Image source: murketing,eventbrite

I’m a little behind in the blogging, but I heard Rob Walker for a Q&A with Danielle Sacks from Fast Company, on his book on murketing called Buying In. The event was at the ADC and hosted by the fine folks at psfk. As a speaker, Walker is likable and tells a good story. The questions were designed to give a run down of a book, which was good because it seems like most of the audience hadn’t read it yet. However, there were some nice tidbits that where not in the book. I especially appreciated his condor in stating that coining and branding “murketing” had originated in semi-seriousness; however, the realities of being a writer, (even one who has a weekly column in the New York Times Magazine) means that he needs to be known for his ideas and words.

Money take-aways (which I will paraphrase) :

- Apple iPod users went for fringe pioneers to a tribe of fans. Do you know of any Zune fanatics? Please contact him if you do, because the Zune is basically the ultimate anti-iPod.

- Obama has “projectability,” not unlike Hello Kitty, which allows people to project their ideals and images upon him. Where as, Hilary Clinton was working with a predefined concept in people’s minds, which she had to pivot against.

- American Apparel dropped their sweatshop free branding in order to move from niche to mass. However, they didn’t drop their ethical labor ideals. To them, ethical business practice IS business practice.

- Marketing formulas don’t work because “most formulas ignore culture and culture changes.” What made one campaign or strategy work in a certain time and place may not translation to another implementation because “culture marches on.”

- And probably my favorite idea of the night: saying “I’m down with that,” and clicking a Save Darfur Facebook group isn’t activism.

Video Source: youtube.com

I was in Pittsburgh a few weekends ago, and finally made it to the Warhol Museum. Regardless if you like his aesthetics, Warhol’s influence on post-modern culture is unquestionable. Our current ideas of celebrity, selling out, authenticity, urbanism, mass brands, and cultural production (to name a few) can in some way be traced back to Warhol, whose life was as much of his art as the objects his produced. Many say that if he didn’t do what he did, then someone else would have. But someone didn’t and Warhol did, which makes the point moot.

His appearance on the Love Boat with the parents from Happy Days (which I remember seeing in re-run in the 80s) pretty much encapsulates this influence. From just being on the show, to interacting with middle America sit-com icons to proving the mass appeal of his art, the clip shows it all.

Image source: myspace.com

I’m feeling really nostalgic lately, maybe it’s because the Pixies have reunited, or the launch of muxtape, or that I’ve been catching up with friends from high school and college in Facebook, and then of course, was my roadtrip to Pittsburgh (where I spent my college years.)

For all the reasons above, I’ve been recently listening to my catalogue of Bob Mould and his 90s band Sugar: Workbook, Cooper Blue, and File Under Easy Listening. This prompted me to look into Mould more recent recordings. I had heard that he was went electronic (which is sort of true) and had been meaning to check him out again for a while. So, I finally got his most recent record, District Lines. (Ok, when I say “got,” I mean I bought the mp3s on amazon.com.)

Music was such a huge part of my past especially in my college and post-college years, that there is a distinct soundtrack that I can hinge to parts of my life. If bands are brands as Grant McCracken recently and brand formulates our identities as Rob Walker suggests, then we are what we listen to. However in revisiting this albums, what’s changed over the years, isn’t just what we listen to that is most striking, but *how* we listen to it.

I played it a few times from start to finish. In the age of mp3 downloading and streaming (even the legal ones on myspace or band sites,) who still gives an album three or four full listens just to see if they can get into it? More often than not, I jump from site to site, checking out singles, which often do not even get a full play. Tracks that I immediately like get frequent (sometimes even obsessive plays) for a week before I move on the next ones, most other get are quickly forgotten. The music listening experience is akin to Galactus, the devourer of planets from Marvel Comics, who descends upon a planet to suck all life from it, before it moves on to the next one.

District Lines was a return not only to a musician I’ve admired for years, but also a return to a way of listening to music. I love how Mould uses the traditional album structure, built around tracks 1 and 4. Track 1 “Stupid Now” opens on the quiet side, not unlike “Sunspot” of his solo album, Workbook. But then, the song shifts into great power pop, with melodies layered underneath the noisy guitars that fans expect from Mould. Track 4 is the *hit* track. In this case, “Old Highs, New Lows” shows the electronic influence of DJing at Blowoff, his DC-based party, and is, for me, as least, the biggest track on the album. From his involvement in the electronic scene, Mould started adding electronic elements to his records, like Modulate (which I haven’t bought, but it is now somewhere up on the list,) which confused critics and die-hard rock fans. Maybe he was getting used to the form, or his listeners needed to get used to his new direction. Many people have noted for years, that labels don’t have the patience to nature a musician to develop a sound over a few albums. However, I’m not sure audiences have the patience today either. But it is great to be able to trace the progression of a career over 20 years, plus he blogs.

