Time is a House of Wax

I spend too many hours in thrift stores. Whenever it’s time to kill some time, I find myself browsing the detritus of donations, usually at one the several locations of Housing Works around the city. I occasionally flatter myself that I can stroll without purpose in the manner of a flaneur, but really any walk I take has some thrift store in mind as the destination. It’s the mild thrill of discovery that animates my pleasure, and it scratches the shopping itch; I can justify any purchase by thinking of it as that most deceptive of lures, a “bargain.” 

But the reality of these forays is that I often buy nothing, which is just as well. I emphatically do not need any more books (it’s only my awareness of my compulsive bibliomania that keeps it in check); I still own just under a thousand CDs, so even at a dollar a disc I can rarely rationalize buying another one (I picked up the Rykodisc editions of David Bowie’s Station to Station and Lodger, both of which I already own, for no other reason that they were a dollar each and unsealed); the only used vinyl worth thumbing through is classical because the discs are often pristine, and I have an awful lot of classical for someone who dips into that genre only every other month or so. Clothes are impossible: ties are always overpriced (anyone who pays more than ten bucks for a thrift store tie is a fool), and it seems that Big & Tall men never donate their old jackets and coats. As for furniture, even when a piece is affordable, the thought of figuring out how to schlep a secretary from the Chelsea store in Manhattan to the depths of Brooklyn is exhausting.

That leaves ephemera, and it’s often ephemera that does me in, even if whatever I bring home will only gather dust or be tucked away in the exorbitant storage unit three blocks from our apartment. Ephemera, however useless, always justifies itself somehow. Will I ever do anything with the Seventies-era CCNY notebooks I once found, each filled with lovely pencil sketches of horses? No, but it said something to me as I turned its pages, it was only two dollars, and so it now lives in a box of “found art.”

Not long ago I was exiting that Chelsea Housing Works when a framed image by the door caught me eye.

A cloaked figure, moving menacingly on a foggy cobblestoned street, toward a woman in Victorian dress in the distance, turning to run, all in black and white, but fuzzy—as if the fog itself had bled into the image and rendering it into a greyscale of white noise. Further, the poster with this image had suffered some water damage, the surface visibly wrinkled, like ripples in a tide pool, even beneath its glass. Below this read: 

HARRISON BURNS

Drawings and Paintings

October 2-October 27, 1979

Brooks Jackson Gallery Iolas

52 East 57^th Street, New York City 

It was an arresting image because I instantly recognized it, even in its altered state: it was a still from Alex DeToth’s House of Wax (1953), the film that began Vincent Price’s journey to horror icon. I’d seen the film many times, once even in full 3D at Film Forum, but the still itself had a deeper resonance: it formed the endpapers of Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of the Horror Film (1973), one of the most treasured and formative books from my childhood. My love of the genre began in some measure here, with countless hours spent gazing at evocative images from movies I wouldn’t see until years later (and some I still haven’t seen). One image, from an otherwise inept B movie,  was so strangely disturbing to me I had to quickly turn past that page as I leafed through the book; other images fascinated by juxtaposition, as many of the smaller stills from wide variety of horror films were grouped by Gifford thematically on the pages, leading to odd, almost surreal collages that I can still picture in my mind. But that scene from House of Wax, its perfect composition of encroaching doom and flight, really lingered—when I finally saw the film not long after immersing myself in Gifford’s compendium, I felt a distinct frisson as that scene, now in sickly green technicolor, came to life.

The poster sat there in its gray frame, speaking to me in its little whisper of a Proustian rush. Who was this Harrison Burns (such a great, resonant name for an artist), who had appropriated this image for his art? 

I pulled out my phone and discovered that there are any number of Harrison Burns; adding the keyword artist produced a couple of auction images, a brief review from a 1990 issue of Artforum, and an obituary from the July 29, 1991 edition of the New York Times:

“Harrison Burns, a painter and teacher, died on July 14 at his summer home in Almunecar, Spain. He was 51 years old and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Burns died of a heart attack, said a friend, Michael Walls.

Mr. Burns recently completed his 20th year as an art teacher at the Rutgers Preparatory School in Somerset, N.J., where he had served as chairman of the art department for several years.

