Last month, as the weather dipped and the days got shorter, eggnog returned to the dairy aisle. I found myself pouring a glass at home and topping it with just a splash of brandy. The creamy elixir inspired! Soon I was researching if there were any bars in lower Manhattan offering eggnog this season. With few definitive results, I began to crowdsource.

Christmas Eve. A snowy night. A distraught man stands on a bridge, staring down at the icy water. Suddenly he hears a splash and another man’s cries for help. He dives in to save him. That stranger turns out to be his guardian angel. What follows is one of cinema’s most enduring parables of despair and redemption: Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Not all that long ago, an editor at a website that covers green architecture and sustainable design called me about doing some writing for them. We had a pleasant conversation, and then, before saying goodbye, I asked for her phone number. Awkward pause. Just use this number, she said. Awkward pause. I’m on a landline without a readout, I explained. Oh, of course, she replied, and gave me the number.

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidaze!!

I always had this fantasy about becoming an official tour guide in the Village. But I never got beyond taking friends on informal tours of Westbeth Artists Housing (my building) and leading them through the quaint cobblestone streets of the West Village. Instead, I’m an armchair guide who hangs out in the active Facebook group “New York City Travel Tips, Tours by Foot.”

I always had this fantasy about becoming an official tour guide in the Village. But I never got beyond taking friends on informal tours of Westbeth Artists Housing (my building) and leading them through the quaint cobblestone streets of the West Village. Instead, I’m an armchair guide who hangs out in the active Facebook group “New York City Travel Tips, Tours by Foot.”

In a storefront like any other on Avenue C, between a burger joint and a convenience store, sits the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space (MORUS). Though many museum curators stay shut up in their offices when not hunting for new acquisitions or donors, the same cannot be said about Bill Di Paola, the museum’s founder. On a November afternoon, Mr. Di Paola could be found in a nearby community garden he is on the board of, talking to a group of college students from Cooper Union.

What to send? What to give? Where to go? Where to eat and drink? I only make suggestions. There are, of course, no hard and fast rules about any of this. This column is about the holiday season–Christmas and Hannukah (and Festivus?). If this offends you for any reason, your attitude offends me. So, we’re even. Merry Christmas! First suggestion: be grateful.

“New York City housing stock is being gobbled up by multinational investment companies, investment funds, and people who have tons of cash,” Brooklyn City Council Member Sandy Nurse declared. “To buy a home, it’s impossible, unless you have a million dollars.” Speaking on the steps of City Hall on Nov. 12, Nurse rallied an eager throng of tenants’ groups and housing advocates, the crowd buzzing with hope as they looked forward to the likely enactment of a landmark measure—one that would begin to level the playing field by giving nonprofit housing groups the chance to compete with speculators and predatory landlords.

Last weekend, Bob Terry circled Washington Square Park with a stack of flyers in hand, eagerly inviting the people he passed to his upcoming event. However, the 75-year-old was seeking one demographic in particular. “You look like smokers—come to my event on Friday,” he said to a group of young people lounging on the grass. They responded enthusiastically. His event? An open invite to join him for a cigarette on Friday, Nov.

New York Jews have strong feelings about what’s happening in Israel and Gaza. They don’t always agree. This subject is so potentially divisive that they often avoid talking about it at all. For Jews, discussing post-October 7th events can be like stepping on the proverbial third rail, similar to our Thanksgiving table flareups after the 2016 election. Relationships can go up in smoke, in an instant.

The current oeuvre of Fernando Pomalaza, a Peruvian-born, New York City based artist (who for many years showed at the Marunouchi Gallery in SoHo) presents to the viewer a complex interplay of textures and forms. His canvas, “Escaping the Pandemic,” showcases a deliberate application of bulbous, lugubrious black paint, evoking mandala-like wheels of incarnation. The accentuated suggestion of the repoussé technique, characterized by wrought iron circles of muscular, black, bulging steel, gives rise to sculptural forms that seem to emerge from cauldron-like founts of molten metal.

Kelly Reichardt might be one of our era’s most subversive filmmakers. In this attention-addled age, cinema has gone increasingly loud, increasingly bombastic, increasingly frenetic. And not just in mediocre blockbuster franchise flicks, like Mission: Impossible—Final Reckoning or Tron: Ares, where you expect a certain kind of screaming antsyness; it’s found in more ambitious, highbrow films, too, like Eddington and One Battle After Another, where quiet moments are spaces to be shattered by violent externalities rather than interiority or reflection.

