Dispatch from the service culture
16 - 18 July, Ian
A few warm-up questions to begin with. Just note
what answer occurs to you straight away then move on: there are no
prizes...
First, when was REM's Green album released?
Second, what were you doing when you were 24? And what music were you listening to?
Finally, is reminiscing a bitter or a sweet experience for you?
This morning Heidi and I were sitting in the dentists before 8 a.m. when Heidi was scheduled to have an extraction. Our first visit had been a preliminary check up on a lump that had appeared on Heidi's gum and on our second visit, which was our first real appointment, Heidi was kept waiting in the dentist's chair for over an hour while he floated around seeing patients - or clients - in other rooms. When he breezed in finally he looked at the book I was reading - Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux - and, mistaking it as science fiction, bluffly said, "I used to read a lot of that stuff". I didn't like him. He was clearly uncomfortable dealing with a nervous child and insisted that when we returned to have the tooth out as he recommended we take the first appointment of the day, and that his assistant should dose up Heidi with nitrous oxide before he began. So we were there early this morning with Heidi anxiously lying back in the chair, gums numb from the anaesthetic paste that the friendly assistant had smeared on, and breathing nitrous through a mask. The dentist, who stands about 6'5" in height, briskly started to inject his anaesthetic and Heidi winced as the needle went into her gum. Immediately the dentist got up, said he wasn't going to do it and walked out. The assistant referred us to a paediatric dentist about an hour's drive away, writing candidly on the referral note that Heidi was nervous and the dentist "didn't have the patience" to treat her. We drove up to the paediatric dentist afterwards, only to find that they wouldn't take any new patients for "only" an extraction; they gave us a number we could call to get a suggestion for who to try next.
Well, dentists and plumbers are hard to get anywhere and we shouldn't have expected the US to be better than the norm. I'm half tempted to drive over the border to Canada, where at least we might get a more civilised brush-off. In reality, since Heidi's gum lump has gone down we'll probably try to hold on until we reach Australia, hoping that it doesn't flare up in Ecuador (where as well as any other concerns we don't speak the language).
A conspicuous success of US culture has been to consumerize a huge variety of human activities, empowering us with the twin tools of supply and demand and legal redress. I have reservations about the effect of this on academic pursuits, particularly science, but in most areas of life it provides standard forms of engagement that everyone can grasp without special rites of education or initiation. Very democratic. If you don't like your dentist, for example, and you have enough time and money you can just go choose another. As I say, the range of disparate phenomena onto which this pattern has been stamped is extremely broad. From dentistry to recreational strolling.
Yesterday we had another walk along one of the many smart trails that are laid out across the Arcadia National Park. I mentioned previously that the walks here are different from walks at home: in England you basically take your map and walk in the land as it is, apart from where local councils or ramblers associations have maintained sign posts on ancient footpaths and bridleways. In Arcadia there has been a conscious and successful effort to cast the landscape into a user experience. There is a selection of trails, graded by difficulty, all provided with convenient car parks and facilities. There are even signs that tell you not to add to the cairns or create new ones, which is highly countercultural in Europe. The landscape has been re-imagined as scenery, and, more specifically, as discrete view points and photo stops. There's even a blow hole, dramatically badged as The Thunder Hole, funnelling sightseers from the frequent Park buses along its regular steps and sturdy rails, with signs redundantly warning of the danger of slippage. My romantic imagery of these blow holes was partially formed by Lyndsay Clarke's novel Alice's Masque and this combination of user-friendliness and legal defensiveness doesn't really hit the spot for me. Nonetheless, the Park's genuine beauty is truly available to all, and it works: the people are out there in high numbers doing the walks.
Two areas of consumer life where you'd expect the US to be solid are the provision of fries and the screening of Hollywood movies. Well, both yesterday and the preceding Sunday we took lunch at nice popular restaurants in Bar Harbour. And both times the meals came friesless. Most surprising was that they tried to pass this off without mentioning it - with the insouciance of Michael Palin in the cheese shop sketch - even though Paula, trying to get into the swing of things on our infrequent outings to these places, had ordered burger and fries both times, and yesterday's restaurant even boasted "all lunches served with fries" on the whiteboard (!) on the way in. Our meals were better for their frieslessness but I was disappointed that they didn't raise a smiley apology (or a discount).
