Ben Lyons, MTV Co-host

Subway or Taxi?
Subway. Iron horse all the way baby. Subways in other cities are so fugazi. The 'T' in Boston can kiss my ass. NYC has the greatest subway system in the world, why not ride it? Cabs are just waaaay too expensive these days, I give Bloomberg the L on that one.

Puma or Adidas?
Adidas. I feel like Puma has them beat on those track suits, but as far as sneakers go, the Adidas shell toes are classic. I'm a sneaker head, I need to slow down a bit with how many shoes I have.

Mets or Yankees?
Mets. The Yankees have come to embody all that is wrong and disgusting with New York. Too many out of towners, posturing like they represent the city (Matsui, A-Rod, even Jeter is a hick from the Midwest). They have ruined the game with how much money they spend.

Ben, tell the fine audience of Gothamist how we met?
You used to baby-sit me back in the day. Our parents met through mutual friends. Our moms are so much alike they are practically twins. It’s scary. As you know your sister Alex and I are also tight. She did hairstyling for some of the shoots I’ve worked on.

You are currently the co-host of a new MTV show with SuChin Pak. What is the show called and what is the premise?
The show is called “Your Movie Show”. It is basically a movie review show for MTV viewers at home to decide if a movie is worth seeing or not. We meet crewmembers, give our feedback on the movie, go behind the scenes and interview celebrities. It’s cool. So far I have had the opportunity to interview Jack Black, Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, ‘Pussy’ from the Sopranos, etc.

Your dad is New York NBC movie critic Jeffrey Lyons. Do people ever give you crap for getting where you are today because of your connections?
My friends give me crap all the time but not for that. They tease me by calling me ‘Dan Cortez’ - all wack people from the past with lame MTV shows. People are cool about my dad because he’s an old school guy who has been in journalism for forty years. I mean if Kurt Loder was my dad perhaps it would be a different story.

What was the last movie your father and you saw? Did you agree on the review?
We saw Sky Captain. We agreed to agree.

I watched the premiere episode of your MTV show and it appeared Angelina Jolie was flirting with you. Was she? More importantly are her lips that gigantic in person as they appear on TV?
Let’s just put it this way - Angelina Jolie wants to have lots and lots of my babies. Yeah... you know. Her publicist calls me everyday begging me to fly back to LA and drive with Angelina to the Napa Valley for a few days of bike riding and wine tasting. Hold on.... (phone rings)... I think that's her right now.

I was also amused by your interview with Vincent Pastore (Big Pussy from The Sopranos) where you are behind the wheel of a car interviewing him during a car wash. I happen to know you don’t have your driver’s license. Was ‘Big Pussy’ aware of this?
He had no idea I didn’t have a driver’s license. He was loving every second of it. He used to own nightclubs in New Rochelle until Matt and Kevin Dillon convinced him to become an actor. He was in Goodfellas, Made, Carlito's Way, he's going to be in a new Guy Ritchie movie. He is a true professional, and loves promoting anything he is involved with. He was talking about his TV show "Repo Man" where he and some wise guys go reposses peoples cars, as if the show was the second coming of "New York Undercover". Don't laugh, that was a great show, Malik Yoba gets syndication checks out his ass.

This is your first on-camera hosting gig. Were there any bloopers worth mentioning?
The only blooper from my first gig on TV was my haircut. They gave me the "Ted Koppel", totally wack. They ended up not using one of the segments where my hair looked REALLY bad which I was extremely thankful for.

Have you gotten paid yet for your first MTV gig? If so how did you spend your first paycheck?
I haven’t! When they sent me out to do my interviews in LA though I did get a fat per diem. With that I bought myself a pair of Huarache sneakers. I wore them on the premier episode.

You have a lot of connections for someone your age. Is it true that Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter once called your house collect?
Yes! We were kids. Ivanka and I used to play spin the bottle together. I went to a school on the west side called Collegiate, so I was in that whole private school scene in the city. She went to Chapin, I still run into her sometimes, we have a lot of mutual friends. She is incredibly sweet and sincere. I think she could be bigger than her father someday if she wanted to.

Your new MTV gig must get you in to a lot of cool parties. What is the last New York party you checked out?
I recently checked out the album release party for The Alchemist. He has produced for Jadakiss, Nas, Fat Joe, Snoop, etc. He actually lives in my building! Literally, a floor below me. In my elevator I’ve seen everyone from Prodigy to Nore, etc.

After a night of partying, where would we find you eating a hangover breakfast in New York?
Stage Deli at 33rd and 8th Avenue. They have free newspapers, hot Spanish hostesses, and they make Turkey and Eggs like they do at Nate & Al's in LA. Mad good.

Name one New York band we should all keep on eye/ear out for? Where do they usually play? Do they have a web site?
Team Face Lift. I describe them as the Beastie Boys before Tibet. Three members: The Fat Jew, Gingerale and Machine. These guys are nuts and their shows are crazy. They ride horses naked or wearing women’s fur coats or their little sister’s blouse and men’s underwear.

Do you ever see yourself living anywhere else other than New York? If so where and why?
Yes! In five years I see myself living in Bondi Beach, Australia. I was fortunate enough to be able to travel around Australia by myself a few years ago and just explore the country, meet the people, etc. It was amazing how it affected my life. The people are extremely genuine and engaging. There is good energy there.

Top five web sites you visit on a regular basis?
CNN.com, SOHH, NYKnicks.com, ruffsketch.tv, and Pokerroom.com.

I play poker with my friends for real money, and poker online for fake to practice and kill time.

Every time I see you are on your cell phone or it’s ringing nonstop. What number are you most proud of to have in your cell phone?
I know it’s bad. I'm on my cell phone way too much, I am 100% positive I am developing a small tumor in my brain. The number I am most proud to have in my cell phone is that of producer Robert Evans, who produced The Godfather, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby, etc...The film The Kid Stays in the Picture is based on his life.

Who is an industry idol of yours?
I’d have to say Russell Simmons. Before my MTV gig I was producing a syndicated Hip Hop show called “Hip Hop Nation”. We once did a day in the life of Russell Simmons. Russell wore a phone earpiece the entire time and throughout the interview he’d be nodding and listening when suddenly he’d bust out while staring directly at me, ‘Christie Turlington - what's up? How you doin?’ It was totally freaky.

After the interview I had the crazy opportunity of introducing Russell Simmons to my dad. Russell actually got on his knees to thank my dad for his review of Russell’s play ‘Def Poetry Jam’ on Broadway that had opened that day. Most surreal moment of my life.

Interview by Kristen Duncan Williams

Lana G, Celebrity Make-Up Artist

Bagel or Donut?
Bagel.

Taxi or Walk?
Walk... oftentimes skip.

Starbucks or Vendor Coffee?
Neither. Instant from South Africa.

Lana, tell the fine audience of Gothamist how we met.
We worked together on a shoot. I was doing make-up and you were doing wardrobe styling. I was told I would be working with an inexperienced fashion stylist and I wondered if you had any taste. Much to my surprise, I met a stunning, intelligent friend who I totally looked forward to seeing each time we got to shoot together.

That's nice Lana, but what about my taste? Ha. You grew up in South Africa. What brought you to New York and how did you get started in your industry?
I was always interested in print and film since they had no television when I was a kid in South Africa. I was a relatively successful child model from the age of six. I enjoyed my mum picking me up after school, changing in the car, grabbing a sandwich and going to work.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, I fell in love with a boy who was Cape Malay (of Malaysian heritage). He was a musician in a band called the Flames. This was of course when the apartheid government was still in control. The Flames had been playing at a club for several years, when the government decided to wreak havoc with their lives by creating one of their infamous petty apartheid laws... this one stating that if a club is serving drinks to whites, blacks (or any color other than white) could not be there entertaining... although busboys and people in incidental positions could still work. How convenient. This prompted a group of us to raise enough money to put the band on a boat headed for Europe. As luck would have it they were introduced to the Beach Boys and signed to Brother Records.

After years spent with these guys, pretending to be Cape Coloured (mulatto) I became pretty good at darkening my skin with make-up and it gave me the opportunity to recognize the direction to become a make-up artist. We used to laugh because wherever the makeup stopped, say just above where my sleeve, the inside of my sleeves would be covered in makeup.

I moved to New York when I was nineteen, knowing I had gone as far as I could over there and I have never looked back.

Wow. What a story! Since moving to New York you have made quite a name for yourself and have done makeup for a number of famous New York celebrities. Name the top five that you enjoyed most and why.
I might have to mention seven or eight:

Tina Brown, because she is always pre-occupied and at the same time very present and generous.

Paula Zahn, we called her Super P since she really is that dynamic woman who juggles so many things and multi-tasks while still being kind, thoughtful and gracious.

Gregory Hines, because he was so playful and fun to be around. Not attitude whatsoever.

Rosanne Cash, a real cool lady with a fabulous voice.

Whoopi Goldberg, because she is her own person. I remember once we were doing a show with three other women. She piped up, "you all look like the same person". And they did. All carefully put together in the appropriate labels. Not Whoopi.

Suze Orman, because she follows her spiritual nature, and believes we limit ourselves and goes about sharing how to be a bigger and better person by just being herself.

Isaac Mizrahi, because he has a naturally hilarious personality and is completely irreverent.

Nora Ephron, because you know she is asking you focus group questions for her next movie.

What qualities do you possess that make you feel like a real New Yorker?
I am very sociable, but like my home to be my respite. I also enjoy a long walk. Yesterday I started at the corner of 16th Street and Fifth Avenue and marched all the way up to Columbia. One hundred blocks is equal to five miles when going north/south. The lights are so damn powerful in Times Square these days it has the pigeons flying around and believing it's still daylight. The next morning, it looks like they have a hangover from staying up so late.

Everyone knows makeup artists get all the dirt. Can you share any with us?
It's true, but my lips are sealed!

What are the normal working hours for a makeup artist? What person have you worked on that we might know that looks fantastic no matter what the hour?
No such thing. That's what makes it so interesting. Often I have to jump in a cab because of a sudden late breaking story... adrenalin pumping, full steam ahead. When I was Paula Zahn's makeup artist at CNN, my alarm went off at 4am and I was done by 10:30am. My job often requires flying by the seat of my pants.

How much is your makeup case worth?
Thousands.

Is it heavy? Have you ever left it in a cab?
It can be. At times it has weighed in at 30lbs. I pack for each gig and have found that a few basics are better then all the "current" favorites. No, I never left it in a cab however I did leave my cell phone in one once. It was returned to me when I called and the cab driver answered. He drove over to return it to me.

What kind of money does a make-up artist of your stature make?
It depends on the gig. My rate is $250 an hour for a three hour minimum.

What celebrity do you wish you could get your hands on for a makeover? And while we're at it what do you think of my eyebrows?
I'm not as interested in celebrities as I am everyday people. They are so much more appreciative. As far as your eyebrows, now that I've cleaned them up, just fabulous darling!

Where do you buy your makeup in New York?
I seldom buy. I recommend the makeup I use and get it into the hands of many celebrities. Therefore I put in a request to these companies who are nice enough to send me what I need. Some of the larger companies play their cards very close to their chests. Not generous at all.

Can you share a little makeup secret for New York women on the go?
A good bronzer all over your face and neck that will brighten up New York women in an instant. We tend to be quite pale in le grand pomme. Bronzer lets you keep your skin healthy while giving you the look of a light healthy tan.

Where was your last celebrity sighting and in your opinion how did they look?
Diana Krall and Elvis Costello walking along University Place on a Sunday night stroll. Fantastic.

What kind of men hit on you in New York?
Smart men!!!

What scares you most about living in New York?
The chain stores taking over the charming mom and pop stores that make New York, New York. Everything looks alike. When I first came to America I thought this was a place where you could be unique. Now everyone wants the same, or so the chain stores think.

Where do you live and what does your apartment look like?
I have a loft downtown with barrel vaulted ceilings overlooking a garden. Lots of color on my walls, original wooden floors from circa 1898, flowers. It's so quiet. The street is tree lined, and I wake up to birds chirping.

What are the top five web sites you go to on a daily basis?
Media Bistro, Daily Candy, Astrologyzone.com. I'm always conscious about keeping my life simple so less time spent on the computer or in front of the television set the better.

You are also a writer. Can we expect a tell-all juicy gossip book from you in the near future?
During my last trip to South Africa, I found myself in the middle of a truly remarkable situation. Although it was tragic, I saw the hilarity of it as well and I'm in the midst of turning it into a caper.

How do you find quiet time in the city. Where do you go and what do you do to relax?
My home, or the home of my best girlfriend Val. We are partners in writing. We tend to spend time in Central Park, walking through museums talking about our plans. Watching old black and white movies, making tea or having wine with friends. Nothing in particular since New York provides a backdrop for performance art, which as any New Yorker knows, comes to you by way of just walking down the street.


Interview by Kristen Duncan Williams

Joel Sherman, Professional Scrabble® Player

Subway or Taxi?
Subway! I’m cheap and hate traffic, it's the most efficient way to get around the city, except from the Bronx to Queens and Brooklyn, and it’s sounder environmentally.

J tile or Z tile?
Z, makes more bingos.

Mets or Yankees?
I’m really only a part-time follower, have despised Steinbrenner since the 70's, because it took him forever to bring quality pitchers in among his constant avalanche of megabuck free agent acquisitions. Loved the Mets in their heyday from the "Miracle" thru Gooden/Darling/Cone/Orosco days, but have been in mourning since they broke up Dykstra/Backman of offense and fielding and utter disgust since they let the two dumbest managers in history, Davey Johnson and Bobby Valentine give away several almost certain championships with horrendous strategic patterns and individual blunders (Kenny Rogers?!? BV let a Steinbrenner failure pitch to Steinbrenner’s pro hit-men? Get real!!). I'll only admit to being a Yankee fan to the extent that I enjoy seeing any team play well as a team, where each individual has a role he knows, and all make valuable contributions within the framework of those roles; but if I have to choose just one, I'm afraid I have to go with the Jersey Devils!

Joel, tell the Gothamist audience how we met.
We met at one of the National Scrabble® Championships where you were working as an intern for your parents that run the National Scrabble® Association. You were counting tiles and managing players as I recall.

Where did you grow up? Were you always into Scrabble®? Were you considered a nerd in high school?
I grew up in the Williamsbridge section of the Bronx, where I still live. I was considered a nerd in elementary school (P.S. 89), but by the time I got to Bronx High School of Science, I had become more of a ne'er-do-well. My teachers there really deserved more effort than I put out for them, but I was a quick study and a strong test taker.

You are considered one of the best Scrabble® players in New York. How did you first get into the game, and at what point did Scrabble® become a huge part of your life instead of just a game for you?
It was a huge part of my life since childhood, not that I ever dreamed then that it could be someday bring me "fame and fortune." My mother gave me "Scrabble® for Juniors" just before I was six, and I found it babyish, grew bored with it quickly; but watching my parents and older brother play the adult version, I decided that was interesting, and I began to play with them. I wasn’t consciously training to be a future champion as an adolescent; I just loved to play, and so did my mother, so we played hundreds of games a year until her death when I was 25.

You play in World Championships held all over the world. You also play in National Championships held all over the US. When was the last time either of them was held in New York and how did you do?
One of each has occurred in New York City and I played in both. The Nationals was held at the Pennsylvania Hotel across from Madison Square Garden in 1989. That was the first one I played in, and I won a low "class prize" within the Expert Division with a 14-13 record. The World Championship was at the Plaza Hotel in 1993. It was the first Worlds for which I qualified, and the second one ever held, and I placed 10th of 64 players.

What is the most amount of money you have won playing Scrabble®? What did you do with the money?
I won $25,000 for each of the 1997 World Championship and the 2002 National Championship. It all goes toward basic living expenses. I'm not materialistic or extravagant, but I do like food, shelter, climate control and electric light, and using my opposable thumbs to hit the space bar on my computer keyboard.

What is the highest score you have ever achieved in a single game? Play? What was the word?
My highest game was exactly 700. Highest play occurred in a different game, 212 for AFFECTER across two triple word squares.

In the Scrabble® world your nickname is "G.I. Joel". Why?
I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV; nor have I never been in military service, neither of us would have the other. It stands for Gastro Intestinal, because of my chronic churning tummy.

Recently you were featured in a documentary about Scrabble® called Word Wars. What did you think of the movie? Did seeing yourself on the big screen change you as a person?
I attended the New York City premiere at the Cinema Village on 12th St. in June. I also was flown to Sundance and had a lot of fun doing post-screening Q & A's there with the directors and Marlon Hill another featured Scrabble® player in the documentary. I love the film, thought it was very well made, and presented us accurately both because of and in spite of it being from the viewpoint of a filmmaker who shares our passion.

I don't think it changed me, though it certainly made me a little more aware of my image. For example, it showed me how often I laugh at my own jokes, as if I need to cue the listener I was purposely making fun, and now I cringe every time I see those moments. And yet, folks say that doesn't bother them about me. So mostly, the film just demonstrated to me how many different ways people perceive things.

