Applauding at Auctions

As much as I dislike shopping, I love browsing at garage sales and junky "antique malls," and going to auctions. We have quite a few auction companies in town, including one "high end" house that alternates between really expensive stuff and regular monthly auctions featuring things that normal people might buy. A month or so ago, we went one of the chi-chi auctions.

We observed a ritual that never ceases to baffle me: applauding when something goes for a high price. There was a cool mid-century coffee table by some designer I have never heard of that inspired a sedate bidding frenzy, both from people in the audience and bidders on the phone. The table started at something like $10,000 and by the time it was all over, it went for an amazing $40,000. As soon as the final gavel fell, the crowd broke out in spontaneous applause. Now, this wasn't some sophisticated Paris or New York audience dressed in haute couture. There wasn't a lovely spy lurking in the background, like in the movies. It was a rather frumpy looking mid-western crowd, with lots of jeans, sweat shirts, and baseball caps. Few of them looked like they could spend $40,000 on a table (although looks can be deceiving, I know.) Nonetheless, they all applauded.

Exactly what, I wonder, are people applauding in such a situation? The object itself, which has achieved such a high value? The designer or artist, probably long dead, whose work has inspired such a frenzy of desire? The auction house, for its foresight in attracting the right crowd? Or are they applauding Mr. or Ms. Deep Pockets, that wealthy person who can afford to spend $40,000 on a table, as if to say "Bravo! Way to go for earning so much money that you can afford to spend so much! We admire you! We envy you!"

Maybe its a combination of all of these things. I don't know.

But I do know that we didn't get any applause for our little purchases, which totaled $150. Even so, I was pretty happy with them.

First, we bought four mid-century dining chairs that look great with our 50's dining table. I found the table and original chairs about 15 years ago at a garage sale for $90. The chairs, never the sturdiest, have gotten rickety, and one broke when a 300-pound friend sat in it. (I felt so bad for her! She wasn't hurt, but it must have been humiliating.) The new chairs more or less match the table and are very heavy and sturdy. I love the interesting lines they have ... you can't tell from this photo, but the wood on the sides creates a little triangle shape, and the back is all wood. At $12.50 apiece, I think they were a steal, even though I'll need to recover them.



And, I could not resist buying a set of Russel Wright Modern American dinnerware. My mother had these dishes in this exact color when I was growing up. They are sleek, cool, and incredibly mod. Plus, they remind me of mom. She never had much money to spend on herself or home decor, but she managed to decorate our tiny house with style. These dishes will remind me of her every time we use them. I plan to use them as our every day dishes. I was pleased to get the set for an amazing $100. It's not a full set-- there are 8 dinner and bread plates, and 12 cups and saucers. To have a complete set, I'll need to find the serving bowls and a few other pieces. But that will be a fun endeavor -- something to look for at junk sales! Read more!

Playbills from Broadway--Waiting for Godot

A lot of people collect the Playbills from the theater, so much so that there are even special bindings you can buy to preserve them. And opening night Playbills come with a little sticker attesting to that.

I totally understand the urge to keep the program; I always bring mine home, especially from plays I've enjoyed. But mine are never crisp, neat, and well-preserved. Somehow they end up all rumpled and bent from being rolled up, dropped on the floor, stuffed in a bag. But I keep them nonetheless. They are free souvenirs, easy to pack, and a good way to spark my notoriously bad memory for details long after I think I've forgotten the play.

On our recent trip to New York, we saw three plays, all coincidentally featuring well-known screen celebrities and all featuring a rather bleak outlook on life, although that's not necessarily why we chose the plays. The most memorable was Waiting for Godot, starring Bill Irwin, John Glover, Nathan Lane, and John Goodman.

I've seen Godot before and have read the play several times. Waiting for Godot can seem quite despairing, especially on the written page. Full of existential angst and brutality, it's an odd choice for someone like me who trends toward depression. But this production was a revelation -- I had never realized how funny Godot is, in the right hands. Comedy truly is in the timing.The actors in this production hit every note. It was by turns hilarious, profoundly moving, and -- again somewhat unexpectedly-- optimistic. We may not know why we are on this earth or what our lives mean. There may be nothing to do. But we are alive and that is reason enough to keep on living. Or so this production implied.

Lane (Estragon) and Irwin (Vladimir) are excellent, two satellites that circle each other at safe removes, seemingly independent, and yet tethered by the gravity of companionship and need. Glover's Lucky, literally tethered to his master Pozzo by a thick rope around his neck, was an interesting blend of Tim Burton's Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas and the loose-limbed, pontificating Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz (although certainly less cheerful than the latter.)

All the actors were superb, but John Goodman's performance just blew me away. I've often been impressed and surprised by the depths Goodman reveals in some of his films. It's a mistake to consider him only as the funny fat man he played in Roseanne or movies like the Flintstones. He can tap into something very dark, as evidenced in his scary performances in Barton Fink and O Brother Where Art Thou. Here, he plays Pozzo, a cruel, selfish, aristocrat with a vaguely British, uppercrust accent and an imperious, threatening demeanor. Goodman's immense size and power contributes to his threatening posture and makes the scene when Pozzo falls to the ground and can't get up all the more moving. His Pozzo is at once full of aggrandizing self-assurance, unquestioned privilege, barely contained rage, pathetic neediness, and, at the end, wisdom and insight, if only for a brief moment. It's a stunning performance.

We lucked into a brief after-show discussion featuring Irwin, Glover, and Goodman. They talked about the choice of pronunciation (GOD-oh rather than Go-doh), which I at first found disconcerting. Apparently, it's closer to Beckett's original French, and it resonates better with Pozzo. But the most amusing and interesting exchange was John Goodman's answer to the inevitable question about whether Godot is God and what in the heck it all means. "I don't know or care," said Goodman. "I just try to tell a good story." In this, he seems to be echoing Beckett, who once said, "all I knew about Pozzo was in the text...if I had known more I would have put it in the text, and that was true also of the other characters.” Beckett also once said that "if by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.”

