I’m Howard Dinin. This is a new blog, though I’m not new to writing a blog. I’ve had blogs since 2004. I needed a new one.

This one will be more personal, more philosophical. Given my propensity to be wordy (the other blogs would run entries with as many as six or seven thousand words: essays in other words), this blog will have posts much more brief and focused.

I’ve given it the name 1 standard deviation because I hope it will be seen for what it is, a slightly askew, certainly personal view of the world, but not that far from what most people see when they look around. It’s the way we learn to make our way in the world. That is, by paying heed to hearing what others say when they account for what they see when they look at the very same things we do. Sometimes the real truth is in the differences.

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To some people one thing that emerged from the recent major product announcement by Apple that was of the utmost interest and importance was a new version of the operating system, OS X, now called Mavericks (after one of a whole series of challenging surfer beaches on the California coast). The mainstream press mainly concentrated on the reduction of the cost of this nominally major upgrade to zero. That is, Apple has said that anyone with an Apple device that can run it, can have it for free. This applies to machines produced as early as 2008, and still running, because of the vaunted Apple product quality and reliability.

The magazine “Ars Technica,” which is techier than “Fast Company,” and geekier than “Wired,” has traditionally had one of their senior editors, an especially intelligent, expressive and well-written character named John Siracusa give an intensive review of new operating systems from Apple as soon as possible after they are released to the public.

His reports of the past have been lengthy (as many as 20-30 printed pages, or, if you prefer, a PDF document of equal length, and always made available for a fee, around four or five dollars, to those enthusiasts who didn’t care to subscribe to “Ars Technica”—which most people, including their subscribers don’t realize is owned and published by Condé Nast, the vast consumer magazine empire whose fiefdoms include such venerable and honored marques as “The New Yorker” and “Vanity Fair”). Although decidedly of a much more technical focus, in many senses of the word technical, “Ars Technica” fits right in with the full array of Condé Nast publications, in its thoroughness of coverage, persistence in journalistic terms, and its relentlessness in the pursuit of perfection of the craft of special interest journalism.

There are many people who won’t, or wouldn’t, formulate a personal opinion on the value and importance of the latest release of Apple’s flagship operating system for Macintosh computers (as opposed to the operating system for their incredibly popular and commercially successful mobile devices, the iPhone and the iPad), not before getting a complete reading of what the comprehensive nit-picking and scrupulous examination of Siracusa’s hits the stands in the form of a review.

I sent the link, which appears way at the bottom of this blog entry, to two friends who have as avid interest as mine in the worthiness of this significant new step in the evolution of the most important software that runs on the computers each of us uses, one way or another, to occupy ourselves, at the very least, or even to produce productive work at a professional level because of our vocations.

I started in the email that contained the link to excoriate Siracusa, even as I was suggesting they might be entertained or even engaged by his remarks. As I wrote, and wrote, I very clearly veered from what had been a friendly post to similar minded comrades, dealing daily with the vagaries of IT products that touch our lives in a very deep way, and have done for a very long time in each instance. Two of us are older. One of us, as the grown son of one of us, is younger, but with more formal technical training, and more dependence for his living on how the machines work, that is, on how well or how poorly they work.

Here, edited and adapted for Per Diem, is what I wrote.

John Siracusa has been the chief bull goose looney of Mac OS X reviewers. He is thorough to a fault and candid. I think this is probably worth reading, or at least jumping around in from high point to high point. However, as he has become ambivalent, clearly, while trying valiantly to appear still to be objective, if not disinterested with a god-like quality, I think with this review, having read a series of them now over the last most recent years, he is coming dangerously close to jumping his own shark.

Pugnacity has entered in a rather sinister way, to the point at time of my feelings of repugnance. I don’t mind fair criticism, which is substantiated. I don’t even mind substantive personal crotchets about various features, which might have gone a different way because of obvious alternatives not chosen by the vendor. However I do mind gratuitous opinions that are offered ex cathedra. Now, according to him, to cite a very minor matter, the uncluttered, non-skeuomorphic, simplicity of the Mavericks Contacts app interface is “boring?” And not just boring, but the overall thrust of getting rid of the leather, on which fact he seems to be fixated, apparently because he can’t find a serious credible critical peg on which to hang his overall basically highly critical tone, is that it is ugly. When it is neither, but merely non-distracting.

