Flaming Pablum

Some Perspective

I wanted to weigh back in the wake of both my last post and on the larger story as a whole, which continues to snowball from being a local concern to now one garnering sensationalist headlines in UK periodicals like The Independent and The Daily Mail. There is indeed a lot of stuff going on in Washington Square Park, of late, but I think it’s prudent to point a few things out.

Firstly, the park in question has gone through myriad iterations over the decades, to say nothing of its fairly grim past as an execution ground and a potter’s field in previous centuries. As recently as the late 60s/early 70s, the park was a fairly grotty hub of desperation, as depicted in the documentary film embedded in this comparatively ancient post, wherein I alluded to 2016’s version as being “comparatively idyllic.” Defenders of today’s version, meanwhile, will be quick to point out the druggy, dirty and edgy version of the park that held sway in the `70s and into the `80s. There is indeed truth to that. In my own experience, I certainly remember regularly walking through Washington Square Park in the `80s, invariably on my way to any number of since-vanished Greenwich Village record shops. The park, by that point, was certainly awash in drug sales, but predominantly just weed (or, more accurately, oregano posing unconvincingly as weed). Even at this point, though, I never felt a sense of menace in the park, although I was also young and naïve. To my mind, the experience of Washington Square Park in the `80s is perfectly captured in the video of “Que Pasa/Me No Pop I” by Coati Mundi.

Of course, by the Giuliani era, the drug trade was pushed out (largely to points east) and actual video cameras were famously installed, some allegedly hidden in treetop birdhouses, if the myths are true.

I don’t remember seeing a striking difference in the park, though, until the mid-2000’s, when they started carving up the space in an arguable upgrade (the crux of the plan being to move the fountain so that it was flush with Fifth Avenue). By this point, I was regularly visiting the park with my kids, them having both spent sizable amounts of time in the park’s playgrounds. As I mentioned here, I don’t believe I was entirely onboard with the renovation.

When Washington Square Park fully re-opened in 2009, it was indeed lovely, and myself and my family resumed our regular visits.

From that point on, I think we all just took the park for granted. There were always going to be elements of it that didn’t entirely play nice with others, but such is the nature of public space. To think it was going to remain squeaky clean, especially given its long history, is kind of ridiculous. Just as there will always be old hippies hoarsely crooning out-of-tune John Lennon tunes there, there were always going to be some shady goings-on if you looked hard enough for them.

The pandemic, however, gave another spin to proceedings, revitalizing Washington Square Park’s former status as a hotbed of a public activism, demonstration and protest and becoming a favored spot for rallies of various causes, most notable among them being Black Lives Matter. Anyone who was shocked or upset by that probably isn’t very versed in the city’s history.

But this spring brought something different. The shady goings-on alluded to two graphs up were no longer especially well-hidden. The drug trade came back with a vengeance, and – as mentioned – we’re not just talking about pot. Crack and heroin took up residence in the northwesterly quadrant of the square (uncomfortably close to the smaller children’s playground). Both the collective trauma of the pandemic and the seeming relaxation of both basic amenities and law-enforcement within the confines of the park sort of morphed the square into a permissive oasis for some and a scary headache for others. Then the late-night raves started.

As far as I’m concerned, I don’t really give that much of a damn what people are up to in the park. But I do take strenuous objection to the hard drugs, the crime, the violence, the proliferation of garbage and the abject lack of basic consideration. As I said in the last post, by all means utilize your public spaces to their fullest potential, but show some fucking courtesy, restraint and respect while you do it. I posted something to that same effect on social media, and swiftly came the “Hey you kids, get off my lawn” rejoinder. More like, “Hey you kids, stop giving hand jobs to crackheads in full view of the playground, shitting in the fountain and assaulting people.”

In terms of the late-night parties, I don’t live close enough to actually hear what’s going on, but I see what the place looks like in the mornings, and I’m just not down with the ensuing melees that have been the result. The bozo behind all that is this idiotic asshole, who is as egomaniacal as he is myopically stupid, … which is saying something.

