Flaming Pablum

"Beer Isn't Good For You..."

It’s one of those work days ruled by technical problems, connectivity issues and the seemingly endless wait for elusive assets from marginally communicative colleagues who clearly do not share the same priorities. As such, I’ve had some down time, and this post – dear readers – is the fruit of that down time.

If I’m being honest, I was entirely unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Unit 3 + Venus until earlier today, but I gather this particular track (here captured by Dutch documentarians, if I glean my hearsay correctly) was included on several arguably seminal, early `80s West Coast punk compilations. Despite it not being technically “No Wave,” someone saw fit to post it on the contentious-but-illuminating “No Wave” Facebook group, as it does inarguably share a lot of the same aesthetic as said New York scene.

Enough of my meandering preamble… here’s “I Don’t Like Beer” by Unit 3 with Venus….

Now, as it happens, I very much do like beer, so the fact that this track was able to vault over my firm preconceptions about it is a testament to … something.

In any event, as I dimly understand it, the band was Unit 3, and they did other stuff that did not involve little Venus. That said, Venus later grew up and reprised her moment on the mic with the Long Beach Stingers, who – I believe – count at least a former member or two from Unit 3. This was posted in 2012.

Venus aged very well.

Julian Gets Back to The Rock

I’ve written about my fandom for the great Julian Cope here a few times (notably here, here and most recently here). An unparalleled songwriter with a knack for seamless pop perfection and drooling rock abandon, Cope cannily straddled both worlds before ripping up the rule book and following his own eclectic muse. Ever since, his musical outpourings have been more erratic and prone to wild tangents of arguably esoteric experimentation. But while his stuff may not always be for everyone, he is assuredly never dull.

The only reason I’m bringing him up again today is because someone just recently uploaded his documentary from 2000, “The Modern Antiquarian.” Based on his sprawling tome of the same name that was published in 1998, this film finds Julian driving around his native Great Britain to explore and expound upon sacred sites of prehistoric significance. While that might sound impenetrably heady, Julian does it all with his signature brand of insouciant cool. As excited by megalithic minutia as he is by a galvanizing record by The MC5, Julian makes the subject come alive. It’s both highly illuminating and frequently hilarious.

Enjoy while you can. Go buy as many Julian Cope albums as can be had.

Fran Lebowitz ... Punk Rocker

I have to confesse that prior to “Pretend It’s a City,” Martin Scorsese’s extended love letter to Fran Lebowitz, I had never really given the writer/humorist/raccounteur a great deal of thought. To my mind, she was just one of those storied Gothamites like Tom Wolfe or George Plimpton; literary figures I was aware of, but had never fully invested in, given the generational divides between us. Her curmudgeonly sensibilities seemed akin to fellow dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker Woody Allen, albeit with a bit more urbane sophistication. What little I’d read of hers, I’d certainly enjoyed, but never gave it much more thought beyond that.

Here in 2021, thanks for Scorsese’s series on Netflix, Fran is unwittingly experiencing something of a rennaissance, having gained a whole new audience for her wry asides and acerbic observations. While she remains pointedly not for everybody (an old colleague of mine from TIME Magazine wrote a bit of a screed about her in the New York Times), I have to say that my admiration for her had quadrupled. Not only do I completely relate to her Manhattan-centric worldview, I find her completely hilarious. I think most of her detractors, like my friend from TIME, seem to take her just a bit too seriously and literally. This isn’t to say that I think Fran secretely does have an internet connection in her home – I’m sure she doesn’t -- but rather that I think she amplifies some of her diatribes for comedic effect. You, of course, may beg to differ.

One aspect of Fran’s life that had never even occurred to me was her fandom for the New York Dolls, which Scorsese fleetingly touched upon in the series. I wish they’d expounded further on that subject. I know she was a fan of Max’s Kansas City, but did Fran ever go to the Bowery in later years to check out CBGB? Did she ever get into Television or the Ramones? Hard to picture that. 

In any case, if you’re still gagging for a fix after finishing “Pretend It’s a City,” Fran spoke with Kara Swisher for the New York Times’ “Sway Podcast” earlier today. Check it out here.

