Burning the furniture: my life as a consumer | Gentrification | The Guardian

Some thoughts on enlightenment purchases, white privileges and household goods

The last modification time is January 6, 2021 (Wednesday) Eastern Standard Time

I think that mass production can have limitations.

We just bought a house, but there is no furniture yet. We have been eating on the back for three months. Last week, a Mexican woman with four children rang our doorbell and asked if our front room was rented out. Sorry, I said embarrassingly, we live here. She was confused. But, she said, it was empty.

It is empty. I hung curtains to cover up the emptiness, but it was still empty. There was no furniture in the house where I grew up until a German cabinetmaker moved into our house. The truck he was riding in was so heavy that it caused a dent in the driveway. He filled our dining room with furniture, and then used a machine on a truck to make small replicas of the furniture. I still have a small corner cabinet with lattice doors, a small kitchen cabinet with brass knobs, and a small dining table with professional turning legs. They are in the basement, wrapped in newspapers. That little dressing table is sitting on my dressing table

.

The apartment we just left is equipped with shelves made of cheap pine wood by John. They are now in the basement, reduced to wood. The ammunition box I found on the curb was made into a coffee table and placed in the backyard, filled with marigolds. I hate furniture, my father used to mumble to himself. He just visited a warehouse full of unprocessed pine furniture. This was after the cabinetmaker went to the nursing home and his furniture was gone. When I was young, I burned a hole in the dining table. The cabinet maker who smoked the pipe offered me matches. I like to burn things, but I also like to repent on the table.

In my opinion, the lyrics "I burned a hole in the dining table" are related to the lining notes of the Billie Holiday album I borrowed from the university library. The note explained that she was singing songs that were written by others, but she rewritten them in a singing way. Her delivery turned the mediocre portrait of money life into a harsh criticism of money life.

In the furniture store we visited, I was filled with a strange desire without specific requirements. I do not want anything. The soft colors of the carpet, warm wood grain, brass and lamp glass all seem to imply that the shop is full of beautiful things, but when I look at anything, I don't feel beautiful. "The desire to consume is a desire," Lewis Hyde wrote. "However, consumer products only attract this desire, and they are not satisfied. Consumers of bulk commodities are invited to eat without passion. This consumption will neither cause satiety nor cause fire."

In the end, all the furniture we buy will feel like lyrics written for someone else’s song, except for the Amish dining table. This table will be solid cherries, beautiful wood. It will do well, but not as good as the table I grew up, the table I burned. In order to get such a table, we need to spend more money. Otherwise, we will need German cabinet manufacturers to move in with us.

"I used to have a girl, or should I say, she used to have me," car radio

. Both John and I remained silent. It's been a long time since I heard this song. And I don’t know if I actually heard the ending. I want to know what happened there. Did he light a fire in the fireplace when the girl went to work? No, John told me that he burned her place. He is sure about it, but I am not so sure.

I can't stop thinking. The forest in Norway. This annoys me. Soon, I was reading an interview with The Beatles. "Really pine, cheap pine," McCartney said of the wood paneling that inspired the title. Regarding the ending, he said: "This may mean that I lit a fire to keep myself warm. Isn't the decoration of her house very good? But it is not the case, which means I burned the damn place."

He had told me that he was going to the same elementary school as his son and was beaten on the playground.

He told me that in those days, he couldn't risk talking with a woman like me. He said that when he passed a white woman on the sidewalk, he had to lower his head and answer "Yes, ma'am, if she speaks to him". He also told me that he refused the holiday turkey provided to him by the owner of a lakeside mansion, and a rich man asked him to trek in deep snow to deliver the package to the service entrance behind the house.

The former owner of our house was white, and they made extra money by allowing the house to be used as a commercial advertisement. John discovered this when he received a call from the casting director, who wanted to know if the house was available. Unavailable-we live here. But then we learned how much we will get paid. All we have to do is leave the house for three days and two nights, and we will get an income of $8,000.

The advertisement will be used for Wal-Mart, the company has created two-thirds of the wealth

In this country. Walmart can't build a store in Chicago

But although they have been protesting against low wages, they are still here, and they want to put their commercials in classic Chicago bungalows. We don’t own anything from Wal-Mart, but it’s okay, because Wal-Mart’s furniture has been moved into the house, Wal-Mart’s curtains have been erected, and some Wal-Mart’s photos have been hung on the walls of Wal-Mart’s frames. A white set designer and a white director co-created an authentic African-American interior. They told us that the ad will feature an African American grandmother advertising a holiday turkey.

