Flaming Pablum

Got A Light?

It being a whopping seven degrees outside today, the wife decided it was a great opportunity to do some arguably premature spring cleaning around the apartment. Suffice to say, not every member of the household was as enthused about this plan as she was, but there we are. 

Whilst Peggy was on a ruthless search-&-destroy mission in our overly-stuffed linen closet, we came across an old jar of matchbooks I used to keep in our previous apartment's bathroom. For a while back in the 90's, we'd both gotten in the habit of absconding with loads of matchbooks from any bar or restaurant that was foolhardy enough to offer them. I cracked open said jar to reveal a host of establishments that simply no longer exist. 

Today, the space that was the old Hi-Life Bar & Grill on the Upper West Side (which had great neon signage) is now a relatively banal clothiers.

Merchants was a chain of kinda douchey, ersatz-posh bars scattered around town that are all gone, I believe.

Around The Clock was a standby 24-hour East Village mainstay on Stuyvesant street just north of St. Marks. Today, it's a Japanese bakery called Pan Ya. 

The Stanhope Hotel was a stately concern across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the Upper East Side at 995 Fifth Avenue. The wife and I spent our wedding night there in 2001. It closed in 2005, and is now a luxury co-op. 

Grange Hall was a great restaurant on Commerce Street in the West Village with bright, airy space and a traditional American menu with inspired, Depression-era decor. It closed in 2004, and the space hosted a few other concerns in its wake. Today, it's newly vacant again.

Lakeside Lounge was a particular favorite Alphabet City bar I posted here about a few times. It closed in 2012, although it sort of lives on via its website. Today, the space it once occupied is part of Maiden Lane, the restaurant that took over the old Life Cafe space on the corner of 9th and Avenue B. 

The Cedar Tavern was my dearly beloved local on University Place between 11th and 12th. I wrote about it here extensively, most recently here. It closed suddenly in 2006 with news that the air rights above it had been sold. The plan was that they'd build above it, but that the bar would re-open. They lied. It closed and was gutted. The bar itself was removed and shipped to Austin, TX. In its footprint was built a strenuously ugly condo. The ground floor sat vacant for years until a "European" waxing space opened. Yeah, like we needed that. The circumstances of the Cedar's abrupt departure still make me palpably hostile. 

Cafe Noir was corner bar in SoHo with a kitschy Moroccan theme on the corner of Thompson and Grand Streets. It was a great spot for beers and tapas, but closed around 2012. I believed they re-located to TriBeCa. This particular space is now a somewhat ridiculous lingerie shop.

Technically, Chumley's on Bedford Street in the West Village and ACME on Great Jones Street are both still going, but both are newly "bespoke" versions of their former incarnations. I frothed at the mouth about the shitty new version of Chumley's most recently here. ACME, meanwhile, used to be a great BBQ joint with a disarming selection of hot sauces. It also came appended by a live music venue in its lower quarters called -- wait for it -- Under Acme. My friends' band The Hot Corn Girls played a gig or two there. More recently, however, ACME underwent a "culinary transformation" and now serves "French-meets-Italian" fare. The space beneath that was Under Acme is now reserved for private functions. Read: It went all upscale and prohibitively pricey and now, basically, sucks. 

Lastly, The Knickerbocker Bar & Grill at 33 University Place is still there, mercifully, and retains its rarefied character of old Manhattan. If it ever closes, I will be devastated beyond words. 

Hats Off to the Highline

Relatively hot on the heels of news that the space that was formerly known as alternately Webster Hall and The Ritz is reopening later this year (although it’s reopening now directly across the street from a new mega-hotel …. the guests of which, I’m assuming, might not be thrilled to be staying across the street from an active live music venue), comes news that the Highline Ballroom over in Chelsea is shuttering.

While by no means good news, I can’t say I’m especially heartbroken, as the truth of the matter is that I only darkened the doors of the place once, and that was to see The Stranglers in 2013. For whatever reason, I’ve never gone to another show there.

That being said, it seems more often than not that the shows I do want to go to are now happening at venues in Brooklyn. Both of my new favorites – IDLES and Daughters – are both playing in Brooklyn in the next few months (at Brooklyn Steel and Warsaw, respectively). That’s cool, and I’m planning on going to both, but … I am missing the days when Manhattan was more of the destination for these things.

In any case, farewell, Highline – I should have known you better. For what it’s worth, that Stranglers show was absolutely astounding for both crowd and band alike.

