In the time of Four Or Five Americas, the possibility of a meaningful alliance between environmentalists and religious leaders strikes me as pretty compelling, and it’s been getting steadily more attention for about a year now. Here’s an article sort of on the subject (particularly focused on Rev. Richard Cizik) from the L.A. Timess. Also related, E.O. Wilson’s recent book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.
Moyers took a more pessimistic look at the attitudes some religious thinkers toward the environment in a March 2005 New York Review essay, which is available online only to subscribers, but whose tone is hinted at by the title: “Welcome To Doomsday.”
Posted Under: America,Believing,Ethics
This post was written by Rob Walker on October 11, 2006 Comments Off on Green Believers
Usually when I’m thinking/writing about consumption, I’m essentially focused on the moment people buy something. I don’t think I’m alone in this: consuming and buying sound like the same thing.
But of course you could also argue that the purchase moment is actually just the beginning. The process of consuming something doesn’t end until it’s gone (in the case of, say, a beverage) or thrown out, or dissolved, or whatever. And we all know it’s pretty common to feel much differently about a given object at the end of this process than at the beginning.
For a long time I’ve had this on my list of “themes to address some day,” but lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because we’ve been in the process of getting rid of a lot of stuff. For instance, the sneakers above — one of two pairs I just threw away. Pondering the conclusion of my personal history with these consumable objects has given me a reason to act on a months-old invitation to join an online “sneaker community,” called Sneakerplay.
The track bike—fixed gears, no brakes—is the new skateboard. We’re making six, basing them on the eighties; they’ll be out for February. The Williamsburg kids rock these with rolled-up pants, Vans. Messenger chic. You can do wheelies and skids and be in another borough in twenty minutes, and that’s whassup.
Strictly speaking, I’m not sure I would say it’s new, but I do think that what he’s calling “messenger chic” could be pounced on by the trend industry in a much more aggressive way than it has been to date. As an interesting bit of background, this Village Voice article on “mutant bike culture” was quite memorable — and not just because it includes a Brooklyn Industries guy bumming out about “malicious” graffiti on his shop window. Also possibly interesting (I keep meaning to get this book), is Pedal: “a wild ride alongside a band of New York City’s most feared and respected inhabitants: bike messengers.”
This is something I meant to bring up a while ago (but instead found myself dealing with hard drive failure etc.): A piece on Beliefnet by Michael Shermer on the subject of who believes in God and why. Really it’s about the “why” part, more than the who. The basic point of it is that believers tend to give one answer for why they believe, and a different kind of answer for why they figure other believers believe.
When speaking of themselves, the most popular answer believers gave was some varation on “The good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of the world or universe.”
When speaking of others, their top answer was something like: “Belief in God is comforting, relieving, consoling, and gives meaning and purpose to life.”
Shermer suggests that the results are evidence of:
intellectual attribution bias, in which people consider their own beliefs as being rationally motivated, whereas they see the beliefs of others as being emotionally driven. By analogy, one’s commitment to a political belief is generally attributed to a rational decision (“I am for gun control because statistics show that crime decreases when gun ownership decreases”), whereas another person’s opinion on the same subject is attributed to need or emotional reasons (“he is for gun control because he is a bleeding-heart liberal”). This intellectual attribution bias appears to be equal opportunity on the subject of God. The apparent good design of the universe, and the perceived action of a higher intelligence in daily activities, are powerful intellectual justifications for belief. But we readily attribute other people’s belief in God to their emotional needs and how they were raised.
I guess I would have thought that — to take the gun control example — a person who holds that position not only sees his or her point of view as rational, but would see those who agree as being rational, and those who disagree as being half-cocked, emotion-driven thinkers. It seems surprising that someone who professes belief in God would be so cynical in evaluating the thought processes of others who believe the same thing.
On the other hand, this gap between how we think of our own decisions vs. how we think of other people’s is something that, obviously, I ponder all the time in writing about consumer behavior. And it’s actually not that unusual to hear people suggest that while they like the good design / natural beauty / perfection / complexity of [insert trendy brand/product here] — everybody else who is consuming that same thing is just following the trend or joining the herd or whatever. I suspect this is not just a matter of cynicism about other people’s decisions — although that may be part of it — but a form of self-flattery: The more everybody else’s decision process seems suspect, the more more mine seems pure and considered.
After the French hit song, the jokes, videos games and adverts, there is now a new face to the most infamous headbutt of all time.
Italian defender Marco Materazzi is to publish a book containing 249 phrases he might have said to France captain Zinedine Zidane to invoke the now-retired midfielder’s wrath.
