saigesaunders

[saigesaunders]

where have we been? where are we going?

WARNING! This is gonna be a long ass post. Read on only if you dare.

Where have we been this semester? Who have we examined? Whose minds have we tried to get inside? Too many to count. So in preparation of my final paper for which I don’t even know where to start I thought I would make a post containing all my favorite people, poems, songs, outfits and pictures that I loved from this semester. 

So lets start at the beginning. Who better than Nietzsche? My man. That dude was seriously fucked up and an old white dude which takes away from his likability but his quotes are some of my favorites because they are still so true. 

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.”

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.”

“The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously.”

“What is needed above all is an absolute skepticism toward all inherited concepts.”

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”

“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living creatures.”

Can you say foreshadowing of basically the entire 21st century. This is the entire basis for the mook and the midriff. If you don’t control of yourself and who you want to be in this world someone will come into your house and feed you a consumerist product made for your generation. 

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If there is no struggle, there is no progress. - Fredrick Douglas 

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.     - Fredrick Douglas 

—–

So since I’m still here livin’, I guess I will live on. I could’ve died for love– But for livin’ I was born Though you may hear me holler, And you may see me cry– I’ll be dogged, sweet baby, If you gonna see me die. Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

- Langston Hughes 

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Oh and I have to include the O.G. cool man himself, Lester Young. The man who started it all. The man who mastered the art of improv, spoke in code, “wore sunglasses in nightclubs, sported a crushed black porkpie hat and tilted his saxophone at a high angle “like a canoeist about to plunge his paddle into the water” (Whitney Balliett).

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Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. -  Oscar Wilde

Illusion is the first of all pleasures. -  Oscar Wilde

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. -  Oscar Wilde

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for. -  Oscar Wilde

Lauren Bacall

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James Dean

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Marlon Brando

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Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, perhaps, in heart and life and longing… but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. -  W.E.B. Du Bois

—–

The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places.  But those that will not break it kills.  It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.  If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. - Ernest Hemingway

In modern war…you will die like a dog for no good reason. - Ernest Hemingway

What changed the world more than anything else. War.

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I am not a heroine. But I have chosen the person I wanted to be. - Coco Chanel 

Dress like you’re going to meet your worst enemy today - Coco Chanel

—–

You don’t have to be born beautiful to be wildly attractive. - Diana Vreeland.

—–

The problem that confronts us today… is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities. - Emma Goldman

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I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste - Marcel Duchamp

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Elizabeth Eckford, turned away from entering Central High School by Arkansas National Guard by order of Governor Orval Faubus, is followed by hostile whites, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.  - Albert Camus

Hang on, hang on… life’s long, energy creates energy, things are all-right, hunger piles up, love waits… and when found… grows. Hang on. - Jack Kerouac    

Little Richard

Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. - Walt Whitman

Many of the idols I have included in this post took this Whitman to heart. A sign that the rest of us should too. Keep your cool.  

Woody Guthrie

Do you have a reason to live? One you would die for. Do you have a why to get you through any how?

Are we on the rise of a new revolution? Are we still capable of revolt to that degree? Can we still tap into the energy of the youth from the 1960′s? These pictures say maybe.. just maybe there is hope.

A central lesson of cool… suffering is not just a part of life… but most of life. However, we live in a society that makes us feel as if sadness is a sin. A society that instead of teaching us to utilize our sadness (muck to gold), tells us to hide it deep inside because it is a sign of weakness and vulnerability. And if you do tell someone… they will prescribe you drugs to get rid of it.

Black Panther Party

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. - Martin Luther King, Jr

You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem. - (Leroy) Eldridge Cleaver, 1968

Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure. - Malcolm X

John Lennon

Every society honours its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.  - Marshall McLuhan

Bob Dylan

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks

- Masters of War, Bob Dylan

Pablo Picasso

People are always so boring when they band together. You have to be alone to develop all the idiosyncrasies that make a person interesting. - Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, ‘So what.’ That’s one of my favorite things to say. ‘So what.’ - Andy Warhol

If I am being totally honest I was never a fan of Andy Warhol’s stuff before this course. I looked at it like a lot of people look at modern art and say well I could make that. But now I am realizing but I don’t.. most of us don’t.. make the effort to create anything, even just a silkscreen (or a silly drawing of a fish like Picasso would sketch). I also never took the time to think about why Warhol made what he did or what the significance of his work was in the time period. I still think he is a pretty weird snd freaky but he’s also probably one of the coolest people I have learned about. And sadly I don’t know if I ever would have made the effort to really look into a lot of these people if it wasn’t for this class. 

Edie Sedgwick

Forever wishing I was this funky

Kurt Cobain

How many of us are just meat puppets really? Probably a lot of us. But we can make a decision at any moment to change that can’t we. Make a decision to change anything about ourselves at any moment. Endless possibilities.

If you made it to the end of this post. Bravo.

[saigesaunders]

The Allure of Cool Today

Something we discussed in class on Friday that freedom is required for cool exist: freedom to dress oneself and freedom to make one’s own decisions. We said that cool was born from societal wide oppression because of something you can’t change. So I have been thinking about what freedom means in my life. It is hard to think about the concept of freedom today because I am pretty  free, at least in the sense that I could change anything about my life right now (doesn’t mean that I will even though I probably should) We mentioned that maybe today we don’t need cool anymore because for the most part people (aka white dudes) are ok and cool was created as a coping mechanism. I can see how that could be the case but I can’t help but think cool is still looming on the outskirts of society, ready to be used by anyone daring enough to take that step. I mean the real cool not the consumerist product cool that people are trying to sell to us every second of our lives. 

