Flaming Pablum

Wherewuzzat? Back Once More to SoHoZat

I’ve twice written here about SoHoZat, an odd sort of magazine/comic eporium on West Broadway just above Canal Street in SoHo. Back in the `80s, it was a joint I’d regularly pop into for copies of various curious periodicals. They had a wide-if-frenetic selection of reading material, and you were always bound to stumble across something new and different. It was also a great hangout. No one was chasing you out the door for not buying something. It was a safe haven for freaks, geeks, artists, weirdos, artists and the like.

As mentioned in those older posts, SoHoZat’s rent took a stip climb and they were forced to close their doors in about 1992 (now amost 30 years ago, …. jeezus). Following SoHoZat’s departure, the space it formerly occupied became a deli for a while. The surrounding strip also became significantly gentirified and built up to the extent that it’s incredibly hard to fathom that a cool, relaxed, bohemian concern like SoHoZat ever existed on that block, considering it’s now populated by pricey bistros, lavish hotels, exclusive haberdasheries and their ilk. The only real remnant of SoHoZat is their sister concern across the street, that being the graffitti emporium Scrap Yard (formerlly called Bomb The System, in less sensitive years).

There’s much more hustle and bustle on this patch of West Broadway than there ever was, although the pandemic has taken a bit of the shine off. The space that had been the deli following the depature of SoHoZat is now an animal shelter/hospital, oddly enough.

In any event, whilst trawling around the internet today, I came across this image of the old SoHoZat, taken by one Susan Kleckner in 1987. Click on it to enlarge. 

 

For Those Not About To Rock ... Redux

About five days ago, there were reports that in the wake of a music festival on Randall’s Island – something called Electric Zoo – a cluster of at least 16 confirmed cases of COVID-19 had surfaced, and attendees were being advised to go get tested immediately, regardless of their vaccination status. This event happened outside and was attended by tens of thousands of people with deplorably bad taste in music EDM fans. According to the festival’s official website, attendees had to provide proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test before they would be allowed to enter. Those with neither had the option of taking an on-site test (for a tidy $99.00). It had appeared that the organizers were being responsible, proactive, were all buttoned up and ready to … uhh …rock (well, not really).

But, alas, not so.

As weepily reported yesterday, my beloved DEVO – despite having themselves played the Riot Festival in Chicago just last weekend – cancelled their grand return to Radio City Music Hall this evening over COVID-19 concerns, although bitter rumors persist that it was more about poor ticket sales. People are also actually wagering as to whether this coming weekend’s Governors Ball -- another Lollapalooza-styled annual music festival also on Randall’s Island -- will get a similar last-minute plug-pulling.

If you go to the official websites of both Radio City Music Hall and the Governors Ball, both operations plainly lay out their COVID-19 protocols, just as the organizers of the Electric Zoo did.

While I’m still super bummed about the DEVO postponement/cancellation (the band is saying they’ll reschedule, but Ticketmaster are already saying I’m getting a refund), there was another gig I was planning on going to tomorrow night, that being Lydia Lunch’s Retrovirus at St. Vitus in Brooklyn.

Neither a stately, art-decco Manhattan institution nor an airy, outdoor festival ground, St. Vitus is a comparatively intimate, grotty rock club. Its walls are painted black and it has no windows. It plays host to an endearingly unsavory amalgam of heavy metal, punk, industrial and gratuitous noise rock. In other words, it’s fucking perfect. I’ve seen a handful of shows within its forbidding confines, and I’ve always had a fucking marvelous time.

But while entirely unlike the other concerns invoked in this post in every conceivable fashion, St. Vitus also has a proactive and starkly worded COVID-19 policy, just like Radio City Music Hall, Governors Ball and Electric Zoo. If you want to darken the already-dark doors of St. Vitus, you have to observe the protocol – proof of full vaccination in order to gain entry. It’s reassuringly worded and suggests a heightened awareness that this struggle is about the collective, not the individual.

Regardless, I’ve decided that I’m not going.

I wrestled with it for a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn’t seem prudent. As has been alluded to in the graphs above, even the best-laid plans and intentions have gotten this wrong. While I may be encouraged by St. Vitus’ precautions and would be super keyed-up to see Retrovirus play, I regret to say that it’s just not worth the risk for me, right now. This will actually be the second show at St. Vitus I’ll be opting out of since the arrival of the pandemic, the first being Human Impact’s gig there in March of 2020, which I wrote about here. That performance indeed happened, but was an odd evening out, by all reports.

