Laurel Ann Bowman

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I was devastated to learn this week that my pal, colleague, confidante and mentor Laurel Bowman passed away.

Wait a minute – weren’t we supposed to grow old together and sit around the Old Ad Folks Home and talk about how kids know nothing anymore and how it was back in the day? Weren’t we supposed to found the Geriatric Sound Museum where old rockers could wheel off and have another go at fame and ear drum damage?

So it’s only now dawning on me that this is the real deal and that Laurel has left us. I guess that means that I’m leaving Denial behind and about to experience Anger.

Laurel BowmanSo… I remember being introduced to Laurel at 855 Boylston Street, where i worked for IQ&J/121 Marketing. (“Help Clients Win.”) I worked for Jim Ricciardi at the time, managing computer art and layout in his studio. When Laurel came on board, Jim knew her from Arnold and I got the signal that she was good people, family. They shared laughs about folks they knew in common, and I could tell immediately that Laurel was somebody I needed to get to know.

I was spending a lot of time flipping between the Photoshop/Quark workflows that fed the print production beast, and writing HTML and figuring out this new dealy-o thing called The Web. There were like maybe two other computer geeks in the building who got it (Lee Stanford and Bill Fanning), but for everyone else it was a mystery – in fact almost nobody had heard of it. So a skunkworks task force formed, and Mark Wilson came on board, and we decided to go to Management (Bink and Tom) to show them what this new medium could do and to get buy-in that we should take the agency in this direction and pursue work. Mark selected Jay Bernasconi as his art director, and Laurel as his writer.

We landed work, thanks in no small part to the fact that when Laurel entered a room, things lit up. She was a force to be reckoned with. There was no denying her presence.

Clients loved Laurel. They believed in her, because she made it clear that she believed in them. She was their partner. We got repeat business, from clients who would leave their company and brings us along to their new employers. We started to grow.

There was a period of time when it was sort of like we were moonlighting – direct ad spreads by day, interactive projects by night. At one point, Laurel and Emily Gallardo went to the Kwajalein Atoll. on a project for Raytheon. They came back jetlagged and exhausted and filled with stories. I still have a little wooden Buddha that Laurel gave me from that trip.

Ingalls moved to the Design Center in South Boston and rebranded itself. I almost got myself fired, I was so angry over the move. For the record, and to clear the air, I want to say this to Tom Block: I am sorry I was such an asshole. Now that I am older, I understand what you did, and I know my words and actions must have really irritated you. I apologize, once again.

You see, Laurel and Tom had a great rapport. Of course! Laurel and Mark helped me through that rather bleak moment in my life. I owe you guys still for that one.

But back to Southie, and the freshly-minted Ingalls Interactive. Mark brought Katie Fitzgerald on board, and we started pulling down business for real. We were full time interactive, and we became a component in most new business pitched for General and Direct – especially Direct.

You must think that all we did was advertising. Not so. Here’s the heart of the story for me.

Laurel had her band, Lumen. Through her gigantic magnetic field, she managed to pull me away from the desperate orbit I had fallen in to and helped me achieve enough velocity to rejoin the world of the living rockers. I dusted off my keyboard gear and found myself playing with Jack Frosting. I hung out and took in the local rock scene. I felt my fingers thaw and I got back into action.

One time Laurel had a gig or something and she asked if I would come along and maybe just help out a little. I said sure, of course. So we’re riding along in Walter, and we get to TT’s or some place, and we’re getting out of the car, and Laurel leans over and in a confidential voice she says to me, “You know, I’m not as butch as I look. Would you mind grabbing that amp out of the back seat?”

We went to each others gigs. We listened to each others studio roughs. We celebrated each other’s CD releases. When her copy of CMJ would come in, she’d drag me into her office and play me the cuts she thought were worth anything.

Laurel used to dog sit for my family. She took the Baby Dog when we went out of town. I recall also having Bailey come and live with us for a week at one point. What a sweetie Bailey was.

Simone glommed on to Laurel. It was sort of like watching two atoms fall into orbit and bond to form a bigger molecule. Simone insisted on being dedicated at the Theodore Parker Church and on having Laurel as her godmother. At work, Laurel was always asking about Simone.

We grew and grew. Sichon, Mel, Michah, Anthe, Jill (“SHAPIRO!!!!!!!”), Johnny Figs came on board. We landed a whopper from John Hancock and Matt Warren and Ryan McDonough joined the family. And we were a family, with Laurel as den mom.