I can’t speak for everyone but I would say that I still find cool quite tempting as a lifestyle. Sure, if you look around this campus.. almost no one is cool because pretty much everyone’s got it somewhat easy; in a way part of me feels like that makes life more lonely. When look back on high school, some of my favorite times are all my friends and I struggling together, stressing about college, dying of work during junior year, getting 3 hours of sleep some nights but it was ok because none of us were going through it alone. For some reason college doesn’t feel like that in the same way, probably because most people don’t have the same goals anymore, in high school our collective goal was to get out but in college everyone is just stressing about their own personalized future. 

Ok I got off on a tangent there but what I am trying to say is that as a teenager or young person, at least for me it is extremely tempting to adopt ‘cool’s’ way of life. I guess because whenever you feel lonely in the world, you can look at these cool people from history and desire to have their level of awareness and confidence. Cool people want to follow the masses or hop on the band wagon (something that is incredibly hard to avoid today), and because making the decision to not do what everyone else is doing is quite lonely, we look up to them for having the courage to actually separate themselves from the masses. I think capitalism has made it way harder to avoid falling into line with everyone else because they are constantly broadcasting what they think that cool should be, what you should wear, be like and how you should live your life. Think about UM today… do you know how many girls rushed this year.. almost 700.. our class is like 2,000 people half of which are guys who rushed frats.. and the most of the girls I know who didn’t rush didn’t because they were busy and they wanted to do it next year instead. I am by no means bashing on the greek system (well maybe I am), I rushed too.. I fell into the trap. Anyways I just feel like today cool is like this lone-wolf last ditch attempt to be something without selling your soul to someone else or some organization. I found cool tempting this semester because I didn’t want to be some cookie cutter cutout of the typical partying UM sorority girl but I also didn’t want to feel left out or lonely for my whole college experience. Cool is somehow at the same time an attempt to be a part of something but also show the world you are cool with whatever.

 I went on the join the least sorority like sorority at this school but it has been hard sometimes to watch people worship the ground some of these sororities; I think it is hard for everyone to be surrounded by these ideals being pushed on you on how you should be, which is basically perfect. Cool’s ancestors helped me realize you gotta say fuck em to everyone else and define things for yourself. Capitalism may be the truth today, it may be how the world works but it doesn’t have to be all there is, the reality is we actually have more freedom than ever..even if we feel suffocated by consumerism and ideals. Cool would want you to take the road less travelled and learn to be ok with that path. 

[saigesaunders]

My Brain Hurts

SOOOO it is currently 10:41pm on a Sunday and I have waited until now to write my 500 words.. cough cough.. can you say escaper? So here we go. Andy Warhol once said that “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.” Need is a funny word though... everyone seems to have a different definition for it. Ask a scientist and they would probably tell you “oh well you need 8 hours of sleep a night, 8 cups of water a day and a balanced diet.” Ask a psychologist and you will get “you need a balanced social life, goals and aspirations, healthy relationships, self love etc etc.” Ask a priest and he would say “devotion to God, humility, charity.” Ask a college student “a lit pool party, grove night, good pic for instagram and maybe a decent grade or two.” 

So I guess that is why Andy Warhol painted all those common things.. if everyone needs different things than anything can be art. You need a picture of Jesus Christ? BAM. art. You need a self-portrait? BAM. art. You need some heavy metal to forget your troubles? BAM. art. You need some soup? BAM. art. We make fun of business majors and advertising majors but they are the best artists of all if you choose to look through the lens of Andy Warhol. No one creates useless shit and propaganda like them. I mean think about it, don’t we think about propaganda posters as art today? Hello that is advertising right there. Wow now that I think about it religious paintings were even advertisements for the church. 

But that is the thing... today we create so much stuff that is not needed that literally ANYTHING is art. So yeah I guess America is the land of the free, a place where anything is possible... but is it worth it if nothing has any meaning anymore? If art can be a urinal hanging on a wall? or a literally white canvas hanging in a modern art museum can sell for a million dollars? It is like art has become SO democratic that it doesn’t stand for anything anything anymore. Don’t get me wrong, art can change the world but there is so much of it that it is overwhelming and it is easy to get lost in it. Think about instagram, it was an app for photography and now we have thousands of followers and never spend more than a second looking at a picture. The same thing has happened to cool... before this class I had never even thought about its history. It was just a word to me, like awesome or rad or nice. Just 4 little letters. But it is so much more than that so much richer but it requires engagement and work to even begin to scratch at the cluttered surface of overuse and misuse. 

So the reality is most of us don’t have the will or desire to engage with most things in life. Sad really because you only have so long to engage and then you get to escape forever, why waste this time escaping? But what is considered escaping and engaging is also up for interpretation... gah my brain hurts now. But that is good, maybe engagement is anything that makes you think so hard your brain hurts...?

[saigesaunders]

Thoughts 4/8

Cool Rules got my thoughts kind of in a jumble, so for this post I am winging it. I am starting from here and just typing forward no going back and editing.. just my random raw thoughts. Trying out some Picasso type work. So here we go...

There are so many groups of people that emerged in the last fifty years: the hippies, black panther, punks, beats, situationists etc..etc.. It is like every event from our history spawned a new movement. These groups would last for a few years maybe less and were then pushed out of the mainstream for something else to take its place. But that group never truly disappears, all of these groups still exist today, they are just no longer movements and never will be again. Everyone always says history repeats itself but in this case it kind of doesn’t it just keeps building and moving forward, pushing through so many identities that people are free to try on as time plows onward. So I guess that is why we said in class that cool doesn’t really exist anymore. It has branched off into so many subsections that no one can actually define it anymore or even relate what exists today to what cool meant 100 years ago. It reminds me on biology, the tree of life. Nothing moves backwards, instead new branches just keep breaking off for millions of years and we try to organize it and figure out which came first and how this evolved and why, but the truth is we probably won’t ever know.

