I'm on my feet, I'm on the floor, I'm good to go
🤘🎤💥
Welcome back to your regularly-ish scheduled Big City, Little Friend! I hope you enjoyed last week’s Cherry Blossom detour; I had a lot of fun researching and writing it. I feel like I’ve been seeing tons of blooms pop up over the weekend, so I hope you put my guide to good use in the coming weeks. I also made you all a Cherry Blossom Google Map that you can follow if you’re planning a lil Springtime walk 🌸
And in case anyone was wondering, the majority of readers feel that it’s ok to leave your TSA pre-check-less companions behind. Thank you for somewhat confirming that I’m not a terrible person. Please send Lorenzo your thoughts and prayers this Friday as he waits in line, not even alone, but with my family, which might actually be worse. And because I’m taking a little vacation, there probably won’t be a newsletter out next week since I’ll have to catch up on my actual work. What a drag, amirite?
This week, paid subscribers will be regaled via “A Tale of Two Japanese Curries.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like, I tried Japanese Curry at two different places next to one another. I’ve also written a review of Madame Web. Yeah that’s right, I paid money to see Madame Web so I could write about it. How do I turn this shit into tax write-offs?
1. Exploring 🛼
There are two kinds of people in this world - those who karaoke and those who do not. I want to be someone who karaokes and maybe one day I’ll get there. If you’re also on the fence about your karaoke status, may I recommend attending one of McCarren Parkhouse’s Thursday karaoke nights? I recently hosted a Wowza Hangout there and it was a fucking blast. Oh, and it’s free ✨
McCarren Parkhouse opened in Summer 2022 and I’ve somehow never stopped by until now. The little building houses a bar (Park Bar), a sandwich shop (Club Club, a collab with Salty Lunch Lady), and most importantly - public bathrooms. There was an Oddfellows popup in there for a while but as far as I can tell they’ve moved out and were replaced by Blank Street Coffee, which we do not support because they are soulless. In addition to these amenities, there is regular programming of community events in the space ranging from comedy shows to trivia to speed dating and of course, karaoke.
Every Thursday at 8pm the Kings of Karaoke take over the little movie room in the parkhouse and give us regular schmos the opportunity to fucking rock. Our host that night was Billy and they absolutely knew how to keep the energy up and make everyone feel like they were putting on the best show of their lives. Billy took to the mic first and opened with Jimmy Eat World’s A Praise Chorus, which just so happens to be a song I’ve had on repeat lately. I was immediately on my feet, on the floor, and good to go after hearing that gem of a throwback (how is that song 23 years old 🥲).
It was so much fun listening to the variety of songs that folks sang! They sang Green Day, they sang Natalie Imbruglia, they sang fuckin Frank Sinatra! I really appreciated that the host turned the music up and the mic down when appropriate (when they could tell the singer was shy, not bad!) and they played air horns and other sound effects to help the singer through the awkward musical interludes. The bartender also sang a couple songs, including a very impressive rendition of Rock Lobster. It was excellent vibes all around and a great karaoke experience.
Some things I learned to help make your karaoke experience top notch: pick popular songs so the audience will sing along (The Killers are surprisingly super popular bangers!?), don’t rap unless you know what you’re doing (it’s cringey, I’m sorry), ham it up and make the audience participate (with claps, chorus singalongs, whatever).
You can literally drop by McCarren Parkhouse any Thursday and sing your heart out for free! You can also sign up for Wowza Hangouts to attend pre-planned events like this where you can meet new friends 😁
2. Learning 🧠
NYC had the most beautiful weather this past weekend so Lorenzo and I took an impromptu trip to Brooklyn Bridge Park. We walked all the way from the southern end to the northern tip under the bridge and I was so happy to see a marker designating an area as Emily Warren Roebling Plaza! Emily Roebling is kind of a big deal and since Lorenzo had to listen to me tell him all about her, now you have to, too.
You might recognize the name Roebling from Roebling St which runs through Williamsburg. The Roeblings for which that street is named actually lived at 106 Columbia Heights, so I’m not sure why their street namesake ended up in North Brooklyn. However, their Brooklyn Heights home gave them the perfect vantage point to keep an eye on one of their most well-known projects: The Brooklyn Bridge.
Emily was very well-educated for a woman of her time and studied at Georgetown Visitation Academy in Washington, DC. After marrying Washington Roebling, the two spent their honeymoon in Europe learning about caissons (how romantic). These structures would play a huge role in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge though so honestly, it was time well spent. Construction of the bridge began in 1869 and was led by John Roebling, but when he died a year in, his son, Washington Roebling, took over. But tragedy soon struck again in 1870 when Washington tried to put out a fire in one of the bridge’s caissons and got a case of The Bends (the sickness, not the Radiohead album). He became bed-ridden and our girl Emily stepped up to see the project through to completion!
