Flaming Pablum

November

I remember being informed by someone, eons ago, that when it comes to blogging, one should never qualify one’s posts with an apology. No one cares if there’s been a delay in posting, let alone have probably noticed a delay to begin with. The blog will progress when it progresses. To laboriously apologize for prolonged silences between posts is a ridiculous display of narcicistic presumptuousness.

Evidently, this was advice I didn’t really take to heart, as I seem to routinely stammer out apologies for perceived tardiness in regular activity here.

The bottom line, I guess, is that I feel I’m being remiss in my purely fictioinal obligation to continue composing Flaming Pablum.

I’ve indeed started a few longer pieces in the past couple of weeks, but have either been forced to abaondon them prior to fruition or lost the momentum. The truth is that work is busier than usual, of late, with several demanding projects on the burner. Secondly, my son is currently unspooling the sticky skein of red tape that is the high school application-&-entrance-exam process. As such, stress levels are in the red.

When life calms down, I’ll have more stuff up here. Until then,.... go enjoy your Autumn.

`Tis The Season...

Happy Halloween, y'all...

Joking on The Steps

I posted this on Facebook today, but I might as well share it here, too, because … well, why not?

According to several reports, notably this recent one in Vulture, certain fans have discovered the location of an evidently crucial scene in “Joker” and started to make touristy pilgrimages to the site in the Bronx. I say “evidently” as I still have not seen the film, and have no real desire to. To my mind, as I may have stated here before, we don’t need another telling of the Joker story, in much the same way we do not need another James Bond, or another goddamn “Star Wars” installment. Shouldn’t we all be bored to tears with these mythoses by now? How about new stories, new heroes and new anti-heroes. Just a thought.

In any case, while I might not give a rat’s ass about “Joker,” I really cannot get mad at folks for getting excited about tracking down those stupid Bronx steps, given the fact that I’ve undertaken countless pilgrimages of similar intent to any number of significant locations from photographs, album covers and films, usually in the company of my very patient kids. Many long-time visitors to this blog may remember same.

Here are some you might remember, should you care….Click on them to enlarge. 

 

Brûlant Pablum à Paris: Part 2

Just to complete the recap...

The flat we stayed in was literally steps away from the current Picasso museum on Rue de Thorigny in the Marais. We couldn't not go, obviously, it being so damn convenient. As cool as it was, however, Picasso strikes me as an artist that has reached such an iconic level wherein literally every single thing he ever did is now treated like absolute gold. This is not to say that his work isn't striking to the layperson, but we didn't see anything within the collection that was especially well known, so the "wow" factor was slightly diminished. Against my better judgment, I was privately hoping they'd be selling beach towels with "Guernica" on them, but -- to the credit of their taste -- this turned out not to be.

Much to the chagrin of my kids, we made it to the Francis Bacon show at the Pompidou. While m'self and the wife are fans of his work, the kids weren't really buying it (nor is much of Bacon's work especially "kid friendly"), but the element that made it especially tough was the crowd size. Enjoying Bacon's paintings is somewhat difficult when you have people stepping on your feet and breathing down your neck. Still, while not for everyone,if you're a fan of the man's stuff, it's worth seeing.

While they didn't necessarily dig Bacon's splattery grotesqueries, the kids did quite enjoy the view from the top of the Pompidou.

While significantly decreased here in Manhattan, street art is still alive and well in Paris...

Oh yeah, and the French don't like him either....

The day before we left, Peggy & the kids went to do some shopping, letting me off my leash long enough to go track down a punk rock record shop I'd read about across the Beaumarchais in a slightly less salubrious area of Paris. I found Born Bad Records in the end, tucked around a corner on a quiet little street. They didn't really have anything I crucially needed, but I bought a t-shirt to be supportive. Vive Le Rock! 

I will say this. If you're planning a trip to Paris, you very well may have heard about the Bateaux Mouche, which are those boats that sail around the Seine, giving sight-seers a view of the City of Light from the water. While that certainly sounds nice, lemme tell ya.... if you hate tourists as much as I do, avoid the Bateaux Mouche like the plague. It will put you swiftly in touch with your inner xenophobe in no time. Packed with competing hordes of German and Japanese tourists (the former are way more annoying than the latter, I decided), the experience made appreciating the visual splendor on offer very difficult. Don't say you weren't warned.

So, yeah, Paris was just as magical as we're all repeatedly told it should be. I ate like royalty and regained the fleeting remnants of my sanity that have otherwise been robbed of me by the daily grind. That is, of course, when I wasn't squabbling with my teenage daughter, who took a bit of time acclimating to the pointedly unhurried nature of Parisian living ... something native New Yorkers have a harder time adjusting to. In the end, she was heartbroken to have to leave. We all were. 

