Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Magali Duzant

I can listen to Magali Duzant talk all day. Animated and expressive, each story she tells colorfully unravels with gestures from her lithe arms and hands, arches of her eyebrows, and curling corners of her mouth. It’s wonderful to me that as such an accomplished multidisciplinary artist she’s able to maintain her deliciously quick and occasionally self-deprecating sense of humor. 

Though she received her MFA in Photography and Related Media at Parsons The New School for Design, Magali is currently interested in “the transcendence of time and space, the act and faith of looking and searching, desire and longing.” She experiments with light, like with her Golden Hours: Live Streaming Sunset, a project featured in the Queens International which involved cameras set up in eight cities all over the world streaming footage of what would become a perpetually setting sun. She also recently completed a sculptural installation at the Brooklyn Infusion Center of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center called A Certain Angle / A Shape In The Sun, which involved a sculpture series reflecting and refracting light around the windows of the space. 
When I visit her at her studio, she is now working on an upcoming commission from Bike NYC that involves video and bike rides across the boroughs, a mural for BRIC Arts Media based on Walt Whitman’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and an installation for FLUX Factory’s upcoming exhibition centered around language. Earlier this year she was invited to exhibit her work at Arts Suzhou in China and will be heading to Italy in August to study astronomy with monks in Italy. Not to mention she has exhibited all over New York and the far reaches of the globe, like the aforementioned China, as well as Russia, New Zealand, Denmark, and Australia. She is also currently an adjunct professor at the School of Visual Arts. 
I remain utterly in awe of her talent, intelligence, and hustle, but am also delighted that every so often she will also regale me with stories of Mets games gone awry and that we can watch "RuPaul’s Drag Race" together while eating baguette with cheese and drinking the ginger beer she brought to my house. 
Today in her studio we eat danishes and she makes coffee with a kettle she plugs into the wall and a French press. Her installation from Memorial Sloan Kettering is now hung on her wall and as light comes in through the south-facing window it casts an amalgam of rainbows across the space. She tells stories and I laugh and laugh. She tells me about her work and I listen and listen intently, fascinated. 
Magali recently discovered there is a park not too far from her studio, past graffiti and industrial spaces. We go for a quick constitutional, and there happens to be a small skate park amongst the greenery. My camera is aimed at Magali and she deadpans, “Ah yes, a portrait of the artist staring at shirtless skateboarders,” cracking a smile and then moving on.
Follow Magali on Instagram and Twitter. 

Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Taylor Reynolds

Studio B at ART/NY is dimly lit with long fluorescent bulbs overhead. At just past 7 o’clock in the evening, two women, an actor and a director, sit at a small table chatting and nibbling homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, waiting for two other actors to arrive so rehearsal can begin. There are thick packets of scripts on the table, one which fills a big red binder belonging to Taylor Reynolds. Taylor is director of the show Think Before You Holla, which will next be performed this coming July at the Capital Fringe theatre festival in Washington, D.C. 

Think Before You Holla is a show Taylor developed in 2014 for the Harlem Arts Festival as a response to street harassment, the way some men shout at, catcall, or actively force unwanted attentions onto women walking on the street. In a series of vignettes and scenes, it relays women’s true stories that Taylor culled from interviews, social media, and news. It looks to examine “the patriarchal roots of gender-based street harassment and its overall influence on women’s psyches.” In D.C., the show is part of the premiere season of the Ally Theatre Company.

Since graduating college with a BFA degree in Directing, Taylor has worked with Chicago and New York theatre companies like Victory Gardens, The 24 Hour Plays, Stage Left Theatre, UglyRhino, The United Solo Festival, and many others. She is also a member of the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab, and is currently a Producing Artistic Leader of the Movement Theatre Company. 

Soon all three actors are present and, since Holla is partly a movement piece, Taylor leads them in a warmup. Arms swing, legs are stretched, hips are swirled, necks are rolled, and jaws are loosened. Taylor explains to the actors, scripts in hands, what scenes they will work on that day. They go through blocking, or stage positioning and movement, and Taylor’s hands move as quick as her brain and her tongue, fluttering through the air like two butterflies attached to her wrists. Okay, move here. A little further. Great. Now come here. Yes. The actors move about the space, sharing with each other with these stories of men walking into glass doors while trying to speak to them, men coming up to them to ask about their thighs, doormen hitting on them, and others. Then they tackle a news story about street harassment gone violent, like a man who ran over a 14-year-old girl twice when she refused to get in his car and have sex with him. Say the lines like a news broadcaster, Taylor says. Now like you don’t believe street harassment is real. Now like you are the family of the victim. All of this conjures in my mind the oft-relayed Margaret Atwood quote: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” 

“What can women do to make men uncomfortable?”, one of the actors wonders aloud. 

