The other day, sitting through previews before a screening of the Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony, I watched trailers for Behemoth!, Tony Gilroy's return from a galaxy far, far away and his first feature since 2012's The Bourne Legacy; James Gray's Gowanus-set period crime thriller Paper Tiger; the showbiz-is-hell character piece Misty Green, directed by Chris Rock; and Noah Segan's dripping-with-nostalgia The Only Living Pickpocket in New York.

Nina’s New Wonderland. The New Eve is Rising by the New Eves was one of the most exciting debut albums of 2025, broadcasting a female energy that recalled fellow Brits the Slits and Savages. If there’s any justice in the world, the Eves will have a longer recording career than did either of those assemblages. Until such time as a sophomore album arrives, though, a solo album from Eve cellist Nina Winder-Lind’s has emerged.

There is a lot of focus these days on health and wellness. Many people are realizing that if they take better care of themselves, they can be a better colleague, friend, parent, sister, brother, etc… One of the ways that people are taking care of themselves more so is to look at skin care and what helps us stay vital and feeling fresh as it relates to the face and body.

My husband and I have long lived in a converted early 20th-century cold-storage warehouse in the Far West Village. When we arrived in 1989, less than a decade after the residential conversion, our super told us the building once stored spices. It’s a charming idea, seeing as how Nabisco used to have multiple factories in the vicinity, one of them right next door.

Irish Rep Co-founder Ciarán O’Reilly Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape—subtitled “A Comedy of Ancient and Modern Life in Eight Scenes”—spins a tale that hardly seems comedic. It depicts the undoing of a burly fireman named “Yank,” who shovels coal in the stokehole of an ocean liner: work that’s unrelentingly exhausting, soul-sapping, and grimy. The play debuted in 1922 at the Provincetown Playhouse on MacDougal Street and eventually moved to Broadway.

After a relaxing vacation at the Jersey Shore. I returned to Westbeth where the construction noise never stops, (except on holidays and weekends). Back in my home, I heard the drilling from the masonry repairs outside and new sounds from the endless renovation of the apartment next door. Thankfully, it’s not as loud as the demolition process, which shook my floors and walls and drove me out of town.

In June, David Siffert won a 15-vote victory to succeed 35-year incumbent Deborah Glick as the next state Assembly member representing the West Village, SoHo, NoHo and Tribeca. Now, as the campaign gives way to the work of governing, Siffert sat down with the Star-Revue to discuss their grassroots campaign, the importance of representation and their legislative priorities for their first term.

A long-shuttered newsstand in the bowels of the West Fourth Street subway station has found new life as a shrine to New York City transit, offering free magazines, subway memorabilia and a venue for pop-ups and events hosted by local artists. The project is being spearheaded by comedian and writer Al Mullen and multidisciplinary artist Ruth Lichtman, a husband-and-wife duo who hope to use the stand to connect everyday New Yorkers with the city’s artists and performers.

We Villagers have been watching our bohemian neighborhood character leach away for a very long time, but we remain blessed with movie theaters. It’s true that many are just a memory (the Art Greenwich Twin, Bleecker Street Cinema, two theaters on Eighth Street, Theater 80 St. Marks, the Landmark Sunshine), but we are still richer than most neighborhoods in art and revival houses, including the Roxy, two Angelikas, Film Forum, IFC, Quad, and Cinema Village.

It is five o’clock, when I arrive at The Theater at City Tech. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) annual hearing starts at five-thirty. After a quick press conference alongside Council Member Chris Banks who chairs the public housing committee of the city council, I sign up to speak, like a good citizen, like someone who still believes in sign-up sheets.

After a relaxing vacation at the Jersey Shore. I returned to Westbeth where the construction noise never stops, (except on holidays and weekends). Back in my home, I heard the drilling from the masonry repairs outside and new sounds from the endless renovation of the apartment next door. Thankfully, it’s not as loud as the demolition process, which shook my floors and walls and drove me out of town.

Would two inches really make a difference? No, I wasn’t taking a sex quiz. I was buying a new beach chair. After my first trip to the Jersey Shore this June, I had to admit I could no longer get up from my sand chair without a struggle. Another sign of getting older.  My neighbor Ian, who’s younger than me, switched to “an old man” chair a few years ago after his heart surgery.

In 1968, a friend of Dr. Alec Pruchnicki returned from study abroad with a revelation: in Italy, healthcare doesn’t require insurance. "They don't ask how you're going to pay”, Pruchnicki’s friend told him, “they just take care of you." That moment inspired Pruchnicki’s decades-long advocacy to bring that very system to the United States. Last month, Pruchnicki was one of three honorees named a "Single Payer Champion" by the New York Metro chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), at the group's annual benefit in Greenwich Village.

