Inventory Porn

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I pulled a page out of Newsweek a year ago, intending to do something with the article, anyway a year later, I finally get around to blogging Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth, mostly as Yet Another example of what I would call Inventory Porn (of which Taschen books might be a leading example) – if you go to some extreme length and document something (a big collection, all the stuff in your home, every manhole cover, gum wads, lost pet posters, bowling pins) at length, it becomes some publishable hipster NPR-reporting bloggable story.

It’s sort of the ultimate in DIY (or sorry, I mean User Created Content); anyone can seemingly visit every Starbucks in the US. Most won’t. But the person that does can get a book/movie/TV deal.

Some of these efforts are fun, some offer some insight, but others are just tedious. I might like to photograph the hotel doorknob of every room I stayed in over the last 3 years. Do you want to look at those pictures? What if I tell you engaging stories about each doorknob? Or each hotel? Or each trip? Well….maybe.

I admit it’s compelling to consume and create, but I’m also feeling a little burned out with this stuff. Perhaps it’s the lowbrow ethno vibe the whole thing gives off, that it’s an aesthetic and attitude of being into the details of consumption more than the implications or outcomes of the study (if it is even study; perhaps it’s just documentation).

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