I can't say what prompted its rather brusque, indelicate removal, but --- following up on a post from last December -- it seems the demolition of street-art mosaicist Space Invader's homage to the Ramones on Thompson Street between Broome & Grand has come to its stark fruition -- which, frankly, broke my heart a little bit.
I mourn.
As laboriously extolled in this post from 2016, I’ve always been a huge fan of Cortlandt Alley, that dark, thin canyon stemming south into TriBeCa off Canal Street. I love its slightly forbidding aura, its back history as the narrow strand of pavement that once led to the Mudd Club, a storied venue I was never old enough to attend. I love its periodic bursts of street art, its weathered exteriors and rough-hewn, industrial trappings leftover from bygone eras. In every season, Cortlandt Alley takes on a new vibe. I never find it boring or unpleasant to walk down, even if I’m hopscotching over random dollops of (human?) excrement, dead rats and pigeons flattened the night before by delivery trucks, or evading the suspicious eyes of furtive weed-smokers in its darker recesses.
And I walk down it a lot. After I drop my son off at school in the Gramercy neighborhood, I hop on a downtown 6 train and get off at Canal to walk the rest of the way to my office at the bottom of Manhattan, taking a hard left down Cortlandt Alley on each and every one of those commutes. I’m now so familiar with that particular strip that I practically notice each and every change to its topography on a daily basis.
As was seemingly inevitable, however, there’s been a recent uptick in renovation and refurbishment in the Alley (as I mentioned just last summer). Scaffolding appears and disappears with some regularity, as certain addresses endeavor to spruce themselves up. While a wholesale facelift of the stretch seems unlikely, certain patches of it are very definitely changing. At its southernmost segment between White & Franklin Streets, a pricey-but-seemingly-dormant condo vainly tries to keep up appearances. But the real big activity is happening on the portion between White and Walker Streets. A few months back, a series of light fixtures were installed along its easterly wall, decimating a bit of this byway’s signature gloom. Beyond that, there was clearly something brewing in that building. Sure enough, just last week, some signage went up. Evidently, Cortlandt Alley is now home to a new venture called the Au Cheval Diner.
Here’s how the official website describes it…
An eclectic diner hidden down Cortlandt Alley with a passion for eggs, Au Cheval elevates traditional diner fare. Guests can indulge in dishes ranging from chopped chicken liver and roasted bone marrow, to traditional sandwiches, egg-focused entrees, and griddled cheeseburgers. The bar program showcases strong, classic cocktails including the Negroni, Vieux Bonal, and Hemingway Punch. A robust draught beer list offers a wide range of neighborhood, domestic, and international selections. The dimly lit restaurant, pulsating with an eclectic and resonant soundtrack, features leather booths, reclaimed wood paneling and a zinc bar that wraps around the open kitchen.
If my high school French still serves me well, Au Cheval means “by horse” …. a particular species of mammal that very rarely graces Cortlandt Alley, these days. While I am wary of Cortlandt Alley becoming further gentrified, it’s a bit late to lament the damage of that particular tsunami in 2019. I do, at least, appreciate Au Cheval’s relative discretion. Yeah, they’ve brought a bit of polish to the pathway, but we’ll see where it goes. I’d be curious to hear what constitutes their “eclectic and resonant soundtrack.” I want to believe they’d play geographically-appropriate stuff like DNA, The Lounge Lizards, Teenage Jesus, The Cramps and the like, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Still, I might try to check it out. Watch this space.
Here's a bit of DNA playing just down the way from Au Cheval's front door. Today, this space is someone's doubtlessly well-appointed, private and expensive apartment.
Yet another post that reinforces the notion that despite my best intentions, Flaming Pablum is little more than a loose aggregation of NYC nostalgia-porn and a rogues gallery of musician obituaries.
I was genuinely shocked and saddened to read, this morning, that Keith Flint of The Prodigy had taken his own life at the age of 49, especially so shortly after news of the respective deaths of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis and World Domination Enterprises’ Steve Jameson.
