The master of hand-waving

Has Malcolm Gladwell become a parody of himself? It's as if there's a Gladwell machine out there, accepting multiple inputs and spitting out some theory that manages to glue them all together, however awkwardly. Everywhere I look, he's constructing on-the-fly analysis for why things are the way they are, the why always couched in some public misapprehension of a problem and his jaunty strolls through low/high culture to debunk it. People think it's like this, but really, it's like this! That subversion of our common sense beliefs is the core of his appeal -- his answers, seemingly so logical and matter-of-fact, are the perfect turnabout. It tickles people's fancy, discovering these hidden secrets behind our assumptions. He takes some issue and re-focuses it, revealing its real nature, shows how there's some underlying structure that connects it to, well, just about everything. And that's the crux of the problem.

Gladwell is a pat analyzer, at least in the design of his New Yorker articles and two immensely popular books, Blink and The Tipping Point. He's "the explainer", the guy who takes unrelated concepts and by induction, attempts to connect them under a single unifying principle -- or at least, that's what he appears to be. You see it here, most recently, where in a talk about prodigies, late bloomers and the finicky timing of creativity he gave at Columbia University, he draws together Fleetwood Mac, Picasso, hybrid engines and new drug discovery as data points joined by his thesis. As he begins his speech, he makes light of the topic of Fleetwood Mac as if it's some arbitrary selection, but in fact it's completely calculated. What he does is the exact opposite of induction: he develops an overarching thesis (pretty typically, derived from someone else's work) that applies in a particular area -- in this case, the idea that there are two groups of creative people, those that excel early and those that come to their peak late -- and then applies it to everything, even things to which it fits quite badly. He analogizes the Japanese who developed the commercially-viable hybrid engine, in one hand-waving swoop, to Paul Cézanne, the French painter, whom he describes as a creative meanderer that didn't start off with a master plan of where he wanted to go but arrived at an end result in the act of painting his art. This, according to Gladwell, is how Japanese car companies developed the hybrid engine. Huh? American car companies, he claims, are like the visionary prodigies who have the entire plan mapped out beforehand. He claims that the muscle car, SUV and minivan were products of this bold and sudden creative agency. Double huh?

In another example, he argues that the concept of our high schools is flawed because it's possible that some mediocre high school students are actually just late bloomers -- not much of a bolt of original thinking there, but even still, what is he trying to get at? Is there some kind of litmus test for determining whether or not a high school student might have some future talent that hasn't yet been expressed? And if so, so what? Unexpressed potential has to basically find its own way to manifest itself and it's not clear at all how you could modify the school system to support legions of people with unexpressed potential. Gladwell acts as if the impatience for results is a new thing, that we're in some kind of era that celebrates fast and easy, but it's not clear to me that there is such a cultural shift. Cézanne lived for much of his life on an inheritance from his father and was not particularly celebrated in his lifetime -- where was the attempt to support this wellspring of potential? The fact is, Cezanne sought out the painter's life, because he was drawn to it and worked to develop his potential. His other main example of late-breaking creativity, Fleetwood Mac, scored their hit Rumours sixteen albums in. Using this as his example of how things used to be done and how we're moving towards a culture of instant results, he makes a broad assumption that all record companies acted like this at the time, and that record companies now all adhere to the instant-hit template for deciding the merit of their musicians. I think it's fair to say that he cherry-picks his examples, something I'll get to in a bit.

It's interesting to look at the discursive style of his writing in the light of another writer: Stephen Jay Gould. Gould was another immensely popular, rambling kind of writer, whose essays for the general public would begin on one distant topic and in a sequence of seemingly unrelated segues and digressions, somehow arrive at the real meat of the essay, the central point. Sound familiar? Aside from the purplish writing of Gould versus Gladwell's pithiness, the major difference between Gould and Gladwell, is that Gould was trained as a scientist. He was a paleontologist by profession and brought the requisite empiricism to his writing -- much of it was based on his own scientific work. He was presenting, to a popular audience, work he had done himself or knew intimately -- mostly related to evolution and natural selection. This isn't the case with Gladwell, who immerses himself in an area if he feels it might somehow support his conclusions, who uses the journalistic technique of finding supporting anecdotes to fill out the body of his pieces, even if the link is tenuous. Google is Gladwell's muse. (Is this a manifestation of a web-inspired taxonomy brought to the book format? The logical jumps from one realm to another, seemingly unrelated -- not unlike the fragmented information gathering process of hyperlinks. One second you're reading fark.com and the next you're on the New York Times website.)

