Hot on the heels of sharing the Apology Line podcast with me earlier this week, my pal Caroline (both a fellow former Upper East Side resident and kindred spirit in all things punky/indie/underground, specifically of the New York variety) shot me another link to another podcast, albeit to a very specific episode. She did this, I assume, given my penchant for getting fixated with finding elusive minutia from my ever-distancing youth.
In any case, in this episode of the Reply-All podcast, a man becomes singularly mystified by not being able to identify (nor find any evidence of) a song he vividly remembers both the lyrics and the melody to, and it haunts him. He searches all over the internet, but finds absolutely nothing to back up his recollections. This is the story of the lengths he goes to in order to solve the quandary of the mystery pop hit from his memory.
Anyway, it was definitely right up my alley, and I totally empathize with this story’s protagonist. Want to find out how it all ended? CLICK RIGHT HERE TO LISTEN.
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.
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...
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?
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.”
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.
For as long back as I can currently remember, there’s been a strange little doorway at 40 Crosby Street that has been an enigmatic magnet for all stripes of street art. Regularly camouflaged by stickers, flyers, graffiti, posters and scribbles, it is a different visual experience every time I walk by it. And when I do, I frequently take a picture for posterity. This week, on my way back from a quick trip to my office, I walked by it, and its dazzling colors stopped me dead in my tracks. Here it is.
So impressed with the image (not that I had anything to do with — I just raised my camera), I posted it on social media and comments immediately came in its wake. More than a couple of people assumed it was CBGB. A third friend suggested it might be the former site of The Magic Shop, the recording studio where icons like Lou Reed and David Bowie recorded. As it turns out, that site (now permanently closed) is on the same strip, but across the street. I still have no idea what goes on behind that door and why the exterior looks the way it does.
In the grand tradition of this post, I was originally going to launch a new quest to divine the cover location of the Plasmatics’ first album, New Hope for the Wretched (above), but the answer came quickly and was nothing I was ever going to have been able to solve on my own, so I’m just going to share it all here now. Oh, you're welcome.
Despite being technically the band's first album, New Hope for the Wretched was the last Plasmatics studio album I was to attain, not including a few compilation discs they put out posthumously in the last two decades. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I came to own this particular album in a fairly dishonorable way. Here’s a very brief explainer about how that happened, as unspooled on this ancient post.
I'm really not proud to admit this but I once shafted a local used record store over a Plasmatics record. They were selling a copy of the band's debut LP, New Hope For The Wretched as a deluxe picture disc (the vinyl platter looked like someone had vomited radioactive slime all over it), but the shop was asking a king's ransom for it. Like a dick, I slipped that record out of its sleeve and swapped it with another record. I brought the picture disk -- now sheathed in a different album's cover -- to the counter and paid pennies for it. I was never a bad kid -- I didn't make a habit of ripping stuff off, but for some reason, I had to have this picture disc. Decades later, I still feel guilty every time I walk by the shop in question.
That last line is true. To this day, I still feel compelled to go into the shop in question (still there, amazingly) and confess my wretchedness, pardon the pun. It’s forever tainted my ability to fully enjoy the record in question, given its inexorable ties to my bottomless wellspring of guilt.
Regardless of how you come to New Hope for The Wretched, you should know, going in, that it’s really not for everyone. Still finding their way, at the time, the band was obviously having a problem in trying to make their album match the sensationalized impact of their live show. Let’s face it, songwriting was never their primary strength.
Playing a loose approximation of what had become known, by that point, as “punk rock” (although, by the time of the release of this record, the Clash had already stylistically branched out with London Calling and Sandinista, Sid Vicious was already dead, John Lydon was making way more experimental music with Public Image Ltd. and The Ramones were recording with Phil Spector), the songs are energetic, if not especially inspired. Standout selections like “Monkey Suit” (see below) and “Butcher Babies” are entertaining enough, but one could credibly suggest that their efforts on later records were a bit more successful, in this capacity.
The most inspired moment probably comes during their cover of “Dream Lover,” originally by Bobby Darin. Their version boasts a noisy gimmick that unwittingly borrows a page from the burgeoning No Wave scene that would have been going on, at the time, in that during an extended passage of the recording, the musicians were isolated from each other and could not see or hear what each other were playing — the ends results being as discordantly cacophonous as you’d expect. You can’t say the Plasmatics didn't try.
This all said, much like their kindred spirits in KISS, the Plasmatics' early records were still overshadowed by their penchant for violent and prurient spectacle, and New Hope was no exception, which might handily explain the knowing ludicrousness of the album’s cover, featuring the band posing in and around a suburban backyard pool, appearing as if they’ve just driven a car into it and also destroyed a nearby television set for good measure … as you do.
After I’d posted my findings about the band’s Tribeca headquarters last week, my comrade Bob Egan of Popspots NYC fame challenged me to tackle finding this location. As it happened, I did find the below bird’s eye view of the location shoot, but it didn’t really give that many clues.
From there, I went directly to the source. Many years back, I used to work side-by-side with a woman at a certain media outlet who, for the purposes of this narrative, I’ll call Gwen. Gwen was a whip-smart colleague who was a remarkably versatile journalist and also the quintessence of a no-nonsense, common-sense-espousing mom. Despite this, not only did the younger iteration of Gwen spend a formidable amount of time in the nascent New York hardcore scene, but she also dated — for a spell, I gather — Richie Stotts, the guitarist of the Plasmatics. I initially found this hard to reconcile, given the impeccably professional manner in which Gwen comported herself, but when pressed on the subject, she could (and still can) rattle of period-specific minutia like a genuine insider. Gwen is no poser.
