mid-70’s, both records are almost more notable for who they failed to include (like, say, the Ramones and Blondie) than for the class of largely lesser celebrated acts (like, say, the Tuff Darts and The Fast) who made the cut.

On the strength of Wayne (now Jayne) County’s homage to the premier punk club of New York City, I picked up a used copy of the vinyl LP of Max’s Kansas City in, somewhat ironically, Columbus, Ohio, at a shop on High Street called, inexplicably, Magnolia Thunderpussy, during my sophomore year of college. Truthfully, while I liked that song, Suicide’s “Rocket USA" and Pere Ubu’s original recording of “Final Solution” (before owning this LP, the only version I’d ever heard was Peter Murphy’s cover), the rest of the Max’s album kinda failed to excite my imagination. A passing glance at Bob Gruen’s class photo on the cover depicted a gaggle of individuals who didn’t so much resemble punky iconoclasts as shaggy haired, denim-bedecked refugees from the staid, beige decade they were supposedly renouncing. But, y’know, I was young and stupid. I filed the LP away and spun the tracks I liked, from time to time, but rarely gave it further thought … until this past Saturday.

Blown up to about seven feet tall (see pic at the top of this post), the details of Gruen’s portrait really popped, and I captured a few shots accordingly. Strangely enough, while it’s easy to pick out Jayne County because of her massive red hair, the Suicide guys are harder to spot, tucked discreetly in the back, in front of Max’s ground-floor storefront window. Paul Zone of the Fast also cuts a distinctive profile by the hydrant, with his long black locks and garish sunglasses (atop his head), not to mention his self-promoting t-shirt. But the rest of the gathered scenesters seem to blend together in a manner that’s hard to identify.

But as I scanned the picture, for the first time looked at the couple depicted sitting on the curb. Again, I’d never scrutinized this photo this closely, prior to this, but now maximized in sharper detail, the angles and contours of the face the gent on the left suddenly struck me.

Is that Jim Carroll?

Certainly, looks like him, right?

A certifiable regular at Max’s Kansas City, as well documented in both his writings and on his amazing spoken-word album, Praying Mantis, it would not at all be surprising or uncommon to expect Jim Carroll to be hanging out with the Max’s crew. While Carroll wouldn’t release his debut LP with the Jim Carroll Band, Catholic Boy until four years after the release of the Max’s Kansas City album, he would have already made a name for himself as a budding writer, poet and perennial cool cat.

Unable to find any credible who’s-who guide to Gruen’s photograph (neither on Gruen’s own website nor the Morrison Hotel Gallery site, who currently offer prints of the work), I did some inventive Googling, but came up empty. I then remembered a book I’d prized off the TIME Magazine discard pile back during my days at the news desk, that being Yvonne Sewalll-Ruskin's (Max’s proprietor Mickey’s widow) beefy coffee-table book, “High on Rebellion,” which documented the club with over 200 photos. Unable to put my hand to it, I suddenly remembered that I’d parted with the book in a bag bound for Goodwill about two months ago, and cussed in exasperation.

I even found another shot from the same session, but it doesn't really shed more light...

My copy of the old LP currently resides in a flight case in my mother’s all-too-flood-friendly basement out on Quogue, but I don’t remember a breakdown of who’s who on the cover included in the LP anyway. In 2017, meanwhile, a concern called Jungle Records re-released Max’s Kansas City as a deluxe, two CD/LP set, re-titling it Max’s Kansas City: 1976 & Beyond, now including recordings from the folks they should have had the first time around like Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and Sid Vicious. If they included more information about the cover photo on that release, however, I’m still shit out of luck, as it’s already out of print.

As a going concern, Max's Kansas City itself on 213 Park Avenue South closed for good in 1981. In more recent years, it was a deli called Bread & Butter (as I captured in 2013, with my kids standing in for the punks), and later as a concern called Fraiche Maxx, but that, too, has closed. 

Jim Carroll tragically left us in 2009. Photographer Bob Gruen is still around. Next time I spot him on the street (which does happen), I'm going to ask him, unless, of course, YOU know? 

