this is something new. i have not written in a while, but i am back. i keep asking myself, in my life, am i transcending it all, or am i just being stupid ? here is another version of the same piece.

there once was a boy named she

I went back to the sushi restaurant for the first time one night about a year after I stopped working there, to get take-out. When I walked in door stiffly to pick up the order, the hollow bell rang, and I could see that the new owners hadn’t changed a thing-everything from the layout of the place to the china they were using was exactly how it was when I last left-but two new chefs were behind the counter where I used to explore; a new waitress now sat at the stools where I once laid my feet. Immediately I felt embarrassed to know the intimacies of the place; I felt like a peeping Tom at the house of these friendly strangers. All the hijinks and the magic of the place had evaporated and all that was left was the physical space, occupied by people who had no idea that I too had existed here. Later I heard they were hiring waitresses again-my friend suggested I apply-but I felt like my home had been violated, taken over, like it could never be the same.


i think we all need it
sometimes
but some of us
need to cut deeper
and deeper into our stem
to start to grow toward our sun.

good god,
will you just
eat me already.

 At about 10 p.m. on the 18^th of February, a group of about fifty students, members, and supporters of the activist group Take Back NYU! began a three-day sit-in at the Kimmel Center on Washington Square. The demonstration was meant to be a peaceful protest of the university’s lack of financial transparency and refusal to make public the yearly budget, among other demands. The event got the campus community talking and brought outside attention to the university for several days as students, residents of the community, activists, and the media all gathered around the protesters. The situation, meant to be a nonviolent student protest of university policy, soon became a mish-mosh of different ideals and different ideas about the students’ actions, demands, and manner of execution.

            I went down to the scene myself several times. Each time I saw students, supporters both from NYU and not affiliated with NYU, chanting, holding signs, and shouting their support for their comrades on the balcony. They were there to make a scene, to start a riot, to bring visibility to the students and their stated causes. At one point, several women took off their shirts to draw attention to themselves and the crowd under the guise of “Exposure till Disclosure.” It worked; the media that was covering the event immediately rushed towards their nakedness. Whenever the protesters came out onto the balcony, the crowd below cheered; the more enthusiastic they were, the more the crowd cheered. All I could think of was Thomas de Zengotita’s statement on society-”Method actors all” (141). The crowd reacted to the protesters on the balcony; the people on the balcony reacted to the crowd; they all did and said what they thought should have been done and said in the situation. They all played a role. As I sat away from the protestors, away from the counter-protestors, with a full view of the situation, my friend turned to me and said, “This is better than watching television.” Right. Because, I realized, this was a live performance.

It is after all, as they say, monkey see, monkey do. De Zengotita, in his essay “Attack of the Superzeroes” argues that we have learned this, learned how to act when in the spotlight by watching and, later, by doing. We are, he says, “coached by performer heroes,” celebrities both on television and “common person” celebrities on the internet, and we seek “the recognition to which [we feel] entitled” by the success of other “common people” as celebrities-the Numa-Numa guy got an incredible amount of attention, why can’t I? (140). In fact, de Zengotita articulates, television and self-made “YouTube celebrities” give us “a sort of God’s-eye view” of a situation or event, so that we can almost place ourselves in it-”[t]he hidden blandishments of representation implanted a sense of entitlement, and envy, a desire for public significance commensurate with our unconscious sense of centrality” in any situation (140). The students in Take Back NYU!, fall into a group of people who, in this spirit, “have not had some problematic condition thrust upon them by fate [but] feel as if they have” (141). They want to feel as if they are in the center of some great occurrence, as if they are of some great importance; they want to feel as if they too have been marginalized; they too want to join in the fight against “the man” and gain attention through a cause, albeit an empty one. They used the model of Civil Rights and Vietnam War-era protests, peaceful demonstrations for a respectable cause-to save lives-and people who believed in what they were fighting for, not who just believed in fighting.  Both those who “occupied” the building and those outside the building knew what to expect from watching these historic demonstrations, what made the protests in the sixties so righteous, the people so marginalized, the outcome and their treatment so shocking. “We have this on camera,” one student warns an administrator who has come in not to harass, but to negotiate with them, “and we are filming this brutality” (Brown). The difference between this protest and the demonstrations that took place in the 1960s is that in this situation, they don’t know what brutality really is, they don’t know how to take responsibility for their actions, and they don’t know what they’re fighting for.

