Why Malls are Doomed

I think I've managed to avoid my local mall for months, straight through shopping season.  I've missed so many new things there! 

Like the takeover of digital displays. Big video screens now hang from the mall ceilings, designed to attract the attention of your seven remaining idle neurons.  I caught a flash of Joe Biden and John Hamm trying to tell me something on my way from Lord and Taylor's to Macy's.  Don't ask me what, but I think it was some kind of public service announcement.  Another time, on another screen, it was just more advertising; something to remind you of the shopping possibilities you were missing just ten stores away, down the escalator.

Be where you actually are?  So over, even in transit.

 

Retail marketers have to catch us on the run because they know that the second we stop, we're gone... into the rabbit hole of our own private little screens. (Where of course, micro advertising videos are also queued up...) I checked mine to review my text messages, and Lord and Taylor, with yesterday's "up to 75% off" offer, did its job, diverting me from my original objective -- Macy's.  Following the text's link to the mobile site, the store looked like it had the necessary selection.

So I started my hunt -- for men's winter pajamas  -- on the lower floor of Lord & Taylor's, or, as we like to call it in my house, Gott un Schneider's.  

Now I wonder if men even sleep in matching pajamas anymore.  All of L&T's men's pajamas, half off a week past Christmas, were sold by the top or bottom.  And all of them with downscaled upscale logos; Polo players and Nautica sails or Reebock and Calvin. 

Reverse snobs like my husband and me, we don't believe in logos; we don't like to buy ready-to-wear advertising.  Neither do we want winter pjs in fleece (too warm) or short sleeves (too cold). Nor are  we happy to pay twice for one pair of pajamas.  And finally, did all of northern NJ's medium-size dads get pajamas for Christmas or Hanukkah?  And did all of the smaller or larger guys sleep in their skivvies?  'Cause they left all their pajamas in the stores. Except for the fleece and the techie winter camping fabrics, that's all there was; smalls, large, and 2x, 3x, and 4x large. So I exit L&T.

I figured solidly middle-class Macy's would stock medium-sized pajamas, and maybe even in sets. Wrong. Same separate top and bottom Calvins and Ralph Laurens, same logos, at less discount. Same techie thermals and fleecy pants; a few hanging sets of plaid flannel pjs in two colors and all sizes but M.

I decided to abandon all hope of cool. I headed for Sears. 

Sears had the sets, by Hanes, in flannel.  But again, not the size.  Sears also had doors to the parking lot, where a sudden and blinding snow was now in progress. Panicking, I took a Large and resolved to take them in -- remember, I sew -- before coming to my senses.  Then I found and grabbed a flannel bottom in medium with a print I knew my husband would not be embarrassed to wear.  I found a non-techie shirt, also medium, that in a pinch could pass for sleepwear. 

I got on a short check-out line of retirees.  When it came my turn the cashier apologized for her point-of-sale terminals, which always slow down, she said, when it snows.  Then she asked me if I wanted a Sears charge card, for fifteen dollars off, and swore it would only take two minutes.  Name, address, phone, driver's license, do we own/rent our home, and estimated household income, please.  I still wanted to pay cash.  She forgot and added the 5% for using the new credit account; that took extra time.  Somehow I had to reenter name, address phone, driver's license, etc. 

I consulted my Android again, this time for weather.  Would it pay to wait for the white-out to clear?  In addition to the local weather, Google also took it upon itself to tell me how long it would take to drive home at that moment, show me my parking space on the map, other nearby attractions, and six other places selling men's winter pajamas.

The cashier apologized again, told me she could help me order a medium pajama set from another store, and it would be shipped home with no shipping charge.   She said she would take my cash and pay the credit card balance with it, in a few more minutes.  But the terminal was working very slowly, and I had reached the limit of my limited patience. She swore I would get my bill in the mail, with all the discounts. 

By this time, the snow had let up a bit.  And two ordering screens were on the floor right nearby, for the convenience and comfort (chairs and desks, back to back!) of frustrated brick-and-mortar shoppers. With free shipping, to boot. So I sat down and searched for the pjs myself.  The online system turned up sets of Hanes flannels, medium, in several colors.  It even accepted Paypal, just like home. Which all went to show me, shopping for a commodity I wasn't even trying on, the utter stupidity of driving to a mall in the first place.  

