UP FRONT

By Richard Mandel
Editor in Chief

The Bling-Bling in Winter

The last days of 2002 found me in New York City. There was a family gathering, a celebration, happily; so it was pack-the-car-and-go, an 8-hour jaunt with the missus, the 5-year-old son, and the before-mentioned Cousin Marty (who left a trail of business cards across several states, in an attempt to garner more connections). During the hours not spent with the relatives in the wilds of Flatbush, we took the subway twice into Manhattan, to join the other shopping lemmings.

If you’ve never journeyed to the Big Apple, it may be best described as the living, breathing physical embodiment of the Internet, though with better food. Anything you want can be bought, sold, researched and explored in New York. There is an avenue, for example, on the lower end of the island appropriately named Canal Street. The moniker is apropos when you view it as a man-made causeway for commerce. At 1300 hours on a Sunday, all manner and description of humanity was cheek-by-jowl with each other, crowding the sidewalks and stalls, examining the wares, seething up and down the street. Watches. Clothing accessories. Toys. Tattooing equipment. Gimcracks and gewgaws. The cheap and the tawdry, the elegant and expensive, rude and intriguing, mirroring the onlookers in their jeans, furs, leather and baseball caps. A friend will tell you where the best bargains are to be found, as they would email you with the latest URL to check out. There are even pop-ups, the guys shouting, “You like? Five dollar!” Or the other gent, standing just off the curbside — “Hey, check out my watches! I gotchure bling-bling right here!” (Your jewelry, your flash, according to my local translator) Like the Internet, there is the dubiously legal on Canal Street, as we walked past two setups in short succession, conning the gullible into games of cup-and-ball, the conjurors performing within tens of feet from bored traffic cops looking the other way. You pays your money, you takes your chances, says the man. It’s gritty and visceral, with people crouched in doorways eating steaming rice and vegetables from paper bowls with ivory chopsticks, and pushcart vendors charging two bucks for a giant pretzel heated over charcoal on a cold December afternoon as the steam rises from manhole covers. So recharged, I return to the realm of e-bay and online for another year.

However, we did not go to see the site of the late World Trade Center. The natives informed me that it’s now just a large hole in the ground, a subject of debate as to its future use. I was more transfixed by an 8 x 10 photo in the cousin’s dining room, one I took the weekend they were married over 13 years ago. She is standing on a concrete bench, to gain height on her beau so that their faces can be on the same plane. Behind them, less than 100 yards across the plaza, are the modified arch windows we all saw standing empty after 9/11, the last remnants of the mighty façades. It’s hard to view the picture without the haunting overlay.

Back near Canal Street was an old brick building, maybe six stories tall, emblazoned with the message, “Grand Machinery Exchange – Machine Tools – Entire Plants Bought & Sold.” The painted letters are decades old in style, yet appear to be kept freshly applied. The subtext we might draw from such a message is a reminder that scavengers have existed for a long time — because there is always something for them on which to feed. Rises and falls are cyclic, and industry in America is not gone, not just yet. As the character Chauncey Gardner observed in the film, “Being There,” ‘Winter is followed by spring, then summer,’ which became an arboreal metaphor for American business. We’ve still got plenty of bling-bling in our pocket, but it’s useless unless we learn how to use it wisely.