Do Not Sell At Any Price

by Amanda Petrusich

  We all find different ways to press that lever, and, importantly, to limit its pressing: such is the civilized experience of pleasure. In my drunker, more hedonistic moments, I think that life is long and hard and why shouldn’t we press the stupid lever if it makes us happy? Why shouldn’t we forgive each other our lever pressing? But the issue is never the payoff itself (although for many addicts, there are clear physical penalties), it’s the external consequences: the rat ditching her baby, the addict forsaking his family, the long, hurtful trail of busted relationships and soured promises. We measure the problem of addiction by its fallout. As Linden writes, addiction is nothing more than the persistent pursuit of something in the face of “increasingly negative life consequences.” The ramifications, however catastrophic for everyone involved, aren’t always potent enough to combat that want.

  Some people learn to manage the cost better than others.

  After reading and rereading his book, I finally contacted Linden and asked if he’d be willing to talk me through some of the neurological impulses behind the pursuit of pleasure and to discuss how the collector’s quest might or might not be biologically ordained. Maybe collectors were just addicted to records—or, moreover, to the acquisition and categorization of records. But I suspected it wasn’t quite that simple.

  Linden, it turns out, is one of those infuriatingly smart people—bubbling over with ideas that seem premeditated even as they’re being extemporaneously rendered—who makes you immediately feel like you need to recomplete your entire education beginning with third-grade science. After I explained my basic questions about gender as it related to collecting and my two-bit observations about the similarities between the archetypal Asperger’s patient—as I understood him—and the archetypal 78 collector, Linden immediately brought up the work of Simon Baron-Cohen (a cousin of the comedian and Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen), who published, in 2006, a little book called Pre-Natal Testosterone in Mind, a groundbreaking and oddly gripping study (“This is a book about a scientific journey,” it opens) of how prenatal testosterone affects postnatal development and behavior.

  “The astonishing thing was that prenatal testosterone was extremely predictive of how these kids, both males and females, would fall out among a spectrum of behaviors,” Linden said. “And what Baron-Cohen believes—and I think it has some validity—is that autism is just extreme maleness. In other words, the kind of differences in cognitive style and personality that you see on average—now, of course, this is broad strokes, obscuring all the tremendous variation amongst individuals—but if you’re looking at the average cognitive differences between men and women, men are more object oriented, less person oriented, they hold gaze less, they’re less socially intelligent, they’re less verbally fluent, they have a reduced ability to generate language quickly,” he continued. “There are a number of things you can test. And of course within both male and female populations, there are a lot of variations: there are females that are more malelike and males that are more femalelike, and at the extreme end of maleness, basically, are your Asperger’s and autism patients who are not exclusively but overwhelmingly male. And so when I’m hearing about your Asperger’s-y collector guy, this is what comes to mind,” he finished. “I wonder what their prenatal testosterone was like.”

  I wondered, too.

  I remembered, then, a 2005 op-ed Baron-Cohen had written for the New York Times titled “Is Autism an Extreme of the Male Condition?,” which had appeared not long after Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard University, delivered a controversial speech in which he suggested that women were inherently less suited to careers in science. (He chalked it up to “a different availability of aptitude at the high end.”) Baron-Cohen was more diplomatic, but essentially made the same claim, citing a slew of psychological and biological testing: “In my work I have summarized these differences by saying that males on average have a stronger drive to systemize, and females to empathize,” he wrote. It seemed possible, then, that the overwhelming maleness of 78 collecting couldn’t ever be chalked up to any one social, cultural, or even personal cause. The need to compile and systemize might have been imprinted into the collector’s brain long before the OB nurse could squeal, “It’s a boy!”

