Happy first day of Spring! As a child of the Cold War (my school never bothered with duck-and-cover kabuki, because as New Yorkers we expected to be ash before the flash), I’m pleased to know that some brave souls are still dedicated to “Building A Better Apocalypse“:
ON Chris Hackett’s personal periodic table, the world’s most interesting, and abundant, substance is an element he calls obtainium. Things classified as obtainium might include the discarded teapot that he once turned into a propane burner, or the broken beer bottle he used to make a razor, or the 9-millimeter shell casings he acquired some time ago, melted in a backyard foundry (also made of obtainium) and cast into brass knuckles for a girlfriend.
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If you ask Mr. Hackett — or Hackett, as he is uniformly known in the Brooklyn bohemia that skips south, from the G station at Greenpoint Avenue to the Gowanus Canal — where he got the components for his homemade still or the numerous jet engines he has built from scratch, he will likely shrug, smile and say, “Around.”
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Last month, Mr. Hackett, 39, was working in his Gowanus workshop, a ground-floor space on Butler Street, near the head of the canal. The workshop is a veritable obtainium mine. In one corner sat an upright piano transformed into a cabinet for fasteners. In another was a rack of reclaimed two-inch metal tubing. There were doctored band saws, jury-rigged drill presses, repurposed metal barrels. A shop cat, Shop Cat, napped in front of a plastic chest of drawers marked with labels reading, “ball bearings,” “flange bearings,” “regulators,” “pulleys,” “rivets,” “channel locks,” “drills” and “more drills.” The backyard was heaped with obtainium: half of a car’s rear axle, bolted I-beams, a yellow boat built from scrap.
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As he often does, Mr. Hackett was procrastinating, trying to overcome his easily inspired distractedness and get to work on one of the many projects he juggles at any given time. Not long ago, he was hired by Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, to help construct an art van for the Occupy Wall Street movement, a sort of mobile media center with a crank-lift-mounted video projector and rooftop speakers like those heard during Latin American elections. He is also working on an installation for the Honey Space Gallery in Manhattan, in which an old bicycle pump will run a pneumatic engine, which will in turn run the tiny television screens he rescued from the viewfinders of junked video cameras…
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His most ambitious current project is probably the book he is writing, with a proposed companion television show, about how to survive the apocalypse, in style, using the debris: an apotheosis of his obtainium obsession.
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“When I read ‘The Road,’ ” he said, referring to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, “it got me thinking: ‘O.K., so there’s all this stuff lying around. How do you recreate civilization?’ I did some research and figured out the two most important things you’d need are car batteries and Drano.”…
Speaking of Zombie Apocalypse, anybody got an opinion about the GOP primary in Illnois?
Early Morning Open Thread: A Bricoleur in BrooklynPost + Comments (64)