A musician friend of mine was once seeing the best friend of a famous heiress and he told me this story: “I had been dating her for a month and one night she invited me out to go meet her whole crew for the first time. I was SUPER nervous. Meeting the group of friends of someone you’re dating for the first time can be nerve-racking anyway, but especially if they are like…. that. I drove there and I was standing outside like, ‘OK… I need to get my shit straight and go in there and own this place.’ All of a sudden it hit me: ‘Channel your inner Tony Stark!’” It worked, he said, “Game over.”

Hearing this story, I wondered, who was my inner spirit superheroine? What clever badass would I conjure for existential ammo in a situation like this? I started searching my mental pop culture database for an acceptable candidate and this is when I realized I could barely think of a single one. The only two vaguely applicable options coming to mind were both from a decade ago: Buffy foremost, and, more hazily, Trinity. But Buffy’s final episode had aired, and Trinity had devolved from enigma to boring love interest saved by her boyfriend at the end of the Matrix trilogy, both back in 2003. As far as contemporary, mainstream, pop culture was concerned, there was a giant void.

I turned to the Internet for help, and found a list of the 100 Greatest Female Characters, compiled by Total Film. While not exactly rigorous in its methodology (fully 6% of the list’s alleged 100 greatest female characters are not actually human; 3 — Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, Lady from Lady and the Tramp, and Dory from Finding Nemo — aren’t even humanoid), the audit is, at the very least… directional. Narrowing the list down to just those heroines who’ve graced the big screen within the past 10 years (minus the non-human entries) the chronological order looks like this:

• #7: Hermine Granger (Harry Potter series – 2001 to 2011)
• #45: Paikea Apirana (Whale Rider – 2002)
• #65: Lee Holloway (Secretary – 2002)
• #8: The Bride / Beatrix Kiddo (Kill Bill – 2003 to 2004)
• #44 Charlotte (Lost In Translation – 2003)
• #4 Clementine Kruczynski (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – 2004)
• #43 Ofelia (Pan’s Labyrinth – 2006)
• #99 Cherry Darling (Planet Terror – 2007)
• #11 Eli (Let the Right One In – 2008)
• #30 Kym (Rachel Getting Married – 2008)
• #13 Lisbeth Salander (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – 2009 t0 2011)
• #36 Older Daughter (Dogtooth – 2009)
• #38 Mia Williams (Fish Tank – 2009)
• #26 Nina Sayers (Black Swan – 2010)
• #40 Mindy “Hit Girl” Macready (Kick-Ass – 2010)

Among these 15 possible spirit superhoreine candidates there are 6 victims of sexual abuse, 3 are dealing with some form of depression, 4 haven’t hit puberty, 2 are addicts — including one vampire — and, most notably, a full third who would sooner slaughter a party than charm it. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis observed this trend last year, writing:

It’s no longer enough to be a mean girl, to destroy the enemy with sneers and gossip: you now have to be a murderous one. That, at any rate, seems to be what movies like Hanna, Sucker Punch, Super, Let Me In, Kick-Ass and those flicks with that inked Swedish psycho-chick seem to be saying. One of the first of these tiny terrors was played by the 12-year-old Natalie Portman in Luc Besson’s neo-exploitation flick The Professional (1994). Her character, a cigarette-smoking, wife-beater-wearing Lolita, schooled by a hit man, was a pint-size version of the waif turned assassin in Mr. Besson’s Femme Nikita (1990), which spawned various imitators. Mr. Besson likes little ladies with big weapons. As does Quentin Tarantino and more than a few Japanese directors, including Kinji Fukasaku, whose 2000 freakout, Battle Royale, provided the giggling schoolgirl who fights Uma Thurman’s warrior in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Mr. Tarantino and his celebrated love of the ladies of exploitation has something to do with what’s happening on screens. Yet something else is going on…. The question is why are so many violent girls and women running through movies now.

That question is particularly pointed since this genre is not exactly blockbuster material. Hanna was only slightly profitable. Sucker Punch flopped, as did Haywire and the Besson-produced, Colombiana; both Kick-Ass and Let Me In were “gore-athons that movieplexers don’t want to see,” and, in spite of all its hype, the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a “huge box office disappointment.” And that’s all just in the past two years.

