Flaming Pablum

5 Things I'm Thankful For

With the strangest Thanksgiving in recent memory looming, it was a tense day here at Chez Pablum. The kids were bickering about invasions of their respective spaces during Zoom classes. I was on edge in the dining room with several important work projects pending, and playing a frenetic game of beat the clock. I regret to say that at certain points, voices were raised — and not for the purposes of extolling each others’ merits.

But, with the overriding themes of Turkey Day in mind — those being gratitude, family, humility and generosity, not gluttony, sloth and football — I thought it would be prudent to take a moment to reflect on the things I am indeed thankful for this year.

(5) I am very thankful for my network for friends who’ve kept in touch, kept me laughing and kept me arguably sane in the past several months. Whether online, on the phone or over a couple of socially distanced beverages, their counsel, good cheer and friendship has meant the world to me.

(4) I’m very thankful that while we’ve both been crazy busy, my wife and I have remained gainfully employed during this whole experience. We know some folks who haven’t been as fortunate in that capacity, and we genuinely thank our lucky goddamn stars that we’re still working and earning.

(3) Despite my grumblings at the top of this post about how we’re all getting on each others’ nerves, I feel entirely grateful to have been able to spend so much time with my family throughout this whole experience. Being that both of my kids are teenagers now, this would normally be an era wherein they’d be going well out of their way to spend as little time with their annoying parents as possible. Periodic lack of elbow-room notwithstanding, it’s been a lovely period of familial solidarity. I’m also crazy lucky to have the single greatest spouse in the world who puts up with my big-mouthed neuroses and abject idiocy.

(2) I am very grateful that no one in our immediate family has taken ill or worse during this period. I have a few friends who were infected a few months back, and another writer pal of mine who was just diagnosed with a positive. By all accounts, it’s a harrowing ride, and I am very thankful the bug hasn’t paid any of us a visit, as yet. That could all change of course, but so far, so good.

….but most of all, I am thankful that….

(1) DONALD TRUMP LOST THE ELECTION AND WILL SHORTLY BE VACATING THE WHITE HOUSE — POSSIBLY IN HANDCUFFS — ALONG WITH HIS SHITTY FAMILY AND HIS ABJECTLY FATUOUS ADMINISTRATION. IT’S OVER. HE LOST.

But back on the slightly less provocative subject of this coming Thanksgiving, my family and I will simply be celebrating this one at home here in the city. I will be on mashed-potato detail, being that it requires more blunt-force physical maintenance over nuanced culinary finesse.

My friend Dana posted the below on social media earlier this week, and I think it hits all the right notes.

Be safe. Be smarter and have a happy Thanksgiving.

So, I’m going to flip the Thanksgiving narrative, starting now…

...I am thrilled to eat Thanksgiving dinner with my immediate household this year.

We are going to cook the hell out of the meal.

We are going to get dressed up.

We are going to meet up with our families on Zoom.

We are going to talk about gratitude and all that feel-good Thanksgiving crap.

We are going to drink plenty.

We are going to play awesome music that makes us want to sing, and we will sing.

We are going to meet up with our friends on Zoom and play Cards Against Humanity and drink some more if we want.

We are going to eat dessert, and plenty of it.

We are going to go outside and look at the sky, howl at the moon, light a fire and think of all the people we love, looking at this same night sky on this same night.

We are going to shine thanks into every cell of our bodies, and out from there, impossible as it might seem.

We are going to celebrate like we don’t spend every hour of every day in the same household.

We are not going to regret, be sorry, apologize, be upset because we can’t do what we usually do.

We are going to thank the Hell out of this Thanksgiving.

That’s my declaration of Thanksgiving.

So, suck it, COVID. Suck it, 2020.

Thanks, But No Thanks ... giving

As Turkey Day looms, the CDC bluntly suggested that no one should travel this particular holiday. Is that a bummer? Certainly, but think about it. We essentially cancelled Halloween, right? No one went — or no one should have went — to parties, parades or trick or treating. It sucked, but it’s what had to happen. Thanksgiving? Same deal. Yeah, it’s no fun, but have your turkey at home and tell Aunt Jean you’ll see her next year. It’s not that complicated, nor is it really that much of a sacrifice.

But, no. If the last nine months have demonstrated anything, it’s that a vast swath of the American populace is stupid, obstinate, arrogant and weak, and determined to fuck it up for the rest of us. It’s poised to make the outbreak after Sturgis seem like a damp fart.

