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We’re going to be sort of busy for a few days, or maybe a week. This site is likely to be neglected during some, or all, of that time. Just so you know.
Fakes On Display — Really
Via Counterfeit Chic, here’s The Museum of Counterfeit Goods: “This permanent collection, located at the Bangkok office of the Tilleke & Gibbins law firm, displays not only a range of fashion items but also food products, electronics, toiletries, pharmaceuticals, and even automobile parts alongside the fake versions. Open by appointment — and no, there’s no gift shop.”
Not going to Bangkok? At least you can browse some online pictures of the collection.
Work / Meaning
Yesterday’s WSJ op-ed page had a long piece by Edmund Phelps, who just won the Nobel Prize in economics. The piece basically made the case for “dynamic” U.S.-style capitalism, over the “social market” or “social democracy” style capitalism of some Western European nations. In addition to all the arguments that you’d expect, he contends that U.S.-style capitalism affords more opportunities for “self-realization.”
The concept that people need problem-solving and intellectual development originates in Europe: There is the classical Aristotle, who writes of the “development of talents”; later the Renaissance figure Cellini, who jubilates in achievement; and Cervantes, who evokes vitality and challenge. … The American application of this Aristotelian perspective is the thesis that most, if not all, of such self-realization in modern societies can come only from a career. … If a challenging career is not the main hope for self-realization, what else could be? Even to be a good mother, it helps to have the experience of work outside the home.
Acknowledging that’s drawing “an idealized portrait of capitalism” that’s more important than reality, he adds:
But we can, nevertheless, ask whether there is any evidence in favor of these claims on behalf of dynamism. Do we find evidence of greater benefits of dynamism in the relatively capitalist economies than in the Continental economies as currently structured? In the Continent’s Big Three, hourly labor productivity is lower than in the U.S. Labor-force participation is also generally lower. And here is new evidence: The World Values Survey indicates that the Continent’s workers find less job satisfaction and derive less pride from the work they do in their job.
He concludes by saying that dynamic capitalism is better, among other reasons, because it proves “entrepreneurial types” with more “opportunities … for self-expression.”
I happen to be a big believer in the idea of work as a source of meaning — as a source of meaning superior to that which is likely to be achieved by consumption, for example. (Although I’m not sure that work trumps family as a source of “self realization” — and I’m hardly a family-guy type.) What I think is sort of dissonant here is that my general impression is that many, many, many of the jobs being created by the present economy are actually kind of meaningless. For every Knowledge Entrepreneur Blah-di-Blah, there are many Wal Mart cashiers, for every tech innovator, there are many tech-company customer service reps. Many, possibly most, of the new jobs being created today are not exactly opporunities for Aristotelian problem-sovling.
And I don’t find the evidence that he offers of U.S. capitalism as a self-realization machine particularly convincing. He seems to be saying higher productivity is evidence of higher work satisfaction, but I don’t buy that. The only other evidence he offers is this World Values Survey, which I’d never heard of, and on brief examination appears to be, basically, a global poll. I’ll look into that further later, when I have more time.
In any case, interesting arguments, and I agree with him about the goals, and actually I’m prepared to believe that “dynamic” capitalism is the best way to achieve them. But there’s nothing here that convinces me that we’re on that path now.
Green Believers
Possibly worth watching tonight: Moyers On America: Is God Green? Some clips on Beliefnet.
In the time of Four Or Five Americas, the possibility of a meaningful alliance between environmentalists and religious leaders strikes me as pretty compelling, and it’s been getting steadily more attention for about a year now. Here’s an article sort of on the subject (particularly focused on Rev. Richard Cizik) from the L.A. Timess. Also related, E.O. Wilson’s recent book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.
Moyers took a more pessimistic look at the attitudes some religious thinkers toward the environment in a March 2005 New York Review essay, which is available online only to subscribers, but whose tone is hinted at by the title: “Welcome To Doomsday.”
Sneakertrash
Usually when I’m thinking/writing about consumption, I’m essentially focused on the moment people buy something. I don’t think I’m alone in this: consuming and buying sound like the same thing.
But of course you could also argue that the purchase moment is actually just the beginning. The process of consuming something doesn’t end until it’s gone (in the case of, say, a beverage) or thrown out, or dissolved, or whatever. And we all know it’s pretty common to feel much differently about a given object at the end of this process than at the beginning.
