So much for holidays. I spend a week on the west coast of Vancouver Island. “Long Beach” has waves that come ashore all the way from China, some of them ridden the last 30 feet by wet-suited surfers. I am rich in sand dollars and completely untanned.

Long Beach was fine, but a little dull. Working as an anthropologist in a First
World culture is a little like being a naturalist in the Galapagos islands. There is always plenty of everything. And if you don’t like what’s on offer, you only have to wait a while.

Long Beach, by contrast, was a little under-populated. Both the natural world and the social one scaled way back, mostly walkers in Land’s End anoraks and surfers. The surfers showed some evidence of evolutionary activity, with a new, busy school for women called “Surf Sister.” But that was it, really.

So it was nice to be back “in the world.” Today’s Wall Street Journal offers two glimpses of our feverish mutability: Carmen Electra, one of our “it” girls, and Red Wing boots. These two creatures exist at the two extremes of a commercial culture, one too contemporary, the other not nearly contemporary enough. Both are struggling to sustain themselves. Both are in peril.

Carmen is famous for being famous. She came to public notice through Bay Watch and she has sustained herself by remaining famous, not least through the escapades of her rock star husband. The WSJ worries that Electra might be risking overexposure. She has hired herself out to lots of brands.

Normally, we posit a straight forward relationship here. The celebrity becomes famous through dramatic or real world accomplishment, and then lends his or her celebrity to the commercial world in a zero-sum game. At some point, unless replenished, the celebrity’s celebrity is mined out and used up. The last days of celebrity are spent offering up confessions of abuse and recovery. And the last moment comes in the Oscar parking lot, to which the celebrity comes early in hope of an interview.

Electra is also “spending” her private life. She must remain in the public eye with appearances and episodes that replenish the brand creature. She must be seen with the right kind of person in the right kind of places. But this is a difficult game. Life in the fast lane is punishing and you have to hope that the latest publicity capturing stunt does not cost you private emotion funds (clarity, stability) on which long term survival depends.

But this model could be wrong. Properly deployed, Carmen could use the commercial work to sustain the brand and the private shenanigans to make a life. This would mean that we are looking at an interesting evolutionary development: the arrival of a creature that has actually turned adaptive challenges to adaptive advantage. The environment that extinguishes some species makes her thrive.

And then there’s Red Wing boots. This has been a favorite brand of the construction site. Red Wings are expensive, but they last and last and last. On the construction site, they become a marker of seriousness and maturity. Kids and other newcomers wear lesser boots. The real players wear Red Wings “877.”

The “877” boot is an iconic product if ever there were one. It is deeply rooted in American culture. But the WSJ says the pressure to “update” is tremendous. Red Wing is made in the US and it has higher labor costs. It is subject to new competition from Timberland and store brands. But updating? Move away from the brand equity for which most companies would happily surrender their chief executive and all his children? Somehow this seems a perilous adaptive strategy, too. Maybe, Red Wing needs to do what Carmen may be doing, working the niche not abandoning it.

In sum, perhaps these two creatures should diverge, not converge. Maybe advantage lies with those that forsake the traits that generalize adaptive capacity. Maybe it comes to those who work into the specialized position, not away from it.

This would have some interesting implications. It would break with the “work to the middle” strategy that continues to dominate commerce. Now commerce would be blossoming the way culture does. If Carmen and Red Wings were more like themselves and less like the middle, what would happen then?

The Wire is a great TV show both because it resembles its predecessor, Homicide: Life on the street, and because it departs from it. 

Homicide was a "crime drama"” that was less about the crime and more about the drama.  It used great performances from Richard Belzer, Yaphet Kotto and especially Andre Braugher to give us close character studies and a glimpse of personal complexity we don’’t usually see on TV.

The Wire is more interested in the complexity of the city.  It gets out of the police house into the ports, housing projects, churches, prisons, unions, and politics of Baltimore.  It is a dizzying sociology, a god’’s eye view of the several exchange systems that make up urban life. 

Season 2 turns on the opposition between two Polish Americans.  One of them runs a local union on the docks.  The other runs a section of the Baltimore police force.  Both want to give a stain glass window to the local Catholic church.  When the union leader wins out, the police chief begins an investigation that sets one part of the plot in motion.

But there’’s more.  Season 1 treated us to a sympathetic treatment of the Barksdale brothers and their drug trafficking in Baltimore projects.  By Season 2, one of the brothers is in prison, and this gives us a chance to think about the complicated exchange systems at work in a local prison.

And there’’s more.  The police force is embroiled in politics.  The key figure is Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) who makes a shambles of everything and especially his career.  Watching the police figure out what to do about Jimmy is our chance to watch another complicated set of politics play out from the street into the offices of local politicians. 

And there’’s still more.  Jimmy insists that the Baltimore police investigate when a shipping container filled with dead prostitutes from Eastern Europe turns up in Baltimore harbor.  This allows us to see how an international sex trade impinges on city life.  Season 2 also gives us a glimpse of how the ports play a role in the importation of large amounts of chemical, evoking another still more sinister international dynamic.

For most TV shows, this would be evidence of "plot sprawl.”"  But for The Wire, it is the opportunity to show how many domains are encompassed by a city, and how events in one setting off reactions in another.  The characters don’’t share our "god’s eye” view."  They negotiate conflict, competition and cooperation, according to local terms.  Only we the audience get to see how things ripple across the domains.

The social scientific question is a little daunting.  How would we, how could we, devise a conceptual system capable of taking account of how value keeps leaping registers?  To take one example, the union leader is desperate to keep the port, and his union, alive.  He is prepared to engage in crime to give himself resources he can take to the church which he can then use to reach and leverage political influence.  A legitimate institution is used to secure a criminal dollar to buy a spiritual dollar to access a political dollar.  The political dollar will be leveraged by the police to help solve the Jimmy McNulty problem and in the meantime McNulty is busy trying to force the police to deal with the Eastern European prostitutes, which investigation will have cataclysmic consequences for the union leader. 

Yikes!  This is enough to make the intersection of anthropology and economics suddenly shut down from grid lock.  Talk about complex systems!  I’’m sure this looks like a Rube Goldberg cartoon or an exercise in ‘the house Jack built” seriality.  But in fact, it does work as a complex system with events and motives eddying back and forth across the several plot domains.  The challenge, and this is a PhD thesis waiting to happen, is to build the system that allows us to think about this complexity as clearly and cleverly as the show’s creators manage to write about it. 

References

The Internet Movie Database entry on The Wire, here

For a plot summary from H.M. Schultz, here

For details on the third season, starting Sept. 19, on HBO, here

Last note:

I am on holiday for the next 10 days.  If I can post, I will post.  But I have a feeling there will be very little traffic here at the intersection.  Please come back September 26.

There is a wonderful story in the current New Yorker about salad. It reveals some of the characteristics of culture and commerce in our time.

Step 1: cultural innovation

Salad in America was, as some of us will remember, an industrialized foodstuff. Iceberg lettuce, created with the help of the Whirlpool Corporation and their food technologists, was king. It wasn’t very food-like, but it traveled well. By the late 70s, three quarters of the lettuce sold in the US was iceberg.

