Flaming Pablum

Greece is The Word

Hello again, all. I have returned from the cerulean splendor of Greece.

I, of course, have loads of anecdotes, observations, cheeky asides and ruminations to share about our vacation to that beautiful place, but I’m still quite jetlagged, scrambled and tryikng to manage re-entry with a minimum of turbulence, so I think I’m just going to let some photos tell the story, for now. Suffice to say, it is indeed a magical destination that is well worth your time. We spend four or five days on Paros Island and four or five days in Athens.

Back to University Place: Fancy a Pint at Smith's?

The shot above was taken by one Richard Greene in about 1974. It was snapped on my own strip, University Place, just above East 13th Street. Were you to stand in this same spot today, you would essentially be standing in front of the newly-truncated Basics Plus hardware store. The southeast corner, until recently a juice bar, is currently occupied by a new deli.

In 1974, however, that corner was evidently held by Smith's Bar. Personally speaking, I don't remember a Smith's Bar on that particular corner, but I would have been very young, at the time. When I first moved into the neighborhood in the `90s, that space was occupied by a noodle restaurant. As described in this post from 2012, that venture suffered a fire and was then taken over by a Vietnamese restaurant. After that it became a sprawling, two-level hardware store, Basics Plus, with its own corner juice bar. That closed after several years, and the space was divided up again. A new, smaller and markedly less fabulous Basics Plus opened, and that afore-cited new deli took the corner space. 

In 2022, there aren't nearly as many bars along University Place as there used to be. Obviously, the Cedar Tavern is long gone. Jazz-bar Bradley's morphed into the douchey Reservoir which, despite rumors, never left. Our local, the Knickerbocker, is still going, but has kind of lost a bit of its luster, if I'm being honest. I would love to have Smith's Bar back, but I'm not holding my breath. That establishment clearly belongs to another era. 

On that post from 2012, a reader named Mykola shared thoughts about the bar...

On that corner in the late 1960s was Smith's bar, which used to be all over the city. A great place that served you beer or booze but also had a kitchen making corned beef sandwiches, knishes etc. I used to go there for lunch very often when I worked at Grove Press on 11th Street and University. Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove, who had recently passed away, always used to pop in for a pick-me-up drink. Ah, those were the days...

Sounds pretty great, right? Oh well. 

Funnily enough, my next-door neighbor actually gave me a Smith's Bar t-shirt (I have doubts about its legitimacy) several years ago. At that time, I only knew about the Smith's Bar on 8th Avenue in Hell's Kitchen. My friend Rob D. lived in that neighborhood, and we were always taken by its signature neon signage and its refreshingly unpretentious vibe. I have yet to find any other photos of this University Place iteration, but I'd be super curious to see more depictions of it. 

Back … Again … to Magickal Childe

At the risk of alienating vast, huge swathes of what remains of my readership, here’s yet another update on that silly Magickal Childe photo, which was last invoked here.

By request of my friend Howard, I blew up a few prints of the thing and mailed one off to him. I also figured that the new proprietors of the space at 35 West 19th Street – now Vinyl Steakhouse -- should have some sort of documentation of their restaurant’s former incarnation, so I slipped one in an envelope and dropped one off for them. Evidently, they’re currently offering a signature cocktail in honor of the occult emporium’s namesake, so be sure to ask for that.

Tell’em I sent ya, … see where that gets ya.

The Photograph (Slight Return to Magickal Childe)

Just a quick follow-up to this post. Being that this photo keeps getting strangely invoked every couple of years, I figured I’d dig out the negative to make some better prints of it. My friend Howard (invoked here, a million years ago) actually expressed interest in getting a blown-up print of it, so that’s what I did. Honestly, it’s a wee bit darker than I’d prefer, but it’s still pretty nice. I made a few, so if you’re interested, as well, do let me know.

Once again, here in 2022, the space that once was Magickal Childe at 35 West 19th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is now slated to open up in May as Vinyl Steakhouse. Find out more about that venture right here.

Meanwhile, here's a glimpse of Magickal Childe in it's hellfire-flecked heyday...

ADDENDUM: In searching around, I also happened upon this video ... an homage to Magickal Childe by an ensemble called Cruz Machine. My photo again appears here about three minutes in, wherein they try to conjure its return...(and still I get no credit). Anyway, enjoy...

The Photograph

Okay, here’s another kinda convoluted one.

