The Oncoming Hope

In a space that now houses Gran Electrica, Dumbo's foray into fine Mexican food, there once lived a haberdashery with a rather bizarre marketing strategy. While we can all thank Lewis Carroll for introducing us to the effects of mercury on lonely haberdashers (twinkle...twinkle...little...bat...), the reality of this particular mad hatter seems a trifle darker.

Can you explain how 2 chickens fighting over a frog could possibly convince the New York public to purchase new hats? (please invent your own captions in the comments)

And to think that you'd receive a free copy of this non sequitur just for gracing Turnbull's house of mercury poisoning? Keep on, dear reader, for the chicken-fight may be the most sensical of Mr. Turnbull's ads.

"Turnbull's hats turn dentists into vigilantes!"

"Turnbull's hats make cartoonish minstrels into cartoonish minstrels."

"Turnbull's hats give errant cats psychic control over the universe!"

You may enjoy many more ridiculous (and also beautiful) ads in the Brooklyn Public Library's digitized archive.

Reader, think back to one gloriously gruesome incident in S3 of Mad Men, when a rapacious Brit was sent crying (screaming) back to Blighty, feet in hand. Well, many of the tent-pole events in Mad Men are inspired by real life incidents, and I wondered, when in real life did a young man find himself so memorably dismembered in a New York office building? To the interwebs, I say!

Once more, with feeling: "Lost life by stab in falling on ink eraser, evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in office Metropolitan Life Building." Poor George S. Millet lost his life in a manner most embarrassing.

Serendipity works in wonderful ways. Thank a filmmaker named Pes for discovering this tombstone in the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In his post on Cartoon Brew, he linked a New York Times story that gets to the heart of this mysterious indoor impalement. I recommend reading the entire article (the greatest tragedies are marked with the greatest silliness), but here's the pertinent bit:

Yesterday he came down and remarked that it was the anniversary of the wreck of the Maine. He explained that he knew it because the ship had been blown up on his birthday and that he was 15 yesterday.

At once the girls began to tease him. They told him that on such an occasion he deserved a kiss, and every one of them vowed that as soon as office hours were over she would kiss him once for every year that he had lived. He laughingly declared that not a girl should get near him, and was teased about it all day.

As 4:30 o'clock came, and the boy's work was over, the girls made a rush for him. They tried to hem him in, and he tried to break their line. Suddenly he reeled and fell, crying as he did so.

"I'm stabbed!"

One might say that poor George S. Millet met the real Kiss of Death.

While I cannot be certain that this inspired the great lawnmower incident, it perfectly matches the double bill of hilarity and gore.

A couple days ago, the Village Voice published a tale of the "crater-faced old woman," known to you and me as ma po tofu. Well, contrary to what your local greasy Chinese takeaway may offer, real ma po tofu isn't actually an oily mess, but actually a delicate dish that uses sichuan peppercorns to maximum effect.

These little bombshells keep popping up in reviews of New York Chinese food, which is experiencing a little bit of a revolution, as Szechuan cuisine is becoming more readily available. So I made it my Sunday mission to find an authentic Szechuan restaurant as I wandered through Midtown, and at last stumbled upon a place aptly named Mapo Tofu.

Sichuan peppercorns were banned by the FDA until 2005, so don't be surprised if it hasn't shown up in a cuisine near you yet. But try it if you can. It's unlike anything I've ever tasted - neither spicy nor hot, the flavor's more herbal than anything else.

But the flavor's not the point - it's all about the effect. It not only numbs the mouth, it makes everything you eat taste different, more flavorful, more balanced. As food scientist Harold Mcgee wrote in his book "On Food and Cooking", it's like putting a nine-volt battery to the tongue and will "induce sensitivity to touch and cold in nerves that are ordinarily nonsensitive, and so perhaps cause a kind of general neurological confusion."

The classic example is water. If you drink a glass of warm water after eating a peppercorn, your mouth will feel freezing cold, and the water will taste metallic, like drinking a cloud of acid rain. I'm not going to pretend it was a pleasant sensation, but it's definitely one of a kind.

The main dish, on the other hand? Tasted absolutely amazing. And since Mapo Tofu served monstrous-sized portions, I'll be digging in again in just a few minutes :).

This post was intended to resurrect my long dormant Filling the Gaps series, but as sometimes (often) happens, a film moves me to consider more than its parts, or even the sum of its parts.

In She's Gotta Have It, Spike Lee provides us with a time capsule of a time when independent African-American film burst into the mainstream, providing hope for a whole new type of cinematic experience, only to surrender to racial stereotyping, insidious in the works of Tyler Perry, and backward in the case of The Help.

Spike Lee cannot have predicted the consequences of this film. In creating an almost Woody Allen-esque psychological portrait or urbane, educated, professional African-Americans in Brooklyn, he exposed Brooklyn to the masses. Now guess who can't afford to live in Brooklyn Heights anymore? Middle-class African-Americans. He set out to show America that there's a place in where blacks aren't gangbangers or drug dealers, but poets, artists, dancers and philosophers. It worked.

