Take My Rug – Please

August 31, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Two couples at dinner. The check comes.
“We’ll get it,” says one man.
“OK, thanks,” says the other.

Of course, that’s not what happens. The other person is supposed to protest, to make the same offer to pick up the whole tab. Then comes the negotiation.

I’m not concerned here with how these things get resolved or the basis of the moves and countermoves. My point is just that we’re not supposed to take that first offer at face value. It might be sincere, or it might not. That’s what’s to be discovered in the subsequent negotiation.

When it comes to this generosity gambit, Iranian culture is way ahead of us. In Farsi, it’s known as tarof. I first heard about it on a 2011 episode of “This American Life.” An Iranian-American woman, Nazanin Rafsanjani, explains.

It’s basically this social custom of never saying what you want and offering things to people that you may or may not really want to give them. . . An uncomfortable thing that would often happen to me growing up is that I’d have all these American friends coming over to our house, and it always makes me slightly uncomfortable when someone’s at my parents’ house and they compliment my parents on something. Because the custom is, if you go to my parents’ house and you say, like, “That’s a beautiful painting on the wall,” they’ll offer it to you. They’ll just be like, “Take it. It’s yours. It’s not good here anyway. It would look better in your house. Take it. It’s not worth anything to us. It’s much more important that you have it.”

Which brings me to the “Modern Love” column in the Styles section of the New York Times Sundays ago. It’s by Sharon Harrigan, presumably not Iranian. She begins:

The nicest thing I own is the first thing you see when you walk into my house: a red handmade rug bought in Tehran, haggled over in Farsi and delivered, in person, to the Brooklyn apartment of the man who would become my husband. Back then, James told me the woman who gave him the rug, a woman he had recently dated, was by then “just a friend.”

I’ll skip the friends-become-lovers-become-married story (you can read it here) and jump cut to the next appearance of the rug, later in the narrative but earlier in chronology, when the author first sees it.

Weeks later, he buzzed me up to his apartment. The door opened to reveal the most beautiful rug I had ever seen, so finely woven it was more like a tapestry. The kind of precious object that could be ruined by a few stray Cheerios crumbs. “It’s a gift from a friend,” he said. “She bought it when she visited her family in Iran.” “She’s trying to get you back,” I said. “What? She’s just being kind. Don’t you love it?”

It’s possible that she’s right – that the old girlfriend is trying to get him back. It’s possible that he’s right – that the old girfriend was just being kind. But – and I’m just guessing here, and I could be very mistaken – it’s also possible that the Iranian girlfriend, the one who haggled over the rug in Farsi, was tarof-ing her ex.  And he, not knowing any better, accepted the offer.

In the “This American Life” episode, the American producer does ask Nazanin Rafsanjani what happens if someone does just accept the offer. Rafsanjani answers: “I don't know. I mean, that just never happens.” But she means that it never happens between Iranians. They know how the game is played. But if the other person is a tarof-ignorant American, maybe an Iranian woman winds up losing her beautiful rug.*

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* In the episode, which you should really listen to (here) or read the transcript of (here), Rafsanjani describes how tarof happens even in retail sales. The storekeeper offers the merchandise for free.  “Take it” etc. The customer of course refuses and insists to know how much it costs. At some point in this negotiation, the storekeeper names a price. Now the sides switch, for the storekeeper, who had been saying that the goods were nearly worthless and that the customer should take them, asks a price which is invariably far more than the goods are worth, and the customer must haggle the price down.

Trickle-down Culture – As American As Pad Thai

August 26, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Resentment against cultural elitists holds a prominent place in the populist energy driving Trump supporters. Mainstream conservatives have been playing this card since way back in the game with playground taunts like “brie-eating, chardonnay-drinking liberals.” In fact, this animus against elite culture may be what divides the pro-Trump and never-Trump conservatives, at least those who babble publicly in the media. Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity imagine themselves to be one with what another Trump supporter, Sarah Palin, called “the Real America” united against the cultural snobs.

But as Paul Krugman (here) points out, we’re all cultural elitists now. Or rather, what was once elite culture has gone mainstream.

But most of all, this kind of punditry, while ostensibly praising the Real America, is in fact marked by deep condescension. One pats the simple folk on the head, praising their lack of exposure to quinoa or Thai food — both of which can be found in food courts all across the country. Sorry, but there are no country bumpkins in modern America.

Even as recently as the early 2000s, part of the liberal stereotype mocked by conservatives was “latte-sipping.” Now NASCAR dads might well have a chai latte or venti in the cup holder of their pick-up. That didn’t just happen. Starbucks spent a lot of money opening outlets and spreading the word.

The same is true of Thai food. Americans didn’t wake up one morning with a cravings for pad thai and green curry. Matt Yglesias links to an article in The Economist.

In a plan ambitiously called Global Thai, the government aims to boost the number to 8,000 by 2003. This, it is argued, will not only introduce deliciously spicy Thai food to thousands of new tummies and persuade more people to visit Thailand, but it could subtly help to deepen relations with other countries. In the United States at least, . . .  the number of Thai restaurants has grown from 500 in 1990 to more than 2,000 now [i.e., 2002]  . . .  More modestly, the Thai government aims to make it easier for foreign restaurants to import Thai foods, to help them to hire Thai cooks and sometimes to benefit from soft loans. It has been much encouraged that Tommy Tang, a Thai chef working in the United States, has said that he plans to open 200-300 Thai restaurants there during the next five years

Sometimes popular tastes change seemingly without anyone with a vested interest pushing things along, as when names like Barbara and Ashley go out of fashion, and Olivia and Ava become all the rage. In other areas, an entire industry – clothing for example – depends on its ability to convince people to follow the latest fashion. With food, there’s a complicated interaction between person-to-person influence within the population and a strong push from the outside by players who have a stake in the outcome. I don’t know about quinoa, but thanks in part to the efforts of the government of Thailand, Thai food may be on its way to becoming as American as pizza.*

*As a food becomes more popular, restaurateurs in the US who want more customers will find ways to make it more palatable to Americans, probably by toning down the spices and ramping up the sweetness. That’s the cue for elitists to look down on The Olive Garden and other “inauthentic” foods. (Pad Thai is to thai cuisine roughly what chop suey is to Chinese.) The politically correct will decry the cultural appropriation in Hawaiian pizza or a college food court version of banh mi. I know: cultural propriation, bad; Asian fusion, good. But sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Lenny and Me

August 25, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston
(No sociology, just –  to borrow Chris Uggen’s term –  self-indulgery.)

