What makes a cell phone cool? It’s not that an executive from the service provider showed you his, the one that’s engraved with his name and filled with Frank Sinatra songs he’s downloaded–oh, and a couple tracks by Nelly Furtado and Matchbox Twenty, just to prove he’s hip to the times. Nor is it that you went to a party that rang in the new phone while declaring its predecessor obsolete, where you got to drink countless delicious shots of lemon vodka served over tiny scoops of lemon sorbet: you’d slam the vodka, then suck down the leftover white glob like a whore. But both of those things were part of Motorola’s strategy last Thursday night at the launch party for its new phone, the SLVR.
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The local arm of the promotions company Gen Art, the event’s producers, pitched a giant white tent in Millennium Park and carpeted the floor with sparkly black Astroturf. The tables were Plexiglas boxes filled with plastic ice cubes and huge faux black pearls. The centerpieces were obscene orchids submerged in square glass vases. The whole thing looked like some decadent Hollywood version of Tokyo: sushi for miles, tiny tiramisu parfaits on Japanese miniature ladles, more strawberry-garnished glasses of champagne than a crowd of about 450 could guzzle.
This was the kind of party where the only way to have fun is by making a spectacle of yourself–if you don’t, someone else will, and you’ll be forced to watch. I bumped into my friend Joe, whom I hadn’t seen since an episode a month ago that saw the two of us humping a trash can together at Nick’s after the rest of the bars had closed. The tent was our oyster.
The guy explained that he was in white and Joe was in black, so the spill was actually more tragic for himself.
A couple weeks ago Beans and Prefuse 73 performed at a free party at the Puma store on Rush, which was promoting the marriage of Puma and Evisu jeans. It was so uncomfortably packed I was having perverse trampling fantasies and almost had a panic attack. Puma has become so pervasive as a brand it didn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind that their presence was feeding the cultural currency of the product, making the sneakers more valuable for their function as symbols of a kind of arty hip-hop affluence than for their functionality or even the way they look.
