NYC24: Nerdy Games Rock Bars
NYC24.com: Nerdy Games Rock Bars April 2008, multimedia story
If you’re longing to re-do the time you were ousted in that grade-school spelling bee, pulverized in debate class, or left in outer orbit in Solarquest (my childhood favorite). Now is your second chance. And you can play games while sipping cocktails in bars!
Adults compete with cocktails and kid games
By Lisa Biagiotti & Lauren Feeney
“Hijinks is the only word in the English language with three consecutive dotted letters,” said Tim Harrod, who sat drinking a draft beer at Freddy’s Bar & Backroom in Park Slope.
“Fiji” also has three consecutive dots, said Rose Martin, 29. But because it is a proper noun, it’s no threat to hijinks’ status.
Such are the conversations that unfold the first Sunday of every month at Freddy’s when the board games come out. Harrod, 39, a writer who was playing Trivial Pursuit as he talked about the dotted letters, has been playing board games in the back of Freddy’s for the last year and a half.
Board games, spelling bees, debates and quiz nights are already standard fare during off-peak nights in New York City bars, but attendance to bar games has become more popular with the rise of online game playing. Web sites like Pogo.com and Yahoo Games, which feature online versions of classic board games and new online gaming applications like Scrabulous, have revitalized interest in playing games in real life, or at least made them cool enough to headline nights at local city bars.
According to Erik Arneson, expert and editor of board and card games at About.com, the “golden age,” the “renaissance” and the “rebirth” of these games are now here.
“The Internet has reminded people that games are fun,” said Arneson, who has seen an uptick in traffic to the gaming column he has written since 1999.
But while Arneson said playing a game on the Internet is “lovely,” the experience is not comparable to playing in person. “You holler, you cheer, you groan,” said Arneson, adding that playing in bars promotes a sense of camaraderie that is more personal than playing over the Internet.
Nerdy games have become hip. Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sometimes has to turn away contestants for its packed bi-monthly spelling bee.
“A lot of people like to go out and socialize with some interesting framework,” said Andy McDowell, owner of Pete’s. “People like to do what they did when they were kids.”
Susan Tansil, 26, a medical student who lives in Park Slope, took home the spelling bee championship title, a dictionary and a $25 bar tab. She came to Pete’s haunted by the time she was eliminated in the first round of her fifth grade spelling bee.
“That traumatized me ’cause I didn’t think I was a good speller,” Tansil said. “Mozilla Firefox has built-in spell check now, so I thought I’d be crippled by that, so like, thanks Firefox! You didn’t cripple me!”
Michael Evanchik, one of the organizers of the popular debate night at Lolita Bar on the Lower East Side said people like to be challenged, even while hanging out with friends. “We were sick of having inane conversations in bars,” he said, explaining how debate night got off the ground, “so we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to go out and actually talk about interesting things?’”
Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, said the games not only open up social situations, but represent a longing for the familiar of presumably happy childhoods and create a sense of accomplishment.
“The real world is hard, there are lots of things we are up against all the time,” said Marcus, the author of the new book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. “Board games and video games are both designed in the same way, which is to give you a little kick, a little sense that you are making progress in every moment.”
“If I play scrabble and I get a double word score, I feel it right now,” Marcus said. “The brain is all about right now, and what feels good at this moment.”
Junction BLVD: Flux Factory flaunts final show in LIC
Junction BLVD: Flux Factory Flaunts Final Show in LIC
Last night, Flux Factory, an artist collective in Long Island City, unveiled its final exhibition,”Everything Must Go.” Art installations spread out across bathrooms, bedrooms, and even the laundry room of this 7,500 square-foot space, which is set to be demolished to make way for MTA expansion.
Lisa Biagiotti and Kenan Davis produced and edited the following video on Flux Factory’s opening night, which marks a month-long goodbye to 38-38 43rd Street.
Flux Factory began as an art community in Williamsburg in 1994. The community moved to Long Island City in 2002 and currently has 18 artists-in-residence. The building will be demolished to make way for the MTA’s East Side Access Project. While this is the last exhibition, artists are scheduled to move out sometime during the summer.
City Picklers: Reviving local food, one pickle at a time
Citypicklers.com: Reviving local food, one pickle at a time
April 2008, multimedia story
Driven by the local food movement, pickling is making a comeback on home countertops and in gourmet grocery aisles. The website, citypicklers.com, crunches on the pickle’s impact on New York culture, health and community.
I produced this multimedia story with Lizzie Stark.
