Yearly Archives: 2002

Hunting the cool hunt

Historically, the relationship between mainstream and non-mainstream music has been love-hate. Pop stars love the welter of ideas in the underground and the indie world hates them precisely for their avarice. Whether it’s the newfangled French disco influence on the last Madonna record or the electronic strains on Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, when mainstream musicians seek inspiration, they inevitably look underground. (from Mayer, Andre. 2002. Listen: Snap, Crackle…Pop? Shift Magazine. 10/3 September, 63-64, p. 63.)

This is the received assumption: the mainstream takes, the non-mainstream gives, that the mainstream exploits and the margin is exploited, that capitalism feeds on the innovations of the groups it excludes and despises.

But it is, anthropologically and economically, only one way of looking at things.

MSP (mainstream parties) are speaking to their publics, only thus do they sustain themselves. They know their audiences are interested in the “new”. They know that their audiences can “hear” innovations in, say, French disco, if only distantly, and that they have perked up their ears. French disco is a little strange but not unattractive. This means three things: 1) that the MSP must incorporate the “new” into what they take to market, 2) that if they don’t do it, someone else will, 3) they must chose their moment exquisitely: too early and the audience recoils, too late and they sneer. Accessing the “new” in this way is part of their contract with their audience. It is, to use the language of the Harvard Business School, the way they create value for the consumer.

By this rendering, it’s not clear that the MSP are “raiding” cool, as Thomas Frank and now Naomi Klein would say (and as Mayer implies, though his argument is more subtle). They are acting on behalf of their audience…both when “sourcing” the “new” for them, and when “stepping it down” so that it thrills but does not frighten.

Well, the interlocutor might say, but this merely pushes the Frankian accusation down the path to the ultimate beneficiary of the raid. Whoever benefits, marketer or consumer, the charge of cool hunting still stands.

But does it? The ultimate recipient, the consumer, does not “profit” from the receipt of the cool in any obvious way, certainly not in the ways that a studio or magazine does. The “new” works for them as a kind of “cultural capital” but what they do with this capital and why they care about it, these questions demand ethnographically nuanced answers that the “raiding” metaphor cannot deliver (and actually serves to obviate). (One such question: “what does the main stream use the “new” for? How and why does it use it to construct self and world?”)

A post Frankian model has several advantages. One of them is that it helps to explain the likes of Moby. We might say that when Moby made his music available to clothing stores as the sound track of commerce, he was merely cutting out the middle man. He was delivering cool “direct,” so to “disintermediate” the studios and magazines. Clearly, it would be wrong to ignore two external conditions that made this possible: first, that the music in question wasn’t as difficult as avant-garde artifacts sometimes are, and, second, that the mainstream has moved away from the banalities that were once its stock in trade. Moby may or may not be a fair test.

Naturally, the margin (M) disdains the whole affair. That someone should steal their innovations, that they should then water them down, that they should be driven by commercial motives and not artistic ones…all of this is galling. But it is still not clear that M is an injured party. It would have moved on to new innovations in any case and that it is not, therefore, being driven by market predations. Second, this system actually sees to the distribution of music without the M having to step it down. (There are some in the M camp who argue that they don’t want anyone else to have access to their music…and some who say that those who want it should only be allowed to have the “raw” original form. We can agree, I think, this is anti-democratic in the first case and elitist in the second. Parties in the M camp are entitled to these arguments, but they can hardly use them as the cri de coeur of an injured party or as the foundation of their “j’accuse” attack on the mainstream.)

We could push this notion a step further, which I do now mostly for the sake of argument. We could say that M is rather well provided for. Its structural position is inevitable. It can invent without regard for popular taste. It can speak to very small audiences and even merely to itself. In an egoistic, individualistic society, many people want this liberty, only M gets to have it. Indeed, it looks as if M are the classic beneficiaries of an avant-garde model. The deal here has always been poverty (or at least an insufficiency of goods) in exchange for freedom and a superfluidity of currency. Even when an avant-garde artist is not very good or productive, s/he has a robust cultural capital and the right to sneer. In the history of the West, fierce contests have been fought over the right to sneer, the right to claim status. To think that, in our moment, it comes merely from a subfluidity of goods is…well, perhaps not such a bad deal, after all.