In any case, this all said, while the park has indeed seen better days (however you’d care to define that), this is not to say that you cannot still sit down and enjoy its green, open pleasantness. I passed through it this past weekend and took the picture below – not the roiling sphincter of acrimony and bloodshed the headlines would otherwise have you believe.

But we can still all do better.

What's Going On In Washington Square

Whether you’re going to Washington Square Park to be your authentic self, let your freak flag fly, commune with the similarly inclined, enjoy the nice weather or because you’re simply trying to walk through it to get to the other side, can’t we all agree that – as it’s a public space – it should be an experience that DOES NOT involve brazen drug abuse (we're not just talkin' weed), prostitution, the threat of violence and late-night, high-volume bacchanalia in a residential neighborhood?

It’s also a complete, goddamn bomb-site every morning with trash all over the place. I’ve lived in NYC my entire life, and even compared to the freewheelin’ 80s, it’s never been as off the rails as it is now. By all means, use your public space, but at least attempt to demonstrate some courtesy, restraint and respect while you do it.

A Quiet Patch of Green

Just a serene little moment in soon-to-vanish East River Park

Back Into The Basement

My friend John (who I mentioned here) put up a telling post on Facebook recently that struck a firm chord with me. A similarly besotted music geek, John recounted coming back into possession of a big crate of records he’d stored at his mother’s place back in the 90’s. His mother had moved house, however, at some point, and a friend of John’s picked up those albums from her home and sent them back to him. Years after first sending them away for safe-keeping, John found many of the LPs to be in rough, unplayable shape. Coupled with the fact that he has since aquired the means – like most of us – to play most of the music on those records on multiple other formats, John was struck with a quandary, which he neatly summed up in the following three sentences….

I'm not going to play these records. They sit in their box taking up space in the house, and anchor me to a past that no longer exists. But I can't bring myself to just throw them away.

Maybe Freud could have a holiday with this particular syndrome, but I, too, stored many of my old records at my mother’s house. While I’d formerly been loath to part with any of them, when my wife and I moved from my old apartment on East 12th Street to our current apartment on East 9th Street in 2002, I stored about a third of my vinyl collection at a mini-storage space on Vandam Street (never do this) and packed the other two-thirds into a series of stylish flight cases procured at long-vanished Eightball Records on East 9th (which later turned into a long-running sushi joint called Yuba, which has also now closed) and kinda snuck them into the basement of my mom’s house in Quogue out on Long Island.

I ended up having to forego my Vandam Street storage place when it got too expensive and discreetly migrated those records into our apartment. The other two thirds – still in those flight cases, covered in deliberately offensive stickers by prurient hot-rod artist Coop so that my mom wouldn’t want to touch them – have been down in that basement ever since, tucked away in an ersatz playroom with board games, toys and old coats no one will ever wear again. At some point, this will have to change, especially if my mom ever makes good on her threat to sell the house.

We went out to visit mom over Memorial Day Weekend, and given the unseasonable chill and pervasive rain, I succumbed to a ritual I’ve been keeping for some time. Every three or four years or so, I go down to the basement and exhume my old records from those flight cases. At this stage of the proceedings, there is no turntable in my mother’s home to play them on, nor do I expect there ever will be. So, all I can do is take them out, look at them and feel that anchor John was talking about pull at my neck.

When not fretting myself an ulcer about work demands and pressing life matters, my brain frequently finds the time to wake me up in the middle of the night to plot out what I’ll have to do about those records. Honestly, I’d consider farming them off to my nephews, but I don’t know that they’d genuinely want them or even give a damn. I mean, truthfully, I don’t want to give them away, but I don’t know that I can keep them. I’d rather they go to “a good home,” so to speak, but who knows?

In the short term, here are a few of them.

Back to The Ear Inn

It’s been yet another crazy-busy period at work. I have multiple complicated projects on the burner, all requiring heaping amounts of deft navigation, thoughtful strategy and efficient execution. Similarly, I'm vainly trying to plot out my family's summer -- from my youngest's second COVID shot through transporting same back to camp in Vermont again and wrangling fleeting vacation accommodations, to say nothing of my wife and I's looming 20th anniversary. While I do genuinely consider the two posts I put up this week to be interesting and worth your time, I’m always looking to post more substantial things than placeholder entries built around esoteric YouTube videos. But, y’know, we all have our things to contend with.

