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Thoughts on a really bad haircut

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!

Late night television and other bed time stories

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.”

Carmen Electra and Red Wing Boots

So much for holidays. I spend a week on the west coast of Vancouver Island. "Long Beach” has waves that come ashore all the way from China, some of them ridden the last 30 feet by wet-suited surfers. I am rich in sand dollars and completely untanned.

Long Beach was fine, but a little dull. Working as an anthropologist in a First
World culture is a little like being a naturalist in the Galapagos islands. There is always plenty of everything. And if you don’t like what’s on offer, you only have to wait a while.

Long Beach, by contrast, was a little under-populated. Both the natural world and the social one scaled way back, mostly walkers in Land’s End anoraks and surfers. The surfers showed some evidence of evolutionary activity, with a new, busy school for women called "Surf Sister.” But that was it, really.

So it was nice to be back "in the world.” Today’s Wall Street Journal offers two glimpses of our feverish mutability: Carmen Electra, one of our "it” girls, and Red Wing boots. These two creatures exist at the two extremes of a commercial culture, one too contemporary, the other not nearly contemporary enough. Both are struggling to sustain themselves. Both are in peril.

Carmen is famous for being famous. She came to public notice through Bay Watch and she has sustained herself by remaining famous, not least through the escapades of her rock star husband. The WSJ worries that Electra might be risking overexposure. She has hired herself out to lots of brands.

Normally, we posit a straight forward relationship here. The celebrity becomes famous through dramatic or real world accomplishment, and then lends his or her celebrity to the commercial world in a zero-sum game. At some point, unless replenished, the celebrity’s celebrity is mined out and used up. The last days of celebrity are spent offering up confessions of abuse and recovery. And the last moment comes in the Oscar parking lot, to which the celebrity comes early in hope of an interview.

Electra is also "spending” her private life. She must remain in the public eye with appearances and episodes that replenish the brand creature. She must be seen with the right kind of person in the right kind of places. But this is a difficult game. Life in the fast lane is punishing and you have to hope that the latest publicity capturing stunt does not cost you private emotion funds (clarity, stability) on which long term survival depends.

But this model could be wrong. Properly deployed, Carmen could use the commercial work to sustain the brand and the private shenanigans to make a life. This would mean that we are looking at an interesting evolutionary development: the arrival of a creature that has actually turned adaptive challenges to adaptive advantage. The environment that extinguishes some species makes her thrive.

And then there’s Red Wing boots. This has been a favorite brand of the construction site. Red Wings are expensive, but they last and last and last. On the construction site, they become a marker of seriousness and maturity. Kids and other newcomers wear lesser boots. The real players wear Red Wings "877.”

The "877” boot is an iconic product if ever there were one. It is deeply rooted in American culture. But the WSJ says the pressure to "update” is tremendous. Red Wing is made in the US and it has higher labor costs. It is subject to new competition from Timberland and store brands. But updating? Move away from the brand equity for which most companies would happily surrender their chief executive and all his children? Somehow this seems a perilous adaptive strategy, too. Maybe, Red Wing needs to do what Carmen may be doing, working the niche not abandoning it.

In sum, perhaps these two creatures should diverge, not converge. Maybe advantage lies with those that forsake the traits that generalize adaptive capacity. Maybe it comes to those who work into the specialized position, not away from it.

This would have some interesting implications. It would break with the "work to the middle” strategy that continues to dominate commerce. Now commerce would be blossoming the way culture does. If Carmen and Red Wings were more like themselves and less like the middle, what would happen then?

Vacation notice

Friends and readers of This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics:

I am on vacation for about 10 days, and back at 'em around the 26th. Please forgive the hiatus.

Best,

Grant

complexity on TV

The Wire is a great TV show both because it resembles its predecessor, Homicide: Life on the street, and because it departs from it. 

Homicide was a "crime drama"” that was less about the crime and more about the drama.  It used great performances from Richard Belzer, Yaphet Kotto and especially Andre Braugher to give us close character studies and a glimpse of personal complexity we don’'t usually see on TV.

The Wire is more interested in the complexity of the city.  It gets out of the police house into the ports, housing projects, churches, prisons, unions, and politics of Baltimore.  It is a dizzying sociology, a god’'s eye view of the several exchange systems that make up urban life. 

Season 2 turns on the opposition between two Polish Americans.  One of them runs a local union on the docks.  The other runs a section of the Baltimore police force.  Both want to give a stain glass window to the local Catholic church.  When the union leader wins out, the police chief begins an investigation that sets one part of the plot in motion.

But there’'s more.  Season 1 treated us to a sympathetic treatment of the Barksdale brothers and their drug trafficking in Baltimore projects.  By Season 2, one of the brothers is in prison, and this gives us a chance to think about the complicated exchange systems at work in a local prison.

