July 20th, 2008
In China, suburbs are populated with gated, self-contained communities. Buyers choose from all inclusive lifestyle estates with Anglicized (and intentionally bourgeois) names like “Latte Town, Glory Vogue, Yuppie International Garden, Wonderful Digital Jungle, and–cutting to the chase–Top Aristocrat.”
From a review by Dave Atkins of The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World by Thomas J. Campanella.
July 20th, 2008
There are many strange things about Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, but one thing that bothered me at the time was that despite being set in New York, the street scenes sometimes looked strangely un-New-Yorky, and not just because they were filmed on a studio set in Pinewood. Jon Ronson’s recent documentary “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes” has a partial explanation: Kubrick had thousands of photos taken for the purpose of research, but all of them were of London streets. Ronson discovers this when he finds dozens of photos taken on Upper Street (see here, 5 minutes in), down the road from his house and from mine, and which I walked up and down the length of today. It’s a bit uncanny to see the pubs, shops and cafes you know so well turning up in the files of the world’s most famous film director. What I don’t get is why he didn’t just have somebody go take photos of New York.
It’s a pretty enjoyable documentary overall. The boxes reveal Kubrick’s quirks and obsessions to be alternately alarming and endearing: the bizarre memos instructing a minion to phone up the Met Office to ascertain the barometric pressure for 4am the previous Friday night, the cardboard boxes he had custom-made because the lids on the ready-mades were never ‘just right’, the meticulously scrutinsed newspaper advertisements for his films from around the globe, the accumulation of vast quantities of Rymans stationary (according to Jan Harlan, he would go frequently “go to Ryman’s and see if they had something new”). And if you’re one of the thousands of fans or cranks who wrote letters to Stanley Kubrick, you’ll be glad to hear that he not only kept your letter but carefully filed it and made a note of your contact details in case he needed to ask you to check on a local cinema or perform some other favour. Amusingly, the only thing he didn’t keep was the outtakes from his films, which were incinerated.
July 11th, 2008
Peter Bradshaw watches Mamma Mia! The Movie so we don’t have to:
Everything has been squeaky-cleaned up. It too has a feelgood wedding motif - but there is no irony, no heartache, certainly no paralysing illness, no dramatic plausibility, and weirdly, no hint that the characters know whose songs they are singing; there is no sense of perspective on the music. In Mamma Mia! Abba is everywhere and nowhere. This is Planet Abba or Abbaworld. The characters are forever dancing and smiling and bursting into Abba songs like Stepford cyborgs when you flip the secret panel behind their heads and press the Life-Affirming Behaviour button. An Abba instrumental is even used when the bride walks up the aisle, instead of Handel. And nobody ever says: “Oh for Gawd’s sake, just for a change, can we sing something by the Carpenters?” …
Mamma Mia! ties itself in knots trying to shoehorn in every single famous number, and each time, the beginning of an Abba song triggered in me a Pavlovian stab of pleasure, cancelled after a millionth of a second by a backwash of rage that this soulless panto has done nothing to earn or even understand the good feeling.
Some songs are easier to incorporate than others. Waterloo is saved for the closing credits, perhaps because screenwriter Catherine Johnson didn’t grasp its metaphorical quality, and that she would not in fact need a vast Napoleonic army to troop across the island. But there is one very famous Abba number which is entirely omitted. That is a crying shame. I have an idea for the way in which it could yet be included, should an extra scene be needed for the DVD. There’s a six-year-old boy on the island called Fernando, and caring Meryl Streep suspects that poor little Fernando could be hearing-impaired. She sits the little lad down, takes out a set of drums and bangs them close to his ears; with tears pouring down her cheeks, she sings to him a single, heart-rending question …
He puts his finger on the problem with most of these productions - the songs of the artist in question are everywhere, but there’s no sign of the artist or any songs by anyone else. This was perhaps the crowning failure of Julie Taymor’s jaw-droppingly bad Across the Universe: it was based on the songs of the Beatles but set in a version of the 1960s from which the Beatles, who did more than anyone to define the cultural consciousness of that decade, were entirely missing - as were any of the other leading musical lights of the time, though some of them were dealt the additional insult of being crassly impersonated by one or other of the movie’s characters, with the sole black male actor forced to embody the diluted essence of everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Marvin Gaye at some point or another. If the intention of the film-makers was to permanently erase any imprinted nostalgia felt for the 60s by anyone who wasn’t sentient at the time they did a bang-up job.
