Innholdsfortegnelse for June 6-19, 2022 i New York Magazine

OH, MANDY, let me get you a chair,” says legendary Swiss nightlife hostess Susanne Bartsch to also legendary New York nightlife fixture Amanda Lepore as the latter slowly struts into a dressing room shortly before midnight on a recent Saturday. We’re backstage with Bartsch and her club-kid crew, most of whom were not born when she started throwing parties in 1986, at the most mega of new midtown megaclubs, Musica, where she was hired to provide some freaky atmospherics on Thursday and Saturday nights. “Basically fashion meets opera meets vaudeville meets burlesque meets show business, you know?” is how she explains her shtick. Lepore, who arrives with a chipper twink in tow ready to fetch her a shot of tequila, is always invited. Musica is located in a blocky building…

Frame: Experts recommend a frame with an elongated step-through geometry, allowing for an upright position when pedaling (it’s easier on the knees). A narrow-frame cruiser makes for a cramped, less relaxed ride. Gears: Cruisers past have been single speed, but manufacturers now offer either three- or seven-speed gear systems. If you don’t live in a flat area, it’s worth the added cost. “Three-to-seven gears go a long way,” says Rocky Wood of Bike Palm Springs. “There’s less resistance, and you can cover more ground.” Brakes: The most common are coaster brakes, which require pedaling backward to stop; whether you’re comfortable with them depends on how you learned to ride, says Wood. Most cruisers recommended here come with coaster brakes, with hand brakes available as an upgrade. Best Overall Electra Townie…

I REALLY DISLIKE traditional writer’s rooms,” the writer and actor Julio Torres says while sitting on the custom-made red-and-blue couch in his office in Greenpoint, his hair dyed to match. “The fluorescent light, the kitchenettes—I never thrive in those environments. I need to be surrounded by the things I like and to be visually stimulated in order to function.” Torres grew up in El Salvador, where his family lived in the capital in an apartment over his mother’s fashion boutique. “I remember it feeling very chic,” he says. “There was lots of artwork on the walls, including paintings my dad had commissioned depicting Indigenous myths—there was one where trees would whistle at the stars—and a cheeky print he got in Amsterdam featuring the red-light district, where if you looked closely,…

items into their stomach, reacting in abject shock as something explodes forth from their stomach, or having their stomach torn open and emptied by a malevolent entity. In his latest film, Crimes of the Future, which premiered at Cannes, the stomachs are the whole point: The movie takes place in a dystopia in which everyone is doing surgery on one another for fun, sensually slicing into torsos to gaze at, lick, and sometimes yank out the organs therein. THE FIRST THING I ASK David Cronenberg about is the abdomens. The Canadian writer-director, who has been described as the “Godfather of Body Horror” by some and “beyond the bounds of depravity” by others, has made nearly two dozen movies since 1975. Almost half of them feature somebody reaching into their own…

JAMES IJAMES’S Fat Ham, a comic adaptation of Hamlet, is more about alleviating generational anguish than it is about Shakespeare. The two plays share little in setting, mood, spirit, or language, but each deals with equivocation, as a man examines and extends a moment of doubt. After seeing this Pulitzer Prize–winning show at the Public Theater, I have been lost in my own version of that long indecision, teetering between disappointment and pleasure. To like Fat Ham, or not to like Fat Ham? That is still my question. For Ijames, all this ambivalence is soaked in the melting lassitude of a summer backyard get-together where the heat is serious. Instead of princely, dithering Hamlet, Ijames gives us cash-strapped, indecisive Juicy (Marcel Spears), whose murdered father, Pap (Billy Eugene Jones), was…

Intelligencer THE LATEST ERA FOR THE elite mainstream media—that is, the heavily paywalled, rule-bound, college-educated-reader-focused American news media—has been marked by a rolling journalistic reassessment of how women are covered. This began with the investigations into Harvey Weinstein five years ago. More recently, readers have followed along as writers (and their editors) explore how journalism has historically treated women as sex objects and punch lines. Most notably: Britney Spears became the subject of esteemed investigative projects and mournful personal essays; Justin Timberlake was shamed into apologizing to Spears and Janet Jackson; Paris Hilton took to the Washington Post and Congress to crusade against the cruel “troubled teen” industry and was treated with respect for the first time; Kim Kardashian, future Esq., was no longer to be blamed for the horrible…