Is that Jim Carroll sitting on the curb? ADDENDUM: FIND OUT THE ANSWER HERE.

Weigh in.

Busy Week

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….

Pete Missing Speaks

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. 

Find Jesse's interview with Peter Missing here. 

"How Did They Know?": Klosterman's Radiohead Theory ... Revisited

Here’s an entry I’m relatively certain I’m going to regret posting. But first, a bit of background….

Over the course of a long, deathly quiet overnight shift at the TIME Magazine News Desk in the late July of 2005, a little under a month after I’d first launched this silly blog, I composed an epic-length post ruminating on an article for SPIN that Chuck Klosterman had penned that was later appended to a collection of his writings. The subject matter was his not-entirely-serious postulation that Kid A, the arguably confounding and divisive fourth album by arty British alternative band, Radiohead, had predicted the events of September 11, 2001. Should you be curious and willing to overlook some invariable typos and maybe a broken image or two, you can find that here:

Klosterman’s Theory: Did Radiohead’s Kid A Predict 9/11?

In the gradual wake of unwittingly posting that entry, it became one of the most frequently clicked pieces of this blog’s almost-19-year history, being frequently cited on any number of Radiohead fan forums and conspiracy-theory sites. It was linked to by legitimate outlets like Cracked and Noisey, with both repeatedly resurfacing those posts on social media, prompting me to post no fewer than five retorts, notably…

Klosterman’s Theory Redux: Kid A Gets Cracked (2010)
Radioheadache: The Scourge of Klosterman’s Theory (2016)
Radioheadcase: The Endurance of Klosterman’s Theory (2020)
You’ve Got to Be Kid A’ing Me (2020)
Kid Oy! (2022)

Each of these basically reiterated the same point, that being that I personally never really took the theory all that seriously nor, did I suspect, that Klosterman himself did, either.

But the clicks and links kept coming. Despite how many times I mentioned that I didn’t really care or that I thought it was all a bit in bad taste and that there were surely bigger fish to be fried, the interest in this bizarre theory hasn’t really waned or diminished.

To that end, I fielded a cryptic note today, almost nineteen years after that first post, from a reader named Paul. Paul wrote in, in all caps, “I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU CARE,” and included a link to a video. The accompanying text for that video is as follows:

SHARE THIS. SPREAD THIS.

Radiohead are the kings of 9/11 foreknowledge. They embedded *dozen and dozens* of visual and lyrical clues in three consecutive albums — OK Computer, Kid A, and Amnesiac. (Chuck Klosterman's half-assed writerly analysis of merely some lyrics in merely one album, Kid A, is a weak-sauce limited hangout.) Radiohead absolutely knew about 9/11 ahead of time, to an eerily specific extent, almost as if they were commissioned to perform a years-long artistic conjuring/welcoming ritual. I myself attended the Suffolk Downs show, and the vibes that night were off-the-charts spooky. Not just the ominous pre-show sunset, not just the panic-frequencies emitted by Thom Yorke all night, not just the planes from the adjacent Logan Airport flying around us all night. There was one moment I will never, ever forget. Just when the "Rain Down" section of Paranoid Android began and the music dramatically paused, a single plane roared directly over our heads, and the crowd erupted at the classic concert synchronicity. I don't know how anyone could have arranged it, that moment might have had a paranormal basis. Regardless: RADIOHEAD KNEW. Which is way, way more important than you probably think it is right now. They have been conspicuously omitted from all 9/11 Predictive Programming compilations, probably for a reason, and probably not a good reason. SPREAD THIS VIDEO. Copy the url, and text it to someone who will be interested, email it to your favorite conspiracy theorists, share it with any Radiohead fans, post it on social media, rip the video and post it on your own account, do whatever it takes to publicize this. DO NOT JUST READ THIS AND KEEP BROWSING. Do your part, please. Thank you.

Here is the video in question. Be warned -- there are some jarring passages herein, if you are triggered by this subject matter. 

Please make of that what you will. 

My only question to you, dear, patient readers, is this … where in New York City was the photo at the top taken? Weigh in, street-spotters.

