Snake America weekend estate sale preview 002
estate sales and home auctions in New York, LA area, Chicago (kinda)
Welcome to Episode 2 of the Snake America Pre-Weekend Estate Sale Preview With a Focus on New York and Los Angeles. For full sale info, email me. Reminder that you can find this sale info pretty easy. And reminder that Snake is a monthly newsletter about vintage clothing that can be read on GQ.com.
Looking for other stories I have written? Me too. What about T-shirts and records I made for sale, and streaming? All here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit
My latest story is a look at non-limited (general release) sneakers for High Snobiety: https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/general-release-sneaker-opinion
<Herbert Hoover voice>And now, the sales…
NEW YORK
High-Mid: Mad Magazines collection (appointment only), New York, NY 10001, Nov 7-10, 9a-6p (no address, call 630-667-1090)
Really good Mad Magazine sale that shows up when you search New York and Los Angeles. 630 is a Chicago code. So it is in Chicago. But the sale lists Manhattan as the zip. If someone smart lived in New York they would buy the whole collection. Appointment only, since I bet if it was open, people would show up to ogle Bruce Willis. I have to assume Willis is a MAD collector of some repute and shows up to these things. The Bounty Law Mad issue is so great. Looking at the above cover gets me thinking about how bad Mad socked it to Murphy Brown.
I have a lot of ideas that don’t get off the ground, which is disappointing. But as long as new ones keep coming it’s fine. One of the best ideas I had, though, that I didn’t carry out was hiring Norman Mingo, Mad’s best artist, to portrait my friend Alex Russin, then a musician, in the style of Neuman. I was going to call it “Albite D. Knauman,” and it was going to go on the cover of my old fanzine. This was a decade ago. A quick Google search reveals Mingo died before I was born. Nevertheless, a pretty good idea. I can also reveal now that I have been prank-faxing Alex at his law firm’s fax number for the past five years. It is his personal office fax so it’s not in bad taste or anything. He didn’t know it was me until just now. My favorite Mad cover in the sale is No. 194, where Neuman, who is boxing Rocky, wears shorts the size of his body.
Rating: No-brainer, would attend were this an physical sale and get my Hudson Hawk one-sheet signed
Mid-high: (ENDED), 97 Sunfield Ave Edison, NJ 08837, just missed it.
Even though this sale ended Thursday it is still worth writing about. I think the best thing about Instagram is the foreign cars accounts on there, and the second best thing are the fine China accounts, most of which are also foreign. Since I have started following these accounts and hashtags a third of my feed is JDM cars (some modded, some not) and a third is China. The DeLorean is not Japanese Domestic Market, of course. It is Irish. But it looks like a Reagan-era Corolla, a little. This seller is cutting out the middle man for me since they have both. They are in Edison, N.J., which is one of the most American cities in this country. It is close to New York and is the home of Harold’s Deli, the restaurant Mark Baumer loved that sells an eclair the size of a toilet seat for $24.95. Here is some of the China:
When I first started getting heavily into electronic music a few years ago, I mean really paying attention to it, I didn’t understand why genre fans signed off in near-unison on what appeared to be disparate interests. Designer clothing, cheap Chinatown tourist hats, pill drugs, Victorian art and Baroque picture frames, church pants, the food at Dimes, black and white movies, and, also, reading the news on their phone in a prone position. Eventually I understood. Taken apart, these items are just mostly pretty satisfying or destructive pursuits. Taken together, they refract off each other and create a nice, if predictable, net of aesthetic dialog. It is also just another lingua franca in a cross-section of the culture that, though it seems isolating, is not. It is because of this experience that I understand how someone in New Jersey might own a stock DeLorean and many beautiful and delicate plates. I don’t understand, however, why they might sell them: besides the giant eclair, this guy’s tableware is the only good-looking anything in Edison. Maybe they are going through hard times. Maybe they are buying synthesizers. Maybe they are moving. To that end, the sale also contained a not-insignificant amount of Broyhill furniture. The sale was at a convention center.
Rating: Would’ve gone early yesterday but I am on deadline.
