Art, omurice, and teen angst?

How very

It’s somehow only the second week of October, but I feel as though I’ve lived many Octobers already. This past long weekend was very full (of good things!) and I was so grateful to have Monday off for Indigenous Peoples Day to recuperate. It’s not lost of me that I am not an indigenous person and yet I was able to reap the benefits of this holiday by not working and I hope this is an issue that we (as in the royal we) figure out how to address. I didn’t have it in me this past weekend, but one day I would like to properly visit the Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan. I was there briefly when I had to get interviewed for my Nexus card and the building is so gorgeous. Also, the museum is free!

Also yes, it’s a Thursday again. As much as I want to be an earlier-in-the-week newsletter person, this is simply who I am and I’m not going to try to fight it. Thursdays, it is.

1. Noshing 😋

After a very long weekend of events & lots of walking, Lorenzo & I were craving some cozy comfort food & Hi Collar in the East Village is one of our favorite places for a delicious bite. Hi Collar is a Japanese cafe by day & sake bar by night & as soon as you walk in you’ll forget that you just stepped over piles of barf one block over on St Marks because the decor is so unique. There’s a fountain with bamboo right in the middle of the space under a skylight & the entire back wall is lined with colorful sake barrels. It’s a decent size for a NYC cafe & we’ve never had to wait more than 15 minutes to get a table, although they do take reservations.

Lorenzo pictured with the sake barrels and his usual omurice + karaage

Something to note, though, is that they close at 5pm on Sundays. We didn’t know this (I guess we usually go earlier?) & just showed up at 5:07. A brief exchange of niceties & apologies ensued but they insisted on seating us & we thanked them profusely. I usually get their fluffy pancakes with red beans, but since I know those take a while to make I switched up my order to hopefully inconvenience them less. We asked if they could make omurice & they said ok, so we both got that. You’ve probably seen videos of people slicing open an omelete atop a pile of rice & the eggs folding over & enveloping the dish - that’s omurice!

American animation needs to take note from anime and portray food better

Lorenzo always orders their Hayashi Omurice, which comes with a savory mushroom demi glace. My body is sadly mushroom averse, so I ordered their Tomato Omurice. I cannot stress this enough, but this place makes the best omurice in the city. If you know a place that you think is better please let me know because I’d love to try it, but Hi Collar’s is going to be tough to beat. The eggs were perfectly soft & creamy & the chef put their whole omurussy into the dish even though we embarrassingly showed up after closing time. My rice had tiny chunks of chicken in it & while the first couple bites felt very ketchup-heavy, the flavors melded together really well once I got to mixing. The Hayashi style is good if you want something very savory, but the Tomato was a great balance of sweet + savory.

My usual fluffy pancakes + tomato omurice

2. Watching 👀

I somehow just watched Heathers for the first time & I really liked it! It felt strangely contemporary despite being made in 1989, though I doubt anyone would make a movie like this nowadays (in fact, they made a TV show that suffered multiple delays & heavy edits because of school shootings that occurred IRL). If you, like me, have somehow never seen Heathers, allow me to break down the general plot for you:

This movie had so many quotable lines. Why don’t we quote Heathers more?

Heathers follows a Mean Girls-esque group of 3 girls (all named Heather) & their “friend”, Veronica (the Cady of the group). It’s not entirely clear how Veronica joined forces with the Heathers, but the why seems to be for the usual reason - to be cool. The Heathers are essentially The Plastics & they rule the school through a combination of adoration & fear, while Veronica, their lackey, gleans some level of cool by proxy. It’s quickly clear, though, that Veronica misses her old life & old friends. When the school rebel, JD, suggests they kill one of the Heathers, Veronica doesn’t outright say no, but rather plays along passively. When the first Heather is accidentally poisoned, Veronica goes right along with JD’s suggestion to forge a suicide note. However, the two are surprised that while Heather was feared by their peers in life, she was loved in death. When the two accidentally kill two jocks later, the same things happens & the “dumb” jocks are now remembered as being bright boys who were beloved by their peers.

Ahh, high school

Ultimately, JD gets a little too nuts for Veronica, tries to blow up the school, yadda yadda yadda. The movie touches on a lot of interesting themes & why yes, I will write about them now:

First, the legacies that the suicide notes create reminded me a bit of The Virgin Suicides (though that movie & the book it was based on were created after Heathers). The Virgin Suicides is told from the perspective of a group of boys who knew the Lisbon sisters ever so briefly, but many years after their suicides the (now) men state that they loved them. What the men really love is the idea of the girls & the fact that they now own the narrative of the girls’ lives. When someone dies they cease being the narrator of their story & rely instead of others’ retellings. When Heather & the jocks died, their peers crafted their legacies by choosing to tell stories not of how things actually were, but of how they perceived them to be. Every father wants to believe their son was kind & smart & every girl at school wants to believe that deep down the popular girl only didn’t like them because she herself was so tortured. It’s rose colored glasses, people!

Second, let’s talk about JD. I thought that JD & Veronica would engage in silly shenanigans that would lightly torture the Heathers (ie: feeding them nutrition bars that will make them gain weight). JD even mentions that “chaos is what killed the dinosaurs.” Now I’m all for chaotic good, but things escalated quickly. What I thought would be a movie of Veronica vs The Heathers turned into Veronica vs JD and this was a surprise maybe only to me; I wish it focused more on female relationship dynamics. I did love that Christian Slater went full Jack Nicholson though, the likeness was uncanny & it made him sound very unhinged.

