Flaming Pablum

What's Going On In Washington Square

Whether you’re going to Washington Square Park to be your authentic self, let your freak flag fly, commune with the similarly inclined, enjoy the nice weather or because you’re simply trying to walk through it to get to the other side, can’t we all agree that – as it’s a public space – it should be an experience that DOES NOT involve brazen drug abuse (we're not just talkin' weed), prostitution, the threat of violence and late-night, high-volume bacchanalia in a residential neighborhood?

It’s also a complete, goddamn bomb-site every morning with trash all over the place. I’ve lived in NYC my entire life, and even compared to the freewheelin’ 80s, it’s never been as off the rails as it is now. By all means, use your public space, but at least attempt to demonstrate some courtesy, restraint and respect while you do it.

What's In The Box?

So, just to close the circle on this, here is the rest of the story….

In the wake of learning that a UPS package with my name on it had mysteriously shown up at my former address 19 years after I’d moved out, I was understandably intrigued. New occupant Carl mentioned that he’d shoot me an email after he’d left it downstairs for me to pick up. All day, however, from the banal to the bizarre, I was bewildered by what the explanation could be.

My first guess was that it was the next phase of an eBay scam I’d somehow gotten ensnared in. A month or so back, I started receiving strange, small UPS packages that were obviously not actually meant for me. Containing these plastic shoelace-protector things for sneakers, at least nine or ten of these parcels showed up with my name and current address on them, all from different eBay buyers, and all seemingly intended as “goods returned to sender.” I believe it’s technically called a “brushing” scheme, and it’s sort of disturbing. After a while, though, they stopped arriving. I still have them all in a box in my front closet, uncertain what to do with them. But upon first hearing about the mystery package on East 12th Street, I became concerned that the problem might be spreading to my old address. So, yeah, that was my first thought.

Sticking with the eBay theme, though, I also harbored the notion that the package may be some long-errant item I’d won on the auction platform that had been languishing in limbo this whole time, finally reaching its appointed destination. Maybe it was a vintage Stranglers poster or a rare Bad Brains 7”. This, by far, was the option I was hoping for the most.

Thinking even further afield, however, my next concept was that it was something more personal, potentially from someone I’d have fallen out of regular contact with prior to moving in 2002. My mind entertained wild notions of it being a box full of personal effects from a far-flung, estranged relative or a bag of ancient mixtapes from a disgruntled ex-girlfriend or a neatly-packed and meticulously counted bundle of 100-dollar bills in tight plastic bands or, y’know, a severed head. The possibilities on this thread were maddeningly endless.

Carl emailed me again early Monday afternoon to say that the package was with the doorman. I left my office downtown around 5:30pm and went to go solve the mystery.

With my brain now spinning the scenario into a fanciful hybrid of “Paddle to the Sea” and the denouement of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (wherein robotic interstellar probe, Voyager Six, returns from the hollow vacuum of a black hole in deep space to reconvene with its creator), I walked into my old lobby to retrieve my fateful package. I didn’t recognize the doorman on duty, but having not lived there for almost two decades, that was not entirely surprising. “Hi, I’m Alex,” I said, "I’m picking up a package that was left for me by Carl on the third floor?” I pictured the doorman reaching under his desk to reveal a weathered, battle-faded parcel, pockmarked by age and festooned with stickers from various ports of call like the pages of a secret agent's passport. I imagined it being covered in dust with barely-discernible handwriting scrawled across it.

Instead, he handed me a thin, flat UPS mailer that very assuredly did not date back to 2002. Sure enough, my name and former address were on it, with the return address being simply the “mail room” of some fulfillment center in West Virginia. I thanked the doorman and took off.

Reeling from a combination of incredulity, confusion and, frankly, disappointment, I opened the cardboard envelope when I got back out onto East 12th Street to reveal its contents ….

…concert tickets for DEVO’s September show at Radio City Music Hall.

As expected, the explanation is somewhat strenuously anticlimactic. On June 11th, tickets went on sale for this show at the very same venue I first saw DEVO in 1981. I immediately purchased a pair of tickets via the site featured on Facebook — that being Ticketmaster. Evidently, I have not used my Ticketmaster account since 2002, when I lived on East 12th Street, so upon completion of the transaction, Ticketmaster sent my tickets to the only address it has for me. No scams. No rare Bad Brains single. No clandestine box of cryptic ephemera. No wads of cash. No severed head.

