The Value of Stuff
Well folks, I am officially on the brink of moving for the third time in three years. I moved from Chicago to my in-laws’ basement in Marietta, Georgia about three years ago, then from Marietta to Decatur a year and a half later and in about two weeks we’re going to move from a lovely little two bedroom apartment in Decatur to a condo in the Chamblee Tucker area big enough to house our growing family.
This is nowhere near as big a move as the trek from the frozen Midwest to sunny, green Georgia but whenever you move you are confronted with the significance and insignificance of stuff, the material possessions that surround you and fill your lives with deep meaning, meaningless clutter and everything in between.
When you’ve worked in pop culture media for over two decades, as I have, a lot of that stuff is related to your job, or at least to the job that I used to have. For years I consider it part of my job as a film critic to maintain a library of the greatest and most influential films ever made. Criterion made that easy but when I got laid off from The Dissolve with a six month old child, no savings and no non-book freelance career to speak off, my Criterion collection served an invaluable secondary purpose: selling my Criterion DVDs made enough money for me to stave off the ominous specter of foreclosure. It literally helped keep the lights on.
The value of stuff can be abstract and hard to pin down, or, in the case of my Criterion collection, its value can be very concrete and practical. Even now, when I acquire something, or decide to hold onto something through a move one of the questions I ask myself is, “Can I sell this for cash money if the situation arises?”
In the case of Criterion DVDs, the answer is yes. They’re the rare piece of physical media that has retained its value, financially, culturally and otherwise.
My wife is the most voracious reader I know. For a long time, owning and compulsively re-reading her 1500 books was a source of incredible pleasure. Seeing as my wife has never had an iPod or a laptop of her own, I assumed she was addicted to the old ways but then she got a Kindle and suddenly she did not give a mad-ass fuck about her 1500 books anymore. They were no longer an essential collection for her to dip into whenever the mood struck; they were a heavy, cumbersome burden.
My wife got rid of her books and never looked back. I’ve had the same relationship with DVDs and CDs. At one point my DVD and CD collection were a source of pride. Now they barely exist—I have about sixty DVDs and almost no CDs—because you can get the same experience via MP3s and streaming movies.
I have a whole lot less to move this time around. I wish that I was less materialistic. I wish material things did not matter to me but I have some really awesome shit I will treasure until my dying day, and I hope to God that after I die, someone else will get something out of my most cherished belongings.
The cornerstone of my future modest shrine to American pop parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic
Stuff has a purpose beyond its resale value and usefulness. It tells us who we are. It reminds us of triumphs and adventures and misadventures and our exuberantly squandered, celebrated youth. A lot of the stuff that I’ve hung onto falls into this category. For example, when I had “Weird Al” Yankovic sign stuff for my GoFundMe I snuck in a fair amount of stuff for myself.
I plan to set up a nice, understated shrine to “Weird Al” Yankovic in my new condo. Nothing creepy or ostentatious, mind you, just a classy assortment of signed detritus from throughout the decades.
That’s the essence of souvenirs: they’re physical reminders of ephemeral experiences and there are few experiences I’d like to remember more than my kaleidoscopic experiences chasing America’s preeminent pop parodist throughout God’s own United States just last month. It was a heck of an experience, and thankfully I’ve got a whole lot to remember it by.
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