"The Greenwich Village Story"

As recounted in this ancient post, I believe the first time I ever visited Greenwich Village as a snot-nosed Upper East Side kid was at some point in the mid-to-late `70s, when I was taken on an antique-scouting trip with my mother and step-father. Sometime after that, my father (divorced from my mother since my birth) rented a one-bedroom apartment on West 10th Street, opposite a firehouse with a garishly painted (for the era) garage door (more about that here), so we periodically went down to visit him. It seemed like an entirely different city from the one we lived in uptown.

Years after that, my mom befriended an artist character named Irwin who lived on Mott Street, just across from Old St. Patrick’s Basilica. I remember going down there with her to visit, a few times and walking around the Village and SoHo and being completely captivated.

By the early `80s, I was finally let off my leash and started exploring downtown on my own, my principle destination being the original Forbidden Planet on the west side of Broadway at 12th Street (more about that here). My father, by this point, had split from East 10th street, logged a few years in England and repaired back to New York to another one-bedroom apartment on East 74th. But he was working, at the time, at Forbes, which was then located over on Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. I’d go down ostensibly to “visit” him and then run around the Village, hitting Forbidden Planet and a few other likely spots. It was around this same time that a classmate of mine, Walt, moved to Cornelia Street with his dad and discovered Bleecker Bob’s. From there, there was no going back. Greenwich Village and its surrounding environs had all the cool stuff. The shops were cooler. The vibe was more relaxed. The people were freakier. There was more history. There was more to do and see than the neighborhoods I’d already wrung dry uptown. This was the place for me.

That was then.

Today, I’ve lived in Greenwich Village for over 25 years… practically half my life. But the Greenwich Village of today only dimly looks like the neighborhood I was first taken to as a small boy, much less the storied bohemian enclave it was in decades prior to that. Most of the stuff that first captured my imagination is gone. The cool shops are mostly vanished. The vibe isn’t relaxed at all. The freaky people are largely gone. There’s still a lot of history, although many don’t seem to care about it, and the sights and topography keep getting remade and remodeled. For all intents and purposes, it’s not all that different from points uptown — only more expensive.

But despite all the neighborhood's changes and diminishment (and let’s not even get into what the pandemic has done to it), I have no plans to go anywhere else. My kids grew up on these streets. Greenwich Village is our home.

In any case, while this was initially just supposed to be a quick preamble, it’s turned into a dangerously sepia-toned paean to the lost Greenwich Village, weepily composed to tee up the curious film below, “Greenwich Village Story.” Here’s the backstory….

Greenwich Village Story by Jack O'Connell shows the Village in the early sixties, teeming crowds in Washington Square Park, impromptu hootenany sessions, beatnik poets reciting by candlelight in coffee houses. Scenes are picturesque and germane to Jack O'Connell's tale of young love and desire for a place in the arts in Gotham. The film was invited to the Berlin, Venice and Locarno Film Festivals.

Sit back and enjoy a slice of Greenwich Village of yesteryear….

Take It Back to Tumblr

My friend Chung was instigating a conversation on Facebook, earlier today, based around a controversial billboard used to promote the Rolling Stones’ 1974 album, Black and Blue, which featured an image of a woman who’d been tied up and abused. While also comparable to a similarly objectionable billboard the Doors used to promote L.A. Woman (which featured a woman incongruously crucified on a telephone pole), I immediately thought of an old poster I’d spotted promoting a gig by — of all bands — Kraftwerk. I did some quick Googling to find the image in question, but came up with nothing. Then, I remembered that I’d probably put it on Get Back to Work, my ancient Tumblr page.

I started Get Back to Work (or Get Back Vassifer, really) as a complete lark — much like this blog — mostly as a means of aggregating images that appealed to my sensibility. This included album covers, GIFS, flyers, tour posters, promo photos, comics, memes, drawings, weird ads, archival pictures of New York, outtakes, t-shirts, movie stills, foreign movie posters, magazine covers, curious videos, risqué images, sci-fi, monster movies, cool graffiti, interesting book jackets, propaganda posters, Japanese robots, concert shots, ticket stubs, odd postcards, political humor, old New Yorker illustrations, badges, strange animations, unexplained phenomena, prurient doodles, and other bullshit like that, all presented usually without any explanation, in no order and more often than not without any helpful tags.