I, of course, would love to blithely assert that we here in New York have it all figured out, but of course we don’t. The infection rate is climbing here, too, which is wholly dispiriting. Schools are reverting back to all-remote learning plans and some small businesses already struggling to keep up with the changing topography are just throwing in the towel entirely. Restaurants across town that have been building, re-building and customizing their sidewalk sheds with heat lamps are feeling the two-pronged pinch of earlier closing-time mandates and the inevitable patron-scaring power of the winter chill, which will put the kibosh on just about any al-fresco dining scenario. When that option is curtailed, there will be more places shuttering for good.

Sure, there is good news on the vaccine front, but effective distribution of same will still take time. And with lame-duck Donald doing pretty much everything he can to sabotage any proactive attempts by the rightfully incoming administration to address the problem Trump has long neglected, downplayed and flat-out abandoned — at the expense of thousands of American lives, let’s remember — the prospects of “rounding the curve” any time soon are not exactly within reach. We still have a ways to go.

Bottom line: Things fucking suck. And they suck because lots of people didn’t listen. They should be listening now. But, some still won’t.

Stay home this Thanksgiving. Cook your own turkey and have a Zoom call with your far-flung relatives. That doesn’t mean you’re “living in fear,” it means you’re demonstrating compassionate consideration for your loved ones.

And wear a fucking mask.

Word on The Street

"New York is a Hell Hole..."

Don't believe the hype. 

Say Goodbye

Choke On It, Donald

Achieving Ecstasy in Emerald City

Lots of people kept their vinyl LPs and singles. I certainly did, even after the advent of the compact disc. Of course, I’ve also kept all my CD’s in the wake of them being rendered anachronistic by mp3s, the comparatively brief reign of the iPod and then streaming. Ask me if I care. You can take my physical music media when I’m dead, and not a nanosecond before.

But because I’m an extra-sad bastard, I also kept a healthy supply of my cassettes. I no longer have anything — or anything that works, anyway — to play them on, but there are several that I just simply refuse to part with. Sure, I ditched several workaday store-bought cassettes when I upgraded to compact disc. But I have stacks of cassettes that I consider otherwise irreplaceable. This is about one of those.

I managed to ruffle some feathers on social media, last night, when I made some cheekily uncharitable statements about Philadelphia’s myriad failings, prompted by the agonizing wait for Pennsylvania to tally their vote count in the election. I imagined my invocation of the Hooters might have tipped some people off that I wasn’t being entirely serious, but some folks started getting genuinely hot under the collar about it. Again, these are tense, divisive times.

In any case, in thinking about complementary things to say about the so-called City of Brotherly Love, i was reminded of a certain live-music venue, albeit one I never got to visit. More to the point, the venue in question wasn’t actually in Philadelphia, but rather just across the Delaware River in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. It’s unsurprisingly long gone, these days (razed after a fire in the mid-80’s), but once upon a time, this place was called Emerald City.

Now, despite some people’s claim that Philadelphia is New York City’s “sixth borough” (a notion that I’m sure irks the shit out of native Philadephians), I can count the number of times I made it to that city on one hand. I went once in 1994 to see Pink Floyd at Veteran’s Stadium, and twice in 1997 to see U2 at Franklin Field and, lastly, the Sisters of Mercy at the Electric Factory. That’s it. It’s not that I had anything against going to Philly. I just didn’t have enough of a reason to go, most of the time.

The only reason I had any clue about nearby Emerald City, however, was via a crucial bootleg cassette I bought from a guy named Greg during my freshman year of college.

Prior to going to Denison University in 1985, all I knew about XTC was “Senses Working Overtime,” which — while a sublimely catchy, well-crafted pop tune — was in somewhat stark contrast to the steady diet of Black Flag, Motorhead and Bauhaus I was otherwise concerning myself with, at the time. Once ensconced at Denison as a gloomy punk fan amidst a student body otherwise fixated with Ziggy Marley and The Grateful Dead, I was lucky enough to align myself with a tight gaggle of similarly inclined folks for whom tye-dyed t-shirts and interminable Jerry Garcia guitar solos had refreshingly little appeal.

Regularly convening with my friends in the dank ground floor of Crawford Hall (in a room half-ironically referred to as “Anarchy Hall”), I had my horizons forcibly broadened to music by bands previously beyond my narrow vista like The Velvet Underground, R.E.M., King Crimson, fIREHOSE, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Lime Spiders, Split Enz, The Modern Lovers, The Feelies, The Cramps, The Stooges, Television, NRBQ, The Tom Robinson Band, The Three O’Clock, The Smiths and — oh yes, wait for it — XTC.

On many a beery Friday and Saturday night did we in that room repeatedly crank the entireties of Chronic Town by R.E.M. and Black Sea by XTC before four or five of us set out to wobble around the campus in a drunken stupor, looking for trouble.

