Posts Tagged consumerism
Dennis Rodman’s Million Dollar A Month Heavy Metal Habit
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on April 11, 2012
As rumors of NBA Hall of Famer Dennis Rodman’s possible bankruptcy fill the news, recent court documents have revealed that his collection of heavy metal albums may be a major factor in his current financial crisis. Rodman, who is believed to owe hundreds of thousands of dollars to his ex-wife, apparently averaged spending 1.3 million dollars a month purchasing metal records over the past three years.
Rodman’s mind-boggling collection takes up two-thirds of his Malibu estate. It features a mountain of great metal treasures from original vinyl pressings of Iron Maiden’s “The Soundhouse Tapes” to numbered collectors editions of the first ten Judas Priest albums.
Some experts claim that he overvalued many items and paid ridiculous sums for them. For example, Rodman spent 40,000 dollars on two copies of the recent Morbid Angel IIud Divinum Insanus Wooden Box Set. The set, which included a red 180 gram copy of the record, a leather bound CD edition and two red candles, was valued at 199 dollars. He also spent 130,000 dollars to purchase all six hundred and sixty six copies of the Marduk-Panzer Division Set, valued at 40 dollars per copy.
Rodman was duped into purchasing many “autographed” albums that were fraudulent. For example, Rodman paid 10,000 dollars for a vinyl copy of Anthrax “Among The Living” that was signed by Johnny Belladonna, clearly not the singer from Anthrax. He also paid 30,000 dollars for a copy of Danzig III: How The Gods Kill. The album was autographed by Glen Danzig, a misspelled version of the singer’s name (which has two n’s).
Rodman even purchased European versions of albums that did not actually exist. He paid 800,000 for one of the supposed 12 copies of Dimmu Borgir’s “Morbid Fascist Iconoclast”, a demo that the band was believed to have recorded in 1989 (four years before they were actually formed).
In spite of the problems, Rodman’s collection is still a sight to behold. Imagine a record store with everything from Anacrusis to Znowhite. Rodman has entire rooms dedicated to genres and sub-genres. His NWOBH metal room, complete with life-sized photos of Steve Harris and Rob Halford, is located right down the hallway from his thrash room, which features a stuffed and mounted fake heads of Chuck Billy, Steve “Zetro” Souza, and Nuclear Assault’s John Connelly on the wall.
For a brief stretch, he even had the real Paulo Jr. from Sepultura living in a caged room in near the garage. Paulo was kidnapped by a group of Hamas agents and sold to Rodman for 150,000 dollars. He managed to escape Rodman’s collection by gnawing through the bars when Rodman was on a weekend vacation in the Bahamas.
Rodman did, for a brief moment, consider selling his collection. It is, after all, valued at over 8.7 million dollars and would set him up securely for the rest of his life. But Rodman believed that selling his collection might make him a poser, so he quickly shelved the idea. He has instead, considered selling one or both of his kidneys in order to get himself back on firm financial footing.
Requiem For A Dumb Idea
Posted by Keith Spillett in Articles I Probably Shouldn't Have Bothered Writing on November 10, 2011
Every once and a while the free market really gets it right. Dippin’ Dots, the mothball shaped ice cream that took America by storm back in the 1990s, has finally, mercifully filed for bankruptcy. The fact that 2,000 of these stands exist today is a shaming blight upon the wooly, pock marked face of consumer capitalism. I am not much of a dancer, but I need to admit that I actually leaped out of my seat and did a fair Michael Flatley impression when I heard that this frozen pox was nearing eradication.
Anyone who has had the misfortune of having been around me when walking by a Dippin’ Dots stand has been subjected to a mile-a-minute tirade about how “the rat poison of the future should be grinded into the dust of the past” (as I told my wife on our second date). I actually got in a shouting match with a Dippin’ Dots franchise owner in Poughkeepsie, New York that ended with me nearly getting maced by a mall cop.
What bares further investigation is surely not the uselessness of the product, for who among us can actually defend such swill, but my disposition on the matter. With famine, war, pestilence and torture all more obvious candidates for my vitriol, what really rankles me is the existence of these pellets of shame.
To be fair, I can’t even be certain I’ve ever eaten the things. They actually might be quite good. There is just something about them that makes my internal organs weep. I feel insulted by their very existence.
I’m certainly not harboring some deep dissatisfaction with the concept of frozen desserts. I could ingest nothing but ice cream, Italian ices and Sno Cones from now until when my first social security check comes in and be perfectly content. It’s not like I had to be hospitalized with an ice cream headache for three weeks or got hit by a Good Humor van when I was 11 and have some odd physical aversion to this sort of thing. I practically sweat gelato.
After almost four decades of being offered a shameful array of stuff that I could not find a use for in a million lifetimes, I think this may be the Dot that broke the camels back. How many Sham-Wows, how many Pillow Pets, how many steel-belted, titanium, rust-proofed, icy cold scams can a man endure before he reached the point of feeling genuine, hot-blooded scorn? Every time one of these asinine businesses get started in the name of The American Dream, a little part of me dies.
If the little Chamber of Commerce member in your mind has started to spew rhetorical vomit about how having 67 thousand different brands of oatmeal is good for the economy and, thus, America, tell him that while this stuff may be good if your goal is to create a society who’s members all have amassed personal debt in excess of the Gross National Product of Peru it might not be the best use of their time and collective brain power.
I’m a communist, you say. Fine! At least Lenin never had to sit through toothpaste commercials. If what passes for communism in America is being ill-disposed to living in a 24 hour a day flea market that has been approved by 9 out of 10 dentists, then sign me up.
Truthfully, my real anger is at the feeling of having to participate in the market at nearly all moments. Sure, I could go sit up on a mountaintop and breathe fresh air all day, but most people’s lives put them face-to-face with The Never Ending Hustle. In The Great Gatsby, the billboard of Dr. TJ Eckleburg was a façade that hid a part of the soulless, desolate valley of ashes. The billboards of today merely serve the purpose of hiding more billboards.
I can’t get five steps away from my door without some hackneyed inducement to participate in the ever-glorious marketplace of individual freedom. Sometimes they are gentle, sometimes they are rough, sometimes they play on my nerves, sometimes they tug on my heartstrings, but the pull is interminable.
Sure, I don’t have to buy whatever this or that company is selling, but I do have to make an effort to tune it out. Constantly. And while that effort is minimal, the collective weight of it has worn me down. After all, you can be crushed under the weight of a hundred tons of feathers just as you can be crushed under a hundred tons of lead.
At some point along the line, a very real feeling of insurmountable weariness has crept into my mind. Like when you are trying to fall asleep and different vague, unconnected noises continue to awaken you right when you have become completely calm. Eventually, you can be annoyed into the belief that peace and calm are impossible.
I blame you Dippin’ Dots, because getting my arms around a problem this big and pervasive doesn’t seem feasible. I’ve forgotten how to take to the streets and I don’t know the mailing address of my duly elected state representative. I only know the language of futility and those types of words don’t move mountains. I might not be able stop the endless flow of sugar-coated avarice that flows unabated though our collective veins but I sure know how to smile when the axe of the free market lands squarely on the neck of a hated foe.
Thanks to good old-fashioned American knowhow and the virtues of commerce, I can be assured that five even uglier heads will sprout up where there once was only one. That problem, however, is for another day. Tonight when I lay my head down on a pillow, I can rest easy knowing that at least one stupid idea is being vanquished from our world. Sometimes, that’s enough.
The Tyranny of Tradition 