And there'’s more.  The police force is embroiled in politics.  The key figure is Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) who makes a shambles of everything and especially his career.  Watching the police figure out what to do about Jimmy is our chance to watch another complicated set of politics play out from the street into the offices of local politicians. 

And there’'s still more.  Jimmy insists that the Baltimore police investigate when a shipping container filled with dead prostitutes from Eastern Europe turns up in Baltimore harbor.  This allows us to see how an international sex trade impinges on city life.  Season 2 also gives us a glimpse of how the ports play a role in the importation of large amounts of chemical, evoking another still more sinister international dynamic.

For most TV shows, this would be evidence of "plot sprawl.”"  But for The Wire, it is the opportunity to show how many domains are encompassed by a city, and how events in one setting off reactions in another.  The characters don’'t share our "god’s eye” view."  They negotiate conflict, competition and cooperation, according to local terms.  Only we the audience get to see how things ripple across the domains.

The social scientific question is a little daunting.  How would we, how could we, devise a conceptual system capable of taking account of how value keeps leaping registers?  To take one example, the union leader is desperate to keep the port, and his union, alive.  He is prepared to engage in crime to give himself resources he can take to the church which he can then use to reach and leverage political influence.  A legitimate institution is used to secure a criminal dollar to buy a spiritual dollar to access a political dollar.  The political dollar will be leveraged by the police to help solve the Jimmy McNulty problem and in the meantime McNulty is busy trying to force the police to deal with the Eastern European prostitutes, which investigation will have cataclysmic consequences for the union leader. 

Yikes!  This is enough to make the intersection of anthropology and economics suddenly shut down from grid lock.  Talk about complex systems!  I’'m sure this looks like a Rube Goldberg cartoon or an exercise in 'the house Jack built” seriality.  But in fact, it does work as a complex system with events and motives eddying back and forth across the several plot domains.  The challenge, and this is a PhD thesis waiting to happen, is to build the system that allows us to think about this complexity as clearly and cleverly as the show’s creators manage to write about it. 

References

The Internet Movie Database entry on The Wire, here

For a plot summary from H.M. Schultz, here

For details on the third season, starting Sept. 19, on HBO, here

Last note:

I am on holiday for the next 10 days.  If I can post, I will post.  But I have a feeling there will be very little traffic here at the intersection.  Please come back September 26.

Brands outstanding in their field

A brand is like the tree a farmer leaves standing in a field. It just shows up one day, struggling upwards, trying to find its way out of the corn into the sun.

The farmer could have dug it under. But he liked how improbable it was: the poplar that doesn’t get that it’s out of place. Or maybe, the poplar that doesn’t know it isn’t corn. Or maybe, a poplar with so much self possession it just doesn’t care it isn’t corn.

He let the poplar stand. He let it grow. The farmer isn’t sure what it has cost him over the year. A lot, probably. It represents a real chunk of his tillable land. It got steadily more demanding, taking up more space, stealing water and sunshine. Happily, the farmer’s affection grew as the popular did. He let it stand, he let it grow.

Eventually, the accidental became the emblematic. The farmer couldn’t imagine his field without it. It was the place he ate his lunch. It was the place the kids came for adventure. It was the thing that identified his farm to others. "Levi’s place. You know, the big popular out on trunk road.” It was the first thing he and the kids saw coming home. Without the poplar, Levi’s place would have been just another field of corn.

Lately, Levi’s been thinking. If the poplar is his emblem, shouldn’t it keep pace with the times and his new prosperity? He put a ring of rocks around it. He started fertilizing it. He even got it trimmed. He planted smaller trees, to set it off and give it scale.

Then Levi thought, "what the hell,” took out the poplar and put in a giant blue spruce. Naturally, they flattened half the corn field, bringing it in. It created a certain amount of confusion for the locals. "The Levi place, the poplar, er, the blue spruce. Blue spruce, what is the matter with that guy?” The kids said, "Dad, how do you build a fort in an evergreen?”

So it wasn’t perfect. Now Levi is thinking about a bunch of trees, all different, all equally grand. Or, no, what about statues, a sort of Greek bower? Briefly, he wondered if a statue to Ernie Banks might not be a good way of honoring his childhood hero.

Levi’s field draws a crowd. Because there’s always something happened. Trucks coming and going. Trees give way to statues, statues give was to bowers. Levi’s field is more interesting than the country fair. Corn? No, he doesn’t grow corn there anymore.

References

Deutsch, Claudia. 2004. New Logo and Tagline for Xerox. New York Times, September 13, 2004.

[T]oday, Xerox is bidding "The Document Company" and the X a grateful goodbye. In their place will be a new, cleaner-looking logo, featuring the Xerox name over the signature "Technology/Document Management/Consulting Services." Industry experts applaud the change.

