Modern Lovers (31 page)

NEW YORK POST

Cops Bust Brooklyn Yogis for Extra Funk

This week, the 67th Precinct got more than they bargained for when following up an anonymous tip that EVOLVEment, a hipster yoga establishment in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, was illegally manufacturing and selling highly potent kombucha, a fermented alcoholic beverage. In addition to the kombucha, the police also found several marijuana plants, some psychedelic drugs, as well as a large number of unidentified natural products such as twigs and leaves that EVOLVEment used to make teas and other ingestible beverages.

EVOLVEment received a misdemeanor citation for selling the kombucha without a license, as well as several other misdemeanor citations for the additional illegal drugs found on the premises. “We aren't selling drugs,” EVOLVEment leader David Goldsmith told reporters. “We are a holistic community, and are deeply invested in the spiritual and physical health of our members and of the human race. It saddens me that the NYPD doesn't understand what we're doing here, but in time they will.”

No arrests were made, but the EVOLVEment website says that all yoga classes and services (including, presumably, kombucha fermentation) are suspended while the center is under further investigation.

TRIVIA SECTION FROM DAVE WOLFE'S IMDB PAGE

• Dave speaks fluent Sanskrit.
  
• As a teenager, Dave won second and fourth places in two celebrity surfing contests, competing against David Charvet and Eddie Cibrian.
  
• Dave's facial hair grows so quickly that it's listed as a “special talent” on his résumé.
  

NEW YORK TIMES
ARTS SECTION

Review:
“Mistress of Myself”
Goes to the Origin of an Icon

NYT CRITICS' PICK

Lydia Greenbaum sang like her house was on fire. With no vocal training, and pitch that could generously be described as “approximate,” Lydia (who dropped the Greenbaum during her brief tenure at Oberlin College) became a star in the early 1990s, bolting from obscurity to ubiquity in a matter of months. This softly lit and romantic biopic concentrates on the period just before Lydia's stardom, when the soon-to-be star spent most of her time eating Tater Tots in her college cafeteria.

It's a humanizing choice. The film avoids the standard arc of so many musical biopics, perhaps because Lydia's arc was less a curve than an arrow. Instead of focusing on her later drug abuse and sudden death, the film chooses to exist in a somewhat fuzzy pre-fame time period, where the viewer is encouraged to imagine a different end for Lydia (played in the film by Darcey Lemon, a look-alike with capable acting skills suited to the dreamy mood of the film, and a surprisingly sharp voice).

The strongest section of the film, and the filmmaker's best decision after casting Darcey Lemon, is the time spent on Kitty's Mustache, Lydia's college band, to which (the film implies) she contributed very little. The love story between Lydia and her bandmate Andrew Marx (played by a brooding young Samson Tapper) is the linchpin of the plot, and when the romance ends, so does the band and, shortly after, so does Lydia's college career. It's a reminder that it wasn't so long ago that celebrities were allowed some privacy and also of Lydia's own power of reinvention, which allowed none of her soft, lovesick past into her onstage persona.

“Mistress of Myself” doesn't save Lydia from the fate to which we know she is doomed, but the film does deepen our understanding of a complicated artist. Lydia now joins Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain as one of the members of the 27 Club whose brief, impactful lives now exist on film as well as in memory, and it feels like a gift to have been granted access to a prickly performer's tender beginnings.

GRUB STREET

Openings

Hyacinth Team Brings the Butter to Ditmas Park

Five months after the fire that shut down the kitchen at their Brooklyn locavore pioneer Hyacinth, Zoe and Jane Kahn-Bennett are open for business at their cozy new bakery, Hot + Sweet. Located two blocks away from Hyacinth, on Ditmas Park's miniature restaurant row, Hot + Sweet is now open seven days a week for breakfast and lunch.

There are no cronuts, no macarons, no cake pops—Hot + Sweet's menu is strictly old-fashioned, and that's just how the Kahn-Bennetts want it. “Why mess with perfection?” chef Jane Kahn-Bennett asked us. “I would rather have a perfect apple turnover or croissant than some trendy thing any day of the week, and I know the neighborhood agrees, because they've been asking us for ten years when we were going to expand.”

There are also chocolate cream pies, cinnamon rolls, and enormous chocolate chip cookies.

