By ALAN FEUER
ON Chris Hackett’s personal periodic table, the world’s most interesting, and abundant, substance is an element he calls obtainium. Things classified as obtainium might include the discarded teapot that he once turned into a propane burner, or the broken beer bottle he used to make a razor, or the 9-millimeter shell casings he acquired some time ago, melted in a backyard foundry (also made of obtainium) and cast into brass knuckles for a girlfriend.
If you ask Mr. Hackett — or Hackett, as he is uniformly known in the Brooklyn bohemia that skips south, from the G station at Greenpoint Avenue to the Gowanus Canal — where he got the components for his homemade still or the numerous jet engines he has built from scratch, he will likely shrug, smile and say, “Around.”
Last month, Mr. Hackett, 39, was working in his Gowanus workshop, a ground-floor space on Butler Street, near the head of the canal. The workshop is a veritable obtainium mine. In one corner sat an upright piano transformed into a cabinet for fasteners. In another was a rack of reclaimed two-inch metal tubing. There were doctored band saws, jury-rigged drill presses, repurposed metal barrels. A shop cat, Shop Cat, napped in front of a plastic chest of drawers marked with labels reading, “ball bearings,” “flange bearings,” “regulators,” “pulleys,” “rivets,” “channel locks,” “drills” and “more drills.” The backyard was heaped with obtainium: half of a car’s rear axle, bolted I-beams, a yellow boat built from scrap.
As he often does, Mr. Hackett was procrastinating, trying to overcome his easily inspired distractedness and get to work on one of the many projects he juggles at any given time. Not long ago, he was hired by Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, to help construct an art van for the Occupy Wall Street movement, a sort of mobile media center with a crank-lift-mounted video projector and rooftop speakers like those heard during Latin American elections. He is also working on an installation for the Honey Space Gallery in Manhattan, in which an old bicycle pump will run a pneumatic engine, which will in turn run the tiny television screens he rescued from the viewfinders of junked video cameras.
First among equals in a madcap group of Brooklyn builders called the Madagascar Institute, Mr. Hackett has won a following in the borough’s underground society of painters, performers, sewer explorers, journeymen carpenters and creators of flame-powered carnival rides. He is something like a fabricator in chief for the Kings County D.I.Y. arts set, always willing to lend his plasma cutter to a friend or teach MIG welding to an amateur. If an aesthetic can be said to emerge from the question, “How will this work?” Mr. Hackett has an answer: How hard could it be? The artistic principle that guides him is awesomeness, he says. (“I make pulse jets because they’re awesome.”)
His most ambitious current project is probably the book he is writing, with a proposed companion television show, about how to survive the apocalypse, in style, using the debris: an apotheosis of his obtainium obsession.
“When I read ‘The Road,’ ” he said, referring to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, “it got me thinking: ‘O.K., so there’s all this stuff lying around. How do you recreate civilization?’ I did some research and figured out the two most important things you’d need are car batteries and Drano.”
Nathaniel Grouille, a television producer who produced Mr. Hackett’s most recent show, “Stuck With Hackett,” for the Science Channel and is helping him pitch the new show, said, “There’s an elegant, design way to make things, and then there’s a Dunkirk, let’s-get-it-done-with-baling-wire-and-string way — that’s Hackett’s way.”
“He’s the master improviser,” Mr. Grouille added. “It’s almost like he thinks with his hands.”
Those hands — large and scarred, like the rest of him — finally got busy at a milling machine, shaving squiggles from a cylinder of plain-carbon steel. Mr. Hackett, perhaps illegally, was fashioning a makeshift key to a subway grate he had been drawn to, in a trespassing way, while out for a walk on Super Bowl Sunday. He had photographed the lock (“While all the cops were watching the game”), measured it to scale and was now trying to reverse-engineer a female device to open the male bolt. This was not a paid or a planned job; it was a whimsical distraction. He wanted to test his skills — and, of course, break into the station.
As he worked, someone banged at his door. Walking over, he discovered it was two friends in a truck with an unannounced obtainium delivery — a dozen castoff wooden palettes.
Distracted from his distraction, Mr. Hackett hauled the palettes through his shop and into the backyard, where he tossed them in a pile for future use. He has no heat in his apartment (he lives upstairs), and burns palettes in his wood-burning stove.
