Flaming Pablum

What Was on West Eighth

Over the course of this silly blog’s almost …. Jesus … 14-year existence, I’ve posted multiple entries about doings over on West 8th Street, specifically the strip between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Time was when this little patch of Greenwich Village covered a vast array of my needs and interests. From amazing record stores like It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll and the original Venus Records to mediocre ones like Revolution Records and Record Factory, there was no shortage of places to procure music. You also had Butterfly’s, should you ever be in search of just-the-right Iron Maiden or Black Flag t-shirt. Across the way was Postermat, which featured a dizzying array of crap --- poster, buttons, badges, décor – aimed squarely at teenage music jerks. There was also the suitably surreal art gallery, Psychedelic Solution and Flip, for all of your New Wavey fashion needs, the 8th Street Playhouse – which was the first place I ever saw “Repo Man” -- and the seemingly ageless Gray’s Papaya, once touted as Lou Reed’s favorite restaurant in New York City, at the end of the block. You also had the amazing video store TLA, and a massive B. Dalton Books (later Barnes & Noble) on the corner, across from Gray’s Papaya. There were also numerous places to buy shoes of every possible description.

In later years, when fortunes started to change for this once-busy byway, there were still places like Disc-O-Rama and Sleep of Reason Comics, but somewhat gradually, West 8th Street had less and less to offer me.

All of the concerns listed above, of course, are long, long gone here in 2019.

More recently, my kids became very fond of The Burger Joint (which left us about two years back), while I enjoy both the odd visit to endeavors like the 8th Street Wine Cellar, Arts & Crafts Beer Parlor and nouvelle-Italian eatery, Aunt Jake’s. My wife quite enjoys cocktails at the Marlton Hotel, every now and then, but I wouldn’t call that a particular favorite of mine.

In any case, blah blah blah… Who cares what I like, right? Fine. Regardless, as happened on University Place, and as is happening on the other side of town at St. Marks Place, West Eight Street is about to be blighted with its own enormous new luxury tower, slated to be plonked right down on the southeast corner of Eighth & MacDougal, finally putting to rest speculation of why that particular row of storefronts has been vacant for so long.

Whatever your memories of West Eighth Street are, get ready for this formerly signature byway of olde Greenwich Village to (further) decimated. Incidentally, the lovingly rendered painting of the intersection of MacDougal and West Eighth above comes courtesy of the great Ephemeral New York blog, and was painted by Alfred S. Mira in 1942. Below, meanwhile, as covered here a few times before, is Lowell Bodger's walk down West Eighth Street from the early 1970s.

No Idling

At periodic points throughout the year, work at my place of employment ramps up to a hectic degree. I’m reasonably sure it’s the same where you work. There are some seasons that just don’t seem to let up. We are in the throes of one of those seasons right now.

As laboriously bemoaned in some earlier posts, I’ve got multiple projects on the burner that should come to fruition within the next couple of weeks. But, until they do, it’s a delicate dance of beat-the-clock and keep-everybody-happy, the latter being an exceptionally difficult task.

On the home front, things are busy as well. The Blowout is coming along well (new update soon … like anyone cares), and we’re hoping to sink our fangs into other long neglected projects, leftover funds permitting.

In the midst of all this, however, both my favorite-ever band and my new favorite band -- Killing Joke and IDLES -– are both slated to perform shows here in NYC in the next couple weeks (IDLES play this FRIDAY!), and I have tickets for each. I’m hoping I’ll be in the right headspace to enjoy these gigs, as I seem to be worried all the time, of late.

In any case, while it’s up, enjoy this blistering new track by IDLES. They rock.

Too Fast To Live, Too Young to Die, Too Old to Let Go

“Daddy, everybody there looked just like you. It was just old guys in blazers for miles.” So sayeth my 15-year-old daughter, yesterday, upon sending me the picture at right of Flea’s bass guitar, as housed in the Metropolitan Museum’s latest rock’n’roll-themed exhibit, “Play It Loud.” While I was pointedly underwhelmed by the Met’s last venture toward anything rock-related -– as you might remember from this ancient post -– I am indeed curious to go check out “Play It Loud,” as it’s more about actual instrumentation than fashion.

