In college, we film students had a certain sense of disdain and smug superiority towards our TV-major classmates. Miramax, along with the whole independent film movement it was spearheading, had just hit it’s apex while we’d been in high school, and the late 90’s / early 2000’s saw the releases of such epics as The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, Requiem For A Dream, and many, many more. Meanwhile the most relevant cultural content TV had managed to produce at the time were shows like Seinfeld, Friends, and Survivor. I remember being simply dumbfounded that anyone would want to major in TV at all. I mean, like, what for? The big screen is where the REALLY cutting-edge, fascinating, intelligent, and just plain COOL stuff was at.

Was at.

Slowly, over the course of the decade, in sync with another major trend that has been gradually, and then suddenly, taking over our world, TV has changed. These days, there is such a slew of phenomenal output coming off the small screen, and conversely, a big fat quagmire of mediocrity projecting in theaters. TV is killing the movies.

In a recent Vanity Fair article on Mad Men, Bruce Handy offers this thumbnail history of Hollywood:

Once upon a time, the studios reigned supreme. They bulldozed geniuses and turned out dreck, but in applying Henry Ford discipline and efficiencies to filmmaking they also gave us The Lady Eve, Casablanca, and Singin’ in the Rain. By the 1960s, however, the factory system began to give way, power shifted to directors and stars, and a new generation of independent-minded auteurs crafted sometimes indulgent but often original and even brilliant films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now. Then, another turn: studios got the upper hand back, or learned to share it grudgingly with a handful of superstars and A-list directors. But without the old assembly-line rigor the result has too often been big, bloated dreck, like the films of Michael Bay, or the gaseous Oscar bait that bubbles up every fall—the worst of all movie worlds.

But, ah, television. Its great accomplishment over the past decade has been to give us the best of all movie worlds, to meld personal filmmaking, or series-making, with something like the craft and discipline, the crank-’em-out urgency, of the old studio system. I’m thinking first and foremost of The Sopranos, which debuted in 1999 and sadly departed in 2007. This strange and entertaining series, as individual a work as anything by Hitchcock or Scorsese, was the creation of David Chase, and it paved the way for The Wire, Deadwood, Rescue Me, Damages, and its successor as the best drama on television, the equally strange and entertaining Mad Men, which launch[ed] its third season on AMC August 16.

I’ve got my own theory, tho, and it goes something like this: digital technology saved television. Not that it meant to. It just happened by accident. See, the shows of the 90’s and before were, by and large, episodic. Things basically stayed the same from episode to episode. The characters didn’t really change much. The storyline didn’t really go anywhere unexpected, and if it did, it would always manage to resolve the issue, and find its way back to the beginning by the end of each episode. Things like Ross and Rachel  getting together or breaking up or getting back together were EVENTS, reserved for seasonal ratings sweeps.

The new shows we all watch and love, however, are not episodic, they are serial. They typically start with a “previously on” montage. Episodes build on one another in a series, relationships grow, change happens — or perhaps it doesn’t, and that’s exactly where the tension comes from — characters makes life-altering decisions, or maybe we simply find out more about their back-stories, which lets us see their current predicament in a totally new light. Serial shows evolve. And up until this decade that used to scare the shit out of TV networks. Cuz that narrative evolution can quickly become confusing. Lost, as its name would suggest, is perhaps the extreme example of this kind of narrative disorientation. If you miss one episode, shit’s changed and you just have no  idea what’s going on anymore, which is off-putting, and might make you likely to switch the channel to something more familiar. Since greater audience retention means more commercial watchers and higher prices for ad slots, this sort of confusion-induced channel surfing is why TV execs generally wanted to avoid complicated serial content as much as possible.

And then digital technology came along. Technically, HBO was first, with its seminally serial Sporanos, as Handy mentioned, which they could get away with for the same reason they could get away with all their other controversial programming — on premium cable, the shows aren’t at the mercy of advertisers. Nowadays, between Hulu, Tivo, and DVDs, not to mention all the torrent sites for downloading shows, if you’re so inclined, it’s virtually impossible NOT to keep up with a show you really dig, on whatever schedule you prefer. It is absolutely no overstatement to say that these new digital tools have not only had a profound impact on the actual content of television, they’ve helped  release the latent art-form in the medium itself.

As Handy writes:

At its core Mad Men is a moving and sometimes profound meditation on the deceptive allure of surface, and on the deeper mysteries of identity. The dialogue is almost invariably witty, but the silences, of which there are many, speak loudest: Mad Men is a series in which an episode’s most memorable scene can be a single shot of a woman at the end of her day, rubbing the sore shoulder where a bra strap has been digging in. There’s really nothing else like it on television.

There isn’t even anything else like it in the theaters! And this leads me to another change that the new technologies have enabled in television. Because of the new, truly serial format (unlike, even, shows like Buffy, or the X-Files, that came before, which were still a mix of episodic and serial episodes per season), the new TV series story-arc has been extended exponentially. Every episode ends on a cliff-hanger. Nothing is settled. The through-line isn’t just 45 minutes (the duration of a typical hour-long episode, allowing for commercials), it’s now a full season long.

Handy goes on:

I asked David Carbonara, the show’s composer, about a lovely piece of music he used to score a small but key scene in the second-season opener (Episode 201, by the production’s accounting), in which Don, intoxicated for once by his wife, watches a mink-clad Betty descend a hotel’s grand staircase as she arrives for a night out in the city. This was Carbonara’s answer, by e-mail: “It’s a piece written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov called ‘Song of India’ from his opera Sadko. Tommy Dorsey had a hit with an up-tempo version in 1937. Matthew Weiner [Mad Men's meticulous creator and executive producer] wanted a harp in the hotel lobby to be playing the song, then have the arrangement become larger for scoring Betty’s entrance.… But my favorite use of ‘Song of India,’ and sadly I don’t think anyone noticed, was in episode 211, ‘The Jet Set.’ This time it’s played as a jazz samba in yet another hotel bar as Don thinks he sees Betty! It’s played as source music with a bit of score overlaid on top hopefully calling us back to the previous hotel lobby in episode 201 [which had aired 11 weeks earlier in the series’ initial run], when they were very much in love. I admit it was a bit subtle, but maybe (hopefully!) it had an effect in the viewer’s subconscious.”

There’s just no way a 90-minute movie can compete with something like this. There’s simply no opportunity for this kind of subtlety and nuance and atmosphere in the timing. It’s incomparable. Watching The Jet Set episode Carbonara mentions, in fact, at the very end, when the camera pulls back from Don’s arm, naked, outstretched over the back of the couch in a strange house in Palm Springs, I had a kind of epiphany about the show….

This shot is a direct mirror to the iconic Mad Men silhouette, from over Don’s other arm, shirt-clad, stretched over a couch in his New York, Sterling Cooper office….

