Tinted glasses, haircolor for men, nun casualwear

Great people-watching on the downtown 6 train today.

I saw my third man wearing tinted prescription glasses (not sunglasses) of 2008. The first two men were wearing yellow-tinted glasses and I saw both of them on St. Mark's. One was wearing a very nice suit and the other I don't remember that well but was generally a bit nebbishy-chic I think. This man on the 6 today had pink or "rose"-tinted glasses. He was a short, plump thirty-something man wearing a tight blue-and-yellow-striped long-sleeved polo shirt, lots of rings, and a gold bangle bracelet. Like with the other 2 men, I was too afraid to ask him what the deal was with his glasses. I didn't like his as much as the yellow glasses because they were very high-style, whereas the yellow-tinted glasses on the other men were otherwise very normal and I thought that was cool. What's the deal? Is this a fad? Does it have to do with insisting on one's own subjective experience of reality?

Second: I saw a tall businessman, also in his thirties, in a nice suit, with platinum-blonde hair that I for some reason did not buy as his natural haircolor. I started wondering whether he'd started going gray and was dying his hair back blonde. His face looked older than his hair, somehow. Then I saw it in a different light and the blonde looked more believable. It was hard to believe someone that nicely-dressed would be *tacky* enough to dye his hair. Then I wondered whether it wouldn't just be very punk rock to dye one's hair, if one were a man. Natural colors that were just a little bit off would be cool. A reddish tint on a natural light brunette, black on natural dark-brown hair.  Here's a redhead from Face Hunter who went Manic-Panic-red with great success.

Then I saw what I think must have been a nun in a nun's casual-wear ensemble. Do nuns have special casual-wear uniforms?? The all-over light-blue color was the main reason I thought she had to be a nun. That and most of what she was wearing was handmade: handmade light-blue knee-length A-line skirt with white embroidery (obviously done by one of the automatic stitch functions on a sewing machine -- scallops and zigzags); a light-blue V-neck cardigan, baggy fit, definitely hand-knit; white blouse looked like it could have been hand-sewn; and then my favorite, this chunky beaded necklace of alternating white and navy beads. This with tan hose and black-on-black cheapo sneakers, maybe Reeboks. And a short pageboy with bangs. She was doing the crossword. Is this an approved nun's holiday ensemble? Or was this woman just some sort of wacky Holly Hobby? I love spotting handmade clothes. They always just leap out at you. They look so original, and so wrong.

Maximizing the contradictions

I've already complained about how, in this twilight of the Late Modern collage aesthetic, consumers are required to put a lot of time and effort into expressing themselves through creative consumption. So now I'd like to propose a better, newer, more advanced transitional aesthetic -- a tide-over until the recession-delayed New Sportswear.

I mentioned it in my post about Unhairdos. My idea is called Beautiful Ugliness and would consist of ensembles, in various mediums including but not limited to fashion, in which disparate elements are combined without regard to aesthetic harmony and in fact with the goal of creating dissonance.

I think Beautiful Ugliness is a good next aesthetic step because it's a clear way to acknowledge a problem that I think we as a culture are avoiding: that our current mash-up culture is a temporary, uneasy compromise at best and is not helping to move us forward. Because, I think, we are so afraid of facing the huge difficulty of collectively fabricating more original cultural forms to meet our modern human needs, we're procrastinating by obsessively trying to make mash-up culture "work." And of course it feeds into consumerism, too. If everything is original and different but everything has to "match" and "balance," etc., you have to spend a lot of time shopping for the right-color, right-style, right-"wrong," in a way, products. Magazines and TV shows are full of advice on how to make all the crap work together. Obviously it's a big strain on everyone. Why not put a stop to it with something a little more "real" and honest?

Instead of "right-wrong," I propose "wrong-right." This means, instead of trying to sublimate the apparent "wrong"-ness of our mismatched culture into the "right"ness of matchy-matchyness, let's put it out there, create obviously "wrong" mash-ups, and decide to accept these as the new "right."

Think about it: when you look around as you walk down the street, does everything match? It absolutely doesn't. When you walk around in nature, in a forest, say, everything matches to some degree. But in artificial human environments, aesthetic continuity exists within individual, self-contained environments such as stores, sure -- but not (except in the strip-mall environments that almost everyone agrees are heinous) in larger blocks of what actually constitute our living environments. If you look at a whole block, a whole street, together -- everything clashes. Everything is a jumble. Because it wasn't masterminded; it's the result of evolution, not intelligent design. And lots of city planners would tell you that that's precisely what makes good neighborhoods good. So why don't we expand this aesthetic, which is so expressive of what's good about melting-pot culture, and apply it more deliberately?

