hybridity

by jenks

even more queer once you’re used to it

image

this weekend was the 27th annual sunset junction music festival, a kind of cross between oldskool urban summertime carnival and indie rock block party. think: stale cotton candy and amusement park rides, local shops and art galleries trapped in the warpath shelling beer, dancing in the streets to mobile soundsystems, and the major stages blaring serenades by such haircut stalwarts as she wants revenge, autolux, blonde redhead, hot hot heat and so on.

sunset junction is the most fun you can have at a locally nurtured street festival tradition south of pink saturday in san francisco, which, if you haven’t been, is a complete free-for-all of music madness and making out that takes place the saturday night before san francisco’s gay pride parade every year. which is kind of a good segue to where i’m heading with this entry. because what struck me the most about this year’s sunset junction had nothing to do with the music (at least not directly). about half an hour in, i thought i saw something that no former san francisco resident has any right to get confused about: two straight guys holding hands.

this wasn’t some 4 am e-puddle at a rave cir. 1998. this was around 6 pm on a sunday afternoon in 2007, and while queer eye for the straight guy had mainstreamized the revolution in gay-straight male relations, metrosexual had become a house-hold word, and looking stylish was now par for the course for any sophisticated urban male, there’s still one thing that straight guys simply do not do as a fashion statement, and that’s hold hands.

yet “straight guys holding hands” was the first thing that instinctively passed through my mind. followed immediately, of course, by knee-jerk confusion: that’s not….right…. so then…. what the fuck?

the problem was that they didn’t look gay. not that there’s a certain kind of way that gay guys look that straight guys do not, but rather there are definitely certain ways that straight guys look that gay ones wouldn’t–or at least… there used to be.

what threw me off was that this seemingly-straight hand-holding couple were wearing plaid shorts that looked like swimming trunks found in a florida retirement home, and were sporting sloppy 60’s style columbia-university protester haircuts–the kind that 40 years ago just sort of grew out on their own, but today are no doubt cultivated under the careful attention of a hairdresser to look appropriately “period” vs. “politically active.” essentially, they were dressed like guys dressed before any kind of particularly gay aesthetic EXISTED, when less than 25% of men’s apparel was bought by men anyway. women used to buy 75% of it. (and you can imagine who was buying that other 25, right?)

for the rest of the night i kept seeing the same story repeated: all kinds of gay couples that didn’t look gay aside from the the fact that they were hardcore making out. (true story: at one point, towards the end of the night, when the real minority at sunset junction had become the sober people, one of a trio of guys walking in formation with their arms around each other’s waists backed up into me, and hiccuped, “oh! a girl! where’d they come from?” and i realized i was indeed hard-pressed to find an answer.) there were even mexican dudes in big white t-shirts and shaved heads going at it, that you know blast the radio when down’s “lean like a cholo” comes on. on a sidenote: do people outside of calexico even know what reggaeton is? after a while you start to go a bit blind to the contours of local culture’s idiosyncrasies when they are so prevalent….perhaps this is what has also been going on in the expression of gay identity as well.

one of the things that virtually all my gay friends have in common is a professed dislike of other “gay guys.” which is pretty telling of a major generational rift in the gay community.

the generation coming of age in the 70’s, in the wake of stonewall fought first and foremost for the rights of their community. the chant was “we’re here. we’re queer. get used to it.” the assertion of an individual gay identity, one that has the luxury to be vague, and even profess distance from the rest the gay community, is one that was only achieved through decades of pre-will and grace civil rights struggles.

in a 2005 article from the NYTimes style section, sensibly titled “Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell” bruce pask, the style director of cargo magazine, talked about why especially younger gay men don’t want to feel or look that different: “They didn’t need to assert their place in society, their right to be who they are. They’re not fighting for visibility. We got it; they don’t need it.”

perhaps that’s the issue my gay friends have with the established gay community: they do not feel that this community which is primarily defined by sexual preference is a viable forum for expressing their individual identity.

