Yearly Archives: 2011

What happened to confidence? Reading the fourth of July

I just stumbled on a talk given by Wallace Stegner in 1980.  It proved pretty good reading for this 4th of July. 

Stegner opens by observing how Thoreau gave voice to “America’s stoutest self-confidence and most optimist expectations.”

He then reflects on more recent books like Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and the Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism, remarking on their pessimism.  

Stegner’s question: How did we get from Thoreau to Lasch?

Assuming that Thoreau spoke for his time, as he surely did, and that Christopher Lasch speaks for at least elements and aspects of his, how did we get from there to here in little more than a century? Have the sturdiness of the American character and the faith in America’s destiny that Thoreau took for granted been eroded entirely away? What happened to confidence, what happened to initiative and strenuousness and sobriety and responsibility, what happened to high purpose, what happened to hope?

Stegner scrutinizing the historical run-up to the American present.  And there are some wonderful moments in this speech.

Because Europe has always dreamed westward, America, once realized, touches men’s minds like fulfilled prophecy. It has lain out there in the gray wastes of the Atlantic, not only a continent waiting to be discovery but a fable waiting to be agreed upon.  

Stegner gets to one of the strengths and weaknesses of the experiment. 

Admittedly there were all kinds of people in early America, as there are all kinds in our time – saints and criminals, dreamers  and drudges, pushers and con men. But the new world did something similar to all of them. Of the most energetic ones it made ground-floor capitalists; out of nearly everyone it leached the last traces of servility. Cut off from control, ungoverned and virtually untaxed, people learned to resent the imposition of authority, even that which they had created for themselves. Dependent on their own strength and ingenuity in a strange land, they learned to dismiss tradition and old habit, or rather, simply forgot them.

Things end badly.  Eventually Stegner embraces Lasch’s dystopic view, and the lecture descends into scolding contemporary culture as a place where “celebrity obscures distinction.”  

Intellectuals often end up here.  They believe that selfishness and greed rule the day.  And this causes them to believe that the American experiment is corrupted and that confidence must be forsaken.  

At its worst, this is a self indulgence from someone blessed with privilege (and, usually, tenure) and so protected from the hurly burly of the world. Well, worse still, it’s an act of vanity that says in effect “oh, why can’t the world be more like me?”  By which the intellectual usually means, thoughtful, deep feeling, (and thoroughly protected from the hurly burly of the world). (Ironically, the Walking essay by Thoreau from which Stegner draws is shot through with this disdain for people who can not rise to the author’s fineness of thought and feeling.)

But at its best, the intellectual is declaring what all of us hope for: that we should hold ourselves accountable to something larger than ourselves, that we should make sacrifices for a larger good.  

But there is a problem with allowing this thought to pitch us out of American confidence into the dystopic nonsense Lasch inflicted upon us. The fact of the matter is clear: America is a roaring experiment driven sometimes by self sacrifice (and God bless those who make this sacrifice) and the rest of the time by self interest.  (The fable would never be agreed upon.  It was to filled with people wishing variously, exerting themselves in all directions.) 

This scares the pants off an intellectual. This America is so very messy, unthoughtful, and unformed by ideas.  So coarse.  So reckless.  So unpredictable.

Precisely.  If we are going to come to terms with America, we have to come to terms with this.  With “messy,” “coarse,” and “unformed,” not as failings but as virtues.  Indeed, I wonder if we shouldn’t treat these adjectives as our higher calling.  

And the sacrifice asked of the intellectual?  Hold your nose.  The American experiment is not going to be pretty.  It’s not going to be elegant. You don’t have to like it.  But you are unwise to mistake it.  Because without grappling with this truth, your confidence abandons you. And when your confidence goes, you write intemperate books like the Culture of Narcissism and encourage a moral panic that affects the rest of us.  

And that’s when the republic is really in peril.  When the people appointed to think for us cease thinking for themselves…and lose their nerve.  

Reference

Stegner, Wallace. 1980. “The Twilight of Self-Reliance: Frontier Values and Contemporary America.”

