Nick Cave's equine Soundsuits amble along. (Photo: Matthew Kassel)

It’s kind of wonderful that Nick Cave’s art—like the work of Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak—is so accessible to children and adults alike. And it’s the reason, one might imagine, why Mr. Cave was chosen to present his wild and whimsical work in Grand Central Terminal as part of the building’s centennial celebration.

Mr. Cave’s “Heard NY,” a public art performance that ran twice daily last week, featured 30 horses frolicking through Vanderbilt Hall. The horses weren’t real, as some children who showed up had been led to believe; they were costumes—or Soundsuits, as Mr. Cave (not to be confused with the Australian singer-songwriter, who performed at the Beacon Theatre over the weekend) calls them. Each fit two people.

The horses were decorated with colorful strands of raffia, which rustled softy. They shuffled about as a harpist plucked out lilting notes, kicking out their legs, stomping their feet, shaking their behinds, bowing to the crowd and nuzzling up to the children. When a hand drummer began pounding out a beat, the people inside the horses, students from The Ailey School, separated and broke out into a planned dance routine; half of the dancers looked like Mardi Gras Indians with horse heads as they lumbered about, while the rest, covered entirely in raffia, resembled a small army of Cousin Itts run amok.

“It’s a choreography of movement, of people and of sound, which in some ways mimics the already existing activity of the station itself,” said Nato Thompson, the chief curator at Creative Time, which commissioned Mr. Cave’s project in association with MTA Arts for Transit. “I love when it’s unexpected, when it’s just like this ‘What’s going on here?’ Kind of like when you’re in the subway and people are doing the breakdancing.”

At the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts the Friday before the “Heard NY” premiere, Mr. Cave, who is based in Chicago, explained how he came up with the horse costumes, which were originally shown about a year ago at the University of North Texas.

“As a kid, how did you create images?” he mused. “And how did you identify with characters?”

Mr. Cave told the Transom that he looked at early puppetry for ideas. Was Dr. Seuss an inspiration, we wondered? Yes, he said, and Haitian and West African dress. George Clinton, too, he added.

Mr. Cave made his first Soundsuit in 1992 in the wake of the Rodney King beating, which deeply disturbed him. His costumes are made of discarded materials; he spends a lot of time in flea markets and secondhand stores looking for items that “have a pulse,” as he put it.

“What does it feel like to be discarded?” he asked. The suits are big—they tower over you—and mask any signs of race, gender, age or class. Their anonymity can be quite terrifying, though Mr. Cave said that children are not usually afraid of them.

It was hard to find any somber traces in the “Heard NY” performances we saw. People snapped photos with their iPhones as a fugue of oohs and ahhs filled the room. Children gasped, reaching out to touch the horses as if at a petting zoo.

“She wants to see it again,” one mother said, pulling her daughter away from the crowd after the first performance at 11 a.m. on Tuesday.

Near the exit, a boy asked his parents, “Where are we going?” It was clear from the tone of his voice that he wanted to stay for the second routine, three hours later. That’s when we found Mr. Cave, who was quietly hanging out on the sidelines. We asked him if the performances had been meeting his expectations. They were, he said.

“As the days go by,” he explained, “the dancers get more accustomed to the routine.”

Mr. Cave seemed reserved—perhaps it was the nerves of an artist on display—but when we told him how much the kids seemed to be loving his creations, his eyes widened.

“Oh, my God,” he said, grabbing our arm with delight.

Fresh Off the Boat

Eddie Huang

(Spiegel & Grau, 288 pp., $26)

Eddie Huang’s entertaining memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, contains what will probably turn out to be the top backhanded compliment of 2013. It comes near the end of the book, when the BaoHaus chef appears on the Food Network’s Ultimate Recipe Showdown. He’s a little sauced, and he’s already run out of the taping to use the john, to the horror of the show’s producers. He loses the competition, but chef Guy Fieri, the anti-Huang, tells him to keep cooking.

