Category: etc.

I guess the “and that’s half the battle!” view of MTV’s relentless pursuit of their demo is their success in completely baffling someone who’s aged out of it. I hadn’t watched MTV once in the last five years, at least, before we ended up watching the last half of Star Wars Sunday night, because there was literally–literally–nothing else to watch in our entire cable/HD/VOD/TiVO-verse.
And wow, besides the commentary bumpers with a hatin’ it Mark Hammill, and a cuh-razy Peter Mayhew, the greatest thing was the commercials. MTV has commercials for things I had no idea even had commercials. Brands who have a strategy, but don’t have enough money for a campaign, just a commercial. Which they run in MTV spot buys late at night.
Brands like Wonka, not Nerds–or not just Nerds, they want to get the umbrella brand in there, too. And Miracle Whip. As befits a commercial from the dweebiest condiment in history, Miracle Whip’s attempted ad makeover is an instant classic of the Gigantic Corporation Tries Way Too Hard To Look Way Too Edgy genre [cf. Intel, HP, Sprint, Zune]. The kind of commercials where you don’t know who to be embarrassed for more–the company with a hopelessly banal product to sell, the agency who’s stuck with the account, or the target demo, who you really, really, really hope is able to see through Cheap Fake Mayonnaise’s attempt to be their coolest friend.
So far, though, I can’t find the commercial to link to, probably because unlike all Kraft’s desirable customers, I’m not on Facebook. I’m left to read about the campaign, which is fine, because almost every word in BrandWeek’s recent article, Miracle Whip Whips Up Social App” makes me giddy with excitement for the future of the English language:

“What we’re trying to do with Miracle Whip is really get our target of 18 to 34 who grew up on brand. Many of them have just stopped using the category,” said Chris Kempczinski, svp of marketing for meals and enhancers at Kraft. “This campaign was about reengaging with 18- to 34-year-olds. The biggest place to go after them is in digital, and a big part of what they’re doing there is in social media.”

So perfect.

But that means the commercial I saw, with grungy hipsters gettin’ all Pop-Up Video with their Miracle Whip label-shaped thought balloons, was just a sop thrown to the mangy, three-legged dog of television. The real action is in digital, in social media. Which is why Miracle Whip created a Firefox extension/”app” called Zingr, which lets you annotate the web with Miracle Whip-lookin’ “Zings!” which it then shares for you while you social media in digital:

Miracle Whip hopes the use of Facebook Connect, which allows third-party developers to tap into a users’ social network, will spread Zingr (and the brand) far and wide. Leaving a “zing” on Kraft’s site, for example, triggers this message to a user’s Twitter network: “I just left a Zing! On brands.kraftfoods.com Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/oorhaa#Zing!”
The subtle branding was a tradeoff to make sure Zingr didn’t appear “too corporate,” Kempczinski said. But Miracle Whip will benefit from its own association with “zing,” he said. “If we can get ‘zing’ adopted as part of the digital vernacular, it will be tied into everything else we’re doing.”

Oh no, don’t worry, it’s really subtle, doesn’t look “‘too corporate'” at all. And it is indeed tied very well to everything else Kraft has been doing for their demo’s entire lives. In the Depression and the Baby Boom, Miracle Whip was about being a thrifty mayo substitute. But since at least 1979, when a chorus of hamburgers sang the enhancer’s “Zesty” praises, Z words have been central to Miracle Whip’s brand essence. In the 80’s it was “Zip” for your late-night sandwich binges, and even when America abandoned hamburgers for chicken in the 1990’s, we still “gotta have our Zip!”
Of course, by “we,” Kraft meant the now-grown, suburban Boomer schlubs in their ads, who were even then a caricature of anti-MTV lameness. But WTF, dude, that was over 18 years ago! Before some of Kraft’s awesome, new, social mediaing digital demo was even born! Now Miracle Whip is not all about consuming the category anymore. It’s all about Zing!ing and stuff; you know, part of the digital vernacular like you guys.

“It’s a pretty cool app,” Kempczinski said. “Even if you’re not a Miracle Whip lover, you can fall in love with the app and hopefully you’ll fall in love with Miracle Whip along the way.”

Miracle Whip Whips Up Social App” [brandweek]
Tangentially related, and from the same week, practically, as BrandWeek’s found poetry: “Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies” by Heather McHugh [newyorker.com]
Also, mad digital props to Harry Shearer Le Show. “Reading The Trades” is like the funniest parts of business school, for free, on the radio.