Enter Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, her Berkeley based restaurant. Alice proselytized on behalf of Mesclun as part of her “slow food” revolution. According to Wolf, “That was the salad that changed America.” We must be suspicious of “one person” accounts of cultural innovation, but this one seems apt. As the New Yorker puts it, “In the years since Chez Panisse opened, American produce has been virtually reinvented.” Here a small innovation from one part of the country managed to transform tastes, preferences and culture throughout the US.

Step 2: commercial response

Enter Todd Koons. Koons is persuaded that Mache, the successor to Mesclun, is the next new thing. “It’s going to be big. It’s going to be a mother.” But it’s a struggle. Mache is hard to grow, especially in the quantities Koons has in mind. You need a machine. Koons hired an engineer and spent $600,000. The results were disastrous. “It was like a giant green smoothie machine. I was, like, ‘Schnake, you’re an engineer. My five-year-old daughter could have designed something better than this.’ I wanted to kick him.” Koons has kept trying to commercialize Mache. He has suffered every misadventure that befalls the entrepreneur. But he keeps trying. Watch for Mache on a plate near you. (I expect you have seen it already.)

Step 3: the reaction

“When I think what that little Mesculn mix has turned into, it just makes me sad,” says Alice Waters, presumably with her hand held to her forehead. Then she adds, “And I feel terribly responsible for that.” Oh, spare me. Poor Koons. For his heroic effort to put Mache on our plates, he is now being vilified. Waters, once an employer and friend, does not like him anymore. When he drives into Berkeley in his SUV, someone puts a sticker on his bumper that reads, “ask me what I’m doing to change the climate.” As the New Yorker puts out, Koon actually needs four-wheel drive. He’s a farmer.

The thing about innovators like Waters is that they like being on the margin and they like to keep their innovations to themselves. But a commercial culture insists on drawing things from the margin to the centre, by the grace of efforts of people like Koons. Is Waters being “ripped off?” No, my dear, this is what it is to “share.” This is the price you pay for being part of a culture that creates innovation.

This latest stand off between the self righteous innovator and the hard-done-by diffusion agent must be unpleasant for Waters and Koons. But it serves the rest of us well. Culture and commerce do not always work “hand in glove,” but together, they manage to change the world in which we live.

Acknowledgements

All quotes and details for the New Yorker article. (It really is worthwhile reading the article, if only because Koons turns out to be a quote machine.)

References

Burkhard Bilger. Salad Days: how a lowly leaf became a high-end delicacy. The New Yorker. September 6, 2004.

Hollywood is a tough business. Each “product” costs around $100 million to make and market. It is created by a director over whom the studio has imperfect control. It will be “on the shelf” for a brief period. Good films can be swamped by popular ones. Bad films die early, killed by almost instantaneous word of mouth.

Were it not for foreign markets, TV and cable distribution and DVD sales, the industry would be a complete crap shoot.

We would expect an industry of this kind to be highly risk adverse. Go with what you know: bankable stars, familiar themes, genre film making. And indeed this has been the slam that intellectuals bring against Hollywood: that it turns out goo.

The trouble is that goo doesn’t sell the way it used to. Smash hits, the real revenue spinners in Hollywood, are often departures. They have been exercises not in risk management, but in risk taking.

Here are some recent winners. These figures show the film’s budget (in millions), the US gross, the worldwide gross, and, finally, where the picture stands in the Internet Movie Database “All Time Box Office” list.

Forrest Gump (1994): 55-330-679-13

The Sixth Sense (1999): 55-294-661-21

Home Alone (1990): 15-286-533-23

Shrek (2001): 60-268-455-25

We can only imagine the pitch that had to be made to the studio.

Forrest Gump:
“You’re going to love this. It’s about this guy who is, well, he’s a little simple. And at one point, this is so great, he runs across the country for no reason at all. And…”

The Sixth Sense:
“What a story! This guy is dead, right. What? Yes, the hero. He’s dead, but, like, he doesn’t know it, so anyhow…”

Home Alone was about a kid locked in his house and Shrek is about a big, green ogre and a donkey! At the moment of commissioning, these projects did not have “hit” written all over them. Nervous studio executives must have been thinking, “What are we doing here? How about a car chase? Maybe, a hero with a brain or just a pulse.” The first miracle is that these films got made. The second is that they grossed $2.2 billion.

$2.2 billion, that’s the kind of number that gets Hollywood’s attention. The trouble is that it’s hard to pick ’em. Consumers are hard to anticipate. Tastes change. You just never know. In this marketplace, risk aversion often gets you goo. Risk can get you riches.

The sequel franchise has the advantage of an installed base of consumer familiarity and support. It allows the studio to maximize the up front investment. It gives an additional reward for the initial risk. [Shrek 2 (2004) is 3rd on the “all time box office list” (75-436-837). Spider Man 2 (2004) is 9th (200-404-806).]

But there’s more. From the intersection of anthropology and economics, we may see sequels as a strategy for dealing with dynamism. For they solve a larger problem. They create a continuity of consumer taste and preference. The world may be bucking and weaving. Tastes may be changing at a furious pace, but this little world, for the moment, belongs to the studio. For a moment, they have a place in the eye of the hurricane of contemporary culture.

Without the Shrek franchise, Hollywood would have had to turn out 4 new distinct movies, each of them an uncomfortable combination of risk and risk aversion (“what if we are risking too much” now accompanied by “what if we are risking too little?”). With each decision, Hollywood has to be right in touch with consumer taste. If they had the bad fortune to produce Troy ($200 m.), Van Helsin ($140 m.) and King Arthur, they would be well out of touch.

But with a sequel, studios pave their own way. They actually create the taste and preference to which they then speak. (We could think of this as a kind of Bernoulli model of cultural engagement. They create the world into which they effortlessly enter.) One moment of risk (Shrek I) becomes, potentially, 3 moments of safety (Shrek II, III, IV). Where does this safety come from? Not just from cynical repetition, but the fact that the studio has fashioned consumer tastes and preferences instead of merely chasing them.

It is customary to think of sequels as dreary affairs in which the studio tries, cynically, to cash in on their initial success. Certainly, this reading fits and Hollywood, as always, looks good in it. But what is more interesting is that the sequel represents an adaptive response in a dynamic culture.

One last point: I wonder if Hollywood is factoring this in. Do they say to themselves, ‘to get a 4 picture franchise, and the diminished risk of the last three pictures, we will have to take more risk with picture 1”. Probably. They may sometimes act like idiots, but that doesn’t mean they think like Gump.

References

Waxman, Sharon. 2004. Summer box Office Hits a High, Despite Lows. New York Times. September 7, 2004. here subscription required.

all movie numbers from http://www.imdbpro.com. subscription required.

Spent the day in Midtown, Central Park, and the Met. “Gaze data” everywhere.

Some New Yorkers wear their emotions not on their sleeves but on their brows. They may be surrounded by hundreds of people, some in very close proximity, but they do not veil the gaze.

If you are, as I am, involuntarily empathic, you get split-second moments of access. The emotion in them becomes the emotion in you. This is streaming data, a succession of emotional lives: a women who is puzzling with a cryptic feature on her cell phone, a girl in front of a store window wondering what to get her girl friend, a man who is deciding that it is time to demand that senior partnership, damn it! These New Yorkers let you see right in.