  Linden had plenty of other ideas—enough to convince at least one willfully naïve, poetry-reading person that every single humiliating habit or weird fetish she’d ever secretly indulged was actually a function, in one way or another, of her particular human body. “I don’t mean to say we’re all the slaves of our genes and our chemistry,” he said, chuckling. “What it means is that your experience modifies your brain—it’s a two-way street. Your experience in the world changes your brain, starting in utero and throughout your whole life. That’s what makes your memories, that’s what makes you an individual. And your genetics and your brain’s function influence your behavior, your cognitive processes, your emotions, et cetera,” he said. “The substrate is all biological, even if the origin is sociocultural.”

  We also talked for a while about the thrill of the chase (of not knowing when or if or what you’ll find, the lure of what’s new and what’s next), another common experience of pleasure that Linden believed was dictated, at least in part, by basic biology. “The journey is the destination. I think that’s fundamental,” he said. “It’s something that really seems to be deeply true in terms of the biology. In other words, people have this rational economist’s model that randomness is anxiety-producing. Not knowing is only a negative, and it’s only when we win that we get rewarded. The brain imaging does not seem to be supporting that notion. It seems to be supporting the notion that to a certain degree we are hardwired to get a buzz off of uncertainty. And probably there is genetic variation that some people get more of a buzz off of uncertainty than others. I don’t know if you’ve talked with compulsive gamblers, but they’ll tell you that the winning is the least of it. It’s the action that they crave. And maybe this is in some way analogous to your collectors, who really enjoy the pursuit.”

  Beyond the exhilaration of the search, Linden agreed that the collector’s insistence on discovery and knowledge—on having enough information to both locate and then properly contextualize a record—could also have neurological origins.

  “We like a sense of agency,” he said. “We like to plan, execute that plan, and then get information that that plan has succeeded. That’s something that is fundamentally human, and it gets expressed in different ways in different people,” he continued. “This is also what makes firearms so attractive. You sight down the barrel, you imagine what’s going to happen, you pull the trigger, you hit some targets, you can see that your plan succeeded. Once I asked my father, ‘What is it that you like about playing the stock market so much?’ And he said, ‘I love being right.’ When I think about your collector guys who take pride in their knowledge about their collections and go to great lengths to learn about and get a particular disc, I can only imagine this sense of agency is somehow involved in the pleasure they’re feeling in the process. My suspicion is that these guys also have very particular ideas about their food and about their living space.”

  “Yes,” I muttered into the telephone. “Yes.”

  It hadn’t previously occurred to me how rightness—in this case, about the aesthetic and cultural worth of this music—could become such a potent narcotic, although I suppose whole wars have been fought over less-quantifiable certainties. Collectors may have been intimidated by contemporary culture (or socially inept, or sartorially challenged, or whatever else), but they were rarely timid about the righteousness of their work. They believed.

  That unwavering intensity is the 78 collector’s other defining attribute. It certainly accounts for their marginalization and also for their occasional unpleasantness. Linden had convinced me of the neurobiological basis for the collector’s behavior, and how those habits might be inherently gendered; I also felt like I had a pretty good handle on the various sociocultural reasons why i
t could feel good—very good—to indulge these particular wants.

  But the more I thought about why, the less I cared. I still don’t entirely believe that the collector’s work is driven exclusively or even predominantly by appreciation, but on occasion (if I spend enough time listening to Blind Uncle Gaspard in Chris King’s music room, say, or if someone plays me “Skokiaan” late at night while simultaneously feeding me cookies), I find myself feeling profoundly grateful, unconcerned by why they did it or whatever personal consequences their habits may have wrought. Whatever called these folks to save these records, be it their own bodies or some unknowable celestial force, whatever sacrifices they chose to make—I’m thankful that it happened at all.

  / / Fifteen / /

  Who Wants to Hear a Story About a Boy Learning Guitar from a Book?

  Michael Cumella, Jerron Paxton, Commodification, Whiskey, Brooklyn, the Future

  East Ville Des Folies is a beer and whiskey festival held at Webster Hall, a nightclub and concert space in the East Village that, in the 1910s and ’20s, at least, was noted for its public embrace of hedonism and hip clientele (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp were supposed regulars). These days, though, it’s just another mainstream concert venue in a fully gentrified neighborhood in downtown New York City, remarkable only for its cavernous layout and the fact that there is a bathroom attendant.

