What is Marie Osmond wearing? Doesn't Nutrisystem provide her a stylist budget?
The end of monthly magazine nirvana
Just when it was starting to get really good, Fabien Baron ups and leaves Interview magazine, taking Karl Templer along with him! Now I'm super-annoyed that I renewed my subscription last month. And Domino folded this week. I loved Domino.
I knew this monthly magazine nirvana couldn't last forever.
Back to the Euro bi-annuals for me.
I knew this monthly magazine nirvana couldn't last forever.
Back to the Euro bi-annuals for me.
Defriending
This is such a smart story from today's NY Times -- all about defriending (they call it unfriending) people on Facebook. I've definitely defriended people -- mostly people I don't know who've requested me as a friend and then proceed to torment me with spam messages, self-promotional wall postings (on my wall! Like my friend Sam says, "I don't go over to your house and scribble on your kitchen counter."), invitations to join fan groups celebrating themselves, etc. I've defriended people who use their status updates to rave about nights out and bottle service at superclubs (sorry, I get embarrassed just reading those), people who lift my contact information and e-mail from my profile and spam me at my work and personal emails, publicists who pitch me on Facebook, people who constantly name-drop in their status updates, and people I don't know, have never met, and have no association with who leave me regular Wall postings like, "Hey Danica, what's up?" Yeah, you're defriended, that's what's up.
Niche in the market
I just went to the Universal News to look at fitness magazines. Noooo, I'm not going all carrot sticks. Next week I'm going to be in a situation where I will have to be photographed IN GYM CLOTHES. Seriously. Like, what am I going to wear? I'm probably the least athletic person I know -- I own tons of sneakers, but I've only really worn the properly sporty ones (like, the ones that aren't Converse and Margiela Tabi sneakers) once or twice. I even have a pair of Air Jordans, the ones with flames. I was peer-pressured into getting them by Sam. Wore them once and they hurt the backs of my ankles. That was the end of that.
Didn't people do sports in polished black leather boots back in the day?
So I looked through all the women's health and fitness magazines, looking for fashion spreads where they feature cool new workout clothes and flattering silhouettes and sporty-type styling. Guess what? It doesn't exist. Fitness and health magazines have normal casual-like market fashion spreads, just like magazines like Marie Claire and Glamour. I don't understand -- why don't they show their readers all the cool new athletic wear and how to mix and match it? This is a definite gap in the market. Casualwear and sportswear athletic styling.
I bought Women's Health, which I'm pretty certain looks like the best of the bunch. Let's see what I come up with. I might have to go to a sporting goods store or something. Just the idea of going to City Sports kind of makes me panic...
Didn't people do sports in polished black leather boots back in the day?
So I looked through all the women's health and fitness magazines, looking for fashion spreads where they feature cool new workout clothes and flattering silhouettes and sporty-type styling. Guess what? It doesn't exist. Fitness and health magazines have normal casual-like market fashion spreads, just like magazines like Marie Claire and Glamour. I don't understand -- why don't they show their readers all the cool new athletic wear and how to mix and match it? This is a definite gap in the market. Casualwear and sportswear athletic styling.
I bought Women's Health, which I'm pretty certain looks like the best of the bunch. Let's see what I come up with. I might have to go to a sporting goods store or something. Just the idea of going to City Sports kind of makes me panic...
I love this passage from Cathy Horyn's blog today
Despite the fact that some of us daily reporters were summoned to IMG the other day and asked by Fern Mallis not to write the "Who would wear this in this economy" story -- I love how Cathy Horyn does it today in her blog:
I think maybe this is where the fashion market, maybe not high-end luxury fashion-fashion, but everything else, the mass market, all the way up to the $450 silk shift print dresses girls have been (inexplicably) buying at stores like Intermix and Scoop for the past five years, has gone wrong. Save a handful of designers, so few of the others have actually created a compelling reason over the past five to ten years. Menswear is different, I think, because menswear has had a brilliant run over the last ten years, I think it even sort of outdoes the wow-factor of most of womenswear, if you look at the last few years. It's been hard to find a compelling reason lately, and maybe it's because designers have been lulled into complacency by a flush market. One year, two seasons later, and everything's turned around. This market demands more. It's not enough to buy some fabric, slap a label on it, and price it at $1000, sorry. There has to be a compelling reason. I like that phrase.
