This song goes out to Meredith Yayanos – ethereal violinist, cryptohistorian, deer-butt art connoisseur. Want to give Mer a little birthday gift? Then I suggest you do this: check out all her awesome Coilhouse posts, find a post that you somehow missed out on, and really get into it. We all have those busy days/weeks when a post or two slips us by, and today’s a great day to catch up. Celebrate Mer’s birthday by letting her make you a little bit weirder!
Shining Time Station: Mr. Conductor & his sister in One of the Family
“Most everyone refers to George Carlin as a comedian, which I believe to be slightly misleading. The man was a teacher, with a great gift to pass his ideas and observations through the use of comedy” – vlpod’s YouTube comment on It’s Bad for Ya! – 2008 (Part 7 of 7)
Everyone took a moment today to remember George Carlin. Some people scoured YouTube for Carlin from every era: the scrubbed, black-and-white ’60s Carlin in a suit as Al Sleet, the Hippie-Dippie Weatherman, the shaggy-haired, FCC-infuriating Carlin performing the immortal 7 Words You Can’t Say on Television of the 70’s, the talkin’-like-he’s-from-the-‘hood Place for My Stuff Carlin of the ’80s, cab driver “George O’Grady” Carlin of the ’90s, and finally, the vitriolic, white-haired, Old Fuck (“not an Old Fart, but an Old Fuck, mind you!”) Carlin of the new millenium. This was my favorite Carlin. Now he’s gone, and the nation is just this much stupider; there’s this much less of a chance for people to question what’s around them. That’s how I felt all day.
Out of all the balding, acerbic little digital ghosts that paced around my screen today, there was one iteration of George Carlin in particular that put me weirdly at peace after a day of unrest. Mr. Conductor from Shining Time Station:
Until today, I never even knew that this version of George Carlin ever existed. And that’s the thing; we always find ourselves researching people after they’re gone; hitting up their Wikipedia page, finding old interviews, watching clips. So he’s an idea: every week, pick one person who inspires you and research the shit out of them. Don’t wait ’til they die to learn what they’ve been up to, what you’ve been missing out on – be there and support them while they’re still out there. You have the entire internet at your fingertips – Carlin would probably tell you to enjoy that while it lasts.
The ads above, part of a European AIDS prevention campaign, appeared today on my favorite advertising blog under the title “There Are A Lot Of FishDicks In The Sea.”
But before I tell you about more about this magical blog, a quick trip down memory lane: before blogging existed, back when I used hide in the school library because no would would sit with me at lunch, I discovered back issues of Consumer Reports and Ms. Magazine – in particular, their Selling It and No Comment back pages, which were eerily similar. Both departments critiqued advertising. Consumer Reports was strictly in the business of calling bullshit; highlighting self-contradiction, spoofing ridiculous copy, and pointing out deceptive images. Meanwhile, Ms. made it their mission to shine the spotlight on the advertising world’s misogyny. At 13, my obsessive love-hate relationship with advertising (currently a.k.a. “my job”) had begun.
All the pleasures I got from those magazines – from the pleasure of mockery to the pleasure of discovering an interesting photo, even if my beloved Ms. was hating on it – I now find at the incredible Copyranter blog. Copyranter is this phenomenally hateful individual, a New York advertising copywriter who’s been working at the same ad agency for the past 16 years. His bio consists primarily of his exhaustive shitlist: capri pants, advertising, advertising people, PR people, marketing people… the list goes on and on, ending with “men named Jack” and Scrabble. Almost every day, he provides ingenious commentary on a given ad campaign (usually ripping it to shreds) with inimitable elegance and wit. Lots of insight about the advertising industry, our culture, and the creative process here. To show you what I mean, I present some of my favorite posts in categories of interest below:
What happens when you bring together the leading actress from Audition, the FX artist behind The Machine Girl as a first-time director, the screenwriter of Uzumaki and the action star of Versus as fight choreographer? You have a cinematic supergroup that makes the geysers of blood you’ve come to expect from violent Asian films look like minuscule popping zits. Behold, the 5-minute trailer for the upcoming J-splatter film Tokyo Gore Police:
The trailer starts off kinda slow, but gets better and better as it goes along. Gore and body horror await: exploding heads, sliced-off faces, penises instead of noses, borg-like facial implants and a mermaid-from-hell with a chomping crocodile head instead of legs. There are also some hyper-detailed fetish costumes by the latex designer duo Kariwanz.
