            When I was a kid my best friend's brother had a gazillion Garbage Pail Kid stickers plastered to his bedroom door. So rather than having a "do not enter" or "proceed at your own risk" sign he just grossed you out before bugging him. So prior to Netflix, this inspired me to rent Garbage Pail Kids the Movie which in ended up lodged in our VCR player and then eventually became a part of my family. Today the movie has a 35% rating on Rotten Tomatoes which says it all. The Garbage Gang taught me valuable life lessons, for instance everyone is beautiful and valuable even if they are covered in snot and scars. Sure at the time purchasing the rental video cost my mom $50 and she thought my mind was most certainly going to rot from the films content. But surprisingly these gross little fucks taught me something.
Sure they they taught me the essentials of bulimia as how to pull the trigger, pick my nose, grow body hair, pick scabs, zits, and anything pretty much anything disgusting. Sure they were banned from schools along with porn and guns. Garbage Pail Kids were also the punk rock of multipurpose trading cards in the form of sticker, scratch n' stink, magnets, puzzle piece, etc. So basically inspired Vice magazine where you have the Do's and Don'ts of Do it Yourself Cyst Removal, Cum Shots, STDs, Shits, Drugs, and Decapitations. Obviously Garbage Pail Kids arn't necessarily classified a need on the human necessity richter scale. They can't satisfy you hunger, actually they can deter that. Unless you're a midget a hospitable the house of cards won suffice and cards to you tits but most likely that won't get you anywhere. So unless you're Jonny Knoxville or Terry Richardson, Garbage Pail Kids cards served as inspiration not competition, i.e. Tampon Terry. As for Jeffery Dahmer, Joey Buttafuoco, and Lorena Bobbitt maybe they should've just kept their eyes shut. Actually as a result of parent repulsion, the animated television series never saw fruition. So Leaky Lindsey and Paul Bunion never made to Saturday Morning Cartoons nor Saturday Night Live. Another factor may have been the 1988 lawsuit where the the Cabbage Patch Kids Coleco (who were all the rage) sued the Garbage Pail Kids Topps. Obviously if this were a fist fight we know who'd win. Basically the Garbage Gang could no longer resemble the cabbage patch crybabies, however they could be still say all the disgusting shit you couldn't. Since we can't get enough gore from Saw XVIX, Topps decided to re-release the former cards and then come out with new ones. So thank the Lord, you no longer have to scour Ebay for oldies but goodies.
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LAJ
100 Objects of Popular and Material Culture is an blog exploring the manifestations of human consumption and commodity-ization. The purpose of this experiment is to explore material and popular culture in contemporary society by using objects and concepts to prompt wider questions and reflections. So by emulating The British Museum's and Neil MacGregor's format of A History of the World in 100 Objects I plan to satirically analyze and reinterpreted 100 material culture objects over the course of 2014. Material Culture is the study of our culture's consumption of stuff; namely the manifestation of culture through material productions where people's perceptions of objects is socially and culturally dependent. With this, objects reflect conscious and unconscious beliefs on the the individuals who fabricated, purchased, or used them, and by extension the society where they live. So examining materiality, cultural truths and societal assumptions may be discovered. As anthropologist Arjun Appaduai states "in any society the individual is often caught between the cultural structure of commodity-ization and his own personal attempts to bring a value and order to the universe of things." Objects and commodities make up a much larger symbolic system consisting of want and need, socio-economic status, fashion, etc. Often times form follows function whether the commodity, market, and or consumer forever evolve around one-another. Philosopher Pierre Bourdieu's theories of capital flow full circle; where regardless if you are a minimalist or a hoarder the world is made up of things and everyone will leave their footprint on the earth. So by humorously analyzing marketed objects and concepts, hopefully this blog will provide further incite into ideas of over-consumption, a disposable society, consumerism vs. anti-consumers, planned obsolescence vs. sustainability, as well as the greater good of mankind and future generations. Archives
March 2015
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