Thursday, February 18, 2010

Defying gravity

I am looking at a picture of Shaun White, a celebrity snowboarder. He is suspended in midair doing a stunt which helped him win one of the events at the winter Olympics. I am wondering what I should think of his streetwise outfit: does it express (1) glorious youthful rebellion, or (2) another rush of turbo-charged self-expression that has been digested and harnessed by the matrix - woops, the market. Meanwhile, White is widely admired in the advertising industry as a true wunderkind for his ability to rack up a long list of endorsement deals (Burton, Target, Red Bull, Oakley, HP, Ubisoft…) without diluting his own personal brand. I( was scratching my head and sking myself why the McDonalds legal SWAT team have not nailed White for naming his signature stunt McSomething, as they have sued countless others, some of whom had the impudence to use their own age-old family names to brand the minor products or services they were peddling. Then I read somewhere that McDonalds were in complex negotiations as they wanted to become the 47th company whose brand name White has graciously endorsed. His head is apparently beginning turn from all that well deserved fame, so he is rumored to have requested $110 per every breath he breathes out over the next 35 years of his life. But the tough negotiators working for McDonalds want him to undergo upsula yoga training first in order to start breathing more slowly.