Photo Courtesy of CollectingCandy.com

Is New York’s increasingly renowned vintage candy wrapper collector, Jason Liebig, collecting offbeat art or merely living out some unfulfillable boyhood fantasy? And why are we, the public, so intrigued? 

Jason Liebig isn’t just like a kid in a candy store;  in many ways he is one. Except he’s 43 and the candy store is actually his Queens apartment where he houses over 10,000 neatly preserved vintage and modern candy wrappers.

What’s more, he tosses out any new candy prior to its wrapper’s preservation, a fact which would likely bring joy to no child anywhere. Liebig believes he has the only such collection in the city and that nationwide very few people, if any, share his particular hobby.

Liebig and his Willy Wonka-esque tendencies have only recently emerged from semi-anonymity. His collection and the website where he archives his ongoing project, CollectingCandy.com, were just featured on the long form journalism site Narrative.ly. His story was then quickly nabbed by the Huffington Post. At least one of his blog posts has gone viral, receiving more than 20,000 views in one day.

For Liebig, a former Marvel Comics editor and present day bartender, this is not about reliving a childhood love of sweets, or even really the candy itself; his collection is about art.

“In a way, my appreciation started out of my love of graphic design and art,” says Liebig.

“My dream has never been to work in the candy industry,” he explains. “I’m interested in a very specific niche part of it, that has thus far been ignored by much of the candy historians, which makes sense, since the packaging designs are often forgotten and lost.”

“But that’s what I love about it,” he adds. “I realized there was the whole segment of consumer goods packaging that really was an art world and history of art unto itself.” It’s this segment Liebig chronicles on his website.

***

Nearly everyone collects something, most without realizing it. These collections vary in size from a couple tokens to essentially every item found in a pathological hoarder’s domicile, and in type from buttons to real estate. Many would argue “collecting” is more about the psychology that drives one to accumulate rather than the physical items themselves.

New York-based psychoanalyst Dale Karp explains: “People collect things for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they collect just for the sake of it, sometimes the art of it, sometimes the value of it.”

“Amassing lots of things one loves should not be confused with the compulsion to possess or own things,” he continues. “There can be a fine line separating a hobby from a drive which might be pathological.”

Karp equates “pathological” with those who “hoard purposeless quantities of meaningless things.”

Don’t accuse Liebig of hoarding though; he is careful to note he keeps his apartment relatively clean of trappings from his candy-related endeavors. Walking into his apartment you may have an inkling from the decor, but until you start digging you could never know the true extent of his fascination.

Some experts say collecting items, particularly those reminiscent of childhood, is simply nostalgic. Other times they observe collecting to be about gaining a sense of control over a lost period of time.

According to life management expert Kimberly Friedmutter, “to the collector, collecting childhood symbolism is simply a subconscious way of rectifying and making amends with the time when we were the most vulnerable.”

“Collecting is protecting,” she says.

Without knowing him personally, Karp is quick to dismiss the theory that Liebig’s hobby necessarily has something to do with, say, some unfulfilling trick-or-treating experiences from his youth. Further, despite the amassment’s uniqueness, does it really differ in any way from a more ubiquitous comic book or baseball card collection?

“Candy wrappers can have pop culture significance in America,” Karp says. “They might represent our values about food, vintage art, advertising, wastefulness, consumption, etc.”

“Do we question Andy Warhol’s interest in Campbells soup in terms of his personal concerns about food?” Karp asks. “You can wonder about the significance of candy to this particular collector, of course, but any conclusion about the unconscious symbolism of candy wrappers is over the top pop psychology.”

Liebig’s earliest memory of engaging with candy wrappers — or candy — on a more profound level than the average individual dates back to 1992 when he first saved an M&M’s peanut butter wrapper, which remains neatly maintained to this day.

“It really struck me graphically,” he says.

Though Liebig emphasizes the process is in large part artistic, he often finds himself wondering how some long vanished candy might have tasted. Moreover, he wonders at the accuracy of his memories of childhood tastings past.

“I loved the Mars Marathon bars of the 1970′s, and I’ve found that they were very much like the Cadbury Curly Wurly bar,” says Liebig. “In the last few years, I’ve had many of the UK’s Curly Wurly, but I still wonder if there were subtle differences from these, and what I had as a kid in the Marathon.”

