Flaming Pablum

Back to The Met

I’ve already privately evangelized it to a few select individuals, but if you’re an acolyte of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for ANY reason (childhood nostalgia, its tireless capacity as a sanctuary of solace or simply …duh… the art contained therein), you need to go track down the new book, “All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me” by Patrick Brinkley.

Ultimately the memoir of a journalist who loses an older brother to prostate cancer, Bringley recuses himself from a plush job at The New Yorker in order to become a guard at the Met. I’m only half way through, but his poignant ruminations on the art and the location and the magical power of the institution are well worth your time, if you are similarly inclined.

Find out more here.

Curlycues in ‘Casablanca’ - a Mission Mystery

Here’s one strictly for music geeks of a certain stripe, so ready thyselves.

As discussed in this post from last year, when the First and Last and Always incarnation of the Sisters of Mercy fell apart circa 1986, departing conspirators Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams made more than a few deliberate attempts to stick it to Sisters’ Mother Superior Andrew Eldritch on their way out of the convent. For a start, their initial plan was to name their new project The Sisterhood, an uncomfortably comparable name to the former order, that is until Eldritch beat them to it with a hastily released EP (recently re-issued on CD). Unfazed, the new band re-christened itself The Mission, also a dig at Eldritch, being that plans for the follow-up album that never transpired were to call it Left on Mission and Revenge.

But the jabs didn’t end there. The Mission wholly made off with the tonsorial/sartorial aesthetic of the Sisters, with Wayne adopting Eldritch’s shades-on-absolutely-all-the-goddamn-time and big-fuckoff-black hat flourish. A sharper sting was naming their debut LP’s lead single “Wasteland,” blithely cribbed from the title of an epic modernist poem by Eldritch’s beloved T.S. Elliot. It seemed as if the new band was going well out of its way to mock and taunt their former taskmaster at every opportunity.

Of course, the mighty Mish went onto find a grand amount of success on their own accord and soon defined their own identity, largely shaking off the shackles of their former association and, I want to believe, burying the bitter baggage along the way, although a full-scale reunion with Eldritch has yet to happen, and I’m not holding my breath.

But there was one more thing from the Sisters that the Mission kind of adopted that always intrigued me - the curlycue cross.

A big part of the early Sisters of Mercy was their bold iconography. Even before they’d properly honed their chops as a functioning band, they’d established themselves with a stark design scheme, a proper logo and even a preferred font, not unlike the template-founders in hallowed Motorhead before them. As the band developed, Eldritch basically assigned the now iconic head/star motif to the band’s label, Merciful Release, and soon adopted the so-called "Chinese Chop,” another cryptic design that graced the sleeves of the singles and the eventual release of the first LP, First and Last and Always, although when that line-up dissolved from attrition, Eldritch retired the “Chinese Chop” for good.

Doubtlessly recognizing the value of that type of readily identifiable insignia, the Mission, too, sought to similarly brand themselves, and settled upon the curlycue cross you can see at the top of this post, a sort of suitably baroque rune that hints at arcane lore. It was just vague enough to conjure any number of gothy connotations, and looked fuckin’ great on the back of a black leather jacket. One friend of mine always thought it looked like four condoms, ... a decidedly more pruriently priapic suggestion than I'd believe the band would prefer to espouse. 

Personally speaking, I’d always been curious about the curlycue cross — what was its origin? What did it actually mean? Where did the band first find it? What was its true provenance?

I’d always assumed it was appropriated from some Celtic, pre-Christian art or swiped from some esoteric medieval source, and figured that, short of directly asking Wayne (which I actually had the opportunity to do, at a couple of points, in the early `90s as a fledgling "rock journalist"), I’d never actually solve the riddle.

And then came yesterday.

