Chris Cornell is a musical genius. Yes, I was raised on the heavier music of the post-punk pre-Nirvana-breakthrough wave, and therefore have a preference for these tones, but what Chris Cornell has accomplished as a “Futurist” is extraordinary.

If you listen to Chris’s first popular band, Soundgarden, you might fight it off as “heavy metal.” If you listen carefully you realize the band is practicing the art of dissonance. Practicing, or at least being able to identify, dissonance is the anchor to being a Futurist. Each Soundgarden (and his solo stuff, and his time with Audioslave) record, performance, and song is an exercise of dissonance. He is weaving into the mainstream-songbook the external forces of marginalized sounds. Nearly of all of his songs, the structures, the chords, the vocal ranges, are built on dissonant chords that find moments of serene resolution, and then break back apart into dissonance.

There are many historical examples of weaving dissonance into the mainstream. Specifically related to Chris, is one that has been replicated since the birth of “print-making” and is now found in Instagram. Let’s use punk-rock bass playing as the pivot point.

Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols didn’t know how to play the bass. It didn’t matter. The band had a strong drummer and guitar player; both “professional” studio musicians. They were the forces of resolve… weaving Sid’s dissonance into the mainstream. This allowed Sid, and Johnny Rotten, to be the “punks” they are now famous for being. If you listen to Sid’s playing you realize that he can’t play, but what he did bring to the band is the historical print-making technique of, “over-biting,” or “foul-biting.”

Way back when, when people realized they could duplicate things, they relied on the printing press to be their duplication machine. They eagerly attempted to make things perfect. The key problem of early print techniques is it required the use of acids to burn the texts or images into the metal printing plates. When all went well, the ink would remain within the cracks, scratches, and acid-made lines in the plates. These plates were then used to press the ink into paper. But acid is volatile, and it would leak, run, and escape the lines the printmaker carefully laid. Somewhere along the way, dissonant printmakers found a beauty in the overrun of acid. They created techniques to make it happen on purpose. They were our culture’s early punk-rockers.

This overrun is called over-biting or foul-biting. It added a genuine quality to the prints; it added an unseen force, a “filter” to their images that was out of their control, but still exciting, and even beautiful to the eye. If you should browse through Instagram, you are made acutely aware that this dissonance trend is in full force. Thousands, if not millions, of images are struck with an over-bite layer to give them that “old school” quality. It’s as old as people making prints, any type of prints. And it is an obvious example of the weaving in of dissonance into the mainstream, or potentially the other way around. This specific “print” wave took around two hundred years to crest.

Back to music…Sid Vicious was the over-bitten plate. Chris Cornell is Instagram.

Through Chris’s songwriting and performance, he continues this over-bite tradition and elevates it to a genius level. Through following Chris’s career, as an exercise of dissonance, you could predict Instagram. The western culture is becoming more and more dissonant as the voices of difference become available on social networks. This effect is illustrated within the adoption of filters on Instagram.

Even so, dissonance works both ways. And if we look to Chris Cornell as the trailblazer of the dissonant wave, it seems the next step is to take the popular, resolutive sounds of our day and to weave them backwards into the force of dissonance. This is an unwinding, a drawing out of the dissonance from the popular and putting it back into the wave of change. Like a tornado pulling up the hot ground-air from the plains to power its might, the next wave will be a powerful change, a shift to the marginalized, a shift away from a one hegemonic force and into the facets of a multi-force web of cultures, people, and voices.

Case in point: Chris is currently on tour. On the news of Whitney Houston’s death, Chris learned one of her songs, overnight, but wove it through his dissonance filter. The outcome is still her song, some of his song, but ultimately a genius moment where a futurist listened deeply to his surroundings, found the resolutive force, and pulled it back into the roots of dissonance.

Chris Cornell, live, San Francisco, 2/16/12, “I will always love you”

http://www.youtube.com/user/concertkid2#p/a/u/1/vgFAq9Q8l8U

Super, freaking, genius.

