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Fashion is Most Glorious!

June 19, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Walking on Chunxi Lu in Chengdu I passed a full sized advertisement which draws upon the imagery and language of the Cultural Revolution. Featuring a worker, peasant, soldier trio the text plays on slogans common during the CR. The CR slogans I’m familiar with, but I’m a bit unsure about the exact translation of the edited ones in the advertisement, so hopefully someone can help me with this. Below I have given my best shot at these phrasings and then […]

Categories: Advertising, China, Nostalgia, Politics • Tags: Chunxi Lu, Cultural Revolution, 红色年代, 革命, fashion, marketing, nostalgia, Revolution, slogans, 口号

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Patrick Wilken’s Biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss

May 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I just finished a very enjoyable read—Patrick Wilcken’s biography Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology. I picked it up used at a local Minneapolis Bookseller, Magers and Quinn late last week. Billed as “the first biography in English” of its subject, it was not something I could turn down. For years I have enjoyed teaching Tristes Tropiques in my Anthropology of Travel class—Pilgrims, Travelers and Tourists and I read some of his work in graduate school—but never really had an impression […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Nostalgia, Objects of Power • Tags: biography, Bororo, Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mato Grosso, Musée du quai Branly, Patrick Wilcken, structural anthropology, Tristes Tropiques

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Moon Nostalgia

December 21, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

This past week there have been quite a few articles focusing on the breakthroughs, accomplishments and historical firsts of the manned Apollo missions. Among my favorites are a recent article in Slate telling the interesting, untold story of the first sculpture on the moon and coverage of the influential 1968 Earthrise photo and how it almost didn’t happen. Popular Science ran an article about alternate Apollo mission plans. The Verge reminded us all of the Apollo Image Atlas with its 17,000 photos and […]

Categories: Memory, Mythologies, Nostalgia • Tags: 1968, Apollo 11, Apollo 8, Apollo missions, China, 玉兔, Earthrise, Mao Zedong, moon landing, Neil Armstrong, space missions, yutu

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Old Red Books For Sale

October 24, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Books, China, Memory, Nostalgia • Tags: Cultural Revolution, Mao, Red Books, Taiyuan

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Chinese Tycoon to Rebuild Crystal Palace, Remembers Glorious Historical Period

October 6, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“Wonderful, amazing, fairylike, are the words that come uppermost in his mind as the full glories of that famous vista break for the first time on his astonished sight. For a few moments he is so lost in astonishment and absorbed in pleased wonder that he can do nothing but gaze upwards on the noble proportions of that vast central hall, in admiration of the cunning workmanship by which such common materials as mere glass and iron could be made […]

Categories: China, Exhibitions and Fairs, Memory, Nostalgia, Objects of Power, Zombie • Tags: 1851, Chinese tycoons, colonialism, Ni Zhaoxing, Opium War, The Crystal Palace, The Great Exhibition, Yuanmingyuang, ZhongRong, 倪召兴, 圆明园, 水晶宫, 中融集团

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Among Warm Objects

September 29, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“These wild objects, stemming from indecipherable pasts, are for us the equivalent of what the gods of antiquity were, the ‘spirits’ of the place. Like their divine ancestors, these objects play roles of actors in the city, not because of what they do or say but because their strangeness is silent, as well as their existence, concealed from actuality. Their withdrawal makes people speak—it generates narratives—and allows action; through its ambiguity, it ‘authorizes’ spaces of operations.” —Michel de Certeau, “Ghosts […]

Categories: Antiques, Collecting, Consumption, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Photo Essays, Value • Tags: carnivalesque, commodity chain, flâneur, global commodity, Junk Bonanza, maker culture, memory, Michel de Certeau, nostalgia, patina, practice, Shakopee, shopping, souvenir, vintage, warm objects

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Mystery Object #12: Flesh Crayon

September 21, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Antique stores are useful repositories for objects that evoke memories of the past. Nearly every time I visit an antique store I am confronted with a few objects that evoke things long forgotten. Sometimes I find objects from a time before I was born that confound me with their alien common-sense assumptions. About a week before fall semester started, on the way back from a canoe trip, we stopped in an antique store in Lindstrom, Minnesota. While looking through the […]

Categories: Antiques, Mystery Objects, Nostalgia, Play, Race • Tags: antiques, Crayola, Crayons, flesh crayon

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TARDIS Value: Blue Box as Totem and Fetish

June 10, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

There is a lot of Doctor Who going around these days. My teenage self—the closeted geek who stayed up late on Fridays and Saturdays to catch episodes on my local public TV channel—would be very happy to see the show’s resurgent global popularity. I even found an advertisement that used his image on the streets of Beijing a few months back. Of course there is a big difference between Doctor Who of the 1970s and 1980s and the post-2005 reanimated […]

Categories: Anthropology, China, Consumption, Games, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Science Fiction, TV, Value • Tags: Barnes and Noble, Branding, Doctor Who, Evans-Pritchard, Karl Marx, Monopoly, TARDIS, totems, Yahtzee

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Beating Snake and the Memory of Video Games

May 18, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Jesper Juul has posted a fascinating GIF, Tweeted by Brendon Sheffield  on his page at the Ludologist. The GIF, “beating-snake,” is instantly recognizable to anyone who has played a variation of the simple game. In my case, I watched with rapt fascination as the game progressed to its conclusion. The GIF promised something that I had never seen—the end of a snake game. After the game ended, however, I realized that while watching it I had been actively recalling memories […]

Categories: Games, Memory, Nostalgia, Play • Tags: snake game

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Finding Red Flag Canal

July 14, 2010 by Museum Fatigue

One summer of my early graduate school career I made friends with the very large man who managed the audiovisual collection at the University of Washington. I don’t remember his name. He was friendly in a grumpy sort of way and loved quirky films and videos almost as much as he loved rollercoasters. I had come to him with a request for some films for a class I was TAing, when we got to talking about China. He told me […]

Categories: China, Memory, Museums, Mythologies, Nostalgia, Photo Essays • Tags: China, Cultural Revolution, 紅旗渠, nostalgia, Red Flag Canal, red tourism

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