LIM College Faculty Blog

LIM College Fashion Insiders - Screening of Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston

by Michael Palladino

"He called me 'The Moth,' " Pat Cleveland told our audience at the panel discussion after a private screening of Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston at FashionOpolis on January 26.   

A memorable night for all who attended, not only to have watched the film, but to meet the director, Whitney Sudler-Smith, fashion stylist and author Phillip Bloch, and the legendary Pat Cleveland - aka “The Moth.”

The film was a tribute to the elusive Halston; a man who is admired and often copied but none the less revered for his undeniable talent and impact on what was to be the future of fashion. 

Ahead of his time and the darling of the fashion elite, he wanted to expand his horizons beyond Bergdorf Goodman and sought to bring his vision to a world that he thought eager to embrace  a new elegance. His collaboration with JC Penney failed and that precipitated his fall from grace as he was scorned by the fashion elite, who wanted to keep fashion to themselves. A badge to wield as armor, which was not his vision at all, he became the unwitting victim of the excesses of the seventies.   

The film not only captured great personal anecdotes from inner circle friends including Liza Minnelli, Stephen Burrows and Pat Cleveland, but also gave us entré to the decade that gave us Studio 54, The Factory, the rise of celebrity and cast the first shadows of AIDS, which was to be a scourge to a generation.

The audience was able to travel back in time and bear witness to a world that will not be forgotten; the music, the parties, and of course, Ultrasuede.

Once the film ended we were entertained and enlightened by our celebrity panel that included the director and two of the people featured in the film: Phillip Bloch and Pat Cleveland. All three could not have been more candid and genuine in their responses. From the frank answers of Whitney, to the memories of Studio 54 shared by Phillip Bloch, to the honest insights provided by the legendary Pat Cleveland, who spoke of her friend Halston with love and the desire to still protect him from harm. A friend even now, Pat Cleveland offered her humanity to his memory and held the entire room captive by her charm.

Oh, and why  “The Moth”?  Because she would move down the catwalk towards the light, in billowing chiffon dresses he made specially for her. She seemed to flutter and pause unaware of the audience and responding as if transformed into a moth; delicate and ephemeral, an icon to be remembered. A great night at LIM College and one I will always remember.  

ABC’s Pan Am and the Infantilism of American Culture: Are We Ready to Grow Up?

Pan Am, the new mega-dollar drama from ABC aired last night, and of course, as a devotee of Mad Men, I watched it in hopes that it would transport me (as Mad Men always does) to an era I actually might have enjoyed. 

Both series are set in the early 1960s, a time of cocktail dresses,  Eames furniture, Bobby Darin, sexism (I may not have enjoyed that), and a promise of a Space Age, Jetson-esque future.  Indeed, Pan Am had many of these elements (the marvelously recreated interior of the original Pan Am terminal was a masterpiece of CGI, as was the replacement of the words "Met Life" with "Pan Am" on the now-iconic building), and yet – as I was watching it – something was missing. 

Accurately recreating the epoch (there was only one hairdo in the episode that screamed "anachronism" to a professor of fashion history), I couldn’t quite put my finger on why Pan Am failed so miserably in its intent to mainstream Mad Men, and why (I concluded as the episode ended) I shan’t be watching it again.

And then it occurred to me why, as a cultural analyst and forecaster, I am so fascinated by Mad Men, and was ultimately left so bored by Pan Am; Mad Men is about adults; Pan Am is not. Pan Am is about young, squeaky clean ingénues, neat and fresh-faced as they dream of foreign travel. It is about suave and handsome young pilots, all joshing each other in the cock pit like so many good natured college boys. It was as perfect and as wholesome as a Magnolia cupcake, and as sanitized and "child friendly" as the life of the average adult in America today.

There was not one cigarette to be seen in Pan Am, an anachronism unto itself, as everybody smoked in the 1960s. And there was hardly any drinking (the only character who asked for a martini was the caddish character involved in an extra-marital affair with a stewardess). But why wasn’t there? In an era when smoking and drinking were de rigueur, why (when Mad Men embraces these elements to the point of celebrating them) did Pan Am pretend that they didn’t exist?

The same goes for sex. Remembering that the characters in Pan Am are adults, why was the only hinted-at coupling between a deceitful married man and the French stewardess (note: the character is not American) he had lied to by saying he was single?  The message? That sex and martinis are only for "bad boys," and that everyone else in the Early 1960s was a celibate, non-smoking teetotaler.

Mad Men is probably as guilty at over-playing the drinking, sex, and smoking (especially the sex; not everyone in 1963 was as handsome as "Don Draper"!) as Pan Am is guilty of ignoring them, and the fact that the former is on AMC (a cable channel with less censorship than Pan Am’s ABC) probably has something to do with it. Yet I feel there is a more interesting and overarching story behind ABC’s desire to sanitize the Sixties, and I think it has everything to do with what I’ve termed an infantilism of American culture in the post 9/11 climate.