I was a Person of the Village many years ago, when graffiti slathered the subways, fires devoured the Bronx, doggy doo marbled the streets, and a weirdo named Son of Sam ran around killing people, and the city was “broke as a fish,” as my grandfather used to say. But people were connected, they talked to one another, they weren’t encased in cyber magnets repelling them from one another.

What can white musicians say in jazz? That’s no small question, particularly today. The goal of the Trump regime and American conservatism in general is to restore segregation (a form of apartheid) to society so there is no challenge to the political, economic, and social status of the white majority. You’d think that being the majority, these people would feel safe from challenges.

The first time I met Oneika Mays was in the sanctuary of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. A quartet of musicians from the New York Philharmonic was playing a Mozart sonata, and between movements Oneika spoke about how metta—the Hindu and Buddhist practice of offering loving kindness to all beings—is like sharing a favorite piece of music with others.

Family dramas have been a staple of American theater at least since Eugene O’Neil thought, Hmm, maybe I’ll write something about blustery old Dad, woeful old Mom, and that doomed brother of mine. The genre doesn’t appear to be in danger of disappearing anytime soon. And, at times, it seems that the more dysfunctional the onstage family is, the more audiences want to settle in and savor the rancor.

Pleasure, Dilation, and Mythology in the Works of Reza Abdoh: A Historical Profile by Asal Azari Contradiction, infection, and a stimulation that drones. The work of Reza Abdoh warps the present moment as it straddles across seas and dual-identities. Born in 1963 in a pre-Revolution Iran, Abdoh’s father was heavily influenced by Western culture, aesthetic, and tradition. By the time Reza was born, his family was established as high status by operating numerous businesses catering to the social elites of Tehran, including the Shah.

Gwendoline Riley broke boundaries when she came out with her sort of existentialist, prize-winning novel, Cold Water, at age 22. Cold Water is full of humor that is wry, dark, and dry, and narrated by a young woman working in a distinctly American-style bar in Manchester. Gwendoline Riley herself worked in such a Manchester bar and uses her dark humor to describe the eccentric if defeated clientele who “carry their emotional life around like a dead rat in a box.”

Bowery Poetry (formerly known as The Bowery Poetry Club) is being reimagined, according to Bob Holman. Possibly America’s most well-known poet, due to his extensive presence on PBS over the years, Holman is the founder of Bowery Poetry and the author of 20 volumes of poetry. Though he is a globetrotter and champion of endangered languages and dialects, he prefers to be known as the Bowery Bard.

I WILLL NOT GO TO WAR (TODAY TOMORROW OR EVER FOR YOUR LOST MIND MR. PRE-SIDENT) You want me to lay on the hard tarmac my head split open my eyebrows on fire my jaw dislocated my children pulling off my shoes for their teacher me screaming, how much money do you get my father? None. I can see in your eyes no money, the man you served for thirty years drinking his piss and blood, why should I do this in front of them, my wife torn apart, why?

At six in the morning, long after last call, Daniel Root is most at home. The dive bars and restaurants are closed and empty and no one is there to notice he’s taking photographs. Even if someone did, they wouldn’t care. Root drifts around the Village, and when something reveals itself, he photographs it. This has been his method for decades: an instinctive practice that has produced some of the most quietly evocative images of downtown New York.

On Sunday, May. 17, Hellenic food, dancing, and music held sway at Congregation Kehila Kedosha Janina’s 11th annual Greek Jewish Festival, which took up the length of Broome Street between Allen and Eldridge Streets on the Lower East Side. The festival lasted six hours, and several thousand people braved the 85-degree heat to attend. Familiar Greek foods like bourekas and Greek salads, as well as other Middle Eastern foods like hummus, were served.

Like many people in lower Manhattan, David Siffert has grown tired of the New York State’s legislature failure to address the concerns of his community. He’s long been a community activist, but running for public office was a new idea. “I’ve just gotten tired of waiting,” he says. When Assembly Member Deborah Glick decided not to run for re-election, he realized that “impatience can be a virtue.”

Sure, high school reunions can be a chance to reconnect with old friends and share some laughs over those woebegone glory days when the sun was rising on your future. But in the main, they’re bad trips down memory lane taken by people creatively curating their lives for people they probably didn’t like all that much in the first place. All those long-held animosities; all those dreams dashed; all that potential squandered.

