I and I deal in righteousness!
Apr. 19th, 2008 10:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy latest piece for New York Times magazine blog The Moment is Ethical consumerism's next wave. It links Virtual Water with secondhand clothes and the non-consumerism of Fumiko Imano's "Dream Closet" performance.
I won't keep pretending the blog isn't real, but I'm fascinated by the kind of dialectics my Post-Materialist slot sets up with its context -- this week, for instance, the message "just don't buy clothes" finds itself luring readers towards ads for Bloomingdale's bags.
With my current thinking on hypocrisy, I'm much more inclined to see this as "generative dynamism" or "an interesting tension" or "a realistic complexity" than the h-word. Or, if it is hypocrisy -- a secular ethical sin of sorts -- it's also an opportunity to introduce the concept of other secular ethical sins, like the list I begin this week's article with: unfair trade, non-recycling, carbon emissions, water waste.
In other words, in order to bang an ethical drum about the evils of consumerism in a consumerist forum, I need to be a hypocrite of some sort. I need to commit at least one sin in order to raise consciousness about others. Anything else would be preaching to the choir. But there are risks. For a start, there's the risk that I'll become like some kind of homeless rasta at a swank cocktail party, tolerated but ignored as I slump in the corner muttering about how Babylon shall fall as the mighty Lion of Judah rises in righteousness. Secondly, there's the risk that ethical consumerism just fits into the dialectic already at work in our attitude to our own consumerism: guilty pleasures, rich and poor, need and plethora, famine and feast, boom and bust, anorexia and bulimia.
A consumer magazine can as easily appetize its readers as ethicize them by talking about scenarios in which people are too poor to consume. Take Fumiko Imano's Dream Closet performance, for instance. I try to present it as something ethical -- consume expensive clothes without actually buying them! -- but when I interview Fumiko she tells me she isn't interested in that. She's rather down on ecology and ethical consumerism. She thinks it's hypocritical. But even if she'd been 100% eco-ethically correct in her statements, the vision of her trying on clothes in London and Paris could well be appetizing, a consumerist lure. There's a distinct sense, in the film, that Fumiko is "getting something for nothing" -- the exact same sense that advertisers often invoke when they offer free prizes as a way to lure us into thinking about making purchases.
It's an idea I keep coming back to: things contain their opposite. An ethical post-materialist column could well kindle consumerist urges. It seems to be working that way on me: I may be the Times' post-materialist Babylon Critic (an' ting), but the person I'd most like to be is Chandler Burr, the paper's Perfume Critic. I've become fascinated by Chandler's slot in The Moment, Scent Notes. Yes, I have column envy. While I write plainly and sternly about water, Burr is writing the most florid, elegant prose imaginable about Ballade Verte by Manuel Canovas.
"Ballade Verte," purrs Burr, "smells to me like the authentic aromatic gum resin galbanum, an ancient raw material from modern-day Iran. Galbanum is listed as a sweet herb in chapter 30 of Exodus. (”And thou shalt make it a perfume,” God tells Moses, “a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy.”) It is, in fact, bitter to the taste, but the scent is like nothing else: deeply, darkly, earthily green, old and musty in the best way, a rich and almost rotting organic green like fresh branches mixed into soil. Dirtier than vetiver, richer than basil, greener than myrrh... The result is a scent to wear on chilly nights at parties in marble halls — perhaps the foyer of the New York Public Library."
Burr gets to be biblical too, but instead of invoking sin he conjures an ancient sensuality through olfactory poetry -- the necessary descriptive impressionism scent (still impossible to quantify or qualify any other way) demands. And how completely fabulous that he gets not only to describe these musks, but recommend the locations (the New York Public Library, "where the candles burn, the men are wearing black tie, and the women wear long black gowns, pearls, and ancient green galbanum") they should be worn in! No wonder Morrissey leaves a comment!
Something about Burr's evocative, aristocratic style reminds me of my favourite Times writer, the late great Herbert Muschamp, the paper's architectural critic, who died last year of lung cancer aged 59. Muschamp was an outrageous stylist, comparing Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, for instance, to Judy Garland's face "framed by her splayed hands". Here he is recalling his student days at the Architectural Association and being shown around London by a young Derek Jarman. That article is flawed -- Muschamp attributes a building to the Smithsons which wasn't by them at all -- but his prose is rich and aromatic. And what would a great perfume be without its flaws and contradictions? A bit like consumerism without sin, perhaps. Jah Rastafari!
I won't keep pretending the blog isn't real, but I'm fascinated by the kind of dialectics my Post-Materialist slot sets up with its context -- this week, for instance, the message "just don't buy clothes" finds itself luring readers towards ads for Bloomingdale's bags.
With my current thinking on hypocrisy, I'm much more inclined to see this as "generative dynamism" or "an interesting tension" or "a realistic complexity" than the h-word. Or, if it is hypocrisy -- a secular ethical sin of sorts -- it's also an opportunity to introduce the concept of other secular ethical sins, like the list I begin this week's article with: unfair trade, non-recycling, carbon emissions, water waste.
