Flaming Pablum

"Ten Words!"

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, in my primary and elementary school years, I was ridiculously privileged enough to attend Saint David’s, a private boys’ school in the Carnegie Hill section of the Upper East Side. While I was rubbing blazered shoulders with the sons of powerful executives, diplomats and other movers, shakers and captains of industry (various schoolmates, along the way, included the late John F. Kennedy Jr, the late Ali Reza Pahlavi, the youngest son of the exiled Shah of Iran, and … umm ... Robert Chambers), I can’t say the intra-student dynamic was especially different from any other school. Boys will indeed be boys. There were as many cliques and tribes of posh preps, knuckle-dragging bullies, gormless nerds, perpetually sweaty jocks, insouciant class clowns, anti-social weirdos, high-browed brainiacs and unhinged juvenile delinquents as should be expected (I’ll let you guess which group I was a member of). Somehow, though, we all more or less harmoniously coexisted.

In sixth grade, I had a homeroom teacher I’ll refer to here as Mr. Kozlowski, a gentleman who’d accrued a reputation for both his intolerance for shenanigans and his inventive and scrupulously thorough signature punishment, that being the dread “Ten Words.” Basically, were one foolish enough to test the parameters and incur the wrath of Mr. Kozlowski, one would be swiftly admonished with the laborious task of writing out ten different lengthy definitions from a particularly wordy, antiquated dictionary. In retrospect, that’s not really that big a deal, but try telling that to a sixth grader. Mr. Kozlowski was so adept at administering this unsavory sanction that he even devised a system. Every couple of weeks, he would distribute “Ten Word Passes,” which acted as sort of “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. As such, if you were zapped with a “Ten Words” for being late or interrupting a discussion about Homer’s “Iliad,” you could absolve yourself from the sentence by coughing up a Ten Word Pass. I seem to remember chronically naughty classmates furtively bartering with each other, exchanging baseball cards for extra Ten Word Passes. It was deathly serious.

From Monday to Thursday, around 2:30 pm or so, we’d all repair downstairs to the locker rooms and change into our gear to head out to the verdant expanse of Central Park to go play soccer or softball on the Great Lawn, which, at the time, was neither especially great or even really a lawn so much as just a wide, dusty oval with spotty patches of withered grass. We’d all line up, in pairs, in front of St. David’s and then march west towards the park, invariably testing the patience of whatever unfortunate coach was looking after us. As we approached Fifth Avenue, to our left was the boldly innovative architecture of the Guggenheim Museum. On the northeast corner of that museum was a little walled-in garden wherein they’d periodically exhibit sculpture. During my sixth grade, the sculpture in question was this sort of metallic, inverted mobile that featured two oblong, rectangular panels which moved with the wind. As if it were yesterday, I vividly remember my classmate Theo, a preternaturally funny individual, probably still to this day, marching past it and loudly exclaiming “Lookout for Kozlowski’s Radar!” Given that Mr. Kozlowski was indeed always tuned in, and always listening, it made perfect sense that he’d employ such a surveillance device to monitor our idiocy when we weren’t in his classroom. I remember giggling about that all the way to the Great Lawn. From that point forward, that sculpture was known to everyone as Kozlowski's Radar. 

I graduated from St. David’s in 1981 and started attending the Loyola School down on East 83rd Street. I graduated from there in 1985 and then flew off to Denison University in Ohio, from which I graduated in 1989. I can’t readily say how many sculptures have graced that garden on the northeast corner of the Guggenheim since I was in sixth grade, or for how long they stay there, but I’m imagining it’s quite a few. I haven’t been up in that neck of the woods in a long, long time, but I’m pretty sure Kozlowski’s Radar is no longer there.

Cut to 2023... My friend Susan is a writer and a photographer who frequently posts pictures on Facebook that she’s taken around New York City from decades past. Today, she put this one up, and it immediately smacked me in the face, almost getting me to scramble dutifully for a dictionary.

This is Kozlowski’s Radar.

