Me-vision.

This is a close-up of a vinyl sofa I took while I was waiting for my ex to shop for tea. There was a series of these but most of them have been lost along the way. My ex shopped like a California trophy-wife.

I thought the details of that sofa were highly suggestive and wanted to shoot them in a way that would convey their erotic qualities.

My ex thought that was a warped way of thinking about a sofa - or anything. He wanted me to stop it. Ironically, he was, for the most part, all hands all the time - he practically drooled over me, it was repugnant.

I think different ways of looking at the same world make life more interesting. Seeing this sofa in this way is not a personality trait of which I am ashamed. I don't like the fact that we have to pretend the whole world is rated pg. I'm happy to be an adult and I don't think sex is creepy or shameful. For the most part, I think it's healthy.

If, like my IKEA sniffing friend (see deciphering IKEA) or my lacivious ex, you think there's something wrong with me for being me and you feel compelled to try to pressure me into being another kind of person or tell me I don't have the right to take a picture, think a thought or express myself on my own blog- you need to go away. It's a big wide web. I am not objective. I see things the way I see them and I hope you do too.

Focus? What Focus?

These are two things I miss about Ottawa.

and tulips and a perfect latte.

and my very much beloved Pootsy-cat.

Since I decided to focus this blog I have denied myself permission to write.

I changed my mind.

Here are some pictures.

Deciphering Ikea Heights

Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot of press about IKEA. First there was the hub-bub about the change in font in the new catalogue; apparently the IKEA catalogue shift from Then came the story on CBC about an independent film maker who shot a TV series inside an IKEA store in Burbank. It was reported without any critical analysis at all.

From the perspective of a PR pro, this series is like having a press release published as hard news. Sure, the reporter said the series was shot "without the staff's knowledge" and "without permission of the management" but these are phrases that can be used honestly without divulging the fact that corporate headquarters support the project.

Even the most unseasoned reporter should have wondered how it was possible for this series to film four episodes, getting in and out of beds, sitting in displays and filming strangers, chase scenes and clinches all without attracting a ripple of attention.

I thought I sensed another campaign and so decided to ignore it and let it cycle through the web in the same way the Bridezilla and Lonelygirl 115 videos did when they appeared on YouTube. I figured people probably saw it for what it was and my mentioning it would only be restating the obvious and drawing still more attention to the series.

Then IKEA Heights appeared on my friend's Face Book page. He swallowed it whole - I think he wanted to think about the place of consumer culture in most people's lives and he may have seen it as subversive. He is a brilliant man - his intelligence is not at issue. I think what is at work here is a desire to see the possibility of subversive creativity working in the margins of corporate culture. That desire to believe in the magic of the rebel, the allure of the pirate artist, is powerful enough to trump common sense.At first glance it looks like any other ad.

The IKEA Heights logo's similarity to IKEA’s logo is unmistakeable, the blue background of the IKEA sign has been replaced by black, sure but otherwise it looks like a pretty clear trademark infringement to me. My friend believed it. That bothered me. I went to the site and looked at the series. Here is a link: http://www.ikeaheights.com/ Look at it objectively:

First the front page. Unlike the floating Face book logo the IKEA Heights web page is IKEA blue with yellow writing. Swedish flag colors - IKEA colors. The yellow on black logo is displayed to the right; a reinforcement of the link to the logo that appeared on my friend's Face book page. The web page is called ikeahights.com. And there was one more thing that should always raise suspicion on a web page; no place to leave a comment and yet there are comments listed - all positive, like the blurbs on the back of a newly published book.

This could come off looking like an attempt to make a joke about the act of filming the series, an ironic nod to IKEA’s role in the production of the series. However, IKEA is protective of their brand. On September 9 of this year, they won their suit against someone for using the word IKEA as part of their domain name. Here's a link.

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/2009/09/09/Ikea-wins-domain-name-ruling/UPI-65531252528299/

The domain name in question was iloveikea.com Now have a look at episode one: Opening shot - a couple snuggled down in bed. Price tag, visible. Could be an accident, you never know. Cut to - wide shot of IKEA sign, in case you didn't get that it's filmed inside an IKEA store. No reason to do that if you're just a guerrilla filmmaker guy and no reason to allow it to stand if you're the corporate entity who owns the brand unless it serves a purpose.