Another Curves Flattens

 My local Curves is closing. The women I meet there or elsewhere in town greet each other with, "Did you get the letter?" We shake heads and shrug.

The letter came from Kathryn, who's had this location for 13 years, absorbing orphans from closing branches for miles around.  It was beautifully written; a real heart tugger.  Seems that Curves Corporate has gone and bought Jennie Craig or maybe vice versa, and now insists that Kathryn sells Jenny Craig food alongside the workout memberships.  That's not something Kathryn, who's always recommending particular fish oils, moisturizers and green cleaning products, wants to do.  Even if she did, she'd have to move: Curves/Jenny Craig cannot be located next door to a Weight Watchers, and that's where this Curves is, sharing the same entryway. Some of us just go out one door and in the other. She's got to be out by the end of the month; lock, stock and stations.

The franchise fees were squeezing her anyway.  Corporate was also giving her flack for the posters she put up, the suction-cup dartboard, the little personalizations she chose.  Moe, her little Pekinese, probably wasn't Curves-approved, either. He ran right through the circuit, or sat on his little throne by the front desk, and nobody complained.

I bet Jillian Michaels, the skinny video bitch with the low-rise spandex capris,  was another corporate directive.  That started this year, with a big Jillian Michaels Curves poster on the wall in the entryway.  For an hour several times a week, instead of the faceless but caring "change stations now" lady who reminded us to switch every half a minute and periodically counted out ten seconds for us to check our pulse, we got Jillian, who told us how she knew we wanted high, sculpted booties, because that's what she wanted.

I hear she got paid nine million to make those monthly videos,  most of them something out of professional cheerleader practice. And no pulse checks, since Jillian didn't actually give a crap if you stroked out and died on the mat. I think she actually made the attending employees nervous; they didn't really want to have to break out the defibrillator.

I didn't even do Jillian's "modified" versions for elderly slackers. My feeling was, If I wanted to do exercise videos I could go home and dust off Jane Fonda; my VHS player still works.  Jillian drew in a few fresh faces, some under-50s, but I tried to avoid her times of the week. I got used to the Zumba sessions -- especially the low-impact one -- but I drew the limit there.

We now have at least six different fitness chains to choose from around here, but none of them are women-only. None have all their machines face into a circle, none have lilac walls, or local crafts or sparkly baseball caps to buy, and none exhibit much of any personality.  Most of all, none of them have the familiar faces and relaxed, among-friends conversation of the women I've been stepping and pumping and bending among for five years -- women whose names I may not remember, but whose stories I do. 

And everyone knows it.  "It's the camaraderie," Sandy says, she of the "3400 " pasted over her head shot on the wall, for 3400 visits. With the faint British accent, Sandy is our most prominent personality, comes up with the bawdiest comments and jokes, gets the most laughs and gives the most hugs.  There's Angela, who's daughter is getting married next month; I know that the catering hall she picked lets you bring your own meatballs.  And Ellie, who's traveled everywhere and volunteers at a help desk in the airport, at international arrivals.  And Sheila, the snow bird, who happens to be a close friend of the mother of a guy I knew all through high school, college and after. Retired and not-yet-retired nurses, teachers, librarians.  And me, the work-at-home, happy for face-to-face interaction at the start of the day.

We Curves customers are not taking this lying down, though.  Annie, one of the long-time employees properly lauded in the farewell letter, has already gotten proposals from several other gyms that would like our collective business.  She's organized a meeting with the local Planet Fitness a week from Monday to see what they'll do for us; many of us have said we'll be there.  But they're a huge ugly warehouse with TVs, no improvement over the corny country music, Beatles medleys and neighborhood news and opinion I've been hearing at Curves for five years. LA Fitness might be nice... with a pool.  I sure would like to see us move en masse.  Maybe they'd line the machines up in a circle?  Then something has to make a noise every thirty seconds. Then we paint the walls a pastel, something less macho...

Readers: Who's reading from Eastern Europe?

Readers: Who  (or what) are you?

Lately I've been getting a lot of hits to this blog from eastern Europe: Ukraine, Romania, a few from Poland and Russia.

Are you real readers?   There's not quite enough of you, every day, to suggest that an unfeeling bot is merely registering my site as it orbits the blogosphere.  I think you're real. I hope you are.

