I don’t know that it makes sense to have spent the 4th of July watching television programs and movies, but that’s what I did. 

Monk (USA Network)
House (Fox)
Match Point (a film by Woodie Allen)

So there was a theme: how people with massive psychological problems can still make a contribution.  I always find this heartening news. 

There were other themes.  Two, actually:

1. the rule of partial disclosure

Being a viewer used to mean having things served up with perfect clarity.  All people, institutions, events on the screen came with full exposition.  Anything less, the filmmaker seemed to think, and the audience would panic and stampede from the theatre. 

But now TV and the movies are filled with partial disclosure.  People, institutions, events come and go.  They are not explained in and off themselves.  They are not explained as players in this drama.  The medical lingo in House is a good example.  We are prepared to take these things as read.  Several of Monk’s obsessions are perfectly, intuitively accessible, but some are sort of baffling.  (Rounding numbers, for instance, what’s up with that?)  We take these as read.

This is an exercise in synecdoche, where parts stand for wholes.  The parts may be quirky and unintuitive, but, often, we go, ok, that’s about the medical professional (House) or the medical condition (Monk), got it, let’s move on. 

2. the rule of exquisite choice

If you are going to evoke a whole with a part, the part can’t be lame or too general.

This is where Woody Allen got it badly wrong.  Match Point is a good movie.  Allen is particularly good at capturing the way people carrying on group conversations, everyone chattering to someone who is chattering to someone who is chattering…  Language rises up in a little cloud of indeterminacy, not so much referential as phatic, people locating (or placing) one another in emotional space. 

But, oof, but the howlers!  Allen offers us his male lead as a tennis instructor, only to have Jonathan Rhys Meyers demonstrate that he hasn’t a clue how to handle a racket.  I mean, we are prepared to have this biographical fact dropped into the plot without much exposition, but if and only if Jonathan Rhys Meyers can actually sell the thing with a decent forehand.  And he can’t. 

It’s not just disbelief that is no longer suspended, it is the rule of partial disclosure.  What, so he isn’t a tennis instructor?  He’s merely pretending to be   We are alert to the small details.  We can manage with the tiniest amounts of exposition.  And as long as this is the case, a director wants to watch what he puts before us.  What will not do is that Hitchcockian "oh, they’ll never notice."  Noticing is what we now do. 

This happens again when Allen wants us to understand that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is entering the world of business.  This is precisely the kind of thing that was boiler plate for Hollywood.  Because no one there knows anything about business outside of show business.  So business, when it is not demonized, is presented in a general, you-get-the-idea, way. 

But the law of exquisite choice says it can’t be general.  We are prepared to move from the part to the whole, from the specific to the general, but only if you offer the specific part if fully credible, ethnographically nuanced, terms. 

Anyhow, that’s what I did with the 4th of July.  Try to formulate new laws for popular culture.  Codification, it’s an anthropological thing. 

It is, I think, literally impossible to imagine what it’s like to be a Russian now. 

To have the world so closed and regulated suddenly open up to storms of data, information, opinion, knowledge, and the necessity of their navigation.  Many must feel lost.

The average moment of mortality for men has fallen to 57 and some observers see this as evidence of stress that beats people down, actually extinquishing some of them before their time.

Sorry about the image to the right.  It shows a mosaic I passed on the way to my interview this afternoon.  (It was taken from a speeding car.  Where is that traffic jam when you need it?)  What you are looking at is the bottom half of the body of a cosmonaut.  Around him are arrayed the heavens.  It is an astonishing piece of work, and it takes you directly into itself, deftly reprogramming consciousness.  For a moment, it is all you know and how you know it. 

Here’s another photo taken the day after this post was posted.

The Mosaic Cosmonaut persuaded me that I knew the promise of the Soviet space program in its days of glory.  He is poised to colonize planetary worlds with socialism’s triumphant vision.  He is the new man.  (I have searched the internet high and low for a better image of this fellow, but for once Google Images has failed me.  Sorry.)  It’s as if outer space would be communism’s great theatre, that it was its best hope.  In a classic moment of displaced meaning, an ideology that was not working very well on earth was removed to the safe keeping of super-lunary world.

Here is the cosmonaut as close up as I could get. 

The Mosaic cosmonaut is a pretty good metaphor for the average Russian, poised for the exploration of new worlds, at once questing and vulnerable.  For the moment, there are muddles in the models everywhere.  In the restaurant of my hotel this evening was a classically trained pianist who could do Scott Joplin but this was as close as she was going to get to popular music.  (Still, last night it was a harpist who’s earnest play was indistinquishable from parody.)   In the lobby, as I came up, the sound system was playing House of the Rising Sun on a Zampir flute.  And when I got to my room, local TV featured 10 year old girls dancing to hip hop, complete with the witless reproduction of gang signs from South Central LA. 

I can imagine the Communists felt a deep ambivalence about both classical culture and popular culture.  What a fateful moment when they decided on the former, and how in God’s name did they reckon that the elitist form would serve them better than the more democratic one?  Another choice and it might all have turned out differently.  But command economy’s will cost you.  And command cultures will cost you even more. 

I want a website for the universal traffic jam, something that shows in real time how many people are caught in how many traffic jams, in how many cities, at what cost. 

The issue is a lively one for me, as Moscow is one big traffic jam for most trips.  It’s not as bad as Mumbai or New Delhi but that doesn’t mean it’s not a nightmare (as pictured, stock photo).

Is the universal traffic jam visible from outer space?  Probably.  It is certainly visible to Google Maps and we could use this technology to figure out at any given moment how many humans are the captives of how many jams.  We could calculate how much time is wasted, how much fuel consumed, how much environmental damage incurred, how much health risk created. 

The trick is to give this graphical representation so compelling that this becomes a problem we can no longer ignore.   On the whole, I am not a fan of intervention, but clearly we are now looking at a blight upon the planet, a predation on every city that endures it, and a tax upon the species.   

Every family in China and India would love to own a car.  When they do so (not if), we will have added something like 1.8 billion vehicles to the international traffic jam.  This would almost certaintly be visible from outer space, were it not obscured by great clouds of pollution.

Maybe the guys at Google Sightseeing will step up on this one.  See their website here.

In Ontario, over the weekend, 17 men were arrested. The charge against them: "plotting to attack targets…with crude but powerful fertilizer bombs."

In the world of counter terrorism, this group must represent a "mixed signal."

The "Ontario 17" were sophisticated enough to recruit widely and train in camps. Plus, they had the wherewithal to purchase 3 tons of ammonium nitrate. Apparently, this was a group to reckon with, and not merely loudmouthed hotheads at the Mosque.

