Tag: Public Relations

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1854 and Will The Real Fake Fendi Please Stand Up?

I don’t know if I should be flattered or irritated but I learned funniest thing this week. Netflix “stole” my Real Fake Fendi story for their hit show Emily in Paris. Let me explain.

Emily in Paris wrote a plot-line into the current 5th season which appears to be riffing on one of my old blogposts “The Real Fake Fendi.” It is a true story & anyone who has known me awhile has heard me tell it.

I wrote about it in ‘21 on this blog five years long before this season premiered. I am on day 1853 day of writing a daily blog and published the story on Day 89 of my writing experiment though the actual experience took place sometime in the late aughts or early teens where I believe I first wrote about it on an old blog I took down.

Emily pitches a campaign to Fendi for a “real fake Fendi” on Emily in Paris

I suspect I would find earlier variants of this tale from my very first (somewhat popular) fashion blog as well. I suppose where fashion is headed is always where fashion has been. Or as they say on the show “it’s super meta and self referential”

The story goes like this. I was once was asked by a tourist for directions to find “a real fake Fendi” when I lived in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

I was honestly stumped by this inquiry. I didn’t answer immediately as my mind raced through the implications of their request. Imagine my mind retrieving.

Was there a fake that had inherent realness that other knockoffs did not possess? Was there a vendor who sold the most authentic mimicry of Fendi which the tourist wished to find? I had no clue how to answer.

Did they mean the realness one sees on the catwalks overseen by RuPaul? But which kind of realness? The creation that evokes the spirit of its inspiration? A realness so over the top and yet absolutely true to its essence?

Or perhaps the blunt direct feedback from being “read” by a drag artist that no construct, no matter how convincing, is the original artifact. Is is serving realness? I honestly didn’t know. I had Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction swirling in my head and still has no answer.

Apparently tourists looking for Canal Street want to buy the most authentic real fake Fendi

I just told the tourist that Canal was one block north and walked away. I don’t know if they ever found what they were looking for and I may have even given them the wrong directions I was so flummoxed.

Now can I really complain about someone taking one of my coinages and injecting it into a Darren Starr show about spunky brunette girl from heartland American who becomes a luxury fashion marketer by being good at social media. You see where I am going with this. That girl is me.

Perhaps my friend and fashion scholar Susan Scafidi of Fordham Law School’s Fashion Law Institute & author of “Who Owns Culture” would know who owns this cultural artifact. I bet I’ve told her this story too.

This life story archetype has been aspirational long before me. Murphy Brown anyone? It has been done in many different formats including Darren Starr’s best known work Sex and The City.

But it is my story too. So is Emily in Paris the real story of Julie in Manhattan? Is Julie in Manhattan the real Emily in Paris? Am I a retro causal multiverse prequel version of Emily?

Who is the real Emily? Am I the real Emily? Who buys a fake version of the real thing? Either way, I think Netflix owes me at a walk on spot. It would be very self referential. Or me-referential

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1838 and Tractor Protests of the Mercosur Free Trade Deal In Greece

As I continued my journey through southern Europe yesterday, I encountered one of the most striking protests I’ve ever seen. At every major intersection and city limit there were hundreds (if not thousands in instance) of tractors lining the streets.

From enormous modern combines to Jeremy Clarkson style esoteric speciality vehicles, I saw more tractors yesterday than I think I’ve seen in my entire life. It was majestic. And it continued for my entire drive through the country from border to port to border.

Mind you I drove a tractor before I drove a car, and I live in farm country so trips to the local John Deere dealership are a monthly ritual for us. And I’ve never seen such a variety of tractors. It made quite the spectacle and was deeply emotional seeing so many of them empty and lined up in a row in quiet dissent.

Crossing an intersection over Greek Farmers protesting the Mercosur trade deal

The tractors flew flags and banners indicating their disapproval of the signing of the EU-Mercosur Trade Deal. The European Union will be trading with the Mercosur bloc consisting of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It is set to create the world’s largest free-trade area covering 700 million people. 

