My life is a constant research for what makes human beings the way they are. I want to understand what makes them shine when it' dark outside and what makes them want to soil everything whenever the world doesn't seem to spin fast enough. That balance between the normal, everyday life and the total nightmare that people can be is the object of my constant fascination. There is one type of people that constantly get on my nerve, that I don't understand, but yet I keep circling around them like an anthropologist on methamphetamine, asking questions and all. I call this type of people, the beautifully darkened.
I am at loss to explain where this all started. Maybe it was Robert Smith? Or maybe it was TiM Burton and his whole death-can-be-cute-and-sure-made-me-rich scheme/imaginary. But death and fatality got a long way as an artistic inspiration since the glory days of the goth movement. Dark imagery has crept his way up the consumerism ladder to the state of commodity and to its final consecration of meaninglessness, as a way to pick up chicks. Sex is the biggest life impulse one can have, so foreshadowing your own demise to get into somebody's pants is the ultimate inconsequential line of thought. In other words, it means you didn't understand anything about your own mortality.
There's this new guy at my work. Tall, strong build and visibly nerdy. The typical person they hire (I am aware I might fall into this category to a certain extent). I've been struggling around him. His socials skills are limited and whenever he opens his mouth, he finds a way to irritate me. I walked up to my friend Eddie during the lunch hour this week and that guy happened to be talking:
"I realize that I have had my mid-life crisis already" he said.
"Shit, how old are you?" I asked.
"Twenty-seven"
"Last guy I knew who said he had a mid-life crisis during his twenties hung himself at forty-six"
*regular readers know who I'm referring to here*
"Oh, I don't expect to live passed fifty" he said, bowing his head aside in a oh-so-choreographed move.
"Why do you say that?" I continued. There I was being a shithead, trying to call him out.
"I don't know, I just do".
What an interesting thing to say. We have here a potential runner-up for the most uneventful life in history of mankind and he goes on this fatalistic rant around co-workers he has known for a few months at best. Maybe it's that he has nothing to hide, but we're talking here about somebody with obvious problems with social relationships, who hasn't been close with anybody outside work yet. It was sad, as it was obviously an attempt to reach out, but it was also a textbook example of a beautifully darkened, with pitch-black and moon-blue sparkles and all.
How has death became so cool? It's the most democratic thing there is. Every single one of us will go through there. Is young demise a promise of eternal youth? I'm sure James Dean didn't mean to crash that car and become an immortal icon of ill-fated and destructive youth. I'm sure that he planned to have kids someday, to grow old and retire. Death made James Dean a beautifully darkened icon (hey, maybe he was the first), same thing with Heath Ledger. If he had survived the Joker role, he would have been hailed as a great actor, rather than a symbol of passionate self-destruction through art. Now that he died, Ledger is probably worth more than he ever did when he was alive.
The point I'm trying to stress here is that we owe ourselves to be smarter than this. The world is a very big place, full of nice (and not so nice) people and we only have a certain number of lapses around the track to visit it. Why would you waste your time in self-indulgent death worship. And I'm not talking about the depressed and the suicidal here. This is a different kind of people. There are the darkened and the beautifully darkened. Those who have one foot in the grave and those who would love to, so they could get attention.
Death is a very interesting subject and a very inspiring one when it comes to art. It has to be treated seriously though. It's something that separates families, lovers and ruins the day more often than not. It's not something that will make your legacy live on. Producers and people who wants to make money off your back tend to do that. Death itself will not market you, especially if your name is not James Dean. All that's waiting for you is a hole in the ground and your name on a rock. Pretty tragic huh? But that's what the beautifully darkened is about. He sits in his bed, wondering how his friends and his loved ones would make his legacy live on, because he had such a tortured artistic mind, he could not bear the world. It's a borderline clinical case of self-involvement, it's a lack of respect towards anybody who really needs help, but somehow this is.
I am at loss to explain where this all started. Maybe it was Robert Smith? Or maybe it was TiM Burton and his whole death-can-be-cute-and-sure-made-me-rich scheme/imaginary. But death and fatality got a long way as an artistic inspiration since the glory days of the goth movement. Dark imagery has crept his way up the consumerism ladder to the state of commodity and to its final consecration of meaninglessness, as a way to pick up chicks. Sex is the biggest life impulse one can have, so foreshadowing your own demise to get into somebody's pants is the ultimate inconsequential line of thought. In other words, it means you didn't understand anything about your own mortality.
There's this new guy at my work. Tall, strong build and visibly nerdy. The typical person they hire (I am aware I might fall into this category to a certain extent). I've been struggling around him. His socials skills are limited and whenever he opens his mouth, he finds a way to irritate me. I walked up to my friend Eddie during the lunch hour this week and that guy happened to be talking:
"I realize that I have had my mid-life crisis already" he said.
"Shit, how old are you?" I asked.
"Twenty-seven"
"Last guy I knew who said he had a mid-life crisis during his twenties hung himself at forty-six"
*regular readers know who I'm referring to here*
"Oh, I don't expect to live passed fifty" he said, bowing his head aside in a oh-so-choreographed move.
"Why do you say that?" I continued. There I was being a shithead, trying to call him out.
"I don't know, I just do".
What an interesting thing to say. We have here a potential runner-up for the most uneventful life in history of mankind and he goes on this fatalistic rant around co-workers he has known for a few months at best. Maybe it's that he has nothing to hide, but we're talking here about somebody with obvious problems with social relationships, who hasn't been close with anybody outside work yet. It was sad, as it was obviously an attempt to reach out, but it was also a textbook example of a beautifully darkened, with pitch-black and moon-blue sparkles and all.
How has death became so cool? It's the most democratic thing there is. Every single one of us will go through there. Is young demise a promise of eternal youth? I'm sure James Dean didn't mean to crash that car and become an immortal icon of ill-fated and destructive youth. I'm sure that he planned to have kids someday, to grow old and retire. Death made James Dean a beautifully darkened icon (hey, maybe he was the first), same thing with Heath Ledger. If he had survived the Joker role, he would have been hailed as a great actor, rather than a symbol of passionate self-destruction through art. Now that he died, Ledger is probably worth more than he ever did when he was alive.
The point I'm trying to stress here is that we owe ourselves to be smarter than this. The world is a very big place, full of nice (and not so nice) people and we only have a certain number of lapses around the track to visit it. Why would you waste your time in self-indulgent death worship. And I'm not talking about the depressed and the suicidal here. This is a different kind of people. There are the darkened and the beautifully darkened. Those who have one foot in the grave and those who would love to, so they could get attention.
Death is a very interesting subject and a very inspiring one when it comes to art. It has to be treated seriously though. It's something that separates families, lovers and ruins the day more often than not. It's not something that will make your legacy live on. Producers and people who wants to make money off your back tend to do that. Death itself will not market you, especially if your name is not James Dean. All that's waiting for you is a hole in the ground and your name on a rock. Pretty tragic huh? But that's what the beautifully darkened is about. He sits in his bed, wondering how his friends and his loved ones would make his legacy live on, because he had such a tortured artistic mind, he could not bear the world. It's a borderline clinical case of self-involvement, it's a lack of respect towards anybody who really needs help, but somehow this is.
