Whole Foods

I had a heated conversation a few years back with the former marketing head of Whole Foods. This was when their stock was around $70 and they thought their shit was priceless manure.

I was fishing for business and suggested that they didn't have any silver bullets and so could expect competition to do in much of their advantage over the next few years as they "taught" the rest of the market how to sell organics and take care of foodies.

The marketing expert was insistent that it was magic and that that anything they touched would soar. He actually said that Whole Foods products were price inelastic--meaning that it didn't matter what they charged. He was high as a kite.

My advice on how to grow their business--by adding a "dirty thirty" of products like Clorox and real mayo that consumers were forced to shop at Safeway or Dominics for was obviously ignored. (My idea--isolate them, put them on a back wall, and make them pay for the priviledge. Then use the $$ and relationship to clean up what you can of their practices. --Like trading with China instead of boycotting them. Just having WF be a one stop shop would mean a huge jump in sales.)

It's still a couple hundred million dollar idea, but who wants to work with someone struggling just to keep their spot on the middle of the totem pole? The corporate fear must be palpable--probably indirect proportion to the arrogance that they felt three years ago.

My point is it's hard to tell a top performer anything, even though studies show that improving top performers is a much more efficient way to grow than trying to "save" poor performers. A lot of times a brand must succeed and then fail before it gains any true legs--witness Apple, Starbucks, etc. It may seem like a natural process, but it can easily be avoided. There's also a lot lost in that early failure, somewhat like a corporate divorce--you can find love again, but making the first run work is a much better story and much more fun.

Their stock today is around 20. And the stock of Kroger--an old school grocery concern--has beat their performance soundly over the last three or so years. (Since we had the conversation.)

The atmosphere gets very heady around the best in the business--and no one wants to hear no or experiment. Success tightens people and brands up like nothing else, a lot of times it's years before they get back to anything even broadly resembling a freedom to which consumers can relate.

Can people really only innovate and go big when they're threatened with failure?

Hipster Update

Corroboration of my post the other day about the Adbuster's article.

Today I happened into Barney's Co-op. I usually don't do Barney's, but I've been switching up my look a little and decided it might be worth another look. (It wasn't but that's what I get for entertaining stale sympathies for folks who pledge allegiance to communalism.)

And what did my wondering eye observe? The 20 something clerk wearing a DIE HIPSTER SCUM t-shirt.

Either that's pure irony or he hates himself entirely. Who the fuck would be more hip than the guy selling Acne Jeans?

Either way, it's clear the counterculture is imploding. Everyone thought it would happen after 9/11 but better late than never.

Glory Hallilujah..

I know the end is near now.

How?

The Adbusters cover story is blasting hipsters.

Fuck, if that isn't the final solution of self-hatred curing itself, then nothing is or will ever be.

A little history--I used to be a self-loathing graphic designer. I was on top of the corporate world (in a sense--I had international clients and my own firm but little interest in making money so didn't make any huge money, just enough for Italian bikes, Gore-Tex, travel, fancy beer and regular Thai food). When I was there, I was simultaneously on top of the hipster world (backstage on the Seattle scene before and in its heyday).

I worked 6 or 7 hours a day, 4 or 5 days a week, 4 or 5 months a year.

The rest of the time I traveled, fucked off, slept and tried to think of productive things to do. I also did a significant amount of volunteer work. And hung hard.

I was a hipster par excellence and relatively unabashedly so. I worked in a dirty, smelly, huge, raw loft in the middle of downtown and rode my bike to work every day. I was also a DJ and in a band. (Previous gigs--espresso jerk and bike messenger. THis was 15 years ago or so).

Anyway, the only magazine I felt worth it's salt was Adbusters. And a similar anti-advertising rag called Stay Free, which was very similar but ten minutes ahead and more punk. And more fun and loving.

Not that I could read either, I just recognized that they were on the leading edge of culture and media.

But it was implicit that they were hipsters. Uber-hipsters. What on earth else could you call moping, over it graphic designers who wrote for the just as over it cultural elite? Who thought that writing and better design would save the world and art couldn't do shit?

Mayakovsky?

Anyway, for as whatever as these mo-fos were, I certainly didn't know and couldn't find anyone who knew more than them. I was them and they were me. (At some point, I'll tell you about my "liberation capitalist" company T Hree--which was two thirds what Adbusters should have been and one third what White Gold became. All mixed up into a beautifully unprofitable mess.)

Fast forward fifteen years or so and the counterculture has both grown and fractured so much that it's hard to find a head anymore. But if there was one mass media publication (I saw it at the checkstand at Whole Foods, after all--it's not like I was rummaging around some hippie newsstand)--if there was one pub that led the mainstreaming of hipsterdom charge it would be Adbusters. Not Utne, definitely not The NAtion, not Spin or Rolling Stone and not Details or Interview. (It sounds strange to include those last two, but they used to be important, along with Paper--for a minute, Mondo 2000 and maybe even Wired a tiny bit. And Dirt, Sassy and Grand Royal kind of.)

