A lot of people have commented on George Will’s recent commentary on Blue Jeans and the Fall of Western Society. Will was taking points from Daniel Akst’s Down With Denim. No reason I shouldn’t join in, too.

Akst and Will both try to make aesthetic, practical, and cultural points against jeans as the flashpoint of our culture’s inability to dress itself. The problem with this is that aesthetics are valid but subjective, they’re wrong on practicality, and the cultural significance of jeans is no longer what it once was and it doesn’t so much matter what it once was as it does what it presently is.

The real problem with jeans, from a culturally conservative perspective, is their ubiquity. Akst does a pretty good job of pointing this out, but Will mostly misses the boat on it because he just dislikes them so too much to bother coming up with good reasons why. The ubiquity is a problem, though, for the same reason that cultural history is not.

The main point of dressing in particular clothes is that they are signifiers. They tell us something about us and how we view an occasion. If we’re dressing in a suit and tie we are declaring that this is important and that we expect that. If we go to something where a suit and tie is significant, refusing to wear such, we are signaling a rebellion against the code. Or laziness or clueless. How we perceive these clothes clothes are the main cultural point. That jeans used to be an act of rebellion is somewhat irrelevant when it comes to their current application. Jeans currently signal comfort and casualness over formality.

We can expect a conservative like Will to be horrified as such mass displays of casualness. And I’m not unsympathetic. Whether this truly represents a cultural problem is a matter of what we think that culture should be. Those who would prefer a greater degree of formality understandably detest this trend. Similarly, I am discomforted by the increasing trend of girls and young women wearing what seem to be pajama bottoms out in public. Or people that wear sweats everywhere. On the other hand, if 40 years down the line (God help us) everybody is doing these things, the future arguments I have with my future daughter turn to mud.

But we’ve reached the point where jeans’ ubiquity don’t really represent anything at all. We have jeans that are so tight as to be uncomfortable and others that are made too large. Jeans make so little of a statement that you have to sub-signal. The kinds of jeans you make are the statement. Will admits as much when he talks about those jeans that come out 0f the factory looking like they have already been worn. Those are now what represent casualness. Jeans, ironically, now more represent conformity than anything else.

I say this as that guy that never wore jeans in school up until I forced myself in late junior high. For some of the same reasons that Akst gives. They are hot and uncomfortable in the long Delosian summers (spanning from April to October) where I was raised. They always seemed itchy. So when we were banned from wearing shorts to school, I wore slacks. At this point, I was being the rebel. Unfortunately, the kind of rebellion that you pay a social cost for. Will should approve of the fact that I paid a price for bucking convention.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come around on the jeans front as they pertain to me. In the cool weather up here, they provide a little extra warmth compared to most of the slacks and cargos I wear. Some of the discomfort I experienced when I was younger is gone now, probably due in part to “relaxed fit” jeans that fit my legs better. And I think I got used to the way that they rub against my legs. Now I see the upsides of jeans. They don’t significantly wrinkle. They’re flexible to go with whatever shirt you happen to have handy. Even if it weren’t the norm, it’s probably what I would wear when appropriate.

Of course, some of the things that I like about them are the things that people like Will and Akst don’t. The fact that they’re easy and don’t need to be ironed means that I don’t have to put much effort into it and are thus inferior. It’s the male equivalent to the female need to make dressing as complicated (and uncomfortable) as possible. It shows effort. And, of course, that they go well with anything could be turned around to say that they don’t really go with anything.

I’m sort of sympathetic to that last part. The problem with jeans is the ubiquity. Or at least how jeans symbolize the ubiquity of modern dress. In my perfect world, we would have one type of clothes to wear on our downtime, another to work, another to church, and so on. When I was a kid, I had to dress nicely for church. I objected strenuously. Ties have always been particularly uncomfortable around my big neck, who the heck wants to wear a jacket in the southern heat, and so on. By the time I was graduating from high school and when I would go to church afterward, this custom had relaxed and young people were coming to church in jeans and later {gasp} shorts. I welcomed the development at the time, but now I see what Mom was talking about.

