The new X-files movie is almost upon us, and the other day I stopped my feverish channel surfing to watch a rerun. It was amazing how bad it was.
In it’s day, in the first couple of seasons, the X-files was mezmerizing. It didn’t matter that it was shot in my home town, that the production values were modest, that plot lines were improbable. There was something captivating there. Fox Mulder was tortured, complicated and wry, qualities never before given a TV character. And of course Scully was the quiet siren, every thinking man’s idea of a bit of alright.
But this episode was appallingly bad. Poor Duchovny (Mulder) was pallid, Anderson (Scully) overwrought. And the problem, I fell to thinking was that this was a late season and by this time the plot line was so fantastically complicated that what made the X-Files ineffably interesting, indefinably mysterious had been burdened and broken. The show was over. I had this vision of Chris Carter pinioned like Gulliver by plots lines, rendered incapable of creative freedom by the promissory notes he had issued with each passing season.
Surely, it’s time to get rid of the idea of consistency. Plot lines, let’s think of these as sight lines, a general indication of where we are going, nothing more. Now that we live in an era of what Henry Jenkins calls transmedia, there are necessarily many versions of the narrative in play. Who thinks that new narrative should be found by the details of old narrative. Let us treat every season as a variation on the theme. We would expect to see themes that resonate, but surely the pressure of each new season should be see not the slavish consistency but the departures.
We had the happy opportunity of listening to the producers of Heroes at MIT not so long ago and it’s clear that consistency is a tyranny. It gives power to rapid fans who define their fandom by their knowledge of the narrative. Some of these people are not cocreators of the narratives. They are jailers, constantly vigilant for any, even unimportant inconsistency. On the other side, the newcomers look at the detail of a narrative enterprise like Lost and think to themselves, "there’s no way I can catch up."
Consistency, surely this is a cultural relic up with which we should no longer have to put.
post script:
See Rick Liebling’s very interesting contemplation of this theme here.
The thing that attracted me to the world [of bikers as depicted in the FX show Sons of Anarchy] was this amazing camaraderie. There was this amazing sort of familial "I’d kill for my brother" bond that all of them had that was just somewhat endearing.
John Landgraf, President and General Manager of FX Networks The 2008 Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour in Los Angeles Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Image: I purchased this image from Alamy.com. This is a huge database of photographs (12 million or so) and they now have very attractive prices for bloggers. See their website here.
I have spent most of July working on a project and the end is now in sight. At 155 slides, the deck is still too large, but I have a couple of days to weed and winnow. (If I owe you an email or phone call, expect something soon.)
As always happens on a project like this, I am an anthropologist at large, wandering around American culture, surrounded by great bodies of ethnographic knowledge and the certain knowledge that this knowledge is being ignored by my academic colleagues. They are too pure, too proud, actually to study their own culture.
One of the things that leapt out at me on this project was how much of the social world of my respondents is organized by "kidship." Kidship is the social connection established between adults by the relationship that exists between their children. For dwellers of the suburb, a very large part of the people we know is determined by the connections our kids forge witlessly on our behalf. Our child plays soccer? We are going to know a lot of soccer moms and pops.
We may take this as some measure of the American devotion to parenthood, and I am sure it has always been thus. But it is also true that now that the American corporation churns so, fewer friends come from work. People are still moving often, so connections that come from one’s locality are difficult to come by, except of course as fashioned by our kids. Kinship, the real thing, is of course a special challenge. Relatives are spread across the country, and gettogethers at Thanksgiving appear sometimes to designed expressly to demonstrate what a good thing this distance is.
Kidship has certain graphite quality to its sociality. There is also an easy familiarity between parents. As plenitude creates new diversity in the American social world, people can rely apon parenting to supply common interests and ready topics of conversation. It is not entirely different from dogship, that extraordinarily robust sociality that seems to spring up between dog owners in the local park. Americans who might not speak to one another for any other reason, who might labor to find something interesting or civil to say, discover that as a fellow dog owner, their neighbor is really very charming after all. Kidship has the advantage of being something still more urgent, child rearing an art and science that perpetuates its difficulty as American culture rolls bumpily on.
