What is your mode?

"It is the treatment of the subject that matters, not the subject itself." Morgan Fisher

There are some highly peculiar omissions in my life. To take just a couple of examples, I have never changed a tire and I have never played a video game. I have never seen a Britney Spears video, a fact that provoked two exasperated interlocutors to plead that I watch them, in one instance for erotic stimulation as Ms. Spears is obviously extraordinarily appealing, in the other instance for the sake of what was deemed a bare minimum of cultural literacy. As if I were being irresponsible in not watching Britney Spears! As if my illiteracy were itself a flagrant violence to and lack of respect for her millions of fans, as people.

But whatever any of us does or doesn't do, the most important matter is the mode. None of us can ever escape it. It is no small matter that Ira Gershwin wrote "the way you wear your hat, the way you sip your tea" and later, "the way you sing off key." No mention is made of the fact that a trilby or fedora is being worn, nor what the song is, nor if the tea is orange pekoe or Darjeling. The focus is on why rather than what. That is, I imagine the real subject is the rakish tilt of a fedora, or the posture with which one raises the tea cup to one's lips.

Normally one venerable and good way to speak of this is to speak of style. But that word style runs into problems, none of which are the word's fault, but rather the fault of historical fate. Style gets pitted against substance and content. Though I would be the first to admit style as the supreme measure of all matters in life and art, style still gets pegged as that which is superficial, added on top, decorative, and so on.

Which brings me to the word and its referent, mode. I shall take mode to be something a little more general than style. Modes often refer to larger historical trends. Mode might indicate a kind of mood. In music, modes are ways of expression certain emotions through tonal colorations, not just in major and minor, but scales that might appear in between, as in, well, certain modes. In Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album, Miles Davis and pianist Bill Evans wanted to make music fully constituted out of modes as specific scales.

The overwhelming popularity of certain modes, in life or art, has shockingly little to do with the objective merit of the mode in question. If the mode of raiment at this particular time involves the use of raggedy yet seemingly indestructible sportswear and forms of denim at all times and at all functions, that fact about the world is no guide to whether we all should be going around like that. It is ironic that at a time when individual choice is at a premium, never before have there been so few individuals.

There is little difference between the mode of a human life and the mode of an art work. With the internet, for the first time since the invention of the printing press, a technological change has overwhelmed and overturned all previous modes of life.

Yet in such a time of tumult there remain those who are stubborn in their quest for some modicum of truth. That is, while there are the largest, most generalizable modes, having to do with vocabulary and speech and dress, there are still modes most unrepeatable and irreplaceable.

If we realized that we are always in a particular mode, rather than thinking our lives some transparent expression, more or less, of reality, we might have more freedom within our modes. Two false narratives face us when dealing with modes. One is a theory of progressivism (or historicism) the other is the converse of this - a theory of decline. Both presume a kind of natural and holistic transparency. They both believe there is a single world such that all any one part of that world inevitably follow if other parts are present. This is to concede a kind of defeat. To take the worst decision of the past century - the decision to have the automobile be at the center of our lives - there was nothing inevitable about building the disastrous interstate highway system and the contemporary suburbs and all of that. We could have decided to limit the use of cars, or not have them a matter of individual consumption. But once we are caught in a mode we cannot see it as one choice among others. We feel we are in the real world, and can be quite arrogant about being real.

People are virtuous about their modes. Nobody is more virtuous and self righteous than advocates and practitioners of the rock and roll revolution and culture. It is especially tempting in an artistic mode predicated upon a kind of authentic honesty and a struggle against a perceived oppression.

I recently had an experience which will suffice to bring these preliminary notes to a conclusion. I had the opportunity to watch the new Abbas Kiarostami movie, the first film by the Iranian master to be made in Europe, in Italy, outside of his native Iran. Moreover it features a professional actress, one no less than Juliette Binoche. In keeping with Kiarostami's penchant for non professional actors, he pairs the French star with a British non actor (who is an opera singer outside of the movie). The movie is structured around this man and woman talking, and about the issue of being a man and woman and being married, such that we are initially led to believe they are strangers pretending to be married for others, but, as the film progresses, it becomes more unclear the nature of their arrangement, their relationship. Is it acted?Performed? Where does the acting being or end? This almost quaintly modernist and Samuel Beckett or Borges like decision to make the confusion over their identity as a real or fake married couple the way to tell a Romantic "story" has the effect of creating some of the most absorbing drama, far superior to previous attempts with only two people like Linklater's Before Sunrise. Had it been done in a straightforward and transparent manner we might not feel the pain of the situation and it's significance so acutely.