This is weird. The English and the Japanese react to the close quarters of a small island by withholding emotional data. But then both England and Japan are hierarchical societies that give status to those who exercise emotional control. Candor costs them. Americans (especially New Yorkers?) see no status penalty to revealing their emotions and some of them come from cultures that actually penalize those who withhold them. Anyone from a Latin culture expects emotions to be front and center, and they are inclined to doubt the motives of those who wear dark glasses (thank you, Virginia) truly or metaphorically. On this small island, revelation is ok (when it is not obligatory).

I guess they can’t be New Yorkers unless they are well armored. Otherwise, this island, with its crowding, noise, and commotion, would eat them up and spit them out. This means that they do not have to worry about someone taking their candor as an invitation to approach. Approach a New Yorker at your peril. Canadians are declawed at birth. In New York, the nails grow long and are never clipped. Or to shift the metaphor, every New Yorker comes with a SWAT team built in. They can mobilize instantaneously to rebuff the intruder. With great internal defenses, they do not need external ones.

This is more “gaze as window” than “gaze as economy.” But there was plenty of the latter. People survey one another with open interest. There’s that raking glance that takes in what we are wearing top to bottom. I was walking with Pamela, and I saw women noticing her with intent. Intent to what, I wasn’t sure. Intent to evaluate, to judge, and sometimes to criticize, apparently. She was, I thought, wonderfully dressed but some observers were posting grudging scores (“7.7, 8.5, 8.3”). There were approving glances (“9.3, 8.8, 9.5”). And there were even a couple of looks that suggested intimidation, as if to say, “I could never in my life have taste and money enough to manage that.” (I guess this is a “10.”)

The nice thing about the city is that it is, still, a pretty diverse place, with lots of cultures and subcultures. So we might get an approving or neutral gaze from someone “like us,” but chances are that bike courier (all dread locks and attitude) didn’t think particularly well of my J.Crew not-a-clue outfit. In fact, he did not see me at all. (“4.4?”)

No New Yorker wins every contest. In fact, every New Yorker is going to see someone in the next 15 minutes who will bring them down a notch. This gaze economy has so many scales of value that no one gets to triumph. Indeed, the higher we score on one scale, the lower we score on another. Interestingly, there is no exit scenario. Unless we spend all our time at home and the club, we must expose ourselves to diminishment. Or to put this in the form of a trade off, we cannot present ourselves for approval, without exposing ourselves to the reminder that we are, in someone’s world, a dolt.

And this may be one of the secrets to Manhattan’s diversity. If New Yorkers cannot win the extensive game, they might as well play the intensive one. The rule of thumb: play where you can win. If they can’t wow everyone, they might as well narrow the audience, and compete more locally, with people like themselves.

A new market in the making: competition becomes more intense, distinctions finer, players more ferocious, stakes higher. If the bike courier is presenting himself to the entire city, even modest dread locks and attitude will get the job done. But once he competes in a smaller market, he ends up wondering whether he shouldn’t “go big or stay home.” And now the gaze economy begins to drive the real economy, as the market responds to each intensifying culture with more and finer choices.

This is weird, too. In a sense, the city grows more parochial and more cosmopolitan at the same time. Actually, it grows more parochial and cosmopolitan from the same motive. The economy of the gaze encourages everyone to be more “like they are” and in the process the city becomes less like it is. Plenitude begins with a gaze. We start “just looking around,” and it’s not long before someone is wearing really long dreadlocks.

More on gaze economies

Yesterday, I had a look at the gaze economy in a little beach bar on Shelter Island.

Gazes are costless in the moment of production, but we seek and distribute them with care. I imagined a hierarchy of 5 gazing groups: those who get but never give gazes, those who get more gazes than they give, those who get as many gazes as they give, those who give more gazes than they get, and the dorks who give but never get.

I imagined that most of us (Groups 2, 3, and 4) look for gaze markets in which we trade off the most gazes we can get against the value of the gazes on offer. Gazes assume still more value when they are converted into identity capital (self confidence), social capital (skill in creating relationships and networks) and financial capital. In sum, gazes are, perhaps, scarce, traded, and fungible.

Friends of ‘this blog sits at” weighed in and things got interesting. Fouroboros offered a wonderful phrase: the “elasticity of the Lizzie Grubman curve.” Ennis made the characteristically astute observation that gaze economies probably change according to the community in question. Leora offered this interesting observation (by email) on gaze economies in the gay community:

just read your economics of the gaze post. most interesting. i have learned from my gay male friends that there’s a 1-2-3 to the gays’ gaze. this is how they manage to deal in volume. the first is a “did we both just make eye contact”? look, followed by a 2nd quick check, hoping the person doesn’t catch the other one, and if there’s a 3rd look, seen by both, acknowledging the first 2, verbal communication (and other things) follow. they even let me watch this happen. and it does. i was stunned.

So gaze economies may have an addition pragmatic function: to communicate expressions of interest, to establish contact and, perhaps, to negotiate the terms of contact. In this case, presumably, asymmetry of gaze (how much gaze is given and received) helps to propose and negotiate the asymmetries of the relationship to follow. In other words, the general economy of gazes has within it little tidal pools in which particularly relationships are being fashioned. (I am assuming that what Leora noticed in the gay community applies to the straight community. The stereotypic case in point: the beauty at a bar indicates by gaze first whether she is prepared to accept the advances of a “suitor,” and then, by the quantity and quality of her gaze, how hard he is going to have to work to win her attention.)

Leora made a second point.

in the unusual summer heat of vancouver this year the gaze game (the hetero variety) has been interesting to graze, though ultimately disconcerting. The ones whose gazes I garner are never the ones whose gazes i want to garner. And then I feel like I’m refusing a “gift” or something. So it might be time to opt out of this economy.

This moves the gaze economy from the set piece of a beach side bar to the sidewalk where we find ourselves moving through crowds of people and a constant stream of gazes given and reciprocated or refused. Who am I looking at? Who is looking at me? Am I more often gazing at or being gazed upon. And then Leora’s crucial issue: am I getting the gazes that I want.

As we walk, we are the recipients of a social assessment that works a little like stock price. Our “value” is being set dynamically in real time. Naturally, we can change the price by seeking out markets that are more responsive (the senior’s home of yesterday’s post). We can also engage in what Goffman called identity repair when our present market proves a little stingy. (And in this case we are resorting to the identity capital we have built up on other occasions and extracted from other sources, including, as Marshall suggests, blogging.) It is also true that we are the recipients, as Sarah points out, of unwanted gazes that “construct” us as social actors we do not wish to be.

In a perfect world, we have enough self esteem (identity capital, again) to resist even the stingiest markets (the lobby of a very exclusive hotel, the line up at a very exclusive disco). In my case, this usually leads to a pathetic recitation of the Stuart Smalley line, “I’m smart enough, I’m good enough, and gol darn it, I blog.” But there is always a shadow here: the suspicion that I am precisely what people think I am (here the nod goes to George Herbert Mead) and there is, perhaps, something darker still: Sartre’s nausea (with hats off to Tom).

Jerry Seinfeld has a famous routine in which he offers to tell us “what men are really thinking.” What are they thinking, Jerry? “Nothing. They are just looking around.” If only it were so. A celebrity culture is, in this view, steeply and cruelly hierarchical. There are those we are eager to look upon and others from whom we withhold the gaze. The celebrity culture is a scarcity culture and the gaze economy is one of the ways we rank the community, determine value, and fashion identity, social and financial capital.