Flaming Pablum en Piedra Rodante

I honestly really didn’t see this coming, but in the wake of last week’s naming ceremony and plaque-unveiling at the corner of Cortlandt Alley and Walker Street, I pretty much thought that was that. As a final coda on my part, I reached out to my friends over at the TriBeCa Citizen and pitched a short piece about it, being that it happened in their back yard. They posted that and it actually garnered a lot of negative comments, specifically ones questioning why Charly Garcia deserved such an honor when, say, Robert DeNiro doesn’t have his own street. Apparently, there’s a healthy degree of myopic xenophobia in TriBeca, but I digress….

In any case, once that story moved off the TriBeCa Citizen’s front page, after a week, I figured that saga was complete.

Well, imagine my surprise, then, to find that Rolling Stone en Espanol devoted its cover to the story, and further augmented their coverage with an ancillary piece that concentrates on how the location of the fabled corner was determined, as well as the crucial story behind the very name Clics Modernos, that being my friend and storied New York City punk rocker, the late Fran Powers of Ultra Violence, Whole Wide World, East of Eden, Box of Crayons and – oh yes, do please wait for it – Modern Clix.

Guess who gets mentioned in that story. I do, that’s who.

Being that I don’t speak a lick of Spanish, however, I’m pretty much relying on Google Translate to make head or tail of it. But you can read it here. 

Better Late Than Never: The New York Never List Strikes Back

Back in the sepia-toned days of 2015, when I was still “between jobs,” I killed off a large swathe of a long afternoon in a dismal coffee shop with free WiFi, banging out a post, inbetween firing off desperate emails to disinterested media outlets, about all the super-fabulous, quintessentially New York-y things I’d ever done. I closed with a stately list of equally celebrated NYC-things that I’d never actually done, despite being a lifelong native New Yorker. I called this post The New York Never List.

Four years later, I updated that list with another list of places and things conventionally considered essentially New York that I’d also never done.

Well, here we are, almost five years after that…..

Last weekend, I was sitting in the library of the fabled Gramercy Park club, The Players, following a nice dinner in their downstairs bar, The Grill. I should point out that I am not a member of this establishment, but my wife and I were there as guests of a couple who are. For those who might not know the place, The Players is a storied Manhattan institution, founded by Shakespearian actor Edwin Booth – older brother of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth, don'tcha know – as a club for arts and the arts lover. Its membership includes thespians, musicians, writers, artists, and folks from all over the creative community. As such, the building – situated on the southern side of park, abutting the National Arts Club to its west – exudes a formidable aura and every room in the place seems veritably caked in history. I sat across a table from my friend Brian, and over the course of a couple of beers that I really don’t believe we were supposed to be consuming whilst in the stately library, we returned to this topic of places and things that are supposedly singularly New York, that we’d each experienced and a list of things we hadn’t. I rattled off several items from the posts cited above, and Brian countered with his own roster. In the wake of that conversation, it dawned on me that I was due for an update.

Since composing that last update in 2019, …

I have been to the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn. I was there to see my beolved Killing Joke open for the band Tool. The place is massive, antiseptic and largely devoid of any charm whatsoever – like an airport without planes.

I have walked around Hudson Yards and while I did not enter it, I have stood underneath the Vessel. Nothing about it is compelling to me.

I have been to the new Whitney Museum in the Meat Packing District. I went with my family during the latter stages of the Pandemic, and then again earlier this year to see the Hopper exhibit. It’s alright.

I have now finally eaten at a Momfuko. I can’t lie …. it was indeed delicious.

I have now shopped at Russ & Daughters on East Houston Street on the Lower East Side. I went to buy some chocolate babka for my family, and it’s indeed quite a place, although agoraphobes beware – it gets very crowded in there.

