Something happened on the way to Walmart

A lot has me down this past week. Mumbai has me way down. My job has me down. The deteriorating economy, my best friend and brother being out of work and consequently having to worry about money and healthcare has me down. And then there's the holiday hype, in full swing now that Thanksgiving is out of the way. I'm still half hoping that the Long Island Walmart incident was actually an Orson Wells-type experiment and the media will soon reveal the whole situation as a sham. Their apologies for any bad feelings. Because watching a news story where a mob of Walmart shoppers stampede through a door, trample a man to death, injure a pregnant woman, and then attempt to continue their bargain hunting as "they have been on line since yesterday morning" (NY Times), doesn't seem real to me. Maybe I sound naive. Or maybe a bit dramatic. After all, as far as I know, no one set out of their house at 4 am with the intention to kill--it was an "accident." I'm not so sure that matters, though. Intent would make the story less disturbing. The worst part about the situation is how oblivious this hype makes people.

I watched the story on the news a couple of days ago. In the same segment, the station went on to nonchalantly interview people in the Tri State area who were doing their Christmas shopping. Back to business as usual. One young couple had saved 2K for all their Christmas presents. 2K. That's a trip to Europe. That's a huge deal. At least for a middle class 27-year-old with rent and student loans. (That's also about the cost of one credit at NYU, so technically, who I am to judge...)

I don't want to be a hypocrite because during the holidays I start spending more than I should, too. It just happens; you love your friends and family, you want them to open a gift and you want to see their face light up. You know exactly what would do that. It's actually rather self-indulgent, but I've resolved, not in a bad way (well, at least not in most cases). For me, if that something has a high price tag, unless it's truly unreasonable, I'll get it. It's human.

I wait anxiously for the time when my mom, dad and brother are all together in our living room close to midnight on Christmas Eve. It's a quiet refuge from the emotional medley that we're coming from--yelling, laughing, fighting, singing, my mom's entire extended family, the traditional Italian 7-types-of-seafood spread, 15 little kids, a visit from Santa, Christmas carols, videos from Christmas past. We all take a breath and wind down in the glow from the lights of my mother's Fortunoff-style tree (she stopped using the kid's decorations once we were all grown up, much to my dismay), and the low buzzing of mechanical Mr. and Mrs. Claus as they loosen up their joints and dance their slow jig, candles in hand, in the front window. My grandmother's old nativity scene, a solitary little wooden barn with Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus and some hay glued into it, is always sitting at the base of the tree. We're all impulsive so there is no waiting to open gifts on Christmas morning, at least not since we stopped believing in Santa Claus. My mom eventually gets up. Here, she says and hands a box to me, and we start to open our gifts. We all watch as each one of us unwraps. It's my favorite part of the holiday, but only a certain, small percentage of it really has to do with the gifts. The gifts are more like an excuse.

Everyone knows that already though, right? We all say it and remind each other of it. It's not about the gifts. It's about being with family, whether they're blood relatives or those you have come to consider family out of pure, voluntary love. It's about Jesus's birthday, or the longest night of the year, or the miracle of the Temple, or 7-days of candle lighting in dashikis and kaftans, or adhering to the Four Noble Truths, or, or, or... For me, unfortunately, it's really nothing so profound. It's about this moment when we are sitting together with my brother Al, whom I only really see twice a year, and the two of us spend the entire time laughing and imitating my father behind his back. (Only because we love you, Dad.)

If we all know this I'm just curious as to what the hell happened. There's a line that gets crossed, or rather trampled, somewhere between gift giving for appreciation and tradition and just plain old excessiveness, which ironically minimizes the experience. Albeit, I am not married with children, I don't have to worry about the latest Nintendo Wii game that all the other kids will be getting, the toys, clothes, or Sosoandso's parents are getting him a car! I can just say, at this point, thank god I don't have to deal with all of that and this viewpoint is slightly biased towards my single woman status. I can buy gifts for my family in one shot, usually at Barnes&Noble. (Let me tell you, my nieces and nephews love me for all the books I've gotten them. Ha. They'll thank me someday.)

