Monthly Archives: January 2005

Davos and identity politics

Rick Astley was a pop star in the 1980s. At the height of his fame, someone asked Mr. Astley his position on a political question, and he endeared himself by replying:

“What are you asking me for? I’m a singer. What I think about politics doesn’t matter.”

I thought of Mr. Astley today when reading of the appearance of Bono, Sharon Stone, Richard Gere, and Angelina Jolie at the World Economic Forum.

I don’t mean to be exclusionary, but there’s a strong argument against movie and music celebrities giving us political advice.

I do not intend to develop this argument here, but I let me offer ethnographic evidence collected while I was working as a Hollywood chauffeur. We, the “staff,” had been assembled at the home to be occupied Julie Christie and Warren Beatty for the duration of the filming of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

There was, all of a sudden, a terrible explosion of epithets and exclamations. The cook, the butler, and I raced to see what the matter was. We found an executive producer shouting with unhappiness. The occasion of his misery: some of the flowers in the hallway were not quite fresh enough.

“What,” I remember wondering to myself, “must it be like to live in a world where your every wish is anticipated, often invisibly. Really you can’t have any idea what any of the real worlds are like. You might as well be a European monarch from the 17th century. You can’t really have a clue.”

But Bono, Stone, Gere, and Jolie were all at Davos. Not just present, but audible. Not just audible, but influential.

“You see celebrities walking through here, and you see CEO heads spinning like Linda Blair in ‘The Exorcist’” (Sanford Climan, Entertainment Ventures, WSJ, Friedman)

So what’s the problem? If Bono uses a little of his celebrity to shine a light on the poverty or sickness of the third world, what could it hurt? Here’s how it hurts. This is a high altitude piece of identity politics. The publicity is now as much about Bono as the poverty in question. At the moment we have been invited to think about hunger, we are obliged to ‘tithe” to Bono, surrendering admiration for what a big hearted, socially minded, heroic guy he is. I feel pretty much about Bono the way I do about Jesse Jackson working on world peace. Spare us the grandstanding and get out of the way.

These issues will take good minds working in the best American tradition of problem solving: well briefed, unsentimental, utterly pragmatic individuals who would not hestitate to “kill a few baby seals” to get the job done. Because it’s not about them, it’s about the hunger, poverty, illiteracy, disease. With Bono, it’s always about Bono. It may well be that the most intractable aspects of these problems is that they have been taken captive of the liberal agenda. Could we not appoint some real problem solvers to get on with this? A little less beating of the breast and a little more ruthless efficiency. I would take a single Harvard Business School grad for the lot of them.

Mind you, according to Bret Stephens, there are other reasons, besides addled adoration, to wonder if Davos is really up to the challenge it claims for itself.

[W]hen it comes to politics, the Forum reflects a “Davos Consensus”—that is, the clichés, nostrums, banalities, elisions, evasions, upstanding sentiments and lowest common denominators generated when people of differing views are at their most polite. Everyone gets along splendidly at Davos, but platitude is frequently the glue that holds them together.

What do these people think they are doing at Davos? Networking? If there is a trace of sincerity to the Davos’ mission statement, surely participants are obliged to get beyond making “nice” with one another. If Davos means to solve problems, instead of posturing about them, our advice is clear: stow the chumminess, get over yourselves, and get on with it. It’s not about you.

References

Friedman, Alan. 2005. Hollywood Goes to Davos: Celebrities Attend World Economic Forum and, in Some Cases, Steal the Show. Wall Street Journal. January 31, 2005, p. 2.

Stephens, Bret. 2005. A Jolie Good Time at Davos. Wall Street Journal. January 31, 2005, p. A19.

Stray impressions

Spending the week gave me a new view of Toronto. I lived there for most of the 1990’s, and it always stuck me as a particularly unhappy place. Not so much anti-entropic as inanimate.

Toronto is the economic engine of Canada. It is also, vibrantly, home to 8% of the population of Canada. But the city sleeps like a damsel who will never be kissed. Abandoned, ever more unlovely, a candidate possibly for cryogenesis…but, really, why bother?

The city has always had a stubborn, Scottish Presbyterian “everything is what it is and not another thing” literalism. As if creativity, imagination, and any innovation not ferociously practical were properly the reserve of musical headed Frenchmen and other mad cap foreigners. Toronto was a good, gray town because, well, it achieved some of its practicality by forsaking the poetic, dramatic, and evocative. Many Scottish Presbyterians believe this to be an excellent bargain.