European farmers are not happy about it. Yet the protestors did not disrupt traffic at all. The roads were open and passable. A blessing given that in many areas it either snowing or had recently snowed and the temperatures were below zero.

Mediterranean olive land covered in snow on January 11th.

The snow is not a very common experience for an area that farms olives and grain. And yet on top of changing weather patterns, the Greek farmers I saw protesting (along with 27 other European countries who are signatories) must now contend with farmers in 4 Latin American countries that do not have their standards or rules.

Economic collaboration and global ties were touted in all the press from Brussels as they condemned America’s retreat from trade. And the part of me that is a committed free trader wanted to agree. But the part of me that struggles with illness and the American food system was on their side.

And yet Europe is saying damn their own farmer’s opinions, stick it to America and our government’s trade wars. Ursula von der Leyen will let in Brazilian fruit and glyphosate saturated grains come to Europe.

I am no stranger to protest movements from the Battle of Seattle to EarthFirst! I picked up Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a child. I remember the era where organizations like the WTO were criticized and concerns about trade and agriculture were front and center. We forgot along the way and the politics went horseshoe theory but the problems remained.

I don’t farm or ranch, merely keep chickens, garden and maintain our land in Montana, but my husband’s beloved electronic free Deere is practically a family member. We are sympathetic to farmers and care about topics like soil earth, permaculture and the endless glyphosate lawsuits.

I’d rather America be trading with Europe than Europe be trading with Latin American countries. The land some of them work is meant to be rainforest not grain fields.

I’d be furious too if I were a Greek, Irish or French farmer under restrictions my competitors didn’t face knowing that they produced a better product on land cared for under high standards and almost impossible conditions. They know what they yield is destined to move on their ports somewhere. Thats what their ports do. But protest they must.

The Thesolonikki Port as seen from a hotel

And yet here the farmers were, placing their precious equipment on the roads silently condemning the entire lot of politicians who care neither for the people or the land.

Seeing like a state means we are just numbers to them. I couldn’t count all the tractors I saw. There were too many. At every crossing I saw there were more. And that’s the point. It will affect all of us in the local and global balance of the land and the people it feeds.

The land and its stewards ultimately don’t matter where no matter what Brussels says. Neither does America’s politicians and their economic foibles. It’s all a numbers game.

So the farmers showed them their numbers every where I turned. I noticed them. And I hope others do too. What we can do is not for me to say. I see them and am sharing so you can too.

A gas station stop in the middle of nowhere
Categories
Politics

Day 1828 and Collective Warmth

I feel lucky to have acquired an education that taught enough of totalitarian history that I feel I can paraphrase Walter Benjamin.

I’d used to say well we all know “fascism is the aestheticization of politics” because academics helped me to be skeptical about theory and Marxism.

Benjamin saw the logical result of fascism is to introduce aesthetics into political life. A hundred years later we have cultural war politics to serve as spectacle instead of transforming material conditions.

So I’m exactly the sort of person who came to the end of Gramsci’s Long March and wanted to understand Frankfurt School academics viscerally. I like to be on the ground when I learn.

So I am horrified to have spent my New Year’s in Sarajevo only to see a socialist taking on the mayoralty of America’s most important financial center.

To go from seeing the history of a hundred years of European continental war to watching bratty millennial nepotism play act at collective action is frankly not a positive development.

Millions of Europeans did battle with communism and in America we are so coddled the swearing in ceremony of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is celebrated.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. – Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address

If misery loves company then we should all suffer equally is a less aesthetic way of saying we are all in it together. Or as Sebastian Junger said “It was better when it was bad”

Categories
Media

Day 1811 and Flakkity Flak

Maybe because the profession’s entire raison d’être is to engage you there is always a new name for people who are good at grabbing your attention.

I swear I’ve lived through half a dozen new names for the communications profession in twenty years of being paid, in one form or another, to get attention for other people. And I don’t even call myself a marketer.