I think maybe he has been doing this for too long. He has his own cadre of fanboys (see the “Promoted Comments” at the end) and he has to perform at this point, I mean be performative, rather than simply being an exhaustively thorough fair, if not tough, minded reviewer of what’s designated a major release. I think it is, and I am disappointed only, as he seems to be, that they didn’t do more to adopt more of Ivey’s new graphical interface esthetic for the new OS X. That will no doubt appear in the next release.

As an aside, and having read deeper into the very long review of Siracusa’s, I want to add this interlinear emendation. To be fair to John Siracusa, who I’m sure, even if he knew, could give less of a shit about what I think, he reverts to his usual stalwart, well-informed and articulate critical (in the good, classic Arnoldean sense) self when he gets deep under the hood of OS X Mavericks and begins analyzing the less visible technological changes and advancements he has detected. Not that this has anything to do with him, but some of the changes related to local networking and file sharing, like a new SMB protocol, are particularly welcome to me. I don’t want to, but I actually do have to have some rudimentary understanding of these technologies, because I actually use them. I’m happy to have had him point them out and review the changes so cogently.

For all that, Siracusa seems to have caught the same virus as the entirety of the blogosphere and the rest of the frauds and pretenders who work for mainstream media and have to pass for journalists who now perpetually bemoan the departure, in their eyes, of excitement, or, as it’s usually called, the “wow” factor in Apple product releases. Often this is expressed as a metaphor or, in larger terms, a manifestation of the lack of invigorating, inspiring developments in society from which people might derive not only some solace, but motivation and the renewed exercise of vigor in their daily activities. These people clearly have no notion of what true innovation is, and that virtually every vendor of every product ever introduced sincerely believes among other things, that what they have wrought is not merely functional one way or another, but is an innovation. Of course, what everyone, but the vendors, forgets is that no one, but no one, is in the innovation business. They are in the development and sales for profit business. And it’s only hindsight that allows us to see what was an innovation and what was not. And it is not innovation, of course, that Apple has ever touted, because they have not, except with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984, ever really introduced to market a true paradigm shift in how something fundamental to behavior or activity among a significant sample of the functioning population within a market is done.

What people are missing in their lives, apparently is excitement, or more specifically an absence of dreariness and an inescapable feeling of a lack of control over anything in their lives outside what they can comfortably put under the roof of their usual lodgings. Apple, or anybody, is not responsible for that state of affairs. I am long since sick and tired of seeing Apple (and President Obama, both of whom probably head what is a growing list) blamed for what people individually should first look to themselves to be accountable for. We have become a nation of whinging, thrill-seeking, know-nothings in a state of denial, and we want something material put in our hands that somehow will produce a simulacrum of orgasm and deep feelings of self-reliance and pleasure combined.

Here’s the “Ars Technica” John Siracusa review of Macintosh OS X Mavericks: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/

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Water and air, almost nothing and virtually nothing at all, can, with constant motion, wear away rock or reduce it to sand and silt. In an eon surely, but at times in minutes, perfectly natural forces can alter the land irreparably. With an outer crust as well that is perpetually unstable, shifting and tearing, the earth has been formed for constant change, even as Man moving about the surface beguiles himself with dreams of permanence.

Add the evidence of what happens when living beings become entrapped in sticky fluids oozing and pooling from resin, or merely from the ground, and you have the three simple lessons nature offers, since long before we appeared on the planet, to teach us the value of adaptability, and the inevitable futility of persistence in certain objectives. Nothing lasts, but memory. And we forget that too. We will never outdo nature. Yet even when we submit to this truth, we overlook the power of these phenomena as metaphor. We need no better morals than the fables natural acts teach us.

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If events of the past six years, or 25… 50… 100 or even 200 years have taught us anything it is that it doesn’t matter how well you have informed yourself as a nation. Or armed yourself. Or how rich you are. Even a very small band of individuals determined, or inspired, or desperate enough can bring you to your knees, sometimes by the simplest of means.

Sometimes one person, with enough grit and spontaneity, can stop a tank or release secrets that bring a government to a halt, if only to be exposed to the world for its excesses. Sometimes cunning and stealth are greater than superior strength or mass or numbers.

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I’ve just published a book of photos, called sitting, consisting of photographs in France and America and to be thought of as a meditation on the title subject. It’s a premium design: case bound with archival materials, salon quality paper and printing technology. For a limited time it’s available at the actual cost of on-demand production (each issue is printed to order), a significant discount over the retail price marked. It’s fully registered with the Library of Congress and carries an ISBN order anticipating its availability at retail.

