The Winnipeg Jets: Symbols of Vanished Reason and Morality

(source: cbc.ca)

When the Winnipeg Jets returned in the fall of 2011, I did not know whether I living was in Winnipeg or in Communist Russia.  That big, dominating Jets logo was as omnipresent as the hammer and sickle displayed at any pro-Communist rally.

I literally could not walk a distance of five metres without seeing that logo.  If I did not see it plastered onto the bumper of a car, I could certainly see it on a cap or shirt.  I saw it stitched to men and women, elderly and newborns, whites and blacks and Filipinos.  I saw Winnipeg Jets flags hanging down from trees and apartment balconies, towers of glass, and the ledges of homes -- inescapable colours and patterns.  I was not draped in those colours, but my mind certainly was.

The logo is one of identity, and identity means power.  Identity lets people define surrounding areas.  To many living in Winnipeg, the Winnipeg Jets logo represents the city itself.

Many stand in awe at the sight of professional athletes.  But it is not the athletes that wow us.  Instead, we wow ourselves.  When the Jets lose, many in Winnipeg get the collective sense that they lose.

I cannot simply say that mass celebration of victory is an ethos of living vicariously through professional sport.  Rather, mass celebration represents a collective self-affirmation.  There is a sense of defeatism among many who live in Winnipeg, and anytime a professional sports team wins a game, many get the sense that not all is lost. 

And by 'defeatism', I mean the collective sense that morality and justice are things of the past.  Having read the news over the past few years, I cannot blame those who feel this way.  Who can honestly be proud to live in a city where a man tortures and rapes his daughters over a span of seven years? 

Who can honestly feel that the forces of good prevail over the forces of evil when Richard Dow gets a mere 16-month sentence and credit for time served?

Who can conclude that reason is winning over sheer absurdity when Darrell Ackman, a man facing serious child pornography charges, gets enough signatures to run as a candidate in the Fort Whyte by-election?

When morals are gone, the symbol prevails.  In a way, the collective symbol dies when many feel that morals are regained.  The symbol of the New York Yankees is a good example.  In the 1970s, as crime, looting, prostitution, and bankruptcy ravaged 'Fear City', New Yorkers everywhere cheered for the Yankees.  The Yankees were the only thing New Yorkers could root for and talk about.  When crime went down, people were talking about things other than the Yankees. 

It is the symbol that obscures the darkness of identity.  When darkness is obscured, all will believe the myth of divine exceptionalism.  For those who believe the myth, I would suggest reading this great column by Bartley Kives. 

The following passage by Kives captures my feelings appropriately:

 

                               I've long argued the civic despair in the mid-1990s was not just about the 
                               loss of the Jets, but a vestigial sense of entitlement displayed by a city that
                               never quite got used to fact it wasn't important any more.  Many times then,
                               I've argued Winnipeg must get over itself and finally grow comfortable
                               within medium-sized, ordinary-city skin.

                               And now that the Jets are back, I wonder whether this will ever happen.  I
                               wonder whether the jingoism of the "True North!" chant has subsumed our
                               collective capacity for self-reflection. (source: winnipegfreepress.com)


The collective wearing of a brand requires no mental effort.  It is all about emotion, not logic.  In a city like this, one can get sick from thinking because the problems can be complicated.  Ultimately, there is a desire to wear something powerful in the wake of collective failure to right wrongs.  We decry our justice system yet elect politicians who appoint the same old group of judges.  We decry our civic infrastructure yet vote for the same people who vow to do nothing about it. 

The problems, of course, become more complicated, more convoluted.  But the mere presence of the Winnipeg Jets allows everyone to forget absurdity a little more easily.  The logo of the Jets is the Cross, and the MTS Centre is the Holy Temple.  Everyone will wear a Jets logo and go to a hockey game to cleanse their interior remorse.  Nothing is cleansed, but the fabrication is good enough for just a little satisfaction. 



Worship the iPhone

(source: infoline.com.pk)

According to this CNN article, people are posting offers on craigslist to stand in line for the new iPhone.  In previous times, people stood in line to watch religious and political figures.  Now people stand in line for gadgets.  

We live in secular times, apolitical times, postmodern times.  Piety and ideology no longer define our society. Technology does instead.

Redefining 'Hipster'

As you all may know, my CreComm buddy Jacob has a blog called Jacob Defends Hipsters.  It's an interesting read, and it inspired this blog post.

Jacob's blog is interesting because it got me thinking of the exact definition of the word 'hipster'.  Today, people use it to describe the D.I.Y., American Apparel-esque subculture that emerged throughout the 2000s.  Yet it seems strange that people would apply the word 'hipster' to a subculture.  To me, 'hipster' in the original sense is someone who is overly concerned with being 'cool'.

In the 1940s, 'hipster' meant something else.  In 1948, Anatole Broyard published this essay on hipsterdom in the '40s.  Broyard painted the picture of a 'hipster' as someone obsessed with jazz culture.

