Flaming Pablum

Summer 2020

"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...

Random Pics Taking Up Space on My Desktop

You're welcome...

 

Developing The Damage

As a fan of both their respective bands — Japan and King Crimson — I was certainly aware of David Sylvian and Robert Fripp’s collaboration in the early 90’s, which resulted in two albums, The First Day and the live Damage, but didn’t really give it a lot of thought until discovering the title track off the latter several years later.

As a brooding slice of acute melancholy, “Damage” could be construed as slavishly overwrought, but still imbued with a stirring beauty, if you’re in the right mood. To my ears, it owed more to Sylvian’s post-Japan project, Rain Tree Crow than to Fripp’s exhaustive body of work.

In any case, some years after that, I stumbled upon the clip below, which I assumed was an official video for the song — its stark visuals seamlessly meshing with the sound and sentiment of the track in question.

Again, one might consider it a tad heavy-handed but also pretty compelling, should you be in the right frame of mind.

Well, as it turned out, that wasn’t an official video at all, but rather the result of someone’s inventive splicing, the finished product working remarkably well, considering the complete disparity of the source material.

The visuals come from "Le Révélateur,” an experimental — and ostensibly silent — film from 1968 by French director Philippe Garrel. Cinema website MUBI synopsizes the film….

In the words of Bernadette Lafont, who stars in the film with Laurent Terzieff, “a couple and their child flee in the face of an unknown but still considerable menace… In a desolate landscape, full of humidity and humiliation, we see the weakest of beings stage his revolt: a child.”

Here’s a fragment of the original…

They Filmed Bands

Some of you might remember a post or two from 2017 wherein I discussed stumbling upon the video archives of one director Charles Libin, a trailblazer in the field of music video, being one of the first bona fide veejays. For a while, there were several of his clips on YouTube, showcasing a trove of period-specific footage of live music and conceptual video. Check out this post for more details, although the videos themselves are no longer embedded therein.

Well, recently, the daughter of Mr. Libin reached out to me with something really cool. Here’s what she had to say…

I’d love to share with you Charles Libin (my dad) and Paul Cameron’s series WE FILM BANDS. Libin+Cameron made conceptual music videos and shot live punk, post-punk, and no wave performances by iconic bands in the 1980s, many of which have never been seen. Fortuitously, I also began directing in my early twenties, the same age my dad and Paul were when they made these videos. In my music video for Princess Nokia’s Green Line, I included their footage of the Bronx breakdancing crew Floor Masters, from their Melon video After the Death.

We felt that, in celebration of the 40 year anniversary, their collection would be a cool discovery for people stuck in their homes.

And here’s a bit more info from the press release:

On March 3, 1979, Charles Libin and Paul Cameron gathered fellow film students from SUNY Purchase and shot the B-52s’ now legendary performance of Rock Lobster at the Hurrah nightclub in NYC. Libin+Cameron’s filming of the B-52s kicked off a series of live performances they captured, including The Cure's first NYC appearance, Gang of Four, Suicide, Polyrock, James White (aka James Chance) & The Blacks), Debbie Harry, Defunkt, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Kid Creole & The Coconuts, The Plastics, and other ground-breaking bands. Libin+Cameron designed and programmed an immersive video experience with monitors throughout Hurrah. “A fair-haired, soft spoken 22-year old named Charles Libin is credited as the first veejay.” – Daily News, Sept 4, 1981

Friggin’ cool, right?

Anyway, you can check out all this stuff on WE FILMED BANDS.

Satie Night Fever

As time goes by, I’m often more intrigued to discover older music I’d never previously known about, heard of, listened to or appreciated before more than discovering genuinely new music, as, y’know, “young people…..HURRUMPH!”.

Case in point, what I credibly know about French avant-garde composers from the late 19th century really ain’t much. But, strangely — two different musicians whose tastes I completely respect and admire — namely Michael Gira of SWANS and my friend Tod Ashley of Firewater/Cop Shoot Cop — both posted bits of music by one Erik Satie on Facebook, recently, and while absolutely nothing like the sonic outpourings of either of those gents, I’m finding it entirely compelling and contemplative stuff.