His art was based on still photographs that he made from television broadcasts and altered with stencils, collage and paint to give an impression of how one sees in an age of television. A resident of New York City since 1972, he began exhibiting here in 1977 and had his most recent show at the E. M. Donahue Gallery in SoHo in June 1990.”

51. He was survived by his parents and siblings; I was now five years older than he when he died (a calculation I now do in my mind whenever I read about someone’s death). And that was all. The brief description of his method explained the image before me, and the review in Artforum, two paragraphs in a round-up review of recent gallery shows, was positive:

“Harrison Burns has succeeded in breathing fresh life into the tradition-bound genre of flower painting. While it was indeed possible to consider the examples shown here as simple still-life genre paintings, they are more than merely decorative. For all their electrifying colors and sensual good looks, these are intellectually rigorous pictures that bring together visuals and ideas in endlessly fascinating combinations … The paintings that resulted are characterized by a high-keyed opticality that transcends their ostensible subject matter.”

A high-keyed opticality, sure. The outline of the mysterious stalker, Price in disguise, seemed to vibrate a little before me, shimmering in gaslight. I dove a little deeper, not finding much more: the paintings up for auction were earlier works, interesting collages of image and words, highly colorful. I also turned up the fact that Burns had a work in one group survey at MoMA, a show called “Gold” that ran between November 1978 and February 1979. Works by Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Louise Nevelson and others were in the show as well… Burns must have been thrilled to be in that show. Or maybe not, maybe he was disgruntled for some reason; nothing about Burns as a person, about who he was, his thoughts and ideas, turned up in this brief Google foray. It was obvious he had ideas about mass media and television… But what else? How much digging would one need to do to recover something about an obscure artist who died too young over thirty years ago? Someone somewhere surely remembered Harrison Burns. Some of his works had turned up in a couple of auction houses. He doubtless had friends and perhaps family still around (no mention of a wife; was he gay? 1991. Was “heart attack” code perhaps for the plague?).  

The poster leaned against the wall like salvage from a shipwreck, but it was only the shipwreck of time, the one that deposits us all on our little desert islands to stare at distant horizon.

In House of Wax, Vincent Price plays a brilliant sculptor, Henry Jarrod, whose wax museum is full of tasteful historical tableaux; his grasping business partner, Matthew Burke (Frank Loveloy), wants Jarrod to turn it into a collection of gory, sensationalist crime scenes, like more successful wax museums are trading in. Jarrod finds such work distasteful, and offers to buy Burke out in three months’ time, but Burke needs cash now. It’s the old dichotomy, art versus mammon, and when Jarrod rejects Burke’s scheme to burn the museum and collect the insurance, Burke lights the figures anyway. A struggle ensues, and Jarrod is left beaten on the floor of his creation, his beauties melting all around him, while Burke escapes… only to be found dead, hanging inside an elevator shaft sometime later, as that mysterious, disfigured man (but not mysterious to the audience) begins his campaign of revenge.

All the best villains are those who have a true grievance; everyone has his reasons. Any artist ground in the gears of capitalism will have a twinge of sympathy, even schadenfreude, for Henry Jarrod’s reign of aesthetic terror, even though Jarrod, his hands burnt beyond use for the delicate sculpting he once did, will now cover dead women in hot wax to create works of art. Now I know how Joan of Arc felt… Price perfectly conveys, with very little of the overacting that occasionally marred later performances, what it’s like to have your ability to make the things that feed your soul taken away from you… and how that soul is now only fed on bitterness and death.

But most artists won’t find themselves in such melodramatic circumstances. Rather, they find themselves in the mundane realm of failing powers, obscurity, and neglect. Everything tends toward oblivion; Hayden Carruth, in an essay about the poet and novelist Kenneth Fearing, described him as a good minor poet, and further said that’s the best most can hope for—the only other options are “the fluke of greatness” and oblivion. Harrison Burns did not become a Famous Artist; was he happy to have sidestepped it? Was he all about the work itself, his teaching? Was he a mix of regret he didn’t go farther and relief he didn’t get sucked up into the dubious world of reputation, where everyone applauds you as you walk the tightrope and holds their breath, waiting for you to slip? Did he love House of Wax, or horror movies, or was this image simply one that stirred him amidst the tsunami of images that wash over us via screens? Does it matter? I saw a faded poster for a long ago gallery show in a thrift shop, and something stirred.