A happier view comes from Steve who suggests that the gaze economy is a kind of public theatre in which the poorest players are not benighted creatures but free riders. I like this view, but I’m not sure it’s true. Perhaps Liz is right when she creates the possibility that this isn’t an economy after all.

Whew! I would much rather go back ‘to just looking around.”

The economics of the gaze

I was on Shelter Island (far end of Long Island) this weekend and I went to a little beach bar there called the Sunset. It sits on a road that borders a beach that looks out on a bay. The Sunset is open and breezy, with a patio below and a Caribbean style deck above. Everyone was dressed for the beach, bathing suits and casual wear.

There was a subtle air of surveillance about the place. Everyone was quietly looking at everyone else. My friends told me that this is one of the places to be seen this summer, with people bring large boats from the Hamptons which they then moor in front of the Sunset bar that everyone might look upon them in wonder and gratitude. The crowd was mostly young, tanned, and beautiful. Even the relative absence of clothing could not conceal their wealth. It was the kind of scene that gets Americans reaching for the term “Euro trash.” (Canadians don’t use the term much, but that’s because, well, no one young, beautiful, wealthy and European ever goes to Canada.)

Thanks to the work of Laura Mulvey, we have been encouraged think about the politics of the gaze. Who looks at whom, in what way, with what consequences? Feminists have suggested that men sometimes look at women in a way that plays out the power asymmetries of a sexist society.

But if there is a politics of the gaze, I wonder if there is not also an economics of the gaze. After all, gazes are exchanged. Some people give more gazes than they get. Others get more than they give. The gaze is desirable and scarce. We might even say that the gaze getters get something fungible, to the extent that the flattery of the gaze funds their “identity capital,” making them more self confident, self possessed and successful as social actors, and this makes them more successful as economic actors. (We would need some way of modeling how identity capital is converted into social capital, and how this, in turn, is converted into financial capital, a topic for another post. One datum: that scene in American Beauty where Annette Bening, as Carolyn Burnham, stands in a garage and wills real estate success. This might be a conversion moment, or not. I thought the movie was idiotic, more collective self loathing, and recall it imperfectly.)

Let’s begin with the assumption that we are all of us monsters of vanity and in a perfect world, everyone would look at us, and only us, all the time. I don’t have any data here except internal evidence of my own voracious ego. We could also reference the fact that everyone wants to be a “star” despite the fact that it would spell the end to their privacy and force them to suffer, eventually, a fall from stardom that makes Icarus’ fate look like a children’s ride at the country fair. Yes, we all want everyone to look at us and it is to improve our chances as gaze recipients that we engage in a lot of consumer activity. (“That’s my boat out there, you know.”)

Let’s say that there are three groups: those who get more than they give, those who get about as much as they give, and those who give more than they get. Let’s include two more groups, one at the top and bottom of our hierarchy: those aristocrats who always get and never deign to give, and those poor bastards who always give and never get.

The top group (Group 1) was represented by the hostess, a woman of sterling beauty who turned every head, but replied, when she was obliged to look at someone, with a cool, thoroughly professional, entirely indifferent gaze. The bottom group (Group 5) was represented by a poor dork at the bar (I use this term in its anthropological sense), who gazed about wolfishly and shamelessly and was fastidiously ignored by all for his efforts. Your faithful anthropologist? I notice for a living, so I am always giving more than I get, but truth be told I would consigned to Group 4 in any case.

I fell to thinking about how these economies form. Where do we go looking for gaze exchanges? What conditions need to be satisfied for different economies to take shape?

If you are in Group 5, presumably you want to be present at the hottest exchange that will take you. You are accustomed to being ignored. Your expectations are thoroughly asymmetrical. You are, like the dork at the bar, just glad to be there. (And in the case of a half decent disco, of course, you aren’t there, but standing in a line, in the rain, in the diminishing gaze of the bouncer.)

If we occupy Groups 2, 3, and 4, we don’t necessarily want to occupy the hottest exchange. After all, the hotter the spot, the greater the asymmetry, and the less we get. We can actually reposition ourselves on the hierarchy through the judicious choice of exchanges. Those of us in Group 4 can vault to Group 1 by going to a senior’s home. (And I’m not above this sort of thing, believe me. That’s how I know.)

But in fact, a senior’s home as no “buzz.” We do not feel like we are somehow at the centre of something. (At least, I don’t, and usually leave the senior’s home with a great show of indignation.) So we can reposition ourselves but it will mean forgoing something we want as much or more than gaze. I am not sure how to think about this one, but I am tempted by a Mount Olympus model (topical reference points!). Everyone wants to be at far enough up the mountain slope to feels ourselves included in its majesty, power, exclusivity, or, to use another anthropological term, whatever. To use the once contemporary turn of phrase, we want to be within shouting distance of the “beautiful people.” We want to be something place where gazes are relatively scarce, hard won, and therefore valuable. (Gaze is cheap at a senior’s home.)

Most of us strike a balance, perhaps. We look for the place where we will get at least enough gaze that we stay well clear of dork status, and put ourselves in a position to capture that identity capital that will someday convert to social and financial capital. But we must trade this off against a gaze quality. In other words, we choose our market so that we get as much gaze as possible in a place where the gaze is as valuable as possible. (We can tune this trade off according to the demands of our particular egos, our emotional needs at the moment, and the gaze exchanges to which we have access short and long term. Datum: the scene in Soap Dish where Sally Fields, as a fading actress in a moment of crisis, goes to a local mall, where she can be “discovered” by fans she would normally ignore.)

Naturally, this model would have to include as assessment of gaze worthiness on several dimensions: youth, beauty, gender, wealth, social standing, dress, and sometimes skill (at dancing, say). In a status society of the kind that existed in the 16th century, social standing was it. Low standing gazed upon those of high standing, who quite often refused to reciprocate. In a post modern society, there are lots of dimensions and the exchange becomes more complicated. Some people are gaze worthy because young and beautiful, but they have no standing or wealth. Others are riveting because famous or powerful (but would otherwise would not qualify). Studio 54 in its day might have been a good place to do the research, with diverse groups of New Yorkers having to make these complicated calculations on the fly. We might also interview club owners, maitre d’s, and door men who are obliged to do the same.

These are preliminary thoughts and I look forward to the havoc shortly to be wreaked upon them by my economics readers.

Reference

Hoffman, Michael. 1991. Soap Dish. Paramount Pictures. (gross: 36.5 m.)

Mendes, Sam. 1999. American Beauty. DreamWorks (budget: 16 m. gross: 336 m.)

Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Capitalism needs you. It needs people who have their ear to the ground, who understand what is happening in contemporary culture, who can read and respond to the dynamism of the world around us. Capitalism has created (or at least enabled) a “plenitude” it can’t keep up with. It needs you.

Scott Miller divides the world of business into three categories. At the top of his model, he puts the big corporations like General Electric, General Foods, General Motors. These companies are very large and quite slow. They respond to the shifting “field of battle” with difficulty and often they find themselves caught in a desperate game of catch-up.

At the bottom, he puts the little companies: start-ups and small enterprises like Vans (before they were bought by Nike), Kashi (before they were bought be General Foods) and Snapple (before they were bought by Quaker). These companies are (or were) smart, fast and highly responsive. (In the middle he puts the companies that are too small to have muscle and too big to be nimble. Scott calls this “death valley.”)

Most innovation and responsiveness enter the marketplace at the bottom of the marketplace, through small enterprise. If we wanted to increase the cultural responsiveness of capitalism, this is where we would put our efforts.