On the other hand, 17 people is a very large group, almost certain to leak (or otherwise "give off") the group’s intentions.   Seventeen people produce a lot of ripples.  Plus, one member of the group, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, was a hot head and a loudmouth, and, as the imam-like figure in the Ar-Rahman Quran Learning Center, a vitriolic presence widely known to the South Asian community in Toronto and the RCMP.  Apparently, the Ontario 17 hadn’t quite worked out the "stealth" part of the terror equation. 

But here’s what makes the Ontario 17 unmistakably scary: they have no ties to Al Qaeda.

In the great sandstorm of information with which counter terrorism must deal, spontaneous combustion must be the biggest threat. With enough time, talent and money, it should be possible to pick up the connected players. But what if we must also deal with rogue groups, people without ties to Al Qaeda, people who are self defining, self funding, self organizing, self motivating? Then the "threat universe" grows larger and less scrutable.

Anthropology and economics to the rescue? Those of us who loiter at the intersection of anthropology and economics may be qualified to make a contribution here.

The economics side of the investigation is probably well mapped. I bet, for instance, that every ammonium nitrate sale is now scrutinized by man and machine. What about the anthropological side? I would guess that we are now assuming that no one or group not connected to active, public, mosque-based worship represents a threat.

This is probably true. But what if it isn’t? Is there a group out there which is not only not connected to Al Qaeda AND not connected to a public place of worship? With the ethnography in hand, an anthropologist could help decide this question, and, enabled the pattern recognition of which economics is capable, identify what we should be looking at, if indeed an additional threat exists. (This would be an exercise in anthropological profiling.)

But as usual, I have made the anthro and the econ mutually exclusive, when the point of the undertaking is to bring them together. And this is indeed where it gets interesting. If we have the ideological, social, cultural, religious signals that the anthropologist can identify, brought together with all the transactional data and pattern recognition that the economist controls, and we make these fully iterative and interactive, zounds, this would be sensational. Now we can ask our anthropological questions on the strength of economic data, and the economic questions on the strength of anthropological data. (If only all the world worked like this.)

Now I know this is beginning to sound like an episode of Numb3rs where the older brother (Rob Morrow) gives the younger brother (David Krumholtz) a mountain of data, and after a couple of days of dreamy reflection with a kooky colleague (Peter MacNicol) and unbelievably beautiful research assistant (Navi Rawat), the younger brother returns with the criminal’s defining characteristics, favorite movies, and home address.

It could work like that, but I imagine it would be more like Bletchley Park, the English code breaking operation in World World II, lots of really smart people sitting around, searching the world of terror for signals both qualitative and quantitative, for patterns both anthropological and economic. There would be lots of beauty, brains, dreaminess and acuity in our Bletchley Park, but the exercise would have not an episodic character but a cumulative one, so that as anthropology and economics worked together over many months, the data, the analysis and the understanding would take on real power and precision.

Eventually, one would hope, we would know what the terrorists were having for breakfast (to paraphrase Field Marshall Montgomery’s praise for Bletchley Park). More important, we would be in a position to anticipate the "unknown unknowns," the threats that exist out there, but throw off no conventional signals to identify their existence and intentions. The very world of unknown unknowns would be smaller and less unknowable.

Post script

If you had asked me to predict whether a show about mathematics (a kind of CSI where math replaces science) would prosper, even after you had quaranteed big stars, big money, and big talent (the Scott brothers), I would have said you were dreaming. Which tells us, once more, that this culture is a lot like the weather in Ireland.  Don’t like it? Give it 5 minutes, and everything  will change.

References

Austen, Ian and Johnston, David.  2006.  17 held in plots to bomb sites in Ontario.  The New York Times.  June 4, 2006. here.

We all remember Malcolm Gladwell’s influential article on cool hunters, the one he wrote in 1997.  And the late 1990s did seem to be the hay day of the species. 

It’s not mysterious.  Popular culture was becoming more productive, more interesting and more influential.  Corporations suddenly had to start paying attention, and as long as the only person truly in touch with popular culture was the 20 year old temp down the hall, the corporation was obliged to hire this expertise in.  (Cause who listens to temps.)

It was pretty horrific.  I remember listening to the consultant simultaneously wow and demean the marketers in the room with salacious stories of what the kids were up to.  There was always something deeply self-congratulatory and other-condemnatory about the exercise.  The cool hunter claimed glory for knowing what running shoes the kids were wearing.  He might have divined this from the window of the limo on the way in from the airport, but hey. 

Even this simple understanding raised the cool hunter in the larger of  scheme of things, and from this great height he saw the marketer and saw that he was clueless.  Always there was, on the part of the cool hunter, a fatal confusion between knowing cool and being cool, and you couldn’t help feeling that however much the coolhunter was being paid by the corporation, he prized his knowledge more.  He wasn’t in it for the money.  He was in it for the status. 

This assumption/presumption of cool lead to shocking abuses of trust and privilege and more than once I heard cool hunters make things up that were not true.  (Not, God knows, that I had a clue myself.)

So it was gratifying when we were treated to this recantation in the pages of Time Magazine in 2003. 

The trouble was, it turned out that cool hunting didn’t work.  “As hip as it was, as exciting as it was, very few people were able to monetize anything that came out of that,” [Irma] Zandl explains.  “People were fed this line that if the cool hunter found it, then six months from now you would have a rip-roaring business.  And I think a lot of people got burned by that.”

How humiliating!  Time Magazine!  Flat footed, lumbering, always the last to know.  And here was it was playing taps for the cool hunters who were supposed to put it out of business. 

So what killed the cool hunting?   Certainly, as Grossman pointed out, it didn’t work.  But, as we all know, not working has done nothing to discourage several consulting juggernauts.  So that can’t be it.

Three things, possibly.  The corporation developed its own internal resources.  Knowing and caring about popular culture ceased to be something to be ashamed of.  Everyone got smarter about it, and some of them worked out for the corporation.  Certainly, each successive generation coming into the corporation carried a still finer knowledge and a still greater love.  The corporation would get smarter by simply standing still. 

Second, the journalistic resources got steadily better.  With the likes of Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and even Time Magazine (not least in the person of James Poniewozik), suddenly there was intelligence with intelligence, and the corporation always prefers this especially when it can be had for the price of a subscription.

Third, I think contemporary culture just got too complicated for any individual to claim comprehensive knowledge or systematic insight.  Yes, we now have websites like PSFK and Agenda, and these do a great job. And they are wise enough not to claim to divine the source, trajectory or advent of cool, as the cool hunters often did.  They give us lots and let us choose.

