Farting Around is Good For You
Farting Around is Good For You
Further adventures in the default world.
To start where I left off a week ago, in my post subtly entitled You Don’t Have To Read This…
I’d already succeeded in coming to NYC to “move around” and “dance” and have what Kurt Vonnegut would call “a hell of a good time,” I’d also had a full Saturday to do even more of it, to fully live out the expression he actually used to close out the sixth chapter of that book A Man Without A Country:
“We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.”
I spent my Saturday, after the great IDLES show the night before that brought me to the city in the first place, joyously farting around, and those farts will now form another post that, really, you don’t have to read. Beyond the hope that, if you do decide to settle in here for the long haul, these diary ramblings may point you off in some interesting directions of discovery, there is a point to this post. It will be made at the end.
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1) The Football Factory
Football is better in company. Always. Much as I love the fact that I can watch every Crystal Palace league match these days, indeed every single Premier League match, live or on replay, (and all for just for $7 a month, thanks Peacock!), I sometimes lament how it has me hooked to my own isolation. Watching weekend matches at home, on TV, even with Paula alongside me, is a poor substitute for the real thing: watching with people, plural. It’s too easy to feel not just distracted – I’ll make some more coffee, what are we doing this afternoon, why are we debating J.K. Rowling in the middle of a football match? – but detached, remote in all the worst senses of the word.
Far more fun to bounce on up to midtown Manhattan from my Brooklyn digs – via Smith Street Bagels, because it’s New York City, and bagels – and join the Palace fans at the Football Factory, underneath a bar right opposite the Empire State Building known as Legends. It’s Palace’s home turf in NYC and I make a point of attending games there a couple of times a season. On old-fashioned Saturday afternoon kick-offs like this one (i.e. Saturday mornings in New York), there are any number of games going on simultaneously and the bar is packed to the gills with disparate, usually desperate, and occasionally rival fans, all watching their teams on their own dedicated suite of TVs in their own flagged-off corner – with many of those fans frequently aiming to out-sing out the others. It’s the nearest you can get to being at the ground from 3,000 miles away – or, arguably, the nearest you can get to being at several grounds at once.
Legends is a bar, so regardless of the 10am kick-off time, people have beers. Some people have lots of them. Not me, despite my previous post. Even in the old days, when I took pride in being the last man standing in the hotel bar at breakfast, I struggled with the notion of the post-breakfast beer, and I know myself well enough to avoid the temptation today as well. Besides, there’s nothing worse than having a daytime beer in the belief your team is going to win, only for them to lose and there still be six hours of daylight left to sober up. Sure enough, despite going a good goal up early on and bossing the first half, two minutes of lapsed concentration early in the second half sees us concede twice to Everton, who hold on to ratchet up their first win of the season. From a footballing perspective, it’s disappointing and frustrating, but from a social aspect, it’s just the ticket.
Besides, now I know that one of the former regulars, John J O’Connor, who has shown up today all the way from his new home in Nashville, in what may actually be his original (as opposed to replica) vintage 1970s Palace shirt, is not only among the hardest core of hard-core vintage Palace fans – put it this way, he had sideburns back in 1976, and even if he has grey hair now, he can sink a morning pint with the best of them - but also the author of the book Once Upon a Rhyme in Football and a regular contributor to Back Pass magazine. You don’t get that info by watching from the comfort of your couch.
2) Renaissance Man Roerich!
But you didn’t come here for the football. You came for the Russian artist you never knew about and the museum you never knew existed for his life work. And don’t worry, I had never heard of Nicholas Roerich until two weeks ago, when the Professor in my “Performance History: The 20th Century” course, told me about him in passing during our weekly Zoom class. She mentioned Roerich because he designed the stage set for the inaugural performances of Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet the Rite of Spring in Paris – the one so out there that it that caused riots. Soon after, the Russian Revolution sent Roerich into exile. He and his equally pro-active wife Elena settled for a while in New York, where Nicholas established an Art Institute and Elena an Agni Yoga Society, in the same large townhouse on the far western end of West 108th Street that now houses a museum to their lives.
This museum is an absolute treat; it’s also free. I was immediately taken by Roerich’s magnificent Himalayan mountain paintings – “of the 7,000-odd paintings that he left behind, at least 2,000 are dedicated to the Himalayas,” notes this Indian web-site - which for Roerich symbolized man's spiritual longing and spiritual transcendence, and for me were especially emotive because I’ve seen some of these mountains in the flesh. Roerich spent the last 19 years of his life in the Indian Himalaya, where he established an(other) Institute, having long ago converted to Buddhism, though judging by the title of one of the biographies for sale at the Museum, The Painter who Would Be King, perhaps developing a Monarchist complex in the process.
