Nike just launched NSW, a clothing line of sportswear and technical apparel.  

Based on the concept of the "playmaker".    The playmaker is basically the player that controls the game.   Art critic Neville Wakefield wrote one of the essays along with other conceptual writers and contributors.    This campaign was executed perfectly based on contemporary art inspirations.   The visual imagery was to capture speed, action, sports and futuristic technology components.    I did the photography and the Design was by DUALFORCES. who designed Lipsticktracez as well.
  check it.

I love magazines and will read them forever.   But the fact that most magazines are dying is sad but true.      Circulation for almost all magazines is at an all time low and they are closing up shop left and right.     Most magazines have a strong web presence which is the only way they will continue to grow.       Luckily our site (new media) has been growing about 35% a month since we started.    Im thrilled.   I think great magazines like Vogue, and W will be around.   They just won't make money.    When media has become accessible through the web, younger generations will read it there.     Pretty pictures and all.



    The phrase "flat is the new up" became a mantra in recent years when it came to assessing newsstand sales. Well, as core fashion titles, women's service books and men's magazines have almost universally posted declines in their single-copy sales in the first half of 2008, how does "less down is the new up" sound? (just wanted to add a footnote that this bastard (Edwards) cheated on his cancer striken wife- can't men in politics keep their dick in their pants? Atleast during  the course of a presidential race.)

To wit, Hachette Filipacchi Media's Tom Masterson, senior vice president for consumer marketing and manufacturing, pointed out that, while Elle's newsstand was down 6.3 percent in the first six months, "many of Elle's competitors decreased more."

That's true -- Vogue was down nearly 15 percent, though it still outsells Elle on the newsstand by an average of about 50,000 copies monthly; Harper's Bazaar fell 8.3 percent, and W, which gets the vast majority of sales through subscription, was down 10 percent.
Media Numbers/WWD media site

Or take Shape, which was down about 10 percent overall on the newsstand in the first half, but still averaged higher total sales than the troubled fitness category in general. (Self had the dubious honor of being less down, but is still smaller; Shape has beefed up its distribution at checkout and added 17,000 pockets nationwide.)

Growing market share might be the last remaining competitive advantage in an environment where nearly every editor in chief is seeing the kind of declines that once would have gotten them fired. The long-standing expectation that a healthy magazine is one that sees successive growth on the newsstand is in question -- you can't exactly fire everyone.

Whether the change is cyclical (uncertain economic times that include high gas prices, fewer supermarket trips and less disposable income) or secular (consumer behavior is undergoing a fundamental change away from newsstand, or from print magazines themselves) depends on whom you ask. Editors and publishers would have it be the former.

"I don't think newsstand softness is systemic to magazines, but rather systemic to the economy," said O, The Oprah Magazine publisher Jill Seelig.

But some advertisers and observers are beginning to wonder whether the second diagnosis is upon us. As consumers' attention fractures, spoiled by choice and easy digital access, the culture and entertainment industries already have adjusted their expectations, counting smaller sales numbers than ever as blockbusters. The magazine industry might be falling prey to the same tectonic shift.

Several magazines, such as Glamour and Marie Claire, have seen disappointing sales for several periods in a row, even when the economy was flush, suggesting more of an overall move away from big women's titles. (Perhaps in reaction, Glamour unveiled a redesign this month.) Even newsstand stalwart Cosmopolitan dropped 6 percent in this period, a difference of more than 100,000 copies, after essentially flat newsstand sales since 2004.

By Irin Carmon  with contributions from Stephanie D. Smith  Amy Wicks 

From WWD Issue 08/08/2008

Now that I find myself blogging and reading more blogs than ever I have to wonder, what are the ethics of blogging?

The Ethics of blogging

1- Honesty: 
In certain countries journalists are licensed.   That is not the case in
America, although I feel that sometimes it should be. Fact check your
sources, print accurate text and check your spelling and
punctuation.    (please note: wikipedia is not fact)
Like your mother said,  honesty is the best policy.   
 
2:
Credits:  If you are reprinting information or images give credit where
it is due.    The internet is the public domain of the information
highway, but stealing is totally unacceptable.  Plagiarism is
cheating.   That little credit is always appreciated.     If you are
doing a feature, ask the source if possible.   Credit is a great thing
and its nice to get people's work out there so other's can follow up on
the trail.
 
