I'm not much of a fan of Halloween, although I am a big fan of the candy -- I like artificially flavored, pure-sugar, teeth-rotting candies that come in little plastic coffins, and the peanut butter cups in the shape of pumpkins, and all that. What I have trouble with is not trick-or-treating, but the wearing of costumes.
I realize I'm in the minority in this: NPR reported this morning that about 2 million people were expected at the annual Halloween Parade in Manhattan. But I find seeing people in costumes a bit embarrassing, a bit like peeping through a window into their inner psychic weirdness. Many people probably enjoy it for just that reason; it offers a chance to be exhibitionistic without guilt, and carries with it the illicit allure of the carnivalesque, the loosening of strictures, the subversion of social norms, and all that other Bakhtinian goodness. But the fantasies being unleashed in costume form somehow seem so paltry: people dressed as characters from TV shows, or attempting some other "clever" appropriation from pop culture.
The clever costumes, however, are less embarrassing than the vaguely sexual ones: Spend any time at the parade and you may conclude that most women want to dress like hookers and most men want to dress like women. With an opportunity to dress up and tap into the collective unconsciousness, it seems as though people gravitate to the image that our culture projects as being the most powerful, from an attention and marketing standpoint -- that of the beautiful, objectified women who is sexually available. So adults in costumes becomes a depressing reiteration of the way sexuality is so thoroughly bound up with commercialization. I guess in other cultures, where the harvest celebration still has religious overtones, there's a greater emphasis on the spiritual world -- ghouls and demons. Now, it's become a strictly carnal affair.
Anyway, that makes me one of those lame people who goes to costume parties without one. Why can't they be more like 18th century masquerades, where many wore the same costume, the eerie domino suit, and the emphasis was on concealing your identity altogether -- and generalized licentiousness -- rather than trying to come across as cool, a heightened form of one's true self?
Showing posts with label cool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cool. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Timeless (28 Oct 2007)
Rob Walker shows admirable restraint and does not state the obvious in his NYT Magazine column about watches that don't tell time.
Walker, who can apparently read coolhunting blogs without judging (or vomiting), instead highlights the appeal of objects that are "counterfunctional," that make it harder to do what they are putatively supposed to assist a person with. Ordinary people don't want them, which makes them that much more attractive for people who need to be nonconformists. Essentially, these are consumer-goods equivalents of the Mahavishnu Orchestra or Metal Machine Music.
I can still remember making my own subtle calculations about how to come across as mysteriously different and ineffably superior to the people I might encounter. I never wore sunglasses indoors or anything, but I tried to figure out ways to impress people without having to do all the unpleasant work of talking to them and being interested in what they might say. It still has only barely sunk in that perpetrating a scheme of "nonconformity" is a surefire way not of impressing people but alienating them. It creates a forcefield that will prevent people from bothering with you. And those who aren't warded off can't have anything but a sort of false relation with you, since you are so studiously avoiding risking anything that you're sincere about. In this way, the pursuit of cool is ultimately isolating, which tends to further the conditions that foster it -- being alone, deprived of the skills to be sociable but susceptible and exposed continually to marketing promises of winning identities that one can imagine richly in fantasy without requiring the participation of others.
In other words, it’s not that a watch with one hand, or no hands, has no value. It’s that the value it has is unrelated to the telling of time.Exactly, it screams loud and clear that you are an idiot. And sensible people would be wise not to get into a conversation with you or give you any of the attention you so desperately crave but clearly don't deserve.
This, in fact, is what makes a useless-seeming watch potentially more valuable — in identity terms — than, say, regular jewelry. If the Timeless Bracelet didn’t have an empty space where the face should be, it would just be a bracelet. “It has more value because it’s missing its functional component,” Berger suggests; a thing that’s more of a comment on watchness than a watch “provides more information” about the person wearing it.
Walker, who can apparently read coolhunting blogs without judging (or vomiting), instead highlights the appeal of objects that are "counterfunctional," that make it harder to do what they are putatively supposed to assist a person with. Ordinary people don't want them, which makes them that much more attractive for people who need to be nonconformists. Essentially, these are consumer-goods equivalents of the Mahavishnu Orchestra or Metal Machine Music.
