M.A.V.

From deep within the Stumptown Coffee Roasters on SW 3rd:

In a place where the apparent sole basis for esteeming the worth of others is Style of Dress--and not just any old Style of Dress but a very particular Style of Dress, a Style of Dress that itself values eccentricity as an End In Itself--the stage is set for the fashion equivalent of the nuclear arms scenario known as M.A.D., or, Mutually Assured Destruction, which I’m going to call “M.A.V.,” or, “Mutually Assured Vacuity,” where everyone is at risk of having nothing but vacuous relations with everybody else. Scary a** sh*t, I know.

So, here’s my question: How does one get out of a M.A.V. scenario? Assume that you’re the fashion-equivalent of some relatively podunk--at least in terms of nuclear armature--country, like France, and that the Russkies and the Amis--the coolest/most fashionable kids--have started launching their nukes...

 

One can not fire, i.e., dress like the unintentional geek and/or dud. This tends to be yours trulys tried and, er...

The second option: one can fire ones own nukes, launch a couple at England or Germany, i.e., do ones damndest to not dress like the rest of them (and therefore wind up looking like the rest of them because you’ve failed to understand the trappings of the form/content distinction). Honestly, I feel the worst for the people that take this course because it’s F*CKING M.A.V. PEOPLE and there’s just no stopping once you start...

 

Sweet Jesus.

The third option is, what, launch a nuke at the fashion equivalent of some relatively nuclearly hapless country, like the Netherlands or Brazil. No African countries because that wouldn’t be fair. Same goes for Canada. But what does this response to M.A.V. actually look like? I’m not sure...

Billy Zane?

 

Jimmy Fallon?

 

Britney Spears?

  

Anyways, my point is/was just that I’m not sure what the third option actually looks like, in action. Maybe B-Spears was actually onto something? Probably not.

The fourth option is to just fold-up shop and drop-off the World (fashion) Stage entirely, i.e., find a different coffee shop for a hangout spot, one that’s filled with less fashionable people. But the problem with the fourth option is that, well, some of the girls present at places like the Stumptown on SW 3rd are just too damn cute...

 

P.S. Yours Truly recently purchased some jeans that are, uh, periwinkle in color... Sh*t.

Hey, Can You Turn Down the Music?

A few weeks ago, I was at Barista, a swanky little coffee shop down in the Pearl District and straight out of Portlandia, i.e., staffed by a bunch of young retirees (men and women with big glasses and tats and attitudes and graduate degrees in areas as short-term economically disadvantageous as my own), serving like 46 kinds of exotic espresso, impractically small, etc. So, I’m sitting, sipping my Big Mutha’ Trucker Americano (it had a name like that, I swear), and listening to a bunch of Super-Cool for White Kids Music. In this case, the SCWKM (prounounced “Squi’cum”) happened to be a bunch of early 90s hip-pop playing just loud enough for everyone to hear and recognize and be able to proceed to reflect upon for the purpose of appreciating the super-coolness of its promulgators; it was not, however, playing obnoxiously or offensively loud (one should never offend others, now should one...).

The music--Biggie, Warren G, etc.--wasn’t bad or annoying or anything like that, but then I’m super-cool, too, like Straight Out’a Portland!, in fact, sort of, so... But even if it was bad or annoying or something like that, there’s no way I would’ve asked the Barista staffers to turn it down. Hell, they could’ve been blaring old Ska and I wouldn’t have asked them to turn it down. Why? Would I be too embarrassed to reveal my lack of coolness to people as cool as the Barista staffers? I sure hope not. No, for me, and this is my honest-to-goodness answer, I do not understand myself to have much of a say in the kind of music that Barista plays or doesn’t play, as in, if I don’t like it, tough-toodles for me, it’s up to them, I can go elsewhere, it’s their coffee shop, they have the Power, etc. Maybe I could argue with them that Biggie actually kind’a sucks (sorry, all you Biggie lovers out there) and that their SCWKM is just that (“Squi’cum”), but I’d have to argue and win these points if I actually wanted the music to change...

Early last Wednesday morning, no later than 7:15, working at my own coffee shop, we were listening to Corporate Unapproved soul music--James Brown, Sam Cooke.

“Can you turn down the music?” asks a man, a white man, an older man, a large man, a man of the ex- collegiate middle linebacker variety--big broad forehead and shoulders and jaw--and curly white hair, a customer, “Jimmy.”

  

Yeah, that’s about right.

“Sure,” I reply with a protracted “uuuuuuuurrrrr.”

“Thanks,” says Jimmy before he lumbers back over to the little granite table he’s sharing with his wife and his friend, and before I make my way to the back of the coffee shop, and not to turn down the Corporate Unapproved soul music we’d been listening to since 5:30, -ish, but, rather, to turn it off and turn on the Corporate Approved classical loop that I/everyone else has been listening to non-stop for at least the last year and a half.

