Talented beauties: Avril Lavigne, JoJo Levesque, and Eliza
Dushku
The
Idea:
By making beauty scarce, we have paradoxically lessened, rather than
increased, its value. This article explores how and perhaps why this
paucity of beauty has come about, and the damage it has done to our
psyches.
What
is it about extraordinary beauty that takes away our breath and tears
away our reason? The words we use to describe it, drawn from many
languages, all suggest madness or physical incapacity: stunning,
knock-out,
mesmerizing,
hypnotic,
pretty
(from the Germanic word meaning 'pratfall-causing'), spell-binding.
Exceptional beauty can literally render us speechless, weak at the
knees, without volition. All we want to do is stare, and sometimes we
simply cannot help ourselves.
What can nature have intended to make us this way?
I believe that in nature there are 'three beauties', and each has an
essential
purpose, one which succeeds in an evolutionary sense, making us better
able to survive and thrive and desirous of doing so. The purpose of
beauty is attraction.
The first beauty is beauty
of place. It is what keeps us
from going elsewhere and disturbing the ecosystems of others. We are
drawn to certain places because of their unquestionable beauty, as if
they were always calling us home. We still love, and consider
beautiful, forests and streams and waterfalls and hills and flowers
and
wild animals, because they are all part of our natural home, and were
essential elements of our
place for three million years
before we strayed. It is only if or when that beauty is destroyed that
we wander, looking for the beauty we have lost. It is no surprise that
today we travel incessantly, almost automatically. We have lost our
place.
The second beauty is personal
beauty. It is what attracts
us to community and drives us to procreate. It comes in two forms:
physical beauty and beauty of personality, often called charisma. It
makes us want to be with those people, be a part of their community,
surround them and protect them. This is the beauty whose purpose
civilization has most perverted -- I'll return to that in a
minute.
The third beauty is beauty of
community. It is the joy of friendship
and of play and of collaboration. It is collective spirit and
companionship and creating and doing things together that make us say:
We
did that! This kind of
beauty, too, is now scarce. Here's how I think that happened:
We love all three types of beauty, and our lives are stories of our
love. When we first appeared on the planet our lives were full of love
and beauty, but then civilization was invented (for well-intentioned
reasons) and it produced, for the first time, a scarcity
of love and beauty. Civilization required people to behave in
unintuitive ways, so its inventors had to create a motivation for
these
strange new behaviours. What better motivation than to allow only the
obedient to experience beauty? So the concept of hierarchy and private
property was created, and all things beautiful were appropriated for
the elite and apportioned sparingly to their obedient followers. The
most beautiful land was restricted, or destroyed to create artificial
beautiful things for the elite and the obedient. The most beautiful
people were no longer a gift that held the community together,
bestowed
in return by the community with breeding privileges so they could
produce more beauty; they became chattels owned by the elite and
jealously kept from the gaze of others. The concept of the 'family'
was
invented to break the bonds of community, limit and destroy the
expression of love, lock beauty out of sight, make it a scarce and
coveted possession.
The family was designed to encourage everyone to procreate, and hence
produce more workers for the farms and then the mines and armies and
factories and offices owned by the elite. Adultery and coveting beauty
became sinful, and people were told by the lords and generals and
preachers that they had to work hard and individually both in their
daily labours and in
their family lives, and that this work was its own reward and
necessary
to deal with growing scarcity. This scarcity was, of course, created
by the exploding human population, and by the destruction of beauty
and
natural wealth to keep all those people alive and obedient. It was
also
created by the ever-widening gap in wealth between the elite and the
rest of the people, needed to keep the masses worried about survival
and hence obedient and busy procreating the only useful resource that
isn't in short supply: babies. The human gene pool has been diluted by
making everyone want to be, and able to be, a parent. I suspect that,
on average, we're getting
less beautiful every year. Other creatures must find us now, on the
whole, a pathetically unattractive species.
In nature, beauty is a gift. It is the attractor that keeps the
community together, and it gives the community great and endless joy.
