Not Buying It

by Judith Levine

  Commercial tenants suffer the same fate. The storefronts whose low rents drew young Manhattan sous-chefs now command—thanks in part to their restaurants—four to five times the rents they did in 1997. In the shops, well-designed quasi-useful items have replaced utilitarian ones—housewares pushing out hardware, shoe stores stepping over shoe repair, “vintage” clothing hanging on the racks where plain old used clothing could once be bought for a song. The scruffy miscellany that filled every third storefront a decade ago has been packed up and moved farther into the boroughs, or sold by the pound. Among the victims of this process is an intermittently open business, run by an intermittently attentive purveyor of Brooklyn memorabilia, old sheet music, and vintage posters with the emphasis on grade-C monster movies and racy women’s prison films. A fixture on the street since the early 1980s, the shop was called Main Street Ephemera.

  Consumption, say Douglas and Isherwood, is an instrument that both confers social privilege and effects social exclusion. On Smith Street, consuming is fun and funky, tasteful and tasty. But the system inside which it works can also be powerfully cruel.

  Paul and I emerge from the diesel fumes at the other end of the Manhattan Bridge pedestrian walkway, and the air turns redolent of pork. I am excited, but also a little sad. Sad because our weekly jaunts to Chinatown for greens, fish, dried mushrooms, and soy products have always been forages for street food, too. We have sampled all manner of fried and stuffed dough, as well as a less appealing class of edible featuring gelatinous substances inside inedible grasses. But the all-time prize, which we seek out on each visit, is what we call the “green bun,” a spongy white-flour roll stuffed with mustard greens fried in hot sesame oil. There is only one Green Bun Lady, stationed in front of the mall tucked under the Manhattan Bridge, selling everything on her cart at the low, low price of $1. In fact, almost everything in Chinatown can be had for $1—a pound of long beans, a windup bathtub frog, a plush slipper ($2 a pair).

  Usually we buy two green buns, share one, eat it in haste, then put the other away to avoid repenting of our impatience later. Now, having eliminated street food as Not Necessary, we pass the Green Bun Lady’s table without stopping and make our way to the supermarket at the back of the mall. I feel in my stomach a wistfulness where the green bun would have been.

  Inside the noisy supermarket, my mood brightens. As always, we are the only Caucasians in the store. No one speaks English except the schoolgirls working the cash registers, and many of the food labels on the shelves are in Mandarin, Korean, or Vietnamese. We skip the zillion prepared sauces that baffle our Western palates with minutely differentiated grades of heat and what sometimes tastes to us like spoilage. I select one of the soy sauces, which are equally numerous and varied, on the basis of its attractive yellow label. We pay $19 and haul out three bags of food (the bill never comes to more than $25). It’s as if we’ve just flown to Beijing, but saved the $900 airfare.

  Walking westward, we stop at the Thai Grocery on Mosco Street for hot basil, lime leaves, lemongrass, sweet black rice, and fresh-frozen coconut milk. My consumer desires this year are all channeled into food. I hope I don’t get fat.

  Well, I think, as we approach tourists’ Chinatown, one thing I won’t consume: “bubble tea,” cafés dedicated to which have proliferated since our last expedition. Bubble tea originated in Taiwan, but it resembles a sweet Southeast Asian milk drink; it is served hot or cold, with or without a scoop of tapioca pearls, or “bubbles”—pronounced “bobos” by the waitstaff—that float to the bottom like rubber-cement roe and are sucked along with the drink through an extra-wide straw. The bubbles appeal to the pan-Asian taste for savorless, toothsome culinary elements. The teas’ colors are the soft pastel of Japanese teen apparel; their flavors are named for a catalogue of the teas, beans, and fruits of the northeast Pacific, many of which are exotic to Western drinkers—but bubble tea is as comfortingly bland as frozen custard from an American roadside stand.

