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| March 2005 »
We all had a couple of days here to recover from ferocious jet lag. T and I rented bikes and after lunch with my friend Darcy we rode along the Pacific coast up past the cliff house to the Presidio. It was one of those gorgeous SF days when I had to keep reminding myself this was in the middle of a city.
One afternoon I caught 3 art shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — one consisted of photos of pretty severely mentally and physically impaired adults — all had been given art therapy by a common teacher — and there were examples of some of their work. The glyphs of a man named Dwight, now passed away, I had seen before — they're powerful, as were some bound objects by a woman who was pictured burying her face in one of her constructions. Her pieces consisted of ordinary objects, more or less appliance size, bound tightly with multicolored yarn, bits of cloth and anything else that seemed to be available — they resulted in powerful talismanic objects, at least that's how they appeared to me... and judging by her photo she wants to merge with them — she was pictured hugging one, her face half submerged in the loops and layers of yarn.
To be honest, the photos of the artists were pretty intense. As much as I love and am inspired by some of this impassioned desperate work I maybe find it easier to feel the humanity of these folks by looking at their works rather than at their person. Obviously their therapist is beyond this stage. But for the person not accustomed to looking at these folks it's disturbing at first glance. That's not very PC, but it's the truth.
A second show was of large labor-intensive contemporary works, some of which were great. One was a wall of fans in a room that you activated by sitting down and breathing into a miniature version of the same thing on a desktop. It was as if your breath was being amplified, made more powerful and louder. A third show was lots of 18th and 19th century posters and handouts from the collection of Ricky Jay, the magician. There were flyers for mesmerists, automatic writing machines, the pig faced woman, and in one instance, an elephant — the first one to tour North America. The typography was amazing.
Barnum ("there’s a sucker born every minute") was represented by a small poster for a man he claimed was 161 years old. It turned out to be a fake, and Jay claimed that the European image of Americans and America were partly formed by this showman who was less show and more con man. Maybe not much has changed in that respect.
We did 3 nights at the Fillmore. It was a way to balance the budget (The Australia/NZ part didn't quite break even), break up the jet lag and it's loads of fun, it's such a great place. I had already invited the Extra-Action Marching Band to join us — and to join us more extensively than they did 2 years previously — Tony Fino did an arrangement for "Burning Down The House" and it was sent ahead of our arrival for them to look at.
As before, they entered the room after our set — how could we possibly follow them? — they entered from the back doors, wading into the audience and eventually making their way to the stage where we re-emerged to join up with them. Some of their cheerleaders (male and female) were pretty close to naked... which added another layer of headiness to the incredible grooves they were playing. (I think some of the rhythms and riffs must be Balkan, there are some odd time signatures going on.)
(Click here to link to an audience member's video posting of the Fillmore show.)
After our last show (our last for a LONG time) we went to the rehearsal/living space in Bernal Heights neighborhood where the Extra-Action folks and their pals were having a party with live music — one set was a guy playing cello through electronics accompanying a young woman who managed to smile almost all the time as she sang. Tracy said they teach you that in chorus class, but I think she was just genuinely enjoying herself. She said hi afterwards and she was still grinning. And...there was a genuine San Francisco light show — 2 movies projected onto the same screen — and on another wall oil and water made old school light show blobby shapes. The Extra Action band did a short set — how they had the energy after playing earlier and it was after 2AM at this point I don't know — though their music and show seem to generate energy rather than suck it up.
Once again, as happened 2 years ago, with this bunch I have the feeling of entering a chaotic and somewhat sexy utopia. People are wearing all sorts of outfits — Victorian hats and mustaches on some of the men, wigs on some of the women, and some folks wear not much at all. Haircuts are all over the place. I myself am in a baby blue western jacket and golf shoes. The music is varied and made with and generates sheer joy — that singer wasn't the only one smiling.
Why do scenes like this develop here? One of the players has some connection with Survival Research Labs, which is maybe another slightly more dangerous variation on this impulse. Maybe there's something in the weather, in the water, the light, the unstable land?
