I’ve a number of things that need fixing or improving here at This Blog Sits At The Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.
Is there someone out there I could help with my TypePad account?
Please drop a line to grant27[aT]mit.edu[cational].
Thanks, Grant.
I just passed my neighbor in the street and he gave me the New England salute: a "moue."
He might have waved his hand, nodded, smiled, flashed his eyebrows, or even stopped to chat. But, no, what he had for me was a moue.
This is a small gesture of the mouth. Lips are pulled back and compressed, as if someone were about to play the trumpet. it happens very quickly. If you are not watching very closely, you’ll miss it. (In the image to the right, President Bush is making what might be a moue.)
It’s the French who call it a "moue." And in France the moue is defined as an "expression of discontent, disdain, disgust." But in America, it means something else, I think. Actually, I don’t know what it means.
I see New Englanders doing it all the time. On the train from New York City, I watched a man walking up the isle. People were spilling out of their seats and talking across the isle. This obliged him to invade the personal space of these people. He made a moue.
So is that it? An apology? Well, it might be. But I’ve also seen it used as an acknowledgment. Another neighbor of mine passed me in her car. She made a moue too. This one can’t have been an apology. I think it was her idea of hello.
To someone who grew up in Western Canada, and lived, most recently, in Quebec, the moue feels stingy. It feels like a withholding. If I were Hispanic or African American, I would assume my neighbor disliked me for my difference. But in fact, he and I are white, male, middle aged and middle class. Two peas in a sociological pod. God knows how he treats people who don’t share the pod. (Maybe he’s friendlier! That would be interesting.)
So, the moue is not (or not only) an expression of disgust, apology or acknowledgment. I spend the rest of my walk thinking about it and decided finally that it is the smallest negotiable social gesture. It doesn’t really signify anything except a disinclination to give nothing.
You can’t help feeling that the perpetrator would like to offer nothing. But that would expose him to censure and the charge of "social noncompliance." In this little world, you can’t do nothing, however much you might like to. So you offer the tiniest bit more than nothing. And that’s the moue. In this New England economy of gestures, anything more than a moue is too much, and any thing less than a moue is too much, too. If you withhold the moue, they can get you for non compliance.
Ok, sure, it’s a matter of temperament for some people. It is also good policy in some cases. Sometimes you just want to keep your distance. Especially when you find yourself around anyone my father would have called a "rum customer." And there might be something in me that provokes this fear in my neighbor…despite the fact that I do not wear odd hats, sing to myself, or gesticulate. (This could change.)
No, I think there is a deeper motive, a systematic sociological one. I can’t say what it is but some of my neighbors are so stingy with their hellos that I believe that they believe that if they are more generous I will ask them for a loan. This might be an enactment of policy created by the founding poet. It might merely be a performance of Frost’s "good fences make good neighbors."
Is the moue a good fence? No, it’s a terrible fence. It looks like a begrudging gift, like you would rather offer nothing. Failed reciprocity is worse than no gesture at all and a very bad fence indeed. But that’s me, the reluctant New Englander, talking. Chances are I’ll get over it. Or there’s therapy and some kind of cultural counseling. It’s not to late to send me to summer camp.
I made a note of every hello I got on the walk, and many of them were superb. The happiest came when I passed a blond woman and her bull dog. We said "hello" in almost the same way, in almost the same tone, at almost the same time. Perfect reciprocity. We had dispatched our responsibility. And it was kind of fun. (Simultaneity when accomplished accidentally is always fun.) More to the point, it made a lovely fence. We have acknowledged one another and that was that. This fence made good neighbors of us both.
It soon became clear to me that the best hello is a "cheery" hello. A cheery hello is generous, uncomplicated, and closed. It’s a gift that doesn’t ask for any kind of return. It’s a kind of enameled bonhomie. It says, "take this or leave this. It’s my gift to you. See you later."
Or, you can offer "how you doing?" as a passing jogger did. Visiting the US in the 1970s, I used to find this confusing. It’s not as bad as the greeting "what’s happening" which once elicited from me the information that I had slept rather late, enjoyed an indifferent breakfast, and was off to the laundromat. Something in the astonished response of my interlocutor told me this was not what he was looking for, and eventually I learned that it’s ok to answer a question with a question. I said, "how you doing" back to the jogger.
There is the question of who goes first. The first hello risks more and is therefore more generous. You can be refused and in this case you feel like an idiot. A moue is precisely this refusal plus 1 increment of sociality. You still feel like an idiot, but you can’t call them on it. But it’s also true that there is something gallant about the second hello. The first speaker has exposed themselves to risk and when someone replied they are coming to their aid.
