Part of finding your toehold in New York is figuring out which New York to call your own. Those not interested in living in Carrie Bradshaw’s fantasy soon learn to peel back the city’s layers. By burrowing in, by deciding whether you’re the kind of person who waits in line at Magnolia Bakery or knows where to get the best Szechuan in Jackson Heights, whether you covet the phone number to Milk and Honey or prefer a corner table at the Brooklyn Inn, you can begin to crack it open.
“When I started, I made like a bible where I had the characters likes and dislikes,” Dunham said. “It’s pretty easy at this point to say, Hannah would watch an episode of “Real Housewives” but wouldn’t fuck around with MTV. I think Jessa doesn’t know who Miley Cyrus is but is really into croissants”—which she pronounced with an exaggerated French accent. “It was really clear to us that both Marnie and Shoshanna loved Rent. We just knew that that would be a commonality of theirs.”
“Marnie, in her fantasy all her dates take place in the Oak Room at The Plaza. That’s her idea of what she wants, and I think she’d go to Enid’s but be in a bad mood about it. Hannah would be like ‘This is my jam. I just want a cheeseburger.’ And then Marnie would be like, ‘I think this is a lot of money for what this food is,’ and be really pissy about the vibe. She wishes there was a Starbucks near her house.” (This reporter was quick to point out that in fact there is.)
Lena Dunham on getting New York right in her new HBO series, ‘Girls’
“In New York City, there are very real concerns about the cost of living, and whether we are creating a city so dense and so expensive that it will repel diversity, both ethnic and economic. That diversity is vital, and correct, particularly as the city contemplates ways to accommodate a population boom over the next ten years.
But the rest is just nostalgia. We New Yorkers are thought of as a nostalgic bunch, but that’s not quite right. We archive and study the past because we know here in a way that they can’t quite know in Mayberry that things change all the time, and we want to remember all of it. We want to understand all of it, and here, nothing lasts long enough to be understood in its actual lifetime.
When it comes to ‘knowing’ New York City, the line that I think of is Chaucer’s version of one of the oldest proverbs of antiquity: ‘The lyf so short, the craft so longe to lerne.’”
- Tom McGeveran in our newsletter. Have you signed up yet?
![Meet downtown’s most in-demand new eccentric: 24-year-old art star and Megazine editor Loren Kramar
“For us, Megazine solves the problem of renting an exhibition space in New York City,” said [managing editor Maren] Miller, adding that art published in Megazine will be on display in a series of to-be-announced pop-up shows. “But it’s also a chance for us to use design to put the work we show in unusual contexts, or to make people see it differently.”
Presently, the founders are testing and debating different revenue streams, including an online store and a “curated” ad section. Four original Fat Ebe drawings have been sold for $600 each, Kramar said, and the proceeds were split 50-50 between the artist, Ebecho Muslimova, and the founders.
For upcoming features, a young artist named Joe Kay, Megazine’s “Man on the Street,” will interview people walking out of liquor stores, Kramar said. And in March, Megazine will launch its new erotica section with a one-page reinterpretation of Moby-Dick entitled “Maybe Dick.” First sentence: “Call me a shemale.”
In the meantime, Kramar is preparing for his first live performance in two years. He plans to auction thirty “works of art” that he has collected, borrowed, or made, he said, including a glass slipper fabricated by a Venetian glassworker and an abstract painting made by a Thai elephant.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzws84dI0Q1qc0o3ko1_400.jpg)
Meet downtown’s most in-demand new eccentric: 24-year-old art star and Megazine editor Loren Kramar
“For us, Megazine solves the problem of renting an exhibition space in New York City,” said [managing editor Maren] Miller, adding that art published in Megazine will be on display in a series of to-be-announced pop-up shows. “But it’s also a chance for us to use design to put the work we show in unusual contexts, or to make people see it differently.”
Presently, the founders are testing and debating different revenue streams, including an online store and a “curated” ad section. Four original Fat Ebe drawings have been sold for $600 each, Kramar said, and the proceeds were split 50-50 between the artist, Ebecho Muslimova, and the founders.
For upcoming features, a young artist named Joe Kay, Megazine’s “Man on the Street,” will interview people walking out of liquor stores, Kramar said. And in March, Megazine will launch its new erotica section with a one-page reinterpretation of Moby-Dick entitled “Maybe Dick.” First sentence: “Call me a shemale.”
In the meantime, Kramar is preparing for his first live performance in two years. He plans to auction thirty “works of art” that he has collected, borrowed, or made, he said, including a glass slipper fabricated by a Venetian glassworker and an abstract painting made by a Thai elephant.
Why Christine Quinn is slowing down Sadik-Khanism in New York
In recent years, the city has built 16 new pedestrian plazas on underutilized D.O.T.-controlled land. Another 26 are in the works. In the past four years, the city has also built 260 miles of new bike lanes.
According to Quinn, “we’ve heard from people in the disability community, particularly people in the visually-impaired community, who raised the concern that pedestrian plazas have not been constructed in a way that it is safe for them to move through those plazas.”
“And we need marriage equality in every state in this nation, otherwise no state really has marriage equality,” he said. “And we will not rest until it is a reality.”
Chinatown, with its jostling sidewalks narrowed by bins heaping with live crabs, dried shrimp, arrow root and porcelain dishes, is still as tantalizing as ever. Merchants, restaurateurs and residents from hundreds of miles away stream in on low-price Chinese-owned buses to get their menus printed, kitchens stocked or prescriptions filled by people who speak Mandarin, Cantonese or Fujianese.
The weekly influx explains the location of four eyeglass shops in little more than a block of Mott Street and is seen by some as an encouraging economic trend.
Still, Chinatown’s economy is ailing.
life:
Twice a year — once for fall, and again for spring — the already chic city of New York gets a sprinkle of extra glamour, with the coming of Fashion Week. For those few days, the designers, models, celebrities, magazine editors, and fashion risk-takers who converge on Lincoln Center, headquarters of the ready-to-wear shows, make for some of the best people-watching there is.
Photojournalist Zoran Milich shows us his unique perspective here.
