I have all my ticket stubs going back to 1976. It's a very interesting box to pick through.
Years ago I worked on the Biography of the Rockefellers. I had to go up to their estate in Pocantico and rifle through Old John D's ledgers. It was very much the same thing. One entry read: Gift from Father- 1 Cent.
ouch! i guess that's how you accumulate a fortune. see, i was much too generous, spending $3 on Wayne's birthday gift.
i remember once talking to you about your collection of ticket stubs. you reminded me that there's always some institution or something that could potentially find shit like that is useful. i think you told me once about some guy who collected restaurant menus? and how great a resource that was for some historian of old New York City?
Yes. That was for the same project. We needed an antique menu that had Oysters Rockefeller on it. Some guy had obsessively saved menus for 25 years and when he died he donated them to the New York Historical Society. It was an invaluable resource.
"I'm starting to depress myself now. I mean, is this the content of a life? All the crap we accumulate and consume? Looking back on it, it all seems incredibly silly
( ... )
it DOES perform some sort of nostalgic function, for what that's worth. the thing is i tend towards sentimentality as it is, which i've found is a detriment to (a) living fully in the present, and (b) making art. so i'm wary.
The funny thing is, though, those of us that tend toward nostalgia (I think we're alike in that respect) will find nostalgia about the past no matter what. It's amazing that sometimes I find myself looking back fondly on, say, this spring or whatever, when the process of actually living through this spring at the time didn't seem particularly noteworthy. What I do find is that I manage, in retrospect, to pull little treasures even out of experiences that seemed mundane at the time. While it would be a mistake to get too wrapped up in this sort of thing (therefore not living fully in the present), there's certainly things that can be "mined" from this type of recollection for use in creative pursuits.
you're right, of course, which is why i've been posting these little reminiscences. i'm hoping to fine-tune them for inclusion in a new comic book/text project i've putting together. eventually.
Re: Where is that stuff now?4_eyezOctober 10 2005, 07:27:01 UTC
i long ago mined through all my oberlin stuff for possible stoop-saleage. the only thing i came up with was an extra copy of my 1989 yearbook, which featured a color photo of (then-unknown) liz phair. the yearbook fetched a pretty penny on eBay, lemme tell ya!
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Years ago I worked on the Biography of the Rockefellers. I had to go up to their estate in Pocantico and rifle through Old John D's ledgers. It was very much the same thing. One entry read: Gift from Father- 1 Cent.
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ouch! i guess that's how you accumulate a fortune. see, i was much too generous, spending $3 on Wayne's birthday gift.
i remember once talking to you about your collection of ticket stubs. you reminded me that there's always some institution or something that could potentially find shit like that is useful. i think you told me once about some guy who collected restaurant menus? and how great a resource that was for some historian of old New York City?
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