For the weekend: Seven songs

Alex at Flaming Pablum passed along this music meme to, uh, me. Here's the deal:

"List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they're listening to."

My list seemed fitting to include here. For starters, I just entertained my 21-year-old nephew for a few days here. He's really into Britpop now, and wanted to know more about great New York bands. Of course, I quickly got out the album that started it all here: Vampire Weekend!

[Ducking beer bottles being thrown my way...]

For real though, I went about trying to give him a variety of New York bands. Yes, some are obvious. But it's a good place to start with a 21-year-old whose mother's favorite band is the Monkees.

In any event, since we played these songs the other day, I've continued to listen to them -- making these my favorite songs right now. (Ask me tomorrow, and...)

Lou Reed, Coney Island Baby


New York Dolls, Trash


James Chance and the Contortions, I Can't Stand Myself


Sonic Youth, Teenage Riot


Unsane, Body Bomb


Pussy Galore, Dick Johnson


Sugar Hill Gang, Apache


[Cheating] Bonus, for the summer season:
The Ramones, Surfin' Bird


Now for my seven tags...I don't have that many friends...this may take some effort!

Believe Me

Hmm...

Fire trucks on St. Mark's Place

Someone said something about a gas leak. Didn't seem too serious.

Appreciating the classics

Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is, of course, the most realistic film ever made about New York City. As the review on AllMovie.com notes, "Screenwriter Paul Schrader and director Martin Scorsese place this isolated, potentially volatile man in New York City, depicted as a grimly stylized hell on Earth, where noise, filth, directionless rage, and dirty sex (both morally and literally) surround him at all turns. When Jason attempts to transform himself into an avenging angel who will "wash some of the real scum off the street," his murder spree follows a terrible and inevitable logic: he is a bomb built to explode, like the proverbial machete which, when produced in the first act, must go off in the third."

[Hey...wait a minute here! C'mon, it has been a long week...In all seriousness, there are some unintentionally hilarious moments in Part 8...You get the idea just be watching the opening...]

"The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would give you a month's free rent just for signing a lease"

[Photo of 216 E. 7th St. in 1979 by Marlis Momber]

My obsession with the East Village in the 1970s and early 1980s continues.

In November 2003, new editions of the bible, Luc Sante's "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), included an afterword, which was also published in The New York Review of Books on Nov. 6, 2003. (I have an old copy of the book, and was unaware of the essay. By the way, the essay also appears in the booklet that accompanies the Stranger Than Paradise Criterion Collection.)

Here are a few of the many compelling passages from My Lost City:

I drifted down from the Upper West Side to the Lower East Side in 1978. Most of my friends made the transition around the same time. You could have an apartment all to yourself for less than $150 a month. In addition, the place was happening. It was happening, that is, in two or at most three dingy bars that doubled as clubs, a bookstore or record store or two, and a bunch of individual apartments and individual imaginations. All of us were in that stage of youth when your star may not yet have risen, but your moment is the only one on the clock. We had the temerity to laugh at the hippies, shamefully backdated by half a decade. In our arrogance we were barely conscious of the much deeper past that lay all around. We didn't ask ourselves why the name carved above the door of the public library on Second Avenue was in German, or why busts of nineteenth-century composers could be seen on a second-story lintel on Fourth Street. Our neighborhood was so chockablock with ruins we didn't question the existence of vast bulks of shuttered theaters, or wonder when they had been new. Our apartments were furnished exclusively through scavenging, but we didn't find it notable that nearly all our living rooms featured sewing-machine tables with cast-iron bases.

The neighborhood was desolate, so underpopulated that landlords would give you a month's free rent just for signing a lease, many buildings being less than half-full, but it was far from tranquil. We might feel smug about being robbed on the street, since none of us had any money, and we looked it, and junkies—as distinct from the crackheads of a decade later—would generally not stab you for chump change. Nevertheless, if you did not have the wherewithal to install gates on your windows you would be burglarized repeatedly, and where would you be without your stereo? In the blocks east of Avenue A the situation was dramatically worse. In 1978 I got used to seeing large fires in that direction every night, usually set by arsonists hired by landlords of empty buildings who found it an easy choice to make, between paying property taxes and collecting insurance. By 1980 Avenue C was a lunar landscape of vacant blocks and hollow tenement shells. Over there, commerce—in food or clothing, say—was often conducted out of car trunks, but the most thriving industry was junk, and it alone made use of marginally viable specimens of the building stock. The charred stairwells, the gaping floorboards, the lack of lighting, the entryways consisting of holes torn in ground-floor walls—all served the psychological imperatives of the heroin trade. . . .