My wife and I had a dinner plan with one of her siblings on the Upper East Side later in the evening, but decided to go uptown early for a mild mid-winter stroll and maybe a quick museum trip. We settled on the Neue Gallery, a poshly teutonic little institution on the corner of East 86th and Fifth Avenue that, despite my having grown up in the same neighborhood, I’d never actually visited. The Neue is a comparatively tiny museum next to its stately neighbors like the Metropolitan Museum of Art to its south and the Guggenheim to its north. Its humble succession of rooms features treasures like several iconic paintings by Gustav Klimt, an impressive-if-random array of medieval arms and armor, some Austrian illustrations from two centuries ago and — quite incongruously — a tiny alcove filled with trivial ephemera from the classic film, “Casablanca.” The private collection of one wealthy German art-collector and rampant cinephile Ronald Lauder (of the Estee-Lauder gang), this trove of memorabilia featured a wide selection of movie posters, stills and promotional materials from the film, as well as the prop passports used by protagonists Rick, Ilsa and Victor Lazlo. It’s pretty impressive, if completely out of nowhere, even if you’re only a passive fan of the film.

So, I’m standing there, admiring Lauder’s collection and listening to Louis Armstrong’s throaty rendition of “As Time Goes By,” when I suddenly spot something that just about blows me out of the alcove. In a promo shot from the film, there’s a scene of the great Claude Rains, portraying French officer Captain Louis Renault, conversing with Humphrey Bogart’s Rick. Claude is attired as the jaunty policeman, and has his head cocked at an angle, revealing the top of his fetching chapeau — adorned with, mais, oui — qu’est-ce que cest?? Why, it’s the Mission’s curlycue cross!!! Here’s that shot now….

Further scrutiny reveals that the curlycue cross was something of an ongoing motif in the French military. Here it is on the the top of a cap from World War I.

Now, as far as I’m aware, the great Wayne Hussey doesn’t have a solitary drop of French blood in his person. He was born in Bristol, moved to Liverpool and cut his musical teeth in the local punk scene in bands like The Walkie Talkies, Pauline Murray’s Invisible Girls and then Dead or Alive before decamping to Leeds to join the Sisters. So, why the curlycue cross, and where did he first see it? Was he covertly a student of the sartorial finery of the French military or did he indeed swipe it from Claude Rains in “Casablanca”?

As has always been the case, probably only Wayne has the answer.

Punk Before Punk Was Punk: More About Tom Verlaine

Following up on my last post about the late, great Tom Verlaine, even when he shared a fleeting moment of discourse with me (if you can even call it that) that rainy night on University Place, as we unwittingly sat side by side in the front window eating our respective slices and watching our neighborhood fill up with water, I knew not to push my luck and try to carry on a conversation with the famously icy icon.

But had I done so, I might have asked him what he thought about the word “Punk.”

Read any of the myriad obits for him in the last day, and you’re bound to see descriptors of Television’s distinctive musical style as “angular,” “lyrical,” “innovative,” all of which, I’d concede, is more or less accurate, if all a bit predictable. Billboard magazine even ran an obit, which I thought was pretty rich, given that Television really never came within squinting distance of vaulting a record onto the pop charts, which is really all Billboard cares about. One outlet referred to the dynamic of Verlaine and fellow string-bender Richard Lloyd as a “combative two-guitar assault,” which kind of made me laugh. Had this writer even heard Television? Despite inarguably being Punk pioneers (there’s a legend about them being the first band outside of the “country, bluegrass, blues” milieu to approach CBGB’s Hilly Kristal about playing the venue, but that may be apocryphal), Television didn’t really make music that bludgeoned its listeners, even at their most aggressive, like on this live recording of “Little Johnny Jewel” below.

There’s another possibly apocryphal anecdote about Television that always comes to mind in that when they were recording their debut LP, Marquee Moon, Verlaine ruffled Lloyd’s feathers by constantly insisting to co-producer/sound engineer Andy Johns that he wanted all the guitars to sound “smaller” and “dryer,” already looking to distance himself from the trajectory so-called “Punk Rock” was headed. It’s for this reason that, to this day, Marquee Moon’s eight songs still sound fresh and completely unlike anything else.

