social-creature

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 with Latin American [...]

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 when [...]

“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 the [...]

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 and [...]

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 the Adultery, [...]

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 [...]

“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…

…to thine own self be true.”
- William Shakespeare as Polonius

YOU MUST READ THIS STORY FROM THE NEW YORKER:
Something in me had snapped, was broken beyond repair. My taste had been central to my identity. I’d cultivated it, kept it fed and watered like an exotic flowering plant. Now I realized that what I thought [...]

“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside.”
~ Joan Didion

In the midst of the quicksand hazard posed by every single episode of Lost available online, and in high def, I saw an ad [...]