Who killed the cool hunter?  I think contemporary culture did.  It got more complicated, in the process outstripping the cognitive abilities of even those who claimed guru status.  And the knowledge of contemporary culture became more distributed.  Increasingly, even the corporation had a clue. 

Useful in their brief moment, cool hunters would eventually be remaindered by historical forces beyond their control.  Those who live by the trend, apparently also die by it.  And somehow I think that’s fair.  Surely contemporary culture is too interesting, important and difficult to be represented by catching phrases, exclamatory declarations and a haughty self importance.  Cool hunters, you are now removed from fashion. 

References

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

In Grossman, Lev. 2003. The Quest For Cool. Time Magazine. Vol. 48: September 8, 2003

This little blog is supposed to be an intersection of Anthropology and Economics but too often I treat these as incommensurate worlds that must run like railroad tracks in parallel without hope of intersection. 

Very well. Here’s another way to make the difference. Anthropologists trade in indignation. Economists do not.

Trade in indignation? Anthropology is now deeply preoccupied with the production of indignation. To take an undergraduate course in anthropology is to be inducted into the arts and science of indignation. To take a graduate degree is to be made an officer of indignation, appointed by the court of scholarly opinion to hold forth loudly and often in defense of any idea, group or institution that appears to suffer affront.  Economists, on the other hand, are dispassionate to be point of being bloodless and entertain, apparently, a glassy indifference to what the world will.

So if you have to choose one, blindly, in that evolutionary way, which is better? The anthropologist’s indignation? Or the economist’s calm? I am shocked (shocked!) you should have to ask such a question. Clearly, unmistakably, calm is better. Because calm does not anticipate itself. It does not require anything to be true. When confronted with reality, it does not prostletize. Glassy as in transparent, the light of the world can actually penetrate this academy. 

Anthropology shares its affliction with many people in the humanities and the social sciences. Tom Wolfe, in a recent interview, treats indignation as the great affliction of the intellectual. He says,

An intellectual feeds on indignation and really can’t get by without it. (p. 8)

One of the problems with indignation is that it eventually gives way to self absorption.  When one investigates the world in order to be outraged by it, discourse turns inward.  Academic deliberation becomes, to steal a term from Gitlin, a kind of identity scholarship.  It is not about the world, it is about the investigator.  Postmodernism was especially troubled by this tendency.  Every book and article, whatever it’s title or topic, ended up being about the plucky little investigator carrying on in the face of epistemological difficulties that would crush an ordinary mortal.  Author, author! 

Tom Wolfe is good on this theme as well.  He says the "psychological novel [] is mainly the novel of yourself at home…  Your own experience is the only valid experience that you can draw from." 

The novel will become a worthy but unpopular pursuit unless the novelists get outside their own lives, depart their comfortable little studies, … and do what writers did in the great period of American literature, which was the first half of the twentieth century.  Everybody from Stephen Crane to John Steinbeck quite intentionally went outside of his own experience. (p. 35)

Wolfe says that he is a "chronicler," someone who "keeps tabs on what is happening in society, in the sense of social mores as a well as just "society" with a small s."  This is precisely the way an anthropologist or sociologist could make him or herself useful. 

Useful?  What an antique idea.  Social scientists, many of them, are too busy posturing, turning their scholarship into acts of identity construction, to do anything so ordinary, so coarse, so banal as making themselves useful.  Good thing, perhaps.  I have a very strong feeling that many of them are not fit for the real world, and could not make themselves useful even if they really wanted to.  (Finally, this is a evolutionary process of self selection where the incompetent remove themselves from harm’s way, there to nurse wounded self esteem with the septic salve called tenure.)

This should be good news for economists.  With anthropologists engaged in amateur dramatics, the field is wide open.  Steven Levitt has stepped up and offered novel and illuminating approaches.  But generally, economists police their disciplinary limitations every bit as assiduously as anthropologists do, and won’t come out to play.

Opportunity goes neglected.  A contemporary world filled with its eddies of innovation and sudden, unapologetic dynamism that makes January 2000 now almost impossible to restore from memory.  Imagine.  6 years.  Substantial parts of the world are unrecognizable.  Who is standing this watch?  Who is there to chronicle what is happening to us? 

Tell me it’s more than Tom Wolfe.  He is a wonder.  Our Dickens, our Balzac, our Zola.   That much is clear.  But he cannot be enough.  But as long as the economists continue to ask the wrong questions and anthropologists to supply the wrong answers, Wolfe’s the man. 

References

Cole, Bruce. 2006. A conversation with Tom Wolfe. Humanities. May/June, pp. 6-9, 35-37.

Gitlin, Todd.  1993. The Rise of Identity Politics.  Dissent.  Spring.  pp. 172-177.

McCracken, Grant. 2004.  Dr. O’Neill, may I present Dr. Boudreaux?  This Blog Sits at… May 31, 2004. here.

Wolfe, Tom.  1998.  A Man in Full.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 

I spent the day working on an introduction to my new book Transformation.  This book argues that there’s a new cultural regime, one that is, I believe, changing how we define the individual, the self, our culture and our economy.  Yeah, I know. It’s shamelessly overweening.  But, hey.  (That’s my defense for arrogance and intellectual presumption.  But, hey.)

Anyhow, I had occasion to reflect why Transformation is being written by me in 2006 instead of by someone else in, say, the 1980s.  I mean, you coulda.  Much of the evidence was there.  The theory is not hard to fashion.  (You could have built it out of spare parts and duct tape in, say, 1987.)  All you had to do was to believe the evidence of your senses and build an analytic device that make sense of this evidence. 

Someone coulda wrote this book and no one did.  The question is why.  I think it’s because popular culture was still under the intellectual embargo created by the academic community in the postwar period. 

Here’s a short list, by no means an exhaustive one:

The academics and the essayists insisted that popular culture was a corruption, that the consumer was a dupe, that something had gone terribly wrong now that capital and commerce had been allowed to interfere with culture.  It was crap as an argument even in the immediate aftermath of World War II, but the intellectuals made it their badge of difference, their  cri de coeur, their enduring accusation to the friends of capitalism, their warning to the rest of us. 

Oh, damn,  They were dead wrong.  Popular culture got steadily better.  We did not dumb down and out.  TV improved.  (How do I know this?  I am watching House as I write this.  It’s the episode about the girl from New Orleans.  The script writers have just found a way to work a reference, unmistakeable but inoffensive, to oral sex into the script   This is more than the I Love Lucy writers could ever dream of this.)  Movies ran in two directions: up hill to the blockbuster, the last properties that could talk to everyone in a splintering society, and down hill to the long tail, a million little movies you and I will never see.  But hey presto, the blockbusters got better and so did the little movies.  The parts of culture not touched by commerce, well, many of them descended into self absorption and incoherence.  As Tyler Cowen pointed out, commerce is actually good for culture.  Go figure.  Shakespeare did. 

