Saturday 31 May 2008

Jesus Goes Shopping

I spent the afternoon yesterday writing content for a website about dips. A few weeks before, the business owner had asked me if I would consider a contra deal - content in exchange for dips. If I could pay my mortgage with food, I told her, I would love to.

Maybe that's the direction we are all headed.

The vision of Adam Grubb, founding editor of EnergyBulletin.net, a site dedicated to the proposition that oil output has peaked and that our current way of life will inevitably change, looked decidedly apocalyptic. His vision was of a suburban wasteland where abandoned McMansions are raided for their copper wiring, where people lose their homes and are forced to live out of cars and destitute communities rely on neighbourhood trading to survive.

Last night we watched What Would Jesus Buy?, a film about Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, who, like missionaries, travel across the US preaching their anti-consumerist values.

You see them trundle through mall after mall, in the days leading up to Christmas, attempting to get their message through to the shopping throngs lining up for their Nintendo Wiis.

"This is why we need to have a crash," PJ says.

This is why we are growing our own vegetables.

Friday 30 May 2008

Blue

I bought this BOOMER bubble gum head at Camberwell Market 12 years ago. 

I love this blue man. 

But who I love more is the man I live with, PJ, who hates the head. 

I told him I would sell it on eBay. But photographing it yesterday in order to list it, I realised I am not ready to part with it.

This is not a question of who I am going to choose, but where to store differences in a house with no storage.

Thursday 29 May 2008

Blog Designed

A few weeks ago I was employed to write a series of short bios of a dozen mid-century furniture designers. One of the many reasons I like being a freelance writer is that I am always researching interesting topics and learning so much along the way, like this for example, about Finnish American designer Eero Saarinen:

The Saarinen household was one where drawing and painting were taken very seriously, and a devotion to quality and professionalism were instilled in Eero at a young age.

One of the lessons he was taught is that each object should be designed in its “next largest context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, environment in a city plan.”
I have kept a diary since I was 11, and am now ready to design my personal writing for this larger global context.

Welcome along on my experiment.