I am in Toronto doing a Culture Camp today, so posting is going to be tricky, but I am half way through a reply to the comment that Chris Anderson made on Friday’s post.  Hope to have something in place by tonight.  Tomorrow, latest. 

I read last week about anthropologists engaged in the war effort in Afghanistan.  There is a "Human Terrain Team" working there, as the Pentagon searches for new ways to understand the field of battle.

Apparently, the terms of engagement there have been changing over the last 18 months.  Whereas Rumsfeld optimized the fighting force, General David Petraeus puts an emphasis on the social and cultural contexts in place. 

(It was my understanding that Rumsfeld was using new ideas of dynamism, some of them culled from Complex Adaptive Theory, to make the military more responsive.  His notion was, or may have been: if the military is maximally responsive, it doesn’t really matter what the social or cultural context is.  This is, often, the very logic of capitalism, after all, so it’s not a notion that’s entirely untested.)

The Times articles notes the participation of Montgomery McFate (pictured).  McFate may be considered an architect of the Human Terrain approach in Afghanistan.  In 2005 she co-wrote as essay that served as the basis of a Department of Defense program called the Cultural Operational Research Human Terrain System.  This program has been called "an anthropological brain transplant" for the military.

McFate has her Ph.D. from Yale and a J.D. from Harvard.  She grew up in a houseboat community in Sausalito in the throes of the hippie revolution.  As a teen, she was something like a Goth and sometimes like a Punk.  After Harvard, she had a go at corporate law, but decided, pretty quickly, that this was not for her.  It wasn’t until 2002 that she saw her calling.  After a long talk with her husband one evening, she scribbled on a napkin: "How do I make anthropology relevant to the military?"

Fellow anthropologists are unhappy with this undertaking.  Hugh Gusterson, a professor of cultural studies at George Mason University, says, “I think she’s encouraging people to do things that I regard as unethical.”  He has accused McFate of creating a "hit-man anthropology" that "prostitutes" the discipline.  (San Francisco Chronicle, SFC hereafter)

Gusterson sees anthropologists in Afghanistan as instruments of destruction. 

The thought that you would cultivate those relationships of trust and intimacy and then … go to the Pentagon and say ‘these are the people you should kill, these are the people you shouldn’t kill,’ that’s extremely problematic… (SFC)

But it is not clear that anthropologists are combatants in the conventional sense of the term.  The Times quotes General Petraeus as saying that social scientific advice has helped reduce combat operations.  Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, says operations are down by 60% since the anthropologists arrived.  By understanding the concepts of Afghani cultures and social tensions on the ground, anthropologists have helped remove the Taliban recruiting levers and its ability to exploit local tensions.  (This is another way of saying that the enemy has been using local, entirely anthropological, understandings to prosecute it’s war effort.  The military is finally fighting fire with fire, ethno-anthropologists with professional anthropologists.)

McFate is proud of her accomplishments.  “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology.  But we’re really anthropologizing the military" (NYT).  And she makes quick work of the criticism brought against her by other anthropologists, referring to,

their intentional disengagement from policy process, their uninformed unwillingness to learn about what actually goes on in Washington. There’s a blanket condemnation without trying to understand, which strikes me as particularly un-anthropological. (SFC)

I think she has this right.  Listen to the first paragraph of the petition that Gusterson and several other anthropologists circulated late last month. 

We, the undersigned, believe that anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the “war on terror.” Furthermore, we believe that anthropologists should refrain from directly assisting the US military in combat, be it through torture, interrogation, or tactical advice.

Is there something odd about assuming that what anthropologists do when assisting the US military must consist of torture or interrogation? It seems to me these petitioners are not very good at imagining what might make them useful, and that they leap to conclusions that assume the worst.  As we have seen, Gusterson imagines that anthropologists in the field would engage in a "hit man anthropology," that their task would be deciding who the military should kill. 

