An accidental part of this research has been marathon sessions of home-buying television shows, principally "Property Virgins" and "House Hunters".

The primary appeal of "Property Virgins" is the strange post-nationalist blend of Canadian Realtor/host and mostly mid-western clients. It can be surprisingly difficult to tell whether an episode is taking place in suburban Toronto, but in the end it usually is. And the nice neighborhood what-can-you-afford headfake opening is always fun.

Wherever the houses are located, there is inevitably a shot wherein the buying couple enters the kitchen and, bracketed by b-roll of the appointments and hardware, one of the virgins comments on either: a) the presence of a nice island workstation, or b) the disappointing absence of same.

After walking through enough kitchen layouts myself I realized why islands are so valued by prospective home buyers. Today, cooking is so often viewed as entertainment in mass media that home buyers--when imagining their occupancy of a particular property--project themselves into the kitchen as a show not a room. In a sense the question their asking themselves is: can I shoot a cooking show in this kitchen?

An island most often means you can address your television audience. Without one, food preparation is done back turned, looking away from an audience. One might as well be in a 19th century scullery, not an open-plan sound stage. I think this reaction is completely unconscious, but with open plan living areas with an ability to converse with company while working in a kitchen reproduces the television effect. In this sense its likely a proxy for a wish deeply held with home buying.

I think it leads back to the notion that celebrity experience is an increasingly powerful prism for framing and addressing consumption. Even , safely buffered by twenty plus years of media evolution and celebrity magnification, clearly highlights the role that projection plays in evaluating a house.

As it happened.

Viewing in HD recommended.

I wish to touch on the deep connections between McNamara and organizational thinking. McNamara's work applying civilian oversight and robust operations research to the armed forces yields interesting object lessons. His perspective is certainly established by his work, coming out of the Harvard Business, to establish a similar rational revolution at Ford Motor Company. In that time, his invented management caste held an inviolable faith in data: the sourcing, transforming, and establishment of organizational containers. He accomplished similar changes in government. And these vectors of modernist thinking would be tested mightily when management theory collided with the bewilderingly complex "theater" of post-colonial Southeast Asia.²

What makes a study of McNamara so rewarding is his exposure at the elbow of modernism and post-modernism, terms I use only in their context at least as it relates to organizational thinking and perhaps information design. His testimony in Errol Morris' The Fog of War, an essentially uninterrupted two hour survey of his intellectual life that is at turns confessional and professorial. In particular, McNamara's focus on the role of empathy seems to me an acknowledgement of the irrationality present at the core of the human mind. His awareness of this conflict appears strongly in his writing following his public service.

To apply a man's life of controversy and the nihilogism of the Vietnam war to the running of organizations, or the transfer of knowledge or the design of information may appear flip. I run that risk in suggesting his success and failure therein have useful object lessons for a careful student.

Notes

1. The title may be particularly connected to Halberstam, but I'm not sure. It's an interesting choice for sure.

2. I believe an examination of McNamara's theater of thought as it relates to a continuum between perhaps Lévi-Strauss and Foucoult--at least their work on the formation of collective meaning and the roles and responsibilities of man--merits some academic attention.

Presented in order of occurrence.

As listed on claim ticket no. 071528, W New York Hotel (541 Lexington Avenue)

As remembered by the author; unverified.

Feedback for sellers of: press photo of Robert MacNamara; Knoxville 1982 World's Fair drinking glass; Return of the Jedi McDonald's drinking glass; Empire Strikes Back McDonald's drinking glasses complete set; Zabriskie Point on VHS, respectively.