Comedy was a central part of our daily rituals. We usually had a Howard Stern debrief around 11 am every day. Me and her, we did Jerky Boys routines. We traded being “Sizzle Chest” and “Liver Lips”. That’s where the concept of the Hot Mop came from, a Jerky Boys call that had us on the floor laughing. Laurel turned it into a verb, so when she indicated we should hotmop something, that meant climb up on the roof of it and fix it pronto, bud. No excuses!

Things change, the world turns, people get new jobs. Katie went to iXL, I followed about six months later. Laurel and Robert Guay peeled off and formed Red98 – a whole ‘nuther story that I really don’t know much about, since I was already drinking iXL’s Coca-Cola. Laurel and I kept exchanging dog sittings until she moved to Ipswich and I moved out and got an apartment of my own.

Laurel, Mary, I’m sorry I never made it up to Ipswich to visit. It’s totally my lack of initiative that’s to blame. But then, I guess we take each other for granted sometimes, don’t we?

Back in the old days, when I was pounding out HTML for Ingalls Interactive, I’d run across situations where the copy needed an edit or tweaking – or there was just no copy outright. So, I’d supply my own and run it past Laurel in an email. She’d either tweak my tweak or tell me “Rock on!”. The greatest honor Laurel gave me was to tell me I was an honorary member of Local 855, her pet name for her club of copy writers at the agency.

Laurel, as I write this, they’re laying you to rest. I’m glad I was with you and Mary and your mom and dad and uncle and family last night. I’m glad I saw all our family from back in the day. I love you all.

I love you Laurel. I can’t tell you enough.

Zappa Plays Bicycle

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Normally, I’m not one of those bloggers that post a lot of video, but I’m still savoring the recent Zappa tribute on WZBC that I did with James and Matt. Along the way, the conversation turned briefly to the famed Zappa-on-bicycle bit, so here it is – as long as it stays posted on YouTube.

I guess there’s no hope for the video on this piece – it looks like bad compression, sort of like what you see when you over-jpeg something. Sometimes, this is the best that the wayback machine can come up with. Try googling Ghoulardi and see what you get…

The Future Futures Index Is Down

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Think back to ancient history – like before Al Gore invented the Internet.

I don’t recall ever hearing the top story of the hour being “American Stock Exchange futures are down, due to heavy losses in Asian and European markets”. I reckon that we can now know this because we can all see stock performance around the world instantly thanks to the web, and because we have people who stay up all night following this kind of activity.

I guess I have few problems with this bit of news. For one thing, it is manipulative. If I invested in the markets (I don’t), I’d be gearing up for the bell to sell whatever shabby bits of paper I have left because – omigod – the market’s headed LOWER. I mean, when the radio tells you it’s going to rain, you bring an umbrella, don’t you?

For another thing, though it maybe newsworthy, does it deserve the lead spot at the top of the hour? When I decode the message “stock futures are down” or phrases like “pretrading”, I visualize the really rich and powerful Joe Stock Traders out there getting a jump on the stock market by betting on what it’s going to do before it opens.

When do these guys do this? As soon as the NYSE closes? Or do they go to dinner first?

When the stock market was explained to me, my grandfather pointed to a building we were passing on the Rapid and said, “Jimmy, you own a brick of that building.” Of course, I had to ask if we could go to the building and take my brick home with me, to which he patiently explained that it was better if I let the company use my brick, to keep their walls up. Later, I was taught the basic principle, “buy low, sell high – and hang on to a good stock. When it’s down, it’s down, but if it’s a good stock, it’ll go up again.”

Does anyone still believe this? Or am I just waiting for the ice man to deliver a block from a horse cart?

In other news, layoffs are coming. The American auto industry will be insolvent within 12 months. Cheerful stuff about, um, the future.

Oh yeah, it’s going to rain this weekend. Bring an umbrella.

Barefoot children

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I’m thinking hard about a site redesign for my minimalist, boring link page casually known as sendai77.com. The problem is me of course: i’m the client, the writer, the designer, the technical consultant, the developer, and the cobbler.

More about me: I’m a busy consultant for IBM. I use the word “consultant” loosely: in the Global Services branch where I serve, we’re all consultants, so I sort of can’t avoid the moniker. But a more accurate description of what I do is “IT Specialist – RIA Developer”, which, translated into Ordinary American, means I make web pages. True, I try to get on the slick projects that require Flash or Flex, but since I’m a sub genus of Consultant, I go where the work takes me.

