Monthly Archives: July 2004

site specificity and the Jurys hotel

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As I understand it, "site specificity"” is a sensitivity on the part of a work of art or architecture to the context in which it finds itself. 

One example is the garden in Toronto’’s chic, little downtown neighborhood called Yorkville.  This garden reproduces the lot lines on the houses that once stood on the garden plot.  It also represents the geographical and floral variation of Canada, with the forests of BC represented at one end and the shore line of the Maritimes at the other.  The garden is specifying of where its plot once stood in time and still stands in space.

Site specificity has found its way to my hotel in Boston, the Jurys.  This is located in a 1920s architectural landmark, the former Boston Police Headquarters.  In the 19th century, the Boston Police Force became a largely Irish American institution.  And it turns out that the owners of the Jurys, the ones who put up $60 million for the restoration, are from Dublin.  The Jurys embraces this historical "loop the loop”" with enthusiasm.  Think of us as a new Irish immigrant, here to celebrate, with this building, the old Irish immigrant.

It seems to me almost certain that the Jury’s hotel, had they done this restoration say 40 years ago, would not have embraced this building, and, if they had, they would have worked to efface its origins and their own.  Forty years ago, architecture in general and hotels in particular were sited in the modernist "everywhere” "space.  They looked to blend into the hotel scape and the Boston one.  More particularly, Irishness still carried the taint of a hardscrabble immigrant community, making it an unlikely historical reference for a hotel that reaches, successfully, for elegance.

Site specificity reopens locality and history as sources of the meanings on which capitalism can draw.  It will help capitalism fight off that long standing charge that is it the champion of uniformity.  In the Jury’s case it is not bleaching out the historical particulars but restoring and then celebrating them.

As I was arguing in an earlier post, I think we can look forward to a time when our local Starbucks will carry design references to the neighborhood, city, and region in which it stands.  This even as it carries the mark of a national brand.  This too will largely put paid to the intellectual’s insistence that the marketplace is the enemy of culture, difference, variation, locality, history.   In any case it moves us beyond the time that the best capitalism can do is the faux Disney tableaux, the cultural other or historical other in heavy quotation marks, sensitized, as those glassine bags used to say, "for your safety.” 

We shall see.  But I think the Jurys hotel in Boston says that if the intellectuals were ever right, they are now quite wrong.  More to the point, if capitalism is now an agent working for an ever intensified and integrated locality, things are going to get very interesting indeed.

Connecticut Problems (and other business opportunities)

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Problems? Connecticut? Come on. Get real.

Well, there is one: how to survive success.

Consider this scenario. We start at start-up, a beverage company, say. We call it something like “Nantucket nectars,” “Snapple,” or “Odwalla.”

The early days are a trial. Long days, sleepless nights, groaning credit cards, triple mortgages, nervous bank managers, neglected families, and constant, grinding risk.

Slowly the world responds. Our little brand takes off.

We’re a smash hit. After a grueling decade, sales are so good big corporations come calling. Often they don’t always do great product innovation, and with deep pockets they don’t have to. They wait for “naturally occurring” experiments to map the market, and then they reach for their wallets.

Lucky us. This is the big “pay day” we’ve been waiting for. We are 80 million dollars richer. We move to Connecticut, get a house on the water, and wake up one morning to a new question: “what in God’s name have we done?”

Unlucky us. The best thing that can happen turns out to be the worst. We just put our baby up for adoption. The single, enduring, consuming objective of our lives has disappeared. The very point of our existence has been ripped away. This is our existentialist moment.

This is a business opportunity for someone. In a perfect world, we would have seen this moment coming. We would have contracted with a company that specializes in “lifestyle architecture.” This is a team of social scientists (anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, economists, b-school types) called Transformations R Us. Their job is to scrutinize us right down to the ground and to begin building a second career, one that will be ready and waiting, up and running, for the moment of transition.

Transformations R Us creates a perfect second career. This could be what Sundance was for Robert Redford. What Trigger Street might someday be for Kevin Spacey. It might be the foundation Paul Allen created for himself. It might be restaurants in Milan, LA and Mexico City, our favorite cities. It might be a venture capital fund that “seeds” entrepreneurs in the cities of the 2nd and 3rd world. It could be funder of archaeological long shots. (There’s got to be another Troy out there somewhere.)