So imagine the pleasure of finding, this trip, a city filled with stray impressions. Stray impressions come to us “over the transom.” We don’t ask for them. We don’t know what to do with them. They just drift through our heads like a weather system. Very actual, one second, utterly not, the next.

My favorite stray impression (and I do realize that this is probably a symptom of some kind, so this is just between us) are the ones that “come off” a building or a street scene. We are “just looking round” in that great tradition documented by Jerry Seinfeld, and all of sudden, we can see another time and place. Just for a second, the world looks and especially feels exactly like, say, Berlin in the 1860s.

Something about the light. Something about the architecture. Something about the layout of the street, we can’t really say. But there it is, the city has produced a new version of itself. Never mind that we have never been to Berlin. Never mind that we know next to nothing about the 1860s. We have something as emotionally certain as it is sensorily dubious. We are there. Berlin 1865. Then we’re not. Now it’s gone.

How many cities “entertain” stray impressions? Cambridge, MA, didn’t have them. Cambridge, UK, did. There was so many of them in Montreal you could almost hear the city muttering to itself, tossing and turning in its sleep. New York has them like crazy but this is partly because the city has been niched by several urban and some historical cultures. We need only dial in the local signals. So, unless we are sequestered by a cruise ship, a resort hotel, or deep provincialism, travel is the poor man’s opportunity for the stray impression, supplying a new place and its claimant definitions.

Where do stray impressions come from? Sometimes they are like Polanski’s Los Angeles, so apparently we soak them up from art. Sometimes they are a street corner from childhood, so apparently we collect them as we go. Sometimes, they have no clear provenance, so they are the work of the internal bricoleur.

Stray impressions are not one of the places from which ideas come. But they do have a role to play. They are about the “departure” on which creativity depends. They persuade us that things can be other than they seem. They persuade us that we can occupy these alternatives, because for a second that’s what we’re doing. Stray impressions act like that revolving stage at the MET. They deliver. Now we have proof that the conventional scheme of things is not necessary, inevitable, or lasting.

Stray impressions only flourish in cities that have escaped, or are escaping, the dead hand of competence, the rule of elites, the suffocations of a monolithic culture, the center’s self importance, all the things that Toronto once did so well. Hegemony is pretty much over, and the word is out. Stray impressions are assembling like the ghosts in a Wim Wenders movie. Toronto will greet them as it does all “new Canadians,” with the fervent wish that they leave their “difference” behind. But these citizens are only difference and already they are remaking things.

More on the new mixing

Wharton recently held a conference called “Pioneers in Marketing.” The issue of mixing apparently came up (see Monday’s post “Mixing not matching”).

The definition of luxury lifestyle used to translate to an image of old-money Palm Beach, said George Ayres, vice president of marketing for Jaguar North America. Today, it is much more difficult to conjure up a consistent picture of luxury living. People may live in expensive homes and drive luxury cars, but purchase Evian water by the case at Costco and live with barely any furniture, he said. “They might have two bean bag chairs, but they have the car. That’s how they decided to express themselves. Other people might drive a Honda Excel, but have a plasma TV.”

Status consumption is one of the grammars of the marketplace. The ability for new and larger groups to participate in this grammar is one of the things that helped create a “consumer society.” It’s a little stunning to think that “ordinary consumers” should now be cavalier about something that was once a solemn undertaking, a secret passion, a quilty secret, and the magnetic north of the consumer society.

It is all very well to say, as Silverstein does, that this is strategic behavior, or to say, as the post modernists do, that all signs are drained of meaning and are now devalued and unmoored. There is a good deal more to say here.

For a fuller account of the conference, go here.

A couple of days

A couple of days ago, I was talking to a guy who works for Oracle. He told me Oracle changes fundamentally every 8 months or so. He has survived all of these transformations. And his job has changed each time, sometimes quite dramatically.

I started thinking about how different this is from the world of work as my father understood it. Certainly, my father, a printing executive, watched technology, managerial philosophy, and consumer preference change his industry several times. But between these changes, there were “breathing spaces” sometimes as long as a decade.

I started casting around for a rough and ready typology that would help capture some of the ways the manager’s world has changed. How about these three “stages?”

