Flaming Pablum

Big City Survey: Part One

I started composing this several weeks ago, gradually adding to it as time and inspiration allowed. This was all, of course, well before everything turned upside down.

As has been established, I am now outside of the city, isolating with my wife and kids out on Long Island, trying to stay sane and looking forward to better times and healthier circumstances. What things will be like when we all return to “normal” in the wake of this remains to be seen.

In the interim, this is part one of a list of about thirty questions. I only got through half of it. Look for the other half soon, and cite your own choices.

Favorite Building:
There are obviously loads to choose from, but I’m going to go with 644 Broadway at the northeast corner of Bleecker Street, known by some as Bleecker Tower. Completed in 1891, this former bank building is notable for its eye-catching red sandstone exterior, its Romanesque architectural flourishes and its metal tower, now greened with age like Lady Liberty herself. I’ve only ever set foot in it when its ground floor played host to a noxious clothiers whose name escapes me, but I was there in homage to a former incarnation of that space, the Blue Willow, and only then as said restaurant served as the location of the photo shoot the produced the cover shot of one of my favorite albums of all time, that being Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves by Gavin Friday & The Man Seezer.

Least Favorite Building:
There’s now several of them, sprouting up like fucking weeds, but the first so-called “supertall” I really latched my hatred onto was 432 Park Avenue, which thrusts out of midtown like a giant glass’n-steel penis, lording over its surroundings verily like Barad-dûr (look it up). I hate it. It’s an artless rod that plays host to impossibly wealthy oligarchs. It decimates the symmetry of the cityscape. Awful, repugnant shit. Knock it down.

Favorite Landmark:
There are several places that I believe ought to be “official” landmarks (i.e. legally protected) that aren’t. CBGB was one of them, but it’s way too late in the day to be boo-hooing that one. In terms of things that are still operational, visible and/or still standing, I’m quite partial to “the Alamo,” otherwise known “the Cube” at Astor Place, although I feel that’s kind of an obvious one. Glad it’s still there, though. Back uptown, I’ve always been fond of Louise Nevelson’s “Night Presence IV” sculpture on the island at East 92nd Street and Park Avenue. As a child, during snowstorms --- back when it still snowed in New York City – my friends and I would throw snowballs at it. The correct hit would make an endearing bonnnnnnnnnggggg sound.

Least Favorite Landmark:
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for that stupid bull downtown to fuck right off.

Favorite Local Sports Team:
I don’t have one, because I don’t give a crap about sports.

Favorite Museum:
As much as I grew up wandering the halls of the Metropolitan Museum and the Natural History Museum, I’m going to go with the dark horse and vote for the Museum of the City of New York over on upper Fifth Avenue. It’s amazing. 

Favorite Coffee:
For a start, I hate Starbucks for a number of reasons, but first and foremost, their coffee tastes burnt to me. Stop spending your money there. I’m also not what you’d call a coffee connoisseur. I’m not impressed by artisanal blends or bespoke roasts. Give me a generic, large cup of shitty coffee with milk and sugar, and I’m good to go. I get mine at either the Corner Gourmet on West Broadway & Murray Street or from an endearingly irritable Egyptian gentleman who operates a food cart at the bottom of Greenwich Avenue at Barclays Street.

Favorite Pizza:
Okay, now we’re getting into it. This is an incredibly divisive question, depending on who you ask. Personally speaking, I regret to say that most of the beloved pizzerias of my youth are now all gone. Time was when there were decent options for pizza on practically every other block, regardless of what part of town you were in. They weren’t necessarily top of the line, but joints like St. Marks Pizza on Third Avenue, The Pizza Box on Bleecker, Mimi’s on East 84th and Lexington, or Stromboli’s on University Place were all entirely respectable options for a good slice. And we’re talking slices, here, not sit-down joints – there IS a difference. We’re talking about quick food on the go, not full-on dining experiences. That should be a separate question. In any case, all those spots have vanished. In terms of a slice here in 2020, I’m likely to shoot for Joe’s Pizza just north of Carmine Street off Sixth Avenue, but they’ve been discovered and the lines are crazy now. I’m also fine with Champion Pizza in SoHo at Cleveland Place just north of Kenmare Street. In a pinch, I’ll settle with my local, that being Pizza Mercato on Waverly Place, but it’s very decidedly not my favorite. I could list loads of shitty pizzerias, but who’s well served by that? Also, if you spend your money in any of those 99 cents pizza holes or --- may God forgive you – procure your “pizza” from Domino’s, you should by gored by a disconsolate bull.