Image source: jnd.org

A couple of weeks ago, I finally finished, “The Design of Future Things,” by Donald Norman. I loved his popular book, “The Design of Everyday Things.” Norman is clearly an important thinker in the subject of design and usability. He tackles the intelligent systems that are being designed for our homes, offices, cars and personal devices. Instead of writing a full blown book review, I want to highlight on idea raises towards the end of his latest book, which is the entitled “The Science of Design.”

In this section, he cites that design is an interdisciplinary field, which often combines, art, social science, engineering, and business. Of the fields which comprise design, each field falls within a spectrum of formal methods of evaluating design. Engineering has quite formal approaches, and aesthetics tends to resisting them. Norman calls for a “science of design” because he feels that more rigor is needed in the intelligent systems he describes the book. The argument is easy to accept after reading about the many failures in the initial attempts at intelligent systems, which he documents in the book.

Norma does not offer the specifics of what this methodology would look like. While there are benefits to a formal approach to evaluating design, I would argue that we need to proceed with extreme care in creating an approach. My fear is that the easy route will be taken, which would blindly try to build evaluation tools based on medical experimental methods, which is where “quantifying research” usually ends up. This would be clearly wrong. Understanding if a cancer drug treatment worked is much more straight forward than if and more importantly why a design worked. (I won’t go into the problems of medical experimental methods, of which there are many.) Tom Reeves from the University of Georgia has some interesting thinking in this area when looking at methods of evaluating interactive educational tools.

Obviously, someone could create an experimental measure if a person used, learned, and understood the design properly. However, a simplistic efficacy rate (99% of testers used the design “properly”) may miss the big picture of, for example, a disenfranchised population who are not being designed for, which raises questions about the ethical and political responsibility of the designer. (Products such electronic voting booths, public transport, and educational tools are examples which readily come to mind.) Further, the leaps in innovation often require a lag time for people to understand and integrate the new design features into their lives. The temptation to overuse design evaluation tools will be great for companies who risk millions of dollars to roll out products. If the evaluation tools are poorly implemented, innovation may decrease as companies and innovators choose safer designers over ground breaking products such as GUI desktops, because they don’t initially “test” well. In the end, Norman’s call for a science of design is an important one, and it ties into the ethics of design that I’ve been thinking about lately. So, I suspect that there will be more posts in the future on the subject.

Images source: latimes.com

I just saw Sex and the City movie opening weekend, arriving to the theater 30 minutes early to find 100 people in front of me. I had avoided the trailers (which basically spills most of the movie) and reviews, so most of the plot twists were still a surprise. To that idea, I am going to avoid major plot spoilers, will with bring up a few product or cultural references and minor scenes that will not ruin the movie. But if you’re a purist, you’ve been warned.

I heard that the movies was getting bad reviews (which is now leading to the inevitable backlash to the backlash.) After seeing I could guess why the critics were panning, and my gut instincts were confirmed after reading up what the critics said after my screening. The movie was made for fans, and the critics for the most part obviously were not watchers of the show. They complained about all the product placement in a movie based on a show the made “Manolo Blahnik” a household name. Furthermore, an early voiceover states that a major theme is “Labels and Love.” Note that labels come first. If you were watching for the fashion you were not disappointed (Louis Vuitton, Vera Wang, Dior, Vivienne Westwood, all make appearances along with the Manolos.) If you wanted new insight on human behavior or a stretch in cinematic achievement, you were disappointed.

The labels of SATC taps into some of my recent readings and posts. Especially relevant is the idea that we create identities from our brands that Rob Walker explores in “Buying In.” In the middle of a very good read, “Transformations,” by Grant McCracken who examines our culture of transformation. Combining these two ideas show the way people seek transformation of the self with brands and in the cast of SATC fan through fashion labels.

Years after the HBO series ended, the cultural currency of SATC is shockingly strong, even if the SATC fan has reached point of cliche. (Before, I delve too far into discussing the SATC fan and lest you think I’m taking easy cultural criticism pot shots, I’ll just admit now that I made plans to see the movie back in January.) Defying negative reviews and blowing out opening box office estimates, fans of the show arrived in droves and in dress. The most telling sign of the strength the shows influence is the film’s ability to self-reference the caricature of the SATC fan, with shots of other groups of female foursomes out for the night. Even more so, we see the on-screen characters state they stopped drinking their once prerequisite Cosmopolitans cocktails (which was the signature drink of the show,) because Cosmos become too popular. The applause which erupted at the end of my screening proved that the audience didn’t take offense. They chose affirmation over critique of the film’s self-awareness of SATC’s cultural impact.

