Salinger, the documentary

When a person is dead, then there is no stopping what the living will speak. This applies to everyone, regardless of power, status, respect nor dignity. 
- My key takeaway of the documentary.

My life on Netflix is pretty unexciting. Whenever I really want to spend time on it, it stops loading. Like #foreverPIXELATED!!!! [Insert all kinds of worldly profanity here]. I then proceed yelling at everyone in my family to turn off their phone wifi to maybe perhaps get less pixelation... But of course, to no avail. When it's working though, I'm usually shuffling through the documentaries.

As always, my reviews of stuff come way later than when I actually viewed them. This one, I viewed a long time ago. "SALINGER" came out in 2013 and has a lovely unimaginative poster that resembles a book cover. SO CLEVER!!!!..... Not.  Apparently this director guy (Shane Salerno) had spent about a decade working on this documentary. SO WORTH HIS TIME!!!!...... Not. I sound sour because the documentary leaves you feeling sad and sour to the extreme. I watched it to kill some time in between the two FIFA games of the day, and because I knew I'd learn something new. I was also never a big fan of The Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield, so I was mildly intrigued in what ways would this documentary glorify the book even more than it already is. In fact, "Salinger" glorifies EVERYTHING even down to the unpublished characters of JD Salinger's work. Go figure. Making the documentary pretty "phony." LOL! Get it??? hahaha..... (insert awkward turtle hand gesture here..)

Source: chicagonow.com

Most of the interviews are quite generic (more and more extraordinary compliments of JD Salinger, his looks, his writing, his style, his perfection-obsessed personality, yaddayaddablahblah), except for Jean Miller's as she gets pretty deep, personal, and sentimental when revealing her side of the story. This is when I was shocked about how a person could keep silent for more than half a century and spill the beans on EVERYTHING when Saliger's gone off to the heavens. Same sentiments ensued when I watched the other interviews of the women Salinger had encountered (pretty much countless). Then I went onwards to assure myself to never fall for word-masters who are suave, brilliant, and veiled-in-secrecy-in-super-mysterious-sexy-ways. Hard. Very hard. I think I'll fall for a personality like Salinger's just for the sake of self-destructing my emotional self. Anyways, back to the documentary review... Not only is the privacy-invading content from these women pretty disturbing, but it is more about the documentary's existence itself. Salinger had spent his whole life with a mission to seclude himself from the outside world, truly pursuing the art of living in secrecy and in insane mental state. One can't blame him as his fame did not merely bring money and happiness, but also heavy burdens; there were three--not one--murders in America where the killers quoted Holden Caulfield in the court testimonies. The most famous incident would be the murder of John Lennon. This topic is also briefly covered in "Salinger." Despite all of Salinger's troubles and wishes to remain away from the world, this entire documentary is about divulging his life, tearing his secrecy apart, and publicizing almost everything he had wanted to keep silent about. It fucking starts with this guy stalking around to take paparazzi photos of JD Salinger walking out of the mail depot. RUDE. Just so rude! Poor JD Salinger... He will definitely not rest in peace now, would he? :( :( :(

Yet there are still good parts to this mediocre documentary. There is a somewhat ridiculous amount of time spent on Salinger serving the state in WWII. I never took the effort to read JD Salinger's wiki page, so I had no idea how long he had served, how hard he tried to get enlisted, what kind of position he undertook, how he came back, et cetera. This part and his survival through WWII is enriching and complements his subsequent life events well. Needless to say, this fact-driven history lesson in the middle shines out and stays with you after the documentary, because it clearly juxtaposes against all the emotional, sappy, and overtly pretentious interviews and viewpoints on JD Salinger.

Still interested?
Watch the trailer below. 

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Bits of Burberry

BoF: Are millennials the customers of the future?

AA: It’s a great question. Eight years ago we targeted the millennial consumer, because that was the white space we needed to play in because our peers didn’t. We knew that was the customer coming out of these high-growth emerging markets.

There are going to be seven billion smartphones in everybody’s hands in the next five years. Now, everybody is a digital customer, so doing things digitally is no longer a niche [play]. Doing things digitally is how the entire world communicates.

That’s our language today. Digital is not an afterthought. Our design teams design for a landing page and the landing page dictates what the store windows will look like, not the other way round. In creative media, they’re shooting for digital, then we are turning it back to physical.