This is clear evidence, I think, of McFate’s criticism, of an "intentional disengagement," an "uninformed unwillingness to learn about what actually goes on," and a "blanket condemnation." These are unattractive qualities in anyone but in anthropologists they are deeply problematical.  After all, this is a field that justifies its existence on the grounds that we need to find out what people are thinking, that the world is wrong to proceed without understanding what is happening "on the ground."  There most certainly is something "un-anthropological" going on here.   

But here’s McFate getting at a deeper issue. 

The military is so willing to listen now … and for anthropologists to sit back in their ivory tower and spit at these people that are asking for their help — I think there’s something unethical about that.  If you’re not in the room with them, you won’t influence their decisions. (SFC)

This is exactly right.  For some anthropologists, there is no such thing as an opportunity cost.  Not participating in the work of the military, the state, the corporation, this is always seen to be manifestly the right thing to do. For many anthropologists, engaging with the world is always to enter the embrace of its compromises.  Anthropology, that ancient student of world-renouncing culture, has made itself world-renouncing too. 

I think the refusal to participate as an anthropologist in Afghanistan has problems of its own.  If this refusal makes it easier for the Taliban to recruit young people, to divide communities, to wreck terror locally and abroad, well, refusing to participate now has a cost. There is something to answer for here.

In point of fact, anthropology’s chief contribution to discourse these days sometimes seems to be righteous indignation and positions that are blanket and unsubtle.  In the words of Roberto Gonzalez, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University,

The American military is being used by and large from my point of view for geopolitical domination.  I think it is very problematic for anthropologists to be involved in a system of essentially domination.  (SFC)

Inclinations to generalize in this way sometimes costs a scholar his credibility, if not his chair.  But when it comes to talking about their own society, it is par for the anthropological course.  This is the disciplinary idea of a badge of courage, their cry from the heart, a noble willingness to stand and be counted.  Ah, they are nothing if not self-dramatizing, this group.  Anthropology has gone from studying identity politics to practicing identity scholarship. 

Anthropologists used to worry about "arm chair" anthropology, the kind of scholarship undertaken in the 19th century by the founders of the field. But I wonder now if the object of our concern shouldn’t be something like "high horse" anthropology, that inclination to address the world outside the ivory tower as if it were always and only an exercise in compromise and prostitution.

Some anthropologists may be too good for the world.  But they have to understand that their refusal to participate has consequences and that these consequences have moral implications.  You say McFate is an easy target.  How bout you? 

References

Gusterson, Hugh, et al.  2007.  Pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency.  Network of Concerned Anthropologists.  Circulated September 29, 2007.  here.

Rohde, David.  2007  Army Enlists Anthropology in Wars Zones.  New York Times.  October 5, 2007.  here.

Stannard, Matthew.  2007.  Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq.  San Francisco Chronicle.  April 29, 2007.  here.  (referred to herein as SFC) 

The Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT is hold it’s second annual conference devoted to the futures of entertainment.  It’s being held in Cambridge, MA, November 16th and 17th.  Seats are limited so book now!

More detail from the Futures website:

Futures of Entertainment 2 brings together key industry players who are shaping these new directions in our culture with academics exploring their implications. This year’s conference will consider developments in advertising, cult media, metrics, measurement, and accounting for audiences, cultural labor and audience relations, and mobile platform development.

Scheduled speakers include: Jesse Alexander (Heroes), Danny Bilson (The Rocketeer), Marc Davis (Yahoo!), Mark Deuze (Indiana U), Raph Koster (Areae), and Tina Wells (Buzz Marketing Group)

You can register on-line here. 

It’s here.  Google Powerpoint, aka Presentations, has arrived. 

I haven’t seen any fanfare.  It was rumored in February and again in April.  The official confirmation came on September 17, 2007 on the Google Blog. I found it at Google Docs and Spreadsheets when I checked today. 

This is a momentous occasion.  It marks the end of the Microsoft hegemony.  Between them, Google and Firefox now give us an entire suite, a web browser, a word processor, a spreadsheet, gmail and now Powerpoint.  God almighty, we are free at last. 

So why not more publicity?  Why a not a little celebration?  I can’t believe that I found out about my liberation by accident.  Google must do more.

