Flaming Pablum

SOLVED: The Whereabouts of Wendy's Wall

By its very design, street art is ephemeral. Not necessarily made to last and furtively executed either in haste, overnight or under the radar, it is a guerrilla-style form of expression the very clandestine nature of which is to surprise its viewers and then, in most instances, vanish forever. I’d suggest that huge parts of its appeal are in its fleeting existences and outlaw status. You may not have expected it. You did not ask for it. You cannot control it. You cannot own it. The most you can do is paint over it.

Graffiti is loved and loathed in equal measures by the city’s residents. But despite New York’s own robust history of trailblazing street art, there isn’t really one, formal public record of it. Sure, names like Zephyr, Lee Quinones, Futura 2000 and Dondi are frequently cited by denizens — to say nothing of artists whose work went “legit” like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Richard Hambleton and Jean-Michel Basquiat — but, as far as I know, there is no single tome or collection that authoritatively documents the work of the most celebrated street artists and graffiti-writers. But, I suppose that’s the point. It’s a wild, organic art form. You’re not supposed to be able to institutionalize it.

It’s for this very reason that I’ve been so preoccupied with a certain quest — to find the Plasmatics wall.

I originally invoked it in this comparatively ancient post from a decade ago, but my actual search for the image dates back to 1982 or 1983, after first spotting the art on a wall in Spanish Harlem from within a southbound school bus on the northern reaches of Park Avenue.

It seemed sort of wildly out of place to spot an invocation of The Plasmatics — very much a downtown concern — on a wall up in Spanish Harlem, much less an invocation composed in the signature bright colors and stylized renderings of graffiti, which, in those days, was more steeped in the burgeoning culture of hip-hop than in punk rock. But, again, it’s easy to assign such meaningless parameters for the sake of neatly encapsulating an era. There, for whatever reason, was a colorful depiction of Wendy O Williams and the Plasmatics' logo on a facade north of East 96th Street. Why was it there? Who knows? Maybe whomever spray-painted it was simply a fan.

But, as mentioned in that post, when I sheepishly went back to find it after that school trip, pedaling nervously on my shitty BMX past the “the border” between the Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem at East 96th Street, I couldn’t seem to find it again or, more likely, I wimped out and did an about-face before getting too far uptown.

And that was basically that.

I cannot recall what prompted my penning of the post in 2010 about it other than that it’s always been something I was struck by and remembered. After a while, though, given that I never found any further evidence of its existence, much like that certain “punk” issue of New York Magazine (which I, of course, later found), I started wondering if maybe I’d imagined it, and started giving up the notion of trying to find any evidence of it.

But in already in a few instances this year, for whatever illogical reason, I have stumbled across beguiling bits of Plasmatics trivia that resulted in a series of in-depth posts (all collected here, for your convenience, if you care). in the spirit of same, I figured I’d revive my quest for Wendy’s wall.

For a start, I posted the entry on the Plasmatics fan page on Facebook, asking aloud if anyone else had remembered seeing it. Suddenly the thread came alive with remarks from commenters saying they’d recalled seeing it from the windows of a Metro-North train and speculating as to its possible whereabouts. The problem, however, is that like me, no one had snapped a pic of it. At the very least, I had corroboration of its existence.

Then I went back to the well and started getting creative with Google, entering in any number of combinations like “Plasmatics,” “Wendy,” “mural,” “Manhattan,” “80s,” “graffiti,” “Park Avenue” etc., but continually came up empty. I actually reached out over Instagram to fabled graffiti tagger Lee Quinones and photographer/graffiti-champion Henry Chalfant to see if either of those guys remembered it. No one got back to me. 

I started feeling that old sensation of futility once again until I happened upon one article or another that made mention of an over-promisingly named strip of concrete called — wait for it — the Graffiti Hall of Fame. While not an actual “hall” of any tangible quality, this area was a designated street-art destination established in 1980 on — WAIT FOR IT, ONCE AGAIN — the northernly reaches of Park Avenue. Things were starting to add up. I started Googling “Graffiti Hall of Fame” and “Park Avenue” and scrolling through the ensuing images.

It was almost too easy.

