The Steampunk World

Being the continued explorations of a living steampunk.

The steampunk world is all around us, lying just out of sight, in a continuous thread of steampunk builders and culture that extends from the Victorian era to the present. You'll find no science fiction here: This is real life steampunk.

Friday, November 22, 2002

The ole monthly poker game was at Jeff’s last night, and I won some light-up drink coasters. Jeff is the guy mentioned a few posts back who works for an advertising photography firm. I’m not exactly sure what he does, but then again, nobody is really sure what anybody does unless they work in the same field. So I’m going do my best to describe my understanding of what goes on at his job that results in me coming home from a poker game with light-up drink coasters, but forgive me if I’ve misunderstood any of it.

The first time I asked what Jeff did the answer was “I am a photographer.” Subsequent conversations have revealed that he is involved in the retouching of ad photography, but all that is not only over my head but completely out of my range of experience. I’ve toured the ad firm that Foamy (co-attendee and sponsor at aforementioned poker game) works at, and he showed me the way that the cameras command the movement of the virtual sets he designs and fill them in real-time where the bluescreen is, and I thought the motion-capture suit was really cool, but I’m basically left saying “sweet” and not really understanding any of it. I can appreciate its sweetness without understanding how it works, but I was one of those kids who took everything apart, so I try. I am currently obsessed with the program that runs the elevator in my building, but that’s a story for another post.

Whatever they’re photographing, they get a bunch of it, and then it just goes to waste afterwards. Thus the three gallons of Haagen Dazs he gave away last week. Photographing food sounds really interesting, because there’s a person called a Food Stylist, who is not only a chef but knows ways to make food look its best for the camera- and at a certain point, food is either edible or good-looking, not both. So this guy is applying a torch to a raw chicken to make it look baked, because a baked chicken has had all its fat sizzled away and just isn’t as plump. Then he heats up a shish-kabob skewer and uses it to make grill marks, or whatever other amazing tricks of the trade are required to make the food on display look good at any cost- which I think is great because it’s sort of a betrayal of his training as a chef. I compared it to a mortician, who is a sort of death counselor, but on the back end is trying to make a dead person look as alive as possible using whatever trick necessary. The guys at the poker table were speaking in hushed tones about rumors of another bacon shoot.

This week, his firm or department or team or whatever was given the assignment to create a catalog for a gift importing firm. You know those Lillian Vernon catalogs or all those other little bric-a-brac catalogs that are addressed to “Resident”. His client wasn’t Lillian Vernon, but I mention it because I can remember as a wee lad my mom waging a war against Lillian Vernon, calling them up and asking them to stop sending catalogs to our house, in a futile campaign chillingly representative of anybody bothered by ad creep. By the way, did you know that they’re putting ads on dogs now?

Jeff called the stuff from this catalog “absolute landfill”. He had brought some home and was throwing it in the ante as bonus prizes for each hand. There was a lighthouse wind chime, some Tweety night-lights, a safety paper cutter, a miniature milk can, a Scooby-Doo coin sorter, an angel clip, and a car wallet. Not to mention the coasters that light up when you put a drink on them.

None of the stuff really had a use, maybe marginally, like night lights and coasters are kinda useful but so unnecessary it’s almost as if the need was invented to fill a product. Sad, really, to think of someone ordering that lighthouse wind chime for $4.95 plus shipping and putting it up and just for a moment dreaming of the romantic notion of a lighthouse on the east coast and experiencing that little bit of joy, for $4.95 plus shipping, the joy of picking it out of a catalog and then waiting for it and when it arrives there’s that moment of excitement and then maybe the moment of imagination and then it’s over. The lighthouse wind chime traveled from China for that little moment.

What’s worse is that the import company buys a shipping container of these things for pennies on the item, and then pays an ad firm $20,000 to take pictures of them. I know this is the way it works with everything, but stopping to pay attention to the process really made me feel like we live in a world that’s crazy, even if you ignore the person in China who made that wind chime, it’s so sad how many people’s lives are wrapped up in stuff like that, and how ultimately unfulfilling it is. After all, the trap of material joy is that it fades quickly and the next knickknack must be purchased. These people are the ones who buy what telemarketers sell and respond to spam and click on popups and call up the home shopping channel and run up thousands of dollars in purchases sometimes just to have somebody, anybody to talk to. My heart really went out to anybody who would want that wind chime. Not because it was a lighthouse windchime- I’m not being critical of their taste here- but just because it was a shoddy little thing, a five cent wind chime marked up by stuff-pushers and sold to a stuff-junkie for a moment of joy. What a sad, crazy world we live in.

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