In an April, 2011, New Yorker article titled, “Funny Like A Guy, Anna Faris and Hollywood’s Women Problem,” Tad Friend wrote:

Female-driven comedies such as Juno, Mean Girls, The House Bunny, Julie & Julia, Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, and Easy A have all done well at the box office. So why haven’t more of them been made? “Studio executives think these movies’ success is a one-off every time,” Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, observes. “They’ll say, ‘One of the big reasons that worked was because Jack was in it,’ or ‘We hadn’t had a comedy for older women in forever.”

Amy Pascal, who as Sony’s cochairman put four of the above films into production, points out, “You’re talking about a dozen or so female-driven comedies that got made over a dozen years, a period when hundreds of male-driven comedies got made. And every one of those female-driven comedies was written or directed or produced by a woman. Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view. “Let’s be honest,” one top studio executive said. “The decision to make movies is mostly made by men, and if men don’t have to make movies about women, they won’t.”

Except, it seems, if those women happen to be traumatized, ultra-violent vigilantes of some sort. Perhaps these movies keep getting made because their failure is seen as a one-off every time, too.

“Men just don’t understand the nuance of female dynamics,” Friend quotes an anonymous, prominent producer. Although the conversation is about comedy (why men can’t relate to Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones, for example), it could explain why all these vengeful heroines seem to inevitably wind up defective. This violent femmes sub-genre — which expands the traditional Rape/Revenge archetype to also encompass psychologically violated prepubescents — by default demands female protagonists. But since their creators don’t understand how to make them, they stick to what they know. Consider that the title role in Salt was originally named Edwin, and intended for Tom Cruise before she became Evelyn and went to Angelina Jolie. The emotionally stunted, socially inept, tech savant protagonists of David Fincher’s two latest films — male in The Social Network, female in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — are equally as interchangeable. From Hannah to Hit Girl, all the way back to Matilda in The Professional, it’s always been a father, or father figure who’s trained them. A woman, this narrative suggests, would have nothing to offer in raising a powerful daughter. When a film needs a Violent Femme the solution has become to simply write a man, and then cast a girl. (Failing that, just mix up a cocktail of disorders — Asperger’s, attachment disorder, PTSD; a splash of Stockholm Syndrome — where a character needs to be.) No understanding of female dynamics required.

“What if the person you expect to be the predator is not who you expect it to be? What if it’s the other person,” asks producer, David W. Higgins, on the DVD featurette for his 2005 film, Hard Candy, about a 14-year-old girl, played by Ellen Paige, who blithely brutalizes a child molester. Whereas for 20th century heroines like Princess Leia (#5 on Total Film’s 100 Greatest Female Characters), Sarah Connor (#3), or Ellen Ripley (#1 — of course), not to mention their brethren, overcoming trauma is what made them become heroes, for this new crop, trauma is what excuses them from seeming like villains in their own right. We love to see the underdog triumph, but do we really want to watch a victim become the predator, and a predator become the hero? The ongoing failures of films fetishizing this scenario suggest we’re just not that into this cognitive dissonance.

So much for movies no one wants to see, but what about those those every girl has? On the one hand there’s Twilight, whose Bella Swan is a dishrag of a damsel in distress so useless her massive popularity is a disturbing, cultural atavism. On the other, there’s the Harry Potter series, whose Hermione Granger (#7) might be “The Heroine Women Have Been Waiting For,” according to Laura Hibbard in the Huffington Post. “The early books were full of her eagerly answering question after question in class, much to the annoyance of the other characters. In the later books, that unapologetic intelligence very obviously saves Harry Potter’s life on more than one occasion. Essentially, without Hermione, Harry wouldn’t have been ‘the boy who lived.’” Meanwhile, here’s how Total Film describes Leia: “Royalty turned revolutionary, a capital-L Lady with a laser gun in her hand. Cool, even before you know she also has Jedi blood.”