I occasionally had an agenda. It was a good place to store images, or at least set them to one side for later potential use here on Flaming Pablum. After a while, though, it just became an unwieldy pile of cool stuff collected for no readily apparent reason.

It seems I’ve occasionally added a scant image or two over the past year, but it’s far from a regular stop. But in searching for that Kraftwerk poster (which I eventually found here), I took a long, perilous trip down the rabbit hole. There are some truly great things to be found, if you’ve got the time.

Check it out here.

A Vocation in Location

I used to be a big fan of this blog called Scouting New York, which was run by this film-location scout who’d pinpoint and document famous locations from a wide array of films and point out weird urban anomalies and curious facts. For whatever reason — I believe it’s because he moved to another city — Scouting New York stopped updating in 2015, and I was sad to see it end. Regardless, the site is still up, so I encourage anyone with an interest in that sort of thing to go check it out.

I am happy to report, however, that a (relatively) new obsessively eagle-eyed cinephile has risen to the challenge to pick up where Scouting New York left off. Launched, evidently, in 2016, the straightforwardly titled NYC in Film seeks to accomplish much the same mission, and its attention to slavish detail is encouraging and impressive, not at all unlike the exacting eye for architectural minutia and fine-toothed scrutiny of my pal Bob Egan of PopSpots NYC.

I’d noticed some repeat visits to an old post of mine from 2018 regarding the former site of Disc-O-Mat, a record store I frequented in the very early `80s. Turns out, said post was of some use to NYC in Film, who reference while in the process of divining specific locations from the 1986 thriller, “F/X” staring Aussie Bryan Brown.

I’m late, of course, but I’m glad to welcome NYC in Film into the NYC blogosphere, such as it is — he even takes on my favorite and oft-cited film of all time, “After Hours.”

Manhattan, 1976 ... Again!

As if this post needed a sequel, here is yet another tourist-shot 8mm journey back in time to the New York City of my youth. Over the course of 19 grainy minutes and change, you see much of the same old stuff — drab midtown, still-seedy Times Square and the obligatory view from atop the Empire State Building — but you do get some fleeting glimpses of downtown, replete with requisite Bowery bum.

My favorite aspect of this, however, is while the visuals are indeed compelling— so familiar, yet still so far away in time — the soundtrack is another beast entirely. Unspooling a ceaseless medley of familiar old tunes you might hear in a doctor’s waiting room of the era — “Around the World in 80 Days,” “Moon River” and the like — in a wobbly, queasily listing muzak style, it sounds like the sort of music David Lynch might score a surreal nightmare with.

Enjoy….

Beyond The Valley of 84 Thomas Street: The Search for Plasmatics World Headquarters

I put up another entry, a few days ago, about the Plasmatics. Once again, to be writing anything about the Plasmatics in 2021 seems a bit odd, given that the band was basically over and done with well prior to the dawn of the `90s, and because poor Wendy O. Williams took her own life in 1998. They’re occasionally name-checked here and there, as I mentioned in that last post, but rarely with any genuine respect. In the grand scheme of things, their era is over.

Regardless, just like my affinity for Venom, I still harbor fond associations with the Plasmatics. And, also like Venom, while their music may not be have been as timeless of that of some of their peers, I am still invested in the Plasmatics. As such, when the following minutia crossed my screen, I sat up with attention.

In doing research about the sleeve of the band’s late 1981 effort Metal Priestess, which features the giant pentagram recently up for auction on eBay, I was reading the following WikiPedia entry, and was struck by a tiny detail. Here’s the passage in question.

Dan Hartman, who produced acts such as 38 Special and James Brown, among others, had been working on a session in LA when he picked up a copy of Beyond the Valley of 1984 and couldn't stop playing it. It was "ground breaking," he said. "I knew I wanted to meet these people and do something with them." Dan came down to the Tribeca loft where he met Wendy O. Williams and Rod Swenson and a month later he and Rod Swenson were working on the production of the Metal Priestess EP.

To be fair to Mr. Hartman, to have worked with as wide an array of artists as 38 Special, James Brown and the goddamn Plasmatics is pretty impressive. But that’s not what caught my eye. No, the factoid that I latched onto was the allusion of Dan Hartman heading “down to the Tribeca loft” to meet Wendy and her partner Rod Swenson, who was the band’s manager and mastermind.

