June 2008 Archives
Undermining capitalism through domesticated cartoons:
England and The United States of America. Because money is the driving decision making and "creative" force in these two countries, both of these legendary characters have been short-changed and/or sold-out.
Just when films based upon graphic novels and comic books are beginning to show some promise (ie. V for Vendetta... along with Batman Begins, X-Men, and Spiderman to some extent), Miracleman, arguably the finest revisionist comic book hero and one of the greatest unknown stories of the 20th Century (written by the brilliant Alan Moore and then later continued by the equally qualified Neil Gaiman), has been "trapped in a complex and expensive legal battle with several people claiming at least partial ownership of the character" since the early nineties.
Meanwhile, one of the most beloved canines of my generation has become laughable, or rather pitiable, as the AOL/Warner/Disney money making machine bought out then tried to revisit a character that will only truly work as one who is animated and anthropomorphic. The Rotten Tomatoes Freshness Rating gave "Underdog: The Movie" a very low 13% and mentions, "Underdog is a mostly forgettable adaptation that relies far too heavily on recycled material and sloppy production." Ken Fox of TV Guide said: "If you set your expectations just low enough, or are an easily satisfied 8-year-old, you might have a bit of fun."
When it comes to making lots of money, one can always rely on dumbing down the creative, thoughtful, and provokative in exchange for appealing to the Lowest Common Denomonator.
Classic vintage billboard blowback via Weirdvertising.
My aim in that post was to crank out a quick and crisp set of potential explanations for what's going on, though of course there are other possible explanations and, as they said in the old Miss Clairol commercial, only DC's hairdresser knows for sure.
Since you're taking the trouble to read this here post, a possible bonus factor: the Superboy trademarks. Ya wanna keep those suckers alive, and to do that ya gotta use 'em. Keeping Superboy off the market--and signaling to the world that that's your plan as long as the rights are in dispute--could be cited as evidence that DC has abandoned the marks.
With regard to the behind-the-scenes legal sparring, those who immersed themselves in the March case would recognize the strategies and many of the citations. Time Warner is honing in on trademark and the pre-Action Comics #1 ads, which, as I noted before, could be seen as a weak spot in the ruling. The Siegels' lawyers are equally adept in parrying those blows.
All in all, it remains a fascinating study not just in law, but the complex and irreducible dimensions of corporate ethics, creativity and personal identity.
In this morning's Wall Street Journal, U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins rhapsodizes on the common root of poetry, cartoons and human identity. Inspired:
I think what these animations offered me besides some very speedy, colorful entertainment was an alternative to the static reality around me that dutifully followed the laws of the physical world. The brothers Warner presented a flexible, malleable world that defied Newton, a world of such plasticity that anything imaginable was possible. . . . This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry.
Bugs
There he leans:
cracking wise,
biting his bright orange carrot
bugging the world
speed demon
ventriloquist
and master of disguise
he is everywhere at once
buck-toothed
and spectacularly eared
he is armed with dynamite
he is the only one
who really knows what's up.
Elmer
The mailbox in front of the neat cottage
spells out the unfortunate name.
This morning the homebody
is singing in his sunny kitchen
dum-dee-dum, waiting
for the tea water to boil.
Later he will have his nap,
the enormous pink head
rolling on the pillow
dreaming again of the wabbit,
the private carrot patch.
Waiting by his bed
is the shotgun and the ridiculous hat
for he is the human.
This weekend in the UK marks the first part of what promises to be an epic finale of the latest season of Doctor Who. From a DW message board, here's one viewer's moral dilemma.
Seek comfort here....
I have to play a charity gig to fund a mission to help Orphaned Kids in Romania, tomorrow nite. 7pm.
Would have wrangled out of it but my daughter is the one who organised it! It'll def get a mention in between tunes. . . .
I still can't convince my 11 year old that the gig is a better option. Poor kid. Watch Dad gig or The Stolen Earth! Guessing that'll be one less!
