[Schmatte is Yiddish for a rag or worthless thing, but we've adopted it to mean, roughly, street talk, patches and snatches of public conversation taken from the great electronic weave. We use them for our reasonings and musings. We have to do it that way, since, after all, we are outsiders. And we wouldn't have it any other way in this town.]
by Jerome du Bois, with Catherine King
1. Artlink's Wearable Art Auction. We don't want to sound like we're beating the batik down to bare threads against the washing rock, but: what happened to the Wearable Art Auction 2005? If we visit the Artlink website we notice that they're still advertising it (though it supposedly happened October 22nd), with an active PayPal link, too. But we cannot run down any photos or lists of contributing artists, or anything else about this crucial fundraiser for Artlink.
[And nobody out there will send us an honest email about it. Hmmm . . .]
Elsewhere on Artlink's website, we read this criterion in their Mission Statement:
Facilitating events such as First Friday, Art Detour and Wearable Art Auction --intended to grow arts awareness and advocacy.
How can you begin to advocate activities of which you're not aware?
These are the sponsors of Artlink, from their home page:
We'd like to sincerely thank our sponsors for their support of our efforts. They include New Times, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, The Arts & Business Council of Greater Phoenix, Copper Square Downtown Phoenix, the Friends of the Phoenix Public Library, Phoenix College, Arizona Arts Supply, Bentley Gallery and Stephen Rodgers.
Perhaps they should rethink their sponsorships.
2. Fashion Marketing. It astounds us that Angela Johnson can teach Fashion Marketing, and the Art Institute of Phoenix offer such a course --to her or anyone-- when they both ignore the power, flexibility, and reach of the internet, which can now be delivered, in real time, to the palm of one's hand.
Instead of posting photos, videos, liveblogging and podcasting in a dynamic, ongoing way during the week, Angela Johnson and Labelhorde have surrendered strategic control of her brand to local newspapers and magazines and a photographer, Steve Morrow, who finally squeezed out some pictures a few days ago on his site. (Phosphor Photography. More pending, he says. Waaaiting.) Well, the ones he posted have no captions. (Oh, but they do sport his nice vertical watermark.) We have no idea who made the things we're looking at. Is this smart marketing? Is this striking when the metal is warm, as Poirot would say?
[In fashion expertise, I'm far behind Catherine, but I pay attention to whatever she points out to me. And I say that no outfit or ensemble I saw came close to Catherine's own Psychedlic Leprechaun. Catherine will have her own comments in a separate post analyzing the online images. Coming soon.]
Instead of relinquishing control of both the timing and the crucial visual aspect of her business to editors and photographers with other agendas --after all, she's marketing things to look at -- Angela Johnson should have hired two photographers and a videographer to cover the Ball, and someone to person a blog dedicated to the whole week. And to heck with Steve Morrow and azcentral.com and JAVA and YES and the Phoenix Fashion Week website.
As of now, if anybody asked what happened that Week, Labelhorde and AIP are reduced to . . . uhhhh . . . you shoulda been there. And pointing to a couple of squibs. (Over on the Labelhorde Forum, everybody is sooo pathetically grateful for the media crumbs. Lookee us. And they rilly rilly should cut down on the exclamation points.)
Instead of being able to say, "You ask what happened? Check this out," a few fingertaps, and voila: 250 pictures with captions of the whole night, with video and whatever you want.
But no; and nobody in a remote location --Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, even Central Phoenix-- has any idea what went on. Unless they hunt and peck. Unless they check out Phosphor, for example; but how would they know to do that? and, once there, what to make of what they see?
And why are we doing Ms. Johnson's fashion marketing for her? Because we're the little boy, pointing, pointing, pointing.
There's a lot to point at. And the klute, for example, misses the point of the old saying, "When I point my finger at the moon, don't mistake my finger for the moon." He posted yesterday, in nonresponse to The Muslim Follies, dodging his Islamic dhimmitude:
Nice Try, duhBois.
But no dice. You get no links, your sitemeter remains stagnant! Oh, and labelhorde's big write up in New Times, AZCentral.com, and the AZ Republic must be really, really sticking in your craw.
We already told this guy and his crew to stay away, but he's still creeping around. (I check out his website because I do regular pest patrol with anyone who's hassled us. And he hassled us first.) We'd rather have no readers than those readers. And then the usual flat-footed, unimaginative, and irrelevant jab, which misses completely.
Like most people stuck in the 20th Century, the klute thinks you must passively wait until the big media get around to noticing you, instead of managing your own profile. Talk about duh. And he already wrote somewhere that he neither knew nor cared anything about fashion. I believe it. So his note just confirms his creepiness: it isn't about Labelhorde or fashion, it's about us. Leave us alone. Mecca's thataway; go bang your head, dhimmi.
3.Phoenix Fashion Week Website. First, look at the horrible illustration on the home page. A neck like a giraffe with goiters; a twisted body with tortured, anorexic limbs. As for the outfit, there's no sense of the fabric, or-- but wait: why have an illustration in the first place? Why not have four full-motion video windows, which could be paused by the mouse and linked to various ongoing activities during the Week? (Part of the reason: Morrigan Interactive, the web designer, is pretty tame itself.
The website will be up for a year. Why not start updating the links in the Calendar to reflect what happened?
4. YES, No, Maybe So. I hold today's (11/25/05) print copy of YES in my hands. It does not correspond to the cover, the layout and the emphasis on the website. Interesting. In the print version, YES covers what attendees were wearing to Fashion Week events. The online article covers the Fashion Ball, which occurred on 11/12. The online article is dated 11/18, but I'll swear it wasn't there on the 21st, when I first began this schmatte. (Angela Johnson makes first note of it on the 22nd.) And here it is today, 11/25. Somebody's doing the time warp, anyway.
I'll leave the rest of the fashion analysis to Catherine. I only want to say, in closing, one thing about the article I just linked. The article was written by Kalea Yoshida, and includes this sentence:
But Brian Hill's "fashion or die" rhinestone w*fe b**t*rs summed up the night.
I've run across the term I've censored from time to time, and I'm shocked every time I see it. It is unconscionable that Kalea Yoshida should use it, and that an Arizona Republic editor should blithely let it go by. It's misogynistic and cruel, but they don't care.
(We've also had to censor f*m*l* h*m*l*at*on, because of the creeps of the Rebarb, male and female. But we must make these objections anyway, in the name of all that's civilized.)
Posted by Jerome at November 25, 2005 11:15 AM | TrackBack