It's Gonna Be May
It's Gonna Be May
Happy May to all who celebrate
Thank you all for the BCLF birthday wishes last week! Some people were confused and thought it was my actual birthday but isn’t it painfully obvious that I’m a Virgo?
We’re back to our usual programming with some really fun stuff this week. I’ve been sitting on today’s Learning section for a while now so I’m excited to be able to remove that bookmark from my browser. Free subscribers will also get to read about The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and see many images of big manly men. Paid subscribers get a real fucking treat with a pretty big feature on visiting the north end of Roosevelt Island and I also write about some treats I picked up from a Japanese bakery.
This weekend I’ll be dog sitting for the first time in my life (classic Elaina, I’m always doing her favors) and will be living in Kips Bay for a bit! If you know of any good eats or fun places to visit, please send them my way. I’m both nervous and excited to cosplay as a dog mom and would love to hear about favorite parks good places to walk a dog on the east side.
1. Learning 🧠
Moving in NYC is stressful, but would you believe me if I told you it actually used to be worse? Once upon a time the city celebrated a little thing called Moving Day and it was an awful day “celebrated” on May 1 that no one liked and was memorialized as such in the New York Atlas in 1849:
Day of trouble—day of chaos/Day of toil for man and “dray-hoss;”/What confusion! Wha a rumpus!/On the sidewalk bedpost bump us/All are moving, helter skelter/Women scold and fume and swelter
If you haven’t already guessed, Moving Day was a weird ass tradition dating back to colonial times. On February 1, known as "Rent Day", landlords would tell tenants what their new rent would be and since there were even less rent increase protections back then than there are now, rent hikes were sometimes absolutely insane. Then, on May 1, all leases in the city expired simultaneously at 9:00 am, causing thousands of people to move apartments, all at the same time. So yeah, now that poem makes a bit more sense - rumpus!
May 1 was a significant date for the Dutch because that’s when folks left The Netherlands to explore The New World. It also marked the start of the Dutch trading season known as Handelstijd. After being a sort of unofficial thing for many years, Moving Day was eventually codified into law by an 1820 act of the New York State Legislature. The ruling basically said that if no other lease end date was specified, all housing contracts were valid to the first of May. And so every May 1 the streets would be gridlocked with carriages carrying folks belongings. And naturally, folks took advantage of this. Drivers charged astronomical prices for folks to use their carriages for transport and farmers from Long Island and New Jersey would even travel into the city to rent out their wagons on that day.
But all awful things must come to an end (I hope). Eventually a second Moving Day on Oct 1 began to take form, as that’s when folks would move back to the city from their summer homes. This second Moving Day, combined with a lack of “able bodied men” during WWII and the creation of rent control(!), naturally created enough hurdles to sticking to this strict schedule. By 1945, Moving Day was no more.
I don’t know who ever really thought this was a good idea, but can you even fucking imagine if we did this now? I recommend reading some of the firsthand accounts available on Wikipedia because they are just wild. Anyways, wishing you all negligible rent increases, no broker fees, and good fortune when apartment hunting 🙌
2. Watching🍿
I recently saw The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and it taught me something about myself: I like watching big beefy men kill Nazis. This shouldn’t have been too surprising to me as Inglorious Basterds is the only Tarantino film I can sit through. I also grew up watching Indy fight Nazis over and over on my VHS copy of Last Crusade (👵🏻). As soon as I saw a sweaty Henry Cavill laughing maniacally while shooting a giant gun in the trailer for this movie, I was fucking hooked. This was going to be a goofy action filled Nazi massacre!
It turned out to be a bit less action filled than I wanted as most of the middle of the film took place on an excruciatingly slow boat journey. The movie tells a fictionalized version of Operation Postmaster and that story involved a lot of time on a boat in the 1940s on the way to sink (or as it turns out, capture) other boats. I fuckin hate boats.
