"If you don't like gay marriage, don't get gay married"

I shot this photo yesterday in Manhattan while Kee and I walked along The Highline. Nice.  The building was in the meat-packing district. 

click to enlarge

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Keelin on The Highline

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1 World Trade Center, a/k/a The Freedom Tower

By Jack Brummet, NYC/Metro Editor (reporting from NYC)

1 World Trade Center as it looks today - click to enlarge

What was once known as The Freedom Tower, and recently renamed 1 World Trade Center, is looking good.  I was not thrilled with the early sketches and concepts, but seeing it live, I think it is going to be impressive.  And thank God they changed the name.  The earlier name evoked the silly pathos of America's rampant jingoism in the face of the 9/11 attacks, reminding us of the "Freedom Fries" silliness.

The World Trade Center buildings were, to me, the real totems of New York City.  When I lived here, sure, I went to the top of the Chrysler Building once, and to the top of the Empire State Building a couple of times.  But whenever anyone I knew from the West Coast came to visit, I would haul them to the "observation deck" of the World Trade Center every time.  I even went to a couple of meetings there, for my work.  I loved those towers.  I remember going to the Avant Garde Fair there in the late 70's, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono had skywriting planes put their messages in the air, over the fair.  Those towers, clad in white, reminded me (when I saw it much later) of the Getty Museum's (in the Santa Monica Mountains near Los Angeles) gorgeous travertine stone.   Even more than the Statue of Liberty, the Twin Towers were my ultimate New York touchstone.

Me, in front of the original World Trade Center, 31 years ago

Up close and personal, the new building (which will rise to 1,776 feet high, with its mast) is going to be a great addition to downtown Manhattan.  Bring it on.

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42nd Street, 1986

By Jack Brummet
NYC Metro Editor

Not long before the Times Square cleanup began, there was still a thriving grindhouse row on The Deuce, a/k/a 42nd Street.  Here are some double and triple features that ran on 42nd Street 25 years ago.

42nd Street (North)

Rialto:  Basic Training/Madman
Victory: "3 Adult Hits"
Lyric: Police Academy 3 / The Protector
Times Square: April Fool's Day / Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
Apollo: Eyes of Fire / Hell Night
Selwyn:  Band of the Hand / The Last Dragon

42nd Street (South)

Cine 42: I: Critters / Deadly Blessing; Theater II:  The Toxic Avenger/ Bloodsucking Freaks
Harris: P.O.W.: The Escape / Exterminator 2/ Delta Force
Liberty: Make Them Die Slowly/Savage Man, Savage Beast / King Dick
Empire: Shaolin Kung Fu/ Shaolin Vs. Lama /Shaolin Red Master

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From The Archives: The NYC Slides, Part 3

By Jack Brummet
ATIT Chief Archivist

A couple of months ago, I began scanning a box of slides we have from the years 1973 to around 1983. I posted them on Facebook because many of the surviving subjects/participants are on there. I always intended to also put them on All This Is That. These photos are from 1977-1982. Coming next, Bellingham, Seattle, and Europe.

The gang, with Nick taking the photo

Keelin

Jack

Jean McBride and Jack

Jack and Miya

Jack and Vicki on the subway

Jerry, Norm, Jack, Kevin, Neil

Keelin, on our block in Brooklyn (324 Atlantic Avenue)

Jerry, Jack

Miya

Molie on the Staten Island Ferry

Jack, Vicki

Nick, Jack, Vicki

Pinky

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From The Archives: The NYC Slides, Part 1

By Jack Brummet
Chief Archivist

A couple of months ago, I began scanning a box of slides we have from the years 1973 to around 1983.  I posted them on Facebook because many of the surviving subjects/participants are on there.  I always intended to also put them on All This Is That.  And, now, I am finally getting around to it.  This first batch is from the years we lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn (1977-1982).

Click all photos to enlarge. Right click to download.

Parade in Brooklyn, shot from our fire escape at 324 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn

Franco, Claudia Curran, Nick, and me at President Nixon's brownstone, 1980

Jack and Franco, late at night on the UWS

Me, Nick, and Franco on our stoop on West 84th Street

Me with a wonderful painting Pinky and Cheryl Loaned us for the entire time we lived on 84th St

Jerry Melin and Jan, Upper West Side, 1981

Me, with my gal and my pal.  In heaven, or what?

Keelin, across the street from our apartment in Brooklyn

Keelin, Jan, and Jack in Brooklyn

Franco posing near faux armor, NYC

Franco and Nick outside a theatre in NY?

