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FANTASIES OF THE JUNK SHOP HUNTER BRAITHWAITE It’s good for art. -Boo Boo One way to organize a library is the stock, a junk shop owner could resort law of the good neighbor, wherein to Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia; books are ordered not numerically they could organize by shape, color, or alphabetically, but by theme. The or price; or they could just say fuck it. idea is that similarities breed conver- gences, serendipity. This is the basic At Argo Electronics on Canal , principle of the Warburg Library in the record jackets cost the same , which is structured by ori- whether there’s a record in them or entation/image/thought/action. not. You can buy the locking mech- anism for a car. You can buy car seat Thematic categorization also works headrests, with or without embedded when organizing a conventional store screens for back-seat entertainment. with a standardized inventory: shirts You can buy lots of different types on the shelves, tennis rackets in that of tape. Tape is a best seller. You can corner, shoes on the table in the back. buy select books, such as Essential But a junk shop is quite different. Boat Drinks & Assorted Frozen Con- Everything in a junk shop is fiercely coctions. That book, which emits an individual, incommunicative, and, antiquarian aura but was published once singled out by the shopper, in- a handful of years ago exclusively comparable. Faced with such irascible for the gift shop of Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville restaurant chain, con- You can buy dog toys. You can buy tains a recipe for a “Memphis Belle,” old electric toothbrushes. Security a brandy and SoCo affair named cameras. Regular cameras. You can after the first B-17 Flying Fortress buy whatever you want, provided you to survive 25 missions over occupied can find it. Europe.

Damaged on these missions, it was To know Argo is to know Zdislav repaired piece by piece, until it “David” Lasevski, the store’s owner. practically became a new plane. This He careens through the aisles like recalls a much earlier vessel, the a freewheeling gear in a clogged mythological Argo, which similarly machine, bemoaning the global shift underwent continual rejuvenation, towards “iPad,” his catch-all term for retaining its name while becoming contemporary electronics, holding up a new ship. This tangent leads to odds and ends asking if “You know Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and what it is, this?” Almost always you then on to Roland Barthes by Roland don’t, sometimes neither does he. Barthes, but suffice it to say here that junk, the cast-off, the glued-on, is Now, it’s tempting to describe the serious business. proprietors and staff of a junk shop with the same distanced interest that with soot, his eyes reflecting the cam- garbage, sell them to me for a dollar a both essential and beside the point. you consider the objects for sale. But era’s flash like LEDs. piece.” He did, and David took home of course the choice to operate one a few boxes, fixed them, and then Beyond running Argo, David keeps of these stores, to spend one’s life After traveling around, he decided resold them at a profit. In need of himself busy writing memoirs surrounded by objects that are at that America was the best country, so a replacement part for one of these and improving the lives of others once garbage and treasure (garbage when the ship docked at Port Eliza- calculators, he went to the electronics through suggestion and invention. to most, treasure to a few), is mani- beth, New Jersey, he took his suitcase shop at 391 Canal. The owner said He sent a handwritten proposal to fest in a unique personality. and got off, leaving “the sea for the eight dollars. David countered with the DOT to alleviate congestion fish.” This and more anecdotes from four. The owner said, “Are you crazy, on the BQE by rerouting the HOV After a childhood in a Polish orphan- his early life are contained in his this store makes no money. If some- lane, which they implemented. Com- age,FANTASIES David, who is Israeli, spent a few memoir, OF No Place THE Called Home ,JUNK which one comes SHOP with four thousand FANTASIES dollars parative before and after videosOF are years in the army before joining the is $1.99 on Amazon. If you come to I’d sell them the store.” available on Argo’s YouTube page. merchant marines, working in the Argo looking for something, chances He invented a do-it-yourself kidney engine room of a tanker. One time in are he’ll end up selling you his book So, David came with the four thou- stone removal kit. the Red Sea he helped extinguish a instead. sand dollars. This was in 1978 or fire on another, sinking ship. There 1979, he doesn’t remember. Why he He invented a tiny tube that connects was an official commendation, a med- One day, David met a man who was would buy a failing electronics shop a bottle of lotion to a lubricant car- al, and a check. A few faded pictures selling calculators. The broken ones in a failing city is a larger question, tridge for your electric shaver. This is taken of him below deck show an he tossed in the garbage. “I told him, and a good one to keep in mind as fortuitous: the bulk of Argo’s income exhausted yet focused face smeared