*Sarcasm*. </sarcasm>. #Not! Since the dawn of the postmodern age, ironical writers have struggled to imbue the printed word with the nuances of sarcasm. Solutions involve signposting suffixes like “Joke!”, so as to spell out any intended irony to those readers too thick to work it out by themselves. (Joke!)

The “SarkMark” was invented last year – a piece of punctuation that solved this massive problem once and for all.

In fact, it was such a great idea (not!) that another typographer has come up with perhaps the best solution yet: the “Sarcastic Font”, a typeface that renders sarcastic comments in reverse italic script.

Great article, Guardian.

Vanity Fair have a really interesting article about the design rut Fashion, arts, entertainment, popular culture, style etc finds itself in and why.

It’s easy to say “fashion’s cyclical”, but Kurt Anderson’s article nicely reminds us that it didn’t use to be so; and it’s easy to think about the innovations in technology that have driven us forward, leaps and bounds, in the last 20 years (or even 10, as a recent article referred to on TheScrapBook reminded us)… but actually this “progress” is a fallacy – we’ve not moved on. Not in the last 20 years, we havent.

I have long thought about defining recent decades in terms of significant musical innovations. It’s no a hard and fast science, and I wont pretend that my timings are accurate nor specific to the year, but consider these broad moments of decade defining/influencing popular musical history:

1947 – Rock’n'Roll

1957 – Rock music

1967 – Disco

1977 – Punk

1987 – Dance music (even that’s

1997 – ? Sampling culture? Maybe…

2007 – ?? Erm…

Perhaps Hip Hop is 2007+ given its ubiquity today… but it’s surely more 1987+? And that’s part of the point that Anderson’s article makes. Certainly, “Sampling culture” plays into that hand.

This broad decade-defining should cause lots of debate (which I welcome), and I admit I’m brushing over all sorts of sub-genres – New Romantic, Pop, Grunge etc etc etc – to make the point, but to refer to Anderson again, the last 20 years has not been innovative in music, and where it has it’s been exceptions that prove the rule.

Below is an excerpt of Anderson’s article about the stagnation of popular culture over the last 20 years, and I urge you to read the full piece.

Try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey—both distinctions without a real difference—and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco. Except for certain details (no Google searches, no e-mail, no cell phones), ambitious fiction from 20 years ago (Doug Coupland’s Generation X, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow) is in no way dated, and the sensibility and style of Joan Didion’s books from even 20 years before that seem plausibly circa-2012…

If, in 1990 or 1980 or 1970, you’d examined a comparable picture from 27 years earlier—from 1963 and 1953 and 1943, respectively—it would be a glimpse back into an unmistakably different world. A man or woman on the street in any year in the 20th century groomed and dressed in the manner of someone from 27 years earlier would look like a time traveler, an actor in costume, a freak. And until recently it didn’t take even that long for datedness to kick in: by the late 1980s, for instance, less than a decade after the previous decade had ended, the 1970s already looked ridiculous.

There are, of course, a few exceptions today—genuinely new cultural phenomena that aren’t digital phenomena—but so few that they prove the rule. Twenty years ago we had no dark, novelistic, amazing TV dramas, no Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire or Breaking Bad.Recycling bins weren’t ubiquitous and all lightbulbs were incandescent. Men wore neckties more frequently. Fashionable women exposed less of their breasts and bra straps, and rarely wore ultra-high-heeled shoes. We were thinner, and fewer of us had tattoos or piercings. And that’s about it…

Part of the explanation… is that, in this thrilling but disconcerting time of technological and other disruptions, people are comforted by a world that at least still looks the way it did in the past. But the other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to have to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. If blue jeans became unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on.

Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing anybody wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

The 50 best shops in Shanghai? According to TimeOut, that is.

I don’t massively disagree with any of these shops, and there are enough places that I’ve not had the pleasure of spending my hard earned Rimbim’s/Rambo’s/Rimbibibibim’s/RMB in that I could spend an afternoon remembering the pleasures of  a consumerist society. It’s strange the things you miss…

Check out the article here, but I’ll be referencing it for DVDs, handmade shoes, vintage watches, ceramics, and adult toys.

TimeOut’s 50 Best Shops in Shanghai

“10 events of the last decade that were more important and significant than Sept 11th” is another fascinating piece of writing from Foreign Policy, this time considering perspective.

