Seeking relief from the utter domination I suffered not only at the hands of the women in my family (mother and two sisters) but also at school (for a time the only male teacher was Mr. Bishop); my friends at LeConte Junior High School offered me something that was, for that time, an underdeveloped yet definitely needed male outlet. Though sometimes relating to other boys took some counterprogramming on my part.
I’ve been in the Natural Foods business for years, 16 of them in fact. It’s changed a lot; it’s become a lot more mainstream – now going to places like Whole Foods is for a lot of people like going to the mall. But it wasn’t always that way.
Health Food stores used to be the province of the hard-core health nut. I know, because I worked in one, a place in New York City called Perelandra, for four years in the late ‘90’s. It was a magnet for the neighborhood’s zombie-like ascetics who frequented the place (loyal customers though they were). Thin and drawn was the look of the Perelandral habitué (their appearance seemed to belie their whole healthy pursuit thing, no?). The severe ethos of many of these people worked on them like a social attrition, making them as demanding of us as they were on themselves. Read more
I worked hard and saved all my money to get into Pratt Institute. Even so, the vast majority of the tuition I had to funnel into that Brooklyn school of art and engineering was paid for by bank loans. Delayed a full semester by months of paperwork, I was pretty excited to get there in January of ’88. One cold weekend I settled into my new dorm.
I moved to New York to go (presumably) to Art School but as far as plans I hadn’t really figured anything out. I decided to just go there anyway and stay with my brother in Brooklyn, either forever, or temporarily, until something, some plan, coalesced.
I arrived in June of ’87 armed with a 4-foot steamer trunk, an art portfolio and vague plans to get my art together to show to the admissions department at Pratt Institute. Pretty quickly my brother disabused me of the permanent residency option.
This came a quite a shock to me; I guess I really HAD made plans after all (to crash on my brother’s floor in Boerum Hill until we were both old men). It turns out Luis had become the “plan coalescer” and I realized I had to get a job, and fast. Read more
Driving past another dead Blockbuster Video the other day made me think in general about the deaths of locally owned video stores a decade earlier and then, more specifically, the death of my own little store in Brooklyn. Far from celebrating the possible karmic backlash represented by the retail failure of a large company like that of Blockbuster (after they’d stomped on little mom and pop stores for years); I was actually in there a couple of weeks before they closed, stocking up on $1 DVDs.
For a few years in the early 90’s I worked at a video store in Brooklyn called Screen Memory. It, like thousands of other small businesses everywhere, had a stable core staff that at least for awhile, and only while they were still employed there, considered each other to be kind of like family.
7th Avenue, The Slope
Well, that is, a family that not only fought each other over the store remote, but also over shifts and assorted duties (like splitting up the cash deposits customers had to leave to become members). Many of us (except Bob, the general manager, who was REALLY religious) drank a little too much; every night after work was kind of like a weekend night for us.
It’s a well-known fact, and even a hoary cliché (which is I guess itself a cliché) that New York City is a gathering place for creative people who want to express themselves in a larger, more fertile setting. But there are places even within New York where that matriculation of talent is even more refined, places where Liberal Arts Majors from all over can find work. Examples include Perelandra Natural Foods, Ozzie’s Coffee, and a little (now defunct) video store called Screen Memory.
Living in Hollywood with a single mom who was trying to support herself and her three kids was hard; especially with all of the kids in school and a mother that was, by necessity, not home much of the time. Lucky for us, and due to our close residential proximity to Hollywood Boulevard, Uncle Mann really came in handy. Uncle Mann must have been a rich guy, after all he owned the 2 biggest, coolest theaters on the Boulevard. I assumed he must have owned all the rest too, the ones we passed daily walking back and forth to school.
My sister worked for him; so you could say that’s how we got in good. We spent hours on end, sometimes in a single day, fixated while Uncle Mann regaled us with Historical Dramas and Science fiction and Fantasy.
Going into a new school in a new city, state and way of life was not without its challenges, particularly for a 12 year old. Luckily, and almost right off the bat, I acquired the services of a motivational coach. Seeming to perceive my need, fellow student Shawn was obviously attracted to the pathos I projected. I was meek and scared, afraid of being picked on or beat up by some bigger kid, maybe even some messed up gang member. Shawn showed me right away that fears, like fairy tales, can sometimes come true.
When the Oscar’s come around I always think about how different that area used to be when I lived there. The Kodak Theater is the site of the Oscar Awards and has been for 10 or so years. A visit back there 3 years ago was surprising for me because the only thing I remembered was the Chinese Theater (the core of which is largely the same).
It’s become a hoary cliché that New York tears itself down continually, disrespectful of its past (i.e. Penn Station), but this 2-block segment in Hollywood did the same thing; in this case maybe it was a good idea.
Boarded up building, parking lot, theater, parking lot; no wait…
Even at a very young age I knew I wanted to be multilingual, or at least bilingual. Having finally learned enough of my own language, by the 8th Grade I was able to take a foreign language class. I chose Spanish, mostly because I had several friends I could practice with. But I was already learning bits of different languages from kids around my school. I asked around avidly because what I really wanted was to be able to curse fluently in any country in the world.