The transformation that sits waiting for us dock side, one of those 1930’s inboard all-mahogany launches, can be anything and we can play with the details once we climb aboard. It’s chief accomplishment is that it saves us from that terrible moment of entropy that occurs on payday. Whatever it does, it spares us that “who am I, what am I?” moment, and the sudden brown out of purpose and clarity.

I was at a conference recently and wondering through the crowd at the reception was a guy in his 50s who created a brand name known to us all. He still had celebrity power and we were all pleased to meet him. Universities and charities had put him on their boards. People ask him for advice and he still gets “ink.” But there was a distinct note of “yesterday’s man” about him. He had not made the transition. He was merely “keeping busy.” The unhappiness was discrete but palpable.

How much value would Transformation R Us create? How much value could it extract for services rendered? Give me a second and I’ll get the calculator. A lot. That’s my answer. Hang a second. That should be, “really a lot.” We are working for someone who just made 80 million dollars. And we just helped them dodge a bullet and move from joy to joy.

Anyhow, if you want to help start Transformations R Us, send me an email. (grant@cultureby.com). Connecticut has done something to me. I’m looking for a start up opportunity. (Just don’t let me anywhere near the calculator.)

riding and rowing in connecticut

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I was walking along the Connecticut shoreline today, and saw a little dinghy on the beach. It had nice, big oar locks, the kind that give good “leverage.” The oar locks on English dinghies are more shallow and give much less.

This got me thinking about English and American saddles. Same difference. English saddles do not give the same purchase that American ones do.

This means that the transition from English row boats and horses is, for someone accustomed to the American equivalent, perilous. Just when you want to “dig in,” you find you can’t. With English rowboats and horses, you have to know what you’re doing.

So what happened to this technology? Presumably, the Americans started with the English original and adapted it. Why, and why so much?

One answer: immigrants. Almost certainly, the American adaptation was driven by the arrival of a stream of new comers. They may have worked in trade or service in the old country, but the American opportunity would engage them in new ways. It might oblige them take to land or sea by unfamiliar means, all of a sudden, with not much training. Horses and row boats had to be “fault tolerant.”

Second, in the English case, the mastery of row boats and horses was inevitably about class. To be good a riding or rowing, this was one way to separate the sheep from the goats in a system deeply preoccupied with this distinction. (Riding would have been about distinctions of rank and rowing also about something more guild-like, but we will not worry this distinction here.)

The English planted “lie detectors” everywhere: elaborate systems of food, clothing, language and interaction, containing hundreds of fine distinctions, every one of them a test of whether you were “one of them” or “one of us.” A Georgian place setting, on a slow night, could contain 12 implements. “Excess to requirement” for some purposes, but very useful for seeing who was born to their station and who was newly arrived. Worse, these tests were to be dispatched with aplomb. To use the phrase Leora evoked in a recent comment, Castiglione’s sprezzatura was the order of the day. Knowing the code was not enough, you had to dispatch its demands with faultless grace (‘the art that concealed art”).

What a vast carrying charge this was. The English were extraordinarily inventive. But, mark you, only gentlemen were in the early days trusted to be scientists. They might and did engage in every kind of technological and industrial innovation, but they were disinclined to let these innovations “ripple out” to rework the social order.

How gifted the Americans. Possessed of the same inventiveness but not “saddled” by the same cultural governors. Damn the rippling, just get the job done. They had just found a way to get another 20 miles a gallon from the engine of industry. The English had always had access to this “secret weapon,” a small cultural change that would unleash unimagined new powers of dynamism. (And of course, in small and un-American ways they did.) But culture and practice imposed upon them oar locks and saddles was devoted to other objectives.

Walking around Connecticut, you sometimes, but only sometimes, think of that Faulkner line: here the past is not dead, it is not, in fact, past. But mostly what you see is a landscape that has been reworked with furious energy and a scant regard for preservation. The past is past and quite, quite dead. Look, you can see it there in that row boat lying on the beach.

References

“Can it have been merely by coincidence that the future was to belong to societies…ready to break with their traditions?

Braudel, Fernand. 1973. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800. translator Miriam KochanLondon: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, p. 323.

Castiglione, Baldassarre. 1967. The book of the courtier from the Italian, done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, anno 1561, with an introduction by Walter Raleigh. New York: AMS Press.