Again, I’m going to quote excerpts, and then list the 10 events as the author, David J Rothkopf, has them.

“9/11, for all its tragic and heroic drama, is an easy event to overestimate. Indeed, we have been overestimating its significance since almost the moment it happened…

In fact, the success of Osama bin Laden was in masterminding a low-cost, comparatively low-risk action by a handful of thugs that produced one of the most profound overreactions in military history. Trillions of dollars were expended and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the emotion-fueled maelstrom unleashed by a shaken and clearly disoriented America. Bin Laden aimed for Wall Street and Washington, seeking to strike a blow against symbols of American power, but in so doing he also hit us where it would hurt the most — right in our sense of perspective.

We spoke of 9/11 as though it were somehow equivalent to Pearl Harbor, the beginning of a global war against enemies bent on, and at least theoretically capable of, destroying the American way of life (unlike al Qaeda, a ragtag band of extremists with limited punch). We spoke of cultural wars and a divided world. We reorganized our entire security establishment to go after a few thousand bad guys. We went mad…

One way to demonstrate [a] restoration of historical sensibility comes if we ask ourselves, looking back over the past 10 years, what other developments took place that exceed 9/11 in lasting importance? What events of the past decade will historians write of that will have them looking past or beyond the attack, its masterminds, or its immediate response? There are scores, I suspect. Here are just 10 that come to me off the top of my head:”

10. The American Response to 9/11
(so much of that response was irrational and more directly related to issues in America’s past)

9. The Arab Spring
(These revolutions are having a broader social impact than extremism and are linked more directly to the self-interest of the masses in the region)

8. The Rebalancing of Asia
(it touches more lives and will be of far greater impact to global foreign policy than anything that happens in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or anywhere in the Middle East)

7. The Stagnation of the U.S. and Other Developed-World Economies
(Entering an age of limitations is forcing big powers to work together differently and has put the kibosh on the momentary and misguided unilateralism of the Bush era in the United States.)

6. The Invention of Social Media
(What’s more important? Knocking down the World Trade Center and killing several thousand innocents or linking half a billion people together as never before?)

5. The Proliferation of Cell Phones and Hand-Held Computing Devices
(Everyone is connected. Everyone is a witness. Everyone is part of a global news network, an instant coalition, a mob, an electorate.)

4. The Crash of 2008
(The tens of trillions of dollars in losses sent hundreds of millions of people deeper into poverty, crushed retirement accounts, impacted the well-being of billions of people, and called into question the viability of countries and companies in ways that cannot yet be calculated.)

3. The Eurozone Crisis and the Crash of 2011-2012
(it [could] have an even more devastating impact on already weakened economies worldwide; and if it undoes the European experiment, which has helped ensure decades of peace on a continent previously riven by conflict, well, then it will again on totally different grounds easily trump 9/11.)

2. The Failure to Address Global Warming
(If global temperatures rise another degree or three this century, 9/11 will be seen as a comparative footnote to an event that could remake the nature of life on Earth and lead to a toll many, many times greater than either 9/11 or the wars it triggered)

1. The Rise of China and the Other BRICs
(The past decade has seen them emerge to the point that they are now the engines of growth that will determine whether a market crash of 2011 occurs, whether the United States and Europe can borrow to fund their ailing economies, whether the world will reach an agreement to manage greenhouse gas emissions, whether we will truly contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and what the real future of international institutions and agreements will look like.)

…It is important to [the] process of consigning 9/11 to history to understand both what it was and what it was not, why it was important and why it was just one of many even greater stories of the past decade.”

Again, I encourage you to read the full article and think for yourself.

This is one of the best articles about Hip Hop I’ve read in recent years, comparing Jigga to the USA, 50 Cent to Russia, southern rap’s rise as that of Asia’s increased power, the West Coast (Snoop, Dre et al) as Europe and perhaps Eminem as India or Brazil – a power in his own right that seems neither influencing nor affecting the wider world.

The following are extracts, but I urge you to read the full article by Marc Lynch, here.

