Syd lived in Victoria, a place that didn’t seem to me ever really to suit her.  It’s a place filled with hippies, retirees, and bureaucrats, people  sure to provoke her impatience.

As a wife, mother, and gardener, she had a gentler side, something softer and more spiritual. 

And just when you began to think that this was the real Syd, you’d find a magnet on her fridge that read:

"Jesus Loves You."

Then a picture of the Italianate Christ (the one with the flowing hair, soulful eyes, and pious expression).

And below:

"everyone else thinks you’re an asshole"

What a magnificent sister.  I always felt a bit dozy by comparison, a bit slow on the uptake, a little too credulous.   She was the least little little sister. 

1)  Interesting vs. Interesting

One of the differences between Interesting2008 NYC and Interesting2007 London might have been that the English did a better job of giving presentation the outcome of which was unpredictable.  This really is discourse released from genre, and it was fun to listen to especially because there was a "no looking ahead" rule in place.  The presentation was, in this case, a shaggy dog story.  What the Americans did that the English did not was present from within someone else’s persona.  So we had a great visit from Bud Melman from the Mad Men mailroom.  Azita Houshian appeared as Jane Eyre. 

2) Paranormal romance. 

Someone mentioned this over drinks at Eric Nehrlich’s good-bye party as a new category in fiction.  And this is when you know women are really giving up on men, when they begin recruiting creatures from other worlds.  The new TV show that features vampires would fall into this category.  I am not sure what else is intended.  This is flat out interesting and a thesis waiting to happen for the anthropology student who is up for the challenge.

3) livery in America. 

A livery is a uniform  or other sign worn in a non-military context on a person or object to denote a relationship with a person or corporate body, often by using elements of the heraldry relating to that person or body, or a personal emblem and normally given by them. It derives from the French livrée, meaning delivered. Most often it would indicate that the person was a servant, dependent, follower or friend of the owner of the livery, or, for objects, that the object belonged to them.  (Wikipedia)

Favre’s No. 4 shirt already is the NFL’s all-time best seller and current No. 1, according to NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy. NFLshop.com so far has taken 1,250 orders for the jerseys, which cost $80 each, a one-day sales record. Revenue from licensed merchandise sales is split among the NFL’s 32 teams, with a portion going to the player.  (from the official Favre site)

4) The SDG (self dramatizing gesture)

"Oh my God!"  As uttered by a teenager, this is a little linguistic designed to seize and hold the attention of the group.  Ever so fleeting, it is a way to make the social self more vivid and present. 

This too is a thesis topic waiting to happen.  I wrote about it a bit in Transformations but I don’t think I got to the bottom of it, by any means.

One further thought.  In any hierarchical system, things trickle down from high ranking parties to low ranking ones.  And we could say that the SDG is a way that teens cut themselves in on the celebrity culture.  For that one brief second, they are the star. 

5) Being black in America

The cultural idea of who an African American is has changed with fantastic speed since the 1960s.  Youth cultures assigned African Americans special properties: a particular authenticity, an entitlement, a currency, and in some cases a thugishness.  I am thinking here of a particular kind of hip hop.  White Americans knew who Black Americans were with such certainty that it looked from time to time that racism had not so much disappeared as changed its valence.  People, black and white, were still prepared to insist on defining the African American, and too bad that someone acting in a manner that defied this definition.  For instance,  God help the kid who wanted to be a poet when everyone else thought he should be a thug.  These wobbles in our culture are acutely uncomfortable, but typically they stimulate inventiveness.  As an anthropologist, I am prepared to guess that people have risen to the occasion and cultivated a fantastic versatility, the better to take advantage of all, even the most contradictory, selves they are supposed to inhabit. 

This is the Wordle that Rick Liebling created for the event. 

I am talking about how you, dear reader, have Asperger’s syndrome.  I really feel you should be there. 

It’s only $35, pretty good value for an anthropological consult and diagnosis.  We will repair to the Black Door about 6:00 where self medication will begin immediately. 

For details on time and place, go here.

1. A Reality TV show of your very own

Your own Reality TV show, but you get to keep the humiliation to yourself.   German firm makes it possible for people to submit pictures of themselves, and have others comment.  Thanks to my old friend Alan Middleton for the head’s up. here. 

2. Design and design gods at Yale

Here’s a course taught by Michael Beirut and William Drenttel at Yale.  Not sure when it is taught next.  I would love to sign up.

