The reviews for the Ray Charles movie are now in and everyone seems to agree that Jamie Foxx is very good indeed. The New York Times called his performance “inventive, intuitive, and supremely intelligent.”

This raises one of the compelling little puzzles of our time. Why and how it is that so many people who begin their careers as stand up or improv comedians end up flourishing in more dramatic assignments on stage and screen. Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, and Jim Carrey all have demonstrated unsuspected dramatic abilities.

Surely, comedy is the last place we might expect to find someone capable of plumbing the depths of the human heart. Comedians are supposed to be interested in the cheap laugh, the easy out, the throw away line. This is why we contrast tragedy and comedy.

Technically, things are less mysterious. You can’t be a good comedians unless you have a suberb control of body and voice. Training for the stage is about learning how to make everything count. Training for improv is about seizing the opportunity. Both of these work well on film.

It is also true, in Mr. Foxx’s case, that he is actually very good at playing football and the piano. Not usually at the same time. And this gave him a useful preparation for Any Given Sunday and the Ray Charles project.

lI wondered if this might be a small part of the answer here: that actors tend not to be very good at much of anything except of course acting like people who are good at something. Comedians start later and they sometimes have real life experience on which to draw.

But there must be more to it than this.

Pam’s home is not much larger than a Tokyo hotel room. So we went to a couple of open houses over the weekend.

One place was kind of sweet and sad. It had an Asian theme: Japanese pottery, bamboo flooring, Balinese textiles, a Buddha sculpture, Tibetan art—an effort, apparently, to cultivate massive amounts of serenity. And it must have failed. I mean, surely, if you had a home this serene, you would never move. But someone was.

So who was the owner? Why was serenity so terribly important? And what went wrong? Was the owner a refugee from a new age religious cult? (Was this his spiritual “half way” house?) Was the owner a dot.com entrepreneur who was trying to shift down from the maniacal life style that had made him his fortune? (Was this house a kind of architectural air bags?) Had this guy actually found some place more serene? (I had a hard time imagining this. Anything more serene would have been stupefying.)

This is my idea for a game show. Every Saturday across America between 2:00 and 4:00 there are hundreds of thousands of open houses. One of these open houses should be wired for image and sound, capturing reactions as visitors move through the house. Once they leave the house, they should be discretely removed to an interview area, and asked to describe the home owner. The person with the best answer gets to keep the home.

North Americans have an astonishingly detailed knowledge of the world of consumer goods. We are very good reading the material record and leaping to conclusions. I notice that one of the demands of life in Connecticut is a mastery of the lifestyle implications of the “S,” “E,” “C” distinctions in the Mercedes line. (My conclusion so far: it’s illusive, important, and generally speaking intelligible only to those with many years [perhaps many generations] of residence here.) This would make for interesting, and thoroughly anthropological television. It would reveal a cultural literacy we all possess but don’t much talk about. And of course this literacy varies with age, class, gender, lifestyle, region (and on and on) and all of this would be very interesting to see. Most important? Someone gets to win a house.

No, most important, we would see how thoroughly our material culture makes our culture material. There are no cultural distinctions that do not have material expression (not for long anyhow). We have a more sophisticated knowledge of the social order that we generally acknowledge and it is contained in the fine, fine distinctions of the consumer culture. I can’t tell whether this knowledge of the material code is disaggregated because it has to be (that’s who we are) or whether its disaggregated because we cannot let go the old categorical systems. (I think there is an old Steven Reich joke: “Your socks are different colors. They don’t match.” “Yes, they do. They’re the same weight.”)

There is of course a less anthropological, more literary opportunity here. You remember the scene in Wonder Boys where Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) and Terry Craptree (Robert Downey Jr.) are speculating about the life story of someone at a bar, but then James Leer (Tobey Maquire) comes out of his apparent coma to supply an imaginative rendering so interesting and so plausible that you can hear Tripp, the failed novelist, thinking, “why do I bother.” I am not sure what the right prize here would be, but I am leaning heavily in the direction of a “S” class Mercedes.

I’m in Connecticut for the moment. This is from a phone call last night:

Grant: She’s getting back Thursday night, so the soonest she could call you is Friday.

Caller: But that’s tomorrow, silly.

Grant: Is it? I thought tomorrow was Thursday.

Caller: [pause] well, I guess I’m just as confused as everybody else.

Grant [to himself]: No, I think we’ve demonstrated you are more confused than everybody else.

Call it malevolent meccano. The new Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas looks menacing in an innocent sort of way, like a children’s toy working up the courage to consume the city. Not too big, not too small, Seattle, you can hear it thinking, would make a nice light snack.

Apparently, the frightening half of the message was deliberate. “I thought it was important that you have a sense of awe when you come into a public building, especially a library.” So says Deborah Jacobs, Seattle’s chief librarian.

How really sad. Jacobs is charged with getting people into libraries. Her institution is surrounded by formidable distractions: Hollywood, television, sports, theatre, blogging. She is also up against new competitors: especially Google which now serves each of us daily as a librarian without precedent or parallel.

Is awe really the way to make the Seattle Public Library more accessible? Clearly not. Awe will make this institution less accessible.

So what was Jacobs doing? I have an uneasy feeling that this is self aggrandizement. I think Jacobs figures that if the library is a thing of awe, she must be the keeper of awe. Koolhaas’ building has the effect of making her awesome.