Making the cut

Raymond Kurzweil is famous for declaring that he wants to stay alive long enough to be a beneficiary of what he calls The Singularity.  If he can just hang on until the great synthesis of humans and machines, he can live forever.  He will have made the cut.

But there is another cut.  I thought about the other day when someone told me I should read Leslie Fiedler.  (Forgive me I can’t remember who.  I am still using organic memory and frankly it’s crap.  At least mine is.)

Fiedler was an American academic who dared take popular culture seriously when this was a great violation of intellectual orthodoxy.  There is lots to like about Fiedler’s work (one of his essays is called “Fiedler on the roof”) and I am astonished (and, yes, ashamed) that I am only now hearing about him.  

I went to Amazon to buy one of his several books and only one been digitized.  Fiedler didn’t make the cut.  It’s not an irreparable difficulty.  One of these days we will have everything online.  (Of course we do now, but Google Books is only showing snippets and previews.) But Fiedler is plenty obscure as it is.  Not being available in digital format is a problem. 

This may some day be an important categorical distinction: those who didn’t make the digital cut or the singularity one, those who made the first but not the second, and those who made both.  

a breathless arrival

I was congratulating myself on completing the manuscript when there was a great clutter at the end of the platform.  A late arrival!  Forsaking her accustomed grace, in a small state of panic, and this close to tears, she made her wishes known.  

“Stop this train.  I want to get on. I have to get on.”

No trainman is also a gentleman refuses a belle in distress and the belle is now on board, ribbons stowed, heart beat slowing, perfume pooling (where once it trailed), dignity on the mend.  

I have around a week to make her really comfortable, but she is most welcome because now we have a better last chapter and Culturematic will be, er, “heavier” by 10,000 words.   Anyhow, this means I will be AWOL another week.  Sorry.

In the meantime, this is a nice little test.  Law and Order is auditioning 5 guys as replacements for Chris Meloni.   

The dark horse favorite, IMHO, is Michael Raymond-James (Terriers), the most effortlessly gifted actor I have seen in a long time.  This role may be too small for him but they would be mad not to take him if he’s willing.  On another note, this array of talent tells us how “deep is the bench” for American TV, a cultural undertaking that used to be hard pressed to find a single one of these guys.  

Your thoughts, please.  

Working the high mountain air in Banff, Alberta

Apologies for having been away. I was laboring to finish the manuscript for Culturematic.  And it’s done! God, Tim Sullivan, and the Harvard Business Review Press willing, it will be published March of next year.  Thank you to blog readers for their encourage and comments.

I am in Banff at the moment, at the Banff World Media Festival.  I present in a couple of hours.  Will be talking about how to use the Kauffman continuum to make great popular culture. I dreamed it up for the Rio Content conference in Brazil last year and it played quite well.  

Last night I got back to the hotel around 9, still lots of light in the sky this far north.  I walked out on to the grand patio at the back of the Banff Springs hotel.  There was an older couple already there.  Together, we stared at the sheer glory of the mountains, the water, the forests.  It really is astounding.  

And then we realized we were not alone.  The air was filled with swallows fetching their evening meals.  They were doing that fly-boy thing, whistling at top speed, changing direction in the blink of an eye, flying apparently in all directions at once. 

The three now stood watching the sheer art and athleticism of this performance, when we were buzzed by a swallow who traveling at 100 miles an hour managed to come within 18 inches of our heads.  We grinned with alarm at one another with that look that claimed to say, “that was close!” but really said, “I’m not afraid.”

A voice in the back of my head, “is it safe out here?  I mean, what if one of these guys runs into us.”  And then I thought again.  A swallow has as much trouble avoiding a human on a patio as I do avoiding a winged back chair in the lobby.  A tiny course correction.  Collision avoided.  Ain’t nothing to it.  

Of course the comparison is preposterous. Compared to these feathered fly boys I am quite a lot like a wing back chair in the lobby. Utterly immobile, virtually insensate, and incapable of dynamism of any kind.  And that is the point of these proceedings.  How to be more like swallows and less like winged back chairs.  How to produce culture that is responsive to the new speed and diversity of contemporary culture. How to course-correct in real time and the blink of an eye.  Most of all, I guess, it’s how to find the joy in the proceedings and forgo the self congratulatory stolidity of a winged back chair.

