We Love Your Dog!

The signs of the city can tell you a lot about what's happening socially. About a decade ago, we started seeing "Shut Up" signs all over the place. Clearly, they were necessary, and so we must assume that people needed to be told to shut up because they were getting louder and louder, caring less and less about their impact on others.

There's another breed of sign that's been cropping up everywhere more recently. It's the "We Love Your Dog" sign. It might also be the "We Love Your Baby" or "We Love You and Your Laptop" sign, but most often it has to do with dogs. ("Pets" really means dogs, since cat people don't usually bring Fluffy on errands.)



Years ago, businesses that sold food had signs on the door that said "No Dogs Allowed." Simple, straightforward, unassailable.

But today, more and more, they say something along the lines of: "We love your dog! Unfortunately, the big bad laws of the land say we can't let your dog inside. Please don't get mad at us--it's not our fault! To placate you and contain your narcissistic rage, here's a bowl of water and some treats. Really, truly, we LOVE your dog. Please don't get mad." (I am paraphrasing.)



You see these signs everywhere--I've collected quite a few--on the doors of big chain stores and little coffee shops. On grocery stores and Chinese restaurants. Many of them come with pictures of cute dogs. See? We really, really like them! (Please don't get mad.)



"Love" is the operative word here. The signs typically say we "love" your dog, pets, etc. Not: we're tolerant, or we don't mind, but we LOVE. The message is: We're not "haters" filled with negativity.

The signs almost always say "your" dog/pets. We love YOUR dog, not dogs in general. "We love dogs" could actually be true, but "We love your dog" is almost impossible. "We don't know your dog, so how could we love it," would be more accurate. But the words "you" and "your" have taken over marketing. They make people feel special, so there it is, the appeasing "your."



And then comes the turn, usually in the form of the word "unfortunately." It has a stammering quality, like a big gulp before the delivery of bad news you're afraid will get you slapped in the face. Don't upset the dog owner!



In this climate, some businesses just want to be the good guy. Like Ricky's, where they don't sell food, and so can allow pets. They make the most of it with this sign, basically saying, "Hey, we're not dog-hating jerks like a lot of other people in this neighborhood. We're cool."



So what are these signs telling us about human interactions in the city today?

It seems obvious that they are revealing a trend: Entitled people with dogs are getting very upset when they walk into a food establishment with their pet and are asked to take the animal outside. Maybe the dog person throws a fit. Maybe they go home and attack the business on their blog or give them a scathing review on Yelp. This happens frequently enough, and causes enough disruption, that the business has been forced to put up an ass-kissing sign.



We see a variation of the sign, though less frequently, with babies and strollers. "We really love your baby" they say, but the fire code says we can't have strollers in here. Again, the subtext is: "Please don't blame us! Please don't get angry! It's not our fault! Blame the government. We are not baby haters."

With good reason they cover their asses--we know what the stroller brigade did to the anti-babies in bars people.



But one of my absolute favorites in this genre of signage comes from a popular coffee shop in Park Slope, the New York neighborhood that is perhaps the epicenter of entitlement, and home to many dogs and strollers. It's a very long, funny, ass-kissing, walk-on-eggshells explanation about why they don't want customers hanging out for hours on their laptops, and it begins, "We're absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day...and we love having you here, believe you me!"

It goes on to apologize in advance for having to "say something" to people who don't follow the rules, and "we really dislike that sort of thing, it is so not 'us' and makes everyone uneasy." Once again, the message is: Please don't make us be bad guys.



There's something pathetically simpering about all these signs. When did businesses get so afraid to be the heavy? It's like the Mom or Dad who wants to be pals and buddies with their children, rather than the authority figures who say what's what. In fact, I'm inclined to blame those Moms and Dads for the behaviors that led to the necessity for these signs.

Finally, here's how it should be done. This sign--in parent-coddling Park Slope, no less--is not afraid to assert itself and tell it like it is. "This is a doctors office, not a playground!!" But maybe you have to be a needle-wielding M.D. to get away with that?