But that’s not all. In my less lazy off-hours, I’m a musician, painter and photographer. I try my hand at songwriting and composing, and I’m not a bad cook to boot. My pals tell me that I have a “very full life”, which may be a way of saying I take on too much.

Given that, you’d think I’d have a smashing, wildly self-promoting web presence. Well, I don’t. Maybe I never will – maybe it’ll always amount to what LimeyG referred to as a few “sad, lonely blogs” which are perennially neglected.

I had a long discussion with Viv yesterday on the topic of blogs and topics. See, I feel that one WordPress is not enough. My infrequent rantings tend to jump categories, and it’s my personal feeling that WP does an inadequate job of fully presenting multi-topic content. Instead, users are force to pick the content channel out of the raging stream (or in my case, pathetic trickle) and apply the Category Filter technique of content sifting to arrive at a page that sieves the stream into, well, categories, which are basically akin to del.icio.us tags.

Well, I guess there’s nothing wrong with that…. except I’d like to write a music blog and a technology blog and a somewhat-related-but-entirely-new-thread user experience blog – in short, I sort ofwant more silos, each with the ability to categorize within themselves – and possibly out to each other.

One answer may be to skin my own WordPress in such a way that it reacts the way I want it to.

Viv suggest that I redesign my site. What I’m describing is basically a one-person magazine.

That brings up the spectre of Content Management….

So am I going to put the yellow “Digger Dude” sign up on sendai77.com? I’d rather just unveil the new site when it’s ready, rather than titllating the 1.5 readers I’ve got and letting them down when they realize that “Coming Soon” means “Coming By The Time The Sox Get To The World Series Again”.

Anyone seen my kids anywhere? There’s the barefoot ones.

SBUX and me

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I’m a quirky consumer.

If I didn’t have to be a consumer, I’d be quirky, period. If I wasn’t quirky, I’d be a plain old consumer.

I know. Self-fulfilling truisms. But they’ve been banging around in my head for a few weeks, and it all came tumbling out for me when I read an article in the Metro about Starbucks. Actually, it was a transcript of what Jim Cramer had to say about SBUX, or so I glean after attempting to summit the highly-unreadable www.thestreet.com. (Note to theStreet: just because you cover finance doesn’t mean you can’t use plain English – and don’t get me started on the evils of linkfarming…)

I digress. The gist of the article is that SBUX is in the middle of a hard business turn-around, similar to what McDonalds has just gone through. Starbucky’s suffered from too rapid expansion, too many outlets in the wrong places, filthy stores, stale menus, disgruntled staff, the whole shebang. Enter Howard Schultz, who is going to turn the ship around and right the course.

Back to me, the quirky consumer. I’ve noticed the changes down here at street level. After all, by my reckoning, SBUX gets between $15 to $20 out of me per week. Maybe that’s about average – I’m guessing it’s a little low for the typical weekly SBUX addict. I usually just get coffee and a reduced fat coffee cake in the morning. I don’t often go for the 3:30 latte or whatever. The quirky bit: I just ask for a simple, dark roast coffee. I’m generally not interested in espresso drinks, unless I’m craving a straight-up shot. But I am interested in their brand, and I study it while listening to smooth jazz-folk and watching privileged people ordering complex beverages. There’s not much else to do.

OK, blindfold test: When I say “Starbucks”, you think of….

Coffee, right?

Right. Because they’ve gone to much trouble to build their brand on “Starbucks Coffee”. It’s on their sign. It’s on their cups. The lattes and cappucinos (and all their variations and descendants) are variations of the key word “coffee”. They are made of coffee. The brand isn’t “Starbucks Cappucino”. It’s “Starbucks Coffee”.

Which brings me to change number one. They’ve decided to standardize on one flavor of urn roast called “Pike’s Place”, which they go to great pains to tell you is roasted monthly in some place like Latrobe, PA. It took a few moments of brand education, but I (who have never been to Seattle) came to discover that there’s a Place in Seattle called Pike. Oh. I get it.

Of course, my poor old eyes deceived me one day early in this new change, and it looked as if the staff had written “Puke Decaf” on the board. Astigmatism is hell.

