HOLLISTER, Yah?

"Few companies rival Hollister's brand-powered momentum, and our success is founded in the excellence of our employees."



Ok, let's congratulate ourselves. Society has arrived at the point where a video on youtube where a girl shows off all the tops she has managed to accumulate from Hollister gets 4 stars. That's 80%. That's more than American Psycho gets on IMDB... and American Psycho is a pretty great film. Just why is this brand so nauseatingly ubiquitous? On the way up a set of stairs the other day, just one set of fairly average stairs, I counted five people on the way down wearing Hollister branded T-Shirts. FIVE. Out of a maximum of 15 people. Something's deeply wrong here. I am no expert on fashion, or sociology, but as far as I can see this phenomenon can be explored by a process of elimination. Let's start with why we wear clothing in the first place, a broad question but here goes.

1) Clothes are for keeping warm, and for allowing us not to be naked in public. For this sole purpose, what we wear need be little more than the most utilitarian option, maybe a big boiler-suit, a huge baby-gro. If there were no other consideration to clothes than utility, this is what we'd all be wearing.

2) Clothes are designed to enhance our bodies, and make us more attractive to others. This is largely to do with the cut, and quality of the clothes we choose to wear. It has very little to do with brand. A good suit is a good suit, regardless of whether it has 'Armani' monogrammed into the inner pocket. Some of the very best and most flattering tailoring is produced by firms in the Far East with no brand identity at all.

3) Clothes are a status symbol. The ubiquity of fake branded goods on markets across the world is a testament to this. These clothes are of poor quality, but the appeal is in broadcasting to others your ability to wear a brand. To anybody who's grown up in the last 100 years, this is part of our cultural landscape.

So the clothes we wear cover broadly these three bases. But where did the idea of 'brands' come from? I guess that somewhere a long way back in time from here, clothes were about quality, and the subtle branding was to remind the wearer who had provided him, or her, with such quality. Although 'brands' have been around for a long time, it has in the past been in a very subtle manner; the tiny Lacoste crocodile, the hint of Burberry tartan on a coat hem. It seems that now, the importance of the brand has overtaken that of the clothing. The chicken and the egg have switched places. Fake burberry is so successful simply because it turns the subtlety on its head and gives the people what they want, a brand.

The problem with these brands is that they become identikit.  Rather than people making individual choices about what to wear, how to express themselves through clothing, people who can't be bothered to think about what they wear, but still want to look 'stylish' presume that they can buy into a brand and save themselves a lot of effort. It is the shortcut, off-the-shelf solution to style. The problem is twofold: this comes at a huge premium of cost, and it's entirely misguided. I have enormous admiration for those who have decided to completely buy out of the style game, who are content to wear charity-shop garb because they genuinely don't care. But for those people who do like to use clothes as an expression, simply paying a premium to cut out the work of thinking about how you look is completely insipid. It's the fashion equivalent of the spouse of a famous actor who basks in the reflected glory without having done anything of merit themselves. Think of Kevin Federline, or Jack Tweed... The truth is that clothing yourself head-to-toe in Hollister, American Eagle, Jack Wills, White Stuff or whichever of these modern-day superbrands it happens to be is the work of minutes. You can buy an entire wardrobe in an hour. And such is the garishness of the huge logos, that to dress in this manner is infinitely worse than going to your local charity shop and piecing together something unbranded, yet entirely you.

These brands are painting by numbers. Most people stopped doing that years ago, There's nothing wrong with brands per-se, they remind us that when we buy something of good quality, we are likely to get it again when we return to the same shop, but to pay a fortune to become a walking advertisement form these brands beggars belief.

I always thought that companies were supposed to pay you for the privilege of advertising on your property. Obviously I was wrong.

One last thing...

I found this, and it is terrible.  

Could we get any more brand aware?

Postmodern Irony, Yeah?

Vice magazine (www.viceland.com) encompasses, perhaps better than any other cultural touchstone, the modern breed of sardonic postmodernism and cynicism which has become the status-quo of young urban living. Parodied succinctly in the guise of the magazine ‘SugarApe’ in the cult comedy series Nathan Barley, Vice is a collection of bleeding-edge indie fashion and art, as well as special features designed largely to be as provocative as possible. The magazine has published features such as The Vice Guide to Shagging Muslims, and many other incendiary articles in a similar vein, and whereas any ‘serious’ publication would get in extremely hot water over content such as this (“The Financial Times Guide to Statutory Rape”…), Vice, being self-proclaimed satire can, much like South Park, irreverently explore and produce content on the very edges of taste and get away with it. Although there is nothing inherently wrong with this attitude (satire is one of the most important levellers of both pretention and hypocritical taboo), there is an element to the Vice phenomenon which is representative of a particularly negative breed of postmodernist posturing.

