Consumer Objectivity Down the Literal Drain

  by Sam Van Eman 

Transcript of this recording:

Two years ago, we bought a foreclosed home. The loan stipulated that we finish the upstairs bathroom which previous owners must have started but couldn’t afford to finish before being evicted. It was all studs, insulation, and exposed plumbing, and I argued that we didn't need to finish it yet since we had another one downstairs. I promised to take on the project myself, but the bank didn't budge. So we compiled a list of item numbers and paid a contractor to finish the job.

It's been two years, and we've never really used the downstairs bathroom I originally claimed would be sufficient. Turns out that except for a few emergencies, it served better as a tool storage for current projects. My wife was right: It really was a mess.

Last week, with tax return in hand and help from a friend who knows more than I do, I began gutting what had become the tool storage. I checked off his to-do list, even squeezing under the crawlspace for inspection and digging (By the way, a cubic yard of dirt is a lot to move while lying on your back in the dark).

Every trip to both local and box stores, I bought supplies based on what caught my attention from the shelf. Not willy-nilly decisions, but reasonable decisions. Products complement each other so well that if I saw an item on sale, I could pack it into the cart and take it home, knowing I'd find its match later.

Then yesterday evening, after comparing prices of what seemed to be rather different items, a reflection drew me out of the shopping trance. I realized that these items were not rather different at all; in fact, they demonstrated such a lack of creative variety that they suddenly appeared quite the same. I thought about the toilet, and then the shower fixture, and then the sink, and mirror, the light and fan, and all of it together appeared in my mind like every other bathroom of every other person who has a Lowe's within driving distance of their house.

Part of the problem lies with building code, which isn't too different than, say, car design. Just as you can only do so much with a side-mirror or a bumper before you risk driver safety, regulations for plumbing and electricity behind the scene influence aesthetics right in front of you. Certainly color and shape vary, but the stipulations are strict and the freedom, little, especially for the vast majority who can't afford gross distinction. Still, I ask, Why am I limited to few real options? Am I actually limited? And what convinced me to see the array of selections as more different than similar in the first place?

It's like a kind of shopping socialism had taken over and I was suddenly aware of its tight fit.

The project will move forward. It has to. I'm looking forward to problem-solving and installation—activities which make me appreciate being human. But now I feel tied. No matter how I’d like to escape cultural bounds, every member in my family views the world in their own shaped way, which means I can't simply claim the entire vote for what gets installed and what doesn't. I have to consider their aesthetic wishes too.

And even if they agreed to my requests, I'm still left with the effects of social influence. I want what others have. When Lowe's sells a product that I swear I've seen in a wealthy home, I feel drawn to the suggestion of elevated importance. When the cheap items are listed as "Basic" or "Our Most Popular Model," I feel poor and want to be above the tier of consumers who look for those items. (Design doesn't happen in a vacuum, after all.)

But here I am in the aisle, alerted by the trance and asking myself a perplexing question: How would this bathroom look if I could build it outside of the cultural parameters currently guiding my opinions?

I really don't know. Unless I've traveled abroad, or, conversely, grown up in isolation, contrast is hard to find. Innovation is difficult to consider. This fact reminds me of a former Disney employee whose boss said, "We purchased some land, build something." The employee replied, "You mean, like a theme park?" to which his boss replied, "Whatever you'd like." The employee's reaction was limited to what he already knew. He had to be given permission to think beyond it.

I don’t have the money for gross distinction, or even for sliding down the aisle past Basic in most cases. So I want permission. I could go with Our Most Popular Model and let someone else—the entire middle class, in fact—determine how to decorate our home, but I want permission. I feel alive when I create. I feel emboldened, empowered. Human. That's a spirituality I can enjoy—walking in the footsteps of the Creator.  

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Bug-eyed for Culture: Help Me See

Image by Thomas Shahan.

Dave fixes my car. Dave also coaches Little League. Both are work, and both are cultural acts, even though only fixing my car earns Dave a paycheck. We are, as Andy Crouch says, “culture makers.” Some make improvements to cars for pay, yes, but we also make toys, music, houses, apps, children, communities, stories, language, history, libraries, justice, noise, and play.

Culture is all day, every day. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Help me create a sharper vision for the culture content at TheHighCalling.org. To do that, read the rest of this post and my invitation here. Thanks!

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Streetwalking in 2012

by Sam Van Eman

Transcript of this recording:

Here's how it feels. I've come just around a city block corner onto 2012 Avenue and I'm thinking about both the last street and this one. The last one wasn't ugly or dark. It feels more like a friend's house with a decent dinner and pretty good company; the experience keeps me warm on the walk home.

More of my mind is on the next street. I've just popped out of the New York City subway and turned the corner. I've got a meeting address in my pocket. Haven't been there, haven't met the people. But the city scape is alive and the meeting promises. I see it as a brainstorming session of sorts on a topic I love to discuss. That's the feeling, anyway, rounding this corner.

As critical as I am, and as often as I complain about this issue or that discomfort, I get this feeling every year. I'm glad for a perennial optimism. I won't set New Year's resolutions (I wouldn't keep them). I'm not trying to clean last year's slate with a fabricated belief that this year will be my year. I won't even lie to myself about what potential I might or might not have. I know what I have to work with, and but for grace, those tools could sink me or save me in a few short steps.

