cheapbohemian's Open Salon Blog

Poetry Thursday: Russell Edson

Thu, 2 Aug 2012 00:08:34 -0400

The Airstream Bambi: So awesome it lives
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

With all this talk lately of Airstream trailers and the open road, of what we'd do with the lottery winnings and how we might just have to start before we win, it all minds me of a particular poem by prose-poet Russell Edson.

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The Adventures of a Turtle
by Russell Edson

The turtle carries his house on his back. He is both the house and the person of that house.

But actually, under the shell is a little room where the true turtle, wearing long underwear, sits at a little table. At one end of the room a series of levers sticks out of slots in the floor, like the controls of a steam shovel. It is with these that the turtle controls the legs of his house.

Most of the time the turtle sits under the sloping ceiling of his turtle room reading catalogues at the little table where a candle burns. He leans on one elbow, and then the other. He crosses one leg, and then the other. Finally he yawns and buries his head in his arms and sleeps.
If he feels a child picking up his house he quickly douses the candle and runs to the control levers and activates the legs of his house and tries to escape.
If he cannot escape he retracts the legs and withdraws the so-called head and waits. He knows that children are careless, and that there will come a time when he will be free to move his house to some secluded place, where he will relight his candle, take out his catalogues and read until at last he yawns. Then he’ll bury his head in his arms and sleep....That is, until another child picks up his house....

"Luck Is When Knowledge Meets Opportunity"

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 23:07:28 -0400

Collecting is pretty addictive.
(Image via Maureen Stanton, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money). So says antique dealing whiz Curt Avery (a pseudonym) in Maureen Stanton's book on the flea-marketing and antiquing world, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money. With Avery's sturdy guidance, Stanton scavenges the realm of bottle-diggers, gramophone dancers, shrunken-head purveyors, stalwart dealers and tentative feelers at the tables and tents of America's auctions and antiques fairs.
There are thousands of books out there for collectors and wanna-be dealers, but few capture the carny atmosphere and canny arcana of flea-marketing quite like Killer Stuff. It's a behind-the-scenes peek at how vintage and antique dealers make their trade, told through the eyes of one successful dealer who has built a steady business over decades of self-taught and hard-won lessons in eyeing the prize. Part road biography, part History of the World As Seen from Card Tables, Killer Stuff is also a friendly and fascinating compendium of information as diverse and diverting as anything you might spot among the estate lots.
Stanton takes us from the first known weathervane (48 B.C.E., Athens) to the development of auction theory and its implications for economics (William Vickery won the Nobel Prize for it in 1996), with side trips to the introduction of tea to England (documented by none other than my personal hero Sam Pepys) and the invention of heroin (as an aid to kicking opium). As Stanton unpacks a slew of factual finds she leads us through her encounters with passionate collectors and errant oddballs, fakes, fanatics, and fabulous finds, investing her tale with the rugged and eclectic charm of the hunt.
Stanton became interested in her subject in a very fitting way: It grew on her over a lifetime. "Scavenging is a habit that dies hard, or maybe never dies," she writes, recalling a childhood of “dump picking” with her frugal mom who reassembled old rotary phones as an avocation. In her college days, Stanton haunted junk stores and flea markets and "wore 'bag lady' coats I now know were swing coats from the 1940s," along with "1950s dresses, costume jewelry, funky plaid men’s blazers (one in mustard color—still have it)."
Still, Stanton didn't think about writing about her interest until Avery, who'd been a friend in college, looked her up when he was attending a glass auction in her city. "He needed a place to crash. I went with him to the auction and took notes. A few years later, I asked to tag along with him to a flea market. I found myself drawn further and further into that world. It was fascinating and entertaining."