While I’m on the subject, I’d also like to point out that – in addition to the long list from the first post -- I’ve also wandered through the sepulchral gloom of “Sleep No More,” I’ve sampled the slices at Defarro’s Pizza in Midwood, I’ve bought fresh fish at Aqua Best in Chinatown, I’ve said rude words into the Whispering Gallery in the downstairs concourse at Grand Central, I’ve wandered around the grounds of the former Roosevelt Island smallpox hospital, I’ve replicated the cover of David Bowie’s The Lodger in the bathroom of a bar on Staten Island, I’ve uncomfortably watched strippers perform at Scores, Show World and the Baby Doll Lounge, I’ve had too many beers at the White Horse Tavern, gotten into an argument about Scottish pop music at Fraunces Tavern, unwittingly happened upon Alexander Hamilton’s grave in the Financial District, toured the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, participated in a sing-a-long at fabled piano bar, Marie’s Crisis, watched a jazz combo noodle at Kettle of Fish, took a dispiriting stroll through the Freak Show on Coney Island, watched two drag queens fight with each other at Save the Robots, put quarters in the jukeboxes of Max Fish, the Mars Bars and Alcatraz, visited the miniature model of the city at the Queens Museum, admired the graffiti at 5 Pointz in Queens, strolled around the grounds of the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows/Corona Park, felt deeply uncomfortable watching someone get a disarmingly emphatic handjob at the Cock in the East Village, and had my sneakers scrutinized at the Campbell Apartments.

Apart from those, however, I still haven’t ridden a Citibike, been to the 9/11 Museum, been to the top of World Trade Center 1, taken an open-door helicopter ride, attended a show at the Apollo Theatre, shopped at Zabar’s, dined at Sylvia’s, watched the ball drop in Times Square, partaken of high tea at the Russian Tea Room, rented a boat at the Central Park boathouse, gone to Elaine’s (which I believe is long-gone, anyway), attended the Christmas Spectacular at Radio City, been on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, stepped foot in the Dakota or Ansonia, stood online for Magnolia Cupcakes or ever perused the galleries at the Frick Museum.

Additionally, however, I have also never seen “Phantom of the Opera,” “Cats” or “Book of Mormon” on Broadway, never consumed the pasta at Rao’s, never visited the raw bar at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. on Times Square, never viewed the city from the deck of The Edge, never had a burger at Junior’s in Brooklyn, never been to the Little Island in Hudson River Park, never been to the Russian & Turkish Baths, and have absolutely never waited patiently for the alleged privilege of eating a cronut.

What about you?

No Dissing the Missing

Just a quick dumb one. 

I spotted the above photo taken by the incomparable Lynn Goldsmith on the Facebook group, Rock & Roll Explorer Guide to New York City, and was struck by some small details. Obviously, this is the License to Ill-era Beastie Boys, which leads me to suspect the photo in question is from about 1987. I've mentioned the Beasties innumerable times here before (most recently here, I guess). I'm a lifelong fan, and always will be, but that's not what caught my eye.  

No, what got my attention were the flyers they're posing in front of. On the left, there's a flyer for the Kitchen, a fabled SoHo performance space the Beastie Boys actually played at, during their nascent period (and there's video of that performance to be seen here).

Apart from the invocation of the Kitchen, however, there is also there flyers by Flaming Pablum-favorites Missing Foundation (two are behind the Kitchen flyer, and third behind Ad-Rock). I've also mentioned Missing Foundation entirely too many times on this blog. Suffice to say, they're not to everyone's tastes, but interesting art never is. 

If my chronology is correct, MF would have been promoting their first, eponymous LP, at the time, featuring such toe-tappers as "Kill the Hypnotic Bastards" and "Eat by The Pool." 

These, meanwhile, were the `87-era Beastie Boys...admirably not trying especially hard to lip-synch to their big single, at the time...

Charly Gets His Corner of TriBeCa

I realize I’ve been discussing it an awful lot since first invoking it in, gosh …2021, when I first stumbled upon a telling photograph by a tourist named Bo G. Eriksson that was shared in a Facebook group called Manhattan Before 1990, but in the long wake of that revelation, today the corner of Cortlandt Alley on Walker Street played host to an official naming ceremony that re-christened the plot of Manhattan real estate as Charly Garcia Corner. Sadly, the individual who first reached out to me about it – one Iñaki Rojas – was not able to make the trip from Mendoza, Argentina.

Once again, for a more-or-less succinct summary and timeline of all this, click here.

Anyway, today was the big day, so I went on down to check it out. Here are the pics…

Here's the corner, .... all dressed up for the unveiling of the plaque. 

