(for a quintessentially New York experience — and a flattering nod for the walrus — there’s no better place to develop your sense of the super-natural than SoHo’s latest retail “evolution”…)
Natural Selection, Perfect for Browsing
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
The New York Times
THE first time I ever came across the term “penis bone” — in JT Leroy’s novel “Sarah,” the main character wears such a bone on a necklace — I thought it was made up, a novelist’s surreal fictional version of perma-Viagra.
Later it turned out that JT Leroy was made up, but the bone is real, the animal world’s answer to successful propagation. Many mammals (homo sapiens excluded) have a bone within the erectile tissue, called a baculum, which helps during copulation. The largest baculum in the animal world belongs to the walrus, and it can grow as long as 30 inches.
The only reason I know such things is that the helpful clerks in Evolution, a SoHo boutique that traffics in natural oddities, can enlighten shoppers on subjects like the baculum; what piranhas eat in captivity (herring or ox hearts); how long it takes Venus’ flytraps to digest an insect (a week, after which they burp out the crunchy exoskeleton); the location of the end of the universe (probably about 14 trillion light-years from Midtown, and then it most likely begins to fold back in on itself); and the size of the egg produced by the now extinct elephant bird (10,000 times larger than a hummingbird’s egg).
Politically, the store’s name suits SoHo. I can only wonder if there is a similar store in Dover, Pa., called Intelligent Design, and if it stocks anything other than office furniture.
Evolution, which has been open since 1993, sells collectible items from the world of natural history, like framed butterflies and beetles, fossilized mud cracks, medical models, animal hides, taxidermy specimens, skeletons (human and animal, real and fake), tribal art, fossils, phrenologists’ model skulls, desiccated piranhas, framed scorpions and miniature asteroids.
These are the kinds of things that have become chic to keep around the house, as if you have just returned from a jaunt in the veld, fresh from slaying and skinning a scimitar-horned oryx, or perhaps recently inherited a collection of Papilio zalmoxis specimens (rare African swallowtail butterflies) from your great-grandfather, the famous lepidopterist. It’s naturalist chic.
This is why shelter-magazine-subscribing New Yorkers seem in the last few years to have given over their apartments to a coral motif. Everything is made to evoke or resemble coral: coral embroidery festoons every cocktail napkin; candles are snug in coral-shaped ceramic holders. I think it’s the urbanite’s way of reaffirming a relationship with the exotic natural world that lies far outside Manhattan, like the prizefighter who holds onto his training gloves even though he has not been in a ring in years and never will be again.
We’re disenfranchised from our savage natural selves, a sorry fact we overcome with interior decoration. To us, nature is walking around the sailing pond in Central Park, avoiding the pigeon droppings, hoping to catch a glimpse of Pale Male or Lola.
ANY store avowing the barest level of chic keeps a book by the art publisher Taschen in stock. Upstairs at Evolution, you can buy “Cabinet of Natural Curiosities” ($140), a collection of drawings commissioned in 1731 by the Dutch naturalist Albertus Seba, who was so busy collecting animal and plant specimens that he never learned how to draw. He had to commission artists to illustrate his book. Of course, the cover features a big branch of orange coral.
Several West African murals that once served as advertisements for doctors’ offices are on sale, with naïf drawings of patients suffering from ailments like “menstruition pains” and “skin rachese.” It was here that a sales clerk, his arm inkily tattooed with an image of scissors, lectured me on the mammalian baculum, adding the tantalizing bit of information that the bones are often slightly hooked at the end, for the purpose of helping the male hold on during his brief romantic interlude with the female.
Downstairs, dishes of freeze-dried mice compete with the Venus’ flytraps, insects captured in 40-million-year-old amber and miniature sea horses rattling around inside glass vials. I sifted through a bowl of Crick-ettes, packaged snacks made of dried crickets in various flavors. I asked the sales clerk which flavor he preferred.
“The sour cream and onion crickets are quite good,” he told me, his face so sober and defiant that I could tell he was asked this question every day by incredulous children or their squeamish mothers, and was by now deathly bored of the inevitable unoriginal reactions. (Wrinkled noses, exclamations of “eeee-yew,” etc.)
I bought a pack of the sour cream and onion Crick-ettes ($3). In addition, I purchased a small skull carved out of crystal ($15) for my 12-year-old stepson, who dyes his hair black and has started his own Goth band, and a dried miniature sea horse in a glass vial ($5). On the subway ride home I took out the pack of Crick-ettes and opened it. The woman next to me looked over curiously at what delicious little snack I was shaking out into my palm. I thrust the box toward her. “Like some?” I asked.
Down the hatch went the crickets. They tasted like sawdust, sprinkled with sour cream and onion flavoring. Maybe next time I’ll try the Salt N’ Vinegar.
VISITOR INFORMATION
Evolution
120 Spring Street (between Greene and Mercer Streets); (212) 343-1114
ATMOSPHERE Just musty enough to be convincing.
SERVICE Casual, friendly and knowledgeable.
PRICES Bobcat toe bone, $3; fruit bat mounted in frame, $149; 68-inch-tall model of a human skeleton, $425; framed collection of Peruvian dayfly moths, $795; model skeleton of Smilodon californicus, or saber-toothed cat, $11,100.
AVOID The Crick-ettes (with sour cream and onion flavoring).