Yet the two people I saw the movie with did not have my reverence for this achievement or accomplishment on Kiarostami's part. During the movie they kept asking me "What is the point?" "What is happening?"

Yet, whereas to my companions it seemed as if nothing was happening, it seemed to me that everything was happening in this movie, like a miniature history of courtship and marriage condensed into an odd two actor conversational scene.

Looked at in terms of modes, the movie Certified Copy is in a mode based on present mindedness, where meaning is created in minutes, and, eventually results in large and powerful impressions towards the conclusion. It is not only in the moment since there is still a sense of ultimate climax and meaning, but the generation of meaning is to be found in the microcosm of this man and woman interacting. My annoying and annoyed filmgoing companions had lived their entire lives in an opposing and opposed mode in which meaning was generated by large scale and extraverted behaviors or acts, and those acts are isolated from unimportant, less important or transitional spaces around them. Even if the act of extraversion is a sentence there is a kind of boldface type to it to let you know what is crucial. Kiarostami's mode, by contrast has the fluctuations of impressionism, maybe even the all over effect of Ad Reinhardt. The conflict between movie and audience was a conflict between a mode of grand gestures on the one hand and intimate gestures on the other hand.

Yet there is no escaping the fact that modes are always operative. As individual as Kiarostami is, he is still in a mode - even if it is a mode all of his own.

Lest you think that modes aren't the most powerful things in the world, I invite you to reflect on that odd photo that appears at the very top of this installment. What do the modes of the presentation of self of the four musicians tell you about change through time? What do the stories and differences between Apollo and Dionysius tell us about the power of different modes?

That is all I can say for now.

My Childhood in the 1970s: Part Eleven

If you will recall my first love, rather my first love who was actually a peer and not a teen working for the family business (Carla), or an English teacher (Ms. Miller) or a celebrity stranger (Jacqueline Bissett, Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant etc.), you will remember Lydia. Of course I got distracted by Lydia's mother because of, well, Ms. Rodding's Miles Davis records and the fact that Ms.Rodding (who was the first woman to explain to me the Ms. formulation, in great earnestness) was more like Ali McGraw, that is, a fully developed woman, than her daughter. I also got distracted by Lydia's best friend Sally. But it appeared to me then and it feels in my memory now that Lydia was more important to me than anybody else, at least with a certain degree of romantic equality.

But as we talked, usually in and around the expansive trees that populated the freaky free school - the one with the headmaster's van and other local color - we shared all that we had on our minds, especially our shared love for the movie Annie Hall, which was the only "adult" movie Lydia's mother allowed her to see. (Seeing R rated and G rated movie was a weekly event for me of course). People then as now love to fit our individualities into the fashion and framework of celebrity examples, and Lydia was always told that she looked like Diane Keaton (!) No similar comment was made as to my likeness with Woody Allen.

Such long talks over hours gives you an idea, not only of our lovely time together, but also of the absolutely irresponsible attitude of a school that would allow so many hours pass by with kids spent outside in the afternoon, with no clear classes, grades and other traditionally accepted parts of school life.

What I had not revealed before dear reader was that after many years apart, I suddenly got the idea to contact her. I had just spent my first year away at a boarding school and I was curious to see a childhood friend now that we were teenagers and I was in high school.

In life we often must look back in order so that we may understand the present. Partly in fidelity to this particular truth we must slightly leave the 1970s behind - alas and alack - and venture into....the 1980s, albeit a very early 80s that in many respects is not so far apart from the late 1970s.