For a long time I’ve had this on my list of “themes to address some day,” but lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because we’ve been in the process of getting rid of a lot of stuff. For instance, the sneakers above — one of two pairs I just threw away. Pondering the conclusion of my personal history with these consumable objects has given me a reason to act on a months-old invitation to join an online “sneaker community,” called Sneakerplay.
“Messenger chic”
New York Magazine asks Dave Ortiz of DQM, “what’s new in the skater world?” He says:
The track bike—fixed gears, no brakes—is the new skateboard. We’re making six, basing them on the eighties; they’ll be out for February. The Williamsburg kids rock these with rolled-up pants, Vans. Messenger chic. You can do wheelies and skids and be in another borough in twenty minutes, and that’s whassup.
Strictly speaking, I’m not sure I would say it’s new, but I do think that what he’s calling “messenger chic” could be pounced on by the trend industry in a much more aggressive way than it has been to date. As an interesting bit of background, this Village Voice article on “mutant bike culture” was quite memorable — and not just because it includes a Brooklyn Industries guy bumming out about “malicious” graffiti on his shop window. Also possibly interesting (I keep meaning to get this book), is Pedal: “a wild ride alongside a band of New York City’s most feared and respected inhabitants: bike messengers.”
Why do believers believe?
This is something I meant to bring up a while ago (but instead found myself dealing with hard drive failure etc.): A piece on Beliefnet by Michael Shermer on the subject of who believes in God and why. Really it’s about the “why” part, more than the who. The basic point of it is that believers tend to give one answer for why they believe, and a different kind of answer for why they figure other believers believe.
When speaking of themselves, the most popular answer believers gave was some varation on “The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe.”
When speaking of others, their top answer was something like: “Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life.”
Shermer suggests that the results are evidence of:
intellectual attribution bias, in which people consider their own beliefs as being rationally motivated, whereas they see the beliefs of others as being emotionally driven. By analogy, one’s commitment to a political belief is generally attributed to a rational decision (“I am for gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership decreases”), whereas another person’s opinion on the same subject is attributed to need or emotional reasons (“he is for gun control because he is a bleeding-heart liberal”). This intellectual attribution bias appears to be equal opportunity on the subject of God. The apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in daily activities, are powerful intellectual justifications for belief. But we readily attribute other people’s belief in God to their emotional needs and how they were raised.
I guess I would have thought that — to take the gun control example — a person who holds that position not only sees his or her point of view as rational, but would see those who agree as being rational, and those who disagree as being half-cocked, emotion-driven thinkers. It seems surprising that someone who professes belief in God would be so cynical in evaluating the thought processes of others who believe the same thing.
On the other hand, this gap between how we think of our own decisions vs. how we think of other people’s is something that, obviously, I ponder all the time in writing about consumer behavior. And it’s actually not that unusual to hear people suggest that while they like the good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of [insert trendy brand/product here] — everybody else who is consuming that same thing is just following the trend or joining the herd or whatever. I suspect this is not just a matter of cynicism about other people’s decisions — although that may be part of it — but a form of self-flattery: The more everybody else’s decision process seems suspect, the more more mine seems pure and considered.
How’s that for cynical?
Commodification of headbutt continues …
It started early, and AFP reports that it’s not over:
After the French hit song, the jokes, videos games and adverts, there is now a new face to the most infamous headbutt of all time.
Italian defender Marco Materazzi is to publish a book containing 249 phrases he might have said to France captain Zinedine Zidane to invoke the now-retired midfielder’s wrath.
The book is called “What I really said to Zidane,” and Materazzi has been writing about it in a column on Italian sports newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport’s website.
The weirdly resilient consumer
Jim Cramer behaves like a lunatic on his CNBC show, but he’s actuallly a smart guy sometimes. I say that of course because he’s just made a point that I agree with, in today’s WSJ. Namely, he points out that despite all the headlines you’ve seen about the any-second-now collapse of consumer spending, it never seems to happen. Consider this list of culprits that we’ve all heard are about to bring the consumer to his/her knees, he writes:
A new credit-card bill that would permanently set back the consumer by making it too prohibitive to default; a triple hurricane scourge that wrecked the Southeast coast; a natural-gas heating bill which tripled, leaving consumers devastated; a dramatic decline in the value of each American’s bedrock investment, the home; a debilitating war in Iraq that has sapped the optimism needed for robust spending; and, worst of all, a quick doubling of the price of gasoline.
