Jon Schubin

Greenpoint Heights’ 50 cent wing special will allow you to take in that afternoon game on Sundays in style. If “style” means “face covered in buffalo sauce.” Photo by Dave Rosado Listen, team. A new NFL season is upon is. The days of relaxing at home, watching baseball and golf, and not suffering from concussions are OVER. It’s time you suit up, get yourselves ready and in some semblance of shape, get the hell out there, and be ready to ruin that summer body you probably didn’t have all over again. Put on your uniforms: loose-fitting, elastic-wasted pants and a jersey that’s one size too big, which you’ll need to hide that new wing and beer gut. You better come hungry. For victory! For glory! For like 10 wings for just under 7 dollars! Once the whistle blows, this shit is getting real. Because it’s time. It’s time to eat your weight in chicken wings… Read More

POW!

Kilo Bravo, North Williamsburg’s newest bar, is right off of Bedford Avenue, a couple of blocks from the new Diesel pop-up. So it wasn’t surprising that I had to fight through a throng of European tourists on the corner to get to the door. What was surprising was to find a place that neither screams gimmicky tourist trap nor cliche Williamsburg. Recycled barn wood, petite Parisian tables, and vintage taps were nowhere to be found at Kilo Bravo.

“It’s really just a neighborhood spot with an American soul and a hint of rock n’ roll,” explained owner Kate Buenaflor, all smiles under her camo hat. She’s certainly not the jaded and distant owner service industry vets might be familiar with, which is surprising because she’s been in the business for a while, as owner of nine-year-old Soft Spot.

“When we did Soft Spot, in the beginning we had a different mind set. Northside is a different place now,” she said. And unlike the Soft Spot, which is a pretty straightforward spot to soak up some two-for-ones with a couple of friends, Kilo Bravo has some really inventive things happening.

Though Kilo certainly has a theme, you wouldn’t know it walking in. There are only hints of Buenflor’s playfulness– subtle details like Janis Joplin peering out from one of the mirrors– until you take a look at the menu, which features 50 cocktails, one for each state. If customers are down for the road-trip challenge, the bartender will give you a loyalty card. For each state cocktail you drink, you get a stamp and once you’ve completed them all, Buenaflor promises the bar will throw you a Welcome Home Party. “You get to drink for free and you pick two drinks off the menu to be the special for that night– maybe you liked them, or maybe you hated them– but you can invite your friends and they can take advantage of the deal,” she explained. “Some of the cocktails are delicious, but some of them are a little intimidating, but that’s kind of the fun of it.”

A few of the Road Trip Cocktails are predictable– the Mint Julep is repping for Kentucky, and the Bronx Cocktail stands in for New York. But others are head-scratchers like the Iowa Sunrise (vodka, rum, lemonade, orange juice, grenadine, topped with Sprite).

Kilo Bravo also has a food menu with two categories of sandwiches (grilled cheese and slow-cooked beef), of which there are several varieties ranging from $7 to $14. Buenaflor said Kilo Bravo will also be offering a $5 happy hour menu which includes the Heartland sandwich (beef, pickled pepper mayo, pickled peppers and Provolone cheese), 24 oz. cans of Budweiser, and even a cocktail, the Manhattan.

The menu is geared toward drawing in people from the surrounding area. “I’m happy to have people come in from out of town, that’s awesome, but it’s really important for me that the neighborhood knows they can come here and feel right at home,” Buenaflor said.

As a resident of Williamsburg for over a decade (she lives just a block away), Buenaflor has seen the neighborhood transform. Some of her favorite bars and restaurants have closed up shop, which was part of the motivation for opening up Kilo Bravo. “Soft Spot is an amazing place, but I realized a few years ago that maybe I wouldn’t get to stay,” she explained. “So it was like, alright– time to look for a new place. And even if I have both [bars] at the same time, that’s amazing, but it did occur to me as I started seeing my favorite places closing, that it might happen to me.”

Despite the changes and resulting challenges for small business owners, Kate is taking it all in stride. “But it’s awesome what’s happening around here, I’m really excited about it. And it just different, you just treat it different.”

Kilo Bravo will have its grand opening on Friday, September 4.

Click on the thumbnails to see the food and (non-Road Trip) drink menu below.

