" Object fetishism is probably over. "
blisblogger did a thread about this. about how tawdry and grubby the products of the entertainment age look now. all those seedy looking DVDs in Cex, all those tatty record sleeves in music and video exchange. all of it representing a terrible waste, waste of time, waste of materials, waste of potential. tat, all of it, from citizen kane to the backstreet boys. it feels like a distinct historical period now. an awful one.
I dunno, I sort of feel that this can go in two directions... there is definitely the possibility of that happening, of it just being this horrible pile of stuff, tawdry and quotidian, bringing you down tot the ground and then actually pinning you to the floor and holding you a prisoner. Something kind of grey and stolid and impenetrable and literally dark - filling space and blocking light and so on.... but then, it can go the other way. I see people on Facebook and their houses are this big mess of stuff but in a way it's a positive mess, kind of the opposite of the above with glittering piles of random stuff reflecting the light and filling the room like a mirror ball - the feeling that if you wander into this maze you could find some wonderful piece of musical equipment or... or... who knows what? And I don't know what chooses how it works - cos some people have their stuff organised alphabetically and some have it in random piles, but I really don't think that that split is the same as the good bad one.
Oooh a good example of this, would be my friend Dan from Wolf People (
@DannyL knows him for sure and I guess would have been round his house and could back me up on this if he were around) - we stayed with him for a couple of days in summer when we came back from Orkney and passed through London, and his house is really magical and inviting and part of what makes it so nice is the mess of records and books and musical equipment on every surface and loads of guitars and bass guitars on the walls and even a double bass in one room. I guess it helps that it's not like a MASSIVE collection, but just the right amount of stuff everywhere and it mixes in with the wood walls and surfaces and also plants so it feels really kinda organic - you sit down in any comfy chair and stretch out your hands and one will come back with a book in it and you look at the title and think "ooh that looks interesing" or "oh I've wanted to read that for ages" and your other hand has like a toy drum machine in it or something, I dunno.
Now I hope he wouldn't mind me using his house as an example, describing it to a bunch of strangers on the internet like that - but I know he wouldn't cos he's the nicest man in the world and maybe that's why his house is so inviting.... maybe the mess somehow reflects his personality. That's possibility one anyway. Possibility two is even more intriguing in a way cos that is the idea that somehow the way that his various collections have been laid out inside his house is so perfect that it has kind of resonated on to the wavelength of his brainwaves and has rewired them to make him the nicest man in the world... that is to say that his record, book, guitar, synthesiser and plant collections have somehow combined to rewire his personality for the better. When you say it like that it does completely insane... cos obviously it is, but it's no weirder than religion or crystals or whatever.
Personally I reckon the truth is in-between - Dan is a nice guy, makes a nice collection, that makes him feel better and make the collection better, which makes him better and so on, a virtuous circle all based on the "products of the entertainment age"