Let us push the argument one more step. We could say that when the MSP and the M interact as they do, they create a division of cultural labor. The M creates cultural innovation, the “new,” for the mainstream. (It is another and relatively unexplored question why the mainstream should be so dependent on the “new,” but it is.) The MSP act as conduits here, capturing the “new” and, with appropriate and progressive modification, passing it along to the mainstream. Like any trans-shipper, they chip off some of the value they are helping to distribute. This division of labor pays out in two quite different ways. The M is paid for their trouble in “currency,” the MSP is paid for their trouble in value that is more tangible but not obviously more valuable. This is one of the ways cultural capital and economic capital meet and doe-see-doe in the economies of a capitalist society.

Let us push the argument one last step. There is perhaps a division of symbolic labor at work as well. The MSP need the M to create the “new,” to render the currency with which the economy, desire and especially the modernist and postmodernist self perpetuate themselves. And the M need the MSP and the mainstream in order to create an anti-new, a terra cognito, a center which in its turn creates an edge, a verge, a new. In this division of labor, the antagonists are mutually defining and the complaint in Frank and Mayer is not actually a complaint. It is an exercise in the process by which a modern and post modern cultures construct themselves out of the interaction, the contest, of disparate groups and conflicting projects.

See also:

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. In Other Words: Essays toward a reflexive sociology. Oxford: Polity.

Brooks, David. 2000. Bobos in paradise: The new upper class and how they got there. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Gladwell, Malcolm. 1997. The Coolhunt. The New Yorker. March 17, 1997: 78-88.

Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Klein, Naomi. 2000. No logo: taking aim at the brand bullies. Toronto: A.A. Knopf .

Thorton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, media and subcultural capital. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press.

the Drew Bledsoe paradox

The Drew Bledsoe paradox: the mysterious home economics of homo economicus

When Drew Bledsoe (then the quarterback of the New England Patriots) decided to build a home for himself, his economic advisors had to explain to him that the millions he was about to spend would never come back to him. This is because the people who bought his house would be buying it for the land alone. They would knock Drew’s palace down, and build anew. Everyone who owns this property, in fact, knocks down and starts fresh. None of them recapture the millions they spend on their homes.

Drew was apparently puzzled. So should we all be. Homo economicus, economic man, is not supposed to act like this. To “invest” millions of dollars in a “property,” and then have to walk away from it…this is not the rational thing to do. (It is especially not rational when you are an NFL quarterback who may discover on any given Sunday that the caprice of an owner or a coach obliges him to pick up and pursue his career on the other side of the country. But never mind, almost everyone who spends this kind of money on a house lives a fluid life that can demand sudden relocation…and this cataclysmic loss.)

The Bledsoe paradox does not hold only for the very wealthy. It is a truism of home renovation that the renovator will not recapture all (in some cases, any) of the value of the money they spend on their renovations. They might think about a new kitchen and deck as an improvement that must increase the value of this property. But they’re wrong. They are about to sacrifice hard-won savings to the Bledsoe paradox.

How should we think about this? We might say, “well, no, the money people put into their homes or their renovations is not meant as an investment.” People spend this money to make themselves comfortable. They are spending for the moment, not the long term. It is an investment in happiness, not the real estate market.

Let’s run the numbers, shall we? Let’s say that Bledsoe spend 3 years in his house before moving to Buffalo and that he spend $2 million on house construction. The happiness fee here was around $650,000. That’s $220,000 a year, around $20,000 a month. What about the more usual home owner? Let’s say the average renovation is $100,000 and that people spend an average of 3.5 years on their homes. Here the happiness fee is roughly $3000 a month or a hundred dollars a day. (An anthropologist with a calculator is a dangerous thing; better check these numbers.)

