You're heard of elf on the shelf, now it's time for...

S'Moosh Your S'Mores?!

Somehow, despite having a whole extra day to February, this month has still managed to fly by. I’m grateful we’re getting closer to warmer weather and earlier sunsets, but holy heck it feels like time is fucking flying by. Somehow nearly all of my month of March is full too? What is life, y’all?

Anyways, I had a super busy weekend so I’ve got some fun stuff in this week’s issue. Paid subscribers will get to read what I thought of the new Avatar series on Netflix and learn whether or not I thought the S’Moosh Your S’Mores experience at Hershey’s was worth it. It only costs $5/mo to read all of my words and that’s 1/3 of the price of a giant Hershey’s S’Mores, so it’ll honestly save you money in the long run. I’m all about those deals, baby!

1. Learning 🧠

I mentioned Seneca Village when I wrote about the Afrofuturist Period Room and Weeksville a while back and I almost didn’t dedicate a section to it because I figured everyone know about it by now. But I didn’t want to just assume that and I also think it’s an interesting example of how the city truly tried to bury the existence of a group of people for its own benefit. If that could happen to Seneca Village, what’s to stop it from happening to any other group who are deemed “less than” in the future? Nothing, probably.

Seneca Village sprang up as a free Black community in 1825 after Andrew Young and Epiphany Davis purchased land from John and Elizabeth Whitehead, but by the time it was razed in 1855 the demographics had expanded to include a good amount of Irish-Americans. This area of Manhattan was still only lightly developed, so it was a great place to have a little space and fresh air and get away from the densely populated downtown. In those 30 years, the residents built 3 churches, 2 schools, 3 cemeteries, and numerous gardens. They had homes filled with very normal stuff - dishware, clothing, books, toys for children. Records showed that most residents paid taxes; folks needed to own $250 worth of land to be eligible to vote and 10% of Black New Yorkers who were eligible to vote were residents of Seneca Village. Everything that we have come to discover about Seneca Village shows that it was a thriving community filled with people who were just going about their lives.

Location of Seneca Village within the Central Park plans

But then the city decided it wanted to build a park. This park would be a grand achievement that would provide beautiful green space to allow New Yorkers to escape all of that dang urbanism that was smelly and disease-y and gross. Since most of upper Manhattan was still largely undeveloped, the city decided to square off a big chunk of land and get to building. Except, that land wasn’t all uninhabited; there was a pesky plot of land on the western edge that was in the way.

Instead of fairly compensating the residents of Seneca Village to gain their land, like the city did with other residents that needed to move, they instead engaged in a smear campaign against the village. Newspaper articles at the time described it as a shanty town full of squatters. No photographs of the village exist, but there are some newspaper drawings that depict the area in this negative light. This made it easy for the residents of NYC to turn on Seneca Village and demand that they get the heck outta there to make way for their beautiful future park. And so the residents were removed, often violently, and the village was razed to build a park.

Artifacts uncovered and land labeled as a "squatter settlement"

After we got our park, the village was forgotten until the 1970s when Peter Salwen noted a discrepancy in city maps of the village's impressive architecture that seemed to contradict the historical descriptions. Later, the NY Historical Society launched an initiative to uncover the history and artifacts of the site and excavations took place that uncovered tiles, shoes, and pottery. The Central Park Conservancy now offers tours of the site and has a lot of info plaques up all around. So it seems like we’re coming to terms with this very shitty thing that happened. And I hate to end things on a downer, but I just feel like it was entirely too easy for the press to sway everyone’s opinions of this village and result in pain and destruction and I don’t think that’s a lesson that we’ve learned just yet.

2. Exploring 🛼

Switching gears here: I attended a very fun Wowza Hangout over the weekend at The Escape Game. It was an escape room y’all! I know I know, is this 2008? I feel like there was a boom of escape rooms around then, suddenly popping up all over the place. They were based on the “escape the room” computer games of yore and some are pretty technically advanced now. I absolutely love solving puzzles, so this type of activity is very up my alley. However, I’m not always able to corral a group of friends to solve puzzles with me and since it’s no fun to do an escape room alone (it would also be really hard), I was grateful to have my Wowza pals along for the ride!

