Cover art by Tom Fruin.

The Magnetic Fields told downtowners to “be true to your bar,” and that’s exactly what The Midnight Moan does with “Johnny’s,” a song off their new album, Build Up Big Temples. The track, now streaming along with the rest of the album, is a rollicking, anthemic homage to Johnny’s Bar in the West Village, “the last dive around.”

“It became a little refuge for me when I lived on the west side,” explains singer-guitarist Andrew Paine Bradbury. Bradbury moved to New York in 1995 and dived right into the nightlife, writing about bars and restaurants for BlackBook and other outlets (I edited his reviews for NYMag).

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Ice cream weather is so close we can taste it (preferably at the new OddFellows) and with warmer temperatures come rooftop hangs. To that end, two of our favorite Brooklyn spots, Output and Our Wicked Lady, released their summer lineups today.

Output’s Saturday afternoon series will feature local house legends Louie Vega, Victor Calderone, David Morales and Danny Krivit, plus summer party fixtures Tiki Disco. The Sundays on the Roof series will include DJs and producers from all over the world, including Berlin’s Move D, Romania’s SIT, and Brooklyn’s own Ray Zuniga, proprietor of Touch of Class Records, and Lauren Ritter. The Friday Night Live series will kick off with a live performance by acid jazz legend Roy Ayers. You can scoop up tickets here, or just roll into one of the weekday sessions for free, from 5pm to 10pm. Check out the full rundown at the bottom of the page.

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The city just got its first “night mayor” and repealed the dread anti-dancing Cabaret Law, so nightclubs can bust out the sparklers and magnums of champagne, right? Well, not quite, as the story of Club Cumming goes to show. And what’s with these “STOP DISCOS IN SOHO!” flyers spotted around the Soho-Nolita area? They complain about “excruciatingly loud music… assaulting the psyches of nearby artists.” The flyer proposes a rezoning that would stomp out discos and “juice bars” in the neighborhood, and a moratorium on new discos and the “fighting, bottle throwing, vandalism” and “illegal drug traffic” they bring.

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(Rendering courtesy of Asbury Lanes)

Two forthcoming venues in hallowed spaces have announced their initial lineups. Asbury Lanes, the Bowery Presents reboot of the 57-year-old bowling-and-music dive in Asbury Park, will open May 25 with a Cold Seas show, and Coney Island Baby, the new incarnation of the former Brownies and HiFi space in the East Village, opens April 26 with hardcore legends Murphy’s Law.

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(Photos: Angelica Frey)

Between the Egg House on the Lower East Side and the Dream Machine in Greenpoint, there’s no shortage of Insta-friendly environments in the city right now. But that didn’t stop weekend warriors from lining up for House of Color: Monochrome, CJ Hendry’s ever-so-colorful installation in Greenpoint.

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(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

Do you remember the Museum of Ice Cream? That not-really-a-museum pop-up thing that drew massive lines of selfie-seekers to the Meatpacking a few years back? Made a ton of money here, and is now touring the country?

Cecil Taylor at the International Jazz Festival in Prague, October 1984. (Photo via Wikicommons)

Pianist Cecil Taylor, who died on April 5, performed with an eclectic group of artists that included poets and dancers as well as the cream of the jazz world.

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(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

(Photos: Scott Lynch)

Saturday was International Pillow Fight Day of course, so we hope you had a lovely time surrounded by close friends and family and I guess pummeling each other? But even if you didn’t celebrate the non-holiday, hundreds of others had a blast “swinging the downy” in more than 20 cities around the world (Rotterdam, Atlanta, Hong Kong, etc.) and right here in NYC’s historic Washington Square Park.

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A bevy of issues separate Andrew Cuomo and gubernatorial challenger Cynthia Nixon (first and foremost: Nixon wants to legalize weed). But, as always with American politics, the race is going to come down to one question: Who would you rather have a beer with?

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From left: Danny Fields and Sacha Lecca. (Photo: Bradley Spinelli)

“I was the best friend of several superstars,” Danny Fields told the crowd at Spoonbill Studio yesterday, explaining how he went on to sign Iggy and the Stooges, manage the Ramones, and become one of the godfathers of punk.

Fields is a wonderful, weaving raconteur, with wandering recollections of a time when being in the right place and meeting the right people was all there was to it. Set up with prompts by Sacha Lecca, deputy photo editor at Rolling Stone, Fields started at the “beginning,” which meant hanging around the San Remo on Bleecker and falling into Andy Warhol’s orbit. His role was “kinda shadowy,” a witness to it all. “Suddenly some of us were very rich, very famous.” The Velvet Underground, Edward Albee.

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(Photo: Daniel Maurer)

When Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh arrived in the United States in June of 1981, he stepped off of a Pan Am 747 and declared, “I am the Massiah America has been waiting for.”

If you’ve binge-watched the new Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, you know the Indian guru went on to establish the communal town of Rajneeshpuram and become a target of federal law enforcement. But Bhagwan didn’t make his famous proclamation in Oregon; he made it right here in New York City, at JFK airport. That summer, before moving on to their 64,000-acre utopia out west, Bhagwan and his followers would make their home in a 10-bedroom, Rhineland-style “castle” on the border of Montclair and Verona, New Jersey. It’s there that the cult first started rankling neighbors, as evidenced by a New York Times headline: CULT IN CASTLE TROUBLING MONTCLAIR.

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