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Reading about the upcoming Damien Hirst auction provoked so many reactions in me that I don’t know where to start. I was amused that anyone could be so shocked at the idea of an artist, especially one as famous as Hirst, selling art all by themselves. Is that even legal? Don’t you need some kind of art dealer’s license, like when you want to sell booze? And how will those poor art dealers pay for their Upper East Side townhouses if they can’t take their cut of big artist’s sales? Sarcasm aside, it’s amazing to see the level of hypocrisy this event has brought out.. Apparently it’s OK for everyone else in the art world to try to make a buck, but if an artist does it they’re a cynical, greedy sell-out.

But what’s more interesting about all this is that art markets are doing well even as real estate and physical consumer goods are showing signs of saturation. The affluent classes in the western world already have far more “stuff” than they need. In recent decades they (especially in America) have spent their extra wealth on more stuff - bigger and more houses, more cars, more clothes. Now the trend seems to be reversing.. Wealthy people are more likely to brag about their latest art purchases than vacation homes, and Art Basel Miami was filled with a lot of mid-priced art aimed at the same demographics that were bailing on their Miami condo deposits en masse. And even further down the income scale, the video games industry is growing at over 30% annually while apparel and home goods retailers are flat or shrinking.

Is this part of a final shift in emphasis from the tangible to the intangible? Have we maxed out on “stuff” and shifted our focus to “content”? Or will the pendulum swing back the other way next decade and we’ll all go back to craving 10,000 square foot houses with 5-car garages?

It’s a scene right out of Mad Max: someone pulls up to the back of a restaurant in the middle of the night, siphons off 300 gallons (gallons!) of used fryer grease into a tanker truck, and goes home to convert it into fuel for their rag-tag vehicles.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure?

Never mind $4 a gallon at the pump, you really know we’re screwed when people start stealing skunky grease out of restaurant garbage dumps. What’s next? Obese people kidnapped and drugged, waking up in a bathtub full of ice, 30 pounds lighter after thieves lipo’ed out their fat for conversion into biodiesel. You read it here first.

My latest celeb sighting - Willem Dafoe, buying groceries at Whole Foods yesterday afternoon. It’s not often you run into an actor who’s done everything from playing Jesus to a soft-core sex scene with Asia Argento. I wish there was a way to sneak a photo without feeling like a celeb-stalking creep.

He looked good, skinny as ever, he was laughing and joking with the checkout clerk. He was buying a lot of green vegetables, very healthy-looking load of groceries. He looked exactly the same as he does on screen, which is rare for actors. I wonder if he’s a good cook.

I remember reading Idoru years ago, where one of the characters is a purely virtual pop idol, a software construct created to entertain the masses. You can imagine the advantages - no rehab, no paparazzi, no romances with sketchy guys.. though there’s always a risk of a software bug causing her to freeze up in mid-concert (please be patient while we reboot the performer..).

Frank Sinatra’s royalties are safe for now

A virtual pop star is a lot way off, but synthetic singing software already exists… enter whatever words and notes you want, and it sings them. They of course created a virtual idol (limitations be damned) called Miku Hatsune, whose songs are all over Japanese charts.. it’s all still pretty scripted, so we’ll have to deal with the Britneys and Winehouses for a few more years, but I’m looking forward to the day when tabloids are full of rumors that the latest virtual idol has caught a deadly computer virus (planted by a jealous rival, natch..).

Call me a late bloomer.. last night I felt every bit the virgin fan that I was at the Kaiju Big Battel at Webster Hall. I had read about it before, it sounded like a goofy godzilla-meets-wrestling pseudo-satire, where huge “monsters” battle it out in the ring. The series comes complete with backstories, rivalries, betrayals and intrigue.

Monster vs monster, duking it out

The event definitely blew me away… first of all it was sold out, over a thousand people. The MC kept the crowd worked up with melodramatic commentary that any WWF/WWE fan would recognize. People were really into it, some sporting t-shirts of their favorite monsters, and I even spotted one wearing the costume of a recently-deceased monster (Pablo Plantain RIP.. or not..).

Dr. Cube talkin’ smack in the ring

The other thing that amazed me was the action. I was expecting silly dweebs in the costumes hitting each other with foam appendages… these guys were doing all the crazy flying moves you’d see in a pro wrestling event. I mean, the “fighting” is fake, but when they’re doing flying backflips off the top rope and colliding in mid-air, it’s still impressive.

Finish off that slimy beast!

Definitely an event best viewed with a sense of humor (a drink or two doesn’t hurt).. highly recommended.

I had the pleasure of attending a talk this evening given by Gore Verbinski at the DICE summit in Vegas. Gore’s claim to fame is that he’s the director of all 3 of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which together have grossed over $1 billion in box office revenues - which puts him in a pretty exclusive club that includes the likes of Peter Jackson and George Lucas.