Where do you play Scrabble® in New York? Describe the scene.
I play at the club that I now have been directing for the past five or six years, NSA Club #56 in Manhattan. We rent a room from Honors Bridge Club at 133 E. 58th St. betw. Park and Lex. Every Thursday night, and some Sunday afternoons. The ambiance varies from club to club, as do the players. Some clubs (like mine) are highly organized and ultra competitive, others are more social and populated by less skilled players (often the much older players). Our club has a nice mix of demographics though, we range from teens to veteran players in their fifties and sixties, and even one or two around 80. Our club has comfortable furniture and snacks provided by Honors, and is in an office building with lobby security. Other club venues range from libraries and community centers to churches and school cafeterias or lounges, to restaurants or large retail stores with café spaces. The weekly club sessions tend to be more relaxed than rated tourneys. Our players like to take the game seriously, but we also encourage them to have fun. And they really do get to be all members of a very large family when they find their word-crossing kindred spirits. Plenty of socialization goes on among the players away form the board. Occasionally, romances even develop.

Why do New Yorkers make tougher Scrabble® players?
Probably the general New York City business attitude, a determination to be successful, commitment to do whatever is necessary to that end, and pure "put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is" aggressiveness.

Most of the professional Scrabble® players seem to be men. Why do you think that is?
We're not as likely to be distracted by or feel we owe responsibilities to "real life" concerns as women. And we still have been more culturally conditioned to be competitive, though that is slowly changing.

Like sports stars, Scrabble® players tend to have a lot of lucky charms or superstitious rituals they do before a game. Do you have any? What are some others you know of?
My only pre-tourney ritual is to play a couple of songs I consider relevant on the piano before I leave home. I don't think I can really call doing that a superstition, it just puts me in a positive frame of mind, a "happy place," if I play and sing well. I don't know of other players' rituals, but several do have lucky charms, which range from stuffed animals to pictures of their children or spouse or friend or mentor that they will set on the playing table next to them.

How many games of Scrabble® do you play on a daily basis? Do you ever feel like there is such thing as playing too much?
I play anywhere from two to ten games in a day, depending on whether I’m at a tourney, or playing a training session with another player or a computer program, or just passing a random day in between. I do feel it is possible to play too much, but only when the games are serious, with prize money at stake. It can be tiring (mentally, physically and emotionally) to play the game at the highest level, and I feel the quality of play starts to decline when you play more than six games in a tourney day. But a lot of the players just want more and more, and seven and eight game days at tourneys are becoming fairly common. I don't like playing substandard games, but at least I know the effect will be about the same on most of my opponents as on me, so I don't feel too disadvantaged by it.

What are some of your study tricks to become a better player?
Tricks to become a better player are at my club web page, and more can be garnered on a regular basis by joining the National Scrabble Association, and reading the newsletter it distributes 8 times a year. Human minds work in a variety of ways, so everyone has to experiment to find the study habit that is most effective for them, but any study will help your game to some degree. The fastest way to begin playing a decent competitive game is to learn the 1,000-odd words that are printed on two sides of a single sheet which the NSA sends to all new members. That sheet lists all of the acceptable two- and three-letter words, short words that use the high value tiles (JQXZ), all the Q words where it is not immediately followed by a U, and medium length vowel dumps (ways to shed multiple I's or U's in one word or four- or five-letter words containing three or four vowels).

Name the top five web sites you visit on a regular basis.
http://www.isc.ro -- that's where I play Scrabble(r) on-line
http://www.scrabble-association.com -- for upcoming tourney listings, results and ratings for me, and anything anyone else would want to know about our pursuit and community
http://www.imdb.com -- the Internet Movie Database, where I like to look up cast lists, filmographies and biographies of my favorite actors
http://www.jumbletime.com -- a nice anagramming practice server
The fifth would probably be "adult", which I won't name, because anyone's personal taste in that area is none of anyone else's business.

Most Scrabble® players are good with anagrams. Can you anagram GOTHAMISTDOTCOM into anything interesting?
GOT TO MID-STOMACH is the best I came up with, most of the others were too scatological (note presence of DOG SHIT).

Interview by Kristen Duncan Williams

Loretta Buckley, Law Student

What's your name, where do you live and with whom, and for how long? Where do you consider your 'hometown'? Tell us a bit about it. Do you spend any time there now?
Name is Loretta Buckley. Live by myself in Manhattan for two years now. Before that I lived year and a half in Ireland, year and a half in Spain; also lived in France seven months and Italy four months. My hometown is a small college town in upstate New York. I never go back. The only reason I would go back now is to put flowers on a grave.

What do you 'do'?
I am a law student.

What are your plans for after school?
I want to do something good, something that helps people who need help, before I die. I also want to leave the United States.

There is a pervasive vision of law school as a place of relentless competition, dry subjec matter, rote memorization, and a lot of being called by your last name by professors who are ‘out to get you’. Describe your experience relative to this 'myth.' Everyone ends up in law school these days. Like our society itself, law school is designed to break your spirit, but you are not powerless. Nietzsche said that one should laugh at least once a day and dance at least once a day. For dancing, think Rosie Perez to “Fight the Power” at the opening of “Do the Right Thing.” Repeating mantras to yourself is always calming. My personal favorites are, “Jump up, spread out/ I’ll put your head out” or “Punks jump up to get beat down.” These are especially effective if repeated under your breath in the library during exam time, while staring at fellow students. Feel free to use prayer beads. One last trick: when other law students are passive-aggressive with you, as they invariably are, respond with naked aggression. Example: when some one asks, “So, where were you working this summer?,” a simple “I’ll kill you,” hissed venomously into their ear, should suffice as a response.

What's the worst, best, or most remarkable experience you've had involving transportation in New York?
The loveliest experience I have ever had on public transport was drunken making out in a deserted subway car at 7 on a Sunday morning, riding the express train to Harlem. That bastard. This is not my own transportation story, but do you remember that this summer there was a girl who drunkenly passed out in the back of a cab and when she woke up, a man was having his naughty way with her, and she asked him, “Who are you?” and he replied, “I’m your cabbie.” Now, around this same exact time, Gwyneth Paltrow gave birth, and her husband, Chris Martin of Coldplay, posted a song on his band’s website to celebrate his daughter’s birth. The refrain of the song went, “I’m not a baddie/I’m your baby’s daddy.” All last summer the punchlines to these two stories bounced off each other in my head until I was a whirling dervish: “I’m not your cabbie/I’m your baby’s baddie/I’m not your daddy, I’m your baby’s cabbie/I’m not a baddie/I’m your cabbie’s daddy.” And so on.

What, if any, publications do you read regularly?
The Economist, The New York Post, The Literary Review, US Weekly, In Touch, Time Out New York.

What’s your poison?
Foreign men and vodka.

What three things piss you off the most?
(1) People who moan during yoga class. (2) People who ask me if I have ever been in a threesome. (3) Rich, aggressive mothers of toddlers who jab into you from behind with their giant-tank baby strollers.

Interview by Laurie Woolever

Margaret Braun, Sugar Artist

1-Where do you live, with whom, how old are you, where
did you grow up?
I live in the West Village with my husband and my cat Francis. I’m 41, and I grew up in Levittown, NY.

2-How do you make a living? Are there other things you do/create regularly that are not necessarily money-making?
I make my living as a cake designer and a sugar artist, which means mostly that I make cakes –wedding cakes, cakes for films, special-occasion stuff. Because it’s food, and because there’s always a client and a deadline and an end point, the artistic process tends to happen on a really sped-up level. I have to think on my feet a lot and come up with ideas and sketches very quickly. In that sense I don’t operate on the normal artist’s wavelength, where you can lets things happen a little more organically. I find I get good ideas if I’m moving, walking around, riding in a cab or a subway, just out of the kitchen for a little while. Right now everything I’m doing seems to have an Indian or Middle Eastern feeling – the colors, the motifs. I don’t think that’s it’s necessarily political. It’s really more about aesthetics. I think it comes from the collective design consciousness. These motifs show up everywhere – clothing, and home deisgn, and fine arts.

I’m also involved, on a non-paid basis, with The Moth, which is an urban storytelling collective. I’m a board member. It’s a group of amazing New Yorkers of many talents an we all work closely with the Moth’s artistic director and executive director. It’s a very hands-on board, and we naturally have to help with getting sponsorship and all sorts of things. For me personally, I like to be as close as I can to the creative decisions. I curated a show myself, two years ago, about food and love, and that was great. Right now I’m working on the annual benefit – it’s going to be November 9, at Capitale, an amazing old Stamford White-designed building on the Bowery, and the theme of the evening is Arabian Nights, meaning that all of the stories told will reflect that theme in some way. We’re looking for headliners right now, and Andy Borowitz is hosting. It’s going to be the smartest, best party in New York.

3-What are some of the more unusual things that people have asked you to represent with cake and icing? Are there objects or ideas you'd rather not create
with cake?
I have to say I don’t do a lot of the things that are strictly representational. More often a cake is evocative of a lot of things. It’s more about coming up with a design that is evocative of aspects of the event, or of the person’s interests. That being said, I recently did a cake portrait of a big pop celebrity. He’s cute in real life, and he was cute on the cake. I painted his portrait by hand. I do everything by hand. In general I don’t make big blocky things. I don’t make computers, stereo equipment, airplanes, vehicles or buildings. They never look exactly right, and even if they do, you just don’t get that much bang for your buck. I mean, it could look exactly like whatever car or computer or airplane, but who cares? It’s just novelty. You could easily and cheaply go to Toys R Us and buy a perfect plastic replica of one of those things. So I just don’t do them.

4-How did you come to write your book, Cakewalk? How long did the process take, and how difficult was it to retain your original ideas and desires for the book?
Friends were always saying I should write a book. At some point, an editor saw me on TV and called me out of the blue, and asked me if I’d ever thought about writing a book. She ended up leaving her puiblishing job and became my agent, and it took off from there. It took me a year from porposal to delivery. In keeping my original vision intact, I was one of those authors who was incredibly lucky. I realized the first editor I was working with had no idea what I was talking about, and she didn’t get me at all. I was about to sign the contract, and I freaked out and called my agent and ended up going with Rizzoli, and it was the best decision I ever made. My editor there gave me absolute full creative freedom. She knew that the best thing to do would be to leave me alone, and she protected me and just made sure I didn’t make a fool of myself. So that was great, and I’d tell anyone who is writing a book, make sure you like your editor and make sure your editor gets you. It’s a privilege to write a book, and it’s very personal. It really cannot start out being about the money. In the end, it’s your book, and your name out there. Especially for your first book.

5-Ridiculous-hypothesis-with-obvious-political-opinion-corner: Would you be willing to work a year of double shifts in a Duncan Hines packaging plant in
order to prevent George W. Bush from taking a second term in the White House?
Oh my God, are there any openings? Yes yes yes yes yes.

I guess we have to prepare ourselves, be realistic and not take our rights for granted anymore, not be afraid, and speak out. Because I’m not sure, even if Bush loses, that the Republicans are going to just leave quietly. They’ve got too much at stake. We have to start thinking like future patriots. My brother is a brilliant political thinker and has very radical politics, and he is always, always right. It’s been very comforting to hear him say, ‘It’s impossible to take over the world. You just can’t do it. The world will rebel.’

Interview by Laurie Woolever

Sean Howe, Editor

1-What's your name, how old are you, where do you live and with whom? what do you consider your hometown, and would you ever consider returning to
live there?
My name is Sean Howe, and I still can’t believe I’m thirty years old. My hometown will always be the idyllic Cazenovia, New York, just east of Syracuse. Everyone who’s visited has been impressed with its beauty. Last year, having still not sufficiently adjusted to living in post-9/11 New York, I decided to move back there for a few months, and it was absolutely rejuvenating. I made a plan that I would rise every morning at sunset, go to the gym, jog a few miles, make coffee and a big breakfast, read the paper, work on my novel for three to four hours, swim, play guitar, render sketches, return emails and work on the anthology I was editing, drive around and photograph the area in the waning hours of sunlight, cook a big dinner, and read until I passed out. I wish I could admit that this regimen only lasted the first month, but…in fact it never started. I got as far as gym, jogging, breakfast, coffee, newspaper, anthology, email, pass out. A year later, I’m just starting the novel, and if you’d like, I’ll show you the one sketch and two photographs. I live in Park Slope again, with my spectacularly spectral friend Alex Pappademas.

2 – Isn’t he the dad from Webster?
No.

3- How do you make your living?
For the past few years, I edited liner notes (and wrote jacket copy, and proofread all text, and occasionally produced) for a DVD production company called the Criterion Collection. It was an ideal situation for me as an editor, once I realized that I could match my favorite writers (whether they were "critics" or not) to their favorite movies, and watch the sparks fly. I loved the people I worked with, and it jumpstarted my love for film (it had been all but extinguished by film school and other industry jobs).

I left Criterion to put together an anthology Give Our Regards to the
Atomsmashers: Writers on Comics and work on some other writing projects. Just as I turned in the manuscript of Atomsmashers, I moved back to New York and returned to Criterion, in a freelance capacity, to help produce an eight-disc box set of movies by my favorite filmmaker, John Cassavetes. After nearly a year, work on this has finished and it’ll be out September 21.

4- How did you come to edit Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers? To what or whom does the title refer?
Over the last few years, several of the writers I worked with were dropping hints (and sometimes coming right out and saying) that they’d grown up on comic books. I thought it was a shame that all these eloquent voices were not coming forth in print about an artform that affects so many people. When I approached the writers about contributing, they were unanimously excited—for some reason, no one had asked them to talk about their fandom before.

I really wanted the writing to be personal and emotional enough to give
non-comics readers a foothold, a way to invest in the essays, but I also wanted it to be a book for all the comic fans who never discussed this particular passion with their friends. So in that regard, I guess it does have kind of a clubhouse feel.

The title comes from the first appearance of Spider-Man—as Peter Parker heads to the science lab after school, it’s shouted by a convertible full of pretty girls and jocks. I liked the idea of taking a taunt and turning it around into a declaration of tribute.

5- What are you working on now?
I’m helping a friend develop a comedy show for cable, writing some short fiction (my first published piece will be in the next issue of the CalArts literary magazine Black Clock), and finally getting started on that novel, which has involved a lot of research on Southern California in the 1970s. If anyone can provide me with photographic references of domestic life in that placeand time, please get in touch!

6- Ridiculous-hypothetical-scenario-with-obvious political-opinion-corner: Would you spend a year coaching girls' junior varsity bowling in your hometown if it meant that George Bush would not return for a second term as president?
You underestimate my commitment to the good of my country. Never mind
coaching, I’d gladly serve as a bowling pin if it meant getting the nation back on track.

7- Who would you rather drive cross-country with: Vincent Gallo or Courtney Love?
Honestly, the first thought I had was that maybe I could get VG to change his vote, but then I remembered that he’s registered in a solid-blue state anyway. Still, I think he’d take better photographs of the road, and we could discuss Upstate New York, Two Lane Blacktop, and Ben Gazzara performances for a couple hours. What am I going to talk to Courtney Love about?

8- what's the last thing you cooked for yourself?
Chicken and rice. I’m not much of a cook, sadly.

9- Tell us about the last time you got really drunk.
A wedding reception in Chinatown. A lot of vodka. I’m sorry to report that I had to ask a friend to fill in the blanks of my night. Apparently I did “the running man” and hugged everyone I knew. Let’s change the subject.

10- Think you'll stay in New York forever?
That’s what all the interviewees are supposed to say, right? But who knows. Depending on how November 4th goes, I can’t guarantee I’ll even live in the United States forever. But for now, it’s wonderful to be here.

Interview by Laurie Woolever

Regina Schrambling, Food Writer

1. About you: Where do you live, what do you consider your 'hometown', how long have you been in New York?
I grew up in Clarkdale, a town with 800 people in the exact center of Arizona, and I’ve lived among the hordes on the Upper West Side for 23 years.

2. Describe your first job ever.
It was courtesy of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, I think my junior summer in high school, when I would get into the back of a pickup truck four mornings a week with a bunch of other kids and ride over to the country club. The guys would go tend the grass and the girls and I would spend the day cleaning the manager’s booze-reeking house for $1.25 an hour, paid by the OEO. The fifth day was supposed to be some sort of education for pay, but we all just rested.

3. Are there publications or websites that you read faithfully? If so, which ones, and why?
This is why I get so little done: Wall Street Journal (smart), Daily News (quick), NYT (obligatory); New Yorker, Time Out, New York, Time, Observer, the Financial Times and the NYPost on their respective food days; Harper’s, Sunset, Vogue, Fortune, W, Food Arts, Saveur, Bon Appetit, Gourmet, Mother Jones, Metropolitan Home; online: the Guardian, romenesko, gawker, wonkette, gothamist, atrios, talkingpointsmemo, washingtonmonthly, smirkingchimp, dailyhowler, cursor, juancole, tomdispatch, dailykos, altercation, digbys,
rudepundit, workingforchange, stevegilliard, michaelberube, allhatnocattle, bartcop, thomasmc, corrente, blah3, southknoxbubba, whitehouse.org, thefoodsection, manhattanusersguide, chowhound, sautewednesday, badthings, nyceats, toomanychefs, jameswolcott and more. (I also look in obsessively often on pieces of many more sites in hopes of detecting signs of intelligent life in the food universe.) Before the internet and especially pol(itical) porn, I might have had a life.

