nametags & academic culture

miami was, in case i haven't been clear, an academic conference.

several thousand Communication PhDs, grad students, teachers & scholars overtake a hotel and conspicuously consume and produce their collective disciplinary values.

textbook fairs are huge affairs with cake and champaign. big wine and cheese parties distinguish big schools from unimportant schools and people schmooze in desperate attempts to kick start their careers, stay relevant, or stay alive in the flow of the measured successes they've found.

But in all of it -- one artifact really intrigued me this year -- nametags.

we all wore them on our chests. and my friend thomas quickly noted the horrific practice of the nametag glance-and-dismiss.

the thing about the nametags this year was (other years too?) that the FIRST NAMES were big. really big. all caps and probably a fifty plus font size. Last names and affiliate institutions? 20 font. and small.

So that in order to see WHO a person is -- who they REALLY are (eg. what their last name is because that's what they publish with or where they teach because that's what designates how important they are on the academic food chain) you have to glance. The first name? no glance needed. its the first thing you see.

So the glance-and-dismiss is this sort of I'm-schmoozing-my-way-upward-in-this-world gesture that performs a persons social location in a really eloquent and (in my mind, for them) embarrassing way.

i talked about a performance piece that i was considering doing next year at the convention where i would modify my institutionally issued nametag after registry to read

ANDREW
rudd but does it
really matter? I haven't
published since grad school.

or

ANDREW
no last name and
youve never heard of my
community college

alas, i don't think i'll get to because there's suddenly an outcry on the disciplinary listserve where the upwardly mobile, status-seekers are complaining. how do we find out who legitimates us? who makes us real? important? who's worth talking to?

have you read You Are Special? the childrens book about the wemmicks and the stars and the dots? That's a great example of the nametag-glance. (i'll not mention the name of the author, in fear that he may pop up on my blogger banner above -- and in general, i'm as peeved as i can be that he and the greedy-hungry christianbookstoreindustry have sold this nice story up the river for a franchise opportunity......brands, brands, everywhere...)

i thought about posting a response on the listserve -- but really, what's the point? there's no way for the posters to save face. i'd be proclaiming the emporer to have no clothes on -- and they'd all feel naked for a year. But a year of nakedness might redeem them....

so i rant here instead.

its a strange world when a university is a brand name and a last name is a franchise...

paper lantern icons

while i was in miami i bought paper lanterns for the kids that had an indian looking design on them (a little bit like these ones). last night we finally bought some cords and colored low wattage light bulbs and hung them in their rooms.

their response was unwarranted. crazy.

jaelyn was (literally) jumping up and down running back and forth across the hall jabbering non stop. addison was two steps behind and two (half-articulated) sentences behind.

stuff like:

"I love my new lamp."

and

"That's so cool, Daddy."

and

"lamp, lamp, lamp, lamp. pink lamp."

and then out of the blue, right in the middle of all the running and hopping and smiling and laughing, jaelyn shouts, literally,

"hosanna!"

wow. lynn and i just looked at each other. i think we were both filled with ambivalence in this moment.

there's a part of me that always feels wierded out when people start using church-code-talk. even in church. calling each other "brother" and "sister" and "blessings" and "greetings" and when they start to feel sick about a decision or inconvenience -- changing course midstream because -- they "didn't have a peace."

how do you have a peace? just one.

but then there's this other part of me -- the part of me that's trying to parent by surrounding my kids in the stories of the Bible -- instead of in the decadence of church-bubble-culture -- that goes: wow. jaelyn just reached deep for a better, bigger expression of joy, and came out with a storied truth -- possibly ritualized for her in the three year old class in the basement of our little church -- but ultimately, she found that story meaningful. i love that.

i know people who would correct their children, no, honey, JESUS is who we shout Hosanna to. only him.

but i'm glad that jaelyn shouts hosanna when she feels deep joy, because ultimately, the connection will come. deep joy springs from great longing and long waiting and surprising magnificence. that seems like a good incarnation for the Divine for her for right now.

BTW ~ Lynn, if you're reading, I just realized where ELSE "hosanna" has been ritualized for her, but that only ratchets up my ambivalence by about twenty-eight (exactly twenty-eight). so i'll save that story for another blog.

peace~

[grid::brand]

a long time ago i wrote that objects which define us actually signify multiple possibilities.

Any object that a person possesses points both ways -- the hopes she has and the fears he hides.

