The Notorious EJG
Black History Month, Lunar New Year, and Valentine's Day, oh my 🙀
Abigail of is a proponent of Gentle January, aimed to help ease folks into the new year by focusing on little bits of joy instead of ambitious new year goals (though both can exist if you want them to!). However, a couple weeks ago the WeWork space I work in told me that I had 2 weeks to get out and find a new office, so my January has not been the gentle hobby-filled romp I’d hoped it would be 🫠 My therapist says I’m taking everything in stride, though she wants to unpack exactly what I mean when I say “everything is fine.”
Thankfully the movers just finished packing everything and when I say everything I mean everything: they accidentally packed the Daily Provisions cruller I had on a table for a little post-move treat. So that’ll be fun to unpack in 3 weeks…
Anyways, part of my job is planning experiences and learning opportunities for my employees and since Feb is Black History Month and has Lunar New Year, I’m planning to highlight lots of relevant information and activities in my work Slack and hopefully some of that will transfer over here, too. I think sometimes folks miss the point of National XXX Months; it’s not that we only care about these things for this month, it’s simply a month-long reminder to set time aside to learn about whatever it is we’re celebrating. Life is busy and we tend to nestle ourselves in whatever nook is most comfortable or familiar and this month is an opportunity to expand our horizons and learn about Black History. I’m obviously not going to be the target audience for a lot of these things, but I’m gonna try nonetheless! I’ll also try to highlight a bunch of Lunar New Year activities that are great if you celebrate and equally great if you just want to be a spectator. I love the lion dances and my favorite part is when they eat the cabbages.
That said, if anyone has suggestions on where I should go, what I should watch, etc I’m all ears! I would absolutely love to be educated, so please don’t be shy about pointing me in some sort of direction. Otherwise, I’ll just be out here doing my best!
1. Noshing 😋
Lorenzo and I had lunch at Singapura, a Southeast Asian restaurant by the same folks behind Laut (which I also love). One of my old jobs was right by Laut and we ordered from there often, so I was excited to finally try the food at Singapura. The menu features a really interesting overlap of different Asian dishes and some have a bit of European influence.
We started with a Milo Dinosaur and Roti Prata. Lorenzo grew up drinking Milo and it’s sort of similar to Ovaltine (fake chocolate flavor and lies about nutrients). He had never heard of a Milo Dinosaur before and apparently it’s just an iced Milo with more Milo powder sprinkled on the top. I don’t know what the extra sprinkling of Milo powder really does for the drink but it’s got a fun name so we said fuck it and ordered it. I am a person who always needs some form of bread (I live in fear of developing a gluten allergy) so the roti was a must for me. It was served piping hot with a tasty nutty curry dipping sauce. We were both starving and immediately began ripping and dipping the roti despite burning the fuck out of our fingers.
Lorenzo is a fried rice boi so he got the Hainanese chicken fried rice. He usually hates Hainanese chicken because it looks pale from being boiled, but in this case the chicken gets an extra bit of browning from the frying so he actually really loved it. The rice was super flavorful and had some nice crispy bits. He’s a big critic when it comes to fried rice but this one got his seal of approval. It came with some curly veggies on top and a miso soup on the side, which did not get Lorenzo’s seal of approval (too healthy?) so I enjoyed those bits.
I wasn’t feeling great this day, so I was all about the tamarind claypot curry with veggies. One of my favorite FIlipino dishes is sinigang, which is a sour tamarind based soup. If you’ve had hot and sour soup from your local Chinese takeout place, that’s kind of the flavor I’m talking about. Singapura’s curry was slightly spicy, but the tamarind added such a brightness that it truly brought me back to life. The curry contained puffy bits of tofu and eggplant which were perfect for soaking up the broth. There were also little tomatoes and peppers which added a nice sweetness and crunch in between soupy slurps.
I would love to go back and try the rendang beef, goat curry, and nasi lemak; these are usually my go-to SE Asian dishes when I’m not in soup mode. They also have a really fun looking cocktail menu if that’s your thing, but this little friend has a sensitive tummy so it’ll be Milo Dinosaurs for me all the way 🦖
2. Exploring 🛼
Over the weekend I attended a Wowza Hangout that took me to the MOMA to see the Picasso in Fontainebleau exhibit. I’m not a huge fan of Picasso’s work (or even of modern art, generally) but I’m always trying to challenge myself and see if my tastes have changed so I figured why not? I met my Wowza group at the nearby Devocion and then we walked over to the MOMA to see some art!
Apparently Picasso was an incredibly prolific artist - at his death there were more than 45,000 unsold works in his estate and the only artist who created more work was Bob Ross (and his pieces were specifically made to be easily mass produced). And one summer he decided to rent a villa at Fontainebleau (a small place outside of Paris) and absolutely go to town painting something like 80+ pieces. A lot of the works were smaller or simple sketches, but the pieces that this exhibit is built around are huge canvases over 7ft tall - Three Women at the Spring and Three Musicians.