4. Your weblog, gastropoda.com, reads like a list of hilarious Page Six blind items and cynical observations, with capsule restaurant reviews and links to your printed articles in newspapers and magazines. In a business (food writing) that is all about flattery and hyperbole, you point fingers at naked emperors, publicists' whores and bad ideas, executed badly. How did you come to create
gastropoda?
I wanted a showcase when I left what the Times would have you believe is the be-all and end-all, and I never wanted to have to send clips out again to some editor who had no idea what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. While I was planning my exit strategy, I had a brilliant web designer, Sloan Smith, who made me really think about what I wanted from cyberexposure, and I realized a chance to unvarnish the truth was No. 2 or 3 on the list.

5. You're still writing for the LA Times, Metropolitan Home, House Beautiful, et al. Is it difficult to reconcile such 'legit' journalism with the unfiltered honesty of a weblog?
Writing for the LAT can be like typing for gastropoda but with a much huger audience. Otherwise, I try to remember what my dead dad always said: “You have to look in the mirror to shave.”

6. You were deputy editor of the Dining In/Dining Out section of the New York Times from 1998 to 2001, and spent the last 11 months of that term writing and reporting. According to your gastropoda bio, "For 11 months I had the best job at the paper, until the Dining editor went west and the section went south." With the departure of Michaelene Busico, there was a definite change in the section's tone and content. How would you describe it, and do you think it had more to do with Sam Sifton, the editor who replaced Busico, or with more global changes at the Times and in the world at large?
To use a food analogy, the fish truly does rot from the head down. Even before the Dining editor decamped, the capo of the Style department was promoted and then resigned and what moved into his office was, shall we say, no John Montorio. Then, as the sections went national, they lost their way. There seemed to be a deadly misunderstanding of the outlanders, no sense that those readers might actually be sophisticated and, worse yet, might want some New York in their Times. When I finally wangled my way in to tell Howell Raines I was quitting, I blurted out something along the lines of: “Food is so important, to me and to this city -- it’s culture, it’s life, it’s the second biggest moneymaker
after finance. And the Times is just dumbing it down.” He stood up, shook my hand and drawled: “Well, doan sound lahk you goan be happy here.” I can only assume they’re still deliberately trying to be as lame as they wanna be.

7. Chefs have really been given an unprecedented amount of media coverage and adulation in the past 10 years - some of it warranted, some of it just grossly sycophantic. With or without naming names, who are some of the biggest and most overrated douchebags in the business?
If you read gastropoda.com, you have a good idea.

8. Dining trends of the last five years - what are some of the best and worst, in your estimation?

Best: Serious ingredients driving the menu more than chefs’ whimsies. Chefs working in harmony with nature, idiotically effete as that sounds -- the great ones really are attuned to the environment. Focused food, as in restaurants doing a few things really well (Pearl Oyster Bar, say). Fearless chefs maturing (David Burke, say). True Mexican. Adventurous restaurants opening in neighborhoods (everywhere but the taste-wasteland of the Upper East Side and the coke-hole of the Lower East Side). Better wines by the glass. Bigger wines by the glass.

Worst: Chain food. Theme parks posing as restaurants (can you say Spice Market?) “Crudo,” that adjective turned noun and insult to Italy. Other
Bataliesque Italian. Asian insanity. Bogus Spanish. Both tricked-up and toned-down Indian. Tequila-driven Mexican. Clearly, no one travels anymore. Manhattan is becoming Epcot Center.

9. What would advice you give a young writer looking to break into food journalism?
Educate yourself every way you can. Then go to the newsstand and find any publication that includes food and pitch it. Ten little outlets will make you a better writer than one big one that wants to force your words into its voice.

- Interview by Laurie Woolever

Jay Brida, Contemporary Press Publisher and Freelance Copywriter

1- What's your name, how old are you, where do you live and with whom?
Jay Brida, 33 and I live with my wife Jessica in Park Slope. I've never felt more like an easily pegged demographic: Part of a yuppie couple in Strollerville,
waiting for the heath care to kick in to have a kid.

2-What do you consider your 'hometown'? If it's not New York, why do you live here and not there, or not someplace else?
It has to be Northampton, MA. While it's now a cute little boutique city, college town that teems with writers, artists and lesbians, it used to be a divided old mill city filled with bitter old Lithuanians and Irishmen who didn't much care for the freaks and students who started running around like they owned the place. It was the city Augusten Burroughs wrote about in Running With Scissors. Like Burroughs, I grew up a Townie (although he alternated between Amherst and Northampton). However, unlike him, I'm from an old union family, and I wasn't brought up by my ma's psychiatrist. Although, because it's a small town, I knew a couple of members of that family pretty well through old townie ties.

I love the way Northampton turned out, shiny, happy, liberal and completely out of the American mainstream. Now, I love Park Slope too, and before that Jamaica Plain in Boston, but I have to live here and not there because, for now, I'm in publishing and advertising and I hate academia - which is the only industry up there in the Pioneer Valley. If my wife and I can get a modicum of financial independence, then, like Tracy Kidder, Bill Cosby and Sonic Youth, I'd consider living in the Northampton area.

3-With or without proper names, how do you make your living?
I'm a copywriter. I write ads for money. It sounds filthy, but really, it's not that bad. I've done freelance work since April 2001, when the economy went South for the Bush regency and the company I was working for went under. Since then, I've been foraging for jobs, like a starving weasel.

Recently, I've done work for a big, metastisizing bank and I think I just got a billboard up in the Dallas area on which I was able to tell the good people of the Metroplex that their ATMs are safe. I've also been writing a lot of the interactive copy for a company whose cars retail up to $400 grand. Of course I don't drive much, but I appreciate the idea of barrelling down a race track in the Batcar at about 180 m.p.h. with the car's torque pinning your balls to your leg.

So right now, things are good, but I'd like to take this opportunity to completely and justifyingly slag one agency: The Coastal Group/Redscope. There's a little freelance organizing going on against these motherfuckers. Through simple fate, I ended up working on a couple of disparate projects with these guys, a few campaigns for furniture wholesalers and an updated website for a Voice Over IP organization. I did the work for them in early to mid '04 and they've stiffed me.

Now, it'd be a somewhat (and only somewhat) mitigating factor if they were about to fail - I've been around dying agencies and you can smell the decay, it's
pretty pitiful. But from everything we've been able to tell, it's something approaching company policy NOT to pay their freelancers. I got paid less than half of what they owed me, but I subsequently found out they only paid that after a Channel 7 expose on them. Now among the 7 freelancers who've managed to contact one another, we've discovered that they owe us, collectively, more than $40,000. There's no telling how many others are out there.

Some of the Coastal/Redscope 7 (hey, you need a catchy name!) have taken them to petty claims court, won their case, and the owners are still giving them the shaft. This is part of the pitfall of being a freelancer - dealing with completely unscrupulous shitbags and having next to no legal rights.

4- Tell me/us about your publishing company, Contemporary Press. How did it come to be, who's involved,and what are your roles?

In late 2002, I was desperate for something to occupy the time other than worrying about where I was going to find my next job, and I thought, "What about publishing trashy, neo-pulp novels?" Really, it's sad in a way to think this was my Eureka moment, but that's how it came about. After having it, I couldn't
sleep for two days, planning in out in my mind, I decided to tell a couple of friends who were also writers and designers in the Inessential Arts and who
also were habitues of a regular, roving Wednesday night drinking party. To my surprise, two of them Jess Dukes and Jeffrey Dinsmore dug the idea right away. In short order, we managed to talk four more people into the 'company', designers Chris Reese and Dennis Hayes, illustrator Jenn Lilya and misanthrope Mike Segretto.

In my vision for the company, I saw us pumping out new takes on old genre novels (thus "Contemporary Press"), so we didn't have writers self-consciously trying to write like Dreiser or Hemingway (or more horrifyingly Eggers, who should be the only one writing like Eggers), but rather to concentrate on providing plot-driven, hard hitting books. Beach books, subway books, books you CAN judge by their covers, which are provocative and cool. It's my slightly literary way to pay homage to the Ramones, an all-time influence of mine, to take the flab out of the Publishing medium.

There's next to nothing new -- unless it's unreadable, or precious, post-modern bullshit -- but there's SO much that can fit into genre. Everyone from giants
like Graham Greene to dull hacks like Tom Clancy exist in genre, so do some of the great archetypes of literature, that are great to subvert or play with.

We currently have five books out, all written by our partners, Jess Duke's Down Girl (a jujitsu version of a roadtrip, woman-on-the-run story), Jeffrey Dinsmore's Johnny Astronaut (a cheeky take on 50's sci-fi and private dick lit. He wrote it under the pseudonym Rory Carmichael), Mike Segretto's Dead Dog
(a Southwestern trailer-park noir comedy) and my two (hey, it's good to be the Publisher) Wet Work (a James Bond-meets k.d. lang spy novel) and G.O.P D.O.A., our first effort with national distribution. It's about big city politics, murder and the idiotic hysteria over sexual transgressiveness -- all centered around the recent pleasantry over at Madison Square Garden. Our next book is Segretto's second effort, How to Smash Everyone to Pieces, which we decided is a genre of one.

What's made the nut though is that before we even had our third book out, we made GQ, thanks to a brilliant young writer who still hasn't gotten her due. From
there, we got distribution from Publishers Group West, who are THE outlet for indie publishers and now, suddenly, we've found ourselves to be a real company, with a charter, taxes and everything. Of course, we're an unprofitable company at the moment, but that's why we all still lope around making the buck in advertising.

5- Do you publish writers from outside the group?
Yeah, we have our first non-partner book coming out early next year, called Dead Rite by Jim Gilmore, a retired ad man who came up with Apple Jacks jingles back in the 60's and 70's. Honestly. He's now an Associate Professor at Michigan State and has done some writing for Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock
Presents magazines, which is cool. It's a nice link to a classic era of pulp and noir, it's something to respect.

Before Gilmore, we had another book slated to go, but the kid kind of went his own way. It was partially my fault. I told him that he'd have final say over the
voice of his book -- but that was assuming he'd follow our First Amendment, which is that it had to have a plot. It had the essence of a plot, the barest
gossamer of a plot, which our editors (Dukes, Dinsmore and Segretto) could be fleshed out with some significant changes. Once we cleared that up, he balked at the contract - which a friend of mine at a big publishing company sent us and we changed the particulars - which allowed the company final say over
the final product. Completely standard. He said no.

All of us were trying to tell him, an unpublished 25 year old, that we're a crank-it-out pulp company, and he's not that good, but whatever. I hope he can write
a bio down the road slagging us, but I'd be willing to bet we were right.

And a couple of books down the road, we're coming out with a noir collection called "Danger City". Most of those stories will be from writers who we hope to work with in the future.

Although it's staggering what we get. Our premise can't be more flexible, or more basic (plot-driven pulp), but people take considerable time and effort to
send us their sincere poetry or their intimate take on scatological fetishes. But that's what we get for having "Fuck Literature" as a slogan.

6-Why are you drawn to the pulp genre?
I love the ethic of pulp, if not always the delivery. It's both punchy and the best of it can be profound. It's a populist form of writing and reading that is almost strictly an American form. Pulp, noir, whatever you want to call it, gives a glimpse into the time and mores of the society that is less self-conscious than
if you were just writing a novel where you are basically the main character. Great pulp, and this includes movies and HBO, is involving. It's alive.

7- What would you rather do - spend a year as a manservant to the Bush twins, or be the lifetime weekend supervisor of Mary-Kate Olsen's caloric intake?
That's a good question. Now, I went to the University of Texas, like Jenna, and I know the place where she got busted for a fake ID. And I respect her effort.
But, like much of Texas, there's less beneath the eye. Whereas three years ago, I thought she was hot in a floozy party girl way, she's much less attractive, and I mean physically, now. Barb,on the other hand, seems better put together, but remote. For example, she won't return my calls.

The Olsen twins though are successful in ways I truly do respect. I imagine them being run by a remorseless mother, "You're not being cute enough! Stop
pronouncing your 'g's!" "You're 18 for crying out loud, slut it up! Those magazines aren't going to sell themselves with their articles!" But maybe not, I
don't know their bio.

What I do know, though, is that I'm a cook. I love eating and good food, and I like the preparation of making a meal. So I wouldn't mind the caloric intake
job. By the time I was through with her, Mary Kate wouldn't be able to live without my wild boar (OK, pork shoulder) ragu and a good Barolo. In other words, I could make a positive contribution to her life in ways I could never reach the Bush girls.

8- what are the three things that piss you off the most?
I tend to get pissed off pretty easily, so this is a difficult one. Normally, I'd say mimes, but now, circa Sept. 04, first and foremost is the state of the union. I feel like I'm living in a slow-motion horror movie where it can't be more obvious what's going wrong, yet somehow the asshole sheriff doesn't believe it and the person who knows the deal is getting mocked. Here we have, in real time, an Administration who has utterly fucked up in just about everything. His successes, like gutting the environmental laws in the name of industry, are completely repellent. His failures are making me consider how my next four years will be in Buenos Aires. Here's a guy who considers the greatest mass murder in American history his crowning achievement, while his sycophants think that their fight in Iraq is Churchillian. It's grotesque. While at the same time, a truly thoughtful guy is getting the tar beat out of him for telling the truth
about Vietnam and saying he was in Cambodia, when it's completely probable that he was. It's fucking surreal.

That leads me to the second part of this hallucination, the mass media. I used to want to be a journalist. Hell, I used to be a journalist and I know the 21 year old woman I worked with who covered Sudbury, MA for a weekly newspaper had more balls than these mannequins. Even growing up during the Reagan years, when the old man was considered Teflon, there were people willing to check behind the curtain. John Kerry, in fact, went after the Iran-Contra people
and BCCI, and the Washington Post helped. There WAS a fight. Now, it's the shameful laydown. Shit, mobbed up fighters have more pride than the kissasses who constitute most of the 'media'. Elizabeth Bumiller, who covers the White House for the New York Times said it was downright SCARY to question the President during times like these, fraught as they are with uncertainty. Why did she want to ever write to begin with? I always thought it was to speak truth to power, be it left, right, Republican or Democrat. Pulitzer said his papers, yellow as they may have been, served to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the
afflicted." That's a mighty quaint notion these days.

But whatever. I could add that I hate traffic, but after being so long winded (another pet peeve), I'll leave it for my blog, Needles on the Beach.

- Interview by Laurie Woolever

Lindsey Caldwell, Hustler/DJ

Vitals:
Name: Lindsey Caldwell
Age: 18 (Shhhh!!!)
Occupation: H-U-S-T-L-E-R Hustler!
From where: Born in the 'Lou (St. Louis, MO), grew up in AZ, moved to ATL
Reside in: LES, NYC
How long have you lived in New York: a little over 4 years

The Real Questions:
You’re one of the hardest working DJs around town right now, playing just about every party where the young and hip are guaranteed to be plus holding down a monthly residency at APT with the Negroclash crew. How did you get started?

I actually started out just admiring the local DJs when I lived in Atlanta. I started a magazine with some friends just to shine some light on all of the talent that was emerging in the city called Frank. I had a lot of reservations about DJing. There were NO successful female DJs in Atlanta and I didn't want to be a novelty. I really wanted to be taken seriously. I started collecting records before I even got turntables. And I was hanging out with these guys who were a part of this group called Massinfluence. They had a set up and would let me play around on their equipment. They grew to regret it. I had a girlfriend who now lives in LA who I would get together with as well and we'd listen to music, we shared a lot of the same taste. I just practiced and practiced until I felt comfortable enough to play out.

Any advice for those wanting to make the leap from jaded partygoer to master of the music?

I just think it's a serious commitment. Financially as well as time wise. You have to buy a lot of expensive equipment and records aren't cheap either. If you want to do it for a living, good luck. Especially in New York, bar owners can't even be bothered to get in good sound let alone concern themselves with whether or not the music is good. It's a tuff gig. Most people who are out want to hear the hits, if your musical taste lies elsewhere your feelings are bound to get hurt. Also, there is a ton of competition out there, it seems like everyone is a DJ these days now that people can get away with just playing records without much technical skill.

For me, it’s always inspiring to see women behind the decks as it is to see all-female rock bands. I idolized Spinderella growing up and remember being excited when I first went to Guernica for the Ubiquita night. But, I’ve always wondered about what it feels like for the female DJ to have girls be their fans and gush, as well as certain issues they have to deal with. What (if anything) do you find makes it hard for you sometimes? Do you appreciate or get annoyed at the attention for being a female DJ (or shejay, if you wish)?