The thing about Gladwell is that he has now vastly increased the popularity of other writers who would seek to do the same kind of explaining, and rarely are they any better, although they seem to multiply every day. One of them that comes immediately to mind is Steven Johnson, the ex-editor of Feed magazine and author of Everything Bad Is Good For You. The central premise of his book is that much of the media that we currently consume which we generally assume to be fluffy or intellectually unstimulating, is actually complex in a way that older forms of that media are not. He makes a notable comparison of the television show The Sopranos to an older series, Dragnet. In the former, the show's multiple overlapping storylines, legion of characters and relative narrative subtlety are contrasted with the latter's simplistic structure and single plot. Now, if it's not immediately obvious, this complex new structure of television has been around for quite a while -- in the form of soap opera. Hidden motives, multiple characters, overlapping storylines? It's all there. No one has ever claimed that General Hospital was, by its very structure, making people smarter, although I suppose Johnson might retroactively argue that it was. He avoids the real reason people consider certain media "bad" -- it's the content of television that people decry, not the structure.

That is the Achilles heel of Gladwell and his literary cousins. They bring in facts and statistics but only in a selective fashion. Perhaps no one likes reading the work of an author who admits that they don't really have an answer, so instead we have writers who, like a professor leading you in a meandering and informative fashion to one inescapable conclusion, already have the solution -- it's just how entertaining and succinct they are, how many clever catchphrases or nicknames they can introduce (most obviously seen in Gladwell's tendency to rebrand other people's theories). Introducing abberant facts and counter-arguments would turn the carefully wrought creation into a complicated mess. Not unlike the actual problems, themselves, which might not be so easily resolved.

This aspect of Gladwell is the exact reason why he is so beloved by business people, and paid well to speak to groups of them. Business, on the whole, loves organizational theory and consumer psychology, the attempts to encapsulate people's behaviour in ways that allow them to better market their products and create new consumers. The sheen of skeptical inquiry and analysis that Gladwell's books contain appeals to that same person who arrays themselves with performance metrics and demographic reports. The Tipping Point has become standard reading in a business culture that wants explanations, that hates uncertainty and seeks rationalization for the irrational. Look at the cultish devotion to earnings forecasts and meeting and beating numbers, numbers that are often arbitrarily manipulated, as anyone who knows a little about corporate accounting can attest to.

There is another writer favoured by business folk who I find writes just as well and doesn't leave me feeling leery. Michael Lewis of Moneyball and Liar's Poker fame, also has the qualities of an explainer, but he has the best traits of Gladwell -- the casual, anecdotal storytelling; the profiling of cultures that have not gotten mass exposure -- without the worst: the tendency to draw too many conclusions from his disparate stories. In Moneyball, Lewis discussed the problems in baseball and its player selection that allowed a team with one of the smallest budgets, the Oakland A's, to get to the playoffs. Billy Beane, the general manager of the A's, applies a controversial philosophy to his player selection and actually gets results. In a related article that Lewis wrote for the New York Times, he profiled a football coach who was a contrarian in his coaching style and who also got results. Notice: Lewis never attempts to construct a grand theory from it -- he doesn't try to correlate it with why Japan became a top automaker in the 1980s and the intricacies of online dating, which is something I could see Gladwell doing. And, in my opinion, he's a better writer for it.

I appreciate and enjoy the brainstorming that Gladwell does and that he has the ability to bring to light ideas that may not typically be well-discussed in the mainstream, but the fact is, he too often puts his words down with an indiscriminacy that borders of laziness. He makes digestible reading that is savvy and thoughtful and contains some indisputably interesting ideas, but he doesn't approach his own writing with the same skepticism that he brings to other people's theories and beliefs. And that's his appeal -- the pill is so easy to swallow, the read so entertaining, Hush Puppies! Aeron chairs! -- and seemingly so obvious, once you look at it the right way, that readers can apply those pre-build theories to the messy, complicated world and make some sense of it -- in his books, he becomes a sort of higher echelon self-help guru. He asks the questions and gives answers to questions, glibly, but rarely does he inspire you ask more questions. And that does his readers a real disservice.

Never the twain shall meet?

A thoughtful entry from Christopher Simon about the subtle prejudices that still pervade when overt racism is generally frowned upon has got me thinking about this some more. In the wake of the shooting of Jane Creba in Toronto, which disturbed the lid that a lot of people put on their racist convictions -- and I mean racism in the most bloodless sense, "prejudice based on race", not racism in the sense that seems to stifle discussion -- Simon's musings are very germane. I thought this passage was particularly interesting:

How many people of the same people who saw 8 Mile looked at the ads for Get Rich or Die Tryin'and dismissed it out of hand? Looking at the grosses for both films,about $95 million dollars worth. To be fair, although they both star major rap stars, the stories in the individual films are dramatically different. But yet, Hustle and Flow, a movie that hews much more closely to the "aspiring star makes good" plot description of 8 Mile, made even less money than Get Rich. Again, race presents as the most prominent X-factor.

