social-creature

Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.
- Andy Warhol

It is totally disconcerting to discover a book that pretty much compiles your insights and articulates them back to you. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue [...]

“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
- Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

I always find it fascinating when movies do things that executives didn’t expect. Entertainment, particularly the kind with narratives and characters, is like a Rorschach test where what we have to say about the inkblot and what the inkblot [...]

…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 [...]

heard a track on indie 103.1 a couple of weeks ago by a dude named yoav and really dug the sound, then i checked out the lyrics last night, and was completely sold. with songs about the nightlife underbelly (”club thing“) and celebrity culture (”adore adore“) it’s like social psychology insights on a guitar–with [...]

“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 [...]

“Is The Tipping Point Toast?” asks the recent FastCompany article in which researcher duncan watts talks about his findings (and their less than exuberant reception) that expose the billion dollars a year marketers spend targeting “influentials” as a waste of money.
i am constantly repeating the phrase that “we buy the brands and products that we [...]

photo by: danny newman

are YOU thinking about how your brand can let people express their sense of identity?
you SHOULD be.
BONUS POINTS: to anyone who found themselves wondering: “what brand of kicks is that he’s wearing?”

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
– e.e. cummings
which is all quite noble and good, but the thing of it is, e.e., is that [...]

there’s a funny story about these birds once.
nature decided to run an experiment in its whimsical way, and cast a bunch of birds adrift on an island called new guinea, essentially without any predators to worry about and a perpetual abundance of food, and then sat around for several million years to see what might [...]

 
 
“We’re the most permeable membrane in show-business. Anyone who thinks they’re part of Mystic Family Circus probably is.”
- Mystic Family Circus in Freaks & Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus

ok… i’m going to confess: i didn’t read the cult of the amateur (and i’ve read enough reviews of it at this point to be [...]