While rave culture was never really my particular thing, I’d always loved electronic music in its myriad forms, be it the crude, assaultive battery of Suicide, the magisterial precision of Kraftwerk or the elegiac minimalism of Wendy Carlos. By the dawn of the 90’s, however, I cannot say I was as invested in electronic club music (house, techno, rave, etc.). I was -- and remain -- simply more of a rock guy. It was for this reason that I warmed to the rise of Big Beat, a subgenre of electronic music that cribbed elements of rock song structure and swagger. One of said subgenre’s biggest proponents was The Prodigy.
I’d heard of the outfit –- not really a “band” per se, at the time -– from my days working at SPIN, but it wasn’t until 1993’s Music for the Jilted Generation that I started to take an interest, largely based on the profanity-laced number “Their Law,” featuring members of bedraggled Grebo beatboxers Pop Will Eat Itself. I mean, what’s there not to love about a pounding beat punctuated by periodic bursts of ”FUCK’EM, AND THEIR LAW!”?
But it was the next album, The Fat of the Land, presaged by the two crucial shots across the bow that were “Firestarter” and “Breathe,” that really solidified The Prodigy as a bona fide band, or at least a close approximation thereof.
While ostensibly a bristling document of electronic dance music, The Fat of the Land is also just a great, big dumb rock record in the same vein as, say, Electric by The Cult, Destroyer by Kiss or Kings of The Wild Frontier by Adam & the Ants. While most of my favorite records make an assertive statement of one form or another, there remains something to be said about music that just sounds cool and fun. That’s what big dumb rock records are for. Not everything has to be a po-faced manifesto. Silly, hollow and/or objectionable lyrics notwithstanding, The Fat of The Land revels in its own giddy vacuity. It pumps, pounds and prods, but it ultimately has nothing to say … and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Dance to it. Bang your head to it. Leap around to it. But don’t bother overanalyzing it. Beyond its infectiously pugnacious pulse, there is no there there.
It was his turn on this album -- particularly on those two afore-cited singles, but also the similarly ridiculous “Serial Thrilla” and “Fuel My Fire” -– that vaulted Keith Flint’s status to vocalist. Today’s headlines frame him somewhat astonishingly as the band’s “frontman,” when in truth he’d originally been relegated to “dancer” and/or mascot, not unlike Bez in the Happy Mondays, only on a different variety of stimulants. Keith’s performance in the video for “Firestarter” effectively changed all that, cementing him in the firmament, in the grand tradition of Sir John of Rotten, as the next great threat to the impressionable youth of England.
I knew “Firestarter” and “Breathe” were completely silly records the first time I heard them, but -– as mentioned above -– that didn’t stop me from falling completely in love with both of them. As I mentioned in an early post, both songs were put into maddeningly regular rotation on my sound system when I moved into my apartment on East 9th Street. When the full album landed in 1997, I of course snapped it right up, thrilling to the carefully cultivated imagery (ooh, look – he’s wearing a Varukers t-shirt!) and the pavement-cracking, beat-heavy production (for my money, the best track on the album, in the beat capacity, is “Diesel Power”). Certain tracks -– notably “Smack My Bitch Up” -– haven’t aged quite so well, for exceptionally obvious reasons, not that there were especially a-okay at the time, either.
As I mentioned of Facebook this morning, I vividly remember putting “Firestarter” on the jukebox at the late, lamented Stoned Crow on Washington Place about five or six times in a row. This prompted a fellow patron to get exceptionally cross with me and threaten to take my life. In retrospect, given my actions, this was actually a reasonable response to six or seven airings of the song. What can I say? Beer might have been involved.
The following June, the Prodigy came to the Hammerstein Ballroom here in NYC, and I happily attended. Much like the album it was still promoting, the live Prodigy production was an endearingly ridiculous circus of smoke, volume and overall ludicrousness. You can read Ann Powers’ very serious review of it here.
At this stage, I was going to post something about how strange I thought it was that the words “legendary” and “iconic” kept popping up in headlines regards to Keith, and how, while I very much count myself a fan of this particular era of The Prodigy, I don’t necessarily agree that these words are necessarily appropriate. Then, I thought better of it.
While “iconic” is inarguably overused these days, who am I to diminish the impact Keith Flint and The Prodigy had on their fans? Am I disappointed that said terms weren’t brandished as zealously with regard to the passing of Mark Hollis? Absolutely, but this isn’t a competition. It’s frankly tragic, regardless.