“Girl,” Taylor says, “I have been wondering that since 2014.” 

Follow Taylor on Twitter and Instagram. 

Food Blindness

The vibrance of New York often makes me forget the interesting places I've eaten. But I think I just get a little blind sometimes. Here are some things I'm looking back at now that were great, and I just haven't given credit where it's due.

Village Yokocho

Village Yokocho is up a set of ominous-looking stairs inside a glass-doored vestibule that's mysteriously always open and just sort of beckon you from Stuyvesant Street. It's actually the restaurant in which famed cocktail bar Angels' Share resides, but it's also a bustling spot in its own right. Village Yokocho serves Japanese food, not sushi, though you can get some sashimi. HanOre and I strolled in there one night craving some tasty treats, and we were not disappointed. There are pages upon pages of goodies to choose from, in small plates and large. We shared an eel bowl, marinated octopus, salted clams, and beef tongue with bean sprouts and left happy, with our wallets still in tact. 

The Pickle Guys

There have been pickle joints on the Lower East Side since time immemorial, and The Pickle Guys is perhaps the most well-known today. SE and I took a brief trip there recently and were greeted by barrels upon barrels of deliciousness, from the traditional (half-sour pickles) to the sublime (pickled pineapple). We ended up with both the traditional and the sublime, and ate them as we walked through the neighborhood. The pineapples were spicy sweet; they made my hands a little sticky, but it was totally worth it. 

Fig. 19

Maybe I'm supposed to tell you about Fig. 19, and maybe I'm not. But here goes. It's a cocktail bar in the back of The Lodge Gallery on Chrystie Street. I had been in the gallery so many times, and when HanOre suggested we go, I had no idea she was talking about. We showed our IDs to the bouncer who asked what we were doing there. "We're here for the bar," HanOre said. "What bar?" The bouncer asked. "Fig. 19," I responded, and he nodded and let us in. I had a drink with egg whites, vanilla, cinnamon-infused gin, and some other delicious things I can't remember right now, but it was fantastic. Sometimes speakeasy bars can be gimmicky and awful, but the drinks here were actually good. 

Springbone Kitchen

I had heard about Springbone Kitchen a while ago, entranced by its healthy options--cauliflower rice instead of regular rice, zucchini noodles instead of pasta, and countless others. SE and I went one evening and sidled up to their counters, eventually diving into hearty bowls of goodies. I had the Meatballs and "Spaghetti" which was made with those aforementioned noodles and a hearty tomato sauce, and it hit the spot. I left with a cup of vanilla mushroom tea--yes, that's tea made from mushrooms--which was so weird and wonderful, sort of nutty but earthy but very subtly sweet. 

Cafe Dada

At the French-Hungarian spot Cafe Dada in Park Slope, AR and I ordered tea. But it was what they call their Immuni Tea, so it was hot water in a tumbler with lemon, mint, honey, fresno chili pepper and fresh lime juice. At the time, I opted for just the lemon, mint, and honey, but it was a soul-warming experience nonetheless. We chatted while a jazz band played, surrounded by the restaurant's dark, wood-paneled bar. 

Bang Cookies

Dear Sweet Jesus. These cookies are so good. Thick and soft with huge chunks of chocolate, Bang Cookies are usually baked to order. When I had them, they were being sold at the Coffee and Tea Festival in Brooklyn. I had only the smallest sample of the Sea Salt Chocolate Chunk cookie at the festival and I thought my brain was going to fall out. I stood at their booth saying "Oh My God" for about five minutes. In between breaths, however, I found out the company is based in Jersey City, and every so often will come in for a street fair to sell their wares. I'm hoping to track them down soon, or have some delivered since it's really just that (dangerously) easy. 

Chai Mookie

Also at the Coffee and Tea Festival SE and I found ourselves at the Chai Mookie booth sipping cups of chocolate chai tea blended with milk. It was all the great things about chai and hot chocolate but not weird together and not exploding with calories. I had never sipped anything like that in my life, and bought myself a cup after tasting it. SE went for a full bag. It was the perfect antidote for a day of shitty weather and now, months later, I can still taste it. 

Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Stephen Chan

There are people in this world who, if you don’t like them, there’s something wrong with you. I have met three in my life. One of them is Stephen Chan. 

Stephen and I met almost 10 years ago at our university on the first day of his freshman orientation, when I was an orientation counselor. We have not been able to get rid of each other since. 

