Friday, March 23, 2007

The Lure of the Stamp


Our Town downtown

March 26, 2007


Mail artists have more fun

Ed Higgins is an unlikely salesman.
His Ludlow Street studio doesn’t have a buzzer – not broken, just never did – so I call, as instructed, when I get there. “Yup,” he says in his voice made of gravel. “Be right down.”
He chain smokes on his bed with his cowboy boots crossed and the news on, talking about his work and looking over occasionally to offer me a beer or hand me a book or suggest I get a tape recorder. (I have one. I forgot it. He says it’s probably good practice.) He is lankier than Lyle Lovett and can reach most things in his bedroom cum work studio from his bed.
Like his faded jeans with their smattering of stains, Higgins’ apartment looks like he’s lived in it forever, almost like it formed around him – and indeed, he’s been here since the 70’s and is sitting on a goldmine, paying “three-something” a month for what would be worth well over a grand a month if he moved in tomorrow.
He’s still got to be a salesman. Half his income used to come from construction work, back when he made $25 an hour supervising construction sites. Now that the field is saturated with workers willing to do the same job for $7 an hour, it’s no longer worth his time. So E.F. Higgins III makes his entire living making stamps – and selling them.
“Do you want to send that back to me when you’re done or you want to buy it for twenty bucks?” he asks as I page through a chapbook he put together in 2000. Neither had crossed my mind when he tossed it to me a few seconds earlier.
“Uh, I guess… I can just bring it back,” I answer.
I end up dropping $16 on a bundle deal that includes the pamphlet, which he inscribes like an old pro, and a colorful patch featuring one of his stamps and his signature wingnut logo (“‘wingnut’ is sort of slang from the Midwest,” Higgins explains, that means “crazy, off the wall. Not dangerous, just kind of fun-goofy.”)
There’s not much money in mail art. Higgins has some subscribers who pay to receive monthly mailings, and sometimes he’ll barter, like when he gave a guy a subscription in return for an old digital camera. But stamp artists are mostly just interested in communicating with each other – which Higgins does daily, by mail. He’s got a correspondence going with hundreds of other stamp artists from around the world and about forty on a regular basis.
He’ll decorate an envelope with the stamps he’s created from full-sized paintings. (“I would hope to be thought of as a good painter as well as a good stamp artist,” he says, which is not goal common to all mail artists. Some have political goals, others are photographers.) Inside, he encloses a communication: a sheet of stamps.
The stamps, worth nothing in the eyes of the USPS, are actually miniature copies of paintings that have been photographed, scanned, shrunken down, laid on gum paper and perforated. Higgins’ sheets each have an arcane labeling system by which he can tell the date and series number, which is important since his “company,” Doo Da Postage Works, has produced over 750 editions of stamps. The recipient can “frame ‘em, hang ‘em on the wall, tear ‘em up, use ‘em.” What’s important is inter-artist communication.
The original paintings for one of Higgins’ most recent stamp series are on display at 429 Greenwich Street in SoHo. Hanging from wires on the brick wall is an entire collection of aggressive-looking but personable fishing lures (and there were dozens more paintings that didn’t make it to the gallery) done in acrylics and watercolor washes.
Names like the Bayou Special Spoon, Boyagian Lure, Green Baguette Pencil Plug, Schoerpf Spinner, and Alger’s Tantalizer make you think Higgins’ dad must have been a fisherman or something. Nah – Higgins just likes their “cartoon-ness… their curvy shape, and how that works in conjunction with the sharp hooks.”
Five years ago, he picked up a beat-up specialty book in Michigan called “Made in Michigan Fishing Lures II.” He was drawn to the diagrams. “Some of them were real goofy-looking,” Higgins recalls. Flipping through the hundreds of Post-it-marked pages, I recognize some of the lures from having seen them in the gallery: the googly eyes, the disjointed marionette-like bodies that stoked his imagination.
But I don’t see anything in the book as ugly as Friggles, a lure-like creature on display at the gallery that looks like it was drawn by someone with cerebral palsy. It’s a joint work: the border is done by C.T. Chew, a Seattle-based mail artist, who creates the context: a middle school science competition. Friggles himself is drawn by Higgins, its various parts labeled as if it were a microscopic organism and the accompanying text written as though Higgins were a seventh grader hoping to win the challenge.
You’ve got to see it to get it, and even then, it may leave you scratching your head. But it’ll make you grin all the same, like an inside joke between old friends that you can’t help laughing at even though you’re on the outside.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Drink Locally, Be A Good Person Globally