“if you can hang out with your straight buddies and be part of the group,” said brendan lemon, the editor of out, in the NYTimes article, “why would you feel the need to look different as an assertion of identity?” lemon suggested that for a generation that grew up watching “The Real World” on MTV, in which the gay and lesbian characters were no more or less flamboyant in dress or persona than their straight counterparts, being gay carries neither the stigma nor the specialness it once did. that, he said, has also altered the landscape of men’s style.

“it’s easier for gay men to come out of the closet as slobs, just as it’s easier for straight men to be dandies.” said lemon. “one of the things that’s breaking down how gay guys are seen is that people know more kinds of men who are gay.” but this dissolution of any one gay sensibility seems to be developing not just from the way in which the outside world sees gay men, but from the way gay men themselves want to be seen. as individual as any straight people would consider themselves from the rest of the “straight community.”

in a certain sense, even the breeders have been affected by the coming out of a whole generation. claims that the gay agenda to turn even the straightest of the straight gay by using the media to subliminally refashion their very notions of what they find attractive in women to resemble a male figure aside for the moment, this is the lifestyle that invented the CONCEPT of an “alternative” lifestyle (as opposed to simply a “counter-cultural” rebellion). it set the precedent. as all the rest of us participating in the greater culture now likewise face the burden of defining our own identities (whether we’re conscious of it or not), we all sorta ended up becoming queer…

and wouldn’t you know it, as soon as we did, they just turn around start lookin’ straight.

bastards.

    



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by jenks

what does a web entrepreneur have in common with a fashion designer?

http://www.smejtese.cz/smejtese/images/obrazky/reklama/Benetton5.jpg

when i worked at house of blues, every so often we’d have social events with all the other people working in l.a.’s concert marketing industry. people from goldenvoice, livenation (at the time this was a separate company from house of blues), nederlander, etc. lots of people in attendance had even worked at one of the other companies prior to their current position, so to a great extent the people showing up already knew one another well anyway. the real benefit of attending such an event thus wasn’t even really to meet people from whom to gain new insight so much as to validate your own membership in the industry. i think this quintessential misunderstanding leads a great deal of “networking events” to confuse the goals they are trying to fulfill by focusing their outreach inward vs. extending it out. (intra-industry vs. intER-industry).

last week i went to twiistup, an event for “mingling with other techies in a lively atmosphere of tunes, videos and inspiration.” i am not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, and i actually hate mingling (mingling is like the thing cows do in the holding pens on the way to the slaughterhouse. they… mingle.) so mostly i was going for the “inspiration.”

in an interview with entrepreneur.com, john c. head III dean of MIT’s sloan school of management, and david s. evans, vice chairman of LECG europe and visiting professor at the university college in london, co-authors of the Catalyst Code, talk about one of the most profitable business models in today’s economy, the “catalyst business”:

You ask yourself, Are there two groups you can profit from getting together? A catalyst business serves two or more distinct groups of people who benefit from interacting with each other, but need help to do so efficiently.

this kind of perspective for hybridity and creative collaborations speaks very much to the kinds of opportunities that all the inward-focused networking events are missing. as a marketer, what piqued my interest in twiistup wasn’t about the latest, most obscure, soon to be hip, “underground” apps or widgets or whatevers, but rather the reasoning behind their creation. what, exactly, about this particular app or widget or whatever did the creator consider relevant enough to the current social climate to warrant all the time invested into its creation? you don’t need to be a techie to appreciate that question, but what i discovered is that unlike “what does this do?” or “how does this work?” in an environment teeming with people creating products that beg the question, the answers are in notoriously short supply to “why does it matter?”

schmalensee says:

I don’t want to put down technology guys, because somebody has to make the idea work, but at the end of the day, the creativity comes not in writing the code, it comes in seeing the business model and thinking it through from a business point of view.