Emily passed information from Washington to his assistants and reported on the progress of the bridge. She really put “on the job learning” to the test and developed an extensive knowledge of strength of materials, stress analysis, cable construction, and calculating catenary curves through Washington's teachings. Thankfully, she was pretty involved in the bridge’s construction even before Washington’s accident, so she had a good deal of prior knowledge to draw on anyways. She was essentially the chief engineer of the project for over a decade until it was completed in 1883. Emily was the first person to cross the new bridge and rode triumphantly in a carriage while carrying a rooster, which was a sign of victory. I, for one, think we need to bring back weird ass symbols like this.
After the Brooklyn Bridge was completed, Emily worked to support many women's and humanitarian causes. She wrote an award-winning essay, A Wife's Disabilities, that criticized laws that discriminated against women (of which she had some personal experience). Emily traveled extensively; she met Queen Victoria and she was in St. Petersburg for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. And because Emily was a bad bitch who wasn’t satisfied with just building the largest bridge at the time, she also received a law certificate from New York University.
Unfortunately, the hype around Emily died down shortly after construction on the bridge was completed. When she died in 1903, most newspapers at the time scarcely mentioned her because she technically never held the title of chief engineer - she actually fought for her husband to retain that title. While The Brooklyn Daily Eagle did report on Emily’s death, the reason for her passing was noted as “fatigue — not the stomach cancer that actually killed her.”
“The work done by Mrs. Roebling at this time was far too great for any woman and her health has never been the same since then,” the newspaper reported on March 1, 1903. “Dr. Clark, the family physician, traces the mental and physical exhaustion, which culminated in the recent breakdown from the time when Mrs. Roebling worked on Brooklyn Bridge.”
A few years ago, the New York Times published a series called Overlooked in which they updated their obituaries to give proper credit to those who deserved it. You can read her updated obituary here.
3. What’s Good 😎
Alamo Drafthouse is hosting a Queers and Beers speed dating event on Saturday March 23. Tickets are $10 and they have a few little events planned to help you break the ice with folks!
Women in Coffee Project is hosting a public tasting & local roaster showcase on Sunday March 24. It’s totally free and there will be lots of coffee to sip on.
I’m on the fence with the new Ghostbusters movie that’s coming out (some trailers look good, some look bad) but the NYC Tourism Board seems to be all in. They published this fun Ghostbusters Guide to NYC so that you can see all of the locations that appear in the movies. One thing I do love about the Ghostbuster movies is that they feel like they’re happening in NYC, so they’ve got my respect there.
Do you wanna dabble in some creative work but you don’t know where to start? If you have $180 to burn, you can sign up for Recreate Collective’s 4 week Creative Sampler. You’ll learn to draw! sculpt! paint! and fold! If you break it down, each event is actually a reasonable $45 and you’ll get to see what you like best, so it’s not a bad deal at all. Starts on April 1.
I’ve been loving NYC’s Free Bus Pilot and it looks like it might not only continue, but expand! If the Get Congestion Pricing Right bill is passed, the free bus pilot would be enacted on 15 additional lines, expanding to three in each borough rather than one.
I finally tried Radio bakery when I was in Greenpoint a couple weeks ago and y’all, it was so good. They’re planning to open a second location in Prospect Heights in the fall that just so happens to be next to one of my favorite places for learning: Brooklyn Brainery!
If you want to read something written so beautifully it makes me gag, head over to
. Matt is beginning a series “about fighting nihilism, believing in magic, and making art, told through the work of the acclaimed comics writer Alan Moore” and I simply cannot wait.
4. Noshing 😋
From the person who brought you “A Tale of Two Soups” comes “A Tale of Two Japanese Curries.” The last few Fridays in my life consisted of me fasting all day so that I could get blood taken after work. This obviously resulted in me being hangry AF by Friday night so I needed food immediately after that needle came outta my arm. Thankfully, there’s no shortage of places to grab a quick bite near my doctor’s office in FiDi and I decided to test two Japanese Curry places nearby….for science!
The first curry I tried was Go! Go! Curry on John St. I used to work in FiDi and somehow never tried this place despite it being a literal block from my old office. They actually have a very silly story behind their name: 5 is pronounced “GO” in Japanese and they’re named after former baseball legend, Hideki Matsui’s, jersey number of 55. They offer special dishes called Home Run, Grand Slam and World Champion, to pay tribute to Matsui. They also offer a few different curry options, but I went for the classic pork katsu curry.