Usually no one gushes. They may stop by at the end of the night and give me a thumbs up or comment if they had a good time. That feels awesome, I get freaked out by too much attention so just to see that people are having a good time is rewarding enough for me. I never really idolized a female DJ just because she is a female. I have always been the kind of person who will make a way for myself. If I have to work harder because I am a girl, I just work harder, there's nothing I can do about it. I typically steer clear of girl DJ nights as they don't really flow well for the most part. Unless I know people are going to be open to whatever, the Girl on Girl party that Roxy and the I Heart girls promote is so much fun. People trust the DJs to just do what they do. I never thought creating a night simply for girls was particularly helpful, I want to play with whoever plays what makes sense with the kind of music I play, that person can be a guy or a girl.

I think what makes being a female DJ hard is guys think they need to help you all the time. I am always experiencing some guy DJ twiddling knobs on the mixer while I am playing, that's pretty annoying. I once had a guy approach me as I was rolling records into a venue and as me if I was as good as Beverly Bond. I was so insulted. As if the best I could be compared to is another female DJ and to top it off a black female DJ, that was as good as I was going to get. He would have never gone up to say DJ Language and asked him if he was as good as Rich Medina, never. He just put all his ignorance out there with one statement. Other than that I just try not to let comments like that get to me. Getting pissed isn't going to make people stop being ignorant, so I just gotta deal.

Many DJs have serious pet peeves about people requesting Britney Spears at a hip-hop show or standing around like statues no matter what they drop. Name one thing that will drive you nuts when you’re just trying to spin your records and keep the party going.

By far requests are the most irritating thing ever. Here's the thing. There are millions of tunes out there in the world. If I am playing for 3 hours, I am probably not going to have that tune you want to hear. Just chill out and enjoy the night.

I can't really get mad at people for not dancing though, since they're not technically supposed to be. I know no one's been enforcing that law lately, but I think it definitely killed our spirits. I just try to pay attention to what people are responding to and stick with that style. They're not necessarily not enjoying it if they're not dancing.

I do get annoyed when someone leans over to look at the label of what I am playing. Come on dude, that thing is spinning around way too fast for you to read anything that's on there. Just ask me.

Your list of records that never fail to make the crowd go wild:
Your list of 5 records that never fail to make the crowd go wild:

Damn, this is hard. I'll just list stuff that goes off at Negroclash or parties I have played at recently.

Strafe - Set it Off
Scenario/or the Scenario Remix - A Tribe Called Quest
Frankie Beverly featuring Maze - Before I Let You Go
Swing My Way - KP & Envy
Anything by DJ Technics

At the moment various radio hits:
Fat Joe "Lean Back"
Anything produced by Lil' Jon
Ciara "Goodies"

Lucky Thirteen
Who, in your opinion, is the quintessential New Yorker?
I think the quintessential New Yorker is a person who is just a little different from the norm. Who never really felt comfortable anywhere else and though it is a bitch to live here they make a way and somewhere in between find time to have a live. Basically a masochist! (kidding)

Favorite subway line:
As much as I complain, the F is pretty on point. Takes you all through the city east to west and to Brooklyn, Queens it connects to everything, it's dope. I just hate that it's such a mess. And I think it has the longest train route so there's always homeless guys on there sleeping and stinking. I know that they gotta go somewhere, but they sometimes manage to stink up the whole train, I gag easy.

Favorite bar or club:
I love APT. It's like my Cheers. I know that if I go there, I will see someone I know. The music is always good. It's one of the few spots in the city that really makes it a point to provide a good overall experience.

Please share a personal (and hopefully interesting) NYC taxi story.
I refuse to be a victim (that's a roundabout way of saying that I have an attitude). Anyway, my boyfriend at the time and I were at a dinner party all the way out in Red Hook. We found a cab and before we got in, we asked him if he knew how to get to our part of Brooklyn. He said yes. He proceeded to get us totally lost with the meter running. Finally we both had to step in and ask him to please shut off the meter as we were going in circles and weren't going to pay more than the cost of the car service price we paid to get to Red Hook earlier in the night. He refused so when we finally got home, we argued and argued holding exactly the cost of the car ride from before, I was on my cell trying to call the taxi commission to complain. He finally just took what we gave him and begged us to please get out. Cabbies can be such scam artists, we held him hostage until he gave us a fair deal after getting us totally lost. Ol' buster. I feel bad for tourists that have to deal with their mess.

If you had good luck and/or millions to spare, where in town would you live?
I LOVE the west village. It is so beautiful. If I could afford it, I would buy something over there. It just feels more like a neighborhood, the pace seems a little slower and people seem to be a little more considerate. I live on the ground floor of a building in the thick of it in the Lower East Side. My super and his family set up a ghetto BBQ session every Saturday where they play music from a stereo in the cellar just below my apartment.

It's like they are right in my apartment with me, it's so annoying. But, I really love the LES, it's grimey and relaxed. I lived in Brooklyn for 2 years so I missed how convenient it is to live in the city. I didn't miss the roaches though.

Best celebrity sighting in New York, or personal experience with one if you’re that type.
Hmm... It's such a normal thing to see celebrities in the city. I have seen a bunch, they are just normal folks. I am too shy to ever talk to any of them so no real encounters.

Just after midnight on a Saturday – what are you doing?
Chilling with a pint of Ciao Bella Green Tea w/White Chocolate Chunk gelatto, feet propped up on my dog Bing's back or belly watching a movie. That's on a good Saturday. My schedule is so hectic, I am constantly doing someting random. I try to just chill out on the weekends though. Doesn't usually happen, but I try.

What’s the most expensive thing in your wardrobe?
I try not to buy expensive clothes. It freaks me out. Freelancing and DJing for a living is a hustle. Work comes and it goes, when I make a lot of money, I put it in the bank and am afraid to touch it. I work at a clothing shop too called MZ so I get a lot of my clothes there at a discount. When I want to treat myself to something nice I go to Castor & Pollux in Brooklyn, I Heart has really cute stuff too. Opening Ceremony on Howard Street always has really unique things as well.

Best bargain to be found in the city?
I really only spend money on food. The Pho at Pho Bang is a good deal and it's SO good. There is a Veggie Dim Sum place on Pell Street that I go to most Sundays that is cheap and good. (Brett's going to kill me for revealing that spot.)

Most overrated trend/movement sweeping the city:
Ugh, there are so many. I wish people would just be original. I mean, I am not setting any trends, but I just wear what is comfortable sometimes a little trendy. But, I get so annoyed that people aren't creative anymore. For instance the trucker hat (an easy target I know, but so so annoying), why? Big logos are equally annoying, I just think people need to relax, there's always going to be someone out there that looks cooler than you. And usually it's someone who didn't try as hard as you did.

What bygone NYC place or thing do you wish were still around?
I miss this record store called Dub Spot. I liked it there, the girls who owned it were so nice. I wish the PS1 series of I think it was 2002 could just happen every summer, I had such a good time that year there.

I get sad when I see things being overdeveloped. I am freaking out over all the construction in the Lower East Side. I worry that it will lose its character. I love that I can see the sky down here. But, it looks like there's a lot about to go down on Houston, Orchard Street, Hotel on Rivington... booo!!!

I wish there was a reset button I could press to make all my jadedness go away. I remember when I first moved here and every little stupid thing would make me feel so inspired. It's so hard living here that it wears you down so quickly, I've only been here for 4 years and I am so salty about everything!! Pour out a little liquor for my innocence y'all.

If you could change one thing about New York, what would it be?

I guess if I wanted to change it too much I would be ready to move away. I wish it weren't so damn expensive to live here so I could save some money or buy a place.

The End of The World is finally happening. What are you going to do with your
last 24 hours in New York?
I feel lucky to have some really great close friends. I would just get them all together and bug out. I always end up piling too much into my day. Ideally, my last 24 hours would be completely free form.

Hani Khalil, Law Student

Vitals:
Name: Hani Khalil
Age: 25
Occupation: Student at Rutgers School of Law
From where: Libertyville, IL
Reside in: Kips Bay
How long have you lived in New York: Four years

The Questions:
You came to New York straight after college with stars in your eyes and the gumption to make these mean streets work for you. Four years later, you’ve adapted pretty well and are still unashamed to be a Midwesterner. What’s one thing about New York that can’t hold a candle to the heartland?

One thing that always amazes me is how very short people's fuses tend to be out here. Today, for example, when I was swimming, a fellow in the lane next to me accidentally collided -- and not at a particularly fast clip -- with an old lady who was practicing her back kick using a board. A simple and honest mistake. It's a pool. In the city. Things tend to get a little crowded. I swear this old woman just totally blacked out on this guy. I mean, yes he should've watched where he was going, but it certainly didn't merit a "What the hell is the matter with you?" It's a hustle living out here, I realize that, and sometimes it gets the better of me. Maybe it's a product of aging, but I really don't look forward to the day when I begin seeing provocation in everything that happens to me.

I think a lot of folks out here, for whatever reason, internalize that hustle and just become instinctively nasty.

You’re a future lawyer of America, but without the aspirations to become one of the scum sucking ambulance chasing depraved normal ones (no offense to lawyers). You’re the head of your campus ACLU with past summer internships helping out at the Neighborhood Entrepreneur Law Project and Arab-American Family Center. Poor you, when your classmates are running around power-lunching and making cash hand over fist, you’ll be living pseudo-GOSPLAC style. But you’ve got your ideals! But enough with the cynicism, what made you want to become a lawyer?

I did International Relations in college (if I make it sound like drug abuse, it's only because the residual effects have proven to be probably just as beneficial to my career path as LSD), and eventually became interested in comparative governance and comparative normative orders. That's what laws, and legal systems, really are at the end of the day. I never harbored any aspirations a la L.A. Law or The Practice. In fact, the appeal of trial practice continues to elude me. But, I've always been interested in the scope, power, and formulation of laws; what they say about us, and to what extent we are shaped by them. This fascinates me and it's probably not the first thing you'll hear most law students say. Then again, I know people who practically get off on reading the Federal Rules of Evidence. No complaints here.

On your blog, you write in a dense erudite manner that is a throwback to the days when being urbane was a must, not a pretense. In keeping with that, you’re presently on the elusive search for the perfect vodka gimlet. Any frontrunners?

Well, let me start with one place you'll all do well to avoid: Zana on 30th Street. I ordered a gimlet there once. The bartender, after verbally acknowledging that I had, indeed, asked him to make me a gimlet, wound up serving me a Gibson. That's a dry martini with a cocktail onion in place of the olive. Sad to say, it wasn't bad. There are currently two frontrunners in my search: 1) Rue B, on Avenue B, mostly because they've had a lot of practice with me; and 2) 718 in Astoria, where they hand-squeeze the limes. One of the best new restaurants in the outer boroughs.

Half-Dozen:
Please share a personal (and hopefully interesting) NYC taxi story.

I spent a big chunk of June 2003 with my family on a cruise of the Mediterranean. There comes a time in every mid-20-year old where they realize that family vacations are simply not to be done...until they get kids of their own. After an especially harrowing experience just getting my parents back on the plane to Chicago, I picked up a cab (illegally) from the departure level and couldn't help but notice that the gentleman driving the cab was Egyptian. I started speaking with him in my admittedly weak Arabic and somehow, the discussion devolved into what a horrible job he thinks my parents must have done raising me. I think the low point was when he flat out said, "I don't want my kids turning out like you." Egyptians are, by nature, a pretty sarcastic bunch, but this guy was just ripping into me with full conviction. He also shared with me the philosophically objectionable pearl about how nothing you do in this life matters because we should all be living for "the day after the end". This might've been the time I contemplated just upping and leaving the cab without paying, except we were stuck in traffic on the Queensboro.

Favorite subway line:

The 7. For sentimental reasons. When I first moved to the city four years ago, I was living on my cousin's couch out in Fresh Meadows. I was so desperate to get myself onto Manhattan and the 7 was my umbilical cord to the island. I remember getting off at the wrong stop -- Bliss Ave maybe, I really can't recall -- and looking up at the skyline from there in the hot August sun and just standing in awe of the immense clusterfuck I had just committed myself to.

Also, the 7 train produced the best line ever uttered on public transportation: "Yo mamma ho'd herself to every dude in town before she went and sucked my daddy's dick!"

Best celebrity sighting in New York, or personal experience with one if you’re that type.

Growing up, I was subjected to a lot of repeat viewings of The Muppets Take Manhattan and assorted Woody Allen. I think, overtime, this is where I developed the notion of moving to New York at the earliest opportunity. You can imagine then, how weird it must have been to see Woody Allen crossing Lexington, Soon Yi by his side, as I left my first day on the job, only my third day in New York. I took from this some sort of strange comfort that all gestalt happens for a reason and that everything was gonna be okay in the end.

What’s the most expensive thing in your wardrobe?

A $1200 pinstripe suit I had custom tailored. The material came from a German manufacturer called Gaenslen & Volter. I had it made for an interview that, suffice to say, has yet to happen.

What’s your theme song on the streets?

It always changes, but "Theologians" by Wilco has probably been getting the most rotation on my iPod these past few months . . . the lines eerily relate to an incident between myself and a Union Seminarian from about two years ago.

I've been binging on Nina Simone lately, too, and she did this great cover once of Hall and Oates "Rich Girl". No story behind that, but I just can't stop listening. I'm sure it'll arc in a few days.

Most overrated trend/movement sweeping the city:

Livestrong. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that so many people are buying them and contributing to a great cause but I'm pretty physically active myself, my mother is a two-time cancer surivor, and I don't even have one...because they're all sold out...fuckers!

-Interview by Candice Holmes

Carol Mayse, Senior Housing Court Clerk

Vitals:
Name: Carol Mayse
Age: 40-something
Occupation: Senior Court Clerk, Queens Housing Court
From where: Brooklyn
Reside in: Jamaica, Queens
How long have you lived in New York: Whole life

The Questions:
You’re the lynchpin of the Queens Housing Court as the coordinator of the Queens Resource Center. You sift through a stream of questions every day about troubles of landlords, tenants, and housing conditions. In New York City at large, housing is an obsession for the average person. What’s some advice you can give to people so they won’t end up in front of you with a sob story?

With the economy and price of real estate making it almost impossible to find affordable housing, taking a share or a roommate has become a necessity, not an option. When taking a roommate, find out something about them. Knowing their first name is not sufficient. Take references, job information, and verify it before they move in. Spend a little time talking to them. Finding out about their unnatural attachment to their various exotic pets is best discovered before the keys are turned over. And also remember that a verbal agreement is not worth the paper it’s not printed on.

If you were the mayor, what would you do to solve the housing crisis in NYC?

I would build more affordable housing – and by affordable, I don’t mean yuppie standards. I’d pass a law that would make all senior citizens eviction proof. Nothing is sadder than a 75-year old person facing homelessness due to inability to afford a place to live.

You see a lot of people on a daily basis and seem to like it. Before this, you worked as a token booth clerk for the MTA. There’s a long list of things you don’t miss – the bureaucracy, sitting in a fish bowl for 8-hour shifts, and many of the annoyances – but you liked the social aspects. I guess you’re a people person, something that many think a civil service job description wouldn’t ask for. What makes you so good at relating?

The people. NYC is a fascinating place and people in and of themselves often have very interesting stories if you take the time to listen. I genuinely enjoy being around people. I think it’s my purpose in life to educate people one person at a time. And by taking the time to listen even when there’s sometimes a detour to the purpose of their visit, people know that someone is actually trying to help them.

You taught me the neat trick of getting to the DMV on a Friday afternoon to make my wait fly by and other tricks navigating the public works. What’s a good tip everyone should know to navigate the court system smoothly (unless they’re on the wrong side of the law, that is)?

When you receive papers, don’t ignore them. They are not a suggestion. When receiving court papers, the proper response is to come to court.

Name three things that the average person does to make a civil servant’s life hell:

1. Coming to the office without the proper paperwork
2. Waiting until the last minute
3. Asking you a question and then talking through your answer.

Lucky 5:
Favorite subway line: There is no such thing.

What is your inner theme song on the streets? “Everyday People,” Sly and The Family Stone

If you had good luck and/or millions to spare, where in town would you live? Upper East Side, in a penthouse overlooking Central Park

Best bargain to be found in the city? Century 21

What bygone NYC place or thing do you wish were still around? Rockaway Playground. It was a Coney Island type amusement thing in Rockaway Park

-Interview by Candice Holmes

Petur Magnusson, Young Curmudgeon

Vitals:

Name: Petur Magnusson
Age: 24
Occupation: Loan Processor/Fauxtographer
From: Iceland via The Bay Area
How long have you lived in New York: One year

The Four:
You’re one of the rare breed of people who’ve moved to New York and admitted that everything wasn’t all you imagined it to be and it took a while for things to fall into place. Knowing what you know now almost a year later, what are some things the newbie to NYC should be prepared for?

I have to admit, I totally fooled myself into believing that I could handle anything before I got here. The majority of my grievances were caused by my own lack of planning and foresight in coming. I would strongly recommend that anyone (albeit those with a healthy trust fund) considering the migration to this city put serious thought and planning into it. I showed up with no place to stay, and no idea of where to do so. I had an apartment within 48 hours, but I was limited to finding places in the neighborhood of my hotel (St. Marks Hotel, a beautiful place for a nice weekend getaway with the missus).

