I AM A VERB...

I am a verb. One of the first signs that a society has a poverty of imagination is when…usually in things like faculty meetings…a collective starts talking about ‘states of being nouns’ instead of making things with the incredible cheap and available media around you. It is pathetic. There is first the complaint about the non-existence of money (those who are provincial and have not seen the way that other cultures and societies del with the lack of material resources cannot follow the adage that …’the lower the budget, the greater the creativity). The next knee jerk reaction of academics and artists who find themselves in the petting zoo of the modern university is they start talking about the states of being nouns. ‘we should define what a ‘meaningful curriculum’ is. Pathetic.

Adorno developed a type of architecture around social criticism itself…. there was a shell…a periphery and then there was a core…a center. For the individual to get back to a type of ‘natural condition’ of essential freedom, creativity, and veritable happiness (an a priori of the child like state) the individual would have to strip away or at least ask questions of the seeming individuality of the periphery. Take the leather bomber jacket. Elvis wore one. He ‘radically’ took the gyrations and the overt sexuality of African American music…added a hyper white boy pace, gyrated his hips in suggestive manner, and dressed the part of the social reprobate of the rigid fifties. The bomber jacket had been a utilitarian item for bomber pilots incinerating the old cities of Europe and risking their lives ‘high above’. They were hero’s. The bikers took that jacket in the fifties and with it came a juvenile delinquency. The jackets were passé in the hippy sixties and the granola seventies. In the eighties, under the Regan Thatcher yuppie financier mini robber baron libertarian living in London, upper west side, and every yuppie core of the former abandoned cities of north America the leather jacket was the weekend uniform par excellence. They were top gun with their libertarian values of ‘dad the prol doesn’t understand why I am in hedge funds…I am beating the system the way he wanted to with his weekend biking…. I am robbing him and his bottom feeders…and everybody else. Or something to that effect. The bomber jacket was top gun and every eighties star who wanted to exhibit ‘non-conformity’ and aloofness as the bomber pilots and the biker anarchists. This was the deceptive outer shell. At the core was a Regan Thatcher conformity and a twist on the neo-con conservatives: I will be what you want me to be… oh society…and I will put the jacket on and off (attending to the rituals of time in the evening and weekends in the yuppie bars of the lower east side) and I will camouflage myself in a non-contradictory way with the new pluralism that had exploded along with the Regan thatcher life style change of the eighties. Now, everybody wears bomber jackes tanned in brazil and India (they wait till the cow dies of natural causes). The corporate farming has transformed our society of transparency into the utter conformity of expedience: our food and nutrition habits are conditions by the nightmare hormon and ‘intensive farming’ concentration camps of cows and pigs and chickens who move knee high in their own filth. We eat and wear them in their filth. We eat the big Mac around the world to ‘non conform’ to the local food (everybody) and this becomes the libertarian act: where ever you go there is a standard. Eat it.