We were booked in the venue’s Gold Rush room and had to find out grandpa Clyde’s treasure before time ran out. I was the only member of our group who had done an escape room before, so I knew that you had to basically touch everything in the room: pick up rugs, turn signs around, etc. The first clue that I was very excited to solve was a code that we had to enter by knocking on a tree trunk - how fun! Other clues included counting the amount of birds scattered about, completing a number puzzle with the clues found on various bottles of booze hidden around the room, and a math puzzle that was way too hard to occur in the last 3 minutes of the game. One activity that tripped us up a bit involved shooting a bb gun; sadly we were all soft liberal NYers who did not know our way around guns 😅

We were bad at guns, but good at reading signs

This is honestly one of those activities that could go either way with a group. You might find that you all compliment each other wonderfully - one person is great with numbers, another is great with logic puzzles, and maybe someone else is just awesome at noticing small details. It’s like forming a well-rounded trivia team, you need a variety of folks who can handle anything thrown your way. On the flip side, it does require a good amount of communication and cooperation. You won’t get anywhere if one person decides that they’ll go off and just solve everything on their own. I was super thankful to be partnered up with an amazing group of people, chosen pretty at random by the Wowza organizers.

A secret floor puzzle!

This was honestly a great way to spend an hour of my life and like $40ish. I was completely engaged the whole time and sweat more in those last 3 minutes than I ever had in a spin class. When we finally freed ourselves from the room we were all so hyped that we went for a walk around Bryant Park and followed that up with burgers from 7th St and fancy French treats from Marvelous by Fred. If you’ve managed to corral a few friends, I definitely recommend checking out this escape room venue for a fun activity. I know lots of companies use escape rooms as team building activities and to that I say, I hope your coworkers won’t mind yelling and sweating with you for an hour.

3. What’s Good 😎

• Yu & Me Books has reopened in their original location in Chinatown and they have a whole calendar of great stuff planned for March!

• Brooklyn Museum’s First Saturday this month will feature a market lineup of female vendors for Women’s Month! Shop the Night Market, explore the Museum after hours, and dance! Entry is free, but you must RSVP at Brooklyn museum.org

• We have our first reader-submitted event - Volar Dating is having a launch party on March 7 and you’re invited! They’re an AI dating app that helps take those first few uncomfortable steps for you. They’ve kindly provided a promo code for BCLF readers - use BIGCITY for 20% off the ticket price. Please let me know if you go and meet the love of your life there!

• Sad news for fans of Flaco the owl - our “symbol of self-reliance” is dead after a building collision. Flaco was freed from the Central Park zoo a year ago and had been living his best rent-free life perched amongst trees from the East Village to the Upper East side.

• BCLF’s favorite Seltzer Museum is having an Egg Cream Invitational on March 15! Get your tickets now - they’re $25 and you’ll probably get to try some sick egg creams.

• I usually don’t post same-day events, but this one was just shared by my buddy Andy: a poetry reading at Art Cafe Brooklyn! I was also told there will be cake, so you know I’ll be there.

Are you hosting an event you want included here? Or have you just heard about something cool coming up that you want to share? Let me know!

4. Watching🍿

Do I have fans of Avatar the Last Airbender here? That show is absolutely near and dear to me and is something I’ve rewatched multiple times. It looks like a kid’s show on the surface, but the themes it deals with are real AF: grief, genocide, war - sounds like what’s on the news today but nope, that was a children’s cartoon on Nickelodeon in 2005. When Netflix announced they were doing a live action remake I cringed; not only did M Night do us so wrong in 2010, but live action remakes are generally bad (see every live action Disney movie). Reviews on the new series have been super mixed ranging from calling it a beautifully crafted disappointment to claiming it’s everything fans hoped it would be. So, is it any good?

I’ll start with some criticisms: the acting is not great. I love the diverse and ethnically-accurate cast and I love that the actors are roughly the same ages as their characters, but I think the fact that some of the actors are so young could be the issue here. A lot of the acting feels very Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - they tried, but they’re 12 fucking years old. Some of the younger actors just can’t really speak and act with their faces at the same time. See: Katara’s furrowed brows and blank stares and Aang word barfing all of his lines out. On the flip side, they somehow managed to find a human Sokka in Ian Ousley. He’s not quite as quippy as he is in the cartoon, but I think the essence of the character is still there. Some folks complained because they thought Sokka’s sexism was toned down, but that never felt like a primary character trait of his to me. I think the issue was that his character growth was just sped up because of the shorter episode arc. The absolute highlights, though, are the actors who play Zuko and Iroh - absolute fucking perfection.

