I've updated the page for my Upcoming Appearances, which next year will include speeches at the University of North Texas and Cal State-Long Beach, both free and open to the public. Among conferences you have to pay for, a couple are noteworthy:
The Design Management Institute's Seminar at Sea, aboard the Queen Mary 2, sailing from London/Southhampton to New York, and featuring a special lecture and tour by the ship's designer. Schedule, registration, and fare information here.
There's a January 1 deadline for deposits.
Brand Identity & Package Design conference, featuring lots of interesting speakers including the always-fascinating Grant McCracken, April 18-20, 2005 at The Plaza in New York City.
Dynamist.com readers can get a 15% discount. Email me for details.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 23, 2004 • Comments
I get enough emails asking that question to suspect that folks haven't been scrolling all the way down to the bottom to see Adrian Quan's logo, so I've moved it up the column to the right. If you're looking for a designer, I highly recommend him.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 22, 2004 • Comments
Strengthen the Good is soliciting English-language books for a private high school in Bratislava. The StG website has more info on what books are needed, how to send them, and how to donate funds.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 22, 2004 • Comments
The new movie about Howard Hughes could have had any number of titles, from the simple Hughes to the inflation-ignoring America's First Billionaire. But no alternative would have the magical attraction of The Aviator.
From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour. Aviators have personified national ideals, from French elan to Soviet party discipline. They've inspired lust and admiration. They've turned sunglasses and short, utilitarian leather jackets into fashion statements. "Glamour boys," the press called Royal Air Force fliers between the wars, and the nickname stuck through their finest hour.
Charles Lindbergh's glamour was once as potent as any movie star's, powerful enough, imagines Philip Roth in his latest novel, to topple Franklin Roosevelt. When George W. Bush stepped on to an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, he wrapped himself in the aviator's aura. So did Sen. John McCain when his 2000 presidential campaign used a portrait of the candidate as a handsome young flier.
If glamour is, to quote from a fashion blurb, "all about transcending the everyday," what could be more transcendent than flight itself? Even today, when commercial air travel has become a dull yet stressful routine, a photo of a jet in the sky still has a glamorous power. It promises to transport us out of the everyday, to take us away to some better place.
Director Martin Scorsese, in an interview with The Boston Globe, recalls reading the Aviator script and "imagining Hughes up there in the clouds, flying over the world, that is transcending the mortal self." His movie is all about transcendence, aspiration, and illusion. It portrays glamour for a cynical, media-savvy age.
That's the beginning of my latest article. Read the rest here.
The smartest review of The Aviator I've read is David Edelstein's piece on Slate (though I'm guessing he's not a No Doubt fan, since he seems not to know who Gwen Stefani is). Roger Ebert's review is also good, noting that if Hughes "had died in one of the airplane crashes he survived, he would have been remembered as a golden boy." The movie opens nationally on Christmas Day.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 22, 2004 • Comments
From the otherwise annoying Apple startup page that overrides my browser-homepage preference comes a link to this cool article about radiologists using iPods to store and transfer medical images:
The iPod is not just for music any more. Radiologists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and their colleagues at other institutions from as far away as Europe and Australia are now using iPod devices to store medical images.
"This is what we call using off the shelf, consumer market technology," says Osman Ratib, M.D., Ph.D., professor and vice-chairman of radiologic services at UCLA. "Technology coming from the consumer market is changing the way we do things in the radiology department."
Dr. Ratib and Antoine Rosset, M.D., a radiologist in Geneva, Switzerland, recently developed OsiriX, Macintosh-based software for display and manipulation of complex medical image data.
"We chose to do it on the Macintosh because of the high performance of Mac graphics," Dr. Ratib says. "The purpose is to be able to quickly and interactively manipulate very large data sets in 3D, 4D and even 5D. It's amazing how much performance we get."
How did the developers go from a music player to a medical storage device? "We basically wanted something that everybody could use," explains Dr. Ratib. "That's why OsiriX can be used with the iPod, iChat and other tools."
"Radiologists deal with a very large amount of medical imaging data," Dr. Ratib explains. "I never have enough space on my disk, no matter how big my disk is — I always need more space. One day I realized, I have an iPod that has 40 gigabytes of storage on it. It's twice as big as my disk on my laptop and I'm using only 10 percent of it for my music. So, why don't I use it as a hard disk for storing medical images?"
How about that--entertainment R&D (and a much larger market) supporting medical applications. It's not exactly what any industrial policy guru would have planned.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 21, 2004 • Comments
"On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common," I wrote in this 1999 Forbes ASAP column. Last October, Wired editor Chris Anderson published a great article called "The Long Tail" looking at what has in fact happened as this vision has turned into reality--and what may happen as that reality expands. He now has a book contract and a blog to refine and expand on his ideas.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 21, 2004 • Comments
When I was working on The Substance of Style, Eugene Volokh asked, once in conversation and once in the Q&A after a speech, why, if people care more about aesthetics, we don't see more car customization. It turns out that we do--just as extrapolating from my trend-spotting would predict. (The car-customizing trend didn't make it into the book but it did show up in my Wired article, much abbreviated from its original version, on aesthetic jobs.)