Kilo Bravo, Kilo Bravo, 180 N. 10th Street, bet. Bedford and Driggs Avenues

There was a moment in recent history when Angry Birds, a smartphone game people play on the toilet, was poised to sweep all of pop culture. There would be Angry Bird theme parks, museums, stuffed animals, and tampons. Now, that dream is dead.

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From today’s Charleston (WV) Gazette:

At 173 feet tall, the wooden tribal totem in Alert Bay, British Colombia is demonstrably the tallest tower of its kind in the entire world, but many people have argued that for a number of reasons it is not worthy of the surprisingly contentious title. 

Despite the raw numbers that the Alert Bay totem pole holds the title with, hardcore totem pole enthusiasts have called foul on the carved wood spire due to the fact that it was built in three sections which were then joined together. According to such record pedants, the true heir to the title of world's tallest totem pole is a 140 foot pole located in Kalama, Washington, which is one solid length of wood. However even this pole was not satisfying enough to some people who deem it invalid due to the fact that it was not carved by a Native artisan. Looking further still for any totem pole worthy enough to claim the title through their byzantine set of criteria, there is a 132 foot pole in Kake, Alaska that seem to fit the bill even for purists.

This categorization is so contentious that the world's former tallest totem pole, a 185 foot giant that stood in Victoria British Colombia (and was also built in sections) was actually taken down after a great deal of vocal protest. At the end of the day, the Alert Bay totem pole is in fact the tallest in the world, but in this competition, like in so many things, size doesn't always matter.     

We might swipe right for you, Aracelis Girmay Public transit is full of people trying to force culture on you, what with all the fairly talented street performers and those Metro distributors trying to trick you into reading free newspapers. The MTA will now be joining this bombardment by expanding their Poetry in Motion program to buses, our final culture-free sanctuary, according to the New York Observer. There’s no word on when exactly the poetry will start showing up on buses, but Arts in Transit’s director, Sandra Bloodworth, told the paper that it would be happening “soon.” We like Silverstein and Blake as much as the next guy, but are we ready to have the crass bliss of our bus rides rocked by the MTA Anthology of American Literature? Are we ready to have the poetry of that passenger with really greasy hair hitting on us usurped? Most importantly, can we sacrifice some… Read More

Last night, Beyoncé proved all over again that she, in her husband's words, is the "greatest living entertainer" in the business. At Sunday's VMAs, Bey brought down the house in a 16-minute set that made the other performers look like opening acts. The VMAs more or less became a Beyoncé legacy concert.

It's hard to think of a time when Beyoncé wasn't dominating pop music. But there was indeed a time. In fact, it was 2003, when The New York Times, in a review of Bey's Dangerously in Love and Ashanti's Chapter II, thought Ashanti was the better bet.

Critic Kelefa Sanneh declared that Beyoncé was "no Ashanti." Sanneh was right — Beyoncé was not an Ashanti — but, in hindsight, not in the way he intended. Sanneh really believed in Ashanti.

"Maybe this album is merely a misstep, and maybe Beyoncé has yet to record the brilliant solo album that people expected. Or maybe it's proof that she isn't quite as versatile as she seemed," Sanneh wrote. "Each singer says her new album is a step forward, an evolution, a triumph — that's what singers always say. But only one of them is right," Sanneh added.

Sanneh, who now writes for The New Yorker, is a smart and astute writer. And all critics are put in a position where they have to ultimately share their personal opinions. Sometimes, as in Bey's case, history proves them wrong.

And perhaps Sanneh pushed Beyoncé to greatness and a mission to obliterate Ashanti. It's worth noting, that on the same day Beyoncé crushed the competition on one of music's biggest stages, Ashanti was 35 minutes late for her afternoon performance at the New York State Fair in Syracuse.

The growth of bike share programs is gaining momentum in the US.

But this growth is absolutely dwarfed by the explosion of bike share programs in China over the last couple of years.

The country now has more than 400,000 bike share bikes in operation across dozens of cities with programs, with the vast majority installed since 2012. To put this in perspective, there are an estimated 822,00 bikes in operation around the world — so China has more bikes than all other countries combined. The individual country with the next-highest number of bikes, France, has just 45,000.

Here are the 15 countries with more than 3,000 bikes in operation, with data coming from the Bike-sharing World Map, a database maintained by Russell Meddin and Paul DeMaio.