The poster wasn’t priced. Usually, if something isn’t priced at Housing Works, the employees can’t sell it; it has to wait for the manager to look at it again and price it. Usually, when I stumble upon an unpriced item, I walk away. Usually. But this time I asked an employee about it, and they raised an eyebrow, puzzled. “Huh,” they said. “I priced that just yesterday. I think it’s ten dollars.”

Ten dollars! Sold.

I walked out onto 17^th Street, holding it awkwardly under one arm, wondering where I would hang it, or even if I would hang it. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t let that moment and this object—this work of art—melt away into the flow of thrifting. There were too many echoes. An image, framed by the eye of Alex DeToth, shot by Bert Glennon and Peverell Marley, embedded in my brain by Denis Gifford, reshot and reconceived by Harrison Burns, waiting for me in my purposeful drifting through New York City, speaking… something. A mystery, not terribly mysterious, yet still a mystery (House of Wax was a remake of Michael Curtiz’s 1933 The Mystery of the Wax Museum). I’m tempted to call this mystery “Harrison Burns,” of which I still and perhaps always will know so little; I think it’s more than that. I think it’s the mystery of art itself: a private synecdoche in which some part of the world comes to stand in for some aspect of yourself. I think the art that means the most to us is this private kind, and it’s always found when you’re not looking for it. I don’t know what this means to me, except perhaps to say:

Time is a house of wax, and we’re all melting, no matter who sets the fire, or why.

My Life in Halloween Costumes

1970: My father dresses me as Kaiser Wilhelm II, last monarch of the Second German Reich. I have little say in this, as I am three at the time. This is an early example of Chekhov’s famous dictum, “If a German helmet from the First World War (you know, the one with the spike on top) is sitting in the basement in the first act, then it must inspire a Halloween costume by the third act.” There’s a picture, of course: a chubby Kewpie doll with painted-on moustache, struggling to keep his head upright under the weight of a war souvenir. At the very least, my expression resembles that of the Kaiser’s when he found out he’d lost the war.

1973: I am Satan, on the theory that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, though naturally I am unable to articulate this thought, as I am in the first grade. I am wearing a red tail, red horns and carrying the pitchfork. I am wearing a painted-on black moustache and goatee, which embarrasses me, as all makeup does, right through high school (thus sparing me from dressing up as Robert Smith). When I cavort in the elementary school parade, I am targeting souls for later acquisition, though my red tights droop in a manner unbecoming to the Prince of Darkness. I may, in truth, be the shortest Prince of Darkness on record, beating my personal best of being the shortest Kaiser Wilhelm on record. 

1974: I am the Mummy. Short of having my tongue cut out and being buried alive, I insist on Karloffian authenticity. I insist that my parents buy yards and yards of Ace bandages and literally wrap me up. My father, having previously produced an exact replica of the Kaiser’s bristling mustache, is happy to comply. Though I make a concession to the store-bought aesthetics of the hoi polloi and wear a plastic Mummy mask, my replication of Karloff’s shuffling walk (slower than a Romero zombie, faster than a… well, than an actual dead person) is incomparable. I am the Method hit of the second grade, and find that no one picks on me so long as I am utterly not myself (this lesson, and the names of the capitals of all 50 states, represents the apex of my early academic career).

1975: When not beheading plastic German toy soldiers with a shovel (in order to create a headless Nazi zombie army), I imagine myself a soldier in “The Good War,” but without the ironic quotes. My father, who spent the Korean War in a radio room in a Paris, still has his old army jacket. Once swallowed by this great olive cloak all I need is my spike-less American helmet and a toy .45 automatic so realistic that thirty years hence I could easily commit suicide by cop with it. I am ready for patrol. No one thinks to mention that my Uncle Jim actually fought in the Battle of the Bulge until I am in my twenties. It is that sort of family; not the sort that doesn’t talk about the war so much as the sort that doesn’t talk about anything, except to look around the basement and wonder what’s become of that German World War I helmet.

