jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology

I'll never know why didn't he snap up the vintage photo of Public School 238's eighth-grade graduating class. He had a really good reason to do so -- but maybe an even better one to leave it be.

Who can doubt that flea markets are museums?

Yard and garage sales are those museums' feeder galleries, and all of them provide a surprise immersion into the lives that neighbors past and present have led. Those of us who are hypnotized by these object lessons in popular culture also understand that the rich discards displayed for sale have soaked up buckets of emotional juice -- some actually vibrate with survival after years of use and handling.

You may be stopped cold by one of these items, petrified by its story.

Faithful yard-salers, even the most blithe or cynical, will recognize each particular madeleine, be it the ceramic ashtray identical to the one your dead father filled or the old postcard of a pastel hotel you happened to have stayed in when, as a tan young man, you discovered the salty taste of a stranger's kiss.

I can't remember at which parking lot or upon what lawn I found the sepia graduation photo of the "Class of June 1949, P.S. 238, Brooklyn," showing rows of boys in suits and ties and coy girls in cliche-prim white blouses. I do know that I bought it because it was my very own school, the one I attended from the first to the seventh grade -- at which time we moved abruptly from the tulip-lined plots of East 8^th Street to a raw, swampy development in Howard Beach, Queens, directly under the path of flights to and from Idlewild Airport. We learned to lip-read at our new apartment, because no episode of Gunsmoke or Alfred Hitchcock Presents could be watched without the deafening interruption every few minutes from the roar of a plane. Funny how you become accustomed to regular holes in a plot and learn to fill in the blanks. I was well-prepared for postmodernism.

That photo, though of a much earlier class, still pushed me to recall the names of my teachers: third grade's plump, encouraging Mrs. Horween; the disgusting Mr. Barash, who clipped his nails at his desk and never answered questions; the wondrous Miss (Jane) Costello, whose clearheaded kindness and direct intelligence I will never forget. You probably don't care to read about how she passed around Halloween apples with hidden coins stuck in them, pennies in the large ones, nickels in the littlest, to make her modest moral point. I can still hear her calm voice, see her generous gray-blue eyes. That's my treasure, not for sale.

Selling Day

So, the photograph under glass in its ridged wooden frame is propped against a box on a lawn, part of our yard sale, along with more than a hundred material friends.

The day, hot as blazes, goes by quickly as folks stroll among the stuff. Some shoppers are grim, even offended. "That '10' is dollars? Should be cents!" one shouts, referring to a Mexican tourist-ware candelabrum of inlaid brass. Others are genial and happy to finger whatever's in front of them.

An older man and woman come by. They are somewhat sloppily dressed for their age, though their car is hybrid and expensive. She picks up a single dish with an ugly floral rim and turns it over. "I know who designed this. Now what was his name?" she asks aloud. I had a dollar on it, a steal.

Her companion lifts the school photo.

"That's from Midwood, Brooklyn," I say from my aluminum chair.

"I know."

How does he know?

Robert Kusmirowski, Unacabine, 2008

Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment. -- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future ("The Unabomber Manifesto")

A perfectly fine artist few in the U.S. have heard of named Robert Kusmirowski has a perfectly fine piece in "After Nature," the first perfectly fine group show at New York's still new New Museum. Kusmirowski, from Poland, specializes in evocative models of the past, encrusted memorial recreations, and his work in "After Nature" -- whose modest theme embraces a world "darkened by uncertain catastrophe" -- is nothing other than a creepy redo of the primitive cabin in which Theodore Kaczynski lived, wrote, and assembled his fatal explosive packages.

The poor gallery guard standing by the cabin had to keep repeating that no, the door didn't open. (Same problem with the Bucky Fuller 1930s Dymaxion car in the lobby space at the Whitney. That guard agreed in a charming way that it would be valuable to allow us to see the quirky vehicle's rotten or gutted or absent interior, and he would do what he could.) Everyone, of course, wants to open doors.

Wouldn't you know, at least a few of the younger folks didn't know who the Unabomber was -- or is, because Kaczynski's still alive, 66, in a Colorado prison for the rest of his days. He keeps up with current events, though, which we know because a few weeks back the cyber-must Smoking Gun wrote that Ted was perturbed that the actual cabin was on view as part of an exhibit in the Newseum, the ill-named temple of journalism that opened this year in Washington, D.C.

In a truly contemporary, interactive institution, one should be able to choose the soundtrack of one's experience. So Out There must therefore ask, what exactly would you, kind reader, wish to hear spoken from beneath the Unabomber's various floorboards?

Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment. -- Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future ("The Unabomber Manifesto")

A perfectly fine artist few in the U.S. have heard of named Robert Kusmirowski has a perfectly fine piece in "After Nature," the first perfectly fine group show at New York's still new New Museum. Kusmirowski, from Poland, specializes in evocative models of the past, encrusted memorial recreations, and his work in "After Nature" -- whose modest theme embraces a world "darkened by uncertain catastrophe" -- is nothing other than a creepy redo of the primitive cabin in which Theodore Kaczynski lived, wrote, and assembled his fatal explosive packages.

The poor gallery guard standing by the cabin had to keep repeating that no, the door didn't open. (Same problem with the Bucky Fuller 1930s Dymaxion car in the lobby space at the Whitney. That guard agreed in a charming way that it would be valuable to allow us to see the quirky vehicle's rotten or gutted or absent interior, and he would do what he could.) Everyone, of course, wants to open doors.

Wouldn't you know, at least a few of the younger folks didn't know who the Unabomber was -- or is, because Kaczynski's still alive, 66, in a Colorado prison for the rest of his days. He keeps up with current events, though, which we know because a few weeks back the cyber-must Smoking Gun wrote that Ted was perturbed that the actual cabin was on view as part of an exhibit in the Newseum, the ill-named temple of journalism that opened this year in Washington, D.C.

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