Creativity likes chaos.  So it loves Mexico City.  The graffiti here is markedly better than what I see in New York City, and it’s better than what I saw this spring in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels or Paris.  (I admit happily that I am using old fashioned aesthetic notions to make these judgment.  Would a graffiti artist agree with me?  I think she would.  Please click on the image to the right.  It’s worth a closer look.)   

And it’s everywhere.  Very few vertical surfaces in Mexico City escape sprayed paint.  In Monterrey, my present location, there is much less work and what there is often anemic, as if someone can’t quite work the nerve to get on with it.

But chaos doesn’t just come from graffiti.  It’s there in the mixed (read, "no") zoning that shapes Mexico City.  A single block can contain an array of possibilities: several types of architecture, a couple types of habitation, many sizes and shapes of building, and a mix of commerce and habitation.  Buildings that are carefully segregated in the US here jumble up.

What Monterrey lacks in graffiti, it makes up in other intrusions. Just when we think we have a fix on what we’re doing, something intrudes, a glimpse of mountains, a field of brush, a stand of cactus, clouds draped on a hillside.  Just for a second, we’re a world away. And then we’re back.  What were we thinking again?  Oh, right.

Thomas Hardy was pretty good on the chaos of the heath, where perceptions swim and distinctions tremble.

the heath wore the appearance of an installment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky.

Monterrey’s got this sort of thing going on in a big way.  Who needs graffiti artists when the natural world remakes itself?

The creative classes are drawn to places like this.  I think that because, in these places, chaos does most of the hard work of creativity.  Graffiti in Mexico City and heaths in Monterrey break apart received wisdom and the taken-for-granted assumptions that would otherwise prevent us from (cliche alert) thinking outside the box.  The creative classes need "mixed zoning," because otherwise the decomposition and recombination of things would be up to them. 

Mea culpa.  Me, too.  Chaos at work is totally interesting.

References

Florida, Richard.  The Rise of the Creative Classes.  [sorry, I don't have the full ref.]

Hardy, Thomas.  Return of the Native.  read and download here.

Post script

Alex, I see your NY Graffiti (see comment below) and I raise it! (please click on this photo to get fuller detail)

Thanks for your kind words and the opportunity to pit noble graffiti tradition against one another.   (Not that graffiti is competitive or anything.)

A life long dream came true yesterday on the flight from NYC to Mexico City.  I was able to watch a film in flight, not an airline film and not on airline technology which feels increasingly like a stowaway from the 20th century.  I used my Lenovo ThinkPad X60s, the one with the long battery life, and thanks to Amazon UnBox, I was able to see Chinatown, the 1974 film by Roman Polanski.

I got thinking about Chinatown because the post on Raines (Thursday) got me thinking about Noir.  Now, I was singing the praises of Raines but then it occurred to me that it is not nearly so good as Polanski’s film.  It is, at least, good enough to claim kinship with Chinatown, and to have make itself the beneficiary of the things Chinatown did for the genre.  (And that’s saying something.)

This is a "second look" film if ever there were one.  The plot demands it, in the way that Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects does.  Once you know the outcome, you are obliged to review every detail.  But it is second look in another way:  it is so very carefully crafted.

I have a funny habit of mentally "clicking" when things in the world fall into a "composition."  It’s as if whenever things line up in the manner of a photograph, I feel compelled to "take the picture."  Sometimes I actually click my teeth, to mark exactly when the composition was "just right."  Normally, I would not share this with you, dear reader.  But it’s worth mentioning here because Chinatown had me clicking like crazy.  In the scene that has Jack Nicholson (as Jake "J.J." Gittes) drive his car up the driveway of the Mulwray mansion (24:37-55 on the Amazon UnBox counter), I clicked 17 times.  (I had to go back and count, obviously.  There is actually a double count opportunity, but never mind.)  It is as if the eye (Polanski too?) is trying to return the moving images to a series of stills.

Having satisfied his aesthetic craving for order, Polanski puts the film back together again with a device that I came to think of as "eddies."  There are little moments in the film that refer us back into the film, as if one moment were a ripple returned from an earlier one.

Notice the look Mulwray’s secretary gives Gittes as he is escorted out of Mulwray’s office.  It has ferocious, well banked disdain.  (She is punishing him for having invaded her boss’s office.)   Gittes looks at her as he passes, and, as he groks her disdain, he looks again.  Their eyes lock.  (It’s a .3 second stand off.)  This scene evokes the earlier one, and the movie feels more and more a record of a world, and less and less it’s simulation. 