Then there was the guy in the parking lot. He was in his middle 20s and dressed like that loser-loner that everyone knows from high-school gym class: white socks, ill fitting shorts, give-away t-shirt, an expression somehow both defeated and truculent. All in all, a pretty convincing confession of athletic incompetence that seemed also, very quietly, to give off an air of menace. We know what this adds up to: "loner" plus "menace" = someone who someday may go postal or at least Paula. I kept my distance. Even a moue was too good for him!
As if to compensate for this, I came across an elderly man with sports cap. He smiled beatifically at me and nodding his head at the tennis ball in my hand, said, "man on a mission!" This was wonderful and charming, but I couldn’t think of anything to say in reply, and just grinned idiotically. I personally love these little phrases said in passing, and, with more time, I would see if I couldn’t work out the grammar. We can say they are brief, self-evident, cheery, and if possible witty. On another walk, I encountered a woman on a bike pulling a tiny caravan filled with children squealing with a delight so audible that you could hear them coming 100 yards away. This gave me time to think up a little phrase to give her as she passed. With pretend gruffness, I said, "joy rider!" She smiled.
So only some of my neighbors insist on the moue. And I can only guess on their motives. The effects of this behavior are a little less mysterious. When people insist on this stinginess, they damage the social capital in which community consists. Cheery hellos, and well exchanged greetings, have the effect of increasing the sense of fellowship. I bet we could establish empirically that communities that exchange greetings are richer in every other respect, in the amount of time, money and interest they are prepared to give one another. (Whether the greetings are cause or consequence (or both) another, interesting question.)
But again that’s the Canadian in me talking. New England was an experiment for which we should all be grateful. The little culture created a stubborn, sometimes aggressive individualism that helped to enable revolutions, military, social, religious, and economic. So it’s probably wrong for a newcomer to complain. Especially when he comes from a country that is famous for its politeness, and, increasingly, not much else. If you have to choose…
References
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Economics of the gaze. The blog sits at the intersection of Anthropology and Economics. August 23, 2004. here.
An episode of Hey, Paula feels like an episode of another kind. Delight gives way to crying which returns to delight. Girl, call your anthropologist.
Here’s what he’ll tell you.
1) Our culture distinguishes between public and private.
2) This helps us distinguish between "front stage" and a "back stage."
3) Everyone seeks to "manage impressions" on the "front stage." When this is done well, our social capital increases, and other capitals accrue to us.
4) Everyone works to conceal the "back stage." When this is done badly, our social capital diminishes and other bad things happen too.
5) The distinction between public and private, and the one between front stage and back stage, has been shifting in our culture in the last 100 years. Once an iron clad distinction that ruled social life and personal experience, it is now blurred. Victorians lived and died by this distinction. It is now, as we might say, "in play."
6) All public figures (actors, politicians, business leaders, public figures) are now obliged to reveal more of the private self in the public persona. It’s part of the new contract fashioned between leaders and the rest of us. It’s almost as if we are saying to celebrities:
"if you want us to take you seriously, you have to show us more of who you are. We need to know who we’re dealing with. Personal revelation helps. It’s what you owe us. It’s part of our due diligence."
7) It is possible, then, to increase one’s social capital, celebrity and credibility by moving the boundary between public and private and revealing more of one’s private life.
8) But the old rules still apply, and when some people reveal the private self the result is punishment and self-diminishment.
9) Reality TV has a mixed record as an instrument of revelation. Stars like Kathy Griffin has used to to good effect. It has built her standing and celebrity. But it has been less kind to other celebrities. I think we are obliged to say that on balance Mr. T’s appearance on the reality program, I Pity the Fool, did more to confirm his obscurity than save him from it. Nick and Jessica returns a split verdict: Jessica, ok. Nick, not so much.
10) The question for Paula Abdul was whether reality TV would augment or diminish her standing.
11) I think every student of popular culture was obliged to sound the horn of caution. In point of fact, Paula Abdul had already participated in the new culture of "revealed privacy. " Several years of exposure and unrehearsed reaction on American Idol had given the American public a pretty good sense of the "real" Paula Abdul. Evidently, this was a woman who lead with her emotions, cared about the little guy, came to the defense of the vulnerable, and otherwise qualified as the "people’s Paula."
12) The question was simple: was there any more to be gained from still greater revelation? And this question was haunted by the "diminishing returns" suspicion that there couldn’t be enough "revelation capital" left to justify the risk of overexposure.
