Lifestyle & Culture
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Fame & Fugliness
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on February 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010Is ugly the new hot?
It’s been said that beauty is in the eye of the beerholder, but you may find a sort of hideous beauty in these photographs by Phillip Toledano, even if you’re not holding a beer. The photos are from a series exploring the strangely compelling appearances of individuals that have undergone what many would describe as botched or excessive cosmetic surgery. Part of what gives the images their power is how they reference images from art that you may already be familiar with, as in the case of this image, which suggests both Portrait of a Young Woman in a Turban and the Death of Marat. On his web site, Toledano asks if – as a culture – we are “…creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?” I’d have to say “no”, in this case. I’m perpetually perplexed by how perfectly decent-looking people go to such great lengths to be more attractive, and when all is said and done end up looking literally monstrous, as in the case of Internet meme celebrity Jocelyn Wildenstein, or just a little more fake and not any more attractive (though a lot more famous!) as in the case of someone like Heidi Montag. And for me, the fact that a desire for fame is what often drives these surgical compulsions is especially ironic, when being “ugly” can be such a draw in itself. As evidence, just take a look at Nerve.com’s 20 Sexiest Ugly People or Ravi Vora’s Ugly Actors You Know And Love. There’s even a modeling agency that specializes in ugly called – aptly enough – Ugly. I’ve personally always been a little partial to the “ugliness” of Sandra Bernhard, Helena Bonham Carter, Bai Ling, and more recently Yolandi Visser. To me, it’s the exaggerated features of the sort Fellini relied on (see the book Fellini’s Faces
The Kindness Economy
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 12, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Friday, February 12th, 2010The new bestseller that you and I can write every day.
I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a short book based on the idea of The Kindness Economy. It started as a friendly joke with a few friends; we were comparing notes on how people seem to have slowly become ruder and more self-centered with every passing day over the past couple decades. Our idea was that if you make a little investment in being kinder ever day – hold a door, let someone go first, say excuse me – it would sort of make a deposit into the “Kindness Economy” that would help build up the “Kindess Supply”. This idea has helped me grow a little bit as a person, but it occurred to me after a while that maybe there was something to it. Over the past decade I’ve not only done a lot of work to try to improve myself as person, I’ve been learning a lot about how to and how not to run a business. One thing I noticed at some point was that there was a marked difference in the style of how business people of different ages seemed to approach running their business. At this point I’d put the marker around 55 years old and up, and it’s a simple difference: business people under that age right now are much more likely to be motivated more strictly by profit, and people over that age are much more likely to motivated by a deeper sense of value and community. I am of course speaking anecdotally and in broad strokes, but I’ve noticed that the “old school” model includes a lot more personal touches of “going the extra mile” by throwing in simple courtesies of service, and not treating customer care simply as a way of retaining disgruntled customers, but as a way of building new ones. It also includes the idea of building business that is of value not only to shareholders and investors, but also people like employees, customers, and the citizens of the community from which the business derives its revenue. I’m old enough myself to have watched the general sense of prosperity in America dwindle from a high point in the 60′s to the current sense of impending econopocalypse. Concurrent with this I’ve noticed this trend of people seeming less courteous as time passes, and I can’t help feeling that there’s some kind of connection. We could enter some broad sociological discourse at this point about how prosperity and courtesy in America were impacted by the Great Depression and the two World Wars, and how the generations of that era were forced into a sense of community and later thrived on the post war prosperity, but how about this time we skip the whole financial collapse and global conflict part, and just get back to being kinder for the sense of comfort and prosperity it brings all on its own? Read the rest of this entry »
Reality Is A Life Or Death Situation
[ Comments Off ]Posted on February 6, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, February 6th, 2010It’s interesting that in spite of the fact that one of the few things you can count on about this planet is that no-one gets out alive, no-one seems to have advice for how to die well.
  I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that this one only works for Tibetans |
It’s interesting that thanks to the self help industry we have so many books at our disposal that tell us how to live, but scant few on how to die. Sure, there’s a plethora of paperbacks devoted to grieving, loss, and dying, but that’s still about how to live, albeit while watching someone else die. A quick Google search of the phrase “how to die” turns up the Deathclock and a bunch of tips on suicide, but even suicide is a conscious act of the living, not a process of dying. You also find things like the book How to Die in the Outdoors: 100 Interesting Ways
When Did Everybody Become A Brand Expert?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on January 30, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, January 30th, 2010Or, why you’re really just a piece of livestock.
I’ve been thinking about brands a lot lately. Mostly because every time I turn around, whether in a restaurant, on an airplane, or in a business meeting, some self-appointed marketing guru is telling me how I have to “define my brand”, and how I have to “do some brand building” by doing something that “goes viral” using “social media”. When did everyone become an expert on marketing and branding? Before I go on, I’d like to say that I’m not one of these experts. Although I’ve helped a number of organizations refine their pitch or their image as part of my work, I don’t have a degree in marketing, and have never worked with a global marketing firm or ad agency. I do speak English reasonably well though, and I think a lot about why people do what they do, and a big part of what people do is think about what they want, and then try to buy it. So let’s think about the word “brand” for a minute. Do you even know the origin? In Old Norse it meant “to burn” and may have referred to a burning piece of wood, a torch, or a sword, and referred to marking the goods one created with a burn mark. Later, it of course referred to branding livestock. It wasn’t until the 19th century that it referred to a specific product going to market, and for a long time it was still simply a way of claiming ownership, much like a trademark. Although PT Barnum was an early user of the “brand as identity” concept in the 1800′s as the Prince of Humbugs, it wasn’t until the end of that century that slogans and brands began to really take shape, with companies like Ivory Soap and Kodak. After a hundred years of companies “building brands”, many of you probably think you know what a brand is, but do you? If you think you do, there are Read the rest of this entry »
Social Media Is Like Sex – Everyone Thinks They’re Good At It
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on January 25, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, January 25th, 2010Does the ability for virtually anyone to create a book or a movie diminish the overall quality of media in general? Clay Shirky wrote “Here Comes Everyone”, and now he seems to be saying “And There They Go”.
 Yes, getting published these days is child’s play. |
I joked back in the 90′s that the proliferation of literacy and availability of desktop publishing tools would decimate the general quality of available reading material across the board within a few years. My implication being that if EVERYONE has the ability to write and print a book, they WILL. It seems everyone’s an expert on something, and everyone has an opinion, and frankly, I’m inclined to agree with what Dirty Harry said about opinions. In any case, when I originally said this, the web was in its infancy. Little did I know that not many years later, this same principle would apply to virtually any topic or any aspect of life, and with a multitude of new channels (YouTube, Social Networks, Blogs, Podcasts) for delivering content. This obviously has its upside, in the form of things like crowdsourcing, but it clearly has its downside as well. One of the obvious examples of this would be splogging by multi-level marketers or search-rank-obsessed bloggers; organic search results lately are cluttered with blogs, and as this article points out, the quality and credibility of the information provided by these sources is often questionable (and yes, I’m aware of the irony of making that remark on a WordPress-powered web site). The same sort of access that makes this user-generated content possible also exists in the fields of design, manufacturing, and communications technology, so we end up with a mind-boggling array of ways to do things we didn’t know we needed to do, using nicely-designed devices. I’ve had several experiences in just the past few months with failing to connect with someone in my social network, precisely because of the multiple channels available, i.e.: Facebook, e-mail, texting, and mobile phone. Because of all of this, I sometimes feel like the dystopian future suggested in the movie Brazil
