The Rueful Reuben

Shelley Postman shared this video with me a while ago, and I've been meaning to post it here on Blog Time Passing.  It's a marvelous bit of fun, one that speaks to some issues that exist within the Jewish community, and that can be generalized to other groups as well.  In one sense, it serves as a parable of the conflict between orthodox and reform, literal, and liberal, fundamentalist and metaphorical approaches to a sacred text or canon or tradition.  In another sense, it reflects the conflict between east and west coasts, specifically between New York as an old world, elitist center, and Los Angeles as the new world where people feel free to recreate their identities.  But go ahead, take a look, it's worth your while:

Over on YouTube, the write-up for A Reuben By Any Other Name is as follows:

Noble Savage Productions and Sonny Boy Studios are thrilled to announce that we have completed our short comedy "A Reuben By Any Other Name." The film takes a humorous look at the differences between Orthodox and Reform Judaism played out in terms of the differences between the New York and Los Angeles versions of the Reuben sandwich. Brilliant performances are provided by an ensemble cast of familiar faces from film and television - Jasmine Anthony (Stephen King's 1408, Commander in Chief), Anita Barone (The War at Home, Daddio), Paul Ben-Victor (In Plain Sight, Entourage), Larry Cedar (The Crazies, Deadwood), Pamela Cedar, Alanna Ubach (Hung, Legally Blonde), and Matt Winston (John from Cincinnati, Little Miss Sunshine). Are you an Orthodox or Reform Reubenite? Watch the film and find out!

And so, you might be wondering which category do I fall into?  Well, I don't keep kosher, although I do have some preferences that are rooted in the kosher laws, and I avoid some foods for the same reason.  It's aesthetic, and cultural, for me, rather than religious.  But in this, I'm pretty much with the little girl.   The delis I remember from when I was growing up, including the Pastrami King in Kew Gardens, Queens, which was often referred to in the columns of famous New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin, were kosher, and something like the Reuben sandwich was never on the menu.  My first encounter with it was in Greek diners in New York City, although I later saw that some Manhattan delis served it as well.  But I really don't see how the Reuben could be a Jewish sandwich, no more than the Philly cheesesteak, or your basic, run-of-the-mill cheeseburger.  It's just not kosher!


If you have a similar encounter with the Reuben, or a different one, well, feel free to share in the comment section, I'd be interested to hear about it! 

And so, the lesson is, both sides are right, both sides are wrong, and no one knows where the truth lies, so why don't we all just get along?  And have a good laugh at ourselves in the process?

Winning Body Languished

So, on my last post, The Word and the Nonverbal, I got a rather nice comment from Mark Bowden (click on the good ol' link and scroll down to the bottom to read it), who is a communication consultant and trainer.  He also started to follow me on Twitter, from his profile called truthplane.  And I reciprocated.  That's how things go out here on the social media frontier.

I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about folks in this line of work, at least the ones who act as if they and they alone hold the secret to effective communication, when that's exactly what we teach (or used to teach) in Communication 101 courses.  And there are others who do the same thing in regard to basic anthropology, or general semantics, or media ecology.  I have trouble with that kind of misrepresentation.  But Mark is not one of that ilk, not one of those types, I hasten to add.

Now, maybe this has something to do with the fact that I heard a colleague at a recent faculty meeting talk as if getting paid to be a corporate consultant is inherently evil, a position I find to be absurd in its absolutism.  And maybe it has something to do with the fact that I attended a memorial gathering this week for an old colleague here at Fordham University, Edward Wakin, who did quite a bit of corporate consulting in his day, as well as being the only faculty member we had who really focused on getting students jobs after graduation.   People are entitled to earn a living, after all.

Or maybe Mark is just that good in his nonverbals, I can't rule that out, his emphasis is on projecting an impression of trust.  But after reading his comment on my post, and going to the URL he left there and watching his YouTube video, I was impressed with his open and modest presentation of his area of expertise, and decided to write this follow-up post on his behalf.  We have had no direct communication, I just find him to be the kind of communication professional I can readily endorse.  So here, take a look at the video:

I also rather like the way this was done, from an aesthetic point of view.  So from there, I went on to check out his website, TruthPlane, and found another interesting video there:

I think this video is very helpful as a starting point, and kudos for all the connections to the animal kingdom--nonverbal communication is the aspect of communication that we share with other species, whereas verbal communication is ours alone, for good and for ill.  

And I like the bit about the verbal being the spaghetti sauce and the nonverbal the spaghetti.  It reminds me of how my colleague at Fordham, Ed Wachtel, once wrote an email spoofing Marshall McLuhan, with an Italian theorist who said that the macaroni is the message.  That inspired me, in turn, to declare on every Passover holiday that the matzoh is the message.  Hey, what can I say, food is an often-overlooked element in the study of orality and literacy.  Walter Ong misses it, although Jack Goody does say something about writing and recipes.  But all this talk is making me hungry, so I'd better wrap this up soon.

Mark does speaking engagements too, and appears to do a great job of demonstrating nonverbal techniques, as can be seen from this video:

There also are some other videos on his YouTube channel, and I'll leave it to you to check them out if you care to.  And he's written a book, entitled Winning Body Language: Control the Conversation, Command Attention, and Convey the Right Message without Saying a Word.  That's a title that fits right in in the Self-Help Section of the bookstore, but I can't help but find it a little over-the-top, and couldn't resist having a little fun with it in the title of this blog post.

The thing is, I had a telephone conversation earlier today with general semantics expert Sanford Berman, who has a PhD in Communication, and studied with S. I. Hayakawa and Irving Lee.  Sandy was criticizing contemporary Communication departments for abandoning the teaching of effective communication, which, on the verbal side, included a good, strong dose of general semantics.  And he has a point, it's much like English departments abandoning the teaching of literature in favor of theory.  Understanding verbal and nonverbal communication will serve students much better in life than teaching them about Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Zizek, and company.


So, I wish the best of luck to Mark Bowden, I'll admit to having learned some new tricks from his videos (old dog that I am), and more importantly this has given me food for thought (but now I need to go get some dinner).

Pete of Pete's Café -- Rest(aurant) in Peace

I was saddened to learn last week of the passing of Pete, owner of Pete's Café on Fordham Road, a diner that I have frequently dined at over the past two decades that I've been teaching at Fordham University.  

I've had many a conversation with colleagues there over coffee, and sandwiches, burgers, salads, and the like.  And most of the time, Pete was there, always ready with a smile and a word of greeting.  Pete was a neighborhood celebrity, and we loved him for giving us something more than just another bland coffee shop of the sort that the TV show Seinfeld made famous.