My family will treat September 17 as a special day.  I will be very surprised if we don’t gather each year at the dining room table to thank God for our deliverance from the pharaonic Microsoft. 

References

The announcement from The Official Google Blog, here.

Have a go at Googles Presentations, here. 

Two new TV shows will run on Wednesday nights this fall.  Back to You airs on Fox at 8:00. It stars Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton.  Life airs at 10 on NBC and stars the lesser known Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi. 

Life has life.  It is a cop show procedural with a difference.  Many differences.  Actually, it renovates the genre almost completely.  Life does to cop show what House did to the medical drama, breaks most of the rules to good effect.  There is a putative reason why Life is genre busting, it’s that the principal character has been rendered more or less insane by 12 years of false and very dangerous incarceration, a cop imprisoned with criminals.  The less obvious reason is that writers and producers have taken up the new freedoms that cable brought to the networks, and mainstream culture. 

Back to You doesn’t…have life, that is.   This is comedy as if ripped from the pages of the genre handbook.  Not even actors as talented as Grammer and Heaton can get it airborn.  It’s like watching a game of ping pong under water.  You can see the jokes coming  long way off.  Vaudeville comedy in an era of improv. 

The good thing is we like Grammer and Heaton.  We care about the show because we liked these actors in Cheers, Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond.   And this affection will force us to watch as the show slowly loses altitude.  The first program got over 9 million viewers.  We will watch this number erode steadily.

The secret of TV in our new culture is that it must skillfully defy expectation.  It must work with what we know and take us somewhere we haven’t been before.  Life does this nicely.  Not least because Lewis is a great actor, and the latest proof that in the our new culture, talent counts more than good looks.  (And if this isn’t a measure of how much our culture has changed, I don’t know what is.)

Below, is my "TV table."  (Or you may think of it as one of those fiberglass trays that held TV dinners while Americans watched TV in the 1950s.)  Left to right, the dimension is whether we care about the characters in a new show.  Top to bottom, the dimension is whether we can tell what is going to happen in any given episode to any given character.  Back to You falls in quadrant 1 because we do care about the characters and we can tell exactly what is going to happen to them.   And so on.  (I would offer more exposition, but I really have to get going.  Plus, I respect my reader’s ability to work it our for themselves.  Blogging is part of the new culture too.)

Here’s what I found at the train station in my little town in Connecticut today.  It’s an ad for the Donald Trump line of clothing at Macy’s which has been, um, reworked by a passer by. 

Actually, I think what we are looking at is an almost surgical intervention.  The passer by has ever so carefully torn away the face of D. Trump on this advertisement, and on the surface beneath the original, they have drawn this effective Dorian Gray rendering of M. Trump. 

Sure we can say that this is a rough rendering but I couldn’t help feeling that I had never seen the man so truly portrayed.  The man himself, the man in full, the man unmasked that we might see him porcine in every nook and cranny

Here’s a closer look.  We have seen ad interventions of this kind for some time.  I believe Adbusters was advocating something like this, and kids were responding with enthusiasm.  In Toronto in the 1990s, it was customary to pass jumbo, Jeff Wall sized ads that had been reworked with speech bubbles.  Razer thin models would have bubbles that read, "Feed me."  Happy parents were made to say, "Don’t make me buy anything more.  Please."

Amateur stuff, really, and certain proof that brand hijack so completely misunderstood the powers of the "enemy," that finally there could be no contest.  The bus shelter told the story: Capitalism 1.  Adbusters 0. 

But this work takes it to the enemy with skill and viserality, if that’s a word, and my spell checker tells me it is not.  You know what I mean.  What we are looking at here is an amazingly successful intervention, one that truly does hijack the ad and uses it most ferociously against the man. 

Everything depends upon the skill of the intervention.  badly done, it’s a prank.  Done this well, it gives one’s pause, and M. Trump hooves.

We can imagine what Trump did to deserve this re-celebration.  He has been annoying people since the 1980s and his days as a short fingered vulgarian in Spy Magazine.  But I wonder if this is not the punishment that awaits the bully who dares speak ill of Rosie O’Donnell.  Rosie has her fans.  Her fans have their weapons.  The war is on.   