Now we can wear the same clothes to work and church that we might want to wear on the weekend. I feel sort of robbed of the chance to dress like an adult. I don’t dress exactly as I did when I was younger (worse, back then I didn’t wear jeans!), I rarely wear t-shirts, for instance. But I usually dress within a comfortable range. I dress for work wearing the same sorts of things that the janitor wears and the auto guy wears. My employer wouldn’t fire me for wearing a suit-and-tie to work, but the symbols of my progression in life have become pretense. I share with Will and Akst a sense of loss in that.

That is where I do feel a sense of common cause with those scolds. Dressing up and dressing down may be arbitrary cultural dictates, but I do think that such things are important. There’s a reason we don’t dress in togas or African robes, after all. I think that targeting jeans is a big misguided, particularly on the grounds that they do.

On the other hand, if I really want differentiation-in-dress, I guess we do still see that. Most offices (my current withstanding) don’t yet allow employees to show up in shorts and flip-flops. The young girls wearing pajama pants are doing some differentiation of their own, however-much I disapprove and will forbid my future daughters from doing the same. Somehow, I doubt that Akst will approve of this any more than I do. So I guess in that sense I am trapped in the same sort of thinking that they are. A preference for a more classical look losing, day-by-day, in the face of modern culture.

My usual car has fallen a little ill recently. It doesn’t like the uphill climb in downtown Soundview on my drive home and falters a bit on the Interstate. So Clancy and I have decided to switch cars for a spell. As tragic as it is for my little green guy, I was actually looking forward to spending a little time driving Clancy’s nicer automobile. It’s almost certain that for most of our marriage she will be driving the nicer, bigger car. Mostly because I don’t care. But I figured it would be nice to drive the alpha car.

So it stands to reason that the first morning I go out to take over her car and open it, the hatch comes right off the car into my hand. So now I have to get in on the passenger’s side. I had to do this sort of thing on my old Escort because the driver’s side lock didn’t work. I managed to work out a way that I could kind of spin around into the driver’s side seat. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to do it in her car. I keep running into the gearshift. and my leg keeps kicking the faceplate off the radio.

This is not optimal.

Since my original post on the Watchmen movie, I’ve seen it three more times. Twice on a regular screen and once on an eye-popping IMAX. I haven’t re-watched a movie this much since Memento. I’m putting the bulk of this post below the fold since I know interest is waning. (more…)

Today, on my drive to work (or maybe my drive home), I will have finished the last of the Scott Turow Kindle County books and will have no more to read. It’s my habit to go back and forth between genres, but I’ve been listening to nothing but Turow for over a month now.

I’m taking a CD for John Grisham (The Client) and another Douglas Adams (Holistic Detective Agency) to carry on where Turow leaves off.

Any Turow fans out there have any recommendations?

Some of you may recall that I have very large feet. Size 15, to be exact. Very inconvenient. I also have particular foot-related needs that don’t serve me when when I need to shoe-shop. For instance, I like high-tops, which were very much the style back then that aren’t now. I like the support. I need comfortable shoes. that’s on account of having spent too much of my youth in shoes that didn’t fit because my parents were too thrifty to get me new ones. And I really, really don’t like dress shoes.

I’ve said before that I would prefer a workplace that required dressing nicely. The only problem with that is shoes. I’m addicted to steel toes and ankle support. That would, unfortunately, create problems when it came to dressing for an upscale work place. In order to close the gap on my one hesitation with dressing nicely — the hesitation that has me wearing Caterpillars to church on Sundays — I’ve decided once and for all to get a pair of dress shoes that are nice enough to get by and comfortable enough to wear.

One idea that came to mind are police shoes. Those guys have to spend a lot of their day on their feet and have to be able to run, so those shoes would have to be pretty practical, no? Besides, I was willing to bet that a number of cops probably had outsized feet as well.

