Category Archives: Contemporary

September 5, 2012 · 8:06 PM

Thrift vs Patriotism: The Nationalistic Debate over Olympians’ Clothing

The Olympics may be over, but cultural critique is forever.

Before the start of the Olympic Games in London, there was a bit of a controversy state-side over the uniforms that the U.S. team was going to be wearing to the Opening Ceremonies. Apparently they were made in China. Shocking. The mass media had a field day with this, and politicians weighed in, everyone up in arms about the fact that the uniforms should be made in the United States.

Meanwhile, back in America, this is still a capitalist country that participates in a global marketplace. Of course the uniforms are going to be made in China: it’s cheaper! This made me wonder if, had the uniforms been made in the United States, there would have been a controversy about the expense of outfitting our athletes for the Games. Because you know they would have been pretty darn spendy.

What we have here are coexisting, competing yet related sets of values, ideologies even: the virtue of thrift vs. the virtue of patriotism. At this historical-cultural moment in the United States, the virtue of thrift is tied closely to the recession discourse and the “Jobs” trope people have been hammering for the past year(s). On the other hand, the virtue of patriotism [read: anti-China-ism] mandates that we buy U.S. made goods. This virtue is tied to the Jobs trope and the recession, as well. That hypothetical backlash would have been about excessive spending and anti-American consumer practices that “steal jobs” from hard-working stiffs. So basically, in this climate of competing ideologies, consumers can’t win. They will always be doing something antithetical to mainstream American discourse, which draws upon currently-held beliefs. (Those traitors!) This transcends to the larger scale as well, where Olympic officials can’t win, either. There is no right choice, because either one offends a deep-seated and currently harped-on ideology in America.

So you see, there’s no winning. Or rather, there is a winner, at least rhetorically, and that winner is America. (It’s also the loser, based on my argument, but the discourse will always position itself as drawing attention to how America should be winning. Maybe the real winner is capitalism.) This whole controversy–or rather, both of these controversies, the real and the hypothetical–is wrapped in the always-justifying “virtue” of Nationalism, which is really what the Olympic Games are all about.*

And the coverage of the Games, before, during, and after, is all about drumming up the controversies and human-interest stories that can be squeezed out of the sweaty towels of the competitors and turned into profit. There will always be hand wringing and finger-pointing. Newscasters gotta eat, too. Yay, capitalism!

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*Side-note: In grad school during my Transnational Ritual class, I made the mistake of pointing out that the Olympic Games totally mirrors the hegemonic system of nationalism around which the world is currently organized, man. In response, my professor basically called me childish for not just accepting this as the status quo. (He had a hard-on for the Olympics because it was his “field-site,” and he couldn’t really take any analysis of it that he hadn’t thought of himself, especially not a kommie-Gramscian one. …and I may have aided in his dressing-down of me by sporting pig-tails at the time. But this does not alter the fact that he was still an asshole.)

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June 17, 2012 · 6:54 PM

Mobile Gentrification

If you live in LA, you’ve witnessed the recent rise and domination of the food truck. I’m no expert on the history of food trucks, but I am aware that they didn’t start here. That Portland is screaming, disaffectedly, that they had them first. Except their food trucks had the good sense to stay put in a vacant lot and let the hipsters come to them. I also remember when food trucks were one color (industrial white), had blue-tinted skylight-vents, and were called “roach coaches.” Just to add another subtle layer of racism.

Now we’re witnessing what I’m pretty sure is the gentrification of the mobile lunch cart. All the trucks are painted with logos and designs and have acquired the quirky-yet-palatable aesthetic of half-yuppie, half-hipster. White people love these things and flock to them in droves. The prices are sometimes prohibitive. The food is fancy. Gone are the days when you could just get a sandwich or a taco and those with first dibs usually worked at a car wash. (Exaggeration, but still. The vehicles of yore were often spotted at such establishments.) Now the choices of food truck are so numerous as to make one nauseous, thus undermining their whole business model.

What this trend has done is spread gentrification to a cultural space that one might not think was possible: the truck. A space that transcends space, occupying many. Nothing is safe from this upwardly mobile force. It seeks and destroys all things lower-income and non-model-minority. It lives to please the rich, white hegemonic taste and spreads wherever it can. Colonization is not just for neighborhoods, anymore. Now the gentrification comes to you. It goes everywhere. And it’s edible. It’s the gentrification of food; of the cultural forms that carried it.

This theory is still in the germinating phase, but I stand by it.

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June 4, 2012 · 9:01 PM

NKLA and Participatory Advertising

In the age of the internet, advertisers can rely on consumers to do a lot of work. Because people in this hyper-connected, digital culture are in the habit of constantly looking things up, only to forget them because they can call back that knowledge at will (think wikipedia) less and less information can be provided in advertisements. It is up to the consumer to figure out what’s being sold. What the message is.