My colleague, Ron Jacobson, told me earlier today that no less a newspaper than the New York Times ran a story about Pete, under the headline:  Mourning a Diner Man, if Not His Mustache.  The story is dated February 17, it's written by Sam Dolnick, and it features the following photograph:

The caption under the photo reads:   "Anna Nikolopoulos holds a photo of her late husband, Pete Nikolopoulos, founder of Pete’s cafe. He died Feb. 2."   And Dolnick begins the story with a reference to Pete's famous mustache, I suppose that's an irresistible lead for a journalist:

Maybe it was the handlebar mustache that kept them coming back. The perfect curlicues framed an everpresent smile and gave everyone, new customers and old, a conversation piece and a reason to remember Pete of Pete’s Cafe.

For more than three decades, Pete Nikolopoulos presided over his diner on East Fordham Road in the Bronx as the generous host with the funny mustache, the neighborhood uncle who would pour you free coffee, ask after the family, and wink at your girlfriend.


Generations of Fordham students went to Pete’s to soak up hangovers with greasy eggs and fries. Deans discussed office politics over coffee, while neighborhood regulars lingered over tuna melts and gyros.

By the way, I can personally recommend both the tuna melts and the gyros to you, and I'm a big fan of their chicken wrap.  In fact, if you go to my profile on foursquare, a social networking site based on geographical location that I haven't done all that much with, you'll see that among the few things I have done there is post a few tips, the first and foremost reading:  "@ Pete's Cafe: Have a gyro or chicken wrap."  But, to return to the story, and the sad news, as told by Dolnick:

But Mr. Nikolopoulos is no longer there to play host. He died of a heart attack on Feb. 2 at the age of 56 during a business trip to Sparta, Greece. For the past two weeks, as the news has slowly spread through the Fordham community and beyond, members of his enormous circle of friends have stopped by the diner to pay their respects — and eat lunch, as Mr. Nikolopoulos would have wanted.

I'm sorry to say that I have not had the chance to stop by and pay my respects.  Truth to tell, I mostly order in to my office these days.  But I plan on heading on over there.  I hope they still have the Pete's Cafe T-shirts with a cartoon image of Pete on them, I really want one now.  Of course, his mustache figures prominently in the image, and in our memory as well, as Dolnick relates:

On Tuesday, his widow, Anna, sat at the counter accepting the condolences of old customers and retelling “famous mustache stories.” There were the trophies he won in various mustache contests. 

Oh, and there was the woman who accosted him on the street, waving a single piece of hair. She said it came from his mustache, and it had been her lucky charm for years.


“He took pride in his mustache,” Mrs. Nikolopoulos said. “It kept him unique. And he loved standing out.”

And Pete's story is classic tale of the American Dream, as Dolnick explains:

Mr. Nikolopoulos came to the United States in 1976 and worked as a busboy and a dishwasher, first in Manhattan and then in the Bronx, at the diner at the corner of East Fordham Road and Hoffman Street, where Pete’s now stands. The Greek couple who owned the diner liked the friendly young man, and in 1978 they sold him the business, his wife said.

Mr. Nikolopoulos quickly made the place his own. The wall behind the counter is covered in his photographs, mustache always well-coiffed, standing with mayors, councilmen and neighborhood friends.

And the story of Pete and his café is also a Fordham story, as Dolnick reveals:

Everyone who had been to Pete’s more than once, which seemed to include everyone who had attended Fordham University since 1980, remembered his affability and his charm. 

“He went to every single table to say hello,” said Stephie Mukherjee, an assistant dean at the school who has been eating lunch there for 18 years. “As I’m talking, I can still see him with his kindness, talking to everyone.” 


It wasn’t just idle conversation, at least not all of it. Mr. Nikolopoulos met his wife, then a Fordham student, at the diner. As she tells the story, he flirted with her as soon as she stepped inside the diner, before classes had even begun, and he kept at it for months. She finally relented and went out on a date with him. Seven months later, they were married.


“He was a very charming guy,” Mrs. Nikolopoulos said. “He was very charismatic. I wanted a solid foundation, and he was solid.”

 

The couple had three children together over 23 years of marriage, but she could never persuade him to lose the mustache.

 

“I couldn’t stand it,” she said, “but it was him.”

It all comes back to the mustache, the mustache was Pete and Pete was the mustache, and so very much more.  Rest in peace, dear Pete, our friend, rest in peace.

 

A Social Media Tasti-D-Lite

Back on April 27, we were delighted to have BJ Emerson of Tasti-D-Lite as a guest speaker in my Interactive Media class at Fordham University (see previous posts Meet The Social Moose and Social Moose Goes YouTubing). And yes, BJ did bring us free samples, which we loved, but it was also marvelous to hear him talk about his own experiences and approaches to social media in a business context, and we were fortunate that he allowed us to video his talk. It's not possible to present the class in its entirety, but here are some excerpts from his time with us:
















It was great to meet and get to know BJ, and I'm grateful for the delicious discussion of social media that he provided. After class, he was off to their Columbus Circle store, right by Fordham's Lincoln Center campus, for a tweet-up that I really wish I had been able to attend. I understand they served Fail-Whale Cake!

A Manhattan Starbucks Challenge

Okay, so here's one my wife came across that's pretty amusing, certainly offbeat. The filmmaker, Mark Malkoff , is identified as a comedian, not that that's a guarantee of anything funny, but this certainly is well made.

And if you like coffee, especially Starbucks coffee, and I am partial to their lattés myself, then you may really appreciate this, or maybe not, I don't know.

If you've reflected at all on the success if not outright domination of the Starbucks Coffee Company as a retail outlet and capitalist enterprise, and on the simple pervasiveness, the ubiquitous nature of Starbucks, you might enjoy this, or find it really, really irritating and offensive.

But, I think that if you know Manhattan, and love New York, whether you are a native New Yorker like me, or not, then you will get a kick out of it.

Thoughts on Thanksgiving

I had a few free moments this morning to start on a post about Thanksgiving, and now I'm returning to it. My wife and daughter had a chance to go see the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this morning, a friend from my daughter's school had a couple of extra tickets for reserved seating, lucky ducks that they are. Then we all went out to eat at Charlie Brown's, my son and mother as well, and for a small group this sure beats working like hell to make a big meal and then staring at leftovers for a week. But that's neither here nor there.