Today, after the angst with the dentists, we tried for a simple pleasure in the afternoon: seeing Bewitched at the multiplex at Bangor mall. How could this not be fun? Well, the sound was mangled all the way through the movie, which didn't help (again, no apology) but it was still enjoyable. Nicole Kidman is really building up an admirable corpus of work in my opinion: Birthday Girl (probably my favourite), The Hours, Eyes Wide Shut (which I like and you probably don't), Moulin Rouge (which I didn't like - I find Ewan MacGregor very irritating - and you probably did), Stepford Wives, even Batman Forever.
(As a side note on the topic of films, Shaun pointed out that the David Lynch movie in which someone travels across the US in a lawn mower is The Straight Story and not Mulholland Drive - I've seen neither.)
Our other pop culture indulgence this week, keeping with the theme of witchcraft, was the release of the new Harry Potter book. We joined in with the parade at Bar Harbour (though lamely not in costume) and collected our new copy at midnight. Again there was a service breakdown - they'd lost our name from the list of book reservers - but we still got a copy. I'm about half a dozen chapters in, reading it to all three girls. I read the previous one to them when we were in Corsica last year, and prefer this new one (it's less backstory and more action). In the first chapter the mention of Somerset made me think nostalgically of home: it's exactly the right sort of place for the dementors to circle mistily around in, and I miss it. I'm less delighted by the Americanisation of the text (colors, sneakers, airplanes, the sourcerer's stone) and I don't know whether Fred and George's bedroom is on the second (UK) or second (US) floor of The Burrow (I suspect the former). I resent the changes to the text in the same way that I would if Penguin decided that I had to have u's added to John Updike's colors for me to understand them.
For me, the image of Wal Mart has become an encompassing icon for the service aspect of the US: a huge store you can push your trolley around to sample everything that you might conceivably want, with the advantage of accessibility and the drawback of the loss of the romance of the particular idiom. As I said last time, which is even truer today, my disappointments with Maine, such as they are, are its inability to serve us up a satisfactory consumer experience.
I would, though, emphasize that there's a lot more to the US than a service culture, which can be magical or dreary depending upon its execution and, equally variably, your mood. But it is a distinctive and important feature of the US, and I'm coming to think that its reductive aspects lead to a return of the repressed in the guise of a concern with a bald spirituality that could only be American. There's a show on the local radio station here called New Dimensions that is what you'd imagine it to be. Yesterday's programme centred on an interview with a lady called Oriah (?) Mountain Dreamer. I listened to the whole thing in the car. When she began - being as we're here to learn about other cultures - I consciously turned down my Brit scepticism (which bristled equally at the interviewer) to listen to what she had to say. After I managed to get past some of her verbal mannerisms (and her name, for God's sake) I found that I liked much of what she had to say. Partly this was because she said stuff that is already part of how I think about things, which always warms up my sympathies. For example, she cited a study of teachers getting kids to make pots. They were split into two: one group told the kids only to make really excellent pots, while the second group told the kids just to make lots of pots. Guess which group made the best pots? Of course: the group that made a lot of pots! So Ms Mountain Dreamer's message to people was lower your standards! While I certainly don't think that this has universal applicability for proud professionals, I do agree that the more you do something the more you can and there are a load of other cliches and slogans I like that say the same thing. Beyond reinforcing my existing thinking she said some fluffy and less fluffy stuff about the importance of creativity in people's lives that I buy into. If I lived here I'd listen to this show every week.
As well as these overt and consciously styled forms of spirituality that are here all around, there are stranger phenomena that seem to intrude more surreptitiously. For example, there are a number of roadside graveyards around by us that appear in unexpected clearings in the woods; at two of these I've noticed naive stags figures brooding over the graves:
Paula speculated sensibly that these may be over children's graves but in at least one of these (where the birth date is clearly visible) that isn't the case. Any ideas?
After we watched Bewitched today I went into Borders and bought a copy of Green by REM. There's an REM track in the movie that's not on that CD, but I had the Green tape when it came out (1988) and felt like hearing it again (I gave my tape away years ago). At the time I was living in central London and driving out to Sutton every day where the company for which I then worked had a client. It was a nice drive, against the run of traffic morning and evening, in my black Renault 5 Turbo. The other tape I remember listening to at the time was Michael Nyman music from Peter Greenaway films; I particularly used to enjoy this as I drove back across Holburn Circus in the summer evenings, looking up to the statue of a chap on a horse raising his bowler hat.
There are very few people from that time whom I'm in touch with now. Reminiscing, it seems to me, is a rosy experience when the people you shared the memories with are still around, and a more poignant one when they're not.
