With its much-discussed attack ads, the McCain campaign is trying to do something difficult: to puncture Barack Obama's glamour without resorting to insinuations of horror (the Manchurian Candidate fears mocked on The New Yorker's famous cover). The first attempt, the Paris-and-Brittany ad, was lame. It was neither funny nor convincing, and it confused glamour, which inspires, with tabloid celebrity, which titillates and makes the audience feel superior. (The claim that the ad is racist, because the tabloid princesses are white and blonde, is absurd.) Throwing in stuff about offshore drilling, presumably an attempt at substance, just made it weird.
The second ad, "The One," is more successful and more interesting. Here is full-bore 1990s (or 1980s, if you go back to Spy) hip comedic irony--laughing at the earnest and self-important. Mainstream political candidates don't do that, least of all if they're Republicans. Mainstream political candidates, Republicans especially, are the ones comedic ironists laugh at. Besides, comedic irony is for young people, not oldsters like John McCain.
Except the young people who made irony hip--late boomers and GenXers--are now middle-aged. Obama is selling an end to irony, a return to unchastened New Frontier liberalism, at least in feeling. (How that lines up with specific policy proposals is a more complicated question.) Maybe hip isn't hip any more.
McCain's ad is calculated to appeal to people who think that sort of grandiosity is ridiculous. Many of those people happen to be part of McCain's traditional "base," the media, including the irony-drenched talk shows from which lots of youngish people get their political news. Reminding them of Obama's grandiosity won't make them vote for McCain. But it might embarrass them into helping to puncture his opponent's glamour.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the People magazine cover of the Obama family sold worse than the magazine's average, 1.4 million copies versus a typical 1.45 million. Now Barack Obama covers usually sell very well--and, judging from my haphazard West LA survey, that New Yorker cover blew off newsstands within minutes--so what's up with People? The problem I think is that readers aren't interested in Obama-the-wholesome-family-man. They want The One.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 04, 2008 • Comments
"Is the Chrysler Building the world's most glamorous building?" someone asked me recently. It was meant as a rhetorical question, a way of defining glamour. Without using the g-word, the WSJ's Bret Stephens makes the case:
[W]hat distinguishes the Chrysler is its ability to inspire, as few modern buildings do, a sense of fantasy. For one thing, it achieves a skyscraper's fundamental task: It soars. From its first recess, just above the Lexington Avenue entrance, it follows an uninterrupted vertical path directly to the 68th floor, and only then begins to taper toward the spire.
Then there is the way the building remains perennially modern, perhaps because it is forever the past's imagining of the future. The entrances -- framed in black granite, zig-zagging patterns of metal and opaque yellow glass -- seem drawn from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" or a Batman comic....
And finally -- again -- there is that fabled Chrysler top. Today's tall buildings (few of which really deserve to be called skyscrapers) are often nothing more than stacks of all but identical floors, none really different from the other except, perhaps, for the view. Not so in the Chrysler Building, where the highest nine stories become progressively smaller as they rise toward the vanishing point. Seen from within, it conveys the sensation of an aerie, or a crow's nest, or a mountaintop -- not merely a higher place, but another world.
Is it the world's most glamorous building? It may very well be, I said, but it has competition from Disney Hall, LA's instantly beloved and much photographed landmark. (Couples even take wedding pictures there.) While the Chrysler Building creates glamour through streamlining, Disney Hall does it with complexity, which creates mystery without hiding anything. It's too complicated to comprehend in full--a model for glamour in a world without privacy.
Of course, the world's most glamorous building could be the Taj Mahal. But I've never seen it.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 04, 2008 • Comments
Thanks to everyone who's sent emails asking about the state of my health. After quite a year, I'm happy to say that I'm doing fine. I completed radiation therapy on July 3 and, as the oncologists put it, I have "no evidence of disease." I still have a few more triweekly Herceptin treatments to go, but they have no side effects.
This photo was taken July 4, while we were waiting for the South Pasadena fireworks. As you may be able to tell, my formerly straight hair came back in curly. Apparently, that happens a lot after chemo. Eventually, the hair goes back to its former state, but it can take a couple of years.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on August 03, 2008 • Comments
State authorities have decided it's important to close down the foot massage business, an increasingly popular service that employs lots of low-income Chinese immigrants.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 20, 2008 • Comments
Responding to my post below, reader Kenneth Gauck shares some calculations on the economics of telemarketing fundraisers:
I had done some telemarketing in the 80's for lawn care and at some point in the early nineties was in need of extra cash and answered an ad for telemarketers. We were raising money for something that sounded very much like a state agency for the blind here in Missouri. I was trained for a day, and after the second day, did some math, estimating our labor costs, the rental for the space we used, and I knew the amount of money we raised. The costs as I estimated them were about 90% of what we were raising. Even if the charity was legitimate, and I doubt it was, it was using nearly everything it raised to pay for the telemarketers. I went back the next day and explained my math. No one else seemed interested, so I went home during break and never came back.
Nonprofits are exempt from observing the federal do-not-call list. If they call, hang up. If you want to be polite first say, "Sorry, we're not interested and do not call again." Or ask to be contacted only by mail.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 20, 2008 • Comments
As California experiences (yet another) budget crisis and Democrats push (yet again) for big tax increases, John G. Matsusaka of USC points out a major reason why the public obstinately demands more services while refusing more taxes: While spending has skyrocketed, services haven't--at least not in ways that people notice. Money quote:
Voters are criticized for wanting more services yet being unwilling to pay higher taxes. That is unfair; Californians have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to fund valuable programs. But if spending can go up 40% and most of us can't discern any difference, can we blame voters for being hesitant to put even more tax money in the hands of the state?
