June 14, 2004 - 2:37 p.m.
Howdy pardners, I did indeed go to the Big Barbeque Thing yesterday in Madison Square Park. I'm actually glad no one ended up coming with me (no, really) because it was super mobbed and irritating and by the time I got there at four (blame the MTA) they had stopped selling the food tickets you needed to get access to the long lines potentially still offering food. It's hard to beat me down though folks. First I faced a fire on the F Train track, then the F running on the G unannounced, then inaccessible food. But I overcame. I found a shady teenager selling tickets and got six dollars worth. Then I found the shortest line and got some beef brisket from Kansas City. This was definitely in the dry rub camp. Course, with all the fat it gets pretty moist anyway. All the barbeque was served with potato bread and pickles, and each booth had only one specialty. It was super tender and good for a brisket. I sat in the sort of "backstage" area and ate it, behind Mitchell's BBQ, and they were all wearing those Big Mac overalls I used to have when I used to dress like a...actually, god knows what I thought I was dressing like back then. So apparently earlier in the day they had entire pigs on their grills, and actually there seemed to be one pig still cooking but it was all closed up in the smoker. And then by skulking around back there I was able to espy that one of the vendors had started taking cash for food instead of tickets. So I scurried on over there. This was KC style ribs (sauced) from Blue Smoke, in, um, New York City. Well, but, I bet it was much cheaper than in the restaurant ($6) and by that point I just wanted ribs and didn't care.
I wasn't surprised, because the whole thing was put on by Danny Meyer, but the whole affair was pretty contrived. There was this blues music going on with those washed-up state fair type acoustics going on, you know the kind, and just lines everywhere, and angry hungry snobby people, and just this overall faux authenticity foodie stuff that I always think I'll like but then bites me in the butt. Like I can really tell good ribs from bad. Then those little $6 grazing portions. I'm more of a gorger than a grazer, personally. I think at the very end they started giving the food away for free, but I wasn't up to facing the melee. Maybe next year that would be the right tactic.
Then I wandered westward, to see what I could see, and fell in to the back end of the lowest-rent Chelsea Flea lot. Like basically it's a dumpster with francophone africans sitting in it. I guess that's the cool part of going to a crappy ass flea in New York instead of the many other crappy ass fleas I've been to. The people there are just soo multinational and soo bizarre. Then because I'm a late riser and a late bloomer and generally just late I'm always there at the end of the day. The good stuff's been bought, the rest is scattered and shopped and broked, and everybody's cranky and packing up. There's a certain beauty to it that I can experience for a few precious moments, just before the allergy attack and the pathetic bottom-feeding feelings begin. I think I like the photos best. They sort of slip in everywhere, especially at the end of the day. Open up a silver box and it just contains a piece of chandlier and a japanese postcard of people eating dinner. There's a table that's mostly empty except for a tiny black and white snapshot of a house. Look into the album and some people took a trip to DC in the 70's and later they made enlargements of 80's portraits and that one black guy was still posing silly ten years later and you wonder just what the story is with him and the lady and the other guy. After you've read that other book I told you about you should check out "Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash." It's not heavy on the theory and there's lots of stuff you might want to know about in there, mostly about the kind of stuff people used to save and/or scavenge. Maybe I should write a book about flea market people. They are really really strange. I think I must be getting more and more normal as the years pass because I used to want to be one myself and now the idea makes me want to curl up and die. Although I'm still pretty scroungy, I have to admit. The only stuff I really want is the kind of stuff you just sort of pick up for free. One picture, one swizzle stick, one ragged handkerchief, with like a picture of a dancing ham on it or something.
