The Dead Salmon Theory

 Read this a while ago in a story about the recent spate of orcas, a.k.a. killer whales, attacking and damaging boats:

"... Scientists point to orcas’ documented propensity to adopt brief-lived behavioral “fads,” such as the weeks in 1987 when killer whales in the Pacific Northwest paraded about with dead salmon draped across their heads. Such fads have no clear benefit to the population — they usually are anomalistic in nature — and thus are one of many indicators that killer whales participate in complex cultures humans are unlikely to fully understand. Orca scientists say these fads are uniformly observed among juveniles and adolescents, making them analogous to aggressive and reckless behavior in human teenagers. Some describe the Iberian orcas attacking boats as “hoodlums” and believe the behavior is meant for young orcas to demonstrate membership in their group as well as a kind of prowess. They also believe that, as with humans, the orca fads fade as the whales mature, though they can last anywhere from two weeks to two years."

This blew my mind in two ways 

First was "Wow! The animal kingdom is unfathomably complex!  Cetacean species might have civilizations that - while lacking written records and tools and science (at least as we understand it) -  might nonetheless be equal to  our own!!" 

But the second mind-blow was, in a way, more disorienting  - the sudden thought that what excites and enthralls human beings, including everything that excites and enthralls me -  is conceivably no more significant than parading around with dead salmon draped on your head. 

Perhaps obsessing about particular kinds of music - or playing and/or following a sport - or being into a distinct clothing look - perhaps it's all just a variant of  Dead Salmon. 

These blogs - salmon on the head! 

The connection to the orca equivalent of adolescence seemed to bolster this suspicion. 

Apparently the orcas are only attacking wooden boats - yachts and the like - as opposed to ones with steel hulls. Because with the latter, they can't inflict any real damage - whereas craft made of wood are potentially destroyable. 

This detail again blew my mind a bit, because it so much corresponds to teenage-boy dickishness, and to a certain strategic thinking within that dickishness. Picking your target for maximum pay-off. 

I mean, these have got to be boy orcas.  

I also imagine the older orcas looking on at the young ones butting into yachts and shaking their heads and saying "whatever will they get up to next?", "don't they know how ridiculous they look?", "bloody fools, they're going to get themselves harpooned if they don't watch out".... 

And perhaps some of the really old ones say things like "this boat-bashing lark ain't a patch on when we used to do the dead salmon draping..."

 "My father and I have always used the cinema to explore our psyches, and to try, with art, to confront the unspeakable, but I am not sure that this is a good idea, because art rarely offers solutions. It only helps you to put a face on your own demons, but not to defeat them."

-- Asia Argento 

 "We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

Franz Kafka

 After the circumstances I have just recalled, it is undoubtedly the rapidly acquired habit of drinking that has most marked my entire life. Wines, spirits, and beers: the moments when some of them became essential and the moments when they returned have marked out the main course and the meander of days, weeks, years. Two or three other passions, of which I will speak, have been more or less continuously important in my life. But drinking has been the most constant and the most present. Among the small number of things that I have liked and known how to do well, what I have assuredly known how to do best is drink. Although I have read a lot, I have drunk even more. I have written much less than most people who write, but I have drunk much more than most people who drink. I can count myself among those of whom Baltasar Gracián, thinking about an elite discernible only among the Germans — but here he was quite unjust to the detriment of the French, as I think I have shown — could say, ‘There are those who got drunk only once, but that once lasted them a lifetime.’

Furthermore, I am a little surprised, I who have had to read so often the most extravagant calumnies or quite unjust criticisms of myself, to see that in fact thirty or more years have passed without some malcontent ever instancing my drunkenness as at least an implicit argument against my scandalous ideas — with the one, belated exception of a piece by some young English drug addicts who revealed around 1980 that I was stupefied by drink and thus no longer harmful. I never for a moment dreamed of concealing this perhaps questionable side of my personality, and it was clearly evident for all those who met me more than once or twice. I can even note that on each occasion it sufficed but a few days for me to be highly esteemed, in Venice as in Cadiz, in Hamburg as in Lisbon, by the people I met only by frequenting certain cafés.

At first, like everyone, I appreciated the effect of mild drunkenness; then very soon I grew to like what lies beyond violent drunkenness, once that stage is past: a terrible and magnificent peace, the true taste of the passage of time. Although in the first decades I may have allowed only slight indications to appear once or twice a week, I was, in fact, continuously drunk for periods of several months; and the rest of the time, I still drank a lot.

