19 May 2011
We got a chilled evening on our hands, boys! The window’s cracked open a little bit and the cold air’s sifting in, but there ain’t anything I can do about it on account of the thick layer of white paint on the pane and sliders and chains. It’s acting like a glue and holding the framed glass firmly in place. Darn! So I’ve got a blanket wrapped around my soldiers while I wait for the green light from Es to run out the door and down the steps into the night with her! We put dresses on to look like girls—a right nice change from the cutoffs or jeans I’ve been pulling on every morning.
It’s late I know, almost too late to even venture out. But holy cow we’ve been old ladies all week long and it’s the rebirth of summer upon us and we’re sure as heck not going to pass up the freedom! Now I just gotta find the right shoes…I was wearing my ankle moccasins today—the ones with the dying sole on the right shoe—and the thought of anything other than soft leather is agony.
I made progress on that Kerouac book tonight. Almost done, they’ve just put out to sea. I also ate a delightful little orange that rocked my world. I never got so excited for a piece of citrus before. But man! When I sliced the navel end off, this light and sweet aroma rose up out of the rind—not the typical orange smell, but the scent that rises out of the blossom before even the earliest sign of fruit on the tree. One whiff and I was catapulted to an afternoon cruise through the orange groves out in the desert Valley during golf season. The citrus trees are all dotted with delicate white flowers, the air thick with the sweetness. Man! I want to be there now!
15 May 2012
I declare it high time to start creative writing again! There used to be the most unimportant of stories scribbled all over the place—in school books, in pamphlets, in secret journals, in hidden places on the bedpost—but they’ve all been forgotten because they were smaller than trifles and I can’t even remember where I’ve left them. Now, I’ve got about four half-empty books full of blank paper in my suitcase, squeezed in between the other books I falsely promised myself I’d read before I called on the bookstore again. These poor lonely things need some love. I always think about Milo’s adventure in The Phantom Tollbooth and how he came upon a bug whose title was to read every word out of the dictionary so that they would not be forgotten—this quite often happens, you see, and these poor words pass into oblivion without even so much as a blink of an eye. People just forget. I want to write stories with beautiful words that people have long since given over to the nether! That would be nice, to introduce and reintroduce words that deserve more attention than the ones we use daily. I like words like hackneyed or humdrum, quotidian or banal. These words are better than the ordinary. (har har if you get my pun..or the irony).
Where’s my pen!
10 May 2012
I don’t even know what to call this week. The ‘transition’ ? Yeah, I’ll call it that. That’s what you call that time period where things are still shifting around and there’s no other word to resort to. Transition. Transitioning…
Today was a dooze. Took Lucas to school this morning and then dipped out after 1:00pm and walked home with Melina and Henry. I don’t know what kind of day it was today, but man did exhaustion sweep over us like a fine coating of dust. We were so tired. We’d stayed up talking with Jake and Dusty. They’d all gone out for Jake’s birthday (I bought him Kerouac’s The Sea is My Brother which was only just released last year! They call it ‘the lost novel’) The rest of the day was mine to tinker with so when we got home I slipped into velvet shorts and a cotton sweater while Mel dug up recyclable grocery bags for me—I’d mentioned I was running to the store to buy some groceries. Man, the Trader Joe’s at Union Square is a headache! I was standing there with my pearl tomatoes, snow pea packages, and pita chip bags with my neck craned around the shelves and checking out the nasty-sized line of people wrapped around the plastic-wrapped cheese display. I shook my head and just did the darn thing.
At home Mel and I took naps—mine lasted a little longer than I’d have liked—and she made coffee when I woke up. The past couple of weeks took sleep away from me; the schedule was go! go! go! go! and of course I went. That’s how I always am, though. I forget about things a lot, like sleep or food or minute responsibilities. After a while I hit a wall, crash and burn…I’m like a Kamikaze plane. It’s always all my own fault. But I manage to pull myself out of it—just ease back into a normal routine. Cooking helps. That’s what Melina and I did all afternoon. We just cooked and cleaned and talked and laughed…she told me stories about her and Jake when they were younger, about her roommate getting attacked by a pack of dogs in Mexico, about Lauren’s wedding when they rented out the 42nd Street NYPL for the reception party. Mel cooked brown rice and chicken with carnitas. I cooked coconut-curry-tomato-snowpeas-onions in a big Dutch oven to pour over it all. After dinner I read Soph two chapters from The Borrowers in a British accent before putting her to sleep (she’s actually in my queen-sized bed now, where I’m typing this out, conked out). Then I skedaddled out to Brooklyn to share iced chai lattes with Shan, reminisce, watch useless TV, clean, and then pick up my bicycle to bring back to Gramercy. I’m tired.
McKeever reached out today to let me know about his show at DBA tomorrow night. I think Shan and I are going to try and watch him and Rob play after we get off work. Haven’t been out to the Burg in a while and now I live a block away from the L train station—two stops away from BK.
Another wave of exhaustion just swept over me. Time to go. Soph makes the perfect cuddle buddy !
The Postmodern World: Artisanal America and the Move Towards Authenticity
“I want it to be made so well that my grandkids would fight over it while I was still warm in the grave,” said David Munson to a Mexican leather worker in Southern Mexico.
The ‘it’ David Munson was talking about concerned a custom leather bag that he had literally been praying for weeks prior to its conception. He was looking for meticulous planning, durability, and quality. The leather craftsmen south of the American border knew their trade and they knew it well. Munson was inspired by the craftsmen’s knowledge and the family history that fueled it. The idea of a bag made by men whose grandfathers first began the practice in the 1800’s was fascinating. Munson wanted to share the excellence of that craftsmanship. Hence, the creation of Saddleback Leather was born. Saddleback is a company which prides itself in the quality of the leather products it puts out. The company’s not driven by greed, but by love for design and a sentimental dedication to its customers. Their ethos goes against the capitalistic ambition of greater America where commodity and industrialization rule.