Nick, Franco, Jack, and Topiary

Miya (heart)

'Moto. but not quote sure where...it probablyis not Manhattan

'Moto, Nick, Kevin, and Jack on our stoop @ 158 W. 84th St. NYC

Nick, 'Moto, and Franco aka Kevin

Sean, on our fire escape at the Atlantic Avenue Parade

Pinky, turning Japanese.

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Stealth squatter: a woman secretly living (and eating) in a guy's apartment

A fascinating and creepy story. A woman had been living in the crawlspace of a guy's NYC apartment for weeks. He started to notice food was missing and set up a video cam.

"Yes, I found out the hard way that I had an uninvited guest living in my apartment, sharing my food and drinks and pissing in my sink. Talk about a creepy situation... only in the big apple...."

The hooligan in me can somehow appreciate the whole notion of a stealth squatter. Maybe those weren’t really rodents we heard in the walls when I lived in NYC?

You can read more on YouTube, or here on N*akedApartments.


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A letter from Son of Sam during the Summer of Sam

When I moved to NYC, it was, as Spike Lee called it, "The Summer of Sam." David Berkowitz was nabbed in a few months, and deposited in the Brooklyn House of Detention, right across the street from our apartment. This is one of the letters he wrote to the press as his killing spree continued. . .


click Sam's letter to enlarge
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The Fish, Part 1 - My life at Carl Fischer, Inc.

Click to enlarge - view of The Fish from Cooper Square Park or The Bowery

I moved to New York City in the spring of 1977, arriving at the Port Authority after a $50, eighty-three hour ride on the Greyhound Bus from Seattle--an excruciatingly cramped and bumpy ride in the back of the bus through Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York.

Click to enlarge. A shot from 4th avenue/E 8th (St Mark's Place) just north of Cooper Square. I think!

Keelin had already been there since September, along with a dozen other students from Fairhaven College, including the adorable and funny Jan Newberry who became one of our main partners in crime. For the next couple of months, we lived in a loft on Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn, then in a loft in the Houston street war zone near The Bowery, and later back to Atlantic Avenue in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn and for the last three years, at 158 W. 84th Street on the Upper West Side.

I walked through these doors every day for over four years.

The Son of Sam murders were in full swing and the New York Daily News and New York post were filled with Son of Sam headlines every day--almost daring him to strike again. Mayor Abe Beame continued his haphazard and befuddled stewardship of the city. It was dirty, the subways were not air conditioned, there were transit strikes, garbage strikes, litter everywhere, and Times Square was still filled with strip clubs, grindhouses, bad Irish bars, pickpockets, and three card monte players.

New York City was at one of its various low points. . .but it would get worse. Within a year, the first people began showing signs of H.I.V., and the AIDS epidemic began to devastate the city and pick up steam as it spread. The crack epidemic had not yet hit. Punk and new wave music were in full flower and theatre was flourishing. The Boss roared to life. The Yankees were hot. We would attend a World Series game the next year. In fact, we would sneak in using a password for which we'd paid rogue stadium employees. But these random memories are not why we're here. We're here to talk about The Fish.

I bounced back from my first disastrous job at Brewburger (See My Worst Jobs, Part 3), and from my near-death experience in Long Island College Hospital from a collapsed lung that blossomed into double pneumonia (I was a patient there for 23 days). While I was in the hospital, on July 5th, 1977, I watched as the lights of the World Trade Center, and every building across the river and all around me, blinked off. Within a few hours massive looting broke out in the city, and they had to re-open The Tombs to hold the three thousand arrestees. The lights came back a couple of days later. At the worst of it, the hospital was around 103 degrees.

Click to enlarge. July, 1977 - By the time this was taken, it was was no longer touch and go after a collapsed lung devolved into double pneumonia (which the first resident diagnosed as T.B.!) I recovered from double pneumonia after a week, and the pneumothorax was cured in two days once they realized they hadn't actually put the chest tube in the right place. They realized this 20 days in to my 23 day hospital stay. I did not file a lawsuit.

After a week of recovery at home, it was time to hit the job trail again. I grabbed a copy of The Village Voice and New York Times and started firing off resumes and pounding the streets. The letters and resumes: crickets. You were competing with Ivy League grads and their impressive resumes filled with prestigious internships and lists of community services and awards for even lowliest jobs at book publishers.

The silence from potential employers was deafening. I heard nothing back, and received a ream of polite mimeographed turndowns. In September, 1977, after a month of fruitless searching, I received two phone calls and one letter--all on the same day. The first was an offer from a publisher of adult fiction. I would receive a dollar a page for writing pulp porn. They would furnish a bare-bones plotline and list of characters, and after that, it was up to you. You would essentially write a book a week for a couple of hundred dollars.

