Young man of Athens, your vanity peeps from the holes in your robe!
-Socrates to Antisthenes
Earlier this month, I had two Friday evenings in a row which required hurrying directly from my standing Bavarian gig in Newbury Park to the geographic and cultural center of Los Angeles to give performances more in line with the aesthetics of my life's work: first with a one-off improvising group assembled by Garrett Hickman at the Hyperion Tavern; and subsequently to celebrate the unusual occasion of three Evil Geniuses being in the same city at the same time.
In both cases I chose to remain in my "work clothes" rather than change out of them (no small task) and risk being late. I have previously made a few perfunctory appearances at parties and bars wearing this outfit, and I thereby have learned to expect not ridicule, as I initially feared, but rather adulation, including occasional heightened interest from the opposite sex. The preponderance of evidence coalesced rather decisively one Saturday last summer when two of us wore our full Bavarian garb into the diviest of dive bars, deep in The Valley, complete with "regulars" who looked like death and horses parked outside in a strip mall parking lot. I thought we were not coming out of that bar alive, or at least not with all of our possessions, dignity, and teeth intact; in fact we were literally treated like royalty, were profligately photographed, and were told that our appearance would not soon be forgotten.
On one level I am thankful for all of this, but ultimately of course it merely confirms so much about world and culture that we would change if we could. Any yokel with a few hundred dollars of disposable income can purchase some German clothes and strut all around Southern California wearing them, whereas not just anyone can make something of themselves, or at least not without putting in quite a bit more time and effort. And yet, if you want people's attention and admiration, preliminary results strongly suggest you'd be better served opting for the funny clothes and leaving the hard work of perfecting art and craft to the foolhardy and the narcissistic.
In any case, by the time of my recent calendrical near-collisions, I had long overcome any fear of appearing in my work clothes outside of work. I also knew given the venues that I would probably not be the only one up to some sartorial mischief. In fact, this was the ideal chance to play at being a hipster while ultimately possessing an airtight alibi to any such accusations. After all, those clothes help me pay my rent each month and the cost of purchasing them was a 100% legitimate tax write-off last year. No hipster can say that about their various thrift store raids.
I pulled a similar stunt when the geniuses at PSC decided to strictly enforce the company's grooming policy at Oakwood (incidentally the contract of theirs which undoubtedly boasts the most hipsters per capita, laying bare the obliviousness at play). Thus forbidden from having facial hair below the lip, I resolved to grow the thickest, nastiest cop-stache that heredity would allow. As with the funny clothes, the only feedback I ever heard with my own ears was positive, and as it also forced me to play with less pressure, I discovered a marginal practical excuse as well. (A trombone colleague told me he gets "that mustache sound" under such circumstances and immediately goes to shave, but as with most every other embouchure question, tubists seem able to get away with pretty much whatever we want.)
The very word "hipster" has of course been thoroughly worn out over the past several years, but it is a real phenomenon and we really ought to call it out when we see it. I will always view it as superficial, defensive, and a path of least resistance. However, having somewhat accidentally conducted the fieldwork related above, I will no longer view it as ineffective in any of those ways.
9 comments:
"Among the American Indians as well as the Australians and other peoples, a typical form of [body] painting is, in fact, the sign of the tribe, which indicates membership of a particular totem, and is therefore in a sense a collective badge of the individual which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others. Both would explain why tatooing follows on the puberty ceremonies at which the individual becomes both a personality and a member of a community. On the other hand, the belief held by the Fijians and the Eskimos alike that to remain untatooed is to hazard one's future happiness in the world beyond throws a light on the religious significance of tatooing, a significance that inheres also in membership of a particular totem-society. We have thus along with the enhancement of (and even emphasis on) the self its levelling-down by means of the collective symbol; so that in fact we should find the fundamental dualism of art ["personality" vs. "community"] even at the primary stage of human creative instinct. This discovery loses much of its strangeness and gains considerably in probability when we remember that the same thing is found in the mediaeval guild uniforms, and still exists today in the uniform of various professions, which marks out the individual above his neighbors, but makes him, as beyond himself, a member of a great professional group or class.
