Shanty Shack Art, the U.H.B., and Taboo

It was Friday. The boss was not in town, the workload was light. Probably the only things I accomplished were digitizing a steady stream of mini DV tapes and faxing my request for video footage of a House of Representatives hearing by the Science and Technology Committee on the Electronic Waste and Recycling Act. The procedure to obtain these tapes is impossibly tangled in red tape.

Leah’s best friend Nicki’s brother (whose name I have forgotten already) was in town from Berkeley, California to complete his application for a Masters in Music Arts at Yale. Since his audition was on Sunday, Leah proposed a dinner of takeout at her place….which Andrew and I attended but not before going to an art gallery exhibit on Canal and Orchard Streets….

I seriously don’t know how to begin to describe the exhibit. Except that Andrew’s friend Reesa is the co-owner of the gallery and the featured art was, in all seriousness, a shack that was entirely composed of “found objects.” So imagine a shack with walls and ceilings built from dirty found wood, plastic, steel, various metallic objects, various non-metallic objects and which is probably about the space of my college dorm room at The White House in Berkeley. The dark, one room, dilapidated living space would be something you would stereotypically associate homeless vagrants living in.

Ok, great. So what’s the big deal? There are tons of these tiny art galleries all across Manhattan with weird avant garde art and this "found art" notion is anything but new. Except that there were real real estate agents leading poshly dressed white women in stilettos with their husbands trailing behind like obedient afterthoughts through the tiny space. One woman wore a strapless knee-high thick wool dress. I know wool is supposed to keep you warm in the winter, but doesn't a strapless one defeat the purpose? Other oeople were eyeing the place like they would eye a summer villa in the Hamptons.

“And of course, if you look to your upper right, you can see that these solar panels are designed to fully heat the home and keep you cozy during the night when you are entertaining guests,” one agent pronounced. I noticed that she did not use the words "shanty," or "shack." This was a "home." She also reminded me of the superhero suit designer in that Disney/Pixar movie, The Incredibles, only Jewish and stuffed into a stiff asexual gray suit-skirt combo. “Oh! And here is the dining area.” She motioned to the flimsy table made of orange and white construction signs where we--Andrew, me, and probably about 6 of his friends from his high school (a prestigious New York Preparatory for future U.H.B.s) were crammed on, drinking Negro Modelos and discussing the latest about novelist Phillip Roth.

“Wonderful teak wood benches,” the agent crooned. “And the kitchen comes fully furnished as well!”

This “kitchen,” I might add consists of the bottom of a fruit crate attached to the wall to make a “shelf.” Dirty silverware and some broken plates, cups, and bowls adorned the decrepit culinary space. Below it, a rudimentary hose tried to disguise itself as a faucet and the sink looked like some kind of large, steel, wok-like bowl, also perched on top of other crates.

“Simply lovely,” one anorexic, fur-clad lady said.

“This is so original!” her friend with perfectly coiffed hair agreed.

Finished with the tour minutes after they had entered the shack, they were ushered into the genuine real estate office at the back of the gallery.

The premise of this shack exhibit is that it is also a timeshare. Rich people, or anyone (even you! even me!) can for $250 purchase a week’s stay in this luxurious House of Cards shanty which will soon be disassembled and relocated to the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard for a year. Weeks are selling fast (probably due to the uber-predatory real estate mavens).

One journalist approached me and I had nowhere (literally) to run. “So, what do you do? What do you think about this project and are you going to be renting space?”

“Uhm, I work in video production.”

“Ah! A film artist!”

“Erm.”

“So tell me—what do you think is the significance of this art?”

I stammer out something about how it is symbolic in the fact that it is a sustainable shack (I mean, just look at the exquisite solar panels!) and that it is definitely a social commentary on American wastefulness. I might have said some other things, but I was spewing out so much bull my embarrassed subconscious probably blocked the majority of it out of my conscious memory.

“Hmm…” said the journalist and moved on to her next victim, a quarter of a foot away.

One of Andrews friends offered to show me around and we stopped by a large black and white photograph on the wall of somber hipsters chilling in the shack and looking like “duh, this is the only cool place to be.”

