Two
days ago, pianist Matthew Shipp
published a
blog entry at The Talkhouse
essentially excoriating Keith Jarrett: “I have always felt a tremendous amount
of pretense surrounding his whole universe. Of course he has some real skill,
and sometimes sounds inspired. But I just can't get past the layers and layers
and layers of pretension.” One of the points I’m aiming to make in this
extended take on Jarrett and “the commodification of genius” is to evaluate the
materiality of what Matthew Shipp understands as pretense: how is the reception
of Jarrett’s music and of his image tangibly shaped by the production and
dissemination of his music? What privileges his work? Pianist Ethan Iverson
(who has interviewed
Jarrett, and is an admirer) yesterday offered something
of a rebuttal to Shipp’s critique – defending Jarrett’s virtuosity, for
example, but also admitting something of Jarrett’s enmeshment in American
capitalism and marketing hype: “Jarrett owns too much real estate and is too
abrasive a personality not to be taken down a peg once in a while,” he writes.
My aim in this series of posts – culled, as I mentioned last time, from an
extended book chapter on Jarrett – is to assess how the spectre of value, its genius, attaches itself to his
recordings, especially his much-lauded and best-selling Köln Concert. In the
first part, I tried to set up an approach to the commodification of culture
and of cultural artifacts. In this section, I’m focused almost exclusively on
the concoction of value at yard sales, a site of vestigial counter-capitalism.
I don’t really mention Jarrett directly in these particular pages, but my
acquisition of an LP of his lies behind the whole essay. In the third part, I’ll
deal directly with buying the album and with Jarrett’s relationship to American
capitalism. In the fourth and final part, I’ll offer my own analysis of The Köln
Concert, and its transcription. Here is part two, then, on yard-sales.
Saturday
ought to be a day of rest. Instead, we used to get up as early as if it were a workday,
but to shop. And not ordinary shopping: Saturday morning early is prime time
for hitting yard sales.
It had become an early-stage addiction with us. We
rarely missed a weekend, and had started to turn into what yard sale vernacular
calls "early birds." Usually a label applied to unscrupulous junk-dealers
and avaricious collectors, the moniker comes from the obvious cliché about
worms. Get to someone's stash soon enough, you're liable to unearth the dusty
treasure you’d imagine you've been searching for your whole life, though you
hadn't realized, some personal grail of cast-offs; apocryphal stories of lost
necklaces mistaken for costume jewelry and sold for a dollar, or of an unknown
Van Gogh unloaded for five bucks, keep buyers motivated, anxious, hawk-eyed.
You never know.
Most people, however, aren't in it for big scores,
but for everyday bargains. And what we find isn't necessarily worth anything to
anyone else; we have tastes and preferences, although those tend to be fluid,
depending on what we think we need, or what we happen to like that day. I like old
and weird records. Most people sell boxes of warped lps that have been in their
attics for a decade: not usually a source for anything good. But every now and
then I get lucky. Mostly it involves pawing through stacks of mildewed Billy
Joel, Boney M. and Barbra Streisand, hoping for odd gems. It's important to
keep yourself open, since you have no real way of knowing ahead of time what
might be available at a given sale. Some people — maybe half on a particular
Saturday — run ads in the classified section of the Friday paper, but those are
vague at best ("furniture, clothes, other good stuff"), and often
misleading. One time we headed for a sale advertising a "HUGE [all caps]
selection," only to find four men smoking on a concrete patio around
cardboard box that contained (no lie) a broken toy fire-engine, one badly
dog-eared John Grisham paperback, and a crumpled flowery blouse still on a wire
hanger. We asked no questions, left quietly. So, while its possible to go with
specific objects in mind — and at our own garage sales I've been queried for
everything from toy trains to Limoges ("no harm in asking") — chances
are you won't find it. Personally, I like to let the sales shape my interests;
often I never even knew I wanted something until I saw it.
Early birds sometimes get into trouble. Some
people don't like bending the rules. If they say a sale starts at nine, then no
one gets to buy anything at 8:55. Ads say things like "No early
birds" to ward us off, although in practice it usually doesn't work. Some
try to make "early birds pay double," which seems like a more
effective strategy. At a recent sale, the homeowner was adamant, and refused
even to let potential buyers touch what he called his "merchandise"
until the hour had come; he pulled clothing, pottery, frames, even
cross-country skis from out of people's hands, bellowing "No fair! No
fair!" as he grabbed each article back. Naturally, the buyers were
affronted (even if they were technically
in the wrong). One woman muttered she wasn't going to bother to wait, this
idiot had lost a sale; but she didn't actually leave, and ten minutes later owned
a framed imitation Group-of-Seven print.