Jeff Mangum has created a unique catalog of songs that resonate with a troupe of wilting-flower intellectual Americans. He keeps his songs scarce, instilling the pre-digital value of songwriters in the eras without recording devices. Bottled-up and pickled in the cold shed he cracks the jar open on seldom occasion. Each time the vinegar grows ever dim, the sweetness fades, the brine stings less. I’m not sure if Jeff likes these songs anymore, but he seems to know there’s a proud-hearted audience that is decreasingly half-desperate for them.

These earnest sons and daughters with crisp-cuff jeans above their pale ale workshoes are crafting their lives upon grass-fed hopefulness. These kid-faced mid-life professionals secretly loathe the ironies of middle-class rewards, but hang the vinyl above their beds. Finding solace in the soft-faced muppets, they pray with all their secular might for a truth found within the cracked guitar tonks of Mangum’s photomatic broken-youth parables. They hope their live viewing of his near-pantomime performance will free them from the irritation of their destabilized generation.

In Jeff they see an available ideal, the soft hero. They find their salve through an album and a half of decade old songs, sung by a man quiet enough to allow intrigue in his bio. Maybe if they sing along, especially when he asks, they’ll scrape the genius from his air. In an era where the value of nearly everything is churningly reinvented, the decay of these songs is painfully obvious. Two years ago the audience would be standing, singing at the top of their lungs. At this event, we all sat in theatre chairs and half-sung self-consciously. Next time we’ll put him in a glass case and kiss the surface.

The songs are good. I wish Jeff the best, but wish even more that he’d write new songs. Still, more importantly, the songs he sang last Thursday night are songs that dance upon the string theory within our cells. They mingle with neutrinos that are older than stars and gape at our bones from amidst the eldest vibrations. My grandkids will like these songs. Eons ago there were apes who would find magic in these songs.

Over the piles of time, songs have formed-up within cultures, combined like chemistry, and followed the math of notes and time. Uniform audiences warmly gawk at the modest majesty of a lonesome figure. Sitting, surrounded by sound-making tools that only they can play in a special way.

Like the slow salt-loaded waves on the moonless sea, these songs have seen their crest. They’ll soon be stacked within the basement boxes of polaroid portraits, cheap plastic school trophies, and mom’s love letters to a man who wasn’t her husband.

Retail will be a mash-up of experience and mobile

The history of retail, particularly the mall, was born from the experience of visiting circus-tent-sized panoramas. Early in our modern era, folks would gather together to view wide-angle-scoped scenes of far away landscapes. They’d walk within them, be enveloped by the magnificence of places they couldn’t imagine of seeing themselves, and ponder the expansiveness of the world. Film, as we experience it today by gathering together in theaters to be enveloped by the moving pictures, started from the same historical pivot.

It’s no surprise then, that retail has steadily been spiking the “brand experience” as a key element to strategic planning. As this trend continues, mixed with the ever-innovative feats of mobile technology and the digital components being layered upon the connected world, the demand for greater experience will grow in partnership with a greater demand for immediacy.

Greater experience

Who needs a retail space for brand experience? Brands should take these spaces and turn them into regularly-changing “living portals.” What if Levi’s created their retail spaces in the same manner they create their live-action ads? A space with growling self-proclaiming voice overs, stages with sparkling band-equipment, weather blown floor-spaces with spinning trampolines and campfires that shift into lamp-post street corners and wood paneled cabins.

By visiting this space I can chose my role, put on the Levis garments of how I envision myself within this place and then take part in the action with my fellow brand fans. Actors gallop throughout the space, wearing all the newest articles from the Levis catalog. They shift from the stations, from the band-stage to the trampoline to the lamp-light, with appropriate wardrobe changes, to showcase all that Levis has to offer and why. They show, don’t tell. I live in their space, not just witness it. The articles I wear then become souvenirs, the relics of my experience. They are infused with the spirit of the energy the brand gives to me.