Stick with it long enough, and your’e bound to recognize certain passages (as I’m dead sure whole portions of this have been used in myriad films). It’s lovely, stirring music.

If you're not already familiar, see if you agree.

ADDENDUM: I was correct. Satie's music has been featured in several films, among them "My Diner With Andre," "Man on Wire," "Being There," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and a few others.

Back to The Park

An inventive stitching-together of scenes from various films for those of you, like myself, missing carefree days in the verdant wilds of Central Park.

Be safe. Be responsible. Enjoy.

The Street Light

Pretentious Preamble:

There’s a unique sort of trope director David Lynch regularly employs throughout his work that’s become one of his signature moves, if you will. With his inimitable blend of intangible nuance, Lynch manages to imbue certain, otherwise banal, inanimate objects with a heightened degree of sinister significance. Through Lynch’s lens, innocuous items like electrical sockets, radiators and blinking traffic lights take on an inexplicable aura of enigmatic menace. While there’s nothing inherently scary about the images in questions, Lynch -- through the power of his elliptical narratives and his particular use of light, sound and music -- is brilliantly able to assign each with powerful implications of something deeper, something unseen and, usually, something unspeakably terrifying. It’d probably be a tired cliche if he didn’t pull it off so well.

Perhaps I’ve just watched too many David Lynch films.

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It’s the beginning of our sixth week out here at my mother’s house in Quogue. Time has moved strangely, during this unprecedented period. The days can be very long, but the weeks fly by. The family has already gone through several phases — stir-craziness, boredom, agitation, fatigue, etc. While we’re settled into a routine, it still feels far from normal, which is apt, because nothing about this is situation is normal.

My mother moved into this house in 1996, I believe, after she sold both her previous cottage and her Manhattan apartment, bought this bigger place and made Quogue her permanent residence. I met my wife only a couple of years after mom got this house, and we’ve been coming out here in the summers and on holidays ever since. Our children have grown up running up and down these stairs and playing in the backyard.

That’s one of the reasons this period feels so alien. We normally just associate this house with vacation time and with my mom. Mom’s not here — she’s hunkered down in Florida — and this is no vacation. There’s a cognitive dissonance in trying to go about the remote workday while in a place normally designated as a space to get away from all that.

But there’s another thing about this stay that feels different, an element I’d either never noticed before, or that possibly wasn’t there.

The street light on the telephone pole across the street.

I’m pretty sure the pole has been there forever, but I’ve only recently noticed the street light. It’s practically invisible by day … something you’d never look twice at. But, at night, when the darkness falls on Quogue like a heavy, impenetrably black quilt, it take on a wholly different form.

Maybe the light was only recently installed or repaired, but it now cuts through the dark in an assertive manner. When you pass by it, in the late evenings, from the many windows that face the street, it seems strangely magnified — a bright beacon in the gloom. When we turn off all the lights at the end of the night, the aura of the street light floods into the living room, and all eyes are drawn to it like insects to a flame.

On the one hand, we should appreciate the street light. My mom lives on an otherwise very dark, quiet strip, and it certainly provides enough illumination to allow for better vision in the dark. But, by the same token, there’s just something …. odd about it.

Like some sort of unblinking sentinel, it seems to be waiting for something. It’s like some persistent reminder of an unshared secret. Why is it …. there? Did someone ask for it? Did something happen here that warrants such a light? What has it seen?

What does it know?

When I open the front door at look at it in the dark, the shine it emits seems to jump back across the lawn again, not quite as brilliant as when viewed from inside our house. But it keeps its fixed gaze. What does it want?

Quogue isn’t a loud town. Sure, on certain summer nights, you’ll hear people having the odd backyard barbecue, or you’ll hear cars gunning their engines on nearby Montauk Highway, but it’s mostly quite tranquil. In the dead of night, you can hear the trains weave through the pine barrens north of the highway, blowing their ghostly whistles in the dark. But, most of the time, it’s whisper quiet.