Now, more than a decade after I finally finished my book Low Life, the city has changed in ways I could not have pictured. The tenements are mostly still standing, but I could not afford to live in any of my former apartments, including the ones I found desperately shabby when I was much more inured to shabbiness.

[For more amazing photos by Marlis Momber like the one above, please visit her Web site.]

Things are getting really tough at the Fed

Outside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Liberty Street, 11:20 a.m., June 12.

Bonus (Or, perhaps, Punishment):

Jeremy Irons rips off the Federal Reserve in Die Hard: With a Vengeance

(Because we're such big Bruce Willis fans!)

Old sign of the day

I came across this Cloder sign on Ann Street, which runs parallel to Fulton near the Financial District. I did a little digging and couldn't find out what Cloder was. Based on the condition of the storefront, it doesn't appear anything has been in this space for a few years.



Also, it's a one-sided sign, apparently to attract the one-way traffic moving east on the street.

This former business is directly across the way from the closed-off back entrance of the Blarney Stone, where their neon goodness brightly shines. Must enter through the front door on Fulton.

"Every successful society needs its Bohemia, a haven for the artists, exiles, and misfits who regenerate the culture"

Finally made it past the cover of the July Vanity Fair.

Recommended reading, this piece by Christopher Hitchens:

Last Call, Bohemia
Every successful society needs its Bohemia, a haven for the artists, exiles, and misfits who regenerate the culture. With the heart of New York’s West Village threatened by developers, London, Paris, and San Francisco have a message for Manhattan: Don’t do it!

[The photo: The studio of the artist Arnold Bergier, at Greenwich Avenue and 10th Street, which was demolished in 1960 to make way for a 14-story building (despite the painted entreaties). Photograph by Fred W. McDarrah.]

Checking in with "The God of Gambling"

Lysandra Ohrstrom at the Observer checks in with some OTB regulars, including "the God of Gambling." It's a brief slice-of-life of the character that will be lost if the parlors go:

If a deal to save the city’s 61 Off Track Betting parlors is not hammered out this weekend, we bet the Aqueduct race track in Queens is going to be pretty crowded come Monday.
The regulars clustered at the branch on Lafayette and Canal streets Wednesday morning almost all said that if they can’t gamble in the stark, grimy, fluorescent-familiarity of OTB, they’ll go to the track instead. No matter how inconvenient playing the ponies becomes, if OTB were to close, no one we spoke to had any intention of stopping.
“Gas is five dollars now, but people still want to bet,” said Sylvio, a suavely dressed retiree, sporting a Panama Jack straw hat. “If people want to bet and they got money they’ll bet, it doesn’t matter where.”
A man placing a bet at the counter interrupted, shouting, “We’re never going to stop! We can’t stop!
“I don’t work. I just play the horses,” said the jumpy, Asian man, who identified himself as “the God of Gambling.”
“I can survive. I pay rent and I have two cars, but too many people lose. I suggest they close it. A man will come in here with three restaurants and leave with two. They’ll come back another day and leave with one. Then they lose that and they’re broke. It happens all the time.”
A retired merchant marine who served for 38 years now visits the Canal Street OTB two or three times a week and goes to the track on Wednesdays. Though he “loses more than he wins”--$700 to $800 per day is not uncommon—he keeps on coming back “for revenge.”
“Some people come with 50 bucks to bet, they’ll lose 48 and have two dollars for the subway home,” he said. “Some people come with 50 bucks, lose it all, and walk 60 blocks home.”

[OTB photo by Bonnie Natko via Flickr. This native New Yorker has many more great photos here.] 

“New York at that moment was bankrupt, poor, dirty, violent, drug-infested, sex-obsessed — delightful”

New York City during the 1970s was a beautiful, ravaged slag — impoverished and neglected after suffering from decades of abuse and battery. She stunk of sewage, sex, rotting fish, and day-old diapers. She leaked from every pore.
[Expletive] was already percolating by the time I hit Manhattan as a teen terror in 1976. Inspired by the manic rantings of Lester Bangs in Creem magazine, the Velvet Underground's sarcastic wit, the glamour of the New York Dolls' first album, and the poetic scat of Horses, by Patti Smith, I snuck out my bedroom window, jumped on a Greyhound, and crash-landed in a bigger ghetto than the one I had just escaped from. But with two hundred bucks in my pocket tucked inside a notebook full of misanthropic screed, a baby face that belied a hustler's instinct, and a killer urge to create in order to destroy everything that had originally inspired me, I didn't give a flying [expletive] if the Bowery smelled like dog [expletive].