In some interactions I've had about this holiday, some of the controversy that surround it has come up, and that prompts this post. At the core of the trouble is how we react to Thanksgiving as a symbol, and the meaning we attach to it, making it a problem that general semantics might mitigate to some degree. And the first thing to be said is that Thanksgiving is a symbol, not a "thing" in and of itself, it has different meanings for different people, and we probably need to separate out the historical realities from the myth and ritual it represents today. And we probably need to understand that the holiday is not the same "thing" as the mistreatment of native Americans by European settlers in the New World, and at the same time that criticism of the holiday is not the same "thing" as a personal attack on us as individuals.

We Americans set aside this day to take a break from work, which we most certainly need to do, and to express our gratitude for all that we have, which we also very much need to do, and to get together with family and friends, which is a good thing. As a ritual, it is a national, secular substitute for the kind of harvest holidays, which generally involve feasting, which can be found in cultures all over the world. I have heard tell that it actually was based on the Jewish Festival of Sukkot, our harvest holiday.

The American Thanksgiving myth itself is a good one, one of peaceful coexistence and community, and we also very much need messages about community to counter the heavy emphasis on individualism in our culture. Every society has its sacred symbols and rituals, and this is one of the main ones in American culture, and ought to be respected as such. And it may be that the story of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving is something of a myth, but no society can survive without a set of myths to bind it together.

Many myths have some connection to history, though, and this one certainly does. And somehow, we have never reconciled our history of warfare against native Americans with the present day. It's easy to say, that happened centuries ago, and has nothing to do with me--it would be especially easy for me to say so, my parents immigrated to the US in 1955, so we had nothing to do with it, so pass the cranberry sauce please.

But maybe we do need to do something more, like add a ceremony to this holiday, a period of silence and mourning to remember the price that was paid for our present-day comfort? And when you think about it, we have this holiday about the Pilgrims, we have Columbus Day which is also controversial, we even have Martin Luther King Day, but we don't have a national day of remembrance that recognizes the first peoples and nations of our land. If you really think about it, it is hard to explain why we don't have anything like that? Doesn't it seem conspicuous by its absence?

To move forward, we do need to achieve some kind of reconciliation with the past. And we have yet to achieve that.

Tomorrow night, I will be one of the lay leaders for a special Thanksgiving service at Congregation Adas Emuno, and everyone will be invited to say their own prayers of thanksgiving. And I intend to ask for that moment of silence to remember the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere, and all over the world. When Eurpoeans first discovered the Americas and encountered the native peoples, some thought it might be the ten lost tribes of Israel. And there certainly is much that our people have in common with indigenous peoples, so we of all people should acknowledge them, as we also acknowledge the American ritual of giving thanks for all that we have in our lives.

I'll write more on this in my next post.

Magic Hat

So, I'm a guy who likes to have a good beer or two, every now and then. Maybe more now than then, like right now, as I write this. You might say I'm a bit of a beer snob, I won't try to dignify the situation by suggesting that I'm some kind of connoisseur, I just like some flavor with my suds, whether it's a light Mexican Sol or Pacifico or a German wiess beer, or a good old pint o' Guinness Stout. I'll even take some cheap Genesee Cream Ale now and then. Just please, please, no Budweiser!

So, yesterday I stopped by a local liquor store to pick up a six--in New York State, where I grew up, beer was never sold in liquor stores, but only in supermarkets, grocery stores, and beverage centers, while in New Jersey beer is only sold in liquor stores. And I saw a beer I don't remember seeing before, that really caught my eye with it's orange and brown label and packaging. The brewer's name is Magic Hat (how about that!) located in South Burlington, Vermont, and the name of the beer is the enigmatic #9!!! A reference to The Beatles perhaps--remember Revolution #9 (number nine, number nine, number nine...)--or to Cloud Nine maybe, or the nine lives that cats are said to have?

I really can't tell. But the name is followed by the following description: "flavored not quite pale ale" which is also a bit mysterious. Definitely what McLuhan referred to as a cool medium. In fact, a nice, cold one. Anyway, on the little label on the neck of the bottle I found the following text:

The ancient ritual of brewing a distinctly rich and flavorful beer is nothing short of magic. Our mysterious mix of time-honored ingredients, chaotic chemistry, humble patience, and blind faith age into the secret brew we share in the rousing company of good spirits.

Tell me that's not intriguing, and ya gotta love the reference to chaos theory--maybe a bit of the old magic ecology? So, I open the bottle, and notice that under each cap is a little message--shades of Snapple! The one I just opened said "It's all a Movie, but it's Your Movie" which isn't exactly fortune cookie profound or Snapplishly noteworthy, but does add a little bit of fun to the proceedings.

But none of this means a lick if da beer don't taste good. But if it didn't taste good, I wouldn't be writing this, would I? And it is good, excellent really, absolutely delightful, and surprisingly so. It's definitely on the pale side, light, but it does have a lot of flavor, a fruity quality that's not too strong, just enough to give it a little extra something. The bottom line? I found it utterly delightful.

Now, you may be wondering if this is some kind of paid endorsement. It isn't. This is entirely unsolicited, 100% me just wanting to share this with you, and recommend something that is both interesting in regard to packaging, and a really great beer. I am getting nothing in return for this.

But, if the Magic Hat Brewing Company sees this and wants to send me some more, well, I won't protest.

But even if you are an absolute teetotaler, let me recommend their website to you. I took a look before writing this, and I have to say that it is also quite involved, and a bit mysterious. One frustrating thing about it is that I couldn't copy and paste their images to pretty up this post, or copy and paste their text, so I had to type the following in all on my lonesome--see what I do for you? Here's what they say about #9, which appears to be one of about a dozen or so beers that they sell:

A Beer Cloaked in Secrecy

An ale whose mysterious and unusual palate will swirl across your tongue and ask more questions than it answers.

A beer brewed clandestinely and given a name whose meaning is never revealed. Why #9? Why, indeed.

A sort of dry, crisp, fruity, refreshing, not-quite pale ale. #9 is really impossible to describe because there's never been anything else quite like it.

And they're right! I really can't compare it to anyone other beer I've ever had.

Anyway, the website, http://www.magichat.net, is more than a little strange-looking, intriguing in its imagery, offering "amusements" and "happenings" in addition to information about the beers, a shop with t-shirts and the like, a search engine for finding outlets that carry the beer, and under the heading of "Mother Ode" there's "A Brief and Illuminating History of the Magic Hat Brewing Company, An alchemistic tale of great intestinal fortitude and mental fermentation" all in the form of an extended poem!

I should add that I think there are problems with this web design. It's attractive, fun, intriguing, but difficult to navigate or get a handle on. I'm not sure it's as effective as it could be. But you can go judge for yourself now, if you care to. Me, I'm going to get another #9.

