Flaming Pablum

Boosted

Hey all. Sorry for the slowdown, but it's been a busy few days. Also just got my booster shot on Friday. Saturday was summarily foggy and with a sorer arm than before, but today I'm as right as rain.

Go get yours.

More here soon. 

That's My Boy

My son made this. Why Godzilla is playing an accordion I'll never know, but it made my day on a level that simply cannot be quantified. 

Back to NYC `94 with "NY SCENE"

For whatever stupid reason, 1994 still doesn’t seem *THAT* long ago, to me. I still regularly listen to some fairly crucial albums that were released that year – Portishead’s Dummy, Jeff Buckley’s Grace, Nick Cave’s Let Love In, Massive Attack’s Protection, Release by Cop Shoot Cop, Pandemonium by Killing Joke, Orange by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and many, many others. It was a great, great year for music. I was still technically living on the Upper East Side, at the time, but spending most of my time downtown. I would have just been starting my gig at the TIME Magazine News Desk and freelance writing for various music periodicals.

But, obviously, once I take off my rose-tinted shades, I realize that 1994 was freakin’ 27 years ago. Pre-O.J. trial. Pre-Oklahoma City bombing. Pre-Princess Di death. Pre-9/11. Pre-Afghanistan. Pre-Iraq War. Pre-Indian Ocean tsunami. Etc. Etc. Etc. On a personal level, it was before I met the woman who’d become my wife, before our wedding, before we moved to our current apartment and, very obviously, before we had kids. It was verily several lifetimes ago.

Never is this more apparent than in the video below. Shot in 1994, “NY SCENE” was an “alternative” New York City tourism documentary. Here’s the official description:

NY SCENE is an alternative New York City travel documentary from 1994. As the tape says, "How to do New York... without looking like a tourist." Ripped from a VHS tape that I found while rummaging through The Thing thrift store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Featuring many defunct and some still-functioning New York City establishments, local alternative music from the time and a superfluous use of the word "funky," NY SCENE is an incredible snapshot of NYC culture in 1994.

From the back of the VHS tape: NY SCENE is the ultimate insider's guide to New York City. This 52-minute travel documentary is a sonic blast of New York sights and sounds. Price down peddlers at the 25th St. flea market, feast at an Indian row restaurant, breeze past the ropes of Manhattan's hottest clubs. It's much more than the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. NY SCENE will show you where to find the New Yorker's New York. A few more NY SCENEs: Day Activities: Street art, funky museums and Central Park like you've never seen it. Cheap Eats & Dining Out: Bagels, falafels, coffee shops, Indian, Mexican, Sushi... and more! Night Out: From performance poetry to Showtime at the Apollo... and everything in between. Tips Around Town: How to get around and get by- without getting taken.

Travel expert Julie Karlin walks you from St. Marks to Soho and real-life cabbie Clinton Herrington gives you the tips for a change. Fueled by a soundtrack from some of NYC's hottest bands, NY SCENE is for those who want to be part of the scene... even before they get there.

So, yeah.

For all its bluster, the recommendations herein are nothing too especially radical, but it’s fun to see several since-vanished concerns again, like Howdy-Do, the Sixth Avenue flea markets, the Yaffa Café, Magical Childe, the Ludlow Street Cafe and the old Japonica and invocations of since-closed ventures like Wetlands, Downtown Beirut, Club USA and even my old neighbors at the 24-hour pool hall, Le Q (which is now a sedate antiques emporium). It's a very different city. 

Enjoy the trip back in time…

21 Questions from Curbed

I have a long history of waffling on New York Magazine, especially more recently, when their online presence -– and especially their pop-culture site, Vulture -- zig-zags wildly from great, in-depth interviews with various movers and shakers to vacuous, rinky-dink pop piffle written by sniveling youngsters who, in the grand scheme of things, really don’t know shit from shinola. Results may vary, but that’s how I feel about it.