All others who have to miss it. Share your pain here!
I love this, in part for the bit about how it was only his daughter who kept him from canceling, in part because I thoroughly relate.
Brilliant: Olivia Lee's new series of dolls of famous designers represented in the style of their work. Above: postmodern superheroine-architect Zaha Hadid.
Limited Edition Designer Dolls pokes fun at the Design cognescenti. By carefully studying the visual languages and distinct personalities of some of the Design world's most formidable designers, this project is an observation of how designer personalities are literally becoming synonymous with the objects they design.
Via Trendhunter
The FSM/syphilis posted earlier today is a goofy illustration of why do-gooder cause marketers need to think about how folks outside the bubble will see their ad--one group's Serious Message is another's joke. Trendhunter's #1 item on its list of 30 charity trends--Shockvertising--highlights a trend we've seen a number of times here in Uncivil: the increasing use of (ostensibly) disturbing images in PSAs.
Do these ads really work? I imagine folks who use them would say they attention they receive on the web proves they do the job of promoting awareness of the cause. But whether it does that in a way that actually leads to positive corrective action is not so clear. For me, most of this stuff comes across as contrived and cliched; transgressive stopped being transgressive by the 1980s at the latest, when Transgressing Boundaries became the way to show that you were part of the in-crowd. When everyone's transgressive no one's transgressive, so why bother?
My own preference: boo shock; yay fun.
The Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services provides a graphic reason to avoid noodly appendages.
I can't say how many law school professors have ever assigned Grant Morrison's Invisibles and Marvel Boy in advanced seminars on corporate law, but my guess is that I'm the only one. But that's OK, because if you've ever those comics you know they raise provocative questions about the corporate commodification and personal identity.
One of things that makes Morrison's work so compelling to me is that he doesn't take the easy route of equating business with bad. Corporate identity can be a force for soul-erasing memetic replication (Hexus, the Living Corporation!) but it can also be a tool for subversive cultural enlightenment--King Mob's "I use the en-eh-mee . . . " Sex Pistols riff made that phrase a permanent part of my working vocabulary.
Beyond that, his exploration of ethics and identity is a much more informed and creative use of cutting-edge info than most of what you find in academic journals--for example, if you've read just the two series I've mentioned above, you understand more about Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine than many professors. And if you come to my office you'll straightaway notice issues of New Scientist on my meeting table--a subscription that began, not coincidentally, when the Invisibles was still ongoing.
Which brings me to Grant Morrison's latest series, Final Crisis. Yesterday marked the release of the second issue, and if you keep up with comics news sites you know the series has sparked its fair share of controversy. For my part, what's making this series work, as with so much of Morrison's work, is focusing not on the MacGuffins but on its magic mirror of our world.
Below: my two favorite scenes, both of which reflect identity crises that you might have noticed in other forms on this site. The culture clash in the first scene should be quite familiar to anyone familiar with do-goodery today:
The next, where the elder and younger Flash-es reflect on the final fate of a storied community-center--well, if you were in New York yesterday and got bumped by a guy walking down Broadway reading & laughing instead of watching where he was going, you know how much I enjoyed that.
Once again, it seems, the supercontext has a sense of humor.
Talk about the end of innocence:
A jury convicted a man Tuesday of killing Alan Shalleck, who collaborated with the co-creator of "Curious George" to bring the mischievous monkey to TV and a series of book sequels.
Shalleck was the writer and director of more than 100 episodes of "Curious George" for the Disney Channel.
The jury deliberated for about 90 minutes before convicting Vincent Puglisi of first-degree murder and robbery with a deadly weapon. He is scheduled to be sentenced in July.
Puglisi's co-defendant, Rex Ditto, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and robbery with a weapon in 2007. He was sentenced to life in prison.
A message left for Assistant State Attorney Andy Slater was not immediately returned Tuesday evening. The phone at Assistant Public Defender Shari Vrod's office rang unanswered.