There’s a healthy preview here, online: [For the best viewing, click on the view full-screen icon, just to the left of the “blurb” logo at the bottom of the viewer]

sitting by Howard Dinin | Make Your Own Book

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Have you done or said or thought anything that you’re not sure you’d be ashamed of? Presumably, the way to find out, or to rid yourself of the nagging bit of your conscious mind we used to call having a conscience, is to disburden yourself of said thought, or utterance, or an account of said action by posting it on Facebook… While you’re at it, make sure you have all your personal data up to date. Fill in all those blanks on your profile page. And make sure that you have set your privacy settings for all aspects of your life to “public.”

You’ll rid yourself of all those nasty second thoughts in a very brief amount of time. The more frequently you simply let it all hang out, the more quickly you’ll eliminate any doubt, of the reflexive sort first, and then you can graduate to that status we all aspire to. Absolute certitude. Don’t you want to be sure you’re right all the time, and know it so thoroughly in every cell of your flesh and bones, in every firing neuron that, in fact, you’ll never question it or yourself again?

Facebook, in short, is the great liberator. Or so is the proposition to be pondered, at least according to one two-bit philosopher, that is, blog-writer. Must be something to it, because this particular blog is accessible on the site of the venerable “The New Yorker.” Must be worth pondering, no? I mean these are the pages in which Rick Hertzberg and Adam Gopnik disburden themselves. This is where Louis Menand gets out his epistemological yayas. Three more articulate, not to mention intellectually estimable, spokespeople for the human condition I can’t think of.

Of course in the blog entry in question, the writer, one Andrea Denhoed, chooses to apostrophize, instead, another not so deep thinker, Mark Zuckerberg, the master haberdasher of the Emperor. I am left, however with the nagging question. Does Mark himself subscribe to the theory Ms. Denhoed so economically encapsulates on his behalf:

“Mark Zuckerberg, for all of his supposed ham-handed obliviousness to the way people think and feel, is attuned to the gap we straddle between performance and secrecy. His vision of a radically transparent society built on open information sharing (on Facebook) is based on the idea that we should all just acknowledge and embrace all the disparate ways we act online, effectively eliminating the distinction between private action and performance. The way to avoid doing anything you’re ashamed of, the argument goes, is not to be ashamed of anything you do. But achieving radical transparency would require more than an overhaul of our online habits; it would require an overhaul of the human character. A radically transparent world would have to be made up of individuals so luxuriously comfortable in their own skins that they would be unbearably annoying. Privacy protects us from surveillance and coercion, and offers the basic human need to be alone with ourselves.”

The rest of the blog post is here: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/a-fake-facebook-wedding.html

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Poor François Hollande. He should only be glad that Depardieu didn't choose to begin a run for President. Our political heroes (and leaders) are largely voted in on the strength of their apparent personalities and popularity (notice I said "apparent"). For all we know, Hollande may be a completely decent, boring fellow, who has a problem with women, but is otherwise harmless and well-intentioned–not correct necessarily; economists who are very much smarter than we are about, well, economics can't agree on what's the right thing to do.

Depardieu has cast himself as a rogue, but a lovable one. A Shrek in the flesh. His life story is far more compelling than Hollande's, especially for the majority of people who live a life closer to the seeming original desultory destiny of the movie star (and let's not forget, he's a movie star, a very rich one) than to Hollande's. Yet Hollande, who has become rich enough, does not hold a candle to the multi-millionaires and billionaires who are threatening to decamp with all their gelt. And yet, even further yet… most people are destined to live their lives of quiet desperation, never to rise even close to the level of a Hollande, never mind a Depardieu. But millions of people live eternally in hope, the only palliative to unrelenting desperation and struggle and a sense of one's own mediocrity measured in material terms. That's how lotteries become popular (and put tons of money–a painless tax, it seems–into public coffers). They'll smoke a cheap narcotic, tobacco, and ruin their health, accepting the confiscatory taxes on it and expecting the state will take care of treating their pulmonary and cardiac disease when they get them, and will do it at no cost.

In short, everyone's values are totally screwed up.

The people will buy trickle-down economics and tax shelters for the rich, as long as they love the guy selling them. Another movie star, Ronald Reagan, was an incredible salesman (in the 50s, 30 years before he became President, he sold cigarettes for Chesterfield, part of the pitch was it's a "healthy" product… Google T-zone if you don't know what I'm talking about). If people love you for whatever reason cooked up up by your publicists and handlers, they'll buy what you're selling.

