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. With Flickr Interlude
Flickr photo by apollosputnik
This is part of a really good (and big!) set, “Thrift Stores.”
And now I wanna be your dog. Or your agency of record.
Over at her blog on the Punk Planet site, Anne Elizabeth Moore notes that while Clamor Magazine may be closing, punk’s not dead to marketers — in fact there’s a new book coming out called Punk Marketing! (“In quick chapters that include unorthodox case studies, illustrations, and proven ideas from the best campaigns dreamed up, Punk Marketing is the new manifesto for America’s creative workforce.”) At $29.95 retail, she notes, the book costs just about what a year of Clamor might have cost, and asks: “Or, like, is the lesson here that Clamor really needed to buy Punk Marketing (AKA, Get Off Their Asses and Join the Revolution) to survive?”
The book is out next year. I hope the cover design involves a mohawk. That would be really punk.
The No Mas Q&A [Pt. 2]: Art, writing, business, and the “Baghdad Oilers.”
Here’s the second part of the No Mas interview; part one focused on appropriation, free speech, and the law. Part two deals with why founder Chris Isenberg turned to a brand as a vehicle for expressing ideas about sports, given his background as a writer, plus details about how he got things off the ground that should be of particular interest to any of you creative-entrepreneur types out there, plus the story behind the shirt that first got me curious about No Mas. Here goes.
You’re a writer, so of course I’m also curious, if you had a set of ideas about sport and culture, why did you choose this medium as opposed to say, writing a book?
Well, I guess in my own way I had tried very hard to create a career for myself as a dude who wrote long, sports feature stories for magazines. That definitely was my original intention to be A.J. Liebling or Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer or Roger Angell—to be a high-minded writer of feature pieces for magazines. And I discovered that career really was basically gone.
I have had tastes of how great a job this could be. Right out of school, I got a commission from Sports Illustrated to write a feature about the Oxford Cambridge Boxing Match. Full ride travel and a decent fee, and I wrote something I was very proud of and they said they loved but held for a year and never ran. I also tried to get funding to make a documentary about the Oxford Cambridge boxing match and failed (now of course, ten years later someone else has done it). I got an assignment from Vanity Fair to do a small profile on the bullfighter Francisco Rivera Ordonez which they killed because W came out with a story about Ordonez right before my piece was scheduled to run. I did a long piece for a magazine called Icon about Michael Ray Richardson, the former Knicks point guard who had been kicked out of the NBA for drugs and went to play in Italy, and that magazine folded right before my story was supposed to run and then a big documentary about him came out.
Cleaning Up
In Consumed: Making a hit in the culture of handmade soaps.
Of all the consumer goods cluttering your well-appointed home, one that seems relatively innocuous is soap. It turns out that this is misleading: choosing a soap involves — or at least, can involve — a thicket of choices guided by the full array of factors that define who you are as a consumer. …
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.
Additional links: Indigo Wild; Natural Magic; Indie Friendly Directory; Etsy; Craft Revolution.
The No Mas Q&A: [Pt. 1] Cassius Clay, Appropriation, Sport, Free Speech, and the Law
One of the projects on the brand underground scene that I’ve been sort of fascinated by is No Mas. The man behind it is Mr. Chris Isenberg. You’re going to get the full scoop below, but here are the basics on him. When I approached him for a Q&A, I had high hopes that I’d get something interesting out of it, but turns out he blew my expectations away. In fact, there was so much interesting material that I’ve decided to make the unprecedented move of turning it into a two-parter. Today’s installment covers some of the most thoughtful material on logo/visual remixing, intellectual property, and free speech — not to mention sports and culture — that I’ve encountered anywhere.
Part two will be in Monday, but meanwhile if the issues above are relevant to you, I encourage you to take the time to read the below.
Q: So I’m curious about the initial decision to start No Mas. Did you see it as a brand, as an art project, as a business, all of the above?
A: I definitely did not have a clear idea of starting a “brand” in the way I now think of No Mas as a “brand”, when I made the first t-shirt with a No Mas label in 2004.
Sometime in about 2001 I think, I saw a picture from 1964 of Muhammad Ali, at that time called Cassius Clay, training at the 5th Street Gym in Miami. The photo was just before the 1964 “shock the world” fight with Liston. In the photo, he’s wearing a t-shirt that says Cassius Clay in a sideways script font that looks very much like it was inspired by the coca-cola script.
The picture that was here is not here anymore.
It’s funny, Ali was really doing the exact same thing that a lot of us do now. He kind of appropriated and parodied the visual identity of the coca-cola brand to lend power to his own personal brand. That’s classic Ali. Not only was he the greatest fighter, but he was the greatest promoter and marketer. Anyway, I just wanted that Cassius Clay t-shirt really badly. So I made a run of about twelve at a screenprinter in Brooklyn. I wore them myself and I gave them to a few friends.
Wearing this particular shirt in New York City was like conducting a very complicated sociological experiment. Here I am, this white, Jewish kid wearing a shirt emblazoned with a name Muhammad Ali rejected as a slave name. It is a name that has the power of celebrity but also the power of taboo. Muhammad Ali was furious at fighters in the sixties and seventies who still called him Cassius Clay. He famously tortured Ernie Terrell who refused to call him Ali, yelling, “What’s my name fool?” as he pummeled him in their 1967 bout.
So for the people that noticed the shirt it usually produced one of two reactions:
One was basically, “Yo, that’s dope.” “That’s the coolest t-shirt I’ve ever seen.” Etc. I am not gassing myself here because all it really was a well-timed reproduction of Ali’s own work, but literally I would get at least four or five comments every time I wore that shirt out. And a lot of times the conversation ended with, “Where can I get it?” So it became clear really quickly there was a market for this product. Read more
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Kim Fellner's book 
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