Yeah, I know you thought I abandoned this, but you were wrong. To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. This'll be done with a cool poll you can vote on. And there will be prizes. I'm serious. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: A Ten Letter Word for Facebook
Sure, Facebook's awesome -- it's 99.9% less ugly than MySpace, you're not bombarded by girls in bikinis offering you Macy's discount cards and it's not, as of yet, owned by Rupert Murdoch. But as cool as that newsfeed is and as much as we love being bitten by vampires, zombies and werewolves, the killer app for Facebook is Scrabulous.
Scrabulous is , as you may have guessed-- a game that resembles the Parker Bros. game Scrabble to a degree that Parker Bros. could sue if it wasn't for the excellent P.R. the online game gives to the real thing. Created by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two Indian graduate students; Scrabulous has been around for two years at its own site. But it's the Facebook incarnation of the game that's become fantastically addictive, gaining the attention of both The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The brothers run both incarnations as a hobby.
Why? Playing Scrabulous on Facebook is a lot like playing Scrabble in real life-- it takes some degree of concentration, you can chat with the other players and you can make a move in under five minutes, usually. It's the perfect work time distraction: you get your mind off the task at hand, get to socialize, but it's not very committing. Chatting online and browsing the web are popular Internet work distractions, but can easily become time sinks; while you could still waste your time at Scrabulous, the turn-based nature of the game makes it more difficult to do so. At the very least, it's more fun than listening by the water cooler to your co-worker talk about his bender last night; more efficient, too. You can tell your boss I said so.
Yeah, I know you thought I abandoned this, but you were wrong. To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. This'll be done with a cool poll you can vote on. And there will be prizes. I'm serious. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: The Frug
The frug is only gaining in popularity and 2007 was its break-out year, thanks to YouTube and Beyonce Knowles. For those not in the know, the frug (pronounced "froog") is a dance from the '60s which is basically "The Twist" for lazy people. You hold your arms out and sway your hips from side to side and look disaffected. But thanks to Beyonce's uh- "appropriation" of Bob Fosse's choreography for "The Rich Man's Frug" for her "Get Me Bodied" video (a mash-up of the two here), the dance has made a comeback.
Purists argue that underage booty shaking with babies crying in the background and Sims dancing to Beyonce do not a frug make. I say live a little, but if you're in that category, you'll want to direct your attention to YouTube videos set to the 1998 Rilo Kiley song "The Frug", as the renditions tend to be more faithful. Well, for white people trying to dance, that is. If that still isn't frugalicious enough for you, you can always watch cute little kids doing the original Fosse. A few years ago, this little dance wouldn't have a chance. But with its lethal combination of ironic hipster nostalgia, multiple pop cultural allusions, and viral internet appeal, the frug may just well be the macarena of the Aughties.
To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. Starting Friday, you'll be able to vote for the trend you think is the most important. Somehow, there'll be a prize involved. I've got to figure it out. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: Mean Girls
On the surface of it, the drug-fueled train wreck that is Lohanspearshiltonrichie is awesome; rich, privileged girls perform HI-larious stunts (ranging in creativity from driving drunk to shaving your head in front of the paparazzi), showcase the injustice of the criminal justice system (by avoiding it) and publicly back stab each other on any of the network shows more than willing to roll over and satisfy our collective fascination with America's favorite problem children.
But even if the objects of our attention have no depth, there is an undercurrent to our obsession with them. American culture is a deeply misogynistic one and never so clearly as when it's delighting in the destruction of sexually promiscuous women. But we've gone from eulogizing candles in the wind after the fact to active speculation of when and how Britney Spears will kill herself. It's the modern day gladiator tournament, with the maddening crowd goading these fame addicts to the grave. Spears et. al. are on the hook for their behavior, but we're not off the hook for watching it. Are these women a fascinating distraction from the tedium of our own lives or merely a reflection of it?
To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. Starting Friday, you'll be able to vote for the trend you think is the most important. Somehow, there'll be a prize involved. I've got to figure it out. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: Macho Macho Modernism
It used to be that the prevailing trends of architecture transformed slowly over decades; now style turns on a dime. This year, MOCA's "Skin + Bones" show charted parallel processes and techniques between architecture and fashion and brilliantly showed that how the two disciplines had moved closer to each other in recent years. It's easy to see the couture lines in the recent work of Libeskind, Gehry (who was sued by M.I.T. this year for creating a building that dumps snow on students) and Hadid. Each of these architects have been recently called on by cities to build glamorous tourist destinations that could serve as both icon and visual shorthand for renewal, even if they did little to actually improve the fabric of the city. And like fashion, architecture styles now change as fast as hem lines.
A few high-profile projects this year distanced themselves from the swooping digital aerobatics of "starchitecture" by embracing function over form, most notably the Japanese firm Sanaa's New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Admittedly, it makes use of a mesh skin, but it's firmly rooted in the Modernist tradition of a building responding to a problem, but marries it to the best lesson of Post-Modernism: That a building must be more than machine for living; it has to respond to its environment as well. While PoMo's like Michael Graves took that mandate as an excuse to create buildings shaped like castles and china cabinet's, Sanaa's New Museum is the kind of clever that doesn't break a sweat. That mesh skin recalls the Bowery's dwindling industrial past and the playful arrangement of the Modernist box serves the practical purpose of letting more natural light in. In the process, it avoids the pitfalls of both schools: it's too playful to develop any of the Modernist's self-importance and it lacks the showy insecurity displayed in a lot of the new buildings being created now.
