viz. - Thanksgiving

Consuming Images of Black Friday

clsloan — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 14:42:56 +0000

This past Thanksgiving/Black Friday combo gave me some time to reflect on (read: be befuddled about) some of the paradoxical impulses these distinctly American holidays encourage. On Thanksgiving day, as I finished cobbling together the world's simplest casserole to take over to a friend's, my partner was snoring the next room, trying to catch a few proverbial Z's before heading in to work for a midnight shift. I muttered my frustrations into gravy that stubbornly insisted on being lumpy, desperately trying to mobilize holiday vibes and feel thankful about the jobs my partner and I are lucky to have. No dice, though. The fact that someone I love had to miss out on dinner with friends in order to be awake for a middle-of-the-night work day made me all sorts of spiteful. Increasingly, more and more people are in this terrible boat.

It didn't help that, come Black Friday, the internet (myself included, being a denizen of that place) was bombarded by images of people brawling over discounted towels, standing in staggeringly long lines and stampeding madly through aisles lined with price-cut goodies.

Image Credit: ABC News

Now, call it my liberal proclivities, but Thanksgiving itself has always made me all sorts of antsy. I don't think that our culture should be able to neatly shake off the genocidal realities that are integrally attached to this holiday, but what to do about that particular paradox escapes me. The Black Friday thing might just be the nail in the coffin for my personal Turkey Day (which, serious issues about American history aside, is hard enough to celebrate with your meat-loving family when you're a vegetarian). At dinner itself, sympathetic ears enabled me to laugh bitterly about the polarized urges associated with the back-to-back “holidays” of Thanksgiving and Black Friday (I'm calling Black Friday a holiday in the bacchanalian sense). Thanksgiving supposedly asks us to count blessings, take stock of the most important things in our lives and reflect upon our good fortune. It's day about contentment, right? Nipping hard on its heels, however, comes Black Friday, a day to ferociously acquire more and more, revel in materialism and forget about all those points of contentment from yesterday.

Did I say yesterday? My mistake. This year big-name stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy decided to open their doors on Thanksgiving Day, ringing in Black Friday before the leftovers had time to cool. Granted, many professions give up their holidays every year in order to ensure the safety and well-being of others. Police officers, nurses, doctors, fire fighters, can't simply check out and head home en masse. When retail workers join the herd of “crucial service providers,” though, something, somewhere, has gone horribly wrong. Flipping through images of fights and arguments, the only news about Black Friday seemed to be bad news: basic humanity forgotten, common decency left at the sliding glass doors. Is this a good thing, though? Visual activism to discourage Black Friday madness? I find myself wondering whether this massive influx of images will help quell the raging fires of consumerism or simply toss more fuel on the culture of Black Friday. If part of the celebration (here's the bacchanalia again) involves enjoying the violence and the spectacle, maybe visual exposés aren't really the way to go.

Revolution Chic

ladysquires — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 03:14:51 +0000

This past Sunday at Paris Fashion Week, New York designer Thom Browne showcased a menswear collection in a manner that evoked performance art more than a conventional fashion show. Male models strutted down the catwalk in creations inspired by the Founding Fathers, specifically Thomas Jefferson's trip to Paris and the Thanksgiving tradition. Wearing 18th century sillouettes, top hats, canes, and knit caps that suggested powerded wigs, the models carried turkeys down the cat walk before sitting down at an elaborate table and "eating" a traditional Thanksgiving meal.

I personally find the entire thing delightful. First of all, menswear collections are usually just so boring, and this one, well, isn't. Fashion from the fashion-as-art school is about making an argument about where society is at a given time and place and avant-garde fashion done well reshapes our notions about what is beautiful and what is socially acceptable. I won't use the word "subversive" to describe fashion, since as a marketing technique for a luxury consumable accessible only to the extremely wealthy, fashion shows remain inextricably embedded in the status quo. Yet fashion does have the ability to alienate you from things you thought you knew and understood, and there is something fascinating and compelling about evoking Thomas Jefferson and Thanksgiving dinner in such a weird way given the manner in which political groups lay claim to the Founding Fathers with such frequency. There's a bit of a play on class signifiers with the "hobo-chic" (sliding perhaps a little too close to Zoolander derelicte territory) of the layered tartan coats contrasting the opulence of the dinner table. The makeup and use of skirts create an androgynous effect on some of the models. It also seems to be pretty clearly referencing the French Revolution, which, of course, Jefferson wholeheartedly supported. In fact, Jefferson's francophilia was so infamous in the new Republic that the Federalists printed the following critique, showing Jefferson about to burn the U.S. Constitution on a Satanic altar dedicated to the French Revolution:

No, not many men are going to rushing out to buy floor length wool skirts, jumpers, and puffy-sleeved coats, but that's not the point.

Photo credit: Getty Images via Tom and Lorenzo

No More Kings

dsmith — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:26:26 +0000

For your Thanksgiving pleasure—Pavement's cover of the Schoolhouse Rock classic, "No More Kings."

And here's Gillian Welch's version of Neil Young's "Pochahantas."

And who doesn't love Iggy Popp, circa 1979, taking you home from Grandma's house with a renewed "Lust for Life"? Yum!