Normally, we may and we do leave this to the “invisible hand” of capitalism. Opportunity has the magical effect of summoning enterprise and we can leave this naturally occurring process to its own devices. But culture, often aided and disseminated by capitalism, is moving ever faster. The ability of the marketplace to respond to culture is under challenge.

So I was thinking to myself the other day: “what is the path of least resistance by which someone who “gets” contemporary culture can enter the marketplace?” I am no expert here. A year teaching at the Harvard Business School was illuminating and I got to sit at the feet of the likes of Joe Lassiter and John Deighton, but strictly speaking I should have been studying, not teaching, there. So treat these remarks with caution. They represent an early cartography, filled with error and ‘terra incognita.”

The fastest route is “import.” Ennis (refs. below) very kindly sent me a great clipping recently that described black visors now being worn by female bicyclists in China. In this case, the world supplies the “product development lab” and the manufacturing. It’s up to us to decide whether this innovation could ‘take” in North America.

If, with good research, we decide it can, we play the import game. We do not need a big investment to secure some of these helmets and we can test them in a couple of local markets (Seattle and New York City, say). If these work, we need to find a distribution channel and I am assuming that bike shops are numerous and disaggregated enough that we should be able to get “placement” here without having to worry about getting “muscled out” by larger players. In the import game, we are merely moving fads from one part of the planet to the other. Our advantage, we see them early and we respond much more quickly than a larger company can.

The problem with this option is that we will see our spouses or significant others 5 times a year tops. We spend the rest of our lives on the plane. We will die with many millions of frequent flyer points. The second problem is that this enterprise has almost no momentum. We are only as good and as profitable as our last “find.” We are cats on a hot tin roof.

There is a “scale up” opportunity here. I believe that the guy who founded Restoration hardware started by sourcing things this way, and now of course he has a small empire of stores. But this makes sense only if we wish to invest the time and risk that big enterprise takes. And we’re not. Some people like the leadership, the book keeping, the constant pressure of turning a little enterprise into a large enterprise, but I am pretty sure you are not one of them. I know I’m not.

The next fastest route is the small brand. This is how Snapple got started. Just a couple of brothers in Brooklyn, the original little engine that could. Snapple had the advantage of attaching itself to the moment in a way that the big companies like Coke and Pepsi could not. It “got” the 1990s and it spoke to them with advertising that used a receptionist as its spokesperson, and delighted in the fact that Ivan Lendl mispronounced the company name. They also made a virtue of necessity. Their only hope of distribution was the “mom and pop” store. (Coke and Pepsi controlled the supermarket and the 7-11.) But this turned out to be the very place that a generation preferred to shop.

Then it was a matter of scaling up and selling out. Many big companies are too big to anticipate the trend and they make up for this by buying out those who can. This makes for a big “pay day.”. Now we have the problem of too much money, instead of too little (see post for July 11, 2004: “Connecticut Problems and other business opportunities”), but this is the problem of plenty. We can start a foundation to support third world education, fund start ups in the alternative energy field, or just lie on the beach and turn ourselves into one of the great living authorities on the street life of Elizabethan England. Poor us.

There is an intermediate game that seems to be to maximize the fun and diminish the risk. This is to start a brand nursery. In this case, the trick is to listen to contemporary culture and rough out a brand that speaks to it. We are doing the conceptual work, and leaving everything else to someone else. In this mode, we might have created the idea and the branding for the cereal Kashi (before there was a Kashi). Along comes General Foods, and snaps it up. We don’t get a vast pay day, but we do get a pay day.

The advantage is this third option is that it leave us free to devote ourselves to the extensive process of staying in touch with contemporary culture, without having to invest our time and life savings in the much more intensive game of starting a company and babying it into existence.

In the first two options, we need capital, that great “barrier to entry.” In the first case, we don’t need a lot, but we will probably need more than can be extracted from parents, friends, and credit cards (the traditional indie method of financing). In the second case, we are going to need lots of capital and that means venture capital. (And venture capitalists are described by some of the people who turn to them as a little like the Mafia. They make you take most of the risk and they take most of the profit.) In this third case, we need just enough financial capital to create intellectual capital and that means a small office somewhere filled with lots of very smart people. Actually, we don’t even need to hire lots of people. In a “free agent” nation, it is possible to create a virtual corporation that “velcros” teams together on an “as needed” basis.

That’s the rough outline. To truly map the opportunities for the plenitude specialist, we would have to talk to someone who knows what they are talking about: venture capitalists, brand specialists, distribution specialists, and so on. And to do this right, hiring or getting an MBA would be a good idea.

But then we are a gull on the winds of contemporary culture, surrounded by 767s with imperfect navigational devices. There is a place for those who really understand contemporary culture in the marketplace. And without them capitalism will continue to be run by the generals.

References

Ennis here and here

On learning that Apple can violate my digital rights any time they want.

There’s an old joke about bicycles: that we don’t really own them, we just rent them from the thieves.

This somehow summons the truth about homeownership: that we don’t really own homes either, we just share them with the bank.

Qualified ownership even applies to clothing and furnishing. We believe we own these, but any time it wants to, the fashion world can declare them obsolete and render them worthless.

This does nothing to dim our sense of ownership. We are outraged at the theft of a bicycle. We would be astonished to find bank executives having lunch on our patio, (“actually, if you read the contract, you will see we own this part of your house-the whole yard actually. Hank’s gone to get his barbeque.”) We would be unhappy to get a note from J. Crew telling us that the expiry date for your new shoes has been moved forward and that we must cease and desist in their public display. No, as we understand and feel it, we own these things as if ownership were outright and in perpetuity.

Ownership has this quality in part because the things we own are part of what Goffman would call our identity kit–they help define who we are, both inwardly and outwardly. Strip us of these things, and our lives become, as Lear put it, “cheap as beasts.” Naturally, we regard the most ‘telling” of our possessions as if they were strategic resources and we defend them as governments do. Our security depends on their security.

Generally, the market place understands this about us. In a depreciating world, it sells us things we should lease. It leases things we should rent. And it rents us things we could borrow. It “gets” the power of ownership and makes us pay for it.

But not the digital industry. Apple gives us qualified access to the songs we download from iTunes. Realtunes gives us access only so long as we pay a monthly fee. Apple can actually change our rights to songs retroactively.

Of all the identity suppliers, music is the most potent, more than homes, more than clothes, and, yes, more than bicycles. We may not need to own our music outright, and indeed as our tastes expand and our library grows, outsourcing the task of choosing, storing, managing, and delivering music makes more and more sense. But we will never cease to think of our music as our music, as something we must own.

It is clear why Apple instituted Digital Rights Management. It was trying to recruit content suppliers still traumatized by Napster and the great give-away. But I thought the war was won. iTunes road in like St. George. It killed the dragon and brought recording labels from the verge of irrelevance and bankruptcy. Isn’t this the time to extract a reward from grateful villagers? More to the point, Apple created a new channel that rivals retail ones. Does Warner Brothers have a choice here? Can they compete without a digital play? I think we would all like to be there when WB executives tell the Board why WB has now “gone dark” in digital distribution channels. In sum, Apple no longer needs to supply DRM to get the supplier to play. The supplier has no reasonable choice.

