I work at a place where the whole thing is people come in and smash stuff. It’s called “la Collision”, on the Rue Balzac in Paris. I’m American, but I moved to Paris because I had the money to. There’s a million things people can smash, but it’s mostly cheap glasswork from thrift-stores. Part of my job is going out and buying a bunch of cups and lamps and cheap vases and collecting bottles I see on the street. I get all this stuff and take it back to the shop. Old TVs are great if I can find them. We charge extra for that because everyone wants to smash those. I get lightbulbs, but I have to be careful about which lightbulbs, because some of them have like, deadly gas inside of them. Everyone signs forms when they come in, but I still don’t want to be poisoning anyone. The other thing I do is stock the rooms, which mostly means putting boxes of stuff in the corner for people to pick up and throw, but it also means putting the fake walls back up after they’ve been knocked down. The paint stuff I don’t get, they let you throw paint at the walls. Why would you throw paint at a wall you could break down if you’re trying to actually destroy it? I just think that you should go somewhere else for that. Go to some branché finger-painting studio. I don’t complain, though. The job pays well, and since they have me go to thrift stores with cash and my manager doesn’t really care if I lie about how much things cost, I make some money on the side. But don’t put that in the article. Edit that out if you could, off the record. But the only bad thing about breaking stuff is there are only a certain amount of things that you can break. We have some old cars every once in a while, but things tend to be cheap. Like, I mentioned the toxic lightbulbs, but there are other things that are off-limits. Some people have asked if we have refrigerators, jewelry, nice china plates, things like that. I have to tell them that we don’t have anything super expensive other than TVs. Of course, there are places where you can break that kind of stuff, but they’re not open to the public. Invite only places. But I hear unsavory things about those. 

PERRY: 

I break things for my YouTube channel. Part of that is traveling around the world and finding crazy places to break stuff, and places where you can break interesting things. We break stuff in front of Niagara Falls, in front of Shinto shrines, places like that. Before I started watching YouTube or uploading videos, I watched a lot of Ellen. So much Ellen. Ellen DeGeneres, you know? Ellen is a genius. She is, quite literally, the greatest artist and content creator of the last 30 years. When she got canceled it was sad cause it meant she was gonna be off the air. She was really smart because she basically understood that everything is transient and what people like is stuff just like, seeing something or someone that we know isn’t gonna matter very soon. Which isn’t a big deal or anything and it doesn’t stop the people on there from being unimportant, obviously. But destroying stuff is so fucking cool. Everyone likes it. It’s just rewarding or something. Of course, it’s too expensive for most people to do because stuff is supposed to exist, which is where we step in. But I guess a lot of stuff actually isn’t made to exist at all, like iPhones. It’s planned obsolescence, right? To get you to buy more? So with something like that, who cares if it gets blown up? Or hit by hammers, right? That’s why we smash new shit. It’s more, it’s like, way more exciting.

JAKE: 

I think things don’t really exist until they’ve been destroyed. Cause the stuff I break is in its shortest phase of existence when it’s whole, when it’s stuck together. Like, for example, isn’t the frailty of a vase part of what makes it expensive? If we’re talking about a nice vase, you know, one that holds value, like the vases they made in medieval China maybe, with the beautiful flowers printed on the side, or the Dutch imitations, the ones they made in Delft, the blue bone china plates and tea-cups? You pass that kind of thing down because it takes care to keep it together. You have to put it in its own, like, wardrobe or something. It’s as fragile as the family itself, so if it breaks, so did your lineage or something. But that’s cowardly. It’s capitalist bullshit, too. On some level at least. Putting aside that these things have no real use because everyone lets them sit, never putting any actual food on the things, it’s cowardly because we get to act like that’s the natural state of those fuckin’ things. It’s pussy, because we like, can’t acknowledge that those things were made to be broken. We’ve, like, wrapped a myth around that bone china, a myth of time being something we can slow down and stop consuming. So I break things, yes, serially. But I’m not an anarchist or an iconoclast, nothing like that. I break useless shit because I think that’s, uh, basically what it’s there for.