Early on, most bike share programs were in Europe. The French town of Rennes pioneered the first computerized system in 1998, and as late as 2008, only a single system existed outside of Europe (Washington DC's). For years, Paris had the largest system.

But over the last couple of years, China has lapped the field several times over. As its private bicycle fleet has declined — largely because more and more people can afford cars — officials have implemented bike share programs to give residents a transportation option that cuts down on traffic.

Nowadays, dozens of Chinese cities have truly enormous programs, bigger than most other countries' systems. All told, China has eight cities with more bike share bikes than the entire United States does.

Here's a chart of the 30 cities worldwide that have more than 5,000 bikes in their systems (note: for cities with multiple programs, the number reflects the total number of bikes across all of them). Of these 30 top cities, 24 are in China.

It's not a huge mystery why China would want to invest so heavily in bike share: it has the world's largest population, is rapidly urbanizing, and is trying to cut down on traffic and pollution. What's impressive is how quickly the country has implemented enormous programs in so many different cities.

But if you're a fan of bike share, what is a little disheartening is how many other places that are going through the same challenges of urbanization haven't even gotten started with the programs. Both India and the entire continent of Africa have only conducted a handful of pilot studies, with zero active systems in place.

Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Anam has a heartbreaking editorial on Bangladesh's dismally maintained, murderous roads and waterways in today's Times: As she details, using WHO stats, at least 17,000 people die a year on Bangladesh's roads, not always while they're in vehicles.

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Monday mornings, am I right? Or Thursday afternoons. Or just being awake in general. Oscar the Hungarian Vizsla is not having any of this.

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Atlanta Public Schools fired a sixth grade teacher this week for playing her class Beyoncé and Jay Z's eternal classic, "Drunk in Love." According to the administrators' complaint against Ms. Nikki Turner, "This song contained profanity, vulgarity, and sexually explicit lyrics. This song is not [in] alignment with Teacher Keys Standard 9, Professionalism." Blah blah blah, surf-boring, this is bullshit.

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A nurse who appeared on a recent episode of Untold Stories of the ER told the horrifying story of a pageant mother who fed her daughter tapeworms to slim her down for a competition.

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Brooklyn has CSAs for food. We kind of have a CSA for beer (it’s over in LIC). We’ll soon have a CSA for bread. But, did you know Brooklyn has a CSA for art? Because, it totally exists.

Shares for the 2014 season of the Brooklyn Community Supported Art + Design program are on sale now and the idea itself is a pretty cool one. Each summer, patrons purchase $250 half shares or $500 full shares. That money goes to twelve artists handpicked by a jury of experts who then produce enough art to give 3 works to those with half shares and 6 works to those with full shares at a special fall pick up event, Bedford + Bowery reports.

The program began in 2013 as a way to connect burgeoning art lovers to “reasonably priced contemporary art and design works produced by artists and designers,” and so far has proved to be a success, with last year’s shares selling out.

This year, there are a mere 50 shares compared to last year’s 100, so if you’re interested head over to the CSA + D website and give the site a gander. And check out the video below for a breakdown of how the whole process works.

Follow Nikita Richardson on Twitter @nikitarbk

[The dining room at Acme]

There's no question that New York City is home to the finest canon of tasting menus in the country. But the one two Eater editors endured this month, unfortunately, is not among them.

The Acme vegetarian tasting menu, launched late last month at the Noho restaurant, seemed incredibly promising: It lacked tofu, offered eggs and cheese (a rare occurrence on the typical vegetarian prix fixe), and best of all completely avoided vegetables masquerading as meat dishes— e.g., "cauliflower steaks."

The price was right, coming in at $65 for 10 courses, and the restaurant itself, headed up by Danish chef and Noma co-founder Mads Refslund, received at one point two stars from Pete Wells of the New York Times, who praised the "gentle and thoughtful cooking."

Gentle and thoughtful our meal was not. Below, 18 ways the vegetarian tasting menu at Acme fizzled:

Our whole "tabe" participated.

1. The hostess did not have the mostess. Despite having reservations, arriving on time, and re-emphasizing our interest in the tasting menu— not to mention that only a handful of tables were occupied when we walked in— the hostess acted as if it was a hassle and a hardship to seat us.

2. Failed Dunking Dynamics 101. How exactly should anyone dip large, raw hunks of turnips into a paper-thin layer of goat cheese coated with a film of parsley powder without looking like an idiot?

