Deepest Bluest
My hat is like a shark's fin
Disclaimer: Anything in this week’s newsletter was written under the influence of Covid. Yes that’s right, how embarrassing is it to have Covid in fucking 2024? Weren’t we past this? Apparently not, as Covid cases are up 250% in NYC at the moment due to the cutesy FLiRT variant, which I can confirm is anything but cute. The CDC’s current guidance is also pretty laughable; they recommend “practicing good hygiene, wearing a mask, and not standing too close to other people.” Have they ridden the L train in the summer?
If anything, I am grateful that I’m forced to stay indoors in my air-conditioned apartment (#blessed) during this insane heatwave we’re experiencing. It’s so hot outside a bridge broke. As someone with asthma and just a generally ineffective immune system, I know how problematic extreme heat can be and I am beyond lucky to be stuck inside with a/c. If you or someone you know is not fortunate enough to be relatively comfortable at the moment, I can’t recommend the resources shared by The City enough. Take a peek at some of these very helpful articles:
*What to Do When Your Apartment Is Too Hot
*How to Help Your Neighbor
*Where to Swim, and Learn to Swim, in New York City (stay safe out there because we are also experiencing a lifeguard shortage)
*‘Adams and Adams’ Shake Hands on $112 Billion City Budget (libraries received a chunk of their budgets back, which means more branches will remain open and can act as crucial cooling centers)
*The Right Way to Open a Fire Hydrant in the Heat of Summer (the dude on your block who owns the giant wrench is a local hero tbh)
A few weeks ago I decided to treat myself to a day at Bathhouse in Williamsburg. My cat sitting gig got extended so I figured why not spend all of that additional money immediately and get myself a massage and a scrub and then sweat all of my bodily liquids out? I generally hate being wet outside of the shower (I don’t even swim; I can, I simply choose not to) but people like doing these kind of things and I could be people! Maybe I would have an epiphany and realize what I was missing all along so I threw on the single bathing suit that I own and prepared to be perpetually moist for a few hours.
When I arrived the person at reception gave me a little bracelet and shuffled mw towards the locker room. The bracelet could be linked to a credit card for even easier spending and would also be used to access the lockers. I eventually found my way through the locker room and down to the pool level. I purposefully booked my massage and scrub with some time in between so I could “enjoy” the saunas and pools but once I got there I realized I had no idea what to do. How does one sauna? No one ever taught me.
Thankfully, I am riddled with anxiety and googled some tips beforehand. The general guidelines were “go from the hot wet to the cold wet and then back to the hot wet and then cold wets and continue until you are cleansed of everything.” So I began my periodic transitions from the hot wets to the cold wets and simply moved around whenever I felt too hot or too cold.
Something that I neglected to realize would be difficult was navigating an unfamiliar location without wearing my glasses. I figured they would fog up in the steam room and just get wet in the pools, so I left them behind in my locker along with my phone (you can’t bring it with you and no pictures are allowed). So I sort of floated aimlessly while struggling to read the tiny signs in the dark to figure out what things were. The first pool I jumped in was, surprisingly, the cold plunge! I ran out of that bad boy very quickly and managed to find the dry sauna. I actually liked this room quite a lot and would return to it often for my hot wets. I did eventually get used to the cold pool too; it was much more refreshing when I expected the cold vs being surprised.
There was a steam room that I visited briefly, but my asthma immediately flared up and I noped outta there before I became a medical emergency. Across the way there was also a tropical sauna that I liked. I’m not sure what about it was tropical; it was sort of like the dry sauna but slightly less hot? The tropical sauna was also the site of the aufguss ritual that occurred every hour and a half. I squinted to read a sign about the aufguss schedule and was able to attend one between my massage and scrub. During aufguss, a very nice employee shuffles folks into the room, pours various smelly oils on the coals, and fancily fans us with their towel. I actually enjoyed the brief 12 minutes of guided activity because it provided me with a respite from my aimless cold to hot wanderings.