FROM
THE
PITCHFORK REVIEW

Top Ten Moments from All Tomorrow's Parties Festival, New York City

3. Best Reunion of a Band No One Ever Listened To

Kitty's Mustache is famous for being Lydia's college band, but in the two months since the release of the
Mistress
of Myself
biopic, the college band has garnered some pretty big invitations, including ATP. I showed up not knowing what to expect with Lydia's absence, but the band—Zoe Kahn-Bennett, Elizabeth Marx, Andrew Marx, and
Mistress of Myself
actress Darcey Lemon stepping in for the chorus of the title song, none of whom addressed the crowd except for singer Elizabeth Marx—was tight and sounded as angry and vital as they must have on cassette, with wobbly guitars and short skirts. A girl next to me said, “She's an icon!” about Marx, and her friend replied, “And I read on BuzzFeed that she's a real-estate agent!” which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about surviving on the paycheck of modern music.

NEW YORK TIMES
STYLE SECTION

Weddings

Sarah Annabelle Dinnerstein, daughter of Hannah and Eugene Dinnerstein of Park Slope, Brooklyn, was married Saturday to Anthony Dustinsky, the son of Elena Rodriguez, of Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn, and the late Leopold Dustinsky, of Ridgewood, Queens. The Rev. Elliott Beall, a Unitarian minister, performed the ceremony at the Boathouse in Prospect Park.

The bride, 24, who is keeping her name, works in the public-relations department for Jah Juice, a Rastafarian juice company based in Brooklyn. The groom, 26, is an architecture student at Columbia University.

CONDÉ NAST TRAVELER

Brooklyn Food Royalty Goes Native

Ruby Kahn-Bennett has lived in Mexico for five years—first on the Baja California peninsula, where she landed after a sailing course following her high-school graduation, then a short spell in Mexico City, and finally on the east coast, in beachy Tulum—but the native New Yorker says that it took her until now to feel like she was at home. “I couldn't drive until I was twenty,” she told us, laughing. “And I moved to Mexico when I was nineteen. That was a rough year. Lots of buses.”

Kahn-Bennett seems to have figured some things out, though, and has set down roots of her own, at the intersection of tourism and comfort food from home in Brooklyn. Her pizza shop, Brooklyn's Finest, is close enough to hotels to service traveling Americans but has earned a loyal local following as well, due to Kahn-Bennett's embrace of local flavors. “Mexico has the best
peppers in the world, so we do lots of different combinations. My current favorite is a white pizza with queso Oaxaca and poblano peppers.”

Kahn-Bennett's mothers, Jane and Zoe Kahn-Bennett, are still in Brooklyn, dividing their time between Brooklyn favorite Hyacinth and their new bakery, Hot + Sweet, but Ruby says that her family comes to Tulum at least once a year. “My moms love it,” she says. “They keep threatening to open a Mexican place back home.” As for Kahn-Bennett, Brooklyn's Finest keeps her busy, though she does return to New York every summer, when she forces her mothers to cook her a proper Thanksgiving dinner. “I would come home for it,” she says, “but it's our high season! Someone has to make the pizza!” And so Thanksgiving in July will have to do for now.

PROSPECT PARK YMCA MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Big Brothers Basketball Game Has All Winners

This month, our Big Brothers program capped off its summer season with the annual basketball tournament. Big Brother mentor and volunteer coach Andrew Marx said just after the game, “It was one of our best tourneys yet—the kids all played their hearts out, and everyone had a really good time. It was the highlight of the year for us, for sure.”
(Pictured in photo: Big Brother participants and Andrew Marx, at center.)

HARRY MARX
BROWN UNIVERSITY

English Department Honors Committee
Thesis Proposal

Proposed Title:
Friends and Neighbors

The novel will be inspired by the tropes of classic love stories such as
Romeo and Juliet
and
Tristan and Isolde
, set in modern-day Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with two neighboring families falling in and out of love simultaneously. My plan is to write a novel that both celebrates the youthful embrace of reckless love and the way that older people struggle with those same feelings some decades down the line. I plan to incorporate ideas from Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault as well as to draw inspiration from hypertext-based Internet platforms, which I think will provide an interesting juxtaposition with the somewhat old-fashioned and straightforward form of the novel.

Thank you for your
consideration.

TIME OUT NEW YORK

Listings

Elizabeth Marx, Bowery Ballroom

In the year since the release of “Mistress of Myself,” former Kitty's Mustache singer Elizabeth Marx has had a stunning resurgence, though “discovery” is probably even more apt, as few people ever heard any Kitty's Mustache material aside from the song made famous by Marx's former bandmate, who needn't be mentioned here. Marx is promoting a new record,
Modern Lovers
, out this fall from Merge Records.