Return to Dirty Old Fun City

Astonishingly persistent readers here might remember a post from -– Jesus -– five years ago already wherein I documented the doings of an intrepidly obsessed cinephile named Jonathan Hertzberg. Hertzberg took it upon himself to compose something of a master-reel of footage from New York City-centric cinema from arguably the most adventurous era, that being the 1970’s (and into the very early 80’s). This was all culled into a frankly overwhelming video series called “Dirty Old New York a.k.a. Fun City.” The end results were a location-spotting NYC blogger’s dream, …. kind of the cinematic equivalent to the Beastie Boys’ sample-heavy watershed opus, Paul’s Boutique.

When I’d penned that original post in 2013, Hertzberg had only completed, I believe, two installments of the series, and I somewhat churlishly whined that he hadn’t included any footage from Tony Scott’s “The Hunger,” Milos Foreman’s adaption of the Broadway musical “Hair” and a host of films from later in the 80’s. At the time, Hertzberg himself wrote in. Here’s what he had to say.

Thank you for words and space you've devoted to my "Dirty Old New York" project! These are fluid pieces and have been updated already a few times with more planned, i.e. "missing" footage could and likely will appear in the updates, like firmware. It's hard to have every wanted film on hand at any moment. I was a bound a bit by availability, quality of footage (rules I broke a few times), and time frame (which I also stretched a bit). In general, I was going for DVD-quality, 16x9 footage from approximately '66 to '84. But, this has stretched a bit into '85. I had to stop somewhere or it would keep going, and I was looking for the gritty '70s-like years for the most part and not the period when the '80s started to look like the '80s as we remember it.

DOWNTOWN '81 appears for a bit in Part I and returns in Part III. SUSAN will likely appear in III. HAIR and KING KONG and some of the others you mention should be in there as well.

Tellingly, it’s taken me five goddamn years to get back on board. In the ensuing half-decade, Hertzberg not only completed his series, concluding with a fifth chapter, but did some specialized cuts as well, concentrating on stuff like recurring character actors, a Super 8 reel of New York footage his father shot in 1969 and other fun stuff, all very much worth checking out.

For the sake of this post, I’m going to embed Part IV of “Dirty Old New York aka Fun City” being that a passage of it enjoyably concentrates on “punk vs. disco,” cannily juxtaposing the strangely parallel exploits of John Travolta’s Tony Manero from “Saturday Night Fever” with Richard Hell from “Blank Generation.”

 

Cool, right, well, click here to go to Hertzberg’s Vimeo page to watch the whole series and then some. Tell’em Flaming Pablum sent ya.

Bowie's Day

Today is the birthday, of course, of the late David Bowie, who died three years ago this Thursday, … an event the world is still coming to grips with.

A lot has been said since his passing (I memorialized his impact thusly), and his absence continues to be felt. While we still have his enjoyably vast body of work to explore and/or re-discover, there will sadly be no more from the great man.

Every Bowie fan has their own favorite iteration. While I first warmed to his apocalyptic, proto-goth phase circa Diamond Dogs (the first record of his I acquired after appropriating my older sister’s copy of the ubiquitous ChangesBowie LP), thrilled to the post-punk-imbued Scary Monsters and got swept up in the unabashedly populist reign of the Let’s Dance days (hey, it may have been pure pop for the masses who couldn’t get their heads around his earlier work, but it was still fucking marvelous music), I prefer to remember Bowie preserved in the video below, an augmented outtake from the 1981 film, “Christiane F.”

If you’ve not seen it, don’t get too excited about the film, unless you genuinely enjoy gloomy scenes of squalor, drug abuse and sexual degradation in early 80’s Berlin. That all said, the title character (played by the doe-eyed Natja Brunckhorst, who appears in the latter-half of this clip) is obsessed with Bowie. As such, this is a snippet of “the concert scene,” fleshed out and subtly augmented by a savvy YouTuber named Mister Sussex. Sussex excised most of the narrative elements of this clip (i.e. heroin-addled Euro-teens in varying states of despair) and beefed up the Bowie content. I think he did a pretty great job of it, actually.

Some curious factoids: Bowie & Co. are lip-synching here, but doing it masterfully. Then again, footage of Bowie reading aloud from a phone book would be damn compelling, too, as far as I’m concerned. Secondly, evidently the wide crowd shots meant to imply the expanse of a concert stadium were allegedly lifted from footage of an AC/DC show -– and in the final, released version of “Christiane F.,” there’s even a wide shot wherein AC/DC fleetingly appear –- were the editors on heroin, too?

