[ OT ] Sunday Free Write : Leave A Story , Leave A Comment - Half Dozen Edition

The New Yorker never writes anything about my town, so I wrote one for them. 
 
 https: //drive.google.com/file/d/0B8MzGjyOwsMMNkRoZTBKR0pod00/view? pref=2 & pli=1 
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 **The Medium Is The Message** 
 
 
 
 
 New York ’ s newest art museum opened last week in gritty Upstate Troy and almost nobody noticed. 
 
 “ It doesn ’ t matter, ” said founder and curator Floyd Marks, setting up wine bottles and cartoon Dixie cups ( Smurfs bathing in a wooden tub ) at a table in the back of The Brown Bag, a burger joint across the street. “ More wine for the rest of us. ” 
 
 The opening of the New York State Museum of Post Contemporary Art, or MOPCA, had to be moved at the last minute from the front of the building on the corner of Fourth and Ferry. 
 
 First, the weather wasn ’ t cooperating. It rained and then sleet fell and then more rain. Marks, a tall dusty man of 63, with white wisps of hair, and a stoop that makes it look like he is eternally searching for a dime he just dropped, had to huddle in the MOPCA doorway in his dark blue velvet suit and galoshes. 
 
 “ My wife got the umbrella in our divorce, ” Marks told a man who had showed up with a plate of mini-hotdogs. The hotdog man had heard there was free wine being served. 
 
 “ She gave this suit to Salvation Army, ” Marks said as he poured the man a Dixie cup of wine. ” I had to buy it back. Eleven dollars! ” 
 
 “ You got robbed, ” said the hotdog man. 
 
 Next, the police had come by and threatened to lock Marks up for having two open bottles of wine. 
 
 “ You think this is Flag Day or sumthin? ” an officer yelled from the window of his squad car. 
 
 “ It ’ s an opening. ” 
 
 “ Nah it ’ s not, ” said the policeman. “ Take it inside or I ’ m taking you in. ” 
 
 Inside, however, is not an option when it comes to MOPCA. The museum does not own, or even rent, the building, a two-story red brick storefront with a green and white striped awning that was the Troy Pork Store until it closed in 2008. A sign out front advertising Bratwurst, Sappressata, and Westphalian Hams still says “ we make it here ” but the inside is dark, the doors of the empty display cases ajar as if someone had run off with the Brats in the middle of the night. 
 
 “ They didn ’ t understand Post Contemporary, ” said Marks of the building ’ s owners, whom he described as “ Pre-modern nitwits. ” 
 
 Post Contemporary Art, or PCA, according to Marks, is post concrete. It ’ s entirely conceptual, existing for the most part completely within one ’ s thoughts. There are no mediums; the artist is the viewer is the art. That being what it is, there is nothing to buy or sell, which makes the art world nervous. 
 
 “ They hate my guts, ” said Marks who worked for one of the bigger art galleries in Manhattan back in the late 1980 ’ s. 
 
 He ’ s been attacked twice in the past year. A “ large shrieking lady ” bit one of knees, damaging his only pair of Dockers, when she recognized him in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Saugerties. Then a gang of “ sparkly young men ” whipped at him with their scarves in the Art Basel Miami hospitality tent. Later that same night, his motel room in Opa Locka burned down and his scooter was thrown into a canal full of alligators. 
 
 The Troy Pork Store owners aren ’ t exactly fans of Marks either. They balked at the offer of Marks paying exactly nothing for a 10 year lease on the property. Marks says he did offer them the food concession, though this would have been limited to fetching glasses of tap water. 
 
 “ Those Pork Guys could have retired on the tips alone, ” says Marks. 
 
 The Pork Guys told Marks to stop contacting them. He didn ’ t. Marks works now and then across the street at the Black and White Cab Company. In between fares he would stare at the Pork Store and think “ that ’ s PCA, that ’ s the place. ” 
 
 “ I called them two, three times a week. I would say, ‘ Look you guys will be in on the ground floor. You guys will be like da Vinci. ’ I personally hate da Vinci but these are Italian guys with pork under their nails, right? They eat da Vinci! ” 
 
 The Pork Guys didn ’ t want to be on the ground floor like da Vinci. Instead, they had their phone turned off and moved back to Italy. 
 
 It hardly mattered. 
 