Bill Wasik, creator of the flash mob, in analyzing his creation, notes that the flash mob (which is not so different from the stunt pulled by Take Back NYU!) draws people in because “flash mobs were gatherings of insiders“-people who felt they were more important than others because they knew about the situation, knew what was going on and were showing off that fact, and “they drew their energies not from impressing outsiders or freaking them out but from showing them utter disregard, from using the outside world as merely a terrain for their private games” (65). By excluding the outer population in their planning, yet demanding their support, the student protestors acted as if they knew what was going on, how to handle the situation, what to demand at all times-they pretended they were on top of things, taking charge, and expected the rest of the student body should follow (and some did) because they wanted in, too. Yet it was never all about demands, never all about Palestine, never all about budget transparency. Their first demand was for their own amnesty. They refused negotiations several times. In de Zengotita’s way of thinking, they pictured the protest before it occurred, imagined their fame, imagined the support from the student body, imagined their faces on CNN, YouTube, their story in the New York Times, reality and representation fused in “the irresistible flattery that goes with constantly being addressed in such fabulous ways” (139); it was “pure scene,” as described by Wasik, an event in which “the scene would be the entire point of the work, and indeed would itself constitute the work” (58). These kids were dreaming of a way out of anonymity and into the spotlight-they wanted, above all, to be cool.

How can this possibly be cool? To put yourself at risk of losing almost $24,000 worth of credits toward a degree and of putting a possible permanent stain on your reputation? The price of attention?  Or is it status? At a place like NYU, where the great majority is of the same socioeconomic status, in order to stand out, you have to do something to attract attention, to set yourself apart from the rest, to seem better in some way, and therefore cooler. One way people do this-especially those with enough disposable income like you find at respected private universities-is to use their money for good, or to prove how good they can be to someone less fortunate than them, partially to feel better about themselves and partially to look better to others. In “The Neoliberal Imagination,” Walter Benn Michaels explores the nonexistence of lower class students in top universities-calling affirmative action a program “designed to convince white kids that they didn’t get in just because they are white,” citing the “passionate support among upper middle class white students” (73). “Every black face they see on campus makes them feel better about themselves,” and every step they take to “improve the lives of others” is a step they take above their peers (73). On a larger scale, outside the university setting, we see things like Product Red and the Eco-friendly movement that play the same role. Product Red, a line of clothing and accessories that donates a portion of the profits to support the fight against AIDS in Africa, where it is an especially large problem, is recognized by the word “Red” and the eponymous color, thereby allowing people to display their purchase of an expensive item-similar to wearing a shirt that reads “I did community service.” If you bragged about doing community service, you would generally be seen as arrogant and self-important. Product Red allows people to give more subtle signals of their righteousness-displaying themselves as “insiders” in this movement, that only other “insiders” can recognize and appreciate. And everybody wants to be an insider. The eco-friendly or “green” movement can be regarded in the same way. Those who are outwardly green may show off to their friends, almost compete for who can be more green, some being very strict about recycling and some even going to the point of purchasing a hybrid vehicle or eating strictly vegan. These choices-if I may note-would not even be an option if the person in question did not have enough financial security to even consider them. Eating completely vegan and purchasing ethanol-powered vehicles are continually expensive habits. Is it no surprise, then, that many of the Take Back NYU! protestors were vegan?

When we spend money and effort to make others’ lives better rather than focusing on ourselves, it allows us to distinguish ourselves from the rest in our class; it has been a status elevator, has become the new “cool”. In this socioeconomic class, that of middle- to upper-middle class, if you can’t buy yourself into cool-dom-everyone can afford the new Nikes, the trucker hats, the flashy jewelry and the name brand shirts-you’ve got to select what you buy-what that says about you-to get ahead. Normally, as Rick Moody says in his essay “Against Cool,” that “[w]hen advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it’s time to retire from it” (121). But it’s the idea of “charitable coolness,” that you can advance your status by being more charitable, more worthy than the next person. It’s the idea that you can buy $40 T-shirts, but no one can call you an elitist because the money went to the victims of genocide; that you can destroy things, yell at people and raise your fist in anger, but in protest of an oppressive administration, to protect student rights. However, the latter did not exactly happen in the case of Take Back NYU!. The major product to come out of that protest was that much of the student body became openly critical of their methods and their goals, and the media put a negative slant on their story, making them look like fools. They accomplished none of their goals, and they are facing serious disciplinary action. Essentially, nothing favorable happened. And that’s what distinguishes Product Red and the Green Movement, and any charitable cause from that of Take Back NYU!: True ends to their means.

