new years wish list and some predictions

first, HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone. i started the new year in a new apartment and with a huge party, and i plan on carrying that energy forward into this new and exciting decade.

nooka: i am always asked "what new for nooka next year?" but am constrained by the PR calender of my public relations people. what i can say is that 2010 is the year we re-launch the fragrance as production problems last year pretty much rendered the 2009 effort as money i could've easily flushed down the toilet! nooka fragrance got 4 stars from chandler burr of the new york times and i'm looking forward to seeing it in some great stores this year [bergdorf, barney's and nieman marcus – are you listening?]. that writ, we will have some exciting new additions to our nooka strip line [belts] and the AO wallet series. i think it's safe to leak that we will be producing a fairly innovative iphone cover. a totally new line of accessories will also launch 2010, but i'll keep that secret for now.

non-nooka predictions:
even without the release of the apple iSlate, i predict the death of the e-reader as a product category in 2012. this is solely based on my own experience. aside from battery usage issues [on the iphone], i haven't picked up my kindle since using the kindle app on my iphone. i believe the tablet computer apple releases will be the death knell of the current e-readers like the kindle and the nook – people will pay more for more features than they need. in the 1990s everyone was taking about convergent devices, and the iphone finally delivered. now let's see what's next!

i predict that google will eventually roll-out an advertising supported cell phone by 2012 and it's own network supported communication system by 2013. this will include a free global wifi system sending shutters throughout the telecommunications world. i myself will be dumping all of my telcomm stocks this year – their business models are more than overdue for a true free-market challenge. back to the nooka theme of universal communication, let's please have a global system already!

aaargh cables! this is more a wish than a prediction, but please, when will ALL electronic devices automatically communicate with each other the same way you link the iphone as a remote to your computer? there is nothing less attractive than the tangle of cables behind computers and TVs! the technology is there, someone suggest a universal standard and make it happen. one should never have to have the following conversation again: "honey, i need the HDMI cable, do you know where it is?" "is this it?" "no, that's DVI and only works with our old monitor, i need the one for the new one" "this one?" "no, but i do need that dvi to mini-dvi converter to connect the computer to the TV, so hold onto that til i need it"...

on air travel. i predict that airlines will still be utilizing mid-twentieth century technology for planes totally ignoring any innovation in airplane design that would cut down travel time. moreover, i forsee continued convoluted pricing schemes and business practices that make air travel more and more unpleasant each year. as a child, i was promised 3 hour flights between tokyo and NYC by the year 1985! since that is obviously not going to happen anytime soon, add this to the wish list: make an airline with all business class style seats and service for all flights over 5 hours and blend the cost to have a fixed price of between $1500 and $4000 RT. it may take a while to get popular, but trust me, a good portion of travelers would rather take fewer flights a year in comfort than many trips in pain. people are bigger and taller than they were when the current airplane standards were devised in the 1960s and also, we travel more and farther than 30+ years ago. people enjoy low fares, but really, a $700 RT between NYC/Tokyo is equally as ridiculous as the $10,000 RT for business class. obviously one is subsidizing the other.

colors. i feel that bright fire engine red is going to become a popular color towards the end of the year.

wildcard: nina hagen will release an electronica album produced by giorgio moroder.

london

the last leg of this business trip is to london, which is a city i know well and absolutely love. my impressions of all cities change each trip and i've been coming often to london for the past 18 years, but i remember my first impression was formed when i spent a week in mumbai/bombay after my first trip – that london is the great mother/father of cities and New York and Mumbai are the half-siblings of travel/conquest/trade – each raised in a different time. and even though the siblings grew up and developed on different continents and different times, one can see the seeds of utopian urbanism in the parent. i see this when i visit all the post colonial cities including sydney and even hong kong – i actually feel like alice through the rabbit hole traveling to alternate realities of the same place or perhaps the cities are morphing through time and just the people are concurrent to my age...i'll devote a separate entry to my musings on utopian urbanism as i see them applied in various cities.

so needless to say, when i'm here, i never have a dearth of things to do and people to see. this trip is no exception.

