events

by jenks

even more queer once you’re used to it

image

this weekend was the 27th annual sunset junction music festival, a kind of cross between oldskool urban summertime carnival and indie rock block party. think: stale cotton candy and amusement park rides, local shops and art galleries trapped in the warpath shelling beer, dancing in the streets to mobile soundsystems, and the major stages blaring serenades by such haircut stalwarts as she wants revenge, autolux, blonde redhead, hot hot heat and so on.

sunset junction is the most fun you can have at a locally nurtured street festival tradition south of pink saturday in san francisco, which, if you haven’t been, is a complete free-for-all of music madness and making out that takes place the saturday night before san francisco’s gay pride parade every year. which is kind of a good segue to where i’m heading with this entry. because what struck me the most about this year’s sunset junction had nothing to do with the music (at least not directly). about half an hour in, i thought i saw something that no former san francisco resident has any right to get confused about: two straight guys holding hands.

this wasn’t some 4 am e-puddle at a rave cir. 1998. this was around 6 pm on a sunday afternoon in 2007, and while queer eye for the straight guy had mainstreamized the revolution in gay-straight male relations, metrosexual had become a house-hold word, and looking stylish was now par for the course for any sophisticated urban male, there’s still one thing that straight guys simply do not do as a fashion statement, and that’s hold hands.

yet “straight guys holding hands” was the first thing that instinctively passed through my mind. followed immediately, of course, by knee-jerk confusion: that’s not….right…. so then…. what the fuck?

the problem was that they didn’t look gay. not that there’s a certain kind of way that gay guys look that straight guys do not, but rather there are definitely certain ways that straight guys look that gay ones wouldn’t–or at least… there used to be.

what threw me off was that this seemingly-straight hand-holding couple were wearing plaid shorts that looked like swimming trunks found in a florida retirement home, and were sporting sloppy 60’s style columbia-university protester haircuts–the kind that 40 years ago just sort of grew out on their own, but today are no doubt cultivated under the careful attention of a hairdresser to look appropriately “period” vs. “politically active.” essentially, they were dressed like guys dressed before any kind of particularly gay aesthetic EXISTED, when less than 25% of men’s apparel was bought by men anyway. women used to buy 75% of it. (and you can imagine who was buying that other 25, right?)

for the rest of the night i kept seeing the same story repeated: all kinds of gay couples that didn’t look gay aside from the the fact that they were hardcore making out. (true story: at one point, towards the end of the night, when the real minority at sunset junction had become the sober people, one of a trio of guys walking in formation with their arms around each other’s waists backed up into me, and hiccuped, “oh! a girl! where’d they come from?” and i realized i was indeed hard-pressed to find an answer.) there were even mexican dudes in big white t-shirts and shaved heads going at it, that you know blast the radio when down’s “lean like a cholo” comes on. on a sidenote: do people outside of calexico even know what reggaeton is? after a while you start to go a bit blind to the contours of local culture’s idiosyncrasies when they are so prevalent….perhaps this is what has also been going on in the expression of gay identity as well.

one of the things that virtually all my gay friends have in common is a professed dislike of other “gay guys.” which is pretty telling of a major generational rift in the gay community.

the generation coming of age in the 70’s, in the wake of stonewall fought first and foremost for the rights of their community. the chant was “we’re here. we’re queer. get used to it.” the assertion of an individual gay identity, one that has the luxury to be vague, and even profess distance from the rest the gay community, is one that was only achieved through decades of pre-will and grace civil rights struggles.

in a 2005 article from the NYTimes style section, sensibly titled “Gay or Straight? Hard to Tell” bruce pask, the style director of cargo magazine, talked about why especially younger gay men don’t want to feel or look that different: “They didn’t need to assert their place in society, their right to be who they are. They’re not fighting for visibility. We got it; they don’t need it.”

perhaps that’s the issue my gay friends have with the established gay community: they do not feel that this community which is primarily defined by sexual preference is a viable forum for expressing their individual identity.

“if you can hang out with your straight buddies and be part of the group,” said brendan lemon, the editor of out, in the NYTimes article, “why would you feel the need to look different as an assertion of identity?” lemon suggested that for a generation that grew up watching “The Real World” on MTV, in which the gay and lesbian characters were no more or less flamboyant in dress or persona than their straight counterparts, being gay carries neither the stigma nor the specialness it once did. that, he said, has also altered the landscape of men’s style.

