No, Man, We're Dead Serious.

Marketing 2.0 Paris took place this week and has swallowed my life, but I recorded a BeanCast the other day with some Objectively Awesome People™ -- Bill Green, John Wall and Bob Knorpp, the most disciplined podcast host in the known universe -- and wanted to get the link out there.

The episode is called "Amish Legless Hookers." Fuck* the blasé title for a moment and observe all the ish we covered:

• Netflix and Facebook
  
• Big brands tag-teaming on Cannes UGC ad contest
  
• Charmin on iPhone; the shelf life of iPhone apps in general
  
• Presidential Face-Time
  
• Rick Wagoner exiting stage left
  
• Making Money, Social-Network Style
  
• ExecuTweets and monetizing Twitter
  
• Facebook whoring for more cash
  
• How Alex Bogusky Looooves Small Agencies
  
• How Mike Hughes Looooves Newspaper Ads
  
• Asian AdFest Troubled By Prostitution
  

You can kinda get a sense of where things went horribly wrong and the episode title was born.

Anyway, I'm off to decompress with some Marketing deux-point-zero peeps. Will post photos and thoughts ASAP. (Promise.)

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*Do you like how I tossed in that expletive in the middle of a take-me-seriously transition? Yeah? Me too.

Dear People-that-Still-Use-Myspace,

Please stop sending me these. They make me feel sad.

Maybe in 1996 I would've pegged all my self-worth on how many saucily text-rendered Kisses™ I got,* but times've changed.

Now I measure my value by how often I'm reTweeted for saying stuff like this. All. Day. Long.

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* "7-9 freaken hot." Yeah, baby, yeah.

Still Puritans, After All.

Michelle Obama's bare arms stir controversy.

La Grève

I recorded this video a few hours ago and wish I had waited until now (it's about 5pm). Tensions are higher; chants louder; men in yellow vests have formed strategic lines in the crowd. Wouldn't want to step outside at the moment; reminds me too much of The Dreamers, and damned if I'll be Michael Pitt for my generation.

(If for some odd reason you wanna know what I'm mumbling in the background, no worries. Just click on the video; the full text is thar.)

Uploaded some photos and included the terms of the national strike, as well as figures from earlier today (75,000, says AFP), on flickr. But really, the only way to read French rage is en français. Have at it.

Thinking.

There are mornings when I wake up and feel pleasantly surprised by the fact that I am no longer in college.*

It hits me all afresh, like coming out of a dream, and then I get giddy.**

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* If only I could remember where I put my diploma.

** We're finally at the grown-up, freewheely part of Life where we can just make things up as we go! When you're a kid, you never imagine you'll get to this point -- and here I am, all nestled in the middle of it like a surprise cream filling.

Assassin

It was Ernest Hemingway who coined the term "grace under pressure." Exhibiting grace under pressure means you don't walk through life in a perpetually defensive stance. Instead you dance, you make it look easy, you smile like a good sport in the face of an enemy. You shake hands.

We don't carry spears anymore and we can't run through forests half-naked, our faces streaked with paint. Our armor now is pinstriped, and our weapons subtle: words, gestures; a raised eyebrow, a slow smile.

Some of us would have been perfectly happy in the jungle, our bodies slicked with sweat as we moved and killed and ripped flesh apart, the heads of enemies swinging haphazardly from our white-knuckled fists. But today is different and one must adapt: we wipe away the blood, the sweat, the war paint, and the stray hair hanging in our faces. We pull on the suit and straighten the lapels. We look in the mirror and practice our clean-slate poker faces, our ready smiles. And we go out into the world and play a survival game as savage as the one we left behind.

But restrict your reflex to kill in heat. Grace under pressure means different steps for the same pastime: it's Assassin, but the guerilla is dead. Nobody's behind the bushes, waiting in the dark for you to approach your threshold. The best assassin is the one you never expect.

The kill is slow; you only know it's happened when you close your eyes.

Too Many Tasty Things ... and a (Minor) Manifesto.

NASA. Ras Congo. Seu Jorge (the only man alive who can make Bowie sound better). David Byrne. Chuck D. Z-Trip. SHEPARD FAIREY.

More on NASA's music/art renaissance project here. It's exhaustive awesome. See how I have to gush? This is me, gushing.

Slightly off-topic, note how Fairey's become the aesthetic poster-boy du moment -- in part because of two converging trends that stem from the same root (economic decline, American fatigue over Biz-nass As Usual):

• The cult of Obama (and his glowing contribution).


• Rekindled interest in the Constructivist style, which Karl Lagerfeld is also nudging along with his Paris-Moscou line (see associated tribute to Chanel).

Reticent spending and a comically villainous government climate precipitated a return to working-man chic and ironic, tight-jawed Russian kitsch -- something Fairey's been preparing for for years.

The proletariat finally gets its revolution; it just didn't imagine that it would be packaged, licensed, sponsored and used to sell handbags, pop music and the new media-driven democracy. Among other things.

I Love the Internet.

Priceless, just priceless:

When you have completed a Bombshell Betty Pinup Workshop, you will not only have many amazing, high resolution photos of yourself, you will also have learned the modeling skills needed to get great results from future photo shoots and candid pictures!

“Pose a woman for a shoot, give her great pictures for a day. Teach her to pose, give her great pictures for life!”

Waiting for The One

Me: I'm tired of being one of those people who wants to start a business but is waiting for "the one." You know? That once-in-a-millennium Steve Jobs idea that makes me feel both fulfilled and rich. I wanna be one of those unscrupulous guys that can take a profit model, any profit model, and execute it without feeling.

Ex-Business Partner (EBP): Yeah. Me too. But hey, making money online is dead. We need a new milk-cow.

Me: That's not true. There's a few web-based ideas left out there to milk.

EBP: Name one.

Me: Like ... hot webcam girls. That give SEO tips. While stripping.

EBP: That's not a bad idea, actually.

Me: Each vid can last two minutes, subs-only, and we can end each one with a cliffhanger: "Next week" -- while playing with thong -- "find out how to leverage Google Analytics for your social media campaigns." All broadcasts will be transcribed for max SEO magic. And we'll slather them with ads.

EBP: I'm in. When can we get started?

Me: Screw that, man. I'm not doing that.

EBP: You're pathetic.

No A for Effort.

Lib-Arts kids want credit for trying hard.

Life isn't Full House, and if you can't get the job done, it's in no one's interest to rub your back and give you props for spending precious time. Suck it up and -- hey, while you're at it? -- SUCK IT UP.

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Notes on image: “Four Women Crying” (c.1878). Tintype photograph, via.

It's a Sad Day When...

...Viagra of all things makes you long for that one epic amour. See Z Publicidad/Mexico's "Couple" (my full review here):




I'm probably just a sucker for this particular gimmick, though. Levi's "Dangerous Liaisons" also filled me with a cup-runneth-over, totally overblown sentimentality.

And as I watch it, knowing what a tool I'm being, I still can't help but think something really lame like, "This is why I do what I do!" -- with my eyes all filling with tears and whatnot.

(BTW, if you ever tell anyone I told you this, I will kill you.)

Experimenting with Video -- and Milking The Dirty Knife Allegory Dry.

Live & Uncensored!: The Dirty Knife Allegory.

The DKA gets some real-life application.

Gotta forgive the shakycam. I'll improve things if I decide to keep doing this.

(If we ever have a conversation like this one, it's because I'm playing Zuma on Mute.)

Sayed (by phone): ...so I go into this toilet in Pakistan, which is nothing more than a 20-foot hole in the ground, and this CHICKEN falls inside it!

Me: ... Hahaha! Poor girl.

Sayed: Did you not hear what I said? A chicken.

Me: Then that's not funny, it's sad. It might teach a drunk chick to fall into a latrine every once in awhile, but chickens are stupid. It'll probably die in there.

Sayed: Heh. Chickens are stupid. Anyway, people keep them as pets over there, and my uncle thought my cousin had put it in the hole on purpose. He got in SO much fucking trouble.

Me: Hahaha! Aww. Poor girl.

Sayed: You're not listening. Are you laughing just to laugh?

Me: No, no, I'm listening.

Sayed: ...Heh. 'Chickens are stupid.'