Flaming Pablum

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.

Wherewuzzat? Back Once More to SoHoZat

I’ve twice written here about SoHoZat, an odd sort of magazine/comic eporium on West Broadway just above Canal Street in SoHo. Back in the `80s, it was a joint I’d regularly pop into for copies of various curious periodicals. They had a wide-if-frenetic selection of reading material, and you were always bound to stumble across something new and different. It was also a great hangout. No one was chasing you out the door for not buying something. It was a safe haven for freaks, geeks, artists, weirdos, artists and the like.

As mentioned in those older posts, SoHoZat’s rent took a stip climb and they were forced to close their doors in about 1992 (now amost 30 years ago, …. jeezus). Following SoHoZat’s departure, the space it formerly occupied became a deli for a while. The surrounding strip also became significantly gentirified and built up to the extent that it’s incredibly hard to fathom that a cool, relaxed, bohemian concern like SoHoZat ever existed on that block, considering it’s now populated by pricey bistros, lavish hotels, exclusive haberdasheries and their ilk. The only real remnant of SoHoZat is their sister concern across the street, that being the graffitti emporium Scrap Yard (formerlly called Bomb The System, in less sensitive years).

There’s much more hustle and bustle on this patch of West Broadway than there ever was, although the pandemic has taken a bit of the shine off. The space that had been the deli following the depature of SoHoZat is now an animal shelter/hospital, oddly enough.

In any event, whilst trawling around the internet today, I came across this image of the old SoHoZat, taken by one Susan Kleckner in 1987. Click on it to enlarge. 

 

Ecstatic Pizza! Thurston Moore’s Favorite Slice

A bunch of years back, I posted a windy little entry that sought to debunk the arguable cache of being a native New Yorker. I mean, yeah, being originally from here certainly comes with myriad inherent advantages, but being born here is something that only happens out of a combination of wildly uncontrollable circumstances and pure luck. Having been born in New York City doesn’t immediately imbue an individual with some supernatural arsenal of weapons-grade street smarts, urbane sophistication and/or some greater power of cognition. It’s nurture that does that, not nature. To buffer my point, I appended a laundry list of names I considered consummate New Yorkers – individuals that, to my mind, personified all the attributes of the city – but that weren’t actually born here. Thurston Moore was one of those names.

Wrongly cited by me as having been born in Connecticut, Thurston Moore was actually born in Coral Gables, Florida, which is very approximately 1,284 miles from East 14th Street, give or take. Moore moved to the East Village in Manhattan in 1979, romanced here by the music of Patti Smith. Following stints in proto-hardcore band Even Worse, Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra and a band called The Coachmen, Moore formed Sonic Youth with Kim Gordon (herself from Rochester) around 1981. The rest, as they say, is history. In relatively short order, Sonic Youth became a kind of a quintessential New York band in the same vein as their forebears in the Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, The Ramones, etc. A concussive amalgam of art, noise and attitude, the very name Sonic Youth became synonymous with downtown New York City.

All this laborious preamble is all to underscore the point that, in my estimation, Thurston Moore is very much still a bona fide New Yorker, even if he currently lives in London.

Now if it’s one thing New Yorkers – native or otherwise – have strong opinions about, it’s pizza.

While originally an Italian dish dating back to the 10th century, pizza as we know it is essentially a New York City thing. Sure, different cities have tried to put their spin on it, but it’s still inarguably New York’s great culinary contribution. That’s not just my opinion, it’s just a fucking fact.

Personally speaking, I think Manhattan, with regard to pizza, is in steep decline. Once upon a time … and not even that long ago … pizza parlors were as plentiful as Manhattan’s ….er… bookstores and record shops. I used to be able to rattle off seven or eight worthy locales wherein to procure a respectable-to-exemplary slice in practically each and every neighborhood I frequented. Back then, it seems a decent pizzeria could be found within only a couple of blocks’ walk. Here in 2021, I’m afraid that’s just not the case.