1977: I am, bizarrely, wearing a werewolf mask and a yellow hooded rain slicker. It is some kind of prescient old school monster/demented slasher mash-up. I laugh as my friend’selaborate robot costume falls apart after the fourth house, and then stand around silently while I wait for him to run home and change into a football outfit. When other kids walk by, I simply stare, in an equally prescient sunglasses-at-nigh-dead-drunk-but-still-standing mash-up.

1982: I am too old for trick or treating, and resolve to play the vampire and scare the kids, my cape pulled over my face, cackling sluggishly in a thick Lugosi accent as I hold out a bowl of mini Snickers. But there are no kids. Urban myths about poisoned Halloween candy have destroyed the tradition of the trick, the treat. Not one case is ever documented in America of random poisonings of candy, though one father does try to kill his son for the insurance money by lacing a Pixy Stix with poison. I wait in vain all evening for trick or treaters, then throw away the candy in disgust, appalled at the waste of thirty dollars’ worth of arsenic.

1984: I do not dress up in high school, except for a party at which I have my first and last romance with Jungle Juice. I am Sam Spade, a fedora one-size too big cocked on my head, my trench coat belted in classic Bogart-style. Of course, I fall in love with Pebbles, who, of course, only has eyes for Gilligan, thus following Chekhov’s famous dictum that characters from popular culture are always in love with the wrong person.

1986: I wear a suit and tie, walk around with a scythe, and hand out business cards that read G. REAPER Don’t Call Me, I’ll Call You. But I never call anyone, especially any girls, as I do not have their phone numbers.

1987: My best friend throws one of those parties with a No Costume, Absolutely No Admittance policy. Thus, I put on a black pea coat, black wrap-around sunglasses, and black jeans, and go as the entire Velvet Underground. I am not admitted.

1988: I dress up as Dean Stockwell’s character Ben from Blue Velvet, and even wear makeup, but my rapidly thinning hair is cut very short and everyone thinks I’m Pee Wee Herman; this is possibly as close to queerness as I will ever come.

1993: I make good on a threat I’d been making for years by going to a party as Groucho Marx. Much like the Mummy, I am a committed Marxist: painted-on moustache, cigar, Method. I stay completely in character for the entire evening. My date soon wears the pained expression of Margaret Dumont, even though she is dressed as a “sexy pirate.” This costume brings me full circle, as Julius Marx created his persona initially as a spoof on the ethnic stereotype of the German immigrant, many of whom wore spiked helmets and exclaimed “Dumkoff!” at any opportunity in post-war America.

1994: I am Special Agent Dale Van Helsing of the Federal Bureau of Vampire Destruction (known to freedom-loving patriots everywhere as the FBVD). I wear a suit, flash my badge, wave a cross around. I am unable, however, to dispatch the film adaptation of Interview With a Vampire; this particular Halloween must thus be counted a failure.

1995: I am a Shipwrecked Millionaire: naval jacket, captain’s hat, ascot, cigarette holder and ice bucket of champagne, combined with shredded white pants and sandals. I am NOT Thurston Howell III, as I have given up Method, and cannot do a Jim Backus impression.  Stop asking.

1996: In my finest conceptual hour, I am a Ouija Board: a black jacket, with white vinyl letters and numbers placed on my back, and YES and NO running down each lapel. The planchette is worn over my heart; a black beret and skeleton gloves complete the ensemble. I return to Method by declaring that I will only communicate via writing on a notepad for the length of the party. Someone bets me I can’t keep my mouth shut until midnight. I am forced to pay up at five minutes to twelve, after which dark forces flow through me and destroy everyone in the house in a frenzy of supernatural evil.

1997: I am Hades, Lord of the Underworld: a double-breasted black suit, a tie with skulls on it, and a black laurel wreath around my freshly shaven head. Since Hades is both the god of the dead and of riches, I decide this subdued corporate look is appropriate; I finish it off with gaudy fake rings on every finger. I also hand out mock business cards (HADES, Lord of the Underworld, Zero Styx Way). I get a few numbers, and ascribe this to the faux bling.

