Copywriting season is upon me, so no 1000 word wanderings from me today. Apologies if you were looking to get lost in a rant. I’m guilty of hypocrisy when it comes to HBO’s ‘How To Make It In America’ because I keep watching it. I watch it on Megavideo, so I assume I don’t add to the viewing figures, but I’m talking about it here, so even the piracy equals promotion. Louis Guzman, Larry Clark alumni James Ransone, Eli Gessner on consultancy and Joey Pants as a guest star, plus that Earsnot cameo are all winners. Gina Gershon is still beautiful plus there’s plenty of casual nudity, but it’s all so douchey. There’s only a very thin line between print tees in limited numbers, hand-wringing blog hustles and the fixation with the material things, and Ed Hardy tees, flip-flop clad hi-fiving, bootcut denim bro-isms. The industry’s douchey. It just thinks it isn’t because it owns some Medicom toys. The show is a Sex in the City that uses Google reader and wears Dunks. Viral videos! Pop up stores! It tries to use credible reference points creating a jarring clash between realism and cartoonish lead character plots — like Bob Hoskins and Roger Rabbit or Pete and his Dragon.
It’s fluff, but why spend all that HBO loot but base it around two chancers peddling designs that look like TapouT? Sixteen years ago, you’d get giddy at a split-second Supreme or Zoo York shirt sighting in Larry Clark’s ‘Kids’ (itself a heavy-handed parable, but an endlessly quotable slab of big city grimness that could be a skatier Jack Chick tract) or the stray box sticker on the ultra-dated ‘Hackers’ released the same year. Now the brands and locations are all over your cable channel and monitor. Shouts to the consultants — shame about the show. Like ‘Entourage’ it’s just dopey life lessons clad in a hipster uniform — ‘Highway To Heaven’ in loomed selvedge denim. On the ‘Kids’ topic, to pad out this anemic blog entry, here’s the Lynn Hirschberg (Courtney Love’s favourite journalist) ‘New York’ magazine feature, ‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’ from June 1995 that profiles Larry Clark, Harmony Korine and their relationship with Miramax at the time of the film’s release. I wish I’d kept the Daily Mail cover story call to ban the film.
There’s a whole essay to be written on Steven Seagal’s jackets, but during his zen eco-warrior phase his outerwear reached its apex. This Buckskin jacket from a cinematic game of slaps that just trumps Goldblum’s humiliation in ‘Deep Cover’ — the beating of a rowdy bigot in ‘On Deadly Ground’ for his bullying of an area native — sold last year for just $1,216 dollars. it was was pointed out to me by my buddy Dave, that’s it’s at least third cheaper than an RRL version would be. There’s tassels and embroidery aplenty. According to the auction, it was a gift from Seagal that might not have been the one used during that bar room altercation, but fuck it. For that money, the scope for waddling around, squinting, quoting the “What does it take to change the essence of a man?” line and abusing friends and family into spiritual change was worth the risk. This is heritage looks and the boom for native American prints on a hundred, thousand zillion.
GWARIZM 