Additionally, it's well worth it to annihilate your vermin problem Armageddon style...even though you'll never get rid of every roach when you live in a 100 year old building, you can keep them away for the most part by roach bombing your house four times in two days and patching up that hole under the sink where they're bumrushing like it's backstage at Freaknik or some shit. And no matter how high you are off fumes at 5am the night you move in, don't stop cleaning until you get all the fecal matter and semen off the walls and floor. You'll be glad you did, it really helps the feng shui.

Even in your general pessimistic state, even you’ve got to admit that there’s something good to be said about this town. What’s the best only in New York thing you’ve experienced so far?
The best only in New York thing I’ve experienced has got to be Metronaps, that place with the sleep pods. It's like, no matter how hung over you are, the place makes you feel great. It's a little creepy, since they could totally steal your wallet or violate you while you're sleeping, but when they give you head phones with soothing sounds of loveliness, it just makes you feel like you're in heaven's waiting room. I imagine that's what lobotomies feel like. Do they still do those?

You’re based on the Lower East Side, supposedly the epicenter of what’s cool, but until recently you could care less that there was life existing down there besides the distance between your apartment and the subway. You’ve likened yourself to vermin as the first white guy in your building that made it safe to lead the deluge of gentrification to your building. Why do you hate on your pale peers so much?
Well, the problem is, Candice, white people suck the beauty and fun out of everything...period. It's as if I opened up this sorta sci-fi spacey black hole vortex with a reverse function. And how it works, see, is that it sucks out culture, and spits in white people. Okay…that was a joke.

Well, the truth is, I feel like I ruined it for everybody in the building. I'm pretty good friends with one of my neighbors, and just the other day he told me that I was the first white guy to move in here in the twenty years he's lived in the building. And in the year since I've been here, rents are steadily on the rise, the old tenants are getting forced out, and a slew of trendy young white couples have moved in. They don't yell in the hallway, they don't cook anything that smells interesting, they don't play loud music; it's like all the fun is just getting sucked out. The point of living in the melting pot is the potential for exposure to new cultures, and because my building happens to be in a high demand, "hip" part of town, exposure becomes limited, and it's rapidly becoming very one-sided. It's amazing to see it in progress, and really just sad.

Five things that you wish you could find in New York:
1. Good weed
2. One single block that doesn’t smell like fecal matter.
3. A rat smaller than a cat.
4. A good chiropractor for that 200-year old lady that lives in my hallway…oh wait, I think she died the other day.
5. A horizon. I’ve never seen one since I moved here.

Hot Six:
Favorite subway line:
The F. Duh.

What’s your theme song on the streets? “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” Poison

Please share a personal (and hopefully interesting) NYC taxi story:
The guy drove 12 blocks past my stop before I realized it and I told him to stop the meter and take me back. But he pulled over furiously and threw me out!

Best celebrity sighting: I saw Jessie Spano get into a cab on West Houston!

Best bargain to be found in the city? The Love You Long Time Massage Parlor. It’s in the basement of my building.

Favorite bar or club: Sapphire Lounge. Because the bartender tries to kill me with alcohol poisoning every time I go in there.

- Interview by Candice Holmes

Steven I. Weiss, Journalist/Blogger

Vitals
Name: Steven I. Weiss
Age: 23
Occupation: Journalist/Blogger.
From where: Lived in six states.
Reside in: Just moved to the Lower East Side. "Welcome to the
neighborhood" casseroles are much appreciated.
If applicable, how long have you lived in New York: Since August '98.

The Questions
At 23, you're a seasoned journalist, former staff writer at the Forward and published in New York and Village Voice among other pubs. You founded Protocols and are launching three others: Kosher Bachelor, Canonist and The Metro Section. You've got a leg up over the average post-college bright-eyed and bushy-tailed would be writer youngsters. Any words of advice for your Brenda Starr and Clark Kent wannabe peers?
Maybe I've got a leg up because I'm not truly "post-college"? I'm actually not published in the Village Voice (except for my "Additional Reporting" credits on Wayne Barrett stories), but feel free to continue telling people that; while you're at it, mention any other prestigious publication that comes to mind. Is Brenda Starr a cartoon? Clark Kent is an example of precisely what's wrong with so many mainstream journalists today: no transparency. His writing about Superman is just a shonda.

My main advice is to be persistent and to start a blog. I was pitching the Boston Globe's "Ideas" section for a year by e-mailing ideas@globe.com, never getting a response. Finally, one day I just knew I had an idea that they'd bite on, so I called their main desk, asked to speak to Alex Star, told him I'd been pitching him and not getting a reply, and he said, "Oh, yeah, we get so many e-mails at that address that we don't keep track of it. Why don't you send it to my personal e-mail?" I did, and within five minutes I had a guaranteed paycheck.

That was a pretty simple life lession: Be as persistent and creative in tracking down editors as you are with tracking down sources, and you'll have little problem getting in with the publications you're right for. A blog is an instant resume; even if you didn't mention your blog in your application/pitch, you can be sure that if the place you're trying to get into is worth your effort, they'll have figured it out before all is said and done.

So you might as well make it worth it. I guess I'm among the first generation of journalists that's getting gigs with/because of a blog. While those might be slow right now, in a couple years, our first generation will be the ones hiring, or at least making important recommendations for hiring. So start a blog, pick a beat and run with it.

Oh, and another thing is to always contact someone who you think is headed in the same general direction you'd like to, and is a couple steps ahead and can help you out. If that's me for you, I'm here. Lastly, be a bit wary of those ahead of you in the media biz; they might help you out, but they also might try to keep you down. Know the difference.

You're known as a bit of a political rabble-rouser -- activist and former city council candidate, controversial ex-Yeshiva University student. In our conversations during the RNC, you looked on most of the proceedings with critical disdain. What’s your informed forecast for the road leading up to the November elections and the January turnover?
Every indication is that Bush is going to clean Kerry's clock, and I can't say I'm all that upset by it. The operatives running the Democratic house have been screwing up in grand fashion, and Kerry's just a disaster. It seemed like they might be able to get some mileage out of this new focus on the economy, but they've been flubbing that, too. I just saw Roger Altman on television, and he was stumbling all over himself. They're not inspiring confidence. Kerry's only the nominee because he's been around so long, and I think that says everything to the younger generation of Democrats that we need to know.

In your blog collection is the Kosher Bachelor, your sporadic guide to osher life and living. The color scheme brings to mind that a kosher bachelor's life would rival that of a Playboy. How does the K.B. about town get down?
KB is actually supposed to be more about cooking than anything about life and
living...except insofar as there is nothing more important in Jewish life than food. Except God...maybe. I don't really get down. First I was too poor and now
I'm too busy. I like going to blogging/media events, or whatever's on the press release pile on a given day. As to all the other Orthodox Jewish men of my age,
well, they're either married or that guy at the club you go to with too little rhythm and too much hair grease. For sketchy Y.U. guys, go to AmCaf or the West End near Columbia; for sketchy recent graduates, go to Mod; for sketchy
older graduates, head to a singles event held by any organization that focuses on bringing Jews back to the fold -- all the guys who grew up religious think returnees to the faith are easy.

A Quick Ten
Please share a personal (and hopefully interesting) NYC taxi story.
Taxis are for rich people, much like beer in quantities less than 40 ounces, agnosticism, and Gothamist.

What's your New York motto?
"The greatest experiment in human history."
Also: "Jews, Jews, Jews."

Describe that low, low moment when you thought you just might have to leave NYC for good.
If you're really doing that poorly, you can't afford to leave.

The End of The World is finally happening. Be it the Rapture, War of Armageddon, reversal of the Sun's magnetic field, or the Red Sox win the World Series. What are you going to do with your last 24 hours in NYC?
I'd head across the bridge to hang out with my niece. She's 20 months old, a
darling of a child, and gives me hope. Of course, I'd get an exclusive interview with God and blog it at Canonist.

Who, in your opinion, is the quintessential New Yorker?
Is Jesus an option? Maybe Forward Arts Editor Alana Newhouse; she's got this town wrapped around her finger. Or maybe my mother, who grew up in the Lower East Side projects, and just returned some 30+ years later. Or Teddy Roosevelt, which is an answer that makes me look smart without much justification.

Favorite subway line:
2/3. Zoom, zoom, zoom.

Best celebrity sighting in New York, or personal experience with one if you’re that type.

This was an e-mail I sent to Peter Rojas, then of Gizmodo, and Choire Sicha, then of Gawker, last winter. I was just gonna link to it from when it got put in Gawker Stalker, but it seems they don't have archives going that far back. I guess when, like Choire, you have interns loading you up with vodka tonics all day, everything beyond a few months ago is just a bit hazy.

Peter & Choire -

Walking to the subway from the Arab-American Comedy Festival last night, around 11:00 or so, I passed by the Bottom Line, where Steven Tyler + ladyfriend were singing "Those Were The Days" (not the Bunker family version) loudly with another couple, the guy of which was probably some old rocker I don't recall. A bunch of huddled NYU kids gawk at the grouping, basking in the afterglow of said Aerosmith man.

One obnoxious NYU kid walks up and asks them if they want to go get a drink, to which the rainbow-goateed companion responds, "We don't drink anymore," and the kid goes "Yeah, right," and marches off.

I'm about to pass by when Steven Tyler pulls out a digital camera and starts taking pictures, then video, of their sing-along. He's asking his friends to speak into the microphone and showing them samples of the pictures he's taken.

So I figure I've just gotta find out what kind of camera it is for Peter. It looks like a Casio Exilim, but it's in a black leather case, so it's hard to tell. I'm hesitant about walking up to him and asking about it, because all these fans of his are hanging around just gawking, and I'm afraid I might get crucified on the awning for having nothing better to ask their mighty rock god than what camera he's using. But I gather up the courage to wade through, creep up behind him and say "What kind of camera is that?"

"It's called a Casio," he replies, as he begins showing me its functions. He's now pulled it out of the case, and I can see the printing in the top-left of the back says "Ex-M2," which I guess means Exilim M2? It touts "2.0 Megapixels." So I'm like, great, thanks. "I've got this friend who runs a technology site, and I'll be sure to tell him," I say as I begin to walk away (when I finally did walk away, I kicked myself because I realize I never actually mentioned the word "Gizmodo"). But as I'm heading off, he goes, "Oh, you've gotta get one," and then starts mouthing geek-speak, pronouncing that his camera is "16 bit," that it utilizes "2 million pixels," but the piece de resistance, he tells me, is "the 512 card," with which "You can go on vacation for a week, then still be sitting in
bed going [mimics taking useless pictures]."

The idea of Steven Tyler in bed on vacation snapping away with his digital camera while pronouncing on its technological superiority was just too funny for me, and I started giggling and walked away. In the future, of course, I'll be sure to mention Gizmodo, and ask substantive questions like where he bought it, how long he's had it, and what other gadgets he has around. Overall, though, I think it's a pretty good job of celebrity and technology reporting for a guy who walks the religion beat.

What’s the most expensive thing in your wardrobe?
Seeing as I'm not really eligible to give Elizabeth's famous answer...my bar mitzvah suit might still fit.

Best bargain to be found in the city?
Other than the 30-day unlimited Metrocard, the $3.50 calzone that definitely used to be available at Time Out Pizza in Washington Heights. But I don't know if that's still around, so then the $4.00 falafel at Murray's.

Most overrated trend/movement sweeping the city
The renewed belief in the relevance of Gen X.

- Interview by Candice Holmes

Kevin Walsh, Forgotten NY

Because we're nosy
Age, occupation, and where you live
I'm 47, which makes me a geezer compared to your usual interviewees. I don't mind 47...it means I have fond memories of both Frank Fontaine and the Ramones. I work for a major retailer as a copywriter and live in fab Flushing.

New York, New York
You run a website, Forgotten NY dedicated to the all the wonderful, lesser known things about the city. How did you get started? What drives your interest in the forgotten things in new york and sharing these things? Enquiring minds want to know!

I'm an odd choice as a New York City expert. I haven't been to a Broadway show since Christmas 1993 (that was Patrick Stewart as Scrooge). I couldn't care less about most museums, restaurants or clubs. I despise the pace of New York City, where everyone runs around like like crazy talking into their wireless telephones. Actually, my goal is to get up enough money so I can move to a North Shore town and sit on a houseboat and drink beer the rest of my life. A good deal of the time, I HATE NYC. But there's also a lot of things I love about it, like stuff that's there solely because nobody wants to bother removing it. That's how things get saved in NYC...not through any cogent preservation process.

When I was a kid in Bay Ridge, they built the Verrazano Bridge about 20 blocks away, and they built the Gowanus Expressway just across the street, barely missing our apartment building. I think the fact that I saw most of the buildings across the street bulldozed to the ground, and then this huge trench opened up where the expressway would be, kind of planted the seed in my mind that things aren't static, they're not always going to be there, and you better save them somehow. The only way, really, is on film.

Around the same time, when I was on my way to first grade one morning, I noticed that all the cast iron lampposts that were on each street corner on Sixth Avenue were replaced by these strange stainless steel goose necked things. I had my parents worried for awhile with my lamppost obsession: I would fill drawing tablets with them (the kind that come in five colors, like Life Savers) and when my parents and I would go places on the bus (we didn't have a car, and I still don't drive) I would bring along a pencil, a Carvel Ice Cream spoon, and one of those little light bulbs that go in flashlights, and make my own lampposts. I never lost my interest in lampposts, or more specifically, the more ornate ones that proliferated when I was little. I'm glad they're kind of getting back to those now, but why tear down the old ones in the first place?

Bay Ridge was rife with old, dark houses in those days. You know, the ones with the overgrown hedges on the outside, and the little old lady and the 10 cats inside. I was always fascinated by old, decrepit architecture that's been there longer than the neighboring buildings. Since the 60s, of course, the old ladies, cats and their dark houses are gone, except in my memory.

For many years, I'd make mental notes about interesting items like this that had disappeared, and more that were still there. But I had never thought to photograph them or make any kind of record. That changed when I got a computer in 1994, went on the web in 1996 and stumbled on a series of websites that inspired me. The first was Frank Jump's Fading Ad Campaign a compendium of those painted ads you see on the sides of buildings, often when an adjoining building has been torn down. I had just begun to notice fading ads, and then encountered Frank's site. The next was Jeff Saltzman's Streetlite Nuts in which I found a kindred spirit with photos of hundreds of NYC lampposts. Other inspirational sites were Steve Anderson's nycroads.com and Dave Pirrmann's nycsubway.org, dealing with NYC's major roads and subways, respectively. The latter two approach a level of organization and comprehensiveness I can only dream of. After months of absorbing those 4 websites, I knew I had the ambition to do the same thing myself.

I sketched out the schematic of what I wanted Forgotten NY to look like in my office at Publishers Clearing House, where I was working at the time, in early 1998. It pretty much had the same categories then as it does now: Streetlamps, Subways & Trains, Ads, Trolley (remnants), Signs, Cobblestones (a misnomer since none are left in NYC), Street Scenes (a catchall category for whatever doesn't fit in the other categories), You'd Never Believe You're In NYC (rural scenes). Alleys, Street Necrology (old names of NYC streets) and Cemeteries came along later.

I took an entire year walking around NYC, every borough, most every neighborhood, with a little Canon point and shoot film camera, recording what I had filed away in my head for decades, but also making new discoveries as I walked. Walking is the only way to see a city. I wanted enough images to fill a goodly amount of pages when I launched the site. There's nothing worse than going to a website with anticipation of what marvels you'll find there, only to see "under construction" or "404 Not Found." Finally, I acquired a knockoff of Pagemill, Adobe's old web building software, and went to work creating logos and assembling pages and photos into something approaching coherency. The first pages were crude, raw things, with amateurish layouts and horrible writing. I've gone in and cleaned them up a bit, but I've mostly left them alone, if only to prove to myself how far, or how little, I have come.

How did the Forgotten NY tours start - we get the sense it's groupies wanting
more Kevin Walsh.
The tours are fun to do, but I'm not a real tour guide in the model of say, Francis Morrone or Justin Ferrate, who are real architecture guys and know what every last detail on a building is called. My attitude is, I'm taking a walk today...who wants to come along with me? I prepare a route, and bring a list of highlights that I talk about when we get there.

Our first tour in June 1999 was along Broadway. In Brooklyn, that is. Brooklyn's Broadway is mostly under an el, and preserves a plethora of ancient advertising...a shoe factory sign in Yiddish, a lot of snake oil and cough remedy ads (one, Tucker's '59' was painted in the 1890s), an embalmer's ad painted in the 1880s, and dozens more. About ten of us walked and trained down Broadway all the way to East New York, and then wound up back in Williamsburg in a bar with a dog. The real mavens were there on that first tour: Jeff, Steve and Frank, who I mentioned above. It was like the All-Stars of urban exploration. The next tour, in July, we walked the Grand Concourse, in the Bronx, on a 100-degree afternoon from Bedford Park Blvd. all the way south to about Franz Sigel Park, checked out an old aqueduct, saw the Hall of Fame (the Bronx has one) split up, got back together, got stuck in a drenching downpour, then got caught in a parade, and finally, some of us were attached to barstools on a Bainbridge Avenue dive where we watched David Cone complete a perfect game.

