Flaming Pablum

Belaboring the Bollocks

Prompted by this nonsense, ...

I have something of a long history of harping on about music biopics (summary: THEY SUCK), but -- in all candor -- in the wake of "D.O.A.," "The Punk Rock Movie," "The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle," Alex Cox's "Sid & Nancy" and Julien Temple's "The Filth & The Fury" -- to say nothing about Lydon's multiple memoirs, Jon Savage's "England's Dreaming," Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain's "Please Kill Me," John Robb's "Punk Rock: An Oral History," Steve Jones' "Lonely Boy" and Glen Matlock's "I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol" (and this is just a select smattering of media -- there has also been a pile of TV documentaries) ... is there any actual *NEED* for a biopic on the Sex Pistols?

I mean, even a cursory listen to the gratuitous cash-in that was Some Product: Carri On Sex Pistols tells you pretty much everything you could ever really need to know.

BOTTOM LINE: Want to learn about the Sex Pistols? Get ahold of a copy of Never Mind The Bollocks, listen to it and GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE!!

Going “Home” Again: Re-Re-Re-Exhuming Chantal Akerman’s “News From Home”

It was probably about 2012 when I first learned about Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s “News From Home,” a strangely somnambulistic rumination on distance, family and solitude, centered around footage of a particularly lonely New York City captured in 1976. The film periodically appears on YouTube, sometimes in bits and pieces, only to be yanked down at one point or another, probably at the behest of Janus Films.

It’s an odd bit of cinema by any standard, and strangely haunting and hypnotic. Of course, the extra attraction for me is the depiction of a downtown New York City that simply does not exist anymore. Sure, I’ve said that before about films like Glenn O’Brien’s “Downtown `81” and Amos Poe’s “The Foreigner” (just to name two), but where those films have narrative structures — however tenuous — “News From Home” tells less of a definable story. And while I thrill to the shots of, say, pre-gentrification TriBeCa, I sincerely doubt Ms. Akerman chose to include said footage with any intention of preserving the neighborhood as it was for future generations to marvel at. I project that she chose the locations she did to convey an overall sense of desolation and disconnection. In that respect, she completely succeeded.

In previous posts on the film, I’ve mentioned that I’d love for someone to do a shot-by-shot homage to “News From Home," capturing the modern-day iterations of the locations Akerman captured back during the Bicentennial. I sincerely doubt it would have the same lulling effect, although there certainly were moments, in the past year of COVID, when Manhattan seemed to return to the directionless drift of Akerman’s film. By and large, though, the Manhattan of 2021 is an entirely different place. Finding the degree of tranquil isolation that is so overwhelmingly rife throughout “News From Home” would be a genuine challenge.

While it’s still up, travel back to the endless half-light and mournful limbo of “News From Home.”

Charly Clicks With Fran in The Alley

Here’s a convoluted one.

Some of you might remember a couple of posts I devoted to my musician friend Fran Powers, over the last couple of years. He’s based in Okinawa, Japan, these days, but our Fran was previously a figure on the New York City scene, having played in a series of bands, the most notable of them probably being a combo called Modern Clix (pictured above), who played a cool amalgam of punk rock and reggae. You can hear some of their stuff by clicking — pardon the pun — right here.

Not unlike Missing Foundation’s cryptic cocktail glass insignia, Modern Clix had a tenacious presence on the graffiti scene. I recall seeing their symbol, a sort of warrior brandishing a spear, on walls all over the place, back in the day. In fact, a photographer named Tom Langton actually captured one of the ones I vividly remember from a garage door on East 8th Street between Broadway and Astor Place at some point in the mid-80’s. Here it is now…

Sadly, I never got to see Modern Clix perform, but I first got to know Fran from running into him on the street, a few years back, outside a party for Yukie Ohta’s SoHo Memory Project. Fran was waiting for the external elevator I was stepping out of. I recognized him from a series of photographs taken by one Brooke Smith, a former NYHC scenester-turned-actress (you’ll doubtlessly remember her as the poor girl down the well who’ll get the hose again if she continues not to put the lotion in the basket in Jonathan Demme’s “The Silence of The Lambs”) who captured the nascent CBGB scene (which I wrote about here). He and I started chatting and that was that. A few months later, I was sitting at home re-watching my favorite movie of all time, Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” and — for the first time — realized that my new friend Fran had something of an amazing cameo in the film. As such, I reached out and asked if he’d speak to me about the experience for an interview on this here stupid blog. You can read that right here.

And THEN, you might remember a post from 2019 wherein I posted a NYC-centric video titled “Fanky” by an Argentine gent named Charly Garcia. The video in question found Mr. Garcia performing around various points of downtown Manhattan. The odd thing about that, however, was that some years earlier, Garcia spent time recording in New York, the end results being an album released in 1983 called Clics Modernos or …. wait for it … Modern Clix. Here is the album cover for same below…

That’s Charly sitting underneath one of artist Richard Hambleton’s “shadow men” (who I discussed here). But just to the right of the shadow man is the legend … “Modern Clix.” I am purely projecting, of course, but my assumption is that Charly spotted the words on the wall and just thought they sounded cool. Did he know Modern Clix was actually a band, at the time? Possibly, but I’m inclined to believe probably not.