Naturally, he made the stove himself.
TALL, hulking, dreadlocked, perpetually dressed in a black shirt, black pants, black boots and a black jacket, Mr. Hackett has a distinctive physical presence. His nose is scarred (a spring-loaded automobile shock once ripped off one of his nostrils), and so is his jaw. (A “confetti gun” he made exploded in his face eight years ago, the start of an ordeal that ultimately involved the emergency room, the Police Department’s bomb squad and 65 days on Rikers Island.)
Never far from a pack of Marlboro Reds (he no longer drinks or snorts cocaine, but remains “binge-y,” he says, on nicotine and coffee), Mr. Hackett looks a little like a Marxist guerrilla on leave from military operations working as a roadie in a reggae band. In fact, he is the product of a quintessentially New York marriage: his mother, Raymonde, came from an educated Haitian family and emigrated during the reign of Francois Duvalier, while his father, James, came from an Irish family of long standing in Manhattan. (“Famine Irish,” Mr. Hackett says, “not Troubles Irish.”)
Both his parents were schoolteachers, which may begin to account for his autodidactic nature. Raised in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, and then in Westchester County, Mr. Hackett once brewed his own batch of napalm as a boy and later applied himself to the study of what he called “Reagan administration hardcore,” picking up his D.I.Y. ethic and one of his favorite maxims, “Don’t rage against the machine; build a better machine,” from punk bands like the Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front.
In December 1998, his parents died when a kerosene heater caught fire in their home in Jefferson Valley, N.Y. Mr. Hackett was living at the time on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, working in the city’s then-thriving, but soon-to-wilt, technology sector, at a well-paying job he didn’t care for. “It was the dot-com boom,” he said. “All I could think was, ‘You’re going to pay me how much to go to meetings?’ ”
With his share of his parents’ estate — he has two sisters: one lives on Long Island, the other in Manhattan — Mr. Hackett bought the building he now lives and works in. A few years earlier, he had gone to the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert, and is still astonished by the gunplay he had seen, the bacchanalian fireworks and the flame-spewing robots manufactured by groups like Survival Research Laboratories, a machine art collective based in San Francisco.
“I’d been looking for the same kind of people in New York,” he said, “but I couldn’t find them. So” — build a better machine — “I decided to become them.”
His Gowanus workshop soon turned into the atelier and lair for the artists of the Madagascar Institute. With Mr. Hackett as their host (their motto: “Fear is never boring”), the members of the group — out-of-work tech geeks, writers bored with their laptops, graphic designers, a disaffected law school student or two — taught themselves the rudiments of welding and metal fabrication, and began to fashion street junk into pranksterish electrical and pyrotechnic devices: mechanized bulls built out of salvaged AC motors or a hilariously dangerous carousel with jet-powered ponies.
The group’s esteem for improvised technology was matched by a kind of Situationist love of public spectacle. Several years ago, it staged a reenactment of the Hindenburg disaster, in which a crowd of hundreds towed two 15-foot dirigibles through the streets near Union Square — that is, until they exploded. (Mr. Hackett described the event last year to an interviewer: “The crashing, the burning, the confused and terrified N.Y.P.D., the cheering crowds, the glorious fire.”)
In 2009, for the Madagascar Institute’s 10th anniversary, Mr. Hackett and his co-conspirators decided it would be appropriate to send a 350-pound opera singer across the Gowanus Canal on a zipline.
This taste for showmanship, boyish danger and extreme art has not always been easy on those closest to Mr. Hackett. Bonnie Downing, a freelance writer who dated him on and off for a decade, said that he was “a careful explainer of things and a patient teacher of skills,” but that he “tends to live in a state of wreckage.”
“By and large he’s a 12-year-old boy,” Ms. Downing said, “living in a zombie movie and playing in the garage all day with leftover chemicals.”
Friends say Mr. Hackett is fiercely loyal to his family, although he himself said of his younger sister, an accountant, “Our relationship is basically running into one another on the F train.” (His sisters declined to be interviewed.) He is unmarried, and in place of domestic ties has surrounded himself with an extended family cobbled together out of like-minded makers and seekers — a kind of relational obtainium.
