Publishers Weekly
01/13/2020
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. (Apr.)
Paris Review "Staff Picks" - Lauren Kane
"[Rips] captured the singular vocational pull of the collector, and in doing so…show[s] us the whimsical and strange roots that run deep beneath stuff."
Bookforum - Luc Sante
"A tender, passionate, melancholy elegy."
Joseph O’Neill
"An extraordinary portrait of a New York filled with unlikely treasures, human and material. Michael Rips is a magician of seeing, and only he could have come up with this enchanted construction."
David Salle
"Michael Rips writes with a unique combination of sly humor, close observation, and sympathy. He takes the philosopher’s long view, is impressively open, and treasures all manner of people and experiences. He finds gold in stories that might otherwise go unremarked. This book is exemplary in its inclusiveness, humanity, and wit."
Kirk Wallace Johnson
"Michael Rips’s surreal style is perfectly suited to the wondrous world of flea markets. The Golden Flea delights with portraits of people on the margins of city life, the eccentric and easy-to-ignore pickers, collectors, vendors, and others obsessed with laying claim to a piece of the past. In describing his own fortunes and follies in that world, Rips captures the best and worst of what it means to collect."
Patricia Marx
"I love this book so much I decided to mark my favorite bits with asterisks and ended up with something that looked like the Milky Way galaxy."
Shelf Awareness
"Discovering the flea through Rips's experience is magnificent, but the human influence on the transactions…give it true beauty."
Wall Street Journal - Ben Downing
"[Rips] has humanity, humor and the gift of a limpid, agile, unpretentious prose style…A captivating portrait."
Kirkus Reviews
2020-01-13
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.