This was not the topic of my study, so I caught a glimpse of it only in passing. But the details were tantalizing. For example, parents tend to make better friends with the parents of older children. And this means that the younger a child in a family the harder it is to arrange a playdate.
Is this being studied by anyone? Probably not. Anthropologists are too busy pondering the moral, political and epistemological reasons why anthropology is impossible. Oh, splendid. Just splendid.
Pictured: a Mexican family, um, looking in a tree. Oaxaca 2007. That’s Sara Winge in the center background.
In Plain Sight stars Mary McCormack as a U.S. Federal Marshal who helps relocate witnesses and then care for them when they fuck up, which they do eagerly and often. She is, in other words, a kind of guardian angel.
The Cleaner stars Benjamin Bratt as a ex-drug addict who comes to the rescue of people in need, and then cares for them when they fuck up, which they do eagerly and often. He is, in other words, a kind of guardian angel.
We are drawn to the idea of angelic intervention. But of course TV has too much integrity to go for celestial trumpets, fluffy wings, smiling cherubim. No, televisual angels come in street clothing and street cred. Our angels are troubled, this is meant to make them troubling, and this is meant to turn TV into art.
As I remarked in the case of the CBS failure called Hack, these shows are locked in a contradiction. They reach for credibility but finally they promise us a universe more benign. It doesn’t matter how much credibility TV puts on the screen, finally these shows are loaded with sentimentality. They mean to defy that Nietzschean (and trans-party) anxiety that God has fled the heavens, that goodness is now AWOL and that angels are finally "just in it for themselves." These shows would like to be art but they are committed to corn, a place where art cannot find purchase, and ends up being lapsarian too.
Except in the case of half of my evidence. In Plain Sight is better than the formula. I thought the best moment, so far, comes when Mary’s partner levels with her. The two of them are sitting on the floor of a busted saloon. Death and gangsters hover.
The partner tells Mary that he wants out of their partnership and Mary protests,
You’re like my only friend.
The partner says, somewhat dutifully,
You’re my only friend, too.
He pauses, and then says,
The problem is with us is, I feel like I am the keeper of this exotic animal. I spend my time either protecting you from the world or the world from you. And it’s just a lot of responsibility.
Mary says, with no trace of awareness at how smart this is, let alone how unfair,
I’m sorry, but that’s your job.
And then she kisses him passionately on the cheek.
In Plain Sight is only a handful of episodes old, but devoted viewers are beginning to understand that Mary is approaching tragic status. She is very good at what she does, but it’s now clear she’s not much good at anything else. In other words, the "exotic animal" metaphor is right on the money. The only real relationship Mary is every going to have is with her keeper. Ah, the guardian angel turns out to have a guardian angel.
And this is the theme, it turns out, in The Cleaner. Except in this case, Benjamin Bratt talks directly to God. Everything else is being disintermediated in a digital culture, why not this? (And, hey, it could be he’s a Protestant.) Holly Hunter has her own angel in Saving Grace. And he is one of those active, engaged, dropping-in-when-you-least-expect-him kind of angels.
As usual, I am not sure what we are looking at here. A couple of things strike me. First, that our appetite for angels is growing so that even our angels now get angels. Second, TV is managing to wriggle out of the sentimentality that destroyed Hack.
And these might be related. As TV gives us female characters as post-genre and post-gender as the ones performed by McCormack and Hunter, is it struggling to find away to reassure us? Angels to the rescue. It’s as if TV has found a way to say, "There, there, dear viewer, do not be alarmed by these powerful women talking the world by storm. It’s ok. They are not dangerous. Look, they have keepers."
References
McCracken, Grant. 2002. Hack. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. December 02, 2002. here.
Maureen Dowd thinks there’s a problem in the Obama campaign.