"The way I see it is that all the men’s designers have to prove to the consumers that they need these clothes. There must be a compelling reason, if your standards are high and your budget—well, isn’t budging. Givenchy? Not a believable vision. Galliano? Been there, Jack Sparrow. Dior Homme? Wasn’t this a cool label once? Lanvin? Seductive and romantic, the clear fashionista favorite. Number (N)ine? Crazy delightful, worth it if you have $2,500 plus to spend for one of the Flemish-colored jackets. Saint Laurent? Drab and unimaginative. Rick Owens? Original but I don’t want to know what the wearer’s hobbies are. Raf Simons? The fit is the compelling reason, nothing more, nothing less. Comme des Garcons? A good season for eclectic pieces, including the leopard pumps. Dunhill? Pointless things done to clothes, with the formality of a boutique hotel uniform."
I think maybe this is where the fashion market, maybe not high-end luxury fashion-fashion, but everything else, the mass market, all the way up to the $450 silk shift print dresses girls have been (inexplicably) buying at stores like Intermix and Scoop for the past five years, has gone wrong. Save a handful of designers, so few of the others have actually created a compelling reason over the past five to ten years. Menswear is different, I think, because menswear has had a brilliant run over the last ten years, I think it even sort of outdoes the wow-factor of most of womenswear, if you look at the last few years. It's been hard to find a compelling reason lately, and maybe it's because designers have been lulled into complacency by a flush market. One year, two seasons later, and everything's turned around. This market demands more. It's not enough to buy some fabric, slap a label on it, and price it at $1000, sorry. There has to be a compelling reason. I like that phrase.
Paul McKenna can make me thin.
I bought his book/cd on Friday night. On Saturday I had a family day, hanging out with my parents, brother, and sister. Came home, read the book. Listened to the hypnotising CD, FELL ASLEEP while listening to the CD, and woke up when Paul McKenna said so. I've never really imagined I'd be someone who's susceptible to hypnotism, but, well, I guess I am, because I totally blacked out for a few minutes there. Who knows what happened during this time and how this bespectacled British person has reprogrammed my mind. To be honest, I'm very excited and looking forward to the pounds just dropping off. (With effort, of course.) I'm not allowed to weigh myself for the next two weeks, but I shall keep you posted.
I give up
Post-mortem, my adventures in Livescribe Smartpen land: Apparently I'm not the only one who's having problems getting my HP laptop to recognize the Livescribe Smartpen. The customer service manager said I can do all this resetting stuff on my laptop (which hasn't caused me any problems in the two months I've owned it, so I'm just going to leave well enough alone, thanks) or I can trade in this broken Smartpen for a new Smartpen. To be honest, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have the same problem with the new pen, I mean, since there seems to be an HP/Livescribe Smartpen compatibility issue. I have to think about what to do with this thing. I can hardly believe the amount of trouble it is and I haven't even gotten to use it yet. I'll probably just stick to my cassette and tape recorder in the end. Yay low-tech! Here's the note from the Livescribe manager:
"I see – one customer that had the same issue discovered that the pen was recognized on a different computer with no issue. When he called HP support, they had him unplug his battery (it was a laptop), re-plug it and reset the BIOS settings to the default settings, and then it worked. I’m not sure if you have a laptop or not, but you could try that as well if you do. Otherwise, I can arrange to send you a replacement pen right away and you can send the defective one back to us – there is no charge for this either."
In the ongoing Livescribe SmartPen saga
I got an email from the customer service manager at Livescribe about my absurd/appalling experience with their tech support line and this is what the manager said:
"I’m the Customer Service Manager here and can definitely help you with your issue. The system failure 3 problem on your pen can be resolved by using the Master Reset application she sent you, which will erase the corrupt data on the pen. You should then be able to get the Livescribe Desktop software to recognize the pen, at which point you can follow the instructions in that email to reload the firmware onto the pen. The system failure 3 problem occurred in an older firmware version, so once you apply the master reset and get the latest firmware, you should not have the problem again."
OKAY. Let's go over this One More Time for good measure, guys: My computer is not recognizing the SmartPen. I cannot use the Master Reset. This is The Whole Problem, it has always been the problem. I have uninstalled the driver and restarted my computer, undocked, re-docked, uninstalled the Livescribe desktop, reinstalled it, unplugged the USB, replugged, switched it. I. Have. Done. Everything. You. Told. Me. To. Stop telling me to do the same things over and over again. I am not a monkey. The. SmartPen. Is. Broken. Thank you.