Shalleck had 83 blunt force injuries and more than three dozen stab wounds, including to the abdomen, neck and groin, an autopsy revealed.
Ditto and Puglisi went to Shalleck's Boynton Beach home on Super Bowl Sunday in February 2006 intending to rob him. After the killing, Ditto and Puglisi stole jewelry from Shalleck and pilfered funds from his checking account, authorities said.
From today's Mary Worth, who uses yesterday's answering machine.
Yesterday's post with 50 women dressed as Wonder Woman illustrated, among other things, how repetition can transform an archetype of creative identity into a visual cliche--and vice versa. It's a trope Warhol memorably played with a number of times, from his multiples of Marilyn to his Campbell soup cans. It also provided a number of examples of how the juxtaposition of magic and mundane can generate images that are simultaneously profound and absurd--for instance, there's a picture of costumed woman at home, IIRC in her kitchen, that captures the complexity of the human condition in ways all too often missed in High Art.
Extending this trope, today we have three variants on the theme from the Batman TV show, from different times and places.
First, Parisian psychobilly rockers the Washington Dead Cats offer an avant garde visual interpretation that updates Warhol's Batman painting, photography and film for the Youtube generation:
The version in this video was one of teen me's favorite flea market finds long ago: the '60s bootleg version by The Who. Be sure to read the crawl:
And last but definitely not least, The Jam!
And yet it does, according to this roundup from Europe:
[S]ocial businesses “that according to the media, academia, the government and the wider public don’t exist, are today at the front line when it comes to dealing with social emergencies”. But unacknowledged social enterprises exist in Denmark too, where there are more than 9 thousand non profit organisations involved in the provision of public services. And Poland, where entrepreneurial projects with a high social impact have to operate under the juridical terms “foundation” or “association”.
As a method of proving the real impact of social enterprise despite the lack of a law acknowledging their existence, the article's approach reminds me of this classic passage from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."
Now *this* is an educational PSA. More at Carpe Testes.
And the occasional guy contemplating what this says about the nature of human identity, all on Bam! Kapow!
This morning on my walk to work I noticed that the demolition of an office building had exposed a church to public view--and not just any church, but Manhattan's first Roman Catholic parish. Drawn by the sight I decided to do a walk-through. The ornamentation, the altars, the markers commemorating the history of building and craft--the place was a vivid reminder of a visual style in some ways alien to life today, but at the same time its direct antecedent.
The blend of sensory richness and spirituality reminded me of this recent article on the goldsmiths of Iraq. Gold as an expression of transformative identity has a long history there, a tradition evident not just in the Bible but in the diffusion of its iconic values throughout the globe. Which is just one more why the plight of Iraq's goldsmiths is so tragic--it's not just that the invasion led to the pillaging of ancient art; Iraq is losing the very artists whose work help gives life meaning.
Even more disturbing--the role of religious conflict in this spiritual implosion. For more on that check out the whole article; for now, a poignant reminder of one family's lost golden age:
For Walid, goldsmithing is more than a business, it is a family tradition too important to abandon.
His grandfather worked on the golden-domed Kadhimiya shrine, where Imam Musa al Kadhim and his grandson, Muhammad Taqi, revered by Shiite Muslims, are said to be buried.
His father made jewelry for the Iraqi royal family.
A faded photograph hanging above Walid's counter shows his father with the portable wooden box he used to display his wares before he opened a store in 1934 in Baghdad's most famous gold bazaar, which fills the winding alleys leading to the shrine. . . .
The jewelry sold in the Kadhimiya district is especially prized by Iraq's majority Shiites, who consider it to be a blessing from the imams buried there.
Before U.S.-led forces invaded the country in 2003, the shopkeepers say, as many as 3,000 Iranians also visited the shrine every day. After offering a prayer to the imams, the pilgrims would join the bustling throngs to shop for gold.
