Great post on possible design for iPad and iPhones as “hub + satellite” setups.
Accidental Storytelling
The world is split into two different kinds of people. When I moved into my flat, we were having all our kitchen goods delivered. My then girlfriend got off the phone and said to me, “we need to stay in because the fridge men are coming.” The world is divided into those who hear that and think, “I need to be in because I’m having a kitchen delivery” and those who hear the word “fridge men” and immediately conceive of a kind of cyborg creature with a big open door in his chest and stopping arms and legs and kind of freezing demeanor—a fridge-man hybrid.
Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set)
As I mentioned the other week, I’m testing out the Dragon NaturallySpeaking iPhone app. This is my first experience using speech recognition software, but I’ve always had warm feelings about the brand since it is what Robert Conquest uses and well, who doesn’t love dragons? My hope was it would alleviate two major problems in my life right now: I have to drive many miles every day and I have very little time to write.
James Franco on General Hospital and I think on that of New York as a band being of what people think New York is her more every day lead when they were young that there is no New York has true iPod Andy Warhol imagination in his bed There is no need to work as true as the noon your hands me or call imagination on his background before you and being so general but all in the mid-the TV show General Hospital is written by someone who doesn’t know what a gallery show is really alive or what’s going in hard and really live it’s written by someone who was never there
In that particular paragraph, my actual comment was that New York is, at its best, a projection of Andy Warhol’s fantasies of New York from his bedroom in Pittsburgh. It’s a city with a rich history at odds with the fantasies of those who finally arrive after dreaming of living there. LA is the same way, like that wonderfully titled documentary “LA Plays Itself.” From that point, I said General Hospital’s “Franco” character is scripted like the writers have never met an artist, never gone to a gallery. It’s this fantasy element like the city itself. They might as well have dressed him in a beret and given him a French accent. If Dragon NaturallySpeaking worked better, I can’t says that any of these thoughts would make the cut to draft 2. It was just something I was considering at the time. I was talking out my ideas, which is very strange for me as I’m definitely someone who thinks before she talks — having the classic introverted tendency of holding back in conversation until developing a strong opinion, rather than shaping and creating opinions in the act of a conversation. Speech recognition seems to work for Fred Wilson and it probably works for certain type of talking — “to do” list transcription or very direct correspondence. Just speak clearly, with uncomplicated words and sentences. I’m amused Dragon recognized “Franco” of all the words — Conquest’s influence? Conquest, by the way, explained to WSJ, “my handwriting’s pretty bad and my typing is worse.” In the same interview he points out Henry James always dictated his novels. Miguel Palma, Dream House (detail), 2003, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, (Art Fag City Flickr set) As for the way I like to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it operates as a from-pollen-comes-honey word machine. “There is no need to work as true as the noon.” Now, I have a higher tolerance for purple prose than most, but that sounds lovely to me. Maybe I’ll turn that into a song lyric, a medium less stringent upon the precision of words and their meanings. I have no idea what I was saying when that line appeared on the screen. But I’ll take that and make something from it. I didn’t think it, but I created it. Either way it is mine. “your hands me / or call imagination / on his background / before you and being so general” … Well, I’ve written far worse song lyrics than that in the past. Now, I’m not recommending speech recognition for the moments that you badly need to capture an idea before it escapes. But if you just playing around some thoughts, ideas aren’t so committed to, this is a fun way to seek inspiration. We are so often presented with these kinds of quick fiction experiments. I can’t argue with my savings account interest rate but the credit union website makes me want to pull my hair out. For months, I was fine accessing my account through Mint.com. Then one day there was an error, I needed to re-answer the security questions about my first car and major in college. Well, I did and still generated error messages. I had to go to the credit union’s website, which presented me with an entirely different list of questions! On both sites there were a bewildering number of questions I had the option to answer. Here’s the catch, anything about me — my favorite food, my alma mater — was not available to answer on the Mint.com prompt. The only questions that were available to answer on both Mint and my credit union’s site were about my spouse’s favorite food, or my child’s preschool. Well, I have neither a child nor a husband, but for the purpose of accessing my accounts online, I’m happy enough to invent them. Remember Sarah Palin’s email hacking? All it took to get into her gov.sarah@yahoo.com account was answering “Where did you go to high school?” Even being quite private about these kind of details, were I married, just how hard would it be for anyone to figure out my “spouse’s occupation?” or where we met? LMGTFY. But who would ever guess that I do have a husband, his name is Nikolajs, we met in an airport in Abu Dhabi, and he works a pilot? The children are Omni and Jurate, we married in Riga, Latvia, and have a summer home on Saturn. For security purposes isn’t it better to invent a story? Otherwise, your password might as well be “123456″