The trauma that America experienced with 9 /11 cannot be overstated, the result being a cultural obsession with the concepts of "safety" and "security."  This is understandable. Yet with it has came something very strange; a need to feel "protected" seems to have instilled a desire to return to an almost "childlike" state.  We are continually told that "40 is the new 30" and that "30 is the new 20"; if we follow this through, then what is the "new 20"? Ten?!

In fashion, women in their forties dress like women in their twenties, and the old joke about middle-age being "ten years older than you are" is starting to be true (my seventy year old father refuses to call himself "middle aged," and cannot understand why I – at 46 – do).

Cocktails are now frowned upon, and if consumed, must have childlike ingredients and monikers that make them look like ice cream sundaes by way of shifting the focus from the fact that they contain alcohol; Chocolatinis, Marshmallowtinis, M&Mtinis are all the rage, and consumed without question in company. Yet order a regular vodka martini, and eyebrows are raised. Basically, it’s okay if your booze looks like dessert, but order a scotch on the rocks, and 12 step programs are suggested.

Yet the strongest evidence for the infantilism of American culture must surely be the phenomenon of The Cupcake! A cake traditionally served to children at birthday parties and provided at elementary school bake sales, cupcakes have become an adult obsession; there are currently no less than four cable television shows devoted to cupcakes, the line outside of Magnolia risible in length when one remembers that cupcakes were traditionally intended for kids (and not for well-paid and well-dressed adults holding onto each other for ballast in their six inch Jimmy Choo heels).

It is hard to imagine Don Draper lining up to buy a cupcake – and yet the popularity of Mad Men (and its retail tie-ins with Banana Republic and Brooks Brothers) is just one of the indicators to suggest that we, as a culture, are ready to once again embrace the idea of adulthood as a pleasant and desirable state.  Emotionally dysfunctional and not always very nice, the characters in Mad Men are united by one factor; they are adults. They dress as adults, speak like adults, and enjoy adult pursuits. I think this is why we like watching them, and why – in fashion – apparel is becoming far less "chick" and far more "chic," the slow return to modesty and minimalism suggesting that women are starting to want womenswear once again (as opposed to modified juniorwear in larger sizes).

Perhaps the fact that mainstream television, by way of ABC’s Pan Am and NBC’s ill-received Playboy Club, which debuted last week, have jumped on the Mad Men bandwagon by developing series set in an "adult era" is the most obvious sign that we’re ready to enjoy being grown-ups again, although – in the case of Pan Am – we’re only pretending to be grown-ups. Like children playing dress-up in their parents’ adult clothing, Pan Am’s sweet and chirpy clean-cut innocence says more about America in 2011 than the jet-set, adult days of the early 1960s.

-- Amanda Hallay

Amanda Hallay is Clinical Assistant Professor of Fashion Merchandising at LIM College.

Her book Vintage Cocktails: Retro Recipes for the Home Mixologist (Skyhorse Publishing) will be published on November 1 and is available on pre-order from Amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/Vintage-Cocktails-Retro-Recipes-Mixologist/dp/1616083948/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317092246&sr=8-1

Spanish Days, Spanish Knights

Eric Feigenbaum, Chair of the Fashion Merchandising Department, blogged about Barcelona for the website VMSD, which caters to store display professionals and retail designers.

Bad Bad Teacher

Movie trailers promise that both Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz will soon amuse us with their antics as drunken teachers. Maybe only working teachers closely watch how teachers are portrayed on film.  But the devolution of Hollywood fantasies about the classroom coincides with real-world contempt for teaching and learning that will cost the U.S. dearly.

Not just individual burned-out teachers, but teachers as a group are the object of attack in Waiting for Superman, a reality-show style “documentary,” that casts CEO Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone as a caped crusader. That is because his semi-private school, a favorite of corporate funders, is purportedly the opposite of public schools with unionized teachers. Doctors, lawyers, accountants and electricians have an ethical obligation to certify the expertise of their peers and bargain collectively.  Teachers who want to retain the same principle, in this much-praised film that has inspired Washington to reproduce its strategy, are presented as free-loading obstructionist bureaucrats. Have teachers become less admired than lawyers?

Yet if groups of teachers are craven, how is the lone, devoted, rebel-teacher, the one who stands up to outdated educational bureaucracy, faring these days?  We’ve come a long way from Blackboard Jungle, To Sir with Love, or even Lean on Me or Stand and Deliver. Today the violent teachers of those movies would be jailed for assault, not vindicated by turning the lives of gang-youth toward gainful employment.