Hollande is very lucky Depardieu is leaving, and not running for the Assembly… People will still watch his movies. He'll stay superfluously rich (how much do you think his estate will be worth, when he's fought his last Visigoth?), and people will forget he welched on a 75% marginal tax rate for the few years it will be imposed. We all seem already to have forgotten the concept of the 1% and the 99%…

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As if Per Diem were not sufficient for a world not yet fully prepared for its dubious wisdom and antic ways with the English language, I have decided to launch (or actually re-launch) a blog devoted to the subject of art. It's called Art Long, and it was originally intended, starting some three years ago, and a bit more, to be brought to the world under somewhat other auspices and by a different hand than mine. The explanation is on the blog, if you click the "About" link.

There is also a first entry, mercifully brief, and also written by another, being a short quotation from a book, a psychobiography, about Diane Arbus the troubled brilliant photographer who took her own life in 1972 and entered the canon long since. Arguably even before she died.

I'll repeat that entry here, which I will do for a while, as I begin to populate Art Long with posts. It's a way of priming the pump, to direct some sparse traffic there. I won't wear out my arm, or any other part for sure, as I pump as, at any one time, there are barely more than about 30 reliable regular readers of these posts on Per Diem. But, as the saying goes, it's a start. Not a false one, but given the numbers, a quick one.

I hope you enjoy it. It will not be like the carnival ride here, to use one of my repeated metaphors, but it should be fun nevertheless.

Here's the URL for Art Long: http://artlong.net

And here's that quotation you'll find there:

"Art is not intrinsically therapeutic. It doesn't always allow us to rise above. Instead, it can be an immersion in products of self-expression that mirror our troubles back to us so that we see them metaphorically, but still glaringly. Then it's a matter of what we do with the information, what we make of it. We can turn away again, re-repress what we've inadvertently discovered, or try some means of assimilation."

— William Todd Schultz, An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, New York, 2011. P.27

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I like to make regular and passing allusion to my tendency to write at great length about just about anything. Friends and loved ones (inevitably one and the same) obligingly and conscientiously acknowledge what is possibly a character flaw, by skirting around what might easily be interpreted by someone as thin-skinned as I can be at times as a personal injury. They point out that not many people can write, never mind spontaneously respond, as volubly, with the added ability of typing incredibly fast, faster than some people allow they are comfortable thinking about something they would then have to commit themselves to putting into words that could be repeated back to them.

Though I am mindful, somewhere in the back corridors of my mind, of the hazards of what is commonly called “popping off” or “venting” I nonetheless invariably proceed, seemingly heedlessly. In actuality I make a splint-second split-second decision, usually electing not to act at all, rather than to speak, invariably at painful length. If I decide to write something, I don’t look back. And invariably I do so, using the same, or seemingly same, convoluted, discursive, complex-structured, Latinate, digressive prose. I use every device I am at all familiar with, rhetorical or grammatical, including all the ways of setting off clauses and phrases, independent and dependent, so that sentences grow and grow, seemingly mindlessly, sometimes in a variety of directions, or with that appearance, to what looks like will be indeterminate length until they loop back and come to a conclusion, logically complete, if having all the air of a chaos demanding to be deconstructed to see if it will surrender any meaning, much like the rag-tag collection of stalwarts holding the Alamo against Santa Ana’s army of 5,000 men under arms, refusing to surrender their small redoubt even as the chapel belied a kind of vulnerability to easy assault.

Now I would never offer as a defense for the way I choose to express myself the style of much greater masters of the language than myself, or, if they prove not greater, because I prove to be none the lesser, in the long run—the run not likely to end until the regrettable day that I am no longer around to be challenged to defend myself—then at least they have proven to be more enduring, and more deserving of tolerance and dedication to the onslaughts of followers seeking to quarry sense from the deep mines of writing they have excavated, though at least, for their good sake, they don’t seem to provoke the anger and frustration that I do (from a very much smaller audience of admirers and devotees). Hence, I am mainly challenged for the length of my little exercises in rhetoric, which I humbly and modestly call essays, for that is what they are, in a great tradition, purely and simply because I do not, as the repugnant common saying goes, “getting down to cases.” I am never asked who my nobler predecessors might be, whom I, presumably, either mimic or to whom I pay homage. Surely there are none so erudite, knowledgeable and at the same time engaged in a serious way, worthy of spending their time, by my prose, to venture theories as to my possible inspirations. It would be too much to ask not only that such readers lend any of their valuable attention to my modest and undeserving efforts, but that they accord it enough seriousness of purpose, such dignity, as to embody a reflection of, dare I use the term? literary forebears.

