Hip Hop

Celtic bands and Rockers are not the only musicians to sport kilts.  Take a look at these Hip Hop superstars:

[Source image 1:  http://nahright.com/news/2009/10/06/snoop-dogg-ft-the-dream-gangsta-luv/

Source image 2:  http://cocoandcreme.com/2010/10/pause-for-mens-fashion-diddy-and-the-kilt/]

Here's the challenge.  In picture number one, Snoop Dog, clearly establishes his cool, his sexuality, and perhaps race by embodying several codes which signify Hip Hop.  These signs, that is, scantily clad women, being surrounded by women, the homogeneous shape of the women's bodies, the positioning of the bodies, the bling, the lighting, perhaps even the Converse All-Stars certainly signify several things, but when we view the picture as a whole, Snoop Dog has either offset any questions about his authenticity as a Hip Hop artist, or, we might even suggest, the picture can be "read" comically--a level of cool by not taking oneself so seriously while working very hard to maintain star status at the same time.


Diddy pictures, captured at a performance, raise the questions Snoop Dog appears to offset.  The Coco and Creme fashion site captioned the picture, "is this OK?"  Obviously wearing a kilt is questionable.  The commentary goes on to say, if so, "we blame Lenny Kravitz."  (the commentary on Kravitz, who pictured in a leather kilt; "I’m sorry but Lenny was wrong for that ensemble a few weeks back. Dead wrong").  So, we have a "we."  Who is this "we?"  Moreover, the comments (available on line) clearly make this a "black" issue. Even within the Hip Hop fashion world, there is no escaping being perceived not as an artist; you are a black artist.  This reinforces and reifies white invisibility and hegemony.  A white rock star, such as Sting, when posing in a kilt, has challenged neither his masculinity or his race.  The commentary on Diddy's image ends with this quotation:  "This is perfectly fine for Scotland…but he better not bring that kilt state-side!"

So, we have a talented performer chained to the social subjectivity of race, perhaps gender, perhaps sexuality, and then he is threatened based on a non-rigorous  geographic audience analysis by an audience member.  When we remember that people get beat up and even killed over these issues, we see that not only are we not living in a post racial world, but wearing the wrong clothes subjects you to threats. 

Do the Clothes Make the Man?

The experience was transforming.  I did change.  I felt it in my body.  It was not the kilt.  Kilts may have magic; I'll have more to say about this later.  But I am not depressed anymore.  I am again joy.

As directed, I went to play with the band--the Rhizomatics.  Two of us were available (Tom's son played bass and drums for a while but had to go to work), so dug and I set up some prerecorded loops in Abelton's Live.  We played and recorded over these tracks.  At certain moments we hit that magic that improvisation makes possible.  dug played the best solo I have ever heard him perform, and I listened, really listened, and picked notes with effects (I love echoes more than anything else; read my book on music video [shameless advertisement]).  

After an hour or so, like in deep meditation, we were in tune.  This is an important moment in the musical experience of communication; is the band actually in tune with each other?  When we hit that moment, my body responded.  I stood up straight and tall.  I could feel myself growing and receiving from the sounds the power and force (I have read so much on these metaphors that, like many educated people, I feel like I know less and not more.  So, I will use force, like "the force" of jedi lore (so I'm a geek, deal with it) and Power to refer to discourse.  If you do read my older blogs you may see that this use is not consistent; will you, reader, bother reading on with this thought flowing from my fingers, edited by my mind, and sent to the world by the web? I hope I do not bore you with these details that I believe scholarship deserves--even in a blog).

Kilted.  Red and black tartan with red t-shirt and black sweater--at least I think that's what I wore.  It was an entire day ago.  But when the music swelled I felt again that masculinity that I have only felt when kilted.  At some time I will blog about my recollections of early experiences, but know here that the clothes make a difference.  They do make the man.