I can’t tell you the number of times I have seen this sort of thing in the museum world. (Yes, I can: 47 times.) We don’t pay museum professionals very well. We don’t hold their institutions in very high esteem. And at the very moment, museologists and librarians should be struggling to return themselves to usefulness, they are inclined to find someway to dress themselves up in grandeur or, in Jacobs’ case, intimidation.

Well, bad luck on Jacobs. The Seattle Library ends up being intimidation lite. Whether this is incompetence or mischief on Koolhaas’ part, we can never know. I am betting it’s the latter, and his idea of truth in packaging.

Libraries truly are over. (Why they spend all this money on the Seattle one is a mystery. This would have bought a lot of public access for the digitally disadvantaged.) Once gateways to knowledge, the library is now an archeological remainder.

The librarian responds by protesting the institution’s majesty. Koolhaas may be making a somewhat different point, that the institutions that sprang from paper-based knowledge are, and must be made to look, rather less intimidating in the coming era of ubiquitous and instantaneous digital access.

Reference

Goldberger, Paul. 2004. High-Tech Bibliophilia. The New Yorker. May 24, 2004, pp. 90-92.

Last note: this is the 200th entry of this blog. Trade your ticket stubs for the beverage on your choice (small) in the lobby!

Ricky Williams is an All-Star running back for the Miami Dolphins who abruptly quit professional football just weeks before the present season began. (His team is now in a 0-5 free fall.) Ricky Williams was making $3.5 million dollars a season when he left the game. Esquire magazine caught up with him recently. They found him living in a $7-a-day campsite in Brisbane, Australia.

I was talking to the daughter of a friend of mine, “Sandra” we’ll call her. Sandra is a second year college student with formidable intellectual gifts and a superb pre-college education. She told me she was planning to work in a clothing store this summer because she feels, as she put it, “like I have been in a harness since I will 12.” After the rigors of her college prep, minimum wage at a clothing store looked like a vacation.

Usually, two data points is everything this anthropologist needs to leap to a conclusion. (That’s what I’m going to call my autobiography: Leaping to Conclusions.) But in this case, more data was forthcoming. 60 Minutes did a piece a couple of weeks ago on people in their 20s. It claimed that all of these people had been as children programmed to within an inch of their lives, and some of them have been pushed really hard.

“Hmm,” I thought, “just like Ricky and Sandra.” So that’s the question. If it’s true that young adults have been programmed and pushed, should they be regarded as “contents under pressure?” Can we expect some of them to bail out suddenly and without apparent cause. Sometimes this will be a declaration that they can’t take the pressure anymore. Sometimes, it will be an act of personal protest.

As Daniel Bell pointed out, there are two conflicting individualisms at work in American culture: economic and expressive. People are quite happy to take up the challenges of economic individualism but when they believe that this challenge preempts the challenge of expressive individualism, they begin to act strangely. They just walk. They say to themselves things like, ‘this [football or college] can’t be everything, can it? What about me?”

Ricky Williams is an odd fellow, to be sure, but what if he’s also a harbinger?

References

Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Ever feel like an aristocrat? It’s deliberate.

The consumer revolution was, and is, driven by the democratization of privilege. Goods and services once reserved for the elite are routinely made available to the middle class.

Every man has his “castle.” We eat food that 200 years ago was the definition of aristocrat privilege. Our clothing is better than most nobs could have hoped for. We have access to music and literature that once existed only in private libraries and exalted drawing rooms.

Most of this democratization has been driven by technology, to be sure. That thing we call a ‘telephone” accomplishes a task that once required a private secretary scribbling furiously. That thing we call a “kitchen” once required a “downstairs” staff of 10. (I recently heard someone call a dish washing machine a robot. I prefer to think of it as a servant.)

We’ve been stubborn on certain points. We continue to insist on driving our own cars, not a very aristocratic thing to do. But then this is what a taxi is for. All we need to do in a crowded urban centre is to raise our hands, and suddenly a cab appears. Surrender a few coins, and the cab goes away.

And the process continues. While I was doing research for IBM on the business traveler, I fell to thinking about how the princes of New York City travel. They’re the ones who maybe seen striding into gleaming towers without encumbrance. We know them in Manhattan by how little they carry. In this case, the status object is no object at all.

I thought of this as I watched people schlepping their luggage through airports in Boston, Chicago and Denver. Beasts of burden! Kay Lemon, my colleague, and I fell to thinking. Surely, there is a solution to this sort of thing. We wondered, “why don’t people surrender their bags to Fed Ex the night before they travel, and have it waiting for them when they arrive?”

It was too good an idea not to occur to someone else. Pam, my fiancée, spotted an article on the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel. Apparently the PBH routinely acce[ts guest luggage from Fed Ex. Once the guest has left the hotel, the PBH cleans, presses and repacks everything and sends it back. (Pam’s idea: “Perhaps airlines should reduce rates for passengers traveling without luggage.”) Suddenly, the schlepping is over. The security line at the airport is a breeze. And the airline no longer has a chance to set our suitcase to Argentina.

This is one of those business revolutions in the making. Now that we have an almost perfect distribution system in the form of Fed Ex, why not relieve the airlines of something they do badly? Indeed, why is anyone leaving the home or office with anything larger than a purse or a brief case? At one of the cross roads of culture and commerce is a steady stream of innovations moving from on high to the rest of us. Thank you, Monarchical Express.