Go Johnny Go!

His talk was a prototypical creative rant - as you’d expect from a brilliant director. Some funny anecdotes about the studios’ reactions to Johnny Depp’s performance - “What’s up with him? Is he drunk? Is he gay?”… but he fought against changing it, believing the eccentricity of Depp’s character was what made the film a success.

So far I agree.. but Gore went further, ending up on the well-worn plank that “the suits” just want sequels and that original ideas are the only way to really excite audiences. The reality is somewhat less satisfying.. the first Pirates movie did well, but the sequel earned nearly 50% more.. and even the third release, widely viewed as crap, earned as much as the original.

So what’s up with that? Clearly there’s a disconnect with what the creators think is innovative and what audiences pay to see.. the ugly reality is that people will pay to see a known quantity, even at the risk of being disappointed by a crappy sequel.. the best performers tend to be well-executed sequels, where they capitalize on name recognition but still manage to build on the original. Terminator 2 comes to mind, as does Empire Strikes Back… of course there are plenty of counter-examples, which merely prove that it’s easier to screw up a sequel than it is to get it right.

Stopped by the Loden Dager fashion show yesterday to check out their latest hipster duds.. they’re one of my favorite menswear lines, sporty casual, lots of ironic touches.

The show was a presentation, always a bit more relaxed than runway shows.. the venue was fantastic, inside one of the seminary buildings in Chelsea, with the spotlit models standing up in the window alcoves.

The spotlights were a little lower than the models and aimed right at their faces, and with no gels so the models had a ghostly white glow to them. Between that and the ecumenical setting, there was more than a little bit of a goth vibe to the whole thing.

I’ve been a fan of podcasts for a while, subscribing to everything from business-y fare like Ad Age Today, to the pseudo-businessy but very interesting TED Talks, to just plain cool little snacks from (natch) the folks at Cool Hunting. Living in NYC means spending a fair bit of time on trains or subways, and they’re also not a bad way to make the ol’ gym workout go by a little faster.

The lads from Vampire Weekend crooning away in the car

One of the cooler little ‘casts I’ve come across lately is Concerts a Emporter, a series of videos of impromptu live music performances, shot mostly around the streets of Paris and New York. Some of the bands are a bit obscure, but there are quite a few like Beirut and The Shins that anyone with the remotest interest in indie music will know. The videos are all 4-5 minutes long (1 song), perfect for a little break whenever you need it.

I still remember when the original iMac came out.. first it was Bondi Blue, shocking a world used to getting their computers in beige, beige and beige. Then Apple really screwed with our minds and put out 5 versions in different colors.. I think that was the first time (ever) that a company had released multiple versions of a tech product where the only difference was the color. The idea that appearance was important enough to justify multiple SKUs remained a heresy in the rest of the industry for years.

My Taser matches my shoes!

Lately the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Most of the really cool stuff like diamond-encrusted iPhones and wooden PCs is still mainly done by small after-market companies that mod existing products, but slowly the manufacturers are getting into the game.. not always with the most tasteful results, but at least we’re starting to get a little variety out there. I mean, if someone’s going to Tase me, the least they can do is use a cool-lookin’ Taser.

I’m ashamed.. I’ve fallen victim to a food-fad book. Not Atkins, not south beach, not the cleanse - a few days ago, I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that’s supposed to be the anti-foodfad book. The author even starts off by saying the book was inspired by his outrage at the way the Atkins craze almost eliminated bread from the American diet.

As I read it, I felt a smug sense of intellectual superiority - I was reading a real book about food, not some diet book that weak-minded housewives grab off the shelf as they’re pushing a grocery cart filled with pop tarts and cheetos. The book explains the evils of industrial food production, especially corn - which has infiltrated nearly all processed food in the country. It then presents our salvation - harmonious, ecologically sustainable small farms, where everything is organic, tastes amazing and is good for you.

You are what you read

A couple of days later I dutifully made my way to the Union Square Greenmarket, where I loaded up on sustainably-grown produce and grass-fed meat sold by small farmers in upstate New York. The meals we prepared from that food did taste amazing, and I felt much healthier by the end of the weekend (placebo effect? naaah…).

Then I got on a plane this morning. They handed me a bagel for breakfast.. I looked at the cream cheese packet - mostly processed milk products. I shuddered, but at least it’s still milk of some sort. Then I looked at the jam - high fructose corn syrup, the root of all food evil and the cause of America’s obesity epidemic. I almost couldn’t eat it - how brainwashed have I become? I read a book and suddenly I’m grossed out by a teaspoon-sized pack of corn-sweetened jam. Pretty sad.