As fortune would have it, I have an aunt that used to sell cop supplies. I always kept track of her career because it was assumed that when I graduated from college that I might move out there and work for her. The cop-supply thing was kind of funny because she was on the liberal side of my father’s family, which is populated with Democrats to begin with. She struck me as the activist sort if she hadn’t had children young. That she would sell supplies to those fascists in uniform, as I’d always imagined her imagining them, always struck me as a little funny. Then again, her husband struck me as a real Republican sort, so maybe she moderated her views. from what I understand, they sort of stumbled into it. First designing the website for an existing company and then, when the company sold, buying it.

Given her California (rather than Dixie) demeanor, it was always a bit of a surprise to see her sometimes wearing cop gear. A SWAT jacket or some police shirts or pants that had been returned and couldn’t be resold for one reason or another. Apparently, the pants that SWAT cops were are extraordinarily comfortable. She used to complain about how there was literally more paperwork involved to sell nightsticks than there was to sell guns. No joke. Guns could be sold to anyone that wasn’t on some sort of list but cop credentials had to be established before they could buy a night stick. I wondered if she would make these comments because they were amusing or because she wanted us to know that just because she sold guns does not mean that she approved of them.

So when I decided to see about getting some police shoes, I checked in with her. Turned out that they’d sold the business. No problem, I figured. I’m sure the current owners have shoes in my size. After all, big ole cops have big ole feet!

I forgot about our Napoleonic police forces in this country. Anybody else ever notice how cops often tend to be short? Obviously, at my height most people are at least somewhat short, but in a profession where you would expect people to be big, they aren’t. At least not as far as height goes. I read recently a discussion on a conservative blog about how most female cops shouldn’t be because almost all women are too short to be cops and what a travesty it is that police departments have done away with height requirements. It was a blog that I never comment on, so I didn’t respond the way I wanted to, which was to say “I bet more male than female police officers (in pure numeric terms) are below the old 5’10” requirement.

So her old website wasn’t able to help me. The good news was that it gave me a model number to look for. So when I’m ready to buy some good cop dress shoes, I’ve got a model in mind. Maybe I’ll get one of those sweet SWAT pants, too. And if I ever want to get a gun, I know where I can go.

But if I want a nightstick, I’m SOL. Those things are dangerous.

Hey Dad, if you’re reading this, shoot me an email.

A while back, Kirk made the comment that he wanted a license plate on his car that said “Expect Less” and that was generally his outlook on things. I told him that if I was going to put any bumper sticker on my car (other than the Episcopal Shield, Southern Tech University logo, and Please-don’t-give-me-a-ticket Highway Patrol support sticker) that would be it. I’m not really a bumper sticker sort of guy (except for the above), but I’d put that on there before I’d announce support for a particular political candidate or any other pithy saying.

There are two ways to take that statement, I guess. One empowering and one resigned. Kirk means it in the resigned way. I would mean it in both.

It seems that a lot of people out there expect too much from life. Which is to say that they expect life to give them too much. This isn’t some right-wing rant about people being no longer willing to work for a living, but that’s not what’s intended. I know more people in debt that hold down jobs than I do people that don’t. They’re sort of like that person that thinks that because they spent ten minutes puttering along on an exercise bike that they’ve earned that piece of triple-chocolate cake. Because they’ve worked hard, they deserve whatever it is they see in the window on their drive home. And one of my big pet peeves (and one of the reasons why complaints by young people about how tough they have it) is people that think that since they work for a living and their parents worked for a living that they should be able to afford – right off the bat – the same sort of lifestyle their parents had… ignoring that their parents worked 20-30 years to be able to afford.

This also applies to guys in search for a girlfriend. I pick on guys here not because it’s only men with expectations that are too lofty but because it’s generally men that are expected to do the heavy lifting of securing the date. A lot of the whole Nice Guy Wars boils down to the expectation that if a guy is nice and good that he should have women falling all over him. That’s an exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. Guys think that since they’ve earned the right to a girlfriend by doing the things that girls and movies and all say that they should do, that they deserve a particular girl. Such guys often have limited social circles and so they fixate on the one girl that they have access to. When that doesn’t work out (because a pairing between any two specific people usually doesn’t work), they get haughty over being unable to find anyone. Or they take periodic shots in the dark in online personals or random girls on the street. Those are not inclined to work out for a number of reasons, but the expectation with a profile or a response to a profile should magically turn into something enduring because you are nice and sincere is a faulty one.