Anyway, if there was one demographic descriptor that could be applied to that same leading head it would be hipsters.

How this microscopically wide leading point of the head split and attacked itself today, I have no idea. It would almost be worth buying it to try to figure it out. (Maybe it's a battle over rent controlled apartments in Williamsburg.)

I know for certain they don't listen to different bands, like different politics, buy different products, eat different food, like different restaurants, take different classes or wear different clothes. So--what would make them different? Eyelash inclination? How often they wash their American Apparel socks?

It's not like they're two separate people in the same relationship, or two separate eyeballs on the same head, they're the indivisible heart and soul of the same beast.

It's a split that can't be survived. One symbolic of an entirely and comprehensively fractuous society.

Anyway, I say hallilujah completely unironically--because you can get to heaven either way--through believing belief (the mainstream or Western tactic) or through disbelieving disbelief (the counterculture/Eastern approach).

Evangelical Christians are working on believing belief, Adbusters and hipsters are working on disbelieving disbelief.

Both paths lead to ultimate, transcendant, belief, of course. But with believing belief, the appearance of a superficial, judgmental, supplicant's belief covers any real knowing right up until whatever precipitates real knowledge.

With disbelieving disbelief, irony, weariness and distance covers everything until knowledge appears--until the disbeliever decides to apply his disbelief entirely, and disbelieves his own disbelief as well as everything else. (Disbelieving everything else only is a lazy, self-serving, and trite disbelief indeed.)

From this realization, it's a short freefall--some would say relaxation--to a rock solid, eternal, knowing and ultimate belief. Because this belief has tried everything, said everything, and inhaled, in my opinion, it has the chance to be more real or more solid--more appealing--that a naive believer's belief. Folks leave the Evangelicals for the hipsters because Evangelicals are about as appealing (culturally, sexually and epistimologically) as a polygamists' housedress.

We must be getting close. It's like in the Matrix when the attacking machines split and then join again--finally overwhelming the defenders of Zion. Except this time the two droid channels have different instructions and collide into each other with radical ferocity--saving the beleagured city below. (I have no idea how to spell beleagured.)

First you blast big government and corporations. Then the media, then capitalism--or all of these. You blast the other--your father and mother. The state. The church.

Then you blame your friendcs, cool kids and hipsters, then yourself--then you realize that blame only gets you more blame. And attack only prolongs war.

Sooner or later you just decide to try vulnerability. Not because you're corny or happy or nice--but because there's nothing else left.

You don't leave irony because you feel great and are revved up and ready to go. You slink off alone because you're fucking hurt from all the sarchasm, in jokes and put-downs. Just like you don't leave the mainstream because you're stronger than it, you leave it because you're sick and tired and there is no where else to go.

It's a delicate exorcism--because the hipsters are us. We are adbusters as well. And if we are eventually to end up more loved and happier, we have to be more more certain of ourselves. It's no simple operation to skim off the fat without taking off a hunk of meat or some delicious broth. Since the patient is alive, any gouges are going to hurt.

Let me put it this way, Adbusters doens't make anything, they just critique things that others have made. Even their shoes are a critique of other people's shoes.

The counterculture is no different--it doens't make itself vulnerable or express it's desires--because it wants what it considers superficial and unholy: sex, money and happiness. So it just ends up recycling what was already cool--what is already mediated and safe. What is already counterculture.

It runs from the "normal", warm, and calm just as dig doggedly as the mainstream runs from the weird. If the mainstream doens't love anything, the counterculture loves only drama--after a while both are just as boring.

HIpsters--Adbusters included--are just as uptight as a Southern Bat=ptist preacher--they just have different "issues" or reasons.

Let me put it this way, after I wrote my book I started buying and wearing the most beautiful clothes I could find--$800 cashmere sportcoats, $200 pink shirts and $500 bench-made shoes. I looked like a million bucks and would tell anyone who asked exactly what I wanted to do--make art, make money, get laid--whatever I felt like I wanted to do. I started to live like I wanted whatever happened and no matter what anyone--cool or not--said.

When I started, I was rock-solid in with the in crowd. I knew top indie filmmakers and #1 indie rock stars. I knew lots of people that owned labels... etc. It's not cool to say you're cool, but I'm not cool anymore so believe me when I tell you I was. The kings and queens of the scene were at ratted-out parties at my house. We were so cool we didn't even hang out with mainstream punk or rock bands. We all knew bigger--stadium/Intl./SNL--bands, for example, but they weren't cool enough for us. (Though we did like some of their wives and nannys and would gain entry to their practice spaces/houses/pools and weren't above playing music/chilling/swimming there when they were out of town on occasion.)