The paintings are the visible draw, but there are also sketches, his plentiful writings, working drawings of his stage set designs (including The Rite of Spring), details and photographs of his two multi-year explorations of Asia back in the 1920s, and the pact that was named after him in 1935, designed to preserve cultural artefacts and signed by all members of the Pan American Union—at the White House in Washington, with FDR’s signature at the bottom. “This is a treaty still in force,” notes the museum literature, proudly. Roerich, it’s fair to say, lived more than enough lives for one man.
3) Search & Destroy REsearch
But you didn’t come here for the Russian-born Renaissance-guru, you came here for the fanzine research, which necessitated a couple of subway rides back down close to where I had started the day, in Park Slope, via a brief stop-off in Union Square. There, twenty years since he moved in, which is about twenty years since I moved out of the ‘hood, I visited for the first time the home of Jack Rabid, editor of the Big Takeover, recent guest on The Fanzine Podcast, and a music obsessive of the kind I am not sure is still being produced in the younger generation. Jack recently convinced me I should have V. Vale, founder of the legendary San Francisco punk (and more) fanzine Search & Destroy and the subsequent book series REsearch, on the Fanzine Podcast, and to help in that cause, offered to let me peruse his back issues, given that they are not cheap to purchase.
V. Vale is maybe not quite on the level of Nicholas Roerich but his output of publications over the years has been truly phenomenal, and if the researchpubs website doesn’t give a sufficiently strong impression, then maybe these pictures from the first couple of broadsheet-style issues of his post-fanzine cultural bibles will do the job instead.
I probably don’t need to remind my Substack readers, as much as to say it’s worth remembering, how in pre-Internet days, we relied on publications like these to school us, per reSEARCH, with such graphic charts of Krautrock history, articles about Fela Kuta, editorials on free thinking, and entire book publications dedicated to Pranksters and Modern Pagans. Sadly, Jack’s archive collection of V Vale artefacts turned out not to extend to Search & Destroy itself – “I believe they got lost in the great flood,” he said with the wariness of every collector who ever entrusted his collection to the basement – and I moved on down the road…
4) Something Else
…To the new record shop on Park Slope’s 5th Avenue: Sterling Records, the one my friends Tom & Kristin had told me about the night before, the one being run by my old bartending friend from the Gate bar further back up 5th Ave, Gary.
As a record shop, Sterling fits the modern bill of requirements, with the usual combination of quality old 45s, rare albums and overly expensive new releases, but it’s the collection of music books that I admire most. They have been given proper space, with excellent curation that places, as you can see from these images, Factory/Manchester-related books on one shelf-top, reggae books on another shelf of their own, punk girls together and so on. (I even see a couple of mine in there somewhere.) The books here feel like they belong, like they have a sense of purpose. Like they’re valued and they have value. It gives me hope in an industry that can sometimes feel like the equivalent of being a horseshoe maker.
The shop is still very much a work-in-progress. Gary hopes to open the space in the back for a coffee shop, by which time, he also plans to be hosting book events, and yes, I say I’ll do one. Just promise the book selection won’t get so grand that it becomes overwhelming; I like how it looks right now. And then I buy a jigsaw puzzle.
5) Killer Conversation
I am super hungry, so I head to a vegan spot over the road, where I have plenty of time to sit down and eat given that I haven’t quite figured out the rest of my evening.) Being a Saturday night, many of my friends have plans already, or are playing gigs on opposite sides of town, and I hadn’t made a big deal about staying over the extra night because I quite liked the idea of taking it as it came anyway.)
Maybe it’s because I am the only person sat in the place, but maybe it’ s because I have that kind of face, somewhere between curious and receptive, and I guess the English accent never harms in the States. Any which way, the guy running the place, a middle-aged New York Colombian whom I will call Mario, was the talkative kind, the streetwise kind, the kind it’s always fun to hang out with and the kind that you know you don’t want to mess with, and the next I know we’re talking about the rough streets of the city and he tells me how he killed someone.
He came to his fatal/fateful (depending on perspective) life error by virtue of a neighbor back in the old days, further south out in Brooklyn, a guy who was apparently a burglar-rapist, and therefore due some street justice. They had gotten into it in the streets one night, and I guess the red mist came over Mario because he said he realized how far he may have taken the beating when the other guy started twitching. Mario did the right thing and called 911 – and then did the wrong thing and ran from the scene of the crime.
“That’s what they got me on,” he said. “Fleeing the scene. 28 ½ years.”
“Wait, what? When did you get out?”
“A few years back. This is my family’s place.”
“You spent 28 and a half years inside?”
“Yeah. I guess we both died that day.”
