Letter From The Editor
With the amount of Vitamin D I’ve consumed in the past year, I should have gotten stock for it. Prevention, pain relief, these are the basics tenets of any product out on the market. Not getting enough Sun? Go for a walk. Can’t go out due to pandemic? 1000mg of Vitamin D, stat.
Art is my vitamin/drug of choice. I’m a pusher of picturesque portrait pleasure. Ailed by inferior imagery, I’ve got a painkiller for that. Concerned about looking bad wherever images are seen? Karjaka has a prevention pill for you. Want to escape stiff photographs, and lose yourself in the moment creating iconic art, with a team to attend to your every beck and call?
Dr. Karjaka has your prescription ready.
Vitamin KARJAKA.
Have you had your daily dose?*
Refills are available in Studio or wherever photographs are being taken.
The Ambitious Image:
Own it from the Boardroom to the Bedroom
by Tavia Sharp, CEO of Styled Sharp
As an Image and Personal Branding coach, I work with ambitious men who want to make their competition irrelevant by stepping into their next level so they can magnetically attract more of [what they desire personally & professionally. After working for 15 years as a NYC based designer and stylist for some of the top fashion brands like Calvin Klein and Nautica and dressing celebs like Drake, Chrissy Teigen and Ne-Yo, I realized that the key to magnetizing people towards you is to dress the part and own it. I believe having a profitable image is the X factor for men to magnetize everything they want in life!
Did you know, 75% of people believe that a well dressed man is more successful?
We often hear, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but the reality is the book cover is your first impression which includes your appearance. Now that we are all living and working remotely, people are checking you out online more than ever. From your photos to your digital profiles to your Zoom backgrounds. First impressions online have the same gravitas as meeting in person. It’s time to start thinking about how your online image is impacting your results. This is your opportunity to stand out and break through the digital noise. This is where I come in.
Take Devin for example. We first worked on crafting his 2.0 vision of what he wanted to create for himself, his business and his life so he could step into his future power player self now. We then built a killer wardrobe around his best styles, colors, and fits that reflects this 2.0 vision. I selected the best stores and brands to shop and afterwards, I created a done-for-you Lookbook of all his newly styled looks. Then we set up a branding photoshoot with Karjaka to give his online presence a boost. He is now rocking his new look with confidence and emitting a magnetic presence that instantly attracts people towards him.
When you look the part, you can charge the part. Whether it’s in dating or in business, be aware of what people aren’t saying but are actually thinking. Updating your appearance is one of the quickest ways to do that. You get to take the power back by taking control of your image and your personal brand. That’s when you get to say how people interpret you. That’s the power your image has.
Look, there are many things out of your control right now, but the one thing you can control is your image. It’s time to get in the driver’s seat and make it your #1 asset.
Here are 3 ways that you can stand out and get noticed online:
- Level Up Your LOOK
When you look the part, you can charge the part. Many studies have shown people buy from people that look successful so your appearance is absolutely making an impression. It creates trust and credibility and helps you stand out in a good way. Whether that’s in dating or in business, you have to be aware of what people aren’t saying but are actually thinking. Updating your appearance is one of the quickest ways to stand out online.
2. Brand Yourself Online
How you look, how you speak and how you act is your personal brand. Personal Branding is a buzz word these days but here’s the thing, you cannot just focus on your message, your image has to match. This is how you build that know, like and trust faster. Be intentional about it. Are people experiencing consistency when they Google you, look you up on social media, meet on Zoom or in person? Start thinking about what you want to be known for and start showing up that way!
3. Polish Up Your Profile Pics
Besides your appearance, make sure your photos are a match for your brand. Especially on your digital profiles! Some questions to ask yourself: Are you communicating visually who you are and what you’re about? How about your interests and values? Do your pictures represent your personality and highlight your best self? Do they paint the picture of someone that the viewer wants to get to know more? Your profile should reflect all of that so people want to take the time to connect with you.
All of these things combined make for an impactful online image. Look, there are many things out of your control right now, but the one thing you can control is your image. It’s time to take charge of it!
Guys, are you ready to take it to the next level? Set up a Complimentary Image Accelerator Call with me to learn how I can help you make your competition irrelevant and unleash the man within so you can magnetically attract more of what you desire both personally and professionally!
Woke 10, Dance 3
How Virtue Signaling is Causing the Demise of Art.
with Nate Patten
The 2021 Golden Globe Awards had a 68% drop in audience ratings from the previous year. No, there’s not a misplaced decimal in that number. That’s sixty-eight, a truly staggering decline in interest of one of the most popular annual award shows. A drop in 10% of the audience would’ve been significant, but a decline of nearly 70% is a virtual free fall; an actual ratings catastrophe. The show was hosted by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey, two of the most skilled and talented mega-stars in Hollywood. Anyone would be hard-pressed to find more adept and likable people to host a virtual award show, and the evening was still filled with major Hollywood A-listers even if they were, like Gillian Anderson said, “sitting alone in a hotel room in Prague.” So this begs the question: why did this show have worse reviews than “Gigli”? Well, to be fair, it didn’t help that the entire show was going to be held on Zoom. Humans are tired of screens, whether we know it or not. This didn’t make people clamor to their televisions to watch a pieced together Zoom disaster, but I suspect there was a bigger problem at hand. Audiences sensed intuitively, and correctly, that the Golden Globes were going to be a woke, virtue signaling nightmare, so 68% of viewers tuned out.