I complained a lot today
Classes were great this morning, got a ton done at school. Then work was normal, fun as usual. Lunch was a disaster. Shoot turned out well, I'm floored we finished seven looks in four hours, but hey, everyone was amazing. But the party we were trying to shoot around? What a disaster. It was the Fashion meets Finance party where guys who work in finance go to try to meet fashion industry girls and vice versa. What a clusterf-. Seriously. Liza and I were joking about how these guys ought to be required to wear their net worth on their T-shirts. Thank god we had a reflector to hide behind most of the time. The poor models we were shooting -- as we were walking one of the models from the floor to our room, some crazy guy grabbed her arm and shouted, "DO YOU LIKE SEAFOOD!?" Liza and I's first instincts was: Protect the model! So we totally body-blocked him. We are a good team. I've been awake for 18 hours now, and been wearing creeepers for 17 of those hours. Time to lie down. Night night.
At Asiate, they treat Rosé like soda.
This was our lunch: Got to Asiate in the Mandarin Oriental for our 1:30 p.m. reservation. Waited 20-25 minutes to be seated. Sat down between 1:50 and 1:55. Waiter came over, blamed us for late seating: "Well, you should have told us you were five, we could have seated you faster," even though our table was set for five. "Just water right?" he said. Took our orders. I ordered a glass of rose, with a little ice, which in the rest of the restaurant industry means two or three cubes. Got a McDonalds-amount of ice. Decided they must be taking the piss because we're there for restaurant week. All food came out room temperature or lukewarm, rather bad congealed room-temperature pasta. Check unceremoniously dropped off. In and out in 45 minutes at Asiate.
I mean, I am kind of shocked. This is not the recession face businesses ought to be putting on.
Livescribe Pulse Smartpen = Useless. Their customer support? Even more useless.
I have a Livescribe Pulse Smartpen -- you write and it records, it all syncs up, blah blah blah. I used it for about five minutes when I first got it about a month ago, just doing the demos and stuff. I just turned it on again because I thought it would be super-helpful for the IMG Fashion Week conference tomorrow morning. I installed the desktop software, the desktop software won't recognize my pen, and then the pen starts flashing "System Failure: 3." Great, it's broken. So I phone their customer support, where the woman on the other end tells me to uninstall, restart, reinstall and then call back. Same problem. Nothing works. So I call back and talk to the most useless customer service-support person I have ever spoken to in the world, Laura at Livescribe. She asked me the same questions over and over again.
Laura: Are you on a Mac?
Me: No, my Mac isn't compatible with the Livescribe software.
Laura: So you're on a Mac?
Me: I'm using a Windows XP computer.
Laura: You're not on a Mac?
Then she spent 45 minutes telling me to keep switching USB ports.
Laura: Can you try another USB port?
Me: I tried them all already.
Laura: Do you have any other USB ports?
Me: No, I only have two.
Laura: Can you try another USB port?
Seriously, she made me want to scream.
Then she told me the only recourse I have is to do a master reset. Great, that's fine. How do I do this? She wanted to send me a file through email.
Me: How do I get the reset onto my Smartpen?
Laura: You plug it into the USB port.
Me: But it doesn't recognize my pen.
Laura: Oh.
I mean, talking to Laura at Livescribe was like TALKING TO A WINDOW.
Finally, she told me she couldn't do anything for me and that I'd have to "send my Log" to the tier-3 service team.
Me: Wait, I have to send my log? Won't there be nothing on it because my computer doesn't recognize the pen?
Laura: Well, that's for them to determine.
Me: Where is the Log?
Laura: I'll send it in an email.
Me: So when I send the Log, will I get a confirmation that it's been received and they are working on the problem?
Laura: Well, I'll be here for another hour and a half, so if you send the Log now, I'll email you back to tell you I got it.
Me: What? You're the tier-3 service team?
Excuse me while I go and THROW OUT this broken, brand new Livescribe Smartpen because they have the Worst Customer Service and Worst Tech Support I've ever encountered, ever. Seriously, I didn't know that any company could possibly be worse than my cable company, but Congratulations Livescribe, you and your broken Smartpens have got even New York City cable companies beat, hands down.
Laura: Are you on a Mac?
Me: No, my Mac isn't compatible with the Livescribe software.
Laura: So you're on a Mac?
Me: I'm using a Windows XP computer.
Laura: You're not on a Mac?
Then she spent 45 minutes telling me to keep switching USB ports.
Laura: Can you try another USB port?
Me: I tried them all already.
Laura: Do you have any other USB ports?
Me: No, I only have two.
Laura: Can you try another USB port?
Seriously, she made me want to scream.
Then she told me the only recourse I have is to do a master reset. Great, that's fine. How do I do this? She wanted to send me a file through email.
Me: How do I get the reset onto my Smartpen?
Laura: You plug it into the USB port.
Me: But it doesn't recognize my pen.
Laura: Oh.
I mean, talking to Laura at Livescribe was like TALKING TO A WINDOW.