What is it about certain cities and places that fosters specific attitudes? Am I imagining this? Do people who move to L.A. from elsewhere lose a lot of that elsewhere and eventually end up making L.A.-type work? Does creative attitude seep in through peer pressure and causal conversations? Or is it in the water, the light, the weather? Is there a Detroit sensibility? Memphis? New Orleans? (no doubt) Austin? (certainly) Nashville? London? Berlin? Düsseldorf? Vienna? (yes) Paris? Osaka? Melbourne? Bahia? (absolutely)
Does New York foster a hard-as-nails no-nonsense attitude? Not exclusively, but maybe a little bit. Here creativity is a career, a serious business, something that can be achieved only by absolute focus — and sometimes by what seems like paradoxical means — silliness, sloppiness and studied anti-seriousness can all be serious pursuits.
Is it in the layers of historical happenstance that make up a city? The politics and local laws? The socio-ethnic mix? The evanescent weight of fame and glamor that weighs upon all of L.A. mixed with the influence of the Latin and Asian populations that are fenced off from that zone — that and the hazy light on skin might make certain kinds of work more appropriate. Yes? No? Maybe?
Maybe in some cases, but not all, this is a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own aura. But I think every myth at least stems from a kernel of truth... which might be as slight as the need for that myth to exist. The myth of urban character and sensibility exists because we want it to exist — in order to lend meaning and order to a sometimes senseless world.
George W. Bush is in the news preaching democracy to the Russians. From a grade school civics kind of mindset this might seem to have some basis in reality, but in fact it is pure arrogance coming from a man who was not even elected, has established a string of illegal penal colonies around the world, illegally invaded a sovereign nation and rejiggers zoning lines to disenfranchise half the population. The recent revelation that more and more "journalists" and white house press conference "reporters" are actually Republican plants — and are not even reporters at all, is an old Soviet trick. The pot calling the kettle black, as they used to say. That doesn’t mean it isn't in fact black, but... (and isn’t this a sort of racist aphorism?)
The last Australian show was at a rock festival in Perth. In the afternoon, after a morning sound check, I got my surfer wish and Kristin, Ames, Jennifer, Graham, Mauro, Paul and I went to Scarborough beach just outside the city. The guys were hooked on trying to get it right, as if guys won't. I managed to eventually catch quite few waves, but never got up above a kneeling position. But I was thrilled, as it was my first time and the water was perfect, brisk and blue and clear, and no sharks either. Mauro, however, ruled — almost immediately he managed to stand up and soon he was catching wave after wave even though a lot of them were deemed too small for any of the other local surfers to bother with — but Mauro managed to wangle a decent if short ride out of these.
Later, at the festival backstage we met Ray Manzerak of The Doors who is touring with Ian Astbury "doing" Jim Morrison. He recently moved to Napa valley and says he is growing fresh gourmet vegetables. He’s holding a Budweiser, so one of our group goes and fetches him a decent local beer.
I don't really like doing outdoor festivals much. Except the Italian ones that are spread out over a week and which allot an evening to each act. I feel like the audience is primarily there to party, to dance, drink, whatever... and the music is simultaneously the focus and the background. That's all O.K., but some artists are better at providing that than others. Most festival audiences naturally therefore have short attention spans — it’s a natural result of being outdoors, daylight, etc — so our normal show, which "takes you on a journey" as the cliché goes, has to be edited in this context, and the unexpected detours on that journey — often the stuff that makes it really interesting and in my opinion special — have to be curtailed and we just hit the high points. It's the Classic Comics version of our show.
These festivals have evolved into money-makers for the local promoters — staging one big gig or a weekend festival is way easier than doing a string of dates for each act in town — and the acts get paid well, so they show up. The booking agents use them as cash points between less well-paying gigs.
As we're playing I wonder to myself how these things got started. Maybe they began innocently enough with festivals like the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals and semi-spontaneous celebrations in the parks and town squares of various cities. These then moved to stadiums and became more formalized. Occasionally some transcend the efforts to make them a big machine — the early Lollapaloozas, the New Orleans Jazz Festival.
Festivals are also used in the old argument given to bands:"it will expose you to a new audience." Which is true, but so would a lot of things that don't necessarily help one's career. My counter argument is that if the audience isn’t paying attention and you've edited your show then it doesn't really aid your career or attract new fans.
