Buddhist Marketer

Worth The 8:33

I take back all snarky comments I’ve ever made about Ukrainian spammers and/or graphic designers.

Very moving, and also intriguing. (How does one develop the playing-with-sand-on-a-lightbox hobby?)

Matty Charles’ new album comes out 10/30

One of my favorite artists in the whole wide world is Matty Charles, whose music was put on my radar as his bassist, Josh Stark, is the oldest son of my ‘god’mother Neal, the ‘N’ in ‘ANP’.  When I lived in Brooklyn, every Sunday evening I’d hop into my Jetta and drive over to Pete’s Candy Store in outer Billyburg to experience the intimate live show.

As a marketer, I know that people are more likely to buy Product X of Quality N if it’s framed against Product Y of Quality Less Than N.  As a human, I love to sing, an experience I treasure all the more for its concomitant demons that I had to slay.  So, here:  you can play this YouTube video while reading the rest of this post.

The song I am singing along to is “Valentine Song” by Matty Charles and The Valentines from their 2003 album Land Beyond the Sea.  The lyrics — and the lyrics are one of the reasons I love Matty’s work so — start out:

Would you be a flower just for me
When the days are short & cold
and I won’t have to face the darkness all alone
if I have you there to hold

* Swoon *!

From his MySpace page (bolding mine):

If you want to know where I’m from, all you need to do is listen to my music. I don’t hold well to the idea of mere geometrical placement but the land is one of long rains and low clouds, stolen from the past and lurching unsteadily towards the future. In fact, the place of my childhood no longer exists. It’s an old brick building that has since crumbled. It’s a framework upon which I hang my thoughts and my feelings but it’s impossible for you to see just as my own vision of it has grown dim and unreliable.

My haunts were junk stores, old movie theatres, used book stores, rooms containing boxes and bins of old records and the people who would hang around looking for something exceptional in those dusty catacombs. Most of it was garbage but occasionally the needle would slip into the groove and colorful flowers of music would grow right out of the speakers. The clock would stop and so would the rain and monotony would cease to exist for a while. Most of my life happened internally and this is how it’s always been.

With any luck, my strategic inclusion of my own novice singing alonging butted up against Matty’s own have made you fall in love with his music too.

I am so grateful for artists like Matty who reach deep inside themselves and place palms out to the universe so that the rest of us can experience the ways in which they see the world.  And when their vantage point seems sympathetic to my own, it makes me feel like

I won’t have to face the darkness all alone.

Come to think of it, I think this is why I write.

Worst. Week. Ever.

Blog post title written by my best friend (holla!).

The title of this photo is “Anittah’s Week 25 Levels of Freedom.”

Pretty, floaty data balloons

I am so sad that I missed this exhibit at MoMA; I’d wanted to see it. Presentations of self in a technology mediated context! Delta between what we claim we want versus what we actually select when given a choice! Variance in desires of demo a, b, c versus 1, 2, 3! Yowza!

Here’s a project by the peeps who brought project We Feel Fine to the universe:

Note that the following picture of yours truly will appear in the upcoming We Feel Fine book. I feel kinda neat-o about that.

I also feel kinda neat-o about the open source of the We Feel Fine data. Statistics class, anyone?

ANITTAH : DATA :: PIG : ____