When I first met Susan Shapiro, I was desperate. I had been kicked out of my parent’s house and spent two years drunk and high, scribbling mangled poetry in a railroad apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Then, my dad’s father died in the Midwest and his funeral and family trip—with Dad, […]

I first speak with Kristen Johnston when she calls me from her private number, bypassing the snoopy PR people who usually listen in on such phone calls. Right away, I am captivated by this small act of bravery, an instinct Kristen has to cut to the truth uncensored and raw […]

I met Lori Bizzoco for the first time when she lost her phone and I let her use mine at an uptown New York party. As soon as we started talking, we realized how much we had in common: a thirst for fame, childhood loneliness, partying habits. As I got […]

by PenTales Pundit Royal Young Often, you don’t realize the importance of people until they leave you. My younger brother and I really got close after I left for college. Of course, as kids growing up on the Lower East Side, we shared pillow fights and comic books, Hanukah candy […]

My father fled his dad’s restrictive Midwest world to move to New York’s downtown in the 1960’s, pursuing a career in art. As a bearded beatnik living on Crosby Street, Dad painted vivid, colorful canvasses and made papier-mâché masks. He met Mom at a party where she was the only […]

Royal Young. What a cool name. By extension what cool (and ambitious) parents to give him that name. No wonder this creative Lower East Sider, writer at Interview Magazine and The Lo Down, picked up a thing or two from mom and dad: the Oedipus Complex, Daniel Burnham, changing the […]

Royal Young was born and bred on New York’s Lower East Side. He has chats for Interview Magazine and reports on the downtown’s changing arts and culture scene for The Lo Down.