The opportunity cost is itself quite high. If the renovators had invested the $100,000 intelligently in the stock market of the middle 1990s, they could have retired by decade’s end. The inconvenience cost is high too. Ask any homemaker what it’s like to put up with commotion, dirt, and a missing kitchen for 4 months, and s/he almost always says, “we will never do it again.” That there is an inconvenience cost should make us suspicious of the happiness argument. If happiness were truly the objective, this family could treat themselves to lavish hotel life every weekend and still put money in their pockets.

The socio biologists will no doubt say that we rebuild or renovate to claim the property. The notion here, to put it somewhat crudely, is that this investment is our species way of peeing in the corners. As usual, this argument is a blunt instrument which fails to explain most of the data at hand. Are we to understand that the construction of a vast faux Tudor and a monument to modernism have exactly the same motive? Are we to understand that the hundreds of little decisions that people agonize over when building or renovating are really just a false consciousness. French drapes, glazed windows, open skylights, it’s all really just pee. But there is a simpler question, one that sociobiology cannot reckon with: why don’t we just actually pee in the corners?

Let’s imagine we have done our anthropological homework. We have interviewed Mrs. Maison about the new renovation she and her husband just completed on their three year old home. They tore off the back of the house and replaced it mostly with glass. Light now pours in. When we ask Mrs. X why she went to such great expense and inconvenience, she says,

“Well, you see, my husband just loves the light in the morning. Me, I would sleep until noon, if you let me, but Frank’s a morning person and he loves to get up and pad around in the first light of the day. It’s his quiet time. It’s his thinking time.”

This is a charming statement of wifely solicitude but it’s also wrong. When we talk to Mr. Maison, he doesn’t talk at all about morning light. He talks about space and openness and being able to see the garden. When we gently prompt him about mornings, he says, “Oh, that. Yeah, I know. My wife keeps saying that to everybody, and it’s partly true. I mean I am a morning person, and the house is way nicer in the morning. But I liked it before. I mean in the winter months, there really isn’t any light.”

Homo economicus meet homo faber (man the maker). The reason Mr. and Mrs. Maison spent $180,000 on this renovation was to capture an idea Mrs. Maison has of her husband, and, more important, to create the idea she has of her husband. He works too hard, she thinks. He has so many demands made of him. If only he had a little more time to himself. If only he could be bathed in the light of the morning, maybe… This is a more complicated species of wifely solicitude. It is Mrs. Maison crafting the home to craft her husband.

The Bledsoe paradox proves not to be a paradox at all. We invest in our homes (when we have the good fortune to have homes and money enough to remake them) because they are transformational opportunities. We make them to make ourselves. This is money well spent…when it works. It’s badly spent when the idea we are trying to invent for and of ourselves is implausible or otherwise uninhabitable. It does not fit very well with our notions of economic man, of ourselves as rational creatures who invest for future profit. But that’s only because homo economicus is defined too narrowly. It would help a little if we would see that some economic activities are also cultural ones (the reverse is also true), that we undertake these activities especially when we want to cast our ideas out into the world in the hopes that they will “discover” us there and take up residence.

In a sense, the paradox comes from a paradigm. Economic man is a robust part of who we are, but only a small part of who we are. When we case this idea out into the world, we are sometimes puzzled by the creature who turns up at our door.

CBS and gender separatism

In King of Queens, "Doug"” is true to the new form.  He’’s a big lug.  He fails to wrap his wife’’s present and ends up hiding it behind the Christmas tree.  He compares coitus to hitting a baseball and later in the episode refers to his sperm as "bullets."”  He is, in short, a dolt.   

But there was a second theme I didn’’t anticipate: Dougie the shlemiel.  Doug is hectored by his wife and belittled by his parents.  Overwhelmed by performance anxiety, he is reduced to shouting at his penis, "come on, damn you, come on.”" 