Again, this isn't always true — as much of a mud fest as they can be, I remember playing Bumbershoot (Seattle) and Bonnaroo (Tennessee) and weeks afterwards in other cities folks would come up and say how much they enjoyed those sets.
Blondie is on after us — their set is perfectly tailored for this event — they play hit after hit (at least they're all memorable songs to me) and they play them without pause, as if a DJ were doing a Blondie set.
Australian expressions: Hooley freaking dooley
Scrouch
Footie
Besides vegemite there is Spearmint-flavoured milk!:
After we do the three Fillmore shows this is more or less the end of this tour cycle. There will be a week of dates in North America in the summer, but those are an afterward. My feeling at the moment is that this tour was in a way a continuation and refining of the last one. An amplification of what that one was hinting at. These shows use the strings more fully and the music ranges more widely. I think overall it went over well — actually I know it did — and in some areas it made money. (This last leg is break-even at best.)
I suspect I'll want to radically change things after this. Two tours and records over 4+ years with more or less the same format might be enough. I can return to this format, but I suspect in the upcoming months I'll want to challenge myself with something that I will feel more intrigued and less confident about.
Kristin arranged that a primo surf photographer give some of our group surfing lessons on Manley beach. I couldn't go, I had interviews and meetings, but was jealous of those who did, as I've never been surfing in my life.
I did catch Bill Henson's retrospective at the Museum of NSW, across the park. I liked the photo collages in one room that seemed to imply some sort of tribal urbanism — groups of naked youths among foliage with the lights of a city in the background. Most of the photos are dark and moody, as is the exhibition installation — the lights are low and I think the walls are dark too, which made for a nice semi-creepy mysterioso vibe. I almost feel that the lighting and atmosphere are as important as the actual pictures... which is not a criticism.
Wildlife:
In the park as I walked back I saw the hundreds of massive bats that cling to the branches of the park's trees. Occasionally one would flex its massive wings. They swarm over the park at sunset, dispersing over the city.
Near the little park ponds were ibises — weird birds with long black beaks:
In Brisbane there was recently a "wet" — a period of rain — which resulted in an infestation of jellyfish and echidnas — a marsupial (well, related to the duckbilled platypus) that has spikes like a hedgehog.
The local dogs are also reportedly getting addicted to licking cane toads, the skins of which are poisonous, but a little taste gets a dog high. Some unfortunate dogs overdo it and end up in violent spasms, but most learn to regulate their toad poison — after a dose wears off they return for more.
We arrived in Sydney and I went for a run around the opera house and the Domain, the adjoining park. It's hot out, and I paused on my run to have a drink and some oysters with Leigh, Tracy, Paul and George at the opera house café, so it was more of an effort than usual.
In the evening we went to see Rufus' club show at a place called The Basement. He was here in Australia to do a Leonard Cohen tribute and also some dates with his "family", but this was his own show. It was packed. The audience was pretty much 50/50 straight and gay, which sort of surprised me, as Sydney's a pretty gay town and I expected the locals to represent for Rufus. The gay/straight mixture was refreshing — proof that his songs are personal, yet also universal.
Afterwards, Kristin introduced me to the singer (Pelle) from the Hives who was hanging at the bar. They'd played the Big Day Out festival here and he and his girlfriend went on a wine tasting tour along the Margaret River in Western Australia. He was dressed in what looked like a sort of sailor's outfit. I mentioned we'd gone on a hike in New Zealand. I was mildly surprised that someone who appears as a wild young rocker in their videos would choose a wine tasting holiday, but maybe Scandanavians develop sophisticated tastes early. And the wines here are awfully good.
Our shows were at the Enmore, a traditional theater just outside the center of town. The shows went well. A Melbourne band, Architecture In Helsinki, opened. I'd heard their EPs in NY and liked them — so I requested they open the Australian dates. They seemed an eccentric collective, and they were. Clarinet, xylophone, drums, bass, keyboards, sax and trombone, a young woman on tuba... maybe more... I think there were 11 of them. At times they seemed like a school project, often switching instruments and moving from place to place on stage. That might seem a criticism but they had pretty catchy tunes imbedded in all that business.