“If our goal were to sell something to everyone, we would no longer be selling to shepherds; but only to sheep. We’d lose our edge and our designs would lose their originality and charm,” Munson says.
He’s putting something back into the design of the consumer’s digestion: value. And it’s not just in the monetary sense.
There’s been a lot of this kind of movement lately—the want for personalization, the preference for products made on a human scale. Society went through a few revolutions that really screwed with its idea of an economy of scale. First there was agriculture in the Jeffersonian sense, which saw farmers who grew and catered goods to a select number of people within physical proximity of production. Next came industrialization, where factory-made products could be churned out identically by a prepared formula and transported via train, boat, or airplane to locations farther than the neighboring farm. Now there is the digital age, blowing the idea of mass accommodation right out of the water. The Internet maximizes possibilities for buying options to a global scale; it’s the ultimate tool for consumption.
Brought on by the dawn of the technological age, Americans now have this notion of optionality from the overload of information afloat out there in both the ‘real world’ and the virtual. The current lifestyle of Americans was cultivated by the idea that everyone is free to choose. It leaves the world with a reconstituted idea of reality, widening the plane of where real life can occur. An editor at Harper’s Magazine as well as a professor at New York University, Thomas De Zengotita remarks, “The whole process, of which we have just afforded glimpses, has been accelerating since the invention of modern communication technologies (telegraph, photograph, telephone), and it crossed a qualitative threshold in the past couple of decades, with the rise of the new media” (17-18). De Zengotita’s analysis of media shows how the virtualization of the past few decades permeated the social and political constructs of everyday American lifestyles, how constructs of life have become intentionally representational.
Prior to the information age and its visibility through media, identity was comprised of the customs and traditions of the smaller culture one was brought up in. When the rise of virtual media arrived, it tore down the walls of once-separated cultures and forged one large, shared world where anything and everything was available at the click of a button. Identity became something each person could construct themselves—whether it was race, gender, sex, etc.—and the self-awareness of those constructs no longer belonged to just the handful of reflective members in society. Everyone became self-aware. Being a part of the mediated world demands it. The compression of time and space included with the role of technology suddenly forced everyone to become aware of events that were happening across the globe at the exact moment that they were occurring—‘real time,’ if you will. The idea of co-presence made possible by the media fueled Marshall McLuhan’s denotation of a global village. People are no longer required to be bodily present in order to witness events, just connected through air waves, wires, and metal modems. Co-presence without physical attendance is possible; two people inhabit a space together—but that the space need not be a material one any longer. And that space is available for all to observe, which is why people began to think a bit more carefully about how they project themselves to that global village. Self-awareness is heightened when your business becomes public and your online doings have a built-in audience.
That self-awareness is one notion of the postmodern condition people find themselves in. Another notion would be to consider a larger scope of awareness. An individual’s self-awareness is just one story amidst the hundreds of thousands of stories out there in the world. There is no justification as to why one narrative would overrule another in validation or significance. The current culture became this thing where there is no universal narrative, no metanarrative that encapsulates the people as a whole. The micro-narratives of the world make up the whole. Postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard calls this “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Butler, 13). Lyotard’s shtick lays down a suspicion of the modern consensus that rationality as the sole guarantor of truth. That suspicion denounces any totalizing claims made for the whole of mankind. Lyotard states that narrative attempts to prove its claims by proclaiming them within a story rather than appealing to an austere, universal notion of scientific reason. In postmodernity, legitimation is not required as it was in modern or pre-modern times.
Author of Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism, James K.A. Smith, characterizes the postmodern condition as “an unveiling of the fact that all knowledge is rooted in some narrative or myth” as opposed to universal criteria that has been “unveiled as just one game among many” (Smith, 69). Lyotard’s incredulity towards metanarratives means to say that there is no dominant narrative, no overriding lens through which all members in society look through. Instead, local narratives exist side by side among other local narratives. Another postmodernist thinker, Jacques Derrida, claims that all that is experienced is a matter of interpretation. No one experience can be exalted over another because the way in which something is experienced is dependent upon the interpreter (who may experience events differently than the next guy who comes along).
Along those same relativistic lines, arrives another cornerstone of postmodern thought. Michel Foucault was a postmodern thinker who subverted the accepted ideas of history. History as a catalogue of human progression was no longer a valid view of events to postmodernists. Foucault’s ideas of history described the events unfolding as the passing of power from institution to institution—the classifications of good or evil are not taken into account in this point of view. Even those institutions which by moral standards are considered “good” are viewed as a power looking “to control beliefs or behavior” and are “inherently dominating and repressive” (Smith, 98). In assuming power, even those “good” institutions must have taken it from another one, regardless of the standards of better or worse. The significance of Foucault’s ideas is the role that these powers and their disciplines serve to form individuals living under their influence. Each power asserts instruments of discipline that mold individuals through a variety of practices to conform to what society calls for. We ourselves become exhibits for these power structures, our identities contingent on these facets of power. This is where the postmodern condition of having a constructed identity gets its legs from. That self-determination is actually informed by power plays, with multiple discourses subconsciously at work on one’s identity.
Upon contemplation, this state of affairs looks fearsome. It seems that the direction of human accomplishment knows no forward direction, demonstrates no hope for advancing progression. In fact, from a postmodern worldview, the human condition doesn’t even seem to even be moving laterally. All points on the plane are open for occupation; direction is a silly concept to compare the current condition with. The outlook on humanity shows one of relativity. No system of meaning has complete control over the truth. With a culture informed by such philosophic ideas provided by the likes of Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault, the state of society cannot help but feel an unsettling atmosphere of confusion, uncertainty, and unease hovering above its head.
