People Of The Now 9: Gemma

A shop space in Kingly Court. Beer and ink flow freely, intermingling with synthpop as the evening glides along.

Me: So, this is pretty awesome.
Gemma: It is? Oh, thank you! I'm so glad everyone likes it!
Me: Well, I think you've tapped into a zeitgeist here. I mean, everyone wants to draw, right? But something stops them...
Gemma: Yeah! I designed the new t-shirts and I can't draw, really...
Me: This a one-off thing?
Gemma: Not at all! We try and do something with every new line release at Lazy Oaf; this time we just wanted a bit of a drawing party. Only had two weeks to organise it, but its worked!
Me: Well, you've hit on the kind of thing where the people make the event. It's changing the way people act, you can see it.

Vlad: And maybe they'll come up with some new designs for you!
Gemma: Oh no, its nothing as serious as that! We just want people to come and well, draw! How are you guys getting on? Drawn yet?
Vlad: Yeah!
Me: ...I had my drawing inhibitions for a while. I've been trying to shake them for a year, and then something like this comes along and smashes it...
Gemma: Have a beer!
Me: We certainly shall. Oh and, isn't this basically the best job ever?
Gemma: It's got its good points!

The Lazy Oaf drawing club stays open all weekend in Kingly Court, Carnaby. It's awesome as all hell and deserves YOUR support.

The Shoebox Full Of Gold.

You know how some people have little boxes of their most treasured possessions? Possessions so treasured, in fact, that they're prepared to entomb them and look at them only every five years, all the for the knowledge that they're safe? I know people who did/do that, and it struck me as odd. Aren't your most treasured possessions your memories, and all that stuff?

Not today. Today, I'm backing up my music. 32 Gigabytes of pure love. Flowing from the teetering shack-on-a-cliff of my laptop to the lead-lined underground supersafe safe that is my budget portable hard drive. And it feels so very, very good.

Should it?
The kind of thing that's taking place as I type this is something that conventional notions of transaction and value can't keep up with, and it's a little dizzying. The hard disk costs about 50 quid. Onto it, I am adding just over 5000 songs (many of them are hours-long mixes, fact fans). At an iTunesy estimate, that'd be, what, £4050? And once I copy my dissertation, and all my old uni-work (hey, it's important), we reach about £4051. Except it's just not that valuable, is it? It's mentally impossible for me to treat the thing as though it is. Is it right that we take a shoebox and fill it with gold?

In the future, that shoebox won't even be in our hands. We'll send our stuff off to some guy who promises that he'll keep it really safe, and we can come and look at it every now and then, and poke around it, and he won't look in it himself, honest. This is called The Cloud, apparently. We'll be carrying our treasures in invisible bubbles behind us, and it'll be impossible to lose them.

Sounds awesome. Sort of.

Oh, transfer's finished. My precious...

Conscience Clea(red)

On the 25th November, Starbucks unveiled its new campaign for the US and Canada. Really nice in connection with Christmas, right? Not so nice in connection with World Aids Day, which is what it's actually about. Ouch! I wonder if the copywriter's gonna be a little (red) faced over this? A whiff of client writing, I reckon...

(red) is something of a success story right now, between catching the wave of philanthro-branding (alongside Fairtrade), and being very careful in its associations (phones, The Gap, the right sort of celebs). This campaign, unfortunate strapline aside, will almost certainly be a moderate success: the facebook event for this 1st December promotion currently has 531,000 attendees.

Looking closer, some of those have only joined to use the group as a forum for their grievances:

"...maybe I'd reconsider if they didn't support authoritarian regimes, if their coffee was fair trade certified, or if they didn't practice semi-legal union-busting techniques"

Quite, Stacy. Whatever Starbucks' practices may or may not be (and I'm certainly not qualified to know), lots of people still have an anti-capitalist attitude towards them - and against that, what this promotion amounts to is a 5 cents donation towards AIDS charities, for each cup of coffee.

Isn't that about... 3p? Thruppence on a £2 coffee? And beyond that, there's the nature of (red) to consider. From joinred.com:

"(RED) is not a charity. It's a business model designed to create awareness and a sustainable flow of money from the private sector into the Global Fund, to help eliminate AIDS in Africa. Consumers buy (PRODUCT) RED, and at no cost to them, money is sent directly to the Global Fund."

(red) isn't a charity. But neither is Starbucks! And the people that buy this won't, in a personal sense, be 'giving' much to charity. What they will be doing is expressing a notional support for the idea, like we all do with badges, or T-shirts - and incidentally, you can bet that the cups this coffee comes in are branded to bits.

So perhaps Starbucks are doing the right thing here? They're a business. They've partnered with a business. Both are experts on branding, image and aspiration. Your purchase will perform the function of showing you in a certain light, without too much of the markup associated with a significant charity donation. If people actually want to give any real money I guess they'll just go and do it.

Right?

thanks, http://forums.somethingawful.com people. I love you.

Append: Stacy writes back to say that 'anti-capitalist' is something of a slur and certainly, I can understand it might touch a nerve in America! Lets pretend I'm a better writer and that I actually put 'responsible-consumerist' instead :)