Close up on the Swedish meatballs sign. Close up on "We're crazy about low prices." If the film maker is trying to be funny about being in IKEA, once is enough and anyway, these signs are on-message for the company's agenda, aren't they?Then there is the pillow scene, the crime boss wanted down pillows but the henchman brings an assortment of colorful cushions filled with polyester. His boss is annoyed because "polyester breathes"

No video screen, regardless of how good its definition may be can discern between polyester and goose down or foam or any other kind of fill. However, not everyone is clear on the selling points of polyester fill, one being, cost and another, apparently, that polyester fill, at least this polyester fill, breathes. Gee - thanks for the information, you can get breathable polyester pillows at IKEA in lots of colors, who knew?

From there, it just goes on and on. The acting is awful, the scripts are not funny enough to raise a smile but the product placement and the idea, as viral, are brilliant. I have shown this video to a couple of other people and they have laughed but what they laughed about was the absurdity of filming a TV series in IKEA and about how awful the acting, shooting and scripting was. Ask them anything about the actual content and they can't remember. Hmmmm

With IKEA Heights, IKEA has launched into a new level of marketing, making pretty good use of web resources that have puzzled other marketers and finding a way to generate income without wasting resources on an untried medium.

Doubtless it is an excellent use of resources even if the film maker was paid from the start and especially if, as people continue to claim, this is a series made by some struggling film maker in California who received no remuneration for his efforts.

With this campaign IKEA avoided the cost of placing ads in any medium. It was carried virally and generated its own press. Most of it looks as though it came free and all of it top tier. The LA Times covered this story, as did CBC, NBC and of course there is all the chatter online. You cannot buy coverage this good.

Even better, all of the press was of the "gee-whiz-isn't-this-great!" variety. Not a critical word was spoken. Just two months previous, IKEA other "viral" campaign tanked in the news. A Vancouver skateboard shop owner complained vociferously to the CBC that IKEA had defaced his property with graffiti as part of a guerrilla ad campaign. (story below)

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/07/29/bc-vancouver-guerilla-ad-campaign.html

Then there is the fact that the series continues to run online making full use of the IKEA name, showing interiors and garnering coverage that is positive if not exactly credible. I know I have said this already but I feel it should be emphasized, IKEA is a sophisticated corporate entity with an elaborate corporate structure. This would not and could not happen without consent from IKEA.

IKEA Heights is completely consistent with IKEA’s history of unorthodox ad campaigns. IKEA campaigns have, in my opinion, successfully positioned them as a quirky individualistic place. This placement defies all logic. Surely, if there is a MacDonald's of furniture stores IKEA is it. They are literally everywhere, all over the world and their product serves a very large segment of the market.

In these times, IKEA may serve the largest segment of the furniture buying market. I have only ever met two people who have not been to an IKEA store; both make well in excess of $100,000 a year.

In the course of my research into this story I took one of them to the local IKEA store. What did he do? He bought a dresser.

Here's a link to another interesting IKEA campaign from 2006: http://marketallica.wordpress.com/2006/05/23/everyday-fabulous-with-ikea/

Then there was the official IKEA TV series which starred Ileana Douglas and can be found here http://www.easytoassemble.tv/ Easy to Assemble wrapped up earlier this year, leaving a plank missing from IKEA’s marketing platform until the space was filled by IKEA Heights.

If IKEAHeights were an independent production, copyright law would protect IKEA’s right to their trademark. If IKEA chose to relinquish that right, even by choosing not to prosecute, then this story could be true. However, if IKEA allows IKEA Heights to use their trademark as they have then the door is opened to anyone else using it in a similar fashion, once you’ve opened up your trademark to the public domain you cannot choose to reel it in. If IKEA protects their trademark as they have proven they do, a contract must exist between IKEA and IKEA Heights which means it is not guerrilla film making it is smart if cynical, marketing.

