I was at the tail-end of a relationship that wasn’t working very well, and had a series of ‘Is this what my life has been leading up to?’ moments, when I found Hoarders on Netflix.
For those of you in the US who haven’t seen it, shame on you. But just to bring you up to speed: it is about people who compulsively fill their house full of stuff. Sometimes it is collectible (dolls) or brand new (unopened QVC packages) but mostly it is just trash. In every case it is clear that the people involved are harbouring some pretty major issues that simply cleaning up won’t fix. So at my nadir I found a show about people who have more issues than I have and expressed it worse than I did.
It was refreshing. I immediately decided that I needed to de-hoard my apartment. Granted, I had far less than the folks on TV, but there was a lot there to deal with. I quickly filled three or four garbage bags full of clothes and took them to goodwill. But I couldn’t touch my t-shirts. I had already given a whole stack to my mom to make a quilt because I couldn’t bring myself to part with them. The quilt is awesome and I got rid of a bunch of shirts, but I still had an embarrassing amount in my closet and dresser. This past weekend my parents came to visit so I talked my mom into digging through the pile. After splitting them up into ‘Keep Here’, ‘Make Another Quilt’ and ‘Donate’, I made one more pass through and found this shirt.
After I graduated from college and moved to Chicago, I bounced around like any English major does. Luckily I knew some folks here and one of my best friends, Merlin*, was about two buildings down from my day job. We’d get lunch together about two or three times a week and spent most of our day dinking around on our respective company’s high-speed internet connection. I’m still not sure how it started, but we would randomly email each other names for an imaginary band that we were never in or never going to form. Throughout the day, I’d send and receive cryptic three or four word emails. ”Aboriginal Ninja” ”StuckFick” “Damnit Randall” ”Banal Probe”… I even compiled them all into a fake Behind the Music of sorts. I’m pretty sure it was around that time that one of us found a robotic band called Captured! By Robots! I was massively upset: I couldn’t come up with a name that good in a hundred years.
This was 2001 or 2002, the wild west of the internet, so there wasn’t YouTube where you could type any band name and see ten videos from all over the world for nearly any band. In the three or four 30 second RealPlayer clips on the official site, it was pretty clear this guy was nuts. We thought he was one part David Byrne and one part Breakdancer that Paints Himself Silver for Cash. And yes, the band is all robotic, or at least directed by him by some mishmash of puppetry and remote control. There was quite simply nothing like this at the time. Hell, hipsters couldn’t even say they had seen this before. Not only were there no hipsters, but literally no one had done something like this. Now if you say ‘I saw a robotic band the other day’ four people in the bar would have video of their own robots covering Dark Side of the Moon on their iPhone.
When C!BR! came to the Empty Bottle a few months later, we were there. At the time, the Empty Bottle was in no-man’s land. The crowds that showed up for a show there were varied but interested in whatever was playing. Even then I don’t think anyone had any idea what to expect. After two opening bands went on, he began to set up in full costume, which, if you can’t tell from the picture, is a gimp mask with googly eyes and a shirt customized to seem as if his entrails are pulled halfway from his body. The entire time he seemed to be talking to himself or to someone the rest of us couldn’t see.
For those of you in the US who haven’t seen it, shame on you. But just to bring you up to speed: it is about people who compulsively fill their house full of stuff. Sometimes it is collectible (dolls) or brand new (unopened QVC packages) but mostly it is just trash. In every case it is clear that the people involved are harbouring some pretty major issues that simply cleaning up won’t fix. So at my nadir I found a show about people who have more issues than I have and expressed it worse than I did.
It was refreshing. I immediately decided that I needed to de-hoard my apartment. Granted, I had far less than the folks on TV, but there was a lot there to deal with. I quickly filled three or four garbage bags full of clothes and took them to goodwill. But I couldn’t touch my t-shirts. I had already given a whole stack to my mom to make a quilt because I couldn’t bring myself to part with them. The quilt is awesome and I got rid of a bunch of shirts, but I still had an embarrassing amount in my closet and dresser. This past weekend my parents came to visit so I talked my mom into digging through the pile. After splitting them up into ‘Keep Here’, ‘Make Another Quilt’ and ‘Donate’, I made one more pass through and found this shirt.
After I graduated from college and moved to Chicago, I bounced around like any English major does. Luckily I knew some folks here and one of my best friends, Merlin*, was about two buildings down from my day job. We’d get lunch together about two or three times a week and spent most of our day dinking around on our respective company’s high-speed internet connection. I’m still not sure how it started, but we would randomly email each other names for an imaginary band that we were never in or never going to form. Throughout the day, I’d send and receive cryptic three or four word emails. ”Aboriginal Ninja” ”StuckFick” “Damnit Randall” ”Banal Probe”… I even compiled them all into a fake Behind the Music of sorts. I’m pretty sure it was around that time that one of us found a robotic band called Captured! By Robots! I was massively upset: I couldn’t come up with a name that good in a hundred years.