There is a song title in those words.
Mario wasn’t making excuses or apologies, looking for sympathy or understanding. It was what it was, and it took him down a long path of Maximum Security. For no sooner was he in Attica than he ran into a guy wanted to make him his “punk,” and Mario demonstrated to me mid-restaurant the pro-active measures he had to take to demonstrate he wasn’t going to play that role. Mario also regaled me with details of the quartet who’d escaped from Wallkill Correctional Facility in 1994, among them “the nicest guy you could ever meet.” That guy’s name stuck with me long enough to remember it and follow up later on. Sure enough, I tracked down a newspaper article, and this guy too was a convicted killer, murdering a jeweler in a robbery. Depends how you defend “nicest guy,” I guess, and under what circumstances you meet that guy.
I’m not judging. I grew up around violence. I’ve seen some bad shit. I’ve run from some of it and I’ve had to witness some of it. I’ve known a lot of good people in my life, but I’ve occasionally come close to people who exude evil, a kind of Mafioso evil that sends out deathly signals at several paces; I also learned way back not to make eye contact with characters in pubs that made Irvine Welsh’s Begbie look like a Samaritan. Mario was and is none of these. He took the law of the streets out on someone whom he saw to be abusing the more universal laws in a most horrific way, and he paid his price. I hope you’ll understand when I say I took a liking to the guy. He’s a dad now and I can’t imagine him doing the same again. I’d be happy to pick up our conversation next time I’m down there.
6) Black Mountain Wine Hop
A big part of me really wanted to hang out in Park Slope long enough to hit Barbes – another venue that was open two decades back when I lived in the area – for a 10pm bugalú show. (Bugalú was a Latino music from the NYC streets formulated mainly by Puerto Ricans but with a decidedly Afro-American influence; I so regret I did not explore it more thoroughly in All Hopped Up and Ready to Go.) But that meant killing another couple of hours first, and late nights are no longer my thing, even though I kind of wish they still were, and by now I had a hankering for a civilized glass of wine and a civilized place to enjoy it. My phone, combined with my instincts, pointed me to Black Mountain Wine House, conveniently on my walk back across Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens. In fact, I’d walked past the place once before at night and wondered about stopping in, but it had looked a little hipsterish, like maybe not the place a 60-year old walks into on his own on a Saturday night. (Damn, it feels strange typing out that age. My father died at this age. Anyone else have that same sense of detachment when they write it down?)
The moral: Never judge a bar by its exterior. While sure, the tables were taken by generally young couples and groups, I was not the only person who’d popped in solo, nor the only one my age. That alone is a healthy sign of a real neighborhood bar, but Black Mountain gets bonus points for living up to the other part of a wine bar’s title: it serves a really good range of really interesting wine, at prices barely more expensive than you’d pay for any old swill at a restaurant. I got chatting to the bar staff and especially, the woman who appeared to be the manager. I asked her about the popularity of “orange” or so-called “natural wine,” and as I suspected, being of that younger age, she sung its praises, pouring me a taster of “orange” Vinho Verde (yes, she poured a glass of orange green wine) that, honestly, tasted like sour Tango.
Demurring on the offer of a whole glass, I followed up a perfectly rustic Spanish Carignan with a pretty Italian Sagrantino, chatting, reading up on the news and perhaps even watching an earlier football highlight while the staff were busy with the other customers. It was a lovely way to close out a Saturday evening, another reminder of how much I used to enjoy the art and taste of wine, especially when I lived in a city where I could find places to drink it and walk some of it off afterwards. Nonetheless, I turned down the suggestion of a third glass partly because I had reached my lovely mellow limit and also, because wine by the glass in an NYC wine bar is not cheap. But when I came to pay, I found out that the manager was comping me the second glass.
Was it my face? My conversational nature? That British accent? Or did she think I was new to the neighborhood and needed that friendly welcome? Perhaps only the latter, as she made a point of letting me know they’re open daily – or nightly, I guess – until midnight. In turn, I’m really really happy to recommend the place. Black Mountain, corner of Union and Hoyt? I’ll see you there next time.