And that is the one, simple, yet infinitely complex element that is consistently missing across the entire spectrum of stiff, 21st century downers: Cool. “Of all the comic books we published at Marvel,” said Stan Lee, the creator of Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and more, “we got more fan mail for Iron Man from women than any other title.” Cool is the platonic ideal Tony Stark represents. It’s what makes him such an effective spirit superhero for the ordeal of party. But while Stark may be special he’s not an anomaly. From James Bond to Tyler Durden, male characters Bogart the cool. And it’s not because they’re somehow uniquely suited for it (see: the femme fatale). It’s because their contemporary female counterparts are consistently forced to be lame.

“You have to defeat her at the beginning,” Tad Friend quotes a successful female screenwriter describing her technique. “It’s a conscious thing I do — abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry fifteen minutes into the movie.” That could just as easily describe Bridesmaids as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Which is totally fucked, first of all. And secondly, it’s boring. You’d think there’d be more narrative to go around — though I suppose I did just see the once female-driven Carrie, and The Craft remade as an all-male superhero origin flick called, Chronicle. Perhaps we really have reached Peak Plot. In which case now would really be the time to be R&Ding some alternatives.

“I love to take reality and change one little aspect of it, and see how reality then shifts.” said director, Jon Favreau. “That was what was fun about Iron Man, you [change] one little thing, and how does that affect the real world?” Favreau’s experiment has yielded a superhero archetype that reflects a slew of Millennial mores, from the intimacy of his relationship with his gadgets, to his eschew of a secret identity in favor of that uniquely post-digital virtue of radical transparency, to his narcissism. “If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that ‘with great power comes great responsibility,’” I wrote in a post titled, Why Iron Man is the First 21st Century Superhero, “Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun. Unlike the prior century’s superhero, this new version saves the world not out of any overwhelming sense of obligation or indentured servitude to duty, but because he can do what he wants, when he wants, because he wants to. Being Iron Man isn’t a burden, it’s an epic thrill-ride.” Breaking with the established conventions of the genre to create a uniquely modern superhero has made Iron Man a success, to the tune of a billion dollar box office between the two movies, and launched Marvel Studios and ensuing Avengers’ franchises in its wake. But there’s one 21st century shift Tony Stark will never be able to embody. And it’s kind of a big one.

From The Atlantic Magazine:

Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.

In the wreckage of the Great Recession, three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood.

To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools, where a quiet revolution is under way. Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.

American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.

Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment. It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: in the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.

That view makes even comedian (and father of two daughters) Louis C.K.’s pronouncement in a recent Fast Company article that “The next Steve Jobs will  be a chick” not unimaginable. And when she is, who will be her inner superheroine? Any of the girls brandishing medieval weaponry headed, like crusaders, for movie theaters this year?

Considering the cruel, dystopian premise of The Hunger Games, Katniss will likely get to have as fun as an overachiever prepping for the SATs. And while Kristen Stewart as persecuted maiden turned, apparently, warrior in Snow White and the Huntsman (whose producer previously suited up Alice for battle in Wonderland) couldn’t possibly be more joyless and blank than as Bella (….right??), my money’s on Brave‘s Merida to win in the the flat out cool department, here:

Either way, while Tony Stark is an archetype boys grow into, the above are all manifestations of one girls grow out of, and when they do, they will expect their own spirit superheroine to aspire to. Someone who doesn’t have to be brutalized to be a badass, or a predator to be a hero. Someone clever and charming and cool as fuck, whom you’d just as soon want to party with as have saving the world; who’s faced the dark forces that don’t understand her and threaten to break her and strip her of her dignity, and, like the century of superheroes before her, has overcome. The next 21st century superhero will be a chick. The girls coming for the 21st century won’t be satisfied with anything less.

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Amanda Lepore in an ad for the Jawbone headset. Just saw it in Vanity Fair (the one with Marilyn Monroe on the cover). The image on the opposite page, was of a “surgeon”:

Definitely makes you look.

