You Had Me At Banana

Stumble upon the fallen.

Objects live.

Almost just as much as we do. They start out fresh, unscathed, innocent and with all the potential of the world, hoping they’ll find good homes that will take them in as one of their own and cherish them for a lifetime. We imprint them with our memories, experiences and emotions, almost as if we give them a little part of our soul, of who we are and they live through us.
If they’re fortunate, they’ll age in love and comfort on your bedside or a cozy shelf in your bedroom. And if they’re super lucky, they’ll end up in a bedroom like mine, that’s basically a shrine for all the puzzling man-made objects on display and in boxes, preciously kept and pampered.

Every once in a while, i go exploring in my own room, to remember forgotten things, find lost treasures and feel like Indiana Jones, time after time. The adventure of the day had taken me in the deepest caves of my photographs, the exploration of snapshots of objects and traces of the past. That’s when I stumbled upon a series of photographs I had not seen in three years and that had completely eluded my mind. With every picture I looked at, pieces and traces of a misplaced memory came back to life.

The “souk el ahad” or popular souk or beirut is the closest thing Beirut has to a Flee Market. Most people will brush through there and only see junk - piles and piles and piles of junk. From used shoes, to bulk house supplies and XXXXXXL clothes on sale just for that day.

But to an Object Adventurer like me, the view is quite different. That market is a retirement home and cemetery of all fallen objects. A Land filled with many other “Object Adventurer” and Hunters, trading their treasures and finds. I walk through and see the eroded  and erased  memories of other people’s lives in their objects and outcast belongings. All the toys, tapes, vinyls, decorative items gone astray in that oversized Nostalgia Shop, being sold, and for the right price, you can buy a piece of someone’s else’s memories and lives, put them in your home and call it vintage.

As I look at all the lost souls, I feel compelled to save them, rescue them from the damned placed and give them a new home. I stumble upon a stuffed animal of a Tiger and get a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. It seems too familiar and I remember that I used to have the exact same one as a child. I hold it and i feel like I’m holding a memory of a life that seems like just a hazy dream now. I hold that memory and see all the wares and tears of the Tiger, wondering if by some strange cosmic coincidence it could be mine. And if it wasn’t, what life had this Tiger been through. It almost felt like I could see where it had been, my imagination transported me through all its grand important milestones and life, a kind of movie-flaskback-end-of-life moment. It could’ve belonged to a little boy, who adored it like a real pet his whole childhood, then moved it on top of his closet in his teenagers years, then came back one summer as an adult to see that his mother had decided to give away his toys to kids who needed it more than he did. But it eventually got disregarded again, ending up in a lost corner of the Nostalgia Market.

The toys are something of fascination, but the delicatessen of the souk, are the picture albums and photographs gone astray. I always take a hard long look at them. wonder who the people are, what lives they lead and why the snapshots of their memories and lives would end up here.
On a specific trip to the souk with a friend, I lingered on a couple’s wedding album and honeymoon pictures. There it was, right in front of me, one of the most important days of that woman’s life, at church, surrounded by her family and loved ones, all smiling on that joyous occasion. A mere simple thought crossed my thoughts and I told my friend: “Wouldn’t it by funny if we actually found pictures of people we know?”. She laughed at the thought and quickly peered over to the album. It took her a second to react and she screamed in shock: “Wait! that’s my mother in the pictures!”. I had stumbled upon her aunt’s wedding album, right there, in the Souk. The shop tenant refused to just give them back and we had to purchase her aunt’s and mother’s lost memories. We later learned that her aunt’s house had been robbed 10 years earlier and for some strange reason, the album and pictures had found their way into our hands that day.

That day, I walked out of the Nostalgia Market with an immense satisfaction that only Amelie Poulain understands, when reuniting people with their long lost memories.  