Evidently painted by an artist named Dez, the whole wall came up via another promisingly named entity called Graffiti Database. I was genuinely astonished to have found it. Here’s a closer look at it…

Regrettably, I have no idea who took this photograph or when, but it’s definitely the mural I first saw, although the passage of time rendered the images in my head with way more nuance and detail. I’m still mystified as to the specifics of its backstory, but I can at least now rest, knowing I didn’t imagine it and that I’ve closed the circle on another inane quest.

Here in 2021, the Graffiti Hall of Fame is still a going concern, but the Plasmatics mural was painted over decades ago.

And, once again, for the uninitiated, these were the Plasmatics...

Sad But True

2019:

2020:



2021:

 

Where Smoked Yeh Jong Son?

I suppose I should stop repeatedly mining the Facebook group Manhattan Before 1990, but some great stuff pops up there, periodically, and it’s worth evangelizing. In any case, that’s the initial source of this entry.

In any case, a member of said group named Kathy B. posted the photograph below, and I found it quite striking. Taken in 1986 by one Susan Aimee Weinik, this is a shot of former Palladium doorkeeper Yeh Jong Son.

I mean, it’s a great photograph by any stretch of the imagination, capturing both the stylish insouciance of the enigmatic Ms. Son and some great nocturnal atmosphere of a since-vanished New York City. As if on cue, however, the chatter started, speculating as to the location of the photograph. Many, if not most, seemed to assume that, given Ms. Son’s vocation, it must’ve been snapped within the environs of her stomping ground at the Palladium, that being East 14th Street between Union Square and Third Avenue. Sure, that might’ve made sense in a rigidly linear sort of way, but I couldn’t reconcile that featured architecture, specifically the hulking building in the background.

Acting on a hunch, I took a circuitous route home from my office down by the World Trade Center (notice I didn’t call it “the Freedom Tower”? Nor should you!), and sure enough, I was correct. As just discussed in a relatively recent post about the former site of the Plasmatics World Headquarters on Thomas Street, that large building behind Ms. Son is the western-facing façade of the massive Western Union building on Hudson Street. That puts her having a ciggie just steps to the south of Puffy’s Tavern, where she very well might have been having a post-Palladium-shift drink. To make good on my sleuthing, I captured the exact spot where Ms. Son was snapped smoking.

While I certainly made it to the Palladium a few times, I cannot say I was ever hip enough to be able to recognize Yeh Jong Son at first glance, although I was never stopped from entering the place, so I guess that counts for something. If you want to get a feel for what the interior of the Palladium was like click right here.

Here in 2021, the Palladium is, once again, long gone – razed to accommodate a massive NYU dormitory that churlishly bears the old club’s name. Puffy’s Tavern on Hudson Street is indeed still there, as it has been since about 1945, and it has refreshingly not changed very much.

As to the whereabouts and doings of the sleekly svelte Yeh Jong Son these days, who can say?

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.”

What Remains So Funny `Bout Peace, Love & Understanding?

I can’t remember if I got it at the Woolworths on the corner of East 86th Street and Third Avenue or the King Karol just a block to its south, but I bought Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces when I was in high school, strictly on the strength of its inclusion of “(What’s So Funny `Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding,” which — to my ears, at the time — packed all the energy and wallop of Punk Rock without subscribing to its nihilism and negativity (not that I really had a problem with either of those sentiments). I interpreted it as Elvis breaking away from the pack, carving out his own niche and making an earnest plea for sanity in an otherwise insane era.

Some elements of that might be accurate, but the truth of the matter is that Elvis didn’t actually write the song, his producer singer/songwriter Nick Lowe did, and did so several years prior to advent of the British Punk scene. Somewhat ironically, it was a different track on Armed Forces that found Elvis venomously lambasting British Punk, that being “Goon Squad.”

But regardless of its origin, “(What’s So Funny…)” remains arguably the quintessential Elvis Costello track (although my personal favorite of his will always be “Beyond Belief”), so much so that, considering how much music the prolific artist has written and released since Armed Forces, one almost takes it for granted. That said, the song exploded into my headphones, earlier today while I was running an errand, and the sheer, sprawling impact of the recording — a wall of guitars and keyboards, punctuated by Elvis’s earthy lower-register — hit me like a hammer. Pete Thomas’ stiff-backed drumming alone, bursting with machine-gun fills, is still so astonishingly great.

