Update on: Saul Bass left a footprint in Chelsea

I also saw this phone booth in Chelsea on 23rd and 8th. The Saul Bass’ logo lives on.

Today, I manage to hit architecture, Japanese pop culture, intellectual property, and branding all in one (fairly) short post.

My favorite building in New York is SOM’s Lever House. Built in the International Style in 1952, its form of blue-green glass is perfectly proportioned. The building also been known to house some eclectic art by the likes of Damien Hirst and Keith Haring. Recently, Tom Sachs put an instillation of Sanrio characters without their permission. Sanrio seems to be cool with it, where as they are generally very protective of the brand against counterfeit merchandise.

I love the telling comment from David Marchi, the Sanrio brand manager: “You know, there was Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol, and then Michael Jackson and Jeff Koons. When you’re an icon, that’s what happens… [Sachs] even put Hello Kitty’s bow on the correct side of her head. And that’s something we pay attention to.”

In “Buying In,” Rob Walker talks about how the silent Sanrio characters allow us to project meaning onto them, which is part of the reason behind their decades long popularity. Here, Sachs’ sculptures recontextualize something familiar, but using a foreign scale and material. That is only one part of the equation at play here. The other part is the authorized use versus unauthorized use of Sanrio’s intellectual property. We have these deep relationships with brands, as Walker noted, and we use them to express ourselves and formulate our identities, which I have been thinking about a lot lately. It isn’t surprising that people would want to use these brands as the source material for other kinds of expression. Unfortunately, this repurposing is often illegal, and companies are very protective of the trandmarks and copyrights of their brands. However, at the end of the day, how different is fan fiction from Sach’s work?

Late nights are a rarity, but still fun. Here is a photo taken at 3 a.m, about a week ago. Alex was craving ramen, and we scored on at this place on St. Marks. Sorry, I didn’t take photos of the food or even remember the address. I leave the food blogging up to other people I know.

Last Friday morning, I stopped by Likemind to see Piers, Noah and others, as well as to pick up an advanced copy of the book “Buying In” by Rob Walker. His publisher, Random House, offered Likemind attendees in North America free copies and kindly paid our coffee bill too. Walker is a journalist who covers marketing and consumerism for the New York Times. The book attempts to explain why we prefer certain brands, for seemingly irrational reasons. His theory is that we have a deep relationship and dialogue with the products we consume. More importantly, we use these products to create our own self-perceived identity and they give meaning back to us. Changes in marketing strategies have made the relationship even more complex, as the traditional modes of advertising such as mass television and print ads give way to the untraditional methods of “viral” or “guerrilla” marketing. The shift blurs the differentiation between marketers and consumers. Many of the cases he covers will be familiar– Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Bull, Timberland, American Apparel, and of course Apple’s iPod– especially if you read Walker’s column “Consumed” in the New York Times Magazine.

The idea works like this: we buy into brands and their products mainly in order to a tell a story about ourselves to ourselves, not just to other people. Many successful brands are a blank slate, onto which people can project various stories. These multiple meanings allow certain brands to grow beyond their initial niche. Messages from marketers as well as peers shape our perception of what a brand means. Things get interesting when Walker explains how, although we believe that we can see through marketing and branding, exposure to external messages (that is, marketing) can affect not only our perception of quality but the *actual* quality of a product. He cites an extremely interesting study by Dan Ariely, Baba Shiv, and Ziv Carmon, which gave a group of students an energy drink, its true full price, and told them a scientific study showed that the drink helped mental performance. These students did better than students who were given only the test. Surprisingly, other students who given various combinations of getting the drink, being told it was cheaper (and therefore less valuable,) and that the drink “might” improve performance all did measurably *worse* than the control group.

The relationship between our identity and our brands become apparent when we look at two human drivers that Walker mentions, wanting to be an individual and wanting to belong to a community. The two seemingly opposing internal motivations work out in fascinating ways. We buy products that conform to what we perceive to be our individual taste. However, our unconscious minds process and react to much more than our conscious minds detects. My point is not to argue that we are victims of subliminal “buy popcorn” images in movies. Rather, people are complex beings, full of, emotions, gut instincts, competitiveness and irrational thoughts. If we were truly rational beings economists could more easily explain our behavior, and everybody would be saving more, eating healthy, and exercising a few times a week. Further, the “truth” that we bestow onto our brands is relative. The actual “truth” about the brand is secondary to our perceived brand identity. As Walker notes, anti-marketing hipsters can drink a “working class” beer like FBR, when in fact, it is increasingly drunk by hipsters and less by mid-Western working class beer drinkers.