All of these different movements also got me thinking about how the original cool would likely cringe at most of the movements that arose in the 1960′s, 70′s and 80′s. Like the hippies who used drugs to avoid the real world, trying to expel bad thoughts and emit good vibes. The hippies were definitely important in paving the way for many other movements as we saw in Cool Rules but the movement itself seemed obviously temporary. Same goes for the punks and beats. It is a quick rise due to some catastrophic or shocking event and then it dies down, usually quickly. 

Not sure what cool would think about what is happening today. Although these gun protests are certainly not private, nothing really is anymore and it can’t really be if you are trying to make a change, and fast because people are literally dying every week because of the stupidest shit. Private rebellion can’t do much nowadays unless it is for your own purposes. However, the issue with all these large protests is that people aren’t wholly dedicated to the cause. People come to these marches and walk around and think that their job is done but what actually happened... nothing... Don’t get me wrong I think they are very important when it comes to showing these idiot politicians that there are so many people who are opposed to what is going on. I have attended multiple myself and it is so inspiring to see but when you get in the car and go home that is usually the end, until some other march pops up. The problem is I don’t have a better solution because I do not think violence would solve anything and I don’t think the OG cool would either, after all one of the main purposes of cool for the Yoruba was to control intense and violent emotions. Although I guess they did have designated periods of time to get all that out in the open. But unlike the Yoruba our violence is so disorganized, it is so personal but not at all private. These lone shooters have their own personal rebellion but it negatively affects so many people and a gun says nothing all it does it kill. But like I said, we probably can’t go back to what the Yoruba did, we just gotta keep going forward and try to find our own solution.

[saigesaunders]

The Mystery of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is the embodiment of the saying “Je suis un autre,” coined by the 19th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Dylan is quite an interesting character and his differences helped him draw people’s attention. He was this scrawny white kid from Minnesota with a nappy jew fro, who had this uncanny ability to sing about slavery, war and poverty, and have people actually relate and understand. Dylan possessed this inspiring combination of imagination, empathy and artistic talent that allowed him to enter the minds of minorities that he had little to nothing in common with. His songs were refreshing for the time, because they were so brutally honest but still had this glimmer of hope. His music was not ‘sanitized and pasteurized’ like most music at the time, as he would eventually write in his book Chronicles, Volume One. His songs were so true and real that they became the anthems of a national movement and the voice of the generation and decade.

Early Dylan managed to combine the suffering of blues and the optimism of folk to create what everyone called protest songs. However, he constantly expressed that he despised having his music being labeled with a genre or specific type. When asked by an interviewer at a San Francisco press conference in 1965, “What would you call your music?” he replied “vision music, mathematical music.” This was a response so unlike how most musicians would ever describe the art of performing or writing music. Many people define it as the opposite of math, devoid of calculations or formulas which most see as unimaginative. Instead they believe music to be a true form of art from the soul or something else cliche. That is why Dylan was different, he saw his music as mathematical because he was a true synthesizer; he was able to take all of these different melodies, instruments and ideologies, and rearrange them to make something new out of something old. Nothing Dylan made was new; he was simply a master of deconstructing, reshining and reassembling parts to reuse. Dylan and his music were both this hodgepodge and patchwork created from his imagination.

One aspect of Dylan that contributed to this great hodgepodge of who Dylan was, was the many stories he told. Dylan rarely told the truth; he told incredulous stories about his upbringing and when asked what his songs meant, he would always reply, “I got nothing to say about these things I write. I just write them. There’s no great meaning,” leaving his followers incredibly confused because they saw him as a leader and teacher. He has continually stated that he never asked for or wanted to become the spokesperson for this generation or movement. However, the irony of the situation was that he did ask for this role by dressing like his idol Woody Guthrie and writing songs that resonated with huge numbers of people. No one forced him to go to Greenwich Village and write folk music or produce relatable and controversial songs.

He began to represent this deeply personal and private rebellion in its most public form because it was on display for the world to see. He was contentious, weird, unexpected, and the most authentic thing people had seen in awhile, even though he rarely gave up information about himself and when he did it was usually false. He didn’t set out to write anthems, he wanted to write songs that didn’t insult the audience by being overly simplistic, ones that you could listen to for 100 years and still debate the meaning, because Dylan certainly isn’t ever gonna shed any light on it. His artistic and personal evolution was so rapid and confused, he made gestures of renouncing his past in very high volume, highly public ways to force people to let him be free to create something new. Dylan may as well have lived by a quote by the French author, Albert Camus, that revealed, “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Since Bob Dylan was always wary about divulging too much of himself,  most of his first album is covers and he once said “I didn’t want to reveal too much of myself at that point.” However, though he began releasing his own songs, outside of that music platform he rarely, if ever, disclosed his innermost thoughts, such as who he believed he was, what his goals were, and what he wanted the future to hold; that knowledge was for him and him only. He would never dream of letting people have it easy. He did not just tell them what something meant. It was his way of playing hide and seek, pushing the boundaries, and letting the world know, you are never gonna catch me.

He had many tactics that allowed him to avoid one dimensional reactions. For example, his very nervous demeanor of giggling, fidgeting and looking away, when speaking to interviewers may just have been a strategy of concealment to avoid giving a definitive answer. He was the opposite of what American poet Gwendolyn Brooks would call a ‘straight shooter’. Dylan conducted himself in a manner much like Marlon Brando, not exactly in the way he looked, but attitude wise. Similar to Brando, it is obvious from listening to Dylan’s songs and watching him in interviews that he enjoys playing with people. He is always responding to the deep questions of “who are you?” or “what does your music mean?” with vague answers and witty replies. He would give a slight smirk whilst bringing a cigarette up to his mouth and say “well what do you want me to say?” or “I don’t know man, it doesn’t mean nothing.” And everyone would look confused and laugh uncomfortably.

