Chasing the Cool

There's a Lupe Fiasco song called The Cool.  The second half of the chorus runs:

You're breaking the rules, making your moves, paying your dues

Chasing the cool.

We've all chased the cool.  Most of us couldn't describe what the cool is, but we know it when we see it, and most of us want it.  There's an entire industry based around the idea of the cool, entire social groups are divided, run, and driven according to the unwritten rule of the cool.  The cool is everywhere; schools, bars, offices, high streets.  And yet it's hardly what we could call meritocratic, the cool defies lines of race, genre and wealth.  Some people work full time to attain it and end up with nothing, others have it without even trying.  But how are our attitudes to the cool formed?  How astute are we at recognising it ourselves, and how much of our appreciation of it is to do with what we are told.  

To put it simply, I'm suspicious about the genuineness of the tastes of my fellow men.

I'm suspicious that there are multi-million selling artists who produce music which is far inferior to many deal-less artists.  (I appreciate taste is a personal matter, but seriously)

I'm suspicious that fashions rise out of nowhere, and suddenly people wear things they'd never have dreamt of wearing a few months previously.

I'm suspicious that in blind taste tests, budget brands so often topple luxury food brands, and yet droves of middle-class consumers still flock to the expensive options.

The question.  Have we lost the ability to decide for ourselves what we like?  Are we really so suggestible as to base all or most of our tastes upon what others like, rather than our own naked inclinations?

You'll say 'Come on, that's f**king obvious,'  but knowing this doesn't exactly stop us does it.  

There's an excellent illustration of how fickle we are, provided by an article which ran in the Washington Post.  The article was based around an experiment whereby a busker in the Washington Metro was filmed over a 45 minute period as he played the violin for passers by at rush hour.  Only 6 people stopped to listen, 20 gave him money.  In all he made $32.

This would hardly be extraordinary were it not for the fact that the violinist was world-famous concert soloist Joshua Bell, on a violin worth $3.5 million, playing one of the most challenging pieces ever composed for his instrument.  He regularly sells out concert halls, where tickets retail in excess of $100.

The experiment seems to confirm that taken outside of a frame of reference where we expect it, we fail to recognise beauty.  The music, taken outside of the concert hall, fell upon deaf ears.  The same would almost certainly happen if great works of impressionist art were placed alongside amateur art on the wall of a resturant.  Very few people would recognise in that environment what in one of the great galleries would be revered as genius.  There's a pub near me with a print of a work of art on the wall of the toilet, a pastel piece of a badly proportioned dog sitting on a beach.  A few of us were divided on whether it was a child's painting, or a work by a known artist, and eventually decided it was almost certainly done by an amateur. 

 I opened a magazine recently to find the same picture in an article on art.  Turns out the picture was Dawn after the Wreck, one of J.M.W Turner's most famous works.

Take this principle back to the cool.  If we are really that suggestible, how much of what we see as cool is only viewed that way because we've been told it's cool.  Either by the television, the magazines, or even people themselves.  If people around me tell me somebody is cool enough times, will I start to believe it?  I hope not, but who am I to think I'm not as suggestible as the rest of them, the same people who passed Joshua Bell playing Bach on the metro and thought he was just a bum.

Words from Moby: 

"I had an epiphany a few years ago when I was out at a celebrity party and it suddenly dawned on me that I had yet to meet a celebrity who is as smart and interesting as any of my friends."

You know how when you stop fretting about how to make it with the opposite sex and just relax, you suddenly find they're attracted to you?  Maybe if we stopped letting other people decide for us what was good, what music was worth listening to, which people were worth knowing, what clothes were worth buying, we'd turn round and find ourselves having arrived at a genuine cool.

Last Rites

Question 1)  What's the greatest certainty of life.

Question 2) What's the most taboo subject in Western society?

Doesn't that seem strange?

How many people have even seen a dead body?  The answer is very few, unless you happen to be an undertaker or a doctor.  Do you think about death?  Of course you don't.  Death won't happen to you, it happens to them.  We do, as a society, have a remarkable aversion towards any consideration of the one thing we all know is certain for us, despite the fact we prepare endlessly for many eventualities which are very unlikely to occur.  There are still many people in this country with garages full of canned food to tide them over in the event of nuclear apocalypse, and yet when it comes to big D, it's three monkey syndrome; hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. 

 A brief look at Western funeral rites confirms this condition.  When somebody dies, the coroner sees the body, a close family member may go and see the body, but there is almost certainly no lying in state.  The body goes into an ornate box carried in the back of a morose black car.  At the crematorium, the ornate box sits on a little conveyor belt, and moves behind a curtain, where somehow it magically disappears.  Even our vernacular regarding death dodges the reality.  People don't die, they 'pass,' 'go to a better place' or we 'lose' them.  Some people would regard this entire process as respectful, but in reality I suspect that it is symptomatic of deeply unhealthy attitudes regarding death.

In Eastern cultures we find a very different story when it comes to last rites.  In the Hindu tradition, the dead body is placed on the floor of a room in the house, having been washed and dressed.  The body is carried on an open stretcher to a cremation site, preferably by a river, where it is lain on top of a pyre and cremated in full view of the associated mourners.  Following this the ashes are swept into the river.  They even cremate tigers for goodness sake.

In Tibetan Buddhism, where wood for pyres is scarce, the practice of sky burial is more common than cremation, whereby the dead body is dismembered and laid out on a hilltop for vultures to eat.  Far from being something out of a B-line slasher film, this is viewed as a last act of generosity to the natural world by the deceased.

