I'm starting to pull some ideas together about spring. I really really really really like the colors in this inspiration board a reader submitted over at Design Sponge.

Let's face it...as awesome as Southern Rock was in the 70s, it wasn't a genre that produced many really good looking guys. It's almost impossible to work the word "hottie" and the phrase "Southern Rock" into the same sentence.

There was one exception for me back then...Dickey Betts from the Allman Brothers. Squirrely, mysterious, and cool and sexy southern guy with a mustache and long dark hair that could WORK a guitar. Dickey was always sorta the aloof one...always the "other" Allman. And besides, he was from Florida...which in my 14 year old mind meant "exotic". Oh shit...I had such a TOTAL CRUSH on Dickey Betts.

Looking back, I'm glad that instead of pursuing Dickey Betts, I followed my teenage credo..."WWMTD"... (What Would Marlo Thomas Do?)

Under no circumstances...even during sweeps week...would That Girl star Marlo Thomas hook up with the likes of bad boy Dickey Betts.

In my understanding, One Way Out was one of the only songs that Dickey wrote while in the Allman Brothers Band. It's the jam. I still love this tune.

It's actually sorta beautiful...the way the gee-tars and percussion and vocals progress and play off of each other. You can just sense that they had fun with this tune.

T

I had an amazing and fruitful trip to NYC this time. There is so much awesome new stuff out there in my industry right now that it is almost overwhelming. I'm totally optimistic.

There are three trends in the industry that I am excited about right now and that were evident at the New York Gift Fair this week.

1) A heavy push toward "green" and sustainable products.
2) The smaller cottage industries and independant designers stole the show this August. The larger and more engrained design houses have been dominating the business for years now. It was great to see so many first time exhibitors and independant designers showing their stuff and giving the fat cats a run for their money.
3) There was more of a "Made in the USA" emphasis at this show than I have ever seen before.

There's an interesting thing I kept hearing over and over again this past week from all the innovative and cool start-up companies. Designers and vendors have been traditionally using focus groups and the media to test products...ie...they have always sent prototypes before product was actually produced to focus groups and shelter magazines to get feedback. This was the first show that I was constantly hearing "We send prototypes to all the major design bloggers now". How cool is that? The power of the blog...wow.

Here's an example....

Gaurie Nanda prototyped her product "Clocky" and has been sending it to bloggers for six months now. It's an alarm clock on wheels that jumps off of your nightstand and runs around the room, forcing you get your butt out of bed and chase it around so you can turn it off. She watched feedback through comments on blogs and then put it into production. She showed it in NY this week for the first time for wholesale. Maybe I'm just geeky, but I thought that was so cool.

I ordered some for the store and the website. I totally love it when designers outside the big corporate houses buck the system and score hits. She designed and prototyped and produced and marketed this item all on her own with her own personal funds. That's a brave and scarey thing to do nowadays. Check it out...it's awesome.



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But enough about all that shop talk.

I got to spend an evening with Lucy and CH and one of my best friends in the whole wide world, Adam, on Tuesday night. THAT was the highlight of my trip. We had a blast. Lucy and CH and Adam and I spent a night at Sammy's Roumanian Steakhouse...this awesome, quirky hole-in-the-wall place on the Lower East Side.

(Lucy has pictures on her blog.)

Ok, so there are more details about the night. There were a lot of vodka shots involved. Certain things that happened later in the night are a bit foggy still. I remember Lucy and CH dropping me and Adam off at Splash and that there were male strippers dancing all over the place. After that, the next thing I can clearly remember is thinking the next morning "Oh my God, I am sure that I am too old for what I might have done that I thankfully can't remember from last night."

T

(I realize that this post...or for that matter, the past few... may not make a whole hell of a lot of sense, but my brain is too full of mundane and everyday stuff at the moment and I'm just sorta in too much of a random and reactionary and free association mood these past few days to write with a clear head)



I've been bombarding myself with wierd thoughts about my personal chronological milestones for the past few days.