The massage and scrub I got were fine, nothing to write home about. This is going to sound privileged AF (and it is), but I will forever miss the massages I got from Betty and Jeffery when I worked at Slack. We had massages there for employees every Thursday (in this economy??) and I have not had a massage since that was as good as the ones those two provided. The lady who did my scrub was very nice, but when she appeared wearing rubber gloves and a black apron and shuffled me into a room with lots of hoses and drains I couldn’t help but wonder wtf I’d signed up for. The experience wasn’t as torturous as the room had me thinking it would be, but the amount of oil I was rubbed down with at the end basically made me a human slip n slide.
After spending a few hours going from the cold wets to the hot wets and having someone rub oil all over my body, I desperately wanted to leave. There is a restaurant upstairs, but I opted to make my escape and grab some sushi from Ten Ichi Mart to enjoy back at home. A day pass for Bathhouse costs $50ish and their cheapest massage is $177, so this is not an affordable experience at all and I would never have done this if I didn’t get the extra cat sitting money. At this rate, I can sit on my apartment roof and sweat just as much for free. Claire at
had a similarly puzzling experience at their Flatiron location and I think I’ve just concluded that I am not a sauna person, or at the very least I am not a Bathhouse person.
Lorenzo has never seen Jaws and this is something that continues to confound me. How has he not even seen it by accident? How does he not even desire to watch it? He’s completely content never watching what is probably one of the best movies ever made. I tried, as I often do, to get him to watch it over the weekend but it wasn’t available on any streaming platform (for free anyways, fuck Amazon for making us pay to rent stuff on top of paying for Prime). However, when searching for Jaws on Netflix, they suggested Anaconda as an acceptable replacement. I’ve actually never seen Anaconda (Lorenzo has) so I figured I’d give it a shot and see if it scratched that same itch. This movie was not what I thought it was going to be at all.
I knew JLO was in this movie, but the rest of the cast was a complete surprise to me. Eric Stoltz? Jon Voight?? Owen Wilson??? The fucking dad from Jumanji???? I was prepared for JLO to be the scream queen of the movie and it turned out this was not that kind of movie at all. In fact, this was a movie about Jon Voight playing a guy from Paraguay(?) channeling Tommy Wiseau and searching for his one true love - the anaconda. Like I was not prepared for the amount of Jon Voight that we got in this movie and for whatever choice he was making with his character. The anaconda itself was forgettable and completely overshadowed by the pure Voightiness that was on the screen.
The movie was honestly just bad. And not even good bad, just bad. The anaconda had a single move that it used repeatedly to maim its victims, so minus points for lack of creativity there. And the insistence to make Jon Voight the main character of this movie was just a mistake. Honestly, justice for Eric Stoltz who gets injured early on and disappears until the end. Like it’s bad enough he got replaced in Back to the Future, at least let him have some screen time in this shit fest.
After watching this disaster, I decided we needed to watch a quality shark movie. I still refused to shell out money to rent Jaws, so we watched the only movie that can possible compare - Deep Blue Sea. I fucking love this movie. Oh you’re trying to cure Alzheimer’s so you genetically modify sharks’ brains to make them bigger so you can harvest more proteins and as a result the sharks get smarter and trick the humans into flooding the facility so that they can escape and be free in the deep blue sea??? This is quality storytelling the likes that Anaconda could never hope to achieve. The sharks never let us know their next move because they are in fact smarter than we are so each kill is a delightful little surprise.
This movie is also sexy AF. It came out a couple months after The Mummy and The Matrix in 1999 and I think this was just a good year for hot ensemble casts that will forever have me questioning my sexuality. Thomas Jane is in a skin tight wetsuit the entire time and my man is looking fit. They give one of the women an excuse to take off her wetsuit and use it as a rubber barrier so that she can electrocute a shark. LL Cool J is a chef and there is nothing hotter than a man who can cook for me. Even fucking Michael Rapaport is there and y’all, my guy is intellectual sexy and knowledgable about every inch of that underwater facility. Also like is Stellan Skarsgård smoking a cigarette just before getting his arm bit off weirdly hot or what? All of the Skarsgårds can get it.
But what might be the greatest thing this movie has to offer is its soundtrack, headlined by none other than LL Cool J’s Deepest Bluest (Shark's Fin). It is very important to me that you watch this video in its entirety and take in every single lyric, most notably the 35 mentions of LL’s hat being like a shark’s fin. What, and I cannot emphasize this enough, in the fuck is he saying here? Well lucky for you, I have the answer. Well, I have an answer.
