Anyway, I thought it did have some interesting ideas in between. Here are just a few quotes:
“For most people who go on these ritualized scavenger hunts looking for something that they may not know exists, it is a kind of pilgrims’ process through the detritus of the past.”
Ok, so maybe it is not such a dramatic experience, not all the time. Sometimes, you really just want a cheap summer dress because it's suddenly gotten to hot to handle. However, there is definitely a romantic element of pilgrimage involved in taking the trip to the market: the hunt, finding that specific dress, the unexpected, scavenging through piles and piles of... sometimes not the nicest or best smelling items.
In the NY Times article, a vendor says: “You looking for brand new junk?” he huffed. “Go to Bloomingdale’s. Go down to Chinatown. You can get new junk there.”
True. Oftentimes, there's a lot more more junk in the new, the poorly manufactured, cheap-fabric, thirld-world-assembled items whose ads we're being constantly bombarded with. Of course there's everything, good and bad pieces everywhere. But in the flea market, you can get the really good for really cheap... and that's when you score, that's why you undertake the the expedition! At least that's one of my reasons.
“Personal taste needs an urban space for fashion, like a flea market with an element of playfulness and randomness and spontaneity. We’ve got a nostalgia for outmoded, outdated and anachronistic items, especially when they’ve all been replaced by technologies.”
I honestly don't know if young people in the 90s were as obsessed with flea markets as my generation is now. I haven't done my proper research, but its my impression that this is just another trend particular to us, another piece in this nostalgic generation's obsession with vintage (which also makes me question, is it really that irrational to be looking bad? But that will be for another day!)
"And in the process of picking over other people’s junk, they are telling the world something about themselves". I hate these lines. I hate corny journalism/writing like this. I say this, yet my definition of 'alone time' usually means browsing for hours through the little vintage shops around les Halles and Beaubourg waiting for some special item to charm me. Moi... cliché parisien!.
There were two ideas I wanted to write down. The first one is about the concept of curation of personal belongings, and the curatory experience you get in markets. Vendors are curators, but in a larger sense, the consumer experience in general is also a process of curation. And I feel like this experience is especially enhanced in markets.
We all put on the jacket of the art curator when we browse through those endless piles of old photographs and albums, when we look at the hundreds of items in the one-euro pile, and carefully select what will make part of our collection.
And this activity of looking for things, picking, selecting, and most importantly, accummulating brings me to my second idea. It's that of our relationship, or the meaning we give to the things we decide to put around us, collect. This is something I've had to think about a lot for the past three years. It's also something I quite enjoy to talk about.
In fact, I had a brief conversation about this yesterday with Jessica's friend James. He's visiting for a few days, and will be travelling around Europe for about 7 months. So packing smartly, selecting what's essential is crucial in those cases: What will I really need to live in Europe for these 7 months? And then the question to be asked later: What about everything else I haven't used for this time? Does coming back imply that I need those things back, or the opposite?
The article in the NY Times mentioned something that caught my attention. A course taught in the Ontario College of Art and Design called "Stuff". Here's an excerpt of the description:
HUMN 3B92: STUFF: Material Culture and the Meanings of Things by Michale Prokopow
"This course examines the meaning of things, buildings and places and the relationships people establish with them. Interested as much in the methodological questions of how to assess critically the built environment, as in philosophical and aesthetic questions of meaning and significance, whether functional or emotional, that tend to accompany the interactions with "stuff", the course is structured around thematic units. Here, the intention is to interrogate the central, complex and powerful roles that things of all sorts play in daily life."
As for myself, the amount of my "assets" had dramatically decreased since I went to Vancouver for the first time in 2008. I'm at the point now where I've lived in 10sq meter dorms and everything that I own (with a very few exceptions) is contained in that space. Furthermore, the things in those little rooms I've inhabited are continuously subjected to 'purges'. I clean out closets, drawers, photos and posters everytime I have to go back home for the summer, and must fit all my belongings in two black bags once again. Those same two black bags that have come back and forth so much! Big companions.
In Gage, September 08. Packing my stuff to move to my 1st year dorm in Vanier.
then my first meal in my Cite U drom, sitting on top of my bags.
These almost ritualistic purges have always been a big thing in my house. Cleansing, donating what we don't need anymore, cleaning up, letting the old out to welcome the new, letting things flow in and out. Back home, I've been taught that all my life. We're the opposite of hoarders and I've repeated this pattern even more intensely living by myself.
I love to have things circulating in my life, and buying second hand fits well with this whole principle. I buy clothes that have belonged to someone else, when I don't need them anymore I pass them along, leave them at the store and change them for something else, and so the circle goes on... Nice idea, no? It's nice because it satisfies an appetite for change and new things, yet it avoids accummulation of the unnecessary.
I'm cynical enough not to be a vintage-utopianist, but I do think flea market-ing and second hand shopping is a fun way to consume responsibly.
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AAAAANDDDD.... I just spent two hour on this because the pictures wouldn't load. I better go study for my 8am final tomorrow. Ciao.
Cannes pictures coming up later tonight during study breaks.
