Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

He went down the stairs slowly, petting Bingo’s head on the way out. The day had started to fade. Harry wanted to walk past someone he knew, someone from school, just to see if they’d recognize him, but Argyle Road was empty. He was at his own driveway, and the garage door was half open. Through the four feet of open air, he could see his mother’s legs, and her amp. She was playing something quiet, and Harry walked a little bit up the driveway to listen. It was pretty — something new. There were fireflies starting to flicker, and Harry turned around to watch one float up into the tree. The garage door opened a few more feet, and his mom ducked underneath, poking her head out. “Harry, is that you?” The air smelled like fall, and Harry watched the firefly go all the way under the canopy of leaves before turning back around.

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.”