Drinkin’, Lechin’ & Lyin’ at the Pyramid

During a presumably recent performance in the hotbed of class, distinction and good taste that is Las Vegas, pronouncedly melismatic warbler and erstwhile Voice “coach” Christina Aguilera was photographed sporting an oversized vintage t-shirt adorned with the cover art of Drinkin’, Lechin’ & Lyin’, the 1989 debut e.p. by blues/punk/noise-rockers, Boss Hog, notable for their inclusion of Jon Spencer of Pussy Galore and his lovely wife Cristina Martinez. Stereogum posted this pictured on its Facebook feed, and the inevitable debate of whether or not “Xtina” was genuinely a fan of the band ensued.

I can’t honestly say whether or not the singer is a legitimate fan of Boss Hog that can name more than three songs, although she very well might be. I mean, she was about nine years old when that record came out, but that means nothing. I was only three years old when Fun House by the Stooges came out, and I consider that the greatest album of all time. I’d love to hear Christina abandon her usual poppy piffle and bust into a gruff, throaty cover of “Winn Coma” or “Pull Out” sometime. That would be refreshing.

In any case, prompted by some other commenters who were evidently confused as to who and what exactly was on Aguilera’s shirt, I quickly pointed out that it was a band and not (directly) a reference to Sorrel Brooke’s infamous character on “The Dukes of Hazzard.” To underscore same, I posted this video, a performance by Boss Hog from around the same era as the e.p. in question, captured within the intimate confines of what was then The Pyramid Club on Avenue A. Check it out….

Okay, so not only is it prime early Boss Hog with Cristin Martinez in fine, feral form, but it also totally takes one back to what it was like seeing live shows in that great room. As mentioned back on this post from 2015, my first show at the Pyramid was around the same era, when I caught my friend’s band Fractured Cylinder opening for Rats of Unusual Size and The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black (fun side note about that: I made a slightly disparaging comment about the Rats of Unusual Size in that post, and the lead singer wrote in about it as recently as this past February).

Another amazing thing about the old Pyramid (not to be confused with the more banal iteration in its latter years) was that it was this strangely harmonious plateau where otherwise incongruous tribes all gathered. It was practically Ground Zero for the East Village’s Drag community (for a more authoritative account of that era, check this page out).

There’s also a big deluxe book about that whole scene coming out shortly, which you can find out about here. At the same time as all that fabulousness, the doors were manned by dudes from A7 across the way ..

Recognize those cats? That’s RayBeez and Jimmy G (from Warzone and Murphy’s Law, respectively), who handled security. When not hosting disco balls for the drag community, the Pyramid hosted hardcore matinees, with Jimmy and Ray booking bands like Sick of It All, Warzone, Youth of Today, Token Entry, Judge, Gorilla Biscuits and many more.

Beyond the drag queens and the hardcore kids, however, you also had the neighborhood’s contingent of noise-rock bands like SWANS, Sonic Youth, White Zombie, The Unsane, Pussy Galore and my pals in Cop Shoot Cop…

Fun easter egg for the Cop Shoot Cop fanboys, back in that Boss Hog clip, as the band is plugging and getting ready to do their thang, the sound system plays “Disconnected 666” from Consumer Revolt.

Of course, the Pyramid closed for good in 2021, and I wrote a suitably weepy eulogy here. The space that had been the Pyramid re-opened last summer, and it’s now a venture called Baker Falls, which described itself thusly:

An oasis in the heart of New York City’s East Village where you can attend live performances, crash a late-night dance party, grab coffee, have a meal, sip cocktails, buy and sell goods…pretty much anything you can think of in a brick and mortar establishment. We’re bringing people together in the real world.

Sound nice, right? I’ve yet to darken its doors. Incidentally, the striking photo of the interior of the old Pyramid at the top of this post was captured by the great Ken Schles. The shot of Baker Falls below was poached brazenly from my good pal EV Grieve. 

The Return of "Did You Feel That?"

