Sunday, October 31, 2021

Antiques antics — why are young people buying old stuff?

 Are Céline’s long-lost manuscripts “the greatest literary discovery ever” — or an antisemitic bomb waiting to go off?   literary mysteries


Two of the most influential American men of the past 100 years have surprising parallels in their biographies: W.E.B. Du Bois and Barack Obamabiography  


Songs as poems: Paul Simon, ‘I Know What I Know’


Antiques antics — why are young people buying old stuff?

Antiques antics — why are young people buying old stuff? Millennials are forsaking flat-packs for second-hand furniture and prices are skyrocketing

This past June, I tried to rationalise driving nine hours north to the US state of Maine to buy a bed. There was a man there willing to part with an antique spindle double bed for a reasonable price, and I wanted one with a singular passion. I’ve long coveted a spindle bed, also called a Jenny Lind bed. But in the past year, they’ve become chic. Spindle beds, spindle shelves and a whole host of early-American antique styles are now beloved by a new generation of designers and enthusiasts trying to bring a farmhouse energy to modern interiors.

 Antiques dealers say that five years ago they couldn’t give these antiques away, and they were a bargain to buy. An old, turned wood bed would retail for about $150 on Craigslist, the classified ads website, because of irregular sizing and the tedious updates required to make it usable. Now a person cannot buy spindle furniture within 100 miles of New York City for love nor money. Or, at least, without a ton of money. If I drove to Maine, I reasoned, it would still be cheaper to pay for petrol and a hotel than to buy a bed in Brooklyn.


The cost of antiques has skyrocketed in the past few years as their popularity has grown. Nostalgia is in, and so are post-pandemic homes that feel cosy and comforting, mixing old furniture into modern design. Some call it an “old money aesthetic”, a national reaction, of sorts, to the easy, epidemic minimalist aesthetic seeded by premade-but-not-cheap design outfits such as West Elm and Crate & Barrel. 

Nostalgia is alive and well at Brimfield Antique Flea Market in Massachusetts, the US’s largest outdoor flea market © Megan Haley for the FT “Our family thinks we’re nuts for the stuff we buy [to sell],” says Timur Williford, an antiques dealer in the Netherlands who exports furniture to the US. “They think it’s garbage, it’s old-fashioned. They see no value in it, until they bring it [to the US market].” 



Despite a decade of generational mythology that millennials are not interested in stuff so much as experiences, the rising prices of second-hand furnishings is driven by demand from environmentally and budget-conscious younger consumers.

 “We have a lot of designers come in, and stylists,” says Lori Guyer, the owner and designer of White Flower Farmhouse, a shop on the North Fork of Long Island that stocks both new and vintage homewares. But recent business has been heaviest from “a whole new younger generation of customer, people in their late twenties and mid-thirties”. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and all of a sudden we can barely keep the vintage pieces in stock,” Guyer says.



When I moved to Brooklyn, New York, from London this summer, in my possession I had one mattress, one small area rug, two plant pots, a ladle and 41,362 books. After eight years of relative transience, I had done my time with cardboard Ikea dressers. 

The world didn’t need more flat-pack bookshelves destined for landfill. I made a decision (part budgetary, part ethical, mostly aesthetic) to try to only buy second-hand furniture. Pinterest fed my vision with images of eclectic living rooms I never suspected my own might fall short of.


During a 72-hour window spent with a concerning addiction to Craigslist, I was able to procure a charming couch and free chintz chairs. But soon my search radius spread as wide as Maine to try and find furniture within my budget. 

Chairs you would recognise from your middle-school classroom are apparently now collectibles in Brooklyn and resell for more than $1,500 for a set of four. Bentwood chairs, likely salvaged from out-of-luck bistros, retail on Brooklyn Craigslist for more than $150 per chair. Cheap plastic Formica diner tables — more than $500 for a four-seater — have gone from being disposable to retro and covetable.