She wonders whether Obama might be "trying so hard to be perfect that it’s stultifying." What, she asks, if Obama seems:
so tightly wrapped, overcalculated and circumspect that he can’t even allow anyone to make jokes about him, and that his supporters […] so evangelical and eager for a champion to rescue America that their response to any razzing is a sanctimonious: Don’t mess with our messiah!
Dowd’s concern has appeared elsewhere. Bill Carter of the NYT complains there’s nothing "buffoonish" about Obama and James Rainey of the LAT remarks on his campaign’s "irony deficiency."
All presidents are people. All people are flawed. All president’s are flawed. Clinton was a womanizer. Bush a challenged communicator. Gore a bit robotic. We know our leaders by their faults, errors and inadequacies.
But there is more at work here than a sophomore’s syllogism. Flaws turn out to be an essential qualities in the democratic process. And where flaws do not exist they are made to exist. We might argue that that’s what late night TV is for. Letterman, Leno, Kimmel, O’Brien, that’s their job: to point out flaws, and to insist on them where they do not exist.
From an anthropological point of view, teasing is a political act. It’s part of the cultural construction on which democracy turns. Otherwise presidents are too grand, their powers too great, their status too asymmetrical. We scorn our politicians to level them. We tease to keep democracies democratic.
Teasing must allowed into the the Obama campaign or there can’t be any realistic hope of the White House. This will be a test of the Obama team. How good are they at meaning management? Is there room for even this in brand Obama?
Reference
Dowd, Maureen. 2008. May We Mock, Barack? New York Times. July 16, 2008. here.
My Princeton hotel room this morning got the news from Philadelphia. There was an ad for running for Barack Obama and I was impressed, as I always am, by the cadence with which he speaks.
Senator Obama speaks with a special quality of self assurance, as if he has thought about everything he’s saying for a very long time and he has rendered a decision with such depth and profundity that there is not even the merest chance of contradiction. The Senator is sorry about this, he seems to be saying, but there is nothing to be done about it. That’s just the way it is. The Senator wishes he weren’t reading from tablets, but, well, that’s how the thing falls out.
Obama hits the last syllable of his sentences with assurance. And then, surprise, surprise, he brings the sentence in for the softest of landings. This doubles the effect of self assurance. He enters that last syllable like a lion and leaves it like a lamb. And that’s because, well, he really merely stating the obvious and it would be unseemly to pound the gavel or make a fuss.
This is deeply presuppositional speech and what it presupposes is that no reasonable man or women can disagree, that this truth is self evident, that the speaker is merely, and with some modesty, pointing out that all of us already know. More generally, this is the art of politics taken places it hasn’t gone in some time.
The anthropological question (and today, after the heated debate of yesterday, I am prudently and quite pointedly putting my anthropology hat back on) is where did Obama get this very effective rhetorical instrument. It seems to me ecclesiastical, but it is not the sort of thing he can have got from the likes of Reverend Wright. It is also a little as if from the mold of the newscaster, Cronkite etc. But it doesn’t appear to have a political precedent, not at the moment anyhow.
I think Obama has studied other oratorical exemplars. And I think he has made this a very careful and purposeful study. I leave it to someone with an ear better than mine to "reverse engineer" Obama’s style speech and figure out what these influences are. Some of the secrets of the coming kingdom are there to be divined.
There’s an ad playing on TV that has a graphic novel (aka comic book) artist, saying
"we like to think of ourselves as the people who do the R&D for Hollywood"
This notion was still circulating in my head when, Wednesday, I finally got to see V for Vendetta. And it was easy to see the scenes that sprang from the graphic novel. It reminded me of early Hollywood movies where you can still see the signatures of the stage play from which they came.
