Let’s all Try the Mundane for Just a Moment or Two
Happy Thanksgiving from Arazoo!
As Thanksgiving is only a few days away, I wanted to extend a thank you to all of you, and tell you how grateful we all are here to have such a dedicated community of design professionals using Arazoo on their projects! I know how busy you all are in these last few days before the holiday, but I thought I’d send along a short post about a website I recently came across that is sure to keep you occupied on your long trips home for the holidays, and provide a little break from today’s current events.
Like each of you, I have officially hit the point where I am overloaded with emails, articles, TV interviews and other media assaults stating that our nation is either headed toward one of the nine levels of Hades described in detail by Dante in his classic, The Inferno, or poised to begin an upward spiral that will see Elon Musk shoot us to Mars amidst other wonders being promoted by Silicon Valley. In other words, I am ready to escape the world that is assaulting us with information on things that are mostly irritating and to gravitate back to the world of the ordinary i.e., when times were normal and we could bask slowly in the glow of things that made us feel good about ourselves and the world.
So it was propitious to come upon a most amazing website that allowed me to lose myself for a few minutes or hours this past week. The Museum of Online Museums(“MoOM”) is a website that connects to a long list of links to museums and galleries offerings that lets one peruse links to obscure online collections that will make us smile and pine for older, simpler times.
The site has so many links that it has an annex. Some links take you to the websites of real museums — catch the latest collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or if you are internationally inclined, to collections from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, or Paris’ Musee d’Orsay. Or, you may choose to explore outside your realm and visit the Atlas of the Underworld — the first complete mapping of subducted plates in the Earth’s mantle and their geological interpretation.
Through my musings on the MoOM site I ambled across my favorite new group of places we can disappear to that will bring a smile to our faces: http://www.grocerylists.org/ “The Grocery List Collection is compulsive reading” says The New York Times. or try The Museum of Useful Things, which describes itself as a collection of utilitarian products designed to lend a helping hand around the home or office. Here is a small sample of fun and interesting products that warrant the time spent on the site:
Yes, you might shake your head as you glance through the Museum of Burnt Food, where you’ll find King Tut’s tomato and freestanding apple cider. You may find the Museum of Food Anomalies more practical and fun as you look at Siamese fruits and snacks resembling the Virgin Mary. It will certainly take you far away from talk of “fake news” and the end of Obamacare.
Let me confess that I fell heavily for The Grocery List Collection is compulsive reading. Among the 700 shopping lists is one that includes Under the words “Urgent — Needed” are “knife + sheath,” written in red ink, then scratched out and replaced with “hatchet sheath.”
MoOM has a number of links to candy wrapper galleries. One, the Collection of Candy Cigarette Packaging, is fabulous. A grid of cigarette candy packs greets you on entering the site. One glimpse makes you feel like a kid in a candy store. There is an old-fashioned feel to the Museum of Coat Hangers.
In its half-decade of existence, the Museum of Online Museums has evolved. Peek in the annex, where the individual collections are organized by the date they were posted on the site. You’ll notice that at the beginning, among the galleries of condiment packets and unfortunate Christmas cards, were a few mainstream exhibitions, including Duke University’s collection of magazine and newspaper ads, the Getty Museum’s “Devices of Wonder”show and an exhibition of Ben Katchor’s musty drawings at the Jewish Museum. Those are seeds of the MoOM beanstalk: commerce, contraptions and nostalgia.
So, off you go and find your own favorite collection and immerse yourself away from the humdrum of the daily news and talking heads who are nowhere near as much fun as all this.
As always, please let me have your thoughts on my blogs which try to get my friends around the nation to stop and think about issues rather than letting each day become a blur of activities.
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