Furniture resale websites such as Chairish and 1stDibs turned up the volume on the price surge, dealers say. While before it took an experienced eye to value an item, curated resale websites have made it simple for anyone to check what something could sell for. 



Craigslist postings frequently feature screenshots of comparable items on Chairish listed for staggering sums, to emphasise the discount you are getting on someone’s still-overpriced castaways. Second-hand furniture has always been defined by a seductive mythology of the possibility of stumbling upon treasure.

 Websites that make it easy to check the maximum sale price make it more difficult for both dealers and buyers to find diamonds in the junk heap. Intent on my goal to furnish my apartment without bankruptcy, I decided to go to the source.


The Brimfield Antique Flea Market in Massachusetts was shuttered for almost two years due to the pandemic. America’s “oldest outdoor flea market”, it is a week-long event held three times a year and attracts thousands of antiques dealers from all over the world. 

Antique shows, auctions and flea markets are crucial for the wholesale dealers that supply second-hand shops and designers. Lockdowns meant many disappeared overnight. The supply of antiques ran low as demand from homebound shoppers and designers increased. Dealers turned to Instagram and Etsy to stay afloat.


The return of the Brimfield Antique Flea Market in earnest this July is an important touchstone for the tight-knit community of dealers who make their living through antiques. 

“It was like a family reunion,” says Josh Zollinhofer of dealer Junk Merchant. “People gathered again. Finally, it was a bit of normalcy.” The mornings at Brimfield start at 5:30am, though for some intrepid shoppers with headlamps, it is even earlier. 

The market sprawls out over numerous farm fields larger than football pitches, along a single stretch of road in rural New England. Lanes of vendors wind and meander. It is rumoured dealers make a chunk of their profit from purchased items that disoriented customers cannot find their way back to at the end of the day.




I arrived at the market with my mother and a shopping list that included a dining room table, chinoiserie plant pots, end tables and “general wonders”. Despite its pastoral feel, Brimfield is also sensory overload of the highest order. Fields open at different hours of the day, to keep the offerings fresh and the crowds moving.
 I walked through the fields taking in an unfathomable variety of stuff. Casting an eye over tent after tent, I tried to separate the gems from the junk at speed.


Flea-market hunting requires a laser focus for spotting needed items, while trying to remain open-minded to amazing things it was impossible to know existed. I thought I was doing this well until pictures from the day showed how many awesome finds were right in front of my face that I never noticed. 
Making hundreds of mini mental assessments per minute is exhausting work. It is important to bring someone with you. Someone to act as another set of eyes, to show discoveries off to and to remind you to measure the old Quaker meeting house table you’re suddenly overcome with desire for.



Researching (obsessively searching for) vintage pieces before the market helped identify when a price felt like a bargain on the day. It also meant that I frequently whispered to my mom, “Do you know how much that would resell for back in Brooklyn?!” 
The temptation of becoming a dealer myself was great, but spare boot space was not. I tried to listen to my gut. If I felt I would be in physical pain to walk away and risk loss to someone else, such as in the case of an exuberant toleware chandelier of a daisy bouquet, and an old portrait repainted as a “secret mermaid”, I bought it.
 If I could wait, I tried to walk away. Trends come and go in antiques; that is the game. Dealers must source items cheaply that they anticipate will heat up. They then price popular items to meet demand, while trying not to price them so high that they will be unable to shift their wares before the trend passes.

  

At Brimfield, green Depression-era jadeite glassware was everywhere, commanding top dollar from shoppers. Coloured Pyrex glass, basically free a decade ago, is so expensive as a hip collectible that a co-ordinating set of mixing bowls cost more than $100. 
The crowd this July was both much larger than the summer market usually attracts, and much younger, dealers say. “The antiques revival, it’s a lot of fun stuff,” says Pearl, a Brimfield dealer who was selling Pyrex and mid-century glassware, suddenly hugely popular with younger customers.
 “And it’s really thanks to your generation.” I couldn’t help myself. I found a bright pink Pyrex casserole dish for a semi-reasonable price and got right on the bandwagon.