I talk to these outdoor companies and we get some amazing deals. They’ve invested in thousands of digital screens but everybody is still giving them still images. It drives them crazy.

Great companies need to move as fast as the consumers are moving. Look at Samsung. Look at Apple. Look at what is happening in this whole world. The brand has to look cool on every device.

BoF: How are smartphones driving your strategy?

AA: None of us go anywhere without them and organisations have to keep evolving. Sometimes what [investors] don’t like is the expense structure. Look at the number of new departments that we have had to create in the last three years alone. You can farm a lot of it out, but you’re going to pay three times the amount, or it’s going to take you three times longer.

So, if we all agree none of us are getting rid of [mobile] and it’s only going to get better and better, how do I make sure there is a team in house that can take every bit of our content and make sure it’s perfect and relevant and for where mobile is going. There are companies that still do everything for print. We were doing everything for desktop, but now let’s do everything for mobile and then take it back to desktop.

BoF: Is that is what’s happening now?

AA: That’s what is happening right now. We have a huge team, we have a mobile director, we have a mobile team in the creative department, a whole mobile team in the tech department, because we know this is where it’s going.

All you have to do is look at your own behavior and how you want to shop. How many times do you go on Google? So what’s our Google strategy? What’s our YouTube strategy? What’s our Facebook strategy? Wherever the consumer is going, we have to have a strategy, for every consumer across every one of those devices, platforms and channels.


FULL READ: http://www.businessoffashion.com/2013/09/burberry-angela-ahrendts.html

Excerpt from Somewhere

"And so she sauntered out of the house, battered. Emotionally battered.

She yelled on top of her lungs words that never should have been invented.

Everyday and every morning and every night and every early evenings and even the fucking afternoon’s were the same.

And she whored her ideals for her reality.

Her love for ambition,

Her smiles for wrinkles,

Her trust for assassination,

Her realness for lies,

Her insights for empty words.

She needed to escape and she needed a partner-in-crime, a friend, a bank account, a functioning brain, wisdom and momentum. She needed a start to start the inertia.

And so she sauntered out of the house, never looking back.

Cursing herself and cursing her past and cursing whatever hope and belief she had put on herself. Cursing everybody who had believed in her and cursing the world in a whirlwind of angst that one can never imagine – trust me, her angst was worse than Holden’s.

She lay on the small street outside her front door, praying for a grizzly bear to come nuzzle her life out of her below-average body. But God wasn’t on her side and no grizzly bears came to eat her up. God watched her cry on the asphalt and for a dramatic effect, turned her tears to neon blue, complete with visual mapping. Seeing the transformation of her tears’ color, she popped up and stood erect and thought, ‘Scrumptious.’"

RAAAAAAANT

APPARENTLY A BLOG IS WHERE YOU RANT ABOUT EVERYTHING AND THEN HAVE EVERYONE READ IT AND THEN SECRETLY HATE YOU FOR RANTING SO MUCH.

Therefore

I don't want to rant.

I really want to wail.

But I will wait.

And whisper

in a small little voice

perchance husky as my mother calls it

in my morning voice

into your ear

with small

tears

by the corners of my eyes

"how come I'm here
I'm finally doing everything for myself
but I'm not myself"

breathe
weep

"and I'm doing everything else than whatever
I want to be doing for myself...
at this moment."

sigh
smile

"Lack of sleep, maybe," you may reply.

Prayin' hard

Posting at work

Life is wheezing by and I am an outsider.
Actually, let me rephrase that.

I'M A FOOKEN NOOB.

Seoul's very big and big and busy and did I say big?
Seoul is familiar yet unfamiliar.

The thing is, I can't formally formulate this... uncomfortable feeling of not knowing... a lot of the ins & outs. I know Vancouver as if it's the palm of my hand (I know the city's size is VASTLY different) but I know Vancouver's insides, too, you know? I'm confident.

Here I flounder through buildings, people, signs, cigarette smoke, dirty air, systems, structure, unknown language, and mannerisms in a tired state. I'm grateful for all the things I flounder through. But why do I have to do this alone and... in a tired state. I hate that word, TIRED. So I keep myself up high with my mentality just floating up there. But the comfort ain't here. Not in my body and not here. Not yet.

cheerios~