I was somewhat familiar with The Three Musicians already since it’s in that classic Picasso Cubist style. I love that this exhibit provided extra details and context for this piece though! It was filled with a bunch of smaller paintings that were basically Picasso jamming on an idea before he committed to painting the big 7 footer. You can see his Jester character made an appearance as one of the musicians. And elsewhere in the exhibit there was a sketch on display of a monk that a friend of his sent him which clearly inspired the monk character on the right. I truly can’t enjoy art unless I know the context around it, so I enjoyed that I could really track Picasso’s thought process that led him to the final work.
I was surprised to see work by Picasso that looked so…normal. I wasn’t familiar with any of his non-cubist work, but he apparently has a large body of work inspired by Neoclassicism. This image of a single woman would eventually become three women gathered around a stream. And again, you could see all of Picasso’s sketches and musings of the figures before he combined them onto the larger canvas. My boy absolutely had a vision though because in just about every sketch there was a titty loose, it was simply non-negotiable.
My group wandered through some of the other MOMA exhibits afterwards, though none really stood out to me. I’m just not a modern art girlie - I love old shit! We did happen upon one exhibit that’s been at MOMA for a while though - Dial-a-Poem. In 1968, John Giorno began delivering instant poetry through Dial-A-Poem, a free telephone hotline in New York City. He believed that “poetry is intended to be heard, not merely read,” so he invited a bunch of poets to recite their works, which he recorded and played back using big ass answering machines. It’s very much in the vein of the college students who sit in Washington Square Park and offer to write a poem for you on the spot.
3. What’s Good 😎
There are a ton of events going on for Lunar New Year: 🐲🧧🎊
Kitsby is hosting a LNY Night Market on Feb 2. $12 tickets are still available at the door and you’ll have access to a ton of food and art vendors, as well as performances and giveaways.
Welcome to Chinatown x Gaysian Tile Party are hosting a late night Mahjong, Market, and Mingle event on Feb 9. This one is happening a bit past my bedtime, but I’ve really wanted to learn how to play mahjong! Welcome to Chinatown also posted a great resource to help you find all of your LNY goodies.
Mala Project is having a LNY party at their Greenpoint location with an all night buffet!!! I’m eating a delicious mala dry pot from Mala Project as I type this (through spicy tears).
I still haven’t made my way over to Red Pavilion and their LNY programming looks very cool. There will be jazz! There will be pole dancing!
Valentine’s Day is also coming up and if you’re terrible at planning things, let me help you out with a few quick options:
Grab a lil bouquet of flowers this Sat/Sun at this flower popup in McCarren Park.
Feb 14 is a nightmare for reservations, so celebrate a little early with this adorable dinner at Farm to Table on Feb 7; it’s Retro Winter themed!
Lady Moo Moo came out of hibernation to make a special batch of white chocolate moocadamia ice cream that you can pick up for your sweetie. They’ll have other flavors too, so slide into their DMs!
My ceramics teacher is an absolute gem and she’s selling some of her work at Brooklyn Museum this weekend! Grab some his and hers (or hers and hers/his and his/whatever) cereal bowls or teacups and support a wonderful Black artist!
Give your boo the gift of Big City, Little Friend! It’s the best kind of gift because they’ll get a new version every week and they’ll recognize that you have exquisite taste 🧐
4. Watching🍿
I recently rewatched the first 3 Pirates of the Caribbean movies (I needed a couch rot day and did you know the third one is 3 hours long??) and honestly, they mostly hold up. They do get progressively worse though and by the time I was done with the third one I did not have the will to continue, but I would say that ultimately it was 8 hours well spent.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (Pirates 1) came out in 2003 and I believe this movie had a huge effect on the types of movies that are getting made today. It was one of the first movies to be made that was based on a ride at Disneyland and is probably the best. It created the whole Pirates universe that I think really showed studios that something like the MCU could exist (the first 3 movies were out before Iron Man was released in 2008). But ultimately, it was just a good ass adventure movie.