Price is a delicate balance for dealers. Pyrex has almost priced itself out of its own customer base, dealers say, hitting the upper threshold of what young customers are willing and able to pay, and risking the end of the vibrant trend. Social media has amplified this cycle for dealers. The speed of trends “is absolutely crazy,” says Zollinhofer from Junk Merchant. Images of interiors spread widely online and create dominant aesthetics in record time. Design-conscious consumers pay top dollar to stay on trend, driving up prices. 
While longtime dealers say trends used to ebb and flow slowly, over the course of maybe 15 years, “now a trend lasts a third of that, if that,” according to Zollinhofer. Humans are predisposed to covet thy neighbour’s spindle bookshelves and rattan coffee tables. “Happy for antiques dealers, sad for myself,” one interior designer says. “Antiques are a quicksand path straight to the bottom,” one dealer said to a friend. He was talking about the lifestyle, but I felt in that moment he was talking to me. By the second day and second 5am wake-up, I had not found a table for my fantasy of hosting dinner parties, and I was bereft. 
There had been a few, but they had either been wildly out of my price range or wildly out of proportion to my little apartment. But then, as if by magic, there one was. It was rougher and darker than I had been hoping for. It had been an oyster shucking table, the dealer told me, in the same family for generations. It had history. Someone else was interested in it, too.
 I had reservations. It wasn’t basically free, which was the price I had been hoping for. But not daring to walk out of eyesight of the table lest it be snatched away, I realised it was the one. There was romance, I thought, in being able to tell all its future admirers that it had been an oyster shucking table. After a polite, painful negotiation, it was mine. My mom and I got fancy french fries for lunch, split a beer and celebrated our victory to the tune of the live folk band. 
The soaring highs of a flea-market score are matched only by the crushing lows of having to schlep that item to its eventual home. I think it was the moment, 10 hours and a long drive later, sweaty and crying with frustration in the staircase of my fourth-floor walk-up because my romantic farmhouse table wouldn’t fit through the apartment door, that it really hit me: Ikea has a point.

When my romantic farmhouse table wouldn’t fit through the door, it hit me: Ikea has a point There is a specific joy in buying new furniture delivered to your door — the colour options, fixed prices and mud-less showrooms. I understand why people buy it. Wayfair, matching sets from Pottery Barn — all of it. 
By the fourth time I tried to hang my daisy bouquet chandelier and get all the bulbs to work, I was at the end of my rope. The dealer had told me it would be easy. Not all stories dealers tell you are God’s honest truth, it turns out. Why can’t my apartment just be done, I lamented to my father-cum-handyman as he left for the third time, intending to return a week later with yet another rare lamp part for my blasted chandelier. 
Why had I been so foolish as to think I could do all of this second-hand? I had run out of the will to go on. “Ah. That’s just life,” my dad said, turning around. “If everything is done, you’re dead.”  It has been painful to learn to live in the incompleteness of it. To accept that my apartment does not look exactly like my Pinterest vision. Second-hand furniture by definition doesn’t always match, and the line between cosy and cacophonous is a fine one. Making mistakes is part of the process.
 I spent too much money on things I should have walked away from. I got into a competitive bidding war on eBay and bought a wood lamp with two galloping horses that I determined was the hokiest lamp in the world. But successes have a way of softening your memory. With the right burlap shade, the lamp feels chic and unique. It is now the focal point of my living room. 
Second-hand furniture can be addictive not just because of the thrill of the now hard-to-find bargain, but because of the story. I love my home and its slightly granny-chic vibe. It feels like me. I found each of these items one by one, and loved them enough to drag them here. 
When friends come over and admire my weathered old table, I can tell them about its oyster shucking history. And then I will tell them about how I will grow old in this apartment because I can never face moving it ever again. 
Madison Darbyshire is the FT’s US investment reporter Follow @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram to find out about our latest stories first


Hallelujah by Father Ray Kelly

 First potential trailer for a movie 🎥 41 years in a making


EXECUTIONER NWORB , CALL YOUR OFFICE:  Geomagnetic storm watch in effect this Halloween following intense solar flare.