I’ve met some wonderfully agile people over drinks, including a rollicking conversation about popular culture with Mickey Rogers and Ty Funk yesterday and Judy Gladstone and Philip Alberstat last night.  Canadians have a genius for working the interface between culture and commerce.  Of course, I say that without knowing whether the audience is going to like my presentation this morning.  And if they don’t like it, well, the nation totally has a problem with the culture and commerce thing!  (I can do winged back, I really can.)

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Robert Montgomery and Achilles Media for including me in this event.  

Paws up, little monsters

Please come have a look at my post today at the Harvard Business Review on Lady Gaga.  It’s a reflection of liberty, culture, and America’s dour mood.

Thanks to Debbie Millman for giving me a quick course on Lady Gaga.  And to Ben Malbon, Google Lab, and BBH New York for the Chrome ad in question.

Donald Trump and the fame economy

Please come have a look at my new post at the Harvard Business Review.

I ask whether Donald Trump might now be rethinking his presidential bid and whether indeed the celebrity culture may decide to rethink fame.

And please leave comments there…or here…you decide.  

Douglas Adams on generational rhythms in the adoption of tech

Douglas Adams was the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  We have just passed the 10th anniversary of his death. 

In 1999, when the internet was still being greeted with some suspicion in some quarters. (Hey, just a couple of years ago, a group of planners at a big agency were prepared to tell me that social media was just a passing fancy.)  Adams wrote an essay that includes this wonderful passage that segments technology adopters by age:

Then there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists … pronounce internet addresses. It goes ‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH… today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there will probably know what it means.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

It would certainly explain those planners.

Thanks for Steve Crandall for telling me about this essay.  
 

Reading Chuck Norris

Yesterday, in our discussion, Chuck Norris surfaced a couple of times. 

Specifically, the question was, “did everyone see the irony intended in the Old Spice ad.”  Or was this, for some people, a return to the old stereotypes of masculinity?

There are 4 possibilities here (see the chart below).

  • The first, far left, is the fan who sees no irony in Chuck Norris. Norris is masterful, heroic and exemplary.  
  • The last, far right, is the fan who is hip to the joke.  He/she scorns Norris, and loves these ads because they scorn Norris too.
  • In between are people who are more or less admiring of Norris but who are also more or less hip to the joke.

It’s astounding that these ads should have this kind of range. It’s as if our culture accumulates meanings and does not shed them.  So irony comes in but admiration remains available.  

Still more remarkably, people in the middle categories are holding opposing ideas at the same time.  (Very Roger Martin.)  And that is never supposed to happen in popular culture.  

the most interesting men in the world

He wouldn’t be afraid to show his feminine side, if he had one.

His mother has a tattoo that reads “son”

At museums, he’s allowed to touch the art

He is the most interesting man in the world!

We have 3 campaigns that feature a certain kind of man.  I refer to the most interesting man in the world.  Sorry, I mean of course, the most interesting man in the world!

This Dos Equis ad.  

The Old Spice ad featuring Bruce Campbell.  

The more recent Old Spice ad.  

And most recently, the DQ ad in which a guy says “I’m not just playing a guitar, I’m playing a guitar that sounds like dolphins.”  

The men in these ads appear to have somethings in common.  They suffer from overweening self regard and total self possession.  These are the people for whom the term “supercilious” was invented.

We have noticed hyperbolic males here before.  Charlie and Barnie, characters in Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother, respectively, as played by Charlie Sheen and Neil Patrick Harris, respectively, are self-regarding males.  But what marks them as males is not just the fact that they are self self aggrandizing, but a still deeper cynicism.  

The DosEquis,OldSpice,DQ man is much too vain to entertain cynicism. Cynicism requires a knowledge of the world outside yourself.  DEOSDQ man does not know about the world outside himself.  