With just this single, slow, meditative stroke the shot silently articulates everything you need to understand about the strangeness of this Californian mirrorland that our hero has found himself in, his own strangeness at being there, and how far removed and flipped around everything there is in contrast to his New York reality. Watching this almost subliminal storytelling layer that I’d previously known solely as an achievement of cinema, I suddenly realized that Mad Men had left TV show territory entirely. It had become almost mathematically perfect, a number multiplied by its reciprocal, always equaling 1. It had become a kind of poetry, where every single word and punctuation mark is critical to maintaining the meaning and integrity of the overall structure, which would otherwise collapse if even a single element were removed.

Sure, not every TV show is Mad Men, but there’s more and more shows edging closer. Some of my personal favorites:

• Sons of Anarchy: Hamlet, set in the world of a central coast Harley gang club. As in, “Something is rotten in the state of California.” I kid you not, the Shakespearean tragedy was a deliberate plot basis. And especially after last year’s Mongols bust, it’s an endlessly fascinating glimpse into a truly subversive culture that’s as much an alternate reality as the world of the Irish Traveller gypsies in the now sadly defunct The Riches.
• True Blood: the grown-up antidote to the hormonal immaturity and teenybopper banality of Twilight’s vampires. Thank you, Alan Ball (writer of American Beauty, no less), for the sophistication and wit to portray immortality as an existential boredom. There is something absolutely hilarious about an ancient viking vampire complaining, “I texted you three times. Why didn’t you reply?” And a Civil War veteran vampire responding irritated, “Ah hate using the number keys to tah-ype.” Twilight couldn’t summon this much humor from its characters in a million years… literally.
• Californication: If it’s tortured, satirical, manic celebration of hedonistic nihilism doesn’t feel  familiar to you, you’ve probably never been alive in the 21st-century… or lived in Los Angeles. Also, not since Buffy have I wished for occasion to use the quips and one-liners from a show more.
• Weeds: The concept alone is fantastic, plus there’s the razor sharp commentary on race and class relations, but it’s the tight structure of the writing that takes it over the edge. With every episode the rule is: Nancy gets something big; Nancy has something bigger taken away. It’s a narcotically addictive formula.
• I’d mention Lost, too, since people still seem to like it, I guess, and at one point I was among them, until everyone went BACK to the goddamn island last season (are you fucking kidding me?!) and the show became a narrative jerkoff. (For context: Mad Men = narrative sex).

Think about the last movie that you really loved. Was there even one this year? More than one?

Probably not. The economic downturn has screwed the movie industry. Studios’ profits have plummeted. DVD buying, which might have once helped salvage theatrical-release turds, is way down in North America, and in other markets is basically nonexistent due to piracy. With a lot less money coming in, and with production costs continuing to rise, studios are pouring more money into “branded entertainment”—movies based on franchises that have strong brand recognition and can, theoretically, provide a decent opening weekend, a la G.I. Joe. According to the LA Times, an adaptation of the board game Battleship is scheduled for release July 2011, the same month as a third “Transformers” film. Studios have even recently announced the development of new movies based on Monopoly, Clue, and Candy Land. Meanwhile, as traditional movie stars’ are becoming less and less reliable for drawing an audience, major studios are producing far fewer adult dramas, and the independent film world is slowly collapsing under the weight of the recession as well. Last year alone saw the dissolution of three major independent film companies. Time Warner closed Warner Independent Pictures (Little Miss Sunshine, Good Night and Good Luck), and Picturehouse Entertainment (The Women, Mongol), and Viacom closed Paramount Vantage (No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood). Things have gotten so whack, Paramount has even had to delay the Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio thriller, Shutter Island, from October to February of next year because it couldn’t afford the necessary marketing budget that kind of vehicle requires.

It’s no surprise, then, that so many movie actors are working on the small screen. Once considered a fatal oblivion for movie stars, TV shows these days include titles like Alec Baldwin, Tim Roth, Lawrence Fishburne, Ron Perlman, Anna Paquin, Minnie Driver Eddie Izzard, Jonathan Rhys Myers, Keifer Sutherland, and those are just off the top of my head, but clearly, you’ve noticed this trend yourself. It’s pretty unmistakable. So this is where we find ourselves. Hulu is developing more of a brand online than the big broadcast networks that own shares of it, overtaking ABC, NBC and Fox in web traffic for the first time in June. 1 in 3 households owns a DVR (Digital Video Recorder), 33% in fact, up from 28% a year ago, adding significant numbers of time-shifted viewers to shows’ ratings — 36 shows now add 1 million or more viewers one to seven days after the original air-date. And as movies have sunk to the new low of board game franchise tie-ins, television has woken up out of its reality-TV coma and become the far more innovative, dynamic, and risk-taking medium.

Charlie Collier, president of AMC, quoted in the Vanity Fair article describes Matthew Weiner’s vision for Mad Men, which can be as easily applied to the current state of the tube in general: “It’s not television; it’s a world.”

Do you like Reggaeton?

This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California.

If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s:

A form of urban music that became popular with Latin American youth in the early 1990s, and, after mainstream exposure in 2004,  spread to North American, European and Asian audiences. Reggaeton blends the West-Indian music influences of reggae and dancehall with those of Latin America, such as bomba, plena, salsa, merengue, latin pop, cumbia and bachata as well as that of hip hop, contemporary R&B, and electronica, combined with rapping or singing in Spanish. While it takes influences from hip hop and Jamaican dancehall, it would be wrong to define reggaeton as the Hispanic or Latino version of either of these genres; reggaeton has its own specific beat and rhythm, whereas Latino hip hop is simply hip hop recorded by artists of Latino descent. Reggaeton’s origins represent a hybrid of many different musical genres and influences from various countries in the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. The genre of reggaeton however is most closely associated with Puerto Rico, as this is where the musical style became most famous, and where the vast majority of its current stars originated.

Here’s an example, Daddy Yankee’s “Rompe”:

I’d heard the term, Reggaeton, out at certain parties in L.A., but I didn’t really know what it was until KXOL-FM relaunched in 2005 as Latino 96.3, bringing the Reggaeton format to the airwaves. After a while, I’d been finding myself stopping the dial scan every so often at 96.3 to catch the end of some song even though I couldn’t understand the lyrics. My answer to my friend at the time was  that I didn’t think I’d heard it enough to fully like it yet, but I probably would.  It didn’t occur to me until my friend pointed it out, that it was a strange way to respond to a question of music taste.

Not too long after I fist started going to raves, back in high school, I discovered Jungle. If you don’t know what Jungle is, it’s a type of electronic dance music which emerged in the mid 1990’s as an offshoot of the UK rave scene. Encompassing drum and bass, oldschool jungle, and ragga,  the genre is characterized by fast breakbeats (typically between 160–190 bpm) and heavy sub-bass lines.