  The arrival of this odd and delicious beverage is one more bit of evidence that the worse things get for the rest of the world, the better they get for this city’s diners: each famine, war, or economic catastrophe abroad brings a new food or cuisine to New York. But unlike the stews of sauced gristle and chicken feet being served to the elderly Chinese along East Broadway, bubble tea is a global citizen. It poured into town with the latest, immense wave of Asian immigration. And like the kids clustering around these café tables, sporting post-punk haircuts and tattoos, text-messaging ceaselessly and chattering in Spanglish, Korenglish, and Chinglish spiked with words likechill andmad, bubble tea assimilated in a New York minute.

  After two months in Hardwick, it’s exhilarating just to be on the street. Around us commerce clangs, spices sting the nostrils. Inspecting the merchandise overflowing onto the sidewalks and hanging from the awnings of the souvenir shops, I note this year’s Thing, an embroidered silk handbag in any of a hundred fabrics and color combinations, available in every store for $10 to $15. I’d love one of those handbags, which would add just the splash to refresh my spring look. But I can’t take the street home with me today. There will be no spring look for me this year.

  We pause to wait for the green light on the median halfway across Confucius Square. “So how are you feeling about the project so far?” Paul asks.

  I put down the canvas bag, which suddenly feels heavier for the plainness of its contents. Part of me feels relieved not to be indulging thoughtlessly in the fruits of the world’s poverty (though we have already gathered groceries whose prices depend on cheap immigrant labor). An equal part feels severed from my city, not to say from the world. The traffic is loud; I wait for a lull in the honking. “So far,” I answer, “I’m appreciating all the wonderful things there are to buy.”

  MARCH 7

  For vicarious pleasure, or perhaps in anticipation of next year, I clip restaurant reviews and take them out from time to time to reread, returning like a regular to my favorite spots. Marian Burros praises Bread Tribeca: “Every neighborhood would be lucky to have a place like it, where the dress code is immaterial for patrons and waiters alike, and people who linger over a cup of coffee and the paper in the middle of the afternoon are not shooed out.”

  Not patronizing cafés, bars, or restaurants has made social life, and especially business life, awkward. In Vermont in winter, with two feet of snow on the ground, you can’t exactly hold a meeting on a park bench. Paul has timed get-togethers not to coincide with meals and engineered the occasional brown bag lunch in a conference room. I don’t have much business to conduct there, but I’ll have to face the problem here. I’m not looking forward to finessing this aspect of Not Buying It.

  But reading the review, I realize I’m forfeiting more than convenience. I’m losing conviviality and communion, which is a lubricant for dealmaking both professional and personal. Without the glass of wine or cup of coffee, the meeting—and its participants—can’t help but be all business. At the same time, if forced to meet at someone’s home, which Paul has sometimes done, it’s hard to maintain any businesslike distance; the level of intimacy can feel too high.

  The café is a uniquely urban amenity, offering a uniquely urban pleasure: to work, eat, read, daydream, or observe others doing the same, unknown but seen, private in public. The city allows anonymous intimacies of every intensity—from sidewalk glances to barroom confessions to backroom sex. This version, coffee and the newspaper among friendly strangers, is safe and solitary; compared to sex in a bar, it is frigid. Paul doesn’t particularly miss it; not being a city native, he’s enjoyed transporting our country custom of at-home dinners with friends to the city. Yet I find myself yearning for the time I’ll again sit at a side table and sip, consuming cool intimacies.

  MARCH 13

  Organizing our cultural life around one primary criterion—“Does it cost anything?”—we seize on a too-little-tapped venue of entertainment, the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. The li
brary, where I’m already a regular patron, has many things to recommend it besides being free. It is ten minutes by bike from our house. It is open late almost every night. And you don’t have to dress for events there. Due to underfunding of both library and users, the look is shabby chic, with the emphasis on shabby.

  Today, Saturday, the place is ababble with immigrants from even more severely underfunded countries, lapping up America’s comparative plenty. They are using the computers, reading to or scolding their kids or helping them balance circus-act stacks of children’s books on the way to the checkout counter. In the Multilingual Room, languages from Swahili to Croatian are represented on the shelves, and from the round wooden tables rise shy and halting conversations in accented Spanish and English. Next week, Paul will join the free Italian group.

