Jeff Clinton portrait

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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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Dean - a photo of unknown provenance

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I'm not sure when this photo of Dean was taken, but it reportedly came from a business development trip in the middle-east.
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Rock Shows in Kent, Washington at Tiffany's Skate-In

I went to see my earliest rock shows (after seeing The Beatles at Seattle's Coliseum) at Tiffany's Skate-inn in Kent, Washington. Barney Armstrong, a local Kent boy, always seemed totally cool, since he was fronting rock bands like Aftermath, and Ralph. I think I saw them both at Tiffany's. I also saw Fragile Lime there, as well as Merilee Rush and the Turnabouts (who had a national hit later with "Angel of the morning"), who Barney had also played with. Around this time I also saw Them with Van Morrison (Gloria, Mystic Eyes, Brown Eyed Girl), but I can't remember if it was at Tiffany's or elsewhere.

According to PNWbands.com, "The Barney Armstrong Aftermath played the club circuit in the Pacific Northwest. This was the first band Barney formed after leaving Merrilee. Barney and the band gained notoriety with a "Mister Bojangles" tap dance routine that Barney would do. Adding to their uniqueness was a pedal steel guitar and a five-foot grand piano in a rock band. Bob "Boom Boom" Bennett, formerly with the Sonics banged the skins for the Barney Armstrong Aftermath."

Some other bands that played at Tiffany's:

The Archies

The Bards

Borrowed Time

City Zu

The Box Tops (Alex Chilton's first band...Soul Deep, etc.)

Fragile Lime

The Pied Pipers

Sundae Funnies

The Sunn

Merrilee and the Turnabouts

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"No hamsters" - 1980's dating service video compliation

Dating Montage is an 80's video-dating video compilation on Daily Motion, an Internet video site. Whew. One line, by one of the prospective suitors says it all: "No hamsters."

Dating Montage
Uploaded by smithy00101. - Independent web videos.

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SP No. 39 - jack brummet under the lens

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Joseph Griffith's painting of George Washington - The Surrender

[click the painting to enlarge]

According to Joseph Griffith, "I painted this for the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown when George Washington and the Continentals traunched the British. The county would not dignify it with a response, however, George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate kindly wrote me an e-mail saying they would “pass it along to the staff”.

I think I like Fonzie the best...
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Huh? Keep f***ing that chicken! Ernie Anastos's live "slip"

Ernie Anastos of Fox News affiliate Channel 5 in NYC tells the weather man to keep "f***ing that chicken..." He drops the F-bomb seemingly out of nowhere. The best part of the video clip has to be the look on his co-anchor's face--a mix of horror, her own innocence, and the realization Ernie is in hot water.

As a meandering side-note...Anastos alludes to Frank Purdue's commercials from my days in New York, where Frank would tell us "it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken." Purdue sold a lot of chicken in the NYC region (and his company still does I think). I remember that he somewhat resembled our mayor, Ed Koch, and that Purdue chicken were quite yellow (like many chickens in Mexico) because marigold leaves were part of their diet...


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Digital art: Twisted

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Gollum terrorizes Panama town?

According to the Panamanian news service Telemetro, locals in a Panama town are scared sh**less after a creature they describe as "Gollum" crawled out of a lake and charged at schoolchildren. "The four terrified boys said they hurled rocks at the strange creature to kill it, before throwing its corpse in the water and running away." Actually, they don't sound THAT scared, do they? One of the boys said the five-foot creature emerged from a cave and started scrambling over rocks "as if to attack them".

In a "desperate bid to defend themselves" the four boys hurled rocks at the strange creature to kill it and then threw the body in the water before running away. Their parents returned to the lake the following day — where they discovered the disturbing body washed up on the beach.
Panamanian officials have yet to make any statements regarding their discovery. Quite possibly, their silence is due to the fact that Panama Red is back in town.

Thanks to Jeff Clinton for suggesting this article.
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TBTL Lives!

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TBTL roared back to life as a Podcast after being cancelled as a terrestrial radio show in Seattle. The show was always one of the lowest rated in Seattle, but it has fans around the world and its podcast was always extremely popular. The parent company decide to fund Too Beautiful To Live as a podcast for an unspecified period of time. This is my favorite radio show of all time.


Subscribe! Go to the iTunes Podcast page to subscribe or download shows, or go to http://www.tbtl.net/



Tom Tangney, a Seattle movie critic, wrote the following moving tribute last week, when TBTL's cancellation was announced:


TBTL - Why it mattered
By Tom Tangney


The KIRO radio show TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has attained its own apotheosis. The show whose very title dared to foretell its demise has now completed its mission. TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has indeed died.

I am not here to bury TBTL however, but to praise it. Its 396 shows now constitute the complete "TBTL Collector's Series" of programs and, in retrospect, the most compelling question may not be "Why is it suddenly gone?" but rather "How did it last as long as it did?" I'd like to believe we live in a world in which something like TBTL could survive but the evidence points to the contrary. So instead, I'll just appreciate the fact it existed at all.

TBTL was the most original, innovative, and intelligently off-the-wall show I've ever heard on radio. Where else are you going to hear butchered impromptu readings of famous movie scenes, regular visits from a grammarian, an in-house a capella re-enactment of a modern opera, an Oscar show in which food from a nominated film is cooked and consumed live on air, a week's worth of Spanish and Latin lessons, a spontaneous dance-off to music designated as impossible to dance to, in-studio imitations of Bob Dylan singing Christmas songs, and hundreds of other wacky ideas. And who else but TBTL would organize a listeners' prom, a roller skating party, and nights out at the Opera AND a Mariners game?

Often described as the radio equivalent of the TV series SEINFELD, TBTL really was a show about nothing. And in its seemingly haphazard investigation of "nothing," it proved to be, more often than not, about "everything." The genius of TBTL was that it recognized the profundity of the mundane. We all have to live in the mundane world, of course, but articulate dissections of our mundane lives can actually produce clever and entertaining insights. The personal stories shared each night by host Luke Burbank, producer Jen Andrews, and board-op Sean De Tore were more humorous than earth-shattering but the point was they were always very human - the kind of daily victories and embarrassments that make up our everyday lives.

TBTL often hurtled headlong into the inane preoccupations of pop culture as well. Their WHY IT MATTERS segments would debate everything from the silly to the sublime (e.g. an early show took on the significance of those Karate Kid movies, a late show examined the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino.) But no matter how deep it dove into the superficial, it would always, or almost always, emerge with a smile and a wink. After all, this was a show run by smart and culturally savvy people. Burbank is an especially quick and literate host who can drop off-the-cuff references to Tenzing Norgay, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jeff Koons as readily as he can to Zooey Deschanel and Jemaine Clement and he often does so in a single conversation. And Andrews was always more apt to cull material for the show from, say, THE NEW YORKER than she was from TMZ. For me and much of the TBTListan nation, I suspect, it's that high art/low art tension that best defines the show's appeal.

TBTL always reminded me of a slice of lemon meringue pie. At its best, it was the perfect combination of sugar-spun fluff and tart flavor. When taking a bite out of TBTL, you had to make sure you tasted both the meringue and the lemon, or you'd miss the point. Too many people, I'm afraid, couldn't get past the meringue in the show to taste the lemon. But if you stuck with the show long enough, the lemon would always out.

Rawr.
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Scwarzkopf on War and France

"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Norman Schwartzkopf