But, biased or not, I'm wondering how the holiday experience has snowballed (no pun intended) into debt, Christmas shopping from October on, spending weekend after weekend--time off from work for many-- in purgatorial shopping malls, stuck in traffic, stuck on lines, stuck listening to the inevitable arguments that break out both inside and outside of the stores. I remember from my days of actually having a car that drivers become full-blown crazy during this season. The excess brings about a temporary insanity. With the recession, it's understandable to perhaps go the extra mile for a bargain, to be a little neurotic about getting through the holidays when you're not even sure if you will have a job. How, though, does that translate into nearly breaking down a store door, so focused on video game value bundles, and digital cameras, and plasmas and iPod shuffles and maybe some half-priced long-johns to stick in a stocking, so absorbed in your own desires that you fail to notice you're stomping on someone at all, nonetheless to death? And injuring others along the way. I don't care how many kids you may have, how bad your finances may be (after all, everyone still seems to be shopping, right?), how frustrated you are or maybe just how much you may want to make someone else happy, a circuit was shorted somewhere along the line between reason and action.

The saddest part is that lately, it seems we have so much less vigor for the things that actually matter. Imagine if all of that crazed energy could be stored and put towards one of the 5 hundred causes that would actually be bettering society.

Neighborhoods

I talked to Tom this morning, who admitted to getting on his "real New Yorker" high-horse. You people from the suburbs have the wrong view of New York. It's not just about Williamsburg, and cafes and trendy bars. What it's really about is the neighborhoods. That may not be verbatim, but it's close enough. Tom's right. The rebuke was spurred because I impulsively exclaimed the city is just not conducive to marriage and families, wrapped up in the shallow belief that everyone is too independent, to career and goal oriented, maybe even too intoxicated to truly be serious about relationships, whatever form they may take. He shot me down in a matter of seconds. After all, what do I really know?

I come from about 40 minutes away in New Jersey, but the distance can't really be measured in miles. Childhood to me was summer nights, running through backyards playing manhunt, lightening bugs, BBQs, Belgian waffles on our deck at night with the next-door neighbors who would come over for tea during the day. Building Fort Ticonderoga in the woods behind my house, treehouses, girl-scout cookies, snow past my thighs. Like all reminscences of childhood, it's biased nostalgia that makes the thought of having a family in NYC--where a second bedroom, nonetheless a backyard, is a luxury--seem depressing.

I suppose to a semi-new NYC resident coming from the suburbs with so much at her feet, so much entertainment and alcohol and art and creativity, and yes, lots of ugliness and consequent beauty, it's hard to think about life as eventually being real. Especially coming from a place where none of that was very accessible. And for a child, at first, it doesn't matter much what is at your feet, when your own imagination makes mudpies, snow forts and always daydreams. But after a certain point, the nostalgia fades. And then I remember that plain old boredom that came with the suburban neighborhood. Then I started to feel what wasn't directly at my feet and boredom eventually grew into, pardon the cliche, feeling like a square peg in round hole. Trapped down a man-hole. Maybe even a black hole. You get the point.

Artist rendition of my suburban life.

(Photo taken from http://www.tutorgig.com/ed/Black_hole#_note-1)

So, I'm not a real New Yorker, but I'm fascinated by them, and I am trying to find some balance between the surreal and the stable, because I think I would like to stay for a while (at least until the Icelandic economy picks up). Personally, I thought maybe I'd cut back on some, (just some) of my time spent in West Village pubs and explore what Tom refers to as the neighborhoods.

It's a subject that's been coming up often, in the media especially (and by "media" I actually mean public access channels). Last Saturday night, Reel 13 on PBS featured the short-flick The Last Butcher in Little Italy, a brief documnetary about Moe Albanese, owner of the now-Nolita butcher store store started by his Sicilian father. Located on Elizabeth and Prince, Moe has still managed to keep his business despite the sprouting and less accessible boutiques that are slowly smothering him. He reflects on a different time when he would spend "three quarters of an hour to serve one person" and customers would inundate him with their stories and problems. All as their meat was sliced. It's the same, nostalgic story that gets told repeatedly as old-ethnic-city Manhatten becomes more and more--and here's that word again--gentrified. But I think it's one that we should continually be reminded of.

Astoria seems to have avoided the dreaded "hipster" sprawl, at least for the time being, despite a recent move by many younger people priced out of Manhatten and Brooklyn (myself included). While I have always said that Queens would never be as aesthetically pleasing as some of the other boroughs, I'm beginning to take comfort in the rows of brick-stone houses, of the porcelain and plastic Virgin Mary's and Saint SoandSos sitting on terraces or in front-yard gardens. The massive pool at Astoria park and the Triborough rumbling above. And, right now, we still have some obvious signs of autumn as well!