Why is it that pure-laine white soccer moms can love Eminem's violent, sexist and misogynist imagery and understand it to be a cartoon production -- although that's probably up for debate -- and yet cannot apply the same thinking to other rappers, other rappers who are often just as thoughtful and intricate in their lyrics, and less controversial? Is it an ironic update of Langston Hughes' indictment of exoticism in The Ways of White Folks, where it's now kosher to exoticize someone of the same race, as a safe haven from more obvious forms of it? Why is Tony Soprano a figure of amusement to most people, even as he engages in wholesale killing and adultery? Rewrite The Sopranos or The Godfather or Goodfellas with black people and the movies become invisible to the populace at large, or worse, they become case examples of a violent black culture. Somehow, mafioso have become figures of harmless caricature in a way -- perhaps in the way a term like "white trash" is used with abandon -- while black figures of crime are still portrayed as truly dangerous, rather than in equally cartoonish visions.

Even the most enlightened and purportedly rational of people fall into the trap of these small-scale prejudices, prejudices that obviously have much larger consequences. This is what I would term "passive" racism, because it's not something people consciously act on. Someone I know castigated me recently for daring to initiate an online conversation with the word "yo"; his response? "Please stop trying to talk like a black guy." Another example is a fellow who complemented a friend of mine for his excellent English in a job interview -- the friend being a second-generation Asian-Canadian -- and spoke of the "jackass" who rear-ended his car who he mentioned just happened to be Chinese. With these kinds of attitudes slipping out still, it's hard for me to believe that there isn't going to be an effect that, in the aggregate, continues to keep people in weaker economic positions. Whether it's the significantly lesser box-office results of films with a predominantly non-white cast or the latent prejudice that causes someone to pass over a potential employee for hiring, for a promotion or raise to those already hired, this has a strong impact in a society that claims to be fully integrated. At least in the realm of obvious racial policy, like in the pre-1960's segregationist American South, full alternate economies developed in parallel to white ones. In our current system, it's much harder to counter these less blatant forms of racism, stereotypes that have somehow remained acceptably non-confrontational, "truisms" to anyone who isn't part of the race being subtly derided.

Is it even possible to remove this stubborn remnant of racism from society? As we move from isolationist and nationalist societies, to a more inter-mixed global society, where race and culture become an additional attribute rather than the key identity of an individual, will we see this effect fade away naturally in the coming generations? Or is this an aspect of human consciousness that will always exist, due to the intelligence's focus on pattern recognition and forming of stereotypes (initially for informational purposes, but calcifying into dogma even in the face of counter-evidence)? And if this bias is always present, are such hack-like measures as affirmative action the only methods we have to combat the economic consequences of "the X-factor"? And how do we address the issue in industries, like film and television and other media creation, where the old-style isolationist and racist policies have been replaced with often ham-handed attempts to lard in non-white actors, regardless of the quality of their depiction? (For a current example of this ham-handedness, look at Memoirs of a Geisha, which I looked into previously and which Michele of isolato also takes to task.)

Premature

Reading the CBC website's comment page in the wake of the Boxing Day shooting death of Jane Creba and the wounding of seven others in Toronto, you'd have thought the Big Smoke had turned into a warzone, a scene of racial strife that was playing out the last days of a dying city. In some of the letters, the thin veil of racism is almost completely ripped off, one J. Villa even going so far as to imply that black people are "devils". Several readers from New Brunswick and Red Deer, Alberta write in to comment on a city they don't even live in, armchair generals to the last.

As someone who was born in Toronto, and has lived in its suburbs and knows its urban core quite well, it amazes me that anyone could look at an incident like this and assume that Toronto was going to the dogs. As the same J. Villa on that page pointed out, in April 1994, Vivi Lemonis was killed during a robbery at a cafe called Just Desserts-- over 11 years ago (a little off of the 20 years guesstimated by Villa). The fact of the matter is that this kind of incident is a rarity -- that of a black man shooting a young, attractive, white women -- and it betrays the parochialism of a lot of people when they start making noise about immigrants, gun cultures and how a city is fast turning into a cesspit of violence and carnage, when such an incident occurs.

