Cool Shit: No longer just in the USA

Have I just always lived in bumfuck, MI, or is Taipei really that interesting? I’m at Cafe 26 in Ximen, the “Japanese” area of the city. I’ve never been to Japan, but from its stereotypes, I can recognize the influence.

During the Japanese occupation, Ximen was the center of imperial Taiwan. 150 years later and Japanese pop-art, fashion, and design are still obvious here. This influence, despite its being made on conditions of military rule, reminds me of something I’m going to call American cultural arrogance. Visiting my brother in Manhattan, the purported world center of everything cool and original, I wandered for 3 days looking for a place like Cafe 26, to no real avail. Every “cafe” was a high-end restaurant.

The walls of Cafe 26 are filled with original artwork, there are splendid pale whitewashed schooldesks for seating, juxtaposed with Murakami-esque superflat patterned couches. There are kleenex boxes covered in original fabric from the housewares art gallery/shop below. The music is in English, but to order I have to point to #2 on the English menu the barista pulls out from underneath the counter. There are little design magazines inside the schooldesks with that matte-paper feel characteristic of good arty magazines. And my iced coffee is at least as good as anything I’ve had in the US.

America is great, and so is New York City. But an hour in Ximen and I’ve seen more creativity than months in Manhattan. It may be that, to my fresh eyes, everything that seems original to me is redundant and predictable to locals. But it seems more likely that the US takes its place as world-cultural-generator for granted.

The real disaster of American ignorance in this respect is that we refuse to be influenced or inspired by external innovation, particularly in the arts. How many US indie-rock musicians listen to stuff made outside North America? In my experience studying philosophy at Michigan State University, a relatively open-minded department, I was exposed to maybe one or two non-Western thinkers, even in courses on contemporary issues. Globalization, even by the definitions of radical American leftists, is understood as the outward explosion of Western values.

I have hope for the US, but it seems that unless Americans begin to comprehend the value of a two-way global culture, the country might lose relevance to creative, original people altogether.

Cafe 26 gives me a little white ceramic plate with my coffee. It has a deep, espresso brown “2,” cookie, a pale green “6,” and a cold chocolate dot: “26.” It’s a color scheme out of a (good) web designer’s portfolio. American culture does spread outward, but all of these other countries are sharing with each other, exchanging ideas, coming up with new stuff. Things are happening here, whether people on the other side of the world recognize it, or care.

edit: somebody’s cell phone just blew up with Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.”

Bus Drivers and The Human World

Kant imagined and advocated a world in which each person was considered and treated as an “end.” He called this the “Kingdom of Ends” (he was always a sucker for epic names, I mean it doesn’t get much more bold than Critique of Pure Reason). In this Kingdom of Ends, each and every life would be considered an end in itself, rather than a means to something else. Thus, none cane be used as slaves, none can be cheated; their lives must be respected as ultimate goals.

Herbert Marcuse also puts this nicely in his famous New Left text One-Dimensional Man: “Life as a means is qualitatively different from life as an end.” And I’ve been thinking about this. Are our lives carried out for the sake of something else? Should they be? What does it mean to live your life as a life? Or to treat others’ lives as lives?

It seems to me that this requires contextualization, a stressing of process over product. The Hegelian idea of the seed never realizing its reality until it grows into a tree and dies, the idea that the world is not “what is?” but “what has been and what is happening?” still holds its magical quality. But I think Kant was too tied up in his enlightenment rationality, his political liberalism, to understand what he was saying. Sure, nobody should be the means to another, nobody should be a sacrifice, but for what reason does “means” imply this sadistic individualism, a relation of one to another only?

To me, a life should be a means: a means to the creation of the human world. What would our lives be like in the Kingdom of Ends? Who would we love? What language would we speak? No, that is not the human world. The human world is an infinitely changing aggregate of potentiality. Each human life is simultaneously a past and a future. This does not end. We cannot treat lives as ends, because lives do not end.

What does this world look like? Quito buses have two employees, in East Lansing there is one. The human world looks like the former. The latter lives his life, is treated as an end in himself. “We don’t want to exploit you. We will give you a job, pay you, we want you to live your own life, and live it well.” The East Lansing bus driver is limited to an existence as an end. It’s not bad, he does live his own life, and lives it well, but he can never be a means to the creation of the human world. He does not realize that any of the day’s events he might go home to tell necessarily involved the lives of others.
–“Big accident today on Grand River.”
–“Anyone hurt?
–“Don’t think so.”
–“Lucky then.”
–“Yeah, guess so.”

But the questioning stops at the end. “Anyone hurt?” Anyone sad? Why weren’t they focusing on the road? Were they drunk? In a hurry? Just stupid? Did they just realize they actually loved the person they just broke up with? Were they convinced that if they drove fast enough and with enough conviction, the car would fly? What is our world without these stories?