L.A, for its part, hasn't added much to the conversation, other than to prove that like New York, it's perfectly capable of throwing up a bunch of banal overpriced condos with stupid names. One exception is the Wilshire/ Vermont Station, designed by Arquitectonica, the first housing development in L.A. to actively engage itself with the city's mass transit (a number of MTA stations are part of a building, but are treated as afterthoughts). That's all going to change with the February opening of Renzo Piano's Phase I redesign of LACMA, which looks to be both spectacular to look at as well as an intellectually rigorous exercise in function; recreating (well, this being L.A.- - creating) the social dynamics of pedestrian urban space. Originally, the plan was to have Rem Koolhaas raze the existing campus and replace it with an undulating dystopian glass tent. Money (and the question of how to clean the roof of bird droppings) stopped that plan, but it could turn out that Piano's modernist-influenced plan may be the face of the future after all.
To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. Starting Friday, you'll be able to vote for the trend you think is the most important. Somehow, there'll be a prize involved. I've got to figure it out. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: Republicans Go Down
It was just a few short years ago that Karl Rove & Co. were declaring that you could count on the Republicans to run the country for the next 40 years. How did it all go so wrong? Well, there's the sex scandals, the corruption charges, the incompetence, which certainly doesn't help, but there's a deeper current at work-- and one the Dem's ought to take notice of. The Republican rush to the right was by all accounts brilliant strategy-- combine moral conservatism to please the base with fiscal policy that favored big business and you get a party that translates into both votes and cash. Unfortunately consistent ideology was thrown out with the bathwater and Republicans found themselves becoming the very thing they accused the Dems of being; an issue party -- arguing that marriage was too important an issue to be left to the states, while howling that abortion could only be handled on a state-by-state basis.
For liberals, the parade of scandal and downfall of the G.O.P is cause to party like it's 1999 (when Bill was still in the White House), but they ought not to send out invitations to their pan sexual loft parties just yet. Less than 4 years ago, the Dem's future looked just as bleak and look what's happened. The calls of 'inevitability' are myopic ones. Just because your opponent's house is on fire doesn't change the fact that you're still living in a pile of rubble yourself. Voters aren't voting for Dems because of anything they've done; they're voting because they're dissatisfied with the status quo.
Both parties are in the process of reinventing themselves and the rapid shift of loyalties is more a sign of instability than in one party triumphing over another. While both sides have done a great job of securing their bases (watching the G.O.P. Presidential candidates trip over themselves to show which one is the most socially conservative is as painful as the Dem's quibbling over who was for what, when), but in America today, if you're not a partisan, you're probably disgusted.
Why should Dem's care? After all, they're getting the White House in 2009, right? Well, for one-- all those people who voted for Bush twice haven't suddenly become flower-wearing hippies. They're pissed off and disaffected and they're not going away. The candidate who takes the DNC nomination can either be a lightning rod for their collective frustration (rhymes with "Dillary Plinton") or can lead help the country move beyond the cul-de-sac of "red vs. blue".
No President operates in a vacuum and the one who is "most qualified to lead" in 2009 is the one who will be able to bring both sides to the table to forge a new kind of American politics. Both parties are in a unique position to reinvent themselves for the 21st Century; you see it in the popularity of Obama and Ron Paul, politicians with policies and positions that would not have had a platform eight years ago. It's impossible to predict the future of American party politics right now, but the Republican party is going to be a part of it. Whether it becomes the minority party of social conservatism or returns to a more ideological consistent centrist party is anyone's guess, but if Dem's need proof that you can't kill your opponent and dismiss them as inconsequential, they just need to look to their own recent history.
To close out the year (and to give you folks something to read while I finish up scripts), tMR is listing the "Top 20 Trends of 2007". But I need your help putting them in order. Starting Friday, you'll be able to vote for the trend you think is the most important. Somehow, there'll be a prize involved. I've got to figure it out. If you have a suggestion for a trend, email me.
2007: The Unconcert -- Daft Punk's Alive 2007
Two words: Robot. Humanity. You can barely make the words out as they're slowly pronounced on a heavily digitized vocoder. Then they speed up until they blur into each other, the crowd goes wild and two motorcycle-helmet-wearing Frenchmen start playing music inside a giant pyramid on stage. There are no instruments, only computers. A lot of ink had already been spilled about Daft Punk, an electronica group known for it's love of repetitive lyrics (if you know the title "Around the World", you've memorized the song's lyrics) before this year's Alive 2007 tour. But in figuring out a way to present totally synthetic music in a live setting, Daft Punk's reformatted everything you knew about concerts.
Strictly speaking, there's no music-making to see at a Daft Punk concert. The elaborate electronics which allows the duo to manipulate the pre-recorded tracks they use are all hidden from view. Instead the audience witnesses shear spectacle-- two robots in a pyramid surrounded by lights. It's iconic, but devoid of meaning, much like the music itself. While most concerts are about seeing your favorite live, a Daft Punk concert is all about you. It's an old stage-saying that the audience makes the show, and by polishing their stage presence into a high-gloss mirror, Daft Punk's creates a show that reflects the audience's energy right back onto itself; creating an adrenalin-induced feedback loop.
The contradiction here is that the spectacle makes for a more genuine musical experience. Without visible ego's and personalities on stage, you focus on the music-- and by "focus" I mean "dance your ass off". While Gen X searched everywhere for ways to "keep it real", Daft Punk celebrates a generation whose reality is an artificial and digital landscape. As our identities dissolve, morph and expand across social networks, text messages and Google searches Daft Punk's robotic vision reminds that we're still "human after all".
