I don't believe he spoke a single line of dialogue, and he basically had his ass handed to him entirely by foul-mouthed Ajax, but I was sad to learn that veteran stuntman Jery Hewitt -- who played the lead representative of the Baseball Furies in Walter Hill's 1979 urban combat epic, "The Warriors" -- just passed away.
I've written about my love for "The Warriors" a few times here (find those links here), but suffice to say, if you are of a certain age, let alone a New Yorker, it's a pivotal film for a lot of people.
Here's Hewitt's big scene on the mean streets of the Upper West Side. Pour one out for the great man.
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 twoposts 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?
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.
I can’t remember where I was, who I was with or how I old I was when I saw it, but I remember watching a film on television -– a black-&-white mystery, possibly “noir” -– involving a protagonist haunted by a recurring nightmare or vision. In that mysterious scenario, he’s in some clandestine chamber that holds some horrible secret –- a murder, perhaps? The thing that makes it distinctive, however, is that there is music playing -– a strange, lulling, creepy dirge. Again, the protagonist is driven to distraction by this eerie vision, but cannot connect the dots as to where it happened or its significance.
Later in the film, he's at some social function, and there is music playing via an old-time record player. At one pivotal point, a woman near that turntable bumps into it with her elbow, inadvertently changing the speed of the turntable to a slower revolution-per-minute, like dropping from 45 to 33 1/3. When she does this, the music playing suddenly replicates the creepy music in the protagonist’s recurring vision, and he becomes convinced that the clandestine chamber with the horrible secret is immediately nearby.
So, yeah, my quest was to divine the name of that film. A cinephile friend of mine suggested posting the link and the query on Kindertrauma, a pop culture blog devoted to arcane horror cinema, so I did that. I was not at all expecting anyone to respond. I figured it would be one of those things that I’d never figure out.
Until today...
A reader named Lisa H. wrote in and had this to say…
Hey, I read your 2019 post on Kindertrauma. I believe the film is "Nightmare" (1956). (Your description sounded so intriguing I got obsessed looking for it :-) )
Duly intrigued, I took to Wikipedia, and stumbled upon this telling descriptor of the plot:
"Nightmare" is a 1956 American film noir crime film directed by Maxwell Shane starring Edward G. Robinson, Kevin McCarthy and Connie Russell. The story is based on a novel by William Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich). The book also became a 1947 film, "Fear in the Night," made by the same writer-director. "Nightmare" had been the original title of "Fear in the Night."
PLOT: New Orleans big band clarinetist Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy) has a nightmare in which he sees himself in a mirrored room, killing a man, while in the background, haunting dirge-like music plays. He awakens to find blood on himself, bruises on his neck, and a key from the dream in his hand. Grayson goes to his brother-in-law, police detective Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson), about the problem but is dismissed. Later, the two men go on a picnic in the country with Grayson's girlfriend and sister. Grayson leads them to an empty house, the house of his dream, when it begins to rain. They find a record player, switch it on, and a catchy jazzy tune begins to play. While dancing, Grayson's girlfriend bumps into the record player, changing the speed. Slowed down, the dance music becomes the tune from the nightmare. They are then shocked to see that the house has a mirrored room just like in Grayson's dream. After it is found out that a murder did indeed take place, Grayson becomes Bressard's number one suspect.
It goes on from there. I don’t want to ruin it for you further, should you be intrigued enough to track it down.
In any event, YES! THIS IS THE FILM! I clicked on over to YouTube, and the film can be seen in its entirety there, including the turntable scene I first spoke of (from whence the screen grab at the top of this post comes from).
So, there you have it. Mystery solved!!! Thanks to Lisa H. and Kindertrauma for settling this.
Here’s the film. Check out the opening sequence, featuring the recurring nightmare in question….
Here’s a curious artifact, although many will doubtlessly find it depressing and abhorrent.
I’ve spoken about transgressive filmmaker/photographer Richard Kern a bunch of times here (notably here, here and here), but he was a big pal and creative contemporary of the Cop Shoot Cop guys, as well as a primary figure in the Cinema of Transgression scene and former member of The Black Snakes. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, as I said on those posts, please explore it with discretion, as it’s not really appropriate for every audience, and all that that entails.
In any case, this video clip finds Kern being interviewed in 1985 on what appears to be an L.E.S. rooftop by a strangely listless interviewer named Victoria from a program called "Videowave." Kern here is fresh off the filming of the gratuitously gory video for Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley `69” (which I spoke about not long ago here), and doing so with characteristic low-key nonchalance. Fittingly, about 47 seconds in, when Victoria is asking about Kern’s penchant for drugs and violence, there seems to be the sound of gunshots from the streets below.
It just gets weirder from there, really. Victoria awkwardly gets Kern to out himself and seems to fish for purely salacious content, and the filmmaker remains fairly blunt and understated throughout. He does make a fairly prophetic prediction, at one point. After Victoria fails to re-engage Kern on a correlation between his depictions of abuse and his own experience “in the Gay movement,” they switch topics to music, and Kern exclaims that “music videos are gonna die.” He was right about that.