In all my years as a Plasmatics fan, I had never heard that they were based down in Tribeca. I mean, it never occurred to me. During the band’s gestation and its heyday, the neighborhood in question was still a comparatively desolate no man’s land. I started exploring Tribeca in the early 90’s, and now actually work at the southern end of it. Before the pandemic, I was walking around Tribeca on a daily basis and now actually know the lay of the land fairly well, down there. This all begged the obvious question — where was their loft?

I started doing some creative Googling, and the first thing that came up was this blog post featuring an interview with Rod Swenson that first ran in 2008, the ten-year anniversary of Wendy’s death. In it, Swenson goes into detail about Wendy’s motivations and lifestyle, citing her virulent penchant for anti-conformity and her healthy, toxin-free lifestyle. It’s actually quite illuminating. But the part I was looking for was only fleetingly mentioned, that being that they grew their own raw food in the loft in “what is now known as Tribeca” and that it also served as “Plasmatics World Headquarters.”

Finding a dead end beyond that, I took my query to a Plasmatics fan group on Facebook, which immediately came back with an answer: A fifth-floor loft space on Thomas Street.

Thomas Street is a narrow little passage that extends off Broadway and runs from east to west down in Tribeca. A few steps from its eastern end, 33 Thomas Street … aka the mighty Titanpointe … looms like a forbidding, windowless monolith, towering over lower Manhattan. From there, Thomas slopes gradually to the west, into a tight lane that ends at 60 Hudson Street, the massive former Western Union building, serving as a slightly less ominous bookend with Titanpointe. Between these two spots, Thomas Street plays host, on the southeast corner of West Broadway, to The Odeon, an iconic eatery once formerly frequented by scenester socialites and famously cited in Jay McInerney’s paean to irresponsible `80s hedonism, “Bright Lights, Big City.” On a personal level, beyond going to the Odeon several times, my own associations with Thomas Street are fairly random. I once attended a New Year’s Eve party in the mid-`90s at its eastern end. Just steps to the west of its intersection of Church Street, my friends Rob and Joanne — then newlyweds — briefly flirted with the idea of renting a third-story loft with a big picture window overlooking Thomas, but demurred at the last minute and moved to midtown. I also once logged several laborious hours serving jury duty at 71 Thomas Street, the civil court house just across the street from The Odeon. Beyond all that, though, I’ve always enjoyed walking through Thomas’ canyon-like architecture. It’s just a cool, atmospheric little street.

Ah, yes, …. but WHERE on Thomas Street was Wendy & Rod’s fifth-floor loft?

On that same thread on the Facebook page, Ramones producer Ed Stasium weighed in with more detail:

Rod owned the building, he offered me a floor for the purchase price of $30k in 1979. I certainly couldn’t afford it then. I can’t imagine what it would be worth now.

From here, I hit Google like the ball peen hammer Wendy used to use on unsuspecting television sets. But try as I might, searches like “Plasmatics” and “Thomas Street” or “Plasmatics” and “Tribeca” continued to give me nothing I hadn’t already seen or considered, and no extra details.

Then I had a stroke of luck.

Remembering that Swenson, in the wake of Wendy’s passing, had left the music business and pivoted into a career of scientific academia, I started plugging in his name and suddenly up popped a heady text from some sort of conference in 1989. The text in question was titled "Engineering Initial Conditions In A Self-producing Environment,” penned by one Rod Swenson. If you read it looking for salacious details about the Plasmatics, you won’t find any. What you will find, however, is Mr. Swenson’s old address on Thomas Street, that being… 84 Thomas Street.

To be clear, lest you think I’m overstepping my bounds with my fanboy sleuthing, I’d like to assure you — dear readers — that you won’t find Swenson there today. Prior to Wendy's death, the couple had relocated to Storrs, Connecticut, to be closer to the university Swenson was teaching at.

But armed with my breakthrough information, I took a stroll back down to Thomas Street to check it out.

I’m not sure what I was expecting or even looking for, but today, 84 Thomas Street is an enviable plot of real estate on the western end of the street. The PH apartment — what would have been Wendy & Rod’s place — is listed on the buzzer as something called Stone Studios, although I could find no other information. I wonder if the occupants of same are aware that the space used to be Plasmatics World Headquarters. To see what apartments inside this are like, click here. 

