What do zoos & Nic Cage have in common?

cages 🥲

Oh hi there, welcome back. I’m truly floored that so many of you found your way to my little Substack. Even my mom found out about this & she gets all of her news from the manager of the Manorville post office so I have no idea how I infiltrated the USPS news system.

If you’re just joining, I’d recommend going back & reading my first post because it’ll give you some helpful context as to why I’m like this. But if you want to experience me without context, have at it!

1. Noshing 😋

Every month my brother, Beef, comes into the city & I surprise him with dinner somewhere excellent. This all started when I invited him to an all you can eat wagyu dinner at Hyun & he asked if there is other amazing food in the city, to which I responded, “hold my beer” 🤌

This month, we went to Da Long Yi Hot Pot in Chinatown. I’ve had hot pot in Chengdu & nothing local has compared, but Da Long Yi is rumored to be very good. It was pretty easy to get a reservation on a Thursday evening & when we had to push it back last minute the staff was super accommodating. When you arrive, you’re given a plastic bag for your belongings, which is very thoughtful because hot pot can be splattery. They have a well-stocked sauce bar to create dips (I made a cooling tahini/sesame oil concoction, Lorenzo made a Hoisin heavy dip). The hot pot broth itself was pretty tasty. The spicy broth was just spicy enough that I was able to enjoy the flavor & my mouth was tingly by the end. We got a split pot with their pork bone broth to have a non-spicy option & it was fine, but the spicy was much better. I loved the seaweed knots & the lamb to dip & the crispy pork belly app was amazing. No one would share the tripe with me (le sigh) so I’ll have to get it next time (tripe fans, hit me up!). We closed out the meal with ice cream from Milk & Cream Cereal Bar, one of our faves.

I should mention that this was our second ice cream of the night because Lorenzo & I pre-gamed for hot pot at Gentile Gelateria on Elizabeth St & it was without a doubt the best gelato I’ve encountered in NY. As soon as we walked in I had a good feeling because I saw a tik tok saying that you know gelato is good when it’s in covered containers vs the big mounds decorated with chunks of stuff. We shared a cup of stracciatella & cioccolato with a tiny cone on top. It was so good we went back the next day for round two.

The hot pot spread & the pre-game gelato

2. Watching 👀

To say I was excited to see Renfield is an understatement. I had done my homework. I had seen every single Nic Cage film that came before. We all went down some sort of rabbit hole during the pandemic & Nic Cage was mine. I watched & tweeted about every movie he was in. I started writing down my thoughts to make sense of what I’d done but stopped midway because was it even possible?

It was not possible - but I’d like to try to revisit it one day

Anyways, Renfield was a delight. Not since Vampire’s Kiss has an actor embodied a vampire so artfully. True fans of the mega actor know that he has a love for German Expressionism & you don’t get more German Expressionist than Nosfer-fuckin-ratu. Cage definitely put his own spin on things (as he always does!), but his performance as Dracula was definitely an homage to the classics. Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield was adorable although I wish we saw more of the good times he & Dracula allegedly had in the past to solidify their relationship. I somehow didn’t know that Jean Ralphio was going to be in this movie & it was the best surprise. He played the yin to Hoult’s yang perfectly (his words). The only weak point for me was Awkwafina’s character - she played a cop whose father was killed & the whole department is on the bad guy’s payroll so they keep covering it up & she just wants justice - ugh. She was funny though & I think her character served pretty well as the audience’s conduit into the story.

The action sequences in this movie were so freakin wonderful & gave Evil Dead/goofy horror vibes. In one fight, Hoult rips a guy’s arms off (this is actually the second time in the movie he does this) & proceeds to use the arms as nunchucks to beat other bad guys with. He eventually uses the arms as spears & impales some other dudes to a wall with them. His fighting was energetic & the camera work was fluid & it was so fun to watch that I found myself wishing he was ripping arms off of people more often.

3. Exploring 🗺️

This is your nudge to get an IDNYC & use it for free stuff. So far I’ve gotten free memberships to The Met, Museum of the City of NY, & most recently the Wildlife Conservation Society which includes access to all NYC zoos & aquariums.

I had a Friday off & dragged Lorenzo to the Bronx Zoo. I hadn’t been there in at least 20 years (👵🏻) & there was something I’d been wanting to see. No one on Instagram guessed correctly & I honestly set you all up for failure because what I wanted to see is so niche & not zoo related at all, though it just happens to reside on the zoo grounds.