Facebook

My Aunt wrote a message on my wall on Facebook. It said she had heard about my ear infection and hoped there was someone in Austin to take care of me while I am sick.

Considerate enough - and innocuous. I deleted it immediately.

My reaction to my Aunt's perfectly reasonable and totally banal posting on my page taught me something about Facebook: yes, it's personal and yes, it's marketing.

The posting she had replied to was one about pouring poison into the ear. Although I did not realize it at the time, it was a way of being intensely personal whilst also showing off my knowledge of literary references. The latter being more of the point than the former. In fact, the personal front-loading of the message served more to point out that even when I am ill, I am still clever.

That is, I believe, the function of Facebook. My Aunt's reply was completely inappropriate, unless it had been a private message. I was not wrong to remove it - I was wrong to treat the medium as though it could be navigated by people who didn't grow up with the idea of using every aspect of your life to consciously create a persona. My friends all get it and can read postings on two levels - in that case, 1.) Stephanie is sick and 2.) Stephanie is still looking for a job. (if you count my writer friends - there is a third level 3.) Stephanie is still one of us.

Any response to the first level alone is worse than useless, it is distracting, potentially a liability - it breaks the seamlessness of the interface and draws attention to the wrong side of the discourse.

I know she did not do it intentionally, I look at her own page and it is painfully boring, completely concerned with how cute her grandkids are, what she did with them today, how happy she is - it is, in short, a family Chirstmas letter except that it runs year-round.

This is my first real brush with the awareness that it is possible to master the technology and still not get it. Now I have to ask myself, do I get it?

I know my Facebook status updates should be funny or interesting or informative in some way. I know better than to do what some of my friends do and post things that are secretive or cryptic. It's tempting to write about the personal details forgetting why and how they must relate to anyone who reads it.

Which, of course, leads me to this blog. It cannot be an online archive, even if it isn't getting read. It's nice to have somewhere to put random new writing and ramblings on various issues but it isn't enough.

Some conversations really should be private.

Time to reassess. More later.

Today, it is only partly sunny in Austin.

Compare "partly sunny" here to "a very nice day" in Ottawa or "gorgeous" on the west coast and you will find very little to distinguish them, except for the fact that it is likely to be warmer, softer and lovelier in Austin - with less road work - and better restaurants.

People can be good anywhere, I think they always try. Just the same it is easier to be friendly when the air is soft and fragrant, the sky is blue and the temperature remains above the freezing mark.

Maybe it's just me.

Of course there are lots of problems in Austin, just as there are in any city but if you're going to tackle problems, I think it is somehow more manageable under blue skies. Simplistic, I know - maybe I should say, it's easier for me. Fine weather soothes me like money soothes many people I know.

I am going out tonight - going to have dinner at a family restaurant all by myself. The reason I am doing this is because it will benefit the local homeless shelter. I'm trying not to mind that it's just for men. Gotta start somewhere.

There is just so much to do in any community, people take on the problems they think they can manage first. I'm looking at it this way; if we can all make an effort to get this program settled and stable maybe then there will be the time, energy and resources to help homeless women.

But then again - I just looked at that and it sums up my entire life and not in a good way.

All my life I have put my problems on-hold because there is always someone with a more pressing or more predictable problem standing right beside me demanding to go first.

My sister with her refusal to stay in school and subsequent employment problems - her three pregnancies, her endless need for every bit of the family resources in every way, my lover - with his very many catastrophic individuals who are in seemingly endless orbit around him, propelled by one distaster after another - drugs, career derailment, petty crime, family suicide, unplanned pregnancy - all self-made, of course but no less pressing for all that - work, where some other woman attached to the firm needed more work directed her way than I did because she was going through a very messy divorce and had two kids to support...

And on and on and on - all of these are very good reasons for me to stand aside and wait my turn, after all, I am pretty self-sufficient and one way or another, I get by. More accurately, I give the impression of getting by. What I really do is stand aside, make do, keep trying and wait.

It occurs to me that this method of coping with my own seemingly insoluable problems, is very similar to how women in this era deal with homelessness. I've been there myself. Without enough money to support yourself, women go to family or they find a man. How many marriages have been made out of fear?