So, do the clothes make the man?  Like many hackneyed phrases, this is weak.  However, when the music lifted me from this depression (I have had some moments of relief in the past two weeks), I found that re-adopting my preferred dress (well, really a skirt;  that's a joke) allowed the moment to rise, the body to rise with a connection to the force in which bodies and musical expression were tied in musical expression in a circularity that we call communication. This is where Merleau-Ponty seems to have been going with his discussions on art.  It is where Vivian Sobchack, Richard Lanigan, and my own work have gone.  So many phenomenologies written in the spirit of Merleau-Ponty focus on perception (for indeed his work in this realm is supreme).  Algis Mickunas wrote an excellent essay called "The Primacy of Expression" that stood along side Merleau-Ponty's "Primacy of Perception."  Even the book I just bought, "Perception and the Phenomenology of Music Experience," by Harris M. Berger, which I am trying to make time to read, focuses his title on perception.  I will argue that perception and expression do not have a battle for "primacy," but instead, when seen in an unending circularity, are what we call communication.  Indeed, I dedicate my life to this probelmatic. 

So, at the end of the day, Kilt Guy is feeling good, and going home to get dressed for a night at the theater.

I AM Back (sort of)

Photo of and by Cam Switzer

Most of my time is not devoted scholarship (researching and teaching), but to minding schedules, writing "white papers," instituting mandates--most of you know the office gig.  What does this have to do with kilts?  ...wait for it....

My doctors knew that I was an amateur electric violinist, so both he and she suggested I play more music.  I was able to find some musicians with whom I could play every week.  Sounds great, but it's hard to schedule.  And what does this have to do with kilts? ..wait for it...

Then, my wife was in a horrible car accident:  She's recovering well, but we had to sell our two cars, including my beloved Mazda Miata, for one car.  She may never drive again, and I don't know about your life, but a one car, two person, two professional, career persons, one car situation appears to me to have the potential to damage a perfectly good marriage.  So, what does this have to do with kilts?  ..getting tired of waiting for it...

Maybe everything.  The women I talk to about clothes often tell me that they pick out clothes to help make (magical power) them feel good about themselves and their day or night.  When I talk to men about this, most say that they just grab something clean and get to the task at hand.

In the paradigms of clothing, two stand out.

1. Uniforms:  Men's clothes tend to be uniforms.  Here denotation, for example, the business suit, connotes professionalism, built on mythologies and ideologies of success, power, hierarchy, capitalism, the paradoxes of individualism, and so on.  Remember, this is a blog, and I'm just grabbing a few examples.  Life is much more complex.
2. Costumes:  Women's clothes tend to be costumes.  Denotations vary widely, as do connotations, but connotations have a twist we don't find in the uniform, for example, connotations can range from invisible, to categories we rarely think of with men such as sexy and even slutty. The mythologies and ideologies that construct "women" and "the feminine" are different:  The constitutional and revelatory narratives go back to stories such as Eve in the garden of Eden. 

Switching from kilts to business clothes appears, at first glance to be shifting from costume to uniform.  I like my business clothes.  I have some great dress pants, shoes, formal shirts, funky ties, killer jackets.  I can also mix them with jeans, and lots of heavy and dark jewelery. While these clothes are coded as uniforms, I am quite cognizant of the fact that I wear them as costumes because I am clearly putting on a show.  I don't know if I can say I'm enacting a guerrilla semiotics, but awareness of expression and perception, being able to push the perception of the beholder (kairos), is a type of communicative power. 

Wearing my business clothes as "costumes" short-circuits a beholder's first perception of social subjectivity and lends an objectivity to the body that has the potential to build trust.  For example, even when wearing kilts regularly, I would put on a suit and tie when "acting" my "role" as department Chair, meeting prospective students and especially their parents who were preparing to spend quite a bit of money on their child's education.  The "appearance"  was "packaged" and "delivered" as paralanguage.

So, what happened?  By turning to the uniform (and whether my expressive, communicative action was deliberate, the code for suits is uniform) I was able to become invisible.  Believe me, people do not hassle you as much as you think they might when you wear a kilt, but you are never invisible.  So, this week I wore kilts again.  My goal was not to fight depression (you can't do that).  You can, however, reconstruct yourself in the image you desire.  