1. Task completion

2. Problem solving

3. Pattern recognition

In the case of task completion, the manager’s role is clear. Someone had established a “job description.” The tasks are well defined. The manager’s job is to look for efficiencies, to increase productivity, to keep the machine running. In a manner of speaking, this manager is “hardware.” What he or she does for the corporation changes only as and when the corporation installs new “software.” This is someone else’s creation and someone else’s choice.

In the case of problem solving, the manager’s attention shifts from supplying solutions to figuring out what his or her job is. This takes the ability to see what the matter is, and deeper intellectual resources with which to put it right. This regime was defined by the “manage by objectives” revolution in managerial philosophy. Now the corporate was installing the final objectives and saying, in effect, “you figure out what things you need to do to make these happen.”

In this case, the manager will be required to retrofit assumptions as required. The manager is now operating on the world and the manager, and the intelligence of the corporation has devolved a little to the individual. He or she is the locus not just of practice but idea. The manager is now responsible for changing the “operating system” as required.

In the case of pattern recognition, the manager lives in a world streaming with dynamism. There can be no task completion, until problems are solved, and there can be no problem solving, until the manager has grasped what the world is becoming. This demands that assumptions (the software) are being reworked almost continually. We saw this sort of thing in the late 1990s when people in the Silicon Valley spend a lot of time trying to figure out what value was being created and how to monetize it.

Pattern recognition requires that we ask Theodore Leavitt’s famous question, “what business are we in,” not occasionally but continually. And this means it is no longer, as Leavitt made it seem, a moment of Brahmin reflection, performed, once or twice a decade, preferably in the company of an HBS professor. It was now an everyday task, something to be done by an Oracle employee all the time.

Indeed, and this is pattern recognition level 2, the Oracle employee must now must engage in pattern recognition not just to do his job, but to keep his job. He needs to have an inkling what Oracle is going to be the next time around if he wants to keep his job.

I was describing this issue to Wodek Szemberg (TVO and CBC Ideas) and it suddenly seemed to us that this sort of managerial challenge might mandate the Liberal Arts as the best educational preparation for the contemporary manager. Naturally, the Liberal Arts have been hijacked by every kind of lunatic and it is now not always a preparation for clear and creative headedness. But we may find that b-schools and the humanities need to spend more time in one another’s company. Yeah, that’s it. Send Oracle back to the oracle.

References

Leavitt, Theodore, [reference forthcoming]

Acknowledgements

Wodek Szemberg

p.s., today, the lobby of the hotel is jammed with media all waiting for an outcome on the hockey negotiations taking place in the hotel.

Universe of ones?

Yesterday, I discussed a trend: the mixing of style, formality and expense of individual articles of clothing in a single suit of clothing. It’s there in the great codex of contemporary culture: Housewives. It’s there in the upscale bars and restaurants of New York City.

Today, a couple more thoughts on the cultural motives that might drive the trend.

It’s possible that the wearer of mixes the clothing message is saying, or better, implying, or still better, performing:

“Look, I will not have my hand forced by the conventional rules of clothing combination [the “syntagmatic chains of yesterday’s post]. I choose what I am going to wear. I am self invented. I am no drudge of the marketing regime, no dupe of social convention.”

I am of course a little nervous about rushing to conclusions, but that is what blogging, or at least what this blog is for. Could it be that we are, for some consumers, looking at a shift in the locus and the unit of change. An awful lot of cultural innovation in matters of art, clothing, music and design is accomplished by groups. Or by individuals who are soon surrounded by groups. When engaged in dynamic cultural behavior, we like to travel in packs. One individual dressed in leather, mohawk, the safety pins is a nut case. A larger group of people so dressed is a social statement, perhaps a social movement. The locus of change has been the group.

But, to rush now to a conclusion, the “mixed message” in clothing suggests that individuals are now prepared to “go their own way.” They are prepared to innovate on their own and outside a group. Clearly, lots of people will continue to innovate in groups. Just as clearly, the dressing phenomenon that Cheryl Swanson was remarking upon is still governed by some codes even as it departs from others. (We can’t combine any articles in any combinations.)

But I still think it’s possible to suppose that this phenomenon makes the individual more active as an individual and his or her cultural behavior in matters of dress more various and less coded. The expressive universe here is not infinite but it ends up being a lot larger than it used to be.