Anyhow here’s a paragraph from the introduction.  (You saw it here first!)

The transformational turn is driven by rising sophistication in the entertainment industry and in the fan. Sometime in the last quarter of the 20^th century, popular culture began to use itself as a creative resource. Self repudiation gave way to self discovery. Shows like The Simpsons, Buffy, and the X-files began unashamedly to draw upon pop culture. A virtuous cycle was set in train. The more self referential pop culture became the richer it got, the richer it got, the better it got, the better it got, the easier it was to recruit more talented writers and producers, the more talented the writers and producers, the richer pop culture became.  {Rinse well and repeat]  By 2005, Stephen Johnson felt it possible to write a book called Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. It is worth pointing out that this improvement of popular culture ran entirely against expectation. The intellectuals and the academics insisted that pop culture was “dumbing itself down,” that it would become ever more stupid, ever more craven.  I believe recantations are in order.

Anyone who wants to read the dynamism of our culture knows that numbers are essential. But we also know that some of the most useful numbers are hard to come by.   

I would like to propose we consider a new set of metrics.  Let’s call them “smoot metrics,” after the MIT student Oliver R. Smoot, Jr.   

Oliver was a freshman at MIT in 1958.  His fraternity brothers decided to use him as a way to measure the Harvard Bridge.  Rolling Oliver head over heals the length of the bridge, they determined the bridge was 364.4 smoots plus an ear (see below).  

The likeable thing about the smoot measurement system is that it is at once deadly earnest and entirely whimsical.  This makes it perfect for our purposes.

I was walking across the Harvard Bridge (pictured with appallingly healthy undergraduates) on Friday night with Henry Jenkins and Robert Kozinets (we were not running) when our conversation moved me to say I wished we had a smoot measurement for the creativity taking place in the world.  How many people engaged in how many creative endeavors in the creation of how many cultural artifacts…what would this number look like?  More to the point, why don’t we have one?

It is commonplace in media, culture, and marketing circles to remark upon how many people are now engaged in creative activities and how good their activities often are.  We have lots of ways of explaining this development. It marks the continuing democratization of an aristocratic privilege, the growing strength of what Bell called expressive individualism, the multiplication of venues and the decline in the costs of production, gatekeeper elites, and other "barriers to entry.”

By some reckoning, it was the rise of Punk that sounds the "all clear" signal.  Now anyone could, and everyone should, pick up a guitar and “have at it.”  It doesn’t matter how bad we are, the point is to get up on the stage and let rip. Rock stardom…not just for musicians anymore. This was the DIY (do it yourself) spirit now legitimized

What I don’t think anyone appreciated was how good this DIY stuff would become.  I think the general assumption was that we would live in a two-tier world, with a great no man’s land between the professionals on high and the amateurs below. 

Boy, were we wrong.  I was at a wedding some years ago in Canada when three brothers roasted the groom with quality material.  At PopTech a couple of years ago, the resident comedian Rocket Boy complained that all the speakers were doing pretty good material. 

Every time someone holds a contest inviting people to submit their own films or make their own ads, I think the judges are a little chastened that so much of the stuff should be so good.  They know that it is only accidents of biography that puts them on the panel and not in the crowd.  An awful lot of DIY work turns out to be "performance grade."  (It is precisely this rise in quality that makes the cocreation branding process vastly less risky and much more interesting.)

We live in a period of cultural efflorescence.  For cultural purposes, this is a Cambrian era.  It would be nice to have a number that helps us track this productivity.  Does it rise steadily?  Does it change with the decades and the state of popular culture?  Does it change with each generation?  We would need to measure print, video, music for a minimum.  YouTube would be a great place to start, with the very film festivals as a follow up.  It would be great to find out from Ed Cotton at Butler Shine how many submissions for Converse "make your own ad" competition there were. 

Then of course we need a big board on which to plot this and other stuff.  I mean, how else can we hope to keep track of our exceedingly dynamic culture?

Acknowledgments

With thanks for the photo of Harvard Bridge, here.

Clotaire Rapaille is a market researcher and a gifted one. 

Every time I hear his name, I remember a marketing conference a couple of years ago.

We were sitting around a table, 4 or 5 of us.  It was late.  We were deep into our cups.  The evening was over.  Rapaille’s name came up.  Someone said,

"Oh, yeah, that guy.  We hired him.  He told us our ATM machine was "mother.""

Heads shot up around the table, and almost simultaneously, several voices protested,

"That’s what he said our product was!" 

"Hmm," I thought, "that’s the trouble with Jungian archetypes.  There only a few of them, and eventually you have to start recycling." 

Ever since then, I’ve had a picture of a dart board at Rapaille’s headquarters.  "Let’s find an archetype for sports cars!  How about luncheon meats?  Stand clear, everyone.  I’m throwing for a South African resort!"

This is unkind.  But hey, I’m entitled. Rapaille and I are in the same business.  And he’s a big success.  According to a recent story in Fast Company, Rapaille has a mansion in Tuxedo Park, an 9th century castle in France, his own helicopter, and millions of dollars.  Until recently, I lived in a rickety condo in Montreal where I lived without a car, a chateau, a helicopter, or much in the way of a bank account.  (I take my profits and pour them straight down the hole marked "deservedly obscure books."  Clearly, I need a new investment advisor.) 

I would not have offered comment had John Winsor not gently baited me on his blog today.

But comment is called for, because Clotaire Rapaille is a man without shame, the P.T. Barnum of the research world.

What else can we say about a man who claims to have understood Japanese, Chinese, German, American and Indian culture by "cracking their code."  Rapaille says,

"The code is like an access code: How do you punch the buttons to open the door?  Suddenly, once you get the code, you understand everything. It’s like getting new glasses."

When I listen to this kind of thing I think of Milton Singer, the great anthropologist at the University of Chicago who devoted his life to the study of India.  "Did Professor Singer discover a code?"  I ask myself.  "Did he break through the South Asian security system?"  My head spins. 

I know enough about India to know that it is encompasses an almost limitless diversity.  And this was true before it embraced the postmodernism that has reshaped global and local cultures.  The idea that there is a code!  This is ludicrous.  The idea that someone can crack this code with a simple proposition, a lively phrase, a striking image!  I think it’s just possible even the infinitely gentle Professor Singer might well have strangled you for suggesting as much. 

Now, I am guilty as charged.  I have presumed to do ethnographic marketing work many times in China and several times in India and Japan.  To be credit, I always told the client (usually Kodak and the Coca-Cola Company) that the culture in question, that North America is my "beat."  They always replied that they wanted the same eyes and ears for the problem at hand. 