That self-awareness is assuredly post-modern. The movie offers an urban princess roadmap. Moving from renting luxury bags from the internet to owning the real thing suggests McCracken’s idea that our society is not only transformational, but also one of *upward transformational*. The ultimate end point is the penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue, with a closet that evoked an audible gasp from my fellow audience members. Literal references to the fairy tale are seen in the film via a young daughter’s request to have Cinderella re-read to her, which reveals the existence and the power of the SATC myth of (for the vast majority of fans to realize) the unobtainable. Therefore, the myth relies on a simulation of a lifestyle which is constructed and supported by both the creators and actors of the show, as well as, the fans.

The simulation relies on more than buying knock off LV bags on Canal Street, but the SATC creators involvement as well. Sarah Jessica Parker’s foray into producing fashion is her Bitten line, with Steve & Berry, a ultra-inexpensive clothing chain where dresses cost under $10. The relationship of the culture and myth SATC and the fashion world is complex. Vera Wang criticized the Steve & Berry line, perhaps feeling defensively of rendering the sanctity of not only the fashion designer but of luxury itself. I guess they made up because a Wang gown has a fairly prominent placement in the movie. Perhaps, Wang realizes that in this new world of simulated luxury, she is as dependent on SATC and Parker as they are to her. It is hard if not impossible today to make couture profitable, thus designers use couture for brand building and eventually go mass to make the serious money. (Teri Agris’ “End of Fashion” is still to my knowledge the best description of the evolution of fashion from top down scarcity to horizontal mass.)

This duality of the simulation, of the myth maker and believer mutual reliance on each other should ultimately not be that surprising, although it feels that it should. The relationship is a house of cards of interlocking layers, and seemingly contradictory forces.

With the current world of mass luxury and simulated luxury, the end result is that the very idea of luxury itself becomes a myth and part of the simulation. It is rendered meaningless by both the producers, buyers, and aspirers. We must keep up the illusion, but how can this balancing act last? Removing scarcity, will ultimately destroy the idea of luxury. Perhaps, it is already gone, as Cathy Horn has wisely suggested, and if that is true, what comes next?

I was walking in midtown today and saw crowds of people staring and pointing at the fairly new New York Times Building. I generally ignore this kind of gawking, but there were more people stopping than the average film shoot gets. I got a little worried, in case, something *bad* happened. After a couple of blocks I finally asked someone, and was told that someone was climbing the building. Apparently, two climbers, Alain Robert and Renaldo Clarke scaled the New York Times Building. I caught a glimpse of the second one, who started around 6.00 pm.

Image source: Flickr

Lots of press and media coverage on Millennials (and the Gen Xers who loathe them) has been recently crossing various news media outlets. The back and forth on Radar Online is particularly telling. The slap down by Gen X representative Robert Lanham and the rebuttal by Alex Pareene, is highlighted by their references to a 90s Gen X Time magazine article and the movie “Reality Bites,” the so-called movie about Generation X, and the following indignation by Gen Xers. Trying to boil a generation down to a few stereotypical traits is never going to satisfy a large group of people, especially those being examined. We live in a society of individualism, which is antithetical to that kind of categorization. I recall seeing “Reality Bites,” and found the idea of it speaking for “my generation” laughable. Not that it was a terrible movie, but can you really encapsulate the complexity of people born in a twenty year span in 100 minutes?

Generation X resented being deemed by “slackers” for basically being young, by their Baby Boomer predecessors. Ten years later, the Millennials are reacting against the labels of being “A.D.D. Facebook addicts.” What is so surprising?

Why aren’t people seeing that this conflict of generations as just the way human nature and history work? Each generation is always afraid and resentful of the next one, just like a king wanting to produce heirs but being afraid of them usurping his power. In today’s youth obsessed culture, parents still strive to be cool in their middle age and beyond. In the 90s, I remember reading a quote in article on Gen X, with a quote I’ve carried with me. A Boomer being interviewed said, “We weren’t supposed to get old,” which an American interpretation  of the traditional generation gap. In one sense, yes, I can appreciate the underlying social forces which produced this continual sentiment (which goes far beyond this one person.) On the other hand, I just want to say, get over it.