The key is not that you have to be an expert in the technology, but you have to not be afraid of it. You have to not say “Oh, I’ll never understand that”….Where you make the money [is] not in the new “gee whiz,” but what the new “gee whiz” can do for people.

part of the problem is that it’s not always so simple to see the forest in the context of an outside perspective when you’re in the thick of the overgrowth. being so mired in the details makes articulating the thing’s overall relevance much more difficult. this is then ever more reason why “networking” events should reach out to a broader range of industries. it’s not simply that non-technologists can benefit from overcoming the tech-phobia, it’s that everyone can benefit–that is, catalyst strategies are born—from overcoming industry xenophobia.

evans says there are probably more opportunities to start catalyst businesses now than ever before and proposes the reason for this is that many of the elements that you need to start a catalyst business (i.e. communications technology) have become easier to get. but i would argue there is another, just as powerful force involved here: culture.

in the rise of the creative class richard florida presents the idea that there is a distinct demographic segment, comprised of knowledge workers, intellectuals and various types of artists, with its own particular predispositions and proclivities. beyond just the nature of their occupations, this “creative class” is also defined through commonalities in many of its members’ lifestyles and values. i think there are two particular ways in which the attributes of this expanding cohort relate–not coincidentally–to the kind of business model evans and schmalensee see expanding as well:

1. the creative class grows through the very processes that catalyst-businesses enable. the creative field of technology merged with the creative field of music, develops whole new fields within music/audio technology. likewise with technology and art, and so on.

2. this group (which fills about 12% of all U.S. jobs) is disproportionately responsible for the development of the contemporary cultural landscape, passing on the very values of hybridity that fuel the catalyst-business model to industries and fields beyond just the creative class itself.

evans and schmalensee might say that what connects a fashion designer and a web entrepreneur, is that, for instance, the former would need the latter to stay competitive in their online presence, but that’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg.

what industries of all creative flavors have in common is the necessity to take the significance of cultural trends into consideration. whether you are working in technology, music, design, marketing, entertainment, business, or really anything else where what’s going on in the greater culture matters, then being able to accurately distill, develop, and disseminate cultural relevance can mean the difference between success and failure. literally. is there anything successful that WASN’T relevant to its time?

(….ok, van gogh is coming to mind…. but i’m telling you: it’s a short–posthumous–list.)

it seems then that a good way to avoid a fate of irrelevance would be to explore the directions that the industries driving culture in tandem with yours are leading culture. a great forum for jus such an exploration (on any scale) is a “networking” event.

for the creative class, culture is the raw material ALL of us work with, and all of us have a hand in shaping different aspects of it. it’s why the answers to the “why does it matter?” question are so important to me, and should probably be to you too. one of the goals for any significant networking event aiming to provide value to this particular yet disparate demographic segment then, should be to apply this approach towards a greater industry hybridity.

    



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by jenks

you are not the demo

piolin.jpg
photo by: anearthling

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that “you are not the user.” If you work on a development project, you’re atypical by definition. Design to optimize the user experience for outsiders, not insiders.
– jakob nielsen

much the same way that the developer is not the user, the marketer is not the demo. being a marketer does not actually make you so atypical, (anyone who has given thought to what they put up on their social network profile, and why, suddenly understands the concept of “branding”), but being who you ARE does. to a certain extent marketers address the fact that not all markets are made in their own image, but at the end of the day, despite all the demographic research, despite all the focus groups, and everything that the nielsen ratings have to say, it is, inevitably, still individuals who design the ad and its messaging. individuals whose natural tendency is to take for granted that their own identity defaults are relevant to other people. the tricky thing, of course, is that since they’re defaults, it’s quite hard to recognize their personal and non-universal nature. and since we generally tend to hang out with the kinds of folks that reinforce our own identity and worldview back to us (our “community”) we often end up viewing the people who don’t agree with us as “wrong”–just think about people with political leanings or musical tastes that are incompatible with yours….

well, it’s those same people thinking about your political leanings and musical tastes right now, and comparing how incompatible they are with their own, that are designing the marketing message that’s gonna speak to you.

as humans we define our modern identities by our cultural affiliations and lifestyle choices, and the more we are identified with them the more it can get in the way of understanding what resonates with the people who do not share our community’s language and values. as marketers–who still happen to be human–this poses a particular problem.

unlike, say, the perspective of danah boyd, i don’t subscribe to the worldview that american society is so easily split up between the “hegemony” (dominant class) and the “subaltern” (subordinate, lower class). perhaps it’s like that among high school kids, since that’s whom danah studies, but i still doubt it. if this simple split between the popular kids and the burnouts castes was a hugely relevant definition of identity then all marketers would need to do is keep cranking out hegemonic “aspirational” ad messages, go home, and call it day. the reality of ad messaging, however, seems to have gotten a bit more complicated than that since the 1950’s, and then even exponentially MORE complicated since the 1980’s. there is no universal influencer anymore. there are instead tribal market segments, and the tricky part is translating between, and even within them.

