Flaming Pablum

Back in Time to `89

As I was walking home from work on Monday night in something of a news-addled stupor, lulled into mental atrophy by pervasive waves of coronavirus hysteria, I spotted something both hugely familiar and entirely incongruous – a old flyer from a long-ago gig by Prong and Live Skull wheat-pasted to a painted plywood wall at the bottom end of Sixth Avenue between Canal and Grand Streets. What the fuck?

Shocked back into the moment by this comparatively ancient artifact, I essentially zoomed out to view it in context. Across the northern end of this plywood wall --- one used to fence in the outdoor shenanigans of Gitano Tulum, a sort of tropical-themed adult playground, complete with palm trees – was a wide array of gig flyers, movie posters and bills, all advertising concerts, events and movies from several decades back. It was like this tiny patch of real estate was stuck in a hole in the time/space continuum.

I took a few photographs (see below), figuring it was for a movie shoot or a television show. The new “High Fidelity” series, maybe?

This morning, as I was walking back by it in the other direction, I saw two people spraying the façade to make it look appropriately “weathered,” and I asked what the story was. Evidently, I was correct – it’s for a forthcoming show or film called “`89.” That’s about as much as I could glean.

I complemented them on their faithful job and kept walking.

Trivial facts: Circa the late 80’s, the building that this particular plot of real estate once hosted (since-razed) formerly played host to Triplets, an ill-fated steakhouse owned and operated by three identical twin brothers whose truly bizarre story was recently the subject of an amazing documentary entitled “Three Identical Strangers.” It also served as the location, earlier than that, for Lou Reed’s video for “My Big Red Joystick,” which I discussed here and here. Across the way was the Moondance Diner, which is now somewhere out west. In its footprint is the looming James hotel.

Here are some of the details. Click on them to enlarge. That's also not how you spell psychedelic. 

SoHo on Screen: Deux

Almost on cue, right after I shared the excellent documentary about the SoHo Memory Project here, I stumbled across the video below posted on the page of a Facebook group I follow. Titled “Walking in New York’s Most Expensive Neighbourhood [sic],” this lengthy clip is a wide-angled 4K video that showcases a rambling stroll around the SoHo of 2020, what the shooter – who goes by the YouTube handle “The 1%”…ugh --- calls “one of the most iconic shopping and fashion district of New York City.”

Astonishingly Trivial Bonus: If you’ve got a lot of time to kill and have a super-keen eye for detail, one of my stupid stickers that I spoke about here makes a fleeting cameo around 16:41 in. Can you spot it?

SoHo on Screen

My excellent blogging comrade Yukie Ohta of the SoHo Memory Project has become the subject of a new documentary.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it's not embeddable, so click thyselves over here to check it out. 

NYC 1911

In a Lonely Place

If it’s not aready readily apparent, I spend a lot of time walking around the city looking at relatively banal, workaday bullshit. I much prefer walking everywhere, as it affords me the opportunity to study the topography around me, and if you bother paying attention to that stuff, you’ll see all sort of cool things.

This morning, I was struck by something I’d have never expected. As mentioned back on a couple of posts, I used to be a fan of the New York band The Smithereens, a sort of arguably dour power-pop quartet from the mid-80’s who scored a couple of hits like “Blood & Roses,” “Behind the Wall of Sleep,” “A Girl Like You,” usually all flecked with a signature blend of melancholy, courtesy of primary singer/songwriter Pat DiNizio. DiNizio sadly left us in 2017, but what I spotted today might have cheered his otherwise usually glum demeanor.

Scrawled within the interior of a laughably anachronistic phone booth on Lafayette Street, just south of Kenmare street, I spotted the slightly altered lyrics to DiNizio’s poignant duet with Suzanne Vega, “In a Lonely Place” from 1986’s Especially for You.

ADDENDUM: My friend Erik schooled me on the origin of this line, and it predates the Smithereens' tune, alas. I stand corrected:

It's a Humphrey Bogart line from the noir "In A Lonely Place." I assume that's what inspired the song.

Here it is and the song in question and the original line from Bogart beneath.

The Unband Unbound

I spoke about “We Like To Drink, We Like to Play Rock’n’Roll,” the "official" rockumentary about The Unband – a trio I’ve typed about numerous times here -- specifically back on this post wherein I posted the trailer.

Well, as these things sometimes happen, some generous soul has seen fit to upload the whole goddamn film onto YouTube. How long will it remain there? Who knows? So, grab it while it’s hot.