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after mentioning him in the previous post, i ended up going on what can only be described as an eddie izzard bender.

a self-identified “male lesbian,” and “action transvestite” (you know… “running, jumping, climbing trees… putting on makeup while you’re up there”: action transvestite), izzard is also fluent enough in english and french to do standup in both. so clearly the man understands a thing or two about the intricacies of hybridity and cross-cultural communication–phenomena that likewise are pretty fascinating for me.

i first saw dress to kill in 2002, and what forever earned my respect for izzard’s genius is when, during the encore, he actually performs a bit in french and manages to get everyone in the audience–and me watching–laughing hysterically. i don’t know french. neither does most of the rest of the english-speaking, san francisco audience where the show was recorded. yet in a feat of linguistic alchemy he somehow is able to completely pull it off. we’re watching him in a different language, and we totally get it. it’s such a bewildering display of how little a language barrier might actually matter in the process of understanding people who are unlike us that it feels like you’ve just witnessed a magician perform rather than a comic.

so somewhere in the course of the haze induced by binge consumption of every glorious, sexie, eddie izzard clip on youtube last weekend, i stumbled onto his website. i’m not entirely sure i remember how i got there, but i do remember flashes of what happened after. (note: this will be way funnier if you’ve actually seen eddie’s shows. since i had just watched several years of them before i arrived at the site, it was completely hilarious to me.)

when i went to sign up for eddie’s email list, i was faced with the following options:

Send me news and info about Eddie via Email

Only send me gig & appearance emails for my chosen country

Cake OR
Death

when was the last time you were asked THAT before joining a mailing list?

and furthermore, what’s a nav. section called gonna lead you to?

click on it and an audio clip of izzard’s voice admits, “well, it was the pressy-makey-doey-things page…but that didn’t really fit it.”

maybe you might want to pressy-makey-doey up on eddie’s sexie fridge…

…where you drag words eddie utters during his show onto the jam smear on the fridge and then play them back to hear him say customized nonsense. (“jamtart arthur squeezy fishburger murderers catapult” is a good one).

but let’s back up for a second. maybe you’ve never seen eddie’s standup. maybe you came here because you’ve seen eddie in a movie, or on his TV show, the riches, and you’re trying to find out more about that. then you want the page. and when you click on it, eddie’s relentless, adlibbing audio which follows you around–as in real life so on the internet–announces in a tone of sophistication, “this is the acting page. it is a very serious page.” it, in fact, does look very serious. with a vogue-y black and white glamour shot of izzard. but when you look in the corner there’s a little purple beehive just below eddie’s face with bees buzzing all around it. drag your cursor over to it to find out what the hell that’s all about, and your mouse gets covered in bees!

you may have seen glorious. you may not. you may think that’s hilarious. you may not. but either way, at least there’s something different going on here. something unexpected. and it’s not some kind of slick design-gasm. it’s not trying to wow you with unprecedented feats of programming. no. the site actually comes off as a pretty uncomplicated bit of online real estate, but with these absurd little pressy makey doey game-y bits. and it’s great!

i think the most important question for anyone creating a website to answer has to be “what do you want the website to do?” and at the basic level this question is pretty easy to answer. sure you want it to provide information, to sell something, to connect people, to encourage participation, whatever. all that’s well and good, but as soon as it gets beyond the level of “what do you want it to do beyond simply function,” the vision for what’s possible becomes kind of polarized and discordant.

on one side of this mania there’s:

make more features!
make it slicker!
make it cleaner!
make it cooler!
make it bigger…

and on the other side is something my friend jesse shannon calls the “myspacification of websites,” where content management systems are churning out the online equivalent of cookie-cutter suburban tract homes. sure it might be super intuitive and user-friendly, and you might know where your neighbor’s bathroom is located when you come to visit without anyone ever having to tell you, but….isn’t there anything else to an online experience beyond features or navigability? beyond flash or content management?

how about “i want the website to entertain people.” or “i want it to make people laugh.” creating a FUN experience is just as valid as an easily-navigable, informative one, but between the designer, the developer, the information architect, and everyone else…. whose job is it to make sure a site is FUN?

i once got asked if the “this is not a trend” in masthead image on this site is supposed to be a reference to magritte’s “this is not a pipe.”

