Hunter S. Thompson died yesterday of a self inflicted gun shot wound in his home in Woody Creek, Colorado. He was, among other things, the creator of “gonzo” journalism.

The NYT recounts the way Thompson described the origins of gonzo journalism.

“‘I’d blown my mind, couldn’t work,’ he told Playboy. “So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody.”

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it “a breakthrough in journalism,” an experience he likened to “falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids.”

He went on to become a counter cultural hero with books and articles that skewered America’s hypocrisy.

A couple of points suggest themselves. They turn on what kind of innovator Thompson was, and how best to think about his particular engagement with culture and creativity.

First, it’s interesting to note that this particular cultural invention began with an act of “nothing left to lose” desperation. Some will be tempted to say that this disqualifies Thompson from hero status. After all, he was driven not be choice but necessity. Can this properly be called “innovation?”

I think Thompson deserves rights of authorship and hero status. Some people would have bowed before their desperation and given up. It takes more than mere recklessness to keep going in these circumstances.

Second, there is never nothing left to lose. At the very least, it takes a willingness to make yourself ludicrous. Thompson was courting ridicule. He might have made himself a laughing stock.

But more than that, there was imagination. This because we are never really “trying anything.” We are choosing even in our desperation. Choose wrong, and it really is just a fall down an elevator shaft. No pool of mermaids awaits s.

So it looks like there was courage, choice, and imagination in Thompson’s act. It was innovation, not brute reaction.

There remains a voice of skepticism. Thompson’s particular act of innovation, combining pages at random, was entirely in keeping with the cultural moment. In a sense, we could say that the cultural innovators of the 1960s were merely democratizing the aesthetic, cultural innovations created by European artists, especially Fluxus, the surrealists and other modernists. Here too Thompson is reduced from hero’s status. He is, by this account, merely part of the diffusion set that brings things from the margin into the mainstream.

I think this is too little too. Thompson was a modernist to the extent that he was prepared to set up shop where culture had not yet gone. One splendid way to get there is to refuse to form your first impressions and general observations according to the rules of journalism, to leave them be, to supply them whole, to pass them on.

This takes a refusal of the writer’s vanity, the one that says “look how fully, how formally, how artfully I operate the rules of discourse,” or “Look, how I add value by giving form.” Passing things along took a new kind of artfulness, that art that withholds itself. The hit against Gonzo journalism is always that it was narcissistic, that it always insisted in putting the author in the thick of things. But is this the whole story?

What Thompson was learning was something that we now take for granted: that the fresh, the vitality of cultural artifacts comes often from the extent to which they are created out of disparate parts. This is one of the continuities of the modernist and post modernist eras. We accept that creativity can be had by jamming together things that the rules of culture have put asunder. (I believe this is the best account for the surprising success of Strange Love, the show that features Flavor Fla and Brigette Neilsen).

I leave for another post the large problem here. The freshness of this strategy depends on the existence of subparts that are well formed, that are well defined by cultural rules. The moment we take the Thompson strategy down below the surface of discourse and begin created the bits and pieces without regard to a cultural code, this the moment that we are approaching the word salad (world salad). Sorry, have run out of time on this time.

Hunter S. Thompson, we remember.

Reference

O’Donnell, Michelle. Hunter S. Thompson. New York Times, February 21, 2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/21/books/21hunter.html?th

p.s., still a problem with MT.

More news that the “great room” is dying.

Great rooms are the spaces that absorb living room, dining room and kitchen, to create a large, open room on the main floor of the home. Pasanella calls these rooms the “signature space” of the McMansion and he suggests that they are as “cavernous and appealing as airport lounges.”

Pasanella says the problem is that as a room becomes ‘too giant, it loses its connection with its inhabitants.” This means that the NYT is now prepared to join the apostasy started by Susanka’s “Not so big house” movement.

This revolt has happened once before in living memory. Some families rushed to embrace the wide open split level homes built after World War II. But for some the sheer scale of this space began finally to tell.

One occupant of the mid-century modernist home put it this way.

“The major lack that we have begun to feel…is some place to retreat to from the very openness that we like so much. We need a small cozy, den-like room to sit in sometimes as a change of pace.”

Another said:

“We like the open planning, but there are times when human beings have a need to feel closed in and comfortable. As such times we use the library.”

