Do You Collect Anything & Why?

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
I collect stickers. The one criteria is that they must be free. The point was always that one day I would own a house and I would install a glass wall onto which I would stick all the stickers. I have quite a collection...but no house. I don't much care about them anymore because I will never own a house. But I still collect them out of habit.

Ernie - Maybe you could find an old glass coffee table at a thrift shop or something, and jazz it up with all your stickers?
That could look really sharp!

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by Flash (here)
3years ago I found, in a thrift shop, salt and pepper shakers and jam containers (a few) that were pottery with rooster designs.

It was the fashion 20 some years ago I think. Then I found plates and bowls with the same design. Then I found hanging plates with roosters that matches. Then I found door stoppers that were roosters. Then I found a clock, more plates, salad bowls, tea kettles, frames and my last acquisition 2 weeks ago is a table cloth, all roosters, all in thrift stores.

My kitchen is a huge roosters area - I am restraining myself from the rest of the place and there are no more space for roosters in the kitchen.

The joke around when people start collecting: avoid roosters 🤣. And I live in the city, not in the country - so roosters are truly out of city peoples’ mind! Next will be a real live rooster in the garden 😂 but I think my neighbours will stop me.

Beware Flash!
Once the folks around you notice that you have roosters, you will receive rooster gifts for every occasion forevermore. haha
"Hmmm - what would Flash like for a (fill in the occasion) gift?"
"Oh yes - she loves roosters! We simply must find her something with a rooster theme..."
You will fast become innundated with the critters.

[Sue (Ayt)]

Like Bill, I used to collect stamps and yes, I learned so much about languages, country names, geography while sorting them. They used to sell large bags of cancelled stamps from around the world, and they were great fun to go through.

Now my home looks a bit like a wild whimsied museum of crazy curios. Nothing official, just intriguing objects that I stumble upon and put on the walls or shelves for a while. I am also quick to give them away to anyone who seems drawn to one of them. Like a Mr. Peanut figurine, or an old Ringo Star doll, or a glass pyramid, or a ?unknown? intriguing object.

Sometimes, when the clutter gets too much, I put some small things in a little gift bag, and with a note - "A gift for you to keep or pass on. Enjoy!" And I secretly leave it in a park for the perfect soul to stumble upon. Just maybe it will bring a small smile to a fellow traveler.

Oh - another funny story about those coin books. I had them too, as a kid, and tried to fill all the slots with pennies of each year.
One year, I went to a yard sale, and someone had several book there like I used to have. They were marked to sell for 25cents each. But when I looked inside, they were already filled with about 50 pennies or so. I let my kids buy them up, as 25cents for 50 pennies seemed like a pretty good deal.

[Le Chat]

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
Sometimes, when the clutter gets too much, I put some small things in a little gift bag, and with a note - "A gift for you to keep or pass on. Enjoy!" And I secretly leave it in a park for the perfect soul to stumble upon. Just maybe it will bring a small smile to a fellow traveler.

What a lovely gesture

[Ernie Nemeth]

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)

Posted by Ernie Nemeth (here)
I collect stickers. The one criteria is that they must be free. The point was always that one day I would own a house and I would install a glass wall onto which I would stick all the stickers. I have quite a collection...but no house. I don't much care about them anymore because I will never own a house. But I still collect them out of habit.

Ernie - Maybe you could find an old glass coffee table at a thrift shop or something, and jazz it up with all your stickers?
That could look really sharp!

I've been thinking about making a room divider to hide the cat's litter box. I could make it out of clear plastic panels, to which I could affix those stickers of mine...

[Inversion]

David Wynn Miller claims Post Masters control the world. British Commonwealth mail belongs to the royal family and not the citizens. Stamps have a one-time use, and coins could be in circulation for a very long time passing through many hands. Those that collect the two things may have had served the Post Masters in a past incarnation and it's a latent interest. I think it's possible thought forms could be imbued into coins and paper money. This was described by Preston Nichols in his book. There was an episode of Stargate SG1 called Citizen Joe where a man purchased an engraved stone at a garage sale that gave him hallucinations.

