Island Bazaar.(New York City street fairs)(Brief Article)

It is the season of yard and tag sales, when you slam on the brakes to stop at the table set with rusty silverware, Darth Vader masks, assorted dinner plates (the only ones that were once costly all now chipped), and a cardboard box full of books, their back pages swollen and ruffled with water damage. That means that in New York it is the season of street fairs.

Street fairs last through the swelter of late summer, into the chill of fall. But now, while the air is dry and thick with pollen and the heat of the waxing sun is diminished by stiff breezes, is the time to sample them. Weather must provide an inducement to go, because their wares are as uninviting as they are predictable. Every weekend, the police close off ten to fifteen blocks of some Manhattan avenue. The merchants line the curbs, and the New Yorkers slowly perambulate up and down. What the former display and the latter inspect is always the same.

The sellers of Africana offer collections of clothing and artifacts that are the material equivalents of Alex Haley's Roots: cheap, kitschy, and fake. There are wooden sculptures of gazelles and antelopes, made in Indonesia; "tribal" drums with "animal skin" heads (street drummers in New York are more likely to tip over plastic buckets and bang them; drummers in Johannesburg probably do the same); collarless shirts with animal motifs, or pictures of African mothers breast-feeding (the lack of a collar is the guarantee of ethnicity and authenticity). What would a similarly flashy and incoherent collection of Europeana be? Dutch wooden shoes, Breton lace headdresses, and T- shirts with the duller sayings of famous Europeans like St. Francis, Napoleon, and Hitler. Sometimes it is better to be the orphan of identity politics than its heir.

If the Europeana stands sold food, they would sell the inedible Italian sausages of street fairs, whose vendors cluster two-to-four to a block. The stink of burning grease from their booths is overpowering. Does it come from the grills, or from the food? Are we only smelling it for free, or if we pay, can we eat it too? The wittier booths boast garish signs of pigs in crowns or chef's hats, gaily advertising their own slaughter. If you ever want to become a vegan, these booths are the places to do it.

Does your back hurt? Of course it does; there were no kitchen counters or personal computers on the savannahs where our bodies evolved. Look for the free-standing plastic spines, erect as a hypnotized cobra, or the massage chairs, with padded face rests shaped like toilet seats. Chiropractors, who display the spines, have been with us for many years (H. L. Mencken wrote one of his sprightliest hit jobs on them), but the back masseurs, who use the massage chairs, appeared all of a sudden ten or fifteen years ago. They all seem to be Asian, and they might be exiles or spies or even ...