I came home and put the UPS mailer with my tickets in it on my bureau and told my wife the ridiculous news.

Later that night, she accidentally threw that UPS mailer out.

My son Oliver intrepidly fished the mailer out of the bowels of the trash in the basement this morning, averting further hysteria.

Move along. Nothing further to see here.

Back Into The Basement

My friend John (who I mentioned here) put up a telling post on Facebook recently that struck a firm chord with me. A similarly besotted music geek, John recounted coming back into possession of a big crate of records he’d stored at his mother’s place back in the 90’s. His mother had moved house, however, at some point, and a friend of John’s picked up those albums from her home and sent them back to him. Years after first sending them away for safe-keeping, John found many of the LPs to be in rough, unplayable shape. Coupled with the fact that he has since aquired the means – like most of us – to play most of the music on those records on multiple other formats, John was struck with a quandary, which he neatly summed up in the following three sentences….

I'm not going to play these records. They sit in their box taking up space in the house, and anchor me to a past that no longer exists. But I can't bring myself to just throw them away.

Maybe Freud could have a holiday with this particular syndrome, but I, too, stored many of my old records at my mother’s house. While I’d formerly been loath to part with any of them, when my wife and I moved from my old apartment on East 12th Street to our current apartment on East 9th Street in 2002, I stored about a third of my vinyl collection at a mini-storage space on Vandam Street (never do this) and packed the other two-thirds into a series of stylish flight cases procured at long-vanished Eightball Records on East 9th (which later turned into a long-running sushi joint called Yuba, which has also now closed) and kinda snuck them into the basement of my mom’s house in Quogue out on Long Island.

I ended up having to forego my Vandam Street storage place when it got too expensive and discreetly migrated those records into our apartment. The other two thirds – still in those flight cases, covered in deliberately offensive stickers by prurient hot-rod artist Coop so that my mom wouldn’t want to touch them – have been down in that basement ever since, tucked away in an ersatz playroom with board games, toys and old coats no one will ever wear again. At some point, this will have to change, especially if my mom ever makes good on her threat to sell the house.

We went out to visit mom over Memorial Day Weekend, and given the unseasonable chill and pervasive rain, I succumbed to a ritual I’ve been keeping for some time. Every three or four years or so, I go down to the basement and exhume my old records from those flight cases. At this stage of the proceedings, there is no turntable in my mother’s home to play them on, nor do I expect there ever will be. So, all I can do is take them out, look at them and feel that anchor John was talking about pull at my neck.

When not fretting myself an ulcer about work demands and pressing life matters, my brain frequently finds the time to wake me up in the middle of the night to plot out what I’ll have to do about those records. Honestly, I’d consider farming them off to my nephews, but I don’t know that they’d genuinely want them or even give a damn. I mean, truthfully, I don’t want to give them away, but I don’t know that I can keep them. I’d rather they go to “a good home,” so to speak, but who knows?

In the short term, here are a few of them.

Back to The Ear Inn

It’s been yet another crazy-busy period at work. I have multiple complicated projects on the burner, all requiring heaping amounts of deft navigation, thoughtful strategy and efficient execution. Similarly, I'm vainly trying to plot out my family's summer -- from my youngest's second COVID shot through transporting same back to camp in Vermont again and wrangling fleeting vacation accommodations, to say nothing of my wife and I's looming 20th anniversary. While I do genuinely consider the two posts I put up this week to be interesting and worth your time, I’m always looking to post more substantial things than placeholder entries built around esoteric YouTube videos. But, y’know, we all have our things to contend with.

In any case, I wanted to write about this sooner, but I was let off my leash briefly last weekend to meet an old friend of mine I’d not seen in two or three years. Now that restrictions are easing, it seemed like a fine time to meet up, so we settled on a place I’ve been dying to return to since the pandemic first turned our collective existence into a c-grade disaster movie, the Ear Inn over on the western end of Spring Street in SoHo. 

A longtime favorite bar of mine, I’ve had more memorable evenings within the Ear’s storied interiors than I can count. It’s arguably the oldest bar in Manhattan, although McSorley’s and Pete’s Tavern make comparable claims. Regardless, I’ll take the Ear over both those joints every damn time.