It’s 3:30 pm, April 7, 2026, less than five hours before an entire civilization may be eliminated, according to the peeling Orange in Charge. It’s also Taco Tuesday, so we shall see. Last night, Monday night, I had dinner with my brother Paul at Via Carota. 9:30 pm. The place was eerily empty. I think Monday night is the one night when the entirety of the West Village hits the gym and then GrubHubs chicken salads, watches Reality tv, pops Xanax and gets to bed by 10:30 pm.

Last week Mayor Mamdani released his “Block by Block: The Housing Plan for A New Era” which aims to support, with public and private financing, the construction of 200,000 new “affordable” (a term largely undefined) homes and preservation of another 200,000 lower income and rent stabilized units over the next decade in NYC. The Plan also calls for more capital investment in NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings, again drawing on public and private sources, and aggressive housing and building code enforcement by city agencies.

As temperatures rise with the coming of summer, so too do political tensions as primary day approaches. On June 23, voters will head to the polls and decide who will carry their party’s nominations for November’s races. Due to the high density of registered Democrats, these primary elections are usually more competitive than November's. The 2026 primaries are also the first major citywide elections since Mayor Zohran Mamdani took office last year.

With Jackson Pollock’s huge historic work "7A" from 1948, which seems like the fairy tale cow to leap up in paint up and over the sky and back down again, obtaining a headline grabbing $181 million at Christie’s this season, action painting has surged back into the mass consciousness of contemporary culture. While many artists tip their backwards baseball hats here and there to the mid-twentieth century season of splurge canvases, one painter continues the tradition with an at a moment’s notice zero-to-sixty velocity: Barnaby Ruhe.

I can’t get anything done. I can’t write. I can’t take a Zoom meeting. I can’t even make a phone call. I can’t stretch out on the couch and take a nap. I can’t step out of my bathroom naked. I can’t relax. All I can do is escape from my apartment while they drill on the walls outside my windows.

Political meet-and-greets are a funny hybrid, with two separate goals folded into one gathering. You go to get to know a candidate who may be only vaguely on your radar, and an hour or two later the campaign manager is passing out palm cards and pointing to the QR code that leads you straight to the donation page. Having been to a few of them over the years, I also know that they can be invaluable: generally pretty intimate, so you end up having a good feel for the positions and character of a person who would otherwise be just another eager stranger with a clipboard collecting signatures at the Greenmarket.

Public housing must remain public. The name really says it all. This should not be a radical idea. It should be the municipal equivalent of “water is wet.” And yet, after forty years of historic disinvestment in housing, the assault is shifting. It is no longer only the housing that is being assailed. It is the word public itself that now requires a forensic accountant, three board books, and a strong drink.

High Times a documentary short about the magazine and its founder Tom Forçade is now on Hulu as part of 4X20: Quick Hits, an anthology of 20-minute documentaries about weed culture produced by Jimmy Kimmel. As I walk from the licensed cannabis dispensary along New York sidewalks scented with the ubiquitous smell of weed, it’s obvious how times have changed in the 50 years since I worked as an associate editor at…

Barbara Kopple’s 1976 film Harlan County, USA, chronicling the literal life-or-death effort to establish a coal miners’ union in rural Kentucky, is a masterpiece of documentary cinema. It’s human and humane and, despite its age, crackles with the urgency of collectivism and class consciousness. So monumental is the film that her follow-up feature—American Dream from 1990, which also takes unions as its subject, this time the acrimony and rot that take hold after a couple generations—gets overshadowed and crowded out, despite winning the 1991 Oscar for Best Documentary.

In 1948 Allen Ginsberg wrote Jack Kerouac “Don’t you see we both suffer. That’s really the basis of our friendship.” The Beats brought suffering to the surface. In the 1970s we were a people defined and united by our pain. The more you suffered the cooler you were, like those kids in high school who were always going to commit suicide.

“I was walking down the street with Phil Ochs as we often did,” said singer-songwriter Eric Andersen at The Bitter End recently. “I sang him the chorus, just walking down Bleecker Street. He said the chorus is great. … With his encouragement, I finished the song.” That song was “Thirsty Boots,” probably Andersen’s best-known one, addressed to a civil rights Freedom Rider and released in 1966.

One of the current exhibitions at the newly reopened Princeton University Art Museum, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years. 1945–50.” This compact survey offers a needed reifying of the late longtime downtown artist’s pivotal early abstractions and semi-figurative works including such noted pieces as “Secretary” (1948) and “Black Friday” (1948), the latter work culled from the museum’s own collection.

The scene was Shalom Neuman’s exhibit at Art Expo on Pier 36 last month. Anyone aware of the ongoing art history that began in the East Village in the 1980s knows that Shalom is a major figure, an artistic visionary with the drive to explore and realize that vision while generously sharing the bounty that has resulted from his relentless creativity and focus.

