Curatorialist

Sometimes you can hit a bullseye and still miss.

The We Are The World remake for Haiti, 25 years after Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie rocked the world for USA for Africa, is sort of its own disaster in and of itself. My emotional preference would be to just go down the list of artists then and now and discuss the vast difference in artistic quality. Not that there aren’t some real deals in this video: Jennifer Hudson, Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Tony Bennet, Beyonce, Wyclef Jean, Usher, even Pink. There were some heavy hitters in there, to be sure. But the lows were so much lower as to bring down the overall quality quotient too dramatically. Popularity was never the casting spec in the ‘85 version. Jonas Brothers? Justin Bieber? Will i Am? Enrique Iglesias? Josh Groban? Miley Cyrus? I don’t need to discuss the differences between those artists and Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers or any single person who was invited into that studio in 1985. This isn’t an old guy’s “times were better when” speech, either. It’s a pure, one-to-one look at artistic integrity. Not about album sales, but about having undeniable expressive art in your soul. The kind that lasts. If you play the ‘85 video right this second (I just did), every one of those artists is undeniable. One look at the Haiti video and you just know that 25 years from now, nobody is going to want to open that time capsule. That’s a miss. Should have been part of the consideration process for something important, like disaster relief. It detracts from the integrity of the message and this message deserves it. The Jonas Brothers should have bowed out. T-Pain should have said, you know what, I’m honored to have been asked but the message is too important to make this about the trend I represent. Same with Miley Cyrus. But that’s not what goes through their minds. Not that they don’t care about the cause, I’m certain they do, but it’s the lack of soul-searching about the true meaning of something, obscured by the false rationale that popularity, in and of itself, is also a contribution to the cause, that disappoints. And nothing could sum that up better than the difference between Lionel Ritchie introducing the video in ‘85 and Jamie Foxx introducing the video in’10.

But there’s deeper issues at play here. On the surface, 2010 WATW seems to have the same premise as 1985 WATW – bring artists together for a cause. Did artists come together in 2010? In the 1985 WATW, disparate musicians stood shoulder to shoulder and finished each others’ sentences. You could barely tell where Lionel became Lionel and Stevie. Where Paul became Kenny. Where Warwick became Willie. And wasn’t that sort of the point? Quincy’s magic was in the pairings and the way the individual gave way to the duet, the duet gave way to the song and the song gave way to the message. Can we say the same about 2010 WATW? I hear the overlaps in the mix, but from the video, it appears that all of them were recorded separately. We open on Justin Bieber, HEAR Jennifer Hudson and Nicole Scherzinger come in and then hard cut to them by themselves. Where’s the sharing of the mic? Where’s two artists working it out? Where’s the “Check your ego at the door” sign? Seems to me, this is one big ego enabler: separate recordings, close-ups and a who’s who of most-Tweeted-about flavors of the month. What, Jennifer and Nicole don’t want to bend down to Justin’s height? Too good for that, are we? What a missed opportunity. And if you think that none of that matters as long as it gets people to watch and donate to Haiti, I’d beg to differ. I’d like to ask how much more money might be raised, how many more relief workers might be enlisted, how many more concerned and helpful people might come out of the woodwork with a better product? If you set out to make something of value, make it great – or you underachieved. This version drafts off the success of a predecessor, lazily substitutes artistic effort with buzz metrics and propels an already suffering industry of music into further chaos by continuing to confuse popularity for genius. Haiti and Music deserved better.

And I can applaud the intention of the people who put this together while still disliking how they went about it.

Group rapping is terrible. It should have just been Snoop, Wyclef, Kanye or maybe Lil Wayne. Diverging into a group rap segment belittles rap and misses the point of the whole get together. Let’s mix it up. It’s okay to blend Mary J. Blige in with Tony Bennet (sort of) but rappers need their own interlude? So much for creativity. Speaking of which, auto tune? Why why why would you employ a technique like this to a song with such a heartfelt message? Auto tune corrects tone at the expense of humanity, that’s why the more it’s used, the more robotic it sounds. Conceptually, where does that help in a situation where you’re asking people to have empathy for a cause?

The irony of all of this is that the ‘85 WATW starts with a slate of the USA for AFRICA logo with all the artist’s signatures on it, but all you remember is their voices. The ‘10 WATW video is a lot of voices, but all you remember are their signatures.

There’s something more than a little thought-provoking about this video. Be warned, it’s graphic:

RAD OMEN – “Rad Anthem” from Nicholaus Goossen on Vimeo.

This video forces you to look at the advertising business, both from a creation standpoint and a consumer standpoint. Jack, from the Jack in the Box ads, has become over the years a complex character. He, and The King in fact, have become pretty edgy. Willing to get in fist fights, blow up boardrooms, show up in people’s houses unannounced, etc. But they are still, in their fictitious bones, kid-like cartoon characters. The disintegration of innocence didn’t start with this video, it started with how advertising has evolved the characters to reflect ourselves. But how far do we take it? Advertising’s job is to connect to people, up to a point. There’s also a responsibility that comes with being a public message. So, advertising takes things right up to that line of appropriateness. It’s fascinating to see the other side of that line. Especially when that place somehow doesn’t feel so far away.