Big Mac Attack!

The following image was forwarded to me by Janet Sternberg, who got it from Brazilian scholar and media ecologist Edison Gastaldo, who took the photograph during the MEA convention, during a visit to the Communication School of the Universidad IberoAmericana in Mexico City (a Jesuit school like Fordham University):





I'm not sure how to interpret this, but I think old Mac himself would appreciate the punny business involved here.

And while we're on the subject, let me add on a series of YouTube videos coming from St. Louis-based media ecologist and artist Paul Guzzardo. These are recordings of a performance art event, which presents a problem in translation, as something is always lost when a live performance is recorded, and in this case it looks like it would be impossible to capture more than a small slice of the event. Nevertheless, as a dedicated blogist, it is my duty to bring to you the footage that has become available. There are five different videos posted, and there is no indication as to what order they are to be viewed in, perhaps it doesn't matter, as long as your taste runs to the experimental, avant-garde, kinda stuff.

Anyway, first, here's the write-up from YouTube:

This is one of five YouTube posted video shorts from "A Sam Clemens Remix". "A Sam Clemens Remix" concert opened the 2007 National Media Education Conference (NMEC) on June 23, 2007. NMEC was sponsored by the Alliance for a Media Literate America http://www.amlainfo.org/ . The venue was St. Louis Missouri. The concert was produced by Paul Guzzardo.

"A Sam Clemens Remix" was a live -- largely improvisational -- thirty minute multimedia remix concert. The artists previously worked together on "The Secretbaker Cycle" of multimedia productions http://www.secretbaker.com/. In Secretbaker we used digital tools and toys to navigate through information environments; thousands of pages of FBI files. In "A Sam Clemens Remix" we grabbed on to three of Samuel Clemens' texts; "Life on the Mississippi", "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "A Tramp Abroad". In the concert we explored how the texts and associated archival imagery might be used to fashion new narrative and myth building platforms.

Hemingway said Huckleberry Finn gave birth to the American novel. We're not novelists and don't intend to write novels, but we think Sam Clemens gave us the gear we need to plot a course just like he did Huckleberry Finn and his raft-mate Jim.


THE ARTISTS:
Paul Guzzardo: Designer and Writer
http://www.secretbaker.com/recursive-urbanism.html
Leon Lamont: Digital Disc Jockey- Composer - St. Louis
http://www.myspace.com/djleonlamont
Zlatko Cosic: Digital Video Jockey- Video Artist
http://www.eyeproduction.com/
Amin Hinds: Musician and videographer
Cora Lowry: Musician and Dancer
http://www.myspace.com/finalveil

A Sam Clemens Remix was praxis to a March 2007 polemical article on digital remix and landscape design. The article -- "Is There A Digital Future Landscape Terrain"- was published in AD - Architectural Design and was co-authored by Paul Guzzardo and Lorens Holm. The abstract can be found at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/114171216/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.

And now for something completely different:

A Sam Clemens Remix Video: "Pretend To Read It As A Book"





A Sam Clemens Remix Video: "All Right Then I'll Go To Hell"




A Sam Clemens Remix Video: "We Passed St. Louis"




A Sam Clemens Remix Video: "Hemp and Potatoes"




A Sam Clemens Remix Video: "I Took His Name"




Looks like Cirque de Media Ecologique to me! I hope I get a chance to see one of these things live someday!

Blue's Clueless, and So's Steve Burns

So, anyone who's had anything to do with children and children's television over the past decade has undoubtedly heard of the Nickelodeon network's Nick Jr. program, Blue's Clues. The original host, Steve Burns, pretty much defined the show, at least for those of us in on it from the beginning, and we lost touch with the show right around the time Steve was replaced by Joe (last name forgotten), and now the website says something about someone else named Kevin, whoever he might be.

What I can say about Blue's Clues is that it was pretty innovative, and pretty much put Nick Jr. on the map as an alternative to PBS as a source of television programs (aka electronic babysitter) for preschoolers. If you're familiar with Blue's Clues then you know what I'm talking about, and if you're not, you could just skip ahead to the video, which is amusing in and of itself and require no prior knowledge of the Nick Jr. show, and in fact is entirely unrelated to Blue's Clues apart from the fact that Steve Burns stars in it.

I must say, though, that in my opinion the Blue's Clues program is essentially a watered-down, less manic, more educational, more stable version of Pee Wee's Playhouse. Pee Wee's Playhouse was a very creative children's program, with strong appeal to adult viewers who could enjoy the sheer weirdness of the program, starring the comic Paul Rubens as Pee Wee Herman. The show ran from 1986-1991, ending about half a decade before Blue's Clues premiered. This show was pure postmodernism in action, and exemplified all of the characteristics of television that Neil Postman argued were leading us to amuse ourselves to death. But it was very amusing indeed, great fun, but also really, really strange. And strangest of all was the character Pee Wee Herman, who seemed entirely ambiguous, not just sexually but in terms of age--was he a childlike adult, or an adultlike child or what? In this, Pee Wee also illustrates what Postman identified as the disappearance of childhood.

There were other points of ambiguity in the series, which I won't go into now, because that's not the point of this post. And of course, how can I resist mentioning that Rubens career was severely damaged not long after the show came to an end, when he was arrested for obscenity, after he was caught abusing himself (as the saying goes) in an adult XXX movie theater. Interestingly, while Ruben's troubles with the law have kept his show out of syndication for children's television, it's now shown on cable as part of Cartoon Network's late night Adult Swim programming (when kids graduate from Nick Jr., they migrate to Cartoon Network's regular programming, I should add).

Now, Steve Burns is nowhere near as strange as Paul Rubens was (or still is), and beyond that, the Pee Wee Herman persona and Pee Wee's Playhouse was the brainchild of Rubens, while Steve Burns, as I understand it, merely answered a casting call and was chosen for the starring role in Blue's Clues by the program's producers. But the Nick Jr. show has traces of the hallucinogenic quality of Pee Wee's Playhouse in that both made everyday objects such as furniture, food, flowers, etc., into characters with personalities, both featured segments where the main characters would dive into the world inside a picture hanging on the wall, and both revolved around some kind of game--more so Blue's Clues with it's mystery/puzzle/guessing game, but Pee Wee's Playhouse had it's Word of the Day, which only Pee Wee and the other anthropomorphic residents of his playhouse, and the viewers at home, were aware of, and when anyone said it, everyone would yell and scream! Like I said, it was manic. But along with that, while Steve Burns is nowhere near as ambiguous a persona as Pee Wee Herman/Paul Rubens, he still has that childlike adult/adultlike child quality, but again, in much milder form--but still noticeable!