Rest in peace, Keith Flint. By all accounts, regardless of your bug-eyed stage persona, you were roundly regarded as a kind and decent human being in an industry not especially renowned for same. One only wishes that was enough to quell your inner conflicts and convince you to stick around.
Once again, I get all my news from EV Grieve.
I read with some surprise that evidently the Hell’s Angels are leaving their long-held perch on East 3rd Street. When the Hell’s Angels are vacating the East Village, that’s got to be a sign of impending apocalypse, no?
My interactions with the `Angels were very, very few. I did, once, happen upon their fabled Halloween street party several years back. That was fun, if memory serves. I remember frequently going the bar at the eastern end of their street, The Edge. I don’t remember much about the place beyond needing to examine any change the bartenders gave me, as they were supposedly notorious for brazenly skimming. They shut up shop in 2016, or so. Don’t know what’s there now.
I enjoyed the lore of the Hell’s Angels’ tenure on that street – how nothing happened without their knowledge and/or say-so. That seemed like a throwback to a bygone age. But I never had any altercations or bad occurrences or run-ins or anything with the fellas, …. not that I ever went out of my way to instigate any. Obviously, you were well served to leave them to their business (whatever that might have been).
That all said, there’s definitely one aspect of their alleged plan to depart the neighborhood that makes me sad --- their front door. That's it up top from the 90's. In more recent years, they had the painting touched up, making the skull-faced demon guy slightly more buff. See below.
Since I don’t know when, I’ve taken photo after photo after photo of their endearingly over-the-top entrance, usually appended with a comrade or two posing incongruously in front of same. In more recent years, it’s been a favorite spot for the kids. See below...
Like so many other things I took for granted, I will miss it when it’s gone.
Eleven years ago, my friend Sean penned an audacious op-ed for the New York Times — he was able to do those things — in advance of the opening of the much-feted High Line. In his article, he took the planners to task for their comparatively banal designs to transform the long-derelict strip of elevated railway into a public park. Sean had more lofty ideas, although few of them seemed especially likely — let alone practical — but such was Sean’s perspective on the world. Personally speaking, my biggest grievance with the High Line was that I’d never been bold enough to venture onto in during its less accessible iteration as a forbidding artifact of urban abandonment, tangled with wild overgrowth and street art. I’d had friends who’d done it, but I’d always wimped out.
Regardless, the High Line opened amid much fanfare and congratulatory backslapping in 2009. Touted as some kind of blow against the empire, the opening of the public park was seemingly perceived as a bold defense of art, beauty and history — a lovingly cultivated green space born of the obsolescence of a vanished industrial age. Enabling its visitors to reclaim the vestiges of an outdated era, one of the primary purposes of the ambitious re-imagined space — or so I was led to believe — was to provide new vantage points with which to view the surrounding city. Much Like Robin Williams’ rapturous lecture on the value of different perspective in “Dead Poets Society,” the core of the High Line’s original mission was to allow its visitors to experience the surrounding environs in a whole new way.
My children were still relatively tiny tots when the High Line opened, so — as detailed in this ancient post — I dutifully took them to the High Line for a look around. Indeed, it was a fun new spot for them to explore.
It’s funny how fast things change.
Ten years later, the High Line is essentially a complete atrocity. As Justin Davidson rightly pointed out in a recent article for New York Magazine, all the initial attractions of the High Line — that rarified new perspective on the surrounding sprawl, that placid green space of tranquility amid the hoopla, that reverent intermingling of the city’s past with the city’s present — have been basically reduced to a pack of fanciful lies.
In very short order, real estate developers seized upon the long-fallow opportunities the High Line enabled and almost set about ruining everything that was promising about the project from the get-go. Arguably ringing in a prurient new era of architectural voyeurism, buildings started sprouting up around the High Line with an accent on avaricious exhibitionism. High Line visitors were essentially invited to openly gawk into the vast windows of plush hotel rooms and sweeping, extravagantly appointed private apartments. This aesthetic was conceivably kickstarted by the Standard Hotel at the southern end that — it has been suggested — encouraged its guests to engage in panstless sexytime in full view of the park beneath, a trend that was swiftly adopted by the veritable emerald city of structures that sprang up like a gaggle of erections — sorry — in very short order. One or two buildings has since turned into a lustily impersonal gang-bang of wanton development, brazenly altering the cityscape the High Line was ostensibly supposed to complement.
