[SIC] 129: Epicly Later'd

February 25th, 2021

Hi everybody.  It’s been a huge week already, so lots to read (and sorry about the late arrival, had some weird publishing issues trying to link to an NFT on rarible.com).

 First and foremost, welcome to everybody who found the newsletter via last night’s Culture Club “NFT Boom Room" on Clubhouse and also to everybody from the Lean Luxe community that welcomed me into their ranks this week too. I’m stoked to have you all here. Note: I don’t do this alone. Thanks to Tim, Elva, Iolanda, Danny and Erik for their contributions this week. Appreciated as always - and idea are welcome from everyone. Hope you get something great from this edition, all. 

Because of the publishing delay I didn’t get to re-promote my [SIC] Talks today with longtime buddy and creative legend Cheryl Dunn - but it was a really fun one and it’s live now in my grid @dietznutz - check it out. Cheryl’s directed films (including a new campaign for Diesel), shot every kind of photos, published books and generally fomented the genre of street photography for decades. I’m a fan first and always, but I also admire her take on the contemporary creative and art worlds and her fearless approach to visual storytelling.

=====SIC 129: Dictator Banknotes=====

Life on the Margins. 

• The most important single class I took in college was a Jazz History course that introduced me to the idea of liminality. Via Maekan: Liminal space is the idea of a temporary or transitional space that's abandoned. Think a shopping mall at 4am or a school hallway during summer break. Or, the spaces where new, weird ideas are born, in other words. (Aesthetics Wiki) 

• The Absurdity of the Modern (Digital) Condition: 

  • Check your head: Rishad Tobaccowala’s illuminating ruptures in the mediascape (Re-Imaginings) is great read back to back with

  • Not Boring on the Creator Economy, NFTs, and the rise of the solo corporation: The Person Economy (Substack)

  • Related: Substack’s Lonely War on Publishing. (Frieze)

  • Further corollary: How Finimize grew to over 1 million email subscribers (Simon Reynolds) 

  • From the indispensable Iolanda Carvalho :Why People Share: The Psychology Behind “Going Viral” - the 8 Clusters of Motivation That Trigger Sharing: Status, Identity Projection, Being Helpful, Safety, Order, Novelty, Validation, Voyeurism. (NFX.com) 

  • Via Spoonshare: Rachel Benner’s  The Unpolished Era: How Algorithm Awareness Is Rewriting the Rules of Social The pendulum has swung. Don't expect it to swing back (Musebyclio)

  • Elsewhere in auteurs of rewriting the rules: via Declarative Statements: Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker in Conversation with Adam Curtis of Can't Get You Out Of My Head. An Emotional History of the Modern World’ (VICE)

  Tokking / Social Commerce: 

  • Tiktok is testing a seller marketplace (Retail Dive) 

  • Also (s/o Nick Tran):  TikTok has jumped into the ring with the UFC in a multi-year partnership to carry live, weekly short-form programming. (The Drum) 

  • As well as tapping 100 black creators (Rolling Stone)  

  • Corollary tokking: via Markus Bosch: Cat Zhang has written a brilliant text about the TikTok Face for Real Life

  • Navigating the ‘newly constrained’ consumer (The Drum)

  • [SIC] buddy Colin Nagy on “The Buillion Cube” effect of social media. (Whyisthisinteresting)

  • While another friend, Ana Andjelic posits that social commerce “social commerce turns consumption into creativity and blurs the boundary between buying things and making things.” (Sociology of Business) 

  More general tech stuff:  

  • New [SIC] friend Matt Klein’s excellent Zine newsletter asks Is Dispo, David Dobrik’s Nostalgic New App, The Future of Tech? (Zine) 

  • Elsewhere, The New York Times’s new Slack app is an experiment by The Times to get a better sense of how people are sharing Times journalism through their own Slack workspaces. (Nieman Lab)

  • Via NYT, Michael Bolton’s got a song about breaking up with Robinhood (Twitter)

  • Speaking of online money machines, from Erik Lavoie: “Everyone’s favorite VC Dancing Machine” [Science’s Peter Pham] (dot.la) 

  • This is the future' - NBA Top Shot and the dizzying world of digital collectibles (ESPN)

  • From Tim Nolan: “FYI This was 2013. First sale of 'digital art’” (VICE)

  • Via Future Party: buying and selling tweets using NFTs. 

