MUSEUM FATIGUE

Candy Crush Saga and the Hänsel and Gretel Economy

July 7, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] bout six weeks ago I started playing Candy Crush Saga. A few days ago I stopped playing it at Level 147, because after […]

Categories: Anthropology, Consumption, Games, Play, Social Class • Tags: Candy Crush Saga, casual games, economy, Hänsel and Gretel, iPad, pay-as-you-go

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The Chinese Businessman and His Magic

June 20, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

[I was going through some old drafts of posts-never-completed this morning and decided to delete the ones I’ll likely never complete. Others, like this one are parts of ideas or beginnings of drafts that never got finished but don’t deserve to be deleted because there is something there worth keeping. So I’ve decided to just post them as-is.] Earlier this summer, just outside of Shenyang, China, the group with which I was traveling stopped for a visit to a small […]

Categories: China, Collecting, Corporate Culture, Material Culture, Objects of Power • Tags: buddha, 貔貅, guangong, guanyu, manufacturing, pixiu, Shenyang, 关羽, 沈阳

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Good Luck With Your New Car in Shenyang

June 19, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

During a few days in Shenyang I noticed a number of cars that had little pieces of red cloth tied on their tires. Actually, once I noticed the pieces of cloth I started seeing them everywhere. A local acquaintance explained to me that it was a local custom to tie a piece of red cloth in this way on the tires of new cars—to bring the driver of the car good luck. Often the cloth was then left on the […]

Categories: China, Everyday Things, Material Culture • Tags: automobile, local custom, red cloth, Shenyang, tires, 沈阳

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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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The Facebook Database Must Be Fed

May 23, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Most people around at the dawn of the public Internet might remember the brief period when important webpage addresses circulated by word of mouth, in emails among friends, and were even published in books. Back in 1994, for example, I remember buying a telephone book-sized tome hundreds of pages thick, packed with URLs broken down by type. I’d look in the book’s index, find what I wanted, and then type the unwieldy URL into the browser. Viola! Then came search engines— Yahoo!, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves!, Google and […]

Categories: Discipline, Internet, Random Reflections, Surveillance • Tags: Database, digital double, Facebook, internet, social web, technology

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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Cannibal Tours

May 17, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

A year ago a student borrowed our university library’s copy of Dennis O’Rourke’s classic film, Cannibal Tours, and never returned. The film is out of print and it has been tough to find a replacement—a big inconvenience because this film is so well done. I know of few films that so effectively make viewers aware of their own spectatorship—and offer a teachable and discussable critique of the tourist industry. I regularly give students a first taste of this film in my […]

Categories: Documentary, Representation, Tourism • Tags: Cannibal Tours, Dennis O'Rourke, Papua New Guinea

“Welcome to Chinese Walmart”: Emailing Oriental Curiosities

April 28, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Over the past few years a number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances have forwarded an interesting email to me. The email, usually titled “Welcome to Chinese Walmart” features a series of images taken at Walmart stores in China. Judging from the number of times the email is indented—indicating that it has been quoted and forwarded–each of the emails circulated many dozens of times. Folks send it to me with good intentions because they know that I have spent some time […]

Categories: China, Food, Mythologies • Tags: culture, curiosities, email, exotic, Orientalism, sensational images, Walmart, walmart stores

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Hardware and Games

April 26, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

It isn’t much of a stretch to say that the hardware store is a space that is primarily gendered as male—a place where men buy tools and materials for construction. Whether professional or weekend do-it-yourselfers, the stores promise encounters with physical labor—selling things for—designing, building and fixing. They sell hardware. So imagine my surprise when on a visit to my local Menards, I walked past a display selling software—”Value Video Games.” If there is a male that is configured as the inverse […]

Categories: Games, Gender, Labor, Play, Work • Tags: gamer, handyman, hardware, hardware store, Menards, software, video games

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June 4, 1989: Report on Putting Down Anti-Government Riot

April 25, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Last week while looking for a book on my bookshelf I happened upon a slim, blue-covered pamphlet wedged between two larger books. The moment I pulled it out I recognized it as something I hadn’t seen in many, many years—the Report on Putting Down Anti-Government Riot (关于反政府暴乱的报告). It was the official government account, in English, of the government response to the student protests in Tiananmen Square during the late spring and early summer of 1989. The book is a first […]

Categories: China, Mythologies • Tags: June 4 1989, student protests, Tiananmen Square, 六四

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