Artvertising? Kenneth Anger for Missoni Fall Winter collection

The underground, experimental film-maker, Kenneth Anger, has created a short film for the Missoni fashion house’s fall/winter 10/11 season. The house and Anger may seem like an odd couple but there’s something weirdly correct about this mashing of creativity. I wish I knew who the music was by. Let me know in the comments if you happen to know who it is.

If you are interested, here’s a video interview with Anger taken one year ago at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he discusses “The Wickedest Man in the World,” Aleister Crowley. A British occultist, hedonist, and author, Crowley inspired a fanatical following in the 20th century through his occult writings.

[Update 11:52AM]

From Vogue Italia:

“I’m fascinated by Kenneth Anger’s use of color and his ability to transform a film into a three-dimensional texture, a fabric of images in movement,” explained Angela Missoni. This is how she introduced her decision to entrust the Missoni F/W 2011 campaign to one of America’s most famous authors and directors of avant-garde cinema.”

Hat tip to Arthur.

Jeff Jarvis – on why advertising is next

Jeff Jarvis writes on his blog about magazines, paywalls, the shrinking of ad dollars et al. The larger issue – in fact his underlying point – is when he says Advertising is Next he means that magazine publishers like Condé Nast will fail to convert their readers into revenue paying customers on the web. And it’s not for lack of strategy..nor can they blame the Internet.

So ad people – what do you think?

From Jarvis’s post:
Condé Nast is a house built on smoke and mirrors — that is, to say, on brand advertising. So it is astonishing to hear its CEO, Chuck Townsend, essentially toss the company’s business model out the window of the Death Star in what The Times frames as “a fundamental overhaul of the advertising-based business model.” This, folks, is surely the real product of the McKinsey studies undertaken at Condé, not a few magazines folded but a new strategy. In a phrase:

I’ve said that Rupert Murdoch’s paywall is also essentially his surrender of any hope that advertising can be grown or even maintained. He gave up and shrank like George Costanza’s privates. It’s one thing for the dirty digger to give up on car ads. It is quite another for Condé to go off its diet of Madison Avenue and Seventh Avenue in favor of a parking meter.
[edit]
The company plans — like Murdoch — to try to suddenly get new money from consumers who for years — long, long before the internet — have been accustomed to almost-free content: $1-per-issue luxe magazines that cost probably four times that to produce and distribute (not to mention the tens of dollars it takes in marketing to acquire that subscription with advertising and schwag — a purse for Glamour readers or the fabled sneakerphone up the street at Sports Illustrated).

Read the whole post here.

Pan Am’s world by Chermayeff & Geismar

I came across the iconic work that Chermayeff & Geismar did for Pan Am on Flickr over the weekend, driven there as always it seems these days, via social media. In our often crazed, fast-paced digital culture, I find it always great and almost charming that after a discovery/reminder like this, I can slow down and soak up images like these as if they existed only in really ancient history; or they were from another planet. Slow food, slow music; slow design?

From the C&G website:
The most important aspect of the identity design for Pan Am was to suggest that the name of the airline be changed to “Pan Am” from the long and cumbersome “Pan American World Airways.” The Pan Am logotype in capitals and lower-case letters was also adopted with an accompanying world symbol.

In addition to the corporate identity, Chermayeff & Geismar designed comprehensive graphics for the airline, including a poster campaign and the menus for the inaugural flight of the Boeing 747.

I like this comment from Chermayeff in an AIGA interview from 1980:

“We do not have an office style,” Ivan Chermayeff has said, “like some designers who concentrate on graphics systems, such as grids. And we don’t have a special style of illustration like those who are collectors of historical style motifs—Art Deco or 19th century typography. We are not involved in style and fashion in that way.”

A Portland inter-agency meat cook-off powered by social media

Apologies in advance to our vegetarian readers.

I’m not sure if I’m just not paying attention but I have noticed that I am seeing less calls via Twitter for a “tweet up” than I used to. Maybe my Twitter friends don’t invite me, who knows? What I do know is that by extension Tweet up was often accompanied by the phrase “well we decided to take it to the meat space” as in, real humans doing non-virtual things in concert; the very thing that we were built to do. [More on that here.]

I mention this because last night I opened up my home to what could only be described as a “meat up” – pun thoroughly intended. About a week earlier @JerryKetel, formerly of Leopold Ketel, posted something to Twitter about how he was preparing some grilled meat and how he was anointing himself as champion of his particular dish. As can be expected in social media this was akin to throwing down the gauntlet; and so a meat up was birthed via Twitter. The idea soon had legs, and although there was no direct invitation to anyone we soon had about thirty people signed up to either bring meat or a side dish, plus various libations. It was quite the turn out.

In a small way this gathering was an example of how social media works really well in niche silos. This particular turnout included people in the following niches – men [no females opted in to grill, just to eat and drink,] meat eaters, people who enjoy smoking and grilling meat, beer drinkers, advertising agency and/or marketers [almost everyone had past or present connections to those disciplines,] and of course, Twitter users.

And best of all were the new friendships we all made and the great conversations – some of which went long into the night.

All thanks to Twitter. Follow these people on Twitter as there’s a very real chance that we will all be doing a cook-off again this summer:

@dtboyd @thomschoenborn @daveatnorth @rebeccamary @hillerns @daveselden @davidburn @scotthuber @PeterLevitan @DanGoldgeier @bonegypsy @Moss_Robert @bellenoelle @rupdooley @jetstream @Forktown

And here’s photos of the event.