Perhaps tough love has morphed into self-esteem training, if the Hillary Swank film Freedom Writers is representative. But despite good intentions and a distant inspiration by a true story, Freedom Writers was a flop compared to Half Nelson. In that film, Ryan Gosling teaches Marxist dialectical materialism to his students to empower them. As one might today expect of such a subversive, Gosling’s character also happens to be a crack addict. The two-fisted tough-love mentor now only harms himself as a tame substance abuser. 

Self-medication might be an understandable reaction to the actual material dialectic of U.S. education in the last half-century. During the Cold War school-building boom of the 60s and 70s, other accelerations took place. The arms, engineering and space race neatly coincided with the demographic explosion of the Baby Boom. Every Boomer, then, wanted to be credentialed, which created a thriving market in degree-dilution. Jobs that once required a high-school degree ratcheted up to require a college degree. (In the Julia Roberts film, Tom Hanks, despite excellence in his job, is fired and goes to college to credential-up.) During the same period, the actual achievement of U.S. students slid down a slope when compared to that of other nations, particularly in reading, writing, math and social sciences.

Diving into the bottle may look good if one is cast as a cog in a machine turning out increasingly numerous degrees that signify less and less. The movie-cousin of the rebel-teacher is the rebel-detective, a hard-drinking outsider who battles a corrupt system.

Portraying teachers as embittered outsiders has been very popular, perhaps because teachers have an inconvenient habit of teaching the history of state politics in the classroom. Consider that recently New York, New Jersey and Wisconsin state legislatures decided, after the bad investments they made went south, to make up the difference by reneging on promised teacher (and other public worker) benefits. Voters love that idea. It turns out that despite how expensive and powerful teachers are supposed to be, they don’t have the public support or the resources to defend their own contracts.

George W. Bush’s and Barak Obama’s administrations have met the challenges of an oversupply of degrees and the decrease in educational quality with a smoke-stack economy answer. If we restyle “No Child Left Behind” as a “Race to the Top,” the strategy still assumes that education is like any other manufacturing enterprise. Centrally standardized benchmarks and frequent tests will boost quality. Such a view of education is fascinating from graduates of Columbia, Yale, and Harvard, which are all branded as places that nurture the one-of-a-kind excellence and entrepreneurial inventiveness of their students. 

In any case, an ever tighter focus on testing as the gold-standard of product (student), and increasingly, teacher quality, is the new normal. Life is full of tests, but many of them are not in blue books or susceptible to theoretical solutions. Back to teachers: how much affection, respect and inspiration can the teacher as test-preparer and administrator generate?

The nations that are winning the global competition in education do test frequently. More importantly, they combine testing with an emphasis on academic subjects and a passion for enquiry, give little attention to sports and school-social events, and insist on small-class size, instruction until 5pm and short vacation breaks. 

Shockingly, those nations also instituted large government investments in education, raised teacher salaries, and constructed teacher-development programs that attracted elite members of their societies. Winners in the education race also tend to make work-experience related to school intense, demanding and academically challenging, something proprietary colleges are positioned well to do.

But let’s return to movies. Slick films by John Hughes have not helped. The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off  all promise that buying the coolest products and undergoing a style makeover are way better than any academic accomplishment. That fit the times. When production and consumption was perceived as a viable real world educational model, fantasies that the champion consumer was also the unappreciated champion student took hold. 

Once the customer-student was a hero, the star of Legally Blonde could crash Harvard. Yet before Reese Witherspoon played a charming and intelligent fetishist of pink, Thorsten Veblen’s conspicuous consumer in heels, she portrayed a devious and driven conniver in a great film about venality in students and teachers, Election. Her earlier first role was simply the dark side of the second. 

Facebook was devised as a money-making machine from the beginning, marketing fellow students to one another based on their sex appeal. But The Social Network invented a fantasy in which the obnoxious hero only slowly realizes the consumer potential of exploiting an invention initiated by others. Twin streams of intellectual theft and classmates-as-commodities became a river-flood of cash.   

The late arrival of concern for education of the data-marketing barons Bill Gates, entertainment baron George Lukas, and even charitable efforts by Facebook, miraculously timed to offset bad publicity from The Social Network, have the potential to do a great good. Sometimes the data-marketing barons have simply tossed dollars at school systems. Sometimes they have funded political lobbying to privatize education. But their initiatives are likely to mature. The precedent is the educational efforts of the smoke-stack robber barons Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller, which eventually benefited education when the organizations they founded hired seasoned teachers as well as leaders recruited to overturn the status quo. 

Yet now that the fantasy of education as high-end shopping has been inculcated for two generations, it would take a great deal to revitalize the tradition of education as a forum for hard-won discovery, a realm apart from instant gratification.

