Gimme Shelter: To collect is human
I was browsing at a yard sale a couple of weeks ago, checking out a rusty bayonet on a card table when a guy started to tell me more than I wanted to know about it.
He then asked what I collected. When I told him, “nothing,” he gave me that grin with raised eyebrows that says: Be honest.
But I was. OK, there are some books I have, like a tiny pamphlet printed on purple pages in Portuguese published in the 18th century that I bought off a blanket on a sidewalk for a buck. And a signed first edition “Of a Fire on the Moon” by Norman Mailer that a friend gave me, and the second of a two-volume paperback first edition of “Lolita” I bought for 50 cents at a yard sale, and …
Psychologists agree that to collect is human, noting the extremely rare child who doesn’t have a stash of something, be it baseball cards, sea- shells or Barbie dolls.
I started to think about collection obsession last weekend looking at the masterpieces of the Frick Collection, the small museum in a mansion just off Fifth Avenue at 70th Street. It was once the home of Henry Clay Frick who made a fortune in steel and coke processing in Pittsburgh in the late 19th century. Hailed as one of the great benefactors to the world for leaving his art collection to the pubic, he was also known during his life as “the most hated man” in America by some, especially the people who worked for him (something to remember this Labor Day). When workers went on strike he hired armed goons and things spiraled much worse when the state militia came in, resulting in riots and five deaths. An informational film the Frick shows tells how the old pirate decided the better part of valor was to head for New York, build his mansion and collect art.
He wasn’t alone in this strategy; several other robber barons, including J.P. Morgan, bought every piece of art they could get their hands on, playing the game of “He who has the most toys when he dies wins” game long before it became a bumper sticker in the 1970s. To their credit, they left all their stuff to us. Guilt? Penance? Or just more megalomania? Who cares? You won’t care if you go to the Frick.
When it comes to impassioned collecting, psychologists warn of a potentially bizarre endgame. The craving to possess isn’t alarming until it turns into hoarding, trying — always unsuccessfully — to fill an inner void. It gets really dangerous when the collector continually makes hare-brained decisions and develops an emotional attachment to things rather than people.
Combine the urge to collect with nostalgia and there’s a chance of slipping your moorings completely. It seems a very American thing, possessing objects that relate to a certain era, including (often exclusively) the junk of a particular time.
Long Island has its own nostalgia-for-sale king in the person of Ken Farrell, who has made a successful living selling people the past. Owner of Just Kids Nostalgia, a mail order business in Huntington, Ken is quick to insist he’s a merchant, not a collector. He keeps only the stuff he can’t sell.
An appointment with Ken had me following him into an alley behind a restaurant. He led me past a guy flinging vegetable scraps into a can with an open door behind him framing a chaotic kitchen. Farther along, Ken unlocked an unmarked door and went down two flights of metal stairs, unlocked another door and walked into a cave overflowing with literally tons of stuff made of paper, plastic and cheap metal. Or, you could say, cheap stuff worth tons of money.
In his subterranean warehouse of bygone Americana, I asked him about obsessions as he found two chairs from somewhere in the jammed mass of stuff.
Here were movie posters from Abbott & Costello to Hitchcock to a creepily over-the-top poster touting “I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany,” featuring a voluptuous woman in a torn black negligée. Lunchboxes, dolls, clothes, cereal boxes — an unending list of relics from America’s pop culture past receded in the dim light, floor-to-ceiling, including whole subcategories devoted to Howdy Doody, and all things Disney. Over the years, Ken said, he’s sold about $1 million of this stuff to people possessed by past lives, mostly their own when they were children.
He’s seen the dark side, mentioning the frightening women who collect a certain mass-produced object for girls — he told me what it is off the record, afraid he’d lose clients. “They’ll come this close to killing you to get what they want,” he said. But there are equally unhinged men who collect stuff suitable for little boys.
Some say the nostalgia business is seeing its sunset, since these days, there’s no stuff. Culture isn’t in objects, but in bytes. Ken, though, is an optimist. “I can see someone looking at an iPod loaded from 2001, going ‘Wow, how much for that?’”
Ken’s clientele ranges “from those who want to visit the past for an hour every day, to people who move in and live there all the time. People get stuck.”