In any case, I noticed that their Curbed section (which New York subsumed in 2020) just revived its "21 Questions" column, their most recent edition featuring architect Billie Tsien. I thought the questions themselves were compelling, so despite not being a “creative New Yorker” on par with Ms. Tsien, I thought I’d take a stab at them myself. Here’s how that goes….

Name: Alex

Age: 54

Neighborhood: Greenwich Village

Occupation: Director of Content and Editorial Services in the Corporate Communications department of a performing rights organization.

What’s hanging above your couch? A framed poster of Jamie Reid’s graphic design for “God Save the Queen” by the Sex Pistols. I bought it in the summer of 1986 off the ceiling of Second Coming Records on Sullivan Street (long, long gone). It hung on the walls of my college dorm rooms for my sophomore, junior and senior years, after which it was rolled up and put in a cardboard tube for three decades, only to be exhumed, framed and hung on our living room wall last year.

What’s the first job you had in New York? I had a gig as a runner/gopher (or as I described it on my resume, “apprentice”) for a graphic designer. Basically, it was my job to run painstakingly crafted mock-ups of ads and other promotional materials to various cosmetic agencies around midtown. I’d wait there while executives scrutinized the work (I had to bite my tongue frequently from saying “DO YOU KNOW HOW FUCKING HARD SHE WORKED ON THIS?”) and then run back to the graphic designer’s studio apartment on the Upper East Side.

What color are you always drawn to? Purple.

What work of art or artifact are you most surprised you own? We own a little figure called “The Little Wanderer” by artist Yoshimoto Nara, thus called as she has little wheels and rolls around as if sleepwalking. We bought her as a lark when our little Charlotte was born in 2004 from a long-since-vanished baby shop on Broadway called Little Wang. She has lived in our kids’ room ever since. Upon hearing that Nara’s work has become only more celebrated in recent years, I did a little research. Today, “The Little Wanderer” can fetch up to $4,500 on eBay. Who knew??

Which New Yorker would you want to hang out with? So many of my favorite New Yorkers – Jim Carroll, Anthony Bourdain, Joey Ramone, Pete Hammill, Spalding Grey, etc. – are already dead. I think Laurie Anderson would be kind of interesting to have dinner with.

What’s the last thing you made with your hands? Well, I didn’t make the pumpkin itself, but I carved one last weekend, and was pretty pleased with the results.

Is there one thing you own multiple versions of? There are certain albums like It’s Alive by The Ramones, Funhouse by The Stooges, Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk, Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction and several albums by Killing Joke and Cop Shoot Cop that I own on every available format. I also have all of the published editions of “Please Kill Me” by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain.

What New York City museum do you always go back to? This is a toughie, as I genuinely love so many of them. While I frequently cite The Museum of the City of New York as my favorite, I think the one I routinely return to the most is probably the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as it remains just a magnificent place to stroll around and get lost in.

What do you always have next to your computer? At this stage, probably an external disc drive.

Where is the best view of the city? The one from my office.

What building or object do you want to redesign every time you see it? I genuinely loathe all the so-called “supertalls” (fuck you, yimby!), but there’s something particularly noxious about 432 Park Avenue. It was probably the first one of them to go up in Manhattan, and it’s just an artless rod that blocks out the sun and ruins the symetry of the cityscape. I have nothing but ill will for everyone who owns an apartment therein. Knock it the fuck down.

What’s one thing you would change about your field? I would make the calculation and quantification of royalties for artists from streaming platforms significantly fairer.

If you could live anywhere in New York City, where would it be? I genuinely love the neighborhood we live in, so I wouldn’t change that, but a couple more bedrooms would make life significantly simpler.

What would you hoard if it stopped being produced? I don’t know if the paltry amount I’ve already collected could be construed as “hoarding,” but I have three or four 160gb iPod Classics (one still pristinely wrapped) and would not be averse to picking up another, should the right opportunity present itself.

What do you do to get out of a creative rut? Go outside and walk around.