Walker also describes how the lines between marketer and consumer are blurring, as I previously mentioned. As with most business books these days, he coins a new term for this observed phenomenon, in this case “murketing.” He goes on to describe how new marketing companies hire “agents” to push products onto friends, family, local store owners, and strangers. The key insight here, is that the agents often do this for free, because they like the feeling of empowerment from sharing their ahead of the curve knowledge about upcoming products to people. What is also interesting is that many of the agents aren’t the hipster influencers in the Lower East Side that Malcolm Gladwell describes in “The Tipping Point” or as Walker names as “Magic People.” Instead, they are regular people with regular jobs, living pretty much anywhere. This idea of weak links and how influence spread through them deserves a post of its own.

Often, people make the claim that people are in control over their decisions, and are further aided today by having overwhelming access to consumer product and service information. This is true, but the issue is more complicated than that. In the past, my general reaction was that this idea, while true, is only part of the equation. We need to insure that our society supports media literacy for people to have the tools to properly deconstruct all the marketing we increasingly exposed to seeing and hearing. Now, Walker’s research suggests that media literacy is not enough.

“Buying In” is mostly descriptive, rather than normative. Walker doesn’t go out and definitely argue that murketing is itself bad, and acknowledges that he too is influenced by these forces at play. He cites his personal questioning of his allegiance to Converse sneakers as an authentic anti-establishment choice after it was purchased by Nike. He does starts this exploration some of the ethics behind our brand-based identities in his coverage of Etsy and craft culture. The founder of Etsy, Robert Kalin, states that his mission is to create authentic “connections” with the things we own. I saw him speak at the recent PFSK conference and was interested to hear him talk about wanting to move towards away from big box shopping and towards a more authentic bazaar-like experience. Walker reports that Kalin has the goal of having his entire wardrobe be hand made products from his site. While this is a noble goal, it does not attempt to unbundle our identities from our brands, be it an artisan on Etsy or the Gap. I would have liked to see Walker take his ideas further in a more normative direction, and explore the possibilities of walking away from our brand attachments. What would happen if we unplugged from our brands? How would we and those around us react to separating ourselves from our possessions? Is that even possible? Even better, what stories would we construct about ourselves? Who would we be?

I just made a muxtape.

And actually, I turned 19 in 1992, but “19 in 1991″ made better copy. In any event, 1991 was a pretty influential year. I graduated high school and started college at CMU. Back then, music was a scarce resource. Not just music, but information about new music was fairly scarce as well. We read magazines, listened to the radio, and watched MTV to learn about new music. CDs were expensive, imports from Japan or the UK were $40 and locked behind glass cases in record stores. Despite all that, it was a great time to be in college, just for the music. Freshman year in college, you could size up a person with one simple question, “so, what do you listen to?” (If you needed a second opinion, you could also look at their shoes.)

We were also transitioning from cassette tapes to CDs, analogue to digital. (Vinyl is a whole other story.)

Back in the era of cassette tapes, I made a pretty damn good mixtape, complete with of course carefully chosen songs, but also, witty titles and cover made from cut up magazines. I also made mix CDs, but it wasn’t the same.

In 1991, I made a mix tape for my sister, who was still in high school. I filled it with “college music,” precisely keeping track of the song lengths to maximize the 90 minute tape. I also had to physically borrow music from new friends in my dorm. The whole process now seems antiquated, in the post-Napster world.

A couple of months ago, muxtape launched. You can upload a mix tape, or what the kids called playlists. I must say, muxtape is impressive. I am not sure of the legal issues, but the system is smart enough to automatically link your songs to amazon.com to buy the mp3. I finally got around to making a mix tape, two months everyone else seems to have.

The theme is 1991, although just like the title, I took some liberties. So, the mix tape is more early 1990s than strictly 1991, but I really tried to stick to music that I was really into and frequently listening to, which as you can see was mostly 4AD, brit pop, with a bit of grunge, and a lot of Pixies influenced music. As I said, the early 90s were a great time to be in college. I left out the bands, I “should” have been listening, at the time, but got into late. I think that goes back to the scarcity issue. The tracks include lesser known gems from familiar voices, one hit wonders, and early singles from bands before they really hit it big. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which ones fall into which category.

Enjoy, and I wonder if my sister still has that tape…

I’m not watching the various dancing reality shows (just not my thing,) although, a lot of people seem to be. However, here are two music videos that feature some breath taking dancing.

