Last night during St. Louis Symphony’s performance of Mozart’s Requiem I bid farewell to Alexander McQueen and gave thanks for prayers answered that the world was spared of the horrors of a disastrous tsuanmi.

By now I am sure I’ve convinced you I’m a Twitterholic and not ashamed to admit it. It’s for now a very useful means of doing research, keeping people apprised of what I am up to, quickly, and getting my news fix, and lots of it.

The past few weeks however have been nearly intolerable. Not because people are unkind: exactly the opposite. If you like or think in big picture terms, however, as I do, sometimes the massive amounts of information that come at you in such short periods of time have you on more than a merry go round as I mentioned a few posts back; it’s more like a roller coaster and one of the biggest and meanest ones around. You’ll come away with more than a case of whiplash.

This morning when I got on Twitter, the news of the earthquake in Chile and its eventual full destruction was just breaking. That alone is horrifying. When you’re sitting there having your coffee and trying to think of quippy statements to say on Twitter, suddenly anything you might want to say seems pretty insignificant compared to what someone in the Southern hemisphere is going through at that same moment. It’s just too unbearable to think about and then ultimately how helpless you feel. I am not embarassed to say, it brought me to my knees.

News of Alexander McQueen’s death by suicide is still pretty fresh in my mind, even though it seems like eons ago….and of course we know the Haitians are still in hell and fighting like hell to get through whatever hell they’ve been through and are now in trying to get out of. God continue to give them strength and supplies.

The Olympics in Vancouver have conspired to be a part of the drama with the death of the Georgian in the Luge competition to begin with, but then we’ve got the lovely but heartbreaking story of the Canadian skater whose mother died 4 days before her competition where she showed a near Herculean strength to go on to win a Bronze medal. Thank God for Apolo Ohno and his unrelenting high spirits which he has been freely sharing while tweeting to his many fans.

And how can we forget the domestic terrorism from one of our own with the pilot who kamakaze like flew his airplane into an IRS building. Those of us on Twitter were made aware of the suicide note that he put online, but taken down in a few hours. Like Alexander McQueen’s twitter account was taken down very shortly after the announcement of his death.

People get to (and have to) react pretty quickly today because we are hearing about these things as they happen and sometimes at the same time. I am reminded of the riots in Iran. Innocently in a way you are on Twitter to do a job, at least I am trying to, and sometimes you just have to stop and get off in order to somehow square the mindbending events that have infiltrated your brain in the span of sometimes only a few hours. It can be like watching 4 of the worst horror flicks imaginable on different sets, all at the same. Why would you ever want to do that to yourself?

One thing I can say right now is that I wish I were John Travolta and could call my friends in high places and fly my own plane in to do some rescue work somewhere, anywhere in the world that it was needed. That was almost a Superman act on his part for the Haitians, one we are all grateful for. But then we are all doing what we can, when we can, with what we have.

Today though, no matter what I do, it just doesn’t feel like it’s enough. Prayers for the moment are the best thing I have at my disposal. And right now, on Twitter, that is what many are doing. So today especially I am going to believe in the power of the group and know that all those prayers and uplifting thoughts being sent to Chile will in someway, somehow make some difference and help give people the strength to get to safe harbor so they can help their loved ones or others in distress.

God bless, my thoughts and prayers are with you people of the Southern Hemisphere and on the Pacific Coast. Know that right this minute, I wish I could make it stop,now, and am praying that it will.

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designer Narciso Rodriguez

An outstanding round table hosted by Charlie Rose “Fashion Week Update” includes fashion critic Cathy Horyn of the New York Times, designer Narciso Rodriguez, CEO of J. Crew Mickey Drexler, and Elle Magazine’s fashion editor Roberta Myers.

The discussion is some of the most relevant I’ve heard about fashion and the state of it in well over a year. It’s frank, it comes from different perspectives and it gives some pretty clear direction in terms of where or how a company needs to position itself for future growth and some of the problems you’ll encounter along the way.

