Flaming Pablum

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...

Abandoned Posts

Over the past several months, there have been a few posts that I'd started composing that, for whatever reason, I abandoned. Either because I was distracted by other commitments at the time or simply because I lost the momentum, each of the posts below failed to reach fruition. In their dormant limbo state, they are as follows…

1. Back to the New York Comic ArtS Gallery - A trip back in time to my days as a sniveling, comic-collecting grade schooler scouring the less salubrious corners of New York City for vintage comic books.

2. Spinning Out: Updating SPIN’s “40 Best New York City Videos” List - a needlessly lengthy and link-heavy aggregation of the best music videos shot in New York City.

3. Revisiting the 84th Street Bombers - A further rumination on a notorious gang of Yorkville toughs from the early `80s.

I actually made a fair amount of headway in each of these.

Given the option, which of these would YOU actually want to read … if any?

Let’s hear it.

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.

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 steep 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

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