13) The empirical outcome is I think indisputable. The danger of overexposure is clear and with each passing "episode" ever more costly. When Paula melts down over a missing hair dresser, she puts in jeopardy her "people’s Paula" standing and risks looking like a Princess.
14) I think the larger conclusion is also clear. It’s time for every public figure to put an anthropologist on retainer.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2007. Kathy Griffin. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. June 07, 2007. here.
I was at an event last night that took place at the intersection of culture, capital and technology. (To protect everyone’s anonymity, I won’t say more.)
Several tech people spoke with loathing about Google. One of the notions seemed to be that this corporation, made virtuous by its determination not to be like Microsoft, is now quite a lot like Microsoft: large, dangerous, another brand behaving badly. The slogan "don’t be evil" sloughed the negative. Interesting.
Is this true? I don’t know and I hope not. But it might be early warning. Diffusion theory tells us that the future can be read if we can just get to the top of the diffusion path. If the early adopters are bailing out, someone like me, a middle adopter, might eventually follow suit. I won’t know why I’m now longer pro-Google. I just won’t be. This is the way that brands come and go. This is one of the ways Google eclipsed Microsoft.
The diffusion theory here comes from the German sociologist Simmel. This says that adoption runs like a pig through a python. The earliest adopters take hold of the pig and then three things happen.
1) The later adopters go, "Pig! Yes, please. Now that I know about it, and now that it has been approved by my betters, I would very much like some pig."
2) The early adopters go, "Oh, please. Now that our lessers are consuming pig, we’re not interested" and they bail out.
3) Eventually, the later adopters notice that the early adopters have bailed, and they bail, too.
Thus does a bump run through the python. As each later group adopts, each previous group repudiates. (Of course there are always extenuating circumstances. Adoption is also decided by the value created by competing parties. Simmel’s theory accounts only for the effects of admiration and imitation.)
Now, the marketing community is keenly interested in buzz, word of mouth and the tipping point. But many marketers seem to believe you get to keep the early adopters. They act as if the python keeps filling up from one end to the other. In their view, apparently, the adoption process is not a running bump. It’s a filling up.
For these marketers, all we have to do is to ignite interest and watch diffusion happen. We never have to worry about what we might call the classic Simmellian question: what are our early adopters doing, and what happens when they bail?
Last night, I might have been listening to the early adopters signaling that they are done with the brand. And it can only be a matter of time when an middle adopter like me begins to have doubts. This is the moment for Google to intervene, and reprogram the diffusion effect. That’s what marketing’s for. Maybe it’s time to reach out and rebuild the relationship with the early adopters.
I might be wrong. Maybe the word-of-mouth community is all over this. Would love to hear.
Saving Grace debuted last night.
Entertainment Weekly and Henry Goldblatt gave high marks to Holly Hunter as Detective Grace Hanadarko. Predictably, her performance was flabbergastingly good.
What Goldblatt didn’t like was the the "heavenly subplot" that suggests that Grace is the recipient of divine intervention. I do see what he’s saying. TV now resorts to intervention of divine and supernatural nature too frequently, from Joan of Arcadia to John from Cincinnatti.
But I think this plot line is here for a reason. (And it’s not just we are culture keen on organized religion and every kind of spirituality.) "Heavenly subplots" are useful.
Here’s what I mean. Ours is a culture where genre is being loosened and elements of the imponderable are being let in. Even the most predictable cultural artifact will sometimes have elements we don’t quite "get." This was once the trade mark, the defining feature, of avant garde culture where artists have taken joy in creating art that evades our ability to make it make sense. (According to the trade-off, only art that refuses conventional meanings can capture new ones.)
The history of Hollywood is the story of a "creative tension" between producers who want things to make perfect sense, and writers and directors who want to open up the semantic field and let in subtlety, nuance, and things that tremble on the edge of the intelligible.
For a long while, the producers were winning, and this is a principal reason Hollywood was so robust as a cultural form and so successful as a cultural import.
But now, writers and directors are making a little headway. This is due to many things, and HBO and cable can take much of the credit. But it is also due to the fact that our culture is getting less intimidated by difficulty, and a lot better working with relatively unformed materials. A creative team can dial back the "keep it simple, stupid" advice and fill a project with notes that are strange, wonderful and sometimes downright inpenetrable.
Naturally, the war continues. Producers still want things to remain full-impact obvious. And when the creative team can’t stand it anymore, they have a "last chance" strategy. It’s divine intervention.
The divine element certifies plot elements that are hard to understand. After all, God works in mysterious ways. This is "premise" you might say of religious discourse. Now, the creative team has the right to loose the bounds of genre and construct a world that’s less formed. Now they have a license of forgivable mystery.