Notice the smile that Nicholson gives when he is sitting in his office, reading a newspaper and listening to one of this "operatives" describe Mulwray with a resounding, "He’s got water on the brain!"  This tells us volumes about office interactions, a long standing relationship, the pleasure of a friend (or a knucklehead) playing true to form.  Eddies everywhere. 

Polanski is especially good with odd noises, introducing them as anomalies and only later giving us the lowdown.  The first scene of the film begins with a grunting, keening sound we’ve (I’ve) never heard before.  Eventually, it proves to come from a cuckold as he confronts evidence of his wife’s infidelity. 

At Nicholson gets out of his car at the Mulwray’s mansion, he hears squeaking issuing inexplicably from a magnificent sedan.  Eventually we see that this is caused by a servant hard at work waxing and who, eventually, waxes his way right into frame.   When he discovers Nicholson staring at him, he returns a gaze of dull significance.  This is Polanski telling us, possibly, that if there are some signals the significance of which is withheld from us, there may be others.  Faire attention!  Viewer, be warned. 

Clearly, Polanski is a champion noticer.  And he is in this case of Chinatown, a noticer doing a film about a noticer.  The detective is one of those noticers who may, by noticing, actually change the outcome of municipal politics and LA history.  Every artist wants this kind of influence, and the trouble is that, usually, they are forced to settle for something more general and indeterminate.  To be sure, this influence is actually more powerful than the redirection of LA politics, but it takes long and credit is rarely forthcoming.  The vanity of the artist demands both power and proof, cultural influence and political effect.  (And if you’ve got gifts like Polanski’s, who’s to say you don’t deserve it.)   

Now, clearly no one this talented doesn’t steal aesthetic resources anywhere and everywhere.  There is a trace of Kubrick, with every frame furnished and inhabited before we get there (as opposed to Altman who pushed the camera into the hurly-burly of an improv in the hope of capturing something more interesting than anything he could furnish or inhabit. In a sense, Kubrick and Polanski are France.  Altman, England.)  There are moments entirely Hitchcockian, wonderfully shrill and sculpted, as when the body of of poor, drowned Mulwray, his eyes pried open by terror, is pulled into frame.  The is film making ripped from the pages of the pulp and scandal rag, Noir at its most unapologetically overwrought. 

Why does Noir matter to us, especially when so much of it is over the top?  I think its because of all the inventions of popular culture, this is the one most devoted to complexity.  Chinatown has lots and lots of complexity, the plot for one.  The viewer (this viewer anyhow) must from time to time break frame and ask "ok, what’s going on here?" and even then we’re left with the uneasy feeling that there are complexities here that are still probably going to escape us. 

Complexity aside, Noir has always been prepared to be openly sociological.  In this case, we can see social classes cleanly delineated.  As when Nicholson has the black, veneered door of the Mulwray mansion closed in his face.  This is not very subtle, but it gets the job done.  Notice the gazes, then, that pass between the Mulwray’s staff, so like wrought iron in their attention to good form.  This isn’t very subtle either, but clearly Polanski wants certain social truths made clear that he might investigate real subtleties with more subtlety.

Notice the look Mrs. Mulwray gives a detective at 34:14.  The Lieutenant is asking Mrs. M. if she knows who "the girl" is.  She says no.  The detective slides in from the hallway to inspect Mrs. Mulwray more closely.  She returns his gaze and then, seeing his impertinence, she looks at him a second time, this time with affront and that look that leads with a downturned chin, and rakes upward as if to say, "who are you to look at me that way? I return your challenge with my own, and, listen here, you jumped-up little man, my challenge trumps your challenge, by rank and performance and gender."  Of course, Dunaway issues this challenge with the steely fragility she exhibits in this film, so the "trumping" is, like so much in Chinatown, balanced on a blade’s edge, only just holding and millimeters from failure.   Another kind of tipping point, this one with tolerances set by sociological stipulation.

Complexity and that sociological eye come together as Nicholson begins to understand that he has been drawn into the "wheels within wheels" interaction of forces much larger than himself.  This is urgent sociology.  Nicholson has to crack this case if he is not to end up in a drainage ditch pointed at the Pacific ocean.  See also the moment that Dunaway realizes that she has a problem on her hands.  (Spoiler alert: stop reading here if you have not seen Chinatown, and take this script to your local video store: "for one copy of Chinatown, to be viewed immediately, repeat as necessary (and at least 4x).  [Signed] Dr. McCracken"). 

Dunaway’s problem is Nicholson, a guy whose motives are not quite clear.  He is an accident scouring her life for a place, unpredictably, to happen. We can see her character wondering, who is this guy and what do I have to do to manage him?

