Class and Society:

TAKE A NUMBER

Recently I have found that when I look through the newspaper in the morning I invariably stop on the full page of camera advertisements. I purchased a modest little Nikon digital camera a few months ago and already I have camera envy. I look with longing at the ad for the Nikon D-70 6.1 megapixel camera. I try to imagine how my life would be different with such a camera in my possession. My guess is that I would be dating a movie star or something. To be honest, I have no fucking idea who or what a megapixel really is, but I know that more of them is somehow better than fewer.

Everything you purchase should be numbered like digital cameras. Say you buy a pair of shoes, along with the size they should be numbered as to their quality and price. That sort of system already exists for all practical purposes but numbering objects would save us all a lot of time and energy. A product would be rated on a scale from 1-10. This system would obviate the advertising industry as we know it today. Most ads on TV and in print are not about giving information about the product, but about the status the product will confer upon the buyer.

Cars could have the numbers right on the hood. An economy car would have a 1 while a luxury sedan would rate a 10. The numbers would be subject to change. If you bought a used 10 it would be down-graded accordingly. You can no longer pretend like you are rich by driving a ten year old piece of crap BMW. If you bought a used 1 (God, you are such a loser!) some sort of sub-1, humiliating symbol would replace the 1.

Engagement ring purchases would certainly be easier under this new system. We could do away with those silly diamonds entirely. You could just buy a ring with a number on it. “Oh my God, you got a 10! He must love you so much.” Under the present system of actual diamonds we are forced to carry around a jeweler’s glass and be experts in gemology in order to be judgmental about some girl’s ridiculous engagement ring stone. I mean, to hell with cut and clarity; just give me a number. Does he love you enough to buy you a 10 or not? I happen to think you are worth it.

Let’s take this a step further. I just saw some tech dork walk by with one of those ID cards held around her neck with a lanyard. We could just force everyone to wear one of those things but instead of an ID there would be a copy of your W2 Form. Under this system you wouldn’t have to buy much. If you make a lot you could take the bus and still impress people.

I Just Want to Be Entertained

“I just want to be entertained.” I hear that sentence a lot from people trying to justify wading up to their ears in the sewage that makes up a lot of popular movies and television programs. Why are so many people terrified to do anything to improve their intellectual well being? These same people are often terrifically ambitious about improving their monetary or physical well being.

Take a look at a lot of the patrons of the gym where I go. The place isn’t exactly cheap so I would imagine that most of the members are doing fairly well financially to afford a luxury like a fancy inner-city health club. Now go and look at the magazine rack of the periodicals left there by members. Fucking People Magazine is about all you will find, that or some other rag that drools over celebrities (Entertainment, In Style, Cosmopolitan, etc). Call me a snob but I would just as rather scream over the gym intercom that I am a fatuous, brain-dead zombie than read one of those awful rags.

My other pet peeve at the gym (as anyone who reads Leftbanker already has been bored to tears hearing about) is the constant playing of CNN on the TV’s. CNN is the People Magazine of television news. On that channel today some Republican mouthpiece said that the movie Shrek II would be more factual than Moore’s film. I don’t know about that but I can say that CNN has spent more time reporting on Shrek II than about how the war in Iraq has affected Iraqi citizens.

What we refer to as art and entertainment these days contains very little substance. Many modern writers who I admire greatly have almost nothing to say about the culture we inhabit. When a writer writes about being a writer then you almost always know that the writer has completely given up on trying to understand the world around them.

I find it odd that people are so threatened by an artist such as Michael Moore who chooses to actually say something in a film. I don’t think Moore is any sort of intellectual but his heart is in the right place as far as I’m concerned. I do find him to be a highly entertaining and funny filmmaker.

In a culture of coma-inducing tripe like Dodge Ball and American Idol, passively watching the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 may be the first political act a lot of people in this country ever commit. I only hope that their second political act will be to vote in the coming election.