The basic essence of Vice is that the reader who chooses to interact with it can never win. If they take the magazine seriously, they have ‘lost’ because they have been taken in completely by ludicrous subject matter dressed up with a semblance of seriousness. If the reader takes offence, they have also ‘lost’ by being prudish and guilty of moral hypocrisy. If the reader finds the magazine funny, they ‘lose’ again because they are admitting that the writers have somehow keyed into some vein of truth in society. This is a modus-operandi reminiscent of that employed by the satirical website ‘Best Page in the Universe,’ created by George Ouzounian, which features dozens of articles filled with acerbic viewa on a wide range of topics; political, commercial, and social. Grammatically, all the articles are meticulously written so as to allow almost no room for any criticism of the content, except for the reader’s views on the subject. One of the features of the site is a ‘hate mail’ section where Ouzounian replies to criticism with savage wit and intelligence, ridiculing anybody who levels any and all forms of negative feedback. Similarly, and more blatantly than in Vice, readers are berated for taking the articles seriously if they complain, and for being pathetic if they find them funny. In this sense the only way for anybody to ‘win’ is not to interact at all.

In Nathan Barley, ‘Sugar Ape’ magazine is designed to be a direct parody of Vice. In the show it is deliberately provocative, carrying such features as topless girls of legal age, all stated as being 13 or 14 years of age. The sardonic editor of the magazine describes the appeal of the publication thus: “Stupid people think it’s cool, clever people think it’s a joke; also cool.” This statement typifies the ‘problem’ of such self-referential cultures, but the theme spreads from the comedic sphere to many other levels of art and society. In many ways, assuming postmodernist attitudes of the kind typified by these examples are like trying to be an impenetrable fortress. By never being able to be wrong, and by aiming attack at those who go out on any sort of limb with the weight of serious intention behind them, those with the cynical, postmodernist attitude so prevalent among modern, well-educated 20-somethings, end up being incapable of ever fully supporting or committing to a cause. As soon as you show others that you care about something, you can come into line for criticism and ridicule. What Vice magazine mirrors is the postmodernist trend towards distancing one’s output, creative and otherwise, from any real intention, such that any criticism may be easily deflected by pointing to the critic’s perceived ignorance. A writer who genuinely wrote an article entitled The Guide to Shagging Muslims, would expect to have to seriously defend himself against being torn to shreds in the broadsheet media. By holding your cards close to your chest, you can easily claim that those actions which come under criticism are ‘satire’ or ‘a joke,’ and all those which are praised had genuine, serious intention on your part.

In this vein, Noam Chomsky has criticised the attitude of ‘postmodernist’ academics and artists for being unwilling to explain the principles and basis of what they assert or create. Ironic and self-referential modus-operandi avoid intended and static meanings, preferring to allow the freedom to choose meaning later in order to suit criticism and perception of the work. It is a lot easier to tailor respones to your attitude or work than it is to defend a prestated set of ambitions or intentions. The artist who explains his goals, then produces his art will be measured against those goals, whereas the artist who produces work and then exhibits can decide to back-fill their intentions with whatever will flatter them most for a particular response to their work. The Bruno segments on Da Ali G Show exhibited this mentality within the fashion industry beautifully, with Bruno being able to make top designers contradict themselves entirely as to the themes of their work in the space of a few minutes, so keen were they to latch onto the praise he seemed to be heaping upon what they had created. The same clothes collection thus ended up being “dark and heavy’ as well as ‘lighty and weightless,’ suggesting that the designer had no clear intention thematically or otherwise when they designed the work.

If modernsim was all about progress, and about the relentless pursuit of change and advancement through challenging norms and assumptions, the postmodernist attitude seems doomed to be almost entirely stationary. The cynical avoidance of any form of criticism, as if avoiding criticism were the highest attainable goal, requires the adherent to such a philosophy to be a critic rather than a creator. Even if the ‘postmodernist’ does choose to create something, their purposes must always be able to shape-shift in order to belittle others and deflect negative criticism. This allows for no clear morals, beliefs, or purposes. If modernism did one positive thing it was to foster an attitude of challenging assumption and fiduciary frameworks for believing or living, but the ironical, postmodernist philosophy does not allow the creation of new beliefs or purposes based upon measured thought or experience to fill the void, because it would then be open to criticism. It is particularly because it is so self-absorbed that ‘postmodernist irony’ is able to be so slammingly self-referential and acutely conscious of social quirks or customs. As a philosophy it is the equivalent of the person who will never admit that they do not know the answer to anything, straightfacedly claiming to already know things they are in fact learning for the first time. In this way, although it is seen as socially desirable to be of the cooly cynical disposition so familiar in the arts faculties of university campuses, the spread of the Vice culture castrates the possibility of serious philosophical or social advancement, requiring adherents to become immaculately fashioned, achingly cool, yet vacant critics of those who actually have the bravery to produce something fresh and then stand by it. Such cynics are like stone-age survivors, spending so much time defending themselves and finding food that there was no time to contemplate music or art or anything of a higher meaning, they may be successful in their aim to defend themselves, but it is those who have ‘got over’ their hang-ups over being criticised who are actually in a position to enjoy all the higher joys that life has to offer.