Mr. Huang writes, “Despite the fact that Tony Bourdain and I both think Guy Fieri looks like a rodeo clown, I have to say, he played a part in encouraging me to do this. I can’t cosign Tex-Mex sushi or wearing your sunglasses backward, but one time ... he got it right. So, as I say this with a trashcan under my head in case vomit involuntarily spews out of my eyes, ‘Thank you, Guy Fieri.’”

The book traces Mr. Huang’s rise from the child of an “off the boat” Taiwanese family to a successful chef whose pork belly is coveted by foodies. But it’s worth reading for the “Ten Beef Noodle Soup Commandments” alone. —Michael H. Miller

My Brother’s Book

Maurice Sendak

(Harper Collins, 32 pp., $18.95)

When Jack Sendak died in the winter of 1995 from a brief seasonal illness, he became the subject of what was to be his brother’s final work. Maurice Sendak’s My Brother’s Book is an honest depiction of the author’s desire to be reunited with his “snowghost,” the brother who encouraged him to start drawing in the first place.

The story is set in cold Bohemia, the first of several references to A Winter’s Tale, on the fifth anniversary of the event that “heaved the iron earth in two.” Guy, the protagonist, is longing to see his brother Jack. Mr. Sendak, who died last year, then drops Guy into the arms of a Great White Bear that threatens to hug him out of breath, characteristically expressing the author’s feeling of love as an affliction that is out of his control. Finally, through the suggestion of a riddle—“a sad riddle is best for me”—Guy is flung in the direction of his brother again.

Mr. Sendak’s book draws heavily on autobiography. He references the month Jack died, (“In February it will be/My snowghost’s anniversary) and the cause of his death (“A boy in winter fell deep in ice”). But he also remains wonderfully visionary. The book and its William Blake-esque illustrations serve as a fine epitaph. It is a sharp, sad, personal account of life after death. —Henry Krempels

Richards.

British GQ gave Keith Richards its "writer of the year" award for his autobiography Life. The award was presented to Mr. Richards by Johnny Depp, whereupon Mr. Richards disclosed that Life was being made into a film. This is funny because there really is only one actor who might be qualified to portray Keith Richards in a film. Also Keith Richards looks so tan and healthy!

Add Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections to the list of novels by New York writers currently being fashioned into a series for HBO. What kind of series (mini?) is as yet unclear, but Noah Baumbach has reportedly signed on to direct.

Keith Gessen's play by play of the creation of his n+1 co-editor Chad Harbach's new novel, The Art of Fielding (out today), is in the print edition of the October issue of Vanity Fair. An expanded 17,000-word version is also available as a $1.99 e-book, where publishing gets glamorous Vanity Fair treatment: "In this e-book of sweeping scope and fascinating, behind-the-scenes detail, Gessen pulls back the curtain on the insular, fiercely political, and cutthroat literary world of Manhattan—a place where the 'Big Six' publishing houses, owned by multinational conglomerates, reign supreme, while smaller houses are left to fend for themselves."

At The Paris Review, Maurice Sendak speaks about the publication of his first book since 1981, Bumble-Ardy.

The
topic of benefactors encouraging and, at times, shaping culture can encompass a myriad of fascinating and often knotty tangents. Chief among them for this exhibition are, as the title makes plain, ethnicity, religion and gender:
Throughout the years examined here (roughly from the late 18th to the early 20th century), Jewish women were, almost by definition, doubly disenfranchised.
Politics—whether predicated upon the Enlightenment, National Socialism or Bohemia—is also a component of the mix. Art, in all of its variety, is in there, too. Combine all of that with a geographical purview that zips from Berlin to London to Milan to Paris to Manhattan, and you have a show that has bitten off a lot to chew.

How
well it chews is another matter. History can be clarified with startling effectiveness by a museum exhibition, but the rat-a-tat-tat cadence of The Power of Conversation will leave visitors hankering for a sense of bearing. How does a survey provide for personalities as audacious as Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Auguste Rodin and Margherita Sarfatti—an art critic who was Mussolini’s mistress and a co-architect of Fascism—or artists as significant as Thomas Mann, Gustav Klimt, Medardo Rosso and Walter Sickert? By glancing upon them with efficient haste, that’s how.