Look, everyone has their own comfort level with this situation. I don’t mean to dissuade anyone from going, nor am I shaming the venue for hosting the event nor the band from performing. Given my responsibilities and schedule of activities, it just doesn’t seem like the right move for me to make at this time. If you want to go, by all means do and have a great fucking time.

While I’m absolutely always game to see Lydia Lunch speak/read/perform/castigate in any permutation, I am especially bummed to be missing this particular iteration of Retrovirus, which features Sonic Youth/Pussy Galore/Bewitched drummer Bob Bert, rock-solid bassist Tim Dahl and explosive guitarist Weasel Walter of the Flying Luttenbachers. Flanked by these accomplished players, Lydia delves into her sprawling back catalog to reinterpret old works with strenuously muscular results. It’s damn hard to imagine ANYone being able to upstage Lydia Lunch, but Weasel Walter comes really damn close in the clip below. These motherfuckers can really play.

Here’s hoping they’ll be back.

ADDENDUM: For those of you, like myself, who opted out of attending last night's Retrovirus show (for whatever reason), they've since hosted the whole thing on YouTube. Enjoy ....

Ecstatic Pizza! Thurston Moore’s Favorite Slice

A bunch of years back, I posted a windy little entry that sought to debunk the arguable cache of being a native New Yorker. I mean, yeah, being originally from here certainly comes with myriad inherent advantages, but being born here is something that only happens out of a combination of wildly uncontrollable circumstances and pure luck. Having been born in New York City doesn’t immediately imbue an individual with some supernatural arsenal of weapons-grade street smarts, urbane sophistication and/or some greater power of cognition. It’s nurture that does that, not nature. To buffer my point, I appended a laundry list of names I considered consummate New Yorkers – individuals that, to my mind, personified all the attributes of the city – but that weren’t actually born here. Thurston Moore was one of those names.

Wrongly cited by me as having been born in Connecticut, Thurston Moore was actually born in Coral Gables, Florida, which is very approximately 1,284 miles from East 14th Street, give or take. Moore moved to the East Village in Manhattan in 1979, romanced here by the music of Patti Smith. Following stints in proto-hardcore band Even Worse, Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra and a band called The Coachmen, Moore formed Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon (herself from Rochester) around 1981. The rest, as they say, is history. In relatively short order, Sonic Youth became a kind of a quintessential New York band in the same vein as their forebears in the Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, The Ramones, etc. A concussive amalgam of art, noise and attitude, the very name Sonic Youth became synonymous with downtown New York City.

All this laborious preamble is all to underscore the point that, in my estimation, Thurston Moore is very much still a bona fide New Yorker, even if he currently lives in London.

Now if it’s one thing New Yorkers – native or otherwise – have strong opinions about, it’s pizza.

While originally an Italian dish dating back to the 10th century, pizza as we know it is essentially a New York City thing. Sure, different cities have tried to put their spin on it, but it’s still inarguably New York’s great culinary contribution. That’s not just my opinion, it’s just a fucking fact.

Personally speaking, I think Manhattan, with regard to pizza, is in steep decline. Once upon a time … and not even that long ago … pizza parlors were as plentiful as Manhattan’s ….er… bookstores and record shops. I used to be able to rattle off seven or eight worthy locales wherein to procure a respectable-to-exemplary slice in practically each and every neighborhood I frequented. Back then, it seems a decent pizzeria could be found within only a couple of blocks’ walk. Here in 2021, I’m afraid that’s just not the case.

Sure, there are plenty of higher-end pizza places around. I have nothing against those, but I’m speaking more about the street-food variety. Slightly more revered than the hot dog (and invariably healthier), a good slice has become perilously hard to put one’s hand to, although mediocrity is always in great supply. Then, of course, there is the somewhat new trend of “$1 pizza” which is a deplorable, function-over-form disservice to the city’s legacy and traditions.

For my money, while former favorites like St. Marks Pizza on St. Marks Place, The Pizza Box on Bleecker Street and several joints peppered around the Upper East Side of my now-distant youth are all long, long gone, you can still get yourself a slice to be proud of at Joe’s on Carmine just off Bleecker Street, although they’ve assuredly been discovered, by this point. I’m also quite fond of Village Pizza on 8th Avenue, just north of West 13th Street. My wife is a longtime supporter of Pizza Mercato on Waverly Place, but I’m afraid I have to part with her on that front. In terms of our immediate neighborhood, I used to regularly haunt the Stromboli’s on University Place between 12th and 13th Streets. That whole block was razed several years back (taking Bowlmor Lanes with it), and that pizzeria is no more. I used to laboriously point out how I once ducked in out the rain there one night and found myself sharing a slice in silence with notoriously thorny Television front-man and New York Punk Rock pioneer, Tom Verlaine. I wonder where he gets his slices these days.