***

Why are we, the viewing public, so fascinated with Liebig and his collection? Why all the blog hits — why is the media catching on? According to Karp, “maybe deviations from the norm tap in to our unconscious wishes to be extreme and simply act out for us what we don’t dare do, like eat a million candy bars.”

Liebig points out many collectors like him have a specific goal in mind: “To most buyers, what’s best to them is getting the ‘one they remember’ from their personal life. And I can agree with that,” he says. “That’s what got me started on the whole thing.”

“It’s my way to add to our collective nostalgic consciousness,” he adds. Perhaps then we the viewers are merely reaping this nostalgia Liebig and his archives confer.

While this is where the experts might nail Liebig on the connection to his childhood memories, the issue of what psychoanalysts may think of Liebig’s passion is one he approaches with dismissive caution.

“I’ve often said that, in the modern age, we have extended adolescence well into adulthood across the board,” Liebig says.  “We are a progressively fun and silly culture.”

“Of course, New York City extends adolescence in a host of other ways,” he notes.

“I don’t know that my hobby is so much extending a childhood fantasy, but I think it is a fascination with the trappings of adolescence, and in a way a kind of literal extension of it,” Liebig explains.  “I don’t see myself as stuck in some phase of incomplete development though, anymore than the historian who studies the Beatles is stuck in the 60′s.”

Liebig is also wary of promoting his collection too much, as he told Narrative.ly, for fear of who might similarly glom on to his hobby and exorbitantly run up the memorabilia’s valuation. Scarcity does not make Liebig see dollar signs, it just makes him excited, like an art-lover stumbling upon a rare work.

His biggest hopes for his collection are a coffee table book or perhaps a television show. “I don’t want to have an empire, but I would like to make a living and have a lot of fun with it,” he says. So far, it sounds like the project is at least living up to the “fun” requirement.

Liebig likely won’t be listening to the head-shrinking naysayers anytime soon either.

“I have a sense of humor about this stuff because it’s just a bunch of things,” he notes. “But when I sit down to tackle the history of it, I do so as an adult, and as seriously as I do anything.”

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The NYPD is patrolling New York City Sikh temples as a precaution in the aftermath of a shooting in a Milwaukee Sikh temple that left seven people dead. Gothamist reports there is “no known threat” against any temples in the City, but officers are being cautious nonetheless. The blog also reports the Milwaukee shooter, 40-year-old former Army soldier Wade Michael Page according to the Huffington Post, is likely dead and the incident an isolated hate crime.

Some commenters on Gothamist‘s site said they were dubious whether a police presence would be reassuring to temple-goers. The increased police activity post-shooting is reminiscent of the recent NYPD monitoring of midnight Dark Knight Rises screenings in the wake of the Aurora, CO shooting.

—Alissa Fleck

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A fire that broke out at the South Street Seaport on Saturday was caused by faulty electrical wiring, reports the Huffington Post. 

The fire started under Pier 17 and grew to engulf about 100 square feet, but was tamed in under two hours. Pictures of the blaze show onlookers photographing and gawking at immense clouds of black smoke over Lower Manhattan.

The fire could have been building under the dock for some time, according to the New York Times.

Fire Department spokesman Jim Long called the fire an averted disaster in the tourist-heavy area—no one was hurt and no shops were damaged. The pier was opened back up to activity Saturday evening, including a planned Seaport music festival.

Fire marshals looked into any possible structural damage on Sunday, reports the Huffington Post. Parts of the pier will remain closed for some time as stability in the area is assessed.

—Alissa Fleck

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Nora Ephron, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director and longtime journalist/essayist, passed away in Manhattan last night at the age of 71. Ephron’s career was vast and had much to offer in the way of teaching. She was beloved for her romantic comedies as much as her own brand of feminism, which included no shortage of realist sexiness. Here are some of my favorite lessons the impressively quirky and courageous Ephron had to offer:

1. “Take it personally”

In a 1996 speech to the graduating class of Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ephron urged the women to take every perceived attack on their gender personally. “There’s still a glass ceiling,” she said. “Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally.” Ephron urged against the kind of passivity and naivete that allow us to see public instances of marginalization as occurring inside a vacuum.