The increasing prevalence of the media only serves to feed this uncomfortable cloud of apprehension. The idea of a medium that encapsulates multiple views—like the Internet—makes the ideas of postmodern relativism visible and put into practice. Media’s accessibility capabilities to information impose an overload of information upon society, making navigation through the virtual world difficult and taxing. The options are too abundant, the distractions too numerous. A postmodern state runs the risks of germinating the effects that arise out of plurality. An “anything goes” society loses sight of values and standards of how a good life is to be led. That classification of “good” technically doesn’t exist to a postmodernist. One way of living does not assert its moral code over another in terms of postmodern philosophy. The Internet conditions its users to put postmodern ideas into practice. Incredulity towards metanarratives is embodied in Internet users’ exposure to the plethora of information available on the World Wide Web—stories juxtaposed next to stories and the constant influx of new narratives on top of it all. Accompanied with these narratives come multiple interpretations of experience, observable in commentary and self-projection in the media. The idea of a constructed identity has no better medium to exercise itself with than the Internet where people are able to pick and choose their representations. Through the Internet, society has become conditioned to the idea that all ideas and experiences are subjective; objective truths assert no design over people any longer.
The result is highly disheartening. That postmodern condition coupled with the difficulty of sifting through the media’s massive information overload is taking its toll. Philosophic postmodern aims of reaching meaning by removing all criteria from the methods to which we attempt to find it grew tiresome. Postmodernism’s aim to attack and deconstruct traditional ways of thinking leaves its twenty-first century children with the makings for anxiety, distrust, and a disappointing confusion of being directionless. Postmodernism’s intention was never to arrive at such a bleak position, but the public has inevitably arrived at it nonetheless.
Prospect Magazine asserts that “if we de-privilege all positions, we can assert no position, we cannot therefore participate in society or the collective and so, in effect, an aggressive postmodernism becomes, in the real world, indistinguishable from an odd species of inert conservatism” (Docx). What this statement means to say is that though the points of postmodernism are logically understandable, when put into effect the aims become impracticable and a paradox forms. Humans are human, after all. A yearning for recognition will always be persistent in the ordering of the human soul, and de-privileging all positions proves to be an arduous solution.
Allan Bloom’s phenomenally bestselling book Closing of the American Mind speaks out about rampant political correctness, excessive multiculturalism, and the declining standards in higher education. He writes against the type of moral relativism that arose out of the 1960s era, where a denial of the existence of absolute standards of morality and truth was established. Much of what he argues against can be attributed to postmodern thought, and Bloom makes a point of underlining the consequences that arise out of an anything-goes state of mind. He writes, “Out of chaos emerges dispiritedness, because it is impossible to make a reasonable choice” (Kramnick, 1439). Observing the powers of postmodernism, one sees that there is no guiding force to align one’s self with in terms of navigating the presented choices. Multiversity is dangerous when it renders its members in a state of arbitrary bewilderment. Postmodernism’s attack on tradition and habits left society without resolution. These old agreements, customs, and conventions were not so easily replaced. In postmodernism, one cannot explore nor develop any real human potential if there are no standards to adhere to. And humans desire that, a personal advancement in the world where rewards are cherished and granted by those who believe importance and significance is important and significant.
This is not to say that postmodernism is dead. The current generation is conditioned to be skeptical, to democratize everything, to understand that all ideas are borrow from previous ones. But a new dissidence has been ignited, a new hope for transcendence. Postmodernism is a movement that society is now moving through and onwards, deciding that it would rather place its merit in the next movement that doesn’t leave confusion and ambiguity in its wake. One can blame the digital age for catalyzing this desire to move on. The offense that this generation takes up with postmodernism is its inability to render meaning (ironically ironic, if you ask me) and the excessive use of media sped up the onset of that wish to break with it. The confused realities, the exorbitance of choice, the increased opportunities of consumption—people either want something more or something less.
That something involves a return to meaning, to values, and to authenticity in hopes of redemption from the practices cultivated by the postmodern state. All of society’s involvement in the virtual world is enforcing a new examination of the definitions of reality. Brought on by the age’s use of technology, a new universal is established: offline authenticity is sought and venerated. Check any of the blogrolls online where a call to life, to the natural world, is blaring out of a series of photographs with the slogan “Adventure Awaits” typed out in a woodsy children-scrawl. Observe the following:
These were first pasted all over Tumblr’s dashboards a couple of years ago, and now they’ve migrated to the pinboards of Pinterest to be repined and passed along even more. The youth in America are suffering from the disconnect they feel from nature and the natural world. They feel the constraint of technology but only know how to deal with this problem with the only medium they’ve been raised to master: technology itself. The newest additions to the generation of common postmodern thinkers, born at the tail end of a century of wars and toppling social structures, recognize the confusion and constriction on their realities even if they are not learned of the postmodern philosophic thought behind it. Even these young bloggers, whose ties to the Internet are now knotted and difficult to sever, feel a calling for something greater: to revere something above other things. Authenticity, or what De Zengotita would call “real real” (De Zengotita, 19). That passion to transcend the current state of affairs trumps an incredulity towards metanarratives, does it not?
This yearning for transcendence is heavily apparent in the neo-artisanal movement that began to sweep the nation a few years ago. There’s a certain appreciation for a person who undertakes the meticulous practices of craftsmanship, along with the products they expertly put together with their own hands. There’s an opportunity for originality in the process of hand-made items. No two handmade items are exactly alike; each has its own special characteristics provided from the dedication put into it and from the worth of production on a human scale. This is in stark contrast to the un-special products churned out by a robotic machine in a factory somewhere, where the richness of history, emotion, and craftsmanship are nowhere to be found.