I can still remember making my own subtle calculations about how to come across as mysteriously different and ineffably superior to the people I might encounter. I never wore sunglasses indoors or anything, but I tried to figure out ways to impress people without having to do all the unpleasant work of talking to them and being interested in what they might say. It still has only barely sunk in that perpetrating a scheme of "nonconformity" is a surefire way not of impressing people but alienating them. It creates a forcefield that will prevent people from bothering with you. And those who aren't warded off can't have anything but a sort of false relation with you, since you are so studiously avoiding risking anything that you're sincere about. In this way, the pursuit of cool is ultimately isolating, which tends to further the conditions that foster it -- being alone, deprived of the skills to be sociable but susceptible and exposed continually to marketing promises of winning identities that one can imagine richly in fantasy without requiring the participation of others.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
I love to say dada (2 September 2006)
Dada seems like a poor subject for a museum retrospective considering how those artists' mission seemed to be to undermine the credibility of institutional art and its curators while lampooning the tastes and proclivities of the bourgeois philistines who frequent such palaces of pomposity and complacency as museums. Yet there I was, a philistine at large at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, taking it all in. Perhaps the artists would have reveled in this irony. As the paragraph on the wall explained, the Dada artists were pioneers in the art of branding, coining the word Dada to unite the heterogeneous art -- quasi-cubist painting, embroidery, typographical experiments, pictographs, collages, manifestos, mannequins, readymades, etc. -- that went out under its banner.
Consequently Dada works seem to be about little more than brand building and self-promotion -- it's not an accident that there are dozens of posters for Dada exhibitions in the Dada exhibition -- and the influence this work had on graphic artists, industrial designers and marketers is apparent in how familiar everything in the exhibition looks, how the experimental pieces evoke nostalgia rather than perplexity, how pointedly the provocative Duchamps fail to provoke. Though much is made of the Dadaists devotion to randomness and spontaneity in their methods, these works are outrageous in the calculated way advertisements can be; they use deliberate randomness the way ads now use non sequiturs and absurdity to arrest our attention. So the experience of all this attention-craving Dada in one place -- no quiet dignity to these objects -- is pretty exhausting, even more disorienting than the usual big, crowded museum show.
The show is organized around the local art enclaves in various cities that the Dada movement was able to manufacture, which gave the appropriate impression that the Dada's main achievement was to make hip happenings, to create proto-Williamsburgs of self-importance wherever they chose to congregate. I had the feeling the less I knew about Dada, the more I would be able to appreciate the works, which taken in isolation, disburdened of the posturing that surrounded their marketing, could have been quite impressive and moving. Exhibited together, though, one is too conscious of the oppressive art scene, its peculiar anxieties and egoistic concerns. But Dada artists were among the first to discover how to use the emerging mass media as an artistic medium -- the collages made of pieces of newspaper and theater tickets and photos cut out of magazines are only a fitting symbol of this.
I liked Schwitters's collages, though, for an entirely different reason. Though the works seemed to demonstrate the artist's efforts at mastering the discombobulating proliferation of entertainment and information the era experienced, bringing all the industrially produced pieces of culture together, the works now made by countless, nameless hands, ordering it all and making it coherent and subject to the individual artist's imprimatur, I appreciated the way they seemed to bring artistic endeavor to a DIY level. They made me wonder why I didn't try my hand at making some art -- all I need is a good matte cutter and some nice frames, and I could maybe put something together. It wouldn't be as good as Schwitters, obviously, but it would be better than simply consuming art, herding myself through the mass of people. But then the more people who feel like they should be making their own art, the more one has to work to promote oneself, to stand out from the masses, to earn exhibition space and an audience. So the DIY spirit I felt was part and parcel with the revulsion I felt at the branding and attention-grubbing.
Consequently Dada works seem to be about little more than brand building and self-promotion -- it's not an accident that there are dozens of posters for Dada exhibitions in the Dada exhibition -- and the influence this work had on graphic artists, industrial designers and marketers is apparent in how familiar everything in the exhibition looks, how the experimental pieces evoke nostalgia rather than perplexity, how pointedly the provocative Duchamps fail to provoke. Though much is made of the Dadaists devotion to randomness and spontaneity in their methods, these works are outrageous in the calculated way advertisements can be; they use deliberate randomness the way ads now use non sequiturs and absurdity to arrest our attention. So the experience of all this attention-craving Dada in one place -- no quiet dignity to these objects -- is pretty exhausting, even more disorienting than the usual big, crowded museum show.