Other than suggesting, defiantly, with a certain air of pity, that those who complain are free, in all events, not to read it, and having already acquainted themselves with the daunting task of extracting sense, if not pleasure or edification, out of my outpourings, and having persuaded themselves that whatever else they might stumble upon from me will simply be more of the same, they should altogether, henceforth ignore anything with my byline, I say nothing. Just to be safe. I abhor physical abuse.

In the earlier years of my putting my writing out there to be consumed, or having been, to be regurgitated into the metaphorical toilet, half-eaten or, more likely, merely tasted with a bite or two—notice I speak not of “digestion”— I did suggest to those who seemed even moderately literate that, clearly, they were not familiar with the work of Henry James (not that I want to make favorable comparisons between that master and my lowly self; not that my writing is remotely Jamesian, for style, not that anyone, as it turns out, is remotely knowledgeable about style and willing to engage me in conversation about it; I do have to make clear, at this point, that both conditions are absolutely necessary, as I do know people more than adequately knowledgable in the arena of style to go on, more expertly I would guess than I could) and I did that only because he was, at the time, the most recognizable of writers within the canon with a reputation for verbosity (which your garden variety reader could not see justified to any purpose, that is, to say with no appreciation for that elusive and sometimes incomprehensible quality of the written language called “style”). But there are such readers as know style and know James and at least one or two of them have done me the good grace of actually reading through an entire essay of mine. They have simply preferred not to talk about it.

It happens that, in the fullness of time, others have appeared in the literary firmament, far better illuminated, than me for certain, but also, alas for the slightly younger of the two sons of the elder Mr. William James, than Mr. Henry James, and these new constellations, for sure, studied, and usually studied assiduously, seriously, and in dedicated fashion, the subject of scholarly theses and earnest debates. A school of writing in a particular style, such as the one I have fragmentarily defined as typical of my own, has been discerned, the chief practitioner, the ascendant avatar, especially as he did his literary reputation the favor of offing himself as a very young man (48), and quite recently, which has given his canon a lift, and increased it by some multiple as his canonization (he seemed to have to endure the briefest of beatifications, but then we live in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and patience, as a concept, has been delegitimized, as there is nothing worth waiting for that can’t be had right NOW, goddamnit) is a man who, when he walked the earth, was called David Foster Wallace. There is a whole assembly of writers, essentially mainly young (let’s say under 60) males, white, and all of whom seem to go by three names, much like a whole gaggle of a new generation of female movie actresses that, by definition, excludes or stops at Ms. Natalie Portman, who apparently has eschewed her middle name. It is also typical of the current lauded sensibility, which glows around the school of style in question, like an aura, that some of the most approachable—Mr. Wallace and his works were and are not always wholly approachable, as nearly as I can figure because he was a genius, unquestionably, and could speak of philosophy and higher order mathematics with equal facility, if nearly impossible accessibility to the visitor, and it is mainly his writing in these disciplines, which apparently somewhat opaquely actually purports to be about more universal and humanistic matters, more like literature, but merely in the guise of philosophical inquiry and/or mathematical analysis—of the contemporary practitioners might as easily be recognized a nominal very ordinary combination of a singular forename and unhyphenated or compounded surname. So for every Jonathan Safran Fore, there’s a Michael Chabon, indeed, for every Brett Easton Ellis, there may be half a dozen: Jonathan Franzen, Orhan Pamuk, etc., though this begins to trespass beyond the boundaries of consideration I’ve set, which is to say, the practitioners of what has come to be called a form of postmodernism, the greatest living practitioner of which, within the parameters of gender and age I’ve set, is David Eggers. Be that as it may, let me remind the reader that I am, in fact, talking about me. It’s about me, and my style. And the exemplary practitioner of that same opaque, convoluted, discursive, digressive, every technical typographic, rhetorical, scholarly, grammatical trick in the book or whatever you like to call the vehicle as long as it is constituted of typography represented technologically upon a substrate, actual or virtual is the self-same deceased individual formerly known as David Foster Wallace.