Today, I noticed that there is a new book out by Richard Zoglin called Comedy at the Edge. Zoglin describes the rise of the comedy club and its influence on TV and film. And it’s true; so many Hollywood stars began in comedy (Richard Prior, Jim Carrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Catherine O’Hara, Drew Carey, Liley Tomlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Tiny Fey, Ellen DeGeneres, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock, Larry David, Amy Poehler, Amy Sedaris), and so many shows go straight from the comedian’s club persona straight to the screen (Roseann, Home Improvement, Everyone Loves Raymond, The Drew Carey Show, The Larry David Show, etc.) R & D indeed.
It’s no surprise to think that Hollywood steals from everyone. But this favorite 90s metaphor conceals a more interesting creative process and the possibility of a larger cultural shift. I mean, was there a moment when Hollywood "rolled it’s own," when the studios created both the cultural forms and the entertainment that sprang from it? Noir certainly came from the world of fiction, but Hollywood did something more than steal it. Action-adventure, surely that’s largely Hollywood’s own.
And if between stage plays and comic books, Hollywood was producing its own, how is it that it was once again obliged to look "outside the box" for ideas. I am assuming that, left to its druthers, Hollywood would prefer to invent things in-house. I mean, who wants to deal with those quirky comic book guys if you don’t have to. If we can do our own production, we do.
The other question, the anthropological one, is whether we could capture the net givers and takers of cultural inspiration. More than most culture, ours is a place where meanings are in constant motion. And not because Baudrillard was right to say they have been emptied of significance and now chance one another deliriously in popular culture. This is wrong, and you would have to be a French academic to think it even vaguely plausible in the first place. Happily, it looks as if the Humanities and Social Sciences that embraced this lunacy are now coming to their senses (see Menand below).
The question is this: can we identify and locate all the new producers for Hollywood? It’s a long list: graphic novels, sports celebrities, the comedy world, youth cultures (several and various), other national cinemas, the avant-garde (music and film), other creative worlds (e.g., The Devil Wears Prada), and what else…
This is the sort of thing Richard Florida should be able to do. And this would be a glorious contribution to our understanding of contemporary culture. We need to see where all the ideas are coming from, by what means they "diffuse" to a place like Hollywood, who does the retrofitting, and how ideas are changed in the process, and what happens to contemporary culture as a result. How porous is it? How mobile are the ideas within it? What turbulence is created as a result of swift passage? What producing stations are becoming more important
The image above describes flight patterns in North America. Planes, I mean. What if it were a map of memes?
References
Menand, Louis. 2005. Dangers Within and Without. Profession 2005. Rosemary G. Feal. editor. New York: Modern Language Association.
Zoglin, Richard. 2008. Comedy at the edge: How stand-up in the 1970s Changed America. New York: Bloomsbury.
Has this ever happened to you? You are hot on the trail of exactly the article you need to complete a thought, a post, perhaps a book, and, oh no!, you hit the red light from JSTOR.
Chances are you have. As of June 2007, the JSTORE database contained 729 journal titles and over 165,000 individual journal issues, totaling over 23 million pages of text
Wikipedia says,
JSTOR (short for Journal Storage) is a United States-based online system for archiving academic journals, founded in 1995. It provides full-text searches of digitized back issues of several hundred well-known journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions.
JSTOR was originally funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, but is now an independent, self-sustaining, not-for-profit organization with offices in New York City and Ann Arbor, Michigan.
But I say, this stuff is bought and paid for. It is time to release it into the public domain. Surely, there is a university server somewhere that would assume the costs. Google, I am quite sure, would be willing to shoulder the burden.
The fact of the matter is JSTOR is holding precious resources captive to sustain itself…and its ability to hold precious resources captive. This content was created by academics funded by not-for-profit institutions. JSTOR is not reinvesting revenue in academic production. It is, as I say, now self sustaining in the worst sense of the term.
JSTORE is taxing public knowledge in order to sustain its ability to block access to public knowledge.
Anthropologists love to find documents that illuminate a culture. Here’s a passage I just found in Debbie Millman’s How To Think Like a Great Graphic Designer.
