MURKETING

In The New York Times Magazine: Margaux Lange’s Barbie-parts jewelry

DECONSTRUCTING BARBIE:
Loved, hated, analyzed, critiqued — the iconic doll gets repurposed.

This week in Consumed, a jewelry-maker whose raw materials include pieces of Barbie, the consumption icon who turns 50 this year.

Margaux Lange figures she was about 4 or 5 when she got her first Barbie. “I remember very quickly becoming obsessed with collecting as many as I possibly could,” she says. Eventually she had around 50. “I played with them, embarrassingly, until about seventh or eighth grade. In secret.” She’s 29 now and makes jewelry for a living; in her studio, along with her soldering torch and other standard tools of the trade, is a much larger Barbie collection. But these dolls are mostly in pieces, stored in stacked plastic boxes marked with phrases like “One Eye” or “Mouths With Teeth.”

Lange is still playing with Barbie, in a way, but now the dolls are not so much toy companions as elements that she breaks down and incorporates into handmade rings, necklaces, brooches and the like: work made from “sterling silver and Barbie parts,” as she puts it.

Read the column in the January 25, 2009 New York Times Magazine, or here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. The Times’ Consumed RSS feed is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

“Letters should be addressed to Letters to the Editor, Magazine, The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10018. The e-mail address is magazine@nytimes.com. All letters should include the writer’s name, address and daytime telephone number. We are unable to acknowledge or return unpublished letters. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.”

AFTER THE JUMP: Some background regarding how this week’s column came about. Only for those who are hard-core curious about the way I think — proceed at your own risk (of being bored).
Read more

Dept of Updates

Not surprisingly, there is a big sale on all merch at the Bush’s Last Day product site — get your hats, T’s, coffee mugs, and countdown magnets marked 1.20.09 now, so you can … uh… well, so you can have them, I guess. February 10, 2008 column on the brand is here.

Brandweek reports that VitaminWater is being sued by the Center for Science in the Public Interest: “The suit states that the Coke-owned brand is guilty of deceptive and unsubstantiated claims.” An August 22, 2004 Consumed mulled the brand’s over-the-top claims. CSPI’s release about its lawsuit is here.

NYT says mainstream companies are warming up to the idea of sponsoring mixed-martial-arts competitors. August 29, 2008 Consumed on MMA brand TapouT is here.

Tomorrow’s (Obama) Kitsch Today

I don’t have time to look up the links, but shortly after the election I remember a few non-Obama-fan Web commentators suggesting that all the posters and whatnot created by Barackist artists and designers would end up taking on the quality of totalitarian propaganda. I didn’t, and don’t agree (unless the much-awaited stimulus plan includes a government-sponsored proBama postering campaign).

However … the other day, looking at stuff like this with E, it wasn’t hard to imagine another fate for the massive glut of Obamafied artifacts: future kitsch. I think the thrift stores of the future will have shelves and shelves of this stuff.

Possibly that same idea is implied by The Future Perfect’s offering of Obama commemorative plates designed by Shepard Fairey.

Or possibly not. I’m not sure.

Anyway, here’s a painting of Obama, nude, riding a unicorn.

Change we can cash in on

By now somebody must have observed that the Obama economic stimulus plan is clearly premised on (frugal?) consumers buying an absolutely unlimited amount of Obama tchotchkes.

Here is Slate’s slideshow with some examples. Sadly not mentioned: The “Obama Victory Mugs” ($24.95 for a set of two), “Keepsake T-Shirt” ($32.95), and copies of tomorrow’s newspaper (order now!) on offer in the Barack Obama section of the New York Times online store.

In other Obama-culture news, Studio 360 did a segment on Obama art this weekend. April 13, 2008 Consumed on that subject is here. Not enough Obama for you? Link roundup on Obama art and products and marketing here. Search this site for “Obama” for even more.

Annual reminder: MLK BLVD open-to-all photo project

You and everyone you know are, as always, still invited to contribute images from streets, avenues, boulevards, drives, etc., named for Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Flickr pool is here. The highlights blog is here — and now has images from about 44 cities and towns around the U.S.

Bikers

PSFK put up a post about “mutant bike clubs” the other day, and I was annoyed with myself, because I hadn’t taken the time to post a link to some pix taken by friend of Murketing Charles R. Franklin, a New Orleans photographer who was was on hand for a recent gathering of these rather impressive customizers in N.O.

His set of images — worth checking out — is here.

Mr. Franklin also passed along a link to B.I.K.E.: The Movie, in multiple parts on YouTube. Lastly: Here is a 2006 Village Voice article (mentioned here at the time) on the mutant-bike thing — opening with an anecdote about Brooklyn Industries outlets getting defaced with “Bike Culture Not For Sale.” The Black Label Bicycle Club is described as “virulently anti-consumerist.” Making them likely targets for sponsorship offers, I assume.

Banks evidently waiting for America to devolve into a more Road Warrior-like scenario

That’s the only conclusion I can draw from yesterday’s NYT story about apparently healthy banks who got chunks of cash from TARP and now amiably admit that they’re simply sitting on it.

One guy actually refers to the $88 million his bank received from Treasury as “opportunity capital.” (After all, “They didn’t tell me I had to do anything particular with it,” he said.)

“We see TARP as an insurance policy,” agrees the head of a bank that got $300 million in “bailout” money. “That when all this stuff is finally over, no matter how bad it gets, we’re going to be one of the remaining banks.”

Great.

Flickr Interlude

frites – den haag, originally uploaded by europics.

LastFM? iLike? MOG? Your opinions sought.

I’ve toyed with both LastFM and Pandora. I have not used iLike or MOG, which like LastFm seem to turn on a more “social”-oriented idea.

Do you have opinions about these networks/services — or others?

Please chime in, in the comments, if you do.

Thanks.

PS: No Consumed this weekend.

Planning your digital afterlife

Let’s say that right after I post this item, I keel over, dead.

Who would approve whatever pithy comments you might submit? Aside from this site, I have two other unrelated blogs, a Facebook profile and page, a Flickr account, a personal website, an Etsy store, etc. What happens to all that stuff?

I know that there are policies in place at the companies that ultimately control my digital expressions of my (living) self — I just read this NYT column in which the writer relates some the death-related policies of Facebook, which she looked into after being notified of the pending birthday of a deceased friend.

But the column made me wonder what the dead friend would have wanted. And how I would want my digital afterlife to be handled: What should disappear along with me, what I would prefer to persist and with what adjustments and caveats.

Morbid! But still. Maybe such a business already exists, but if it doesn’t: Perhaps one of the bright, young business-school things who read this site can found a digital-afterlife-management service.

The product/service would be sort of analogous to a will. It would store and manage all the necessary passwords for one’s appointed digital-life executor, but would also spell out the wishes, preferences, and instructions of the relevant individual: Wipe out X account; put up an announcement on Y blog and close the comments; renew the domain registration on Z site for as long as possible, etc. Unlike a traditional will, this would have to be some kind of regularly updatable service, to keep pace with the digital venues, as they come and they go.

At the very least, I’d like to know, for the sake of accuracy, that somebody would be making sure my Twitter feed finally showed a second tweet.