Despite just being informed by my primary care physician —who I’d also not seen since before the pandemic —that I’d gained seven pounds since my last visit, I ordered a cheeseburger and had a few pints with my friend in that great bar. While it, too, boasts the trappings of responsible social distancing, I am very happy to report that its splendor remains undiminished.

What places are YOU ready to return to?

Oliver Takes On Time Travel

My son Oliver is 15 years old. As recently mentioned in this post, now that both my children are well into their teens, I am generally less inclined to feature and refer to them as much as I might have done when they were littler. They have their own interests, likes, dislikes, identities and lives, and I try to respect their privacy. That all said, Oliver recently put together a video for a school project, and while, granted, I am incredibly biased, I think it’s pretty spectacular.

Peculiarly tasked with crafting a project about time travel, Oliver was able to utilize his passion for stop-motion animation. Here are the fruits of his labors. Be warned: While the recurring theme of grisly patricide might give one pause, “The Grandfather Paradox” is indeed a genuine example of doomy, paradoxical theories about the potentially damaging travails of time travel.

Please enjoy.

Back to Lee's on Ludlow ... with Jeremy & Dennis

I honestly have no earthly idea how or why my friend Jeremy ended up on a YouTube channel hosted by a talking tennis ball, but …. y’know,… maybe he lost a bet or something.

In any case, my friend and fellow music geek Jeremy Shatan was recently on a YouTube program called “Dad Jokes with Dennis Ball” wherein he got to chat about a number of different things. I’ll try not to be too brazenly namedroppy about this, but along with being an exceptionally good guy and a man of exquisite musical taste (Jeremy is a similarly avowed Killing Joke acolyte and also hosts an exhaustive blog about music fandom called An Earful), Jeremy has a few notables to his name, namely that (a) he was a founding member of The Young Aborigines, the teenage punk band that would gradually mutate into the Beastie Boys and (b) it was our Jeremy who took the wide-angled panoramic photograph of the intersection of Ludlow & Rivington on the Lower East Side that would grace the cover of the Beasties’ legendary sophomore LP, Paul’s Boutique.

Now, despite having these fairly impressive items on his curriculum vitae of cool, to spend any time chatting with Jeremy, you’d absolutely never know it. He’s an affable, grounded and normal guy, and he generally speaks about these things with the same nonchalance you might recount a goofy anecdote about some silly shit you did with your friends when you were a kid, which is more or less precisely the scenario. It’s just that the friends in question happened to become genre-straddling iconoclasts.

In any case, I’m happy to evangelize any endeavor Jeremy’s involved in, so please enjoy the clip above.

The shot below, meanwhile, was one I snapped in about 1995. If you cannot figure it out, it’s the same corner Jeremy captured on the front panel of Paul’s Boutique. If you visit this spot today, it looks like nothing of the sort. The last time I walked by it was a cafe of some kind, and there’s a massive mural of the Beasties on its east-facing facade. But circa `95 (only six or so years after Jeremy’s photo), it was still more or less the same concern.

The Band Was There

It’s been a long while since I’ve been as fixated with one, but I used to be pretty hung up about tracking down the locations of photographs of favorite bands of mine. I have a whole category on the blog devoted to it (and comparable mysteries), but I’m thinking my exhaustive (and exhausting) search for a specific shot of the Lunachicks some years back may have broken the back of that preoccupation … or maybe it’s just because I haven’t encountered another photo that captured my imagination the same way. Who can say?

In any event, along the way, I was aided and abetted by a few folks whose sleuthing skills were considerably sharper than mine, notably my comrade Bob Egan of Popspots NYC and a friend on Facebook named Chung Wong, among a few others. On several occasions, both Bob and Chung gamely dove in and helped divine the true provenance and practically the precise longitude and latitude of the locations in question.

As it happens, there is apparently another prominent and versatile cat on this beat. Slated for an upcoming session on my friend Drew Stone’s “New York Hardcore Chronicles” live, one Steve Birnbaum is an artist, photographer, filmmaker and fellow music head who takes comparable pains to seek out and artfully replicate shots of famous music luminaries. Where I was inclined to mimic the shots with the then-willing aid of my little kids (now that they’re in their teens, they are less enthused about such shenanigans), Mr. Birnbaum adds his own signature by framing the original photograph within the larger environment of the location. In a weird way, it’s a little reminiscent of the Instagram account of Murad Osmann. If that name doesn’t ring a bell he’s that self-styled “travel influencer” that continually photographs his smokin’ hot spouse from behind in the “follow me” series as they jetset around the globe. In Birnbaum’s case, instead of holding his lovely lady’s hand, he’s brandishing the original source material.