References

McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb. 1982. The Birth of A Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

It’s customary these days to hear people in meetings talk about “bucketing” things. As the board room conversation goes forward, participants start “bucketing” this and “bucketing” that. They are making order of the conversation, but it feels often as if the roof is merely leaking.

It is not a pretty metaphor, and it doesn’t particularly flatter the people in the room. If “buckets” is the best we can do, perhaps this is not the most adroit conceptual activity, and perhaps the corporation deserves better.

Indeed, just about everyone I know makes fun of the bucketing turn of phrase. But we all use it anyhow. It occurred to me the other day that this phrase might be a symptom of the nature of discourse in the corporate world. In the anthropological manner, I began to wonder whether the phrase did not reveal something more fundamental about the culture in place.

Let’s assume, and for anyone who has spent any time in a boardroom, this is an easy assumption, that corporate discourse is a newly complicated thing. Under the influence of complexity theory and other ideas designed to give us a leg up on the new dynamism of the marketplace, we are encouraged to contemplate many possibilities from many points of view. Even the simplest problem admits of several, radically different, treatments. The boardroom task is to think its way out of this complexity to a plausible action plan.

The bucket metaphor has two advantages. The first is to let us honor the first rule of complexity theory: that we must work with heterogeneous problem sets. We must honor the complexity of the world by being very careful not to oversimplify it. “Buckets” is a good metaphor because it says, in effect, “we believe all these things go together, but we are not insisted how. We leave that for later.”

Furthermore, buckets allows us to proceed even when we don’t have full consensus. I am not talking about the political tensions that have always haunted corporate discourse. I’m talking about the multiplicity of points of view that a complex approach to things inevitably encourages, indeed demands. The “buckets” approach says, “we are not saying which point of view is privileged by this categorization. We are not insisting on one approach. By bucketing these considerations, we are agreeing to disagree at a later time.”

It’s not a pretty phrase, and it’s not an elegant one, but “buckets” does suggest that something might be happening to the conceptual architecture with which we address the problems of the corporate world as it takes on the new dynamism of the marketplace. “Buckets” are, by metaphoric implication, messy, uncertain categories. But there are within these limits stable ones. They allow us to say “We the people believe these considerations are somehow related and belong together.”

It’s possible that this slightly risible metaphor is in fact a harbinger of the new intellectual order and difficulty of discourse in a complicated and dynamic world.

More trouble on the hair front. As faithful readers of this blog will know, I have very short hair. I like to think of this as my tribute to Jeffrey Katzenberg and a touchingly frank acknowledgement of Hollywood’s influence…even on my hair.

But the real reason I have short hair is that I am going bald, and it seems better to remove my hair by an act of will than have it taken from me follicle by follicle. It’s better just to get it over with. Plus, thanks to Jeffrey and other metrosexuals, it’s the fashion.

But trouble today. On my holiday to Vancouver Island, Air Canada managed to break into my luggage and lose the electric razor with which I shave my head. (Their way of saying “thanks for flying with us…and the razor.”) On the Island, I resort to one of those blue Bic razors and this did a good enough job cutting things back. Pam, my fiancee, said, “no, it looks fine. Really. It’s fine.” You don’t have to be a highly trained anthropologist to see this for what it is: absolute affirmation of your skill with a Bic and the fact that you have returned to the shores of high fashion.

I tried the same thing today, but this time I used one of those small-bladed Schick razors and the result was disastrous. Great patches appeared on my scalp. “Hmm,” I thought, looking in the mirror, “this is not good.” Of course, I could just shave right down to the scalp, but I thought in the interests of anthropology, I would leave the patches and see what happened.

It was worse than Kansas. People sidled away from me in the drug store. I got alarmed looks on the side walk. Dogs regarded me with grave suspicion. Clearly, my hair has become a declaration of something people just don’t want to hear. And looking at myself in the mirror, I can’t say I blame them. Well, not every one reacted badly. The woman at a bookstore give me a look of the warmest sympathy, as if too say, “it must be awfully hard being a poet.”

We have seen lots of experiment with haircuts in the last few years. New subcultures use new looks. The Punk movement gave us several striking innovations, including the Mohawk and the Chelsea. Goths prefer something dark, dyed, long and moody. Country and Western gave us really big hair. Sassoon supplied an asymmetrical architecture for a decade. Career women in the 80s declared their seriousness with the blunt cut.

But no one has resorted to the “patchy look.” How strange. If the object is to send a signal of disaffection, of refusal, of new citizenship, surely patchy hair is just the thing. It says, “Screw you, I don’t care how I look. I just took a Schick to my head and this is what happened. I am no slave to fashion. No captive of convention. I am my own man. This is my remaining hair.”

All of the new looks (Punk, Goth, Sassoon) carried the shock of the new on first introduction, but eventually we said, “Ok, I get it. Carry on.” The innovation starts as a departure from the rules and eventually, as it forms, it becomes a new rule, a new form. But patchy hair appears to be un-formable. It will not “take.” Even the most radical social actors seem to know this. However innovative their intentions, patchy hair is one place they will not go.