The Neue Sammlung design museum in Munich has organized the first [??] exhibition of the history of Ikea design. The idea of vintage Ikea fascinates me, and not just for the incongruity of it. Alright, mostly for the incongruity of it.
“Democratic design” and “beauty for everyman!” have a nice, if slightly messianic ring to them, but the reality of Ikea’s cheap furniture is often that it doesn’t last, doesn’t get preserved–by design. That Spike Jonze Ikea ad about how it’s crazy to cry for the lamp that gets thrown away, even though it still works? Obsolescence and replaceability are baked into Ikea’s strategy as surely as the ruthlessly unsentimental winnowing of any designs that don’t perform as well over time. Or that get too expensive to produce and thus get replaced by some sawdust&resin replica with a fatter profit margin.
To the extent that history is nostalgia, it just doesn’t exist in Ikeaworld. So there’s no way the company would keep making the totally solid-looking, mid-century Scandinavian all-wood product like Bengt Ruda’s 1960 Manhattan cabinet; it’s just not in their DNA.
Still, there’s a history there–and no doubt many interesting design stories and inspirations–to be had. I’d like to see more Ikea scholarship, frankly. And I’d like to see more vintage Ikea design; it can’t all have been thrown away, can it? Wouldn’t it be a riot if someone licensed some of Ikea’s original designs, which can’t be mass produced at Ikea’s price/profit point anymore, and brought them back into small-scale production? Anyone?
Democratic Design – IKEA runs through July 12 die-neue-sammlung.de via atelier]
Stylepark’s a little snobby-cranky, but they have a lot of pictures [stylepark]
A couple of nice flickr sets here and here, though the exhibit looks a little PR-y. [flickr]

Fritz Goro was the longtime science photographer for LIFE magazine. He covered the Manhattan Project, including shooting at the original Ground Zero. His image of a fetus in an artificial womb inspired Kubrick’s 2001. He crafted photo-simulations of x-ray diffraction and created elaborate graphics in-camera using multiple exposures, lenses and focal depths to depict atomic structure. Much of America’s 20th century image of science was either made or influenced by Goro.
In 1945, he also shot an unidentified collection of slightly odd 19th century technologies and inventions. Such as these rocking stilts, for crossing a swamp. Goro’s technique for shooting these objects was to cast as strong a light as he could on them. The harsh, high-contrast images remind me of some of Charles Sheeler’s domestic photography, which reveled in the hard edges and abstractions of pre-Industrial machinism.
Also, the 19th century folks were just as crazy as we are.
But also brilliant. Just look at this photo of a “reflection candlestick,” more commonly called–when it’s called at all anymore, I mean–a candlestick reflector. It’s somewhere between Olafur Eliasson, the end of Diamonds Are Forever, and ye olde ocularift fhoppe in downtown Fitchburg. Fantastic.

Ever since discovering Mister Jalopy’s blog Hoopty Rides a couple of years back, I’ve been low-grade obsessed with vintage tools and vintage toolboxes. There’s something about the combination of lost quality, survival, and embedded history that makes an intact box of tools a veritable mirror of at least one man’s soul–or less loftily, of his life and his projects.
Von Dutch was apparently a racist a##hole drunk, so I just admire his hand-lettered, gold Snap-On tool chest as an object. An object that was too expensive to be my first vintage toolbox purchase when it came up for auction in 2006 or so.

But a remarkable thread full of vintage tool chests and tool boxes has developed on the message board at JalopyJournal.com [no relation]. Many of the boxes were bought at garage sales. A user named Nealinca got the cabinet above from the estate of a high school shop teacher.

Many more, though, are inherited from fathers and grandfathers–especially grandfathers. A man rarely gives away his tools as long as there’s a chance he might need them. To commemorate his late grandfather’s 80th birthday, Imp59 had his awesome artillery shell-shaped toolbox pinstriped–later on in the thread, someone identifies it as a 1947 Nuggets socket case from Blackhawk.
And every few pagedowns, there’s a shot of a shiny metal toolbox, stripped clean of stickers, paint, chips, and grime, every sign of its previous history. It’s tempting to say it’s sad, but then someone’ll point out their daddy didn’t give’em anything but alcoholism, and you realize that wistful embrace of the past can be a luxury, or certainly an indulgence, that is not to everyone’s taste.
Hand Lettering [hooptyrides]
The H.A.M.B. “Vintage” Tool Box Club [jalopyjournal.com]

Until they start re-enacting Metropolitan Diary anecdotes with sock puppets [OMH! BRB!], the pinnacle of NY Times multimedia achievement is Bill Cunningham’s weekly narration of his On The Street fashion photos.
Normally, he lays down the audio back in the office. But this week, he’s actually on the street. There’s ambient street sound and everything. It’s like we’re hanging out with him, hearing his subjects exclaim, “How’d you know it was Kansai Yamamoto?”
Could a live, streaming Bill Cunningham channel be far behind?

Seriously, who had the hubris to come up with that phrase? Unbelievable.
The irony, of course, is that early spring and fall are the times of the year when you, the pre-war apartment dweller, realize how little control over your climate you actually have.
It’s freakin’ cold in here, but not cold enough that the boiler kicks in. The sun warms the place nicely in the day, but now you realize that all these months, you’ve actually been dependent on the radiators, not the sun, for your comfort.

But not that Bill.
The Obamas Get Up Close and Personal In DC [nyt’s automated related link generator]