I Guess That's About Right.

@PatStansik's produced this video about being in your early 20s, which @CandaceHetchler showed me as part of an ongoing discussion we're having about whether or not Girls is a depiction of reality.

I tried to dislike this video but it was hard to, because this is what my early 20s were like: my parents paid for the gas, I paid for everything else; Trader Joe's was the organic supermarket of choice because Whole Foods is wallet rape; and coming in early to work was a way to show enthusiasm as well as a symptom of the ever-present paranoia that you could get canned for sucking at any given moment.

This isn't my time anymore, but I remember it because that's what it was like. I still can't find anything remotely relatable about Girls, though, and at the very least now I know that it's not just because I'm too old. If Judd Apatow's big "joke" is that he's put some smart privileged girls on the screen to prance around ruining their lives and being abjectly unfunny and mediocre, that's cool ... but the schadenfreude needed to make that consistently funny is separated from me by too many degrees.

Stay the night, steal a Banksy.

In keeping with AdVerveBlog reader Zed's incendiary appropriation of Banksy's anti-advertising manifesto, Melbourne's Art Series Hotels attracted guests and plenty of earned media by inviting them to stay the night and try to steal Banksy art hanging on the wall. If you could get it out of the hotel without getting caught, it was yours.

The hotel tracked the thieves via GPS so it could contact them afterward to send authentication documents and campaign follow-up. This looks like it was lots of fun and the hotel's stories about the burglary attempts are great. Even celebrities got in on the theftery. More importantly, it apparently also resulted in a 300% ROI and nearly 7 million impressions on Twitter alone.

So what are you guys waiting for? Go disrupt, go make culture. In the world of subversive anti-art, all's fair.

SapientNitro: Anatomy of a Culture Cult

Some moments after I sat down with SapientNitro’s Worldwide Chief Creative Director Gaston Legorburu and Creative Director John McHale, I got a hard sense of what our time together would be about.

“Our secret weapon is our culture,” Gaston said. And the culture is bred and nourished with conscious attention.

They reflected that they've never actually discussed this with the press before, and maybe because of that, they sat and outlined the entire blueprint.

Read the rest of this (EPIC!) nummy num-num on Yahoo! Scene, for which I'm doing Cannes Lions coverage this year.

'Baked a Lot of Bread and Carried Off the Books'

Paul: "You know the dollar's in trouble when Jay-Z's flashing Euros."

We needed to wait for Jay-Z to tell us our economy was in trouble? This is the kind of news that makes my figurative Baby Jesus cry.

One Monkey to Berate Us All [video]

Dance, monkeys, dance!

On the Meaning of Occupation

"Should men and women, after all, be defined in any important way by their work? The answer, of course, is yes, otherwise the activities that largely support our lives and consume our time would be unfriendly, foreign, and irrelevant to us.

"Our occupation should not be something we visit like the seashore in summer or a prisoner in a prison, despite the fact that the work may be unpleasant [...] Even if it is like speaking a foreign language we haven't learned, that incapacity itself is totally defining."

-Foreword by William Gass, Stanley Elkin's The Franchiser

Bay Area Women

Transit is a state of limbo; everyone's preparing for the next act. There's a lot you can learn about a person in transit based on books read in idle time, clothes, expression and features.

Here are a few photos of women from a late afternoon on BART. I was traveling from Oakland to Walnut Creek, on the Pittsburg/Baypoint line from San Francisco.

Symptoms of an Adolescent Country

Me, staring in horror at the business acquaintance who's just told off an overwhelmed waitress: "You're damn high-maintenance. How on earth did you manage to live in a Third World country for a whole summer?!"

He tilts his head, smiles pertly and replies, "Outside the lines is one thing. In the States, anything less than my way is unacceptable."

It's Just Culture, Man.

If you talk to maybe most any first-gen Southeast Asian, what you'll find is that rice is a big deal. No. It's not just a staple; it's a really big deal. There are songs about it.

I concluded yesterday that Filipinos in particular are weird about rice. I don't excuse myself from that statement. When I first tasted rice outside my parents' house, I was appalled by its strange consistency. The rice I grew up with is stubby, and not quite sticky but sticky enough to squeeze into airtight balls if you like to eat with your fingers.

It took some time to learn that rice has many faces, only one of which I came to know intimately - the kind that comes with the little red medal. The use of the red medal is actually a splendid sales tactic, considering I'd push my otherwise indifferent parents to patronize whatever brand it was so I could tear the medal off the rice bag for use in various games of pretend, like pinning it to the clothes of Angela the Olympic Winner or attaching it to very valuable wills for discovery by Angela the Sexy Spy. Don't ask when.

But I digress. For the last few weeks I've been working with a new marketing trainee that I happen to know really well. In fact, together we wiled away our Fil-Am centric youths battling imaginary foes in swamp-side Vallejo.

Yesterday I took him to an Indian restaurant and he sat staring at his rice for over 10 minutes because it was so long and dry. "Where do they find it?" he asked, perplexed. He didn't look up at me the whole time.