Surprising, too: "I thought I was entering a world with fairly low-level vendors, maybe even down-and-out people who had an edge of desperation. I didn’t even know my friend had transformed himself into a really knowledgeable, successful dealer." Stanton became acquainted with "this whole subculture of people...who are experts and authorities at little cells of our collective history—the guy who sells and repairs only antique and vintage toasters.... the collector who self-published a book on Wistarburgh glass, the oldest glass manufactory in the country." Many of the most successful denizens of the flea market circuit are as knowledgeable as art historians and scholars--and sometimes more so. "These squadrons of people are lay historians, quasi-curators, and they are driven by a passion and love for objects—not money, because it’s just not an easy way to make a living."
Now that she's been on the road with the best in the business, can Stanton spot a fake or a find herself?
"I have definitely gained knowledge that has helped enormously." In fact, Stanton has shopping tips and a few other bonus items at her website. Yet, "I still get caught by reproductions, though, like a pair of Roseville candlesticks I bought about a year ago. Within a minute of researching them at home, I realized they were repros. I’d been careless and hasty and made some classic mistakes. The price was too good to be true, they were dirty so I did not see that there wasn’t really any “wear” where there should have been but didn’t look closely enough, lighting was poor and I didn’t have a flashlight or magnifying glass, they’d been sitting there for hours in the open in a large group shop that dealers pass through all the time, so they would have been gone if they’d been real. I didn’t know the dealer or his reputation, but it was a lower-level indoor flea market so he wasn’t really knowledgeable (though I think he knew these were repros and did not let on to me). I’m doing a lot better than I used to in spotting reproductions. Fakes are harder to tell because someone went through a lot of effort to make something look old, but I do know how to tell fakes in a few categories. I think you have to worry more about fakes as the price goes up. I paid $35 for those candlesticks and that was the cost of my lesson, and a mistake I’ll never make again."
Although the book is full of insights into aspects of collecting, this is not a how-to, but a firmly driven narrative about the thrill--and frequent upsets--of the hunt for killer stuff.
"As I was researching and writing over seven years, I kept thinking someone was going to come out with a similar book at any minute since this story hadn’t been told," recalls Stanton. No books, so far, "But there has been a huge onslaught of reality TV shows," including a new competitive show called Market Wars, just announced by PBS. "There was one when I started—Antiques Roadshow," Stanton remembers. At last count, Stanton says there are now 45 shows on the topic, with 30 of them being launched in the last two years or so (from 2010 to 2012). As entertaining as they are, none of those shows gives an in-depth or truly authentic or holistic look at the subculture because the medium doesn’t allow for that sort of depth."

Killer Stuff and Tons of Money is available in hardback, paperback, and ebook. You can still probably pick up a first edition of the hardcover--and keep it in good shape if you do. It could be worth a lot more one day.

Go Big or Go Home

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 09:07:25 -0400

There is a free lunch. It is in Redstone, Colorado. It's not every day you're a newlywed. By the book, in fact, it's only 365 days. So you can't blame me for trying to make each day after July 15, 2012 count for a little something toward the bottom line. I started before we even exchanged vows.

"Tell them we're getting married on Sunday!" I hissed in John's ear as the flight gear went up and we departed for Colorado. "They'll give us stuff."

John looked skeptical. We've both been married before, and I could see him racking his brain for an example of when his marital status ever entitled them to anything free.

Over the next two weeks, as we prepared to tie the knot and then tied it, we tried the newlywed card in a number of situations. At the car rental counter. At the hotel check-in desk. At the nicest restaurant in our honeymoon town. We even announced our marital status proudly to the deli lady at the Safeway in Delta, Colorado about 36 hours into our bliss.

We got a lot of congratulations, and if you squinted hard at the Safeway incident you could say we got some extra mustard packets for the corn dogs. The fancy restaurant in the honyemoon town offered us a premium bottle of wine at a fraction of the typical price, but they were offering that to everyone. In essence, we discovered that the newlywed card doesn't get you much these days.

Luckily, we had a Plan B. Our Plan B consisted of throwing money at any wedding-related task or entertainment until it fell off our to-do list. There are times when this has to happen.

"Go big or go home," we told each other.

Then, days later, when we'd long since stopped hoping, a miracle happened.

We got a free lunch at the Trading Post Cafe in Redstone.

