A latex fetish mask, from Flickr.
yellow mask
Originally uploaded by Latexfan75.
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Category: Culture
Creative have launched a competitor to the video-capable iPod. It looks rather like the iPod except clumsier and uglier. But this is the bit I thought was extraordinary:
Creative are touting the Zen as a far more powerful player than Apple’s offering, with additional functions such as FM radio and a built-in mic.
“We are focused on the technology,” he said. “This is still a technology marketplace.”
“This is the key difference between a technology company and a branding company,” he said, taking a side-swipe at Apple’s successful marketing campaign for its iPod.
Firstly – the iPod does what it does very well. What makes Mr Sim think people want additional functions? But more to the point – how many millions of units do Apple have to ship, and what proportion of the market do they have to win, before their competitors come to terms with the fact that all consumer products are brand items, and bought as much because people like them as for what they can do? We’re not talking about coal-fired power stations or aircraft carriers here, we’re talking about something that people are buying for entertainment, that they carry around every day in their pocket. Car companies get it – that people want cars that look nice, have the right associations (yes, Mr Sim, that’s branding) and that they enjoy owning. If that’s true for a £20,000 car, it’s certainly true for a £200 mp3 player. That’s not much more than a pair of trainers. If the chairman of Nike suggested that branding was unimportant, we’d all assume he’d lost his marbles.
I’ve got an iPod shuffle. It weighs 22g; about as much as a reasonably fat nightingale.
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Orchestra Super Mazembe
Aduna has three MP3s up at the moment from one of my favourite CDs, which is an Orchestra Super Mazembe compilation called ‘Giants of East Africa’. So go and download them, enjoy them, and then buy the album.
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Mask of the Week
A seasonal one. Krampus is one of the Companions of St Nicholas.
![[Krampus pic]](https://www.luehrmann.at/BildderWoche/2002/02-12-04-krampus.jpg)
I found that photo via Google Images. I don’t know where on the site it is, but the domain is that of the only naturist hotel in Austria.
I’ve just finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which I found a bit disappointing. My problem, I realised after a while, was that I was expecting literary fiction and it was actually genre fiction.
Which is a slightly difficult statement to justify. It’s not literally true – there is no genre the book neatly fits into. It’s about people doing magic, so I guess you could call it fantasy, but the real-world setting (Regency London) means it would be just as fair to call it magic realism, in terms of subject matter. It doesn’t have a happy ending. It has some rather literary quirks – the whole thing is presented as a C19th text, complete with footnotes.* Certainly none of the (glowing) reviews quoted on the cover suggest it is anything but literary – though they’re only excerpts, of course, and may say more about the publisher’s marketing strategy than anything else.
It’s quite difficult to put my finger on why it reads the way it does. Prose style? Characterisation? It’s not straightforwardly a quality issue – there are plenty of bad books that are clearly literary in intent, and JS&MN is competently enough written. It’s something to do with the approach to storytelling, perhaps.
I should have checked Amazon; not the reviews, which are full of idiots comparing the novel to Austen and Thackeray, but the bit where it says:
Customers who bought books by Susanna Clarke also bought books by these authors:
J.K. Rowling
Terry Pratchett
Jonathan Stroud
Jasper Fforde
I might actually have enjoyed it more if I’d picked it up with different expectations – I do read plenty of non-literary fiction, including Pratchett and Rowling. Though I suspect JS&MN really needs to be cut down by a third, literary or not.
* I found the footnotes were pretty tedious, on the whole.