An air of disorder in the great variety of emptied bottles remains susceptible, all the same, to an a posteriori classification. First, I can distinguish between the drinks I consumed in their countries of origin and those I consumed in Paris; but almost every variety of drink was to be had in mid-century Paris. Everywhere, the premises can be subdivided between what I drank at home, or at friends’, or in cafés, cellars, bars, restaurants, or in the streets, notably on café terraces.

The hours and their shifting conditions almost always retain a decisive role in the necessary renewal of the stages of a binge, and each brings its reasonable preference to bear on the available possibilities. There is what one drinks in the mornings, and for quite a long while that was the time for beer. In Cannery Row a character who one can tell is a connoisseur proclaims, ‘There’s nothing like that first taste of beer.’ But often upon waking I have needed Russian vodka. There is what is drunk with meals; and in the afternoons that stretch out between them. At night, there is wine, along with spirits; later on, beer is welcome, for beer makes you thirsty. There is what one drinks at the end of the night, at the moment when the day begins anew. One can imagine that all this has left me very little time for writing, and that is exactly as it should be: writing should remain a rare thing, since one must have drunk for a long time before finding excellence.

I have wandered extensively in several great European cities, and I appreciated everything that deserved appreciation. The catalogue on this subject could be vast. There were the beers of England, where mild and bitter were mixed in pints; the big schooners of Munich; the Irish beers; and the most classical, the Czech beer of Pilsen; and the admirable baroque character of the Gueuze around Brussels, when it had its distinctive flavor in each local brewery and did not travel well. There were the fruit brandies of Alsace; the rum of Jamaica; the punches, the aquavit of Aalborg, and the grappa of Turin, cognac, cocktails; the incomparable mescal of Mexico. There were all the wines of France, the loveliest coming from Burgundy; there were the wines of Italy, especially the Barolos of the Langhe and the Chiantis of Tuscany; there were the wines of Spain, the Riojas of Old Castille or the Jumilla of Murica.

- Guy Debord, I think

 nietzche contra generalism

on the dangers of historical consciousness /creeping impartialism / liking everything

"Anything which compels a person no longer to love unconditionally cuts away the roots of his power. He must wither up, that is, become dishonest.... only when history takes it upon itself to turn itself into an art work and thus to become a purely artistic picture can it perhaps maintain the instincts or even arouse them"

on the dangers of eclecticism /excessive cultural intake

"Constantly losing more of this feeling of surprise and dislike, becoming excessively astonished no longer, or finally allowing oneself to enjoy everything—people really call that the historical sense, historical education."


of course Nietzche is just preaching basic good-sense "home economics of the libido" here: you spread the love around, you spread yourself too thin, nothing has the same depth of impact... a sort of weakly attached generalised cathexis to "pop" or "music" replaces the obsessive fixation on a particular instance or area of pop or music...

 Rockism versus Popism in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World:

"And yet," said Helmholtz when, having recovered breath enough to apologize, he had mollified the Savage into listening to his explanations, "I know quite well that one needs ridiculous, mad situations like that; one can't write really well about anything else. Why was that old fellow such a marvellous propaganda technician? Because he had so many insane, excruciating things to get excited about. You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases....

[Said the Controller]"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead."

[said the Savage] "But they don't mean anything."

"They mean themselves; they mean a lot of agreeable sensations to the audience."

"But they're … they're told by an idiot."

The Controller laughed. "You're not being very polite to your friend, Mr. Watson. One of our most distinguished Emotional Engineers …"

"But he's right," said Helmholtz gloomily. "Because it is idiotic. Writing when there's nothing to say …"

"Precisely. But that requires the most enormous ingenuity. You're making flivvers out of the absolute minimum of steel–-works of art out of practically nothing but pure sensation."