The “added-value” is I get more take-aways then the clothes…I get a video of myself on the trampoline, photos with my new friends running with the “Go Forth” banner. I become part of a webcast, part of the play. My actions appear on digital billboards in Times Square, Picadilly Circus, more…I will leave the store refreshed, vibrant, recharged by the brand down the path of the lifestyle it represents to me. I am woven into the narrative and plan for my next foray into the Levis space. Wondering what Levis  will become next, what experience it will offer me, what I can become next.

Immediacy

Still, I do need some socks, a t-shirt, and a jacket. Anywhere within the Levis store I can use my phone (or a kiosk) to view the catalog, including my past purchases and recommendations. I can access this catalog from my phone later, anywhere. I can click through the characters I’ve seen and interacted with, and select their garments for myself. I can watch videos of them modeling the clothes, or wearing them live within the experience. I can even see the videos of myself wearing these clothes as these will have been uploaded immediately, in real-time. I can share these videos with my friends, my family, I can post them to YouTube, Tumblr. I can edit them into new videos and post them across the Levis network.

And once I have decided on which garments I need…I can have these new clothes delivered to me, either by an associate who appears magically from a secret door or by having them drop-shipped to my home, same day, or for a scheduled delivery-time I chose through an interactive calendar.

I want to be in the experience, and I want my stuff now. It’s possible. I expect this to happen in the near future.

Klout is the Sugar Cereal of Social Nutrition*

I like sugar cereal, I do. In my family home we were rarely allowed to have it. The rule was if sugar appeared as one of the first two ingredients on the box, then that cereal was unfit for our bodies. As soon as I was a grown up and had rented my own apartment, one of the first things I purchased, one of the first things I deserved, was to eat sugar cereals. Because I could, because they were delicious, because it was what all the ads I watched on TV and billboards and the radio said I should do. “4 out of 5 doctors who eat cereal say…” “100 Million people have Klout…”

Kellogg’s cereal was born from a sanitarium in 1877. It was a health-food. In 1909 Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner prescribed Muesli for his patients. Health food. Cocoa Puffs? Trix?

Modern day social-dietitians prescribe lots of tactics to increase your social health. Some are solidly nutritious, some are attractive AND nutritious, some are deliciously sweet, and vibrant, but are really just empty calories. Can you tell the difference? Tony the tiger says, “They’re great!”

Reading the Klout ingredients, it’s mostly sugar. I ignore the logic, I’m tempted by it. I reach for its colorful box, its game-like content scribed across its front. I sneak it late at night when no one is watching. I know its really not good for me, but its seductive. Its magical powers map to those puzzle holes in my brain, the receptors, that make me feel better. See, I have a score! And I can control it, I can manufacture my own destiny through a handful of activities that increases my value to…um…my impact on…to…other folks who check Klout scores? Community! That’s it. It increases my value and impact to a community of other people who value algorithmic scores as the indicator of value and impact to a community.

C’mon, the social space is so vast, so uncharted, so full of disruption and change, who can really deal with its unfathomable nature? I want, I require, the simple answer. Having to analyze people, messages, and behaviors is hard. I’d much rather just know their Klout score and call it a day’s work. Is that so wrong?

Listen, sometimes I need a crutch to lean on, a respite from thinking, a break from the healthy-body healthy-mind regime. We all do. I like sugar cereal, I also brush my teeth. In the meantime 19% of US children between the ages of 2 and 19 have untreated dental cavities. Children below the poverty line have a significantly higher rate of untreated cavities. In 2010, an estimated $108 billion was spent on dental services in the United States. In 2008, on average, 68.5% of US citizens visit the dentist each year (CT was the highest, Oklahoma was the lowest). That must be a good business to be in. Now only if we can take that model and layer it on everything else…

Oh Klout. There you sit on the shelf, burgeoning in your adoption. Social-dietitians professing your whole-body goodness while armies of social-dentists and social-rewardsmen hover at the door, waiting to provide the trinkets and salve for the eventual ailments. What to do? I’m torn between wellness and sweetness! I want to check my Klout score!

Nay, fly to Altars; there they’ll talk you dead;
For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread.