In Still Standing, "Bill"” is incorrigible.  When he and his friend drop their pizza on the floor they try to give it away to visitors.  When his wife tries to convene a meeting of her book club in the living room, Bill mocks the idea, his wife, and the participants.  His wife has specific instructions for him, "why don’’t you and your friend watch the game, scratch yourself, and burp upstairs?"

Instead, Bill demonstrates a surprisingly astute grasp of the book in question.  Lest this take him too far off form, he explains the book by comparing it to the movie Commando, revealing that he read it while sitting on the toilet, and eventually we discover that part of his participation in the book club was scripted for him by his son.  Bill’’s a dolt, too. 

This is the new male, "man as Labrador":” happy, dim, appetitive, predictable, shameless until corrected (whereupon he becomes "aw shucks, you caught me"” bashful) and incorrigible until corrected (whereupon he starts shouting at his penis). Really, I feel like Godfrey Cambridge, who, when asked what he thought about Jimmy J.J. Walker, the TV star who entered every room shouting, "Dy-no-mite,” said, quietly, "That doesn’’t happen at my house.” 

This version of maleness has many roots and many authors.  But some of it comes from the 1980s and that extraordinary moment when feminism seemed very close to accomplishing a revolutionary shift of gender principles.  Somehow a symbolic deal was fashioned.  Some men and some women struck a deal. 

Men could then say, "We’’ll pretend you are too complicated to understand, that the subtleties of the feminist era are beyond us, And you may suppose that we are too simple to understand, really just big happy Labradors."”  This is the new gender separatism and the stuff of the situation comedy on Monday night.  It’s no longer Lucy who’s got some splaining to do. 

Must see TV: CBS meets CxC

Please could I ask the readers of this journal to do something for science and watch CBS this monday night (December 23rd) from 8:00 to 10:00.

This means you’ll be watching The King of Queens, Yes, Dear, Everyone Loves Raymond, and Still Standing. Hey, it’s for science.

I believe these four programs are helping to change the way we think about guyness. The gender duet continues. Feminism, in some forms, may be moribund. But it has set in train a male reaction that continues and intensifies.

Your assignment: observe what notion of maleness you see played out on Monday night. My comments, and, I hope, yours, Tuesday.

CxC: Watch this space

Spent last night working with Leora Kornfeld and Lars Meyer on a redesign of the CxC website.

Actually, I spent last night listening to Leora and Lars roll out a new design. My contributions: “wow,” “Yeah, that’s really good,” “no, I mean it, that’s really good.”

And it is. The chief change, I think, (really, you should ask Leora and Lars), is that the website will be less book-centric and more organization-centric. Instead of being about the three books in the Culture by Commotion triology, it will present a statement of Culture by Commotion, the enterprise, the journal, the projects…and then the books. Better.

The thing about your own website is you think you it’s familiar because it’s good, but in fact it works the other way around. It’s good because it familiar. So, actually, the first thinking Leora and Lars did was gently shake me out of my sense of complacency.

There is supposed to be a quid pro quo here. I am helping them with a business plan. So far this is not a balanced exchange.

Other developments: 1) the sophie project statement is now up, 2) I hope to have the Pepys project statement up today, 3) the Pudgie statuette is taking shape somewhere in the desert outside Santa Fe, 4) the board is growing with invitations out to three new members.

The Pudgie, controversy already!

There have been a couple of complaints from board members about the name Pudgie. Offensive to overweight people, said one. Too common, said the other.

I like Pudgie because the goddess of creativity is always voluptuous with possibility. “Pudgie” captures this idea of generosity without taking itself too seriously. I would love to have a Pudgie sitting on the edge of my desk, strangely beautiful by form, familiar by name.