I think that might be what is happening in Saving Grace. Naturally, when you have an actor as good as Holly Hunter, you can do anything you want. On the other hand, perhaps TNT, the producing partner, is not as open handed as HBO. Perhaps, it was necessary to use a heavenly subplot to smuggle in more genuinely creative options.
Divine mystery is EZ mystery. It’s certified mystery. Everyone knows what it is. The question to ask is whether TNT was right to think that mystery here needed certification. Hey, they may be right. Or maybe because they are relatively new to the producing game, they are working up to creative risk by stages. It might even be that the wonderful performance we get from Holly Hunter was actually "purchased" by this divine certification approach. It was the price the creatives had to pay to give her this room and us this gift.
I don’t pretend to know. This much I think is clear. The center of our culture is moving away from the days of "big studio simplicity" and towards, lets call it, "cable complexity." And in this view, divine intervention as a strategy at TNT may be seen as the swing, the intermediate, position.
References
Goldblatt, Henry. 2007. Holly Holy. Entertainment Weekly. July 27, 2007, p. 58.here.
At some point in grade school we all had an epiphany. It went straight onto the "This book belongs to" section of our notebook:
"My name is Jimmy Smith, I live on Cable street, in the city of Burtonville, in county of Burton County, in the state of Nebraska, in the country of the U.S.A, on the continent of North America, on the planet earth, in the Solar system in the Milky Way."
For an 8 year old, it was a magnificent act of scaling. But that was usually the end of it. Elementary school was not there to encourage kids to climb (or rappell) hierarchies of knowledge. The world, after all, was flat.
Hierarchical mobility was restored, a few years ago, by Google maps. Now we could go from a view of North America to our house in one fluid motion. But once we had scaled up and down a couple of times, the thrill was gone. We were by this time self policing. (Education, it’s the gift that keeps on giving.)
Enter a new Microsoft program called Photosynth. This allows us to navigate multi-scale media in new ways. At TED this year, Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave a breathtaking demonstration. (I wasn’t there to see it in person. Thanks to The Very Short List, I found the TED video today. See below.)
Blaise Aguera y Arcas showed the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. It was build up out of many hundreds of photos taken with every kind of camera, capturing every aspect of Notre Dame large and small. Photosynth had put them all together again and made them navigable.
For social networking purposes, the most interesting thing about Photosynth is that it allows photo tags to migrate. If someone has named the figures on the Notre Dame cathedral, this information is available in my photos, too. This means that my photos of Notre Dame just got smarter, and the memories they evoke just got richer. To the extent that these photos are my memory, my past is now more substantial in ways it wasn’t before. Everything ends up being co-locational not just in space but between people.
In effect, tags and texts end up giving me perspectival information as, or more, interesting than the photos themselves. They become an opportunity to build collective memories as good or better than the memories we construct for ourselves. And this suggests an internet that contains collective emotional and intellectual resources.
More and more of our internal operations are being off loaded into cyberspace. That memory should be one of them feels wrong, because memory is perhaps the most personal and authenticating of our internal faculties. But it is not difficult to imagine a time when the the "memory of crowds" might be the best memory of all.
References
Blaise Aguera y Arcas. 2007. Photosynth demo. Ted: Ideas worth spreading. Filmed March. Posted May. here.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to VSL (Very Short List) for the head’s up. Go here to sign up for this excellent service.
I got to see the first episode of Mad Men last night. It’s a new AMC series from Matthew Weiner. It stars Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, and Christina Hendricks, and runs Thursday nights at 10:00.
Most things about this show are engaging, from its magnificent opening sequence to the casting, music, sets, dialog, and plot lines.
Ah, plot lines. Remember when these were the same as sight lines? We grasped them at a glance, a world made perfectly proportioned and intelligible. Happily, several of the plot lines in Mad Men are not at all like sight lines. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Weiner and director Alan Taylor do not telegraph what’s going to happen. Our intelligence is respected. Our participation is invited.
But there is one plot line that works exactly like a sight line. It is central idea of this series that the ad executive in 1960 was craven, soulless manipulator. In this first episode, Don Draper, creative director of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, is trying to find a way to sell a product he knows to be dangerous. But of course he does find a way, because, you see, he is an ad man, and the stereotype tells us that ad men in the post war period were deeply complicit in the enterprise to enlist Americans in a cargo cult of materialism and dumb down American culture.
Matthew Weiner takes aim at many of the horrors of this period, women treated in a manner that was highhanded, diminishing and abusive, anti-Semitism both casual and ubiquitous, gay men obliged to conceal their sexual identities, executives who never escaped the Frat house mentality that shaped them in college.
