Snow Storm

This weekend I was purposely striving to stimulate the economy. I've been a spending anorexic for the past few months as I have tried to digest the situation we're in economically. I almost said "the situation we're in economically in the United States." I shuddered the way I do of late when I almost say that, and correct myself. "The situation we're in economically around the world."

I went to Target. The Target strategy is famous for creating a superlative merchandising engine that handily has produced profits for the company and killed off competitors like it's own once iconic parent, The May Company. Homers' Oedipus Retail.

It's a merchandising strategy where goods are placed in graphic groups. Visual connectedness is at the core. A section of Reitienne Benedasti includes the sheets, pillow cases, shower curtain, ruglets, hair barrettes, and teaspoons that all go together (but not too much; nobody wants to be matchy, matchy) to create a designer look in your loft or dorm room without having to think it through on your own. Prefab does interior design. What an opportunity for partnership: Target and Rocio Romero! Watch out, Michael Graves.

Another of the merchandising hallmarks is the turnover of goods. Heretofore, if you liked it, you better grab it, because they don't buy quantities they don't expect to turn over within no time (which appeared to be about 2-4 weeks from my consumer's viewpoint). Newest looks supplanting new looks. They keep enough commodity stuff like light bulbs around to give you a reason to come in so you can see the splashy designer stuff. Though, I'd point out, I always sensed some disagreement about value-priced commodity items (light bulbs, Kleenex, and ibuprofen) and home and personal fashion among the store staff. Sort of an old-timers, young-timers, rift, I parse.

The Target stores I went to (I checked out a second store in a different neighborhood, my disbelief was so great) showed pockmarked designer groupings and stale reruns. This resulted in poor range to choose from, dinged stuff, missing parts of the design groupings (if I can't get the hair barrette, I don't want the ruglets, for heaven's sake), and a generally sad state of the aisles including empty shelves. Clearance and price reduction signs were everywhere. It was both dismal and, because it was a system out of kilter, it was eerie. It was like when there's a heavy snow storm that shuts things down and the streets are empty, it's very, very quiet, everything's blanketed over, and it's hard to get your bearings. It looked like they were running a going out of business sale. Are they, you know, going out of business?

Another part of my economic stimulus project was to search for an Asleep at the Wheel CD after hearing an interview on NPR with Ray Benson. I like antiques and still use CDs. I went to Borders and in there books were buy-one-get-one-free, and other embarassing discounts were conspicuous. The Borders music collection is always a crapshoot when you're looking for something not easily categorized like Asleep at the Wheel. (It would seem to me if your name were Borders, putting things into categories would come naturally. Hmmm.) And the bathroom was a mess. The bathroom at each of the Targets I went to were a mess, too. Staff cuts so no time to worry about the "amenities?"

The exception to this Retail Armageddon was Hobby Lobby. That store seemed to be pretty full of customers but it did look like The Crafters were able to pick from tons of drastically reduced merchandise. Crafters are crafty about that sort of thing. Some sort of production management mentality, I suppose.

It left me to wonder, overall, will this be the tip over the edge for retail as we know it? Will drop shipped indexed shopping come into it's own decisively in the wake of the Great Retail Meltdown?

I was looking for a cookie jar and a breadbox. These are pretty simple items, aren't they? You'd think you'd find a bunch to choose from. In the stores I finally picked out a Plain Jane glass jar with a silver lid. I did at last find a breadbox I found tolerable that wasn't dinged or broken. But it was a matter of settling. Neither item was really that appealing, and as nothing but sheer luck would have it, I really didn't need to worry about the cost--well, within reason. I would have paid much more (double!) for something that struck my fancy, which neither item I took home did.

In fact, just yesterday morning I bought a silly plastic action figure of Tofu Zombie online. Price per ounce, it was much more expensive than the stuff I was looking at. I don't need a Tofu Zombie. Environmentally, I'm against plastic though it remains inescapable for the time being. I hope to justify Tofu Zombie by using it to promote reducing meat consumption in my office. So, maybe I do need it. They're big meat eaters there.

Last week I bought a stuffed Hello Kitty and a bottle of Harajuku Lovers Baby. I sure don't need that stuff either. So why buy it? Long story, but my assorted researches and readings led to Google et al and Google et al led to hook ups with de facto representations of those researches I felt I just had to have. You know, culture kicked in. My personal culture.

How will bricks and mortar stores compete with inspiration induced acquisition? Mass markets are fragmenting. Multiculturism and personal culture have been gnashing their teeth in their mass merchandising cages for a long time, and Obama has lifted the hook out of the eye on that cage door. How will bricks and mortar compete with the capacity to search and get a virtual store loaded with cool cookie jars and breadboxes to choose from? And my bathroom is clean and will soon be graced by my soon-to-arrive Harajuku Lovers Baby cologne bottle.