day 1: dan, my friend and former coworker from my london days as creative director at reuters came in to meet me at the glamorous metropolitan hotel [i got a good rate by london standards from tablet hotels, check out the site here. i booked my rome (the pulitzer hotel which i highly recommend) hotel via them as well. it's a great resource for design savvy travelers like me as an ugly room/hotel can really depress the aesthetically sensitive]. we had lunch at a little pub in mayfair near the hotel that specializes in polish and mexican food [i did not make that up]. we both had the wild boar sausage with mushroom sauce and mash – amazingly deliscious. we then went to the london design museum which always impresses. the had a show on industrial design on one floor, a photography exhibition and a retrospective of richard rogers architects work. the design museum of london is something that the cooper hewitt in NYC needs to study more. i truly feel like the collections and shows are curated by design professionals whereas the cooper hewitt [the american museum of design, part of the smithsonian in in nyc] seems guided by corporate sponsors and populist trends with little research on the true innovators in particular genres. that said, the london design museum could be a bit more international, for example, why are my designs not in the collection and not in the shop? [dear reader, please feel free to email them yourselves and ask them for an answer, their website is here]. moreover, why am i not in the cooper hewitt? [again dear reader, feel free to research and email/contact their curators from their website here. i am an american designer and the cooper hewitt is the national design museum!] THEN we had dinner with mia and kevin who have a lovely toddler named george who was born in my 2 year absence from london. he is adorable. i left them to meet darren at the british museum which is open late on fridays now...so overall...lot's of culture in one day.

day 2: a bit of window shopping and visited selfridges to check out nooka there as well as their new concept store within the store, the wonder room. selfridges is a great store and really merchandises well. they are also early adopters of nooka, so check em out there when you're in the UK. at the moment, nooka is on the 4th floor in the men's department but will soon migrate to the wonder room. i'll update the blog when that happens. i also went to primark, which is the uk version of h&m but even less expensive – it was a ZOO, so i'll go back monday morning to really check out the goods [i can't shop in a crowded shop]. talking of zoos, i met darren at the london zoo where he is a fellow and we had v.i.p. treatment – i got to pet a lemur named dana who was so sweet and affectionate – an incredibly memorable experience. their butterfly exhibition is also amazing with the insects bred on-premises and they are quite tame. not as big as the bronx zoo, but well worth a visit.

i think that's enough for one blog entry. no?

der nookanooka wurde über Berliner Himmel entdeckt

my trip to berlin is winding down. i got to see my friends, do some shopping and visit the holocaust memorial near the newly opened u.s. embassy. last night, after dinner at a beer garden [i drank this thing called berliner weissen which is bright green woodruff syrup in a light wheat beer] i met yuna at platoon, an art organization that does some cool stuff in korea of all places [as well as locally and in europe]. i signed up as a member of their platoon and got a membership dog tag. their website is here. berlin is full of great art spaces and it seems every night is a party right in the museums and galleries . we hit a photo installation on one street and then a dj party at the KW [kunstwerk] after platoon. the dj at KW was amazing but the cops came and made them turn the volume down at midnight.

foto is of a nookanooka near alexanderplatz. next stop...rome!

nooka japan hanami etc.