Favorite Diner:
Much like the pizzerias (and the record stores, and the book shops), the diners are swiftly vanishing. My local standbys like The University Restaurant on University Place and the Silver Spurs on Broadway are both long gone. My old favorite, The Mansion, on the corner of East 86th and York Avenue, is still there, I believe, but they had a re-modelling some time back that robbed some of its charm for me. The Three Guys Restaurant on the northeast corner of East 96th and Madison Avenue is exceptional. For aesthetics, the Square Diner inTriBeca (65 West Broadway) has all the old school charm you need, but if I’m being candid, my favorite is the Gee Whiz Diner on Greenwich Street at Warren Street. The burgers are what you’re after.

Favorite Italian Restaurant:
My family’s old favorite, Col Legno on East 9th Street, vanished eleven years ago, when owner Chris pulled up stakes and went to go work at a bar in the West Village. Since then, our favorite is really Da Andrea on West 13th between Fifth and Sixth Avenues (just across from the Quad Theater). It might not look like much from the outside, but it’s always hopping when we go, and the food is always amazing. Also don’t mind the oddly named Aunt Jake’s on West 8th Street.

Favorite Chinese Restaurant:
Well, since posting the last installment of the perpetually delayed Flaming Pablum Grub Guide, I did expand my horizons further when the wife and I took a shamlessly touristy culinary walking tour of Chinatown (which I cannot recommend enough). From that, we did glean some choice spots for Chinese cuisine of very specific types (i.e. a good place for dim sum, a great place for Peking Duck, a fab spot for dumplings, etc.), but in terms of an overarching eatery that covered all the bases, a visit this past January to Shun Lee West on the Upper West Side really checked all the boxes, …including my tireless demand for “big fuckoff dragons!”

Favorite Sushi Restaurant:
As cited here, my heart still belongs to Japonica.

Favorite Steakhouse:
I love all steak houses, from the charmingly grotty Sammy’s Roumanian Steakhouse on the Lower East Side through to the higher tiered places like Smith & Wollensky’s. Peter Luger’s out in Brooklyn used to be a big fave. I haven’t been in eons, but I’ve heard reports of diminishing returns in the quality department. Similarly, the last time I went to the Old Homestead over in the Meat Packing District, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the fare. While not solely a steakhouse, the longbone and the t-bone at our local, Knickerbocker’s on East 9th and University Place are both outstanding and highly recommended. If we’re talking super-dupe high-end, Father’s Day-type shit, I’m always down for a trip to Keen’s Chophouse on West 36th off Sixth Avenue. Tons of history and atmosphere, and the food is nothing short of fucking sensational.

Favorite Subway Line:
Hmm. Can’t say I have one. They all let me down, in the end. I suppose the N/R is the best for my purposes. I was born and raised – like Jennifer Lopez – on the 6, but cannot say I’m especially fond of it.

Okay, that's as far as I got. The next batch of questions concentrate on bookstores, bars, live music venues, parks and more, so stay tuned for that, although they'll all be answered through the prism of current experience, so will probably have a more melancholy, world-weary tone. Naturally.

Hope you're all hanging in there. Be safe & healthy.

The Deserter & The Deserted

Rat calling Sinking Ship, Rat calling Sinking Ship, … Come in Sinking Ship!!!

I remember when the darkness closed in after the lights suddenly went off during Hurricane Sandy, my family and our best friends/next-door neighbors hunkered down together that first night and made an evening out of it. The next day, however, they quietly crept out of their apartment and decamped to a spot they have upstate. Circumstances, obligations and limited resources forbade us from following suit, so we stayed put and rode the rest of the week out in the dark. In retrospect, we were mildly inconvenienced, whereas lots of folks in places like the Rockaways lost everything. We had nothing to complain about, other than ennui, really. We’ve joked about it since then, how our neighbors “jumped ship,” but who could blame them? They had a warm, lit house to escape to.