Modernism demanded big, open spaces. They created the scopic regime, the way of seeing, that modernism believed in. They let in the pure light of reason, science and technology that were the future’s hope. They “made room” for individuals and families committed to new kinds of social and existential mobility. When people took refuge in the den or the library, they were not simply declaring a feeling for coziness. They were “voting with their feet,” and repudiating if only for a moment the terrible demands that modernism made on individuals and families.

So if we are now once more refusing big, open spaces, the question is what part of post modernism, McMansion grandeur, or middle class striving is under challenge. I am, for one, a little stunned. I give the floor to the reader: what factors, social, cultural, demographic, economic, aesthetic or other, are responsible for the death of the great room and the rebirth of coziness?

References

Creighton, Thomas H. and Katherine M. Ford. 1961. Contemporary Houses Evaluated by their Owners. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, pp. 219, 195.

McCracken. Trend Watch: the great room Oct. 19, 2004.
/archives/000208.html#000208

McCracken, Grant. 2005. More on great rooms. February 3, 2005
/archives/000291.html#000291

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Great rooms and wee spaces, February 10, 2005.
/archives/000296.html#000296

Pasanella, Marco. 2005. Taming Spaces: Living Large. New York Times. February 17, 2005, p. F1.

Susanka, Sarah 1998. The Not So Big House. Taunton Press.

Sorry about the absence of hyperlinks, something is screwed up at MT.

Virginia Postrel wonders in her intelligent way about the “what” and the “why” of blogging. Clearly, blogging is a medium still searching for its message. What is blogging for, how does it contribute to other forms of discourse, and, especially, how does it serve as a place of idea generation?

Virginia is concerned that there is a certain “hit and run” quality to the exercise that fails to “deepen the blogger’s own thinking” on the topic at hand. Bloggers are, to shift the metaphor, in danger of remaining the short order cooks of the intellectual world.

Let me begin by acknowledging the problem. It’s a problem. Blogging taxes me the way a particular university Dean used to do. It interrupts just enough each day to prevent certain kinds of intellectual activity.

But the risk of blowing my own horn, I think I have a way of solving this problem.

My head works a little like a lazy susan. I never know what topic will catch my attention, but I have noticed that there is, finally, a limited set of topics that do. Something in Virginia’s blog, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times spins the lazy susan each day and, before I know it, I am working on one of my defacto themes.

One of these themes turns out to be the interaction of culture and commerce. One of the subthemes turns out to be creativity. Over the 300 posts or so, I have accumulated several that address creativity. Each was written with a distant memory of the last one. Each looks forward in a vague sort of way to the next. But they are, finally, ideas on their own, so many bottles in the stream.

The good news is that there is an unsuspected mutuality here. When I look at the posts all at once, I am interested to see that while I repeat my themes, I don’t repeat my approach to them. As a result, the posts end up piecing together a multi-dimensional view, I would not managed were I to treat the topic head-on and all-at-once. Yes, things overlap, but they do so in that interesting post-modern way where one image is made out of many images. This is, in short, a good way to think. It may be a better way to think than head-on and all-at-once contemplation.

The posts we write over several years could be seen as so many pylons peeking out of Long Island Sound. Eventually we wonder if we couldn’t fashion a wharf out of these. Hey, this could be the beginnings of one of those pocket yacht clubs that run up and down the Sound. Several hundred members. Small to middling sail boats and kayaks. A small community of people who want to moor here, even as they take advantage of reciprocal memberships in other clubs from here to New Haven. (Really, when you think of it, the blogging world was probably invented for metaphors. They wanted a place where they could happen profusely, safe from editorially intervention. Blogs are a metaphor’s idea of heaven–the way we are merely carriers of the meme.)

Anyhow. My point and I do have one: posts accumulate. And, when brought together, they begin to network. Created discretely, they begin to interact with one another. Larger themes, and posts, begin to emerge. Before we know it, we’ve got a book on our hands. Or at least a larger constellation of some kind.

This method of book construction is, as I noted, actually better as a way to approach certain topics. Parallel processing brings us back to the same topic over and over, liberated from the perspectival tyranny of the classic French intellectual.

But if that argument doesn’t move you, this one surely will. Writing books out of blogs, proceeding by fragment and overlap, is vastly easier than the traditional method. In the old method, we work from the big idea down. Here we are working from small increments up. Bottom up?

Anything to ease the pain of writing must be a good thing. Blogs don’t have to apologize as the second class citizens of the intellectual world. They may be the next new thing.

For Virginia’s post, “The Cost of Blogging,” go here.

For an example of posts accumulating: “Where do ideas come from: the M&Ms way,” go here.

