Across from a typical all-american tattoo parlor, right in front of the Fremont Hemp Center and Masonic Temple #92 stands a defiant Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution. Surrounded by stone flames and bayonets, a prominent sign by his head advertises Taco Del Mar, mission style burritos. The father of russian-style communism looks out on small shops and coffee houses, surveying the busy traffic streaming toward the yacht docks and into downtown Seattle. Behind him stands the City People’s Mercantile. There is no sound but the traffic.
He is at home.
Sponsored by the Fremont Chamber of Commerce, the Fremont Art Council, Gallery 154, and Wharton Specialty Seafood (featuring succulent smoked salmon on 34th street), Lenin is dwarfed next to his surroundings. Only by standing next to him do you get a true measure of his size- a 6’ 4” man can easily stand unfettered under his downward pointed finger. Driving by on the busy street he can be easily overlooked or confused for a tribute to the Northwest fisherman. Surely a casual passerby would not presume that this is the Lenin, forerunner to Stalin, the first leader of the Soviet Union. After all, what would a statue of Lenin be doing in Seattle, Washington in the year 2000?
He is for sale. A hefty price tag of $150,000 (or best offer), however, may keep him in place at Fremont for years to come. There has been at least one interested party.
Communism Meets Capitalism
“We were vying for Lenin,” agree Shana Iverson and Pete Gibson, management of the Archie McPhee retail sales store. “It would have been great to have him. I don’t know where we would have put him, but it would have been great,” said Gibson, soon after pointing out that, although he did play the guitar, he was no relation to the famed guitar makers. “I play a Fender,” he said. “But I’m open to finding a long lost relative.”
They are also clear about being open to anything new and/or unusual. The story of Archie Macphee and Lenin, and how the two meet is as unusual as some of the items that they sell every day. It seems that they were contacted by the owner of the statue when it was still in storage and there was some confusion about just what you could do with a large bronze statue of a Russian revolutionary.
The statue was made by artist Emil Venkov, on commission from his government. It took ten years to fashion it from bronze, and it stood in place for only a short time in Poprad, Slovakia from 1988 until it was toppled in the revolution of 1989. It was at this point, with the statue lying face down on Slovokian soil, that an American, Lewis Carpenter, in Poprad as a teacher, decided to mortgage his home in order to acquire the statue and bring it to the United States. When he died in 1994 his family was left with Lenin. Not knowing quite what to do next, it was only natural that they would contact Archie Mcphee.
Self styled “outfitters of popular culture,” Archie Mcphee has been selling toys, nostalgia, and strange items for the past fifteen years. What began as a retail store has blossomed into a mailorder business, a distributer of a line of their own signature merchandise, and a solid presence on the Internet.
If they had managed to acquire the statue, it would not have been an unusual way for them to have come across an item. According to Iverson, they have developed a network of contacts through the years and they often acquire things from people who call on them to see if they are interesting in something, as well as making acquisitions through industrial surplus. Currently they have on display at the store a flag from the old East Germany priced at forty dollars.
The Products & The Competition
A first look at the Archie Mcphee inventory is bewildering. Item after item makes no logical sense. It’s as if you are drowning in cast off material. Elvis playing cards. Pop Rocks. Bolshevik lunch boxes. Rubber slugs. Religious items. Oral hygiene posters. Taxidermy eyes. Chinese dinner placemats.
After a while you realize that Mcphee deals primarily in nostalgia and secondarily in defiance. These items are alike in that they have no real use. No one needs the items that Mcphee sells, yet many are eager to buy. Mcphee items are a celebration of bad taste. They hark back to the excess and stupidity of the recent and not so recent past. The Mcphee catalog is filled with pictures young people reveling in bad taste in a fun environment. It is an experience devoid of politics and meaning, an experience of pure escapism.
The closest competitor to Archie Mcphee would be the Johnson Smith catalog, billed as “products you never knew existed.” But there is a difference between the two. Johnson Smith is a more serious company, rooted more in the here and now, in a world that makes sense. Archie Mcphee is based on not making sense. Johnson Smith will sell you products that are largely more ordinary than the products sold by Mcphee. The staff at Mcphee find the gap so large that they don’t even acknowledge the Johnson Smith Catalog as competition, believing that they are not in the same league.
History
Archie Mcphee is owned by Mark Pahlow. He named the business after his great-uncle-in-law, the real Archie.
In 1924, Mcphee left his home in Bismarck, North Dakota in order to bring jazz music to the orient. He formed a band called the North Star Music Makers and booked passage for them from Seattle. Archie filled in shoveling coal in the hold of the ship in order to make the passage east. The band played in China and Japan before coming home.
Years later, Archie’s great-nephew-in-law started selling toys and junk, things he found in local warehouses, to customers out of his house in Los Angeles. After a taste of success, he moved his inventory to Seattle’s Fremont district, not to far away from where Lenin stands today. As it has grown, branching into mailorder catalogs and online shopping, the store has had to move to larger facilities several times, currently landing them at their current retail store at 2428 Market Street. Other phases of the business are housed at other locations- where the web site is maintained and people handle orders and shipping.
Mcphee now has three distinct divisions:
1. The retail store in Seattle.
2. Mailorder, including catalog and internet sales.
3. Accoutrements, a wholesale division.
Through Accoutrements they sell a line of their own merchandise to any business that is interested in making bulk purchases of many of the things that are for sale through their catalog and on the web.
Their online newsletter tells stories about the store. One newsletter told of the return of a large Satan head that the store had made for halloween. After being stolen from their parking lot and eventually returned, Satan is again at home in the Mcphee store. He is now decked out in Pilgrim attire and will be dressed appropriately for all holidays from now on. Reading the Mcphee newsletter one would get an idea of what would have been in store for Lenin had he been acquired by Mcphee.
Why People Buy
People buy things that they don’t need because in some way it satisfies them, perhaps as nostalgia, perhaps as art. There is certainly a little dada in Archie Mcphee.
There is a similarity between the merchandise Archie Mcphee sells and the psychotronic film movement, people watching and enjoying old films, the vast majority of which are very badly made and enjoying them on the level of a bad film. Watching and collecting these type of films has become so popular in some quarters that several magazines cover the subject and many small companies, such as Something Weird Video in Seattle specialize in rereleasing and selling them. This industry is driven by the same thing that drives Archie Mcphee- nostalgia and reveling in bad taste.
And then there is the possible critique of society. The icons celebrated by Mcphee merchandise are not fabrications of their own industry, as psychotronic films are not new products. They are, for the most part, nostalgic in nature, made by society and sold afterwards. The statue of Lenin was never made to be sold in America; however, after the fall of the Soviet Union it has become commoditized and is now available for a price.