Moving in silent desperation
Keeping an eye on the holy land
A hypothetical destination
Say, who is this walking man?

A local enigma passed last night. Marc Abrams who was simply known as ‘The Walking Man’ was found dead in a hot tub at the age of 58. I lived in Silverlake for two + years when I was coming back to LA after stints in San Francisco and New York and at first you see this guy walking in the noon day sun with his shirt off reading the paper, and you think, “Who is that guy?’  And then you see him and you realize he’s doing this every day, walking around the reservoir in the noonday sun each and every day and you have some silent admiration for his commitment, even if it seems possibly slightly unhinged.

Then you might meet him, or his lovely wife, and you discover that this man walking the streets in his small shorts with his shirt off is a family doctor. And you still have the same feelings about this man who walks on by, but you begin to sense there is an unspoken complexity to this man. You smile when a muralist cements his reputation with an homage…

And then you hear the guy on NPR start, “You may have seen him walking the streets of Silverlake…” And your heart sinks and you know what’s coming next.

I hope they are serving you some Johnnie Walker right now Walking Man.

Keep walking.

Is Nicorette a cigarette smoker’s buddy?  Are Social Media experts recovering smokers who are fond of Nicorette?  Personally I think if they had suggested that I like the below…

It would have made more sense.

UI for the Buy

So last night I finally sat down with the joint iPad (belonging to me and my beloved) and rocked out to some awesome Captain America comic books. Here’s a few quick observations.

As a friend of mine put it, it is great for comics. The form factor and the four-color are a perfect match and the way you move through the comic is approximately the feel of reading the printed page. Of course it helped that I was reading the epic ‘Winter Soldier’ story arc by perhaps one of my favorite comic book writers Ed Brubaker featuring sexy spies in latex, cold war mind control and an oversized creepy psycho-analyst named Dr. Faustus.

However what didn’t work for me, or didn’t work enough to prompt me to write a blog about it is the manufactured transitions which are at the core of this manifestation of the digital experience.  You can either read a comic page-by-page like below:

Dig the White Space

This for my money best replicates the off-line experience. Is this a good thing? I don’t know but a long time ago I read Scott McCloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’ and in that book he posited that it is the white space between panels where all the action is. A reader fills in the gaps – for example as the shield flies through the air and back into Cap’s hand.

Then there is the new way of reading, which is enabled by this digital experience. As opposed to reading an entire page and going from panel to panel on that page, you ‘read’ one image at a time causing you to have to preserve in your head more information in order to experience ‘action’. Over time this may work for me, but right now it’s jarring and is actually disruptive to the reading as opposed to making it more dynamic or more entertaining. It is nice to get to look at the art up close and personal but seeing one sole frame at a time as you do below, well it’s not the joint.

On the one hand it’s awesome and amazing that this works at all and it may extend the life of comic books by another 40 to 100 years, ensuring the possibility that my child will enjoy them as much as I have. On the other I’m still not sold on the presentation format and hope they keep innovating until they do find the right ratio of motion to still.

I’m a Californian and that’s a confession and a truth all wrapped up in one. It’s pertinent as this is the lens through which I view a conversation with Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie at the 92^nd Street Y, which may differ slightly than one who dwells in the Five Boroughs.

And while both boys most certainly did lay claim to be cunning linguists and there was the requisite literary name-dropping (though no mention of Kingsley), the marked characteristic of the evening’s conversation, in addition to liberal doses of sex, alcohol and ego, was a leitmotif of friendship, of the true-blue variety,

The packed house was greeted to a surprise introduction by none other than Hitch’s editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, whose hair was as fabulously floppy as ever. In what would prove to be the first of many charming anecdotes, Graydon related how upon founding Spy ‘Hitch’ was the ‘very first person’ he called, and Mr. Hitchens promptly turned him down. And then some years later when Mr. Carter had ascended to Tina Brown’s throne at ‘Vanity Fair’ he placed the same call and this time Mr. Hitchens accepted, perhaps as the coffers and perks of the then still-great Condé empire were vast enough to accommodate for Hitch’s prodigious habits. Carter then listed off the innumerable war-zones to which Hitch traveled on behalf of the Newhouses all of which was upstaged by a recounting of Mr. Hitchens getting waxed, yes waxed, for a story for ‘Vanity Fair’. The waxing consisting of “The Back, The Sack and the Crack,” a notion that produced the requisite titters of laughter from the Upper East Side crowd.

Cue the heavyweights and in walked Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens. The amity between them was obvious and genuine and whatever had passed betwixt them in decades prior would not be put on display this evening. That Rushdie is most likely one of the few people who could put Hitch, the man that claimed to have been called a ‘Naughty Boy’, by Margaret Thatcher in his place, was most certainly a key to the evening’s entertainment.