ok, i don’t know about you, but if i have to slog through reading a lot of abstract theory i tend to zone out and go skipping stones across my mozilla tabs, so how about a practical example?

nielsen writes:

The Web’s chattering classes tend to be overly engaged in the “Internet elite experience.” They actually care about the ‘Net for its own sake, and go gaga over new ways of showing maps. In contrast, average users just want to complete tasks online. They don’t particularly like the Web, and they’d like to get back to their jobs or families as quickly as possible.

i’d add that they want to get back to their own identities as quickly as possible. the “elite internet user” is a kind of identity/lifestyle/community unto itself, and it’s not that the “average” user is just a wannabe tourist in this clique, it’s that the average user isn’t even INTERESTED in being part of the clique. the average user probably has interests and ways of defining their identity that the “elite internet user” couldn’t even care about, much like an “elite soccer mom” probably doesn’t give a shit about the “Net for its own sake”–except for the times when it’s in any way involved with sex offenders, maybe.

that photo at the top of this post is for a spanish-speaking morning radio show in l.a. hosted by piolin, and i think it’s absolutely hilarious. this message, which proclaims in a broken english that “we espeekinglish tu!” is in no way aimed at convincing any native english speaker to listen to the program. this is, of course, a more dramatic example of translating between market segments since it actually involves a product and a message that, literally, speaks to a demo in a different language–but it’s not spanish. it’s spanglish.

these billboards are all over l.a. (including an even funnier one that involves the phrase “free toes free hole es” smack dab over hollywood blvd.) these are not messages relegated to some “subaltern” niche corner, they are actually pretty brazen displays of a very inside joke that is only supposed to resonate with a particular kind of identity.

even though markets are increasingly defined by their individuals’ identities, it is impossible for any one individual marketer to be able to understand and speak the language of EVERY identity out there. the first step to learning anything new, however, is to simply accept that you don’t know it. accept that you are not the demo. EVER. even if you fit the profile, it doesn’t matter. it’s not the point. it’s just luck. (like it’s lucky that you, reader, happen to be part of the 35% of internet users who are familiar with “blogs”… if you’re from the west coast, 18-34, college educated and male, you’re also likely to be a part of the paltry 16% familiar with “wikis”…. and if you happen to be surprised that those percentages are so low, considering how much impact you might feel these channels/tools carry, then it’s even more proof of why taking your personal self out of the equation when developing a strategy is crucial.)

nielsen says that the antidote to the elite “bubble vapor” problem is user testing:

Find out what representative users need. It’s tempting to work on what’s hot, but to make money, focus on the basics that customers value.

in marketing it’s not specifically about what the “user needs” but what they “relate to.” it’s not about what you think is “hot,” it’s about distilling a message and an approach that resonates with a particular identity.

    



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by jenks

the cult of the gate-crasher

 

 

“We’re the most permeable membrane in show-business. Anyone who thinks they’re part of Mystic Family Circus probably is.”

– Mystic Family Circus in Freaks & Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus

ok… i’m going to confess: i didn’t read the cult of the amateur (and i’ve read enough reviews of it at this point to be fairly certain that i will never want to) but i’m sure whatever the book is trying to say, it’s got it wrong.

wait, no, that’s not right… we can’t begin this way…

this isn’t even about the book. the book is just a a timely incarnation of a widely-held perspective that there is, and needs to be, a set dividing line to separate creative expression of worth from that which is worthless. and without this line there would be no way to distinguish between that which is moving culture forward, and that which is, as andrew keen says, “killing culture.” what the book is wrong about is this perspective in the first place.

i’m going to give the majority of the credit for why i’m not going to read the book to this fantastically insightful customer review of it on amazon. (i actually can’t think of a more amazingly ironic sort of fate for a book that’s a polemic decrying the worthlessness of the web’s content! can you?):