Our Town downtown

March 19, 2007


For one day, NYC tap water will be branded -- but you've probably already heard


On all other days we get free tap water at restaurants; why on March 22 would we pay?
It all started last October. The creative minds of a SoHo advertising firm were hard at work to come up with something… big. The challenge, which had been posed to them by Esquire Magazine: build a brand out of nothing.
“So we came up with a bunch of super-silly ideas to build a fictitious brand, send people on a wild goose chase,” says Andrew Essex, CEO of the advertising firm Droga5. “But we happened to be sitting around a restaurant. It was the week that India ostensibly ran out of water.”
“Paying $47 for a piece of chicken,” he recalls, “and realizing that you get this bountiful, magnificent tap water for free and realizing that you take it completely for granted” sparked an idea. Thus was born a brand.
“We thought we could brand New York City’s tap water: we’d call it New York Tap, and then we could get the restaurants to sell it constantly, and that would be a great thing and that would be that.”
However, kind of like all the awesome ideas I come up with, like a floating love seat that moves at the speed of the average pedestrian or a game show where the winner would become a presidential candidate, Droga5’s brainchild didn’t quite hold up when it encountered reality.
“We subsequently learned that that was not even remotely viable, that bottled water is a huge source of revenue for the restaurants.”
Only a little bit daunted, they headed to the revision table. “We thought maybe we could do it for a week,” says Essex.
“And some restaurateurs said: ‘Mmm, not so much.’”
Still, it was the best idea they had, and they knew it was a good one, even if no one else did. Water, the most valuable resource in the world, cost nothing here. That made it a huge untapped fountain of revenue – if they could only put a label on it. “In advertising there’s a chestnut that you pay $100 for the swoosh and $5 for the sneaker,” says Essex. “If you could put a label on the tap water that they serve, you’d suddenly make it valuable to people.”
Their restaurateur friends suggested they try it for a day. “And then once we modified our expectations, we realized, well that would be cool.”
Droga5 found out the United Nations had something called World Water Day on March 22, “so we thought, well that’s clearly the day to do it.”
Then they realized that they were going to be making money that they, being a for-profit business, could not collect. And so they called up UNICEF and asked, hey, do you want some money?
Unsurprisingly, “They completely embraced it, went over the moon for it,” says Essex. “We have their complete backing, it’s their plan to take it globally after this year. You know, we’ll start in New York and then next year they can move it exponentially to other cities that have first-rate, plentiful, clean water. So there will be New York Tap, Chicago Tap, Sidney Tap, London Tap, Geneva tap, and we think it’ll make a real difference in terms of revenue and awareness.”
The rest, Droga5 could do in their sleep. “We created ads for it, created a logo, a look. We lined up support of four or five of the top restaurateurs and chefs in the city. We got a sister agency to create a magnificent website, all pro bono.”
They’ve been advertising as only an advertising company can. By the time March 22 rolls around, every sequestered juror and elderly hermit in all five boroughs will have seen an ad for New York Tap.
I first saw a cute essay by George Saunders in New York Magazine last week about his lifelong antagonistic relationship with water, personified. At that point, I thought this Tap Project might be a cool, relatively obscure idea for a Water Log. Then I saw an ad on the website gothamist.com. Then I realized that a massive advertising campaign was about to crest and I was just surfing along with it, but oh well.
Essays by ten prominent novelists will be running in print publications. Reuters donated two big Times Square billboards on March 21st and 22nd, Van Wagner donated 100 free phone kiosks to be plastered with ads. The New York Times gave a full page ad that Essex said will likely run on March 21. It will look like a menu and say something like, “Special of the Day: Tap Water, $1,” and it will list all the participating restaurants, which was over 300 as of last Wednesday and increasing by more than twenty each day. The day of the event, Microsoft is giving them the homepage of the MSN network.
So how will it work? Well, in case you haven’t seen the ads: on March 22, you go to one of the participating restaurants, get a glass of tap water and pay for it. The money goes to UNICEF, to provide safe drinking water to children around the world.
New York Tap will raise money and awareness about the scarcity of drinking water, but that’s not all. This is the best ad campaign ever – for advertising itself. If this kind of buzz can be created over tap water, what could happen with a product that doesn’t come out of everyone’s sink? A full-scale Japanese little girl-style craze.