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Untreated Dental Caries (Cavities) in Children Ages 2-19, United States
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsUntreatedCavitiesKids/

Adults aged 18+ who have visited a dentist or dental clinic in the past year
http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/nohss/ListV.asp?qkey=5&DataSet=2

An Essay on Criticism, by Alexander Pope
http://poetry.eserver.org/essay-on-criticism.html

*Social Nutrition is a TM of Jason Moriber

The baby wasn’t crying so much as trying to get our attention. He blinked his solid brown eyes, clenching them into fresh wrinkles, as if to clear his lenses. He looked up at us, the mashed-together subway riders on the uptown 4.

He shifted his binkie, tethered to the handrail of his old-school steel-framed carriage. He looked left, then right, then up at me, seeming to read the back of my paperback book. I flipped it to the cover, as if to show him the title. His mother glanced at me. “Stand back,” her eyes said, “I don’t know you.” I telepathically sent her a message, hoping it would show on my face, “I have two children, I’m not bad.” Her glare increased. I turned away.

The 4 train is crowded no matter the stop. Compare this to the uptown D train, which is half empty by the time it hits mid-town. I can shave ten to fifteen minutes on my commute by taking the 4, but the 4…oh the 4.

As the train doors opened somewhere near Wall Street, the too crowded passengers fell backwards, spilling out onto the platform, falling into each other’s bodies, tangled up. They clambered to their feet, made regretful and apologetic eye contact with each other, and stoically hurried to work. The mother and carriage shifting towards the center of the car, but there wasn’t any more room over there. New passengers pushed their way on to the car, pressing the mother into her carriage.

Three of the seated people immediately stood up offering her a safe place. She refused. She said aloud, to the empty space between the poles, “If these motherfuckers can’t see that I’m pushing a baby then they can all go to hell.”

The seated people cautiously sat back down, hoping the mother would change her mind. An elderly woman, hissed at her, not maliciously, but to get her attention. She was offering up her seat for the mother. The car drew quiet. Then, just as the doors were about to shut, which would allow the train to continue its lurch forward towards the next stop, one last person tried to push on. She held the doors open. The train conductor was firm on the speaker, “Please use all available doors, there is another train directly behind this one…”

The woman holding the doors yelled into the car, “Is there space over there? I see some space…” A current passenger, a matronly woman, now pressed against the handrail and the half-open doors tried to twist to look into her face. She replied, “Can’t you wait for the next train? There’s no room here.”

“I see it.”

“There’s NO room”

“Can’t everyone just step in a little more?”

‘What makes you so important?”

“I see there’s room…”

The conductors voice grew agitated, “…there is a train DIRECTLY behind this one…”

At that point the mother with the baby carriage had enough. Speaking again to the neutral space, the bit of empty location just above our heads and the roof of the train, where the air might be clearer of heat, dust, and body smells…

“I have a baby here! I’m moving back to the Bronx, people know how to live up there. You Brooklyn people are crazy!”

The Postal Convenience Station

I was the third of four postal patrons on the makeshift line. We arched away from the tinted glass aluminum framed door, attempting to allow enough personal space for the next potential patron to enter. The auto-teller was wedged at the front corner, along the glass, away from the walk-in-closet-sized room of PO boxes. At the right was the one big package-size-accepting mailbox for all parcels needing to be mailed.

A mu-mu and sandal-clad elderly woman sat on the low, rough pine bench, resting her arms along her black-metal walker, “I’m taking a break,” she said, “there’s AC in here.” Her hands squeezed the brake levers tightly.

At the front of the line a young woman in standard-issue running gear (white trim navy shorts, t-shirt, white sneakers) was balancing a wide corrugated cardboard rectangular box with her arm, hand and shoulder while also pressing her cell phone to her ear. The box could hold five pairs of shoes, if they were placed side by side, but in transit, it seemed, all shifted to the right. She couldn’t manage. The box would slide, the phone would slide; she juggled these items while reading aloud, to the person on the phone, the entire directions on the auto-teller.

