Regular readers of this Web log already know that the sub-prime mortgage crisis affected my dear sister Rose, her husband Hank and their children months ago. That was when her brother-in-law’s family defaulted on the mortgage to his McMansion, after which Hank and Rose took them in, striking a deal to split Hank and Rose’s soaring mortgage payments among the four adults so that everybody would not end up living on the sidewalk.
(My Dear Foreign Readers who have heard all kinds of fantastic stories about the United States of America take note here, please – our esteemed presidents Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43, together with the rest of our venerable Republican Party, have lately made sure that, primary among our freedoms here in America, are the freedoms to [1] be unemployed with absolutely no source of income; [2] be literally without shelter against the elements, living in dilapidated motor vehicles, makeshift tents or cardboard boxes; [3] starve to death in the gutter; and, [4] die for no particular reason, should we lack funds to hire a doctor. The streets here were never paved with gold in the first place, and believe me, hog-wild shyster bankers and the war in Iraq make it hard to even keep the actual asphalt up in a lot of places these days. So if you’re itching to get out of wherever you are, take it from an American who isn’t stupid and doesn’t brag about the place – do yourself a favor and emigrate to Canada instead.)
Regular readers also know that Hank and his brother are one hundred percent Polish American, and that, like me, Rose is Italian American, so it follows that Rose and Hank’s suburban abode, which, prior to the Big Burst of the Housing Bubble, domiciled a somewhat excessive six offspring, now shelters an additional seven of their cousins. Since it was necessary to evict Hank Jr. from his room to provide two master bedrooms for the two couples, and install numerous Ikea Mydal bunk beds all over the place for their broods, Rose’s house is now filled with the pitter-patter of twenty-six feet, attached, in nice orderly pairs, to a bunch of kids ranging from toddler to teenager, all of whom are challenged to coexist peacefully not only with their siblings, as might be expected, but also with their first cousins. Let’s just say that everybody at Rose’s place spends a hell of a lot more time thinking about hot water and solitude than I do – and much more, in most cases I bet, than you do, too.
Under such circumstances, Rose, Hank, his brother and his brother’s wife can hardly be blamed for inviting Uncle TC (as I insist on being called) over for a home-cooked Sunday dinner once in a while. They know that if they do that, not only will I get to enjoy the company of loving nieces and nephews but also a gaggle of kids, who, despite the fact that I can’t actually find any term to describe them in relation to myself, are, I suppose some sort of nieces and nephews-in-law or something.
Being no fool, on such occasions I bring plenty of good food, including an assortment of premium ice cream, like Haagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s for that mob kids and plenty of pricey liquor, wine and beer to slake the thirst of their four haggard, overworked, perpetually broke and loving parents. Maybe Julius Caesar had a larger throng to welcome him after he crossed the Rubicon, but on the basis of individual crowd member enthusiasm, I’d stack my reception for Sunday dinner at Rose’s place up against his march into Rome anytime.
So it was, during a such a visit in July, that we had a cook out. I brought mounds of choice Angus ten percent fat hamburger and the best frankfurters Balducci’s had to offer for the children and a three-inch thick, seven-pound USDA prime porterhouse that I prepared Tuscan style for the adults. After dinner that particular Sunday night, Hank Jr. cornered me under the maple tree out back – the one with the swing attached – and began to sing the “I’m the Oldest Kid in This Three Ring Circus Blues.”
Yeah, Hank Jr. was beginning to chafe at the conditions, and the time until he would be 18, all legal and allowed to go live somewhere else, seemed to be an eternity. If only he could have his own bedroom again, like before, even if it was just a coach house dormer over the garage, poor Hank Jr. would be, if not happy – since no teenager is ever really happy – at least content and, more importantly, not constantly plagued with dark impulses to strangle one or another of the additional dozen children with whom the cruel Fates had forced him to live. It was during this conversation that I developed an even deeper appreciation and respect for my dear old Mom and Dad, who, despite the fact that they were Catholic, only had three kids. After all, I had been a teenage male myself once, not all that long ago, and I remembered what it was like. And that, of course, made me feel a great deal of empathy for Hank Jr.’s woeful predicament.
So I said, “I understand. Chill for a while and I’ll get back to you.”
I suspect Hank Jr. thought I was giving him some kind of adult brush-off routine he just hadn’t seen yet, but he perked up considerably when, about an hour and a half later, when it came time for the smallest fry to bed down and, therefore, time for me to leave, I took him aside.
“You’re a motor head, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, you could say that,” Hank admitted.
“Your car, your Dad’s car and your Mom’s SUV, not to mention what appears to be some of your friend’s cars and motorcycles?” I continued, “You work on them in the garage, right?”
“Uh-huh,” Hank Jr. agreed, obviously not too sure where this was going.
“Okay, then,” I advised, “here’s what you do. Measure the garage floor. Draw a diagram of how it’s shaped. Buy enough 3/8th inch plywood to completely cover it. Get nine different colors of bright acrylic paint, enough to paint that whole area of plywood with a single coat of each. Take your time and build up nine layers of acrylic paint, a different color for each time, on one side of those plywood pieces. Then apply two coats of black acrylic paint on top. When the plywood is ready, clear out the garage floor so it’s completely bare, sweep it up and clean it nicely. Then tack each plywood panel, unpainted side down, to the garage floor with dots of epoxy that aren’t any bigger than about a dime when you flatten the glue out. Use five dots for each panel, one at each corner and one in the middle.”