What Walter Benjamin once diagnosed as the
"helpless fixation on notions of security and property deriving from past
decades" (Reflections 70) — a vestigial psychosis haunting the proprietors
and capitalists of his Weimar Germany who clung to the slippery and
indeterminate commodities as if values, both economic and moral, could somehow
be stabilized, fixed — ghosts itself into the present day yard sale in the
guise of rules and standardized "value." This necklace or that vase, we’re
be told, must be valuable, rare, worth something. Play fair or pay double — or
maybe you won't be allowed to buy at all. Such resolute assertions of order and
such fixations on worth suggest much more than grubbing for extra cash, since
the sellers at garage sales have no hope of recouping anything remotely close
to the price they paid for an article, or, in the case of "antiques"
and "genuine" curios, whatever they might sell for at a dealership.
Money isn't exactly the issue here, and has little to do with value. What comes
into play through ascriptions of worth, in the process of reselling, is personal
history, largely unreadable but nonetheless tangibly present. I am selling an
object no longer of use to me, but at the same time continue to attribute value
to it based on the history of its possession, what I got out of it and what I
invested into it over the course of my time. What I did with it makes it
valuable, not in Marx’s sense of "use-value," since the person buying
it has no direct relationship to whatever I might have done with it, and may
never use the thing in the same way. (We once bought an old pail, for example,
which we polished and painted and now use as an outdoor planter.) Nonetheless, clinging to that object as a
sort of aura, imperceptible to the buyer but colouring the object visibly for
the seller, is the private history of its presence: a tack-hammer I used to
hanging wedding photos in our old apartment, a t-shirt I bought five years ago
at a jazz festival, a collar my first cat wore. The buyer isn't necessarily
purchasing these associations, and in many ways they vanish once the object is
sold. (We have no idea who had our pail before us, where it might have been.)
But a vestige of someone else’s nostalgia, a hopeless gesture toward fixity,
assigns its price, even as it dissolves into the a-historical moment of the
sale itself. Prices (and rules, and formalities) at yard-sales are temporary
stays against confusion, an essential but futile attempt to cling to an
un-archived past in the process of being released, unknit, let go.
Garage-sale manuals and guide-books I have come
across almost unanimously recognize the tug of what they call
"sentimentality" in establishing prices, but they argue for the
virtues of "objectivity" in pricing:
Emotion Has No Place in Pricing. It is vitally important that vendors not allow
their emotions to affect pricing decisions. Completely objective judgment is
necessary in order to arrive at prices within market range. Sentimental ties
and family history of a sale item have no relevance to the price that buyers
may be willing to pay. Stand back and ask yourself, "If I were a purchaser,
how much would I pay for this?" Analyze the practical use of the item,
then draw on your sense of what price might be reasonable and fair, not on your
recollection of how dearly the item cost you. (Stratas 44)
Pleas
for rationality and abstracted detachment such as this one necessarily appeal
to what they call the "market" for a sense of both fairness and
order, but the problem is that the market value of what this particular guide
calls "clutter" (defined as "usable, practical surplus
goods" as opposed to "junk . . . broken ugly decrepit stuff"
[Stratas 23]) is far from simple to determine, and becomes — as this paragraph
suggests — an impressionistic judgment call, hopelessly inflected by the
discriminations of history and past uses that the author wants us ostensibly to
avoid. How much would I pay for this? The full price, of course: I already paid
just that. There is no yard-sale collectivity in a "market" like that
of commodity trading or even retail sales. Setting a so-called reasonable price
is an impossible task, since the structure and form of the rationality to which
one appeals is far from determinate or stable. Even the idea of practical
"use" offers no real standard, since, as Marx sagely points out,
use-value is differential at best, at once flexible, indeterminate and local (cf.