The Quito bus driver knows this world, and knows it well. He has a partner. The money-taking, destination-shouting, sign-changing auxiliary bus maverick. The two talk constantly The bus driver goes home with a much different story to tell.
–“Andrés estuvo diciéndome que tu madre está enferma.”
–“Ay, ¿que pasó?”
–“Creen que cáncer pulmonar. Ella fuma montón. Él me dijo que ella nunca fumaba hasta su esposo murió hace veinte años, y desde entonces, siempre tiene un tobaco.”
–“Pobrecita. ¿Que dijiste a él?”
–“No mucho, no sabía que decir. Solo le escuchaba.”
–“Pobrecita.”
–“Pobrecita, si.”

(Translation)
–“Andrés was telling me that his mother is sick.”
–“Oh no, what happened?”
–“They think it’s lung cancer. She smokes a ton. He told me she never smoked until her husband died twenty years ago, and since then, she always has a cigarette.”
–“Poor thing. What did you say to him?”
–“Nothing much, I didn’t know what to say. I just listened to him.”
–“Poor thing.”
–“Yeah, poor thing.”

And that is our world. An interaction between potentialities rather than a collection of realities. When we treat people’s lives as ends, as real rather than potential, product rather than process, this world is lost. There are no new stories to tell. Only old memories with weird changes over time and an alienation from the events they describe.

I want to live in the human world, where my life story is important to strangers and theirs to me. A world where feelings are valuable and exposed and described, not hidden. There is no physical thing in the way of that goal. Let me tell you a story about myself. Tell me a story about yourself. Welcome to the world.

Hoping and Waiting

In the Spanish language, the words for “to wait” and “to hope” are one in the same: “esperar.” I think this might explain a lot of the cultural differences found here.

‘Esperar’ comes from the Latin “sperāre” which means “hope” and has no mention of waiting. In English, ‘wait’ and ‘hope’ are drastically different. While hoping usually involves waiting, its implications are much more grandiose: we ‘hope’ for a miracle, we ‘wait’ for the bus. The first instance of ‘wait’ shows up in the English language c.1200, while the temporal origins of ‘hope’ are not as well known, which implies it came earlier. It is known, however, that both words come from Germanic roots.

The time frame here seems to be important. In 1200, the English- and German-speaking worlds started to do a lot of hoping. In the heart of the crusades, it was important to draw a distinction between the waiting of every day, natural life and the hope of eternal redemption. There was nothing much to wait for in the life of the crusader or crusadee, in fact, life on earth was rather painful, and was purposely construed as such by the church. But there was plenty to hope for, as any of us at all familiar with Christianity (as I barely am) know. Eternal happiness, harmony, absence of hope. Nothing to hope for, it’s all at your fingertips (of which you have none you intangible angel, you). So it was necessary to describe the way in which, even though there was nothing to ‘wait’ for, your life totally sucked, there was much to ‘hope’ for.

In Spain at this time, the situation was slightly yet importantly different. The Spanish, fighting their own battles of Reconquista (Reconquest) were more concerned with reclaiming land ruled by the Islamic Moors. Spain, with a history containing a milder Christian zeal, was fighting a land battle rather than angrily attempting to impose a particular religiosity. So the Spanish language never found it necessary to draw a distinction between ‘waiting’ and ‘hoping.’ Though the Spanish were not pleasant people at this time, it was at least never an assumption that there was nothing to wait for. The idea of life on Earth was never completely rejected as a pointless step toward salvation. You could wait while hoping, for something to happen in your current life, or in the world around you.

So here I am, an English-speaker in a Spanish-speaking country, and I seem to be the only one who is distinguishing these two terms (besides the other gringos or otherwise Westerners). I am 10 minutes early to class, I arrive exactly at or slightly later than the agreed upon time, when waiting for the bus I get jittery and constantly look for it to round the corner. It’s because I am the only one waiting. Everybody else is both waiting and hoping, a miracle of simultaneity that my brain can’t figure out.

In the US, perhaps in the “West,” we consider ‘waiting’ to be an empty, bland place to stand around until some predictable, particular event occurs. The notion of waiting implies that we know what we are waiting for. The bus, the mail, class, to exhale. This is a big flaw in our culture, as I see it. The idea that point A leads directly to point B and all empty spaces are automatically filled with this empty waiting, empty anticipation of points B/C/D/Etc. But here, in the world of waiting/hoping, the empty spaces are not boring hindrances of our plans. They are places of possibility. Here, point A seems to lead directly to point B, but the empty spaces are always filled with, in addition to waiting, the underlying hope we might be sent flying to point ! or point ↓ or to a land where points no longer exist.

Words say a lot about cultures. It is my sense that there is something important to be gained from this difference in language use. I have been trying to interpret moments of waiting, which normally frustrate me, as moments of possibility, of hope. I have been trying to find a happy medium between the boredom of waiting and the impossible grandiosity of hope. With this distinction intact, it is hard for me to discover things anew. It is hard to understand that empty spaces in time can be filled with exploration rather than anticipation.

I hope you have enjoyed this. Hope a minute to take it all in and… hope for it, BAM! Maybe it didn’t work. If this doesn’t make me famous, I’ll just become a hoper. I hear they make good tips.