Everyone on LinkedIn, and a few on Twitter have latched onto the latest buzzword: storyteller. Someone call Joseph Campbell and see if they can send him a residuals check beyond the grave.

The aversion to existing terms like marketing, communications, and public relations is endemic to the space. There is always the new hotness and thus always a new name. Crisis manager. Influencer. Honestly I miss socialite. That was a great term.

I had not intended to read the trend piece as it’s not news to me that we hire professionals to craft stories about brands and people.

Millennials were the original generation who experienced personal brand building as just one of those things required to get a job.

I am glad I opened it up though as I got to experience a pretty amusing bit of story telling inside the Wall Street Journals mobile application. A most unfortunate creative services choice to place storytelling sponsored content from consulting firm Deloitte.

Who knew that consulting firms final form would be not as management consultants but publicists? The remaining few journalists at the Wall Street Journal definitely were not involved in this.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1802 and Very Julian Fellowes Coded

The temptations to build an investing case around a historical parallel cannot be avoided. Americans love their booms and busts. And we love grand television dramas about them.

Julian Fellowes is the stage name of a conservative British peer, actor and dude who gets BAFTA award for making television about aristocratic families familiar to adapt and Americans bailing them out.

Then he went on to make a period drama about righteous industrialists in America called the Gilded Age which isn’t as iconic as as it’s not as personal since obviously a British peer won’t understand American mores.

I keep reading editorials about what the artificial intelligence boom most resembles. This week it’s railway booms and busts and the fortunes made and most. We’ve got dueling mandates for skepticism and boosterism.

It’s just a little weird to think that we’ve already made the Silicon Valley drama about the last boom and bust moment and it didn’t get written by a British conservative peer but by a Gen Xer Mike Judge.

Maybe in another generation on Netflix we will get a sweeping historical drama about a polycule group house in San Francisco as the next Downton Abbey.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1801 and Parked in Front of The iPad

My immune system must be reacting to something, be it travel and environmental factors or perhaps a bug I caught, so I’m in bed and trying to keep my body happy. That means catching up on a few Love is Blind seasons.

As the American seasons get worse and worse, the international editions offer up clues as to the politics and tensions that producers feel the need to offer up to international Netflix audiences.

I am an unabashed fan of the franchise and what it offers up as a cultural mirror especially as different countries try to show the ways their status, class, colonial and power structures impact marriage.

The United Kingdom had a Manchester season that was more commentary on the failures of the working class and the country’s immigration systems than it did romance. It almost hurt to watch.

France’s most recent cast was more pan-Asian colonial tensions at the forefront (with an Algerian or two) than featuring any continental or regional ties. The Italian season reflects a more United Colors of Benetton than Georgia Meloni’s. European franchise spin offs feature more immigration more than America.

While everyone is talking about Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers today, I wonder if Hollywood will drive new cultural directions or if the data driven Netflix will produce endless remixes of subgroups and niches so no matter your identity you too will have an avatar on a spinoff of a reality show. Love may be blind but the watching data sure isn’t.

Lest you think it is all fan service and showcasing different immigrant groups being absorbed into the wider national identities of their former colonial governments, you do see the occasional fusion of sanded off styles meant to appeal across strange niches.

I love watching the style of the country doing offs as it is both globo-homo any and everywhere while still targeting very identity driven and place specific people.

Some make no sense. Who doesn’t love seeing a bizarre fashion choice like a Prada bolo ties at a French wedding? Unless you are an Italian getting married to a Texan girl at Marfa, it’s odd to pick 2020’s most viral celebrity accessory to get married in France on a 2025 reality show.

Sure still see some aesthetic choices you expect for both local and global reasons. Like the Italian party planner with the Gucci bee broach. That seems culturally appropriate with a cast that was variably actually Italian despite their their aesthetics

Long burgundy blazers and Gothic Bulgarian girls could work in any country this year. That’s simply globally appealing in the now in any country. Warner Brothers should be taking note.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1794 and What We Expect From The Wives

I’ve been intermittently online (as opposed to extremely online) this week what with the travel and the holidays. So I decided to use the Twitter algorithm to catch up on what the “Everything Platform” thinks I should see.