MGT 833, Designers Designing Design. 2 units. This course offers students the opportunity to be design clients, and to acquire the skills and experience necessary to use design to shape and manage products, programs, initiatives, and campaigns. Two working designers will explore design as a methodology, a way of working in modern organizations — corporations, foundations, magazines, schools, even cities. Beginning with an overview of contemporary “design thinking,” the course will survey far-ranging examples where design has been used as a means of innovation, change, message, and influence. Cases will include corporate, retail and non-profit identity; content-rich media and editorial projects; and social and political initiatives. Weekly assignments will involve writing design briefs for real world projects, considering strategic goals, organizational strengths, and consumer and public need. The course combines hands-on exercises, lectures, readings, and cases. Guest lecturers will include well-known designers, as well as clients involved in live cases.

3. Wendy’s and the "meatatarian" philosophy.

In this ad, a guy and a girl are eating at a restaurant.  The girl offers the guy a bite of her salad, and he says, "no, no, thank you, I’m a meatatarian.  I only eat meat and bacon.  You know, meatatarian.  It’s a personal choice."  This gets a version of "guy humor" that is much practiced but completely unstudied in the social sciences. One of the keys to have it works is the delight guys take in faux sincerity…as a way of mocking people who are earnest where they are, um, jocular.  This is contemporary culture generating itself.  There are vegetarians.  They are much scorned by mainstream males who think them precious and self absorbed.  Along comes a creative team and, hey presto, new term, and a small ripple in our culture.  This term is sure to become a "clam," a fragment from commercial culture that gets pressed into service in daily life. 

See the ad here. 

4. Michelle Obama was perfect last night

I watched the Fox news coverage.  Williams and Barnes thought Obama did a good job.  But Wallace,  Kristol and Rove thought her talk was study in missed opportunities.  I disagree.  Yes, Obama could have offered more issues.  But this was not the moment for issues.

I was reminded of the advice on public speaking that you start a teaching job.  In that first class, your students are not going to hear a word you say for the first 2 or 3 minutes.  That’s because they are "taking a reading" in that odd and interesting way that humans do.  They are sifting through the verbal and nonverbal signs.  They are not listening to content.  They are trying to figure out who you are.   There is a Canadian phrase for this (perhaps it’s American, too):  They are "sussing you out." 

And I think this is what Americans were doing during Obama’s talk last night.  They were "sussing."   Much of what we hear about Barak Obama says that people are unprepared to take him at his word, to accept the appearance for a reality.  He is "other" in several ways, and this means simply that Americans an extra long sussing period before we are prepared to start to absorb content. 

Think of it as a kind of instinctual due diligence.  We just have to log those sussing minutes, perhaps hours, before anything else can happen.  So the beginning of a conference is exactly the time to let the sussing begin, and a talk like Michelle Obama appeared designed for precisely that.  No content, because by and large we weren’t to (or for) content.  But lots of cues and clues, lots of the verbal and nonverbal stuff we need for the "sussing" process.  Rhetorically and strategically, this talk was perfectly on target. 

5.  News of a radical new experiment in anthropology.

This blog is interested in the Human Terrain experiment taking place in Iraq right now.  Anthropologists are famously unhappy about the use of their method for any practical purpose.  As a result of which, the field is now so removed from application it has become something like a museum piece.  But Montgomery McFate, David Kilcullen and the people serving in the Human Terrain program are reinventing the field in difficult circumstances, and we can take for granted that already the field is beginning to change.  There is for instance something interesting about the idea, below, of the "professional counterinsurgent."  The mind bends and then it boggles.  We shall have to wait to see learnings filter back into the field.  In the meantime, here are a couple of words on and from Kilcullen.

David Kilcullen is a former Australian Army officer, now seconded to the United States State Department.  He earned his Ph.D. studying guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia and East Timor. He is the author of Twenty-eight Article, a practice guide for junior officers engaged in counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Kilcullen calls it "conflict ethnography."

The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional
counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and
interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in
which the conflict takes place. Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow
a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close
reading” of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in
no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and
cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a
participant observer. And the key is to see beyond the surface
differences between our societies and these environments (of which
religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and
cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on
their own terms.

References

Anonmymous.  n.d., David Kilcullen.  Encyclopedia Entry in Wikipedia.  here.

Kilcullen, David.  2006.  Twenty-eight articles: fundamental of company-level counterinsurgency.  here.

Kilcullen, David.  2007.  Religion and Insurgency.  Small Wars Journal Blog.  May 12, 2007. here. 