Entertainment Weekly was not kind to the new TV show from FOX called K-ville but I thought I would have a look.  After all, not even EW can be right all the time.

I arrived a little late.  I was upstairs hammered away on my book proposal.  I declare, never has a document been more completely or frequently renovated. 

Actually, I was about 12 minutes late getting to the TV.  K-ville had left without me.  And low and behold, I loved it.  Well, lest EW takes me off the subscriber list, I liked it.  Anthony Anderson, Cole Houser, and John Carroll Lynch have all found a property they can make their own.  (Anderson gets better with every role, but this may have been Lynch’s last chance.)

Tuesday, the next day, I tuned in for the opening 12 minutes of the "encore performance."  Just to see how they had got things started.  Oh, bad idea.  I began to like the show less.  The problem is, of course, setup.  It’s not that those opening minutes are bad.  It’s just that they seemed to remove the K-ville from K-ville, the wonderful indeterminacy that certain cities seem to have, as if the city were proceeding on many registers all at once. 

This is the problem with introductions.  They are the enemy of indeterminacy.  And this is why every film and most novels are better when we arrive late.  We are spared that laborious exposition.  And this leaves us something to make up, to guess after most of all, to work with.  And we like having something to work with.

Call it semiotic roughage.  When we arrive late to a program, there is grist for the mill.

Call it cocreation.  When we miss the exposition, we are obliged to make the rest up.  Obliged?  Thanks to the work of Henry Jenkins, we know that that’s much of the point of contemporary culture.  We are eager to make the rest up. 

But I’m not sure this is the whole of it.  I just like not knowing stuff. I like it when the "back story" is missing, when certain (especially heroic) motives are left out.  It makes the plot airier somehow…and more K-ville.   

Certainly, it’s more realistic.  As Pam is sometimes obliged to point out, there are a great many things I do not know, whole portions of the world that are opaque to me.  I am happy when what is true of my world is true of my television.  I am not confused or resentful.  I most certainly do not what producers to scream at writers, "Keep It Simple, Stupid."  I do not want is a plot that has been tidied up and made accessible.  In all things but one’s desk top, messy is good. 

I am sure that the world distributes on this point as it does on others.  Not all of us wish to be spared the exposition.  And not all of us want to to be spared exposition to the same degree.  Some want a little, others want a lot.  There is a nice mechanical here for the asking.  We could each of us decide to turn on new programs at the moment that works for us.  For some this would be minute 2.  For other, minute 6.  For still others, and in this case, the moment was minute 12.  We are effectively editing out stuff we don’t need. 

This is not so much cocreation, as it is "coediting."  And there are several possibilities.  We could come late.  This often happens at the movies in any case.  We could exercise selective inattention, zoning out at regular or irregular intervals in the course of the show.  This too happens a great deal, especially now that we are multiprocessing so much of the time.  (I only really pay attention during the car chases.)  And finally we could leave early and make up a conclusion of our own. 

Right.  Done.  Now where were you?

I had a long conversation with Sam Ford, a friend and colleague at C3 at MIT yesterday.  We were talking about what makes websites attractive, compelling, and engaging. 

Inevitably we were talking about bad practice, companies that treat their websites as afterthoughts or, as Sam put it, as mere "guided tours for the brand."

I was struck by what happened to my half of the conversation.  I began to roll out the scorn.  When talking about bad website design, I would relish how really bad it was.  I would hold the brand up for "how stupid can someone be" excoriation. 

Now, the linguists can tell us what is happening here.  This kind of talk has a meta-pragmatic function.  It builds solidarity between the speakers.  (The mechanics: scorn presumes that we both understand a topic is risible.  This presumption claims a commonality.  This commonality builds a solidarity.  Or something likes this, more or less, give or take.)

Solidarity is a good thing especially with one’s colleagues, but in this case it didn’t sit right.  In fact, I found myself recoiling from scorn even as I manufactured it. 