To over-simplify a bit, this trend started nearly 100 years ago, when advertisements became less about long-form essays detailing the benefits of a product, and more about images that conveyed the feelings one would get by consuming said products. Now, there’s a type of ad that uses a combined strategy of images and limited accompanying text, relying on consumers to either guess at or go looking for the message and even the very product it’s attached to. These advertisements don’t even have to be about selling something. They can be about conveying an idea; making it “go viral.” It’s propaganda that masquerades as subtle, all the while hoping the masses will whip out their smartphones, find the hidden message on the internet, and hit themselves over the head with it.  Oh, and tell their friends, preferably via tweet. The marketers have passed off their work to us.

Take, for example, the NKLA billboards that popped up in the greater Los Angeles area. These consist of black-and-white photographs of cats and dogs, the letters “NKLA,” and a tiny emoticon-like logo in the bottom corner that suggests a doggie face. That’s it. What the hell are these for? Is it a new clothing line? A rap-group? Soap? Unless the viewer of these ads already knows what they’re supposed to take away from this collection of signifier-less signs, it’s a mystery. And I’d argue it’s designed to be obscure in order to pique the viewer’s interest, igniting a burning curiosity that eventually forces them to take to the interwebs and find out what these billboards and bus-stop ads are supposed to mean. It’s designed to force participation on the part of the view–or in the case of an ad for a product, the potential consumer.

Far be it from me to do the same thing and keep you, my imagined reader, in suspense. It turns out that these “NKLA” ads are for a campaign promoting the idea that no “viable” pet animals be killed in the city of Los Angeles. Here, you don’t even have to go looking. The campaign is backed by a coalition of like-minded organizations, some corporate and some non-profit. What they’re really selling/proposing is an old idea: eugenics. Like Bob Barker used to remind us after every “The Price is Right,” they want us to remember to spay or neuter our pets, and these organizations are mounting an effort to make that easier for people to do. I won’t get into the politics of this or why I find this problematic. For the purposes of this discussion, it’s enough to note that this is not a revolutionary idea that this campaign is trying to promote. Rather, it is the method of promotion and dissemination of this old message that’s somewhat revolutionary. It’s not word of mouth; it’s words from technology.

It is curious that the coalition’s strategy was to rely on viewers to figure out what campaign they were seeing. To do the work to figure out what the message was. Now that is some clever propaganda, and a risky move. Predicting the crowd is not an easy thing to do. And baiting them to do what you want them to do is arguably harder. If not for our digital, internet-connected, give-me-the-info-now culture, this would have no chance of working, of getting the message across. The images would just sit there, not being “read;” not being understood as their makers intended. The message would remain un-conveyed, or at least misinterpreted by the many consumers who were now going to be sorely disappointed the next time they tried to find NKLA’s newest album release.

This type of advertising strategy implicates the viewer–it requires that they participate. It demands their effort and their involvement in the campaign itself. They are part of the advertising team. It is self-directed marketing. Only those with the curiosity bug will exert the effort to get the message. It is self-selected, in a way, as it is more likely that someone with a soft spot for vaguely sad-looking pet animals will be inclined to take the time to find out what those puppies and kitties are trying to tell them. The black-and-white images help set the down-and-out tone, but that only really clicks and becomes part of the message when the viewer looks on the internet and finds out what the ad campaign is “selling”–the idea of a society in which no animals qualifying for the “pet” category have to be killed. (I won’t hold my breath for an “unhappy cows” spin-off.)

It’s all quite clever. And would seem to usher in a new era of marketing methodology.*  The consumer is the partial-producer of the advertisement that encourages them to buy (or in the case of NKLA, buy in to an idea and possibly become involved in either materially realizing it or further disseminating it). The consumer becomes a partial producer of the ad’s message because only after going through the effort of finding the message does the entire campaign gain its layers of meaning. And now, the idea has another follower. Perhaps another member of the movement who is willing to participate even further. Because that viewer searched and found the site and read it and understands. Understands that they now have to decide whether to cruelly say “no” to a campaign that is only trying not to have stray pet animals needlessly die to make room for more stray pet animals. The manipulation is palpable, but is over-ridden by the ostensibly “good” message that is so benign and “right” that no one who took the trouble to find it could possibly, in good conscience, disagree with it. Propaganda’s sneaky that way.

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*Or maybe this strategy has been employed before. It would be worth looking into from a history-of-advertising perspective.

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May 14, 2012 · 10:41 PM

Ruining a Stranger’s Visual Joke

A man is out walking his dog through a large public park. The park contains the ruins of an old zoo, complete with constructed rock outcroppings and caves and rusty partial cages. The man stops at the edge of one row of old cages, then enters it with his dog. He loops the dog’s leash around one of the vertical bars to anchor his pet inside. Then the man exits, coming around front and pulling out his camera phone. The dog strains at the leash but does not seem otherwise distressed. The man quickly gets the desired shot and retrieves his dog. They continue on their walk.

Now, were I a good anthropologist I would have asked this man why he had done this; what had moved him; what he thought it meant. I would have gotten his take on the whole situation by asking sneaky questions and scratching the dog’s ears. But I am not a good anthropologist. Talking to strangers is difficult and I avoid it and that is why I remain in this comfortable theoretical armchair here with nary a threat of fieldwork in sight.