That's part of an essay by Lydia Lunch included in “No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York. 1976-1980,” a visual history by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley. No wave gets the coffee-table book treatment this month. Ben Sisario at the Times takes a look at the book in today's paper:

Of all the strange and short-lived periods in the history of experimental music in New York, no wave is perhaps the strangest and shortest-lived . . .

With crisp black-and-white photographs and interviews with musicians and visual artists, the book is a loving reminiscence of a largely unheard period, as well as a look at a seedy, pre-gentrified Lower East Side. . . .

"New York at that moment was bankrupt, poor, dirty, violent, drug-infested, sex-obsessed — delightful,” Ms. Lunch said by phone. “In spite of that we were all laughing, because you laugh or you die. I’ve always been funny. My dark comedy just happens to scare most people.”

[Lydia Lunch photo by Julia Gorton]

Bonus: Teenage Jesus and the Jerks live

Drv-In moving to the East Village?

Saw the following item in BizBash yesterday about Grand Opening's expansion away from its current digs on Norfolk Street:

The folks at Grand Opening, the small Lower East Side venue with a rotating roster of quirky activities, are expanding their offerings—both indoors and outdoors. The fall and winter concept was Drv-In, an intimate screening room outfitted with a 1965 convertible four-door Ford Falcon. This summer, the same concept (and the same car) moves to a larger, permanent venue in the East Village. The new Drv-In has a reception area and concession stand, and while the car still only seats six, the space can hold as many as 15 guests. For a bigger group, the company’s new summer drive-in series, Cars Under the Stars, takes over parking lots around the city.

According to the link for the new Drv-In supplied by BizBash, the address is 215 E. 4th St., which also happens to be the address for the very-much-still-open wine-and-tapas joint In Vino.


Or maybe the new location is the vacant storefront to the west of In Vino. Though that place still has a "For Rent" sign above it.

Hope for OTB: The end may not be so near

According to NY1:

A day after Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the end is near for the city's Off-Track Betting Corporation, Governor David Paterson said he is considering a state takeover of the organization. Bloomberg has threatened to close down the city's betting parlors on Sunday unless a permanent resolution can be reached that will not cost the city money. OTB actually generates $125 million a year in profits, but the city loses money because most of the revenue goes upstate to subsidize horse racing. Today Governor Paterson said he would explore every option to preserve the revenue and jobs that OTB generates. Nearly 1,500 workers would be out of a job if OTB shuts down.

Previous OTB coverage on EV Grieve can be found here.

No one is apparently approving the reader recommendations at visitnyc.com

How do I know this? Because I went to the site yesterday and started making stupid nightlife recommendations as part of the NYC & Company's "Just Ask The Locals" campaign. (According to the press release, "The site provides an expanded list of celebrity and local insider tips and top five recommendations, organized by Shopping, Dining, Arts & Entertainment and Nightlife. Visitors to the site also will be able to provide their own tips and ideas on how to navigate and experience the City.")

Why did I have such a mean-spirited high-school moment? Part of it was just wishful thinking. I wish that the Cedar Tavern didn't become a condo, for instance. Plus, I was actually curious if anyone was paying attention and patrolling the comments. More important, though, I'm tired of seeing these "Just Ask the Locals" ads everywhere. Seems as if I can't even walk to the bodega on my corner without seeing an ad with Mr. Mickey telling me about the lobby bar at the Bowery Hotel.

I don't mind real locals offering some advice to out-of-towners at the site, as we're invited to do. (Well, I mind a little bit...particularly when it's awful advice.) But! The site also features input from real celebrities! Say I'm from out of town looking for a place to go for a drink. Hmm, Sean "Diddy" Combs suggests a cocktail at the Mandarin Oriental. Perfect! Alan Cumming suggests the Box on the LES. Coltrane Curtis suggests the Beatrice Inn! Go the site and you'll see nuggests like this:

"If you are into clubs, I’d check out Butter, Marquee or 1 Oak." -- Sean "Diddy" Combs

All places that even tourists might know about, and likely couldn't get into unless they were really wealthy and dressed the right way. Here's the thing, the campaign (and site) only caters to an upper-class demographic. (For example, the site lists the most popular hotels, shops and restaurants based on user page views. The top three hotels? The Waldorf, the Bowery Hotel and the W.) This is the sanitized, condofied city our leaders apparently want us to be. All nice and glossy and...

Oh, and there's a whole Sex and the City section on the site:

This is the Life.
This is New York City.™ This is home to Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. This is a city known for its cutting-edge dining, shopping, entertainment, nightlife and culture. It’s where lines wrap around the block for a cupcake; where cosmos are sipped over conversation and where energy, excitement and style are found on every street. It’s classic and modern all at once with iconic landmarks that never lose their allure and new hotspots are constantly emerging. So whether you want to try the places made famous by Sex and the City or discover you own favorite locales—this is where it’s done. This is New York City.

