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Here’s a reading
assignment: two books, some big ideas. Neither one will tell you what — or
how — to think, but you will be spurred to think for yourself while reading
them.
The first is John
Seabrook’s Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture
(Random House, $35). John Seabrook only ever wanted to work at The New
Yorker. Once he got there, he found Tina Brown had altered it
irrevocably. He’d admired the magazine’s studious avoidance of the
ephemeral, the evanescent and the fleeting. But that had meant declining
readership numbers and a publication advertisers viewed as moribund and a
pointless buy. Brown hoped to reverse that by focusing on subjects making
noise — and money — further down in the market.
But Seabrook
didn’t walk out once Brown took over. He needed to pay for a SoHo apartment,
for one thing. And he needed, apparently, to pay way too much money for
Helmut Lang pants and ridiculously expensive T-shirts whose chief charm is
the fact they’re indistinguishable from T-shirts sold for pennies a pound at
Wal-Mart. Not that Seabrook was entirely comfortable with the arrangement,
of course. He really wanted to write long pieces about tuna fishing. He got
to write them, but Brown never published them. Instead, she assigned him to
execute the magazine’s end of a delicate exchange: the prestige of a New
Yorker profile for the borrowed “hotness” and buzz of celebrities whose
presence in the magazine would, it was hoped, boost its circulation and ad
rates. So Seabrook ended up writing deeply ambivalent profiles of people
like affectless, obscenely wealthy and exquisitely bored mogul David Geffen,
never-grew-up movie director George Lucas and not-grown-up-yet rock stars
like Ben Kweller.
That same
ambivalence runs all the way through Nobrow, which aims to look at
how marketing and “culture,” (whatever that is anymore) melted into each
other and morphed into the ubiquitous lukewarm soup we all swim through but
remain vaguely dissatisfied with. Seabrook admits to bafflement as to how
the old high-low taste strictures went soft in the heat of celebrity-worship
klieg lights and devolved into nothing more than differing brand
preferences.
Some critics have
taken swipes at the book for its discursive nature and its shape-shifting:
personal memoir to philosophical musing to recycled New Yorker
assignments to thinking out loud. But that’s what makes it an interesting
read; watching Seabrook think on the page is a lot more entertaining than
having somebody who doesn’t know the difference between politics and
ideology denounce you for drinking Starbucks coffee. Seabrook tries out a
couple of possible explanations for the collapse of the old high-low
cultural continuum (he may be overestimating its pervasiveness and power
when it was ascendant). But he avoids the main temptation in an undertaking
like this: prescriptive instructions on how to “fix” the current situation.
If you want to
know how something could be fixed or improved, follow Seabrook’s Nobrow
with Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a
Big Difference (Little, Brown, $34.95). Also a New Yorker writer,
Gladwell disproves a lot of Seabrook’s contentions about Brown’s regime. She
hired Gladwell, whose work seems the apotheosis of the William Shawn-era
New Yorker as limned by Seabrook: lucid, unadorned, beautiful for its
lack of filigree. And because of that, the depth and quality of Gladwell’s
plain old shoe-leather reporting shine more brightly. Even when interpreting
what he’s discovered, you never get the sense Gladwell’s done selective
reporting as a means to advance his own prejudices, agenda, received opinion
or blind-faith contentions.
Reading this
book, I thought every ad agency in the country ought to buy a copy for each
of its employees, then test them after a week to make sure they’d read it.
In the old days as described by Seabrook, of course, cultured folks would
have heard about this book from similarly educated members of their own
class and read it in order to stay current. That doesn’t happen anymore. And
while Gladwell doesn’t directly address why, his discoveries may offer some
possible explanations for the cultural shift Seabrook posits in his volume. |
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