TAMMIE TECLEMARIAM IS ABOUT to hit the halfway point of “The Year I Ate New York,” her 12-month attempt to visit as many of the city’s restaurants and bars as possible. So far, she has tried 200 spots. On the following pages are 100 especially useful tips she’s accumulated along the way—including the most delicious way to kill 20 minutes in midtown and where to procure the city’s largest Long Island iced tea. What our diner-at-large has discovered after five months on the job. Delivery from Peter Luger is much better than you’d expect it to be. The rib steak may be warm instead of sizzling hot, but it will somehow be perfectly medium rare. My favorite place to drink whiskey is a Flatbush pizza joint called Wheated. Sea Witch…

THE COURSE OF MUSICAL THEATER never did run smooth. Michael R. Jackson should know. The playwright first started working on his Pulitzer-winning show, A Strange Loop, when he was 21 years old. He’s 41 now. Two decades and 11 Tony nominations for it later—the most this year—he’s fairly Zen about how long it took Broadway to notice his work. “It’s worth it to take your time,” Jackson says, wearing a T-shirt that quotes the signature lyric, “Big, Black, and queer-ass American Broadway show.” ¶ Indeed, A Strange Loop is all of those things—that’s precisely why Jackson never thought it would be produced. It’s a story about a Black gay man named Usher who is trying to write a musical, also called A Strange Loop, about a Black gay man trying…

WHEN YOU HEAR snippets of Keri Blakinger’s story—white girl, Cornell student, busted with a huge amount of heroin, spends under two years in prison, gets out, graduates—you may think, This is what happens to privileged white girls who “misbehave.” Or even, A nauseating example of white privilege. These were the tweets that followed a 2014 Ithaca Voice story about Blakinger with the headline “Cornell Senior Arrested With $50K of Heroin Graduates After 21 Months Behind Bars.” In Blakinger’s memoir, Corrections in Ink, she reflects on those mean-spirited tweets. “I realized they were not wrong about the privilege,” she writes. “I thought back on all my interactions with the system over the years, the moments that could have gone differently if I were Black, or did not have money ... Everybody…

IF YOU TOUCH, SAY, A SCULPTURE at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, maybe because you want to know what ancient Greek marble feels like, you’ll set off a quiet chain of events. A security guard has to tell a supervisor, who will write up an incident report, and anywhere from five to ten people will be notified, including the museum’s top curator. “I wish people realized the magnitude of this one touch,” says Regina Lombardo, head of security, bemoaning TikTok art-touching videos. “It creates a lot of heartburn.” Without the guards, there is no Met. They not only protect the art but also help lost tourists, work special events, make sure no one brings in a knife, and, now, enforce a mask mandate. The pandemic has been a rocky time…

➸ WITH THEIR HEAVY STEEL FRAMES, balloon tires, and single-speed gears, cruisers aren’t typically associated with speed or power. But recently, new options have entered the market. Some bike-makers are using aluminum to render them much more lightweight and aerodynamic; others are replacing the wicker baskets and ’50s shtick with modern conveniences like hand brakes, multiple gears, and pedal assists—meaning cruisers can be used for much more than slow rides along the beach. (If you’re skeptical that you could get around town on one, consider that the Citi Bike program employs a fleet of over 20,000.) To help you find the cruisers that are as capable of traversing a state park as they are suited for a leisurely spin down the boardwalk, we spoke to 14 experts, including bike-store owners…

THE LAST TIME Harry Styles released an album, his late-2019 sophomore effort, Fine Line, nothing went according to plan. COVID-19’s first wave forced the British singer-songwriter and erstwhile One Direction member into an unplanned break in the States. Styles wisely postponed a spring 2020 tour, and that March, for the first time in a long while, the singer found himself taking inventory of relationships he’d neglected during his six-year tenure in the boy band and the subsequent simultaneous launch of his solo-music and acting careers. Escaping and exploring exhaustion has been a theme of the pandemic era; new works from Lorde, Taylor Swift, and Kendrick Lamar have each expressed it to varying degrees. Harry’s House, the third Styles album, follows suit. It is your quintessential spring release, a batch of…

MUSIC 1. See Phoebe Bridgers Get out your skeleton suit. Lena Horne Bandshell in Prospect Park, June 14 to 15. For her hushed acoustic/piano ballads, beefy indie-rock workouts, and arresting covers of classics like Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees,” California singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers is amazing live. Catch her at BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival with synth-pop trio MUNA. CRAIG JENKINS ART 2. See Richard Serra: Sculpture A very large one. David Zwirner Gallery, 537 West 20th Street, through July 15. In the center of this ground-floor gallery is a ten-foot-high steel cylinder weighing in at 80 tons (!). Circle it at a distance of about 20 feet. It never changes. It sits as some still spot in the always changing space of the gallery. Richard Serra has forged a spatial singularity—an absolute…