Cultural phenomena often defy definitive placement. Hunter S. Thompson wore white lo-top converse throughout most of his adult life; my father wore them throughout his high school basketball career; I wore them while meandering around Europe on my version of what has become the American college student’s cultural right of passage. What do we have here: counter-culture, conservative-culture, present-culture(?); my father hated Hunter S. Thompson (not the individual, per se, but what the individual represented); I worshiped Hunter for some years; Hunter, most likely, would have derisively yet lovingly reviled us both (that is, if he could have been bothered by those of us who, for the most part, walk the straight and narrow).
Claude Monet said, “I don’t paint what is. I paint what seems.” What I am interested in here is not a plain canvas shoe with a rubber sole, mass produced and available at a plethora of retail stores that know no national boundaries; no, I am not interested in the shoes themselves. What I am interested in is what the shoe signifies. In France, to don a pair of chucks is a glaring status symbol that does not go unnoticed by the massive flux of hip young Parisians boarding the metro on the way to their busy lives (chucks are extremely expensive because they’re an American import). Yet, in the US chucks are most often seen on the lower strata of the population, the strata more responsive to cultural undulations–those who are standing at the epicenter of the underground and at the foreground of burgeoning cultural movements; the more ragged, the more personalized they are, the higher their value soars. Just as in France, a statement is being made. What I am trying to say is, we are examining not the shoe itself, but the content of the shoe, the soul behind the foot on the sole.
May 10, 2008 at 5:32 am
I think Hunter, depending on his stage of life and relative sobriety, would have done more than reviled you. Or at least tried.
I like the plain canvas shoe as well. I guess we could call it “classic” and not sound corny. I used to buy them as work shoes: they’d wear out from the constant grease and moisture of the kitchen but at 20 odd bucks a pop that was ok.
Funny though the truly cheap shoe, mass-produced under horrifying conditions by teen girls in maquilladoras don’t quite have the same cache. If it was about utility and low-price as an aesthetic then we’d all be headed to Payless. No, it’s maybe got more to do with chucks as part of the material culture of an earlier time, when white boys with flat tops played basketball and girls wore class rings on their necklaces.
Of course in I, Robot Will Smith orders them special delivery. A classic shoe for a pseudo-classic actor (the poor man’s Poitier or the rich man’s Fiddy?) brought to you by Nike.
May 10, 2008 at 7:23 am
And I would have let him; I am a sucker for a man who can write, especially if he’ll read poetry or prose aloud.
You got me thinking about product placement in movies and how they alter the atmospheric impact of the cinematography. Continuing on with Will Smith, Men in Black II was one of the worst offenders and turned out to be a script written around the product placements. Which reminds me of how the Super Bowl is almost a postscript to the commercials.
We are so commodified that we don’t even realize we’ve offered our cultural present–and thus our cultural heritage, in some respects–to the highest bidder.