This is of course the problem of the modern and post modern society.  With roles unspecified (or at least undeclared) a good deal of social interaction turns on the question:

"who are you to me"

and

"what am I to you?" 

(This question is usually haunted by another set of questions.  These are:

"Who do you think you are?"

and

"Don’t you know who I am?"

This is effectively our opportunity to protest the indeterminacy of our social world in situ.)

Finally, we work our way to clarity.  Identities are determined.  Interactions are dispatched.  This is worked out in the economy of impressions, and the exchange of social and cultural capitals, but before this economics is engaged, anthropology must be satisfied.  The actors have to detect role, motive, character. 

At the beginning of Hamlet, when the keepers of the watch are changing shift, Barnardo, the incoming guard, issues a challenge,

"Who’s there?" 

Francisco, the incumbent, isn’t having any of this.  He says,

"Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself." 

Barnardo obliges, "Long live the king!"   

If I read this correctly, it is a classic role play.  Barnardo has usurped Francisco’s authority and Francisco responds with something like, "Listen, this is my job.  I challenge you, not the other way round."  Who is Francisco to Barnardo?  It’s clear.  Even in the face of Barnardo’s indiscretion, it is clear that Francisco is right to challenge the challenge and restore things to order. 

This kind of clarity is missing in our world.  (It was of course being dismantled even in the 16th century to the extraordinary profit of the Elizabethan age and our own.)  In our world, it’s not clear who is who, and how whos should how (if you will forgive Dr. Seuss phrasing.)  Eventually, it will be negotiated, thanks not least to the facilitations of the marketplace, but for the moment things are unclear and perilous, especially if we harbor a secret like Dunaway’s own.

Noir matters finally because it is the only popular form, I think, that can approach tragedy.  My rough and ready definition of tragedy are those moments when two things can’t but must be true.  Clearly, popular culture has always had an inclination to make itself agreeable, like the good natured uncle who works so hard to please everyone.  (My family, rich in scoundrels and the merely disagreeable, would have liked to have had even one person like this.  I speak not from experience, but the big pop-out book of cultural truisms.)  Popular culture has usually defaulted to sunny simplicity and Noir offers something richer, more complicated, more ambivalent.

Ok, I am as you read this sitting in a living room or a kitchen in Mexico City plying the respondent with questions.  I’ve done work here a couple of times before.  Almost universally, respondents have been helpful and illuminating.  Mexico City, does this place do Noir? 

References

Rich, Nathaniel.  2007.  The Shadows Know.  Vanity Fair.  February 7, 2007. here.

Straw, Will. 2006. Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America.  PPE Editions.

For the Wikipedia entry on Chinatown, go here.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Paul Melton for the Vanity Fair reference. 
 

One of the secrets of understanding contemporary culture is the telling comparison.

Yesterday, it seemed to me a good way to extract the significance of Jeff Goldblum’s character on Raines was to compare him to Kieffer Sutherland’s character on 24.  This comparison is not so much telling as damning.  Sutherland looks like a robot by comparison.  (I say this with some regret because I actually like 24.)

I guess I was vaguely aware of the limitations of Kieffer Sutherland’s character, but it took a telling comparison  to make them leap into view.   Raines is a character who thinks and feels, and this helps us see Jack Bauer as wind up toy programmed only for "stoic impassivity," "heroic grimacing," and "fleeting regret."   

Telling comparisons demand the right terms for comparison.  Comparing Jack Bauer to Homer Simpson, Conan O’Brian, Les Moonves, Johnny Depp, or Jack Welch is not going to help us see him in a new light.  What we need is what Fred Egan used to call a "controlled comparison," one with enough similarities to make the contrast stand up and holler.  Raines gives us this.  No, of course, there is scientific or very precise about these comparison.  They are not, in fact, very controlled at all.  They require a good deal of editorial discretion, but in the right hands they show (or tell) us things we couldn’t/wouldn’t otherwise see.

Telling comparisons are useful, I think, because our culture has expanded so much I, for one, think of things discretely.  When I think of 24, I don’t do much comparing.  I am captive on the little universe created by the show.  In fact, I find that when I construct what I hope will be a telling comparison I get a little shock, as if I have crossed wired, as if I have conjoined things that are made to be kept separate.  The anthropology, the blogging, of contemporary culture depends on comparisons.   All of us would love to live free of the judgment that comparison brings, but sorry no can do. 