  The festival had a speakeasy vibe, by which I mean the aesthetic was old-timey in the most blanket sense possible. Some attendees were sporting partial costumes: polyester flapper dresses, felt bowler hats. For reasons I could not entirely understand, the live entertainment included burlesque dancers, trapeze artists, and “circus acts.” I was there to meet Michael Cumella, who hosts WFMU’s Antique Phonograph Music Program and had been hired to stand on a low black stage and DJ 78s from his collection on two windup portable phonographs.

  When I arrived and checked in, I was handed a little plastic cup, which I could use to request samples of craft beer or artisan whiskey. Already this seemed like a treacherous way to spend a dark, midwinter afternoon. I weaved through the crowd—the event was sold-out—elbowing toward the stage, stopping midjourney to procure a nip of rye. I introduced myself to Cumella, who was wearing high-waisted pants, a bow tie, and suspenders. He had just finished explaining a phonograph horn to a young woman in velvet platform shoes.

  Over the last few years, a seemingly insatiable appetite for bespoke wares had awoken in New York and other American cities, and with it came an attendant fascination for times gone by—a mass enthrallment with the decades before the age of mechanical reproduction, when everything was hand-crafted with, the presumption goes, extraordinary care. Frankly, it was sort of vague, the whole thing. It included vintage taxidermy, Edison bulbs, enamel dishware, pre-Prohibition cocktails, red lipstick, dropped-waist shirtdresses, vests with pocket watches clipped into place, and so on. Cumella had seen it coming: subscribers of the new-old aesthetic would need someone to DJ their weddings and events. Nothing would shatter the mood faster—sour your whiskey sour, even—than an iPod dock and a bunch of tangled-up cables. He called his service “Michael Cumella’s Crank-Up Phonograph Experience” and promised it would “thrill your guests’ ears and eyes.” His calendar was full through the spring.

  Since 1995, Cumella’s radio show had been a must-stop for 78 collectors visiting New York and a must-listen for fans of early-twentieth-century recordings as played on period-appropriate machines. Most collectors deliberately eschewed the original players because their tone arms—those heavy, monolithic limbs—were too rough on the records, gouging out the grooves, but Cumella was nonchalant about any potential damage. “I’m not that guy, the preservationist guy—I’m the use-it-and-destroy-it guy, I’ve firmly established myself as that,” he said. He liked the synchronicity of it all. In the WFMU studio, Cumella used a Victrola XIV, which was introduced around 1910, an Edison Standard D model phonograph, which sold from 1908 to 1911, and a Victor IV from around the same time (“Why, that is the real thing—you can’t tell it from the actual human voice!” early advertisements proclaimed). At East Ville Des Folies, he was attracting a bit of a crowd with his setup. Tipsy onlookers seemed shocked that the machines were “real”—that was the word they used, over and over. “Is this real?”

  Cumella was playing jazz-age dance bands. There was a microphone pointed into the horn, and the records were being broadcast over the venue’s PA. I watched him work for a while, answering questions, cueing 78s, winding his machines. It was a novelty act, but a novelty whose time appeared to have come. I sipped my small-batch whiskey, leaned against a wall.

  A few months later, Michael Cumella and I met again in the upstairs café of J&R Music World, a hulking relic of an electronics store in downtown Manhattan, across from City Hall. Open since 1971, J&R used to sell records. Now, walking through the ground floor, I grimaced at a few undertrafficked racks of compact discs, at shelves and shelves of dusty-looking computer accessories. We sat at a table and ordered coffee and sandwiches. Cumella was on his way to Brooklyn, where he was meeting with event coordinators at the new Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg. The hotel, which opened in the spring of 2012, had been instantly popular. All summer long, a horrifyingly long line to access its rooftop bar had twisted outside its front door and around the corner.