But he missed one stereotype completely: that ad men prayed upon culture and consumers. Bad luck, old chum, otherwise Man Men is great television.
References
The AMC webpage for Mad Men is here.
For another view of the advertising man in this period, see my own poor effort:
McCracken, Grant. 2007. When Cars Could Fly. Pp. 54-90, In Culture and Consumption II: markets, meanings, and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
post script:
The dialog is pretty wonderful. Don Draper is taking the advice of the agency head of research, a German trained Freudian psychologist who stands in, one guesses, for Hans Dichter. Dr. Gutmann says that no health claims may be made on behalf of a cigarette brand, on pain of government intervention.
She says,
"We must police ourselves."
The art director says,
"There’s your slogan."
Jerry Michalski and Pip Coburn were recently talking about the puzzle of "exhaust data." These are data that pass between friends on Facebook and Twitter…as when someone tells me they’re doing their nails, or I tell them I’m entertaining my cat.
Who on earth cares? What kind of communication is this? Can it be that we are using the internet to issue trivial facts about ourselves? Facts? The "fact" that I am entertaining the cat is so staggeringly unimportant it fails to interest even the cat.
But there is another, anthropological, point of view. Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.
Today, reading Dino’s Chroma blog, I was surprised to see that the phatic idea has already been taken up by our community and even more surprised to see that it is changing shape.
In a lovely post, Ian Curry suggested that Twitter is compelling because it has a phatic function, specifically because it is communication "simply to indicate that communication can occur."
The notion was picked up by Leisa Reichelt who used the idea to develop her influential notion of "ambient intimacy," which she defines as the ability,
to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.
May I weight in? I’m feeding my cat. Sorry, you wanted something more substantial. Fine. I believe that the phatic notion originated with Malinowski, moved to Jakobson and then to Bakhtin. (Now that’s a double-play dream team: Malinowski to Jakobson to Bakhtin.) It comes, that is to say, from some of the great pioneers of anthropology, linguistics and post-structuralism.
Flying without instruments (aka access to my library), I believe that phatic communications sends a series of messages. What follows is not from the double play dream team, it is my fanciful elaboration on their thinking. (It’s not in Malinowski, but it’s not not in Malinowski, if you see what I mean. I do wish I did.)
The phatic messages "stack" nicely, each message presupposing and building on its predecessor. These messages are:
1. I exist.
2. I’m ok.
3. You exist.
4. You’re ok.
5. The channel is open.
6. The network exists.
7. The network is active.
8. The network is flowing.
When I use Twitter or Facebook to say that I am entertaining my cat, no one, I’m pretty, sure gives a good God damn that I am entertaining my cat. But they are reminded that they have someone called Grant McCracken exists in their network.
This is not nothing. Facebook sustains social knowledge and networks that begin in conferences and then fade almost immediately until a couple of months later we have a hard time attaching a face to that business card still banging around in our briefcase. A "newsflash" about my cat helps keep the network node called Grant McCracken from blinking out.
But this is not just news that I am extant, but that I am, as much as this is ever true, emotionally and intellectually active. You don’t just want the datum: "GM exists." You want the film makers call "room tone," some sense of my general emotional well being. (Well, of course, I am just hoping this is of interest, and as a Canadian, I understand and accept that you might not have the slightest interest. And that’s fair. I mean, really. We Canadians struggle to be as interesting as possible under the circumstances.)
I have a friend on Facebook who recently posted in the "Florence is" field: "SUPER, thanks for asking!" Which I liked because it brings the oldest formula to the newest venue and infuses new networks with the peppiest self presentation possible.
Naturally, networks, especially really distributed, anti-hierarchical ones of the kind we like, are profoundly reciprocal enterprises. So it is especially true here that, as George Herbert Mead observed, our knowledge of ourselves depends upon what (and that) others know about us. Or, to put this another way, we we find ourselves when others find us. This is messages 3 and 4, above.
So I’m ok and you’re ok. This means the channel must be ok, and this means that the network must exist, and this means that the network is ok, and this means that the network is active, and this means the network is flowing. There is a "superorganic" concept of the network at work here, according to which every small moment of phatic communications so reverberates that we are briefly and tinyily reminded of our larger network and social connections.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play with my cat.
References
Curry, Ian. 2007. Twitter: the Missing Messenger. Frogblog. February 26, 2007. here.
Demopoulos, Dino. 2007. The Presents of Presence. Chroma. July 18, 2007. here.