But of the myriad rock/punk-related exhibits going on right now -– you might remember my recent, pedantic takedown of the Museum of Sex’s somewhat one-dimensional “Punk Provocation” show -– I was quite enthralled by the Museum of Art & Design’s “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die” retrospective of so-called “punk graphics” (as first mentioned here yesterday). I qualify that with “so-called” as many bits of the ephemera on display had precious little do to with bona fide punk by any definition. I mean, I’m sorry, but while lead singer Holly Johnson may have been a veteran of fabled Liverpool punk club, Eric’s, Frankie Goes to Hollywood were not a punk band, nor were trailblazing all-female British band Girlschool, who were heavy metal to the bone. That said, I get it --- had punk not happened, neither of those two outfits would have existed, or certainly not as we would come to know them.

Insufferably arrogant, music-knowitall quibbles like that aside, the two-floored exhibit checked way more of the right boxes than wrong ones, showcasing a host of period-specific artwork from across the pertinent spectrum of bands/scenes/labels, etc. I audibly gasped several times at some of the posters displayed -– both out of genuine awe and affinity, but also out of recognition.

To be sure, it’s a very strange sensation to see things that formerly hung on your own walls now displayed in an official museum as rarified artifacts to be studied with reverence. Now sequestered at my friend Rob D’s place out in New London, for many years I had a lovingly framed poster from Road to Ruin by the Ramones on my wall, also framed at the M.A.D. show in a display case sturdy enough to hold The Shroud of Turin.

During the course of my prolonged meandering around the galleries, I was strenuously tempted to fact-check a curator who was leading a gaggle of patrons, but thought better of it. As much as she was getting some of the minutia wrong, no one likes that guy.

Anyway, if you’re as enamored of this stuff as I am, you’d do well to check it out. Below are some more of my favorite pieces from it.

Of Punk, Product & Pricelessness

Hey again, all. It’s been a crazy April -- what with multiple projects percolating at work and the home renovation all happening, and life is poised to stay well and truly frantic until mid-May, it seems. We’ve finished the kids’ room, by and large, but the renovation has had ramifications on the rest of the apartment, so we’re re-imagining our living room in a somewhat painfully piecemeal way. On the office front, I’m preparing for two massive annual events and orchestrating a complicated tribute video to a prominent music executive, so that all has me all fucking stressed out. But, I have faith we’ll get through it all.

In any case, while I’m planning a larger piece on the Museum of Art & Design’s exhibit about Punk Graphics, I thought I’d quickly post this silly update to an older post involving one tiny bit of same.

Back in 2014, some regular readers might remember an entry I posted about Product, arguably one of the first CD boxsets put out by a punk band, that being the almighty Buzzcocks. In that post, I recounted how, as recently sprung post-collegiates , my friend Rob and I desperately coveted Product, but neither of could afford it, at the time, which leant the artifact a rarefied air of incalculable value. It also became a standard of measurement for us. We’re regularly tally the cost of debilitating financial demands and/or comparably unattainable items in terms of how many copies of Product they would equal. It was a genuinely silly idea, but a tenacious one.

This past Saturday, I was briefly let off my leash to go check out the afore-cited “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,” the retrospective of graphics from the Punk era, and, upon entering, what should I behold but --- WAIT FOR IT – you guessed it, a pristine and lovingly preserved copy of Product (the cassette version), presented under thick museum glass as if prized from an Egyptian tomb, lending complete and utter credence to Rob & I’s long-held reverence for the collection.

Sadly, in keeping with the Museum of Sex’s ham-fisted mishandling of key facts about the Plasmatics and Cherry Vanilla, the Museum of Art & Design somewhat unbelievably mislabeled this item as the Buzzcocks’ debut LP, Another Music in a Different Kitchen, despite the collection’s actual name spelled out in big, block capital letters.

That unfortunate quibble notwithstanding, it’s indeed a great exhibit. More to come about that.

Pour one out for Pete. 

Where the Music Stays

As much as I am slavishly prone to waxing rhapsodic about the great lost record/disc shops of New York City, the place I bought my first propler LP at was actually out on the East End of Long Island.