There is no code.  There is just good marketing.  Listen carefully.  Identify the cultural meanings,the market conditions, and the economic constraints and inducements in place.  Spot the opportunity.  Sell the opportunity back in to the corporation.  No theater.  No fancy language.  No professional Frenchman charisma.  No glittering phrases.  Just very clear insights that can be put into practice straight away. 

Good market research, especially these days is bound by 3 rules that seem specially germane in a case like this one.

1)  Research has to be bespoke.  It has to come from the interviews in a particular way.  It has to speak to the problem in a particular way.  It has to be custom made.  No Jungian dart boards.  No prefab archetypes. 

2) Good research should not be parading around in grand declamations and charismatic presentation.  We are not branding an idea.  We are reporting our findings.  Good research is thoughtful, grounded, nuanced, and precise.   It is after all social science, of a kind, and not theater, of any kind. 

3)  It’s not about us.  The Fast Company records Rapaille’s eagerness to claim the success of the PT Cruiser has his own.  "I discover the code, and–bingo!–the car sells like crazy."  The article also notes the unhappiness of Chrysler employees when they hear of this.  Good research delivers new insight but this insight will come from the corporation as much as it does the researcher.  The research is working collaboratively with the consumer and the client. 

But, hey, I’m keen on anything that works.  And evidently, Rapaille has created lots of value for lots of clients.  Fast Company suggests that up to 25% of his utterances may have substance.  And let’s not forget.  Sometimes it takes a PT Barnum to create a PT Cruiser. 

References

For a brief summary of the career of Milton Singer, see his obituary here. 

Sacks, Danielle.  2006.  Crack this Code.  Fast Company.  Issue 104.  April. here. 

Winsor, John.  Cracking the Culture.  Under the Radar.  April 19, 2006.  here.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to J. Duncan Berry for giving me a head’s up on the Fast Company article.

Thanks to John Winsor for getting me to shoot my mouth off. 

The New York Times is beginning to look more and more like a badly tethered Macy’s parade float.  One more busted guy wire and it’s good night and good luck.

In the Times yesterday, James Wolcott offered a fond remembrance of Dwight Macdonald. 

Dwight Macdonald!  If there is a 20th century man of letters who earned his obscurity fair and square, it’s Dwight Macdonald. 

Macdonald bet heavily against popular culture.  He specialized in scorning it.  Here Wolcott remembers a debate between Macdonald and Stanley Kauffmann about filmmaking. 

Stanley Kauffmann [] said he didn’t  want to speak slightingly of "the popcorn crowd," which made Macdonald crack,  "Aw, go ahead."

Kauffmann: "No, no; Ingmar Bergman has remarked that those who go to see a Doris Day film […] may go to see one of his films the following week. Often in the same theater."

Macdonald: "They shouldn’t be allowed to."

[Finally] Kauffmann explained to the audience that Macdonald came from the Mencken generation, more comfortable responding to culture with a cynical No rather than an embracing Yes.

Macdonald pleaded guilty, but argued that experience had taught him the wisdom of heeding his inner veto power: "When I say no I’m always right, and when I say yes I’m almost always wrong."

But No was wrong and Yes was right.  Hollywood continues to make films that would horrify even Kauffmann, but popular culture got better.  In the language of Hargurchet Bhabra, popular culture became culture, the usual mixture of the good, the bad, the atrocious and the sublime.  And, quite suddenly, it ceased to be an easy target. 

Oh, damn.  Bad luck for the intellectuals!  It’s the 30s all over again.  A couple of soup kitchens sustain them.  One or two publications take them in.  A few simpletons continue to bang the drum, but, really, who cares?  (Ok, I do, evidently.  Consider this custodial work.  I am the man in a green twill jump suit, pushing confetti and stacking chairs in the hopes that stragglers will just go home.)

James Wood reviews a new book on Flaubert, and while this is less provocative, it remains a little, um, how shall I put this, oh, never mind.

Flaubert writes:

At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses’ workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller’s stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps.

Wood comments:

This was published in 1869, but might have appeared in 1969; many, perhaps most, novelists still sound essentially the same.  Flaubert scans the streets indifferently, it seems, like a camera.  [W]hat he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, [] each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate the details are – the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air.

The flaneur exercised new liberties, noticing things not noticed, not noticeable, actually non negotiable, in the world of letters and polite society. 

But I think Flaubert acknowledges that his literary powers are always up against a limit, that some of the things in his gaze sit on the verge of comprehension.  And this makes him a friend of the blogger, anyone, in fact, who ambles through contemporary culture. 

I would be grateful if you would stop reading, for a moment, and go to your Del.icio.us file.  Tell me:

1) who many items you’ve clipped,
2) how many items you’ve reread (since clipping),
3) how many items you actually remember clipping,
4) how many items are now mysterious (as in "why did I clip this again?") 

As contemporary flaneurs, sauntering through the virtual world, we are no longer choosing.  The gel of chosenness, as Wood calls it, has liquefied and run away.   We no longer file.  Some time ago, filing gave way to piling.  Piling gave way to binning, binning then to dumping.  Happily, we’re using a virtual land tip.  Still, we do we bother?

We bother because, before Del.icio.us, we were trailed everywhere on the internet by the uneasy feeling that this was a random search out of which nothing recoverable could come.  I remember how thrilled I was by Del.icio.us.  Finally, a map, a record, a way to recover my investment of time and effort.  But I almost never go back.

Flaubert could retrace his steps.  But when we exercise his liberty, the world overwhelms us.  Much of what we see sits on the verge of comprehension, if only by weight and by volume.  What was a test for Flaubert is a trial for us.

This continuity might have been worthy observing in the Times, but then of course the Times still believes in a manageable world, they believe they are a source of order, that they are architects of the manageable world.  All the news that’s fit to print! 

Come on, fellas.  You are going to have to do better than Dwight Macdonald remembrances to make yourself useful. 

References

Wolcott, James.  2006.  Dwight Macdonald at 100.  The New York Times.  April 16, 2006. 

Wood, James.  2006.  The Man Behind Bovary.  The New York Times.  April 16, 2006. 

Thorstein Veblen invented the term "vicarious consumption" some hundred years ago. Look, he said, the consumer choices exhibited by one person sometimes work to the credit of another. When we see a butler in a tuxedo, a benefit accrues not to the butler but his "master." The butler is consuming vicariously for his boss.

Great.  Splendid.  Veblen was ahead of his time.  One day we who loiter at the intersection of anthropology and economics will get serious about the issue here: how the value called money can be turned into the value called status by the intermediary called clothing, display and ritual.   How do capitals of one kind become capital of another, performing certain kinds of social work in the process?  What conversion processes are at work?