So where is this guy from, why are we using him, and why is he, in the Old Spice case, so spectacularly successful as a cultural artifact?

The good news is that our culture used to produce these males, on screen and in the world, without a hint of ridicule.  James Bond and other spies were all about “touching the art,” that is to say, claiming special privileges that came to them because of their special status. (License to kill!)  

And this is what make these guys funny.  We are not laughing with them, we are laughing at them.  But there are lots of ridiculous artifacts that can be retrieved from the backwash of our culture.  

Why this guy now?

Naomi Uman, time traveler

If ever I update my book Transformations, I may well open with the story of Naomi Uman.

Uman is an American artist. In her first career she worked as a private chef for Gloria Vanderbilt, Malcolm Forbes, and Calvin Klein. She then turned to filmmaking and her work’s been screened at The Guggenheim, The Whitney, and the Museo de Art Moderno in Mexico City.

Uman’s great-grandparents emigrated from the Ukraine in 1906 and a century later she returned there, settling for four years in a remote village called Legedzine.

Out of this experience came Ukrainian Time Machine, a cycle of 16mm films that give us everyday activities, a local wedding, a small brick factory and glimpses of the world that her ancestors occupied long ago.

The Nazis inflicted a murderous devastation on the Jewish community of the Ukraine and there are some places Uman’s time machine can never take us. But parts of the Ukraine are relatively untouched by urbanization and industrialization, and here and there she finds traces of the 19th century and the world we have lost.

Uman “re-entry” was not easy. Virtually everything that defined her made her unwelcome. She was an unattached, Jewish, woman with a full body tattoo who at first didn’t speak Ukrainian, and who made art for a living.  In some quarters, only her dog (pictured) broke the ice.

Uman stuck it out for 4 years. (She may still live there. I found the record unclear.)  We sometimes talk about the “old country.”  We are eager to catch a glimpse of the Europe, Asia, Africa from which we come.  We might dedicate an vacation to a search for “ancestral origins” in, say, the highlands of Scotland or the basin of the Amazon.  But, really, who goes back?  Who learns the language?  Who bears witness to horror? Who inflicts on themselves the discomforts and alienations of being an outsider? Who gives up home?

Really, as a transformational exercise, this is heroic and pretty close to unprecedented.  

References

anonymous. n.d. Festival PdV 26-02-2011 Coloquio Naomi Uman “Ukranian time machine.”
 

I gotta hit ya (the coming revolution in retail)

Please come have a look at my post today on the Harvard Business Review blog.  

It’s about how we interact with people at point of sale.

(And I tell the story of a recent trip to Whole Foods.)

Click here.  

What is capitalism? Don’t ask the poets

Poetry is one of my favorite magazines and not just because it gives me the opportunity to demonstrate how very sensitive, cosmopolitan and fascinating I am.

The March issue reveals why the publication exists in its present form. It turns out that the Poetry Foundation was generously funded by Ruth Lilly.

Recently, to my surprise, Christian Wiman, Poetry’s editor turned on Ms. Lilly and her gift. He says,

I felt shocked and thankful that, because of the will of one woman, the great roaring engine of American capitalism had been made to serve the interests of learning, healing and art.

Oh, brother. The artist insists on making a dichotomy where in fact there is a lot of continuity. In this long-standing cultural construction, culture and commerce are made mutually exclusive categories, one ranked high, the other put low.

Between them goes a death valley, through which only the most intrepid undergraduate is prepared to pass. In our culture, thanks to the tyranny of this idea, the undergraduate is obliged to choose: lofty or vulgar, true to our best aspirations, or false and falsifying.

In fact, capitalism is a learning exercise. And I don’t just mean a brute experiment, Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.”  Capitalism creates rich, various and changeable problem set in which nothing is ever still. Learning here takes an order of intelligence and accomplishment that would humble the most gifted poet.

Capitalism is a healing system. Religion, folklore, politics, and even art has made themselves faithful students of orthodoxy, failed imagination, emotional and existential stasis.  Capitalism does doesn’t do orthodoxy.  Not for long anyhow.  It is constantly searching, in Levi-Strauss’ language, “for that other message” and it is prepared to reform thought entirely to get at the code from which the message springs. (That learning thing again.)