Think back, way back, to that afternoon when your mother asked if you could share your music with your little sister. This is the kind of thing that persuades a 13 year old that parents are certifiably insane and possibly extraterrestrial. This music could NOT be shared with our idiot sibling because it had been the object of our devoted attention, working its way out of the grove through the air into consciousness with such power and completion that some part of the artist was now some part of the fan. No, we won’t want to share our “music” with our sister. Not Apple, either. Dear M. Jobs, they’re not iTunes, they’re our tunes.

References

Wingfield, Nick. 2004. The New Digital Media: You Might Have It, But Not Really Own It.” Wall Street Journal. August 16, 2004, p. B1.

The topic of today’s blog: the new, troubling, rationality of the economic actor.

But first, the fashion news. Today’s New York Times says that young women are:

‘turn[ing] their backs on track suits, tank tops and bling, putting their money instead on the seed-pearl-studded camisoles.”

Bling is out, elegance is in.

This is continuous with a trend noted in this blog a month ago (7/11) on the decline of the bare mid riff. I noted that young women were moving away from the sexuality of Christina Aguilera and the later Brittany Spears towards the polish of Reese Witherspoon’s character Elle Wood (in Legally Blonde) and the women of Sex in the City. Flash is out, poise is in.

This represents one of those sudden shifts of taste and preference that now routinely transform our culture and our commerce. A trend gathers like a wave at sea. And then it comes ashore. Without good forecasting (and a sturdy “marine band radio”), it’s upon us before we know it.

And it has force of impact. Lots of people, and especially economists, regard fads and fashions as so much fluff, epiphenomenon that comes and goes, signifying nothing. But in fact, this change in fashion makes (and marks) a change in what Greenblatt calls “self fashioning.” These young women will become substantially different people, moved to make substantially different life choices. They will pursue different movies, men, colleges, and careers (until the next trend comes). Fashion might once have been superficial (a thing of the surface). Now it comes ashore like something out of The Day After Tomorrow.

Things change. And we change with them. We’re a proverbial cat on a hot tin roof. We must be economic actors who practice commitment and release. (I am now evoking terms similar to the ones proposed by Hirschman: loyalty and exit.)

Committment

We must commit to new trends. We must give up the old and embrace the new. Those who fail to do so are scorned. (Recall the contempt we had for hippies when disco arrived, and the contempt we had for disco enthusiasts when preppies arrived. “Snap out of it!”) We practice loyalty, but it is a rolling, contingent loyalty.

There will be slow pokes. When I was in Redmond this week, I heard a 12 year old girl asking her mother if she (the girl) could buy something “saucy.” The Pacific Northwest has always been slow to get the news, and chances are this little girl will win the argument only to discover that, mysteriously, Christina isn’t saucy anymore. One of us will overhear her at the mall begging her mom for a seed-pearl-studded camisole.

Release

But then we have to leave. The all-clear signal sounds. Trends change. Time to move on and embrace something new, as women who invested heavily in raccoon eye liner, saucy clothing and a candid sexuality are now redeploying. (The stars will have to redeploy as well and it will be interested to see whether Christina Aguilera can make the shift.)

Paradox

It is a double, contradicted, rationality. On the one hand, we must commit well and thoroughly. Boomer readers will remember people who did not quite commit thoroughly enough to the hippie revolution. The price? The price was to foreswear “cool” and all the benefits of credibility, membership and sex it made possible. On the other, we must move when the trend does (or pay the price of “uncool” and all the costs that come with that).

This means the rationality of the actor depends upon two conflicting impulses. We must commit with perfect “loyalty.” We must then release and “exit.” How the hell do we do this…by keeping two internal sets of books, one hidden from the other? By practicing a cultural mandated amnesia? How does the rational actor avow and disavow with such perfect intermittent sincerity?

There is a credibility problem. The world is likely to say to Christina Aguilera: “Sorry, you can’t do elegance, not when you did rauchy so very convincingly.” But do we say this to one another? Forget the external dialogue, what about the internal one? Why don’t we put our heads in our hands and say, “you know what, I am the world’s biggest hypocrite?”

Economic actors in a dynamic society have an adaptive problem. They must “lock on” and “lock off” continually. Under the force of necessity, they have apparently crafted a solution: cultural amnesia or intermittent sincerity. This might also by one of the places irony came from in the 1990s. This is a useful adaptive position, because it allows us to play out anything and everything with a wink. We are not “really” doing this. Perhaps this is the new adaptive response we would expect from the economic actor.

But try telling that to a teen girl in 2004. Irony was someone else’s cultural moment. This generation is rather more sincere. Her persona is rather more earnest. Maybe it’s wrong to say that youth is wasted on the young. They’re going to need it.

References

Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance self-fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, voice, and loyalty: responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

La Ferla, Ruth. 2004. Less Bling, More Elegance. New York Times. August 8, 2004

It’s like watching a high wire act. Sometimes, you just want to shut your eyes.

When I read a [movie script], I’m not analytical about it. I just go, “Ah, I’m interested in this.” (Tom Cruise on how he chose his new movie, Collateral)

No doubt, Cruise consults his agents and managers. He pauses and ponders. He looks before he leaps. But finally, his guide is not analysis but intuition. Finally, he leaps more than he looks.

Isn’t this a risky way to do business? Of course, it is. Tom is one of Hollywood’s most “bankable stars.” His pictures have made $4 billion. But the history of Hollywood tells us that fame is perishable. Every film is potentially a tipping point, and it’s a long way down. Ask Kevin Costner or Vin Deisel.

Tom’s problem is clear. He needs to change horses in the middle of the stream. He can’t play “grinning and boyish” forever. Where to go next is not clear. “T.J. Mackay” in Magnolia was an interesting, ambitious, choice, but the film made only $37 million. Vanilla Sky and Eyes Wide Shut did badly too. Tom is taking risks. (You might say that with hundreds of millions in his bank account, there is no such thing as a risk for Tom Cruise. On the other hand, maybe he likes being the most famous man in the solar system.) On balance, you might think Tom would be more “analytical” about it.

But there is a defense for Tom’s “decision” making process, one argument that’s says his reliance on intuition is the rational thing to do.

For certain purposes, our intuitive makes better decisions. This is because, according to Bateson and others, it has deeper processing powers than the conscious mind. When we rely on intuition, we push everything back into the unconscious problem solving set. It gives us access to new powers of search and pattern recognition. For certain problems, the unconscious mind, and its emissary intuition, is our best guide.

And these problems are now the order of the day. The world is becoming more complex, changeable, and inscrutable. In the face of this new complexity, the minor but once reliable powers of the conscious mind are sometimes overwhelmed.

There is a group of professionals who were “first in” to the world of complexity. The people who make their living in the world of design and fashion have always had to contend with an extraordinarily dynamic set.

Where is fashion going? Where must Karl Lagerfeld position Chanel to keep it current? These are not questions that can be answered with a surface analysis that takes calculates the behavior of every other designer and the movement of all the salient aesthetic, cultural and economic trends. No, a decision like this has to be turned over to the deep processing power of the unconscious mind.

Eventually, intuition will come. Designers famously defend their bets on the grounds that they “just know.” “It came to me in a flash.” “I was looking at a seashell and I could see the future of fashion.” “Don’t ask me to explain it, I just know that green is the new black.” (I am grateful to Joan Kron to alerting me to this aspect of the fashion mind.)