“First class? Priority? Do I weight it? (Pause) Yeah, uh huh (Pause), you said this would be easy…”

As she rubbed her right pointer finger along the deep-browed touch screen she thankfully put the box down on the scale.

“It’s 16 pounds (Pause) I don’t know (Pause) do we insure it?”

The person directly behind her on the line turns to me, “I just need to check to see if I have the right postage…” I turn to the elderly woman on the bench, the witness to this and probably other postal transactions, she sighs, fixes her lipstick with the back of her hand, and shuffles her feet.

“You said this would be easy (Pause) so what do I do now? (Pause) Ok, take this label and stick it on the box? But you already wrote the address…”

I look out of the glass door, more postal patron arrive and hurry towards the back. I hear the click-clank of postal boxes open and shut, papers rustle, tearing and tossing. The sun reflects in long strands off the roof of a black sedan as it backs-up into a no-parking space in front of the station. A man from the grocery store, wiping his hands with his green apron, walks up and points at the sign. The driver rolls his window down, squints, shrugs, and rolls it back up. The grocery-man looks in at us, with the hopeful gaze that we’d agree with him. He dramatically drops his arms to his sides, shakes his head at us, and walks back towards the market. He bumps into a customer, raises his arms as if to hug the man, but doesn’t.

The woman with the unbalanced-box continues, “Pay with debit or credit? (Pause) I don’t know. (Pause) This was your idea…”

Still looking outside through the glass, the walk sign becomes a flashing do-not walk sign. A woman grabs two children by their forearms and rushes them along the crosswalk stripes. Two men in suit-pants and ties ignore the cars and walk at a careful gait from this side to that. A taxi honks.

The sign becomes a solid do-not walk sign, cars flash by, halt, and rumble off. The sign once again becomes a walk sign. The wind picks up for a moment and brushes the pedestrian’s clothes away from their bodies and towards the east river.

I hear the tin clicking of the auto-teller printing out a receipt, the unwieldy-box-shipping must be complete. I look up, the woman’s anxiety has increased, “Ok, so now where do I drop off the box?” She looks at me and the elderly lady. Was she talking to us? I wait to see if she’ll ask us again. Clamping the phone to her neck with her shoulder she shifts towards the back of the station.

As I step up to the auto-teller to gain the correct postage for my envelopes I hear the box-shipper gasp, “It’s stuck, the box is stuck in the drop-box, why did you tell me to put it here? You said this was going to be easy.”

- Google/Motorola and the Western Male Myth

- Pimping the now for a Premium Past

- Check-ins are to Graffiti what Pop Songs are to the Blues

- Ungame Creativity

Five Applied Cultural Economics Ideas to Build the US Economy

1. Foster group-buying of health-care. One of the largest weights on grass-roots/start-up innovation is health insurance. Alleviate this burden and new businesses and opportunities will spark. Similar to the model currently used by The Freelancers Union, allow for groups of friends, coworkers (as in co-working), start-ups, etc. to purchase health insurance, not just on the state level, but national.

2. Green Tech the urban core. Provide agressive tax-incentives and rebates to spur a rebuilding/replacing of blight with new, green technology-based building and infrastructure while also reinforcing the phoenix-type of community growth already taking place.

3. Five-year moratorium on sales tax for locally/nationally produced goods and services of less than $500 in value. Spur the local economies of thousands of neighborhoods, provide a foundational incentive for start-ups of all types to test the waters, and allow for consumers to purchase the goods & services they need while pegging the revenues to locally/national manufacturers and providers.

4. Boost interconnected public transportation options. Spur both state and private investment to connect urban to suburban to rural travel. Increase the paths for commerce, interactivity, and learning. Yes, high-speed rails between urban centers would be cool, but let’s start with connecting smaller hubs to larger hubs to increase the movement of people and ideas without burdening the roadways.

5. Local food. Shift our food-supply emphasis to locally grown, prepared and delivered food. The movement is already underway, let’s amplify it and increase it’s footprint across all communities.

What am I missing? What do you recommend?

This post was sparked by a email thread with my coworkers at Waggener Edstrom, shouts to them all.