3: Images: A picture is worth a thousand words, but
its nice to see some text.    Try and furnish content whenever
possible.   If you are publishing images, than follow up with a
sentence at the very least.   Anyone can choose cool pics and post
them.    What really makes a good blogger or tastemaker is producing
content.     Remember, you are creating a record for a long time,
possibly forever in cyberspace.    Post the date and location or film
or person and give a brief description. 
If you are promoting
events, give  a little backround on the promoter or crowd or music.   
There is so much out there, a little filter is always good.
 
4:
Time:  Try and post your information in a timely manner.    If you are
covering an event or party make sure you get it up there asap.     No
one cares once it has run in the tabloids.   Old news is boring.     If
you are talking about politics or News this is imperative. Op ed or
editorial comments can be published whenever.    (although chances are
you will get more hits when the information is timely)
 
5: Fact v. Fiction: Distinquish whether your information is factual, commentary
or advertising promotion.   Don't blur the lines.
 
6: Blogger as
subject-personality: Don't talk about yourself.  Major pet peave here,
I'm sorry but no one is that interesting.    Maybe Norman Mailer can
get away with it.   You just come across as a blowhard.     Your
sensibility is far more interesting.   Talk about what you like, what
you did, and what you think.    It does not need to be written in
relation to you.  That's obvious.   Your blog is a reflection of
yourself.   Art imitates life.   IF you are an asshole, the blog will
reveal it.

7: Standards: Hold yourself to a higher standard of
good taste.  Keep language clean and upscale.  Avoid gossip and
pandering.    Save that for the celebrity blogs. 
 
Hold yourself accountable if you make mistakes and correct them right
away.     Never print something questionable, false or
unsubstantiated.   If you move forward,  state that you are in doubt. 
If you hated the show, tell me why.   Be ethical.
 
 
8:  The
Critic: Don't be mean or vindictive.    Realize that critism can hurt
someone, if you are writing a critique- fine.   But realize that you
must be objective and present your reasons. Tell me why you hated it. 

Always back up your opinion.
 
 
9: Knowledge is the beginning: Talk about what
you know or want to know.    The best artists, writers, and musicians
write about what they know.     If you are eloquent, nothing is
banal.  
 
10: Titles: Cryptic titles don't work.   They just
limit your hits and the links that will connect to your posts.    Look
at magazine and newspaper headlines.   They are always pretty
direct.    The average reader spends 4-5 minutes on a website.   You
better get their attention.     If you write about something or someone
known you should have that name in the title to your post.
 
11:
Promotion: Feel free to promote your friends and occasionally your
business.   If you have a line, book, project coming out-great.   It is
ok to talk about it.   But don't make it about yourself all the
time.          Promote your friends, but as artisans or creatives, not
just because you know them.   Nothing is more self absorbed than saying
I did this and that and I own this and that and I know that rockstar.  
If the blog is too self involved it gets pretentious.    Keep things
more accessible.   
 
 
12: Information:   List information,
links, videos etc.     A great tool when you talk about something is to
link to a website or video.    Blogs are about disseminating
information and this makes it easy for your readers to follow up on the
post.   Your mission should be to create awareness for something and
let your readers follow up.
 
It also creates a link back and forth and increases your exposure.
 
Don't print incidents or content out of context.
 
13: Sensitivity:   Never use tragedy or personal loss to exploit a story.  
If you are writing about Katrina or the Beijing Earthquake be sensitive
to victims of tragedy.   
 
14: Privacy:   Realize that
celebrities are public figures and your friends may not be.    If you
are publishing images or stories about private citizens be careful to
respect their privacy.
 
15: Motivation: Have fun, most bloggers
write for free so make it a pleasurable experience for you and your
readers.

( Adorable blogger in this picture is my friend Marina, and, no I never look
this great while blogging, nor do I blog on my lawn.)

If you have ever been to Los Angeles or plan on visiting I highly recommend reading City of Quartz by Mike Davis.

Mike offers a cyberpunk vision of Los Angeles from the eyes of a scholar written like a noir novel.   It is a riveting book and a must read for anyone interested in urbanization.   True brilliance.    (If you like Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy you will love this)

  Other books by Mike Davis I recommend:

Ecology of Fear and Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums  is especially timely since it talks about the history of disease, the environment, and population growth in the cities that we can't control.        If you are interested in the human footprint and society as we know it today-Read Mike Davis.