For another take on posts accumulating: “Blogging: what it’s for, how it pays,” go here.

On Saturday, Christo launched his “Gates” project in Central Park in New York City. He has installed 7,500 saffron-colored gates on 23 miles of park pathways. These will remain in place till February 28th.

Christo is a French-Bulgarian artist well known for his monumental interventions in public space. He created a “running fence” in northern California that ran 24.5 miles across the countryside before plunging into the Pacific ocean.

In 1995, Christo wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin,

In 1983, Christo wrapped 11 islands in Biscayne Bay in hot pink polypropylene.

In a surprise, cobranding/endorsement move, Saran Wrap announced today that it would release a brand called ChristoWrap. “We believe that housework is art and that housewives are artists. ChristoWrap gives homemakers a chance to bring new levels of aesthetic accomplishment to the refrigerator, the kitchen, and the home,” said a Saran Wrap representative.

Christo is famous for conscripting non artists as artists. During the making of Running Fence, for instance, he declared that any farmer who objected to the fence was engaged in art. “ChristoWrap will help make artists of us all,” he declaimed.

ChristoWrap will remain on the shelves until the end of the month.

References

For more on The Gates project, go here.

For more on the Reichstag wrapped, go here.

For more on the illustrious career of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, go here.

last note:

In a last minute announcement, Saran Wrap has said it will give a portion of the proceedings of ChristoWrap sales to the Orson Wells/Alan Sokal Fund for the Perpetuation of Contemporary Apochrypha.

News on the latest in the anti-American feeling abroad and it’s consequences for American brands.

According to the Edelman company’s annual “trust barometer,” a survey of 1,500 opinion leaders throughout the world, 32 percent of Europeans polled in January said they were less likely to purchase products made by companies in the United States because of disagreements with American culture. The Coca-Cola brand, for example, was “trusted” by 69 percent of respondents in the United States but by only 45 percent in Europe and 46 percent in Canada. Procter & Gamble products, which include Vicks, Folgers, Charmin, Clairol and Pampers brands, were trusted by 74 percent of Americans but only 44 percent of Europeans.

Edelman suggests brands avoid ‘treat[ing] Europe as if it had a single, homogenous culture.” Edelman says, “That’s one of the secrets here. There’s no such thing as global media.”

Exactly. And while we’re at it, we might avoid treating America as if it had a single, homogenous culture. This is another way of saying that glib, simple minded anti-Americanism is wrong for many reasons, but the most compelling is that there is no single American mentality or point of view.

Brands that stands for America may once have stood for a monolithic. (This might have been particularly true when they stood for mid-century modernism.) But now they stand for a multiplicity.

Or to put this in a more pugent marketing formulae: Brand America is actually Brand Americans, and Brand Americans are diverse. There are many ways to roll this out. One of the simplest is to argue that Brand America is about the Americans you know, not the country you imagine.

When you think about how hard America has worked to inspire, enable, and various license its multiplicity, it does seem like this should be one of the payoffs: a new versatility when it comes to crafting an image for itself overseas.

References

O’Brien, Kevin. 2005. U.S. Companies Rethinking Their Marketing in Europe. New York Times. February 14, 2005.

A report from the International Furnishings and Design Association (IFDA), released 4 years ago, offers some thoughts on the future of the home. These touch on recent posts here on the “great room.”

Home interiors … will change radically: the sharp delineation between living rooms, dining rooms and kitchens will virtually disappear…

This is the great room in action, consuming the domestic space around it, releasing formal space back into family life. It is odd this took so long. We were surrendering too much space to the demands of ceremony.

Some highlights from the IFDA study:

An overwhelming 92 % of respondents forecast that the average house will contain more multi-functional rooms

73% predict a move toward more open plan design, and almost 40% expect moveable walls will replace permanent walls in home interiors

71% of survey respondents believe great rooms will eclipse living rooms

There will still be dining rooms, but they will frequently be used for other purposes as well, such as offices or libraries, media rooms and guest rooms.

One of the study participants refers to “‘the big blur.’ Our homes will no longer be clearly separate from work, hobbies, passions, education or entertainment.”

72% of survey respondents indicate that it is likely that kitchens will increase in size.

Kitchens will become more significant spaces, both from a functional as well as a social standpoint,

the kitchen [will become] “almost a mini- apartment with seating areas, home office space, wine cellars, food preparation areas all vying for attention.”

