Per architecture expert John Hill on his Archidose blog, South Manhattan is looking like a pretty fun summer installation stroll with David Byrne’s Playing the Building at the Battery Maritime Building and Olafur Eliasson’s NYC Waterfalls at and near the Brooklyn Bridge less than a mile from each other…DOPE!
A little chat between good-lookin’ boyz! Lots about hummus, a little about hackysack and the Jews in Hollywood.
Time Jerusalem blogger Tim McGirk’s notice
of McCann Erickson Israel’s irreverent use of the spectre of Iranian
president Ahmadinejad in a commercial for that country’s YES satellite
TV company led me to the massive and fascinating YouTube channel for Tel Aviv agency Mizbala, run by confessed “shameless copywriter” Dori.
It seems to feature the whole of McCann’s series of spots for YES, many of which seem to feature a hilarious Busby Berkeley-ish song-and-dance number extolling the virtues of YES programming.
Orthodox Jews singing “YMCA”? YES!
Full Metal Jacket the Musical? YES!
Chapelle-ishly edgy intersection of slavery & hip-hop imagery? YES! YES! YES!
UK-based social network site Bebo is packed with pages by kids repping (or claiming to rep) South London gangs, providing an interesting insight into the multiracial (AfrCarib, S. Asian, white) gangsta scene in the capitol (made up of apparently over 160 crewz). Gun & knife attacks are now running sky-high
Start here, and click on the Similar Stuff icons on the top of the page, and you’ll get the general picture. Among other observations:
Check out part of Ross Kemp’s chat w/some S. London boyz, and as a bonus, his exploration of London’s Tamil gang scene. Chili powder!
“IF WE SEE A NEEK SLIPPIN ITS HEAT-DEM-TIME.”
As I’ve noted previously on this blog, these folks keep delivering some highly incisive stuff. Among others, check out:
John McWhorter
&
Glenn Loury
Author and Manhattan Institute scholar McWhorter and
Brown econ prof Loury throw a lot of things around, mostly about race ‘n’ politix, including how racism plays less of a role than race, ie white people are less scared of a black prez per se than an unfamiliar black prez surrounded by Farrakhans.
Raj Patel & Megan McArdle
Stuffed and Starved author Patel and Atlantic writer and econ blogger McArdle talk food ‘n’ politics, tackling topics like the World Bank and democracy, the downsides of food aid, and obesity. The occasional familial distractions that Patel experiences during the vlog show the cute idiosyncracies that B-heads makes possible.
Marcom pro Moses Foster pretty gracefully leverages a truly embarassing episode of benevolent white ignorance to school AdAge readers on the concerns of the black middle class as a marketing segment.
After announcing the existence of the black middle class as the shattering of a stereotype, Foster relates an episode where a white colleague at a conference essentially links his or her perception of black male professionals’ penchant for white women to said professionals’ ability to “talk white.”
Foster follows this up with a curious plea:
I implore you as marketers to get it right, even if no one else does.
And goes on:
We have an obligation to know our target audiences, so that these misconceptions don’t bleed into our communications and feed the stereotype engine. The results can be disastrous — both to company’s trying to build brands within diverse audiences, as well as young, impressionable members of those diverse audiences whose perceptions are shaped in large part by the messaging that accosts them day to day.
Foster goes on to frame marketing’s mission in terms of an urge on the part of the black middle class to “increase access for Black people to the tools, resources, and people that are going to help the community. I’d like to hear in your advertisement about how your product helps me do that.”
This is pretty striking. Who else but a marketer would call on his industry to please get perceptions of race–and presumably relations between his own community and the commodified mainstream–”right, even if no-one else does”? Does that “no-one” include teachers, artists, community activists and others whose main interest lies in simply enriching the community?
Among other things, marketing creates desire for products and services, and anything remotely socially redeeming about the process is entirely secondary. Calling on marketers to “get it right” in terms of discarding stereotypes seems a little cart-before-the horse, if only because marketing perpetually lags far behind the cultural zeitgeist. Hell, marketers get their clues from the cultural choices of consumers, which reach far beyond their buying choices. Let’s not forget that 1) it took FOREVER for the ad world to recognize hip-hop–even as a trend, much less a cultural phenomenon and 2) it’s taking even longer for a print or broadcast ad to feature a gay or lesbian couple.
In short, marketing is generally a chicken-shit industry that doesn’t want to upend the apple cart.
Asking marketers to get race “right” is like asking me to fully understand the social impact of video gaming. NOT INTERESTED.
Ziggy vs. Reality
Designer Khoi Vin at Subtraction shows how rock stars’ album art gets shittier as they get older. Good thesis that bears out on the examples he shows.
Daniel Levy on the diavlog
[Yes it's been forever, all 3.5 of you reading. I've little excuse for this, it's just magnified itself as I sit here dormant on a contract job, so hopefully I'll have lots of downtime to do stuff like this and make music, etc. all the other crap I've been thinking of doing. Bim!]
I salute Bloggingheads.tv, a diavlog (dialog video weblog) site that you should check out. Basically, a diavlog as defined in this site (actually I think this site defines it) involves a split-screen view of two participants speaking to each other in real time via webcam, more often than not wearing headsets (although some use phones for the audio).
Started 2.5 years ago by journalists Mickey Kaus (Slate) and Robert Wright (New Republic), it now involves over 150 journalists, bloggers, science writers, scientists, philosophers, book authors dealing with all kinds of topics.
Today at work I watched a diavlog called The Intra-Israeli Mideast Peace Debate between New American Foundation senior fellow David Levy on the left and Ha’aretz US correspondent Shmuel Rossner on the right. Their lively, interruption-filled, typically Israeli discussion proves an especially good example of how the video augments this dynamic app–you get to see both Rossner’s argumentative sneering and Levy’s combative fidgeting. The other plus was the contrast of Levy’s Cambridge accent to Rosner’s sabra brogue–this kind of dynamic is probably rare amongst these match-ups.
So, have a look, give it a try, who knows?
Verbatim from an email from my non-blogging buddy PHL:
Iran leader dismisses US currency
====================
The dollar has weakened considerably against the euro and other
currencies in the past 12 months.Its decline has affected the revenues of Opec members because most of
them price and sell their oil exports in the US currency.Mr Ahmadinejad said that all Opec countries had showed interest in
converting their cash reserves into other currencies.“They [the US] get our oil and give us a worthless piece of paper,” he
told reporters.
=====================Look at the pic of Ahmadinejad and Chavez - what is that, the penguin
and the riddler? Fill your tank and charge your cell now. Yeah, that
will keep you safe.
Time Magazine Cairo correspondent Scott McLeod offers up a remarkable slideshow from Education City on the outskirts of Doha, the capital of Qatar.
Read it and weep, America–this is what can be done with a portion of the profits from a half-million barrels per day. Fourteen million square meters, branches of 5 major American universities. Proportionally, if Qatar can hook up one of these, we can do better than our single Education City of Boston—right?