In any case, I wanted to write about this sooner, but I was let off my leash briefly last weekend to meet an old friend of mine I’d not seen in two or three years. Now that restrictions are easing, it seemed like a fine time to meet up, so we settled on a place I’ve been dying to return to since the pandemic first turned our collective existence into a c-grade disaster movie, the Ear Inn over on the western end of Spring Street in SoHo. 

A longtime favorite bar of mine, I’ve had more memorable evenings within the Ear’s storied interiors than I can count. It’s arguably the oldest bar in Manhattan, although McSorley’s and Pete’s Tavern make comparable claims. Regardless, I’ll take the Ear over both those joints every damn time.

Despite just being informed by my primary care physician —who I’d also not seen since before the pandemic —that I’d gained seven pounds since my last visit, I ordered a cheeseburger and had a few pints with my friend in that great bar. While it, too, boasts the trappings of responsible social distancing, I am very happy to report that its splendor remains undiminished.

What places are YOU ready to return to?

Oliver Takes On Time Travel

My son Oliver is 15 years old. As recently mentioned in this post, now that both my children are well into their teens, I am generally less inclined to feature and refer to them as much as I might have done when they were littler. They have their own interests, likes, dislikes, identities and lives, and I try to respect their privacy. That all said, Oliver recently put together a video for a school project, and while, granted, I am incredibly biased, I think it’s pretty spectacular.

Peculiarly tasked with crafting a project about time travel, Oliver was able to utilize his passion for stop-motion animation. Here are the fruits of his labors. Be warned: While the recurring theme of grisly patricide might give one pause, “The Grandfather Paradox” is indeed a genuine example of doomy, paradoxical theories about the potentially damaging travails of time travel.

Please enjoy.

Back to Lee's on Ludlow ... with Jeremy & Dennis

I honestly have no earthly idea how or why my friend Jeremy ended up on a YouTube channel hosted by a talking tennis ball, but …. y’know,… maybe he lost a bet or something.

In any case, my friend and fellow music geek Jeremy Shatan was recently on a YouTube program called “Dad Jokes with Dennis Ball” wherein he got to chat about a number of different things. I’ll try not to be too brazenly namedroppy about this, but along with being an exceptionally good guy and a man of exquisite musical taste (Jeremy is a similarly avowed Killing Joke acolyte and also hosts an exhaustive blog about music fandom called An Earful), Jeremy has a few notables to his name, namely that (a) he was a founding member of The Young Aborigines, the teenage punk band that would gradually mutate into the Beastie Boys and (b) it was our Jeremy who took the wide-angled panoramic photograph of the intersection of Ludlow & Rivington on the Lower East Side that would grace the cover of the Beasties’ legendary sophomore LP, Paul’s Boutique.

Now, despite having these fairly impressive items on his curriculum vitae of cool, to spend any time chatting with Jeremy, you’d absolutely never know it. He’s an affable, grounded and normal guy, and he generally speaks about these things with the same nonchalance you might recount a goofy anecdote about some silly shit you did with your friends when you were a kid, which is more or less precisely the scenario. It’s just that the friends in question happened to become genre-straddling iconoclasts.

In any case, I’m happy to evangelize any endeavor Jeremy’s involved in, so please enjoy the clip above.

The shot below, meanwhile, was one I snapped in about 1995. If you cannot figure it out, it’s the same corner Jeremy captured on the front panel of Paul’s Boutique. If you visit this spot today, it looks like nothing of the sort. The last time I walked by it was a cafe of some kind, and there’s a massive mural of the Beasties on its east-facing facade. But circa `95 (only six or so years after Jeremy’s photo), it was still more or less the same concern.

A Way Back to Wendy's Wall

Just a quick follow-up to this revelatory (well, to me, anyway) post from back in April.