Brown eggs. [Photo: Khushbu Shah]

3. The mansplaining. The egg course, which happened to be delicious, featured cauliflower and dashi— a Japanese broth often made with dried fish. When we asked our server to double check the dashi's ingredients (to make sure it was vegetarian), he decided it would be more appropriate to stand there and slowly explain that dashi is in fact a "savory Japanese broth with good flavor."

Sad onions. [Photo: Khushbu Shah]

4. Tepid onion cups. Course number seven was literally a plate of onions cups. Served lukewarm and slippery, topped with currants and nasturtium. Inedible.

5. The Organic Ave course. The carrot soup felt like a fancy juice cleanse garnished with flowers and served in an earthenware bowl over a bed of ice.

Thin carrot soup, raw carrots from Brooklyn. [Photo: Khushbu Shah]

6. …that came with a raw carrot. "From Brooklyn," of course. Just a large unpeeled carrot next to bowl of fancy carrot juice.

7. The blind taste test. It was impossible to tell the difference between the [undercooked] beets and the [off-puttingly warm] cherries without biting into them in the course entitled "roasted beets with sweet and sour cherries." Russian roulette on a plate.

A lot of food for course nine. [Photo: Khushbu Shah]

8. The DIY course. The ninth course was a build-your-own Johnny cake dish with too many topping choices— from cactus to mushrooms to three types of sauce— and too-thin crepe-like cakes to wrap them in. Weirdly, this was also the most filling course, even though it came out second to last. It was as if the kitchen knew the rest of the tasting sucked and scrambled to make sure diners didn't walk out completely starving.

9. It also had cactus. On a "Nordic-influenced" menu. See also: The strange, strange plum-and-sumac corn on the cob that showed up as course four. The plum sauce was shellacked on and yet somehow managed to give corn zero flavor.

10. Post-game meal planning. It was around course six that we started plotting our next move. It didn't appear as if the menu was going to redeem itself, and we were hungry. Table next to us appears intrigued by our discussion.

Ricotta dumplings and asparagus. [Photo: Khushbu Shah]

11. The hide-and-seek course. The ricotta dumpling to asparagus ratio was essentially 1:100. The few gnudi that showed up were quite good after we managed to find them under the semi-cooked rounds of asparagus floating in a slick, flavorless broth.

12. The Pinterest dessert. In this apparent spin on an oft-searched Pinterest dessert, the "frozen" crème fraiche was not, in fact, still frozen. The strawberries also came coated in a dehydrated fruit powder that brought back bad memories of Warheads. The dessert left a sour taste in our mouths— especially when a look at the menu informs that the non-veg tasting's dessert came with Mast Brothers chocolate.

13. The price was not right.This meal was only $10 less than the non-vegetarian version, which featured ingredients like foie gras, langoustines, oysters, and the aforementioned bougie chocolate. Instead of high-end ingredients, we received sloppily cooked side dishes (looking at you, onion cups) as full-on courses.

14. The pacing. We had just managed to get halfway through course number one when our server brought out course two. He brought out plate three mere minutes after. Barely 15 minutes into our meal, we had the first three courses on our table. It's as if the team forgot the point of courses.

15. The pacing, part II. And then the server had to ask us if he should slow things down. And then he did, and then it took far longer than necessary for the next three courses to come, and then all of a sudden we had courses seven and eight come out almost immediately.

Watermelon with vinegar and smoked sea salt, smoked cheese with parsley in the background. [Photo: Khushbu Shah]

16. The salty watermelon stick. The second dish felt like a popsicle out of a nightmare, with all the sugar swapped for salt. Think a long frozen cylinder of watermelon, like a biopsied cross-section, doused in large, coarse sea salt flakes.

17. The plating. Two things to note about this tasting menu: Every course that wasn't served in broth [so excluding the soup and the gnudi] had the two portions plated together, for sharing. Also, six of the nine savory courses were also available as selections on the menu. Seven if you include the onion cups served with a monkfish entree as part of the regular offerings.

Course eleven at Morgenstern's. [Photo: Khushbu Shah]

18: The escape. $200, tax, tip, and grumbling stomachs later, we left for Morgenstern's with the couple from the table next to us, ready to eat ungodly amounts of ice cream.
—Khushbu Shah and Sonia Chopra
· All Shitshow Week Coverage [-ENY-]

All pop songs may not sound the same, but most are close to the same length. So many songs are close to three minutes long that that length has become lore. This lore is so popular that the Beastie Boys even wrote a song about it. It's not easy to create a masterful pop song that will stick in the minds of listeners and repeat over and over again in just three minutes.

