Comments on: this post made by elves as I slept

By: Grant

Grant — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 21:08:17 +0000

Steve, why do I have the envious feeling that your memory is like one of the classical loci models where there is a place for everything and recall is instantaneous? It’s not entirely fair for those of us who are struggling to remember whether we have, as my father used to say, “buttoned our trousers.”

Good point on the microbrewery (and yes at some point we just very much want people to just “get real”).

The microbreweries then faced the interesting problem of scaling up (if they could)to something national. This took new kinds of scale in production and distribution, but it also took new kinds of scale in meaning management.

How do you keep your mystery when you are producing with vats the size of Rhode Island and is it anything, then, more than puffery?

I think we have seen Nike struggling to micro manage the message, not for mystery (though the “hide and seek” ads by Weiden and Kennedy were pretty splendid as were the ones showing the girl who walks to school without every touching the ground). But they are working on a version of this problem, keeping things particular when almost everything about the logic of capitalism takes you, with scale, to banality.

This is why, I think, the department stores had to turn over their space to boutiques. Only they could do the micro management necessary to speak to the new consumer. Anyhow, thanks! Grant

By: steve

steve — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 20:43:00 +0000

I recall the old Keebler cookies jingle: “They’re baked by little elves in a hollow tree. And what do you think makes them taste so yummy? They’re baked in magic ovens and there’s no factory–hey!”

Interestingly, the beer business went through this in the 1990s with the rise of microbrews, those obscure and scarce brands that could only be accessed by the lucky or determined. Personally, I was charmed by the major brewer who countered with TV ads saying “It’s time for a good old macrobrew…Brewed in vats…the size of Rhode Island” along with pictures of the industrial beer making process playing over martial music. Perhaps vineagar will go through a similar cycle.

By: Thoughtsignals

Thoughtsignals — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 07:19:55 +0000

“Reenchantment of the world”

Over at This Blog Sits At: 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:…

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 23:29:56 +0000

Gary, it is a great and terrible nexus, forming and when necessary reforming whole civilizations (and their discontents)! Grant

By: gary

gary — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 23:16:23 +0000

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.

Heh. Not to mention the power of the woman/jewelry nexus.

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 23:02:59 +0000

Well said, as always. The entire New Age thing presumes that science and reason will supply the infrastructure of our lives…so that we may be free to imagine a world without it. I think we need to file this one under “civilization and its discontents,” subcategory: hypocrisy. On the other hand, to supply a little anthropological balance, the regime of reason and science can be a little shy on the imagination side. So we don’t want to judge the enterprise too hastily, perhaps. It may be true that science depends on the science fiction of new age, as surely as the new age does upon it. Thanks for the corrective view! Best, Grant