I love them

The condensed storyline and the fact that some plot points were changed also received some criticism, but did you just want to see the exact same thing with people instead of cartoons (again: see Disney)? Obviously changes had to be made for pacing and practicality, just like with a book-to-movie adaptation. I have absolutely nothing wrong with folks making changes to the source material as long as it carries the same spirit as the original and I think the changes here do that just fine. Yeah, we didn’t meet Jet and The Mechanist in the same episode in the cartoon, but I think mashing up their stories into one episode and one locale worked just fine to hit the same beats and push the story forward. The only thing that bummed me out is that we didn’t get a whole ass episode of the spirit library owl because I loved that episode, but the change they made still made sense.

I love big creepy owl

Something strange that I noticed that I didn’t see called out anywhere else was the editing and choice of framing. These are sort of those invisible things that you don’t notice until something feels off and you can’t quite put your finger on it. There were multiple instances of scenes captures in wise shots that didn’t need to be. Having all of that extra stuff in the frame made the characters look smaller and less important. I wonder if they just wanted to show off the sets? I also felt like there could have been a lot more cuts in the editing process. A good editor knows what’s actually important to show and what can be cut around to suggest action. For example, in one scene we see Katara wrapped in a blanket, she slowly stands up, awkwardly removes the blanket, and then turns to Jet and begins talking. That action only took maybe 7 seconds, but we didn’t need to see all of that. And it was in another wide shot! The editing felt amateurish to me at times (I say as someone who only ever edited a grand total of like 3 videos in my life).

A big strength to me was the action and distinction between all of the bending styles. This is largely due to the fact that this series stayed true to the martial arts disciplines that each bending style pulls from. The actors in M Night’s Avatar kind of just kicked and waved their hands around and poof, air bending. But in the Netflix series, you can clearly tell that folks from different nations move differently when bending elements. Water bending is based on Tai Chi and you can see Katara making slow fluid movements that wouldn’t look out of place amongst a group of elders in a park in Chinatown. Fire bending is based on the Northern Shaolin martial art and includes lots of sharp punches and sweeping kicks. This was a huge part of the animated series and it looks really great in this adaptation. All of the actors attended a boot camp to learn their bending/martial arts styles and this really paid off.

Chuck Norris would be proud

I believe that adaptations should either add to the source material or present it in a new way and to me, the Netflix series did that. I never want to see the exact same story told again because then why wouldn’t I just watch the original? This series was never going to come close to how beloved the original cartoon was and I honestly don’t think it was trying to. I think it stands just fine on its own and now we have the benefit of having a badass live action Zuko (Dallas James Liu) and cartoon Zuko (Dante Basco). Be still my heart ❤️‍🔥

5. Noshing 😋

I will never stop singing the praises of the Reese’s Stuff My Cup experience at The Hershey’s Store, though I am sad to say that inflation has caught up with the giant cup and the price is now $25. Of all the things I’ve written about, this seems to have landed with the most folks and I’m proud to know of at least 3 people who have stuffed their cups because of me. One of those people is my brother, Beef, who stuffed his cup before our dinner at Minetta Tavern.

I, however, wanted to try a different Hershey’s experience: S’Moosh Your S’Mores. This is housed in another corner of The Hershey’s Store and promised a giant S’mores treat and the only thing I love more than peanut butter is S’Mores. Different flavors based on Hershey chocolate bars were available - there was a kit kat, cookies n creme, peanut butter cup, and classic. I obviously got the peanut butter cup and Beef got the classic.

Action shot of Beef s'mooshing his s'mores

The s’mores were…fine? I mean you can’t go wrong with a toasted marshmallow, it’s hard to mess that part up. Even the chocolate was fine. Hershey’s chocolate isn’t the best chocolate out there but it’s chocolate. I had a big problem with the graham crackers they used, though. The graham is arguably one of the more difficult elements of the sweet sandwich: a too-hard graham crumbles and falls apart, but a too-soft graham doesn’t provide enough structure and just, well, smooshes. The texture definitely veered too far in the soft camp for me, but an even larger problem was the taste. A graham should be a little cinnamon-y, or maybe a little honey-sweet; this one was neither. It tasted like a plain ass cardboard cracker, it lacked any of the texture of a traditional graham, it was bad. The graham managed to drag the whole experience down for me.

That graham cracker is paler and smoother than my own butt, it is nearly indistinguishable from the paper it’s packaged in

That, and they cost like $14 each?! These were expensive ass s’mores and I wanted them to be great, I wanted them to be on par with the big peanut butter cup, but alas they were not. Don’t get this s’mores, we can’t let Hershey’s get away with this. I paid $14 to eat a sweet cardboard sandwich and rather than end up with egg on my face, I ended up with marshmallow and chocolate all over my face.

POV you’re me with marshmallow all over my face