Ria Chung

Good morning, East Village.

To kick off your day, dig Joey Ramone’s new posthumous album, currently streaming on Rolling Stone’s site. Pyramid Club and Save the Robots, the legendary after-hours on Avenue B, get shoutouts in a song with the chorus “I’m proud to make my home in New York City.”

Speaking of gritty hangouts, Bowery Boogie has a look at Max Fish’s new Asbury Park outpost. Needless to say, the blog has an opinion about what’s more punk rock, skee ball or pool tables.

Commercial Observer reports that Edward Minskoff, who personally invested over $100 million in equity in his 51 Astor Place office building, is closing in on a deal with its first tenant: “Hult International Business School is in talks to take 51 Astor’s entire second floor, a roughly 55,000-square-foot space. Sources say the school could pay rents that begin in the $60s per square foot but escalate to around $100 per square foot over the life of a long term lease at the roughly 400,000-square-foot property.”

The Huffington Post runs an excerpt from a new novel set in the East Village, “Post-Academic Stress Disorder.” The Local spoke to author Nikolas Kozloff in April.

According to Music Industry News Network, local songstress Rachael Sage, who has a new album out, is playing at Joe’s Pub and her artwork is being shown at Think Coffee’s Bleecker and Bowery location.

Gallerist notes that the work of Jeremy Kost, who got his start photographing drag queens and transsexuals in “the bowels of the East Village” (at the Cock, specifically), is being shown along with Andy Warhol’s Polaroids at a temporary gallery on 11th Avenue.

Mixologist Dave Arnold tells Serious Eats that he’s not trying to be showy at Booker & Dax. “Okay, we chill glasses with liquid nitrogen—it happens to be the best way to chill a glass. Yes, the red-hot poker creates giant flames in the bar, but it makes a drink unlike any other and it hearkens back to a technique that was around centuries ago. So to me it’s 100 percent valid. If something makes a drink better, awesome. If it happens to be showy, double awesome.”

Huffington Post visits Kasadela to film the making of the sake bar’s popular Nagoya-style fried chicken wings.

And Gamma Blog posts a couple of lovely East Village panoramas.