Hallelujah by Father Ray Kelly (Lyrics Included)


Catholics singing in Slovakia


The Ark of the Covenant is one of the holiest artifacts in religion. It’s been referenced in different forms of media, from books to movies, yet most people don’t know what exactly it is. From its portrayal in the 1981 Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Ark is depicted as a chest that should not be in the hands of evil people. 

Alternatively called the Ark of the Testimony or the Ark of God, the artifact was a movable sanctuary for the Israelites. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the Ark was like a place for God to sit until they arrived in the promised land and could establish a temple there. Grunge dives deeper into the history and lore of the mysterious artifact here!  



Watch: the amazing prophecy of Niagara Falls artist Isaiah RobertsonWatch: the amazing prophecy of Niagara Falls artist Isaiah Robertson


Why Dragons Were the #1 Medieval Monster



HOW ALL THE PLAYERS ARE GOING TO BORROW DOGS FOR THEIR PORTRAITS:  Men with dogs in their dating app pics ‘more likely to settle down’.


Living the dream


How finger counting gives away your nationality. "In parts of the Middle East like Iran, they begin with the pinky, whereas in Japan they start with the fingers extended in an open palm, drawing them in to make a closed fist."


Here's how to spot the methods of moral panic journalism. "Thousands upon thousands of words dedicated to the same arguments, the same low-stakes anecdotes, the same tortured historical analogies."



The Generalist: “Harvard, a Media Company. Harvard Business Review is a surreptitious media giant. Actionable insights –  If you only have a couple minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders can learn from Harvard, as a media company.

  • There are different paths to success. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) was founded in 1922 and struggled to breakeven for more than 25 years. Today, it’s one of the world’s most impactful media organizations.
  • Media can turn expenses into revenue. Plenty of businesses devote time to content marketing. But by building a media arm worth paying for, companies are able to turn marketing expenses into a revenue stream.
  • The next HBR could be built by a startup. Edtech companies and fundraising platforms look well-positioned to run the Harvard playbook and create a durable, valuable media arm.
  • Adapt or die. HBR adapted its content and form multiple times over its history to appeal to contemporary readers. It did so while preserving its foundational value.


Harvard Business School is a bigger media company than Forbes.  Though best known as a home for higher learning, America’s most prestigious scholarly institution is sneakily, surreptitiously also a publisher par excellence with financials to match.  Since its founding in 1922, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) has become a defining voice in the media landscape, bolstering the authority and reputation of its parent organization, while simultaneously bringing in hundreds of millions in revenue.  It begs the question: is Harvard Business School ​​​a media company in disguise? And if it is, who else might unknowingly be a publisher, wrapped in another business?  We’ll interrogate these questions in today’s piece. In particular, we’ll touch on:

  • HBR’s long road to success.
  • How the Review compares to other publishers.
  • The case for Harvard as a media company.
  • Other media empires in the making…”

Instant gratification in 1948

What we had that day was our story. We didn't have the other bit, the future, and we had no way of knowing what that would be like. Perhaps it would change our memory of al of this, or perhaps it would draw from it, nobody knew. But I'm sure I felt the story of that hall and how we reached it would never vanish.”


There’s this photograph of Violet Carson, who played Sharples. She’s dead now. In the photograph, she’s standing on a balcony over Salford, it tells you everything you need to know about everything. 

I was looking at Barrie. The Nicholson portrait. It’s haunting, actually. I’ve never seen a person more alone. He’s only forty-four. It was painted a dozen years before the tragedies began. 