And that for anthropological purposes is interesting. We are a society that streams with innovations. Even the really radical looks eventually shoulder their way into prevailing practice. We get used to them. Patchy hair shouldn’t be any different. (It is, for instance, less irrevocable than bolts or tattoos.) But patchy hair is where we draw the line. This says that there are some things that are inassimilable, some signs that will never scan, some innovations that are truly off limits.

Why patchy hair? I am sure “this blog sits at” friends and readers will tell me. And I know Steve and/or Leora will point out that artist X wore patchy hair for the whole of his concert tour in the American Southwest in the spring of 1993. (To which I reply, “yes, but no one followed suit.”)

Apparently, patchy hair stands as a declaration of personal distress and disorder. The patchy look says not “behold, I have departed from the world.” This is the look of a “masterless man” who stands not apart from social convention, but utterly outside its ambit. It says, “here’s a guy who is really fucked up.”

So what’s the anthropological moral of the story? It’s that there are some innovations that cannot innovate, some sounds that will register only as noise.

Patchy hair says that, for all our dynamism and diversity, there are shared rules and a commonality. All the post-modernist moaning aside, there is still, an irreducible set of rules, a “smallest instruction” set, still in place.

We have been so wowed by the post-modernist conviction that culture is “over” that we have failed to look for these rules. This is one of the tasks that must engage an anthropologist of the culture of commerce. What are the rules that continue to govern us even as we set about rewriting every other cultural convention? We must keep looking.

Next experiment: no pants!

I go on vacation for a week and NBC starts making decisions without my approval.

Conan O’’Brien is the wrong choice as a successor to Jay Leno on the Tonight Show. 

O’Brien is a good comic.  But he lacks the single most important quality required for the Tonight Show post: smoothness.  Johnny Carson wasn’’t very smart, very gifted or even very funny.  But he was the picture of self possession.  David Letterman by some appearances is smart, gifted and funny but what establishes his position as a late night host and a fixture of contemporary culture is his aplomb. 

Why does self possession count for so much on late night TV?  It’s because whatever else happens on a show, we want to know we have put the last moments of the day in the hands of a man who is in control of things.  Jokes, be damned.  Late night television is the adult equivalent of a bed time story.  It is designed to make the world seem ok.  It is designed to assure us that we depart this world for the little death called sleep with our soul or at least the world in order. 

O’’Brien is quirky and it’s a physical quirkiness—he looks as if he wants to crawl out of his skin.  He growls, he mugs, he twitches.  It’’s shtick, to be sure, but it is an unsettled performance and not at all self possessed.  O’’Brien is not quite as bad as, say, the late Sam Kinison screaming us to sleep.  But he’s not much better. 

So O’’Brien is wrong.  Apparently, NBC executives are thrilled that the average age of O’’Brien’s viewers is a full decade younger than Leno’s.  No doubt they think they have made the hip and edgy choice.  But edgy is unsettling, and unsettling does not work on late night TV. 

Now, it’s possible that O’’Brien intends to transform himself for the job as thoroughly as Leno did.  This was one of the great acts of compromise of pop culture.  Leno was one of the really funny comics to come up in a newly competitive era of comedy.  To take the Tonight Show post, he dumbed himself down. 

More to the point, he smoothed himself out.  Remember his early performances on the Tonight Show stage: elbows pumping, head bobbing, he was a snickering, ingratiating mess.  Not any more.  Now his performance is as smooth as the jokes are predictable.  Ah, the warm bath of bad comedy.  Nothing difficult here.  "Now I lay me down to sleep.”

O’’Brien can dumb down the jokes, but can he smooth out the performance?  Can he master the "palaver”" effect: that air of self congratulation that says, "I think so well of myself, I don’’t care how bad this joke is, or what you think of me for telling it”?"  I don’’t think so.  O’Brien doesn’t’ start till 2009, but I predict he will be gone by 2010. 

References

I am not sure whether friends of "This blog sits at" will recognize "Now I lay me down to sleep."  In 1950s Canada, they sent us to bed with a little prayer:

"Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
And if I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Now is the time for an American museum to stage an exhibit on the accomplishments, importance and majesty of the countries and cultures of Islam. (I don’t mean a permanent exhibit. The LA County Museum has one of those. I mean a temporary exhibit, the kind that gets lots of attention in the press.)

Huh? What a tremendously bad idea! Just about everyone would get on their high horse. The museum who dared such an exhibit would be pummeled with bad publicity, vilified by Mr. O’Really, and lose its funding for the next 100 years. It would be accused of giving comfort to the enemy in time of war.

But there are two good reasons for such an exhibit. The first is that it would be just plain interesting. The Islamic tradition and influence are extraordinary. (It is hard to imagine the Western Renaissance without the participation of the Islamic world from and through which classical texts were recovered.) How could such an exhibit fail to be interesting?

But we are not the “designated” audience for such an exhibit. The real audience is the countries and cultures of Islam. We want to make this exhibit something like an olive brand, a gesture of recognition, and a claim to solidarity. The designated audience is the moderates of the Islamic world.

The contest between the West and terror will turn, to some extent, on a second contest, the relationship between extremists and moderates in the Middle East. And the moderates are losing. Anti-American sentiment is deeply entrenched. There is a prevailing view that Americans and the West are hostile not just to the prevailing regimes but to the very idea of Islam. In this environment, the moderates have a difficult time standing their ground. In this “climate” of opinion, advantage tends to go to the extremists.