Finally, she told me she couldn't do anything for me and that I'd have to "send my Log" to the tier-3 service team.
Me: Wait, I have to send my log? Won't there be nothing on it because my computer doesn't recognize the pen?
Laura: Well, that's for them to determine.
Me: Where is the Log?
Laura: I'll send it in an email.
Me: So when I send the Log, will I get a confirmation that it's been received and they are working on the problem?
Laura: Well, I'll be here for another hour and a half, so if you send the Log now, I'll email you back to tell you I got it.
Me: What? You're the tier-3 service team?
Excuse me while I go and THROW OUT this broken, brand new Livescribe Smartpen because they have the Worst Customer Service and Worst Tech Support I've ever encountered, ever. Seriously, I didn't know that any company could possibly be worse than my cable company, but Congratulations Livescribe, you and your broken Smartpens have got even New York City cable companies beat, hands down.
Circuit City liquidation sale = l.a.m.e
Stopped by the midtown Circuit City on the way home and was totally disappointed at the lame 10 to 20 percent discounts off MSRP prices. Regular Circuit City prices were far lower than these! Left empty-handed.
I'm super-excited about teaching my first college courses tomorrow morning. What to wear, what to wear. Photocopied my syllabus a million times today, and got all eco shrinking the font and photocopying on two sides of each sheet of paper -- though Kinko's charges you the same whether you use a new sheet of paper or not. Charge-per-printed-page, I guess, which is kind of unfair. I know, from working at a newspaper, that between paper and ink, paper is, by far, the greater expense.
I've been blogging more fashion stuff over at blogs.nypost.com/hilo so check over there for pretty pictures.
I'm super-excited about teaching my first college courses tomorrow morning. What to wear, what to wear. Photocopied my syllabus a million times today, and got all eco shrinking the font and photocopying on two sides of each sheet of paper -- though Kinko's charges you the same whether you use a new sheet of paper or not. Charge-per-printed-page, I guess, which is kind of unfair. I know, from working at a newspaper, that between paper and ink, paper is, by far, the greater expense.
I've been blogging more fashion stuff over at blogs.nypost.com/hilo so check over there for pretty pictures.
Am up waaay too late editing my syllabus for Tuesday morning's class and planning tomorrow's agenda. I have a 10:30 walk-through tomorrow morning, kind of uptown, how ambitious! I also have to start planning for a big shoot on Thursday night. I hope there aren't too too many publicists and showrooms closed tomorrow.
What I have cooked so far today
A pot of fresh chicken stock and turkey bolognese. For breakfast I had leftover pizza and three chicken wings. Ah, too-cold-to-go-outside weekend.
I love this CNN commentator. He's very earnest, soft-spoken, and kind of has a muppet voice.
Everyone else has off on Monday
When I'm tired and it's cold out, I get a hive under my right eye. It only stays there for an hour or so, but it's not pretty. I call it my "sleepy hive."
Had a relatively productive back-in-the-office-after-vaca day today. Met up with Todd Hanshaw mid-day, he's the fashion director for the Wynn properties in Las Vegas, and he is brilliant. We had a really good chat and I learned so much about the way fashion retail works in Vegas. Super-interesting stuff, I'm hoping to get some of it up on the nypost.com HiLo blog in the next week.
We landed yesterday at JFK about ten minutes before the US Air plane landed/crashed into the Hudson River. The whole thing was really scary because my brother and I had just landed and my sister was still in the air. And all I could think of this morning is: "I wonder what PETA would say. Someone should call PETA." Because PETA always goes on and on about animal rights, I wonder whether they'd call it the other way around -- i.e. the plane flying into the geese rather than the geese flying into the plane. Would PETA call it goose-murder? I guess we'll never know. PETA really irritates me, in general.
Had a relatively productive back-in-the-office-after-vaca day today. Met up with Todd Hanshaw mid-day, he's the fashion director for the Wynn properties in Las Vegas, and he is brilliant. We had a really good chat and I learned so much about the way fashion retail works in Vegas. Super-interesting stuff, I'm hoping to get some of it up on the nypost.com HiLo blog in the next week.
We landed yesterday at JFK about ten minutes before the US Air plane landed/crashed into the Hudson River. The whole thing was really scary because my brother and I had just landed and my sister was still in the air. And all I could think of this morning is: "I wonder what PETA would say. Someone should call PETA." Because PETA always goes on and on about animal rights, I wonder whether they'd call it the other way around -- i.e. the plane flying into the geese rather than the geese flying into the plane. Would PETA call it goose-murder? I guess we'll never know. PETA really irritates me, in general.
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