Book 'em, Dano
NYC street vendors subject of Book Wars
BY EDDY VON MUELLER
Book Wars
Directed by Jason Rosette
Sept. 22-28 at GSU's cin*fest
You have to admire obsession. Your ordinary, average person
gets interested in something, say, the Kennedy
assassination or the mystery of Atlantis or corduroy, they
poke around for a while, read an article somewhere, watch
something on the Discovery Channel, and then remember that
they have to feed the dog and go to work and bathe. The fit
passes and they go on with their lives. That's the trouble
with normal people. No stamina.
The obsessive, now, is totally different. The obsessive
doesn't just think about something or interest her or
himself in a subject. The obsessive inhabits it, and it
consumes him. There is nothing outside his obsession. As
far as the obsessives are concerned, real life is something
that happens to other people.
Obsession is the force that prowls just beneath the surface
of BookWars. Way back in the early '90s, filmmaker Jason
Rosette found himself, like so many do, out of college, out
of cash and deep in debt. In a bid to keep a roof over his
head (no easy task in New York City), Rosette took to
peddling on the street the one thing with which higher
education had left him a superfluity: books.
He was not alone. Street booksellers have been a feature of
the Big Apple metroscape for decades, and many of the
vendors working alongside Rosette on Sixth Avenue were
longstanding veterans of the recycled reading material
trade. Hawking the rarities and remnants picked up at
thrift stores and yard sales or scavenged out of the trash,
itinerant lit pimps are a vivid part of the urban culture
-- and in 1995, Rosette, a relative newcomer to the racket
and a self-styled nouveau Beat, started chronicling this
local color.
Using an array of low-end media; Super8, 8mm video, DV,
anything a hand-to-mouth page peddler could afford, Rosette
recorded hundreds of hours of footage of his fellow
booksellers. They make for a memorable bunch: mysterious
emigres, a toad-fancier with dreams of owning a real
bookstore, a born-again bookman with an evangelical
approach, a stogie-smoking cartographiliac who specializes
in maps and atlases.
The diverse characters have only two things in common: All
of them are imperiled by then-newly elected mayor Rudy
Giuliani's campaign to sanitize New York's streets, which
includes squeezing the street vendors out, and all of them,
in one way or another, are caught up in a obsessive
circuit, ferreting out fragments of vanishing print culture
for the fanatic few still in the grips of the book bug.
Casual passersby buy books, sure, and some vendors would be
just as likely to sell hot dogs or faux Rolex watches as
used volumes of Hume and Roethke, but one gets the sense
that the hardcore street sellers are the connection for
serious print addicts. We meet some of these people, people
who truly get off on finding that out-of-print oddity or
that antique edition. Whatever their individual fixation --
Eastern religion, ancient history or Satanism -- they are
all a little bit mad and a whole lot in love with the very
bookness of books.
And some of the sellers share this obsession. Seen through
the intimate eyes of Rosette's modest media, the street
booksellers of New York emerge as more than stock players
in the tragicomedy of street culture; they are a link in a
tenuous chain connecting us to entire traditions in art,
thought and culture, salvaging and circulating data and
discourses in danger of swirling away into the backwaters
of the electrified Information Age. The very existence of
the booksellers is a precious reminder that the Internet is
not God, and that there is still magic in books.