“When his parents died, he took the money he got and created a place where the group around him could grow into what it became,” said Ryan O’Connor, a founding member of the Madagascar Institute who has known Mr. Hackett since the 1990s. “At the end of day, it’s what he wanted: an environment where all these crazy, interesting people are around him all the time.”
ONE day late in February, Mr. Hackett lay on his back, on the floor of Serett Metal Works in Brooklyn, his torso wedged beneath the undercarriage of a used van picked up cheap on Staten Island. He was trying to free the van’s spare battery from its casing in order to connect some electrical wires to its leads.
The van, soon to be christened the Illuminator, was the brainchild of Mark Read, an activist and artist, who said the idea emerged from a conversation he had recently had with Mr. Cohen, of Ben & Jerry’s, at an Occupy Wall Street strategy session. He recalled: “Ben said: ‘You know what we should do? We should build a Batmobile for the movement.’ I said, ‘Yeah, we should.’ ”
Who better to build a Batmobile than Mr. Hackett?
With a budget of $25,000, it was not a project based on pure obtainium, although it was obtainium-ish. Mr. Hackett and his crew from the Madagascar Institute connected the van’s battery to a reserve power source, an AGM deep-cycle battery, which was itself connected to a 1,500-watt pure sine wave DC/AC power inverter. The inverter was connected to a huge Sanyo video projector, which was bolted to a hand-cranked platform, which could then be raised or lowered through a hole cut in the van’s roof.
Mr. Read described the Illuminator as “a movement art tool,” able to travel the country showing films and serving hot cocoa. While Mr. Hackett happily agreed to be the project’s foreman, he claims to be no fan of political art. “People think they’re painting ‘Guernica,’ ” he said. “They’re not.”
Then again, he is no fan of politics, either. (He describes his own as “quietly disgusted.”) Art van project aside, he has largely stayed on the outskirts of the Occupy phenomenon. The Illuminator was a challenging, remunerative job, but that’s all it was: a job.
The apocalypse project seems closer to his heart. While obviously meant as entertainment, it is essentially political, at least in the sense that an inherent social critique resides in any endeavor that takes as its premise the catastrophic ruin of the nation.
These days, there are those on the left — Occupiers, say — and also on the right — ammo-hoarding, gold-burying believers in peak oil — who harbor the suspicion that America is more or less an interlocking network of overburdened, unsustainable systems, from energy to transportation, finance to food production. The question is: once they reach that conclusion, then what?
Mr. Hackett has a what. He recently looked over a 1918 arc welding patent filed by a Wisconsin inventor, and determined that all an amateur, stranded by calamity, needs to make his own welding rods are coat hangers, some silica gel, some lye and a newspaper. “If civilization and supply chains collapse,” he wrote in Make magazine about this process, “the anti-zombie fences will still get built.”
Mr. Hackett likes to joke about anti-zombie fences, but the truth is he has thought about how to reassemble modernity in a serious way. Electric power? “Any motor cranked in reverse is a generator.” Tanned hides? “Drano works great.” Weapons? “Primer is the hard part. I’m working on it.”
“He’s a history geek — it interests him to know where things come from, how they work,” said Julia Solis, a longtime friend and collaborator. “But I think what really interests him is self-reliance.”
This makes sense at a moment when most Americans don’t know how to change their spark plugs, let alone tan their own hides. When Mr. Hackett talks earnestly about growing hydroponic crops or mischievously about making explosives with oxygen, acetylene and bong water, he is really speaking of a fabricator’s self-reliant pride.
The day before the Illuminator was due to be finished, two of his crewmates, Ben Mortimer and Boris Klompus, dropped by the workshop. They had to make a ladder for the van, and started slicing his two-inch tubing with a cold saw.
The van would be making its debut the next night at a live-streamed art party at Zuccotti Park, where it would project Occupy slogans — “99 %,” “The New World Is Possible” — on the side of one of the buildings surrounding the square. Was Mr. Hackett going? He was not.
Didn’t he want to see his labor celebrated?
He smiled; he shared a look with his colleagues. The look seemed to say: The celebration had already occurred. The joy was in the making.
NYT
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