  It was hard to figure out the fate of 78s in the digital era: whether the technology would be fetishized and protected, what might be lost.

  I’d recently encountered a handful of younger collectors in and around New York, including the guitarist Jerron Paxton, who, at twenty-three years old, was the youngest of them all. Paxton and I first met at the Jalopy Theatre and School of Music, a small performance space with an old-time bent on Columbia Street in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a few yards from the glowing yellow entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. He was teaching a series of guitar workshops on early blues greats—the afternoon we were introduced, he was concentrating exclusively on the Reverend Gary Davis, a fingerpicking Piedmont blues guitarist from South Carolina—to eager packs of aspiring players (per my survey, mostly bearded white men in flannel shirts). Paxton was wearing slacks, brown leather dress shoes, a white button-down shirt, a gray vest, and a black bowler hat. A short silver chain peeked out of his vest pocket, and he periodically tugged on it and consulted an engraved pocket watch.

  Handsome and sweet faced, Paxton was refined in presentation—it was an awful lot of look—but he still grinned and called me a dumb fuck when I mispronounced his first name. He’d brought a portable electric turntable and a small box of 78s to play for me, and after his class was over, we clomped downstairs to the basement workshop, where Jalopy co-owner Geoff Wiley repairs and restores vintage stringed instruments. In the venue’s main space, a young woman was teaching the basics of vocal harmony, and bits of early country standards—as performed by a dozen singers in training—drifted down through the floorboards. Amid the handmade instruments and spare parts, Paxton spotted a framed piece of sheet music—for “Colored Aristocracy,” an old minstrel tune—and yelped. “Where the fuck did you get that?” he asked Wiley, who only laughed in response.

  Paxton performs under the name Blind Boy Paxton, and according to local lore (and his Wikipedia page), he started losing his sight at sixteen. He often squeezed his eyes shut in photographs—an approximation, of sorts, of promotional portraits taken of Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s—although as far as I could tell, he saw well enough to get around without much assistance. This, like many self-produced facts regarding Paxton, had a whiff of tricksterism. He was raised by his Louisiana-born grandparents in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles and practices Judaism (there was a yarmulke pinned under his bowler hat). Besides 78 rpm records, he collects sheet music, antique razors, and fountain pens. Paxton was wily—while performing, he would adopt a kind of antebellum accent and often said things like “Seeing as I am a colored gentleman, I must play some blues.” He graduated from Marist
College in upstate New York and, in a 2008 interview with Eli Smith for The Down Home Radio Show, half implied he’d been taught guitar by Blind Blake, whom Paxton also claimed had lived to be 108 years old. (He later admitted it was a joke: “Who wants to hear a story about a boy learning guitar from a book?”) I sort of liked Paxton’s nonsense—it reminded me, at times, of Fahey’s long Blind Joe Death con and of the self-mythologizing executed by folks like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan. While some of it was surely practiced at the expense of his more earnest fans, it was a welcome respite from the self-seriousness that plagued so much blues scholarship and fandom.

  Over and over, in the basement of Jalopy, Paxton played me a record and then refused to tell me the artist or title. He took my digital recorder and placed it on the turntable, though, so that I could capture a clear recording of the song to listen to later on, if I wanted to. I got it—that he thought the only story was the music.

  Like Joe Bussard, Paxton had an acute and visceral reaction to his records. He clutched his heart, grinned, and danced in place while they spun. He was particularly seized by 1920s gospel songs and sermons, which were more affordable than prewar blues records. He was annoyed by the way those blues 78s had been monetized. He played me a 78 by Blind Joe Taggart and his wife, Emma; Taggart was a gospel shouter from Chicago who recorded under a couple different names in the late 1920s. “This is a fellow who sang the blues, but [then he] sang a gospel song with his wife, so it’s worthless,” Paxton said. “Like, what the fuck, fuck you! How does Blind Willie Johnson go for several thousand dollars and I got this for thirty bucks?”