Flickr Interlude


snagged

Originally uploaded by swirlingthoughts.

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!

Dr. Z: Fear him

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?”

Tie Game


White on Black Bowtie Gasmask
Originally uploaded by toybreaker.

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.

Happy

“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.

Cell Your Soul

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?”

Head Gear

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.

Popping of caps

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.

Current-Events Product of the Week


Okay, so, things are hectic at Murketing headquarters right now, as the team of monkeys (by which I mean me and me alone) struggles to finish a particular project. Even so, this can’t wait: A tossing-of-Zizou T.

High Snobiety says this is from a sneaker/streetwear boutique in Switzerland, called Pulp68. The red card has been altered into what I assume is the store’s logo, since it has a 68 on it. It is, of course, a limited-edition item. See the High Snobiety entry for further details (including close-up pictures). I’m pretty sure they’ve got his age wrong, and can increase the production run by three shirts, should they choose.

Believing In Believing

An essay in the New York Review of Books by Freeman J. Dyson, reviewing a book called Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennet, has some interesting passages in relation to the recent post here on varieties of belief:

Dennett … observes that belief, which means accepting certain doctrines as true, is different from belief in belief, which means believing belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal. The phenomenon of “belief in belief” makes religion attractive to many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief in belief is easy. Belief in belief is one of the important phenomena that give a religion increased transmissibility and consequently increased fitness….

Dennett has an easy time poking fun at the modern evangelical mega-churches which pay more attention to the size of their congregations than to the quality of their religious life. The leaders of these churches are selling their versions of religion in a competitive market, and those that have the best marketing skills prevail. The market favors practical convenience rather than serious commitment to a pure and holy life…

The Big Butt

Everybody loves Virginia Heffernan, even me. The Times has her blogging now, and she has a great post about the thing that’s been Topic A (who used to say that?) around Murketing HQ: The Zizou head butt. Do not miss this exquisite time-wasting “game.” Or VH’s comments.

Art / Objects

An interesting find by Josh Spear: This artist, Gautum Rao, does oil paintings of Apple products (among other things), and I guess sells them on eBay. More of Rao’s “Mac Paintings” here.

Looking at them immediately made me think of Dave White, who is most famous for doing paintings of sneakers. (Although he paints other things too — like Stormtroopers from Star Wars, for instance.) A lengthy Sneaker Freaker interview with Dave White, including lots of images, is here.

The Four Or Five Americas

On the ever-popular topic of whether mass culture is dead, consult the most recent (July 10 & 17, 2006) issue of The New Yorker. Two features are of interest: One about Hot 97, the other about “blue collar” comedians.

Hot 97 is the New York rap station that’s become notorious as the site of several shooting incidents. According the article (by Ben McGrath), Hot 97 was the first station in the U.S. to go with to an all-hip-hop format, back in 1992. That was a long time ago, and throughout the piece there are glimpses of and allusions to something we have all come to take for granted since then: Hip-hop’s enormous cultural reach and influence. If you doubt that Jay-Z is mass, note that his supposed offense at the remarks of a Cristal executive in The Economist “generated international news.” McGrath’s article, which is really good, is not about the relationship of hip-hop to mass culture, but let’s just acknowledge: hip-hop is mainstream.

The “blue collar” comedians are Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy and a couple of others. The piece is by Tad Friend, and it’s also very good. (Friend is one of my favorite magazine writers.) The general theme is that these guys are hugely successful in a way that basically freaks out the people who run the entertainment business. If those people thought about it, Friend suggests, they might “have to confront the idea that there are indeed two Americas, and that theirs – the isolate island states of Manhattan and Hollywood – is wildly out of step with the rest of the country.” For instance, Foxworthy has sold 15 million comedy albums, “more than twice as many as Steve Martin and Richard Pryor combined.” Larry the Cable Guy’s catch-phrase, Git-R-Done, “is the most profitable phrase in comedy,” Friend writes. “Last year, the comedian sold more than seven million dollars worth of novelty merchandise in convenience stores alone.” Clearly, the Blue Collar Guys are mainstream.