Here's me, waiting for things to kick off...

...and then it started to get crowded....

...and then it got REALLY crowded...

...and then a proverbial mob scene.... the Charly Army was out in FORCE!!....

Then came, at long last, the ceremony ... here's Mariano Cabrera, who was instrumental in putting this together....

Here's the formal proclamation (the woman is, I believe, Charly Garcia's sister)...

Here's a view from the east, looking west from Cortlandt Alley down Walker Street....

After the plaque and the street sign were unveiled, alumni from Charly's band came on and played five or six songs from the record in question, that being Clics Modernos, which is a very big deal in Latin American/Argentinian music. 

There might be video later. Watch this space.

Wobbly on Wooster Street

 

 

 

 

 

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To the Stars, Mr. Pokey

In the window of a stately townhouse on 11th Street west of Sixth Avenue, there has been a tireless memorial for a fallen guinea pig named Mr.Pokey for the last two decades.

When my children were little, they used to demand a solemn moment of silence when we passed this spot. Though he only lived for a little over a scant two years, Mr. Pokey clearly left an indelible impression on the residents of this well appointed home, as they continue to keep the flame burning.

Respect is due. GODSPEED, MR. POKEY!!

The Spirit of Vengeance in the Boogie Down Bronx

Here’s a post that probably won’t mean anything to anybody, but I feel compelled to tell someone about it, so it might as well be you, dear lucky readers. You’re welcome.

Just out of curiosity, I was thumbing through the photographs in a Facebook group called, somewhat audaciously, The Real New York: 70’s/80’s, and came across the photo below taken by one Lisa Kahane in 1982 of the corner of 148th Street at Brook Avenue in The Bronx.

Now, the Bronx is not an area of New York City that I can credibly claim to have any meaningful knowledge about, so my reasons for being struck by the image had nothing to do with any geographical specificity. No, what fleetingly caught my eye was the graffiti.

If you look at the mural painted across El Farito’s storefront, you’ll see a small child posing underneath a pistol pointed right at the viewer. For whatever reason, I was instantly hooked by that image, and knew that I knew it, but couldn’t immediately discern why. It was heavily unlikely that, in 1982 (when I would have been about 15) that I would have been strolling around this particular patch of the Bronx, so I couldn’t have seen this graffiti in real time, but still – I knew that image of the bug-eyed guy brandishing a pistol.

Here's a closer (albeit pixilated) look...

Then, I figured it out.

Through pretty much all of my grade school years and at least one third of my high school years, I was an avid comic collector (until the point at which I basically gleaned that being a devout comic geek – let alone one that also played “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” – was doing me zero favors in the “impressing girls” department). But my affinity for my preferred titles – yes, I collected “The X-Men” like everybody else but was also enthralled by more left-field names like “Howard the Duck” and my all-time favorite, “Ghost Rider” – ran pretty deep. To this day, while I sold off a healthy supply of my less crucial issues, I do still own a hefty crate of comics that resides in our storage space. I should probably sell them (if I even can) at some point, but I’ll never be in a giant rush to do that. In any case, the reason I recognized that bug-eyed shooter lives in that crate.

From Issue #58 from July 1981…

Here's that very same corner in 2023...

Doctorin' the Beat

It being the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop (or so I’m repeatedly informed), here’s an arguably appropriate post.

Listen, no one ever said rapping was easy. Sure, lots of folks make it appear seamless, but probably do so with a nonchalance that is entirely deceptive. While it may seem like, say, Busta Rhymes barely breaks a sweat delivering his intricate wordplay, I’m fairly certain it’s the product of lots of very hard work and endless rehearsal. Then, there are those who have tried to mimic the linguistic dexterity and stylistic trappings of Hip-Hop but with results that have been, shall we charitably say, significatly less convincing than intended.

