The Vine

When your mother-in-law gives you a book and says, “It was too gross for me, but it seems right up your alley,” should you: (a) be alarmed, (b) be offended, (c) be flattered, or (d) start reading it immediately?

I chose (c) and (d), which is how I discovered Charlatan, Pope Brock’s fascinating, brilliantly told, historical account of medical quackery in the early 1900s. Think The Devil in the White City meets The Road to Wellville.

It is, on one level, the story of John Brinkley, who got his start as a transient hawker of miracle tonics, obtained a medical license from a shady diploma mill, and eventually grew famous and wealthy as one of the pioneers of “rejuvenation”—that is, the transplantation of goat testicles into impotent men.

But underneath the bizarre, sleazy and frequently abhorrent practices of Brinkley and many others (medical hucksters flourished in this more provincial, trusting era), you will find a story of human gullibility, suspension of reason, and willingness to be led, however implausibly, by the promise of a shortcut to happiness. The central characters, then and now, are you and I.

It’s easy to “tsk tsk” those simple, unenlightened souls of an earlier age. Who would pay the equivalent of $8,000 in current value for such a dubious experimental surgery, one aggressively condemned and repudiated by the AMA? (Brinkley would eventually be sued for more than a dozen wrongful death cases.)

But you could just as well ask, why do people today pay $29.99 for an “energy” bracelet whose benefits are acknowledged to be entirely bogus? Why is cosmetic surgery a $30 billion—and growing—global industry? Why did so many of Harold Camping’s followers sell their possessions and quit their jobs in anticipation of the Rapture?

Because we want to believe—in God, in Nature, in scientific discovery, in something beyond ourselves—never more so than when our health and vitality are involved. (We think we’re applying reason, but research shows we’re drawn to evidence that confirms what we already believe.)

“Unlike most scams, which target greed, quackery fires deeper into the Jungian universals: our fear of death, our craving for miracles,” Pope writes. “When we see night approaching, nearly all of us are rubes.”

If this sounds misanthropic, I don’t mean it to be. I’m not at all condemning belief. Objective reality has gaps in it, and each of us fills them in with something.

Just not goat testicles, please.

Photo credits: Shane Rounce, Nina Jean, Mike Fisher

PCBC’s new tagline, The Art, Science + Business of Housing, reflects the convergence of disciplines at their annual tradeshow: builders, the design community, the R&D engineers, the money guys (they’re always guys), the product manufacturers, etc., etc.

(PCBC is the parent company of The Vine.)

It also, I believe, speaks to something deeper, which prompted me to sketch (crudely) the diagram that you see here.

There’s a magical alchemy in the blending of art, science and business, and I think the key lies in balancing—and honoring—all three. Diminish art and you lack the aesthetic value that drives emotion and desire. Diminish science and you lack rigorous, analytical, objective inquiry. Diminish business and you lack a means of creating tangible, economic value.

It’s not easy to nurture all three within an organization, but for those that succeed, the results are amazing. Apple. IKEA. Nike. Pixar. GE.

I don’t pretend to know how or when our country’s housing funk gets resolved. (Here’s a promising place to start.)

But I’m convinced the solutions reside within the intersection of these circles.

Midway through last year’s NBA season, my hometown Sacramento Kings announced a name change for their building. What had been Arco Arena since the team’s arrival in 1985 would now be known as Power Balance Pavilion. (As in the makers of supposedly energy-optimizing wristbands popular among athletes.)

To locals, the change was sudden, clumsy and, frankly, inconvenient. Around here, “Arco” no longer signifies Big Oil, it’s simply the place where our Kings play.

It’s where, in our short-lived but glorious heyday of the early 2000s, “we” challenged—albeit briefly and unsuccessfully—the supremacy of the reviled Lakers, clanging cowbells so rabidly and obnoxiously that Phil Jackson and his coaching staff wore earplugs on the visitors’ bench. (Doing nothing to dispel Sacramento’s image as a hick town, I might add, but that’s a topic for another post on regional identity.)

So when the building signs were hastily replaced and the hardwood floors lacquered with new logos, we were resigned to the name change…and kept right on calling it Arco. (And yes, I’m well aware of the irony of rejecting one corporate namesake in favor of another. But, understand, the old name is attached to our memories now. It’s firmly established in our local lexicon.)

This is the reality of sports in the big money, corporate entertainment era, and we’re certainly not the first—or the last—fan base to wrestle with this. In San Francisco, the 49er faithful make their weekly pilgrimage to Candlestick (not 3Com, not Monster) Park. Boston built an entirely new facility and leased its name to TD Banknorth, but fans still watch their beloved Celtics and Bruins in “The Garden.”

Teams can supplement their revenue by selling the signage on the outside of the stadium. What they can’t do, not by decree alone anyway, is change our vernacular.

Who gets naming rights to our sporting complexes? We do.

Photo credit: Jocie SF