It’s funny. With advertisers leaving magazines these days, I am reminded of the Renaissance. That’s actually not funny, everything reminds me of the Renaissance. If you recall from history class, it went: Middle Ages, Black Plague, Renaissance. Some say that the plague left people thinking about their own mortality, empathetic to the human plight and that set the stage for more humanistic movements in art and patrons with the hearts to fund it. We might be in that Black Plague right now.

Nobody seems to be making this connection, but both music and magazines are both artistic expressions that have relied on some kind of business arrangement. As those arrangements and our economic structure unravel, the art just might be getting to a better place. The next stage very well could be patronage, especially if the art gets very good and reaches some kind of new height of personal expression.

This new book out, “We Make Magazines,” highlights a number of independent magazines who are doing their thing outside the mainstream. No coincidence that the sub-title of the book is “Inside the Independents” and that you could very well put that line underneath many of the new venues for music and film, as well. People are doing it on their own these days and, since the tools are all at our disposal, we simply don’t need the business to get published. And the decisions are, therefore, all our own. When you have a job working for someone else, you make what you make according to their vision. This is the draw of independent _____-making, be it film, music, magazines or whatever. We make whatever we want, according to our own vision. It’s a great time to be an artist, but what will you make? What is the new renaissance about? How will you be part of it?

More info on the book here.

You either start loving cars really early, or most likely you never really get that obsessed over them. I was an early obsessor: Matchbox to kit cars to remote controls to, eventually, my first car. A Dodge Dart. It was a hand-me-down, but it was mine. I came across this emblem and it took me back, not just to my first car, but to a day when car badges weren’t so squared off and corporate. These guys had verve. Panache. Style.

Take a trip down Highway Awesome over at this guy’s Flickr page of Cool.

“Thirst for knowledge.” That actually turns out to be completely true, studies prove it. The human (and other animal) brain signal the body to release a stimulant as a reward for learning. Pinker’s “if you were to design a being, you’d give it the same qualities” math applies here, too – a system that rewards continued learning, guessing, probing and speculation keeps a species safe from predators. In the end, perhaps, it is not a thirst for knowledge so much as a love of life, but at least I feel a little better about my 2 hour jaunts on Wikipedia. This is life or death, ppl!

Here’s an excerpt:

“Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.”

Read more here.

The best math class I ever took was the very last math class I ever took: Statistics. That was 1987. I remember remarking that if math had been this interesting in High School, I might actually have enjoyed it. And who KNOWS what would have happened to me if I had enjoyed math. But math was horrendously boring in my high school and I couldn’t see the magic in it, despite teachers who tried to speak of it romantically. In practice, they crammed formulas down our throats and lost us with ugly overhead projections and grease pens.

By college, I had sworn that I would be done with math as soon as humanly possible and Statistics was my random sampled swan song of choice. From there on out, I would concentrate on only things that had pictures. But in that class, I discovered something interesting – math can tell a story. The single moment that opened my mind (I can remember the classroom, I can even remember what seat I was in ) was the day the professor explained the fallacy of the phrase “3 out of 5 dentists recommend.”  “Which 5 dentists?” He asked. It was like the sound of one hand clapping. The class, for me, became a study in skepticism. Numbers never lie, but numbers can be used by liars, to tell lies. To this day, anyone who tells me something is a “fact” is immediately suspect. If you listen to Steven Pinker speak (from my earlier post), you see that he hardly ever uses “facts” and yet he is so clearly knowledgeable. Reason, I have found, is much better than math, in almost every instance.

Over the last few years, though, there has been a merging of math and reason, and it has happened through a technique known as “data visualization.” A quick sequence of events has lead us to a very interesting place in history, where we can now “see” math. The metaphorical operating system (desktop, folders, etc.) introduced us to this notion that code could be translated into something more humanly accessible. Then an important thing happened: the evolution of interface design merged with the evolution of the database. This was most prevalent in Website design, where engineers and designers worked side-by-side with each other, merging their talents to create online business solutions for people. One of the major discoveries during this time was the activity of “tagging,” which, in essence, was people filling up databases themselves. Imagine one guy at Flickr putting tags on photos as opposed the current practice of people putting tags on the photos themselves. Same with Facebook. Information started streaming in. Now, all of the sudden, we have a generation of people who are adept and trained to fill out database questions: from logins and passwords to cities and friends’ names to preferences and personal information. And we are starting to discover exactly how interesting math can actually be.

It used to be that visualizing data was was Excel did – you fill in the database and then it spits out a pie chart. Now, though, people are finding newer and more exciting ways of showing data visualized. Perhaps you’ve seen The Visual Thesaurus. Or tag clouds a sites like TwitScoop. Check out this site that maps Renaissance artists and writers on a timeline, as well as an overlay on Google Maps. During all the talk about “earmarks” in the debates, I used this website to get a better idea of what’s really going on, all done through data visualization. Or this guy, who has decided to log just about every activity in his life and rather than create a new kind of visualization mechanism, has just cleaned up the old one in kind of a fascinating way.  And we’re using it in marketing all the time, from Sprint’s “Now Network” Website, to our own “Health Footprint Calculator” for Anthem. And this site gives a whole overview of different data visualization techniques. A macro of the macro.

