British prestige

“Tailors naturally considered London their holy city.  My grandfather, the best tailor in Orvieto, ironed his trousers, like everybody else, with reverse creases at the sides, but added some horizontal creases too because he had noticed English travelers always wore them that way.  He did not realize the horizontal creases appeared because travelers had to fold the trousers to pack them in trunks and suitcases.”

Luigi Barzini, The Europeans, The Imperturbable British

Christmas music

I’m not a big fan of Christmas music, but there are a few things I like to hear.  The fat man (Pavarotti) really could sing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNYAGnqLgnA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gBfTkB2KkU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7uiqRCW6I8&feature=related

By the way, you can transfer youtube music on to your computer and itunes by copying the link into this program and following the steps.  http://www.flvto.com/

And while it isn’t really a Christmas album, the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Blues on Bach strikes me as especially fitting right now http://www.amazon.com/Blues-Bach-Modern-Jazz-Quartet/dp/B000002I6B/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1323127317&sr=1-1

The problem with Movies

I happen to have a friend whose side career is acting, so we’ve had a number of conversations about the movies.  My line of argument has been that Hollywood is simply out of ideas and that part of the problem might be that people making movies are immersed in movies and otherwise don’t have much of a cultural repository to draw from.

Rushfield Babylon http://rushfieldbabylon.com/post/13040426507/gatsby-for-kids-americas-internet-is-overflowing points to another problem; lead actors who can’t convincingly pass for adults.  The specific subject of the post is a new Gatsby film that will star Leo DiCaprio prompting this conclusion:

“Our young actors today, even the finest of them, are just too much of lightweights to carry off historical roles.   We are not capable anymore of portraying a time when people didn’t act like pouty teens well into their 50’s.

That is not a slam on their acting abilities.  Today’s actors are far more versatile and technically capable than actors of the golden age.  But it’s just who this generation is, who we are.  We can’t just put on maturity anymore than we could put tusks and be convincing wooly mammoths.   

Maybe it’s just that we favor actors with baby faces, but I don’t think so”

The poster goes on to draw a contrast between DiCaprio who is 37 and Cary Grant and James Stewart when they were 37. 

Well, I think he’s right and if anything understating the case.  With the possible/probable exceptions of George Clooney and Christian Bales, the standard male star of today (Depp, Damon, Maguire, Downey, Cruise) can still play young but can’t play old or come across as characters with any sort of gravitas.  A little digging around on IMDB reveals for instance that Matt Damon was the same age—32-- at the start of the Bourne movies as Sean Connery in the Bond films.  Connery comes across like, well James Bond, while Damon looks and acts like someone a few years removed from grad school or as essentially the same person as he played in Good Will Hunting  And this isn’t a minor problem as anyone who’s seen Tom Cruise play the German aristocrat Claus Von Staufenberg in Valkyrie can attest—there are after all limits to how far you can suspend your disbelief.

If you think about the next level of star the contrast is even greater.  Who is there today to play characters of experienced, suave sophistication that makes movie watching so enjoyable?  Again perhaps Clooney but he hardly compares to past actors that come to mind: David Niven, Ray Milland, Anthony Quayle, George Sanders, James Mason.

It is revealing that the movies have a hard time doing maturity.  A few months ago I picked up the Pat Moynihan book of letters and leafed through it to the center section of pictures.  What jumped out was how often the people pictured were smoking pipes and or wearing three piece suits.  It was almost as if there was a time not that long ago when adults were in positions of responsibility….and on the silver screen.

Moynihan on the '60s cultural change

"What has been going on is a pervasive and quite unprecedented onset of role reversal.  The process of socialization is one whereby the infant and then the growing child is gradually taught to perform certain roles that are appropriate to his age, sex, and to a lesser extent his class and caste.  These roles are not performed in a vacuum. Rather, they relate to other roles.  In the case of youth, to that of adults....Typically these have been hierarchical roles, with one person being superior and the other inferior.  These roles have had 'authority' They have been occupied.  In Erickson's formulation, this authority gradually forms as childhood moral standards are acquired, and these gradually transmute into ethical standards in youth.

