I love -- no, I LOVE THIS VIDEO of Lady Gaga walking through the new Polaroid products.
Glasses that take pictures and video: awesome. Sending your cell phone's stuff to a printer or a usb stick: good. Telling the crowd that they're "fucking beautiful" in the midst of a demo: FABULOUS.
I, uhm, need those camera glasses. And I don't know how I'd wear dark sunglasses inside. Every time I see women wearing sunglasses on the subway, I write them off as a diva or someone with a migraine. But now I realize what sunglasses means to Gaga: empowerment. She said in a Barbara Walters interview that she doesn't take off her glasses for just anyone, which initially said 'trust issues' and 'defense mechanism' all-over to me. But, really, it's the male gaze that Gaga wants so that she is the looker rather than the looked-at. You can even see her video-in-sunglasses idea in her "Pop Ate My Heart" teaser (below). The people at Polaroid must have been all over that very early on last year.
Well, the real reason why I wanted to blog about this vid was because I wrote a post last summer about Nintendo's demonstration at the E3 conference and never published it for the exact opposite reasons of why I am publishing this post. It was one of those things that you write out of anger, and right before you hit the Publish button, you hear a clear, therapeutic voice that says "It's okay; it's over.", and you get up and go get another piece of chocolate. But now time has passed, and I do feel like posting it now. Here's a snippet:
I own Nintendo products, I grew up to love the Nintendo brand, contemplated writing about how awesome the new Mario Galaxy 2 is, and yet Nintendo's behavior today makes me feel betrayed and heartbroken. If Nintendo had shown more diversity in this group beyond the homogenous selection of 100% women, I could have blogged about Nintendo, The Socially-Progressive Always-Innovating Company-I've-Loved-For-20-Years with Products I Can't Wait To Buy.
WTF, Nintendo?
The live-blogging of Nintendo's keynote at E3 made me feel especially unawesome:
Wired makes me feel moderately better as to why there's a "massive massive pile of women" on stage:
The truth is that Polaroid could have paraded Gaga around as the designer and architect of these new products. Their brand could have done just as much as piggyback on her own brand. They could have even come up with a fabulous new logo involving lightning bolts, a jagged black crown, "Haus of" anything, or any of the other visually striking and hard-to-forget gagaisms. Instead, she not only attends this conference, whose audience is technical in nature (and in the media to boot), but she's showing the products, describing the features, speaking from experience about the usb stick in the glasses' earpiece. The Polaroid rep just stands by -- Gaga does the talking, Gaga does the looking. She ain't no booth babe: she's herself on this stage and on every other stage, and this is something that she worked on and wants everyone to love with her. I am 1000% down with this.
Great post PoDog.
Posted by: Angrywayne | January 07, 2011 at 03:07 PM
nice mulvey ref.
Posted by: finn | January 11, 2011 at 06:57 PM