From the onset Salman made it clear that there was a mix of respect and if not consternation or befuddlement, a wholly different kind of admiration for Hitchens’ commitment to his beliefs. His opening salvo being, “You liked Margaret Thatcher but disliked God.” Hitch then declared that ‘Hitch 22’ was designed as a ‘Paradox in a Minor Key’ and defined his current mood (as if it were a Facebook Status) as ‘Committed against the New Totalitarianism.’

As they moved from the personal to the political, discussing the Falklands war, Iran-Contra and then subsequently the invasion of Iraq it became clear that these men were perhaps from a different time, and without too much nostalgia, a time that smacked of betterness. For surely there are young men in cafes today debating the merits of freedom and conflicts with the State, but the depth and breadth of Rushdie and Hitchen’s knowledge, and their ability to converse had the feeling of a bit of a lost art. For now the salon is the Internet and the communication is often one of shouting, and if there is dialogue at all, the most celebrated form is one of 140 characters or less.

For anybody who has read the press, yes Hitchens did indeed talk about his relationship to Martin Amis and his fondness for the man. And yes, he did talk about visiting a brothel (which is now the home of Opus Dei) with Martin but his presenting of that tale in person was no different than reading the excerpt in the pages of ‘Vanity Fair’. Rather, the emotional highlight of the evening was when Hitchens spoke about his mother, her death and the secret he learned following her suicide.

Hitch, when discussing Amis, Bush, Thatcher or any of the assorted stops on his career of drinking and writing would talk quite fast and be nearly indecipherable but when the story of his mother came up he was clear, cogent and very nearly soft-spoken. The man with whom his mother died was one that Hitchens did not seem especially fond of, recalling that her suitor had followed the Maharesh Yogi because, “His sail was so raised as to be buoyed by anything which passed by.” Regardless his mother was under the man’s spell and they had some form of suicide pact resulting in her killing herself alongside her lover in a hotel room  in Greece when Hitchens was just 23. As the investigation into the double suicide went on, Hitchens would learn his mother tried to ring him 5x prior to dying, and he is convinced that had she succeeded, she would have remained alive. “I am sure I would have steadied her.”  It would be some 15 years before he would then discover that he was Jewish, something which his mother kept from him for he felt she, “…wanted me to pass.”

Before getting to the audience’s questions Rushdie and Hitchens let loose their drawing room wit beginning with a game whereby you change one word of a famous book – rendering it more pedestrian than epic.  The examples they reeled off:

-       A Farewell to Weapons

-       Laugtherhouse Five

-       Toby Dick

-       Blueberry Finn

Rushdie then did his solo parlor game trick of turning Shakespeare’s plays into Robert Ludlum novels, which if you have not heard before is a marvelous merger of the High and the Low. Hamlet is ‘The Elsinore Vacillation’, Macbeth, ‘The Dunsinane Reforestation’ and Othello, ‘The Kerchief Implication.’

And so it went. Tales of warlords and presidents mixed with literature and alcohol, but the incendiary talk was light. There is still fire in Hitch’s belly but as the young contrarian moves into his sixties it may just be that the onetime enfant terrible has done what was once unthinkable and grown up.

And then there were some other tweets. Talking of this new site.

Featuring Red Bull.

And Silverlight.

And some crazy mother’ who is going to jump out of a balloon at 120,0000 feet in a spacesuit. Some crazy mother named Felix Baumgartner.

It is called Red Bull Stratos . And it just might be ‘The Bomb’. But not for the reasons you might think. It is astounding, crazy, freaky and powerful that a man is willing to ‘jump’ from such a height. I once jumped from 4,000 or so feet and though it had it’s moments of beauty that was enough for me.

Yes. There is the question of, “How do you brake?” But that hopefully will get solved.

As a media observer what is fascinating about this is the marriage of content, technology and brand, all of which is accomplished with nary a 3rd party distributor like a Yahoo!, MSN, YouTube or Hulu.

Red Bull has been ramping up the role that content plays in their marketing, and as we near the opening of the Winter Olympics this is only escalating with their sponsorship of fan favorites Lindsey Vonn and Shaun White. But with Red Bull Stratos you have something remarkably different, so different that it bears mention.

Here you have a one-of-a-kind activity (space jumping) with an ‘athlete’ in the Red Bull fold (Felix Baumgartner) creating a media event that is being powered by a technology company (Microsoft).

And this is to be the first of many, here’s an excerpt from blogger David William’s site outlining where Microsoft hopes to see this partnership go.

In parallel, Microsoft is in the process of developing a broader media technology and marketing partnership with Red Bull, where they want to bring together Red Bull’s premium content and innovation-in-marketing with our technology platform and worldwide reach with consumers. The goal of this partnership is to develop a cutting edge media distribution and marketing platform on our stack that will allow Red Bull and their +400 athletes and artists to run super targeted media and experiential marketing campaigns within their broad portfolio of events, including Formula One, Red Bull Air Race and Red Bull Music Academy and many others.