I published an essay in 1988 in which I argued that expressive clothing behavior is not language-like because when clothing is used in a very innovative way it becomes harder and harder to read. The language code can produce absolutely unique utterances, utterances never heard before. As long as these are well formed, they are intelligible. But when we use the clothing code in this way, we end up baffling more often than we do communicating. At least that was the argument.

But the mixed message outfit gives us an individual engaging in a clothing behavior that becomes more various and less formed by convention and code. I am thinking that we might use Bernstein’s distinction between open and closed codes, and say that clothing is moved from being a closed code to be an open one. But then it is pretty noisy here in the lobby of Sutton Place so any sort of thinking must be treated as badly distracted and highly suspect.

The thing that especially interests though is that we may be observing here the death of the self defining group. The group that defines itself and then in the individual that belongs to it. Perhaps, we are moving in the direction of a “universe of ones.” (As I recall Levi-Strauss has something on this possibility in The Savage Mind.) This universe would mean no more Yuppies, tweeners, punks, or geeks. The cultural categories that now do so much to inform the way individuals construct themselves for public purposes and the way we “read” the world around us, perhaps these are so much “packaging” we will some day do without.

This is, formally, one of the logical conclusions of our individualism. In effect, we have build our individuality out of the prefab materials made available to us by certain conventions and “groupings” in the code. Surely, it was only a matter of time before we moved towards something more disaggregated.

References
[I am on the road and sitting in a hotel lobby. All references are approximate and will be sorted out when I get back to CT.]

Bernstein,

Levi-Strauss. The Savage Mind.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Yesterday’s post on this blog.

McCracken, Grant. 1988. “Clothing as language.”
Culture and Consumption. Indiana University Press.

mixing not matching, a new consumer strategy

The blog sits at is never far from the beating heart of popular culture. Today, we look at costume on the hit television series Housewives.

Cate Adair [costume designer for the show] borrows from both haute couture and thrift shops, mixing and matching high- with low-end, cutting edge with vintage—all with wild abandon.

“I’ll take a fabulous designer skirt and pair it with a pair of pumps I found direct cheap and someone’s grandma’s vintage jewelry,” she says. “I think that’s the way realwomen shop. They’ll splurge on something they really love but also find deals at Target or at the local flea market. That’s how real women express personality in an extraordinary way.”

We know that this is art imitating life. I was sitting in a NYC bar last week and Cheryl Swanson (Toniq) exclaimed that she had been at a NYC dinner party in which everyone was evidencing the high-low strategy in their wardrobe, men and women both.

A new book by Silverstein called Trading Up explains the mixing phenomenon pretty much the way that Adair does. Consumers buy low in order to buy high. That vintage and Target shopping is really about freeing up budget to buy a few things that are extravagance and or indulgence and or status laden.

No doubt, this is part of the story. But it begs a question: why is it suddenly ok to wear things that were purchased on the cheap? (We know some of the factors here: better quality at the low end, and better design as well.)

There may be a deeper motive. I wonder if people are not mixing for cultural reasons as well as economic ones. It’s possible that we are looking at a new strategy of message construction and self presentation.

We know, thanks to Diderot, that there was a Western convention that says that everything in a consumer’s choice set (syntagmatic chain) must come from the same place in the paradigmatic category. Everything, coat, shirt, pants, must be of roughly equal quality, cost, formality and style. You couldn’t mix without looking odd.

But something happened. I think highly redundant cultural creations are not precisely that. When we wear an outfit all from Ralph Lauren, it’s a little like we are telling the same joke over and over again. It’s as if we are repeating ourselves in the most tedious way.

Jonathan Miller has a wonderful little essay in which he talks about the importance of creating characters for the stage that play against type. He says that if you create an “old man” for the stage and you make everything about him, clothing, voice, body posture, read “old,” your character seems almost to vanish from the stage. The secret of successful direction is to add to every character something in their presentation of self that runs against type. This, Miller says, has the effect of a key light (my metaphor, not his). The character now leaps into view.

I wonder if this is not the cultural motive that inspires us to create the mixed message outfit. We are now pretty good readers of the codes of a consumer culture. We don’t need lots of repetition to get it. The use of “genre” to construct looks can let up a little. We have permission to move away from highly redundant codes. But there is another motive. When we mix the message, we become more interesting to look upon. We become more vivid. We become actual. We might even say that this is the sartorial equivalent of the “mash up” that combines two songs, making them both more interesting than either would be alone.