As such, I asked Gwen if she might know the location, and without missing a beat, she cited Sunshine Park, a former nudist colony Plasmatics manager/svengali Rod Swenson had evidently been a member of in the mid-70’s. Don’t go looking for Sunshine Park today, though, as it closed in 1983 after neighbors complained and health violations were cited. Some folks just have no sense of fun.
I then did some further snooping around came across a tweet from the … ahem…. American Association of Nude Recreation that linked to this creepy photo below. By 2009, evidently the campground had fallen into a state of neglect and was being reclaimed by nature. Is THIS the very same pool, I wonder? See more pictures of the abandoned Sunshine Park campground here. I have no idea what goes on there — if anything — today.
A few years back, I happened on some photographs of stalwart proto-shoegazer band My Bloody Valentine taken in New York City around the time of their watershed 1991 album, Loveless. I was quasi-lucky enough to see them on that tour at the Ritz, on a high-decibel triple bill with Dinosaur Jr. and Superchunk that I am convinced took a palpable toll on my hearing. In any case, in one or two of the photos, the band were depicted standing with their backs against a mosaic pattern that was inarguably the work of Jim Power, an East Village fixture whose signature art adorns many corners of the neighborhood to this day. The thing that was so perplexing, however, was that the picture of MBV also featured these strange, mask-like faces that looked so incredibly familiar to me, but I could not place where they might be. In my downtime, I searched far and wide or a wall with those faces on it, but always came up empty.
Eventually, I gave up and lost the pics in question. Life went on.
Last week, someone invoked My Bloody Valentine in one online forum or another, and up popped that very picture again. Here it is now.
Again, those strange background faces jumped out at me. I knew I’d seen them before, but certainly not recently.
Eventually, I figured it out.
The mask-like faces are no longer on that façade, that being on the southern side of the street on St. Marks Place just steps to the west of Avenue A. At the time, that would have been the side of rock’n’roll bar Alcatraz. It would later turn into a sushi bar and is more recently a taco place called Empello al Pastor.
Like I said, the faces are gone (knocked off by a vandal or Jim Power collector fanboy?), but the rest of the mosaic is still intact. You can see the same side of the patterned dish to the left of guitarist Kevin Shield’s head right above my son Oliver’s head below.
Mystery solved.
For the uninitiated, this is My Bloody Valentine....
More about My Bloody Valentine on Flaming Pablum here….
My friend Chung was instigating a conversation on Facebook, earlier today, based around a controversial billboard used to promote the Rolling Stones’ 1974 album, Black and Blue, which featured an image of a woman who’d been tied up and abused. While also comparable to a similarly objectionable billboard the Doors used to promote L.A. Woman (which featured a woman incongruously crucified on a telephone pole), I immediately thought of an old poster I’d spotted promoting a gig by — of all bands — Kraftwerk. I did some quick Googling to find the image in question, but came up with nothing. Then, I remembered that I’d probably put it on Get Back to Work, my ancient Tumblr page.
I started Get Back to Work (or Get Back Vassifer, really) as a complete lark — much like this blog — mostly as a means of aggregating images that appealed to my sensibility. This included album covers, GIFS, flyers, tour posters, promo photos, comics, memes, drawings, weird ads, archival pictures of New York, outtakes, t-shirts, movie stills, foreign movie posters, magazine covers, curious videos, risqué images, sci-fi, monster movies, cool graffiti, interesting book jackets, propaganda posters, Japanese robots, concert shots, ticket stubs, odd postcards, political humor, old New Yorker illustrations, badges, strange animations, unexplained phenomena, prurient doodles, and other bullshit like that, all presented usually without any explanation, in no order and more often than not without any helpful tags.
I occasionally had an agenda. It was a good place to store images, or at least set them to one side for later potential use here on Flaming Pablum. After a while, though, it just became an unwieldy pile of cool stuff collected for no readily apparent reason.
It seems I’ve occasionally added a scant image or two over the past year, but it’s far from a regular stop. But in searching for that Kraftwerk poster (which I eventually found here), I took a long, perilous trip down the rabbit hole. There are some truly great things to be found, if you’ve got the time.
I used to be a big fan of this blog called Scouting New York, which was run by this film-location scout who’d pinpoint and document famous locations from a wide array of films and point out weird urban anomalies and curious facts. For whatever reason — I believe it’s because he moved to another city — Scouting New York stopped updating in 2015, and I was sad to see it end. Regardless, the site is still up, so I encourage anyone with an interest in that sort of thing to go check it out.
I am happy to report, however, that a (relatively) new obsessively eagle-eyed cinephile has risen to the challenge to pick up where Scouting New York left off. Launched, evidently, in 2016, the straightforwardly titled NYC in Film seeks to accomplish much the same mission, and its attention to slavish detail is encouraging and impressive, not at all unlike the exacting eye for architectural minutia and fine-toothed scrutiny of my pal Bob Egan of PopSpots NYC.
I’d noticed some repeat visits to an old post of mine from 2018 regarding the former site of Disc-O-Mat, a record store I frequented in the very early `80s. Turns out, said post was of some use to NYC in Film, who reference while in the process of divining specific locations from the 1986 thriller, “F/X” staring Aussie Bryan Brown.
I’m late, of course, but I’m glad to welcome NYC in Film into the NYC blogosphere, such as it is — he even takes on my favorite and oft-cited film of all time, “After Hours.”
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