Additionally,
there’s an assortment of medals, letters, rare books, manuscripts, fabrics, photographs and films: a lot of stuff, artfully over-arranged. The installation will not go down in history as a model of underkill.

The
main impetus for my attending The Power of Conversation was the promise of paintings by Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). In that respect, the Jewish Museum delivers. Stettheimer, a cult favorite whose stylish, cartoon-like paintings are an acerbic form of autobiography, was a grand, big-city eccentric. Along with sisters Ettie and Carrie, Stettheimer hosted salons in her West 76th Street home, where the likes of the great American sculptor Elie Nadelman, the great American art critic Henry McBride and the great trans-Atlantic gadfly Marcel Duchamp hobbed and nobbed.

Of
the 11 Stettheimer paintings on view, you’ll find one of her worst, Self-Portrait (1915-16); one of her wittiest, Soirée (1917-19); and Portrait of My Sister Ettie Stettheimer (1923), a picture in which intensity is inseparable from ridiculousness.

Who
knew that a Christmas tree could simultaneously appear as an agent of the Apocalypse and an emblem of self-involvement? Stettheimer did, and it’s to her credit that she makes its power felt either way. The Stettheimer room alone makes a visit worthwhile.

Otherwise,
the exhibition feels like an addendum to its accompanying catalog. There, you get a better sense of how the social gatherings put into motion by the various Jewish women made for milieus heady with artistic ferment. The audio guide, with its recordings of actors interpreting texts by participants in the various salons, provides some amusing bits of useless information. (Did you know that Picasso had a “whinnying laugh”?) Even so, the narrator’s voice is the audio guide’s biggest selling point: It’s the only chance most of us will get at having Isabella Rossellini whispering in our ear.

The Power of Conversation:
Jewish Women and Their Salons is
at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, until July 10.

Tame
Things

Aesthetically
speaking, there’s little to be gained from direct experience with Maurice Sendak’s drawings, sketches and watercolors, as seen in the exhibition Wild Things: The Art of Maurice Sendak, also at the Jewish Museum. That’s not a condemnation. Mr. Sendak’s skills as an illustrator are justly celebrated; few artists bring to the imagination such lilt and heft. Rather, it’s a commendation on his knowing what is the proper—one wants to say exact—medium for his art.

A
popular artist in the best sense of the term, Mr. Sendak has a gift inherently geared to the age of mechanical reproduction. Storybooks like In the Night Kitchen, Zlateh the Goat or (my favorite) What Do You Do, Dear? gain not a little of their authority through mass production and, as its coefficient, democratic goodwill. The actual pictures, while masterful, are strangely nonexistent on the page; they never connect as material objects. Mr. Sendak’s touch operates under the assumption that magic begins on the drawing board but thrives out there.

The
assumption, in this case, is the truth. Go to the Jewish Museum and reacquaint yourself with Mr. Sendak’s rich and indelible cast of characters: enjoy romping with Max, making chicken soup with Rosie and hissing at Brundibar. Be diverted by the costumes and sets designed for the theater by the artist himself. But head to the local library if you want Mr. Sendak to really send you.

Wild Things: The Art of
Maurice Sendak is at the
Jewish Museum until Aug. 14.

"This is Mel Birnkrant," she said. "He collects Mickey Mouse."

A burly man in his early 60's was seated solidly in an armchair on the porch. He had a large, round balding head and a cool, spacey gaze. He seemed big and scary, but also childlike.

I introduced myself and wangled his phone number, and 10 days later I lifted the giant iron knocker on the door of what looked to be a converted schoolhouse.

Mr. Birnkrant let me in and up some steps to a large dim room with very high ceilings. The room was filled floor to ceiling with Mickey Mouse sculptures, dolls, toys and other images. There were cases filled with porcelain figurines arranged in a circus, there were giant carved carousel Mickeys hanging off the rafters, and there were German posters of Mickey Maus on the wall.