I spent a tearful moment looking up these images after finishing the book and I think they tell you all you need to know about Mayflies 


Would You Pay $550 Million to Live in an Italian Villa (that Includes a Caravaggio Mural)? Built in the late 16th century as a hunting lodge, the stunning property is likely to set real estate auction records


Life: The Sopranos: The Show That Changed Television


Instant gratification in 1948

While on vacation with his family in 1944, Edwin Land’s three-year-old daughter asked him why she couldn’t see the picture he had just taken of her on his camera. Within the same day, the prolific inventor claimed he came up with the camera design, the film, and chemistry that could accomplish his daughter’s wish. It was another three years until he finally realized his vision and presented instant camera film to the public for the first time. Land’s invention was a huge milestone in the history of photography, as it transformed the timely traditional process of the medium into something that took just a matter of minutes. In 1948, the Polaroid Land Model 95 camera was born, bringing this exciting technology to the hands of the consumer. The original model had two separate positive and negative rolls, which enabled the image to be developed inside the camera. Polaroid manufactured just 60 copies of the Land Camera at first, but the company seriously underestimated the demand—all of the units and film sold out in one day.



P eople Shared The Most Absurd Job Listings And Offers They've Ever Come Across, And Reader, I Have A Lot Of... reddit


Solved by walking - During World War II, around 7000 Allied pilots and soldiers stranded behind enemy lines were smuggled back to the United Kingdom via a secret network of escape routes



The Simpsons Library Instagram accounthas been documenting all of the books, magazines, and other printed matter that has appeared on the long-running sitcom.



Why It’s So Important To Figure Out Who Gets To Own Our Data

Our problem today lies in finding a model of data ownership that recognizes the collective interest we have in how personal data is used, that avoids the profound costs of free-wheeling private exploitation by individual firms, and that does not slip into authoritarian state control. - Boston Review

Saturday, October 30, 2021

Villeneuve’s Dune: Reviewing the Reviewers (and a Review)

 "They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again."


The Truth About Conspiracy Theories — By Those Who Study Them

True, we’re hearing a lot about Covid-19 and QAnon-related conspiracies. But just because they are more visible does not mean that belief in them has gone up. - Persuasion

Villeneuve’s Dune: Reviewing the Reviewers (and a Review)




The methods of connection between author and reader are increasingly owned by Amazon. But ownership does not constitute  possession  

Like Sports, Ideas Have To Be Played To Be Tested

Sport is fundamentally about what you do when the chips are down, not what you say or plan beforehand. What matters is how well you perform in the moment. Athletes have skin in the game when it comes to their progress. There is a consequence for a lack of improvement. -...

The passage at the top is from Steve Ayers’ essay “The Art of Book Collecting.” He is a  more sophisticated and knowledgeable bibliophile than I will ever be. I can marvel at the books he owns without coveting them. I agree with his statement that “book collecting in itself is a good thing.” So too, the stockpiling of food and medicine in wartime is a good – and pragmatic -- thing. I remember as a kid reading in a literature textbook Walter van Tilburg Clark’s short story “The Portable Phonograph” (1941). The setting is a war-ravaged wasteland. Four men huddle in a shelter around a peat-fire. The host is an old man who has salvaged four books he keeps wrapped in burlap: Shakespearethe Bible, Moby Dick and the Divine Comedy. Four inevitable choices, as in a desert-island fantasy. The old man says: 

“[W]hat do we know of those who will come after us? We are the doddering remnant of a race of mechanical fools. I have saved what I love; the soul of what was good in us here; perhaps the new ones will make a strong enough beginning not to fall behind when they become clever.”

Curating a Small Portion of Civilization'


Boji spends his days traveling Istanbul's subway trains, ferries, buses, and historic trams. His calming presence is infectuous. Boji sometimes travels 30 kilometers a day. Most days he passes through at least 29 Metro stations and take at least two ferry rides. He has learned how and where to get on and off of trains and ferries. He is A Good Boy.