Dinner with Guy and Simona tonight turned to alternatives. One group centered around creative women: Isadora Duncan, George Sand, Virginia Woolf. One group centered on classical sources: Venus, Cythera, even caryatid. I still like the idea of naming the award after one of the founders of the study of contemporary culture: Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman or Lloyd Warner. But no one, and I mean no one, likes this idea.

Ben Affleck, pop culture quiz

Adam Sternbergh asks the right question. Why is Ben Affleck such a big star? His career has not been distinguished by great films, or even by very popular ones. Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford, his predecessors in the parthenon, had big hits and several of them. Ben’s stardom is much bigger than his middling career seems to warrant.

But Sternbergh boots the answer! What is missing here is Oscar night 1998. This was the year when Ben and Matt won for Good Will Hunting. But what was more telling than the award was that they showed up to receive it.

It was left to Joan Rivers to sum up the obvious. “You are the only guys here your age! We’re glad you’re here!” And indeed Ben and Matt where the only ones under the age of 35 in attendance. They had come from an award but, as Joan pointed out, really, they were the prize.

It felt as if something generational was happening. Ben and Matt had agreed to show up and Hollywood, always sensitive to demographic realities, was eager to give them an Oscar for their trouble (and, oh yeah, that film, whatever). It was no cynical payoff. Ben and Matt were genuinely pleased to be there but it was like a visit from royalty. They were making a gesture, generously, happily, but it was a gesture nevertheless.

The reason Ben and Matt were such a hit, the reason they got Oscars for showing up, is the story of the 1990s. This began with the demographic exclusion that took place in the very late 80s, it matured into the great Seattle refusal of the opening years of the decade and it became by mid decade the great indie alternative in film–a development so robust it could make Steve Buscemi a household name without any studio work and see to the rehabilitation of the career of Harvey Keitel–an event most thought impossible. The 1990s may have started with the wrenching discovery that Generation X was not wanted on the voyage and by mid 90s it turned out that it was Hollywood that had missed the boat.

People under 35 weren’t at the Oscars because they had been refused in the first case, refused to come in the second, and were just much too busy to make it in the last.

Everything that Sternbergh says is no doubt true but this, I think, is the real reason Affleck is such a big star in spite of his not so stellar record. He didn’t exist, so Hollywood had to invent him.

[for the Sternbergh article in question, go here]

serial ownership

Roy Hoffman has a good essay today in the NYT called My Private New York City.

He describes his visit to the Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this way.

Among them [the paintings], I also have the chance to become a thief. When the guard steps to an adjacent room, and other museumgoers drift out before a new batch wander in, I steal a heightened moment. Of the billions of people on the planet, I, alone, commune here.

The portraits are all mine.

This is serial ownership. Every Met visitor owns a Rembrandt in their turn. It’s a charming idea, a deeply proprietary feeling for things we do not own…or a feeling of ownership that lasts a moment and leaves no mark. Cats, I believe, think of the world as a matter of serial ownership. This is why they jump up on counters when you’ve told them not to. If you’re not using it, the feline argument goes, then for the moment it’s mine.

Skeptics will say that serial ownership is an illusion that serves the idea of property and its institution of theft. Romantics will say it’s a way of stealing things back.

But what’s called for is a more careful inventory and analysis of the possibilities. What, precisely, are the connections, satisfactions, meanings, definitions and functions of the things we own? How many of them can be true of the things we don’t? What satisfactions, etc, are unique to the things we own serially? (It should count for something that we can have daily access to the wonders of Rembrandt, without have to spend a penny in upkeep, conservation, insurance, security…and not a “penny” in insecurity of ownership.)

I don’t think anyone has broken this down. You would think, of course, that museums and other institutions would take an interest here. Pragmatically, it supplies the logic with which they could persuade an art collector to put their collection into the public domain. It is also the logic of museum support at the membership and the philanthropy level.

Some of the web is a commons. We own it serially. Some of the culture it cares about is a commons, too. You would think someone in this community would have “run the numbers” on this argument.