Once I gleaned that the original site of the elusive Plasmatics mural from my distant memory was the tellingly-titled Graffiti Hall of Fame on 106th & Park Avenue (this discovery coming courtesy of an uncredited photo on “Graffiti Database”), I started to wonder if I could find any other — and/or preferably better — photographs of the art in question, but tireless Google searches were giving me nothing further on the subject. I mean, Hell, I was lucky to find that first photo to begin with.

Branching my search out further, however, I noticed that there is a very robust subculture of reverent graffiti-centric publishing. As such, when I spotted a fetching, paperback coffee-table book on Amazon that was exclusively dedicated to the very spot where the original mural was, I figured there was a sporting chance it would include another shot of it. And even if it didn’t, I was intrigued enough by the story of the place and its accompanying images that it would be cool to own. Tweny-something bucks later, it was mine. It arrived today.

Much to my delight, fourteen pages into the book comes a beautiful wide shot of the wall in question that was obviously snapped at least a year or two earlier, as the artwork is still vibrantly colorful and unsullied by other tags. This photo was taken by maverick shutterbug Martha Cooper. I remain mystified as to why these artists chose to immortalize the Plasmatics in this manner, but, again, perhaps they were just simply fans.

As a lark, I have reached out to Ms. Cooper to see if she’s consider selling me a print of the photo. We’ll see.

Incidentally, you can check out more of Cooper's amazing work on her Instagram page. Tell'em Flaming Pablum sent ya.

 

The Band Was There

It’s been a long while since I’ve been as fixated with one, but I used to be pretty hung up about tracking down the locations of photographs of favorite bands of mine. I have a whole category on the blog devoted to it (and comparable mysteries), but I’m thinking my exhaustive (and exhausting) search for a specific shot of the Lunachicks some years back may have broken the back of that preoccupation … or maybe it’s just because I haven’t encountered another photo that captured my imagination the same way. Who can say?

In any event, along the way, I was aided and abetted by a few folks whose sleuthing skills were considerably sharper than mine, notably my comrade Bob Egan of Popspots NYC and a friend on Facebook named Chung Wong, among a few others. On several occasions, both Bob and Chung gamely dove in and helped divine the true provenance and practically the precise longitude and latitude of the locations in question.

As it happens, there is apparently another prominent and versatile cat on this beat. Slated for an upcoming session on my friend Drew Stone’s “New York Hardcore Chronicles” live, one Steve Birnbaum is an artist, photographer, filmmaker and fellow music head who takes comparable pains to seek out and artfully replicate shots of famous music luminaries. Where I was inclined to mimic the shots with the then-willing aid of my little kids (now that they’re in their teens, they are less enthused about such shenanigans), Mr. Birnbaum adds his own signature by framing the original photograph within the larger environment of the location. In a weird way, it’s a little reminiscent of the Instagram account of Murad Osmann. If that name doesn’t ring a bell he’s that self-styled “travel influencer” that continually photographs his smokin’ hot spouse from behind in the “follow me” series as they jetset around the globe. In Birnbaum’s case, instead of holding his lovely lady’s hand, he’s brandishing the original source material.

You can see the fruit of Birnbaum’s labors on his Instagram page called TheBandWasHere. On it, he covers a lot of the bases I, too, sought out, like the Misfts in the West Village, the Beasties in Charles Street, Joe Strummer on East 14th, The Cramps on Charles Lane and several, several others. He and I have clearly been bitten by the same bug.

Go check it out and tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.

Incidentally, my 2009 response to the above original (the cover of The Ramones' Too Tough to Die) is below. 

...And Still Running

Strangely untouched by the cruel passage of time, Record Runner on Jones Street just keeps on running. I spoke about it here, but to walk inside (knock, please) is to step back into a world where Madonna and Duran Duran are still gods among mortals. Names like the Senseless Things, Flesh For Lulu and Pop Will Eat Itself may all be the answers to Anglophilic trivia questions in 2021, but at Record Runner, they still sit comfortably upon shelves, waiting for reappraisal.