Upon the further spreading of the Trump Virus, we did the same this week, taking advantage of my family’s kind offer to escape the heavy case concentration in New York City (check out the map below, courtesy of this story in the New York Times). I’ve been called out by a couple of select readers on it, but y’know what? If you had the option to get your kids out of a tiny apartment to an (arguably) safer space, you’d do it, too. If you have cognitive difficulty processing the logic of that decision, I cannot help you.

Take even a cursory glance at the media source of your choice, these days, and you’ll doubtlessly see images of normally bustling city streets across the world transformed into vast, empty spaces, largely bereft of another human being. This doesn’t mean everyone’s taking the hint (witness the stubborn influx of party-determined spring breakers in Florida), but the smart ones are refraining from large gatherings. For it to genuinely work, I’d imagine everyone has to abide, but we’ll see, I guess, if the curve is indeed flattened.

In any case, speaking of bustling city streets, my friend Gregoire Alessandrini, who maintains the excellent photographic site, New York City in the 1990s, recently posted a cool new entry. Gregoire lives in Paris, these days, but returned to NYC last summer. Regrettably, we were not able to meet up, but he took the time to revisit some of the places he’d first documented decades ago. See those pictures here.

In the interim, please stay safe and sane and look out for each other. There’ll be more here soon.

Back in Time to `89

As I was walking home from work on Monday night in something of a news-addled stupor, lulled into mental atrophy by pervasive waves of coronavirus hysteria, I spotted something both hugely familiar and entirely incongruous – a old flyer from a long-ago gig by Prong and Live Skull wheat-pasted to a painted plywood wall at the bottom end of Sixth Avenue between Canal and Grand Streets. What the fuck?

Shocked back into the moment by this comparatively ancient artifact, I essentially zoomed out to view it in context. Across the northern end of this plywood wall --- one used to fence in the outdoor shenanigans of Gitano Tulum, a sort of tropical-themed adult playground, complete with palm trees – was a wide array of gig flyers, movie posters and bills, all advertising concerts, events and movies from several decades back. It was like this tiny patch of real estate was stuck in a hole in the time/space continuum.

I took a few photographs (see below), figuring it was for a movie shoot or a television show. The new “High Fidelity” series, maybe?

This morning, as I was walking back by it in the other direction, I saw two people spraying the façade to make it look appropriately “weathered,” and I asked what the story was. Evidently, I was correct – it’s for a forthcoming show or film called “`89.” That’s about as much as I could glean.

I complemented them on their faithful job and kept walking.

Trivial facts: Circa the late 80’s, the building that this particular plot of real estate once hosted (since-razed) formerly played host to Triplets, an ill-fated steakhouse owned and operated by three identical twin brothers whose truly bizarre story was recently the subject of an amazing documentary entitled “Three Identical Strangers.” It also served as the location, earlier than that, for Lou Reed’s video for “My Big Red Joystick,” which I discussed here and here. Across the way was the Moondance Diner, which is now somewhere out west. In its footprint is the looming James hotel.

Here are some of the details. Click on them to enlarge. That's also not how you spell psychedelic. 

SoHo on Screen: Deux

Almost on cue, right after I shared the excellent documentary about the SoHo Memory Project here, I stumbled across the video below posted on the page of a Facebook group I follow. Titled “Walking in New York’s Most Expensive Neighbourhood [sic],” this lengthy clip is a wide-angled 4K video that showcases a rambling stroll around the SoHo of 2020, what the shooter – who goes by the YouTube handle “The 1%”…ugh --- calls “one of the most iconic shopping and fashion district of New York City.”

Astonishingly Trivial Bonus: If you’ve got a lot of time to kill and have a super-keen eye for detail, one of my stupid stickers that I spoke about here makes a fleeting cameo around 16:41 in. Can you spot it?

SoHo on Screen

My excellent blogging comrade Yukie Ohta of the SoHo Memory Project has become the subject of a new documentary.

Unfortunately, at the moment, it's not embeddable, so click thyselves over here to check it out. 

NYC 1911

The Unband Unbound

I spoke about “We Like To Drink, We Like to Play Rock’n’Roll,” the "official" rockumentary about The Unband – a trio I’ve typed about numerous times here -- specifically back on this post wherein I posted the trailer.