Where was your first NYC apartment and how much was the rent? Well, when I was born, we lived on East 89th Street between Lexington and Park Avenue. I have zero clue how much the rent was.

Where in the city do you go to be alone? If I “vant to be alone” Greta-Garbo-style, I go out for long walks. There are myriad places wherein to find solace and solitude in this teeming metropolis. You just have to know where the quiet streets are.

Worst piece of career advice you’ve ever gotten? “Let them call you,” or words to that effect. Anyone that tells you that playing hard-to-get is the way to land the job you want is fucking wrong. Be assertive. Let them KNOW your level of interest.

What have you given away to someone that you wish you could get back? When I got married and my wife “officially” moved into my apartment on East 12th Street, I put a lot of my stupid shit in storage and farmed off a few items to friends. My friend Rob now has my lovingly framed poster for the Ramones’ Road to Ruin album (featuring art by the great John Holmstrom), as well as a super-rare Cop Shoot Cop/Cows gig at CBGB (albeit NOT my Holy Grail poster). I honestly don’t have the wall space for either of them, anymore, but I do miss that Ramones poster something awful.

What’s your favorite NYC restaurant and regular order? I don’t honestly know that I could single out one, solitary restaurant as my very favorite. It depends on my mood, the company, the day of the week, etc. But for the sake of this post, I’ll pick Elephant & Castle on Greenwich Ave just steps to the south of West 11th Street, and my favorite dish there – although it was worryingly absent the last time I was there was the brunch favorite of poached eggs with pureed spinach on potato pancakes. Sheer joy on a plate.

What do you want your obit headline to be? “He’d have agreed with you, if you were right.”

Welcome Back to The Pleasuredome

Last night was my 36th high school reunion. Technically, the proper milestone would have been *last* year (35th, as we all love tidy increments of five), but because of COVID, that was reduced, last year, to a chaotic zoom call. But probably because COVID is still with us (thanks to the willfully ignorant and vax-reluctant), this 36th wasn’t quite as robustly attended as it might’ve otherwise been. Still, as my son now goes to the same school (and was giving tours to crotchety alumni), I felt obligated to go. Plus, y’know … open bar. Who am I to turn my nose up at that?

In any case, given my heartily cultivated neuroses, I, of course, arrived bang on time. This is a long-standing problem. Throughout my teens and twenties, I used to arrive at parties at the specified times, only to hear the sound of hairdryers still blowing behind front doors, prompting the necessity to walk around the block three or four times before making a more well-timed, fashionably tardy entrance. Not wanting to (still) be that guy, I decided to take a leisurely stroll around the surrounding environs before making the scene, so to speak. To score said stroll, I selected an album that was period-specific to my high school years, that being Welcome To The Pleasuredome by ye olde Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

While ambling south down Fifth Avenue, beneath the magisterial edifice of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I realized I probably hadn’t listened to this record in any real capacity in decades. Richly over-the-top and somewhat ridiculously overproduced (thanks, I believe, to former Buggle/Yes knob-twiddler Trevor Horn) Welcome To The Pleasuredome is a sumptuous and suitably audacious affair, but still kinda completely rocks (that bass!) Heard through the prism of 2021, where songs like “WAP” and “Pu$$y Fairy” win prestigious industry accolades, “Relax” *still* manages to sound uproariously un-nuanced and strenuously inappropriate in its espousal of indiscriminate ejaculation. “Two Tribes” hasn’t aged quite so well, and suffers from a bit of frowny heavy-handedness, considering the libidinous reverie of the rest of the album. But it still has that bass to recommend it, unlike “The Power of Love,” which remains po-faced and ponderous. Who decided to put an earnest Christmas carol on an album otherwise preoccupied with carnal gratification? There are also the covers — The Temptations’ “War” and a cheeky swish through Springsteen’s “Born to Run” — but neither threaten the main attractions here.