Last note:

What am I doing here in Connecticut? I obliged by the anthropological vow of silence to withhold the details, but I can say that I’ve been engaged to do a preparatory study of prison life, and my client asks, merely, that we pray for her.

Payola and Avril Lavigne

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“Payola” is the practice of buying airtime for music. It’s a common practice and it generates millions of dollars for the radio industry.

And it’s effective. A “spot buy” pushed Avril Lavigne into the Top 10.

Surowiecki works up a righteous indignation in this week’s New Yorker, but I’m not sure I see the problem.

How is this different from buying ad time? Payola means we are listening both to the song and an ad for the song. Why is this a bad thing?

Here are the standard objections to payola:

1) Consumers are mislead. The radio playlist does not represent what the nation wants to hear but what the label is prepared to pay for. But, really, do we regard the Top 10 as a voting system? More do the point, in a postmodernist age, do we care what other people like? Perhaps the teenager from 1958 wanted to know. These days, who cares?

2) Consumers are manipulated, taste is shaped. This presupposes that consumers like what you give them. This is a perilous assumption as every marketer now knows. Consumers have plenty of options and if they don’t like what they hear, they can and will move—to other music and other media. It is perhaps not consumers, but radio stations that must fear payola. It can lead them to pursue a short term interest at the expense of their listener base.

3) Payola “unlevels” the playing field. Little producers can’t afford to compete against people with deep pockets. This was once a very good criticism, but now that the internet supports many radio stations and access to every label’s website, the “gate keeper’s” strangle hold has disappeared.

4) Payola turns radio stations into automatons, mere conduits for big business. The station that might have served as a exploration of local taste ends up “working for the man.” This is a good criticism but it ignores the fact that there is quite a lot of “listener supported” and college radio out there. If consumers want local, they can get local. (Jesse Walker, below, offers a more complaint treatment of this problem.)

5) Payola makes bad music flourish like the bay leaf tree. If the station is paid to play bad music, it will. But I think the radio station may be using payola as a sorting device. Payola allows them to pass along the risk. Without it, they are obliged to comb through the 700 or 800 new CDs released each week and find what their listeners want. Plus, the producer is highly incented to pay time only for the songs in which it is most confident. Its power of trend detection are probably better than those of the radio station and (because) it has more to lose. In effect, the radio station gets paid twice, once in better song selection and again with “spot buy” revenue.

6) By giving advantage to big producers, payola penalizes the small players who are more inclined to take risk and to “push the boundaries” of artistic license. Maybe. But if music adoption is classically distributed, the early adopters are relatively few. To ask mainstream radio to speak to them is unreasonable…and again this is what college radio is for. It can play to 25 fans and congratulate itself on its integrity.

Actually, payola may work to increase risk taking, at least in the mainstream. How many times have you liked a song only the 8th or 9th time you heard it? The payola guarantee of exposure allows the label to try things that are not merely “hook heavy” (studded with catchy lyrics and melody). With this confidence, it can now try things that might not ‘take” on first or second hearing.

People love to hate payola. They say it’s a confusion of culture and commerce. But if we think about payola as advertising, does it not offer an answer to every culture critic’s hatred of advertising? The payola song is, after all, the cleanest form of advertising. All the hype is stripped away. We are given the product and nothing else. (And this in a medium that specializes in the noisiest advertising in the commercial world.) And radio, lest we forget, is given away for free to the consumer. With payola, they would be obliged to listen many, much noisier, ads.

I am not Dr. Pangloss. I don’t think payola is a necessary thing or a good thing. But unless I am missing something, it’s not clear to me that it’s such a terrible thing. Radio has always been an imperfect, highly constrained channel, and someday it will be swept away by less mediating mediators. And then we will suffer an embarrassment of riches and a new set of problems. We may even look back on payola with affection.

Last note:

Ok, I am on the road again, this time for 3 weeks, (New York, Boston, Seattle and Kansas City). If I can blog, I will blog. Please forgive intermittent blogging, if this occurs. And watch this space for ethnographic notes of life in the American city.

References

Lavigne, Avril. 2004. Don’t Tell Me. See the video on line here http://www.blastro.com/player/avrillavignedonttellme.html&artist=Avril+Lavigne

Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Financial Page: Paying to Play. The New Yorker. July 12 & 19, 2004.

Voltaire, Francois. 1990. Candide. New York: Penguin Classics.