The problem is that this scorn must, I think, interfere with the dispassion with which we are, I believe, obliged to talk about contemporary commerce and culture.  It really gets in the way.  At the very least, we have confused the issue.  More specifically, we are using our talk to build solidarity when we ought to be using it to think about the world.   

But set the solidarity issue aside.  If we go into the mechanics of the meta-pragmatics of scorn, we see a deeper problem.  Scorn depends upon a presupposition, and this presupposition has the effect of making us assume the very things we are supposed to be surfacing for study.  More exactly, when we are congratulating one another for "getting" why a website is risible, we are assuming, not demonstrating, why it’s risible.  Worse, we have submerged the very problem solving that is supposed to happen not sub rosa but "under glass."

Much of this discourse of the postmodernist camp is presuppositional in just this way.  In moving from the Harvard Business School to McGill, differences in discourse became extra clear.  At HBS it had been considered perfectly ok to ask for clarification.  Routinely, faculty meetings would stop while the speaker repeated himself.  And sometimes the listener would actually vocalize his or her understanding of the point at issue, to show/see if they had got it right.  There was no shame in these requests. Very smart people were expected  to interrupt other very smart people, when they did not understand.

But in the cultural studies world at McGill, questions of this kind seemed to happen.  No one ever asked for terms to be defined or arguments to be clarified.  There was a prevailing feeling that "we all get this" and that a request for clarification was therefore unnecessary, even gauche, perhaps even a declaration of intellectual deficiency. 

What made this difference odd is the fact that at HBS, people speak in a plain style (a remainder of the Protestant roots of the institution, perhaps).  In fact, several meetings would go by before I heard anyone use a metaphor!  That’s how plain speech was.  (This is an interesting conundrum for Deidre McCloskey who insists that economics is rhetoric before its economics.)  At McGill people spoke in the abstract language of a high altitude postmodernism, complete with rhetorical stunt flying that never seemed to inscribe anything legible in the heavens above.  Even if McGill students wanted to, it’s hard to know how they would ask for clarification.  I mean, where would you start?  (This reminds me of a wonderful moment in which Ernest Becker having listened to a long, convoluted comment, paused for a Vaudevillian beat, and said, "Huh?") 

But there I go getting all scornful again.  And that’s wrong.  I think it’s fair to say I am not harboring a 19th century scientist’s regard for objectivity.  On the qualitative side of things, we want to be subjective, we want to use every bit of our "selfhood" to solve problems.  And I believe I am not attacking scorn as a rhetoric device.  Christopher Hitchins’ new book, God is Not Great shows us what it can accomplish in the right hands.

It’s this presuppositional thing that gets me.  Scorn submerges what we are supposed to expose to view.  But this is the very moment in which many intellectual bets are off.  Capitalism is changing at light speed. Commerce is changing, it seems, every quarter.   And of course our culture is now something like a blur.  This is not the moment to be congratulating ourselves on the things we "get," the things we "share," the things that are "obvious" and "ludicrous."  This is perhaps a time we want to be a little less Mr. Smarty pants, and a little more Martian.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Barb Henry on Flickr for the image of the Siamese kitten.  Why did I use it?  No idea. 

Andy Samberg is the SNL comic responsible for Dick in a Box, the skit featuring Justin Timberlake that got 10 million viewings on YouTube. 

His skit Lazy Sunday is credited with increasing YouTube traffic 83%. 

He is heralded as one of the people who will replace Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller now that they are on to grander things. 

Adam Sternbergh has an interesting treatment of Samberg in a July issue of New York Magazine.  He quotes Mr. Samberg as saying,

When I was growing up, I was into movies like Ace Ventura and Billy Madison and Airplane. You know, movies where it’s like, ‘Welcome to Crazy World!’ That to me was so refreshing and freeing—that people actually made a whole movie about bullshit.

Ace Ventura, freeing?  Funny, yes.  Crazy world, check.  Refreshing, sure.  But freeing?

And then you discover that Andy grew up in Berkeley. 

References

Sternbergh, Adam.  2007.  Three Easy Steps to Comedy Stardom.  New York Magazine. July 23, 2007. here. 