Steve Burns has not been arrested, to my knowledge, but I recall him launching into a tirade against the producers of Blue's Clues after he left the program, having appeared on it from its debut in 1996 to 2002. But there also were a number of rumors started about him, that he had become a hippie-type, that he had joined the Hells Angels (improbably!), that he had become addicted to heroin and died of an overdose! According to the Wikipedia article on Steve Burns:

The legend may have started from Burns' appearance as an autistic teenager in an April 1995 episode of Law & Order, in which his character died before the opening credits. Burns' "overdose" may also have been simply another iteration of a sub-genre of urban legend in which celebrity figures whose public personas are associated with innocence are supposedly revealed to have a hidden, seedier side. There was a rumor that Steve left Blues Clues because of his mental issues. According to a 15 minute documentary on Nickelodeon, titled "The 10 years of Blue", Burns left Blue's Clues to start a self titled band. Burns was quoted on said program saying "[He] didn't want to lose [his] hair in children's television.

The article goes on to indicate that this wasn't a bad move for him:

After Burns left Blue's Clues in 2002, he recorded a rock album, Songs for Dustmites, which was released in 2003. The album was produced with the assistance of producer Dave Fridmann of Tarbox Road Studios, and with the assistance of and contributions by Steven Drozd, drummer for The Flaming Lips. (During the recording, Burns portrayed an engineer aboard a spacecraft in The Flaming Lips' film, Christmas on Mars.) The album was well-received by critics, many of whom expressed surprise at the album's quality (given their previous associations of Burns as "merely" a children's show host). Burns followed up the album's release with an international tour in 2003 and 2004. Burns also made an appearance on Figure It Out: Wild Style as one of the panelists.

In 2003, Steve Burns supported The Flaming Lips on their UK tour.

Burns recently contributed a cover of They Might Be Giants' "Dead" to the TMBG tribute album, Hello Radio.

For more on his career as a musician, you can take a look at his website, Steve Burns Rocks!!!

But before he left Blue's Clues to play the rhythm and blues, he starred in a short film directed by Jonathan Judge, entitled Hot Pants: Enchilada Surprise. This was 2001, so if you've seen this one already, my apologies, I'll try to do better next time. If not, but you are familiar with the Nick Jr. series, his character here is not that far off from the one he portrayed in Blue's Clues, same nice young man, now out on a date with a nice young girl, both from New Jersey!

And if you haven't a clue, blue or otherwise, about what I've been writing about so far, no matter, as I said, this stands on its own merit as a very funny film. Be warned, however, that it involves just a little bit of crude humor.

Anyway, this is courtesy of YouTube, where the description of this film reads:

"A perfect date goes from bad to worse in this re-telling of the urban myth of the Enchilada Surprise. Ben and Suzy are having the perfect first date until Ben orders Enchiladas Surprise at a Mexican restaurant. Now Ben's in a battle to avoid the ultimate humiliation."

Absolutely hilarious! So funny you will crap your pants!

Starring: Steve Burns
Director: Jonathan Judge
2001

And now, this:

X-13D

The other day I was shopping in our neighborhood Pathmark supermarket when I saw a display that caught my eye. It consisted of a bunch of unusual looking bags of chips. Now, I'm not very big on chips myself, but other members of my family go in for them, and it's not like I won't touch the stuff, I will (which is why I try to stay away from them), so I brought a bag home with me (after paying for it, of course).

Anyway, the bags are mostly in black, which is somewhat unusual for chips, with very large writing in white, some of which is outlined in red, giving it a very mysterious, if not dangerous look. At the very top is a kind of squiggle slanting slightly upwards as you move from left to right, going from a straight line to a series of sharp up and down marks, like the graphs drawn by a lie detector or some such device, and then trailing off into a straight line. Although horizontal, it also evokes a kind of lightning bolt effect, but mostly seems to signify some sort of electrical device used for testing. It appears in white against the black background, but outline in red.

Below this is the familiar Doritos logo, but in very large print, in white with a touch of gray to give a 3-D effect, outlined in red. Below it, in plain, white type as large as the logo is the mysterious designation "X-13D" which takes the place of any kind of description or name for this particular product. Below that is an image that looks like a paste-on label. The top half is white, and in black print it reads:

This is the X-13D Flavor Experiment.
Objective: Taste and name DORITOS® flavor X-13D.
Receive additional instructions at snackstrongproductions.com
or text 'X-13D' to 24477 ('CHIPS').

The bottom half is in gray, and lined like note paper, with just the words "Tasting notes:" followed by "ALL-AMERICAN CLASSIC" in what looks like handwritten felt tip pen. And here's what it looks like:

So, it's a mystery for the consumer to solve. The website, snackstrongproductions.com, provides an attractive view of an urban landscape, kind of reminds me a little of the SimCity videogame/simulation, with different areas to click on, including one devoted to X-13D. And that takes you to another site, http://x13d.doritos.com/, where you have the opportunity to "Name the Flavor," and also use the "Clue Generator" to play videogames and obtain clues about the mystery flavor, and also use an "Ad Generator" to actually create an advertisement for the new product.

This takes the notion of cool media that McLuhan discussed, where less information delivered by the source requires more participation on the part of the audience, to a new level, and it does the same for what McLuhan's associate, media and advertising practitioner Tony Schwartz, dubbed the soft sell. And it capitalizes on the open-source, do-it-yourself mentality fostered by the internet, web, and social networking sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and MySpace. It also adopts the media marketing strategy of films such as The Blair Witch Project and The Matrix trilogy, which rely on the audience to go to the internet to complete for themselves the entire narrative.

So, when you go to the X-13D site, text appears informing you that, "You are now part of the X-13D Flavor Experiment" and then cuts to, in large type:

GET IT.
TASTE IT.
NAME IT.

It's all that and a bag of chips, but I'm sure there are people drawn in by the mock-serious tone and the mystery of it all--chip noir. Hey, the winner gets a year's supply of snacks, so let the chips fall where they may.

But is this snack food any good, you may well ask. In the end, no amount of cool and groovy advertising will sell a bad product, at least not more than once.

Well, first of all, the taste seems somewhat familiar, but it's hard to put your finger on. My first reaction was tartar sauce, but that would hardly be an "ALL-AMERICAN CLASSIC" now, would it? A second tasting made me think of pickles, a little better maybe, but I don't usually associate pickles with baseball and apple pie. And the chips sure don't taste like apple pie. In all honesty, neither I, nor my wife or son could figure it out.

