Pizza, Between Two Rivers, Sex Scenes
Kernels: Dec 19, 2023 - Jan 8, 2024
Hey friends, I hope that your year has gotten off to a decent start! It’s been nearly three weeks since I last sent out a post, which is a bit longer than I would have liked. I’ve been slowly working on some year-end lists and capsule essays to cover 2023 in film, food, music, and theater. Mid-December is when people usually publish their end of year recaps. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like to reflect on my year until it is actually over! My writeups will be coming out sporadically over the course of this month, mixed in with posts about what’s new and next… a little strange, but it’s not like I have to follow any rules.
When I started this newsletter six weeks ago, I honestly wasn’t sure if anyone would care to read me try to find my writing voice. But the messages I’ve gotten have meant a lot. Thank you for words of support and typo corrections! One of my good friends told me that he tried to find something cringe-inducing throughout these posts and couldn’t find anything, which is the best compliment I’ve gotten. David, I’m sorry that I will disappoint you at some point this year.
In this edition: fusion pizza, a terrific photography exhibition at the MoMA, and sex scenes. There’s a couple segments that got pretty long, so I’ll be publishing them as separate posts: an overview of Edward Yang’s films and an in-depth guide to the dinner party I threw for The Holdovers.
Pizza Parties
Two pizza places in Brooklyn with decidedly non-traditional toppings. One’s a sit down restaurant, the other a slice shop. Coincidentally, I didn’t eat anything with tomato sauce at either pizza joint.
Nowon Bushwick
The first time I ate at Nowon was on Super Bowl Sunday in 2020. A couple friends and I, as people who don’t follow the NFL at all, decided to go out on the one night that everyone stays in. The Korean-American gastropub had just opened in the East Village a couple months before, and it was the kind of buzzy new spot that was impossible to get into. But during the Super Bowl, the restaurant was completely empty; the host was streaming the game on his phone. It felt like a private dinner, and the food was terrific. The chopped cheese rice cake remains one of my essential New York restaurant dishes, especially with a side of honey butter tater tots. Since that first visit, I’ve eaten at Nowon at least a couple dozen times. It’s the type of restaurant that you could go to with pretty much anyone who eats meat. The menu is an inspired combination of pub grub and Korean staples, the prices that are fairly easy on the budget, and the raucous vibe is the perfect way to start a night out. (Plus, their spacious outdoor booths were a lifesaver during the pandemic era.)
The restaurant’s head chef, Jae Lee, has made it known that he wants to “build a Korean American restaurant-bar empire, throughout the nation.” He’s taken his first step by opening a second restaurant across the East River. The Bushwick version of Nowon is larger and quieter than the tiny, frenetic East Village space. (There, I prefer to sit in the outdoor booths because inside, it’s hard to hear your dining companions talk.) It’s well positioned to be a pre or post-show destination. House of Yes, Elsewhere, The Sultan Room, Moonrise, Avant Gardner, Honey’s, Red Pavilion — all of them are within blocks of Nowon Bushwick. Two new concert halls are popping up around the corner, one of them from the remains from formerly beloved bar The Rookery.
As for the food, most of the menu here is identical to the original restaurant. The charred broccolini, the cheeseburger (which I don’t get the hype for), the chopped cheese rice cakes; they’ve all been transplanted to Brooklyn with little fuss. But there’s one major addition at this new location: a pizza menu. A wood-fired pizza oven was left behind by the prior tenant, which couldn’t go to waste. The five pies currently on offer fit right in with the pocha-gastropub fusion of Nowon’s menu. There’s a margherita pizza with a tomato sauce infused with gochujang, a burrata pie that’s gussied up with kimchi. I had the “Smokeshow”: a white pie with smoked mozzarella and roasted mushrooms. The smokiness is subtle, leaning more towards pulled pork than Laphroaig.
I’m not sure why I expected this second location to feature a different concept than the East Village original. Perhaps it’s because the usual playbook for a successful chef is to try something different. But the point of opening a new Nowon wasn’t to make a new restaurant, it was to test the viability of opening up more and more Nowons. Chef Lee is well positioned to capitalize on the explosive popularity of Korean culture in America, especially with pizza, a reliable way to combine American food with another cuisine. I can see successful Nowon franchises in Boston, San Francisco, DC…. And, if Chef wants to eventually go the route of Momofuku’s David Chang and pivot from F&B to CPG1, the frozen pizza market is valued at $6.6 billion. Now that’s a pie worth taking a slice of.
Cuts & Slices
A very long walk away from the nightlife epicenter of Bushwick is Cuts & Slices, a pizza shop that melds together Italian and Caribbean cuisines. It’s a mashup of two cultures essential to New York, and the offerings are immediately appealing. Chopped cheese, lasagna, chicken and waffle, shrimp and truffle, oxtail: who wouldn’t want to try one of those? My cousin Eric and I popped in one cold night. It was pretty quiet, but I could see this place being a pretty fun time on a summer afternoon, with people hanging out outside the shop with skateboards to match the ones displayed on the wall while hip-hop blares over the speakers.