As such, the slightest creak, snap or settling of the house can stir me from sleep. My daughter sleeps downstairs in her own room here, a luxury compared to the tiny room she shares with her little brother back in the city. Now a 16 year old, she’s less inclined to go to bed early, so I’ll frequently hear her puttering around in the kitchen or giggling as she texts with friends back home. I thought I’d heard her knock something over, the other night, which had me out of bed like a shot, and creeping down the stairs to discover her fast asleep and nothing out of place. That said, she’d left the kitchen light on. I flicked that off and went back towards the stairs in the living room.

I tried not to look at it, as I knew it would fire the usual synapses and get me thinking about it all over again, but the cold glow of the street light outside was visually inescapable. I could not look away.

It looked like a spotlight shining on a stage awaiting someone. I turned and adjourned upstairs again, unable to shake the feeling that one night, I’ll see someone standing, …. and waiting … under that light.

Big City Survey: Part II

As I mentioned in the first part, I started answering the individual questions of this survey well over a month ago — back before life as we all knew it came to a grinding halt. As such, the tone of the answers below may be a bit different from the first batch.

Once again, I am not in the city in question, at the moment. About three weeks back, the wife, kids and I took up my family’s kind offer to decamp to my mother’s empty house out on Long Island. Given the limited space of our Manhattan apartment — which was already feeling tiny well before this crisis hit, even after some “creative" renovations — the spiraling uncertainties and the growing predictions of a looming, unstoppable uptick in COVID-19 cases — I felt it was prudent to get my family out of what has since become, by all reports, an unspeakable tragedy — one that we could have collectively been better prepared for had Trump and the rest of his clown car of an administration not dismantled the Nation Security Council’s pandemic response team in May of 2018. But, what’s done is done. There are now coronavirus-treatment tents on Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park and makeshift morgues in the streets. There is continued talk of temporarily burying COVID-19 victims in trenches in city parks.

Out here in Quogue, I would take solace in the notion that we’ve now been out of the city long enough for the incubation period — had we been infected before we left and unwittingly brought the virus with us — to have flowered into sickness by now, and that hasn’t happened. We are all still, to our knowledge, fully healthy. But, that, too, is speculative. We could very well have been infected and continue to be asymptomatic. As such, we are staying inside, washing our hands frequently and furiously after supply missions and, now, covering our noses and mouths when we have to do those runs. Most of all, we’re staying indoors and maintaining physical distance with others in accordance with that elusive goal of flattening the curve. But I cannot — and will not — complain.

I am profoundly privileged to have gotten out, but I miss my city, and I sorely fear for my friends, family and countless independent local concerns still there. I worry constantly about what happens next. As do we all.

As such, here’s the second half of the survey that celebrates my home town.

Favorite Book Shop:
Much as with my favorite record & CD shops, New York’s once great network of small, independent bookstores has also been largely vanquished by the advent of technological convenience. Time was when I would have answered this question with Shakespeare & Company at 716 Broadway, but that closed a few years back and is now a Foot Locker (`cos, y’know … we needed another place to buy expensive sneakers). That was an amazing bookshop, as I discussed here, but it’s gone now. As such, my fallback position is the mighty Strand on Broadway at East 12th Street. A huge, cavernous, multi-tiered hive of all sorts of literature, it is absolutely essential and unfuckwithable.

Favorite Music Shop:
I have already devoted entirely too many posts to lost record & CD shops. It’s a subject that largely defines this stupid weblog. As such, I’ll devote this answer solely to what remans … which regrettably isn’t very much. If I’m hard-pressed to find a specific disc, my first inclination, these days, is to head to Rough Trade in Williamsburg, which has a sprawling and enviable supply of great music of all stripes and is staffed by knowledgable folks (like my good friend Miles). Failing that, in Manhattan, there is always Generation Records on Thompson Street, but their selection is growing somewhat thin, of late. I’m also still quite fond of Downtown Music Gallery down on Monroe Street, in a sleepy patch of Chinatown, but that’s exclusively for deeply esoteric stuff. With regards to all three of these businesses, I have grave concerns about their well-being in the wake of this pandemic.