Although The Cult of the Amateur is highly thought provoking, it is marred by sloppy thinking. For one thing: “Amateur” is never defined. Professionalism is a complicated concept in the fields of literature, music, visual arts, and dance (the last is a field this book does not cover, but it is one I am familiar with as a performer and teacher). Professionalism is often not defined by whether the person makes his or her living as a writer, musician, etc. Most people in most arts fields, including some highly skilled and well-known artists, simply cannot earn a living working in the arts full time because the pay is typically too low. Professionalism is sometimes defined by whether the artist has passed “gatekeepers,” in the form of publishers or producers, or by winning contests.

yes… this is where we should begin.

right there.

artistic expression of worth, i.e. “professional-quality,” as defined by whether the artist has passed “gatekeepers.”

see this is where the cult of the amateur is wrong. in the very concept of its title! there is certainly no lack of amateurs out there–those that haven’t passed through the gate–but the cult isn’t about them. no, all they get is a club. and they’re quite happy with it.

the cult…is about the gate-CRASHERS! these are the people who don’t give a shit about the gate.

see, despite whatever the book is (i’m told) trying to assert, it’s not REALLY about how web 2.0’s proliferation of “amateur content” threatens “our cultural standards and moral values.” it’s not really about how a static volume of books edited by a bunch of white guys who determined what was and was not worthy of inclusion is “better” than a universal wiki-encyclopedia. it’s not REALLY about how news written by a professional journalist working for a publicly-traded corporate-owned media outlet is better than a blog. it’s probably not even about concepts for determining the merit of creative expression in a more complex way than “created by someone who has passed through the gate” vs. “not.” no, it’s not about any of that nonsense…. what it’s really about is a huge degree of fear and anxiety from the cultural conservatives within the gates, who will pay money to read a book that might allay these fears by discrediting the unwashed barbarian insurgents outside threatening to undermine the very foundation of the elite’s worth as artists, not to mention their authority.

hold up a second…. let’s pause for a brief history lesson on “degenerate art“:

Entartete Kunst-

In 1927, the National Socialist Society for German Culture was formed. The aim of this organization was to halt the “corruption of art” and inform the people about the relationship between race and art. By 1933, the terms “Jewish,” “Degenerate,” and “Bolshevik” were in common use to describe almost all modern art.

Viewers of Degenerate Art Exhibit In 1937, Nazi officials purged German museums of works the Party considered to be degenerate. From the thousands of works removed, 650 were chosen for a special exhibit of Entartete Kunst. The exhibit opened in Munich and then traveled to eleven other cities in Germany and Austria. In each installation, the works were poorly hung and surrounded by graffiti and hand written labels mocking the artists and their creations. Over three million visitors attended making it the first “blockbuster” exhibition. Many of the artists included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition are now considered masters of the twentieth century. The following are some of the better known artists whose works were ridiculed in the exhibit. Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Kandinsky, Die Brücke….

woops. looks like someone messed up on their art history final. oh wait…. hitler was never accepted to art school in the first place…

“All my life I have wanted to be a great painter in oils … As soon as I have carried out my program for Germany, I shall take up painting. I feel that I have it in my soul to become one of the great artists of the age and that future historians will remember me not for what I have done for Germany, but for my art.… As for the degenerate artists, I forbid them to force their so-called experiences upon the public. If they do see fields blue, they are deranged, and should go to an asylum. If they only pretend to see them blue, they are criminals, and should go to prison. I will purge the nation of them.”
– Adolf Hitler

he really really tried to feature picasso’s work in the entartete kunst exhibit too, unfortunately picasso could never be proven to be jewish enough to fit with the theme.

ok, you know what?…. that was a pretty extreme example. don’t lets get carried away, aight? alls i’m sayin’ is…. it ain’t like discrediting gate-crashing artists out of fear is a new thang. it’s got quite a robust history. ironically, angstily revenging your rejection by the gatekeepers by wiping them out isn’t really what gate-crashers care about. really, more often gate-crashers don’t even care whether they are accepted or not.

