Tag: Bruce Willis

Clothes and costumes

Just about now, we start thinking Halloween costumes.

We have tried on cotton, polyester, paper, fur, animal skin (leather) and raw meat.

At work, the dress code has changed as well since IBM went “soft” (ware).

Gone are the blue suit, white shirt and red tie. Who wants to upstage their CEO’s at Facebook, Google, and Apple (turtleneck).

So the working men are out shopping for “casual”.

And the sales clerk adapts: “Do you want the I-pad carry-on with it?”

Salesmen are facing an identity crisis. Gone are the 50’s hats, and the 80’s suspenders.

Now, with robot wrestlers, robot cops and robot ads (pop up), the next outfit will probably be Star Wars’s.

Clothes don’t make men (appearance matters, though).

But it certainly goes along way to buff up what’s already there (or cover up some tattoos ).

If I were to choose, I would pick Mission Impossible for this Halloween.

In fact, they did just that at Dancing with the Stars last night.

First, it’s Hollywood that set the standard (for music and fashion).

Then, TV followed in (dancing) step. Finally, we saw tie-in merchandise and toys.

Hopefully, the raw-meat-as-outerwear trend doesn’t catch on (Bruce Willis appeared with a raw-meat toupee on Letterman’s Late Show).

In fact, the go-casual trend fits right in with the digital generation.

Poor dry-cleaner chain! (who needs their T-shirts dry-cleaned).

Now, even brief cases and PCs  don’t sell. Just sleeping bags,  T-shirts and tablets.  Campus life forever at Google Plex. No clear break at Facebook’s Timeline. One infinite loop in the here and now (A/C, 24/7 news cycle and global office with backroom in the Cloud).  There is talk that Mark Zuckerberg will be the next Steve Jobs (after all, they both were on TIME magazine cover). In other words, the (turtleneck) long sleeves has just been replaced by the short sleeves. Just don’t skateboard in every time you launch a product (Google). Gaga would have preferred to be carried in, inside an egg, with hatch opened. Ham and egg breakfast-wear.

the Me in a changing We

NYT columnist sums it up and I have nothing to add to it, maybe except the cross-cultural angle about change or perish.

I hear Yesterday’s lyric ” I am half a man I used to be”. ..

Technological leap forward (surround sound, anyone?). Star Wars itself has to keep up with its own 3-D version.

Google Eric Schmidt says “there is always the OFF button”, implying that we, human, are still in control (or IQ>AI).

Yet, how many of us even want to turn it off, just to again boot up.

Semantically, “friend” is a new definition for “contact”.

Acronyms are too long. We speak in short bursts “3-D”, “4-G” , “Hi-def” etc…

Stephen Cannell, Hollywood prolific screenwriter, recently passed away. The obituary shows him sitting  next to an IBM Selectric (not I-Pad).

That generation (Norman Mailer, Andy Rooney …) has passed away.

Raw meat, raw man (BTW, Bruce Willis appeared on David Letterman, wearing a raw-meat toupee. He even dared Letterman to taste it).

Talking about paradox: the more society changes and moves on to the “cloud” somewhere, the more likely we long for the real and raw stuff of “yesterday”. (as of this edit, there is an op-ed in the NYT about French’s Bonjour Tristesse).

I never understood people who collect antique, until I put on Lennon’s Dream # 9 (he might be dead, but his dream is still alive).

Yesterday, I waited for an oil change.  So I sat with my second of the Tatoo-girl trilogy (adult version of Harry Potter). Next to me was a gentleman immersed in his Sony E- reader. And here I was, still in paperback version.

Change or perish. It would be ironic to read “A La Recherche du temp perdu” by Proust, on a Kindle.

And the best book, according to Amazon’s Bezos is The Remains of the Day.

Thank you Mr Cohen of the NYT for a beautiful summation about where we are: at the crossroads of change. And the streets are now paved with conveyor. So even if we stand still,

it still carries us forward, no matter what.

The more we want to stay in place, the more we will have to change.

It is so true of what John Lennon said “life is what happens when you are planning  something else”.