In his last interview, George Carlin offers this insightful assessment of the value in living at right angles to society. Marshall McLuhan spoke of the artist as a counterenvironment, and this quote illustrates precisely why Carlin was the consummate artist:
Abraham Maslow said the fully realized man does not identify with the local group. When I saw that, it rang another bell. I thought: bingo! I do not identify with the local group, I do not feel a part of it. I really have never felt like a participant, I’ve always felt like an observer. Always. I only identified this in retrospect, way after the fact, that I have been on the outside, and I don’t like being on the inside. I don’t like being in their world. I’ve never felt comfortable there; I don’t belong to that. So, when he says the “local group,” I take that as meaning a lot of things: the local social clubs or fraternal orders, or lodges or associations or clubs of any kind, things where you sacrifice your individual identity for the sake of a group, for the sake of the group mind. I’ve always felt different and outside. Now, I also extended that, once again in retrospect, as I examined my feelings.
Today's Wall St. Journal front-pager on the "rebranding" of Planned Parenthood illustrates how poor nonprofit design can trigger a backlash against profitability and growth.
The giveaway that folks at Planned Parenthood are trendhopping without sufficient reflection: the rote corporatization of their mission statement:
Last spring, the nonprofit -- which has 882 clinics nationwide -- dropped its crusading mission statement setting out the rights of all individuals, no matter their income, to "reproductive self-determination." In its place, Planned Parenthood adopted a crisp pledge to "leverage strength through our affiliated structure to be the nation's most trusted provider of sexual and reproductive health care." . . .
"This is not the Planned Parenthood we all grew up with... they now have more of a business approach, much more aggressive," said Amy Hagstrom Miller, who runs abortion clinics in Texas and Maryland.
Naked dolls at play in a Goodwill charity store, via Thrift Shop Horrors
A few years back I wrote on design and nonprofit identity, an article you should be able to find on this site by searching for "design jurisprudence." This graphic captures a lot of what's in that article, except in a single image.
No Caption Needed points to this stunning piece in Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers series: Constitution 2008 "[d]epicts 83,000 Abu Ghraib prisoner photographs, equal to the number of people who have been arrested and held at US-run detention facilities with no trial or other due process of law, during America's war on terror." Click through from zoomed-in images of this 8x25 ft. five-panel work.
$499 prefab political ads are the subject of this Slate V piece, but Spot Runner's offerings don't stop at election day--you find a range of ready-made commercials for green business--and they use words like "organic" and "sustainable", so you know they're on trend.
Current Disney ads typically reinforce the association with kids, but not this De Soto ad from 1939. Wealth, success, high art, beauty--all for an affordable low price--that's the value of the Walt Disney brand back when his feature-length films were fresh. Excerpts from the ad copy are below; note the references to Snow White and the blurb for the upcoming release of Pinocchio.
Taxi Ray Kottner was a New York icon, giving away free rides & memories in his vintage Checker cab--an act of charity that got him in trouble with regulators because he wasn't charging standard rates.* He was also "an environmental activist pressing for the entire country to run our motor vehicles on hydrogen."
Vanishing New York laments his passing; Jena Starkes' Heaven-O tells his tale.
*A commenter on Gothamist didn't share the love: "the old pretending to do charity work but really stealing from society. Just like the Ford Foundation," prompting the following response:
Mr. Kottner is not Bill Gates. Like most charitable enterprises, he needs contributions from those who can afford to do so. There is no reason why those who choose on their own to ride in his vintage checker should not, if they can afford it, contribute to the free rides of those less fortunate. . . . For the Taxi Owners union to claim that Mr. Kottner is stealing from cab drivers by giving people free rides and tourists or couples on dates a tour of the City is akin to Walmart's claiming that the Salavation Army is stealing from Walmart's legitimate clothing business.
In Vancouver this weekend, Karyo Edelman--a leading PR firm--is conducting The Little Give, a weekend-long contest in which it works with four nonprofit partners to create the most effective charitable program for kids. The nonprofit judged to be the winner will be the firm's CSR partner.