Above is yet another shot I took of them at the late, lamented Continental during its 90’s-era heyday as a live-music venue, and not its current iteration as a pile of rubble.

All Mimsy Were The Borogoves, And The Mome Raths Outgrabe

According to the Huffington Post, there's some prolonged discussion happening on Twitter about movies that traumatized people as children. I don't use Twitter, really, so I'm bringing it here.

My mother took my sister and I to see Terry Gilliam's "Jabberywocky" in 1977, based, I believe, on the fact that we were all big Monty Python fans -- so it was bound to be great. It wasn't, but that's another story. 

Despite this not being a wholly sanctioned Python film, the 10-year-old me was fully onboard with the idea. Two minutes and 46 seconds into the film, however, I was verily scared out of my wits. With obvious nods to "Jaws," here are those two minutes and 46 seconds, ... and, yes, that's the sadly late Terry Jones.

Start Spreadin' the News...

I’ve never liked “New York, New York,” or at least Sinatra’s rendition of it. I always associate it with hordes of freezing tourists, pretending to have a good time watching the ball drop in Times Square. Its lyrics are rife with clichés and platitudes that ultimately don’t amount to anything especially substantive about the city, and I hate Sinatra’s mannered crooning of it. I hate the way they dust it off for weddings and sporting events. I find it plodding and ponderous and I never need to hear it again.

But, here it is, scoring a strange little film from 1979 by a gent named Arnold Baskin.

Providing stark visual contrast to the tune’s lushly over-rhapsodized descriptions of living the high life in the Big Apple, most of Baskin’s film concentrates on footage of unsuspecting sunbathers in Central Park and senior citizens picking their noses on Broadway benches on the Upper West Side, all captured on a typically unrelentingly hot and sunny summer day in New York.

I can’t speak for the filmmaker’s intentions, but it seems like a rather heavy-handed rebuke of Sinatra’s vainglorious victory lap of an ode to New York.

This all said, it’s still kind of a telling slice of what the city looked like back then.

See what you think.

Six Minutes on St. Marks Place

©RichAllen

I’ve spoken about photographer Rich Allen a couple of times here (notably here and here). In any case, he’s been sharing his remarkable images of the East Village and Lower East Side from previous decades for a while now. Just recently (i.e. yesterday), he uploaded a great video. It’s an amazing step back in time.

As I mentioned in my last post, so much of the topography of downtown Manhattan has changed in the past couple of decades that many of these locations might seem tough to recognize.

In any case, it's regrettably unembeddable, so please go here to check it out. 

 

Strange Days Indeed

This past weekend, my son Oliver and I found ourselves watching one of my favorite movies of all time, that being “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” this being the original from 1974, not that Travolta bullshit from 2009.

Not only is the 1974 version a gripping, well-written and compellingly executed thriller, it’s also a quintessential New York movie. Being that large swathes of the film take place in the enrivons between Union Square and East 28th Street (just a stone’s throw from where Oliver has been going to school for the past decade), it is rife with visual depictions of spots that he and I encounter every day. Periodically throughout the movie, I’d blurt out location-signifiers like “look, there’s that corner where the Pret A Manger is today!” or “See, that’s Union Square, directly across from where Barnes & Noble is now!” or “That cop car is on Astor Place!” The specific sightings are all correct, but in many instances, given how much the topography of the city has changed since 1974, many of the locations were hard to recognize and reconcile.

In any case, this morning, I had to quickly run up to a spot in so-called “Midtown East.” After dropping off what I had to drop off, I started to head back downtown, hanging a quick right on East 36th between Second and Third Avenues. For rock geeks of a certain age and sensibility, this strip has resonance, as it’s the home of Sniffen Court, a bespoke little strip of choice real estate that features a fetching little mews of a type usually found in London.

Presumably preserved as a historic landmark and spared the rampant overdevelopment evident around the rest of the city, Sniffen Court is well known to the afore-cited rock fans because it’s the cover location of the second studio LP by The Doors, that being Strange Days. The suitably surreal sleeve to that 1967 album featured a slew of circus performers doing their thing in the middle of stately Sniffen Court. Personally speaking, while ostensibly a whimsical scene, I’ve always found something about the photograph somewhat sinister. Here it is now. Click on it to enlarge.

I covered both Sniffen Court and my feelings about the Doors back on this post, and don’t have much more to add to that, but as I walked by Sniffen Court this morning, I was relieved to see it looking, for all intents and purposes, more or less completely unchanged from the way it looked in 1967. It helps that the morning was similarly grey.

Here were the Doors in another part of the city … specifically Battery Park.