Well, as these things sometimes happen, some generous soul has seen fit to upload the whole goddamn film onto YouTube. How long will it remain there? Who knows? So, grab it while it’s hot.

Above is yet another shot I took of them at the late, lamented Continental during its 90’s-era heyday as a live-music venue, and not its current iteration as a pile of rubble.

The Lower East Side in 11 More Songs

The New York Times published a nice little piece by one of my favorite writers, this past Friday. “The Lower East Side in 8 Songs” by John Strausbaugh  (whose most recent opus, “Victory City,” all about New York City during WWII, is currently my mom’s favorite book) culled together a selection of tracks that harken back to key points throughout the decades, addressing jazzbos, proto-punks, rockers and beyond from within the cultural diaspora of the East Side of Lower Manhattan. Being the insufferable pedant that I am, I quibbled with his selection of “Waiting for the Man” by the Velvet Underground. Yes, the Velvets were L.E.S. to the very bone, but that particular track has more to do with Harlem (East 125^th Street and Lexington Avenue, where Lou Reed’s protagonist cops his dope) than the Ludlow Street roots of the band.

In any case, in perusing his list, I felt the need to add my own suggestions to the mix, most of which allude to my own eras. What else are we missing??

"Life During Wartime," Talking Heads, 1979

Admittedly, by the time Talking Heads released their third album, Fear of Music, in 1979, the band's days of hanging out at CBGB on the Bowery were over, replaced by world tours, growing global renown and quality time with cats like Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. This all said, "Life During Wartime" alludes to that period-specific locale with a degree of prescience. While New York City writ large was slowly recovering from the near-bankruptcy of the mid-70s, much of downtown Manhattan still seemed akin to a veritably lawless war zone. "This ain't no party, This ain't no disco, This ain't no foolin' around," famously sings David Byrne, his protagonist lamenting the passing of the salad days into the stark realities of desperate survival in a region under siege, strangely presaging Missing Foundation's own defiant slogan, "The Party's Over" by a few years. "Life During Wartime" was lazily held up by many a witless classic-rock acolyte as being some sort of anti-disco screed, but those oafs failed to take Byrne's lyrics in context. The scenario Byrne depicts was never a renunciation of disco. It was more a rumination on life in an environment so plagued with hardship and conflict that frivolous activities like dancing and having fun are no longer on the menu.

Today, the space once occupied by CBGB at 315 Bowery is a laughably expensive clothiers. The space once occupied by the Mudd Club at 77 White Street in TriBeCa is an exclusive condo ... although there is a plaque on the exterior, commemorating its tenure as the Mudd Club. Here they are playing in it...

“East Side Beat,” The Toasters, 1987

It might sound vaguely ridiculous that downtown Manhattan once had its own thriving ska scene, but that was indeed the case, for a little while. At the arguable center of that scene were The Toasters, a high-stepping, horn-honking gaggle of Big Apple rudeboys fronted by British ex-pat Robert “Bucket” Hingley, who brought a degree of Two-Tone-styled authenticity to proceedings. By day the manager of geek mecca Forbidden Planet (near and very dear to this blog’s heart), Hingley emulated his homeland’s premiere ska band, The Specials, by recruiting fellow Brit ex-pat Joe “Look Sharp” Jackson to produce their sophomore long player just as the Specials had drafted Joe’s peer and fellow “angry young man of the New Wave,” Elvis Costello to handle their debut. The resulting album, Skaboom, arrived in 1987. This standout track from same paints almost a “West Side Story” depiction of life in the East Village of the late 80’s, complete with references to police brutality, riots, junkies, skinheads and shout-outs to fellow NYC Ska bands like Second-Step and Urban Blight. For a while, Hingley operated his own ska record label and shop on East 10th Street, Moon Ska Records.

Today, the space Hingley's shop occupied is a derelict former ramen restaurant. Forbidden Planet, however, is still on Broadway.