Even though nobody else requested the music change and even though Jimmy did not actually ask me to change the music (he merely asked me to turn it down), I did not hesitate to do so. Immediately after having had done so, I asked myself, Why the hell did I just do that? Well, in part because I suspected that Jimmy was not the sort of guy who really liked soul music, in part because we aren’t supposed to play non-C.A. music while the shop’s open, in part because my shift-lead asked me to do so, in part because Jimmy is kind’a scary, and in part because of what I understand to be the nature of the relationship between me, my employers and our customers, like Jimmy.

What’s the nature of said relationship? I’ll be blunt: customers like Jimmy have The Power, or, at least, my employers and myself give it to them in that we do our very darn-damndest to give all the Jimmys of the world what they want, when they want it. Why do we do this? So that, presumably, all the Jimmys of the world will stay our customers. What’s the ideology that undergirds such a relationship? That if we don’t give all the Jimmys of the world what they want, when they want it, they won’t be our customers; that giving them what they want makes them happy. Beneath both of these ideologies is the one that claims that getting what we want makes us happy and loyal and all that jazz, too. But is getting what we want really what makes us happy?

I don’t know about you, but what I want changes pretty regularly. When I was 26 (i.e., now), I wanted, more than anything, to finish my second novel and rewrite my first and get both published by the end of the calender year... When I was 25, I wanted to prove to myself that I could stick with a romantic relationship... When I was 24, wanted to get the hell out of O-H-I-O... 23, to get my PhD in philosophy, preferably from Depaul... 22, gulp, move to O-H-I-O... 18,  KJO and a BMW M3... 16, Fortress Maximus, the biggest Transformer ever...

 

13, braces off... 10, Shawn Kemp’s Kamikaze basketball shoes... 8, be a professional basketball player... 5, Fortress Maximus, again... My point is that what I’ve wanted in my own life has changed pretty regularly. Sure, occasionally it’s stayed the same for a few months here, a few years there, but then it has changed again, perhaps back to something from before, perhaps to something new--just like that. And then, whenever I’ve gotten what I wanted, was I ever truly happy? For a spell, sure, but usually all too brief.

If we were to ask Spinoza why our desires change so gosh-darn much, he’d tell us it’s a function of the fact that we stand in pretty passive relationship to them--i.e., our desires move us, not the other way around. We do have, of course, the ability to reflect on and address--Spinoza calls it taking an “active” relationship w.r.t.--our desires and so can abstain, sublimate or substitute our desires with a certain degree of plasticity--

 

(I just made a pretty complicated Catholic priest joke, for your information...LAUGH!)--but that’s beside the point. What’s my point? That we don’t necessarily have control over what we want. In conjunction with this and the fact that it changes pretty regularly, getting what we want doesn’t necessarily make us happy and doesn’t necessarily make desire go away. Such is the nature of desire, says everyone from the Ancient Greeks to Buddha. Why else would the advertising industry be a multi-baggillion dollar one?

Part of my reason for thinking that getting what we want doesn’t necessarily make us happy is that what we want is constantly changing, not up to us, and never quite satisfying once we get it. Another part of my reason is slightly more complicated and less common-sensical and has to do with what I understand to be the importance of having a sense of self that isn’t “total” if we’re going to be happy. What do I mean by this? Well, for example, back in Spinoza’s time (1632-77), a great many people believed that everything on earth was put here by God for humanity to use in any way it saw fit, and not only everything on earth but everything in the whole universe, the center of which was earth. Spinoza considered this perspective incredibly vain and stupid and set about proving--as in used the method of geometric proof--said vanity and stupidity with his Ethics.

Many of us, present company included, often think/feel that we’re the center of everything. This thought/sentiment is not entirely our faults. For one, we’re constantly told that we’re the center of the universe and that our wants and desires are paramount. Those people that work in that multi-baggillion dollar industry, advertising, tell us this all day, everyday. For another, we experience ourselves as being at the literal center of everything: our worlds extend out from us, us being at point “0.” For yet another, we’re regularly treated like we’re the center of the universe, e.g., when we ask that music be turned down at some coffee shop and somebody actually turns it down without any resistance. DAMN IT!!!

