[SIC] 183: Brain Is Clay

Vol. 4, Number 27

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Hi all,

The picture says it all: after 2 years of assiduously avoiding the ‘vid, it finally got me this week. I feel fine, thankfully - 12 hours of chills and flu-ish symptoms, but that’s been it so far. A reminder, then, to not let your guards down too much just yet, even as ‘the new normal’ is in sight.

Apropos of that: it would be irresponsible not to include some pertinent developments concerning the unconscionable war in Ukraine, so this week opens with a new category of related links called “the World,” that I hope sincerely will be short-lived.

As for normal programming: No ‘Five Questions For’ this week, but [SIC] Talks returns this week with special guest Darren Hemmings, managing director of Motive Unknown, whose newsletter I cite frequently. Darren’s a music industry vet on the label, management, consulting and now media side so I’m stoked to get his takes on all the action in Entertainment and IP this week.

By happenstance we were work colleagues 20+ years ago, so doubtless there’ll be some stories from the late 90s too. It’s at a special time this week: 3p ET / 8p GMT on my IG live, or thereafter in my grid @dietznutz. A three piece rabbithole I went down, thinking about it: Beat Konducta’s “Conducted Rhythms” reminded me of Gangstarr’s “Just to Get A Rep”  (s/o Williamsburg  in the late 80s…) which samples Jean-Jacques Perrey’s “E.V.A.” / Spotify , YT

On a similar note, speaking of [SIC] Talks, the ep with Justin Staple from last week was great, but the newsletter missed including some work Justin sent me, which is worth checking for. To wit: Rod Wave - Rags2Riches 2 ft Lil Baby, Trevor Daniel on Fallon and the first rap video NFT / YT, YT, Foundation.

Thanks, Justin! And thanks to Celeste, Tim, Isaac, David and Iolanda for contributions this week, too. Couldn’t do it without you.

Ok. On the links.

=====[SIC] 183: Brain Is Clay=====

The World:

• On the Cusp of an Economic Singularity. “This article discusses the possibility that a great reset of the international economic order is underway. The catalyst was the US cutting off Russia from $630B of foreign reserves.” /  Doomberg via Declarative Statements

• De-dollarization or Zongyuan Zoe Liu and Mihaela Papa’s “The Anti-Dollar Axis” via 8Ball

• Looking to history, veteran war correspondent Sebastian Junger identifies three qualities that define most successful underdog campaigns. / Vanity Fair

• It’s like that scene in Trading Places, but not funny?  We’re going to $200/ Barrel Oil, guys. ….. / YouTube via Peter Zeihan.

• Why the memes mocking Putin’s absurd meeting tables are actually meaningful. Fast Company via The Art of Noticing.

• Via The Art of Noticing: Google Doc in progress collecting ways people can help out with the awful situation in Ukraine. / Google Docs

• Too Close to Putin? Institutions Vet Artists, Uncomfortably / NYT via Jing Daily

• Here's how you can help the Ukraine aid effort by buying art / The Art Newspaper

Trends

• What Is ‘Bigorexia’? / NYT via Public Announcement

• Do journalists need to be brands? Elizabeth Spiers via Nieman Lab

• Apropos of “TayLoGate”: Personal brands are a reaction to institutional failures / The Rebooting

• Besides, Who’s afraid of Taylor Lorenz? / The Present Age

• When will Baybay descend from her [echo] chamber? 75% of people in the US never tweet / Axios

• Half of Gen Z ‘buy now pay later’ consumers regret using them / Marie Claire

• What small towns need is more creativity and less chain retail. One solution may be for malls to go back to the past. Malls in the afterlife / The American Convservative via 2pm

• The biggest condom manufacturer is predicting a sex boom / Input

• Just in time: the first official FDA-approved anal sex condom / Inside Hook

Style

• From Celeste Blewitt:  The Hottest Job In Fashion?  Knitwear Designer' / BoF

• While the Chief Supply Chain Officer is the new C-suite star / BOF

• An Anthropologist discovers workwear and gets over his dread of stuff / 032c

• The styles, subcultures and pure hedonism of London nightlife 98-2000 /THE FACE

• Also from THE FACE and the late ‘90s: Pulaski Park in Photos: the ultimate 90s skate Mecca. Habituees of Philly’s Love Park (like me) or of SF’s Embarcadero might disagree. / THE FACE

• The new Sky High Farm Workwear collection aims to spread awareness about food insecurity and regenerative farming. / The Slowdown

The Arts

• The Male Gaze in 3D: Why are there so many naked, bald women? / It’s Nice That

• Corollary: the absolutely batshit saga of 70s art star Ernest Trova, whose trademark “falling man” could be considered an archetype. / Etrova.org

• What now? Lessons for the art world in the BLM and #MeToo era / The Art Newspaper

• Hockney and his iPad: why the artist is still ‘pushing through the boundaries of what fine art is’ / Christies

• The Baltimore Museum of Art will unveil an exhibit curated by the security guards. NPR via Reasons to be Cheerful

• Art Dubai flexes city’s futuristic credentials with focus on NFTs and crypto / The Art Newspaper

• One Year After Beeple, the NFT Has Changed Artists. Has It Changed Art? (The New York Times)

Entertainment + IP

• The state of Music DAOs / Water and Music via Music Redef

• Downtown Music is creating a $200 Million fund to pay artists against future royalties / Bloomberg

• Sonic Optimism or Drain Gang and Stockholm Cloud Rap via 8Ball

• Snoop’s doing Esports now. /FAZE Clan

• While Sia says she’s behind popular Snoop Dogg-affiliated NFT twitter 😯 / Billboard via Probably Nxthing

• S/o [SIC] homie Matt Goldman: Inside School Night, the LA party that launched Dua Lipa’s live career

• Even if her live show… isn’t very good (according to another [SIC] homie, Jon Caramanica / NYT

• What Pandemic? Tomorrowland Sells Out 600,000 Tickets in 10 Minutes / Hypebot via The Cadence

• Alvin & The Chipmunks 1980 album “Chipmunk Punk” played at 16 RPM is “secretly the most important postpunk/goth album ever recorded.” / Twitter via Today in Tabs

• Related?! How Today’s Electronic Music Is Bringing Age-Old Folk Traditions Back to Life / Pitchfork

• From Tim Nolan: I Heard It In A Magazine is an online destination for sound culture and the listening-obsessed. Sit back relax and listen to some... / Hii-Mag

• From Isaac Dietz: This is my favorite of the Plastikman albums (‘98) - a benchmark in minimalist composition- now getting a pretty cool overlay from the pianist Chilly Gonzales. Plus the story in the timeline is pretty funny / Consumed in Key

• Corollary?! Getting Meta: why films and TV shows are cannibalizing themselves / THE FACE

• The Oral History of Wolverine, the Unlikely Superhero Who Saved the X-Men / Inverse via Elevator

• And The Oral History of Prince’s ‘Batman’ Soundtrack / The Ringer via Music Redef

Platforms & Influencers

• The video essay boom. Hour-long YouTube videos are thriving in the TikTok era, reflecting our desire for more nuanced content online [maybe]. / Vox

• Conversely, Is the Next Big Hit 15 Seconds Long? / Rolling Stone

• FB and Cornell researchers have created an “underground fashion map” across 37 cities, developed using “public, geolocated social media photos” from Instagram and Flickr. / Motherboard via Future Party

• TikTok wants to help musicians make money. The platform introduced SoundOn, a music marketing and distribution service that lets musicians upload songs and earn royalties / Protocol

• YouTube Offers Up to $300,000 to Get Podcasters to Make Videos bloomberg

• While Amazon launches a ‘live radio’ app, Amp, which lets you play DJ with the Amazon Music catalog, as a Clubhouse killer / Techcrunch

• From David Bloom: Instagram has pulled its Boomerang and Hyperlapse apps from the Apple and Google app stores. / Tech Crunch

• You can now put up warning labels on content on Twitter. Stuff like nudity, violence, and “sensitive” content. Oddly, no “spoiler” / The Verge via Splice Slugs

• From Iolanda Carvalho: What can we learn from an in-depth look at Elon Musk’s Twitter feed? / Visual Capitalist

Marketing & Advertising

• Microsoft Ads Chief Rob Wilk On Why Advertising Is The Company’s ‘Newfound Religion’ Ad Exchanger via 2pm

• How Bang Energy’s flashy, neon world of influencers conquered TikTok. / Morning Brew

• How book lovers on TikTok are  changing the publishing industry / Fast Company

• Is Disney World becoming something for rich people? WaPo via Marginal Revolution

• Why American Eagle is looking to be an early adopter in metaverse-based marketing and sales / Digiday

• Metaverse and NFT hype lure marketers back to SXSW / AdAge

• Pantone's color of the year becomes an NFT at SXSW in Pantone’s Very Peri” room inside the Tezos “Block/Space” experience. wwd via Future Party

• Doja Cat says her song about her love of Taco Bell's Mexican Pizza was 'contractual' and she made it 'terrible on purpose' / Insider

Media Business

• Axios wants us to read everything in bullet points. / NYT v Nieman Lab

• Highsnobiety’s newest venture is an NFT Studio / BoF

• Complexland is back. ComplexCon, too. / Complex

Metaverse & Web3

• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen interviews Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX / Marginal Revolution

• What if you and thousands of your friends wrote a graphic novel together? That’s the idea behind The Electrician, funded and written by holders of The Electrician NFTs, of which 10,000 have been issued. / Highsnob via Future Party

• Similar: THE FRINGE, an NFT project that aims to pioneer indie filmmaking via web3. As Zeek Earl explains in its mission statement / Mirror via Dirt

• The Oral History of The Lawnmower Man / Inverse via Elevator

• “A brutally honest conversation on the metaverse” / Highsnobiety

• More honesty: 'Men still own the world, and it’s not cute': NFT projects and DAOs lead the way during Women’s History Month / The Art Newspaper

• Also honest: “The NFT space is quite white”: The Black Arts Project on championing Black creativity in Web 3 / It’s Nice That

• A Solana-based NFT marketplace, Neon, has opened the first NFT vending machine in New York City. Located in Manhattan, this “NFT ATM”, as inscribed in neon on top of the machine, gives anyone that ability to acquire a digital art piece. / Thrillist

Miscellany

• Liar’s Poker, 3 Decades Later. More than 30 years later, Michael Lewis’ 1989 book “Liar’s Poker” is still the book to read if you want to really understand Wall Street / Ritzholtz

• A Bicycle Is an Anti-Poverty Machine / Reasons to be Cheerful

• The secret world of competitive car audio. / House Grail via Morning Brew

Things to Do

• Listen to [SIC] Talks alum Michael Williams on developing a personal uniform / The art of manliness

• And watch [SIC] Talks alum Thalia Mavros’s new series The Principles of Pleasure / Netflix

• This Friday March 11, PSFK’s webinar with experts from Estée Lauder and Metavrse that optimistically dissects metaverse opportunities and the top strategies for brands and retailers.

=====[SIC] 183: Brain Is Clay=====