Authenticity, Part Three
This morning I listened to Jim Gilmore, co-author of Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want on the Sound of Ideas.
(Thanks to Ed Morrison's post on BFD for alerting me to this...I'd gotten out of my Sound of Ideas habit. Why? Because - and this is frightening, people, so brace yourselves - I've found that even when you have all the time in the world, as I do right now, you still can't get a handle on all the ideas that buzz around in your head. So, I've had no room to hear the sound of anyone else's ideas, thanks very much.)
Anyway. I've been crawling through this book for the last two months. Frankly, reading it makes me feel like I'm drunk as a skunk and stuck in the middle of an elaborate, philosophical shell game. ("Where'd he put reality again? Under that one, there? Uhhh, my head hurts....")
But listening to the show, particularly the opening discussion about which presidential candidates seemed the most authentic (Huckabee, with his cornpone accent and whimsical anecdotes about growing up in the South), reaffirmed my suspicion that authenticity is just the new "slumming it."
According to the first caller (and Gilmore) George W. Bush, with his bad grammar and down-home mannerisms, "seemed authentic." Should we glorify a perceived lack of education as a natural, desirable state? Especially when -- by the book's own standards -- rich, Yale-educated Bush is "fake, fake, fake."
I wonder, is Jim Gilmore himself authentic? He lives in Shaker Heights, after all. Shouldn't he live someplace like Collinwood in order to have real street cred?
(Thanks to Ed Morrison's post on BFD for alerting me to this...I'd gotten out of my Sound of Ideas habit. Why? Because - and this is frightening, people, so brace yourselves - I've found that even when you have all the time in the world, as I do right now, you still can't get a handle on all the ideas that buzz around in your head. So, I've had no room to hear the sound of anyone else's ideas, thanks very much.)
Anyway. I've been crawling through this book for the last two months. Frankly, reading it makes me feel like I'm drunk as a skunk and stuck in the middle of an elaborate, philosophical shell game. ("Where'd he put reality again? Under that one, there? Uhhh, my head hurts....")
But listening to the show, particularly the opening discussion about which presidential candidates seemed the most authentic (Huckabee, with his cornpone accent and whimsical anecdotes about growing up in the South), reaffirmed my suspicion that authenticity is just the new "slumming it."
According to the first caller (and Gilmore) George W. Bush, with his bad grammar and down-home mannerisms, "seemed authentic." Should we glorify a perceived lack of education as a natural, desirable state? Especially when -- by the book's own standards -- rich, Yale-educated Bush is "fake, fake, fake."
I wonder, is Jim Gilmore himself authentic? He lives in Shaker Heights, after all. Shouldn't he live someplace like Collinwood in order to have real street cred?
posted by Christine at 9:20 AM
2 Comments:
Regarding your Shaker Heights reference, I don't think economic status is a criteria for authenticity. For example, the Ritz is authentic, so much so that it's iconic.
The way I've seen "authentic" used -- and, granted, this is coming from a few years' experience in New York -- is to refer to the quaint, the old, and the working class. Like Gilmore said, everyone has their own criteria for what's "authentic."
Personally, if you want my own criteria, I think everything that exists is authentic, meaning "real." But I think "authentic" is picking up connotations like the one I described above.
Post a Comment
<< Home