instead of throwing them to the you sort through Argo’s bins. It is is due to the huge amount of used Remington electric shavers David roundings in mundane objects. For bought years ago, and now sells on those who live in cities, this means eBay. He reportedly moves $6,000 of transposing the flow and energy Remingtons a week. of a metropolis onto whatever is at hand—Craigslist furniture churning There are more anecdotes, enough to through a neighborhood over the compile some semblance of a biog- course of a decade, used (or stolen) raphy. Again, this is fitting, because bicycles, legal tender, or, in this case, what is junk if not a material anec- a junked circuit board. dote—something passed down, en- tertaining but somehow insufficient. Starting in the 1920s, if you wanted to buy a radio or get yours repaired, you went to Cortland Street, 17 Hold a circuit board in your hand. blocks south of where Argo is today. Spin it between your fingers like a This was Radio Row. Radio’s star was green cracker. The globs of solder on the rise, as the expansion of the set like bits of salt on a saltine. It’s consumer class set the pace for the almost a cliché to see this carto- advent of broadcast culture. World graphically, but we are conditioned War II put a damper on the business- to see the reflection of our sur- es selling and repairing radios, as did the medium’s eclipse by television, that had been hauled to the curb.1 He but the small stores (there were over reconstructed a sense of place from 300 at the height of it) rolled with these derelict things. This junk. So, the punches for as long as they could. how does this work now, when the The erection of the World Trade history of Lower is trot- Center led to protests (one in July, ted out to justify its expensive restau- 1962 featured a black-draped coffin rants, boutiques, loft apartments with containing the dummy labeled Mr. original beams and new fixtures? Small Businessman) but, ultimately, the How does a storefront on Canal demise of Radio Row. disrupt this linked accumulation of place and wealth, especially by selling The thing about material culture is used items at a discount? that you have to try really hard to get it to go away. Especially in this city, Perhaps subversion lies in bargain even with space at a premium, objects pricing. This is not Shaker furni- enter a perpetual shuffle. In “My Lost ture, or Mid-century Danish. It’s not City,” Luc Sante writes about walking Dieter Rams, it’s not Ettore Sottsass, the of the Lower Charles and Ray Eames. It’s not finding objects—old furniture, etc. Northern Soul 45s or Pre-War Blues

1 Luc Sante, “My Lost City,” in Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990 – 2005. New York: Yeti, 2007. 78s. It’s not even vintage Casio (ok, scene published in 1979 said that “for maybe it’s vintage Casio). Every item the artists of SoHo, [] has a backstory, sure, but the prove- has become a vast, luxurious, tan- nance of this stock is noteworthy gled garden of the real.”2 Nam Jun because it’s so unspecific. In these Paik had a studio on Canal; it is no boxes is the vast chaff of globalism, leap to imagine him sorting through the gravel of a place, the loam of a the electronics of Argo in search for place. Dusty electronics had to accu- materials. Donald Judd’s tidy aes- mulate dust from somewhere, even thetic might have led him elsewhere, if it’s just the shipping container or but the restaurant-supply sink you the storage unit. So, backstory is a can still find at his loft at 101 Spring dead end. It is where junk goes after Street likely came from Canal or its it leaves the shop that has made the environs. And then, of course, there’s biggest cultural impact on this city. Rauschenberg.

The hardware shops, junk shops, and Since the Ashcan School, life in Low- electronics shops on Canal inadver- er Manhattan has been territory for tently became a destination for new artmaking. Since Rauschenberg, the types of consumers: the artists of 2 Alexandra Anderson-Spivy and B.J. Archer, Anderson Soho. A book on the downtown art & Archer’s SoHo: The Essential Guide to Art and Life in . New York: Simon and Shuster, 1979. city itself has been fair game. Tales for sure. Sante described the Lower goods spill out onto the sidewalk, an be tainted, for better or for worse. abound of the artist wandering the East Side in terms usually reserved omen of desperate, transient times to streets of the neighborhood, collect- for the dark side of the moon. How- come? Junk sucks up the specific. It con- ing debris for his combines. Though ever, a line from that essay gets to the taminates. It is the memento mori Argo lacks a merino sheep, or an relationship between junk and junk ignored on the shelf. This, too, shall eagle, or bedding, for that matter, shop: “Before the early 1980s you Before and after. Site, and frozen pass, it says. Except it won’t. Argo is there’s more than enough raw mate- never saw people selling old books moment of transit. This is integral filled with objects that ring in spe- rials for artmaking. or miscellaneous refuse from flat- to the identity of junk. As objects cific chimes of nostalgia, or else are tened boxes on the sidewalk. If you prized both for their relationship to so undefined, so excremental, that As the economy