While I will continue to argue that women are largely "stripped" of power in our culture, there are sites of power, as there have always been, where "women's" power of expression is more interesting than men's.  (I hope I do not have keep saying that there is no "women" as such; I am talking about connotation, myth and ideology not any one real woman).  

Is it possible to shift one's perception (when that perception is depressed, everything is dark, and you have what Alan Watts called an inverted mystical experience, things look plastic, getting our of bed is difficult) by shifting one's expression?  

My readings in contemporary psychotherapy, cognitive therapy, while being a bit too positivist for my tastes, reveal that "communication" is in fact the site of functional and dysfunctional experience.  Phenomenology and semiotics had found this out at least one hundred years earlier, but, what the hay, they deserve credit for finding this out also--and it lends credential to phenomenology and semiotics at the same time.  While cognitive therapy focuses on intra-personal and interpersonal communication, the Kilt Guy is going to focus on a wider range of communication.  If changing thoughts (e.g., all or nothing thinking) changes the person, does changing clothes change the "person"?

I'm NOT back

Frank Toes in Kilt

 OK.  So.  I spent two years wearing kilts and I did not blog at the time.  Bad phenomenology.

What happened?  I've been wearing pants for almost a year (man time flies in midlife).  First, the politics:  The economic crash has made me more conservative (not politically...duh), but I've been wearing cool pants with sharp, bat-toed shoes and boots, lots of heavy jewelry, vests and jackets... a goth meets rock musician meets himself (while wearing pants) ... at work.  Oh, and I gained some weight and most of my kilts were hand tailored by UTILIKILT (one of the two two best companies in the world; the other is WOODS violins; Roger Linn designs is quickly becoming the third company I endorse).

And I don't "work" THIS blog (I have several) because I think I have to always write about important insights (when I should just be describing experience).  But not tonight:  I have the flu, and that buys me some latitude.  Trent Resnor's new soundtrack for The Social Network is playing (I'm digging it) and I'm surfing the web, multitasking, and pretty much all over the place.

Here's something that irks me (like Zim;  Zim's from planet Irken...get it?).  Why DO women get all the cool clothes?  I mean really, I can make a mean argument about how seasonal buying undermines women's abilities to get ahead in the world, but come on.  We get little real choice.  My blog is called the kilt guy because if you wear a skirt that becomes the focus of your life, and the attention put on you.  I'm not talking about drag (that's an art form in itself and not what I am discussing here).  I am talking about having lots of options made for men.

And the nonsense:  One night we were at a mall (I mean you cannot get lower) and my wife skipped one entrance and went to another.  Why?  She thought the guys hanging out might beat me up because I was wearing a kilt!  Another night, I went to dinner with a "so-called" real punk rocker (that pissed me off because I was a musician throughout the whole punk scene and many punks...not the real punks... had the same sense of entitlement the hicks have (you know, "I'm better because I'm from the country and not the city").  Wow.  I grew up ON a farm.  I HAD to break frozen water buckets at 5 am every morning, every winter for the horses, pigs, chickens and steer.  I've actually done things that people feel their are better for because THEY listen to Country Music.  Man.  So here I am, I played the music, I grew from the farms of NJ to CBGB in NYC.  I don't feel entitled to anything.  And I can't be a member of any club; nobody let's me in because while they talk I'm busy doing it.  Oh yeah, the "punk" just though kilts were gay.  What kind of punk is that?  Mall Punk?

OK.  So, pants, kilts, whatever.  The point here is that men have little choice.  Even if you grab a theme, an idea, a vision, and try to work it you will find that women have more options.  I just want options.  And I just think pants are stupid for guys.  They're designed for women, not men.

Convocation

Shepherd opens each academic year with a convocation.  Faculty and freshmen proceed across campus, hold a formal presentation, and then eat and drink.  In the Fall of 2009 I was asked to deliver the address.  I wanted to balance scholarly material with the kind of "pep talk" material appropriate at these sessions.  While preparing (and wondering what to wear; i.e., to kilt or not to kilt), I realized that my mode of dress was the topic at hand (to some degree).  Printed here is the speech.