To walk the High Ling now is simply to gaze at countless, prohibitively expensive living spaces that are either still in the throes of tireless construction or are finished but strikingly, noticeably vacant of any signs of life. Try to find a spot to stand there for a few minutes undisturbed (no easy feat), and you’re doubtless to hear someone exclaim something to the effect of “Who would want to live in an apartment on full display all the time?” It’s an entirely fair question, and one that sort of answers itself when you search for its willing participants.
Taking that a step back, however, “to walk the High Line” itself in any capacity has become a joyless chore. Like the wait for an overhyped ride at an amusement park, traversing the length of the High Line — in either direction — is all anticipation and zero fruition. There is no payoff. One is herded through it in a glum exodus of corpulent human cattle, waddling though vulgar monuments to the affluent. I cannot imagine why anyone — be they native Manhattanites or born-&-bred Pataskala, Ohio buckeyes — would derive any pleasure from the experience. But dutifully, they still come in hordes.
But beyond the High Line itself being ruined, the public park has played a greater role as ruiner.
The surrounding neighborhoods the High Line weaves through have all been affected, and rarely for the better. Longtime residents have been driven out by the escalating rents, and age-old businesses, landmarks, institutions and neighborhood favorites have been swiftly and mercilessly extinguished. Like a delicate eco-system grappling with the introduction of a virulent new species, large swathes of the Meatpacking District and Chelsea are wholly unrecognizable today, “re-booted” as uber exclusive enclaves.
My son and I found ourselves on the High Line on Saturday, naively thinking it was early enough to beat the crowds and that we’d be able to make our way downtown in a more direct manner. Suffice to say, we were laughably mistaken in that assumption. Much like finding oneself in the middle of Times Square, the experience was such a deeply irritating headache that I doubt I’ll ever voluntarily return.
Fuck the High Line.
As I've periodically mentioned, I am forever setting images to one side that I've come across in my travels around the information superhighway. Frequently, they end up being used in a post. In other instances, they wallow in a limbo-like state on my desktop before they're either purged without being used, or left to idle in context-free perpetuity on my frequently dormant Tumblr, Get Back to Work.
Here are a clutch of those images ... all still waiting for their moment.
I'm not sure where I found this, but this is another exterior shot of long-vanished Yorkville comic shop, Supersnipe, which I wrote about in greater detail here.
This is yet another lovely shot of the old Moondance diner and accompanying Stefano mural that used to sit at the mouth of Sixth Avenue, just north of Canal Street. I've written about both here many times, notably here.
This is -- I believe -- a rare shot of the interior of Supersnipe with the gent who used to run it.
This is, of course, the late Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys, taken from a still from the video of "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party)." I believe I'd set this to one side for the purposes of composing a post after learning that the whole video was shot in a certain photographer's apartment on Broadway, just north of Union Square. I actually know a guy who lives in that building today, and I was going to try to go check the place out, but it never came to pass, alas.
This is a shot of the former entrance to the second iteration of NYCD, a great compact disc shop on the Upper West Side I wrote about not too long ago here.
This is a shot of the late Jackie Onassis leaving a King Karol record outlet. Now, is it the same King Karol outlet on the Upper East Side (certainly her stomping grounds) that I spoke about on this post (specifically between 86th and 85th)? Honestly, I cannot say -- I don't remember that particular entrance so well. But, it could be.
This one is pretty self-explanatory.
I wrote a longer piece about Crosby Street back in 2015, but it occurred to me, this morning on my way to work, that I was steps away from the exact location of Thomas Struth's famously bleak picture of the intersection of Crosby & Spring from 1978, prompting me to try to replicate it. I think I did alright.
Click on it to enlarge.
I mean, let’s face it, January sucks, no matter how you slice it. Between it being long, dark and cold and the comedown from the ostensibly festive holiday season, one can’t help but enter into it with some semblance of dread and despair. This, of course, comes coupled for many with a sense of guilt and obligation, whether it’s because of the resolve to honor one’s New Year’s resolutions or simply to detoxify via the self-imposed exile from boozeville that is so-called “Dry January.”