“Burn Trees,” Missing Foundation, 1988

Espousing a literally scorched earth approach to the encroaching gentrification of the Lower East Side in the late 80's and early 90's, enigmatic noise-rock collective, Missing Foundation accrued a formidable mystique for their uncompromising aesthetic. Banned from countless live music venues for their penchant for riot-incitement and wanton property damage, Peter Missing and his cohorts burrowed further underground, pointedly distancing themselves from any conventional music-scene shenanigans and aligning themselves with the defiant squatters movement. Were you ever able to find them, Missing Foundation's records were violently expulsive and incendiary, dispensing all finesse in favor of industrial clamor and high-decibel agitprop. "Burn Trees" from their second album, 1933 Your House is Mine, is a perfectly realized taste of their mission -- a harrowing, repetitive call for destructive insurgence. The video for same (see below) bludgeons the point with footage of the Tompkins Square Park riots from August of 1988. Peter Missing de-camped from New York City in 1992, but still continues making art and music, although his current approach seems slightly less nihilistic.

You can still spot invocations of Missing Foundation (the cryptic upside-down cocktail-glass insignia) all over the Lower East Side.

"Invisible People," False Prophets, 1990

With hearts similarly aligned to the ethos of Missing Foundation, if not quite as militantly chaotic, False Prophets started off as more or less another early hardcore punk band like Kraut, Heart Attack, The Undead and Even Worse, earning them a spot on ROIR's seminal cassette compilation, New York Thrash, despite their brazenly artier inclinations. The band was led by one Stephan Ielpi, captured at the top of this post by photographer Q Sakamaki. Evolving beyond three-chord blitzes and into more refined fare towards the end of their decade-long run, False Prophets released Invisible People in 1990, its title track being a lilting, heartfelt ode to the plight of the homeless that sounded planets away from their earlier rants like "Mental Ghetto." The message of "Invisible People" was further augmented by the album cover art and video animation of illustrator Erik Drooker, whose stirring portraits of social inequity have gone on to grace magazine covers around the world. 

The video also finds False Prophets performing in the eroding, graffiti-slathered East River Park bandshell, a space that has since been re-imagined and cleaned up, although it's still a chillingly lonely spot at certain times of the day.

"There's a Riot in Tompkins Square," The Undead, 1993

Taking a more pragmatic-if-cynical approach to the continued unrest in the neighborhood, at the time, Bobby Steele penned "There's a Riot in Tompkins Square" with precious little empathy for any of the parties concerned. A former guitarist for The Misfits and a Johnny-Ramone-styled conservative (albeit one with a big, fuckoff mohawk, on occasion), Steele had little time for the hue & cry of the East Village squatters, equating them with lazy hippies. I have no idea how he feels about the Trump Administration's co-opting of the GOP, but he remains an affable, approachable guy, and is still making music with The Undead years later.  

Today, Tompkins Square Park is largely squeaky clean, compared to its late 80's iteration. 

“It Only Hurts When I Breathe,” Cop Shoot Cop, 1994

Never ones to shy away from the ugly truths of life in a city in decline, Cop Shoot Cop frequently spun narratives rife with bleak urban imagery, flinging off caustic couplets like a particularly world-weary Micky Spillane. "It Only Hurts When I Breathe" from the album that would become their swan song, 1994's Release, is no exception, coughing up grim verse after grim verse about a life-engulfing cynicism, underpinned by the band's signature dual-bass battery, which jovially swings, despite its otherwise dour demeanor. Possibly only Lower East Side locals will catch their telling invocation of an infamous Alphabet City street corner -- B & Third -- which unmistakably alludes to the shadowy purveyance of smack. 

Today, Avenue B & East Third Street is essentially a well-traveled nightlife destination that's about as comparatively threatening as a summer spent in Nantucket.

“Ditch,” The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, 1994

Though largely spawned from the same gene pool as their pals in Cop Shoot Cop, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion -- formed by the inimitable Jon Spencer in the wake of the fittingly acrimonious dissolution of Pussy Galore -- dispensed with all semblance of po-faced misanthropy in favor of a rollicking celebration of non-stop diaphoretic coitus. "Ditch," from 1994's suitably detonative Orange, is precisely that, finding Spencer giving emphatic voice to his roiling libido whilst also name-checking Ludlow Street, the former epicenter of a L.E.S. variant of bohemian bacchanalia anchored around since-shuttered bars like the original Max Fish. While only a few, short years prior to era of The Strokes, The Rapture, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, this iteration of the Ludlow scene seems like ancient history.

