| Dec. 8th, 2009 @ 10:03 am Steampunk |
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I don't get it. I mean, it's a neat aesthetic... I just don't get the ongoing fascination with it. I'm baffled that something so shallow has really taken off. Even the anime aesthetic that seemed oh-so-novel ten years ago had more depth. 1
What is there to steampunk besides making anachronistic Victorian-ish looking gadgets and things, and maybe some appreciation/fetishization of crazy hacker/inventor types?
I see people modding mp3 players inside brass and leather wrist-things and it's like, uh, I don't get it. I certainly do kind admire the days when things were made of heavy, durable materials and were made to last in both an aesthetic and a practical sense . It's like, hey... this radio costs a month's salary, but it will be the center of your living room for the next twenty years so we're going to build it like a tank and make it a fancy piece of furniture. That's cool, and a welcome contrast to today's cheap disposable shit.
But I'm not sure that modding today's cheap disposable shit into needlessly ornate versions of itself is really any kind of response to that.
Why not actually be a crazy hacker or inventor and actually make something of value that will last ten or twenty years? Get a subscription to MAKE and build your own coffee bean roaster or kerosene-powered dildo or whatever.
....I think I've made this post before...
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1 And more of a real world basis; a lot of the anime/manga aesthetic was born from the constraints faced by its artists -- limited animation budgets, cheap black and white printing processes on paper smaller than that of American comics, etc. |
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