In past years, I’ve endeavored to accomplish the DryJan challenge, as routinely mentioned on my year-end surveys and at great length here last year. Last time around, as I said, I was knocked off the horse early by the arrival of the colorfully named winter weather event, the Bomb Cyclone. That’s just an excuse, of course. Had it not been the Bomb Cyclone, I’m sure I would have concocted some other reason. In short order, it was beery business as usual.
This year, however, it felt less like a whim or nagging twinge of guilt and more like a necessity. December had proven to be a robust month of imbibing, what with a preponderance of holiday events to attend. After weeks of office Christmas parties, a wedding and a few other booze-laden social engagements, we repaired to my brother-in-law’s place out in Pennsylvania for Boxing Day. I was pretty much handed an open beer when I stepped out the car at 2:00 pm, and that kept going until well into the evening. By New Year’s Eve, I was beyond determined to undertake a Dry January. Hell, I was positively looking forward to it.
I wasn’t getting sloppy-shitty, blacking out, slurring my words, starting fights with strangers or anything, but the burly intake of beer was becoming routine, and my tolerance was ascending sharply. Between the probable weight-gain, the conceivable strain on my liver (although my friend Keith keeps reminding me: THAT’S WHAT YOUR LIVER IS FOR, DAMMIT!) and, frankly, the expenditure -– I felt it was high time to flex my long-dormant will power, dry my system out and save some money… the latter reason reinforced by the arrival of some beefy post-Christmas Amex bills.
For no readily apparent reason, however I decided to augment the swearing-off of beer with two other stipulations. I would go without my iPod (yep, I still use an iPod … and you can go fuck yourself if you find that funny), as I’d been noticing a shrill uptick in the tinnitus that has been screaming in my right ear since 1999. Being that it’s been suggested that alcohol-consumption heightens the ring (along with salt, sugar and pretty much anything else that makes life worth living … like, say, oxygen and sex), I figured I should give my ears a break as well as my liver. A steadily stentorian diet of IDLES, Daughters and, strangely, The Upper Crust for much of December certainly weren’t doing them favors.
The third prong of my resolution was fairly simple: Take the stairs. Not at the office, mind you, but at home. It’s not a big deal, but I figured walking up and down the five flights would be a good habit to get into. To be honest, my building is fairly squat, and you’re on the second floor before it even hits you and while you’ve digested that information, you’re practically on the fourth floor. But hey, … couldn’t hurt, right? Regular readers might remember my running campaign from a few years back. Recurring knee problems forced me to abandon that, but I figure walking up and down stairs is something I should be able to regularly tackle.
Anyway, that was going to be my January – thirty-one days marked by sobriety, silence and strength.
Honestly, the toughest of the three directives to honor has been the stairs. It’s not that I’m lazy or that I find ascending those five flights too challenging, but rather that I just forget. I walk into my lobby, and muscle memory almost takes over. I check my mail and boom, next thing I know I’ve pushed the button and gotten on the elevator. There have been times when I have actually gone back downstairs and repaired to the stairwell to complete my mission, but I’m just finding it hard to remember to do it.
Swearing off my iPod has been less complicated, although I threw that particular towel in today. In the ten days without wearing earbuds, I’ve noticed the ring minimally rise and fall in its ceaseless pitch, but not necessarily as the direct result of anything I’ve been doing – as far as I can tell, at least. This morning, I was just bored, so I slipped them back in and scored the latter half of my commute with some vintage New Order at a reasonable volume. No one is hurt by this.
In terms of the beer? Last night, after a bone-chilling walk home from the bottom of TrBeCa to the heart of the Village, I reconsidered my decisions. Yeah, I was able to turn it off for ten days, and can completely keep going, but why am I punishing myself? It’s not like someone’s going to hand me a fucking medal at the end of the month. I’m sick of drinking seltzer and tea in the evenings. I sprang for a six of Sapporo and indulged.
And with that, yes, I’ve technically failed Dry January again. I may go back to it this evening, but it almost doesn’t “count” now, not that anyone’s keeping score.
Weigh in, readers …. How are you fairing with your resolutions?
No reason, other than boredom. I was actually at this show in 1988. It was delightful. Rest in peace, Stiv.
