h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, this book isn't really quite what i thought it was going to be. I've read some of Naomi Klein's journalism before (in New Statesman, the Guardian, and online) but i'd expected this to be written somehow meatier than it is, it feels like your reading something in a glossy weekend magazine - not a serious textbook. I can't really fault what she's saying though, i'm sure i'll get used to the style

Acknowledgements

There are some organisations mentioned in the acknowledgements who are well worth checking out. Primarily Schnews at www.schnews.org.uk a Brighton based newsletter and information distribution service - send them a couple of quid and read it for a few months - you won't regret it and you'll carry on subscribing - very funny, very current, very open and very very good. They were No Logo ten years ago. These are the boys.

Also

The International Labor Organisation http://www.ilo.org Does what it says on the tin.

Adbusters www.adbusters.org Attaking advertising, oh yes.

Corporate Web Watch i don't know myself but there are a couple of similar group's sites at www.corporatewatch.org.uk www.corpwatch.org

Introduction

One of the things i did notice was that i've never heard of "London Fog" - is that just me (i have studiously ignored branded clothing for fifteen years - so it could be all the rage but it's passed me by) or is this a US / Canada only 'global brand'. It's certainly interesting that a brand with such a name, which itself purports to be 'international' using the kudos of European exoticism to make the brand seem established, high quality and therefore desirable is not only unheard of in the UK (which for US researchers is quite close to 'London' ) and is in fact a Canadian brand made in South East Asia (Neither of which are very close to said 'London' village).

Also nice to see Emma Goldman get a name check - surely one of the greatest women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Anarchist, Feminist, Union Activist, Organiser, Libertarian, Sexual radical, Drama Critic, Publisher, Writer, Assassin and Seamstress. Labelled by McKinley as "the most dangerous woman in American". Arrived in the US with just her sewing machine and the clothes she stood up in, deported from the US to the USSR for being a 'red', deported from Russia for being redder than them, lectured through Europe and North America, going to Spain during the Republic and the civil war. The true renaissance woman. She once said "If i can't dance, it's not my revolution".

I like the bit about "Marylyn Manson clones" too. Not that i've anything against him as such (apart from he's so bloody safe) but it always amused me about ten years ago, when Rage Against the Machine first emerged as the 'new big thing' that you'd see a dancefloor full of young guys all the same age, all in the same clothes, all with the same hair, jumping up and down in the same way and the same time to the same record singing along the line "F**K YOU, I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME". Laugh? I nearly bought the skate shorts. The sentiment's a good one, but it seemed to get 'branded away'. Manson is the same. He's a Xerox of Alice Cooper in the early seventies, except he's not radical in anyway - Coopers material is still more challenging and dangerous than Manson's thirty years later, but with the same shock theatrics he comes over as being so very rebellious without saying anything at all, there's nothing dangerous about his message because their is no message - and it's not even 'no future' nihilism, it's just branded rebellion in a form unpalatable enough to parents and teachers to be saleable, whilst being perfectly safe for the companies promoting it. Sapping the revolutionary will of 'The Kids'TM.

Just swooshing through and leaving a bookmark...

Have to apologise now because I can't put the book down and have already got to the 'No Choice' part of the book.

I love this woman's style of writing. I normally find political books either completeley incomprehisible or patronising, and this manages to be neither.
Autist, your description of all the Rage fans made me laugh, especially as I was one of them, jumping up and down like everyone else. Reminded me of the bit in Life of Brian where he shouts 'You are all different' and they all shout back 'Yes, we are all different'.

In terms of the early part of the book though - just trying to get the discussion moving a bit - the first aspect to be dicussed must be that of branding. Now that I've read her description of it, I can see it everywhere, from football to music, it seems to reach far deeper than what I had previously imagined (i.e. the Nikes, the High Street, etc.)
You can see how the brand Manchester United set up around the world has such pulling power, and by putting their name on everything from bath toys to birthday cakes, is just one way of universal advertising. People can now decorate their kids' bedrooms from head to foot with Manchester United gear. Creating a life-long Manchester United customer as we all know that TRUE supporters don't change their team.

I kinda thought that the size of the book would cause a problem for a one thread discussion. GWL if you want to open up a thread on part 1 of the book, No Space, then those of use who have hardly started chapter 1 can mull over the intro (but like you I'm hooked).

I hadn't really known what to expect from this book. However the intro gives a brief overview of the topics to be covered which is a very helpful start. Nice one NK.

Like everyone else I think I'm surprised at the style. flinch is right, there is a definite air of the glossy mag. in the style of writing. This is very definitely a journalistic piece of work.

It remains to be seen whether it is unbiased, but I suspect it is not from NK's own admission that she was working from a hunch and went looking for data to support the hunch. Having said that if she sticks with facts (and there seem to be a lot of references, stats, tables, graphs, etc.) she might be able to prove her hunch was right.

On the brands thing I guess we have to remember that NK is Canadian. Anything that permeats North American culture tends to be seen as global by North Americans. This has some justification because of the size of the market, but I very much doubt if anyone outside of the US/Canada area and certain parts of Europe would recognise some of these "global" brands.

Obiously some brands seem to have trancended cultural and language barriers fully. Coke is the obvious one, but London Fog?

As i say, i'd never heard of London Fog - and i assumed that she'd included a regional brand in the intro because of the ironic descovery that she was living in the house of the people she was investigating - it is a small world after all. But when i asked the kids at work if they'd heard of it they reeled of a list of people who wear it (notably they didn't mention what they make - just which stars wear it).

The style is ever so personal - almost confessional (at least in the opening bit) - there's a review on the cover that says 'part mallrat diary' or somesuch, i can see what it means.