For me, though, the real revelation was the title track, a sprawling, thirteen plus minute suite, veering from the wide-screen audio depiction of a verdant garden of abundance into a driving, bass-driven odyssey ripe with lush and surprising sounds and instrumentation -- washes of space-age synthesizers, periodic bursts of clangy guitars, Morricone-cribbed “HOO HAH” chants and even a chugging harmonica subtly buried in the mix. The lyrics may not be the band’s finest work (“there goes a supernova … what a pushover!”), but Frankie never claimed to be profound.

As a single piece of music, the suite of “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” is practically as expansive and cinematic as latter-era Pink Floyd, albeit the horniest and gayest Pink Floyd you could ever hope to hear. That aspect really cannot be overstated, though. I would have been a high school junior upon first hearing the whole Welcome to the Pleasuredome album and otherwise slavishly devoted to laughably hyper-masculine punk, hardcore and heavy metal records. While just shy of any brazen bluntness (Holly Johnson’s zealous pronunciation of the present-tense verb/descriptor, “ERECT” while quoting Coleridge notwithstanding), Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s debut opus was still such a proudly in-your-face celebration of myriad facets of human sexuality. As a result, it felt a thousand times more taboo and dangerous than anything Suicidal Tendencies or Iron Maiden could ever hope to offer.

Even as the pimply and introverted geek that I was, I indeed knew what this album was all about. Much like “Love My Way” by the Psychedelic Furs, it duly fired my imagination about the mysterious realms of intimate physical interaction (a realm I would still be some years away from attaining, not for any lack of trying). It didn’t matter to me that these songs were almost certainly about gay sex — they were about sex, and performed in a manner that addressed the subject in a comparatively more welcoming, healthier and more relatable way than as handled on, say, Shout at the Devil by Motley Crue or Fair Warning by Van Halen, where sexual scenarios were invariably more predatory than celebratory. These songs, like the afore-cited “Love My Way” before them, scored many a fantasy of dancefloor and boudoir escapades with various ladies from my high school who shall remain forever nameless. While those ornate dreams were ultimately never realized, they still vividly exist in three-dimensional technicolor within the grooves of Welcome to The Pleasuredome.

How is this record regarded today? As far as I know, it hasn’t been feted with any critical reappraisal. No one’s penned a 331/3 edition about it (like Annie Zaleski’s excellent recent one on Rio by Duran Duran). ls it perceived as too empty, arch, affected or topically irresponsible? Is it marred by its proudly lavish production? I don’t quite understand it

As the title track came to its preposterous signature climax with Holly Johnson’s campy cackle roaring through my headphones, I glanced at my watch. It was time. I stepped inside my former high school with the impossibly bacchanalian strains of Welcome to the Pleasuredome still ringing in my ears to re-join the ranks of my now middle-aged classmates to reconvene and reminisce.

54

I turn 54 years old, today. I have nothing really to say about it, but felt I should acknowledge it. 

 

Back Again to Club Berlin

Now, as I understand it, there really was a Club Berlin somewhere in Manhattan in the `80s, although it was invariably before the era wherein I was nocturnally out and about, roaming these New York City streets. The first time I’d ever heard about a nightclub called Berlin was, of course, via my laboriously over-cited favorite film of all time, that being “After Hours.” I’ve devoted more space on this stupid blog to the minutia of that film, so if you genuinely care, please just do a Google search.

In any case, in the film, insouciant, topless sculptress Kiki Bridges asserts that Berlin is on the corner of West Broadway and Grand Street. Today, that particular corner is a douchey restaurant called the Sola Pasta Bar, but back in the `80s, I honestly don’t remember it being anything other than a wall whereupon fabled SoHo artist Renee extolled the merits of his own work (see below as captured by photographer Leo London). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. More to the point, I’m lazily assuming for no discernible reason that we’re talking about the southwest corner of that particular intersection, and who knows if that’s even accurate?