July 9th, 2008
Arctic Economics, courtesy of long-time economics blogger Ben Muse. It’s pretty good, too - I particularly like the post about a company called Skyhook International promoting dirigibles as the Arctic transportation mode of the future.
July 3rd, 2008
The BBC has a delightful story today. It is either the basis for a sit-com or a tear-jerker movie of triumph against the odds. Whatever it is, there’s wrestling involved so it’s sure to be a hit.
July 1st, 2008
June 28th, 2008
Belgium isn’t all chocolate and comedy prime ministers.
That’s from a fairly extraordinary bit of modern folk-culture archeology over at Tom P’s blog.
June 28th, 2008
*Swoon*
Kinder spielen Fußball mit Stürmerstar TorresEgal wie das Spiel Russland gegen Spanien am Abend ausgeht, die spanischen Stars sind jetzt schon die Europameister der Herzen.
Wo spielt Fernando Torres, der 35-Millionen-Euro teure spanische Stürmerstar? Genau: beim FC Liverpool. Und jetzt auch im Feld hinter dem Sonnhof in Neustift. In der kleinen Gemeinde im Stubaital, in der Nähe des Hotels der spanischen Nationalelf, ist damit wohl auch ein Bubentraum Wirklichkeit geworden.
Keine Berührungsängste
Spontan hat der spanische Stürmerstar dort an einem seiner freien Tage unerkannt mit fünf Jungs aus dem Dorf fast eine Dreiviertelstunde lang Fußball gespielt – mit Jakob, Matheus, Benedikt, Peter und David, allesamt zwischen 6 und 13 Jahre alt.
June 28th, 2008
Turns out all the cool stuff you wish they’d put on TV they probably tried to but it never got past the pilot. Behold Lookwell!
June 26th, 2008
Good job the economy’s fucked. Maybe she‘ll have to emigrate.
June 8th, 2008
So, Mexico seemed pretty disappointing. On arrival in the holiday town of Puerto Vallarta, the Benidorm of the Americas, I checked into a fairly dull hotel, ate a tedious sandwich, and sighed. This isn’t the Mexico I have come to expect, tequila-swilling toughs wearing tattoos and leather waistcoats, ready for a stand-off* at any moment, stroking their moustaches and eyeing you suspiciously until that moment comes. A stroll around the Marina shows promise though, an Iguana, flame-clawed crabs, and crocodiles all sauntered about.
It wasn’t until I encountered a local tour salesman that I got the real Mexico:
“You like pussy man?”
“Sure, chum.”**
“I get you on this tour, you get all the pussy you want. You like weed?”
“No thanks, I’m cool.”***
I only wish it was Danny Trejo who had asked, not some slack-jawed teen.
*In Mexico, it’s just called a “stand-off”, see old joke about Chinese food
**Portions of my answer have been edited to make me look cool.
***Portions of my answer have been edited to make me look like an old man trying to seem cool.****
****Just because.
June 4th, 2008
I drafted this post in November 2005, more than a year after Obama gave this speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention (I had only just read it). And yes, I was genuinely excited and uplifted by reading much of that speech.
I never posted, because I always thought I would get to a more thorough, deserving analysis of that speech and, I hoped, the person who made it, about whom I was genuinely curious. I never did. But, for no particular reason, except maybe this one, here in all their toe-curling glory, are my initial thoughts (as saved by the good people at Wordpress - damn their eyes).