I still believe that the freeing of formal space is part of the motive here. But I wonder whether the great room is not also being driven by the need to having spaces that accomodate our expansionary individualism. We are now typically several creatures: father, husband, professional, colleague, media consumer, householder and sometimes more than one of each. We want rooms that provision us in these capacities, or at least enable, or at least get out of the way.

A great room has the advantage of a versatility. It can be as many rooms as we are people. We can take a call from a colleague, watch a ball game, catch up finances, read the paper, plan the 4th quarter expenditures, contemplate taking the dog for a walk, prepare the batting order for the next Little League game, drive off the aggressions of a four year old, prepare a signature Cesare salad for dinner, seek out googled answers to errant questions, take the pulse of wife and family, plan Saturday afternoon, wonder whether 12 year olds might have had a chance to take drugs, and all of this more or less seamlessly. Living rooms would have been too small. Dining rooms too uncomfortable. Kitchens too particular. A great room is “just right,” an expansionary space for our expansionary individualism.

And now yet another development. The IFDA, in this study from 2000, noted a “contradiction” in the data, with some consumers continuing to adhere to “smaller, more intimate spaces.” And today I heard of a writer called Sarah Susanka who now has 800,000 books in print, all of them dedicated to the theme of the “not so big” house. This suggests another trend at work, one that cares for cozy spaces more than great rooms.

Hard to know what is going on here. Has the great room trend peaked? Or can we expect to see great rooms running neck and neck with nooks and crannies? And if the little room is once more on the rise what forces and factors should we say are operating here?

One thing is clear. Pam and I, living as we do in a place that it is not much larger than a Japanese hotel room, may not be comfortable but we are once more in fashion. Whew.

Reference

IFDA. 2000. Viewing a “Crystal Ball” of Home Design: Pioneering Survey by IFDA Predicts Dramatic Changes in Homes and Lifestyles by the Year 2020.

McCracken, Grant. 2005. Homeyness. In Culture and Consumption II: markets, meaning and brand management. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22-47. (appears in Apri.)

Susanka, Sarah 1998. The Not So Big House. Taunton Press.

The “not so big house” website here.

I was watching Columbo yesterday. I have to do something to recover between posts. And I was surprised to see the immortal Mr. Falk drinking an unbranded cola. It was the episode about the architect (aka Howard Roark, aka Frank Lloyd Wright) who deposits his murder victim in the foundations of a building. You know it, I’m sure.

Anyhow, they are digging up the foundation and, well, it takes a long time, so Columbo has a soda. The can is silver with a vertical racing stripe. And that’s it: no name, no styling, no branding. I am sure the producers thought a branded cola would be distracting, but I have to say an unbranded one was more distracting. It ruined the whole scene for me.

Brands have not been welcome in imaginary worlds. Ian Fleming used them in the Bond novels. Bret Ellis did the same in American Psycho. But generally brands are excised or excluded from acts of the imagination. Alice Munro’s characters never seem to buy anything and when they do, it’s always the generic choice. Smart shoppers, apparently. (How much of our literary culture has engaged in this wishing away of commerce? Quite a lot, it seems, and quite enough for a Ph.D. thesis on the topic. Anyone?)

Thanks to product placement, brands do sometimes make an appearance. In January alone, Rolex appeared in WB’s Grounded For Life, iPod appeared in NBC’s Committed, Oreo appeared in CBS’s The King of Queens, Nintendo appeared in ABC’s 8 Simple Rules, and Hershey appeared in Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle. (Watching TV, looking for product placements. It’s pretty much all I do.)

Naturally, we hate product placement. It’s like someone has just dragged a needle across the record. All suspension of disbelief stops abruptly. Oh, Rolex! And that’s it for our favorite show. It is still worse in the movies. And it is never clear to me why someone would put a $60 million production at risk by putting a Coke can on a table. The movie is diminished. So is the Coke can.

But now that advertising is fighting to make itself heard against the wall of sound that is contemporary culture, product placements of one kind or another are very much the coming thing. Product placement has been moving into the news for some time. It is now also struggling to get a foothold in the blogging world. ( )

Product placement is seen as a way of getting brands out of the dense shipping lanes of marketing into quiet water and real visibility. It is hoped that a Coke can will be the only brand we will see all movie, and certainly the only cola brand. (Though surely, it won’t belong before Hollywood producers are chopping up their movies and selling “front end” exposure to one brand and “back end” exposure to its competitor.)

