“These would make really good garden stakes,” jokes Rob. The seventy-five-year-old Repair Café regular was talking about some blinds that are behaving a bit wonky. At one point six men were standing in front of the blinds trying to figure out what to do with them. The gentleman who brought them in didn’t exactly know what was wrong with the shades, just that his wife told him to bring them to get fixed, so he was following orders. Rob left the others to it and chatted with me for a bit before a big project arrived. He has been retired about twenty years and was one of the elders of New Paltz who heard John’s presentation and liked the idea. “I spent my career as a biologist. My personal ethic is to try to fix things or reuse things, and not throw them out. Not always buying new stuff, because every time you buy something either it or its replacement is going to wind up in a landfill somewhere.”
Rob would help tackle three projects that day: one that was just a tiny fix, one that involved glue and clamps, and something else that required the collaboration of two longtime fixers and a professional contractor. The first project was a wood rattle brought in by Repair Café regular Marybelle. “My cousin’s husband made it and it lasted through Emma and we gave it to Simon and he was sitting in a high chair and they have a wooden floor.” What happened next was pretty obvious: “And I’m thinkin’, I wonder what happens when he drops it on the floor? And just as I was about to take it away from him . . .”
It was a lovely blond wood, smooth and filled with small hard beans that made a soothing chuck-a-chuck sound when shaken. The end had broken off. Rob sanded the edges, got out super epoxy, aligned the two round hemispheres to make a whole sphere. The catch was it needed time to dry, so Rob told Marybelle he’d bring it to her at church.
Then there are the strangers who walk in with big problems. A slight, middle-aged Asian man arrived with two terribly broken pieces of furniture. One was an older chair with a leg broken in half and the other a pedestal end table with one of the supports busted off. “Whaddya have a fight in your house last night?” joked Joe in a thick New York accent. He was up from Brooklyn to help. He is part of the Fixers Collective. They’re a long-running local fixit group, and as someone who spends a lot time in the Hudson Valley, Joe likes to help out his upstate New York friends. “Is Patrick Murphy gonna be here?” wondered Rob.
This was a job that would require either a miracle or a professional. Enter Patrick Murphy, a master carpenter and contactor who owns his own firm, Building Logic. A friendly, soft-spoken fellow in his early fifties, he’s happy to share his pro-level tools and industrial epoxies. He has all the good toys, like a pneumatic nail gun. “To me it is a no-brainer to do repair and fix things around my house, around my neighbor’s house. It’s the skill I possess.” Once Patrick arrived it took all three men to figure out how to use a dowel and some rope—and I think a little bit of wizard magic—to get the legs back on that chair. The man left happy but never did answer the question about a fight.
Patrick likes being around the ladies and gentlemen who have lived a bit of life. They, like the items they fix, clearly have a lot of use left in them. “From my standpoint, the retired tinkers have time and patience, old work knowledge, everything used be repaired. I love all those guys and talking to them. I can bring the younger attitude and strength and tools and newer ways of fixing things. I am sucker for volunteering.” It explains why a busy contractor who specialized in green design would spend his Saturdays helping to fix music boxes and mechanized Christmas trees. Patrick used to coach youth sports, and when his kid aged out he found himself looking for a way to contribute to his community. “I had no outlet for volunteerism.” Like most volunteer opportunities he says he gets as much out of helping people as he gives. One of his most memorable days involved a woman’s childhood memory. “A fifty-year-old woman brought in the piano stool she used when she was like eight years old, to learn to play the piano. It had been broken for decades.” He worked on it for a bit and when the woman returned she didn’t see the stool. She assumed it was too far gone and Patrick had just put it aside. When she asked about it, Patrick, who is a big, strong, blond guy, told her he was sitting on it and had been for a while. “I noticed that she didn’t move. Then she just melted. She was crying.”