You can see the fruit of Birnbaum’s labors on his Instagram page called TheBandWasHere. On it, he covers a lot of the bases I, too, sought out, like the Misfts in the West Village, the Beasties in Charles Street, Joe Strummer on East 14th, The Cramps on Charles Lane and several, several others. He and I have clearly been bitten by the same bug.

Go check it out and tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.

Incidentally, my 2009 response to the above original (the cover of The Ramones' Too Tough to Die) is below. 

Thursday

Since about October or so, the company I work for has been letting those of us who’ve wanted to come back to voluntarily work two days a week in our offices, if we’d like. Given the diminutive size of my apartment and the fact that I frequently have two testy teenagers therein vying for WiFi and elbow room, I’ve taken full advantage of this offer. Surprisingly, however, not many other of my colleagues have, and I’ve frequently spent those two days alone in my office, often going entire eight-hour shifts without seeing another human being.

While at first it felt like a step towards normalcy, the prolonged failure to bring the pandemic under manageable control quickly put a stop to any hopes of a return to the pre-COVID routines. The novelty of going into the office swiftly wore off, but I’ve kept going in, regardless.

But, I’ve not been totally alone. There has been a skeleton crew of regulars from various departments that have also been periodically coming in. As such, we’ve been frequently stopping by each other’s offices to say hi and get at least brief, reassuring moments of human interaction. It’s a small enough organization to really know most of the people on staff.

I have one colleague, whom I’ll call Koby for the sake of this post (not his actual name), who has been doing the same as I have. While he’s not a member of my department, I have worked with Koby on a number of different projects. Since I first got here, he has always been the coolest, most inclusive team-member to work with, and we’ve always gotten on like a house on fire. It’s a nice organization to begin with, but I was always stuck by how nice Koby was to everyone. He seemed genuinely invested.

Yesterday morning, it was looking like another day of solitary confinement until Koby popped his head in my office to say hi. He pulled up a chair, and I happily turned away from the frankly yawnsome project I’ve been working on to chat with him. We had the most banal of catch-ups, discussing the usual COVID-related topics and when we expected the office to officially open back up. These were not pressing issues by any stretch of the imagination, but, again, it was nice to talk and remind ourselves of the regular practices we’ve left behind and look forward to brighter days ahead. After a bit, Koby got up to continue his rounds of saying hi to the paltry few other folks in the office. I thanked him for stopping by, and off he went.

Today, I heard that, overnight, Koby passed away. I don’t know very many particulars, but he was evidently home with his wife, suffered a heart attack and died. By all appearances, Koby was young, healthy and spry, with no readily detectable, health-impairing vices to speak of.

I have been in something of a fog all day since learning this horrible news. Mere hours after blithely shooting the shit in my office, Koby crossed to the other side.

Take care or yourselves and be good to each other.

Rest in peace, Koby. 

Sole Asylum: My Incrementally Futile Quest for Nike SB Black and Tan Dunk Lows

 

PREAMBLE: I’ve never considered myself an especially materialistic person. Sure, I collect a bunch of stupid shit like records, compact discs, vintage rock posters and dumb band t-shirts, but those have more to do with my associations with the music rather than items that assert any impressions of wealth, status or style. I couldn’t care less about luxury goods. I don’t care what type of car I drive, as long as it can get me from point A to point B. Prestigious fashion labels like Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, Fende, Versace … none of that matters to me at all. I have no real brand loyalty other than an adherence to that which has proven long-lasting and practical. I mean, sure, I like nice things as much as the next person, but by and large, the stuff I like is more super geek than uber chic, and that is entirely fine with me.

This post, meanwhile, is something an unwitting exception to all that — a fixation I backed into with oblivious and entirely coincidental parallels to the zeitgeist, something I am otherwise habitually out of step with.

It’s a silly situation, but here it is…

For a million years, all I ever wore was Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, … and usually the black ones. While completely clichéd and ubiquitous today, their low-tech, retro aesthetic, back in the '80s, set them well apart from the frankly ridiculous, then-newfangled sneakers of the day. Eschewing the garish, boot-like footwear sported by meat-necked jocks, frat guys, mean girls, professional athletes, proto-yuppies and rappers in favor of comparatively cheap, thinly soled, minimally supportive and tonally dour sneakers (originally designed, ironically, as basketball-wear) was a lifestyle choice I embraced based on their alleged espousal by the Ramones.