Capitalism does healing in another way.  Now to evoke Fernand Braudel, surely it can’t have been merely by coincidence that the societies that let people out of the captivities created by geography, race, age, ethnicity, outlook, religion, subculture and lifestyle are also vibrant marketplaces. 

Finally, capitalism is art, a transformational exercise that turns meaning into value and value back into meaning. Ovid would have been impressed. So were the Elizabethans who read him so avidly.

Take the case of John Wheeler, the author of A Treatise of Commerce published in 1601. In the opening pages, Wheeler observes how much of his world is now part of the marketplace.

For there is nothing in the world so ordinary and natural unto men, as to contract, truck, merchandise, and traffic one with another, so that it is almost unpossible for three persons to converse together two hours, but they will fall into talk of one bargain or another, chopping [i.e., bartering], changing [i.e., exchanging], or some other kind of contract.

Wheeler concludes with an Ovidian observation, “all things,” he says, “come into commerce and pass into traffic.”  Consider the number of conversions a bolt of cloth must undergo to pass into traffic, take on significance (fustian!), find a seller, find a buyer, adorn the wearer, define a household, fashion a self, appoint a community, with the value so created winging its way back into “some other kind of contract.”  I dare say no contemporary poet has tried.  

The thing I like about poets is how sighted they are, seeing things invisible to the rest of us. And I like how nimble they are, running the riggings of our culture pretty much at will. Except here. Where Wheeler sees things changing shape, Wiman is “shocked,” “thankful,” and the captive of orthodoxy.

References

Braudel, Fernand. 1973. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800. New York: Harper and Row, pp. 235-236.

Carey, John. 2002. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939. Academy Chicago Publishers.

Wheeler, John. 2004 (1601). A Treatise of Commerce. Clark, New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

Anthropologist as talking head

Yesterday I did an interview with USAToday on the t-shirts, coffee mugs and other memorabilia that greeted the death of Osama bin Laden.  And seconds ago I did an interview with the BBC. 

The USAToday approach was “what are we to make of these crazy t-shirts, the ones that read things like “Obama got Osama. You’re an anthropologist, you figure it out!”

I welcomed the challenge and fell to thinking how useful t-shirts are as a kind of bulletin board.  They are cheap, cheerful, and almost instantaneously available.  

I figured you could say at a minimum that t-shirts have three functions from an expressive point of view, that allow us to share in the event, in this particular case, they give the wearer an opportunity to diminish Osama culturally, and finally, to reuse the words quoted in the USA Today article, people wear these things “to inflict a final indignity on bin Laden.”  Functions 2 and 3 are a little close, I agree.  I would nudge them apart by suggesting that function 2 says, in effect, “you are now a t-shirt,” and function 3 says, “you are now a punch line.”  

The BBC phoned to ask for an interview.  As a child raised at the knee of the CBC, I was happy to oblige.  But I must say I drew breath when the interviewer said his Skype handle was “opsbush.”  Was this to be an interview or an ambush?

It turned out to be an interview.  And I am sorry to say that I rambled in answer to several questions.  Worse than that I stumbled once or twice.  It was one thing to be bad television, and I believe my Oprah appearance demonstrates that I can be very bad TV indeed.  But to be bad radio.  Really, what excuse can you possibly have?

I opened by saying that most Americans were feeling conflicted, that most people felt the occasion called more for solemnity than joy.  But this was not the point of the interview.

Acting as if I had not just said that Americans were feeling conflicted, the interviewer pressed on to ask whether these t-shirts were not perhaps “a little sick.” To which I replied something like “Americans had suffered cruelly as a result of Osama.  Perhaps it was not be surprising that they should feel relief and even joy at his death.”  

There was one of these long silences that only the English do with real gusto.  (We Americans say nothing comes of nothing, speak again.)  I had delivered exactly the answer hoped for in these circumstances.  I had confirmed the English suspicion of our barbarity.  