The previously stated introductory story about David Munson and the conception of Saddleback Leather Company tells a local narrative, all the while asserting an even grander narrative. It is here that we can see how postmodernism is not dead, but a movement to be incorporated into culture’s pastiche files of characterization (Romanticism, Enlightenment, Postmodernism…). Postmodernism taught its followers the importance of specificity and historical context amidst the universal and the abstract. The practice of postmodernism by itself does not allow for a prosperous growth of the human condition. Only by its incorporation in a greater context does postmodernism become prescriptive rather than merely descriptive. And what does it mean to be human if not to seek refinement and betterment over an existence of indifference that arises from pluralism? Society might as well be swimming in primordial soup if the latter was the case.
The neo-artisan movement in America reveals a moving aspiration of its people. The craftsmen who comprise the category of neo-artisans—along with the crowd who seeks out their carefully-crafted products—assert themselves in something more than just a quest for happy consumption. They assert themselves in a quest for meaning through respect of tradition and the proper formation of goods. The process is a serious engagement of connoisseurship over one of playfulness. Connoisseurship reveals a formal inventiveness combined with intellectual rigor that removes the power of commodity when depth and design are sought after. The acceptance of the idea that there is nothing new under the sun forces people to hunt down some sort of outlet in which originality is still able to thrive. In hand-crafted work, one finds that there is a window of opportunity for originality to occur when the work is informed by personal stories.
Mast Brothers Chocolate, a Brooklyn-based artisanal chocolate company started up by brothers Rick and Michael Mast, prides itself in creating sweets that embody much more than mere candy. The brothers say that their sweet treats exhibit “a fiercely independent, almost Emersonian spirit” (Wallace, New York Magazine). That’s a pretty heavy statement for a little bar of chocolate to carry. But before any quizzical objections are made, let’s consider what goes into making these nine-dollar slabs of drool-inducing joy.
La Red de Guaconejo organic cacao beans from the Dominican Republic supposedly taste like there are hints of sweet pipe tobacco and Cabernet Sauvignon in them when turned into chocolate. The Masts order these special cacao nibs—which are delivered via wind-powered schooner, artisanal in itself, that travels between Cape Cod and the Caribbean—and then roast them customarily for thirty days to bring out richer notes of flavor. The nibs are then milled in repurposed stone grinders and then melted down into the delicious, high-end chocolate bars wrapped in custom design heavy paper from Long Island City. Some variations of the chocolate bars include a thin sprinkling of sea salt by hand, developed in solar salt houses off the coast of Maine. The world of Mast Brothers Chocolate is one of specificity and attunement, “a rather grand vision of chocolate modernity” (Wallace). The chocolate company’s vision is one that returns authenticity to a human scale, an imaginable process of creation that represents a rejection of the industrial status quo.
Artisans like the Mast brothers are concerned with conserving abstract things like the culture of tradition and the sanctity of community through smaller scale production operated by human hands and personal stories. The hope to preserve meaning through meaningful acts elevates these artisans to levels of heroism; it is as though they are crusaders standing at the edge of a civilization that lost itself to capitalism, commodity, and virtual realities where “real” is indiscernible from non-real. People who call themselves locavores create a lifestyle based on the earnest of farmer’s markets, the superiority of small-batch goods, and the meticulousness of the artisanal spirit. Delight arrives from a smaller-scaled production rather than a consumer-scaled one. Items grown or made with formulas of simplicity are intrinsically more valuable than those from mass production because they were fostered in care, informed by attention from their cultivators, and steeped in a traditional sense of worth.
Sustainable agriculture returns an imaginable scale of production to the people who depend on it. Taking an interest in locally-grown foodstuffs or handcrafted objects narrows the physical and psychological distance that grew out of the industrial and digital age. Handcrafted clothing, like the sorts stitched out of Brook-lyn Tailors by Daniel Lewis and his wife Brenna, are a means to bridging the gap between producer and consumer. The business is special because it is one of the select few that maintain the privilege of forging an in-person relationship between the artisan and the buyer of the product. The set up safely discerns the exchange as “real life” versus a transaction that requires no interaction between the maker and the consumer.
We can now separate the authentic from the detached products of machines. Something unique is now imaginable, whether it is classified as a reversion to pre-modern customs or post-postmodern reworking. A sense of scale returns originality to the people. Neo-artisans return meaning to the public through their craftsmanship; they transcend the relativity of other production methods. The new crop of artisans reflects a sense of traditional value that is as enduring as the hand-stitched, hand-churned, hand-made products they put up for sale.
In a culture that now accepts any and all forms of lifestyle, it is still difficult to bring oneself to deny that some lifestyles can be considered better than others. There is a certain admiration for purveyors of specialized knowledge, a notion of honor in the idea that there is a correct way of doing something. Postmodern philosophy can sit back detachedly and say that one way of living is unable to trump that of another, but in practice, the difficulty of turning off notions of virtue proves to be tricky and overbearing. This method of viewing the world is not realistic. Even from a utilitarian stance, a human’s sensibility weighs pleasure against pain in order to conduct itself, striving to reach a level of survival at the bare minimum and happiness at the most. Postmodern relativity removes those facets of actual reality and posits a dim version of humanity where apathy runs rampant.
People naturally strive to live better. The repugnance of manufactured realities is fracturing their attachment and subscription to the postmodern condition. The premise for a diminishing postmodern power is observable in the neo-artisan movement, the Green movement, or even the perennial hunt for existential meaning. People affirm those who stand by their beliefs. Postmodernism is a purist’s nightmare; it makes standing by principles difficult when everyone thinks it’s pointless to hold such beliefs if they amount to no significance. One cannot achieve significance if everyone’s significant, because then nobody is significant. The same criterion stands for beliefs. Postmodernism creates a paradox in trying to create meaning, its doctrine essentially removes meaning altogether. Postmodernists presuppose the very distinctions of which they attack, and their playfulness doesn’t allow anything to be taken seriously. Because seriousness is negated in a postmodern practice, any attempts at making a case for what actually matters is impossible. The postmodern condition should be resisted, or else justification for living with ironic indifferentism is made possible.