I quite like the mention of the garment workers' strikes too. Sorry to be so annecdotal but it reminds me of a conversation i had a couple of years ago - a friend asked if i took any newspapers or magazines - i said yes, that i bought the Guardian a couple of times a week and the Morning Star a couple of time a week. He said that he'd stopped taking the Morning Star about ten years ago because it was "only ever full of the knitwear workers strike". This was a strike and a period that i remembered, and we laughed about how foolish it was buying a paper whose main concern was a stike amongst knitwear workers - how sad do you have to be to read that stuff. So i offered to show him some current issues when i bought them and lo and behold the next issue of the Star was dedicated to a strike in the British sock factories - how we laughed, how we giggled - sock factories, it's hardly the Miner's Strike is it! But then i thought, well hell, it's an industry, and there's probibly more need for regulation in the sweatshops than there is in heavy industry where the work may be hard but the wages are good. Billy Bragg sang "I was a miner, i was a docker, i was a railwayman" in his terrific Union ballad "Between the Wars", he missed out "i was a seamstress, i was a sock maker". Odd that. I wonder if it's because they are primarily women's industrys that it's so easy to belittle them. It's almost as though women shouldn't really have a union - is it that old social idea at the back of our minds that women are mothers and their work comes for free. Why are the Steelworkers, Miners or Dockers strikes heroic things and yet knitwear workers striking is a bit of a giggle. When the Derbyshire seamstresses banded together to join the union in the 1890's they Union of Tailors wouldn't have them because they were women 'and not proper tailors' - they eventually had to join the Gasworkers Union, the only union that would take them in.

www.mcspotlight.org Covers the McLiable trial nicely if anyone wants to look it up.

The Intro summarizes the book's thesis beautifully and, as Finch mentions does seem a bit Sunday Supplement. As the book progresses and becomes less confessional the writing tightens up a bit and becomes more passionate, polemic even.
The intro is compiled to give an idea of the scale of the problem, which is reinforced by the mention of Emma Goldman. Things that would have been anathema to almost everyone 20 or 30 years ago have been naturalised and Marx's concept of commodity fetishism has been extended to brand fetishism, whereby it doesn't matter what we buy, as long as it sports the right identity.

Oh, I've never heard of London Fog either. Also, I am trying to introduce my 14-year-old daughter (who likes Linkin Park, System of a Down etc) to the joys of Jello Biafra and The Dead Kennedys - now that's polemic.

I've started a second thread http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/A705386 - No Space.

I've started a second thread http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/F85144?thread=170746 Let's try that again

I tend to agree that the intro is very 'journalese'. I mean, I see what she is trying to do, personalise the issue and all, make it real, provide a bit of human interest, but still, a bit annoying, really, very glib, stock writing.

But like someone says, once she settles down and gets into her stride I did really enjoy the fairly accessible and dynamic style she employs. And in general I do welcome the move towards well-written, apleasure to read serious books, which is in sharp contrast to a lot of the history books I had to read at uni.

In fact, as long as she's not writing about herself.... I do think that 'first person' writing has to be handled with care, and sometimes I can see why the guide has banned it with such abandon.

Anyway. Never heard of London Fog, either. Or Esprit.

Autist,

Really agree with you (for once ) about Rage Against... and Marilyn Manson. I'm deeply suspicious of highly-popular "politicised" or "shocker" bands who make millions for the very people they're supposedly criticising/trying to subvert. Someone's laughing and it's not The Kids (tm).

I don't think it'll be long before record companies "manufacture" alternative and controversial acts, perfectly tailored to their target audience. Listening to the predictable teen-angst drone of the "nu-metal" bands, I wouldn't be surprised if that process has already started.

Just look at that grunge band they created for the Levis ads, Stiltskin was it? Maralyn Manson is soooo very shocking and out on a limb, but he's just doing what Alice Cooper was in the 70's, and not being so clear, direct, political or inteligent about it. There's just no message behind the shock. Which is a shame because he comes across in interviews and stuff as a really inteligent bloke, but there's a real dearth of ideas in the music / lyrics.

I think one of the points this woman makes though (in the 'no space' bit. Can I write this here), is that while these alternative bands/styles or whatever may start off as an original scene, they pretty soon get colonised by the image makers.

Which isn't to say that bands like 'Rage...' don't then get into somekind of parasytical/hypocritical relationship with the image makers ('Stiltskin' is a case in point I guess, but I thought they were an original band, who sold their tune to Levis in order to get attention, while Levis were going for the 'discover a new space' approach. I could be wrong though, maybe they were manufactured).

But I think the point she makes is that it is impossible for any area, scene or whatever to avoid getting taken over these days, so whether or not they were original/independant in the first place, they won't seem like it after about five minutes. It's not that I don't agree that MM is derivative, but even if he weren't we would be able to go after him on the grounds of being the spearhead of a slick marketing machine, because it is impossible not to be these days.

Anyway.

I think the point here is that branding / marketing is a great tool - it's what you do with that tool that makes the difference. When you're selling a brand not a product, then you can get away with a shoddy product, the brand is still being sucessful because no-one is going to look forward that.

MM is selling rebellion, or at least thats what his branding suggests, but in fact there's almost nothing daring in what he does.

A lot of the conversations here seem to have run out of steam a little so i thought i'd follow up on some of the points people have been talking about in the Introduction conversation here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/classic/F85144

in an expansion on the topics raised in Chapter Four.

Well, there is that to. Yess.

... or even '...too. Yes.'

I just wish there was some way of rebranding social harmony, community values, internationalism and personal freedom and integrety that used to define the socialist movement, before the brand was trashed by those seeking to establish this global nightmare were complying with now.