‘A book of poems featured prominently in AMC’s widely lauded “Mad Men” sent viewers scrambling to find copies of Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency” after the second-season premiere July 27. Google reports the book of verse shot to No. 1 on its “Hot Trends” list for that day and is out of stock on Amazon.com. O’Hara rose to prominence during the New American Poetry era alongside Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder. The book was first published in 1957.’ [LAT] (You can also read it here.) Of course, those who saw the Sex and the City movie and were unable to find the book featured prominently in that bit of screendom — because Love Letters of Great Men didn’t exist — may now do so.

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Post tags: Books, Mad Men, Marketing

Ready to jump into the Web 2.0 fray, Salon — the left-y web magazine that isn’t Slate — today launches Open Salon, a sorta bloggy-news-aggregator-social-networking thing that hopes to bank on the readership’s tendency to whine and talk about each other. So far, we don’t see any advertising, which makes Open Salon’s most ambitious undertaking not its We Are One Web tool set, but how it plans to compensate bloggers content producers.

Because we all know one left-y website with a problem doing it.CONTINUED »

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Post tags: Blogs, Internet, Salon, Web 2.0

“The UN has estimated that 20,000 civilians have been forced to flee their homes since fighting began in Georgia. The BBC’s Gavin Hewitt reports from the frontline near the town of Gori, where Russian planes have been in action. As he reported on the fate of civilians in Georgia, his team came under attack from Russian fire.” [Video]

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Post tags: BBC, Georgia, Russia, War

So, nobody really understood this outdoor marketing stunt from Wonderbra. It was basically a pair of yellow lines printed in front of a subway track — the farther yellow line represents the regular caution line that passengers should stand behind, while the near yellow line represents how far back Wonderbra-wearers must stand because of the added, um, depth. Probably clever on the drawing board, not so much in real life.

So Wonderbra returned to another marketing tactic: the obvious.CONTINUED »

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Post tags: Advertising, Wonderbra

Five days, people, and the long-awaited, understandably mocked Lynne Spears memoir, Through the Storm, will be upon us.

The cover photo finds Spears staring pensively out of a window, thinking on some unknown turbulence, surely considering how her daughters' money will help her carry on. And the tome's content is just as ridiculous.

CONTINUED »

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Post tags: Books, Britney Spears, External, Idiocy, Jamie Lynn Spears, Lynne Spears, Profiteering, Sam Lutfi

The New York Times finds itself embroiled in some gay drama.

Longtime copy editor Charles Cretella has been suspended for two weeks after allegedly sexually harassing a newer hire. But Cretella claims he’s getting the shaft - and now he’s suing:

CONTINUED »

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Post tags: Charles Cretella, Discrimination, External, GLBT, New York Times, Scandal

Launching in the fall, Tina Brown’s upcoming news website The Daily Beast may fail not because she runs over budget with Barry Diller’s cash, but because her site doesn’t lean to either the right or left, but up. As in upscale. [LAT]

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Post tags: The Daily Beast, Tina Brown

Have a friend that’s done you wrong? Disney is now providing you with an unintentional revenge opportunity: a five a.m. wake-up call from their controversial tween money-machine Miley Cyrus.

The back-to-school site Hannah Montana Calls is a Wall-Mart campaign purportedly for parents trying to woo their kids out of bed in the morning with a semi-personalized phone call from the singer.

But since you can type in any phone number into the website, it has a great potential for misuse. Like sex predators hounding their prey.CONTINUED »

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Post tags: Disney, Hannah Montana, Marketing, Miley Cyrus, Tweens

HBO celebrity and man tramp Adrian Grenier has been seen in recent months running around Hollywood armed with a SLR camera and a smirk. Nobody knew exactly what he was doing — okay, they totally did — but posing as a paparazzo and traveling among the stalkerazzi was all part of something tangible: Paparazzi, the Entourage star’s documentary about the industry, which is shopping for a distributor. It comes complete with commentary from Martin Landau, Noam Chomsky, and Whoopi Goldberg about what it’s like to be famous in an era of non-stop privacy invasions. Funny, because real paparazzi do not photograph any of those celebrities. But Grenier does turn to MySpace CEO accessory Paris Hilton for expertise in crotch flashing. His film centers around a 14-year-old photographer who snapped his picture. Touching. But that wasn’t our favorite Grenier paparazzi moment. This is:CONTINUED »

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Post tags: Adrian Grenier, Movies, Paparazzi

The Knox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt issue of People supposedly moved “only” 2.5 million newsstand copies, considered a disappointment for its share of a $14 million investment. The September issues of fashion glossies like Vogue and W have been dieting; they’re hitting newsstands with fewer ad pages, when this month’s editions are supposed to communicate heft.

Need more evidence the magazine industry should just throw in the towel?

Jann Wenner is taking Rolling Stone for a dip in the pool, and letting shrinkage kick in — he’s cutting the book’s signature size by 25.5 square inches. When the new Village Voice hit, we mistook it for an insert. What to think of the new Rolling Stone when its itsy-bitsy form hits newsstands in October?CONTINUED »

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Post tags: Jann Wenner, Magazines, Rolling Stone, Wenner Media