and while we may not all be looking for subliminal surrealist messages in our online experience, i think we are definitely looking for that kind of element of surprise, for unexpected juxtapositions, and even for non sequiturs sometimes, the same qualities that made the surrealist movement’s artistic expression so different from what had come before it. check out whateverlife.com on that note. the whole thing was originally created by a teenage girl who taught herself all the necessary design skills. not surprisingly, since there was no formal training which could instill upon her what a website SHOULD look or operate like, it looks completely different from any typical site.

perhaps it’s because we’ve always thought of the online experience as “browsing” that all we’ve been doing so far has just been making different versions of that one experience. maybe it’s time to re-imagine the whole thing. to integrate fun into its very functioning (as opposed to relying solely on the content), to reclaim it from its current humorless condition–and i mean, beyond just with LOLcats or cute hipster tech geek colloquialisms in dialogue boxes and error messages. if you’re looking at whateverlife and thinking, oh, so does this signify the next stage of a website experience?

instead think: maybe it just seemed like it would be fun.

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ok then. now that you have been adequately briefed, we can begin.

i first saw the trailer for across the universe on quicktime.com in march and was not only blown away by how stunningly imaginative the visuals looked, but actually–i swear!–brought to tears by the drama of 60′s-era youth struggle depicted in just 2.5 minutes of preview footage! needless to say, i saw the movie opening weekend, six months later, and left the theater feeling beyond satisfied. the movie was so visually innovative and different it was like i’d just witnessed julie taymor–the director-slash-visionary best known for broadway’s “the lion king”– reinvent the very concept of movie a little bit.

i then proceeded to tell all my friends they should check it out, and even posted the preview on facebook. i was somewhat startled to discover the incongruent presence on the movie’s otherwise fairly unimaginative site of a special link that allows for easy one-stop posting of the preview directly to facebook. either this was incredibly nuanced forethought, or obviously tacked-on afterthought, i figured.

last friday, the LATimes weighed in on that debate, asking: Is this the next cult sensation? as you may have noticed, across the universe is a musical about teenagers. and while the plot-line is punctuated by beatles’ tunes, the fact that this coming-of-age movie didn’t find an audience with middle-aged boomers, who were part of the original “beatlemania,” apparently came as a marketing newsfalsh:

To judge by “Universe’s” trailer, which began screening in front of “Spider-Man 3″ in May, it wasn’t immediately clear which genre “Universe” belongs to. Is it a coming-of-age story? A rock opera á la “Moulin Rouge”? A surrealistic period piece? (Answer: all the above.) Worse for marketers at Sony, the film’s distributor, contractual obligations bound them from hitting home with “Universe’s” primary selling point.

“Yoko Ono, Paul [McCartney], Ringo [Starr] and [George's widow] Olivia Harrison were all supportive of the film, but I couldn’t use the Beatles name in any advertising,” Taymor recalled. “That didn’t make things easy. And you can’t advertise that you have Bono, Eddie Izzard and Joe Cocker in cameo roles. We didn’t have a real big push from Sony; they were stumped by it. So nobody was really sure who the film’s audience was.”

i’m ten years older than the median teen-movie demo–but on the tail end of recovery from the quarterlife crisis the concept of trying to figure out life in a conflicted, confusing, “changing world” still feels totally relevant–and that’s, i think, the cutoff point for the audience to be marketing coming-of-age tales to.

After an uninspiring opening last month… help arrived in the form of an audience whose parents were their age when the first wave of Beatlemania hit. After three weeks in theaters, the PG-13 movie finally penetrated the top 10 by connecting with a zealous core constituency: teenage girls.

….According to Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Media by Numbers, audiences are now finding their way to “Universe” thanks to Sony’s textbook execution of what is known in the industry as a “platform release.”

“Expectations were unknown. But Sony has handled it perfectly. They got big initial interest in limited release, then they’ve been capitalizing on that every week.”

“They’re taking their time. On a movie like this, that’s what you have to do.”

so… like, besides the fact that the movie’s supercute cast is totally perfect bedroom-wall poster material, and that this “60′s story” is retold with acutely contemporary (and boomer-anachronistic) sensibilities…. did, um, no one at sony bother to check if maybe teenagers might not actually totally dig the beatles, at some point before they released the movie?

three and a half years ago (maybe somewhere around the time taymor got this funny idea for a musical) USA today reported:

Beatles historian Martin Lewis began spotting a young wave of Fab Four fanaticism as emcee of Beatlefan conventions the past 14 years. Boomers constituted half of the audience in 1990. Now 75% of attendees are under 30, and many barely in their teens.

As marketing consultant for The Beatles Anthology, he met with label execs plotting campaigns targeting fans 45 and up. “I’ve got news for you,” Lewis told them. “I’m the oldest guy at Beatlefan conventions.”

Sure enough, a marketing survey showed that the under-30 constituency scooped up 40% of the first Anthology run. “I’ve interviewed those kids,” Lewis says. “I’ve said, ‘Surely you’d rather listen to Justin Timberlake. Why are you here? Were you forced by your parents?’ But they chose to be there.”

the relative “drought” in contemporary rock (“Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer,’” says a manhattan producer and guitar teacher quoted in a feb. 2006 article in rolling stone called “teens save classic rock“), multiplied by the internet’s universal ease of access to music of all decades, means you better do your homework about whom to target with your alleged “primary selling point,” yo. (even hiphop’s got love for the fab four as evidenced by wu-tang’s becoming the very first group EVER to legally sample the Beatles (!!?!)–sooooo… THAT happened.)

…anyway:

While Dergarabedian heaps praise on the marketing plan, Taymor feels the movie has benefited from a kind of benign studio neglect. “In a funny way, young people found the movie because it wasn’t marketed huge,” she said. “Young people don’t want to be dictated to about what’s the new cool thing.”

…. “We gave people the sense that they’d discovered it for themselves,” said Valerie Van Galder [the division's president of domestic marketing].

i am sure that beyond classic rock’s sheer novelty or vintage cred, for the current crop of teenagers, its appeal likewise stems from the satisfaction in the personal discovery. this is a sense that is simply not possible to generate through mainstream teen-targeted music options. (wait… did classic rock just turn into alternative rock? wow. bizarre.)

i’ve written before about how valuable sustaining a sense of mystery can be for a brand, and it applies to the process of its initial discovery as well. whether sony was just hedging their marketing dollars on this weirdo bet of a movie, or whether they actually had the temperamental teen psyche aaaaall figured out reverse-psychology stylie when they eschewed spending money on any TV commercials, billboards, or PR, i think there’s something to be learned from across the universe’s model–accidental or not–that can be applied to a more deliberate kind of “discovery strategy”:

1. start with something unique. you can’t really capitalize on a “discovery strategy” if the product won’t actually FEEL new or unexpected. (of course, a “discovery strategy” isn’t really the kind of thing that well-established fare needs to pursue in the first place, so it’s the unproven stuff to which this sort of option is most applicable anyway.)
2. understand who the appropriate audience is and the communication / media channels they use that are particular to them. even if what you’re marketing is not a pop property but its message is disseminated through one-size-fits-all media, it invalidates the personal intimacy of discovery. a caveat in this case is using mass media to broadcast a message that will only really be meaningful to a particular community, but why do that when instead you can…
3. provide the tools for people to be able to easily distribute the message themselves. a handy little “post to facebook” button helps, but so would have the option to get the embed code for the preview so that people could post the video to myspace and their blogs and wherever else that wasn’t just facebook. (nuanced forethought, or obviously tacked-on afterthought, right?)
4. go on TRL.

and in case you’re wondering, this is NOT a “viral campaign.” the difference is between a ploy to abuse some unfortunate loophole inherent in ADD for an attention-spike, and a strategy to enable the creation of a meaningful, personally-compelling discovery that leads to a lasting (consumer) relationship.

from the LATimes:

Nicole Sacharow, 15, from Culver City, for one, ranks “Universe” among her “favorite movies ever.” She’s seen it twice and would already have notched up several more viewings were it not for scheduling conflicts with her friends.