Personally speaking, while I was smitten by various Hip-Hop records throughout the `80s and `90s, I can’t say I’ve been particularly wowed by a Hip-Hop track in a very long time. The last “new” Hip-Hop act that caught my attention was probably this trio from Los Angeles called, inexplicably, Clipping. They bring a compelling new aesthetic to the genre that seems worlds apart from popular stuff of the day, most of which I find cripplingly staid, stupid and boring. I mean, I cannot get away from stuff like Doja Cat, Ice Spice and Post Malone fast enough. And let’s not even talk about Kanye.

But I’m not here to harp about Hip-Hop. As a 55-year-old rock schmuck weaned on metal, punk, hardcore and all things goth, I’m pretty much the last person you should listen to if you’re looking for insights into contemporary Hip-Hop.

Back to my closing point in the top graph, though, there were several early examples of artists who seemed keen to jump on the burgeoning bandwagon of hip-hop, back in its relative infancy. Some pulled it off – Blondie’s “Rapture” springs to mind, despite Debbie Harry’s rap being sort of clunky and bizarre. John Lydon’s collaboration with since-disgraced Afrika Bambatta, “World Destruction,” also felt completely credible. Others weren’t so finessed. Witness Dee Dee Ramone’s heroically ham-fisted reinvention as rapper Dee Dee King, Anthrax’s well-intentioned but funkless “I’m the Man,” Wham!’s frankly appalling “Wham Rap” and Adam & the Ants’ endearingly strange “Ant Rap.” Wendy O. Williams, from my beloved Plasmatics recorded a deeply lamentable record called – good lord -- Deffest and Baddest!! -- that found her trying her hand at the genre to gravely dispiriting effect. Even Lou Reed gave it a shot with “Original Wrapper” from the Mistrial album, an effort people still groan about to this day.

Enter Dr. John….

While he was renowed in New Orleans blues, jazz, funk and R&B circles as an eccentric, voodoo-fixated singer/songwriter, I had precious fuck-all idea who Dr. John was when he stepped onto the stage with the unlikely gentlemen in Squeeze at the Ritz on East 11th street, back in July of 1988 to perform a rendition of his own composition, “Such a Night.” It was great, of course, and I sought out more of his music shortly thereafter. If you’re not immediately familiar with him, you might remember his signature single from 1972, that being “Right Place Wrong Time.” As a fun side note, Dr. John was also the inspiration for Dr. Teeth of Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem, the house band from “The Muppet Show.”

One track of Dr. John’s, however, that I managed to overlook was “Jet Set,” a single from 1984 wherein, much like the rock luminaries cited above, the good doctor dared to wade into the waters of Hip-Hop. To be honest, while is sounds irretrievably dated when heard through the prism of 2023, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as embarassing as those lame efforts cited above by cats like Lou Reed and Dee Dee Ramone. It is whole solar-systems away from the hip-hop of today by evidently influential folks like Travis Scott, Pop Smoke, Cardi B and … y’know… whomever, but as an attempt to keep up with the sounds of that particular era, I don’t think anyone could lambast Dr. John for this effort.

The video is also a fleeting glimpse of the Manhattan of 1984, so … enjoy that, regardless.

Back to El Internacional/El Teddy's

I can’t remember when I first encountered it, but it was obviously at some point in the Eighties. While the original restaurant – Teddy’s – was kind of an old school/old New York Italian joint (see commercial below), it didn’t really become the iconic, visual phenom it was until the space was re-occupied and re-imagined by a concern called El Internacional. In this iteration, the new owners garishly decked the place out, outfitted the exterior with a dalmatian-esque paintjob and dropped a giant replica of the Statue of Liberty’s crown on the roof, an artsy, architectural flourish rivaled only by the Lone Star Café’s tremendous rooftop lizard up and over on Fifth Avenue.

Inside the original Teddy’s….

Regrettably, I never made it into El Internacional – which evidently held onto the place between 1984 and 1986, but when it became it morphed into the hybridized (I suppose) El Teddy’s, I did stop in for a drink, although I remember not being as wowed by the interior as I was hoping to be.

In any case, after spotting this story about its peculiar trajectory, I found myself wondering about the answer to a question I’ve been pondering for eons.

After El Teddy’s closed and the building was razed in 2004 to accommodate yet another yawnsome condo …

…what happened to the crown?

Anyone?