Granted, most cultures, from the Aztecs to the Victorians, have been fascinated with death. Postmodern man is, of course, still interested in death and suffering, particularly the aesthetics of disaster, but technology has brought new developments to the old fascinations. As the wheels of the capitalist machine turn ever faster, they put an entirely new spin on the "death" of inanimate objects. *[PICTURE OF A TRASH HEAP]*Because the whole idea of capitalism is to acquire more and better things, death for an object begins not when that object is worn out, but when something better comes along. As a result, many fashions and technologies are already well into their afterlives by the time they hit the shelves. Frustrated by our own battles against obsolescence, many of us humans find a Velveteen Rabbit-like beauty and promise in the slow decay of the afterlife of things.

The lifespan of fads, fashions, and mind-sets is just has always been a short one, but the advent of the half joke/half nostalgia retro look has been quite a catalyst for the death and subsequent regeneration of period styles. In the past decade, retro has eaten and digested the twenties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies. Now, in 1996, retro begins to gnaw at its own backside. Nostalgic albums of eighties music play at the retro theme parties of the very generation that enjoyed those songs for the first time just a few years earlier. Manufacturers have dutifully reproduced the "look" of the eighties, but anyone who cares at all about authenticity will be wearing an original (holes and all) "Mel's Diner" t-shirt to next week's get-together. Just ten years after the fact, children of the eighties peruse the thrift shops in an effort to buy back tattered symbols of the time when things were new. We wear those symbols of innocence in loving parody of our own childhood.

Technologies are by nature unrecyclable, and "die" even faster than fashions. Celeste Olalquiaga speaks of electronic devices which are obsolete by the time they hit the market, and the modern city that "becomes its own graveyard, housing the ghosts of its dreams shortly after coming to life" (65). Mike Davis describes the end of the Fontana steel mill as "a post-apocalyptic society of industrial scavengers and metal vultures" (Davis 1990: 432). To put it bluntly, the technology we devise not only makes garbage, but becomes garbage almost instantaneously. "Often made for a very short lifespan, these artifacts die without age marks, still shining new" (Olalquiaga 1992: 67).

We have begun to find a profound message in the afterlife of things because there is something in their stories that parallels our own. In the market of the workplace, we too are constantly battling obsolescence. With enough plastic surgery, we too could die without age marks. Consistently caught in the rush, how could we not find a haunting beauty and heroism in the lengthy process of decay?

When left alone, a building can take hundreds of years to rot. It will just sit there, slowly falling apart in perfect counterpoint to and defiance against a system of enforced obsolescence. I think many of us harbor secret admiration for these rebel junk heaps that insist on decaying in real time.