Aviram Cohen of Silk Flowers on his favorite flea market
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More Ringing Endorsement
For Ringing Endorsement, The A.V. Club asks local characters of note for their recommendations of an event, restaurant, or whatever else strikes them. This week, Aviram Cohen—vocalist for local industrial band Silk Flowers—talks about a ragged flea market in Chelsea.
One place I like to go is the flea market on 25th Street and 6th Avenue. It’s kind of a different experience—you don’t really feel like you’re in New York, but it's so urban. It’s in a parking lot in the middle of the block, and you definitely get a sense that people steal stuff and bring it there. It’s kind of like urban blight. They sell the weirdest random stuff. I’d been going there for years, but I started going there again the last couple weekends. It’s not like the other flea markets that have antiques and nice clothes and stuff like that. It’s a lot more haphazard and you have to just sort through stuff. It’s not that I find really great stuff there, although there is one thing I like. There are these guys that have crystals and minerals and stuff and they don’t really treat them very well. So they’re less expensive than if you find them in other places.
The other weekend I went and I was walking away and I noticed this guy had a five-gallon bucket, one of those big paint buckets. It was full of big pieces of petrified wood, but it was under his table. So I went back and I got this big, substantial piece of petrified wood. That was pretty cool. It’s a section of a tree. Also there’s a lot of paper stuff, just weird magazines, crazy magazines. I saw some weird old transvestite magazines from the early ‘70s. I try to look for paper goods like that because I use it for artwork.
What I like about the flea market is that you don’t really find anything you want to buy, but you look around and it’s so weird. That’s kind of what makes it special, you know?