I cannot accept Take Back NYU! as an honestly intentioned or helpful organization. What they did speaks in every way of the desperation of students to be recognized among a sea of the same and a school and community that is largely impersonal. They had no back-up plan, no idea about the realistic achievement of their goals. They were seemingly organized, yet were barely hanging on in the end, struggling to remain at a consensus about their actions and clinging to their stated goals. They failed to market their ideas properly to and seek the support of the student body. Product Red, on the other hand, is organized, has an achievable goal-to save lives (or at least earnestly try to)-and is manipulating the idea of “cool” and the advancement of status in order to achieve its goals. I am a firm believer of working within the system-it being impossible to change the minds of a massive amount of people within a short period of time, it is best to try to take advantage of the way they think, like recycling old cooking oil to fuel cars-utilizing a waste product of our society in a quest to do good.

 But can this falsity be dangerous? Absolutely. We are fearfully awaiting the death of this movement-then what happens? One thing Moody and Wasik can agree on is that cool, and anything labeled cool, eventually gets worn out or old, becomes Uncool, especially when it passes on to the hands of someone trying to sell something-when money gets involved. In his study of the flash mob, Wasik sees that when Ford began to use the concept to sell cars, they “had managed to take [the] fad, an empty meditation on emptiness [of hipster culture], and to render it even more vacuous” (66). Moody says that “[c]ool is empty. Cool is ex post facto” and has become “a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries” (121). “Cool” in fact means nothing but what it is in the moment. It is a desire wholly unreachable, yet we try to catch it by buying into fads and advertising and keeping up with the latest trends and joining movements, all to seem bigger, better than someone else. We do whatever is necessary to achieve it, yet we can never achieve it.

Moody wonders in his essay, “[w]here is the cool we once thought we had or thought we wanted? Shimmering interstate mirage, never to materialize? Cultural speck of a credulous age?” (121). We need to stop associating the past “cool” that Moody describes-of blues and Ken Kesey and punk rock rebellion, so fresh and so forward-with the “cool” of today, of material things and imitation and “Method acting” through our lives. In spite of this, rather than trying to fight the tide, which Moody tries-his essay is titled “Against Cool;” he advocates “that we begin to avoid cool now” (121)-I believe we must work with it. If it is cool to be fake, to pretend we like doing acts of charity and standing up for the little guy (in some cases, maybe not the right little guy) then at least let it have an end result, like Product Red. Let it give money to save human lives. We can’t just give up on cool so easily, when clearly it is here to stay.

            So I say let’s take back cool-but in a different way than Moody advocates. We can’t just kick it to the curb, but we can work from within the system and redefine it. Let’s take back cool from the hipsters, the jocks, the tepid, the know-nots of the world, and let’s put it in the hands of the change-makers, the learned, the truly empowered, and the scholarly. Let’s use this weakness for good; let’s make books and brains sexy and manipulate teenagers to idolize Kant and Plato and Thoreau. (Okay, maybe not Thoreau.) Who knows? Intelligence may make a comeback. But in the meantime, we can teach them to do charitable things in their free time. Be a better person than everyone else! And in turn it will make someone’s life a little better. We can do it! We can save lives by being ignorant! Who ever would have thought?

Works Cited 

Brown, Cody. “Raw Footage from the Last Moments of the Kimmel Occupation.”Weblog Entry. NYU Local. Posted 23 February 2009. Accessed 23 February 2009.<http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2009/02/23/raw-footage-from-the-last-moments-of-the-kimmel-occupation/>.

de Zengotita, Thomas. “Attack of the Superzeroes.” Morgan, Mischkot, and Bennett 133-142.

Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Neoliberal Imagination.” N+1 Magazine. Fall 2005: 69-76.

Moody, Rick. “Against Cool.” Morgan, Mischkot, and Bennett 95-122.

Morgan, William M., Jono Mischkot, and Nat Bennett. The Advanced College Essay:Education and the Professions. Boston, MA: Pearson, 2007.

Wasik, Bill. “My Crowd.” Harper’s Magazine. March 2006: 56-66.

but i know this is just a microcosm for the rest of the world, a metaphor; living in manhattan, trying to see the stars is so hard because of all the obnoxious light. trying to hear someone playing a guitar across the street is so difficult because of all the tires on asphalt and truck motors and squeaking breaks and sirens and wailing and and

here, it is never about what you leave behind, it’s what others leave behind for you. where does it come from? i don’t know. it’s here. get fucked up, sleep, wake up, repeat. you live, and then you die. you are no more, no less. why try? “i want i want i want i want”

how self-important you are to think that you will matter to others, because all that matters to the others you want to impress is themselves. we are all alone in this. the people, they love you because in you they see themselves. they love you because they want to be loved, to rise up, to feel better than everyone else, for just a split second; for a lifetime.

how dare you think that you are any better than anyone else, when time only can judge.

it’s an inescapable cycle we are bound to not by choice but by nature.