If you are real, what brings you here?  Do you sew?  I had a pen-pal once, for a short time, who lived in Russia and liked to sew.  I sent her several packages of patterns and at least once, fabric.  I'm sure she didn't receive them all; I'm not sure if any made it to her. I was warned not to trust the mails, but I didn't have much choice.

Sometimes people land here from searching on a particular sewing pattern number.  It's fun to see how McCalls 6844 turns out fitting on a real body, and proud pictures of sewing projects, modeled on surprisingly unstandard sizes, are always being posted online.

Are you hackers?  Eastern Europe is notorious for hackers. A Bulgarian friend who lives here in NJ (I have a few hits from Bulgaria) says that underemployed computer whizzes in his home country amuse themselves by hacking.  But where could you get to from my blog?  I don't even bank online.

Are you Jews?  Or Jew followers?  In my fantasy, you're relatives; my father's mother was born in Kiev, I'm told, and grew up in a little town outside the city called Kopaigorod. His father was from nearby Shargorod.  My other grandparents, similarly typically, came from Poland. But if you were undiscovered relatives you'd have to do some searching to find me, even online, since neither maiden name (fairly common) nor married name (much less so) appear on the site.

On the other hand, if you go to Soundcloud, as I sometimes do to hear clips of my radio-storyteller daughter, I find lots of Pavels and Borises and the like with my husband's Russian-sounding last name. So he (and my daughters) might have distant cousins in Russia whose grandparents made it home from wherever they survived the Holocaust, didn't know the American branch well enough to tell us, and gave rise to musicians two generations later who post on Soundcloud. And maybe you guys just googled yourselves one day and then scrolled all the way down to the fourth page of search results, and there I was. Google knows where to find me, somehow, even though I haven't linked the blog to my Google account.

You could be interested in Yiddish; People bump into this blog from searching on "forschpeis," a Yiddish word (appetizer) that I used many blogs ago.  Obviously this is not a hot SEO keyword. In fact, it's just about the only keyword that ever shows up among reported search terms that lead to my site.  Obviously someone's bidding on all the other words...

You obviously read English.  Even if you don't write English too well, or at all, write and tell me if you're real. And what brings you here?

Body in the Basement

Down in my basement is a limbless, headless tan body shape;  a paper-tape paper-mache of my torso.  It's my own personal dress form, made, per Barbara Deckert's instructions in a Craftsy sewing video, by my sister.  It should be a much more accurate likeness than the dial-a-butt/bust, felt-covered forms they sell in fabric/craft stores.

Wear comfortable shoes and stand on a cushy mat

It takes a good friend or a close relative to make this for you, as it involves dunking and pressing long and short strips of pre-pasted brown tape all over your body.  Three times over, for three layers, over a t-shirt.  You have to be able to stand still for well over an hour as it dries, although you may -- and you will -- laugh. You can also move your arms during this process a little, as we're not trying for sleeves.  You can help pat down your own boobs and belly, reaching left with the right and vice versa. Trying for your sides is going to raise your shoulder; we don't want that. We want the relaxed, straight-standing  clone of you that you need for fitting clothes you sew for yourself.

You have to sacrifice the t-shirt, because after it dries (do this on a low-humidity day and pool your blow driers) your mummifier has to carefully cut you out of this hardened shell, up the back.  She should lay her hand between the blade and your back wherever possible, and try to angle the scissor blade away from your spine if she can't.  My sister wound up cutting a hole in my exercise shorts (they were old) and underpants (they were newish), but not my skin.  

You should hear a nice crisp cracking going on behind you, like the sound of walnut shells, when your form maker cuts through shaped and hardened tape and t-shirt.  Then you carefully back yourself out of the body cast, put on another shirt (and shorts, if necessary), line your cut ends together (get help with this, too), and tape it back closed. Insert a padded hanger through the bottom and hang in a sunny bay window, to let finish drying.  It makes a great murder mystery prop when seen from the outside.

My sister did a good job.  When my form was done I was fairly dismayed to see how much space I take up, particularly from the waist down.  Looking inside the hollow bottom, I could see that my internal organs had much more room than they needed.  If we kept it in the kitchen I'm sure it would keep my nibbling in line much more effectively than a photo on the fridge.  It would be... not quite the elephant.. but undeniably surplus me..... in the room. 