At some point in the spring or summer of about 1997, I snapped a picture of the storefront at 35 West 19th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, which was a shop called Magickal Childe. I’ve spoken about it before, here, quite a few times, but Magickal Childe was essentially an occult emporium, selling esoteric books and black magic knickknacks for spells, rituals, ceremonies, conjurings and the like. It was the perfect gift shop for all the Aleister Crowley acolytes in your family. A lot of folks spoke about Magickal Childe in hushed, ominous tones, but I never felt any sense of dread or unease in the place. The one item I remember actively buying there was an inverted pentagram pendant because,….well… METAL!

Personally speaking, Magickal Childe, to me, always embodied that now-rarefied essence of New York City. It was this wildly niche sorta concern that catered to a very specific demographic, but was still a thriving venture, very much an “only in New York” sorta place. It was there for several years, as I remember, until it closed in 1999, in the wake of the death of its proprietor, a guy named Herman. The vacated space at 35 West 19th Street became a tapas restaurant, as reported here, named Sala in 2004 and lasted until the pandemic forced its closure in 2020. Today, the space is in transition, but there are signs in the window that say “VINYL STEAKHOUSE,” suggesting a strange amalgam of record store and steak joint. Not quite sure how that works, but I being that I like both records and red meat, I wish them all success.

In any case, back in 1997, I was genuinely fascinated with Magickal Childe, so I snapped that picture. Those with a sharp eye for detail might notice that I even appear in the photograph, reflected in a mirror in the center of the shop’s window (just underneath and slightly to the left of the gold pentagram). I had no agenda in capturing the image beyond thinking it just looked cool.

Some years went by, and I ended up posting the photograph, along with several others, on an entry on this stupid blog under the title “Things That Are Not There.” As it turns out, photographs of Magickal Childe must be few and far between, as people started to reach out to me about it. I fielded a request from one reader to sell a print of it to him. I think I just ended up sending him a copy of it free of charge. I didn’t think much of it.

Years after that, some readers might remember my laborious search for the location of a certain photograph of the Lunachicks. When I finally got in touch with the photographer, a guy named Joe Dilworth, he graciously emailed me the contact sheet with the mystery photo in it. Along with the answer to my quest, that contact sheet also boasted a shot of the Lunachicks chatting with this guy who looked strangely familiar. I swiftly deduced that the guy in question was the same kid depicted in some age-old hardcore matinee photos by Drew Carolan. I realize this is all very confusing, but bear with me. As if on cue, that kid — named Anderson Slade — bizarrely got in touch with me out of the blue on Facebook. By this point, he was no longer a little punk rock kid from Staten Island, but now an aspiring actor and filmmaker who was putting together a documentary about Magickal Childe and wanted to use my photograph. I said “sure,” and then let him know about the photo of him and the Lunachicks, which blew his mind. You can read a more detailed about that whole chapter here.

Slade’s documentary, entitled “Horrible Herman’s Warlock Shop,” was in development for quite a while, and even had some trailers posted on YouTube, but those have since been taken down and there’s no news of any release dates. Anderson Slade is also no longer on Facebook. The plot thickened.

Cut to 2022. With the wife in London for the London Book Fair, I am suddenly free to watch stuff on television that I wouldn’t normally be able to. As such, I start watching “Sons of Sam: Descent into Darkness,” a four-part documentary series on Netflix that explores one investigative reporter’s feverish quest to break the story that David “Son of Sam" Berkowitz did not act alone. Even as a sniveling ten year old during the summer of 1977, I still vividly remember the atmosphere of paranoia that gripped New York City, so have always been fascinated with the story. Here’s the trailer…

In any case, halfway through the first episode, they start discussing the uptick in fascination with the occult in the `70s, stemming from disillusionment with the hippy ideal of the late `60s. In doing so, they start showing images of Wiccan ceremonies, illustrations from the Rosicrucian secret histories of the world, Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan, Aleister Crowley and …. fleetingly … MY PHOTOGRAPH OF MAGICKAL CHILDE.

I instantly sat up from my bowl of General Tso’s chicken and hit pause. What the fuck, Netflix? I don’t remember being asked about use in any Son of Sam doc. Laughably, I suddenly felt sort of violated, but then…. given the already-established paucity of images of the exterior of Magickal Childe, outside of screenshots from the Nicholas Cage film “Vampire’s Kiss” in which the shop makes a cameo, mine seems to be the first thing that comes up in a Google image search. Being no stranger to liberally appropriating images for this blog, I shouldn’t be surprised. But still, having a rinkydink blog post a pic without due credit is one thing — use in a major feature film on Netflix is another.