"India," I answered. This was probably not the best or most accurate answer but under the circumstances it did neither harm nor good.

He picked at it. "They put spices in here," he observed softly. "There's ... a flavour."

"It is good with yogurt," I said mechanically. At that point I disengaged myself from the conversation and began eating my curry. I wish I'd known that hours later I'd again be condemned to more rice-talk.

Me to my parents as I dug through the rice cooker, less than 4 hours later: "Dude. Why do you guys make rice that's half brown and half white?"

Mom: "What do you mean?"

Me, teasing: "It's, like, both brown and white. Can you not make up your minds?"

Mom started to laugh. "We have to mix so your daddy will eat it," she said. "This way at least it's still half-healthy."

I carried my rice-laden plate to the kitchen table, where my pops gave me that smug look and said, "See, Angel, if it's all brown, it's ..." He seemed to be at a loss. "Terrible."

"Terrible? Is that the best you can do?" I said. Really. He's normally devastating on the rapier-wit scale. It's a point of pride, even. Possibly the rice thing draws less-than-rational sentiments.

He started to laugh. "You have to put some white in so it's edible," he replied finally.

I didn't pursue this realm of logic further. But today at the office I mentioned the exchange to my trainee, sans ending, and he just looked at me strangely and said, "Half brown, half white? I bet that tastes hella good. Isn't it healthier too?"

Revisiting the Roots of Hyphy

Over the weekend I hung out with my relatives in the cities where I spent more than fifteen years of my childhood. Back in a world in which I passed so much time, a world I abruptly left, I experienced a sense of culture shock almost equal in magnitude to what I felt upon my return from France.

Urban fashion for the hip-hop generation in Fairfield and Vallejo is strikingly distinct from anything you'll find in the City or in Concord, which are less than an hour away. To illustrate the point, my cousin is dating a dude from San Francisco and they absolutely hate the way the other dresses. There's a jarring of the tastes that simply can't be overlooked. The hyphy movement is of course wildly influential across the Benicia Bridge, considering this is the home of E-40.

It's not uncommon to see the stunna shades everybody is trying to wear. But there's an added flavour in the clothing that, superficial sheen of hyphy/crunk aside, maintains a sense of the authentic. It's attractive, witty, tongue-in-cheek - and anything but lazily conceived. I still love the elegant earthy embroidery on colourful LRG hoodies pulled up over a crisp shirt, big-ass headphones draped lazily over the shoulders, and contrasting kicks you won't find anyplace else. I dig the brass-coloured pointy heels you wear with mid-calf jeans, a form-fitting wifebeater and a flesh aviator jacket that falls down to mid-waist. I love the long straightened hair partially covering oversized shades, and baby tees that say I'M GOING GOING BACK BACK TO CALI CALI. I think it's hype the way Vallejo and Fairfield natives have their own slang and have really pushed grassroots marketing for "the soil where them rappas be getting their lingo from" (E-40, Tell Me When to Go).

As kids, the music permeating through the flesh of the streets was wildly influential. All of us were in bands and most guys were rappers who made beats on the side. It was as if the music industry was the only foreseeable way to do anything with your life. I wrote songs to somebody else's music. Breakdancing thrived here. And we wedded all this to the provincial, authoritarian way in which we were raised - those nagging apron strings that added inherent and uniform values to our foundations.

Another interesting thing about Fairfield and Vallejo is the sense of pride wrapped around the slippery and infectious lyricism E-40 is known for. It's not something that originated with him; it's part of the earth in the cities, the asphalt's twang. I grew up saying "sigg" when a kid got teased, "goosed" when somebody got laid and "hutch" to refer to a girl of questionable propriety.

I've spent so much time away from the place that I forgot what it's like, how slow and chill life feels, and how it's as much a part of me as anything else. I can see why we moved - my father always felt that if I grew up in this atmosphere I'd acquire a brand of comfortability and possibly racial self-entitlement that would never be beneficial to an opportunist - but at the same time, I can appreciate the culture that thrives at the roots of the cities, both provincial (when I was young Fairfield was a farm town) and gritty as you can imagine (I went to church on a boulevard that, to this day, remains rife with prostitution and street drug sales).

It's nice to come back to the soil in which you took root, even if life brought you elsewhere. And hell, it's also nice to know there's still nuance to hip-hop.

Culture Clash

Since returning from France, I've found:

• The Mona Lisa's fame is only perpetuated by propaganda. She's not all impressive and I'm sorry I broke through the exhaustive crowd just to see her
• I want to eat, and eat well, 3 times a day - sitting down, with no distractions
  
• I'm preoccupied with hot chocolate and prefer it over coffee in the mornings
• I smoke
• I feel the desire to walk and be outside a lot. Everything here is so remote, and I want sunshine, wind and rain
  
• I am a red wine person, and I favour Beaujolais
• I like knowing the people around me, and the people who make the ingredients in my food
• I love Doisneau, Klimt and Dali

But I must admit I much prefer the ads here.