Today, I was thinking about how much interesting stuff about  marketing appears in the pages of Fast Company.  And I wondered whether Fast Company had maybe not done us the very great favor of smuggling marketing discourse back into serious treatment.   I mean this is a field that gets it from all sides.  The liberal left think it’s the work of the devil.  The intellectual world believes it an exercise is stupidity.  The b-school world regards marketing as a dark art, one that must struggle without the aid of metrics.  Fast Company has done us the very great honor of taking the field seriously, showing that it is not a moral dubious exercise engaged in manipulation, not a field of simple problems pursued by simple people, and not a dark art that makes up with guess work what it lacks in metrics.  Thank you, Fast Company.

But have I taken their measure fully?  No, what I need now is a telling comparison, and after due deliberation and running the mainframe very nearly to the point of combustion, I think we might compare Fast Company to the Harvard Business Review.  Oh, cruel comparison!  Now Fast Company begins to look positively mercurial, mobile and curious and connected to contemporary culture and commerce, and poor HBR looks tired and a little clueless, as if everything it cares to comment on in the world of marketing and culture is whatever it can see from the window of it’s men’s club in Boston.  That Google Trends map above shows HBR on high but losing altitude. 

Alright!  Enough on telling comparison.  I have 4 minutes in which to work if I want to post this on Friday, April 20th, and I do.   (Next week I will be in Mexico where I hope to do my best Jan Chipchase imitation.  Stay tuned.)

References

For more on Fred Eggan, see his Wikipedia entry here.

Raines is a new show on NBC.  Chatter on line suggests that it has not taken off like a rocket.  This is a pity, because it is, I think, the best thing to come to television in a long time. 

I’ve never liked Jeff Goldblum.  He always struck me as self-enamored. But this is a new Goldblum.  Somehow the guy got gravitas.  And this changes everything.  With a new seriousness and depth of feeling, all that preciousness and posing transforms itself, hey presto, into great acting.  That virtuous control of face, body and especially voice, now that they are no longer servants of his vanity, give Goldblum extraordinary depths and control as an actor.  It’s really an amazing transformation…as if Olivier has spent the opening years as a talk show host.  A star is born. 

Did we need a new detective show?  Certainly not.  But somehow had the very good idea of giving this show roots in the Noir tradition.  At a stroke, this gives Goldblum’s character that air of a tarnished knight and Goldblum works moral weariness and self-doubt to perfection. Hollywood shamelessly ransacks Noir structure and vocabulary, always taking, never giving.  It borrows, in the famous phrase by x because it cannot steal.  Raines steals.  This is Noir actually lives and breathes.  This is Noir getting better.

Listen especially for the voice-over dialog that Goldblum offers at the beginning of each show. This is a Noir staple, the voice of bad tempered authenticity.  The Noir novelists (Chandler, Hammett) always made this voice a little too tough-guy for my tastes, as if getting this close to literary obliged them to hype the speaker’s gender credentials.  In a more secure time, Goldblum can work this territory with nuance, and I think it’s fair to say that these opening orations may be the best voice-over work ever. 

The show turns on a stunt.  Goldblum’s character can see dead people. Yawn.  This is a device that is precious close to jumping the shark, if it didn’t do some years ago.  (Consider Sixth Sense, Ghost Whisper, etc.).  But even here the show draws up to the brink of cliche and then finds a way to make it work.  In this case, Goldblum is not so much seeing dead people, as inventing them.  They are figments of his imagination.  They know it. He knows it.  Your scalp will not tingle. Your spine will not shiver.  Nothing supernatural is revealed.  This turns out to be a lovely device for listening to a thinking, feeling man thinking and feeling.  An interior dialog made outward for our delectation. 

The casting choices are stunningly good.  Hats off to Meg Liberman and Irene Cagen.  Everyone in the station house is good.  Dov Davidoff is flat out brilliant.  Madeleine Stow as the psychiatrist is not so good.  It’s as if she is trying to put too many funny, gracious roles behind her, and prove that she is an actress with chops playing a professional woman with substance.  It’s a one note performance from a cast that is very good at working the scale.  One of my favorite things is that this ensemble never has those terrible moments that beset the cast of CSI: New York where everyone keeps repeating "vic" over and over like a support group for people with David Mamet disorder.   (We get it!  We get it!  You are street toughed officers of the law!)

Some of the credit for this show must go to the executive producer, Graham Yost.  Graham’s Dad was Elwy Yost, a famous Canadian film buff who once sent Graham to school with a note that read: "I am sorry that Graham is late for school today.  We were watching Citizen Kane till very late last night."  What Graham draws Elwy.  Raines draws from popular culture.  Some TV is getting better because we have taking it seriously, and doing it better, for several generations now. 