Many, if not most, music videos have dancing. Duffy and Gnarls Barkley both just take it another level, in completely different ways. Mercy, by Duffy, has dancers, gliding as if on ice, demonstrating the epitome of smooth. Going On is manic and jittery, like someone moved by the Holy Spirit. I could both of these video multiple times in a row. Oh… wait, I already did.

I guess Spring is really here. I can’t seem to focus on writing up any “big” ideas, but I am definitely finding inspiring things everywhere, which definitely feels like a Spring attitude. Now, that I’ve said this… I will throw out that idea that, since we all know that MTV doesn’t play music videos anymore, we must be thankful for youtube. Online video isn’t just a substitute, but an improvement on watching music vids. On-demand video sharing is a much more effective model for distributing music videos, which in the end have their beginnings as advertisements for the music, like trailers for movies.

Scaffolding in ubiquitous in New York, which is always under construction. On 57th and Madison, the facade of the Nokia Flagstore gets a face lift. It, along with neighboring stores, Yves Saint Laurent and Burberry, have scaffolding that matches the store colors. At first, I thought, is this too much? I don’t think so, it serves the function of helping to maintain the store’s presence during the construction. What I like is that it shows a little more thought and intention, where there is usually none.

I was walking in Chelsea last Sunday, and approached one of Verizon’s buildings. I wondered if there where any remnants of Saul Bass‘ classic Ma Bell logo. His design was the last in the evolution of the Bell System’s logo, before the 1984 break up of the company. I was surprised, if not pleased, to see that there was, clinging to the side of the brick, leaving a fading trace of the past. I was not exactly pleased, because the logo’s successor fails to reach the original’s greatness.

The Ma Bell logo was strong, clear, and confident. (Look at the red check of the other logo, off balance, ready to tip over.) Bass designed a bell, for a company named after Alexander Graham Bell. He is credited for inventing the telephone, which rang. The logo was created back into the days of monopolies over start-ups, land lines over wireless, circuits over IP, a few indestructible phones styles over a multiple of unusable bricks, expensive long distance over universal access, clear voices over shouting through static on sidewalks, and 99.99% reliability over dropped signals. What governs the features we value, which are often mutually exclusive, in the evolution of something so pervasive as the phone?

I did a quick search for a little more history on the logo. Michael Bierut over at Design Observer, wrote a nice piece in 2005 about AT&T redesigning its logo, which they still use today. He gives the story behind Bass’ original design and his globe inspired logo for AT&T, after the 1984 break of the Bell System. By coincidence, he ended of the piece to commemorate the destruction of Pennsylvania Station forty-five years ago whose anniversary coincided with his Bass-AT&T posting. He said “graphic design, unlike architecture, leaves no footprint.” Perhaps he was wrong.

The shifts of the city, both graphic and architectural are natural. The images on a building’s facade are not quite removed as a snake’s shedding its skin, but decay and erode. An evaporating logo has a half-life, akin to a sweaty glass’ ring left on a coffee table, waited to the properly cleaned or covered with a stack of magazines.

Thanks to Frank who sent me this link to the Chicago rap group, Psikotic, who wrote a rap about the Economist, with lines like “the magazine that tells the world how it should be, cream of the crop since 1843.” They also rap about McDonalds and the Internet. Enjoy the awesomeness.

Image source: amazon.com

Blog is back, still not exactly right, but at least, the layout isn’t the default.

I went to hear Ed Lin read his new novel “This is a Bust” at the Asia Society. I got stuck at work and came a little late, in the middle of the introduction, which means I missed the photo op. The novel is about a Chinese American cop who works a beat in Chinatown in the 70s. The book is pure pulp genre crime fiction.

I bought a copy, but wished there was an audio book read by Lin. He did a good job reading, giving different voices to the various characters, which was unusual and fun. When I was getting my book signed I thought about telling him, he sounded like the voice actors on Cowboy Bebop, but chickened out. I’m not a big genre reader, but the setting is of interesting to me, because I’ve been visiting Chinatown for a long time, even if as an outsider.

The Q&A was so-so, as they usually are. But I did learn that he likes pulp fiction and punk rock. Great to hear him mention Hüsker Dü and the Dead Kennedys. But the highlight of the Q&A was when he recognized a MySpace friend in the audience, whom he had presumably never met in person before last night, and said, “oh are you [insert some name that starts with D]?”