Every New Yorker has their go-to, even in these comparatively dark times. It’s for this reason that I was somewhat shocked to spy on Thurston Moore’s Instagram page the below declaration. Of the establishment Little Italy Pizza III on my own University Place, he writes….

My go to cheese slice in nyc these days. Not in Little Italy but on University between 13/14th west side of street. The crust w just the right crunch appeal and slice thickness neither too thin too fat, the sauce etc on the money, downed w a fountain iced coke - boom yr off.

Now, again, far be it from me to doubt the tastes of Thurston Goddamn Moore of Sonic Fucking Youth, but the eyebrow-raise this post prompted has left creases in my forehead. Also, not for nothing, it's not "a cheese slice," it's just a slice. The cheese goes without saying. Without cheese, it ceases being proper pizza, goddammit.

But as far as this place is concerned, as Thurston even concedes, so-called Little Italy III is fucking Hell and gone from actual Little Italy. For this ruse alone, I think I’ve always shunned the place. Secondly, it’s like a bus station with a pizza oven. It looks like a Five Guys’ men’s room. I’m not saying a proper pizzeria has to be aesthetically pleasing (Village Pizza, by way of comparison, is frill-free in absolutely every conceivable way), but there’s a garishly over-lit, antiseptic quality to the interior of Little Italy III that has always driven me away from it. It looks just as uninviting as the 99 Cent Pizza closet on Sixth Avenue adjacent to the West 4th Street-Washington Square subway station – which always looks like a fine place to get stabbed. Never once have I considered grabbing a slice at this place. Nothing about it says “come sample our fare.” Nothing at all. To me it looks like a chapel of heartburn and regret.

But hey … fuck do I know? I didn’t write Daydream Nation.

What's your favorite pizzeria? 

Vega's Vista: Downtown Pics from the Eighties

There’s a group on Facebook I’m a member of that I’ve mentioned several times here before called Manhattan Before 1990 which is largely dedicated to,….well, … photos of just that. Obviously, in recent days, it’s been filled with shots of the World Trade Center, but in the days prior to that, I came across several photos by a gentleman named David Vega, who apparently was loitering on the same downtown streets as me back in the 80’s. I asked Mr. Vega if I could re-purpose some of his photos here, and he gamely obliged. Here are just a few of them….

French Kisses was this little spot on St. Marks Place that largely traded in vintage movie posters, the true provenance of which, I believe, being France (hence the name of the shop), so they might have all been in French, but don’t quote me on that. I remember they also sold a robust array of postcards modeled after promotional gig posters. I remember buying fistfuls of them of bands like The Clash, The Cult, The Jesus & Mary Chain and the like, and taping them up all over my walls during high school and college. French Kisses had an ancillary operation over on Bleecker just west of LaGuardia. According to Mr. Vega, this shot was taken in 1985.

Also taken in 85, here’s a shot of the other side of the street. This is, of course, Trash & Vaudeville. By this point, you can see a gate has been put up in front of 4 St. Marks Place (which I wrote about here). Trash was forced to leave this storied space some years back. They decamped to a spot over on East 6th Street. Owner and mastermind Jimmy Webb passed away last year, but the shop soldiers on.

This is, of course, the old Lone Star Cafe. I devoted many posts to this over the years. Suffice to say, the place is long gone. In a nutshell, after the Lone Star closed, it briefly became a bar called Mr. Fuji’s Tropicana (albeit without the lizard on the roof — he went to Texas). After Mr. Fuji’s closed, it became a sort of middling deli. They the space was derelict for quite a while until it was razed and a noxious condo was built in its footprint with a Brandy Melville in its ground floor, a shop I took exception with for their incongruous selling of comparatively rare Ramones ephemera.

It’s been about nine dozen ventures since then, but back in the early-to-mid 80’s, this corner was home to, as the sign says, The St. Marks Bar & Grill. Personally speaking, I was too young to visit the establishment in this incarnation, but it was made famous as a location for both the climax of the video for the Rolling Stones “Waiting on a Friend” and as the bar Wren and Richard Hell hang out at in the film “Smithereens.”