There is a somewhat exhausted account of the absence of vision in a postmodern era. Grounded issues evaporate into self-expressive options as a result of the onset of the multiverse. Multiplying interests and identities multiplies the number of issues that one must process. The scarcity of attention towards each issue creates a generalization towards all of these issues, creating an absence of thought and the proper reflective abilities to contemplate why parts of the world matter.
And now the question remains to be answered: is postmodernism dead?
The answer is no, just as Romanticism and modernism have not passed completely into oblivion. The impact of all of those previous modes of thinking still clings to contemporary generations today. Elements of each movement are simply added to culture’s arsenal of ways to observe, understand, and process the world. Postmodernism is no different. This generation is fostered in a very postmodern fashion and there’s no escaping its method of thinking. But there are a few critiques to be made against postmodernism that explain the shift away from its central force. Postmodernism lacks accuracy in its attempt to provide a complete description of society. People must view postmodernism as just a mere sliver of a larger picture. It fits into a greater puzzle of interaction with other traditions of belief. What we take from postmodernism is an approach to truth that states it must be viewed from a rhetorical stance versus a dialectical one. In other words, truth is based on persuasion rather than proof. Even the neo-artisans partake in a mild form of power-play in trying to assert that their lifestyle is better than one based in manufactured realities. The current culture incorporates postmodern thought into its everyday regimen whether it is conscious of it or not. It is conditioned to do so.
Though postmodernism will never be fully dead, one can make the assumption that its power over the general public will someday pass from the prime spotlight. A clean break from the postmodern movement—or from any movement, for that matter—will never be obvious. Humans are gradual beings, sliding from one movement to the next without rigid beginnings or ends. But humans today are concerned with verifying true representations of reality, no doubt a consequence of its immersion in the digital age’s offerings. People question reality when so much of it can be fabricated in false, unnatural environments like the virtual space of the Internet or the blinking lights of a cable box.
What the majority of it all comes down to is the sojourn for realism, for warranted authenticity. The implementation of a value system naturally gives definition to lifestyles, but the fundamental assumptions of postmodernism puts a disturbing roadblock on that quest. What people must understand is that all of these movements of philosophical thinking are provided as tools to order the greater picture of the universe and the significance of one’s place within it. In The Beauty of the Infinite, a book by modern theological philosopher David Hart Bentley, he defines modern thought as “the search for comprehensive metanarratives and epistemological foundations by way of a neutral and unaided rationality, available to all reflective intellects, and independent of cultural and linguistic conditions” (Bentley, 5). From postmodernism we learn that those cultural and linguistic conditions abandoned by modern thought are necessary in capturing the human experience in totality. The two contrasting modes of thinking complement and supplement each other, allowing for an even grander picture of human significance and analysis to be rendered.
Postmodernism douses the possibility for transcendence. This is off-putting when the way to explain the human condition would be to describe the desire for a progression in the name of human betterment. That’s essentially what humans aim for, a kind of satisfaction in personal achievement and accomplishment. But all that postmodernism confirms is that all of humanity is in a constant state of becoming. It denotes neither end cause nor greater vision other than asking its followers to accept the narratives of other members in society apart from one’s own. But again, all one can do with this kind of thinking is add it to the arsenal of other beliefs gleaned from past zeitgeists. When it is said that this generation and future generations will never be able to escape the chokehold of postmodernism, even this arsenal of beliefs referential to the past is an example. Even by passing through postmodernity and into the next philosophic movement, one enters into an act of pastiche, reserving the method of viewing texts in a Derrida fashion to take in other philosophies.
Examples of artisans who are both postmodern and transcendent of the movement at the same time are the British food fanboys, Harry Parr and Sam Bompas. The young duo are professional food artists who make wild jelly delights along with experimenting with food formulas to create strange confections likely to rival the mythical candies of Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka. The culinary dabblers scour nineteenth century, out-of-print Victorian cookbooks to inform their eccentric food expertise. At the bottom line, they borrow ideas from the past to forge something incredibly new and original, like their flavor-changing gum (one successful flavor includes both foie gras and passionfruit). Parr once majored in architecture before switching his interest to culinary pursuits. He borrows ideas and conventions from his education in architecture to inform many of the artistic food projects commissioned to both he and Bompas. The pastiche of their methods presents the originality of their work with a laudable panache as artists who surpass pre-existing standards of art through the medium of food.
Postmodernism is just another tool for understanding and creating. The threads that bind us to it will never be undone, for it’s impossible to unlearn what has already been learned. Postmodernism is not dead, but the opportunity for transcending the boundaries of postmodern thought is growing as people grow uncomfortable with the mode of indifference that often arises from its ideas. Perhaps the time has come for another swing of the pendulum, but there is no doubt that society should claim the best of postmodern thought and apply it to its hunt for authenticity and the real world.
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Works Cited
Bentley, David Hart. The Beauty of the Infinite. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 2003. Print.
De Zengotita, Thomas. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in
It. New York City: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005. Print.
Kramnick, Isaac. American Political Thought: A Norton Anthology. New York City: W.W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 2009. Print.
Smith, James K.A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to
Church. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2006. Print.
Wallace, Benjamin. “Ye Olde New Brooklyn Artisinal Delirium: The Twee Party” New York
Magazine. 23 April 2012. Print.