The new consumer, first, king, now hacker?

Paul S. Ottelini, a rising star at Intel is now being identified as the person most likely to be made the new CEO there.

In 1992, he was appointed a chief of sales and marketing, an appointment he protested. But it was his new position that helped him rise. His revelation:

"The history of the industry was the better-mousetrap syndrome: You build a faster thing and the world will beat a path to your doorstep. But as the industry matured, that no longer become the best way to look at the problem.”

Ottelini wanted to talk to the consumer, not just the engineers. This consumer-centric point of view prompted Ottelini to create the "right hand turn” that began to transform Intel from 2001 onwards. Co-workers say Otellini helped "push an entire company from where it [was] most comfortable.” The consumer was now "king” at Intel. Naturally, we’re pleased to see that this fundamental notion of the marketing literature (usually attributed to Theodore Levitt’s influence in the 1960s) has now come to rest at Intel.

Intel’s change of heart comes perhaps not a moment to soon. For there is evidence that the consumer is shifting from king to hacker. The Wall Street Journal reports that there is a "growing breed” of hardware hackers who "rip apart gear to change both form and function.” No sooner have videogames, cell phones and other gadgets hit the shelf that useful "hacks” appear on line.

Joseph Torrone has just published a book called "Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty.” There was a time when software hackers got all the attention, but Mr. Torrone recently gave a talk at Las Vegas tech conference to a crowd that was standing room only. Recently, the MIT-trained engineer, Andrew "Bunnie” Huang figured out how to hack the Xbox motherboard. Microsoft responded but their supplier Nvidia was left with a surfeit of old chips and took a $21 million dollar write-down which they blamed on the "MIT hacker.”

It is unlikely the ordinary consumers will ever demand this degree of control over the technology but it seems to me we are looking at a familiar lifecycle here. In the early days of technology, the engineers know best. No one consults the consumers. Competition enters the scene and now it’s necessary to supply what the consumer actually wants. Eventually, even this is not enough. The consumer, acting not as kings, but hackers, being to rebuild according to their own specifications. The final moment of responsiveness comes from the consumers themselves.

We have seen this sort of thing happen in the realm of consumer products. Susan Fournier of the Tuck School at Dartmouth observed the consumer effectively reinventing product meanings for their own purposes, happily indifferent to what the corporations had in mind. (We may see these consumers as descendants of the Fluxus art movement, the way Greil Marcus sees punks as descendants of the Situationist International.) It is now widely supposed in certain marketing circles that consumers routinely "hack” the meanings of a brand and reengineer them as they wish.

I can hear the engineers (tech and brand) rubbing their hands with delight. Fine, let’s go back to giving them what we want. They are just going to hack them anyhow. But, no, the tech and the brand have to be within shouting distance of the consumer to have any hope of finding a consumer prepared to hack them. The corporation still has to do its homework. It has to consult the consumer carefully and often.

But there is a larger challenge on the horizon. Andrew Zolli gave a presentation to the Global Business Network recently in which he noted the Andre the Giant phenomenon, the practice of stenciling an image of a former wrestler on billboards. This was an effective hijacking of commercial messaging for non commercial purposes. He also noted the "all your base are belong to us” phenomenon where kids demonstrate a new ability to handle the messaging technologies. We may add to this, Burning Man, the art/tech festival that is described as an "annual experiment in temporary community dedicated to radical self-expression” and held each year at Black Rock, Nevada. We may add to this the torrent of zines that appear each year, and the reinvention of pop culture that takes place continually, best described by Henry Jenkins of MIT. This represents a hacking of the very technologies of communication.

Where culture leads, commerce must follow. This is what makes it more responsive to innovation than social arrangements that privilege elites and other "smart pants” who believe, like engineers, that the world should come to, or at least conform to, "us.” But now that the consumer acts less like a king and more like an anarchist, commerce really has its work cut out for it. Keeping up with the "consumer hacker" will pose a new challenge, encourage a new ferocity of interaction, and create a new dynamism.

References

Duncombe, Stephen. 1997. Notes from Underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture. New York: Verso.

Forelle, Charles. 2004. So Your Roomba Vaccums…Does It Also Take Pictures? Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2004.

Fournier, Susan. 1998. The Consumer and the Brand: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research. Journal of Consumer Research 24, no. March: 343-73.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual poachers: Television fans & participatory culture. Studies in Culture and Communication. New York: Routledge.

Marcus, Greil. 1989. Lipstick Traces. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rivlin, Gary and John Markoff. 2004. Can Mr. Chips Transform Intel? New York Times, September 12, 2004.

Andre the giant "obey” website: here

"All your base are belong to us” video here

Burning man website here

Museology, the hard way

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."

Harleys, hot cars, and noise abatement

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.

having dinner with Sherlock Holmes

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