Title: The ‘voice of reason’ market? Huuuuuuuge market.
Barack Obama. He’s too good to be true, right?
I’ll be honest with you. Obama creeps me out a little bit. And it’s not just the whole ‘head boy at Hogwarts’ goody-goody vibe; that’s just my own built-in prejudices biting. I can get over that. But he makes me uncomfortable. I hate listening to a politician and thinking, ‘Hey, people should listen to this guy. This is a great idea - and I think he means it!’
And that was it.
May 26th, 2008
It being Africa Day, it naturally poured rain in London today, so I stayed in instead and faffed around online.
And finally, some sage advice from Sesame Street and a cast of thousands (Jeremys Iron!)
May 22nd, 2008
Weighty things happening in Lebanon, apparently. Fortunately our correspondent in Beirut is on hand to explain it all in terms I can just about understand.
It is a great day for the historic underdog, admittedly the historic underdog with a phenoemnally powerful militia. Shia power! They came to Beirut unwanted refugees from the south, they toiled away, under-represented, discriminated against, reviled as a common and racially inferior underclass, and now their martyrs bedeck the chi-chi shopping malls of Hamra! the Sunnis, who are always telling you they “love life” (local racist code for not crazy martyr-obssessed like the Shia) have banners hanging where their precious Hariri once stood screaming “death is our glory, killling our habit, graves our cradles”. You have to love a revolution.
Seriously, there is an aspect of this whole terrrorist organisation supported by nasty Iran versus US-backed government whole thing which has been totally overlooked, which is that they were demanding representation for the Shia commensurate with their numbers, didn’t get it, shot some guns off, and got it. I’m not saying Hezbollah are the good guys, or that they aren’t serving an Iranian agenda, but for whatever reason they’ve made the political system less institutionally racist.
May 14th, 2008
I was chatting to an Irish girl at a barbecue here the other day and she asked if I spoke Irish, and I was slightly embarrassed to say that I don’t. Part of the reason came back to me when I read this post by Maria over at Crooked Timber:
it’s Monday today, so my thoughts turn inevitably to the Teileagoir. (Irish for slide projector, a term I only learnt as an an adult, and pronounced “tel-a-gor”). Every Monday, the Teleagoir would be loaded with a new set of slides in Irish, something along the lines of ‘Mammy and Daddy and Sean and Maire go to the cinema’. Each slide would have a picture of the scene and maybe some vocabulary to prompt us. For each one, we memorised a sentence of the story. We would do a couple of new slides every day, and at the end of the week we would recite the whole thing as a group without the pictures. How this might ever have translated into being able to speak Irish, I’m not sure. But I do remember the gut-clenching boredom that set in around Wednesday as we went through the slides for the 20th time. There wasn’t much a teacher could do with the Teileagoir.
From the sounds of it Maria finished primary school in the late 1970s or early 80s, but I can vouch for the continued use of the Teilagoir and its deadly dull slides through to the end of the 80s. Thanks to the crappy teaching methods used back then I will always have a ready-made excuse for why I don’t speak Irish, handy for deflecting blame from what in retrospect was clearly incipient West Britishness.
May 14th, 2008
Any time I’ve been lucky enough to fly over the land on a clear night, I’ve found the lights of cities below an beautiful but alien and almost ominous sight, without quite being able to explain why. The fantastic video below is by NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who rigged up a way (from spare parts on the International Space Station!) to capture high quality still photos of cities from orbit.
See also this article from NASA on snapping cities from space, which includes a great pic taking in Ireland, most of Britain and the North of France.
May 13th, 2008
According to the Center for Global Development, Ireland ranks only behind Sweden in terms of positive policies towards development in Africa.
The index attempts to quantify the impact on development of a range of policies, not just the usuals like aid and trade but also policies on migration, the environment, security and so on. Ireland does well in large part because of its contribution to peacekeeping in Africa.