The Whitney Biennial: Sam Lewitt’s Fluid Employment
There’s little in this world that exists constantly suspended between different states of matter. But before I start going off about demarcating liquid crystal technology or the enthalpy levels of water or something stranger like interstellar mediums, let’s focus on a concentration of science that artist Sam Lewitt has turned into a work of art—ferromagnetism.
On display at the Whitney Biennial, Lewitt’s Fluid Employment exhibit looks like nothing more than a child’s paint project abandoned to damp rainfall, left to bubble up with mold in between plastic tarps. Upon reading the exhibit’s description, you’ll find that the spectacle is no fraction of careless disarray. In fact, the display is a careful concoction of intricate science. The opaque black, gelatinous bubbles sitting on sheets of rusty-looking plastic resemble the kind of clumps you might find at the La Brea tar pits, but the substance is in fact a material called ferrofluid—a mixture of magnetic particles suspended in liquid. Magnets strategically placed across the plastic tarp hold the ferrofluid in place, forcing the liquid into bubble-like forms by suspending the magnetic particles within it in place. Electric fans blow air over the clumps in attempt to evaporate the liquid (to no avail, however, because Lewitt pours more ferrofluid over the whole thing bi-monthly).
It’s a weird choice of materials for something supposedly called art. What was Lewitt thinking, other than to fashion a project that’s sure to grab an audience’s attention? It turns out that the ferromagnetic substance actually has substance to it. The materials chosen by Lewitt have a purpose to demonstrate a postmodern message, not just to make viewers turn their heads at the gleam of the sticky, black lumps clinging to the floor.
Ferromagnetic materials are best known for their spontaneous magnetization—magnetic moments without an external magnetic field affecting it—and for their association to phase transitions. Phase transitions are those instances where a material is in the process of changing from one state of matter to another (like when a solid ceases to become solid, but is not quite a liquid yet). Lewitt’s use of ferromagnetic liquid and magnets in Fluid Employment was to highlight a medium that exists in “neitherness.” The product of his creation straddles a space between definitions of solids and liquids. The magnets hold the ferrofluid dollops in place, compressing them into forms that appear solid. The electrical fans tell a different story, or rather show us. The evaporation of the ferrofluid shows that the material is, in fact, liquid. According to the placard on the wall above his project, Lewitt’s aim is to “subvert the ideas of formality and informality, adaptability, and overdetermination.” The ferrofluid’s refusal to be confined in a solid state by the magnets—transcending that state of matter through evaporation—bespeaks a rebellion against rational conventions. What would postmodernists say? Single, fixed forms can be surpassed.
Lewitt’s science project fights a modernist’s rational outlining of defined boundaries. Fluid Employment instigates a special kind of incredulity, of deep suspicion that emphasizes a tension between science and narrative. The magnets resting between the ferrofluid represent the constraints that sole allegiance to science place on society. The evaporation of the ferrofluid represents another possibility—something transcendent over faith in science. The electrical fans confirm the skepticism we should hold in relation to accepted norms; they reinforce our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.
Lewitt shows us something about what an indefinable state of matter can look like, but what does he teach us about a vague state of humanity—one that we find ourselves crawling through with each progressing day? Perhaps it’s a message in choosing a method of communicating truth—there is no accepted way. This postmodern age asks that we get creative in the ways in which we try to reach truth, and Sam Lewitt’s display of subversion is duly noted.
27 April 2012
Dad was right. He said I’d get bored this semester without anything to do except for school. He was right. I got bored.
Now classes are over and a series of tests are what lie between now and summer. Only one more week of self-sacrificial living (weird bedtimes and terrifying diet schemes).
Dad said I can lie on the beach when I get home. That’s all I’ll be responsible for. Man! How good does that sound. All I can think about is a hot California day, sand sifting between my toes—or dipping underneath a curling wave, sliding under the surface of the water and rising back up with that strip of skin across the bridge of my nose burning with sun exposure.
Hearing Dad’s voice on the phone is one of the greatest sounds I’ll ever hear. When did we become such good friends? The last conversation we had was about Mom’s mastery of the kitchen and the research paper I was working on. Wilkinson asked us to answer the question, Is postmodernism dead? and to use cultural examples to support it. My paper ended up being about transcendence and the human condition and how a philosophic movement like postmodernism won’t ever be dead—like how Romanticism or Modernism can never be dead—but we can decide how much to take from each one, apply it to the whole. I used the Neo-Artisanal movement in America as my cultural example. Craftsmen and purveyors of intellectual rigor through connoisseurship stand at the brink of a civilization whose ideas of reality got lost somewhere in the virtual translations of the digital age; these crusaders pursue the authentic, posit values back into the system, and prove that there really can be something new under the sun when all thought that originality was lost. I remember giving Dad the rundown in a pretty confused blur of words while I stood on some street corner in Brooklyn Heights. That’s when he goes, “Well, shiiiiit” and I just bust up laughing. I was like, “Yeah, I feel like my skull’s bruised from all the thoughts bouncing around in there.” (This is when he told me I could come home and just lounge on the beach and not worry about a thing).
There was this point a couple of days ago when Shannon and I were really losing it being cooped up in the apartment writing these ridiculous narrative essays for Scientific Reasoning. The sink was full of dirty dishes and I was opening a dried ramen pack that I’d resorted to buying for a meal quicker to prepare than to consume. And then it was like the universe was compressing in on me and the walls caving in and out of oblivion and my spirit was clawing at the inside of my rib cage like a wild animal trying to get out. I told Shannon, “I can’t take this! There’s so much life going on outside right now!” And we were laughing about it, but man I was really wanting to cry about it. These papers and tests that make up less than 1% of significance in the greater scheme of my life. My friend Ben G said something like this earlier in the week when I was telling him how funny it is when we all give each other this false reassurance during finals week. “You’ll be fine!” we tell each other. It’s comical because it’s true, but boy do we feel like we’re dying when Finals Week rolls around. Ben told me he won’t be worrying about these tests years from now when we’re old and these tests have passed out of our lives. I have to remember that events like these will get eclipsed by more important ones down the line.