As I discussed here, Sam’s Record Shack in Westhampton Beach was two towns over from where my family spent the summers. I cannot put an exact year on it, but probably around the summer of 1976 or so, I waddled into Sam’s Record Shack as a wide-eyed 9 year old and plunked down three or four dollars (that’s how cheap LPs were, at the time … honestly), for my own copy of Dressed to Kill by KISS. If memory serves, I had originally intended to buy a copy of KISS ALIVE, but my meager funds dictated otherwise. Regardless, I brought it home and proceeded to play the shit out of it on my crappy mono record player at every conceivable opportunity --- its many lyrically lumpen connotations and hackneyed sexual innuendos lost on my small years. I’d long appropriated certain records from my older sister, but at last, this one was ALL MINE. I still have my battered, “well loved” copy of the LP to this day.

As its name might suggest, Sam’s Record Shack was assuredly nothing fancy. A cramped, narrow little storefront with racks on each side and a cash register in the back, it was a fairly humble operation. I’d go on to procure many arguably crucial albums there, including my first copy of Magical Mystery Tour by the Beatles, a cassette of Joe’s Garage Volume 1 by Frank Zappa, Piece of Mind by Iron Maiden and Coup D’Etat by the Plasmatics. I actually had the temerity to order that last choice. The shop ordered two copies from their distributor. I paid for mine and took it home (much to the chagrin of my family and/or anyone within listening proximity), and the other copy was displayed in the shop window, where it sat -– unplayed and pointedly unpurchased -– until Sam’s Record Shack closed for good in about 1984, or so.

While I lamented the loss of Sam’s, in its place came a new record store a few streets away. The Westhampton branch of Long Island Sound (a pun on the name of a nearby tidal estuary) was a much more expansive operation than Sam’s. As I mentioned here, while it wasn’t exactly staffed by imperiously pedantic record geeks like my favorite places in the city, it did indeed meet my needs in terms of new releases. I swiftly became a regular customer, in due course, of both the Westhampton branch and its sibling over in Southampton.

In time, of course, CD’s became the go-to medium. I’m not quite sure when Long Island Sound (both branches) closed, but close they eventually did. After that, one’s best options out in “the Hamptons” to buy compact discs became limited to big box retail joints in places like Riverhead. But, clearly, the physical manifestation of music was becoming scarcer and scarcer out there.

Back in Westhampton, by the mid-to-late 90’s, the only way you could really buy a CD was if you found it on the racks of a local pharmaceutical chain -– which did not suggest anything too promising about the likelihood of finding anything very esoteric.

These days, the pharmaceutical chain store in question on Main Street in Westhampton Beach --- just a block or so to the west of the former site of Sam’s Record Shack, which until recently had been a footwear emporium called Shoe-Inn -– is now a Rite Aid. It was called something else prior to Rite Aid -– although stocked the same shit –- but Rite Aid bought that interest out at whatever point. But, by and large, it’s been a big pharmaceutical outlet since the late 90’s, or so.

You probably see where I’m going with this, but since it became the lone place one could fetch CD’s in the area way back when, I’ve been in the habit of always perusing what’s on offer, which is usually dire and dispiriting. Multiple Christmas albums sit uncomfortably next to dubious compilations of “hits” by bands like Great White and Survivor. You’ll find the sophomore effort by Gnarls Barkly (which failed to yield a single like the once-ubiquitous “Crazy”) shoved in tightly next to a late-80’s Doobie Brothers effort and an opus by largely forgotten white funkstress Tina Marie. There is no rhyme nor reason to the selections. They are haphazardly stocked on a shelf in the same aisle you’ll find equally anachronistic DVDs (cinematic epics like “Meet the Fockers,” “Scream II” and “Ice Age”), batteries and device-chargers. Woe unto thee whose lovingly crafted music ends up here.

That said, there is strangely still turnover. New discs still come in and old discs still go out.

Except …. for one.