In any case, it’s a bizarre glimpse of Lower East Side life from a different era. I wonder what transpires on this rooftop today. It’s probably someone’s private roof-deck.
New York hardcore trainspotters like myself might appreciate that Kern’s wearing a vintage VIRUS shirt.
Lastly, as unconventional Victoria's interview style may have been, "Videowave" did manage to stage quite a few interesting chats. See more of them here.
I have no recollection of where I first spotted the New York hardcore logo (above, in case you’re unfamiliar, as rendered in blinding neon at Vinnie Stigma and Jimmy G’s tattoo shop on the Lower East Side), but it was invariably on a flyer for one show or another. While not quite as cryptic as other logos like, say, Black Flag’s bars or, later, Missing Foundation’s upended cocktail glass, it was an immediately arresting symbol that neatly encapsulated the scene and the subculture. In short order, not only was I spotting it everywhere, but I was summarily scrawling it everywhere. It usually prompted blank looks from the layperson — but if you knew, you knew.
Over time, the symbol took on a strange life of its own. As punks and hardcore kids turned into hardcore adults and started infiltrating the halls of industry, the symbol — or, more accurately, appropriated mutations thereof — started suddenly popping up incongruously in places not normally associated with hardcore. Gradually, variations of the the original NYHC logo became ostensibly “cool" shorthand for concerns looking to create certain impressions. As time went on, the original meaning and associations behind the symbol got lost in translation. I’ve spotted variations of the logo all over the place, and when I point out its origin, too often I’m met with stares as blank the ones I got back in the early 80’s. Much as with that Misfits Crimson Ghost image I spotted using to advertise a friggin' pilates class (read that tragic tale in the preamble to this post), the appropriators no longer bother to investigate where they’re getting their iconography from.
I think the most striking example of this I found was out in Quogue. A leafy, affluent enclave of Suffolk County where my mom lives, this sub-Hampton has never exactly been a hotbed of hardcore. My skulking around the town as a pointedly tennis-shunning teenager in a KRAUT t-shirt did little to change that. But about a year back, I was in a local chic boutique out there, looking for a birthday gift for the wife, when I spotted a t-shirt that pretty much knocked me out of my Chuck Taylor’s. I ended up buying it for my daughter, who wore it regularly for a while, blithely unaware and frankly uncaring of the symbol's antiquated roots in New York City punk rock.
In any case, my friend Drew Stone just posted another great installment in his ongoing video series that traces the roots of the symbol. If, like me, you spent large swathes of your youth evangelizing this insignia on every available surface with a sharpie, you should check it out.
If you’re feeling unduly agitated, why not take a break from the Hellish circus of death that is the current news cycle and check out Amos Poe’s 1976 film, “Unmade Beds,” a punk-adjacent cinematic endeavor that fleetingly stars Debbie Harry. IMDB describes it thusly…
This is the story of Rico, a man who lives in New York in 1976 but who lives his own life in Paris during the time of the 'New Wave'. He is a photographer who thinks he's a gangster, a loner, and an outsider. He uses his camera like a gun, loading it with bullets of film. He's constantly on the look for a reality to fulfill his fantasy, and as long as he has that energy, he lives. Of course, he's also a romantic, and this is his downfall, because he believes all photographers to be liars. When Rico falls in love, the delicate balance of the world he has made for himself is disrupted.
It's not nearly as compelling as Poe’s “The Foreigner” (which I discussed here), but the shots of mid-70s downtown are pretty compelling.
Some of you might remember an entry from 2015, spurred from an original post in 2010, about The Mill at Burlington House, a curious midtown attraction from the 70’s I’d wrongly remembered from my childhood as “Burlington Mills.” It had become one of those intangible memories I was on a quest to find verification of. When I learned of my naming error, I did some feverish googling and found out more about the place, as detailed in that post from 2015.
Well, on a lark, I did some further searching this past weekend and actually found a video of the thing. See that below.
What’s striking about the video is how, well, …. dull the thing seems. I mean, I realize thrills were few and far between in the mid-70s, but I can’t imagine why these kids (or me, at the time for that matter) was so captivated by the thing.
Anyway, ya can’t go home again. But you can now go back to the Mill, thanks to YouTube….
Popped back into my office, today, for the first time in six months. My desktop was chockablock with extraneous crap. Here are some visual items I'd obviously set to one side for a later use that never materialized.
Downtown Music Gallery when it was on the Bowery...
An old interior shot of Rocks in Your Head in SoHo. This shop closed, after many years, and became a real estate agency. I walked by over the weekend, and that concern has since closed up shop. The space is now vacant.
The iconic old rooftop of El Teddy's on West Broadway. This building was razed and a condo was built in its footprint. The space that had been El Teddy's is now a hardware store. No idea where the crown ended up.
An old shot of the exterior of The Pyramid on Avenue A. Still there, last I checked.
The brothers Ramone.
The west side of Broadway around 8th Street. Taken from a film.
The show I didn't go to.
Nixed sticker concept.
No idea.
Lafayette Street a long, long time ago (1975) as captured by Rich Allen (not to be confused with one-armed Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen).
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