I was at an event last night that took place at the intersection of culture, capital and technology.  (To protect everyone’s anonymity, I won’t say more.) 

Several tech people spoke with loathing about Google.  One of the notions seemed to be that this corporation, made virtuous by its determination not to be like Microsoft, is now quite a lot like Microsoft: large, dangerous, another brand behaving badly.  The slogan "don’t be evil" sloughed the negative.  Interesting.

Is this true?  I don’t know and I hope not.  But it might be early warning.  Diffusion theory tells us that the future can be read if we can just get to the top of the diffusion path.  If the early adopters are bailing out, someone like me, a middle adopter, might eventually follow suit.  I won’t know why I’m now longer pro-Google.  I just won’t be.  This is the way that brands come and go.  This is one of the ways Google eclipsed Microsoft.   

The diffusion theory here comes from the German sociologist Simmel.  This says that adoption runs like a pig through a python.  The earliest adopters take hold of the pig and then three things happen. 

1) The later adopters go, "Pig!  Yes, please.  Now that I know about it, and now that it has been approved by my betters, I would very much like some pig." 

2) The early adopters go, "Oh, please.  Now that our lessers are consuming pig, we’re not interested" and they bail out.

3) Eventually, the later adopters notice that the early adopters have bailed, and they bail, too. 

Thus does a bump run through the python.  As each later group adopts, each previous group repudiates.  (Of course there are always extenuating circumstances.  Adoption is also decided by the value created by competing parties.  Simmel’s theory accounts only for the effects of admiration and imitation.)

Now, the marketing community is keenly interested in buzz, word of mouth and the tipping point.  But many marketers seem to believe you get to keep the early adopters.  They act as if the python keeps filling up from one end to the other.  In their view, apparently, the adoption process is not a running bump. It’s a filling up. 

For these marketers, all we have to do is to ignite interest and watch diffusion happen.  We never have to worry about what we might call the classic Simmellian question: what are our early adopters doing, and what happens when they bail?

Last night, I might have been listening to the early adopters signaling that they are done with the brand. And it can only be a matter of time when an middle adopter like me begins to have doubts.  This is the moment for Google to intervene, and reprogram the diffusion effect.  That’s what marketing’s for.  Maybe it’s time to reach out and rebuild the relationship with the early adopters.

I might be wrong.  Maybe the word-of-mouth community is all over this.  Would love to hear.   

Saving Grace debuted last night. 

Entertainment Weekly and Henry Goldblatt gave high marks to Holly Hunter as Detective Grace Hanadarko.  Predictably, her performance was flabbergastingly good. 

What Goldblatt didn’t like was the the "heavenly subplot" that suggests that Grace is the recipient of divine intervention.  I do see what he’s saying.  TV now resorts to intervention of divine and supernatural nature too frequently, from Joan of Arcadia to John from Cincinnatti. 

But I think this plot line is here for a reason.  (And it’s not just we are culture keen on organized religion and every kind of spirituality.)  "Heavenly subplots"  are useful.

Here’s what I mean.  Ours is a culture where genre is being loosened and elements of the imponderable are being let in.  Even the most predictable cultural artifact will sometimes have elements we don’t quite "get."  This was once the trade mark, the defining feature, of avant garde culture where artists have taken joy in creating art that evades our ability to make it make sense.  (According to the trade-off, only art that refuses conventional meanings can capture new ones.)

The history of Hollywood is the story of a "creative tension" between producers who want things to make perfect sense, and writers and directors who want to open up the semantic field and let in subtlety, nuance, and things that tremble on the edge of the intelligible.   

For a long while, the producers were winning, and this is a principal reason Hollywood was so robust as a cultural form and so successful as a cultural import. 

But now, writers and directors are making a little headway.  This is due to many things, and HBO and cable can take much of the credit.  But it is also due to the fact that our culture is getting less intimidated by difficulty, and a lot better working with relatively unformed materials.  A creative team can dial back the "keep it simple, stupid" advice and fill a project with notes that are strange, wonderful and sometimes downright inpenetrable.