2. You’re only a couple hours a week away from being a homeless person (appearance-wise)

In I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts On Being a Woman, Ephron writes in the essay “On Maintenance” about the fragility of being human, the thin, superficial line between being put-together and falling apart: “…the other day, on the street, I passed a homeless woman. I have never understood the feminists who insisted they were terrified of becoming bag ladies, but as I watched this woman shuffle down the street, I finally understood at least my version of it….I am only about eight hours a week away from looking exactly like that woman on the street—with frizzled flyaway gray hair I would probably have if I stopped dyeing mine.”   

3. You can write sappy romantic comedies and still influence national politics…maybe

Ephron claimed she figured out who Deep Throat was while married to Carl Bernstein (half of the team responsible for breaking Watergate), though he did not tell her. She alleged in the Huffington Post in 2005 she figured out his identity on her own and for years told everyone she knew. Apparently Mark Felt himself had begun revealing his identity as Deep Throat though, as with Ephron, no one took him seriously. Whether no one listened because Ephron was, well, Ephron, we’ll never know.

4. “Secret to Life, Marry an Italian.”

This was Ephron’s six word biography in Larry Smith’s Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Ephron was married to screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi for over twenty years. It speaks to Ephron’s sense of wit when asked to sum up her life in six words, she steered clear of the preachy or esoteric.

5. Get Over It

The advice may seem trite, but in Ephron’s essays this conclusion is more or less a consistent theme. In a 2010 column on divorce for the Huffington Post, Ephron writes: “People are careless and there are almost never any consequences.” Of her two painful divorces, she writes: “I survived. My religion is Get Over It. I turned it into a rollicking story. I wrote a novel. I bought a house with the money from the novel.” She explains the “most important thing” about you at any given time seems it will last forever, but whether it’s being a divorcee or simply getting old, the “most important thing” always changes. And of course it’s always relative too—in “I Remember Nothing,” she writes: “I am old. I am sixty-nine years old. I’m not really old, of course. Really old is eighty. But if you are young, you would definitely think that I’m old.”

6. It’s okay to be a bad secret-keeper, if you’re whimsical about it

By 2006 Ephron was a renowned screenwriter after an early career in journalism. She still, admittedly, had a very difficult time keeping juicy secrets (of which she had a lot). While on a trip to Las Vegas, Ephron witnessed hotel tycoon Steve Wynn put his elbow through a $139 million Picasso. Everyone present agreed to keep the incident a secret, which Ephron wrote in the Huffington Post in 2006 was “the most painful experience of [her] life.” (If the case of Deep Throat is not evidence enough.) She kept the secret for nine days. Ephron may have changed her career four times and been a champion of the relativity of all things in life, but she also showed us some things—like a penchant for sharing delectable gossip— never change.

7. “Be the heroine of your life, not the victim”

The advice, also from Ephron’s graduation speech to Wellesley College, reflected her own trajectory as a woman breaking down barriers in her industry, spanning across four different careers. Ephron was widely considered one of the most successful female writers in Hollywood. Rather than allow herself to be defined by the tragedies which befell her, she made them humorous fodder instead. Ephron advised the graduating class if things did not turn out how they wanted, they had no one to blame but themselves.

—Alissa Fleck

NYPD - photo by scoutnurse

It was a hairy situation on Friday.

Fishel Litzman, a Hasidic NYPD recruit, just a few weeks away from finishing his training, was forced to leave the police academy on Friday because his beard was too long, the Daily News reports.

Litzman cites religion for why he refuses to trim his beard to the NYPD’s required length, and does not see how the length of his facial hair could affect his performance on the job.

He might not agree, but the NYPD clearly states that all officers must be clean-shaven.

In a statement released by the NYPD, their chief spokesman, Paul Browne, addressed Litzman and the confrontation between the two parties.

“The NYPD makes reasonable accommodations in this regard, permitting beards to be 1 (millimeter) in length for religious purposes,” Browne said.

The police department did not give Litzman an explicit reason for his termination, but also reported that Litzman was achieving high test scores while in the academy. In his last three tests, Litzman scored a 96, 99, and 100, the Daily News reported.

Sources said that the long beard does pose a hazard, though, the Daily News said. According to that report, the beard compromises the safety of the masks used in counter-terrorism training.