Cells at Registers

People talk on their cell phones everywhere. We know this. We bear this unbearable fact daily. But one of the more egregious cell-phone uses occurs at the city's countless cash registers. You've seen them. Those people who approach the counter, plop down their purchases, and say nothing to the cashier, all the while yakking to some invisible someone else while the worker silently rings up their wares.

Money changes hands. No one speaks. The consumer behaves as if they are alone in the universe. It's one of the more dehumanizing everyday experiences we can witness.



Some businesses have begun expressing their weariness of such behavior with little signs displayed on their cash registers.

Think Coffee tries the polite approach, "kindly refrain from talking on your cell phone when ordering."



Soy Luck Cafe takes another tack, trying to flip the script, "If you are on the phone at the counter we will pretend that you don't exist." (As you pretend we don't exist.)

In small, parenthetical type, they add, "It's a beautiful world all around you. Be a part of it."



Awhile back, Ken Belson wrote about sidewalk cellphone use in the Times, "cellphone walkers are less likely to help a stranger in need, for instance, or to exchange pleasantries with passers-by. They are effectively cutting themselves off from the random encounters in public spaces that used to invigorate city living."

In Sherry Turkle's new book Alone Together, she complains "that the sight at a local cafe of people focused on their computers and smartphones as they drink their coffee bothers her: 'These people are not my friends,' she writes, 'yet somehow I miss their presence.'" In the Times review, Kakutani called this "primly sanctimonious...sentimental whining," but it's a profound statement. I know how Turkle feels. We have lost people to these devices.

As we lose humans to technology, we also lose a piece of our humanity.

Soylent Green

The pop-up "green space" Park Here closed a couple weeks ago, after an extended run at Openhouse Gallery, "New York's pop-up retail space."

I took a stroll through the indoor park, over the Astroturf "grass" and under the faux trees, past the ladies selling cupcakes and the signs about yoga classes, into a weird world where people were behaving as if they were in an actual park.



When I'd read about Park Here, I expected people to behave as if they were looking at a spectacle. But instead, they set out blankets--as if they could get dirty--and were sitting on them with snacks and babies. People were lounging around, reading the newspaper and chatting. Had they actually planned to spend the day in here?



I kept thinking: They're being prepped for the post-apocalypse, when the air will become unbreathable, when grass and trees will have all been incinerated--and they're ready for it. They're perfectly willing to accept a future in which nature is reproduced in plastic and kept indoors. As long as there are cupcakes and wi-fi.

They Live

Kicking off their Deep Focus series, Soft Skull Press has just published They Live, Jonathan Lethem's take on the film by the same name. I haven't read the book, but Douglas Rushkoff has. He provided a couple short excerpts in BoingBoing.

I have, however, seen the movie--and recommend it highly. Made in 1988, it provides a kitschy and prescient commentary on the way we live today.



In They Live, the world is not the colorful, shiny place we think it is. With the help of special sunglasses, a guy called Nada, played by "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, sees the real world beneath the Oz Technicolor.



Everything is black and white. Beneath the veneers of ads, magazines, labels, and money are the messages that keep us all hypnotized: OBEY, SLEEP, CONFORM.

Beneath the skins of the beautiful people--the yuppies in suits and shoppers in furs--are skeletal monsters from outerspace.



The best scenes take place when the glasses are on--in the hair salons and shops of this all-too familiar world.



Here's the copy for Lethem's book, "Lethem exfoliates Carpenter’s paranoid satire in a series of penetrating, free-associational forays into the context of a story that peels the human masks off the ghoulish overlords of capitalism. His field of reference spans classic Hollywood cinema and science fiction, as well as popular music and contemporary art and theory."

St. Mark's Bookshop has a bunch in stock now. In a time when the ghoulish overlords are brain-washing people into being stupid, fight back by reading books. They help you to see.

Your Generation?

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked..." No, not that generation. This generation. Maybe you've seen the ads?



They are absolutely everywhere. On the tops of cabs, on the sides of buses, payphones, and walls.