For reasons difficult to understand, young persons are suddenly reversing these roles.  Of a sudden, they are the superior ones, and are treating their elders as inferiors.  They do so moreover, with a moralistic harshness that is a caricature of the adult world.  They become in effect supermoralistic, treating adults as children who do not know what they are doing really, and certainly cannot fool their all powerful, all knowing guardians.  They turn on adults in a caricature of adults." 

Letter to President, May 17 1969, (page 191) DPM, A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary

I find this interesting because Moynihan's description of what happened in the 1960's seems accurate--at least within a large and influential set of the population--and because the product of this role reversal are now parents and cultural leaders, so that the effect of this change is still very much with us.  I think you can also see the makings of the cultural wars here, in a split between those in the boomer generation who went with this role reversal and those who didn't.

The purpose of education

In a roundtable discussion last week a participant made the point that education was to prepare you for life and that if an athlete went from college to the pros then the college had succeeded.  This trade school view of a college education seems to be quite common—at least I hear it all the time--and is I think mistaken.  A well educated person will be employable but that isn’t the purpose of education.

If life is a stage and we are merely players, then an education is getting up to speed on the story so far, of coming to understand the other characters as completely as possible, and perhaps most importantly to come to understand all the opportunities available to us in the playing of ‘our role.’  It’s also to ask whether Shakespeare’s metaphor of life as play is correct, and if so to what extent and what follows from that understanding.  As much as education is about getting a good job it is about seeing Sherman and Mr. Peobody trying to find the ruby yacht of Omar Khayam and getting the joke [Rubaiyat, by Omar Khayam].

In her The Gentleman in Trollope, Shirley Letwin described education as follows:

“A man is then what he learns to be.  And learning requires submitting to a teacher.  But that does not turn learning into ‘an imposition on a given self’; it is rather the making of selfhood…The pupil has the character of an apprentice, not a disciple, and he is only temporarily so until he acquires the skills, not the style, of the master.  For learning the arts of civilization does not consist in copying patterns but in mastering a language of one sort or another, and knowing a language does not dictate what should be said.”

London Riots III - thoughts from Michael Kelly

To Michael Kelly it was clear, it was/is all Sinatra’s fault as the prototypical iconic celebrity.

“The iconic celebrity is the result of the central confusion of the age, which is that people possessed of creative or artistic gifts are somehow teachers—role models—in matters of personal conduct.”

Kelly delineates the model to be aspired to before Frank:

“He possesses an outward cynicism, but this is understood to be merely clothing; at his core, he is a square….He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old fashioned.  He believes in truth, justice, and the American way and love.  He is, after his fashion, a gentleman and, in a quite modern manner, a sexual egalitarian.  He is forthright, contemptuous of dishonesty in all its forms, from posing to lying….He is honorable and virtuous, although he is properly suspicious of men who talk about honor and virtue.  He may be world-weary, but he is not ironic.”

Then came Sinatra:

“The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature.  Cool said the old values were for suckers.  Cool was looking out for number one always.  Cool didn’t get mad; it got even.  Cool didn’t go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for….Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool’s philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly.  Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws….cool was nihilistic.  Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice.  Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.”

King of Cool, Things Worth Fighting For, Michael Kelly  
http://www.amazon.com/Things-Worth-Fighting-Collected-Writings/dp/B000BTH5OY/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1312928216&sr=1-1

Cookies, A Tale for our Times

There is very little that I remember from the course I took in marketing as an undergraduate, but I do remember the following example precisely because it explains so much that has nothing to do with business:

A company made cookies at the high end of the market.  After awhile they looked at changing the recipe to lower costs.  So they came up with a cost reduced version, then tested it against the current version and when the tasters couldn't distinguish between the two versions they went with the lower cost recipe.  A year or so later they did the same thing testing version (b) against version (c) and getting the same result they switched again to the lower cost version.  Over the course of a few years this pattern persisted, until at some point their sales dropped off.  They couldn't come up with a reason for the declining sales until they tested the current version of the cookie (after many changes) to the original.  While the incremental changes had been too subtle to notice, the absolute change was significant and easy to detect.