Walker, Jesse. 2001. Rebels on the Air. New York: New York University Press.

Driving in Montreal

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Dynamic systems are a challenge for anthropology. This is the way contemporary culture invents itself and anthropology hasn’t had very much exposure to this kind of thing. So I have been trying to think about how to think about these systems. As a novice, I suck at it.

I’ve been thinking about traffic in Montreal. There are two kinds of drivers: very good and very bad.

The good drivers go like the wind. They are quick, nimble, fearless and very calm.

I have good data here. I walk a lot, and sometimes it’s tedious. I relieve the tedium by sprinting to get the last of a green light or to cross the street in mid stream. In this second case, I time my passage so that I hit the stream of traffic just as a gap appears. (This is stupid and dangerous, but it is fun. But if the posts suddenly stop, you’ll know what happened.)

In Toronto, this sort of thing provokes howls of unhappiness and lots of horn work. Toronto drivers scare easily and they like to take umbrage at unruly pedestrian behavior. In Montreal, there is never an objection. They don’t object, I think, because I am walking the way they are driving: quick and nimble.

The bad drivers are amazingly bad. They appear to be oblivious to everyone and everything around them. They are inclined to draw the ire of the good drivers who punish them with lots of honking. And in this case, some of them seem to give up and just sit there. Bad drivers have become worse drivers.

So I fell to thinking: why such good drivers and such bad ones. Presumably, the Montreal driving “experiment” began with a normal distribution and a graduated continuum of skill. At some point, the continuum gave way to something bi-modal.

Maybe, I thought, these drivers created one another.

I believe (and this is where culture comes in) Montreal drivers subscribe to a European model of driving. They don’t care about right of way and rules of the road so much as they do seizing the opportunity exactly when it presents itself. The good ones create a highly dynamic traffic system. You have to be on your toes to avoid nimble drivers and on your toes to act like one.

But anyone who occupies the “far half” of the continuum, the “not so good” half, now has a problem. They are surrounded by people driving like the wind. I am guessing that this group now splits in half as well. The medial half “gets with the program” and begins to drive with forced enthusiasm. But the far half (last quartile) is now living in an environment that constantly overwhelms them. Tested to their limit, they get worse. And then they get punished. And so they get worse.

The readers of this blog are, I know, smarter at thinking about systems like this and I am curious to see what they have to say. After all, and as I have just demonstrated, I suck at this.

this post made by elves as I slept

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When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, my girlfriend and I used to walk home at night past a jewelry story that had a little note pinned in the window: “all our jewelry made by elves as we sleep.” The store was dark but at the very back was a little lamp burning.

If you stared long and hard enough, as my girl friend and I sometimes did, you could begin to see the elves at work. I remember saying to Jane, “is this not the very best way to sell jewelry?” to which her silent reply was, I believe, “so buy me some.” This was my introduction (post childhood) to the power of mystery as sales technique.

Yesterday, I noted how Minus 8 vinegar creates scarcity. Today, I want to show how it creates mystery.

Minus 8 vinegar is made by a couple who work hard to protect their anonymity. (The CBC is waiting to see if they are willing to participate in the story.) Not quite elves creating jewelry but something close.

This anonymity, and the obscure and secret details of Minus 8 production, help create a sense of specialness about the brand. Consumers want it more, not less, because it is so produced.

This marks a movement away from the traditional bargain created by capitalism. Boomer readers will remember those charming (and endless) documentaries that showed footage of the production line. Companies staged factory visits. “Look,” was the message, “nothing to hide! We want you to see where the product come from and the pains we take to make production immaculate.”

Now, we say, “how dreary.” We want things from sources secret and mysterious. Jewelry and even vinegar.

The deeper trend is clear. We are no longer enamored of our once vaunted rationalism and its promise that darkness, confusion, uncertainty would be burned away by the clear light of reason. We declared war, in fact, on mystery. Mystery was the locus of mischief, confusion or evil.

With reason installed (relatively speaking) as the great feature of a modernist society, we began to pine for the old days. Those superstitions and fairy tales, now scorned, were remembered and revived. New age practices became popular. (I still remember a relatively intelligent woman from the Midwest telling me that my balding pattern was proof of my descent from the Pharaohs.) In sum, we made the world a kinder, gentler place by readmitting mystery and magic and folk beliefs. (As I say in Transformation, no one ever seems to discover that they are the reincarnates of a stupid, cruel, tubercular char women living with 5 kids in the grinding poverty of an 18th century slum. Better to think of ourselves as Pharaohs.)

