The Vulture flies to NYC to see the one show you didn’t need to see
In the middle of May, the Vulture sat through four utterly stultifying hours of the One Show in New York City, where hundreds of agencies competed for useless metal pencils in fake velour sacks. Here are some highlights, gleaned between morsels of the finest and rawest of tunafish flesh: The best ads are all being made in Thailand, and many Thai adpersons have names that are long and hard to pronounce. Brazil is the new Japan, and Sao Paolo is the new Tokyo. Doug Jaeger has passed the tuxedo/mohawk combo off to a heavyset Happy Corp. associate. We were surprised at how few of the award-worthy ads had ever been deemed worthy to be shown on T.V., and how many spots, particularly those of Wieden+Kennedy, did not contain any discernable reference to an actual product. We were highly impressed by pencil-winner Clay Weiner, better known as the director and breakdancing star of MTV’s the Intro Guy. Weiner has achieved the hipster dream of being, at once, a naturally awkward dork and a self-knowing elitist, than capturing the whole spectacle on film and getting paid for it. Half Napoleon Dynamite and half Bright Eyes, Weiner looks fourteen years younger than 30, his actual age. Attention Williamsburg! Box up your loft and catch the next Dragon Bus back to Cleveland! The game as you know it is over. Weiner has won.
Bud’s Wiser Logo
Making a good logo is a little bit like making a good beer, there’s a lot of refining and distilling to be done before the wise master can say “Eureka, we’ve got it.” The new Budweiser select has certainly got it, with this jagged red icon that’s somewhere between the randomness of a Jackson Pollock splatter and the willed effortless of Japansese calligraphy. It can read as a fire, a crowd or a crown. Now if only Bud could find a team as bright as the one that made the logo to brew the actual beer. We’ve tried it. It is a definite improvement on standard Budweiser. It may even be better than Pabst. It has only 99 calories. But premium? The Vulture likes looking at the logo, but we’ll continue washing down our carrion with pints of cold Philadelphia Yards ESA, thank you.
Budweiser Select
Crucial Brutal
Crucial Brutal – Twelve skateboarders collaborate on a crew-wide blog, sharing the most awesome rail slides and late-night boob shots from coast to coast. The point here is one well known to anyone who’s published a “blog.” Do it by yourself for ten hours and you will go crazy. Do it with your friends for ten minutes a day and you’ll have time left over to actually do things worth blogging about.
Albino Black Sheep
Albino Black Sheep – headquarters of America’s Crappiest Homemade Videos. Note especially the hypnotic Llama Song and its hit chorus: “Llama llama llama llama llama llama DUCK.” At which point there appears a picture of a duck. We have Macromedia Flash software to thank for these animated masterpieces, to the delight of grade schoolers and other connoisseurs of infantile humor.
The Next Tetris?
That’s what one ace Gyro employee thinks of Katamari Damacy, the highly addictive Playstation 2 game where you roll around the screen like an avalanche, growing fatter and faster as you inhale objects faster than Kristie Alley on a hamburger binge.
Poker-Palooza Knows No End
Has there been any interruption in the supply of sedentary men with too much time and money on their hands? Is anyone offering them a way to play the outlaw while reclining in a soft chair and drinking a Heineken? Well, Grand Theft Auto II, arguably, but note that the bestselling video game includes, yes, a poker sequence. Poker keeps posting gains at the high and low ends of the spectrum. Restaurants are quickly dropping their Quizzo nights for Hold ‘Em tourneys and Toby Maguire’s $2,000 buy-in Hollywood game is still going strong. Atlantic City’s top casino, the Borgata, is planning to add 100 new poker tables by the end of this year. The smart money knows that vice (the category, not the magazine) has unusual staying power. Just look at the Rat Pack cocktail culture of the late 90s. The swing dancing died but the martini survived, and even managed to drop that clumsy uppercase “m.” For the next decade at least, men will continue to pine for the days when there was dinner on the table, the kids were in bed, and they could retire to smoke-filled rooms of dirty jokes and civilized financial combat.
Sub Pop Vet Switches to Books
At the nerdier and whiter end of the publishing continuum novelist Matthew Stadler has teamed up with former Sub Pop Records general manager Richard Jensen to publish books out of Astoria, Oregon. Sold by subscription and in advance, their carefully crafted pocket-sized chapbooks have attracted strong contributions from New Yorker contributors, snowboard photographers, and at least one former high-level Enron employee. Stadler and Jensen espouse a highly indie “capillarial” method of distribution and promotion, which is a fancy word for not hiring a publicist and sending free copies to all your well-connected friends.
True Crime by True Criminals
Mix crime with sex and you’ve won our attention, along with that of white suburban America. Two new magazines with ex-con editors, F.E.D.S. and Don Diva, have this formula down. Both have 5,000-word interviews with famed drug dealers, lush photo spreads of scantily-clad lady rappers, and an underground distribution network of those guys who sell fake watches off picnic tables. But we’re most impressed by the ads! There are generic condoms, flavored wraps for our blunts, and 800 lawyer numbers we can call the next time we’re pulled over outside Poughkeepsie with a kilo of coke in the trunk on those pesky Rockefeller laws still on the books.
The Slingbox by Sling Media
Speaking of the disposable and digital, here’s a plastic box that costs about $300. It sits on top of your TV and fires the signal to your laptop. Presto, TV on your laptop. But the Slingshot has taken after the carabiner in one respect–it does one job and it does it well.
How the Cool Keys get Clipped
Have you seen the carabiners? Once, rock climbers used these metal rings to keep their ropes under control. Today, the carabiner latches the keys of pretty much everyone we know to the belt loops of their respective pants. Carabiners are being used as promotional tchotchkes and sold in drug stores. Another week of this carabiner madness and they would have been too stale for the Vulture to even mention. First question: Were you already aware of the carabiner? If not, we can’t help you. Stop reading email all day and start taking in some actual public air and crowds. Second question: Now what is the significance of the carabiner? We’re not sure, but we believe it to be a cousin of the fixed-gear bicycle. It is a functional, useful machine that does one job and does it perfectly, much like the keys that it holds. Take care of it and it will last pretty much forever. It’s a solid hunk of weighty, almost blue-collar gear that hangs on your belt. It’s so utility that it’s almost Batman. And now for the big, sexy conclusion: As we’re asked to buy more and more crappy disposable digital devices that will break down after a few months of demanding use, we’re starting to fetishize simple, sturdy, single-job workhorses like the carabiner.
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