8 posts tagged “party”

Here are the photographs from the BMW launch on Thursday night, to which Devin, Natalie and I went.

BMW 2009 launch 1

BMWs under the covers

   This was the first time in Wellington the revised Z4 and new F01 7er-Reihe were shown. And here they are, unveiled:

I know both cars have been shown already on the Lucire website but it’s still nice having the opportunity to appreciate them in detail here.

   The revised 3er and the X6 were also shown. In the first photo, Jeff Gray BMW’s Wellington branch manager Chris Pile chats to Devin and Nat. Chris and I had a good catch-up about football.
   But what was really weird was this. William, one of the folks working for the dealership, said he noticed something about the 6er-Reihe as we talked about the Audi S5 and the Porsche 911.
   He told me to stand at a particular angle, then opened the boot of an M6 they had at the dealer. What does this remind you of?

BMW M6 rear—Porsche much

If you are around Wellington on Saturday, come along to Queen’s Wharf from 2 to 4 p.m., where Carolyn Enting and I will host New Clothes for the New Year, a celebration of fashion and dance to kick off the Lunar New Year.
   I was thrilled this year that the Asian Events’ Trust’s Stephannie Tims chose my Yan Series 333 typeface for display and supported our company.

AET New Year festival 2009

[Cross-posted] Steve Leon at Springtv and his team ventured to Starfish’s store reopening at the end of August and have some great footage of the event, plus they get to ask the host, Laurie Foon, and some of the guests there (myself included) what we’re wearing. Here are the two videos from Lucire TV—the first of many under this brand. For the article about the reopening, click here. Thanks, Steve, Simon and Clare! (You can also catch these clips on YouTube.)

I needed an Olivia injection after watching Kerry Butler. I’ve seen a few interviews now with the star of the stage version of Xanadu and she is intentionally taking the mick out of the role, the story and even Broadway itself—some of her singing style parodies Olivia Newton-John’s (see this clip from ABC’s Nightline). As the Australian accent is meant to be part of the parodying, I can forgive her!
   Meanwhile, here’s Olivia herself performing ‘Xanadu’ for the 200th anniversary celebrations of Hans Christian Andersen on Danish TV on April 2, 2005—which means she was 56. She hosted the show, which had a royal audience: Crown Prince Frederik and Crown Princess Mary—the world’s most famous Tasmanian—were in attendance. I’m not sure of the connection between Xanadu and Andersen, but who cares?

This is no surprise given the promotions that Sen. Obama has been getting in the media: ‘Obama elicits more excitement than McCain’, according to USA Today.
   I want to be the voice of reason but 21 years in communications tell me that this is important. If your brand, personal or organizational, elicits excitement among its constituents, then you have a greater chance of mobilizing those people when you need them.
   Even when it comes to politics, to get messages across to voters, one has to resort to the tried and trusted techniques of branding and marketing.
   There are few in the present generations who will, as many bloggers do, investigate someone’s voting record or dig deeply into their histories. It would be nice to say that presidents are not elected based on how much excitement they can generate. Or that we should place greater emphasis on other qualities like honour and sincerity.
   While some might point to exceptions, such as the Tory victory in the UK of 1992, I beg to differ. That campaign was hard fought by the Conservatives and depended on party unity—which was sorely lacking in 1997 when Tony Blair was elected. The National victory in New Zealand of 1990 was a result of the cry for change and the belief that Labour was leaderless.
   And the cry for change is such a powerful message in politics, because politicians understand our nature: even the vaguest change is better than the strongest, best defined policies if a party has been in power for too long.
   Labour in the UK in 1997, National in New Zealand in 1990, Labour in New Zealand in 1999, Clinton in 1992—all these are examples of that message. And that, too, “excites”.
   Sen. McCain should not pursue an excitement route himself, but he should capitalize on mistakes that the Obama campaign is making with greater regularity. The New Yorker gaffe—where Sen. Obama felt the need to comment rather than appear presidential and above satire—was an opportunity missed. Meanwhile, I wonder if people appreciate the maverick, go-it-alone style of John McCain, which plays well in the Senate, but could be symptomatic of future Cabinet divisiveness under his administration.
   A winner is by no means clear, and a week remains a long time in politics. Months, as Sen. Clinton will attest as she went from dead cert to second-best, are an eternity.

Katharine McPhee at Too Faced benefit

[Cross-posted] With less on the newswires today except for more Sarko and Bruni, we thought we’d put up a few of the unpublished images from the Lucire server. Here are two that didn’t make publication for one reason or another: American Idol’s Katharine McPhee (mentioned by Summer Rayne Oakes in Lucire 20) at a skin cancer benefit hosted by Too Faced Cosmetics in May 2007; and, in the same month, two models at a Diesel function in the same area. These were from Lucire’s west coast editor Elyse Glickman.

DieselCar

This is my 9-11 commemoration post and in case you thought the title is a typo, I can assure you it’s not.
   Mention to any New Zealander ‘9-11’ and while we would understand the reference, to us it all happened on the morning of September 12, 2001.
   I remember switching off the TV before 1 a.m. on September 12 thinking that there was no big news that day, and went to bed. It really did start off as a quiet news day.
   All night, I dreamed about people—probably Americans—channel-surfing. No matter what channel they got to, it was the same news item. I could not make out what the news item was.
   I was awakened by a phone call from my friend Edward Hodges, who knew I had people in New York covering Fashion Week. He also knew of my close ties because I was in New York in August 2001. I was outside the Twin Towers weeks before, declining a friend’s invitation to visit the Observation Deck because I would be back in October. 
   Edward filled me in. I don’t remember panicking. I just remembered that I had to find out what had happened to my friends. The charitable would call it grace under pressure. The less charitable would call it an automatic reaction to shock. Maybe they are both correct.
   September 12, 2001 was the first day of the Wellington Fashion Festival. No one was in a mood to party. I had to get back from the breakfast do at Kirkcaldie’s to find out what had happened to friends and colleagues. One, the husband of my host in New York, was normally due to exit at the WTC stop on the Subway at exactly the time the first jet hit.
   I found he was OK after calling but I kept my conversation short. ‘Is everyone OK?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Right, I’ll hang up then.’
   I don’t know how I found time to do it, but I wrote an editorial in Lucire that day. I was flattered to find that it touched such a nerve that it was forwarded in emails around the world at that time. Our website cover background went from red to black. The event did inspire me, perhaps, to preach my humanist agenda more and a lot of its thinking was found in my 2005 book, Typography & Branding, which I actually wrote in 2002.
   That evening there were three Festival events: one at the National Library (where Susan Bartels told me that she had a friend who did not make it to work because his alarm did not go off—otherwise he’d have been in the World Trade Center), a second one in the sheds on the wharf for Minx Shoes, and a third installation on Cuba Street, at which I met the jewellery designer Mandi Kingsbury.
   The following weeks were strange. I had a friend who was a waiter in NYC and he noted a change in behaviour for a fortnight after 9-11. People were nice to him for two weeks, then became bastards again. I don’t know if his being black and gay had anything to do with it—African–American friends indicate to me that it might. An Arab–American friend down in Princeton told me how her friends were getting kicked out of cafés, some just for reading a newspaper printed in Arabic. These days, those weeks seemed more surreal than the actual attack.
   Down here, we were united with the US and we even sent troops that time to Afghanistan.
   We were also united in prayer. Churches organized prayer vigils. The US recorded a statistic where a clear majority of Americans prayed on and immediately after 9-11.
   I returned in 2005 to pay tribute to those who perished in the Twin Towers, joining thousands of mourners on the morning of September 11, eastern time. By then, it was a very different world again.