Crazy Stable

Thank you, Brother Poverty! Every time I think I have numbered your blessings aright, along comes another cautionary tale to redouble my gratitude. Take, for example, the esteemed Home section of today's New York Times, which today reveals the heavy burden of conservatorship imposed by art in "nontraditional media" upon its affluent collectors. The works of Mr. Damien Hirst seem to involve particularly onerous upkeep requirements, from renewing the fading boxes of anti-HIV drugs in his faux medicine chest (shown fetchingly mounted over the mantlepiece  in a swanky all-black study) to a $100K price tag for neutralizing the formaldehyde when relocating the artist's famous shark-in-a-tank.

We have acquired a few modest pieces of art for the CrazyStable: a hand-painted faux-Colonial Primitive painting of a little girl holding a cat (bought in Savannah years ago from a darling old fellow straight out of Garden of Good and Evil), and a seriagraph by a Japanese guy named Kozo, all delicate shades of grey and lavender, that I purchased on installment in the Village so long ago that I didn't have a credit card yet.  Oh, and watercolors by my grandmother, Fanny Granger Becker, who studied with William Merritt Chase. (The painting of butterflies caught in a sunbeam that hangs over the Child's bed, hung over mine in my childhood.) But I'm sure you see a certain bourgeois sensibility at work here already. Where is the risk, the curatorial daring, the  formaldehyde?

However, the Times article features two patrons of the arts who gave me new hope that the Crazy Stable, should we ever happen upon Bloombergian cash reserves, could qualify as a showplace for the very best that post-modern installation art has to offer--and that we could muster, based on our life experience, the kind of "eternal maintenance" required by such "ephemeral art." 

First, we learn of an "art consultant in Manhattan" who, with his partner (a Sotheby's honcho) acquired an installation piece in 1999 by John Bock, a German artist described as "very important." "The sculpture, which featured prominently in the couple's dining room, involved a series of hand-knitted sweaters, fishing wire, and a constant supply of fresh melons and vegetables. Dinner guests were suitably impressed, but Mr. Fletcher grew tired of maintaining the sculpture, so the couple decided to give it to the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. 'I didn't want to be putting out fresh vegetables every week as those things rotted,' Mr. Fletcher said." 

Avoiding any puns involving "Carnegie" and "melon," I will state only that our experience in the CrazyStable has superbly equipped us to deal with a tangle of fishing wire, sweaters, and rotting melons; at least two of those were probably still in our garage on closing day. It's our turn, dammit.  I  want to leave dinner guests suitably impressed. I want to buy an important German!

If you scroll down to the previous post, you will see how even more perfect for the CrazyStable would be this "conceptual work" by the eminently collectible Matthew Barney:

"A novel quandary presented itself in 2002," recounts the Times, when a hedge fund mogul purchased the "Ehrich Weiss Squite," a Barney installation which includes seven black Jacobin pigeons. (Hey, these are hipster pigeons--what other color would they wear?) Contained in a room with a transparent door, the birds are allowed to perch on a black box intended to represent the coffin of a Harry Houdini-like escape artist. "We were very concerned when we purchased this," said the curator employed full time  to oversee the mogul's "burgeoning collection."  "Pigeon guano is acidic and we feared it would eat away at the acrylic coffin."

Of course, we had this problem often in our early days in Flatbush, but the mogul and his curator turned in their puzzlement to a contemporary art conservator specialist, who consulted with the artist "and decreed that the guano should stay put." After a week of "scientific inquiry," the conservator determined that the guano would remain harmless if it were kept away from moisture, so the whole wondrous work is now in a humidity-controlled warehouse in Queens*, "and the rented pigeons have returned to their coops." 

[* The next time an artist, or anyone, gives you something you just can't bear to hang up or put out on the  credenza or the mantlepiece, remember this line: "We're storing it in a humidity-controlled warehouse in Queens."]