I vividly remember the 2011 earthquake here in New York City. I was working, at the time, at the website for the TODAY show (not the greatest fit for me, to be honest, but hey … it was a gig). I worked on the third or fourth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza with about 30 other people in a large, windowless room with garish orange walls (NBC did enjoy its petty tortures) and we had these hanging light fixtures above our bullpen of desks. I was busy typing up something inane, and suddenly noticed all those light fixtures suddenly … swaying, something we’d assuredly never seen them do before. It was a bit ominous, but that was pretty much the extent of it.

A couple of teeth-grinding years after that last seismic event, I managed to get protractedly “managed out” of my increasingly stressful job at TODAY, which was honestly the best for all parties concerned, although it certainly didn’t feel that way, at the time. After several months on the street, I finally landed the job I've held for the last eight years and six months. It has its issues, like any other gig, but overall, it’s great and I’m very happy to be there. My office is on the 31st floor of 7 World Trade Center.

Those of you playing along at home might remember the building that used to stand in the footprint of my current office building. On the morning of September 11, 2001, the former 7 World Trade Center had the ignominious distinction of being the building that completely collapsed despite not having actually been hit by any planes. Practically immediately after it was reduced to a smokey heap of rubble, conspiracy theories started to grow like kudzu about the reasons behind its collapse. Friggin’ books have been penned about it.

Anyway, despite the address's history and grim proximity to the 9/11 Memorial, it’s astonishing how one can put all that information to one side, so to speak, when simply concentrating on one’s job. I frankly don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the fact that I work on basically the same plot of real estate where 2,996 people died horribly.

I don’t think about that fact very often … until days like today.

I was in my office, this morning, by around 8:30 am, having already been tasked from the evening before with chasing down some far-flung bits of interview video from our extensive archives. I spent most of my morning compiling all those assets and typing up a detailed report about their contents, and was about to hit “send,” when I suddenly felt a pronounced disturbance.

From a distance, 7 WTC looks like 1 WTC’s younger sibling. It’s perched in front of what some folks still insist on calling “The Freedom Tower” like a stumpy little runt, compared to the sweeping height of 1 WTC’s 104 floors and cloud-piercing spire. But, at 54 floors of its own, 7 WTC is still one tall drink of water, when you’re standing right in front of it. Technically, it’s the 28th tallest building in New York, if that makes any difference.

As such, those of us who are regularly teeming in any out of the thing like busy little ants are used to feeling the building literally sway, at times, or hearing the elevator shafts periodically groan during windy days. This usually happens without any compromise to the building’s integrity, and as odd as it sounds, one does get used to it.

But the shaking the building experienced this morning assuredly was not that, and in very short order, had my undivided attention.

My first thought, was “holy crap, what has hit us?”

I spun in my chair and looked out the window, but nothing looked off. The view across Manhattan looked bright, clear and bereft of any sign of trouble.

I suddenly started fielding text messages from colleagues in Brooklyn and then New Jersey and then Long Island, and it all immediately made sense.

Earthquake.

In the grand scheme of things — or thus far, at least — it wasn’t that big a deal. No great damage has been reported, and no lives have been lost. I’m sure people in California and other quake-prone points on the map are chuckling at what pussies New Yorkers are being about this. Fair enough.

Having completed my major tasks of the morning, I decided to clear the fuck out to evade the possibility of getting stuck in the building (or worse). Probably against my better judgement, I took the elevator down and walked home.

 

 

In the hysterical hours since, I’ve seen the above meme being widely circulated over social media, and someone else posted a pic of t-shirts for sale saying “I SURVIVED THE 2024 EARTHQUAKE.” I get it, and I suppose we can all feel free to giggle about how much ado about nothing it evidently was, but I’m not really ready to get that cocky about it, myself.

You may consider yourself to be one slick captain of industry with your shit well put together, but all it really takes is one fleeting shudder of Mother Nature to remind you of how fucking insignificant you truly are.

Yes, this morning was ultimately just a minor blip, comparatively speaking, but a series of aftershocks could still be on the way. We may not be out of the woods. And was it indeed a blip… or just an amuse-bouche before a larger entree?