I really love movies that don’t follow the classic Hollywood formula of wrapping themselves up into happy endings. At the end of Heathers, Veronica actually grabs one of the surviving Heathers’ bows & wears it herself. What happens next could go either way - Veronica can claim the high school hierarchical throne & carry on the Heathers’ tradition of fear, or she can wear the bow & serve as a sort of figurehead wearing the crown to create a vacuum of power so no one else can claim it. The film wants us to believe in the latter happier ending as we see Veronica walk off with one of her old friends, but if the movie has taught us anything, it’s that we we see & what’s actually going on may be two different things.

Technically this is true because Winona Ryder had just come off filming Beetlejuice. How very meta.

3. Exploring 🛼

Tuesday night I was very fortunate to be able to view the Judy Chicago: Herstory exhibit at The New Museum that opens today & runs through Jan 14 (thanks Brit!). Most folks may be familiar with her work that’s housed in the Brooklyn Museum, The Dinner Party, which features 39 place settings around a dinner table commemorating famous women across history. This new exhibit features 60 years worth of art from Judy Chicago across multiple mediums such as painting, sculpture, stained glass, & needlework, as well as exhibit-within-an-exhibit “The City of Ladies,” featuring additional work from over eighty female artists, writers, & thinkers.

What if women ruled the world? Would there be violence?

The above banners are part of the City of Ladies exhibit & they present pretty lofty ideals. The world would be different if more women were in charge, that’s for sure, but I think that there would still be violence - it just might look different. Maybe instead of dick shaped rockets we’d have ovary shaped bombs; it seems to be human nature to destroy itself. I did really enjoy being in a room surrounded by art only created by women, though. I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a minority, but you can’t argue that the world is overtly male by default & being in a room that was instead female by default was quite nice.

I wish there were more plaques around to tell me about the art because I like to read everything. One work that I found really interesting was The Birth Project; less because of the subject matter & more because of the process of creating it. This was to be a large scale needlework project & Judy Chicago collaborated with about 150 women to create it. To select needleworkers, sample drawings of a fetus in a womb were sent to all of the applicants who would then translate that drawing into their preferred needlework medium. Most of the applicants would have never considered themselves artists, but rather they identified with Chicago’s ideals & just straight up enjoyed crafting. I really love collaborative art like this & thought it was so cool to see how multiple women interpreted the sample drawing given to them so differently.

This was one of those exhibits where every gun or cigar was in fact a dick and every flower was in fact a vagina

Tickets to the New Museum are $22 for adults, but if you have a library card you can sometimes get free or discounted tickets via Culture Pass. The area around the Museum has also seen lots of revitalization recently & isn’t quite as sketchy as it used to be (I once saw a man casually poop in a public trash bin right nearby, but I feel like that might not happen now).

4. Learning 🧠

I recently took a tour of the art in Grand Central Madison & I learned something that seems so logical in retrospect, but still surprised me: the art you see in the subways is not installed by the actual artist, but rather by one of two companies (I reached out to my tour guide to get the name of those two companies because I can’t remember them, but they haven’t responded yet).

Unlike Judy Chicago’s collaborative needlepoint process where folks were encouraged to take an idea & run with it, the goal here is for the installation company to translate the artist’s work into the application medium, often mosaic tiles since that medium has proven to hold up well. The artists whose works you see in the subway are generally not mosaicists, so they provide these companies with a painting, photograph, whatever & that is translated into tile. This doesn’t sound particularly difficult for simple works, but some of the art I saw in Grand Central Madison clearly took a lot of back & forth between the artist & the installer. This was especially the case with Kiki Smith’s “River Light” piece.

My photo doesn’t do this piece justice at all, but if you can try to zoom in and look at all of the jagged skinny tiles.

This piece had quite the journey before it ended up on the wall - Smith first developed the image by photographing the local landscape & animal life, it was then turned into flags exhibited at Storm King, then it was turned into a mosaic. Needless to say, the process of getting art on a subway wall is much more complicated than I thought!

5. What’s Good 😎

• The film festival I used to work with, The Art of Brooklyn, is opening submissions for their 14th season on October 16! They accept films, series, & screenplays of any genre as long as there is some connection to Brooklyn. I spent about 6 years working with them & can confirm that they throw a heck of an event.

• Last Place on Earth is an amazing board game cafe in Greenpoint that regularly hosts game-focused events. They’ve got a few Halloween-specific events on their calendar for this month including Pumpkin Carving (Oct 15) & a Murder Mystery Party (Oct 22)

• October is Filipino American History Month & one of my favorite shops in Essex Market, Southeast, is hosting popups all month. Coming up this weekend are popups with The Boiis Co & Djablo Hot Sauce - both absolutely delicious!

• One of my favorite museums, The Museum of the City of NY, is transforming into a 1920s speakeasy this Friday Oct 13 to celebrate their 100th birthday. On Saturday they’ll have a scavenger hunt going on & Sunday will have even more events for the whole family!

• This Friday the 13th many tattoo shops around the city will be offering special flash sheets! Last year I got a spooky umbrella tattoo at Memorial Tattoo & they’ll be offering special deals again this year.

• I’m actually devastated I can’t go to the next That Dinner Thing so I need someone to attend in my stead. They’re teaming up with Heyday Canning Co to host a bean party! I love beans 🥺

• Forgot to mention this last week, but October in NYC is Archtober! It’s a month full of exclusive stuff for architecture nerds aka me. Lots of buildings that are not usually open to the public will be open & there will be lots of tours & workshops available.

It’s been a long week - you can have a little cat, as a treat