Sure, there are plenty of higher-end pizza places around. I have nothing against those, but I’m speaking more about the street-food variety. Slightly more revered than the hot dog (and invariably healthier), a good slice has become perilously hard to put one’s hand to, although mediocrity is always in great supply. Then, of course, there is the somewhat new trend of “$1 pizza” which is a deplorable, function-over-form disservice to the city’s legacy and traditions.

For my money, while former favorites like St. Marks Pizza on St. Marks Place, The Pizza Box on Bleecker Street and several joints peppered around the Upper East Side of my now-distant youth are all long, long gone, you can still get yourself a slice to be proud of at Joe’s on Carmine just off Bleecker Street, although they’ve assuredly been discovered, by this point. I’m also quite fond of Village Pizza on 8th Avenue, just north of West 13th Street. My wife is a longtime supporter of Pizza Mercato on Waverly Place, but I’m afraid I have to part with her on that front. In terms of our immediate neighborhood, I used to regularly haunt the Stromboli’s on University Place between 12th and 13th Streets. That whole block was razed several years back (taking Bowlmor Lanes with it), and that pizzeria is no more. I used to laboriously point out how I once ducked in out the rain there one night and found myself sharing a slice in silence with notoriously thorny Television front-man and New York Punk Rock pioneer, Tom Verlaine. I wonder where he gets his slices these days.

Every New Yorker has their go-to, even in these comparatively dark times. It’s for this reason that I was somewhat shocked to spy on Thurston Moore’s Instagram page the below declaration. Of the establishment Little Italy Pizza III on my own University Place, he writes….

My go to cheese slice in nyc these days. Not in Little Italy but on University between 13/14th west side of street. The crust w just the right crunch appeal and slice thickness neither too thin too fat, the sauce etc on the money, downed w a fountain iced coke - boom yr off.

Now, again, far be it from me to doubt the tastes of Thurston Goddamn Moore of Sonic Fucking Youth, but the eyebrow-raise this post prompted has left creases in my forehead. Also, not for nothing, it's not "a cheese slice," it's just a slice. The cheese goes without saying. Without cheese, it ceases being proper pizza, goddammit.

But as far as this place is concerned, as Thurston even concedes, so-called Little Italy III is fucking Hell and gone from actual Little Italy. For this ruse alone, I think I’ve always shunned the place. Secondly, it’s like a bus station with a pizza oven. It looks like a Five Guys’ men’s room. I’m not saying a proper pizzeria has to be aesthetically pleasing (Village Pizza, by way of comparison, is frill-free in absolutely every conceivable way), but there’s a garishly over-lit, antiseptic quality to the interior of Little Italy III that has always driven me away from it. It looks just as uninviting as the 99 Cent Pizza closet on Sixth Avenue adjacent to the West 4th Street-Washington Square subway station – which always looks like a fine place to get stabbed. Never once have I considered grabbing a slice at this place. Nothing about it says “come sample our fare.” Nothing at all. To me it looks like a chapel of heartburn and regret.

But hey … fuck do I know? I didn’t write Daydream Nation.

What's your favorite pizzeria? 

Vega's Vista: Downtown Pics from the Eighties

There’s a group on Facebook I’m a member of that I’ve mentioned several times here before called Manhattan Before 1990 which is largely dedicated to,….well, … photos of just that. Obviously, in recent days, it’s been filled with shots of the World Trade Center, but in the days prior to that, I came across several photos by a gentleman named David Vega, who apparently was loitering on the same downtown streets as me back in the 80’s. I asked Mr. Vega if I could re-purpose some of his photos here, and he gamely obliged. Here are just a few of them….

French Kisses was this little spot on St. Marks Place that largely traded in vintage movie posters, the true provenance of which, I believe, being France (hence the name of the shop), so they might have all been in French, but don’t quote me on that. I remember they also sold a robust array of postcards modeled after promotional gig posters. I remember buying fistfuls of them of bands like The Clash, The Cult, The Jesus & Mary Chain and the like, and taping them up all over my walls during high school and college. French Kisses had an ancillary operation over on Bleecker just west of LaGuardia. According to Mr. Vega, this shot was taken in 1985.