I started combing through my emails, with friends' voices in my head shouting “you can SUE them!” I wasn’t really interested in any financial gain from this, I was just kind of curious how they found it and a little hurt that they didn’t see fit to ask me if they could use it.

Then I figured it out.

Chalk it up to the fog of the pandemic or the steady erosion of my short-term memory, but in July of 2020, a company called “Radical Media” apparently reached out to me to say they were putting together “a documentary series for Netflix that features a storyline about the occult presence in NYC back in the 1970s and 80s, and we wanted to feature a photograph of the occult book shop Magickal Childe. It turns our there are very few photographs easily accessible, but a photo that you took of the storefront is one that comes up and is of good quality."

Evidently, I said “sure, no problem,” and even signed a release. I did not charge them anything for the use. They asked how I’d like to be credited, and apparently I wrote “Alex S./Flaming Pablum” in the email.

I watched the first episode to the end credits. Under the “photos courtesy of…” section, neither my name nor my blog’s dumb name came up. I watched the second, third and final episodes. A credit was never mentioned. I guess my signed release absolved them of that necessity, but that still kind of bummed me out.

That petty affront notwithstanding, I still recommend “Sons of Sam.” If you’re a bona fide New Yorker and a true crime buff, it’s a fascinating series, however grim (what? you were expecting frivolity??)

I was running errands earlier this week, and found myself not far from 35 West 19th Street, so took a short detour to revisit it.

Here’s how it looks today.

Pooper Union

I once spent four days, back in the early `90s, living in Cooper Union's eyesore of a then-brand-new dormitory (above) for the purposes of writing an article about it for the school's alumni magazine (a friend of mine was a contributor there, at the time, and got me the gig). I remember many of the school's own architecture students being abjectly appalled by the building. My piece was edited beyond all recognition, but that was probably more to do with my penchant for including anecdotal asides that were not-entirely-flattering towards the school, coupled with my needlessly "descriptive" verbiage. You can read more about that riveting chapter on this ancient post.

In any case, if Cooper Union is forcing Sunrise Mart and Angel's Share out of the neighborhood, as EV Grieve reports, and out of business, they have earned my eternal fuckin' scorn.

NYC Standard Fare: A Quick List for a Friend

As a director of content and editorial services for the corporate communications department of my company, I was initially hired for my writing abilities. But when our in-house video editor abruptly resigned shortly after I started back in late 2015, I somehow absorbed his duties, despite not being in any real way versed in the realms of video editing. As a result, I swiftly established a network of regular vendors to tackle our needs. One of those vendors is a Nashville-based videographer named Brian who has saved my hide more times than can be quantified. He and his team do rock-solid work and never part with their cool, even under the tightest of deadlines. I remain eternally indebted to him.

So when Brian postulated the query below to me, earlier this week, I felt duty-bound to help him out.

“Hey, my friend! I have a very close friend of mine coming to NYC later this month … they are staying a block off Times Square. Can you recommend…

1. A pizza place

2. A hot dog place

3. Any other “NYC standard” you can think of…”

It looks pretty cut-&-dry, but if you’re a bona fide New Yorker, you know there is rarely ever a single, clear-cut answer to questions like these. Even post-gentrification and post-pandemic, we still live in a city literally teeming with options. Which does one cite?

I’ve done a few posts about this sort stuff before, notably my two Flaming Pablum Grub Guides and the Big City Survey, but I’m always slightly hesitant to use descriptors like “Best,” being that it’s all relative. I prefer to use the term “favorite.”

As such, let’s dig into this….

"A PIZZA PLACE"

As expressed above, cripes …. where does one even begin?

For a start, not to deflect the question, but there are different types of pizza places. There are your standard pizzerias tailored to quick slices on paper plates to be eaten at counters or taken to go. Then there are more formal joints where one orders an entire pie and eats at a table with a table cloth and waiters and the whole nine. There is also a league of high-end, bespoke pizza restaurants, although the fare here is usually a more refined dining experience that owes precious little to the afore-cited, street-side pizzerias. Whatever your preference, budget or social status, there’s a pizza place for you.

Not to be a downer, but as expressed elsewhere on this blog, as far as I’m concerned, the heyday of grab-n-go Manhattan slices is lamentably behind us. When I was a kid, it seemed like there was a credible pizza joint every three blocks, or so. Every neighborhood had at least one, and they were usually all pretty decent. Today, for whatever reason, this is no longer the case. I mean, sure, there are still droves of middling-to-dismal places wherein to get a quick slice. Just this week, I ruefully ducked into one on Cortlandt Street (not to be confused with Cortlandt Alley) in the Financial District and had a perfunctory slice that, while still technically “pizza,” lacked pretty much everything that the dish is supposed to embody. Then, of course, there is also the more recent trend of “one-dollar pizza” places which I’ve bemoaned here before. While I respect that people need to be able to eat on the cheap, “one-dollar pizza” is a strenuous affront to the rich culinary heritage of New York City and should be duly shunned with an extra topping of contempt.