Now, when we faced similar challenges with an important installation of roofing shingles, drywall, wood, human blood, and pigeon guano (created by a team of roofer-performance artists by falling through the third-floor eaves in 1986),  my week of scientific investigation determined that dry pigeon guano, particalized and inhaled, could give you a wicked fungal infection of the lung called psitticosis; we "maintained" that particular installation with bleach and sponges. But then, as the artists said in their statement, "This work--Blood, Guano, Sky--is intended to transgress traditional concepts of "roofing," "contractors," and "skill," and to create a participatory experience for the bourgeois homeowner involving liability, disease risk, and other issues seldom associated with pigeons and home improvement in a postmodern artistic dialogue."

Damien Hirst, we have 3,000 square feet just waiting for you! 

Back in the mid-Eighties, when the men of our great city were Masters of the Universe and their women wore LaCroix puffy skirts, this was our kitchen sink.  I'm very fond of this picture; as the Spouse said, "It indicates so many things are wrong, all at once."  Yet it never fails to touch me, the idiot pigeon's resourcefulness in squeezing herself through our then-broken windows and creating this short-lived masterpiece in its convenient niche.  St. Philip Neri recommended that his followers' residency in oratories, or prayer communities, be characterized by permanence; lacking (I am told) a precise Italian equivalent for the English word "home," he envisioned the oratory as il nido, the nest. 

Sadly, permanence was not the hallmark of this nido. In fact, every trace of the old kitchen except a stained-glass window was hauled to the landfill in 1990, and the only egg-residents now are destined for omelettes. (Don't worry, there are still air-rat nurseries elsewhere under the Stable's eaves, and their gargled pre-dawn serenades awaken sleepers in our third-floor guest room.) But it is a vivid reminder of that first winter, when the concepts of "inside" and "outside" so often seemed to merge.

"Jesus said to him, 'The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.'"

Matthew 8:20

 Yes, this is the Bronx. (Well, just.) If you have never been to Wave Hill, go soon. We lounged on their lawns overlooking the Hudson last Saturday, drunk as the bees on hazy warmth. (The bees were either stupefied or dying, but either way they allowed themselves to be lavishly petted.) I collected a bagload of pinecones and spiny little beech seed pods, and we tore up and ate the foccacia we bought at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket back in Brooklyn that morning. The Child ran around the mighty trees barefoot and we all lay down under a cedar tree in the last rays of the setting sun.

No wonder I felt brave enough today to unpack my platen press (a gift from my lovely and creative cousin-in-law) and its mysterious packages of type, reglets, quoins, and coppers. Up in my corner of the Crazy Stable, I am determined to set words into type the old-fashioned way--one letter at a time. I've done it before, at the Center for Book Arts, under the tutelage of letterpress instructors...now it's me, a typestick, and a tweezer. Check back for reports on my progress.

Wouldn't it be cool to set these words into type?:

Autumn begins to be inferred

By millinery of the cloud,

Or deeper color in the shawl

That wraps the everlasting hill.

The eye begins its avarice,

A meditation chastens speech,

Some Dyer of a distant tree

Resumes his gaudy industry…

                       --Emily Dickinson

Blogging has been on hold for life--well, for Hallowe'en--and the good news is, nobody egged us this year. For all our haunted-house looks, the Crazy Stable has avoided being the target of Hallowe'en mischief until just last year, when to my disgust we were egged on November 1. It wasn't the eggs but the stupidity--since when do you toss eggs on All Saints Day? What, did some cretin have leftover eggs jangling in his pocket the next morning and decided to lob them? Anyway, no goblins waxed wroth on our property, and the Child (done up as Elle from "Legally Blonde," complete with faux Chihuahua--her idea completely) and I decamped to suburbia to join old friends for carefree trick-or-treating, the kind I enjoyed as a kid. The kind our neighborhood is a little too urban and edgy for.