Let’s wish the characters that Julia Roberts and Cameron Diaz portray well as they rediscover the joys of sobriety, doing their jobs, and, one can expect, finding romance. There are a few pockets of education that are not predicated on an assembly line, thank goodness, even if now movies cast the teachers, not the students, as the ones who must be redeemed. One can tune in South Park or The Simpsons to see the raunchy redoubt of education as liberation.

--Robert Clark          

Further Reading:

Rankings are dubious (particularly for business schools). Here is a selection of a few, but they must be weighed for the agenda of the group doing the ranking, methodology (often flawed by gathering information from the universities themselves), and scrutinized for several years to see if schools rise or fall with improbable rapidity. 

In addition, as a rule of thumb, rankings are only meaningful within a particular discipline, such as school-psychology. Rankings of whole colleges and universities are highly suspect, even for “general education.”

Probably the most reliable “ranking” within the U.S., is published by the National Research Council (NRC). Their Report provides data-driven assessments of doctoral programs across the U.S.

http://www.nap.edu/rdp/.  Other NRC publications evaluate U.S. education in the context of other nations.

International University Rankings

Newsweek

http://onlineuniversityrankings.org/rankings-by-country/world-international-university-rankings-2010/

The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/us-falls-in-world-education-rankings_n_793185.html

The Times (UK)

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2010-2011/reputation-rankings.html

ARWU (Institute of Higher Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

http://www.arwu.org/aboutARWU.jsp

The Central Intelligence Agency report on expenditures on education as percent of GDP

(The U.S. is ranked #43)

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2206rank.html

International School Data

National Center for Education Statistics (data from various countries)

http://nces.ed.gov/partners/internat.asp

UNESCO data on pre- and post-secondary educational attainment

http://www.uis.unesco.org/ev.php?ID=2867_201&ID2=DO_TOPIC

from The World Bank

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK:20573961~menuPK:282404~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:282386,00.html

Improving Schools

A California lawmaker and former professor of education with an international focus, Mike Honda, discusses his ideas:

http://foundasian.org/2011/03/mike-honda-schools/

How Finland, a tiny country, but at the top of international comparisons of education, improved their schools

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/070318/26education.htm

The McKinsey consulting firm’s report on how nations can turn around their schools, and how one size does not fit all:

http://knowledgeworks.org/worldoflearning/2010/12/the-mckinsey-report/

A report by the Annenberg Foundation on how collaboration and idea-sharing can improve secondary schools

http://www.annenberginstitute.org/products/TSIA.php

 

 

 

 

My Meeting With An Ambassador

Many years ago, I read the book Windmills of the Gods. The heroine of the book was an Ambassador. I remember sitting on the beach and exclaiming aloud, "This would be my perfect job.  You deal with world issues by day and then host elegant dinner parties wearing glamorous gowns and host world leaders by night!"  I've long aspired to that type of global role. Alas, that career goal has eluded me.

But I was fortunate enough, yesterday, to meet Ambassador-At-Large, Women's Global Issues, Ambassador Verveer. I do some work in conjunction with Executives Without Borders, specifically on a project called Nanhi Kali. The project was started by the Mahindra Foundation and directs its efforts to aiding female children in India and helping them to go to school. Nanhi Kali provides school uniforms, meals, books and sundry items that are out of reach for many of the poor in India. The principle that education will be most valuable to the economic development of India, and the merits of educating female school children are well-documented.         

Ambassador Verveer visited India last year and was introduced to the details of Nanhi Kali’s efforts. She visited a Nanhi Kali school in Mumbai and saw firsthand the pride and sheer joy of young girls who've been enabled to attend school. Nanhi Kali stands for "little bud" and Ambassador Verveer saw firsthand how these "little buds" were flourishing.

Ambassador Verveer’s enthusiasm about the project was palpable in our meeting: she had infectious energy, exuberance, and excitement. She has put making Nanhi Kali prominent on the agenda at the famous Davos Conference of world political and economic leaders on her “to do” list. For me and my classes, I’m thinking through campaign ideas for the organization, such as  “Get Girls Going.” I’m looking forward to brainstorming further with my “girls collective” to think through how we can make the communications “sing.”

I very much dig the title "Professor Diamond."  But what I'm really jonesing for is to be "Ambassador Diamond." Who knows?  A girl can dream can't she?

-- Heidi Diamond

Further Reading

U.S. State Department page for Ambassador Melanne Verveer
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/biog/122075.htm

The Executives Without Borders http://executiveswithoutborders.org/

Nanhi Kali
http://nanhikali.org

Fall Fashion Trends for Kids

LIM College Marketing professor Jasmine Bellamy produced a segment on fall fashion trends for children featuring stylist Pamela Watson. The video originally appeared on Jasmine's blog Chocolate Chip.