So, in homage to quaint explorations and truly adopting our neighborhood, Colin and I recently visited Rosario's deli on 31st and Ditmars, whose mozzerella and sundried tomatoes we had sampled at our friends' place the night before. We bought a ball of fresh mozzerella for about $5, as well as some other gourmet treats. The mozzerella is rich and as tasteful as mozzerella can possibly be. The sundried tomatoes are plump and slightly juicy to the bite. There was something comforting about this place, walking into the smell of cured meats and provolone, pizza and garlic and peppers. The chatty Italian guys behind the counter. (One with rosy cheeks sniffed my pumpkin coffee. Man, that smells good). Yes, it was familiar and brought me back to what I could recollect of my Grandma Anne's in Belleville. On Sundays she would always talk about her weekly trip to Violente's deli. (The infamous salami sandwhiches from Violente's was the subject of a much earlier post.)

Rosario's specializes in meats, cheeses, cold cuts, sandwhiches, pizza, and has a ridiculous selection of Italian/European gourmet products if you choose to peruse the well-stocked shelves.

I think this may become a regular weekend trip.

Unfortnately, our camera was dying and we couldn't get too many pictures. At least here you can see the vast selection of olive oil.

And a slightly blurred picture of me standing outside with our purchases.


Info:
Rosario's Deli.
2255 31st St
Astoria, NY 11105
(718) 728-2920

Subway
Ditmars Blvd (N, W)

Antique Critique

Per usual, my original plans of extensive thrift shopping last weekend did not come to full fruition--at least not as expected. The rain and a late Friday night had me feeling far too cozy to venture outside of Astoria. Luckily, I did make it out of my apartment for a brief stint to check out Mariola's thrift shop on Crescent Street, right off of 30th ave. I pass by every time I walk to Astoria Park, and am always attracted by the fringe of white Christmas lights on the awning, the dazzling pendants, and the ominous lamp shades displayed in the window.

Mariola's on Crescent Street.

It was an odd setting to walk into at first. There were a number of women in the very narrow front of the shop, one shining jewelry set in a glass case, the other two talking extensively in Spanish. A shortish man, clad totally in white--white pants, white tee-shirt, even a white hat--and black shoes walked up from the basement, smoking a cigarette and nearly knocking me over. The top of his ears were covered with a fine white powder. (Even with extensive googling I cannot figure out why this would be, the only plausible explanation is that he was an actor coming out of costume.) He was abrupt and talked loudly in Spanish and when another customer mentioned what nice things he had, he hastily answered, I don't know, my sister, she knows, with a Napoleonic march out the door.

One of the things that I have come to both love and sometimes hate about Astoria is this type of reality. I would not exactly call it rude overall, although there is plenty of rudeness going on in all the boroughs, but it's a lack of forced decorum, and dependent on my mood I often find it refreshing. I was reading a review of Mariola's, in which it received only one star based on the rudeness of the owners and a lack of clarity in pricing. Now if you're getting ripped off, understandable. But since I wasn't trying to negotiate any major pieces (nor would I even know how to negotiate any major pieces) and my interests were only in some weird-looking pendants, I was fine walking in on a seemingly passionate conversation (for some reason, all languages other than English seem so vibrant and dramatic to me) and being left to myself until I exerted some interest in the store merchandise. At that point, a tiny and quaintly sexy Spanish woman (possibly Mariola?) started telling me in a heavy accent the history of how she came across certain pieces of jewelry, what era they were from, how she inhereted part of her jewelry collection from and old man in Greece who had recently passed away. She pulled certain chains from the rack where they hung and delicately displayed them in her palm. She told me she had very, very nice things.

In terms of the store itself, it wasn't just second hand junk thrown into piles. There may have been a bit of that going on, but it definitely felt more "antique" than "thrift," enough so that I lingered nearly an hour with a slight hangover. I have a particular penchant for old things and am on a continual quest for objects that tell stories, whether it be filling my pockets with stones, scouring beaches for odd shells, or collecting antique photographs for their formality and eerieness. Here are a few from my small collection, below:

Slightly frightening. Children's very adult like faces from this period always fascinate me.

