November 5, 2014--The New Mediocre

As if we didn't have enough to complain about. We need to make it worse?

That's just what Vanessa Friedman did in a column in last Sunday's New York Times Review, "Mired in Mediocrity."

The title of her piece says it all--things globally, but especially in the United States, are stalled out because we are accepting, even embracing what she calls "the new mediocre."

Her bonafides? She is the Times' chief fashion critic and fashion director. More about that in a moment.

Let me summarize her indictment--

The idea that mediocrity is "the new normal" originates, Friedman claims, with Christine Lagarde, director of the International Monetary Fund, who applied that term to the global economy. It could use a jolt, Lagarde correctly suggests, to get it going, mired as it is, "muddling along with subpar growth."

Fine. But to generalize this to just about everything else is questionable. I do not want to come a across as Pangloss, seeing everything to be the best in "this best of all possible worlds," but to see everything to be the worst in this worst of all possible worlds goes way beyond the defensible and slips more into whining than legitimate analysis.

When she sees the newly emboldened Republicans putting forth an economic agenda that is made up of "a compendium of modest expectations," Friedman sees this this to be a manifestation of "the new mediocre."

Ranging far afield, she sees Twitter losing participants and thus income not because as a fad it is fading but because it has become an example of "the new mediocre."

"Old-guy action films" and "comic-book-hero" flicks that are predominating at the box office, squeezing out higher-quality art-house Indies, is yet more evidence that the the movies that are thriving--what else is new--are yet more evidence that "the new mediocre" is all-pervasive.

And then there is clothing, fashion, Friedman's expertise. Here she sees the same thing--mediocrity.

Enduring the recent spate of fashion shows in New York and Europe, she sees little evidence of new ideas among designers. Rather, she unhappily reports, everything seems deja vu--1960s-style "rock chick dresses," 1970s "flared trousers," 1980s "power jackets," and even 1920s "flapper frocks."

It doesn't get any worse than this, in this worst of all possible worlds.

I've been hearing from disillusioned and generally despondent friends that the Friedman piece sums up what they have been thinking and feeling about the contemporary world. That we are in fact mired in mediocrity. That this not only explains what they are seeing but also helps reconcile themselves to their own unhappy and frustrating circumstances. "It's not my fault," they are in effect saying, "but the larger world's."

I have been pushing back, claiming that though there is much to not feel good or optimistic about, to balance things, one could contemplate making a case in opposition to "the new mediocre" in support of "the new excellent."

A list of things to feel optimistic about would include--

All the advances in medicine and healthcare. Yes, the system for its delivery is deeply flawed, but if one has various types of cancer or needs life-saving, minimally-invasive surgery, with any good fortune, methods and tests and medications are now available that a scant few year ago were only dreams. "The new excellent."

If one is fortunate enough to be in the top 25 percent academically, public education capped by still the best higher-education system in the world could be considered an example of the new or continuing excellent.

Then there is Google, wirelessness, iGadgets, the Internet itself and all the possibilities that these enable--more "new excellent."

Evidence-based philanthropy, best exemplified by the Gates Foundation, which just last week announced it is stepping up its promising efforts to eradicate malaria, is, as part of "the new excellent," making progress on many fronts from environmental conservation to potable water to sustainable economic development. Yes, I know the counter list, but the picture is more balanced than the "new mediocre" people are claiming.

Even in regard to military hardware, while waiting for peace and sanity to break out in the world, drones, as one example of excellence of its own sort, enable battles to rage that inflict fewer civilian casualties than conventional methods. I know many of my anti-war friends (include me among them) will blanch at this, but in realpolitik terms this represents "progress."

At a different level of things to feel good about is the New Brooklyn, ATM machines, E-ZPasses, and the ubiquitousness of really wonderful coffee--my counter case to worrying too much about power jackets and flapper frocks.

One reason to consider the excellent to be at least as pervasive as the mediocre is that it can motivate one to shake the funk, get up off the couch, turn off the TV and iPhone (at least for a few hours a day), and look for ways to become engaged with making things a little better for yourself and the larger world. To take the opposite tack is to me to waste one's life.

May 9, 2014--Schmattas at the Met

Half my family was in the schmatta business. The rag business. Ladies clothes.

Cousin Moritz sold cloth and fur coats from a shabby loft on 36th Street. They were not the best quality, my father took endless pleasure pointing out, but if you knew Moritz, better, if you were related, he sold to you wholesale.

So the buttons fell off after brief usage and they never quite fit right, but there was family pressure to give him the business. (I always suspected that the idiom--give someone the business--was derived from the way he and his bitter rival Uncle Max, his brother-in-law, operated.)

Max made and sold fancy, special-occasion dresses and his female relatives, my mother, her four sisters, and a dozen nieces and cousins, were expected to shop at his broken-down warehouse of a showroom even though the seams on the sleeves tended to unravel even before the bar mitzvah boy could finish half his Haftorah.

It was a shonda, a terrible shame but that's the way things worked in those days.

These days, things work differently. At least some things do when it comes to women's designer clothes.

Now even the Metropolitan Museum of Art is in the schmatta business.

Through its Costume Institute, sorry, I mean its newly-named and endowed Anna (Vogue magazine) Wintour Costume Center contemporary fashion, celebrity, and commerce are pushing aside Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Matisse.

At last week's annual gala (Anna's A-list party) alongside Vermeer's Woman with a Lute we now have schmattas by Oscar de la Renta worn by Sarah Jessica Parker and Rianna in Stella McCartney. Next to Bruegel's Harvesters one finds Nicole Richie decked out in Donna Karan. Beside Rembrandt's Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, posing is Lena Dunham in a gown by Giambattista Valli. And preening in front of Henri Matisse's Reclining Odalisque, David Beckham sports the Bronx's Ralph Lauren.

Puzzled by the Met's interest in fancy schmattas, their relationship to the museum's high-culture collection, there were some answers in a New York Times article that cites the thoughts of one of the designers-of-the-moment--Charles James.

He thinks about clothing as sculpture. As "a prop for the performance of living." But it's not the body that's sculpted or even the fabric, but rather, "It's the air that's sculpted, not the silk."

Got it.

And the connection between fancy outfits and the Met is now clear:

Dresses=sculpture; sculpture=art; art=Metropolitan Museum of Art.