Cultural Nudity: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Being

I was having trouble getting started on a post today. I've had an idea brewing since about the time I made that first post after a long break, but I haven't been able to find the time amidst my personal and professional chaos to sit down and write it. I started something an hour ago, involving tortured references to Foundationalism and Coherentism (which only applied in the most slanted possible way to the matter at hand), in addition to an attempt to tie it to this post and rumors of someone's misunderstanding thereof, and . . . well, it was just too dang thinky for me to parse out the relevant bits and get to the story I wanted to tell. What sucks is that all those connections--even the skewed philosophical ones, and especially the one relating to the other post--were actually quite real, and quite important, in my mind, whereas the story itself lacks resonance on its face. Could I rely on most readers to make the proper inferences? Would this post be of any worth without them?

I'm not gonna get into the whole debate as to whether blogs are supposed to be good writing or not, except to say that I try to keep things at least nominally thoughtful and somewhat (anti-)intellectual to differentiate it from the multitudes of bloggers who seem to think that their journals are interesting to anyone (though I certainly think some of them are correct; indeed, my hope is that my concepts, and the ways in which I write about them, will interest the reader in the being who formulated them, thus finding them willing to engage with my autobiographical details and prosaic musings). No, what just occurred to me was a conversation I had with 'Stine sometime in the last day or two. I was coming home, exhausted from a day at work following a weekend of some serious writing. See, I had a big deadline for the summer issue of ALARM on Monday, so I had three features and eleven reviews to write (actually, I'd already written four of the reviews, and transcribed all the interview text for the articles, but STILL . . . ) over the weekend. And quite accidentally, I said something to 'Stine that was more true, more profound than anything I could actually have cooked up from my arsenal of noetic recipes.

"If there's one thing the deadlines and money help me with, it's getting over any worry about whether my writing is any good. My title is 'contributing writer,' after all, not 'good writer.'"

Okay, it doesn't look so profound now that I've put it down. But it's still true, and truth trumps profundity. See, it doesn't really matter if I get the best of my craft out there; that's between me and whoever prints, publishes, edits, or markets my work. That's what those people are for. Since this is a forum where I rarely rewrite, and where all middle-men/-women are removed from twixt my readers and myself, I'm actually even LESS obligated to produce good writing, and more obligate to WRITE, to tell the damn story I wanted to tell.

So as far as either my philosophical interest or the connection to the other post goes, we can either address that in the comments, or--should this fail to draw any comment--in a future post, where the dialectics can be unburdened by mere observation. Here's what I was interested in noting, and what it seemed to mean aside from its relation to either big philosophy or its relationship to my other ideas.

I was listening to one of the CDs I'd requested from the list for review. I don't get everything I ask for from every list--there are other writers to take into account--but I don't get anything I didn't ask for, unless my review editor thinks there's something I'd enjoy based on her (remarkably astute) understanding of my tastes. In order to avoid falling into a rut, and only reviewing one or two kinds of music, I do like to shake my own foundations up a little, and request something that resides outside my tastes, if not entirely outside my musical values. **
The process can be a little risky, but it's often quite rewarding.

So I'm listening to one such gamble--we'll leave the artist's name out of it for now--and I'm finding myself a little put out, at least for the first track. It might be because it's blues rock, and I'm just suffering from precisely the prejudice I was trying to address in picking the CD; post-punk theory (because post-punk is nothing if not theoretical) has traditionally demanded that the blue be bled from the blues, hollowing out the recognized emotion constructs in order to create music that is resolutely deconstructionist, situationist, etc. This was partially a function of European bands trying to de-Americanize the essential tools of rock & roll, but, considering that American bands like Devo, Mission of Burma, Talking Heads, and Pere Ubu also engaged in this, it's also fair to say that they were rebelling against the Rousseauist warmth of '60s ideology (it's no coincedence that Rousseau's number one rival, the Marquis de Sade, was such a profound influence in the industrial camp, one of post-punks most easily recognizable sub-genres).

