La Crosse, Wisconsin
I was planning to take a trip to La Crosse, Wisconsin to do some research soon. I’ll have to be mindful of a new ordinance that took effect on March 18:
Earlier this month, the city adopted a new ordinance: Vomit or urinate in public, stagger or fall down, appear to be a danger to others or yourself, and your part of the party could be over.
"It's a turning point in the history of La Crosse," said Mayor Mark Johnsrud, who proposed the ordinance despite resistance from the Wisconsin Tavern League and students at the three local colleges.
The city has "a rich heritage of breweries and festivals, and drinking is part of that heritage," Johnsrud said. "But it doesn't have to be to the point of binge drinking."
I suspect that this won’t be a problem for me. I haven’t vomited or urinated in public in decades. It seems interesting that the “rich heritage of breweries and festivals” has granted them stature as “One of America’s least stressful cities” as well as the 12th fittest city in America—it must be all those 16 oz curls.
Historical Imagination
a.k.a. Larry "Bud" Melman
The death of Calvert DeForest last Monday triggered a weird flurry of thoughts. There wasn’t much to say about it, though I couldn’t quit thinking about the factoid that Larry “Bud” Melman was the nephew of Lee DeForest, inventor of the triode. Both men were not strangers to the intellectual property circus—Calvert lost his stage name to NBC, and DeForest won a hollow battle establishing himself as the father of feedback. But there is divergence.
Calvert DeForest will have no funeral and leaves no survivors. His web site has already left the Internet, and no real details of his personal life/interests outside of his fictional caricature/signature are accessible. Lee DeForest, however, has left a strong trail of autobiographies and papers—both personal and professional. Lee DeForest was falsely accused of misleading the public over the possibility of transmitting radio signals across the Atlantic, while Calvert DeForest referred to the public as “suckers.”
I never watch David Letterman. I don’t find him funny. Calvert DeForest is a different story. I first saw Calvert in the Run DMC video “King of Rock.”. The video, interestingly enough, is about creative history. I find it curious that the “fluff” of Calvert’s career deliberately obscures any “stuff” that a researcher might hope to uncover. But perhaps it’s because his persona was the charge of “Big Look Management” (also the home of other small-box notables like Yasmine Bleeth). The website expired, as his persona did, after the cliché fifteen minutes. Vanished, without much of a trace. Small scale, and small time.
This is the antistrophe to what Bruce Sterling labeled as the “Cahill factor.” The telharmonium was big in scale and ambition—yet it vanished with few traces. If only Thadeus Cahill had taken Lee DeForest’s advice and broadcast instead of relying on the wired network, perhaps we’d all be tuning in. The audion piano ultimately survives, genetically at least, in analog synthesizers. But perhaps we just have to get used to people and things having increasingly shorter expiration dates. I wonder if the disappearance/ disrepair of celebrity sites might be termed the “Calvert factor”? The litany of dead media which Sterling rattles off at the New Media and Social Memory conference has a certain genetic similarity to the rock and roll museum curated by Calvert DeForest in King of Rock; neither history has any function beyond second banana for the romance of the new.
Skin Divers
Both movie and radio are hot media, whose arrival pepped up everybody to a great degree, giving us the Roaring Twenties. The effect was to provide a massive platform and a mandate for sales promotion as a way of life that ended only with The Death of a Salesman and the advent of TV. These two events did not coincide by accident. TV introduced that “experience in depth” and the “do-it-yourself” pattern of living that has shattered the image of the individualist hard-sell salesman and the docile consumer, just as it has blurred the formerly clear figures of the movies stars. This is not to suggest that Arthur Miller was trying to explain TV to America on the eve of its arrival, though he could as appropriately have titled his play “The Birth of the PR Man.”
. . . With TV, the smarter advertisers have made free with fur and fuzz, and blur and buzz. They have, in a word, taken a skin dive. For that is what the TV viewer is. He is a skin-diver, and no longer likes the garish daylight on hard skinny surfaces, though he must continue to put up with a noisy radio sound track that is painful.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964) p. 232-3
In the intervening years, DIY has taken on a different spin. It hasn’t shattered the image of the salesman so much as it has made us all salesmen. The star system seems relatively intact, however. And silent surfing has taken over as most people I know have shunned the crappy techno sound track that many web designers insist on providing. Since 1964, I suspect we have embraced the power of the mute button. The visionary business is always a hit or miss affair; I’m surprised that anyone would embrace the label (except as a joke). Scratch any visionary and there is a conservative reactionary underneath.
Advertising
We don’t know how to handle this comedy of plenty in which the more we give away, the more we have. The efforts to absorb it into the alien, stuff, conception of property, to impose it on stuffy sales patterns and profit expectations, have cluttered it up with advertising and finally, perhaps, along with ordinary human folly lead to the dot-com collapse. These efforts may also, judging by the metastasizing intellectual property claims, strangle it. The Internet models the larger cultural conversation, and when something is put up there, people naturally consider it not as a product but as part of a conversation, whether it be the exchange of embroidery patterns or pop songs. The outraged exclamations that this conversation is “simple thievery” refuse to acknowledge the movement from an economics of stuff to an economics of attention.
The Economics of Attention by Richard A. Lanham, p. 13
Salesmen on the move
Stavros hits one out of the park. Tom does as well. Sometimes all you can do is admire the talents of others. I never could think of a good way to link to Alec Soth’s perfect comparison of Jeff Wall to Jesse Ventura either, so I guess I’ll just spit it out now.
March 6, 2007 11:35 AM | Comments (3)
Not My Nation
Professor Kim is right. This really sucks. From the NYT:
“There are Freedmen who can prove they have a full-blooded Cherokee grandfather who won’t be members,” said Ms. Vann, president of the Descendants of Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes. “And there are blond people who are 1/1000th Cherokee who are members.”
Mike Miller, the Cherokee Nation spokesman, agreed.
“We are aware that there are those who can prove Indian blood who are not Cherokee citizens, because they are not on the Dawes ‘by blood’ Rolls,” Mr. Miller said. “But I don’t know of a single tribe that determines citizenship through a bunch of sources.”
