The PriceMaster 📖💿🎥
Tuesday Trio: One book, one record, and one movie recommendation
Hey y’all,
On February 10th, 2001, a group of friends held a garage sale in Denton, Texas. The sale was immortalized in a surreal, 32-minute short documentary that has since become a cult classic. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the happening, today’s Tuesday Trio — one book, one record, and one movie based on a theme — is dedicated to The PriceMaster.
📖 The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
The PriceMaster begins with two quotes from Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 book The Medium is the Massage. The first quote comes from page 68:
“Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The ground rules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or counter situations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly…”
The second quote comes from page 92:
Humor as a system of communications and as a probe of our environment — of what’s really going — affords us our most appealing anti-environmental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in immediate experience, and is often the best guide to changing perceptions.
Combined, they form an epigraph that serves as mission statement for the performance art that is about to unfold onscreen.
The Medium is the Massage was an influence on the design of my own book, Steal Like an Artist. The visual magic of Medium came from graphic designer Quentin Fiore:
Mr. Fiore’s first book with McLuhan was “The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects” (1967). “Massage” was a printer’s error, but McLuhan, a wordsmith who delighted in puns, liked the typo and kept it, believing that it amplified his theory about how different forms of media thoroughly “massage” the senses in the “mass age” of communications.
The book, which Mr. Fiore initiated, was a kinetic interpretation of McLuhan’s philosophy. Some pages were printed backward, to be read in a mirror. Some of the writing was upside down. Some pages contained text superimposed over pictures.Mr. Fiore said his goal was to reduce “complex ideas to simple signs, glyphs, patches of text.”
You may wonder about the credit on the front cover: “Produced by Jerome Agel.” That’s another story we don’t quite have the room for today.
If you like The Medium is The Massage, I highly recommend The Electric Information Age Book and The Book of Gossage.
💿 The Sound Of Won Jang-hyun’s Daegeum (1998)
The daegeum is a big bamboo flute used in traditional Korean music. A daegeum sanjo (“sanjo” meaning “scattered melodies”) is a performance of solo flute, accompanied by a drum. You can watch one here:
The Sound Of Won Jang-hyun’s Daegeum is the record you hear in the background of The PriceMaster. Like any great soundtrack, it’s impossible, now, to imagine the film without it.
The music would’ve sounded strange enough to the Western ears of the people of Denton, Texas, but it was made even stranger by the fact that it was being played forwards and backwards on a 4-track cassette recorder.
I’ve taken the first track of the CD and pasted it forwards and backwards so you can get an idea of the effect. (Crank it in your studio and see how long you can last!)
If you dig the flute, but need something a little more chill, try André 3000’s New Blue Sun or Laraaji’s “Segue to Infinity.”
🎥 The PriceMaster (2001)
Finally, we come to The Pricemaster itself. From the film’s description:
"Everything is for sale." "Make me an offer!" . . . the wonderful mantras of the prophet of Captive Market Capitalism (i.e. American Style Corporate Capitalism) echo pertinently on a crisp winter day in Denton, TX in the newborn hours of the great decisive 21st Century. Members of the hallowed Fast House look on and document the unfolding.
From a recent article in D Magazine, “Everything Is (Still) For Sale: Denton Celebrates 25 Years of The PriceMaster”:
The PriceMaster itself was born of an idea artist Rick Perry had while helping an ex-girlfriend host a garage sale.
“There were these folks that were very serious garage sellers who came earlier than the posted time,” he explains. “[They] were these kind of older…coiffed hair…Sunday best kind of garage sellers who were very serious and sort of aggressive and kind of rude to us and sort of looked down on the meager offerings of our little yard sale.”
Perry decided to develop a subversive garage sale where he and his friends could have total control. The idea was that if someone made them an offer, they would raise the price and refuse to sell them anything. Nathan Austin brought the idea of the PriceMaster character into the mix and everyone went with it. Another friend, Nova Martin, brought a camera to record the proceedings; she and Perry captured the footage that ultimately became The Pricemaster.
I think The PriceMaster ranks alongside other great “Texas is a weird place” filmed stories such as Hands on a Hardbody (1997), David Byrne’s True Stories (1986), Mike Judge’s King of The Hill (1997-), and Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) and Bernie (2011).
I recommend watching it with your friends and loved ones so you can toss lines off to each other like, “Make me an offer!” and “SEVENTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!”
I’m having fun with these Tuesday Trios and I hope you are, too. If you missed the first 3 letters in the series, they are: “Radioactivity,” “Problematic Gifts,” and “Sherlock Holmes.”
xoxo,
Austin
We watched this during dinner tonight. Absolutely loved it! Thanks for introducing us to The PriceMaster.
I love how I can count on pleasant surprises when reading your newsletters and being introduced to something I didn’t know I needed—like to watch The Pricemaster. I sometimes feel like a decorator crab with all these ideas that go into my commonplace book as onto my shell.