FRESH & FRUITY // Your Luxury Gift
The other day I was at Starbucks on Aotea square thinking about Oprah. Have u ever tried her line of teas for Starbucks? I remembered this display in Te Atatu at a pharmacy with a series of portraits of Oprah and the name/brand Oprah everywhere around it. There were vitamin jars everywhere stacked on top of each other. I really liked the way they used levels and how crass it was. It was both a celebration of Oprah coming to Australia and a competition where if you spent money on vitamins you could be in the draw to meet Oprah. YOU GET A CAR. YOU GET A CAR AND YOU GET A CAR. Does money create taste? I love looking at Bathroom showrooms and thinking about cleaning shower heads with chemico. I love the lighting, font and bold but tacky opulence of that house in Herne Bay that we stayed in once. It had the most cliche pieces of art. It contained bold and clashing, but very garishly patterned homewares.There was no clear sense or understanding of how to use space. It was very confused but decadent in its resolve to reflect opulence, upper middle class banality and ‘good taste’. Is capitalism the reason I am so depressed? My friend used to work at Las Vegas and she said that being on Karangahape road filled her with a sense of history and empowered her to own her body. The legendary 19th century courtesan Cora Pearl was said to have diamonds encrusted all over her shoes. Michel Foucault and his writing on the panopticon as a system of social and institutional regulation. LOOK UNDER YOUR SEAT. Every re-merchandising will be captured as a brand “moment”. Office team temps by Jennifer Nielson in 2011.
This guy told me that kicking all the sex workers off of K road was a good idea. He said K road had nothing to offer except crime and sex. He smelt like stale whiskey, mothballs and nervous sweat. He said the TPPA was a good idea. “The People’s Pharmacy of Aotearoa.” capitalism and mental illness. I don’t understand how you can’t think about how expensive my medication is going to be. The semiotic game. Lana Del Rey in the Blue jeans video. Will there just be lots of really mentally unwell people everywhere unable to find support. What will happen to our medical system? Broken systems. Displacement. Erasure. Ecological apocalypse. My mum having a “brand moment” walking past the billboard size print of a smiling white lady at Life Pharmacy. Her medication is too expensive so she borrows money from me. Risperdal M-Tabs. The physical labour needed to produce expressions, ranging from the mere recognition of existing phenomena through their ostension to the production of replicas and the effort to invent new expressions.(1) The other day I thought about all of the volcanoes in Auckland exploding all at once. In the tv show Stranger things all of the female characters are the true aliens. Netflix is self care. Personification of self. Constructed self. Projected self. The semiotics of class and wellness. Modes of artistic production in the free market. Capitalist subjectivity. I did this performance once at a boutique window front in Dunedin where I got dressed over and over again. Changing the window display twice a week just to sell specific Nomd pieces to wealthy middle aged white women who say they live on ‘marey hill’ (it's māori hill). So divorced from your body. My attachment to my body and what clothes I wear is so emotional. The genderless Gethenians living on the planet Winter in The left hand of darkness. Adopting the incentive structures of social order as our own.(2)
1) Umberto Eco in his essay ‘Producing Signs’
2) Rob Horning in ‘social media is not self expression’