Lucking Out - James Wolcott [88]
Although CBGB’s remained my main port of call, I hit other venues to see other bands as the underground/punk/new wave/neo-minimalist/post-punk/No Wave scene spoked off uptown and crosstown, to Danceteria and Hurrah and the Mudd Club, the latter having its own status strata and a more arty-boho attitude of enclosure than one encountered on the Bowery. (Though the rats that milled outside on the blocks adjoining White Street were, if anything, plumper and more capable of playing for the NFL.) As the bands I had first seen at CBGB’s became irregulars now that touring had become their new mistress, my own visits became more infrequent, tapering off to nil once hardcore with its boots, stubbled heads, and mosh-pit crocodile feedings seized the banner as if it were a pikestaff with a head attached. Hardcore was too hortatory and single-minded for me, a power tool with only one fast speed. But each to his own bedlam.
After an absence of many years, during which I was introduced to adulthood, I made a little pilgrimage down the Bowery, part of a reunion tour. It was around midday. Rain spattered from a pouty, gray sky that had little to recommend itself, the rainfall light enough for the drops to make contact individually, though it was clear heavier reinforcements were on the way. The Bowery had seldom looked so indifferent to itself. And yet it was a warm occasion that brought me—us—here, a trio of former alumni. I was rendezvousing with Mary Harron and Fran Pelzman, whom I had met at CBGB’s when we were young and pale and new to the show. Mary was more than pale, closer to spectral, as I discovered one afternoon when I ran into her on the street months after we had first met each other and did a double take. It was the first time I had seen her in daylight—she looked like something out of Henry James. Canadian by birth, educated in England, Mary imported a cool, accepting air of refinement to any room steeped in squalor, a probing curiosity attached to a deep appreciation for comedy that would come in handy in her role as Punk magazine’s touch of class. Originally a print journalist, Mary began writing and directing feature segments for the BBC’s Late Show, a cultural review show where we collaborated on a segment devoted to Martin Amis (during which we re-created his arrival at Oxford with a soundtrack choir of angels). When the Late Show and Channel 13/PBS co-produced an arts program called Edge, though public television being public television, whatever “edge” there was was soon filed away by the genteel overseers of caution under the Emasculation Proclamation that seemed to be PBS’s primary directive. But before the bland-down began, we managed to do funny, imaginative visual essays on Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost, the shock comedy of Andrew “Dice” Clay, and a never-aired visit to the luxury crypt overlooking Central Park South that was the diabolical lair of Albert Goldman, then at the height of his celebrity-defamation infamy, a mini-feature that was shot as an Expressionist horror film and never shown in the States, the corporate plug pulled