This period in history will go down as one of the darkest periods in human civilization. Not only is there a raging pandemic that has taken the lives of over (at the time of writing this) 520,000 Americans, we are also in a period of civil unrest, economic despair, racial disparity, the brink of civil war and, to top it all off, we got a lot of snow. To quote Donna Summer, “Enough is enough.” The Golden Globes had a beautiful window of opportunity to put on a transcendent, imaginative production; one filled with comedy, joy, optimism and hope. This is true because 1) we could have used an escape from life in 2021 and 2) Americans have literally done nothing but watch television for the past calendar year. In fact, TV and film were all we had. Was this not the perfect year to celebrate the achievements in those mediums? It’d like being on a sinking ship and not taking a moment to thank your life raft. But the telecast was a pandering evening filled with less humor than “The English Patient,” despite the immeasurable talents of Fey and Poehler, and speeches from people’s houses. There were cringe worthy sketches that paired celebrities with actual doctors while Mark Ruffalo, an actor and activist worth $35 million, told the audience from his mansion, “we’re all in this together”. It should be noted that when Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can’t make something funny, you’ve got a problem. I suspect they were constrained by the producers and not allowed to do any of their own material, all of which would have been stronger. Instead we got three hours of, “We must stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. Because trans women.” The Globes were so focused on checking all of the boxes of political messages and virtue signaling to satisfy the Twitter mob that they forgot they actually had to entertain the audience.
A recent press release showed that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the committee that votes on the Golden Globes, has zero black members out of 87. That’s right. There were more black people in The Brady Bunch than there are in the HFPA. This is utterly preposterous and, frankly, hard to reconcile, but I’m waiting to discuss it in my next think piece “Unsolicited Ideas About Race from a White Guy.” There was clearly well-founded outrage about this leading up to the day of the telecast. Hollywood has had a major come-to-Jesus moment with its race problems and, to be fair, we did see diversity on the stage, at least with regard to race and gender. The Golden Globes clearly felt an unprecedented pressure to present themselves as not racist and the effects of that were evident in the telecast. The two white hosts came out and called out the HFPA for not having any black members but…so what? It looks good on paper, but does any of this afford actual change? The HFPA should be on the stage addressing this, notthe hosts. It’s like hitting someone’s car and then sending your four year old over to apologize—and 7 pm on the evening of the telecast is a little late to address the issue. The Hollywood Foreign Press made every attempt in their last minute, frantic attempts to cover up their complete lack of diversity and in doing so forgot the most important part: the show itself.
Now before everyone gets upset, I get it. Doing this event remotely and with no one in the audience had to have been a logistical nightmare on all accounts, and the fact that it even happened is probably a true testament to the technical crew working the Golden Globes. But, are you telling me this was really the best thing we could come up with a year into this? This looked like what the award show could have been if we did it one week into Covid. Alas, 365 days later no one could seem to find a way to make this event happen in a more creative way. Also, for the past four years, award shows have been recognizable largely by anti-Trump tirades with stars lecturing the audience both in person and from their gazebos about how the country needed to “vote with your heart” and “lead with love”. Two months into the Biden presidency with the Democrats controlling the senate, there wasn’t really that much to complain about besides the apocalyptic state of the world. And guess what? The show was boring as hell. Anti-Trump rhetoric wasn’t able to be used as a substitute for actual entertainment and Hollywood was now forced to come up with an actual product.
My nonagenarian Grandma Harriet (God love her) is alive and well, and has spent her entire life as an avid theatre goer. Growing up in the New York area, she was fortunate enough to see Broadway shows, like the original Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, including Oklahoma and South Pacific. She unfortunately didn’t see the original production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852—she was out of town. But I vividly remember her once telling me that it was great to go see a Broadway show during World War II because she could “forget about the war for a few hours.” This idea has stuck with me for my entire life; that theatre could be a form of escapism from the everyday world, especially during a time of great catastrophe. And this is where the Golden Globes, and much of the entertainment industry in general, have failed us so acutely. It didn’t allow us the opportunity to escape. The Golden Globes were an exposé of all our current social and political issues. Americans were asked to sit like Alex from “A Clockwork Orange” and listen to every moment of horror from the past year relived. They knew that this was going to leave them as empty as they have felt during this entire bleak experience which is why most of them watched episodes of “Mama June: From Not to Hot” instead of tuning in. Art has to be an escape, not a prison.
We’ve been careening down this path long before Covid hit. Hollywood and Broadway have gotten extraordinarily lazy, with reboots and sequels dominating the movies and screen-to-stage musicals, or star-studded revivals taking over the entire purportedly creative theatre scene. With the shutdown of all live performances we’ve proven to ourselves that the moment the status-quo dissolves, we are not the creative people we’ve claimed to be all along. It’s all a fraud. Being artificially woke is the low hanging fruit du jour, and it’s what everyone thinks they have to artificially embody to be relevant. Well, here’s a hard to swallow pill: it’s complete inaction and entirely undermines the relevance you crave above all else. The least creative way to confront a problem is to talk about it, especially in the droll, pathetic ways we’ve been trying to. We need to let art itself fight the fights, prove the points, and incite people to think; we need to let art itself provide the escape. This is why we write. This is why we perform. This is why we create. We are artists. We can get through the pandemic without a musical set in the Cedar Sinai coronavirus ward. Let art do its job. More dance, less woke. As Mark Ruffalo once said, “We’re all in this together.”