Once again, despite being Punk before Punk was Punk, what made Television a preeminent Punk band was their disdain for tired, staid convention. While original bassist Richard Hell — who split to form the more volatile Voidoids and Heartbreakers well before the recording of Marquee Moon — is credibly regarded as the tonsorial/sartorial blueprint of the “Punk Rocker” (being the first to cut short and spike up his hair and adhere his ripped clothes together with safety pins — more out of necessity than prescient fashion), Television didn’t really look like punks, and they certainly didn’t sound like what the media was spinning as “proper Punk Rock,” at the time. The comparatively mild-mannered Television were never going to deafen you with feedback or be gratuitously prurient. We had the Dead Boys for that.

All this is why I wonder — what did Tom Verlaine think of the term he was saddled with?

Down on West 8th Street

In the latest episode of "Broken Record," Rick Rubin speaks with greatest living American, Iggy Pop. Regardless of what you think of Rick, it's a really great discussion. Find it here.

My favorite bit of trivia revealed therein: This song was originally titled "Down on the Beach," until Ig & the Ashetons visited NYC and walked down West 8th Street "between University Place and 6th Avenue" when it was "more active" (circa 1970), and were captivated by what they encountered. Love that a little chunk of my backyard (not *nearly* as "active" as it used to be, alas) inspired the greatest rock album of all goddamn time (fight me).

Crank it. 

Fermenting New Firewater: Tod [A] Looks Ahead

With the possible exception of Killing Joke, I don’t think there’s a band I’ve scribbled more about here than Cop Shoot Cop, the former NYC-based, clangy noise-rock ensemble of one Tod [A], who bowed out of said band, in the mid-`90s, during the recording of what would have been their fifth studio LP. Upon leaving C$C under arguably not the most amicable of circumstances, Tod turned his attention to forming Firewater, a loose collective of musicians who’d go onto to explore, over seven diverse albums, a far broader vista of musical styles than Tod’s previous band was ever likely to dare. Largely jettisoning Cop Shoot Cop’s full-frontal industrial assault in favor of a sinuous amalgam of influences from klezmer to ska to Middle-Eastern folk music to Romani to bhangra to sea shanties to Russian drinking songs to straight-ahead punk fucking rock and virtually all points and ports of global call in between, Tod’s inherent sense of wanderlust became deeply imbued into the music he was making. Putting his money where his mouth was, by the band’s sixth album, 2008’s The Golden Hour, Tod pulled up stakes and set out on a formidable trek across the imposing terrain between New Delhi, India and Istanbul, Turkey, recording with local musicians along the way. This experience not only fueled that album -– arguably Firewater’s finest -– but also served as fertile fodder for his first novel, “Banging the Monkey,” which surfaced in 2019.

I’ve been friends with Tod since the very early `90s, when I was tasked with writing up a cover story for a local freebie news weekly about “a hot new band that typifies the New York sound and sensibility.” Without skipping a beat, I chose Cop Shoot Cop, having become enamored of their wilfully chaotic live performances, their boldly unconventional approach (two basses, no guitars), their dark sense of humor (lost on large swathes of their audience), their unwieldy aesthetic and their cryptic poster campaign. Over the course of Cop Shoot Cop’s tumultuous rise and fall and then into the Firewater years, Tod and I have spilled many gallons of beer and ink about our respective trajectories. Now ensconced full-time in Istanbul, Tod only gets to New York City every so often, and he and I only get to convene in person every couple of years or so, usually around the holidays. The last time he was in town back in December, we caught up for a drink at an old favorite, the Ear Inn on the westerly end of Spring Street, and it dawned on me that I’d never subjected the poor guy to the Flaming Pablum Interview. So now, joining the estimable ranks of Big Paul Ferguson of Killing Joke, Chris Egan of Missing Foundation, RB Korbet of Even Worse, Erik Sanko of Skeleton Key, Fran Powers of Modern Clix, J Yuenger of White Zombie, Brooke Smith of Sunday Matinee, Don Rauf of Life in a Blender, and Andi Harriman of Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace, here with the Flaming Pablum Interview with Tod [A]…

FP: You’ve now been living in Turkey for almost 12 years. How’s that going? Of all the places you’ve lived, how does Istanbul compare?

