That was the Week that was

We have reached the end of "Staten Island's Hidden Treasures Week" on NY1, an admirable attempt to promote little-known aspects of the borough.

Unfortunately, their attempt to battle anti-Statenism was overshadowed by the Island's more recent turmoil. When NY1 ran a promo, "Learn about Staten Island's best-kept secrets!" people in the newsroom joked, "You mean Vito Fossella's love child?"

Oh well. Let's take a quick look at the stories of "Staten Island's Hidden Treasures Week."

On Monday, they profiled the Jacques Marchais Museum of Tibetan Art, a premier Orientalist art collection and an incongruous taste of a Lhasa Buddhist temple in the middle of a Staten Island neighborhood. Can't wait to visit this one.

On Tuesday, they profiled an interesting neighborhood shrine, the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Grotto in Rosebank. In 100 years, generations of Italian-Americans have contributed to the site.

On Wednesday, they profiled a big glacial rock - old river sediment in Dongan Hills from millions of years ago. This probably would have made a better print story than TV segment (there's only so many seconds you can look at a gray rocky loaf on the TV screen), but I admire the series for not just profiling consumable traits of the borough.

Thursday's story, arguably the most interesting, profiled View Recording Studios in my neighborhood, St. George, which started out as the office of Remedy of Wu-Tang Clan fame, and now offers cheap recording space for budding hip-hop artists. No doubt about it - ARTISTS NEED LOW RENTS FOR THEIR CREATIVE SPACES!

Friday's story was not as dynamic, although the subject matter is arguably the most dynamic - human migration! which is studied at the St. Charles Mission Center in Dongan Hills.

More dire stories grabbed people's attention in this bloodstained week of city neighborhood shootings and a crane collapse. A shooting in Tompkinsville (2 miles from my house!) injured two teens, and the party endorsements of professional rich guy and Republican Frank Powers and Democratic City Councilman Michael McMahon as candidates for congressman, and the fact that not everyone's happy with those decisions.

Lastly, I stayed up way too late last night watching "Häxan" (1922), an extremely bizarre Scandinavian documentary on medieval and Renaissance witchcraft trials. It combines the grimy lyricism of "The Passion of St. Joan of Arc" with the delirious theatricality of Georges Melies's cardboard circus films. An old woman births carnivalesque chimera of felt and feathers! Old crones kiss a papier-mache demon's rump! Satan bleeds and cooks a jiggling rubber unchristened baby! (Startling images, like the Russian baby "burned" alive by medieval German Catholics in Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky.") The director used an eldery mental patient to play the part of an accused goodwife, to knock us over the head with the fact that mental institutions = the Inquisition's torture rooms!

Watch the film on YouTube - it's divided into 11 parts, and the first part is here. It gets weirder as you go on.

Witchcraft trials have very little to do with Staten Island (the Dutch weren't witch-crazy like the English and their Puritans), but P. T. Barnum exhibited a tableau of the "Witch of Staten Island," and earlier this year, some Staten Islanders showed a severe fear of Wiccans.

Yes, we don't have no Bookstores!

Ah, the power of the double negative!

One day earlier this month I was innocently Googling, when I came across this bastard who claimed that Staten Island "doesn't seem to have any bookstores."

Let me prove that blatant anti-Statenism wrong! 

A ten-minute walk from my house, down scenic tree-lined St. Mark's Place to Bay Street, is Every Thing Goes Book Café, which is a combo coffee shop/performance space/bookstore that brings me back to my former hometown of Northampton, Mass. (or as Newsweek profiled it in 1993, "Lesbianville, USA"), right down to the Celtic warbles of Loreena McKennitt played over the P.A. 

On first sight, the round tables and organic muffin counter with a tea leaf menu look like it's just a coffee shop, with the few bookcases on the back wall looking as ornamental as the locally-produced paintings that hang on the wall. But go up the backstairs, and one realizes that the entire ground floor of the house is a bookstore, with a surprising range of subjects and relatively obscure titles (two that caught my eye on my first visit were a "History of Gesture" and the libretto to Philip Glass's "Satyagraha," which had as a momento/bookmark a polaroid of a straight-out-of-the-'70s dude with afro and plaid shirt. 

The back room also contains an impressive amount of 12-inch records, VHS cassette tapes, old newsprint-paged comic books, even abandoned family photos - all sorts of ephemera! My sentimental self has a great fondness for that sort of thing. 