But where did the "three-minute rule" come from?

History of the three-minute pop song

Image courtesy of Flickr Creative commons, Pam Lau

A flat record made between 1858 and the late 1950s is called a "78" by vinyl enthusiasts and collectors. It's called that because the record spins at 78 revolutions per minute. The 78 disc severely limits the length that a song can be, because only so much music can fit onto the disc. The 78 comes in two sizes: a 10-inch that holds three minutes of music and a 12-inch that holds four.

In 1949, RCA introduced a 45 rpm disk that quickly overtook the 78 and made it obsolete. These 45s were better than 78s in numerous ways. They were made of vinyl instead of shellac, which made them more durable and more easily portable. They were also cheap to make and to buy, which made them easy to market to teenagers in the mid-1950s. Like the 78, the 45 also holds about three minutes of music (depending on the range of sound a song required and the depth of the groove in the disc).

For a band to get its songs played on the radio, it needed to have a 45. Artists complied. This invented what was known as the "single," for a record containing a single song. The 45 record was cheaper for Americans to buy than a full album and easier for radios to share, making the single in many ways the bedrock of American music.

The songs that came out immediately after the creation of the 45 defined American popular music for decades. All of Elvis's singles were sold on 45, for instance, as did the singles of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd. The seven-inch 45 single carried rock and roll, Motown, R&B, psychedelia, and the British Invasion into American households.

Has song length evolved with technology?

Image courtesy of Flickr Creative commons, (Pam Lau)

It makes sense to assume that since the basis of the three-minute song was the 78 and then 45 rpm single, then songs would become longer as technology evolved.

And there have, of course, been bands that wrote songs longer than four minutes even before the music industry switched to CDs. Rush and Jimi Hendrix have both recorded 20-minute-long songs. Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, and Bob Dylan all have 10-minute songs. In no way are long songs unheard of in music, but the average song length is still — even as the industry has evolved almost entirely to digital media — under five minutes.

Average song length by year. Data courtesy of MusicBrainz.org

Based on data derived from musicbrainz.org, we can determine the average length of a song based on the year of its release. It would be easy to say that as new technologies have been developed that allow for longer music, the length of songs has increased. But the length of songs had its biggest jump, according to this data, between the '60s and '80s, and very little has changed from the'90s to 2008, a time period when the technology of music changed drastically.

"What drives what is heard on the radio is an artist's desire to have their music hit the mainstream, and a record label's desire to profit from that," Steve Jones, vice president at the Canadian radio firm Newcap, told NPR. Newcap is a radio firm that recently debuted a Top 40 station that offers "twice the music," which really means it cuts hit songs in half to make them shorter.

Jones is right. The length of a song on an album doesn't matter for anyone except for the artist and fans, but a song that hopes to make money and be played on the radio simply has to be a certain length. Either that, or radio stations will edit the song down to the standard, making it three to four minutes, just like the 45.

Clark Griswold can forget about driving all the way to Walley World.

If "National Lampoon's Vacation" had been shot today, he just couldn't have taken the time off work. That's according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which show that Americans are taking fewer, shorter vacations.

Nine million Americans took a week off in July 1976, the peak month each year for summer travel. Yet in July 2014, just seven million did. Keeping in mind that 60 million more Americans have jobs today than in 1976, that adds up to a huge decline in the share of workers taking vacations.

Some rough calculations show, in fact, that about 80 percent of workers once took an annual weeklong vacation — and now, just 56 percent do.

Long vacations are going out of style (BLS)

It's not as if Americans are cutting back on an excessive vacation habit, either. The United States is the only developed economy that doesn't guarantee its workers a paid vacation. Most of its peer nations promise about 20 days off a year, according to a report by Rebecca Ray, Milla Sanes, and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

About a quarter of the American workforce doesn't get paid vacation, according to data they cite from the National Compensation Survey. The no-vacationers usually work part-time or for small employers in low-wage jobs.

The average American gets 14 days off from work, according to an annual survey by the travel company Expedia, but actually uses only 10 of those days each year. It's an open question why Americans don't use it all. They say their bosses are supportive and that scheduling got in the way. Others say they're are just stockpiling it for some future trip —but wouldn't someone, then, eventually take that trip?