If you've ever lived in Toronto, or even in many American cities with per-capita murder rates an order or two larger than any Canadian city, you'd know that you can generally walk around feeling pretty safe and secure. These are not warzones, but like any large and dense population, there will be people with bad motives and loose ethics -- restricting immigration assumes that only foreign cultures can spread violence, when Columbine, the Michigan militias and Timothy McVeigh, as well as the thug-jock ethos of modern white culture manifestly demonstrate this is untrue.

The reality is, there are bad parts of cities, places where the poor and underprivileged live, where due to circumstance and lifestyle, bad things are more prone to happen. "Good people" don't go there. That's what we usually see on television and on the news, when there's a shooting in the black community, or in the Indian community, or in the South-East Asian community. In fact, not long ago in the suburbs of Toronto, a young, attractive, Indian woman was shot through a door by some men, also Indian. This added to people's belief that Toronto had gone gun-crazy, but beyond local mention, didn't even play across Canada. The only reason that this particular tragedy has garnered continuous national attention is because "good people" are getting hurt now -- good people being a euphemism for middle-class and white. As long as the violence stayed in bad areas, in Scarborough and the seedier parts of downtown, or the low-rent areas of South Etobicoke, it could be shrugged off as another news item, another bullet on the list of reasons why Toronto was no longer as good as it used to be. But Jane Creba, with her pretty, pleasingly blonde face, so white and innocent -- well, that's something to get worked up about.

The supposed insularity that breeds tension and dissension caused by multiculturalism isn't the problem -- even in the supposed melting pot of America, the black community is as separate from the Jewish community as it is separate from the white community and violence is more a component of the superstructure than any individual section of the country; at least in Canada, we recognize people's natural need to group and great effort is made in introducing each other to our respective cultures. As more rational minds have pointed out, time and again -- the effort has to be put in at the level of class: social programs, good schools, good urban planning and architecture, inclusion rather than isolation, if things are to really work. To blame the gun violence on cultural issues when the problem is completely social? That is inherently racist.

The Temple of Leisure

I was on the slopes the other day, the first time in nearly two decades that I had clipped on a pair of skis. I went to Whistler-Blackcomb, the vaunted ski resort and Vancouver's trump card in a 2010 Winter Olympics bid that has the city feeling its oats. Since I'm writing this now, I survived, and I might likely ski again, but one of the things I noted was how costly it all was, even with discounts and my thrifty nature. A lift ticket in the area of seventy-five dollars, a set of rental equipment for thirty, transportation up to the mountain and food and drink while there (nine dollars for a bowl of chili!), and it all added up to a fine dent in the wallet. No wonder people have always thought of skiing as one of the provinces of the rich and well-to-do.

Recently, too, I cancelled my membership at the local aquatic centre. I hadn't been swimming as much, and though it was relatively inexpensive, I still felt strange paying for leisure and exercise I would never use. It made me think of all those private gyms that people go to, determined and humourless in their pursuit of weight loss and fitness, and all the money spent to make use of them (or not, depending on their diligence). The way these annual memberships and season passes are structured, it forces a person into a mentality that requires them to maximize their usage of the services they've pre-paid for, to the point where it becomes akin to chore.

The Economist, earlier this year, began publishing a lifestyle magazine called Intelligent Life in whose inaugural issue they profiled the sport of leisure boxing -- people of white-collar background who felt that they weren't getting enough out of their pansy, low-impact workout, and so chose to pay for the benefit of the highest impact workout around. The magazine's sections, ranging from the explicitly consumerist "Wealth" and "Luxury" categories to the implicated-by-association "Leisure" and "Travel" headings, are all about what people do when they have money and few native ideas on how to spend it.

It's hard to tell whether or not this is a good thing -- is the slow creep of the "wealth instinct" to the middle-class a sign of rising, global prosperity? I have my doubts. People have been rich since time immemorial, and conspicuous consumption has been practiced just as long, but why has this consumption become something aspirational? The home improvement and gourmet cooking shows, the profiles of music stars' houses on MTV Cribs, the proliferation of gadget and other "next wave, cutting edge" consumerist tracking blogs; all seem to add up to a culture that is quite different from the consumption of the past, because the consumption is no longer specific to a particular class of people. Marketers cast their net wide, now, and hope to capture as much market-share as possible, creditworthiness be damned.

It's quite possible that this strive-for-more, cooler, faster, is a product of how the current crop of twenty, thirty and even forty-somethings grew up: in the age of television and electronics. We've moved so quickly from a time when toys were simple, well-crafted things on which to focus a child's power of imagination and play, to a time when product placement and cross-over marketing ensure that everything already comes with a detailed backstory and history. For instance, video games, as enjoyable as they can be, are the outlet of the creator's imagination -- if there are spaces in which a child can insert his or her own fantasies, those spaces are becoming narrower and fewer. What once allowed a free-form imagination that -- in my mind -- gave rise to the great age of invention that preceded the past twenty years is being slowly choked off. (That's not to say it would disappear; the human capacity for creativity is boundless even within the confines we've put it.)