The Social Network

Sorry.  Facebook corporation did not attract an avalanche of venture capitalists because it was cool. The subtribes of the Harvard College tribes are not actually very cool. Linux? Cool. Living a Second Life? Cool. Reviving stereotypes about young people? Even in a world gone mad with franchises, brands, and other tools of conformity, that is not cool. 

This follows up my post about The Social Network during the hype phase, before I saw it at the New York Film Festival screening.  The film will do well on ROI, and some take it for an insightful look at 20 year olds today.  But let’s hope a little rage at the machine still survives.

There are a few slim inventive elements to the film. It may not be a feat worth achieving, but David Fincher made the tourist-ready picturesque yards of Harvard menacingly noir-ish at night. Yet the real menace of the film is deeper and far more terrifying. High school might last forever.

Here is my nightmare of the pitch The Social Network gave to the money people before production. “It’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets Election meets Slackers meets Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle with a hint of Glee, High School Musical, the new version of 90210 and a hint of Gossip Girl thrown in!”

All the generic high school stereotypes, more those from 1950s B-movies than later versions, run through The Social Network. It is puzzling that a writer as talented as Aaron Sorkin has been praised highly for the script. Arrogant rich jocks. Check. Brilliant nerd who gets rich. Check—slight modern tweak. Gradual revelation that a woman with an assertive sex life is actually a psycho. Check.

The Harvard yards are not dark because sadistically difficult and probably meaningless tasks are required of students, as in the Harvard classic The Paper Chase. They are not dark in mourning for the end of the sugary romance of Love Story. This gloom is a zombie-sheltering darkness, appropriate for Jesse Eisenberg’s remarkable performance as someone both enervated and tensile, a perverse triumph.

If 20 year olds today are different from those of the past—and every generation is —they should be unhappy to be depicted in roles so well market-tested.  Couldn’t there be one character who goes beyond a formula?

The least cool scene in the film is when a pair of crew-rowing twins, Harvard classmates who inspired, hired and were manipulated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, meet with the President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, to complain about being misled. 

There is a fun irony.  Summers—who was drummed out of Harvard (and onto the Obama economics team) because of remarks that enraged female Harvard scientists, African-American literature specialists—and many other faculty members, unknowingly helps Zuckerberg by insulting and waving away the twins.  In reality-land, tactlessness can unite one’s enemies. In this fantasy of college and corporate life, arrogance is supposed to be a sign of supreme, if misplaced, self-confidence.  Well, sometimes. OK, I lied.  Perhaps it is cool that in one place, a demanding university, people can be blunt, extreme, and not sugarcoat hard truths.

Like all other adults in the movie, Summers is supposedly clueless about the potential financial value of Facebook (even though Summers points out to the angry hoodwinked young athletes that he served as Secretary of the Treasury). Hmmm, it must have been 20 year olds that supplied all that venture capital to Facebook because Justin Timberlake poured on the charm and coolness.

Adults, you see, just don’t get the new world of blind ambition, loyalty only to oneself, delusions of grandeur, and dreams of wealth and glamour that have hypnotized the young who aspire to zombie-hood. Old folks have never heard of such things before, maybe because they are uncool. They don’t know stereotypes about young people either, and did not live  through and past them. The Gilded Age, the Robber Barons, a business cycle of boom and bust, and ruthless monopolies have never been heard of in American before.

-- Robert Clark

 

Further Reading

Business writer Joe Nocera finds The Facebook Effect may be no more revealing than The Accidental Billionaires 

If you don’t like Harvard Love Story, the Korean TV series (filmed at U. of Southern California) try these

If a more edgy fantasy about the web and social networks attracts you, see the movie Catfish, which, of course, has a Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/catfishmovie

I'm Teaching As Fast As I Can

If you don’t get the reference to the classic 1982 film, I’m Dancing As Fast As I Can in the title of this post, please Google it. In the interim, you may drop off sedatives in an unmarked envelope on my desk. Like Jill Clayburgh, my lips are sealed.

As we approach mid-terms students often express their anxiety about “stress”, that feeling of being overwhelmed, unprepared, and ill-equipped to complete everything on time. Welcome to my world.

On the face of it I teach a few classes, (technically five) which equal nineteen hours. Basic mathematics tells us that leaves lots of spare time (twenty-one hours) to grade papers, meet with students, prepare for class, work on that pesky PowerPoint presentation and maybe even walk over to Bryant Park for lunch and indulge in a lemon cupcake from Crumbs. La de dah. Let me ask just one simple question…what planet do you live on?