Anyway--nothing was cool enough for me--that was the whole thing. The less you think is cool, the cooler you are, duh.

And believe me when I say that being cool didn't do shit for me.

Not shit. I was the most depressed I had ever been at the height of my cool (and the height of my money--as a designer, I was basically paid to be cool. After I lost my cool, I couldn't even convince my previous clients to hire me on a sympathy job).

When I started wearing nice clothes--and by this point I was more of a starving artist than I had ever been, living on credit cards and by selling my musical gear--I felt this was the logical punk progression. If punk was really dead, then sharp was the new messy.

And since punk, or hip, was so huge, then the way to show the new squares (who were really the newly minted hip) was to flip the script on em.

They were only into the shit now that it was safe, neutered and Hot Topic. They were conspicuously absent when you could actually get hated on, yelled at, go broke or lose your privledge for the shit.

Needless to say, my redefinition of punk--my out-punking of the punks--wasn't a huge success. (There's a great book about this in Thomas Man's Antonio Kroger--also check out The Anarchist Banker by Pessoa.) My hip friends took to my cleanshaven, clean, upscale punk like I had fucked their girlfriend. Which is to say not at all.

I've since loosened up my look, but I still like the good--read expensive--shit. Unabashedly and unapologetically. I'll scream quality from the mountaintop.

And I still believe in free markets, ambition, drive, self adn all that other shit that's taboo in both the counterculture and at Adbusters.

There's no difference between material quality and spiritual or mental quality. You have to put the right one first, or course, but they aren't at all mutually exclusive--that's some stale-ass fearful thinking.

It's unfortunate that we have to learn it this way, of course, because there's a huge attrition rate. It's not cute, fun, or even necessarily safe to learn love by hating hate, but it does work.

Anyway, if you're still here and still interested, the future is ready to be dropped. It won't be at current price points, of course, but it's ready-made.

The bottom line is that almost no-one in the counter culture because they're original, they're in there because it's the best thing going. They didn't create its values, mores or artistic forms, they just prefer them over mainstream offerings.

Just as the mainstream became too stifling for the freespirits of the 30s and 40s (and even earlier for a few real weirdos--and I mean weird lovingly)--today's counterculture is suffocating.

Today's counterculture doesn't allow almost anything. It doesn't like warmth, money, fucking, responsibility, fun, being in charge, ambition, leadership. The mainstream may be one dimentional, but the counter culture is only two-D.

What's coming is 3-D.

I can mothafucking-m-u guarantee.

I've been putting the shit together for ten years.

In The One

Content has split.

Upwards is Kanye West--high art that you're lucky to get once every two years. Concept albums with pretty videos and meaning. Rare quality. This is the tiny head.

Downwards--not at all necessarily worse, mind you--is Lil Wayne. He just spits off tha top. He's reality TV to Kanye's immaculately scripted sit-comma. Mass quantity. This is the "long tail".

We're all hungrier for the real shit--middle shit with some quality and some quality--than either of these poles allow. A half hour a week of something you like isn't shit. Neither are daily episodes of "Who Want's to Be a Millioniare?"--something you don't really like.

What corporation sits on a hot brand like MTV sits on Buzzin'?

What if you couldn't buy but one Mercedes every four years? Or could only have one cell phone at a time? One latte every two days?

Why can't the content industry meet demand? Because they have socialized--fixed--their own prices. They are so inefficient it's laughable. If they weren't all doing it, they'd all be run out of business.

It's moronic, stupid, idiotic and a huge waste of money.

Not to mention an enormous drag on the economy.

We could have Kanye quality songs coming out every week if they made more than Lil Wayne's one-offs. The split is entirely arbitrary, a function of the fixed prices charged for all mass content--movies, music, books, tv--all that shit.

Content is stuck in the world of either/or like a depressed-ass Elliot Smith--either great and fleeting or plentiful and shitty--because it can't afford to reach any other level. Kanye's got to tour, shoot videos, advertise cell phones, run a label and sell clothes to make money. He doesn't get paid anything to write or record music.

Lil Wayne makes tons of music, but so what, only one in twenty songs is worth buying. And even then, they don't have any ideas or real inspiration in them.

We think that the real--the authentic--is naturally rare but it's not at all. We've made it so. Our frugality and fear. Our insistance that consuming content is a guilty pleasure.

White GOld says FUCK THAT SHIT.

We're not victims to anyone--big business, woe is me artistes, mommy and daddy, our own demons--no one. We're 3-D, the whole enchelada.