This is the formerly iconic corner of St. Marks Place at Third Avenue. There’s a lot to love about this photo for me, notably the sneery Gringo mural and St. Marks Pizza. Today, this corner is basically a yard of rubble behind plywood walls awaiting construction of yet another new development. Boo hiss.

Further east down St. Marks, this is the exterior of Venus Records. Mr. Vega says he took this in 1984, but I politely beg to differ, as Venus Records was still perched over on West 8th Street until at least 1986. The shop that later became Venus Records on St. Marks circa `88 or so was a bookstore before that. If I’m not mistaken the space in question is a pho joint (Asian broth) today.

This is, of course, CBGB in 1986. I love this shot in that it features the CB's Record Canteen (although I'm still on the hunt for shots of the CB's pizza place on the other side....anyone remember that?).

Big huge thanks to David Vega for his generosity. Check out his Instagram account here.

Back to Downtown Music Gallery on East 5th

I’ve written about Downtown Music Gallery a few times here. In the wake of one of those posts, one Stephen Popkin, the founder of the place, got in touch and we started an email exchange that has lasted years.

This morning, he sent me a clutch of photos from the iteration of the shop when it was on East 5th Street, just steps from Cooper Square, right next to my beloved Scratcher, and also the street on which Dead Boys drummer Johnny Blitz was stabbed, back in the day, as mentioned on this ancient post. 

Here’s what he had to say about them…

Hi i just found these . Thought you might want to take a look . Photographer is Scott Hiller 1992 For this we got DGC to pay the stores rent for a month plus boxes of product.

And Thurston was one of our best customers! Those were the days!

I want to say this was the first iteration of the shop I ever went into. Today, this space is a veterinarian’s clinic.

More about DMG on Flaming Pablum....

Downtown Music Gallery in the Line of Fire (2008)

Back to Downtown Music Gallery (2012)

Downtown Music Gallery Needs Your Help (2018)

Brooke Smith Comes Out of the Pit

While many may know her from stints in television shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Ray Donovan,” “Big Sky,” “Law & Order” and several others, actress Brooke Smith is invariably *BEST* known for her memorable portrayal of star-crossed Catherine Martin, the hapless senator’s daughter who is repeatedly posited to put the lotion in the basket lest she get the hose again in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic, “The Silence of the Lambs.” For better or worse, it was a breakout role that she will probably never entirely shake.

But beyond her acting, there’s a side to Brooke Smith many may not know. Now in her early 50’s, Brooke grew up in the suburbs of New York City, but became deeply ensconced in the nascent New York Hardcore scene of the early 1980s, hanging out with bands like Agnostic Front, Murphy’s Law, the Cro-Mags and Cause For Alarm. I wrote about her back in 2011, when her photos of the Lower East Side punk community came to light, and they were and remain a real revlation. As an added bonus, Brooke was also, for a time, the roommate of the late singer/songwriter Jeff Buckley (it was Brooke who first introduced him to the music of Bad Brains, whose “I Against I” he’d later cover). Back when the Earth was young, I posted an MP3 of that recording to a music discussion board in the wake of Buckley’s passing and bizarrely got in a really heated email exchange with the late singer’s mother, but that’s another story.

In any case, Brooke was recently a guest on Turned Out a Punk, the podcast of Fucked Up lead singer Damian Abraham I’ve mentioned before. Brooke is quick with some great anecdotes about the CBGB matinee scene and so much more. Plus, she’s got a book coming out about the whole thing. If you’re a fan of of this stuff as I am, it’s well worth your time. Check it out here.

Desktop Detritus: Things That Are No Longer There

As previously mentioned here multiple times, I am forever on the hunt for things to post about, and when I see something that sparks my imagination, I usually grab it and set it to one side, so to speak. Quite often, those images (or videos or links or whatever) result in a windy rumination in the form of a blog post. Other times, however, whatever context I had in mind gets lost, and the item in question just becomes one more heavy file eating up space on my beleaguered MacBook Air.

I recently discovered that my laptop is sorely in need of a OS upgrade, but that I lack the space and memory to install the most up-to-date version. As such, I’ve been purging large piles of stuff and relegating other crap to the iCloud, Dropbox, external drives, etc., although I’m still dubious I’m going to be able to create enough space.

In any case, along the way, I came across the three photos below, which I’d obviously set aside to write about at one point or another. I’m relatively sure I had whole posts mapped out for each of them, but those are now lost in the mist of time. In re-discovering them now, I’m going to take a stab at whatever I might have had in mind for them.