Speaking of which...hope you caught last Sunday's Schadenfreude Section of the New York Times--i.e., the Real Estate Section--and their latest "Living In," the column that highlights a lucky town or neighborhood where Times readers might consider living. This one features an irony-saturated exegesis of the Gowanus canal environs of Brooklyn, which we are informed "all of the sudden, is happening." The piece is an absolute classic of that highly specialized New York Times genre, "Biff and Muffy Take the Subway, and Guess What They Find!"

This time, they find the once-fetid canal, "sandwiched between the real estate markets in Park Slope to the east and Carroll Gardens to the West," being touted as the "next Brooklyn neighborhood for those who seek a gritty edge to their urban experience." The houses around the canal, we learn, are being "snatched up by families and developers, delighted that more-or-less intact buildings can be bought in the area for less than $1 million."  In the Whitmanesque elegy of one Hal Lehrman, co-owner of Brooklyn Properties: "There's a lot of potential in the whole Gowanus area. You're between very expensive neighborhoods, so it's a no-brainer."

Of course, there are a few drawbacks to go along with these bargain-basement prices. Trucks "still zoom down Third and Fourth Avenues at alarmingly high speeds," surely posing hazards to the oncoming hordes of joggers. The article glancingly mentions two housing projects (shudder) adjacent to the happening townhouse blocks. These are implicitly carved out of the area of gritty happeningness--their residents presumptively cordoned off from Biff-and-Muffyland by a sociocultural gulf that va sans dire.  Hey, we said gritty edge. And the local schools suck--er, "do not perform particularly well on city and state examinations." But the Times helpfully suggests the proximity of $25,000/year and upward private schools in Park Slope, where the offspring of le nouveau Gowanus can obtain an education with all gritty edges abraded to Harvard-bound smoothness.

 Two aspects of this post-hipness anointing bother me. One is, There go the artists. And we've met some of them, on the annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour, and some of them are amazingly good. Check out Ella Yang, Regina Perlin, and Elizabeth O'Reilly, whose gorgeous Brooklynscapes would adorn the walls of the Crazy Stable if we had money to buy art. This tour (last weekend in October) is an amazing experience: As you walk the cobbled streets and the broken industrial vistas, you push open rusted doors and ascend crumbling stairwells to see those same images, glowingly re-imagined, evolving into a nascent but authentic "school"--part Hopper, part old Dutch, all suffused in the ever-changing light of Brooklyn's weirdly ravishing Rust Belt.  Few give the impression of being able to pony up the kind of money they'll need to stay, once the magnetic appeal of "intact" million-dollar properties spreads around.

The other  problem is, There goes everybody else, too. Most of them are gone already, but there's a surprising number of real businesses still hanging on down by the canal--scrap metal, trucking, welding, even a casket factory. People who worked in gritty places with lousy schools and barreling trucks used, at least, to be able to afford to live there. There's Lowe's and Home Depot, whose workers presumably must commute to the Poconos if they want to be homeowners like the well-off renovators they wait on. And there are those anonymous Project People. In a city where a ratshack by the Gowanus Canal is going, going, gone at $750K, do the concepts of thrift and mobility even exist any more? 

Yes, this tide that has lifted the Gowanus into real-estate heaven has lifted our boat, too--even if Flatbush has never been hit with fevered, Times-noted gentrification. The Crazy Stable has, on paper, appreciated absurdly in the 19 years since we bought it with every penny to our names. Despite its bloated worth, we remain stubbornly house-poor (having extracted all the extra juice we dared through a second mortgage years ago); we could sell the house and live like kings in Mississippi.  I would be far happier if it had appreciated half as much in a city where rookie firemen, Catholic schoolteachers, and non-celebrity artists still had a prayer of buying their own little house, even on the gritty edges. Sometimes, in our har-har-har million-dollar manse, I  feel like an occupant of one of those half-filled Titanic lifeboats, rowing away from the splashing masses, having just barely gotten hauled aboard myself (and as an imposter from steerage, no less).