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New York

For Your Calendar: When The World Came To Queens

By Jason Diamond on

To know Queens is to truly love the borough. It isn’t Manhattan, and it doesn’t have the cool tag that Brooklyn has had latched onto it in the last decade, but anybody that has spent a good amount of time in the easternmost of the five boroughs knows about the great buildings, the wide array… Read More

New York

For Your Calendar: Cocktails, Pork, and Philip Glass

By Jason Diamond on

You know that summertime is closing in when you can’t keep track of all the things New York has to offer over a weekend. Thankfully that’s what we’re here for, and this weekend is full of so many great things, we had to boil it down to three that you really can’t miss. … Read More

New York

For Your Calendar: Young and Old Punks

By Jason Diamond on

Here’s an idea for your Saturday: stop by the Metropolitan Museum for PUNK: From Chaos to Couture, to take in how the punks from around 1977 dressed, then go see a band that can trace its lineage back to those fashionable nihilists that hung out on The Bowery and Kings Road. … Read More

New York

For Your Calendar: Fran Lebowitz Being Fran Lebowitz

By Jason Diamond on

Some people say Woody Allen, others still cite Carrie Bradshaw; some people move to New York intending to see if it’s actually anything like a Velvet Underground song, while others think they can arrive as a modern-day Holly Golightly — but before anybody moves to New York, most have one or two people, real or fictional, that they hold up as the best example of how one should look, act, and talk when living in the Big Apple. I call this the New York Spirit Guide, and before I made the move to New York a decade ago, mine was (and still is) Fran Lebowitz. Although it is very un-Fran Lebowitzlike to admit something like this in a public forum, I feel that with her upcoming PEN World Voices event,where she’ll be speaking with the very great novelist A.M. Homes this Friday, a little Fran appreciation is due. … Read More

New York

For Your Calendar: Sonic Youth Detox With Lee Ranaldo Band

By Jason Diamond on

It wasn’t exactly the day the music died, but for people who grew up thinking Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore’s marriage was an indestructible artifact from the glory days of the alternative 1980s and ’90s, Gordon’s revelation to Elle of what caused their marriage to crumble was pretty devastating: … Read More

New York

For Your Calendar: The New Golden Era of Zines

By Jason Diamond on

It makes sense that zines became a big part of the punk-rock movement in the late 1970s, because like punk rock, zines are tough to define. The definition given by Wikipedia to explain zines is even a bit murky: “most commonly a small circulation self-published work of original and/or appropriated texts and images usually reproduced via photocopier.” … Read More

New York

For Your Calendar: Downtown Literary Festival

By Jason Diamond on

New York is a paradise for book lovers. You’ve got the rich literary history stemming back to the founding of our country, big-time magazines named after our city like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, over a hundred really important writers living here, and tons of literary journals and blogs popping up from Crown Heights to Harlem. … Read More

Design

Heirloomists Hollister and Porter Hovey’s Remembrance of Things Past

By Jason Diamond on

“I was basically Pinteresting before Pinterest,” Hollister Hovey tells me as she sits on a brown leather Chesterfield sofa wearing a (probably vintage, I guess 1970s) black, belted, muumuu-style dress with blouson sleeves.  She and her sister Porter, dressed in a sunny yellow draped shift dress, settle down after a few moments of rearranging things around their apartment. They tell me there had been a problem with the pipes in the building a week earlier, right before they were supposed to start showing off their living space, which has become well known since Hollister launched her blog in 2007, so there’s been a bit of shuffling around over the previous few days. Yet they seemed totally undaunted by any of it, and the place looks wonderful. But the timing of the plumbing problem coincides with the release of the sisters’ first book, Heirloom Modern, which tells their rich family history and explores how it influences their aesthetic, but also features the stories of other like-minded heirloomists. … Read More

New York

The Art of Billy Childish

By Jason Diamond on

There was this little window of opportunity in the early aughts where, thanks to the garage-rock revival that helped lay out the welcome mat for bands like the Black Lips, Thee Oh Sees, and The Strange Boys, Billy Childish almost became well-known beyond the legion of devoted fans the unrelenting artist had picked up in his 35+ years making music, paintings, and poetry. While Childish has never actively sought out that spotlight, one admirer, Jack White, tried his damnedest to get the world to pay attention by talking about Childish in interviews, and inviting him to play with White on television; and in true Childish fashion, he wanted nothing to do with it, sparking a feud between the two that was mostly contained to the pages of British magazines. … Read More

New York

For Your Calendar: Hang Out With Mr. Met

By Jason Diamond on

This week the New York Mets and New York Yankees start what some are predicting will end up being one of the most disappointing summers of baseball in recent New York history, thanks to injuries, bad trades (seriously, Mets, you trade the reigning Cy Young winner?), and the impending retirement of the one Yankee that even Red Sox fans will tip their caps to, Mariano Rivera. All we can hope for is that there are plenty of unoccupied beach houses in Montauk, so we can escape the boredom usually filled up by our beloved baseball teams. But no matter how dire things look, you know you’ll still be itching to catch a game or two. And starting this week, the hardest working mascot in showbiz, Mr. Met, gets ready to take the field night in and night out. … Read More