In my last column I reviewed the History Channel’s show about junking, American Pickers. My reaction to the program and its hosts veered from indifference to hostile irritation. However, I acknowledged that maybe I just didn’t like spending TV-watching time looking at people do my job, and suggested curious viewers take my review with a […]

“Take your pick, Frankie Boy, my loss will be your gain.” – Bob Dylan Over the past couple of years, a number of people have asked me whether I watched the show American Pickers on the History Channel. They were extremely surprised when I admit that not only did I not watch it, I’d never […]

In the last episode, the Junker, while digging around the outdoor tables at Smiley’s Flea Market, learns that a new shop has opened in the generally fruitless indoor booths. This shop is rumored to have large numbers of his favorite type of junk, old records. Anxious to beat the other wax-hounds to the new stash, […]

It's been a while since there's been a "Junker's Blues" in the Xpress. I'll forego the editorial and personal details of its hiatus (basically, it comes down to your humble correspondent being a lazy good-for-little), but I thought we'd take the opportunity to reintroduce the column with a little junker aesthetic theory. We'll get back […]

"Lo, there shall come an ending!" – Stan Lee What has transpired: Having spent hours carefully sorting through a mixed bag of records and then carelessly leaving the whole batch behind to pick up the next day, the junker finds his labors benefiting another when his deal is blocked by the son-in-law of the collection's […]

I've spent the last year mapping the junker's geography – his haunts, her habits, my priorities. Over the course of the next year I'll be attempting to set down some lessons learned while traveling the junkscape. These lessons are based on my own and others' experiences in the field, usually the failures, as a) you […]

It's Fall, a transitional time for the junker. As the salad days of yard sales, warm flea market mornings and spring cleanouts lead into the hoarding, barren days of winter, the junker can go through weeks at a time without a decent "score," which leads to withdrawal, the jitters, anxiety. Which is just my schmaltzy […]

I see them all the time in the record bins at the thrifts or in the dollar bins at record stores – in the '50s and '60s there was a subgenre of LPs designed as incidental music for specific activities. "Music to study by," "music for dining," music for "that special feeling" (a subgenre dominated […]

"I say, 'How much you want for that?' (I go into a store). Man says 'three dollars.' 'All right," I say, 'will you take four?'" – Bob Dylan, "Po' Boy" When the junk is on the table and the deal is about to go down, there's an endgame before the money changes hands – the […]

"One man's trash is another man's treasure." It's a cliché I hear all the time, when I'm "in the field" junking, or when I'm trying to tell some new acquaintance about my odd method of making an income. Illustration by Nathanael Roney. I'm here to tell you that it isn't true. Take it from a […]

One of the many ideas in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that you won't find in its movie adaptation, Blade Runner, is the concept, the spiritual warning, the call-to-arms against the relentless, creeping presence of kipple in our lives. Illustration by Nathanael Roney. According to Dick, kipple is "useless objects" — […]

Every time a flea market enthusiast has encouraged me to go to Pickens Flea Market they've always started with the caveat: "You have to get there early."  Early birding is a good idea for any flea market, but it seems dogma de rigueur for this massive tribute to individualized entrepreneurialism, located on the western outskirt […]

When you're a junker, it's hard to avoid magical thinking. Success is so dependent on serendipity you start to believe it's not just random. It was, for instance, easy to feel things were "meant to be" when I found, via that magical portal of Facebook, that my friend Rabuck was heading to the Biltmore Square […]

For those of you who've been enjoying this column over the last couple of months, it's time to let you know that you need to take the whole thing with a large grain of salt. Illustration by Nathanael Roney Because I'm a junker, and all the junkers I've ever met are liars. Well … "liar" […]

The week before Michael Jackson's death I ignored a copy of Thriller I saw at the Goodwill. I already had one out at my antique booth and there was no point trying to sell it on eBay, where copies were too abundant and selling at around $5 a pop with shipping. There was no need […]

Watching the gas prices creep up past $2.30 is giving me flashbacks to those awful months in 2008 when gas was nearly five dollars a gallon.  Those times were hard on everyone, including the junker. This is a nickel-and-dime game, and for a while, I was really wondering how I was going to continue to […]

When I was growing up, while other kids decided to be doctors, firemen or sports stars, I chose a different career path. At three years old, I’d tell any grownup who would listen that I was going to be a paleontologist. I was going to spend my life digging up dinosaur bones. I guess I […]