As you can probably tell, this blog is more or  less moribund. I wanted to keep it up, but I found it too hard writing for three different blogs. Currently, my main blog is at www.macleans.ca/andrewpotter — please drop by.

 Meanwhile, The Rebel Sell continues to have legs. The Korean edition was released a few months ago, in  a wonderfully playful-looking volume. Also, HarperCollins recently sold the Serbian rights, which is a total delight. Finally, the film rights were optioned during the summer by a New Zeland company — hopefully they’ll come up with something neat.

 Feedback on the book or related subjects is always welcome, so feel free to email either of us at the addresses linked on the right.

Last summer, I wrote a piece here about the incessant diving that basically ruined the World Cup of soccer for  me.  For the past few months, Canada has been hosting the Under 20 World  Cup, and one thing the juniors have  learned is that diving pays. I’ve been talking about it at my regular blog at Macleans magazine. For anyone interested:

 Here’s an entry about the domination of the CBC’s commentator ranks by goaltenders.

Here is  a recent one about how to fix the diving.

Here is the  original entry, “World Cup of Acting”

 Comments are very welcome.

UPDATE:   Would help if I turned  comments on. Done

Neither Joe Heath nor I even  knew that the Russian edition of the Rebel Sell had been released, so we were both delighted to receive in the mail this week some copies of the book. It might be the coolest one yet, though I’m still quite fond of the German edition. The cover illustration is printed directly on the hardcover (no dust jacket), and while I now know what my name looks like in Russian, I can’t figure out the translation of the title. Can anyone here read Russian?

(Sorry about the blurry photo — this is a cellphone snap. The  publisher is Dobraya Kniga, and the approximate selling price is $3.00. That’s correct. Not sure how the business model on this works, but what the heck.)

After a lifetime spent telling us that reality had disappeared, Jean Baudrillard has – apparently – died. Not a bad career move at all for a philosopher of virtuality; I presume he’ll live on as an avatar in Second Life.

I can’t say I ever learned much from anything he wrote, though he has some good lines here and there — his observation that the city is a competition did as much to shape my understanding of urbanization as anything in Jane Jacobs. Everything you need to know about his thought is in The Matrix.

He was always a bit of a philosopher/clown, but he became embarrassing in recent years. His thoughts on the riots in the French suburbs last year were inadvertently hilarious; his take on terrorism and the post-9/11 world was near-criminal in its idiocy.

Still. There is that cool scene in The Matrix where Neo hides the disc in the copy of Simulacra and Simulations.

Gerald “Gerry” “Ger” Underhill (gerald.underhill@gmail.com) took time out of his Saturday to pen the following:

Andy & Joe

just finished going through “nation of rebels”.

didnt know if you were being serious, sarcastic or ironic or none of the above.

whatever weak points you guys attempted to make were only made by dismissing other ideas which you dont really understand.

your sense of history seems more beerhall hist/phil than well read & digested. feel sorry for your students.

curious why ‘harperbusiness’ & not an academic publisher? pretty sure you arent making much money from it.

you guys are still fighting (personal?) battles that are long over. others have moved on?

are you guys ‘randians’ (rush fans) trying to slip anarcho-capitalism into the ‘left’ media?

or just developing yet another political iconography into the stew of human discontent?

& your conclusion is seriously dis-eased.

well thanks for another piece of the puzzle. but where does it fit.

gerald

outside of a dog, books are a man’s best friend. inside a dog, its too dark to read.

groucho marx

My friend and former Trent University colleague Bob Wright has just published Three Nights in Havana, his book about Castro and Trudeau, set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Bob is an outstanding Canadian historian, a fine writer, and a funny guy. The book is being launched tonight, February 20th, at the Gladstone Hotel.

There will not be a book reading; instead, I’ll be sort-of interviewing Bob onstage, which basically means we’ll drink mojitos, gossip for a bit about Maggie and Pierre and Fidel, then drink more mojitos.

Here’s the informacion. All are welcome.

I believe this is the first time that the  Rebel Sell has been used to explicate the phenomenon that is Paris Hilton

Is customer service authentic? A German reader of The Rebel Sell wonders:

 I thought about my job in customer service while reading “THE REBEL SELL”. The authors think that: “Consumer capitalism has taken every authentic human experience, transformed it into a commodity and then sold it back to us through advertising and mass media.”.

I would go one step further, customer service is a part of personal selling, too. For me, it is very difficult and complex sometimes, because I had to deal with emotions. I didn’t lie, because I never said anything that is not true, but I didn’t say what I was really thinking sometimes.