Capitalism will respond to this as it responds to the scarcity challenge. This is a cultural meaning it can and will invest in our consumer goods. It will be a challenge of course. Most marketers do not rely on elves to help out around the office. But if consumers want a “reenchantment of the world,” that’s exactly what they’ll get.

References

There is an early post that is germane here. If you’re interested, have a look for the one called “Tag, we’re it.”

Of vinegar and value

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I got an email from a CBC journalist, Jeff Buttle, asking me to comment on Minus 8 Vinegar. According to Wine Spectator, Minus 8 is a big deal in the culinary world.

What started out as a hobby for two Ontario foodies has become an ingredient much coveted, and consequently, guarded by some of the nation’s preeminent chefs.

Minus 8 vinegar, named for the temperature at which the grapes are picked to produce its base wine, shares company with sweet wine vinegars, though those who use Minus 8 say it has much more depth and complexity than its balsamic and Sherry-based cousins.

The problem with Minus 8 is — although it tastes great — you can’t have any, unless you eat at some of the country’s best restaurants.

Everything about Minus 8 is clandestine. The vinegar is produced in Ontario’s Niagara region (the exact location is a secret) by a couple who wish to remain anonymous (we’ll call them “Rick” and “Karen”).

Jeff asked me to comment on this trend. My reply:

I like the way Minus 8 vinegar creates scarcity. In a market place with national brands and perfect distribution, there is almost nothing we can’t get. (You remember the days when people were flying cases of Coors out of Colorado because it didn’t exist in the rest of the US.) But scarcity creates intrigue, interest, conversation, bargaining, in sum, a kind of specialness.

Or to put this another way, one thing that’s scarce in our marketplace is scarcity itself, and we prize it when it comes our way.

I also like the idea that the vinegar is being made in small batches and slightly mysterious circumstances. This too is something that capitalism doesn’t do particularly well: make mystery.

But this is very much the coming trend. We are no longer quite so interested in perfect transparency. (You may or may not have seen those 1950s documentaries on the production line, proof that capitalism had nothing to hide!) Mystery, too, creates intrigue, interest, conversation and specialness.

In sum, the market doesn’t do scarcity and mystery very much these days but we wish they would. And then along comes a little wine vinegar by “Rick” and “Karen.”

The rise of the national brand has created several kinds of value but, in the process, it destroyed another. It destroyed the particular savoring that came from knowing that this case of beer (or bar of soap or bag of bagels) was spirited across the country, that we were the only locals now to have it, and that when it was gone, it was gone for good. It’s the difference between the small, exquisitely chosen dish and the all-you-can-eat banquet. In one case we treasure, in the other we just eat. (At least, I do. You are probably more like the great food critic of our community, Tyler Cowen.)

I especially like the social effects of this scarcity. People pleaded with a friend going to Colorado, “bring me back a case, please. Listen, I’ll get you tickets to the Mets game!” And now the recipient had a precious resource and a fungible one. With whom was he going to share his precious beer? Which friendship ties would be cemented, which opened up, and which closed down?

Wait a second. Precious beer? This scarcity makes it so. And it encourages acts of exchange that set in motion several kinds of currency (e.g., Met tickets) in the creation and destruction of several kinds of relationship (“Bob’s a fat bastard. He didn’t even give me one of his Coors.”)

Do robust, well integrated, economies tend to eliminate local variation? I am guessing they do. This is strange because our capitalism has specialized in making consumer goods mean more, and more interesting, things. But in this case, the local meaning is taken out. It no longer matters where goods come from. Place of manufacture no longer counts. (I am generalizing here. It is impossible to think about Starbucks, Ikea, or Prada without place creeping in.)

National brands will someday solve this problem. Not because they care about consumers carting things across the country. They will do it to respond to the splintering of consumer taste and the differentiation of consumers themselves. They will begin to build variations into the brand message. Our local Starbucks will have several design signatures: national, regional, city and neighborhood. This is one of the ways Starbucks, for instance, will add value for the consumer and make itself part of the “Experience economy.”