I run from pillar to post. I tote books, class projects and papers from Fifth Avenue to Maxwell Hall and back again with such regularity that I know Miss Clarisse, the poor undocumented Jamaican woman who, rain or shine, sells the NewYork Post and New York Daily News between Cosi and the side entrance to Grand Central. Clarisse says she feels sorry for me. Now I know I have hit bottom, but like a true academic addict, I am in a state of denial.

It’s true God created the world in seven days (actually six, he rested the seventh) so I should be able to get a lot done with my twenty-one hours of “free time.” FYI: the next person who calls it free time had better not be in pie throwing range.

The Serenity Prayer is not helping me too much this week.  I don’t have the wisdom to know the difference. Is your week like mine? I’m preparing for mid-terms, but I swear to you the semester only began two weeks ago. Was I in a blackout? But wait.  Student Surveys are also coming up. Just what I need…students telling me that class isn’t enough fun. I begin to feel the rush, but first a reminder to self: draft notes from ATC Committee Meeting (held on my day off) for Dept Chair, including a report on Google Sketch Up progress. But first, place on the calendar that the next Faculty Council is coming up. What do I have for the agenda? Maybe I’ll just observe. Do I smell a sub-committee? What is the first step again? “Admit I’m powerless over my circumstances and that my life has become unmanageable.” Great only 11 more steps to go, but another list of things to do. Before that, I must not forget to attend the Faculty Development Trainings on “Blog, Blog, Blog,” “Blackboard” (which I’m appallingly behind on) and “PowerPoint”, lest I forget that the Brown Bag Lunch on “Collaborative Caseloads for Millennials: To Be or Not to Be” is also coming up.

That’s strange…only 36 emails received since this morning. Is my email working correctly? Why isn’t anyone writing me? Should I contact IT? Wait a minute; I do see the fifth reminder for the President’s Award Nomination for Outstanding Faculty is due. I did get that done, but now I’m thinking…should I nominate someone else too? No, it will be 1968 all over again and Katharine Hepburn will tie with Barbra Streisand. I can’t live through that twice.

I still have thirteen of the seventeen Senior Capstone site evaluations to do. Each one takes about an hour, except I will need to allow extra time to get out to Greenwich, Connecticut, for that one, and get over to Long Island City for the other. There goes the lemon cupcake at Bryant Park. (Oh, the snarky things I could say.) Oh Damn! I’d love to get involved with the 3^rd Annual Leah Ryan Benefit Production, but it coincides with my Academic Enhancement class at HB Studios. Is it Thursday? Bergdorf’s is redoing their windows. I need to photograph them, maybe I’ll skip lunch. It will be like dieting. Which reminds me, (I don’t know why) that I need to focus on writing my scholarly article. Performance reviews are coming up.

But first, and this I really must not forget, I must follow up with my students to get then to go to the Larry Laslo Event at The Gramercy Arts Club on Thursday. But first, the deadline for the Metro Card Conversion is coming up. What is my faculty code? Is it the same as my faculty ID?  No? Where is my pay stub? Now I’m having a Valley of the Dolls moment. I need to double my dosage why? Because I have to get up early tomorrow morning to rework a proposal, and "I have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and SPARKLE, Neely, SPARKLE!"

I’m a heel. Student Life is running a great series for National Hispanic Month and I’ve missed every one. But first, a former exchange student is returning to New York and looking for a fashion internship. She was an exceptional student and would make a great intern. OK, but who do I know who can help her? Here’s a real Sophie’s Choice.  Do I grade papers here at LIM College or bring them home to grade after the season premiere of Dexter? What’s the trade off? Can I explain the blood stains on my student’s copy of “The Store of the Future…Today?”

I’d start an AA (Academics Anonymous) meeting here at LIM, except I just couldn’t bear another meeting.

-- Ron Knoth

The Chronicle of Higher Education on time management for professors

http://chronicle.com/article/Do-You-Really-Not-Have-the/45780

A Google search returns many articles about teacher burnout

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&expIds=25981,26807,26885,26993,27006&sugexp=ldymls&xhr=t&q=teacher+burnout&cp=11&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=g4g-o1&aql=&oq=teacher+bur&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=d0ac9ec56b61efa1

A life coach who specializes in working with academics http://www.academicproductivity.com/2006/fooling-the-reactive-mind-mark-forsters-time-management-system/

 

 

 

 

The Facebook Movie Hype

If you build a machine of 500 million potential customers by age 26, maybe it’s only natural that big name directors, producers and writers will want to tell your story on the silver screen and cash in on that too.

But apparently the founders of Facebook do not like the movie about them very much. They would like the film to praise their corporation even more uncritically, according to Yahoonews.com.  

Yet perhaps it would be better if we were honest that the real purpose of Facebook, from its founding, has been to sell things. The stroke of its brilliance was to sell people to other people, an activity that earlier in history has received some notably bad press. 