I think one way to see the significance of Raines is to compare it to 24.  24 has become a drama machine.  There is no surprise left.  Only tension.  Jack Bauer (Keiffer Sutherland’s character) has become an action figure, running, jumping, hitting, shooting, and only very rarely actually acting.  Raines is Shakespearean by comparison.  Raines may well owe its existence to The Closer, but I think it is much better.  In fact, it’s not clear to me that there are few things on TV better than Raines.  (Though I have to agree with Peter and Joshua that nothing is better than The Wire.)  That there is talk of cancellation is pure madness.  I don’t doubt that there was an editor and a publishing house that refused the early work of Chandler and Hammett.  I mean, come on, take a risk.  History may be watching. 

References

Raines runs on NBC, Friday, 9/8c

There are 5 episodes on the NBC website here.

McCracken, Grant  2004.  Complexity on TV.  This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics.  September 15, 2004.  here.  [in praise of the Wire]

Full Credits

Premiere date: March 15, 2007

Starring: Jeff Goldblum, Matt Craven, Dov Davidoff, Linda Park, Madeleine Stowe, Nicole Sullivan, Malik Yoba

Executive producer: Graham Yost

Creator: Graham Yost

Co-executive producers: Felix Alcala and Fred Golan

Producer: Preston Fischer

Consulting producers: Bruce Rasmussen and Jennifer Cecil

Co-producer: Josh Singer

Story editor: Taylor Elmore

Staff writer: David Andron, Moira Walley-Beckett and Wendy Calhoun

Director: Frank Darabont (pilot)

Casting directors: Meg Liberman and Irene Cagen

Production designer: Greg Melton

Art director: Anthony D. Parrillo

Director of photography: Lex du Pont

Costume designer: Giovanna Melton

Editors: Ron Rosen, Derek Berlatsky and Peter Frank

Music supervisor: Gregory Sill

Sound mixer: Tim Cooney

Origination: Hollywood, California

Produced by: NBC Universal Television Studio

AD suffers from Zelig’s disease.

With doctors, [he] assumes the role of a doctor; with psychologists he says he is a psychologist; at the solicitors he claims to be a solicitor. [He] doesn’t just make these claims, he actually plays the roles.

Clearly AD suffers this condition for good medical reasons.  Cardiac arrest caused damage to the fronto-temporal region of his brain. 

But perhaps you recognize something in AD as you did in Zelig, Woody Allen’s character in a film of the same name. 

If we de-pathologize this condition for a moment, it looks adaptive.  The world grows more various and more demanding.  We are defined by looser boundaries, fewer "off hours," and a diversity of stimulus, opportunity, obligation and response. 

Zelig’s condition might be useful.  What if we could be exactly what people want us to be with no opportunity cost.  We could be X with the Xs, and still be Y with the Ys.  Perfectly fluid, undetectably various, effortlessly responsive. 

I mean this is what we hope for in all circumstances.  We all know people who are too sweet to be tough and others too tough to be sweet…to name just one of the failures of "coverage" that can challenge the biographical fortunes of the individual.  The costs of even this ordinary failure in versatility are high: wrong jobs, failed educations, bad marriages. 

But the world has grown in its complexity, breadth and depth.  There is more "identity space" out there, and therefore more possibility of contradiction and personal shortfall.  Who can be all things to all people, now that all people are so very various?

AD seems to have lost the capacity to keep his own identity constant…

Very wise.  Yes, it looks like a symptom or a condition to the British Association of Psychology.  (Yum, more to cure.)  And in AD’s case it plainly is.  But for the rest of us…who wants to keep his identity constant in a world like our own?

It’s all very Stuart Kauffman, the complexity theorist from the Sante Fe institute who asks us to consider the structural advantages of the "complex adaptive system."  Real adaptation, Kauffman will tell us, comes from being messy and multiple.

Naturally, this is a power that will have to be used for good.  We don’t like the sound of the character in Catch Me If you Can, Spielberg’s 2002 movie, staring Leonard DiCaprio.  Zelig is a sweet, bumbling idiot, motiving by a wish to please and an effort to do his best.  It is precisely this sincerity we hope for, and not the cunning of the con man.

Certainly, this is what we do in an ethnographic interview, trying to turn ourselves into the other.  So three times today, in people’s kitchens in Brussels, I tried as much as possible to become them.  It was pretty.  It wasn’t successful.  But boy was it interesting.  But forget interesting.  Someday, very soon, it’s going to be adaptive.   

References

Anonymous.  2007.  Brain damage turns man into human chameleon.  The British Psychological Society.  March 20, 2007.  here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Johan Strandell for spotting this article and giving me a head’s up.