Montauk: The Alien Connection by Stewart Swerdlow edited by Peter Moon

P176. The USPS is a front for a British bank.

Tim Cohen

King Charles is the head of all Masons, and he prevented an end to the Ukrainian war because it'll lead to WWIII.

The Music of Time

P49. He explained how to put thought forms in music.

P138. Music is thought form. Authors will encode thought forms into music without being aware of it. He believes our entire reality was created via the Montauk Project.

[Vicus]

The only thing that I "collected" were tickets from all concerts I was...

There is no place here to write all the bands,musicians...been in Europe was a paradise for me in that aspect...in Argentina was rare,because too far...( naturally all good Argentinos that nobody here knows about)

Big festivals in Summer with many differences bands/music styles for example:

Rolling stones,Miles Davis,Prince, Iggy Pop,Metallica,Perl jam, Faith no More,Goldfrapp,Gotan Project,Rage against the Machine,Cipres Hill,Danzig,Garbage,Type O Negative,Muse, and many many others...

For example: Stone Temple Pilots

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1666451

[Denise/Dizi]

I collected a few things through the years, Coca Cola items being the biggest offender, and as said above, as soon as people learn that you collect it, you become buried in it. My story was no exception...

Our ideas of "Collecting" were very different, I was gifted a very nice vintage rounded top Coca Cola vending machine, (In amazing condition) when I started collecting... But my friends? They gifted me anything and everything with the logo on it. We have a 1967 Chevelle being restored at the moment, and BOTH will eventually reside in the garage together with some other hot rod memoribilia, and a few of the cooler Coca Cola signs I have, the rest is all going to be sold off at that point... And I can't wait. I will get my dining room back!

I have learned to appreciate not having to spend my time dealing with "Stuff" versus just being free to do what I want when I want. It will free up a lot of time to live, versus dusting, moving stuff around for a new look, etc... I still have some things I must hang onto, so I don't have to keep buying it if I want to participate, such as holiday deco, etc.. But aside from that? I have been paring down now for years.. And it feels nice.

[madrotter]

I always collected music, vinyl, but not aggressively, but over the years it became quite a collection, punk, post-punk, jazz, African, blue-grass, experimental and later loads of hip hop.... I moved from Holland to Indonesia in '96 and I got married (in Holland) in 2001. I needed money bad so I sold almost all my vinyl back then....

Then around 2002 I bought a record from a Sundanese (West Javanese) singer, Titim Fatimah, and that record just blew me away, couldn't believe it and she still blows me away when I listen to her. She was HUGE in the late 50's, 60's and 70's, highest paid artist in Indonesia in the 60's, Indonesia's first President, Sukarno, if he had foreign guests he would have her come to the Presidential Palace in Bogor and perform. She opened up the way for female artists in ways that are just amazing....

Anyway... I started asking people about her and I found out that nowadays, she's very much forgotten... I was doing a blog about Indonesian hip hop and I was still producing music for various artists here, I put out some albums myself too, there's some very insane stories there but that's maybe for later.... I started losing my interest in hip hop, didn't like what it was becoming and through learning about Titim Fatimah I started getting more and more into Indonesian music, especially traditional music and I started buying cassettes, and vinyl which, back then, was still dirt cheap, nobody was buying vinyl here and I started blogging about all the stuff I was finding, including links so you could download all these cassettes and lp's, for free.... In the beginning the sellers weren't very happy with me giving music away for free but a strange thing started to happen. More and more people started buying vinyl and cassettes and there was a direct correlation with what I was doing.... Back then my blog would get around 50.000 visitors a month, nowadays, yes. I'm still doing it, I get anywhere between 150 to 200.000 visitors a month. I started a youtube channel, there it's around 50.000 visitors every 48 hours....

Unfortunately, I don't make any money with it, you can't monetize other peoples music, not with the blog, not with the youtube channel.... I now have one of the biggest collections of Sundanese traditional music in the world. I often work with local artists, usually very old, forgotten artists who were huge in the 70's and 80's. I often work on stuff, research, mostly for a University in Pittsburgh in the USA where they have a gamelan program, and lots, lots more stuff....