So, yeah, anyway….

For the purposes of my friend Brian’s query, I would steer his friend to John’s Pizza of Times Square. This is a sit-down establishment of deserving renown. I personally prefer the original John’s down near me on Bleecker Street, but the Times Square location is roomy and atmospheric and the pies are still pretty goddamn great. It’s also nearby where this guy is staying, so everyone wins.

Beyond that, though, I would also cite Lombardi’s Pizza on Spring Street in SoHo, although they’ve become a bit touristy, it has to be acknowledged. Their brick-oven pizza remains fucking outstanding. A nice place to go without so much fuss would be Numero 28 Pizza on Carmine Street. They don’t come out in conventional pie shapes so much as gooey rectangles, but their pizza is simply delicious.

A recent addition to my favorite pizza joints is right here on my own University Place, that being Simo Pizza. They don’t serve slices, but their pies are light with amazing, soft crusts. You cannot go wrong with this place. Ribalta Pizza, for a similar sit-down situation, on East 12th between Broadway and University Place is also mighty nice.

With regards to quick and greasy slices, most of the favorite places from my youth are long gone, but you can still get a great slice at Joe’s Pizza, also on Carmine Street, but they, too, have been discovered.

I’m also partial to the slices at Champion Pizza in Soho on Cleveland Place.

Begrudgingly, I also truly have to give it up for Little Italy III on University Place, which is the favorite pizzeria-du-jour of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. I wrote about how I thought he had his head up his ass about this, but I went shortly afterwards, and despite the place still being something of a depressing bus-station-without-the-bussses, the slices are indeed pretty goddamn good.

Do not, under any circumstances, go to a Domino’s Pizza when you are in NYC.

“A HOT DOG PLACE”

This may sound weird, but I’ve never really considered New York City that much of a hot dog town. I mean, yeah, they’re everywhere, and while the “dirty-water dogs” you get from the Sabrett carts may seem iconic — and they kind of are — they’re really the sort of food you eat only when you have no other alternatives. No time to stop for lunch? Grab a street-side dog, and you’ll at least have something in your system, so to speak. Don’t expect it to make a huge, flavorful impression on you. I’m just being honest.

When I was kid, the Papaya King on the corner of East 86th Street & Third Avenue was a way better bet for hot dogs, even if it meant standing in that narrow chamber to consume them (best with a tall cup of papaya juice). Amazingly, Papaya King is still there, as are a few of the similarly inclined Gray’s Papaya places, albeit not the storied one on the corner of West 8th and Sixth Avenue (which turned into Liquiteria before closing during the pandemic). It has been said that this Gray’s Papaya was Lou Reed’s favorite place to eat in New York City.

There is also Crif Dogs on the eastern end of St. Marks Place for a higher-end variant of the hot dog, if that’s your thing. I like Crif because there’s a secret speakeasy bar tucked in its rear interior.

Lastly, of course, there’s the famous Nathan’s, but that involves going way the Hell out to Coney Island. That’s fun, but that’s a day in itself.

“ANY OTHER ’NYC STANDARD’ YOU CAN THINK OF…”

Okay, this is the one that really does my head in, because I can think of quite a lot.

But, if we’re simply talking about food, I’d say….

Get a five-dollar order of the fried dumplings from the scary fried dumpling closet on Mosco Street in Chinatown.

Get a big, fuckoff steak at Keen’s Chophouse on West 36th Street

If you can afford it — and I generally can’t — treat yourself to sushi at Nobu on 195 Broadway

Get the Korean barbecue at Dons Bogam on East 32nd Street. Yeah, it’s still Korean BBQ, but they still do the cooking for you, so no one feels like throwing up the next day, if you know what I mean.

Get the dim-sum at Dim Sum Go-Go on East Broadway. It is fucking special.

Get a burger at the Corner Bistro on West 4th Street.

Have the pierogis at timeless Ukrainian eatery Veselka on East 9th, and raise a middle-finger to Mother Russia.

Hope that helps!! Bon appetit!!!