Naturally, the war continues. Producers still want things to remain full-impact obvious.  And when the creative team can’t stand it anymore, they have a "last chance" strategy.  It’s divine intervention.

The divine element certifies plot elements that are hard to understand.  After all, God works in mysterious ways. This is "premise" you might say of religious discourse.  Now, the creative team has the right to loose the bounds of genre and construct a world that’s less formed.   Now they have a license of forgivable mystery.   

I think that might be what is happening in Saving Grace.  Naturally, when you have an actor as good as Holly Hunter, you can do anything you want.  On the other hand, perhaps TNT, the producing partner, is not as open handed as HBO. Perhaps, it was necessary to use a heavenly subplot to smuggle in more genuinely creative options. 

Divine mystery is EZ mystery. It’s certified mystery.  Everyone knows what it is.  The question to ask is whether TNT was right to think that mystery here needed certification.  Hey, they may be right.  Or maybe because they are relatively new to the producing game, they are working up to creative risk by stages.  It might even be that the wonderful performance we get from Holly Hunter was actually "purchased" by this divine certification approach.  It was the price the creatives had to pay to give her this room and us this gift. 

I don’t pretend to know.  This much I think is clear.  The center of our culture is moving away from the days of "big studio simplicity" and towards, lets call it, "cable complexity."  And in this view, divine intervention as a strategy at TNT may be seen as the swing, the intermediate, position. 

References

Goldblatt, Henry.  2007.  Holly Holy.  Entertainment Weekly.  July 27, 2007, p. 58.here. 

I got to see the first episode of Mad Men last night.  It’s a new AMC series from Matthew Weiner.  It stars Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, Vincent Kartheiser, January Jones, and Christina Hendricks, and runs Thursday nights at 10:00.

Most things about this show are engaging, from its magnificent opening sequence to the casting, music, sets, dialog, and plot lines. 

Ah, plot lines.  Remember when these were the same as sight lines?  We grasped them at a glance, a world made perfectly proportioned and intelligible.  Happily, several of the plot lines in Mad Men are not at all like sight lines.  We don’t know what’s going to happen.  Weiner and director Alan Taylor do not telegraph what’s going to happen.  Our intelligence is respected.  Our participation is invited.

But there is one plot line that works exactly like a sight line.  It is central idea of this series that the ad executive in 1960 was craven, soulless manipulator.  In this first episode, Don Draper, creative director of the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency, is trying to find a way to sell a product he knows to be dangerous.  But of course he does find a way, because, you see, he is an ad man, and the stereotype tells us that ad men in the post war period were deeply complicit in the enterprise to enlist Americans in a cargo cult of materialism and dumb down American culture. 

Matthew Weiner takes aim at many of the horrors of this period, women treated in a manner that was highhanded, diminishing and abusive, anti-Semitism both casual and ubiquitous,  gay men obliged to conceal their sexual identities, executives who never escaped the Frat house mentality that shaped them in college. 

But he missed one stereotype completely: that ad men prayed upon culture and consumers.  Bad luck, old chum,  otherwise Man Men is great television.

References

The AMC webpage for Mad Men is  here.

For another view of the advertising man in this period, see my own poor effort:

McCracken, Grant. 2007.  When Cars Could Fly.  Pp. 54-90, In Culture and Consumption II: markets, meanings, and brand management.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

post script:

The dialog is pretty wonderful.  Don Draper is taking the advice of the agency head of research, a German trained Freudian psychologist who stands in, one guesses, for Hans Dichter.   Dr. Gutmann says that no health claims may be made on behalf of a cigarette brand, on pain of government intervention. 

She says,

"We must police ourselves."

The art director says,

"There’s your slogan." 

I spent the morning removing Ani DiFranco lyrics from my book manuscript.  I was obliged to do so because DiFranco had refused me permission to use them, despite two emails to Righteous Babe Records that were thorough, pointed and courtesy. 

It’s not as if DiFranco had anything to fear from this anthropologist.  My treatment was laudatory.  I regard her as a transformational exemplar. Here’s my opening sentence for her from the book.