The show is organized around the local art enclaves in various cities that the Dada movement was able to manufacture, which gave the appropriate impression that the Dada's main achievement was to make hip happenings, to create proto-Williamsburgs of self-importance wherever they chose to congregate. I had the feeling the less I knew about Dada, the more I would be able to appreciate the works, which taken in isolation, disburdened of the posturing that surrounded their marketing, could have been quite impressive and moving. Exhibited together, though, one is too conscious of the oppressive art scene, its peculiar anxieties and egoistic concerns. But Dada artists were among the first to discover how to use the emerging mass media as an artistic medium -- the collages made of pieces of newspaper and theater tickets and photos cut out of magazines are only a fitting symbol of this.
I liked Schwitters's collages, though, for an entirely different reason. Though the works seemed to demonstrate the artist's efforts at mastering the discombobulating proliferation of entertainment and information the era experienced, bringing all the industrially produced pieces of culture together, the works now made by countless, nameless hands, ordering it all and making it coherent and subject to the individual artist's imprimatur, I appreciated the way they seemed to bring artistic endeavor to a DIY level. They made me wonder why I didn't try my hand at making some art -- all I need is a good matte cutter and some nice frames, and I could maybe put something together. It wouldn't be as good as Schwitters, obviously, but it would be better than simply consuming art, herding myself through the mass of people. But then the more people who feel like they should be making their own art, the more one has to work to promote oneself, to stand out from the masses, to earn exhibition space and an audience. So the DIY spirit I felt was part and parcel with the revulsion I felt at the branding and attention-grubbing.
Tattoo nation (27 August 2006)
Everyone else in the op-ed racket seems to be writing about some rainstorm or other that happened almost a year ago, but David Brooks comes through in today's NYT with a gripping and timely piece about this breaking new trend: tattoos. Believe it or not, people are marking their skin, with ink! What deep insight, what keen powers of observation for Brooks to notice this. And these people seem to think it marks them in some unique way despite the fact that all these other people are doing it! How silly, they don't even realize how conformist they are in their non-conformity. As Brooks so wisely sums up in his majestic closing statement: "Another generation of hipsters laid low by the ironies of consumerism." Wow. By highlighting this 15-year-old "trend," he has torn the mask off "hipster" culture at last with this column and proven once and for all that all supposed acts of subversion are phony and resistance to the happy progress of American consumerism is futile.
Now, I'm no fan of tattoos myself, but something about hearing Brooks make a similar case as me makes me want to rethink it a bit. Brooks is essentially denaturing the argument made in Heath and Potter's Nation of Rebels and before in Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to seize yet another opportunity to mock people for signaling self-awareness, a tendency he conflates with elitism and selfishness. He makes out people with tattoos to be a shallow bunch of short-sighted simpletons who are blinkered by their worship of empty gestures of individualism (the only individualist gesture that matters, of course, is entrepreneurship). The stories tattoos tell are far more complex than Brooks is willing to admit; they have long ceased to be expressions of how dangerous or different a person thinks she is. Also, having a tattoo is not "an alienated look" as Brooks suggests -- by his very logic, tattoos are an expression of belonging to the zeitgeist, not rejecting it. He seems trapped in preconceptions about tattooing that ceased to apply sometime around the Stone Temple Pilots' debut album. Some people may tattoo as a form as self-harm, as an elaborate form of cutting, but probably the majority do so not to express anger but pride. Brooks is quick to sneer at youth culture as conformist, but when has youth culture ever been about anything but pseudo-rebellion? To call it "conservative" as he does is to distort the terminology -- seeking to belong isn't the same as espousing a political ideology. Or is Brooks admitting that to be conservative is to be conformist and cowardly?
It seems much more likely that there's nothing insincere or aberrant in one's getting a tattoo -- the conformity inherent in the practice at this point seems to confirm that. A person's not simply erroneously calculating how rebellious or subversive they will become. Instead I would imagine one gets a satisfying feeling of having followed through with a serious commitment (something you'd expect Brooks to cheer) and displayed some courage (it's not joining the Army, but tattoos do hurt). And the ownership over one's own body one asserts by marking it in some conscious way is a private matter, ultimately, which is why most tattoos, I'm guessing, are not usually immediately visible to strangers -- they are often in a more intimate place and can serve as a way of showing you trust someone. You show the tattoo, you tell the story behind it, which Brooks dismisses as some self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing narrative about shopping, since he sees tattoos as nothing more than "perfect consumer items", but which can often be more a way for a person to organize and articulate a long-developing self-awareness and share it with a privileged few.