We shared four different slices. The chopped cheese didn’t quite hit the mark; the sauces were great, but the whole thing needed to feel cheesier. And honestly, I missed the shitty lettuce and tomato typical of the bodega sandwich. Much better was the jerk chicken, which was pleasantly spicy. The now-closed ZuriLee had an inspired idea to add corn kernels to their own jerk chicken pizza, which would have been a good addition at Cuts & Slices. Then there was the brown oxtail, which was great, and made the curry oxtail a bit disappointing in comparison. The spices were neutered a bit in that slice, and weirdly, it was drier than the brown oxtail. With the savory meats and lack of red sauce, these were more like flatbread than pizza. Slices cost more than the average shop, with most ranging between $7-11, but they’re quite hefty and dense. While Cuts & Slices didn’t change my life, I’m looking forward to coming back to try more of their unique offerings.
Far From Vietnam
Between Two Rivers, an exhibition of An-My Lê’s work currently showing at the MoMA, is one of the best museum shows I’ve seen in recent memory. Encountering her work for the first time stopped me in my tracks. Lê, who primarily works in photography but has made excursions into other disciplines, explores the global reach of American imperialism, then and now. It’s a different kind of war photography, one that humanizes its subjects without valorizing them.
Some series that I thought were particularly brilliant: “Small Wars,” an eerie transposition of Vietnam War scenes to the American South that was staged in collaboration with Civil War reenactors, and “Events Ashore,” which captures the far-flung places where you’ll encounter the U.S. Navy. A fun sculpture installation, “đô-mi-nô,” features jumbo-sized recreations of lighters that American soldiers had taken to and from Vietnam, many engraved with various phrases and etchings. My favorite: “Let me win your heart and mind or I’ll burn your god damn hut down.”
But the images I responded to the most were her earlier photographs, which directly addressed her relationship to Vietnam, the country she left as a refugee after the fall of Saigon. The first series in this exhibition, “Viêt Nam,” captures a complicated homecoming. Many of the photos were taken in 1994, the same year that the U.S. government’s trade embargo on the communist country. You can feel the ambivalence behind the lens: this was home; this is no longer home. Studying one image of a school courtyard, where some boys played soccer and others watched from above, I tried to recognize myself in their faces. None of them looked like me.
Cinema Erotica
Last weekend, I went to one of the most unique musical performances I’ll probably experience this year: Cinema Smootaphilia: Hot Scenes From The 60s 70s & 80s, at Film Noir Cinema in Greenpoint. Musician Dave Smoota Smith led a foursome (vocals, bass, guitar, Casio keyboard) that soundtracked a compilation of erotic scenes from movies that came from Hollywood, Europe, and Japan. The original score, a cross between exaggerated porno tunes and psychedelic funk, dispelled any potential discomfort of getting in a dark room full of strangers to watch (mostly) simulated sex. Particularly inspired was the vocalizations, by Ann Courtney, that faded moans of pleasure into a soothing soundbed.
One topic of “film discourse” that I hope we leave behind is the necessity of the sex scene. Puritans say that on-screen intercourse is uncomfortable and does nothing to drive the plot forward. Defenders say that sex scenes are necessary to tell a story. But the premise of the debate lays bare the misguided notion that cinema is simply a storytelling vehicle. This parade of sex scenes, stripped of their context, undeniably had artistic merit. From an aesthetic and cinematic standpoint, it was pleasurable viewing.
I messaged Smoota Smith for a list of the movies he put together for this show, which I’m passing on to you if, for your next movie night, you’re looking for any… inspiration.
Don’t Look Now
Ganja & Hess
Personal Best
Wicked City
Persona
Women in Love
The Other Side of the Wind
Emmanuelle
Belladonna of Sadness
Stranger at the Lake
The Groove Tube
Body Heat
Henry & June
In The Realm of The Senses
A Thousand and One Nights
Wet January
For the record, I am in full support of anyone who practices Dry January, but I’m just not the type to adjust my drinking habits for a short time period. (I’ve cut back on how often I “go out,” but that is less about the health of my liver than it is the health of my bank account.) At a friend’s birthday party on Friday, a couple beers in, I was feeling a little contrarian and decided to do Wet January: I have to have at least one alcoholic drink every day.
Here’s a running list of the first drink I had on each day this month, which will be updated in subsequent columns. Entries in bold are for days where I probably would not have had any alcohol were it not for this little stunt. (Nothing is currently bolded and that is not a typo.)
Leftover white wine at home
German beer at Black Forest
(taking a mulligan on this day; hadn’t decided to do Wet January at this point)
Hard cider at Eric’s
Lagunitas at Plug Uglies
Cocktail at Hide & Seek
Brooklyn Kura Saké (Blue Door) at home
A flight of beer at Sixpoint Brewery
It’s All Coming Back to Me Now
Indiewire critic David Ehrlich makes the best video countdowns of his favorite movies of the year, and his new edition is no exception. His pairings of a movie montage against a pop song used in a different film are at turns cheeky and illuminating, and always inspired. “The Power of Love,” used to devastating effect in All of Us Strangers, plays over footage from Killers of the Flower Moon and The Taste of Things, both of which are love stories that play out very differently from one another. And using Matchback Twenty’s “Push” during Anatomy of a Fall is just [chef’s kiss]. The 2019 video, which put Elisabeth Moss’s cover of “Heaven” over scenes from Portrait of a Lady on Fire made me cry.
food & beverage to consumer packaged goods