That's the odd thing about a lot of our food, that it is, well, not exactly tasteless, but somewhat less than flavorful. I've heard the complaint about our tomatoes (and New Jersey is known for its tomatoes) repeated, in contrast to the tomatoes from (fill in the blank with your favorite old country), and I also heard, when I was a grad student in a class on propaganda taught by Terry Moran in the grand old media ecology program (now sadly eliminated) at New York University, that when people are blindfolded, they have a great deal of difficulty telling the difference between different flavors of soda. Apparently, it's the color, and the name of the drink that set up our expectations and tell us what we're supposed to be tasting. Talk about your cool media.

So, what do other people think about this mystery flavor. I did a quick google and found that on taquitos.net it says:

The chips looked brighter than normal Nacho Cheese Doritos, as they had the same underlying yellow tortilla chip shape and color, with some brighter orange powder. I thought I was wrong when I smelled pickles, but then I tasted them and there was a hint of pickle flavoring. I then saw on the bag that they have "Tasting notes: All-American classic," which made me think that they're going for either a cheeseburger taste or maybe a hot dog flavor, with pickles and onion. The ingredients included onion powder, tomato powder and cheddar cheese, but no pickle flavoring that I could identify. Definitely a bizarre taste. It should be interesting to see what other people think about this flavor. Not the best Doritos flavor I've tried, but certainly an unusual one — at least it didn't taste like Nacho Cheese or Cool Ranch.

Aroma: They smell a bit like dill pickles, oddly enough.

And, on another blog, Kathunter's Personal Space, in an entry entitled Doritos: X-13D Campaign, I found the following:

I love a good advertising gimmick. I have spent too many hours in war rooms with slightly insane and terribly talented creatives to miss a mentionable effort. In case you bought a bag of Doritos at your corner store in the last couple days (which I do often - in love with the new BBQ flavor dipped in mexican cheese dip from the restaurant on my corner), you may have seen the generic black bag labeled "X-13D".

After a brief description of the bag, she goes on to relate:

Any agency who tries to pull a packaging or otherwise meaningless marketing stunt is an immediately absorbing opportunity, so I shell out the 99 cents...
-- eat some chips
-- tangy
-- eat more chips
-- strange this is not so mexican
(I am an EXPERT AT MEXICAN)
-- omgwtflol i know exactly what this tastes like!

I had to respond via the super forward thinking method of short-code sms communication, and quickly found out the actual promotion does not begin until 05/13.
My attention span these days does not last that long, so for anyone who may Google this, the answer to Frito Lay Corp's question is the following:

McDonald's cheeseburger - specifically the bite with pickles and onion pieces.

I dare you to buy it and tell me I am wrong. Usually, I am wrong, however THIS time I am fracking positively beautifully correct.

Her post drew a lot of comments, with others suggesting that it might actually taste more like a Burger King Whopper, or McDonald's Big Mac. I suppose that sooner or later we will know for sure, if anyone still cares, but this also shows how, if you try to live by the internet, you may also die by the internet--no secret is entirely safe from this collaborative medium.

But the bottom line is that the chips just didn't taste very good, and I don't think that any one of us would buy them again, even knowing what they're supposed to be. Especially knowing what they're supposed to be.

But with advertising like this, who needs products in the first place? Just ride, captain, ride, upon your mystery chip.

Sopranos Style and Substance

Several years ago, I was one of two speakers featured in a symposium about The Sopranos held at Montclair State University, which is not too far from where Tony Soprano lives (allegedly). The symposium was co-sponsored by their Department of Justice Studies (amusingly enough), and by their Coccia Institute for the Italian Experience--not being Italian myself, I can only say that I understand the agita that the series has caused many Italian-Americans (I felt the same way about Rob Morrow's whiny Dr. Joel Fleischman on Northern Exposure, for example, and Grant Shaud's Miles Silverberg on Murphy Brown), but I still consider the program to be an artistic achievement.

The other speaker had written about The Sopranos and more generally about the gangster genre in relation to Italian-American stereotypes. I was invited on the strength of the book chapter that I contributed to This Thing Of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos (a terrific anthology edited by David Lavery). My chapter, "No(rth Jersey) Sense of Place: The Cultural Geography (and Media Ecology) of The Sopranos" obviously hit close to home for the folks at Montclair State--I have also given a talk on the subject at a conference of the New Jersey Communication Association, and at a panel that my friend and colleague, Paul Levinson, set up for us at Fordham University a couple of years ago, which also included a member of The Sopranos production team. Anyway, I posted a copy of that book chapter on the second entry on this blog, The Sopranos (I still didn't have down the finer points about formatting posts at that point, but all the text is there). Since then, I've posted a couple of new entries, Return of The Sopranos: A Border Dispute, and Scenic Routes on The Sopranos.

So, this is my third follow-up commentary on David Chase's HBO series, and I am taken back to that Montclair State symposium because a comment that a professor of Italian made there comes to mind (I just received a copy of a new anthology about memory published in Rome, for which I helped to edit the section on Media with Elena Lamberti of the University of Bologna, and contributed an original essay on "Time, Memory and Media Ecology" which they translated, since I don't actually know any more Italian that I can read off of a menu at one of the excellent establishments in the Arthur Avenue section of the Bronx (near Fordham University), the Little Italy that is not the tourist trap of downtown Manhattan and has the best Italian food in New York City bar none, so maybe this also has something to do with me remembering the symposium all of a sudden--but I digress).

This professor was from Italy, and had that air of European elitism that often doesn't mix well with American populism, and basically he expressed his overall disdain for The Sopranos, wondering why anyone really cared about the series in the first place, saying that it has no artistic merit, in contrast, say, to a Fellini film. This is a classic put down, labeling the subject in question as low culture in contrast to high culture. And it may be the case that David Chase is not Federico Fellini, but then again Fellini was not always Fellini, and certainly did not start out as the revered filmmaker that he came to be. And Fellini films, I am certain, were said to have no artistic merit in contrast to Dante or da Vinci (I know it should be Leonardo, but I like the alliteration).

But I find questions of comparative artistic merit a bit childish, which is not to rule out aesthetic judgment altogether. But a fundamental rule of media ecology as applied to aesthetics is that each medium has its own bias, and therefore its own aesthetics. It makes no sense to say that film is a superior artistic medium than television, or that books are superior aesthetically to film. The epic poetry of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, being essentially oral compositions, should not be placed in the same literary category as written epics such as Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, as similar in content and theme as they may seem to be. This is a point made by Marshall McLuhan, Edmund Carpenter, and Susanne K. Langer for that matter.

