11.25.2023
11.25.2023
"My baby’s so vain that she is almost a mirror" —The Boys Next Door
A run-down little house in downtown Brevard. Usually it’s the Transylvania Heritage Museum but at the holidays it becomes ATOM—the Aluminum Tree and Ornament Museum. The three rooms are cramped with about thirty shaggy, shimmering, skeletal trees of varying sizes, mostly silver, though some are gold or emerald. Their arms radiate in roughly conical shapes from central poles that look like painted broomsticks. Rotating color wheels sit at their bases, cycling through red, green, yellow, and blue light, casting stained glass shadows. So much shine in such a dingy world.
About six people are inside and it’s packed. The brief glory of aluminum trees is on full display—a reign that stretches from the late fifties to the very early seventies. An old man points to a box of ornaments that shows Santa shaking hands with Uncle Sam, explaining it was made during “the war” and is especially collectable. The grand finale is a “Blue Christmas” themed room— a sapphire-colored tree decked in Elvis ornaments, with memorabilia tacked onto the wall behind. The King’s portrait hangs in the corner, so beautiful. Who fucking looks like that? Features carved like a Michelangelo sculpture of the Madonna: strong angles with slight curves, smooth and hard. Gloria, in excelsis Deo!
Christmas junk stuffed into an old shack: a “Hoarders” Christmas special. Real melancholy permeates the forced cheer and cheap magic. And yet, there is undeniable aesthetic triumph. The dizzying freedom in abandoning mimesis. Unlike the horrid dark green plastic fir trees we had in south Florida, which deprive you of the sensuousness presence of pine without giving any kind of compensation. For all they lack, aluminum trees do offer something else: a vision of deathless down-home dazzle; the promise of a glamorous future, arrested and discarded—now, modestly preserved.