The Golden Flea

January 13, 2020
In this thoughtful memoir, Rips (Pasquale’s Nose) recalls New York City’s Chelsea Flea Market, a legendary bazaar held in a two-floor garage that Rips visited each weekend for almost 20 years beginning in the early 1990s. “Many in the flea called me a collector. Those outside the flea, a hoarder,” he writes. Among the treasures he found there are the Romanian film collection of pornographer Al Goldstein, and many examples of boli, a type of African tribal fetish art. Over the years, Rips developed friendships with “the pious society of the flea and its people,” including Jokkho, the flea’s grumpy gatekeeper; Paul, an erudite haberdasher; and the Diop brothers, who sold African art and antiquities. Rips’s flea-market craze reached new heights when he acquired an unsigned and seemingly worthless portrait of a woman and became determined to know its provenance. His sleuthing revealed that the painting is an early work of postwar abstract painter and printmaker Sam Francis. He declares the portrait “a symbol... that the flea was something more than how others saw it.” Though some of this work is about the birth of a borderline hoarding lifestyle, Rips doesn’t suggest much about causes of his compulsion, nor does he offer more than a few obligatory quips about how his wife and young daughter live with it all. Still, his narrative is a wry and engaging ode to a bygone aspect of N.Y.C. culture.

February 1, 2020
Manhattan denizen Rips shares his passion for the Chelsea Flea Market, which used to be "one of the largest flea markets in America." At its zenith, the market thrived on the west side of Manhattan, mostly on Saturdays and Sundays, with buyers and sellers coming and going from abandoned parking garages, open-air lots, old office buildings, and sidewalk stands. In his third book, Rips, who lives in the Chelsea Hotel and serves as the executive director of the Art Students League of New York, focuses his compact yet detailed narrative of oddball possessions and quirky humans on a parking garage that offered merchandise from dozens of vendors. Their customers included native New Yorkers seeking bargains, tourists wandering by, "pickers" searching for underpriced treasures that could be resold for profit, and buyers who could be considered hoarders. In addition to chronicling the goings-on of the many eccentric characters that frequented the market, the author also writes about his daughter and their trips together to the flea. She seemed to enjoy herself, and many of the vendors enjoyed entertaining her. Throughout the book, Rips muses, often entertainingly, on the people he met during his forays in this unique environment, but few of his portraits feel more substantial than sketches. While he is to be commended for diligently listening to them spin their background stories--many of them likely embellished--Rips rarely verified the facts of these sagas, preferring to hear without judgment. Because the author identifies the characters only by first names and nicknames, readers may need to take the findings with a grain of salt. There's a sometimes-pleasing surreal quality to this journey that fits the idiosyncratic landscape--in which sellers hawked everything from "paintings, lithographs and photographs" to "canes, vintage clothes, costume jewelry, tools, Asian scrolls, screens, and jade, sports memorabilia, and African art," not to mention "stacks of crumbling newspapers and magazines"--but one wonders if Rips could have dug even deeper to produce a fuller picture of this world of lost and forgotten treasures. An intriguing but slight sociological snapshot.

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February 15, 2020
In this remembrance of the now-defunct Chelsea Flea Market in New York, Rips (The Face of a Naked Lady, 2005) cultivates his bohemian persona through the patchwork of eccentric people and unusual objects he encountered there. The book's ostensible story?about a mysterious painting that enraptured him?is buried beneath portraits of The Prophet, an amateur art dealer; The Cowboy, a former member of an anarchist art group; The Dane, a professional graduate student who waits for objects to move him; and others. Saleable goods offer detours into little histories: a boli made of wood, cloth, dung, feathers, and other bodily materials into African ritual objects, a surrealist drawing into the origin of the term flea market. In breezy, readable prose, Rips delivers this collection of people and things to the reader so that they, like the market's gems, arrive without provenance. For example, he never dates his decades at the flea, and never names The Cowboy as radical anarchist artist Ben Morea. Protecting his collection, Rips insists upon being the key to unlock their secrets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)