I don’t object to the presence of brands on TV or at the movies. After all, the real world is thoroughly branded, and an imaginary world should follow suit. What I do object to is the presence of a brand: one brand, a sudden can of Coke that looks less like naturalism than a Martian landing.

Hollywood, repeat after me:

Many brands. Good. One brand. Bad.

Alice, may I have your full attention:

Many brands. Good. No brand. Bad.

Time to end the embargo.

Montreal the next new thing in music? The New York Times says so. So does Spin Magazine. We’re surprised that a place so obscure could have this kind of influence.

Once only the big centers, New York and LA, mattered. Only they had the self confidence of the innovator. Plus, they had the concentrations of talent, the force of competition, access to a scaleable fan base, a better chance to catch the attention of a talent scout, more media to help fan the flame of celebrity, quicker access to news of exogamous innovation, and more local experiment from which to learn. It was as if the big centers had a “gravitational force” drawing in talent and resources. But the truth was simpler. Big centers materially advantage insiders and penalize outliers…at every turn.

So much for the old days. Now obscurity is one of the places we expect to find the next new thing. Seattle, Atlanta, Austin, and Athens (Georgia) were all birthplaces of a creative impulse that helped transform music, taste, and the very sensibility of the moment. Obscure, little towns turn out to be “producing stations” of contemporary culture, and New York and Los Angeles must, sometimes, follow suit.

As we know, the new power of obscurity is partly due to technological advances. Cheap technology makes for cheap production and capture. This ‘tech” and some of the “capital” advantage, of the big city has disappeared.

Some of it is due to cultural advances. The big one here is a refusal to defer. The margin used to feel like the margin. If we lived in a town like Montreal, we believed ourselves too unimportant to make a difference. This is over. No one defers to LA or New York City anymore. (Not in music, anyhow. Design, perhaps that’s another thing.)

This advance contradicts the long standing “center-periphery” relationship between cultural producers and consumers in Western societies. And it is probably true that the West transformed itself partly because it was prepared to move the resources and the deference of the periphery to the center with so much dispatch and so little apology. Indeed, I may be wrong to call the rise of the periphery a “cultural advance.” I am pretty certain Matthew Arnold would want to call it something else. Culture, as he understood it, called for elites in centers to lecture or at least intimidate rubes on the margin. But from an anthropological point of view, it is an advance. The rise of the periphery means that there are more people participating in the creation of more various and vital cultural outcomes. Thus does Arnold’s Culture give way to something more…and a lot more it is, too.

Some of the new power of obscurity is due to changes in media and the marketplace. Staying in the know, once the bane of life in the provinces, is now cheap and easy. The internet helps here, but so does a surprisingly well-distributed underground music press. I am surprised how often I see quite obscure titles in really obscure places. (And I always think, that title used to be the New Yorker’s advantage!) And music is easy to get, too. Growing up in Vancouver, we would sometimes have to drive to Seattle, or, if a jazz fan, San Francisco. Now Amazon gets it here “next day” and iTunes, right now. (Disintermediation meets disintermarketing, or something.)

Obscure places “breathe in” better than they used to. And so do they “breathe out.” Any little invention that happens in an obscure place now has a better chance to “make it big.” Not so long ago, it didn’t matter how good you were, you had to go to LA or Detroit. We don’t know how many people as good as Dylan or Hendrix just never scraped up the money for a bus ticket. This is a debatable point, but I believe it’s true that the media and the marketplace are better wired, “discovering” solitary talent with new acuity.

So the periphery escaped the costs of the margin, which left only the benefits. Working far from the centers of influence and confluence, local communities can “go their own way.” No need to look over one’s shoulder. No grounds for “am I worthy?” self doubt. They only need get on with it. Before long, the local community becomes a productive cross roads of competition and collaboration, commonality and differentiation, praise and disdain, tradition and departure, locality and internationality of influence.

For awhile it’s a cozy “cosa nostra” (our thing) enterprise, at least until the national press corps and music labels come calling. Now the community offers up its riches to us all. Some of the players rise to greatness. Some stay home. The former are well paid for even a brief run of prominence. The latter pay themselves in indignation and the self righteous satisfaction that they did not “sell out.” There is a tragic third group that finds itself dwelling in the excluded middle, not famous enough to make any real dough, too famous ever to go home again. And everyone else cultivating bar stories that prove they were in early and out early…well before this little paradise was visited by the slithering, boneless viper of commercial temptation.