More broadly, though, I think that people are often unhappy because they expect more. More than whatever it is that they have. Once they have something, they expect more. Despite my best efforts, I’m guilty of this. I go my entire life without something and then once I have it, I want more and more of it. I had no Pocket PCs a half-decade ago. Now between my Pocket PCs and smartphones I don’t even know what to do with them all. I have a ridiculous number of computers. I’m always looking towards building on what I have. That’s not a bad thing in moderation — and I suppose I may be a moderate — but the failure to build on that should never make someone really unhappy. Expecting less – expecting what you have rather than what you are working towards – can be just as valuable to a better life than the constant working for more.

This is all common sense stuff, really. Yet it’s really hard to keep the eye on the ball here. Capitalism is built on notions that run contrary to this. If everyone were suddenly happy with what they had and did not try to get more, our economy would fall apart just as surely as it has now because of so many people standing on a house of cards trying to get more than what they have without earning.

So forget what I said. Expect more.

Be wanting and unhappy.

Our economy depends on it!

-{No, this post is not a serious critique of capitalism. Nor is it an endorsement of any specific political ideology. I’m not sure it even has a point at all. A striking number of things that I say are generally pointless.}-

Circa 2003 (more…)

Stepping back into the “real world” for a moment, CNN carries a story about a tiny town that may be overstepping their authority when it comes to traffic stops.

The difference between “legal” and “right” comes up in the story as well:

“The police and local district attorney there say they’re operating within the law, and it appears as if they are,” said Howard Witt, the Tribune reporter who wrote the story. “Texas has an asset forfeiture law similar to many other states, and it basically allows police to seize assets [that] are used, or suspected in being used, in commission of a crime.”

The law as it currently exists does not mandate that a person be convicted of a crime or even charged with one before the police can seize the assets, Witt said. A bill was introduced Tuesday in the state Legislature to close that loophole, he said, because of the alleged goings-on in Tenaha.
…
In 1997 Louisiana lawmakers reformed that state’s asset forfeiture law after a report on NBC’s “Dateline” alleged that law enforcement officers in Calcasieu and Jefferson Davis parishes were stopping motorists without cause, particularly out-of-state drivers and minorities, along Interstate 10 and seizing their money and property from them, according to an article on the National Drug Strategy Network’s Web site.

The unfortunate thing about this kind of story is that if it turns out to be true, or even if it turns out to be false, it is going to raise even more the tendency of people to distrust the cops.

The other part of unfortunate reality is that, when stopped out-of-state or far from home, civilians are at an even greater disadvantage to the cops than normal. If you’re far from home, you don’t likely have such easy access to your bank. You don’t know how to reach any local lawyers, or which are the best for your needs. You’re not as likely to have family/friends nearby to come help you out. The local judge likely knows the cop quite well, danced at his wedding, his kids date the cop’s kids, etc… and knows nothing about you at all, save for the fact that His Buddy The Cop decided you had done something heinous enough to warrant (at least) a traffic stop and a ticket. The phrase “innocent until proven guilty” means little when the judge is the best friend – or even “a better friend than the random stranger who got stopped” – and is ruling on your case.

Thus there’s an extra onus on small-town cops, at least if they are considering the factor of making other traffic stops easier/safer across the country, to avoid doing things like this or even encouraging the appearance of same. Unfortunately, there’s also the opposite onus – to raise as much ticket revenue as possible. Thanks to the passing of bungled laws that allow ticket revenue to be metered, budgeted, and used for a given year, there’s every incentive for cops to try to raise as much as possible. An extra 5-10 motorists pulled over each month, even if they’re innocent, may be the difference between a new squad car or other new gear, or may even be funneled into other city services. One of the worst things I ever heard from Colosse’s “civil servants” was when the Colosse mayor excoriated the Colosse Police Department because “underperforming traffic ticket revenue” had caused Colosse to experience a budgetary shortfall. They swear up and down that quotas don’t exist, and maybe for individual cops there isn’t… but rest assured, for Colosse just as sure as for Pudunkistan, the police department as a whole now carries a “quota” of ticket revenue to avoid a city budgetary shortfall.