Here’s an example, Aphrodite’s “Bomber Style:”

When I discovered Jungle, I had only just gotten into a relationship with hip hop a few years prior, when I started 9th grade at a public, urban high school, and then fallen into the questionable companionship of entry-level rave trance (a la Paul Oakenfold, etc.), so when I first heard this stuff, it sounded way too fuckin’ cacophanous and chaotic and fast and just plain weird. I distinctly remember a time when I just didn’t get Jungle. I didn’t get how to understand it. I didn’t get how to like it. And I sure as hell didn’t get how to dance to it. Then my best friend at the time, who’d been going to raves before I started, and had once been a ballerina, showed me. You just had to move a different way. You had to get onto a different rhythm. And as soon as I figure it out, I started to really like, and then just completely LOVE Jungle. By the time I’d started hearing Reggaeton, I knew from past experience that if I listened long enough to start to understand the sound, I would come to like it.

It turns out the line between being unfamiliar with something, and not liking it is very slim, indeed. In Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how the Aeron chair, which would eventually redefine the entire office chair category, was originally despised and deemed ugly when it was first market tested. The Aeron was a complete departure from the office chair norm, and didn’t mesh with the prevailing cultural proclivities for seating comfort in general (think: La-Z-Boy recliner). But after two years, the Aeron became the most popular chair in Herman Miller history, and the most widely imitated office chair in general. How did something that was once considered ugly become beautiful?

Gladwell writes:

Office chairs in people’s minds had a certain aesthetic. They were cushioned and upholstered. The Aeron chair of course isn’t. There was nothing familiar about it. Maybe the word ‘ugly’ was just a proxy for “different.” The people reporting their first impressions misinterpreted their own feelings. They said they hated it. But what they really meant was that the chair was so new and unusual that they weren’t used to it…. Buried among the things that we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes us time to understand that we actually like them.

The problem with market research is that often it is simply too blunt an instrument to pick up this distinction between the bad and the merely different.

And perhaps nowhere is that nervousness more acute, or that distinction more obscure than when it comes to music.

In his recent New York Times piece about Pandora, the internet radio application based on the Music Genome Project, which decodes the essential components of songs as though they were bits of genetic information and suggests new music users might like based on strictly auditory criteria, author Rob Walker (whose book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, I’ve written about a quite a bit last year) references neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music:

Much depends on culture. Just as we’re hard-wired to learn a language, but not to speak English or French, our specific musical understanding, and thus taste, depends on context. If a piece of music sounds dissonant to you, it probably has to do with what sort of music you were exposed to growing up, because you were probably an “expert listener” in your culture’s music by about age 6, Levitin writes.

By the time I was six years old, 85% of the music I had heard was classical violin. My mother is a violinist, and when I was younger, performed with many orchestras and symphonies, both in the former Soviet Union, and then in Boston, where I grew up after we emigrated. She has also been teaching violin for longer than I’ve been alive, and as a child the sound violins was so constant and ubiquitous around the house that I developed the capacity, which I retain to this day, to sleep right through an afternoon full of violin lessons going on around me. The other 15% of the music of my early childhood consisted of Russian folk-rock music by the likes of Vladimir Vysotsky (imagine a  Russian sort of Bob Dylan — in fact, the genre Vysotsky defined is precisely what Gogol Bordello is currently perpetrating as a zany new indie sound, which I gotta say is pretty freakin’ weird to witness.) I didn’t really start hearing ANYTHING even remotely in the vicinity of contemporary popular American music until I got to the U.S. (by that time I was almost 7), in large part due to the efforts of the Soviet government to achieve that goal.

Anyway, the point is, the music that I was acculturated to became wholly irrelevant in the new culture I found myself in just at the moment when I had become an “expert listener.” When everything sounds dissonant, nothing sounds dissonant. Not any more dissonant than anything else, anyway. I suspect, much in the same way new languages become a lot easier to learn if you’d had to learn a new one when you were little, new music sounds and genres, for me anyway, are a lot easier to learn to understand, and ultimately appreciate because of this history. It’s why the question “What kind of music do you like?” has always made me uncomfortable. I have watched as other people draw on instantly accessible answers, but for me, sentences like  “I like hip hop” or “I like electronic music,” have become learned responses, like fragments memorized from a phrase-book for emergencies in a foreign country. The answer to that question is never really about what kind of music you happen to find structurally, acoustically, or thematically appealing, anyway. No, what that question is actually asking is: “What kind of music do your friends like?”

As Walker writes:

It’s the “social” theories of music-liking that get most of the attention these days: systems that connect you with friends with similar tastes, or that rely on “collaborative filtering” strategies that cross-match your music-consumption habits with those of like-minded strangers. These popular approaches marginalize traditional gatekeepers; instead of trusting the talent scout, the radio programmer or the music critic, you trust your friends (actual or virtual), or maybe just “the crowd.”Pandora’s approach more or less ignores the crowd. It is indifferent to the possibility that any given piece of music in its system might become a hit. The idea is to figure out what you like, not what a market might like. More interesting, the idea is that the taste of your cool friends, your peers, the traditional music critics, big-label talent scouts and the latest influential music blog are all equally irrelevant. That’s all cultural information, not musical information. And theoretically at least, Pandora’s approach distances music-liking from the cultural information that generally attaches to it.

One of my co-workers, a married dude, loves the Calvin Harris station on Pandora, which is basically straight up Gay House (that’s Gay House as in the music genre, not the epithet). Were the station defined by its cultural information, as opposed to strictly by sound, it’s much more probable he’d simply assume this wasn’t for him, and not venture any further. Which, as Walker writes, raises some interesting questions:

Do you really love listening to the latest Jack White project? Do you really hate the sound of Britney Spears? Or are your music-consumption habits, in fact, not merely guided but partly shaped by the cultural information that Pandora largely screens out — like what’s considered awesome (or insufferable) by your peers, or by music tastemakers, or by anybody else? Is it really possible to separate musical taste from such social factors, online or off, and make it purely about the raw stuff of the music itself?

What Pandora’s system largely ignores is, in a word, taste. The way that [Pandora founder Tim] Westergren might put this is that it minimizes the influence of other people’s taste. Music-liking becomes a matter decided by the listener, and the intrinsic elements of what is heard. Early on, Westergren actually pushed for the idea that Pandora would not even reveal who the artist was until the listener asked. He thought maybe that structure would give users a kind of permission to evaluate music without even the most minimal cultural baggage. “We’re so insecure about our tastes,” he says.

(Or as Gladwell might put it, “nervous.”)

While his partners talked him out of that approach, Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice.

He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’”

This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”

Much as cultural information attaches to music, music attaches information to culture. Piggybacked like parasites onto unwitting sound-waves are all manner of cultural and identity definitions. The “What music do you like?” question is also intended to be responded to as: “What scene are you in?” After all, you don’t just like hip hop or punk or emo, you ARE hip hop or punk or emo.  And even with mainstream artists, saying you’re a fan of Garth Brooks or Adam Lambert or Muse or Jay-Z is more than simply giving an example of the sort of musical style you enjoy, it’s an admission of your cultural affiliation, of your individual and social identity.

