Television Without Pity
If we set aside the esteemed John Leonard and Sasha Frere-Jones for a moment, critics of sound mind generally like to write in plain English about stuff that matters for an audience that cares. Like it or not, this means television, and the Partisan Review of television is Television Without Pity, where anonymous fans rehash and synopsize last night’s backlit drone in prose that’s often three or four times as amusing as the episodes themselves.Television Without Pity.
Eno Eno Uber Allies
With a new album just out, it’s worth returning to Brian Eno’s greatest contribution to the creative process, the Oblique Strategies. These are a series of flashcards to read when you’re working on something and you’re stuck. They were intended for audio producers but with such gems as “Faced with a choice, do both,” and “Go outside. Shut the door,” they work just as well for images, text and even business plans as they do for audio production. We dare not even go to the bathroom without consulting these cards.
A Primer on Oblique Strategizing
Pink Skull & the House that House Built
When it comes to working out, completing a project, or generally integrating oneself into the relentless, throbbing beats of life, what could be more perfect than house music? Of this genre, there are few albums we approve of more than Pink Skull. Constituted of local misanthropes Julian S. Process and DJ Diabolic, this music is indeed pink and candy-like, but with a hard, bony, Jawbreaker center that molds the listener into the key-pushing machine he or she needs to be.Pink Skull
Method Cleaning Products and the Domestication of the Wild Unclean Hipster
Lofts are better than ordinary apartments, and the people who live in lofts are better than ordinary people. High aspirations and net worths need higher ceilings, whiter walls and more square footage to stretch their wings. After all, what’s the use of spending $900 on a single Aeron chair if your apartment doesn’t look like an art gallery worthy of displaying such a fine design choice? And why would you ever want to scrub those wonderfully distressed oaken floors with the same dreadful ammonia compound that the cleaning lady uses in your office? Really, there is no reason. CVS-bought Tide will not suffice to clean the sheets of the Real Simple reader. Lofty lives need lofty soaps. It was only a matter of time before the free market devised a special soap that smelled better, cleaned faster, harmed a lesser number of innocent animals, and, most importantly, cost slightly more than the greasy prole stuff. It is called Method, a line of wholesome detergents that will put the shine back on your granite countertop while restoring your Diesel jeans to their original threadbare state. They come in bottles designed by Karim Rashid, backed by a cute/sexy campaign called “People Against Dirty.” And so Method is something of a milestone. No longer are our junior creative classmates solely interested in boozing and brawling and passing out. They do the dishes and the laundry now. Their domestication has begun.Method Home
Keep it Clean
Oh How the Eye Loves a Naked Lady
Though some would argue that in never really left, porn is back in a big way. Perhaps inspired by the anchor advertisements and inveterate chauvinism of American Apparel, Vice seems to be boosting the twat quotient of each new issue, to give just one example, with young lasses of all colors draped in Triple Five Soul and moistly splayed like fresh pomegranates. For the harried young designer or art director who has been instructed to come up with something “edgy” but is short on time and ideas the hot naked porn lady is an easy solution, a way to hover between making a sophisticated commentary on the crass, exploitative nature of commercial culture and reveling in its most debased moments. Effective, yes. Original? No. But this is the “design” section not “art” buddy, so we’re not awarding points for originality. Just rip whatever you have to rip, get the job done and move on to the next one.Future Relic
Cum in the Streets
God’s Got a Great Logo
Ripping off a classic will get you out of any design jam and it doesn’t get more classic than the 4,000 year-old Hebrew alphabet, with its calligraphic splatters and twists leaving traces of the wizened scribe’s own hand. Clearly these 22 old warhorses have attracted attention from the folks at Panera Bread and Campbell’s Soup at Hand product, whose logos and packaging bear the same sorts pictographic swirls favored by the Lord of Hosts and found on Torahs everywhere.Panera Bread
Campell’s Soup
Zoe Straus: These Philly Streets is the Illest & the Rillest
It’s one thing to wander around Philly and see our lumpy, debased white ethnic citizens hanging out under the El wearing too many genders and not enough clothes. It’s another thing to get close enough to take a picture and convince them to pose. It’s yet a third thing to work in some sense of unity, balance and composition while managing these freak encounters. The work of local street photographer Zoe Strauss walks this tightrope between exploitation, collaboration and good old-fashioned rubbernecking at the passing freakshow that is pedestrian urban life. She shoots some very strange people without the voyeurism or exoticism that permeates most art school street safaris. She is also willing to put her ass on the line as evidenced by the shot of what looks to be a rodeo assistant displaying his ample manhood in a shadowy corridor beneath the arena. Every year, she has an art sale underneath I-95 where all her photos are taped up to the concrete pillars beneath the road and sell for five dollars each. She is met with our approval and we advise that you check her site out. Zoe Strauss
Of Men & Flip-Flops: There ought to be a law
We’re cool with seeing men’s feet. We’re fine with the Birkenstock, which says, “I am a wandering monk who values comfort over aesthetics.” Nor do we have a problem with Dad’s Teva sandles, which say, “when the dog and I take long walks together in the woods sometimes we romp through the river.” But we draw the line at the flip-flop and its sneering, “the world is my fraternity house, and all who dwell within my chattel.” We’d honestly rather these blokes just go barefoot. Frankly, unless you’re gay, you have no business wearing anything (even on your feet) that is otherwise known as a thong.