We will go back. 

Brûlant Pablum à Paris: Part 1

You're probably all getting bored sick of hearing me continuing to invoke Paris, so before any more time goes by, I thought I’d just post a quick recap not unlike the one I did for our trip to Beirut last year.

It should come as zero surprise to anyone who has been lucky enough to go there that our quick trip to Paris was nothing short of delightful. Say what one will about the French, but they do know how to live. If you’ve not been, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

For maximum fromage effect, click on the video below for a suitable soundtrack as you view the pics.

S'amuser

The courtyard of our AirB'n'B on Rue de Thorigny in the Marais...

Oliver enjoys a crepe...

Action at the Louvre....

As is to expected, everyone loses their shit for a glimpse of the "Mona Lisa," which -- to be perfectly candid -- left me a little underwhelmed. In an adjoining gallery, however, I came finally face to face with a painting I'd both studied in high school and adored from the cover of the Pogues' Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, that being Gericault's "Raft of the Medusa." I'd never realized the sheer scope of the painting before, and to see it up close stopped me dead in my tracks. Forget the "Mona Lisa" and check this out!

Just a hairstylist on the Beaumarchais whose name caught my eye...

He is rightly everywhere still...

As first invoked back on this post from way back when, we made it back to surreal taxidermy emporium Deyrolle. To be honest, I'm not sure my kids knew what to make of it. Oliver was certainly intrigued by the beasts on display, but Charlotte -- who is a bit woke, it must be said -- was somewhat horrified by the whole endeavor. I did manage to spot the afore-cited poster for "Squelette de Lapin," but they had none left for sale, alas...

More to come ... watch this space. 

The Old Man on The Bridge

True story. Prior to boarding our flight home from Paris, yesterday, we actually had to go through border security again. I’d encountered that upon entering a country, but never exiting. In any case, I gathered up all our passports and went up to the clerk. She checked through each passport, calling out my wife and both kids by name to come collect theirs. When she got to mine, she looked down, and looked up with bug-eyed mock-surprise, as if to say “That’s you? What the Hell happened?” She then laughed in her merry French way, stamped my passport, and off we went.

Settled on the plane, I whipped my passport back out. The picture on same dates back to 2012 -– seven years ago. Have those seven years really taken that much of a visual toll?

As previously mentioned, I crossed the Rubicon of my 52nd birthday while in Paris. On the day of, we found ourselves walking along the Seine and happened upon the stately expanse of the Pont Neuf, a bridge I was photographed on during my first trip to Paris the summer of 1987. I handed my phone to my daughter and asked her to capture me in the very same spot. The results are below. 

Technically, I was 19 years old when the top photo was taken. Behold the difference of 33 years.

Paris was, of course, beautiful. Look for more photos and unsolicited anecdotes to come.

Firehouse 1-2-3

Downtown with Sade

This is kind of a dumb one, but I feel it’s worth addressing, as I don’t really like to get shit wrong. I mean, it certainly happens – probably more so than I’d prefer – but when I can, I like to correct my mistakes.

In any case, I have a friend named Peter, who I actually met when he reached out to me about some entry or another I posted here on this stupid blog about some subject simillarly near’n’dear to his heart. Turns out that we had a lot of stuff in common, and became fast friends thereafter.

These days, Peter works at a spot in SoHo that I find myself walking by on my communtes home from the office, and we’re getting into the habit of stopping and chatting.

During the course of same last night, Peter started some anecdote that -– for a reason that now elludes me -– involved an invocation of sultry pop chanteuse Sade Adu. Knowing our mutually shared allegiance to all things Punk Rock, Peter felt obligated to preface his invocation with a sheepish confession that he’d always loved Sade. Not that he was worried, but I told him that I – too – stand with Team Sade (technically and pedantically, it’s worth pointing out that Sade -– like Blondie before them -- is a band, and not just its titular singer). In college, alongside apparently mandatory copies of the first Violent Femmes record and the Legend compilation by Bob Marley (everyone I knew seemed to own both of these), you were always bound to find a copy of Sade’s Diamond Life. Didn’t matter if you otherwise listened exclusively to Black Sabbath, Oingo Boingo or fuckin’ Hank Williams – everyone owned Diamond Life, if only in that it was simple, sonic shorthand for “don’t come knockin’.” If I heard “Smooth Operator” or “Hang On To Your Love” or “Frankie’s First Affair” emanating from behind my front door during those four years, that usually meant that one or more of my roommates were … y’know …. goin’ at it. It was either that or Avalon by Roxy Music.