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

“It was a queer look...  whose protagonists spoke a new slang and swayed when they walked like vicious sexless soldiers in a Nameless army”—Ian Hough, author of Perry Boys: The Casual Gangs of Manchester and Salford

At the end of the Sixties, mod fragmented.  Some went psychedelic (the transition from Spencer David Group to Traffic, from The Action to Mighty Baby, or indeed mod-about-town Marc Feld to Marc Bolan in John’s Children to Marc Bolan in Tyrannosaurs Rex). In the North some stayed mod in an arrested, time-defying way (Northern Soul), while down south, the harder mods, the ones who didn’t go psychedelic,  evolved into skinheads.  That hard mod spirit resurfaced in the Eighties with the youth tribes known variously as casuals, Perry Boys, and scallies: working class youths whose lives revolved around clothes and football.  So named because of their love of the Fred Perry shirt, the Perry Boys were first: they emerged from Manchester in the late Seventies.  Scallies were Liverpool’s answer to Perry Boys. Casuals (sometimes known as “chaps”) was the South of England version of this same archetype, although the term “casual” has subsequently come to encompass all the regional variants.

 
Differing from province to province, changing on a yearly or even seasonal basis, the ever-fluctuating shifts in favored jeans, shoes and shirts, the fetish for tiny details of stitch-pattern, pocket placement, and brand motifs, do not mask the fundamental “unchanging sameness” of the casual subculture and its extension of the spirit of mod, the religious seriousness about clothing. What it is really striking is how inappropriate the word “casual” is.  These young men were fanatics, uptight about their obsessions and their pursuit of kicks. The continuity from mod to casual can been seen in the obsession with expensive European clothing brands, the extreme homosociality (there had been female mods, albeit marginal figures, but was there even such a thing as a female casual?), and there’s always that penchant for violence as a route to a naturally-induced high based on the body’s own internal drugs (adrenalin, endorphins, dopamine, etc). Which many casuals intensified further by the use of unnatural chemicals  (speed, cocaine, etc).

These young men had virtually everything in common, but they warred with each on the football terraces and in the streets surrounding the stadiums. This wasn’t chaos, this was highly organized violence: the rival firms of hooligans virtually making dates to meet and clash.  Ian Hough, scholar of the Northern branches of this Eighties-and-after movement, notes that the Perry Boys, descendants of the mods, would sometimes also go to war with Hells Angels bikers, descendants of the greasy rockers. Hough uses the term “hipster hooligan” to describe these smart-dressed football fans.

Unlike the mods and Northern Soulers and skins, casual culture didn’t have a very specific relationship with music, beyond a general orientation towards Black American sounds and a soft spot for London soul-boy bands like Spandau Ballet. The latter were originally called The Cut and on their first single articulated a mod mini-manifesto in the single line “I am beautiful and clean and so very very young.  But for the most part, music slipped into a distant third place for the casuals, far behind clothes and football. 

During  the Madchester-rave era, though, the Perry/Scally attached itself to music with such indie-dance outfits as Northside, Paris Angels, Inspiral Carpets, The Farm, Flowered Up (who sampled The Who-inspired mod movie Quadrophenia on their “Weekender” single) and Happy Mondays.   “Acid casuals” is how some wag (“acid casualties”, get it?) identified the look of these groups, referring to the way that the hardness had been softened by Ecstasy and LSD (the classic mod/casual preference for tight pegged trousers, for instance, was replaced by loose-fit flares, a style hitherto redolent of the hated hippies). 

But the acid casuals hadn’t been softened that much. I recall reading an interview with Manchester band Paris Angels in Melody Maker. When the journalist went to the toilet, one of the band intoned into the tape recorder: “City are cunts City are cunts City are cunts City are cunts...”. He was a Manchester United fan, clearly. Nothing could be revealing of the arbitrary nature of working class England’s tribal warfare than the enmity between Man U and Man City fans: youth divided even though they wore the same clothes, liked the same bands, danced and drugged at the same clubs, and lived in the same town.  Football fandom as a system for the incitement of fervour and hatred: for their own sake, for the buzz and the crack of it.

America is, by and large, a looser and louder culture than Britain, and one that is perfectly capable of both rowdiness and extreme violence (from serial killers to political assassins to mass shooters). But it’s England that invented both football hooliganism and style-tribe warfare.  There is no other country in the world where young people have beaten the crap out of each other for no reason beyond differences in clothing, music taste, and sports allegiance.  These are forms of insubordinate creativity that are inextricably entwined with violence - a violence perhaps best understood as displaced and diverted politics.  As the style culture analyst Peter York once put it, in a tightly class-stratified country like Britain, talent is “blocked off from conventional embourgeoisment.... If you have a whole lot of people who are blocked, then the steam is much more intense. And where it finds a crack it rises more violently.”