Also taken in 85, here’s a shot of the other side of the street. This is, of course, Trash & Vaudeville. By this point, you can see a gate has been put up in front of 4 St. Marks Place (which I wrote about here). Trash was forced to leave this storied space some years back. They decamped to a spot over on East 6th Street. Owner and mastermind Jimmy Webb passed away last year, but the shop soldiers on.

This is, of course, the old Lone Star Cafe. I devoted many posts to this over the years. Suffice to say, the place is long gone. In a nutshell, after the Lone Star closed, it briefly became a bar called Mr. Fuji’s Tropicana (albeit without the lizard on the roof — he went to Texas). After Mr. Fuji’s closed, it became a sort of middling deli. They the space was derelict for quite a while until it was razed and a noxious condo was built in its footprint with a Brandy Melville in its ground floor, a shop I took exception with for their incongruous selling of comparatively rare Ramones ephemera.

It’s been about nine dozen ventures since then, but back in the early-to-mid 80’s, this corner was home to, as the sign says, The St. Marks Bar & Grill. Personally speaking, I was too young to visit the establishment in this incarnation, but it was made famous as a location for both the climax of the video for the Rolling Stones “Waiting on a Friend” and as the bar Wren and Richard Hell hang out at in the film “Smithereens.”

This is the formerly iconic corner of St. Marks Place at Third Avenue. There’s a lot to love about this photo for me, notably the sneery Gringo mural and St. Marks Pizza. Today, this corner is basically a yard of rubble behind plywood walls awaiting construction of yet another new development. Boo hiss.

Further east down St. Marks, this is the exterior of Venus Records. Mr. Vega says he took this in 1984, but I politely beg to differ, as Venus Records was still perched over on West 8th Street until at least 1986. The shop that later became Venus Records on St. Marks circa `88 or so was a bookstore before that. If I’m not mistaken the space in question is a pho joint (Asian broth) today.

This is, of course, CBGB in 1986. I love this shot in that it features the CB's Record Canteen (although I'm still on the hunt for shots of the CB's pizza place on the other side....anyone remember that?).

Big huge thanks to David Vega for his generosity. Check out his Instagram account here.

TWENTY Years Later: Coda

Even before social media, I always took a laborious shitload of photographs. On September 11th, like pretty much everyone else, I grabbed my camera (a comparatively big, bulky thing) when shit started to happen and started snapping. But when I got the ensuing photos back, I didn't really know what to do with them. I didn't really feel like putting them in my unwieldy library of photo albums (remember those?) and I didn't really want to look at them. To my mind, they didn't really reveal anything new about the narrative. I put them in an envelope and have since lost them in the amorphous pile of ephemera that is my home. But even if I knew where they were, I don't think I'd share them here, for pretty much the very same reasons. All they amount to is some ridiculous proof that I saw the events unfurl firsthand, for whatever pittance that's worth.

But in the same way I prefer to celebrate departed loved ones on the days of their birth than on the anniversaries of their passing, I generally tend to prefer to remember New York's cityscape prior to that event. rather than during or afterwards. I snapped the picture above from somewhere on West Broadway in 1999, and I've always loved it. The bird was just a happy accident. The picture below, meanwhile, was snapped somewhere on MacDougal Street in 1998... again with birds unwittingly captured.

TWENTY Years Later

As previously observed mutiple times here around this time of year, I never quite understand why certain anniversaires take on more meaning than others. I’m not sure why the 20th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001 should be any more significant than the 19th or the 14th or the 6th, other than to underscore that we like to group years in tidy sets of ten.

The sentiments I’ve expressed about the specifics of that day remain unchanged. I still remember it all pretty vividly. I don’t need to visit a museum or view a documentary to bring it all back. I’m relatively certain anyone who was in Manhattan (and/or Washington D.C. and Shanksville, PA) that day feels the same.