There is a certain delicate charm of lost and misplaced objects.
It is often overlooked. Objects live, they perish, they get lost and found, but they do live on, long after we are gone and hold precious secrets in silence that we might never break as they sit on our shelves, by our bed, or even in a junkyard.

weapons of mass consumption

we are what we eat.
we are where we come from, where we live and where we go.
we are the people we choose to surround ourselves with.
these are things we often hear.
we are judged and categorized by all these criteria. We are, whether we like it or not, walking, living tags.

l’habit ne fait pas le moine.
A direct translation of that french saying says that the outfit does not define the monk, or in other words, don’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly how i pick out books, and define first impressions. We read the visual language that the people around us choose for us to see. they define themselves as they would like us to define them.

So i say, we are what we wear. We exceed the skin we live in and who we are blends and fuses with what we wear.
The image we project of ourselves becomes a tag on its own.
Before you get to know anything and everything about a person, you will base your first impression on what you see in front of you. You are presented with a full fledged human being, a personality, the glitches, the smiles, the expressions, all packaged and branded in a bunch of clothes.
Whether we like it or not, we can’t frolic about in the world, all whimsical and naked into the universe, we have to give in to the small vanities of everyday life, package ourselves, visually brand ourselves, objectify ourselves to the pieces of cloth we live in and project a certain image of ourselves, even if that image is one of negligence and indifference.

One way or another, everybody indulges in their own small pleasures of life.
I fall in the category of people who live for these little daily satisfactions.
A few years back, that appreciation of the subtle little things of life was pushed an extra step. Every time i bought an item, i always checked to see what the tag looked like. It became in itself a tiny sample of a design, a signature of the item i had purchased, a visual pleasure attached to another even more exciting object.
And so i started keeping them, categorizing the tags.  Just like clothes, we have the basics, the funky, the classic, the patterns and so on..
With time, that collection also gained another dimension. As they accumulated, it just made me realize exactly how much i’ve been buying over years.
Laying them all out on the floor and looking at them, this growing itch was lurking in the back of my mind. it became necessary at this point to take them all and calculate exactly how much i had been spending. The amount was of course ridiculous.

At the precise moment upon which i came to the conclusion of that tag collection, my brain directly flashed to that one line in Lily Allen’s song “The Fear”.
“I am a weapon of mass consumption”.
And i really truly felt it that precise moment.
I am a weapon of mass consumption, the perfect victim and target of visual pleasure.  I fall in love with shoes, bags, sweaters, dresses, skirts, necklaces, drawings. And when that happens, the need to consume and buy, consumes my being. The temptation to buy, make them my own is too great. And so, I give in to these objects, make them all mine to appreciate the colors, the aesthetic pleasure of understanding how a pattern was created and what it entails.

The moment the item becomes mine, the satisfaction jolt is always that of a knight that just conquered a dragon, i’ve slain the need to buy, to make it mine.
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” (O.W.). Owning the item, ripping off the tag, stashing it away in the collection box, like one of my trophies and treasures… and then the insatiable feeling starts all over again..

it’s about time…

(pun intended)

it’s about man’s obsession to intricately depict and materialize the only essence that matters and seems to be elusively slipping through our fingers and constantly out of our grasp and control.
it’s about the need to hold on to moments that have already gone by before you actually materialize..

As a child, I used to be completely obsessed with time, being on time, calculating time, depicting time, controlling time. I would get highly frustrated if i was even a few seconds late to anything and had very strict set of routines, like waking up at hours like 7:16 Am and snoozing for exactly 4 minutes before getting out of bed.
This of course resulted in the natural creation of a watch collection, Swatch collection to be more precise that was actually inherited and encouraged by my father who himself has a very meticulous and methodological appreciation of the world around him.
The first watch i ever received was a blue plastic Swatch that had no numbers or indications, just an abstract squiggle in the dial. I, of course, had no idea how to read time yet but I knew that its purpose would an important one my life. For the time being,  it served as a wonderful chewing snack.
But i caught on pretty quickly by taking a step back with the arrival of my first pink FlikFlak. (that one was a bit easier to handle, it was kiddy-friendly yet still very chewable)

The collection started very early and never stopped growing since. I’ve worn a watch everyday of my life for most of my life, slept with them and never took them off. Some of them I’ve never even worn and are stored to one day be displayed and exposed for some higher purpose. But that specific collection mixed my obsession with Time and my high interest in design. I’ve only drifted away from Swatches recently, driven by the love of kitsch and vintage.