 Marks had a heavy cast iron sign made up with MOPCA in raised gold letters on a dark blue enameled back ground. One night he went over and epoxied the sign to corner of the building and MOPCA was in business. But not for long. 
 
 “ Two nights later I ’ m bringing my cab in and I see its gone, ” Marks said. He later found the MOPCA sign on EBay but he was outbid at the last minute and lost it by two dollars. 
 
 “ But then I thought about it and, you know, it doesn ’ t matter, ” said Marks. “ That ’ s what Post Contemporary is. It ’ s not giving a damn about things people think they should give a damn about. ” 
 
 The seeds of Post Contemporary Art can be traced to Andy Warhol. 
 
 When Marks worked as an assistant at the gallery, one of his jobs was to follow Warhol around and make sure he got home ok. 
 
 “ He was always tripping over things, falling down. ” said Marks. “ He bruised easily and people said we were beating him up. ” 
 
 Warhol would come by a few times a week and then Marks would take him home, stopping for lunch along the way. “ Every time Andy would say, ‘ can we go to Schraffts? ’ And those places, they were all gone—been gone—for years already. And Andy would get sad, and then he ’ d say ‘ Oh well, how about the Automat? ’ And we ’ d go to Horn & Hardart and Andy would eat one burger after another. He loved putting his money into the machine and opening the little window and getting a burger. We talked about art sometimes, but mostly he ’ d just sit there and eat his burger and then go and get another one. I told him I wanted to be an artist. Andy didn ’ t give a damn. He said it didn ’ t matter. ” 
 
 After Warhol died not much happened until Marks met the German video artist Ute Brauning in the East Village right after her famous arrest for placing land mines in a community garden. Marks and Brauning were married and divorced twice. Marks says they are currently contemplating a third divorce. 
 
 “ When Ute got out of prison, she started creating these amazing VHS videos of sharks breathing. Just a TV and a VCR and a pile of tapes of water going through a shark ’ s gills. She would fly in Helmut, her auto mechanic from Wolfsburg, and dress him up in lederhosen and a forester hat and he would sit in a folding chair next to the TV and drink beer out of a stein and change the tapes for hours and hours. ” 
 
 At one installation the tapes and the German mechanic went missing. “ The guy couldn ’ t speak English and his cab driver dumped him out in Newark coming from the airport—nobody ever saw Helmut again, by the way—and Ute said it doesn ’ t matter and just set up the folding chair with the sign on it that *Sharks Breathing* and somebody bought it. “ 
 
 The art at MOPCA is much like the German lederhosen mechanic. It ’ s not there and it doesn ’ t matter. Marks writes a sentence on a 3 ” X5 ” card and tapes it to each of the windows of the Pork Store. Whatever appears in a person ’ s consciousness, or even sub-consciousness, caused by the words as well as the empty butcher shop, is the art. Marks makes up most of the words but for the opening the musician Michael Stipe wrote “ My soft Trans Am ” on a 3 ” X5 ” card and sent it to Marks along with $ 22 and a close-up photograph of his left ear. 
 
 Marks said he helped Stipe write “ probably most of ” the lyrics to the song Daysleeper in 1997 when Marks was with an underground Haiku collaborative in the South Bronx called Underground Haiku Collaborative. “ Michael never forgot that, ” said Marks. Every Christmas Stipes sends Marks some stationary from all the hotels he ’ s stayed at that year as a thank you. 
 
 Marks had Stipe ’ s Left Ear propped against one of the wine bottles along with a hand printed sign that said MOPCA. Next to it was a photocopy of a signed letter from ex-Governor George Pataki stating the Marks is not required “ to work or pick up heavy things if he is not feeling up to it. ” 
 
 “ I ’ m obligated to post that ” said Marks. 
 
 A cab driver came in and announced that a mini-van full of Chinese tourists just stopped and they scraped all the 3 ” X5 ” cards off the MOPCA windows, including Michael Stipe ’ s “ My soft Trans Am ”. 
 
 “ It doesn ’ t matter, ” said Marks as he swirled Brown Bag fries into a bowl of ketchup with a fork. “ The fries here are great, by the way. Try them. ” 
 
 He quickly looked over his green plastic framed glasses. 
 
 ” But not these. These are mine. ”