At this point, Hank Jr. was looking at me funny, probably wondering if maybe I’d lost my mind. “You’re serious?” he inquired. “Eleven coats of acrylic paint on plywood glued to the garage floor? How’s that going to get me my own bedroom?”
“Just do it,” I told him, slipping the kid three crisp, new hundred dollar bills, “this ought to cover the raw materials with a bit left over to take a girl out on a date or two.”
Well, after I showed him the money, Hank didn’t ask any more questions. The weather was dry, and inside of two weeks, applying a new coat to the plywood every afternoon, the painting was done and the sections were all securely glued to the garage floor.
Now, I did all that, not because I had some wild idea or another; no, I did it because I knew something that other people did not generally know. Those sorts of things can be extremely profitable, of course, but you have to be careful where you use them. Use information not generally known while working on Wall Street and goodness gracious, some serious repercussions could ensue, yes indeed, or so the SEC would like the suckers to believe.
But there are other situations where being in on something that’s not common knowledge is not only acceptable, it’s legal, too. And as it happens, due to some consulting work I did earlier this year on behalf of the National Endowment for the Arts, I knew about Aaron Young and what he was up to – and that’s definitely something, I think you will agree, that most people had no idea of.
Aaron’s the conceptual mastermind behind “Greeting Card,” a combination abstract / performance art creation, involving 288 sheets of painted plywood, oodles of acrylic paint and ten motorcycles. You see, back in July, I knew Mr. Young had obtained a budget of $150,000 just to create this particular piece of artwork, and that he intended to spend some of it paying students from Barnard and Columbia minimum wage to paint the plywood for him.
So last Thursday, up came the plywood on Hank’s garage floor, created for three hundred bucks. I sprang for another hundred fifty to buy a huge polished stainless steel frame, and on Friday, that sucker went up on the wall at one of our local high-priced art galleries in one of the smarter sections of DC.
Saturday night, there was a black-tie reception at the gallery, intended to debut three brilliant young artists, one of whom was Hank Jr. His “Garage Floor” was the toast of the evening. I anticipated that it would be, and paid for the baby sitters so Hank, Rose, Hank’s brother and his wife could get dressed up elegantly and listen to highly educated intellectuals tell them why young Hank Jr. is an artistic genius, just like the fabled and acclaimed Mr. Aaron Young.
“Garage Floor” is a truly formidable work of performance / abstract / documentary / action art. A massive eighteen by twenty-five foot framed composite, the work clearly dominates any space where it is mounted. Viewing this inspired creation, we are drawn inexorably into its thematic schema, subsequently held within it by the rich color and shape palettes, and confronted with the gritty, naked reality of the images embedded there. Dropped wrenches, carelessly tossed ball peen hammers, oil change drippings, the virile tracks of an engine block laid bare on that blackly gessoed field; and countless other marks which boldly and unabashedly signify motor work combine with impressionistic swirls of tire tracks, footprints, full body impressions and stark, abstract lines left by mechanic’s boards, dragged lawn rakes, scraping bicycle pumps, and the enigmatic trails of pesticide and fertilizer bags.
Such is the power of this work, the eye cannot receive it all, nor the mind completely comprehend it, without prolonged contemplation and many, many seemingly inevitable returns to view it yet once more. Here a chain saw, seen in tantalizingly incomplete profile, there a glob of solder that fell, smoldered and eventually became one with the work, burned into it with frank and exuberant sensuality; hither a child’s innocent graffito, thither the young swain’s cigarette butt, redolent with homage to the Modernists, and yon the stray beer bottle cap, its existential message evident to all.
Nor can mere words do proper justice to the semiotic power of this work, which signifies both tender love and mechanical anger, painful longing and sweet succor, aching wanderlust and banal domesticity, maniac frenzy and Zen repose; which signifies, indeed, everything and nothing, simultaneously. To stand before it, to see it, to let it possess you, is both a wicked, ecstatic apotheosis and a pure, virginal paragon of spiritual experience. And on Sunday it rested, a post modern Sistine Chapel mural, evoking wonder and awe in every soul it touched.
Today, Monday, the New York Times ran a piece in its Arts section, describing Mr. Young’s work. Supported by the Art Production Fund, a non-profit cultural organization, “Greeting Card” is the first in a series of daring art events planned by the Seventh Regiment Armory Conservancy, another non-profit cultural organization. The $150,000 comes from designer Tom Ford and Sotheby’s, among others.
Tonight, ten motorcycles will do skids, doughnuts and wheelies in a 55,000 square foot drill hall on 288 sheets of painted plywood, creating “Greeting Card” in front of an audience of hundreds, including specially invited representatives of none other than the Hell’s Angels. Following Mr. Young’s motorized choreography, their burnouts will weave a tapestry of tires, sing an ode to our mechanical infatuations, and fill the Seventh Regiment Armory with so much exhaust that windows will have to be removed from the building and gas masks kept on hand for any in attendance who prove too weak for the experience.
And this afternoon, a collector bought “Garage Floor” from Hank Jr. for an undisclosed sum. I don’t blame him for not telling me how much he got for it – he’s the artist, after all. But I have been assured that it will more than cover the cost of building him his own bedroom over that damn garage.