I do about four tours a year, five if I'm in the mood. People ask for more of them so who knows, maybe there will be more every year. Looks like the next one is in October. I was at Cooper Union in April with Mike (satanslaundromat.com) to see Justin Ferrate do a slide show, and while he was showing Grove Court in the Village, I recognized the photo...it was one of mine!

Groupies? I should be so lucky, you know any?

Do trips outside your home -even ones to buy groceries - become mini-explorations?
I don't carry a camera everywhere I go. I wish I could. I used to take my camera to work, but I noticed every time I did, something bad happened. The big guy up there telling me not to mix business with pleasure. But I do sometimes carry around a scrap of paper or two and a pen so when I see something interesting, I just notate it and then investigate it later.

As my friend Christina, who has the world's best Governors Island webpage has said, sometimes NYC would be much improved if you could get rid of the people. Now, she's not a misanthrope and neither am I, but people and their huge SUV's sometimes wind up getting in the way just when you have something lined up for a shot. And you really have to be careful in southern Brooklyn if you want to get a shot of something...they're manic down there about cameras, if they see you shooting something with one.

Like Dickey Betts, I'm a rambling man. Port Washington, where I used to work, is full of duck ponds, forests and rural patches. Everyone knew I was on another one of my journeys to adventure when I would come back from lunch with my shirt drenching wet. You can't do that so much in midtown, where I work now, because the noise and crowds are miserable, but you know what, there are still times when I find something new by just looking up and studying the skyline where I've walked hundreds of times before.

You're not supposed to look UP, you know? Then they'll know you're a tourist. I'm a tourist in my own city and whenever I see people marveling in the street about NYC, I'm proud of them.

What's been your favorite "discovery" so far? And what do you have your eye on in the future?
I have a whole host of people out there, called Forgotten Fans, who email me with tips and even photos of places they've seen. Now, in Rossville, Staten Island...way out there...there's a bay with rotted hulks of old ships anchored, just rotting away, slowly sinking. You can get pretty close at low tide. I was just sent an email with the news that the Abram S. Hewitt, which was one of the ships that raced to the aid of the General Slocum when it sunk--killing over 1200 people on June 15, 1904--is one of those ships. I'd been there a number of times already, and never knew. I'm always grateful to people that volunteer this kind of valuable information.

I don't know if I've made any breakthroughs or discoveries. What I have done is keep a lot of trivial stuff in my head for decades, like that tiny cemetery on Narrows Avenue in Bay Ridge, or that ancient twin castiron lamp on 6th Avenue and Walker Street in Soho, or that door that says "Knickerbocker" above it on the Times Square Shuttle subway platform. Then I just did Forgotten NY pages about them.

As far as the future goes, I'd just like to keep doing it as long as I'm able to do so. Cosmetically the site has changed somewhat over the years, though not drastically. NYC is so large, I've never had a time when I wasn't able to post. I used to post a new page every week, but that was draining me just a little, so I now do it every two weeks, and I rarely miss. I'm just sorry I got started with it in my late 30s, but that's when I really got started with the photography and when easy-to -use web authoring software showed up. I've never tired of it. I have fun writing or conceptualizing my next Forgotten NY project every single day.

Do you think the city does a good enough job protecting landmarks?
I can't call myself a preservationist. Right now there's a big fuss because they want to tear down 2 Columbus Circle across the street from the new Time Warner building (which I won't enter because they didn't build it for middle class people...they don't want me in there, so I'll oblige them) But c'mon...2 Columbus Circle is one butt-ugly building.

On the other hand, it's the local developers that are really ruining the city. There was this big, blowsy Victorian building on Boker Court in College Point, Queens..it was in the middle of the street because it was built before the streets were cut through...but it's gone now because some clown wants a 4 or 5 family building there. All over Flushing (where I live at present), there are beautiful houses being ripped down and ugly blond brick boxes going up in their place... the kind with sunken driveways, concrete front yards and water meters out in the front. That's the future of Flushing, and it ain't pretty.

Most of NYC's colonial landmarks are gone, due to fire or neglect. Just last year, a house built in the 1780s on Hubbard Place in Flatlands, Brooklyn, was torn down: it had been allowed to rot for several years. In Lower Manhattan, everything south of Wall Street burned down in 1835. NYC has relatively few colonial landmarks compared to Boston or Philly. Surprisingly Flushing has two houses from the mid-1600s, but one of them, the Bowne House, is in tough shape. Prospect Cemetery, in Jamaica, featured in NYPress this week, dates to the mid-1660s and it's a shameful, weed and needle-strewn home to rats and junkies.

So, no, I'd say we treat our landmarks like a sixth toe.

After the basic battery of NYC sights (Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Times Square, etc.), what other places would you tell visitors to check out?
Hit downtown Flushing! Plenty to keep you busy...the Quaker Meeting House and Bowne House from the 1660s, the Kingsland House from the 1700s, Flushing Town Hall has jazz concerts, there's the Latimer House (the guy who invented the light bulb filament lived there) and then cross the mighty Flushing River and check out the Iron Triangle junkyards and finish your day at Shea watching Cliff Floyd lose another one in the lights, or visit the Corona yards and see the last couple of redbird subway cars from the overhanging walkway. Your best bet is Sunday, when most of these spots are open.

Do you have a favorite borough? Why?
No. Go to any bookstore and heft the NYC guidebooks. Without exception, they're all 250 pages with 225 devoted to Manhattan, with 20 devoted to Brooklyn Heights, and 5 pages for what they term the "outer boroughs."

I am an egalitarian and a populist. There's no "outer" anything at Forgotten NY. All boroughs are covered equally, or attempted to be covered. There are still vast swaths of each borough where I've never set foot, which I intend to remedy before too many years go by.

And some specific questions about the city:
Favorite subway line
If you're looking for original subway architecture, catch the 4 or 5 at Bowling Green, and then the 6 at Brooklyn Bridge and take it to Grand Central. That's the original subway from 1904. If scenery is for you, get the A in midtown and take it out to the Rockaways. And do it quick, before those bastards ban cameras!

Favorite/least favorite gentrification trend
I'm really not a fan of gentrification, and sorry if I sound like a relic, but I don't like it when richies come into a neighborhood and raise all the rents. Even in Flushing, which is down pretty far on the gentrifying list, if it wasn't for rent control, I'd be in a trailer park someplace in Jersey or Long Island. Dumbo is getting to be a bit much, and now it'll happen with Red Hook. I'd like to clear out the junkies and hoodlums, but keep the bankers out too. Gentrification's good if it reduces crime, but bad when it prices out people like me.

Favorite moment in NYC history so far
It would have to be when they let Jackie Robinson suit up for the Dodgers.

Better headlines - NY Post or NY Daily News?
I know a woman who writes 'heds' for the Post who would be a little upset with me if I didn't say them.

Best burger in NYC
There really are no bad burgers in NYC at any bar or diner I've been in, and since I've been in quite a few of those, I can't say where the best one is. The Cheyenne, Blaggards, the Old Town, Eamon Doran's, all are good. I had a burger in Long Beach about 14 years ago that was a hockey puck, but that was there and NYC is here. Surprisingly, Jackson Hole, which has a touted burger, doesn't do it for me. Too gristly.

Dogs, cats or babies
I would have dogs if I had a big back yard, I'm allergic to cats, and babies are not a possibility in the near term.

By the way, Amy's wrong about Luquer. It was NEVER spelled Luqueer, but many denizens down there pronounce it like that. I think it's supposed to be "lu-ker."

Keep an eye on Kevin's site, Forgotten NY, for any upcoming Forgotten Tours

Toby Leah Bochan, About.com Editor

The Basics
Age and occupation. How long have you lived here, where did you come from, and where do you live now?
I'm 29, editor at About.com, where I watch over the Home & Garden, Parenting, and Money channels, which is funny because I possess neither home, garden, kids, or money. I’m also finishing up a book, “The Badass Girl’s Guide to Poker,” which is coming out next May. I was born and bred on the Upper West Side, went to undergrad in Ann Arbor, MI, got an MFA in Austin, TX, and moved back to Manhattan in 2000. After two years in Washington Heights, I moved to the unhip side of Williamsburg last December.

Three Questions
1. You have a job overseeing content for a dotcom. Do you ever wake up thinking it's 1999?
Well, lately I’ve been partying like it’s 1989 and that does lead to some confusing mornings but… no, not really. If anything, it's more like working in a very premature archaeological dig. My first day at About, I looked through what my cube’s former occupant had left behind and found a promotional martini glass and shaker set. Around the office, there is evidence of its candyland past – Lava lamps, huge glass jars filled with red sour balls, a foosball table covered in cardboard -- that sort of thing. We do still get free bagels every Thursday.

2. Single again, you decided to sell your wedding dress online and appear in a New York Post dating competition. Neither ended with any visible success. How's the singles market these days?
First off, success is relative – I just wanted to be in the Post and convince my mother to let me donate the damn dress to charity, both of which I’ve accomplished. That said, it turns out I’m an idiot at dating – to be frank, I always have been, but being older and wiser isn’t helping. Half the time, I don’t even know if I’m on a date or not. It’s become sort of a running joke with my friends. The funny thing about it is, just after I recently declared that I was quitting the three-ring circus that is dating in this city, I heard I’m going to be in Esquire for a “Brutally Honest Personal” I submitted months ago.

3. One of your ambitions in life is to become the first woman to win the World Series of Poker. If you did, millions of people would know exactly how much money you'd won, including all your friends. How would you deal with the begging letters and freeloaders?
As anyone who plays in my regular game knows, I'm not that good. I've been playing poker since I was seven, but I've only started playing Texas Hold’em in January. The highest I’ve placed so far in a real tournament is 9th out of 151 – last year there were over 2,500 people at the WSOP. So I expect that if I make that final table, most of my winnings will be tied up trying to buy my soul back from the devil.

Proust-Krucoff Questionnaire
Please share a personal (and hopefully interesting) NYC taxi story.
My favorite taxi story actually happened on the 1 train about 10 years ago. I sat down across from a guy who was talking to another man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts – and it was December. So Mr. Hawaii is very adamantly explaining how he gave up being a lawyer to become a taxi driver because, as he kept repeating, now he “really made a difference.” He got “people from point A to point B. Pregnant women, drunk people, everyone.” I was in a really annoying, carry-a-notebook-everywhere-and-write-down-everything phase of my writing life so I started transcribing the conversation. The best part was, Mr. Hawaii got off at 59th street and the man who had been talking to him, whom I had assumed knew him, looked right at me and shrugged. We both broke into insane laughter. Later, that taxi driver became the inspiration for one of the main characters in my first play.

9pm, Wednesday night - what are you doing?
I've just spent an hour of quality time with my celebrity boyfriend, Tom Welling, of Smallville.

Best celebrity sighting in New York, or personal experience with one if you're that type.
Gilda Radner taught me how to cartwheel.

Just after midnight on a Saturday - what are you doing?
I seem to be constantly celebrating one friend or another's 30th birthday at that time. Otherwise, playing poker.

What's the most expensive thing in your wardrobe?
I wish I were joking but I seriously have 2 dresses that were originally over $4000 that I’ve never worn. When I was in Texas, there was this Neiman Marcus Last Call that I was somewhat addicted to, and I kept buying these ridiculous cocktail dresses and justified it by thinking, Well, I’ll need these when I move back to New York. They're 99% off! I have this perpetual fantasy of being invited to fancy cocktail parties at the last minute.

Where do you summer?
Same place I sprung and will fall.

Just how much do you really love New York?
I want to have like, 10 million of its babies.

Medication: What and how much do you take?
I’ve somehow never been on medication. Go figure.

Of all the movies made about (or highly associated with) New York, what role would you have liked to be cast in?
I would have liked to be in Desperately Seeking Susan in the Rosanna Arquette role, so I could hang out with Madonna when she was still my idol.

If you could change one thing about New York, whatwould it be?
I'd build a casino on Governor's Island.

The End of The World is finally happening. Be it the Rapture, War of Armageddon, reversal of the Sun's magnetic field, or the Red Sox win the World Series. What are you going to do with your last 24 hours in NYC?
What’s funny is that freshman year of high school me and three of my girlfriends used to hang out at this Wendy’s and ask each other this very question. Hey, growing up in the city can't be exciting all the time. We all pretty much answered, lose our virginity, drink, do some drugs, and spend as much time possible with the people we loved. My answer hasn’t really changed much, though I’d be having sex with someone I loved. You know, to multitask.

For more Toby, visit her poker blog The Nut Heart Flush and a site with links to her writing. And the interview is by the inimitable Felix Salmon (many thanks).

Amy Sohn, Novelist and Journalist

All About Amy
Because we're nosy: What's your age, occupation, and where do you live?
I am 30 and live in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, with my husband, a guitar, a
clarinet, and a lot of paintings.

You've essentially been a part of New Yorkers' lives since 1996, with your column Female Trouble running from 1996-1999, a short stint at the NY Post, and now your Naked City column in New York magazine. How does it feel to be not only a social anthropologist in the world of young dating New York but also someone some people might know better than their siblings?
If I am an anthropologist I am by default: I banged her head against the same brick wall so many times I wound up becoming an expert on head banging. I wrote a short-lived advice column in NYPress called "Ask Amy" while I was writing "Female Trouble," and a reader wrote in to say that it was crazy someone so clueless about love was giving romantic advice, that it was only a matter of time before I advised someone to pee on the third rail of the subway. (The best question I ever got was from a guy who said he had a lot of discomfort due to really big balls. I asked Tony Millionaire, an illustrator for the Press at the time, to give advice since he had famously big balls and he urged the guy to apply St. Ives.)

In my Naked City column, to some extent I am an anthropologist because I ask other people about their lives and learn the trends and dating neologisms. I enjoy all the insider terminology, the lingo people use to describe humiliation – my most recent column is on dating fadeaways, or paramours who disappear without any warning. I love hearing people complain about dating because it always reminds me that it's not just ugly and socially inept people who feel miserable, frustrated and unloved. It's everybody.

I most enjoy being an anthropologist of sexual subcultures: dominatrixes, strippers, female wrestlers, whores, trannies, trannie whores. For someone who has written a lot about sex I actually have a lot of fear and getting to know people in the sex industry has opened my mind a lot.

Having people think they know you leads to a lot of weird scarily personal letters. One guy sent a headshot and resume and a letter saying I should go out with him despite the fact that, as he wrote, "I'm goyim." Recently a guy sent a letter about a column I wrote on my husband's and my search for an apartment. The guy said he wasn't surprised I was having trouble finding an apartment, but that I had found someone willing to marry me. I used to cry when people eviscerated me in the Press but there was an upside. Once someone writes a letter that compares your vagina to rotting fish, there is really not a whole lot else that can upset you.

The comparisons to other female columnists who detail their personal lives, the most notable being Candace Bushnell and her Sex and the City column in the Observer, inevitably come up - how do you explain what your angle is?
I never set out to write about sex or dating – although these days many young women do, which is odd. Now we have women at every major college writing sex columns and aspiring to publish books with carnation-pink cartoony covers. I didn't try to have an angle either. I got my NYPress column when I was 22 and it focused on the primary concerns of a 22-year-old: finding a boyfriend, working shit jobs, getting drunk, feeling competitive with girlfriends, sleeping with the wrong guys. The environment was the East Village and Lower East Side of the mid-nineties, bars like Sophie's, Lucy's, the Cherry Tavern, Max Fish, Ace Bar, the International, Big Bar, Three of Cups, Hotel Galvez.

Candace Bushnell's column, which started in '94 I think, focused on north-of-59th-Street dating angst among women in their mid-thirties. She had famous fabulous friends and dated men with their own cars and drivers. Observer readers read it trying to guess who was who. The women in her column were looking for men with a net worth larger than that of all the men in the East Village put together. I wrote about getting laid and trying to get laid, always from a first-person perspective. She had an alter ego named Carrie Bradshaw and you never knew how much was true, which was part of the appeal.

As someone who has put her dating and sex life on display, you must (and do - link to your specific questions page) get some pretty bizarre requests for
dates. How often do you get offers for dates? Did you ever go out with any?
I have never gone out with a stranger who sent me a mash note. I had horrible romantic judgment but not that horrible. However, many times I was set up with guys, through friends, who I later discovered were fans. This did not make for long-term relationships. They imagined that I was jaded and easy. I was easy but also over-romantic and desperate for love. So we'd go on one date and then I'd start calling and asking where he was the night before, saying I wanted him to be my boyfriend. "But you're Amy Sohn," one guy said. "You don't want a boyfriend."