In other words, in order to bang an ethical drum about the evils of consumerism in a consumerist forum, I need to be a hypocrite of some sort. I need to commit at least one sin in order to raise consciousness about others. Anything else would be preaching to the choir. But there are risks. For a start, there's the risk that I'll become like some kind of homeless rasta at a swank cocktail party, tolerated but ignored as I slump in the corner muttering about how Babylon shall fall as the mighty Lion of Judah rises in righteousness. Secondly, there's the risk that ethical consumerism just fits into the dialectic already at work in our attitude to our own consumerism: guilty pleasures, rich and poor, need and plethora, famine and feast, boom and bust, anorexia and bulimia.
A consumer magazine can as easily appetize its readers as ethicize them by talking about scenarios in which people are too poor to consume. Take Fumiko Imano's Dream Closet performance, for instance. I try to present it as something ethical -- consume expensive clothes without actually buying them! -- but when I interview Fumiko she tells me she isn't interested in that. She's rather down on ecology and ethical consumerism. She thinks it's hypocritical. But even if she'd been 100% eco-ethically correct in her statements, the vision of her trying on clothes in London and Paris could well be appetizing, a consumerist lure. There's a distinct sense, in the film, that Fumiko is "getting something for nothing" -- the exact same sense that advertisers often invoke when they offer free prizes as a way to lure us into thinking about making purchases.
It's an idea I keep coming back to: things contain their opposite. An ethical post-materialist column could well kindle consumerist urges. It seems to be working that way on me: I may be the Times' post-materialist Babylon Critic (an' ting), but the person I'd most like to be is Chandler Burr, the paper's Perfume Critic. I've become fascinated by Chandler's slot in The Moment, Scent Notes. Yes, I have column envy. While I write plainly and sternly about water, Burr is writing the most florid, elegant prose imaginable about Ballade Verte by Manuel Canovas.
"Ballade Verte," purrs Burr, "smells to me like the authentic aromatic gum resin galbanum, an ancient raw material from modern-day Iran. Galbanum is listed as a sweet herb in chapter 30 of Exodus. (”And thou shalt make it a perfume,” God tells Moses, “a confection after the art of the apothecary, tempered together, pure and holy.”) It is, in fact, bitter to the taste, but the scent is like nothing else: deeply, darkly, earthily green, old and musty in the best way, a rich and almost rotting organic green like fresh branches mixed into soil. Dirtier than vetiver, richer than basil, greener than myrrh... The result is a scent to wear on chilly nights at parties in marble halls — perhaps the foyer of the New York Public Library."
Burr gets to be biblical too, but instead of invoking sin he conjures an ancient sensuality through olfactory poetry -- the necessary descriptive impressionism scent (still impossible to quantify or qualify any other way) demands. And how completely fabulous that he gets not only to describe these musks, but recommend the locations (the New York Public Library, "where the candles burn, the men are wearing black tie, and the women wear long black gowns, pearls, and ancient green galbanum") they should be worn in! No wonder Morrissey leaves a comment!
Something about Burr's evocative, aristocratic style reminds me of my favourite Times writer, the late great Herbert Muschamp, the paper's architectural critic, who died last year of lung cancer aged 59. Muschamp was an outrageous stylist, comparing Frank Gehry's Disney Concert Hall, for instance, to Judy Garland's face "framed by her splayed hands". Here he is recalling his student days at the Architectural Association and being shown around London by a young Derek Jarman. That article is flawed -- Muschamp attributes a building to the Smithsons which wasn't by them at all -- but his prose is rich and aromatic. And what would a great perfume be without its flaws and contradictions? A bit like consumerism without sin, perhaps. Jah Rastafari!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 09:29 am (UTC)Just write as the epicure you are, is what I say, and let 'em experience responsibility as something lush and sinful. If anyone can do it, it's you.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 09:34 am (UTC)I think my problem with "hypocrisy" is that people think its contradictions are the end of dialogue, when in fact they're the beginning.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 09:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 09:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:07 am (UTC)Hisae bought a lacey white dress while I was interviewing Ahlem.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:26 am (UTC)What have you got against Rick Astley? >:O
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:33 am (UTC)In Momism this -- along with worship of the evil Rick, antithesis to the good Nick -- is the ultimate blasphemy. Only Momus comes from Mount Olympus! Hang your self-worshipping head in shame, Microworlds!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:35 am (UTC)NEVER GONNA LET U DOWN
THIS IS THE MOTTO OF ASTLEY-ISM, WHAT ABOUT MOMISM, HMM???
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:58 am (UTC)RICK IS VERY ANGRY
Date: 2008-04-19 11:07 am (UTC)Gun the man down!
Date: 2008-04-19 11:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 11:53 am (UTC)shadow mind
Date: 2008-04-21 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 10:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 11:01 am (UTC)The outcome for the planet is the same. The choice for us is a choice of pains -- small pain now, or big pain later.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 11:33 am (UTC)Social 'rewards' are heaped on people who 'have it all' and fulfill this ideal. It's a yuppie -orientated
ethos, aided and abetted by a docile mass media and an education system which, by and large, is geared towards the needs of the market and fails to equip people with the necessary critical tools to survive in this environment. Obviously, it's not all-encompassing and there are exceptions (let's face it, or we wouldn't be having this chat now) but I do get the impression most people who have any kind of critical position have it in spite of the above, not because of it, and have often paid dearly in one way or another, for having adopted it.
