Collections and Collectors

Fishing Lures?

In my younger adult years, one of the more interesting and educational occupations I had was working in a museum, actually two of them. I had a brief stint doing some communications and database work in one heritage centre, and before that, I worked in a curatorial centre doing conservation and cataloguing of artifacts. From those vocational experiences, I can assert with great certainty that I learned these four things:

1.  I developed a greater sense of awe and respect for the histories of people, and disclosing their stories accurately;
2. I like antique furniture;
3. I greatly dislike using industrial and household polishes and cleaners*;
4. And, coupled along with my schooling in psychology, those jobs made it interesting for me to sometimes use an anthropological perspective in studying the strange ways people like to relate to their household possessions.

 I think that’s why I used some of the brief bit of time I had free this weekend to tour the Collectors’ Show at Prairieland Park.

I remember that my Dad had
one of these novelties,
. . . a pissing whiskey
dispenser. What a treasure!

Straight razors, from a collector who probably
viewed Sweeny Todd a few too many times

I remember and thought about the comment I made in my last entry about people trying to fill voids with shopping, and collecting and hoarding stuff. There are very intelligent and dignified people with an encyclopedic knowledge and keen sense of history and detail, with a sound sense of pride in preserving antiquities. I’m not talking about them; from what I saw at this event, their population was rather small. They were the ones more likely to be selling the stuff than buying it. I totally do not get what the drive is for people to start amassing and keeping huge collections of bizarre and useless things as a serious interest: an oddly focused, yet wasteful, form of consumption. I understand the acquiring of stuff that appreciates in value after a while as an investment, and selling it for some kind of profit, but I fail to see the appeal of using a whole room to store shelf loads and boxes full the same sort of object, be it in theme, quantity, or quality. That kind of collecting, to me, is what I would just call object-specific hoarding. Some of random photos I posted here say it all. I don’t hate or abhor collectors; I’m just saying that I’m not on the same vibe as they are.

Matchbooks and bottlecaps?

Perhaps it’s because I’m not a very sentimental person**, and commemorative things just don’t appeal to me that much. Maybe I just have a different sense of aesthetics. I don’t really covet trophies, or trinkets, or “artifacts”. I don’t own or wear jewelry. I mentioned that I like and appreciate antique furniture, but I’m quite indifferent to owning any. I’m more likely to check out a book about it, which I still wouldn’t bother to keep. Books, or videos, you’d think would be a passable substitute in lieu of actuality collecting stuff, but some people are just hard-wired to possess the actual object. I don’t have a much of what can be construed as an addictive personality, and I’d fit on the low end of percentiles as one who would be prone to having any type of obsessive compulsive disorder. I’d think you’d have to have a blend of all of those sorts of things to have a hardcore philia-complex approaching an object-porn/fetish thing going on.  I saw very little there of what I would consider “valuable”.

Tobacco Tins?

Don't you . . . step on
my blue suede pooh!

That’s the other thing that floors me about collecting things as a hobby: it’s the absurdity of the arbitrary prices and values that some things are appraised at, and the hype and mystique that has to be tagged to it to make it valuable. A piece of dog crap on the sidewalk is a worthless nuisance; a fragment of coprolite*** extracted from the colon of Elvis after his autopsy, presented in a blue suede gift box is probably worth a small fortune.  Who decides the value of this shit (literally, in this example)?

You have got to be kidding me
. . . is this like Toaster Porn?!
Butter me up baby!

My foreign bills

My own history of collecting stuff isn’t really anything that notable. Maybe I did collect more stuff; if so I don't remember it, and didn't prize it enough to keep it with me today. I grew up in a very small house with not a lot of personal space to use, so I never had anything really big in terms of collections. As a child, I liked models, but wasn’t a hardcore collector of them. I mostly collected cassettes and later CDs of my favourite music as a teenager; nothing else really that was in an inordinate scale compared to anything else I had. My subjects of interest were, and continue to be, pretty random; nothing really intense, nor passionately specific. I like the simplicity of uncluttered space; that’s what I missed most growing up. I read a lot of books, but yet my own personal home library is quite small, because I like space and also being frugal . . . I let the public library store all the books I want to read, or I buy them used and re-sell them, all else is digitized as PDF and other ebook formats. I’m not a bibliophile: the kind of person who is fascinated by a book as some kind of totem object rather than having it for its content. I have a much smaller than average DVD collection. The only really weird thing that I admit that I fancy collecting now and then is foreign currency notes, and even that isn’t a big thing for me in terms of quantity, or use of my money, time, and energy.****

I'm doubtful that I'll ever have one of these.

