The revenge of stuff

I miss stuff. Stuff used to be everywhere. I watched The Lost Boys recently. It occurred to me that stuff clutters every shot of 80s films, trinkets, knickknacks, gumph, it clogs up the screen to the point of distraction when compared to the barren surfaces of modern television. All my life I’ve been told that stuff is the enemy. Excess weight. A morass of barnacles clinging to the underside of our lives that must shaken off in periodical decluttering frenzies. The stuff we accumulate today is tomorrow’s landfill we were told. Austerity is the unsung virtue. One of the first pieces I wrote for this blog in the 2010s was a – thankfully now lost – commentary on the contradiction that stuff presents for vinylheads and other physical media acolytes. If owning stuff is wrong, bad for the planet, resource heavy and the reason you’re poor, how does one square that with the vast document of humanity balancing precariously on your creaking shelves in the form of records, CDs, cassettes, books,…