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Jersey City's Little India Kicks Jackson Heights' Ass
Jersey City's Little India wasn't nearly as impressive 10 years ago. Chowpatty anchored the neighborhood back then, the top dog in a modest pack of five restaurants. Named after a popular Mumbai beach, Chowpatty specialized in the vegetarian cooking of Gujarat, India's impoverished westernmost state. In fact, a large proportion of the groceries, chat houses, and jewelry stores— ostentatiously displaying the gold necklaces that form an Indian bride's dowry—catered to Gujaratis.
The ensuing years have been kind to the four blocks of Newark Avenue north of Journal Square. Little India has bloomed like a rosewater lassi, so that now the thoroughfare and surrounding streets form a South Asian business district more impressive than either Jackson Heights or Iselin, New Jersey. On weekend afternoons, the streets flood with shoppers, many in colorful saris, stocking up on cheap mangoes, dals, and such unusual vegetables as snake gourd, loofah, and tindoor.
nowottney sightings:
Marianne Nowottny was a teen-sensation, causing a stir with her 1999 debut album, ‘Afraid Of Me’. Not an album chock full of sugar-laced powder-pop songs as a casual observer might have wrongly thought, it instead was a unique release, shunning pop trends for avant-garde arrangements and dark twisting vocals. After several releases which have established her name in leftfield-pop circles, her latest album, the curiously titled ‘What Is She Doing?’ has been released courtesy of Abaton Book Company. The thing is that I didn’t know any of this before receiving this album and when I saw the digipak I was slightly perplexed. The cover looks like a cross between Wendy Carlos’s ‘Secrets of Synthesis’ and an early nineties Disney-pop release. Furthermore, the track names are extremely pop-centric and they are all 2-5 minutes long which typically means that the amount of experimentation and melodic-exploration are limited. For a professional music reviewer none of this really matters as it’s the music that does the talking and I for one was pleasantly surprised.
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