In the last interview of the book, Debbie interviews Massimo Vignelli (that’s him to the right) and bang, she uncovers a lovely little cultural account that is illuminating, poetic, funny and, for all I know, true. In any case, it takes us straight into the culture, with a brilliant designer, in this case, as our tour guide.
Debbie asks,
Why do you think so many people wear black in New York City?
Massimo replies:
Because of the image.
Debbie Millman:
How would you describe it?
Massimo Vignelli:
To begin with, black has class. It’s the best color. This is no other color that is better than black. There are many other colors that are appropriate and happy but those colors belong on flowers. Black is a color that is man-made. It is really a projection of the brain. It is a mind color. It is intangible. It is practical. It works 24 hours a day. In the morning or the afternoon, you can dress in tweed, but in the evening, you look like a professor who has escaped from a college. Everything else has connotations that are different, but black is good for everything. My house is covered in black.
Debbie Millman:
Are all your clothes black? Do you wear all black?
Massimo Vignelli:
Yes. Always. Always.
References
Millman, Debbie. 2007. How to think like a great graphic designer. New Yorker: Allworth Press, pp. 214-215.
There is a great article in Brandweek on what women want. Lots of experts are surveyed, including Michelle Miller, author of The Soccer Mom Myth, Ann Mack (JWT), Suzanne Kolb (E!), Adam Rockmore (ABC Daytime), Dan Suratt (Lifetime), Linda Landers (Girlpower*), Kelley Skoloda (Ketchum), Jack Bamberger and Nancy Weber (Meredith 360), an all-star contingent, to be sure. (Hats off to Marilyn Moore for assiduous research.)
There has been formidable change in the way in which women think about themselves. If we want a single measure of this change (something people can look back on in a hundred years and treat as a marker) we could do worse that focus on the new tag for Oxygen Media: "Live out loud."
When you think about how much of our culture was once devoted to persuading women to" live in quiet," this is an interesting development. Our culture once insisted that women not declare their intelligence, their initiative, or their sexuality. There were very substantial punishments for those who dared break the "live in quiet" rule. That someone like Oxygen Media can choose as their motto, "Live out loud" says that our culture is changing especially here.
But here’s the line that really jumped out at me:
Paradoxically, one effective way to reach women consumers is to be nicer to men. some advertising has replaced the "dumb blonde" stereotype with a "dumb husband." And that offends women.
"Husband-bashing is a really tired trend," says Kristin Petrick, director of strategy of SheHive. "I consider my husband my partner, and yet I see a lot of commercials aimed at women that make out husbands to be "the stupid male in your life." I don’t think that’s a very powerful message for women."
I agree entirely that this is a trend we have seen a lot of from the creative world. But I am not sure that the dumb husband is an idea created by advertising. As I have argued in this blog on a couple of occasions, the "dumb husband" was a role I think men carved out for themselves. (See my post, as below, "Who let the dogs out.")
I think that some men decided, now that women had new demands to make of them, the best idea was to present themselves as great, big Labradors, good hearted, not very smart, just barely housebroken and inclined to lead with their appetites and not their brains. It was an adapative strategy, because, hey, it’s pretty hard to stay mad at your laborador. I mean, really, he can’t help himself.
I would love to think that these comments from Moore and Petrick are a first indication that men are finally given up this dopey, demeaning transformation. I mean, yes, Labradors are lovable, but that’s pretty much all they are. After awhile, it starts to wear a little thin.
(I speak on behalf of all males to all males and I do so with a positively canine self assurance.)
References
McCracken, Grant. 2004. Who let the dogs out. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. May 13, 2004. here.
Moore, Marilyn A. 2008. What Women Want: The new terms of engagement. Brandweek. Vol. XLIX, no. 18, May 5, 2008, p. 58.
I have a friend who as a child glimpsed the possibility that he might be dreaming all the time. Everyone has had that "is this a dream?" sensation. Most of us shake it off. He didn’t. Not really.
What got my friend was the fact that he couldn’t prove that he wasn’t dreaming. The fact that it didn’t feel like he was dreaming wasn’t proof that he wasn’t dreaming. After all, his dream might consist in the conviction that he wasn’t dreaming.