I love this wrap dress.  I made one
for the first-born in Indy, too... w/ the
wider seam binding the pattern
actually calls for

I mailed it to the second-born
at work... she had to put it on
and show me right away,
hence the wrinkled hem.

It took me over a month to get this pasted tape from an art supply store. (The stuff at Staples has nylon threads in it, which makes it no good.)  During that time I tried, vainly, to shed a few pounds. Then  I kept the tape in the shipping carton for a few more months, sewed for my kids and made the same safe wrap-around dress for myself -- till I finally gave up and went over to my sister's with tape, dunking tray, t-shirt and extra poundage

So this dress form better help me sew for myself; it may make an improvement simply by not sucking in its gut every time it tries on a waistband.  We've taken it down from the gallows, stuffed it with newspaper and impaled it on the only thing we could find that's on a stand and fits -- one of those skinny ionizer oscillating fans.  Now we can dress it up, stand it in the window and make it turn back and forth -- just in time for Halloween.  And if being able to hug myself truly does inspire me to lose pounds and inches,  I will be delighted to hold still for another taping.

I'll get another fan and keep both sizes in the basement.

McCalls 6959

Catskills Brigadoon -- The North American Jewish Choral Festival, Part I

Last month I went to my first North American Jewish Choral Festival, carpooling and bunking with a fellow alto in my choir and her 7-year-old daughter.  I'm catching up gradually to this annual reunion/conference/love-fest; we only stayed one night out of the four, in the refurbished, partly remodeled Hudson Valley Resort and Spa, known by previous generations as the Granite Hotel.  A very multi-layered experience, making all kinds of connections between past and present.

Spontaneous sing-along in the lobby of the Hudson Valley Resort --
 Two guys wheeled out the piano and Dave Schlossberg,
our wonderful accompanist, sat down to play. 

First, it was a Brigadoon-like return to the Jewish Catskills.  The Catskills were long over their peak, so to speak, by the time I ever stayed at one of the big resorts.  That would have been over thirty years ago with my future husband's family at Brown's, when the comedians still slipped in a good shpritz of Yiddish, or a dozen years later at the Raleigh or Fallsview or Concord, on now-treasured winter weekends as an adult with my husband, kids, their grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins.  Maybe I was catching the tail end of the peak when, at five years old, I spent a week with my parents and baby sister at the much smaller Jockey Country Club, in Ellenville, the town with my name.None of those places are still in business; the relatively obscure Jockey Country Club never made it into Catskill legend but today Googles up a few picture postcards on ebay and New York Post advertisements in an online retrospective. My folks made lifelong friends there.

But here, in Kerhonkson in 2014 for the five days in July, was a living, breathing, Jewish gathering of 600 in a  hotel that hadn't gone ultra-orthodox or been left to molder in the woods.  People of all ages, cities, headwear and possibly even politics -- but one love for singing Jewish music and by extension, creative community.

After getting over the initial geshtalt of welcome banner, familiar and unfamiliar faces, I recognized the general layout of your old Borsht Belt hotel. Here was your grandly spacious arrival hall;  the long reservation desk, the grand staircase, the paneling installed by long-gone-and-buried contractors.  The double-height doors to the vast dining room. Off the back of the lobby, the sprawling, unchartable wings of guest rooms,  built in different stages and styles over the generations. The tower, where elevators took you to the most centralized, modernized rooms. Also the theater, where our mothers and grandmothers had once come in cocktail dresses, drinking whiskey sours and leaving children to pooled babyitters.

Of course some things had been remodeled or at least refreshed.   The carpeting must have dated to  this millennium.  The dark oversized couches, arranged into four or five separate conversational squares with  coffee table in the middle, were probably brought in within the past decade, from some closing hotel or furniture outlet.  The conference wing might have been altogether new, added in the property's reincarnation as a meeting place for all kinds of groups that required, or at least wouldn't mind, kosher cuisine. The spa may have been new -- I don't think anyone went there from our crowd. The theater had been partially outfitted with row-long tables, lecture-hall style, and a modern sound board and mikes.  