These days though, it seems to me that all my watches are attempting to trick me and speed up, blur, distort time, to the extent that I can’t even seem to catch up anymore and everything just seems like I’m in Alice’s Wonderland. They’re like ticking time-bombs, implanting negative thoughts of deterioration and slow fading into the nothingness of the end of time.

That being said, there was only one solution. Letting go of time, or finding a solution to liberate myself from the strains of Time.
Not completely as in i’ll go off into the wild and live off nature and transform back into a cave person dressed only in leaves and bushes. But as much as I could anyways.
Letting go of time became necessary because its the only thing that we actually have that lasts us our whole life.

You just got to feel time instead of trying to control it and pin it down in the tiny dial of your watch. And then,  the second you let go is when you actually realize its full effect and weight. You free yourself of the anxiety of always feeling that you’re chasing something down a rabbit hole, an endless yellow brick road with no Emerald city at the end. And then you realize that it has no actual system.
A while ago I watched this talk about a woman who suffered from a stroke that was triggered by a clog in her left hemisphere of the brain, which is the part that is responsible for everything logical as opposed to the right hemisphere that works around emotions and intuition. As a scientist, she recounted the experience and all its overwhelming aspects in the most interesting words I’ve ever heard, highlighting the feelings she had as her left brain hemisphere was started to fail her. She represented the moments of right hemisphere consciousness as entering as state of Nirvana, letting go of everything logical and calculated and really feeling alive for the first time ever.
 Time is like a stroke, a left hemisphere, always trying to get in the way of Nirvana, of what really matters and the enjoyment of every moment. And that’s when you let go, or stop wearing a watch.

It’s how a day can seem interminable while you excitedly wait for that important thing at the end of the day or how a whole evening can just flash by you without you noticing it and then the sun is suddenly coming up.
It’s how two days can seem so far apart from another that you feel that yesterday was another lifetime and today is a rebirth that can last an eternity and you lose yourself completely in it.

It’s not about trying to kill time with distractions and slowly cruise through life.

It’s about letting go and stopping Time. There’s enough of it to going around to last a lifetime.

The Dream pusher

On the outskirts of the city, a man slowly pushes a colorful cart on the side of the road.
Plastic toys of wonder and fascination overflow from every side. A police set for the boys, a cleaning kit for the girls. The perfect cliché of the premature conditioning of their impressionable and fragile minds.

It’s calling to the children, luring them with plastic promises of better things in the horizon. The abundant and overcharged sugar-coated cart seems to offer a solution for all tastes and indulges all the dreams and desires of the little cherubs who dare to look its way.

As I walk past the cart, my inner child compels me to stop and take a closer look.

Like all illusions and dreams, the surface always appears magical and innocent. The plastic toys and plastic dreams seem inoffensive. They are here to mimic what real life is “supposed to look like”. At the height and expectations of children, seeing high enough or far enough into the future is not possible.

Luckily for me, I’m taller than an 8 year-old child. And when I get close, what I see is a completely different story. The inside of the cart is filled with wrenches, hammers, nails, glue and all sorts of practical objects, all gray and harsh. For some reason, all I can think of at that exact moment is Disney’s Pinocchio. That specific scene where all the children are on that “pleasure island” with all the promises of fun, when what actually awaits them is an actual life of hardship and cold hard reality concealed underneath. The cart behaves in the same contrast. Little do those kids know that their plastic dreams and hopes will one day transform into cold metallic realities.

Those little cleaning sets will one day turn into real ones for some little girls, and those plastic tools will transform into weapons of mind-numbing work one day, all dreams and colors faded and in a long forgotten past. And so the man pushes on, extending the illusions for a little while longer, with staring children passing by, tugging their mothers to stop and indulge in their innocent desires, if only for a brief moment, before their colorful innocence melts away and is welded into the cold burn of an empty tin.