If you honestly believe New York City is genuinely prepared to effectively handle a major earthquake, I’ve got a big, pretty bridge to sell ya.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, have you met our mayor?

Spank Generation: Unpacking "A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell"

I’m normally not one to fall for literary hype, but I succumbed, back in February, and picked up Young Kim’s “A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell,” the first-time author’s allegedly scandalous and graphically revealing tell-all about her brief affair with reluctant punk pioneer/author Richard Hell. Hell himself has gone on record, since the book’s initial release in 2020, dismissing the endeavor as “revenge porn,” and complained that Ms. Kim published the work with neither his knowledge nor consent. Ironically, I certainly never would have heard about the book had Hell not been so vocal about it. But, with my curiosity piqued, I went out to try to track down a copy for myself, but they were hard to put your hand to. I ended up ordering one from McNally-Jackson in SoHo, and about a week later, I picked it up.

In its defense, I’ll say this — the book itself is a lovely artifact to hold in your hand, lavishly published by a little, independent house called Fashionbeast Editions (I apparently own a second edition). This all said, I’m ashamed to confess that, a month later, I am still sluggishly paging through it, which is embarrassing in that the book is barely the length of a novella. The trouble is that I am routinely finding myself driven away from it.

As a quick bit of backstory, “A Year on Earth…” starts off documenting Young Kim’s initial flirtation with fabled poet-turned-proto-punk rocker Richard Hell, who she’d approached for the purposes of recruiting him to present an award dedicated to the legacy of her late lover, Malcolm McLaren. As has been well documented, McLaren famously used Richard Hell as the sartorial/tonsorial template, in the late `70s, he’d later project onto the fledgling Sex Pistols, an arguably thorny bit of pop-culture history that continues to act as an oft-employed cannonball in rock-geek battles about the true provenance of all things Punk. Regardless, in the wake of McLaren’s death, Kim, the lone executrix of McClaren’s estate, rightly deduced what a pivotal inspiration Hell had been to her former partner and reached out. In short order, sparks begin to fly, and the story takes off from there.

There, however, is where my problems with it start. I should preface the rest of this post with the probably obvious concession that I’ve never written a book, much less a detailed memoir. I’ve been approached to do so, a few times, but I frankly just don’t know that I have a book in me, so to speak. As such, who am I to take Ms. Kim to task for successfully vaulting her book into the public consciousness? It may not be a best-seller, yet, but it’s garnered a fair share of critical acclaim, including a prestigious write-up in The New York Times. That’s nothing to sneeze at, and I completely respect the achievement. By the same token, as a reader (and as a longtime Richard Hell fan), I’m perfectly entitled to have my own opinions about Kim’s writing, and not all of them are that reverential.

For a start, while it’s firmly established from the jump that the author is an avowed acolyte of all things fashion, Kim’s indefatigable attention to recounting the minutia of her wardrobe and her slavish devotion to luxury items during any given chapter is of absolutely zero interest to me. The painstaking citations that she sleeps on a bed adorned with “shaggy Tibetan goat-hair cushions,” wears incorrectly sized Yves Saint Laurent heels simply because they were designed by Hedi Slimane (“What an exquisite and glamorous collection!”) and/or that she chooses to wear (and bother describing) a “thick angora sweater dress color blocked in pale cerulean blue an intense cobalt blue” for one tryst with Hell just end up cluttering the page and unwittingly revealing her to be something of a brazen materialist. Now, granted, given her predilections, her vocation, and her background, one should assume that the intended readership of this book isn’t solely crotchety rock dads like me, and there may indeed be a particularly fabulous demographic that cannot get enough of reading about Kim’s bespoke outfits and expensive taste. But, as far as I'm concerned, it just gets in the way of the narrative.

