Bespoke Cashmere

There are reams needed to accurately capture the evolved aesthetic of a place like Beirut. It would be worth all those words though, and there is the French and the Arabic and the English languages all mish-mashed — maybe the reams would have to be in French when speaking of the food and the cafes, maybe in arabic when speaking of the displacement and the stews of Abrahamic faiths, and maybe in English when it was meant to be read. 

Was passing on this stack of fabrics.

We must live with the choices we make.

A few thousand years ago, there was a star in the skies over these deserts. A few men knew that it was the changing of the zodiac house, moving from the house of Aquarius into the House of Pisces; these men could divine the star shining bright, or that star meant the Messiah had been born in a manger somewhere out there. But to begin with, it was just a star they were looking up at. 

So — Merry Christmas. There is no room at the inn. And, bright stars are most of the time important than being just a bright star.

They almost vanished without a trace — these memories, and even still we can’t be sure we were ever there.

Chowpatty Beach — Bombay, late 2007

Herodotus admits that he was obsessed with memory, fearful on its behalf. He felt memory is something defective, fragile, impermanent – illusory, even. That whatever it contains, whatever it is storing, can evaporate, simply vanish without a trace. His whole generation, everyone living on earth at that time, was possessed by that fear. Without memory one cannot live, for it is what elevates man above beasts, determines the contours of the human soul; and yet at the same time is so unreliable, elusive, treacherous. It is precisely what makes man so unsure of himself.

– Ryszard Kapuscinsky

This is vinkat. He is keeping it real in Chandighar making websites. He is also a rapper who is setting the Punjab on fire with his rhymes.

On a Tuesday in December, it was the afternoon in Dubai and the dawn was breaking in New York. There were twelve million people online using Skype. Twelve million people crossing each other in the ether around the world, Columbian girls with a crush on a Australian living in India, grandparents in Phoenix talking to their daughter and her daughter in Seattle, English web designers talking to their back house in the Ukraine, French man reaching across the Pyrenees to talk to a friend in Spain to plan their hike in the alps this coming summer, uncles speak to their nieces, estranged sons to their mothers, and on and on and on; there are twelve million people online this afternoon in December. In Dubai a gentleman was speaking to a polish girl home late from a party in Brooklyn. They talked and talked and blew kisses at the camera, and danced for each other, and they were there in that same ether as the grandparents and the old friends and the rest of the eleven million nine hundred thousand and ninety-six people on line.

Space and time folds in strange ways in the Ether, palpable closeness – the only things missing is the heat of the breaths when speaking comes to be whispers. It is life in the future, it is the appearance of closeness in the seams of the global markets that has taken and moved us all around the world. It is all of this, and there is a deep strangeness that pervades all of it. She is reduced to a talking head, she becomes a character – as fictional or real as one from one of those HBO shows, but this girl home late from a party is a character, the grandparents are characters, the niece is a character, those stupid plans made by the French man are only scenes = we are the operatives in a narrative that takes place inside the computer and dreams of manifesting in reality. 

The Ether has fooled everyone of them, maybe … maybe seeing a niece from fifteen thousand miles away coo instills a sense of being their with her; maybe a lover making proclamations is enough; maybe … but at the end, when one of them has to hang up, the sense of being close and being there is all twirled around in a vortex. The horrors of the cold computer! And the plans and the dreamed scenes of meeting again are prolonged again, days/months/years and the narrative has become the reality – maybe not the reality, but a reality that plays on and on.  And here comes the essential disconnect – the lives led and reams of dreams shared in the Ether versus those physical world interactions. 

This art is profoundly status quo, and yet subversive in its deep explorations of the human condition and noble attempts to push beyond our present social imaginary. Hooray to the collapsing distinction between art and consumer culture and the empty possibilities this opens up.

Art should aspire to being more than pastiche, blank irony, unashamedly devoid of meaning and cultural capital for the socially mobile. One would hope that it could be more than capitalism’s (f)art.

Bespoke Cashmere Responds: Hooray hooray indeed! Francis Fukuyama was wrong about many things in his End Of History thesis, but what he wasn’t wrong about was the seamlessness democracy, capitalism, and consumerism have found – the tracts these cultural forces have managed to paint and how they have succeeded in the homogenizing identity and culture. It is easy and simple to embark on tirades against McDonalds, or yachts, or suburban homes and luxury cars; but what this tirade (which the writer of the letter has not gone on, but may have had they continued typing) actually means, is that they are far removed from the crush of the human condition.

There have never, in the history of the world, been larger amounts of wealth created and controlled by the elite few. Not in France when they built that temple of bad taste (Versailles), or when the rubber barons exploited the delta of Manaus; never. Conversely, never has private wealth been so functionally displayed for the downtrodden to witness and be explicitly excluded from. This is as much related to those ignorant Pakistani boys who tortured and killed the Rabbi in Bombay as it is to the Jeff Koons sculptures in Versailles.

What Jeff Koons did in Versailles was turn the pretension on its head; flaunting a uniquely American asthetic in a strange context that added perfection to pieces that otherwise are otherwise uninteresting.

Art should aim to capture the sublime, inspire the magnifinince of god among other things, but the church has long since stopped being the breeding ground of creativity. And what we are left with, for better or worse, is this.