We make what's real, charge what it's worth, live relaxed adn are ready to ramp up as far as you can afford. No--fuck that--not can afford, cause your ass is starving with a millie in the bank--you can afford fucking anything but you choose not to express yourself that way.

We're ready to go as far as the consumers of the developed world are willing to consume.

But you're scared to consume. Just like you're scared to feel. Just like you're scared to slow down.

Just like you're scared to fuck.

Guilty guilty guilty guilt. This is changing--quickly--but the folks with money are still scared as a motherfucker. Scared and burnt out. It might take a crisis to shake them out of their repression.

White Gold is ready to meet demand because market transactions insulate us from the market's bullshit--we make profits from content itself and so can tell the advertizers, label bosses, dorks, freaky fans and dorvmos to fuck it. We can even tell the audiences to fuck it. We don't work weekends, tour in vans or do press junkets.

We dont kiss ass, don't approach you on our knees or give away our first song. You don't really want a pandering culture, but you don't know that yet. Don't feel it.

You think a non-pandering creative is arrogant, or less valuable. Just like you think a confident, attractive woman is a stuck-up bitch. You don't know her, of course, but you hate that she's escaped the fear and insecurity you cultivate daily.

Higher prices gives us more time to make shit. What a revelation!

The reality is that people are starved for new quality content--but our media structures can only provide huge ponds of shit a mile wide and an inch deep--like YouTube, or puddles of pristine H2o a mile deep.

And you can't high dive in any of them.

No backflips, dives or even pool edge horseplay.

White GOld is a sandy beachfront to this shit. Clean, well maintained and landscaped. Go as far out as you want. Stay as long as you like. There's a raft with springboards up to 60'. Lifeguards, showers and a great little place to eat.

Once you've mastered those, we'll show you where the cliffs are.

And, yes, it costs more than a puddle in the parking lot. Go figure.

Or we can all sit round these oily, evaporating, concrete-rimmed .99 per song puddles for a few more years til they're just dark spots.

I was bored in 1998--I don't know what's sustaining you. Have you convinced yourselves that The Black Kids are great? That LCD Soundsystem will feed you into your 40s?

Or are you surviving on two songs in heavy rotation?

I don't know how you do it--starving with money in the bank. Workaholic thinking that more money will get you more fun, more love or even more like.

Will that promotion make your wife or kids like you any more?

No, fuck that, they're on their own too--will it make you like yourself anymore?

That's the real shit right there?

Luckily, there's a book you can read about just this shit. It wasn't written by David Sedaris, David FOster Wallace, or David Eggers. It isn't sad and doesn't mope because it didn't have the luxury.

And it's not $14.

Not even $24.

It's $120.

Because that's what it fucking costs for an educated motherfucker who's got commerce by the balls to chuck it all to figure out if he even has a book in him.

If you're a businessman worth his salt you'll recognize the risk/reward ratio.

Hipster taking a few years off after school to write a "scene" novel, and maybe make it big among his friends=$14.

Hipster at the end of his rope willing to alienate all his friends and sacrifice any chance of getting published by putting down the white, man, scary and fetid truth=significantly more.

I got the price the same place I got the title--$120.

If you don't like the title, then you won't like the price. The title is The Love Artist.

And if you don't like the title, you won't appreciate the cover.

And if you don't appreciate the cover, don't like the title or aren't willing to drop a fucking measly $120 on something you think you might really care about, then we probably don't have anything to talk about anyway.

Just keeping it real.

Follow the link to White Gold store to buy it. (Upper rightish).

I'm going to bring content back together if it kills me.

I can't do it without you but I won't go begging. There's been too much of that already.

This is a business proposition--$120 is the price of the prospectus. It never goes on sale and it isn't going anywhere.

Take your time.

Maybe selling out will work for you if you do it another 50 years with some real gusto--if you're fucking hookers and taking down your boardroom rivals with aplomb instead of just kind of half-assing your way to the top.

One Way

They just changed the direction of the street in front of my window.

Used to be one way south, now it's one way north.

It's interesting when you think you know something and it becomes not only irrelevant but wrong.

Do you get confused or imagine blockages with people just falling into chaos and punking it out (as I did)?

Do you tell people "It's one way!" even though they're going the right way now, as the businessguy in a suit just did?

Do you ignore the new signs and go the wrong way you're used to?

Do you charge up the new direction beautifully oblivious to anything that the fact that the street suits you?

Cause that's how quick things can change.

The Last Shall Be First

The view from my new balcony. Not bad for an as yet undiscovered motherfucker who hasn't had a real job in ten years. 900+ SF, floor to ceiling windows, granite, 42" cabinets, stainless steel appliances, indoor parking and "espresso" hardwoods--all brand spanking new. May god bless the City of Chicago's Housing Department.