I regrettably have no idea who took this photograph. The only information I have about it is that it was saved under the title “1982,” which sounds, at the very least, accurate. This is, of course, the Astor Place cube or, more precisely, Tony Rosenthal’s sculpture “Alamo.” Honestly, I’m more inclined to believe that I zeroed in on this photo not because of the sculpture, but more in that it showcased the lot behind it with the sort of lightning-bolt mural on the north-facing wall in the background. Beyond being a parking lot, this open space also served as an ersatz flea market. Today, of course, while the cube is still very much an Astor Place fixture, the space that was that lot is now occupied by a big condo tower that I used to say looked like a shampoo bottle, which a Chase back on its ground floor.

Similar to the photo of the cube, I seemed to save this photo with the title “1983,” although this image handily comes with the photographer’s watermark. Taken by one Tom Langton, this is, of course, the exterior of Sounds on St. Marks Place and the Grassroots Tavern on the garden level. Zoom in closely and you’ll see the album covers of Singles Going Steady by the Buzzcocks, Dare by the Human League and Dance by Gary Numan in the window, all of which predate 1983, so who knows? In any case, it’s an iconic shot. Today, both the Grassroots and Sounds are long gone, with nothing having taken their place.

Snapped by one Joe Clementi allegedly circa 1985, this is a shot of the exterior of an old St. Marks Place bar on the corner of Avenue A called Alcatraz, although I honestly cannot remember if Alcatraz dated back that early. I vividly remember going to Alcatraz in the late 80s, so it very well may have been there in 1985, but I cannot swear to it. I wrote about it briefly here, but Alcatraz had sort of a biker/rocker vibe. I seem to remember hearing lots of Guns N’ Roses and Jane’s Addiction there, back in the day. In later eras, the space became a sushi bar. Not quite sure what’s there today, actually.

The End of Summer Survey 2021

Ahoy from the unstable eye of Tropical Storm Henri (formerly Hurricane Henri) out here in Quogue, on the south shore of what Public Enemy used to call “Strong Island.” For the past several days, we’ve been bracing for the arrival of this weather event, but now that it’s finally here, it’s sort of mercifully anticlimactic, … or thus far, I should say. We haven’t gotten any heavy winds, yet, but the torrential downpours have been pretty steady since very early this morning. We’ll see what the rest of the day brings.

In the interim, being that my family is basically packing up and heading back to the city for good, later this week, I’m inclined to suggest that Summer 2021 … a heady cocktail of hope, expectation, cynicism and disappointment, is basically over. As such, I’m exhuming the annual summer survey, … like it matters. Here we go...

Defining Moment of Summer 2021:

While there were plenty of news events from the past couple of months that could act as pivotal moments to sum up the season — from our nationwide failure to contain the advance of the Delta Variant to the inevitably botched withdrawal from Afghanistan — I’m going to scale this question down to a personal level. For us, we spent much of June, July and August traipsing around the Eastern Seaboard, from Upstate New York to Vermont to Massachusetts to Connecticut to Maine and back again, depositing and fetching one child from summer camp and touring prospective college campuses with the other. On one particular evening in the sleepy town of Westport, New York on the shores of Lake Champlain, I both broke a tooth eating shrimp cocktail (no small feat) and, on the creeky front porch of a dilapidated inn we were inexplicably staying at, heard a roughshod husband-&-wife acoustic folk duo launch unexpectedly into a melody-free rendition of “Naked Girl Falling Down the Stairs” by The Cramps. I’d say that bizarre evening pretty much encapsulated Summer 2021, for me.

Best Purchase of Summer 2021:

I actually don’t recall buying that much of anything, this past summer, but I did snag a truly crucial beer-can-chicken stand from True Value in Westhampton that did a magisterial job of keeping our poultry dutifully erect during the indirect grilling portion of the preparation. I was quite pleased with that.

Best Book You Read of Summer 2021:

I really lucked out, this year, as with only one minor exception (a memoir I neglected to finish by a certain noted photographer that I’m sure I’ll go back to), everything I read was pretty compelling. I started off with “Fallopian Rhapsody: The Story of the Lunachicks” by Jeanne Fury, then dove right into the stately “Substance: Inside New Order” by the mighty Peter Hook and then into the suitably grisly “Chaos: Charles Manson, The CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties” by Tom O’Neill. All were entirely excellent. Right now, I’m almost a third into “The History of Bones,” the long-awaited memoir by musician/actor/painter/perennial cool cat (and sometimes Flaming Pablum reader and commenter) John Lurie, and it’s totally engaging, thus far.