Secondly, and, to be fair, this one is a way more niche concern, Kim takes a few misdirected potshots at my beloved local, the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill. Granted, I’m hugely biased as I literally live in the same building as this age-old neighborhood standby and have been dining and drinking there for years, even well before I moved into the apartment in question in 2002. I was very pleasantly surprised to read that the Knick is a big favorite of Hell’s as well (although in all my years of going there, I’ve yet to spot him in one of the booths), and he chooses it for their first date. Unfortunately, during that first meal together there, Kim orders a steak that is not prepared to her liking (while Hell’s comes as he asked for it), which immediately prompts her to brand the place as “sexist.” She doubles-down on this allegation when, at another point, they clear her wine glass without asking if she wants another. Listen, Ms. Kim, I’ve ordered an ill-advisable number of steaks from the Knick, over the years, and you really shouldn’t be taking it so damn personally that they may have not completely prepped the food to your exacting standards. Suffice to say, you’re not that special — it happens to all of us. Is it annoying? Sure, but it’s not sexist.

Hell and Kim end up returning to the Knick a few times, during the course of proceedings, and she continues to dump on the place, at points, for being -- God forbid -- not her style, too crowded and/or “too well lit” (which is bizarre, `cos it’s rarely that), and I’m sorry — I’m not having that. Besmirch the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill at your peril. Don’t like it? Then fuck right off to your precious Boom Boom Room at the noxious Standard Hotel and please never come back. Sorry, but she truly crossed a line with me on that one.

Lastly, for a book so many — including hallowed wordsmiths like Bret Easton Ellis and Greil Marcus — have rapturously hailed as grippingly salacious in the boudoir department, I have to say … it’s just, well, kinda boring, in that capacity. Liberal usage of exhausted “dirty” words like “cock” and “pussy” don’t exactly push the envelope of expression any more than what you might otherwise find typed dispiritedly in the distressed pages of Penthouse Forum. I also sincerely doubt Hell was especially chuffed to read some of his particular bedroom kinks exposed for the world to scrutinize, but I guess that is the crux of the project, which Kim makes no apologies for. It might have been nice if she’d warned him first, but — as she has been quick to point out — many men have written far worse without ever seeking approval or offering apology.

In any case, I still have a fair chunk of it yet to slog through, but one more crack about the Knick and it’s going to be a swift and unrepentant defenestration.

Back ... Again ... to Astor Place

Yesterday, writer Arthur Nersesian, whose first novel “The Fuck-Up” was a big favorite of mine, posted an old image of Astor Place on his Facebook page. That’s it up top. Odd, right? He didn’t slap a date on it but considering the Astor Place Cube (real name: “The Alamo”) was first erected on that spot in 1967, and given the make of the cars pictured in the lot in the background, I’m guessing this could have been taken at some point in the `70s or early `80s, but I can’t be sure.

It’s also striking in that so many of the elements depicted in this photograph are no longer recognizable. I mean, yes, that’s obviously the Alamo on the left side or your screen, and presumably the edifice on the right across the street is the lower façade of the Carl Fischer Music Building, but that parking lot is long gone, as are all the row houses in the distance on the eastern end of Cooper Square. There’s now a giant glass tower – which my kids and I used to refer to as “The Shampoo Bottle” – with a bank on its ground floor where the parking lot used to be. To stand on this very spot and look south today, they would be obscured from view, but the buildings featured in the background are largely all gone anyway, replaced by the space-station-like Albert Nerken School of Engineering and the Cooper Square Hotel, which I once described here as a “priapic pillar of avarice” and a “gigantic robot phallus.” You’re welcome.

In any case, on my way to work, this morning, I tried to replicate the shot Arthur posted. As I mentioned, a lot has changed.

Funnily enough, “The Alamo” was never meant to still be here. It was initially installed for a six-month spell in 1967, but when it was time to move it, the community rallied together to keep it there. Also, it was never designed to be interactive. Artist Tony Rosenthal didn’t assume people would take to spinning the thing. But, of course, spin it they do.

Here's another little fun artifact, an NYU Tisch school student film from 2003 called, simply, “Alamo.” Only 21 years ago, but it already seems like a totally different city. The “Shampoo Bottle” was only just under construction, and the giant “Death Star” monolith that is 101 Astor Place had not yet replaced the humble Cooper Union classroom buildings.

Enjoy the short trip back in time…