Some day.  But for the moment, I want to appropriate Veblen’s term for another purpose. In this case, vicarious consumption is something I purchase not to expand my display of wealth, but my breadth of experience. Now, my agent is not a status advertisement, but as an opportunity for experience. 

I have a new demand as a consumer.  I want to hire people to live my life for me.  I want to hire lots of them.  I want to send them out into the world.  I want them to report back.  I want to be able to live my life, and several others to boot. 

Two things are driving this.

The world got smaller.  I now know about aspects of the world that were simply invisible to my great grandfather.  I know for instance a little about the politics and the culture of South Africa.  I think to myself, "wow, that must be interesting."  Chances are my great grandfather didn’t know anything about South Africa and if he did, it came to him through the lens of a sensationalistic journalism that encouraged a sense of difference, not one of sameness.

I got bigger.  Well, not me, personally.  All of us.  All of us are the beneficiaries of an education and a culture that does not tremble at the appearance of cultural difference.  No, we say, ok, so how is it different?  Differences used to scare the pants off us.  It used to provoke the worst kinds of xenophobia (including racism and genocide).  Now, it’s regarded as a sort of stimulant.  (Food is a good example.  Our great grandparents were inclined to say (adjusting for ethnicity), "I’m not ever giving up my beans and chips.  Not me."  Their descendants now say stuff like, "I thought the Pad Thai was a little bit rubbery. Next time, let’s try that new Tibetan place?) 

A new product category

I am suffering deficit I never had before.  I don’t have enough lives to capture the world out there.  If I’m lucky, I have what’s left of a 75 year incumbency, and the substantial liberties that come with being a creature of privilege in 21st century North America. 

But it’s not enough!  I can see many things in the world that I would love to experience.  It would be really, really interesting to live in many parts of the former Soviet union.  Any part of China would now be deliriously interesting as would any part of India.  I would like to know what the world looks like to David Brooks or Mitch Hurwitz or George  Stroumboulopoulos.  (Their experience is of course not accessible, but I could spend enough time in Washington, Hollywood and Toronto to get a clue.)

A concession: I don’t actually want to raw, unmediated access to the new domains that beckon.  As a member of my generation and this time and place, I am thoroughly spoiled and expect to be thoroughly cosetted.  This means I do not actually hunger for a glimpse into the life of someone who is illiterate, abused, and tuburcular.  Misery, I can imagine…and the misery I cannot imagine, I am deeply, deeply grateful for.  (We need to reverse the polarity of that famous line about each family being unhappy in its own way.  I think misery is probably the true universal.  It’s in happiness (or at least engagement) that makes things unpredictable.)

But I do want things that are very much less mediated than they used to be.  And this means that the old suppliers in the marketplace (journalistic treatment, documentary filmmaking, Disney,  Club Med, fictional recreation on page and screen) are not enough.  I need information that is more voluminous, less managed, and more personal than anything they can supply. 

I figure there are going to be lots of new suppliers for the "alternative lives" product category.  One of the natural options here is a kind of "experience exchange" that allows me to contract with, say, a Southern politician and work out some way of giving the two of us access to one another’s lives.  My friend Craig Swanson and I have been talking about how tourism might be reinvented along these lines.  I recently met a Baptist minister on the train, and we have been corresponding life events back and forth by email.  (I am able to report this much: his life is amazingly interesting.)

But let me stick with the notion of the vicarious consumer for the moment.  I can imagine a college student headed off to the far east with three clients in mind.  William, let’s call him, will be going for his own purposes, to seek adventure, to skirt disaster, to make himself more worldly.  But he will also have consulted with his three clients, and he goes off "to the field" with a sense of what would most surely engage their curiosity.  This is a pretty good way of making up for the parties’ respective deficits.  I don’t know enough about Asia.  William, like every college student, will never have enough money. 

The technologies are there: blogging by word and video, cell phones.  Personally, I’m happy if William writes a public blog.  That should be one of the values he can extract from the  opportunity.  I just hope that I can induce him to engage with the world with a curiosity and an intelligence that resembles my own.  I have to hope, and this is interesting to ponder, that the kinds of things William does and notices to appeal to his clients will prove to be the kind of thing that will broaden and or deepen the potential appeal of his website to others. 

Somebody now needs to build the exchange, a kind of Craig’s list that allows experience seekers to find vicarious consumers plus some way of mediating between buyers and sellers.  All we is need exchange experience, some managerial capability, some test cases, a little research, not very deep pockets, a website, and Bob’s your uncle, as the English say.

I wonder if this isn’t an industry waiting to happen.  You, too?  For God sake, call me.

We are running out of jobs.  So says David Heuther in BusinessWeek.

Mr. Huether says manufacturing jobs are at their lowest level in the U.S. in 50 years.  (This despite the fact that productivity is at an all time high.)  And this is not only an American problem.  The loss of manufacturing jobs is happening in 9 of 10 of the top economies (U.S., Japan, Germany, China, Britain, France, Italy, Korea, Canada and Mexico).  Yes, even China is losing jobs, 4.5 million of them since 2000!  I know.

Surely, some of the jobs have migrated to the non-manufacturing sectors.  We would expect this in a service/knowledge/innovation economy.  We would expect this in a marketplace where consumer tastes and preferences are fragmenting and long tail markets are expanding.   But I would be very surprised if nonmanufacturing jobs were making up the difference.  I suspect we’re still a couple of million jobs shy. 

Structural unemployment is a fact of our world, and it is a problem that will get steadily worse. 

So what to do?  I think marketers have a role to play here.  (I am stealing a page from Bruce Mau.  When he wonders who’s going to solve the problems of the world, he says, "why not designers?  We’ll do it."  Pretty forthright for a Canadian.  I look at the problem of lifelong unemployment, and think "why not marketers?  Leave this to us.") 

In fact, this might be a job for account planners, among other marketers, and so I will, without permission, think about this as an assignment for the Account Planning School of the Web, founded by Russell Davies. (With apologies to Mr. Davies for my presumption.)

The problem: many millions of people in First World societies will live entire lifetimes without "gainful employment." 

The assignment: Create a lifestyle that makes possible gainful unemployment.  Build a lifestyle that will involve, express, and otherwise engage someone who will never work. 

Some considerations:

1. idleness is hell. 

Lifestyle construction here is critical because idleness is hard on the soul.  (I think George Bernard Shaw developed this argument.)  And it’s not enough to say, "oh, just get a hobby."  Lifestyles, well designed ones, are rich, interesting, various.  They are not "a hobby."

