Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Good, Bad, Ugly

Situations which start out good and end up ugly, none of which (thank god) have actually happened to me.

Good: You run into an ex. You're seeing someone new so you have leverage.
Bad: He's with a new girl, and she's prettier than you.
Ugly: She starts talking and it becomes obvious she doesn't speak a sentence's worth of English.

Good: You just made an awesome new friend.
Bad: They invite you to go with them to a rave.
Ugly: You laugh thinking they're joking and they're not.

Good: You get into work early. You're amped about getting business done.
Bad: Your boss is sitting at your desk.
Ugly: He has a boner.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Great moments in translation

Some great things I've had to decipher of late:

Literal translation: "The temperature and the temperature were a degree off."
Ishii-ese: "The temperature missed the atmosphere by mere degrees."
Potpourri: "I got a masters degree. It's a bunch of hot air."

Literal translation:
"Hills."
"Hills?"
"Hills."
"Those are the hills we see from the city? They're the wrong shape."
"That's because we're inside the hills."
"We're inside the hills?"
"Yes, inside."
"These are the same hills?"
Ishii-ese: (Calling David Mamet. BRB)
Potpourri: "My bumps, my bumps. My itty bitty bumps."

Literal translation: "It was like he'd been beaten by the stick of life."
Ishii-ese: "He looked really beat up."
Potpourri: "I'll show you a stick of life."

Literal translation: "I'm making whipped cream of love."
Ishii-ese: "I'm making whipped cream of love."
Potpourri: "I'm making whipped cream of love."



Versus

Rodney King won in his Celebrity Boxing match against a Simon Auoud, an ex-bad cop (not one that beat him up in 1993, however).

For all of Celebrity Boxing's dick cheese, I gotta hand it to them. This was a great versus. I mean who cares about Uwe Bolle or Danny Bonnaducci (sp is wrong. I know, I know.). Here are some more suggested versuses (sp is wrong. Dude, who cares.)

Don King v. Al Sharpton
Odds on: Sharpton
Advantage: Jowel-slap

Terry Gilliam v. Tim Burton
Odds on: Gilliam
Advantage: Not having to cast himself with Johnny Depp

Nancy Pelosi v. Hillary Clinton, pantsuit competition.
Odds on: Pelosi
Advantage: Bill Clinton

Spitzer v. Sanford in a Jack-off-Off
Odds on: Hmmm... This is hard (badum dum). Sanford would probably pull some below the belt moves (badum dum dum... "thanks, I'm here all week"), but Spitzer's hand will probably let him have unprotected anal sex (crickets).
Advantage: vaseline.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

More Speaker goodness

The importance of eating earnestly... Isn't that the real message of 2009?
You ever have one of those wholesome meals whereupon at first bite a single 9-year old boy soprano materializes in your head and sings one long "amen"?

Imagine making that your living.
Brian Halweil publishes Edible in the NYC-area (you've no doubt seen your local Edible magazine affiliate at local whole food markets), and was cuisining local produce before localvore was even listed in urbandictionary.com

He also rocks panama hats.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Speaker Spotlight: Paula Scher

The name Pentagram might not mean anything to you, but the word evokes a sort of fear, doesn't it? Maybe it's just my Christian upbringing. Yet Pentagram is sort of a feel-good Fearmonger. It can be scary without implications of Satanic ritual, because as one of the world's most prestigious design firms, they've designed the face of more corporations than they haven't. You heard me right. They have worked on more logos and corporate identities than they haven't. As jeff pointed out once, the question is not "what brands have they worked on?" but, "what brands haven't they worked on?" This is not exaggeration.

Citibank, U.S. Postal Service, Saks Fifth, Bloomberg, Pepsi, The Met, The Atlantic... to name a few more readily identifiable looks.

Now, Paula Scher is the doyenne of Pentagram, and she's conversing with Chip Kidd about what makes them celebrity designers (among other things), at the Imprint Culture Lab conference.

Once again, if any of you are interested in attending, drop me a line.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Imprint Culture Lab Profiles


Alright, so check it. I'm part of this thing that throws an annual marketing conference/workshop called Imprint Culture Lab, if you didn't already know. Our next conference is on September 22, a Tuesday, and if I do say so myself, is pretty sick.

Brassy people talking directly with registrants. Ridonculiciously good AsiaDogs (hot dogs with Asian trimmings) for lunch, five-diamond reception at the penthouse of the Soho Grand afterward. And yours truly.

I'm going to tantalize you over the next few days with spotlights on our featured speakers.

Ridonculicious, folks.

GET TICKETS/ CONTACT ME

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Vacation, Part II: Why I Love Maine

(Sign off Route 1 near Wiscasset)

Maine...
Actually, I'm going to start with an analogy.

Lesbians...
Back in college, my friend Paige made an observation to myself and a couple other Santa Cruzers (all women), about how San Francisco lesbians weren't fun because they lacked irony. Now, this was 1999, before a "post-ironic post-9/11 America," before "gay" became a ubiquitous pejorative for anything remotely embarrassing.

