maybe observations is more accurate. The first was after the Renegade Crafts Fair last summer. Laine had gone to get the car - I've got these crappy, inconsistent knees - and I was sitting doing some people watching there by Fort Mason. Aside from the hipsters and other folks who had been at the craft fair, after a while there was a trickle, then flood of people who were going back to their cars after this country western concert that had been going on that afternoon. (The music had been faintly audible all day.)The people walking past weren't all that different from the people leaving the crafts fair, maybe a little older, less pierced, but the big difference was the clothing. Here's a shot of people at the fair over there to the right.
Lots of the plaid and ok, the fedora annoys the crap out of me, but you get the idea. The people walking away from the concert were rocking a different aesthetic altogether. As you can see over here on the left hand side of the screen.Those are leather chaps and it wasn't that cool a day.
Both groups had a lot of denim, but not at all the same denim. Hats, but it's fedoras versus cowboy hats. Here are people who are dressing for their respective communities, though the crafts fair folk are probably (just probably) more likely to look the same way in their everyday lives. But the clothes signal a certain membership to different groups saying, "I am this; I am not that."
The other thing that has been floating around in my mind about this came from the Natalie Merchant concert Laine and I went to last year. I am not a big Merchant fan, but a couple of my friends (one from high school and the other from Ithaca) were playing in her band last summer. We got free comp tickets to the show. I hope she pays them a butt-load of money because she must be a complete pill to work for. She was completely a pill to watch perform. Even though the songs were pretty good/interesting, there was so much "Me, me, me, me, me, glorious Me!" about her performance that I've rarely wanted something to be over so badly. But the thing that fits into my thinking here is that for a song about China (I really don't or can't remember the details) she pulled out this paper lantern (looked antique and probably quite expensive) and started looping and bending around the stage in what she clearly thought was an appropriately "Chinese" way.
Man, it was embarrassing.
But what it has in common is that she was signalling something here, something about exoticism, about the "East", about femininity (seriously, she would have done something completely different had she wanted to butch it up), about otherness. She' took on an identity here, even if she tossed it away for the next tune.
All these signals, all these costumes and accessories are ways of telling stories about identity, about marking identity for people to see and recognize. And it makes me think.
Identity is a story we tell ourselves, that other people read, and that they tell about us. The problem, maybe, is that we have t0 believe some sort of story in order to be in the world. There's no natural, unmediated self.
I wrote problem just there. Do I really believe identity is a problem or that narratives are problems?
No. But I am thinking that we need some skepticism, especially when we start treating them as natural.
