Madame Pickwick

Black Friday. Not a day for satanist rituals, or turning off all the lights in your house. But a day for spending as much money as you possibly can. The first friday following thanksgiving day, A day when retailers open amazingly early and offer extraordinary prices to customers that swarm the doors of the store. Black in this case seems to be synonymous with death, People are likely to get trampled in the hordes of bargain hungry customers, as much as employees are scared of the things their customers might do to them if things don’t go as they want. By the looks of it, these people revert to their simplest primal attitudes and just literally go wild.

The ferocity of it all reminds me strangely of Latvian-American Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko. The simplicity of the shopping day reminds me the simplicity of his paintings. The day being simple in the most basic description of it. It also all reminds me the ferocity of Rothko’s actual life, Committing suicide by slashing his wrists and overdosing on anti-depressors. Black Friday in the United states is responsible for the death of at least one person. In 2008, a long island Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by frenzied customers. It’s all very, very dark stuff. Although I find it slightly pathetic for someone to die during a shopping holiday, It just shows how big an idiot the human being can be. It’s sad that a man’s life was taken so that people could get to their flatscreen televisions or their Xbox 360’s.

Mark Rothko