Keenan 125). How I use an object, how I value it, cannot be transferred to
another buyer; uses do not coordinate, except in abstract exchange, at which
point, as Marx writes in Capital, the only "objectivity" has
become "phantom-like," unrelated to the specific use or dinglich
aspect of whatever it is I own (Capital
1.128). (My wife and I had been looking for colanders. We already owned a good
one, stainless steel, but heard they make good planters for geraniums.) We
trade in spectres. Despite attempts at regulation and order that these guide
and manuals tend to impose on the yard-sale, it tends to remain unruly,
irrational; the only traces of fixity, the only determinants of value, are
those trivial and personal emotions which paradoxically, as books remind us,
have no "real" part to play in value itself. In practice, in our
experience, all of these factors — what someone paid for a thing, how much it
means to them — come forcefully into play during any driveway sales-pitch.
So, how are these rules for yard sales, as sets of
conventions or accepted forms of conduct, laid out? A number of books in
circulation have codified them, but in my experience they tend to be a fluid
etiquette, situationally determined. "Listen" to buyers, says one
book; adopt "a cheery enthusiastic voice that communicates enthusiasm and
fun"; "watch the eyes of browsers and buyers for reliable hints about
their desires for sale merchandise"; don't be offended by haggling, but
also don't give in too easily; "[d]emonstrate the excellent value that
your prices represent by drawing comparisons with current retail prices. . . .
Remind [buyers] that if they don't buy the merchandise in question, the next
person will" (Stratas 98-101). A garage-sale is a discursive formation,
structured by conventional interchanges. Imagined values are traded,
reinforced. A sale involves more or less a mutual bolstering of
subject-positions, ensuring that the respective desires for a fair price and
for some cool, semi-useful junk are both satisfied. "Negotiation,"
exclaims one guide book, "must appear to be a win-win situation for you
and the buyer!" (Williams 58). We need to "feel," the authors
remind us, that we're getting a bargain, or that we're receiving enough cash
for our precious clutter. In most cases, haggling is socially acceptable at
these events, even expected. Usually, things are priced with magic marker on
bits of masking tape; we usually price our things a little high, anticipating
some bargaining so that we'll get more or less what we want for the stuff. (I
never trust sales that have no pre-set prices on things. Often these types will
turn to their friends, asking what they think something's worth, or will give
different prices each time you ask. Or else they'll say, "make me an
offer," which is only infuriating. A lack of a price suggests a little too
much self-serving fluidity. Sellers ought to know at least roughly what they
something's supposedly "really" worth to them.) With that general
rule in force, price slightly high, the outcome can only be good. Either
someone will be shy, and give you what you've asked, or else they'll bargain
with you, and you'll get what you wanted anyhow. Plus, they'll think they got a
deal by talking you down, so everyone's happy. We usually add at least a dollar
or two, expecting to deal. Decorum wants maintaining.
Certain sellers can't stand haggling, and are insulted
if you try, as if their precious discards could possibly be worth anything less
than they imagine. Typically, such types will insist that for (let’s say) a
vase they paid three times what they're asking in some exclusive Kerrisdale
shop, or that since they're grandmother knit the sweater they couldn’t take
less than ten dollars. These always seem bathetic – rhetorical excesses –
always implicitly posing the same question: if
it's worth so much, why are you trying to sell it at a garage sale? The
discourse has its limits. Personally, I prefer people willing to undersell
themselves, and not simply because I don't want to spend much. The whole point
of these sales, it seems to me, is to clear out your mess, to put the bruised
and broken goods back into circulation, to re-cycle. Yard sales are
interchanges, not profit-making enterprise. Like I said, you will never get
anything close to the amount you paid for a thing, so why bother trying? Let
things go. Experience bears out a peculiar truth: the sellers with the lowest
prices often make the most at the end of the day, because they sell in volume.
You keep your prices high, and you won't sell much, and then you either have to
cart all your dear crap back inside, or else call the Sally-Ann truck and give it
all away to charity.