I was polite and very professional to make people smile and happy as customers. But those people don’t really mean anything to me.

I just managed emotions professionally.

Am I authentic?

I always thought so.

link 

The election of the year, Sarko vs Sego, is coming up fast. Don’t get caught with your shirt off — pick up your very own Sarko-T, designed by L. Ada.

With a cool simplicity inspired by Film Noir posters of the 1950s (when Frenchmen were, well,  men) the Sarko-Tee is a tribute to France’s straight-shooting man of action, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. The man they call Sarko took some heat in the press for suggesting he’d use a Kärcher (a high-powered street-cleaning hose) to clear the banlieues of their criminal elements, but we admire his frankness. Whether you’re for or against him, you’ll look hotter than a blazing Citroen in one of these items. 

Just in time for Buy Nothing Day, Torontoist has an interview with yours truly on all things culture jamming.

This is probably a good time to apologise for the lack of updates to this blog over the past while. Part of the reason is that I’m trying to juggle two blogs, and not doing the best job of it. Most of my attention is focused on my Maclean’s blog at the moment.  There are a lot of good reasons for keeping a separate non-corporate blog, and if the guy who owns andrewpotter.com ever follows through on his agreement to see the domain to me, I might start one up there.

 In the meantime, I’m going to put this blog into neutral. I hate to do it — traffic remains steady, and rss subscriptions are climbing.  But I think blogs should be a daily activity, and I don’t want this one to just trail off like an ellipsis…

For anyone interested, Joe Heath is working on a new book on economics, and I’m writing a book on authenticity. Please send me authenticity watch items, as you come across them. Meanwhile, I’m hanging out here.

Go buy something.

ap 

On the last day of my consumer fast, the pretence fell. The bank card was handed over before I realized I had taken out my wallet. Some sixth sense had told me to go into Future Shop that day.It was clearance. Open box. Sitting on a red cloth table, priced to go, a 15-inch LCD TV-DVD combo, down to $215 from $430. During the move, the old TV went thud, drop, smash. I would be able to watch my DVDs again. It was time to embrace my inner yuppie, and life.

In which Jen Gerson of the Toronto Star gives Buy Nothing Day a try, decides to go on a consumerist bender, blames The Rebel Sell.

Link.

… As for the welfare state, there is certainly no widespread appetite for rolling back entitlements and leaving people to the sink-or-swim logic of the job market. Are there other possibilities? Putnam thinks the old workhorses of popular culture and public education will do the trick. More likely, then the breakdown of community and the demise of social cohesion will become just another unfortunate aspect of modernity we are going to have to learn to live with.

From my column in this week’s Maclean’s.

Far from revealing the fundamental racism of American society, the Borat film serves to validate Americans’ essential decency and tolerance. Sure, if you go looking for racists you’ll find them. But the fact that people appear willing to go along with Borat’s racist japes does not prove that such people are racists, any more than the Milgram experiments proved that the citizens of New Haven were a bunch of Eichmanns-in-waiting.

 Seinfeld was a show about manners and civility. It routinely demonstrated how sociability is lubricated by implicit rules we all follow (no close-talking or re-gifting), and when we do violate them, we are censured (anti-dentites, not that there’s anything wrong with it). Borat sets out to deliberately violate  all of these rules. What is remarkable is not that people go along with him, but that he doesn’t get his head kicked in. It is a very, very, funny movie. But it does not teach us anything about racism or America.

Further reading:

John Tierney, The Running of the Yokels 

Melik Kaylan, Spoiled Borat 

Borat punched by angry man 

1. Best gang war ever: the Park Avenue Crew vs. the Lexington Avenue Crew. Start practicing your hand signs.

2. “Brooklyn-style” pizza:

“But anyone in the Midwest who thinks this is real Brooklyn is getting fooled,” he said. That’s the basic message from Mrs. Ciminieri at Totonno’s, who was finally persuaded to taste a Domino’s slice in the name of research. “In Utah, they’re going to love it because they use ketchup and American cheese on their pizzas,” she said.

Link (ref from the Handcaper)

 3. CBGBs Vegas:

The dismantling of CBGB is underway, with every major item getting tagged so that when owner Hilly Kristal rebuilds the place in Las Vegas or wherever, the builders will know which scum-coated piece goes where. There’s something about people traveling from all over to line up and pee in “authentic” CBGB urinals that doesn’t seem right, isn’t there? 

From Curbed. 