This is also a way to generate buzz marketing. (Buzz is all the buzz in marketing these days. The issue: how to use word of mouth to create demand.) Consumers will engage on this one. Imagine the conversation between two owners of slightly different models of the same Prada hand bag. “So you got yours in Frankfurt? Mine’s from Milan.”

But note in all the ink spilled on buzz marketing, nobody, as far as I know, has thought to recommend variation as the answer here. No, that was the creation of two foodies in Canada. The market to the rescue once more. Thank you “Rick” and “Karen.”

Ok, I have run out of space and time. Tomorrow, I will have a go at the “mystery” aspect of Minus 8.

References

Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Cowen, Tyler. 2002. Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fauchald, Nick. 2004. Made Like Ice Wine. Wine Spectator. January 31, 2004.

Pine, Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work is theatre and every business is a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

I owe the Prada image to a discussion with Pamela DeCesare of BrandMuse Inc. at the Design Management Institute meetings in Vancouver this spring.

stranger strangers as a test of liberty

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Grant:                                          So, um, what would you call yourself?

Respondent:                            I’’m a punk, a crusty punk.

Grant: [long pause]               Er, so what’’s a crusty punk?

Respondent [sneering]:      It means I don’’t bathe much.

Grant: [long pause]:              So… like… [long pause]  I see. 

In the early 1980s, I was doing ethnographic interviews with Punks in Toronto.  The video tape was funny to watch afterwards.  You can’’t see me on the tape but you can hear the discomfort in my voice off camera.  I was out of my depth.  I didn’’t know where to start the interview or what to ask.  More embarrassingly, it’’s clear I was quietly terrified.  Terrified and clueless, the anthropologist’’s best moment.

I was thinking about punks the other day when blogging about the "society of strangers.”" 

The society of strangers says we don’’t have to know the people around us to live with them.  We don’’t have to have to be bound to them by "trust neworks."

Punks go right after this.  They present us with someone who looks threatening.  Those mohawks, tattoos, safety pins, ripped clothing, black leather jackets send a message.  (I still have a leather jacket from the exhibit we did at the Royal Ontario Museum.  The back reads: "Help the Police, Beat yerself up."”  No, I don’’t wear it.)

Our reaction: "how nervous should I be?"  "What order of threat is this?"”  The punk finds a way to say, "if I am prepared to disregard my own comforts and niceties, can I be relied upon to respect yours?"”  The logic of the (pre-1990s) tattoo was even clearer: "if I am prepared to inflict this act of violence upon myself, think do you think what I am prepared to do to you?”" 

The deeper cultural logic was still clearer.  By breaking the "soft rules"” of civil life (social conventions), Punks signaled the possibility they might be prepared to break the "hard rules”"of civil life (the ones defined and enforced by law).  (I am setting aside the larger cultural and political messages of punk.) 

Punks are, in other words, a test of the limits of a society of strangers.  They introduce a very strange stranger, one who gives us pause.  (Finally, this was more agitprop theater than reality.  For all their talk of anarchy, most punks weren’’t very anarchic.  Conventionally dressed soccer hooligans are much more dangerous.) 

Punks were a test of whether we meant what we said.  Did people have the liberty to define themselves as they wanted to, or not?  In the period following World War II, we were, in a sense, cheating.  The forces of convention were still so powerful that the society of strangers wasn’’t very strange at all.  Most people could read most people pretty well.  Most marginal groups were marginal, driven by stigma and exclusion from the mainstream.  In effect, we had were a pluralist society that permitted freedom but had not yet had to contend with freedom.  We were living a lie.  (No cliché is unwelcome in this blog.  We are inclusive here too.)

Then marginal cultures began to demand a new voice and profile…and now the test was on.  As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I remember how long hair was received.  It was customary for people to react badly, sometimes insisting, in a classic Douglasian moment, that they were witnessing a confusion of gender categories and that the wearer "must be a girl."”  (I remember Rodney Graham one summer in Banff threatening to remove his pants to answer the challenge.)

The test has continued.  As marginal groups have insisted on a more visible place in the mainstream, we found ourselves with stranger strangers.” At first, we reacted badly.  The various youth cultures, lesbians, gays, all took a good deal of grief and, sometimes, acts of violence.  (As of course some still do.)