I said, "What column have you been reading?" because I always thought my romanticism was clear. They all saw what they wanted to see. Some wanted to be written about and others didn't. I went to a party once and hit on a writer who was working on a memoir. I wrote about it in my column, which came out on a Tuesday. We had made a date for that Wednesday and on Tuesday night when the column came out he called and canceled the date, saying if he was going to be written about he had to be the one who controlled it. Another guy, who is the subject of his own recent Gothamist Interview, actually rebutted my account of our date in The Mail section of NYPress, using the same pseudonym I had given him, which I found enormously flattering.

People seem so much more interconnected in New York than anywhere else in the world, and the chances of running into someone seem that much higher. How do you deal with run-ins with exes - both of the ex-boyfriend/girlfriend as well as ex-friend varieties? Any good guiding principles to share?
I remember being on my way into Joe's Pub one night when I saw an ex standing in front of the Public. I had to duck behind a car in the parking lot at Astor Place until he had gone into the theater. I have crossed streets, hidden behind benches, run into restaurants, stood in foyers. I say avoid contact at all costs. If it's too late and the person's walking toward you, just lower your head and look the other way. They may see you but the onus will be on them to acknowledge that they have. Also, when dating someone new, never ever go out of your way to greet someone you have slept with. It will lead to a conversation you don't want to have.

Do you believe in staying friends with someone after you break up?
It may speak to my general taste in men in the last decade that once the dust settled, there really were not many friendships of substance left. There are a few exceptions. The men I am friendliest with are either men that I dated so briefly it almost seemed not to happen, or men with whom I was friends for a long time before we dated, so transitioning back into the friendship was easy.

Let's talk about your new book, My Old Man. It's about a young female
rabbinical student reassessing her life with a gentile boyfriend twice her age
and her Brooklyn parents going through some changes themselves, not to mention an oversexed neighbor. Why does this seem so plausible?
You didn't read the book yet! That is right out of the jacket description so it's not even a good fake! [For the record, Gothamist has now completed the book and we'd ask the same thing all over again, as well as "Are you into bondage?" and "Did trying to write dialogue for NYC indie actors (Harvey Keitel, Willem Dafoe) make you wish there were more movie star action figures?" By the way, Amy will be reading from the book tonight; details below.]

I hope that parts of my book are plausible, like the idea of living in the same neighborhood as [Jake's] parents. I grew up in Brooklyn Heights and now live in Cobble Hill. I have childhood friends in both neighborhoods that live within blocks of their parents. This is useful if and when you have children and need help taking care of them, but not so useful when you're single, on a first date, and see your parents coming out of another restaurant across Smith Street – which happened to me once. The guy wanted to introduce himself to them. Instead I made him wait with me in front of the restaurant until they were blocks away. It didn't last anyway because he worked in politics and said he couldn't date a journalist.

What was your process for writing MY Old Man - how long did it take you, etc?
I started the book in April 2001, when I moved from Brooklyn Heights to Cobble Hill. I had the idea of setting a novel in the neighborhood, the modern neighborhood, and making fun of all the 718 and bklyn T-shirts, the emerging hipster scene and restaurant culture. I had dated a few older men in that time and was interested in portraying a May-December affair from the point of view of the May. I finished the book in September 2003. It was a long and arduous process, because it was my second novel and I was self-conscious, I had been blocked for a long time, and because it has more of a plot than my first novel, Run Catch Kiss.

And how did you exactly secure the John Currin painting for the cover?
My husband Charles is a painter. Last winter we went to Currin's retrospective at the Whitney. When I saw The Never Ending Story, I said, "That would make a great cover for my book." I thought it was a real long shot but through a connection, I contacted the Gagosian Gallery and to my great surprise Currin gave us permission to use it. I have heard he is a really good guy and his generosity proves it. I am hoping this book will appeal to both men and women because of the cover.

You're married now. How is it to be someone's old lady?
I had never lived with someone before, so that was a big adjustment. I tend to have my head up my ass a lot of the time and it has been a process of learning how to take care of someone else, instead of just focusing on my own work and neurotic psyche all the time.

Until I was married I did not know that men like to take their socks off as soon as they come in from the outside, and then drop their socks on the floor. I do gross things too, though, like leave the cap off and forget to rinse off the electric toothbrush. Many of our fights have been about stuff like that. When you are single you take for granted the freedoms associated with singlehood.

The key to making it work is when they drive you crazy you have to laugh instead of kill them. People don't really change so you have to accept your differences. It also helps to go out and drink Silver Patron margaritas with your spouse and then shoot pool together, like you're dating.

I don't feel smug now because marriage is a challenge. I used to ride the F train glaring at the sappy Park Slope couple-y people. Now that I am a sappy Cobble Hill couple-y person I have had to find a new class of people to resent. I have selected the young Stepford mommies in Cobble Hill Park, who push their strollers in unison and say things like, "My husband wants us to go to his ten-year-reunion but I've just gotten Jackson into a good sleep pattern."

Did you feel you needed to get married to put an end to the crazies contacting you, or was that just an added bonus?
I was ready. I was 30 but felt 50. I was lucky to meet someone who was not interested in game playing.

As far as the crazies go, there aren't as many who read New York as NYPress so I haven't heard from them in some time. It is nice to have a six-foot-five tattooed husband come to my readings with me, though.

Who did you bribe at the NY Times Weddings desk to get the feature write-up? (By the way, Gothamist found it hilarious.)
Apparently it was the result of an inter-editorial competition – one editor was gunning for some other couple, another was gunning for us, and we won out. More people contacted me about that announcement than anything I have written in my 8-year writing career.

Your wedding dress was burgundy: Explain this bold, Jezebel-like move.
I never imagined myself wearing white. What a dumb hegemonic choice. Someone recommended the dress store Blue on Avenue A and St. Marks, so Charles and I went over to see what they had. The proprietor, Christina Kara, showed us that dress in burgundy and that was it. Christina is a real visionary with a great sense of humor, definitely the go-to girl for indie brides. If you know Greek swearwords visit the shop and say them to her.

You developed a great show, Avenue Amy, for Oxygen. Not only was it visually different, by using rotoscoping (animation-over-live action technique used in Waking Life), it seemed very honest about dealing with friends and dating. Naturally, it's not on the air anymore since TV networks are determined not to get the single life right. Will we see an Avenue Amy DVD sometime?
My cocreator, Joan Raspo, and I would love to do an "Avenue Amy" DVD if we can get the rights back. Oxygen canceled our show after September 11 because they lost a lot of advertising money. But it was not the right place for it anyway because they took out all the swearwords and dubbed in these weird dolphin noises. I am currently developing another TV project that will deal with twentysomething singlehood and thirtysomething marriage, but not for Oxygen.

Other NYC related questions:
What's your favorite subway line?
The F. It was the first train I spent a lot of time on when I moved into my very first post-grad apartment, on Clinton and Luquer. (Luquer used to be called Luqueer but someone homophobic had the signs changed.) I love the view on the F when it goes outside and the way everyone on the train seems to open up and relax (except for the people who whip out their cell phones). I don't love that the doors between cars don't open because I think it's unsafe.

I am a devotee of pre-walking, but frequently get confused, pre-walk in the wrong direction, and then lengthen my trip considerably.

What are your favorite and least favorite Brooklyn gentrification trends?
Smith Street is really suffering. All the standbys are now lousy. Grocery's terrible. Patois is mediocre. There are some new ones I like, such as Pacifica and Sammy's Coffee Shop. I like going to D'Amico in the morning because you realize that there is always someone crazier than you are. So far no good restaurants in Red Hook. Charles and I went to 360 and could not find one thing on the menu to eat, so we left.

The Cobble Hill gentrification is happening so fast that I had to change a lot of things in my book at the last minute. The protagonist, Rachel Block, is a bartender at Roxy, which closed last month due to lack of business. I had a scene set in Smith Street Kitchen, which disappeared, so I had to change it to Saul. The Atlantic Avenue Detention Center was still active when I began the book. Now it's empty. There is a pivotal scene that takes place in Studio Tavern, this amazing dive bar on Atlantic between Nevins and Third. The other day I saw that it's being renovated into what looks like a restaurant. Very sad. That was a great place to go if you were having an affair.

Best place to take your date to meet your parents.
Chestnut, if you can spring it. I recommend the homemade olives.

Amy will be reading from and signing copies of My Old Man at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble tonight, Wednesday September 8 at 7:30PM. She'll be on tour for the next few months all over the county, so see what neighborhoods from San Diego to Brooklyn she'll be in here. She also has a thorough website, amysohn.com where you can read many of her past columns and let her know if you think she should appear on VH1's 100 Greatest Red Carpet Moments.

And many thanks to Amy for graciously submitting to our numerous rambling questions; we really had no idea she'd answer them all!

Margaret Harper, NYC Public School Teacher

Basically Speaking
Age, profession, where you live, etc...
I am a 24 year old NYC public school teacher. I live in Park Slope/Windsor Terrace, but have also lived in Williamsburg and near Washington Square Park. Strangely enough, I have a degree in Biological Anthropology with a specialization in Primatology...not much you can do with that, but share great trivial monkey facts at dinner parties.

How did you come to become a NYC public school teacher?
I joined through the AmeriCorps sponsored NYC Teaching Fellows program right after graduation. I was pretty unsure of what I wanted to do and the health benefits were pretty tempting. I didn't really expect to love it or become so invested in it...go figure.

Why do NYC public schools keep teachers with their students for two grades these days? [For example, students might stay with a teacher for second and third grades.]
That's actually not that common, it is school specific. A lot of administrators prefer it, I think, because when teachers are working with at risk kids, more time means a better rapport and better results. This year, in fact, I am teaching 2nd grade for the first time with the plan of following (or looping as we call it) my students up to third. I wanted to do this because third grade testing is such a hardship. Knowing my students' strengths and weaknesses going into that grade will hopefully make a difference. On the other hand, many teachers choose to just focus on one grade for many many years. The benefit is that they get to know the curriculum really well. Then again, they have a high risk of burn-out. There are only so many ways to teach the same thing over and over before it becomes mind-numbing.

What do you think of the Bloomberg administration's education initiatives, such as ending social promotion for students after third grade and the re-alignment of the Department of Education?

It is really hard for people directly involved with students to take a strong stance on social promotion either way. For every example of the ills of social promotion, I can show you an example of how it helps. Certain policies, however, are plainly detrimental. Testing as a sole passing criteria is one. Bloomberg claims publicly that many factors are considered. I can tell you though, that on the third grade, you must pass the test. End of discussion. This is such a horrible way to judge eight year olds. These tests are flawed and
really counter to the way third graders think. They require speed reading and rapid inferential leaps. Most eight year olds are just getting comfortable reading without pictures. They lack the confidence to perform when timed. I could go on forever about the evils of standardized testing.

Streamlining the district offices was largely unpopular with tenured teachers because it took a lot of them out of offices and put them (gasp!) back in the classroom. It really wasn't a bad thing though. It had just gotten to this point of being too many cooks in the kitchen; there needed to be a good clean-out.

Overall, Bloomberg doesn't know education. Sadly, Klein is no better. They take the credit for our work, but none of the blame. Same old story of management vs. labor.

What do you think can make a difference to most NYC public schools?
Believe it or not, the issue is not really money. My school, for example, doesn't lack in supplies or equipment. The real difference could be made in better hiring practices for teachers and administrators. At the risk of getting too union here, a better contract would attract better people to the profession. We need bright, talented new teachers. In order to do that, old stereotypes are going to have to be eradicated. We need to get rid of this huge teacher stigma. "Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach." It is really sad. Teachers do a necessary job that most people would not or could not do. Yet, public opinion is often against us. There is also a huge turnover in administration, causing a sort of free-for-all. NYC needs to get good people and keep them.

The NYC Teaching Fellows program was a good attempt at getting better teachers. Of course, politicans went and messed that up too. As part of our contract, new teachers in the at-risk schools were promised $4,500 a year for two years towards paying off student loans or new educational expenses. The money was a federal AmeriCorps grant. After completing our years of service, we were told that the budget had been over-extended and that we would not be getting both payments. Basically, after we fulfilled our part of the agreement, the government reneged on its portion. This was a Clinton initiative trashed by Bush. Thank you, Mr. President, two steps forward, one step back.

It seems that many young teachers are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed whenthey head into the NYC public schools, but end up becoming very cynical, with quite a few burning out. What happens?
The best piece of advice I was given going into this profession was to not make any decisions your first year. Every teacher hates their first year. And it is totally true! Teaching is not the joyfull and exhilerating experience you want it to be...at least not most of the time. It is impossible to not feel like a failure when you are unable to help every kid as much as they need to be helped. And here's the truth, no teacher can work miracles for every kid. It will not happen.

This is where the big burn-out comes from in my opinion. You start on this track of 'Could i do more? I have to do more!' You go home and cry. Eventually, you take pride in the small successes. You learn to let some things go. Either that or you quit.

Describe what you do in a "typical" day.
There is no typical day for a teacher. We come home with the craziest and sometimes most beautiful stories. Working with thirty kids everyday makes your job unpredictable. Add to that the inherent instability of our Dept. of Ed. and the fast pace of our city and you get a day of juggling, troubleshooting and adapting. You have to be creative and quick thinking to do this successfully. The best teachers can whip up a lesson at the drop of a hat when they have to, but have insightful lessons planned and on hand so that rarely happens.

What about other teachers there who have been at the school for a while - what are their attitudes like?
Teachers are not all old, embittered women who scream and instruct from a crusty old manual. This city is filled with creative, dynamic professionals who do their jobs with pride and enthuisasm. I really wish I could change the common teacher stereotype. It is rarely accurate, though admittedly, you will get that old school marm now and then. We have this great job where we get to bring the world to our classroom. We get to fulfill our own academic and worldly curiosities through teaching. It sounds pat, I know, but there is something really
incredible about seeing the world, more specifically this city, through the eyes of a child. Even more amazing, we get to show them the world in a particular light. For me, it is so important to bring world cultures and earth sciences into the classroom... to stress appreciation rather than mere tolerance and conservation rather than exploitation. This is grassroots, people! This is change at the cellular level.

You teach in Cypress Hills. Most people only know Cypress Hill from the group's hit, Insane in the Brain. Do you get a lot of "Are your students insane in the brain?" Or is it a school anthem?
I teach in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn. We're right near the Queens border, but still in East New York. "Insane in the Brain" is definitely a frequent player in my mental soundtrack, but sadly (and be prepared to feel old, people) the kids in our school don't know the song or the group!

You on NYC:
What's your favorite subway line?
The L. I love that it goes across. It is like the defiant train line!

What are your favorite and least favorite Brooklyn gentrification trends?
I love the new Atlantic Terminal Target! I hate the granola bohemes upping the rent and making buying an impossibility. Hmmm...I actually think the worst gentrification trend is when people who partly cause the gentrification, and definitely benefit from it, complain about it. Guilty.

Favorite NYC politician
Gotta be Martie Markowitz, Brooklyn borough prez! That man parks illegally and unapologetically, gives out frighteningly green bagels on St. Paddy's Day, and is just an all around laugh riot. He gave the speech at my graduation from Brooklyn College's Master of education program. It was hilarious! People near the speakers were like blown back by his screaming.

Best place to buy lots of school supplies for cheap
Oooooooo...tough. You gotta be willing to put the time into sale watching. Target and Staples have awesome sales. I'm talking Crayolas for $0.25 and marble notebooks for $0.10. No time for comparison shopping, hit the dollar stores! My favorite is Save on Fifth (5th Ave and like 7th St. in Park Slope).

Dogs, cats, or babies?
Have to admit it, my dog is my baby. Right now, I spend all day with my kids. So, I like to come home, take the dog to the park and curse like a sailor.

Margaret has a blog, Harper's Bizarre, where she'll be posting photographs of her classroom - still trashed from the last day of school. And she also recommends Donors Choose, a donation program that lets donors pick the charities they wish to support, many of them being simple things like funding supplies at a public school.

Geoff Wolinetz, Freelance Satirist

The Basics:
Age, occupation, where are you from, where do you live now?
I'm 27 years old. By day, I'm Ad Operations Manager for Turner Sports Interactive. By night, freelance journalist/writer/satirist a-go-go. I'm from Pomona, NY, about 30 miles NW of Manhattan. I now live in the Upper West Side with my girlfriend and my TV.

A few for you:
You're coeditor of Yankee Pot Roast, the journal of literary satire. What's the state of Internet writing these days, and do you think blogs are the death knell for collaborative journals?
Well, I'm probably a little biased, given that Y.P.R. is such a labor of love that it'd be difficult for me to comment negatively on the state of its genre. I will say that this is a very crucial time for the collaborative Internet lit site. With the explosion of the blogosphere and the proliferation of opinion sites, there's a narrow but fertile spot for Internet fiction and satire. We need more people to step up and fill that void, if only to keep a tenuous hold on the collective sanity of our nation. And I think I know just the person to answer that call: Connie Chung. Last I heard, she wasn't doing anything but chugging tequila from the bottle in her undershirt.

