The mobility of the brotherhood of mankind often serves to disadvantage any possible association that we may make of it. It is easier to believe that we are individuals, that we are independent of our community and environment than it is to believe that we indeed are one giant mass portrayed with individual traits as benefits the global entity.
One doesn’t have to go to far to identify the system, take the “unique politician” an oxymoron for sure, yet every politician is out there saying that they are different and yet that they identify with each and everyone of us. More interesting is how a politician will run against the system, noting how corrupt and incestuous the system is while running on its foundation. More interesting is how we are willing to accept that when they get elected they will change everything without group and bureaucratic participation. It is not going to happen, we know it is not going to happen, that is precisely why we elect them anyway, we know they are inadequate, and we know that with all they shout they will simply make a small contribution to continuity and a modicum of tolerable change at their own expense.
Of course the very fact that a person is a politician implies that they are very much a part of the system, as no politician ever created anything as much as worked with what they found “within hands grasp”. It is exasperating to imagine that we would even benefit from a political figure that was willing to stand out side the system when the only way that they could serve us is if they could work the cogs and pulleys to help us each with our organized self interest.
In fact a politician is the ultimate and glorified representation of organized self interest. Every politician is but a manifestation of a common will that reaches a high level of organization so as to acquire political essence through collectively reinforced self interest.
I will make the case, and when I say “I” allow me to qualify it after these words, but I will make the case that artists, that is actors, comedians, painters, poets, are but representations of a common aesthetic will power that super imposes itself as a statement within the context of the social fabric!
This is true of all major creative elements, futuristic car designs are hindered by the fact that the designer can not march faster than the recombinant nature of his ideas takes to coalesce within the mind of car designers throughout the world. Why is it that if straight lines are in, every designer has to design cars with geometric straightness; we came from the Ford Model T where you could find as many straight lines as could guarantee the puritans that it was perfect, and then it evolved to curve city all over from the forties forward, and at some point, which was probably the seventies, we begun to see a revulsion through the absolutist adoption of minimalist curvature and greater fin and straight laced confinements. Even the eighties followed through on mostly straight structures with feigned curvature, and then suddenly came the nineties and someone put a full uncompromising curvature all over, every automobile had to be aggressively curbed and aggressively straight almost at the same time. Still regardless of the manufacturer and the machination you could see car design simply simmering, the nineties were the last decade where car design could argue that it had continental independence, hence forward we have a silent subconscious agreement that all futuristic cars must look retro futuristic, the digital touches of analog, and the colors harking back at a time when everything was peachy cream and at the same time some hot rod moment is screeched out.
You don’t have to ponder why that is the case, it is the case because the common mind defines the leading edge of car design. When the average Joe goes to buy a car he buys the car that he and his buddies designed in secret a few years back, in the corners of their minds, in their creative whims which may have been molested by the way a beer tasted or the way that the sun went down and caressed the paint job of their first car, those guys put that feeling in the air and somewhere else, in some academy, a sensitive fellow, mostly a loner that had more in common with a TV-tuner than with a TV, sensed the direction of car designs future, and felt it and felt it because he had something in common with it which he was willing to deny and not accept and so had to redesign the existing concepts in order to accept them as his own. Under such guidance is the child’s creative mind, at the mercy of the will of the masses. A silent design team that allows others to upset and test and evaluate the status quo so that they come as close as possible to satisfying the common individual desire.
Of course the common person can never be fully satisfied, but a common person is as close to satisfaction as one can get without getting there. The world belongs to the common folk, everyone else, specially those people from New York, London and Paris work for the masses even as they disdain us!
In some ways the disgruntled artist is more a conception of the artist mind than a reality. The artist far from being at war with his world is merely a representative of the angst and instant pleasures that a common mind wants to experience but prefers to experience through proxy as is the luxury of the privileged. We don’t need to be Kurt Cocaine or Rona the Suicide Mamma, we can let her be that, we can assume that they will make total asses of themselves in the public stage, paid handsomely with fame, we can expose them and challenge them to go further into the gutter or primal exultation of the extreme parody, and watch them overdose in their mirrored privacy and fallacy, we can watch them think themselves unique and sneak the millions that they can not imagine we are willing to pay to watch them perform for us, the circus that we demand to see. They will think they are getting away with something, we will be amazed at what they can get away with, and we will judge the future value of their essence and even tighten or loosen our silent mass imaginations here and there to tune or increase out their evolutionary characteristics.