Thirdly, the Bowie footage was purportedly shot not in Europe but in New York City, somewhere. Based on the grey curtain backdrop, I’m speculating if it wasn’t shot in the confines of the Upper West Side club, Hurrah, where the video for “Fashion” was later shot. Anyone?

While other mitigating factors arguably mire its excellence -– like the fact that this version excises most of the slowly building intro and/or that arguably lamentable guitarist G.E. Smith appears (he later of “SNL” notoriety and also an inexplicably right-leaning wingnut who played this song at the RNC in 2016, seemingly oblivious to its frothy references to the occult and cocaine), it captures a certain period of Bowie’s elegant majesty perfectly. From his signature profile to his popped-collar James Dean jacket, he is the quintessence of cool, here.

It's too late to be hateful.

Your Friday Flyer

No reason, other than boredom. I was actually at this show in 1988. It was delightful. Rest in peace, Stiv.

Whigged Awesome: Whither the Upper Crust?

Upon hearing the disheartening news that The Upper Crust had decided to put their royal selves on “indefinite hiatus” recently, I dialed up some of the fabled Boston band’s finer recorded moments over the holidays, which led me to finally view the 2004 documentary about them (see below).

I’ve mentioned the Upper Crust here a few times, usually in relation to since-shuttered venues like Brownie’s. They were among a coterie of bands like The Unband, Nashville Pussy, The Candy Snatchers, The Pleasure Fuckers and The Lee Harvey Keitel Band, to name a small few, that my friends and I would regularly go see live back in the mid-to-late 90’s, usually at venues like The Continental, Tramp’s and the afore-cited Brownie’s, although I want to say I remember a gig The Upper Crust played on The Frying Pan, a disused barge-turned-live-music-venue, wherein the vessel actually caught fire during the performance. If memory serves, the Upper Crust manfully kept playing as the ship fleetingly burned.

If you’re regrettably unfamiliar, The Upper Crust were originally a quintet who played a high-decibel variant of heavy garage boogie ala AC/DC, whilst dressed like aristocratic fops from the 18th century. While that sounds slavishly gimmicky, the single element that set The Upper Crust well apart from similarly high-concept novelty bands like Dread Zeppelin or Clowns for Progress was the undeniable fact that they wrote great, hilarious, hook-laden songs and they actually fucking rocked. Resplendently bedecked in their signature powdered wigs, pancake makeup, ruffled shirts and platform shoes, The Upper Crust looked endearingly ridiculous, but completely delivered in the rock --- or roque department.

Don’t believe me? Enjoy….

I was undeservingly privileged to see the band perform a number of times, but it always remained to be seen if they were ever going to take off beyond the confines of the then-still-burgeoning punky East Coast rock circuit. I would routinely insert tracks of theirs on mixtapes (remember when we all still made those?) for friends, extolling the band’s myriad merits. In time, however, our little show-going gang started to splinter off and get married (myself included), and then the venues started to close and Manhattan itself started to seem less and less like a place that the Upper Crust and similarly inclined bands would ever find a place to play. Jesse Malin's been doing his damnedest to stem that tide, via endeavors like Bowery Electric and Coney Island Baby, but Manhattan just isn't the same place it used to be ... which fucking sucks. 

As such, I was sad to learn that the band was finally hanging it up. I walked by the old shop in SoHo that lead singer/guitarist Nate Freedberg (stage name: Lord Bendover) was running, but it no longer looked to be a going concern. Then I learned of the documentary. Already fourteen year old by this point, the film tells a decidedly less cheery tale. While amusing that one of the original members went onto become a speech-writer for President Clinton, the stories of intra-band acrimony and conflicting aspirations seem all too familiar. To my mind, the Upper Crust SHOULD have been a bigger deal. The added oddity that drummer Jim Janota (stage name: Jackie Kickassis) is an avowed gun-nut only makes the story stranger.

As I understand it, the band members are all pursuing other musical ventures these days (check out Nat's doings here), but one hopes they might yet again reconvene. I would go see them again in a heartbeat.

Herewith “Let Them East Rock”….

Reincarnating the Ritz?