Whatever the reason, my relationship with the blues is tenuous. I love the old, scratchy stuff; I enjoy some revivalists like Mark Lanegan or Hillstomp; I LOVE artists like P.J. Harvey or the Kills who have appropriated aspects of the blues to tell stories that have more personal resonance with me than the ones usually held out by the old masters. But this recording struck me, on first listen to the first track, as belonging more to the school of '70s classic rock (which, if you haven't gathered yet, ain't my bag), with a vaguely Bob Seger-ish tinge that had me sulking.

Now, the album got a LOT better over the rest of the tracks, and I should note that, although that sense that this was sorta my parents music more than mine didn't quite dissipate, I was almost won over by the music itself. I can thank Quentin Tarantino (among others, probably) for contextualizing classic rock in a way that I could appreciate, and the right flavor of Americana can remind me of dusty road trips back in my old college stomping grounds in the SW, and the notion that this music could go quite well with a smoldering joint, a cheap (3.2%) beer, and a desert sunset did warm me to the whole enterprise. But my impulse was still to write this off as something that was only worth having if I was dying for something I could share with my friends who have no interest in motorik, post-punk, drone, dub, techno, hip-hop, art-punk, prog-metal, freak-folk, or anything else that I might refer to as my bread-and-butter.

Since it always behooves me to research an artist's past projects, I looked this guy up on allmusic.com. Turns out his music is most often classified as indie-rock, and is usually compared to post-hardcore acts like the Jesus Lizard. What the hell? Thing is though, as I'm reading his history, the bands that he's toured with, and the way previous reviewers had described his sound, I'm starting to wonder: Did I give the album a fair hearing? Was I tricked into thinking this music was something it wasn't because the blues element was up front, rather than subverted? Did my prejudices against a certain kind of sound make me miss something hiding in plain sight?

So I listened to the album again with new knowledge . . . and it was better. Oh, it still sounded the same, and it's not gonna be something I play all the time. But when I know who I'm listening to, where he comes from, what his widely-perceived intent is in appropriating the sounds he's appropriating, I hear the music differently.

All of this had me questioning . . . well, everything. Had my theory unduly prejudiced me against the music? Had that same theory converted me back? Did knowing this gentleman's history open my mind to his music, or had it blinded me to its flaws? Do we apprehend art with the raw senses or with the whole mind? Does how we absorb a message depend on who delivers that message? Is it shallow to prefer the music when I know it's been delivered by a tattooed (in theory; I don't know that he has any tats) punk rather than some red-state fogey?

Can we approach anything--art, family, politics, religion--culturally naked, without the noetic baggage accumulated over a lifetime? I tend to think not. Maybe when we were younger, more literally naked. But we DO come to define ourselves by the roles we play, because without those roles, we're more and more like everyone else. C.S. Lewis once noted the irony of people insisting that they were "more themselves" when nude, because the opposite is, in fact, true: any one man is more like every man without his trousers, and any one woman more like every woman. Individuation is a result of serial affectation, calcification, rejection, appropriation, socialization. These labels, identities, archetypes do bind us to other people, but we still find space in the contradictions to free ourselves from those binds, and even that would be impossible if we truly shed everything--language, culture, preference, ethics, philosophy. A human without theory--whether or not he or she calls it that--is an organism, a collection of biological needs with few, if any, strategies for fulfilling them.

Truth be told, my review of this record wasn't that far from my original impression (though another CD on which the same artist played with a trio was a slam-dunk, a fulfillment of the furious promise hiding under the surface of the solo work, so I like to think everything came up [bloody] roses in the end); I just softened the criticisms and looked a bit more closely at the silver linings. But I like to think I listened more completely in knowing what the music's context was. Maybe we should be able to consume art without this knowledge. But do we? Ever? It seems to me that by the time we even started to develop musical preferences, we already had language, already had friends who recommended music to us, templates and paradigms by which we judged good from bad. Maybe we've never arrived on art's doorstep without the requisite shirt and shoes (and trousers, of course, though that was always omitted form the convenience store signs).