The astonishing plumage and preening of birds is for the pleasure of
the entire community (and judging by the number of birdwatchers in the
world, that pleasure is not limited to their own species). We mimic
this ancient longing to see beauty with our films, rock concerts and
'beauty pageants', nature documentaries and 'homes of the rich and
famous' tours, but the effect is perverse: Because this joy is no
longer from beauty that belongs to the community, it merely reduces our
pride, increases our longing, and 'brings home' the scarcity, the
distance, the inaccessibility of beauty in our modern world. Instead
of
the delight and gratification of belonging to a community replete with
such beauty, we jealously guard what little beauty we have, and covet
and seek to possess
much more of it. All the conflicted and deviant emotions and
behaviours
that now so often stem from beholding or imagining beauty may stem
from our
civilization's obsession with making it perpetually scarce.
fruity beauties
fruity beauties09/10/2004 02:01 AM Watermelon
carving - a gallery of intricate work and eclectic subjects. In
Thailand, there is a tradition of elaborately carving fruit and vegetables,
especially when preparing foods for royalty or as part of festivals
such as Loi
Krathong. This gallery offers some pictorial instructions; books, tools, and
sample instructions are also available from the Temple of Thai.
Blogon Beauties.......
Blogon Beauties.......07/23/2004 06:11 PM I finally made it to Berkeley for the BlogOn! It's been so great to
see people that I've not seen...
A Bevy of Teeny Beauties, Minds Set on Being Queens
basement burning09/19/2004 03:58 PM . . . the really good interviews are the ones where the journalist has
done his or her homework, is actually interested in what we're talking
about, and isn't afraid to throw the list of questions away if
something more interesting comes up in the course of the interview.
Don't be so quick to toss out your old PCs, fax machines or digital
cameras — office supply retailer Office Depot is offering to
recycle one electronic product a day for free all through the summer,
according to a published report Tuesday. [...]
The offer includes all brands of electronics, and products
including computer monitors, digital cameras, copiers, fax machines,
cellphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and TVs that are 27
inches or smaller, the report said.
'One product a day' means one product per person per day." [Gadgetopia]
Body of boy, 8, found in basement
Body of boy, 8, found in basement06/26/2004 02:38 AM The death of a young boy in Glasgow is being treated as suspicious,
say police.
Joe Bussard's basement tapes
Joe Bussard's basement tapes05/11/2004 11:59 AM Joe Bussard has 20,000 vintage 78
rpm records from the 1920s and 1930s in his basement. For $15, Joe
will put together a custom cassette compilation for you of 20 tunes
from his collection, perhaps the largest of its kind in the world. I
wish Joe and his friends would rip all of his 78s so he could sell MP3
CDs of these ultra-rare recordings. Here's a great NPR All Things
Considered piece on Joe Bussard from last year.
"'The truest form you'll ever hear in American music is on
these records,' Joe says. 'It was put there, and it's remained there
for seventy years. It hasn't changed.'"
Fuel Oil Delivery Ends Up in Basement (AP)06/03/2004 09:59 PM AP - A fuel company delivered 380 gallons of oil to a home where the
heating system had been converted to propane, pumping the fuel into
the basement.
"Your
Joe Bussard entry reminded me of another, similar story that was
pretty big news in DC last summer: Leon Kagarise of Baltimore, who
recorded around 4,000 hours of artists like Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline,
Ernest Tubb, etc. during the late 50s through early 70s on a
reel-to-reel tape deck at the outdoor music festivals prevalent in the
vast rural area that previously surrounded Washington."
NPR's Morning Edition did a piece on Kagarise last summer. He's
working with Joe Lee, a friend and local record store owner, to sell
the recordings. Not surprisingly, the Library of Congress, the Country
Music Hall of Fame, and others are apparently interested.
"You know, these [performers] were people from the
mountains and from the rural South," Lee told NPR. "And once they were
put in a studio, and they had a producer looking down at their snoot
at the guy. And an engineer telling them, 'Well, if you make one
mistake, we have to stop and start all over again.' It lost the
atmosphere. It's like trying to play guitar in a straightjacket on...
It's sort of like being in the zone. When you're really at ease, when
there's no intimidation factor, then it really soars. And the proof is
in these tapes here."
Meet the AMD Sempron, AMD's bargain basement CPU06/07/2004 10:24 PM AMD has announced that they are bringing a new "value" class CPU
dubbed the AMD Sempron to the market in the second half of this year.
The Sempron name will cover CPUs aimed at both the laptop and the
desktop markets.
When is it Time for the Home Office To Move Out of the Basement?
