Hi! Welcome To Big Sigh🌀
I love the mall. I have loved the mall since I was born and I will love the mall until I’m dead, which is when I will start haunting the mall. My ghostly vapor will clean the checkered vinyl floor and my ghoulish moans will harmonize with the muffled ballads of Sheryl Crow (she plays on the loudspeaker even at night).
Like most tweens in the early 2000’s my mall experiences were hot pink and vanilla. Soft pretzels dotted with thick cubed salt and watery pink lemonade was my manna as I wandered aimlessly from the Target to the Border’s to the Target again. The mall gave me everything, it stimulated every sense and conjured every emotion. I suffer from an acute case of Magpie Brain, an affliction only the mall can cure enable. When I was really young, I’d accompany my grandma to the fabric store in the Triphammer Mall, the most liminal space in the Finger Lakes. This is what it looks like as of like two months ago:
It was here where I started stealing buttons, only the shiniest and most bejeweled. I never quite saw it as stealing either, in my mind I was curating, which I was really good at. I loved objects grouped together in neat rows and piles, it satisfied a part of my brain I didn’t know existed, and so when I got older and the idea of allowance came into play I knew what I had to do. While my parents saw my allowance to Claire’s pipeline as excessive & frivolous I still saw it as curative. I was building my perfect life with perfect objects that would last me forever. I was ignorant to the concept of planned obsolescence and I would absolutely be getting married in body glitter and earrings shaped like candy corn, that is if my wedding was in October, and if any of those shirtless boys standing outside Hollister would ever look at me.
After noticing my fondness for beautiful things my grandma would take me to Bloomingdales in the city. We’d have lunch at 40 Carrots, then ascend to the fourth floor, the designer section. My grandma sews, she is a very talented quilt maker among other things. As we circled the booths she’d point and whisper to me, her elegant fingernails tracing each stitch. She explained what a princess seam was, and encouraged me to touch the garments to assess the quality of the fabric and hardware. Once, as we were ogling at a Chanel jacket, a tall, chic Hasidic woman in an expertly tailored black dress stepped in, her schlubby husband trailing dotingly behind. My grandma leaned down and whispered
“Now watch her, watch the way she looks at each piece carefully. She has excellent taste, and she knows what she’s looking for.”
I watched as she thumbed the tweed, how her lips pursed and her eyes darted. Then all of a sudden, how she matter-of-factly strutted off. It seemed abrupt but I knew it wasn’t, she knew what she was looking for. Back in Ithaca I applied the same logic to the sale section at Claire’s, I liked the purple bandana headband, buuuut why did I like it? What grade of glitter looked the best in lipgloss. Which plush snap bracelet had the highest thread count. Or, do I like the snap bracelet because, not in spite of how tacky it may be. The mall and the department store may seem similar but they are more cousins than sisters. To be able to traverse the two was my greatest joy. The mall is where I learned to love junk. And I ❤️love❤️ junk. The department store is where I learned to thoughtfully assess it.
Sometimes when I’m sad I’ll go to the Glendale Galleria and walk around, it’s always the perfect temperature and I like the way my shoes sound on the tile. Sometimes when I can’t sleep I’ll pretend I’m curled up in my favorite nook with an iced raspberry frappe and a Sailor Moon book that’s just the right amount of homoerotic. It usually knocks me out right away.
🌱🫘🎷Taste Buds 🪷🥒🤸
Raffi’s Place
Location: Raffi’s Place, 211 E Broadway, Glendale, CA 91205
Time: Friday, August 11th, 7pm
RSVP By Email: by Thursday evening
It seems only appropriate that this weeks Tastebuds is next to the Galleria. Did you know that LA has the biggest Iranian population outside of Iran and is therefore referred to as Tehrangeles? Specifically Westwood.
Raffi’s (in Glendale, not Westwood) is a Persian-Armenian institution that’s been around for over 25 years. They go through 3,600 lbs of rice a week. I am obsessed with the food from this area, I just truly believe there is no way to not feel like royalty when you’re eating dishes with pomegranate, saffron, walnut, and rosewater.
Lately, I’ve been doing some cooking out of this book, it is extremely beautiful and well written, two of the reasons it snagged a James Beard. In it, there are more than a few pieces of elegant prose about the sensations behind the steps of a Persian recipe like running your hands through the grains of rice, or watching saffron bloom. And well….that just makes me very inspired and very hungry.
Hope to see you there!
Thank you for reading! Tune in next week where I’ll be jerking off the ghost of Jonathan Gold 🤸