The following passage from Broyard is particularly interesting:

                                    Jive music and tea were the two most important components of the

                                    hipster's life. Music was not, as has often been supposed, a stimulus to  

                                    dancing. For the hipster rarely danced; he was beyond the reach of         

                                    stimuli. If he did dance, it was half parody—"second removism"—and 

                                    he danced only to the off-beat, in a morganatic one to two ratio with 

                                    the music. (source)

'Jive music' isn't exactly the kind of music that comes to mind when I think about hipsters and hipster subculture today.  For the longest time, I always thought 'hipsters' only listened to bands like Radiohead, The Shins, Spoon, and anything that Pitchfork Media praised.  But cultural definitions are changing, and thus, my judgments are entirely based on what I read on the Internet.  How would I define what a hipster was if I didn't visit this famous blog? 

But it's important to remember that you can't spell 'hipster' without 'hip'.  Yet to understand the word 'hipster', we need to know what is 'hip', and in what context do you define what is 'hip'? Do you define individualism as being 'hip' or being part of a subculture as being 'hip'? Ifwe  think of 'hip' of being the former, I can consider myself to be a hipster.  I've ventured into the thickest canyons of music web sites like rateyourmusic.com to find some of the most obscure music possible, and I don't identify with any kind of clothing brand.

I will argue, though, that the only thing 'individual' about a person is the way he or she experiences things. Tastes in music, movies, books, and television do not make us 'individuals'.  One can discover the most obscure music possible, but at the end of the day, at least five other people will be listening to it.  Subconsciously, I am part of a sub-culture.  I just don't have a membership card.

The concept of 'individualism' is not without virtue, but when 'individualism' becomes a label for people to assign themselves to, there are repercussions.  In trying to be 'individuals', we dull worldly experience.  The effort of trying to fit into such a box equals a miserable life, and at the end of the day, a person only declares him or herself to be 'individual'  by rejecting what a consumer culture defines as the opposite. 

The power of the supermarket is to create and reinforce dichotomies and labels.  Individualism vs. collectivism.  Hipster vs. square.  As consumers, we make the effort to trash conformity and embrace individualism.  But the very act of ascribing to the label of 'individualism' is just as conservative as conforming because every person on this earth engages in the practice of 'self-labeling'.  And by rejecting the act of labeling, I am labeling myself as someone who does not label.

You just can't beat them in the end.  Uniqueness is a dead thing when you reduce such a concept to mere molecules and atoms.

Pop Music: A Short-Term Memory

I'm sure everyone has already forgotten about this song:

 

 

Or this one:

 

 



 

 

Or this one:

 

 



 

 

Eventually, everyone will forget about this song, too:

 

 

 

 

 

With YouTube at its peak of dominance, we are witnessing a trend in popular music: no more songs that remain within memory.  Today, your typical pop song will really catch fire and stay on top of the charts for a few months.  Then it gets erased from memory as the next big song rises to the top of the charts.

 

There are exceptions to this rule, but there was a time where popular music, quality notwithstanding, stayed in peoples' heads for years, not mere months.  Pop music has always been quite disposable, but YouTube, iPods, and MP3s have made it even more disposable. 

 

Music is not dead as an artform, but as a business, it has changed rapidly in the Digital Age.  The music business is about selling emotions as style, and because it is easier to market style over substance, something that is emotionally resonant (not in a literal sense, of course) will shoot to the top of the charts.  But what we define as "resonance" has also changed rapidly.  Viral videos and technology have made the world more complicated, and perhaps we don't really know what we feel. 

 

Every generation bears a set of cultural markers.  For the YouTube generation, the one-hit-wonder is a cultural marker.  Pop music burns away quickly, and that speaks volumes about the fragmented consumer culture.

 

Yet there is something I do find fascinating: in an era where it is so easy to find new music, people still seem to wait for music to come to them.  Maybe today's youth are waiting for something to truly wow them.  Maybe people in general are waiting for something to flip the culture of music upside down.  But fragmented audiences and tastes mean it is unlikely we'll ever witness a major cultural shift. 

 

Or perhaps I'll be proven wrong.

 

 

 

 



 

 



Reality Is Meaningless in the Age of Reality

As everyone knows, NBC became the magnet of controversy when it decided to air an interview with Kris Jenner instead of a moment of silence dedicated to the 9/11 attacks.

Jenner is the mother of reality T.V. star Kim Kardashian.  In just a few decades, more will probably remember who Kim Kardashian was than Osama Bin Laden or anyone directly associated with 9/11.

Television rarely captures events so raw, and the September 11th attacks were the exception to that rule.  As ugly as those attacks were, the images of that day are incredibly endearing.  But that was a time where reality television was in its infancy.  Today, there are many more reality television shows to watch and many more cable channels to watch.  Images do not endear as long, and if images do not endear as long, neither does history.  Since reality is history in motion, we are moving into a pseudo-reality.  Objectively, the world as it stands never begins and ends in seconds or minutes.  But to the subjective mind, everything starts anew.

The 500-channel universe helped create that subjective mind.

A Las Vegas Epiphany

Source: FreeFoto.com

I'm in a stream of consciousness mode today.  I think one needs to be when talking about the mental imprint of Las Vegas consumerism.