Goodbye to Davey's

I am frequently heard to lament the deterioration of the East Village I used to love -- my favorite seedy bars like Downtown Beirut, Alcatraz, Manitoba’s and Mars Bar, live-music venues like Brownie’s and the Pyramid and record/disc shops like Sounds, Freebeing and Kim’s have mostly all gone the way of the woolly mammoth. Over the last couple of decades, storefronts that were formerly storied haunts or atmospheric dives became bespoke boutiques, exotic noodle parlors, vaping emporiums or brunch destinations. The punkers were largely replaced by brunchers. Cronuts became strangely way more important than Cro-Mags. The edge went missing.

But I read today via my comrade E.V. Grieve that one of those “newer” places is vacating today. Davey’s Ice Cream on First Avenue only opened up 8 years ago. I honestly can’t remember what is was prior to Davey’s, but in the past 8 years, it has been an all-time favorite with my now-no-longer-especially-little kids (below circa 2018). There may have been a whiff of trendy/foodie about the venture, but they served a particular flavor called Speculoos that – while it sounded like an unsavory surgical instrument – truly rivaled unmentionable pleasures. We shall bitterly rue Davey’s departure.

Pour one out.

Back Into Exile: Exhuming The Siberia Bar

Watch any documentary about a since-closed music venue, nightclub or bar, and you’re bound to hear some of the same stupid shit. Whether conscious of it or not, at least one of the participants will make one ridiculously clichéd remark or another about how the establishment in question was this unique confluence of poetically unlikely factors that could not, should not and never will exist again. Invariably, there will also be florid testimonials about the fabled proprietor of the place which portray that individual like some sort of star-crossed visionary from another dimension. While such declarations might even have varying degrees of truth to them, these soundbites have become so deeply and dependably rote as storytelling devices that these movies all practically blend together.

Given my blog’s brazen predilections for New York City nostalgia, I am, of course, no stranger to these sorts of films. “Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar,” a 2008 documentary directed by one Jack Bryan, is no exception to the rules lamented above. That all said, you should still check it out.

I’ve written about both Manhattan iterations of the Siberia Bar here a few times, notably here and here. I honestly cannot remember who first told me about the place, but being that I worked at TIME Magazine, just down the block from the subway stop that played host to the first iteration of the bar, once I learned about it, I had to go check it out. This would have been around 1997, I’m guessing, and I swiftly became one of a cloying legion of irritating, drunk-journalist types prone to hanging out within its endearingly decrepit confines. I’m the inebriated jackass in the center of the photo above, taken at Siberia around `98, given the then-recently-procured Damned t-shirt I’m sporting (they’d played a Coney Island High — also gone, but no documentary yet — a few days prior). If you were a self-styled, world-weary, laboriously smug scribe of one stripe or another, you were bound to be found drinking irresponsibly there sooner or later.

Around 2000, the Siberia Bar decamped from its celebrated closet-sized perch in the midtown subway system and moved into Hell’s Kitchen. While the new location lacked its predecessor's seedy charm and intriguing mystique, the much roomier second version of the Siberia Bar retained the spirit of the old place … complete with those infamous stipulations about swearing and gratuitous hittin' on women.

Around the same time, however, I’d gotten married. As such, my nights darkening the already-very-dark doors of Siberia were somewhat sharply curtailed. I’d go every now and again, but hardly with any frequency. And then, sadly, in 2007, it closed for good.

I never knew of the documentary below’s existence until earlier this week. A reader named CB hipped me to it. Granted, I’m about 14 years late to the table, but for your viewing pleasure and edification, here it is….

Life After Dark: The Story of Siberia Bar from Jack Bryan on Vimeo.

The Walrus Goes to Hell's Kitchen

In honor of the anniversary of the death of John Lennon, a friend of mine posted a picture of the man they’d been given by a photographer named David Gahr. The photo in question was a great shot of the man standing on the median strip of an avenue in, presumably, New York City. Intrigued, I immediately did a bit of Googling to see if I could pinpoint the spot, and sure enough, it was over in Hell’s Kitchen. You can see images from Gah’rs shoot here. But amidst those images came pictures of Lennon standing in front of a landmark near to my heart.

Here’s John standing in front of The River Diner, formerly at the corner of West 37th and 11th Avenue. Why is this significant to me, you ask? Well, this is the diner, as I discussed here, that Martin Scorsese used as a primary location in -- WAIT FOR IT -- “After Hours” (and not, as widely misconceived, the Moondance Diner that formerly stood at the corner of Grand Street and Sixth Avenue in SoHo).

Pour one out for John, gone 41 years today. And, yes, I know the Walrus was Paul.