Flaming Pablum

In Search of West 5th

I fielded a delightful note today -- which was a nice change of pace -- from a reader named Kara who is a freelancer writer who contributes to a Greenwich Village-centric news letter called There's No West 5th Street ... which, while it hadn't ever occurred to me before, is accurate.

In said news letter, Kara helps aggregate news items and other ephemera she feels the readers might find engaging, and she was lovely enough to include my recent Big City Survey: Part One.  Check out the whole news letter here.

Cheers, Kara -- thanks for including me, and look for Part Two of the survey soonest. 

 

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.

Here's Hoping

Purloined from the Instagram page of actress and perennially fabulous hottie, Gina Gershon.

 

Nighthawks Stay Home

This image has been making the rounds on social media a lot, but only because it's so fitting. 

To quote comedian Billy Eichner:

Stay home as much as you can, my friends. I'm a native New Yorker -- we define ourselves by being defiant in these situations. This is NOT a time for defiance. This was not a terrorist attack. It's a pandemic. DON'T BE STUPID!

To walk the streets in certain neighborhoods, you'd never know anything was up. People are still doing their thing. This should be a collective effort. 

It's going to get worse before it gets better. 

For Those Not About to Rock...

I had a growing quandary, as this past week was slowly unfurling, as to whether I was going to attend a show scheduled to happen this evening at St. Vitus in Brooklyn. A record-release gig for Human Impact, a veritable NYC noise-rock supergroup of former members of SWANS, The Unsane and -- wait for it -- my beloved Cop Shoot Cop, this was promising to be an event practically tailor-made for my predilections.

I was super gung-ho, for a while, even when my longtime comrade Rob D. had to bail, being that the Connecticut university that employs him issued a strict out-of-state travel ban for the conceivable future. That was a bummer, but I was still looking forward to the show.

As events developed, however, I started to suspect that the concert was going to be cancelled, especially in the wake of edicts by Mayor De Blasio and a couple of fatuously botched addresses from our embarrassment of a president.

But it wasn't.

I was starting to have flashbacks to 2012, when the outer bands of Hurricane Sandy were threatening to arrive the same evenings as a SWANS gig at the Bowery Ballroom. Given their steely resolve and, possibly, bloody-minded iron will, SWANS refused to cancel that gig, as you might recall. It ended up being one of the most amazing live-music experiences of my life.

But this situation is different.

After much head-scratching and a few "should I or shouldn't I?" threads on social media, I decided I'm not going, as much as it saddens me. Out of respect for the collective effort to "flatten the curve," I am going to stay put. I don't necessarily believe I'd be at risk to contract the virus at said gig, but ... y'know, what the Hell do I know? I wouldn't want to become a carrier for it either and risk spreading it around, even if I didn't develop any symptoms myself.

I want to support touring bands and independent clubs, but the risks, considerations and the anxieties involved are outweighing everything. If you go -- be safe and considerate.

I want to have faith that we'll have this opportunity again.

Be safe. Be smart. Look out for each other. Get through this.

 

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. 

Word on The Street

"Touch me WASH YOUR HANDS, I'm Sick"

I remember the first time I ever heard Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- or, rather, saw the video for it -- I was in a long-defunct bar on Second Avenue and 12th Street called The Dragon Bar*. I was with a quartet of similarly inclined friends, and we all were stopped pretty much dead in our tracks by it. The clip was immediately followed by the video for "There's No Other Way" by Blur. The latter song was not as widely celebrated as the former song -- then or since -- but I remember being quite struck by it, as well, and immediately put it to my drinking comrades: "Which was better?" You can probably imagine how that went. 

This debate -- such as it was -- was immediately derailed when my friend Joanne walked over to the jukebox to put on the song below, handily drowning out the sound of the television. "This is better than fucking both!"

She was, of course, correct.

To all my Seattle people living in our new weird ground zero, please be safe. 

*The Dragon bar closed by the mid-90's and became a gay bar called Dick's. Dick's had a long run before it, too, closed and became the comparatively drab 12th Street Ale House. A million years prior to the Dragon Bar, it was a storied watering hole called Slugger Ann. 

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?