Ani DiFranco is a phenomenon, largely self taught, almost entirely self invented, the creator of a genre of music, the founder of her own record company, and probably the most gifted feminist performer at work in the U.S. today.

And it’s not like I was asking for the catalogue, probably around 130 words taken from a variety of songs.   I think this represents a very nervous eye on the copyright watch. 

DiFranco is entitled to control copyright in this way, but it is also worth observing that she has made a career mocking music labels for their narrow, controlling ways.  Apparently, it’s ok for her to act this way. 

And odd too.  This is not the DiFranco you think you see on stage and in the ones and zeros.  I guess this tells us that she never was what she contrived to seem, a champion of an open source culture. 

DiFranco’s contribution to the open source culture came in the powerful argument that women should decide who they are, not men, and that individual women should decide who they are, not groups of women.  Or to use the more particular language of open source, DiFranco seemed to say that every women has the right to do her own coding, to construct herself according to her own objectives out of our her scripts and routines, and that she is free  to refuse "sealed code" from higher authorities and the originating software provider.

The second possibility is that DiFranco is aging, changing, narrowing, risking less and controlling more. 

I guess the transformational career continues. 

An apology: Friday I posted a reaction to a piece  in Wall Street Journal called The Rich are Duller.  I took aim at the man I took to be the author of this piece Robert H. Frank, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University.  Thanks to a kind comment by Jim Twitchell (below) I now see the article was written by Robert Frank of the Wall Street Journal.  My sincere apologies to Mr. Robert Frank and Mr. Robert Frank. 

References

Frank, Robert.  2007.  The Rich Are Duller: new class of "Yawns" spurns yachts, wears Dockers in bid to be normal.  Wall Street Journal.  July 13, 2007, pp. W1-W2. 

I took this picture last night in Spanish Harlem.  Good, eh?  Pam and I were on our way to Rao’s for dinner.  It’s just around the corner at Pleasant Avenue and 114th street. 

Rao’s isn’t taking reservations for 2007.  They’re full up.  We thought that if we went for a drink, and someone canceled.  You know, it could happen. 

But of course it didn’t happen.  We showed up way too early, around 6:30, and the guys in the kitchen were eating their dinner.  The message was clear enough for even an anthropologist to detect: go away.  So we did.  We went to the upper east side for dinner and then came back for drinks around 9:00.

What a place, I am telling you.  Tiny, crowded, noisy, New York and then some.  Italian by origin but inclusive now.  We fell into conversation with the owner Frank.  Well, let’s be honest, we laid siege to Frank.  And the guy is such a celebrity that you hold his attention only by rolling out your A material, and hoping for the best.   

We were there with Joe and Christine, and that helped.  They’ve been officially designated by the United Nations as the most charming couple on earth.  Early in the evening, I watched Joe chat with a garage attendant.  It took him 20 seconds to establish a rapport that would take me an hour and a half.  He’s interested in everything.  Christine sees the world unflinchingly over Pocahontas cheek bones, and this gives her the ability, apparently, to penetrate all secrets.  She’s surprised by nothing. 

The two of them could have handled Frank on their own, but between the four of us, it wasn’t long before he felt himself floating on a veritable Humboldt current of congratulation.  You never know, several more occasions like this and we could be booking tables for the same calendar year. 

The thing that’s interesting about Rao’s is that it is an experiment that tests the possibility of urban experiments.  On any given evening, Frank has got politicians, mob bosses, celebrities, socialites, business types, guys in track suits with Rolex, and schmucks like me.  "My job," Frank told us, "is to make all these people feel like they belong here."  This means that in this tiny space, Frank makes very different differences go away.  And then he plays the power impresario, mediating  connections and brokering deals. 

It’s fun watching the eyes of other watchers: people who observe for a living and make their living by deciding what it is they just saw.  I mean, all the planners and anthropologists do exactly this.  So, as I say, it’s fun to look into the eyes of someone who watches every night, in real time, with big consequences.  You watch Frank watching and you find yourself thinking, here’s a guy who is interested in everything and surprised by nothing. 

Acknowledgments

To Pam, my wife, who did the investigative anthropology.