Earls, Mark. 2007. Phatic is phat. Herd, the hidden truth of who we are. March 8, 2007. here.
Michalski, Jerry and Pip Corburn. 2007. Exhaust Data. Yi-Tan Weekly Tech Call #143
Monday, July 16, 2007. here.
Reichelt, Leisa. 2007. Ambient Intimacy. Disambiguity. March 1, 2007. here.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Charles Frith for letting me know about Mark Earls’ "phatic/phat" observation.
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, Inc., has been going on line…to tout his own stock…under an assumed name…for 8 years. Naturally, the SEC is investigating and one fears for what is left of Mr. Mackey’s credibility.
It was the "8 years" that brought me up short. This means Mr. Mackey has been conversant with the internet for some time, much longer than most CEOs.
And this means that Mr. Mackey had an extended opportunity to grasp the transparency of the internet…and never did. Most of us get the notion that everything is eventually public online. The digital world gives lots of shapeshifting opportunities (think Second Life, with its fake, borrowed, and stolen identities) but, finally, it’s almost entirely see-through. There is no place to hide. Eventually the truth will out.
The ethics of Mr. Mackey’s digital masquerade are, well, troubling. (Isn’t that we always call ethical issues: "troubling"?) But there is a second ground on which to doubt Mr. Mackey’s "fitness for office." Ethics aside, is this man technically qualified to be a CEO?
Here’s the question I would be asking if I were on Wall Street: if this guy managed to participate on the internet, without ever grasping its fundamentals, what else does he not know about contemporary culture?
It would be one thing if Mr. Mackey’s company made case hardened steel or CD containers. Not grasping contemporary culture would be unsurprising and more or less forgivable. But Mr. Mackey runs a company that runs a tide. His company has come to prominence precisely because contemporary culture changed fundamentally the way it thinks about food, nutrition, cooking, health, wellness, and eating.
This isn’t a single trend. It’s a wave of many waves. If one were a Whole Foods investor (and very modestly, I am) one would like to think that somewhere at headquarters there was a big board in which all of these little waves were being tracked. It would be nice to think that command central had a clue.
Yesterday, Mr. Mackey said he would stop blogging. Great, so when does he start paying attention?
References
Kesmodel, David. 2007. Whole Foods Sets Probe as CEO Apologizes. The Wall Street Journal. July 18, 2007.
McCracken, Grant. 2007. The Artisanal Trend. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. here.
In ten days, on July 27, a dozen 7-Eleven stores will turn into Kwik-E Marts. The remaining 6400 stores will carry Homer dolls, Krustyo’s cereal, Buzz Cola, Squishees, and pink-frosted Sprinklicious donuts. The Simpsons are coming to visit.
For me, the joke stops here. I used a 7-Eleven when living in Boston. It was a shrine to processed food, bad service, aesthetics without mercy, design without shame. The overlit vacancy of the place gave everything a vaguely radioactive quality.
Some "light at night" is wonderful. (Remember how you used to feel about when you were coming home with your parents as lights came on. Safety. Comfort. Joy.) But light at night can also be terrible in its vacuity. Surely, one couldn’t help wondering late at night in Boston, 7-Eleven is the place that souls come to die. (One of the interesting thing about Hopper’s famous painting of an all-night diner [above] is that we can’t tell which light applies.)
7-Eleven was the only game in town, so we put up with it. But it felt like a place that had managed to capture all that was wrong with the American approach to food, brands and retail. And when you think about it, this can’t have been easy. I mean, how do you get something this wrong this often? Somebody had to work at it. Practice the art. Perfect the formula. There, it’s ruined. Hi-5, everyone, hi-5!
Yes, it’s very Homer, when you think about it. Only he could have screwed a corner store up this completely. But what happens when he comes to visit on July 27th?
Maybe Homer will fit right in at 7-Eleven. But if there is a place that can take the joyful stupidity out of Mr. Simpson, it’s this. Because, you see, bone-headed stupidity trumps joyful stupidity every time.
Maybe Marge and the kids and the spirit of The Simpsons will flourish here. But if there’s a place that can puncture irreverence and irony, it’s a 7-Eleven. You see, places that are aggressively irony-free have a way of prevailing over every other form of human wit and creativity.
That’s the 7-Eleven promise to you.
What I mean is this. 7-Eleven is such a disastrous brand and retail proposition that there’s no way it can save itself with a Simpsons endorsement. Now, if meanings are going to move here, they can only go the other way: from 7-Eleven to The Simpsons.
And how sad is that? One of the most effective enemies of numb skull capitalism will have been damaged by one of the great accomplishments of numb skull capitalism. D’oh!