that’s part of what makes them so dangerous. see, whereas some “amateurs” really might get all despondent (and in very rare cases…genocidally psychotic) if a gatekeeper won’t let their art through, to a gate-crasher the idea of getting discouraged if they didn’t make it is like getting discouraged from sneezing in the future just because you didn’t get a “god bless you.” they’re going to create art no matter what. it’s a disorder. they generally can’t help it. and i’m not talking about all those poor tone-deaf souls with pop-star delusions that american idol relishes for its gag reel. that’s not about compulsive creative expression, that’s about feeding the fantasies of narcissism. and while the two very often come hand in hand, they are very easily distinguishable.

the self-identified “professionals” inside the gate, however, like to lump all the people on the outside into this one big tragic wannabe “amateur” category. it’s a lot less threatening that way. call them all pestilent “amateurs” and it helps delay the need to critically address any revolutionizing impact of the gate-crashers among them. generally the rule is to scoff at the barbarians with spray cans overtly tagging the walls of the hallowed gate until such time as the side facing out has itself turned into a new kind of canvas, and the gatekeepers have figured out how to move the gate to a more accommodating locati–i mean, monetize the new art.

even arguably the most impenetrable gate on earth (i’m not counting heaven) moved when hollywood was financially forced to stop staring at its on celluloid navel. once upon a time hollywood was adamant that there was no way that any entity but an established studio could produce quality movies. after all, how could they? beyond the impossible hurdles of the huge amounts of money and all sorts of other resources required, producing movies that the public would be interested in seeing was a craft, requiring years of professional training and dues paying. this just wasn’t the kind of thing any amateur could do. that is, until miramax’s independently-produced, $1.1 million sex lies and videotape performed better on a cost-to-earnings ratio than the $50 million batman. four years later disney bought miramax, and now now, over a decade later, the concept of an “independent” film is basically an anachronism. (seriously, like when was the last time you went to see an “independent”?) hollywood’s totally cool with good (profitable) movies coming from wherever it is that they come from now–it’s too busy just scrambling to figure out how it’s going to continue to make money on distributing them to care about defending it’s Ahhht gate anymore.

as the auter’s (not amateurs) of the 1990’s independent film industry attest, “outsider artists” are not necessarily all that interested in paying their dues and waiting in line for the chance to get their shot. nor are they particularly resourceless when it comes to finding innovative ways to create and distribute the fruits of their creativity on their own terms. these things hold true for gate-crashers in all creative fields. from film, to music, fashion, entertainment, to business, and even to the creative expression of lifestyle itself.

this is all a great opportunity to reevaluate the question: is creative expression worthless unless it has prestige? does it have to have “superiority” (i.e. better than the stuff outside the gate) to have value? both the “polish” of industry and “ingenuity” of independence lend their respective expressions different kinds of caché, but is there perhaps a way to decipher the inherent value in creative expression regardless of origin? can expression be judged on how insightful it is? how entertaining it is? how relevant? provocative? fresh? without that measure necessarily being a reflection of how many gates it did or did no pass?cuz see, the funny thing about the gate, is that the gate doesn’t actually CARE about the art. well, it sort of does. but mostly, it just cares about perpetuating itself. this is why it’s so difficult for people on the inside side of it to break out once they’ve gotten too far in. (oh, so you want to be a political essayist but your major success is in illustrated children’s books? roiiiight.) this is also why true gate-crashers are defined not by having been able to do so from the outside in, but rather by continuing to crash through the gate, no matter which side they’re on. see: paul simon’s foray into mbaqanga music of south africa on the Graceland album, 1986. According to allmusic.com, “Graceland became the standard against which subsequent musical experiments by major artists were measured.” totally a gate-crasher move.

i’m not saying that traditional training is unnecessary, i’m just saying that it’s not a consistent enough determinant of quality to rely on too heavily for the judging. “self-taught” is not a separate art category. and i’m not saying that gates don’t matter, they are, in fact, crucial. without them, the gate-crasher could not exist. what i am saying is it’s time to give the gate-crashers their due recognition. the experimenting, the visionary, the curious… these qualities that are ignored, denied and discredited by the word “amateur,” these are the qualities that fuel the innovators that are not only not killing culture, but in fact, have always been the ones reincarnating it.

    



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