Yard-saling — and it is a verb, at least in this
vernacular — also involves a form of interpersonal circulation. It isn't only
money or stuff that moves, but also people. The night before we’d go through
the paper, copying out sale times and locations: we’d usually budget about 15
minutes per garage. After breakfast the next morning, usually by 8:30, we’d
load our baby daughter into her car seat, and head out. (Her schedule sets our
time-constraints, since she has to nap by 10:30. The baby actually enjoys these
outings more than we do; she gets an inordinate amount of attention from all
types of smiling strangers.) Using a map-book of the city we bought at the
grocery store, we’d plot a rough course, coordinating start-times and
locations. Usually, you have to choose a particular neighbourhood on the east
or west side. Trying to do too many dispersed sales is only frustrating. And
there are plenty of people who don't advertise in the papers, which means you
have to keep on the look-out as you progress around your circuit. Half the
time, we don't make it to the majority of the sales we've plotted, since our
course has been interrupted and diverted by other possibilities: bristol-board
posters on corners, clusters of balloons. There is a semiotics of garage sales,
a code: certain kinds of signage catch your eye and draw you along. Come and
buy, they plead like Christina Rossetti’s goblins, we've got good stuff cheap.
What happens, however, over the course of several
weekends is that a certain spatial formation develops, a sense of the various
negotiable routes through urban geography. You get to know the city, but not
its landmarks, not at least in the touristy sense. What you start to acquire is
the feel of particular areas, the network of lanes and alleys, driveways and
paths that weave the place together as lived and living. Yard sales grant permission
to cross property lines, to walk temporarily over someone's lawn, through their
gate, to traverse backyards and porches — some even let you into their houses,
especially if they're moving and want to clear out furniture. You meet people,
certainly, and briefly discuss where a thing came from, or who made it, or what
makes it nifty. But more significantly, you circulate yourself: you don't have
to buy anything, but you do have to cross boundaries, park in people's back
driveways, trample (oops) their flowerbeds, paw trough their junk. The semiosis
here, as a sum of meanings generated, isn't necessarily commercial, although it
does hinge on the promise of goods exchanged; rather, what is produced, what's
signified, is a kind of subcultural spatiality, a sense of movement and
arrangement that exists in the interstices of official channels (roads,
storefronts, malls), rather than properly contained and demarcated by them.
There are junk stores aplenty, and I have even seen a "garage-sale store,"
which set itself up as a big garage sale, though nobody was fooled: this is
where the stuff goes that the "early-bird" dealers buy; these are
cast-offs converted back into goods, commodities, proper fare. Yard sales
inhabit the space behind, around, between these sorts of operations, a harmless
black market (since nobody would be silly enough to charge GST in their back
yard) which tends to turn city blocks temporarily inside out, making the rear
alley into an ephemeral store-front, and to re-map the ways in which the urban
space is zoned, gridded, understood.
Urban planning is being temporarily upset, though
not finally disturbed; it is subverted ephemerally from within by a species of
consumption which it cannot quite recognize as proper, or reconcile wholly to the
mechanisms of value and exchange that bouy up the urban economy. In One Way
Street (1928), Benjamin commented on what he called "the decay of
aura" in the contemporary world, a loss of immediate contact with
originality or what he called the "cult value" of objects like works
of art: "Just as all things, in a perpetual process of mingling and
contamination, are losing their intrinsic character while ambiguity displaces
authenticity, so is the city" (cited and translated in Caygill 130-31).
However, for Benjamin the urban experience, described here as loss, involves
not so much a lamentable nihilism as a call to embrace a new fluidity,
"the possibility of a new experience of space and time" (Caygill 131).
When one attempts to apply a century-old analysis like Benjamin's to the yard
sale, however, one finds the terms curiously reversed: what these fly-by-night
(or day) sales create is an unstable counter-urban space, one which sets itself
against the fixities of urban commodification and the relatively stable
networks of commerce represented by the grid of the city in our map-book or by
the five or six day work-week to which we all adhere. Paradoxically, as we have
seen, the yard sale also holds out the promise of a contingent and ephemeral
aura in its pricing and sales practices, as the spectres of domestic and
personal history dissolve into the exchange of used goods for a little cash.
Homey sales offer a vernacular alternative to the false rigidities of urban
consumerism and capitalism by simultaneously subverting that rigidity and
offering the figments of a longed-for authenticity long since purged from the
city's form.
Sometimes the weather matters, and sometimes it
doesn't. Sales will have "rain dates," just in case: usually the
Sunday. But for those of us with garages, a little precipitation means nothing.
