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.

Looking for the Lost Luncheonette

Back in June, I posted a vaguely convoluted post about a gig poster from one of the final shows at The Cooler. In an attempt to tie several disparate elements together, I wrote this paragraph:

As it happened, that weird Ukranian disco was actually a weird Bulgarian disco called Mehanata. You can see snippets of the interior of that place in the video for “Start Wearing Purple” by Gogol Bordello. Gogol Bordello, incidentally, then counted guitarist Eugene Kaplan in its ranks, although Eugene also played for both Firewater and Botanica. Mehanata, meanwhile, was located directly over the former location of Dave’s Luncheonette, a fabled diner for the Mudd Club set which briefly made a cameo in the video for “Jukebox Baby" by Alan Vega of Suicide. See? It’s all related

I invariably patted myself on the back for connecting all those dots. But, alas, I had one detail wrong.

While it’s completely true that Mehanata then occupied the same building as the former Dave’s Luncheonette, the fabled all-night diner that was indeed a regular haunt of the Mudd Club crowd, the diner depicted in Alan Vega’s “Jukebox Baby” was not, in fact Dave’s. How do I know that? Well, for a start, let’s watch that video again.

How do I know that’s not Dave’s? Well, on one Facbook group I’m a member of, someone posted the below photograph of mid-80’s British pop combo, JoBoxers, standing manfully in front of Dave’s. See that picture below.

Okay, so on both the north-facing facade (“Luncheonette”) and westerly-facing facade (“Restaurant”) of Dave’s, the neon signage is very distinctive. Look again at the eatery Vega’s in, and you get totally different signage — much less ornate.

Put simply, it’s not the same place. But it still looked so familiar.

And then it hit me.

The luncheonette Vega’s depicted in is the same luncheonette depicted on the sleeve of the first 8 Eyed Spy record.

…..which begs the question: Where is that luncheonette? Does it even exist anymore? 

Have at it, sleuths. 

Just a Moment, Please...

Apologies for the lull in activity here. I’m having some persistent trouble with broken images on the page, which probably vexes me more than it does you. But I’m disinclined to put more stuff up if it’s not going to look as it should.

 

Once that issue is fixed, it’ll be back to business as usual.

 

Thanks for your patience & understanding,

- The Management

Martin Says

The first time I ever saw Martin Atkins was probably via the video for Public Image Ltd.’s “Bad Life,” wherein he was fleetingly depicted dancing disjointedly behind John Lydon’s insistent mugging. Who he was in the grand scheme of things, at the time, probably didn’t occur to me, as by that point, PiL had basically become the John Lydon show, despite the fact that Atkins had essentially become the main musical force behind the operation in the wake of the inevitably acrimonious departures of PiL alumni Jeanette Lee, Keith LeVene, Jah Wobble and Jim Walker. Shortly after that, Atkins and Lydon hastily assembled a new iteration of the band and toured Japan, which spawned their perfunctorily titled live album, Live in Tokyo.

While both that particular line-up of the band and the ensuing live album were roundly derided by music critics and Public Image acolytes alike — not to mention the band themselves — Live in Tokyo was something of a crucial release for me. I have very vivid memories of a laborious car trip to the Berkshires with a cousin one snowy January weekend, and we only had two cassettes — one was my “well-loved” (read: battered) copy of Live in Tokyo, and the other was my cousin’s incongruous selection, Tales from The Topographic Ocean by proggy stalwarts, Yes, a fractious sonic dichotomy to be sure (although, somewhat ironically, original PiL guitarist Keith LeVene is purportedly a massive Yes fan). To be fair, I, too, am a sizable Yes fan, but decidedly not of that particularly ponderous record. My repeated airings of PiL’s scathing romp through “Analisa” — to say nothing of my insistence on singing along — did little to make the trip any smoother.

Some time after that, Martin Atkins also jumped ship from the ranks of Public Image Ltd., joining a growingly august legion of musicians who found working in close proximity with John Lydon an untenable scenario. Apart from a single or two by his own band, Brian Brain, Martin Atkins didn’t pop back onto my radar until news broke that he was joining my favorite band, Killing Joke. Despite having previously atrophied into a duo of vocalist Jaz Coleman and guitarist Geordie Walker for the divisive Outside the Gate, Killing Joke had geared up for a bracing return to their feral former sound and recruited Atkins to replace the burly rhythmic battery of Big Paul Ferguson. While Martin’s frenetic drumming style was markedly different from Ferguson’s tribal whallop, the injection of the PiL veteran’s aggressive approach and manic energy reinvigorated Killing Joke, and the ensuing recorded results remain some of the band’s finest work.