My Kind of Book Club


Our Town downtown
March 12, 2007

Reading the book is optional, and they serve cookies

I’ve always avoided book clubs although I do a fair amount of reading and I think I recall that I enjoy talking about books. What I don’t like is frantically paging through a book trying to prefabricate a semi-intelligent comment that will make it appear as though I’ve read the book, then spending so much energy trying to figure out where in the discussion to insert that comment that I am incapable of listening to anyone else. I spent more than enough time doing that in college.
I have found my book club.
Last Thursday marked the third meeting of the Seaport Book Club, sponsored by the South Street Seaport Museum, and my second attempt at attending. Back in January I paid $13.95 for David Cordingly’s book about pirates, “Under the Black Flag,” and the grinning skull on its spine has sat on my bookshelf deriding my profligacy ever since. I didn’t make it that time. Thursday evening all the way down on Water Street is a commitment.
This month’s selection – Joan Druett’s “She Captains: Heroines and Helliones of the Sea” – was hard to find. It wasn’t in stock at any Barnes & Nobles in Manhattan, and I’ll be honest, when I finally did get my hands on it at the library, it wasn’t very good. Didactic feminism and a bibliography half as long as the book itself is an inauspicious combo.
“Thus it can be seen that women were as distinguished for bold enterprise as their male equivalents,” Druett writes in the introduction, having given the reader a smattering of instances of she-mariners from various continents and centuries that did not make for a very comprehensive argument. “The rivers and beaches and seas were equal-opportunity spheres back then,” she concludes.
I dutifully slogged through a few chapters, and was rewarded with some entertaining snippets about cross dressing sailor “boys,” and female lighthouse keepers who were completely abashed by the media frenzy that followed a “heroic” rescue for what was, to them, a part of the job description. All in all, however, skimming seemed sufficient.
Perhaps not the best choice of book, but apparently it’s Women’s History Month. And that would make the other attendees more interesting anyway. Who would want to read this book at all, much less read it and then plod through it again with the group?
But then, as 6 p.m. approached, butterflies started fluttering ever so gently in my stomach. I had spent maybe an hour with the book, and I wasn’t allowed to take it out of the library, so all I had was a haphazard page of barely legible notes: passages I had copied in order to deride them in this column.
I was suddenly afraid I didn’t have much to contribute. They weren’t going to, like, call on me, were they?
I shot off an email to the book club coordinator, Leslie Shope, asking if she happened to have an extra copy of the book on hand (so I could pull my move if I had to. You know, the impromptu “close reading”).
Her response, though very friendly, made me slightly uncomfortable. She wrote: “I don’t have an extra copy, but you’re welcome to use mine. I’ve been taking notes all day, so I won’t need it too much.”
Taking notes all day! Oh no. This was a seriously academic gathering. That on top of the last e-mail she’s written in response to my RSVP – “It should be a small group, but good conversation” – made me decide I didn’t want to go anymore. (Small group equals greater obligation on each person to not be a dud.) I felt the scratchings of a sore throat, too.
Alas, it was Thursday night, and I had a Water Log to write. But I was in a bad mood, and that was not made better by the fact that I had dawdled to the point where there was no way to avoid being late.
What a pleasant surprise it was, then, when I barged into the Melville Gallery five minutes after six and (a) not one of the five people seated around the table gave me a look when I made a racket taking off my coat, and scarf, and hat, and gloves, (b) excluding Leslie, only one person had read the book, and those who had not unabashedly admitted it and (c) there were two plates of cookies.
Discussion ranged from related to the book (“Let’s hear some of those stories!” a woman exhorted Leslie) to somewhat relevant (“The Pirate Queen,” a play about Grace O’Malley, is opening on Broadway) to tangential (“I miss grubby old South Street”) to way off target (“What about this woman astro-nut?”).
Most, if not all of the six people who eventually showed up had come before, and there was an emerging easiness about the conversation that was as warm as the light on the gallery’s wood floors and beams.
“Next month,” said Leslie, wrapping up, “is ‘Moby Dick.’”
“That’s a big book!” shouts a white-haired man. “I’m not going to read that! I think I’m going to read Cliff’s Notes!”
I think I might, too.