7) The Brooklyn Book Fair
I’m out of space and you’re out of patience. But I do need to give a shout-out for a reason I didn’t come home until Sunday afternoon. The annual Brooklyn Book Fair was taking place just up the road from where I was staying, and if nothing else, I was keen to get to at least one specific talk, and see one specific small-publisher friend who I knew had taken out a stand. Unfortunately, it rained Sunday, hard and long, and the event was outdoors, and it made what should have been a pleasurable meandering process something of a grind. Still, missions were accomplished. I got to the talk on “ https://brooklynbookfestival.org/event/playing-like-a-girl-the-double-binds-and-brilliant-subversions-of-women-in-popular-music/ ,” managing to say hello to my former Park Slope neighbor Ann Powers, along with a passing Brooklynite friend and Smiths fanatic Rob Sheffield, and even found myself buying a copy of Allyson McCabe’s updated Why Sinead O’Connor Matters after the talk – the book updated because, so tragically, the greatest female singer died shortly after its original publication. Personally, I don’t need convincing on why Sinead Mattered – she mattered to me more than Prince, as this post confirms – but there was enough substance in McCabe’s verbal observations to assure me I did need yet another music book in my collection.
I also got to say hello to another former Park Slope neighhbour and very close friend, Liz Frances, who fulfilled her own life dream a few years back and set up Street Noise Books, where she, quotes “make(s) books that combine words and images in a powerful way, as in nonfiction graphic novels and memoirs” that “seek to provide a platform for the voices of marginalized people.” Best of all, Liz has made a success of it, with almost every new publication receiving some kind of accolade or award beyond their almost universal good reviews. (One of her latest books is on Djuna Barnes, “writer, artist, and queer radical of the Lost Generation in the Roaring 20s,” a companion to Nicholas Roerich in terms of being one of those renaissance people most of us have never heard of.)
Liz was valiantly holding fort under her tent, as were all the other booksellers, dozens if not hundreds of these small presses lined all the way up and down Columbia Park. I felt both uplifted and depressed by perusing them all. On one hand, it’s so encouraging to see that books and magazines and small press literary publications – some of them not dissimilar from those I featured in my latest Fanzine Podcast on litzines – are seemingly thriving; that the written word, the published word, the tangible “read-it-on-the-subway” word is alive and well, or at least, not going down without a fight and that maybe we’re not all horseshoe makers after all. The depression comes from the sheer volume of it, knowing that there is no way almost any of it can be selling in any kind of get-rich quantities – especially because, actually, you don’t see anyone reading a book or magazine, let alone a small press litzine – on the subway these days.
Along the way, I made a new acquaintance at the Coin-Op Books Stand, when my brief pause over a table full of graphically illustrated music-related comics, books, and 7”-sized one-off 12-page “picture books,” found me chatting to co-publisher Maria Hoey, who shares all duties - writing, artwork, publishing - with her brother. (“And we’re not even twins!”) Asking me immediately if I was a Replacements fan, not knowing of course she was talking to someone recently did a podcast on the band and wrote a blurb for the back cover of the Replacements biography by Bob Mehr, she handed over a copy of Stinson’s Inferno, in which Bob Stinson, the one who died all too young, goes to purgatory. I passed it up, but I did promise to pass on her info to Bob (Mehr, not the one in purgatory), and took home one of the 7” booklet comics, Karl Marx Bolan, instead. Because, with a title like that, who wouldn’t? Besides, we have to support the indies, and though Coin-Op is probably not quite suitable material for the Fanzine Podcast, it’s a healthy living, breathing, creative example of that flourishing desire to produce art, to communicate, to be creative, that is such an ineffable part of the human spirit if we just allow it to be.
That last line could be the point of this article. It could. And to some extent it should and it is: looking back over this diaristic post, I see that with the lone exception of my trip to Paragon Sports, every place I went over Saturday and Sunday, everywhere I spent money, was independently run, what the Americans call a “mom-and-pop” business, every one of them striving in their own unique way to make the world a happier, better place.
Fact is, for me, there is so much stimulation to be found in weekends away like this, so much energy and enthusiastic in the personal interactions – the kind that, however lovely my online community here (on Substack), however productive my work days in isolation, simply can not be found elsewhere. I came home tired, for sure, but invigorated, motivated, energized. I returned to my new home with ideas and concepts; with the taste of good wine and food lingering in my mouth; with the sound of IDLES in my head and the vision of young Ash on stage with the band; with the joy of good friendships, several of which – as with Tom and Kristin, and Jack, and Liz – have run deep for decades. I came home encouraged that record shops will survive, that independent publishers will thrive, that live music is alive and well from a Barbes up to a Forest Hills Stadium. I came home knowing there are South Londoners in Nashville writing about football, that there are brother-and-sister teams in Brooklyn churning out graphic art about music. I came home knowing about Nicholas Roerich and Djuna Barnes, and that Sinead O’Connor matters to more people than me. I came home knowing that, “We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.” I came home feeling alive.
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Farting around is indeed a worthwhile activity, and quite rewarding if aimed in the right direction.
Man, I get NYC a week from tomorrow. Bummed to miss you. but I will do my own odyssey, and perhaps it will inspire me to write a similarly interesting missive.