One order of business is to reach out to the moderates. As Thomas Friedman says, “We can train all the police we want in Iraq or around the Arab world, but unless we can strengthen moderates there — those ready to act on the hopes of the intimidated majorities — a decent future will be impossible.” How can we enlist moderates if they suspect we do not respect them?

Museum exhibits have a funny way of reaching out. We are inclined to say, “oh, right, a museum. Like that matters.” But there is something official, substantial, unmistakable about an exhibit. This is why nations use them with some frequency to “send messages” to friends and enemies abroad. Statements from a presidential press conference, white papers from think tanks, magazine articles, all of these have their place and their effect. But nothing says something quite like an exhibit. Nothing says “respect” quite like this.

References

Friedman, Thomas. 2003. Wanted: Fanatical Moderates. New York Times. November 16, 2003.

Pachios, Harold C. (Chairman, Advisory Commission for Public Diplomacy,) 2002. The New Diplomacy: Remarks to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, April 24, 2002 here

Schneider, Cynthia P. (U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands 1998 to 2001). 2000. Art, Culture, and Diplomacy: Three Links on the Chain of Greater Understanding. Educating in Paradise Symposium, Florence, Italy Palazzo Vecchio Salone dei Cinquecento, October 5th, 2000. here

Sardar, Ziauddin. 2004. Cover Story: Can Islam Change? New Statesman. September 13, 2004 here (with tip of the hat to Arts and Letters Daily here)

Permanent exhibit at the LA County Museum on Islamic art here

Quotes of interest:

Pachios (on the importance of Public Diplomacy, as above)

“Americans have become painfully aware of the lack of understanding—indeed, misunderstanding—between our world and the Arab world; between our world and much of the Islamic world.”

Senator William Fulbright (in Schneider, as above):

“The vital mortar to seal the bricks of world order is education across international borders, not with the expectation that the knowledge would make us love each other, but in the hope that it would encourage empathy between nations, and foster the emergence of leaders whose sense of other nations and cultures would enable them to share specific policies based on tolerance and rational restraint.”

When I hear a really loud noise, I’m pretty sure the world is ending. My senses stop working, as if too much data in one circuit provokes an emergency shut down order for all the others. And I can’t think. My wits are scrambled.

Clearly, cats have the right idea. The sensible thing to do is to hide under a bed until someone spends 20 minutes persuading you it’s dinner time. But let me warn you that taking refuge under a parked car is a lot less comfortable, and no one ever comes to talk you out.

One thing I resent about motorcycles, especially Harleys, is that they make the heavens tremble as if before the approach of a God. But the “god” in question sometimes turns out to be a greasy, 50 year old, biker with a prison record, a meth problem and a history of wife abuse. Unless of course he is one of those boomer executives who have taken to riding Harleys, in which case you can scratch the meth problem.

If we were to do the ethnography (to discover what the Harley sound means to the biker), some bikers say a hog makes them formidable, tough, and dangerous. That big, rolling sound makes them look and feel like outlaws. But the sound breaks the soft law of social convention, not the hard law of the penal code. So these bikers can commit an act against the community without actually going to jail. (Babies.)

If we were to do the anthropology (to discover what the Harley sound means to the rest of us), we could say it’s a weapon of class revenge. For this thunder has the ability to cut through the boundaries designed to exclude and diminish an outlaw biker. It cuts through the great leafy hedges and gigantic masonry of the club and the suburb.

The Harley sound goes right through. For a second, it says: I am here, you are mine. In a 60 minutes ride through a city or a suburb a Harley owner can interrupt and antagonize thousands of people, a welcome break from beating your wife or a fellow club member. The Harley sonically amplifies the rider, and sonically disarms the rest of us.

Clearly we need a new noise abatement policy and I was heartened recently to hear that Mayor Bloomberg has passed new by-laws. This is good. But we must go further. The trick here is to reengineer the cultural meaning of Harley or hot-car sound. We need to make it mean something that diminishes the “speaker,” not the listener.

Here’s what I propose, that henceforth we recode the sound of a hot car to mean: “I have very real emotional problems” and the sound of the Harley to mean: “I am sexually inadequate.” Clearly, both things are true. Why else would they protest too much? With this act of cultural re-engineering, we are not so much recoding as decoding the Harley sound.

What you can do. The next time a hot car or Harley intrudes upon your sonic space, give the driver/rider one of those really sympathetic gazes, the ones that say, “I feel your pain. I really do. We know you have a problem. But what you must know is that we are here for you.” Practice with me. Try the international signal for sympathy. Arch your eye brows upward, and tuck your chin to one side. Smile ruefully. Nod sympathically. By golly, I think you’ve got it.

Naturally, what these bikers are hoping for is a look of awe or irritation. If we send another signal, we interfere with this “social construction” of the self. We hold up a new mirror. Naturally, these people are not the brightest creatures on the planet. If they were, they would have seen through their behavior a long time ago. So it will take lots of people engaging in lots of sympathetic nods to have the desired effect.

But one day, with the blessing of George Herbert Mead and the other gods of the social sciences, we may once more walk down the street without fear of sonic infringement or the temptation of taking refuge beneath a parked car.

