As I wrote in the afterword to the paperback edition
, The Substance of Style is not about Virginia Postrel's good taste. It's an effort to understand the value of aesthetics to any audience, regardless of whether I share their particular tastes. To understand how style really works, you have to get out of the critic's head and into the consumer's--a task that requires empathy for people who may be quite different from you.
From this perspective, Greg Goldin, the LAT magazine's architecture critic does a masterful job of explaining the pleasure and meaning that drive Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles to build the houses dubbed "Persian palaces." These homes, even in their downsized versions, are not at all to my taste. But they clearly fill a strong psychological need, beyond ostentatious status seeking, and Goldin explains it well:
Don't try to assemble these parts into a comprehensible whole. You cannot. At least not in conventional architectural terms. The owners of Persian Palaces aren't striving to keep to formal rules of architecture--not Classical order, Renaissance perspective, Baroque composition or Beaux Arts historicism. There are no hidden symbols in their design choices, either. Nor do many of the owners mean to announce class status by deploying all those columns and balustrades. They merely want to enliven the street, and their own surroundings, by plucking familiar images from the glories of architectural history and turning them into a kind of gold-leafing.
As preposterous as this might sound, a Persian Palace is intended to be a palace in the way that the originals once were. Like Hasht Behesht (the "Eight Paradises"), the 17th century residential masterpiece in Isfahan, or the Taj Mahal (thought to be designed by an Indian of Persian descent), Persian homes and mosques and bazaars were built around ideas largely foreign to the West, and still unsettling to our culture. Persian architecture, like carpet weaving and the poetry of Rumi, was an effort to partake of the sublime. Sumptuousness and inutility were the qualities that found expression in elaborate mosaics, mirrored walls, finely filigreed ironwork. The imagery was abstract, the line sinuous, unending, often confusing foreground with background — and intended to evoke the infinite dimension of God. Upon entering a palace (if you were lucky enough), you would be transported to a place of affection and gentleness, the tender ecstasy of youth. These palaces, like the gilded enchantments in today's Los Angeles, were a celebration of beauty in its own right, and in that way a direct appeal to the senses.
...
Otherwise the house, surprisingly, takes its cues from Southern California Modernism. Although the decor is decidedly Rococo--gold leaf and deep swags of silk curtains abound--the downstairs is one continuous open space, and every wall consists of windows or French doors. The entire house, in effect, can be flung open to the air and sun. With the curtains drawn aside, you can see from front to back--an unobstructed view that is characteristic of most Persian Palaces.
In this way, Persian Palaces relate to the Southern California landscape as much as any Modernist steel-and-glass flattop and, to an extent that few of us care to admit, they giddily reflect an architectural heritage that is considered an American archetype. The homes are all about indoor-outdoor living as, equally, they are about community and what the New Urbanists call "front porches." Persian Palaces are welcoming to the street. They are unabashed and uninhibited, and in their almost constant references to the human form, very nearly licentious. They radiate light and coax interest--sometimes our (offended) prurient interest. Still, if you trouble to walk the length of a block where the homes now compose the design idiom, you may be pleasantly surprised at the luxe decorative nature the block assumes. Drab, middle-class modesty is decidedly outré in these environs. It's as if someone had invited Vargas to paint the ceiling of Beverly Hills Presbyterian on Rodeo Drive.
Pausing by the front door, Yadegar explains: "I wasn't building a house to show off. I built it just to live in. The only crazy things are the columns and the staircase. Before I built this house, I bought a house in a different section of Beverly Hills, below Burton Way. I paid $450,000 for that house, and it was all closed off by trees, and there were no windows. I spent $30,000 to take out the trees and open up the windows. People would pass by and say, 'Where did this house come from?' I didn't do it to have them see me. I did it to see them." By which he means, he wanted to watch people the way one watches people on the streets of New York or Barcelona.
"Every night," Yadegar says as we make our way out to the sidewalk, "I turn all the lights on. We like it to be bright. I like to see the people passing by."
Check out the photos here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 19, 2006 • Comments
I'm honored to be nominated--"from the floor," no less--in Gay Patriot's Grande Conservative [or Libertarian] Blogress Diva contest, but there's no way I (or anyone else) can beat this contestant.
Since it's supposed to be flattering, I assume this is "diva" in the opera sense, not the Diana Ross or (ugh) Mariah Carey sense.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 18, 2006 • Comments
Reason's Brian Doherty has an excellent article on Milton Friedman's supposed crime of advising Pinochet. Friedman didn't actually advise Pinochet in any substantive way; he gave a lecture in Chile and had a meeting with the dictator. But that's not the main point of the article. Here's a bit:
Nothing about Chile's economic successes excuses or mollifies Pinochet's crimes. Even Friedman's staunch libertarian fans can wonder about the ultimate propriety of his association, however brief or tenuous, with the dictator. As Austrian economist Peter Boettke once told me, many economists in his tradition--most of whom are hardcore libertarians--find the notion of working in even something as innocuous as public finance distasteful--like "bean counting for the mafia." Friedman didn't harbor such visceral disgust for government or those who govern. He was a policy realist, and tried to deal with the world as it was--to mesh his policy radicalism with the gears of power as they existed.
Friedman was ready and willing to tell the people responsible for all the wrong policies of the world what they needed to do to set things right, which meant he had to talk to them, making open assaults on their crimes ill-advised. He tried to move the world in a freer direction from the point reality presented him with.
Read the whole thing.