One of the mutants looks like she escaped from Kurôzu-cho
The plot: future Tokyo is plagued by bio-mechanical a virus. People who contract the virus turn into “Engineers,” named so for their ability to assemble weapons out of their infected flesh wounds. A special privatized police force (the gore police, also known as “Engineer Hunters”) exists to wipe out these beings, but if they’re wounded by one of the engineers, they quickly join their ranks, horrific implements of death quickly spawning from their own flesh. The protagonist is Ruka, one of the strongest members of the police force. Ruka appears to be the archetypal cute Japanese girl with a sword, but one thing I found interesting about her character is that according to one review, she’s a cutter. There are not many films that I’m aware of in which a main character suffers from self-mutilation, other than the French film Dans ma Pau, or In My Skin (definitely not a ‘feel-good movie’… and since we already got the ball rolling on the horrors of the flesh, here you go)
The main storyline of the film is peppered with faux commercials, reminding me of the faketrailersinGrindhouse. As reviewer Mike Skurko describes it:
We flash back and forth to some extremely demented and hilarious public service announcements as T.V. commercials throughout the film. My personal favorite being three cute school girls singing “Let’s go stylish with wrist cutting!” Just enough “Engrish” charm and realism to make this scene as cute as Hello Kitty while they morbidly introduce a new design that is “rounded for a cleaner cutting edge that school girls love!” Oh, this can’t be beat. More great T.V. ads: “Remote Control Exterminate!!” is a demented Wii that lets the viewer slice and dice a tormented player. Complete with all the spraying blood we’ve come to expect from just about everything with the Tokyo Shock label.
If you’re in New York or San Francisco this weekend, you are among the lucky few who can catch this film’s on-screen North American debut. It will premiere this Saturday at the New York Asian Film Festival. In San Francisco, you’ll be able to see it this Sunday at the Brava Theater as part of the Another Hole In The Head film festival, which looks like a lot of fun. A little bit later on, this film will also be premiering in Montreal.
“Blixa sighed and rolled sideways, his arm reaching unconsciously into the space where Nick should have been. The absence of an expected touch was enough to pull him out of sleep, and he blinked rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the dim light in the room. The faint orange glow from the streetlamps outside allowed him to pick out Nick’s silhouette against the window. He was looking upwards, naked, framed by the open curtains.”
Yes, Virginia. There is such a thing as Nick Cave/Blixa Bargeld slash. Of course! So what is that makes this celebrated pairing – affectionately titled “Nixa” by fans – so hot? Is it the fact they’re a couple of tall, brooding preternaturally beautiful men? Perhaps it’s the fact that both exude a type of sizzling intensity, so that there appears to be a constant electrical tension between them. Whether you’re a Nixaphile or just a Bad Seeds fan, the video above – a piece of live concert footage that originally aired on German television – is very touching. The crowd evidently expected Kylie Minogue to appear on stage and sing Where The Wild Roses Grow with Nick Cave like she does in the music video, but guess who took her place? That’s right. Blixa. The Aragorn to Nick Cave’s Legolas. The Lee Adama to to Nick Cave’s Romo Lampkin. The Lord Voldemort to Nick Cave’s … oh, just watch the video.
I love the part where Nick gives Blixa a flower! So romantic. And just ’cause, here’s a hot picture of a younger Blixa:
It all started when Energy BBDO created the “Damn Right” ad campaign below for Canadian Club Whiskey. The ads featured vintage photographs from the 60s and 70s, with the running slogan “Damn Right Your Dad Drank It.” The headlines were “Your dad was not a metrosexual,” “Your dad had a van for a reason,” “Your mom wasn’t your dad’s first,” and “Your dad never tweezed anything.” The press release for this campaign proclaimed that “the thought-provoking campaign challenges consumers to embrace their dads [sic] classic masculinity, most visibly expressed through their choice to drink Canadian Club whisky cocktails.” Some choice copy:
Your Dad Was Not a Metrosexual. He didn’t do pilates. Moisturize. Or drink pink cocktails. Your dad drank whiskey cocktails. Made with Canadian Club. Served in a rocks glass. They tasted good. They were effortless. DAMN RIGHT YOUR DAD DRANK IT.
But the people weren’t havin’ it. The first thing that was pointed out on many blogs when this campaign launched is how “Your dad wasn’t your mom’s first” wouldn’t have quite the same ring to it. Graffiti appeared on the Van poster: “and that’s why your mom left him.” And the parodies of the nostalgic views of masculinity poured in… “Your dad didn’t use condoms when he was in Saigon.” “Your Dad smoked while pumping gas.” “Dad didn’t call it ‘Date Rape,’ it was just a ‘Date’.”
But the best was when blogger Michelle Schwartz created this template, which let people really go to town, resulting in the ads below and in many more here. The revised taglines proclaimed, “Damn right your mom drank it! And it sure as hell wasn’t Canadian Club.”