And of course, there was wi-fi. While some of the couch corrals were filled with schmoozing choir members from far away, sharing snacks and drinks, others were occupied by lone email and Web junkies, or presenters making last-minute changes to their workshop materials. Or cantorial colleagues planning joint programs back home, or just comparing notes.

from the Hudson Valley Resort's site..

Filling the hallways, stage, stairs and conference rooms, was a special subset of Jewish clientele; people who'd come to make and hear music, meet the composers whose names are on the sheet music they practice all year. Also to get to know each other better, to share meals and evenings and workshops instead of just weekly rehearsals, with their own members and with singers and players from all over North America. To perform before an audience of peers.  To celebrate the 25th year of this event, its founders and each other.

We could hear the great sound of the most professional groups -- the Zamir Chorales of New York and Boston -- rehearsing as we made our way to registration.

What Google Knows

The other day I was map googling, looking up Guttenberg, NJ.   And as I should have remembered, it's right on the Hudson River, right north of West New York.  I zoom out for better context, and there's the Upper West Side across the Hudson, with the American Museum of Natural History called out, a major landmark. 

Also called out is Romemu, a Jewish Renewal congregation that meets in a Presbyterian church on West 105th street, and Zabar's, and Ansche Chesed synagogue. 

This strikes me as rather odd.  Zabar's, OK.  Zabar's has been made famous in several New York-loving movies.   It might rate as a tourist attraction.  But Romemu, the shul with the groovy music and meditation?  Not on the radar of your average Googler.  Ansche Chesed?  Even less so.

Strangely coincidental that I've been to

Ansche Chesed recently for a friend's daughter's bat mitzvah. And funny, too, that I briefly considered a bus trip to Romemu with my fellow suburbanite shul members earlier this month.  But I haven't looked either of these places up on Google Maps, that it should remember. 

Then I remember that nothing is coincidental on Google, the Great Correlator.  I must have Googled these two places recently.  Just plain text Googled; not Map or Image or News Googled. Or worse, maybe I just mentioned these places in a Gmail. My own keystrokes put them on the map  -- my map.  Your map has been thoughtfully highlighted with places you've searched on; if they happen to be churches or mosques, probably with little cross and crescent icons instead of little stars of David.

Google now knows our individual places, just as it knows and tells advertisers which display ads to insert among the text columns in our browsers. They ("I was just looking at sergers!") looked like amazing coincidences once, too. 

Consider that the Google/Android smart phone you carry around, beaming location data to all kinds of web application servers, might also tell Google where you go and where you are right now, in addition to places you merely research.  (That's why you may suddenly  get the discount coupon to the store or restaurant  across the street.) 

With my programming, I can't help but think about IBM, filtering Germany's census punchcards for Jewish names at Hitler's request. Even though I know you don't have to be Jewish to be creeped out by what Google knows and keeps learning, from the data crumbs we drop at every turn and click. 

The Weekend Not in Scotland, Part III

I've already posted two installments of the not-in-Scotland October weekend without describing the trip's core mission:  attending the "Community Open House" of the National Yiddish Book Center, following a postcard invitation and the cancellation of our Scotland plans.   Aplologies.  Over six or seven weeks, this task has languished, stopping up the flow of at least four potential posts. 

The main room of extra copies of rescued
Yiddish books at the Center -- waiting for homes

Anyway, the Yiddish Book Center's mission -- propelling Yiddish into present and future generations -- is clear as a bell and visibly passionate, even before you cross its threshold in that apple orchard up in Amherst.  Before going through the front door, you cross a little bridge. The bridge is labelled "Brik."  Instantly I'm reminded of the song I learned so many years ago, "Dortn dortn," whose first line has the words, "ibern vasserl, ibern brik"; over the stream, over the bridge.  Here's a word to keep, before you even get inside.

I love this place for bringing all this Yiddish back to me from long-term storage.  The old books on the rows of shelves, extra copies waiting to be bought and read, are a perfect physical analog to the dormant vocabulary in my head waking up and getting exercised. And all brought back from a time I looked like the young romantics here, except perhaps for the purple hair.

Can you make out the "shrekliche" disaster 
reported on here? No peeking on the bottom!