First, when was REM's Green album released?
Second, what were you doing when you were 24? And what music were you listening to?
Finally, is reminiscing a bitter or a sweet experience for you?
This morning Heidi and I were sitting in the dentists before 8 a.m. when Heidi was scheduled to have an extraction. Our first visit had been a preliminary check up on a lump that had appeared on Heidi's gum and on our second visit, which was our first real appointment, Heidi was kept waiting in the dentist's chair for over an hour while he floated around seeing patients - or clients - in other rooms. When he breezed in finally he looked at the book I was reading - Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux - and, mistaking it as science fiction, bluffly said, "I used to read a lot of that stuff". I didn't like him. He was clearly uncomfortable dealing with a nervous child and insisted that when we returned to have the tooth out as he recommended we take the first appointment of the day, and that his assistant should dose up Heidi with nitrous oxide before he began. So we were there early this morning with Heidi anxiously lying back in the chair, gums numb from the anaesthetic paste that the friendly assistant had smeared on, and breathing nitrous through a mask. The dentist, who stands about 6'5" in height, briskly started to inject his anaesthetic and Heidi winced as the needle went into her gum. Immediately the dentist got up, said he wasn't going to do it and walked out. The assistant referred us to a paediatric dentist about an hour's drive away, writing candidly on the referral note that Heidi was nervous and the dentist "didn't have the patience" to treat her. We drove up to the paediatric dentist afterwards, only to find that they wouldn't take any new patients for "only" an extraction; they gave us a number we could call to get a suggestion for who to try next.
Well, dentists and plumbers are hard to get anywhere and we shouldn't have expected the US to be better than the norm. I'm half tempted to drive over the border to Canada, where at least we might get a more civilised brush-off. In reality, since Heidi's gum lump has gone down we'll probably try to hold on until we reach Australia, hoping that it doesn't flare up in Ecuador (where as well as any other concerns we don't speak the language).
A conspicuous success of US culture has been to consumerize a huge variety of human activities, empowering us with the twin tools of supply and demand and legal redress. I have reservations about the effect of this on academic pursuits, particularly science, but in most areas of life it provides standard forms of engagement that everyone can grasp without special rites of education or initiation. Very democratic. If you don't like your dentist, for example, and you have enough time and money you can just go choose another. As I say, the range of disparate phenomena onto which this pattern has been stamped is extremely broad. From dentistry to recreational strolling.
Yesterday we had another walk along one of the many smart trails that are laid out across the Arcadia National Park. I mentioned previously that the walks here are different from walks at home: in England you basically take your map and walk in the land as it is, apart from where local councils or ramblers associations have maintained sign posts on ancient footpaths and bridleways. In Arcadia there has been a conscious and successful effort to cast the landscape into a user experience. There is a selection of trails, graded by difficulty, all provided with convenient car parks and facilities. There are even signs that tell you not to add to the cairns or create new ones, which is highly countercultural in Europe. The landscape has been re-imagined as scenery, and, more specifically, as discrete view points and photo stops. There's even a blow hole, dramatically badged as The Thunder Hole, funnelling sightseers from the frequent Park buses along its regular steps and sturdy rails, with signs redundantly warning of the danger of slippage. My romantic imagery of these blow holes was partially formed by Lyndsay Clarke's novel Alice's Masque and this combination of user-friendliness and legal defensiveness doesn't really hit the spot for me. Nonetheless, the Park's genuine beauty is truly available to all, and it works: the people are out there in high numbers doing the walks.
Two areas of consumer life where you'd expect the US to be solid are the provision of fries and the screening of Hollywood movies. Well, both yesterday and the preceding Sunday we took lunch at nice popular restaurants in Bar Harbour. And both times the meals came friesless. Most surprising was that they tried to pass this off without mentioning it - with the insouciance of Michael Palin in the cheese shop sketch - even though Paula, trying to get into the swing of things on our infrequent outings to these places, had ordered burger and fries both times, and yesterday's restaurant even boasted "all lunches served with fries" on the whiteboard (!) on the way in. Our meals were better for their frieslessness but I was disappointed that they didn't raise a smiley apology (or a discount).