I love the fact that the web lets us respond to advertising so actively and directly. It was definitely amusing and somewhat therapeutic to see these responses emerge. Paradoxically, they probably made this campaign more successful in terms of branding/awareness than ever projected. So victory is bittersweet – unlike the drink, which will forever taste rotten to me.
Somewhere out there, there’s an alternate Philip Pullman reality where Dust settles in the form of dæmons that take shape from the strands of hair on your head. They whisper in your ear, telling you which way to go, and talk to each other while their people stand still. In our world, they would consider hairspray, straightening irons and combs an absolute travesty. If I had one, it would be a hedgehog.
What makes Viktoria “bizarre”? Is it her amputated leg? Is it the fact that she has an amputated leg and is still incredibly sexy? Or is it that she has an amputated leg and still considers herself a sexual person? Is this empowering? And to who? Surely the disabled are desexualized in this country, so it’s nice to see that challenged even, I suppose, in a magazine about weirdos. And yet, I suspect her sexuality is acceptable, fetishizable, only because she conforms to expectations of feminine beauty. In the big scheme of things, does she reproduce the standard of beauty, unattainable for most women, that crushes women’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth? And will disabled women, most of whom (like most non-disabled women) could never dream of being so beautiful, actually look at her and be able to identify? Or will this just draw attention to another way in which they don’t match up?
Now really, I think that SocImages went a little overboard with Viktoria (especially when they dismissed her comments about sexuality as “standard porn star talk”). Maybe it’s because I know her little better than they do, but I think that they oversimplify the genuine place that she comes from in choosing to be a model. However, they do bring up an important discussion that’s been nagging me for some time. What is an alternative model, and what is an alt model’s role in visual culture? In my life, at various points, I came up with 3 different definitions. I believe in each of them, and I have a problem with each of them as well. Here they are below. Which one resonates with you? Do you think it’s a combination of the three below, or something completely different? Opinions, please.
1. The model who challenges society’s notions of beauty.
I love these models, but the issue here is that, while they appear to push the boundaries of beauty in some direction, they usually wind up brutally reinforcing another traditional notion in the process. For example, trans models make us rethink gender/beauty, but with their self-presentation they usually reinforce the ideal of a sleek, hairless feminine figure, thus fueling the hair-removal industry. In fact, epilator-manufacturer Philips Norelco has already found a way to to capitalize on this to great effect – just watch this ad. And large models like Velvet D’Amour and skinny-by-comparison but still-considered-plus-size recent ANTM winner Whitney Thompson help to redefine weight in modeling, but what makes them “legitimately beautiful” in the eyes of the mainstream world is their “correct” bone structure, their blond hair. Without some “redeeming quality” of this sort, the world doesn’t recognize them as models, and wouldn’t even give them a shot at making a difference. Mainstream media often presents them as beautiful “in spite of,” not “because of.” While their individual messages are empowering (I love Velvet’s interviews), I don’t find our culture’s use of these models empowering at all.
18th Century Picnic: Viona (above) makes it happen.
One thing I love about Belgian photographer/fairy princess Viona Ielegems is the extent to which she manages to make her outside world match her inner vision of what the world should be. How many times I’ve stared with longing at a sweaty dancefloor, closing my eyes and wishing the cheap satin I saw around me to turn into fine Indian silk, for the lace chokers to blossom into elaborate starched ruffs, and for the club itself to somehow morph from a sauna of cigarette butts and stale t-shirts into an elaborate pleasure den of opium, jasmine incense and free-range peacocks roaming from room to room. I open my eyes to someone spilling beer onto my own not-that-fancy corset, and the scene I envisioned evaporates faster than whatever the ending to Kubla Khan was supposed to be. Not our Viona! If she wants it, she makes it happen. In 2006, she threw her first ball at a neo-gothic chapel. I’d say “it’s like the Limelight used to be,” but no… this place is 10 times bigger. And the people dress 10 times better.
A picnic guest.
This year, Viona outdid herself by throwing a Victorian picnic around the time of WGT. Pictures have just been posted, so let’s break it down. Actual gramophone? Check. Exquisite china set that includes a bloody vampire bunny? Check. Good-looking dandies posing next to fresh strawberries, wine and chocolate éclairs? Check. How I wish I could’ve been there! You go, Viona. Congratulations on making your dreams – and some of our dreams – come true.
This is the Environment Transformer, an appliance created in 1968 by Austrian art/architecture collective Haus-Rucker-Co. I find myself incredibly drawn to this image because it reminds me of the sci-fi tech I saw in Soviet movies as I was growing up. The device is part of a series called Splendid Blend, which also included the Mind Expander, the Ideal Museum, and many other conceptual projects that demonstrate the group’s utopian outlook on living space and technology. I want one!
Although the Haus-Rucker establishment is long gone, an elegant website exists to catalogue all their creations that never got built, and some that did.