So, hat’s off to Red Bull. And all you Media Companies who think you make the content and then marketers have to pay you to be associated with it? Take a look at this slice of the future – the disintermediation of your role hasn’t simply begun, it’s in full swing.

Davos. #wef.

iPad. #giantiPhone.

The return of ‘Lost’. #whocares.

And The President laying it on the line, first with the nation, but then, more pointedly with his Republican colleagues. But one thing which didn’t get as much play, but is kind of fascinating and important is some real acknowledgement of how audience development is playing more and more a role in having a successful TV program.

The money quote on this comes from Elizabeth Murdoch, “We can no longer afford to be [a] one-screen business. Social networks are finally the interactive dimension of storytelling. We now need to evolve with our audience. To resist this would be like resisting Technicolor.” via paidcontent. This was from her keynote at Natpe where she also suggested that fan-sharing had benefit even as it approached ‘borderline piracy.’ Both of these statements from one of the leading forces in global television are extremely powerful and should not be underestimated.

As the video consumption paradigm, something we used to call watching TV, has become so fractured it is no longer enough to have a quality, video program with distribution. To ensure the success of your investment, it is necessary to invest in what were once considered complementary or ancillary media like the Internet and mobile. If you’re not, you’re not even playing the game.

I will not be wowed by the chip processor (thanks tech crunch). Nor the development platform. Thanks Joe Hewitt. But, what I will be wowed by is – This is it. This is, for those of you who have slaved in the interactive TV world, Jennifer Aniston’s sweater. (For those of you that managed to stay out of that sticky wicket, the Holy Grail was that you would be watching ‘Friends’ and you could, with a click buy Jennifer Aniston’s sweater.)

Now forget for a moment that for the moment the iPad is not Cable or Broadcast TV so the TV example is only half appropriate, but think about what it means that instead of pointing and clicking, a mode of interaction that recently celebrated it’s 40th anniversary since being developed in the early 70’s at XEROX Parc, you now have a whole new way of interacting. Instead of scrolling, pointing, clicking, waiting for something to open. You can touch. Zoom. Re-arrange.

Yes, it is the vision we all saw with Tom Cruise manipulating files in ‘Minority Report’ but now, instead of that being a kludge or a gimmick, it is real. All of the ideas that Interactive TV developers have been working on for the last 25 years will begin to bear fruit as ‘touch’ computing goes mainstream.

So the i which once upon a time stood for the Internet in relation to the iMac and has now become simply a prefix. Well the i is now truly for interactive and this is a keeper peoples. This is it.

This will transform advertising.
This will transform purchasing.
And, if we’re lucky, it will begin to transform entertainment itself.

iPad is the new Avatar.

Look at that image.
‘iPhone apps from TV Ads’
‘iPod touch games from TV Ads’

What better way for Apple to mitigate it’s marketing spend on TV and leverage where they’re spending their money. That image appears inside iTunes and is very nearly as powerful a marketing platform as that other bit of 2010 ubiquity – the google home page. Oh, and lo and behold, Google is doing the same thing with their little ad on the google search page for the Nexus One.

What’s going on here? Not only are Google and Apple engaged in a death-match with respect to how we spend our digital dollars but they are both becoming marketing platforms above and beyond their more traditional roles as search leader and fanboy fetishist plaything. It will be a long time, if ever, before you see a non-Google product on the Google home page but their willingness to pimp their own phone shows they have no qualms about using that giant leverage for whatever purpose they deem appropriate. And then there’s this Apple ad within iTunes touting for all those app and games developers – “If you catch our eye – look at all this value we’ll give you.” It’s a pretty powerful proposition and one that will only increase the value that Apple

So think about this. Google is so far beyond being a ’search engine’ as it multiplies the business it’s in – the multiplier effect is making it indispensable to everyone and everything. And then there’s Apple with this cute little ad inside iTunes. They are literally paying themselves. They place the ad on TV. You watch the Ad. You buy Apps based on the Ad and Apple gets a cut of the revenue when the developers sell the App. They also increase their power in the marketplace because they are able to show how if your App can make the cut you get money, fame and recognition. It’s not quite a virtuous circle – but it’s certainly a model sure to yield profits for those participating in the ecosystem.

And I thought it just was interesting because there was an opportunity to be first but Hulu gets to spread its wings and see if it can’t be an international destination hub. It will be interesting to see how it plays. “Quarterlife” or “Dr. Horrible”?

This was a fun thing to stumble across. While ad agencies and all form of media experts warn about the dangers of UGC content – what about good old-fashioned questionable editorial content alongside your home-maker product. Witness the awl and their delightfully snarky and bitter suggestion that you should have had sex last night because you won’t tonight and definitely won’t be in the mood tomorrow in your tryptophan haze.

With copy like the following, “Your family is getting in on Wednesday night and nobody is getting laid with in-laws in the other room. Unless you miss the kind of quiet and terrified sex you used to not do very much of in high school”, methinks Pillsbury wasn’t thinking about this kind of content matching when they kicked down some *koff* dough.