lkurnarsky
ON THE CELLPHONE ON THE CELLPHONE ON THE CELLPHONE, Alavardo St, Echo Park, California
A long rant on this pic:
It seems obvious that the ubiquitous cellphone is the new cigarette. Like the cigarette it serves both as an authenticator and social-lubricant, At a bus-stop he or she is no loser if a cellphone is produced, or better a 'Smart Phone'. An icebreaker like, 'Is that the latest SideKick?'; now replaces, 'Excuse me, but do you have a light?'; Whenever you feel self-conscious you can now fumble with an I-Phone which has way more cool clout than, say, a baseball cap on backwards. Years ago you would pull out a cigarette. Of course some still smoke and cellphone.
So cool you are but, of course, 'cool' now means Persona Gratis and 'I belong'. No more it an indicator of the existential outsider. No more is it, 'I have chosen to be in the world but not of the world'. Instead it is I am in need of your approval or, a level up, I am entitled to your approval. Never can it be, I have no need of your approval. In other words, 'cool' has been hijacked by commercial interests and now means the opposite of what it once meant. And how do you get cool? You buy it off the rack.
Thus the 'belong gene' trumps the 'creative gene'. Thus the marketers win all the marbles. For if the cigarette was physically deadly it was never a killer of content, never a marker of rampant narcissism verging on mass solipsism.
Quite the opposite, the rhythms of smoking was often emotional punctuation in life's little stories. There was the inhale just before the punchline. Then there came the exhale and then the delivery of the content. Now, no punchline, no content, little to no communication.
All those people who live in the town with 'no there there', Los Angeles; they sure seem to have stored away a lot to say before the introduction of the cellphone.Now it's pouring out of their maws and into cellphones like an old fashioned Texas oil gusher. And yet when you meet one of these people who seem to constantly be on their cellphones, and if you try to engage in any meaningful direct conversation, forget it. Nothing. It's a dud. Or it's the sentence after sentence larded with the 'like' word as in, 'so then he like', 'so I like', 'so then I just like' . After the like, a pregnant pause with a still-birth of a nothing, no content, just a beat, a blank for you project your media cliche into. You fill in the blank, not your friend. 'So then Joe he goes like - leave a blank, make a gesture - and so I like just like leave? You know?
It's I trigger your reflex if you trigger mine. Thus, the greatest names of all retailers, 'The Gap'. Perfect. You fill in the gap with your credit card.
My take is that this is largely because there needs to be an 'I' to communicate to a ;thou' and we are living in the time of the atrophied or undeveloped 'I'. Again we are back at this plague of narcissism in which the cost of a need to love yourself before you can love others is the cost of the self. 'Know Thyself' was the imperative historically never until the last century was there a mention of 'Love Thyself'.
The mirror of the self must be the other and not the reflecting pool. The object of the lover needs to be the beloved. Surely there must be an individuated consciousness or there can be no pithy insights or original observations. Who should be surprised that so much of our ostensible two way communications are nowl within quotes, cuttings and pastings of bits and pieces from Planet Pop, flotsam and jetsam of sunken meanings?
The leading instrument of this nothingness is the cellphone. The symbol a figure, head bowed, walking meditatively, slow paced, with hands as if in prayer but coming closer one sees that it is someone with thumbs flying text-messaging into the ether.
ON THE CELLPHONE ON THE CELLPHONE ON THE CELLPHONE, Alavardo St, Echo Park, California
A long rant on this pic:
It seems obvious that the ubiquitous cellphone is the new cigarette. Like the cigarette it serves both as an authenticator and social-lubricant, At a bus-stop he or she is no loser if a cellphone is produced, or better a 'Smart Phone'. An icebreaker like, 'Is that the latest SideKick?'; now replaces, 'Excuse me, but do you have a light?'; Whenever you feel self-conscious you can now fumble with an I-Phone which has way more cool clout than, say, a baseball cap on backwards. Years ago you would pull out a cigarette. Of course some still smoke and cellphone.
So cool you are but, of course, 'cool' now means Persona Gratis and 'I belong'. No more it an indicator of the existential outsider. No more is it, 'I have chosen to be in the world but not of the world'. Instead it is I am in need of your approval or, a level up, I am entitled to your approval. Never can it be, I have no need of your approval. In other words, 'cool' has been hijacked by commercial interests and now means the opposite of what it once meant. And how do you get cool? You buy it off the rack.
Thus the 'belong gene' trumps the 'creative gene'. Thus the marketers win all the marbles. For if the cigarette was physically deadly it was never a killer of content, never a marker of rampant narcissism verging on mass solipsism.
Quite the opposite, the rhythms of smoking was often emotional punctuation in life's little stories. There was the inhale just before the punchline. Then there came the exhale and then the delivery of the content. Now, no punchline, no content, little to no communication.
All those people who live in the town with 'no there there', Los Angeles; they sure seem to have stored away a lot to say before the introduction of the cellphone.Now it's pouring out of their maws and into cellphones like an old fashioned Texas oil gusher. And yet when you meet one of these people who seem to constantly be on their cellphones, and if you try to engage in any meaningful direct conversation, forget it. Nothing. It's a dud. Or it's the sentence after sentence larded with the 'like' word as in, 'so then he like', 'so I like', 'so then I just like' . After the like, a pregnant pause with a still-birth of a nothing, no content, just a beat, a blank for you project your media cliche into. You fill in the blank, not your friend. 'So then Joe he goes like - leave a blank, make a gesture - and so I like just like leave? You know?
It's I trigger your reflex if you trigger mine. Thus, the greatest names of all retailers, 'The Gap'. Perfect. You fill in the gap with your credit card.
My take is that this is largely because there needs to be an 'I' to communicate to a ;thou' and we are living in the time of the atrophied or undeveloped 'I'. Again we are back at this plague of narcissism in which the cost of a need to love yourself before you can love others is the cost of the self. 'Know Thyself' was the imperative historically never until the last century was there a mention of 'Love Thyself'.
The mirror of the self must be the other and not the reflecting pool. The object of the lover needs to be the beloved. Surely there must be an individuated consciousness or there can be no pithy insights or original observations. Who should be surprised that so much of our ostensible two way communications are nowl within quotes, cuttings and pastings of bits and pieces from Planet Pop, flotsam and jetsam of sunken meanings?
The leading instrument of this nothingness is the cellphone. The symbol a figure, head bowed, walking meditatively, slow paced, with hands as if in prayer but coming closer one sees that it is someone with thumbs flying text-messaging into the ether.