It should come as very little surprise to anyone that knows me, but I “run” and/or “manage” Facebook’s seemingly only Cop Shoot Cop page. Actually, to be fair, that’s not true — there’s also a group page called We Demand a Cop Shoot Cop Reunion, but it’s dormant on the best of days. If you’re looking for all things Cop Shoot Cop on Facebook, I am evidently your authority. At the very least, I’ve manage to amass arguably the greatest collection of C$C and C$C-related visual ephemera to be found on the `net. See that here, should you care. So, yeah, yay me.
Why don’t any of the original Cop Shoot Copy guys get involved? Dunno. I assume they either just don’t care, have way better things to do and/or are just fine with me handling it. I was drafted, let’s remember, at one point, with the task of putting together that star-crossed and ill-fated Cop Shoot Cop coffee-table book that regrettably never came to pass. One could argue that said aborted assignment gives me the right. Or not. Whatever. Regardless, I've kept it going for at least five years now, and I’m always heartened that people still contribute to it. It doesn’t happen with roaring fervor, but every now and then, someone posts something rare — which, in the grand scheme of things, is really the only pertinent descriptor for Cop Shoot Cop and their ilk — a scene, a sound and a sensibility that is swiftly becoming anachronistic. This week, that happened.
A user named Erin posted a super-rare flyer of the band’s yesterday. This was from the early days, when commanding officer Tod [A] -- that's him at the top of this post in an image respectfully purloined from Recalcitrant Monthly -- was toiling, by day, at a copy shop on West Broadway, a tenuous state of disgruntled employment that, at the very least, gave him access to vast amounts of paper and copying equipment with which to illicitly print up the band’s signature brand of provocative propaganda. For one particular gig at The Pyramid on Avenue A, Tod paired his own typically eye-catching graphic skills with an appropriated image from the illustrious oeuvre of one Tom of Finland. For those unfamiliar (although there was recently a bona fide biopic on the man), Tom of Finland was an artist from — WAIT FOR IT — Finland renowned for his beatific depictions of homosexual erotica, usually concerning workaday scenarios involving impossibly burly sailors, firemen, cops, etc. Imagine the artwork of children’s illustrator Richard Scarry, only instead of anthropomorphic cats, dogs and piglets, it was blissful, hulking men with titanic erections.
To wit, Tod came up with this poster below …. a bit of promotional material that doubtlessly furthered the notoriety of the band, probably to the pronounced chagrin of the local constabulary. People of delicate constitutions and easily-offended sensibilities should avert their eyes...
I’d actually seen this poster before, hanging on the wall of the original incarnation of Max Fish on Ludlow Street during a late-80’s/early-90’s flyer retrospective. I wish I’d brought my camera to that one.
Also this week, I happened to spy a flyer on the official Instagram page of the mighty Lunachicks for a series of gigs also at the Pyramid. Mind you, as discussed here before, the Pyramid on Avenue A used to be this amazing, ground-breaking, scene-sharing venue that hosted all stripes of subculture — from punks, hardcore kids, metal heads and noise-rock freaks through drag-queens, club kids and disco-zealots, all more-or-less happily co-mingling in this grotty little bar. I haven’t been back in decades, but if the video in this post is to be believed, that iteration has since been replaced by just another douchey disco.
Anyway, boo hoo. The thing that, of course, struck me about this flyer was the line-up. On the otherwise sleepy night of Thursday, April 26, 1990, Cop Shoot Cop shared a bill with the similarly inclined local band Rat At Rat R (who I discussed here) and a hip and happening little beat-combo from Seattle called …. Nirvana.
While that Nirvana show has since become the stuff of legend (for some), sadly, there is precious little documentation of the Cop gig, although — to be fair — it was only one of many nights they played this particular venue over the years. Two short years later, Nirvana and Cop Shoot Cop would both play the fabled Reading Festival in England, although Nirvana were headliners and Cop Shoot Cop were relegated to something called The Session Tent (flanked by their compatriots in the Lunachicks, among others). Cop Shoot Cop did eventually make it to the big stage at Reading Festival in 1994, although still at the bottom of the bill, under friends like Helmet and the Jesus Lizard, with …. er … the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlining.
Does any of this matter now? Maybe only to a few. But for those it does matter to, I’m happy to share.
Meanwhile, as discussed in great detail here, I’m still searching for the rest of THIS poster….
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