May 13th, 2008
All y’all who bemoaned the lack of law-breaking in my cycle video will be pleased to hear that the Dear Leader himself is on the case. Thrill as Boris pedals nonchalantly through red lights as if nobody will notice! Cry as he asks a cabbie for directions to London Bridge! As he lives about five minutes from me his route’s actually somewhat similar, or at least it will be as soon as he works out that it makes more sense to avoid St. Paul’s.
But to me the funniest thing is that if he’s getting to City Hall through Potter’s Field as below then he mustn’t be aware of the rather large GLA underground cycle parking facility (with showers and everything, it’s great), the entrance to which he must have whizzed past on Tooley St.
May 10th, 2008
Here’s the new Tánaiste, Mary Coughlan, in a picture I found infinitely depressing.
And if that arms-aloft, shoulder-raising, parish flag-waving doesn’t get you down, how about this from the accompanying report:
Thousands poured on to the streets in Bundoran, Ballyshannon, Ballintra, Laghey and Donegal town as victory rallies were held in each before the Tánaiste, who is also Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, reached her destination…
Why, what could be less creepy than a victory rally held when no-one has won anything?
She pledged: “I’ll be doing my best for the people of the northwest, particularly my own county.”
Oh… I see. As you were, Donegal.
May 9th, 2008
What with Abbie’s somewhat understated reporting style (”Now the fighting’s outside my apartment. Still, have a lot of vodka and Day Today references to keep me entertained”) I hadn’t quite appreciated that civil war is basically breaking out in Beirut with real bullets and everything. I’d still like her to get that Pulitzer-winning story, but preferably from the vantage point of, I don’t know, Turkey or something.
May 8th, 2008
Many things in this Irish Times article about Ulster-Scots made me giggle, guiltily. First, and all too predictably:
The guttural pronunciation, which is almost Germanic in its harshness…
Glad we got that out of the way. Next, some guff from the natives about its advantages over English.
“Instead of a standard English phrase like ‘it’s a nice day’, we would say ‘it’s a brave nice day the day’,” explains Young. “Ulster-Scots is more descriptive. You can pack a whole lot into it.”
Yes. You certainly can pack more into a sentence with seven words than one with four. Now, as we all know, no minority language can possibly survive without some sort of government agency poking around at it. What would that agency be?
The development of Ulster-Scots is being overseen by Tha Boord o’ Ulster-Scotch (the Ulster-Scots Agency)
That’s right! Tha Boord o’ Ulster-Scotch. Or however you pronounce it - probably just like that. Except with a straight face.
As a vernacular rooted in rural life and with a tendency for retrospection, Ulster-Scots lacks equivalents for certain modern words used in standard English. Cue the neologism langblether, meaning telephone (lang for long and blether for talk).
“Somebody decided to create these words that didn’t make sense,” says Cromie. “We had to tell them to stop making words up.”
Right. So it’s a very descriptive language except when it comes to describing everyday objects. Then, whatever you do, you don’t make up a new word. You just stare at the telephone and jab your finger at it repeatedly.
Apparently there is quite a debate about whether Ulster-Scots (why not just Ulster-Scotch, if that’s its proper name?) is a dialect or a distinct language. I can’t offer an opinion but I note in this dictionary the entry ‘thruither’, which apparently describes a disorganised person, and is very similar to the word ‘throughother’ that my northern Granny used for a messy room and was presumably borrowed.
May 5th, 2008
Oh bravo, Dublin City Council:
Bikes-for-Billboards” scheme exposes major planning flaws
Archiseek / Ireland / News / 2008 / May 2It sounded like a fairytale, yet what was initially hailed as “free bikes” has become one of the biggest planning controversies to hit the capital in years.
The so-called “metropole” plan – whereby advertising company JC Decaux is to swap city advertising space for 450 bicycles has exposed major flaws in the capital’s planning system – with elected representatives left out of a deal where they should have been instrumental.
Over the Christmas break of 2006/ 07, 70 applications were filed, followed by another 50 for billboards which are to be erected on public footpaths.