I love what Andy Warhol wrote in THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol about his own version of Beautiful Ugliness:

I really look awful, and I never bother to primp up or try to be appealing because I just don't want anyone to get involved with me. And that's the truth I play down my good features and play up the bad ones. So I look awful and I wear the wrong pants and the wrong shoes and I come at the wrong time with the wrong friends, and I say the wrong things and I talk to the wrong person, and then still sometimes somebody gets interested and I freak out and I wonder, "What did I do wrong?" So then I go home and try to figure it out. "Well I must be wearing something that somebody thinks is attractive. I'd better change it. Before things get too far...So I think, "How weird. I know I look bad. I made myself look especially bad--especially wrong--because I knew a lot of the right people would be there, and still someone somehow got interested..."

Of course this, like a lot of what Warhol wrote, is intentionally facetious/misleading, as what he called looking "awful" and "wrong" was a large part of the cult of personality he deliberately fostered in order to get the attention he claims he was avoiding. This ironically-ironic ambivalence towards the positive-attention-getting potential of "ugly" aesthetics would be one of Beautiful Ugliness's contrbutions to the cleansing transition out of irony into Post-Postmodernism.

Arguably some hipsters dress Beautifully Ugly, but most try to make stuff match and "look good." I just think it would be so cool if more people tried to "look bad." And wouldn't it be amazing if "bad" became the new "good"? Maybe that extreme of topsy-turviness would be enough to "reset" us aesthetically so we could come up with some good new stuff.

Movie trailers and the dangers of virtual reality

Trailers for old movies are really weird. Since I was born in late 1981, I didn't really see many movie trailers until the late '80s. What I didn't realize until recently is that that means I exactly missed the transition between the old style of movie trailers and the new. But now that movies' original trailers are almost always included in the special features of DVDs, I've been exposed to lots of these old trailers, and I'm blown away by how different and old-fashioned they seem.

What makes the old trailers so different is how focused they were on the narrative of the films advertised. This hits you right away in the voiceover. Whereas lots of trailers today -- maybe the majority -- have no voiceover at all, it seems like every trailer back then had voiceover, and a lot of it. These old voiceovers functioned like narrators, introducing you to the characters and giving you lots of exposition. In contrast, voiceovers in trailers today are spoken by a remote-sounding, Godlike man in vague, stereotyped phrases such as "In a world where...," "...one man...," etc. which set the scene and mood with as few words as possible. The clips in pre-'90s trailers, too, tell a story; they're loooong clips, all of uncut dialogue, all in order, mostly of the same length, going all the way up to the end of the film and often essentially giving away the ending. In contrast, trailers today show you lots of short, out-of-order clips of varied lengths, many of them atmospheric shots of setting, silent action, or even just text on a blank screen, and the clips containing dialogue are always edited down and compressed, creating more of a collage.

Here's a comparison: the upcoming Pineapple Express has a trailer that I love to watch over and over again because of the way it massages my mind's visual and aural pleasure center with its lovely rhythmic cutting while not taxing it with anything but the most basic evocation of narrative; contrast that to the relative clunkiness of the trailer of a similarly-themed movie from 1978. What a difference. And yet I'm sure that if someone made a new trailer for Up in Smoke, it could look just like Pineapple Express, because compared to trailers, the style of movies hasn't changed at all. It would also be funny to try cutting an old-style preview of Pineapple Express to see just how unenticing it could be made to look.

Anyway, basically, the people making the trailers figured out that what they were selling wasn't a story, but an experience of a story. And that's what trailers show you: an extremely heightened, compressed sense of what the full-length experience of seeing a movie will be like. And they work really well; movie trailers are like crack, and all human beings readily admit that they love the previews.

But in terms of the actual movie, people are there for the story, right? The importance of the story of a movie gets lots of emphasis from filmmakers, especially recently, in my experience. Seemingly all film schools aggressively proclaim that their curriculums are centered around "storytelling," and most screenwriters and directors emphasize how their main drive is to "tell a story.” It starts to sound a bit defensive – and with good cause. Because the vast majority of the movie-going public, I’m pretty sure, does not go to movies for stories; they go for the same thing they like about trailers – the experience, which is primarily the experience not of the story but of the alternate world for which the story is only a fourth-dimension framework allowing you to pass through that world in time.