Best Movie You Saw During Summer 2021:

I have yet to re-enter any movie theaters, but I did see a clutch of new films — mostly documentaries — over the past couple of months. I, of course, watched “Roadrunner,” the doc about Anthony Bourdain. While quite compelling, it was inevitably crazy depressing. I realize there was a big stink about some A.I.-enhancement of Bourdain’s voice, but I was more put off by the editorial slant in the final third of the film regarding the man’s fraught relationship with Asia Argento. I would recommend it, but that aspect kind of put me off, a bit, as it not-so-subtly sought to assign a convenient villain to story far too complex for such a tidy conclusion, … in my opinion.

I neglected to watch “Val,” the documentary about notedly eccentric actor Val Kilmer as, upon watching the trailer, it, too, seemed irretrievably depressing. The Music Box doc on “Woodstock `99” was also both wildly engaging and wholly dispiriting, so much so that I had to cleanse myself with “We Are Twisted Fucking Sister,” a great film from 2014 about … well, take a guess … that was way better than it had any right to be.

But probably the best thing I saw all summer was earlier this week, when my friend Rob C and I were invited to a private screening of “The War is Never Over,” Beth B’s long-in-the-works documentary about the inimitable Lydia Lunch. Shown in the incongruously plush penthouse apartment of a cinema-benefactor I shall not name, it was a somewhat striking dichotomy to watch Lydia’s unflinchingly visceral story play out in front of this select audience of cloyingly young invitees mostly comprised of aspiring-film types who had zero idea who Lydia Lunch is. The film, of course, pulls few punches, so it was fun catching a few attendees visibly recoiling at certain points. If you’re a fan of the great lady, you need to see it. Lydia herself actually showed up at the end for a Q&A. I got to ask a few questions of her, which was fun. In typical form, she minced no words and got worked up a few times in her own signature manner. I’d have loved to get a picture with her, but I didn’t want to hassle her like a fawning fanboy. My friend Rob, meanwhile, came face to face with her at one point in the kitchen after the film, and somehow managed to get both a hug and a polite kiss from her. Cheeky bastard.

Best Gift You Received of Summer 2021:

Somewhere in Maine, my wife found me a pair of socks with depictions of ducks and the legend “FUCK OFF” all over them. Priceless.

Biggest Loss of Summer 2021:

I was genuinely pretty sad to learn of the passing of ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill. I don’t care if you’re a punk or a metalhead or a hip-hopper or a rudeboy or a Deadhead or whatever — if you can’t appreciate the singular majesty of ZZ Top, you’re a fucking dolt.

Song That Best Sums Up Summer 2021:

As mentioned back on this post, I listened to a whole slew of different stuff over the course of the summer. I don’t know that I can cite a single tune, however, that ties it all up for me. For whatever reason, here at the cottage, my wife had a habit of playing a whole bunch of Neil Young whenever we were routinely over-imbibing on the back deck. She likes the mellower stuff like “Harvest Moon” and “After the Gold Rush,” whereas I much prefer the angrier fare like “Southern Man” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” the latter usually finding her scrambling for the remote.

Happiest Memory of Summer 2021:

While this summer certainly had its share of discouraging moments, I will say that it was, by and large, a happy season. We quite enjoyed our car trips around the wilds of New England. I had a great catch-up with my old friend Rob D. (not the same Rob as mentioned above) at a great outdoor bar in New London, CT on our way to collect Oliver from camp, which found me laughing out loud more than I’ve done in a long damn time.

Saddest Memory of Summer 2021:

Ah, why dwell on it?

Scariest Memory of Summer 2021:

I don’t know that I felt any genuine fear over this summer, but the encroaching dread brought on by embarrassingly large swathes of the American populace continuing to stupidly ignore the recommendations of the medical community gives me concern for what the next few months might bring.

Word That Best Describes Summer 2021:

Almost.

Real Talk, Greenwich Village Style

For The Skeptical & Proudly Ignorant...

Let's stop blaming the Delta Variant, shall we? I mean, the virus is just doing what viruses do. Modern medical science *GAVE US* a way out of this, but depressingly vast swathes of the populace are still too stubborn, selfish, skeptical and *FUCKING STUPID* to take it. THEY'RE the reason we're still in this mess, not the virus.