a busy tokyo friday night [march 28th] yamada and i went to the sakura café event at tokyo midtown but it was cancelled from the rain, the party moved inside where there was enough free campaign to keep people happy. we then moved to the issey miyake curated show at 21_21 design site which was very good for the most part. the dyson inspired fashions presented on mannequins made from dyson parts was strangely haunting as it made me contemplate whether or not robots will develop a need for fashion. it was great to get a personal tour of the show by masato hatanaka who created the sound installation for one of the pieces. there was also a lovely watercolor by isamu noguchi and a sculpture version by Dui Seid [i don't remember seeing any paintings at the noguchi museum in NYC...i should visit it again]. then off to the re-opening of the claska hotel which was forced to renovate after a routine building inspection to strengthen the structure against earthquakes. they have 2 full floors of gallery space, one with a "sound installation" which was clearly a sponsored piece to sell the speakers and soundsystem, and the other a show/shop for japanese craft that fit the design of the hotel interiors [which are really nice]. i would love to stay a at the claska [they get a mostly foreign clientele from coverage in the wall paper guides] but it is too far from everything. also, the roof garden view faces the wrong direction, away from the city – missing some great vistas [my biggest complaint about tokyo is getting around – it's exhausting, time consuming and expensive. one really gets spoiled living in NYC which is so compact even when you add brooklyn and queens]. saturday i broke- down and went shopping [i wasn't planning on shopping this trip as i get very over stimulated when i shop, ruining my concentration powers for work, but my meetings were all over...it's also market research. my friend gordon joined me on my spree which included japanese pop music and kooky sunglasses before we met my friend akiko for lunch. i then bought 2 pairs of shoes, picked up a ds2 game for joseph in nyc, and went back to my hotel to rest before dinner in daikanyama with mr. nagae, mr. osugi and their wives at IN, perhaps the best sushi restaurant i've ever eaten at [mr. osugi is a regular and it was my 2nd time with him there]. they also have hachiman imojochu which is near impossible to find and my favorite since drinking it with robb of bento.com at a tachinomiya in ebisu 2 years ago! nagae and osugi have been friends since they were teenagers and i've been friends with nagae since he hired me as creative director for new york zoom, a studio i ran in nyc from 1997-2001. i stopped by at stich, which sells nooka, to see how they were doing. i then stopped by shinjuku 2-chome for a nightcap and met 2 of the principal dancers for pina bausch who were in town performing. i was surprised how star-struck i was! i'm a big fan of their work. also, it was very interesting to fill in the visual details of two people i've seen over the years only in silhouette on a distance stage – like zooming in on a digital photo and finding details/elements you didn't notice when you took the picture. we drank and bar hopped til 5:00 am, which is very rare for me. we had office hanami on sunday which i was so exhausted for. yamada had a great space staked out for us in inogashira park, but the weather did not cooperate – it was cold, and then it rained – so we eventually moved to an izakaya specializing in hokkaido cusine [seafood, deer meat, raw horse meat, and sake from that region]. we all got quite drunk with exception of soichi [of fareast recordings] who falls asleep if he has even a drop of alcohol. the waiter/owner of the place is a master sake server, creating the most pronounced meniscus on the glass AND masa i've seen. the guestlist at this point dwindled to just machan and katsu of madbarbarians, soichi terada, artist ogazawara and his wife who spoke not a word, yamada, the beuatiful elle usui, and freelance graphic designer mr. hayashi. i was so overtired, i felt none of the alcohol and strangely had no hangover monday morning which i used to pack, visit the office one last time, buy design reference books at kinokuniya, check out of the hotel and get to narita for my flight back to nyc on which i typed this blog entry.

airtravel

i figure i can try the power of the blog for this one:

OY, air travel...i need to get myself to tokyo for work and was pretty proud of myself for managing a M-class economy ticket on my favorite airline ANA with an upgrade to business class with my mileage until my meetings were changed to the week of the 24th! now i can't seem to get the same deal leaving either the 20th, 21, or 22nd on any airline even though i have more advanced notice? if there are any airline marketing people reading this and you want a hip designer to try your trans-pacific business class...let me know what you can do! or even a skillful travel agent who can find a business class ticket under $6,000US... as sitting in a tiny seat for 15+ hours is something i can no longer handle. ah the problems of a start-up company executive!:)

it'd be great if priceline added business class to their "name your price" feature.

let's boycott air travel

i was itching to write a blog entry on the environment, but decided on an airtravel one since i've already written a few posts on that subject...AND fortuitously...i found a great blog that does a better job than i can [takes the pressure of one more major problem off of my shoulders:)]

it's a blog by chris elliott and well worth reading as you can find great resources. i suggest everyone urge him to post a link to every government offical making TSA decisions so we can help in this crusade, especially now that they think it's perfectly fine to search people's laptop and mobile phone content. read the post on a boycott here.

and the less air travel we make, the lower our carbon footprint though you can do more for the environment by NOT eating beef [or limit to special occasions and then only if the beef is from a grass-fed animal [grain-fed livestock contributes more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere per year than all the e SUVs in the US combined! also, believe it or not, eating whole grains cuts down on your carbon foorprint.

let's all complain about air travel 2

finally a post on the jetlagged blog that makes sense!
read it here.