Shooting

I think going to shooting ranges as a hobby should be a new trend.

I'd thought this before but remembered the idea the other day when I saw that scene in American Beauty:

CAROLYN (cont'd): I was soooo stressed out.

LEONARD: Know what I do when I get that way?

Carolyn SITS UP for this, eager to learn from the master.

LEONARD (cont'd): I fire a gun.

And then they go to a shooting range and she loves it.

Apparently stressed-out bankers and lawyers have already discovered this hobby.  But what about all the young cool kids?  Why don't they try it? It's certainly a million times cooler than stupid overdone bowling.

And easier to do than you think!  For some reason -- perhaps because guns ARE FREAKING DANGEROUS -- I assumed that most shooting ranges were tucked away in backwoods-type places, inaccessible to major metropolitan areas.  But no!  It turns out that, if I wished to, I could go to the West Side Pistol Range ("conveniently located in the Flatiron District" (!!)) and fire a gun myself, today, because apparently "in the City of New York one does not need a permit to shoot a .22 caliber rifle."  Word!  

The only problem is, you probably aren't allowed to get drunk and then go.  That may be what's enabling bowling to continue to win.  In fact, that's got to be it.  But still -- I think it could catch on.

LEONARD: Oh, you have to try it. Nothing makes you feel more powerful.

My marketing idea

There's apparently this big problem where no one can figure out how to make money off of Web 2.0. I came up with an idea for this and I'm curious if anyone thinks it could work.

The problem is clearly that the old marketing paradigm (companies pay advertisers, who buy ad space from media, who show it to consumers, who buy the products advertised) is poorly suited to Web 2.0. The mass-market messaging of traditional advertising is just really clunky within the highly segmented realm of the internet. So far, marketers have been sticking to the old paradigm, tinkering with ways to insinuate mass-messaging into social networks, etc., in creative and sticky ways. But I think this is going at it from the wrong direction.

What if instead of changing how the ad space is used, marketers changed how the ad space was bought? Namely, why don't marketers start buying ad space from consumers instead of from media? This is already sort of what goes on when you watch TV episodes online on networks' pages and they make you watch a little commercial first: you agree to submit to advertising in return for the "payment" of entertainment. But the same idea could be expanded into an actual financial transaction between the company and the consumer. For example, marketers could pay MySpace and Facebook users to post ads for products they like on their pages. You can already be a "friend" of a product; but in this case, you would be a paid "friend." The catch would be that marketers would invent a new kind of spider to crawl social network pages and decide which people are the most popular and cool; these people would be paid more to post ads than other people. Similarly, on YouTube, the posters of videos that got the most views would get paid the most money for showing ads before their videos.

In other words, The Media would get cut out of the advertising loop. Instead of being providers of content, they would become providers of technology -- period. They would be paid by users, not advertisers. So, use of Facebook, YouTube, etc. would no longer be free. This transition from free to paid Web 2.0 would be similar to the transition from free T.V. to paid T.V. (cable).

This new marketing paradigm makes sense to me because it represents a true, complete adaptation to the user-created-content revolution. I'm not sure quite how it could come about, but I think it probably will.

2nd Update: Camouflage

I wrote earlier about the street trend of camouflage prints here and here.

This second update is long overdue because I've been seeing more and new kinds of camouflage for over a month now.  Desert camo prints have been gaining on the woodland ones I saw most at first.  But more curiously, there are now lots of camo-like prints in mass market clothes.  I've been seeing women's tops and skirts in floral prints that copy the look and colors of camouflage.  I also saw a skirt with a print of a collage of faces that formed a camo-like pattern.  There has been a lot of pixillated camo on skater-type clothes for men, too.

The transmutation of camouflage into traditional fashion patterns can be read in multiple interesting ways, such as:

• A symbol of how the foreign policy topic of the war has come to be seen also as a domestic issue
  
• An echo of the trend in contemporary art away from the abstract (camo's blobs and squiggles) and towards the figurative (flowers, faces)
• A gesture of solidarity with the troops
• An anti-war statement
• A motif of national insecurity (we want even our pretty patterns to "camouflage" and protect us in daily life)

These patterns haven't actually been having that much success: I've spotted them a lot on sales racks and in thrift stores.  People may be a bit put off by the potentially very loaded message of these prints.  Or they may just find them ugly and difficult to wear -- which they are.  I can't tell yet whether this trend is surviving into spring, but if it does, I'm sure I'll write about it again.