And yet:
Critics are just now waking up to the fact that the consumer may very well be going through the healthiest month of spending we have seen in many years. There are plenty of ephemeral gauges, including some easily manipulated data from the Commerce Department, that reveal overall consumer spending. Nothing, however, touches retail sales as an indicator of how robust the consumer is, and those numbers being reported just now are quite simply off the charts. We are seeing numbers from the major retailers — both high-end and low, mass and teen — so strong that the consumer is not only not dead, but he’s at the peak of health.
He’s got a point — although personally I wonder what explains it, how and why it is that consumer spending seems to thrive no matter what in recent years. Here’s a link, but it will only work for subscribes, I assume.
Cover Brand
In Consumed: Shade Clothing: Threading between the gospel of fashion, and the Gospel.
Chelsea Rippy enjoys browsing through fashion magazines, watching “Project Runway” and shopping. Actually, the shopping bit is only partly true; she enjoys it up to a point. Sometimes it takes her much longer than she’d like to find the right clothes, partly because she is stylistically finicky, but mostly because she is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and hopes to follow its teachings on the matter of modest dress. So low-cut jeans, tiny T-shirts and dresses with plunging necklines pose problems. Or they did, before she decided to start her own company, Shade Clothing. She was 29 and a mother of two, and her specific goal at the time was to build a business around resolving the hip-but-modest dilemma for other young Mormon women. …
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site, via this no-registration-required link.
Related links: Shade Clothing; Brother For Sister; db clay; LDS publications including “The Latter-day Saints Woman.
Product of the Day: “Fire Bible”
From Pick-Me Products: “Open this authentic looking ‘bible’ and begin to share the scripture for the day as real flames are seen coming from your ‘bible.’ This full size book comes with a battery operate ignition system…. Only $44.95!”
Via Elsewares Blog.
Uniform Distaste
While I basically detest the New York Mets, I’m sympathetic to their fans who feel that:
The addition of black to the team’s color palette in 1998 betrayed and disrupted this proud aesthetic history, transforming the franchise from one of baseball’s best-looking teams into one of its ugliest…
That language comes from an online petition that vigorously protests the use of black in the the team’s uniform, “call[ing] upon the ownership, management, and equipment staff of the New York Mets to DITCH THE BLACK and reinstate blue to its rightful place of chromatic supremacy in the team’s color scheme. It’s time to restore the club’s aesthetic heritage and make the Mets a team we can all be proud to look at once again.” There are already more than 800 signatures, and I’m thinking that number will grow.
Who could be behind this project? There can be only one answer.
Update (10/8): NYT story on Ditch The Black. (Highlight: “To Mr. Lukas, the change bordered on sartorial sacrilege. ‘It would be like if in Washington they decided that the red, white and blue is a little outdated, and maybe we should change the red to a burgundy.'”
Imaginary Brands
In addition Wonder and Old Spice and any number of real brands included in the film Talladega Nights was one that — I believe — is imaginary: Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. So far as I know, you can’t really buy Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. You can, however, buy a Laughing Clown Malt Liquor cap. In fact, they’re on sale. Which might be an indicator that they aren’t exactly catching on.
Still, I think imaginary brands are pretty interesting. The Times ran a story earlier this year about fake brands from the era before product placement became a huge business — Beautee Soap in The Hucksters, Dazzledent in The Seven Year Itch, and so on. (Not mentioned was Vitajex, from the must-see A Face In The Crowd.) I assume there must be more contemporary examples, but all I can think of right now is the Big Kahuna Burger chain in Pulp Fiction. (Googling about that a bit led me to this site, where someone is selling “Bad Mother Fucker” wallets.)
I also came across this article about a German design firm called Schein Berlin, which apparently specializes in fake brands:
In addition to providing products to other TV series, they’ve been designing fake products for the RTL soap “Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten” for five years. For this one show alone, they’ve invented 380 fictional brands, some of which have come into existence in as little as 20 minutes to an hour to meet a set designer’s last-minute needs.
The article says the firm also “built a complete Russian supermarket” for The Bourne Conspiracy, “using hundreds of logos and labels, all of them invented.” But apparently in the film itself, this just flits by and isn’t really noticeable.
Too bad. Somebody should put on a gallery show of fake brand design. I’d love to see it.
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Kim Fellner's book 
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