Now and then I made out other comic characters. Felix, Horace Horsecollar, Punch and Judy. But this was Mickey's kingdom.

My vision was soon blurred. Mr. Birnkrant watched me a little clinically, as though I had dropped acid and he was reporting the results. I asked Mr. Birnkrant how many objects were in the room.

He grimaced. "I have no idea. There are idiotic collectors who count. I don't."

I could see that the collection went on and on through the house. And many of the pieces were stunning, like a wooden Popeye bent over in a homoerotic pose. It felt like being in a Bergman movie, a richly detailed fantasy of lost beauty.

Mr. Birnkrant said that the figures were from the heyday of the comic character, beginning at the turn of the century with the Yellow Kid in Pulitzer's New York World and culminating with the Second World War, when suddenly the characters became lifelike and lost their geometric simplicity.

"I'm fascinated by the life force in all these objects," he said. "Mickey is a pure abstract symbol, with nothing realistic about it. The eyes aren't eyes, the nose isn't a nose. In his best form, he's a series of balls, but it says to the entire world I'm alive , and a newborn baby will respond to it. If you try to make it more realistic, it dies. Madame Tussaud's wax works–that is the essence of death."

I asked where it had all begun, and he led me to a case containing an iron Mickey bank he had seen in the Paris flea market in the 1950's. Mr. Birnkrant was then a struggling artist, and he didn't understand how the toy had such power over him. So much of the Mickey bank was wrong–square shoulders and sharp elbows and a long, sharp nose–but its being wrong was all the better. The bank's designer had been drawn to Mickey's form in an instinctual way, and used Mickey to convey an enduring message, of delight and strength.

After the bank, Mr. Birnkrant said, his purpose in life had been to make enough money that he never had to pass up a beautiful piece. He has made his living as a toy designer (best known for a doll called Baby Face).

We sat on the couch.

"I'm a curator of a museum of icons, without necessarily being a devout believer in the doctrine," he said.

"What doctrine?" I said.

"Oh–the stories," he said. "The personalities. Mickey Mouse only interests me as three circles. Something you can draw with a quarter and two dimes. I can't stand his little voice. Most Mickey Mouse collectors love goddamn Mickey Mouse. I love three circles and the fact that it looks alive."

Mr. Birnkrant's wife Eunice brought me a tuna fish sandwich. An hour later, I stumbled out into the sunlight.

Over the next few weeks, I tried to figure out how for real Mr. Birnkrant was and called around among collectors. Noel Barrett, the ponytailed auctioneer who is a star of PBS's hit show Antiques Roadshow , said, "Mel's collection boggled my mind 20 years ago and reboggles it every time I visit, it is such a significant representation of one of the major cultural themes of American life." Carl Lobel, a Vermont dealer in comic characters, told me, "What makes his collection unique is that it's driven by an appreciation of the art of the object, and not its value or collectibility." "He's like an artist," said Bernard Shine, a Los Angeles dealer. "To see his collection tossed to the wind would be a crime against humanity. Like slashing a Van Gogh."

"As far as I'm concerned, it's the most glorious collection I've ever seen," said the artist Maurice Sendak, himself a Mickey collector. "What Lourdes is to Bernadette [the sainted shepherd girl who discovered the grotto] is the Mickey collection to Mel Birnkrant. And he knows every piece in the world, he's like the Mickey god, looking down from the heavens …"

Mr. Sendak collects Mickeys right alongside other inspirations, Melville first editions and Mozart letters.

I asked him what Mickey meant, and Mr. Sendak described Mickey as a spiritual totem, connected to the creative passion deep in him, a little tinker-toy machine of creativity he had discovered in his gut when he was a boy in the 30's in Brooklyn, a fragile toy that, nearly 70 years later, he hopes will continue to whir away inside him.

Few artists who visit his Connecticut studio understand the connection between Mickey and creativity, Mr. Sendak said, but Mr. Birnkrant does.

I went back to Mr. Birnkrant's mysterious house. This time Eunice Birnkrant made chili, and I asked him about his childhood.