You may remember my series of weepy, tear-stained posts about the closing, gutting and gradual decay of what had been Webster Hall, a.k.a The Ritz, right? Well, despite claims that it had been purchased by an agency called AEG and that it was going to be re-booted into some new venture in 2020, today came news that it is allegedly going to re-open sometime this year.

As reported here by ….er…..something called Dancing Astronaut, while the plan was for the iconic space to become a new “sports and entertainment venue called Spectrum Hall,” it’s now evidently uncertain how the new space will manifest itself.

While I harbor zero hope of the storied venue returning to its former glories in any semblance to its former capacity as The Ritz, I am heartened by news of its impending return.

We shall see.

I went, yet again, into great chapter and verse about my love for the old venue in this post. Like some sort of omen, someone on eBay is hawking a t-shirt from those very Fishhone Christmas shows I wrote about ...for a paltry $219.00. Go fetch. 

Oh Nevermind: Cop Shoot Cop at the Pyramid on Avenue A

It should come as very little surprise to anyone that knows me, but I “run” and/or “manage” Facebook’s seemingly only Cop Shoot Cop page. Actually, to be fair, that’s not true — there’s also a group page called We Demand a Cop Shoot Cop Reunion, but it’s dormant on the best of days. If you’re looking for all things Cop Shoot Cop on Facebook, I am evidently your authority. At the very least, I’ve manage to amass arguably the greatest collection of C$C and C$C-related visual ephemera to be found on the `net. See that here, should you care. So, yeah, yay me.

Why don’t any of the original Cop Shoot Copy guys get involved? Dunno. I assume they either just don’t care, have way better things to do and/or are just fine with me handling it. I was drafted, let’s remember, at one point, with the task of putting together that star-crossed and ill-fated Cop Shoot Cop coffee-table book that regrettably never came to pass. One could argue that said aborted assignment gives me the right. Or not. Whatever. Regardless, I've kept it going for at least five years now, and I’m always heartened that people still contribute to it. It doesn’t happen with roaring fervor, but every now and then, someone posts something rare — which, in the grand scheme of things, is really the only pertinent descriptor for Cop Shoot Cop and their ilk — a scene, a sound and a sensibility that is swiftly becoming anachronistic. This week, that happened.

A user named Erin posted a super-rare flyer of the band’s yesterday. This was from the early days, when commanding officer Tod [A] -- that's him at the top of this post in an image respectfully purloined from Recalcitrant Monthly --  was toiling, by day, at a copy shop on West Broadway, a tenuous state of disgruntled employment that, at the very least, gave him access to vast amounts of paper and copying equipment with which to illicitly print up the band’s signature brand of provocative propaganda. For one particular gig at The Pyramid on Avenue A, Tod paired his own typically eye-catching graphic skills with an appropriated image from the illustrious oeuvre of one Tom of Finland. For those unfamiliar (although there was recently a bona fide biopic on the man), Tom of Finland was an artist from — WAIT FOR IT — Finland renowned for his beatific depictions of homosexual erotica, usually concerning workaday scenarios involving impossibly burly sailors, firemen, cops, etc. Imagine the artwork of children’s illustrator Richard Scarry, only instead of anthropomorphic cats, dogs and piglets, it was blissful, hulking men with titanic erections.

To wit, Tod came up with this poster below …. a bit of promotional material that doubtlessly furthered the notoriety of the band, probably to the pronounced chagrin of the local constabulary. People of delicate constitutions and easily-offended sensibilities should avert their eyes...

I’d actually seen this poster before, hanging on the wall of the original incarnation of Max Fish on Ludlow Street during a late-80’s/early-90’s flyer retrospective. I wish I’d brought my camera to that one.

Also this week, I happened to spy a flyer on the official Instagram page of the mighty Lunachicks for a series of gigs also at the Pyramid. Mind you, as discussed here before, the Pyramid on Avenue A used to be this amazing, ground-breaking, scene-sharing venue that hosted all stripes of subculture — from punks, hardcore kids, metal heads and noise-rock freaks through drag-queens, club kids and disco-zealots, all more-or-less happily co-mingling in this grotty little bar. I haven’t been back in decades, but if the video in this post is to be believed, that iteration has since been replaced by just another douchey disco.

Anyway, boo hoo. The thing that, of course, struck me about this flyer was the line-up. On the otherwise sleepy night of Thursday, April 26, 1990, Cop Shoot Cop shared a bill with the similarly inclined local band Rat At Rat R (who I discussed here) and a hip and happening little beat-combo from Seattle called …. Nirvana.