“You go up to a group of people and say, ‘Who wants to see “Across the Universe” this weekend?’ ” Sacharow explained. “The songs are addicting. Everyone who goes to see it has the soundtrack. I listen to it every day. I hear people singing the songs around school.”

i’d say the movie has the potential to become this decade’s RENT (the war allegory standing in for the 90′s AIDS nemesis.) with wu-tang paving the way on beatle’s rights clearance, i could easily see a broadway version of across the universe in the future. but where could they find a visionary, multi-Tony award-winning director to–oh!

uh… never mind.

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right as i was in the process of rereading the third chimpanzee (i had to read it in college for sociobiology, and recently realized i’d forgotten half of it), a friend of mine forwarded me this NYmagazine article, The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School. “it’s very interesting in terms of trend ideas and stuff,” he told me. “i thought of you.”

the article follows a particular clique of kids (primarily girls) up at NYC’s stuyvesant high school, a magnet public school for some of the city’s créme de la créme teens (similar to my high school alma mater, boston latin). i read this piece in the same week as the NYTimes feature on the girls of newton north high (a suburb right outside of boston). the article was called For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too. it’s funny that i read these two articles in such proximity, because they actually came out within two months of each other and couldn’t be more divergent in what they present as the focus of the elite-educated, east coast, teenage girl experience.

the NYTimes says:

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

….If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé.

two months earlier the NYMagazine article presented the findings of its own investigation into the workings of the contemporary teen female search for self:

Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they’re gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always.

while the “amazing girls” of newton north (it’s what their teachers and classmates call them) talk about lives overwhelmed sometimes to the point of nervous breakdown by the amount of work all their accelerated classes and extra curriculars demand, education is put into a completely different context by the girls of stuy’s cuddle puddle: because of their school’s superior education, one of the girls says, the students are more open-minded.

just as the intense academic pressure that is the focus of the NYTimes article is barely assigned an impact in the after-school lives documented by the NYMagazine article (“Sure, they drink and smoke and party, but in a couple of years, they’ll be drinking and smoking and partying at Princeton or MIT. They had to be pretty serious students to even get into Stuyvesant, which accepts only about 3 percent of its applicants.”) sexual identity exploration is completely brushed aside in the lives of the newton north girls.

This year Esther has been trying life without a boyfriend. It was her mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’” Esther said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better….. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a boyfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ My girlfriends have consistently been more important than my boyfriends. I mean, girlfriends last longer.”

just to be clear, that’s “girlfriends” in a completely platonic sense, but the sentiment is at least the one bit of common ground between these two seemingly wholly divergent worlds. “Relationships are a bitch, dude,” says Alair, the 16-year old “punk-rock queen bee” of the NYMagazine piece. relationships also play a huge role in the process of defining one’s sexual identity, and they seem to be going out of style.

while the gauntlet of college acceptance is now more competitive than ever, i think the process of navigating sexual identity has now likewise become infinitely more complicated. and for the latter there is no standardized test prep-course.

from NYMagazine:

These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

the irony in this, of course, being that the very IDEA that “sexuality doesn’t have to define me” itself comes to define a particular identity. a particularly modern kind of identity that previous generations are ill-equipped to understand what the hell to do with.

“My mom’s like, ‘Alair, I don’t understand you. I want to be a parent to you but I have no control at all . . . As a person you’re awesome. You’re hilarious, you entertain me, you’re so cool. I would totally be your friend. But as your mother, I’m worried.’ ”

“To some it may sound like a sexual Utopia,” says the NYMagazine article. “Where labels have been banned and traditional gender roles surpassed, but it’s a complicated place to be.” it’s one thing to grow up in the suburbs, discover your personal non-status quo sexual identity, and move to some open-minded metropolitan place where you can create a community around this shared lifestyle-identity. it’s quite another to grow up in an environment where the very definition of sexual identity itself is the status quo you’re rebelling against. and though manhattan may be an island it is by no means isolated in this respect.

The Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country. This past September, when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories.