Besotted by tracks like the punkily rousing “Respectable Street” and the manic skank of “Living Through Another Cuba” from those high-volume evenings, I went out in search of more XTC, finding only a Portuguese edition (no joke) of the English Settlement cassette in our campus bookstore. Then, I happened upon Greg, a somewhat standoffish cat who lived downstairs from me in Huffman Hall. Greg and I didn’t have much in common, but he had a sideline business in buying and trading bootleg cassettes. Most of it was crap I wouldn’t play at a dog like Van Morrison and the like, but he did have one cassette I snapped up and bought from him without hearing a note off of it. It was XTC recorded a year earlier in Philadelphia on the tour for Black Sea. I brought that cassette with me to the next Friday night meet-up in “Anarchy Hall” and I was practically treated like the returning prodigal son. The fatted calf was verily slain and that much-loved tape was put into maddeningly regular rotation for our Friday/Saturday beer summits.

Originally broadcast on Philadelphia rock station 93.3 WMMR, the recording of XTC at Emerald City was a revelation. Pairing the adrenalized sprint of punk with irrepressible pop hooks and choppy, clanging guitars, it was high-energy music that was propulsive and frenetic, but more clever and jubilant than angry and nihilistic. In short order, I became an ardent fan of the band and followed them into their less exuberant, “bucolic” phase. But I’ll always adore this particular era of the band.

I always wondered what the interior of Emerald City looked like, speculating if it was more of a proper theatre or a conventional rock club. I pictured a utopian sort of scene where punks and rudeboys and hip-hoppers and hardcore kids and goths and New Wave babes and all stripes in between would mix and mingle, not unlike the then-about-to-shutter Danceteria back home in New York City. That might totally have been a fanciful projection, but it made me enjoy the listening experience of that cassette all the more. Some cursory googling revealed an ad for the venue that might reflect the same performance by XTC (see above). Shortly after that gig, bands like The Plasmatics and Joe Jackson played, lending credence to my image of the place. Who knows, though…. maybe it was a shithole?

Anyway, thirty-five years later, the footprint of Emerald City now plays host to a Subaru dealership. XTC put out several more albums before going into hibernation after 2000’s Wasp Star. I ended up finding a copy of the Emerald City recording on disc titled Fab Foursome in Philly several years back, but you don’t need to hunt that down. The entirety of it is on YouTube.

Hear it below...

The Day After

Author, political commentator and tight-black t-shirt enthusiast Thomas Friedman was on one cable news network or another last week, and made a cogent point. As awful as Trump’s first term in office was, it’s his second term that would do the most damage. The world can overlook his first four years and chalk it up as a mistake. Every nation elects an outlier, sooner or later. But by RE-electing him, we would be sending a message to the rest of the world that we are collectively just fine with what the Trump Administration has been doing for the past four years – and that would effectively seal off the United States’ former status as a global leader.

Ever after last night’s tumult, I realize it’s still early in the process, and there are millions of votes left to count, but the fact that it wasn’t a blue landslide speaks volumes.

To paraphrase what MSNBC’s Joy Reid observed, those of us that were hoping for a cleansing repudiation of Trump’s myriad atrocities – his coddling of white supremacists, his abjectly inept and duplicitous mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, his draconian immigration policies, his litany of petty put-downs, his demonization of the free press, his constant and knowing stream of dishonesty, etc. – WE ARE NOT GETTING THAT. Surely, Biden might still make it to the finish line before Trump in the next couple of days, but that much-sought-after REBUKE of Trumpism is no longer on the menu, which means a vast swathe of the American electorate is perfectly fine with all that. That, to me, is fucking sickening and shameful.

Let’s put that in sharper perspective, shall we? According to the tally of the popular vote as of this very moment... 67,041,757 people are evidently perfectly jazzed-up for Trump go ahead and fire Dr. Fauci and continue spiraling -- without any semblance of an actionable, realistic, science-based plan -- into the gaping jaws of the pandemic. Unpack your bags and get comfortable, COVID-19, … it looks like you might be staying here for good.

Never mind it not being a landslide – it’s currently a narrow, practically neck-and-neck contest. The fact that it’s THIS FUCKING CLOSE has already confirmed that a frankly astonishing amount of Americans are simply A-O-FUCKING-KAY with everything Trump has done, said, threatened, implied, promised and fucking lied about.

Even if Biden wins, we have missed the mark in serving out to Trump what he deserves and what was supposed to happen. He needed be shown up, toppled and humiliated.

We’ve already failed, there.

November 2

There’s been a lot of speculative chatter in the press and on social media about the very real possibilities of violent unrest in response to whatever transpires tomorrow — Election Day.