He had grown up in Detroit after the war, in the most conventional, humdrum era.

"The going thing was conformity, and I just wanted to be ordinary. But I had three strikes against me. I was normal till 5, but my parents fattened me up and I became a 260-pound Baby Huey. Still in grade school, seventh grade, I was 6'4", 260 pounds. Bigger than anything in the school, child or teacher, too. I used to slouch to look shorter. I've spent my life trying to get away from attention–"

He looked around at the collection.

"This is me, but it's not me. I'm hiding. They're supposed to be operating on their own, but I pull the strings."

The two other ways that Mr. Birnkrant couldn't be normal was that he was rich (till his father's real estate empire went bust) and Jewish.

"I despised my mother and father's lifestyle. It was the bane of my existence. I wanted to have values that were nothing to do with financial matters."

Early in his childhood, Mr. Birnkrant had visions of another world, indeed the world he and I were now sitting in. The first time was when he went to the circus. As the troupe walked around the tent, he became fixated on two figures: a fat lady (actually a clown in pads) and an Uncle Sam on stilts. They terrified him and enchanted him, and for weeks after he believed that those grotesque figures would come down the sidewalk of his Dick-and-Jane neighborhood, starting in the distance as tiny dots. For he knew that their world was far more exciting than the tedium of middle-class life.

Then his father acquired an antique chair of an Egyptian design, with dogs' heads and human feet.

"It was so terrifying, and my parents popped it right on the landing. I would never touch it, but it would appear repeatedly in my nightmares. It would try to get me, but the back legs were going one way and the front legs were going forward and it couldn't move. Then it would figure it out, that the back feet had to run backwards, and it would take off like a cannon. And I always woke up right then."

One day Mr. Birnkrant's mother dropped his Teddy bear–to which he was so devoted that he carried it to restaurants and fed it food under the table–on the chair. Mr. Birnkrant never touched the bear again.

As he grew older, his parents spoiled him with anything he wanted, and he began making things. Erector sets. Models of Boulder Dam. Demons' heads. Christmas seal images. His parents indulged him when he said that Hanukkah was just a poor man's Christmas, so let's only celebrate the real thing; and when Temple Beth-El switched its religious class to Sunday from Saturday, Mr. Birnkrant begged off that as well. Sunday morning was reserved for Comic Weekly Man , a radio show in which a man read the funnies and you read along. "They said O.K.–they let me get away with anything."

Mr. Birnkrant was something of a little monster. When his father taunted him, "How does it feel to be rich?" Mr. Birnkrant let loose with a prophetic monologue. He pointed out that J.L. Hudson had just built the Northland shopping center, and the shopping center was going to kill off the chain stores his father had built–and soon it did.

"I thought Northland was wonderful," Mr. Birnkrant mused. "They had a concrete hippopotamus."

Mr. Birnkrant's father was a secretly creative man whose form was Cadillacs. He ordered them in the wildest colors–black and yellow, lavender and white.

"He would feel that he had created that car. I used to despise the whole thing and put it down. Of course, today I think it's charming."

After Labor Day my mother came to visit, and I finagled an invitation to Mr. Birnkrant's house, and Mrs. Birnkrant made me tea and my mom walked around a little stunned, remembering images from her own youth, the Brownies.

Mr. Birnkrant watched her in his detached, somewhat perplexed way, and the next week, when I went back to Mr. Birnkrant's on my own, he fixed me with his cool look.

"Your mother reminds me a lot of Mae Questell," he said.

"Who is May Questell?"

"You know who May Questell is!" he said. "The actress. The neighbor in Funny Girl . Woody Allen's mother [in New York Stories ]. The voice of Betty Boop."

We went over to a Betty Boop case. There was a photograph of Max Fleischer, the Jewish Disney, kissing a little Betty Boop, and several Betty dolls. They had daring fleshy thighs and flouncy dresses whose flounces seemed a little phallic.

We sat back down on the couch, and I asked Mr. Birnkrant why he had agreed to let me visit in the first place.