The beauty and trap of this kind of culture is that it pacifies. Like Noam Chomsky's somewhat dour attitude toward spectator sports, with their emphasis on our-team jingoism and meaningless statistics, and the lethargy it inspires towards more meaningful pursuits like political and cultural awareness, caring about "nice things" and "new things" is really the ultimate form that soma has taken, that narcotizing drug that keeps the peace, at a cost, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Sure, we have Prozac and Viagra, but these are drugs people use to cope with the demands of our culture, not the sources of its problems. The real opiate of the people these days is not religion, but shopping. Well, that's too glib. What's taken the place of religion for those who aren't particularly religious is whatever occupies their time to exhaustion, to the point where trivial things become central to their consciousness. Whether that's the 9/11 conspiracy theorist's decidedly narrow view of the world, or the shopaholic's energetic efforts to collect a particular line of shoes, I think it's all of a piece. In Google-world, where massive amounts of information on any particular subject can be pushed to our screens instantly, it's no wonder that minutiae is what drives most of our waking moments.

It struck me, on the mountain, as hundreds of other eager leisure seekers shusshed past me on their technologically advanced skis, outfitted in expensive Gore-Tex and neoprene, that we had lost some of the pleasure of what inspired the first skiiers in Scandinavia -- being alone among the vistas, in the expansive realm of nature, ignorant of particular techniques and taxonomy and joyful in the way of children in discovery. (It was also pretty useful in those snow-bound countries.) Instead, we've taken the Olympian motto of performance culture ("faster, higher, stronger") to a level where it has become the motto of our times, in much of our endeavours. Unlike those pundits of the past who praised the dwindling of the work-week from seven days to six and then to five, doing nothing -- really doing nothing -- is the biggest crime you can commit. So do something. And if you are going to do something, if you're going to spend your time on leisure, you had better not do it leisurely -- get the best equipment, spend the bucks, work at it! It's not worth doing if you don't!

Destiny manifest

Even as ecological issues have migrated to the forefront of the consciousness of the average Western-world citizen (which ranges from high-minded activism to gas-is-so-expensive water cooler talk), and their lifestyles shift from rural and land-rich to the urban and high-density, the world's population still continues to increase dramatically. How do we, with dwindling resources, maintain a quality of life that we will find acceptable? Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" posited that we would not be able to do so via technology or science, but only by a change in our collective values, a change that lately has become more plausible as talk of our oil dependence takes centre stage. We still seek technical solutions; even the gloomiest energy pundit believes that a diversion of our current oil and gas-based resources to develop alternative energy would help resolve that quagmire, if it weren't for our collective disinterest in this solution.

The reality, though, is this: even if the entire population of the world became model conservationists and ecological stewards of the highest order, unless, collectively, people stop increasing that same population, energy conservation and recycling will likely do relatively little. It's a dramatic onus placed on the natural instinct, to reproduce, an instinct that even colours the majority's impressions of intentional childlessness. Today, every individual still acts in his or her own best interests, and people seek to reproduce for a variety of reasons -- for love, for posterity, for other less savoury reasons. In some ways, it's viewed as our natural right as animals to continue our species. We buy hybrid cars and replace our incandescent lightbulbs with energy-efficient fluorescents, and downsize into smaller and smaller apartments, but are we just delaying the inevitable? As rational and practical a policy of one or two children per family might be, will we be able to adopt this policy on time?

There are countries whose population growth rate is minimal: Japan, estimated at 0.05% for 2005, takes this honour. Although many look upon this as an indication of the decline of Japan and its society, we might have to look again at this measure. Japan is heavily urbanized, committed to energy prudence, with a population comfortable with smaller private spaces and small families: perhaps this is the type of society and culture that, in future, will ensure our continued existence. But that points up the real issue, the area where we should really be focusing our efforts. Even as the culture of conservation takes slow root in the soil of North America, the world is filled with overpopulated and underdeveloped countries, countries where the possibility of a natural population decline is as foreign as easily available contraception. These countries form the bulk of the world's population growth in the coming years and this is where any effects of conservation done in more developed countries will be effectively nullified. So, even as we applaud ourselves in the West, with our sudden focus on energy conservation and conservatism, our fuel cell technologies and solar arrays, we are far from real solutions. Even the vastest resources of land, energy and food are finite.