US elections: Looks like the GOP went to the “Dems are soft on terror” well too often. Huh. Kinda like the Libs going to the “Albertans are scaaary” well, I guess.

World’s smallest violin : In the matter of intolerant Hasidim versus overweening yuppies, it is hard to know whom to cheer for.

International edition: Residents of Laguna Beach don’t like how their “art and culture” community is portrayed on TV.

Non-sequitur watch : In his Post column today about tax refzzzzzz – sorry – tax reform, John Ivison writes:

“A big incentive for Flaherty to pursue sales-tax reform is that Quebec is thought to be enthusiastic. Premier Jean Charest is understood to have felt aggrieved that the last GST cut was sprung on him without providing an opportunity to take up the room vacated by Ottawa.”

I have no idea what that second sentence means. Can anyone help?

Non-sequitur watch II : Michael Ignatieff’s taste for biography-as-argument continues with his reasoning for why he opposes letting Saddam swing: “I am a man who has taught human rights during my university career. I am against the death penalty…”

I can see where he is coming from, I suppose. I am a man who had a ham sandwich for lunch. I am against the death penalty.

Authenticity watch: The anti-suburbia crowd takes a hit: Suburban commuters don’t mind the drive. It’s urban public-transport types who are miserable. Of course, it must be because their drone-like home lives are so awful.

(compiled with help from the handcaper)

(cross-posted) 

I don’t know all of the Aeneid translations, but I prefer this to Mandelbaum (my previous first choice), West, or Fitzgerald.  The overall approach strikes me as a more accurate Fitzgerald.  Highly recommended.

Tyler Cowan outs himself as a monumental poseur.  

In Spain, it’s now hip to be a jew:

“It’s the opposite of 300 years ago when people changed their last names to Spanish names and looked for ancestors of pure Spanish blood,” he said. “Now it’s trendy to say you have Jewish roots.”

link 

Julie Crysler’s creation has become part of the vocabulary. From the Winnipeg Free Press, an article the drops “Rebel Sell” without reference or explanation:

The problem is that Mann never really explains what’s so earthshakingly subversive about custom detailing your car. At times, Rat Fink seems to inadvertently illustrate the Rebel Sell argument that a lot of supposed counterculture actually comes down to a hipster gloss on good old-fashioned consumer capitalism.

Link 

Speaking of the ‘Peg, I was there this weekend. 

I’m a bit late getting to this, but two weeks ago the CBC had an excellent installment of O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion. I’ve been a huge fan of the show for a while, though Saturday in the middle of the day (it has moved from 11:30am to 4:00om on Radio One) isn’t great timing. (UPDATE: Matt writes to remind that it is also on Thursday at 11:30am).

Anyway, the episode I caught looked at the question of why we find some forms of advertising more intrusive than others. Usually, this gets dealt with as the “colonization of the public sphere,” but I’ve always found that an unhelpful way of getting at it, invoking a fairly artificial distinction between the public and the private.

 Instead, O’Reilly frames the question in terms of an original implicit “contract” between advertisers and consumers: In exchange for hearing, watching, or reading an ad, the consumer is entitled to something. So an advertiser would sponsor a radio show, the listener would hear ads in exchange for getting the show free of charge. Other forms of advertising that honour the bargain are those that provide similar “partial public goods,” e.g. in newspapers and magazines and on television.

O’Reilly points out how many of the most annoying forms of advertising are those that don’t honour the bargain: Billboards, telemarketing, product placement in films, and the ads before movie trailers. The trick, he argues, is for advertisers to find ways of honouring the bargain in contexts where the payoff isn’t as direct as it is in radio or television. That is why many ads now try to be entertaining, or funny, or incorporate some popular music, etc.

As a good example of an ad honouring the bargain in a creative way, he mentioned a public service spot that appeared before films last year. It is the one that looks like an action film: It begins with a bomb squad defusing a bomb that will go off if there is the slightest noise. The tension builds, then (thanks to the magic of surround sound) you hear a cellphone go off in the theatre! One of the heroes says, “what kind of person lets a cellphone ring during a movie!?” Kaboom.

Then the payoff: Turn off your phone.

O’Reilly’s show is smart, funny, and really insightful. One of the best shows on the CBC right now. They are supposedly putting all of the episodes out on CD, but I haven’t seen them yet.