Mid: Saddle River mid-Century sale: 16 Old Farms Road
Saddle River, NJ 07458, Friday and Saturday, 10-4
Not a great sale but a good one with a dozen or so respectable furniture pieces (big teak dining table, elegant marble cube) and what I consider the sale’s centerpiece, a really good ‘70s Dutch-type rug in strawberry shading. Which you don’t really see around ever, and when you do, is either in shit condition or is very expensive. There are a dozen of these rugs left in the world that haven’t been stepped on. Maybe this one is cheap and maybe it is not. Also lots of Fiestaware at this sale, which isn’t worth a long drive but is worth a short one if the set is complete. F-ware makes good holdover plating until True Plating (Fire King jadeite, fine China etc.) can be acquired. The house is valued at $1.17m.
Rating: I would only have gone if I needed a dining table. Which I don’t. If I did—which I don’t—I would have gone early
Mid-High: VLADIMIR KAGAN FURNITURE & ALEXANDER CALDER TAPESTRIES, online only, Camden N.J., Thursday at 12:15 p,m. This is how you bid lol.
Really good sale from Thursday run by a Philly liquidator. Writing about it since there doesn’t seem to be a way to buy anything so maybe it is still available. There is an Alexander Calder tapestry (above) that is totally worth a day trip. Also lots of stuff by Vladimir Kagan, a designer whose stuff I guess was in the Chrysler Building? And some Baughman-type frosted 1970s millionaire furniture from the same era. Remember when they let the two Parm guys take over the Four Seasons? And it just happened? A year after they got the concession, Trump wins the presidency, and people are scratching their heads. But this was the world we were living in. First you slide into evil then it takes over.
But.
Trump got booed at the UFC fight this past weekend. If he gets booed as loud as he did Saturday at Bama-LSU this weekend(1) then it’s safe to thin-slice these events to a reasonable chance he will lose the election in November. Getting booed in front of a coach and his statue in Alabama matters more than like Iowa, right?
Anyways Calder lived in Connecticut and when he hung with Picasso, even for 10 minutes, it was recorded for posterity. There’s an exhibit about their friendship in Paris at the Picasso Museum and on one wall is a list of all the times they kicked it. One hang-out was just Calder stopping by Picasso’s dinner table and they chatted for a couple minutes. It said on the wall—I can read French—that he didn’t think the meeting went well. He really just stopped by his table. Incredible. I would like to approach some of my friendships this way.
Rating: Fire, I would have gone, and then gotten a sandwich at Sarcone’s (which is nearby)
All-Fur Tristate Quick Hit
Low: Two sales with fur coats, one at 230 Sussex Rd., Township Of Washington, NJ 07676, Fri and Saturday 10-4, home value $631K, one at 40 Madison Hill, Fairfield, CT 06824. The Connecticut sale has the same rough time and home value. The New Jersey fur coat is on the left.
Rating: Fur is so cool, but only sable. Also, “go vegan or go fuck yourself” — ancient Connecticut proverb
LOS ANGELES
Mid: Brentwood Estate and Demo Sale, 201 S. Westgate Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90049, Thursday to Sunday, 10-4
How sick would this be if this was OJ Simpson’s neighbor’s house or something. Not the immediate neighbor but a guy down the street. Maybe a dentist. “Yeah, I was out of town that weekend.” You think these people are selling off their fine China so they can afford a seventh motorcar? The seller also has a framed thing of Olympic pins:
This doesn’t seem athlete-exclusive. Hanging out in high school at a friend of a friend’s house I saw all this Olympic stuff on the wall, much fresher than the dentist garbage for sale here. Medals, pamphlets, stickers, framed plates. Turns out his mom was a downhill skier in the Calgary games in ‘88. Later we became friends. Later still he got arrested in Times Square for running drugs for the Rock Machine, the second-biggest biker gang in Quebec, the one with the big interest in maple syrup. The house is valued at $2.13 million.
Rating: Would go, honestly
LOS ANGELES QUICK HITS
Mid: Paramount mid-modern sale, 15504 Minnesota Ave Paramount, CA 90723, Friday, 830-4, Saturday 930-3, Sunday, 12-4 and Monday 9-3. This fool has one of those Eames drawing desks. They are great looking, but impractical. There is also Fiestaware. It is in a warehouse.
Mid-High: Rockabilly and VG- records sale, 6126 Eglise Ave Pico Rivera, CA 90660, Friday, 9-3, Saturday and Sunday, 8-2. This guy has a Bob’s Big Boy statue, a Felix The Cat from at least the 1950s and a lot of records, so it is worth going to, and the house is valued at $457K.
Rating: Why not? What else are you going to do in LA? Read a book? Go to the one museum?
Thanks for reading.
Snake
(1) Tom Herman is a disgrace