Tom’s world, once largely manipulated by Hollywood’s tastemakers, is now a little like the world of fashion. It has tipped into the swirling mass of popular culture. It is now ruled not by studio heads but the caprice of changing taste. Indeed, one of the deep trends of contemporary culture is precisely that more of what we do and who we are is ruled by the sudden discontinuity and ceaseless change. Everything from politics to the colors of paint in a hardware store is now ruled by this dynamism. In Virginia Postrel’s phrase, style is our new substance.

It should not surprise us then that Tom is thinking like a designer. His world is ruled by a new complexity. The rational way to contend with this complexity is to diminish rationality as the locus of choice. We have long followed our Hollywood heroes not just on the screen but in the life. And this may be the real burden of Tom’s career relocation. Once an action hero, he is now an exemplar of the new life of the mind.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 1972. Steps to an ecology of mind; collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. San Francisco: Chandler Pub. Co.

Freydkin, Donna. 2004. Crusie takes a walk on the dark side. USA Today. August 5, 2004, pp. 1D-2D

Movie stats from http://www.imdbpro.com

Postrel, Virginia I. 2003. The substance of style: how the rise of aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture, and consciousness. New York: HarperCollins.

Contemporary culture, someone told me, will one day resemble Cuba before the revolution. It will be a place of extravagance and spectacle.

Cirque Du Soleil is a case in point. It’s a kind of Barnum and Bailey on speed meets Siegfried and Roy on ecstasy. Hold the tigers, unleash the lizards (as above).

Cirque is just 20 years old, but it now has three continuous shows in Las Vegas. Last year, 7 million people saw a Cirque show.

How fast things move from the margin! Twenty years ago, Cirque was kook central. Ten years ago, it was a minority taste. Now it’s part of the charmed circle of bourgeois taste, and standard Vegas fare. If we are moving towards Cuba before the revolution, we are traveling at speed.

The anthropological conditions for this economic transformation are clear. We are a culture that is steadily re-embracing theatre, mystery, the sensory, the ineffable and the sublime. We are committed to Max Weber’s “re-enchantment of the world” and in a consumer culture, re-enchantment can be had for $75 a ticket.

Cirque comes from Montreal. It is now probably Canada’s most robust cultural export. But it is not in any sense Canadian. It is fully, manifestly Quebecois. In Canada, only the francophone community could have created such a thing.

Indeed, Canadian anglophones remain uncomfortable with the francophone gift for theatre. They see it as cheesy on the one hand, and frightening on the other. Thus did they refuse the extraordinary opportunity for cultural partnership their neighbors made available. No, Canada’s English-speakers remain steadfastly committed to the grey and the ordinary. They are, in the famous phrase, “as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.”

Not much here for export! And for its role as a plodding supplier of raw resources to the international economy, Canada has paid a price. Increasingly, it looks like Cuba after the revolution. (Those who doubt me should check out the health care system.) People who give up their resources, but hold on to their emotions, have no real place in the Cuba economy.

So what if the Cuba economy is a new source of the wealth of nations? This will be bad news for those countries who prize self control and polished constructions of the social self, and good news for those who are more inclined ‘to let it rip.” You can be polished or you can be Polish, and the choice will cost you.

The Cuba economy is not a marketplace for the shy, the retiring, the emotionally convoluted or the creatively unforthcoming. You can’t export what you do not have. (I’m quite certain that’s in Samuelson somewhere.)

This is particularly bad news for the likes of Disney, a company that has specialized in fun without danger and “spectacle lite.” The rise of Cirque must have struck them like a Christensenian discontinuity. Suddenly, taste shifts and you lose Las Vegas and huge venues in New York, Paris and Tokyo. Worse, you look old, tired and trite. We may rest assured that a Disney person looked in on Cirque 10 years ago and thought, “No threat here. This is a minority taste.” Welcome to the Cuba economy.

Empire was once a game of self restraint. Emotional control was the order of the day. The refusal of spontaneity was a competitive advantage. It was the way that the colonial administrator claimed the right to rule those endlessly emotional colonials.

But if there is a Cuba economy in the works, these bets are off. Competitive success will belong to cultures that put their hearts on their sleeves. The realm of the senses will be a new gateway to empire in the world.

References

Christensen, Clayton M. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Cowen, Tyler. 1998. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Gillespie, Nick. 1999. All Culture, All the Time. Reason. 30, no. 11: 24-35.

Pine, Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. 1999. The Experience Economy: Work is theatre and every business is a stage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Postrel, Virginia I. 2003. The substance of style: how the rise of aesthetic value is remaking commerce, culture, and consciousness. New York: HarperCollins.

Samuelson, Paul and William Nordhaus. 1998. Economics. 16th edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schmitt, Bernd. 1999. Experiential marketing. New York: Free Press.

Weber, Max. 1946. Science as a vocation. From Max Weber. editors H. H Gerth, and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

Yesterday, I looked at the Jurys hotel here in Boston and the way it uses the Boston Police Headquarters, the site on which it sits.  (Our theme: how capitalism uses local meanings as part of the "value proposition".”)

It turns out that the Jurys has used something more than the grand historical reference.  The hotel bar is called "Cuffs"” and it contains a small display that features Billy clubs and a "come along"” used to attach a criminal to the arresting officer. 

Even the staff are quickening to the opportunity.  A hotel waiter told me he thinks he’s found the room that once held the Boston Strangler.  The door man believes that Sacco and Vanzetti were incarcerated here.  (If this building is haunted, it is really, really haunted.)

This is the real challenge of the new strategy.  To acknowledge the site as a former jail and the infamy of its inmates pushes capitalist practice more than a little.  Potentially, it takes us into a contemplation of misery. 

As a jail, this place was a box o’ woe.  I found myself "running the numbers"” to estimate how much misery Boston would have to create to sustain a building this big.  X is the amount of misery it would take to make the client criminals in the first place.  Y is the amount of misery these criminals would inflict on Bostonians before their apprehension.  Z is the amount of misery it would take to detain, house and punish the criminals.  Boston in the 18th and 19th centuries may have looked like one of those Indian trains (think people standing on roof tops and hanging from the sides) as immigrants struggled blindly for a place on the American "fast train."   

If you spend anytime at Cuffs dwelling on cuffs, you will be reordering often and drinking hard.  Jurys are evoking meanings that are enough to make you weep.  This takes us a long way away from the usual capitalist approach which steers us toward pleasure, or its bastard child, the pleasant. 

Clearly, this is a necessary trade off.  If we want to make places more interesting and particular, we will have to score the surface of the consumer experience with difficulty.  Only thus will it take the "epoxy”" of engagement and recollection.

This means two things to the meaning producer, in this case, the Jurys hotel.  On the one hand, you are letting a hundred flowers bloom.  You have empowered your staff to create and communicate an oral culture in which they begin to elaborate the hotel story with imaginative departures.  (Didn’t Maggie Smith star in a play or movie in which she plays a museum docent who flat out invents everything she tells the museum visitor?). 

The trade off is clear.  The more you want to make your place local, authentic and actual, the more you must engage these powers of invention.  The more you engage them, the less control you have of the commercial message.  You had better be persuaded of the value of the multiple, various, contradictory message, because that’s precisely what you are going to get.  Site specificity is a high gain, high risk strategy.