Then came a relative rapprochement.  As a collectivity, we discovered that these "differences"” weren’’t so different.  Punks might look threatening, but eventually they became merely one more part of the urban landscape.  Most people discovered the wisdom, or at least the usefulness, of the New Yorker’s standard response to the blooming variety of that urban setting: "Whatever, buddy.  Do what you wanna.  Just don’’t ask me to like it.”"  Now we could go back to business as usual.  Benign neglect was the order of the day.  It might be better to call this, in the New York style, "disgruntled neglect.”"

And this is why the Protestant Right has responded so ferociously to gay marriage.  Now a marginal group was asking not just for neglect but for inclusion in the very institution that the Protestant church had made the sacred moral ground of the family.  Gay marriage violated the "disgruntled neglect" rule.  In my opinion, it is entitled to do so.  Let us keep an eye on this test of our inclusiveness.

But for the rest of us, disgruntled neglect remains the order of the day.  Except when it provokes the sensitivities of a particular group, difference is tolerated.  We discovered that the society of strangers could expand very considerably…and that was ok. 

The post on plastic surgery (4 posts ago) suggests that we may have new differences on the way.  An encounter with the lion-like Bride of Wildenstein in a New York restaurant would almost certainly give me pause (paws?). 

But I’’d get over it.  Because, 25 years after my first face-to-face encounter with a crusty punk, I know the society of strangers can encompass even this.  It’’s a good thing I finally got the news.  Because the real difference engine isn’t a computer, it’’s a culture, our culture.

References

Douglas, Mary Tew. 1966. Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Leblanc, Lauraine. 1999. Pretty in punk: Girls’ gender resistance in a boys’ subculture. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.

McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. 1996? Please Kill Me: The uncensored oral history of punk.  New York: Grove Press.

Pray, Doug (Producer). 1997.  Hype. CFP Video.

Savage, Jon. 1991.  England’s dreaming: Sex Pistols and punk rock.  London: Faber and Faber.

staying in touch with pop culture

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Whatever happens to the “swing” movement of the late 1990s? Me neither. The last time I looked in it was going gang busters. So what happened?

Everyone interested in contemporary culture has a tough time keeping up with all cultural developments that interest them. I am thinking about books, magazines, cds, music videos, zines and the profusion of experiment they represent. This isn’t so bad if our interests are narrowly defined. Somewhere out there, there’s a magazine editor getting the job done. But most of us have a several interests, driven by a breadth of enthusiasm, or at least curiosity. (We are all anthropologists now.)

Normally, the marketplace would solve this problem by creating a “clipping service” with summary comment. But as far as I know, there isn’t such a thing. The magazine/CD Blender tried something like this a few years ago. But it didn’t have the breadth I wanted. Sarah Zupko’s excellent popculture.com does this but it is more academic, more mediated than I want (for these purposes). Arts and Letters Daily does a nice job for, well, arts and letters, but it doesn’t have extraordinary pop culture cover.

What I don’t want is someone demonstrating their pop culture chops. They may know a area inside out, but I want something that a) takes nothing for granted, and b) is really inclusive. Entertainment Weekly satisfied both conditions (and supplied very good reviews by Lisa Schwarzbaum) but I have got out of the habit of reading it in print and access to the website is restricted.

This might be something that could be handled in an emergent way by a Friendster variation. Everyone posts the things that interest them and eventually we find the people who post the things that interest us. (If anyone knows of such a thing, please let me know.)

Surely one of those pop culture virtuosos wants to step up. The demand is there. The business model is not hard to imagine. The VCs are opening the pockets once more. The suppliers of pop culture are eager for exposure. A great many music videos are already on line, waiting for reference.

Perhaps, I’m missing something. But then that’s the problem.

Arnie meet Toby

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Tobey Maguire very nearly didn’t get the Spider Man role. Studio chiefs said the star of The Cider House Rules and Wonder Boys was too little, too mild.

Maguire’s rise to action star marks something like a trend in Hollywood, a changing of the guard.

The old action star was Chuck Norris, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, and Russell Crowe, men of what the New York Times calls a “glinty gaze and an imposing physique.”

The new generation is inclined to “limpid stares and wiry frames.” Maguire’s contemporaries include Jake Gyllenhall, Christian Bale, Orlando Bloom, and Ryan Gosling. According to the NYT, the “he-man” is being replaced by “sensitive guys.”

Why?