The people who volunteer their time are a mix of tinkerers, former engineers, hobbyists, and environmentalists. Dimitri Galitzine is all four. He runs the Kingston café but also helps out at the others. He was the man who got the typewriter back in useable shape. He also fixed two vacuums and a turntable that day. He has an avuncular presence and the voice of Sean Connery. When he speaks he does so with authority. While he believes in keeping as much out of the waste stream as possible, he understands why people with limited means are almost forced to buy new. “When appliances break on you, are going to pay for the man just to come look at it, never mind fixing it? Which of course becomes noncompetitive in relation to the price of a new one. Which is why repairing seems to work only on a volunteer basis. And I think on that basis it is worth doing. And teaching people you can repair some things. Lamps are reparable. Textiles are easy to fix. The seamstresses fix dolls. And toys. In a great many toys, doesn’t matter if it is perfect. It is still playable.”
A middle-aged couple brought in a toaster that was only browning bread on one side. The man said he couldn’t figure out how to remove the back of the machine. Dimitri showed him the one “safety” screw, sometimes called a one-way screw, that is used on many electronics to prevent tampering. It is slightly different and requires a special tool or some DIY ninja skills to unscrew it. Some tinkerers believe these screws are there to force the average person to abandon fixing things or are meant to discourage owners from opening up an item because it will void the warranty. Always floating around the edges of the fix-it coalitions is the theory of planned obsolescence, the idea that companies purposely engineer their products to fail.
Planned obsolescence was widely promoted by American economist Bernard London. In 1932, when the country was in the grip of the Great Depression, the idea of spending money on something, if you had the money to spend, was anathema. London argued this attitude had the country in an economic chokehold. He believed the way to breathe new life into the economy was to purposely truncate the life expectancy of a product so that people would be forced to buy.
He wrote a manifesto called Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence which he published on October 1, 1932. In it he wrote the following:
People everywhere are today disobeying the law of obsolescence. . . . Worn-out automobiles, radios, and hundreds of other items which would long ago have been discarded and replaced in more normal times, are being made to last another season or two or three, because the public is afraid or has not the funds to buy now…. Furniture and clothing and other commodities should have a span of life, just as humans have. When used for their allotted time, they should be retired, and replaced by fresh merchandise. It should be the duty of the State as the regulator of business to see that the system functions smoothly, deciding matters for capital and labor and seeing that everybody is sufficiently employed.
This idea that companies purposely plan for products to konk out at a certain time certainly has anecdotal support. Who hasn’t had a piece of equipment die just when the warranty runs out? There’s a documentary called The Lightbulb Conspiracy that tells the story of the Phoebus cartel, which was a group of lightbulb manufacturers who allegedly got together in the 1920s to set a standard for lightbulbs worldwide. Part of this standard was for each company to pledge to never make a bulb that would last longer than one thousand hours.2
The twenty-first-century target for those who believe in planned obsolescence is big tech. In a piece for Wired magazine titled, “The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable,” writer and founder of the online repair manual hub ifixit.com Kyle Wiens lists all the ways that certain Apple products are made to expire. He notes that while the heavier professional laptops can be upgraded and fixed,
the light ones aimed at consumers are not built to last. He notes how each iteration has become increasingly difficult to fiddle with or fix. In one version the battery is glued into the case. Yet, it has been a popular seller. Wiens wrote, “We voted with our wallets and purchased the device despite its built-in death clock.”
The writer acknowledges that demand is high for these products so of course Apple keeps making them. But the 2012 MacBook Pro seemed to send him over the edge. He took issue with how unfixable it was. “Unlike the previous model, the display is fused to the glass, which means replacing the LCD requires buying an expensive display assembly. The RAM is now soldered to the logic board—making future memory upgrades impossible. And the battery is glued to the case, requiring customers to mail their laptop to Apple every so often for a $200 replacement.”3
Wiens is part of the Right to Repair movement, an effort to pass strong legislation that would allow individual and independent repair shops to fix electronics. Many companies keep their manuals close to the vest and only allow them in the hands of dealers. A bizarre example has surfaced with farm tractors. Now there are John Deere tractors that are wildly computerized. If one of these tractors breaks down, a farmer can’t really get in there and fix it himself. He has to have a Deere-approved repair person do it with certain parts and manuals only available to certain people. Deere and companies like it argue that they own the computer code in the tractors (or product) and they don’t want anyone stealing it. If you want it fixed, someone they authorize has to do it with parts authorized by them.