Update: Hillary Clinton's style

A friendly tipster sent me this article today, in which the writer agrees with my assessment of Clinton's wardrobe as being extremely calculated (see my post here).

Whereas I theorized that Clinton's shapeless, unstylish suits were a "middle class" costume, the writer sees them as an attempt to desexualize Clinton in the aftermath of the cleavage incident.

Either way, it's my opinion that style is yet another area in which Clinton's overly-managed persona is hurting her.  Most Americans don't think it's shallow to make a reasonable attempt to look fashionable.  A good stylist could make Clinton look professional and attractive, which would really up her political star power and help compensate for what she lacks in charisma.

It feels good to be American again

One of the little tricks of culture that I've always admired is how it facilitates group survival by making cooperation feel good.  It just seems to be something that human cultures naturally do: set up rituals through which food, money, labor, and goods are redistributed in the context of festivals full of sensual pleasure, the relaxation of societal norms, gorging on food, spectacle, dancing, and play -- in other words, fun.  Good times.

It follows that when a culture's traditions of making cooperation feel good break down, the cooperation will not work so well.  This is, of course, what we have going on in our society.  We are not all able to "party" together, exactly.  Bill Gates does not throw keggers to which we are all invited.  This is a problem.

The 1968/2008 connection has been pretty hyped recently.  So I'll add this to it: Another important similarity between the two years is that they're times when a counterculture has made important political progress that was facilitated by methods that felt good.

A friend who participated in some of the protests and marches of the late sixties was recently insisting to me that those political actions, though sometimes scary and difficult, were also pretty fun -- even "sexy."  I'm sure that point must be obvious to most people, but for me it was a bit of a revelation.  In my mind, I'd always kept the counterculture's social and political action in a separate compartment from its other manifestations (music, fashion, art, lifestyle).  I'd always thought of those latter things as mere superficial manifestations of the more substantive things that were going on.  But of course, they were a crucial element of the engine of change.  Because they provided the good times, the fun, that made taking real risks feel good.

Since the sixties, our culture has been lacking that means of making political engagement feel good.  As the medium of TV became more and more powerful, people felt more and more disengaged from, angry at, and helpless against culture. Rather than facilitating worthwhile action, popular culture became a soma.  This happened because there was no meaningful way to engage with our pop culture.  No ordinary American can participate in TV culture, because TV culture only goes one way.  All you can do with TV culture is receive it, not contribute.

But now the internet.  The internet feels good.  It's not nearly as visceral a medium of communal cooperation as actual dancing, feasting, etc. -- but it is one in which everyone can participate.  And that is the crucial part.  The internet is 2008's version of the streets and parks where the protests and happenings of 1968 took place.  It's a place where participation feels good, because it's taking place in the cultural vernacular -- a vernacular that seems pretty silly and childish to people sometimes, but there it is.  In the sixties there were folk songs; now there's Obama Girl.

Because engagement in the American political process is feeling good, American patriotism is coming back.  Michelle Obama's controversial sound bite about feeling proud of her country again is more representative of how we've been feeling as a nation than most would care to admit.  But now, I believe, a trend of popular, mainstream, non-ironic American pride is beginning, and it's showing up in pop culture.  The main examples I'm aware of so far are HBO's John Adams miniseries and the new, heavily-advertised JC Penney "American Living" line.  But I bet more are coming soon.

Baby-you-cheated blue

Light blue appears to be the color of choice for women standing by their philandering politician husbands.

According to Color: Messages & Meanings (Eiseman 2006), light blue is second only to white in conjuring up feelings of cleanliness and purity.  Dressing the wife in light blue, then, emphasizes that although her husband has sinned, she herself is untainted, and that her cleansing influence is washing over him, helping to clean up the mess he has made.

B.O. is the new perfume

Two trends are converging right now:

1. Decreased perfume sales as a result of market oversaturation and the growing social unacceptableness of wearing perfume
2. Increased scientific knowledge about and popular interest in the role of natural human scent in sexual attraction

The outcome, I predict, will be that fashion-forward people will start wearing their own body odor as perfume.  It's the easiest and cheapest way to wear fragrance: just wash with unscented soap, wear no deodorant, and let your happy glands do the work of cranking out some naturally-attractive-to-the-opposite-sex smells.