For someone who's living smack in the middle of the one-mile radius in which Lee filmed, his loving panoramas of Fort Greene, the Brooklyn Bridge and Jay Street provide a view into what now seems like a parallel universe. There are no white people on the streets of She's Gotta Have It. There are few black people in DUMBO today.

So in between all the grand moments of "hey, that's my street!" and "hey, that's my office!", and "hey, the waterfront doesn't have boats anymore!", watching this film also created a pyschological unease. That was 1986. This is 2012. In just over 25 years, Brooklyn has seen one of the most dramatic demographic shifts of anywhere in the country.

But since Lee could never have known what would follow, it leaves us to look at the movie itself, which is as brilliant, moving, and as ahead of its time as so many have stated. He claims he didn't set out to create a feminist film, and yet that's what we're left with. Nola and her many lovers, never disguising her lifestyle to any of them, unwilling to apologize for taking pleasure in her sexuality.

Each lover approaches Nola's lifestyle as a "disease," a mental ailment that she needs to cured of, for a woman that doesn't want to settle down must surely be unnatural. Of course, this is a comedy, so each man's approach to curing her is markedly different. The one who seems most sympathetic throughout the movie does punish her most brutally in the film, in a manner that I'm not convinced fits into the movie.

If you haven't seen She's Gotta Have It, make sure you do. It's a wonderful film for many reasons, not least it's gender and racial politics. It's also incredibly funny.

After a number of years spent breathing British air, drinking British drinks and expounding upon British slang, I've made the Atlantic crossing.

I'm currently housed on the Brooklyn promenade, where the sky takes on many strange colors each day, and always provides this view of Manhattan:

I've been around town, met i lot of people, and no matter how different their lifestyles, they all share one pastime: making fun of Williamsburg. I look forward to experiencing it myself (for anthropological reasons, of course).

But why trek to Williamsburg when I can make this crossing, again and again:

The Brooklyn Bridge, a childhood obsession, proves even more magical in real life than in my imagination. That bridge plays witness to the greatest transformations in NYC, from white flight to 9/11, from gentrification to the downfall of Wall Street. Wealth isn't created or destroyed on either side of the Brooklyn Bridge, it just moves from one side to the other, a finely engineered see-saw. There's no greater feeling than standing on a place that vibrates with history (unlike the Manhattan Bridge, which literally vibrates like an earthquake).

Anyway, with all this beauty and excitement there's a rub (aye, there's always a rub). While my temporary housing is well-located, it ain't well-appointed. I find myself lacking a desk, a couch, or even a table upon which to write. As I lie uncomfortably on the bed, beckoning carpal tunnel with my 45 degree angle, it sorrows me to report that blogging is very difficult. So while I still hope to write at least 3 times a week, I can't maintain my daily posts until I move to a more permanent home at the end of the month.

I welcome any guest writers in the meantime. I hope I can find the balance sooner, rather than later, but I thought it best to be upfront.

As a conversationally challenged barkeep slams a pair of mini-steins on the table, you may wonder exactly what sort of establishment you've stepped into. "Dark or light," he snaps when you're lucky enough to interrupt his purposeful strides across the floor.

I suppose you can sacrifice certain charms when your family bar once played host to Honest Abe (by no means the only president to frequent the place), Boss Tweed and and numerous men both famous and infamous.

The walls are covered in ephemera, from Civil-war era flags to newspaper articles. The Rat Pack loved the place, as did Elvis.

e.e cummings, moved to rhapsodize, wrote here in a poem that begins "i was sitting in mcsorley's":

"and I was sitting in the din thinking drinking the ale, which never lets you grow old blinking at the low ceiling my being pleasantly was punctuated by the always retchings of a worthless lamp.

...

Inside snugandevil. i was sitting in mcsorley’s It,did not answer.
outside.(it was New York and beautifully, snowing. . . ."

John Sloan, one of the more famous NY painters, crafted that lovely image that sits atop of this post, featuring the second manager of the bar, Bill McSorley, Jr.

"Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies"

McSorley's, despite playing host to a coterie of painters, writers, poets and politicians since 1861, may be more famous today for keeping out the fairer sex in until 1970.

Only one woman made it in before then, a Vaudevillean named Maggie Klein. What made her so special? Oh yeah, she dressed up as a man and snuck in.

Even Wonder Woman was denied service in 1941 (clearly H.G. Peter was a man ahead of his time):

Some things haven't changed. The floors and seats are covered in sawdust, sawdust with insect-like abilities to crawl up and down your jackets and into your boots. The legendary wishbones still linger over the bar, tormenting us all with memories of so many wars past (read more about that here).

But I am glad to have seen this place, a strange little place that holds its own against the ravages of time.