Brickshelf user nias recently reorganized some photos, and several things caught my eye (more posts to come).

Here’s Hello Kitty:

So, what’s the deal with Hello Kitty? Brian McVeigh thinks he has the answer in an article titled “How Hello Kitty Commodifies the Cute, Cool and Camp: ‘Consumutopia’ versus ‘Control’ in Japan.” The summary:

Asked about Hello Kitty, respondents judged those interested in this ‘character good’ within a framework of freedom/self-autonomy versus coercion/compulsion. The former is associated with what may be termed ‘consumutopia’ (a counter-presence to mundane reality fueled by late capitalism, pop culture industry, consumerism), while the latter is connected to ‘control’, a critical view of self/collective relations that also comments on Japanese ethno-identity. Hello Kitty also demonstrates the need to focus not just on different tastes within a society, but also on ambiguous and diverse attitudes within the same individual. Such diversity allows Sanrio, Hello Kitty’s maker, to link within one individual different modes of self-presentation, chronologically corresponding to girlhood (‘cute’), female adolescence (‘cool’), and womanhood (‘camp’). Thus, as people mature, appeals to nostalgia encourage a reconnection with the past by buying products united by one leitmotif; same commodity, same individual, different ages/tastes/styles/desires.

ROTFLMAO! Absolutely hilarious, or not. :-/