Assumptions & the Unclouded Eye

The Unclouded Eye
The unclouded eye is better, no matter what it sees.

We all make assumptions about the nature of the world whether we are aware of them or not.  Becoming aware of our assumptions, especially if they are based on another person’s beliefs, accepted uncritically, is a path to clearing the eye, and liberating the mind. 

When you believe certain words, ideas or values, you believe their hidden arguments....   You believe the assumptions in those words, ideas, and values. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

We have the opportunity, at the university, to shift one’s hidden assumptions into the light of awareness.  Awareness of the ways we think literally lightens the load; one is able to see more clearly, uncloud the eye, detect the silent assumptions we make daily in our speech, actions, and reactions.

We tend to start making assumptions as soon as we see somebody:  Hair, clothes, piercings, tattoos all signify within a field of meanings.  We tend to have this deep desire to classify, to apply labels to everything; that way we lay claim to what we name.  But in doing so, we assume an authority that can be misleading and dangerous.

Take my kilt.  The kilt is a dignified garment.   It works with the flow of fabric and not against it, like the collar of this shirt.  Sure, it’s a skirt, but it’s actually radically male. It fits the male anatomy; why would a guy wear clothes that bind at the crotch?  It’s not sensible, it’s just a fad of fashion, a cultural and historical choice. 

But, many of you have already made assumptions about me because of my dress.

    --actually it’s a skirt  

You might have assumed I’m gay--this will be comforting to some, but actually threatening to others.  Assumptions can be dangerous.  This is a great country, but consider that I have to watch where I go because I’ve met with violence toward myself just for wearing an article of clothing. 

Imagine, becoming the victim of not just name calling (I get plenty of that), but physical violence, just for wearing certain clothes! 

So assumptions can lead to violence and wrong doing.  My friend EJ was taking me for a ride in his new BMW.  He was showing off, speeding, 80 plus MPH.  We passed a black BMW, with two black men driving the speed limit.  The flashing lights and siren appeared, and the police pulled over the black BMW because someone assumed the men, driving while black, DWB, was the dangerous issue.

Social Subjectivities
How can we learn to see the assumptions we make about people?

Consider social subjectivity.  Social subjectivities are those categories that you live, beyond your choice, and for which most people have already made assumptions about you:

    Age, class, gender, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, others. 

The meaning of these categories is constructed daily through discourse--talking, writing, thinking, television, film...all of our storytelling devices.  I urge you to seek to see the difference in the ways people experience age, class, race; I urge you to uncloud the clouded eye.  Do not “tolerate” difference, “celebrate” it.  While you are here, seek to understand everything that is Other than you, and to put aside outdated and outmoded assumptions. 

We also make dangerous assumptions about education.  The assumption that our primary and secondary schools are the “great equalizer,” that they allow children from all social and economic backgrounds to compete equally in a market-economy is undermined by a hidden curriculum that often undermines children’s self-esteem, efficacy, creativity, and compassion, and narrows whose assumptions we hear: men over women, whites over blacks, industrialists over laborers, militarists over peace activists. 

Whose story are we hearing?  Whose assumptions?  Ask these questions when you watch the news, talk with friends and family, listen to a lecture.

We make assumptions about the importance of our classes:  What I’m getting at here is, while choosing a focus, a major, a minor, please recognize that your general studies are not something to “get out of the way,” but are the foundation of your education.

But just as we make assumptions about clothes, gender, and other things, your different classes will too assume different things about the nature of the Real.

Keep in mind that different fields of study make radically different assumptions about ontology, epistemology, methodology and axiology: 

    These are not $2 words, $3 words, or even $1 words,
    after the international grammar market crashed
    at the beginning of the economic recession.
   
    (some of these jokes are just for me)

It’s funny how we are taught that big words are considered cheap, uncool, not jiggy-with-it.  When in-fact, the words we know open doors to understanding, and help us win at scrabble
    (which is a good thing unto itself).