Anyway, this is as good a place as any to announce an exciting event next week, I’m thrilled to take part in: Boston Bookfuturists: Introducing experiments in storytelling and The first ever Bookfuturists Meetup is this month at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center Boston Bookfuturists 1 Interested in presenting at future events? Please contact us: info@bookfuturists.com Please visit our website Host: Joanne McNeil, The Tomorrow Museum Presenting: Joshua Glenn, a Boston-based journalist and scholar, is coeditor of Hilobrow.com and co-curator of Significant Objects, an online experiment that pairs writers with secondhand junk, then sells the junk on eBay (using the story as an item description), in an effort to answer this question: “What makes things meaningful?” Peggy Nelson is a new media artist whose work encompasses film, augmented reality, performance art, and reenactments. In Search of Adele H is a Twitter movie, a re-imaging of the life and fictionalizations of Victor Hugo’s daughter Adèle. But as with a book, the moving images are intentionally missing. The Twitter movie happens in your head, much as the main character’s life happened in hers. Stona Fitch writes powerful novels that have earned an international following. His novel SENSELESS is now a UK feature film and a cult classic that critics often refer to as the most disturbing novel ever written. St. Martin’s is publishing his next novel, Give + Take, in April. He has been selected as one of the Boston Public Library’s 2010 “Literary Lights.” In 2008, Stona and other writers/thinkers founded the Concord Free Press, the world’s first generosity-based publisher, which publishes original novels and gives them away in exchange for voluntary donations to worthy causes or people in need. Matthew Battles has written about technology, language, and culture for such publications as the American Scholar, the Atlantic, and the Boston Globe. He’s cofounder of the blog Hilobrow.com and author of the book Library, an Unquiet History. Previously: Handmade Looking Writing Why Gears of War, an Xbox 360 game uses Gary Jules’s Tears for Fears cover in its commercial (via.)
Dragon NaturallySpeaking best delivers as a game giving clues to help you remember something you once said. It takes your words and scrambles them. No idea how the desktop version fares, but the app is very selective in what is chooses to recognize. Or my accent is indecipherable. But it’s free, so I can’t complain about that. Just take a look at what happened when I tried to get thoughts down for a review of James Franco’s “performance art” on General Hospital:
Another storytelling experiment for fiction writing block: reCAPTCHA. “Looming hours” …”helium years”…”hobnails out.” If you are the sort of person like China Mieville describes, you can make something out of that. Not that these accidents are exclusive to the screen either. Someone I met the other night had mistaken my name for “Japan.” In a flash I fantasized about how my life could have turned out… “Japan” studied visual anthropology at Goldsmiths, wears clear frame glasses, and drinks Talisker on ice. I could get away with another level of pretentiousness with a name like that. 
publishing — exploring the intersection of books and technology.
near the MIT campus in Kendall Square. Come listen to presentations on
experiments in storytelling and publishing. The event is free. Please
RSVP:
7-9pm
January 29
Microsoft New England Research & Development Center
One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, MA
From The Telegraph: “[The game] writer’s emphasis shifts from mise-en-scene to character interaction; from constructing grand set pieces to fleshing out a malleable and dynamic world…. Our experience of stories is, by and large, a lateral one, in which the writer commands every aspect of the world the reader inhabits as well as the process by which it reveals itself. Fine; it’s worked for centuries. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that gaming – which increasingly promises a narrative space for the player to make his own way, never having the same experience twice – is where at least some of the great writers of tomorrow will make their names. At which point, as with comics, everyone will get a terrible headache over trying to think of a new name for the medium.” (via Digital Fiction Show who previously wondered “How long will it be before writers use a computer game structure to plot their fiction? Instead of the three act plot (which I’ve blogged about here and here ) how about working out a novel’s structure by listing the plot points as goals and objectives, with levels and ‘maizes’ for the central character to navigate through?”)
My favorite Tumblr: LOLgraves. Here’s a PlayStation 2 advertisement that might be inspired by it.
Boston Globe Ideas interviews Nick Montfort, author of Racing the Beam. Asked why people are still creating 2600 cartridges, Montfort says, “Why does somebody write a sonnet? I think it’s in part because they want to connect to the whole tradition of the sonnet that is different than writing a poem of a different form. They’re interested in the sonnet because they’re interested in what it is as a form.”
Spin the bottle updated for the digital age (via.)
“Anyone who has played D&D has spent a lot of time talking about race – ‘Racial Attributes,’ ‘Racial Restrictions,’ ‘Racial Bonuses.’ Everyone knows that different races don’t get along – thanks to Tolkien, Dwarves and Elves tend to distrust each other, and even non-gamers know that Orcs and Goblins are, by their very nature, evil creatures. Race is one of the most important aspects of any fantasy role-playing game, and the belief that there are certain inherent genetic and social distinctions between different races is built into every level of most (if not all) Fantasy Role-Playing Game” – Race in Dungeons and Dragons. (via.)