Waaiting on Somebody

I was just wondering if I could stare into the blank screen of my laptop for the entire time it takes for the battery to fizzle out? I have run out of other things to do here while I wait for inspiration to arrive. I feel like someone waiting for a blind date to show up. I hope he’s cute. I’m wearing black work out clothes so at least I won’t look fat. Today it looks like I might get stood up. Inspiration often pulls that on me. If I had his number I’d call and leave a nasty message.

I don’t have his number so I sit and wait. Whenever the door opens I look up hopefully but it’s not him. There is nothing in the paper to piss me off significantly enough to compel me to write some sort of blow-hard opinion piece. No shortage of blow-hard opinion pieces out here on the internet, we’re full of opinions.

I did get a kick out of that story of how the State Department claimed back in April that terrorism declined sharply in 2003. Yesterday the State Department announced that the earlier claim was incorrect. “I’m sorry, did we say best year? We meant worst year for terrorism.”

I’m too depressed about the bottom-dwelling Mariners to write anything about baseball. The M’s lost 2-10 against the Rangers. How could M’s fans be further humiliated? Maybe they could dump a bucket of filthy mop water on the first 10,000 fans before the next home game. How about after every loss for the remainder of the season clowns standing at the exits hit each fan in the face with a pie or hit people over the head with a dead chicken? Fans of a last place team would take that sort of abuse passively enough. Almost anything is better that getting beat 2-10 by fucking TEXAS!

Should I wait a little more for Mister Inspiration or should I just say “screw it” and pack up? I’ve got better things to do than wait around for that creep. I have a book I’m almost finished with. I haven’t played my piano in so long I’m afraid that it may have gone feral on me. I have a good excuse for not playing: I have a bunch of winter clothes on the bench that need to go downstairs for Seattle’s two month summer. My piano could be the world’s biggest and most expensive laundry hamper. It certainly hasn’t qualified as a musical instrument in a while.

I’m sorry I’ve had to drag you into this mess. You don’t need to hear about my relationship with Inspiration. I guess I don’t need to tell anyone who reads this tripe I write that, for me, inspiration is like a cross between Sasquatch and a dead-beat dad: dubious at best and quite possibly abusive. Inspiration is like my imaginary girlfriend who I tell people lives in Canada. Inspiration gives me a black eye and I tell people at work that it was my own fault.

Putting on Our Thinking Caps

I came across a few things that I have been pondering. I read that there were over 250,000 breast enhancement operations performed last year in this country. On the cover of a magazine in the grocery line there was some woman who had undergone plastic surgeries (plural--very plural from the looks of her ‘before’ picture) as part of some TV show. The headline on the cover asked if perhaps TV had gone “too far.” Unless the show is called Frankenstein I would have to say that, yes, they probably went too far. And then I started thinking about all of those fake boobs again.

Consider 250,000 breast enhancements, each adding--on average--four cubic inches to the bust; that is an annual increase of 1,000,000 cubic inches in bust for the nation. I’m not a scientist so I have no idea of the medical results of this staggering figure but as a philosopher I can ponder the moral, ethical, and environmental implications.

If we look at this from a conservation standpoint I think we are on to something here. I propose that instead of using saline implants we use landfill matter to make fake boobs, ditto with collagen lip injections. We could reduce landfill usage by 35% annually. The new breast implants would need to include vents for the methane fumes released by landfill matter but that would be a simple procedure (a vent disguised as a piercing?). Indoor areas with heavy breast implants traffic—an Academy Awards presentation, for example—would need extra air circulation, but the benefits of this proposal far outweigh the adverse results.

Now back to the other matter. Please tell me that there really isn’t a TV show in which people get all kinds of plastic surgery. Please tell me that this is just a practical joke on me, because I can take getting laughed at for being so gullible as to believe that there actually could be a TV show where people get plastic surgery just for the hell of it. I would rather get laughed at for that than know that I live in a culture that is so incredibly bored and fatuous that people watch TV shows about other people getting cut up and rearranged.