While that Nirvana show has since become the stuff of legend (for some), sadly, there is precious little documentation of the Cop gig, although — to be fair — it was only one of many nights they played this particular venue over the years. Two short years later, Nirvana and Cop Shoot Cop would both play the fabled Reading Festival in England, although Nirvana were headliners and Cop Shoot Cop were relegated to something called The Session Tent (flanked by their compatriots in the Lunachicks, among others). Cop Shoot Cop did eventually make it to the big stage at Reading Festival in 1994, although still at the bottom of the bill, under friends like Helmet and the Jesus Lizard, with …. er … the Red Hot Chili Peppers headlining.

Does any of this matter now? Maybe only to a few. But for those it does matter to, I’m happy to share.

Meanwhile, as discussed in great detail here,  I’m still searching for the rest of THIS poster….

2018: The Year in Photographs

If you spend any meaningful amount of time on this blog, or are foolish enough to follow me on Instagram, you already know that I take what some might consider an irresponsibly laborious amount of pictures. I can't help myself. Were I unable to share those photographs on social media or here on this blog, I don't think I would behave any differently. And in an era when one can capture striking images without a huge, hulking camera but with simply one's iPhone, I find myself routinely pausing throughout my travels to do just that. 

As such, here are some of my own favorite images I was lucky enough to capture this year. You may have seen some of these before, but I tried to eschew repeating shots from the Beirut trip, the  England trip and the summer, as I feel I've covered those already. Click on each to enlarge, should you feel so inclined. 

Anyway, please enjoy, and why not share your own? 

Rest in Peace, Bleecker Bob Plotnik

I wrote about the significance of Bleecker Bob’s here seemingly more times than can be humanly quantified, the last meaningful post, I believe, being the one documenting my visit to the frankly mediocre Japanese restaurant that now operates in its former space. Above is how it looked in about 2010 or so (that’s m’self and Oliver).

The final chapter, alas, came this week with the news that “Bleecker Bob” Plotnik himself passed away. Plotnik suffered a stroke in 2001, and had been in declining health ever since.

Reactions to this news were candid and mixed. By most accounts, Bob was a frequently disagreeable and polarizing figure, prone to treating people fairly brusquely. Speaking as one of his frequent customers, I certainly weathered my share of his scorn on occasion.

That said, I do fondly remember one afternoon when my friend Rob B. and I were in there and Bob was involved in a surreal exchange with a trio of Scandiweigian metalheads. They’d evidently asked Bob to look at some rareified hair-metal artefact behind the counter, but their clipped, broken English was making the exchange somewhat painful for all parties concerned. Never known for his wellspring of patience, Bob was swiftly losing his easily-abandoned cool with these dudes, and even glanced at us for moral support at one point. My takeaway from that was that we may have been irritating shitheads to him, but we were HIS irritating shitheads. That’s as close to a warm’n’fuzzy moment about the man as I can recount.

Prior to working together at the New York Review of Records, estimable Brit rock-crit legend Kris Needs manned the cash-register at Bleecker Bob’s (indeed it was hirsute Kris who sold me my first vinyl copy of Acid Bath by Alien Sex Fiend). On Kris’ Facebook feed this morning, he posted this nice tribute to Bob…

Sad news; I worked at Bleecker Bob's for nearly three years (86-89). He could be a narcissistic oaf who treated his customers like shit and staff even worse, shouting, spitting when he spoke, getting me to run and get his McDonald's in icy blizzards, take his great dane Max out in all weathers with pooh sack ready, insulting to my friends and often treating me like a slave. But he also encouraged a weird fierce loyalty, looked after me when I was in hospital (catching pneumonia from those food runs!) and did much to bring great records to NYC (and export old LPs to the UK which I boxed in the basement). I didn't like it when old black guys came in to the store with their precious jazz collections, he gave them a dollar apiece like he was doing them a favour then marked them up to $40 a pop after they'd left and many other cruel traits but, underneath the scary broadsides lurked a heart of gold and he certainly didn't deserve to spend his last years crippled from a stroke. I fell victim to the city and had to leave his minimum wage employment, under something of a cloud I'm not proud of, but the man was an iron girder of the old NYC that has now vanished into the history books. RIP Bob.

Bleecker Bob Plotnik may have been a cantankerous, misanthropic curmudgeon, but my early days of music fandom would have been markedly dimmer without his shop.

Rest in peace, sir.