However, not really wishing to be disruptive to the reputation of formerly living geniuses, or to cause any ripples in the time-space continuum—which seems a fitting concern for anyone who takes the notion of postmodern writing styles seriously—I nevertheless finally come to the really rather simple point I wanted to make about this still living author, with no claims to any extraordinary powers of intellect or sensibility, but who has done all right, is that there is, indeed (and who else would know, but me?), a conscious predecessor. Way precedent to Mr. Wallace, or any of his tri-named or even nominally nominal confréres, or any American writer (for the idea of America may have existed, but the nation we know as the United States was not to form for 18 years after the death of my literary exemplar and inspiration) was a man named Laurence Sterne, and, more importantly, his sadly singular novel (though he wrote other important prose works), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. It was published sequentially in slender nine volumes from 1758 to 1765, in which latter year, the Reverend Sterne died. It could have been, was intended to be, and should have been, of much greater length, especially when we consider—for those who have not read the work, as who has save for a relative handful of living souls in any one generation—that the novel opens with an account of the conception of the titular hero and subject (and narrator, off and on) and ends several hundred riotous, raucous and digressive pages later, in an aggregate volume with typographical tricks, printing devices, and tropes that have come, only lately, to be labeled “meta-” without our hero even having been born as yet. And so the story ends, for all eternity, or until the sun we know as Sol goes super nova and evaporates our little planet, whichever comes first.

I won’t belabor all the inspiring aspects of the novel, philosophically and otherwise. Save for this stylistic note, and my one gloss and point of observation is simple and rather brief: two sentences I can honestly say I chose randomly, these from Chapter 37, quite early in the novel as we have it, as it turns out. Don’t ask what these mean. They won’t make whatever sense they may unless you read the entire novel. But then, I write in similar fashion, however feeble and poor are my contrivances by comparison, for what I understand to be the same reasons. To keep the reader paying attention and thinking, and to read the whole bloody thing!

And so, here’s the quotation:

The doctrine, you see, was laid down by Erasmus, as my father wished it, with the utmost plainness ; but my father’s disappointment was, in finding nothing more from so able a pen, but the bare fact itself; without any of that speculative subtilty or ambidexterity of argumentation upon it, which heaven had bestow’d upon man on purpose to investigate truth and fight for her on all sides. —- My father pish’d and pugh’d at first most terribly, — ’tis worth something to have a good name.

Posted with Marsedit

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This past Black Friday I wandered into the local branch of the Macy’s department store chain. It’s a small outlet in this neighborhood, in the semi-revitalized town of Ardmore on the Main Line of Philadelphia. The store is located in what has come to be called Suburban Square, a largely upscale suburban mall, built on the design I’ve come to call the Pennsylvania Model.

There are, I’ve learned since moving here permanently a little over a year ago, instances of the same shopping paradigm even in my former home state of Massachusetts, and in particular the Factory Outlet mall located in Wrentham. I won’t try my usual ploy of making like a minor league (in truth, more like a Little League) Jane Jacobs, and attempt my own half-assed version of analysis of architectural phenomena as expressions of larger social and cultural trends, currents, and indicators of the status quo of civilization as we know it here in the so-called civilized world. Suffice it to say that it’s a model for shopping, running the gamut from staples and groceries to the kind of high-end merchandise you’d expect to see—immaterial whether it’s discounted or full price, as in the spectrum from Wrentham to Ardmore, where the one serves a large swath of the dwindling middle class, and the other serves a concentrated population of consumers who can amply afford to drive the luxury marque SUV vehicles, the bigger the better, that clog the parking lot of Suburban Square for about ten hours every day. And it’s a model, it would seem, designed to inconvenience as many shoppers as possible, and increase the general pollution levels, by forcing drivers intending to shop at several stores in a session to park their vehicles serially in widely dispersed parking areas.