Blue Ocean Strategies ALWAYS ranks in the top 1000 in TitleZ.   (TitleZ shows the relative standing of books sold on Amazon.com.) 

And the kind of stuff I do is usually a 6 digit proposition.  So 5 digits, that’s cause for celebration. 

If you are still wondering whether you should own your own copy of Transformations, let me say this.  This book explores the great new consumer motive at work in the market today.  If you are in the field of marketing, planning, design, the b-school community, you really should own a copy…or two.  Ditto, if you are interested in the dynamics and anthropology of contemporary culture.

You can order your copy of Transformations (and boost my TitleZ number!) here.  It comes with this lovely cover, courtesy of my talented wife.  (Notice clever play on butterfly as Rorschach inkblot.)

It’s about, um, Transformations.  It’s an anthropological account of how we cultivate any self, how we make the transformation from self to self, and how we cultivate several selves at once. 

It has taken about a decade to bring to the light of day.  But, finally, here it is. 

As I say, it won’t be available till the fall, but it can be preordered from Amazon now.  See the link below. 

Whew!

References

McCracken, Grant.  2008.  Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.  Available for preorder at Amazon here. 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Pam, my wife, for designing the cover.  Thanks to Richard Shear and Joe Melchione for producing it.  Good, eh?

Of course, a religious holiday doesn’t mean a mental holiday.  We need a novel that’s soaked through with good choices, from theme to setting to event to dialog to character to drama to every…last…word.  We want a book in which all these choices build orchestrally to an "away" experience so intense that we look up from our novel to discover…we were reading a novel. 

My recommendation is Stalin’s Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith.  It is a catalog of brilliantly successful choices.  It’s thoroughly excursive, if that’s a word.  You travel well and far, well protected from the perils of Christmas, Hanuka (still lingering in its effects), Kwanzaa, and time away from work. 

You can buy Stalin’s Ghost from Amazon.com here. 

One day Mathew’s girl friend came out to watch us play.  After awhile, the dreaded question:

"Can I try?" she asked.

Mathew and I didn’t mind showing off while a woman watched us with rapt admiration.  But having to share the game with someone who probably thought throwing a football badly was somehow "cute," this was annoying.

Gallantly, we obliged her.  After about 12
throws, Julie had mastered throwing a football with her right hand so well that her mechanics were perfect.  And I mean flawless.  She started at zero.  The first throws were abysmally bad.  She was, in the language of the traditional childhood taunt, throwing "like a girl."  By throw "6," her form was dramatically better.  By throw "12," it was, as I say, perfect.  She was now throwing like she had never not thrown a football.

This was a little daunting for Mathew and me.  We had spend our childhoods learning to throw.  And it took months (years, actually) to be good enough to escape the taunt that we threw "like a girl."  Manfully, we played on, but it was now clear we’d be very lucky to throw like this girl.

Well, it got worse.  Julie wondered if she could throw with her left hand, and sure enough, in a dozen throws, she was once more perfect.  By this time, Mathew and I were  bordering on humiliation.  Julie had managed to reproduce the key accomplishment of our childhood in about 15 minutes.

Julie was a student at Massey too.  Occasionally, she would sit down at the College grand piano and favor us with a little well formed Mozart.  This was when she wasn’t taking classes in electrical engineering, I think it was.  Julie was just good at everything.

I wasn’t surprised a few years later that she had been chosen to be part of the Canadian space program.  She flew on Space Shuttle Discovery from May 27 to June 6, 1999 as a crew member of STS-96.  The crew performed the first manual docking of the Shuttle to the International Space Station.

Are Canadians proud of her?  You might say.  Ms. Payette has honorary degrees from Queen’s University (1999); University of Ottawa (1999); Simon Fraser University (2000); Université Laval (2000); University of Regina (2001); Royal Roads University (2001); University of Toronto (2001); University of Victoria (2002); Nipissing University (2002); McGill University (2003); Mount Saint Vincent University (2004); McMaster University (2004); University of Lethbridge (2005); Mount Allison University (2005).

But there’s another side to the story.  There is, who knew, a Canadian government agency dedicated to protecting nation’s self esteem.  It took a long look at Julie and decided that the nation had a choice.  It could suffer the presence of someone who was going to make everyone look bad all the time, or it could get her off planet as soon as possible.  I believe, there was a small minority who felt that Ms. Payette was perhaps not human at all, and the wisest course was to "send her back where she came from."

As it turned out, Ms. Payette was only off planet for 9 days, 19 hours and 13 minutes, but everyone, especially Mathew and me, breathed a sigh of relief.