And, of course, without belaboring the obvious, 42 years (!!!) after the release of Armed Forces, the sentiments assertively expressed in “(What’s So Funny `Bout) Peace, Love & Understanding?” have never been more relevant.

The video is kind of hilarious, as well. Pump it up, indeed.

Back To Fiorucci

This video segment below has been on and off of YouTube for a while and a friend of mine just put it back into circulation, so I thought I’d address it here.

I think the strangest aspect of Fiorucci’s, for me, was its address. Basically right at the southern border of the posh-but-staid Upper East Side (my home turf, at the time), this weird Italian fashion emporium was essentially a dollop of Downtown atop a bland soup of midtown blahs. It was invariably my older sister who came home, one day, with a garish bag full of inane duds she procured at Fiorucci’s. It was around this same era when I was starting to swear off former faves like Pink Floyd and getting into stuff like Devo, The Ramones and the Sex Pistols, while my sister was bringing home records by The Buggles, The Vapors and Blondie. “It’s all punky stuff!,” Victoria said. I felt compelled to investigate.

Once again, incongruously perched on East 59th between Lexington Avenue and the magisterial sprawl of Park Avenue, Fiorucci’s (or, technically, Fiorucci … non-possessive) was an impossible-to-miss source of brave-new-world spectacle, diametrically across the street from the haven of stodgy-old-world knowledge that was the Argosy Book Store. Ironically, here in 2021, Argosy is still there, but that iteration of Fiorucci’s closed around 1987. The space it occupied became several other ventures, notably a William Sonoma. These days, I believe it’s now a Muji.

But at the dawn of the 80’s, it was in full swing. I remember regularly going down to that neighborhood not to shop at Fiorucci’s, but to hit the drearily seedy Comic Art Gallery one block to its south, along the with Disc-O-Mat on Lex and 58th (lionized most recently here). Intrigued by my sister’s claims, I dutifully went down to check out Fiorucci, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting. Suffice to say, it was way more glitzy n' kitschy than sneery and iconoclastic, but who knows what I’d been projecting on the place. Victoria made good several years later when she steered me toward Commander Salamander in Georgetown.

In watching this quaint clip now, though, one can’t help miss the era when New York was indeed a significantly wilder place, and folks could be so easily stopped in their tracks by the sight of downtown freaks dancing in a shop window. Yes, that’s Klaus Nomi, but that’s also Joey Arias, who appeared with Klaus and Bowie on that fabled episode of Saturday Night Live. Joey lives in my neighborhood, these days. I spoke to him once when our local liquor shop was broken into several years ago. He was a very cool gent.

Enjoy the trip back in time.

For The Love of The Dictators

Though usually namechecked for their involvement in the CBGB scene alongside The Ramones, The Dead Boys, Television and other pioneering New York City punk bands, I believe the first time I’d ever heard of The Dictators was because they’d toured with my childhood heroes in KISS, leading me to assume, having not yet heard their music, at the time, that they were a hard-rock/metal band. To be fair, the Dictators didn’t really look like what people came to associate with “punk rock,” either. But it was really their irreverent approach to proceedings and their idiosyncratic lyrics that set them apart from of the more po-faced “rawk” of the time, earning them a seat at the table with other punk forebears, ... even if they didn’t always get along with those folks either.

As a result, the Dictators’ status as perpetually square pegs in a sea of round holes always captured my imagination, and I wanted to learn more about them. But, back in the early 80’s, when I started seeking them out based almost exclusively on their legend, their first three albums were long out of print and seemingly impossible to find. As luck would have it, though, the ROIR Cassette label – the same indie that had released the seismic hardcore compilation New York Thrash and the barnstorming debut by Bad Brains – had issued a live reunion album of theirs in 1981. I found that cassette, entitled Fuck’Em If They Can’t Take A Joke, in the downstairs tape area of Disc-O-Mat on 58th and Lexington at some point in about 1982 and bought it on the spot, having never heard a single note off of it.

I don’t know if I’d known what to expect, by this point, but Fuck’Em… immediately went into heavy rotation on my Walkman, fighting for incongruous dominance with the Circle Jerks, Venom, Gang of Four, Rush, Devo, Motorhead and the Dead Kennedys. They weren’t hardcore. They weren’t really metal. They didn’t really sound like anyone else, but I grew to love several songs on that tape, notably their cover of the Stooges’ “Search & Destroy” and a song called “Loyola,” which I especially dug, as it was the name of my high school.