UPDATE: Lee writes 

I wonder, against O’Reilly’s thesis, if what annoys us is in fact just a matter of habituation.  We get used to advertising in certain contexts, begin to learn how to filter it out or think of it as natural, and simply begin to accept its presence.  For instance, I think people would find advertisements—either public or private—inserted in the middle of a novel somewhat annoying, even if such ads reduced the overall cost of the book or performed some sort of public service.  This might be simply because we’re not used to advertising in the middle of our novels.  Likewise with ads before movie trailers. 

Paul writes:

I agree with your guy Lee, add the comment that people don’t see some of the gains

 

i.e. Movie ticket prices not increasing as fast as they otherwise might have is a gain to you, but you see 1. ads, 2. higher nominal movie ticket prices, and whine.  Certainly introducing ads into as-yet ad-free contexts wierds people out.  Had the theatres found some way to make that clear, better for everyone. There is a long-distance company that I think gives you free or nearly free long distance in exchange for listening to a 30-second before every call is connected.  There the trade is clear, whereas a $12 with ads movie ticket vs what would be a $14 movie ticket without is a clear cost vs a hard-to-imagine benefit, especially when the ticket was $10 without ads two years ago, feels like cost and cost.

 

Americans find European soccer sweaters (Vodafone logo instead of Man U logo) wierd.  As if their sport is not grossly commerical, it’s just everywhere except the uniforms.  But the benefit, well advertised to the fan, is the $100m Man U got and and spent on Prissy Chrissy, with no cost (other than the logo on the jersey) to the fan.  So they are OK.  Advertisers who want to populate new space should either entertain or make clear the beneift of the ad (lower prices, higher quality) or, ideally, both. 

 

As for O’Reilly vs. Lee, I assume this can only be a quibble over percentages. Because there’s nothing incompatible about O’Reilly’s &  Lee’s respective theses. In other words, my guess is that what really  goes on is that we’d insist on more of an O’Reilly-style quid pro quo whenever an advertiser sticks an ad into what is less of a Lee-style  traditional medium. I don’t expect much pay-off from a 30-second TV  spot (TV ads are traditional; I take them for granded), but MAN, if  you stuck an ad in a novel, it’d better be *wickedly* entertaining. 

 I replied to Lee:

The O’Reilly piece began with a discussion of billboards as the first sort of advertising to break the bargain. Apparently the dean of American advertising —can’t recall  his name — hated them. But it’s true that habituation plays a major role — we are all used to Zoom Media ads above the urinal now. There used to be ads in books, but people would be upset if they re-appeared, etc.

This doesn’t work against O’Reilly so much as complement it, IMO. It could be that forms of advertising that honour the contract are more easily accepted, and those that violate it in extremis — e.g. telemarketing — we can never get used to.

As for the fact that we use the Tivo to get over ads, that’s not an objection. O’Reilly doesn’t claim that consumers always honour the bargain. 

After seeing The Queen, the Handcaper was moved to pay homage to the deceased couple, Dodi and Diana. Herewith are some paparazzi shots of their last blissful vacation together, a sundrenched weekend on Dodi’s yacht (done in multigrain loaf, romaine lettuce, zucchini).

Happy 40th birfday, This Magazine.

The most insightful moment in The Queen occurs when Tony Blair says something to his wife, Cherie, about his obligation to the constitution, and Cherie snaps back: “We haven’t got one.”

More than anything else, The Queen is a film about the British constitution. It takes place during the early days of the Blair regime in 1997, mostly in the week between Diana’s death and her over-the-top funeral. The narrative, such as it is, arcs over the Royals’ initial low-key reaction, the public outrage over the Queen’s refusal to show any emotion, and the final decision by Liz and Phil to do a walkabout outside the Palace, put the flag at half-staff, and have the Queen make a public statement about how important Diana was, &c.

But the main item of consideration here is Britain’s unwritten constitution, and the completely tacit agreement between the public, the aristocracy, and the Crown. Brokered over the past thousand years, the British constitution is one of the most remarkable political institutions the world has ever seen. The amount of trust involved in making it work is phenomenal, and it requires a healthy understanding on all sides of the place of tradition, convention, and habit.

The central figure of course is the Queen. Her job is to serve as the living embodiment of those centuries-old traditions. But it requires a tricky bit of balancing: Adhere too much to tradition and you look irrelevant and out of date; pander too much to fashion or public opinion and you might as well become a republic.

The Queen dramatizes the moment when Her Majesty realized she had lost touch with the British people. Not only did she not approve of the gross displays of sentimentality that followed Diana’s death, she felt that her job was to temper it, not indulge it. Believing in the essential good sense and sobriety of her subjects, she felt that if she led, they would follow. She was wrong.