One possibility is that vacation suffers from a "Prisoner's Dilemma." It's dangerous to be "that guy" who uses all the time off they get when everyone else is on the job, so workers limit their vacations. On balance, The Wall Street Journal says, the evidence does support that theory. Workers pay a career penalty for vacation. If Americans could establish a pro-vacation norm, those pressures would lessen.

That seems to be happening in some workplaces, where bosses require workers to use their time off. That might be, for the most part, just a management fad. Yet it is surprisingly normal in one industry: finance. That's not out of kindness, however. Regulators have long recommended banks require vacations as a way of making it harder to conceal embezzlement.

It's not clear what's driving the trend towards fewer, shorter vacations. Tourism tends to be very cyclical, but the decline of the great American vacation seems to have been a gradual affair. There aren't any shortage of possible explanations: lessened job security, stagnant median incomes, rising part-time employment, and an increasing share of households with more than one member employed could all be parts of the story.

There's no obvious sign that any of this has hurt the travel industry, though. Hotel occupancy is back to pre-recession highs, and employment in the leisure and hospitality industry has been one of the bright spots of the recovery. It seems like they're carrying on, Griswolds or not.

* Here's how the math works.

The Current Population Survey surveys workers once a month about a specific "reference week." If an employed person says they were absent that week — that is, they worked zero hours — and the reason why is "vacation," they're counted here. There's no reason to think that workers are more likely to take off during the survey's reference week than any other, so we can divide the number of vacation absences by the number of workers, and raise that to the fourth power to get the percentage of workers who took a weeklong vacation in one month.

Now we multiply the percentage of Americans who didn't across the last twelve months, since vacation is (obviously) seasonal. That gives you the share who haven't taken a vacation in the last year. The calculations assume that nobody takes more than one weeklong vacation each year.

High chairs for babies: easy for adults to get into, not so easy for adults to get out of.

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A cat named Cuppy was a beloved family pet for about 14 years. But after holding his owners hostage in their bedroom earlier this week, his days at the residence might be numbered.

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How you can use inflation to beat the IRS
Anderson
1981

Believe it or not, I found this book in a public library collection. The number of public libraries still holding this title is quite shocking. As a former accountant, I get some serious palpitations when I find this kind of stuff laying around a public library’s collection.  Anyone with a modicum of knowledge has to know that tax laws change over time. Seriously.

Specifically, two pieces of legislation (that were headlines!) make this book weedable. First, is Economic Recovery Tax Act  (August 1981) and Tax Reform Act of 1986.  This legislation fundementally changed income tax laws that render just about anything published during that time period questionable.  If nothing else, this illustrates perfectly that paying attention to current events does have a direct effect on a library collection.

I swear to Melvil Dewey that if anyone says “someone might need this” to me I might have to hit them with this book. (This is what happens to youth services librarians during the summer. We completely lose our sense of humor.)

I will be in the back breathing deeply if anyone needs me.

 

Mary

More outdated business info:

Small Business Resource Guide

Real Estate: Solid as the Rock of Gibralter

Bankruptcy, Circa 1976

 

Rich: The Gorbals is located in a place on North Six called "Space Ninety 8." Outside, Space Ninety 8 has a list of all of its constituent businesses: Urban Outfitters, the Gorbals, Roof Deck, Gallery 98, and the Market Space. But do not be fooled: This is a giant, three floor Urban Outfitters with, like, some other shit—including a high-end restaurant in which you can eat a whole pig's head while listening to an in-store band perform surf-rock-revival revival jams.

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  Buy Beer in a bag. In many parts of China, you can buy beer by the kilogram. You walk to the store, take a plastic bag off of the beer tap, pou...

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The “Life in the UK” test isn’t quite as easy as you might think. Like those really taking the test, you need 75% to pass. Questions inspired by theuktest.com .

MarkUK97 / MarkUK97 /Siraj Datoo / BuzzFeed

This one's got jerked pork belly slices and jerk chicken.