Okay, so why am I bringing any of this ridiculous bullshit back up again now? Well, because earlier this week, a gentleman on the Manhattan Before 1990 page of Facebook named Bo G. Eriksson posted a pair of photographs he snapped in 1984 on Cortlandt Alley. Now, I have long love affair with this particular strip on TriBeCa, as I demonstrated here, so Mr. Eriksson’s pics immediately resonated with me. But under closer inspection, I noticed something that leapt out at me — the very location of the “Modern Clix” graffiti Charly Garcia posed in front of for his album cover a year earlier. Check out the pics below.

Basically, Charly was sitting on the southwest corner of Walker Street & Cortlandt Alley, just down the way from the Mudd Club at 77 White Street, a venue that was doubtlessly a hangout for Fran Powers and the Modern Clix folks.

Today, this corner doesn’t look all that different. In fact I took a shot of some cryptic graffiti on it just the other day, this is around the corner from where Charly was pictured sitting. Beyond that, there are now a couple of high-end art galleries on this strip of Cortlandt (one, oddly, owned by my former next-door East 12th street neighbor Andrew Kreps), as well as a restaurant called Au Cheval that was been dormant since the beginning of the pandemic.

Here in 2021, there is now a luxury hotel just steps to the west of where Charly sat. The Mudd Club is long gone … reimagined as luxury apartments. Charly Garcia is still at it at age 69. “Shadow Man” artist Richard Hambleton passed away in 2017, and Fran Powers is somewhere in Okinawa, Japan.

Droning in the Park

I realize you can do super-cool things with them, but I’ve become somewhat wary of and annoyed by drones. Last summer, when I was fleetingly squatting at a cottage out on the South Shore of Long Island, our next door neighbor had one and routinely had the thing hovering over our house. It’s not that I was concerned about him filming us (he would have been catastrophically bored with the end results, I assure you), but the constant buzzing and whirring noise of the thing was really irritating. They’re a nuisance.

That all said, when used properly, they can deliver legitimately breathtaking perspectives heretofore only available to birds and/or people in very expensive helicopters. Below in one such video.

Shot from in, around and way the Hell above Washington Square Park, here’s a novel view of my neighborhood. He even flies over my drab, nondescript building, at one point. Thrills.

Ignore the awful stock music and enjoy.

Back to Loisaida

It’s all very easy for blogs like mine to lament the loss of the East Village’s punk-rock character and shake a fist at the bottomless brunchers on St. Marks Place or the dude-bros walking down Avenue A carrying golf bags, but it’s prudent to remember that there was a community on the Lower East Side with a complicated history of its own well prior to the arrival of Sonic Youth, Richard Hell, Debbie Harry and the Cro-Mags.

“Viva Loisaida” is a film directed by Marlis Momber in 1978 that depicts the neighborhood well prior to the decades of gentrification that have turned it into what it is now, and the differences are stark. 

One wonders what its subjects would have to say about what the neighborhood transformed into.

In The City: Urban Navigation in "The Warriors"

With both my wife and daughter out of the apartment, last evening, my 15-year-old son Oliver and I were left to our own devices, so to speak, so we ordered in some Chinese food and decided to watch a movie. Usually, this has meant umpteenth viewings of any number of Marvel Universe films or installments in the “Star Wars” series. While I am entirely cool with both of those options, when opportunities have arisen, I’ve tried to broaden my son’s cinematic horizons with further-flung fare. Last year, I introduced him to both the subterranean thrills of 1974’s “The Taking of Pelham 123” (the original, not the Travolta ripoff) and the Kafka-esque, comedic nightmare of Scorsese’s “After Hours” (my favorite film of all time), both of which he was engaged by and warmed to. Seeking to further expand his viewing, last night I dangled the prospects of three crucial films before him, namely “Blade Runner,” “Apocalypse Now” and Walter Hill’s 1979 classic, “The Warriors.” Oliver opted for the latter, so we dug into our beef with broccoli and settled in.

Now. I’ve written about my love of “The Warriors” here numerous times (see links below), so it’s almost impossible for me to be objective about the film at this very late stage in the proceedings, but it was interesting to watch Oliver soak it in. In all fairness, even to die-hard fanboys like myself, what seemed like a palpably edgy and unvarnished portrayal of a violent and lawless urban dystopia in 1979 has not really retained its aura of nervy realism. As I mentioned before, there is inarguably an unwittingly campy element to the film, as well as a relative wholesomeness (despite the odd homophobic rejoinder and crude sexual innuendo, there is not even the slightest whiff of drug use or racial tension, even on the allegedly big bad streets of late-`70s New York City). Admittedly, there is that uncomfortable scene in Riverside Park wherein foul-mouthed Ajax basically attempts to roughly have his way with undercover cop Mercedes Reuhl, but he gets a nightstick in the groin for that, so there are at least consequences for his indefensible actions.