He was secretive, he said, because some visitors left and got into the collection game themselves. They became Frankenstein monsters who competed with him for objects and drove up the prices. (Mr. Birnkrant declines to talk about values.)

Now that world was ending. The large collections were formed. The nostalgic collectors amassing images of their childhood had died off. And Mr. Birnkrant had to start thinking about what would happen to his collection. He felt responsibility, to find some institution to preserve it. The collection had a life of its own; it ought to be maintained, even publicized.

I looked around the room, and as I did on every visit, I saw things I hadn't seen before. A ferocious Mickey in a biplane with teeth and a giant, licking red tongue. A Clarabelle Cow face made up of a bunch of circles.

Mr. Birnkrant said, "You know, this might sound crazy, but these objects together remind me of U.F.O. sightings. There's never been a totally definitive sighting where the flying saucer comes down and a Martian gets out and says, 'Take me to the White House.' But there are so many consistent and related sightings that you have to think there's something out there. Well, when you see these together, it's the same thing. They communicate to each other and to you, and they say, 'Hey, I'm alive. I belong to a world where inanimate objects really do exist.'"

I went into the kitchen, and Mrs. Birnkrant gave me a giant slab of noodle pudding to take home for breakfast. Out the back of the kitchen, I could see a strange ocher chair with dogs' heads and human feet.

It was obviously the monstrous chair from Mr. Birnkrant's childhood. Mr. Birnkrant said that when his mother sold off all her possessions, she told him he could have one thing from the house. "And I chose that goddamn chair."

He sat down in it. For a moment I thought he would turn into fairy dust, but he was gray and solid as ever, and very powerful.

"This is Mel Birnkrant," she said. "He collects Mickey Mouse."

A burly man in his early 60's was seated solidly in an armchair on the porch. He had a large, round balding head and a cool, spacey gaze. He seemed big and scary, but also childlike.

I introduced myself and wangled his phone number, and 10 days later I lifted the giant iron knocker on the door of what looked to be a converted schoolhouse.

Mr. Birnkrant let me in and up some steps to a large dim room with very high ceilings. The room was filled floor to ceiling with Mickey Mouse sculptures, dolls, toys and other images. There were cases filled with porcelain figurines arranged in a circus, there were giant carved carousel Mickeys hanging off the rafters, and there were German posters of Mickey Maus on the wall.

Now and then I made out other comic characters. Felix, Horace Horsecollar, Punch and Judy. But this was Mickey's kingdom.

My vision was soon blurred. Mr. Birnkrant watched me a little clinically, as though I had dropped acid and he was reporting the results. I asked Mr. Birnkrant how many objects were in the room.

He grimaced. "I have no idea. There are idiotic collectors who count. I don't."

I could see that the collection went on and on through the house. And many of the pieces were stunning, like a wooden Popeye bent over in a homoerotic pose. It felt like being in a Bergman movie, a richly detailed fantasy of lost beauty.

Mr. Birnkrant said that the figures were from the heyday of the comic character, beginning at the turn of the century with the Yellow Kid in Pulitzer's New York World and culminating with the Second World War, when suddenly the characters became lifelike and lost their geometric simplicity.

"I'm fascinated by the life force in all these objects," he said. "Mickey is a pure abstract symbol, with nothing realistic about it. The eyes aren't eyes, the nose isn't a nose. In his best form, he's a series of balls, but it says to the entire world I'm alive , and a newborn baby will respond to it. If you try to make it more realistic, it dies. Madame Tussaud's wax works–that is the essence of death."

I asked where it had all begun, and he led me to a case containing an iron Mickey bank he had seen in the Paris flea market in the 1950's. Mr. Birnkrant was then a struggling artist, and he didn't understand how the toy had such power over him. So much of the Mickey bank was wrong–square shoulders and sharp elbows and a long, sharp nose–but its being wrong was all the better. The bank's designer had been drawn to Mickey's form in an instinctual way, and used Mickey to convey an enduring message, of delight and strength.