While I've earned my special affinity by virtue of courses taken decades ago,  the Center also tries very hard to draw in those who don't speak the language a bit.  There are exhibits tucked in among the books; an exhibit of great Jewish moments in popular films and TV shows; front pages of the Yiddish press on historical news days, with translated headlines; old Yiddish linotype machines and their histories; stories behind the translations of great works; pictures and old home movies of an ethnomusicologist's travels through Eastern Europe.    There's also the huge original crate, pried opened with (replaced) books spilling out in a prominent place on the floor, which was sent from the evaporating Jewish community of Zimbabwe.

Who knew? 

There's a sandbox of sorts for playing with Yiddish; a table set with labeled objects and a Yiddish menu.  A phone with recorded phrases to converse with. There's also shelves of good Jewish picture books for children, in English, and comfortable space to read them in.

Exhibits educate the Yiddish deprived.

I love this place for transplanting Yiddish into progressive New England, a place whose trees and fields might resemble the Galicia of my grandparents, but whose sensibility is so modern and world-embracing.   As Yiddish was once, too. A language too rich to starve in ossified Hasidic enclaves, the only place it's natively spoken now.

Once inside, a Yiddish, entre-nous (tsvishn unz)  sense of humor permeates the place along with its eagerness to teach; one of the rest rooms is labeled Vu Der Kaiser Gait Alayn.*

Yiddishist-in-training giving a tour beside
the crate of books from Zimbabwe.

I spend time reading the spines and sometimes even the contents of the shelves, and read the posters and understand a good deal of the song sheets and film clips, even without the subtitles.

I love this place for  memorializing its poets and playwrights on slate squares, in Yiddish and English, over engravings of leaves, among the outside plantings.

The Writer's Garden

English-to-Yiddish is in the works

Beyond the main room of books, there's an auditorium where Dr. Harry Bochner and Professor  Solon Beinfeld, sixty- or seventy-something editors of the new Comprehensive Yiddish-to-English Dictionary, are being interviewed on stage by young Josh Lambert, academic director of the Yiddish Book Center and visiting English Professor at nearby U  Mass.  The dictionary, the first since Uriel Weinreich compiled his back in 1968, has just been published.  These philologists are describing how it differs from its predecessor.  For starters, it has 50 percent more words.  The editors got a great leg up on their project through the efforts of a new Yiddish-French dictionary, whose authors Yitskhok Niborski and Bernard Vaisbrot  created the large corpus of Yiddish words. They say it's also easier to use, without all the cryptic abbreviations.

This volume also includes words Weinreich simply didn't like; his dictionary is famous, for example, for leaving out the dirty words and even "tuchis," one of the best-remembered Yiddish words that ever lived.  It also includes words with the German-type spellings that were favored by socialists.  Adamant secularists, they didn't want speakers to have to refer back to their religious educations to know the original vowel-free spellings of Hebrew words, which keep their original forms when passing into Yiddish.

Linotype machine

The Forward newspaper put up some of the funding for the verterbuch, with the understanding that this lexicon would be used to help readers understand their Yiddish online edition. Some also came from the University of Indiana, whose press is the official publisher. 

The day proceeds with campus tours, including descent into the climate-controlled archive in the basement.  Oddly, they tell us that everything to be digitized is schlepped to Israel for this process and then schlepped back.  And Hebrew-character OCR and indexing, performed pro bono by Assaf Urieli, a computational linguist in the French Pyrenees, will ultimately render the Center's whole collection of books searchable online.

The day ends with a Q and A with Aaron Lansky in the bigger auditorium, followed by a great performance by klezmer duo Debbie Strauss on violin and accordion and Jeff Warschauer on guitar and mandolin. They don't do the Yiddish standards, but gems I've never heard before.

Aaron Lansky

On the way out I buy, for eight dollars apiece, part II of Sholem Aleichem's wonderful Motel, Peysi the Cantor's Son in the original, a Workmen's Circle Yiddish children's textbook from the sixties, and a book of poems in Yiddish and Hebrew. I also buy a copy of the dictionary, just to show support.  Did they know my Rutgers teacher, writer Wolf Younin?, I ask, while they sign the book. Dr. Bochner says he had heard of him.  Later that evening, in downtown Amherst, we bump into him with friends at Moti's, the local middle eastern restaurant. We try to cozy up, even peripherally, with the few families who constitute the Yiddish pillars of Boston. 

*    "Where the Kaiser goes alone."