References

Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The political economy of music. Brian Massumi, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

First note:

Virginia Postrel has a wonderful piece in today’s New York Times in which she notes that Americans now spend “a greater proportion on intangibles and relatively less on goods” and that “new economic value increasingly comes from experiences.”

This is one of those pieces that make the tectonic plates in your head shift around. Among other things, it suggests new ways to think about the rise of reality television, restaurant innovation, vacation travel, the Bobo phenomenon, city redesign, and a number of other things.

We have been noodling around with “experience marketing” and the “experience economy” for some time now, but Virginia’s piece that is the first one that made me see the real scope of what we are looking at here.

References

Postrel, Virginia. 2004. The New Trend in Spending. New York Times. September 9, 2004. On Virginia’s blog here

___________________________________

Ok, on a related note, here is today’s post:

It was a little like having a meal with Sherlock Holmes. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Mark Miller was “detecting” the meal before him, a lobster dish with spinach risotto.

“They have rinsed the rice too often. They prepared the spinach and the rice at different times. The parmesan is ….” From a table at L’Epicier, a little restaurant in Montreal, Mark was able to reconstruct much of what had been happening in the kitchen over that last 60 minutes. Suddenly, the restaurant was transparent. Mark was looking into the kitchen, into the activities and materials there, into the choices, training, and very mind of the chef in place.

I don’t know much about food. I have about 4 analytic categories: really good, pretty good, ok, and not so good. (This is maybe what you would expect from a man who has exactly the same thing for lunch for the last 4 years. I call it ‘tomato surprise.”)

I ordered the same dish as Mark in order to see if I could see what he was seeing. Not a chance. I thought lobster was “pretty good.” Mark spend about 20 minutes talking about different kinds of rice, protein, texture, flavor stops, how lobster releases its taste, where various tastes occur in the mouth, how foods interact in the kitchen, on the plate, and in the eating. Where I saw a meal that was pretty good, Mark offered an account that precisely rendered, patiently offered, and absolutely ruthless, a catalogue of error from one of the best restaurants in the city.

Naturally, I played the Dr. Watson card as best I could, nodding genially as if this tour de force of perception and detection were not utterly beyond me. But of course it was.

Still, this may be the best moment of being an anthropologist: when the respondent begins to show you what you cannot see. It is an eerie experience, because you are “detecting” too. As you listen to the respondent, you begin to glimpse the things they must know to talk like this. You can hear the machinery of culture working, the many categories, the fine distinctions, the operations of assumption and logic. Suddenly, “pretty good” lobster on a plate springs into fuller view. But so does the food critic. In effect, you are borrowing the respondent’s eye to look in two directions: out into the world they see, and back into the mind that does the seeing. It is my favorite “out of body” experience.

Yesterday, I talked about Alice Waters, the Berkeley based founder of Chez Panisse. Mark Miller is another Berkeley product and food innovator. He was trained as an anthropologist at Berkeley and Oxford. He is sometimes called the “high priest” of Southwestern cuisine and opened the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley in 1979, becoming one of the first to use Mesquite grilling in an mainstream American restaurant. His Santa Fe Bar and Grill, opened in Berkeley in 1987, drew on Latin American and Caribbean cuisines exclusively. He opened Red Sage in Washington in 1991 and most recently Wildfire in Sydney in 2002. He has won the James Beard Award for Best American Chef—Southwest. His books sell in the 6 figures.

Unlike Alice Waters, Mark does not indulge in the great flaw of the California innovator, that self congratulation that says that the innovation that begins with us must stay with us. There is no insisting on specialness, no willing of privilege, no circling of wagons against the borrower, no cry of outrage that someone might want to make free with an innovation. Mark is happy, eager to be a diffusion agent. He wants Southwest cuisine to make its way out of his restaurant into the world. He accepts that compromises will happen and that things will not be perfect. He knows how innovations form in our culture. He also just happens to be one of the makers and masters of the “new trend in spending” that Virginia Postrel describes so well.

References

For more on the restaurant here

For more on Mark Miller here

“I thought I could organize freedom, how Scandinavian of me.”
Bjork

Bjork is a singer from Iceland. She was born in 1965 and recorded her first album in 1977. She was a local star by 1981 and an international star by 1987.

Bring up Bjork’s name in conversation, and there’s a good chance someone will say, “didn’t she wear a duck suit to the Oscars a couple of years ago?” Actually, Bjork went as a swan (as above), possibly the first time someone’s Oscar outfit evoked Greek myth instead of an Italian designer.

In 1997, Bjork released the CD Homogenic and the song Hunter. The video shows her singing, “I’m the hunter,” as she turns into a polar bear.

Listening to this album, you felt Bjork was one of those extraordinary people who could set up anywhere in contemporary music. She could be avant-garde and Vegas, experimental and accessible, sometimes in the same song. She was both the product of a global culture and its first perfect, perfectly mobile, citizen.

So when I heard the reviews of her new CD, Medulla, I got worried. Voices only, drawing heavily on Bjork’s Icelandic heritage and her training in modernist music. This would not be the first time a pop artist disappeared into experiment and affectation. (This happened to Radio Head and the world dumped them for Coldplay without a murmur of regret.)