Brian's piece captures a great divide among libertarians, one that sometimes gets nasty. Some of us--and I'm definitely in the Friedman camp--want a better world, even if the improvements are only incremental. Others, who call themselves "hardcore" or (for the really tendentious) "principled," make no distinctions among different degrees of imperfection--it's all non-utopia and, hence, worthless. Besides, complaining is easy. Change is hard.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 18, 2006 • Comments
Reason's Jesse Walker interviews economist William T. Bogart, author of Don't Call It Sprawl: Metropolitan Structure in the Twenty-First Century, about one of my favorite topics: the complex evolution of cities.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 15, 2006 • Comments
Michael Barone comments on the milk fiasco. The problem isn't lobbying, which is otherwise known as the right to free speech and to petition government, he argues. It's pro-stasis (my phrase) big government:
The problem here is not free people; the problem is big government. More specifically, it's a big government program set up during the New Deal whose purpose was not to stimulate economic growth and competition but to freeze the economy in place and stifle competition. Remember that the New Dealers believed that the Depression showed that free markets don't work and that economic growth was a mirage.
Franklin Roosevelt on taking office in March 1933 faced a deflationary downward spiral, and, to his credit, he stopped its momentum with an otherwise cockamamie scheme called the National Recovery Act, which set up 700-some industry codes barring price and wage cuts. NRA was foundering in May 1935, since it was obvious that everyone was gaming this ridiculous system, and Congress was uncertain to reauthorize it when the Supreme Court unanimously declared it unconstitutional.
Unfortunately, Congress kept passing freeze-the-economy-in-place legislation, including the dairy provisions of the farm bill. One in four Americans then lived on farms; they were a big constituency, and they were hurting. Things are different now. Only 2 percent of Americans live on farms. Our economy grows and grows and grows, and we realize, thanks in large part to the late Milton Friedman, that the Depression resulted not from the inevitable defects of free markets but from certain specific policy mistakes that we can, unless we take leave of our senses, refuse to remake.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 12, 2006 • Comments
Thomas Nelson Publishers, which is best known for its Bibles and secondarily for Christian literature, also publishes business and political books like Glenn Reynolds's An Army of Davids. So I was intrigued to see this tiny NYT item reporting that Nelson authors will henceforth have to subscribe to the Nicene Creed and Philippians 4:8, "Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy — meditate on these things." (New King James Version, published by Nelson)
On his blog, Nelson CEO Michael Hyatt writes that the NYT and Publishers Weekly didn't get the story quite right. [Via Nashville Scene blog.] Author contracts aren't going to include doctrinal provisions. But the publisher is clearly narrowing its list of authors for essentially secular books. The Nicene Creed requirement excludes Jews and Mormons, for instance, but the real test is the Philippians verse: It's not exactly a prescription for more books from Michael Savage.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 12, 2006 • Comments
Reader Tom Royce writes that milk protectionism is stinking up the other side of the Atlantic as well, citing this article on the attack on a British cheese firm. To crush the upstart, lawmakers also smashed one of the great traditions of British law. "Never before, it is believed," he writes, "has a statutory instrument been issued in Britain directed at closing down a single named company (breaching the ancient principle of British law that 'the law must be blind', i.e. it must be general in application, not directed at any specific individual or body)."
UPDATE: Tim Worstall has more here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 12, 2006 • Comments
In today's WaPost, Dan Morgan, Sarah Cohen and Gilbert M. Gaul report on how industry political clout managed to crush even a savvy, well-funded upstart who wanted to sell milk at market prices.
Hettinga, who ran a big business and was no political innocent, fought back with his own lobbyists and alliances with lawmakers. But he found he was no match for the dairy lobby.
"I had an awakening," the 64-year-old Dutch-born dairyman said. "It's not totally free enterprise in the United States."
Harry Reid does not come off well. Neither does John Kyl. But the crucial player turns out to be Devin Nunes, a Republican back-bencher from California and the dairy industry.
I wrote about another form of milk protectionism here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 10, 2006 • Comments
In his latest National Journal column, Clive Crook remembers Milton Friedman, whom he describes as "the formative intellectual influence of my life." I particularly like this passage, which isn't about Friedman per se:
Much of what is wrong with popular attitudes to capitalism comes down to one thing: a lack of wonder at what uncoordinated markets can achieve. Going to a grocery store for the hundredth or thousandth time is a pretty humdrum experience. As a rule it isn't going to elicit much of an intellectual response -- though if it does, the response might be one of two kinds. The commentator Robert Kuttner once wrote of his dismay at the great number of breakfast cereals on offer in his local grocery. What a waste, was his point; who could possibly need all these different cereals? Can't we arrange things more intelligently? This is a leftist kind of response: "Put somebody sensible in charge and plan things better." The liberal response (in the proper sense of "liberal") is different: "How amazing that all these choices are available, so that every taste is catered to, and it's all so cheap."
Most of my work these days derives from this sense of wonder the curiosity it arouses about the specific creative processes behind these results. That's why I write mostly about culture and commerce rather than about government policy.
UPDATE: Take my new LAT Sunday opinion feature on the evolution of shopping malls. The growth of "lifestyle centers" is yet another example of the way markets turn valid social criticism--valid in the sense that it captures real and widespread discontent and identifies unmet needs--into entrepreneurial opportunities. (The customer response to such markets can also make certain social critics look like idiots, as my lead suggests.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 09, 2006 • Comments
I constantly get asked to participate in interviews or studies about blogging. (I can only imagine how often active bloggers with big audiences get such requests.) Occasionally I agree, as I did when asked by David D. Perlmutter from the University of Kansas J-school, who is researching a book for Oxford University Press. He's also surveying blog readers, and would like you to participate. Go here for the survey of blog readers.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 06, 2006 • Comments