1998: My fiancée and I dress as poems, in a quest to see how many times we are forced to explain our costumes in a single evening. I am Wallace Stevens’ Emperor of Ice Cream: the naval jacket from the Shipwrecked Millionaire recycled into a Duke of Edinburgh-look, complete with a crimson sash and a crown that features ice cream cones. My fiancée is Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus, which entails looking like an accomplished corpse. Total number of explanations of our costumes: 53. 

1999: I plan to go as a Jackson Pollack, until the fumes from dripping all of that paint over a thrift store suit begin to make me lightheaded. I switch to becoming a Magritte: raincoat and bowler hat with a plastic green apple hanging in front of it on a wire. The apple bobs directly in front of my face; within five minutes my eyes are crossing. I find alcohol to be enormously effective with this glitch in the concept.

2001: I am a Leonard Cohen song. It has been a very difficult year, and my famous blue raincoat is torn at the shoulder. Total number of explanations: 122.

2002: While recovering from my divorice, I find a letterman’s varsity jacket from my high school in a thrift store, and proceed to dress as the sort of person in high school whom I despised. I embrace Method once more, and offer tasty brews to bros all evening. I even sing along to the Beastie Boys, even though I'm the only member of Gen X that hates them (in large measure because the bro dudes love them). By the end of the party, I find it very difficult to shed this character, thus proving Nietzsche’s dictum, And if you gaze into the dude, the dude gazes into you.

2003: I note a resurgence of trick or treaters, but do not attempt to frighten them (at least not as long as their parents are waiting for them at the curb). I wonder when precisely I adopted the costume I’ve been wearing every day outside of Halloween of late, the mask that hides and reveals, the persona that inhabits the mirror. I know I wore something that year; it's all a blank, now.  

2006: In grad school, I’m invited to a costume party by someone I'm briefly dating; because I have long owned a fez (an even longer story), I decide to go as a Shriner. I am now a New Yorker, and I wear the fez all day around Midtown, and no one says anything at all about it. At the party, everyone gets the costume but gives me a look when I try to dun them for a donation to hospital burn units for children.

2009: In a clearance rack, I stumble upon a black suit with orange pin-striping; with my glasses perched awkwardly on a domino mask, I attend a retro dance party as The Man Who is Heavily Into Halloween, a premonition perhaps of David S. Pumpkins. This remains the costume closest to me, an identity that lurks just under my skin at all times but only begins to itch in October. I don't know why this should be. Why do we love the things we love? To accept our mystery is a life's work; I am, as ever, my own... thing. Any questions? 

2011: The time for costumes is drawing to a close, but I make good on another long term threat and dress up as The Shadow, even though it took weeks to find an approximation of a girasol ring. But a nor’easter brings torrential rain the night of the party; my friend and I stay in, sitting around her Williamsburg loft, drinking, blissfully unaware, for a time, of the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.

2019: For the first party invite in years, I resurrect the Van Helsing costume, but because I’m carrying a large cross, everyone at the party thinks I’m the priest from The Exorcist; the hour is very late in America, and I don’t have the energy to correct them. My Brilliant Girlfriend, however, dresses up as a sexy photo of Anjelica Huston wearing a tank top, breeches and riding boots. She’s stunning. No one gets it, but who cares? 

2020: I am simply a man wearing a mask.  

SAID NO ONE EVER

My second book of poems, Said No One Ever, is now availble for preorder from Brooklyn Arts Press. The official publication date is February 2021, but pre-orders will be shipped before Xmas. I'm inordinately pleased with the cover design by Alban Fischer, and grateful for this bit of personal good news here in the ever-darkening Darkest Timeline. 

THE GHOST SHIP

Over the course of April, while under lockdown here in Sunset Park, Brooklyn during the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a thirty-part sonnet crown (also known as a "sonnet corona"; insert gallows laugh here), entitled The Ghost Ship. It now exists as a free, downloadable chapbook. It now feels, here in the depths of June, like a snapshot of a time both long past and ever present. I hope you read it; I hope it somehow speaks to you. Stay safe, stay strong. 

WALKING AWAY FROM EXPLOSIONS IN SLOW MOTION

My first full-length poetry collection, Walking Away from Explosions in Slow Motion, is now available from Brooklyn-based small press The Operating System. You can order a copy here.

It took a very long time for my first book to appear; longer than I imagined it would. But then, nothing is ever as you picture it, is it?