On 'Rich People Things' Party Tonight!
Multiphasic--
I'm genuinely sorry to hear of the change debacle; I've been badly hungover most of the day--surprise!--and am only getting wind of how badly this was handled now. Please email me (chrisblehmann2@yahoo.com) and I'll get a proper copy out to you or refund you the 15 bucks. It's been hard enough to get paying customers n the path of the actual book thanks to the, uhm, quirky OR business model without a goodwill purchaser having to put up with this shit. GRRR
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On Our Rich Culture Heroes Are Shilling Perma-Adolescence
I freely confess that I am tonedeaf to the humor of pitching a crafts book at "the poor" when more people are living below the poverty line--a notoriously inadequate measure of real privation, but still--now than at any other point in the past 50 years. And the whimsy quotient dilutes further for me, it's true, when the advice comes from someone with a Manhattan apartment big enough to contain its own "crafts room." Under those circumstances, "insta" is one of the nicer things I'd say about the project.
I'm sure the beef stew is quite good, however, and bilious though I may be, I have never, personally, had it in for bunnies.
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On When They Say "Everyone" Must Sacrifice, They Mean Poor People
I can offer no guidance, alas, beyond the standard desperate plea to buy my book and use it as the basis for a left-populist uprising! http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/richpeople/?utm_source=pressrelease&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=richpeople
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On The Devaluing of London's Marital Bond Market
Wow, the British courts can even fix a dollar value on sobriety. They did make one critical error in finding for Ms. Parlour, though: "ruin and unhappiness" is pretty much the business model for British football
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On Reality Television
I agree--which is why I took care explicitly to refrain from such blaming: "With Jenkins dead, we'll never know how much the full-surveillance degradation of his character contributed to his morally squalid end." It's not a knowable proposition on either side. What I did was to surmise that invasive reality programing seeking to create the "maximum emotional impact" for participants could have been traumatizing. That doesn't seem like "shoddy work" to me; rather, it's taking the purveyors of this stuff at their word.
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On Russians, Arabs Too Filthy, Ethnic For Dying Couture Industry
Oh, and I actually realized that in my haste, I was actually being a bit unfair to Veblen re. the woman question. In that same chapter, he discusses the corset, for instance, as an elaborate torture device that transforms women themselves into trophy-like objects of pecuniary display. He's similarly astute on the subject of the period's women's footwear. It also seems a tricky business to claim more enlightened feminist credentials on behalf of today's fashion industry, which worships a ludicrously unrealistic image of the female body, and spends untold millions breeding a state of perpetually anxious self-hatred in its ideal woman consumer.
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On Russians, Arabs Too Filthy, Ethnic For Dying Couture Industry
I take your point re. the overtones of misogyny in Veblen's analysis, which of course was endemic in the century he wrote in--though I'd also note that in the same chapter I quoted from, he shows equal contempt for the walking sticks and shiny top hats favored by the male practitioners of pecuniary display.
As to why I quoted from "tired Veblen," my cue came not from my own fusty antiquarian noggin, but rather from Hass's own text, which counterposed the declasse "conspicuous consumption" of the Russian and Middle Eastern New Money set to the seemingly more refined taste preferences of the baronesses of the Old World monied elite. In that context, the testimony of Veblen, who coined the term "conspicuous consumption" struck me as entirely relevant. It was not an effort to separate claims of art from those of economics, but rather a way to exhume a well-worn bit of phraseology in its original context, and to point up its continued relevance, despite what seemed to me to be a very clumsy misappropriation to the present-day couture scene.
A propos of that scene, I don't think I hold it in gleeful contempt so much as I'm just inclined to question the special privileges claimed by soi-disant taste makers. It's fine if you choose to say that skepticism means I don't know what I'm talking about--it's certainly true that I don't subscribe to the notion that the rarefied clothing of the human form is a virtual mystery religion, whose true meaning is circumscribed to its closed circle of gnostic initiates. But it's also true that the sort of invidious distinction (to borrow a term from Thorstein V. again) urged upon us in Hass's dispatch is offensive--if you read through her 9,000 word agon, it reduces to the claim that Russian and Middle Eastern couture clients are vulgar and recherche. I think it's far more interesting to ask why this weird orientalist world view still seems to dominate the world of couture taste-arbitration than to assert that the social thought of the 19th century is irrelevant just because it happened so long ago. You ask what I have against the citadels of contemporary high fashion, but I might just as well question what you have against the idea of the past. All you've suggested as an objection to quoting Veblen is that he's been dead a very long time. Unless I'm missing something, that has nothing to do with the actual argument quoted.
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On Russians, Arabs Too Filthy, Ethnic For Dying Couture Industry
Well, since you asked, they're Luckies, which purport to be made in the USA. Though they're also thrifted, which gives me a comfortable arm's-length (or in this case, leg's-length) remove from objectionable labor contracting.
As to your larger point, I fail to see how the existence of a global media culture mitigates the dynamic Veblen described in the benighted 19th century. If anything, it seems like said media culture accelerates the process, both by bringing in the non-Western New Money philistines that the Hasses of the world make such a show of decrying, and by mimicking the aristocratic excess of the first Gilded Age without, so far as I can see, the faintest whiff of deliberate irony or self-awareness. But that's just me. I don't know what I like, but in this case, it sure isn't art.
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On David Brooks and the Myth of the New Fair Society
Oh, and duh--the main point I meant to raise above is that we should be paying less fulsome attention to the ways our elites are more demographically diverse and diffuse in their folkways than the fact that they have _gotten much richer_ as the rest of us have floundered. And maybe the way to redress that problem would be to entertain heretical ideas like raising marginal tax rates. You do that, and honestly I'll care even less about what civic clubs they belong to, or their favorite modes of assortative mating. (I'll still make fun of them though, because that's my job)
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On Television Commercial Plays Havoc With Meaning Of Common Expression
Bravo, sir. And because I have an unfortunate propensity to obsess over such things, I have to point out that another ad in this series hinges on the rhetorical question "Does a woodchuck chuck wood?" after which we see a painfully unfunny clip of a hick farmer yelling at the rodents, who are indeed gaily chucking his wood* into a nearby body of water. But of course the expression comes from the nonsense riddle "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" Apart from the homonyms and the assonant rhymes, the whole point of the query is that woodchucks CANNOT FUCKING CHUCK WOOD! That is WHAT THE CONDITIONAL VOICE SIGNIFIES, ILLITERATE GEICO AD HACKS!
Thank you. I feel much better now.
*This phrase is not, in fact, intended as a sexual euphemism