Gone

Confusion

How are you going to make sense of the world?  I would offer to you three alternatives.  

1) Assume no prior knowledge or fiduciary framework within which to base understanding.  Attempt to come to some Cartesian method of deriving meaning by challenging assumption, discovering personal truth, and incorporating the whole into a unified framework of understanding into which everything must fit.  The universe is assumed to ba able to provide all the answers to anybody willing to search for them through the medium of science and deduction.

2) Take on somebody else’s beliefs and assume them for yourself.  Be it your parents, your friends, your colleagues or a religious figure you choose to follow, make the decision to defend their beliefs and take them on by proxy, even if you do not understand them.  Such a stance is that of children who would denounce smoking because their parents tell them it is ‘bad.’

3) Admit that there are certain things we will never understand.  

The first option seems to be the most logical, but in fact it requires a certain degree of faith.  To set out on a reductionistic exploration of the world, sure of the fact that everything is able to be explained eventually requires a considerable degree of trust in the linearity of the universe around us, and of the fact that every law or relationship discovered here holds true for the rest of the universe.  Given as this has already been proven to be false, and that in addition there may possibly be infinite universes even if we work this one out, there really is no way we can ever know for sure whether the way we understand our reality is actually right or not.  We can only know how often it seems to hold true in our immediate experience.  In addition, no one person can ever understand comprehensively the entire picture.  The understanding of modern science is shared collectively between all the minds currently undertaking research, and as such no one person is ever going to have the experience of understanding the whole of the scientific view of the world.  At some point we have to trust that fellow scientists are correct in their practice and their findings.  The problems in using this method to make sense of the world become obvious.

The second option seems like something we should leave behind at childhood, but in fact most of us will do it to some degree for the rest of our lives.  There is a sliding scale of trust in others’ opions, from trusting that the doctor knows more than you do about your body, to dying in a war because somebody in government tells you it is the right thing to do.  Within science, researchers cannot each undertake all the work needed to understand a principle so they must trust each other to the extent that they can base the next level of reseach on a base of research that other people have done.  We must ‘stand on the shoulders of giants,’ scientists do not redo all of the experiements ever performed in the canon of science to satisfy themselves before progressing.  At every point that we interact in society we must decide how much we trust the opinions of those around us, but there is no reason why we should take those opinions as our own unless they happen to be so convincing that for us they constitute the most irresistable truth available to us at that moment.  People who spout second-hand opinions on matters that they do not well understand rightfully end up embarrasing themselves; there can be no shortcut to wisdom.

The third option is of the hardest of all to hold, though it contains elements of the other two paths.  It admits that there is some determinable truth in the world, without believing that everything is necessarily understandable.  It recognises that other people have greater insights into some areas of life than we do, but without blindly accepting their conclusions as our own.  It does not seek to build understanding into the gaps where none is obvious.  It does not have to come to an opinion where one does not naturally present itself.  The third path is one which commits to having integrity through holding no belief for the sake of it, as though there must be a truth or an answer or an opinion somewhere.  It is only possible to truly believe anything is if you come at it without desperately striving, in the same way that you are unlikely to find a meaningful relationship if you are constantly searching for the perfect partner.  Archimedes only solved the problem of the king’s crown, discovering the principle of displacement, when he stopped searching and took a bath, allowing truth and insight to take him by surprise.  Some things are too complex to have an obvious handle for understanding.  We belittle ourselves and the magnitude of the world when we try to pretend we can fit everything into our comparatively tiny minds.

Memory and the Value of Experience

As every experience is converted to memory by leaving the present, and retreats away from you on the conveyor belt of time, time experience folds inwards on itself, so that when you look back at what has gone before, the gravity and magnitude of your experience seems comically belittled.  The time spent abroad, the painful marriage, the student years, they all shrink down in the memory to become mere snapshots, pictures simply painted in the colour of yearning or regret.  Occasionally a smell or other sense will break open the impermeable layer that lies between you and such experiences, and allow you a more visceral remembrance of the time gone by, but for the most part our experience, once confined to memory, fades to a shadow, to the facts.  The tumultuous experiences of the early years become childhood, the present and intense joy of a new relationship becomes an ex, and so the formative experiences of our lives become points on the checklist of memory, littered with lifeless snapshots and brief records of conversation.  The point then becomes what the point of any experience is, if not to enhance the meaningfulness of future experience, because experience, once converted to memory, most often breeds yearning, wistfulness, anger, and regret. 