Litzman and his attorney, Nathan Lewin, are planning to hold a religious discrimination lawsuit against the police department, the Huffington Post reported.

The fuzz don’t like fuzz.

The recent decision by the Supreme Court to revisit the issue clearly puts it in peril. Even if the court ends up retaining the legality of affirmative action for now, using race as a factor in school admissions was never seen as a permanent solution; there are fairer ways to add diversity.

Current affirmative action plans typically benefit the most advantaged in a group, including those who are also members of a minority most of us would like to be in—the 1 percent.

Large racial disparities, of course, persist everywhere. In New York City, even though over 75 percent of the students at the top-ranked public high schools are minorities, there are still deeply troubling numbers. Less than four percent of the students are black or Hispanic at Stuyvesant High School, where the black population is a hair over 1 percent. At my alma mater, Bronx Science, 10 percent of the students are black or Hispanic. Compare this to the 72 percent of the city’s public school students who are Hispanic or black, roughly the same percentage of Asians at the two specialized schools.

The city Department of Education has made only half-hearted attempts to diversify Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and the numbers have moved in the wrong direction. The Specialized School Institute does recruit “disadvantaged” middle school students of all races to help them pass the admission test, but the city has also expanded the number of specialized schools.

Adding five schools was undoubtedly done with the best of intentions and has had mostly positive effects—but it also allows officials to downplay the problem at specialized schools, since the new schools have broader diversity. Higher scores are needed to enroll at the top two schools, but the DOE tries to maintain the fiction it has not set up a two-tier system by not publicizing the scores. This was made clear in the emails the agency sent this paper last year when our reporter Megan Bungeroth [then Finnegan] looked into
the problem.

One fair way to add more diversity at Stuyvesant and Bronx Science would be to give the best students at every middle school an added chance to attend, similar to a state college admission plan in Texas.

Coincidentally, the Supreme Court is now reviewing a different part of the Texas system. The undisputed part of the law grants college admission to the top 10 percent of high school graduates in Texas, thus opening doors to the best students in schools with large numbers of minorities. Affirmative action supporters acknowledge that the non-racial component of the plan is working, but they argue it is not as effective as using race. The same argument is also made when income is used. But if diversity were the only goal, strict quotas would work even better than affirmative action.

Fairness can’t be ignored, which is why you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who favors legalizing racial quotas. Although affirmative action is going to end sooner or later, academia, for the most part, is not ready to give up. The energy used on these battles would be better spent on figuring out what causes racial disparity so it can be ended.

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, wrote on the Huffington Post,
“It would be an enormous step backward to force our admissions offices to retreat to a homogeneity that stifles creative, broad-based education.” He won’t have to. There are other paths to diversity.

Josh Rogers, contributing editor at Manhattan Media, is a lifelong New Yorker.
Follow him @JoshRogersNYC.

Gay reality TV is getting a dose of scandal this week! After an A-List: Dallas cast member tweeted a picture of a rock with a hate message allegedly thrown though his window last Friday, gay blogger Joe My God suspected that it was a publicity stunt in advance of the premiere this past Monday. (Although the cast member apparently had just had lunch with gay anti-icon Ann Coulter, so maybe a wee hate crime was justified.) Joe even thought Logo producers were complicit in faking the gay-on-gay hate crime. I caught up with A-List: New York cast member Mike Ruiz at a party celebrating the launch of his new book, Pretty Masculine, this Wednesday to see if the celebrity photog had to anything to tell Bash Compactor about this Texan transgression.

Have you been watching The A-List: Dallas at all?

I haven’t. I missed the first episode.

So you’re a bad A-Lister.

I barely have enough time to watch A-List: New York. I haven’t seen all of the Reunion show yet. I’m just not…I have it all TiVo’d, I just haven’t watched it all.

One of the A-List: Dallas cast members claimed to be the victim of a hate crime, a gay-on-gay hate crime. Some bloggers, like Joe My God and Towleroad, are saying that it’s a publicity ploy. Do you think the Logo producers would be complicit in something like that?

No. No. The Logo producers are not that involved in story, they take what they’ve been given and they create story from that but they don’t instigate stuff like that, and they would never, ever instigate an act of violence like that.