Late last week, I noticed a slew of businesses in my neighborhood — Staples, Sweetgreens, Warehouse Wines & Liquors and …er… The Nutella Cafe — all boarding up their exteriors, presumably in anticipation of the same kind of looting, vandalism and rioting that transpired back in June in the wake of revelations about the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. While I understand that many already-struggling businesses really took a hit during that period — and really don’t want to have to go through it again — I have a hard time imagining the sort of insurrection that would prompt the populace to take out their ire on the Nutella Cafe, regardless of who is (and/or isn’t) declared our next president. That just seems a bit paranoid and over-compensatory to me, but maybe I’m being fancifully naive.

It feels disingenuous to me try to quantify the proper responses to these respective events. The brazen brutality blithely meted out to a defenseless black man by a white policeman— on fucking camera, no less — that resulted in his death ... and the hotly anticipated outcome of probably the most supercharged election of United States history are surely both triggering scenarios, but they ultimately speak to totally different parts of the brain.

The demonstrations and outbursts this past summer were viscerally emotional reactions to YET ANOTHER racially charged diminishment of a black man’s basic human rights, singularly amplifying that for all our alleged progress as a civilized society, there is still much to be done. The ensuing unrest spoke to lifetimes of prejudice, inequity and oppression. George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were just two more names in an impossibly long list of victims that dates back centuries. Why those murders sparked outrage should not be a mystery to you.

Meanwhile, regardless of what the Trump Administration might have up their sleeves, there was always going to be an election tomorrow. Fraught or not, for many of us, since the day Trump was sworn into office, the clock has been counting down to tomorrow, and we have barely been able to conceal our zeal to get to this day and vote his evil ass out out. No matter how agitated all parties concerned are, this is still part of a quasi-orderly, centuries-old process.

But in terms of reactions to how it all plays out, … I don’t quite know what we’re all expecting.

For a start, while I am hoping for a landslide referendum that eliminates all possible doubt that Trump has lost the office, I fully realize that we may not get that. I also suspect we probably won’t get a decisive answer for days — or even weeks — after the fact.

Should that be the case, I fully expect that Trump will pull out all the stops to obfuscate and delegitimize the ballot count via whatever means are at his disposal. He probably won’t even be subtle about it. 

At that possible stage of proceedings, I sincerely hope all my similarly-inclined friends on every strata of the Left realize that wanton violence will only fuel Trump’s narrative. Be angry. Be outraged, surely — but be focussed. Keep your shit together.

Now, if the inverse occurs, and Trump is indeed officially and legally ousted from the presidency, should we expect violence from the Right? 

That's the big question. Will hordes of MAGA-hatted Proud Boys flood into New York City like marauding Orcs from a Peter Jackson film? Will the forces of QAnon and Antifa clash in the streets like an apocalyptic re-boot of "The Warriors"?

Personally speaking, I firmly believe Donald Trump is a lying, indefensible and proudly ignorant scumbag who has no clue what he’s doing. I’m getting up tomorrow morning just as the polls open at 6AM and am planning to cast my vote to remove him from the Oval Office.

We’ll see what happens after that.

Goodbye to the Black & White Bar

It’s been a real week of loss for my neighborhood. First came word that the Strand Bookstore was in trouble, which prompted me to take the wife and kids over there for a book-buying bonanza. Then came word that Astor Place Hairstylists was shutting down, which prompted my son to jog over and get one more trim from our favorite cutter Speedy. Then I noticed that Otto, Mario Battali’s eatery in the ground floor of 1 Fifth Avenue had given up the struggle and put a “FOR LEASE” sign in its window. Granted, Battali turned out to be a grabby schweinhund during the #MeToo era, but he recused himself from the operation in 2015. I cannot count how many great meals my family and I had in that space. We are heartbroken to see it go.

This weekend, after yet another trek around the East Village with no particular destination in mind, I was heading back home up East 10th Street. The strip in question has already lost a few businesses to the pandemic, notably the gimmicky Ikinari Steak House, City of Saints Coffee and Turntable Lab. While my kids are very happy that Sundaes & Cones is still hanging on, I was crestfallen to spot yesterday that Jesse Malin’s Black & White Bar is no more. I stood in front of its exterior with mouth agape. The interior has been gutted, and so have I.

I’m told they are “moving,” but there is no destination as yet.

I logged many a happy evening in the dark confines of the Black & White Bar. Subtle, low-key, comfortable and owned and operated by afore-cited NYC punk veteran Jesse Malin, the Black & White Bar was always a perfect destination. Somewhere, I have an envelope of photographs dating back to about 2003 of myself in the company of various members of Killing Joke’s road crew and a couple of erstwhile SWANS being very decidedly drunk within the intimate watering hole.

I will miss it more than I can put into words.

All that was left of it this morning...