He told me this matter of factly over dinner. And I’m glad we were in a restaurant. Because now infected by his epistemological panic, I felt the urge to start screaming, boxing my ears and carrying on like a deeply frightened, crazy person, and this sort of thing is frowned upon in the Harvard part of Cambridge. (In the MIT part of Cambridge, it is of course completely ok.)
Which brings me to Reverend Wright. What must it be like to be him this morning? On Monday, he gave his National Press Corps, a spirited defense of his religion, his church and his politics. The next day he wakes up to discover that Obama calling his performance a "spectacle" and "a bunch of rants,", black leaders calling him a "narcissist" and the New York Times editorial accusing him of "racism and paranoia."
If you saw the performance on Monday, you know that Reverend Wright will be astonished by this criticism. He spoke as a man who believed in his own grandeur, his centrality in the larger of schemes, the urgency with which the American polity required his guidance. In sum, it was clear that here was a guy who lived in a bubble, who lived in a dream. And this morning, he woke up.
Wright had no idea that he lived in a dream, I guess, because he must be surrounded by people who keep congratulating him on being so darned magnetic. Indeed, the dream was really well insulated. (Without an ethnographic investigation I wouldn’t want to say what the R value was exactly, but we have to know it’s high.) It took national exposure, following by almost unanimous criticism to bring him around. (We must hope it brought him around.)
There is a second, haunting possibility. And that is that Reverend Wright was actually engaged in dream defense. Now that African Americans have served as head of state, head of the military, and may yet serve sometime quite soon as the President, a pastor could be forgiven feeling that his very mandate to preach the way he does, his very self created centrality in the community, has been thrown in question. Maybe Reverend Wright was engaged in sabotage against the man who’s candidacy inflicted sabotage on his own place in the world.
Let’s go with the first interpretation, if only because it’s more Christian. Which brings me back to my theme. Reverend Wright was dreaming and he couldn’t tell he was dreaming and there was nothing in his world that was going to let him out of his bubble, back into the world. It’s easy to look at this as a catastrophe happening to someone else, a very bad dream, as it were, that couldn’t possibly happen to us.
But in point of fact, anyone of us could be caught in a dream. And this is especially true if we are CEOs. Every corporation has a culture. The upside of this culture is that it supplies a set of assumptions and understandings which when well tuned to the world help us navigate and negotiate its complexities. But when its wrong, it puts us at odds with the world. It captures us in a dream that even really good spreadsheets can puncture. Reverend Wright looks like a particularly tragic figure, but there are lots of CEOs who are "living his dream." They are merely waiting for the moment to wake up.
References
Anonymous. 2008. Mr. Obama and Rev. Wright. Editorial. New York Times. April 30, 2008. here.
What a day in Toronto! I am in town to interview women of middle age about chocolate. By the 4th interview my head was spinning: so much data, such a whirlwind of interpretive frames.
On the subway to Scarborough, near the Victoria Park station, I watch 3 girls in their early teens: one an African-Canadian Muslim wearing a chador (sp?), another women who appeared to be Ethiopian by descent, now dressed in a thoroughly Canadian manner, and their Eurasian friend, a women who entertained the car by dancing in the isles. She wasn’t very good at dancing. But she was young and beautiful and, well, she was dancing…and that never happens on a Canadian subway.
I remembering riding the Bloor line after the Blue Jays won a World Series. Everyone was just sitting there, minding their own business in that Canadian way that absents us from the situation even as we monitor one another right down to the ground. Finally, a Jamaican guy exploded with indignation, leapt to his feet and said, "What is the matter with you people? You just won the World series, I mean, it’s the World series, and you’re just sitting there." It’s what we do, our national thing. We just sit there.
