Fine - Finis - Finally
Daedalus Howell
Card-bored Christmas
Finis: Hallmark cards. While in college, a cadre of drunken English majors and I once mused that alien archeologists might one day come to earth and assume “Hallmark” was a great and prolific poet, given the millions of epitaphs that bear his name. If the advent of e-mail greeting cards doesn’t wipe Hallmark’s schmaltzy missives from the planet, perhaps MikWright, Ltd. greeting cards will finish the job.
Fine: MikWright cards. Billed as “greetings that push buttons, poke fun, and provoke something,” the cards and gifts proffered by irreverent stationers MikWright, Ltd. use found photos as inspiration for their comic cards and tchotchkes, which they couple with pithy captions. “They use unassuming vintage photos that they create fictitious storylines for,” said photo editor Ryan Lely. “It’s always a surprise when you open it. Sort of like the ‘junk in a box’ gag.” A photograph of the Last Supper reenacted by mannequins comes with the inscription “Excuse me… but we asked for separate checks! I don’t know about everyone else, but this will be the last supper I eat here!” Visit MikWright.com.
I’m Ready for My Download, Mr. DeMille
Finis: The corporately-owned film studio. After newspapers and record companies, the old-school film studio (and its close cousin the television network) appears to be the next soon-to-be extinct dinosaur kicking up its legs in the Digital Age. Though online services like Hulu and ABC.com have avoided many of the missteps the Recording Industry Association of America has made (like prosecuting kids and their grandmothers for illegally downloading MP3s), the shear amount of diverting, user-generated content online has chipped away at its market share. Studios have informed shareholders that not only are they shutting down their specialty divisions (studio-speak for “fake independent films”), but also that 2009 will see substantially less product released to the local multiplex due to audience decline. Moreover, a recent poll suggests that 20 percent of television owners will apparently forgo adapting their analog sets to the new digital standard come February, opting instead for other forms of entertainment (perhaps WineLibraryTV.com – see our Ten Q interview with Gary Vaynerchuk on page 44.)
Fine: The Flip Mino. Smaller than the average cell phone, Pure Digital Technologies offers the Flip Mino, a camcorder that at just over three ounces fits in your pocket—and at $179.99 (the manufacturer’s suggested retail price) it might fit your pocketbook too. The Mino features Flip Video’s built-in software that allows aspiring Spielbergs to plug the camcorder’s flip-out USB arm into any computer to instantly upload your Oscar moment to the social media site of your choice. “Flip Video Mino delivers the perfect combination of high-quality video, sleek design and ease of use,” says Jonathan Kaplan, CEO of Pure Digital Technologies. “For the millions who share their lives online every day, it’s more than a camcorder—it’s a fun tool for communicating and creatively expressing themselves.” And it and its brethren are rapidly making Hollywood irrelevant. When more than 100 million people login to watch comedian Judson Laipply of Bucyrus, Ohio, perform his interpretation of the “Evolution of Dance”—and receive nearly a quarter-million text comments from fans—something seismic has happened to the media-industrial complex. Watch yourself instantly on the Mino’s 1.5-inch anti-glare LCD display—an act otherwise known as “chimping,” according to our in-house video team. In this case, it’s “monkey do” then “monkey see.”
Plug-n-Play Dessert Wine
Finis: Uppity European Nations coveting beverage names. A favorite Christmas Eve tradition is leaving milk and cookies for Santa Claus. In Sonoma, of course, we leave port and biscotti. That is unless one’s port is from anywhere in the world but Portugal, which, thanks to a humbug move made by the European Union, means it technically isn’t port. It’s dessert wine. This is a new mutation of the name game the Champagne region of France plays with “sparkling wine” made anywhere but there, or Kobe beef, versus “Kobe-style,” when outside of Japan. Sonomans can relate to such vigilance when it comes to regional names and products—after all, our town name has been slapped on everything from trucks to cigarettes and, most recently, a travel agency in Spain. That said, we do admire a good underdog story…
Fine: The fine minds behind Peltier Station Winery have found a work-around for the venerable EU. The winery’s 2004 zinfandel dessert wine is dubbed “USB Port” and features the iconic digital device plug design on its label. Designed by Lodi-based 6 West Design, the bottle’s front label depicts an old vine made of binary code, which translates as the winery’s name. Sporting a “serious nose of chocolate balanced with ruby cherry and spice,” only 250 cases of the $25 dessert wine were made. Download here: PeltierStation.com
Now Read this:
David E. Price’s The Pixar Touch is a comprehensive portrait of the pixels and perseverance that shaped Academy Award-winning animation juggernaut Pixar Animation Studios. Price deftly unravels Pixar’s tightly braided helix of creativity and technology in a stirring analysis of the personalities (Ed Catmull, George Lucas, Steve Jobs and Sonoma’s own John Lasseter among others) that make up its Bay Area-based DNA.
Now Hear this:
Secrets Are Sinister, the latest album from Brooklyn-based indie rock quartet, Longwave (featuring Petaluma-born guitarist Shannon Ferguson), was released in November.
Music Blogger ALZTRON sums up the critically-acclaimed effort as the “loudest, coolest, and most concise Longwave have sounded to date.” The band’s fourth full-length effort, Longwave’s Secrets Are Sinister was released by the appropriately named label, Original Signal (with this sudden spike in the frequency of radio terms, perhaps SETI should quit looking for aliens and start a band). Visit longwavetheband.com.
– DH
Email This Story