The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Playing jazz with the U.S. flag
Robert Carley is trying to liberate my flag.
“They should be framed,” suggests Carley, who has just released “Liberated: Freed from the Flagpole. The Metamorphosis of the Flag Since 9/11,” an art book of photographs he’s taken in the aftermath of That Day.
We’re talking about copies I saved of paper flags we published in the newspaper a score of years ago. After 9/11, flags vanished from hardware store shelves. Newspaper readers taped the paper ones in windows in a declaration of solidarity.
The arrival of the digital age means this won’t happen again. I was the Stamford Advocate’s city editor on 9/11, scrambling that morning to publish what became our final Extra edition, four pages we distributed for free, notably to Metro-North passengers finally escaping home from a news void as wireless signals were disrupted along with the rest of our lives.
I framed the Extra, but there has always been something about the paper flags that sums up the post-9/11 mood. Like life itself, they were ephemeral.
Carley noticed the rise of creative versions of the American flag back then, when he was living in Greenwich and working in Stamford, starting with the likes of a child’s LEGO creation in a New Canaan toy store.
“After 9/11 all the rules ended,” he reflects from his front porch in Darien. “There’s flag etiquette, but no one pays attention to it.”
(I do, to considerable mocking from my wife.)
Old Glory was rebooted by Americans. His book documents alternative flag imagery from around the nation, as well as his own creations. Despite its grim origins, it is a demonstration of the playful, creative American spirit. Carley’s enthusiasm and attention to detail would make him the dream guest for Dr. Sheldon Cooper’s “Fun with Flags” podcast on “The Big Bang Theory.” The man loves a pun. Mention of flag stamps inspires “America wasn’t licked after 9/11.” A van is “a vanguard of patriotism.” A stack of bales in Newtown was like “finding a needle in a haystack!” A Derby lawn is “a real grass act!”
He’s photographed homes painted as flags (starting with one in Kent), as well as cars (including a ’66 Pontiac Bonneville in Darien and a ’74 VW bus in Fairfield), silos, corn, hydrants, planes, boats, tanks, garbage trucks (from Norwalk, bearing the words “Bin Laden’s new Home” above the compacter), and ... people.
Carley is excited to reveal that final canvas when I inquire about tattoos. He flips to pages 66-67 to spotlight Sam, a native of Tonga whose entire face is tattooed with a vertical flag surrounded by phrases such as “America To Me is Heaven” (on his chin).
He can’t resist: “His patriotism is not skin deep.”
I could argue that having the stars over the left eye instead of the right is a violation of flag etiquette, but I don’t think the framers of the U.S. Flag Code had Sam in mind.
The real thread through Carley’s book isn’t the flags, but the people who display them. America is, after all, the cradle of jazz, and seeing Betsy Ross’ original artwork reinterpreted is in that spirit.
His book introduces us to people such as Josephine “the Jug Lady,” who kept trucks and kids off her lawn by cloaking it with a flag display of a thousand milk and kitty litter jugs. Or Bubba, in Iowa, who painted a 50-ton rock with the flag, the Twin Towers, Pentagon and an eagle.
As our reporters have documented Carley’s pursuits over the years, stories have reported a rising number of states he’s visited for photos. He’s now at 45. I’m curious which stars on the flag he’s still missing. Alaska, Hawaii and New Mexico are reasonable. I’m shocked when he mentions California.
“California? Please tell me the other one isn’t New Jersey,” I bellow.
California is expensive, he explains. And yes, Jersey is well represented in the book. But he says he’ll need a map to remember the missing state (it turns out to be Nevada). And he has no plans to chase American flags in other countries (“I’ve got enough to cover here”).
Carley has become a nontraditional journalist in tracking sources, crisscrossing the country by car while consuming Big Macs for personal fuel. In the meantime, he nourished his creative side at home by transforming the likes of badminton birdies and cardboard milk containers into flag tributes. His favorite is a wall of recycled VHS tapes (“I felt like a kid doing that”), which seems to include the entire Disney vault.
His side gig is working as a background actor, primarily on New York location shoots, making cameos in “Blue Bloods,” Jessica Jones,” “Gotham” “Gossip Girl” and many more. He typically wears a suit to portray a lawyer, businessman or doctor.
Of course, “I’ve never played an artist.”
He gleefully shares stories from the set of Adam Sandler’s “Uncut Gems,” only to reveal he’s never seen the 2019 release. Though he’s been doing this for decades, he still sounds like a kid who snuck onto a film lot and got a bit part in an “Avengers” movie (perhaps standing next to the original abstract flag, Captain America).
The work helps pay the bills, and gives him the chance to expand his gallery of caricatures of famous people. He reliably collects photos of himself with these stars of a different stripe. As a bonus, he says, “You get fed very well and then get to see yourself on national television.”
Some of his earliest caricatures appeared in the sports pages of the Advocate when he was a junior at Darien High School 45 years ago. When I tell him I found his name next to a 1976 credit I’ve never seen elsewhere — “Headline by ...” for an illustration of “The Faces of Stamford” — he replies, “I don’t even remember that.”
Since he’s been making headlines for so long, while appearing on screen, it’s surprising to hear Carley reveal he’s shy.
“But this pursuit emboldened me.”
He does not seem shy ... at all, though his longtime friend and assistant, Charles Ras-Allard, who attended Middlesex Middle School and Darien High School with him, confirms this.
That 9/11 lured him out of the background and toward the spotlight seems to parallel the journey of the flag itself. He says, “I think I’m done. I can’t imagine finding anything else unusual or different.”
Carley says this with passion, his voice rising like, well, a flag at dawn. But I can’t believe him. Stopping now would contradict his entire pilgrimage.
The flag will continue to reinvent itself, just like the Americans it represents.