LIPSTiCK TrACeZ

I know I last said that sex and nostalgia sell, but me thinks there is another, more animal dimension, to the situation.

I am referring to dogs.

Pups are pumping into the marketing scene, wagging their wiggly tails into everything from movies (a full length Chihuawa movie), hotels (ME Madrid/Cancun/Cabo/Barcelona Hot Dog Hotel Packs) to album covers of rock bands (the Melvins "Nude with Boots").

Did Miss Paris start the pup craze? Is this doggie dimension doomed to bite the dust, loose its bark like yet another passing poddle fad.....

Who knows. Dogs just may be not man's, but marketing's, best friend.

Woof.

A protest is in order: sniviling Sao Paulo journalists have take a shot at Karolina Kurkova's backside saying she was too curvy to be atop the Brazil's Fashion Week Catwalk (what? they invented curves for god's sake!!!). Reading that I have only one response. We are insane.  Really, society is sinfully insane.

This morning my lovely, classy and not-too-curvy in all the right places mother sent me over a picture of her and my daughter, something that I took when last in Los Angeles visiting.  Both generations looked in my (and I  am sure everyone else's) eyes wonderful, sparkling. But then the evil hand of the Digital Demon got into my mother's brain and she - oh god forgive me for saying so - photoshopped herself!!! The horror! The shame!

She doesn't need it. And honestly, nor does society need another impossibly perfect picture of someone.  But she doesn't want any long term memories of aging and thus, her skin is purged.

30 years back, when my dad (who is a photographer) sat in his darkroom and painstakingly - painter's brush in hand - smoothed out the geometry of lines and circles on his client's head shots, I saw the process as art.  Way before the days of the artistic licensing of airbrushing and the latter fake flattery of Photoshop, the sable tip brush aimed to embellish, not erase.  It was the loving touch to lighting and character, which combined made the best pictures of all.

Now, mouse in hand, we are cursed with the curser.

Is it society that demands us to distort ourselves or is it a demon?

There is something quite unreal and undescribable about the volcanic Canary Islands. Literally off the coast of Africa but belonging cuturally to Europe, this island bit of Spain is a wierd half way house to sun.... we appear to be strangely landed on a geographically difficult to place point on the planet where everything has been imported (literally everything - from the people to the plantains, with a hearty run through of everything else importable). 

Everything except the ever present sun, the endless sky, tons of crunchy grey volcanic stone beneath your feet and an incredible view of the Atlantic Ocean that touches the traveller's DNA at it's core (it's no wonder Columbus sailed off the Island of La Gomera, like what else are you supposed to do when the sea is literally calling you?)

My new favorite series, which was launched yesterday in Spain on Canal +, is MAD MEN.  I know the series already has a following the in States but alas it has just arrived here.  I feel for the girls and guys in the program, who are teeter-tottering constantly between sanity and exhaultation.  The advertising world has changed much in since the 60's, no doubt, but today if a colleague grabs your cheek undesirably it's probably your facial cheek, not the other lace-covered one. That's a good advance in the sake of society and business.

Nontheless 50 years later sex still sells.  In this business and in any other.  Advertising is all about seduction. It's about getting the client to fall in love not with an agency, but with their company once again.  It's about having them see things about their company, their brand and about themselves that they had not felt, recognized or dreamt of before.  It's all about making them believe again or as we say in Spanish "ilusionarse de nuevo".

Like in any seduction process, it's not rare to wonder why certain women and men rise to the top.  Mad Men has a great scene where Don Draper makes his pitch to the Kodak dudes who are trying to sell their not-so-high-tech slide projector with rational messages of how it functions.  Apart from walking in there and seducing them with his voice he gets them at their emotional core with a nostalgic and sentimental TKO.  He says the thing's not a projector, it's a time machine. It takes you back to a time and a place that was good, where you ache to go back to... it's nostalgia with a twist.

In the hey day of Life 2.0, where a new version of everything is coming out every day, the most seductive thing is not novelty.  It's nostalgia. It's what gets you at your core. A memory or a place or a moment that struck you, when you were fresh, young and still an emotional virgin. 

Nostalgia is life's way of transporting us back to a safe place. Something we all need when suffering from the constant crush of novelty.

Had a conversation with my mom last night, she noted the passing of a dear friend's mother, who was in her 80's.  She had lived a full life but spent the last years needing support (which I think we all will need, albeit science has made us almost inextinguishable, like the Duracell Bunny). 