The Fair Repair bill put forth in two states in 2015, New York and Minnesota, would empower the average person or repair person to have access to the information and parts to be able to fix smartphones, computers, and, yes, farm equipment. There is precedent for a law like this passing. Automotive repair folks won the right to repair in 2012. Now that cars are borderline spaceships, for a while independent mechanics and owners who were handy with a wrench were being turned down when they requested manuals and parts to fix cars, based on the proprietary argument. The first bill like this passed in Massachusetts with 86 percent of a vote and it will become a de facto national standard by 2018.
Where some see conspiracy, old hands like Dimitri see a business decision. “Apple computers are wonderful. Unfortunately, they are glued shut so they are very difficult to open and repair. It is almost impossible to get one of those open. . . . I am not sure that it is even malevolent planned obsolescence, but I am sure people will pay more for a lighter computer than a heavy one with screws. . . . There is a competition for making things smaller and lighter.”
Unfortunately, Dimitri was not able to fix the toaster, safety screws and all. But the couple didn’t mind. They just loved the idea that someone would try. John Wackman says there are occasional disappointments. “What we say is we cannot guarantee that the item you bring to Repair Café can be fixed. All we can say is that you will have an interesting time. People get that.” There are disclaimers posted, and when people sign in they are acknowledging that, in the language of the foundation:
Neither the organizers of the Repair Café nor the repair experts are liable for any loss that may result from advice or instructions concerning repairs, for the loss of items handed over for repair, for consequential loss or for any other kind of loss resulting from work performed in the Repair Café. Experts making repairs offer no guarantee for the repairs carried out with their help and are not liable if objects that are repaired in the Repair Café turn out not to work properly at home.
People seem to get it and are grateful, and they come back. One lady who brought in some curtains to be hemmed returned an hour later with a lamp. A woman who had the orange finger of a hand-knit glove fixed last month was back to have the red thumb patched now by the same expert knitter. Dimitri says sometimes he feels like a hero. “People get thrilled about the idea of fixing their mother’s old clock. It is a good feeling. People like it. It is a good feeling.”
15
FOR THE LOVE OF JUNK
Q&A WITH MARY RANDOLPH CARTER,
AUTHOR OF AMERICAN JUNK,
GARDEN JUNK, KITCHEN JUNK,
AND BIG CITY JUNK, AMONG OTHERS
* * *
THERE IS A SMALL, framed picture of a cat whose body is made out of a human thumbprint, head, whiskers, and ears sketched in, perched on the aluminum soap dish above the kitchen sink in Mary Randolph Carter’s Manhattan apartment. There are two more cat paintings above it, and in between them a turtle sculpture affixed to the wall and wrapped in palm fronds, the kind you get at church the Sunday before Easter. Below it all is a thin rack from which vintage white enamel ladles and spoons hang. To the left of the sink is a full-sized refrigerator whose doors are completely covered in a decoupage of pictures, photos, and random notes. An enormous old-school alarm clock teeters on top of the appliance.
Mary Randolph Carter knows junk. Mary Randolph Carter loves junk and lives junk. She is the author of the glossy, photo-heavy coffee table books American Junk, Garden Junk, Kitchen Junk, and Big City Junk. The titles of her more recent books, A Perfectly Kept House Is the Sign of a Misspent Life and Never Stop to Think . . . Do I Have a Place for This?, clearly state her position about stuff. She is for it! She does not want to dictate or lecturer people about why they should embrace junk, but she doesn’t want to people to be bullied into thinking all junk is bad.
Carter’s address is one that makes you think of ladies in Chanel suits carrying small dogs or investment bankers who are trustees on various boards. Entering the exquisite lobby of her Upper East Side doorman building, you would never expect that several floors up is a flat that can be described as homespun junk chic. The apartment is a beautiful concoction of found objects and personal obsessions that has been featured in the New York Times.