The Sopranos, therefore, stands as a singular artistic achievement in the medium of television. David Chase has said that he approaches each episode of the program as if it were a film in its own right, and it is true that the individual episodes hold up in terms of overall quality, and internal integrity. If you have never seen the series before, and watched an episode at random, you would probably recognize the artistic merit, even if you didn't quite follow everything that was going on (which is not to say that everyone will fall in love with the show, coming into it cold and in medias res, but anyone who has an appreciation for and understanding of the aesthetics of television will recognize what Chase has accomplished, even if he or she does not appreciate the topic or themes).

Each episode is not created equally, however. For example, Sunday before last gave us "Chasing It" (Episode 81), which was good but not great. This past Sunday's "Walk Like a Man" (Episode 82) was outstanding. Stories are interwoven about Tony Soprano and his son, who is severely depressed after his girlfriend broke up with him in response to his marriage proposal, and Christopher, once Tony's right hand man, now keeping his distance in order to stay drug and drink free, in conflict with another of Tony's lieutenant's, Paulie. The story lines are distinct, but parallel themes emerge about dealing with depression, about therapy (AA and psychoanalysis), drugs (both in the sense of getting drunk or high, and as medication), parenting and the question of whether genes are destiny (inheriting a propensity for alcohol and drug abuse, depression, and ultimately, violence), the need to be accepted by one's friends and peers and the power that the peer group has over who we are and how we act, and in the end, the shocking turn to violence as the means to resolve problems, manage emotions, and as a high in and of itself.

If this were the first episode of the series that you had ever seen, I believe that you could appreciate all that I have laid out. But in television, unlike film, the art form is not the single narrative, but the series as a whole. There is a growth and learning effect from watching episode after episode, even if there is no narrative progression over the years, as was the case for classic situation comedies. For even the best series, the first few episodes are rarely stellar, and it takes a while for them to hit their stride (certainly, the pilot of The Sopranos, while compelling, does not hint at what's to come, and it's not until the fifth episode, "College," that the program hits the high mark). Even an intentionally stereotypical and unsympathetic character like Archie Bunker becomes more fleshed out, more complex, more human over time. The effect is cumulative. In literary theory terms, it's intertextual to an extreme. What makes "Walk Like a Man" work are all the earlier episodes that showed friction between Paulie and Christopher, the episodes that took us through Christopher's addictions, withdrawals, and relapses, the episodes about his fiancée Adriana and her unhappy demise, and the long and difficult relationship between Christopher and Tony, all of which is unconsciously symbolized as dream-work in the movie Christopher produces in the second episode of the season, "Stage Five" (Episode 79).

The Sopranos is in one sense cinematic, in another episodic. The two qualities are quite different, almost opposites of one another, but David Chase has managed to find a balance between the two, and it is that combination that helps to explain his artistic achievement. The show is a serial, in the sense that the episodes have an order, and that plot lines unfold over the course of the season. But it is not a serial in the classic sense, there are no cliffhangers asking us to tune in next time, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel, and a story line left hanging in one episode may not be taken up again until a few episodes later. The series could also be considered a soap opera, there's a dinner theater parody that plays in the area called The Soapranos, but soaps also rely on the cliffhangers that are absent in The Sopranos (no who shot JR? in this series), and soaps have a multitude of unrelated plot threads meandering over the weeks, while David Chase maintains a thematic unity and a sense of narrative closure from episode to episode.

I come back to balance as the fundamental aesthetic that distinguishes The Sopranos, not in the absolute sense of fearsome symmetry, but in the sense that the characters, the families (relational and criminal), and the episodes function as an ecology, and as I argued in "No(rth Jersey) Sense of Place," an ecology for the electronic/digital age--in formal terms, The Sopranos has some thing in common with a blog, and shows us the possibilities that bloggers might someday achieve with this new medium. But, of course, a blog can never have the artistic merit of, say, The Sopranos.

Technological Equity

Charlene Croft invited me to look in on a live blog event today on the Equity and Technology Workshop blog, and post a comment, which I just did, and I thought I would include my remarks here as well.

I began by quoting a comment on their blog:

More computers in school classrooms isn’t necessarily the answer – return to this later. Important question…studies finding ICT isn’t necessarily translating into better learning outcomes.

And now here is what I wrote in response:

Rather than return to the question later, maybe this needs to be the starting point. That is, if we begin with the question: how can we get more computers in the classroom, or how can we get students to use computers more frequently and efficiently, then we are bypassing the question of purpose and goals. What are we trying to accomplish as educators? What are our educational objectives? Is mastering the technology an end in itself?

At one communication conference that I went to some years ago, there was a keynote speaker who was a school superintendent from Brooklyn, and he was talking about how they brought computers into the elementary school classroom to teach writing, and how wonderful it was that they could just write on the screen, and rewrite, delete and edit with the computer. My friend and mentor, Neil Postman, was sitting with me and he raises his hand to ask a question: "Why can't you do that with a paper and pencil?" Well, the speaker starts to say something more about word processing, and Neil again says, "But why can't you do that with a paper and pencil?" And the speaker really couldn't answer that question.

Neil had a reputation as a neo-Luddite, and took the extreme position in such arguments in order to make his point about our uncritical attitude towards technology. But the point is that it is important to be able to answer the question, in regard to technology, of "what for?" Why are we using it? What are we trying to achieve? I believe there are legitimate applications (and Neil would not deny that), but we need to be able to articulate them, and stick to them.

So, what I would emphasize is the need to determine appropriate applications of a given technology. If we don't know why we're using it, then we end up being used by it.

This is also true of the various formats being used. For example, years ago a colleague in our department brought in a faculty member from another school, who made a presentation and demonstrated the use of online applications for teaching. One of the things he showed us was how he made his lectures available to download. I asked why he didn't just provide a written transcript instead, and he had no answer. Is recording a lecture, for example, the best way to make information available, or is it more effective to distribute it in written form where it is easer to review and jump from place to place?

To be able to consider appropriate applications, it also helps to foster an analytical and critical attitude towards technology. That goes to the heart of what media ecology is about. And, by the way, you can call that a form of literacy, but personally I think phrases like "media literacy" obscure the fact that reading and writing, literacy in the sense of being "lettered," refer to an entirely different medium than film, or television, or the web.

In thinking about these issues, I also find it useful to make some distinctions. For example, one factor is access to information. Increasing access has a democratizing effect that also undermines authority (not always a good thing), and can lead to information overload--Postman's argument is that we solved the problem of too little access a long time ago, but we keep at it, much like we solved the problem of too little food a long time ago, but our instincts still tell us to eat.

