“i just want to focus on my salad.” martha, honey…so do i. quit publicly snitting about and get your handlers to work. you’re making a mess.
but i do, however, thank you for making the NYTimes read like The Onion.
if anyone’s suddenly missing pages from my site, there’s a good reason for it: i’ve been scuttling about behind the scenes to improve my publishing systems.
UPDATE: fixed! continue as you were; nothing changed as far as you will see.
pleix is home to some fantastically relevant video works, including “beauty kit” which shares a nearly-identical conceptual basis with my own “tinkered belles,” but is much more chillingly effective and seductive in execution. look for gia in some of the other entries…and “simone” is a fantastic look at some of the same concepts and visuals mariko mori uses. even better: where mariko refuses to blatantly expose the pain of her work (my main gripe with her work), pleix doesn’t.
p://www.saltyt.com/” target=”_blank”>supermodels are lonelier than you think. my current obsession invokes the supermodel as both silly strutting peacock and object of worship.
while other sites with any serious artistic thought behind their commentary are threatening to go into a coma, this one captivates in a gently tabloidesque way. not new, but the web can certainly use the glamour right now.
“dress codes and code of ethics,” or “why fashion writers should never be allowed to comment on current affairs.” quite possibly the stupidest piece of editorial i have seen (outside of maureen dowd’s work for the new york times, of course) in a very long time. the author asserts that the rise of “casual fridays” pointed to a relaxing of business ethics during the late ‘90’s.
unfortunately, the glaring point givhan misses is that most of the companies embracing the current joie de scandale (terrible french, i know) are not a part of the supposed culture discussed. givhan seems to imply that downfall came directly from dot-com boomsters, but the largest destruction of wealth is currently coming from, hello, huge conservative companies. while even the tiny dot-com i worked for during boom time had books cooked like an overdone turkey and management missteps more intense than a game of twister, the sums juggled were nothing to the level of the billions whitewashed by enron and vivendi’s little oopsies. i suspect the same was true of other onetime wonderkids marchFIRST (ooo, bankruptcy documentation! yum!) and razorfish.
chester and tracy be gettin’ hitched, yo. apparently it’s why su and i were asked to dinner the other night. punk rock!
if anyone from scient is reading this: your company declared bankruptcy this past wednesday. this means that iXL is also gone…and that viant and sapient are the only survivors of the -ients. keep your laptops, run far far away.
however: viant people, watch your asses. if you’re included in your company’s purchase, the company purchasing you has run some shifty tactics in the past: recently, they required each employee to take a percentage pay cut, which was taken not out of yearly pay, but out of two consecutive paychecks from each employee. the result? a sudden flush of cash which had previously been spoken for, which makes the company look as if it is far more liquid than it actually is…just in time to look all pretty for an investment influx to the tune of sixty million. or so i’m told.
is it true? dunno. i’m just telling what i’ve been told.
at the third place: a lovely experimental piece from hoogerbrugge. if you’re hooked up in rotterdam, he needs a new studio. link via dibiase, who’s one of the few designers who can wear leopard print and keep it together. that’s talent.
in an interesting turn of events, two former patients of a connecticut hospital have been sued for breach of confidentiality. they talked to the press about conditions they were proven to have contracted while at the hospital.
while i understand the necessity of a business’ defense of its interests against bad press, bringing this issue to light is a move that will save lives. i am amazed at the stupidity which arises in group decision-making. simply because one is making a business decision does not give them license to abdicate their professional morals. in this case, i think the hospital is at fault for trying to stop a flow of information which will stop unnecessary illness. and isn’t the heart of the hippocratic oath a vow to do no harm?
it’s nice that they’re alive and everything. really. i mean no ill will to anyone. but please, people: get over it. tragedies happen every day. this one happened to look juicy for the news industry’s nielsens. how ‘bout we get down to some problem solving, hmm?
immanuel wallerstein gives a reasonable voice to issues i’ve been considering since last year regarding the continuing validity of american culture. are we a vital presence any more?
i don’t know that i agree with all of this, as i’m not well-read in foreign poilicy and can’t check wallerstein’s facts. but it does set the stage for some of the “hollow-culture” bitching i’ve been doing over the past couple of years. many of the events he discusses emphasize a need to re-evaluate american identity.
in the past forty years, our government has pulled several stunts which undermine the essence of american identity: the scampy outsider who’ll succeed through hard work. we are no longer the young rebel fighting shadowy evil forces. we are now a looming, teetering empire throwing its weight around the world (as proven by this and this). how does this impact how we see ourselves?
via the chicago reader: In 1999, Robert Stephens beat out 12 biological women and girls to win a Britney Spears look-alike contest—which offered as its prize a chance to meet the star herself—only to be rebuffed by the Spears organization when he attempted to collect. Ludi Boeken’s witty comedy uses this incident as a jumping-off point for a comic fantasy about a crazed low-budget filmmaker (Milwaukee schlockmeister Mark Borchardt of American Movie) and his hapless crew, who fail to score an interview with the pop princess and instead trick a drag queen into playing her for a series of “exclusive” interviews on the road to a much publicized concert in New Orleans. The result is unexpectedly understated, thanks to Jonathan Bourne’s subtle script and the many fine performances. Boeken bypasses the common gags about Spears, zeroing in on the paradox that she seems at once artificial and absolutely authentic: the impersonation offered by Stephens seems no more fake than the singer’s impersonation of herself.”
if you love britney like i do (or she does): run, don’t walk. fucking funny.
truths of the nineties: watch them turn on themselves. maybe popup advertising is annoying. maybe the oxygen network is a stupid, narcissistic externalization of geraldine laybourne’s ego. maybe SUV’s are a reprehensible idea. and, hey, maybe we are in a recession. neat huh?
an intriguing map of unsolicited spam built from junk addresses sold from company to company. and some people wonder why internet-based marketing doesn’t work…