Seafood from Long Ago and Far Away


Our Town downtown

March 5, 2007


Oyster bars are back; fish n’ chips are now a New York tradition

A tiny six-seat oyster bar recently opened its diminutive door on Second Avenue in the East Village, tucked between a local drug store and a Turkish eatery. It’s got an upstairs that seats about twenty, but its half-size ground floor and its sign announcing, simply, OYSTER BAR, in painted capital letters, hearken back to late nineteenth century New York, where oyster stands were as commonplace as hot dog stands today and the streets were literally lined with oyster shells (that’s where Pearl Street gets its name).
Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar is actually not new, just moved from its previous location, which opened in 2003 in a carriage house on East Fifth Street between Second and Third Avenues, but this incarnation has got an understated old time quality that recalls the days when oysters could be hand harvested from the river and there was nothing noteworthy about an oyster bar around the corner. Gone are the red and white checked curtains and tablecloths that adorned the old restaurant, gone is the name, Jack’s, in cursive on the window.
This is just an oyster bar – still not as common a sight as a hot dog stand, but no longer such a rarity, either.
Oyster bars vanished from the city after the oysters all but disappeared from our rivers in the beginning of the 19th century. Grand Central Oyster Bar was in a niche of its own when it opened up in 1913 (serving imported oysters).
It was not until the past decade that oyster bars – not just seafood restaurants that sold oysters – started popping back up downtown. In 1997, Shaffer City Oyster Bar & Grill opened on West 21st Street and Pearl Oyster Bar started doing business on Cornelia Street. That year, there were nine oyster bars in Manhattan, according to Shaffer City owner A. Jay Shaffer. Then “oysters boomed big time.” This year there are 78, he says, although only a handful are of the real deal that offer dozens of different types of oysters.
“If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Pearl Oyster Bar has certainly become one of the most flattered restaurants in New York, perhaps even in America,” Rebecca Charles, Pearl Oyster Bar’s owner, announces on her restaurant’s website.
Why the oyster bar boom? “I guess they figured out that specializing a restaurant helps sell food,” is Shaffer’s hypothesis.
Shaffer is even populating the waters as near as Long Island and as far as Nova Scotia with his own oyster beds: a traditional New York-style operation if ever there was one.
Then there are fish n’ chips, another down-by-the-docks tradition, but not an offering native to our seaport – until recently. Now we’ve got an authentic chip cutter from London on Greenwich Avenue and Tasmanian sea bass flown in twice weekly from Australia to be fried on Rivington Street.
From the British talk radio playing over the speakers to the Cockney accents behind the register and among the customers eating at the counter, A Salt & Battery feels like my best imagining of a British chippie. Nicky Perry and her husband opened the fish n’ chips shop in 2000, because the customers at their tiny West Village British tea shop kept asking where they could get them. (The last downtown fish n’ chips shop had closed a decade earlier.)
A Salt & Battery was such a hit that a second location seemed like a good idea. Perry and her husband got the keys to their East Village storefront on September 1, 2001, expecting to receive their building permit on September 15. Then 9/11 happened. For five months, the chippie-to-be sat vacant, digging the couple into a financial hole that would force them to close the Second Avenue shop prematurely.
Still, the Lower East Side would have its deep fried fish and eat them too, whether British or Aussie. As Perry, a Londoner, puts it, “everyone’s copying me. Everyone is doing it in their restaurants, at way more cost than I am.”
Bondi Road, named for the beach in Sydney whose image adorns the restaurant’s walls, began beer battering in 2006 in SoHo. The sit-down restaurant cum bar boasts on its website, “Whereas the English may have invented fish & chips, Australians perfected it.”
May be, but now we’ve incorporated the trend, and it’s become as New York as oysters.