"From this point of view, of course, we cannot admit it to be mere chance that the "Bohemian" artist of modern times, even as late as the close of last [the nineteenth] century, had a definite costume, even a conventional mode of doing the hair and the beard, which were to mark him out as a "genius." The proper artist, who had chosen art as his profession, had a special manner, almost a special life, laid down for him; and in actual fact he had to play a definite part determined by an ideology; so also, according to Dessoir, the actor nowadays represents this pristine type of artist, where object and subject coincide, and the body forms the material in which and through which the artist creates. So, even at this last stage of the "artist's art," we have the genius-type to which the artist tries to suit himself even in costume and manner, serving as an ideology for artistic creation; just as earlier aesthetic, and still earlier religion, had provided the art-ideologies of their various times and places. Yet, be it observed, these were ideologies of art--that is, collective style-laws, as in religious art, or psychological laws of feeling in aesthetes' art; but at this latest stage of individual artist's art we are concerned no longer with an ideology of art, whether abstract or emotional, but an ideology of the artist; and this means a justification of art-creation in the creative personality itself that struggles for eternalization, and not a justification of art by some abstract impulse of the soul, as in religion, or in aesthetic of sensation, as in psychology."
Otto Rank, Art and Artist (1932), trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
"The spurious side of the social structure of modernity is composed out of the information, memories, images and other representations which become detached from genuine cultural elements, from the "true" sights, and are circulated and accumulated in everyday life. This is no longer a simple matter of an occasional souvenir ashtray or the little bars of soap from The Motel that are stored away with the pressed and dried wildflower. It is now possible to build an entire life out of these and other spurious elements. ...
"A certain type of shirt and a certain type of pants do not carry the name or the picture of the islands they represent, but they are known, nevertheless, as Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts. Some young men on the west coast of the United States wear jackets of bright red, orange or yellow silk with a multicolored dragon and the word "Japan" embroidered on the back, the lettering of the word "Japan" simulating the brushstrokes of Oriental characters. I think both Durkheim and the Australian peoples he studied would be astounded by the lengths to which we have carried our "totemic" symbolism. If it is argued that we do not hold our symbolism in the same respect and awe that an Australian holds his, my answer is: try to insult someone's Japan Jacket, or question his taste in wearing Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts, or in decorating his homes with touristic heraldry. If questioned to his face along these lines, a person will behave as if his entire being has been thrown into the balance."
Dean MacCannell
The Tourist (1976)
Ch. 8—Structure, Genuine and Spurious
Yes. Though you don't need to (and probably shouldn't) go so far as to insult the person, or not explicitly. Any drawing of attention to the spurious element is functionally the same here as a terrible insult. It seems essential to this totemism that it remain unremarked upon; a permanent Elephant In The Room, perhaps as a dare. I find this quite interesting, and troubling. I once asked a woman on an online dating site to elaborate upon her Goth aesthetic, since I don't know any Goths and don't know anything about the subculture. She replied that it was too complex and subtle to explain, but that it absolutely is NOT done to attract attention. It should be.
N.N. Taleb
Antifragile
(2012)
"Take this easy-to-use heuristic...to detect the independence and robustness of someone's reputation. With few exceptions, those who dress outrageously are robust or even antifragile in reputation; those clean-shaven types who dress in suits and ties are fragile to information about them."
(p. 52)
Leave it to the hipsters to "aestheticize" this heuristic. Hence we need to develop another heuristic just for them: who is displaying professional accomplishment and who is displaying a trust fund?
Raoul Vaneigem
A Declaration on the Rights of Human Beings (2001)
trans. Liz Heron (2003)
pp. 115-116—ARTICLE 44: ALL HUMAN BEINGS HAVE THE RIGHT TO ADORN THEMSELVES AS THEY SEE FIT
This heading itself seems an apt and necessary inclusion here, so much so that one wonders why it appears so late in the Declaration. But then one reads the ensuing elaboration on this uncontroversial premise and finds only "metamorphosis," "change" of colour or complexion, "costume or mask," "a panoply of ornaments," (115) "games of appearance and evanescence," "[children's] art of becoming someone else without ceasing to be themselves," "disguise," "fantasy," "adventure," "masquerades" (116); there is no explicit concern expressed that "The roles and functions which work-directed societies have imposed on individuals" have also oppressed the willfully/happily unadorned by prescribing adornments. Similarly, there is "surprise," "to show oneself off," arousal of "curiosity," (115) "playful expression," "confounding expectations," etc.; that is, Freedom To is spoken to but Freedom From is not. Here RV is several decades behind West-Fenstermaker-et al, who realized that the right to defy expectations amounts to little more than Repressive Desublimation, whereas the REAL injustice to be addressed is the very existence and power of such "expectations" themselves, an analysis which then is better able to account for both Freedom From and Freedom To. The logic of the classic patriarchal Unmarked Case is in fact baked right into RV's Article even though the historically specific/contingent moment seemed, to him, to justify the particular unmarkedness.