Despite the second act lull, I really enjoyed the action that was in the film. It’s directed by Guy Ritchie and it is pretty fucking British in style, which is to say that all jokes are told with a stiff upper lip and everything is incredibly casual. Near the beginning, Henry Cavill and his team of beefcakes have to break one of their friends out of some sort of prison. When the initial plan goes astray (which would become a pattern), Cavill simply shrugs it off, says something along the lines of “cheerio, let’s just go in there and shoot folks all willy nilly alright” (this is what British English sounds like to me), and the men basically stroll through the Nazi encampment and shoot machine guns in the most casual way I have ever witnessed. It’s a striking contrast to a lot of the frenetic action we see in movies today (like in Monkey Man) and I think it’s actually quite hard to pull off because it goes against how we’re used to witnessing action scenes in American cinema.
The NYT called this a “perfect airplane movie” and I can sort of understand where they’re coming from. I should note that I have egregiously low standards though when it comes to watching poor quality movies on tiny screens (I grew up pirating films on Limewire, what do you want from me?). However this review was based on the quality of the story, not the quality of the picture. The story is very simple and that’s actually what I liked about it. I’ve watched so many movies where I actually don’t understand what the characters’ mission is and I kind of just stick along to watch the action hoping that I’ll eventually understand everything at the end. Yes, there was a lot of expository dialogue when Henry Cavill and his band of merry men weren’t shooting Nazis, but I found it to be helpful rather than excessive.
Ultimately, this movie was really fun and I learned a thing about WWII that I didn’t previously know while watching big muscley men talk in silly little accents. That’s a solid win if there ever was one!
3. What’s Good 😎
The weather this time of year can be pretty unpredictable (a beautiful 80 degree day followed by rain? wtf?) so it’s always nice to have an indoor plan on standby. I love this list of Free Museum Days for exactly that! Most NYC museum will have free or pay-what-you-wish days available and while yes, they do tend to be more crowded at these times, you should still take advantage! Pro tip: some museums will make you reserve free tickets, so check ahead!
This Saturday Popup Grocer is having a @nazliandco pop-up, with slices of sheet cake and mini cakes available from their new spring/summer menu. This event will undoubtedly get crowded but also - cake!
New friend Allie is hosting a Visual Artist Spotlight on May 16. 5 artists will be featured in the Gallery section and 10 artists will flaunt their skills in a visual artist open mic session; each artist has 7 minutes to create art on the spot for the crowd!
Places selling smashburgers are absolutely taking over the city (a new spot literally just popped up in a gas station) but I’m not mad about it. If you’re a burger baby, consider popping by the Smashed Burger Block Party on May 18. A $70 ticket will get you burgers from all 6 vendors and while this seems expensive up front, consider the prices of burgers nowadays and do the math.
If you’re more of a ceramics girlie, you can stop by The Brooklyn Ceramic Arts Tour from May 17-19. It’ll feature local artists, studios, galleries, and businesses across the borough, opening their doors to the public for a variety of exhibitions, workshops, demonstrations, artist talks, and ceramic sales.
Dominique Ansel just released their cronut flavor for the month and while I would normally scoff at such basic things, y’all - it’s strawberry pandan! If you don’t want to wait in line like a noob, just order ahead for pickup or delivery.
And a personal plug for a friend of mine: my pal Susie started a home delivery focaccia company and recently released Bread of the Month boxes! If you love bread (and who doesn’t) head over to Jennie’s House and get yourself a little treat.
4. Exploring 🛼
I took a trip with Lorenzo to Roosevelt Island a couple weeks ago because the whole F Train construction debacle of early 2024 is behind us! It was, however, peak cherry blossom time so the tram ride over was packed. We did see cherry blossoms, but I was surprised that the crowd from our full ass tram car basically disappeared as soon as we started heading to the north end of the island. So I’ll leave you with one picture of the Yoshino trees and then I want to talk about what’s on the north end of Roosevelt Island and why it’s worth the trip (I found something that I bet no one else is talking about).
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