People go to Las Vegas to assume the roles of giants, and if you're from Manitoba, it's wholly relevant, as many can't even locate Winnipeg on a map.  You get in that airplane seat and let your muscles liberate themselves as all Prairie cold exits your psyche and descends into that former wasteland.  

In the grasp of my leather seat, I saw the same reflection in the nearest window.  In the clouds, I stared at iron gates.  As all objects, dwellings, and beings below shrank to the level of fleas, my fingers seemed to grow bigger and more dominant.  The moment of highest levitation can be god-like, and in that god-like trance, I was all those towering things: a king at the peak of his yacht, a dictator on the podium with his devotees seated below.

But this master narrative vanished as I stepped outside the gates of the airport.

And then the realization began as I watched, from the window of the car, the pixie veneer of the Las Vegas Strip morph into a pulsating, blinking, bulbous of a mass waving its mechanical arms and legs for my full attention.  I tilted my head up to those electrical landmarks as an ant does to the peak of the topsoil.  From point to point, all the brands bore the presence of statues: Walgreens, Harley Davidson, the Hard Rock Cafe, everything else.  I was below, not above that man-made forest.  The flesh and smiles of all became irrelevant.

Evening was when the power really took effect.

All of the casinos and their respective signs engulfed and swallowed those who passed by.  Bodies became silhouettes.  The self-described "movers and shakers" looked more like molecules as the trance effect of blinking slogans propelled their girth towards gold-encrusted entrances.  Every sign had a purpose: to cast a pall over any who claimed dominance.  To lure them into a trap of built-up body fat, hollowed wallets, and deranged drunkenness.

The lotus of The Flamingo was a nucleus attracting smaller specimen.

The beacons emitting from the crest of Luxor became the focus of every driver.

When everyone either stopped to take the occasional picture or stand for the occasional glimpse, all faces became anonymous, cloaked -- every light erasing every identity.

The people and the lights were one.

Except the lights bore the power.  They merged into the last flood of the century washing out every city -- all lands and all faces were in a time-lapse state of total erosion.  It was just parallel energy regurgitating itself.

In this peak age of commercialism, humankind's creations have become bigger than humankind itself.  We were once larger than our methods of transportation and habitat, and now those very things run us.  The world became bigger, and we became smaller. This is the age of disconnection, and in the age of disconnection, all facets of consumerism rule over and whip the mind.  No person can ever claim to be mobile, for the car, the airplane, and the casinos all run us; we do not run them.  We only think we do because of the false sense of agency advertising has given us.  Every advertising sign is not an invitation.  Every sign is, in a way, a mockery of the human body, for in Las Vegas, people migrate like flies from casino to casino, and in no way can one call an attraction to things "agency" or "independence".

And thus I say goodbye to the mythical era of giants.



   

The Kitchen Sink Day-Spa Experience

source:  epinions.com

We can't simply do dishes anymore.

Because in this technological era, even the most minuscule labour is all but tedious to many, and dishwashing is no exception.  Thus, all of us demand excitement out of our products, especially the ones that go unnoticed.

The rule of today: everything must be an experience.  The fragmented world leads everyone to believe so, as one immediately notices that almost every new product is designed to grab our shrinking attention: sleeved blankets, living room recliners that massage, ultra high-definition televisions....

So it doesn't surprise me to see that society's constant demand for the sublime is affecting the household cleaner market.  Colgate-Palmolive Canada Inc. has taken advantage of such demand with its newest line of Palmolive dish soaps.

A good example is the Ultra Palmolive Aroma Sensations dishwashing liquid.  When I looked at the description of the product, one particular passage caught my eye: 

                             Sometimes a good smell can make all the difference when you are doing a

                             household chore.  It can perk you up, relax you, or even cause you to start

                             singing. (source: colgate.ca)

Washing dishes is supposed to be a meaningless task.  Yet in the zenith of the Industrial Revolution, humankind has developed a need for comfort anytime, anywhere.  Clothes must be of comfort, cars must be of comfort, and washing dishes must be of comfort.  Comfort is western society's most treasured fetish.  Western society today is truly an enigma: the more innovative its inventions, the more vulnerable its citizens become.

We'll soon be demanding comfort everywhere, even while shoveling manure.

                                   

Introduction

Consumerism is the most telling thing about an entire civilization.

We are told that people buy things for either want or need, but we are never told about how the things we buy end up dictating our lives.  Instead, we just insert those debit cards and move on to the next foray.

But what we buy impacts our consciousness.  Society's as well, for it can be said that human consciousness is a collective one.  What we purchase impacts our rationalities, judgements, and emotions, and we thus defy all societal definitions.  This collective act of defiance will have repercussions for all that is traditional, virtuous or not.  Ultimately, we will re-write the rules for consumerism and for future civilizations as a whole.

I have created this blog as a means of trying to make meaning.  What do brand products say about society's mental state? What do they mean for the future? And, most importantly, what do they say about what it means to be human today?

I want to know.  Maybe you as well.