After much research (having covid and reaching the depths of google) I discovered that this isn’t the first time he’s used that particular lyric! In his 1987 song “I’m Bad” he raps the same thing! And I’m using “rap” loosely here because this was back in a time when raps were goofy and had lyrics like:
Slaughter competition, that's my hobby and job
I don't wear a disguise because I don't owe the mob
Got a pinpoint rap that makes you feel trapped
So many girls on my jock, I think my phone is tapped, I'm bad
This is a man bragging that he doesn’t have any debts with the mob and is also slightly paranoid that his phone might be tapped. I’m not sure what’s bad about that, but ok. Later in this song LL drops this sick line on us:
Emcees can't win, I make 'em rust like tin
They call me "Jaws," my hat is like a shark's fin
And this is where the lore of a hat being like a shark’s fin was born, something that LL Cool J (which stands for “ladies love Cool J btw) felt compelled to call back to over a decade later when he was tapped to write an actual song about sharks. I guess it’s a reference to wearing a baseball cap tipped way back so the rim is almost straight up? I’m no hat expert but even in the best of circumstances I don’t know if I’d describe that silhouette as being like a shark’s fin.
Multiple think pieces have been written about the image this song conjures and I have enjoyed reading every single one. The mere knowledge that this song exists and has a pretty solid movie to go along with it is truly something that keeps me going on some days. I could watch Deep Blue Sea over and over and as good as Jaws is, this is my #1 shark movie.
The Museum of the City of NY is probably one of my favorite museums in the city and on July 18 they’re hosting something called Uptown Bounce. This sounds corny as hell and it probably will be because it’s a celebration of 90s hip hop, which was pretty corny (See LL’s early discography as discussed above"). But it’s free, there will be drinks, gelato, arcade games, and you’ll have the opportunity to show off your best running man.
Mini Mart in Ridgewood has been blowing up (rip short lines, but I’m happy for them) and next weekend on July 14 they’re running a popup with Trinidadian vendor Chuddy’s. A friend once promised to make me salted cod fritters (you know who you are) and since that has yet to happen Chuddy’s might be my chance!
I am determined to see The Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibit before it closes this month and if you haven’t made it over there yet, perhaps this weekend is your chance. On July 14 they’re having a whole afternoon of of music, performances, demonstrations, talks, and hands-on activities inspired by the exhibit. Everything is free with museum admission, which is pay-what-you-wish for NY state residents.
Cool job alert! The Center for Brooklyn History is hiring a Digital Collections and Access Coordinator responsible for managing all aspects of CBH's digital archives, ensuring they are accessible both internally and online, and representative of our overall mission. Salary range is $72,000-76,000. Apply here!
Gonggan in Flushing is reopening on July 12! At first glance, this place might look like it just makes desserts for the ‘gram. And like yeah, don’t kill yourself to get that mushroom thing on their menu. However, I’m here to tell you that their desserts are actually really delicious! Last time I was there I had a black sesame waffle ice cream concoction and it was fucking delicious. I currently have my eye on their new mugwort cake 😍
Speaking of desserts - Cafe Panna just opened a new location in Greenpoint as of 1:30pm today! I actually passed by while it was still under construction on my journey to Bathhouse and I’m very excited to have them in Brooklyn. They also happen to be on an amazing street surrounded by some of my favorite spots: Acre, Davey’s, Rule of Thirds, and Dashi Okume.
Head to Governor’s Island this weekend for The NYC Poetry Festival. Admission is free and you can look forward to tons of poetry-related activities, including readings, workshops, activities, and open mics.
I’m not a boat girlie, but I know people fucking love the NYC Ferry (and I at least love their social media team). Starting July 20, they’ll be operating an express ferry from LIC to Greenpoint to Rockaway. Tickets are $10!
14/10, this was my favorite piece yet. Hot wets/cold wets killed me, and as someone who has been trying and failing to *~do new things~*, everything about your Bathhouse experience resonated. Let's plan a new thing together! Also, Drew has a lot of dumb weekend travel this month, but if he winds up free one weekend, I'd love to go to the Met with you. Also also, nothing beat Deep Blue Sea. Also also also, feel better!
This had me laughing the whole way through and I loved all of it. Also, great timing because its shark week, so you're on theme!