New York

Godspeed, little barfing C train girl. 🤢

Wall-to-wall joy at the Revolution show tonight. I never got to witness the man himself, but I’m so glad I got to at least do this.

Much respect to the folks tasked with shepherding a classroom’s worth of small kids on a rush-hour subway train.

NYers who step onto the train and immediately plant yourselves in the open doorway, blocking everyone behind you:

Did your moms drop you?

Medicine.

Me: “Spring has sprung! Open the windows!” Omnipresent Loud-Ass Trucks: “HELLO”

In case any other New Yorkers are in the market for new glasses, here’s a map of shops that were recommended to me. drive.google.com/open?id=1KB9Q-…

Hey NYC, where do I go for the best eyeglass frames? Warby Parker is nice but kinda vanilla. Looking for something a bit bolder.

Alice Lowe was already well into her pregnancy when she was approached to make a film, and she managed to write, direct, and star in Prevenge before she gave birth, which is amazing. And there’s a lot to admire about its surrealist fusion of horror, comedy, and drama. But the final product doesn’t quite hang together.

Hey NYC friends, I have an extra ticket for the @TRTS show at @thehallbrooklyn tonight. Who wants to go with me?

Jordan Peele’s uncommon wit, keen perspective on racial identity, and perfect cast are unfortunately no match for Blumhouse’s insistent blandness.

If you are taking up space in Manhattan, you are in my way.

I’m amazed this role wasn’t written specifically for Isabelle Huppert, because no one else on the planet could have pulled it off.

When Ryan Gosling sings “City of Stars,” my ears editorialize it as “City of Cars,” but then he wins by making me wish I had nice hair too.

Stray thoughts:

• Going all in on CGI Peter Cushing was a bold move, but more than giving Rogue One a through line to A New Hope, it serves as another reminder that the uncanny valley isn’t paved over just yet.

• The introduction of moral ambiguity to the otherwise black and white Star Wars universe is not unwelcome per se, but Cassian isn’t interesting enough to give it any real weight. (Really, none of the characters… See more →

Tonight I got to see Megadeth play in a room a little bigger than my apartment and it was very very great.

This city is an embarrassment of riches. twitter.com/magary/status/…

I ❤️ @nitehawkcinema. nitehawkcinema.com/series/the-nit…

I loved @essl’s talk yesterday on how @cooperunion has influenced each step of his life in design. Good medicine for the will to make stuff.

Empty and ugly, The New York Ripper is content to have its inscrutable serial killer revel in the seediest corners of early-’80s NYC without the benefit of a remotely compelling narrative. It’s all cheap and no thrills, but I’ll give it some credit for being extremely skeevy, which I took to be its lone goal.

Exquisitely overdone in every respect, and entirely a product – and rebuke – of its time. This was clearly a lot of fun to make, is in turn a lot of fun to watch, and its theme song will get stuck in your head for weeks.

Opening with a newspaper headline about a murderous orgy, I thought this pre-Code thriller might be a bit more scandalous. Luckily, what it lacks in shocks it makes up for in unintentional farce.

If Hitchcock had a predilection for the supernatural, it might have looked something like Cat People. The suspense it creates in a few keys scenes – both in terms of their staging and the psychosexual premise that drives them – is among the boldest I’ve seen from 1940s-era horror.

The gags fly fast and furious in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, but not nearly enough of them land. Compared to the duo’s electric “Who’s on First?” routine, the humor here is stilted.

SoHo and my bike bell were made for each other.

Shellac and Shannon Wright at the Bell House tonight. It was really really good.

NYC friends: I’m showing Hollywood horror classics The Mummy (1932) and The Wolf Man (1941) at Small City on Friday! smallcity.us/events/2016/10…

Recalling the confined paranoia of Roman Polanski’s apartment trilogy, and, more recently, The Babadook’s exploration of grief and maternal anxiety, Under the Shadow is an effective chiller set in Tehran during the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s. When her husband is drafted by the military, Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is left alone to care for her daughter as bombs fall on Tehran and her neighbors flee the city. Still stinging from a medical school rejection… See more →

Hats off to the guy on 6th Ave talking on the giant 1980s cellphone. Or maybe hats on. I haven’t decided. Stand by.

In 1967, Terence Young, director of several 007 movies, gave us Wait Until Dark, in which a blind woman is terrorized in her home by criminals who believe their contraband is hidden there. Its title, a command, refers both to its villains’ nocturnal scheming and to its heroine finding empowerment in her disability.

In 2016, Mike Flanagan, whose Oculus was a modest horror hit, gave us Hush, in which a deaf woman is terrorized in… See more →

In 2013, Edward Snowden provided proof that the American government’s scope of surveillance around the world – including its own citizenry – was even more massive and pernicious than most of us thought. The revelation landed, more or less, with a thud, largely because much of the news media focused more on the size of the leak than the substance of it.

This wasn’t without reason.

With the increasing overreach of the Patriot Act and… See more →

Written documentation of last night’s Wolves in the Throne Room fan who solemnly held aloft a single invisible orange for several minutes.

“Dude, you have orange earplugs! I hate orange. I like green!” says the smiling guy at this show with a novel approach to making friends.

Yeah, so @TheActualMuffs kicked all of the asses tonight, so wherever you are, if your ass is hurting, there it is.

I am just about ready to write a lengthy, diagram-heavy essay on the lack of a communally understood etiquette for standing in subway doors.

When you realize that you accidentally gave a tourist bad directions, and it kinda ruins your day.

I’ll be at @TypographicsNYC on Friday and Saturday. Say hello if you see me!

The aforementioned building is apparently actually known as the Police Building Apartments. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/240_Centr…