Favorite Dive Bar:
There remains a great deal of debate about what genuinely constitutes a proper “dive bar,” but I’ll say this — if the bar you’re in has a flatscreen television, it’s not a dive bar. Dive bars are generally dark, decrepit, a little scary and filled with drinkers for whom the clock has little or no importance. And make no mistake — dive bars aren't “punk bars.” Sure, there are plenty of so-called punk bars, but they’re usually fairly stylized, arty and endeavor to create a specific atmosphere (and many try way too hard, in this capacity). Proper dive bars don’t cater to that. There are loads of seedy, neighborhood bars, but that doesn’t make them dives. Proper dive bars don’t cater to being neighborhoody or kitschy or themey. They’re there to profit from despair, not cultivate character. Proper dive bars may indeed serve food, but chances are you don’t want to eat it. Dive bars are purely function over form — places wherein to get blotto drunk on the cheap to help you forget the shittiest of life’s circumstances. There are no proper dive bars in my neighborhood, anymore. None. Being that less and less is genuinely cheap in Manhattan, there are fewer and fewer of these joints. Dive bars don’t exist in nice neighborhoods. They perch on the fringes of civilization. I used to know a couple of bona fide dives on 8th and 9th avenues, where desperately depressed mailmen would drink themselves blind, but I don’t know if they’re still there. The Savoy, tucked behind Port Authority, was certainly one of them, but that’s changed hands a few times since I was last there in the mid-90s. Billymark’s West on West 28th & 9th Avenue was similarly grim, but the last time I looked, it was a good deal more inviting.

Favorite Irish Bar:
My favorite is probably The Scratcher on East 5th Street. Genuinely Irish, but without any cartoonishly cloying blarney aesthetic. Being half-Irish, I’m allowed to say shit like that.

Favorite Date Bar:
Well, I’ve been married for about twenty years, now, so haven’t really been on any dates, recently. When we were dating, the wife and I were quite fond of Johnny’s Bar on Greenwich Avenue, especially if we could sit in the front window. If you’re feeling flush, I might also suggest taking your date to the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, which has astounding atmosphere (but very pricey drinks). Angel’s Share on Stuyvesant Street (amazingly still there) was also a great spot for dates, especially in that it was hard to find, which made it that much cooler.

Favorite Sports Bar:
Being that I generally don’t give one single crap about sports, I really don’t have one. If I’m at a sports bar, you’re bound to find me at the jukebox, about to piss off several patrons who are otherwise trying to pay attention to their precious ball games.

Favorite Park:
As much as I love Washington Square Park and Tompkins Square Park and Riverside Park, there is only one — 1 — answer for this. Any answer other than Central Park is moot.

Favorite Street:
I have a few, but they’re favorites for different reasons. I love Courtlandt Alley for its atmosphere, vibe and history. I love 13th Street between 6th & 7th Avenues for its overall look and feel. I love my own street, because I live on it.

Favorite Live Music Venue:
I feel like I’m repeating myself, but most of my favorite live music venues are gone. If you’re curious what they might have been, just peruse back under the “Vanished Venues” category. In terms of live music venues that — as of, say, February — that were still in operation, I’d say I’m still quite fond of the Bowery Ballroom. Irving Plaza is reportedly coming back, or at least was before all this bullshit went down. I have not been the re-opened Webster Hall, as yet, so jury’s still out on that, but the building certainly still carries a ton of resonance.

Favorite Movie Theatre:
I love the Quad Cinemas on West 13th Street. Kind of the very last of its kind.

Favorite New York Movie:
Without a moment’s hesitation, “After Hours.” Second place would be “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” the original version from 1974.

Favorite Song About New York:
I could make whole playlists of favorite songs about New York, so picking one is not easy feat. Today, I’m going to say “Manhattan” by Cat Power, but that could change in a half an hour.

Favorite Quiet Place in New York:
Maybe the Conservatory Gardens on Upper Fifth Avenue.

Favorite New York Secret:
If I disclosed that here, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore.