So I’ve been remiss. Back when I started this thing I thought for sure that I would be able to do a daily entry. Man, was I smoking crack. One of the biggest stoppers of typeage, aside from laziness, was my recent excursion to England. So I’m not sure how to approach this as it’s a delicate subject, so first off a big qualifier.  I 100% love the English. After all, I did kidnap one of them, bring her back to America and marry her.  Some of the closest, best, most trustworthy friends I have in the whole world are English. But this last trip over there, hmmm, let’s just say it was definitely something to write a blog about. 

Time for a change

So everyone likes a fun watch. They’re the quintessential form following function invention offering both practicality and, on occasion, a wry wink of style. First, when it comes to fashion, you best go and read the Sartorialist before you do anything else.  The photographs are brilliant and the insight is unparalleled in the blogosphere. As he rightly points out Gianni Agnelli is the steward of stylish yet eccentric taste, pioneering the old watch over the cuff look.  This is approach is bold, and a bit strange, so unless you have balls of steel, I suggest you step away from the temptation. See this Q&A in GQ for some additional guidance.

Still, a fashionable watch is a great way to show style – and style doesn’t have to spell pretentious like a Rolex, nor does it have to break the bank.  I’m off to an English wedding next week and I felt this provided a convenient excuse to go watch shopping.  I’ve found a lot of fun and creative watches over the years, but I have to say, Axcent – a Swedish company – offers fun, funky, stylish and clean watches for both men and women at an affordable price (around or below $100 a pop). They’re not always terribly practical (just like their website), but there’s an inventiveness that goes into each model that really makes an impression and get heads turning. For those of you in SF, Axcent watches can be found in Lava9 and Scandinavian Details, both located in Hayes Valley.

That’s it. Hopefully I’ll have another one tomorrow. Eegaad what have I gotten myself into.

Museums are strange places.  I went to the SFMOMA last weekend with my parents to see the new Matisse exhibit (it focused on his sculpture as opposed to his paintings).  Overall, the experience got me thinking (more b/c it was so much the same as opposed to so much different from my usual museum trip). 

I don’t know if I’m alone here, but museums really try my patience.  I feel like I have to sort through so much (it’s not crap, it’s great) that I end up being the personification of efficiency when I hit a museum. I move through each room pretty quickly, hovering only on the things I really dig.  I can push through a major museum (and I mean major here) in about 90 minutes. It’s good for me, but… if I’m w/others (as I was this weekend) it can drive me nuts.  I worked through the 2^nd floor modern art exhibit in about 30 minutes. When I turned to find my parents, they were no where in sight.  I went back one room, then two, then further still to three, four, etc.  It wasn’t until I traveled back in time 7 rooms before I found them… moseying from one painting to the next. I politely saddled up to Mom and eased her forward to the next room.  There was no convincing her. She needed the extra time.  Giving up, I parked my ass on the aesthetically inventive bench at the exhibit’s end.

I also get really, really tired going through museums.  By the time I’m done with a museum, no matter how big or small, I could snooze for days.  My Mom marks this up to the emotional experience of engaging w/art.  That might be it, or it could be that I’ve counted the floor boards 396 times over before Matisse spat my parents out of his exhibit. My Dad claims it’s much more to do w/the act of “shuffling”.  “Shuffling is an unnatural motion and, in the long run, requires more energy than most are prepared for,” he says.  Tell that to Curly.

So what’s there to do at a museum when no one busts as fast a move through as you? For me, it’s people watching time!!!  There’s always the gaggle of unruly school children, all in uniform picking at their noses and each other and really not giving too much of a shit about what the guide is saying.  There’s the husband who’s been dragged there (or, if he’s from Texas, he’s been drug – BTW, this guy asks a good question: Is George W. Bush dumber than a 5^th Grader?). There’s the pretentious I-majored-in-art-history husband dude (what is up w/these people btw, cuz they’re in every museum, they’re nearly always men and they are always tedious) who enjoys pontificating so everyone in the rome can hear him wax poetic about Rothko’s deep emotional symbolism tumultuously expressed in the frenzied paint applications to ensnare the meaningless materialistic machinations of our steel-drawn-and-quartered culture. Someday I’m going to push a Rodin over on one of these jackasses.

What people are wearing is always fun. The older couples (parents included) are comfortable and wear clothes to accommodate their wise recognition of the practical.  Others, however, go big for eccentric. Funky eyewear is key among this constituency. Billowing clothes – aka smocks – in bold, pastel colors, or earth tones is also at the top of the menu. Huge, untidey hair that could be colonized by Liliputians, the smell of cinnamon incense and maybe a portable tom tom drum are all must-haves for these folks.

Aside from people watching museums can be the ultimate relationship tester.  My college girlfriend hated museums. Woe be to me because I waited two years before we hit a museum together.  It took her a mere three rooms before she collapsed wailing to the gods that her legs couldn’t take another step. She left me to negotiate my way through the remaining 457 rooms. When I lived in NYC I took a girl I dated to the Museum of Natural History. Midway through the rodent exhibit – with wolverines, flying squirrels, lemurs and other wee fierce creatures saluting us behind thick museum glass, each perfectly preserved for posterity in their ferocious taxidermied glory –  when, undoubtedly experiencing a moment of inspiration, this girl turned to me and suggested I get her a mink coat for Christmas.  Dude… 1958 called it wants both its fashion and laissez faire ethics back.

I knew the moment my grad school girlfriend and I clicked when we hit the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK together (this time it was early in the relationship).  We both moved in lock-step at an engaging but efficient clip, (about a two minutes max per room). Only the medieval armor and weaponry room stayed me more than it did her, but I’m a dude, so when it comes to weapon and armour fascination i am blameless (btw, this kid’s got the right idea, bow down in reverence to cool medieval kick-ass weapons). “Museum date” test passed, that girlfriend ultimately ended up becoming my wife.

If you hit a museum and your date shows up wearing a pastel moo moo, time to moo moo moove on.  If, upon entering the Warhol room, your date pulls out a pocket Pop Art guide and proceeds to pop off about 1960s aesthetic and cultural enlightenment, it’s time to hide behind the Henry Moore. Anyway, trust me, early dates at museums are a great way for figuring out your comparability quotient. 

As I’m heading to England this week, and obviously have museums on my mind, here’s my top 10 for the best well-known museums of all time:

1.      Sir John Soane’s Museum – It’s small, manageable and packed w/cool shit. Soane’s knew how to make the most of his tight London quarters; there’s so much looted stuff in here that you can keep coming back again and again and still find new things hiding in the corners.

2.      Museo Del Prado – This is a bit of a rambling, poorly designed, huge museum in Madrid, BUT, it houses the best works by my favorite artist, so to me, it rocks its way up to # 2.

3.      The Whitney Museum – No trip to NYC is truly complete w/out hitting this gem. Its exhibits are always fresh and unique and achieve what all great museums strive to achieve: get you thinking.

4.      The Metropolitan Museum of Art – A great all around museum that although daunting, really endeavors to provide the patron w/an all around interactive experience.

5.      The National Portrait Gallery – As strange as this one might sound to be in my top ten, art is about people and nothing satisfies this more than the genre of the portrait. Whether it’s the death mask of your favorite romantic poet, or a guy who looks exactly like your Dad, the NPG forces you to face more than what you’d expect.

6.      The MOMA – Best collection of modern art in the world. Period.

7.      The Musee D’Orsay – Despite having to deal w/the French, the combination of the best impressionist collection in the world in an innovative space (train-station turned museum) makes this an easy way to spend an afternoon.

8.      The Tate Modern – Although a bit overwhelming and clunky, the 4 story curly slides for kids and adults alike really made my visit worth it.

9.      Galleria dell’Accademia – Not as large, or as popular as the Uffizi, this museum houses the best collection of Michelangelo’s sculptures (including that young sling shot badass). People heading here can also avoid the Uffizi’s long line and 2 hour wait (besides, most of the painting in the Uffizi look like this).

10.  The De Young – This mainly makes it on here b/c I need a local plug, and also b/c I think the concept, design and layout are amazing.  Although imposing in the middle of a park, it certainly is a masterpiece of architecture with significant consideration given to how unify the building w/its surroundings over time.  The collection leaves a bit to be desired and it doesn’t seem to have found a cohesive narrative yet, but it’s still early days for a revised and revitalized San Francisco staple.

At a party over the weekend I was reminded of a tedious situation that occasionally comes up in casual cocktail banter.  Reminiscing on old songs of the 1990s, the conversation invariably drifted towards that bitter girl-power product of our 51^st state, Alanis Morrissette. From there, pulled by the forces of nature, the conversation flowed inevitably to one of Alanis’ biggest ‘hits’. Wait for it… here it comes… “Isn’t it Ironic”.  Big ass, dramatic, pregnant pause please…

In this particular case – which undoubtedly echoes a mere 547 identical moments daily around the civilized world – the temptation for one individual is simply too strong. Let the shameless pedantry begin…

A single person – we’ll call him Johnny – wants to prove that he went to college AND that he even took some English classes!  He also watched that embarrassing interview moment in Reality Bites back in 1994 and from that point forward, refused to ever feel Lelaina Pierce’s (aka Winona’s) pain.  This particular high-flying grammatical acrobat truly understands, knows, nay is AT ONE WITH, his daunting book of literary and poetic terms.  Waiting for the appropriate moment (and he has to act fast for fear that someone else might steal his thunder) he deftly dices through the casual nostalgic music banter and lays it on:

“You guys do realize what the best part of that song is don’t you?”

Ahh rhetorical hell is a wonderful place…. We all wait w/mouths agape w/anticipation

“The irony is there IS no irony; not one single thing in that song is ironic!” 

Oops Pow Surprise and HOLY CRAP!!! 

Are you serious?  Please say you’re joking.  You mean… I starved myself all through junior high and started going to theaters w/more than popcorn on my mind… all of that, was based on a LIE – a lie made by a sugary pop singer and children’s star on that cultural powerhouse of Canadian TV known as “You Can’t do that on Television”. Feigning teenage malcontent, this aspiring intellectual temptress with an edge was, in fact, hollow and her understanding of vaulted literary phraseology a mere façade to lure me and other innocents into the legions of her worshiping fans. Life really does suck.

Phew. I wouldn’t be nearly as heated if I hadn’t been forced to sit through at least 15 of these painful tautologies in my short life.  I hope some day to have those 75 minutes back before I die. 

Furthermore, it’s particularly annoying when it simply isn’t true. Jackasses like Johnny “I-know-Irony” Nobjockey jump the gun in their effort to appear impressive.  Here’s the breakdown, for those that give a shit, or want to be armed w/some “shut-the-hell-up” next time someone tries to bust out w/this tiresome trope at a party (this comes courtesy of Professor Pepsi Pete, aka Encyclo-Peteea: the baddest mutha f#@ing grammarian in town). His dollops of wisdom are duly marked below:

An old man turned ninety-eight

He won the lottery and died the next day *unfortunate*

It’s a black fly in your Chardonnay *unfortunate*

It’s a death row pardon two minutes too late *ironic*

And isn’t it ironic… don’t you think

It’s like rain on your wedding day *unfortunate*

It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid *ironic*

It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take *unfortunate*

Who would’ve thought… it figures

Mr. Play It Safe was afraid to fly

He packed his suitcase and kissed his kids goodbye He waited his whole

damn life to take that flight And as the plane crashed down he thought

“Well isn’t this nice…” *stupid*

A traffic jam when you’re already late *unfortunate*

A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break *unfortunate*

It’s like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife *ironic and uninteresting*

It’s meeting the man of my dreams

And then meeting his beautiful wife *ugh and dumb*

And just in case y’all think I’m crazy in my focused, sputtery rant today, rest assured, I am not alone. Wikipedia has devoted a page – yup, that’s right, one… full… page – to this little song. Hell, Mo Rocca has even weighed in on the debate.

Wiki’s summary is pretty funny and covers off on such lofty terms as “cosmic irony” and a lame explanation from Alanis herself.  The best part of the page is the proposed corrections:

There’s nothing ironic about being stuck in a traffic jam when you’re late for something. Unless you’re a town planner. If you were a town planner and you were on your way to a seminar of town planners at which you were giving a talk on how you solved the problem of traffic congestion in your area, couldn’t get to it because you were stuck in a traffic jam, that’d be well ironic.”

“Rain on your wedding day is ironic only if marrying a weatherman and he set the date.”

“A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break, that’s inconsiderate office management. A no-smoking sign in a cigarette factory – irony.”

Bottomline is Alanis was young, embittered and confused when she co-wrote the song.  Did she screw up a few times in her assignations of irony? Sure.  Is the song destined for the rock and roll hall of fame? Survey says no. Is the fact that some things in the song are not ironic render the title and the song as a whole the ultimate statement of irony? Ahhh, I doubt Alanis was that clever. Did Alanis go to the movies with Uncle Joey? Now, I’m frightened. Is the fact that I spent all this time writing about a 90s artist I really don’t give a shit about ironic? Nope, unfortunate. Unless of course…in writing this blog I give fodder to all those people who didn’t know things in the song weren’t ironic and then those people end up attending the same parties as me and doubling my painful moments by lecturing me about how the song isn’t ironic… but then again, would that really be… Please dear God make me stop.

I work in PR. It should be as simple as that. But it’s not.

In my mind PR provides one of the few careers in the world that can cover off on a wide enough spectrum of things to hold my attention and fit my desire to write, be creative, connect with people and change perceptions.  PR is an interesting but slippery subject.  If you were to ask a dozen PR professionals what it is they do, you would get a dozen different answers (kind of ironic if you think we’re the folks that are supposed to develop and ensure message integrity with our clients).  My parents, for example, simply don’t get it, no matter how many times I try to explain it.  People that I meet at parties, bars, networking events, etc. are often unclear about what PR comprises.  The job itself dates back, in varying forms, hundreds of years. Historically speaking, the first great PR professionals in my mind are William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury (kind of Renaissance versions of Howard Rubinstein).  Together the two managed to successfully navigate Queen Elizabeth I through one of most critical and treacherous periods in England’s development.  In fact, a colleague of the Cecils, Sir Francis Walsingham, was the 16^th century equivalent to Karl Rove: a shady puppet master who worked in the court’s shadows and employed deadly skullduggery to undermine and decimate the enemies of the Queen and her Protestant empire.  To gain confirmation on their similarities you need read no further than Esquire reporter Ron Suskind’s Rovian anecdote collected while waiting patiently outside Turd Blossom’s office (see “We Will fuck him!).

On the lighter side, BBC’s hit comedy Absolutely Fabulous had a flippant but entertaining summary of modern day PR in practice (I confess I’m cribbing Porter Novelli’s London office here as they often show this clip to new, unsuspecting PR candidates):

Saffie: I’m sorry, mum, but I’ve never seen what it is that you actually do.

Eddie: PRrr.

Saffie: Yes, but…

Eddie: PR. I PR things. People. Places. Concepts…

Patsy: …Lulu.

Eddie: Lulu… I make the fabulous… I make the crap into credible. I make the dull into…

Patsy: …Delicious.

So with the task to influence perception and to “make the fabulous”, it was with great interest that I read a recent story that ran in the May 5^th issue of the Economist. “Covered in Shame” examines the power of cover stories in Fortune, BusinessWeek and Forbes on the world of business and asks the excellent question: are cover stories an indicator of future business success.  Now, to better understand the significance of this investigation some contextualization is in order: 

In my profession cover stories are the mother load – the treasure of the Sierra Madre, the elusive pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  Clients demand them, and agencies often die trying to get them. In the PR world today, little analysis or science goes into securing cover stories and examining their after affects.  When a client demands the cover of Forbes, agencies scurry obsequiously to oblige. When asked how it’s done and whether it’s worth it, the tiresomely familiar response is to focus on the former and ignore the latter.  Common answers to cracking the cover conundrum include “David Kirkpatrick is a friend of mine, I’ll give him a call,” or, “I attend all of Don Clark’s rock concerts so I’m sure he’ll hook us up.” It goes without saying that this is not only often painfully wrong, but horribly unimaginative PR. 

Companies themselves know little about the pros and cons of a cover story, aside from the fact that they want it.  Who cares if the cover involves embezzlement, or an option backdating scandal?

The Economist’s article takes a look at a recent study compiled by three University of Richmond Professors that asks “whether positive stories are associated with superior future performance and negative stories are associated with inferior future performance for the featured company.”

The article begins with a familiar anecdote:

BusinessWeek’s famous cover “The Death of Equities” has become a textbook case of the media getting it wrong.

The conclusions are fascinating:

Unsurprisingly, the companies that received the most positive coverage had performed well before the stories were published: their share prices had, on average, outperformed the index by 42.7% once adjusted for sector and size. Those companies suffering negative coverage, in contrast, had underperformed by 34.6%.

After the stories appeared, however, the positions switched. The most negatively portrayed companies managed to beat the market by an average of 12.4%, whereas the outperformance of the media darlings fell to just 4.2%. This difference is not statistically that significant. What matters is that if news is sufficiently good or bad to catapult a company onto a magazine cover, then it is already reflected in the share price. Or, as the academics put it, “positive stories generally indicate the end of superior performance and negative news generally indicates the end of poor performance.”

It’s that last sentence that really caught my attention.  In my world – w/so many of my clients pushing for cover stories – is it possible that it might be a case of “careful what you wish for?” I understand that the research is primarily focused on business and stock performance following a glowing, or damning cover story. But it posits an interesting theory about news cycles, high-profile cover stories and their affect on business performance.

Anecdotally speaking, the clients of mine that have achieved the apotheosis of temporary PR success through a cover in BusinessWeek, or a story above the fold on the front page of the Journal, often report something other than the expected result.  Rather than a mass influx of new leads and a soaring stock price, they experience an increase in incoming cold calls from vendors wanting to sell products and services.

The fact of the matter is PR is difficult work that requires a great deal of creativity and innumerable hours firing on multiple levels.  Although sexy, the cover story can be a bit of a shiny red herring.  More productive and successful work is often done on a day-to-day level with influential trade and vertical magazines, and trend stories in broader business publications.  These can speak better and more directly to your client’s core audience (database administrators, stock brokers, publishers, advertisers, bloggers, etc.) and the issues they truly care about (a fewture in BusinessWeek makes you look good, but your clients probably don’t care how you, they care how you make them look).  In my opinion it’s in these stories where a consquetial needle is truly moved.  It’s not as sexy as those glossy front pages, but it’s often far more effective at achieving your clients’ goals.

As for cover stories themselves, could a good PR strategy really be a bad one?  I’m being a bit faceitious here, but could PR professionals around the globe sacrifice egos and ethos, turning the last 50 years of conventional PR wisdom on its head, by sacrificing their goals for the greater good of their public clients’ business and stock performance?  Is it time to start welcoming, and even working hand-in-hand with journalists to place negative cover stories about our clients to pave the way to ultimate business success – a sort of PR rope-a-dope approach? 

I heard recently that once a empire begins to fixate on producing and consuming gourmet food it’s a signal of that empire’s decline. In other words, once people have nothing to strive for because they achieved the pinnacle of success, success leads to complacency and complacency leads to decline and decline leads, ultimately, to failure. When it comes to the media, PR and cover stories, the big question is really a chicken and egg one.  Does the recognized glory manifested in a cover story merely signal the end of a company’s success cycle (like ordering the Beluga Caviar)?  Or, worse yet does it cause the end?  As powerful as journalists are, i doubt the latter premise.  In all probability, the answer exists in that fuzzy grey world between art and science to ever truly be knowable.  For us PR hacks out there one thing remains certain: no matter what a group of professors concludes about the power of high-profile cover stories on business performance, our clients sure as hell won’t stop wanting them as framed pieces for the boardroom.  And you can take that one to the bank.

Today I rocked white pants.  Not just any white pants: slim fitting, ass-kicking, no holding back white pants.  The kind of white pants that you can only rock if you’ve got balls.  Sure, bystanders, co-workers, nay-sayers – even the homeless dude who shits outside my office – all busted my chops about my white pants. But my fearlessness reigns supreme.  I welcome the criticism, because aside from proving my faith in Nietzschean aphorisms, I’ve got a bigger motivator behind mi pantalones blancos? What’s that you say? Well, truth be told, today’s my birthday and on my birthday, I wanna dress like a rock star complete w/an affected agenda. 

Bad Harvey: 

Quote of the day: “Semicolons are used by those who want to prove they went to college.” – Anonymous

Ok. Soooo, I’ve done it. I’ve got my own blog. After weeks, maybe even months of pestering people with dull questions about best hosting services, topics, “themes”, colors, domain names, RSS feeds, diggs, technoratis, blog faves, blog traffic, infamous blogs, celebrated blogs, useless blogs, etc. a co-worker just told me to stop sniffing around and just shit. So here goes. First, the name.  I spent some time in England, and the English, apart from being a cynical lot, by far have the best terms of abuse available in our common language. Enter ‘m’uppet w/the low cap. (Jim Henson is great, I love the Muppets, but about them this is not).

As my tag line indicates, the biggest motivator for me doing this is my inability to shut up. I can’t. It’s really difficult; it causes me great pain to stop talking, to stop thinking, to stop writing, to stop ignoring those grammatical tips taught in 4^th grade about run-on sentences and dangling participles, ok?  Some times people like what I say, other times, people ignore me.  As writing goes, what’s great about your role, my doting public, with all your infinite wisdom, is that you can tell me what you think.

So a quick word of warning/disclaimer (kind of like those wrinkled “no tear” tags on the side of your mattress, or the FBI blurb you can’t skip on your latest DVD:

This blog is going to cover just about everything.

Nothing is sacred, and everything will, at length, be (un)covered.  Why? Because I can pretty much ramble along with moderate intelligence sputtering on about pretty much any topic I want to (nut’n but a “G”emini thang baaaby). BUT, how about some buckets to drop the sludge into? Specifically, stuff I happen to know more than the average muppet.  Here they are:

Political Banter – To put it bluntly, I’m smarter about this crap than most people.  I know… there will be some painful moments of embarrassment for me when one of you busts an Oops Pow Surprise all over my sorrowful socio-neo-lib-con-tarian ways, but in the long run, I’m right. Always. And I can live with that.

 

Technology Banter – So anyone on a dial-up or using AOL as your ISP, please don’t read my blog. I can pretty much guarantee that it won’t synch w/your values. In a round about kind of way, I work in technology and frankly it is what the hokey pokey is all about.

 

Media and Culture Banter – Media reports on culture, culture reflects media, I dig both and will, therefore, write about both. Enough said (written).

 

Fashion Banter – No, I’m not gay. But I do know how to dress myself. I’ll occasionally offer tips on how to pimp a styl’n suit and work to bring clarity to all those that still rocking boot cut denim and funny/stupid t-shirts. Why, do I care about fashion? Cuz anything that makes me look better than you can’t be all bad.  

 

Local Banter – I’ve lived in quite a few places in the world that include a few big cities.  I currently reside in what I believe to be the best city on the globe: San Francisco. Beaches, wine, beauty, light, weather, culture, food. As rock ballad badasses Journey say, when the lights go down in my citeeehhh, I wanna be theeerrreeyerreyeerrr.  

So that pretty much wraps it up for my first blog. Onward and downward… here we go. Oh, and you can call me Virgil.