As Walker writes:

The cliché that our musical tastes are generally refined in our teens and solidify by our early 20s seems largely to be true. For better or worse, peers frequently have a lot to do with that. Levitin recalled to me having moved at age 14 and falling in with a new set of friends who listened to music he hadn’t heard before. “The reason I like Queen — and I love Queen — is that I was introduced to Queen by my social group,” he says. He’s not saying that the intrinsic qualities of the music are irrelevant, and he says Pandora has done some very clever and impressive things in its approach. But part of what we like is, in fact, based on cultural information. “To some degree we might say that personality characteristics are associated with, or predictive of, the kind of music that people like,” he has written. “But to a large degree it is determined by more or less chance factors: where you went to school, who you hung out with, what music they happened to be listening to.”

Basically, what “scene” you were in. And social groups tend to very easily become self-selecting, especially online. In a recent NPR story, “Facebook, MySpace Divide Along Social Lines,” social media researcher danah boyd talks about the findings she’d first brought to light two years ago on the way the online social world is dividing up — just like the real world — into self-segregated communities: “The fact is that young people, and for the most part adults as well, don’t really interact online with strangers. They talk to people they already know. And when you have environments in which people are divided by race, they’re divided by class, they’re divided by lifestyle, when they go online, those are also who they’re going to interact with,” says boyd.

As I have long asserted, myself, from my contrasting experiences in the worlds of independent music and corporate marketing, boyd suggests that one of the reasons so many business analysts are writing off Myspace is because THEY don’t belong to the social groups that use it. “Millions of daily users are still logging in [to Myspace],” she says, “and it’s really interesting how many people in very privileged environments know not a single one of them.”

In his book “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google,” Nicholas Carr talks about this exact phenomenon, and sees a far darker possible outcome:

Not only will the process of polarization tend to play out in virtual communities in the same way it does in neighborhoods, but it seems likely to proceed much more quickly online. In the real world, with its mortgages and schools and jobs, the mechanical forces of segregation move slowly. There are brakes on the speed with which we pull up stakes and move to a new house. Internet communities have no such constraints. Making a community-defining decision is as simple as clicking a link. Every time we subscribe to a blog, add a friend to our social network, categorize an email message as spam, or even choose a site from a list of search results, we are making a decision that defines, in a small way, whom we associate with and what information we pay attention to. Given the presence of even a slight bias to be connected with people similar to ourselves – ones who share, say, our political views or our cultural preferences –

(or our musical tastes)

we would end up in ever more polarized and homogeneous communities. We would click our way to a fractured society.

As the entire web becomes one ever-expanding, amoebic social application, it becomes increasingly harder and harder to “log out” of this cultural segregation that seems built in to the very nature digital space. In a recent New Yorker article on Google, Ken Auletta, writes:

The more “personalized” [the consumer data that Google collects each day], as [CEO] Eric Schmidt said, the better the search answers. “The more we know who you are, the more we can tailor the search results.” [Google co-founders, Larry] Page and [Sergey] Brin often say that their ideal is to devise a program that provides a single perfect answer.

This preoccupation with mathematical efficiencies triggers various alarms. In “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr writes that Google would like to store as much information as possible about each individual — what might be referred to as “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to “choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious to the possible  social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr writes. “They impose homogeneity on the Internet’s wild heterogeneity…. As the tools and algorithms become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing preferences.” Carr believes that people will narrow their frame of reference, gravitate towards those whose opinions they share, and perhaps be less willing o compromise, because the narrow information we receive will magnify our difference, making it harder to reach agreement.

As much as there is a conservative pull within us to seek out the familiar and the safe, the example of Pandora shows there is an equally as great liberal a pull to discover and explore the new (altho that balance may be different from one individual to another). There are  already so many social sites and applications being developed to enable the former, what we need now are more UNsocial ones. Applications that offer us the opportunity to discover and explore the new and unfamiliar, applications that allow us to confront diversity, and offer us new ways to expand our tastes and define ourselves.

I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before.

The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only when one of the pigs finally shuffles off to the men’s room, and purchases a condom, that he is transformed into a hot guy, and returns to the girl he was chatting up to find that she’s now suddenly totally interested in him.

In addition to the ad, whose message at the end reads: “Evolve. Use a condom every time,” the campaign also includes a website, evolveoneevolveall.com, driven by celebrity and user-generated videos dealing with the subject of sexual health, the Trojan Evolve National Tour, a mobile, experiential campaign “Raising awareness and stimulating dialogue about America’s sexual health in towns and campuses across the country,” radio ads that deal with STDs as Christmas gifts (”How about Herpes? It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” / “Would you like Chlamydia wrapped?” / “No, I’ll give it to her unwrapped.”) and more. All of this, hinging on the word “Evolve.”

“Evolve is a wake-up call to change attitudes about using condoms and, on a larger scale, the way we think and talk about sexual health in this country,” said Jim Daniels, Trojan’s VP of marketing. As Andrew Adam Newman pointed out in the New York Times piece, “Pigs With Cellphones, but No Condoms,” the campaign is an evolution for Trojan itself:

While Mr. Daniels does not disparage the company’s double-entendre-heavy “Trojan Man” campaign from the 1990s or similar Trojan Tales Web site today, the tone of the company’s promotions is moving away from “Beavis and Butthead” and toward “Sex and the City.”

“The ‘Evolve’ ad does a nice job of being humorous, but it’s also a serious call to action,” Mr. Daniels said. “The pigs are a symbol of irresponsible sexual behavior, and are juxtaposed with the condom as a responsible symbol of respect for oneself and one’s partner.”

Newman suggest that “The perennial challenge for Trojan and its competitors is the perception that [condoms] are unpleasant to use.” But I think, for a company that, according to A. C. Nielsen Research, has 75 percent of the condom market (Durex is second with 15 percent, LifeStyles third with 9 percent), Trojan oughtta have really known better than that.

“Over the last few years conservative groups in President Bush’s support base have declared war on condoms,” wrote Nicholas D. Kristof, in an opinion piece, also in the New York Times:

I first noticed this campaign last year, when I began to get e-mails from evangelical Christians insisting that condoms have pores about 10 microns in diameter, while the AIDS virus measures only about 0.1 micron. This is junk science (electron microscopes haven’t found these pores), but the disinformation campaign turns out to be a far-reaching effort to discredit condoms, squelch any mention of them in schools and discourage their use abroad.

Then there are the radio spots in Texas: ”Condoms will not protect people from many sexually transmitted diseases.”

A report by Human Rights Watch quotes a Texas school official as saying: ”We don’t discuss condom use, except to say that condoms don’t work.”

Last month at an international conference in Bangkok, U.S. officials demanded the deletion of a recommendation for ”consistent condom use” to fight AIDS and sexual diseases. So what does this administration stand for? Inconsistent condom use?

Kristof was posing this question back in 2003, while he could still add, “So far President Bush has not fully signed on to the campaign against condoms, but there are alarming signs that he is clambering on board.”

