Writing on wine.
What is the difference between a hot dog vendor and a hot god vendor? It depends upon how hungry you are, doesn’t it?
Hello Astorians, friends, and readers everywhere!
After many months of searching, the Astoria Bookshop is thrilled to announce that we finally have the perfect location for our store! We have signed a lease and, while there’s much to do before we can open our doors, we expect to have our Grand Opening sometime in mid-August. We are bursting with excitement to be moving forward at last.
Later this summer, the Astoria Bookshop will be opening its doors at 31-27 31st Street, a half block from the Broadway N/Q stop and right next door to our friends at Petals & Roots. We’ll keep you updated on our progress by periodically posting photos on our website as we knock down walls, paint others, install bookshelves, and unpack box after box of books.
While you’re keeping an eye on astoriabookshop.com for updates, you may notice some other exciting changes. For one, we will be launching e-commerce soon! You’ll be able to purchase print as well as ebooks directly from our website. We are a general bookstore, and the books you choose will help us decide how to stock our shelves with the things you really want to read.
As the Astoria Bookshop gets closer to opening, we’ll start posting events to the calendar on our website. Our goal is to host events for every kind of reader out there — book clubs, writers’ groups, author signings, children’s story hours, tastings of sample recipes from cookbooks, even table readings. To us, events are one of the most important aspects of our business — we’re designing the Astoria Bookshop to be a space for the community to gather and interact.
So, while you wait for our doors to open, we’ll be hard at work putting our store together. We want the Astoria Bookshop to look and feel like Astoria — eclectic, engaging, and full of characters. Keep an eye on our website, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, sign up for our newsletter, and you’ll be among the first to know all the goings on at your new neighborhood bookstore.
Cheers,
Connie & Lexi
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Favorite Photo Friday!
“As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.”
― Anne Sexton
That’s Not Punk.
I sat down ready to pick apart the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit, Punk: Chaos to Couture, but my morning reading revealed that Sasha Frere-Jones already did all the heavy lifting for me in his piece on the New Yorker blog today.
The show utterly fails to draw any connecting lines between the origins of the punk aesthetic and its appropriation by high-end fashion designers. That may be because there aren’t any. If a $3,000 ballgown imprinted with paint spatters or held together by gilded safety pins makes a society doll feel edgy, that’s great. But it’s not punk. Instead, the show presents lots of congratulatory back-patting. “We knicked these pins off a photo from ‘78, aren’t we clever?” No. Not really.
Punk wasn’t primarily about clothing. it was about music, and politics, graphic art, and putting the means of producing art into the hands of the disenfranchised. Reducing an entire art and social political movement to the equivalent of a trend in dress hem length is offensive—but also exactly what you’d expect from the luxury “brands” and collectors who supplied the museum with the garments on display. And the money to mount the show. (Vogue publisher Conde Nast is a major supporter.) It’s a supremely ridiculous example of the grossness of late capitalism.
Further, the show fails to address one aspect that could have been examined given the garments on display: sex and gender. In the show entry, authentic garments from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s London boutiques are arrayed alongside a few latter-day imitations. Some of the ensembles are skimpy, some cover the wearer head-to-toe. All present images of aggression and defensiveness: torn or ragged edges, tears and runs, clips and pins and studs, or “rude” and subversive messages. All of these elements appear without regard to the gender of the intended wearer. Seeing these, you can conclude that punk meant, by being deliberately “ugly,” to make sex secondary to its greater message. Because, you know, it did. But nowhere in the curatorial commentary is this aspect mentioned. This alone represents a major failure.
I understand the need for major museums to bring in revenue with blockbuster exhibits, such as the concurrently running, clothing-focused Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. I remember the massive, and massively popular Monet mega-show that sold out the Art Institute of Chicago for much of 1995. And the Alexander McQueen show mounted by the Met last year was an incredible presentation of one man’s opus, so smartly presented that it did in fact succeed in making fashion seem like art. Punk: Chaos to Couture does not.
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I had this album. On vinyl, of course. And I’m pretty embarrassed to admit that’s how I knew of these songs for years and years. There was no other way I was going to hear them in Manhattan, Kansas.
(Source: getbackvassifer)
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(Source: restingpeas, via ilovecharts)
Ode to an iPod.
