A few weeks ago we rented The Great Rock N Roll Swindle, which I’d never actually seen, or had seen so long ago that I had basically no memory of it.
I was working on the “brand underground” story at the time, and I think maybe because of that I noticed these T shirts in one particularly absurd scene. Given the context of the movie, I assume they’re fake, and meant as satirical. But who knows? Anyway, I think somebody should make these now.
Incredibly bad movie, by the by, but some of the live-performance clips are amazing.
I was surprised when my snotty review of the Chrysler Dr. Z ads resulted in several comments defending it. Today, however, Ad Age runs a story: “Chrysler’s Dr. Z cure fails; July sales slump; Buyers unswayed by $225M of ads or chairman, who was seen as ‘fictional.’” The story says “auto experts” now predict the campaign wil be junked.
But wait! Here’s the interesting thing. Inside Ad Age is an article about some research firm on the new wave of spokespeople who are … fictional! Apparently certain fictional characters — not the actors who play them, the characters — from Desperate Housewives, Will and Grace, and Shrek, can be more efffective endorsers than actual celebrities. (Confusingly, the top “spokescharacter” is the star of Supernanny, as “played by” Jo Frost — isn’t that a reality show?)
Maybe, then, Chrysler should not dump Dr. Z, but more thoroughly fictionalize him. Put him a sitcom, or a movie, or a comic book. He needs more of a back story, his character needs to be fleshed out. People already think he’s fake, so he’s basically a blank slate.
Maybe in the fictional version he could portray, I don’t know, the head of a popular car company.
In addition to Consumed, this week’s Times Magazine includes my look at the “brand underground.” Here’s a no registration required link, although it’s a rather long piece to read online.
Here are some additional links related to the story. First, the three main example brands are The Hundreds, Barking Irons, and aNYthing. Also mentioned are Futura and Stash, I think the best link to give for them is the Recon Store site. My thanks to all of these folks for the time and patience.
Two of the blogs I mention are HypeBeast and Slam X Hype. If you’re curious about the parenthetical mentions: here are links related to Neckface and Mister Cartoon. If you’re curious about something else in the story that you’d like me to link to, just say so.
I was really pleased with the idea to have a T-shirt created by Kevin Lyons for the cover shot. I think this is his site. Here are some examples of his art. Here is a T-shirt of his, and some coasters, via Arkitip.
This week in Consumed: Wawa: A low-glamour business enjoys surprising fandom. Maybe it’s the service.
The I Love Wawa group on MySpace.com has more than 5,000 members, making it the largest of several Wawa-related groups on the online-community site. Over on Livejournal.com, there’s a group called We Love Wawa, with about 950 members. This would be pretty ho-hum if Wawa were an indie band or video game. Instead, it’s a chain of convenience stores, with 550 locations in five states on the East Coast. Many of the postings to these groups involve praise for Wawa’s house-brand goods — coffee, hoagies, etc. But the most intriguing factor in Wawa loyalty may be something else: the service.
Continue reading at the New York Times Magazine site via this no-registration required link.
Additional links: I Love Wawa Myspace group; We Love Wawa’s LiveJournal; Wawa pool on Flickr.
Paul “Uni Watch” Lukas outdoes himself again by posting a bunch of amazing images from his collection of old uniform catalogs. The image at right, picked almost at random from the impressive assortment, is a foldout poster from a 1940 Spalding catalog.
Paul explains that he prefers catalogs from the 1950s or earlier, for these reasons: “(1) Uniform design was more interesting in those days; (2) catalog graphic design was more interesting in those days as well; and (3) the older catalogs are more likely to include fabric swatches, which makes the catalog much more appealing.” Check the rest here.
An item about Hewlett-Packard paying for placement in, of all things, a Jessica Simpson video (oh yeah, that’s cool) mentions that a guy in the video at one point holds some H-P gizmo in such a way that it “flashes H-P’s new hand-shaped logo on the back.” I haven’t seen the video, of course, but this reminded that H-P’s recent print ads have included a hand graphic that looked suspiciously familiar. A moment with Google brought me to this guy, who evidently had the same thought (and this guy, who thought of it earlier). Here’s the side-by-side graphics offered by Guy Number One:
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.”
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.
"
. With 
Column appears in 
.
.
Kim Fellner's book 
.
A