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The Design Issue 2004

Pile Of Shit

I fucking hate that magazine Wallpaper*. Sad yuppies beating off to the impossibility that one day, they too may be rich enough to build a giant chrome sphere on top of a Spanish mountain.

Photos by Shawn Scallen

VICE: Nobody cares about you or your house. You live in Shitsville, Canada, right? Josh: I like Ottawa. It's close to the woods. You can get out of the city in ten minutes, so it's good for outdoors stuff. Plus, everybody knows each other here and not too many big bands come to play, so it's a really tight community. There's lots of drinking and parties and stupid stuff. Your house is literally full of shit? What's that cost? It's kind of impossible to quantify. I've been a pack rat ever since I was a kid. I have never thrown shit out—maybe when it's broken, but sometimes not even then. My mom never had a problem with it either. I used to go to the city dump and scavenge for shit all the time. Once I found two huge bags of those little trophy men. I dragged them home and tried to make a huge trophy man out of all of them. It seems like there's some kind of method to your madness. Albeit a shitty one. Thanks, the bathroom is the shark-themed room. I've got the Jaws poster and tons of plastic sharks. In the kitchen I have this McDonald's playset where I set up this huge massacre scene. All the McDonald's characters have their hands up and there's this Indian dude killing everyone. Then there's a SWAT team on the roof and all kinds of camera crews. It's like 9-11 at McDonald's. That takes up an entire shelf in the kitchen. Then I've got a rock band scene set up on another shelf in the kitchen there. We also have a whole display of weird foods—things like cans of peeled lamb tongue and seal meat. And where'd you get all this shit? Well, I've lived here for seven years now and a lot of this stuff is from when eBay first started. The rest is from secondhand stores and garage sales. Then whenever my friends are going to throw a bunch of shit out, they just give it to me instead. And, as I said earlier, I've been collecting stuff since I was a kid. You heard me say that right? Shit, I didn't. When's all this collecting going to stop? I think I might be at the point now where I need to take it easy. I just have boxes and boxes of crap that isn't even on display anymore. I've got three or four boxes of Star Wars stuff alone. I had to get a roommate when my girlfriend and I broke up recently, so I cleared out a whole room for Blake. It sucked because I'd had a scene set up in there with about 3,000 action figures all fighting each other glued down on some shelves. That's all boxed up now too. You glue shit down? I had to start gluing everything down because my dogs were always chewing on stuff and pulling it over. Plus every time I'd get up at night to take a piss or something, I'd bump into a display and have to spend three hours putting it back together. What other shit do you get up to? I do effects for movies—like gore and make-up for horror movies. Our last film was called Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. I use latex mostly, but then also a lot of garbage I find on the street, so it's kind of related to the whole house thing. Like I can't walk by and not collect an old vacuum hose that's out in a pile of trash on the sidewalk. A lot of guitarists are like that, Joe Strummer, B.B. King…There's something about being a musician that makes you want to collect shit. That's a stupid theory. You based that on what, two guys? ALASDAIR HALLY

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