Are blogs a death knell? It's difficult to say. On the one hand, they don't seem terribly creative. Many of them just pass around a link the way we passed a joint around in high school. Everyone takes a pull until there's nothing left and everyone is left with that same vague, sort-of-stoned feeling that's more itchy than anything. On the other hand, I can't be a writing snob. Anything that gets people writing at all is exciting to me, be it in the form of opinion, fiction or just a diary-style recounting of their trip to the petting zoo. My 15-year-old brother has a blog. So does my mother. That tells me that writing, on some level, is being embraced all over.

Full disclosure: I'm also coeditor of Y.P.R., along with the great Nick Jezarian. Anyway, it does feel sort of like cheating for me to pretend to ask you objective questions, even though it’s longstanding convention for journalists or interviewers to feign objectivity, along with their subjects, for the readers’ sake. (Go watch Conan O’Brian chat with S.N.L. alums sometime.) Then again, as a freelance-writer / literary satirist / media-whore, you certainly qualifiy as an interesting New Yorker, and thus rightfully deserve an interview. Discuss.
This is going to sound unbelievably obsequious, but I truly believe that every New Yorker is interesting on some level (except for 75-85% of the women that I've dated). On that level, I think that I qualify simply by virtue of living here and trolling the streets every day. We're really splitting hairs by asking, "Who's more interesting: the woman that wears tinfoil as a hat in Central Park or the guy on the bike that just flipped off a pedestrian?" I'm sure they both have pretty good stories to tell. Because of that, as you said, I think I qualify (regardless of the cronyism that may be inferred).

I guess the question here is "Am I interesting enough to counteract the obvious nepotism?" Generally, people who discuss just how interesting they are are quite the opposite. How interesting am I? Let's say somewhere between "interesting enough to be invited to a Nick Denton party" and "not interesting enough to be invited again." I leave it to the reader to the be the judge.

You're also a contributing editor to the just-launched-five-minutes-ago political punditry blog, The Starboard View. What’s up with that?
The Starboard View is a website launched by a group of like-minded, politically oriented people to throw a monkey wrench into the mainstream media. With a crucial election coming up in November and the Republican National Convention here in New York, this is a very exciting time to be a politically active being. Starboard View brings together a group of pundits with unique viewpoints to comment on a variety of issues that are already important parts of the presidential campaign. There's so much being talked about on television and in the papers and so many conflicting viewpoints out there, we figured that it was time to add another voice to the cacophony. If we can get just one more person politically motivated for this November's election, then we've done our job.

What makes satire rock and who are your favorite satirists?
This may be blasphemy to my 10th-grade English teacher, but I think that people like Chuck Klosterman and Neal Pollack have done more for cultural critique and political satire (respecitvely) than Voltaire did. Voltaire's satire is funny, I'm guessing, but satirizing foppish and naïve aristocracy doesn't really hit me on any kind of visceral level.

People like Klosterman and Pollack have brought satire to the people. And in the same way that anything that gets people writing is exciting to me, anything that gets people thinking and debating is exciting to me. If they're together enough to discuss "Saved by the Bell" (à la Klosterman) or rock ’n’ roll (à la Pollack) than they have the tools to discuss politics or anything more "serious" (though calling politics "serious" is debatable itself). And what that says to me is that we have a fighting chance in this country and on this planet. I fancy myself an optimist. For me, one of the most complimentary things is being understood. Klosterman and Pollack are understandable and they do it with humor. And that is where their brilliance lies. I just wish they'd answer my letters.

Proust-Krucoff-Abraham Questionnaire:
What bygone NYC place or thing do you wish were still around? (Defunct bar, passé trend, checkerboard taxicabs, etc.)
The Chinese place on 76th and 1st that I went to as a kid when we stayed at my stepmother's apartment.

What location would you declare a city landmark?
The corner across from my old apartment where the old woman sits and paints pictures of the Statue of Liberty.

Best bargain to be found in the city?
The Kwik-Kart guy on the corner of 45th and 6th. Everything's under 5 bucks and he's actually been reviewed by food critics.

Best place to take a cheap date?
During the summer, to Bryant Park to see an old movie on the big screen. Pack a small picnic basket. During the winter, Wollman Rink in Central Park.

Please describe your greatest celebrity encounter in NYC.
I was standing outside a theater on 48th St, and I noticed Martha Plimpton was in whatever was playing so I started obnoxiously fawning all over her past movie performances to get a laugh out of my friends. I turned around and she was standing right there.

What’s your favorite scene from a movie that reflects New York life?
The scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are sitting under the 59th St. Bridge. There's something about that scene. It's talking, sitting and outdoors. All are essential to the New York existence.

Best public restroom?
A lot of people would go for a bookstore, but they are surprisingly dirty because they discourage you from bringing books in there. The best public bathroom is in the NY Public Library, Mid-Manhattan branch on the 7th floor. And you can bring books in there.

Who, in your opinion, is the quintessential New Yorker?
Woody Allen, because he won't leave New York, even to go to the Oscars.

Describe that low, low moment when you considered leaving N.Y. for good.
As bad as it's ever gotten, living anywhere else always seemed worse.

What happened the last time you went to L.A.?
I sat in traffic on the other side of the Ronald Reagan funeral procession on the way to a wedding.

The End of the World is on its way. What would you do with your last 24 hours in New York?
I'd take a final look at the city from 5 places: Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, the top of the Empire State Building, the crosswalk on the Brooklyn Bridge, the upper deck at Yankee Stadium and my bedroom window.

- Interview by Josh Abraham

Scott Lapatine, Stereogum.com

The Basics:
Age, occupation, where are you from, where do you live now?
I’m 26, originally from Roslyn, NY. I reside in the East Village with my fiancée Eliza Jane. I’m a Digital Music and Media Producer, which is a fancy way of saying I Work At A Website. And I started a music “blog” called stereogum.com that poses as a Britney Spears fansite.

A Few for You:
You've been written up in the NY Post for "chronicling [Britney] Spears' slide" on your blog (i.e., offering candid photos of the starlet running errands in unfortunately chosen clothes). Yecchh. Even though it's clear that you're, um, ironically commenting on our culture's sick voyeurism, doesn't that make you part of what's wrong with America?
Britney has always pushed the envelope. Her music is so manufactured and vocal talent so limited, the naughty schoolgirl act was a necessity. I didn’t pay close attention to real Britney until she broke free from her handlers around the time of her 21st birthday. Who would’ve thought the most successful popstar in the world would have the absolute worst judgment. Each headline was crazier than the last. Britney ingests only Red Bull and Marlboros! Britney stages suicide in new video! Britney proposes to random guy she just met, second time this year! Britney wears shower curtain to 7-Eleven! But believe it or not, I’m a fan. It’s all just fun. I don’t take responsibility for the nasty comments people post anonymously on Stereogum. Um, so short answer to your answer: yes, but I’m not nearly as bad as Star Magazine.

Every day, we read another quaintly out-of-touch article about the ever-changing effects of iPods on music culture, mostly lauding the "shuffle" feature. Now really: how have iPods changed music for you personally?
I love my iPod. It’s one of those retro “first gens,” but it does the job. I bought the Rio 300 when it first came out. It held ten songs and I had a hard time convincing anyone how cool it was. Now with the iPod’s deserved popularity, I think it’s great that casual listeners who felt disenfranchised by the Clear Channeling of the music industry are passionate about music again. It was smart of Apple to bestow Shuffle a more prominent place on the iPod interface; it’s like listening to a radio station that only plays songs you like. Makes going to the post office or DMV almost bearable.

Audio technology has always dictated the way we listen to music. Vinyl demanded a Side A and Side B, then compact disc made that obsolete. Today ID3 tags facilitate making themed playlists. As digital downloading grows more popular, I think we’ll witness the death of the album format. Artists like Ben Folds are embracing the Internet-only EP. Eventually it will be an all-singles market. Ever type your favorite song’s title into iTunes and check out who’s covered it? I ended up with seven versions of “Wichita Lineman.” It wasn’t possible a few years ago.

Artists are dealing more with active as opposed to passive listeners. I’m hearing a lot of good DIY product. Someone e-mailed me a remix of that Killers single. I listened to it a bunch on my iPod before I realized it was unauthorized. But who cares? It’s fun, not to mention a great way for artists to interact with their fans (David Bowie’s on the forefront of this stuff). I also love mashups. My favorite is probably Go Home Productions’ sync of “Drive My Car” with “The Way You Make Me Feel.” I wasn’t blown away by Danger Mouse’s CD, but I support what he’s doing.

You frequently post awesome, if esoteric, MP3s on your blog (for which I must sincerely thank you), with brazen disregard for piracy laws. While your intentions are quite well conveyed by your actions, would you care to sum up in words your feelings on the ethics of distributing copyrighted materials?I draw a distinction between what you describe and P2P networks. I don’t use P2P. I don’t see how someone can defend downloading vast amounts of albums (or movies or TV shows for that matter). Some see it as revenge for years of paying $18 for a CD with only one good song. I sympathize, but these days I’m actually spending more money than ever before on music. CDs and digital downloads, occasionally vinyl.

As for blogs that share a great song or two every now and then, these are the most popular rationalizations.

1. I’m doing the band a favor. It’s free publicity.
2. I only post live versions and demos you can’t buy anyway.
3. I don’t host the MP3, I just link to someone else’s file.
4. I only keep songs available for a few days.
5. The bit rate ain’t even 128, dawg.

I’ve used them all. Any music blogger will tell you he or she would immediately take down a file at the copyright owner’s request. Fortunately no one’s ever asked me to do that. I’ve only received thank yous from label reps and like-minded audiophiles.

I’ve bought dozens of CDs after hearing just one cut on a blog: Animal Collective, Jens Lekman, Athlete, AC Newman, that Third Unheard Connecticut hip-hop comp, Paul McCartney’s second solo album. Last week, one site posted Greg Dulli’s new cover of Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love.” I bought the CD the next day (it’s awesome by the way). The real success stories are this year’s breakout rock acts: Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, and Modest Mouse. Without a doubt they benefited from passionate word of blog.

The MP3 bloggers are very savvy. They don’t cross the line. When an indie rock band reaches a certain level of popularity, bloggers usually back away. No one wants an e-mail from Interpol’s lawyers, much less R.E.M.’s.

OK, what are some of the most embarrassing songs to be found on your iPod?
How much space ya got? I have not one, but three Starship songs (and one Jefferson Starship). I just encoded George Michael’s greatest hits. Then there’s Crosby, Stills & Nash, solo Donald Fagen, Blind Melon’s sophomore album, terrible ’80s songs that were in Wet Hot American Summer, Burt Bacharach, Arrested Development, Doobie Brothers’ “What A Fool Believes,” ’90s Squeeze, The Cure’s Wild Mood Swings, obscure Genesis b-sides, tons of Sting (demos, remixes, you name it). I used to have Christopher Cross’ “Sailing.” I don’t think it gets more embarrassing than that. Oh, last month I paid 99 cents for “Walk the Dinosaur.” Total impulse buy.

On the subway, when I see the other white-wired zombies staring into space, I wish thought bubbles would appear over all our heads, revealing what everyone’s listening to. I think we’d all be surprised.

Proust-Krucoff-Abraham Questionnaire:
Best bargain to be found in the city?
Dolphin Fitness on East 14th street. They seem to pay no attention to who’s using their facilities.

Please describe your greatest celebrity encounter in NYC.
All my awesome rock star stories are from my days interning for Carson Daly, but the MTV beach house that summer was in Seaside Heights, NJ, so those encounters don’t apply. In New York City, hmmm ... I ran into Fyvush Finkel once, but he was on his way to shul and couldn’t chat. I also saw Marilyn Manson on the corner of 47th and Broadway a few years ago. The WWII helmet was a bit much.

What’s your favorite scene from a movie that reflects New York life?
When the Baseball Furies get their asses kicked in The Warriors. I hate baseball.

Best public restroom?
Full disclosure: I haven’t tested them all. But Barnes & Noble is a good bet. Bring your own books.

What bygone NYC place or thing do you wish were still around? (Defunct bar, passé trend, checkerboard taxicabs, etc.)
I went to the same Times Square Dunkin’ Donuts every weekday for four years. It closed a few months ago. They had perfect iced coffee. Also another blackout would be fun. New Yorkers were so friendly. We met our neighbors. It was like the end of Ghostbusters II when everyone gets covered in positive slime.

Who, in your opinion, is the quintessential New Yorker?
Woody Allen.

Ever consider leaving N.Y. for good?
Only when I get my rent bill. Rimshizzot.

What happened the last time you went to L.A.?
I totally saw J. Lo at The Ivy. L.A. is soooooo cool. Actually, I haven’t been to the west coast in six years. I’m due for a visit.

The End of the World is on its way. What would you do with your last 24 hours in NYC?
I’d load up my Armageddon playlist and hit shuffle.

Interview by Josh Abraham.

Joe Quesada, Marvel Comics Editor in Chief

The Basics:
Age, occupation, where are you from, where do you live now?
I'm forty-two years old, Editor in Chief of Marvel Comics, grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, and now reside in Manhattan.

A few for you:
What's great about the Marvel Universe is its grounding in reality: instead of billionaires and aliens protecting made-up cities (as in DC comics), the Marvel characters are struggling teenagers and everymen, beleaguered by personal problems, and the bulk of them live and fight right here in New York City; almost every hero dealt with the aftermath of September 11th. Who in your opinion is the New Yorkiest superhero?
It would have to be a toss up between Spider-man and Daredevil but we would have to give the nod to Spidey because he is much more recognizable. That said, Matt Murdock, a.k.a. DD, is as New York as you can get. Born and raised in Hell's Kitchen, Daredevil is New York.

If you could have any hero's superpowers, whose would you pick? (You don't have to thwart crime; you can use them to have fun. Oh, the fun you could have...)
I would want to have the uncanny ability to always find a legal parking space anywhere, at anytime in Manhattan.

Why aren't all back issues available online for a modest fee? How do we make that happen?
Well, if you're interested in them because you want to read the stories, then they are available at reasonable prices, they're called trade paperbacks. That's when we compile several issues that make a story arc into one nice compendium. Now, if you desire the single issues because you're a collector, well, the Marvel stuff goes up in value and you're just going to have to haggle it out with other collectors. Nothing much I can do about that. We print it and what happens to the books afterwards is out of my hands. I can't help it that Marvel Comics are so amazing, so in demand that people would mortgage their homes, go through their kid's college tuition, spend all their paper route money just to get their hands on our books!

Total geek question here: How does Iron Man bend his elbows and knees when the armor has no discernible joints?
Shhhh, parts of him are aluminum.

Comics and graphic novels finally seem to be escaping the fanboy stigma, and are gradually making their way into non-comic readers' awareness, acceptance, and appreciation. What are some non-superhero comics (Marvel or otherwise) you'd recommend for readers wary of capes and tights?
Well, there's tons of Manga stuff being published by Tokyo Pop which isn't superhero based. Then there are classics like V for Vendetta by Alan Moore or more currently Jinx by Brian Michael Bendis.

Proust-Krucoff-Abraham Questionnaire:
Best bargain to be found in the city?
What New York City are you livin' in?

What's your best dining experience in N.Y.?
No question, White Castle for those late night cravings! Then there's always Brennan and Carr's in Brooklyn. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water.

Please describe your greatest celebrity encounter in NYC.
I used to work at the old FAO Schwarz and we used to get tons of celebrities. I ended up helping everyone from Mick Jagger to Isabella Rossellini to Dudley Moore. It was a great job solely for that reason.

What’s your favorite scene from a movie that reflects New York life?
I think Saturday Night Fever captures it all beautifully.

Best public restroom?
This may be the strangest question I've ever heard. I honestly couldn't tell you.

What bygone NYC place or thing do you wish were still around?
I loved the Horn & Hardart Automat when I was a kid. My dad used to take me there once a year when we went to Times Square to catch a movie and drop quarters at the giant arcade which name escapes me.

Who, in your opinion, is the quintessential New Yorker?
John Lennon, JFK, Jr., Keith Hernandez.

Ever consider leaving N.Y. for good?
Huh!?!?

What happened the last time you went to L.A.?
Actually, I think I'm still over there stuck in traffic.

What location would you declare a city landmark?
CBGB's.

The End of the World is on its way. What would you do with your last 24 hours in NYC.?
I'd start by having pizza for breakfast at Ray's on 11th Street. Maybe catch the 7 train to my old neighborhood in Queens, catch a day game at Shea, watch the Mets lose. Head back to Manhattan, have a couple of dirty water dogs by Columbus circle and then toss a couple of coins into the pond in Central Park. I'd then hail the smelliest cab I could find to Bryant Park and watch al the girls walk by and thank them for all looking so beautiful. I'd then walk over to the Empire State Building and catch a final look before catching a train to Peter Luger's in Brooklyn for a final meal. Then it's back to Manhattan where I would hit Bleecker Street, maybe catch a band or two at The Bitter End or Kenny's Castaways, topping it all off with some jazz at the Blue Note. Stop by McSorley's, grab a pint before last call and then head over to my hotel room at the SoHo Grand. I'd plop Billy Joel's The Stranger in the DVD player and watch the sun come up and the lights go out.

Interview by Josh Abraham