It may keep a few customers away, but then again the dedicated yard-salers will
brave almost anything up to a gale. Your sign is your promise: if you
advertise, people will expect you to sell, and will turn up whether it's
raining or not. Once, we held a sale in our friends' kitchen, since the yard
was too wet. I think more people trapsed over their linoleum than might have
shown up if the sun were shining (in which case many would likely have gone to Jericho
Beach instead of to our sale). Benjamin offers a little allegory of rain and
money in One Way Street, the text I've been citing:
Money and rain belong together. The weather itself
is an index of the state of this world. Bliss is cloudless, knows no weather.
There also comes a cloudless realm of perfect goods, on which no money falls. (Reflections
87)
Benjamin's
perfect world is a realm where goods may be exchanged, acquired or traded
without the intermediary of money, without the bothersome abstractions of
exchange values, trying to decide what is worth what, and how you might even
form such equivalencies in the first place: a central and vexing problem for
Marx. Bliss is plenitude here, but in his and our fallen world, the world of ambiguities,
inauthenticities and tarnished auras, exchange takes on the chaotic uncertainty
of weather. The "rain or shine" promise of the yard sale, however,
proffers perfected exchange that disregards weather, and ignores the complex
objective variables of commodity trading; values are assigned not on the basis
of what Marx might call "abstract human labour," the universal
"spectral" standard by which, for instance, we can determine how many
hammers are worth a shovel, and so on: – the leveling quantification of money.
In the Grundrisse, Marx gestures toward this universalizing property,
which at the beginning of the first volume of Capital he was later to
hone into his theory of "abstraction" in commodification and
exchange:
the proportion in which a particular commodity is
exchanged for money, i.e. the quantity of money into which a given quantity of
commodity is transposable, is determined by the amount of labour time
objectified in the commodity. The commodity is an exchange value because it is
the realization of a specific amount of labour time; money not only
measures the amount of labour time which the commodity represents, but also
contains its general, conceptually adequate, exchangeable form. Money is the
physical medium into which exchange values are dipped, and in which they obtain
the form corresponding to their general character. (Grundrisse 167)
What
you pay, for Marx, is determined by how much work, quantified by money or pay,
goes into that object, roughly at least. But yard sales detach themselves from
such quantifications; money is still used, and still obtains its value on some
level from human labour, but what is being exchanged has nothing to do with the
production or exchange of manufactured goods. The second-hand objects are wholly
detached from their making, and value emerges somewhat arbitrarily from the
sense of what an object might be worth, not in terms of its use or its cost or
the labour that produced it, but (as I have been trying to claim) through the
personal, domestic, dissolving history which that object momentarily signifies.
Michel de Certeau refers to this individual imaginative reading of places or
objects as a "poetics" which cuts against the "technical
rationalities and financial profitabilities" which corporate structures
and institutions tend to reserve for themselves (Certeau 106). This is a
private form of association, a creation of value that cannot be subsumed by the
absolute equivalences and the leveling abstractions of Marxian exchange value,
since if it were shared it could possess no tangible value as a commodity. (The
commodity, Marx writes, is a "born leveler and cynic, it is always ready
to exchange not only soul, but body, with each and every other commodity, be it
more repulsive than Maritornes herself" [Capital 1.179].) My
"stuff," as George Carlin notoriously joked, might be your
"junk," and vice versa. Personal value is relative, fabricated,
poetic. Only at the moment of exchange itself do such values, as they dissolve
or evaporate, become luminous. You can have no access to what an object means
or has meant to me, but at the moment it changes hands, the object bodies forth
that unreadable history, which makes it worth something. For a series of
instants, in other words, as each purchase takes flight, the yard sale offers
what Benjamin calls bliss, the ephemeral moment of pure exchange, unmediated
even by abstract constants of value like money: uncommodified. It is
interchange prior to the economies of value, outside those terms. And it is
fiercely imaginary.