UPDATE: On a related note, the SacBee's Dan Walters points out a bait-and-switch by L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The city more than doubled residential garbage fees, supposedly to put 1,000 more cops on the street. The fee increase raised $137 million, but the city hired only 400 more cops at a cost of about $42 million. Most of the rest went for raises. Walters writes:
Most of the trash money was diverted into underwriting the city's cash-strapped general fund, which includes those generous raises for cops already on the street. And that's just the beginning of the tale. Los Angeles faces a whopping budget deficit, despite the trash fee, and Villaraigosa and the City Council want to raise trash fees even higher to cover the shortfall, along with boosting a batch of other fees.
Villaraigosa also is promoting a countywide sales tax hike devoted to improving mass transit. The council has approved a "parcel tax" on homes and businesses for the November ballot that would finance anti-gang programs.
The amounts of money are not huge, but one wonders whether Villaraigosa and other city leaders are overreaching by proposing a wide array of new fees and taxes while recession is hitting the state and Southern California is being hammered especially hard.
What's happening in the state's largest city echoes what's happening in Sacramento as Schwarzenegger and lawmakers struggle with a $15.2 billion general fund budget deficit and Democrats propose $8.2 billion in new taxes, plus several billion in other revenues, to close the gap.
Oh yeah, and why is this in the Sacramento Bee instead of the LAT?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 20, 2008 • Comments
The always interesting Joel Garreau visits Disneyland and contemplates the ways in which Tomorrowland reflects a changing dream of "the future." You should read the whole article, but here's an excerpt.
Disney -- so far into our heads, hopes and dreams that it is legendarily the Mouse that built the better people trap -- is now presenting not so much the future, but the future that it thinks we want. Wander around Tomorrowland and it no longer gleams with white plastic and blue trim. No "2001." It is an antique future, a bronze future, full of things that look like astrolabes channeling Leonardo da Vinci.
The future of the future is in the past?
"This is an aspirational future," says Disney spokesman John J. Nicoletti....
But this is absolutely not the future in the research pipeline. No genetically modified critters here that eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline. No nanobots smaller than blood cells, cruising our bodies to zap cancer. No brain implants that expand our memory. No cellphones that translate Chinese. No dragonfly-size surveillance bots, no pills that shut off the brain's trigger to sleep, no modified mitochondria sustaining our energy while making obesity as quaint as polio.
Apparently that tsunami of change doesn't sell. That disturbing but dazzling future rumbling our way is distinctly different from the soothing one Disney thinks we crave.
The new Innoventions Dream Home aside, much of this reassuring Tomorrowland is a decade old--a revisionist "culture of futures" old enough to make the introduction of The Future and Its Enemies. While Disney's vision is almost guaranteed to miss reality, it does get something big right: Whatever mind-blowing technologies the future holds, we'll almost certainly incorporate them into lifestyles that change only gradually, where even what sound like radical social changes turn out to be incredibly bourgeois in practice. (Think test tube babies or gay marriage.) All the drawing-board ideas Garreau cites may very well come true, but once we have them they'll seem as normal as cell phones, Prozac, MRIs, or pantsuits.
The article ends with a lengthy quote from Danny Hillis about the way the idea of the future has changed since the mid-20th century. Here's an excerpt.
"We have made incredible progress. The world is way better off than it was in the '60s. But we've had enough of the future to realize that it's complicated. If you look at '2001: A Space Odyssey,' everything seemed quite plausible at the time -- especially the international cooperation aspect of it.
"What I think it says is that we are nostalgic for a time when we believed in the future. People miss the future. There's a yearning for it. Disney does know what people want. People want to feel some connectedness to the future. The way Disney delivers that is to reach back in time a little bit to the past when they did feel connected.
"It's a bit of a cop-out. There was a time when the future was streamlined jet cars. Rather than create a new sense of the future, they say, 'Ah, remember when we believed that the future was streamlined jet cars?' It's a feeling of connection to the future, rather than connection to the future.
"It's a core ache. Something is missing that we're searching for."
That sounds like an explanation of the Obama campaign's New Frontier appeal.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 20, 2008 • Comments
It's harder than it looks, but a lot of fun. (Thanks to Jennifer George and Cosmo Wenman for introducing us.) Order it here or get similar products through Amazon.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 20, 2008 • Comments
Using public records, the LAT reports on the appallingly small amount of funds raised through telemarketing that actually go to the charities who hire for-profit fundraisers. Charles Piller and Doug Smith write:
According to a comprehensive review of state records filed over a decade, the problem of paltry returns extends well beyond what has been reported in recent years among benevolent societies for police, firefighters and veterans. It affects charities large and small, well-known and obscure. It spans a range of causes, including child and animal welfare, health research and opposition to drunk driving.
I understand the argument that these fundraisers are prospecting for people who will become larger donors over time, but their methods are not only inefficient but annoying and misleading. What we need is a campaign that tells people to do their civic duty and hang up on telemarketers, who degrade life for everyone with a telephone.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 06, 2008 • Comments
This photo was taken July 4, while we were waiting for the South Pasadena fireworks. As you may be able to tell, my formerly straight hair came back in curly. Apparently, that happens a lot after chemo. Eventually, the hair goes back to its former state, but it can take a couple of years.
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