To which I say, again anthropologically, that one of the differences between the US and the UK is precisely on this side of the ocean we own our emotions, even the ones of which we are not especially proud.  

wars of a different kind

Someone called Veronica commented on the HBS Blog post “The War for the Soul of Advertising.”  She suggested that my interpretation of the ads in question is sexist.  (I don’t think I have the right to reproduce Veronica’s comment here.  I will have to ask you to go here to see it.  

My first reply, written last night around 11:00, was a little intemperate.

Veronica, I can’t help feeling this is a drive-by accusation. The use of this language judged by context and not by the instincts of an inquisitor is appropriate. I don’t object to showing someone as a “competent leader of outdoor expedition” but I wouldn’t have thought it wouldn’t take much interpretive skill to see that the ad in question makes the character in question look like a complete and utter idiot. (I mean, really, is the guy behind her actually made more secure by “watch your step.”) As to your difficulty figuring out “exactly” what my argument is, I would suggest reading it again. Thanks, Grant

My second reply, written this morning, was still more intemperate.  So much for the clear light of day.

Veronica, I wanted to follow up on my original reply, my last night in haste about 11:00. As it turns out I am a fourth-generation feminist. My great-grandmother saw to that. I point this out not to argue that I am incapable of sexism. This is so deeply embedded in our culture and in our upbringings that I wouldn’t dare make this claim. I point it out to argue how seriously I take your accusation.

So let me give you a more detailed reply than the one I gave you last night. First, “brittle and shrill” is my reading of _a woman in an ad_. I am not imputing this to a real person! Second, it is the guy _in the ad_ who is “suffering” a call from his wife. Go back to the ad and you will see that _it is the ad_ that makes this guy nonchalant. And now to defend the creatives at BBDO. I believe they have made him so in order to set up the embarrassment that is to follow. I am not imputing his indifference, the ad is. And the ad is not doing it out of sexism, it is setting up the story to follow.

Having accused me of sexism, you carry on to diminish the men in the ads…as middle school boys and people with the memory of a goldfish. This is so shockingly hypocritical as to test belief. You can’t accuse me of sexism and then engage in it.

Then to leap to the conclusion that I “don’t relate to ads with strong women in them” This is, well, a leap, isn’t it? Pray have a look at my blog, specifically a post called Lighting It Up at the Coca-Cola Company, February 17, 2006. This post lauds Mary Minnick then the CMO of the Coca-Cola Company.

[I begin with this quote from Hein and Sampey] “The strategy for the global Coke campaign is to make choosing Coke a purposeful act,” said Mary Minnick, the head of marketing strategy and innovation. “We don’t just want to be entertaining or be different, we want to be more relevant. We want to build a relationship with consumers, not hold a mirror up to them.” (from Hein, Kenneth, with Kathy Sampey. 2006. Pouring It On: Coke Unveils New Tagline, Products, Philosophy. Brandweek. December 08, 2005

[the post continues] This is an interesting model that marketers may with to conjure with. In the meantime, we may admire the recent Diet Coke ad (“Haircut”) that seems to me to capture and perhaps illuminate Minnick’s philosophy.

A young woman enters a very old fashioned barbershop. She emerges triumphant. The risk has paid off. She went into the shop a great beauty. She emerges a great beauty who has claimed her beauty with an act of daring and imagination. [end of post passage]

I believe this establishes that I admire strong women in ads, and as makers of ads.

Best, Grant

I pressed on to suggest that Veronica seemed to me to be practicing the blogging equivalent of “vexatious litigation” (as Wikipedia defines it: “legal action which is brought regardless of its merits, solely to harass…”) but by that time I was feeling a little less irritable.  

Last note:

I’m not sure exactly why I sharing this with you, to be honest.  Your comments, please.

good ads, bad ads and the struggle for the soul of advertising

Please come have a look at my latest piece at the Harvard Business Review blog in which I compare this ad to an ad of such deep and enduring stupidity I dare not clip it.  

Please leave comments!  

Hats off to BBDO Atlanta for their brilliant work.