But if you didn’t need a stable framework for the fourth dimension in a world – what then? Well, that’s what’s possible in virtual reality. And virtual reality is the direction we’ve been moving towards for a long time. It’s what goes on in the movie-franchise phenomenon, which allows you to experience a movie in multiple media – the film, books, websites, TV shows, theme parks, food, music, weddings, furnishings, clothing… – to the extent that you’re essentially participating in an alternate world. New electronic media, as well -- the internet, video games, even DVR and OnDemand to some extent – break down the artificial structure of time created by the story and open up untold new dimensions through which humans and their senses can travel. Interestingly, this surrender of the fourth dimension in media is coinciding with new advances in the exploration of multiple dimensions beyond the fourth in reality.

What’s happening is the implosion of fixed-time narrative in media and its replacement by experiences of other worlds in which we the audience create the narrative ourselves.

But wait. What happens when we get rid of the story?

I think bad things might happen. Bad, bad things.

Stories are what communicate meaning and truth. They’re normative. They’re stable. They provide reference points for comparison, standards. So when stories are completely eclipsed by experience, which is amorphous and amoral, we lose a way of examining and agreeing on central significances in life. Is it a coincidence that the most successful virtualesque video game, Grand Theft Auto, is about a chaotic and amoral world? No.

Not only do storyless media experiences dispense with frameworks for meaning, but they also create a very problematic illusion of free choice. In the phantasmagorical hyperreality of a Disney franchise or packaged-goods brand universe, we have the illusion of traveling into a new world, where we can try being ourselves in a different atmosphere. The problem is that this atmosphere is not a neutral playground for our senses; it is a highly fake fantasy designed expressly to sell us things. There is in fact a built-in message in these artificial universes, and the message is BUY ME. And this message gets across so successfully exactly because of the way it exists apart from narrative and time. A commercial, which is like a story, tells you one thing once. A world, which when very successful can get confused with reality, brainwashes you constantly.

Rethinking monogamy

I've been meaning to predict this for a while and putting it off, but since it's been showing up more and more in the news I thought I'd go ahead and put it out there. Basically, I think that non-exclusive sexual relationships are going to be getting more mainstream, and that this is going to have a huge impact on society.

The subject of nonmonogamy is back on my mind this week because it was featured in the winning essay in the NY Times's Modern Love College Essay Contest. It struck me as significant that, in choosing an essay about love in a contest specifically for young people and therefore really by definition specifically about "what's next," the Times settled on a piece that included such as this:

“The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.”

At this stage, I guess, editors at the Times can put this stuff out there and say, "This is something young people are doing." But looking just a step ahead, what they're really beginning to say is, "This is what people are doing."

Part of the impetus for this is what I'm calling New Humanism -- a focus on our ever-growing understanding of intrinsic human psychological and biological needs as a guide for reforming our lifestyles. There's been a big increase in interest in trying to understand human sexual behavior in biological terms, which lately has taken the form of studies showing how sensory stimuli play a huge part in subconsciously influencing mate choice. Recently, for instance, there have been articles about how women's pheromones make them more attractive to men when they're ovulating (article) and how women are more attracted to men with deep voices (article). And many people are probably familiar with the "sweaty T-shirt experiment" from a few years back that showed women were more attracted to the armpit smell of men whose immune systems were different from theirs (article).

The growing awareness that so much of our sexual behavior seems to be subconsciously, biologically determined is beginning to spark questions about the extent to which our instinctive drives about sex invalidate our cultural norms regarding it. But most people are still pretty nervous about discussing this topic with reference to humans. The Times was able to approach the topic, a propos of the Spitzer scandal, with regard to animals, just hinting at the implications for humans (article). Slate went a little further on the topic of sperm competition (article). The anthropologist Helen Fisher is focusing directly on the question of what the human psychological predispositions are in the realm of sex and love and has written some cool books about it. Her basic opinion, which seems to be the preliminary consensus generally, is that humans are hardwired for long-term pair bonds -- on which they're hardwired to cheat.

I don't think that human pair-bonding or social monogamy will ever go away, because I do think it's what people are naturally predisposed to do and what they're happiest doing. However, I think that cultural norms are going to shift over the next few decades with regard to marriage, family structure, and romantic relationships in a way that will reflect at least a more open acknowledgment of the fact that lots of people want to cheat on their partners, and that lots of people do.