The second offer of employment was with an adult "novelties" manufacturer and distributor. The job was manning the complaint desk and fielding phone calls , and mostly letters, from their consumers. Their largest product lines were dildos, "restraint devices," blow-up dolls, and a line of scented lubricants. My job would be to answer complaints and negotiate refunds and exchanges for defective merchandise for $2.35 an hour.

The third job offer came from a famous music publisher in the East Village near Broadway, Washington Square Park, and NYU, right across from Cooper Union, and just a couple blocks north of CBGB--Carl Fischer, Inc.

I did the sensible, but foolish thing. And along the way, I met some great friends like Pinky! and Cheryl, Neil Clegg, Crazy Richie, Fuzzy, Susan Ward nee Lurie, Dot Melin nee Jennin, Jim and Pamela Ahlberg, DelRoy, and Mary Farmer. And, in the end, probably missed out on a thousand hilarious stories at the novelty factory. I took the job at The Fish. It was a union job (the AFL-CIO Motion Picture Workers) and paid just under $10,000 a year.

Next up: The Fish, Part 2 -- How Fuzzy (aka Dwight Henry Thompson) taught a hillbilly boy from Seattle the ropes; how we came to be known at The Fish as White Dwight and N***er John. Fuzzy introduced me to Joey Ramone, Klaus Naomi, the poets Ted Berrigan, Tuli Kupferberg, and Allen Ginsberg. And mafia strip clubs, leather and S & M bars, gorgeous transvestites, the joys of chasing down anisette with Rolling Rock, and various other excesses and experiments, about which, more later. I think The Fish story may be good for about five installments...when you work with that many wacky people in a really strange company for four years, something pretty interesting will shake out. And it did.
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A Keith Haring mural on Houston Street on NYC's lower east side (early '80s)

I'm pretty sure this photo was taken by Jan Newberry or Miya Ramsay, although I don't remember either of them having a Polaroid Land Camera. I have the original Polaroid, but no one has written on it. It was stapled to a postcard or something and mailed to me from San Francisco, according to the postmark. In 1982 I was living in Seattle, just after leaving NYC and Europe, and before moving to San Francisco. So, someone took the pic. in NYC, and mailed it to me from SF? That would make Jan the likely photographer.


When we lived in NYC, you could still see Keith Haring and Basquiat doing graffiti on the street and subways. Haring used to do chalk drawings several days a week on these black panels in Times Square Station, which I passed through on my way to my job in the village. I saw him a couple of times drawing with chalk on the wall. Had people realized those drawings would one day be worth tens of thousands of dollars, they would have probably removed the walls.


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Headshot: Kevin Curran

click to enlarge

Kev must have given this to me sometime in the early to mid-80's. It *seems* to be an outtake from a photo session for a headshot during his acting days (and what I wouldn't give to be able to post his appearance on Days of our Lives I think it was).
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Elizabeth Suman on the Technology used during the Inauguration

Elizabeth Suman--a woman I've met in Seattle and who lives in NYC now--just published a pretty fascinating article in Nerdabout "10 Most Important Forms of Technology Used During the 56th Presidential Inauguration."

She goes into both the successes and limitations of technology in and around the Inauguration. Jump here to read the story on Nerdabout.
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The New York City Sewer Guy

click to enlarge


My boss brought me back a great canvas from New York City on a recent trip there. As you can see from the photo, it matches my own canvases that are hung in my office. The Sewer Guy creates these on top of those gigantic manhole covers all over the city, using paint and a rubbing technique. I love it!

Mark Nilsen has a web site here. If you ever bump into him on the street, he'll whip up a canvas for you either pre-made, or right on the spot on top of a manhole cover...
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The Brummets, Currans, Kruses, and Sanchezes in NYC

Click photo to enlarge - The picture of Pat Curran, Eric Sanchez, Megan Curran, Kris Kruse, Charles "Pete" Curran, Mary Curran, Jack Brummet, Keelin Curran, Kevin Curran, and an inset of Del Brummet (who took the photo) gets better when you know the stranger in the dark jacket on the right just walked up and asked if we wanted him in the picture too? Sure!

We are standing in Cooper Square in the East Village in this picture, heading over to E. 6th street for dinner at the Brick Lane Curry House. This was a great, warm night of dinner, strolling, and much laughter among the extended family.

I don't think I ever mentioned the "reason" for the trip back to our one-time home. About half our crew, above, came to NYC to participate in the Out of the Darkness overnight walk for the American Society for Suicide Prevention. They raised over $1,000 each for their walk around Manhattan. . .20 miles, from 8 PM to 7 AM. They were on this walk in memory of my brother-in-law Colin Curran, who committed suicide in NYC in August, 1982.


click to enlarge - photo of Colin Curran, taken by Keelin Curran, circa 1977, NYC
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