Another factor is the evaluation of information, and its synthesis. This is what is desperately needed now, and in part, it's why blogs are so popular. And note the fact that the United States government agencies had bits and pieces of information about 9/11 before the terrorists struck, but were unable to properly evaluate the threat, put the pieces together, synthesize the information.

A third factor is production--is it better to give than to receive? We know that new technologies have been making production easier and easier, but there still is a gap. Back in the middle ages, the Church sometimes taught people only to read, and not to write. We are not fully empowered unless we can do more than merely access information. And production helps in thinking critically about the information we access, knowing the variable and often arbitrary human factors that go into the creation of media content.

A fourth factor is social interaction. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Information and interaction are quite different, and access to information is not nearly as helpful in many situations as access to social networks (hence the glass ceiling in organizations). Many people who are computer whizzes don't know the first thing about navigating social networks or simply interacting with others in a respectful manner. And that has traditionally been one of the basic lessons of schooling--how to behave.

ChipPOPpitty

So my wife was helping out with a Congregation Adas Emuno fundraiser, and one of the organizers of the event, Robin Cramer, gives her some samples of this new treat called ChipPOPpitty, made by Robin's brother along with Richard LaMotta, the creator of the Chipwich. ChipPOPpitty consists of bite-sized chocolate-chip cookies "triple dipped" in chocolate, so it's like the cookie is inside the chip instead of the chip being inside the cookie. Or rather, the cookie is inside the chip in addition to the chip being inside the cookie, which makes it a self-reflexive or recursive cookie, doesn't it?

I don't know, but I can tell you these things are really, really tasty. I never thought I'd be recommending food items in this blog, but in this case I'll make an exception. For what it's worth, they claim that the product has no trans fat, is 60% cocoa, and is high in flavanoid antioxidants. All I can say is that if you like chocolate, you'll really enjoy this.

But, you probably will have a hard time finding it right now, because it's not being mass marketed and distributed, and that's actually quite interesting. Instead, this product is being introduced by way of "guerilla marketing," an approach that Richard LaMotta pioneered. Here's an excerpt from Richard's story as it's told on their website:

When he learned that distributing Chipwich® through supermarkets would cost $50 million, Richard was a little bit discouraged – being short about $49.999 million.

Then he had an idea –

Sell Chipwich® from every street corner! He spruced up the image of the street cart making it cleaner, spiffier and brighter.

The first rollout was 50 carts.

Lines formed. The Chipwiches were selling out – often within one hour.

Within two years, major supermarket chains were selling Chipwich®

He recruited, trained and managed 2700 students to operate Chipwich pushcarts, and in the process pioneered the use of guerilla marketing to launch and distribute Chipwich® on streets, in stadiums, at carnivals and campuses across the U.S.

22 years later, over 1 billion Chipwiches have been sold worldwide. Chipwich® has attracted more than $50 million in free advertising and Richard has appeared on countless radio and TV talk shows. Chipwich® is now run by a major food company and Richard will forever be known as “Mr. Chipwich.”

Those of us in the New York Metropolitan Area know all about the Chipwich carts, but to be perfectly honest, I had no idea that I was being subjected to guerilla marketing at the time. I just thought (doing my best Homer Simpson impression), "ummmmm, Chipwich..."

Now, LaMotta and his partners are recruiting young people for MyStudentBiz, where high school and college students, 14 years old and up, can earn money and gain business and entrepreneurial experience by selling ChipPOPpitty (which is really, really good) and other products to stores (not door to door, more like getting it for them wholesale). They seem to have a genuine interest in working with young people and providing an educational experience as well as an employment opportunity. Rather than supermarkets , they list a variety of alternative potential outlets such as

Antique shop, Appliance store, Arcade, Art gallery, Art/music school, Arts & crafts store, Auto dealer, Auto parts store, Bagel shop, Bakery ,Bank/financial services, Barber shop, Beauty/hair/nail salon, Bodega, Book store, Bowling alley, Bridal shop, Candy store, Car wash, Carpet store, Cell phone store, Chamber of commerce, Children's clothing store, Chiropractor's office, Coffee shop, Computer store, Convenience store, Cooking store, Delicatessen, Dentist's office, Diner, Drugstore/pharmacy, Dry cleaner, Electronics store, Firehouse, Fitness/health club, Florist/plant store, Furniture store, Gas station, Gift store, Golf driving range, Greeting card store, Gymnastics center, Handbag shop, Hardware store, Home decorating store, Hotel/inn/B&B, Ice cream shop, Ice skating rink, Insurance broker's office, Internet café, Jeweler, Karate school, Kennel, Kitchen remodeling store, Lamp/lighting store, Laundromat, Learning center, Leather goods store, Lingerie shop, Local law firm, Local library, Locksmith, Luggage store, Lumber store, Maternity store, Mattress store, Men"s clothing store, Mortgage broker"s office, Movie theater, Music store, Musical instruments store, Newsstand, Nursery/garden store, Office building, Office supplies store, Optician/eyeglass shop, Paint store, Party supplies store, Pet grooming salon, Pet store, Physical therapy clinic, Physician's office, Pizzeria, Police station, Post office, Printing/photocopy store, Pub, Quick oil change center, Real estate broker"s office, Restaurant, Roller skating rink, Sewing/fabric store, Shoe repair shop, Shoe store, Ski & snowboard shop, Spa/massage center, Sporting goods store, Stationery store, Tanning salon, Thrift/consignment shop, Tire dealer, Tool rental store, Toy store, Travel agency, Trophy/awards store, Tuxedo rental store, Vacuum cleaner store, VFW/Elks Club, Video rental store, Vitamin/health food store, Window treatment store, Wine/liquor store, Women"s clothing store, Yarn shop, Yoga/pilates studio

And they also say that they will help independent small entrepreneurs to get their products out to a market, so it's not just a way to sell Richard LaMotta's creations.

If you are interested in any aspect of this marketing strategy, I recommend taking a look at the MyStudentBiz website. Whatever your take may be on this approach, and I know that people's opinions vary radically on topics such as this one, I would say that what we are seeing here is a reflection of the relatively new electronic/digital mode of operation that involves working from the bottom up rather than the top down, and coordinating activities in new and different ways (not to mention the fact that the self-reflexive/recursive quality of the cookie also reflects our new electronic/digital/postmodern culture). For more about the larger technocultural environment, here's some recommended reading:

Douglas Rushkoff's Screenagers: Lessons In Chaos From Digital Kids

Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution