[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.
To go forth in the future we need to discover our past, a hard thing in an age of short memories as you say. … Leadership might not come from size but from those nations that have steadfastly refused to give in to the prevailing decline in so many places. Switzerland, for all its refusal to join the EU, has managed to maintain one of the greatest gun ownership rates in the world yet not have a single gun-related murder attributable to its own in most years; Singapore, retaining its Confucian philosophies, manages a city-state with limited natural resources.
Their example needs to be communicated to the world, as well as the positive aspects of certain parts of the US or China—they exist, but they are hidden.
This is one reason to like blogs because they can cut through the shield of the MSM and government propaganda. I do not think that we have reached any critical mass among netizens, networking citizens together in a form of moral leadership. … [T]here are pockets of good people everywhere as you and I have witnessed, just that we are not necessarily visible.
But that critical mass can come—and if warfare now is at a terrorist, guerrilla level in so many places, I suspect moral leadership itself will come from a grass-roots base.
The system needs idealists like us, reminding people of their short memories, and maybe change will be effected not through top–down governmental, propagandist methods or the MSM, but through one-on-few communications from each of us.
I would rather [expect] that the next superpower, therefore, is not a nation or even an ideology, but a collective of humankind cutting through the BS and revealing the truth. Who says the ’net cannot be a force for good once more? If it can propagate hate and porn, it can just as easily propagate hope and truth.
I get reminded of this every now and then by others who feel the same way: Chris, at the Edutainment & Convergence blog, wrote to me privately and inspired me. And when I think back to books like Beyond Branding and Typography & Branding, I think there was a great deal of post-9-11 optimism and the desire to build a better, more understanding world. I find passages of my Typography & Branding inspiring, if an author is allowed to be inspired by his own work, and I can’t have been this cynical back then.
It’s a good zone to be in and I haven’t felt this hopeful about the potential of the ’net in about a year.
Last year, I was bemoaning the decline of the blogosphere as it began looking more and more like the darker parts of society, with gossipmongers and rude, anonymous commenters finding their way on to it. Where were, I asked, the globally minded idealists of the 1990s?
On the other hand, their entry into this world surely puts them closer to the hands of the idealists who can now shape agenda, creating more hopeful sites and messages.
And maybe channelling or finding the above message from my subconscious helped me put things into perspective more. If indeed the state nation is less relevant and change is better effected by people helping people directly, because technology has now made that possible, then the moral vacuum caused by various changes in society can be filled.
All it needs are willing participants prepared to get together to make the world a better place, regardless of their political, cultural or religious stripes.
That’s really why I got into media.
If we agree on this target, then the rest must follow.
For those who felt that 13 Mbyte for the free 52 pp. Lucire PDF supplement was too much, we have now created a 72 dpi version at 6 Mbyte. The original theory was that if there are people downloading music and movies, then 13 Mbyte might not be too much—but we recognize not everyone has access to swift broadband lines. So the 6 Mbyte PDF is designed for those with slightly slower internet speeds, and we’ve put it up again at Rapidshare. Click here for the supplement to get a taste of Lucire.
This Mini Cooper S Clubman was my set of wheels when in Auckland. A great little car, and thanks to Piers, Kelly and Grant for their help at BMW. And thanks in addition to Kelly for sending back my Italian Job CD, which I left in the CD player. A full review in an upcoming Lucire.
Each time we put out a Lucire in print, regardless of country, I wonder: do the folks in the countries (such as the UK) where the magazine is not available know what some of the layouts look like?
This time around, Laura and I decided we would do a 52 pp. downloadable PDF, containing some of the pages, for those who can’t get Lucire where they are. And for those who can, such as in New Zealand, the downloadable PDF contains some extra pages, and even an article that we’ve earmarked for issue 26. There are two more pages for a shoot; in fact, there’s one shoot in there by Hannah Richards that you won’t have seen at all.
It’s almost full circle: I remember putting together a 52 pp. PDF in 2003 as a L’Oréal New Zealand Fashion Week special in the pre-print days. It was hugely successful, and was used extensively by New Zealand Trade & Enterprise to market Kiwi designers offshore.
Readers unaccustomed to the print Lucire might know we have pretty outstanding journalists among our team based on the longer articles that appear online. But you don’t get to see the fun we have with the look, and the PDF addresses that.
We also thought we’d champion some of our advertisers as an extra thank-you.
Since the book is 200 dpi and 13 Mbyte, it was better stored on a free service. Head over to Rapidshare, where you can download the issue 25 supplement, as we call it, free. There may be a small delay for the free service but we think it’s well worth it.
Fans of Ashes to Ashescan order the DVD of the first series from Amazon UK at £25·98, a £14·01 saving (click on image to get to the site). It becomes available on May 5.
After last night’s finalé ended the first year on a high, with one of Keeley Hawes’s best performances, the second series, airing February 2009, is greatly anticipated. Till then, this is a fabulous way to relive the UK’s best series of 2008 so far.
Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.0 score out of (10) in the Entertainment category of Blogged.com.
This is quite an achievement!
We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.
After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.0 score.
We’ve also created Blogged.com score badges with your score prominently displayed. Simply visit your website’s summary page on Blogged.com:
This explains the extra link in the sidebar to Blogged.com as of today—and we’re grateful that this relatively young blog has received some acclaim. We checked and the top blogs in our section are in the high eights (Blogged.com gives tenth scores). Thank you, Blogged.com, and thank you, Lucire readers—if no one was popping by we wouldn’t bother. Blog and audience help each other.
We’ve cooperated on a few pages with Adam & Eve. Raquel Olivo, who has a shoot that appears in Lucire no. 26, provided us with a stunning one shot in Malibu, Calif. For whatever reason we didn’t run this one—probably because it didn’t fit with our themes—but with Raquel’s permission we found a way to get it published with a publishing house that I have a very good relationship with. It looks stunning and appears in the March–April 2008 issue of Adam & Eve. I was chuffed to see an acknowledgement to Laura Ming-Wong, our editor, and me! We look forward to doing more.
I have spotted a rise in the use of illustration in recent months—Lucire commissioned some for issue 25 and I understand there is an entire editorial in issue 26 that has been illustrated, by Steph Prowse. Our latest online story on the use of Marimekko prints for an H&M range for April is illustrated by Nyköping-born, Dallas-trained illustrator Lisolette Watkins.
When done well, I believe illustration has a place in fashion publishing. I was very impressed by Kelly Thompson’s work, which I covered a few months ago when she had an exhibition opening. In addition to being a skilful illustrator, Kelly was the first New Zealander to photograph a retail Lucire cover.
If there is a trend toward illustration, I shall be interested to see how it develops, particularly with the reliance these days on digital drawing tools such as Adobe Illustrator.
General Motors’ latest video is pretty unconvincing. While it has alternative-fuel cars at the Detroit Auto Show on this week, the ones that are ready for sale are, for want of a better term, gas guzzlers. And they need to be promoted. The Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1 and Cadillac CTS-V look the business, and GM says that it’s trying to make high horsepower ‘a little more responsible’.
How? The Corvette ZR-1 ‘is built entirely of lightweight material, aluminum, magnesium, and carbon fiber. It has one of the best fuel economies in its class,’ says the company. Bear in mind that it considers other cars in its class some of the more exclusive supercars out of Europe and none of them will likely see any figure over 20 mpg.
It only tells us that the Caddy has 550 bhp and 550 lb ft of torque, which doesn’t sound that green to us.
Still, it’s consumer demand that GM is really trying to tap in to, and consumer behaviour just hasn’t changed sufficiently given where the planet is.
This is an image from Levi Strauss & Co., sent to us for our denim special last year. It never ran, and I’ve since learned that the file was corrupted—something I was reminded of when queried by an art director about it today. Here it is, fixed up. While it didn’t run in our New Zealand print edition, it will appear soon—more to follow.
[Cross-posted] Sometimes I surprise myself on what comes up in blog comments. In a thread about the Iraq war and the short memories of nations over on Vox, I wrote the following. And as I wrote, I believed this to be a possible truth.