In Marx's terms, the yard sale appears to operate
as a return to early, pre-capitalist forms of barter and exchange, where money
is only phantasmagorical or imaginary:
The first form of money corresponds to a low stage
of exchange and of barter, in which money still appears more in its quality of measure
rather than as a real instrument of exchange. At this stage, the
measure can still be imaginary . . . . From the fact that the commodity
develops into general exchange value, it follows that exchange value becomes a
specific commodity; it can do so only because a specific commodity obtains the
privilege of representing, symbolizing, the exchange value of all other
commodities, i.e. of becoming money. It arises from the essence of
exchange value itself that a specific commodity appears as the money-subject,
despite the monetary properties possessed by every commodity. In the course of
development, the exchange value of money can exist separately from its matter,
its substance, as in the case of paper money, without therefore giving up the
privilege of this specific commodity, because the separated form of existence
of exchange value must necessarily continue to take its denomination from the
specific commodity. (Grundrisse
166-7)
The
yard sale, however, need not be understood as a historically displaced feudal
economy, or as a throwback. Rather, the symbolic form entailed by monetary
exchange in these contexts has simply shifted away from the notion of labour
central to Marxian conceptions of value. Instead, the symbol becomes detached,
slippery, personal. Value is ascribed and exchanged not as a function of the
universal constant of money, but in fact traces out the symbolic formations
that give rise to money in the first place. In other words, what yard sales
represent is the process of commodification itself rather than the interchange
of preformed commodities leveled by a particular monetary scale. The yard sale
returns us to the imaginary fabrications that underlie the valuing of money,
the emergence of its symbolic power; money, Marx argues, cannot be if it is to
have value merely a “symbol” or “the arbitrary product of human reflection” (Capital
1.186), not an “imaginary” value (185), but must encrypt “the direct
incarnation of all human labour” (187). Yet despite his work to objectify that
labour, to shift from mere arbitrary symbolization to a kind of direct
embodiment, Marx remains, as Thomas Keenan points out, at a loss to identify
that universal object materially, and must fall back on abstraction:
"Nothing — at least, no thing
— is left, it seems, certainly not the
fact that things are the product of labor" (Keenan 112). Marx himself
confirms this reading in the first pages of Capital: "[The concrete
forms of labour] can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced
to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract" (Capital
1.128). But what this means is that (again, as Keenan points out, echoing
Derrida, Laclau and others) a "phantom-like objectivity," as Marx
himself writes, is all that remains to ground the objectivity of exchange
(1.128): "In the rigor of abstraction, only ghosts survive. The point is
to exchange them" (Keenan 115). But such an interpretation, fostered by
Marx's own rhetoric, undoes the possibility of objective value, and converts
value itself into purely imaginary work. What happens at yard sales, against
the grain of the objective values traded as commodities on the actual
marketplaces of the city — malls,
institutions, stores — is an
intensification of that ghosting, whereby value itself becomes purely spectral
(as if such a thing were possible, since spectres are by definition liminal,
impure, creatures neither here nor there, bodies which both are and aren't).
The process of re-symbolizing value, of remaking commodities in the different
imaginations of trader, buyer, seller, participant.
It seems appropriate then to defer to the jumbled
notes of the Grundrisse in this case rather than to look to the more
chisled political economy of Capital. Marx's earlier work, as Thomas
Kemple points out, has a kind of garage sale style: "It is by now a
commonplace for readers of Marx's writings to remark upon their fragmentary,
scattered, and condensed aspects, their overall roughness and incompleteness,
and thus the difficulty of making sense of them" (Kemple 11). Marx himself
wrote to Engels as he was in the midst of composing his notes that "The
devil is in that manuscript (it would be a fat volume in print) everything is
jumbled up together like beets and cabbages. . . " (53). The point is not
that the Grundrisse is a failure as a treatise, though it most certainly
does not cohere, but that it traces out a process of philosophical formation.
It is a negation of the economy of the book itself, writing across and against
conventions of economic logic even as it acknowledges and accepts them. Garage
sales offer parodies of commerce; one garage-sale manual even concludes by
suggesting that monthly sales could be held in unrented spaces at local malls,
as if to convert the domesticated detritus they feature into renewed and
renewable consumer goods (Williams 88). At garage sales, real money is
exchanged for real goods, just as in malls or on commodity markets; but the
nature of the value attached to those goods and the symbolic worth of that
money are far from clear-cut. Value itself is thrown into question by the
arbitrary, imaginative jumble of the sale table. What yard sales offer, like
Marx's manuscript, are themselves what Kemple calls "mediatized fictions
of the market," an exchange which foregrounds the mediating contrivances
of its own making. Yard sales turn commodification against itself, even as they
revel, sometimes playfully, sometimes frustrated, in its contingencies and pretenses.
