Building a Better Apocalypse
Chris Hackett with a pulse jet engine at his workshop in Gowanus, Brooklyn. More Photos »
By ALAN FEUER
Published: March 16, 2012
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.
Read more articles in this week’s Metropolitan section.
Multimedia
Slide ShowThe Madagascar Institute
Tod Seelie
Jet Ponies (2010)- Anniversary Block Party (2009)
- Madagascar Goes Crazy (2003)
- Running of the Bulls (2001)
- Clip From ‘Stuck With Hackett’ (Science Channel)
- Profile of the Madagascar Institute (Motherboard TV)
Related
-
Critic’s Notebook: Weathering Survivalist TV, Like ‘Man vs. Wild’(December 30, 2010)
-
City Room: Where Engineering Prowess Meets Burning Man(September 24, 2010)
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
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
1. Pause and Save. Before every transaction, ask: Can I do this/get this/go there more cheaply or for free? Make this a reflex. Scavenging soon becomes second nature.