These interviewers would push him for an answer saying, “why are you avoiding the question!?” because they desperately wanted to be able to define and understand him. However, he knew that even though everyone thinks that they want one definitive answer, in reality, nothing would be more boring than knowing everything. After all, you do not think about something you know the answer to; confusion forces you into a place where you have to be ok with knowing “it could be this or it could be that” or simply admitting you just do not know.  Dylan once asserted that “Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.” Dylan’s deceptiveness, mystery and contradictory impulses are some of the major contributors to his wild attractiveness.

Who is the “real” Bob Dylan? No one can say, probably not even him. He would likely slyly respond “I am whatever you think I am.” Perception and interpretation keep life interesting because no two are the same.There are likely few things that Bob Dylan despises more than defining things. He once expressed that “Definition destroys... there’s nothing definite in this world,” so why pretend that it is? Telling yourself you know how something is, is just a way of comforting yourself. However, freedom comes with discomfort and discomfort part of change.

Dylan has never been an easy man to pin down. He confounds the public. This is exactly what he wants because if you are pinned you cannot move forward? He refuses to even pin himself down; he has this awareness where he seems to be able to sense when a persona has grown tired and when it is time to move on. He is able to push his boundaries and continue to challenge himself and others by first altering his outer appearance, and then allowing his music and attitude to follow. It is a very tactical approach to growth. Unlike many people who change internally and let their appearance reflect that, Dylan turned it on its head, as he did with most things. He saw value in personaes because he understood that they provide a lens for you to look through and others to try to make sense of. Dylan’s greatest legacy will be his one-of-a-kind ability to not just make people think but also question everything they have ever believed in.

One of the questions he forces you to ask yourself is do I lie enough? To which the answer in most people’s cases is no. We usually see lying as some sort of sin, one of the signs of low morality but Bob Dylan saw it as tool, not only as a way to disguise but also to get those gears working in your mind. He understood that the very things that make us nice and good also tend to make us boring. His lies and tales were another crucial element of his many personae and another method for changing his image. Something cannot be truly dishonest if good comes out of it. After all what really is the value of authenticity? There really is no way to be authentic if we are not one specific thing; the evolution of cool stresses this a lot, ‘Not finding yourself but rather making yourself.’ I think Bob Dylan had a much greater awareness of this truth and the fact that it is so strange that as a society we place so much importance on “being yourself” and making excuses like “I am what I am” or “what you see is what you get”  when in reality these statements mean little to nothing because we are not one thing and we are not stagnant; every second of the day we are changing, and we all have the opportunity to be in complete control of this evolution if we decide to be. Dylan himself acknowledges that he doesn’t know who he is, “All I can be is me- whoever that is.” Dylan asks us to think outside of this pre-constructed idea of what makes a good person and how a person should be, and create our own reality.

Bob Dylan possessed a very different form of self-mastery than the Yoruba did because in addition to the physical and emotional mastery he had to maintain in order to focus and control his talent, perform and deal with critics, he also possessed an uncommon self-mastery of his identity, not in the sense that he knew exactly who he was but in the sense that he was free to change whoever he was at that moment. Around the same time as Dylan, French-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer, Marcel Duchamp proclaimed, “I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste," and this is exactly what Dylan has done for the past fifty years.

The response Dylan received for his dramatic changes did not greatly concern him as long as he was continually pushing his boundaries and focusing on himself. This is clear because he chose to completely abandon his personae of a folksy protest singer just as he was becoming popular. He could have risen much farther in that genre but instead left that for the boos of his fans when he tried to play his new music, to which his response was to yell to the band “Play it fucking loud!” He had to possess so much confidence and control to be able to upset so many people.

People tend to see Dylan and all the other cool cats from the 1900’s as a thing of the past but we need people like them right now. Americans have lost the spark of the 20th century. Like John Paul Sartre would say it is not enough to think, you are only what you do. College is supposed to be where you try on personae, but students do not focus on this anymore. People are trying to be normal, but Bob Dylan is trying to tell us that there is no normal, so stop being too lazy and scared to reinvent yourself. He understands that if the army can use the persona of shaved heads and uniforms as a tactic to control masses of people, then you can certainly create a persona to control who you want to be. People should try to radically upset expectations instead of being eager to fulfill them. He tells us to keep pushing and challenging the norm. To the average person, the news that we could have one or even two personae and that you can easily change who you are at any moment is very inspiring. As cheesy and cliche as it may sound, he is telling us you can be anything you want to be and anything you can dream up can be real.

[saigesaunders]

Paper Preview

Do I lie enough? The answer in most cases is no. We usually see lying as some sort of sin, one of the signs of low morality but Bob Dylan saw it as a tool, not only as a way to disguise but also to get those gears working in your mind. Even when I began researching Dylan, I asked my mom if she thought he would be a good person to write about and she replied “Well he’s a compulsive liar” in a disapproving tone of course cause she’s my mom, she doesn’t want me to lie. So for a brief period of time I was wary to do this paper on Dylan, but for some reason his dishonesty and evasiveness did not bother me as much as thought it would. I could not exactly put my finger on why though. Eventually I came to the conclusion that it was another crucial element of his many personae and a method for always changing his image. I am not sure something is really dishonest if good comes out of it. After all what really is the value of authenticity? There really is not a way to be authentic if we are not one specific thing; the evolution of cool stresses this a lot, ‘Not finding yourself but rather making yourself.’ I think Bob Dylan had a much greater awareness of this truth, that it is so strange that as a society we place so much importance on “being yourself” and making excuses like “I am who I am,” even though in reality these statements mean little to nothing because we are not one thing and we are not stagnant; every second of the day we are changing, and we all have the opportunity to be in complete control of this evolution if we decide to be. Dylan himself acknowledges that he doesn’t know you he is, “All I can be is me- whoever that is.” 

Bob Dylan possessed a very different form of self-mastery than the Yoruba did because in addition to the physical and emotional mastery he had to maintain in order to focus and control his talent, perform and deal with critics, he also possessed this uncommon self-mastery of his identity or more accurately identities. However it was not in the sense that he knew exactly who he was but in the sense that he was free to change whoever he was at that moment. In fact in order to shake things up he would change his image first in order to force himself to change his music. Around the same time as Dylan, French-American painter, sculptor, chess player and writer, Marcel Duchamp proclaimed, “I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste." 