One of the more popular catchphrases, well-worn by its use in environmental movements, is "think globally, act locally" -- that is, we can do our small part at home and effect change throughout the world. What I suggest is that this is a nice slogan, but meaningless in the long run. We most likely will not see the effects for quite some time, not in our lifetimes and not in our children's lifetimes, but if we really want to contribute to the continuing health of the human world, we will have to think globally and act globally.

The New World

As habitable land inexorably gets devoured by the minute, either through sheer population growth, like in the cities of Asia, or by the growth of the sprawl-hungry North American suburbs and exurbs, what seemed inconceivable with the current state-of-the-art of architecture a few hundred years ago is now commonplace in many cities: the sight of hundreds, if not thousands of concrete, glass and metal spires rising from the ground to heights that dominate vision. In cities like Hong Kong, years of vertical building have created a sea of stalagmitic apartment blocks that scale Victoria Peak in an organic version of highrise living: an amalgam of sleek futurism and Asian pragmatism. The bustling core around Central District and Causeway Bay, all flyover street signage and glittering neon, packed with people, is a keen indication of the vitality in this city of cities.

Vancouver, where I live, is an example of a North American city learning to build vertically, shaped less by population growth and more by accident of geography and hence, land values -- the city is constrained by mountains, the ocean and a border shared with the United States. Land is scarce, and, like many cities on this continent, Vancouver's developers have opted to raise an army of characterless condominiums flanking the downtown core. There's a certain sculptural elegance to these towers that only makes itself known from a great distance, but up close, the condos of False Creek and Yaletown seem copycat utilitarian; the jury is still out on whether a city the likes of the great modern metropolises will manifest itself in such a condo-heavy environment.

What does Vancouver lack? I suspect it's the drive of commerce; the mercantile instinct. Think of the cities around the world that are the vanguard of skyscraper living: New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and lately, Shanghai. These are the commercial centres of the world, to where both the rich and poor flock, to make their fortunes. It's this collision of class, race, religion and creed, brought together by ambition, that seems to me the best recipe for a vital city. When everyone's a potential customer, how can you wall yourself off from the next person? That is both the strength and source of tension in our great cities. With all their flaws, these cities are the models for future living, as space dwindles.

There's still something abhorrent about life in an alveole-like chamber in a non-descript tower. We all want room to move, a place to stretch out, variety in our environment -- not that much different from old Fido. As much as I might believe that vertical living is inevitable for most of us, I appreciate the benefits of space. What is it that appeals about it? Some remnant of life on the plains, under an open sky... a reminder of freedom? Too-small spaces feel like prison cells, with limited vistas and just enough room to pace. Space is to shelter as spice is to food -- it may not be needed, but without it, something is lost. In every cramped little condo, even the grandest fixtures and building materials cannot quite overcome a feeling of claustrophobia.

To some extent, we can find the space we need in the communal areas granted to the public: the great parks, like Olmsted's famed Central Park, and their smaller cousins, and in the various planned spaces found in any urban environment, whose quality is often commensurate to the effort and money expended on them, meaning in many cases that they're pretty awful. Many new high-rise developments, harkening back to L'Enfant's master-planned expanse of Washington, D.C., often devote substantial space to public parks and recreation areas, conscious of their importance. In the future, it's quite possible that these public spaces will become drastically vital, as our private realms shrink.

It's by no means assured, however. As the web continues to grow in importance, our business and social lives conducted online, our information gleaned from predominantly virtual sources -- all the things that common spaces once abetted so well -- we ensure that our real, public spaces will never be as popular as they once were. Though we all seek space and freedom, it seems that many of us have found it in the virtually limitless regions that are available to us online. Even as we are brought closer together, physically, by the expansion of our cities and the dwindling resource of land, the web has ensured that, in its mediated way, we can remain as far apart as we like. (Even as it, too, paradoxically, strives to bring us together.)

A culture of "taste"

Knowing the difference between a confit and a consommé; being aware of the vagaries of font design; having an intimate knowledge of the Queen Anne period of architecture and the Bauhaus school. What once seemed to be knowledge kept in the realms of various specialities -- essentially all forms of craft that, over time, had accrued deep expertise and methodologies -- are now proliferating to the average person, the untrained generalist who probably finds it appealing to dabble in these areas in their spare time. Books and literature on gastronomy, graphic and furniture design, architecture, all fly off the shelves in a time when being cultured in this most materialistic of senses is immensely popular.