I didn't become an attorney like my dad wanted me to. My parents were divorced when I was three years old. Apparently, it was an ugly divorce...they didn't speak to each other one time after that from what I can remember.

Around 6th grade, my dad became obsessed with me becoming an attorney. It was the beginning of the end for my weekend custody visits with my dad and my stepmom. My dad and my stepmom were obsessive newspaper article clippers. My stepmom was infamous in our town for writing scathing letters to the editors of the Chattanooga News Free Press.

My dad used to clip articles about recent graduates passing their bar exams and joining "blah blah blah law firm" and he would put them in a manilla envelope and send them to my mom via me. Then my dad and my stepmom went on vacation to DC one year and the clippings intensified. When I was in high school, my dad used to send random clippings, stuffed in the same kind of manilla envelopes, over to my mom's house...with news stories about young Chattanooga attorneys that had made successful leaps into political careers.

I reckon I'd be an attorney today if my dad had gotten custody of me in 1963, nes pas? What a world. What a world.

Maybe I'd be living in Buckhead instead of the ghetto. But you know what? I freakin' LOVE my ghetto. I like where I'm at. I like the fact that years of hard work and years of creative thinking got me right here where I'm at.

I'm totally lost now as to why I started this post.

Let's start over.

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I saw The English Beat in 1982. It was my first trip to NYC. I was too young to have the job that I had. I was an accessories buyer for a national chain when I was way too young and immature for the job.

I took a friend up with me and I should have gotten in a LOT of trouble for just that. I compted his ticket and hotel on the company and we went to see The English Beat at GBGB/OMFUG. (I think they were just called The Beat then) I was in freakin' heaven. I was 23 and wild as all get out and loose in NYC for the first time. This song gives me chills now.

I missed the first two days of the trade show because we went buck wild and partied for two days straight. I totally should have been fired. I would have fired me. I apparently have angels.

(Actually...this post was supposed to be about the evolution of SKA music, but I got lazy...so much for that)

Soooo...I'm off to another trade show in NYC in the morning. If I can just refrain from getting a wild hair and venturing into Chelsea, everything should be cool.

See yuns in a few days.... T

P.S. I totally stole "yuns" from Bella. I love that word.

Dammit. I remember a time in my life when being southern and gay bought you a ticket to all sorts of debauchery when you visited New York. All you had to do was show up in Chelsea in any bar on Eighth Avenue and open your mouth and utter one word with a southern drawl and every hot New York gay guy was on you like a duck on a june bug.

Alas and alack. The world it is a'shrinkin'. Or maybe I'm just getting older. I'll not consider the latter.

Soooo anyway...I walked into a bar on 8th Avenue in Chelsea last August and found my friends in the industry chatting up this hot Asian guy. (There is a term in gay lingo..."Rice Queen"...that means a gay guy that really digs Asian guys.) But this wasn't the case that night. Turns out, the hot Asian gay guy was a consulate for the factories that produce merchandise for the gift industry and they were chatting him up to find out what Crate & Barrel and Pottery Barn were prototyping for Spring 2009.

Good Lord Almighty.

This adorable and needy little Chinese guy was in a gay bar in Chelsea and was gleefully being all tipsy and openly gay because he doesn't get to be tipsy and openly gay and honest back home in China and he only gets to be tipsy and openly gay twice a year for the few hours that he gets to sneak away and be in a silly little bar in America for one night. What a world what a world.

Dammit. Middle America...and frankly, me too, just for fantasy value...wants to believe that perversion and all sort of deviancy should be going on in that silly little gay bar on Eighth Ave. But here we were, talking about prototypes and landed costs and sustainable packaging. I kinda miss the old days when being gay just meant being perverted and exclusive and sexy.

So much for being gay as a statement. So much for sexual assignment being remotely more of an issue than commerce is. Tangible goods and crude oil are the real deal. Homos are just a theatrical diversion. hmmm