The response Dylan received for his changes did not greatly concern him as long as he was continually pushing his boundaries and focusing on himself or being narcissistic as Cool Rules would say. This is clear because he chose to completely abandon his personae of a folksy protest singer just as he was truly becoming popular. He could have risen much farther in that genre but instead left that for boos from his fans when he tried to play his new music, to which his response was to tell the band “Play it fucking loud!” 

More to come…

[saigesaunders]

Eddie Would Go

I wanted to do a little piece on one of my favorite people ever because his main period of cool was not in the timeframe for our paper... Anyways a little intro to why I find this dude, who I will introduce in a bit, so ‘cool’. Growing up we lived in Maryland so we didn’t exactly have great surf but my first time on a surfboard was at about five. 

My dad’s side of the family moved around the US a lot when my grandpa was in the Navy: California, Rhode Island, Virginia Beach etc. So him and his brothers picked up surfing and that side of my family has been surfing and obsessed with the water ever since. My dad used to collect these surfer tee shirts and I remember my favorite one said in big letters on the back “EDDIE WOULD GO.” I know my dad explained Eddie’s life to me briefly but I didn’t actually learn about him until I started watching documentaries and really reading up about him. I can’t tell if many others have heard of Eddie Aikau (unless they are into surfing or live in Hawaii) but I don’t think so, which makes me kinda sad because he was an amazing dude. 

OK now on to Eddie...Eddie Aikau was a big wave surfer in the late 1960′s and 1970′s about 10 years after Hawaii had become the 50th state of the USA, so many beachfront hotels and rich white dudes (UGH) were moving in on the native Hawaiians who had been there since the 4th century. The native Hawaiians were known for their connection to the water and the art of surfing for pleasure but when cocky white people swarmed the beaches and white California dudes started stealing waves, the Hawaiian’s sense of identity was beginning to go extinct. But Eddie Aikau was a true Hawaiian kid who loved surfing and was always looking for the next adventure, while taking every challenge and risk head on. The word Cool Rules would use: hedonism. Or as we discussed today, following your desires. 

Due to his seemingly fearlessness, Eddie became the first lifeguard on the infamous North Shore, specifically Waimea Bay whose waves were typically 30+ feet and were considered unridable before Eddie (even reaching heights of 60ft). Despite Waimea Bay one of the most dangerous surf spots in the world, Eddie did not lose a single life during his time as a lifeguard and he saved hundreds of lives. He became very famous for his remarkable ability to surf giants and won several surfing awards including First Place at the prestigious 1977 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championship. Eddie had to have so much control over his body in order to ride waves that could kill him in an instant. I think that surfing just might be one of the activities that requires some of the most control (sorry dance). Not only do you have to control every muscle in your body and be perfectly placed, you have to know how to work with the ocean, THE most wild, unpredictable and uncontrollable thing on our planet, which requires A LOT of improv. Aikau is even sometimes called the ultimate water man. 

Amongst all of these intruders who knew nothing of the culture of surfing aka white dudes who thought they know how to surf 40 ft waves, there was Eddie dropping down these monster waves like no one else could. In situations where anyone else would have jumped off or tensed up, Eddie simply couldn’t have seemed any more at ease on these gigantic waves. There you have it... making the hard look easy at its finest. Pretty darn cool. I like to think of it as private rebellion, improvisation and even narcissism all rolled into one iconic dude who changed the course of surfing forever. He knew he was good, he knew why he was doing it, he knew what he was fighting for and he did the unimaginable.  

And what’s more?! He used the massive amount of control he had over his body to help others!!! He risked his life everyday to save people who just wanted to ride those giants. Something maritime historian Mac Simpson said really captures it, "Aikau was a legend on the North Shore, pulling people out of waves that no one else would dare to. That's where the saying came from -- Eddie would go, when no one else would or could. Only Eddie dared." The phrase originated during the first contest dedicated to Eddie Aikau. The waves were huge and the conditions were terribly dangerous and people considered calling it off but someone looked at the conditions and said "Eddie would go" and it had become a global saying ever since. You go Eddie.

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WTF

If you want a soundtrack for this post I suggest Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changing and John Lennon’s Imagine….

When I was younger I had a thought one day that maybe I might join the navy. Sounds crazy now but I am from Annapolis, MD, live just blocks from the United States Naval Academy and my family had been either in or working for the navy for 3 generations. So even if it was a fleeting thought... it crossed my mind. I remember my mom’s reaction so clearly, she just smiled and snickered. It might seem mean or stifling to outsiders but she was honestly right to laugh. She told me “Honey you could never be in the Navy, you HATE following rules and doing what people tell you to do.” She was right, I would be a terrible soldier; I have always despised being told what to do. In fact, like most teenagers, I like to do the opposite just to spite people. I would never be able to follow orders from a commander who told me how to be and who to be. I am someone who if I do not wholeheartedly believe in something or love something I cannot do it well. As dramatic as it sounds, if it were the right cause I might be willing to die for it. But only would I put my life on the line if I knew everything about the subject and could say with no doubts I knew what I was doing and what I was fighting for. So it was so confusing and frightening to watch that video from World War I on Monday, seeing  those men cowering in the trenches and forced to run into. And for what? No one even knows! I learned about WW1 in high school and could tell you nothing about why it happened because it never made sense to me. Honestly probably testosterone.. No offence boys but most if not all terrible wars, battles, and genocides were begun for power, greed and manhood. I know humans have always been like this but god damn we really screwed ourselves over with machines, guns and bombs. It just shocks me how quick and impersonal these things are nowadays. There is no honor, grandeur or even a cause sometimes, just body counts. We gotta get our fuckin shit together man cause we haven’t had it for A WHILE.

