Posts tagged as Consumption
"I have more stuff than I could ever possible use or need."
I've been thinking about the way I buy things, the when and where and why of it all, and how totally dumb most of the purchases (big and small, from gum to Apple products) that I make are. So I'm very into Make It Do, which is about a year of wearing things out, mending things, and buying minimally. (But what about pedicures? That's not in the FAQ!) It's nice that it's not a crusade ("my year without any animal products"!) or a stunt ("my year as a cavewoman"!); it's just a way to pull-back, look at the way we interact with products and see what one learns.
Why Do We Cheerlead the Scandals of Male Infidelity?
Really, you might want to tear yourself away from whatever you're reading about and read this essay on sexuality, privacy, IM relationships, "emotional affairs," the state of cheating and everything else. It asks the question: what is so "primally reassuring in these stories of male infidelity and wronged female virtue"? You know: "These tales of hookers and half-hookers and gold diggers and fame diggers and 'soul mates'-it all presents itself as censure, but the sheer volume of media, the obsessive attention to it, represents a kind of cheering on. 'We really want to believe that powerful men have harems or the equivalent,' as a prominent female West Village writer of 50 put it to me, 'because it's reassuring us that boys will be boys. The alternative is unthinkable.' There is much much more.
Significant Objects
This is pretty cool: Significant Objects is a project from Rob Walker (Buying In) and Joshua Glenn (Taking Things Seriously) wherein writers are paired with a cheap garage sale/thrift shop item chosen by the curators. The writers compose a short story about the item, and the item is put up for auction on eBay. "Invested with new significance by this fiction," write Walker and Glenn, "the object should – according to our hypothesis – acquire not merely subjective but objective value." The contributors list includes a ton of names with which you're probably familiar. How's it going so far? "As of Monday morning, 57 thrift-store objects purchased for a total of $77.07 have sold for $1,851.45," says Walker, noting that the money goes to the authors. Anyway, check it out.