Remarkably, nobody seemed to tell the then Lord Mayor – or indeed the other councillors of this; this despite the requirement under section 183 of the Local Government Act which specifies that the release of public lands is a reserved function, necessitating a vote by councillors.
Yet councillors have not even been allowed to see the already-agreed contract, which officials describe as “commercially sensitive”.
What councillors were told was that the non-cash deal was worth €85m to the city, although subsequently it has been claimed that the revenue generated by the billboards is only worth €1M per annum over the 15 year terms.
This scheme has been hit by a number of criticisms – chiefly that by virtue of a single project being split into 120 applications it was project-split and applied to an authority that had a vested interest in approving the scheme. Critics claimed that this meant that to comprehensively appeal the scheme to the Bord would have cost €30,000.
Fortunately for JC Decaux, all applications left with Dublin City Council were approved – with city planners staunchly defending the scheme and denying that there was any conflict of interest for the council to adjudicate on applications arising out of a scheme in which it has a vested interest. However some 24 units were appealed to An Bord Pleanála, resulting in two dozen successive hearings over three days in October – which an inspector herself described as “unprecedented”.
Bizarrely the billboards all seem to have been earmarked for less well-healed areas; no application was lodged for Donnybrook, Ballsbridge, Sandymount, or Rathgar. Yet applications were made for Ringsend, Dorset Street, Coolock, and Fairview.
So how much are 120 billboards worth? Intriguingly it is claimed that the larger electronic billboards, displaying 3 different adverts, should each generate €8,000 per month – netting approximately €7M per annum, with the 50 smaller billboards making another €3M per annum. Hence over the 15 year terms the deal may have been worth €150 Million to JC Decaux.
So one estimate now puts each of the “free bikes” in the original deal at each costing the city over €300,000 in terms of foregone revenue. But that’s not the only problem. In recommending that the Bord reject all units under appeal, Inspector Jane Dennihey reasoned that the applications were “premature”.
One reason for her recommendation was the use by senior city planners of a map, entitled “Zones of Advertising Control”, as now exclusively reproduced by Plan.
The hitch here is that councilors claim to have not even seen this map previously – never minded voted on it.
This throws suggests that key planning documents are being decided without any consultation with either the public or elected councillors, resulting in what An Taisce often calls as “rezonings without due process”.
Notably the document is broken into areas that correspond with Dublin City Council Development Plan maps – yet equally notable is the absence of an official City Council stamp, or for that matter a date. So the question must be asked: who drew up the map? And by what authority? It is now being acted upon as if it were already adopted policy?
Now the Bord has rejected 18 of the 24 units, permitting some of the smaller bus-shelter size units in pedestrian areas – while refusing all of the larger “Metropole” units which were to be7 sq m and standing 2m off the ground – primarily on grounds of road safety.
The ratio of bikes yielded by billboards was less than 4 per unit, although in Paris JC Decaux provide 13 bikes per unit as well as an annual rental of €2,085 per billboard over 10 years – while Dublin gets no cash over 15 years.
Paris also rolled out a programme of putting in place an additional 300 kilometres of cycle-ways in advance of their scheme.
Intriguingly, the original deal required 75% of all applications to be passed for the scheme to go ahead. However, even though only 72 billboards are now permitted, the deal is still going ahead – and where JC Decaux was to remove 100 existing billboards, as stipulated in each planning permission, city planner Jim Keogan is now saying that only 50 are to be removed – a change which critics say is unlawful.
The units are already under construction although no rental bikes are expected until next spring – and the units are distinctly different from that which was illustrated in the applications, with brown metal mesh detailing replacing what appeared to be solid chrome stands.
Split applications, dubious rezoning maps, and the Bord rejecting all “Metropoles”: to add to this the Dublin City Business Association has written to Minister John Gormley asking him “to investigate”. The only question is what’s next? It’s over to you, Minister.