Which I realize is a bit like saying I’ll just have a little bump to see what is driving the rest of the club insane. I knew it was a bad decision and I fully endorse only using social media without algorithms. I generally use my following list in a chronological feed and stay away from image or video driven social networks.

But I am in many information flows that are built to grab attention and normalize information outside our Overton Window of current civil society consensus.

I was taught this was a good thing as a child. Reading and reconciling conflicting arguments was an important democratic norm required of all responsible citizens. I also understand as an adult that this exposes me to propaganda made by any number of sources.

Now you can judge my information sources but I value both of them and they had a common theme. Women, and in particular the wives of powerful men, are the keeper of m civilizational standards and used for this power. This message came from two very different places.

One is widely known indie founder who writes about doing business in Europe and the other is a publisher of books outside polite discourse messages as well as my neighbor in Montana.

Both accounts took me down different uses of the matter. Though both have share other accounts I’d consider right conservative populists. One was about an interview with Nicole Shanahan the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former running mate of RFK Jr.

She discusses how the wives of wealthy startup founders are finding causes that are not actually helpful to their intended purpose and are perhaps even actively harmful. It uses some language that is tied to a number of conspiracy adjacent words like the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.

It is still fair game as a civic polity might ask about the responsibility of the wealthy pretty regularly. I do think Silicon Valley wives are a new vector to watch as a pressure point though. I better watch it as if the tech billionaires’s ex wives are under watch, I can’t wait to see how their less powerful (but much more numerous), Girlbosses will be scrutinized.

This video sent me right into an interview Jonathan Keeperman aka Lomez doing an interview with right populist pressure researcher Christopher Ruffo. He who made critical theory and Critical Marxism a household issue in Republican America.

Lomez has an essay about the feminization expressed in the longhouse. I won’t do it justify by doing a synopsis but Vikings had longhouses and so do plenty of other cultures. This is not all together a positive portrayal of women’s role in civilization but certainly as its driving force.

The video I was served after LevelsIO’s retweet of a video clip of Nicole Shanahan was certainly further down a worldview. But it was also a more positive view of the role of women could be if the Karen was not viewed as a villain but as a hero of social norms.

Algorithms refine down to clearer distillations. Smoothing functions are revealing of form after all. And I think it is interesting that Silicon Valley liberal ex-wives are being shown against the backdrop of norms enforcing regular mothers, wives and guardians of the good life the Karen.

The Karen was once a liberal nightmare and it is an interesting space to replace for the culturally conservative, especially as the Zoomer incel nihilist view is raging across the internet like a prairie fire. So that was an interesting gradient from a European founder to my neighbor.

I’d also say it’s exactly why I don’t read from the algorithm. I fundamentally agree with different positions expressed here but mane not in ways you’d expect. I’ve seen the pressure we place on women in certain social contexts and we make them feel crazy for being the balance of norms but also being hated for it if we don’t chose the ones our clique or social context prefers. My algorithm wants me to understand the narrow band I walk on. Fucking dicks.

Categories
Community Culture Politics

Day 1776 and Remembering the Specifics

A little quirk of my personal record keeping that day seventeen sixty six of writing coincides with Armistice Day and in America now Veterans Day.

A lot to be said for how Americans always make it about themselves. World War I because an entirely new scale of war that did not exist when we fought the Red Coats for self governance.

And that has a lot of foreign interventionism in it. But we won that war so the assist from the French isn’t seen as pesky meddling. Imagine how the British press must have covered that at the time.

It’s still hard not to think about how different Americans post colonial future could have gone. We stabilized into a democracy and went in meddled in other people’s wars.

I don’t know why it never occurs to most Americans now people meddle in our problems with the intent of making us an easier target. One man’s nation is another nation’s propaganda target. Americans get targeted too.