In the now almost six years since, the very subject of contraception has become as politicized as abortion, and the emphasis on condoms’ ineffectiveness has become a standard component of Abstinence-Only sex education. (You knew about that, right?) It’s even begun to affect mass media. In a written response to Trojan about why they would not air the pigs-with-cell-phones ad, Fox (which had aired prior Trojan ads) said “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” CBS refused to air it, too, and didn’t even offer further comment. Meanwhile, as paid advertising for condoms is being turned away, in the past few months I’ve seen at least two TV shows where characters made a point of mentioning that condoms don’t work: Fringe, and The Practice–a show about DOCTORS for cryin’ out loud! (Clearly, “First do no harm” must not apply to the practice of TV medicine.)

As a teenager of the 90’s, I’ve never known a world where AIDS didn’t exist, and where condoms were anything but an unequivocal necessity for “safe sex” (also a 90’s-ism that seems to no longer be in use, replaced instead by the millennial “sexual health crisis”). Sure, no one was going around preaching that condoms are 100% fail-proof, but in the decade when Magic Johnson and Greg Louganis both came out as HIV-positive, I can’t imagine any TV program deliberately broadcasting (or being allowed to get away with it), the kind of message that says, “Condoms don’t work. So why bother using them at all?”

As of 2006 the birth rate among 15 to 19 year-olds in the United States has risen for the first time since 1991 (that was the year of Johnson’s announcement). While teenage sex rates have risen since 2001, condom use has dropped since 2003. In other words, more teenagers are having more sex, and using less and less condoms in the process. But then, Jamie Lynn Spears or Bristol Palin could have told you that.

And so it is we find ourselves in a situation where Church & Dwight—the consumer products company that owns Trojan—is taking on what should have been the responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services. Teenage or not, the U.S. apparently has the highest rates of unintended pregnancy (three million per year) and sexually transmitted infections (19 million per year) of any Western nation. (What the fuck?!)

“Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom,” Says Daniels. “Our goal is to dramatically increase use.” Then what in God’s name convinced the Kaplan Thaler Group, the New York advertising agency that created the “Evolve” campaign, that aligning condoms with evolution was the way to go about achieving this?

Cuz here’s the thing: The majority of Americans do not believe in evolution!

(CRAP!)

In fact, according to 2006 research in Science Magazine, out of 33 European countries where peolpe were asked to respond “true”, “false”, or “whuuuu?” to the statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,” the only country that scored lower on belief in evolution than the US is Turkey (Also what the fuck?!)

Disturbing as this unfortunate reality may be, this is the contemporary American Landscape, and pushing Trojan as “Helping America evolve, one condom at a time,” in the face of it, seems ludicrous.

Hell, why not just call the campaign “Darwin’s theory of contraception,” while you’re at it?

The biggest threat to condoms is not the perception that they don’t feel good. It’s not even condom fatigue. The biggest threat to condoms is the Christian Right’s propaganda that they don’t work, and the government’s, and much of media’s, wholehearted complicity. And it’s the same people who are waging a war on contraception that don’t like Evolution either. I don’t know about the ultimate impact that the Evolve campaign is effecting (or not), but in my view, if, as Daniels says, Trojan’s focus is on growing the market beyond the–pardon the irony here–already converted, and getting more people to use condoms, I think a completely different slogan/campaign theme would be the way to go.

I’ve been thinking about this, the third in what’s evidently become a series of posts inspired by Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, by Rob Walker, since I read the section in the book (it’s also been reprinted as a Fast Company article) where Walker writes about American Apparel changing its brand messaging. Initially the company’s identity hinged on its “Sweatshop Free” production, but sex, surprise surprise, turned out to be a much better sell than good labor practices. Walker writes:

American Apparel seemed to me to be a marquee example of a business that had positioned itself to respond to a rising tide of ethical, antibrand consumers. At a moment when practically every clothes maker was offshoring to cut costs, American Apparel made its wares at a U.S. factory in which the average industrial worker (usually a Latino immigrant) was paid between $12 and $13 an hour and got medical benefits. The company had taken out ads in little arty magazines, noting that it was “sweatshop free.”

[But] Another self-consciously ethical clothing brand, SweatX, had just gone out of business. The lesson of SweatX, [American Apparel CEO Dov] Charney said, was that building a brand solely around a company’s ethical practices was not a good strategy for reaching masses of consumers. The ethical sell was too limiting. It was a niche strategy, at best. Which was why American Apparel was moving away from the ethical sell to something very different.

Charney pulled out a copy of a book called The 48 Laws of Power and read me No. 13, which suggested that to get what you want, you must appeal to people’s self-interest, not to their mercy. “That’s the problem with the anti-sweatshop movement. You’re not going to get customers walking into stores by asking for mercy and gratitude.” If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, he said, snapping the book closed, “appeal to people’s self-interest.”

By the time I visited American Apparel’s headquarters and factory in Los Angeles to meet with Charney a second time, the company had transitioned to an image soaked in youth and sex. This was apparent in its stores — where the decor often included things such as Penthouse covers — and in its print ads. Yes, some of these ads mentioned quality and the sweatshop-free angle, but usually in small type, under a photograph of a half-naked young woman.

The company was producing 32,000 pieces a day and struggling to keep up with orders. In months, [the company's] system was churning out 90,000 pieces a day and would eventually reach 250,000. While the company was projecting an air of almost reckless decadence in its ads, it was quietly building a thriving made-in-America business model.

All of which, of course, made me wonder–and perhaps might make you wonder, too: Does good matter?

Good itself, I mean, without a gloss of sex covering it over, does it matter as a selling point to us as consumers?

Researchers Remi Trudel and June Cotte were trying to figure out the same thing in their studies for the May 2008 Wall Street Journal piece Does Being Ethical Pay?

For corporations, social responsibility has become a big business. Companies spend billions of dollars doing good works — everything from boosting diversity in their ranks to developing eco-friendly technology — and then trumpeting those efforts to the public.

But does it pay off?

To find out, we conducted a series of experiments. We showed consumers the same products — coffee and T-shirts — but told one group the items had been made using high ethical standards and another group that low standards had been used. A control group got no information.

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.

Our first experiment asked two questions. How much more will people pay for an ethically produced product? And how much less are they willing to spend for one they think is unethical?

To test these questions, we gathered a random group of 97 adult coffee drinkers and asked them how much they would pay for a pound of beans from a certain company. We used a brand that’s not available in North America, so none of the participants would be familiar with it.

But before the people answered, we asked them to read some information about the company’s production standards. One group got positive ethical information, and one group negative; the control group got neutral information, similar to what shoppers would typically know in a store.

After reading about the company and its coffee, the people told us the price they were willing to pay on an 11-point scale, from $5 to $15. The results? The mean price for the ethical group ($9.71 per pound) was significantly higher than that of the control group ($8.31) or the unethical group ($5.89).

Meanwhile, as the numbers show, the unethical group was demanding to pay significantly less for the product than the control group. In fact, the unethical group punished the coffee company’s bad behavior more than the ethical group rewarded its good behavior. The unethical group’s mean price was $2.42 below the control group’s, while the ethical group’s mean price was $1.40 above. So, negative information had almost twice the impact of positive information on the participants’ willingness to pay.