[from a post-it, 2018]
Jean Cassou
"The Nostalgia for a Métier" (1951)
in
Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (1963)
ed. Wylie Sypher
pp. 399-409
quoting Eugène Fromentin, Masters of Yesteryear (1870):
"That there is a métier to be learned in painting and therefore one that can and must be taught, a basic method which can and should be passed on—that this métier and this method are as essential to painting as the art of speaking and writing well to those who use the word or the pen—that there is nothing improper in our sharing these elementals—that to hope to distinguish one's self by dress when one is not distinguished in person is a poor and empty way of proving that one is somebody. ...
"This is what I want to have taught and what I have never heard stated in a lecture, a book... It would be one more professional training at a time when almost every professional training is given except this."
(p. 402)
Christopher Lasch
The World of Nations (1973)
Ch. X, "After the New Left"
"The new left, [Saul Alinsky] says, valued the purity of its principles more than practical results. Instead of taking the poor as they are, it romanticized and at the same time patronized them. It spoke in abstractions about the class struggle, instead of confronting the immediate issues that matter to the poor... "If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.""
(p. 146)
Elizabeth Cowling
Picasso: Style and Meaning
(2002)
"Throughout the Cubist years they [Braque and Picasso] lived in what were then cheap and unfashionable districts of Paris...where bohemian artists rubbed shoulders with the working classes. ... They took up boxing and affected the working man's uniform of overalls and canvas jacket."
(p. 228)
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Paul Goodman
"Compulsory Mis-Education" (1964)
in Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars
[53] "the docility, neatness of appearance, etc. that are useful for getting petty jobs, are not created by years of schooling but they are accurately measured by them."
[76] "An alternative philosophy that has recommended itself to some older adolescents is hipsterism. A hipster cushions the crushing defeat by society by deliberately assuming convenient roles in the dominant system, including its underworld, to manipulate it for his own power or at least safety. The bother with this idea—it is the argument of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic—is that the hipster cannot afford to lose himself, or even become un-selfconscious. He must be ahead of every game. Then he cannot grow by loving or believing anything worthwhile, and he exhausts himself in business with what he holds in contempt, deepening his own self-contempt. But hipsterism does provide a satisfaction of mastery and victory which ward off his panic of powerlessness, passivity, and emasculation. It
[77]
is a philosophy for chronic emergency, during which communication consists inevitably of camouflage and secrecy, "playing it cool," or of gambits of attack to get the upper hand."
Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
[236] "Fetishism exists on a gamut running from pills all the way to furs, leather, silks, and shoes. ...men use the fabrications of culture, in whatever form, as charms with which to transcend natural reality. ...
[237]
"... To control the body, then, it [the fetish object] must show some intimate relationship to the body—have an impress of its form, possess some of its smell,... This is why, I think, the shoe is the most common fetish. It is the closest thing to the body and yet is not the body, and it is associated with what almost always strikes fetishists as the most ugly thing: the despised foot with its calloused toes and yellowed toenails. ... There is nothing like the spiked heel in all of nature, I venture. In a word, here is the quintessense of cultural contrivance and contrast, so different from the body that it takes one a safe world away from it even while remaining intimately associated to it.
"Also, if the fetish is a charm it has to be a very personal and secret charm... We have long known, from sociology and the writings of Simmel, how important the secret is for man. ... The secret implies, above all, power to control the given by the hidden and thus power to transcend the given...
"The secret, in other words, is man's illusion par excellence, the
[238]
denial of the bodily reality of his destiny. No wonder man has always been in search of fountains of youth, holy grails, buried treasures—some kind of omnipotent power that would instantly reverse his fate and change the natural order of things. ...
"The final characteristic of mysterious rituals is that they be dramatized... They stage a complicated drama in which their gratification depends on a minutely correct staging of the scene; any small detail or failure to conform to the precise formula spoils the whole thing. ... The fetishist prepares for intercourse in just the right way to make it safe. ... This pattern sums up the whole idea of ritual—and again, of all of culture: the manmade forms of things prevailing over the natural order and taming it, transforming it, and making it safe.
...
[240] "somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure [the immediately preceding example is foot-binding], and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism. The anal protest of culture can be self-defeating, especially if we like
[241]
our women to walk or if we want to relate to them as full human beings. That is precisely what the fetishist cannot do. Secret magic and private dramatization may be a hold on reality, the creation of a personal world, but they also separate the practitioner from reality, just as cultural contrivances do on a more standardized level. Greenacre has understood this very acutely, remarking that the secret is Janus-faced, a subterfuge that weakens the person's relationships to others."
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