I just realized that this post is turning into a sprawling re-telling to the great man's bio, which is not what I intended it to be. I actually interviewed Martin a couple of times (the first detailed here), and went onto meet him in Killing Joke circles over the years. He's an exceptionally knowledgable and affable gent. In case you're curious as to what he did after his tenure in Killing Joke, let me wrap that up by saying he formed several impactful bands like Murder Inc., Pigface and The Damage Manual, when not lending his percussive prowess to bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails. 

In any case, Martin just recently hooked up with my comrade Drew Stone of New York Hardcore Chronicles fame and had an amazing and informative chat this afternoon, touching on much of the above and so much more. Stick around for the anecdote about a physical altercation with GG Allin. 

Check it out below!!!

"New York is a Hell Hole..."

Don't believe the hype. 

Pie in The Face: Post-Election Edition

Say Goodbye

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...

Reason & Wrath Over Right-Wing Rotten

It’s the morning after this year’s frankly anemic and depressing Halloween (no trick or treating, no parades, no parties, etc.), and I found myself up at what was going be 8:00 am but turned into 7:00 am due to Daylight Savings. As such, I decided to go for an early-AM walk.

Standing at my front door, I did something of a mental coin-toss and decided to head east, serpentining my way through quiet East Village streets until I reached Avenue C, and then meandering back. While detritus from the last night’s muted festivities were indeed evident, comparatively speaking it might has well have been any other Saturday night. St. Marks Place, meanwhile, is looking its most anarchic in a long time, between hastily assembled al-fresco-dining sheds, shuttered age-old businesses like Gem Spa and Khyber Pass and a robust array of blithely-strewn garbage. I happened to glance up the stoop at the doorway of Search & Destroy as I was heading back west, and noticed a small detail.

I honestly don’t know how often they formally redecorate their exterior, if ever, but only scant weeks ago, in the porthole-like window in the center of their door had been Ray Stevenson’s iconic photograph of Johnny Rotten, glaring with signature punk insouciance under the legend “FUCK YOU, CORONA.”

A little under a month later, however, Johnny’s gone, replaced by the similarly over-rhapsodized mug of his late comrade, Sid Vicious.

I know, I know … big friggin' whoop.

But, I couldn’t help wondering. Might this be in response to John Lydon’s recent espousals of Trump that I’ve been repeatedly wringing my hands about?

I have a couple of regular readers who sounded off mightily on this point, incredulous that, in my last two posts on the subject, I was allegedly treating Lydon/Rotten’s latest stream of half-baked humbug  -- especially his quips arguably diminishing the impact of COVID-19 -- with kid gloves and not asserting the same burnt bridge policy I applied to, say, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine after he asserted from a stage somewhere to a baying audience that Obama orchestrated the mass shootings during his administration as an excuse to ramp up gun control. Deal-breaking comments, to be sure.

With Lydon, it’s just more complicated. Beyond the seemingly obvious irony and neck-snapping reversals of the guy who penned “Anarchy In The UK” suddenly chugalugging the Kool-Aid of a “law & order”-fixated administration Hell-bent on lining the pockets of the corporate elite, amplifying racial divide, overturning basic human rights, disenfranchising immigrants, manifesting a draconian overhaul of our Supreme Court and basically dismantling our democracy, I’m just wondering if John’s own once-razor-sharp powers of cognition are in decline. I’m just having a very hard time reconciling his lapses in judgement.

Actually, the real reason for this post is that quite recently, I stumbled upon an outtake from my friend Drew Stone’s excellent film, “Who The Fuck Is That Guy?,” an absolutely amazing documentary about storied A&R exec Michael Alago. It is fucking required viewing. In any case, given Alago’s longtime association with John Lydon, Stone sought him out as a contributor fo the film. Lydon — always with something to say — happily obliged with typical aplomb.

In the clip below, however, Stone got Lydon talking about his tenure living over on the western fringes of Chelsea in New York City in the 80s — a topic near and dear to this blog’s heart. He also takes some enjoyable potshots at NYU and Rudy Giuliani.

Listening to the lucid and reasonable John Lydon here reinforces my stated suspicions above, although that’s ultimately all just projection. Who knows what’s a wind-up anymore?

Anyway, enjoy. To be continued.

Farewell, Sean Connery

I am reminded of two things, this morning. The first is my very first time within the hallowed halls of Radio City Music Hall circa 1975, when my mother brought me to see “The Wind & The Lion,” featuring Sean Connery as the Great Raisuli, a swashbuckling North African brigand with an inexplicable Scottish accent.

The second is countless evenings in the mid-90s at the TIME Magazine News Desk -- just across the street from Radio City -- in the company of my colleagues John Flowers and Mitch Frank. When broken news wasn’t in need of mending, John, Mitch and I had developed a persistent habit of reciting the complex lyrics of contemporary hip-hop in the reverently studied voice of the great Sean Connery. I don’t believe I have laughed so hard before or since.

Rest in Peace, OO7. You are truly the man now, dawg.