2. meanings flow from what we do. 

This is why job loss can be so cataclysmic.  This is why so many people retire to bleakness and sometimes an early grave.  In order to correct the effects of lifelong unemployment, we need to find other sources of meaning, purpose, identity.  One way of getting into this would be to think about your own job, or someone else’s, and figure out what it supplies in the way of meaning, drama, engagement, concepts of self, concept of world, and so on.  What are alternative events and activities and engagements from which we can source these things?

3. build in manageable difficulty.

when we are create, select and combine employment alternatives, it’s worth remembering that everyone wants "manageable difficulty."  An engagement with the world should fall into the sweet spot that stands combines things we can go and things we can’t.  This is to say, we should have the skills and talents to engage with it, but it should be larger than those skills and talents.  In Halo II, the sweet spot for me is "Normal."  "Easy" is way too easy.  "Heroic" is way too hard.  (To be honest, "Heroic" reduced me to tears of bitter recrimination.)

4. make the difficulty scalable.

As we get better at the engagement, it should reveal layers of difficulty we did not see before.  We need a steady supply of challenges to which we can rise.  Someday, I hope to advance to "Heroic."  No, really.

5.  look for mattering racks

We’re odd this way.  We like building little mattering racks.  They help us organize the world and enable desire.  A good illustration here is the collector, for whom X is the great passion of his collecting activity, the thing he moves heaven and earth to get.  Two months later, it is Y that has his attention.  Yes, X is one of the jewels of his collection, but, no, he doesn’t really care about it.  Y is interesting because it will move this coin collection away from antiquities to coins of the early modern Europe.  Now an entire body of coins that never really mattered leaps suddenly into view.  Now, these matter enough to keep a man awake at night, scheming and plotting for the day when he outranks, outweighs, eclipses every other coin collector in Cincinnati.  Hah!

6.  build new kinds of capital, and systems for the exchange and accumulation of capital

That people are not gainfully employed gathering conventional capitals, does not mean they cannot be gainfully unemployed pursuing unconventional ones.  Collectors do this of course.  But it is also clear that one someone volunteers (geez, do something about this word and the odor of sanctimony that surrounds it, will ya!) for social service (phew!), the accululate various capitals, self esteem, social recognition, good will tokens.  This capital can be traded on various exchanges, but that’s the bad news.  You have to formalize these capitals, build new ones, and invent the exchanges.  I would use hsx.com as an example. The trouble with hsx.com is that capital goes in but it never comes out.  Another example here might be Second Life.  In fact, someday I hope there will be Account Planning School of the Web on Second Life.  I am there somewhere.  My name is Moral DaSilva.  I’m the one is the really stupid hat.  Leave me a message.

7. enable plenitude (the invention of new kinds of social life) and transformation (opportunities to add new selves and transform existing ones)

This is a big industry waiting to happen.  As it stands, we are doing things by implication.  A good deal of branding is about identity creation and transformation.  Someday, we will make it more explicit.   When that day comes, and there is a real market for identity supply, the graduates of the Account Planning School of the Web, will rise to greatness, as surely as did those Silicon Valley software engineers in the 1990s. 

8.  create lifestyle constellations

One of the most difficult tasks here is going to be finding ways to draw together varieties of interest, activity and engagement into lifestyle constellations that can be lived, swapped in and out, retrofitted when necessary, and allowed multiply with the chaotic enthusiasm of an English garden.  And that is another way to think of this exercise.  That what you are doing is creating trellaces and other devices in which the inventive energies of the gainfully unemployed may run riot. 

Please have your assignments in by tomorrow at noon.   Quiz Friday next.  Widmerpol, shut up. 

References

Huether, David.  2006.  The Case of the Missing Jobs.  BusinessWeek.  April 3, 2006. 

For more on the Russell Davies’ Account Planning School of the Web, please go here.

Explanations

The image is a small part of the map of Elizabethan London by Hollar.  I liked it because it shows habitable places for people in transit. 

The protest continues today in France.  The New York Times reports 450,000 people marching outside Paris and hundreds of thousands marching inside the city.  A French union puts the figure at 3 million nation wide.

The problem is that there aren’t enough jobs for young people.  This is why the state wants to change the law.  This is why the protesters wish to keep the law unchanged.

Hmmm.   Everyone wants more jobs for young people, but contestation turns on simple contradiction.  More choice for companies!  No, less choice for companies!

It’s a cultural problem.  Anthropologists are supposed to search out the deepest assumptions on which beliefs and ideas are founded.  (Every anthropology major knows the story of Milton Singer in the field.  He was told that the universe rests on a turtle.  When he asked was "under the turtle," there was a brief pause, and he was then informed that it was "turtles all the way down.") 

The French appear to cling to the notion that the marketplace must do the bidding of the social good, that it may be constrained and coerced until, for instance, the job security of young people is assured.  If we were to ask what’s under this "turtle," they would almost certainly tell us (or variously imply) that the world is a manageable, tractable place that responds to the administrative efforts of politicians, civil servants and other elites.  There are lots of things that betray this French confidence in "order from on high."  This little assumption (the "tractable world" assumption, let’s call it) funds a good deal of life in France.

Hah!  Americans think otherwise.  The tractable world idea has fled the land, even Iowa.

Dick Gephardt…ran in Iowa as an anti-dynamism candidate: Protect jobs, protect unions, put up tariffs and barriers, anti-immigration, anti-free-trade. He got his clock cleaned. I was born in Iowa, and if he can’t make that argument work in Iowa, it won’t work anywhere. (Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape)

Under many ideological notions in America, there is a single idea.  This is that if we leave the marketplace to its own devices, wealth will be forthcoming and the social good will be served. 

But in recent years, there is a still deeper turtle, one that has to do the sheer profusive creativity of the marketplace.  I refer once more to the gospel according to Andreessen.

To get philosophical for a minute, I believe (as Milton Friedman says) that human wants and needs are infinite. There are no limits to the things and services that people want or need, so there are no limits to the number of new technologies, companies, and industries we can create. The questions are: how many people worldwide are able to contribute, how much capital is available to them, and how free are they to pursue new ideas?

This argument says that the marketplace should be left relatively unconstrained not just because it is the fount of wealth, but because it is a fount of human invention, creativity and culture. 

Now, I do not doubt that there are many French men and women who are now migrating from "order from on high" to "plenitude from below."  But, as I think Mark Twain once said, it’s awfully hard to change turtles in the middle of the stream.  The special problem for the French is that so much Frenchess assumes the "order from on high" notion.  French culture now looks like the Vista programming at Microsoft.  We can change some of the fundamental notions, but then we’d have to rewrite most of the code that produces social life.  It wouldn’t be easy.  It wouldn’t be pretty.  Gasp, it wouldn’t be elegant!

