This month I traveled to France and Belgium
to see friends, relatives, buy used and new comic books…
rue du Midi, Brussels
Tintin, a lightly clad woman, and a Compostella hiker
… and have a little vacation.
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While figuring out which coats to
bring, one for the rain and one for the cold, I encountered some old LL Bean coats
that had hardly ever been worn. I threw
them in the suitcase, my nice big reliable long trip hawler, with the thought
of offering them to my first host, old time friend and LL Bean lover. He was so
happy! Then at my friend Laure’s, she showed me a dress that had been given to
her by a friend of hers. I tried it on and it was just too tight at the waist.
But the following day I was seeing my friend Carla who loved it immediately.
I did my usual visits to consignments shops and vintage stores, every European city has them at every street corner it seems -- making it difficult to resist the temptation of going in. A few new places I discovered were the flea market in Ghent where the set of six colorful chairs were for sale for 400 euros,
and yet another consignment shop on rue de Turennes in Paris, right next door to a one day "vide armoire," access to which required waiting on a line for which I had no patience.
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All this stuff. And it's Christmas season, so there's even more stuff than usual to tempt the eye. What presents to buy and for whom. What to bring back. All these things everywhere. So many wonderful and beautiful things. But the book Stitched Up was on my mind. I encountered a long line of shoppers waiting to get into the newly opened Primarc on the rue Neuve in Brussels and thought, "arghhh." How can one fight back the awful labor practices of the fashion industry?
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In Lyon, I bought a scarf from somebody sitting at a sewing machine in a little shop that purports to sell only locally made scarves. Lyon is known for its silk industry, and continues to produce, in small amounts, fabric for the upscale market.
Buying hand made things from a reliable source might alleviate the guilt but won't solve the overall problem.
I've been collecting wine corks and bottle caps for years, and this morning, I finally thought of something to do with them. Christmas ornaments! I had read an article in the New Yorker about a severely handicapped person who was wrapping objects with thread. And I had been struck in Brussels by a window decoration that had balls of thread hanging from a wooden treelike shape.
I am obsessing with all the "stuff" I've been accumulating with the idea that someday I would transform it into some kind of artistic object, making a grand statement about consumption, luxury, high vs lowbrow. The process of wrapping yarn and ribbon around a core of useless hard shapes that had served their purpose was extremely therapeutic.
There is no problem with loving objects. While hosting me for tea, my Parisian friend Mathilde laid out her new/old tea service that she had recently purchased in the Loire Valley.
We live in a material world. The trouble is that the material from which we are living has become cheap and disposable.
Restaurant in Ghent with a wall made entirely of old doors
I'm glad that some (old) objects have found new owners. Like this sheepskin coat, which belonged to my friend Laure's Corsican grandfather and has found a new happy owner.
Merry Christmas everyone!