Released four years after their most successful album, Psalm 69, Ministry’s Filth Pig, their sixth studio album from 1995, was a comparative let down from its sprawling predecessor from 1992. Where Psalm 69 almost single-handedly spot-welded industrial caterwaul to metallic thrash in a manner that united acolytes from both of those formerly disparate clans and even fleetingly worried the pop charts, Filth Pig found the band retaining the intensity but sacrificing much of the melodicism that made the combination palatable. Not even a dour cover of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” could really save it. In many respects, while still part of the overarching Ministry saga, Filth Pig marked the point where the band stopped stylistically progressing.

Anyway, if my math is right, there has been a lone copy of Filth Pig on that shelf at the Westhampton Beach Rite Aid since about 1998. Years have come and gone. Seasons have passed. Couples have met, courted, wed, procreated and reared children while Ministry’s largely maligned 1995 effort has sat silently in that aisle, waiting for a particularly forgiving variant of heavy, pugnacious rock fan to stumble upon it. Ministry themselves have gone onto release 11 -- read that number again: ELEVEN -- more studio albums since Filth Pig, yet that copy of it continues to stay on that shelf, waiting for a buyer, not unlike that second copy of Coup D’Etat by the Plasmatics at Sam’s Record Shop decades earlier.

Why haven’t I bought it, you ask? While, yes, I am indeed a fan of Ministry, I was sent my own copy of Filth Pig by Warner Bros. Records upon its initial release, having been a bona fide “music journalist” at the time. I still own it. I don’t play it exceptionally often, but I do have it. And, at the risk of belaboring the obvious, unlike certain iconic albums, it’s just not a record one feels compelled to own multiple copies of.

That said, my heart still aches when I routinely spy it sitting there – unloved – in its Rite Aid limbo. In more recent years, I’ve taken to documenting its timeless sentence, vainly hoping that one day, I’ll find it gone – sold to some skateboarding twerp whose curiosity was piqued by the needlessly bloody artwork. But then I realize, skateboarding twerps don’t really buy CD’s anymore, so it’s probably contingent on another cranky middle-aged rock dork like myself finding it.

Until such time, the sad vigil continues.

This past Easter weekend:

 

The Blowout: Renovation Complete

For those of you following along with this epic saga,...

Renovation has concluded on the kids' room blowout, successfully widening their chamber by a few, crucial feet. Things have been plastered and painted and now look more or less finished. This is not to say, however, that we're all done.

Our next task involves dismantling the bunkbed (still in use, as seen above), settling on new furniture (the wife is pushing for two elevated loft beds, while I'm pushing for one elevated loft bed and one "captain's bed," with drawers underneath) and divining the most advantageous configuration thereof.

After that, out will go the remnants of my desk (also still there) and the re-imagining of the living room space will commence, ideally accommodating our stuff in a practical and intuitive fashion within the newly-diminished space.

Should you care about such things, please stay tuned. 

 

The Blowout Continues

After another day of demolition and construction that I was mercifully not privy to (I am up and out of the house before they arrive), we now have more of a tangible semblance of a new wall than we did on Wednesday. It still seems fairly surreal, but we are getting closer to a more clearly defined new space, and can start thinking about how everything’s going to fit.

That said, having largely removed and re-located everything from that side of the apartment, our home now looks like something that would make Marie Kondo angrily incontinent. They are stacks and mounds and piles of stuff just EVERYWHERE. There’s a stack of books messily assembled in this corner. There’s a pile of important papers hastily stowed in that corner. The rugs are all half-rolled up, askew and trampled upon. There’s a formless aggregation of kids’ clothes strewn in the front room. There’s a herd of half-empty boxes arranged like Stonehenge in the master bedroom. The closets have become makeshift storage facilities, with contents tenuously sardined into too-small compartments. The whole apartment feels like an overstuffed burrito of needless crap. I find myself swearily vowing to completely blitz the place of any non-joy-sparking deadwood once we’ve finished with the renovation.

Before that can happen, we still have to paint, disassemble the kids’ trusty bunkbed and divine the new configuration of their sleeping arrangements.

Again, watch this re-formulating space.

The Blowout Begins

As weepily foretold in this post, we are currently hurtling into the gaping maw of largely planless uncertainty as we undertake the renovation of our kids' room, expanding it approximately three feet to the east. Again, three feet might seem like small potatoes, but in an apartment as diminutive as ours, it should make a big difference.