The Superman Complex

Glasses.

As a child, you have desires for the strangest of things. I remember a period in time where I was convinced with all my being that it would be fun to twist my ankle because clutches looked like the most amusing thing in the world. It would give me four legs instead of two and I’d be a temporarily transformed human slash robot to defend the world. Let’s just say i was a strange little thing with an overactive imagination.

The same thing goes for glasses. I remember really wanting to have eyeglasses because they, as well, would allow some sort of transformation.
The idea of glasses as a means of transformation is very deep rooted desire. I remember always looking up to my father, the doctor, as a role model, always very defined with his eyeglasses. And then when he would take them off, it was like another person appeared. I remember trying his glasses and observing the ways in which they would make my face and expressions different.

My wish finally came true when I was ten years-old. I had worked very hard to earn that eye check-up, disciplining myself to sit 40 cm away from the television screen. My efforts paid off and I was so excited that I kept tripping over my own words when trying to read the challenging decreasing letters and ended up reading something of the sort:
 I C T Z (as eye see tee zee instead of eye see tee zed which sounded like I see my butt in a mix of Arabic and English!)

The good news finally came with the mystical word: MYOPE. It meant I was to wear eyeglasses.

Just imagine the dilemma and enchantment that occurred when they presented me with all those crown jewels to wear at the tip of my tiny nose and to choose at my leisure.

I was not aware of the complexities it implied as a small child, but looking back i understand that it was the birth of the superman complex.

As my glasses evolved and I grew, I came to realize that my personality was almost split. Wearing the glasses would transform me, give me a whole other dimension that I did not have without them. Clark Kent, the four-eyed journalist was awkward and quirky as opposed to Superman who was strong and confident, but it seemed to play out the other way around with me. Only when wearing my mask did I truly reveal my true face and hidden powers. In disguise, I would give myself freedom that I would not have in normal circumstances.

The glasses, the mask, played its role as a tool to give myself freedom and resilience to the kryptonite that surrounded me. 

After years, the mask and I have become one but in a different form. Its shield is invisible yet still present in the form of transparent lenses.

That inner schizophrenia has dissolved today but the glitches of the superman complex still emerge from time to time when my big black glasses take over.

The fetish hunt

The morning light shines blindingly.

A slight breeze blows my hair out of my face.

Nonetheless, it brings very little comfort. The asphyxiating heat manages to cut every single breath.

I walk slowly,  following the trail, blending in my surroundings as much as I possibly can.

I’m surrounded by plastic kaleidoscope jungles of colorful wonders and the extravagant creatures who inhabit this territory. They all observe me as i walk by, an alien in their land, a ridiculous and uncoordinated trespasser.

I try not to make any sudden movements and look down as i walk past them but they still howl strange words at me. I ignore them and hurry forward.

I am near now and I know it.

The adrenaline is pumping in my veins and the excitement escalates with every step.

And right there, without warning, a red framed cavern pulls me into its spell.

A massive gatekeeper welcomes me with a complicit look. We smile at each other with mutual understanding as he gestures me to enter the cave of a thousand and one shoes.

I take a first shy step in and I’m directly engulfed by the overwhelming sight and my eyes light up in stupefaction.

Whoever said less is more was clearly wrong in this case. More and more and more is more.  My eyes have a hard time adjusting to the abundance and i suddenly feel like a child unleashed in a candy store.

I start digging, searching, shoveling and scooping out, in hope to find the lost, the buried, the forgotten treasures of another era.

I transpose myself in the skin of an archeologist, an explorer, a modern day,  more colorful Indiana Jones, discovering a lost artifact and all its secrets. The spectrum of colors call on me to find them, those precious flashy jewels worn by the kings and queens of the noble disco era.

