Outjesting boredom since 2004.
I’ve been in Taipei, Taiwan all week for Computex 2010. A lot of time dashing around, existing on very little sleep. I was reminded of a lovely late R.E.M. song called Daysleeper. It’s partly because it actually references Taipei (one of the few pop songs to admit the existence of such an unglamorous place) but more because it gets the soft, distant-feedback-in-your-cortex feel of jetlag just right.
If Star Wars had been a cartoon from the 60s, Darth Vader might have looked like this. 30 characters from Star Wars, all with a very Jestons sensibility to them, drawn by Ben Balistreri.
Image: Flickr user JBlaze B
It’s always interesting to look at the choices a successful business makes, particularly, choices that are conscious limitations. So-and-so inc expanding into a new area or launching a new copycat product is fairly dull. Looking for new markets, consumers and money is a given in a modern economy. In contrast, a company opting to depart from received wisdom by not doing certain things, skipping certain processes, provided it’s not doing it for cost-cutting measures, is fascinating.
I’ve found myself reading a couple of articles about clothes retailers in the last 24 hours. One is about a place where I buy 90% of the stuff I wear, the other is a shop I can’t stand. Respectively, these shops are Uniqlo and Abercrombie & Fitch. Both are the centre of articles that have much to say about branding, management and choices.
A cursory sweep through the two pieces reveals both Unqilo and A&F have a founder/CEO who exerts strong control over the company:
“Tadashi Yanai, the founder and owner of Uniqlo, is the richest man in Japan, worth over $9 billion… [he is] clearly obsessed with control, [but] is also a deeply pragmatic manager, and fascinated by failure. In 2005, he announced a reversal of strategy for international expansion… Uniqlo works quickly, and the transformation was surprisingly fast. Uniqlo designed and built the Soho store in about eight months, with 150 workers working twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week.”
“Mike Jeffries, the 61-year-old CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, says “dude” a lot… I got a firsthand look at his perfectionism in action when he invited me along for the final walk-through for the Christmas setup of his stores… Jeffries paused in front of two mannequins and shook his head… He stared at the jeans on the female mannequin. “The jeans are too high. I think she has to be lower.” A guy named Josh got down on his knees and started fidgeting with the jeans, trying to pull them down so they hung to the ground.”
However, differences in their approaches are soon apparent. A&F is a typical fashion retailer; it sells a very specific look, and builds up the emotional pull of that look via heavy, distinctive branding that appropriates a series of familiar ideas, images and style cues from the past. Uniqlo is quite unusual; unlike other fast fashion stores, customers expect to wear the clothes until they’re worn out and instead of building stores that are like sets for the movie of the brand, they focus on the way the clothes should be folded and the customer’s credit card is handed back to them. While both A&F and Uniqlo strictly enforce a personality, A&F seeks to sell a certain, specific fashion and style, whereas Uniqlo sells… well, it seems glib to say ‘clothes’, but that doesn’t seem far off:
Continue reading “Fashion versus Clothes (and Apple, of course)”
Three albums I have added to the wishlist, all of which will be out soon:
All release dates are for the UK version.
When the music moves you, you can see it, and you can definitely see it here. Quiet for the first 20 seconds, absolutely burning by 0:50.
Previous a capella 60s pop: The Beach Boys
Published in 2000, A Terrible Beauty is defiantly a pre-internet book(1). In under 850 pages (under 775 if you discount the index), it gives the reader a history of the twentieth century’s defining ideas, from Marxism to Nazism, from Feminism to fusion. Not just the ideas, but the people too – Satre, Picasso, Orwell and Janet Leigh and thousands more. In the words of its own subtitle, it is a history of ‘the people and ideas that shaped the modern mind.’ The idea of any book – any mere bundle of paper – attempting to do that thing now would seem weirdly futile.
Yet it’s the reason why this is the case, the one that’s on the tip of your tongue – yes, Wikipedia – that reading A Terrible Beauty brings to mind. The book is divided into four parts, and within these, 42 themed chapters. They are roughly chronological, but if a later development, discovery or idea fits a theme, it will be mentioned ahead of time, giving a beautiful sense of the uneven march of history. That said, so far, so traditional narrative. What’s very Wikipediary (!) about the book is that the people mentioned are all picked out in bold type when they first appear, enabling you to zip through the text and start reading when someone’s name catches your eye. Despite the fact it all ties together very well when you’re reading sequentially, it’s startlingly easy to just open the book and start reading. That’s how I first got into it; I was staying at a friend’s house, and it sat on the bedside table in the spare room.