Sometimes it’s so weird to think about this stuff… I am sitting here trying to think about the last 115 years and my mind is pretty blank because it is so hard to wrap my head around the fact that all this shit happened and not even that long ago. For some reason my mind keeps jumping back to the comic Watchmen, which basically centered around the Cold War and the literal end of the world. Sometimes it feels like humans as a species are always trying to prevent the end the world or at least the end of our own little worlds.

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The 1970s surfing subculture through amazing photos by Jeff Divine.

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“I was looking for something a lot heavier, yet melodic at the same time. Something different from heavy metal, a different attitude.” -Kurt Cobain

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Me or Them

In class we talked about how cool is all about contradictions. It got me thinking further about this ‘balance’ between looking to yourself and working on yourself and helping others. I guess I am struggling with when that point is that you can truly help others because I have always thought that we never stop working and improving and changing ourselves, which cool actually promotes. So if we are always evolving how can we know when we have reached that point where we can stop looking inward and look outward to others. 

There was this part of My War that I found true but disturbing, Fussell said “My adolescent illusions, largely intact to that moment, fell away all at once and I suddenly knew I was not and never would be in a world that was reasonable or just.” This is the part that I found incredibly real; I think we all experience that one moment where we come to this terrible realization. For instance, the Parkland students just experienced this moment, they now understand how unjust the world really is. However a little later on Fussell says, “Before we knew it we’d lost half the company, and we all realized then that for us there would be no way out until the war ended but sickness, wounds, or oblivion. And the war would end only as we pressed our painful daily advance. Getting it over was our sole motive. Yes, we knew about the Jews. But our skins seemed to us more valuable at the time.” This is the part I found unsettling, even though I can see where they are coming from. Sometimes it is about preservation of the self, but I feel like that is not something cool would support because selfishness and narcissism appear to mean two different things. Only caring for yourself vs. appreciating yourself and doing whats best for you; it’s a very blurry line though.

Anyways back to my first thought...one thing mentioned in class was that people get stuck focusing on the self when there is an insecurity or weakness of their self. I feel as if this is true, but if it is how can anyone ever move past this stage. We all have weaknesses and insecurities and we will always have weaknesses and insecurities. So when is it that we reach this point of being able to live for yourself and others? Do we even know when we have reached it? 

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Cool: The Self-Help Guide to Suffering

For most of our lives we have been trying on different lenses, seeing which ones stick. These lenses can come from just about anywhere: a parent’s beliefs, political and religious exposures, art, experiences and countless more. These lenses create one of the most important concepts in life: perception. Nietzsche believed that there are no outside views, simply lenses upon lenses that help us make sense of the nonsensical world around us. Throughout my life many lenses have been thrown at me, whether it was by my family or a person on the street preaching about some religion. After careful deliberation I have picked particular lenses to add to the ones I was born into, handed as a child or unconsciously picked up. Lenses provide us with alternate ways of viewing the world. Some lenses are more rare than others, and some provide knowledge about the world that can be a great burden or asset for its wearer. The lenses that I have obtained over the past eighteen years of my life are more morbid and realistic than those of most kids my age. Many topics, such as death, mortality and maturity, that are difficult for people to discuss were thrust upon me when I was younger. It was that early exposure and acknowledgement of harsh truths however that positively shaped me into the person I am today.

As a child I was raised to question things. I was always asking “but why” or “but what if?” My parents liked that I was curious, they considered it a good thing. They didn’t want me to grow up to just follow rules, they wanted me to be able to think and look at things in a different way. They, like Oscar Wilde believed that questioning and rebellion were essential for growth, “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made” (Wilde). Growing up in an atmosphere where change and rebellion were embraced paved the way for my current attitude towards life, which acknowledges that we as people hold a lot of power over ourselves and the world around us, but some things are still beyond our control.

When I was one year old my dad was diagnosed with cancer and he battled it on and off for eleven years of my life. So I feel as if I have had a relationship with death for a while, only it certainly was not the deliberate, hedonistic approach to flirting with death that Pountain says is ‘cool’. Because I was a child, my parents tried to shield me from the pain, but I obviously was aware that my father was very sick. My parents traveled around the country for treatments and I spent more time than I care to admit in hospital waiting rooms. Regardless, I experienced a happy childhood for the most part, I loved my parents, had great friends and did all the typical things kids like to do like play dress up, watch disney and explore outside.

As I grew older and reached middle school, I was finally learning to truly think for myself. At this point in my life death was no longer flirting, it had full on asked me out. When I was twelve years old my dad passed away, so I started to flirt back because I was a lonely, confused and scared teenage girl who didn’t really see a point anymore. Nietzsche said that all life is suffering however he did not agree that one should just accept that at face value, as I did at age thirteen. He believed that the purpose of life is to turn muck into gold, take the worst of life and turn it into something good. Nevertheless, it took me a while to understand that and actually attempt to climb out of the rut that I was stuck in.

After my dad died I was offered a lot more freedom. My mom was grieving and I didn’t have any siblings to watch over me, so unlike most teenagers I never resented my parents for not letting me go out or for grounding me, in fact I rarely ever got in trouble. I took it upon myself to determine that I wanted good grades and I wanted to make things easier on my mom. I admired my mom’s independence and strength but sought out my own set of values from music, books and television because like a normal teenager I still needed to venture outside of what I knew. I found solace in some of the most childish and hopeful entertainment like The Lion King, and the happy music of my childhood like Jack Johnson and The Beach Boys that reminded me of my dad.