Can we look to people like Martha Stewart and the cast of the various television networks dedicated to cooking, home renovation and general aspirations to a perfect, sleek vision of domesticity for some of this appreciation? And simultaneously, the proliferation of consumer products as objects of design (like the iPod or the Karim Rashid designed Umbra wastebasket) available to the masses -- the dream of many designers, design populism! What to make of a culture where the average person might happen to care about letter spacing or authenticity in ottoman reupholstering?

I suppose it'd all be pretty harmless if it felt like this was just a pastime, a side story to people's lives, but in so many ways it seems as if people's existences are predicated on making things pretty, caring about looks, essentially being superficial in the guise of being cultured. I'm not one to say what "true culture" is, but I suspect that those denizens of past ages would look upon our current fixations and wonder where our brains were? Or am I wrong? Have we always, collectively, allowed taste and discernnment to be such a defining factor in our lives?

I think that strikes at the crux of the issue. Taste and discernment are things that are associated with people who are wealthy, who as members of Thorstein Veblen's "leisure class" sought to exhibit that wealth in so many ways. This is the lifestyle that has filtered down to Joe and Jane Average: everyone wants to be rich, so if we can't be rich, let's be tasteful. Let's care about beautiful things and have opinions on the aesthetics of things, opinions that define us. Perhaps, in some kind of subconscious reversal, we as consumers seek to become aesthetes first, without the concomitant requirement of money. It's a bad and craven thing to aspire to riches, goes the common wisdom, but to have taste? Well, terrific!

To me, this is where we're at -- we're immersed in lifestyles defined by what we consume, what we like, the things we find pretty and full of character. We surround ourselves with aesthetic values and claim it as culture, when in fact intellectual vibrancy among most of my peers these days is at an all time low. We see it in the innumerable blogs and websites devoted to food reviewing, gadget reviewing, home renovation and collecting. The sheer success of eBay. We're living some weird cross between mercantilism and aestheticism and there's very little going on in the gaps between. Even the reading culture, maybe one of the bastions of non- or anti-materialism has been infected by this taste-making virus, where Oprah's book club becomes one tremendous cog in a giant marketing machine of books, an arena that once depended on individual and mostly independent interest to determine their fates. Will "taste" stand the test of time? Or will all this "taste" ultimately render a culture with little trace?

Whither popularity?

Why is popularity such a fundamental part of the success in life? Even after we leave the knockabout halls of high school, with its intricate social pecking orders, popularity in various forms is still fundamental to our interactions.

As one of countless aspiring writers, I'm part of a mob of people, arms up and frantic, hoping to be picked or recognized for their talent, their incisiveness, their art. There are so many of us that the only mechanism we seem to have is popularity to determine who should gain attention and fame. Google, one of the most ubiquitous names in the online world today, based its famous search engine algorithm on the concept of popularity. Its PageRank system, at heart, is based on the idea that popular is good. For the most part, popular sites are ranked higher in its search engine results, and sites are deemed popular when other popular sites link to it.

As effective and revolutionary as this was at the time, when search engines like the once-famous Altavista would often return pages of irrelevant results, it does result in another problem: popular sites become popular and unpopular sites, no matter their merit, languish in obscurity. This is the blog culture we're now growing up in, one which ensures that only sites deemed "linkworthy" by other popular sites will gain attention. Think of the vaunted Slashdot effect, where a linked site from Slashdot.org will fall to its knees under the load of the thousands of incoming visitors.

Now, perhaps bloggers feel that, hey, they know best. They think, as arbiters of taste and culture, we will be able to ferret out the obscurities and bring them into the light. Where Google, by design, relegates unpopular sites to the no man's land of page 10 results, the bloggers will subvert the order and make them popular. It's the same philosophy behind Google-whacking and search engine optimization, I suppose, although those have less salutary motivations.

The question is, have bloggers been able to finally equate popularity with quality and vice versa? Are we entering an Internet age where the most popular (linked to) sites are also truly all excellent sites? Perhaps blogging, or filtering as some have called it, is essential to combat Google's design flaws. I'd like to hope so, but in fact, the result is not unlike other tastemakers and those who eventually gain a level of popularity and authority that calcifies and makes them unable to see innovation and highlight truly unique things. (Case in point: Coach Leach's profile by Michael Lewis, who seems to be the very definition of an unpopular, innovative and by all rights fameworthy person for his exploits in football coaching, but who is resolutely ignored by the majority of those who should be able to recognize his talent.) If anything, bloggers are quickly approaching that same stage of calcification, absorbing the attention of the bulk of the populace online and leaving the unpopular but truly unique individuals to figure out ways to infiltrate this newly established order.

