And am currently in the Cambridge equivalent of S’nice café, "Darwin's", surrounded by others tapping away at laptops, skimming through mountainous Sunday papers and scribbling in journals.
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Kicked myself for not making more of a schmoozing and insight-gleaning opportunity, when I Googled the guy whose 50th birthday party H, J and I found ourselves at in Washington DC. My sleepiness, combined perhaps with the fact that an artist there had hung a wall-sized painting caricaturing Clinton and Obama as Warhol and Basquiat in their iconicly photographed boxing-glove pose, and the fact that the guy’s new(ish) young wife used to be McCain’s communications director, meant I superficially presumed most of the people in the room were Republicans who, as I wasn't in inquisitive journalist mode, wouldn’t be that fascinating to get into conversation with. Yet I only registered after the Google search that the birthday boy was Ronald Brownstein, former political editor of the Los Angeles Times and now political director of Atlantic Media Company who published his sixth book in November, called “The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America”. I could have no doubt learned a few things journalism- or election- related had I spoken with him. Having said that, being quizzed by a curious English girl was probably the last thing he wanted to do at his party, and H and I still passed the hour or so that we were there most productively – nattering, tucking into the delicious spread of food and knocking back the pear martinis.
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Friday evening went to an art show opening that actually had art in it. Unlike the one that P and I had attempted to attend a couple of Thursdays ago. We had turned up at 11ish at a venue teetering on the edge of Chelsea by West Side Highway expecting to find Sa’s paintings on display - some of which had been festooning the rooves of 11 Weehawken Street - and the after-show party in full swing. There was a party inside, of sorts, but no art. The walls were draped with white sheets. And along one side of the room were a few straight rows of chairs. It turned out that Sa had cancelled her show after one fight too many with the woman directing a production of David Hare’s “The Secret Rapture” with which Sa was supposedly sharing the space (taking the paintings down for the duration of the play, which apparently was long). So the people still hanging around were the cast, their family and friends. We stayed anyway, drinking free champagne, eating blackberries, chatting to the cast a bit and to the gay barman who’d been invited to serve the drinks in return for $20 and enough free alcohol to fire him up for the rest of the night in a club downtown, where a guy he’d been dating was going to be DJ-ing. All very surreal and all very New York.
This Friday though, there was art. It was by R’s Colombian friend J: abstract arial views of cities hung in a SoHo 4th-floor space more like a string of little offices than a gallery. That was followed by a drink at Café Noir and some dancing at an exceptionally cheesy salsa place called Sequoia on South Street Seaport that by the time we arrived had regressed from salsa to reggaeton...
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Michael Conroy’s recent book “Branded” describes how the importance of brands to companies is a powerful tool in encouraging them to improve their social and environmental conduct. Branding’s always been crucial for companies. Some, like Coca-Cola, are their brand. It seems that branding is now increasingly important to countries too. The US is wondering whether brand America can recover from the damage done to its international reputation by the Bush administration. Or whether it will remain forever tarnished in many people’s minds even if the next administration tries to turn things around, just as Nike has had a tough time shaking off its sweatshop image despite the fact it’s now doing more than a lot of apparel companies to reduce labour abuses. Or maybe the appeal and idea of America will survive the reputational damage and people will continue to flock to its shores in pursuit of a better life, in the same way that they continued to buy Nike products despite concerns of child labour in its supply chain: I don’t think the sweatshop allegations made much of a dent in Nike’s bottom line.
Then there’s France: a brand which resonated authenticity, quality and sophistication with a significant splash of arrogance, yet which was beginning to look a little dusty and antiquated. Enter Sarkozy with his re-branding exercise. It's going disastrously wrong, à la expensive management consultancy-overhauls that fall on their face because the consultants are more enamored of their own prestige than the prestige they promise their client.
And brand China. A brash, brave, new-kid on the block brand internationally, unafraid to flaunt its somewhat naughty reputation, using the Olympics as a skys-the-limit coming out party, but now realizing that it too will need to give at least lip service to improving its human rights and environmental record to keep the protestors at bay.
People supposedly grow to look like their pets. Perhaps these national branding efforts say something about the increasingly snug relationship between political and corporate interests, and point to the corporatization of international relations. Or maybe I’m just pulling out a few details to identify a trend that is not really there, all the better to package and sell my argument.
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