Anyhow, the third girl was wearing the colors and fashions of gang affiliation…I think more as a fashion statement than a declaration of group membership, but who knows. And to complete this picture of pretend (practice?) menace, the girls were being aggressive with one another, threating violence, promising vengeance, wowing the car filled with the people in the car all of whom, including your trusty anthropologist, practice nonviolence as a way of life, blue helmet and all. (Who cares about fashion when you can wear headgear that says, "please don’t shoot me.")
And then, as if by magic, a man appeared on one of the seats. He was middle aged, deeply tanned, pretty well and casually dressed. He had a big sports bag, brimming with paper and clothing. And he was struggling with something…what was he struggling with? Ah, a metal can filled with paint thinner. He was grinning like a silent film villain, chuckling madly, establishing eye contact with everyone one by one. (Canadians are wonderfully circumspect on this issue. We can see sideways, so eye contact is quite unnecessary.) And every so often he would dip a piece of fabric in the can, hold the fabric in a cupped hand, put his hand to his mouth, and inhale deeply. Ah! He was "huffing," I think it’s called.
The girls were stunned into silence. I think they were surprised that anyone could be so absolutely menacing without the aid of fashionable clothing or gang colors. The question was, how menacing? Was this guy a threat? The girls thought about it. They seemed to decide the guy was harmless. But there was another question. Were they still menacing?
This year in Los Angeles there will be a Latino Jewish seder, a black-Jewish seder, a feminist seder, a male consciousness-raising seder, a gay rights seder and, just when I thought I’d heard it all, an S&M seder. I’m not joking: A group that enjoys that kind of thing is touting a seder that runs backwards: it begins in freedom and ends in bondage, which for them, I guess, is an expression of freedom.
Here’s what I want to do next spring. I want to return to 1955 and listen to every game played by the Brooklyn Dodgers, in real time, several games a week through to the end of the season.
I don’t know what happened to the Dodgers that year. I have no idea whether Brooklyn did well or badly. So if someone can contrive to play the radio broadcasts over the week and send me newspaper clippings at the appropriate intervals, I can live the entire season with each inning, each game, and the season outcome as a complete surprise. Within certain limits I can experience the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1955 as if I had found a seam in time, stolen back in history, and managed to come upon these boys of summer as they played a season completely unaware that there was a time traveler in their midst.
Thank god for the death of "living memory." None of this makes any sense unless the knowledge of the season is completely extinguished. But happily it is. Unless someone blurts out details or, horrors, the season’s outcome, I will be listening to the 1955 season as innocent of its outcome as the fans of 1955.
I am assuming someone has the tapes of the radio broadcasts. I am assuming someone could send my the newspaper clippings each morning. I am assuming that someone in the video game industry could actually mock up a street card ride to the stadium and that I could watch various parts of 50s Brooklyn passing by. You could scale this up to be as absorbing as a fan could want.
I love the idea of sharing New York City with people who are playing an Area/code virtual game as a result of which the city takes on new drama and urgency that completely involves them but remains invisible to me. (Come to think of it, this is often true of life in the city, area/code or no.) And I really love the idea that I could be watching some guy listening to a game in emotional time and historical time simultaneously. Is he rooting for the Denver Broncos now or the Bears many years ago? There is something charming about the possibility that he is agonizing over games that have the intensity of the emotional moment but are played by athletes now turned to dust. I love the idea of having the spring and summer of my 2009 commandeered by a season that happened a half century ago.
I understand this approach splices reality and history in a weird way, but there is now a plenitude of experiential realties out there now, why not this?
Geoffrey Frost was a CMO at Motorola and the man perhaps most responsible for the Razr. (The Razr is a hand set launched in 2004. Motorola projected sales of 2 million. By the end of ’05, it had sold 20 million, by the end of ’06, 50 million.)
I heard about Frost belatedly…about a month after he died. I could tell from the business literature that 1) that he was, or ought be, a kind of hero in the world of marketing, 2) he grasped the new rules of marketing in inspirational ways, and 3) he deserved a memorial more generous that the world appeared to be mustering for him.