I’m not familiar with much of the background but on the face of it this seems a pretty stupid way to have gone about things. DCC appear to have assumed that bike hire schemes can only be carried out with the co-operation of JC Decaux, and that means economic logic can go out the window. For granting them the privilege of plonking big brown advertising hoardings all over town we’re going to get a measly 450 bikes maximum, and probably less given all those planning defeats. In comparison there are more than 2,000 bikes in the free bike scheme in Copenhagen, a city of about the same size. Critical mass is very important if this scheme is going to catch on, have a marked impact on driver behaviour and encourage more cyclists to take to the roads, and 450 bikes is unlikely to be enough. What scope is there for enlarging the scheme - will we have to put up more billboards? And why this connection with street advertising in the first place? Given the many positive external benefits of increased cycling such as better health, reduced congestion and less strain on public transport, there was surely a case for actually spending some money on it (y’know, like we do by the billion for other forms of road transport) and making some back with user fees and selling advertising on the bikes themselves.
April 29th, 2008
The Irish Times frequently refers to sexual assault when what is denoted is rape. You can see an example in this caption of a photograph of the Austrian man who locked his daughter up.
I’m not sure why this is. Possibly there is an idea at the Irish Times that it’s unwise to deem a crime rape before it’s been proven as non-consensual in court. Perhaps there really are good legal reasons for believing this term to be preferable - I can’t think of any but I could be mistaken. What I can say, from my imperfect knowledge of both human physiology and criminal law, is that it is virtually impossible to become pregnant through a sexual assault. It is not suitable to be used as an umbrella term or euphemism as it does not include rape or penetration. So the sentence in the Irish Times report that she “[gave] birth to seven children after repeated sexual assaults by her father” is gibberish.
Other news organisations (RTE, BBC) refer to Josef Fritzl’s ’sexual abuse’. This works well in this situation but I have no bright ideas for how to fudge the word in other cases.
April 28th, 2008
I liked this time-lapse video of a cycle commute through Copenhagen so much I nicked the idea for my ride into London.
Apologies for the jerkiness of the picture - what with pot-holes and swerving through snarled up traffic it’s not as smooth a ride as Copenhageners are used to. Though the traffic was mostly okay that day, with only Prince’s St and Bank really bad (2:50 in).
April 28th, 2008
Young Gay Rites
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS
Published: April 27, 2008
LAST NOVEMBER IN BOSTON, Joshua Janson, a slender and boyish 25-year-old, invited me to an impromptu gathering at the apartment he shares with Benjamin McGuire, his considerably more staid husband of the same age. It was a cozy, festive affair, complete with some 20 guests and a large sushi spread where you might have expected the chips and salsa to be.
“I beg of you — please eat a tuna roll!” Joshua barked, circulating around the spacious apartment in a blue blazer, slim-fitting corduroys and a pair of royal blue house slippers with his initials. “The fish is not going to eat itself!”
Spotting me alone by a window seat decorated with Tibetan pillows, Joshua, who by that point had a few drinks in him, grabbed my arm and led me toward a handful of young men huddled around an antique Asian “lion’s head” chair. “Are you single? Have you met the gays?” Joshua asked, depositing me among them before embarking on a halfhearted search for the couple’s dog, Bernard, who, last I saw him, was eyeing an eel roll left carelessly at dog level. (At the other end of the living room, past a marble fireplace, the straights — in this case, young associates from the Boston law firm Benjamin had recently joined — were debating the best local restaurants.)
As the night went on, the gays and the straights — fueled, I suspect, by a shared appreciation for liquor — began to mingle, and before long the party coalesced into a boisterous celebration. Joshua looked delighted. And in a rare moment of repose, he sidled up to his taller, auburn-haired mate.
“Honey,” Joshua said, “we may be married, but we still know how to have a good time, don’t we?”
Interesting article, though I’m not sure about the constant use of exclamation marks and italics. Don’t straight people get those when they emphasise things?