The larger malls of this design, which are predominant in this area of Pennsylvania, can cover vast tracts of land, sometimes across multiple criss-crossing super highways which allow transport from a widespread number of communities in all directions. Invariably, there are multitudinous anchor stores, let’s say, a Target, a Macy’s, Bed Bath and Beyond, often a hypermarket of a supermarket chain (around here it’s Giant, say, but could as easily be Whole Foods, or the truly mammoth Wegman’s), a Sears, a Best Buy… in brief running a spectrum of merchandise categories at a variety of price points. The higher end malls might even include the most prestigious of resellers, like Nordstrom or Nieman Marcus. However the latter seem to cleave to the rare mall around here that caters to much higher-income consumers in aggregate emporia built on the more centralized, atrium design villages I am used to in the upper middle class suburbs of Boston. In these, you park in one fairly accessible, central garage (they’re very often covered or underground) and you spend long periods of time shopping, knowing you will never have to brave the elements, or starve yourself, because there are better quality eateries studded throughout, or get dehydrated or thirsty for a beverage designed to slake your refined tastes, as these are served at watering holes of like distinction.

This is as opposed to the dispersed far-spread colonies of clustered storefronts of the Pennsylvania Model. In this model you see repeated endlessly a kind of mammoth strip mall looped together to form a shopping duchy or enclave, complete with its own police force, streets, lighting, etc, and all open to the weather in all seasons. If you must shop a gamut of stores, you are forced either to hike a significant distance over the fullness of time, while shlepping your purchases, or repeatedly to get in your car, cross the network of internal driveways and byways, under- and overpasses, to get to another parking ground, search for yet another empty spot and besiege the next cluster of shops. For food and drink, there are food courts in certain of these clusters, or there are free-standing outlets, of such fast-food favorites as, well, the usual suspects. Bars tend to be massive sports bars, with banks of flat screen monitors, and yards and yards of bars interspersed with high-top tables and counters, specifically designed to leave you uncomfortable enough not to want to linger past the time required to suck down a pint or two of your favorite brew, and scarf a bowl of chips and salsa, a platter of wings, or a mini-pizza or a range of equally nutritious fillers. Necessarily it can take a day just to fill the demands of a basic shopping list of needs, never mind those discretionary purchases and high-ticket items we’re hit with barrages of ads to acquire periodically.

There is, I don’t doubt, a perfectly sensible rational explanation for making the shopping experience as loathsome, costly, unhealthy and unsafe as possible. Though, with no real alternative, people are equally loathe to think about it, never mind let the thought form that there’s a perfectly good explanation as well for their normative constant state of mild vexation and frustration. My guess is that the availability of real estate across large tracts is never sufficiently timely to allow very large scale advance planning, never mind cost-effective ways of gathering titles to contiguous parcels, to allow planning on a grand centralized scale. Pennsylvania is a much larger state than Massachusetts, albeit it was settled originally at the same time. The cities are bigger, and more spread out. Where Boston is quite compact, and, because of its relatively smaller size in several dimensions, like population and land area, combined with the constraint of having been, virtually, an island until the middle of the 19th century, Philadelphia is relatively gigantic and spread out. Further, Philadelphia was always surrounded by relatively endless farmland in three directions, until quite recently, and so the population seeking to find refuge away from a decaying center is much larger and with much greater room to spread itself. But I promised not to try to be Jane Jacobs.

Having described the larger context for my highly localized observations to come, I’ve reached the beginning of the meat of my thinking. While on the impromptu shopping excursion with which I began—I was in Macy’s incidentally because I recalled having read on a corporate web site that the department store chain was an official dealer of Citizen brand watches; I was curious to see one model up close… as I expected, quite frankly, it was not an in-stock item. In store, I noticed a large display of Macy’s promotional artwork. It’s necessary to explain further, at this point, that one of the lifetime over-arching themes of the Macy’s brand is the integration of the symbol of a star, that is, a graphic representation of a star, as part of the enduring identity of the brand.

The pentangle, or five pointed star, usually in red, is festooned throughout the store, advertising, merchandising, signage, packaging, and so forth, and has done for years. The symbol is allegedly reminiscent of a star tattoo that R.H. Macy, the founder (way back when, in Haverhill, Massachusetts), had had applied to his body as a young man, working on a whaling ship. The symbol, by now emblematic, is ubiquitous. It serves as the apostrophe in the name. It is the name of the shopper rewards program. Currently it is also how Macy’s designates the designers with whom they have contracted to sell on a licensed basis exclusive merchandise in the chain’s stores and designed by those individuals.

