Zach Braff Greets His Public
We hated Garden State. We see plenty of blank-faced shy boys sleepwalking their way through life every day, thanks. We don’t want or need to them on the big screen. However, as much as we disliked his movie, we’re seriously impressed by Zach Braff’s blog willingness to wade out into hordes of fans – literally hundreds of them – and answer their gripes, in public, one by one, extending his sensitive emo persona from the silver screen to the liquid crystal one. Simple acknowledgement by the star, after all, is all that the fans and the haters want. So they’ve rewarded Braff with a 500+ comments on every single one of his posts. Damn. Even Atrios doesn’t draw those kind of numbers.
Why Science Rules
Despite the claims of intelligent designers and other flat earthers, science rules the world. Science is the father of technology, and technology, in case you haven’t noticed, is pretty much the stick that stirs the drink of our everyday lives. So it’s good to keep one eye on science, and we’re afraid your National Geographic subscription and Star Trek habit simply doesn’t cut it. First we recommend ArXiv.org, chock full of the hottest and latest physics research, everything from astronomy to optimization models to “systems,” whatever the heck those are. It’s all here, with the original baffling prose and Greek-lettered equations intact. Slightly more personal are the Quantum Diaries, which is sort of like an elite MySpace for übernerds. Here you can follow elite scientists blogging from around the world on everything from their superstring research to the Astros’ chances to random dudes they meet in bars. At the extremely personal end of the spectrum is Not Even Wrong, one professor’s journey through the dizzying realms where math and science intersect. The life of the natural science professor, it seems, revolves around writing papers, going to conference, and having your stuff understood and appreciated by half a dozen other professors. No wonder these guys all wind up in Silicon Valley trying to take over the world.
Cats + Stuff = AWESOME
There are still plenty of good, clean, simple ideas out there, ripe for the taking. These ideas are especially likely to succeed if they involve cute animals caught on camera doing wacky and wild things. Some of these ideas are so simple they can be fully explained in a domain name, hence StuffOnMyCat.com, wherein readers submit pictures of their cats caught in embarrassing situations. There are pictures of cats being swallowed by dogs, cats with slices of pizza on their heads and cats fending off the amorous advances of other pets such as chinchillas and rabbits. But the cat is not just a pratfall comedian. His complex, introverted nature also makes him a favored symbol on which artists and writers to project their cute visions, in zines such as “Catholic,” edited by Vice editor Jesse Pearson. So the cat’s highbrow, he’s lowbrow, he’s got nine lives and he purrs. No wonder the Egyptians worshipped these little fiends.
Selling Ads With a Velvet Rope
First the New Yorker sells an entire issue out to Target, inviting their staff artists to draw up one-off ads that incorporate the Target bullseye into the New York City landscape. Now the venerable 60 Minutes is offering an entire episode to Philips Electronics, for the tidy sum of $2 million. Exclusive deals like these have a twofold advantage for the ad buyer: First, the human attention span leaks like broken juice pitcher. The more glasses you have to fill, the more attention you wind up spilling on the floor. By buying out an entire episode or issue, advertisers get a surplus of attention at a discount price. Second, so long as these deals are perceived as rare, advertisers will net a bonus windfall of publicity for simply closing the deal.
Why Short PDFs Are The New Books
There are lots of things that we hate, but nothing more than paying $22.95 for some 500-page hardcover business book and coming out of the reading experience with maybe a paragraph’s worth of knowledge. It’s not that we have trouble absorbing information, it’s that there’s usually so little information to absorb. The art of book writing is taking 500 to 1,000 words of wisdom and stretching them out, through examples, preambles, charts, and big margins, to 200 or 300 pages. This is why books, especially business books, are such a rip-off, and why you can find hundreds of copies of Megatrends 2000 littering the Free Library’s used books sale for ten cents a piece. A website called Change This has the solution. Authors (and some wannabe authors) post quick-and-dirty synopses of their work, both stuff that’s published and stuff that’s forthcoming. Everything is laid out as a PDF in an easily browsable PowerPoint format, with big pull quotes and funny illustrations. Everyone from no-name kooks to major oracles like Tom Peters and Seth Godin uses the site to push their crackpot theories. Most of these ideas are so general and half-formed that they don’t lose much when boiled down to a few sentences, so we get whatever wisdom is in there without having to make the big time and money commitment that books demand.
The Return of the Fairey King
The last time Mr. Fairey came to Philadelphia, the crowds were so big that the man had to come and bust the place. Since then, his reputation and impact on art and advertising has swelled from merely giant to galactic proportions. As the use of an orthogonal, red-and-black Soviet propaganda tropes has spread, the struggle for Fairey to maintain a distinctive visual style has grown harder. We expect that it will be worth braving the crowds to get a glimpse of Fairey’s new work, which sets aside Heideggerean head games in favor of more overtly prescriptive political work.
Join the Global Pop Conspiracy
Join the Global Pop Conspiracy
If you took Pitchfork without the snobbery, Rolling Stone without the masturbatory Woodstock memories, college radio without the annoying PSAs, and put them all together, you’d have Global Pop Conspiracy, a site devoted to reviewing and allowing you to listen to brand new music. The conspiracy doesn’t care if it’s ridiculously obscure or blaring on Z-100. If they like it, you’ll hear about it. To wit…
At a time when the proletariat has unprecedented access to art and popular culture, we continue to enforce arbitrary and unnecessary divisions: rock ‘n’ roll versus r ‘n’ b; indie versus major; high versus low; b-girl versus indie boy.
The Global Pop Conspiracy believes that only one arbitrary division is necessary: like versus don’t like.
Yes, as the Cool Whip aficionados and Brit Pop connoisseurs among us know, good taste knows no bounds.
COBRASNAKE: Peep Through the Back Room Keyhole Into the Hidden Hipster Realm
Ever wish you had X-ray vision? At parties, you could peer behind the velvet rope into the back room where the freshest hep cats are doubtless gathered around a glass coffeetable, doing whatever it is they do back there. You could note their style of dress. You could emulate their half-amused, half-debauched expressions. In this way become an authority on the styles of today, and eventually, a marketing god. Now, by clicking the link below, you can have this power, thanks to a website called Cobrasnake. One Tennenbaums-wannabe dweeb in a headband and sunglasses goes out and photographs the hideous scenester hordes so you can sit on your ass and enjoy the fruits of his labors. There’s a little bit of an LA slant at the moment, but as the reputation of this foul photoblog continues to mushroom like a radioactive cloud, the Cobrasnake will likely be making more frequent jaunts to LA. Quick, start taking notes now before the REALLY corporate guys get ahold of this link and short circuit the cycle of hip forever!
If You Want To Get Paid to Predict the Future, Crazy Hair is a Must
If you’re reading this blog, you should read this article, reporter Gina Piccalo’s deft and learned takedown of the entire trendspotting industry, from Gladwell to Popcorn to Zandl to those sorry blurb peddlers over at DailyCandy.com. She concludes that while cool itself may be over, consumer insight is likely to remain the most valuable commodity of all.
We Are Hungry For Hippos. VideoHippos.
It’s not enough to stand up at the front of a dark room and play your guitar and drums these days. Now we are in the future. The future is lived in front of a screen. So you had better have a screen running during your little rock show also. This is a lesson well understood by the Videohippos, a pair of post-adolescents who play on cheap Toys R’ Us electronic instruments and wear many kinds of masks. They back their live set with a video melange of foreign films, domestic scenes and old video games. Highly recommended.
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