….It practically takes a diagram to plot all the various hookups and connections within the cuddle puddle. Elle’s kissed Jane and Jane’s kissed Alair and Alair’s kissed Elle. And then from time to time Elle hooks up with Nathan, but really only at parties, and only when Bethany isn’t around, because Nathan really likes Bethany, who doesn’t have a thing for girls but doesn’t have a problem with girls who do, either. Alair’s hooking up with Jason (who “kind of” went out with Jane once), even though she sort of also has a thing for Hector, who Jane likes, too—though Jane thinks it’s totally boring when people date people of the same gender. Ilia has a serious girlfriend, but girls were hooking up at his last party, which was awesome. Molly has kissed Alair, and Jane’s ex-girlfriend first decided she was bi while staying at Molly’s beach house on Fire Island. Sarah sometimes kisses Elle, although she has a boyfriend—he doesn’t care if she hooks up with other girls, since she’s straight anyway. And so on.

the article asks the question, how will this teenage experimentation eventually affect the way they choose to live their adult lives?

and i’m wondering how will it affect the way marketers talk to them?

a couple of months ago there was a bit of talk going on about Levi’s “Innovative Gay Marketing Move,” where levis produced two different versions of the same ad, one for a straight male audience, and one for a gay one. while the gay version premiered exclusively on MTV’s Logo network, whose programming is aimed at the gay community, the actual “innovation” in this dual-ad strategy that everyone latched on to seems to be simply the fact that the gay community was acknowledged at all on their own terms side by side with an approach to the straight demo. (so that only took about 40 years). levis, essentially, letting everyone know that they’re hip to the differing desires of these two identities as defined by sexual orientation. congratulations.

the question now is: how do you approach an identity that is defined not by gay or straight or even bisexual, but by its shared distaste for defining its new hybridity in those binary terms at all?

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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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i went to see the movie with a whole posse of my best friends, and was sitting next to one who happened to be gay, and he burst out laughing. i mean the whole theater was laughing, but it was even more pointed coming from sean. the question was the kind of thing that no doubt many a gay kid has had to endure from their parents, “well, have you ever tried… not… being gay?”

i think in general we like to assume that there are lifestyle choices we make, like listening to rockabilly, driving a harley, polyamory, veganism, white supremacism. and those we don’t, like what socioeconomic class we’re born into, our skin color, our gender, whether we’re good at math, and who we fall in love with.

technically, now more than ever before the once-immutable attributes of identity are becoming a choice. even those options that we did not pick for ourselves, that are dictated by genetics, hormones, or circumstance, are being challenged by the dissolution of outdated conventions and advancements in modern surgery. in a sense it’s almost like if you happen to have been born a straight female, and are still happy to be one, then it’s almost like it was a choice by the sheer act of compliance, if nothing else, when you take into account the varieties of gender and orientational mashups available these days.

i read dana boyd’s essay yesterday on “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” about the lifestyle segregations that seem to be emerging from the user adoption pattern of the two sites, and what really struck me was the following:

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” – they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

i’ve heard sooo many people that fit danah’s demographic description complaining about the “sub-par aesthetics” of myspace, but it never even occurred to me (and certainly not to them) that perhaps these reactions to visual composition were not really their own, but rather determined by the aesthetics of their lifestyle/background.

even if it’s possible to justify conscious identity/lifestyle choices as deliberate, how the hell do you justify the UNCONSCIOUS ones that way? and just how many of the choices we think we’re making for ourselves are actually predetermined in this unconscious way?

i’ve found that an easy way to explain how identity marketing functions is through the example of the clothing styles people choose. there’s so many styles of clothing you COULD be rocking, and yet you choose the kind clothing you choose, and not ALL the other styles. so…why is that? because you feel that this particular style expresseses something about who you are to other people.

so clothing is a tool for expressing our identity, essentially but who we want to sleep with is determined by biology? perhaps neither of these is this cut and dry. my bioanthropology professor used to say, “everything is 100% nature. and 100% nurture.”

so what about our choices about whether or not we like hardcore drum ‘n bass or reggaeton or sex and the city or tofu?

is our “taste” 100% our own, and 100% not our own?

now…. who likes bon jovi?

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