There’s something I’ve said frequently while writing about classical music for the last couple decades, which is that there’s no such thing as difficult music. Sure, there’s some music that may have less general appeal than others, but that doesn’t make it difficult. What “difficult” means in music is that it is unfamiliar in some way, from an unusual style—like minimalist music in the 1960s—to a unique conception, like the dense, mystical micro tonality of Giacinto Scelsi or Alvin Lucier using his voice and a tape recorder to wring the acoustical response out of a room.

Review of “The Director,” by Daniel Kehlmann; translated from the German by Ross Benjamin by Michael Quinn A director has an idea for a screenplay: wealthy passengers aboard a luxury cruise ship find their peace of mind poisoned by rumors of an impending war. Trust erodes, factions form, conflict escalates. Then, news arrives from a distant shore: there was never a war at all.

I used to be half of a musical act named Working Class Bohemians. The name choice was mine. I got it from a line in Judith Thurman’s excellent biography of the French writer Colette. Whenever I did a gig as part of a duet, it was as Working Class Bohemians. Often it would be with Johnny Peppercraft on bass saxophone. Lenny Kaye of Patti Smith’s band and I did some duo charity gigs with him on lap steel and me on resophonic ukulele.

The New York–based performance team of Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland (billing themselves simply as “Xhloe and Natasha”) has — over the past four years — made tsunami-like splashes at the famed Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The duo has been feted in Scotland for their compelling two-hander dramas, which bring clown play to original texts and reawaken the mid-twentieth-century tradition of Theatre of the Absurd — a movement associated with such playwrights as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco.

Among the urban renewal disillusionment of gentrification and post-disaster capitalism exists an oasis of boundary-breaking, artist respite, a well of art spirit since 1980, Performance Space. Performance Space is on the fourth floor in the former PS 122 building on First Avenue. The center is humanitarian in practice, a refuge for “queer and radical voices shut out by a repressive, monocultural mainstream and conservative government...”

At 5:30 p.m. one Wednesday, I stopped by Sly Fox only to find the door locked, the lights off. Forlorn, I walked the busy streets of East Village, sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, listened to a girl describe seeing multiple rats frolicking in the park, watched a squirrel eat a napkin, then circled back to the bar with no luck.

On Oct. 11, National Coming Out Day, members of New York City’s LGBTQ community did just that—to show their support for mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Speaking to the crowd that had gathered at the AIDS Memorial in Greenwich Village, the founder of Gays for Zohran, Katia Portela, said, “Zohran has changed the game for trans people” and “LGBT New Yorkers deserve a city we can afford.” She noted that of Mamdani’s volunteers—of which there have been over 90,000 over the course of the election season, according to his campaign—there were many queer people.

Eating’s a basic biological act, but like sex, it’s so much more. What we eat and how we eat it are social signifiers—markers of our place in a stratified world, reflective of our status, our privilege or our oppression. I’m the child of Depression-era parents who ate canned vegetables and rewashed and reused plastic wrap. When I first encountered rich people accustomed to being rich, I was stunned to discover their special access to an alien and rarified level of pleasure, the pleasure of exquisitely prepared fresh food.

When people talk about Art Deco architecture in New York, some think of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Others think of the luxurious apartment buildings on the Bronx’s Grand Concourse. However, there’s another center of Art Deco — Manhattan's Chelsea district. Among Chelsea’s Art Deco structures— built during the late 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of Deco — are a few commercial and industrial buildings, as well as Fashion Industries High School.

At a time when newspapers and magazines were central to American life, Stan Mack was part of the revolution of how news and feature stories were told. As art director at some of the country’s most influential publications during the golden age of print journalism, he helped unite words and photojournalism of 1960s newsrooms with art and illustration. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Mack worked as an art director at The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times, and as a reporter/cartoonist at The Village Voice, National Lampoon, and later in the ’80s and ’90s, Adweek—a résumé that is a roll call of peak American print media.

Inspired by the spine-chilling, awww-inspiring, tired, and timeless costumes of Villagers this year. Let’s hope a few of my references fade into irrelevance, sooner rather than later…  For the trick-or-treater who keeps up with news both local and national: One Month’s Rent for a One-Bedroom Apartment, Anywhere in the Village All you need is a set of stilts! The taller, the more accurate—but please spend an hour or two practicing before you make for Bleecker…

Let’s talk shampoo, a conversation that I think is long overdue. For years I bought mine from Arrojo, a local salon, in jumbo plastic containers. The products had none of the bad stuff—parabens, phthalates, synthetic fragrances—and I figured one big container uses less plastic than several smaller ones. Then the algorithm started to feed me ads on Facebook for a shampoo bar with a funny name: Humby.