Most of the city is owned serially…even as it is owned by other parties and interests. If there is something to the Putnam’s Bowling Alone argument (Putnam, Robert 2000. Bowling Alone: The collaspe and revival of American community, Simon and Schuster), it comes from this proprietary feeling that we cultivate for things we own in this temporary way, in Hoffman’s. Putnam’s argument says that it is when this temporary sense of ownership is abandoned that cities begin to decay in earnest.

There are some really difficult ideas swirling around here. What if claims (to identity or ownership, say) no longer need to endure to hold. We could dismiss this vista as nonsense…a refusal of the felicitous conditions that have always held and must always hold. But then we now see lots of claims to identities being made on a temporary basis that once required full time committment.

In a postmodern culture, we can say at least that the ideas of ownership are being tested. In the case of the Rembrandt’s, it belongs to the philanthropist, the museum, the curator, and to Hoffman. Oh, no, he just left. Now it belongs to a rather attractive women in a rich red coat.

go here for the original essay

the pudgie process, statuette, step 2

This is the second entry on the Pudgie process. For a description of the Pudgie award, go here.

So I talked to Lisa Werenko tonight. What should the Pudgie statuette look like? Lisa is a sculptor, among other things. (One of the things she isn’t, is a creature of the web. Links, I hope, someday to come.)

She had been to the Modigliani show in Rochester and got to thinking about his caryatids as a model for what Pudgie could look like. Here’s the URL for the show: Modigliani

We talked about what an statuette needs to look like to look like an award, size, shape, materials and so on. More to come.

the pudgie process, step 1

Here is the first entry on pudgies, ported over from my LiveJournal (Dec. 5, 2002)

I’m a step closer to the pudgies idea. This is a CxC (Culture by commotion) award for producers and critics of popular culture…on the assumption that there are awards for many things, but rarely this. (For more, click here)

You have to have a statuette and I phoned Lisa in Santa Fe, the only sculptor I know. Then you have to have cash prizes. I phoned Lisa again, but she said I would have to sort this one out for myself. You have to have winners and we already have 5. See link above.

Prizes are meant to exercise a small gravitational effect…in this case, to encourage people to engage in a thoughtful, sometimes anthropological, reflection on what is happening in contemporary culture. There is a lot of cant on the web. But if the internet is to be any good at all, one of the things it has to be better at is thinking about itself…and right now there is a dearth of meta-web work.

Why pudgie? I was in LA, sitting in my hotel room. (I try to leave the hotel as little as possible…it’s an anthropological thing.) And there in LA Magazine was a story about the founders of the surfing and body culture of the beach scene after WWII. And there was a picture of Pudgie McCabe bursting with good humor and no hint that she was anything but totally unconflicted about weighlifting and surfing. All goddesses of creativity are ample as a fertility doll. Pudgie was, well, pudgie with promise of new and interesting ideas. That’s why.

For those of you who did not go to the Pudgie account:

Pudgies are awards. They will be given to producers and critics of contemporary culture. They will be given by CxC (Culture by commotion). They will take the form of a small statuette (in the well established tradition thereof) suitable for putting on one’s desk as a provocation of admiration from one’s friend and envy from one’s enemies. There will also be a cash award.

Question one: why bother? There are too many awards in the world. Film makers, advertisers, magazines and newspapers get together each year in a riot of self congratulation and hand them out by the handful.

In certain sectors, however, there are precious few awards. This is especially true in the area of contemporary culture production and criticism. There are many, millions, of players and almost no awards. That’s why bother.

Question two: who do you think you are? Contemporary culture is egalitarian and jealous of those of those who exercise power. Almost no one has the authority to hand out awards. And this means anybody can. So CxC is going to. That’s who we think we are.

Pudgies will go to journalists and academics who create work that is peculiarly illuminating. The judging is not systematic. The contest, like life, is not fair.

post card from mexico II

This photo is not composited. It was taken from a speeding taxi. No, I don’t know what the upper half is. Looks like betting numbers or something.