Everything Thomas M Disch writes is amazing, especially Camp Concentration. Tom Moody points out he also made a video game in the 80s (and scripted The Brave Little Toaster.) I haven’t read the MD, but Moody explains it as “From childhood the evil protagonist spends his spare time building a personal world of torture and murder that grows increasingly baroque as he ages.” He’s got a new book coming out called The World of God, and is taking questions (as god) on his blog.
Rip Mix Stitch: Free Fashion Culture
What would happen if the Gossip Girl cast were to design an ARG? It might turn out like middlebrow-luxury handbag house Coach’s college outreach campaign. It starts with a fictional girl who lost her Coach bag, complete with a fake myspace page, fake facebook, and fake blog!
Visitors to the blog (encounterheidi.blogspot. com), which drew more than 15,000 hits after the posters went up, learned that the bag was a gift from an ex-boyfriend serving in Iraq.
One day, Cee blogged that another student had returned the bag. A day later, she wrote that on closer inspection, the bag was a fake and she had been scammed for the reward.
Outraged (”EFFING COUNTERFEIT!” she wrote), Cee blogged that she was researching the world of counterfeit goods. She discovered, she wrote, that they’re linked to criminal activity, child labor and terrorism. She even posted a video to YouTube about counterfeiting, “Break the Chain,” and organized an anti-counterfeiting event on campus that drew a crowd with free food and T-shirts.
But here’s the thing about Cee: She’s fake, too. A public relations class at Hunter invented her last spring. The course was funded by a $10,000 grant from Coach and was part of a college outreach campaign by the International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition (IACC), a trade group that includes Coach and other brands like Apple, Levi Strauss & Co., Louis Vuitton and Rolex.
But it gets dirtier. This is the work of a teacher and class at Hunter College.
A well-known sculptor in the 90s painted fast food containers with the Louis Vuitton monogram. I can’t remember who it was but if I could, this right here would be an insightful paragraph comparing his art with Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton store at the Brooklyn Museum, with some added remarks on how and why the times have changed.
Since then, Adbusters and street artists have expanded on the concept. Now Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles (via) has a solo show for Peter Gronquist with designer labels on everything from chainsaws to electric chairs:
A writer from Jezebel once sewed designer labels in lower-priced clothes and asked for offers from consignment shops.
The Final Tally:
- H&M dress (original price, $39.99) masquerading as Isaac Mizrahi: 2 for 3, with highest offers of $130 and $190.
- Club Monaco jacket (original price, $199) masquerading as Richard Tyler: 2 for 3, with offers of $90 and $110.
- Club Monaco skirt ($129) masquerading as Donna Karan: 2 for 3, with offers of $78 and $135.
- Club Monaco sweater ($99) masquerading as Calvin Klein: 1 for 3, with offer of $50.
Ours is the first generation that truly defines itself by brands, as Rob Walker’s new book “Buying In” explains. But reputation alone doesn’t explain it, nor does personal identification with the product marketing. When it comes to luxury goods, there has to be some added magic to the product. That’s why no matter how many counterfeits flood the market, Louis Vuitton can command a high price.
In “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,” Dana Thomas reports 40 percent of all Japanese own a Louis Vuitton-monogramed item. Her book is nostalgic for the days when high-end good meant quality, patiently crafted items that might last a lifetime. As LVMH changed hands, their standards declined. Meanwhile, expensive seemed attainable to those without qualms carrying credit card debt. Veronica Horwell writes in a review, “significant percentages of the global population have caught, or been taught, the mad idea that they can acquire the signifier of modernity, immunity, celebrity, identity – Thomas can’t or won’t define what the fantasy they’re after is – for the price of a Prada bag, or failing that, a Gucci wallet.”
Notice no one really pokes fun at Hermès, as they do Gucci, Prada, and LV. Although they charge twice more than Gucci and Louis Vuitton combined ($38,000,) there is no branding and no advertising to the masses. Unless you are in a select tax-bracket, a Birkin bag is understood to be impossibly out of reach. Writes Globe and mail’s Leah McLaren:
Earlier this year, I had my first-ever celebrity-bag sighting. I was eating lunch alone at an overpriced hotel when a cosmetically altered matron of indeterminate years pulled up a stool beside me, ordered a $22 glass of champagne and placed her black crocodile Birkin bag on the bar for all to see.
I couldn’t help staring and she didn’t seem to mind. No one spends $40,000 on a purse to hide it, after all. Sure, I’d clamped eyes on a few Birkins before (in the window of Hermès, on the arms of fashion editors at the shows in Milan and Paris), but this was my first sighting in the wild.