If that isn’t a big joke on me then the next question is: Where do we go from here? Let’s all pretend that we are Hollywood entertainment big shots sitting around a conference room discussing the future of television. How do we go even lower than a show in which people are butchered by doctors? How about a game show where contestants pig out at an all-you-can-eat buffet and then see who can take the biggest dump? I know that is disgusting and puerile but I’m thinking that someone has pitched that idea to producers in America’s entertainment capital. Maybe it is already in development.

How about a show where you get to throw your TV off a cliff and it lands on a Hollywood producer or a talk show host? How about a show where you watch people at the library reading books and becoming more interesting instead of morphing into a pile of horse manure right there on their arm chairs in front of the tube? Would you watch a horror movie called Planet of the Women with Natural Breasts and Very Little Make-up?

BONUS BIT I have long felt that our national motto of E Pluribus Unum is obsolete and in need of an overhaul. Today I found its replacement. On the side window of a dirty van someone had written, “Show Us Ur Tits Now!" I think this phrase better defines the America of the early years of the 21rst century. I like the “Now” part as it adds the quality of an implied threat to this command.

How To Goof Off in a Café

If this essay sounds familiar that is because I have plagiarized myself and distilled a couple of essays to come up with this one.

My introduction to European café etiquette started when I was a 19 year old summer school student in France—my first time in Europe. I would go to a café for a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, drink it, pay the check, and leave. I quickly noticed that everyone who was there when I arrived was still there when I stood up to leave. I became self-conscious of my haste. I quickly began to see cafes as a sort of game; a waiting game.
 
I began to take note of the other patrons when I first took a seat. I would nurse my coffee or glass of wine to make it last while I waited for other people in the café to call it quits. I would write letters to pass the time, or read, or simply people watch. I quickly learned that there are worse ways to spend time than sitting on the terrace of a Parisian café. I have since come to believe that there are few better ways to spend and hour or two or three.
 
I got pretty good at the waiting game my first summer in Europe, but I never won. It didn’t matter how patient I was; I could have been in the middle of the best book I had ever read; I could have been engaged in the most interesting conversation of my young life (that wouldn’t have been saying much at 19); it didn’t matter. There would always be some grizzled old French guy in a beret and a seemingly bottomless glass of red who wasn’t about to be hurried out of his café by some hyperactive American kid raised on too much sugar and television. I would tip my imaginary beret to him as I left. “Today you win, but tomorrow is another day, yes monsieur?” For all I know that old French guy never left that table, ever, but I liked his style.
 
Back in America this sort of behavior would be called loitering. Loiter: to spend time idly. In America we have equated loitering with not spending money, or not spending enough money, or not spending money fast enough, and we have made that illegal. After several years of living and traveling around the Mediterranean, the most café-influenced culture on the planet, I learned that if loitering were against the law there you’d have to build a pretty big fence to contain the guilty. In the Mediterranean they have a different word for what we would call loitering. The closest English equivalent to this word would be ‘living.’
 
It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of the café in the quotidian life of many Europeans. Cafes are a meeting spot for friends, or a place where you won’t feel out of place sitting by yourself. You can read the morning paper, or write a letter. They are a place to be among people, or a refuge from the crowded street. A café is a good spot to begin an evening out with friends, or the last stop on the way home. A café terrace is like your living room with better coffee and a view.
 
I had been brought up to believe that consumption was the purpose of going to a bar or restaurant. I soon learned during that first summer in Europe that what you bought at the café was definitely not the main point of the whole exercise. That glass of wine was merely the rent you paid for the wonderful piece of café real estate that you had chosen or had chosen you. The food and drink aspect is a secondary concern.
 
When I go to Europe the first thing I do is head for a café.  When I come back home cafes are what I miss the most.  The explosive growth of coffee shops in America is a response to this basic human need for community.  Coffee shops aren’t quite the same thing, they aren’t as utilitarian, they are a lot more casual, but they are a good start.   
 
The primary function of a cafe is to offer a shared public space. The public space you are sharing may be next to some movie star at an ultra chic Parisian café, or next to a shepherd in a remote Greek mountain village, but the idea is still the same. It doesn’t matter what language you use to order your beer, the same rules of the café apply. Sit back, slowly sip your wine, and try not to think of loitering as a bad thing.