When we’re regularly told that, experience, and are treated like we’re the center of the universe, that our personal wants and desires are paramount, our sense of self becomes what I earlier called “total,” i.e. we start to believe that everything that exists outside of us is actually there for us. Why is this bad? Or, why doesn’t this make us happy? How about this, and this is my honest to goodness best answer: it’s boring. Not that it’s a lie, mind you, or untrue, but that it’s boring, boring, boring. Don’t believe me? Think of an old-school patriarchal marriage in which the man says “Honey, I want Such and Such for dinner,” and the woman goes and makes Such and Such for dinner, or in which the man says, “Honey, give me a b.j.,” and the woman gives him a b.j., etc. Such a dynamic was, for a time, thought of and/or promoted as the ideal for relationships between men and women (and still is in some places), and while it might sound nice to some of you to have a relationship with somebody where all you have say “I want X” and get it, I’ll tell you this: friction and resistance and negotiation and play and strife and obstacles, these are the things that make our lives colorful and fun and meaningful. And hard, sure. But meaningful. And life without friction, resistance, negotiation, play, strife and obstacles, especially between people, isn’t quite worth living. Call me crazy, but I like having to fight for my b.j.s.

As consumers, do we not presently find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the old-school patriarchal marriage, where we’ve come to believe that the ideal relationship between us anyone whom we pay for anything is just to get what we want? That this is what will make us happy? And does it? Does it make us happy? Sure, sort of. I will only answer for myself and my side of this relationship, but... I’m not happy giving customers like Jimmy the coffee-shop equivalent of a b.j. when he asks for it, and even though he thinks he’s happy getting his coffee-shop equivalent b.j. from a hot-young stud like yours truly, I don’t think he is, not really.

So... The next time somebody like Jimmy asks me to turn down the music at my coffee shop--C.A. classical loop or non-C.A. soul--I’m going to ask them at least two questions: first, Why? Second, Do you want me to just turn the music down or do you also want me to change it to something else? I’ll ask them these questions and any others that pop into my head not merely to be a bother or a smart-ass or de-totalize their sense of self, but to add a little friction and color and meaning to our relationship. To hopefully make us both a little happier, long term. What will probably happen after our Q and A? No clue. Probably a formal complaint against yours truly, filed through corporate, that I’ll have to explain later to my boss and my boss’s boss. If this is what winds up happening, I’ll just refer my boss and my boss's boss here and tell them that I don’t think that giving/getting b.j.s on demand ultimately makes anyone happier.

Arendt and the Perplexities of Sex

I had this thought a few days ago while taking a showing: sex is significant like human rights are inalienable. Bear with me.

Recently, a girl and I who’d been “getting to know each other better,” i.e. dating, stopped getting to know each other better over a difference in our respective valuations of sex. Basically, she valued it and I didn’t. Or, she thought of it as QUITE SIGNIFICANT and I thought of it as the physical/emotional equivalent of meeting somebody’s parents, i.e. important, but not one of those thresholds beyond which there is no turning back (which is how she thought of it, in a nut shell). So we stopped getting to know each other better and decided to just be friends. I think it’s going to be for the best.

What does the above story have to do with human rights? Well, do you think that we’re all born with inalienable rights, rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the freedom to buy whatever we damn-well please, and that nobody can take these rights away from us? Are you the sort of person who gets seriously pissed when you think about China’s (or America’s) human rights violations? If you are, then you share something in common with those thinkers of the late eighteenth century--Thomas Paine, J.S. Mill, the writers of the U.S. “Declaration of Independence” and the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”--who came up with the idea of inalienable human rights.

If you are the sort of person who gets pissed when you hear about China’s or America’s human rights violations, then your name is probably not Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a philosopher and political theorist writing during the mid 20th century, was intensely interested in what she labeled the “perplexities” of the rights of man. As a youth, she bore witness to the first World War and its aftermath. Then the second. WWI taught Arendt that stateless people don’t necessarily have inalienable human rights (she was particularly interested in the problems surrounding what we now call refugees). WW2 taught her that citizens, too, don’t necessarily have inalienable human rights (she was herself a German-born Jew who underwent the process of de-naturalization). On the basis of what Arendt witnessed and experienced during the two World Wars, she concluded that human rights are not inalienable, that they can in fact be taken away from us quite easily, and that we actually need a state-body to guarantee them for us if they’re be anything more than empty words. Arendt writes, “The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable--even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them--whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state” (“The Decline of Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man,” The Origins of Totalitarianism, 293).

What does the above have to do with the significance of sex?!? HERE WE COME, FULL CIRCLE!!! Sex without a relationship is like a human rights without a sovereign state: pretty much meaningless. What is the significance of sex outside of a relationship? Sheer desire, acted upon. Nothing more, nothing less. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen it. Because I’ve had it. And ain’t nothing wrong with a little desire, acted upon, but if that’s all there is to your sex, well, you know how that feels the day after: EMPTY, if you’re lucky (and yucky, too, if you’re not). What is the significance of sex within a relationship? Well, I’ll tell you this, it’s one of the richest experiences life has to offer. How do I know this? Ditto.

How does all this relate to my initial story? Well, the girl that I was getting to know believed sex had something like an inalienable significance, whereas I don’t. 

All of the above is/was mostly just a thought which I had, in the shower, a few days ago, and perhaps it can't be anything more significant than that: a few-day-old shower thought.