For an extra, extra treat, Mr. Rose ends the discussion with an interview he had with Alexander McQueen in 1997….this is a must see. The internet has changed how fashion and the market has functioned, forever. Time to get on board with it and start to understand how to salvage creativity and still earn a living, or become public and still be considered creative, and how the fashion editors fit in and will continue to fit in.

Great job.

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Alexander Wang…………………….Carolina Herrera………………Prabal Gurung FW 2010

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Today creativity suffered a severe blow with the death of Alexander McQueen. A true visionary, McQueen never failed to delight and to inspire the senses. In a world where there is too little of pushing the envelope and too much of going with the sure thing, McQueen always took the more difficult path. There was none other like Alexander McQueen.

His 2006/7 Autumn/Winter collection deeply informed my first trend newsletter, Trendcites, which has been on my site since. As such that is the collection I want to feature here as a tribute to his storied and brilliant career in fashion. Ironically that show was his tribute to Isabella Blow, another industry stalwart credited for discovering the brilliant Alexander McQueen and who had committed suicide a few months prior. But it was his Spring/Summer 2010 collection that he went live with in a collaboration with Nick Knight and ShowStudio that showed just how much Alexander McQueen was going to lead the fashion industry out of the woods. I guess he has left it to the rest of us to figure it out from here. R.I.P. Alexander McQueen. You will be deeply missed and never forgotten.

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As a small business owner myself, I have insight into this banking vs. small business vs. Obama’s small business proposals, much better than the pundits do and I can see there is many a slip between cup and lip.

Maria Bartiroma discusses Obama’s push for small bs lending w/banking executives…

It’s interesting to note that Maria didn’t have several owners of small business on this program to combat what the bankers were saying. I’ve heard nothing but war stories from small business owners looking for funding from their bankers, they having particulary good credit but needing to either purchase inventory for purchase orders or raise capital for purchasing product to resell (companies who have been in business for over 10 years, have steady clientele and can show they can pay the money back). In the course of running a business these are not unusual requests in any given year and heretofore businesses got the funding. Everyone I am speaking with these days can’t get funding (access to capital), at least the small businesses that the Obama administration is trying to support.

I wonder who these banks and Bartiroma define as small business. Listening to this report tells me they don’t know anything about how small business operates. Most of the companies who have been able then to gain access to capital for short term lending have had to reach out to angel investors or even friends to cobble together what they need or go without, thus the laying off of employees and the no hiring. So Obama is acting on good intel, however, what the bankers are saying about the federal regulators is also what I am hearing….the regulators have clamped down to a significant degree and have tied the lenders hands, as if things weren’t difficult enough anyway.

The New York Times reported on how badly the ARC loans (the Small Business Administration America’s Recovery Act program that was to have provided emergency bridge loans) have been administered. A lot of the banks aren’t even doing the loans because they seem so risky to them, and the ones who are have been very slow to respond to the small bs. owners needs. Sounds like what I’ve heard also from home owners who are trying to get their loans renegotiated….it’s a process that is slow to happen, constant keeping up….calling to make sure their paperwork has not fallen through the cracks, and then to only have a short term fix on the loan created.

In the private sector we talk about how all successful programs are based on good execution of a plan. And here is where this administration is failing is in the execution. Leave it up to Congress to create the details? That’s a surefire recipe for failure. While I don’t agree with most of what is said in the above video, I do agree that everyone needs to get on the same page. That’s not that difficult. We all speak English. However, the expectation that Congress can do its job accordingly is just foolish, too many in Congress act on the basis of their own agendas and petty squabbles come with the territory. We have a White House administration for this purpose, to set and administer policy. Leadership sets the directive, and makes sure the team has all the tools necessary to do it’s job.

True what they say that government should not be in charge but our private sector isn’t doing it’s job either. They are doing whatever they can to hang onto what they have (with the exception of the no account banking system which seems to be the one making money hand over fist & keeping it….this will come back to haunt them).

Maybe I should have titled this post the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray, clearly.

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