From the Waists of Wasted Waifs comes the LED Belt Buckle
LED stands for Light Emitting Diode, the same diodes you’ve seen doing their thing everywhere from power strips to scoreboards to taillights. And now they’re on belt buckles of all places. You can have your very own squadron of LEDs scrolling out “Jimmy Rules” or “Semper Fi” like a personal pelvic stock ticker. That’s right, we’ve now arrived in a future that Wired and Newsweek have been promising–technology you can wear! The problem is that this trend is completely stillborn. In amonth’s time we’ve seen these things everywhere from MTV to the Fader to the mall to the founder of PayPal, to the gift shop at the Mattress Factory, an installation museum in Pittsburgh where they go for $35 a piece and the girl in the shop told us that the real cool guys get them in white and blue, not red and yellow, because those LED colors haven’t been around as long. (We remembered similar claims about those Hypercolor t-shirts, and swooned with junior high deja vu.) Even this 20 year-old Pittsburgh ingÈnue wasn’t sure whether she really wanted
to participate in this whole “ghetto fabulous” LED belt buckle trend, or simply observe them removed, with a Vulture-like dispassion. We pronounce this trend stillborn, Dead On Arrival. The market reacted too quickly to the first whiff of demand and nipped this sucker in the bud. So a note to all the Chinese LED manufacturers and Canal Street importers out there: Please wait twelve weeks before reading your next Fader. Give us time to discover and savor the marvelous crap you send our way. But keep too close an eye on our tastes and they’ll change before you’ve finished unloading the goods from the boat.
Nanomarketing & the Invisible Guerilla Force
This is like the hottest and newest meaningless marketing term, the Purple Cow of tomorrow, the point that’s just begun to tip. It’s called Nanomarketing. “Nano” is a Greek word that means “seeking venture capital” or “so small that your eye can’t see it.” “Nanomarketing” is marketing so halting and tiny that it leaves no trace of commercial intent. Nanomarketing is not to be confused with viral, guerrilla, word-of-mouth, or any other form of what we like to call “micromarketing.” It’s about being a present, anonymous benefactor, not demanding that your logo fly on a giant banner or your boy ollie over the Great Wall. For example, if Chopard gave Jay-Z a diamond-encrusted watch as a way of saying “thank you for raising awareness of Africa’s plight at Live 8,” that would be micromarketing. Leaving him an unmarked envelope full of $100 bills on the dressing room table would be nanomarketing. Yes, on the surface, nano seems a
lot like bribery, the transfer of cash to an influential superconsumer in hopes of winning his or her favor. But it can also be as innocent as constructing an awesome wooden bowl for Brooklyn’s destitute skaters or paying a gypsy to cast a spell on Madonna so she will try your shampoo. The only rules of nano are that it must be anonymous, it must lose money, and it must hit your target on such a subliminal level as to not generate any quantifiable results. So if you can look back and tell whether your campaign worked or not, it was stone-age stuff. Micro, not nano. We wish you good luck. Nano is still in the early development stage and we invite you to pass along the results of any experiments for our next Vulture.
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