  Like the room’s bookshelves, the library’s films and reading series are themed by identity: last month was Black History Month; March is Women’s History Month; April, National Poetry Month. The turning carousel of honored identities and genres constitutes a kind of fashion—first African-Americans are “in,” then women—if a somewhat dowdy one. But it also allows the library to introduce patrons to the likes of James Baldwin and Dorothy Dandridge. For me this year, hungry for any fashion whatever, it offers a series of “new seasons.”

  I browse the French section and come across Michel Houellebecq’sLes Particules Elémentaires, which caused a scandal in France a few years ago, not for its graphically misogynistic sex but for its finger-flip at the Sixties generation. I also check outAusterlitz, by W. G. Sebald, named one of the best books of 2001. How many good books got by me three years ago? Eliminate the top layer of entertainment and you discover stratum upon stratum of art buried under the fast-falling sediment of the popular culture. The library’s budget can’t keep up. The busy videotape room is heavy on the classics, which are not only crowd-pleasers but cheap. I snap upThe Little Foxes. While I’m at it, why notNow, Voyager, with its famous erotic cigarette-lighting motif. I suggest to Paul that we kick off a Bette Davis retrospective.

  Before leaving the library, I stop once more at the New Fiction shelf and discoverShe Is Me, by Cathleen Schine. I’ve read the review, so I know the book is about a young woman caring for her dying mother while trying to write a contemporary film adaptation ofMadame Bovary. This inspires me to borrowMadame Bovary as well, a novel I have not read since high school, and then only because somebody told me it was dirty. Maybe this time I’ll find the sexy parts. Or kick off a Flaubert retrospective.

  When we get home we eat a quick stir-fry and hurry to Manhattan to attend the one play left from last year’s subscription to the New York Theater Workshop. It’s Paul Rudnick’sValhalla. Funny—how can the lisping fairy king Ludwig of Bavaria not be funny?—but the play has its longeurs. It’s another not-so-hot play in a dull season at NYTW. Still, I’m glad I saw it.

  Before bed, I peek intoShe Is Me. Flaubert can wait. It’s not just because I love Schine’s work. I want to read the book for the same reason I wanted to see Rudnick’s play. While I don’t keep tabs on much of what goes by in the mainstream media parade (I’m ignorant, for instance, of bestselling books and first-run thrillers and weepies), I am avid to read, see, taste—to be alive in—the contemporary culture. I want to readShe Is Me because it is new.

  MARCH 15

  I want to read it because it is new. Ineed to read it because it is new. Needing the stimulation of contemporary culture is one reason I tell Paul I could not live in Vermont full time. I don’t say I want it. I always say Ineed it. An informed person like meneeds to see new art, new films. It’s not so different from the fashionable person whoneeds to wear this year’s skirt length. Or a teenager whoneeds to download this minute’s music.

  The job of consumer culture (and all culture, in order to see the light of day, must be to some extent commercial culture) is to blur the line between need and want. A poster for Target Stores that is plastered all over the subways this month plays explicitly along this line. The picture is an Exquisite Corpse–like photomontage of a woman’s head, the upper half of which is a lampshade of ivory satin, deeply ruched, a bit of twenty-first-century Victorian kitsch. “The lampshade you need,” the copy says. The lower half of the montage is the woman’s face from bridge of nose to sly smile to slender throat, around which is tied a small scarf in a Fiftiesesque green-and-white circle pattern: “The scarf you want.” But because the scarf is a ladylike trifle that wouldn’t keep a lady warm in Mississippi in June, and because the shade seems designed to trap dust in its folds and turn gray and want disposal immediately, and because the lady is wearing the lampshade on her head, it’s hard to say which is practical and which frivolous, the scarf or the lampshade.

  We cannot see the model’s eyes, but she is winking at us. For both Target and the consumer know that outside the hard-knocks merchandise in the likes of theHardwick Gazette, almost nothing that is advertised is actually necessary.