Related: Et Tu, Debbie? (Flaming Pablum)

By the way, I don't have an approval system for this site. Yet.

Hot in the city (1910-1915 style)

The Library of Congress has a photostream at Flickr that includes archival photos of Manhattan. Given the diabolical heat of late, these seemed approriate to post; to see how those before us coped with the heat.

Caption reads, "Fountain, Madison Square Park on a hot day." (Where's Shake Shack?)

No mention where this was taken. Just a note about a man cooling his head on a hot day.

Caption reads, "Asleep in Battery Park on hot day." (Maybe they're just waiting for the new Apple iPhonograph to be unveiled.)

Caption reads: "Milk House, Tompkins Sq.; hot day."

Meanwhile, I wouldn't mind this scene in Union Square for a few minutes right about now...

Speaking of hot . . . checking in at the FunHouse Disco

So what is this? According to the YouTube description: "New York Hot Tracks visits the popular FunHouse Disco on 26th St. in Manhattan NYC 1984. Carlos DeJesus introduces Adam from Canarsie. Adam does some Buggin also known as kick dancing. This style of dance was unique to the club in the early 1980's."

Two for Tuesday -- Suicide

(For no reason. Just an appreciation.)

"Hanging out on the Lower Worst Side"

During my walk around the neighborhood Saturday, I came across a rummage sale in one of the community gardens on East 8th Street. (They seem to hold sales fairly often on weekends in the summer.) The garden is sandwiched between two buildings...million-dollar condos on the left, and a multimillion-dollar residence with a ground-floor apartment to help off-set the monthly bills.

By the way, 337 E. 8th Street, the address of the schmancy house, was the address of 8bc, the performance space/club/gallery that saw the likes of They Might Be Giants, Karen Finley and Steve Buscemi take the stage during its run from 1983-85. This was before my time here. So I always appreciate hearing stories about the place.

Meanwhile, here's a passage on 8bc by Cynthia Carr from the Times in 2006. The piece is titled Hanging out on the Lower Worst Side:

I remember walking down Avenue B with friends one night around 1983 when we ran into the two artists who had just opened 8BC, soon to become the East Village’s hottest club. They told us that if we wanted to perform (though none of us were performers), we were welcome. By then, I had also been invited to join a band, and I can’t sing or play.
The art world had cracked open, shaken by punk, which embraced ugliness and urban decay while putting a lot of old categories in question. What was music anymore when some of those No Wave records could clear a room? This was the era when everything could be tried, and there was space for the tryout.
This was the neighborhood I used to call the Lower Worst Side. 8BC occupied the basement of an old farmhouse. At least, that’s how people always described that building.

Meanwhile, in another piece from the Times on the Lower East Side music scene from 1988:

THE Lower East Side has often been treated as a neighborhood producing one sort of music, neatly categorizable and easily stuffed away with the dirty laundry. But when historians of the Lower East Side reconsider the facts, the 1980's will be thought of as an immensely diverse, fecund era for music. The composers and improvisers John Zorn, Elliott Sharp and Wayne Horvitz have broken out of their turf, gaining a larger audience as they reached artistic maturation. The intense and radical social criticism of rock groups like the Swans and Sonic Youth, and the once endless stream of legendary clubs (now curtailed by real-estate prices), from 57 Club and 8BC to the still-vital CBGB and the new Knitting Factory, will make the 80's sound like Eden.

Dumpster of the Day

On 14th Street just east of First Avenue.

Getting a Handle on the new yogurt place

I walked by the soon-to-open shop at 153 Second Ave., situated between Ryan's and the Thirsty Scholar, that will sell self-service frozen yogurt.

After I snapped this photo, a man walked out of the shop. I asked him when they would be opening for business. He paused for so long, I got the idea that he had nothing to do with the place and maybe just happened by to steal tools or something. He finally said "maybe in a couple of months." Dunno how reliable that is. You'd think they'd want to be open for the summer...

I've lost track at all the dessert joints along here for tourists and NYU kids. There's the Tasti-D-Lite across the street. And the fat, bald guy's chocolate place. And the 8-9 or so Berry places on St. Mark's...And how many things have given this spot a go in recents years? La Ame Russe? Barracuda Bistro?Bandito?

Because ugly dishwashers aren't welcome?

I have no idea when Link Restaurant and the adjacent cafe space closed on 15th Street and Irving Place. I went to Link once for a beer before a show at the Irving Plaza. I think my beer cost me more than my ticket to the show.

Anyway! The new place going in that spot is now hiring. And you have the option of sending them a photo with your résumé.

The Tower of Toys stood here