Design Observer has reprinted a piece from The New Republic that I really enjoyed (and would have linked to there, but I think the TNR site puts stuff behind a firewall or whatever). It’s by Rick Perlstein and it’s called “What Is Conservative Culture?”
The interesting thing about it to me is Perlstein’s point that conservative culture hangs together today partly because of a sense of marginality that is basically out of date. In the 1960s, conservative culture had much to do with an underdog/outsider feeling of fighting back against the oppressive liberal machinery, etc. That hardly seems to describe America today.
And yet … conservatives still rely on the cultural tropes of that earlier period: At one living room “Party for the President” in 2004, a woman told me, “We’re losing our rights as Christians. … and being persecuted again.” The culture of conservatives still insists that it is being hemmed in on every side. In Tom DeLay’s valedictory address, as classic an expression of high conservative culture as ever was uttered, he attributed to liberalism “a voracious appetite for growth. In any place or any time on any issue, what does liberalism ever seek, Mr. Speaker? More. … If conservatives don’t stand up to liberalism, no one will.”
I actually think one of the reasons that there are four or five Americas today is that each of the current multiple mainstreams strongly believes it is an oppressed underdog.
Wikipedia is pretty cool, I suppose. I certainly look at it from time to time (though I obviously don’t consider it a definitive final source on anything that I’m writing about). So I was interested in the big New Yorker piece about Wikipedia. It’s good. And it’s been interesting to see how people react to it. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, people get really worked up about Wikipedia — like if you criticize it, you’re an elitist, but if you defend it, you’re a rube. So people tend to quote from the story in ways that back whatever their opinion was before reading the story.
I guess that’s probably why I’m going to quote this line:
Mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures. At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth. When confronted with evidence of errors or bias, Wikipedians invoke a favorite excuse: look how often the mainstream media, and the traditional encyclopedia, are wrong!
I wish the piece had explored this a little more thoroughly. I think it’s right that there is a “newly casual relationship to truth” about these days — but why? Anyway, I really bring all this up solely as an excuse to link to this Onion story: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.
“It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. “At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world’s oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition,” Wales said. “According to our database, that’s 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven.”
Posted Under:
Pleasing by Rob Walker on July 27, 2006
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Via Faythe Levine’s blog comes word of YarisWorks, which is “a series of events and celebrations to empower everyday creativity and DIY ingenuity.” While “indie lifestyle community leaders in 12 cities across the country” will be involved, according to a press release reprinted on RedefiningCraft.com, the resulting events “are presented courtesy of Toyota’s stylish, fuel-efficient sub-compact, the new 2007 Yaris.”
The Yaris is a Toyota car aimed at young people, and I’ve actually been wondering about how it will positioned in relation to the Scion, another Toyota car aimed at young people. I guess will Scion is more sort of a DJ/street-art thing, the Yaris is more DIY. “The Yaris is all about celebrating innovation and making design more accessible,” a Toyota marketer says in the press release.
Helping out is DrillTeam Media, “a non-traditional marketing services firm” that helps its clients “access and mobilize independent, influential young tastemakers who are hard to reach and even harder to convince.”
It’ll be interesting to see just how hard it really is to convince the independent young tastemakers to let Toyota “empower” them. Faythe’s take: “This makes me feel a little sick to my stomach knowing that if corporations start doing there own fairs, who will come to us little guys’ shows?” Redefining Craft’s (sarcastic) take: “Party on and let the co-optation begin!”
That sounds like bad news for team Yaris, but we’ll see. According to one article I read last year on the subject of how artists should think about corporate sponsorship, “Selling out is more a matter of circumstance than any absolute rule. Sometimes it can be good.”
Of course, that article was in the Winter/Spring 2005 issue of Scion magazine.
In the latter half of the 1990s, we lived in the West Village in Manhattan. Somewhere during that time I had this idea of starting a Gentrification Walking Tour. It would be just like any of the other many, many walking tours of “historic New York,” but instead of visiting and pointing out the building where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin (that’s a joke), this tour would visit the various Starbucks and McDonalds and other chain locations of the Village. A very loud tour leader, who I envisioned an overweight man with a beard, a straw hat, shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a fanny pack, would barge into these retail spaces and start bellowing to the members of the walking tour about what this or that space used to be, until it was taken over in whatever year by whatever chain occupied the space now.
Consistent with most of my schemes, this one never got farther than me talking about in bars. Toward the end of the 1990s, we moved, and that was that. But I was reminded of all of this over the weekend because I finally got around to listening to the Podcasts at SweatShopper.org, in which artist Kris Hall gives a guided tour of a Wal-Mart in Maine. (I first heard about this on Marketplace, back in April.) Instead of taking off from the shouted-walking-tour idea, her project is more like an iteration of one of those headset narrations you can get at big museums. In this case, rather than hearing biographical anecdotes about Thomas Hart Benton or whatever, you get Hall telling you when to look up and count the security cameras, or making points about the secret labor history of a pair of jeans.
I’m sure some people will find her arguments a bit shrill at times, but I was impressed. Even for a listener who is not literally walking through the Wal-Mart she describes, it has the effect of making you want to look more closely and think harder about retail environments and the abundance within.