There is lots more to say here. Not least: this is the introduction of post modernism into the life of the consumer. But the lobby of the Sutton Hotel is now deafening. Gotta go!

Reference

I am stuck in a Toronto hotel that has no broad band access except for wireless in the lobby. And it’s really noisy here. (“For the love of God will you please pipe down. Can’t you see that I am trying to blog.”) All references here and above are approximate.

Diderot. Xxxx. Thoughts on a new dressing gown. [will supply reference when I get back to CT end of the week]

Finlay, Liza. 2005. Desperate fashion. Rogers TV Guide. January 22-28, pp. 14-15, p. 15.

Miller, Jonathan. [will supply reference when I get back to CT end of the week}

Silverstein. Trading Up.

Apologies

Had another computer meltdown today. Travelling tomorrow and may or may not be able to post. Sorry.

Food III: refusing to choose

The last couple of days I have been raiding the 10th anniversary issue of Saveur magazine. It introduced me, for instance, to the “eat local” movement.

This is pretty much what it sounds: a movement that encourages consumers to provision their tables from local farms.

There are lots of happy effects: the growth of farmers’ markets, unmediated relationships between producers and consumers, the creation of tiny niches of producer experiment and consumer response, the diminished use of preservatives, and so. But there is something odd about the movement, especially when it veers in the direction of orthodoxy. Some advocates of the Eat Local movement believe you can’t eat oranges unless you live in the Sun Belt.

This put me in mind of the manifesto penned by von Trier under the title Dogma 95. Von Trier and pals decided that the only thing that would save film making was a strict set of rules, rules they aptly call the “vow of chastity.” Among them: no additional lighting, no sounds not native to the scene being shot, all films to take place in the here and now, and my personal favorite, rule no. 6: “The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)”

Von Trier is a right wanker, this much is well known. (If you don’t believe me, treat yourself to his recent film Dogville.) But it is still hard to credit how utterly and astonishingly cowardly is the vow of chastity. It’s as if von Trier and company feel obliged to hew to orthodoxy because anything else puts them on a slippery slope. Without the uncompromising direction and discipline of the vow, von Trier could not trust himself to make a good film. (Allow a little added sound, and, before you know it, you’re making the Sound of Music.)

I’m all for people making better films but something in me wants to say, “well, you know, if you are saying you can only make good films when you surrender the creative options the art form makes available to you, I have to wonder whether you are not declaring your incompetence as an artist. If you have to give up your ability to make choices, you shouldn’t be making choices in the first place. Choices are what we pay you for, both in salary and reverence.”

The Eat Local movement as this same quality. It is a self imposed limitation. Not doubt this springs from good motives and a certain seriousness of intent, but really, when you decide to give away what a culture of plenitude and transformation makes available to you, are you not declaring yourself unworthy of this culture?

We see this from time to time, a certain panic in the face of our thoroughgoing dynamism and multiplicity. This was funny when the Fluxus art movement said, what would happen to my art if I imposed this tiny, nuttily arbitrary little constraint upon myself? But when it is practiced in this wholesale manner, to foreswear all the technological advances of film making, or the distribution system that puts Brazilian food in my back yard, one feels obliged to shake one’s head. Isn’t there a Greek myth, or is it a Grimm’s fairy tale, about a man who is given everything and then decides he doesn’t want it? Can the economic actor really be this perverse?

The economics and anthropology enterprise, the one that wonders at the emergent properties of markets and cultures, depends on the supposition that actors will make choices. Without these choices, experiments do not happen. The invisible hand falls still. Nothing “emerges.”

What’s really scary about this “choice against choice” inclination is that it dresses itself up in indignation. It becomes the way sophisticated people show their discernment in matters of food and film, and their disdain for the mainstream. Is this what the avant-garde has come to? It is no longer an experimentation in the very new, an exploration of the far edge of possibility, but a refusal of the full range of choice. Could this be a fit of pique practiced by the Left in protest against the fact that markets did what markets were supposed to stand against: the creation of more and more options and the effortless incorporation of the new. Can we say at least that the most important locus of creativity and innovation has moved away from the artist into the very thing the artist stood against: the marketplace?

Na. Couldn’t be.

References

Andrews, Colman. 2004. Ten Years of Cooking and Eating in America, 1994-2004. Saveur Magazine, 10th Anniversary Special. October 2004, pp. 87, 94.