The unfortunate result is a one-sided reading of this zoo-dog photograph situation. Reeking of assumptions and suppositions. What is fairly certain from observation is that the man was amused, and even pleased with himself for having taken this clever picture. You can just tell something like that; it’s in their body language, the smirking. Why bother to stage and take a picture like that if it meant nothing special? He didn’t strike me as a postmodern artist. I base the following on the man’s actions, which tend to be telling of shared cultural categories. Culture in practice. So onward, to inherently limited and problematic analysis!

The man took this picture because the idea of it amused him. He thought it would be funny to place his pet dog in a cage that was once inhabited by a zoo animal. Perhaps he wanted to think of his dog as a killer–as wild, as needing to be caged. If it actually was a dog with violent tendencies, then the picture would be appropriate for underscoring that fact, and dripping with humor of a more sinister type. On the other hand, if the dog was a sweet and gentle animal, then the picture would be hilariously underlining that fact by upending it with a nonsensical context. In either case the picture was taken because it was showing something out of the ordinary, the exact meaning of which is contingent on facts that only the man knows. What is clear is that the meaning is one of humor; of subverting expected alignment of cultural categories. He will show this to his friends or post it on facebook and hope that people get the same kick out of it as he did. People will see his sweet dog in a cage and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

Of course, it’s funny because of this very juxtaposition: this is a tame animal, entirely domesticated, being literally framed as wild. The picture is funny because it collides mutually exclusive categories. Pets are not wild animals, and vice versa. We are quite structuralist in the United States when it comes to the ways we interact with and think of non-human animals. Although the argument could be made that zoo animals are not “wild,” but rather something in between wild and domestic, they are still at a categorical distance from pet dogs, whom we keep closer to our human selves than any non-human animal. The pet dog is one of the most illogical animals one could place in a zoo cage in the United States. It does not belong there. In that context, the dog is a joke.

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May 9, 2012 · 12:00 PM

Drumming Up an Urban Wilderness Experience

A dispatch from November

rhythms multiple permeated grass-tastic groupies who let it absorb laying, staring, points of negative dancing in the skies with unmoving whisps of clouds and softly swaying tree needles and then hoisting up, supporting behind the self gazing on the circle of spontaneous rhythm

A woman circles herself beneath within the central tree’s clearing made cooperative with its overhanging branches and makeshift seating rounds surrounding surrounded humans backwards. She fixtures, twining moving stilling, dancing in the dust made beautiful by her swirling feet bare, the easy confidence of her cloth hugged hips, the unstudied grace of the ever-altering lines of her lined arms. She is familiarly watched, fleeting between measures, up and down with the ease of someone who has been part of this for time numerous and long contained in this moment. We on the outside see her most of all; those creating the beats she stamps out lovingly take her movements for granted. We are all, old and new, grateful. We are one another made musical, made growing warmth and undulationally whole with ever flowing ecstasy externalized experienced internally eternally

“Hey, watch your cigarette.”

A non-random warning pierces our discordantly noisy quietude; emitted by the man chained to himself through orifices natural and once added, wearing a shirt of potential self-referential fractal infinity, fading yet more present than any. Realness embodied future past present personified. He embraces our senses by overwhelming them. Caretaking. Though the circle has no leaders, he is one of those with seniority. Experienced authority of autonomy collectivism rhythmic mayhem of togetherness. His sounds are listened to as other sounds surround. The bystander sitting next to two women one wheeled was lucky. Lucky to have heard this wisened warning through the rhythms changing ever to others but yet cacophonously magical in their unity with us. Though there were detractors to each set–participants with differing views–they all nevertheless joined as one sound of many sounds creating together a great harmonious dissonance.

And then the truck. The warning’s promise fulfilled. The white truck with red lights accusatory, parked upwind and menacing. Its occupant stalked us all–participants, groupies alike. We watched as he watched us. Watched him circle the beautiful circle, wary of any line-crossing any may have perpetrated as he dared to cross ours. The man’s cigarette had long been rubbed against blades damp–extinguished in expectation of this raid of harmonious dissonance. We watched. Watched as he, uniformed, circled with outsiderness. Circled suspiciously as some ignored his sunglass-veiled gaze of removal, as some glared back pretending to ignore, suspicious of his suspicion, watching for those who kept beating, unwilling to watch, watching for each other that we are not part of but are joined to more than joined to this suspicious outsider in sanctioned uniform. Unwelcome but welcomed nonchalantly as expected disturbance to the peace-making rhythms of dissonant unity. He was not done circling soon enough; we watched each other watching, hoping the other had not noticed the surveillance. He circled slowly our circle our outer circle our hipster picnics of bicycled ignorance. He in hegemonically uniformed out-of-place-ness in the place he had been made to patrol. Patrolling our invisible being he had made it visible. Had crossed our lines. But our lines will not remain broken.

And the cigarette remained out. The truck with white red lights atop left us to ourselves to our being. Left us to each other. We came back together having never been apart, repairing the invisibility of our harmony. Overwhelming the air with enormous sounds breathing in winding around the glorious rhythmically dissonant back again and ever

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