It’s the same as it ever was, same as it ever was. Going through the motions to get through them. But there have been good times rolling through it all, too. Tami dropping a wooden block on my foot by accident and our ten minutes of pure, tired laughter. James and I bobbing our heads toEdward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes // Peter, Paul, and Mary // the Monkeys in the car when he drove me home on Saturday night. Jake’s reassuring answers at bible study on Tuesday. Alex, Shannon, and my death-by-laughs freakout last night. Meredith and I squeezing each other’s hand when Chris Thile got on stage somewhere off Houston. Travis and his perfect old-man humor, killing me all through class and afterwards. My appreciation for people has never been so great. These folks keep me alive! keep me sane! keep me going going going! I think I can thank the weirdness on Twitter for having a similar effect, too.
The little things! They add up.
Horizontal Horizon—Monsters—Next Season—Lord Byron and His Words
I feel like I’m constantly staring at the horizon, waiting to see what’ll appear over that solitary line in the distance. The schooner I’ve been riding isn’t even battered up real bad at all. The weather’s been right fine, actually. I keep expecting some Poseidon-level tidal waves to come crashing over the deck, tearing down the masts and wrecking the sails, but no such horror appears. I’ve been cut breaks.
A really terrible story to tell children wouldn’t be about monsters that live under the bed. A really terrible story to tell children would be about monsters that live in your head. Those ones are more real than the dust bunnies and dust mites residing in the floor fibers.
Summer will be good. There’ll be freedom and liberation and warmth…not any of the rigid agenda lines I’ve been aligning myself to these past few months. My friends will be staying in the city this time around, not like last summer. I’ll be twenty-one this summer. I can scarcely believe it! Getting old. Getting wise? Getting wise. I still have the knots to work on though—enjoy the little things, work hard, stop getting bored with every little thing.
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.
And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
Which Author This Month?
To blow through his/her books? Revisit Kerouac? Introduce Hemingway? Scan through essayists? Hmm…
April will be a month of insanity — need something to keep my feet on the ground, my head out of the clouds.
31 March 2012
I recommend everyone to go see the film Detachment (2012).
Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible.
Dustin took me to see it and I almost died of laughter from his commentary. But the film is quality stuff — it’s the same guy who did American History X, so you know it’s some real cerebral anvils that’ll weigh down on you when you leave the theatre. This one’s telling us our duty as people who will bring, or have brought, children into this world. As parents, it’s our duty to care for our children, to raise them up and love them irrevocably because we all know this is a world of pain and solitude if we’re not conditioned right. The methods we carry out in caring for our children builds the fibers of their psyche. Young people aren’t equipped to understand life’s burdens, so we show them. We teach them what is right and what is good, so that they may pass the word on to the next generation. The focus is children, because they are our future, but I think the message can carry on laterally as well. Care for yourself. Care for people. Relations to others. They’re important.
29 March 2012
The college is putting on their 3-day event called “Interregnum” (a self-proclaimed nerdfest where we all debate about social, political, historical, philosophica, etc. issues…or put on performances!) again. People groan about it in the mornings, but in the end we all have a good time. I don’t think there’s any other time of the year where I feel the most school spirit. Interregnum’s actually enjoyable—and I mean this aside from the fact that it allows me to take a break from coffee and wake up at an hour past nine in the morning. I’m granted the privelege to actually feel tired and not on-spot. And I like doing the 3-hour art. The girls from my House just crowd around a big ‘ole canvas to giggle and snort and paint and assemble. I posted a picture earlier—my part was the upper left corner, an imitation of a Roy Lichtenstein pop-art painting. Someone drew the guy face. I added better hair color, comic strip dots on the face, black outline enhancements, red sky, comic bubble…it was a good time.
I sang at last night’s open-mic. My dear friend Jonathan Sargent played guitar and we performed the Train Song, an old folk song. We played the newer version of it by Feist and Ben Gibbard. Man, it was nerve-wracking! I haven’t gotten on stage like that in three years. My voice came out all right, though. I had to let go of the microphone because my hand was shaking so bad. I remember the stage light flickering behind my trembling pinky finger. Terrifying. But all in all a good time! Alex and Jake were there and we just made a ball out of it—busted up laughing after everything.
Alex turned 21 on Tuesday (what!!!!). We’re throwing her a big karaoke party (combined with Kaylie’s, whose birthday is on April 4th) in a couple of weeks. Mine’s not until August, but that’ll be a good time, too because I’ll be in the Hamptons and everyone promised they’d all come out to the beach for it!
That’s all for now.
Song to Woody | Bob Dylan
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walking a road other men have gone down
I’m seeing a new world of people and things
Hear paupers and peasants and princes and kings.
Hey hey Woody Guthrie I wrote you a song
About a funny old world that’s coming along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s dying and it’s hardly been born.
Hey Woody Guthrie but I know that you know
All the things that I’m saying and a many times more
I’m singing you the song but I can’t you sing enough
‘Cause there’s not many men that’ve done the things that you’ve done.
Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too
And to all the good people that travelled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.
I’m leaving tomorrow but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hitting some hard travelling too.
Thesis Inspiration: Wes Anderson
I’ve re-read my big paper for Cultural Criticism—or the 1,700 words that I have so far of it—and decided it reads like a monstrous wad of chewed gum, formless and ugly. My thesis basically talks about what relief Wes Anderson gives Generation Y versus what the scientists psycho-analyzing Millenials has to provide. The stuff can get depressing.