For more on the creative powers of the marketplace: Tyler Cowen in print: Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Consumer Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. and on line.

More on the “eat local” movement here.

More on “Dogma 95” and the vow of chastity here.

Food II: bad food

Yesterday, I offered data from Saveur Magazine to suggest our knowledge and practice of food is becoming more sophisticated (Food I). In the words of Kalins:

…there’s an awareness of food and a love of food and an array of choices that we’ve never had before. You go down an aisle in the supermarket and you find things you never even knew how to pronounce ten years ago.

But there is also plenty of evidence that we are, in the words of Eric Schlosser, a “fast food nation.” Americans are eating more junk food. They are also eating more prepared food. Salt, sugar, fat proportions are all up. The obesity figures have risen apace.

A paradox then: Americans are eating better. Americans are eating worse.

One way to make this paradox go away is to segment the world into two groups: a small group of Americans that is ever more sophisticated in its eating habits and a much larger group eating more and more badly.

This confirms to the “plenitude” view of the world, the one that says contemporary culture no longer has a directionality. It is not headed in any direction, good eating or bad. We are a culture dedicating to mapping all the possibilities. What can be, will be. Yes to good food. Yes to bad food.

But there is another, more interesting, possibility: that good food and bad food are happening to the same people. In this view, Americans are growing more sophisticated in their knowledge of food. They are stocking better kitchens with better food. But by and large, they are eating prepared food.

There was a time when we would have hunted out the “cognitive dissonance” this sort of thing causes. But not anymore. I think we may be looking at a “virtual consumption” as a result of which people “consume” the knowledge and image of good food…and the stuff and substance of bad food. They eat what they eat: food that is prepared out of the house, often by fast food suppliers. But they consume what they read in magazines and cook books and watch on TV.

This approach would help explain how it is people can spend so much on kitchens, cook books, and cooking shows and so little time on cooking itself. This is what is going on in the Martha Stewart phenomenon, when people watch the show with pleasure without ever making or thinking to make that dining room center piece. In a sense, Martha’s making it for us. Martha’s making it so we don’t have to. Martha’s making it because, let’s be honest, we don’t have the time.

The good food/bad food paradox might work like this. The TV chefs, the magazines, and an occasional “slow food” meal at home, these are the virtual diet. This diet is modest in taste and substance, but it is, just as clearly, rich in cultural and identity meanings. The rest of the time, with bad or ordinary food, we are “feeding the machine.”

This is not a variation on the old practice called “potatoes and point” in which people during the potato famine would spear yet another piece of potato and point it the last remaining piece of Cod in the house, so to imagine the potato was Cod. We do not overlay the virtual consumption overtop actual consumption. Nor is it compensatory in the Veblenian or any other sense of the term.

No, this is a weird “division of labor” thing, where we are prepared to farm out some of our experience to other agents, that they might do the consuming (and preparing) for us. Consumption has always been a fount of cultural and personal meanings. But classifically we have demanded that we may only claim these meanings when we do the consuming. Now, it appears we are prepared to appoint virtual consumers (and preparers) who do the meaning creation and harvest for us.

We need a new model of the consumer, and a new model of the “economic man” to understand this. Trying to think it makes your head hurt, doesn’t it, and surely that’s a good sign.

References

Dorothy Kahlins quote is from Saveur Magazine, October 2004, p. 98.

McCracken, Grant. 2005/6. Plenitude. Forthcoming: Indiana University Press.

Schlosser, Eric. 2002. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Perennial.

Food I: good food

Everything that matters in our culture must eventually manifest itself at table.
Here are some of things that have been happening in the period 1994-2004.

Farmers’ markets: from 1,755 to 3,137
Organic farms: from 4,050 to 11,998
Cooking schools: from 338 to 930
Wine imported: from $1.0b to $3.2b
Dry pasta: from $1.66b to $1.98
Olive oil (tons): from 115,000 to 190,000
Viewers Food Netwk: from 7 m. to 79 m.

In the words of Darrell Corti:

Ten years ago, to eat sushi you had to go to specialized restaurants and even in big cities you’d find only a few. Today sushi is an industrial commodity. (87)

We have also seen the emergence of the celebrity chef with a mainstream profile.

More tomorrow on the cultural significance of this change.

