Is buying things bad?
Symphonic slappers, consumerism, and looking hot in the throes of crazy joy
Our Home Goods Report, full of things to enliven the place you live, and stores where you can find them, is here.
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The B.L.I.S.S. List — a handy rundown of Beautiful Life-Improving Spyplane Staples, from incense to sweatpants to underwear — is here.
Blackbird Spyplane is earth’s No. 1 most philosophical style & culture sletter. So it’s no surprise that you, the citizens of Spy Nation, have big craggy brains you constantly seek to enlarge & encraggen re: matters of life, love and the slapper sciences.
This is never clearer than when we do a “Personal Spyplane” open call for reader questions. Here’s a pair of great ones we got the other day — the first of which speaks to nothing less than an eternal push & pull that has animated virtually everything we’ve published since Spyplane Day One.
“How can I square my love of things/objects with my belief that consumption is bad news?” — henrystreetstudio
First things first: In addition to being earth’s No. 1 sletter philosophically, we are also earth’s No. 1 most anti-consumerist dope-clothes celebrators, so we feel you. Wearing great clothes is many times cooler than buying them, and the more you buy, the less you’re able to wear, so the inverse relationship between sauce and consumption is clean cut.
But here’s a story to help push things a little deeper. Recently, a good friend of ours found herself on a Saturday morning with nothing to do the rest of that day. On a whim, she decided to dress up and go to the symphony solo. A fantastic plan.
Looking at tickets online, she balked momentarily at the price — ~$70 + fees, if I’m remembering right — before saying, ‘F**k it,’ and smashing the cop. And by the time she took her seat and the house lights went down, she couldn’t believe her ticket didn’t cost more. She marveled at the talent and feeling of the musicians and conductor doing their thing onstage. She imagined the upkeep of the concert hall. She thought of the armada of staff, seen and unseen, working to keep it all humming smoothly.
Each one of these people, she thought, deserved to be not only paid, but paid well. Because the overall effect of their labor was so much more than the sum of its parts — an effect familiar to anyone who’s experienced the powerful phenomenon of people coming together to make music ring through the air.
Our friend’s symphony experience strikes me (Jonah) as a useful parallel when it comes to thinking through the experience of buying, say, a brilliantly designed, carefully made garment while A) tripping out over its price tag and B) fretting about participating in our deadening consumer culture.
Few people would describe buying concert tickets as an act of “consumption,” even though, in our market economy, it is exactly that. By contrast, copping clothes routinely strikes us as somehow coarse … more enmeshed in, and thus more polluted by, rank consumerism and materialism. We’re inclined to feel a guilt and a grodiness about buying pants that we don’t feel when we spend money elsewhere in the “culture market.”
Several compelling factors help explain this difference. For one, clothes are literally material, taking up room, using up resources, and extending an enormous physical and ecological footprint outward through space and time. Whereas musical notes in a concert hall quickly evanesce into nothingness, lingering only as memories and emotions.
Also, clothes are a human necessity that, like food and shelter, lends itself readily to commodification, greed and fetishization, whereas we tend to see music as more purely artistic — more “superfluous” to human existence (even if it’s crushingly bleak to imagine life without it), but more exalted for it.
Then there’s the connected matter of profit. Most musicians, even pros at the height of their fields, are not getting rich, but the guy who owns LVMH goes back and forth with the guy who owns Tesla for the title of world’s richest man. We know, in other words, that the margins on Beautiful Clothes and other Beautiful Made Things can be grotesquely profitable — for Owners and Shareholders, at least — in a way that the margins on Beautiful Shostakovich Concerts tend not to be. For a conscientious person, this knowledge can make spending money on one harder to feel as good about as spending money on the other.
Is the presence of profit itself bad? In absolute terms, that’s up for debate. But the more pressing question here is, Who is profiting? When you buy a ticket to an NBA game, you’re contributing to the wealth of exorbitantly rich people, too. But at least the rich people on a basketball court, i.e., the players, are getting a ton of bread for being nice with it to a superhuman degree that thrills and inspires us, and, over time, destroys their bodies.
The team owners, meanwhile, are not nice with it and do not incur the same bodily costs, yet they tend to have tons more money than most of the athletes do. (This is why it is tight & big-brained to support NBA players’ strikes, and corny & misguided to hate on them.)
“Jonah,” you’re probably thinking. “I’ve been with you every exhilarating step of the way so far. Bravo. I don’t know exactly how you’re going to pull it off, but I feel a pleasant shiver because I sense you’re about to tie all these examples together in a masterful mixed metaphor that brings us home.”
Yes. Here goes: When you encounter a beautiful slapper, especially one with a price tag you’re inclined to balk at, ask yourself, Are these pants a symphony?