You can track this project live on the web in various ways, such as Flickr, Twitter and a group blog. But for 2.0 PR to work, it's not just enough to use the tools, you gotta have something that folks want want to read--and the good folks at Karyo Edelman go about this the right way. As you can see from the above photo, one of the things that really makes this initiative stand out is that it doesn't take itself too seriously.
Now available to order: the first issue of Dr. Rani Whitfield's Tha' Hip Hop Doc and the Legion of Health. Below, excerpts from the press release--particularly noteworthy: Whitfield's focus on the book's professional standards.
Created and edited by local family physician Dr. Rani Whitfield, the debut comic rivals Marvel comics in quality and message.
Fed Up!, which is scheduled for a Baton Rouge release on Tuesday, June 24, brings Tha’ Hip Hop Doc, a doctor, warrior, teacher and hero, and his team of muscle-bound, super-intelligent health advocates with super human powers to protect the human race from members of the Dungeon of Disease.
Representing Western medicine, fitness, nutrition, spiritual health, alternative medicine, research, and mental health these heroes battle SSPs (Symbiotic Supernatural Parasites) with colorful allusions in this comic world.
Tha’ Hip Hop Doc’s nemesis, Bad Heart, a sickly but shrewd and manipulative villain, will stop at nothing to destroy his foes, The Legion of Health. The comic series delivers critical messages on obesity, poor eating habits, physical inactivity, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, and STDs packed with imagery and action.
Whitfield, who is also a board-certified sports medicine physician, said he designed the three-book comic series to reinforce positive health values using an ingenious, artistic package that is most popular among youth and young adults.
“The obstacle in the past with health comic books is that they were not of industry standard, and physicians were not actively delivering the messages to the youth,” said Whitfield. With that, Whitfield and comic artist Greg Nichols, took Whitfield’s Hip Hop Healthy speeches and created The Legion of Health. The series has been thoroughly researched and is a recommended teaching tool.
Via the always informative ProHipHop
Through June 28th, the Gagosian Gallery in NYC is showing Roy Lichtenstein: Girls, an exhibit of Lichtenstein's landmark comic pop art in anticipation of the upcoming retrospective scheduled for the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012.
Even if I weren't into this sort of thing, I'd have to go for no other reason than to pay my respects to the painting that accurately predicted my early 20s.
Comics with Problems is a true public service, archiving vintage do-gooder comics. The latest: a rare 1969 American Cancer Society comic on pap smears and uterine cancer. One thing that stands out: for all its frankness in describing gynecological exams, this sexual-revolution era book is nonetheless squeamish about acknowledging that women have "marriage relations" outside of marriage.
My local newstand had these for sale, so I bought a pack to scan. The M&Ms were rather stale, the bag beat up, the candy, cracked, so I had to check--and yes, this year's M&Ms cross-promotion with Komen doesn't start until August.
If you've ever been to a nonprofit annual membership meeting, you know the drill: the board of directors presents what it's done over the past year and members gripe about what the board did or left undone. Directors have any number of ways of dealing with this, but tonight I heard one that made me laugh out loud.
The scene: a storied New York nonprofit
Issue: The nonprofit has revamped its dining program and had an influx of new members who (gasp) bring their kids.
An angry older member rises and says curtly: "Children. I saw children in the dining room. I brought this up last year, and yet I still see children in the dining room!"
Bemused director: "Yes, but now they're on the menu."
UNIFY is an Australian program aimed at high school students, who visit various communities and meet with local "leaders to explore Australian values and cultural diversity." Above: an excerpt from a comic they created on this theme.
Western schools have come quite a long way from when I was a tyke. One particularly vivid memory: when I was in kindergarten, my class met part of the day and the rest of the day was for kids from the foster care facility near my home, who at that point were not integrated with us. Many of these kids were brought there to PA Dutch Country from regional cities, such as Philadelphia. Li'l me went to kindergarten, eager to learn, and the teacher--who shall remain nameless here--admonished me not to get my lips too close to the water fountain because "the n**** kids from the Home" had used it.