References
Schiller, Gail. 2007. Discrmininating? D’oh! Only 4 ‘Simpsons’ tie-in partners. The Hollywood Reporter East. July 6, 2007, pp. 1-2, p. 2.
I spent the morning removing Ani DiFranco lyrics from my book manuscript. I was obliged to do so because DiFranco had refused me permission to use them, despite two emails to Righteous Babe Records that were thorough, pointed and courtesy.
It’s not as if DiFranco had anything to fear from this anthropologist. My treatment was laudatory. I regard her as a transformational exemplar. Here’s my opening sentence for her from the book.
Ani DiFranco is a phenomenon, largely self taught, almost entirely self invented, the creator of a genre of music, the founder of her own record company, and probably the most gifted feminist performer at work in the U.S. today.
And it’s not like I was asking for the catalogue, probably around 130 words taken from a variety of songs. I think this represents a very nervous eye on the copyright watch.
DiFranco is entitled to control copyright in this way, but it is also worth observing that she has made a career mocking music labels for their narrow, controlling ways. Apparently, it’s ok for her to act this way.
And odd too. This is not the DiFranco you think you see on stage and in the ones and zeros. I guess this tells us that she never was what she contrived to seem, a champion of an open source culture.
DiFranco’s contribution to the open source culture came in the powerful argument that women should decide who they are, not men, and that individual women should decide who they are, not groups of women. Or to use the more particular language of open source, DiFranco seemed to say that every women has the right to do her own coding, to construct herself according to her own objectives out of our her scripts and routines, and that she is free to refuse "sealed code" from higher authorities and the originating software provider.
The second possibility is that DiFranco is aging, changing, narrowing, risking less and controlling more.
I guess the transformational career continues.
An apology: Friday I posted a reaction to a piece in Wall Street Journal called The Rich are Duller. I took aim at the man I took to be the author of this piece Robert H. Frank, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. Thanks to a kind comment by Jim Twitchell (below) I now see the article was written by Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal. My sincere apologies to Mr. Robert Frank and Mr. Robert Frank.
References
Frank, Robert. 2007. The Rich Are Duller: new class of "Yawns" spurns yachts, wears Dockers in bid to be normal. Wall Street Journal. July 13, 2007, pp. W1-W2.
I took this picture last night in Spanish Harlem. Good, eh? Pam and I were on our way to Rao’s for dinner. It’s just around the corner at Pleasant Avenue and 114th street.
Rao’s isn’t taking reservations for 2007. They’re full up. We thought that if we went for a drink, and someone canceled. You know, it could happen.
But of course it didn’t happen. We showed up way too early, around 6:30, and the guys in the kitchen were eating their dinner. The message was clear enough for even an anthropologist to detect: go away. So we did. We went to the upper east side for dinner and then came back for drinks around 9:00.
What a place, I am telling you. Tiny, crowded, noisy, New York and then some. Italian by origin but inclusive now. We fell into conversation with the owner Frank. Well, let’s be honest, we laid siege to Frank. And the guy is such a celebrity that you hold his attention only by rolling out your A material, and hoping for the best.
We were there with Joe and Christine, and that helped. They’ve been officially designated by the United Nations as the most charming couple on earth. Early in the evening, I watched Joe chat with a garage attendant. It took him 20 seconds to establish a rapport that would take me an hour and a half. He’s interested in everything. Christine sees the world unflinchingly over Pocahontas cheek bones, and this gives her the ability, apparently, to penetrate all secrets. She’s surprised by nothing.
The two of them could have handled Frank on their own, but between the four of us, it wasn’t long before he felt himself floating on a veritable Humboldt current of congratulation. You never know, several more occasions like this and we could be booking tables for the same calendar year.
The thing that’s interesting about Rao’s is that it is an experiment that tests the possibility of urban experiments. On any given evening, Frank has got politicians, mob bosses, celebrities, socialites, business types, guys in track suits with Rolex, and schmucks like me. "My job," Frank told us, "is to make all these people feel like they belong here." This means that in this tiny space, Frank makes very different differences go away. And then he plays the power impresario, mediating connections and brokering deals.
It’s fun watching the eyes of other watchers: people who observe for a living and make their living by deciding what it is they just saw. I mean, all the planners and anthropologists do exactly this. So, as I say, it’s fun to look into the eyes of someone who watches every night, in real time, with big consequences. You watch Frank watching and you find yourself thinking, here’s a guy who is interested in everything and surprised by nothing.
Acknowledgments
To Pam, my wife, who did the investigative anthropology.