I must say that out of all the crowds at the events I witnessed at Prairieland, the Collectors Show has drawn out the weirdest, most eclectic and eccentric bunch yet so far that I’ve seen there. The weirdest of them, disturbingly yet unsurprisingly, hung around the gun tables and displays. I heard a lot of American accents around there. I overheard things like complaints about how much cheaper this guy could buy so-and-so model of shotgun in Nebraska, and about the comparative legal strictness of purchasing and owning firearms here in Canada. I find that most people who love guns beak off a lot about the right to carry firearms, but sure don’t give much thought about the responsibility involved in owning and using one. The guns themselves didn’t give me the heeby-jeebies, it was the weirdos hanging around them who did. I don’t care much about the issue of gun control per se; I do care about the issue of 'whack-jobs-with-too-much-access-to-guns' control. I didn't want to start taking pictures around some of these crazy-looking buggers: I’m talking about the mean-looking anarchist types who looked like they wore camouflage every day, bikers drooling over the automatic pistols, creepy sociopathic-looking bush-hermits from up in the sticks, and some ultra-conservative redneck assholes who were a little less than tactful in being outspoken with blunt, and blatantly racist opinions in less than politically correct language in such a public place. I detected that it was the smelliest region of the exhibition hall. 

Here are some toy cap guns for the
wackos to go play with instead.

Not with the smell of the gunpowder residue, as one would expect amidst such a massive collection of firearms, but of the stench of great volumes of flatulence wafting throughout the crowd. It was like that had to be done by more than just one person. From all that, it kind of scares me to think that if you’re the type who has no civility or enough manners to care about what comes shooting out of your asshole in public, and cares even less and what comes shooting out of your mouth in terms of bigoted slurs, and angry misanthropic remarks in an open public place, I’d think that you’d be close to having the type of personality that could pick up a gun and shoot it in a public place as indiscriminately as well; that’s bothersome to me if your interest in a gun show isn’t so much for the hunting rifles, or admiring craftsmanship. There were too many kids around the gun tables as well, with their stupid parents who weren’t supervising some of them, making it look like it was as casual as a goddamned trip to the zoo. If has come to be such that there are advisories on movies and video games with simulated violence, do pre-teen children have any business being at a place with real weapons on exhibit? It was also sickening to note that in this one place alone, there looked like there were more guns there than there was available big game in a season in all of Saskatchewan. It was a gross example of wasteful over-marketing of a destructive force. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

beaver stamps

HMCS Saskatoon, in very vivid detail.

There were some model-builders and artists there with some of their stuff. Model-builders and artists are different from collectors, in terms that they actually have a talent with working with great attention to detail in a medium, whereas a collector just merely possesses something possibly created by the model-builders or artists. You don’t have to be talented to be a collector, just obsessive. Collectors, to some degree or extent, render fun or useful things useless. They have the toy, but don’t dare open the box. They have that china that’s reserved for the “special occasion” that somehow hasn’t come yet.

Teak root chairs; it looks like furniture
from a Tim Burton movie.

It wasn’t all bad at the collectors’ show. Another thing that really impressed me was the teak root furniture from Java. It was great to see that there is an effort to use all of a tree and freeing the soil up for other life to take root, rather than abandoning a stump (teak takes a long time to decompose), and halting re-introduction of flora in that bio-space for a long time.

One could observe that in the past few years that there has been a wild onslaught in terms of TV shows about collecting, pawning, auctioning, treasures from trash, picking, appraising, and the transactions surrounding them, that are our ‘reality’ entertainment now. Is it because we have an aging population, and this is the most adventurous thing they’d rather do? Is it because of the long spell of global economic downturn, and everyone is desperately trying to assign a hyper-inflated value to any stupid insignificant thing in their attic? Is it like I mentioned before, another way to protect oneself from existential angst as we neglect other things that a genuinely self-actualizing mind needs to nurture itself?

I say pull out those toys out of the boxes and love them, use your fine china more often; leave your guns in the safe, and enjoy life.

*-I’ve had some extremely bad physical reactions to some products with VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds) in them. Plus, as I learned from the conservator, if you really want to preserve your antique furniture, common commercial furniture wax is not the way to go.

**- I’m sure some would say that more accurately I’m closer to being an apathetic son-of-a-bitch. I don’t care; I don’t feel like arguing with them (ha ha, get it?).

***- Coprolite: a piece of fossilized fecal matter. There’s some trivia for you. What a shame it would be to waste that wonderful museum knowledge I learned, why not use it for illustrative purposes here. Now go use it in a sentence and impress your friends.

****- Again, I sort of do this as an anthropological/demographic study, kind of related to what I already mentioned. The representation of objects, words, art/ design, and people printed on a nation’s currency, a share of its economic energy, is like a strange little snapshot of the things that a culture values (or what that country’s government is trying to project that they value). Saying this now, I now understand the mentality of a philatelist. Postage stamps, by rights, represent the same sorts of things (but I still wouldn’t bother to collect them, my weird money collection habit is enough).