That said, nine times out of ten, any photo of da brudders usually found them sporting battered, no-name, filthy canvas plimsolls instead of Chucks, the picture beneath being something of an exception.

Regardless, black Chuck Taylors had established themselves as sartorial shorthand for “punk,” at some earlier point, and became the de rigueur shoe of choice for the sneery agent of renunciation I was aspiring to be.

The inherent problem, however, was and remains that Chucks just aren’t all that great. Sure, they look cool, but they’re murder on your arches, don’t really protect your feet, are prone to smell and don’t usually hold together for very long. And God help you if you get them wet -- you might as well walk around with coarse, wet towels on your feet. Time was when sporting Chucks may have equated with making some sort of outlaw, bohemian statement, but you were often courting orthopedic fallout as a cost.

Today, of course, black Chuck Taylors are everywhere, including the feet of our new Vice President. Over time, much like spiked bracelets, ripped jeans and band t-shirts, they stopped serving as signifiers of a specific subculture. But that’s not why I stopped wearing them.

Well, not entirely. I stopped wearing them so exclusively because I fell in love with another shoe.

Back in 2012, I was very dubiously employed as a homepage editor at the website of NBC’s “TODAY Show,” which, in all candor, eventually turned into fraught experience worthy of a whole, horror-filled post in itself, but I digress. In any case, at one point, we reported a story about sneaker titan Nike getting caught in an awkward position after releasing a line of their signature Nike SB Dunk Low sneakers timed for St. Patrick’s Day called “Black and Tans.” Evidently not keen on doing their homework, the brilliant minds at Nike assumed the origins of the term “Black and Tan” pertained exclusively to the cocktail of mixed beers -- usually Guinness Stout with either a Bass Ale or a Harp Lager -– that results in a layered visual effect (hence the colors … black and tan). If you don’t know your history, that might be a perfectly reasonable assumption. The reality, however, is that the name “Black and Tans” actually refers to a notorious British paramilitary force trained to quell the Irish uprising in the 1920s. Suffice to say, the Irish very understandably don’t take that stuff lightly. Don’t order the drink that way in Ireland, either -- call it a Half N’ Half, else you’ll be courting pugilism.

Anyway, we ran the story, and I was so intrigued by the whole chapter that I wrote a follow-up piece for TODAY.com’s short-lived and star-crossed “fashion blog,” The Look. The mere fact that I was allowed to write about fashion for the outlet ought to give you a clue as to the quality and credibility of the finished product. Don’t bother looking for it today, it has thankfully gone the way of all flesh. Once again, I digress.

In any case, so besotted was I with both the design of this sneaker and its troubled (pardon the pun) history, I thought it would be kinda neat to own a pair. Knowing, however, that I couldn’t simply stroll into my local Foot Locker to procure them, I turned to eBay and, in relatively no time at all and for a slightly more than conventional cost for a pair of sneakers, a fetching pair of Nike SB Black and Tan Dunk Lows were mine. In fact, below is a shot of me in that pair at my desk at the “Today Show” website, shortly before I was unceremoniously given the keys to the street by the outlet.

I should point out, at this stage, that I’ve never given the slightest whiff of a damn about Nike, Nike SB (what’s the difference?) or sports culture or anything of that sort. And despite being essentially half-Irish, I wasn’t really interested in the shoes’ botched attempt at Celtic affiliation either. I just thought it was an intriguing story, and I just really dug the color scheme. The fact that they were comparatively hard to find only made them more special. That was really it.

But, once I owned them, I loved these sneakers. They looked great, went well with everything, and were super comfortable. Random dudes would also periodically stop me in the street with assertions like “fresh kicks, bro!” Sometimes I’d lapse into the needlessly convoluted backstory, but most of the time I’d just say thanks and keep movin’ on.

But in seemingly no time at all, I wore them out, wearing holes into the flattened soles from overuse. Aghast by the unspeakable notion of parting with these cherished sneaks, however, I jumped back on eBay to find a replacement pair.