“Yeah, my hair is a little weird in that picture,” he said sheepishly.

I did a double take and noticed a wide-eyed man in a tuxedo (why is he dressed in a tuxedo when all the other people are wearing rags???) looking petrified off into the distance.

We rejoined the table where Andrew’s friends, all of whom are born and bred New Yorkers (and nothing like Andrew I might add, except when he’s with them) were chattering about the latest holiday gossip. Also, if you are at all familiar with the movie Metropolitan, I have not appreciated until now, just how accurately the film portrays the mannerisms of modern U.H.B.s. Down to the speech. Down to the topics of conversation.

“Guess who I ran into last week,” one guy taunted another girl.

“Ooohh. Oh hm.. I don’t know. I give up. Tell me”

“(Name disclosed)”

Gasp “Wait, isn’t she going out with Phillip Roth?”

“Yeah, and she’s only 24!”

“Wait, what about that other girl?”

“Oh they broke up a while ago”

“This isn’t the same girl?”

“Nah, I mean, the other one was 24 too. Apparently they met at [mutual acquaintance’s] Christmas Party. The story goes that he met her for five minutes and then told her ‘Stand close to me so that if anyone tries to approach me I can just deflect them onto you.’

Laughter (I am not laughing, but rather, wondering why the girl had a plastic hair clip that looked exactly like a cigarette in her hair. I know some people regard cigarettes as accessories to their image, but this was taking it a little too literally.

“And she had only read The Plot Against America before they started formally dating.”

Crowd gasps “No!”

“Yeah so she’s been making her way through the canon and when she was finished with Indignation, you know, one of his seminal novels, she called Roth and was like, ‘this book was terrible!’ To which Roth responded [cue sleezy voice] ‘I know… I got away with murder.”

Uproarious laughter

Another guy chimes in “Yes, I did find that book rather tiresome and incontinent at times.”

“Incontinent? Incontinent... isn’t that like, also related to the inability for one to control their excrement?

The conversation degenerates into adult incontinency and adult diaper wear much in the same manner as the discussion of Roth’s sex life.

I might add that I am NOT exaggerating a bit of this and found myself completely amused. One pale, British woman who was sitting next to me turned to me and began talking about how she just abhors Germany. Just the faces she made when she described the Deutschland made me feel extremely sorry for the 82,369,552 people who live there. When she told me she was a violinist who was temporarily in New York from London recording some of Bach’s works, I told her that I had seen Anne-Sophie Mutter (pronounced mooter) at the Philharmonic a while ago. Mutter is somewhat of a violin superstar. “She looked so great,” I remarked, thinking of when Leah and I were sitting in Avery Fischer concert hall when Mutter came on stage in a figure-flattering dress and the guy behind me said loudly “Wow! She’s looks HOT!”

“Yeah,” the violinist rolled her eyes. “Its all the BOTOX.”

I was more than ready to split when Andrew announced that he and I were leaving. “Are you coming to the after party?” one girl asked. “After party,” I might add, is code for doing lines and singing karaoke.

After declining, Andrew and I run drunkenly through the cold to the corner bodega where we buy smokes. Then we go to “Good Dumpling House” on Grand and Elizabeth and demand two bags of dumplings in three languages, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. The people who sell us the dumplings are unphased. Sometimes I feel like New York is such a melting pot that hearing white people speak Cantonese is nothing special.

We show up to Leah’s place where we (plus Charlene, Justin, Elizabeth, Leah’s friend’s brother whose name I still do not remember) feast on a wide variety of take out food people have scavenged and brought back. A few more bottles of wine and beer later, we were treated to a private trombone performance:

I did not have the slightest clue why playing the trombone was so hard. But I was sitting by Justin who not only teaches music but spent a year in the Netherlands on a Fulbright studying carillon playing (think UC Berkeley campanile). So now I am 100% more enlightened on why wind instruments are so hard to master because you essentially produce various musical notes by how fast you blow air into the tube.

Next we split into teams to play Taboo. My team won of course. Obviously it wasn’t because we had four players. Obviously.