social-creature

(photo: Mick O )

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“They say the music business is in trouble. No! The business of selling CDs is in trouble; this is a religion.”
- Michael Rapino, CEO, Live Nation

I was in the weekly Southern California marketing meeting at House of Blues the morning it was announced that Tower Records was going out of business. [...]

Last night, in a special election to replace the late Senator, Ted Kennedy, my home state of Massachusetts elected its first Republican to the senate since 1978, Scott Brown.
Massachusetts has never elected a Republican senator during my lifetime. I’ve never known anything but Democrats (except for one Governor, once), from my home state my ENTIRE [...]

During their New Moon promo tour a couple of months back, the Twilight Trio was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and at the end of the show Kimmel let a few people from the audience ask questions of the cast. A girl came up to the mic with a question for Taylor Lautner. “I really like [...]

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 [...]

Back in early 2006, Chevy tried to get on the whole “consumer generated content” bandwagon (or bandSUV, I suppose), with a website which allowed users to easily create their own “ads” for the Chevy Tahoe using provided video and music assets. In theory, the idea was to generate interest in the vehicle through user created [...]

If, sometime circa 2004, you were out and about at certain underground parties in the Los Angeles Circus scene, and saw someone wearing a particularly striking pair of pants (male or female), created from asymmetrical strips of leather sewn in a twisted, impeccably tailored way, like the trappings of some Mad Max forest nymph biker [...]

Oh boy.
This is not typically the kind of stuff I write about here, but it is something I feel quite strongly about, and, if nothing else, it makes for a case study in cross-cultural communication — not to mention some interesting neuroscience.
Last week, as the New York Times reported, French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the [...]

I had already joined the Circus scene when, in early 2006, I was consulting at Wong Doody and heard about a clothing company client they were working with called Edoc Laundry. The clothes had an intriguing concept: there were secret codes in the garments, which, if deciphered, would reveal clues to a mystery story. The wearers of Edoc [...]

It first occurred to me as I was watching the trailer for Star Trek: First Contact, back in March. The cast seemed so typical of the racial and ethnic diversity reflected in the TV shows we’ve all been watching for years, like Lost…

and Heroes…

It seemed completely natural for 2009, and yet what occurred to me [...]

Just saw the trailer for the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation: The Informers – Check it (if you’re seeing this in a reader, click HERE to see the video).

Ellis is one of my favorite writers. There’s a lot of people out there who enjoy his writing in a disturbingly literal way (particularly the people who [...]