But no hunt is complete without stumbling upon the crown jewel of the collection. The shining plastic pink diamonds stood on the very top of the very highest pile, glowing gloriously like a holy relic waiting to be saved. As i reach for them, I almost dread the worst in fear of having the whole cave crumble at my feet. I stand on the tip of  my toes and catch them in relief and triumph. My own Ruby Slippers, slightly more plastic, slightly more pink, but just as magical.

I leave the cavern and bow my head to the gatekeeper in great gratitude as I take away a piece of his collection to introduce it to mine.

I walk back out into the jungle, head held high, pink plastic slippers at my feet, carrying me away to their world of wonders.

The Box of Dreams

Wind up the crank and fall back into your childhood with those soft broken notes.

What used to be an oh-so-familiar tune your parents sung to you to send you off to a world of dreams bigger than yourself, suddenly takes on a different dimension.  It was a simple little box. You could barely fit anything into but still tried to stuff all the secrets and hopes of the world into. You would take it everywhere with you as your prized treasure chest, opened and  closed so many times that its little twirling figurine stood with the tilted posture of the Pisa tower.

The music box looks different today.  Its features are harsher and the song more bitter. it now gives the desire to grasp those never-again-reachable memories. But still, you try to recreate that feeling when you wind it up.  And  for a few precious seconds, you get the sweet release and warmth of those notes, the song that could last forever.

It enthralls you and takes you away in the time it takes the little tune to unfold. It sells you intoxicating dreams and mesmerizing illusions. It starts slowly, taking you in note by note, hypnotizing you with all its wonders, glamoring you. Then the ascent, spinning you faster and faster like a never-ending dizzying merry-go-round till it reaches the climax and plays that last singular note to reveal the only truth there is,  ending the haze and showing what it really is. Every word it utters becomes an illusion and a lie. It sells you reminiscence and remembrances of an innocent life that once was. The  box is the marvelous manipulator, alluring its prey with fake promises. It turns you into its puppet, pulling on all the right strings to push you over the edge and fall right into its spell-binding dance of self-deception.

Wind up the crank and fall back into illusion with those hard broken notes.

The love story started at a very young age. That intriguing curved yellow fruit popped into my life from the moment I was given my name: Roanne. And the rest followed naturally with rhyming games at school. So the inevitable bond was instantly formed.

But bananas are just the beginning of the story. it’s about more than just a fruit. It becomes an object of fascination, in shape and form, function and utility.
All objects,things,food products (be it natural or created by men) have a function. But for some reason, the more trivial the use, the more fascinating it becomes.

That which is useless curiously becomes more interesting and a worthless precious gem in my eyes.

In that logic, you can only begin to imagine all the wondrous crap I decide to keep, collect,store and hide in my room. With that fascination with useless treasures, developing an acquired taste for the world of the kitsch, tacky, quirky and strange objects becomes almost a natural step.

I don’t believe that it goes to the extent of hoarding, but stays in a healthy yet slightly chaotic collecting. But the scope of “things” you can collect nowadays is so much wider than what it use to be. I collect words, sounds, pictures, flyers, memorabilia, memories, ideas.

The way I feel about objects is utter fascination, like introducing a being from a foreign land or planet to a whole range of wondrous inventions,gadgets, gizmos. in a sense, I’m like Ariel in the Little Mermaid, collecting man made objects in her little underwater cave.

I feel I should also consider that in some way this fascination I have with objects could almost be called hereditary, as I can see that my mother shares the same interest in objects, hers is a very specific one, that has be on-going since I was a child, and that you could probably spot the second you walk into our house (we’ll save that case for an exploration on some day).

The blog’s first mission is to explore the Aladdin cave of wonders I live in, dig in it, discover lost collected objects, document them, create a digital collection.

But more than that, it will be about hunting for those strange little objects in different parts of the city and country. I’ll do my best not to simply post found images (except ones that relate to bananas!) and try to find varied objects and items! Basically, I am here to share my obsession and fascination with objects and turn it into something that is a bit more productive ad organized.