The page I opened it at was 530, with its piece on Germaine Greer, immediately presenting one of Greer’s killer lines:
“Her book, The Female Eunuch, did not neglect women’s economic condition, though only one of its thirty chapters is devoted to work. Rather it drew its force from Greer’s unflinching comparison of the way women, love and marriage are presented in literature, both serious and popular, and in everyday currency, as compared with the way things really are. ‘Freud’, she writes, ‘is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.'”
So it continues, brisk but not hurried, economical without being threadbare:
“Greer is withering in her criticisms of how men are presented as dominant, socially superior, older, richer, and taller than their women (Greer is very tall herself). In what is perhaps her most original contribution, she demolishes love and romance (both given their own chapters) as chimeras, totally divorced (an apt verb) from the much bleaker reality.”
The conclusion to this section has stayed with me since I first read it, a sentence that completely embodies the book’s title:
“As with all true liberation, this view is both bleak and exhilarating.”
It was this line that came to me today as I read two pieces about the future of computing and the internet.
[Book] The tiniest remarks can spark in me the biggest desire to read something. In this case, it was reading through William Gibson’s blog (he’s back at it now his new novel, Zero History, is done*). He’s taking questions:
“From Mean Old Man:
Q Essays. You’re really, really good at those. I read a few of yours a while ago, and was lastingly impressed; Tokyo, watches, one about U2… How do those happen?A Thank you. It was my first literary form. It was probably your first too. It can happen a number of ways. Ones that involve really expensive free plane tickets (Singapore, Tokyo, say). Ones that involve being asked to consider things I’m peculiarly interested in at the time (the eBay watch one). Ones where I feel honored to have been asked (the centenary of Orwell’s birth) though in some cases I’ve declined out of feeling unworthy. (I declined to write an obituary for Wm. S. Burroughs, but mainly because he was still alive at the time, and believed in magic.) It’s not an activity I actively seek out, much, and if asked (and I’m not asked, that often) I more often decline.
Q And who do you consider to be superior essayists, living or dead, worth reading?
A Orwell comes to mind, of course, but those are classic formal essays. The various parts of something like Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out For The Territory *behave* in some ways like essays, and are brilliant, but do various un-essaylike things as well.”
So welcome to South East London’s biggest pile of unread books, Lights Out For The Territory.
* And in a recursive manner, this is a recommendation that also recommends itself, for like all new Gibson books, I will read Zero History.
Speaking of the Geiger counter, here’s Tyler Cowen recommending and quoting from The Future History of the Arctic:
“Svalbard is an integral part of the kingdom of Norway — there are reminders that the archipelago is both something more and something less than that. Russians and Ukrainians live here, some in Longyearbyen, though most are at the Russian settlement at Barentsburg. The girls at the supermarket checkout counter speak Thai. Somewhere in town is an Iranian who came here six years ago and, under the terms of the Spitsbergen Treaty, was able to settle here. If he were to return south to the Norwegian mainland, he would almost definitely be forced to leave the country, his asylum claims having been refused.”
Just been to see David Mitchell read from his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet at Shoreditch House.
Readings are always a little weird, bits of text disenfranchised from their home-novel, and the author never seems to know whether to show literary firepower with big bits of description or to create motion with some dialogue; whether to play it all for laughs or not, if they should commentate as they go along.
But these are difficulties inherent to the form and it doesn’t stop readings from being enjoyable, particularly as in this case, I’m a big fan, Mitchell’s a great writer and Deijima is a great setting.
Couple of interesting points from the Q&A afterwards:
On why he’s going back to Japan now:
Mitchell stumbled upon a Dejima museum in Nagasaki in 1996 because he “couldn’t read the street signs.” Writers he said, in a lovely similie, have a “Geiger counter built in that goes off when you’re around good material.”
Interesting settings and ideas are saved; they “circle like planes waiting to land at Heathrow… [and] it was time to bring this one in to land.”
Great image, no wonder people were applauding.
On the way characters from his previous books appear in later ones:
“I think of it like the dole, the DSS. There’s this room where the old characters wait, looking for work… So I go in there and see if there’s anyone who can do the job.”
So well put. He also revealed the next novel he’s writing is set in the present day and features, in some way, a character from Thousand Autumns.
Can’t wait for the book itself – it’s out in May.
(Bear in mind I was there for fun, not taking proper notes, so the above is paraphrased).
I’m in Austin, Texas for the next few days for South by Southwest interactive. The sky is blue, I had a a burger for breakfast and there were weathered muscle cars in the hotel parking lot. Texas, folks, is true.
The Wired Jester 