Dungeons and Dragons: No Longer Just For Nerds
Thora Birch. You probably know her as Scarlett Johannson’s cynical “Ghost World” girlfriend. But that wasn’t her first hipster role. Only a year before, she played Empress Savina of Sumdall in a cinematic adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons.
Sure you remember Dungeons and Dragons, played with lead die-cast elves and ten-sided dice? Well the dice are back—on the t-shirts of Philadelphia skateboarders of all places! Our point being that Dungeons and Dragons, and fantasy in general, is the current hot new thing, probably because cool has so ravaged every other nook and cranny of our culture that only the most hardened vestiges of dorkdom remain. Another possible cause is that our present reality is so much like fantasy, that only truly absurd fantasies about winged lizards, brave paladins and vicious mindflayers offer us the hope of escape.
That’s How the Google Crumbles
Do you hear that sound off in the distance, that soft, muffled roar? That isn’t the sea or a jet plane, it’s the Great Google Brand Backlash of 2006, starting to gather steam as we roll into the New Year.
Only yesterday the Vulture was chatting with a plainspoken young lady from central Pa. who told us “I just hate people who use the word ‘Googling.’ It’s not that I have a problem with Google, it’s just that there are other search engines out there, you know. Googling is just so tacky. It’s like ordering a Grey Goose and cranberry instead of just vodka and cranberry.”
Look at the history books. You can only claim to be taking over the world for so long before someone takes you down. Look for 2006 to kick off with a big public backlash against the tyrants who claim to be saving our time while stealing our attention, and who would, if given the chance, pulp all the world’s libraries and replace them with microchips no larger than a speck of dust. Don’t forget that they just bought a custom jumbo jet with walk-in showers and a banquet hall. The geeks have become too rich. It’s time to stop loving them.
Ford Motor Co. Joins Fortune 500 Indie Cred Buyout
It began with Faith Popcorn’s Brooklyn skatepark, built with money from Tylenol’s McNeil family. It accelerated with Toyota’s Scion, the car that comes with its own underground magazine. Now, no advertising campaign is complete unless a Fortune 500 company has paid some crazy longhairs a few thousand dollars to do their wild artsy thing, whatever it may be, so long as they sign the paperwork and insert a tastefully understated logo at the bottom.
The Ford Motor Co. is the latest indie patron. They’ve purchased their own rock band, a Norweigan Turbonegro knock-off called Hurra Torpedo, who wear matching bright blue Adidas tracksuits and drive a new Ford Fusion. They’re also paying digital filmmakers to shoot their own funny Ford commercials and post them to the AtomFilms site as original kitsch artworks.
The suits, apparently, have caught on that artists will work for cheap, and now they can’t get enough of that discounted indie creative labor.
Newspapers Spend $100 Million to Fight Craigslist, Google
After two years of watching their lunch get eaten by Google’s pay-per-click model and Craiglist’s utopian free-for-all, newspapers are finally striking back, making $100 million bet on a service called “PaperBoy.” PaperBoy takes standard banner ads but allows users to discover local specials and nearby locations by rolling over the banner with their mouse, a process that goes by the clumsy name “geo-targeting.” The service should be up and running by next month at Knight Ridder, Gannett and Tribune Co. properties.
In the old analog days, a refrigerator store that was using a big sale to liquidate inventory had to make a buy for an entire market to reach the 2 percent of the population interested in buying a fridge. The other 98 percent of the impressions (and the ad cost) were flushed down the toilet. So we’re still curious what the plan is for the papers’ old fashion print advertising models, which rely on this kind of waste and still provide more than three-quarters of their revenue, ’cause the fridge men of the world have DSL and are sick and tired of being played for fools.
Street Art for Shaky Hands
The wonderful and terrible thing about stencils is that they take all the handiwork out of street art. Unlike normal aerosol work, which depends on practiced turns of the wrist (no small feat while looking over one’s shoulder for the fuzz) a well-cut stencil guarantees consistent, almost industrial results time after time. In exchange, you give up most of your control of depth, line weight, and ability to tailor whatever sign it is that you’re posting to the individual site.
The stencil community likes to compensate for its lack of fine motor skills by being even more pretentious than their freehanded brethren—witness Stencil Revolution, a site that bills its mission as “collectively reconstructing the urban canvas.” Please. Anything that needs to use such large words to explain why it is doing what it’s doing belongs in a white cube gallery, not the street.