  • But, via WITI: is the environmental cost of NFT art too high? (Memo Atken)

  • Via Future Party: Ideamarket is a stock market for popular Twitter accounts (Motherboard)  

  • Corollary: How the Bitcoin brand bolstered its surge. (The Drum) 

  More Crypto / Commercial Wilderness: 

  • From Iolanda: I read this a couple of days ago, and since [last night’s Culture Club on @joinclubhouse]  is on art & NFT… [Crypto-backed Banksy ‘knock offs’ sell for BIG money] (The Art Newspaper)

  • From Danny Goldstein: “Hi Ben! re: your last live from this week. I commented back in the stream about what I’ve been excited about for fashion week, not sure if you saw. Mainly this! : @cryptofashionweek” (Instagram)

  • On the heels of their NFT sale of Beeple’s “The First 5000 Days,” Christie’s named the best IG artists (Instagram)

  • Nevermind the Beeples, here’s the Virtual furniture auction (Dezeen

  Inextricably linked to brands and advertising: 

  • It took a minute, but brands are in the Clubhouse app (Digiday) 

  • What Digital Advertising Gets Wrong (Harvard Business Review)

  • Speaking of wrongness: from Elva Ramirez: "Everyone is mad at Kendall (that's fine) but it's misplaced. Suddenly I'm the Reaganite in the room but ppl are mad that someone bought something that was for sale and is selling it at a higher price?” (Forbes)

  • Corollary: Content Commerce Insider on Why Gucci’s near-flawless content-commerce approach is falling short. 

  • Moonvertising: Is Space the Final Frontier for Brand Marketing? (Content Commerce Insider)

  Which is also inextricably linked to: 

  • For when I start back drinking again next week - County Comm’s got a titanium shot ‘glass’. 

  • Speaking of commissaries: haute cornershops are the wave….  (The Daily Upside)

  • And retail hacks luxury stores must know for 2021 (Jing Daily) 

  Innerviews: 

  • Speaking of hacks (jk): [SIC] amigos Chris Black and Matty Matheson on How to Master Your Personal Brand  (Interview)

  • While Favecore Forecaster Emily Segal got interviewed in Tank mag (Instagram) 

  Innernets: 

  • The Age of Peak Advice (New Yorker) 

  • Related, sort of: Cheech knows chips (Instagram) 

  • Can control. Steve Powers is a master at work (Instagram) 

  • Jamil gs has a new show of photos you should check out.  (Highsnobiety) 

  • School of Song is a new take on music education that centers around community, with group classes & intensives from LA-based musicians like Big Thief’s Buck Meek.

  Style Points: 

  • Via Lean Luxe: Basic.Space is the invite-only resale platform letting you to buy from a specific set of 'taste-makers'. (Vogue)

  • The Patagonia Paradox & How Luxury Can Learn About Purpose (Jing Daily) 

  • Corollary: The New Statesman’s chief sub-editor on the structure and joy of learning to make her own clothes

  • Speaking of Quality Mending: the NY store of that name’s got Bobby Puleo’s Gutter Galler show up now and it looks great (in a literally trash-y way) (Instagram)

  Musique Mystique:

  • Via Music Redef: UNIVERSAL is reviving the VIRGIN brand as a distribution and artist services company (The Telegraph) 

  • Art imitating copyright law, also via music Redef: DE LA SOUL guest starred Saturday on CARTOON NETWORK's TEEN TITANS GO!, in an episode in which aliens try to steal the group's music.  They talk to Slate about why. 

  • Via Public Announcement - Spotify’s got an ad network. (Axios)

  • Irving Azoff bought the Beach Boys Songs, Calling Band 'Underappreciated'   (Bloomberg)

  • Soundcloud Rappers Ride Out the Apocalypse in the Desert in the film “Crestone” (Hyperallergic) 

  • More via Music Redef: When Daft Punk went to Wee Waa (The Guardian)  

  • The history of the Notting Hill Carnival and why it wouldn't exist without the work of a Trinidadian communist (The Weekly Standard)

  • Related, it's February which means DJ Private Ryan’s annual, encyclopedic Soca Brainwash mix. (Soundcloud)

  • Piotr Orlov’s “Dada Strain” Radio mix for The Lot Radio is kinda wild and tasty (Soundcloud) 

  • While Caius Pawson programmed a playlist of uplifting songs for The Slowdown (Spotify)

  • In that vein, lots of shared sound territories in Wale Oloworekende’s  Best new African music: a monthly roundup (The FACE)

  I really, love books and magazines. Here are some. 

  • Standard and Strange’s Black History Month reading list has got a lot of gems.  

  • Elsewhere on my reading list, via Elevator: George Saunders interviewed in The Paris Review

  • The new issue of MacGuffin is about Rugs. I really love rugs. (Import-News) 

  • Author of genre classic “The Preppy Handbook” Lisa Birnbach on the A Continuous Lean pod.

  • Via Monocle; “Dictator Banknotes” is a book I would like someone to please buy me. 

  • While via Monocle On Design: In "Radical Architecture of the Future," author and critic Beatrice Galilee brings together some of the planet’s most original projects by top designers and thinkers. (Phaidon) 

  • Related: “Multiform” (a new transitional architecture movement) is the look of our times (Dezeen).

  • Corollary, then: via Lean Luxe, Supreme’s greatest homeware hits(Hypebeast) 

  • Via @_theola_: YES!! Finally the po po’s and the gung gung’s are celebrated!! Got this book [Chinatown Pretty] today and it is making my whole life better 🧨🧨🧨💥💥💥 (Chronicle Books) 

  • 032c asks: “Do you have an  INDEPENDENT MAGAZINE SHOP? If so, as a gesture of gratitude for your essential work, they'd like to send you posters for free. You can post them up at your store, or better yet sell them – and keep the money. That way, drinks are on us! 🍻 Contact workshop@032c.com to learn how it works and to collect your stash!”

  • Also cool: Gossamer issue 6 - the Garbage Issue - is out for pre-order, pay what you wish. (Gossamer)

  • Via Future Party [SIC] Pal Larry Warsh’s  No More Rulers binds Virgil Abloh’s “Abloh-isms” (Input Mag) 

  • Meanwhile, NMR also hosts Futura x Lee Quinones talking live tmrw [2.26] (Instagram) 

  • The Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair is going and you can  register to attend for free here. The Fair is free to attend, and has a great lineup of performances and events. 

  On unexpected returns:

  • Via Music ReDef: MTV is reviving YO! MTV Raps, Behind the Music and Unplugged (Variety)

  • SPIN (the magazine)  is back. (The Drum) 

  • Via Quartz: A 12th-century Islamic bathhouse was hiding behind the walls of a Spanish tapas bar. It was discovered during pandemic renovations

  • And this bloke reckons he’s got photos of 3 (extinct since the 1930s)  Tasmanian Tigers Roaming Through Bushland (Monster Children)

  Final Diversions: 

  • Via High Tea: @pogue on Twitter says: “This is the COOLEST. A Google Earth-type representation of the planet. Every green dot is a radio station. Click any dot to listen in. It’s like cultural teleportation.  (Radio-Garden) 

  • The most accurate flat map of earth yet (Scientific American)

  • Via Future Party: S/o anybody who’s seen “Sorry to Bother You”: Architecture firm and urban farm company Vertical Harvest is set to break ground on a building in Maine that will act as both an affordable housing community and vertical farm that will provide produce for the community. What could go wrong ;)  

  • Speaking of LaKeith Stansfield I bought the new issue of the relaunched W Magazine because I was struck that he was the cover star. And the whole thing is surprisingly excellent. (Instagram)  

  • Related: Harper’s Bazaar wants to make Fashion magazines cool again (Business of Fashion) 

  • Via Lean Luxe: 75 and (still) sunny. David Lynch’s had an  industrious pandemic (The New Yorker) 

  • Wooly. Mammoth. Via Quartz: A single Australian sheep that hadn’t been shorn in several years yielded (77 lbs) of wool. (Reuters)

  • Elsewhere in follicles: The Portable Hairy Who!(ain’t cheap, but wow, so cool) (Harper’s Books) 

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