boomed in the truly wanted to sell things you could the past and their potential for future it is a wonder they were ever new— 1980s,FANTASIES so did the appeal of Canal rent OF a storefront THE for next to nothing,JUNK reinvention, SHOP junk exists midway FANTASIES be- that anyone ever figured outOF how to Street junk shops. According to a assuming you weren’t choosy about tween antiques and construction ma- package them. Empty DVD cases, Times article from 1987, “Shopping location.” terials. It is this tension between past two for a dollar. Massage wands. Canal St., New York’s Attic,” artists and future, nostalgia and invention Headphones. Technic Dual Cassette still came, but so did yuppies out to What to make of Argo, which still that makes junk such an intriguing Decks. VHS movies, two dollars each. furnish their lofts, looking to remains, a generation later, a store- typology of object. It is too mongrel Music cd 99cents. Camcorders. capture the increasingly rare allure front for junk, a vestige of a freer, to be an antique and yet commands Extension cords. The physicality of of an “older, grittier New York.”3 more forgiving New York, and, too much attention to be seamlessly these objects—their shitty ergonom- The city had gotten much less gritty, during operating hours, when card- inserted into a piece of art. Art made ics and dusty turrets, the sheen of board boxes filled with discount with junk will always be that; it will touch. Everything an alien relic of a 3 Giovannini, Joseph. “Shopping Canal St., New York’s Attic.” , October 29, 1987. time when consumer goods came in everything up and starting over. bigger boxes. JC Penny’s catalogue, Hammacher Schlemmer, SkyMall, and Around the margins of this flow one then what? Nothing. iPad. finds the tide pool of a secondary economy. Ragpickers of yore, boot- Though junk is inert, a testament to leggers, counterfeiters. Secondhand life’s flow washed ashore by an errant dealers, aficionados, antiquers. Art- current, this is all about movement. ists. Canal street. That a thorough- From David’s peripatetic upbringing fare named for drainage, utilitarian to the circuit boards repaired in the intervention, could come to support back, all is in motion. Even the name so many such micro-economies is of the store, Argo, refers back to that wonderful. That is evident in the mythological ship that was repaired junk shop. piece by piece so that, over time, it was remained the same ship but was, This movement needs a locale. As simultaneously, entirely different. such, the junk shop quarantines As tedious as this maintenance can earlier failures. It also incubates new become, surely it is better for the soul ideas. It’s a sort of banal cabinet of (and for those cadmium-polluted re- curiosities, a magnet for tin-foil-hat- cycling towns in China) than ripping ted conspiracy theorists. It’s also a rebellion against real estate’s bottom goods, and don’t do much selling, one line. An alternative to the tyranny of way to describe it is a failure. Howev- the new. er, this failure seems more metaphysi- cal than commercial and, as such, less Despite the transient nature of their of a personal shortcoming than of merchandise, and their clientele, the general way of things. junk shops have a permanence that new stores, perpetually reinventing If the antique seals off the past and themselves, do not. And yet, the mer- brings it to the present, Pine-Soled chandise is aging. So are the custom- and price-tagged, the junk shop ers. So is the staff. David has started refuses distinction between then and talking about renting out the space. now, waste and potential. A junk shop He’d make more money renting it, is beguiling, baffling. It tempts the that’s for certain. It doesn’t turn a bargain hunter, the weekend anthro- profit. He likens it to an unfaithful pologist. Any attempt to categorize wife. What can he do, though? He its contents will be laughably incom- loves her. plete. All paths lead back to Borges, his Chinese encyclopedia, his Library When you make a business out of of Babel. selling broken, neglected, cast-off Lately, David and Argo’s manager worldly traces, plastic residue, relics Boo Boo (né Edward Lawson)— of contemporary effort and cultural whose main contribution to the nonchalance. Argo is reinvented yet store’s sonic atmosphere is a muffled again. Not as a storing house for de- “fuck it” from time to time—have tritus, or a loading dock for second- HUNTER BRAITHWAITE IS A -BASED WRITER AND realized that many of the store’s hand consumer products, but as that EDITOR. HE IS EDITORIAL DIRECTOR OF AFFIDAVIT AND HAS shoppers are artists. There is a tangled garden of the real. CONTRIBUTED WRITING TO NUMEROUS ART PUBLICATIONS. certain romance to this, sure, but it HE IS THE AUTHOR OF FLOODED PENTHOUSE WITH THE mainly meant that they could sell PAINTER MARGAUX OGDEN. more broken things, knowing that they were just going to be painted over, collaged, or mulched into some sculptural assemblage.

In a homemade commercial that is WRITTEN IN PARALLEL WITH MOTOKO FUKUYAMA: YOU NEVER available on Argo’s YouTube channel, KNOW WHAT IDEA YOU MIGHT HAVE FEBRUARY 2017 next to David’s BQE video, the tag line “You Never Know What Idea You Might Have” sounds over an image of this vast array of different