I've lived in NYC, Denpasar, Phnom Penh, Calcutta, Surat Thani and now Istanbul. Though I didn't expect to be here quite so long, I can't complain about the city. Istanbul is the NYC of Turkey: it's a port city, which means it's quite multi-cultural. The cost of living is far less than NYC, and the town has public transport that doesn't reek of urine. It has a lot more cats and a lot less rats (do the math). I guess I feel as at home here as I have felt anywhere else, though the current Turkish government leaves much to be desired. Hopefully the people of Turkey will get rid of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named in the upcoming 2023 general election.

It’s been eleven years since you released International Orange, but now, I gather, have new music demoed and ready to be recorded — can you give us an update?

Having decided to procreate, I took some time off from recording and touring to concentrate on raising my daughter. I didn't want to be the father who was never there. In the meantime, I wrote fifty songs. I am now a free agent and I think I'm almost ready to get back to recording and touring. We shall see who winds up releasing these records.

Firewater has counted many illustrious names in its ranks, over the years — are you in touch with all those players? Might we hear from them again on the next LP?

Yes, we are mostly all still buddies. It's quite possible there will be some appearances from old friends once it's time to go into the studio and begin touring again.

If you had to characterize the direction and sound of the new material, how would you do so?

My itinerant lifestyle has certainly colored the new batch of songs, melodically, sonically, and rhythmically. There is a Turkish flavor to many of them. But somehow I can't seem to scrape all the American mud off my boots. I feel like my time abroad has given me perspective to write about the country of my birth.

Your first novel, “Banging the Monkey” was published in 2019. Are there more books in you waiting to come out?

Yes. I am working on a few new books at the moment: a novel (for adults), and some others for children. But I take my time. They will be done when they are done.

You were recently back in the States and in New York City for the first time in a while. How does your former home turf feel to you in the wake of all that’s happened?

I still love NYC. But as I told you when I saw you last, I feel safer raising my daughter in a quasi-dictatorship like Turkey where almost nobody has a gun, than in America where everyone seems to own multiple firearms.

In 2016, you joined some of your former Cop Shoot Cop bandmates for the commentary track of the live DVD New York Post Punk / Noise Series 1. Are you still back in contact with those guys today?

Yes, I am in touch with Jim Coleman and Phil Puleo and we are on good terms. During the lockdowns, we made some sporadic attempts to collaborate from afar, but nothing seemed to catch fire. Jim and Phil seem to be doing quite well with Human Impact, so more power to them.

Is there any Firewater (or, for that matter, Cop Shoot Cop) material left “in the vault,” so to speak? Stuff that was never released? If so, will it ever see the light of day?

Yes, there is quite a bit. But tracks get left in the vault for a reason, usually because they weren't quite ready.

What’s your take on the music of today? Are there any new artists you’re particularly enthused about? What have you been listening to?

When I was a young punk I thought the way to move forward was to obliterate the past. Now I'm much more interested in the historical continuity of music. I'm trying to catch up on the homework I should have done when I was 21, learning the musical secrets of all the songs I love. I'm delving back into the past: jazz, the birth of rock 'n' roll. I listen to a lot of early blues, jazz, folk and psychedelia. Mainly I'm focused on developing as a songwriter and composer. I've been studying soundtracks (Morricone, Elfman, Zimmer), and I try to learn from the lyricists I admire (Dylan, Waits, Bowie).

Of all the spots you lived around New York City, which was your favorite, and why?

It was definitely fun living in Williamsburgh in the late 80's – early 90's. The rents were incredibly cheap, and there was much fun to be had exploring the empty buildings. I remember setting fire to an abandoned car in a vacant lot and watching it burn. Neither police nor the fire department ever came. That's how much of a no man's land it was at that time.

…which was your least favorite, and why?

By the time I moved to Bushwick, I had already pretty much had it with NYC. The locals weren't too enthused about the bohemian gringos encroaching on their turf, so there was quite a bit of aggro. Also, I was arrested for drinking a beer on the street outside my building, about 20 feet away from the corner where a bunch of jackasses had been selling smack and crack for years. So once I got out of jail, I was off to Thailand.