Carter is fabulous in her own right. She has spent the last twenty-five years working for and with Ralph Lauren, most recently as creative director. She has an effortless style that is part southerner (she grew up in Virginia), part free spirit, and part urbane design icon. With long blonde hair and a clear completion, at nearly seventy the way she looks in patched jeans and a chunky sweater would cause a thirty-year-old woman to be jealous and a make a thirty-year-old man look twice.
Carter brews great strong coffee which she serves in, of course, unmatched cups at a pine kitchen table covered in Mexican oil cloth because it is forty years old and has been repaired so many times. She values old. She values worn. Perhaps it is because during her lifetime her family had been the victim of not one but two house fires that took not only all their belonging, but also their loved ones.
She raised her two boys in New York City with a patient and generous man who lives with all the crazy things in their home because he loves her. He jokes that when they pass a yard sale on road trips he always asks her, “Is your heart palpitating?” It probably is.
Conducting a traditional Q&A session with Carter is a bit like trying to take in her apartment with a single glance. Just as your eyes settle on one interesting thing (a giant owl lamp) you can’t help but notice something else (the nine-foot clock behind it). Our conversation veered right and left, taking detours, returning to original questions. After nearly two hours of talking, interviewing, and touring her home, the joy and challenge of presenting this as a traditional Q&A are both big. So I will say this isn’t heavily edited, it is curated. We started with her first days as a junk-o-phile.
Mary Randolph Carter: So one day the junk thing happened. I attribute my conversion as junker to a little place called the Rummage Shop. It was a converted muffler shop. And there was like a big spider on the top of it that had been made out of old mufflers because the—I found out later the guy that ran it was like a frustrated artist and sculptor. And every Sunday this place was open. Didn’t open until after all the churches were closed, so it opened like around 11:30, and there were people lined up. I never went into that place. I wasn’t really into thrift shops or junk, that
kind of thing. I went to beautiful antique shows, I mean, looking for something special and unique and handmade. But the rummage thing and the thrift shop thing never. But for the last, let’s say, five years I had been—everything got too expensive. The fun had gone out of it for me going to these shows, flea markets, whatever. So one day I just pulled in to the Rummage Shop, and that’s where the conversion began. I mean, it was like a crowded—you had to make your way through all this stuff. And I just started picking up these things, and they were like—what’s her name? Maureen that owned it, she just had these little old tags on there, 25¢, $2.00. I mean, it was kind of like the old five and dimes in a way. But I walked out of there with an armload of stuff for like $12.56 or something. And I had so much fun. And that was my junk conversion.
Q: What drove you to write your book Never Stop to Think . . . Do I Have a Place for This?
Carter: I mean, I guess I wrote the book to give people—I mean, all my books are about the same thing. They’re all about giving yourself permission to fall in love with the wackiest thing, and don’t let other people deter you. Don’t worry about other people’s taste. Don’t worry if it doesn’t have a provenance. I don’t think I ever bought, except for by accident, something that was of real value, but it had value to me. And that’s what I always write about is giving yourself permission, liberating yourself to love what you want to love. And that could be people or things or whatever.
So this particular book, Never Stop to Think . . . Do I Have a Place for This?, I mean, I’ve met so many great collectors, and I was really curious like you in way. I mean, I featured other people’s things in my book, but this was a deeper dive into the lives of people that really have a lot of stuff and live with it in different ways. I would go in and I’d say, Well, why do you have this? And what does it mean to you? And what does your partner think, your children think? And so it was definitely, I think, of all my books, the one that comes closest to really sort of investigative reporting about, you know. And all of them I said, Never stop to think, ‘Do I have a place for this?’ I mean, I would say, Suppose you had to—you lost it all, what would you do? Or, Your house is on fire. What would you save? And most of them just said, If I lost it all, that’s fine. I’ll just start over again.
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