Ramen that's thickened slightly with fermented scotch bonnet pepper paste and topped with jerk pork belly slices pretty much nails the sweet spot on the mash-up spectrum between those blue-collar ramen hoagies and the more futuristic ramen churros, so it's no surprise to hear that the recurring special at Miss Lily’s 7A Cafe has developed a following. The ramen, which is also made with chicken, ackee, bitter greens, and a decapitated soft-boiled egg, goes on sale in limited quantities Monday nights at the East Village restaurant, then stays on the menu until it sells out. Bedford + Bowery says it "sounds more fiery than it is," but Grub has heard some reports to the contrary.

If we've learned one thing in the past few years, it's that ramen mash-ups are never isolated events, and so it goes that the batter and sausage specialists at Corndog Factory have perfected their own ramen version, which consists of a delightfully round ball that's topped with crunchy Top Ramen bits. They're apparently also experimenting with whole ramen-breaded hot dogs at the Hester Street Fair as well. Bring the kids!

Ramen Mash-Up Madness! Jerk Ramen and Ramen Corndogs Hit the Scene [Bedford + Bowery]
Related: Jerk Chicken Ramen With Scotch Bonnet Chili Paste Sounds Very Spicy]

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Filed Under: all ramen everything, corndog factory, miss lily's, miss lily's 7a, ramen, ramen corn dogs

Americans don't trust anything they can't see with their own two eyes, except for government assurances of nefarious activities by strategically hated foreign enemies. That's why see-thru packaging is now "a must" for all American garbage foodstuffs.

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Marvel Universe Live! — a new “action-packed arena extravaganza” from Feld Entertainment, the company behind Disney on Ice, the Ringling Bros., and Barnum & Bailey Circus — is a disorienting, thought-provoking, deeply postmodern entertainment experience, even though it aims to be none of those things. With its skull-numbingly juvenile dialogue, flat characterization, and flimsy plot, the event is designed to excite preteens and distract their parents. It is, by any measure, silly. And yet, in spite of itself, this glorious mess, which kicks off a two-year worldwide tour tonight at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, is also an unintentional thesis statement about what Marvel is in 2014.

Don’t worry if this is the first you’re hearing of Marvel Universe Live!; you won’t need a whole lot of catching up to get the basic gist of what it’s about. The show stars a few dozen highly athletic performers dressed in the garb of iconic Marvel superheroes and villains, and, in service of a story that never gets more complicated than “a bunch of bad guys have stolen pieces of a magic weapon, so let’s steal them back,” they fly on wires, trigger pyrotechnics, perform choreographed fight sequences, ride motorcycles, and lip-synch to corny, prerecorded dialogue (sample line: “If he calls me a sidekick again, I’m going to kick him in the side!”). Here's a video sample of the kind of goofiness you can see in Marvel Universe Live!, which I saw in a preview held recently in New Jersey: heroes Iron Man, Hawkeye, and Captain Marvel hopping around and beating up some evildoers who are amped up on superpower juice.

Few grown-up superhero enthusiasts or cultural critics will take any of this very seriously. But the show — which received creative input from Joe Quesada, the chief creative officer of Marvel Entertainment — inadvertently raises a huge question: What, exactly, is the “Marvel universe” right now? As of 2007, the answer would have been extremely simple: The Marvel universe is all of the interconnected stories and characters in Marvel Comics. Ever since the 1960s, Marvel has been committed to building a rich shared reality for all of its comics characters, from Wolverine to Captain America — a shared reality that superhero fans had pored over ad infinitum. It had a limited spectrum of “authors,” in the literary-theory sense of that word: the writers, artists, and editors of the comics. Sure, there had been scattered movies and TV shows, and some of those adaptations had been very successful (such as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy and the X-Men cartoon of the 1990s). But no one would have considered that licensed material to be the heart of Marvel’s mythos, much less its driving force.

Then came the Day Everything Changed — May 2, 2008, when Marvel’s movie imprint, Marvel Studios, released Iron Man and launched what has come to be called the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Since then, Marvel Studios has built its own meticulous shared cosmology, full of interconnected references and complex continuity — and that cosmology has become far more powerful and profitable than the comics universe. Ask an average person to tell you about Tony Stark, and he or she will describe the cocky, partygoing sleazeball of the movies, not the mildly jokey former alcoholic who lives in the comics. (In fact, he or she might not have even known who Tony Stark was if you’d asked in 2007.) But the success of movies involving Marvel characters not controlled by Marvel Studios has also ripped apart certain portions of the intricate Marvel tapestry. Marvel Studios doesn’t own the movie rights to the massive A-list franchises Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four, which has led to compromise and confusion. As an example, if you were to ask the aforementioned average person if Wolverine is a member of the Avengers, he or she would likely say no, even though Wolverine has been an Avenger in the comic books for years. And it would be tough to blame that person, since Wolverine has never met Iron Man in a movie and he very likely never will.