This all said, when viewed through the prism of the pandemic, as I noted last year, the legacy of September 11th seems a bit muted. As far as tragedies go, while COVID-19 lacks the spectacle of September 11th, its death-toll dwarfs Al Qaeda’s best efforts by leaps and bounds (not that it’s a competition). Moreover, given the tumult currently unfurling in the wake of the U.S. forces’ departure from Afghanistan, the notion that said country may soon revert to just as much of a safe haven for those who’d seek to harm us as it was in September of 2001 is a pretty bitter pill. But lest this get into Biden-bashing, let’s remember that it was George W. Bush who put us there, only later to deceptively use September 11th as a rationale for invading Iraq. It was on Obama’s watch that we finally got Osama Bin Laden. As for Trump, let’s remember that he released 5,000 Taliban prisoners and wanted to invite their leaders to Camp David, so don’t even go there.

Back here in New York, while my recollections of September 11th and its aftermath are, once again, fairly indelible, it no longer feels like it happened yesterday. I was a newlywed on September 11th, and we’d only been home from our honeymoon for two days by that fateful morning. We moved apartments – albeit only three blocks away – in 2002. My first child was born in 2004, followed by a second in 2006, and my life took on a whole different trajectory. I’ve held five different jobs since September of 2001. Life was markedly different than it is today on both a personal level and on a grander scale. It’s a different era.

I cannot help wondering, however, if anything has been learned.

Word On The Street

For more information, visit: SAVESOHONOHO.COM

Back to Downtown Music Gallery on East 5th

I’ve written about Downtown Music Gallery a few times here. In the wake of one of those posts, one Stephen Popkin, the founder of the place, got in touch and we started an email exchange that has lasted years.

This morning, he sent me a clutch of photos from the iteration of the shop when it was on East 5th Street, just steps from Cooper Square, right next to my beloved Scratcher, and also the street on which Dead Boys drummer Johnny Blitz was stabbed, back in the day, as mentioned on this ancient post. 

Here’s what he had to say about them…

Hi i just found these . Thought you might want to take a look . Photographer is Scott Hiller 1992 For this we got DGC to pay the stores rent for a month plus boxes of product.

And Thurston was one of our best customers! Those were the days!

I want to say this was the first iteration of the shop I ever went into. Today, this space is a veterinarian’s clinic.

More about DMG on Flaming Pablum....

Downtown Music Gallery in the Line of Fire (2008)

Back to Downtown Music Gallery (2012)

Downtown Music Gallery Needs Your Help (2018)

Steppin' Out Again

I stepped out of my office, last Friday afternoon, into that fleeting, end-of-summer heat and started my walk back uptown, weaving northwards through the streets of TriBeCa. Ever wanting to keep my commutes varied and interesting, I took a random turn towards the east on Franklin Street. About halfway between Church Street and Broadway, I spied a familiar character walking in my direction. Though disguised with a pair of shades and an incongruous baseball cap, I knew instantly that it was singer/songwriter Joe Jackson (the man responsible for such classics as “Look Sharp,” “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” and several others, and NOT shitty Michael Jackson’s dead father). Despite being an avowed fan of the man’s music, I decided to not say anything and let him pass in peace. Longtime readers may remember an exchange I instigated with him many years ago that did not go so well. As I learned firsthand that day, and later confimed in his biography, Joe Jackson has never felt entirely comfortable fraternizing with his public, so to speak.

That, in turn, brought my thoughts back to the clip below, which acts as a handy teaser for a (hopefully) upcoming and seemingly long-in-the-works post.

"What Is The City But The People?"

A friend of mine shared this on social media, recently, and I thought it was pretty extraordinary, if not for some of the accents alone.  Here's the official description....

In 1969, The Department of City Planning in New York City developed a new city-wide plan. This documentary, produced and written by John Peer Nugent and narrated by notable urbanist William H. Whyte, was released on public television to provide a behind-the-scenes peak on the planning process. There's a lot is gone from contemporary New York in this documentary: a gritty Hell's Kitchen, a robust Model Cities program, acres of slums in Bedford Stuyvesant. But there's a lot that, for better or worse, is still the same: poverty and prosperity, diversity and wealth, greed and good intentions.

Check it out.