“[The] basic argument [is] that Jay-Z handled his hegemonic position by exercising restraint, declining to engage in most provocations in order to avoid being trapped in endless, pointless battles. Jay-Z battling the Game would have risked being dragged down into combating an endless and costly insurgency with little real upside. Better for the hegemon to show restraint, be self-confident, and to carefully nurture a resilient alliance structure to underpin leadership…

The structure of the balance of power in the rap world continued to evolve towards multipolarity over the last two years, if not an actual hegemonic transition, in the midst of a serious financial crisis afflicting the entire industry — a situation not unfamiliar to the White House…

Rap’s center of gravity was being pulled relentlessly away from its New York roots, taking on a more southern and more international feel. The entire industry faced a massive financial crisis, as the internet and market fragmentation continued to contribute to the steady collapse of the business model for albums and record companies. What is more, there was every reason to view Jay-Z himself as a declining power. While a Jay-Z album could still dominate the rap space as completely as the U.S. military could dominate any global battlespace, that dominance rested on deteriorating foundations…

Watch the Throne therefore should not be judged as an album, but rather as a move in this savvy strategy of institutionalizing hegemony in the face of potential decline. Kanye and Jay-Z’s alliance offers a new blueprint for managing decline in a turbulent world from which international relations scholars and American foreign policy practitioners alike should learn. And if political scientists don’t want to take lessons from hip hop artists, then allow me to give the last word to Cyhi Da Prince: “my haters got PhDs, y’all just some major haters with some math minors.”

Brilliant writing from my new news source, Foreign Policy and Marc Lynch. Props.

China largest marketers are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, produce and advertise products to local consumers. Ad budgets are growing, and so is determination to win brand loyalty. So why isn’t China dominating regional and global awards shows like AdFest and Cannes? Thoughtful Media discusses the cultural and operational challenges faced by agencies and advertisers in creating great advertising in China.

Music video for the upcoming concert season @ Bellavista Social Pub.
Director: Bante
DOP: L. Semplici
Hero: Moussa Kaba
Producer: Frisca
Dog: Ultimo
Production: Filmatindustriali

Thanks @thekingmob

To celebrate Nike’s Festival of Sport, Nike China with Mindshare have made this rather splendid 3d Wall Painting.

The Festival of Sport was held at Shanghai Stadium August 18-21, and sent the message that anyone can use sports to make their lives better and provides access to a variety of activities from basketball to football, tennis to skateboarding. The Festival’s impact wasnt restricted to one weekend though: among other initiatives, the basketball courts set up at Shanghai Stadium have been donated to the city. There are now 6 full courts, 1 half court,  a kids’ court, and 3 pavilions outfitted with lights and awnings to provide year-round access to sports.

Living in China I’d believed that any stories about London’s rioting and any real concern I might have should be put down to the distance and lack of real insight that I can have when so far away. Friends in Palestine, or family in Pakistan must get tired of the frequent calls of concern from well-wishers outside of the country on hearing of news of another suicide bomb or military invasion.

It was this in mind that I’d not really engaged with the riots in London.

I’d always known that riots were a result of a number of things, and in this case it’s (at least) a lack of trust in the authorities (News of the World scandals etc), economic uncertainty (yet another collapse imminent and debts ahoy), unemployment rises, memories of recent student unrest, boredom and lack of prospects for young people (who are currently on school holidays) and of course the shooting of an ethnic minority by the police… but I also blame the fluctuation and ultimate rise in the temperature.

Not to dismiss any of the above, but more to come to terms with the irrational rationally.

Lance Workman, head of the Psychology Department at Bath Spa University College, has linked hot weather to levels of serotonin in the brain, which can cause aggression. “The majority of riots in the USA occur when temperature increases to between 27C and 32C,” he said.

“When the temperature goes over 32C, however, riots level off and begin to fall because people become so hot they can’t be bothered.”`

If you dont know what’s happened in London and the events of the riots, the BBC sums it up here

Interestingly, the Guardian notices the parallels with the 1981 riots of Brixton: Riots taking place against the backdrop of a royal wedding and an economic downturn; riots in some of the same locations, even in some cases the same streets; riots repeating many of the same patterns of events – including the looting of clothes and televisions – and all of it resulting in many of the same public and political responses.

I’ll finish by quoting the smart Matthew Toms from Roadworks Co who gives his frank first hand experience (and he should know a thing or two about the streets of London):

Its almost surreal what is going on. I am ashamed to be here, to look at what is happening. Kids, Ben’s age (8 years old), are marching around like Lord of the Flies, burning up the high streets that they grew up on while the police (under-trained, out-numbered and scared shitless of stoking the fires even more) stand by.  Summer holidays…

Stay safe, and let’s pray for rain.
Or at least the start of the football season – that’ll put an end to the boredom.