References

Andrews, Colman. 2004. Ten Years of Cooking and Eating in America, 1994-2004. Saveur Magazine, 10th Anniversary Special. October 2004, pp. 87, 94.

Best performance at an award ceremony

Someday there will be an award for the best acceptance speech. Until that time, it’s up to us.

Last night, the Golden Globes produced three candidates:

Jamie Foxx, for self possession and almost loosing it while remembering his grand mother.

Glenn Close, for vivacity and a coded (but conciliatory) message to her daughter.

Terry Hatcher, for astonishing candor (“I was such a has-been”) and a display of good humor not much diminished by the fact that, as Pam noted, she appeared incapable of registering emotion above the bridge of her nose.

For God’s sake, help me

I signed up at HSX about 6 years ago. They “gave” me $2,000,000 with which to buy “shares” in celebrities and movies. Sometime, around Jan. 1, 2005, my portfolio fell below the $2,000,000 mark. I was now worth less than they gave me. Today, I am worth $1,991,459.08. Ok, I’m in freefall.

My portfolio:

I’ve made money on Adam Sandler (ASAND), Bill Murray (BMURR), Clive Owen (CLOWE), Holly Hunter (HHNTR), Johnny Depp (JDEPP), Jennifer Jason Leigh (JJLEI), John Cusak (JOHNC), Patricia Clarkson (PPERA), Piper Perabo (PPERA), Philip Seymour Hoffman (PSHOF) and Ridley Scott (RSCOT).

You would expect these stocks to do well. Adam Sandler is the People’s Choice. Bill Murray the unlikely Gielgud of our time. Holly Hunter is so talented she stole Timecode with 5 minutes of screen time (and one quarter of the screen).

But look where I did badly. Don Cheadle? We will forgive him Oceans 11 and 12 and the cockney accent. But this guy is talent with a capital T. Ok, Jennifer Lopez was a bone headed move, but I bought her before the fall. Kevin Spacey. This is talent with two Ts. Sam Rock? Ditto. Tony Shaloub is headed for the big time as is Ving Rhames now that they have USA Network series.

My sign-on name “essex.” (An Elizabethan association suggested by hsx?) And here is my password: 2622. Feel free to sign on. You are welcome to buy and sel as you pleasel.

My strategy is to create a decision market within a decision market. Besides, the blogging idea is the decision market idea: we are smarter as a group than we are as individuals. So let’s all sign on and make me some money!

References

The HSX website is here

Surowiecki, James. 2004. Decisions, Decisions. [on “decision markets.”] The New Yorker. Available on line here.

HSX as defined by HSX:

At HSX.com, visitors buy and sell virtual shares of celebrities, movies and music with a currency called the Hollywood Dollar®.The Company’s Virtual SpecialistTM technology allows an unlimited number of consumers to trade thousands of virtual entertainment securities in a fair and orderly, supply-and-demand-based market.

post script

Since I posted this entry, there has been quite a lot of activity on my account on HSX.com. Someone decided to short Adam Sandler, for instance. It would be great if our phantom investors would leave us a comment, explaining why they did what they did. This would be at least as interesting as the investment activity, and a chance to hear comments on contemporary culture.

where do new ideas come from

I’ve noticed something about life in Connecticut. Things don’t break down here. Everything is in tiptop condition. Every so often you will see a house that looks uncared for, or a garden shed that’s leaning perilously. But usually everything is tickety boo. (That’s how we talk in Connecticut.)

In Connecticut, entropy isn’t allowed. The forces of disorder and randomness must apply to city hall for a permit before entering the state, and they must keep this permit in plain view AT ALL TIMES. Deterioration, when this does occur, is put right, immediately.

There are two kinds of vehicles: the BMWs and Mercedes of the people who live here and the panel trucks and pickups of those who work here. The expensive cars are always perfect. No chipped paint, no cracked wind shields, no dragging bumpers. The trucks, on the other hand, are often pretty badly beaten up.

This is ironic because these trucks carry the anti-entropy shock troops. These are the guys, mostly, who put things right. These vans, these are the vessels that bear anti-entropy into the state every morning and install it somewhere, on a house or in a shed, say, that the state may revel in yet another day of well fired, well sealed, well enameled perfection. As night draws near, these trucks withdraw noisily from the state in a gesture of by-law enforced deference. No, we don’t know where they go. Really, it’s just important that they leave. (New Jersey, could it be?)