Robert Leslie’s audience is typically transient. They’ll pause to take in a song or two, maybe shoot a quick video, or take a moment to dance. But eventually they move on, quickly replaced by a new set of curious faces. As the sun sank in the sky over Tompkins Square Park on April 11, however, dozens of people sat on the cobbled ground with their attention fixed on Leslie as he played an hour of original tunes and covers, his gentle voice accompanied by his guitar and the droning fiddle of Rili Xavier Newman.

I love being a sidewalk gardener on Bethune Street. When I moved into Westbeth Artists Housing, I spotted the nine planter boxes lining the block from Washington to West Streets, each tended by a different gardener. This looked like fun, so I put my name on a waiting list. (Everything at Westbeth involves a waiting list.) A few years later, the Beautification Committee notified me that one was available.

Three years ago, my friend Vittoria Fariello approached me. She wanted to tell me about a bill she was advocating for. She knew I was generally inclined to support labor issues, civil rights, and human rights. She told me the bill introduced by Council Member Christopher Marte, would make it illegal for home-care attendants to be forced to work 24-hour shifts while being paid for only 13 hours.

For fifteen years we had a dog, which meant that for fifteen years my days were meted out in companionable, purpose-driven walks. Then, in early 2020, the dog—bless his wiry coat and big dachshund heart—began an excruciating decline. He grew so thin he became almost luminous. We had to put him down that August. I had happily cracked my routine wide open to make room for him.

After a dominant showing on election night, Carl Wilson is poised to become the next representative of Manhattan’s 3rd City Council District, finishing 17 points ahead of runner-up Lindsey Boylan after the first round of voting. Boylan conceded after first-round results showed Wilson with 43.08% of the vote to her 25.66%. District Leader Layla Law-Gisiko finished a strong third, at 20.05%, followed by CB 4 Chair…

The Second Avenue Subway was back in the news a few months ago when Gov. Kathy Hochul proposed that the third step for the Second Avenue Subway, rather than proceeding south from 63rd Street, should be heading west across 125th Street to 8th Avenue, with connections to other lines. While there was some support among transit advocates, most people were ho-hum about this.

Having mixed feelings about Record Store Day is the way. It looks like a holiday, sort of, but it’s like one of those days that are supposed to be a day for some bullshit, like National Chocolate Chip Day (May 15)—which somehow manages to share the same day with Asphalt Day and Straw Hat Day and Vascular Birthmarks Awareness Day, so mark your calendar and hope you’re not busy—an event created by some organization or institution to perhaps harmlessly promote awareness of something, more perniciously to make the idea of buying something seem somehow virtuous.

At the end of 1977I flew to London to join the Ramones for their New Year’s Eve Concert at the Rainbow Theatre. I had not been to London since 1974. When the Ramones and their manager, Danny Fields, invited me to join them at the Marble Arch Holiday Inn and review their New Year’s Eve concert at The Rainbow for High Times it seemed like an ideal opportunity to check out the London punk scene.

Liquid Years. The last day of last month marked 40 years since the release of Philip Glass’s Songs from Liquid Days. At the time, Glass was riding an unprecedented wave for a composer in the classical world. His soundtrack to the film Koyaanisqatsi four years earlier had put New York Minimalism before a much wider audience. Liquid Days seemed a very deliberate attempt to build on that renown: a set of songs with lyrics by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Paul Simon and Suzanne Vega, performed by Glass’s ensemble and the famed Kronos Quartet with singers including Bernard Fowler, Linda Ronstadt, and the Roches. 

Irrititja Kuwarri Tjungu: Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from the Australian Desert. January 22-April 11, 2026. Grey Museum, New York, NY The paintings are unquestionably beautiful, rich with vibrant colors, precise symmetry, intricate geometric patterns, cross-hatchings and luminescent dots. They are beautiful and I don’t understand them at all. To engage with these paintings is to be confounded. Fred Myers is trying to enlighten me.

Walt Disney’s 1952 film “Fantasia,” a 125-minute abstract interplay between classical music and modern animation, opens with musicians tuning up, silhouetted against a regal blue background. The owlish critic and composer Deems Taylor, in a white-tie tux, introduces us to the proceedings with a mix of cheer and gravitas, before giving way to conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra…

At a concert in a church in June 2025, singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche mused on the nature of live performance. “Maybe this will be seen as something weird and strange in the future,” she wondered, “Something only a few people do and go to and see.” Such questions about modernity abound in today’s culture as society stares down anomie, warfare across the world, and political turmoil.