“it’s easier for gay men to come out of the closet as slobs, just as it’s easier for straight men to be dandies.” said lemon. “one of the things that’s breaking down how gay guys are seen is that people know more kinds of men who are gay.” but this dissolution of any one gay sensibility seems to be developing not just from the way in which the outside world sees gay men, but from the way gay men themselves want to be seen. as individual as any straight people would consider themselves from the rest of the “straight community.”

in a certain sense, even the breeders have been affected by the coming out of a whole generation. claims that the gay agenda to turn even the straightest of the straight gay by using the media to subliminally refashion their very notions of what they find attractive in women to resemble a male figure aside for the moment, this is the lifestyle that invented the CONCEPT of an “alternative” lifestyle (as opposed to simply a “counter-cultural” rebellion). it set the precedent. as all the rest of us participating in the greater culture now likewise face the burden of defining our own identities (whether we’re conscious of it or not), we all sorta ended up becoming queer…

and wouldn’t you know it, as soon as we did, they just turn around start lookin’ straight.

bastards.

    



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by jenks

the new and improved enlightenment lifestyle

as a marketer you realize that it’s not so much that you’re really setting anything up for sale, it’s that everything already IS for sale, and you’re just helping it along. so it’s not so much that i’m bothered by the selling of “enlightenment,” (there’s been buddha statues on-sale for millennia, and what are THOSE selling?) but rather it’s that i find the whole “enlightenment lifestyle,” kinda… icky.

today on the website for the san francisco green festival conference i discovered a publication called what is enlightenment magazine, published by enligntennext, which is “defining the contours of a new revolution in human consciousness and culture.” (it’s essentially not doing anything different than any punk band or public enemy-era hiphop act professed to be doing. it’s just targeting a different audience.)

my first encounter with companies targeting this demo was when we were soliciting sponsors for LIB and were approached by the “enlightenment card”:

http://www.enlightenmentcard.com/images/splash.jpg

(in case you’re wondering, yes, the card IS real, no that ad is NOT a joke, and we said “no, thank you” to the offer.)

while on the one hand, i’m trying to think of where else do sheltered caucasian people get to evangelize a brand of appropriated cultural imperialism with such tactless self-righteousness and get away with it, on the other hand, from a technical standpoint, i’m completely impressed.

this is everything i preach about identity marketing in action.

in robotics, there is a theory of the “uncanny valley“:

The hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being’s, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely-human” and “fully human” entity is called the Uncanny Valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-robot interaction.

maybe there is an uncanny valley in the process of identity expression as well. the more a brand or a product makes it easier for people to express their identity the more palatable it is, until maybe it hits a certain point where it becomes so blatant that its appeal suddenly drops off. however, as this brand’s identity-expressing qualities continue to become more innate and nuanced, and less overt it once again becomes appealing. maybe it could be called the uncanny “wannabe valley,” the place in brand authenticity/relevance that will likewise “fail to evoke the empathetic response required for productive human-brand interaction.” (cuz brands are robo–i mean, people too.)

one of the explanations for the uncanny valley phenomenon is that the robots stuck in no-man’s land elicit revulsion because they look “dead,” and biologically we’re wired to have an aversion to corpses, cuz stickin around doesn’t bode so well for the immune system. (makes you wonder tho if necrophiliacs collect weird lookin robots). but when it comes to identity, the brands (and people) stuck in the uncanny wannabe valley turn us off because they’re “fake.” in a similar sort of way, biology may have led us to respond with distaste to “fake” people (and by proxy brands now) because they are untrustworthy. from a social selection standpoint, they may even be community saboteurs.

the funny thing in all of this is that there’s nothing actually WRONG with the enlightenment card except its name. if you have to have a credit card, why NOT get one that’s gonna let you earn points towards, like, trips to spas in costa rican rain forests, right?

while no doubt one person’s fake is another person’s orgasm, it just feels like confusing a lifestyle for an expression of “enlightenment,” is kinda, um, you know…. BOGUS!

    



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by jenks

what does a web entrepreneur have in common with a fashion designer?

http://www.smejtese.cz/smejtese/images/obrazky/reklama/Benetton5.jpg

when i worked at house of blues, every so often we’d have social events with all the other people working in l.a.’s concert marketing industry. people from goldenvoice, livenation (at the time this was a separate company from house of blues), nederlander, etc. lots of people in attendance had even worked at one of the other companies prior to their current position, so to a great extent the people showing up already knew one another well anyway. the real benefit of attending such an event thus wasn’t even really to meet people from whom to gain new insight so much as to validate your own membership in the industry. i think this quintessential misunderstanding leads a great deal of “networking events” to confuse the goals they are trying to fulfill by focusing their outreach inward vs. extending it out. (intra-industry vs. intER-industry).