Analog retail has going for it the ability to see things in three dimensions, to stand toe-to-toe with your prospective purchase. To smell the object of your desire or an ambient scent that makes you desire the object in front of you. It can make you part of a group of shoppers. It can manufacture events. And merchandising. Wow! Merchandising. It is an art form.

But the high cost to the environment of shipping, warehousing and distribution to stores, of getting shoppers there and back home, of theft and personal security breaches, of trying to push a shipment of goods with mass appeal and getting stuck selling it at cost or lower, well, it's all adding up. Maybe bricks and mortar will come back when you can stand in a retail kiosk, find what you're looking for with a search engine, download the specs for your size and your color, and have it manufactured on the spot. Maybe it will come back when that's where you'll be able to recycle your purchases, too. Or when there's real integration of virtual and analog merchandising like fashion shows and online and customization served along with luncheon and martinis. Like anime festivals and cosplay workshops with Buy It Now Online stations. Design classes and computer-aided home furnishing and decor work stations where you conceptualize and furnish from merchandise shipped right after you hit Submit.

Doesn't the very word shopping seem dated? Kind of like the word estate in all those subdivision names. Has the hyperinflated bubble of lockstep, supply-side consumption been pricked in retail as it has in real estate? Woot, woot, woot.

The Joker

I'm not deep into it, but I understand in Native American mythology there is a character called The Coyote. The Coyote is a joker who, like Keith Ledger in Dark Knight, strives to disrupt the plans of ordinary men and women. Like Ledger's Joker he's a pain in the ass. But you gotta love him!

Dark Knight reflects the most recent aesthetic sensibilities of anime as imported and reformulated by American artists in the film industry. Reformulated like Taco Bell is reformulated Mexican cuisine. Not a criticism, per se. I myself like the undemanding character of Taco Bell, though I don't entirely trust it.

Americans younger than Six-Decade-Me are pulling the arts in a direction which abandons story development that sensibly/idiotically runs to a conclusion. We "older adults" lived with a Craving for Closure all our lives. Newbies are embracing choppy, networked stories with dropped threads and lots of fill-in-the-blanks. Twitter does storyboard. Network advertising, even, has become an artboard for creatives to turn the message of those nervously bankrolling things into part of the New Kaleidoscope. During my career we were into direct mail. Now it's all about coming through a side door. The friend of a friend of a friend. Development of an impression without showing the hand doing the developing. Ninja black dress marketing.

Did you hear something?

There seems to be an obsession with what Six-Decade-Me used to think of the magic decoder ring and a belief in the never-ending story. What courage it takes to embrace life in that manner. And what good ears! Stealth is wealth. Or is it a grief reaction? A way to deal with abandonment? "Oh, let's just go with the Ninja thing," she wrote, channeling Ledger's Joker.

The baby boomers (please, don't hang up just because I said baby boomer, this really is about you Gen Whatever-You-Wish-To-Be-Called) had a life story in their heads. They, naturally, were the heroes. And they lived to bring about the 401k-based happy ending they felt was inevitable. Their happiness in life came from any evidence they were headed in the direction of surf-boarding retirement, never-ending rebellion, and worship of them as heroes who changed the world or at least made sex easier to get. We're heroes, dammit, even if we do wear diapers while riding our Harleys in the Black Hills. And we'd leave you our money after we get done playing Captain America, if we still had any.

The Coyote, wily or otherwise, has undone things that comforted us kaboomers. That's how The Coyote rolls. My aging brain can barely understand the new intentions. I can sense my way of thinking is based on a different blueprint (translation: CAD drawing). Along the lines of a different brain architecture. An architecture developed listening to stories told the old way--with an ending.

It's harder to see Ninjas as you get older, but I can still smell them. The new, social-media based, fittest will be the most invisible, the most networked, the most tolerant of ambiguity, the most able to spin off new characters, sequelae, games, manga, toys, word-of-mouth, tee shirts, and, da da, the most able to optimize Google's awareness of them. At least until the day Toy Coyote transforms and does--you know--what The Coyote will always do.

Should I have just left a blank here at the end?

Leapfrog Girls

We live in a cottage with an anomalous side yard. It's essentially a city sidewalk. There is a run of these sidewalks that cuts between properties. At one time they linked residents to the streetcar line. It's called, duh, a cut-through. It saved hard working people from a lot of circuitous walking. This is an area with a history of clay mining and brick making. That's St. Louis Brick. Still sought after in used condition. Savvy Long Islanders, even, have heard of St. Louis Brick. It's got a rep.