Where in the world is the food the best?

Italy, of course. I have worked there a lot, and the Italians really know what they are doing. But I also love Thai street food. Such an amazingly subtle combination of flavors. And usually $1 a plate. Indian and Mexican. Turkish food is also amazing.

What’s your favorite Firewater album?

The Golden Hour certainly was the most fun to make. The adventure of recording it, in India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, combined with working with my buddies in Tel Aviv to complete it. Everything seemed to come together on that record.

What’s your least favorite? Why?

International Orange was a nightmare to make. My record company didn't support the concept, so I had to cut a lot of financial corners. As a result, even though the songs were as good as those on The Golden Hour, the sound quality on International Orange suffered because of budget problems. I would love to re-record those songs someday. My ugly experience making International Orange also made me want to wait until I could afford to record in the right way.

What’s your favorite Cop Shoot Cop album?

Release. At that time CSC was firing on all pistons, and we had producer David Sardy at the controls. After that record, everything went rapidly south for the band.

What’s your least favorite? Why?

White Noise. It just hasn't aged well.

The irony here is the White Noise continues to be my favorite album by the band. It’s aged just fine, to my ears.

Why do the vinyl re-releases of Get Off the Cross... and Golden Hour have different cover art?

When Scott Schaefer approached me about doing vinyl releases of the Firewater catalog, I saw it as an opportunity to make something special. So I decided to re-make all the covers by hand. It's been really fun to re-imagine the art. The vinyl series will be continued in the near future.

Beyond from family and friends, what do you miss most about the United States?

A genuine NYC slice, and a real bagel. And not much else.

What sort of music is your daughter listening to?

I knew going into this parenting thing that I had a window of maybe four or five years in which I could vet the music my daughter would hear. Being a control freak, I took full advantage of those years. I wanted her developing brain to get a solid grounding in classic melody and song structure before she was exposed to bullshit musical 'content' from off the internet. So I made her tons of mix tapes: nursery rhymes; classical stuff like Carl Orff, Peter and the Wolf, and the Nutcracker; plus kid-friendly songs from folks like Raffi, the Beatles, Donovan, Ivor Cutler, Monty Python, Spike Jones, Woody Guthrie and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Yeah, well, to answer your question, the window has closed. You don't want to know what sort of music torture I am subjected to now. I can't wait till she's a teenager, and will start hitting me with some cool sounds.

What was the best concert you ever attended?

I can't name just one: Black Flag at some bowling alley in New Jersey circa 1984, Nirvana at the Reading Festival circa 1992, Tom Waits at the Beacon Theater 1999, Bone Machine tour, Motorhead in Istanbul, 2011. Plus any Jesus Lizard show. 

What five albums can you not live without?

Ramones - Ramones
Tom Waits - Rain Dogs
The Doors - The Doors
David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited

The best songwriter is….

There are seven: Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Robyn Hitchcock, Leonard Cohen, and Ivor Cutler. (and me.)

The Soft Solution

Hey again, all … we’re still doing some tinkering at the back end, trying to parse the comment-leaving problems. We may find a solution, or we may not. I’ve reverted back to the old design, as I personally prefer it, and it’s got sort of what I project as an established identity. If I have to change it, I will, but not sure we’re there, as yet.

In any case, I do have some stuff coming up, including a Flaming Pablum Interview with Tod [A] of Firewater/Cop Shoot Cop and a rumination on Ungano’s, a fabled, long-vanished rock club in the unlikely environs of the Upper West Side. I’m looking forward to unleashing that one.

In the short term, however, please enjoy this live recording of The Soft Boys performing at the Portland Arms in Cambridge, England in 1978. This is, of course, Robyn Hitchcock’s first band (since we’ve been discussing him, of late), and it’s both an amazing recording and entirely hilarious. If I’m not mistaken, the Portland Arms is still there in 2023.

Enjoy. Back Soon.