last week i went to twiistup, an event for “mingling with other techies in a lively atmosphere of tunes, videos and inspiration.” i am not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, and i actually hate mingling (mingling is like the thing cows do in the holding pens on the way to the slaughterhouse. they… mingle.) so mostly i was going for the “inspiration.”

in an interview with entrepreneur.com, john c. head III dean of MIT’s sloan school of management, and david s. evans, vice chairman of LECG europe and visiting professor at the university college in london, co-authors of the Catalyst Code, talk about one of the most profitable business models in today’s economy, the “catalyst business”:

You ask yourself, Are there two groups you can profit from getting together? A catalyst business serves two or more distinct groups of people who benefit from interacting with each other, but need help to do so efficiently.

this kind of perspective for hybridity and creative collaborations speaks very much to the kinds of opportunities that all the inward-focused networking events are missing. as a marketer, what piqued my interest in twiistup wasn’t about the latest, most obscure, soon to be hip, “underground” apps or widgets or whatevers, but rather the reasoning behind their creation. what, exactly, about this particular app or widget or whatever did the creator consider relevant enough to the current social climate to warrant all the time invested into its creation? you don’t need to be a techie to appreciate that question, but what i discovered is that unlike “what does this do?” or “how does this work?” in an environment teeming with people creating products that beg the question, the answers are in notoriously short supply to “why does it matter?”

schmalensee says:

I don’t want to put down technology guys, because somebody has to make the idea work, but at the end of the day, the creativity comes not in writing the code, it comes in seeing the business model and thinking it through from a business point of view.

The key is not that you have to be an expert in the technology, but you have to not be afraid of it. You have to not say “Oh, I’ll never understand that”….Where you make the money [is] not in the new “gee whiz,” but what the new “gee whiz” can do for people.

part of the problem is that it’s not always so simple to see the forest in the context of an outside perspective when you’re in the thick of the overgrowth. being so mired in the details makes articulating the thing’s overall relevance much more difficult. this is then ever more reason why “networking” events should reach out to a broader range of industries. it’s not simply that non-technologists can benefit from overcoming the tech-phobia, it’s that everyone can benefit–that is, catalyst strategies are born—from overcoming industry xenophobia.

evans says there are probably more opportunities to start catalyst businesses now than ever before and proposes the reason for this is that many of the elements that you need to start a catalyst business (i.e. communications technology) have become easier to get. but i would argue there is another, just as powerful force involved here: culture.

in the rise of the creative class richard florida presents the idea that there is a distinct demographic segment, comprised of knowledge workers, intellectuals and various types of artists, with its own particular predispositions and proclivities. beyond just the nature of their occupations, this “creative class” is also defined through commonalities in many of its members’ lifestyles and values. i think there are two particular ways in which the attributes of this expanding cohort relate–not coincidentally–to the kind of business model evans and schmalensee see expanding as well:

1. the creative class grows through the very processes that catalyst-businesses enable. the creative field of technology merged with the creative field of music, develops whole new fields within music/audio technology. likewise with technology and art, and so on.

2. this group (which fills about 12% of all U.S. jobs) is disproportionately responsible for the development of the contemporary cultural landscape, passing on the very values of hybridity that fuel the catalyst-business model to industries and fields beyond just the creative class itself.

evans and schmalensee might say that what connects a fashion designer and a web entrepreneur, is that, for instance, the former would need the latter to stay competitive in their online presence, but that’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg.

what industries of all creative flavors have in common is the necessity to take the significance of cultural trends into consideration. whether you are working in technology, music, design, marketing, entertainment, business, or really anything else where what’s going on in the greater culture matters, then being able to accurately distill, develop, and disseminate cultural relevance can mean the difference between success and failure. literally. is there anything successful that WASN’T relevant to its time?

(….ok, van gogh is coming to mind…. but i’m telling you: it’s a short–posthumous–list.)

it seems then that a good way to avoid a fate of irrelevance would be to explore the directions that the industries driving culture in tandem with yours are leading culture. a great forum for jus such an exploration (on any scale) is a “networking” event.

for the creative class, culture is the raw material ALL of us work with, and all of us have a hand in shaping different aspects of it. it’s why the answers to the “why does it matter?” question are so important to me, and should probably be to you too. one of the goals for any significant networking event aiming to provide value to this particular yet disparate demographic segment then, should be to apply this approach towards a greater industry hybridity.

    



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by jenks

konichiwa!

i don’t have a clue what it says, but they used SIX exclamation points in the space of two little paragraphs, so i think that means they’re pretty excited about us!! !

summersonic.jpg

….anyone know japanese?

    



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