And the people, both those living in the city and those merely passing through, are 100% aware of this fact and less likely to trust the Badged Highwaymen because of it.

Southern comedian Jeff Foxworthy has been given a couple of sitcoms. Most of you know Foxworthy as the guy with the “You might be a redneck if…” jokes, but that’s only part of his routine and he’s a gifted comedian for people that consider people telling jokes that don’t revolve around curse words and sex “comedians”. A good portion of his jokes involve being from the south. So when they gave him a sitcom, they decided to place it in Indiana.

They didn’t want it to be too southern, you see. Jeff Foxworthy’s runaway population notwithstanding, the rest of the country couldn’t relate.

Do you reckon when they get a proposal about a handful of single people living in New York City, they say to themselves, “Can’t we put this show in Indianapolis? I’m not sure the rest of the country is could relate to a show about a bunch of people living in a New York City apartment, dealing with wacky roommates, extremely stereotypically Jewish parents, insults directed towards New Jersey, and jokes about the subway.”

I did a quick tally of television shows currently on the air. Shows that either aired this past week or that I otherwise watch. There were 34 in all. Of those 34, 25 take place on the east coast (excluding Miami), the west coast, or Chicago. Twenty-one of those shows take place in (or have their primary reference point as) New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, or DC. The locations of the shows that do not take place in one of those locations are: South Park (CO), Smallville (KS), Phoenix (AZ), Las Vegas (NV), Scranton (PA), Camden County (??), or Springfield (??). More than half of those places don’t exist.

There are some legitimate reasons as to why this would be the case.

For instance, if a show is filmed in Los Angeles it might as well take place there, right? Well, yes and no. There are certainly some cases where everything is obviously filmed in LA and it would be awkward to place it elsewhere. When they do place it elsewhere, it’s kind of awkward. Peter mentioned that Mayberry, ostensibly in North Carolina, looks very California-ish. Though they never placed Malcolm in the Middle, the landmarks strongly suggest California probably because it was filmed there. Camden County of My Name Is Earl would obviously be in the south or maybe midwest, but it’s awfully desert-y.

But there are limits to this explanation. For one thing, there’s no rule stating that these shows must be filmed in California. In fact, when FX first signed on for The Shield, a very LA program, they recommended that it be filmed in Vancouver or San Diego. Filming in California may be easiest, but it’s also very expensive. Having a show take place in Alabama or Texas but filmed in Louisiana (or Alabama or Texas, for that matter) would likely save them a ton of money. But there’s not much point in any network setting up shop in Louisiana because (with one exception) they don’t really want their shows to take place there.

A better explanation is that writers write what they know and they gravitate towards New York City or Los Angeles. The same sort of reason that there are a lot of songs about being a singer on the road and a lot of main characters have creative class careers. This is more of a sticking point. But you only need one or two natives of Tampa to write a show that takes place there. A lot of people in showbusiness in California are from someplace else. That’s one reason why the characters on these shows are often from someplace else (in How I Met Your Mother, you have characters from Ohio, Minnesota, and Canada)

Another lame explanation is that the cities are central to the shows. Like The Shield, which would have a hard time taking place elsewhere. The problem here is that a lot of shows don’t have much of any attachment to their city and in fact are out of place. Did San Fransisco figure even remotely in to Full House? Greg’s parents in Greg and Dharma are probably the only two Republicans living in the city of San Fransisco. And of course a large number of these shows live in apartments and houses that they could only afford in Birmingham and definitely could not afford where they live.