Brooks won't admit that these people may not care about how "mainstream" they are, that their minds are on something wholly different, that they could be concerned with any kind of issue larger than themselves (like, say, how their government could fail to plan for a major disaster they knew was coming and allow one of its cities to be ruined, perhaps permanently). If tattoos are consumer goods, they are mundane ones, no more deserving of contemptuous treatment than any of the other goods -- T-shirts, cars, housewares, etc. -- we use to communicate ideas about ourselves to others. I agree that there are probably better ways to communicate, and certainly more important messages to communicate than the ones goods limit a person to, but why single out tattoos? Why not condemn the entire consumer economy, or all consumers? After all the only thing separating a hipster from a redneck (or country club suburbanite or any of the other demographics Brooks has fetishized) is irony, and in the end that doesn't show up anywhere on the balance sheet.
Now, I'm no fan of tattoos myself, but something about hearing Brooks make a similar case as me makes me want to rethink it a bit. Brooks is essentially denaturing the argument made in Heath and Potter's Nation of Rebels and before in Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool to seize yet another opportunity to mock people for signaling self-awareness, a tendency he conflates with elitism and selfishness. He makes out people with tattoos to be a shallow bunch of short-sighted simpletons who are blinkered by their worship of empty gestures of individualism (the only individualist gesture that matters, of course, is entrepreneurship). The stories tattoos tell are far more complex than Brooks is willing to admit; they have long ceased to be expressions of how dangerous or different a person thinks she is. Also, having a tattoo is not "an alienated look" as Brooks suggests -- by his very logic, tattoos are an expression of belonging to the zeitgeist, not rejecting it. He seems trapped in preconceptions about tattooing that ceased to apply sometime around the Stone Temple Pilots' debut album. Some people may tattoo as a form as self-harm, as an elaborate form of cutting, but probably the majority do so not to express anger but pride. Brooks is quick to sneer at youth culture as conformist, but when has youth culture ever been about anything but pseudo-rebellion? To call it "conservative" as he does is to distort the terminology -- seeking to belong isn't the same as espousing a political ideology. Or is Brooks admitting that to be conservative is to be conformist and cowardly?
It seems much more likely that there's nothing insincere or aberrant in one's getting a tattoo -- the conformity inherent in the practice at this point seems to confirm that. A person's not simply erroneously calculating how rebellious or subversive they will become. Instead I would imagine one gets a satisfying feeling of having followed through with a serious commitment (something you'd expect Brooks to cheer) and displayed some courage (it's not joining the Army, but tattoos do hurt). And the ownership over one's own body one asserts by marking it in some conscious way is a private matter, ultimately, which is why most tattoos, I'm guessing, are not usually immediately visible to strangers -- they are often in a more intimate place and can serve as a way of showing you trust someone. You show the tattoo, you tell the story behind it, which Brooks dismisses as some self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing narrative about shopping, since he sees tattoos as nothing more than "perfect consumer items", but which can often be more a way for a person to organize and articulate a long-developing self-awareness and share it with a privileged few.
Brooks won't admit that these people may not care about how "mainstream" they are, that their minds are on something wholly different, that they could be concerned with any kind of issue larger than themselves (like, say, how their government could fail to plan for a major disaster they knew was coming and allow one of its cities to be ruined, perhaps permanently). If tattoos are consumer goods, they are mundane ones, no more deserving of contemptuous treatment than any of the other goods -- T-shirts, cars, housewares, etc. -- we use to communicate ideas about ourselves to others. I agree that there are probably better ways to communicate, and certainly more important messages to communicate than the ones goods limit a person to, but why single out tattoos? Why not condemn the entire consumer economy, or all consumers? After all the only thing separating a hipster from a redneck (or country club suburbanite or any of the other demographics Brooks has fetishized) is irony, and in the end that doesn't show up anywhere on the balance sheet.
Cool jobs (25 August 2006)
Nobody should be looking for a "cool job" -- maybe this is just semantics, but jobs aren't "cool". They might be rewarding to varying degrees and offer varying levels of autonomy, but it seems wrong to think about their fashionability (being gainfully employed never goes out of fashion). The Fonzie approach to work seems pretty self-defeating to me. If you are doing something to be cool rather than to simply do whatever it is -- making art to seem like a cool artist rather than because you enjoy making art -- then you are always at one remove from your own activity, self-alienated. (I doubt both can be done simultaneously; the self-regarding pursuit of cool detracts from the pleasures of pure immersion in a task.) Plus the harder you try to establish your cool, the less cool you are. And the degree to which people think your job is cool is often the degree to which you are being undercompensated for doing it. A cool job is usually a matter of someone else insisting how cool it is to be associated with some company or industry, while you slog through the same administrative or managerial tasks you'd do at any job. You end up getting paid in cool instead of cold hard cash, and I know which currency I'd prefer. (No amount of cool is going to pay my electric bill when I'm 64.) Better to never let "cool" come into your thinking and just try to find ways to get paid for doing things you like to do.