Sure, it had nothing to do with us. We didn't even tell them we'd just gotten married. They comped us a French Dip and a buffalo burger for reasons that still escape us. We think it was because the order was late, or badly cooked, or both. Anyway, we celebrated.

All we had to do was spend a few thousand dollars for that magic moment.

Trust me, our budget's blown. But we got some nice stuff:

Playing Ticket to Ride at the China Clipper Inn, Ouray, Colorado Flowers stolen from an undisclosed location. Box Cañon Falls Park, Ouray, Colorado Union Station undergoing renovation, Denver, Colorado

The Oxford Hotel, Denver, Colorado

Domo Restaurant, Denver

Tomorrow Is the Day After the First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Sat, 9 Jun 2012 13:06:02 -0400

I've been doing it wrong.

You have, too.

Like me, you have made list after list, and lists OF your lists, to the point of listlessness, trying to do what you know is To-Do, and making occasional enormous Life Changing Goal Lists that will Make You Way Better in Ten Days.

I know. You're still not better. Me neither.

So listen up: I just bought us a clue.

I've figured out something really important: My daily lists only include the things I think I can get to, or the things I have to get to, or the things I believe I can control.

Right? I've been forgetting the most important thing of all: Every daily to-do list should include at least one meaningful task that is beyond my control, not do-able in a single day, or otherwise just plain impractical. Otherwise, I will never get to those six impossible things before breakfast.

My favorite way to make a list, generally, is to restrict it to the stuff I have to do before I can get to the stuff I want to do.

Or, if I do branch out and go list the stuff I want to do, I ghettoize it into a wishlist. Don't get me wrong: I love me some wishes, all the better if I'm keeping them at a social place like, say, Bucketlist.

Thing is, only today--after walking around on the planet for nearly 50 years--did it actually occur to me to mix them.

That's right. I am introducing aspirational diversity into my To-Do List. To-Day.

Like, here's today's list.
~~1. Post this.~~
2. Pay outstanding bills.
3. Finish Lucas project (small client)
4. Become fluent in French.

I mean, how am I going to keep Item #4 uppermost in mind or even have a prayer of finally making it real if I keep shunting it off to my dream list?

I won't be leaving behind some of the wonderful tools I've been using to stay organized, apps like

43 Folders*
Manilla
Mindmeister
Remember the Milk**
Smartsheet

And I won't stop finding sites like this one that make me want to put a cold washcloth on my head and lie down for a while.

Still. I like to think I am baby step closer to actually tossing off bon mots in our time.

Try it. What's the thing you want to do today, every day, that never gets done? Put it on your list every day for a week and see what happens next.

*Okay, I don't really ever succeed at using 43 Folders, but I feel like I should.
**Okay, I also ignore Remember the Milk.

An Impolite Conversation

Fri, 18 May 2012 15:05:44 -0400

I've been having fun with charts again.

It's good that the charting is fun, because the information isn't so fun.

I believe this is what my friend Nancy refers to as "the horizon always receding":

(Click the chart for a better view.)

This chart represents the changes--both subtle and, ultimately, virtually nonexistent--in my debt load since May 2011. The top bar is last year, and the bottom is now. So to speak.

You see, I've reduced my overall debt by about $7,000, which is nothing to sneeze at. But in real terms, I've made neither net gains nor losses overall. The biggest chunk paid down was on my house mortgage, owing to this helpful scheme. My student loans have shrunk, too, by another $2,500 during the past year.

The big growth is in credit consumer debt, but the picture is not as dire as you may imagine. More than 75 percent of my current credit card debt is actually sitting on balance transfer cards, not accruing further interest. My credit is costing me less than it ever has.

I've finally paid the last of my $5,000 loan to The Lending Club this month, and I am refinancing my house at a lower interest rate, which will help me pay a little more toward credit cards. I have managed to incur no additional debt during the past six months in spite of several major expenses, including a big 13th birthday party for my daughter and travel expenses associated with a couple of professional conferences, plus some major repairs to car and home.

Yes, delightful. But at the end of the day, I am frustrated, my fellow CheapBohemians. Because basically all this means that I am just winning at running in place.