Next door, like our home, lives a real African American grandmother, the wife of a retired postal worker.

We get paid to transform the house into the exterior of the house imagined by the set designer so that Wal-Mart can try to sell goods to people who look like them.

John told his friend Dan about all this. Dan said, I think this is the definition of white privilege.

I admire how thoroughly she abandoned her birth, the silver on the sideboard and the opera on the record player. She only keeps books.

In a fairy tale she told me when she was young, a girl was chased by a witch. When the girl ran, she threw the things in her pocket and the things her mother gave her behind her back. She dropped a comb that turned into a dense forest. She threw down a hand mirror and became a lake between her and the witch. My mother might say that you must throw away all the things you get. I understand. But, I just want to know where the witch came from. If her witch can also be my witch.

She used to exchange eggs from chickens to neighbors for expired bread, but it was still good. When she drove us home from school, she would park in the trash can at the back of a restaurant to salvage fruit, which is still good. I once asked my mother if she had a retirement account, and she laughed at me. She said, I have never done anything like this. Then she said, after a while, my child is my retirement account. You are my investment

She had four children by the age of 30, but she had no income and no social security contributions. I was only 30 years old, had no children, and was already working in the university. I have a retirement account, which makes it difficult for me to explain the privileges to my mother. People without privileges know more than those without privileges. I guess, I told her, I don't understand.

, The artist Amanda Williams (Amanda Williams) drew the work of the house planned to be demolished on the south side of Chicago, starting with a series of colors: Harold’s Coop Red, Royal Purple, Pink Oil, Ultrasheen Blue Color, Flaming's hot orange, currency exchange yellow. She said: "This palette combines the academic training of my Ivy League as an architect with my sensitivity as a native of the South." From the basic bricks to the shingles on the roof, every house is painted. Into a single color. She only drew houses that were worthless to anyone, and worthless to dealers, homeowners, and neighbors. "Zero value"

Is her tenure. She used colors drawn from products sold to black people to paint these zero-value attributes. She said that every color is a code.

I can't find a suitable white. I don't like rich white or Chantilly lace or French manicure. My sister complained that the conversation was boring. I told her that maybe I would give up white and paint the living room pink. She said that Peach has a problem and is now laughing at me.

I found a paint brand that I cannot afford. But I can buy it. For people like me, affording paint and the like is usually announcing your value, not your financial ability. I can't accept the estimated value of paint at $110 per gallon. But I found this paint to glow unbearably and undeniably better than any other paint. At night, when my family fell asleep, I studied paint swatches in the hardware store, then opened the heavy creases in the Farrow & Ball catalog and placed my fingers on the slightly raised paint cubes on the paint block. Even the name is better: match, string, rope, skimming. These are not aspiring white people-these white people can afford it. One is even called blackened.

I remember the great revelation of upgrading from acrylic paint in high school to oil paint in college. First use only black and white on the paper, and then the full set on the canvas. They are worth it, the silk oil in those slender metal tubes. I like all colors, especially cadmium orange, which is slightly toxic. Flamin' hot. This is the closest painting I have bought paint over the years.

I sent a sample of Sulking Room Pink to Robyn, knowing she would like the name. The French word for "suffocating air" is

,source

, A woman's private room. Dusty pink own room. Then came the etiquette, a kind of white described as "soft tones". This is a kind of white hidden behind its own whiteness. Another line of this white poem. Now I think more than poetry. I found a new document: Succubus, Collectibles, White Zinfandel, Pashmina, Fine China, Ivory Tower, Phantom White, American White.

Paint company Benjamin Moore has announced "Simple White" as the best color of the year. In this regard, in 2016, a white man will be elected to the White House. Benjamin Moore's creative director said that choosing white as the "color of the year" is "inevitable." "White is an extraordinary, powerful and polarizing color-it is taken for granted or obsessed."

I'm obsessed, this won't solve much. "Thoughtful" is my favorite name for white, but I don't really like this color. I don't want my wall to fall into contemplation

On the way to the parent meeting, I stopped in the corridor of the elementary school and photographed a large box of institutional toilet paper. The color on the label was "empathy white". Maybe this is the color I am looking for. Or variants such as off-white for all apology concerns

Or something more interesting, such as Paperwork White or Payroll White. Maybe I should just paint it all.