So why the differences?

In Eastern cultures, far more so than in the West, death is viewed as a certainty.  Buddhist funeral traditions focus on, and act as a focus for meditation upon, the impermanence of life.  Life is something to be celebrated, and yet its impermanence is something to be grasped and realised.  In Britain, and most of the West, funerals are more likely an unfortunate blip on our consciously or unconsciously held beliefs that we and those we love will last forever.  Western funeral traditions seek to sanitise death, keep realities behind mortuary doors, under coffin lids, six feet beneath the earth.

Why the problem?

Refusing to confront the natural realities of death most likely leads to one of two conclusions.  Either you successfully ignore the fact that it is inevitable, in which case you or those around you will suddenly face death, and be entirely unprepared for it.  Alternatively you will be so worried about the abstract concept that you might die that you will never risk anything.  On this subject Tony Campolo aptly wrote that 'the majority of us tiptoe through life so as to arrive safely at death.'  Both these scenarios result from a refusal to thoroughly consider what death means, and more importantly its complete certainty.  Our funeral traditions help maintain this taboo regarding the only great certainty, and ensure that most of us cause ourselves far more pain and regret than if we had grown up with mature and realistic understanding of life and death. 

Steve Jobs, better known for founding Apple Computer had the following to say after forced confrontation of his own mortality through cancer.

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.  Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.  You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart."

We could all be a lot happier, ironically, if we accepted the inevitable, and lived in the light of a certainty, rather than pretending that death is in some way a terrible, macabre event which happens to an unlucky few.  

They may not have the Ipods, the Primarks, the comfortable detatched houses, but in this way, the East has a lot to teach us.

Dog Cult

Does anyone know what's going on here?

I don't.  But I do know that if I could train dogs to do this, I'd never need to learn any other skills.

Nazi Wallpaper

I found this.  Nazi Wallpaper.

Begs the question, who would ever have this on their desktop.  

Probably Nazis I guess.

It's hard to figure out what exactly constitutes a Nazi is these days.  Hitler and Goebbels are hardly sitting in their houses, downloading their Nazi wallpapers and sending each other the latest updates on the BNP over Twitter, and yet the Nazi moniker, along with all its paraphenalia is alive and well.  In the merchandise section of resistance.com, a record label for "pro-white" music, you can buy these delightful swastika-soled jackboots, (http://tinyurl.com/lt6b83) presumably intended for stamping the emblem of the Third Reich into the faces of your non-white foes.  There's a very good article by Tanya Gold, (over at the reassuringly non-Nazi Guardian), on what she calls "Hitler Porn," or not to name-drop, obsession with Nazism, both in the sphere of comedy, as well as in much darker circles.  (Article is here http://tinyurl.com/cs6e7x)

Many far right groups indulge in some level of Nazi-fetishism; even Nick Griffin, whose party represents one of the more moderate forms of right-wing racial supremacism, has been known to throw a few Nazi salutes when he thinks nobody's watching, as well as forming links with parties harbouring openly 'Nazi' sympathies.  It's difficult to understand a viewpoint which supports the violent suppression of people on grounds of race, (although it is depressingly easy to understand the small-mindedness which leads to such views), but where exactly is the Nazi connection? What, for example, are skinhead gangs in Russia thinking; whose grandparents fought off the Nazis only 65 years ago, and yet who openly identify themselves as 'Neo-Nazis.'

The issue of Chechenya has obviously led some people in Russia, particularly among the poor, to take up some deeply unsavoury racist views, but Nazism?  Is it not possible to hold racist views without constantly name-dropping Hitler and getting inked up with storm-trooper tattoos, particularly when within living memory, your countrymen fought those same Nazis in the bitter killing-fields of Stalingrad for your freedom?  Why do racist views need what seems to be the legitimacy of carrying the Nazi cachet.  In all likelihood, Hitler himself would refute any connection between his own terrifyingly efficient realisation of supremacist principles, and the rag-tag bunch of angry, shaven-headed young men around the world who claim to continue his legacy.  It would seem that the only purpose that continuous reference to Nazism serves is to make such groups as unpalatable as possible.  Members of such groups and gangs see to provoke, to shock, and to appall.

Having a huge Nazi eagle tattooed across your throat is certainly one way of doing this.

But this is all counter productive.  Advertising works because it subtly influences our decisions.  The best advertising is so powerful that we buy products without ever realising we've been duped, (Addiction to Kinder Bueno being an obvious example).  If far-right groups really cared about making their deeply distasteful doctrine become any sort of reality (as Hitler did) then entire communities and nations need to be cleverly duped into believing gradually greater amounts of racist, far-right hype.  To do this the trust of these people must be slowly earned, their viewpoints carefully manipulated, and their anger gradually stoked.  Essentially far-right groups need to be people we feel we can trust, people we feel are like us.  Walking around in swastika jackboots with 'Aryan Honour' tattooed across your face is not going to do this, it is going to make people run away, and it is going to make many non-white people want to kill you.

And this I think is the answer.

The Nazi cachet is not about wanting to influence anything on any large scale, it is about standing out, about wanting to be an underdog.  It gives angry young men an opportunity to feel part of a brotherhood, to have an enemy, to fight, and to die.  A championship boxer is an intimidating proposition to look at, but his sphere of influence extends only to the man in front of him in the ring.  It is the CEOs and the Presidents who have the real influence.  It's the same with the skinheads.  If they really wanted to see the end of all other races except the 'Aryans,' they'd become CEOs, not boxers.

Fortunately, they haven't got the vision to see it.