After the bank, Mr. Birnkrant said, his purpose in life had been to make enough money that he never had to pass up a beautiful piece. He has made his living as a toy designer (best known for a doll called Baby Face).

We sat on the couch.

"I'm a curator of a museum of icons, without necessarily being a devout believer in the doctrine," he said.

"What doctrine?" I said.

"Oh–the stories," he said. "The personalities. Mickey Mouse only interests me as three circles. Something you can draw with a quarter and two dimes. I can't stand his little voice. Most Mickey Mouse collectors love goddamn Mickey Mouse. I love three circles and the fact that it looks alive."

Mr. Birnkrant's wife Eunice brought me a tuna fish sandwich. An hour later, I stumbled out into the sunlight.

Over the next few weeks, I tried to figure out how for real Mr. Birnkrant was and called around among collectors. Noel Barrett, the ponytailed auctioneer who is a star of PBS's hit show Antiques Roadshow , said, "Mel's collection boggled my mind 20 years ago and reboggles it every time I visit, it is such a significant representation of one of the major cultural themes of American life." Carl Lobel, a Vermont dealer in comic characters, told me, "What makes his collection unique is that it's driven by an appreciation of the art of the object, and not its value or collectibility." "He's like an artist," said Bernard Shine, a Los Angeles dealer. "To see his collection tossed to the wind would be a crime against humanity. Like slashing a Van Gogh."

"As far as I'm concerned, it's the most glorious collection I've ever seen," said the artist Maurice Sendak, himself a Mickey collector. "What Lourdes is to Bernadette [the sainted shepherd girl who discovered the grotto] is the Mickey collection to Mel Birnkrant. And he knows every piece in the world, he's like the Mickey god, looking down from the heavens …"

Mr. Sendak collects Mickeys right alongside other inspirations, Melville first editions and Mozart letters.

I asked him what Mickey meant, and Mr. Sendak described Mickey as a spiritual totem, connected to the creative passion deep in him, a little tinker-toy machine of creativity he had discovered in his gut when he was a boy in the 30's in Brooklyn, a fragile toy that, nearly 70 years later, he hopes will continue to whir away inside him.

Few artists who visit his Connecticut studio understand the connection between Mickey and creativity, Mr. Sendak said, but Mr. Birnkrant does.

I went back to Mr. Birnkrant's mysterious house. This time Eunice Birnkrant made chili, and I asked him about his childhood.

He had grown up in Detroit after the war, in the most conventional, humdrum era.

"The going thing was conformity, and I just wanted to be ordinary. But I had three strikes against me. I was normal till 5, but my parents fattened me up and I became a 260-pound Baby Huey. Still in grade school, seventh grade, I was 6'4", 260 pounds. Bigger than anything in the school, child or teacher, too. I used to slouch to look shorter. I've spent my life trying to get away from attention–"

He looked around at the collection.

"This is me, but it's not me. I'm hiding. They're supposed to be operating on their own, but I pull the strings."

The two other ways that Mr. Birnkrant couldn't be normal was that he was rich (till his father's real estate empire went bust) and Jewish.

"I despised my mother and father's lifestyle. It was the bane of my existence. I wanted to have values that were nothing to do with financial matters."

Early in his childhood, Mr. Birnkrant had visions of another world, indeed the world he and I were now sitting in. The first time was when he went to the circus. As the troupe walked around the tent, he became fixated on two figures: a fat lady (actually a clown in pads) and an Uncle Sam on stilts. They terrified him and enchanted him, and for weeks after he believed that those grotesque figures would come down the sidewalk of his Dick-and-Jane neighborhood, starting in the distance as tiny dots. For he knew that their world was far more exciting than the tedium of middle-class life.

Then his father acquired an antique chair of an Egyptian design, with dogs' heads and human feet.

"It was so terrifying, and my parents popped it right on the landing. I would never touch it, but it would appear repeatedly in my nightmares. It would try to get me, but the back legs were going one way and the front legs were going forward and it couldn't move. Then it would figure it out, that the back feet had to run backwards, and it would take off like a cannon. And I always woke up right then."