So I created a virtual memorial on this blog, just a post, really, but I was gratified to see the post become one of the places that people began to leave thoughts and recollections.
A second chapter of this tragic story occurred in 2007 when stories began to circulate that Frost’s wife, Lynne, had committed suicide. I posted once more. Further details on Lynne’s death were not forthcoming. Frost’s public and private life remained relatively opaque. We had a small glimpse of his accomplishments, and some sense of the cost of these accomplishments.
A third chapter has been brewing for the last month or so. We have now heard from inside Motorola. Numair Faraz worked for Frost there. In a letter dated February 5, 2008, he wrote to Motorola’s CEO Greg Brown. Thanks to Engaget, we now have the text of this letter.
This is a story of self destruction, too. Fazar’s letter is heart felt, accusatory, incendiary, one of those "j’accuse" things. In the short term or the long, it must mark the end of Fazar’s career at Motorola.
But apparently different from the rest of the incompetent senior executives at Motorola — except instead of merely being inept, you’re actually actively killing the company. Your lack of understanding of the consumer side of Motorola doesn’t give you a valid reason for selling the handset business; moreover, publicly disclosing your explorations of such a move, in an attempt to keep Carl Icahn off your back, shows how much you value the safety of your incompetence.
You clearly have no interest in fighting the good fight and attempting to mold Motorola into the market leader it can and should be. Taking control of the handset division, as you have recently announced, will accomplish very little except but to give you an abiity to say, "We tried our best" — which you haven’t — when you finally do cart the business off to the highest bidder.
In order to turn the handset division around,you need to bring in another Frost; someone worldly and dynamic who is more interested in Motorola’s success than their own corporate career. You need to task the company’s designers with the same mantra that created the RAZR — make me a phone that looks, feels, and works like a symbol of wealth and privilege. Recognize the superiority of American software, and bring back those jobs so irresponsibly outsourced to China and Russia. Fully embrace embedded Linux and Google’s Android initiative, and take the phone operating system out of the stone age.
Recognize that, while rich people don’t really know what they want, the lower end of the market does — and fund the development of an online "crowdsourced" device design platform to take advantage of this fact. Get rid of all of your silly, useless marketing, including those overpriced and completely ineffective celebrity endorsements, and do one unified global campaign with Daft Punk (the only group whose global appeal extends from American hip hoppers to trendy Shanghai club kids to middle-aged Londoners). Understand that the next big feature in handsets isn’t a camera or a music player — it is social connectedness; build expertise in this area, and sell it down the entire value chain. (In Block.)
Fazar’s accusations may be true, but they are so vituperative as to discourage credulity. When corporations fall apart, things get very nasty, very fast.
The story in this story is clear. The world of the corporation is volatile. Motorola had the hottest handset two years ago, selling 50 million phones in 06. Last quarter, some 2 years later, the cell phone division managed to loss $388 million (Miller 2008). Hero to zero is around two years.
This is a sad story, any kind of failure is, but I think we might make these our take-aways:
1) that we are now moving at the speed of light. The Razr came out of no where, enjoyed almost complete triumph, only within several months to fall into almost complete eclipse. We see them on current TV series and think, "Razr. How sad."
2) that steady stream of innovation is not a zany enthusiasm of business press and the business guru. It is the new order of business. Motorola failed to find a replacement for the Razr. (Fazar blames Zander, the previous CEO at Motorola. He says that Zander blames Frost.)
3) that to survive in such a world, we need more Frosts. We want people who can nurture and enable innovation. Here’s to the memory of Geoffrey Frost.
References
Block, Ryan. 2008. Motorola insider tells all about the fall of technology icon. Engadget. March 26th, 2008. here.
McCracken, Grant 2005. Remembering Geoffrey Frost. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. December 19, 2005. here.
McCracken, Grant. 2007 Geoffrey Frost and the perils of the fast lane. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. May 16, 2007. here.
Miller, Paul. 2008. Motorola officially considering dropping its phone unit. Engadget. January 31, 2008. here.