Is Google a waning giant? Yes, they are tightening their grip on long tail with Plus, social integration, etc., but in the past (AOL, MySpace, more) this tightening equated to a grasping for relevance while the market rolled on, and away.

I wonder about the users whose social messages appear in the search rankings, or the users who click the “+1 button.” Will social-capital be enough for them if their words appear in the search results? Will their Klout rewards be enough?

Brand-strength, built through a well crafted integrated, marketing campaign, will be what bubbles up from this recipe. If you look at the magnetism of brand such as Starbucks, it probably has more to do with their services and loyalty than with their social media actions. As example, I did some modest analysis for a client of a handful of corporate Twitter accounts mentioned in a Mashable post.  I used my “Matrix” exercise to manually peg these accounts to a graph.

What I found is nearly all of this test group are repeatedly speaking to the granular of their markets with hopes of resonation. More importantly, it seems, that their following is not based on their Twitter actions, but based on the “spectacular-ness” of their brand. Starbucks and JetBlue have a huge amount of followers when compared to Delta or Taco Bell or Dunkin’ Donuts. So although Dunkin’ Donuts is doing a great job with social to keep the momentum with their audience, more people are potentially “listening” to Starbucks.

In regard to Google’s further grip on the tail: Is the next step in the evolution of the social-search space a gaggle of smaller search-engines focussed on segments? A food search engine? A coffee one? What if Kayak also offered a search algorithm of the social conversations around travel? Isn’t this what the Apps eco-system is teaching us?

My question is: while Google screens through the mud to gather up the gold dust, where is the next vein to chunk away the bounty?

A Slow, Sweet, Wet Seattle Waltz

The clouds twist corkscrew towards lightening mist, nearer to the saltwater sound. They faint away miles before the cleft-top peaks that fence all around. Under a taller grey dome of higher sky the lake and sound mirrors the silver. The draped majesty of the statued ranges hide their stark faces in the gauze.

I’m in traffic.

Regimens of windshields pattered with points of silt-fine rain. Wipers don’t swing that slow enough. My glasses fog skin, my hair thickens sponge, and by some magic I can still see sun-pale shadows of the trees along the hedges. Don’t tease me sun, I have a vitamin D deficiency.

“You know, it rains a lot here.”

Un-hatted runners smile along the lake. Bounding in dark tight coveralls on the soaked stones. It could be 70 degrees, but it’s 50. It could be partly cloudy, but it’s all cloudy. The runners run, in stoic abandon, under the force of their inner helix as the rain pelts them furiously, unattended.

The rain falls on all things. It makes this world green.

The lake gazes back at me, slundering its wake under the civil pressure of the low meandering Rainier valley gusts. The water wobbles, mound crests, and slides towards the inlets where beavers build dams so close to the cycles of people exercising, cardio-ing, gaming. From around the curve, a seaplane politely lands. Plump, skid, and mumble. It rolls horizontal behind the hundreds of guarding evergreens.

There are no bugs, except spiders, and bees, and spiders.

How do these dissilient flowers burst so vivid with their faces toughed in the rain? My eye lenses tell my brain, which tells my brain, it should be brighter, but its not. I can’t seem to get my body warmer than my childhood October. The shrubs, incredulous at my shivering, add heft, girth on a daily revival. By the time this week ends they’ll have overtaken the houses.

The fragrant vine that impedes my front door kisses my checks with its leaves. I kiss it back.

I’m told the famed Pacific North-West summer will arrive just as I dip into my departure plane door. I’ll be lifted up and over this land beyond the wintry passes and miss it all. Down there, outside my double-paned window, I’ll look below the wing to where snow is still creviced along the ridge. There are people making a fire, joyfully. While pressing their hands against the heat, which strikes bright lines across their seeing, an eagle studies them, and crests the air with a few crows right behind. They’ll giggle with the time sensitive passion of those things that are fleeting, and hold each other, and be still.

There is love in the Seattle rain. There is love in the Seattle light.

There is love in this Easterner’s heart as I too take flight.

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