** - I differentiate between values and tastes because tastes usually speak to matters of genre, where values can transcend genre. I hate to say I don't like x kind of music, but like y kind of music. More correct would be to say that x kind of music tends to operate from a value system different from my own, but when it does address my musical values, I CAN like it (say, Neko Case helping me like country); y kind of music reflects my values as a matter of its construct (say, dub music already being an intrinsically postmodern form), and therefore it doesn't necessarily have to work as hard to meet my criteria. But even that ties me to genre more than I prefer, because there's a lot of suck-ass dub out there, and one really oughtn't criticize country music for BEING country music.

I bring this up because I find that everyone's preferences look snobbish to someone who doesn't share them, and I'm always taken aback when I--who like more individual bands and more individual kinds of music than pretty much anyone I know--am accused of elitism by people who surely dislike at least as many forms as I do (I remember being accused of elitism because I didn't like Neil Simon by someone who didn't like Theatre of the Absurd; I wondered why one set of preferences was perceived as affectation and the other as enlightened populism).

Be, and I'll Just Watch You

(Props to the criminally under-recognized Julian Cope for the lyric referenced in this post's title, from the song "Soul Desert," on the album Jehovahkill; the lyric quoted is followed, rather devastatingly, with the addendum, " . . . 'cause being is just too hard for me.")

I'm sorry I haven't called. Really. I didn't mean to leave you hanging. I've been busy, but that's not much of an excuse; I found time to play with my other friends over on the Fray, and I don't even like them all that much (I've actually got a lot more over there--click on the "More By This User" key to see what I've been up to--but this review is the only thing that got any honorable mention, so I chose to emphasize it). Well, maybe a few of them. Mostly I go over there to get into debates; it's like a bar I'd never take my wife to because I only go to start brawls.

I had a performance with UMO Ensemble on Sunday, for the Moisture Festival, a great idea (a week+ festival for burlesque, cabaret, clowning, magic, vaudeville, and other arguably archaic forms that, at one point, formed the basis for modern musicals and the Theatre of the Absurd, and a good basic ground for re-enervating, and hopefully innovating, the form) with a terribly and wholly inexplicable name. We were performing as buffoons (I don't actually appear in the picture, but I wore the costume/makeup for the tall one with the horns, and more or less looked exactly like that; the costume defines the buffoon at least as much as the wearer), a staple of the UMO roster with which I, being something of a newbie (I've been a member since 2003, but we've been on hiatus most of that time), had not yet engaged.

A buffoon is the ultimate outsider: deformed (indeed, in the case of Aztooth, not human at all), rejected, interdependent on other buffoons, living in holes in the earth near the landfills and sewers outside medieval towns . . . and liberated to tell nothing but the truth, to exist free of all social grace or obligation, oblivious to stigma, allowed to live in a state of perpetual toddlerdom.

Anyway, we were emceeing the event in question, so it involved a lot of flying by the seat of the pants. I'm a little creaky when it comes to verbal improv--words are a very carefully considered thing to me, though I can react quickly and organically enough on a physical basis--but, luckily, Aztooth is the least verbal of the crew, so I just had to live in the skin. Much hilarity seemed to ensue.

Of course, how could it not? One has a clearer--and giddier--view of truth and being when we use artifice to strip away pretense, costumed that we may run, socially naked and brutally honest, through the world without accountability. Clowns and fools always have a certain advantage when it comes to telling the truth, and fiends & monstrosities have a certain advantage when it comes to seeing it. The rest of us are so tied to the roles we feel obligated to play that we often don't see when the role is doing the talking for us. The role of buffoon speaks for its wearer, of course, but the role itself is obliged only to exist outside obligation; there is no fear of repercussion, no mercy, no sense of consequence, no concern for the consequence when it arrives. The buffoon laughs at being beaten, its anger just a more violent facet of its perpetual amusement.