 

In 2011, meanwhile, I found an odd, cable-access-era video hosted by the late Details editor and nightlife scenester par excellence Stephen Saban called “Dead Clubs,” wherein he rattled off a laundry list of since-shuttered establishments, and I REALLY WANT TO SAY that Berlin … or Club Berlin … was one of them. Unfortunately, that clip is no longer on YouTube. That said, if you want to see it, it’s part of the ongoing “New York, New Music 1980-1986” exhibit. Go check that out for me and see if he does indeed cite it.

In 2015, meanwhile, I interviewed my friend Fran Power, who had a memorable cameo in “After Hours” during the scene in which protagonist Paul Hackett gains brusque entry to Club Berlin and almost gets his head shaved. Here’s what Fran had to say about that.

Where was it filmed?

It was filmed in an empty space that they had made into a club in what is now Tribeca. It was a really dead neighborhood at the time …not a real club.

Wasn't there an actual Club Berlin?

Yes there was a real Berlin club…a girl from one of my bands worked there but it wasn't where we filmed at.

So, yeah, … there’s that.

In terms of the film, though, the location Martin Scorsese used for the exterior shots of Club Berlin was 296 Spring Street on the corner of Hudson Street, just up a block or so from the Emerald Pub, which Scorsese used as the location for The Terminal Bar.

Here it in the film, as spotted from looking south from Spring Street, just a few steps to the west of Hudson.

From at least the early `90s on, that space had become a deli. I took a shot of my kids in front of this same strip pictured above in 2013.

And, as resourced from the great new cinema blog NYC in Film (which I discussed here), here’s a shot of the exterior from 1984, taken from across Hudson Street, looking southwest. Note the checkerboard paintjob. Was that simply during Scorsese’s filming?

Today, my friend Chung Wong posted a great photo on Facebook from 1976 by a photographer named Bevan Davis. This is that same space that would later play host to Scorsese’s location of Club Berlin and that deli, then a bar called JJ’s West, as looked at from Hudson Street looking West.

Today, that particular space is all boarded up with a sidewalk shed. Something in in the works, but not sure what.

The space that had been Emerald Pub down the street remains dormant and derelict. Fran Powers, meanwhile, sadly left us earlier this year.

For a really great, recent breakdown of the "After Hours" locations, check out NYC in FILM. 

ADDENDUM: I did a little further searching around, and came up with some information from this site. For a start, it seems JJ's West was a topless bar (back when New York had such establishments), but prior to that, it was a storied jazz club called The Half Note Club. Says the archives site....

The Half Note Club was one of the premier places to hear jazz in the 1960s, and at least a half-dozen records were “live from the Half Note.” John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderly, Billie Holiday, and Judy Garland all performed here before it became a topless bar in 1974.  It’s now a deli.

Here it was again as JJ's West...

Notes From The Ghost Walk

So, as recently mentioned, we flew to Ohio, this past weekend, to look at Denison University, my alma mater, for my daughter Charlotte. The specifics of the visit are of a very niche and ultimately private concern, but suffice to say, it was a great trip. Charlotte seemed to be engaged by what she saw, had a couple of great interviews and came away with a better understanding of the school as a possible target destination for her impending college years. Mission accomplished.

For me, that was the ultimate goal, but I also had a side interest in experiencing the place again for the first time in 32 years.

As is strenuously evident from even a casual perusal of this weblog, I am a laboriously sentimental nostalgist of the highest order. I assign massive emotional significance to certain periods of my past that, for whatever reason, I consider to have been crucially informative. For better or worse, I have always been this way.

While I had a great experience at Denison back in the distant `80s, I wasn’t exactly indicative of the typical Denison student, at the time. I did not join a fraternity. I didn’t give a single crap about the football team. I was not an econ major. I largely abhorred the ubiquitous reverence for the Grateful Dead. But, I found my tribe, so to speak. I immersed myself in the English and Art programs. I became a disc jockey on the college radio station and staffer on the school newspaper. But I was still a somewhat sneery kid from New York City, at heart. The otherwise preternaturally beautiful ranks of the student body didn’t really know what to make of me, nor I of them. At the same time, I managed to forge several meaningful friendships that carry on to this day. I had my heart broken by various girls along the way, but those dalliances usually fell apart more because of my myopic idiocy than any cruelty or indifference on their part. I don’t know that I was always that easy to hang around with, at the time.