Medulla is pretty wonderful. For some reason, you feel like you are “in transit” while listening. (I guess this makes it good “driving music.”) With the exception of the 6th track and the last one, there is no “organizing freedom” on this one. To evoke a theme from the “Thinking Physically” post, this album is a test of “shape detection” and gives little comfort to those who turn to music for “pattern recognition.”

The first listening is pretty much a blur. With each successive listening, you begin to “get it.” Literally. It moves from randomness to something take-in-able. Percept becomes concept. This is the traditional way of apprehending avant-garde culture, something we destroy through consumption. The more we listen, the less “avant” it becomes. (Ironically, this makes the avant-garde as disposable as the popular culture it disdains.)

There is no posturing in Bjork’s work, no sense of what Kuspit calls “avant-garde … artist as the symbol of heroic resistance to all that is oppressive and corrupt in bourgeois civilization.” Bjork’s music does not move away from bourgeois culture, but acts as one more investigation within it. Or, more precisely, she appears to refuse the distinction between art and bourgeois culture altogether. As the first perfectly mobile creature of global culture, she goes where she wants.

Too often, the heroic artist insists on excluded status as a claim to specialness. (“Defer to me as the master of the obscure and unintelligible. I am the god of hipness.”) This gets pretty tiresome, not least because it appears designed to exclude most viewers as clueless and unworthy. We wonder, “is this art impenetrable for the artist or the art?” Impatience turns to irritation when it becomes clear that the work is funded, more often than not, by a government grant or foundation gift. So much for “heroic resistance.”

Bjork does outrage our expectations but this is merely the result of her search for possibility. She is, as Levi-Strauss said of science, “always searching after that other message,” not the one that comes from the existing cultural code, but one that must be constructed out of shapes (not patterns). Music is one of the places innovation happens in a dynamic culture, as the new shape “returns to earth” to form patterns. We want people “out there” in the ineffable and the unthinkable and, when they’re Bjork, we want them reporting back. Get out your satellite dish, and have a listen.

References

Bjork. 1997. Hunter. From the album: Homogenic. One Little Indian/Elektra.
See the Hunter video here

Cowen, Tyler. 2002. Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Kuspit, Donald B. 1993. The cult of the avant-garde artist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 1.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

First note: The Carolyn Parrish post (4 days ago) continues to draw comment, 70 of them so far. At the moment, Truthseeker and Colin are having at it. It kind of feels like someone is having a donny brook in my living room. But let the games continue!

Now for today’s post.

According to the WSJ, a Hollinger board investigation accuses Conrad Black and David Radler of “aggressive looting” and “corporate kleptocracy” to the tune of $400 million. Lord Black and Mr. Radler stand accused of “lin[ing] their pockets at the expense of Hollinger almost every day, in almost every way they could devise.”

The 513 page report details the alleged abuses: $24,950 for “summer drinks,” $90,000 to refurbish Black’s Rolls Royce, $42,870 for a birthday party for Ms. Black, jets for both Black and Radler, and the subvention of homes in England and the US.

Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel, has a taste for extravagance of her own. According to the Times, she

“spent fortunes on designer clothes. A Vogue reporter given access to her closets counted more than 100 pairs of Manolo Blahnik shoes, 40 jewel-handled handbags and a couture collection that would be the envy of a first lady.”

The question for anthropology and economics readers is this: what the hell happened? Black was once regarded as a hero of the neo-cons. He was seen to be intellectual uncompromising, a captain of industry who cared about ideas. If appearances are to be believed, Lord Black got himself trapped in a cycle of conspicuous consumption that put his integrity and his empire at risk.

We may agree with Frank when he writes “beyond some point, across-the-board increases in spending on many types of material goods do not produce any lasting increment in subjective well-being.” Economic actors do at some point grasp this problem. Presumably, the 100th pair of Manolo Blahnik shows did not bring Ms. Black the pleasure of the first. But she kept buying them.

It is customary to think of this as a kind of madness. Economic actors, sage and careful in other things, can in some circumstances fall prey to what Frank calls “luxury fever.” This fever is attributed to status competition, self aggrandizement, and or the seductions of a consumer society.

There will be lots of speculation on this question in the coming days. Indeed, the press is engaged in a kind of “jump out” of Lord Black and now lovingly details his descent from power. (A “jump out” is, as you guessed, the opposite of the “jump in” with which gang members are inducted. The press has turned on Black.)

But why this delighted rush to judgment? I thought this is what we wanted to happen at the top end of a consumer society. We want to keep super producers in harness (if one may use so unbecoming a metaphor). As someone ascends social and economic ladders, don’t we want them to spend apace? Why otherwise would they keep climbing? We have no “sticks,” when it comes to a man like Black. We want all the “carrots” we can muster.

Surely, the last thing we want is to discover is that productive economic players are overtaken by a sudden sense of sufficiency. We don’t want Ms. Black to wake up one morning and say, “55 pairs of Manolo Blahnik’s, that’s enough.” We don’t want Lord Black coming to, and saying to Barbara, “honey, I think we’re done. Let’s cut up the credit cards.”

Just as surely, we don’t want Black and other players looting funds that belong to the share holder (if that’s what happened). But when it comes to their own resources, we want their consumer preferences to scale up endlessly. (“Manolo Blahnik shoes? Are 100 pairs are enough, Barbara? Do you have any Jimmy Choo shoes?”) Naturally, there is a moment of discomfort here: that so few should have so much.