I used to have a colleague at that “Today Show” gig named Phil. Phil used to make it a point that when he latched onto a particular item that suited his needs, he’d buy that item in bulk, sparing himself the trouble of ever having to hunt said item down again in the conceivable future. I used to give Phil shit about that strange habit, but I was suddenly learning why he did it. Upon my return to eBay for my second pair of Nike SB Black and Tan Dunk Lows, the scarcity of the product and its rarefied charms had caused a noticeable bump in its pricing. Undeterred, I ponied up the dough and — boom — the problem was solved. I had a new pair to replace my first pair.

You might start to see where this is going.

Since tracking down that first pair in March of 2012, I have bought no fewer than four pairs of Nike Black and Tans (although, if I’m being honest, I have technically lost count), each successive pair being slightly more expensive than their predecessors. And given that production on this particular design was hastily halted nine long years ago, the prospect of continuing to find further replacements for each ravaged-soled pair has become uproariously daunting and not-just-a-little unlikely. But, like a pathetic junkie, I have gotten myself hooked on a niche commodity in astonishingly limited supply.

Adding insult to injury, two other factors have come into play.

I suppose there was always a furtive subculture devoted to it, but since about 2005 (if not well before), a virulent cult of -- for lack of a better term -- sneaker fetishism has been on the ascent. No longer an esoteric pursuit, rarefied-sneaker shrines like Flight Club on Broadway and Concepts on University Place have gone upscale and above-ground, selling coveted, status-affirming footwear to high-paying fashionistas and style-conscious b-boys. The same cats who used to remark “fresh kicks, bro” at me now stand on long lines to get into these emporiums to drool over lovingly presented, limited-run or discontinued (like mine) sneakers from eons past. Online ventures like StockX and Grailed act as liaisons between rabid collectors and merchants the Beastie Boys once referred to as “sneaker pimps.” Sneaker fetishism is now a big, lucrative concern, and my little predilection for Nike SB Black and Tans has gotten ensnared in it.

Then, of course, there is also the Travis Scott factor.

If you’re not familiar with the name, Travis Scott is an of-the-moment rapper who is widely revered in the hip-hop world. Personally speaking, I cannot say I am very familiar with his music, but I know he carries a lot of clout and exudes a great deal of influence. Some may remember an incident back in 2019 when Travis sported a 90’s-era Rush t-shirt for a performance at the Grammy Awards, which prompted SPIN Magazine to write a cheeky little piece advising impressionable young fans not to get the impression that Rush were actually somehow “cool,” which goaded me to post something of a pointed tirade in response. Disrespect Rush and expect my wrath. 

In any case, it seems Travis and I share a few things in common in that we evidently both like Rush t-shirts and we both like a Nike SB Dunk Lows. Who saw that coming? In fact, that's Travis pictured above in both a pair of Dunk Lows (although not the Black and Tans) and a different Rush shirt. I actually have this shirt, given to me by Geddy Lee himself. My daughter now wears it, and doesn't care about any of this ridiculous bullshit. 

As I understand it, Travis Scott’s stated affinity for the very type of sneaker I’ve spent the past several paragraphs waxing rhapsodic over has even further accelerated and brazenly inflated their already beefy street value. It’s as if the fates are pointedly conspiring against me.

Here in March of 2021 … almost nine years to the day since I got ahold of my first pair of Nike SB Black and Tan Dunk Lows (size 11.5, if you’re curious), new pairs — when you can actually find them — fetch upwards of $450-500, with some sellers audaciously asking twice those amounts for them.

Now, as a sliver-scalped, 53-year-old father of two high schoolers, I can no longer really justify dropping those sorts of sums on pairs of sneakers simply because I like their design and vainly consider them part of “my signature look.” While I continue to peruse the web looking for affordable pairs (although I’m not so hot on the idea of “used”), I am coming to terms that my chances of finding another new pair for myself are strikingly slim.

Right now, I still actually own two pairs of them, although the soles on both are worryingly thin. I have dispatched one pair to a concern somewhere in Florida who claim to be experts in repairing this variety of footwear, although the likelihood of them being able to replicate the specifics of the sole are evidently very slim. I’ll probably get back some sort of mutant-hybridized pair that will technically lack authenticity.

As I type this, I’m currently wearing my other pair, which I took out of cold storage when I shipped off their younger siblings to the Sunshine state. These soles feel like they could give way at any minute, honestly.