In any case, my four years there were still a seismic experience for me. Having not been back on the campus apart from a brief, four-day visit in 1990, I was genuinely moved by the notion of going back.

We spent Saturday morning doing an information session, walking tour and interviews, and then broke for lunch, after which I was let off my leash so to speak, to go back and wander around the campus by myself.

I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to find. I was reminded of several entries on this blog I’ve posted over the year about searching for that elusive “sense of place.” I’ve combed through the streets of New York City and stood in front of key addresses trying to feel some faint, fleeting semblance of various former concerns. Often times, I’ve come away with nothing, trying to evoke some intangible character from a chunk of real estate that bears no resemblance to some former iteration.

But back there at Denison, it was different. Sure, there was lots of new development, but a lot of the stuff was relatively unchanged. Here were the exact rooms and buildings more or less just as I’d left them. Once again, I’ve assigned so much significance to certain places in my memory, but often times the places themselves simply refuse to reciprocate. Sometimes a room just feels like a room – yeah, it’s a room you might have been in before, but not necessarily the same room you had all these indelible experiences in. It felt a bit like running into someone you used to date, but having them not recognize or remember you at all.

So, yeah, I wandered around to various spots (finding many of them locked), but ultimately felt like a bit of a ghost. The people I knew were no longer in any of them, nor was there any indication that they – or I – had ever been there.

At one instance, I snuck into my freshman year dormitory -- I realize this is invariably frowned upon, but I couldn’t resist. I climbed to the second floor and searched out my old room, amazingly finding the door open. Inside were two disgruntled juniors. I blabbed out a quick explanation of being an alumnus and asked if they would mind terribly if I just took a quick picture. They blearily looked at me, shrugged and acquiesced. I quickly stepped in and tried to replicate a shot I’d taken of the room back in the winter of 1985. I thanked them and ducked back out of the building.

The top shot below is my room in 1985. The shot beneath it is the same room from the same vantage point in 2021. Evidently, these guys aren’t big on decorating. One odd detail: If you look hard at the back of my door in the 1985 picture, you can see a THRASHER sticker (over a photograph of Agnostic Front I cut out of SPIN Magazine). Beneath it, in the 2021 shot, the kid with his back to the camera is wearing a THRASHER sweatshirt in almost the exact same spot.

I thought that was weird. Click on each to enlarge. 

Back to School: A Playlist

Surreally enough, my daughter is now a senior in high school. This means that our lives are currently ruled by the looming prospect of college. Our downtime is largely spent discussing the finer points of the application process, unspooling that tangled ball of red tape that is financial aid and visiting as many college campuses on my daughter’s list of “Likelies,” “Targets” and “Reaches” that we can get to. To say that this is an intimidating process is a herculean understatement.

This coming weekend, the four of us (we’re bringing Charlotte’s little brother Oliver along, as he’ll be in this same position before we know it) to go visit my alma mater, Denison University out in Central Ohio. We made the plan some months ago after the school reached out to my daughter about her fencing. In a strange coincidence, the weekend we planned to visit also turned out to be my reunion weekend. Being that I was already going to be there, how could I NOT go to that? It was turning out to be quite a point on my calendar to look forward to.

But, as fate would have it, much like the Devo show I was all excited about last night, my reunion ended up getting cancelled over COVID-19 concerns.

We’re still going, of course. Actually, the more I think about it, it’s probably for the best. We can now focus on my daughter’s visit and keep our eyes on the prize, so to speak. I’ll still get to wander around the campus and probably freak out.

