JUKEBOX AWARDS 2014 OBJECT LESSONS As I Returned Home From
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JUKEBOX AWARDS 2014 OBJECT LESSONS As I returned home from shopping one morning, I noted a sign posted on a streetlamp. It announced an estate sale. Ordinarily I demur from any opportunity to add one more item to my inventory of possessions. Nonetheless, the location of the event was on my street and only six addresses down. I made my approach and slowly realized it was a two flat I had privately dubbed “the house with the Nazi gate,” due to its wrought iron entry containing a design element, which incorporated the swastika. (Though the quasi-Greek cross design preceded the twentieth century scourge of Nazism, the roots of the ideogram in South and East Asia which became a representation of the inexorable wheel of history vanish into the past.) I opened that gate and entered. Inside I found a handful of people puttering amidst the belongings of a man who I had often seen on the front porch, engaged in the act of combing his dog’s fur. Snatches of overheard conversation revealed that the man had died and the proceeds from the sale of his home and belongings would be donated to an unnamed church. I pawed through a handful of books and found nothing of interest. A selection of records provided no discernible unifying theme, genre or focus. Spotting a reggae 45-RPM single, I had the sudden insight that much of what I was seeing appeared to be souvenirs: a record from Jamaica, a wood carving of Lao-Tse from Taiwan, a dish from here and a figurine from there. In these rooms, the accumulated objects told a tale of restlessness—wandering and return—with a curio placed on a shelf in the manner of a convict’s slash mark on the wall of his cell to denote the passage of time. The prices of these items, at least the few intriguing ones from exotic locales, were negotiable. Yet they were too rich for the market that day. I wandered out empty-handed, but with a mind full of thoughts about last things and an old man who passed the evidence of a life lived over to the custody of others for a kind of material reckoning. * * * How is the seed of getting first planted within us? What is the tree from which it falls? Freudian psychologists speculate that our initial attachment to objects serve as a desperate substitute for maternal absence. Our mothers cannot be ever-present so the thumb becomes a substitute to simulate nourishment and contact. The blanket gives warmth and comfort. Soon, the favorite toy offers a complicated, nuanced combination of color, motion and sound. That initial plaything and our relationship with it begin our series of intimate interactions with the made-to-be- bought world. The affection for the first toy is exhausted, and then renewed with a successor toy. The anxiety of irregular parental availability and the cyclical trading of one beloved object for another opens the gateway to the transitory pleasures of life provisional through our contact with the artificial. The nutritional and the material comforts offer satiety in their ongoing, repetitive fashion. This simple hedonism, the maximization of pleasure and avoidance of pain, is a learned habit. The animal nature of the infant becomes distraught when the expected pairings of stimulus and response are not presented—a kind of withdrawal symptom. After all, one synonym for addiction is habit. This drive for the continued scheduling of nurturing stimulus is an intimation of order to the child. It could be argued that this is the genesis of the will to organize. The round peg goes into the round hole. Our introduction to numbers is to count in sequence. The children’s clothing brand Garanimals teaches the pairing of items of apparel so colors will match and be harmonious. The child will not dress as if blind or an elderly resident of Miami Beach. It also offers a glimpse of the social skills later needed to navigate high school, where the wrong pair of shoes invites social ostracism. One could even argue that the socially maladroit have bifurcated lives in which their family life organizational skills are at variance with the mores of their presumed peer group. This search for pleasure, the craving for inanimate objects and the drive to organize can be said to intersect at the wish to collect. Among boys, the process of collecting may begin with baseball cards. The annual roster of professional teams was once organized by numbered cards purchased in packs of five. The random packaging of the cards contained within and a new annual team line-up guaranteed fresh sales. For the young collector, the secondary market of sales and trades, even if restricted to his neighborhood friends, allowed him to assemble a few continuous sequences. (The buying of card packages and their accompanying, sugar-saturated bubblegum is also good for dentists.) The sports card business eventually hit upon the idea of selling complete sets and turned young collectors into accumulators of product lines and brands. In short, it forced the collector into becoming a businessman, mirroring the more adult and genteel pursuits of the stamp and coin aficionado. Trading cards as a collector niche exploded in the fad-saturated Sixties. James Bond cards offered black and white stills with plot synopses of the popular spy film series. Beatles cards provided photos and trivia concerning the Fab Four, an assault on an infrequently tapped market of pre-teen females. Their younger sisters soon ceded their affections to TV sitcom band the Monkees and their respective cards. Civil War cards presented a pop history chronicle of the conflict while depicting artistic renditions of the disasters of armed combat. Even more grisly was the set of Mars Attacks, a comic art presentation of horrific scenes from a fictional extraterrestrial invasion with visuals inspired by Fifties monster movies. Readers feeling a mixture of nostalgia, a sense of lost innocence and a tremor in their aesthetic awareness at the comparative sophistication of these examples of children’s pop culture can be forgiven. One tends to feel loss for what were the trappings associated with simpler times, particularly when one cannot recall where the items went. It can be framed as a revisit to the infant’s anxiety when the pleasurable item was withdrawn. This can create a mild sense of post-traumatic stress disorder in adults, putting them on the trail of repurchasing the long-missing treasures of youth—preferably in their original packaging. If the viewpoint of the card collector seems skewed to a masculine perspective of action and competition, recent research may reveal it as no surprise. Some physicians and mental health professionals, notably David J. Linden, a neurobiologist, and Simon Baron-Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology, have noted the increased incidence of autism in males-versus-females. By this line of thought, autism is a magnification of a male tendency to be oriented towards things instead of people, a lack of verbosity and a habit of shaping discussions to objects instead of emotions as a way to avoid intimacy. Initial research theorizes that the cause may be fetal overexposure to the hormone testosterone in the womb as Professor Baron-Cohen speculates. (Wordsworth noted that the child is father to the man. I recall collecting rocks in my pre-teen years, the variegated examples kept in several boxes underneath my bed. I then collected matchbooks, a near-defunct niche collectible today as the population of smokers decreases and advertisers hesitate to be associated with unhealthy vices. My enthusiasm diminished when I noticed a propensity for pyromania best left unaddressed. Card collecting came and went, leaving a residual passion for order that bubbled up intermittently. I remember waiting for my mother to get off work at the department store, passing time in the book section by placing all the Hardy Boys juvenile detective novels in the publisher’s numerical sequence. I cannot say I saw myself as being a collector of books. My father subscribed to a book club for young people, its offerings evenly divided into biographies and historical fiction starring young characters as witnesses to great events. He took me aside and said he had paid good money for these books and I was expected to read them. I responded as an obedient son. Books offered moments of private reverie in a three-bedroom ranch house populated by six people. Solitude. Reading served to interlock with the competencies of elementary school and its introduction to the world beyond suburbia. The last World War had happened only two decades before and its mark on the present was still apparent. I read military history often. There was an element of bravery in them and evidence of the human cost missing from the war movies and documentaries about the conflict, both of which seemed omnipresent on televised entertainment. Knowing how the story ended made them less harrowing. And I read comic books. The first stack arrived courtesy of my mother’s uncle, a dentist having excess stock from his waiting room. The superhero comics, with their stories of the triumph of good over evil were predictable, but no less enjoyable for it. After all, we are conditioned to enjoy the fulfillment of our unreasonable expectations for a happy ending, if only in popular fiction and drama. The discovery of the atypical stories in the comic books under the Marvel banner proved a revelation. The imprint’s superhuman protagonists were saddled with all-too-human foibles. The limits of those having supreme skills foreshadowed many readers’ entry into adolescence with its cycles of capability, setbacks and straining against the parental leash.