One change may be that the "serial monogamy" that is so often disparaged, yet is the most common love life model of young people, will become the accepted one. Serial monogamy, or something like it, is in fact what Helen Fisher thinks human psychology may be set up for, for the purpose of child-raising, with the infatuation that causes sex followed by the romantic love that leads to bonding, which is followed by the long-term attachment suitable for child-raising -- which then, after 4 years or so, at about the same time that children in primitive cultures reach a milestone of independence from their mothers (leaving the mothers in less need of help from the fathers), fades away unless another child is born to the couple. Of course, the lifestyle of a primitive culture is not that relevant in modern industrialized countries. What is relevant is the possibility that in an increasingly liberal social environment, people may be naturally drifting toward a more "natural" system of forming and dissolving multiple monogamous relationships over the course of their lifetimes. Currently the "serial monogamy" model gets a lot of criticism since it's a rather painful way of doing things under our current model of marriage and family, with its built-in reliance on parents sticking together, socially and financially, for decades. But if the current rates of divorce continue, which they probably will, it may be time to give up and tinker with the institution of marriage a bit for the sake of kids and their parents. Not sure how this would play out, but one idea is for couples to figure out theoretical child custody arrangements in case of divorce along with the financial plans they make in prenups (Op-Ed).

I also wonder what will happen with how our culture handles cheating. This is much more difficult. Even though the biological motives for preventing cheating aren't relevant anymore because of birth control, the psychological feelings of jealousy about one's partner cheating are extremely strong and will never go away, no matter how much the polyamorists try. The most pressing need in this area is to prevent the disease and violence that can result from cheating. But I also wonder whether gender-specific norms of cheating may develop, sort of along the lines of the "double standard" -- for instance, whether women may get a little more comfortable with men having sex with other women so long as they don't show them too much affection or support, while men may become tolerant of women getting affection and support from other men so long as they don't sleep with them. Of course, this system doesn't make any logical sense, since some of these women would have to be having sex and some of the men giving affection and support. Although, I guess this is kind of what already goes on with women who're close with gay men and men who sleep with prostitutes.

The media currently kind of doesn't know what to do with the few public figures, such as Will Smith and his wife, who are supposedly in an open marriage, who practice nonmonogamy. To me, it's astounding that Carla Bruni has been quoted saying, “I am faithful — to myself! I am bored to death by monogamy.” The current public reaction to stuff like this so far is basically denial, plus "Weird!" But I think we're going to start dealing with it a little more deeply soon.

Update 5/20: Looky here, an article about just this in the 5/26 NYMag: article

I was wrong: New sportswear

Huh.  Right after I post this argument for the glorious future of body-conscious, minimalist, eco-friendly garments made of hi-tech fabrics, the preeminent company designing and manufacturing such garments abruptly folds.  I guess I was wrong?  Or maybe the article's headline is right and the problem is just that the concept was "ahead of its time."  Still, I guess I was wrong about this trend happening soonish.  Too bad.

What's cooler than being cool?

How can our culture turn around from the dead end it’s reached with Cool?  This is something I think about a lot.  We’ve been stuck for way too long re-processing the same cultural material, in this hyper-ironic state of mind, and the feeling of stagnation is overpowering.

Marshall McLuhan would say we’re in a Narcissus phase.  In Understanding Media, he described what he called the “cooling” process, in which a culture uses play, parody, and miming to assimilate new (“hot”) information.  Cooling serves a healthy cultural purpose, but it can become unhealthy if overindulged in.  This often happens in the aftermath of the introduction of a new form of media.  In the hyper-cooling phase that follows the invention of a media form, people, not yet “understanding” the new form, become fascinated and enslaved by the extensions of themselves in it.  This enslavement occurs because people make the crucial mistake of thinking that the new media is separate from “real life,” when it is actually a part – an extension – of life and of people themselves.

In the present day, the hypnotizing media is the internet.  Because of the internet, the speed of culture and its cooling has gotten so fast that living with media is like watching a video of life that’s on a split-second time delay: disorienting, disturbing, and discouraging – but hypnotizing.  Hypnotizing because the split-second delay gives the false sensation of watching something fake, something different from our lives – a fantastic show that we don’t want to miss.

McLuhan would say that we’re making the same mistake as Narcissus, who, he emphasizes, did not fall in love with himself, but with a reflection of himself which he genuinely believed to be another person.  Similarly, what we haven’t realized, in relentlessly parodying, recycling, and remixing pop culture, then consuming it again, is that this parodied, recycled, remixed culture isn’t some “other” culture, separate from our own, better than it – it IS our culture.  Our problem, then, isn’t the common diagnosis of self-love, but rather self-alienation and resulting self-hate.  Who but a really, really messed-up person could look at her reflection in the mirror and think to herself, “That person isn’t me”?  But that’s exactly what our culture is doing.

And it’s clear that, subconsciously, the culture knows that it’s messed-up.  Because just as Narcissus’s initial happiness at meeting such a beautiful creature quickly turned to anger and disgust when he found his image unresponsive, the initial attraction we felt when discovering ourselves on the internet turned quickly to ugly, hateful tearing-down when we started experiencing how empty it is to feed upon oneself.

