Accismus

In matters of grooming and dress, I am sometimes stylish, but rarely fashionable. I hope the same holds true for my creative output, but unfortunately, I fear the opposite is frequently the case for my ideas.

As this article points out:

There is a vast gap between fashion and style. Fashion is about clothes and their relationship to the moment. Style is about you and your relationship to yourself.

And

Style is also one part personality: spirit, verve, attitude, wit, inventiveness. It demands the desire and confidence to express whatever mood one wishes. Such variability is not only necessary but a reflection of a person’s unique complexity as a human being. People want to be themselves and to be seen as themselves. In order to work, style must reflect the real self, the character and personality of the individual; anything less appears to be a costume.

As anyone who’s ever tried to wear something too advanced for them knows, you can’t fake style that doesn’t belong to you. Nothing looks sillier than a person dressed in a way that makes them self-conscious and uncomfortable. I knew early on that I would not do well in outfits that needed to be managed, and in shoes that required an adjustment in pace. I might look silly wearing flip-flops with a cocktail dress, but believe me, I look far stupider trying to mince around in heels like I mean it.

Having recently moved into a new apartment, I’ve been setting up my room, and it occurred to me that, with each move over the years, the way I design my living and working space has more and more conformed to a certain, specific style, regardless of the differences in the actual rooms themselves (which differences have been vast). I like clean surfaces, a good deal of floor space, blues and greens, and stacks of things. I do not like anything small, decorative or incidental. I don’t have knick-knacks, or pictures on the walls.  There is almost nothing in my room that doesn’t have a daily, utilitarian purpose. It’s fascist-chic.  But at the same time, I do choose my useful objects with aesthetic qualities in mind.

Here’s designer Nikolay Saveliev (via Kottke):

 I like the idea of a consolidated aesthetic totality; what you make looks like what you listen to, sounds like what you wear, and speaks like what you believe in. In simpler terms, my girlfriend might look like she’s in a band I’d listen to, my haircut looks like it belongs in the chair I’m sitting in, and the work I’m designing might be written about in a book that I would read. Even my cat has to figure in there somehow. It’s a meticulous thing to maintain, but probably comes from the fact that I’ve discovered mostly everything through music, whether it’s ideologies, writers, artists, designers, cultures, subcultures, or other music. So it’s easy to tie things back into your work, as long as you keep your eyes and ears open, and maintain a healthy dose of critical thought.

Um, okay.  But actually, I think that many of us structure our lives this way to some extent, without being fully conscious of it. You design a personality in the same way you design your look. You pick and choose your political and religious philosophies. Choosing not to decorate a room can be as much a nod to one’s style as decorating it. I design my eating habits to match whatever goals I’m working on at any given time. I live in Williamsburg, land of dressing the part: you can’t be a starving artist if you look flush and fed, so everyone wears rags that accentuate their willful anorexia. Their slight waistlines reflect their genius (possibly in a more literal way than they’d prefer).

One big benefit to creating and adhering to a fully defined personal style is that it helps us easily weed through the massive amount of options that are available to us in every respect. Walking into a department store can be a dizzying horror of over-stimulation . . . unless you know you only wear black shift dresses, or only wear certain labels, or have a system whereby you purchase one kicky garment per month for the precise amount left over after you’ve met your expenses. Picking a book can be overwhelming, unless you narrow your interests to World War II and Catherine the Great, or vow never to read literature by contemporary authors, or only read comedies or mysteries. Style works as a sorting mechanism. If someone refuses to read Harry Potter no matter how much you assure them they’ll love it if they just give it a chance, it’s because it’s not a part of their self-defined style. It doesn’t fit.  Maybe they’ve decided they don’t do children’s literature, or fantasies, or anything that everybody’s currently into, and if they admit the possibility of liking this one exception, they have to alter their entire criteria, and that’s a whole big thing. 

We all enjoy constant and easy access to such an abundance of information and culture now. The challenge today is choosing what to consume and what to skip. All Them often say that the population is getting stupider, but I think the opposite is true, and, as this (cheering, if long) article proposes, the level of the dialogue has really gone up:

In most rich countries, the old distinction between high and popular culture is breaking down. . . . Millions more people are going to museums, literary festivals and operas; millions more watch demanding television programmes or download serious-minded podcasts. Not all these activities count as mind-stretching, of course. Some are downright fluffy. But, says Donna Renney, the chief executive of the Cheltenham Festivals, audiences increasingly want “the buzz you get from working that little bit harder”. This is a dramatic yet often unrecognised development. “When people talk and write about culture,” says Ira Glass, the creator of the riveting public-radio show “This American Life”, “it’s apocalyptic. We tell ourselves that everything is in bad shape. But the opposite is true. There’s an abundance of really interesting things going on all around us.”

I read an article (somewhere, some time ago..in The New Yorker, maybe?) that discussed how much more sophisticated television shows have gotten. Sure, there are a number of dumb ones, and quite a lot of formulaic ones, as well, but shows such as The Sopranos, Lost, Deadwood, etc. are unprecedented in their complexity, requiring viewers to retain and recall a great number of fully-developed characters enacting multiple storylines, which proceed at differing paces and occasionally overlap and inform each other in complicated ways.

I don’t know why it’s so often said that the web is making people stupider. I can hardly see how people in general can help but grow more and more sophisticated as we all have greater and greater exposure to…well, everything.

Sort of.

But then again, perhaps we’re all generalists, dabblers and fakes. Whereas there used to (by which I mean, you know, back then) be fewer intellectuals (by which I mean people who spent a good deal of their time reading, thinking and writing), those intellectuals really dug in. They were all equally familiar with an agreed-upon canon, they had classical educations. Maybe now there are more people who are somewhat interested and a little bit knowledgeable about a great many things, but the standards of deep and specific scholarship have declined, along with the number of serious scholars. Or not – I’m not basing any of this on actual data.

Here’s one challenge to the above article:

Yes, I believe that society is consuming more high culture, but why? Is it because we desire to learn, or because we want to appear that we’ve learned-that we’re cultured, intelligent, and eclectic? Since, particularly due the hipster oeuvre, intelligence is the new chic.

Chic, and easy to attain. Learn to pronounce Foucault, drop a well-placed Freaks and Geeks reference, read a few Great Books, subscribe to HBO and the Economist, mix in a little ironic Lil Wayne appreciation, and suddenly, you’ve got class, intelligence, and culture. And everyone perusing your Facebook knows it. Appearance, not reality.

(via Readerville)

I’m not one of those cheerleaders that believe reading in itself is somehow a wonderful intellectual activity, regardless of the literary content of the material. Is reading the back of a Cheerios box a more intellectual task than watching Citizen Kane? Likewise, I wouldn’t say that reading (or watching or listening to) something you’re completely unable to truly comprehend is a worthwhile way to spend your time. I remember reading Animal Farm in ninth grade, before I had any knowledge whatsoever of political theory or Stalinist Russia (although not all of my classmates were so woefully ignorant), and I got nothing out of it at the time, even though I was able to successfully fake comprehension.

But at the same time, intellectual curiosity is desirable in and of itself, and if that intellectual curiosity is only born of social trends, well, so much the better. If society is making it trendy to be smart, well-read and verbose, isn’t that preferable to honoring thinness, stupidity and purchasing power? And if most people don’t possess a great amount of in-depth knowledge about very many things, isn’t it better to know something about some things than nothing about anything?

I hope so.  If not, I should really stop writing this blog.