Classic zoo attractions - a plaque & a water fountain

I went to the zoo to read a plaque & view a fountain of youth that I read about in Atlas Obscura years ago. The story goes that Bronx resident, Hyman Gould, returned from a trip to Pompeii with a 12in piece of lead pipe (Gould was a plumber, so this was actually the most apropos souvenir for him to choose). Since this was the 1950s & there was no internet, Gould convinced the Bronx Chamber of Commerce & Borough president that they could create an enticing tourist attraction with this pipe. So they made the following claim based on a legend Gould heard while in Italy:

There was a drinking fountain in Pompeii that was fed by the waters of Mt Vesuvius. All who drank from it acquired extraordinary good looks, radiant health, & oodles of money. When Mt Vesuvius erupted on August 24 (my birthday teehee 💁) 79 AD, the fountain went dry & Pompeeians became normal humans again, without regular access to the fountain’s waters.

So with a convincing backstory, they erected a drinking fountain, dedicated this plaque, & stuck both at a very random end of the Bronx Zoo. As far as I can tell, the Zoo already existed when this shenanigan was hatched, so I’m not sure why they chose this location rather than somewhere more publicly accessible (or why the zoo let them?). In any case, they had a fancy ceremony, someone from the Italian Embassy attended, but the scheme never really took off. I can’t imagine why not.

When I asked Lorenzo what he thought of the whole thing he just said “please don’t drink from that water fountain” & I didn’t because I can’t imagine anything worse than living forever.

4. Learning 🧠

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about sports, but I’m going to talk about sports - very tangentially though! I’m talking about The Knicks & I’m only talking about their team name; I literally know nothing else about them except that they used to have Carmelo & Carmelo used to have an unfortunate mustache.

Knicks is short for Knickerbockers & Knickerbockers is long for knickers, so how did we get here? Let’s start at the beginning.

New York was first colonized by the Dutch in 1625 & knickerbockers refers to the old-timey pantaloons they wore. Literally just Google “old timey pantaloons” & you’ll see a melange of frilly cropped pants: the name was shortened to knickers. Since all of these Dutch colonizers were walking around in their fancy pantaloons, people referred to them as Knickerbockers (which would be like referring to dudes in the 90s as JNCOs, but trends are trends).

The term Knickerbocker would eventually become linked to NYC in 1809 after Washington Irving (of future Sleepy Hollow fame) published A Knickerbocker’s History of New York under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker. Through this text, Knickerbocker came to refer to a New Yorker who could trace their ancestry to the original Dutch colonizers.

From then on, Knickerbocker simply became synonymous with New Yorkers. We had Knickerbocker Beer, Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday, Knickerbocker Ave in Bushwick (longest street name in NYC) & even the first organized team in baseball history was named the New York Knickerbockers. Before we had the I ❤️ NY logo, we had Father Knickerbocker, who was literally a creepy old-timey dude wearing knickers & was used as the original Knicks logo.

Father Knick - Basketball with a side of nightmares

So while The Knicks might not be the best basketball team out there, they do have a name linked to NY history & I respect them for that. However, I also respect the Toronto Raptors for naming their team as such just because they really liked the movie Jurassic Park. Canadians are so cute.

5. What’s Good 😎

• Street Vendor Project Scavenger Hunt - SVP is an amazing organization that supports all of the halal, hot dog, momo, & other delicious food carts around NYC. Our street vendors are often immigrants trying to make a living while navigating an incredibly complicated system & this org helps them. For this scavenger hunt, you’re encouraged to form a team to help you complete tasks to earn points. Once your team raises $26 you’ll gain access to their app to start completing tasks!

Since we’re all friends here, I created a team that you’re welcome to join - Big City, Little Friend. We’ll need to raise $26 before we can start competing, so if you don’t want to join the scavenger hunt then a donation is a great way to support the team! I’m going to attend the free Jackson Heights Street Vendor Walking Tour on May 19 if you wanna say hi 👋

• 100 Ways to Send Love to Chinatown - To celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month this May, Send Chinatown Love created the ultimate guide to NYC's Chinatowns! For every activity that you check off, you’ll earn raffle tickets that can be exchanged for prizes.

• Heart of Dinner is another great org supporting NYC Chinatowns. I set up a station in my office for folks to decorate bags & notecards that HoD will use to deliver meals & groceries to elderly residents. The Red Pavilion, a new dim sum/nightclub space in Bushwick, will also be donating 20% of their revenue from their Sunday all you can eat dim sum to Heart of Dinner this month! I’ve been meaning to check this place out & would love to share dim sum with someone there.

• The Writer’s Guild is striking! There are a bunch of things that led to this & @jstoobs broke it down really well on tik tok. The WGA also has a list of picket locations if you want to join & show your support.

  • TL;DR - streaming has changed things a lot, pay scales need to be updated, AI is inching ever closer to becoming Skynet.

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I know, I said I’d publish newsletters every two weeks, but I couldn’t sit on this stuff so you got a second newsletter sooner. Quailman taught me that the rules were made to be broken.