Ask: “Did a constellation of human (and perhaps even non-human) beings come together and give immensely and ingeniously of themselves in the creation of this garment?”
Then, even if it’s clothing you have no strict empirical need for — much the same way you have no strict empirical need to attend a live performance of Steve Reich’s “Octet” — ask yourself, When it comes to beauty, doesn’t “need” transcend the empirical?
And then ask yourself, “Was this slapper envisioned, cut & sewn by the design and craftsmanship equivalent of, e.g., the ‘95 Houston Rockets, among them Hakeem Olajuwon, Robert Horry, Vernon Maxwell, Kenny Smith, Sam Cassell (clutch off the bench), coach Rudy Tomjanovich, his staff and the workers at Summit arena in the 1994-95 season??
“And does the money I put towards the slapper go toward the livelihoods of those people, rather than getting disproportionately sucked up by some swagless, margin-maxxing goober??
And, finally: “Wearing this piece, do I feel like the Sauce Lord equivalent of Clyde Drexler wearing a pimp sweater-vest days after winning the championship and sharing a laugh with Jay Leno?”
The answer to all these questions, when it comes to clothes, is very rarely yes. It’s wise for lots of reasons to err on the side of not copping in the majority of instances when it isn’t.
But sometimes — miraculously, incredibly, enchantingly — it’s yeses across the board. The symphony is in tune, the air shimmers with song, the team is looking good, the ring is in sight.
Don’t give yourself such a hard time for wanting a ticket!
Real quick, and relatedly —
“Has anything profoundly normal provided you with happiness recently?” —christianjharris
Most mornings, I get out for a hike in the East Bay hills. It’s common on these hikes to see hummingbirds, along with rabbits, banana slugs, woodpeckers, crows, rattlesnakes, caterpillars and hawks. Between the months of December and June, it’s common to see the hummingbirds fly up to a very high point, hover mid-air, then careen earthward in a shockingly fast divebomb, only to float back up, divebombing again, over and over.
This is a mating display, a friend once explained. Meaning it is “normal” behavior with an unambiguous biological purpose. But it can’t be denied that it also looks like insane, senseless fun. Sort of like riding a roller coaster as it ratchets up to a peak and then hurtles down a 90-degree slope, only to slowly climb back up and hurtle down again, on a near-endless loop.
It’s a delight to behold. A hummingbird exulting in a mad excess of hummingbirdness. It looks crazy, and joyous. If you are a hummingbird, it ostensibly looks hot to boot.
This is a vivid reminder that, just because we do things with purpose — like, say, clothing ourselves — doesn’t mean we can’t do them with crazy, joyous & hot superfluousness, too.
We don’t run ads, we refuse gifts, and we don’t use affiliate links when we cover new clothes. We do use them for one-off secondhand gems we find on eBay and Etsy, plus books on the independent bookseller Bookshop. We laid out our position on affiliate links and spon here.
The internet is rigged against great stores
Our brand-new 2024 G.I.F.T.S. List, bursting with slappers for the mind, body and home, is here.
Lovely meditations, as ever.
I'm struck that your understanding of music here converges quite neatly with the music scholar Christopher Small's idea that better than thinking about the noun/thing "music" is to think about the verb/process "musicking." As it is for you, it's also essential for Small that we realize just how long a chain of people any instance of musicking involves; ticket-takers and cleaning staff are musicking just as much as a concert's headliner is, for example. Maybe another way of putting your point here is that we might learn to see slappers less as things and more as processes of slapping.
(Check it: https://www.weslpress.org/9780819572240/musicking/)
On the flipside, a more recent trend in thinking about music points out music's materiality and its eco-material costs—perhaps giving us reason to feel the kind of ambivalence about consuming it that we feel more instinctively about clothes. The easy way to see this is in recorded music, which has depended on first shellac and then petrolium-based plastics and nowadays rare earth metals and lots of electricity for streaming. But it's even true in live music like symphony orchestra concerts which, for example, often feature jet-setting conductors and soloists who leave accordingly sizeable carbon footprints.
(Very recommended on this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537780/decomposed/)
Contradictions everywhere, I suppose.
I think this fits right into one point of my triad life-philosophy that I attribute to BBSP wisdom: be a gourmand, not a glutton. If you’re buying something new, put energy into buying from sick artisanal jaun makers and minimize the amount you buy from faceless corporations (but don’t beat yourself up for not being able to do this 100% of the time) and for the necessities for which you can’t be shelling out the “you’re an artist, now take my money” moola, try copping second hand so at least you’re recycling rather than begetting new materials into the ecosystem.