On Wednesday, they removed the wall that formerly stood between Charlotte & Oliver's bedroom and my desk (see earlier photo) and erected the framework for the new wall. Amazingly, they did so with what seems like precision and very little dust. In that respect, so far so good.

In terms of how things are going to look upon fruition, meanwhile, that's still all up in the air. While the skeleton of the new room is in place, if you will, it's still very hard to envision how it's all going to work. 

Moreover, the matter of where my desk and other sundry items will go in the new iteration remains ... unsolved.

You'll notice the bottle of beer in the right hand corner. That's how I'm getting through this.

Watch this space.  

The Blowout

Don't get me wrong -- we are VERY lucky to live in a co-op, but we have a space problem and cannot afford to move.

When my wife and I moved in to our current apartment –- a “junior four” -- towards the end of 2002, we had no children. In relatively short order, that all changed. We had a baby girl named Charlotte in 2004, and then, two years later, a little boy named Oliver. They have shared the same little room -– one ostensibly designed to be either a dining area or a study -– for their entire lives. They have never known any other arrangement. Mercifully, Charlotte & Oliver have always gotten along and have never perceived their sleeping accommodations as problematic. As their parents, however, we have always known it was a dilemma waiting to happen.

As much as we’ve repeatedly entertained the concept of moving to another, more spacious apartment, the fates have aligned against us. Hamstrung by various prohibitive circumstances, we have been emphatically persuaded to stay put. As such, the configuration of the kids’ bedroom has gradually evolved from a single crib way back when to a crib and a daybed and then onto a space-saving bunkbed -– the iteration that has continued to this day. By and large, the bunkbed has really worked -– and even created the illusion of privacy. Charlotte has the top bunk, and can happily read without bothering her slumbering little brother on the bottom bunk. In a room as tiny as theirs, it has been as close to a solution as seemingly plausible.

But with both kids now officially into their early teens, the cozy little space that has been their room for the span of their respective lives is no longer cutting it. They each need their own areas, so to speak, with more semblance of privacy -– if at all possible -– than they are currently allotted. They need more room for desks of their own, freeing them from vying for either the dining room table or the breakfast table in the kitchen to do their homework.

The wife and I have struggled with this pressing necessity for some time, vainly trying to think of ways to divide their chamber into some intangibly more accommodating arrangement. Recently, after much hemming and hawing on my part, we have decided to do a wee bit of renovation. Much to my pronounced chagrin, we are shortly to undertake the task of moving one of their walls about three and a half feet to the east, effectively blowing their room out a bit, as it were.

This may not sound like much, but giving their room that extra little bit of width should enable numerous configurations of beds, desks and bureaus that might be more conducive to their needs. Along the way, we’re also going to jettison a lot of their less-cherished toys, get rid of some largely defeated Ikea chests, dismantle the bunkbed, re-paint, and get some new furniture to outfit the re-invented space. That all sounds promising, right?

Well, it comes with a price -– or prices, I should say. Beyond the actual, financial costs of this renovation, there is the deficit of space in the living room that is shortly to become part of the kids’ expanded room. As it happens, that particular bit of real estate is where I keep my desk, my computer and this large, metal dentist’s cabinet I bought from a long-since-vanished antique shop on Lafayette Street back in the 90’s. So, as the kids’ room prepares to jut out to the east, that metal case and my desk will summarily go … where exactly?

The jury’s still out on that one, unfortunately. To say that I am reluctant and not-just-a-little depressed about this impending development is a Herculean understatement, but -– as the British say -– needs must.

This is all poised to transpire in the next couple of weeks. As such, since we are going to have to dismantle my desktop computer and all that, there may be a delay in posting until the next iteration of my work space –- if one can be credibly divined -– reveals itself.

All suggestions are welcome, by the way.

Status Report

Everything sucks, the news is all bad and the world is going to Hell.

Celebrate the things that bring you joy, and let the ones you love know how much they mean to you.

I know we all like different things and have disparate tastes, but I'm pretty much of the opinion that if you can't appreciate the fucking brilliance of The Beat, you're pretty much an idiot. 

Rest in peace, Ranking Roger.