The city decided, since there was no longer much of a need for the cut-throughs because the streetcar had long ago bitten the dust, to offer the soon-to-be-formerly public property to residents on either side. The elderly lady living next to our home didn't really feel she needed a half of a concrete slab running about 50 yards from the sidewalk proper to the two-lane alley with median in back. That alley used to be the right-of-way for a small railroad that ran clay from mines to brick and clay pipe factories. Now it's trees, grass, plantings. A median.

So the whole cut-through enchilada was titled to our side. I pondered what to do with a "private sidewalk." To reflect what we used to do on the sidewalk in the city, I thought placing a sculpture of kids playing would fill the bill. I found the right stuff on the internet and it was shipped here in an amazing crate. A firm that is accustomed to things with more corners and heft bolted it into the concrete. They didn't even charge me. And it's been sitting there unscathed, unstolen, since.

I was drawn to that solution for the space because it told a story. Maybe my story: I was raised in the city and played on concrete sidewalks in front of my family' pet shop. We lived upstairs over it. Sidewalk was my childhood. Sidewalk with parking meters. The sculpture made the space not only symbolic, but gave it an alive, interactive feel. And in this economically mixed neighborhood it said nobody's excluded. We're just taking care of this sidewalk. The street belongs to all of us. No fences here.

I had some political intentions, I suppose. We were the new kidz on the block being ogled by the neighborhood stalwarts as they mowed and mulched. But I did not picture the social medium Leapfrog Girls would become.

Leapfrog Girls have been in the newspaper and in American Bungalow magazine. Tiny mention. In the newspaper they said "the owner travels often to Mexico and brought this back with her," to paraphrase. I have no idea where they came up with that. Ningun.

We've had people (many people) approach us and say thanks. We love that statue. We thought it was real. I think that's what gets people. It looks just like two little girls playing leapfrog on the sidewalk. Parents bring their kids--in cars--to see the statue. Families stand around it. People take their kids' picture with it.

I've had people I was giving directions to the house stop me and say, is that the house by the little girls playing? DISH Installer Guy last week said he remembered passing this house every day going to high school and looking at that . . . he didn't know the word for it . . . but he knew it. Public buses go down our busy street regularly, and I see people in the lighted bus look out into the night at the sculpture and I know it gives them a little friendship. A little connection. They look for it.

Social media offers the same "Ping, I'm here. I see you are, too." Everyone makes the effort to be creative, to show their art through the turn of a phrase, in photos and videos, in their blogs, and by making zeroes and ones do tricks like make an eye appear to wink. Right out there where all of us can see it.

And we all look for it.

Flat Screen

Traditional Japanese art is a thing (and thing is the right word) of intensity. The mind and spirit of the Japanese artist addresses nuance and detail to create a work, though consistent in many elements to others, that is unique to his hand. Traditional Japanese art transforms landscape and living beings into two dimensions with a strict set of rules. The artistry is in implementing the rules exquisitely.

Manga and then anime artists in post-war Japan instinctively breathed this same meditation into what was perceived to be a radical new art form. The sensibilities of manga and anime, Roland Kelts writes in Japanamerica, incorporated a break-through vision of characters with wide-eyes and open faces. It incorporated a comix-style framing. And though the Japanese use of the visual frame is second-nature, it gives manga and anime the feel of American funny papers and comic books. This might just all be symptomatic of an understandable case of identification with the aggressor. But what remained intact was the Japanese work ethic and formulation and honoring of rules. The beauty is in the details in contrast to euro-american art's constant striving to break with convention for breaking-with-convention's sake.

While the novelty of manga has embedded it in American culture, has it been the beauty of execution that put it into schoolyards, or was it something else? Kelts speaks of the Japanese difficulty with even the concept of putting a price on intellectual property and it has been the things manga and anime, that have made the art form at least closer to break even financially with some blockbusters like Pokemon here and there. The "thingness" of anime in the form of games, toys, and printed matter like trading cards supports the art. Sort of like the art museum gift shop.

The value of a thing is more easily grasped than the value of intellect, of service, of concept. The good news is that people grab those things because they are in some way resonant with those other values. Well, there are those philistines without the interest or capacity to digest the other values, but how many of those are there in America.

What is the thingness of social media? Is the need for thingness why we build our networks bigger and bigger, so that we can get some hint of thing value when we see a list of friends and followers? Do long scrolls of timeline gives us something tangible for our efforts? Can tee shirts--lots of tee shirts--be far behind?