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning

After having spent a frustrating day trying to prove my identity and get a response back from various Internet domain registrars and hosting providers I use for several websites I maintain, it struck me that the whole domain registration business is pretty young. It's a bit strange to see how a certain industry develops: does it turn into a huge, respected area of business with giant corporations, like the telecommunication industry, or does it turn into an industry full of two-bit operators and the occasional more recognized brand name, like the domain registration industry?

Much like gym memberships and cell phone resellers, there's something about this kind of industry that attracts sleazy behaviour. At least part of that is the "take your credit card number and sign a cryptic contract" subscriptions that are the de facto standard in these lines of business. And the obstacles that they put in your way when you do decide to cancel, well, it confounds reason how people can operate businesses in this manner. I've had managers actively avoid speaking to me, in hopes that I'd leave and miss a cancellation deadline. I've had people claim they had no office and no direct phone number so that I couldn't reach them without going through a chain of powerless customer support agents and salespeople that acted as a human buffer. And in this latest attempt to cancel some domains I own that I don't use, I'm finding that my registrar has buried the cancellation website in a frequently asked questions sub-site, where you actually have to search for "cancel" before you can find the link to the cancellation site. Further, the site tells me that the cancellation forms should be faxed in to the number on the forms but the forms don't even list a number! And if you do a search for "fax", it results in multiple possible numbers.

That would be bad enough, but because the email address I registered with them a few years ago is one I no longer have access to, and even though I've changed it through their website to one I do have access to, the activation emails are still not being sent to my new address. So I'm forced to get support through their billing and tech support email addresses, because they don't really offer phone support for the package I signed up with (a "too good to be true" 3 year free hosting offer -- I now see where the catch was). It's despicable behaviour, frankly, and it does astound me that businesses can operate like this.

Then again, even big, respectable businesses aren't really: Enron, Worldcom, Tyco. It's amazing, but perhaps not surprising, how people will cast aside ethical behaviour in the quest for money!

Notes on a Movie Trailer

Watching the trailer for Memoirs of a Geisha, two things came to mind.

One, is it not impressive that Ziyi Zhang, who spoke no English in her debut to American audiences (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) all the way up till her appearance in Rush Hour 2, is the star of a movie acted completely in the English language? This same woman appeared as a presenter at the MTV Movie Awards with Jackie Chan, barely able to comprehend what was going on and asking whispered questions in Mandarin to the multilingual Chan. Think of the reverse situation, with a Western actress gifted in accent mimicry -- say, Meryl Streep or, more contemporarily, Gwyneth Paltrow -- attempting to learn the Chinese language in a short enough period of time to make filming them acting in that language feasible. It wouldn't happen.

I think this demonstrates the relative ease of learning English over Chinese; spoken Chinese I'd hazard would take about three to four years to become fluent in, English obviously much faster. Zhang has put the work in, with her claimed "five hours" of study a day, but still, I don't know how convincing Paltrow might be if she had to master the tones and pronunciation of Mandarin, after a year or two of study. Then again, I could be completely wrong.

The second thing I noticed was that all three major female characters are played by Chinese women. At first, this struck me as exceedingly strange, since all the characters are obviously Japanese, being geishas in Japan. It was starting to raise my hackles a little -- "just another example of Hollywood confusing ethnicities!" -- when it occurred to me that Hollywood has never made much of an attempt at authenticity in this sense. Italians played by Jews, Polish characters played by Italians, Rwandans played by African-Americans. It's a rare occasion when a white character is cast solely on ethnic background, so I suppose it shouldn't be any different if they were East Asian?

Still, something seems off and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it says something about North America, where the strong divisons of ethnicity and language are lost, and a character is no longer British or Spanish or Armenian, but simply white. Still, even in the examples I think of, where ethnicity does become a factor, like the Polish dockworker Ziggy in The Wire played by James Ransone, an ethnically Italian actor, there is something unconvincing about their performances. Obviously, if one is able to make distinctions like Italian/Polish or Japanese/Chinese, these performances stand out negatively -- listening to Zhang's Mandarin-inflected English jars when I know very well how English is spoken by native Japanese speakers.

I suppose this does indeed circle back to a certain ignorance of the producers, and maybe their estimation of the audience: "we can't tell the difference, why would they be able to?" It may very well be open-minded and creative to put someone in a role designed for someone with completely different traits, depending on the nature of the production (gender reversal of characters in a modern staging of Macbeth perhaps?) but it's clearly not the case here. The thought process goes that the (relatively) big names are Chinese, we need big names to attract audiences, and Chinese people look pretty much like Japanese people. It's this line of reasoning that ensures that I'm sure is a definite contributor to the lack of progress in Hollywood film-making and its eventual demise, as people get sick of having their intelligence patronized.

Well, let's hope.