Village Voice Staging

Author: Alexis Sottile

  • Pow! The Red Hook Takes New Brooklyn

    Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s an allegory of gentrification! It’s the Red Hook! Comics creator Dean Haspiel — known for his collaborations with Jonathan Ames on the graphic novel The Alcoholic and on Ames’s HBO series Bored to Death, among myriad graphic endeavors with Marvel, Harvey Pekar, and […]

  • Greenpoint’s New Bowling Alley: Time-Warp Look and Prices to Match

    Sauntering into The Gutter (200 North 14th Street) on a recent Sunday night felt as though we’d just exited a time machine. Greenpoint’s new saloon/bowling alley is also Brooklyn’s first new bowling spot in nearly 50 years—and feels about that old already: The capacious bar, with its blond-wood paneling, stained-glass Busch and Old Milwaukee chandeliers, […]

  • A Brooklyn Barn-anaza

    “It’s not that I’m afraid of farms,” I explain to my companion, who’s been eyeing me suspiciously since I confessed my City Mouse mistrust of Bar(n)‘s (76 St. Marks Avenue, Brooklyn) rural-chic, whitewashed back room. “Just the Sling Blade–Ethan Frome type of farms,” I insist. Besides, who wants to be reminded of wrath-of-God sledding accidents […]

  • Ladies’ Room

    It was dark (but not stormy) as a friend and I wandered into the Snug, hungry and desperate for some kind of meat. I’d been told the bar’s name came from an old Irish term for the corner of a saloon where womenfolk could huddle together and enjoy an 18th-century girls’ night out, virtue unbesmirched. […]

  • Tears for Beer

    We arrived at Essex Ale House just hours after I experienced the (quintessentially modern) dating horror moment: Finding the secret skirt-chase blog of the fellow I’d been dating. Oh, the lurid detail! Oh, the numerous skirts!! I needed a sedative from the bar’s extensive beer-only menu. The names of the varied brew delicacies cram a […]

  • A Potent Mix

    It was my penance, really, to take D. back to Vlada and ply him with vodka after my bout of insecurity. Though a Russian proverb claims, “Love and Jealousy are sisters,” I think Jealousy’s more like Love’s roommate’s annoying lap dog. Unfortunately, that dog finally bit me in the ass the night a gay friend […]

  • Fighting for Plan B

    On January 7, 2005, nine women were arrested for blocking access to FDA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The FDA, the women charge, has been blocking access to the morning-after pill (Plan B) for far too long, by refusing to make emergency contraception an over-the-counter drug. A year and a half later, Plan B is still […]

  • A Bar for Red Sox Fans Even a Yank Would Like

    “We can wear our hats here, and not worry about obnoxious Yankee fans,” one Red Sox–lovin’ barfly confided to me at Professor Thom’s. The Yanks battled the Sox on the bar’s six screens, and the regulars—many whooping like Kennedys on election night—clearly appreciated their freedom to love Big Papi in peace. Professor Thom’s is the […]

  • Drawing Blood Over CHARAS

    Fans of preserving the former CHARAS building, on East 9th Street, won a round last week. Preservationists have been pushing the city’s Landmarks commission to protect the 102-year-old former public school. The owner, Gregg Singer, has been pushing a plan to tear part of it down so he develop a 19-story dormitory “for everybody,” he […]

  • Living Through Horrors no Adult Could Comprehend

    Never again!” was the promise and prayer of an international community shocked by the Holocaust. But for people like NYU student Jacqueline Murekatete, who was nine years old in 1994, when Hutu tribesmen massacred her Tutsi family in Rwanda, words cannot express how empty a pledge that has been. Human Rights Watch calls children like […]

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