Stampedes and shoot outs

Hi Everyone,

You will have noticed that I have just posted a bunch of entries that I have been doing for a little blog called Neighbor Bee. Being brought up in an Irish Catholic family, I have always been passionate about thrift. It was a principle my parents taught me that was originally about simply saving a dollar. Recently for me it has been a kind of lifestyle, a throw back to the aesthetics, Christ even. Throwing off the temptations of the material world has
always been a stylish counter culture, and recently, it has become a necessity, and since I have been living under the radar for very little, and constantly scoffing at TV commercials and the brainwashing that we call life here in America. I will be doing some more posting on the history of commerce (as it relates to human psychology, as I started here

I will also let you in on the secrets of my thrifty life. Well, they aren't secrets, really. As anyone who knows me will attest, if you compliment me on an outfit, I will quickly tell you how cheap it was, and where I got it.

So, on the heals of a very black Black Friday, I have decided to stop keeping my opinions (or my shopping secrets) to myself.

I should make it clear that I like to live ethically and inexpensively, I have a fine taste. I like rich wine, the best food, good style, and fine entertainment. This will not actually be a poor man's life. It will be made of the finest luxuries, with a higher consciousness.

So, as I said, this Black Friday was black indeed. I made cheeky jokes about consumerism in the US in my last post, but I didn't think there would be actual deaths involved. I didn't think that a part-time security guard would get trampled in a stampede in a Long Island Walmart, or that there would be an actual shoot out in Toys R Us in Palm Desert, CA.

I can't even begin to tell you how disturbing and yet how utterly unsurprising these events were. I don't even really feel like I can write about it and draw comparisons about low prices with high costs or something of that nature. In fact, the L A Times treatment of it is somewhat ridiculous. The mention of the man pulling his gun from his baggy pants, the interview with the three-year-old child, and the graphic are all such caricatures of news that I found myself thinking of The Wire's Scott Templeton.


From The Wire website:

The self-promoting Templeton is hungry and willing to go to great lengths for a plum assignment. His prose reflects his ambition: overwrought with a tendency towards exaggeration.

Templeton goes to great lengths to break the great story. First inventing handicap children, then fabricating details of a Vet's story, and finally entangling himself in a fake murder investigation, by faking a phone call from a nonexistent serial killer. If you haven't seen The Wire, please go out now and buy it or rent it. Every season is fantastic, and a fine critique of police, schools, government, journalism, and society in general.

Now, being a writer, my beef is not with the writer of the article in the LA Times. Who can blame her, him, excuse me THEM for this. I'm sure that they didn't choose to make the media this way, but this insistence on sensationalism forces a narrative that is just not necessary. The story itself is the narrative, and I don't think it needs any embellishments. I just can't help but think that a writer on a story like this is pressured in to getting an angle that someone else doesn't have. Thus the poor three-year-old is thrown in there:

Outside Pizza Hut, where witnesses were being interviewed, 3-year-old Landon Stitt sat on the grass munching on his pizza. He spoke matter-of-factly, almost as if he was describing a video game.

"I saw it," he said. "They were fighting. They were shooting." He shaped his fingers into a gun, then fired into the air.

How is the phrase "almost as if describing a video game" relevant? What is that supposed to mean? I get it that we are dealing with the potential desensitization of an entire generation, but doesn't the shoot out itself give us this information? Isn't the witnessing Jingle All the Way meets Grand Theft Auto enough?

I can just hear the response. It's important to "find the the human angle" in every story. But why bother when the story sadly enough is so utterly human?

And don't even get me started on this map.


Oh, thanks, LA Times. If you hadn't drawn that nifty graphic, I would not have know that the shooting took place in Toys R Us, on a highway, next to some roads. That's a very informative map.

Finally, the article couldn't end without throwing in that Toys R Us would not like it if we associated this with Black Friday:

"Our understanding is that this act seems to have been the result of a personal dispute between the individuals involved. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to associate the events of today with Black Friday," the statement said.

Wow, yeah, sure, maybe it didn't have anything to do with Black Friday, but come on really? Must we be so sanctimonious about Black Friday? It is a stupid day that makes people do stupid things. I don't blame Black Friday either, but I also don't feel the need to refute the symbolism inherent in the events of Friday November 28th.

I haven't even touched the more tragic of the two stories. That of the man who was stampeded in the Walmart. Toys R Us may be right about their shoot out, maybe it didn't have anything to do with Black Friday. Walmart's stampede however, had so much to do with Black Friday and the insanity it can breed. Although blame is being thrown left and right, this is a larger problem then some lawyers and a trial can sort out. It's us, everyone. It's us unless we resist.

I will just end by telling you that after the man who died and the pregnant woman who was injured were carted away...people continued to SHOP.

The Impending National...Holiday!

Hello friends. It is a rainy Tuesday before Thanksgiving and we are probably all thinking about how many outfits we need to bring to our parents, and whether it is better to wear the red sweater to dinner or the blue one. Well, at least that is what I am thinking about.

So, is everyone getting ready for Capitalism's biggest holiday? Black Friday?

All the newscasters can talk about is what will happen on Black Friday? Will the fate of the American economy be determined Friday? Will the shopper see his shadow or will we have six more months of recession? Wait, oh, that's a different holiday.

I propose we change our national flag to the following:

Even when the rest of the world seems to suck with $$

My new favorite radio show is the The Takeaway. I love the snappy back and forth between John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji (best name ever!). Sometimes it is the beginning of this show that wakes me up. Sometimes the news sounds like a dream (President-elect Obama). Sometimes it sounds like a nightmare (economy, economy, economy).

So this morning, when I heard John say that the U.S. Treasury Department and The Fed bailed out AIG, I thought I had traveled through time.