In many ways, although I always had my mom to lean on, I was really out there trying to figure things out on my own; I had my friends but it was hard to talk about the deep stuff with them and my family, though very small, was only the kind to see each other once a year. Like Du Bois mentioned, it feels uncomfortable to be unlike the others, however, it is an essential element of cool, “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in the heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (Du Bois). I had been through this traumatic event and acquired this almost instantaneous awareness of the important things in life but I could not share it with other people. This is mostly because we as a society treat sadness, death and grieving like they don't exist; we don't like to dwell on them and we try to move on and forget as soon as possible. We say time heals all but people are always rushing to feel better. It is often a burden to carry around sadness in a world that always seems happy.

So for the past six years I have been trying feel things out myself, trying to gage where exactly I fit in in this world and what my perspectives are. This isolation made me much more in tune with my own thoughts and feelings and more observant of others. As Nietzsche stated, if you want to obtain ubermensch status, you must find your own path away from others, “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Nietzsche). Although it was incredibly difficult at the time, cool would say to look at the good that came out of the pain, reminding me I was lucky to have the opportunity to decide for myself who I wanted to be. Just like the rabbit/duck, the way I chose to look at it determined how it affected me.

I suppose it is impossible to actually ‘raise yourself’ though, rather I pulled inspiration for how a person should be from all kinds of different platforms. Although nothing is original, it is however possible to create yourself from pieces of art and people. Oscar Wilde once said that “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly - that is what each of us is here for” (Wilde). The ironic thing about this process is that you cannot create yourself from scratch, you must be influenced by other people, however you also have to free yourself from the judgement of others as to not let them impede your development. Like most things that are cool it requires a give and take, a dance, a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Being cool is not a conscious decision one wakes up one day any decides to be (Cool Rules), sometimes it can be something you did not even ask for. Many of the elements that make up cool are dark and intense; people who are cool have suffered and experienced pain that is sometimes unbearable. That is usually what gives them such a enlightened and intriguing perspective on things, they understand more about life and how much it can truly suck. Cool people know you have to appreciate the little things and not sweat the small stuff; they say ‘talk to as many people as you can, and absorb as much art as possible while you can because life is short.’ For example whenever something slightly upsetting happens, my mom reminds me that “No one is dying.” Four simple words that manage to put everything in perspective, especially if you have been around someone who is actually dying.

Cool people have the ability to acknowledge and accept the hard truths that most of us try to continually sweep under the rug. Those who are cool have come to understand that there is a certain productiveness in loneliness but that cool was developed as a response to pain, stress and traumatic events and it is meant to be shared. Cool is meant to be used as a tool for coping and relating to others; we will all experience suffering so we need to learn think intentionally about how we handle that stress and how we can utilize it. Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes were two very cool people who did an amazing just of this; their words are directed to us and are meant to comfort us and remind us that life is difficult so you will likely go back and forth between wanting to give up on life and smiling till your cheeks hurt more than seems normal, but that is simply what being human means.

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Me, Myself and I

I like to think I am a pretty intuitive and contemplative person but those qualities came with a price, the price that accompanies experience: knowledge. Knowledge is a powerful asset and one of the most important but it can be a hell of a burden. But it is a burden that is necessary to be cool. I haven’t experienced as much as some people my age but probably a little more than others. I experienced loss way too early and probably had to grow up a little too fast, not really in the sense I had to go out and get a job to provide for my family but more in an emotional sense. (Is an early start to life/the real world necessary for cool? Or can future cool kids have a nice childhood?) I most certainly learned too early that life is simply not fair, and that the good tend to die young. As a kid it’s so hard to grasp the way the world works, I just didn’t understand why things happened the way they did. Now I see that I still don’t really understand anything but I get that understanding everything is not the point of life. We will never know everything… or anything close to it… even if you put all of our knowledge together. Cool says that “cool is not a destination” but I think that is true of most things, there is really no end, except for the ones with designate ourselves. The only exception would be death says cool. Although I don’t know if I buy into that either, like I was saying, I don’t know much, so how could I ever begin to believe I know what happens after we die… how could any of us?

Overall I think cool and I would get along, not get along as in we agree all the time but in the way like when you sit down with a friend to talk in a coffee shop and discuss deep topics for hours… you might not have the same opinions but there is mutual respect and you both walk away having learned something. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly not ‘cool’ at least not according to some of cool’s standards as we have discussed; I don’t smoke, I care way too much about what people think and I don’t spend my free time wondering the streets. But me and cool, we have some things in common and I like to think we got a good thing going on. 

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Drake

Had to write two pieces tonight cause Drake’s appearance on campus really got me thinking about his lyrics from God’s Plan and how they not only relate to cool but the consequences of cool. 

“[Intro] Yeah, they wishin' and wishin' and wishin' and wishin' They wishin' on me, yuh [Verse 1] I been movin' calm, don't start no trouble with me Tryna keep it peaceful is a struggle for me Don't pull up at 6 AM to cuddle with me You know how I like it when you lovin' on me I don't wanna die for them to miss me Yes, I see the things that they wishin' on me Hope I got some brothers that outlive me They gon' tell the story, shit was different with me

[Chorus 1] God's plan, God's plan I hold back, sometimes I won't, yuh I feel good, sometimes I don't, ayy, don't I finessed down Weston Road, ayy, 'nessed Might go down a G.O.D., yeah, wait I go hard on Southside G, yuh, wait I make sure that north-side eat [Post-Chorus] And still Bad things It's a lot of bad things That they wishin' and wishin' and wishin' and wishin' They wishin' on me Bad things It's a lot of bad things That they wishin' and wishin' and wishin' and wishin' They wishin' on me Yuh, ayy, ayy [Verse 2] She say, "Do you love me?" I tell her, "Only partly" I only love my bed and my momma, I'm sorry Fifty dub, I even got it tatted on me 81, they'll bring the crashers to the party And you know me Turn the O2 into the O3, dog Without 40, Oli, there would be no me Imagine if I never met the broskies [Chorus 2] God's plan, God's plan I can't do this on my own, ayy, no, ayy Someone watchin' this shit close, yep, close I've been me since Scarlett Road, ayy, road, ayy Might go down as G.O.D., yeah, wait I go hard on Southside G, ayy, wait I make sure that north-side eat, yuh [Post-Chorus] And still Bad things It's a lot of bad things That they wishin' and wishin' and wishin' and wishin' They wishin' on me Yeah, yeah Bad things It's a lot of bad things That they wishin' and wishin' and wishin' and wishin' They wishin' on me Yeah”