Now, I’m a libertarian and this means that I may not write a blistering attack on the tedium of life in the suburbs. And in point of fact, I think this favorite pastime of the intellectuals is a waste of time. Everyone is entitled to live as they want, assuming that they do not infringe on the rights of others in the process. If they want to live with Martha Stewart rectitude, banging! Someone’s got to keep the faith.

But this doesn’t mean that certain ways of living don’t have costs, and my sermon today, brothers and sisters of the congregation, treats the costs of being anti-entropic. There is, I think, something very, very, very wrong with not letting things break down. This is not an aesthetic matter, though there is often something beautiful about decay. It’s not a moral matter, thought there is something especially interesting about societies that use (and sometimes find themselves suspended between) more than one moral compass.

No, this is a matter of creativity. And here’s my theory. I believe that when houses, cars, clothing and gardens break down, something cultural happens. The fine fissures on the object let meaning leak out. No need to call the Nuclear Commission. There is no danger here. The only effect of meanings leakage is that the object in question gives up a little of its cultural definition. And when this happens it consents to our imaginative manipulation in ways it will not do when brand spanking new.

When things break down, cultural codes give up. Cultural ‘types” lose their power over ‘tokens.” And a certain, crazy cultural reengineering becomes possible. We can now work from the diminished token up to types not anticipated by or specified in the cultural code. In short, convention loses a little of its power over the world and we are free to change this world, or at least the specs from which it comes.

I don’t go so far as the “critical” social scientists or the Po Mo camp. I don’t believe these movements of entropy actually allow for the remaking of the world as a world. But I do think that little departures and diminishments allow for the remaking of the world as an idea. (Nothing happens till we pay the costs of introduction and give the world a chance to vote. This is the problem with, the tragic condition of, “critical” social scientists. They forget or refuse the voting part. Revolutions are supposed to carry themselves by the unaided momentum of ineluctable argument.)

Sorry, yes, I was talking about Connecticut. It’s perfect, or close to it. And this makes it a “no fly” zone for new ideas. They come down Long Island sound, these ideas do, headed for the irresistible bouleversement of New York City. They can see my little town, and fatigued from trans-atlantic travel, they might be persuaded to stop here. But no. There is nothing for them to perch upon. Everything is what it is and not another thing. There are no imperfections that would give a new idea purchase, even briefly, on our shore.

I am sure I’ll be fine, but if you don’t hear from me for awhile, it’ll be because I stowed away on one of those panel trucks. Next blogcast, New Jersey!

Food as the new tobacco

Do you think that when Phillip Morris bought Kraft in 1988, they had any idea it would come to this?

In some circles, it was assumed Philip Morris bought Kraft as a chance to associate itself with something more wholesome, more family oriented, more life giving than tobacco.

So what happens? Food becomes the tobacco of the 21st century.

According to a recent report, the increasing number of overweight and obese Canadians poses a threat to public health.

“The prevalence of this serious health risk is almost exactly what we faced with tobacco use 30 years ago – when half of Canadians smoked,” says Dr. Anthony Graham. Since that time, smoking rates have dropped by half – but during those same three decades, we’ve been losing ground in the area of overweight and obesity.

Rates among Canadian adults: Early 1970s 2000/01 % Change
Smoking (Aged 15+) 47% 22% 53% decrease
Overweight (BMI > 25; Aged 20-64) 40% 47% 18% increase
Obese (BMI > 30; Aged 20-64) 10% 15% 50% increase

“We continue to face the impact that tobacco use has on our society,” says Dr. Graham. “At the same time, we are confronted by the reality that almost half (47%) of Canadians are overweight or obese.”

Geez. Poor Philip Morris. Out of the frying pan into the fire. No, wait…

References

Burros, Marian. 2005. U.S. Diet Guide Puts Emphasis on Weight Loss. New York Times, January 13, 2005.

Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation report here

Devolution: one man’s sacrifice

Here are the results of my Face Analyzer results. I couldn’t be more proud.

My usual photo:

The “50% chimp” treatment from yesterday:

Notice that my “planet of the apes” transformation drops my ratings for intelligence, risk, ambition, the “gay factor,” and income, and an increase in honor, politeness, socialibility, promiscuity. So much for devolution. This really just turns the clock back to the 17th and 18th century, does it not?

I know that some day science will thank me.