Trudel and Cotte also researched just how ethical companies really need to be in order to reap marketplace rewards, that is, are consumers willing to pay more for a product that is 100% ethically produced versus one that is 50% or 25% ethically produced? Their findings showed that there is a certain “ethical threshold” beyond which any ethical acts might reinforce the company’s image, but don’t induce people to pay more. And lastly, they examined the effect of pre-existing consumer attitudes, and found that people with high expectations about how companies should behave doled out bigger rewards and punishments than those with low expectations.

For companies, the implications of this study — albeit limited — are apparent. Efforts to move toward ethical production, and promote that behavior, appear to be a wise investment. In other words, if you act in a socially responsible manner, and advertise that fact, you may be able to charge slightly more for your products.

Not an overwhelming rallying cry to assert that good is here, it matters, and we should get used to it, exactly, but clearly an opportunity to explore a new ethical “market segment.” As Walker writes:

Perhaps this is why many big companies and brands are not so much changing their products as adding new alternatives to their existing product mixes, or carving a small donation to charity out of their profit margins. Pepsi-Cola is testing an all-natural version of its flagship drink called Pepsi Raw, and Clorox has launched an eco-friendly line of cleaning products. The Bono-promoted (Product) Red initiative brands existing products that dedicate a portion of the purchase price to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. There’s even a (Product) Red version of the iPod.

A whopping majority of American shoppers may consider themselves environmentalists, but, according to the Journal of Industrial Ecology, only 10% to 12% “actually go out of their way to purchase environmentally sound products.” Similarly, Brandweek reported on a survey that found that even among consumers who called themselves “environmentally conscious,” more than half could not name a single green brand.

Ask most people whether they care about the environment, and it’s not particularly surprising that many would say yes. Ask whether they would back that up by “buying green” if they had the chance, and again, it’s likely that very few would admit to being hypocrites by saying no. What we do in the marketplace is another matter.

There is a real-world overload of factors that confront consumers in the marketplace — price, quality, convenience, pleasure, plus the countless number of symbols that provide us with rationales to buy. The Yale Center for Customer Insights designed an experiment to test this phenomenon. It divided 108 subjects into two groups. Members of one group were presented with a straightforward consumer choice. Would they prefer to buy a vacuum cleaner (a utilitarian object) or a pair of jeans (a bit of a luxury), each of which was assigned the same price, $50? About 72% chose the vacuum cleaner. Members of the other group were told to imagine they had volunteered to spend three hours a week either teaching children in a homeless shelter or “improving the environment.” They were asked to explain their choice, a process meant to prod them into engaging with the idea. Then they faced the vacuum-cleaner-or-jeans choice. In this group, a majority (57%) opted for the jeans.

Although very few of the subjects made the connection, the researchers concluded that “the opportunity to appear altruistic by committing to a charitable act in a prior task” gives us license to choose a luxury item. A similar set of studies indicates that subjects are more likely to splurge on fancier sunglasses or pricier concert tickets after giving to charity. If you buy ecological or green products or consume alternative health care or practice yoga, it’s easy to conclude, “Hey, I’ve done my part.”

These efforts [by big companies] add just enough options to the miles of retail shelves to give us all an ethical fix — to do our one good shopping deed. Then we can push our basket a little farther down the aisle, letting other rationales take over: Here’s a bargain, here’s a great product, here’s something that I could probably get cheaper elsewhere, but as long as I’m here, I’ll just get it — and here, yes, here is something ethical. I’ll take one of those, too.

Trudel and Cotte concluded at the end of their research: “The lessons are clear. Companies should segment their market and make a particular effort to reach out to buyers with high ethical standards, because those are the customers who can deliver the biggest potential profits on ethically produced goods.”

Rather than marketing ethical products to a mainstream audience, big companies can simply create a separate ethical brand or product line, repackage it as a luxury “good,” and sell it at a premium to the niche, conscientious consumer demographic–which may be willing to pay more for ethical products, but couldn’t scale to support a company like SweatX, or to motivate the big companies to change their practices overall.

Is that the fate of good, then? Is the extent of it’s significance as a selling point simply the justification for a reverse “ethical tax”?

At the PSFK conference in San Francisco last week, GOOD Magazine co-founder Max Schorr’s presentation, “Aligning Interests,” (echoing that 13th law of power) was subtitled: “When cynical people admit they’re idealistic you might be on to something.” At the beginning of his presentation Schorr asked a room full of marketers how many of us wanted to make a positive impact. Pretty much everyone raised their hands. When he asked how many of us wanted to make money, the same hands shot up. The idea then is that to effect real positive change these kinds of interests have to align. Doing good has to be separated from the bleak, unprofitable, un-fun, self-righteous, and ultimately ineffectual idea lf altruism, and the “triple bottom line” of sustainability, profit, and positive impact, needs to become a single bottom line. Schorr’s presentation was the most loudly applauded of the whole day, and thereafter the most frequently referenced. There is no doubt that marketers–well, those of us that raised our hands anyway–we WANT good to matter. We WANT consumer demand for ethics and sustainability to affect the substance of what the market supplies. We want good to succeed.

But does it have to matter as a selling point to do that?

In his presentation, Schorr talked about how the magazine has stopped using the word “Green.” The reason behind this move being to stop presenting sustainable practices as some kind of distinct “alternative” from what should simply be the default standard. In a sense, this is what American Apparel did as well when they stopped trumpeting their ethical practices to distinguish their brand identity.

Maybe it’s all about thinking ahead. We shouldn’t confuse current consumer attitudes with what they’re likely to be in the future. No doubt a company’s environmental friendliness matters more now to the average consumer than it would have before the release of An Inconvenient Truth. And I’d be willing to bet that ethical production practices in general matter more to us now than they did before the wave of mass internet adoption hit, and access to information about a company’s practices became easily accessible to the average web surfer. Trudel and Cotte even acknowledged that if 100% ethically produced products become the expected norm, anything less may be punished by consumers. So perhaps good actually WILL matter quite a bit more in the future than it does now.

But will it ever matter more than sex?

Maybe that gloss on top won’t hurt anyway. Just…. you know….. in case.

[Obscura] create[s] visual spaces and displays so groundbreaking that other design studios not only can’t emulate them, they never would have conjured them in the first place. The largest projection dome on the planet, equipped with a real-time video stream? A 10-story, 60,000-lumen projection of a Michael Graves painting? If you can dream it up on an acid trip, Obscura can reproduce it — on a seismic scale. The company’s engineers have devised software programs that seamlessly combine images from multiple hi-def projectors, making mathematical corrections to account for irregular screening surfaces (a complex image given a fish-eye tweak, for instance, will look appropriately flat when projected onto a curved wall). The proprietary algorithms that drive these programs allow the team to display virtually any image on any surface — a brick building, a jumbo jet, or the hood and windshield of a new Saturn hybrid — with no distortion. “We’re into the immersive experience. It’s a holodeck kind of thing,” Connolly says, referring to the computer-simulated architecture first imagined in Star Trek. “I can turn this room into the south of France. I can turn this pillar into a waterfall.”