Long day yesterday. Flew from Adelaide after a show... arrived in Melbourne and immediately went to the Arts Center to catch the 2nd half of an afternoon concert by the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO) who had approached me some months earlier about a collaboration. This particular collaboration was not in the cards, as my spring schedule is too tight, but in the future, who knows?
So a bunch of the strings and I trooped over and were met by Jessica, an old friend and former Sydney Festival business manager, now working for the ACO.
In the 2nd half of their program there was a piece by the Estonian Tüür, suitably minimal, spiritual and modern all at once, I liked it. This was followed by Bach #5, which I didn’t care for, not being a Bach fan. (I just don’t "get" it — to me I hear someone jamming over chord changes with no particular end in sight — Jerry Garcia was much better at this back in the late 60s early 70s)
The end of the program was a Piazolla tribute by fellow Argentine Goligov which was full of fire. The strings must have liked this, as they are a tango band themselves.
The ACO is led be a young handsome man named Richard Tognetti, which I sensed made the concert slightly more alluring for some of the strings.
We rushed back to our soundcheck. It was a warm summer day and the streets of Melbourne were packed.
The show went fine, though the audience must have been enjoying their comfy seats, because they took longer than most to be up and dancing, but that's O.K.
Afterwards said hello to Kara, Michael, Beck and John Paul — all former NY residents who now have returned to live here. DJ Spooky was in town, too — for his Rebirth Of A Nation piece at the Sydney festival... so he was hanging out as well with some friends.
Jessica then led some of us to a bar café where we'd arranged to meet Richard and Bill Henson, the artist whose images will be part of a future ACO presentation. On the way in to the bar someone called out "David" — it was Rufus W, whom I guess was in town for his own show. I'd been trying, in vain it turned out, to convince him to join me on the Bizet aria in Sydney, as I knew he'd be back there the next day. But he'd already planned a camping trip (!) beginning that day.
As we sat down Spooky/Paul seemed to have friends in common with everyone at the table. He seemed right at home. Graham, Paul Frazier, George, Jennifer and Kris arrived too and sat at a nearby table — I suspect this may have been the only place open at this hour — 1 AM — really nice place, too. Wish there was a place like it in NYC.
Did a show in Auckland last night, our first after a sizable break. I was pretty nervous, even tough we rehearsed all afternoon. It went fine.
As I did in Australia 2 years ago I decided to get to NZ a few days before the tour started in order to do some sightseeing. Having read the guidebooks and talked to friends it was decided that in the time available a trip to the Wai-O-Tapu and Rotorua thermal area and then a drive down to Tongariro to do a hike (known as a tramp here) called the Tongariro Crossing — because it goes up one side of the mountain, skirts a crater or 2, then comes down the far side. You have to therefore arrange to be picked up on the far side, which we did. I sent out e-mails describing the trek to band & crew offering a class trip and there were a lot of takers — Jennifer (merch), George (stage), Kris (production), Tracy (violin), Ames (viola) and Graham (drums) all went for it. Leigh (violin) and Sara (cello) opted to return after the thermal area day in order to catch KD Lang’s show.
The strings arrived in Auckland after me. We went to Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World and Antarctic Encounter in the afternoon. It’s a relatively old aquarium that lies mostly under the Auckland coast highway — the part that is really surprising is the Antarctic Sno Cat ride. It's a cheesy version of a Disney theme park ride though an indoor snowy habitat with real penguins, preceded by a sort of simulated arctic "white out" experience in which the Sno Cat on rails pushes through some car wash flaps and then goes through a revolving white lumpy tunnel (suitably disorienting but nothing like white out)… the whole ride ends in a room where a plaster seal looms at the Sno Cat and a plaster Orca with a screaming seal in its mouth rises mechanically from a pond.
The next day when the others arrived we all drove out past Hobbiton (odd hillock lick mounds dot the sheep meadows) to Rotorua where the landscape is dotted with thermal vents and bubbling mud. Even the golf course is pockmarked with holes with steam coming out. What happens if your ball goes in there?
The entire area smells like sulfur — the town, the golf course, the motel, everywhere. Driving down the highways you look over at the side of the road and there’s steam coming out of the ground.