This article in last week's Seattle Weekly, written by Mike Seely, got me thinking about roles & obligations, about labels and context (which continually both illuminate and obscure truth). The passage that really took me for a ride was this one, in which the narrator--a prank-playing indie rocker--is confronted by someone who chastises him with a label I have often used derisively:

'John, you're such a...a...frat boy!'

"The insult was the equivalent of slapping my face with a white calfskin glove," Roderick goes on. "The term 'frat boy,' as he intended it, had all the connotations of beer-swilling, date-raping, jock, macho crap. I laughed, because to me, a fraternity boy was someone who sneered insults at people with sarcastic WASPy smugness. His knotted-sweater, white-collar disapproval was everything I associated with the Greeks.

"So here we stood, two indie rockers, faced off across a gaping cavern of American culture as defined by the term 'frat boy.' He dismissed my car-wreckin', prank-pullin', fire-startin', gun-shootin', whoop-it-up, call-the-cops American party-makin' with one word: frat. And I saw his sniffing, eye-rolling, weak-assed, big-vocabulary-but-not-quite-used-correctly tsk-tsking as more or less the same thing: fraternity boy. But in fact, we were both limp-wristed, lit-major indie rockers."

The operative words in Roderick's diatribe: "gaping cavern." The stigma associated with frat boys is not a one-size-fits-all-proposition, but has rather been expanded over time to signify anything that anyone might find remotely annoying about white heterosexual males.

Seely goes on to note that no one should get too worked up about the "poor white boy" thing, and I won't get into it here (much; it's probably unavoidable). But it's interesting for me to see not only how two-sided the label can be (or many-sided, if we buy the author's assertion that ANY annoying traits of the white, heterosexual male can be targeted), but on how many sides I've actually been when using the word (only once, that I know of, did anyone ever use the word to describe me; as I was in a bedroom with two naked women when it came out, I decided offense would've been a little out of line). Really, I've been both the merry prankster dismissing the uptight preppy and the trimmed metrosexual chastising the feral party animal; I've been the fashionista and the regular Joe straining at the boundaries of couture. Interestingly enough, while I champion independent music, I've often been dismissive of (some) indie rock (some of my favorite and least favorite bands are tagged with the label), as such, precisely because they seem like a fraternity, a collective with rigid standards of fashion and conduct wherein learning to sing or play instruments is dismissed as selling out (probably because some of them, if they shed the affectation of sloppiness, would be mere rock bands, about as indie as Bob Seger), with an off-putting sexlessness that seems counter to all that I consider revolutionary in art. But I do also see that as a reaction to what I've always perceived as the adolescent sexual culture of the more jockish franternities, where I always imagined that men got laid, but women never had orgasms. Of course, that view may be my envy and not getting laid nearly as much as I hoped I would in college, knowing full well that I could provide the orgasms I was sure the women weren't getting . . .

What was I talking about? Oh, yeah . . .

So anyway, that little exchange noted in the article--in which we see that both sides of the "gaping chasm" see frat boys on the other side--reminded me of this post from back in August. See, I realized as I read the article on the indie rocker/frat boy divide that the term "frat boy," while once indicative of membership in an organization, has become a term rather like "bourgeois," a way of commenting on class, aesthetics, and value systems. And like "bourgeois," it's a term generally only applied by those to whom it might BE applied. Whatever you mean by "frat boy," chances are, if you use it as an insult, that you're white, male, reasonably privileged, somewhat educated, pop-culture savvy (even if you pretend not to be), and either a self-styled bohemian or a meticulously constructed "average Joe." And if you're not at least, say, three of those things, you're not more than a degree separated from someone who's all of the above. I'd also bet money that if you're a male applying that term, you (like me) choke just a little on the envy in the term, probably still a little steamed at the girl who left you alone that night for her frat god, certain to spend her orgasm-less night (unless, you know, she came by such things--pun intended--easily) in the arms of cretin. If you're a female applying the term, I suspect that you either spent too much time around people like me, or you're one of those unfortunate girls who could've been having orgasms with the 'hound, but instead were duped, to your eternal regret, into sleeping with the devil in the alligator shirt.