Sadly, the time may indeed by nigh to either try something new or get those dusty black Chucks back out of the closet.

In The City: Urban Navigation in "The Warriors"

With both my wife and daughter out of the apartment, last evening, my 15-year-old son Oliver and I were left to our own devices, so to speak, so we ordered in some Chinese food and decided to watch a movie. Usually, this has meant umpteenth viewings of any number of Marvel Universe films or installments in the “Star Wars” series. While I am entirely cool with both of those options, when opportunities have arisen, I’ve tried to broaden my son’s cinematic horizons with further-flung fare. Last year, I introduced him to both the subterranean thrills of 1974’s “The Taking of Pelham 123” (the original, not the Travolta ripoff) and the Kafka-esque, comedic nightmare of Scorsese’s “After Hours” (my favorite film of all time), both of which he was engaged by and warmed to. Seeking to further expand his viewing, last night I dangled the prospects of three crucial films before him, namely “Blade Runner,” “Apocalypse Now” and Walter Hill’s 1979 classic, “The Warriors.” Oliver opted for the latter, so we dug into our beef with broccoli and settled in.

Now. I’ve written about my love of “The Warriors” here numerous times (see links below), so it’s almost impossible for me to be objective about the film at this very late stage in the proceedings, but it was interesting to watch Oliver soak it in. In all fairness, even to die-hard fanboys like myself, what seemed like a palpably edgy and unvarnished portrayal of a violent and lawless urban dystopia in 1979 has not really retained its aura of nervy realism. As I mentioned before, there is inarguably an unwittingly campy element to the film, as well as a relative wholesomeness (despite the odd homophobic rejoinder and crude sexual innuendo, there is not even the slightest whiff of drug use or racial tension, even on the allegedly big bad streets of late-`70s New York City). Admittedly, there is that uncomfortable scene in Riverside Park wherein foul-mouthed Ajax basically attempts to roughly have his way with undercover cop Mercedes Reuhl, but he gets a nightstick in the groin for that, so there are at least consequences for his indefensible actions.

But for all the film's tension, imminently quotable dialogue and stylized depictions of nocturnal combat, Oliver’s observations were cuttingly insightful, calling into question several plot points that, in my practically life-long avowal of the movie, even I had managed to overlook.

Oliver was primarily incredulous that the tough-guy protagonists in Coney Island’s Warriors were all presumably native New Yorkers, yet all seemed largely incapable of navigating the intricacies of their own city’s mass transit system. Now, it could be indeed argued that, at the time, New York was so atomized and localized to the point wherein residents of certain boroughs simply never left their own turf, but the hapless Warriors are completely flummoxed even in locating the Dyre Avenue subway station they only recently disembarked from. Never mind running the gauntlet home from the Bronx, how did these guys manage to find their way around on normal days?

Personally speaking, I don’t believe I started riding the subways until I was a freshman in high school, but in relatively short order, I was perfectly able to distinguish uptown from downtown and fully capable of getting myself from East 96th Street to Union Square — continually misrepresented by certain Warriors in the film as “Union Station” — without being confused or hassled. Now, granted, I wasn’t being pursued by baseball-bat-wielding brigands, but the stress of being hunted by roaming gangs doesn’t preclude one from remembering topographical basics.

This nagging complaint with the narrative almost derailed Oliver’s enjoyment of the film, prompting him to suggest other subway lines and/or alternative routes they might have taken to the relative safety of their Brooklyn destination. Beyond that, he was also curious as two why director Walter Hill chose to film the Warriors' first encounter with the Baseball Furies at the intersection of West 72nd and Broadway, when the shot prior found them getting off the subway at 96th street.

While these were absolutely valid points, I basically told Oliver to relax and enjoy the movie, which he eventually did. But, privately, I felt a sense of accomplishment. When my kids were relatively little, I frequently made it a point to take them to as many remote corners of the city as was feasible. My intention was not only to showcase all the great things the city has on offer to them, but to instill within them an inherent understanding of where things are, how to get to (and away) from them, and always how best to find their ways home, ideally without having to “bop” anybody or “waste any heads” along the way.

More About "The Warriors” on Flaming Pablum.

Farewell to The Fury

"The Warriors" at 40

Leave "The Warriors" Alone

Let's Get Down To It, Boppers: Exhuming "The Warriors" 

Can U Dig It?