Any nice thing I try to write about Stephen will be an understatement, so I don’t know if I should bother trying. I will say he is so kind, hardworking, patient, warm, and genuine he makes me want to be a better human and that will have to do. His fiancé Jesse is a lucky man. 

When Stephen is not a Product Manager at advertising technology company LiveIntent, he seeks to fill his life with even more creativity. He has recently taken up playwriting, sitting for hours at Caffè Bene in the East Village working on scenes for his playwriting class. He also has a finished play he will soon be revising. 

We meet at Caffè Bene on a cloudy Saturday, a salute to his favorite place to write. “Do you like kombucha?” he asks me. I’ve only had it once or twice, but I affirm. We sip first pomegranate then ginger versions and talk about the future. Is it supposed to be smelly once you get to the bottom of the glass?

We walk down Avenue A to thrift store Buffalo Exchange. Stephen smiles mischievously at a shirt that says “Let’s Get Drunk” and another with a drawing of a bald Britney Spears, the phrase “It’s Britney, Bitch” underneath. Eventually, he makes other selections and heads to the dressing rooms. 

The first shirt he tries on is a baseball-style shirt with “Boston” printed on it. Stephen was born just outside of the city. The shirt looks good, but it will stay in the store. “I think it’s too butch for me,” he says, amused. He ultimately chooses a pair of white shorts and black shirt that says “This is what a feminist looks like” in white letters. 

We leave and try to walk down the west side of Avenue A, but are diverted by a closure on St. Marks for the New York Dance Parade. We cross over to the east side of the street by Tompkins Square Park, where the parade empties out, and get lost in a sea of young dancers in aqua sequins and tulle waiting to be picked up by their parents. I make it out first, but Stephen gets stuck and the side-eye he throws me makes me burst into fits of laughter. 

We finally arrive at bar Amor y Amargo and order some expertly made cocktails. Stephen chooses the Renaissance Man, a drink the menu tells us is “earthy with rhubarb and smoke.” He sips and swoons, pausing to really savor it. We sit and talk even more this time, effortlessly, the way we always have. 

Follow Stephen on Instagram.

Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Jay Miriam

“Actually, I don’t really feel like listening to Queen,” Jay Miriam says as she puts a record back into its sleeve. It is a gray, rainy Sunday afternoon and she’s feeling more of a Nina Simone vibe. Shortly, Nina purrs a cover of Hall & Oates’s “Rich Girl” from the wooden phonograph and the sound fills Jay’s kitchen. Her cats, two elders and three two-month-old kittens, sleep in the background. We sit on stools by the counter and Jay cuts into Polish pastries procured from a local bakery, one a poppyseed danish and the other a rose jelly donut. They’re sugary and fluffy and “they’re meant to be eaten with wine, so I hope you’re ready,” she smiles, pouring us each a glass of red. 

Jay is a painter. She has shown work all over the world, as far away as Australia and as close as the Half Gallery in New York. Her work, dreamlike yet rooted in memory, explores intricacies and ideologies of femininity with subtle humor and thick coats of color. She has been featured in The Paris Review, Forbes (which called her a “painting wunderkind”), Time Out New York, and many others. I am in her home, a railroad apartment whose center space she converted into a painting studio. In the corner of her studio, there’s a bright white light on a stand that Jay keeps lit when she’s working. It duplicates the light a gallery may put on a work when it’s hung and it shows the colors in their actual tones and vibrancy, where the darker overhead light already in the apartment may not. 

In her soft, honey-like voice, she talks about some of her works in progress: a large, emerald oil painting where witches dance around what will eventually be a hat, which the devil is said to have worn to hide his horns; a woman balancing between lightness and dark, life and death; a nude whose face Jay has scraped away countless times in hopes of getting the features and expression just right. It seems to be on its way, but she’s not sure. 

Jay will soon begin a new work by stretching her own canvas. She wears painting clothes, a ripped tank top and black paint-splattered sweatpants with a giant hole in the knee over cutoff denim shorts. She worries she’ll look awkward in the pictures I’m taking, but there’s something about her I think looks just fabulous, simultaneously messy yet elegant, as a young, professional painter would. 

Jay starts by laying the gray raw linen on the floor, cutting it to match the shape of a wooden frame. A long time ago she became interested in the way Renaissance painters made canvases of their own and resolved to do so ever since. She bends the linen over the wooden frame, solidifying it in place with a giant stapler. The kittens play inside the frame, and every so often she gently picks one up and moves it so she can continue working. 

Follow Jay on Instagram.