Of the many geothermal choices we opted for the Wai O Tapu thermal wonderland, which sounds awfully cheesy again by the name, but was actually a lovely hike around hot weird lime green lakes and bubbling mud pits. Everything in the park belongs to the devil — the devil’s ink pots, the devil’s paint box, the devil’s wastebasket. The devil has the coolest stuff.
We stay at a little motel with mineral tubs on the back porch of every room. We wake up to the smell of sulfur. We were warned not to bathe with jewelry, as it would tarnish, but it didn't matter, as the very air tarnished people's silver rings and bracelets.
The next day the hiking group drove south to Tongariro, a national park with a couple of dormant volcanoes, to do the tramp. It's supposed to get colder as one reaches elevation, so we bring jackets and sweaters. And rain ponchos.
The hike is supposed to take between 6–8 hours, depending on your speed and how many breaks you take. After the first hour or so of gentle ascent through a lava flow the climb steepens. All birdsong has ceased. There aren't even any flies or bugs around. The silence is something unusual, something we rarely hear, or don’t hear. It's a long slog up a lava ridge. We pass some Dutch backpackers with collapsible walking sticks and all the pro gear who seem to be stopping every hundred meters or so to rest and light up more Marlboro Reds.
When we finally gain the top of the ridge one path splits off to climb Mt N, which doubled as Mt Doom in LotR. We can't see it... it's shrouded in clouds this morning. In fact, this whole area doubled for Mordor. We're at cloud level now. As we walk on past or into the south crater it's like we're suddenly nowhere. All around us is a lunar landscape with cloud and fog eliminating all bearings or sense of direction. We're ecstatic.
It's wonderful. Everyone is excited, jabbering, energized. After crossing this plain on nothing we climb up another ridge until we reach the rim of the red crater. More sulfur smell and more steam coming out of the ground. The very earth is warm, almost hot, to the touch. The volcano is dormant, O.K., but looking into this red smoking abyss is still pretty freaky.
From here we slide down a ridge to another plain where there are brilliant azure lakes. Of course there's steam coming out of the ground everywhere.
From there we cross a truly otherworldly valley that takes us to the far ridge that will take us down the far side of the mountain.
Down is a long slog, and it has begun to rain. We pass waterfalls, more steamy goodness and we eventually descend into a lush ferny rainforest that leads to the pickup spot. It's been 6 ½ hours. We have a meal at the hotel and a hot soak and collapse in bed.
The next morning Jennifer suggests that we stop on the way back to Auckland at Raglan Beach which is not far out of our way. It's a surfer beach and its spectacular-tree covered volcanic mountains and cliffs surround a massive wide beach where a handful of surfers and swimmers are in the water. There are no commercial vendors except a kiosk renting boards and wetsuits... and the everpresent (in this area) lifesaving club. For that matter the whole of NZ seems relatively free of commercial intrusion into its landscape — there are almost no billboards on the highways — none except the occasional safe driving advisory (To: funeral, From: driving while tired) ...this, for someone used to the U.S. onslaught of signage, is incredible. The farms, fields and pastures pass by as the road twists and turns... it's relaxing, beautiful.
An article in the local paper even proclaims New Zealand as maybe the most tolerant and progressive country on Earth. A bit self-congratulatory, maybe, but they claim the standards of living for all, including the Maori, are improving. Education, medical, standard of living, all going up. Amazing. Especially when compared to other places with indigenous and/or immigrant populations — Australia and the U.S., for example — where the native people are mostly isolated, cut off, alienated and sad. NZ proves it doesn't have to be that way— the Maori are maybe not totally integrated, and maybe don't want to be, but they are everywhere — in shops, businesses and services — at least so much more than in the U.S. or Australia.
I pick up a book by an early 20th century Anglo artist and Maori portraitist named Goldie (yup, his name is Goldie?) They are formal portraits of elders, heroes and chieftains… done in a super realistic style, featuring extreme and beautiful details of the cloaks and facial tattoos. When I saw some at the Auckland art museum they had captions that gave short paragraph histories of the paintings’ subjects — why this chieftain was important, why this woman was regarded as a hero. Sadly, this information is not on the facing pages of the catalog I got, but maybe it’s hidden in the text somewhere.