Shit, what was I on about? Oh, okay . . . See, I don't really think we can possibly underestimate the role that envy plays in this whole tendency to disparage the frat boy; I can only take TREMENDOUS comfort in the fact that my wonderful wife, 'Stine (y'all know her, right?), chose me over a creature that, truth be told, is probably more like me than I care to admit. It seems to me that stratifying the people you see and know over such mundane details as whether you were into Joy Division or Def Leppard as adolescents, the Decemberists or Jack Johnson now; whether you're into arts or into sports; whether sex came easily to you or only infrequently and with tremendous personal, emotional investment . . . Well, it's all very bourgeois, isn't it? It's like the whole geeks/jocks/art fags thing really just followed us into adulthood. Everybody's adolescent angst has become the meat of our arts journalism, apparently.

But this problem isn't just about frat boys and indie bands. No, this is something else. Look at this article about how New Age culture cheapens yoga. I happen to agree with some of what the article is getting at. New Age-ism claims to have roots in Hermetism, Gnosticism, and Rosicrucianism, but it seems to get the doctrines wrong, and the hippie-turned-yuppie concerns of baby boomer self-actualization have done much to confuse my own understanding of spirituality and self-care. As a Western practicing Buddhist, I struggle not only with those who will criticize, en masse, all Westerners who practice Buddhism, but with the fact that they at least partially have a point: There ARE those who use Eastern thought as a way of avoiding the rigors of Christianity, who adapt it to their least noble instincts and create a consumer culture of fabricated needs disingenuously called "tools." The comfort I take--aside from the physical benefits of doing yoga and martial arts, of chanting, of studying the Lotus Sutra and the Nag Hammadi Library--is in knowing that this disdain is itself a function of the same occidental privilege. Atheists who chastise Western Buddhists as insincere are ultimately betraying their oneness of mind with American Christians, assuming that honest Westerners must surely be either Christians or Atheists, that all religions should be approached only in their orthodox forms.

But then, the Vedic cultures from which yoga arose were often anti-materialistic only in rhetoric; some yogis have been ascetics, but certainly not all. Similarly, the debate as to whether the tenets of Buddhism demand austerity was raging in the East long before it was cool in the West to meditate, chant, or read the Sutras. Western boxing neglects the feet, knees, and elbows as weapons, and anything outside the torso as target; indeed, ALL Western exercise before pilates fails to address the body from a holistic perspective. Moreover, if we LIVE in a material culture, in practicing arts or spiritual disciplines from elsewhere, we need to either adapt those arts to what we NEED TO DO to survive here, or we need to leave.

And I suppose you could make similar arguments for fraternities. People who belong to them develop social connections that help them in the free market; artists may even be able to network in ways that can help future career prospects, or to create a new audience. Hell, a fraternity produced one of my plays back in college, with no help from the theatre department itself, because one of them happened to like what he saw at one of my other pieces. Did I sell out? Did I accept help from a lesser being? Does the fact that I wanted to be Kafka suffer because he may possibly have been listening to Stone Temple Pilots back at the frat-house?