Fact is, homelessness presents more challenges for a woman than it does for a man. Once a month, for example, a woman must bleed. She needs a clean place to do it. We have been convinced by the purveyors of "feminine hygeine products" that somehow, having a period is effortless, insignificant - a minor inconvenience. I am here to tell you (or remind you) that is not true.

Having a period is messy, painful, sometimes embarassing and nearly always exhausting. Unless you are on the pill, have a car, have access to pain killers, have an ensuite bathroom and a readily available shower - it is a bit of an ordeal. I do not know of any homeless women who possess any of those things.

So how is it that the women have stood aside and waited while men, who experience none of this, have their homeless problem solved? Even if that was the only complication faced by women, that would be reason enough to put them first.

Of course there are other reasons - rape, children, physical weakness in comparison to the average homeless man, inequitable access to credit, employment, even transportation - a man can hitchhike, a woman really can't. All of these are reasons why women should come first. Yet, they still don't.

I'm not blaming anyone - you have to start somewhere. It's just that there is so very much to do. Front Steps has started a recuperative care program - how many of us have ever even thought about how it would be to have a heart attack with nowhere to live, nowhere to go? Front Steps is trying to help end that situation, in the processs, they've discovered they often end the patient's homeless too. That's something else to think about.

Austin has problems, Austin is doing something about it - Austin needs a little more. I pray every day that I can contribute something to that.

And I pray, every day, that when people tell me I need to wait for someone else to go first before I can have a life, a job, a love, a place - I remember that they think that way not because it's true but because they just don't know any better. It's easy.

I have to find a way to change that.

Austin Pictures

So far, nobody has been able to tell me what these flowers are the answers I get are "sun loving" "ubiquitous," "orange" and "hardy." I like them anyway.










This is a common chain of grocery stores here. The name gave me pause.




A corridor at the Blanton Gallery at UT Austin.









Grackle.

Giant star and unabashed love for Texas - both absolutely typical of the place and both loveable I think.

Terrazzo floor at the Bob Bullock Museum of Texas History

Driving down Congress.




Downtown Mission-style architectural detail

Dry Creek.

Humid palm.

Austin likes neon

the black smudges are bats. (more bat pictures next time)

River palette

more neon - this time for pizza.

Austin Revisited

People keep telling me this is the hottest summer they've ever experienced in Austin. I realize they say it out of sympathy. Here, I am decidedly an ice lolly, a melting one.

A friend of mine told me to take a cab to a meeting, he underlined it. "Be sure to take a cab." "I will but why are you saying that?" I asked. He said, "Because I don't want you to arrive looking like you just got out of a swimming pool."

Yesterday, at the Italian Festival, I consumed a large strawberry-lemonade water-ice from Jim Jim's water ice, a large Italian soda and two large-ish bottles of water. I could have had more but people were staring.

Anyhow - it never stays in me very long, just comes pouring out of every pore.

I am a sieve.

And sievelike, I also continue to leak information, speak out when I should be silent and all that very interesting, supposedly dangerous stuff.

Here are a few of my observations about Austin at closer range:

Turtles do not like cameras.

Grackles will as happily poop on your head as take a chip from your hand. Charming as they may be, they have no manners whatsoever.

Breakfast tacos are God's gift to eating before noon.

Converted "Motor Inns" do not, contrary to popular belief, make dandy apartment complexes.

The amount of sunshine I can absorb and still be just delighted about it really is limitless.

People are quite baffled by a woman soaked with sweat who nevertheless claims to be having the time of her life. They make every effort to get said woman to admit to the contrary.

I wish people would stop trying to make me unhappy about things - I am perfectly able to make myself unhappy enough for two or more people, just read my posts about Victoria and you'll know that for sure.

Bacon and tacos don't mix.

A half hour walk before yoga is overly ambitious in 100 degree heat.

U2 is good anywhere - Radiohead, not so much.

Southern cooking is not all about the meat. Threadgills is bliss.

Velveeta can be snuck into food that I will eat without complaint. (shocking.)

Sometimes you really don't want to eat on the patio.

Bats smell funny.