McLuhan doesn’t provide an answer for how to overcome the problem of over-cooling.  He does mention something called a “break point,” however, which seems to be the point at which a trend tips and reverses to the other direction.  We simply have to be approaching such a break point now.  How will the tip happen, though?

I’ve been trying to figure this out by extending the metaphor of cooling, asking myself, what happens when something over-cools?  The short answer is that it freezes.  That would translate into the speed of internet “cooling” breaking the speed of the internet itself.  Literally that’s impossible, since it would mean images of real-life events would have to appear on the internet before they occurred in real life.  Conceptually, however, that’s just the right idea.  We have to put things on the internet, and out into the internet-adapted culture generally, before they “happen.”  Meaning, we have to put things out there that aren’t real -- that are, in other words, art.

And entertainment has started doing just that.  The NY Mag article about Gossip Girl pointed out that the most ground-breaking thing about the series is how all the gossip surrounding its actors’ real lives may be being manufactured by the same person who writes the show for the characters.  So that would mean that the gossip reported on the internet is actually being written ahead of time.  This is an old trick, of course – the film studios figured it out a long time ago.  This has also been happening on the super-scripted reality shows like The Hills.  Again, a kind of art sneaking in under the guise of life.  We say this kind of behavior is somehow reprehensible, but I think it's just what we need.

Because like I started thinking here in reference to the internet, I think that our almost-frozen culture is also paradoxically the “hot”test it’s ever been.  The question of which extreme the temperature is actually at doesn’t matter: the sensation is the same, and all that matters is how we conceptualize it.  Are we going to keep thinking of our fake culture as “cool,” and tricking ourselves into thinking that as we constantly disparage it we’re talking about something better than ourselves?  Or are we going to assert that we are part of it – very much a part of it?

What’s “cooler than being cool” is, as we all know, “Ice Cold.”  I think what Andre 3000 wrote about in "Hey Ya" was actually a quite profound message about the redemptive pain of breaking through alienation by embracing it.  In the video, Andre 3000 is the quintessential alienated artist in the act of transcendence.  He's supposed to "act like [he's] got some sense," but all he knows how to do is "play," because that's the only way he knows of dealing with the complete ridiculousness of the adulation of his public (both in the studio and through T.V. screens) -- by inciting it, embracing it, and raising it to even-crazier heights.  He does this by putting on a false persona -- not just one, but actually 6 personas (1 of them repeated 3 times), each with its own costume and personality and style of seduction.  The seduction is both overtly fake (the over-the-top suaveness of the singer, the girl who runs up on stage to hug him but then ends up mainly wanting to wave at the camera) and intensely real and personal (the sweet girl in the yellow top blowing a kiss to the keyboardist, who shyly smiles).  Both modes coexist and make each other possible -- embolden each other, perhaps.

The video parallels the love story in the song, which is itself a metaphor for the alienation in modern life.  The song is about romantic ambivalence: "But does she really want to / but can't stand to see me walk out the door" (these thoughts incoherently running into each other, they're so mixed-up).  There's this terror of committing to something, for fear that its disappointing reality ("separate's always better when there's feelings involved") will make the fantasy crumble ("got it just don't get it till there's nothing at all").  What makes love the exception?  There's no straight answer to that, other than not to try to pin down an answer.  Instead of listening to the words of the song, we should just dance; and instead of introducing Andre 3000 to our mother, we should just have sex with him.  We should just live -- and living necessitates a little fakeness, a little superficiality, but also a little faith, just like love.

In the video, the bizarre instantaneousness of media communication drives home the miraculous coexistence of superficiality and depth: real-life Andre 3000 transforms into a still image of himself on a poster waved at him by a fan; Polaroid pictures develop images of what's currently going on before our eyes.  But again, this can only happen (actually not, according to the Polaroid Corporation) if we "shake it."  Andre 3000 demands this participation, not just by actively seducing his audience, but by weaving a really infectious call-and-response into his song.  Even uptight Catholic school teachers can't resist the excitement of involving oneself in this kind of "play."

"Ice Cold" means that state of extreme “so-hot-it’s-cool”ness which "Hey Ya" is about, which is the best kind of coolness -- the kind in which you’re actually going out on a limb and owning what you create.  Instead of pretending you’re somehow above what we all do now – put on personas, wear costumes, fake attitudes, create brands for ourselves – generally “be superficial” – you’re identifying with it and even asserting that what seems “fake” is, in the world of modern media, actually the realest thing there is.

I was right: Lipstick

As I predicted here, it looks like lipstick is about to come back.  The NYT says it's because of the recession.