Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff

Author:David Rakoff
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary Collections, Humor, Social Science, Form, General, American, Consumer Behavior, Social status, United States - Social life and customs, Essays, Fiction, Business & Economics, Consumption (Economics)
ISBN: 9780385510363
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2005-09-20T07:39:02.500760+00:00

MARTHA, MY DEAR

She was always an easy target. The jokes only escalated once she was hauled off to the clink. Imperious and controlling, people would say, her projects demanding the anal-retentive concentration of a Persian miniaturist. But now that she had been brought down for insider trading, the airwaves were abuzz with gags about her frantically knitting license-plate cozies and stitching rickrack borders onto the meager curtains in her cell. Let's watch her try to fend off the unwanted advances of the many tattooed bulldaggers who would claim her for their very own prison bitch.

I am not one for making predictions. She is still behind bars at the time of this writing. But I know in my heart that her reemergence will be an unmitigated triumph (the truism is dead wrong: there seem to be nothing but second acts in America). Mine is the unshakable faith of one who loves Martha Stewart and always has. I love her for a simple reason: she advocates mastery and competence over purchase. Martha Stewart has taught scores of people—and I'll go out on a limb here and call them women—the value of doing things for themselves. “How to make” almost always trumps “How to buy” in my book. (There are exceptions. I'm perfectly happy not to have to grind my own flour or blow my own lightbulbs.)

It was Martha Stewart, in fact, who made me realize that “art fag,” the disparaging term I used to describe myself and my hobbies, was actually the same thing as being handy. (It was an epithet first hurled at me by some rough boys who walked by me late one night in Brooklyn when I was twenty-four years old. I didn't have the courage to yell back at them, “That's Arthur Fag to you!” I also didn't get it at the time that only a couple of fellow travelers could traffic in such subtle gradations of homosexual phenotypes. The average gay-basher doesn't know enough to call someone a Callas Queen, for example. Besides, “art fag” seemed so apt to describe what I was that I just adopted it as my own.)

I make stuff. Ersatz Joseph Cornell boxes, painted mirrors, that kind of thing. It's an itch, a compulsion that comes over me when I pass by a sidewalk piled with particularly good garbage, or when shopping for a table lamp, I see how little there really is to such an object and how much they're charging. Some people need to exercise every day, others don't feel complete without regular vacations. My salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-Acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive. I make stuff because I can't not make stuff.

During the act of making something, I experience a kind of blissful absence of the self and a loss of time. When I am done, I return to both feeling as restored as if I had been on a trip. I almost never get this feeling any other way. I once spent sixteen hours making

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