April 28th, 2008
‘ChancerWeb‘:
All great Irish satirical publications tend to live short, spectacular lives - think The Slate, Blogorrah (koff koff koff) or The Sunday Independent. Add the that list seminal and sorrily missed Irish humour blog The Evil Gerald, MIA for many moons now. An off-shoot of UCD’s College Tribune, Gerald wasn’t exactly ground-breaking - if the ‘auld Onion template ‘aint broke, etc - but it was funny. Hit and miss, for sure, but who is The Chancer to take the comedic high ground? The Evil Gerald gave us headlines like ‘JJ72/Met Eireann feud escalates’, ‘Pub conversation just like something out of Seinfeld’, ‘NI runs out of ugly, bitter women’ and the unforgettable ‘Church to replace Holy Water with Kombucha’… And for that we remain eternally grateful. Waste some time perusing their achives today, and know this: Irish satire is dead. With possible exception of TV3’s Exposé.
April 27th, 2008
There’s an advert showing on TV at the moment [1] from Orange about its new price plans in which a bunch of people turn up in the desert and erect giant balloon animals representing the different options (raccoon, dolphin, mantis etc) congratulating each other all the while on their cleverness, though it doesn’t seem to me to be that much of an achievement. It’s of a piece with a trend in advertising which I’m sorry to say has caught on enough to be almost considered a genre now, so let’s give it a name - I suggest ‘The Ironic But Mawkish Festival of Pseudo-spontaneous Order’.
Basically if you’re flogging high-end consumer electronics it seems the done thing is to depict groups of either (a) sensitive trendies or (b) white-coated scientists coming together to create some colourful over-sized novelty structure or civic disturbance, each individual contributing their Own Special Talent to the grand scheme which only becomes clear when they’re all done, and all set to the sound of either plaintive nu-folk or a child singing a nursery rhyme, whichever’s more twee. The high-end advertising world appears to have gone mental for this style and is busily engaged in producing iterations on the theme, with superficial changes to setting and costumery applied to mask the dearth of creativity at work.
Orange are probably the most egregious offenders, churning out thinly disguised variations on the theme in which superficially diverse hipsters (or the entire world, yes even African children forgetting about their lack of adequate sanitation for a while) smirkingly collaborate in the kind of disruptive but whimsical behaviour which in any right-thinking society would result in a jail term or at least a severe pounding. Sony, Guinness and even fucking Skoda have gotten in on the act too, and this Honda one is so tired a knock-off I think it might have originally been intended as a spoof.
Honda should get part of the blame actually as their ad showing a Tom and Jerry-style series of minutely balanced mechanical interactions combining to no purpose whatsoever seems to have inspired a lot of the genre. The other daddy of them all is the Sony Bravia ‘bouncing balls‘ spot, which it should be said is genuinely wonderful. Both of these left the ‘creators’ out of the picture but the various copyists are keener for you to empathise so they cram their ads with either grinning tools in jeans and t-shirt or furrowed-brow boffins presumably intended to indicate that it’s okay to be a nerd as long as your skills extend to helping bake a giant cake in the shape of a car or something.
What kind of twisted sub-Jungian impulses are all these ads meant to be playing on then? Well they hit various Zeitgeisty buttons such as social networking and user-generated content, and they seek to persuade you that their products embody both play and craft, imagination and technique. But they also play on people’s insecurity [2]. Want to be seen as creative but too dull to come up with any ideas yourself? Don’t worry, buy a mobile phone and a bunch of strangers will rope you into some brilliant wheeze involving balloons, and what’s wrong with that?
[1] Can’t find it online. Why don’t companies make their ads available on their sites or YouTube or something? You’d think after spending so much money on something like that they wouldn’t try to hide it under a bushel.
[2] Though maybe I always think this because I’m insecure? No, it’s everyone else that’s wrong.
April 25th, 2008
Spring Break are an ’80s covers band in Dublin.
Check out their descriptions of their songs and also their promo videos.