Decentralization & anthro

I was just reading Scott Rosenberg’s account of the SuperNova conference in Palo Alto (at http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2002/12/13/supernova).

The Decentralization conference was designed to ask Howard Rheingold’s question in Smart Mobs. What happens when you get lots of people with wireless devices and constant access to their own and one another’s blogs?

There is an anthropological answer: new and extraordinary opportunities for social and cultural observation, thousands of people doing the anthropology of contemporary culture on line in real time.

To observe the world is to change it. Who is going to wear that new Gap scarf a second time? Not when it is spotted in every Starbucks in the North America, the day it hits the market.

The chatter will be interesting:

“So who else is seeing that scarf with multi colored blocks about 3 inches wide that run down a scarf that’s about 6 feet long.”

“One just walked in here.”

“Shit, there’s another.”

Scarves will go from novelty to cliche in a day.

Hollywood warms to Transformation

Steven Spielberg and DiCaprio are about to release a film called Catch Me If You Can, a treatment of a con man who works his con by transforming himself into a succession of characters.

Transformation (the book on this site) argues that Hollywood shows more and more interest in transformational themes, especially when it takes the form of a character who plays many characters.

I use these films as my cases in point: Sliding Doors (1998, Peter Howitt), Multiplicity (1996, Harold Ramis), Fight Club (1999, David Fincher), eXistenZ, (1999, David Cronenberg), Passion of the Mind (2000, Alain Berliner), The Family Man (2000, Brett Ratner), Me Myself I (1999, Pip Karmel), Down to Earth (2001, Chris and Paul Weitz), Possible Worlds (2000, Robert Lepage), The One (2001, James Wong), The Bourne Identity (2002, Doug Liman), Catch Me If You Can (2002, Steven Spielberg)

The thing about Hollywood and a lot of popular culture is that, because it is governed by the market place, it represents more than an act of imagination. Any given film is a bet. When the bet is wrong, studios lose money, stars lose some of their brilliance and directors, some of them, never work again.

So far transformation has been a risky bet. Many of the films on my list have failed or “underperformed.”

But Hollywood continues to make the bet. If you add up all the budgets for these films, the bet now comes out to $447 million.

We can also say that the following actors have bet a chunk of their careers: Gwyneth Paltrow, Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Demi Moore, Nicolas Cage, Rachel Griffiths, Chris Rock, Tom McCamus, Jet Li, Matt Damon, and Leo DiCaprio.

The way to think about it anthropologically, I think, is to say that Hollywood can hear transformation has a new imperative in popular culture, but, like the rest of us, it is having a hard time figuring out how to treat the theme.

a conversation with Maria on what makes a good blog

a discussion about what makes a good blog

that turns on the idea that good blogs might come from a single, consistent persona on the part of the blogger OR from the multiplicity of the blogger, OR possibly from both.

Thanks to Maria for giving me permission to quote her.

Continue reading →

Cameron Crowe

Cameron Crowe is a convention is some ways, a puzzle in others.

He is one of the journalists, now directors, who is particularly good at treating contemporary culture both as observer and participant.

He’s a puzzle because he seems to have an invisble centre of gravity. How for instance did he managed to cover the counter culture of the 60s without tipping into it. How did he, at 15 no less, manage to keep the company of rock stars on the road without beginning to see his profession and his paper (Rolling Stone) as the corruptions the age now scorned.

He did the same same thing with the movie Say Anything (1989). Here he was reporting Seattle culture (before it was official). This too was a counter culture that treated Hollywood as a corruption, the very thing alternative values were designed to encourage us to repudiate.

So the mystery is this: how did he get close enough to capture without getting close enough to repudiate the media (rock journalism and hollywood movies) he was capturing with.

Is it something to do with being a Californian…so persuaded that popular culture is it that you persevere with it even in the face of values that reject it?