Kyra Sedgwick has found new fame and fortune as Deputy Police Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson in The Closer. Her TNT series has proved successful beyond all expectation. Viewers are happy, sponsors are happy, and Sedgwick is now paid $250,000 to $300,000 an episode.
This puts Sedgwick in the spotlight. And the results are, well, disappointing. Take for instance her appearance on a recent Rachael Ray show where the object of the exercise seemed to be to make Sedgwick approachable and ordinary. It was a "what, little old me?" television, standard Hollywood issue for day time talk.
The interview for Town and Country was equally frustrating. Sedgwick appears in designer gowns and jewelry, and we are told how much she hates Los Angeles and loves her family. Not so ordinary in this case, but still thoroughly manufactured…as if T&C turned the article over to the PR flacks. Yawn.
I couldn’t help feeling something was missing. Then I saw what it was. The person I was looking for was not Kyra Sedgwick but Brenda Leigh Johnson.
Now here’s a woman to reckon with: southern and CIA, steely and melting, formidable and easily distracted, intellectually smart and emotionally cunning, a student of the human heart, a stranger to her own. This is quite a lot more complexity than TV is prepared to give us. (Cable took the risk. A mainstream audience responded. )
Sedgwick the person might be as interesting as Johnson the character. (And as a descendant of the founder of Groton and a relative of the woman who befriended Andy Warhol, it’s not like she doesn’t have biographic materials to work with.) But to judge from the Ray interview or the Town and Country piece, it doesn’t seem likely. Surely, one feels, Deputy Chief Johnson would be more opinionated, unpredictable, charming, contrary, and downright engaged in these exercises, that she would breath new, more interesting life into these PR procedurals.
Well, poor me. Apparently, I’m surprised to discover the actor is not the character. How desperately naive. Of course, there’s a difference. That’s why they are called actors. They’re pretending. Failing to see this is, well, just a little sad.
But I have a larger argument to propose. I think Kyra Sedgwick might be obeying an old model of celebrity. To make this argument, I bid you consider the case of Johnny Depp.
In the early days, Mr. Depp was a guy laboring in obscurity. He ‘s a high school drop out, a member of a modestly successful band, and eventually a struggling actor. Then he takes a role in 21 Jump Street and becomes a teenage heartthrob. Mr. Depp is now "can’t go anywhere in public" famous.
After this jolting exposure to stardom, Mr. Depp cultivates his distance from Hollywood. He does several pictures with the unrepentant outsider Tim Burton. He befriends and then plays the fiercely nonconforming Hunter S. Thompson. He plays plays clueless outsiders like Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands. He moves to France and says intemperate things about America for German magazines.
After 21 Jump Street, Depp was in a position to begin climbing the conventional ladder to stardom…as Bruce Willis did after Moonlighting and Tom Hanks did after Bosom Buddies. But, no, a loose orbit was close enough, apparently, as close as he wanted to get. And we might argue that it was precisely this distance that helped him make the character (Captain Jack Sparrow) that helped make the movies (Pirates) that helped make Hollywood so much frickin money. (The Pirates trilogy has a shot at $2 billion.) Keeping one’s distance is sometimes a good thing.
Back to my argument (and I do have one.) Depp has been unrepentant. He’s an actor’s actor. He’s his own man. He doesn’t care if we don’t like him. He is not here to be our virtual friend or our celluloid hero. He’s not a role model or an exemplar of any kind. (This would make him the Sir Charles Barkley of acting.) He’s not ingratiating himself. We don’t like that he lives in France? Tant pis.
Unless Depp is an utter anomaly, his approach to stardom sets a precedent. It says stardom doesn’t have to cost what it used to. It says that an actor doesn’t have to drape themselves in the agreeable, that they don’t have glad hand their way into our hearts, that they don’t have to do Sammy Maudlin publicity to have a shot at further and farther stardom.
If Depp does set a precedent, Sedgwick’s present PR strategy is unnecessary and perhaps unwise. After all, she returned to stardom in a character who is uncompromising and unpredictable. If she takes her cue from her character, then "loose orbit," (aka "Sir Charles") stardom is hers for the asking. And it comes to her in a historical moment when America is finally prepared to give this liberty even to its stars.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2006. Johnny Depp and the dead man’s chest called Hollywood. This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics. July 8, 2006. here.
Mithers, Carol. 2007. Kyra Up close: TV’s Hottest Star Shines. Town and Country. July. pp. 102-8.
Sibbald, Vanessa. 2004. Johnny Depp Mulls His Post-‘Pirates’ Fame. Zap2it.com. March 01, 2004. here.