Of course that might be what you think of when you hear "cool" -- I just hate to let it stand as a synonym for satisfying or interesting as the following writers do. Nevertheless, via Megan McArdle comes some good job-seeking advice from Timothy Burke that readers -- particularly those pursuing liberal arts degrees in hope of landing cool jobs -- may find useful.
Of course that might be what you think of when you hear "cool" -- I just hate to let it stand as a synonym for satisfying or interesting as the following writers do. Nevertheless, via Megan McArdle comes some good job-seeking advice from Timothy Burke that readers -- particularly those pursuing liberal arts degrees in hope of landing cool jobs -- may find useful.
The bad news, and I’m not sure liberal arts institutions are always as forthright about saying this as they could be to their current undergraduates, is that the significant majority of immediately post-graduate employment experiences are going to suck. Dilbert’s office would be an improvement over quite a few of the ones I’ve heard about. I think my favorite job experience I’ve heard about in the last six years was the non-profit community group that paid $15,000 a year for a 55/hr week with no benefits or vacation time and was run by a near-psychotic incompetent. But there’s lots like that to go around. I do think we promise payoffs in the longer term from “critical thinking” and the like, so any student who’s listening carefully probably understands the implicit point being made when that’s said.I think I was so seduced by the fiction of democratic meritocracy that I didn't think making connections and networking was all that important. One could get by on sheer ability. What I didn't understand is that, unless you are specialized in something extremely technical (i.e. you do something "not cool"), the ability to get along with other people is ability -- more important than any other kind of knowledge or skill for most jobs in most bureaucratic organizations. Having an extensive social network is a good proxy for that ability to blend in organizationally. Judging by my experience in publishing, the easiest way to get a job somewhere is to know someone who already works there. I guess that is Burke's route 3.
Thinking about people I know with Cool Jobs who are not academics, broadly speaking I can identify a couple of ways that they got there.
Route 1 to a Cool Job is applying to a Nasty Leftover job and then proving yourself with diligence and creativity to be a Cool Person and being promoted upwards to the stuff in the same workplace or organization that’s satisfying and interesting.
Route 2 to a Cool Job is going to graduate school but in a specific professional field, aimed at very specific technical proficiencies, skills and credentials, NOT a doctoral program aimed at becoming an academic. You’re looking for something that goes straight into a profession or field of employment outside of academia, preferably a program with a strong, proven track record of placing its graduates in employment. The shorter the program, the better.
Route 3 to a Cool Job is making a nuisance out of yourself in a way that feels very very difficult for a lot of folks (including myself)–basically exploiting your family and social networks, writing to strangers, showing up at lots of events and aggrandizing yourself in various ways, brownnosing if necessary, being gutsy and unafraid, jumping into strange situations without looking. The problem with this is not just that it is difficult to do, but that it takes a certain kind of personality and judicious ability to size up social situations to do it successfully. Somebody with the wrong personality or with a consistent inability to judge when and how the moment has arrived is going to do themselves way more harm than good following this strategy.
Route 4 is hanging out your own shingle in some fashion–if you’ve got a serious technical skill, some special area of knowledge, some ability to do creative writing, anything of that kind, you go into business or do consulting or sit down and write. Anything that either produces a concrete output (artwork, writing, programming, technology, a successful small business) or that serves as an effective entree to some larger institution by proving yourself is a good thing. That is, providing what you’re doing doesn’t suck–bad art, lame writing, or technically incompetent independent work isn’t going to help you any, and parasitic just-one-step-above-confidence-man kinds of consulting work may alienate rather than ingratiate. May require a significant other and/or parents you can sponge off of for a while.
Route 5 is basically paying lots and lots of dues, about ten to fifteen years of painfully bad or frustrating jobs where the next job is somewhat higher paying or more responsible than the last job, but not really a Cool Job or even a particularly good one–and then taking the accumulated reputational and professional capital from that and cashing it in to grab a Cool Job.
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