These prejudices, and the misunderstandings that surround them, are almost necessary for the color in our language and culture; abandoning "frat boy" as an insult isn't likely to happen soon, and I wouldn't want it to. Insults are prejudicial by nature, and a culture without insult is a culture without flavor. Disdain, discord, and elitism are the satirist's bread and butter; subcultures exist to oppose each other, and the greater good of the culture relies on the proliferation of subcultures, where innovation takes place to enrich the whole. I don't object, either, to our turning either our parts in these conflicts or the "objective" analysis of the conflicts themselves into fodder for critique. But I think we need to recognize, also, that there's something inherently frivolous, and a little hypocritical, about taking these things too seriously. We could be talking about the health benefits of yoga and the dangers/benefits of materialism. We could be talking about the effects of white privilege, about the harmful wages of social competition through sex, about different levels of entitlement, about aesthetic theories and the role of theory vs. technical proficiency in the creation of art. If we spend all our time talking about whether it's acceptable to meditate or chant for more money, trying to decide who is and who isn't more of a stereotypical frat boy, or scolding people for driving several hundred dollars worth of yoga equipment to a class in an SUV, it seems to me that we're missing the point.

I, Bourgeois

So the other night, I was unable to bring myself to attend my martial arts class. I do so try to be a dedicated student, but I was tired, grouchy, overwhelmed; I felt overscheduled, underslept, potently dissatisfied with self, life, work, and recreation.

My solution? Retail therapy.

Now, I rarely engage in retail therapy, mostly because our economic circumstances are such that even acquiring what we need is sometimes a bit of an ordeal. But I was feeling a particular dissatisfaction with my khakis: they're the sort of light tan, generic-looking Old Navy khakis that are the uniform of fashion-indifferent, business-casual office drones everywhere. So I find myself a lovely pair of herringbone-style khakis, made of cotton, but with the weave and texture of herringbone tweed. They're brownish, but neutral enough that they could as easily be worn with cool colors as warm, with a shirt and tie, a jersey, a T-shirt and sport jacket, you name it.

Where did I find these wonder trousers? Well . . . Old Navy. Exactly where I got the bland khakis for which I'd come to feel such contempt, which, in turn, I'd bought because khakis just make it easier not to think about what I'm wearing. And I bought BOTH pairs of pants on my Old Navy card, increasing our debt while maintaining the illusion that I still have that money in my real account. Between the use of credit (hell, the possession of credit) at Old Navy, the matter of sweatshops and regressive labor laws, matters of conformity and mass-production, and the decidedly male, in the ugliest traditional sense, approach to wardrobe, I'm at risk of revocation of license for my three most prized practices: bohemiamism, liberalism, metrosexuality. My God, I'm just a GUY. I had to go by a used corduroy shirt jacket at Value Village for $6.99 just to clean that feeling off (and can I say, my corduroy jacket looks great with the new herringbone khakis, and pretty good with my mechanic-fit jeans . . . also from Old Navy).

Yes, folks, the rejectionist himself is really just an average Joe with a tattoo (hey, I'll get another one soon) and some long-neglected piercings.

Like many artistic sorts, I've long sneered at any values I called "bourgeois", having a certain disdain for the notion that respectability or property were of any real use. I've rejected, on well-documented and fiercely argued grounds, the notion that music should please the ear, that cinema should make us laugh or feel good about ourselves, that law exists to protect people instead of wealth, etc. But it's all something of a sham: I DO want to be respected, and even my most dissonant, dystopian and dysphoric aesthetic indulgences are enjoyed because, for whatever reason, they DO please my ear, make me laugh, and, in some roundabout way, make me feel good about myself. I'd like for my aptitudes and talents to earn me admiration, and I'd like to weave a career therefrom, thus securing my access to what I see as my necessary--or at least highly desirable--material comforts. I want my clothing to be inexpensive and reasonably interchangeable, in the sense of everything sort of matching with everything else, without having to always go the all-black, all-the-time route OR stay aware of which color is "in" this season.