Yet ANOTHER aspect which I liked was the store's back yard! - several wooden patio chairs and metal-grille tables set by a wall covered with ivy, a steep hill covered with saplings and bushes, and all under the shade of maple strees. When I went there with my friend Everett, we sat and threw dried maple seeds at each other in helicopter-spirals while hearing the birds call. Pleasantly surprised to find a taste of suburbia in the five boroughs, he half-jokingly asked me, "We're in New York City?"

They claim to be Staten Island's biggest used bookstore, and so far I would believe them. My only complaint is that their dreadlock-cap and loose-skirt wearing waitstaff/cashiers are more adept at running a café than ringing up the books. I found it hard to find prices marked in their books, and I haven't heard back from them in almost two weeks after they promised to call me about the price of "Satyagraha." Oh well, I own too many books anyway, and Every Thing Goes also offers performances, lectures, act auctions, and is associated with three other collectively-owned businesses: a thrift clothing store, a thrift furniture store, and an antiques gallery, all within the St. George neighborhood. More on this place to come.

I also read in yesterday's Staten Island Advance that there is another bookstore opening today in Stapleton, a neighborhood just south of St. George...

Bent Pages - a woman-owned, feminist-friendly establishment that offers books by women authors, LGBTQ-related tomes, and overall progressive titles. The Victorian storefront is apparently painted purple. Good luck to the owners of Bent Pages, for adding one more bookstore to an Island that's bound to have lots more unexpected boons.

"Welcome to the Staten Island Ferry"

Finally, something to write about beyond navel-contemplation! My previous attempt on more Biblical matters may still be maintained... but the building of the Holy Tabernacle is hard to get through.

I have lived on Staten Island since the beginning of this month, and I am in the middle of a rosy honeymoon with "The Forgotten Borough," "The Other White Borough," "Staten Italy," "Lacosanostralia," ... "Shaolin," if you're a Wu-Tang fan. You got any more nicknames?

Personally, I prefer "Staaten Eylandt," the first European name given to the Island by Henry Hudson in 1609, in honor of the Dutch Republic's parliament. Take that, "sweet land of liberty" - Staten Island's got you beat by 150 years. Then along came the imperialist English, who renamed the county for the Duke of Richmond, bastard son of the King's and not of the Queen's, and nephew of the Duke of York (who as King was deposed by a constitutional Dutch monarch... so the Dutch got their revenge).

As for the Bronck's, that honors a Dutch plantation owner, and Breukelen is a Dutch town (which according Wikipedia's OGG pronunciation almost sounds Scottish - 'Brrrrrooklin"). And Manahatta - "Place of [Indigenous] Drunkenness?" C'mon...

Now, enough of nomenclature. 

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I love the Staten Island Ferry - the lumbering, even-keeled Janus who intakes and spews innumerable commuters and tourists through its dual cloacae. 

The best seat on the ferry is the upper balcony facing towards the departing shore (they won't let you sit on the balcony facing the approaching shore). Not all nine ferries have this feature - the late-night tiny ferry "John A. Noble" has no outdoor seating. By the time it's 2 a.m., 99% of the passengers are tired commuters in various levels of sobriety who could give a $#!† about the Statue of Liberty.

But, oh, when you have that seat on the upper balcony, like I did tonight... you have a 180˚ view of New York Harbor unfolding before you. The heated, jeweled diadem that is Manhattan, with lit pearl strands topping the bridges extending to Brooklyn, the sleeping, dull masses of Ellis Island and Governor's Island, the spotlighted, looming Statue of Liberty all recede behind wrinkled night waters.

So far, the ferry rides have been very gentle and steady, but seeing the bright orange railing slightly wobble before me at the jiggling butt end of the ferry while I ate plantain chips made me think of a cheap virtual ride, shaking you to simulate a space launch.

I love riding outdoors. I prefer the constant splatter of sideways rain, the common anxiety of fifty tourists taking pictures of the same green statue, and my jiggling leg and fingernail-gnawing hands steadied by the loud belch of the ferry siren and the dull vibrations of the engines' "magic fingers." Cheap hotel bed massages are here for free - no quarter necessary!

And then finally the engines shut off,  leaving that last smooth glide into the harbors, when the ferry sometimes crunches into the wooden sides of the ferry dock. It's like a pissed-off toddler parked the boat. Everyone anxiously gathers in front of the cloaca, just as they gather in front of the terminal doors, despite guaranteed seats for even the slowpokes. The vast steel ramps screech down to the ferry's lower balcony and release a rusty sigh as the riders burst forth.

This blog will contain my reactions to Staten Island. I intend to get to know most of it. Stay tuned.