It’s been about two weeks since Amazon introduced its “Search Inside the Book” function, and already, we’re witnessing a change in journalism. Take, for example, this unsigned New York Times Week in Review piece that wrote itself simply by going to Amazon and typing in Santa+Ana+winds.
Writing articles hasn’t been this easy since the advent of The Internet Movie Database.
Marketers sure are brilliant! Just when you thought you’d begun to really identify with a brand you’ve loved and faithfully used since childhood, Philip Morris became Altria, and Time Warner became AOL Time Warner, before becoming Time Warner again…so exciting!
7up “flipped it and reversed it” to become dnL, and next thing you know, twenty-somethings felt like skateboarding and reading “Thrasher” for the first time since junior high (and it surely didn’t hurt that 7up, I mean, dnL, tastes way cooler than yesterday’s extreme-sports soda, Mountain Dew).
Now, according to Adweek, the branding wizards at Mendelsohn/Zien are giving us another rechristening. Beloved second-tier fast-food chain Carl’s Jr. is pandering to its Los Angeles base:
“With a simple display of the fast-food chain’s smiling-star logo, a voiceover announces, “Carl’s Jr. would like to extend a special welcome to the L.A. Lakers’ Karl Malone,” at which point a super comes up under the Laker-gold star, reading “Karl’s Jr.” The sound of a bouncing basketball concludes the spot.”
Phew. Seeing that revised logo the first time, and given chain founder Carl Karcher’s notorious background as an avid Southern California Republican, I initially feared far more insidious influences were at work.
Finally! Richard Rushfield and Stacey Grenrock-Woods (and their stellar contributors) are back with a second issue of LA Innuendo.
What you will find inside (or on the Web site if you don’t live in Los Angeles):
Brett Ratner bashing, obligatory (but still funny) Gigli jokes, and more of those great Overheard Conversations like this beaut overheard at the Gold’s Gym Parking Lot in Hollywood:
Two women in workout clothes argue before getting into the car.
FIRST: “Do you want to get something to eat?”
SECOND: “No, I just ate.”
FIRST: “So what, you’re fully bulimic. Let’s go.”
Makes me sad that there wasn’t anything this good to read when I lived in LA.
“Hefner’s two little black books from 1957 and 1958, include a who’s who of celebrities and cultural icons of the day, ranging from Richard Avedon to Oleg Cassini. Christie’s says the address books could fetch up to $12,000 apiece.” Bunny Booty On The Block In Playboy Auction By Paul Tharp
Buried at the very end of Armond White’s review of The Human Stain in this week’s New York Press is this:
The moments are so especially erotic, it’s clear we’re watching Coleman’s secrets and dreams. (Nakedness bathed in Jean-Yves Escoffier’s amber light; Coleman snorfling a young Wasp woman’s body with curiosity as much as passion.)
Snorfling? What the snorf?!? Curious, I snorfled over to the blogger’s best friend, Google and tried to find this word. Here’s what I got: What is my Greyhound trying to tell me?
The click/snap is actually a replacement for the lick; you will find that most of these dogs aren’t lickers. Sometimes they yelp, bark, or make throaty noises while clicking. “Snorfling” might be a good description of this activity.
Snorfled that right up.
Earlier thoughts on Armond White from low culture.
Back in 1994, Douglas Coupland complained in ArtForum that the younger generation of artists and art critics had completely forgotten James Rosenquist. (The essay, on Rosenquist’s F-111, a portion of which is above, is collected in Polaroids from the Dead.)
Not so anymore. Rosenquist is the subject of a big retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York (through January 25th) and pops up today in one of those mini profiles in The Times Metro Section. Here’s a little bit of wisdom from an art world survivor to all you young turks out there:
We lived like kings in New York in those days on very little money. The younger artists today think they have to turn their fine art into cash to pay the rent. Now what happens is they show too early and the critics say they stink and they think they stink.
Keep at it, kids. This guy is 70 years-old.
Saw the trailer for The Last Samurai last night. What’s the deal with Tom Cruise always wanting to be uglied up in his movies? In the Samurai trailer we get two shots of a badly bruised and swollen Cruise, his coverboy looks destroyed.
Reminded me of Vanilla Sky, in which he spent the majority of that film looking like Quasimodo.
Any shrinks out there wanna take a crack at this?
Not sure how I feel about this: it appears the FOX Network (or at least their marketing people) has discovered this weird thing called ‘meta’. How else to explain the ad for the soon-to-be cancelled new show Arrested Development with this phrase:
Though we’re still listening to EMF and several assorted skronk mixtapes, we knew that it would be a great disservice to the youthful upper-middle-class post-hipster community to blithely ignore the arrival of The Strokes’ second album, so we had guest reviewer Guy Cimbalo review the reviews:
The Strokes release “Room On Fire” today, affording the dubious field of rock journalism an opportunity to plow through more self-same cliches than typical coverage of how difficult Thom Yorke can be. But why slog through countless articles headlined “Different Strokes?” when low culture lets you read them all in one sitting?