  MARCH 20

  I’m on the street a lot, now that I’m not inside buying, eating, or watching, and I’m delighting in New York’s street life even more than usual. I’m also more aware of the peculiarity of the urban relationship and of its basic unit, the glance. “The psychological foundation upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli,” writes Georg Simmel in his great essay of 1903, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Most stimulating of all are the other people in the city: my individuality observes your individuality at the table beside me in the restaurant, rubs up against it in the subway, listens to it across the apartment airshaft in the middle of the night. And my individuality observes yours a thousand times a day, on the street.

  To look at others on the city street is to know (or to attempt or assume to know) them. But that communication, like a conversation between foreigners, is aided by interpreters: what the other person is eating, watching, reading, and most important, wearing.

  I can date almost exactly the moment I discovered the silent sidewalk chatter of clothing.

  In the Fifties and early Sixties, living in Queens, I’d been a baby beatnik in Beethoven sweatshirt; I assumed the look of my red-diaper-baby family friends and the kids at my Quaker summer camp. Then I moved to the suburbs, where junior high school demanded conformity, and attempted to emulate the penny-loafer-and-mohair-sweater-wearing cheerleaders. It was a period of howling sartorial ineptitude, mercifully brief.

  At fifteen, I was ready to return to myself. History helped. It was 1967 and a new genre of girl, update of the red-diaper-baby beatnik, emerged on the scene. I could be a hippie peacenik flower child and sexual revolutionary. To realize the last part, I’d need only convince a boy to participate.

  I went directly to the Different Drummer on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The store sold bell-bottoms and Indian shirts, bedspreads, incense, sealing wax, and jingly silver jewelry from India; it smelled of patchouli and mothballs, the scent of Nirvana. There I bought a pair of wide-wale brown corduroy hip-huggers and a translucent embroidered Indian tunic (the kind they’re now selling at Macy’s for $45). The next week I walked up a narrow flight of stairs to a no-name loft on the Lower East Side, where the clothing lay unironed and unsorted in heaps, as if it had just come from Goodwill with a quick stop at the fumigator on the way. I dragged out an Afghan sheepskin coat with so much of the Afghan sheep left in it that my mother made me hang it outside the door. At a head shop on Astor Place, I selected a pair of rose-colored granny glasses and a jar of tiny colored beads, which I took home and strung. The necklace emphasized my fragile, teenage clavicles and tickled my braless décolletage.

  Donning my new clothes, along with a peace-sign button from the Student Peace Union, I walked down Astor Place. It was as if I had donned the tartan of a clan or the headdress of a tribe: my fellows recognized me, and I do meanfellows. Suddenly, I could glance at a boy and the boy would glance back, kn
owingly. I had purchased a costume for the performance of my self, stepped onstage, and was illuminated. Through buying, I became identifiable to others—and visible to myself.

  Today you’ll find me in my black, oddly shaped Alain Mikli eyeglasses and my Ibex jacket from the Athleta catalogue, which caters to women who want high-performance athletic wear that also looks right in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The jacket cost $150 (on sale), the glasses more than $350. But the price tags aren’t the point. These are not wealth symbols or even status symbols; I wear them with a flea market scarf and scuffed sneakers.

  In the city, every one of these nuances speaks. The refinement of individual tastes feeds the urban merchant in pursuit of new customers, says Simmel. In turn, his merchandise feeds that refinement, encouraging increasingly extravagant eccentricity and the competitive sport of “ ‘being different’—of making oneself noticeable.” If our identities are socially constructed, then in capitalism they are commercially constructed. My clothes are tropes of the selectively fashionable, rurally urban, wholesomely hip, ironically butchy heterosexual outdoorsy brainiac that I am. (Marketers: note profile.) People call the glasses my “signature” accessory. Alain Mikli signs my name, tells the world who I am.

  MARCH 22

  In a year without shopping, will I lose my self, and in so doing, my connection to others?

  I pass the Video Corner next to the bank on Court Street, where for two weeks there’s been a poster in the window forLost in Translation: Bill Murray sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in a kimono, unshaved, unkempt, despondent.