General Studies:
Each school of thought will make assumptions about the world.  Your professors will rarely tell you about these assumptions (but this is a good thing).  Some things must be left for you to find. 

    I’m letting you in on the inside scoop on the reasonable grounds that
    Your attention has probably difeted by now.

    But if you’ve just tuned out, or are drifting into thought, thinking: 
    Where’s the best place to go tonight?
    What should I wear?
    Where in the world IS Carmine Sandiego

    Please let me take us back to assumptions:
When you take a class, notice that the subject matter will assume certain things about the world.

All fields of study make Philosophical Assumptions.
They make assumptions about the nature of reality -or ontology.
is reality out there or in here?
Is reality waiting for us to discover?
or is it socially constructed?
 What is the nature of knowledge?  This is epistemology
How do we know what we claim to know? 
Can we be certain or does our perception influence understanding?
What is Human Nature?
are we a product of our environment?
or hard-wired from birth?
This is, of course, the classic nature/nurture debate.
Methodology asks
How do we seek and find things out?
Should we follow a formula?
or are things more interpretive?
Axiology deals with the nature of values.
Are values absolute?
Or are they human creations? 

Answers to these questions will reveal the underlying assumptions a person, a subject matter, or a school of thought makes about the world.  And you can begin to see that there is no one right or wrong answer:  It’s far more complex, far more fun, than that.

All academic fields make Assumptions about purpose.
We make assumptions about why we’re here:

Are we here to make a record of the status-quo?
or are we here to effect change?

I will add another bit of political commentary:

As a person committed to a feminist philosophy (one that seeks to make the world better for all people), I urge you to consider:  Knowledge without action is empty. We really do create the world through our actions.  We are responsible for the state of our lives, the lives of others, and the world itself.

So uncloud your eye, and be aware of the assumptions your making.

 Assumptions.
In the end, I’m not saying that assumptions are bad.  Neither am I saying that assumptions are good.  Assumptions are what they are-the silent grounds of thought.  Recognizing that we make them is key: 

Consider what you assume about other people: 
    Age, class, gender, race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. 
Consider what you assume about:
    Reality, knowledge, human nature, methods of study and the roots of values. 

When you can recognize underlying assumptions--your own, and those of others--you become more aware of the world, and new doors will open.

One of the hardest thing for an acolyte to learn is that she must always challenge hidden assumptions.  However, your abilities will take you farther than you imagine. 

In the end, the unclouded eye is better--no matter what it sees.

    Stay in school; 
    Live Long and Prosper; 
    and Be jiggy With IT.

In the News

 My wife and I were in Ashville, NC (if you have not been there, go; it's a great town).  She was finishing her MA at the Breadloaf School of English.  While walking around the town, we were stopped by a reporter who published these observations.

Mountain xPress, Ashville NC
Jul 19, 2006 / vol 12 iss 51
Top drawer: fashion news and views
by Alli Marshall
Reprinted with permission

Highland games

• Who he is: Kevin Williams

• What he's wearing: A twill camouflage kilt from Utilikilt.com and a sporran bag from Amerikilt.com. ("Usually a sporran is worn in the middle," Kevin explains – he updated his by adding a chain and wearing it like a messenger bag.)

• Why we love it: Kilts have been working their way back into men's fashion, helped by modern fabrics (denim and canvas) and celebs (Vin Diesel wore a leather version to the MTV awards a few years back). Kevin makes his work for a stroll around town – the camo print worn with a tee and sandals renders this Scottish classic a viable alternative to cargo shorts.

Boxed In

Why wear a kilt?  Well, I felt boxed in.  Men have very few fashion options.  I worked in corporate communications for a while and with three work suits, one evening suit, half a dozen shirts and a dozen ties I was set for a year or two (I should address the tie at some point because it may be that while the form is given, men can play with content).  I felt boxed in.  There are many kindred souls out there.  And, there are kindred companies--most namely for me Utilikilt.

Here's me (in a box) wearing my very first Utilikilt. I know you can't see it, but, hey, I was in a box.