Leonard Bernstein was born on this day in 1918.

Earlier this summer, I was walking around Tanglewood on a weekday. The Koussevitsky music shed - the open-air concert venue – was deserted, so I walked up onto the stage and stood on the conductor’s podium where decades earlier I had seen Bernstein stand and conduct. (I’ll spare you the photo. I was not wearing my tux.) But that was not the first time our paths – Lenny and mine – had crossed.

In the early 1950s, Bernstein was a visiting professor at Brandeis. No doubt he felt at home in a department that was eager to go beyond the bounds of what traditional music departments did.

Some years later, when I was a sophomore at Brandeis, I had a campus job in the music building. A few days a week, at 5 p.m., I would play records (this was long before Spotify, long before CDs) for the students in the Opera course. I mean, I would play the records if any students came to the classroom in the music building, which they rarely did. I think a couple may have come when the topic was Don Giovanni; that’s the only reason I can think of that I have some familiarity with “Madamina.” We never got beyond Act I.

The classroom had a piano at the front for the instructor to use – a Baldwin baby grand – and sometoimes I would sit there and do my inept version of playing piano. I’d never had a lesson, and I played a sort of jazz by ear. (I recall that Horace Silver’s “St. Vitus Dance” was one of the tunes I was trying at the time.) One day late in the semester, I noticed a small metal plate, about 2" x 3" attached at the right edge of the piano above the keyboard. I read it. It said something like, “This is the piano that Leonard Bernstein learned to play on as a child, and is donated by his parents. . . .” I played that piano more frequently for the rest of the semester.

Here’s the Bill Evans solo version of “Lucky to Be Me,” from “On the Town” (1944 – i.e., when Lenny was 26). Evans takes some liberties – modulating the last eight bars to A♭instead of F the first time through. But Bernstein’s own chord changes on the bridge are incredible as is the melody – very chromatic and hence not easy for singers.

Soundtrack of the Zeitgeist

August 22, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

Yesterday’s post was skeptical about a link between pop culture and the Zeitgeist. I questioned whether the a change in the content of fiction or film or other products of the imagination reflected important social change. Still, when done well, Zeitgeist explanations often sound plausible.

Chris Molanphy knows a lot about popular music. He has  a feature at Slate called “Why Is This Song No. 1?” where he would give a super-hit of the day a full physical exam. The performer, the producer, the studio, the way the song evolved musically, the market, the audience, the distribution – all the elements internal to the music business and the creation of songs come under his stethescope. (See his take on “Love Yourself” or Drake (“One Dance” and “Hotline Bling”) or any of his other pieces here)

Molanphy also appears in a regular segment on The Gist, where he and host Mike Pesca turn back the pop-music calendar to a single year. Historical hindsight allows them to align the hits with forces outside of the music itself – politics, the economy, the general spirit of the time. When you’re looking backwards, the temptation to go full-out Zeitgeist is irresistible.

Here they are discussing 1999.

PESCA: What’s the case for its importance, what’s the case for its artistic value, what’s the case for 1999? MOLANPHY: The case for 1999 is that this is American-led pop at its absolute apex. This is the height of the Clinton era writ large in pop music. It’s empire America at its peak, very candy colored, very Total Request Live, very Britney Spears “Baby One More Time” even. . . and surprisingly a lot of artists who were hits in this TRL era of pop have proved quite enduring. Britney Spears . . . Back Street Boys . . . Christina Aguilera . . . Nsync. If the first half of the nineties was all about rather grim-faced music – it was about grunge, it was about gangsta rap – this is the candy colored half of the 1990s. PESCA: This is the Clinton expanded economy, the Internet, this is the years of peace and prosperity, this is the pre-9/11, pre-wakeup-call, good time. MOLANPHY: If you watch that year’s VMAs. . .  All of the artists that you see on this list of number ones are there. Britney Spears is there, Christina Aguilera is there, the Back Street Boys are there, and all the Latin Pop stars. Ricky Martin is there. . . You see a culture that feels like the good times are going to last forever. The dot-com era is at its height, Clinton’s in the White House, unemployment’s at five percent, everybody’s got money to burn, and the good times are here again. We know what happened two years later, but we know that 1999 is a very neon colored bright and shiny year, and for that I have an odd sort of nostalgia. [Emphasis added. Listen to the entire episode here].

Pesca even implies that the “good time” Zeitgeist of 1999 somehow knows what will happen two years later when it will give way to a bad times mood descending upon the country. “This is the pre-9/11, pre-wakeup-call, good time.” To paraphrase Yogi Berra, prediction is easy, especially about the past.”

Sometimes the producers of pop culture do try to come up with songs or movies or TV shows that align with the Zeitgeist as they perceive it. Usually, that means copying the most recent big success.  So we get a wave of superhero movies or doctor TV shows. (There are probably equivalents in music; I just don’t know them.) Sometimes it works; often it flops. As the screenwriter William Goldman famously said, “Nobody knows anything.” Including culture analysts who write about the Zeitgeist.