Studies in Pessimism

It’s rough out there. Staying positive can present a bit of a challenge these days, especially if you are, like me, of a naturally melancholic bent to begin with. Billion dollar bailouts. Terrorist attacks. Dwindling retirement accounts. Falling home prices. And that’s just out there in the macrocosm. Here in my own personal little microcosm, conditions aren’t a whole lot better. One friend is on the verge of losing her house to foreclosure. A former co-worker from the NYYC committed suicide last month. Evils big and little seem to be multiplying exponentially all around me, like a cartoon snowball careening down a hill, growing huger & more avalanche-like as it picks up speed. Christmas is coming. My bank account never looked worse. My cat is still missing. My 52nd birthday looms. My weight is not what it should be. My houses aren’t selling. Another turn of the snowball. Add some self-doubt to the equation. What had I accomplished with my life? My achievements felt, well…small, my contributions paltry, my significance negligible. The upbeat approach was fast becoming a thing of the past, a speck in the distance.

So there was nothing else for it - it was time for a trip to the bookstore. When my internal settings need adjusting, only a bookstore can fix me. A conflicted agnostic, I don’t have a church. A therapy drop-out, I don’t have a therapist. I do, however, have a bookstore right down the street. So it was there I turned my trudging steps towards.

It’s been a bad decade for bookstores on the island, and the Newport ones have been steadily disappearing ever since the Barnes & Noble opened in Middletown several years ago. The sole exception has been Kelley’s Books, on the corner of Broadway and Malbone. A used bookstore on a busy street without so much as a parking lot, Kelley’s is an unlikely candidate for role of sole survivor, but there you have it. Used books, bent covers, poor overhead lighting. No lattes are served, no fresh mozzarella & pesto panini are available, no cds or greeting cards or magazines are sold. The inventory isn’t computerized, the proprietor tracks his customers on hand printed index cards he keeps in a dented metal box under the register and the background music isn’t even Muzak – there’s just a staticky radio tuned to a classical music FM station. Kelley’s is an un-hip throwback to a time when the only reason you went to a bookstore was to look for books, period. Even better, since it’s a used bookstore, your finds are pretty much dictated by chance and serendipity. Any pre-planned agenda is pointless; the only way to go is to abdicate all pretense at control and just browse, drift with the tides. And maybe it is precisely this not having to be in mental control that is the sweet secret reward of a visit to the bookstore. What a relief to not have to be responsible for your own consciousness, even just temporarily… In fact, now that I think about it, it’s probably safe to say that just about all of my vices tend in that direction. Farewell, self!

But back to the books. Instead of finding what you’re looking for, you’ll find what you weren’t looking for, and sometimes what you didn’t even know existed. Did I need a book on three modern Icelandic poets? I didn’t even know Iceland had any modern poets. Did I walk in there in search of yet another copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson? Nah. Did I have any intention of settling down with a good re-read of Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism? Nope. But no way could I resist the gloriously self-pitying melodrama of his opening line, to wit, “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” Bitter words, fighting words, succinctly if mordantly put, and so completely over the top that I burst out laughing, right there in the aisle.

So if you’re feeling the pain of the season, I suggest you hie yourself over to Kelley’s for a dose of righteous attitude readjustment. Forget real estate. Forget the economy. Forget your mortgage and your car payment and your tax problems. Lose yourself in the stacks. Flip through an art book. Check out the science fiction. Pull out that classic you’ve always been meaning to read. You’ll be chuckling along with Schopenhauer in no time.

SoBo, NoBo, NewBo

Thirty years ago, when I first moved to Newport, the whole Broadway neighborhood was so rundown and un-hip it virtually constituted another universe. Think downtown Fall River. Think Central Falls. Unless you needed to go to Newport City Hall on some mind-blowingly boring errand, there just wasn’t much point in getting out of the car. Of course if for some reason you didn’t have a car – say you were visiting from out of town – chances were you would probably have needed to utilize Broadway’s derelict & boarded up Bonanza Bus Terminal once in a while. There you could drop your bags, slump wearily onto a filthy plastic seat, and enjoy a cigarette amidst the exhaust fumes of the occasional bus while you watched a slow parade of defeated-looking fellow travelers – a number of whom could be counted upon to be drinking deeply from crumpled brown paper bags - shuffle by you in order to make use of the public restrooms.

For those of us who lived in town and did have transportation, there was less reason to go. Once in a blue moon it might have been necessary to stop at the Salvation Army to donate no-longer-wearable clothes. If you had the kind of job that required you to wear canvas overalls and steel-toed work boots, perhaps periodically you would have gone to Carellas’ Shoe Store to re-outfit yourself. If were hung over and not in the mood to run into anyone you knew at lunch, you could always join the municipal work crews for a burger and a bag of chips at the Star Lunch counter, an establishment whose customer base seemed to consist almost entirely of men, ardent devotees of anonymity and heavy smokers all. Gas was still being pumped at the Gulf station. Litter swirled around on the sidewalks like tumbleweed on the desert, at least until midwinter, when the dirty unshoveled snow held it firmly in place until spring. When a small, unimposing Chinese restaurant finally opened up across the street from City Hall in the mid-late 1980s, it was NEWS. The unspoken consensus on the part of the locals was that the modest but clean Dragon Express added some much needed tone to the neighborhood.

That was the neighborhood. Grimly utilitarian, a Flint Michigan of the soul, the kind of place that could throw you into an existential funk faster than a Bob Dylan tune. Which is why Broadway’s SoBo, NoBo, NewBo transformation of the past decade or so astounds me still. The turning point was when they tore down the old bus station and built the new police station in its stead. Then the Salvation Army store caught fire, burning to the ground, damaging neighboring businesses and emptying surrounding storefronts. In came the pioneers. First was the funky, grunge-inspired Salvation Café, which set the eclectic/alternative standard for much of what followed. Tucker’s Bistro. Norey’s Café. Island Arts. Portobellos. Pop. Spark. Freaky Burrito. Pour Judgement. Artists began to hang around, then moved in. Real estate started happening, buildings were re-habbed, condo conversions took place. Little white twinkle lights started going up in the trees. Restaurants started putting in window boxes and setting tables on the sidewalks.
It was crazy!

All of a sudden, this moribund neighborhood was exploding with youthful energy. Who were these people? Newporters. People – many of them just kids - with ideas & business plans & tons of energy who were attracted by cheap rents and undeterred by the prospect of failure, people who actually found the depressing nature of the area exhilaratingly authentic and used it as the raw material for something altogether different, something distinctly alive. It’s more than just urban renewal, it’s psychic energy in action; Broadway has become Newport’s collective response to a downtown core that has grown maniacally tourist-centered and more and more inhospitable to its year-round residents. What these businesses have given us isn’t so much goods and services as a town itself, a town that tourism almost took away. And what they’ve made is really, when you get right down to it, not a commercial district at all but an anti-wharf, a secession from the prevailing mind-set: a place for, by and about locals.