The soft grey war is much harder to see when the wars we are taught to remember get lumped into one holiday honoring all veterans.

Wars aren’t specific anymore for us and this is a bad thing. My generation got the “global war on terror” and we learned our lessons in ways far too abstract for most and concrete in ways.

That disproportionately affected regular people rather than the wealthy inner core. Hard to consider how that plays into other nations calculations. Just seems like remembering the specifics of a conflict might be helpful to staying a thriving nation.

Categories
Politics Startups

Day 1721 and Valar, Inference dot Net and Policy for The Future

There has been such a bleak mood on the timelines as Americans are once again locked into a cycle of agitation and propaganda driven by hyper persuasion A/B testing of rage bate as tragedy turns on the opportunism machines. So I’d like to share bits and bobs of good news in my corner of the world today.

Valar Atomics is one of my proudest true first check investments. I knew Isaiah was special from the moment I met him. But I didn’t like the company he was pursuing with someone. I said I’d back him in something else so long as he was the CEO. I’m so glad I told the straight truth as Isaiah let me in on his true dream of an energy abundant nuclear future and I was able to be there from day before zero.

Valar is audacious, ingenious and the kind of hard technical work I’d never seen anyone raise from his position as self taught young man. But what a challenge right? I was in. I believe in him. And boy do I look smart now.

The Valar Atomics and Kiewit announced a groundbreaking at the San Rafael Energy Research Center for Ward250, their very first reactor! It is a major step on their mission to answer the President’s call for three advanced reactors on American soil by July 4, 2026.

If you want to watch an inspiring video with a Blackhawk click through. Kiewit is America’s 2nd largest power plant builder, with more active nuclear construction projects than any other company in North America. Utah deserved a win like this today.

Valar is incredibly grateful to the State of Utah, especially Governor Spencer Cox, DNR Executive Director Joel Ferry, EOD Director Emy Lesofski, USREL Director Jaron Wallace, and all our local partners in beautiful Emery County.

Chaotic portfolio founder, and once and future Montana guy, Sam Hogan has a good synopsis of CogSec 101 in times of tension that I thought I’d share as a teaser for introducing his fantastic compute company Inference.Net

He gives good being online advice and his company Inference.net (yes disclosure investor) just started sponsoring a new podcast about the culture of San Francisco.

It’s called Member of the Technical Staff. It’s a fun hang with perennial grist for the social mills topics like where are the girlies in San Francisco. It’s a hang for a subcultural issues relevant to understanding living in a boomtown while building.

In local Montana news, we have had national influence with our work supporting the Frontier Institute and its indefatigable leader Kendall Cotton. Must be something about this Rocky Mountain boys that we love. He’s proving you can just do things.


I’m thrilled to report that two model bills that we’ve pioneered in Montana were officially adopted as ALEC model policy. This means that state legislators from across the country who look to ALEC for ideas will be prompted to introduce their state’s own Right to Compute Act (recognized as the gold standard for state tech regulation) or Private Property Protection Act (a cutting edge approach to zoning reform focused on housing affordability). 

We’ve officially become a national policy leader – a big deal! We’re a small state, and a small team here at Frontier Institute, but we’re making a huge impact thanks to supporters like you.

And that supporter like you? Heck yeah those supporters are me and Alex. .

You two can just do things as our boys Isaiah, Sam and Kendall have shown. You can build nuclear reactors, run decentralized inference compute markets and create new models, and even change your state’s policy with better laws that become models for the entire nation.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1710 and Speaking The True Name or Obfuscating To Remain Illegible in Bureaucracy

There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.

The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.

Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.

“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling

Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.

One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.

So if you find yourself concerned that an obfuscated acronym like the DOD’s Department of Defense is getting a name with a bit more clarity as to its purpose ask yourself why?

Maybe a department of war is the proper name for the branch who commissions prime contractors to make weapons.

War looked different in the past?