This was circa dyed blonde fringe crew cuts and homemade yogurt. Circa the induction of a lesbian chancellor to the UCSC; circa a lesbian attacked and killed by dobermans bred to do exactly that; circa a San Francisco without a WNBA team (which sadly still persists). It was no wonder SF lezes were ostensibly un-ironic.

Anyway, Paige's point was that these Bay Area lesbians were no fun. All seriousness. No sense of humor. Her gang of lady-lovers, by dint of proximity, was having a positive riot making fun of those oh so serious womyn-izers just north on PCH. By the end of that night's conversation, I was rolling on the floor laughing about shit I did not understand at all.

And that's exactly what Maine is like for me, as a proximate observer. Maine is un-ironic to the point where I am just gonna have to pull some easy punches here and make fun of them like so many poor San Francisco dykes. I hope you will understand these jokes better than I had those "Berkeley is an anagram for 'bad klitoris'" zingers. [Still not sure I get this one, but it's always fun to make fun of Berkeley.]

Let me start with the hair salons of Maine.

Coastal Maine, for some reason, is rich with hair salons. Not barber shops... Hair salons. But if I had a penny for every "A Cut Above" or "Maine-ly Cuts" or any other hackneyed play on tried and true tried expression, I could afford to get a bleached fringe crew cut once a week for the rest of my life.

This "play on words" pathology is a resonant theme throughout Maine downtowns. I guess it's hard to avoid. "Maine" is about as self-confident a state name as you can have, and the easiest to to dress up. Mainely Bagels. Mainely Yarn. Maine Manes. Et cetera, et ceterBAARF.

This brings me to advertising.

Now, if you've driven through New England, you know that 80% of advertising on billboards is for some kind of cancer treating hospital. I'm not trying to make light of cancer, but I swear to god that after 6 hours on Route 95 you will wish you had it.

Driving through Massachussets (I know I'm mis-spelling it. Leave me alone.) is a real test on your fortitude. Pictures of hairless children with gap-toothed smiles... advertising hospitals. Handsome older women, hands proudly planted into their hips, wearing shirts that say things like, "Fuck you, Breast Cancer. Suck on this!"

In Southern California the billboards advertise strip clubs and the Yellow Pages.

Well, in Maine, there is a "no billboard" law. That's right. No billboards. No obnoxious signage. That's why you get miniature blue traffic signs for places with names like "A Cut Above," "Maineiac Psychiatrics" and "God Damariscotta Methodist Church." The biggest "billboard" you'll see is a hand-painted sheet of plywood leaned up against an electric pole advertising heavy-duty tarp or firewood for sale, and the occasional birthday party down a dirt road.

I'm fairly convinced this is why graphic design in Maine categorically sucks. There's no native advertising tradition!

[Just so I'm not making Mainemies though, let me state that Maine has several things going for it that excel beyond the rest of THE WORLD. And in terms of design, that includes landscaping and interior architecture. I will need a whole other blog posting on just praising the garden and home designs.]

Lastly, there is the whole issue of Mainers being verbose.

Those who know me, know that my penchant for plays on words and verbosity are actually two of my greatest virtues/vices. This is where I invoke the Paige-amendment. My loquacity is more clever. Trust me. (I mean, you have to trust me unless you have the guts to drive through the hall of cancer-mirrors to Maine yourself.)

I'd mentioned advertising in New England, but in a billboard-less Maine, instead of pictures of post-leukemic children, you get radio advertising. Horrendously emotionally gut-wrenching advertising of children (always children. Exploitative!) saying how glad they are to see another Christmas or Red Sox game. It's really the only time I've thought radio advertising really works. I have no idea what St. Jerome's wants from me, but if I am ever an 8-year old with leukemia, goddammit I'm going there.

One of my favorite ads though, went something like this:

Not all superheroes wear costumes. Some of them wear T-shirts. Some of them wear jeans and sweaters. They wear sneakers and dresses and sometimes jackets. They will even wear duck shoes if they have to wade through mud. Sometimes they'll wear underwear more than two days in a row, but usually they freeball...

I'm exaggerating but you get the point. The ad finally continues after listing L.L. Bean's entire wardrobe.

The superheroes I'm talking about are the boys and girls who've survived leukemia. Their courage and tenacity beats leukemia with the help of (Insert name of saint) Hospital.

Then there's this gem. It's a free boating weekly. "The Boating Magazine for Coastal New England"... Free! And it's about the best thing I read during my whole trip.

I don't know what I was expecting when I picked this thing up, but each article is written like it was meant to stay in a catalog of congress. But again, Mainers are sometimes verbose to the point of missing the whole point of modern, CONCISE rhetoric:

I was not naive enough to believe that I could just show up at the border in a 32-foot recreational sailboat loaded with water-sample bottles, strange-looking instruments lashed in the cockpit, racks of chemicals on a small lab bench over the quarter-berth and not expect some problems.

Verbatim, folks. I love this. I love that I have no clue what the hell he's talking about but the way he uses "I wasn't naive enough to believe..." followed by a bevy of clear experts-only-information, just about made me laugh all my fried clams to a chowder.