The WaPost and Fortuneboth feature articles on how automakers are trying to capitalize on the trend. From the Post piece:
The popularity of those over-the-top decorating shows for vehicles has pumped new life into the auto customizing business, as more mainstream consumers decide they want to trick out their car or truck with fancy accessories. The auto parts and accessories industry has doubled in size in a decade, reaching $29 billion in sales last year, according to the Specialty Equipment Market Association, or SEMA.
That's a stream of money too big for the auto industry to ignore, so car manufacturers are beginning to offer options up front that once were available only from the local hot-rod shop. Toyota blazed the way with its youth-oriented brand Scion, which offers such must-have accessories as glowing cup holders and multicolored dash displays.
"What some manufacturers figured out is if they contract with [customizers] or make the products in-house, they can make a lot more money," said Dan Kahn, a road-test editor at Edmunds.com.
While that seems like a predatory business move, small customizing companies actually welcome the trend, according to Peter MacGillivray, vice president of marketing and communications for the California-based SEMA.
"What they're really going to do is plant the seed, plant the notion of personalization and accessorization in so many more places than we ever could," MacGillivray said, adding that big car companies "have the single largest marketing budgets in the world."
The Fortune article reports from the SEMA trade show (and features a photo of comely autoshow women):
Heads are turning up and down the aisles at this year's show, and it's not just because of the short skirts. Diamond-studded lugnuts, 24-speaker stereo systems, nitrous-oxide injectors, underbody neon lighting, pneumatically adjustable suspensions, flashing tire-valve caps — the bling goes on for 12 linear miles of exhibits. SEMA has become the second-biggest trade show in the country, after the Consumer Electronics Show, and possibly the most important car show after Detroit. "We take it very seriously," says Ed Golden, Ford's director of design. Why? "We want them to be tuning up a Ford."
As the business of aftermarket parts has exploded--sales are expected to surpass $29 billion this year, more than twice what they were a decade ago--it has become something Detroit can't ignore. That's why Golden and fellow Ford designers Larry Erickson and Patrick Schiavone are here, their suits and gold name badges making them look a little out of place among the "tuners" in T-shirts and oil-stained jeans. "The thing is, today everybody's reliable," says Erickson, who designed the 2005 Mustang. "Everybody's quick. Everybody's got quality. So now the personality thing becomes more and more important."
That can mean anything from flashy chrome wheels to $10,000 entertainment systems with ten flat-screen TVs to paint that changes color when viewed from different angles. It started in the 1990s when California teens--much like their parents in the hot-rodding 1960s--started turning beaten-up sedans into street racers. Their racetracks were long blocks and riverbeds, some of them the same places where earlier generations competed in souped-up Mercurys and Thunderbirds. Only now technology allowed hot rodders to get high performance out of smaller, four-cylinder cars like Honda Civics. Some swapped out the computer chips governing engine functions; others lowered suspensions for better aerodynamics. Some just added bass speakers in the trunk or chopped off mufflers to add "noise." But now, a decade later, "tuning" has moved to the exclusive brands. At the SEMA show, there are Porsches with doors that scissor open like those on Lamborghinis, Jaguars with racing-style suspension, and six-figure Bentleys with tinted windows and 20-inch wheels (called "dubs" on the street).
At some point, I hope this trend will break out into serving a less flamboyant market: those of us who'd like a bit more color and style in our boring cars--maybe nothing more than a prettier paint job--but don't share the streetracer or hip-hop aesthetic.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 21, 2004 • Comments
Today is December 20. If I wish you "Happy Holidays," today is included in the season (if not the literal holidays). More happiness all around.
Judging from my email, which is hardly a random sample, the people most adamantly against "Happy Holidays" are not in fact Christians but secularists determined to define Christmas as an occasion that has nothing to do with religious faith.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 20, 2004 • Comments
It's about naproxen, a.k.a. Aleve. It can also make you blow up with hives until you look like an alien. Or at least that's what it did to me.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 20, 2004 • Comments
Lileks is against it, and he's part of a national movement. Among all right-thinking bloggers "Happy Holidays" is out and "Merry Christmas" is in.
To which I say, Come to Dallas. Nobody here (except me) will wish you, "Happy Holidays." Everyone will ask whether you're ready for Christmas and wish you a merry one. And if, like me, you don't want to cause anyone to feel bad, you'll respond politely and let them go right on assuming you celebrate Christmas.
I can't blame Christians, who are the vast majority of Americans and the ones whose religion is celebrated in all those carols at the mall, for wanting their holiday acknowledged in public. I don't get offended when Dallasites assume everyone, of course, celebrates Christmas. (Everyone they know does, after all.) And I hope to have a happy, though not necessarily merry, December 25. But I wish good-hearted folks like Lileks would consider that Christmas greetings don't make everyone feel good.
Why criticize merchants for including all their customers in wishes for a happy holiday season? The holidays do, after all, stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year's, both nonsectarian holidays. "Happy Holidays" includes Christmas, for those who celebrate it. But it also includes holidays we all share, as well as some others only a minority observe.
When you extend these greetings, are you wishing people happiness? Or affirming your Christianity? Do you want people who don't celebrate Christmas to be happy (or merry)? Or do you want to make them at least mildly uncomfortable? The answers will determine what you say.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on December 17, 2004 • Comments