Let me tell you, to an urn coffee connoisseur like myself, Pike Place is awful. So, I continue to order the “dark roast”, whatever it happens to be that day. I do so at the peril of getting really tired, burnt, grounds-filled coffee, but hey, I’m quirky that way. I want my dark roast coffee.

Which brings me to change number two: Vivanno.

OK, blindfold test number two: when I say, “Vivanno”, you think of….

Nothing?

Right you are, unless you’ve had one, or at least paid attention in your local SBUX store. Vivanno is their new line of Left Coast smoothie-style drinks.

Is that a good reaction? Nothing? Obviously not, from a brand positioning point of view.

Well, what do you expect? Nobody knows what a Vivanno is yet. It’s not a household word. (One will get you ten it never will be.)

Let’s look at this new brand for a sec.

Viv – anno. Year of life, or something like that, in some sort of Latinate kind of way. Or so I would guess. Seems to me that the marketing types sat around the table and threw a bunch of important and European-sounding syllables around until they came up with the right word that satisfied their particular criteria for creating this new product. Viv, as in “filled with life”. Anno, as in “it was invented in Rome!” Cue the orchestra: Viiiii-vanno! Oh-oh-oh-oh!

But this is a “Kleenex-before-it-was-Kleenex” situation here, folks. It’s a smoothie by a smooth name, is all. And there’s nothing inherently “smoothie” about the word “Vivanno”. You’re right though – there’s nothing inherently “tissue” about “Kleenex”, except the phoneme “Kleen” as its root word. You could even argue that “nex” is descended from “nez”, which is “nose” in French, so you’ve got… Clean Nose…

Remember the Nova? No va. “Doesn’t go.”

Vivan no. It won’t live.

My message to Howard Schultz: if you really want to get back to basics and turn your stores around, it’s the coffee, stupid. It’s really awful to stand in line for fifteen minutes at a cramped and understaffed store, watching the bored and overworked baristas go through acrobatics filling complicated menu orders for picky clients, just to get sub par dark roast coffee. Make good coffee, and do something to cheer up the future actors and rock stars that are pouring for you. You’ll go farther and get better results. Just a thought.

Especially since it was that yummy, aromatic dark roast coffee that got me to walk in to the store for the first time, oh those many years ago…

Trouble in Narnia

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Usually, NPR stimulates my ears in the morning in order to get me up and out the door for work. Often, it also stimulates my brain and I dash out thinking, “I should write about that”. No time, gotta catch that train.

The case today is one such moment. I heard the NPR film critic review today’s release of “The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian”. The sound bites were filled with the predictable, horn-heavy sword battle type of film score and clashes of metal on metal. Ever notice the choir of women singing indistinct syllables in the background of these scores? They must be the heavenly host, bearing the fallen warriors off to Valhalla or Burbank or someplace.

The reviewer then mentioned that this is all PG fun, and that not a drop of blood was shed.

Excuse me?

I guess that when you’re run through with a sword and die but you don’t bleed, that’s PG fun. But if you’re run through with a sword and blood spatters all over the screen, that’s another story.

Take for example another film I haven’t seen, “The 300”. I’m pretty sure that’s not “PG fun”, and I’m pretty sure my man Mr. Rodriguez didn’t spare the buckets of gore. I’ve seen “Sin City” and “Planet Terror”, so I know what to expect when I’m going to sit down in front of one of Bobby’s films.

But I did see all three “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, and there are hangings, shootings, swordings (?), broken-bottles-over-the-head, cannibals, and a gargantuan, hungry squid. And a frightening monkey. We laugh and squirm as Ragetti can’t keep his eyeball in his head, a schtick that got tired in the first one. Okay, so it’s PG-13, but still, the idea is fun. Death is a fun loving guy.

Disney has built its empire on scenes of violence without consequence. In every animated feature the Magic Kingdom has ever produced, there’s always been scenes of gratuitous, Punch-and-Judy slapstick between two supporting characters, usually one tall and skinny, the other shorter and plumper, both without the wits to extinguish a candle. The formula extends to the live-action films. It’s a staple, like Cheerios in the kitchen.

We’ve been brought up with this stereotype branded into our thought, the idea of violence without blood or consequence. At least Indiana Jones gets all sweaty, bloody and painful when he gets in a brawl. So, as with the last one, I’ll give this trip to Narnia a skip this time. Kill a few bad guys for me, Peter. In the name of Aslan.