It may be that this development has been in the works for some time. We might see Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Leonardo Di Caprio as transitional figures. Not an imposing physique among them.

These three can actually act and there was perhaps too little joy or challenge in the typical action hero role. It’s hard to imagine Schwarznegger in any of the roles performed by Depp or Di Caprio. His only hope of stardom was action adventure. But when the producers had chops, they had options. They wanted more interesting projects, and Hollywood obliged them.

This may be driven by the consumer side. Hollywood fans have become more sophisticated, and they are inclined to mock the old genres. The “irony” generation was perhaps too savvy to look at Schwarzenegger and Stallone with hero worship. The action adventure is a mythic construction and if you don’t buy the myth, you don’t buy the hero.

This could be driven by the administration side and the new influence of women in Hollywood: Amy Pascal at Sony, Nina Jacobson at Disney, Stacey Snider at Universal, Sherry Lansing at Paramount. These executives have created what Peter Guber calls a “leavening of the testosterone effect.” (And isn’t this what the feminists said would happen when “women rule the world?”)

This could be driven by a shifting of the tectonic plates of culture. As we have noted in this blog, women appear to be resetting their sexuality (The anthropology and economics of the bare mid riff). Perhaps men in Hollywood are doing the same. This could mark the beginning of a new era of gender rapprochement.

But the oddest part of this story is that the transition is partly driven by a problem of supply. Hollywood simply can’t find old model males. The NYT quotes the casting director, Debra Zane as saying, “They are always looking for the macho man, but they are pulling from the more overtly sensitive and more emotionally available [type], because that’s what there is right now.”

This is a puzzle. Surely, Hollywood is in the enviable position of being able to draw from a vast range of talent, people who are prepared to work as waiters and brick layers, waiting for their “big break.” This is a tournament model in which the rewards of success are so great (potentially $20 million a picture) that contestants are prepared to risk everything to stay in play. Apparently, would be action stars folded their tents and left the jousting ground.

Hollywood has solved this problem by going off shore. Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman, and Colin Farrell are all foreign nationals. (And I thought this was just a “call center” issue.) There was one local contestant, Vin Deisel, but this guy makes Arnie look like Gieldgud, and his career is now spluttering.

I think this might reflect a change in the industry. Action stars are actually best when bad actors. When playing out the requirements of this mythic form, talent actually gets in the way. (The actor should be smaller than the role, not bigger. Modesty of talent insures this.)

Hollywood, in spite of its best efforts, is getting better. Everyone is smarter and more talented, the directors, the writers, the actors and the casting agents. There are untalented actors out there, but they just can’t get in. As a result of some kind of Gladwellian tipping point, the dynamics of Hollywood have reversed themselves. Good is now driving out bad.

References

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2000. The tipping point: how little things can make a big difference. Boston: Little, Brown.

Waxman, Sharon. 2004. Hollywood’s He-Men Are Bumped by Sensitive Guys. The New York Times. July 1, 2004.

Canada Day

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Who said that the right believes in the liberties of the marketplace but not in those of culture, while the left believes in the liberties of culture but not the marketplace?

Canada, it turns out, believes in neither one. The marketplace is regarded with suspicion. Its dynamism is feared, and, when possible, controlled. Culture, especially commercial culture, is regarded with discomfort. Canadians prefer their markets regulated by governments and their culture mediated by experts (Margaret Atwood, take a bow).

At the moment when commerce and culture have a newly provocative relationship, one funding, and driving, the other to new heights, new intensity, new dynamism, this is a bad place for a country to be. This is not the fount of the “wealth of nations.”

Canada never struck out on its own. It managed a seamless transition from being a colony of the UK to being a dependent of the US. Caution always seemed the better part of valor. Actually, caution seemed a whole lot better than valor.

This opportunity for independence came and went again this week when Canada went to the polls in a federal election. It looked for a moment that voters might declare their independence from the old order and the long standing Liberal Party, that champion of cowardice. But, no. It the last days of the campaign, frightened by Liberal scare tactics, the nation lost its nerve…again.

It’s actually there in the words to the national anthem. Oh, Canada, my home and native land. I stand on guard for thee.” “Standing on guard” is good and noble, but it is not the path to dynamism.

References

I believe the person who gave me the lovely little logical package in the first paragraph was Charles Paul Freund, Senior Editor at Reason Magazine. Thanks, Chuck!