Yeah, so anyway, I love Sade. You’d be a fool not to. Beyond their music being sublimely crafted sophisto-pop ripe for the classiest of sexytime, there’s just no arguing with the enigmatic Ms. Adu’s voice. Feel fee to disgaree, but you’re just wrong.

Back to Peter’s story: For some reason he felt the need to invoke Sade with regards to a torrid teenage tryst he’d been attempting to conduct at the time with a young lady who went to my high school (this was a year or two after I’d graduated -– we didn’t cross paths). It was at this inconvneient point in Peter’s narrative that I interjected with a bit of unsolicited trivia.

“Dude, you know Sade used to bartend in the East Village, right?”

This kinda de-railed Peter’s monologue, so I never found out how his story came to fruition.

The problem was, I couldn’t remember the specifics. Was it King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut (now Niagara) on Avenue A? or the Lismar Lounge (now d.b.a.) on First Avenue? Those didn’t sound right. Can you imagine Sade at the Lismar Lounge? Maybe it was Downtown Beirut???

In any case, I swore to him that it was true.

Turns out, of course, I was off on a couple of points. Sade Adu was indeed a bartender, and did indeed spend some time on the Lower East Side (see photo below of “Sade & Co in Alphabet City in 1982,” purloined from NYC Nostalgia), but the venue wherein she poured drinks … was actually Danceteria, which actually makes a bit more sense, when ya think about it.

So, yeah, my bad. You can read what I have to say about Danceteria, meanwhile, here, here, and here, …. should you care, of course.

ADDENDUM: there have been ... developments. 

The Continental is Dead

I already said my formal goodbye to The Continental in February of 2006, when they removed the stage at the rear of the room and stopped hosting live music. I literally never set foot in the place again, after that. Once it reverted into just another shitty East Village bar – the type of venture the neighborhood already had in unwieldy abundance – there really was no reason for my further patronage.

This all said, in the last couple of weeks, the easterly strip of Third Avenue between the corner of St. Marks Place and the Cooper Union dormitory has been effectively razed. The buildings that once housed that McDonald’s, the Continental, St. Marks Pizza (and its many abortive, follow-up concerns) and the vape shop on the corner that used to be an Optimo newspaper shop are all gone for good, soon to be replaced by a massive development that will block out the sun and decmiate any remaining semblance of neighborhood character.

You may remember I posted a pair of “then and now” pics of that strip in recent weeks, which prompted one specific regular reader to typically take me to task for lionizing and lamenting a patch of the East Village the viability of which as a genuine hub of subculture (or whatever) has been long extinguished. I don’t argue with that point, necessarily. It’s been a long, damn while since this strip held fascination for anyone beyond SantaCon participants. This all said, despite its final thirteen years as just another antagonistic douchebag bar, once upon a time, The Continental counted me as a regular.

As laboriously cited elsewhere on this blog, during the 90’s, I was routinely found in attendance at the venue in question for any number of shows by bands like Nashville Pusssy, The Unband (above), The Figs, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, The Upper Crust, The Pleasure Fuckers, The Candy Snatchers, Furious George, Falafel Mafia, Iron Prostate, The Niagaras, Mephiskapheles, The Bullys, the criminally short-lived Lee Harvey Keitel Band, and countless others. No, it wasn’t the nicest joint, and the stories of owner Trigger’s thorny eccentricities are myriad and colorful, but as a place to catch bands of a certain variety, it checked all the right boxes and then some.

One of my favorite pictures of my dear friend Rob D. and myself was captured there. We’re depicted downstairs, loitering outside the restrooms while – if memory serves – the Candy Snatchers were dodging projectiles above us. Here’s the photo now. Decorum was not necessarily the order of the moment.

And here’s all that remains of The Continental now.

Never Say Never Again: The Return of The New York Never List

Inexplicably loyal readers might remember a certain entry here from the teeth-gnashing days of 2015 (I was unemployed for most of that year, y’see, which might explain the preponderance of lengthy posts) wherein I windily cited with typically laborious aplomb both all the notable, “quintessentially” New York City things I’ve done/tried/seen/visited and a tidy list of ten such things that — despite being an oft-cited native of these Manhattan streets — I had never done, for whatever reason.

There wasn’t necessarily an overarching point to the whole endeavor. I think it spoke to both the perception of what constitutes the quintessence of something and also the lazy inclination to take certain things for granted. I mean, if you literally live just down the street from something, you might not feel the same sense of urgency to go check it out as someone who is only visiting. Convenient proximity is the enemy of exotica.