Not surprisingly his work is controversial. Some Maori are honored that their ancestors should be commemorated in this way while others find the possible marketing of their people as exotica offensive. It's an unresolvable dilemma, at least at present — maybe someday when relations are not quite as out of whack these paintings can be seen in a clearer light.
In New Zealand dog food is marketed as large liverwurst like sausages in the cooler sections of the grocery shops.
The 12-hour flight is filled with what appear to be school groups... possibly Australians or Kiwis returning from (their) summer holidays in the U.S.
The stars out the window are amazing — they're all around... they go all the way to the horizon.
Upon arrival the Auckland airport seems reminiscent of Glasgow Airport, or maybe Manchester. The same British carpeting, same colour schemes, same doors, signage and airport seating. First impression is that NZ is or was under the influence of the U.K., while Australia has a strange frontier California feeling.
For a future project I've been reading biographies of Imelda Marcos. The Rise and Fall of... Steel Butterfly... and now The Untold Story. As a kind of theoretical counterpoint I've also begun William Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down (the abridged version) — his attempt to determine if violence is sometimes justified, and if so, when. I think there may be a connection between the two sets of books, we'll see.
Sat in with The Arcade Fire, the Montreal band, last night at Irving Plaza. The music biz was out to see both of their sold-out shows. In October they played Arlene's Grocery as part of CMJ convention and now they’ve sold out 2 shows — at Irving Plaza and Webster Hall. They're being courted by quite number of labels I imagine, lots of press clamoring for interviews and calls from friends they never knew they had. They did a cover of a Talking Heads song when I saw them at Bowery Ballroom ("Naïve Melody") ...we communicated by e-mail afterwards, so asking me to join on that tune was sort of natural. I loved it. Their crowd was lovely and energized as was the band and the room felt like it was filled with genuine music lovers — the word of mouth and internet buzz has all been fairly natural. Their label/distributor at the moment is Merge, a little label out of North Carolina — bandmembers from Superchunk run it — and they've done incredibly well.
So the question is, can the larger labels that are courting them do better? They can offer larger advances, facilitating larger recording budgets and providing some living expenses for a little while, but beyond that? I wonder. Yale (Luaka Bop) says larger labels have the financial muscle to pay for retail marketing. The CDs that are displayed prominently in stores — those positions at the tops and ends of shelves — are all paid for. Stores where the staff decides which records deserve visibility are few and far between. So this could mean more sales for them — but those sales then merely go to pay off that larger advance the band got — and the larger recording budget. Little of it actually ends up in the musicians' pockets unless things really break big. And most things don’t break all that big. So, I dunno. I dunno how many records they've actually sold through Merge... but unless it's pathetic then maybe they're doing alright right where they are. Hope they do well whatever they decide. I was passed an e-mail by someone at my own label, Nonesuch, who was told by Kris at the label Domino that apparently a video of me singing with them is already up on the web. As I crouched near the pay phones at the airport waiting for my delayed flight to board, a man came up and said he liked my music. This happens occasionally, and it's always wonderful to hear, but this was special This man mentioned that his youngest son, maybe 5 or 6 years old, has a debilitating disease that may eventually kill him. The father had recently been to a conference of other parents of children who suffer from this disease, and driving on at the end of day he was pretty wrung out emotionally. He said he put on Look Into the Eyeball and he smiled and laughed and it brought him out of it. Then he said he visited his elder son in a nearby town. The son is almost a grown man. This young man had burned a CD for his dad, and though the father said their musical tastes never really converged, there was one of my songs on the CD. I sensed that this meant they had found some little thing in common, important after what the Dad had just been through. He then gave me, to keep, a snapshot of the two boys, the elder one holding the younger. Jeez, I was just about in tears at this point. I thought, will he think to himself in a minute "what did I give him their picture for?" But he did it — on pure impulse. It's in my pocket. Value Added My daughter Malu asked me "Dad, why do the police go after the people on the street that sell knockoffs?" She was referring to the Vuiton and Gucci handbags and the Rolex watches, I suspect. Not the possibly fake Duracell batteries that are also everywhere. I suggested that the manufacturers of said objects see them not just as objects, but as fruits of their "creativity" however specious that might be in this case. The