One day Mr. Birnkrant's mother dropped his Teddy bear–to which he was so devoted that he carried it to restaurants and fed it food under the table–on the chair. Mr. Birnkrant never touched the bear again.

As he grew older, his parents spoiled him with anything he wanted, and he began making things. Erector sets. Models of Boulder Dam. Demons' heads. Christmas seal images. His parents indulged him when he said that Hanukkah was just a poor man's Christmas, so let's only celebrate the real thing; and when Temple Beth-El switched its religious class to Sunday from Saturday, Mr. Birnkrant begged off that as well. Sunday morning was reserved for Comic Weekly Man , a radio show in which a man read the funnies and you read along. "They said O.K.–they let me get away with anything."

Mr. Birnkrant was something of a little monster. When his father taunted him, "How does it feel to be rich?" Mr. Birnkrant let loose with a prophetic monologue. He pointed out that J.L. Hudson had just built the Northland shopping center, and the shopping center was going to kill off the chain stores his father had built–and soon it did.

"I thought Northland was wonderful," Mr. Birnkrant mused. "They had a concrete hippopotamus."

Mr. Birnkrant's father was a secretly creative man whose form was Cadillacs. He ordered them in the wildest colors–black and yellow, lavender and white.

"He would feel that he had created that car. I used to despise the whole thing and put it down. Of course, today I think it's charming."

After Labor Day my mother came to visit, and I finagled an invitation to Mr. Birnkrant's house, and Mrs. Birnkrant made me tea and my mom walked around a little stunned, remembering images from her own youth, the Brownies.

Mr. Birnkrant watched her in his detached, somewhat perplexed way, and the next week, when I went back to Mr. Birnkrant's on my own, he fixed me with his cool look.

"Your mother reminds me a lot of Mae Questell," he said.

"Who is May Questell?"

"You know who May Questell is!" he said. "The actress. The neighbor in Funny Girl . Woody Allen's mother [in New York Stories ]. The voice of Betty Boop."

We went over to a Betty Boop case. There was a photograph of Max Fleischer, the Jewish Disney, kissing a little Betty Boop, and several Betty dolls. They had daring fleshy thighs and flouncy dresses whose flounces seemed a little phallic.

We sat back down on the couch, and I asked Mr. Birnkrant why he had agreed to let me visit in the first place.

He was secretive, he said, because some visitors left and got into the collection game themselves. They became Frankenstein monsters who competed with him for objects and drove up the prices. (Mr. Birnkrant declines to talk about values.)

Now that world was ending. The large collections were formed. The nostalgic collectors amassing images of their childhood had died off. And Mr. Birnkrant had to start thinking about what would happen to his collection. He felt responsibility, to find some institution to preserve it. The collection had a life of its own; it ought to be maintained, even publicized.

I looked around the room, and as I did on every visit, I saw things I hadn't seen before. A ferocious Mickey in a biplane with teeth and a giant, licking red tongue. A Clarabelle Cow face made up of a bunch of circles.

Mr. Birnkrant said, "You know, this might sound crazy, but these objects together remind me of U.F.O. sightings. There's never been a totally definitive sighting where the flying saucer comes down and a Martian gets out and says, 'Take me to the White House.' But there are so many consistent and related sightings that you have to think there's something out there. Well, when you see these together, it's the same thing. They communicate to each other and to you, and they say, 'Hey, I'm alive. I belong to a world where inanimate objects really do exist.'"

I went into the kitchen, and Mrs. Birnkrant gave me a giant slab of noodle pudding to take home for breakfast. Out the back of the kitchen, I could see a strange ocher chair with dogs' heads and human feet.

It was obviously the monstrous chair from Mr. Birnkrant's childhood. Mr. Birnkrant said that when his mother sold off all her possessions, she told him he could have one thing from the house. "And I chose that goddamn chair."

He sat down in it. For a moment I thought he would turn into fairy dust, but he was gray and solid as ever, and very powerful.