I’m impressed 1) how few people it now takes to create one of these producing stations, 2) how quickly they create the conviction they are “on to something,” and 3) how often they go about proving that they are on to something (and some of the rest of us go, “yes, I’d like to be on to that, too”). I think we have to assume that if we can find these communities in places as disparate as Atlanta, Austin and Athens, there must be in hundreds, perhaps, thousands, of them in North America.

What’s changed here is the notion that every so often we get the magical confluence of elements, ‘the right people in the right place at the right time,” and suddenly a new order of cultural innovation. (The way we talk about Motown, for instance.) I think it’s fair to assume virtually all cities are host to considerable creativity and that we are now, as a collectivity, “sitting on a gusher.” We are witnessing an outpouring of creativity in hundreds of places by thousands of communities, comprising many hundreds of thousands of people. Wow. Or maybe not. Could be, this is the predictable species-specific outcome when “our crowd” has access to enough nutrition, education, leisure, stimulation, inducement, technology and opportunity.

But here the thing that really stuns me. I am told by reliable authorities that there are now lots of people who genuinely do not care if their creativity is ever witnessed by any one other than a small circle of friends. Not only do they not care if they are ever “discovered,” they devoutly wish to avoid discovery. Creative, talented, accomplished, they never record their work. Some of it rises to genius, and then it’s gone. It changes constantly, but who would know. These strange people are the creatively solipsistic. They trust only in their own existence. Bless them, pity them, I don’t know. But apparently we now have so much creativity we can just throw some of it away.

Creativity, it used to be a class, gender, age and ethnic privilege. Only a few people got to do it. Not many more got to consume it. Now we are so blessed with it that some of the creativity in our midst can “go dark” and we don’t care. Because it doesn’t matter. Creativity used to spring from plenty only then to be taken captive by the rules of scarcity. Now what starts in plenty appears to be ruled by it too.

This puts us in a wonderful position as a culture, to be sure. With all those people experimenting in obscurity, chances are we will find precisely the music that suits the collective mood and cultural moment. The moment we tire of Atlanta, we may take up Montreal. When Montreal becomes tedious, we might resort to Birmingham, Queens, or Lake Louise. In the famous but not very becoming metaphor, we now have so many monkeys working so many typewriters, we can have our choice, and a succession, of Shakespeares. And this is no doubt a good thing as we become more dynamic, more various, multiple, as a culture. The ones I feel sorry for are the anthropologists. Because someone has to think of a way of thinking of all of this. I don’t envy them. I really don’t.

References

Carr, David. 2005. Cold Fusion: Montreal’s Explosive Music Scene. February 6, 2005.

Today’s blog is taking a little longer than usual.

In the meantime, please look at this Miller Lite ad. If it wasn’t broadcast during the Super Bowl proceedings, it should have been. This is the Madison Avenue we saw so little of yesterday in the era of “wardrobe malfunction” induced conservatism.

Go to http://www.preventtasteloss.com here

Click on “Take a Peek”

Click on “TV ads”

Click on “Foosball”

There is a second “unreleased” ad here that is worth checking out.

Now, please, go back to “Take a Peek”

This time click on “Behind the Scenes”

Click on “Author”

Finally, Mad. Ave gives as good as it gets.

It must be my world class head cold but I am feeling a little cranky about the celebrity culture at the moment. We are hyperbolically saying good bye to Johnny Carson.

Stanley of the Times appears both to criticize and participate in the trend:

Mr. Carson, whose death on Jan. 23 was treated in newscasts with the same consequence as a major space launch or a presidential address, was a little like John F. Kennedy or Toscanini: a matchless exemplar who spawned legions of irritating imitations.

“Matchless exemplar?” I remember thinking that Johnny Carson wasn’t very bright or very well informed. He used to say “I did not know that” as if there was something winning or clever about not have a clue.

If there was one person who made it “ok” to conduct oneself in mid-century American conversation with not a whit of wit or knowledge, it was Johnny Carson. If there is one person responsible for the fact that no one on late night television can conduct an interview to save their lives, it’s Johnny Carson.

And that’s a lot to answer for. Carson was an important creator of contemporary culture, let us give him that. But he was not without flaws and these live on.

References

Stanley, Alessandra. 2005. Carson’s Long Late-Night Shadow. New York Times. February 2, 2005, p. E1, E10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernstein,

Levi-Strauss. The Savage Mind.

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

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

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

Last night, the Golden Globes produced three candidates:

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

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

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

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

My portfolio:

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

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

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

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

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

References

The HSX website is here

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

HSX as defined by HSX:

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

post script

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