There are two recordings here, but they’re close to identical. And for those of you in Skowhegan, Maine, Hall is apparently at the local Wal-Mart, or on a public sidewalk near the store, from 2 to 4 p.m. today, “making the tour available via portable CD player to those folks who do not have ipods. If you are in the area, please come down and be part of the conversation!”
Reebok is a really strange brand. I honestly have no idea what its marketers are trying to do. They’ve associated Reebok with Jay-Z and 50 Cent, with Basquiat, with Nigo (sort of, via that whole Ice Cream thing), and from time to time with athletes.
And now? Scarlett Johansson!
“The actress has joined with the Canton, Mass., athletic giant to design and market an athletic-inspired sportswear and footwear line called “Scarlett [Hearts] Rbk,” says WWD.
Johansson’s line with Reebok will be a lifestyle collection inspired by activewear. Exact looks for the collection have not been made final, but both sides describe the pieces as “fashion forward” as well as retro; retro sneakers and cotton T-shirts will be featured.
“I like to do yoga and stretch out, so we will probably do a bunch of stuff for that,” Johansson told WWD. “Things you can wear to the yoga studio and then to coffee with your friends” — with the emphasis on the coffee part. “I like the idea of exercise and aerobics being glamorous: Olivia Newton John and women exercising in false eyelashes,” she added.
Oh. Okay.
Posted Under:
Uncategorized by Rob Walker on July 25, 2006
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So, if you want to, you can pay $50 for a “Targèt Couture Distressed Logo Tee.” This is part of a project involving a boutique called Intuition, in Los Angeles (I’m not familiar with it), selling a new line of Targèt Couture products. Which you can’t, by the by, actually purchase at Target.
“Our own Jaye Hersh collaborated with some of LA’s hottest designers to launch this fun, fashion-forward product line,” the boutique’s website explains. There’s also a $140 pair of jeans, with a Target logo on the ass.
“You won’t find any bargains here,” MSNBC reports. “The high-end clothing, handbags and jewelry range from $25 into the thousands. The new line launched on May 11, and already Intuition has sold more than 3,000 items and is quickly becoming a huge hit among Hollywood’s trendsetters.” Want to see more? Knock yourself out.
In Consumed: gDiapers: An eco-conscious product tries to get beyond eco-conscious consumers.
Jason and Kimberley Graham-Nye could have named their product the Eco-Diaper. After all, one of their chief motivations for selling a “flushable diaper system” is to offer an alternative to disposable diapers, which contribute to landfills and take years to biodegrade. But instead they went with the name gDiapers, which doesn’t mean anything.
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.
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Posted Under:
Consumed,
Ethics by Rob Walker on July 23, 2006
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I don’t know if Dr. Z thought this up, but here’s what the Detroit News (via Autoblog) says Chrysler has planned to sell Jeeps:
Bobble head characters are one way Chrysler Group plans to market its new 2007 Jeep Compass crossover to the targeted age 22 to 30-year-old urban crowd, the automaker announced Friday.
Jeep will introduce the new crossover — a non-traditional Jeep vehicle that shares the same underpinning as Chrysler’s new Dodge Caliber hatchback — through a series of television spots featuring bobble head figures beginning July 31….
The four 30-second commercials will show bobble head characters moving to Hip Hop pioneer KRS-One’s “Steady Bounce” on network, cable and online media. Chrysler chose to go with the bobble head theme because the figurines have a mass appeal to the Jeep Compass target market, the automaker reports.
In one ad, a bobble head drives a Compass through city streets as other bobble heads enviously eye the new wheels. The spot closes with the green bobble heads moving to the music under a mirror ball in the vehicle’s rear as if they were in a dance club…
The automaker will also use product placement in the cable realty show MTV’s “The Real World 18” to market the vehicle.
Jeep will also put the new Compass on display in its month-long Jeep Compass “Uncharted” music tour featuring new artists.
Boy am I looking forward to that! Sounds fresh!
So, yeah, as a matter of fact, I was browsing through the Barbie pool on Flickr, and I don’t think there’s anything weird about that at all, do you? Well, whatever. Lots of stuff in the pool was predictable and/or sophomoric, but I love this picture. The photographer has a nice group of toy pictures — and a shop on Etsy, called Swirling Thoughts: Buttons, Beads, Trinkets. These craft people are everywhere!
The other night, E and I were talking about the DaimlerChrysler ad in which a guy with an absurd moustache, identified as the company’s top executive, terrorizes a pretend journalist. I assumed this man was an actor, but then I read that he really is the top executive, and that the company is actually trying to establish him as its public face. You can see the ad I’m talking about at this (too-ludicrous-to-discuss) company site, AskDrZ.com (after the skippable flash intro, it’s ad No. 1 — just click on that when you get there).
Dr. Z is not, as the New Yorkers among you might assume, Dr. Zizmor, creepy dermatologist of subway-placard fame. It’s Dr. Dieter Zetsche, chairman of the DaimlerChrysler board of management since January 1 of this year. (Doctor of engineering, if you’re curious.) The premise of the ad is that this sort of shaggy-haired young journo with a notepad accosts Zetsche, who is about to get into his car, and asks to know how the merger of Chrysler with Daimler-Benz has paid off. Dr. Z looks at his watch and then says: “Get in.”