If I recall the words I used to describe it in the e-mail I sent to my professor, I said, “It’s a slim, spiky skeleton and scary, no doubt.” This I can’t deny. The baby needs polishing.
But here are some images from the films I love to keep my mood fresh and happy and whimsical.
Personal Review of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides
I completed reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides yesterday. I was wary of picking it up to read because of all the hype around it, all the numerous TUMBLR blogs built from quotes and pictures, all the clippings and scrawled writings quipped from the book’s pages tacked up on teenage girls’ walls…but at the turning of the last page I decided that the book was one of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read.
First of all, the voice that the author assumes is a rare feat of wonderful that he pulls off effortlessly. It’s a collective voice of the neighborhood boys observing the Lisbon girls’ house from the outside. There are five Lisbon girls: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese. They all commit suicide. After one goes, they all go. Why?
It’s a question the boys who watch them—through treehouse windows, from front lawns, by mailboxes, from down the street—continue to ask themselves years and years later, when their hair has gone sparse and their bellies soft. They loved these girls, you see. They loved them for reasons they didn’t know and could only gather what they did know from artifacts they collected: a crucifix, a laminated Virgin Mary card, Lux’s brassiere, Cecilia’s yellow canvas hightops, a tube of lipstick, a journal….
I re-read the NY Times book review by Michiko Kakutani (http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/19/books/books-of-the-times-of-death-in-adolescence-and-innocence-lost.html?scp=3&sq=the%20virgin%20suicides&st=cse) and decided that it didn’t do Eugenides’ book justice. The review ended with the following paragraphs:
“The reader repeatedly wonders why the girls don’t rebel. Why don’t they reach out to friends, or run away from home? Why don’t the authorities insist that they go to school? What has driven their mother to impose such a strict regime in the first place?
Such obvious questions are never addressed by Mr. Eugenides, and his willful ignoring of these issues can grate on the reader’s nerves, momentarily breaking the spell of his tale.
Gradually, however, the narrator’s hypnotic voice succeeds in transporting us to that mythic realm where fate, not common sense or psychology, holds sway. By turns lyrical and portentous, ferocious and elegiac, “The Virgin Suicides” insinuates itself into our minds as a small but powerful opera in the unexpected form of a novel.”
It’s like the reviewer didn’t realize what Eugenides was trying to say. If she did, then she only scratched the surface of it. One sentence is all she gave that hinted to her understanding: “Gradually, however, the narrator’s hypnotic voice succeeds in transporting us to that mythic realm where fate, not common sense or psychology, holds sway.” That’s a skeleton, right there. There’s so much more Eugenides was trying to say. The problem with the suicides was not that they were caused by that isolation we felt as teenagers, or the angsty hormones pumping through our adolescent veins. No, the problem with the suicides was that the Lisbon girls didn’t even try to fight for their lives, to reach out to those who were reaching out towards them. The suicides were a selfish act. They didn’t even think twice about the people they were affecting, who would remain affected so many years later, thinking about the limbo they’d all been put in, but mostly the limbo that the girls would remain in for all eternity. The neighborhood boys would’ve fought for the girls, would’ve fought to make them free and happy and loved. But the girls wouldn’t get into their car that fateful night of their suicides. They refused to partake in life any longer; they committed the grand sin of taking on the role of their maker. They dispersed without looking back and left only their tragic memory behind. Eugenides was trying to show how it’s not merely concrete fate that sweeps in over our lives, but the wrongs in trying to take the powers reserved for God for our own.
After closing the book I thought about how strange it would be if I were suddenly gone from the world and the pieces of me were left to be sifted through by third person parties. The maps, the brochures, the bracelets, and other things that the neighborhood boys gathered from the Lisbon girls told them about the dreams and the hopes of the poor, young things. What would they know about me? Is it enough to know about a person from the things that they own? I remember the other day when Alexander opened our freezer to inspect its contents, Shannon and I glanced at each other all sheepish when the boxes and boxes of frozen breaded fish sticks and apple blossom tarts poked out into sight. Alexander said, “Boy you guys really like this stuff.” All I could think was, what does this say about us? What I do know is that I sure as hell don’t want to be known by the contents of my freezer. Or the contents of my desk (though I’m pretty sure someone who saw the stacks on it would find me a lover of fiction, philosophy, lavender nailpolish, and clicky pens). The Virgin Suicides made me want to reach out and live life even moreso than I already want to. I don’t think it’s good to be remembered by artifacts or material things…I think it’d be best to be remembered by memories of experiences. Like laughs or jokes or hugs or handshakes or ideas or smiles or stories or hand-holding or things like that. The memory of someone…not of their things.
If You Were Wondering What My Writing Reads Like Upon Immediate Command…Two Essays From A Most Recent Exam»>
Photophile: Decided to Stay In
The weather was not inviting nor permitting last night for us to have a good time out in the city…so we stuck around the ‘ole burrow and made music, chatted it up, drank too much tea (again), and watched movies until very, very late in the night. Alex and I spent a grand majority of the early evening hours writing a song that we’d been meaning to write for a very long time. The only instruments we have on hand are my harmonica and Shannon’s really beautiful, snazzy keyboard…but we were looking for more. I knocked on Taylor’s door to borrow a guitar but alas it is somewhere on the Upper West Side, so he pulled out a heavy and old suitcase from underneath his bed, shoved it in my general direction with a big grin and said try it! I lugged it back to Alex and we discovered the 60-years-old accordion within. Wild! We definitely enjoyed wasting time tinkering around on it. Alexander and Taylor came over later to watch Funny Games (2007) and boy, did that film give me anxiety like I’ve never experienced before. Whew.