The book is called “What I really said to Zidane,” and Materazzi has been writing about it in a column on Italian sports newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport’s website.
Posted Under: Uncategorized
This post was written by Rob Walker on October 9, 2006 Comments Off on Commodification of headbutt continues …
Jim Cramer behaves like a lunatic on his CNBC show, but he’s actuallly a smart guy sometimes. I say that of course because he’s just made a point that I agree with, in today’s WSJ. Namely, he points out that despite all the headlines you’ve seen about the any-second-now collapse of consumer spending, it never seems to happen. Consider this list of culprits that we’ve all heard are about to bring the consumer to his/her knees, he writes:
A new credit-card bill that would permanently set back the consumer by making it too prohibitive to default; a triple hurricane scourge that wrecked the Southeast coast; a natural-gas heating bill which tripled, leaving consumers devastated; a dramatic decline in the value of each American’s bedrock investment, the home; a debilitating war in Iraq that has sapped the optimism needed for robust spending; and, worst of all, a quick doubling of the price of gasoline.
And yet:
Critics are just now waking up to the fact that the consumer may very well be going through the healthiest month of spending we have seen in many years. There are plenty of ephemeral gauges, including some easily manipulated data from the Commerce Department, that reveal overall consumer spending. Nothing, however, touches retail sales as an indicator of how robust the consumer is, and those numbers being reported just now are quite simply off the charts. We are seeing numbers from the major retailers — both high-end and low, mass and teen — so strong that the consumer is not only not dead, but he’s at the peak of health.
He’s got a point — although personally I wonder what explains it, how and why it is that consumer spending seems to thrive no matter what in recent years. Here’s a link, but it will only work for subscribes, I assume.
In Consumed: Shade Clothing: Threading between the gospel of fashion, and the Gospel.
Chelsea Rippy enjoys browsing through fashion magazines, watching “Project Runway” and shopping. Actually, the shopping bit is only partly true; she enjoys it up to a point. Sometimes it takes her much longer than she’d like to find the right clothes, partly because she is stylistically finicky, but mostly because she is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and hopes to follow its teachings on the matter of modest dress. So low-cut jeans, tiny T-shirts and dresses with plunging necklines pose problems. Or they did, before she decided to start her own company, Shade Clothing. She was 29 and a mother of two, and her specific goal at the time was to build a business around resolving the hip-but-modest dilemma for other young Mormon women. … Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site, via this no-registration-required link.
From Pick-Me Products: “Open this authentic looking ‘bible’ and begin to share the scripture for the day as real flames are seen coming from your ‘bible.’ This full size book comes with a battery operate ignition system…. Only $44.95!”
While I basically detest the New York Mets, I’m sympathetic to their fans who feel that:
The addition of black to the team’s color palette in 1998 betrayed and disrupted this proud aesthetic history, transforming the franchise from one of baseball’s best-looking teams into one of its ugliest…
That language comes from an online petition that vigorously protests the use of black in the the team’s uniform, “call[ing] upon the ownership, management, and equipment staff of the New York Mets to DITCH THE BLACK and reinstate blue to its rightful place of chromatic supremacy in the team’s color scheme. It’s time to restore the club’s aesthetic heritage and make the Mets a team we can all be proud to look at once again.” There are already more than 800 signatures, and I’m thinking that number will grow.
Who could be behind this project? There can be only one answer.
Update (10/8): NYT story on Ditch The Black. (Highlight: “To Mr. Lukas, the change bordered on sartorial sacrilege. ‘It would be like if in Washington they decided that the red, white and blue is a little outdated, and maybe we should change the red to a burgundy.'”
In addition Wonder and Old Spice and any number of real brands included in the film Talladega Nights was one that — I believe — is imaginary: Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. So far as I know, you can’t really buy Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. You can, however, buy a Laughing Clown Malt Liquor cap. In fact, they’re on sale. Which might be an indicator that they aren’t exactly catching on.
Still, I think imaginary brands are pretty interesting. The Times ran a story earlier this year about fake brands from the era before product placement became a huge business — Beautee Soap in The Hucksters, Dazzledent in The Seven Year Itch, and so on. (Not mentioned was Vitajex, from the must-see A Face In The Crowd.) I assume there must be more contemporary examples, but all I can think of right now is the Big Kahuna Burger chain in Pulp Fiction. (Googling about that a bit led me to this site, where someone is selling “Bad Mother Fucker” wallets.)