That’s just where the confusion begins, though. Seeing Marvel Studios’ success, Fox (which controls the X-Men and Fantastic Four film rights) and Sony (which owns the rights to Spider-Man) have followed suit by focusing on their own universe-building, full of spinoffs (see Sony’s upcoming Sinister Six) and continuity (e.g., all the head-numbing connections in X-Men: Days of Future Past). So, in short, there are currently three different Marvel cinematic universes. These competing efforts lead to bizarre developments, like the two completely unrelated movie versions of the character Quicksilver.

Just to make things even more complicated, Marvel has undergone some pretty radical thematic changes in its comics output in the past decade and a half. Marvel Comics has made an incredible push to highlight female characters and characters of color. Its in-house writing style isn’t as wordy, and it's mostly banned thought bubbles. And, of course, the success of the movies has led it to do things like make comics versions of characters originally created for movies (such as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson) or downplay characters it can’t seem to make movie money off of (such as the Fantastic Four, whom Fox is quixotically hoping to dredge out of box-office hell). There have long been parallel universes within Marvel Comics stories (“What if Magneto had taken over the world? This month, the X-Men step through an interdimensional portal and find out!”); but now we have, in a way, multiple Marvel universes throughout the entertainment industry — and this time, sadly, there can’t be any crossovers.

Which brings us back to Marvel Universe Live!. Right there in the title, it’s claiming to be a live version of something called the “Marvel Universe,” but what it gives us is not a live version of any one of the Marvel universes I’ve just listed. It tries to be a live version of all of the franchise universes. If you’re a casual viewer, you may not care about that distinction at all, but if you're a nerd who cares about postmodernism, your brain will start to hurt.

Here’s just a taste of all the contradictions and influence-mixing in the live show. Right at the beginning, the show shatters the film-universe boundaries: Iron Man is hanging out in Avengers Tower when feisty teenage Spider-Man stops by for a visit. Now, of course, that happens all the time in the comics ... but in the comics, Spider-Man hasn't been a teenager in decades. So this isn’t the comics universe, either. They get a distress call from Nick Fury, who is African-American. That means he’s not the original comics version of Fury (who was white), but he’s also not the movie version of Nick Fury (who is African-American, but is a smooth-talker in a black trench coat; this Nick Fury is closer to Nick Fury Jr., an African-American character introduced to the comics as a result of the success of the movie version of Nick Fury). Nick Fury then fights aliens called the Chitauri, who only exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, although they share a name with a species that once appeared in an alternate-universe comics series. Wolverine is there, but the other X-Men only make brief cameos, and there’s no sign of the Fantastic Four — all of which plays into the comics-industry conspiracy theory that Marvel wants to downplay the characters whose film rights are owned by Fox because it has a bad profit-sharing deal with Fox.

All of that said, this freewheeling inter-universal mishmash can lead to a few moments of transcendence for a superhero addict. First and foremost is the inclusion of Avenger Carol Danvers in her role as Captain Marvel, a mantle she’s held only recently in her own comics title, and one she holds onstage in the amazing new costume she got when her series was launched in 2012. Progressive comics fans have clamored for Danvers to be used as Captain Marvel in a movie, to no avail, so her appearance here is cause for glee. And as lowbrow as it might be to say this, the motorcycle tricks are pretty rad!

I am, of course, overthinking this. Marvel Universe Live! is meant to be enjoyed, not analyzed. But part of the act of true comics love is attempting to pick apart the minutiae of a fictional universe, so I can’t help myself. This arena spectacle suggests that something revolutionary has occurred in the past six years: There is no such thing as “the Marvel universe” anymore. Once upon a time, there was such a thing, but it gave birth to a bunch of other Marvel universes — all of which are limited in breadth, but are growing independently and multiplying. No one entity has control over where it’s all heading; everything is up for grabs. Here’s a suggestion for a tagline Marvel Universe Live! might consider using: “The Marvel Universe Is Dead. Long Live the Marvel Universes.”

Read more posts by Abraham Riesman

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