Is it odd that we as humans love to collect things?
It is safe to say that all of us at one time or another have collected
something even if for only a short time. Maybe it was baseball cards
or My Little Ponies. Perhaps you compiled stamps or coins. Albums,
DVD’s, books, the list is endless and the possibilities limited
only by our lack of imagination. Take Becky for example who collects
banana labels. She now has more than 5,000 different labels! (www.beckymartz.com)
That seems insane to me but that is the upside to serious accumulation.
It only has to make sense to the individual doing the collecting.
Obviously Becky is not alone in her passions of these Musa Stickers
as she has set up a chat forum so she can get together with other
banana label lovers and talk about their assortments. I have always
desired to be a collector, but have never stuck with it long enough
to assemble an assortment worth displaying. Although in High School
I had a complete set of TV Guides from 1983-1984. Don’t ask
me why or how it started. I just began tossing them in my closet instead
of the trash each week. They amassed pretty quickly. No-one ever saw
them and I didn’t have the luxury of the Internet at that time
to talk with Guide Junkies from other states and countries. Who knows
what we would have chatted about. I can see us debating into the wee
hours topics like which art work was the coolest, The March 19th cover
with Gary Coleman and Nancy Reagan or the Dallas vs Dynasty cover
of Oct 15th. Collections that capture a history or era in our culture
seem more significant to me now and fall more under preservation than
a series of stuff. Civil War memorabilia, or election paraphernalia.
Objects that catch an event and retell the story again and again.
If you think about it museums are nothing more than a collection.
Granted pieces by Bellini and Raphael are more valuable than my 1983
TV Guides. But who is to say that in millenniums to come parents won’t
be taking their children to large marbled buildings where they will
stand in silence staring at a picture encased in glass and depicting
nine individuals. The mom will lean down to her youngster and whisper.
“This was a story, about a man named Brady...” If you
have an interesting or offbeat collection I would love to hear about
it. You can write me at matt@mungleshow.com. And if you have the June
11th 1983 TV Guide read the cover story. Scary how right they actually
were.