….As Obscura grew, Threlkel played the Pied Piper, convincing a motley crew of builders from Oregon to move to the Bay Area and construct über-domes, jumbo touch displays, and other fantastical video-projection treatments. “In 2000, I was running my family business in Oregon, Pacific Domes,” says Chris Lejeune, Obscura’s head of production. “Travis’s first project with Obscura involved surround projection, so he called me up and we hit it off. I was intending to move to San Francisco anyway, so the timing was perfect.” Lejeune and his building crew, who call themselves G-Bohs (for gypsy bohemians), feature dreadlocks, multiple piercings, and a postapocalyptic style. But their guiding ethos is straightforward: Failure is impossible.

In part, the G-Boh work ethic is based on a code of having one another’s back. “We’ve been working together longer than Obscura’s been around,” Matty Dowlen says. “We’re a family.” But it’s also a testament to the genuine respect they have for Threlkel and Connolly’s vision. Says Dowlen: “There’s a sense that we’re building something unique and beautiful. Yeah, we do work for corporations, but we’re giving them a piece of what we love.”

“In the past, it was either products or services, black or white, but there may be this evolving hybrid where we can do both,” Connolly says. “Right now, it’s like we’re a Labrador retriever in a room full of tennis balls, and we can’t stop picking them up.”

And what, really, is so wrong with going after every ball? The Obscura crew is reveling in the moment. “We’re so booked right now it’s crazy,” Connolly says. “Last week, I went from Detroit to Dubai, then to Minneapolis. I was in, like, five different time zones. I just heard from a guy who owns one of the world’s largest megayachts — he wants us to go out there and do a multimedia retrofit of the entire vessel” — complete with touch whiteboards that will serve as a digital concierge to manage everything from GPS to weather mapping, not to mention popcorn delivery to an onboard theater (total price: $10 million). “How frickin’ James Bond ’80s is that, man?!” At moments like these, it’s clear that Obscura’s 10-year plan — or lack thereof — is utterly beside the point.

Whole Story HERE>>

Best part about the piece was how refreshing it is to see the culture take a backseat to the actual creative work. I’ve seen so much stuff written about organizations that involve this culture paint its output not as the results of intensely talented individuals and creative teams, but as if it were some kind of bizarre or untouchable or, worst of all, elitist statement. The reality of excited, dedicated, innovative creators, just doing what they do, without the imposition of some cultural divide, is a welcome departure.

Though I gotta admit, “Failure Is Impossible” totally sounds like a fantastic superhero tagline.

First i’m trying to recover from a week in the forest. As part of the decompression process, yesterday involved a trip to the hair salon, which meant I actually had time to do nothing but sit around and read for the first time in quite a while.

“It’s the Adultery, Stupid,” An article in the current Vanity Fair, suggests that, “Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.”

Which is pretty fascinating if you view this idea through the lens of identity. Same as we buy the brands and products that we feel express aspects of who we are, we support the political candidates who do the same. In this particular race, the touch-points for identification are no longer simply about party affiliations, policy views, or even age, but now extend to gender, race, and, as the Vanity Fair piece suggests, sex life too:

We want to know. That’s a big part of Bill Clinton’s legacy: there’s always a sexual explanation. We’re savvy. Sex completes the picture—it explains so much. Tim Russert and other Sunday-talk-show hosts might maintain the illusion that politics is, or should be, a formal dialogue about impersonal issues, with sex only a topic of surprise, scandal, and shocked-shockedness, but in real life everybody is constantly and openly speculating on the sexual nature and needs and eccentricities of every rising and demanding political personality.

It’s a point of identification and differentiation. We vote for or against sex lives.

The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one…. So what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.

John McCain, with his burden of being the would-be oldest president, is helped not just by having his mother on the campaign trail but also by having a much younger wife. He is evidently still vital (that old euphemism). Even the suggestion, by The New York Times, that he might still be compulsively vital has not yet hurt him—quite possibly he gets a break because he’s an old guy. A randy codger seems harmless and amusing.

Fred Thompson, meanwhile, so vividly middle-aged—a whale of middle age—was out of the running almost as soon as his big-bosomed wife, 24 years younger than Fred, came into view and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested she could be a pole dancer. And if that didn’t do it, seeing the weary way he looked at his young children certainly did—here was a middle-aged man who had sexually overreached. Rudy Giuliani offered the most gutsy sexual Rorschach test. His view seemed to be that the problem with sex is that it suggests weakness—the lowest attribute for a politician. But if you approached your sexual weakness with brazenness and bullying, you’d get credit for being tough (implicit, too, was Rudy’s assumption that there was a viable constituency of guys’ guys who had something on the side). Mitt Romney’s problem was that he appeared asexual—1950s-television-style asexual, which seemed like its own sort of fetish. All this, with a digression into Eliot Spitzer’s activities, has been the real background and narrative of the campaign.

It’s helped make Barack Obama possible.

There is next to no speculation about Barack Obama’s sexual secrets. This is a seismic shift in racial subtext. The white men are the sexual reprobates and loose cannons (while Mitt and Hillary are just strange birds) and the black man the figure of robust middle-class family warmth.

Against these middle-aged people, he’s the naturalist, the credible and hopeful figure of a man who actually might be having sex with his smiling, energetic, and oomphy wife…. He’s the only one in the entire field who doesn’t suggest sexual desperation. He represents our ideal of what a good liberal’s sex life ought to be.

The article offers that sex has become a political metaphor, and in a presidential race of unprecedented diversity, the whole election could be like some kind of subconscious cultural Kinsey survey.

We may be in trouble.

In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter explain that really, there was never any conflict between the two to begin with. Counterculture hinges on, and consumer culture consists of, the expression of your lifestyle/identity. Whether you’re choosing to wear Nikes, Doc Martens, or some crazy obscure Japanese brand that doesn’t even exist in the US, you’re deliberately saying something about yourself with the fashion choice. And regardless of how “counter” whatever culture you think you are, getting to express that about yourself requires buying something.

Yet the concept of a strict divide between the “mainstream” and “counter”–or “alternative”–cultures persists, and the distinction between these “affiliations” is now defined not by whether we consume, but by what. Identities hinge on particular expressions and symbols, such as music or fashion for instance. In a very simple sense, you are “mainstream” or “alternative” based on whether the way you choose to express your identity, your taste, is shared by a big group/culture, or a small one. Yet the trouble is that these expressions are given meaning precisely through their common significance within a group, if the group size changes, then so too does the meaning.

Last summer Danah Boyd wrote about the idea of “Pointer Remix“:

One way to think about remix is as the production of a new artifact through the artistic interweaving of other artifacts…. With this in mind, think about an average MySpace profile. What should come to mind is a multimedia collage: music, videos, images, text, etc. This collage is created through a practice known as “copy/paste” where teens (and adults) copy layout codes that they find on the web and paste it into the right place in the right forms to produce a profile collage. One can easily argue that this is remix: a remix of multimedia to produce a digital representation of self. Yet, the difference between this and say a hip-hop track is that the producer of a MySpace typically does not “hold” the content that they are using. Inevitably, the “img src=” code points to an image hosted by someone somewhere on the web; rarely is that owner the person posting said code to MySpace. The profile artist is remixing pointers, not content.