If I were teaching a math class in High School today, I would be teaching kids with these tools. Sure, the building blocks of basic arithmetic is necessary, but geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus are probably not the right set of tools for today’s little minds. Many of those math languages are as dead as Latin in terms of their importance in the actual application of math in most of the world. The excuse that schools use is that the process of learning formulas, equations and proofs creates great minds – I challenge that notion. The best applications of math are happening in the fieds of data strategy and programming. Let’s flip the math on math and assume that the greatest impetus for a great mind is excitement. I don’t have stats to prove that, but it sure stands to reason.

I feel like I somehow get in the “L.A. versus” argument more than most people. Perhaps because I am such a staunch supporter and lover of this city, it invites criticism and devil’s advocacy. I get that. I also get why people hate on us, here. However, I think I just found the single greatest, all-encompassing reason to love this city… an ice cream truck.

Oh, this isn’t just any old ice cream truck, this is that rare crossbreed of ice cream and architecture. Two bed buddies that could only really meet each other in this town. The truck itself is a throwbacky steel Airstream trailer kind of deal with a pink 2nd story (probably permitted) on top, but the architectural references only begin there… it’s one knee-slapping architectural pun after another: the company itself is called Coolhaus and the products all have architectural references, of course (Frank Behry, Mintimalism, etc.), but it’s all earned as the owners have the appropriate pedigree to pull it off. And the cool doesn’t end there – these guys Twitter their locations, secret passwords that get you unlisted flavors and, like any good L.A. citizen, they can’t help but namedrop along the way (“Departing T Lofts in 5 minutes…headed to our friends at Dexter!!!”). And they can be booked for your party.

So, to recap: ice cream, architecture, nice rims and overall insider club vibe. But good for the kids. No city could pull all that off but ours. And although you’ll want to poke fun, in the end you have to admit… it’s cool. Or, as we like to say in LA: so wrong it’s Wright.

EatCoolhaus Website

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Article on “The Moment” NY Times Blog

Posters back in the day weren’t that easy to get your hands on. Not the good ones, anyway. The record store my band hung out in on the weekends had posters on the wall that were terminally Not For Sale. Which made me want them all the more. The most coveted ones were the black and white Specials and Selector posters that Chrysalis and 2 Tone labels put out. The look of those were raw and graphic, playful but serious. Nothing else in the record store looked anything like it. We got our cues as to how the rude boys in the UK were dressing from those posters, and we followed suit. Pins were a big deal back then, too, and nobody was pumping out more black and white pins than The Specials. We wore them on our black suspenders, we wore the white socks with the black shoes, we drew black and white checkers on everything. But I never got my hands on one of those posters.

I guess the chance has come up again as many of them are being reprinted. David Storey, one of the guys behind that iconic look, has a limited edition set of six that he’s offering on his site. A bit on the pricey side, but if adulthood isn’t for buying the crap you couldn’t get as a kid, then what good is it?

Check it here: http://www.david-storey.co.uk/shop.html

Many have gathered to make art in the form, and spirit, of collaboration. Little of it transcends. Originally, the Louvre was a place for a sort of artists’ collective, during the French Revolution. But collectives borne of necessity have a distinct advantage over graffiti artists getting together to do a mural for Nike. Maybe this kind of thing has been done before, but I haven’t seen it. A UK Website here proposes that an interaction on the site results in instant action/reaction at a real art studio. Like much art that relies on technology, rather than a more viscous material, it feels a bit cybercold underneath it all, but from what I’m seeing, the art that’s getting made at the studio itself is secondary to the possibilities that this opens up. Remember Christy Brown, of “My Left Foot” fame? Putting that into context with today’s technology offers some very encouraging possibilities. Beyond that, the gap bridged by technology has never seemed to reach into the world of fine art. All of the sudden, the Internet is a real tool for expression and the spreading of paint, clay, pencil lead and many other things. It is well time that our exponential growth in technology lead to something more artistic, human, tactile and expressive. I’m into it.

One of my new daily check-in spots, Hipster Runoff, is worth bookmarking. Strangely, I’ve been listening to his show on Blog Radio on XM and catching his updates on his sites WITHOUT KNOWING IT WAS THE SAME GUY. WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME???? This is why you should not do things that ruin your brain, like drink from the cat bowl and eat only microwaved potatoes in college (always always always poke holes in it first, with a fork).

On the radio he is recognizable for his monotone voice and not-so-provocative questions, that turn out to be more provocative than you first give them credit for. It’s a style of talking that is one part plain-stupid truth, one part snarkasm and one part keenly observant ponderings of indie culture. He clearly knows his way around the music scene, but to me, it’s all about the cult of him. Sitting at the brink of popularity – a fine mess for a guy who admits he only likes bands that aren’t popular, because pop music themes are too universal. Watching him watch himself walk that tightrope is immensely interesting, even if it’s delivered in the least interesting kind of way.

Deadpan is the new exciting.

Hipster Runoff

Interview in The Village Voice