One of the more mixed explanations is the notion of targeted demographics. The notion that the young demographic is more valuable than older viewers. To be honest, I think that this is something that marketing departments convince themselves of more than anything. A justification for their own preferences. People that go into entertainment and marketing want more than anything to be hip and with it and I think are more interested than that than they are in selling their product. Even when there is no advertising, such as movies, studios released one anti-war flop after another and continue to have a bias towards Rated-R movies over Rated-G movies even though the latter typically do a lot better in theaters and have more ancillary sales such as toys and cheap straight-to-video follow-ups. I’m actually wondering if the credit card crunch might encourage advertisers to target consumers that actually have money over those whose credit cards are now being cut up.

But this thinking is part of the problem, too. Why are there so many shows that depend on the New York City lifestyle being made? Or that depend on Los Angeles? Every city has a story to tell. The Wire eloquently told a story in Baltimore that couldn’t take place in New York City or Los Angeles. There are a lot of cities out there that could have interesting stories to tell but never have those stories told. A show about Atlanta and the conflicts between its southern heritage and the desire to become a World Class City apart from its roots. Right now it seems the only way to get any of the networks to notice is a city-destroying hurricane.

But, they might ask, why would people outside Atlanta care about the tensions there? If the story isn’t well told, of course, nobody would. But the same questions are not asked about yet another LAPD or NYPD TV show. Or another hospital show that takes place in Chicago.

As a brief aside, Chicago is the exception to the coastal rule. Whether this is because Chicago is an honorary coastal city or because Chicago is what New Yorkers and Los Angelinos consider “middle America” I do not know, but Chicago has always been reasonably well-represented. Minnesota and Ohio are also represented somewhat… but only as places that characters arrived to NYC or LA from.

None of this is a new development. Shows have always skewed towards the coasts. There have always been exceptions, usually for some express reason. Dallas took place in Dallas for somewhat obvious reasons. Drew Carey’s Ohio roots made Cleveland a good fit. Of course, a lot of the shows that take place outside these areas do so in order to poke fun, condescend, or otherwise say “These people are weird.” Camden County is very anti-LA and while its portrayal is loving, it’s loving in the same way that parents love their mentally handicapped kid. There is a difference I can’t quite articulate between this and “Isn’t-NYC-rude” and “Isn’t-LA-vane” jokes in their respective cities.

Part of me looks at this and says “Well, then, it’s a good thing that we’re ignored. Any portrayal they throw our way would likely not be very flattering.”

This all came to mind because I’ve been watching old episodes of one of the few shows that actually does take place outside the coastal boundaries. It takes place in Colosse, actually. Very little effort appears to have been made to make it authentically Colossians. They have the parents driving in for a couple days from somewhere that you would never drive in from for a couple of days and a school district situation that differs from Colosse’s and Delosa’s structure, but oh well. A lot of it is typical for its genre and/or the regurgitation of stereotypes, but none of that matters to me. When they mention Colosse or Southern Tech University it does give me mildly more appreciation for what is objectively an unremarkable program.

I recognize that nobody outside Colosse can appreciate that except to the extent that their own hometown is showcased in a program. But I feel a kinship with any show that takes place in a big city that isn’t one of the big three or on the coast. A city where people are born or end up rather than make any sort of journey to. I always liked that Drew Carey’s show took place in Cleveland because as I watched I recognized it far more than those shows that take place in cities where lifestyles like mine are not affordable to people like me.

If I were in charge of programming for a struggling television network, one of the things I would strongly consider is placing shows in less common places and depicting life there in non-condescending ways. There’s a whole other country out there full of people that go to church, vote Republican and mean it, actually enjoy life in the suburbs, and have no desire to live in New York City or Los Angeles. If this sounds familiar, it’s because I’ve said it before.

It might be a risky experiment, but it’s been tried before. CBS was once known for pandering to rural audiences and people with rural affections (note: today’s would need to be aimed more at the suburban demographics). Despite respectable ratings, the shows were all unceremoniously dumped in 1970 and 1971 because they were hurting CBS’s image. They were attracting the wrong kind of audience.