Point It at Daniel Ek Deux: The Hitchcock Kibosh?

In the wake of posting my curious Spotify quandary yesterday, I reached out to a number of different folks -– one a former colleague who now works within the Spotify organization. That individual didn’t immediately know what the answer was, but vowed to “look into it.”

Another colleague of mine, meanwhile, used to work for a indie label to which Robyn was fleetingly signed and has remained somewhat in touch with the great man. She said she’d fly the story by him, but he’s allegedly notorious for taking ages to answer texts and emails (which isn’t entirely surprising). That said, I have faith that he will eventually respond to her, so watch this space for that.

On top of all that, however, a regular reader named S. Norman (a cheeky allusion to a fabled Monty Python sketch involving a gargantuan hedgehog named “Spiny Norman”) helpfully wrote in with a very plausible explanation -– that it’s all Robyn’s doing.

Spiny cited two bits of evidence to back up his theory, the first being this 2020 Tweet from Robyn himself…

And the other being the following passage from this Brooklyn Vegan piece from August of that same year…

Robyn Hitchcock, who has been selling his paintings online to supplement income he would've made touring, says he's actively trying to get all his music off of Spotify and other similar services. "Needless to say, once I’ve clarified the digital distribution situation with my former label, all my past recordings and those of the Soft Boys that we have control of will be removed from exploitative streaming services."

Hitchcock's partner, Emma Swift (whose music is not on Spotify), broke the situation down with Robyn as the example. "Some math, brought you by hacking into @RobynHitchcock’s Spotify for Artists app. Based on these stats, RH would bring in 1.4 million streams per year. Which is about 5600 dollars. 50 percent which gets paid to his record label. In Robyn’s case, he is a prolific artist with more than 20 albums on there. He’s written over 500 songs. It has been his full-time job for 40 + years. He’s been playing guitar since before Daniel Ek was born. Mr Ek seems to think Robyn and artists like him don’t work hard enough. Record labels have made Mr Ek believe artists are utterly replaceable, when the fact is each artist is unique and special. We’re not iPhones. We have individual talents and gifts to offer." She adds that with an artist like Robyn, who had been on major and independent labels, getting off streaming services is not as easy as pushing a button. "It’s not as easy for signed musicians to boycott."

With all this in mind, I’d suggest that Robyn sounds like he’s in the process of doing all in his power keep his new music off Spotify and to remove all the music of his that’s already accessible there. That might conceivably include putting impediments towards his songs being put in playlists, right? Sounds possible. 

Personally speaking, while that somewhat thwarts my original intention of turning my son onto Robyn’s vast catalog of unique and vibrant music, I am 100% in support of Robyn’s position here. To further put my money where my very big mouth is, I’m also endeavoring to indoctrinate my burgeoning-music-fan son into the faith of the tactile artifact. With my daughter now sequestered back at college, I’ve offered to exhume from storage a portable turntable I bought a couple of years back at a school auction, set it up on his temporarily absent sister’s desk (they share a room) and give him full access to my unwieldy collection of vinyl LPs.

Once again, fuck Spotify.

Point It at Daniel Ek: My Mysterious Spotify Quandary

As previously mentioned, while I abhor the platform in question, I've started using Spotify more often, lately, as a means of evangelizing music to my kids. Charlotte doesn't really give a rat's ass, but Oliver's been fairly receptive, thus far. In any case, I started making him a playlist the other day of one of my favorite songwriters who's coming to town in a few weeks and who we hope to go see perform live. He's got a sprawling catalog, so it took a little while, but before I could complete it and send the link to Oliver, I got a “takedown notification” email saying: "We have found the following content to be in violation of our content policies, and we have removed it. Please see our Spotify Terms and Conditions of Use for more information."

Now, while it’s certainly true that I’m an avowed fan of several bands who trade in the brazenly objectionable, this was not a playlist packed with selections by naughty bands like the Revolting Cocks, Cop Shoot Cop, the Murder Junkies, Butthole Surfers, Pussy Galore or the Strangulated Beatoffs – this was simply a collection of songs by British singer/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock.