I loved that their curry sauce was thicc. I don’t like my curry soupy, I want it to be able to exist as a component all its own on the plate. Speaking of plates, I really liked that everything was served on silver cafeteria style plates; it was a vibe. The pork cutlet was pounded fairly thin and had a super crispy crust. I tend to like a thinner cutlet because I feel like you just get more crunch that way and who doesn’t love a whole lotta cronch? The curry flavor was really savory and tasty and it definitely held its own on my plate. I also love that there was a little cabbage salad on the side to help cut through all of the savoriness. All in all, a very solid showing.
That brings us to stop #2 - Kuu Ramen, which is literally right next to Go Go. Although their name implies that ramen is their specialty, I would say skip it and get the curry (the ramen was very salty and mid tbh). I got their pork katsu curry while Lorenzo tried their beef croquette curry. Kuu’s version was almost the opposite of Go Go’s - the pork cutlet was thick while the curry was a bit thinner. Despite being so thick, the pork cutlet was cooked really well throughout and had a very nice crispy breading. The curry was an excellent savory flavor and actually had little meat bits floating in it that were fun surprises to uncover. This curry didn’t come with cabbage, but had some pickled veggies on top. Lorenzo really liked the beef croquette, but I felt like it was a bit too savory to go along with the already meaty curry.
So, in this battle of curry vs curry, who was the winner? It depends on who you ask. Lorenzo preferred Kuu’s curry and I preferred Go Go’s curry. Honestly, both are very good and I would be happy to eat either one again (in fact, I’ve gone back to both after getting additional bloodwork done). I think it really comes down to 1) how think you like your cutlet and 2) how thick you like your curry.
5. Watching🍿
Is Madame Web the worst thing to happen to Pepsi since Kendall Jenner extended a can of the beverage towards world peace? It’s honestly pretty close. I don’t know if I have any more bad jokes to add to the discourse so I’ll just word vomit some of my thoughts, which will probably end up being more well written than the script for Madame Web was anyways.
This movie had actors in it. Like, the people in this movie have acted in other things before so I know they know how to. But for some reason every single actor in this movie performed like they were reading their lines for the first time. It almost felt like they just filmed the rehearsals and were like “good enough, we’ll fix it in post,” but then they didn’t even fix it in post.
And speaking of fixing things in post, this movie had the absolute weirdest editing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve watched almost all of David Lynch’s filmography. First, my man Ezekiel Sims’ (Tahar Rahim) dialogue almost never matched with his mouth movements. I don’t know who did the ADR on this movie, or why every single one of Rahim’s lines needed to be dubbed anyways, but I think a TikToker could have done a better job.
On top of the absolute garbage ADR, the way some scenes were cut was just so bizarre. There’s this thing called the 180 degree rule in filmmaking. It’s easier to see than to explain so give this short video a watch if you’re curious. But suffice to say, I don’t think the Madame Web editors knew about this rule despite it being one of the first things I learned in film school. This is one of those editing techniques that can either make a film flow and you notice absolutely nothing, or it can make the images you’re seeing on the screen feel weird and off in a way that you can’t quite explain. In Madame Web, we got the latter. The camera jumps around in ways that don’t make sense and just make the movie look amateurish.
On top of all of the technical weirdness going on, the story was straight trash. The script danced around any mentions of actual Spider-Man stuff. They tried to “wittily” rewrite the classic line and changed it to "When You Take On The Responsibility, Great Power Will Come" which makes no sense. They tried to be Christopher Nolan and create complicated timey wimey stuff, but it also made no sense. And absolutely no characterization occurred for the three girls who are supposed to be future spider-people (but are actually from different universes so why are they all together in this one?). I also witnessed the worst CPR I’ve ever seen in my life, and the people on the screen were supposed to be trained paramedics.
The last line of the movie was “the best thing about the future is it hasn’t happened yet” and I wrote this down because not only is it so fucking dumb, but it also makes no goddam sense. I want to go back in time before I ever heard this line and before Madame Web actually happened and was just a vague fart of an idea rather than an actual steaming pile of shit that I stared at for two hours.
More cultural critiques, please and thank you! The Madame Web review was a joy to read!
You will be someone who karaokes and I will be someone who duets with you! I was going to ask, "So who do you want to be: Lizzie McGuire or Isabella?" which brought me to HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHY WASN'T THAT OUR COSTUME FOR FAMOUS COUPLES FIFTEEN YEARS AGO?! What a missed opportunity!!!!
Also, as another woman who operates in this toilet of a world, I don't feel like Emily Roebling's reported cause of death was WRONG? We are all tired. The rent (for living as a woman in American society) is too damn high.