Social-Creature

According to the Mayan calendar — as translated by new-age hippies I used to know, and depicted by Roland Emmerich — the year 2012 is alleged to herald the apocalypse. Perhaps this collective unconscious sense of mass destruction is what’s driving the popularity of turn-of-the-millennium musings about the end of the world. In June 2008, [...]

Image: Culture Wins Charlie Sheen is not crazy. Or, at least, he’s not crazy the way you think he is. Charlie Sheen may finally be admitting that he’s lost his mind — exclusively to Life&Style, of all places, if we are to believe it — but that’s something that would have already been a long, [...]

In college, we film students had a certain sense of disdain and smug superiority towards our TV-major classmates. Miramax, along with the whole independent film movement it was spearheading, had just hit it’s apex while we’d been in high school, and the late 90′s / early 2000′s saw the releases of such epics as The [...]

Do you like Reggaeton? This was a question an old friend asked me while visiting in L.A. We’re both from Boston, where most people have never heard of Reggaeton. And I hadn’t either, until I moved to Southern California. If you don’t know what Reggaeton is, it’s: A form of urban music that became popular [...]

I know the Trojan “Evolve” Campaign has been going on for a while now, but just recently something occurred to me that I hadn’t quite realized about it before. The campaign started out last June, with the premiere of a commercial featuring women being hit on by a bar full of anthropomorphized pigs. It’s only [...]

“Companies: How to Make Millions By Switching to A Green-Colored Logo” – Headline in The Onion’s “Obligatory Green Issue” I’ve been thinking about this, the third in what’s evidently become a series of posts inspired by Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between Who We Are and What We Buy, by Rob Walker, since I read [...]

Just came across a great article in Fast Company about Obscura last night. Many of the Do LaB’s collaborators and friends from the El Circo collective work with this San Francisco multimedia design lab that Fast Company likens to “an alternate universe dreamed up by someone who’s been mainlining Pixy Stix.” [Obscura] create[s] visual spaces [...]

More on Lightning in a Bottle later. First i’m trying to recover from a week in the forest. As part of the decompression process, yesterday involved a trip to the hair salon, which meant I actually had time to do nothing but sit around and read for the first time in quite a while. “It’s [...]

In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter explain that really, there was never any conflict between the two to begin with. Counterculture hinges on, and consumer culture consists of, the expression of your lifestyle/identity. Whether you’re choosing to wear Nikes, Doc Martens, or some crazy obscure Japanese brand [...]

“THIS TRACK JUST MADE ME PREGNANT” – Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic at the New Yorker, waxes poetic about the Glitch “Lazer-Bass” Scene. Read more…