A negative commerce, a form of commodification
that resists the reifying pressures of the commodity, flourishes in the front
lawns and back lanes of our Saturday neighbourhoods, as we go to rifle through
cartons of musty, useless textbooks and card-tables stacked with mismatched
cutlery, dust-bunnied macramé and broken ceramics, elbowing among the shifting
gaggles of neighbours and strangers, scrums of hawkeyed second-hand dealers and
ravenous bargain hunters, who mass in yard after yard, trampling shrubs as they
rummage through cardboard boxes. After a few weeks, we even begin to recognize
certain faces. Garage-sale people appear to be creatures of repetition and
habit, making their rounds in vague community, drifting with apparent abandon
through the same restrictive orbits, a cloud of chaotic particles loosely bound
by their strange attractors. (I know one guy named [withheld], but I “know” him only because he seems to like the same
sort of records I do, and so I'm always trying to beat him to sales. When we
meet, we eye each other a little suspiciously, though I try to be friendly.
"Hey [withheld]," I say,
and then I show him the cool electro-acoustic John Cage LP I just found, or he
shows it to me, if he got there first. Then we nod and try not to scowl.) Some
oddly competitive instinct seems to nudge me gently into the fray of
single-minded, full-blooded consumers jammed around a picnic table of used
books, a feeling that I'm missing something over there, amid that pile of
coloured glassware, that everyone desires, the thing at which I really
ought to get a better look. Whether I actually need it is immaterial; the need
is always generated in the hungry, gently seething morass, as we mill through
piles of hand-me-downs; you have to listen carefully, pretending to be
considering a moth-eaten shirt while actually cocking an ear to catch the sotto
voce asides of some couple whispering about a cookbook, or someone admiring
a broken Victrola, or two children pawing a carton of figurines for the really
good ones, whatever those might be. Keeping your ears open is crucial; you have
to hear what's hot, and you have to be fast. Garage sales are pure desiring;
possessing isn't really the point, since most of what you buy is junk anyhow,
and will probably end up in your own sale a few months later. What seems to
matter is the chase, the process, the act of exchange. The experienced
garage-saler, suddenly seized with want, spotting across the grass a kitchen
gadget he or she just has to have, keeps silent — saying anything would alert
everyone else to the desire, and the object could easily be lost — and, firmly
but quickly, strides over and stakes a claim. I have watched many times how
subtly such need arises: objects of no consequence become ardently wanted as
soon as someone else simply hints that he or she might buy it. For me, I’ve come
to a conclusion that it's inevitable: I begin by feeling detached, but soon
lose myself in the general drive to acquire whatever it is, a dozen different
and tacitly-coveted objects for a dozen potential buyers, to fill that uncertain
lack that can never really be filled since it inevitably can't say precisely
what it wants. It only knows that it does.
I have plenty of first-hand true-to-life takes
about the value of holding your tongue. I like, as I said, to buy old records.
78s, in my experience, usually run a dollar or two, no more, and people
generally have no idea who the artists are. Most have, justly, faded into
obscurity, and many scratched lacquer discs of Scottish marches and third-rate
big bands are hard to see as worth much at all (unless you don't care, and
simply like the look of "old" discs). So, if you're sharp, you can
sometimes find things people don't know they have. I bought a Hot Lips Page
record for a dollar, which remains one of my prize finds to this day. And I
almost had a few others, but for my big mouth. A man was selling an old
Victrola: it still worked, and he'd had it refinished, so he was asking a
hundred dollars for it: not exactly yard-sale pricing, but you never know. In
the cabinet, however, were about ten old 78s, which he said he wanted to keep
with the player but was willing to sell separately. "How much?" I
asked, not really looking at what they were. "Oh, I don't know," he
said, "what do you think they're worth?" Replies like that, as I
said, are always annoying: he ought to have known what he wanted for them. (If
ever asked such a question, always reply "fifty cents," or less. The
seller will react by letting you know what he or she really expected.) And then
came my big mistake: I looked at the labels. They were original pressings of
Albert Ammons and James P. Johnson, and a late Louis Armstrong with Sid Catlett
on drums. "Wow," I said, foolishly, aloud, "these are amazing.
Originals." A cult value of which the seller hadn't even been aware suddenly
kicked in, and the price became ten dollars each. I couldn't afford them, and
we left. Never show your hand.