They are for My Generation, a new show on TV about a group of 28-years-olds who graduated high school together 10 years ago. The show's title suggests that it will give us insight into a whole generation, answering that question "What Is It About 20-Somethings?"



If these ads are to be believed, the Millennial Gen is packed with liars, cheaters, and all-around narcissistic creeps.

So tell us, 20-somethings, do these ads represent you and your peers? Are you really Generation Yunnie? Or does the assumption that you are this shallow, vapid, and sociopathic piss you off?



I don't want to believe that the tone of these ads represents the dominant and most vocal segment of the current generation of 20-somethings. If it does, then the future is bleak, indeed.

Book Stigma

I've been trying for some time now to get my head around this new anti-book trend that has led to the popularity of soulless "vooks" like the Kindle and the Nook. Of course, there are many reasons for it, but in an article that scores major points for the coming Idiocracy, the New York Times recently revealed a shocking piece of the puzzle.

Apparently, there is a social stigma attached to reading books alone in public.


Pathetic misanthrope with no friends

This terrible stigma afflicts people not just in illiterate parts of the country and on junior-high cheerleading squads, but all across New York City, a one-time literary capital. What is the stigma? Simply put, if you are caught reading a book in public, you will appear to be: alone, unapproachable, "bookish," unwilling to socialize, and introverted. How awful. But there is hope!

Says a dermatologist on the subject, this dreadful stigma "no longer exists because of the advancement of our current technology. We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone."


Portrait of a stigmatized loser

Dermatologists ought to know. Maybe reading books is also bad for the skin? Perhaps a little Botox for reading wrinkles? Thinking is known to furrow the brow. No, the cure for this stigma does not come from any bacterial neurotoxin (well, maybe it does). The cure is simply: Buy an e-reader, preferably from Apple.

E-readers allow you to be connected to the hive while you pretend to be engrossed in reading. "Given that some e-readers can display books while connecting online, there’s a chance the erstwhile bookworm is already plugged into a conversation somewhere," said a professor of communication and media studies.


Marilyn Monroe: Bravely battling with book stigma

In other words: Reading without digital distraction is social suicide. It will make you unpopular. You will appear intelligent and, therefore, ill-tempered and unfuckable.

Always be connected and distracted, so you appear to be more socially attuned, even though, as anyone who walks the streets of New York knows: People on smartphones, iPads, and the like pay no attention whatsoever to other human beings, rapidly moving vehicles, or open manhole covers. They are in a sociopathic trance, and that is somehow preferable to reading a book?


Unlike lame books, the iPad will get you laid

What the dermatologist and the media professor, and other iPad lovers in the Times article, fail to understand, it seems, is that book lovers are very connected, especially in the presence of other book lovers. When reading a book, we are also connected to our deeper selves, and to the "bigger picture," to universal ways of being, to--dare I say it?--the human condition.

In the New Autistic World Order, the only thing we're permitted to connect with is the anti-human "Borg" system of electronic media. Failure to do so will lead to ostracism from the hive-mind.

But would that really be so bad?

Put us all on an island without Kindles, Nooks, iPads, iPhones, and Blackberries, with lots of bookstores and avid readers, and we'll do just fine. Oh, wait, wasn't that Manhattan not long ago?

• Read the whole Times story here
• On the Future of Books
• The loser bookworm's post-apocalyptic dream
  

Years ago, they put images of total losers on college buildings--
now only ugly gargoyles who can't get laid read books
(photo: Ephemeral NY)

Autistic Age

I came upon the following article in issue #58 of Philosophy Now. Published in 2006, it shows us how the age of the Yunnie is really becoming the age of the Autist, who rules our current, post-postmodern world, called here "pseudo-modernism."

I've excerpted a few key passages below, but the whole article is worth reading as it is relevant to issues on our minds today--like the effect of screen reading on our brains, the demise of books, the rise of plagiarism, and the end of empathy.



from "The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond," by Alan Kirby:

"In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980.

Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them.

Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity."


Borg cupcakes

"The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity--monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold."



"This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity.

In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism."



"You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded."

© Dr Alan Kirby 2006