There is a message on the front of the IKEA catalog: "It is designed for people, not for consumers." In the photo, some young people enjoy fun and unpretentious dinners at crowded tables. The trolley was full of dirty dishes and the guitar was leaning against the wall. The IKEA catalog is at the top of a pile of catalogs with photos of sterile rooms on display that have never been touched. IKEA suggests that this other messy lifestyle is not only cheaper, but also more user-friendly.

John and I have two dressers from IKEA, and Nick and Robin also have two dressers. Nick's is his second dressing table-in the first dressing table, the bottoms of all drawers are dropped. Robin said, this is like a building with a perfect appearance, all floors have collapsed into the basement. I still remember the brownstone like New York, with trees growing in it. The foreclosure in the suburbs is still primitive on the outside, but deprived of all fixtures inside, even wires and pipes.

The dressing table is very simple, its design shaker. Vibrators think that the end of the world is near, which seems to be an argument for temporary furniture, but for them, making something lasting is an act of prayer. Mother Ann Lee told the brothers: "Thinking of all work as having a life of 1,000 years is like knowing that you must die tomorrow."

There are not many shakers left. Their furniture lasted longer than expected. A tour guide in the village where Ann Lee died told me about their values. I visited this village when I was a child and their values ​​are reflected in their furniture. I want to know whether Shaker dressing table, which is free from Shaker's life background, still reflects Shaker's dedication to celibacy and hard work. Maybe it whispers to the owner at night. Maybe my dressing table is where I suspect.

In that village

I saw the chair of the shaker hung on the nail and taught me to sing the song of the shaker. I am not interested in furniture, but I am particularly fascinated by this song, especially the last two lines: "Turn around, turn around, it will be our joy; until you turn around, turn around, we all turn right."

When I was in my 20s, I moved 10 times. In the fourth or fifth step, when I left New York, I left the bed frame made by my mother. It is simple and redundant, has no headboard (almost Shaker), and is designed for singles because it is narrower than a single bed. When I learned that I gave up my mother, my mother felt depressed. I tried to explain that I did not live a life that allowed furniture.

In California, I sleep on a foam board, which can be easily rolled up and moved anywhere. My boyfriend put the clothes in a big cardboard box and suggested that we use cardboard boxes for furniture. This is the first idea proposed by IKEA. IKEA has manufactured a particleboard coffee table with a hollow interior. Lauren Collins (Lauren Collins) "Ikea's convenience for self-invention is liberating

"But it can be sad, able to create life, or dispose of, so it's cheap." In less than a year, I rolled up the mattress and moved the box to Iowa, where I found furniture .

IKEA's mission is to write "Provide a better daily life for everyone" on the paper. I think of all the IKEA furniture I have eaten in my life. The coffee table with the broken leg, the cracked seam of the quilt frame, and the hardwood table left by the roadside were damaged by rain before being taken to the new home. IKEA is one of the world's largest consumers of wood and has made furniture a thing that has been used up. It is the furniture of the apocalypse. But what I like-what makes me smile at "being a person rather than a consumer"-implies that the consumer is not a person.

David Graeber wrote: “This is really a metaphor.” He means consumption, which was once the name of a wasting disease, but now it’s used by anthropologists to mean almost everything we do outside of work. Words for work-eating, shopping, reading, listening to music. He pointed out that consumption comes from Latin

, Which means "total occupation or takeover." A person may eat food or be consumed by anger. In the earliest use, consumption always means destruction.

Consumption is the opposite of Adam Smith's research in The Nature and Causes of National Wealth. In 1776, when work was transferred to a factory and life was re-divided into family and work, he asked. We still use the mathematics of the time to subtract what we consume at home from what we produce at work. In this rough equation, only profitable work is productive.

As long as there is no third quantity (such as the copy quantity), the equation is equal to zero.

She ate it and my father told my sister a few years ago that she wanted to know what happened to my stereo. It was my first year in New York, and the money for the stereo was a gift from my father. My father told me that he would pay for my college tuition, and there will be nothing else. He still has three children going to college. The stereo is an exception, it was a surprise for my birthday, I did eat it. I want stereo, but I need food.

Our consumption destroys food, but silverware does not, although the metaphor behind the word implies that we even ate our own silverware and tableware. Graeber warned: "We should consider how far we extend the metaphor." Yes, we consume fossil fuels to mean "eat, swallow, waste, waste." But we do not consume music.

Music becomes a part of us like food, but it is not destroyed in the process.

Graeber suggests that when we think of ourselves as consumers, what is disrupted is that we might do something productive outside of work.

• This is an editorial excerpt from Eula Biss's "Have and Own", published by Faber & Faber, and can be found on the following website

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