Second, this strategy evokes meanings new to the capitalist inventory.  This puts me in mind of a story told me by a General Motors executive in the 1980s.  He said that Detroit developed new testing methods, to sniff out any time any consumer disliked any part of a new car design.  The result: boring boxy little cars that no one cared about.  Finally, he said, Detroit decided that to make cars that some people really liked, they were obliged to make cars that some people really disliked.  (The happy discovery: that some of the dislikers would eventually come on board.) 

So there is a trade off here too: to delivery the authentic and the actual and the real, it is necessary to trade in meanings that are not always pleasurable or pleasant.  It may be necessary, in the extreme case, to reduce the consumer to tears. 

In this event, capitalism comes charging across the traditional divide between culture and commerce and appropriates the freedoms and the difficulties normally associated with art.  I am not saying that Sacco and Vanzetti will serve someday serve as spokesmen, but even anarchists may turn out to have a role to play in the new capitalism.   

Why does this not surprise us?

As I understand it, "site specificity"” is a sensitivity on the part of a work of art or architecture to the context in which it finds itself. 

One example is the garden in Toronto’’s chic, little downtown neighborhood called Yorkville.  This garden reproduces the lot lines on the houses that once stood on the garden plot.  It also represents the geographical and floral variation of Canada, with the forests of BC represented at one end and the shore line of the Maritimes at the other.  The garden is specifying of where its plot once stood in time and still stands in space.

Site specificity has found its way to my hotel in Boston, the Jurys.  This is located in a 1920s architectural landmark, the former Boston Police Headquarters.  In the 19th century, the Boston Police Force became a largely Irish American institution.  And it turns out that the owners of the Jurys, the ones who put up $60 million for the restoration, are from Dublin.  The Jurys embraces this historical "loop the loop”" with enthusiasm.  Think of us as a new Irish immigrant, here to celebrate, with this building, the old Irish immigrant.

It seems to me almost certain that the Jury’s hotel, had they done this restoration say 40 years ago, would not have embraced this building, and, if they had, they would have worked to efface its origins and their own.  Forty years ago, architecture in general and hotels in particular were sited in the modernist "everywhere” "space.  They looked to blend into the hotel scape and the Boston one.  More particularly, Irishness still carried the taint of a hardscrabble immigrant community, making it an unlikely historical reference for a hotel that reaches, successfully, for elegance.

Site specificity reopens locality and history as sources of the meanings on which capitalism can draw.  It will help capitalism fight off that long standing charge that is it the champion of uniformity.  In the Jury’s case it is not bleaching out the historical particulars but restoring and then celebrating them.

As I was arguing in an earlier post, I think we can look forward to a time when our local Starbucks will carry design references to the neighborhood, city, and region in which it stands.  This even as it carries the mark of a national brand.  This too will largely put paid to the intellectual’s insistence that the marketplace is the enemy of culture, difference, variation, locality, history.   In any case it moves us beyond the time that the best capitalism can do is the faux Disney tableaux, the cultural other or historical other in heavy quotation marks, sensitized, as those glassine bags used to say, "for your safety.” 

We shall see.  But I think the Jurys hotel in Boston says that if the intellectuals were ever right, they are now quite wrong.  More to the point, if capitalism is now an agent working for an ever intensified and integrated locality, things are going to get very interesting indeed.

“Payola” is the practice of buying airtime for music. It’s a common practice and it generates millions of dollars for the radio industry.

And it’s effective. A “spot buy” pushed Avril Lavigne into the Top 10.

Surowiecki works up a righteous indignation in this week’s New Yorker, but I’m not sure I see the problem.

How is this different from buying ad time? Payola means we are listening both to the song and an ad for the song. Why is this a bad thing?

Here are the standard objections to payola:

1) Consumers are mislead. The radio playlist does not represent what the nation wants to hear but what the label is prepared to pay for. But, really, do we regard the Top 10 as a voting system? More do the point, in a postmodernist age, do we care what other people like? Perhaps the teenager from 1958 wanted to know. These days, who cares?

2) Consumers are manipulated, taste is shaped. This presupposes that consumers like what you give them. This is a perilous assumption as every marketer now knows. Consumers have plenty of options and if they don’t like what they hear, they can and will move—to other music and other media. It is perhaps not consumers, but radio stations that must fear payola. It can lead them to pursue a short term interest at the expense of their listener base.

3) Payola “unlevels” the playing field. Little producers can’t afford to compete against people with deep pockets. This was once a very good criticism, but now that the internet supports many radio stations and access to every label’s website, the “gate keeper’s” strangle hold has disappeared.

4) Payola turns radio stations into automatons, mere conduits for big business. The station that might have served as a exploration of local taste ends up “working for the man.” This is a good criticism but it ignores the fact that there is quite a lot of “listener supported” and college radio out there. If consumers want local, they can get local. (Jesse Walker, below, offers a more complaint treatment of this problem.)

5) Payola makes bad music flourish like the bay leaf tree. If the station is paid to play bad music, it will. But I think the radio station may be using payola as a sorting device. Payola allows them to pass along the risk. Without it, they are obliged to comb through the 700 or 800 new CDs released each week and find what their listeners want. Plus, the producer is highly incented to pay time only for the songs in which it is most confident. Its power of trend detection are probably better than those of the radio station and (because) it has more to lose. In effect, the radio station gets paid twice, once in better song selection and again with “spot buy” revenue.

6) By giving advantage to big producers, payola penalizes the small players who are more inclined to take risk and to “push the boundaries” of artistic license. Maybe. But if music adoption is classically distributed, the early adopters are relatively few. To ask mainstream radio to speak to them is unreasonable…and again this is what college radio is for. It can play to 25 fans and congratulate itself on its integrity.

Actually, payola may work to increase risk taking, at least in the mainstream. How many times have you liked a song only the 8th or 9th time you heard it? The payola guarantee of exposure allows the label to try things that are not merely “hook heavy” (studded with catchy lyrics and melody). With this confidence, it can now try things that might not ‘take” on first or second hearing.

People love to hate payola. They say it’s a confusion of culture and commerce. But if we think about payola as advertising, does it not offer an answer to every culture critic’s hatred of advertising? The payola song is, after all, the cleanest form of advertising. All the hype is stripped away. We are given the product and nothing else. (And this in a medium that specializes in the noisiest advertising in the commercial world.) And radio, lest we forget, is given away for free to the consumer. With payola, they would be obliged to listen many, much noisier, ads.

I am not Dr. Pangloss. I don’t think payola is a necessary thing or a good thing. But unless I am missing something, it’s not clear to me that it’s such a terrible thing. Radio has always been an imperfect, highly constrained channel, and someday it will be swept away by less mediating mediators. And then we will suffer an embarrassment of riches and a new set of problems. We may even look back on payola with affection.

Last note:

Ok, I am on the road again, this time for 3 weeks, (New York, Boston, Seattle and Kansas City). If I can blog, I will blog. Please forgive intermittent blogging, if this occurs. And watch this space for ethnographic notes of life in the American city.

References

Lavigne, Avril. 2004. Don’t Tell Me. See the video on line here http://www.blastro.com/player/avrillavignedonttellme.html&artist=Avril+Lavigne

Surowiecki, James. 2004. The Financial Page: Paying to Play. The New Yorker. July 12 & 19, 2004.

Voltaire, Francois. 1990. Candide. New York: Penguin Classics.

Walker, Jesse. 2001. Rebels on the Air. New York: New York University Press.