So you think that this might’ve just been a rogue cast member trying to get some publicity for the show?

I don’t know. It’s in Texas. Sad to say, a lot of the homophobia that I’ve experienced from being on the show comes from the gay community. So I’m not surprised that somebody was so incensed by probably having their life portrayed on TV that they wanted to shut it down by throwing a rock through this guy’s window. I don’t think it was a publicity stunt. I don’t think anyone would go to those lengths.

What do you mean, homophobia from within the gay community?

I mean, most of the attacks that come, you know, bloggers, people who write horrible, mean-spirited, scathing things about our show, specifically, come from other gay bloggers. Straight bloggers aren’t writing about A-List: New York.

Do you think that’s just because they’re not paying attention?

Probably. The point is, we should all support each other. No matter what it is. If the show is in fact a bad representation of the community, it’s not meant to be a representation of the anything. It’s a frickin’ reality show. If people can’t take it for face value, I think it’s on them. But with all of that said, I think there comes some responsibility, being a public figure, especially if you’re on a gay show, to act and conduct yourself in a responsible way.

The guy who did the rock-stunt, he was meeting with Ann Coulter to have her on the show. Is there any conscionable way to support that?

I don’t support that, but that’s…that’s…see, that’s…

This is the woman who called John Edwards a faggot.

I would not invite that into my life in any way, shape or form, but what other people do… I don’t support it but I’m not going to attack him publicly for doing it. He has his own agenda. He’s doing what he feels he needs to do to get ahead in life, and I’m not going to judge him for it.

Some people call you the least involved member of the cast.

Well, it depends on how you look at it. I think I’m very involved. I may not be as involved with the other cast members, but my goal is not to be involved in the cast…you know, I’m a blogger for the Huffington Post and we’re writing a really articulate blog about why Martin and I wanted to do the A-List, and it’ll explain a lot. I think my involvement in the show is important. Even though I don’t have a lot of screen time, what I do contribute is a lot of value. The reality is, I like all the cast, but I wouldn’t really hang out with any of them. So I wouldn’t do it on TV either. I know that doesn’t make sense since I signed on to do a reality show, but my goal wasn’t to kiki with these other cast members. I had other reasons for doing the show.

Some of the gay community says, “Oh, this makes us look so bad.” Do you want to be an antidote to that?

That’s exactly why I wanted to do the show. That’s exactly my value. When I proposed to Martin on the show, we’ve gotten no less than five or six thousand responses, from young gay men saying how we’ve inspired them. If I only would’ve gotten one of those, that would’ve been plenty. So my work is done here.

Let’s talk about your book, Pretty Masculine. These guys look like they go to the gym for four hours a day. Do you think you’re creating unrealistic images for gay men to aspire to?

OK, read the foreword to the book. That’s all I have to say. [He raises his voice.] See, that’s the really unfortunate thing. A lot of people make a lot of assumptions and a lot of preconceptions about something they really don’t research, and don’t educate themselves on.

I’m not trying to ruffle your feathers here.

If you would’ve known, if you would’ve researched why I did this book, what inspired me to do the book, you wouldn’t be asking me that question.

I read the press release. It said you want to “look beyond the stereotypical man.” How are pictures of super-buff guys looking beyond that?

No, no, that’s not what it says at all. It says I wanted to portray masculinity out of context. I wanted to deconstruct the idea of masculinity.

I think what you’re doing, in my opinion, is pretty a hyper-masculine body type in sort of a feminine way.

I don’t want to say feminine, it’s just out of context. Everything I do, you know, the celebrity stuff that I shoot, I take celebrities and I transform them out of context. I make everything aspirational. It’s a fantasy. Everything that I do is rooted in my hopefulness, and I want to create a more beautiful world for myself and whoever else wants to participate.

What was it like to work with Snooki and Paris Hilton and those types of subjects?

They’re all really smart, calculating people. They get a lot of flack, much like the cast of the A-List, but they all have a mission. At the end of the day, you say what you will about them—they could not have made all these millions and millions of dollars, and be such a driving force in pop culture, without making calculated decisions along the way. They’re smart people.

You’re calling Snooki smart?

Snooki’s a comedian. She’s a brilliant comedian, and she spun it into a multi-million dollar empire.