In any case, while I don’t normally use Spotify, for the purposes of beefing up this post, I made a needlessly sprawling playlist of the music I concerned myself with during my four years at Denison as a gormless, chicken-chested college dork. Enjoy.

Jerked Back N’ Forth: Devo at Radio City Gets Nixed

The road to get to this one was long and fraught, but the outcome could have probably been predicted.

Upon first learning that DEVO were returning to Radio City Music Hall for the first time in 40 (!!!) years, I immediately purchased tickets. You have to remember, this was in, what, May? At the time, hopes and expectations were skyrocketing. People here in New York City were getting their second vaccination shots. A long, miserable winter under the dark cloud of COVID-19 seemed to be abating. People were making plans again. Things were opening up.

From the get-go, however, this event seemed star-crossed. Regular readers might remember a bizzarre episode in June wherein a package mysteriously showed up for me at the address of my former apartment on East 12th Street, … a place I hadn’t lived for about twenty years. When I went over to retrieve the enigmatic package, it ended up being my Devo tickets. Ticketmaster had sent them to the only address they had for me on file. It was only by sheer luck that the guy who took the apartment after me had the good will and consideration to hold onto my phone number. Those tickets could very easily have gone completely astray.

When I got home, my wife obliviously threw the FedEx envelope containing those tickets down the garbage shoot, thinking it was just an empty mailer I’d absent-mindedly left on my bureau. Upon learning that, while I descended into a foamy-mouth depression/rage spiral, my intrepid son Oliver went splelunking in our building’s trash compactor and actually RETRIEVED THE TICKETS!

The fates were playing with me.

As we soldiered on through the summer, however, a bigger problem was brewing. Despite the few highs and many lows of everything that had transpired since March of 2020 – the harrowing death toll, the upending of our normal routines, the crippling inefficacy and duplicitous bullshit of the Trump Administration’s mishandling of the crisis, the promsie of medical science delivering effective vaccines, the inevitable arrival of a more-transmitable mutation of the virus dubbed the Delta Variant – it suddenly became apparent that a staggering number of Americans were skeptical and/or reluctant to get vaccinated, opting instead to espouse conspiracy theories and even champion frankly ludicrous alternatives like horse dewormer to flaunt what they’re now calling “medical tyranny.”

Long story short: Because too many Americans are simply too fucking stupid, COVID-19 is still very much here. As they saying goes, this is why we can’t have nice things.

That means that contrary to our hopes and expectations from back in the Spring, we are very much NOT out of the woods, as yet. As a result, folks responsible for staging and producing events, concerts, festivals and the like are now all questioning whether to go ahead as planned.

DEVO posted this morning – the day before the scheduled performance -- on their Instagram account the following missive:

NYC! We are very sorry to announce that due to circumstances beyond our control and the current state of the world due to Covid 19, we had to postpone our upcoming show at Radio City Music Hall this Tuesday.

We will be announcing a new NYC date for 2022 very shortly. Stay tuned.

Refunds are available from point of purchase and we look forward to seeing you again in NYC soon.

The comments started flowing immediately. Pulling the plug on the event the day before seems like an especially harsh blow, especially for folks who were traveling here, but it’s more than likely that the said decision was made by the global entertainment promoter, Live Nation, and not the band (who have been regularly touting the upcoming date). Some embittered spuds went so far as to suggest that the real reason was low ticket sales, but that doesn’t quite add up. Were that the case, the event would probably have been re-designated to a smaller venue as opposed to being postponed entirely.

Personally speaking, I am pretty goddamned disappointed. As invoked numerous times here, Devo’s 1981 show at Radio City Music Hall was my first-ever concert and verily a life-changing and trajectory-informing experience. The thought of seeing them again in that amazing room was genuinely thrilling for me.

But, … I get it. I’m not happy about it, but because we collectively are too fucking slackjawed to get our shit together, it’s not safe or prudent to hold this event right now. So be it. If ever it becomes safe again, … I’ll be ready.

Get vaxxed or get fucked.