Certainly full, and cluttered, but NOT ugly!by brian d
Well done Brian!
Ralph.
Certainly full, and cluttered, but NOT ugly!
Well done Brian!
Ralph.
Searching for anything relating to, Anton Boos, 934 Stamm. Kp. Pz. Erz. Abt. 7, 3 Kompanie, Panzer-Regiment 2, 16th Panzer-Division (My father)
The warning sign is an item of sublime delight.This is from Berlin, is it not?
Do let me make an observation as concerns the keeping of a collection and its display.
I was raised on the principle that one secures the item, and its display is, of course, a great thing of merit,
but the key is the getting of the item. I enjoy seeing a nicely displayed collection, but to do so to the standards
of a museum means a programming, planning and budgeting outcome which logically entails fewer resources for the getting.
I have seen no "ugly" rooms here, but some very nice collections. My collection could be far better displayed than it is,
but where I live, real estate is very, very costly, and the craftsmen necessary to fashion a nice display are habituated
to the fancies of the 1% or the .001% and their versions of Versailles or Buckingham Palace.
My friend Tony from the UK could well organize my collection, and with little money.
A collection is very individual and it should be that way to the nth degree.
Thanks for showing so many interesting things. Had I to do it over again,
I should collect cold war Germany, but I lived in it, and it did not especially occur to me
to collect it, though I got a lot of things in 1989-90.
PS The rooms here are a kind of thing of love. What is ugly are items clutched in sweaty hands, or piled
on empty coke cans and other settings of personal mayhem (an old, cheapo computer key board) that bespeaks a kind of human chaos.
All these rooms, including the quirky ones with the clutter aspect, have their own poetry.
I favor the Victorian approach, with a lot of stuff piled up in excess.
It speaks to me. I am happy that others favor the same aesthetic of decorative clutter.
There is an above element of insanity in being a collector, but the key is to do it with verve
and respect for the senses, including the brain, itself.
Last edited by rbminis; 12-08-2018 at 01:24 AM. Reason: Edited to manage photos.
My ideal.
But, I am a fossil, and a relic, myself.
The modern Zeitgeist is to burn it all, to have nothing, and to revel in being a digital nomad.
Ohne mich.
Of course, all these things are doomed, but, so, too, are the have-nothing-nomads as doomed as anyone else.
Give me my dumb old collection, and they can have their Facebook page. Where is the clutter, please?
I share with you a quote of a person, who would not have nice things to say about us, but I write: pfui!
".......The industrial age changed everything. With mass production, and with cheap labor from Britain’s far-flung empire, homes suddenly became very, very crowded:
A cluttered room is the product of affluence. “Why do you have so much stuff in your house?” “Because it’s there.”
The problem with all this stuff is that it imprisons us. I know a lady who, over the years, assembled a magnificent collection of art work from just about every continent but for Antarctica and North America. She’s quite elderly now and has severe mobility problems. Ideally, she should be living in a single level residence or a place with an elevator. Instead, she crawls up and down the stairs in her three-story house, unable to leave because moving means abandoning her stuff, and she cannot make herself do that. She has become a prisoner, not in her home, but of her home.
I know another couple who classify themselves as “collectors,” although I would call them hoarders. When hard times came, the logical thing would have been for them to relocate to an area with more jobs on tap. Moving their things, though, was so overwhelming, that they opted to stay in their house, unemployed. Again, they are prisoners of their stuff.
I’m never going to complain about affluence. I love having a spacious home, filled with cool things such as computers, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, televisions, etc. But I do recognize that the same things I love are shackles, and I work hard to minimize the number of links in the chain of possessions tying me down...."
This quote, I guess, is emblematic of a Zeitgeist in which I cannot partake. I plan on selling my collection, to be sure, so it does not
burden my wife, but the idea of the aesthetic virtue of a life that looks like a iphone strikes me as real poverty of the soul and character.
PS Kitchen as iphone. Very expensive refrigerator and range, etc. Refrigerator costs as much as my car, or more. Ohne mich.
I wager that, in fifty years, this room will have been bulldoozed and its inhabitants will be scarcely a fading memory.
I have also arranged a home for my library, too, so there....
I am managing the disposition of a recently deceased friend's library. He died suddenly. We went to graduate school together and I watched him build
his library over the decades that we were colleagues. His books are the most tangible thing he has left me, so I can have a sense of him in the tangible realm. I am going to keep his library together, because it is as fine a monument to him as I can erect, although we are going to do Festschrift
for him, too.
I know how much effort and energy goes into a collection, and the counting of coup with the display is all well and good, but you can see in a collection
the character and intellect of the person who built it. You know, Doug Buhler built a very impressive collection very swiftly and then dispersed it,
which is a great shame, because he put real effort and huge treasure into it. It is now spread to the winds. There is some greater truth in it,
but no one need apologize to anyone about the method of display and so forth. Happy collecting and happier shelving.
If I'm to become a prisoner in my own home, hemmed in by mountains of militaria, then so be it. I won't complain, even when I have to dig tunnels through it to go from room to room. It's my passion and I'll enjoy it, even to the point of excess, when many more 'reasonable' or 'normal' people might throw in the towel. Perhaps I have an attention span greater than most people my age, or maybe I'm just mad. I've certainly never been normal. But if I wasn't an eccentric, I probably wouldn't have fostered a hobby such as this one in the first place.
I don't know what will become of all my clutter when I go. Probably the same thing that happens to the mortal possessions of everyone when they die. Family will fight over the best stuff, and toss aside the scraps. I'll make sure that my collection goes to a good home, at the very least. The rest of my possessions can be disposed of or replaced. I can't imagine it'll concern me too much. Being dead tends to distance you from such matters.
B.B.
Bravo. You are a kindred soul. I include this nattering, hectoring voice in yellow because it was attached to the picture of the Victorian room.
I see this aesthetic around me of the iphone as the measure and I think it is bullsh!t, myself.
Give me the Baroque or Rococo, or its more recent equivalent. I am glad that Brodie is a young collector and he will uphold our world view
in this problematic 21st century. Minimalism as a way of life and asceticism and so forth are all well and good, but we have another role,
not the least because these things for me enable me to be a better teacher and a better author. The urge in society to accumulate relics
in order to make sense of the universe and human existence seems to make a lot of sense to me, even at the age of 65.
I know that Google is lining it all up, but I have NO faith in them that they will get it right. I have much more faith in Brodie's
urge, which is more or less identical to my own, to get it right. That is, that the curious mind on its own can apprehend ground truths,
and do it in a conventional manner and then arrange these items in an interesting way. How corporate technology firms do it
actually is piss poor, even though they tell us every second how really smart they are. Pfui.
The sight of persons glued to an iphone when they fail to admire the blue of the sky, and the shine of the sun,
and, most of all, to pay no attention to actual people is an extraordinary statement of being shackled to something
far worse than a cluttered room with old junk.
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