The ‘Meet Me in the Bathroom’ author curates 10 songs for a night out in the city, including Madonna, Bush Tetras, and Grace Jones.
Roughly two years ago, Lizzy Goodman released Meet Me in the Bathroom—a meticulous oral history which transported readers back to the last era of grungy (affordable) New York in the early aughts. Her Please Kill Me of the early 2000s documented a burgeoning DIY music scene was churning with talent, drugs, and ambition as bands like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and The Strokes set the standard for rock and roll in the 21st century.
Meet Me In The Bathroom: The Art Show, the IRL companion to Goodman’s oral history, will open at The Hole in New York next week, curated by Goodman and director Hala Matari. The exhibition will feature works by visual artists, including Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen, as well as memorabilia like Karen O’s pile of broken microphones. Musicians and DJs featured in the book will also show visual works created for the exhibition and take the stage for sets. Weaving together the parallel trajectories of artists and musicians that defined the era, the exhibition reimagines what it felt, looked, and sounded like to live at the epicenter of a creative movement.
In advance of the opening, Goodman shared the songs she plans to play in-between programming—a beautiful, genre-bending compilation of New York counter-culture over the past several decades.
“The idea is to get a sense of the layered history of the city’s many, many different creative eras and realms, all bleeding together to create the fabric of what influences you when you live here. The thing—that beating heart of the city’s artistic energy—that you feed off and hope to contribute to. The goal of Meet Me in the Bathroom was to make a kind of offering to the city’s artistic legacy. The goal of the art show is to color in that era.”
