Hello!
My name is Paul Lukas. I specialize in creating engaging storylines from seemingly unlikely topics, usually by focusing on things that other people either overlook or take for granted. Sometimes the stories are about me, and sometimes they’re about the world around me. Either way, the idea is always to share some sense of curiosity, obsession, revelation, connection, and delight. Big enthusiasm for small details!
Over the past 30-plus years, I’ve used this sensibility to create a bunch of creative media projects covering a broad range of subject areas (more on that in a minute). These days my work is focusing on objects, artifacts, design, and memory, all of which I tend to examine in excruciating detail. That’s what Inconspicuous Consumption is about.
If you’re not familiar with my work, here’s a good starting point: At the very top of this page, above the photo of me, you can see Inconspicuous Consumption’s visual signature — that familiar foot-measurer thingie. It’s officially known as a Brannock Device, after its inventor, Charles Brannock, and it happens to be my very favorite object, my North Star. I’ve written lots of articles about it, and I even have a tattoo of it! Why do I like it so much? Here are some reasons:
The Brannock Device is a near-universal touchstone in our culture — almost everyone recognizes it and knows what it is. At the same time, however, almost nobody knows what it’s called. So it’s simultaneously ubiquitous and anonymous, which is a powerful and intriguing combination, at least for me.
I’m a big fan of functional specificity, and the Brannock Device is nothing if not functionally specific. It’s good for only one thing, but it’s a perfect example of that thing.
The world is full of other items that are ubiquitous, anonymous, and functionally specific — aglets, ferrules, lots of the items sold at your local hardware store. But the Brannock Device is also an unusually beautiful piece of industrial design, which makes it particularly sublime.
Most of us encounter the Brannock Device during childhood, when our feet are still growing. As a result, our memories of it tend to be somewhat primal and formative. So even if you haven’t thought of the Brannock Device in many years, there’s a decent chance that it triggers some evocative memories of long-ago shoe-shopping excursions with your parents.
Add all of this together and you have an item that’s classically, prototypically inconspicuous. If that resonates for you, I think you’ll like what I’ll be exploring here at Inconspicuous Consumption. Thanks for your readership and support!
More About My Work
Since the early 1990s, I’ve built a career as a journalist, storyteller, cultural critic, and media artist. My work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, GQ, Esquire, Fortune, Fast Company, Bloomberg Businessweek, Gourmet, Saveur, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Spin, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, The Financial Times, Slate.com, and many other publications and websites.
I’ve been described as a “minutiae fetishist” and an “obsessive esotericist.” Whereas most people see the Wizard of Oz, I’m usually more interested in the man behind the curtain. Over the past 30-plus years, I’ve used that sensibility to create media projects covering a wide variety of subject areas (including Inconspicuous Consumption, which you’re reading right now). Here’s a sampling:
Uni Watch was the world’s first sports column devoted to athletics aesthetics (i.e., uniform and logo design). It began in 1999 as a column in The Village Voice, later ran for 15 years on ESPN.com.
Unified, a collaboration with fellow sportswriter Chris Creamer, was a short-lived podcast that covered the same basic subject area as Uni Watch.
Permanent Record began as an inquiry into the stories behind a batch of 1920s and ’30s report cards that were found in a discarded file cabinet, and later expanded to become a broader examination of found objects and the stories they have to tell.
Key Ring Chronicles was a crowd-sourced project that explored the stories behind the objects people keep on their key rings.
Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, a zine published from 1993 through 2000, examined consumer culture in extremely close detail. Its first six issues were compiled into the book Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, From the Everyday to the Obscure (Crown, 1997).
Pandemic Porch Cocktails is a photography project that documented the daily cocktail hour on the photographer’s front porch for 424 consecutive days during the Covid-19 pandemic.
My Pet Troll documents the relationship between a writer/webmaster and his most persistent and bellicose troll.
Gromm•It is an art project that explores the juxtapositions resulting from the installation of metal grommets in unlikely surfaces, especially foodstuffs.
The Candela Structures, a collaboration with the architect Kirsten Hively, documents the surprisingly complicated history of a set of super-cool fiberglass structures in Queens, New York.
One-Man Focus Group, a weekly column that ran on The New Republic’s website in 2013, took a close look at the worlds of consumer culture, design, and branding.
Show & Tell was a live storytelling series in which participants were encouraged to bring an object of personal significance and talk about it for up to three minutes.
Fire Wayne Hagin Already! chronicled the on-air foibles of a particularly incompetent baseball radio broadcaster and advocated for his dismissal.
Lost in America, a monthly travel column focusing on road-tripping, Americana, regional subcultures, and the like, appeared in Money magazine from 1998 through 2004. Unfortunately, most of the entries are no longer available on the internet.
While not a distinct project per se, these articles written for the now-dormant design website re:Form all explore slightly eccentric topics, such as the design of bike racks, things that make a “Click!” when they snap shut, and giant fiberglass animals.
The Forewords, a collaboration with the writer Liz Clayton, was a PowerPoint “band” that opened two shows for the Magnetic Fields in 2008.
Okay, that’s enough about me. Enjoy Inconspicuous Consumption!