So here I am, looking forward, eager to get to this meeting but not wanting to rush it either. The conversation I'll have there has significant implications on my work, family, and faith, all of which, as I get older, mean more to me. For everything that shapes these implications, I thank the Lord.

Here's to a walk with anticipated stops along the way and an unusual measure of grace to help 2012 surprise all of us.

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Angelic Gas

Image by Ruth Hallam

It’s hard to be burdened with your parents’ hell while learning how to make a cow fart. Bobby’s uncle ran a farmette about a mile from our flea market trailer and kept a single cow in the pasture. One summer afternoon while admiring neatly routered crafts in the half-wood shop, half-stall, Bobby called to me.

“Wanna see something cool?”

“Sure,” I said. “What is it?”

“C’mere.” And he turned mischievously for me to follow.

I stepped through the shop door and up onto the rail that contained the heifer. I ran my hand along her back, watching the skin twitch at flies and suddenly forgetting that Bobby had something in mind. Her brown coat felt hot and soft. He was petting along her side, just in front of the pelvic bone, and began to depress the area like a doctor checking for appendicitis. His other hand joined the first and he pressed harder, massaging slowly, front to back, front to back.

And then it happened...a long, loud expulsion of gas from the cow’s behind. To a recent seventh grade graduate, it was possibly the best thing I had ever heard. Bobby had trouble containing himself while pressing again, this time slower now that he had it going, and the beautiful, wonderful sound came forth in a tremendous second wave. They both finally quit. The cow’s wide eye stared at the two of us hanging there in tears.

That’s when the smell hit. Rot and heat mixed to burn our lungs and punish us for teasing. We jumped out of the stall, gagging and laughing hysterically.

I liked Bobby. He parted his hair and said Yes ma’am and swore conservatively like people do who live in the Bible Belt but don’t really go to church. And he was good for me in a way I couldn’t have known then. Beyond the cow and dares to touch the electric fence, bike rides, fort-building and praying we wouldn’t fall to our deaths when his brother whipped rocks at us high in the tree branches, Bobby was helping me escape.

One particular memory confirmed it.

We had constructed a battle scene of figures and machines on his bedroom carpet. I remember the white walls and ceiling fan in his room because these were nicer than what I had in my closet space with the furnace in the corner. We tied fishing line around the body of a WWII fighter plane and to a blade of the ceiling fan. The slow circling threat kept soldiers on their toes. It was a G.I. Joe action-figure set-up like only the kids in TV commercials had.

We pulled the chain to Medium, continuing with our battle language but shifting more attention to the plane. It picked up speed. The painted pilot banked wider and had trouble maintaining control before settling arythmically. Bobby and I glanced at the bedroom door and then at each other.

“What do you think would happen?” he whispered.

I had no other answer. “Let’s find out.”

As soon as I pulled the chain to High and backed away, the plane rose, weaving and dipping wildly. Its left wing caught the ceiling and caused the aircraft to spin desperately out of control. Bobby and I ducked in fear. Neither of us could reach the speed chain before the red fang-mouthed decal on the nose struck the ceiling.

The string broke. The fighter plane shot over us and exploded against the wall above Bobby’s pillow, shattering into plastic pieces of camouflage and outdoing everything those kids on TV had. 

Mischief, I figured then, but it’s therapy to me now because I realize that I had my own commercial going on there; a break from the usual program. Dad had drunk himself reckless, mom was on the run with four of us in a far state, middle school kept me awake at night. Welfare and church people put food on the steps by the scraggly palmetto bush. We all wondered when normal might return.

Here I thought Bobby and I were making cow farts and wrecking his models. We weren’t. He was being normal, with a normal family and normal bedroom walls and a normal life. He was my grace in a battle I couldn’t fight alone; a TV commercial of normalcy in a program of chaos.

And I loved every minute of it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"Angelic Gas" is a response to Marcus Goodyear's call for epiphany stories in the Books & Culture article Only Zombies Worship Styrofoam Jesus.

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My Own Manbag line!

Satire just in time for Black Friday, compliments of creative friends at The High Calling.

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Wiggle room

In her book, Eve's Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body, Lillian Calles Barger writes:

"Throughout great classic works of literature the beautiful woman inspires, but this beauty remains largely undefined. It has no particularity. Its content is not fixed, and its attributes are of a transcendent quality. In the Iliad, Helen of Troy is never described except as beautiful. There is no image of her except what our imagination brings to the text. In William Wordsworth's poem 'She Was a Phantom of Delight' the beloved is described as 'a moment's ornament, / Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; / Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair.' Likewise in the biblical Song of Songs the beloved is described through metaphors: 'Behold, you are fair! You have dove's eyes' (Songs 1:15)."

What our imagination brings to the text. I like that. But Barger then asks: "What happens when what it means to be 'the beloved' is no longer articulated with words but communicated by explicit images?"

I spoke with a group of college students about the effects of advertising on body image. In our discussion on the way beauty is defined, one woman said, "There's no wiggle room."

The print ad above for Olay affirms her comment. It highlights Barger's word "explicit," as in: spelled out, given definitive parameters, narrowly prescribed.

Nothing short of a miracle could transform the beauty industry into a comprehensive reflection of the Kingdom of God, but is it possible, in the meantime, to add some wiggle room? How would you do it as an advertiser, or a graphic designer, or a photographer, or a parent?

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This post was first published in early 2008 when I was my only reader. Because it's still valid and because I care about voices who cover these important advertising topics, I'm bringing it back for your consideration.

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