I never thought about it before but so much of this song directly relates to the themes we have read and discussed. Drake writes about his struggle with the many people that wish terrible things on him. I find it incredibly fascinating that he says “might go down as a G.O.D.” There seems to be a comparison between real God and himself as a G.O.D. However, it is as if he doesn’t feel like he can actually call himself a god, even though there are many many people out there who would without a doubt. I know Nietzsche said that God is dead and I agree but you have to admit just because someone/something dies doesn’t mean that the respect is gone, in reality it can actually grow as a result, and that most certainly applies to God as well. God may not be worshipped like he was before but he sure as hell is respected. 

Drake even addresses this fact of life when he say that “I don’t want to die for them to miss me.” So many people through out history were not appreciated until they passed, MLK, Van Gogh, Galileo, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde.. I could go on forever. Drake points out that not only are people not appreciated while they are around but they are constantly fighting these negative comments from others and society (“there’s a lot bad things that they wishin on me”) no matter what one does. Some people even resort to killing themselves just to be appreciated or remembered in some sense. In a way your death can say more than you can during life. Weird...

Drake also illuminates his struggle with coping. Even though he states maybe he is or will be a G.O.D., he still continues to say that the real God must have a plan for him, ‘God’s Plan.’ This is something we tell ourselves constantly, “Everything happens for a reason” they tell you when ANYTHING bad happens. It is simply a method of coping and even the most God like of us such as Drake (I mean seriously hundreds of us came out to see him yesterday :o) utilize this method. He even says to God, “I can’t do this alone.” Cause as we keep saying, life is fucking painful and it’s full of suffering. But it’s comforting to know your not the only one feeling like that... that is what I love so much about music, it is so real and vulnerable... so human.

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Many Many Lenses

Something I found interesting from Ch. 1 of Cool Rules and our class discussion was the fact that perception is EVERYTHING. However, if we are all wearing a variety of lenses how is one perception of us even remotely similar or even relevant? Even more so perception and attitude are CONSTANTLY changing and evolving, whether over the course of a day or decades or centuries. An example of this evolution is music and fashion, two very important platforms of cool. We talk a lot of other’s perception of us but what about our perception of ourselves? What does cool say about that? Maybe we are supposed to be self-confident but if cool flirts with death and suffering doesn’t there have to be at least some level of self doubt and insecurity. For instance, no one who loves themselves entirely contemplates putting that all on the line with suicide or drugs or speeding on a motorcycle. Although, I suppose it is not possible for anyone to love themselves constantly, we are always growing and changing from day to day, molding tiny parts of ourselves into things we desire to be. 

That’s the thing about teenagers, we are constantly trying to form a self identity and group identity. However, those too things are very different. As Pountain said “...being cool forms part of a risky series of negotiations about becoming an individual while still being accepted into a group - it’s about both individuality and belonging, and the tension between the two.” I feel like the group identity you form and present to others is very much a defense mechanism and a very powerful one at that; however whether it furthers your personal identity or heeds it can depend greatly. Do those who leave their group identity in the crowd have a more successful journey to self discovery because they not only understand the world around them but are able to mold themselves into a person who can blend into that world? That confuses me because I feel like today there is a very strong emphasis on “Be yourself no matter what anyone thinks! If they don’t like you for who you are fuck em!” But is it really childish or mature to try to blend into your surroundings? What would cool say about that? Are you just a sheep or actually a lion masquerading as a sheep? Maybe it is just another lens that some have a skill in putting on. I think it gives them a great advantage. I mean think about famous musicians, they are different but still know their targeted audience. 

But maybe it takes a great amount of strength to not care what anyone thinks and maybe that is better. I have to say, I myself am struggling with which one of these paths I want to follow, which one makes me smarter, stronger, and a better me? I honestly do not know and I feel like I constantly go back and forth between the two. Hmm maybe cool would say that’s good though, like a dance... like this and like that. 

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DuBois: The Ever-Present Veil

It still shocks me that our society is still struggling with the issues that Dubois brings up in his writing. It hurts me to think of parents having to tell their children to be polite to police, always show their hands, never ever run, always say yes sir and do what they say because they just want their child to come home safely everyday but it remains so dangerous out there, particularly for African Americans. Actually it still totally shocks me that we ever had to struggle with such injustices to begin with, I just simply can’t wrap my head around how people could enslave and entire race and think it was fine even though we look exactly the same, just in different shades.

Yesterday after class my roommate and I talked about this a lot and how it confused us, not only the history of torment of blacks but also the Holocaust, treatment of Native Americans and how poorly we have treated the earth and its inhabitants. Why is man as a species so selfish and why since the beginning of time have we felt the need separate and repress each other. African Americans actually had to start a movement called black lives matter. MATTER. I mean they are really not asking for much. Matter is practically just one step above the acknowledgement that they exist. For a while I believed we were making progress, but then practically the worst, most sexist, racist, ignorant and selfish person was elected to run our country. That was a slap in the face from reality, showing me what a lot of people in the US actually believe is ok. 

I am very impressed with DuBois, he was an incredibly intelligent and strong man. I have to give props to him, no matter how his people were treated he still considered himself and his people Americans even though others didn’t. We talked about this in class but I feel like people today always want to run away and associate themselves with something else when they are hurt or uncomfortable with their current situation. Kids today find one thing wrong with their college and their first instinct is to transfer. I have definitely been guilty of this. I can’t tell if we as a society are getting weaker or stronger, maybe both.