In the eyes of many, the value of experience is primarily to allow develoment of self image, and to give a wealth of memories which can be relied on when circumstances are different; consider as an example the infirm, elderly man sitting in his chair all day reminiscing on the past.  I would suggest that since our memory of experiences are always belittled and insufficient copies of what actually happened, then to hope that a sufficient wealth of experience will allow us to lay back and enjoy the recollection what we did in earlier days is misguided.  Life can only be enjoyed in its fullness, for better or worse, in the present, and as such any experience we have should primarily be so that the future present can be experienced with more breadth and fullness.  To travel, undertake a new activity, or meet with friends should not be seen as an opportunity for accumulation of memories, or of photos, which are essentially the same thing, but as an opportunity to change the perception to allow future experience to be more full and vivid.  It is a misconception that the drive for success in sports is to do with achieving the highest accolade, ensuring that it need never be reached again since the memory, and the knowledge of the achievement provide vicariously for this need.  In actuality it is the sensation of success which provides the joy, and as such sportsmen, businessmen, and adventurers who attain feats far beyond the dreams of the average individual must continue to drive in the direction that feeds their sensation of being alive.  Think of Ranulph Fiennes still breaking adventuring records in his late 60’s.  One of the biggest lies you can feed yourself about the nature of memory is that any one experience can justify a period of boredom or inactivity.  In a period of doing nothing, the memory of the previous present will more often than not only make the current present seem that much more bitter.

This is not to say that there is no value to memory.  Memory performs many important functions, but most of these relate to teaching us lessons from the past which we can use to make our future present better.  Memory as pure nostalgia is largely useless in that it gives us any benefits in the present.  Reminiscing about shared memories with a friend is very different to sitting alone thinking about the past.  The first case falls under the category of an experience which is enhanced by those memories having been laid down in a previous present shared with another individual.  Reminiscing on your own is rarely an enjoyable pastime, as the memory serves to create or catalyse any new experience save for either a yearning for an unrepeatable past or a regret for mistakes or hurt in times gone by.  With nobody to share these things with, like Christopher McCandless found, the value of them is diminished, with somebody with which to share them, the memories become aids to better new experiences.  That is the difference.  Your experience in the present and the memories it creates should be the stimulus for new and more fulfilling experience down the line, since the memories on their own are bound to disappoint. 

Your Personal Fetish

Look at your photo albums.  What do such annals of experience represent.  Each photograph is a snapshot of a time and a place that you have personally been a part of, in a way which is so much more vivid and real than any photograph can portray, and yet we all snap shutters and confine swathes of our visual life to a proxy memory.  Is there a sense in which we feel we were never really there if we don’t have a photograph, hard evidence that we were?  

Whan an individual dies, they carry all their memory of place, time, and people with them.  If they chose to record nothing, tell nobody anything of their lives, and take no photographs, then to all intents and purposes, they never really existed.  “If a tree falls in a wood and nobody hears it, does it make a sound.”  Time carries on, birds sing, plants sprout, and everything is the same as it ever was.  But even if we do record our lives, take photographs, perhaps attain fame and become the star of films, magazines, and the collective culture, our story is still destined to die out somewhere along the passage of time, when the last photograph has crumbled, the last people who remember you die out, and society finds new icons to raise up.  Why then are we so insistent on making a record of our own lives; of fetishising our own existence?  Even if people do remember us after our deaths, we will not be there to experience our posthumous fame, and as such we might as well look to the span of our lives and forget how we are remembered after it.  The Roman emperors, in a bid for historical immortality, had their faces put on currency, their figures frozen in marble, and painted into frescoes, and yet most of us have far more images of ourselves in circulation than any emperor was able to muster.  None of this will matter when we die, the knowledge that we will be remembered after we die is only of any value to us whilst we are still living, when we could find many more positive ways to gain gratification.  Christopher McCandless, the American who went on a personal pilgramage into Alaska in the attempt to find peace and happiness, scawled out as a last message before he died of hunger, “Happiness is nothing if not shared.”  His personal realisation that in many ways his life had no meaning when not thrust into the fire of society is common to all of us who feel the need to ensure other people experience our humanity, either through our personal contact, or through spreading our image in the medium of photographs, writing or music.  

Photographs represent for us the need to be cemented into society, to prove we exist, to prove to ourselves as well as to others that we have experiences, that we love, we hate, we feel.  We are incapable of trusting our own memory, or of accepting how hugely insignificant our lives are to the world at large, and to the passage of history, and as such we fetishise our own experience.  Part of our frustration at society is that it does not realise  quite how important we all are, that the grand story of your life that you live out and annotate with photographs will never be as important to me as it is to you.  That’s just the way it is.

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.