From Homeland to New York, Pickles Keep Culture Alive
The produce inside the 72nd Street Fairway market in Manhattan never changes. Cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes fill the vegetable aisle, and the smell of strawberries and fresh herbs waft through the air. Once thought of as summer treats, these fresh vegetables are available to New Yorkers year-round courtesy of food corporations that ship food to wherever it is wanted from wherever it is in season.
In the face of such bounty, the traditional method of preserving local, seasonal vegetables through the winter – pickling – seems nearly obsolete. In New York City, why go to the trouble of jarring cucumbers? And furthermore, in an age where much food is pre-packaged and ready-to-microwave, who even knows how to make a pickle?
But driven by the local food movement, pickling is making a comeback - at home, in pickling classes offered around the city and at locally-conscious restaurants.
Heritage
Executive chef Matt Weingarten calls his wife’s hometown of Litmanova, Slovakia, “a place lost in time.” Villagers from this town near the Polish border drink sauerkraut juice - not orange juice - for Vitamin C during winter months. Oranges must be shipped to Litmanova, while sauerkraut, made from fermented local cabbage, is cheap, readily available and traditional.
In fact, like sauerkraut in Eastern Europe, most cultures have their own pickles, and pickles such as Korean kimchi or Indian green mango pickles, are often emblematic of a culture’s cuisine. For decades, immigrants have carried their cuisines’ defining pickles to New York, where their culinary traditions continue, reminding new Americans of their old homes. In his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan wrote, “the immigrant’s refrigerator is the very last place to look for signs of assimilation.”
But in two or three generations, this knowledge is lost. CityPicklers.com interviewed 20 Indian and Pakistani immigrants on the streets of Jackson Heights in Queens, and while nearly everyone remembered homemade green mango pickles, only a handful of first-generation immigrants kept home-pickling alive, and no second-generation immigrants pickled at all.
According to fermentation expert Sandor Ellix Katz, the mere memory of homemade pickles lingers. “I meet lots of people, particularly old people, that have a memory – annual wine making, annual pickle making, sourdough they kept baking every week,” Katz said, noting that in many cases, immigrant grandparents do not pass the customs and traditions of the old world on to the next generation.
Loss
Pickling “connects you to your place,” said Eugenia Bone, author of the forthcoming cookbook Urban Preservation. In an effort to eat seasonally, the local food movement has rediscovered pickling as a method of preserving the summer’s bounty for the winter. In 2007 the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of year was “locavore,” someone who eats food grown or produced locally or within a certain distance, such as 100 miles.
Members of the local food movement believe that eating local food in season reduces a person’s carbon footprint, avoiding the resources expended as produce travels hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles by plane, train or truck to reach supermarkets.
Health is another pressing concern. Bone said that the end product of the corporate food chain is diabetes and obesity. Katz noted that boxed, irradiated and pasteurized foods lack beneficial bacteria, and are, in fact, dead. He said that those who consume only factory-made food become “microbial blank slates,” with weak immune systems susceptible to disease. Pickles and other traditional fermented foods can help replenish the intestinal bacteria that aid in digestion.
New York University food historian Gabriella Petrick pointed out that corporate food isn’t all bad, connecting supermarket chains to lower food prices, which translate into affordable meals for the poor.
Still, Robert LaValva, director of New Amsterdam Market, a nonprofit organization dedicated to establishing a year-round public market on the site of the old Fulton Fish Market in lower Manhattan, romanticizes about a time when local farms fed city neighborhoods. LaValva holds the relationship between farm and city on par with cultural institutions like the Sistine Chapel in Rome. “It’s part of our humanity, it’s part of our society,” he said. “You should treasure and preserve it.”
Revival
Home pickling is making a comeback - whether it’s fermentation revivalists like Katz, who travels the country speaking about fermented food; pickling classes at the Natural Gourmet Institute, a culinary school; or the monthly pickling and fermentation parties Taylor Cocalis, 24, educational coordinator for Murray’s Cheese Shop in Greenwich Village, plans for friends in her Park Slope apartment.
The pickle complements the New York City lifestyle, according to Nancy Ralph, founder of the New York Food Museum, whose annual Pickle Day in July draws crowds of up to 20,000. “If you make food every night, pickling won’t work,” Ralph said. “Living in New York City, you may not cook every night – all the reason to pickle.” A jar in the refrigerator can perk up last night’s leftovers or provide tasty late-night snacks.
Home pickling is also an alternative for New Yorkers who have little room to tend a garden. “For most people in an apartment in New York City, it’s a lot easier to imagine having a half gallon of sauerkraut fermenting on a countertop than it is to have a garden,” said Katz. “That’s a direct connection to the source of food that anybody – no matter how cramped their living space is – can integrate into their lives.”
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