What Scientists Know About the Risk of Breakthrough Covid Deaths

 As long as there are flowers and children and birds in the world, have no fears: everything will be fine.

— Nikos Kazantzakis, who died in 1957 


Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg flowed with nihilism, egoism, materialism. All of it went into Crime and Punishment  crime 


For me love of life—no simple Rotarian optimism but love of life in all its vast complexity--is the ultimate test of a writer’s worth. What is more, I inevitably find that those who love life are the writers I most love.”




The Social Media Problem: We’re Talking Too Much

A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. - The Atlantic

I read Allan Seager’s The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke when it was published in 1968 – probably the first literary biography I had ever read. My practice of letting one book suggest the next was already underway. Seager’s mention of Roethke’s interest in Paul Tillich led me to the theologian, who in turn led me to the more consequential thinker Martin Buber.


The New York Times – “Deaths among people who have been fully vaccinated remain rare, but older adults and those with compromised immune systems are at much higher risk…The vaccines are highly effective, even against the more contagious Delta variant, which is now responsible for nearly all coronavirus infections in the United States. People who are fully vaccinated are roughly one-tenth as likely to be hospitalized and even less likely to die from Covid-19 than those who are unvaccinated, according to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A New York Times analysis of data from 40 states found that fully vaccinated people have accounted for 0.2 to 6 percent of Covid-19 deaths. Among the more than 187 million Americans who have been fully vaccinated, there have been 7,178 deaths, according to the C.D.C. Eighty-five percent of those deaths have been in people 65 or older. “Breakthrough deaths with vaccinated individuals do occur,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “But there are certain groups that are at greater risk.”..
Rivers of Fire and Redemption is a 20 minute video that gives a look into the vision of Isaiah Robertson (1947-2020), a deeply religious man who built an incredible house in Niagara falls. Robertson said that God told him to build the house, which is completely covered in abstract, psychedelic looking shapes and colors. Robertson would not accept any credit for his masterpiece, saying that when he built the house, "the spirit" took over and animated his hands.


In Sunday’s post I quoted John Finlay quoting Dr. Johnson in “The Unfleshed Eye,” his essay on one of Yvor Winters’ finest poems, “To the Holy Spirit” (Hermetic Light, 1994): “One does not make truth; one can only hope to find it.” I was unable to locate the source of the line until Thursday, when Dave Lull came, as usual, to the rescue. A variant of the sentence can be found in a sermon of uncertain date written by Johnson: 

Articles of Note

Should the university be a political engine for radical ends? The idea horrified Robert Nisbet, chronicler of academic dogma. engine  


New Books

“There is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of  literature 


Essays & Opinions

Stephen Crane died at the age of 28. Had he not been so reckless, American literature might now look quite different 


This Map Lets You Plug in Your Address to See How It’s Changed Over the Past 750 Million Years

Smithsonian Magazine – “Some 240 million years ago, the patch of land that would one day become the National Mall was part of an enormous supercontinent known as Pangea. Encompassing nearly all of Earth’s extant land mass, Pangea bore little resemblance to our contemporary planet. Thanks to a recently released interactive map, however, interested parties can now superimpose the political boundaries of today onto the geographic formations of yesteryear—at least dating back to 750 million years ago. The results are intriguing: During the Early Triassic Epoch, the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for example, was wedged almost directly adjacent to Mauritania, yet to be separated from the Northwest African country by the vast waters of the Atlantic Ocean. Ancient Earth, the tool behind this millennia-spanning visualization, is the brainchild of Ian Webster, curator of the world’s largest digital dinosaur database. As Michael D’estries reports for Mother Nature Network, Webster drew on data from the PALEOMAP Project—spearheaded by paleogeographer Christopher Scotese, the initiative tracks the evolving “distribution of land and sea” over the past 1,100 million years—to build the map…”