But this is how we “incent” creators of value.

References

Frank, Robert H. 2004. How not to buy happiness. Daedalus. 133 (2). here

Heinzel, Mark and Christopher J. Chipello. 2004. Report Slams Hollinger’s Black for a ‘Corporate Kleptocracy.’ Wall Street Journal. September 1, 2004

McCracken, Grant. 1988. Diderot Unities and the Diderot Effect. In Culture and Consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character of consumer goods and activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rushe, Dominic. 2004. Black narcissi. Times On Line. here

Before I roll out today’s post, may I note that the piece on Anti-Americanism in Canada (Catherine Parrish is a…) continues to draw a lot of attention, with 40 comments and counting. There is an intensity of feeling around this issue I didn’t anticipate.

It turns out that the inestimably talented Chuck Freund addressed this issue a couple of weeks ago, when he observed the recent controversy surrounding the proposed sale of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Target. In the Canadian press, Freund detects an anxiety:

[T]hat a voracious and imperial U.S. continues to gobble up the culture, economy, and identity of a nearly defenseless Canada. The portrayal of the U.S. as the corrupt, grasping, and stupid giant next door seems to be in 24-hour rotation in the Canadian media, in whatever news guise happens to be available.

Freund may have put his finger on it. Perhaps this is a source of the anti-American hostility in Canada, the fear that Canada must fall before the American predator. May I say, editorially, that the way most countries secure their claims to identity and nationhood is not preventing the sale of department stores, but burning bright with creative energy and accomplishment. But then, poor Canada quite often asks for protected status and so creates a certain vulnerability, and the anxieties attached there to.

Find Freund’s whole post here .

Ok, here’s today’s post:

When I was working at a Museum, curatorial staff members were always ‘telling stories.” They particularly liked to tell the one about the “lost office.” Over the main entrance, there was an office occupied by the director, but at some point the museum decided to close it off and brick it up. I am pretty sure they let the director leave first, but, museum politics being what they are, you never know.

The lost office makes a great story. It fills people’s heads with Spielbergian fantasies. What would the office, locked behind its stone wall, look like now? Cobwebs everywhere, ancient artifacts unturned in the corner, and, no doubt, the last words of the director, scratched into the surface of his mahogany desk moments before he expired. The imagination loves dark, forgotten, historical spaces, and this one is perfect.

Curators tell this story with what Silverstein might call “pragmatic intent.” They giving the visitor “insider knowledge” and a little badge of membership in the charmed circle of museum life. We can be quite sure that the visitor then passes the little story along to other visitors, and claims the “social capital” that results. Like gazes, little stories form a small economy filled with value creation and value capture.

Every institution has these stories, and they all work pretty much the same way. They are one of the ways we induct people into the organization. I’m guessing that if we join Microsoft, we would be told little stories about “Bill.” These stories communicate essential secrets about the organization. And they drive the people at Human Resources crazy. HR has an official story of the corporation to tell, but little stories almost always tell another side of things. And too often, they get to shape the corporate culture.

These stories are charming even when they are wrong. They are quirky, imaginative, and captivating. (“Really, he’s still locked in there?”) But what they really do is to let us to divide the world into insiders and outsiders, the ones who know the oral culture and those who don’t, the ones who belong, and the drudges on the inside looking in. Little stories are the stuff of membership.

So what in God’s name did the University of Chicago Alumni Magazine think it was doing in the most recent issue? In a piece called “Myth Information,” Joseph Liss systematically reviews and debunks the stories that circulate on campus. Like the one that says that Ida Noyes Hall was founded when poor Ida Noyes was badly treated by campus sororities and committed suicide. Or the one that says that parts of the basement of Regenstein Library are still radioactive as a result of the nuclear reaction that Enrico Fermi created in 1942.

As a former student there, I can tell you we loved these stories. We embraced the idea that Fermi’s “gift” allowed us to glow in the dark and find our way home after a tough night of study. Glasses raised, we would toast poor Ida at Jimmy’s bar. We liked these stories not least because they made us a part of an institution that was, truth be told, pretty hard to belong to.

Like every great university, the U of C is a grueling, difficult place. A local joke asks, “how do you tell the difference between the undergraduates and graduates on campus?” Answer: the undergraduates are the ones talking to themselves, driven slightly mad by the unrelenting demands of the college program. Most of us felt like we were there on sufferance. One bad paper, a stupid remark in seminar, and they would send us packing. The University of Chicago gave membership stintingly, and little stories were one way we made our own connection. We might be one error away from ejection, but, hey, we knew the story about Ida Noyes.

Enter Joseph Liss and his debunking article. Most of the oral tradition at Chicago turns out to be false. No doubt, it was satisfying to bring the light of reason to our Pope-ish superstition, but, really, Mr. Liss, what have you accomplished? You have stripped the institution of an essential resource and the very stuff of membership. You have denied students the small points of purchase that secured them in a vertiginous world. Well done, Mr. Liss. I believe that one way the university can make amends is by walling you into an office somewhere…that the oral tradition might once again begin to flourish.

References

Liss, Joseph. 2004. Myth Information. The University of Chicago Magazine. August. 2004. here

Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description. in Meaning in Anthropology. editors Keith H. Basso, and Henry A. Selby, 11-55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.