Of course, the French can do it.  They have produced some of the great minds in the social sciences.  They are effortlessly good at conceptualizing.  The intellectual world is a spectator sport, so mass engagement is not a problem.  Naturally, they will undertake this surrender to individualism in their best collectivist spirit.  They will think their way forward to new ideas, they will work their way from new ideas to all the tiny implications they hold for daily life.  They will manage to rewrite the 47 million lines of code that make up La France.

And there will come a moment of drama that will simultaneously thrill and appall them.  Eventually, it will be necessary to stop conceptualizing…and launch.  And this will have to be the moment when, by agreement, the collectivist approach stops, when the elites desist, and all agreement ends.  (All the big stuff, anyhow.)  All at once, order will give way to disorder, elegance will give way to profusion, and La France will become lots of experiments in Frenchness, unFrenchness, anti-Frenchness, post-Frenchness, and hybrid-Frenchness. 

Brrr. 

References

Anon.  2004.  Outsourcing Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game.  BusinessWeek.  March 1, 2004. (source for first Andreessen quote). here.

Bortin, Meg and Katrin Bennhold.  2006.  Hundreds of Thousands Protest French Labor Law.  New York Times.  March 28, 2006. 

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Precarity.  The Blog Sits At …  (a couple of days ago)

Webb, Cynthia.  An interview with Marc Andreessen.  Washington Post.  June 10, 2004.  (source for second Andreessen quote). here.

Explanations

The photo shows messenger pidgeons taking flight from their carrier in World War I France.  I’ve always wanted an excuse to use it. 

The better image would have been Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void

What’s it like being 18?
like shaking hands with a hurricane?

I was wondering over the weekend what it’s like to be 18.  This is not because I want to be 18 again.  I am deeply grateful to have escaped my youth, a time that now looks to me like Eastern Europe before the collapse of the Soviet, a time defined by arbitary restrictions, ideological immobility, and terrible shortages (in my case, sex, sense and sensibility). 

If you are 18 right now, you were born around 1987.  You began to move out of the parental orbit around 1997 (when you were 10-ish).  Your head began to clear around 2002 (when you were 16-ish). 

In 1997, a boy band (Hanson) and a girl band (The Spice Girls) ruled the world.  Notorious B.I.G. died that year and hip hop began to splinter and reinvent itself.  Around 45% of American homes had a computer and around 40-50 million Americans and Canadians used the internet.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on TV introducing a new concept: witty television.  In the next few years, you will see the installation of the tech industry as the heart of American commerce.  It will look like a gold rush, and it will fail like a gold rush.

In 2002, boy and girl bands were not just a thing of your past, they were a cultural antique.  We were one year away from a violent contraction caused by 9/11, but the music scene was still continuing to fragment in all directions, with pop punk, indie, alternative, emo, hip hop, (to name a few), with critical favorites, The White Stripes, The Strokes, The Vines resurrecting the Velvet Underground.  A couple of years before, another TV show, The Gilmore Girls, had introduced another bold new idea for TV: articulate television.  In any case, you are now spending a big chunk of your disposable time on the computer, a medium that was reinventing itself substantially every 3 months.

If you are now 18, (and I am now guessing, because I haven’t done the ethnography), you live in a world that is noisy with novelty, restless with innovation, giddy with the good natured froth of a pop culture, lively with a new order of intelligence, and swirling with menace and difficulty.   

Of course, all of us live in this world (or something like it).  But my boomer generation boarded dynamism.  We did not have it thrust upon us. 

Boomers could see things getting smaller, faster, more hectic. The intellectuals told us so.  We could see popular culture and culture drawing together, the sheer liveliness of one now joined to the intelligence of the other.  We didn’t have an easy transition, but it was a transition.  However we did it (using a bestseller or amnesia as our launch), we were able to pull up beside the new culture and get on.  ("Jump, Spot, jump!")

Sure, there were unhappy moments, near misses, terrible spills, hard landings.  Not everyone’s dock-siders had quite enough adhesion.  Not everyone was quite nimble enough to decide which assumptions were now called for, and which were to be left behind.  (There are several million of my generation that are still standing on that ever distant shore, insisting on opera tickets and "civilized discourse," before taking solace in American Idol.)  But the rest of us packed our bags and booked passage for the new land of plenty.  (Los Lobos/Latin Playboys was my Ellis Island, Ani DiFranco my Lady Liberty.)

If you are 18, it’s not clear to me when you ever had a moment to "get your feet," as the phrase has it.  The deck is always wet with something.  You go away one summer vacation and "cirque de soleil" becomes the new Vegas.  You go away another, and "cage fighting" supplants boxing there.  Not, of course, that you care about Vegas very much.

No, what you care about is going to college, and if ever there was an institution like the old Vegas, this is it.  The old headliners, aging songsters who are still crooning tunes that haven’t changed for ages.  And why change when fan loyalty (aka tenure) protects them for having to rewrite a line?  A great buffet is there for the asking, and it is filling, but it’s not long before you begin to wonder if you can ever eat again.  Choices, you must make choices!  Look, here’s a building that looks like ancient Rome.  Here’s another that looks like Tuscany.  So life-like, so pleasant, and so utterly implausible as a simulation of any actual Italy, past or present. 

Here’s what I was really wondering on the weekend.  What if the world has got suddenly smarter?  The evidence is everywhere.  People thinking without silos, with newly versatile interpretive frames, with newly assimilative powers of survey, with newly rapid and penetrating powers of pattern recognition.  And who is it that got smarter?  Not me, I can tell you…or don’t have to tell you.  Not my cohort companions who continue to pour themselves into well marked forms, the ones that wick away intelligence and culture mobility, their price for this creature’s comfort.  No, I think it’s "kids today."  (As a concrete test, compare the television created by David Kelley and the television created by Mitch Hurwitz.)

I think this is what happens when you grow up in a world that’s never still.  To think at all, you must think well.  (Well, not everyone.  There’s a "far shore" here too.)  But it doesn’t look comfortable.  No, it makes me think of a cat leaping up to a counter and landing on a tea towel.  He digs in for purchase, only to pull the towel out from under himself…and digs in for purchase, only to…   

I leave the rest to Bloc Party and the lyrics of a track called Pioneers. 

We will not be the first, we won’t
You said you were going to conquer new frontiers,
Go stick your bloody head in the jaws of the beast

We promised the world, we’d tame it, what were we hoping for?

Breath in, breath out

So here we are reinventing the wheel
I’m shaking hands with a hurricane
It’s a colour that I can’t describe,
It’s a language I can’t understand