The story wasn’t overly complicated and every time Capt Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) shrugged and said “🤷 pirate” it really was all the explanation we needed. The first movie had an acceptable amount of pirate-y double crossing and it added a fun supernatural twist to the “find the treasure” trope. One of the movie’s strengths was that it didn’t rely so heavily on CGI - the pirate zombie scenes were generally brief and there was enough going on that we didn’t have time to dwell and ooh and ahh at what was on the screen. Even though the graphics are still pretty good, the movie is first and foremost story driven. Alternatively, a lot of today’s movies have extended scenes with zero dialogue and just CGI explosion after explosion that does nothing to move the story forward and is simply there for us to ogle at.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Pirates 1 actually has a really great story full of interesting characters and it is a very enjoyable movie. Johnny Depp absolutely kills it as Jack Sparrow. Like he became Jack Sparrow in the same way that Daniel Day Lewis became Abraham Lincoln. Geoffrey Rush also looks like he had a blast playing Barbossa and I’m so glad that he returned for all of the sequels. Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Swann was generally an interesting character, though I guess you’d sort of describe her as a weeb but for pirates. Her character gets fucking dark as the series goes on though, which feels a bit unexpected. Orlando Bloom’s Will was always a bit dull to me, but he had that fancy little mustache which for some reason always blinded me. Goddammit fancy little mustache!
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Pirates 2) is also a mostly enjoyable movie, though I do think it’s the beginning of the end for the series. While Pirates 1 had a fairly straightforward story, Pirates 2 explicitly takes that story and makes it more complicated. Suddenly everyone is looking for the chest containing Davey Jones’ heart so they can control his zombie pirate crew, including like a very normal British Lord. How does he know about this supernatural pirate stuff? Feels like Davey Jones should have kept his one weakness more of a secret? This movie also introduces the love triangle between Jack, Will, and Elizabeth and it feels very weird and forced just so it can set up the cliffhanger ending of this movie; I saw that twist coming from 10 nautical miles away. The only good thing to come out of this movie was that at the last second we get Barbossa back, which also essentially sets up the rule that anyone can die and come back at any time (pre-MCU anyone?)
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Pirates 3) is where it all falls apart. The Voodoo Girl from Pirates 2 is a big problem for me because she helps the crew find Jack for the whole movie and then suddenly turns into a giant and wants to kill everyone? I get it, she’s a scorned lover, yadda yadda yadda, but it just didn’t make sense. This movie also contained an entirely too long scene of Jack in limbo/Davey Jones Locker, there were many crabs involved? I feel like this scene alone added 20 minutes to the run time.
Throughout the series I feel like Depp just kept putting on more and more scarves to embody the Jack Sparrow character and the third Pirates film is where we really begin to see him weighed down with all of that excess fabric. He has gone too far to the other side and I don’t think he ever came back.
The moral of this story is to watch the first Pirates movie and simply be satisfied. You could have more, but you really don’t need it. There can be too much of a good thing and that is why we have Sauvage.
5. Learning 🧠
I learned about someone very cool via the Museum of NY’s instagram - Elizabeth Jennings Graham. She’s known as the “Nineteenth-Century Rosa Parks” for taking legal action against the Third Avenue Railroad Company for racial discrimination. I learned about Rosa Parks in school and her refusal to give up her seat on a bus in Alabama, but I’d never heard of Graham before.
EJG was born in 1827 in New York City. Her mother was a writer and founding member of the Ladies Literary Society of New York and her father was a successful dry cleaner who owned a freakin patent, so my girl was born into a family who was already making moves. EJG became a schoolteacher (respect) and on July 16, 1854, she boarded a segregated streetcar that did not accept African Americans as passengers (boo). The conductor asked her to leave but EJG said “fuck no, you’ll have to drag me off this bus” (my words, not hers) and was in fact dragged off the bus by the police.
She wrote about this experience and shared it with the members of her church. It was later published in multiple newspapers which garnered her more widespread attention and support. Because EJG was a fairly well off middle class citizen (all things considered, she was still Black so she wasn’t that well off) she was able to fucking sue the Third Avenue Railroad Company, the conductor, and the driver. And get this - Chester mothefuckin A. Arthur, the future 21st President of the United States, was her lawyer. Despite having the corny ass name Chester, my man won the case for EJG; she was awarded approximately $250 in damages and the Third Avenue Railroad Company was ordered to desegregate its streetcars.
If her life was an uplifting movie, this is where the credits would roll and we’d all be like “fuck yeah, screw the Third Ave Railroad Co!” But it was 1854 and the US was still racist AF. This case didn’t desegregate all streetcars since they were all independently owned. So every other company could continue being racist fucks. EJG also had to flee NYC after the 1863 New York City Draft Riots caused an increase in racially charged violence towards the city’s Black community.
But small victories are still victories and EJG’s chutzpah did have some positive lingering effects. Her case led to the founding of the Legal Rights Association in 1855, one of the first African American civil rights organization in New York that fought against racial segregation in New York City public transit. She was also able to move back to NYC eventually and founded the first kindergarten in the city for Black children out of her home on West 41st Street. EJG was an absolute boss through and through 👏
Listen, I enjoy your reviews of new movies, but it's the old movie reviews that really get me. I guffawed at the Sparrow/Lincoln comparison.