I'm trying to say that there's a certain precariousness to all of our objects. They show us for what we are and for what we want to be and aren't and for what we don't want to be, but may be becoming.

I'm wearing a typical Rudd costume today.

a pinstriped wool suit jacket, a floppy collared dress shirt, jeans with a hole in the knee and bowling shoes.

I'm fond of *bragging* that i buy all of my clothes at thrift stores and today its mostly true, but lately I've been noticing the fact that these shirts have tags in them. These coats do too, and every once in a while they’ll catch my eye…and I’ll be struck by how the brands have decayed – and also, often, at how local the brands seem.

There’s a mysteriously intertwined embroidered DJ (or JD) on the tag of this coat. Along with a place – Muskegon Michigan. On the shirt tag (SEARS) is the detail that its woven synthcotton – a brand in the making? Above the tag someone has written in a black magic marker KRSKA – handwriting, all caps, a brand.

The standard line for me is that I love to wear these second hand clothes because I feel like I am wearing history. That somewhere in Muskegon Michigan maybe fifty years ago, there was a tailor with a shop called DJ (or JD) who made carefully crafted wool suits. And then when his drinking problem kicked in he lost thousands in a gambling incident and the shop went bankrupt. Or he worked until he was seventy five and most of his customer base had passed on until Someone Van Something called his daughter to let her know about how much his arthritis pained him as he stitched up a hem, and he went to live with her for four years, watching birds meticulously out her dining room bay window.

But I have to be honest. My jeans have a Diesel brand on them. And I know that that’s very corporate and a big sell out, but does it help that I got it at a regionally owned discount store?

At least I’m thrifty. And devoted to local economies.

But the workers there, given the strained look on their faces don’t look as if they have benefits included in their jobs. They don’t look like they even get enough breaks.

So should I feel bad that I bought these Sketcher shoes I’m wearing at that same store? Because they don’t LOOK like sketchers – at least not the way that sketchers looked when I decided not to buy them because they were (used to be) too young, hip, and skateboardy (not that there’s anything wrong with that) – they look like bowling shoes. And I’ve always wanted bowling shoes – just like I always wanted a briefcase that was actually a doctors medical house call bag.

I want artifacts that tie me rhetorically backward in time to an era before a brand = a lifestyle = a class status = a set of associational cues as to my other probably psychographic predictors…

But my Hanes boxer briefs are proof positive that I live now. In a brand new age. And that longing for history is the longing of the dispossessed or at least the overly disaffected.

My teaching assistant Andrew Berg wears mostly thrift store t-shirts. Track team t-shirts from cities he’s never visited etc. Everyone who sees him wearing these t-shirts “gets it.” Well, I should say, everyone who should get it – gets it.

I shopped with Ryan my brother in law and Ang my sister this weekend and I was lucky enough to buy an Awana Club Leader shirt (just wait til you see the patches I’m adding…) and a Referee shirt. These shirts clearly can be worn with irony. On the other hand, Ryan and I got stuck in the quagmires of whether enough decay time had passed with an environmentalist shirt that he found.

It was all Love The Earth, Do Good to The Trees.

Stuff that Ryan, Ang & I agree with.

So on the one hand you don’t want to buy that at a thrifts store, because then people will think that you’re being ironic and that you don’t love the earth or do good to trees.

Or maybe they’d think that you just owned that t-shirt. Especially if it was oversize. (since that’s the best clue that you’re wearing thrift store t-shirts—that they’re too small). But that’d be embarrassing, because then you’d be being too earnest.

OR maybe enough decay has set in that the really hip reader would get it that you were being ironic about the irony of wearing thrift store t-shirts and “get it” twice over.

But it’s too precarious. Too much risk. He didn’t buy it.

Andrew Jones wants to be remembered as a naked man in the tub not a branded man in Hugo Boss.

And I have to admit that the idea is appealing to me – brandless, historyless, unfettered, nondenominational, uninstitutionalized – but I feel like a better more honest picture of me is in a bathtub collaged so full of tags that I can’t move at all. I’m not sure if I’m naked or not, because I’m so awash in the influences, in the promises, in the premises of my Awana Club shirt, my old Independent Fundamentalist Preacher Boy Trophies, the General Association of Baptist Churches, Cedarville College, The Young Republicans, Andrews University, the National Communication Association, Bowling Green State University, Covenant Church of Bowling Green, The Democratic National Party, the Utne Reader, Amnesty International….

Aren’t brands just agreements that we believe in the same things? Don’t you think so, DJ? (Or was that JD?)