Indoctrinated into the faith by Fuck’Em If They Can’t Take a Joke, I serendipitously happened upon a pristine vinyl copy of the band’s second album, Manifest Destiny a few years later in a box of “records for a dollar” outside of the Ronald McDonald House for Pediatric Cancer Patients on East 86th Street (from that same box I also prized a copy of the oft-maligned With Sympathy by Ministry). A more polished affair than Fuck’em…, this album contained studio versions of by-then-favorites like “Science Gone Too Far” and “Young, Fast & Scientific,” as well as a studio cover of “Search & Destroy.”

By this point, however, the band was long over. Lead singer Handsome Dick Manitoba had started a new band called Manitoba’s Wild Kingdom, lead guitarist Ross The Boss had started the very metal Manowar (who I also kinda got into, however ridiculous) and guitarist Scott “Top Ten” Kempner formed the Del Lords, who were perfectly fine, but a bit more rootsier than my usual fare. While I still dug their music, for all intents and purposes, the Dictators were done.

Years went by. I found myself a couple of years out of college and hanging out in a bar on Avenue A and 2nd Street called … wait for it … 2A. It was the latter part of a divisive evening wherein two friends of mine were quarreling. All I wanted to do was have a beer. We head in and who should be holding court behind the bar, but Handsome Dick Manitoba, prompting me to geek out ala Wayne Campbell (“We’re not worthy!”) much to the pronounced embarrassment of Handsome Dick (real name: Richard Blum). He listened to me gush like a fanboy for a while then went on to other patrons. About forty minutes later, Handsome Dick gets into an altercation with a customer further down the bar, marches back over to where I’m sitting, grabs me by the lapels and drags me over to extrapolate about how cool the Dictators were, and I happily -- and laboriously -- obliged.

A couple of years after that -- and here’s where my chronology starts to getting muddled – Handsome Dick opened his own bar on Avenue B called Manitoba’s. Around this time, the Dictators reformed in various capacities with some members coming and going. My good friend Dean Rispler even joined for a long while on bass. I even got to see them perform again a few times at places like Coney Island High and The Bowery Ballroom. 

After that, things got complicated. Handsome Dick unwittingly became something of a divisive figure, sometimes alienating people all over the map with some pointed political opinions. Then his bar got some noise complaints. Then some ugly allegations were leveled at him. The band stopped speaking to each other. The bar closed. It was all very unfortunate.

Very recently, members of the Dictators reformed, albeit without Handsome Dick, and started recording music again together. Then something else happened.

I’d heard rumors about it from some similarly inclined friends of mine, but those rumors were confirmed for me by a sad Instagram post from Handsome Dick. Evidently Scott “Top Ten” Kempner has been sadly diagnosed with early-stage dementia. Though estranged from his friend since childhood, Handsome Dick wrote a heartfelt tribute to Top Ten on his Instagram page. Read that here, if you’re interested.

Whether they’ll ever patch it all up remains a mystery, but the reports of Kempner’s tragic affliction and Richard Blum’s anguish for his estranged friend frankly break my heart.

Play it loud…

Happy Easter

Image lovingly swiped from the Mudd Club Book. 

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.

Goodbye to The Pyramid

I've written about the Pyramid several times here, over the years, but I was very bummed to learn via EV Grieve, this morning, that the fabled club on Avenue A is the latest to succumb to the financial rigors of pandemic and will not be re-opening. 

While, in more recent years, the venue catered to a seemingly more conventional brand of nightlife (which I lamented here), back in the 80s and 90s, it was something of a remarkable melting pop of disparate subcultures. As I mentioned here ages ago, you were as likely to run into characters like Tommy Victor of Prong or Tim Chunks of Token Entry there as you were to encounter drag royalty like RuPaul or the Lady Bunny. Bands I saw on that tiny stage included Surgery, the Hot Corn Girls, Rats of Unusual Size, Fractured Cylinder, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black and my beloved Cop Shoot Cop, but it also famously hosted names like Sonic Youth, SWANS, White Zombie and, oh, Madonna and Nirvana -- not on the same evening, mind you, although that wouldn’t have been out of the question, given their forward-thinking booking policy.

For that plot of the East Village, not to mention NYC writ large, it’s a tremendous loss.