Not knowing  who your friends are

Both times that I have seen the trailer for The Social Network, the upcoming movie about Facebook, someone sitting in the theatre next to me has shown that they know little about the corporation. “Did they get in trouble for creating it?” one said. Another almost whistled, “500 million users!”

Seeing a movie in a theatre is of course in itself a pre-web thing to do. Maybe it is not surprising that some fellow audience members were behind the technology curve.

However, bad things happen when people do not know basic facts about a corporation that sells information about them to marketers, influences their family life and activities, and has helped to redefine friendship and community.

Yet understanding is not likely to come soon, let alone critical thinking, about Facebook. The Facebook Effect, a book by David Kirkpatrick, is essentially a long advertisement for the corporation and praise for one of the cofounders, Marc Zuckerberg. Weaker books like The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich tried to jazz up the story of the lawsuits and bad blood between those who started Facebook into an exciting drama. They fall flat because the most of the real issues are technical, complex, and none of the main actors are obvious villains indicted or jailed. None of them are heroes either.

Could it also be that companies of a certain size are also more or less invulnerable? Is a popular technology seen as inevitable? Resistance is futile. Maybe too, Facebook founders are of a kind that no one likes to criticize: they were Harvard students who speak fairly well about how they have spread connectedness and awareness around the globe to the benefit of all humanity.

Facebook at LIM College

When we discussed Facebook in News and Reporting class at LIM College last year, students were surprised to learn that a game called Facebook was played in Boston in 1900, and that today’s “social network” has much in common with it.  The game one hundred and ten years ago involved pictures of the guests who visited one’s home,  a scrapbook to which guests contributed, and journal entries by hosts and visitors. Today people still post news of their parties, trips, family and pets in the modern Facebook, along with quotations and their everyday doings along with music they steal free of charge. Many use Facebook as an online, more or less public scrapbook, and it doubles as a worldwide diary too.

Some students in News Reporting mentioned that Facebook broke up relationships, invaded their privacy, and put them in an awkward relationship with people that they disliked. Others said that Facebook helped them get in touch with family and long-lost friends. But they grew a bit downhearted when just how shallow such relationships are came to light. Two students mentioned discomfort about trusting a corporation with making up rules about friendship and community. Facebook helped to popularize the idea of friends one does not know.  

Most observers seem mesmerized by how quickly the company grew and its triumph in squashing rivals like MySpace, Orkut (India) and the nearly forgotten Friendster. To them the story is all about business and the Benjamins.

The Legendary Formula

People who like memoirs and literature recognize that the story of Facebook is currently being told according to a worn-out pattern: the rags-to-riches story. To freshen that tale, one can blend in a little Revenge of the Nerds, a bit about saving the world, and some shots of ivy-covered buildings. 

The story of Facebook for a pop culture audience might stay at that level of fantasy for some time. The Pew and Annenberg media institutes and other serious analysts of media might be wise to post a more accurate story on a Facebook page. Just how powerful the corporation may become is not yet truly understood.

What’s easy to miss is the real genius of Facebook in claiming to fulfill basic human desires: to connect, to lessen loneliness, with just a hint of the possibility of finding romance. Is the corporation doing well on those scores? There have been studies showing lower grades, more social isolation, and a rising number of divores in which Facebook is a factor.

The role of one of the most successful brands in the world, Harvard, in giving Facebook a halo also cannot be forgotten. Anyone skeptical about the genuine value of the Harvard brand will enjoy the book Branded Nation, by James B. Twitchell, which explains how brand marketing has replaced an earlier kind of marketing that was based on the quality, mission and purpose of a business or institution. Branding can be done nobly or deceptively and we have to wait awhile to see which road Facebook chooses.  Early signs are not promising.

That Facebook exists primarily to sell goods and services and mine data about consumers might be easy to overlook with Harvard and the desire to connect in the mix. The wealth of the founders is “awesome.”  Let’s hope some viewers see through that.

--Robert Clark

Further Reading:

Before release, the Facebook movie has Oscar buzz because David Fincher (director), Alan Sorkin (writer) and Scott Rudin (producer) are involved, according to L.A. Times.com:
http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldderby/2010/08/the-social-network-facebook-film-review-oscars-news-story.html

Will Facebook and Twitter level the playing field, or will money still talk loudest in politics?
http://www.socialtimes.com/2010/07/politics-as-usual-facebook-fans-advertising-budgets-and-the-familiarity-of-new-media/

Facebook wants to know where you are, whenever and wherever you are
http://www.policeone.com/social-media-for-cops/articles/2474179-Facebook-feature-will-follow-users-locations/

Today's Fragrance Industry: A Mountain of Mediocrity

I am writing this to encourage those who are interested in the fragrance industry to approach the art of perfumery with integrity and a desire to return to the artistry that has long vanished from the craft.  If you wish to enter this highly lucrative but often overlooked field, research and study the fascinating work of the great perfumers, bottle designers, and marketers of the past.  Become inflamed by their daring and refuse to accept the mountain of mediocrity that currently resides at every fragrance counter in the world. What follows may seem like a harsh appraisal, but my purpose is a call to revive an art that has been part of human history since its earliest cultures.