Apart from the sadness in my mom's voice, I noted this worry. Without saying it I knew she was thinking "Will I be a burdon to my children when I'm that age?" My mom is so fabulous, so wiry and funny and pretty I can't imagine it ever happening. I feel weary enough at times to see me sooner in that wheelchair than I could see her.

My paternal grandma lived her last years in a lovely little apartment with all her lovely little things (although fully attended by a team in her residence). No tragic drawn out departure, she slept her way to heaven. Fiercely independent from the day she was born, she also went that way too. I see the shared benefit of elders' independence.

While I'd love to be the picture perfect granma to my children's kiddies in my 80's living in the guest house and planting tulips, I doubt it'll happen. It didn't work on Desperate Housewives: a whole pagent of in-laws and moms have paraded down Wisteria Lane and none of them were asked to stay. It ain't gonna work for me.

Out of necessity and their right to sanity, I just might have to do with my inherited till-my-dying-day independence genes, my two beers and a Sex in the City CD.

Foto caption: Beware when your company rolls out the red carpet. Too much glamour may be damaging to your health.

"Just say no" is a great claim.  Originally intentioned to refer to weed, crack, coke and dope, I think professionals such as ourselves should adhere to it.  "Just say no" is a good philosophy to adhere for anyone in this equally addicting business of public relations, event organization, creative design and art direction.

Last night at midnight I was watching one of the world's worst television programs (a really bad reality-show gone sour) as a remedy to my lack-of-human-resource hangover from work. Sick, sick, sick. 

Like my favourite video featuring Will Farrel "The Landlord"  "I work too hard".  I'm a god-dang greedy press junket junkie.  An arts and advertising addict. In my search for press release perfection I am in the social poorhouse.  My kids and husband asleep by the time I tramp on in with traces of my digital drugs still lingeringing on my BlackBerry, I realise I've been left on the wayside alongside the Gucci-belted meterosexuals, the high heeled 30/40 something's who have a incredible bodies, fantastic clothes and a CV like Donald Trump.  But nobody at home to trump them (or me).

I'm a fat 12 year old with that last chocolate chip cookie in his hand, who won't let go of those tasty tidbits in life. Even if they are not good for him.

Letting go, even of the good stuff in life, is key.  Come these fabulous 40 years, life's all about maintaining sanity, balance and harmony.  Addictions are out the door.

"Just say no". Wouldn't it be great if it were so easy to kick the addiction of adulation?

I have a fantasy I turn into Wonder Woman. Maybe that's why I dig big bangles. I think they can protect me from the fierce demons that await me.

Maybe it's because my mom was the voice of  She-Ra, Catwoman and Batgirl and therefore had superhumans take care of me in my infancy (it's gotta be that aspirational sort of thing.... you know like if she had superpowers then why not me too?)

It reads on www.tvacres.com that "On the fantasy WONDER WOMAN/CBS/ABC/CBS/ 1976-79 Lynda Carter starred as Wonder Woman, a mysterious super Amazon from Paradise Island who helped Americans battle Nazis under the guise of Yeoman Diana Prince. Her patriotic costume of red, white and blue featured a tiara, bracelets (that could deflect speeding bullets), and a golden lasso dangling from her curvaceous hips (that could force people to tell the truth when wrapped around them)."

In synergy with the Dove brand's "Real Beauty" campaign (and after some help from the discovery and later exploitation of JLo's delicious derriere) curvy kinds are getting their heyday after years of hegemony from the queendom of celery-chomping size 0 waifs. 

Funnily enough the flash-back to real-body reality was first inspired by someone quite superheroic, Lynda Carter.

Ain't it funny it takes a super-human to give us back our humanity?

Now please, tell me where to get these bracelets. They go oh-so-nicely with my curves this summer.

When a sister approaches another birthday a gift is in order. But if your sister is a stylish, sexy, long-legged blondie like mine, who travels with the same ease via the underground in Madrid or the 101 Highway in LA, then that gift needs to be just a little bit more special.

Haute-couture special.

Like Carrie in the "A Woman's Right to Shoes" episode, Jody had her Manolo Moment (or rather her "Hermes Hour", in this case).  I sent her the right-off-the-runway Jean-Paul Gaultier collection's most impossibly perfect Pelle Melle's, as well as some melt in your mouth muskateer over the knee platform boots in carmel calf leather.

Yes. People actually stopped her in the street. Envious of her eye-candy footwear, friends have made it known that if she drops off to sleep one evening and wakes up footwearless, they had nothing to do with it.... but will be in Vegas strutting their stuff.

Carrie had it right: "Sometimes it's hard to walk in a single woman's shoes.  That's why we need special ones now and then to make the walk a little more fun".