All these books are available at Amazon.com

A little about Mr. Davis, courtesy of Random House, Inc.

A former meatcutter and long-distance truck driver, Mike Davis has taught urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, was a fellow at the Getty Institute, and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.  He was born in Fontana, a suburb of Los Angeles, and now lives in Pasadena.

The digital age is upon us.    What are the ethics of blogging, the legal ramifications of copyright infringement etc.   There are many questions about what "public domain" means, republishing images from other blogs and taking images and content off the internet.    Hopefully this great article will shed some light.

The Future of Copyright

How relevant is it to declare oneself to be "for" or "against" copyright? Neither the stabilization nor the abolition of the copyright system seems within reach. All we see is a seemingly endless assembly line of new extensions to the law being proposed and enacted. The most recent is the proposed "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) [1], to be tabled at next month's G8 meeting in Tokyo, including a clause known as the "Pirate Bay killer" that would force countries to criminalize services that may facilitate copyright infringement, even if not for profit. This is just one example of how copyright law is mutating into something qualitatively different than what it has been in previous centuries.

A very condensed version of copyright history could look like this: texts (1800), works (1900), tools (2000). Originally the law was designed to regulate the use of one machine only: the printing press. It concerned the reproduction of texts, printed matter, without interfering with their subsequent uses. Roughly around 1900, however, copyright law was drastically extended to cover works, independent of any specific medium. This opened up the field for collective rights management organizations, which since have been setting fixed prices on performance and broadcasting licenses. Under their direction, very specific copyright customs developed for each new medium: cinema, gramophone, radio, and so forth. This differentiation was undermined by the emergence of the Internet, and since about the year 2000 copyright law has been pushed in a new direction, regulating access to tools in a way much more arbitrary than anyone in the pre-digital age could have imagined.

This change has taken place because previously distinct media are now simulated within the singular medium of the Internet, and copyright law simply seems unable to cope with it. Consider radio broadcasting and record shops, which once were inherently different. Their online counterparts are known respectively as "streaming" and "downloading," but the distinction is ultimately artificial, since the same data transfer takes place in each. The only essential difference lies in how the software is configured at the receiving end. If the software saves the music as a file for later use, it's called a "download." If the software immediately sends the music to the loudspeakers, it's called "streaming."

However, the receiver can always choose to transform a stream to a digital file. It's simple, legal, and not very different from home taping. What now fills the record industry with fear is the possibility that users could "automatically identify and separate individual tracks from digital transmissions and store them for future playback in any order."[2] In other words, they fear that the distinction between streaming and downloading will be exposed as a big fake.

For example, Swedish company Chilirec provides a rapidly growing free online service assisting users in ripping digital audio streams.[3] After choosing among hundreds of radio stations, you will soon have access to thousands of MP3 files in an online depository, neatly sorted and correctly tagged, available for download. The interface and functionality could be easily confused with a peer-to-peer application like Limewire. You connect, you get MP3s for free, and no one pays a penny to any rights holder. But it is fully legal, as all Chilirec does is automate a process that anyone could do manually.

Cutting a recorded radio stream into individual tracks and entering each correct song title is easy, but takes lots of time. The open source community is continuously coming up with free tools for simplifying it, such as a program called The Last Ripper that can turn the on-demand streaming service Last.fm into a library of MP3 files.

Record industry lobbyists smell the danger, and now they are urging governments to criminalize such practices. On their orders the so-called PERFORM Act ("Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act") was introduced in the U.S. Senate last year. [4] The proposed law would force every Internet radio station to encrypt the transmission of file information, such as the name of the song. Yet anything visible on the screen can still be easily obtained by special software, encryption notwithstanding, and such restrictions would therefore be ridiculously easy to circumvent. Thus the PERFORM Act includes a follow-up clause banning the distribution of this class of software.

People with some programming skills, however, won't need to do much more than combining a few readily available and otherwise perfectly legal code libraries to compile their own streamripping tool, one that would circumvent the PERFORM Act. For regulations like these to be effective, it is necessary also to censor the sharing of skills that potentially can be useful for coding illegal software. The circle of prohibition grows still larger: Acoustic fingerprinting technologies, which have nothing copyright-infringing to them, but which can be used for the same feared identification of individual tracks, must probably also be restricted.

