Swaggy thrifting alt people

Buy nothing!

One of my nephews reps hard for his hometown of Denver. A while back, in making the case to me for the excellence of the D, he claimed it as a city of “swaggy thrifting alt people,” which seems like a pretty good description of the typical Money for Artists reader.¹

You’ve got so much swag it hurts, fam.

You thrift like it’s a job.

You are such an alternative to the sheeple.²

For her part, my BAAW is most def a swaggy thrifting alt person who was delighted to find at the thrift³ a “set” of four little drinking glasses, for 25 cents apiece.

I don’t know why I only took a picture of three of the four, but that’s what I did.

If you too grew up eating your grandma’s chipped-beef gravy on scrambled eggs at the holidays, you will perhaps gasp a little in wonderment when you recognize those as the little diamond-marked jars that the chipped beef (whatever that is) came in, and which were washed and saved in your aunt’s cupboards and repurposed as drinking glasses by a practical and frugal people who were distinctly not thrifting alt people, but who did have a certain swagginess to them.

This quality—finding the beautiful in the cast-off, repurposing old shit and making it hype, having a little bit of goddamn vision—rhymes wonderfully with the art of collage, my favorite practitioner of which has got to be the mononymic Jess (1923-2004).

A Cryogenic Consideration: Or, Sounding One Horn Of The Dilemma [Winter]. 1980, collage, 48 x 72 inches. Credit: Jess Collins Trust

Even his studio is a kind of collage.

Credit: Ben Blackwell

(Read more about Jess and see more of his work HERE and HERE and HERE.)

There’s something so dope in the fundamentally anticonsumerist approach of the collage artist. The collage artist takes old crap that no one wants, pushes it around and around and around until it’s sitting next to another piece of old crap that no one wants, and all of a sudden the juxtaposition of the two is INEVITABLE and PRICELESS.

I don’t adhere in any methodical way to Buy Nothing Day. But here with Donald Trump, himself perhaps the human [sic] embodiment of American consumerism, once more ascendant, it seems like maybe a good occasion to make the admittedly feeble and bearing-no-personal-cost gesture of buying nothing at all today while Americans are out buying a million teevees and shit?

Anyway, I started thinking about all of this when I was decluttering the basement last weekend and found this print that a generous book artist made (a million years ago) of a poem I wrote (a million years ago): “Poem Made from Failed Poems.”

It was long enough ago that I had forgotten about the print and the poem, if that tells you anything. But it comes flooding back: I had all these lines and ideas and gestures and descriptions I had written that had never gone anywhere, had never become anything, and I started jigsawing them together and all of a sudden they just seemed to *fit*.

I don’t know if the poem is any good—it might just suck, actually—but as far as a process goes, it was an occasion of delight and discovery.

Happy Buy Nothing Day, fam.

1. Also maybe a weirdly comforting reclamation of “alt” from the “alt-right”?

2. You are superior to me in all of these things. I have come to terms with the fact that I am, alas, a pretty normcore dadguy, except maybe in my reading and listening.

3. Not just any old thrift; like you, perhaps, she has distinct favorites, and this one came from the champ thrift, where the church ladies really sift through the donations for the gems, lovingly display their faves, and take great pleasure in selling, e.g., some old reused jars for a quarter apiece.