And then I heard the word hanging on to the end of that statement. “Again.”

The (Staying) Home Issue

This morning I woke up and in what I thought was a dream state, heard Soterios Johnson say that the winds could be up to 40 miles per hour today. Whatever it is you do, no matter how much money you make, may you stay inside today. Forty miles an hour. That is some WTF news.

So, in light of that news, I don’t plan on going out today, except perhaps for my daily walk. In fact I haven’t been going out much lately, which makes Episode Two of Bee Thrifty less exciting.

Less exciting, it’s true, though abundantly more thrifty.

I think we can all learn from it. So, let us begin.

[L-R: Untitled Painting #11, Blake Rayne, Miguel Abreu Gallery at Art Basel; Untitled, Kerstin Brätsch, Salon 94; Doctor Atomic at the Metropolitan Opera]

Nifty Thrifty Begins

Hello everyone! My name is Christine Rath and I am new to the Neighborbee hood. My mission: To find you the good life on the cheap. I am a grad student and I pride myself on thrift. In these tough times, who couldn’t use a little cheap fun? Sans risk of VD, of course. I said cheap, not seedy!

This past Friday I wandered into Chelsea for the opening of 'Monitor' an exhibition by artist Noah Fischer at Claire Oliver. Fischer’s lo-tech sculptures made of oh-so-familiar machines may have you scratching your head, but hopefully it's because you're receiving his transmission regarding “calling into question the ultimate function of our entertainment- based culture” as the press release for 'Monitor' suggests. This is a good event for the poor in the wallet and for those who have joined the revolution against consumerism for moral reasons, as Fischer’s refashioning of the icons of our new gods, can help us feel like being poor isn’t a curse, but a virtue. I almost threw my iPhone in the Hudson on my way home.

Do It Yourself: Life

My friends, it has been a while since I have posted here and a lot has happened to me. I lost my job. Well, sort of. I was fired.

Sort of.


I got laid off from Columbia University, the details of which are so boring that I don't feel like going into them here. The big news is that I have entered the MFA program at Brooklyn College, and I am a bona fide writing student. I quit smoking, and I haven't quite figured out how to spend a day. For example--today.

It is 4:00 p.m. and I have been sitting in the same chair for 7 hours. I have written four pages of a story that is totally unrelated to the one I have due on Sunday, and I have only written 2 pages of the story that is actually due. I have had 3 cups of coffee, some chili, 2 glasses of water, and a ricola. I have surfed around through facebook and found some people I know from high school. I have spent at least an hour perusing subliminal advertisement examples. I got to those because I had to google "coke cock"(research for the story that is not due on Sunday). And coke cock, not only lead me to the urban dictionary definition of a flaccid penis due to cocaine consumption, it also lead me to the image of a woman giving head that is hidden in the ice cubes on a coke poster -- coke cock.

Now, this is all endlessly diverting, and didn't I leave that job behind so that I could follow my creative whimsy wherever it lead me? But, coke cock? Really? It's only a step away from youporn. And yes, I know what youporn is.

The endless array of things I could do to fill my day are completely overwhelming and I am sure that according to one quiz or another I have ADD or ADHD, or something that keeps me from committing to doing the laundry, or going to Target, or ordering postcards for my pet portrait business, or watching Oprah, or WHATEVER, and instead has me making various lists that get lost in piles, that I will one day recover only to chide myself for not having done that! AAAAAHHH!!!! How in the hell did I organize an entire program of writers before this?

So, my friends, forget the how to's on designing your own stencils, or installing wall sconces--both terrifying projects in their own right especially to one who doesn't even know which Trader Joe's trail mix to buy--chocolate chunks, or dried mango, chocolate chunks or dried mango. Once again, AAAAHHHHHH! Forget these DIY manuals, I would like to write the DIY manual on how to pay your bills, maintain your friendships, go grocery shopping, and spend your day.

Would anyone buy that? Do you have anything to say to this? I welcome your comments.

On a lighter note, I did not watch the show "A Haunting" today, so I am less fearful that my house is haunted.

The Car is a Man: On the Gender of Automobiles

This is actually a comment I did some months back (with some edits), on this post http://thisisby.us/index.php/content/man__love, but I think it is an interesting question. Do we instinctively apply gender to the industry around us, and what does that gender application mean to us, especially women? Is it a man's world? How long can one survive in machine city? And how important have our machines become that they have taken on the life of a human, or at least an animal ("my car died" "she's having trouble with her engine" "Gotta get her oil changed") and why are we always calling cars shes?

I have a drawing of mine on my wall of a red car. Next to the red car, in childish script, are the words "the car is a man." My parents came to visit my NY apartment some months ago, and my father looked at it and said, "the car is a man?" in way of looking for an explanation. I looked at my father and shrugged.

The truth is the thought came to me as if a message from god on a walk home to my apartment in Manhattan one summer night. I was crossing at a red light, thinking about how much faith I had in the driver who was stopped there, how one could choose to step on the gas and I would be at their mercy. True, if I survived I could sue them and make a pretty penny, but I was overwhelmed in that moment by the trust I was placing in this driver--HE wasn't going to do that to me. I couldn't see him as I passed in front of his car and it wasn't until I was stepping safely onto the other curb that I glanced back to look at him. HE was a SHE, and at that moment I thought, yeah, sure, the driver is a woman, but the car is a man. I have never figured out whether that statement--the car is a man--was global, or specific to this incident, but I think about it a lot. There are a lot of cars here in Manhattan, and some trucks too, and I don't know the gender of most of them. It takes an intimacy (placing your life in a car's hands by driving it, riding in it, walking in front of it) to know a car like that.

In New York, the car is a stranger; an ever-present, loud stranger, of indiscriminate gender. The people here a much the same.