Walter Bagehot famously enumerated the three remaining rights and powers of the English Crown: The right to be consulted, the right to advise, and the right to warn. She reminds Blair of these rights at their first meaning, giving him a fairly direct warning about constitutional adventurism [which, events have shown, he failed to heed]. But by the end of the film it is Blair who is doing the advising and the warning, to a sovereign whose position has become quite precarious.

This is a very, very good movie, probably the best movie about constitutional government ever made.

(cross-posted) 

Last week, the French translation of Rebel Sell was the subject of Le Monde journalist Pierre Passoline’s online book blog, La Republique de Livres. Passoline gives a nice summary of the book, and there is a fairly lengthy debate in the comments after. Much of the discussion turns, perhaps inevitably, to organic produce, which is apparently the hill the remaining members of the antiglobalisation movement have chosen to die upon. But many of the comments are thoughtful and pretty funny. Here’s my favourite:

Attardé du sud, je ne comprends rien à cette histoire de chaussures, de rutabagas, d’urbi et orbi, d’unabomber (c’est toujours Zidane, non?). 23 euros à blancer dans cette “Révolte consommée”, très peu pour moi, pour le même prix je consomme 3 bouteilles de Muscat de Rivesaltes.

Du coup ça fait ressortir Bounan (mais qui c’est celui-là?), Debord (lui c’est comme le sel et le poivre à table, on ne peut plus s’en passer), Ramiel, Sansot, on va avoir Morgan Sportés j’imagine, puis Stalker (ça va Stalker, chouette hier le film!), un défilé, un véritable défilé.

Welcoming the new arrivals, Lakatos had launched into a heated denunciation of how the loathesome capitalist system had dragged these unfortunates into the lustful sweatshops of hypocritical bourgeois depravity. How capitalism had taken young male proletarians to be slaughtered in wars for markets and how their sisters were thrust into strumpetry. It had been, especially for Lakatos, a sterling performance.

He had obviously read it somewhere; he was probably parroting a section in the Party secretary’s manual, “upon receiving whores on the shopfloor.” The girls had listened to Lakatos’s fulminations demurely, wearing factory overalls. The diatribe had ended with Lakatos wiping the rhetorically induced sweat from his brow and disappearing into  his office while the girls had been led off to learn the ropes.

Within a fortnight the girls had been once again plying their trade inside the huge coils of copper wire the factory spun. That really was the heart of Communism, Gyuri decided: It made it harder for everyone to do what they do.

Tibor Fischer, Under the Frog

By now it is pretty clear that nobody knows wtf to do with North Korea. Nothing that anyone has tried — free food and fuel, sanctions, threats, bigger threats — has stopped  Kim Jong Il from moving steadily toward the acquisition of a nuke. Even the best idea I’ve heard so far — using nuclear forensics to back up a new type of deterrent — is unlikely to work. As with everything else, he might just call our bluff. If a NK bomb goes off somewhere, is the US really going to nuke the country? Would they really kill millions of Koreans in retaliation? I doubt it.

 What is required here is not just outside-the-box thinking, but a whole new geometry. Despite the fact that KJI looks like a looney-bin outpatient on a visit to MacDonald’s,  word is that he’s really quite rational. As long as the US/China/etc. guarantee his security, he won’t do anything too evil. The downside of this is that it leaves him in charge of 20 million starving Koreans.

So, what to do? As usual, the handcaper had the best idea I’ve heard in a while. Give him a film deal. 

Think about it. KJI looks like a  mental patient, yes. But what other class of society is full of people who look like mental patients? Film directors. Put KJI side by side with any of the Hollywood big guns, he fits right in. Furthermore, we  know the dude is an auteur manquay:

Kim Jong Il is a movie fanatic, and is said to hav a collection of over 20,000 films. In 1978, in order to advance the North Korean film industry, he ordered North Korean agents to abduct the famous South Korean movie director Shin Sang Ok and his ex-wife, actress Che Eun Hui, and kept them for eight years while making them produce propaganda films. During that time, the two became very well acquainted with Kim Jong Il, and after escaping in 1986, they wrote a book exposing his decadent lifestyle.

Film nut. Decadent lifestyle. Dresses like he is retarded.  This guy shouldn’t be running NK into the ground, he should be running Universal Studios. Forget the UN, forget sanctions, forget nuclear forensics. Get Sumner Redstone over there. Give KJI a three-film deal, in exchange for, well, for his country.