Today, after the angst with the dentists, we tried for a simple pleasure in the afternoon: seeing Bewitched at the multiplex at Bangor mall. How could this not be fun? Well, the sound was mangled all the way through the movie, which didn't help (again, no apology) but it was still enjoyable. Nicole Kidman is really building up an admirable corpus of work in my opinion: Birthday Girl (probably my favourite), The Hours, Eyes Wide Shut (which I like and you probably don't), Moulin Rouge (which I didn't like - I find Ewan MacGregor very irritating - and you probably did), Stepford Wives, even Batman Forever.
(As a side note on the topic of films, Shaun pointed out that the David Lynch movie in which someone travels across the US in a lawn mower is The Straight Story and not Mulholland Drive - I've seen neither.)
Our other pop culture indulgence this week, keeping with the theme of witchcraft, was the release of the new Harry Potter book. We joined in with the parade at Bar Harbour (though lamely not in costume) and collected our new copy at midnight. Again there was a service breakdown - they'd lost our name from the list of book reservers - but we still got a copy. I'm about half a dozen chapters in, reading it to all three girls. I read the previous one to them when we were in Corsica last year, and prefer this new one (it's less backstory and more action). In the first chapter the mention of Somerset made me think nostalgically of home: it's exactly the right sort of place for the dementors to circle mistily around in, and I miss it. I'm less delighted by the Americanisation of the text (colors, sneakers, airplanes, the sourcerer's stone) and I don't know whether Fred and George's bedroom is on the second (UK) or second (US) floor of The Burrow (I suspect the former). I resent the changes to the text in the same way that I would if Penguin decided that I had to have u's added to John Updike's colors for me to understand them.
For me, the image of Wal Mart has become an encompassing icon for the service aspect of the US: a huge store you can push your trolley around to sample everything that you might conceivably want, with the advantage of accessibility and the drawback of the loss of the romance of the particular idiom. As I said last time, which is even truer today, my disappointments with Maine, such as they are, are its inability to serve us up a satisfactory consumer experience.
I would, though, emphasize that there's a lot more to the US than a service culture, which can be magical or dreary depending upon its execution and, equally variably, your mood. But it is a distinctive and important feature of the US, and I'm coming to think that its reductive aspects lead to a return of the repressed in the guise of a concern with a bald spirituality that could only be American. There's a show on the local radio station here called New Dimensions that is what you'd imagine it to be. Yesterday's programme centred on an interview with a lady called Oriah (?) Mountain Dreamer. I listened to the whole thing in the car. When she began - being as we're here to learn about other cultures - I consciously turned down my Brit scepticism (which bristled equally at the interviewer) to listen to what she had to say. After I managed to get past some of her verbal mannerisms (and her name, for God's sake) I found that I liked much of what she had to say. Partly this was because she said stuff that is already part of how I think about things, which always warms up my sympathies. For example, she cited a study of teachers getting kids to make pots. They were split into two: one group told the kids only to make really excellent pots, while the second group told the kids just to make lots of pots. Guess which group made the best pots? Of course: the group that made a lot of pots! So Ms Mountain Dreamer's message to people was lower your standards! While I certainly don't think that this has universal applicability for proud professionals, I do agree that the more you do something the more you can and there are a load of other cliches and slogans I like that say the same thing. Beyond reinforcing my existing thinking she said some fluffy and less fluffy stuff about the importance of creativity in people's lives that I buy into. If I lived here I'd listen to this show every week.
As well as these overt and consciously styled forms of spirituality that are here all around, there are stranger phenomena that seem to intrude more surreptitiously. For example, there are a number of roadside graveyards around by us that appear in unexpected clearings in the woods; at two of these I've noticed naive stags figures brooding over the graves:
Paula speculated sensibly that these may be over children's graves but in at least one of these (where the birth date is clearly visible) that isn't the case. Any ideas?
After we watched Bewitched today I went into Borders and bought a copy of Green by REM. There's an REM track in the movie that's not on that CD, but I had the Green tape when it came out (1988) and felt like hearing it again (I gave my tape away years ago). At the time I was living in central London and driving out to Sutton every day where the company for which I then worked had a client. It was a nice drive, against the run of traffic morning and evening, in my black Renault 5 Turbo. The other tape I remember listening to at the time was Michael Nyman music from Peter Greenaway films; I particularly used to enjoy this as I drove back across Holburn Circus in the summer evenings, looking up to the statue of a chap on a horse raising his bowler hat.
There are very few people from that time whom I'm in touch with now. Reminiscing, it seems to me, is a rosy experience when the people you shared the memories with are still around, and a more poignant one when they're not.
Posted: Tue - July 19, 2005 at 04:38 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM