Object lesson: Why do we buy what we buy?

Sorry, I made a reference to a pretty decent score over a month ago and I never followed up with what it was. This is what it was, a set of breakfast china, made in West Germany by Thomas for Rosenthal.

I mentioned I didn't want to start any new collections, right?

Well, I saw this set at a really fab sale in my hood and I thought it was so fetching. It has egg plates. Anything with egg plates or egg cups is aces in my book. I turned the pieces over to look at the mark and it said West Germany, which is always a good sign (predates the wall coming down, so it's at least a little bit vintage—though hell, that was 24 years ago, which doesn't seem that long ago. Sometimes I do forget that I am vintage; my memories tend to be hazy and glowy as if seen through Instagram filters).

Trouble was, I was already laden down with stuff to buy and it was the first day of the sale so—quelle horreur!—I was paying full price. I almost never pay full price. Thus I carefully put the egg plates back on the table and backed away slowly, despite the estate sale saleslady watching me and saying, "You're not going to buy those? But they're so precious!"

I know they're precious, woman! The colors! The stripes! The espresso cups! But I don't need another set of china. I have several yet we insist on eating off the boring casual-white Villeroy & Boch set we'd registered for when we got married 13 years ago, when we weren't so goddamned choosy and always overthinking our aesthetic choices the way we do now because....because... I've got too much time on my hands? And I think it's fun?

So I paid for everything else and hightailed it out of there, thinking I would return on the following discount days and try to buy the china I totally didn't need and wouldn't want to sell cuz there's no room in my booth/stall for that sort of thing and I can't be bothered with all the bubble wrap and peanuts that must be involved with selling such an item online.

But while I was killing the last hour I had before picking up my kids from school and getting sucked into the post-3 o'clock vortex that is chauffeuring them from activity to activity, I started googling the Thomas for Rosenthal china, in an unhealthy, obsessive way. I learned that Rosenthal is a venerable porcelain company in Bavaria, which has been around since the late 19th century, and that Thomas merged with them in the 1960s. I only found a couple pieces from this line for sale—and they weren't crazy expensive though it was obvious they were priced well below market value at the estate sale... Which made me want to get them. ASAP. But why? If I wasn't going to use them or sell them or even necessarily make room in the Danish modern china hutch to display them properly. WHY?

Then the coup de grace: Following some link from some European etsy seller to some Wikipedia entry (neither of which I can now find), I discovered that this particular set of china was purportedly designed by a Swedish woman of some renown in midcentury-Scandinavian-loving circles and even though I had never heard of her and was not familiar with her work and even now can't remember her name, I had to go back and buy the china. For full price. Which is what I did, managing to only be a few minutes late for school pickup.

The estate sale ladies didn't seem surprised to see me back, even though I seemed to think it was necessary to explain why it was so easy for me to drop by again ("Oh, you know, I live in the neighborhood and the house is on the way to my kids' school—no big deal!"). I'm not crazy.

This is when estate sales are bad news: When they make you want what you never knew you wanted and if you hadn't gone you never would have known you wanted it. Ignorance is bliss, and then it isn't.

That much I've learned after two years of blogging about my stuff (hey, happy anniversary, blog!): If an object has a story behind it—the story of how it was made or how it came to be possessed—then it becomes that much more irresistible.

Where is the irresistible china now? I managed to make room for it in the kitchen cabinet, two shelves above the Villeroy & Boch, just out of comfortable reach. I plan to boil an egg very soon.

Welcome to the dollhouse

You know how hard I try to avoid forming new collections, finding new things to obsess about. If anything, my recent foray into reselling has been about shedding old collections, but sometimes...sometimes a certain something speaks to you so you buy it and then you see another something similar and think, "Ah, of course, I'll be having that as well," and then other people start noticing the array of similar items in your house and they make a mental note, "Next time I see a ______, I will have to pick one up for her!" And you know, it snowballs. And snowballs beget avalanches (of stuff, cascading out of your closets). Lately I've been noticing a lot of new faces around here—weird, wooden faces—but I'm reasonably certain that I do not—repeat, DO NOT—collect weird wooden dolls. Nope, not me.

Match game

The 21 Club

I promise this will be the last post in which I gas on about the odd poignancy of other people's matchbook collections. The collections that belonged to the unrepentant smokers, the older generation, the ones whose estates are being sold off object by object to junkers/thrifters/dealers/pickers/collectors/bottom-feeders, whatever you want to call us/them. Few types of ephemera give you a sense of the (late) person the way matches do—matches are like the digital trail you leave on Facebook or foursquare, but you know, tangible and cute and not an invasion of privacy. The person who collected matches was a person who got around, maybe even globetrotted, smoking and drinking and dining and dancing their way through life. Hell, they probably used cigarette holders! Who were these people? And don't they seem like they would've been fun to hang out with?

Yaffa Cafe

But I try not to buy other people's matchbooks—dust magnets!—especially now that I've rediscovered my own. Last week I shared some relics from places in NYC that no longer exist—here are some from much-loved establishments that are still standing. Though in the case of Yaffa Cafe, I had to google to make sure (if Life Cafe has been shuttered, how is it that Yaffa continues to survive?). I don't think I set foot in the place past my 23rd birthday, but I did love it fiercely for a while there. The food was crap, but that twinkling back garden just epitomized the boho East Village setting I'd been imagining myself in all through my teen years.

Docks

I wasn't sure about Docks either—a very slick noisy yuppie ’90s place—could it still be around? Apparently so. When we lived on the Upper West Side back in the day, good restaurants were few and far between and dang if Docks didn't have the best oysters. We used to celebrate birthdays there. One time we were wedged into a corner table by the window facing Broadway, and Oliver Platt was with a date at the table adjacent to ours. The whole time Lindsay and I just kept staring at each other and trying not to laugh and communicating telepathically "Look, it's Oliver Platt. We are dining next to Oliver Platt." Why do I even remember that? Why will Docks, a place we ate at dozens of times, be forever associated with Oliver Platt (who at the time was starring in a very terrible version of The Three Musketeers)? That's the kind of story other people's matchbook collections will never really tell. You might be able to draw a few accurate conclusions about their lives—about where they traveled and how old they were and whether they liked Chinese food the most or Mexican—but the good stuff, the details, the Oliver Platts, well, that stuff just gets lost.

Michael's

Is it morbid to ponder your own future estate sale—especially on the day after a quasi-milestone birthday...? Perhaps. But I do it all the time, not just around birthdays. What will my legacy be? What's the story my stuff will tell? What does my matchbook collection say about me? Here lies a person who lived hard in NYC for a pair of decades, who went on a lot of expense account lunches and late-night dinners and continued to smoke even when she knew better. Of course this is assuming my matchbook collection will ever be up for sale. I can easily imagine one of my pack-rat children hanging on to it.

The King Cole Bar

Veritas

Balthazar

My city was gone

I miss you, Savoy.

So yesterday we were talking about matchbook collections. About matches as time capsules, touchstones. How they were not only great souvenirs but very handy for lighting cigarettes and temperamental stoves. When my collection of matchbooks was recently dislodged by a closet avalanche, my first reactions was, damn, did I really move a sack of matches across the country? But then I started sifting through them, and, wow, how does a THING give you such a rush of nostalgia? I dumped them out on the dining room table and was all like, hey, Lindsay, remember this place? And remember when we went here? And wait, is this one still open? When did this one close again?

On my visit to NYC two weeks ago, I purposely took a three-subway-stop stroll down Broadway, through a neighborhood where I'd worked two different jobs on the same block between Bleecker and Houston (did I really just mentally pronounce Houston "HEWsten" like the Texan city as opposed to HOWsten like the NYC street? I'll never tell...). Back in high school, I used to hang out on the same short stretch of downtown. My friend Rob's dad used to work at a print shop in Noho (can you imagine? a print shop in Noho?) and sometimes we'd go in with him so we could shop for weird clothes at Antique Boutique and Unique, then over to Bubba's near Washington Square for a Ruben lunch. Is Bubba's still there? I'm not sure if I was visualizing the addresses accurately, but it looked to me like Antique Boutique and Unique are now American Apparel stores.

Godawful food, great sign. Replaced by a Chipotle.

My New York has more layers than a particularly fine wedding cake. If you've lived there for any length of time, I expect yours does too.

I've quoted from this Nora Ephron essay in the past, because, well, she hit many, many nails on many, many heads during her illustrious career but none of her bons mot touch me quite as personally as this one, about what it's like to voluntarily exile yourself from NYC and then come back a mere visitor.

Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, you experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the door. You've turned your back for only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia.

Every time I go back, I think about how I used to be able to glide through the city without thinking, without looking, how I probably could've negotiated the subway blindfolded. Eight years after my departure, I definitely have to keep my eyes open—and often glued to my GPS. Did I really live in New York before cell phones? Before Metrocards and Starbucks and 9/11?

NYC will keep changing but I'll still have my matchbooks, artifacts from another age, proof that the city I lived in once really existed, even if it's now full of ghosts and shadows and unfamiliar subway lines.

I come from the ’90s. Rialto was my hang.

Didn't the waiters wear rollerskates?

Many an expense-account lunch was consumed here.

The Tall Ships: lost on 9/11.

Matchless

A handful of matchbooks advertising defunct restaurants, mostly in San Antonio.

I don't collect matches. At least, I didn't think I collected matches until a few bags full of matchbooks resurfaced in my life after a recent closet avalanche. So I guess it's more accurate to say I never set out with intent to collect matches, but I ended up with a collection just by virtue of being a smoker and a New Yorker who warmed many barstools and dined in many fine restaurants and never could turn down a complimentary matchbook, especially if it was cute but mostly because I was always losing my lighter.

I see a lot of matchbook collections on my estate-sale rounds; the graphics are so great and the establishments being advertised sound so awesome, it can be difficult to resist buying them. But usually I resist. I have my own memories in matchbook form—do I really need someone else's? The handful you see here are from two Ziplocs I selected at random from two laundry baskets overflowing with matches at a sale last summer. Somebody used to really get around!

A lifetime's collection of matches.

I've been mourning the ephemeral nature of ephemera on this blog for some time now, and most often the digital age we live in the culprit: Concert tickets, greeting cards, invitations, business cards, address books, etc., have all been outmoded. But we can't blame the slo-mo extinction of matchbooks on the interwebs ’cuz last I checked, fire had not yet been digitized—obviously, it's because no one smokes anymore. Okay, people still smoke, but they are (for the most part) no longer encouraged to do so, and judging by how my children react to the sight of some pathetic smoker, huddled in the cold for a furtive puff, I don't think the tobacco companies are going to have much luck seducing the next generation (seriously, my kids are ready to make a citizen's arrest of any smoker they see; I have to remind them that even when we're visiting the Nanny State of NYC, smoking is not actually against the law). I assume Red Bull, or some pernicious variation thereof, will be their version of smoking.

Ah, to have frequented the Gay ’90s or Ichabod's...

But what a pity, right? Towers of Future Red Bull and its accoutrements will never have the panache of a serious matchbook collection. We used to keep ours in a large wooden bowl in the living room. My parents (not smokers) kept a container full in the kitchen. Lindsay remembers his grandparents having some sort of  three-tiered platter—like the kind for serving those extravagant shellfish apps at your nicer brasseries—where they displayed their assortment of matches.

My rediscovered matchbooks are still in a plastic grocery bag in the Closet of Doom. I've thought about displaying them in a jar or bowl but they're just another dust magnet and what if the kids take it upon themselves to burn the house down? I did photograph a few of the choicer ones, however, which I'll share this week here on the blog.

Gail and Harold, was it a good marriage?