At first, I assumed this was a scam, but then sure enough, I looked at my Spotify account, and the title of the playlist had vanished. The playlist itself was still there, but there was a blank space where my title had been. I had called it– oh so imaginatively -– Robyn Hitchcock for Oliver. Beyond the fact that the word "cock" happens to appear as part of Robyn's surname (and, yes, it’s his actual name – no relation to Alfred), I cannot imagine what the problem might be.

As they’d voided that playlist title, however, I assumed that that was indeed the case, so I simply re-titled the playlist as Robyn H for Oliver. This morning, however, I woke to *another* takedown notice with the same reprimand. I mean, seriously, Spotify, what the actual fuck?

I perused the Terms and Conditions of Use page, but nothing really jumped out at me. While taste is all relative, I can roundly assure you that nothing in Robyn Hitchcock’s catalog – either with his bands The Soft Boys, The Egyptians or as a solo act – is really anything anyone could genuinly consider offensive, unless whimsical psychedelia and surrealist wit are now considered obscene.

Then, I consiered another explanation – however abjectly ridiculous. The opening track on my playlist is a Robyn rarity that I’d first heard on the great man’s collection of “leftovers and outtakes” called Invisible Hitchcock. Incidentally, don’t bother looking for Invisible Hitchcock on Spotify as, like these awesome nine albums, they don’t seem to have it, but that’s another matter entirely. While not the version I’d first to come to love, I used the version from the I Wanna Go Backwards box set of a song called “Point It at Gran.”

Is that what’s bugging Spotify? Do they deem that title as too aggressive or triggering?

Listen to it and you tell me if this is worthy of a takedown notice that says I violated their terms of service. The offending playlist, meanwhile, can be experienced beneath. You'll notice it has no title. Enjoy, if possible. 

Assault in Greenwich Village III: Another Update

The New York Post ran a story yesterday, appended with a photo of the "suspect." And so did CBS, who provide intel about two other comparable attacks in the neighborhood, diminishing my doorman's theory that the maroon-hooded rage bro was after the victim's bag and more that he was just beating him up for the sake of beating him up. 

Be on the lookout, folks!

 

Assault in Greenwich Village: Update

Just circling back on this one. As I lamented at the tail-end of that post, the frustrating thing about witnessing that attack on Saturday afternoon, is that I’ll probably never get the whole story. The middle-aged victim (I should probably come up with another name of him) purportedly lives on my street, somewhere. I actually saw one of my fellow “good Samaritans” just yesterday, but he looked to be in a hurry, so I didn’t engage.

A doorman in my building, meanwhile, said he and the super took a look at the video from the security camera aimed at the down-sloping driveway adjacent to my building where the maroon-hooded assailant sprang out of. By his account, the video shows the attacker sitting with his back against the westerly-wall, sort of readying himself, the narrative being, then, that his target wasn’t chosen so much as simply the unlucky person who was next to be walking by. According to my doorman, maroon-hooded assailant guy went right for the middle-aged victim’s bag, so it does look to have been an attempted robbery (and not just a random attack without clear motive). My doorman also feels that the reason the middle-aged guy got beaten so badly was because he was trying to simply hold on to his bag, as opposed to letting the guy have it or dropping it and fighting back. His arms were engaged by trying to keep his belongings and, thus, could not cover his face or punch back. I’m more inclined to suggest that he was probably just in complete shock that it was happening that he didn’t know how to react, but whatever.

Thus far, I have yet to learn any further details about the status of either the victim or the assailant.

At the risk of being coy, I should point out that all this happened on East 9th Street between Broadway and University Place, a comparatively sleepy stretch of predominantly residential buildings, bookended by Knickerbocker’s Bar & Grill at the western end and a Bean coffee shop at the eastern end.

Vaguely related, here’s a birds-eye view of the westerly portion at University Place looking north. This was shot in 1939 by one Marion Post Wolcott and evidently appears in the book “Around Washington Square” by Luther Harris. Suffice to say, it looks pretty different today.