Anyway, I don’t know that it’s necessarily worth noting, as they say, but since I first posted that entry back in 2015, I have actually stepped inside One Fifth Avenue (albeit, only its dark, stately lobby), and I did finally make it to The Top of the Rock only a month after I’d claimed I’d never been, and proceeded to replicate a fabled Bob Gruen portrait of Joe Strummer with my son Oliver.

In any case, for no readily apparent reason, I thought I’d throw another few “nevers” into the mix and see what happens. Herewith a few more arguably “quintessential” New York City activities I’ve never bothered doing.

1. I’ve never ridden a CitiBike
No accident, this. I grew up riding my bike all over the city, and even then -- as I was blithely courting all sorts of stupid peril -- I knew my place in the great food chain of the Manhattan street. In the same way you don’t provoke Great White sharks while snorkeling in the Florida Keys, you did your best to remember that buses, delivery trucks, cars and taxis basically don’t give a rolling rat fuck about your wellbeing. After seeing a few too many frankly harrowing bike accidents, I forsook further bicycle-riding in New York City once my children were born. Then the bike lanes and the CitiBikes appeared, and suddenly the streets were filled with entitled bicycle dilettantes who selectively disregard certain traffic rules while ferociously adhering to the ones that best serve their own interests. I can tolerate that sort of brazen hypocrisy from seasoned cyclists and/or bike messengers (i.e. people whose lives and/or occupations are pronouncedly interwoven with that particular mode of transport), but not from the CitiBikers. If you’re pedaling one of those clunky warhorses around, you’re obviously not very serious about it. New York City is never going to become Amsterdam. That’s not a preference, that’s just a fact.

2. I have never been to the 9/11 Museum
While I have indeed passed through the site, and searched around the perimeter of the fountains for the name of my fallen friend from high school who died in the north tower that morning, I am routinely driven out by the hordes of selfie-stick-wielding tourists who feel comfortable posing and smiling in what is ostensibly designed as a place for reflective solemnity. I have never waited on line for – much less set foot in – the adjacent museum. While it may sound melodramatic and hyperbolic, the events of that day still seem too fresh to require a museum.

3. I have never been to the top of WTC 1
… which I will never refer to as the “Freedom Tower.” I harbor absolutely zero desire to ever visit the top of that.

4. I have never attended an event at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn
This one is somewhat surprising, as the venue in question has played host to numerous concerts that would have otherwise engaged my interests. My beloved Killing Joke are even slated to play there next month, although they’re opening for Tool. I’m not about to spend upwards of three figures to watch my favorite band of all time deliver an opening-band set (forty minutes at most?) to an arena full of disinterested Tool fans.

5. I have never visited the Hudson Yards’ Vessel
…and never will, if I have any say in the matter.

6. I have never taken an open-door helicopter tour over Manhattan
This trend was becoming kind of a big thing, for a little while, until one plunged into the East River, a year or so ago, killing three of its passengers in a horrible manner. I love a good photo-op of New York City, but I’ll pass on this option, thanks.

7. I have never been to the new Whitney Museum at the base of the High Line
I grew up roaming around the old Whitney on the Upper East Side (now the Met Breur). In the same way I never went to the new Hog Pig or the new Max Fish, I am sort of inclined leave the old Whitney in my head as I remember it. I mean, I’m not averse to checking out the new one, but it’s not my first priority.

8. I have never attended a show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem
Nine times out of ten, the bands I'm clamoring to see aren't likely to be playing at this storied venue, although Metallica did play there a little while back, if memory serves. I would love to go check it out, but -- as yet -- have not. 

The rest of these, meanwhile, are all food related...

9. I have never shopped at Zabar's on the Upper West Side
Yes, I know ... shock, horror, outrage. Sorry, I assume it must be some kind of fabulous, but being that I've never lived on the Upper West Side, it's just never struck me as a priority. I've been to Sahadi's in Brooklyn and Kalustyan's in Little India, if that makes you feel any better, but never Zabar's. 

10. I've never eaten at a Momofuku
I believe there are Momofukus in other cities as well, but no ... I've never partaken of their pork buns.

10. I've never sampled the soul food at Sylvia's in Harlem
In my defense, I'd cite that I did go to The Pink Tea Cup in the West Village for soul food on a few occasions, but have never, as yet, made it to Sylvia's. 

11. I've never bought anything at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side
If I'm being honest, I'm not really a whitefish/pickled herring/chopped liver/baked salmon kinda guy. I like that it's still there and that it's always crowded, but I just don't think I'm cut out to be a member of its culinary demographic. Given this information, it shouldn't be surprising that I've never shopped at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side either. That just means more sturgeon for you! 

12. I've never stood on line for a cronut at the Dominique Ansel Bakery
....and friggin' neither should you.