color of the bag, the design of the clasp, the shape of the strap and buckles and seams are all the result of vaguely creative decisions, and these people see the bags are embodiments of much personal creativity and research, and therefore a kind of intellectual property. The cheap copies, besides being possibly of inferior quality, well, the makers of these bags have more or less bypassed all that time and investment. Their ideas are not theirs... but they are using someone else's ideas. "O.K.," says Malu, "so what?" She suggests why not let people sell and buy the knockoffs if the name companies won't sell cheap versions themselves. Malu believes that anyone (i.e. her classmates) can tell the difference between the "real thing" and the knockoff. Therefore those who want that status can pay for it, if they want, and if they can afford to — the others can enjoy pretending. Or something. Are the people who buy knockoffs trying to fool anyone? She thinks not. (I have my doubts... but more on that later.) So, if the real thing and the knockoff are as easy to tell apart as she claims, then maybe she's right. Playing devil's advocate I try to personalize the situation. Let's see where this line of reasoning goes. I say what if you made something and someone else sold a cheaper, less well-made copy on the street. Well, maybe that's O.K., she reasons, as you can still get the good quality version in the shop next door. Yale (and Danielle) bring up another point. That the goods Malu is focusing on are all luxury goods, goods of a very specific type in which the value has been greatly added on by attaching nebulous qualities. To be more specific — the actual cost of making the designer bag, the Rolex watch or especially the name brand perfume is not all that much more than what the knockoff charges. But the branding that has been accumulated on the designer version by expensive advertising, carefully considered associations and the history and reputation of the brand allows the designer to multiply the "value" manyfold. Twenty times at least. Sometimes more. So, with luxury goods one is buying aura — a set of associations that the buyer hopes will generate a feeling of status, class and well being. The carefully assembled house of cards based on images of celebrities, beautiful people in glamorous places living the vida loca is something the buyer hopes will be magically imparted and transferred to him or her by simply carrying the bag or smelling a certain way. They’re not buying designer bags because they hold more, last longer or are more practical. Do people really believe that aura is transferred by a bag? Is it that simple? I don't think so. I think the ads, the perfume bottles and the very sound of the name — every little thing — all of it combined — contribute to pushing buttons that make us helpless. At base we're less rational that we like to think, both for the good and the ridiculous. Advertising and branding breaks free from the Enlightenment Cartesian mechanistic view of the universe. This then is what the police are doing when they harass the knockoff merchants. They are making a show that the system has some reasonable and justified basis — they are using law and threat of force to bolster a basically irrational system. The luxury goods market is like the art market. Stuff is only worth what someone will pay for it. Its value — whether it be a designer handbag or a Damien Hirst — has nothing to do with its utility, the labor that went into making it or how well it is made. So we can eliminate that argument right away. The knockoffs are not about quality. There's no reason to pay over $1,000 for a handbag because maybe it's that much better made — because though it might indeed be better made it's not $1,000 better made. According to Malu the $1,000 might gain you entry into the cool club, which is why we suspect people pay that much money. So, that means the folks she claims can easily be spotted with the knockoffs are left outside the velvet ropes. That's also why this situation can’t be moved over to apply to CDs, music and feature films. We don’t pay more to see a movie with Judy Davis in it than an exploitation movie because she’s a better actress. All movies cost more or less the same. There’s no status in owning the "real" Usher CD. Even if it has a little more artwork, it's just not enough of an incentive. Where is this going? I'm getting lost here. Anyway — the luxury goods arena is special case and it is beautiful in its nebulousness. It becomes a weird philosophical exercise, a conundrum, a labyrinth — thinking about stuff that has added value attached, that's worth a lot more — combined with the fact that you can't measure see or perceive in any way what makes that thing worth more. The aura comes from outside the object, it's not intrinsic.
It's as if I had two apples, not exactly the same, but pretty close to one another, and one had a brand name on it — and therefore I could charge about 3 times as much for it.
Flying over snow-capped peaks now. About another hour to LAX... maybe less, as I think the smog that flows from the L.A. basin eastward, cascading over ranges of hills and into valley after valley, is becoming visible.
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