Brandon Bird: A Modern Painter We Can Relate To
When first introduced to the American toy market, the Nintendo 8-bit video game system was vilified as the epitome of crap culture. What could be worse, after all, than sitting on your sofa controlling the choppy and pixelated movements of an imaginary plumber when you could be engaging in a more wholesome activity, like building a model airplane or reading the heirloom edition of the Odyssey that your parents bought you last Christmas?
There’s snob logic for you—if 2 billion people love it, it must suck.
Twenty years later, Mario is hanging in the Whitney and starring on college syllabi, proof that yesterday’s kitsch is tomorrow’s classic. No modern painter understands this principle better than Brandon Bird. He’s painted Mr. T. and Chuck Norris as epic Greek warriors, and as seen above, Abraham Lincoln as a WWF iron cage champion.
Keep up the good work, Mr. Bird.
Guilt is the New Consumption, Which Also Happens to be the New Porn
Why spend $200 on a pair of sneakers if you can’t analyze the decision among friends afterwards? It’s not like the sneakers themselves have any inherently superior qualities as far as design or performance goes—believing that luxury equals quality is, after all, a chump’s game.
That’s what buying luxury goods has become, an anthropological foray into the world of the “mindless consumer,” something that no one will actually ‘fess up to being. This has created a new species of journalism, voyeuristic consumer porn, that reveals the hows and whys of consumption and advertising doing their nasty little business with the buyer’s mind without actually admitting that everyone—reader and writer included—is a part of the process. It’s a good deal because you get to hear about the latest products and the wildest trends without losing that sense of self-assured superiority that supposedly separates you from the rest of the flock.
And now Nick Denton, the Blog King, has made a sizable bet that consumer porn is part of the shallow, narrowcasted future that pays his rent.
My First Loan Shark
Credibility is a funny thing. It holds together for a good long while until the first crack appears. Then it starts to crumble and before you know it, it’s gone, whilring down the drain faster than you can say “DJ Spooky.”
So we can’t really blame Good Charlotte, Chingy, Avril Lavinge, Clay Aiken, Simple Plan and Xzibit for cashing in during their fourteenth minute by trying to push overpriced prepaid debit cards (they’re called “MyPlash,” a division of Mastercard) on their hapless unbanked fans. But check out the fees on these suckers! $28.94 just to get the special Good Charlotte card in the mail! Up to $6.75 to put money on the thing! $15.00 to close the account out, and, get this, $1.50 per minute for the privilege of speaking to a MyPlash agent. But it’s worth it, of course, for the right to possess a bodacious plastic rectangle with your very own name on it, embossed on the image of your favorite artist from TRL.
So while fans lay down good money for the sake of a ring tone, we can only presume that it’s the true hardcore groupie who will pay high fees for, well, nothing. By the way, we’re especially amused/offended by the “lifestyle” MyPlash card, which come in “music girl,” “fashion girl,” and, of course, “skateboarder,” among other flavors.
Are the Streets Too “Open Source” For Sony?
Toys from 23rd and Dauphin, suburban lacrosse players, L.E.S. art school grads and multibillion-dollar transnational corporations all know that graffiti, yes graffiti, the act of covertly painting one’s name in aerosol on the side of a wall, is a great way to put your name out there on the cheap. It’s an especially good deal for said corporations, who pick up a side of much-needed cred with their newfound street-level fame. There’s a downside, though, which is that any old hater can walk up and write his name over yours.
So Sony hired street artists to push its new Playstation Portable with original graffiti in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, and our own Philadelphia, where crudely drawn kids can be seen playing with their PSPs along the 700 block of Girard. Now they’re feeling the backlash from the true street artists, the rugged and raw keep-it-realists who hate to see their pure graffiti form diluted with any commercial intent, unless, of course, it’s their name at the top of the check.
Verizon Likes Their Reality Productive & Upbeat
Do repeated viewings of the Real World and the Simple Life make you feel … well … unclean? Of course they do. Nobody likes seeing able-bodied people lie around a pool drinking martinis when they ought to be contributing to our Gross National Product, like the rest of us. Except we’re watching them on television. That’s the problem with most reality TV—the laziness of the cast shames the viewers into seeing their own slackerly tendencies, and everyone winds up feeling like they’re one more episode away from winding up next to Puck in the welfare line.
Therefore we praise highly Verizon’s new reality ad campaign. It takes after the philosophy of MTV’s Made, that reality shows should actually have a lasting positive impact on their participants. Verizon finds a person with a dream—opening a barbershop, say, or launching your own t-shirt line. They hook them up with a storefront office, a mentor, loads of free publicity, and most importantly, a deadline, a time by which they must complete the task which they have set for themselves. We find the spectacle of a giant corporation taking the time to convince one individual to get their ass in gear to be strangely inspiring.
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