When asked, "how do you handle the humor in such an incessantly pessimistic play," Goodman deadpanned, "with a trowel." He paused, then went on, "What are you going to do? It's an inherently funny play. Samuel Beckett wrote it for Sid Caesar."

I wish I had thought to ask about the obvious blood and bruises on Lane's face. My recollection, reinforced by a quick look at the very interesting Wikipedia entry on the play, is that there was never any evidence to support Estragon's claim that he is beaten every night. This production erases that ambiguity. It might thus also subtly erase the ambiguity about whether the child who purports to be a messenger from Godot actually has met and talked to the never-seen title character, although, as Frink points out, the child is not exactly a reliable witness, as he cannot remember having met Didi and Gogo the day before. This production also encourages a more hopeful ending by having E and V grasp the other's hand in the final scene.

Here's a link to the theatre, where Godot is playing through July 12.

I'll post thoughts on the other two plays, God of Carnage and Exit the King, in the next few days. Read more!

Preserver of Posterity or Pack-rat?

Putting together my recent post about my small collection of Barbie doll clothes got me thinking about what you do with things like these. I have a shoebox filled with the Barbie clothes my mother made for me some 40-odd years ago, along with several doll dresses and a tiny quilt sewn by my grandmother (just like the full-size ones she made for her children's beds.) I even have a red & white cap and skirt my great-grandmother knitted for my mom when she was a little girl.

I didn't give them to my nieces when they were young enough to actually play with them because they're just too precious and delicate. I suppose I'll give them to the girls when they grow up and have daughters...but of course, the doll clothes will be even older and more delicate then, and those children won't be able to play with them either. So what do you do with things like these?

It seems downright wrong to get rid of such family heirlooms. So, after I took the photos for this post, I put them back in their shoebox in the linen closet. And there they will sit, rarely seeing the light of day, except when they will be passed on so they can inhabit another generation's closets. Which doesn't seem quite right either.

Frink says I should put them on the cat. But I'm pretty sure one of the reasons Frink loves me is precisely because I'm not the kind of person who dresses the cats. (Even though, perversely, I love the website Stuff on My Cat.)

Anyone out there have any better ideas? Read more!

Books, Brochures, Bartlesville

Several new objects came home with us after last weekend's road trip through Arkansas and Oklahoma, most of them books or pamphlets from The Price Tower, Frank Lloyd Wright's only skyscraper. Wright called the tower "a tree that escaped the crowded forest." Its main form (the trunk) is a square, made more interesting by the intersecting squares (branches) that bisect it at rotated angles, creating triangular balconies and stairwells. This book, which we bought at the Arts Center on the ground floor, has an interesting history of its construction.






The current exhibit at the Arts Center, "Fallingwater en Perspectiva," features oil paintings of what is probably the most famous home in America. The artist, Félix de la Concha, is from Spain. This lucky (and talented) guy got to spend 14 months in residence at Fallingwater, painting it from dozens of perspectives over the span of several seasons. The brochure shows him with one of a series of paintings that, when hung side-by-side, create a 360-degree view of the living/dining room, each from different, slightly over-lapping angles. Stretched across an entire wall of the gallery, this grouping was stunning and a bit dizzying. (The curator complained that it was hard to hang because the paintings were at all sorts of odd angles.) This photo was taken from the exhibit website, which has many other images from the exhibit. (Click on the photo for a larger view.)

I love collecting brochures like this from places I visit. Even if I take scads of photos of a place, when I stumble across a tattered and yellowed brochure years later, it brings back memories -- who I was with, what the weather was like, what kind of flowers were in bloom, details of artworks and facts that I've long forgotten. Even better, brochures don't cost anything and don't take up much room.


Frink, on the other hand, is a collector, especially of coffee mugs, which take up A LOT of space. (If all the neighborhood Starbucks lose their coffee cups in an earthquake, we've got them covered. Someday I'll write a post about our dueling Oscar & Felix personalities when it comes to collecting things.) Frink hoped to buy a mug showing the Price Tower or its cool Wright-designed logo. (The originals are hard to find and beyond our means. Six cups sold at auction recently for $3,000 and two plates sold for $1000 each.) But, aside from some pens and a poster of Wright's presentation drawing, the giftshop didn't have anything depicting Price Tower or its logo. The guide said the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation claims copyright on all plans and images of his work. For this reason, visitors aren't allowed to photograph the interiors. It seems strange that the owners of the actual building aren't allowed to sell souvenirs showing their own property. But we followed the rules and didn't take interior photos (except of our room--shhh, don't tell anyone.) I did find some excellent pictures online if you're interested.


We also picked up a guide to Bruce Goff's architecture in Oklahoma, and a DVD about Shin'enKan, a home he designed in Bartlesville that was destroyed by arson in 1996. Goff was an architect who worked primarily in the Midwest in an astonishing array of styles, from Prairie to Art Deco to what I call Dean-Martin-Meets-James-Bond Martini Modern. Shin'enKan, a hip bachelor pad built for a wealthy young client, was definitely Martini Modern.
















Goff had an affection for recycling found objects long before it was trendy, and a key feature of Shin'enKan was aqua blue glass, left over from glass manufacturing. It was shattered into faceted chunks, which Goff incorporated into the walls of many of his buildings.



This blog has some amazing photos of Goff's designs, including this photo of the lost house in Bartlesville.

For more on our visit to The Price Tower and Bruce Goff's Oklahoma buildings, please visit my travel blog. Read more!