This was 2001 or 2002, the wild west of the internet, so there wasn’t YouTube where you could type any band name and see ten videos from all over the world for nearly any band. In the three or four 30 second RealPlayer clips on the official site, it was pretty clear this guy was nuts. We thought he was one part David Byrne and one part Breakdancer that Paints Himself Silver for Cash. And yes, the band is all robotic, or at least directed by him by some mishmash of puppetry and remote control. There was quite simply nothing like this at the time. Hell, hipsters couldn’t even say they had seen this before. Not only were there no hipsters, but literally no one had done something like this. Now if you say ‘I saw a robotic band the other day’ four people in the bar would have video of their own robots covering Dark Side of the Moon on their iPhone.
When C!BR! came to the Empty Bottle a few months later, we were there. At the time, the Empty Bottle was in no-man’s land. The crowds that showed up for a show there were varied but interested in whatever was playing. Even then I don’t think anyone had any idea what to expect. After two opening bands went on, he began to set up in full costume, which, if you can’t tell from the picture, is a gimp mask with googly eyes and a shirt customized to seem as if his entrails are pulled halfway from his body. The entire time he seemed to be talking to himself or to someone the rest of us couldn’t see.
After a lengthy sound check he went on stage.With the gigantic expectations we had there was no way the show could live up to it. It just wasn’t as strange or over-the top as we thought it would be. But the music was good; I’d venture to say really good. Everything was in time and he had a kind of duet thing going where he’d click a pedal and his voice would modulate and make the mouths of rest of the band move. He had convincing, full conversations with them and managed to make everyone laugh in the meantime. Merlin talked to the guy after the show and asked a couple of fairly innocuous questions to the guy about what parts he used, etc. He wasn’t a dick about it but he also wasn’t in character anymore either. His response was basically: “I can’t tell you all of my secrets.” He also couldn’t sell us any shirts either, he didn’t have any on hand. I had to email his Yahoo account and send a check to get them.
When I watched Hoarders, I kept thinking, “Jesus Christ, people, it is just stuff! You don’t need five different 9/11 memorial mugs or fifteen stacks of magazines from 1986!” Just as people rationalise watching Jersey Shore by saying, “It is such a trainwreck,” I rationalized Hoarders by saying it was House Cleaning Porn: someone comes over and makes decisions for you about what to keep and pitch and when they leave the house is spotless. But when I picked up that shirt from the pile I remembered the concert, the conversations we had about different bands, the time I wore the shirt to Merlin’s bachelor party, the desktop wallpaper I found on a fan site, the drive back from the concert and even the second C!BR! show I went to a couple of years later. I was watching Hoarders because I have the exact same connections to my stuff as they do to theirs. That stuff doesn’t remind me of other times or bring up emotions, it IS those other times and emotions.
As such, this shirt is how people became friends. It is the conversations Merlin and I had on the walk to the train at night. It is the voice that says “Screw it: I’m going to a concert in a shady neighborhood on a Monday to watch robots play ska music.” It is a time period in my life when I didn’t have an extra penny to my name, a plan for the next day or any idea what to do about it and I didn’t give a shit because I had a friend that felt the exact same way. Getting rid of this shirt is the same as removing a flash drive from a computer or deleting a sector on a hard drive. Maybe a robot can do that and still function. I know I can’t.
Chad H. Mummert
*Yes Merlin is his real name.
When I watched Hoarders, I kept thinking, “Jesus Christ, people, it is just stuff! You don’t need five different 9/11 memorial mugs or fifteen stacks of magazines from 1986!” Just as people rationalise watching Jersey Shore by saying, “It is such a trainwreck,” I rationalized Hoarders by saying it was House Cleaning Porn: someone comes over and makes decisions for you about what to keep and pitch and when they leave the house is spotless. But when I picked up that shirt from the pile I remembered the concert, the conversations we had about different bands, the time I wore the shirt to Merlin’s bachelor party, the desktop wallpaper I found on a fan site, the drive back from the concert and even the second C!BR! show I went to a couple of years later. I was watching Hoarders because I have the exact same connections to my stuff as they do to theirs. That stuff doesn’t remind me of other times or bring up emotions, it IS those other times and emotions.
As such, this shirt is how people became friends. It is the conversations Merlin and I had on the walk to the train at night. It is the voice that says “Screw it: I’m going to a concert in a shady neighborhood on a Monday to watch robots play ska music.” It is a time period in my life when I didn’t have an extra penny to my name, a plan for the next day or any idea what to do about it and I didn’t give a shit because I had a friend that felt the exact same way. Getting rid of this shirt is the same as removing a flash drive from a computer or deleting a sector on a hard drive. Maybe a robot can do that and still function. I know I can’t.
Chad H. Mummert
*Yes Merlin is his real name.
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