True artists of course are not amused by the cruelness of this reality, on the contrary they are abhorred by it, they usually cut an ear off, or walk into a creek with a rock or do some other devastating thing, it is not all artists that are born so lucky as to be blind.
In the case of the Hollywood or Bollywood star it is the same, the star is born from the desires of the mass to recognize her on the screen, the mass feels the energy that it has channeled towards the actors, once the projected figure appears it is instantly recognized and subjected to the harrowing occasion of immediate approval and stardom. Every actor and every actress serve their times well, but they are servants, kept in check by a common will and an image that has to be the image that the masses have allowed for projection, a quick downfall would be met by anyone that does not buy into their allotted fame. You can not be all things to all people, you can be the thing that people have allowed you to become. Anything else is wayward bound and sure to find its own demise as critic fodder; as the critic is the interpreter of mass desire..
Of course fortunately as a rule the avatar of mass appeal is generally toned to its intended destiny, and as such will generally meet cordially with fame, fortune and happiness as such it was for a certain one called Bob Hope.
There is as always a utilitarian presentation to all this, the beauty queen represents a socially normalized beauty, be her with big smile, large teeth, high thin eyebrows, outlined eyelashes, large eyes and curves etc as mandated by the social regiment of the times, this beauty serves a higher purpose than just the ideal, the beauty queen serves as a representative model of the stile types of allure and erotic attractions. Of course as an idealized form they don’t exist in anyone type of woman though in theory the beauty queen or the Hollywood actress should conform to a great number of the socially approved traits throughout her physique and character. The service provided here for the mass is actually rather tremendous, for one it serves to appease the mass by giving it access to what it believes is not obtainable. Most girls know that they are not beauty or diva material. But when you see a modern Diva as one might call such Madonna, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Lulia Roberts they all have something rather striking in common, they are not spectacularly beautiful, they are rather average, there is nothing seemingly unobtainable about their beauty, they seem like a normal girl that had a makeover and it mostly worked. That, that very thing implies an immediate trendyness, a folksy acceptability assures them an instant following, this creature is now not so idealized, she is more normal, she really inst a beauty queen, and we know she inst; playboy magazine will ask her to pose not because of her beauty but rather because of her fame. And their fame comes from the fact that the audience feels at home with them.
Now in the case of the playboy bunny, the girl has to look spectacularly sexy and in fact she has to look unreal and unobtainable. Joe Smuckatelly inst going to masturbate to something he can not fantasize about and for the average Joe that mandates an unrequited love, he must not be able to reach the object of his affection. Sure a playboy centerfold is a real girl, even after playboy prunes her up, but in the end the average Joe isn’t going to marry her, he doesn’t imagine that he deserves her, even as her posing for playboy makes her in fact rather average in ambition.
The beauty queen serves precisely the same role but the audience is now the female, the beauty pageant is to allow women to measure their beauty in relationship to each other and to what appeals to males. But the beauty queen has to look less fuckable than the centerfold, she has to be able to make a living professionally perhaps, and she has to sound intelligent, she can not appear a slut or claim accessibility, she must in a sense remain in a pedestal to get that crown. This is because females are harsher judges than males, the males will be happy with a bunny but women want to see each other or actually themselves in a better light. Beauty Queens everywhere are then propagating the look and feel of a working woman or a housewife, that has the ability to pay bills, work, raise children and perhaps do soap commercials on her spare time. But more interesting the Beauty Queen is also a valve that allows the women to propagate their own sense of beauty through any and all association that they might have with the beauty queen. Their husbands will corner a moment with the beauty queen if their wife looks at them a certain way, if her eyes or lips are similar, if her hands share the imperial hand traits, even body movements bring forth this association. In the grand excursion into the primitive sexual encounter and the passionate mad embrace, there is the alluring magnification of a moment essence magnified a thousand times by proximity, you are holding the female essence!
In this charitable portrayal of what must seem to some of you a rather despicable apparition, there are no saved souls, the philosopher and the writer falls victim to this whole. Philosophers and writers in general all represent a segment of the populace that has franchised its belief and mandates expression, when I write I often say I am taking dictation. The fiction that I write is the products of the whims of the average imagination that wants to read itself and connect to others with similar comprehensions, and when I philosophize I am accepting the prophecies of our progeny. I am just a note taker, an avatar, an amanuensis, for the aspirations, the desires of the common will as they fallibly simmer within me only to be regurgitated. It is this reality that guarantees that I will be published, my reader has dictated, if I executed correctly I will be published, if my reader is not of our present time I will be published posthumously, the only thing I have to do is just type, the rest is done.
RC
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