Today, the original Max Fish on Ludlow Street is long gone, replaced by chic and tony hotel with an insufferable bar. Similar ventures to Max Fish on Ludlow like Motor City, Barramundi, the Pink Pony, the Ludlow Street Cafe, Cake Shop and the Luna Lounge, which was a flashpoint for the afore-cited scene the Strokes kicked off, are also all gone.

“Alphabet Town,” Elliott Smith, 1995

Given the tragic circumstances of his untimely demise and some of his more notorious predilections, it's not much of a leap to make certain assumptions about what Elliott Smith's "Alphabet Town" is really about. Taken from his eponymous second album in 1995, the song is poetically vague but seemingly coded. Though not yet living in New York, at that time in the mid-90's, Smith sings about the infamous proclivities of Alphabet City denizens with a knowing lilt to his fragile, whisper-quiet voice, spinning a melancholy yarn about a tenuous relationship built on a grim codependence that the mood of the music mirrors. 

“Summer on Avenue A,” Cause For Alarm, 1997

Originally from New Jersey, Cause For Alarm (or simply CFA) don't seem to inspire the same immediate name-recognition as some their NYHC peers like Agnostic Front, Cro-Mags, Warzone, Murphy's Law, etc., but they were indeed early participants within that scene. Personally speaking, the fact that Agnostic Front named their second album Cause for Alarm only served to confuse matters, but I'm sure they all had their reasons. This particular track, extolling the arguable merits of eschewing the leafy byways of New Jersey for a life on the then much meaner streets of, once again, Alphabet City, wasn't released until the late 90's, seemingly jumpstarting a variant of "nostalgia-core" later zealously picked up by their pals in Agnostic Front with recent tracks like "I Miss the Old New York" and, wait for it, "I Remember."

“Forsyth Street,” Muckafurgason, 1998

A band not at all concerned with telegraphing any bleak message or pugnacious badassery, Muckafurgason was a light-hearted trio of indie-rock dudes who probably had more in common with the "alt.comedy" boom nurtured at Ludlow Street's Luna Lounge than with the new crop of indie-garage rock revivalists who were gestating at the time. They didn't take themselves especially seriously, as evidenced on tracks from their debut album, Tossing a Friend, like "Lunch," an ersatz-rap homage to their favorite meal of the day. "Forsyth Street," meanwhile, is a comparatively somber ode to their home address, glumly describing a vista of homeless junkies and naked masturbators in Sara D. Roosevelt Park just out their window. 

Today, Forsyth Street is just a bit more salubrious.

“93 Avenue B Blues,” SWANS, 2012

Walk by 93 Avenue B today and it's a fairly innocuous-looking doorway adjacent to a hookah bar called Horus. But back in the early-to-mid 80's, it was the heatless, windowless, concrete-bunker headquarters of Michael Gira and SWANS. True to their Spartan, disciplinary aesthetic, the address served as both an inhospitable rehearsal space and Gira's equally unwelcoming living quarters. When he speaks of what the surrounding neighborhood was like at the time, he does so without any fondness or nostalgia, painting a grim picture of lawlessness, depravity and violence. Tales he's told about life within 93 Avenue B don't suggest that things were much better behind the "safety" of that front door. This instrumental track from 2012's The Seer seemingly seeks to capture the experience of that space, at the time. Easy listening it is not. 

Today, once again, you'd never necessarily know anything of the sort went down at said address, although there is still a SWANS insignia (a cryptic spiral) carved into the pavement in front of the front door.

 

Sticking To It

This is from a few years back, already, but it speaks to my fascination with street-art/graffiti/sticker culture. Personally speaking, I think it’s kind of offsides for this guy to be pulling down people’s stickers (i.e. defeating the purpose of people putting them up in the first place), but he’s not the first guy to dismantle other people’s street art (or vandalism, depending on your perception/sensibility).

Anyway, enjoy.

Six Minutes on St. Marks Place

©RichAllen

I’ve spoken about photographer Rich Allen a couple of times here (notably here and here). In any case, he’s been sharing his remarkable images of the East Village and Lower East Side from previous decades for a while now. Just recently (i.e. yesterday), he uploaded a great video. It’s an amazing step back in time.

As I mentioned in my last post, so much of the topography of downtown Manhattan has changed in the past couple of decades that many of these locations might seem tough to recognize.

In any case, it's regrettably unembeddable, so please go here to check it out.