I’m sure the surrounding environs look entirely different from when this address served as same. And I can only wonder what Wendy would have thought about how the neighborhood has transformed (although I can imagine she’d have some choice words for it).

Anyway, case closed. For a closer look at what Rod Swenson’s up to these days, click here. For a snippet of conversation about The Plasmatics by Jesse Malin and Fred Armissen, click here. 

Foetus on Repeatus

Doubtlessly rekindled by my recent re-exploration of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, I dug out my old copy of Male, the live album by Foetus, which features a surprisingly faithful cover of the SAHB’s signature tune, “Faith Healer.” It had been a long damn while since I last spun Male, which kickstarted a whole new Foetus rennaissance for me. This is also fitting, as today is J.G. “Foetus”/”Clint Ruin” Thirlwell’s birthday.

Recorded at CBGB in 1990, Male is a sprawling, splenetic blitz through J.G. Thirlwell’s catalog, at the time, but significantly beefed up by the addition of a fully fleshed-out band. Prior to this era, Thirlwell had worked predominantly with manipulated tapes and samples. Augmented with a roster of noisy all-stars including Algis Kizys, Norman Westerburg and Vinnie Signorelli from SWANS, Dave Ouimet from Cop Shoot Cop and Hahn Rowe from Hugo Largo, Foetus’ indelicate blend of industrial caterwaul takes on a burlier, almost metallic heft, at points. There is still an avalanche of samples (courtesy of Ouimet), but they fight for dominance with the sternum-worrying crunch of the rest of the ensemble. It’s a burly, bracing listening experience that I highly recommend. About a year after the album was released, they released the show on video which – thanks to the benevolent magic of YouTube, you can watch here now. Duck & cover, …..

This of course, led me back to many of Thirlwell’s other records, including the excellent compilation Sink, his blistering major label debut Gash, Gondawanaland by his side-project Steroid Maximus and a few others. The last record of Foetus’ I tracked down was 2009’s Limb. About as far as you can get from the stentorian wallop of Male, Limb is filled with more nuanced, experimental pieces, though the end results are no less compelling. But I originally picked this album up in 2014 on the strength of its inclusion of “NYC Foetus,” a video documentary that’s as close to a definitive telling of the Foetus story you’re likely to get – featuring testimonials from pals and peers like Matt Johnson of The The, Michael Gira of SWANS, Martin Bisi, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch and other likely suspects. I first mentioned it on this old post. 

And, once again, if you wait long enough, …. these things surface on YouTube. Here it is now it its entirety … for the time being, at least, until someone with an interest in copyright demands its removal. 

Enjoy with a nice slice a red velvet birthday cake for J.G Thirlwell….

"No Comment": Reacquainting With Squid

I’d like to believe it’s still this way, somehow, but New York City used to be full of genuine characters. Every neighborhood had its own share of local oddballs who provided a bit of distinctive flavor and identity. This was especially prevalent downtown, where a more permissive atmosphere of bohemian expression gave sway to individuals who felt compelled to part with convention on their own terms. One such individual was a street performer I remember lurking around the East Village in the early 90s. People plying their art in the street was certainly nothing especially novel, but this gent was different. He brandished a strange, electrified guitar that was shaped like a fish. From that instrument he coaxed inverted melodies that probably made sense only to him. Sure, it was always amusing to stop and listen to him play for a bit, but there was always the suspicion that he was grappling with some bigger issues, and he gradually looked more disheveled each time I happened upon him. Then, as these chapters tend to play out, he just vanished one day. No more fishy street-side serenades.

In all honesty, I’d completely forgotten about the fish guy until, quite by accident, I stumbled upon the YouTube clip below. A filmmaker named Niels Alpert evidently took a greater curiosity in this gentlemen and documented him in a short series of video profiles, all compiled here. It turns out, he called himself Squid.

Throughout, Squid spins several suitably bizarre yarns, suggesting that he spent some time in prison, but that he had a wife and children somewhere. 

This video was uploaded in 2006, but seems to date back earlier than that. Where Squid is today? I shudder to think, but it's very hard to imagine him walking around the Lower East Side of 2021. 

Who else remembers Squid?