I gathered the courage to contact Lydia, after more than five years. I had just finished a freshman year in high school and was prepared to go off to a dream of an institution called Interlochen Arts Academy, one of the very few schools I experienced that I can call with some justification decent, if not excellent. I was unable to drive and called up Lydia. Inexplicably and with some horror I realized that one of my own parents (I cannot and do not want to remember which) had called Lydia's mother to set things up. That is, I had not even had the opportunity to speak with her since we had both entered adolescence, or puberty, or whatever the experts are calling it these days. Somehow, I was told by my mother in her usual manner, which is to say like a female drill sargeant (or female PE coach), I was to be "dropped off" and left in the company of Lydia in one of those early 1980s vast shopping malls, meeting in the parking lot.

Nothing prepared me for the shock which was the sight of an adolescent Lydia. Everything about her was so radically changed, from hair, to clothing, to the excess of makeup and accesories, that I had to literally ask twice if it were her, if she indeed was Lydia. I do know I must have said Lydia several times to her for confirmation, to say nothing of validation.

I really don't know how to describe the change. I am not a great or even particularly good literary stylist. I do not do novels or short stories. I wish I could magically imbide some of the vapors of an Elkin, a Roth, or especially, given our subject, an Oates.

The Lydia I remember was a deeply hippie styled girl. She had wild curly brown hair and full lips and slight but pleasing curves and went about in bell bottomed dungarees and tie dyed or denim halter tops. That may have accounted for a lot of why I loved her. That form was all that I knew.

The new Lydia, you might say, was what was called a "valley girl". She was wearing so many shades of plum, teal, fuchsia and pink that my senses were overwhelmed. I felt as if I couldn't see her. She had this enormous skirt and these large hoop earrings, like a bargain basement version of Cyndi Lauper, you might say. For all I know she might have had incredible style for the time, but I was too shocked by the change to fully be in the moment and relate to the newer her.

It was a date of sorts. Indeed you might say that we saw a perfect date movie, if you believe in such categories, which I adamantly don't. The film was called Valley Girl.

As I recall I loved it but she didn't. This started a lifelong pattern of gender reversal where we would see these studio or even independent movies that were seen as aimed towards a female market or sensibility and it was always I who ended up liking the movies while my female date would hate it. Thus the fallacy of over generalizing and stereotyping.

We ate sushi which I had never had before, and for which I had little appetite and she did most of the talking, about things which seemed far removed from her childhood concerns. Instead of her stories or her flute she talked of New Wave pop music and how much more conservative she had become, at least more so than her out of date parents. And she had to mention her puzzlement at why our parents had set things up as they did. She made it clear in so many ways that she was engaging in an empty formality and, in her words "she was not the same girl" that I had known and with whom I had spent time",  above all making it clear that "I hadn't seemed to change at all".

I was consumed by philosophical thoughts the whole evening, even during the movie which was rather well written and acted. Thoughts like these: what is identity? How and why do people change? What is the nature of that change and is there a deep core that remains unchanged? I really wanted to know. These are questions that are still important to me.

The worst part of the date was its conclusion. As she walked me to her car. I reached over to kiss her something I had never done with her and had always wanted, perhaps because we had always seemed so young. And here I assumed that we could act more like, well, adults. Yet she pushed me away most fervently explaining that she didn't really feel about me the way that "everyone" knew that I did. She said she had to get back to do homework and listen to some music she felt I would just hate, something called Men At Work, or Haircut 100. I forget which.

My first kiss was not a kiss at all but a great risk, a mishap. How much better was the backstage smooching as a child, so primitive and polymorphous, and rooted not in traditional intimacy but bodily brute drive. Why there was even a group involved as it was group kissing with several girls. Conversely, this business of the couple seemed to me woefully overrated to me. I wondered what the fuss was all about for close to a year after that.

A Very Brief (and Partial) Defense Of Shallowness

We live in a world of appearances. This is not only a matter of habit or choice in culture. Perceptual relations make up a great deal of human life, whatever the beliefs of the society concerning appearance. The Republic of Iran may have felt they were banning the hairstyle dubbed "the mullet" for complex spiritual and cultural reasons, but you can be sure there was something visually unappealing in the extreme about that particular hairstyle to warrant such litigation. However much we may speculate about the most interior, intimate contents about others' brain, however accurate our channelers and mystics may claim to be on the content of the brains, or rather, souls of the deceased, and however people may claim to be so clairvoyant as to know others in some privileged manner - in some exotic concoction of non- verbal and body language reading, or in energy and mind reading - we can never be totally sure about other's mental states.