Nowadays, you can almost not find these cassettes anymore and forget about vinyl, it just isn't there anymore, and when you do find stuff it's insanely expensive, all bought up by foreigners and a few of the super rich local elite kids who then sell it on the internet for ridiculous prices... 20 Years ago sellers would ask me, why are you buying all this sampah (garbage)?, now these same sellers, the few that are still active are frantically trying to find it, black gold is what they call vinyl

But I miss those old days, going to Jakarta, Jalan Surabaya, Surabaya Street where there is an antique market, opening boxes that hadn't been open in God knows how many years, going back to Bandung by train, covered in sooth and dust with bags full of tapes and vinyl.....

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=9we5Zskh5u8

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hp0rZe7OcwM

[Victoria]

Thank you for posting about what you are involved in, and your effort to collect and preserve the beautiful music and culture from Indonesia.. I closed my eyes to listen and was absolutely transported by Emi Nurhayati and Titim Fatimah. Yours is truly an example of appreciating and preserving the past... how great that the university in Pittsburgh has a Gamelan program!

My family moved to southeast Asia in 1995, and so much I can remember being just the same as you describe- it was an incredible time...I remember the thrill and excitement of discovering all the unique intricacies and beautiful ways of the people, music and smells, the sounds of traditional song, finding dusty treasures under the counters and in back of the antique markets from decades gone by... nobody seemed to recognize the importance and value of their own history at that time. It is sad to see things changing so quickly and to think that such cultural gems could ever be lost. I am grateful you are preserving a portion of them and continuing to share online

[madrotter]

Thank you Victoria The gamelan program in Pittsburgh is all because of musicologist Professor Andrew Weintraub who has been coming here since the early 80's and he knows everybody, really everybody, always interviewing old artists. He's now in Sumatera doing research for a book about Lekra which was an organisation for artists, musicians, painters, poets etc. back in the 50's and the 60's. They had some ties with the Indonesian Communist Party back then and most of them were either slaughtered or imprisoned for decades during the terrible purge in '65.... Andrew and me have been friends for many years. He asked me, some 10 years ago or so if there was any artist that I wanted to meet, and after thinking about it I said, I would love to meet with Gugum Gumbira. He, Gugum, developed the jaipong genre and all the dances that go with it and it's a genre that I really, really love, it's a lot wilder then the music that I posted above... So I met Gugum and I became friends with him, learned so much from him. He passed away in 2020....

There's a HUGE interest among the younger generations here in older music now but not much for traditional music although in the last 10 years or so it has been picking up a bit. I sometimes go to wayang puppet shows, amazing music and these shows usually start around 8 at night and stop around 4 in the morning and they are very popular.... I also go to the trance dance shows where dancers get possessed by spirits, also very popular and they can get wild, and I mean WILD 3 Or 4 times a year right in front of my house There's always a big spiritual part in traditional music. People think that Indonesia is mostly Islamic, and it is, but in many places it is very much interwoven with the old traditions, Hinduism, Buddhism and the older religion, we call it Wiwitan here, they call it Kejawen in Central and East Java....

I'm quite passionate about it One of my dreams is to see a live show from a singer called Itih S. from Indramayu, her voice is amazing and this is Tayuban music, another form of trance music:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=w5tA_mMUKf0

As far as jaipong goes.... Music and the dance by my friend Gugum Gumbira:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3aEWmmbaCKU

[Victoria]

Wonderful!! 😃 you are immersed in such colorful and rich culture there, in combination with your own! I have been listening to the music and letting Youtube recommend more while learning the history of Wiwitan. Beautiful to contemplate. Also I have enjoyed reading about Professor Weintraub, the music program at Pitt and Gugum Gumbira- what an incredible thing to directly learn from and be friends with him. I hope you will get to see Itih S. She has a distinctly melodic voice and her music is fun to dance to! Thank you so much for sharing these and for literally living your passion!


To the nature of what you share and this thread, my grandmother used to collect Javanese puppets. So many lively and vividly painted characters. She created an entire room to look like a theatre for them. They were something my cousins and I all loved as children. I'm sure we have photos somewhere...if I can find them, I will post.