But for all the film's tension, imminently quotable dialogue and stylized depictions of nocturnal combat, Oliver’s observations were cuttingly insightful, calling into question several plot points that, in my practically life-long avowal of the movie, even I had managed to overlook.

Oliver was primarily incredulous that the tough-guy protagonists in Coney Island’s Warriors were all presumably native New Yorkers, yet all seemed largely incapable of navigating the intricacies of their own city’s mass transit system. Now, it could be indeed argued that, at the time, New York was so atomized and localized to the point wherein residents of certain boroughs simply never left their own turf, but the hapless Warriors are completely flummoxed even in locating the Dyre Avenue subway station they only recently disembarked from. Never mind running the gauntlet home from the Bronx, how did these guys manage to find their way around on normal days?

Personally speaking, I don’t believe I started riding the subways until I was a freshman in high school, but in relatively short order, I was perfectly able to distinguish uptown from downtown and fully capable of getting myself from East 96th Street to Union Square — continually misrepresented by certain Warriors in the film as “Union Station” — without being confused or hassled. Now, granted, I wasn’t being pursued by baseball-bat-wielding brigands, but the stress of being hunted by roaming gangs doesn’t preclude one from remembering topographical basics.

This nagging complaint with the narrative almost derailed Oliver’s enjoyment of the film, prompting him to suggest other subway lines and/or alternative routes they might have taken to the relative safety of their Brooklyn destination. Beyond that, he was also curious as two why director Walter Hill chose to film the Warriors' first encounter with the Baseball Furies at the intersection of West 72nd and Broadway, when the shot prior found them getting off the subway at 96th street.

While these were absolutely valid points, I basically told Oliver to relax and enjoy the movie, which he eventually did. But, privately, I felt a sense of accomplishment. When my kids were relatively little, I frequently made it a point to take them to as many remote corners of the city as was feasible. My intention was not only to showcase all the great things the city has on offer to them, but to instill within them an inherent understanding of where things are, how to get to (and away) from them, and always how best to find their ways home, ideally without having to “bop” anybody or “waste any heads” along the way.

More About "The Warriors” on Flaming Pablum.

Farewell to The Fury

"The Warriors" at 40

Leave "The Warriors" Alone

Let's Get Down To It, Boppers: Exhuming "The Warriors" 

Can U Dig It?

 

St. Marks Place in Snowy `69

Before the vape joints. Before the brunchers. Before the punks. St. Marks was still ... St. Marks. Check out Gem Spa and the Fillmore East....

Other People's Pics

Here is a clutch of seemingly random photos that have been languishing on my desktop, mostly for no readily apparent reason.....

Cait O'Riordan of the Pogues. No idea who took it. Cait was invariably the coolest member of the band. 

A still from Scorsese's "Mean Streets." I walk this strip whenever I head to the office. It's no longer this grotty.

A shot of the Strokes, although I have no clue who took it. I was fleetingly inspired to write another post about the band, based on their actually not-bad, new material, but lost interest, probably because of this picture. I mean, really...

Another shot of long-gone First Avenue favorite, Downtown Beirut. Renowned for their stellar jukebox. Note the unfinished Missing Foundation insignia near the door. 

Another age-old Rock Hotel flyer. I set this to one side not because I ever cared about Cycle Sluts from Hell (I didn't), but because the venue in question is Downtown, the spot on Bond Street I spent some time researching some years back. 

A great action shot of Tod and Natz from my beloved Cop Shoot Cop. No idea where this picture was taken, when or who took it. 

Snapped by one David Vega in 1985, here's an amazing shot of the since-razed corner of St. Marks Place at Third Avenue, replete with also since-vanished Gringo mural. 

Spotted this on Instagram. This is someone's shower curtain. I approve. 

A lovely family portrait of the Sex Pistols after their fabled, final performance at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. No idea who took it. 

A outtake from Pennie Smith sessions for the cover of Sandinista! by The Clash. 

...and there you have it. 

 

All That's Old is No Again

I first posted the video below almost exactly ten years ago to the day (off by about ten days, I'll admit). It's been a crazy week at work, and I'm juggling multiple projects and also trying to find the time to bring certain posts to life here. Please bear with me.

In the interim, why not travel back in time to Rick Liss' "No York City"?

Enjoy and stay tuned...

"N.Y.C." (No York City) from Rick Liss on Vimeo.

Changes on Crosby

I first spoke about this documentary in 2015, when Yukie posted a link to is on SoHo Memory Project that, at the time, was not embeddable. As it happens, someone posted it to YouTube only late last year, so here it is now.

Prompted by my further rumination on Crosby Street, here’s a look back at the strip in question in 1975, and a very different street it was then.

After this was filmed, of course, most of the the manufacturing interests left Crosby Street for good, and it became a haven for artists, only later to become wholly gentrified. For a while after that, Crosby — like the rest of SoHo — became renowned for bespoke retail boutiques and costly residential real estate.

These days, as with the rest of the city, the financial hardships brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic have taken their toll on the businesses of Crosby Street, but it’s still a compelling little street.

But, again, 46 years ago? The living wasn’t quite so easy.