However, we can be very sure about their state of hygiene, and we can never escape the raiment in which they have chosen to clad themselves: such raiment never stops talking to (or more likely yelling at) us, however verbally silent the wearer. Every mind numbing and repetitive article of cheap sportswear will dwarf the little bit of eyes and ears left of their human frames.

And, increasingly, if the scientists are to be believed, there is so much more of them for us to have to accomodate, both in terms of bodily weight and in terms of population density. The world can be a noisome, overwhelming place when we act as if we don't occupy a world of three dimensions, of volume and mass. Whatever we may think, we are are NOT disembodied brains floating in the ethers. The world is nothing like the Internet, however much we may think we can make the world over in that most recent of images.

And the buildings in which we inhabit seem permanently here. We cannot escape their shadows as we navigate from one interior to the next. The 21st century is littered with reminders of architectural decisions made remotely in the past: these are buildings by planners and architects with the most inhuman and obtuse of theories, and buildings from which we ought to, in many cases, recoil in embarassment and even depression. Our buildings, whether commercial or cannot so easily be escaped unless we opt out of modernity altogether and decide to live as anarcho-primitivists claim we should live.

I mention these remarks at a most crucial moment in human history. The world appears to be ending, at least as we know it, especially if Jim Kunstler's peak oil theory is accurate, and, also given the dire geographical trauma that will follow from warmer temparatures. Oh the earth will most likely go on, of course, but life on it will more likely resemble something out of Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD than anything that humans have acclimated themselves to for at least over a century.

Since we are living in a kind of end of sorts it would be most prudent to ask ourselves why we have laid waste to the visible surface of our lives, our environment. (It is too intemperate and indelicate to ask why we increasingly dress as we do, or why we try and achieve a monotonous sameness in our gym manufactured bodies)

All of us are taught from the beginning that it is what is inside that counts. We are taught to be suspicious about our world of appearances. This has deep roots in monotheistic faiths and other general doctrines that have circulated for millennia. It is fairly clear that two things will follow from such advice. One consequence is that our surface lives can become increasingly unattractive and ugly since we have deemed such things as appearance as unimportant.

The second consequence is a kind of reverse of the first one. We will pursue our surfaces in a compulsive and manic way as if mania and excess were the revenge of Aphrodite herself upon us for taking too seriously all of this talk about our invisible interiors. We will become absorbed in plastic surgery and modes of existence in which the surface or our lives is an obsessive and above all CONFORMIST project. (In, for example, some narrow and Platonic ideal of thinness).

But one doesn't have to be a Freudian to see that we are insiting on the importance of something precisely because we never fully respected it to begin with. That is, we insist upon most dogmatically that which we don't truly or fully possess. We commit plastic surgery, we value others solely for their visual appearance, and we wear ugly clothes and live and work in ugly buildings because our heart was never in the surface to begin with. We remain unconsciously guilt ridden that we are not paying adequate attention to this all important interior we possess, as if some secret would be revealed there that would tell us finally who and what we are all.

If we were more, rather than less, shallow, by satisfying the claims made upon us of our external world, we would find we have a deepened life.

We often conceive of individual, human life as like an onion. In peel after peel, and layer after layer we feel we are that much more special, important, and intimate. This is a spatial metaphor.

Yet I would argue that we are more temporal, rather than spatial creatures. Our depths, if we want to call it that, can reveal themselves in the fullness of time.

What if the Jungians are correct and Aphrodite is a real entity and she is exacting revenge upon us for not taking her seriously enough, for ignoring Her needs, both in the form of sick and false forms of beauty and in plain ugliness?

Of course one doesn't have to be a Jungian, let alone a Pagan pantheist, to understand that beauty is its own value, with its own place in our lives.

As Oscar Wilde remarked:

"It is only superficial people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is in the visible, not the invisible".