She’s reviewing Michael Tonello’s new book about getting rich off of buying and returning Birkin bags. How is that possible? you might wonder. Well, you can get some pocket change, as I have in the past, buying broken designer bags, taking them to tailors, and selling them. Ebay facilities so many new ways of commerce.
One Ebay, you can even buy a fake “vintage” bag. A few years ago, I came across the sort of deal one can only find via internet auction. Stuffed in a trunk “lot” full of some now-deceased grandmother’s treasures, was a vintage Gucci handbag, unmarked in the title by the seller, worth about $200. So I placed a bid for far less than that, planning to resell it and make a tiny profit. When the bag arrived and looked like it couldn’t be older than the age of the sweatshop workers in whichever third-world country it came from. I donated it to salvation army.
The irony is my fake is in far better condition than a real vintage would be. It has no scratches or damages; but feels dead in my hands. Why do I like vintage in the first place but for the totemism; the feeling that I am participating in the history of an object. The other irony is that Gucci’s quality has declined over the years. The material they use is easy to replicate, they have long since abandoned the sturdy canvas that made their items lovely. Yet, the prices are still the same.
For sale at the Brooklyn Museum.
Right now monogram-bag makers fight counterfeits for trademark infringement or dilution. But the Design Piracy Prohibition Act (pending in the Senate) offers stricter standards. Designers may register their clothes with the U.S. Copyright Office for about $100 each. The law would protect the patterns for three years.
“Fashion will become very boring if this legislation passes,” Omid Moradi of sometimes knockoff-er Faviana, tells Fortune, “All this will do is create a backlog of lawsuits – the only ones who will win are the lawyers.”
“[Pattern marking is] a craft, not an art. There is only so much you can do with a silhouette, a collar, a drape.” Ilse Metchek, executive director of the California Fashion Association, told the LA Times. “This act is a double-edge sword, because designers think they’re going to be able to protect themselves from knock-off artists, but they are going to have to make absolutely sure there is pure, unadulterated originality in everything they do…Wouldn’t anyone run afoul of things eventually?” says Ivan Arnold, co-owner of LA-based Tokitoki.
It is a particularly dumb move by one industry that is still doing well in this economy. Tech Dirt explains fashion thrives because of lack of IP protection.:
Fashion is a trend industry. You need a trend to make something popular and the only real way to get a trend is when designers are copying each other. Without that ability trends don’t show up, and the demand for the latest “trend” dries up. On top of that, having copycat designs on the lower end actually act as a “signal” that a high-end designer is on to something. It helps prop up the price of those name-brand designs, while making similar copycat designs more affordable to a lower end of the market that would never buy the high end designers. It’s both a way of establishing a larger market and doing price discrimination.
For another example of this read Daniel Pink’s cover story in Wired a few months back about the fan market for Manga.
Currently designers have the option of filing for patents, but there are ways of outwitting copycats without getting lawyers involved:
Meanwhile, some labels are trying to outmaneuver the pirates. Copycat designs often show up in stores within weeks of a fashion show, while the authentic clothes don’t arrive for months. Halston, which is owned by movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, is one of those pushing to make its catwalk fashions available right away, on the online retail site Net-a-Porter.com, in hopes that shoppers will choose immediate gratification over price savings.Weitzman and others are making some of their couture designs a little more haute so pirates can’t rip them off at all. For his spring collection, Weitzman created unusually shaped heels for a $299 shoe called the Bowden-Wedge. He is also experimenting with materials such as titanium and steel, which he says are too expensive for the knockoff artists. If they try something cheaper, like painted wood, the heels will snap. “I used to make whimsical and outrageous shoes for display only,” Weitzman says. “For the first time, they’re becoming part of sellable footwear.”
But why stop at fashion? Might Marianne Faithful come along and request I grow my bangs out? Maybe Nicole Kidman could protect plastic surgeons from copying her most-requested nose. For all the talk of our celebrity (and spawn)-obsessed culture, I am delighted to see Baby Jolie isn’t even first page Google result for “shiloh”. Nevertheless, her babymama (unsuccessfully) sued a perfumer for using a name that happened to be the same as her child’s.
Previously:
Related links:
- Counterfeit Chic
- The Piracy Paradox, The New Yorker
- “Bag Man,” The New Yorker
- Louis Vuitton Sues Darfur Fundraiser for Copyright Infringement, Techdirt
- “Put a Patent on that Pleat” BusinessWeek
- Louis Vuitton Malletier S.A. v. Haute Diggity Dog (Chewy Vuitton) Law.com
- Diddo Velema’s Gucci gas masks
- “Buying in” by Rob Walker
- “Deluxe” by Dana Thomas
- Bringing Home The Birkin: My Life in Pursuit of the World’s Most Coveted Handbag by Michael Tanello
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