Note that I say "fashion-forward" people.  The taboo against body odor in America is strong.  So, were the trend to become mainstream at all, I'm sure that most adopters would go with unscented deodorant instead of none at all.  Arguably that's what everyone trying this out ought to do in the summer.  Consumer products companies can cash in on this trend by offering new or expanded lines of unscented deodorant.  Or perhaps the midday armpit-wash will become a new ritual.

This trend would make sense in the context of the trend toward an increasingly "natural"/"animal" dynamic in sexual relationships that I'm predicting and think I will call "New Humanism."  (Basically I think people are getting interested in "humans as animals" again and that this will manifest itself in culture in myriad ways, one of them this trend in scent, another in romantic/sexual relationships.)

The "B.O. as perfume" trend also fits with the trend of the growing prominence of non-American and especially developing countries.  Americans have long made fun of Europeans for their more relaxed attitude toward hygiene and body odor, but the street goes both ways and they make fun of us for being so uptight about keeping squeaky-clean, too.  If the euro continues to dominate the dollar, maybe The French & Friends will start smelling better to us.  People in developing non-European countries have even less interest in, history of using, ability to afford, and possibly need for deodorant than Europeans do.  The increasing importance of these countries is an argument for America to try out their beauty traditions for a change.

The trend might also be more palatable if B.O.-wearers would Eat to Live, as vegans supposedly perspire less and smell better than meat/dairy-eaters.

Escape from "New York"

This spring we're finally seeing the last gasp of the media's over-the-top fantasy of consumption-fueled, glamour-filled "New York." What began in 1998 with "Sex and the City" the show will come to an end, this May, with Sex and the City: The Movie. Leading up to it have been the pale copycat shows "Cashmere Mafia" and "Lipstick Jungle" and now "The Real Housewives of New York City."

Ever since the media's "New York" debuted, real New Yorkers have bemoaned the disappearance of "real" New York (= affordable, creative, dirty, crime-filled New York in the 1970s). But now that "New York" is about to be over -- and the utter tiredness of the "New York" fantasy in these new shows leaves little doubt about that -- can "real" New York come back?

Well, I don't think so. New York today is very unaffordable, clean, safe, and, according to popular opinion, less and less creative as a result. And I don't think there's any going back. The problem is not New York itself, but the whole idea of the creative city: it just doesn't work anymore. New York is a great place to showcase creativity, because all the infrastructure, both physical and social, is concentrated here to support it. But that's all it is: infrastructure. And that infrastructure has gotten so big, established, and expensive that it's pushing out the creativity it was originally meant to support.

The infrastructure isn't just overgrown; it's obsolete. The art world is already moving onto the internet, and as this trend progresses the physical location of art and other culture will become not just irrelevant, but nonexistent. Marshall McLuhan predicted this outcome in 1967 in The Medium is the Massage:

The circuited city of the future will not be the huge hunk of concentrated real estate created by the railway. It will take on a totally new meaning under conditions of very rapid movement. It will be an information megalopolis. What remains of the configuration of former "cities" will be very much like World's Fairs--places in which to show off new technology, not places of work or residence. They will be preserved, museumlike, as living monuments to the railway era. If we were to dispose of the city now, future societies would reconstruct them, like so-many Williamsburgs.

Isn't fantasy "New York" just such a "Williamsburg"?  The only difference is that it, like the rest of culture increasingly, exists not in physical reality but in the virtual reality of media.

I predict that the creative work of the future, which will be aided more and more by technology and the internet, will be done by people scattered across the remote, affordable, natural, and beautiful rural areas of the country and world, as rural gentrification becomes the next "creative class" trend.  (Friends of mine are doing this right now in upstate New York.)  Major international cities like New York will become more and more expensive, sterile, and artificial, and the work done in them will become more and more abstract and business-oriented.  Perhaps a time will eventually come when the rural creative workers storm the rich cities, demanding their share of the glitz and glamour.  Or maybe the opposite will happen, and the new exciting passion will be not to make it in New York, but to make it out.