There was a time in the not so distant past when the creation of a fragrance was an art form equal to any great oil painting, sculpture, concerto, or play.  The time, effort, creativity, inspiration, and science that went into the creation of the scent, bottle, outer packaging, and for lack of better terms, positioning and marketing was an intuitive, agonizing, and ultimately cathartic experience that involved hundreds if not thousands of conceptual drawings, recipes for the "juice" and revisions until the final masterpiece was completed.  While we know that ancient Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Romans all used essential oils for hygiene as well as to create sexual allure (not unlike today), according to Michael Edwards, author of the book Perfume Legends and an expert whose blog is widely respected in the industry, truly modern perfumery did not come into practice until the middle of the 19th century in Europe.Yet over the past 150 years we have witnessed the birth and death of the art of perfumery.  Other arts, even those older than perfumery, continue to evolve upward and new work is often touched by genius. The demise of the art of creating scents, however, if one reason had to be given, would be the result of the sin of greed.

The wealth created from this sector of the beauty business is the closest thing that exists to an evergreen money tree.  Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren, Thierry Mugler, Dior and countless other brands would not exist today if it were not for the profits from the fragrance sector of their empires.  Licensing income from perfumes enables those companies to design their clothing.  Without their fragrance business, they would be bankrupt.

Such greed has spread to every corner of the industry.  An endless parade of celebrities desire a bit of immortality through the creation of a fragrance named for them.  In most cases, they are simply selling their name to an anonymous company for easy cash and yet another way to compensate for the fleetingness of their careers as performers or public figures.  Fashion designers have either already created one or several perfumes, are in the process of creating their first or tenth, or wish they could rise to a level of fame at which some cosmetic company would be willing to fund the development of their egocentric signature fragrance.

Cosmetic companies churn out fragrances at an alarming rate in an attempt to hide the fact that brands are dying quicker than they can make them. They reuse existing bottles to save on tooling costs, dilute their brand equity by bringing out flanker brands that are mere shadows of second-rate originals, and consistently reduce the quality of the fragrance.  Fragrance houses such as Quest are disappearing or being bought up by a few mega-corporations, according to industry observer L. Prance, who writes for the industry website Cosmetics Design-europe.com (Prance [2006]).  Those that survive are forced to keep up with the demand by pushing their perfumers to create within impossible timeframes, turn out inferior products, sell one company's rejects to another, or copy existing successful fragrances with minor changes.  Even iconic fine fragrances are no longer the product they once were.  In many cases cosmetics companies have replaced the percentage of natural essential oils with less costly chemical equivalents.

Another reason for the decline of quality is the consumer's fault.  The rise of the bath and body category-where single-fruit scents and simple ingredients dominate shower gels and lotions and spawned a huge business in body spray-has dumbed-down the nose of today's consumer.  If bath and body products do not smell pretty like an apple or vanilla, they have little chance of success with a large segment of the consumer market (based upon research done by the Fragrance Foundation in 2009).

The industry has become so saturated that retailers often unload their old stock on drug stores.  If you come across a brand in a drug store or flea market that is usually found exclusively in department stores it is either old, stolen goods, or counterfeit.  Aged products no longer smell the way the perfumer intended. Time changes the percentage relationship between the alcohol and raw ingredients as well as the olfactive nature of the raw ingredients.  Counterfeit products have been known to use human urine as a preservative. 

The music industry and publishing industries have had to migrate to the web and recreate themselves. So, huge changes in a whole field are possible, even though they require time, rethinking and major investments.  The chance that humans will not want to please themselves and attract others through scent in the future is tiny.  For entrepreneurs and new members of the cosmetics industry, however, it is important to realize how severe the challenges are-as well as to recognize the enormous financial and career rewards in this time-honored craft.

-Terry Burstein, Fashion Department, LIM College

Further Reading:

Edwards, M. (1996). Perfume Legends. Levallois, France: HM Editions.

Fragrance Foundation (2009). Market research. The Fragrance Foundation.  Retrieved February 17, 2010 from http://www.fragrancefoundation.org.uk/market-research.htm

Prance, L. (2006, November). Givaudan set to top fragrance market with purchase of quest.  Cosmetics design - Europe.com.  Retrieved February 17, 2010