I kind of think of all culture creation/expression as a process of “Pointer Remix”— and when I say culture creation, I mean brand creation too. There’s a paragraph in Pattern Recognition where William Gibson lapses into fashion historian momentarily:

My God, don’t they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.

And just as much as all labels are creating pointers, that’s exactly what we are buying. In fact, looking TO buy. Now, more than ever before, the possession of an “original” source is either impossible, pointless, or even irrelevant. In postmodernism’s revenge, even an “original” becomes a reference. A vintage dress is all about what it “points” to.

Yet as Boyd points out:

If the content to which s/he is pointing changes, the remix changes…. Say that my profile is filled with pictures of cats from all over the world. The owners of said cat pictures get cranky that I’m using up their bandwidth (or thieving) so they decide to replace the pictures of cats with pictures of cat shit. Thus, my profile is now comprised of pictures of cat shit (not exactly the image I’m trying to convey). This is what happened to Steve-O.

One of the most high profile cases of such content replacement came from John McCain’s run-in with MySpace profile creation. His staff failed to use images from their own servers. When the owner of the image McCain used realized that the bandwidth hog was McCain, he decided to replace the image. All of a sudden, McCain’s MySpace profile informed supporters that he was going to support gay marriage. Needless to say, this got cleaned up pretty fast.

Cleaning it up on myspace is easy. You can just go and find another image and use that, or, of course, you can host your own images, and that way be sure that the content being pointed to will not change without you knowing about it–but that defeats this metaphor, so pretend you didn’t just read it.

Cause what’s interesting to me is when this same phenomenon happens in a non-html-based context. Like, for example, if a priest gets outed as a pedophile. This kind of “content change” happens to real-life “pointers” all the time. Pointers that happen to be used as elements in the construction of identity.

Check this out, below is the ad campaign for the 2008 season of America’s Next Top Model:

(For the record, seeing this billboard is what inspired this whole post.)

There’s a few particular aesthetic elements to note here for the purpose at hand, and I’ll tell you what they are. The hats with the feathers, the general 1920’s and 40’s infusion with the high waists and cropped tops, and the whole cabaret/vaudeville overtone.

These are all elements of a style that’s been rocked in the scene around me for years.

If you’re interested in some history you might want to click here, but the quick version is it became a part of the aesthetic expression of a particular subculture with a significant presence all up along the West Coast. And then last week, at the intersection of Sunset and Vine a bus rolls past me carrying a whole tableau along its side of girls sporting this style. It was pretty startling to see it so out of context, since up until then I hadn’t seen this look used in any mainstream media or setting–anyone who can find links to other examples, post it in the comments, I’d love to see it.

While I personally have no idea exactly how the stylist team for ANTM got the idea for the particular creative direction in the ad, I think the possibility that this burgeoning aesthetic, with a major base of operations in LA, might have somehow made it directly onto their radar is hardly a long shot.

Boyd asks, “What happens when a culture exists that rests on pointer remix for identity construction?” Well, at least one side effect is that meanings of cultural expressions–and hence what they say about our identities–change.

One pretty consistent way this “content change” in the meaning of a cultural expression happens is in the process of becoming more exposed. It’s been going on ever since the first small local band blew up and became huge. Everything else about the music and the act might have stayed the same but the obscurity, and it’s the very “alternative”-ness itself that was a part of its meaning all along. The difference between being a fan of something intimate and distinctive vs. something mainstream and egalitarian could be kinda like waking up to discover your kitten pictures have turned into kitten poo.

Here’s another approach. In October of 2007, Sasha Frere-Jones wrote an article in the New Yorker about “How Indie Rock Lost Its Soul.” The premise of the piece is that in the 1990’s rock and roll, a genre that evolved out of a tremendous black musical influence on white performers, and became the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a kind of racial re-segregation in its style:

Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

…It’s difficult to talk about the racial pedigree of American pop music without being accused of reductionism, essentialism, or worse, and such suspicion is often warranted. In the case of many popular genres, the respective contributions of white and black musical traditions are nearly impossible to measure. In the nineteen-twenties, folk music was being recorded for the first time, and it was not always clear where the songs—passed from generation to generation and place to place—had come from.

…Yet there are also moments in the history of pop music when it’s not difficult to figure out whose chocolate got in whose peanut butter. In 1960, on a train between Dartford and London, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, then teen-agers, bonded over a shared affinity for obscure blues records. (Jagger lent Richards an LP by Muddy Waters.) “Twist and Shout,” a song that will forever be associated with the Beatles, is in fact a fairly faithful rendition of a 1962 R. & B. cover by the Isley Brothers. In sum, as has been widely noted, the music that inspired some of the most commercially successful rock bands of the sixties and seventies—among them Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Grand Funk Railroad—was American blues and soul.

… In the mid- and late eighties, as MTV began granting equal airtime to videos by black musicians, academia was developing a doctrine of racial sensitivity that also had a sobering effect on white musicians: political correctness. Dabbling in black song forms, new or old, could now be seen as an act of appropriation, minstrelsy, or co-optation. A political reading of art took root, ending an age of innocent—or, at least, guilt-free—pilfering.

Himself a white musician/vocalist, Frere-Jones notes that adopting a black singing style even in his own band “seemed insulting.”

By the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term “indie rock” came implicitly to mean white rock.

….How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience—to entertain? I can imagine James Brown writing dull material. I can even imagine the Meters wearing out their fans by playing a little too long. But I can’t imagine any of these musicians retreating inward and settling for the lassitude and monotony that so many indie acts seem to confuse with authenticity and significance.

While the article is specifically focused on the indie rock side, he readily admits that the segregation went both ways. Just as indie rock became “white rock,” “Black” music too began to occupy a space that may be more inaccessible and irrelevant to an outside audience now than it was during the 50’s. In an audio interview accompanying the article, Frere-Jones talks more about the results of the musical re-segregation from both angles. “Why is this a hit?” He jokes, about the absurdity of “Soulja Boy’s” success. “It’s just rapping over a ring-tone.”

Social and (after a series of lawsuits involving sampling) legislative forces gradually changed the sound of the music itself, and also of the “content” in the meaning of these musical pointers. As in: what does liking Indie Rock or Rock and Roll, and even Hip Hop at this point, convey about your identity now vs. what it would have 20 year ago? 40 years ago? Lose miscegenation and something that could once be relevant to a mixed audience becomes divisive.

Just as “Nation of Rebels” points out that there is no conflict between the counter and over-the-counter culture, I likewise see alternative and mainstream culture as just parts of a greater continuum, which ultimately, despite all the obstacles that societies, politics, economics, religions, and even individual personalities may put in its path, seeks its level at the greatest hybridity. “Content change” in the meaning of its expressions is as inevitable as the remixing of the expressions themselves.

In the meantime though, I’m gonna enjoy this kitten while it lasts.