Anyway, I digress...So if you have a nation of people who refuse to face reality about themselves, about the rest of the world, about anything,
they want reinforcement for the fantasy that they're living in. Market research will show you that. I don't think that people will "be mature enough to slow consumption down to the necessary sustainable levels" any time soon. (I see it every day - people look at me almost in horror when I say I get 99% of what I need from skips or the local flea market. People can't believe I repair VHS machines and CRT televisions, which, to them, should be thrown in the landfill in favour of flat panel screens.) Now, how do you think all that's going to turn around?! I've no idea but it won't be soon, that's for sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 11:49 am (UTC)Or perhaps a sort of Harry Houdini "punch me harder" attitude? An idea that criticism would make the system stronger? That is what we see, mostly, I think. It's a homeopathic injection of poisons, an integration of dissents, which ultimately strengthens the system. That's essentially why my anti-consumerist column is allowed in a consumerist magazine.
And here we get to your second question. I think enlightened self-interest will save the system. But I think it will come from the top down, not from the bottom up. It will come from people like the Chinese government, not from Chinese consumers.
what about...
Date: 2008-04-19 01:46 pm (UTC)I know this is a little off topic, and I think the hypocrisy jazz is fascinating as well, I just wanted to get this idea out as someone living in Berlin who has been trying to reconcile life in an urban area (which seems increasingly to me to mean nothing more than a large concentration of people sucking up resources unapologetically from the land base around them) with an anti-consumerist stance. It IS difficult and rife with contradiction, but it seems like there are other ways outside of changing the stores where one shops to approach the dilemma, especially here.
patrick
Re: what about...
Date: 2008-04-19 02:53 pm (UTC)As for reconciling life in an urban area with ethical living, actually the high densities we achieve in cities are the most efficient environmentally. Skyscrapers and high density housing developments are much more ethical and efficient ways to live than sprawled out in the countryside.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 02:56 pm (UTC)http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2537279.ece
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 01:22 pm (UTC)Hmm, rastarian eh? Then you have to smoke pot! It is a part of their religion, unless you call yourself a Neo-rastafarian, or Post-rastafarian! ;)
momus is my duppy conqueror
Date: 2008-04-19 02:30 pm (UTC)(that isn't a fright wig you have on momu -- but dreadlocks in moonlight)
Lightning flash and thunder rolleth!
This post makes me happy in about 1000 different ways momus. Come here and let me *kiss* (http://southerncrossreview.org/49/borges-judas-eng.htm) you on the cheek.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. Selah.
Re: momus is my duppy conqueror
Date: 2008-04-19 03:17 pm (UTC)Re: momus is my duppy conqueror
Date: 2008-04-19 04:54 pm (UTC)Re: momus is my duppy conqueror
Date: 2008-04-19 07:32 pm (UTC)the dionysian impulse
Date: 2008-04-19 08:20 pm (UTC)Or with an acre of poppies -- 4 teen overdoses, 2 urban ghettoes created, 20 families destroyed, and 5 musicians who will start to play "grunge" style music.
An acre of hops and an acre of herb would certainly have their downsides as well - car crashes, wives beaten, oreos eaten... but from a harm reduction standpoint, I think the case is clear.
I am not pretending to an asceticism tha I don't practice, on certain nights, perhaps twice a month, say while listening to a mysterious broadcast, or some broken sounding reggae, I have been known to blow some smoke, but I am 95% against drugs and always have been.
(btw - I've seen your naked picture momus. "Column" envy isn't something you should be worrying about;)
Re: the dionysian impulse
Date: 2008-04-20 12:33 pm (UTC)We might find more and we might find less but let us at least consider that we got a limited amount of materials.
Re: the dionysian impulse
Date: 2008-04-20 05:09 pm (UTC)http://www.worldwrite.org.uk/
Your humanist tangent here is both enlightened and vital.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 02:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 02:55 pm (UTC)NOW WHERE ARE HIS DAUGHTERS?
(in b4 lol bad lube)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 02:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 02:59 pm (UTC)*must not make jokes involving Bolan and incest :(*
SODOMISING
HIS ONLY SONINTOLERANCE?(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 03:35 pm (UTC)Being the woman in pearls at the NYPL and the urban forager both have their richness and pleasures but, increasingly, high-end consumption has become like the most obsessive bulimia: binging and vomiting goods ad nauseam. Yet the patient, despite it's self-destructive behavior, freakishly grows stronger, refuses to die. I finally watched Manufactured Landscapes and, fittingly, hours later a friend teased me for having such an old (perfectly functioning) ipod. As if I should toss the embarrassment on the massive scrap barge bound for China and run out and buy a new one.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-19 07:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 01:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-21 04:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-04-22 03:11 am (UTC)