You may not find anything worthy of invoking the sublime; you may only stumble upon a tiny treasure-for-a-day, but I think many curious people at least enter antique stores under the same type of spell, looking for history and a story--at least that may be the appeal on the most basic level. Anyway, scoping out Mariola's was like walking through an attic, a cozy attic where as I kid I could have played all day and night, with chests and mirrors and hats and clocks. Oh, and German beer mugs.

Overall, my purchases were minor and old costume jewelry doesn't put much of a dent in one's wallet, but I can see how it may get a bit expensive. There are no prices on anything, which makes me a little wary, and when I went back with Colin, who hit up the antique books, the prices were high, although I am not sure what an 1877 book of fairy tales goes for these days. The two stores sell mostly house items and jewelry, with a variety of necklaces hanging in the smaller store. The shop next door, closer to 30th avenue, features much of the housewares and includes cases full of broaches, tea pots, figurines, and other oddities and collectables. There is a small selection of clothing, and I noticed some pretty cool hats, but in terms of forming a wardrobe, I think a trip to Beacon's is still in order.

Anyway, my search for exotic, quirky old pendants resulted in the following:

Coming up next...more Astoria rambles....

Style idols

Again, I have let way too much time lag between postings. The end of my class is in sight and I'm bogged down in feminine construction on the 18th British stage (the revered Sarah Siddons pictured below) and racial interpretations of Frankenstein's monster. But my lack of writing has dipped me into complete boredom concerning my daily life, increased anger towards my commute, and a minor monotonous dread of getting into the shower each morning. It also has me suffering from a bit of amnesia as to why I moved here. So, to cure this bordering-on-severe case of the doldrums, I need to force myself to get out this weekend and reinstate the flair, and I intend on doing so in a very physical fashion. I was reading in Time Out New York that there will be an indoor flea market, or rather, the Westbeth Beautification Committee's indoor yard sale, this Sunday between Washington and 11th, that is boasting of handmade sweaters, thrift store art, hats and records. This spurred me into happy thoughts of a weekend of thrifting (and studying...) including the possibility of a Saturday trip to Beacon's in search of some sparkling broaches and intricately patterned scarves.

Attempting to increase my personal panache has me thinking in particular of two very stylish women with loads of flair, who have really helped me embrace NYC living in their own subtle ways. So, my weekend post will be partly an homage to Denverette, aka Taryn, and Sophia. The former is a thrift-o-phile who is now thrilled to be back among antique clothing that is priced accordingly. Taryn, a 7-year Brooklynite, fled to Denver in July to find a warm home amidst kayaks, bike-riding, light rails, and most importantly, health--a state of being that this city often takes pains to prevent. No matter what city though, I don't believe she will ever shed the Brooklynesque attitude, her natural edge, her passion for Chanel. I met Taryn because she was my former manager in the editorial department at Saatchi; she now showcases her talents for the National Stroke Foundation over in Denver. Some of the many things I take from her style are Parisienne obsessions, which comes with a shared love of vino, royal blue leggings, A-line black dresses and jumpers and a vast assorment of great flats. Oh, and of course her cardigans and perfectly red hair.

And then there's Sophia, pictured above as a lobster. We met at Rutgers and lived in the same house junior and senior year. We watched Breakfast at Tiffany's for the first time together and both fell in love with Audrey. We had all night conversations about our callings in life which would more often than not result in monkey and gazelle imititations. After too long a lag in friendship--she moved to the East Village to pursue acting way before I left Jersey--we reunited as roomates again last year in Astoria, in an oft happy home with our kitty, sometimes called Lula. I now live across the street. Sophia is certainly someone who marches to her own beat, takes the road less traveled, throws caution to the wind to pursue her passions, and represents all other idioms of this sort. Style wise, she is infamous for her exotic arm and hand warmers and her bondage-like bracelets that she often wears behind the bar while charming the karaoke crowd at Planet Rose. I am indebted to Sophia for bringing flair and creativity into my life once again.

In a place where I am constantly bombarded by beautiful women on billboards, at bus stops, on busses and in busses; by skinny jeans and boots and boots and more boots and long legs, and haircuts that way exceed my budget, these two stand out to me as people who possess just a little bit more je ne sais quoi, mostly because of who they are and their ability to own their own choices. And enough so to inspire my own style. So guys, or technically gals...I dedicate my thrifting and my future broaches and scarves to you!