Everyone kows how I feel about marketing. Especially, in your face marketing but what i saw a the Communist Party at Sound Lab - took the prize for most digusting in your face advertising I have ever witnessed. It got so bad that (e:terry) and I left as we couldn't even enjoy the music anymore. I know that events are sponsored and sponsored events have advertising but this took it is a new more sinister direction which intergrated every aspct of the event with the advertiser and every surface with advertisment.

When we first got there I was really enjoying the music. The DJ was and she was totally amazing. I think my favorite party was her playing a childrens light up electric sword during her live set. None of my criticism for the event has anything to do with her. Her blog is also pretty entertaining I wish she blogged here.

Back to the event...

If you haven't been to soundlab the setup is pretty cool. They have a bar on the right and booths in a corner to left. The stage is in the middle. When we first got there, we went over to the bar to get some beers and I noticed that on the side wall there was a scion video advertisement playing. I thought it was weird but then i thought, maybe it was just a TV channel. Then it kept playing and playing. I just ignored it.

Then the place was so packed that we headed over to the booths for a bit to sit. In the booths were hundreds of scion keychains. I thought, I started to take pics.



Well someone must have noticed because with like everytime we moved from the booth and came back, the table was re-decked with more merchandise. After the keychains came Scion music CDs. Well actually the CD's were from iheartcomix.com but it also seems to be a scion marketing front.



Then the last time we visited the booth there were even Scion winter knitted caps which people started wearing truning even the patrons heads into fucking advertisments.



We move away from the booths and decided to just watch the music and dance. But then while we were dancing, someone went and put up a giant 6 ft across scion banner across the stage. At first it seems like a joke. I mean the event was called the communist party and (e:terry) thought maybe it was a challenge to see if we would react to such extreme advertising.

So we move back to the bar to talk about it and low and behold there was a table with more scion keychain, scion metal boxes, and scion headphones, as well as, other scion merchandise and marketing material.





I was out of my mind irritated at this point. Every surface every direction except for the artist herself was 100% scion.

Its so weird the way that they slowly built it up to this nauseating advertising crescendo. And then the final straw. I say to (e:Terry) specifically, well at least scion is not in the art itself. I mean that would be the most ridiculous thing even. Within a minute the artists video screen from her dj set turned into these high tech graphic scion collages and advertisments as her set was ending. I thought I was going to throw up. There was no direction without it anymore. I know I am particularly sensitive to advertising but this was something I just never imagined and I could hear other people talking about how unpleasant it was.

In the end (e:terry) went around and just threw the merchanidse off the tables and onto the floor. Then he started chanting scion, scion, scion and some of the dudes around us jokingly joined in, making it totally insane - we had to exit.

Apparently, for some scionistas it wasn't even enough

After that we went out on the town, invited people to our halloween party and maybe made a new friend. We tried to stop at Ohm at like 1am but it was already closed. Thats sad for that place. Tabu is also closed now. We got home at around 4:30am.

The corner of Franklin and Linwood by my house is ridiculously dangerous. Its so weird that intersection is in the middle of a city, does not even have a sidewalk on the southside. You guys who have walked downtown from our house have all seen how crazy that corner is, especially at nighttime. I wonder when they decided to make the street curvy like that. Both sides Franklin and North Pearl are curvy.

Dear Sir,
I am writing to express my concern for the safety of pedestrians at the corner of North and Franklin. I own the house at 24 Linwood, the first house on Linwood after the intsersection and have witnessed many near accidents as pedestrians, including myself, attempt to cross the street. The southside next to the park is especially dangerous because it does not even have a sidewalk. It is so strange, right in the middle of the city, to have a busy intersection with no sidewalk and just a dirt path along a stretch of it. When you add to the mix the extreme traffic from rush hour or that many drunken drivers head home from Allentown and Downtown bars via Franklin->Linwood, the confusing corner becomes even more of a danger.

I encourage you to please include the final stage of funding for the Franklin, North, Linwood Intersection project in the 2009 Capital Budget.

Thank you for your time,
Paul Visco

I freakin love the bathtub in the back bathroom but I hate the shower
connector faucet. It is so relaxing to take a bath. If you javent
taken one in a long time, you should try it. The heigt of our tub
gives you that wild west bathing in a bath bucket feeling.

So back to the faucet. It's an ugly, dripping piece of crap. I
stopped at home depot and bargain outlet to try and find a nicer
replacement but neither sells bathtub facets sans shower. At home
depot the guy acted like I was crazy to even ask. I guess no one has
just rubs minus shower anymore.

The rejuvination catalog has fancy ones but they are like $300-700+
and I want to spend like $100.

I had no idea that these plain grey looking leaves would make such
pretty yellow flowers in our garden.

I am so confused about the housing market. My friend bought a house of the lower west side for $137,000 that was like $20,000 last year before it "got its hair did". I thought those flip days were over.

I thought housing prices were slipping. Then I was looking at Zillow to see if our house's estimated value had change. In fact it had. The value went up a lot. Our house is now estimated at $279,000 a good $100,000 more than we bought it for. I guess that was a good investment. I mean I put some money in, but nothing like that. Imagine if it had a new exterior paint job and new roof. I don't think this value will hold when the depression starts but I really have no interest in selling or moving. Its proximity to my job is worth well over $100,000 - especially over a lifetime in travel costs saved.

The creepy part is how did they know we went form 3 bathrooms to 2 bathrooms. I used to say 3.