Several individuals have famously associated their names in similar fashion with other chains. Infamously, Martha Stewart, for example, owns a brand featured at a number of chains, usually on an exclusive basis for certain categories of goods. After her felonious run-in with U.S. laws regarding conduct surrounding the trade in securities (and her subsequent prison term) the Stewart brand ran afoul for a while, especially with Kmart and its parent, Sears. Probably not coincidentally Stewart has had a prior relationship with Macy’s as well, though that specifically is not in my sights here. These are not idle associations. Stewart’s brand generates over a billion dollars a year in sales for her company. Not insignificant by any means. You might surmise, as I do, that much of this money comes out of the pocketbooks and wallets of folks somewhat less well-heeled than the 1% who have been vilified one way or another for over a year now, since some portion of the other 99% decided to target the tiny well-heeled portion of our populace for fiddling while the rest of us burn.

I guess at least part of my point is that individuals the likes of Martha Stewart are entrenched members of that 1% club by virtue of the trade they do with the great unwashed. This much larger constituency would generally include, I’m afraid, those SUV drivers in Suburban Square, or out further in the ‘burbs, and wherever they shop, Pennsylvania Model mall or the more protective and embracing confines of a more sensibly designed mall. At any time, whether interested in the goods or not, it’s a safe bet that anyone is never more than a half-hour’s ride in their vehicle from an outlet for brands styled after actual people, and not merely invented personalities. Or, I wonder, is that “merely” a false distinction.

Even as much as we may know this person or that to be a real human being, at some point in our consciousness they acquire a more mythic dimension to his or her personality or character. We already think we know who that person is, and what kind of human being they are, purely on the basis of what we can only know as a manufactured product. Either we know literally the products they have nominally designed or we know the product, the persona, that goes by the same name they do, and essentially just as consciously designed in advance and “manufactured” by means of manipulation of information about them that appears publicly. We actually know as little about Martha Stewart, for sure and for true, as we do about some anonymous soul who lives on the other side of the earth in a proverbial, clichéd teeming ghetto. The same is true of Ralph Lauren or Philippe Starck, of Kate Spade or Michael Graves.

On this particular day, that poster with the name of the Macy’s Star that caught my eye featured this photo below her name, Betsey Johnson.

I hope it’s sufficient to say, though I didn’t recognize Ms. Johnson, by sight, I did know her brand, as women within my ken are her customers by whatever remove (can we say that we are customers of an even better known brand, of far greater global reach among many consumers, namely, Apple? Of course we can). What sprang to mind, however, was a far more fictive creation, at least insofar as the gargoyle of a face with that rictus of aggressive dental work that looks to me like, to paraphrase a famous description of the Duchamp painting of “Nude Descending a Staircase,” a display in a bathroom tile showroom reminded me of anything. It was this famous image, so famous as to have attained to that ne plus ultra of hipster recognition in the zeitgeist, a universal meme.

What I found myself wondering were several connected manifold questions.

Why would someone allow herself to be so transfigured, in life, or even in a mere manipulated photograph, as to appear like a notorious caricature of an even more notorious villain (I acknowledge that to some, perhaps too many, he is still somehow a hero, a thwarted hero, but heroic for his intentions), a symbol of vengeance, if not vindictiveness? What has Betsey Johnson, the avatar of a certain standard of stylishness to do with vengeance? An inquiry into what sort of style she stands for is irrelevant to these considerations. It’s enough to consider that one of the largest retailers in the largest national consumer market on the planet has elected not only to contract for the use of her name and the resale of her merchandise, but has chosen as well, no matter what Ms. Johnson’s say may have been in the matter, to depict her in a way that I can’t help but describe as grotesque and at the same time so etiolated that it borrows conclusively and inevitably from an image that is, in addition to being global and inescapable, bound in identity with vaguely sinister, yet, we are to believe, vaguely noble causes.

It suggests that the denizens of innumerable winding and lengthy suburban driveways in their own ennoblement, sitting atop 300+-horsepower gargantuan mechanisms, each a self-contained paean to consumption, feel some kind of kinship to what is, at present, more than an avatar of pre-adolescent male fantasies of anonymous skullduggery in the larger world that otherwise renders the fantasist null and powerless, but a symbol of ultimate vindication for (literally) billions of downtrodden people who worry, not about where to spend four weeks of winter vacation in some remote corner of the globe, but worry where they will be able to seek shelter within a month, or a fortnight, or a week, or that very night. And if any of these misbegotten victims of the inequities of life in the 21st century could steal into the back or, as we charmingly call it here in the suburbs, the “way-back,” of any of these luxuriant conveyances, they would do so in an instant. And no more defense for their actions, if caught, than a grin of the same rueful force as the Old Guy himself, if not Ms. Johnson.

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