Neither of those articles is online, unfortunately. The Hot 97 article is online; the Blue Collar one isn’t. (My mistake on this — thanks Steve Portigal.) Here, from the same issue, is John Cassidy’s review of The Long Tail. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not passing judgment on it one way or the other, but Cassidy generally takes issue with its contention that mass culture is, in fact, over, and that we’re headed to an all-niche world. Cassidy argues that people will continue to swarm around event movies like The Da Vinci Code, whatever the reviews or word-of-mouth are like, so they can “feel part of a social event.”

I tend to think that that’s true. I think it’s impossible to deny that the world is niche-ier than ever, I just I don’t think a lot of niches necessarily mean that mass over. To me, this issue of The New Yorker suggests that the mainstream has multiplied. I don’t think there are two Americas, I think there are more. I think there are probably four or five versions of “the mainstream” now, each of which could and should be characterized as “mass.” Mass, after all, doesn’t have to mean every single person in the country – it just has to mean big enough to feel, you know, really big.

Doesn’t hip-hop America feel really big? How about “blue collar” America (meaning the audience for those comedians, not actual blue-collar workers)? Can you deny that either one is mass? And yet, how much overlap is there between members of these two mass cultures? I also think you could make a case for a sort of Rick Warren/“Passion of the Christ” mainstream, and maybe an “alternative” America, and possibly a (smaller, but still big enough to be mass) jet-set or cosmopolitan or maybe post-national America. Maybe each overlaps with some of the others. Each of these can probably be divided into a bunch of niches, but that doesn’t cancel out the mass part of the equation.

I’m just winging it here, you understand, but basically I think the niche vs. mass debate is phony. It’s built on a false choice. There have always been niche cultures, that didn’t happen because of the Internet, or cable, or whatever. And as long as there is a need for people to feel as if they are part of something larger than themselves (which would be: always) there will be mass culture – or mass cultures, I should say.

More on the handmade…

A few further thoughts on the handmade world, following last week’s Consumed on the DIY thing. The most interesting response came from my friend Wendy, who said that in the course of some research she’d done on luxury consumers, handmade-ness was often something people cited as a marker of luxury.

That makes sense, although of course I hadn’t really thought of it in connection with DIYism. It reminded me of one of my pet theories, though, which has nothing to do with any of this.

I’m not a drinker of elaborate coffees, but I’m often stuck in line behind such people while waiting to order a cup of regular, black coffee. In those moments of boredom, I’ve concluded that forcing some kid to run around fidding with the espresso machines and whipping this or sprinkling on that is actually part of the appeal of the fancy coffee drink: It’s being handmade, right in front of you. I wonder if, say, Starbucks had located its mocha-whatever manufacturing zone out of sight, and you couldn’t watch the stuff being prepared, if it would have the same appeal. Or if you just ordered it and they handed it to you immediately. It wouldn’t be as good, right? It seems better simply because you’ve watched somebody hustle around constructing it.

Just a thought.

In the blog world, other reactions to that column included a post on Vertical Weblog offering some Devil’s advocate thoughts on the hipness factor of crafting; general crafter support; the small business angle; and a DaddyTypes post suggesting that perhaps the DIY “revolution” is led not by women, but by parents. On the other hand, maybe this column was another example of my “Productivist Bias.”

Flickr Interlude

Originally uploaded by !HabitForming.

Pi graf!

Short & Sweet

In Consumed: Hershey’s Cherry Cordial Kiss Limited Edition: How “limited edition” candy went from novelty to glut.

Consumers crave two things: familiarity and novelty. This, of course, presents a challenge to sellers and helps explain why there are so many varieties of toothpaste, soft drinks, detergent or cereal anchored to a handful of famous brand names. The giants of the candy industry have wrestled with this predicament over the past few years, responding with a strategy that one-ups so-called brand extension: the limited edition. . . . Continue reading at the NYT Mag site via this no-registration-required link.

Related Links: Candyblog; Candy Addict; Limited Edition Candy Flickr set.