This domino effect captures the essence of copyright maximalism: Every broken regulation brings a cry for at least one new regulation even more sweepingly worded than the last. Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses. This development undermines the freedom of choice that Creative Commons licenses are meant to realize. It will also have seriously chilling effects on innovation, as the legal status of new technologies will always be uncertain under ever more invasive rules.

Anti-piracy agencies are today fiercely attacking different kinds of search engines, solely because they provide links to files which may be copyrighted. This includes the bizarre case against Swedish BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay, as well as recent lawsuits against Yahoo! China and Baidu. Only Google remains largely uncontested, although they operate in the same gray zone of copyright. For example, the business model of Google Books is to display millions of pages of copyrighted and uncopyrighted books as part of a business plan drawing its revenue from advertising.

Gray zones like these are omnipresent in 21st century copyright law. One reason for this development is the uncertain status of the very idea of "copying" today. Contrast today's world with the golden age of copyright, roughly speaking between 1800 and 1950. Back then, enforcement was easy. The act of reading a book was far removed from the act of printing one. Record presses and gramophones were safely distinct machines. Since then, things have changed.

You know some days you just want to check out.   Turn off the iphone, i chat, AIM, cell phone, email, pda, email whatever.     Well, when I travel I like to zone out.    I don't want to be a slave to technology every day of my life.  All day, all night, at the gym.   So here I am wandering aimlessly in the airport when low and behold the advertising flat screen flashes in front of my eyes.   I'm forced to look.   Much like the digital giants that we once called billboards are replacing outdoor marquis on crowded thrufares. 
 
It's unbelievable. Its progress, its here to stay.    Atleast they don't have cameras on every corner like they do in London.    I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The techie in me is fascinated with this new program called Hypershot.    It's an application developed by Oscar winning computer graphics guru Henrik Wann Jensen.











































The technique uses photomapping to create photo real lighting situations.    Final product is an ultra realistic composite that looks like a photograph.    The applications are unlimited.   The program is used mostly in the automotive, engineering, entertainment and architecture markets to visualize concepts in the hyper real world.     This product is already revolutionizing advertising and industrial engineering where creating expensive mockups are now a thing of the not so distant past.
Bunkspeed

I can't wait until artists get a hold of this and start shaking things up.





















All you need to do now is dream it and there it is.  Diamonds are a girl's bestfriend.
all images courtesy of Bunkspeed hypershot website.

Need a cool playlist for your next soiree?  Sick of your current ipod work out mix?

check out MUXTAPE.

This is a site for cool kids and real people to exchange DJ set lists, share mp3's and listen to all different types of music.    A hot new site thats well designed and simply elegant to look at.



Muxtape


you can listen to the song and if its a slammin beat you like, buy it.

The "r" word, much like the "f" or the "c" word is a word no one wants to hear.    Looming on the economic horizon the ugly bear called the recession is constantly being thrown in our face.    Consumer confidence is up and down much like the tumultuous stock market has been for the last 9 months.  
In my spare time (I have so much of it) I like to hang out at the Apple store.    haha.    Seriously, there I was waiting to buy a hardrive and 4 people came in within 2 minutes searching desparately for an iphone.    They were sold out.    This is a few days ago.    The store was packed to the nines in the middle of the day.  

The credit crisis, foreclosures, the weak dollar,  just go to the Apple store and it will make you forget.  Its so pretty and clean in there.  so open and contemporary.  Call it retail ecstasy.
















 It just goes to prove that a good company and their products will always do well.      Apple products have transformed my business and my life.    I no longer keep portfolios, all my "books" are on my iphone.     I know many photographers and artists do this now.    In addition to running a completely digital studio, I do everything in post on MACS using Adobe creative suite.


Did I mention that you have to be a punk rocker and wear skinny jeans and vans slip ons to work at the apple store.  oh, and some tattoos are good too.   Seriously, is that a mandatory dress code?   I like it-punky computer nerds are really cute and fashionable.

Well he doesn't rock skinny jeans, but Steve Jobs is one of my heroes.


By the way, this is what a visionary looks like.