Eau d'Japan

My favorite Christmas gift this year is a large-marge bottle of a Japanese scent. I am hypnotized by the scent itself. I have become devoted to finding and acquiring Japanese scents in particular because of their quality. As usual, the Japanese approach to development of high end scent is to focus on the demand side of the marketing equation. It's really so darn simple--problem solve and make a meaningful lifestyle contribution. And they are producing exceptional scents with great regularity that "work really well" and are cost-controlled. They have harnessed the most recent understanding of how human scent detection works, and they have learned to play on the sense of smell as though they were playing a baby grand piano even if your schnozz is more of an harmonica. In the meantime, for whatever reason (like legacy costs, arrogance, sabotage of innovation, guilds) American and European perfumeries go on with hit or miss efforts to score the next big winner. They hitch their star to making me think I smell like an idealized Elizabeth Taylor, J Lo, or some other entity I personally am not even close to that interested in smelling like. Plan B or maybe it's A is to emerge from a name droppable fashion house. Japanese scents can do that and also tickle the olfactory ivories with far fewer failed attempts, with greater sensory excitation, and greater value.

Social media may be stuck in the same hit or miss marketing rut, trying to build a power base based on--well--power, instead of one based on functionality. A network--micro or macro--don't mean a thing if it ain't got that zing. When will demand-side marketing take the driver's seat in social media and start solving problems in a way that vibes lifestyle?

Zoomie Boyz

Somali pirates, the leetle varmints, are scaring people. The other night Letterman had a suggestion. When you see the pirates (1) pull up the ladders and (2) run a-way. Seems straightforward and likely to be effective since the marauders are apparently in somewhat pint-sized crafts, relatively speaking. No air cover or anything like that.

In my neck of the woods, we had some incidents with marauders I like to call Zoomie Boyz. I had my first experience with these high speed hijinxters when I was motorcycling. Zoomie Boyz ride hot speed bikes with racing tires that are treadless, very gummy, and very comical in that they look sort of balloonish. But the equipment permits Zoomie Boyz to do stunts like threading in an out of lanes while zipping down the highway at very high speeds on a back wheel. They can move at great speed and with great agility and the bike remains stable. It's automatic weaponry vs. six-shooters, vehicularly speaking.

Zoomie Boyz use twitter-style messaging to call for a swarm to appear at some pinpoint on the highway. Viral swagger. The swagger wasn't enough after a while, and they took to surrounding motorists (in cars) and banging on windows. There was even some Zoomie Boyz gun play.

Having ridden a motorcyle myself, I am well aware of the vulnerabilities any motorcyclist faces. I can think of six ways to injure or kill numerous Zoomie Boyz driving my piddly Honda Insight hybrid. And confronted with a swarm hijacking me on a highway or shootin' at me, I'd pick one of the six and apply it. Take that viral swaggerers.

So what stops us from defending ourselves against the marauders? Certainly, panic would figure in, but the power of frame of reference and mindset to keep us locked into automatic response patterns should not be underestimated. Mindset has led us to global warming and taken us to our economic knees. Will social media contribute to making the mindset we build and require to keep our bearings even more pernicious, or will it help us open up to new perspectives?

Ch-Ching

I have noticed an internal economic reality. There's probably a brain part responsible for it. Amy Sedaris knows what I'm talking about. I have a built-in need to transact. My name is Cody and I am a transaction junky. I think you are, too.

In animal groups, say a herd of horses, there's a continuous exchange of power and deference, sun up to sun down. I think that's where all this transacting got started. Humans have sublimated it (that is what makes us human) and now it's manifest in things as trivial as buying a medium Dr. Pepper with lots of ice at McDonald's and selling the crazy singing bass you got last Christmas at the garage sale for a quarter. It's sublimated and then aggrandized for the transaction-impaired in the purchase of a Lexis.

It's not just about getting ahold of something we need, these transactions. It's not just about cleaning out the garage. We get pleasure from the raw transaction itself. We get pleasure from the exchange. It makes us feel purposeful, alive, justified, juiced. It gives action to the yin and the yang.

I get the transaction high in my neighborhood though no dinero changes hands. The neighborhood I live in has a village feel to it because it is made of up of people who recognize it as a geographical entity within a city and who feel loyalty to it. We transact with each other in a pre-twitter yahoo group to alert each other to garage break-ins, new stores that have opened in our village, and good people to fix holes in our roofs. And we transact on the street. I pick up a beer can in the neighborh's front yard, they fill us in on the tree removal the city has planned. We tweet each other with porch lights on and off, dogs being walked, garbage take outs, and barbecuing. And it is a pleasurable thing to be a part of the neighborhood because of these transactions.

As we throttle down our consumer culture--we are throttling it down aren't we?-- there will be a need to replace lost transactions with something. It replaced the village--consumerism did--didn't it? Will the village return to supplant consumerism? Will social media provide the stimulus package?