Confused the hell out of me, 'cuz I lived near that institution and grew up knowing a bunch of those kids. I'd also read books about George Washington Carver's work with peanuts and MLK, so school seemed a bit out of step. (Incidental personal fact: a few years later, I and my elementary school friend Tony, who went in and out of foster care, marked our friendship before his departure back to his mom in Philly by trading our most valuable things--he gave me a leather key ring on which he'd burned an image of a frog, and I gave him my cherished Doctor Who monster book from Britain that I'd found in New York, the only thing I had re the program when it disappeared from the U.S. after its initial one year run).
Reading the UNIFY comic makes me wonder what kids today must feel in regard to folks in my generation and beyond, particularly here in the U.S. The tolerance mantra has been ubiquitous for a while, but to see and hear some of the things out there about Obama must seem as discordant as my kindergarten teacher's warning almost forty years ago.
A few weeks ago the New Yorker published an homage to the revolutionary and prophetic comic artist Jack Kirby; the June 23rd issue contains a compelling essay on the French cave paintings that were millennia ahead of their time.
Were these early painters telling now lost mythic stories? Were they paleolithic Grant Morrisons, tripping shamans high on drugs and carbon dioxide? If you're fascinated by iconic communication--comics, painting, ads, the web--Judith Thurman's First Impressions is well worth your time.
Leona Helmsley's will left twelve million dollars to her bitey little dog, Trouble. However, the New York Post reports that her grandchildren and the AG's office has succeeded in getting a judge to approve a deal whereby ten million of that will go instead to Helmsley's charitable foundation.
Aiding the settlement process: an affidavit from the dog's caretaker that the dog can subsist on two mil a year.
Sounds like someone could really use a morals tutor.
After a week+ in the apartment, I've been rarin' to get back to walking around town, so tonight I decided to set out for nowhere in particular.
I found myself drawn to Times Square. Yes, I know that as someone who lives here I'm supposed to say that the place is a soulless tourist trap where real New Yorkers don't set foot unless they work there, but the thing is, I actually like it. Not because I'm particularly partial to Toys 'R Us and Planet Hollywood--blah, actually--but because of what the place represents.
Times Square is what its visitors want New York to be--in a very real sense, they create it. The huge flashing ads, the supersize shops and restaurants, the indoor ferris wheel--go to the rest of the city, and you won't find that stuff there; if anything the norm in Manhattan is for space to be hypercompressed. But when people come to the City that's not what they expect to see--like its skyscrapers, their New York is a City of Marvels where everything is larger, louder, glitzier than anything they could find at home.
And so it exists.
This was driven home to me tonight as I was walking through the pedestrian island at the heart of Times Square. Cameras all around, taking pictures and videos of the surrounding scene that embodies the visitors' New York. It's classic memetic recursion--people are drawn to acquire and to distribute certain iconic images; the images that attract visitors multiply and grow; more people come to see and to acquire, leading to more replication.
The photographers think that they are capturing a souvenir image of New York, but that's the least interesting part of the story--they're actually making their own city with every shot. Take their cameras away and Times Square as they know it--their mythical New York--will disappear. It's not just McLuhan's predicted urban Disneyland; it's a simulacrum that's become as real as the real thing.
No, not that Power Girl--these granola bars promote the empowering work of the NYC's Lower East Side Girls Club. I'm always on the lookout for charitable businesses beyond the usual suspects; this food sales program operates at the Essex Street Market and their flagship La Tiendita ("The Little Store").
Gothamist has more, including the Power Girl recipe.
The commemoration of the life of Tim Russert is filled with reminders that the divide between social enterprise and commercial business is artificial, if not untenable. Pay careful attention, for example, to today's tribute on Meet the Press: beyond the embedded references to charity, note the recurring theme of of the news business as a public trust and the deep regard for the significance of ordinary lives. From the perspective of someone like Russert, the notion that a baseball player, rock musician or garbage collector was merely self-serving denied the logic--and spirit--of life.