Fact is, most people who use the word "bourgeois" are, in fact, precisely that; the rich have no disdain for materialism, the poor don't spend a lot of time weighing social paradigms and value systems. Inasmuch as "bourgeois" means "middle-class", it's we who are moderately educated, working for just-enough-yet-strangely-too-little, who both know what it means and feel guilty enough about it to criticize it. Sure, there are those among us like myself, who have used our modest means to explore outsider aesthetics and maverick philosophies, sought divergence from mainstream religion and are suspicious of mainstream media. But scratch the surface of these "rebellions", and you'll find that most of their theorists, critics and practitioners are of that same bent. They're what Herman Hesse dubbed "steppenwolves", lone lupine luminaries frustrated with, but inescapably held by, a world where order and civility are the norm. Look at any of history's great rogue philophers--de Sade, Lautreaumont, Sartre--and you'll see a gallery of malcontents fiercely (and knowingly) biting the hand that fed them all, carving out a comfortable niche from which to rail against comfortable niches.

I could equivocate on the matter for days (and you can stop giggling there in the back row). Gustave Flaubert once said that an artist should try to live the quiet, ordered life of the bourgeois individual, that he may be violent and original in his art; I'd proudly bear the banner of that idea were I actually creating any art at the moment. And really, I'm only looking for bargains so I can reinvest my income into my other pursuits; but if I'm being honest, the big problem with my pursuits is that I'm at loathe to sell out on the one hand, while finding it too tiring to study, take classes, work full-time and make art, particularly since I find it wholly necessary for my marriage (that most bourgeois of institutions, in which I've been happily and successfully engaged for a decade now) to spend some portion of every week cuddling on the couch to a DVD (whether it's one of my violent independent horror flicks, an obscure proto-surrealist European oddity from the '20s, or the first season of Scrubs).

In The Steppenwolf, after noting that the disaffected bohemian is, generally, a middle-class phenomenon itself, Hesse goes on to suggest that the bourgeoisie survives solely because of the steppenwolves, that the innovations of the middle-class's most disaffected members allow the system against which they ostensibly rebel to thrive. It does seem to me that a system allergic to the uncivilized appetite for deviance and chaos would need an occasional injection of both to avoid death-by-stasis, that the old mammalian impulses to destroy and dominate help give civilization a needed kick in the ass now and again. But I also think it works both ways: without some definition of civility, we'd never need to invent a clever subversion of such base impulses into aesthetics, theory, kink and/or technology. Without the education our (modest) affluence has bought us, we'd never have become too smart for our own good (or anyone else's), never have so exhausted the mainstream canon as to become disenchanted with it, never have experienced privelige to enough of a degree to become mistrustful of it.

That doesn't mean there aren't still conflicts to deal with. While I think that the far left has been facile in its understanding of sweatshop economics--these jobs are often the only alternative some third world workers have to trying to grow crops in fucking sand--I'd certainly love to know that the dapper herringbone khakis I'm wearing were made by people with health insurance, and that my punk-meets-preppy-with-a-dash-of-hippie aesthetic relied more on creative use of homemade and second-hand items than on any prefab, mass-produced fashion mandate. I'll always want more, and always wish I could do with less. I wish civilization hadn't made cars, phones, and computers necessities instead of luxuries. I'm always shaken by the paradox that I could probably simplify my life if I only had more money right now to pay of my debts, invest in a home infrastructure that allowed me to do more with less--by a sewing machine, a giant spice-rack, a handful of strong, well-made, universally applicable clothing items to replace my vast patchwork of half-formed, invariably "settled-for" approximations of what I need, a vehicle or two. I'm always amused that the people exhorting us to shop with the worker in mind, abandoning price as our primary consideration, are usually a little higher on the economic food chain than the rest of us, and that "voluntary simplicity" so often seems to be by-product of affluence. And I may never fully reconcile myself with the frustrations of the art world, the ways that the mainstream seems to stifle innovation, the way that the underground allows deceptive bursts of success that all other underground artists will attempt in vain to replicate.

But in the end, while I'm not likely to stop using "bourgeois" as a shorthand for everything prosaic and yawnworthy, I should remember that I'm also implicating myself with that word . . . and that maybe that's not such a bad thing.