I also came across this article about a German design firm called Schein Berlin, which apparently specializes in fake brands:
In addition to providing products to other TV series, they’ve been designing fake products for the RTL soap “Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten” for five years. For this one show alone, they’ve invented 380 fictional brands, some of which have come into existence in as little as 20 minutes to an hour to meet a set designer’s last-minute needs.
The article says the firm also “built a complete Russian supermarket” for The Bourne Conspiracy, “using hundreds of logos and labels, all of them invented.” But apparently in the film itself, this just flits by and isn’t really noticeable.
Too bad. Somebody should put on a gallery show of fake brand design. I’d love to see it.
“The Nietzsche Family Circus pairs a randomized Family Circus cartoon with a randomized Friedrich Nietzsche quote.” Here it is. Seconds of pleasure, I assure you.
At some point during the reporting of the Brand Underground story, I was introduced to Neek, a high school student who was into The Hundreds, and was also kind of a figure on the NikeTalk message boards. Not long after that, in fact, his notoriety on NikeTalk culminated in someone making a Neek T-shirt. (That’s it at left; the style is an echo of Supreme, of course.) Apart from being another reason that NikeTalk kind of freaks me out, I thought this development was fascinating: Neek had basically become famous by way of his fandom, to the point that he’d made some strange transition from consumer to brand. Of course when I say “famous,” it only applies in the sense of 21st Century microfame of a super-fragmented culture. But still.
Anyway, Neek ended up not being part of the Brand Underground piece, but he’s certainly an interesting manifestation of that culture, and we kept in touch. Lately he’s gotten involved with a project called Fruition — another step on the road to converting his lifestyle into a way to make a living — and I decided it would be worth a Q&A. So here it is.
Let’s start with the very straightforward background stuff about where you live and how you ended up there and so on — including where the name “Neek” comes from, if you please.
Yeah. I live in Vegas and I just graduated high school actually. I am 17 years old, turning 18 next month. I ended up in Vegas because my parents wanted to move away from the hustle and bustle in New York City. They wanted a more slow-paced life. So that is why I am here.
Grace Bonney, who has enjoyed quite of bit of success with her blog design*sponge, has taken that project to a new level: the design*sponge shop. She writes: “I’ve always wanted to have a place where I could showcase affordable, limited-edition designs by my favorite independent artists; I feel strongly about supporting the fantastic community of indie designers making their own goods by hand.”
While Bonney and various other bloggers who focus on products or designers might seem quite distant from the “brand underground” that I wrote about over the summer (using T-shirts as my example category), I see them as having fundamental similarities. So I’ve been very interested to follow how she and others have sought ways to convert what started as a hobby into a way of perhaps making a living — turning their “lifestyle into a business,” as A-Ron put in the brand underground piece. This is an interesting approach, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it, for sure….
Anyway, her initial lineup of six products/pieces includes pillows, a salt/pepper/olive set, and hand-printed wood blocks.
Posted Under: Brand Underground,The Designed Life
This post was written by Rob Walker on October 2, 2006 Comments Off on The design*sponge shop…
So announces a promotional mailing I just got, hyping a marketing-tips book that “draws lessons from today’s most interesting trends and countertrends.” The book is called The Hummer and The Mini, and that title is meant to suggest how, in today’s modern world, “every category now has many next big things — and they often contradict each other.”
The Hummer isn’t really doing that well right now, but still: Things sure have changed since, say, the 1960s, when some consumers were buying Cadillacs and others bought VW Bugs — “in lockstep,” of course.
Posted Under: The Trend Industry
This post was written by Rob Walker on October 2, 2006 Comments Off on This Just In
Although I laid off writing about Second Life on this site for a while — basically until my Second Life Consumed came out — I have continued to make forays there from time to time, both as research and as a way to maintain an intense state of denial about real-world obligations. And I’ll keep doing that in the future, but meanwhile here are a few further notes related to the column.
At one point I did actually buy a pair of the Skoopf Ultra Roller Skates that I wrote about. That’s right, bought em with my own Linden dollars — no comps!
Also, after the column had gone to press, I read about this Skoopf machinima ad, which I promptly visited and checked out.
Finally, to back up the column’s point about in-world brands, here’s a snapshot of some “outdoor” advertising in Second Life:
Posted Under: Update,Virtual Whatever-ness
This post was written by Rob Walker on October 1, 2006 Comments Off on A Smidge More Skoopf
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In addition Wonder and Old Spice and any number of real brands included in the film Talladega Nights was one that — I believe — is imaginary: Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. So far as I know, you can’t really buy Laughing Clown Malt Liquor. You can, however, buy a 
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