While mouthing a predictable hash of alleged benefits (like “better capability,” and other meaningless phrases), he whips the car around roads, spinning out and so on, while the journalist looks steadily more terrified. “Are you really a doctor?” the young guy asks. As if in answer, Z slams the car into a wall, and says to his rattled interlocutor: “Any more questions?”
That line, in combination with that ‘stache, Z’s German accent, adds to the overall feeling that he’s some sort of b-movie madman, who answers pesky questions with displays of threatening violence and borderline dementia. What is the message here? Will the mysterious Z’s weird shows of force escalate if we don’t start buying his products in sufficient numbers? Will skeptics be systematically terrorized? Is DaimlerChrysler trying to intimidate us into being impressed with its cars?
I look forward to future ads featuring Dr. Z holding preparing to push a bothersome inquisitor onto a busy freeway, or locking one in a garage with a running SUV, and asking, humorlessly, “Any more questions?”
Since quitting my last real job in 1999, I’ve had few occasions to wear a tie. I sort of miss it. Sort of. I used to spend a surprising amount of money on ties, particularly after I started working at one magazine where all the other men seemed to spend a lot of money on ties. It was weird, nobody ever talked about it, and maybe I’m the only who thought about it, but it seemed to me like the tie thing was really serious there. I was doing straight-up Zegna, Joseph Abboud, whatever it took to keep up.
Anyway, if I did have a reason to wear a tie these days, I’d consider one made by Detroit’s t0ybreaker, who I came upon by way of the Craft Magazine Flickr pool. I don’t know if I could really pull one of these off, but even if I just bought it and it stayed in the closet, I’d probably be happy.
I really think that somebody in the streetwear world ought to make ties, there’s such an opportunity there. I know that the tie is sort of the ultimate symbol of mainstream male apparel, but that’s exactly why it’s ripe for some kind of vaguely subversive treatment that’s the specialty of the urban-streetwear scene. There was a moment when I was actually trying to convince E that we should launch a line of ties to be sold at sneaker boutiques. Probably, we’ll never get around to that. But hey, if one of you streetwear cats wants to do a collabo with murketing.com, hit me up!
Cough.
Uh, meanwhile, here’s t0ybreaker’s Flickr set of ties and other crafty/DIY-ish garments.
“If you want to find people who are happy, really happy,” Michael Bierut writes in Design Observer, and really happy about design, you have to look in only one place: the letters column of Architectural Digest magazine.” Bierut looked back at the 33 letters to the editor printed in AD‘s last three issues. “Of the 33 letters, 33 of them are overwhelmingly, feverishly positive.”
For instance:
The May issue had me calling my doctor for oxygen. Never have I seen such artistic design as you presented in this issue of your publication. I applaud you for elevating my awareness of what a great artist can create, of what great people can demand of existence.
The rest is here.
Robert Lanham, perhaps best known for his Hipster Handbook, has a new book coming out in September called The Sinner’s Guide to the Evangelical Right. In connection with that, he’s started a Web site, which includes a blog (and an amusing quiz, among other things). Checking this out today, I was interested in an item about Catholic Mobile, which “provides families and individuals with inspiring Catholic content in English and Spanish that will enrich their daily wireless experiences.”
This translates into things like Catherine of Siena phone wallpaper (pictured) and “Ave Maria” ringtones, prayers and Catholic news delivered to your phone, and even a “Saint of the Day” service. “Make your phone 100% Catholic, too,” the site says.
Evanglical Right.com asks: “Is your phone a secular humanist, a Jew, or a Muslim? Do you know where your phone will spend eternity? Has your phone ever taken communion or confessed its sins to a priest?”
In Consumed: Motorola H500 Bluetooth Headset: The gizmo that overcame the Star Trek factor.
Here’s how new tech innovations are supposed to spread: First, clever young people adopt them, because that’s what clever young people are hard-wired to do. Later, everybody else catches on, and eventually even the middle-aged golf-course guy gets it. Think of text messaging or MP3 players. Now think of Bluetooth-enabled wireless-phone headsets. They sound pretty techie, and according to a recent report by Strategy Analytics, a research-and-consulting firm, sales of Bluetooth headsets nearly tripled in 2005, to 33 million units around the world. But this time the pattern looks a little different: Golf Course Guy has led the way.
Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site by way of this no-registration-required link.
Related Links.
Courtesy of the always enjoyable and not-even-slightly pedantic Uni Watch: Here’s a thoroughly entertaining thrashing of the fashionization of caps, by way of hip hop. (That general topic was touched on in a recent-ish Consumed.) “Statements like ‘I root for the Blue Jays’ are gone, and have been replaced with ‘I’m a douche bag who color-coordinates my shoelaces with my headband,'” says some guy writing for a site called The Phat free.
At Murketing.com we are strictly neutral on such matters; the goal is not to endorse harsh opinions regarding consumer behavior, but rather to point them out, for your amusement.
Posted Under:
Anti by Rob Walker on July 14, 2006
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