Shooting Wide Open

Now is the time. The time to get rid of real singers in favor of holographic projections. Of course this has to happen in Japan… We can only hope that motivational speakers and politicians are next. Maybe even CEOs.

I just had to post this after I saw android actors on Conscientious Redux

If you haven’t seen it, why not make a film with toast as frames? (literally!)

Dennis Culver

Click on the image to go to the original high res version.

Gotta love it. I was tempted to dress up as a character from The Wire for Halloween, but alas, there are no prominent female Asian characters…

You know how you can like someone so much you’re nervous to be around them? Well, I’m starting to think this applies to music too. Maybe there isn’t a brown frequency, but there sure is a dopamine frequency. The bassline in this song hits the spot for me. I like it so much it makes me nervous to listen to it. Good thing Big Chief plays it all the time…

Remember this post about Princess Hijab? I was informed of this video interview and follow-around with Princess Hijab (who does appear to be a man, at least to my eye and ear). It becomes quite obvious in this video that the persona and performance is just as important to the princess as the graffiti work itself, possibly because, as PH says:

I don’t have any means, any recognition or money to provide for my projects. So I have to be clever and try the direct way. If you are doing something outside and your method is working, then you can get recognition much faster than with a traditional career.

PH also commented on the work itself:

The best advertising are those that highly inspire my character. But it’s also those that are the most difficult to get access to. But those images are protected by cameras. Somehow they are even more protected than the human being: the advertisements for luxury goods.

Take that as you will.

And to add a little dose of drama, the French passed a face veil ban last week.

A friend (a “special friend” as my relatives would say, heh) made me watch Pump Up the Volume yesterday and I was surprised that I actually liked it. Well, mostly for Hard Harry’s show, at least the first half, before all the drama kicks in. In honor of making your friends watch movies about pirate radio, here’s the Leonard Cohen song prominently featured in the movie:

And a track by Delta 5 that I heard this week on the radio show of a DJ with a bit of Hard Harry in ‘im:

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Don’t you just want a bit of that irresistable downbeat energy? I guess for most people without the musical touch, the music you make will never be as delicious as the music you love, but dear god, can’t I just have a piece of it at some point in my life? Just a taste, one lick…

Princess Hijab

I first heard about Princess Hijab in a thread on Flickr. Essentially she covers fashion and beauty ads in public displaying the rote half-naked women with a black hijab shape. The main point of the Flickr discussion was the ethical acceptability of defacing public or private property in the name of anti-consumerism. While I personally wouldn’t practice defacement of private property for political purposes, the more I thought about this issue, the more I became convinced that this goes beyond consumerism or body image issues to the more visuals-pertinent use of public space.

When some argued that she should’ve gone through proper channels and bought public ad space instead of defacing existing ads, it became clear to me that this section of the law is pretty corporation-friendly. One individual (or, to be more general, non-profit/commercial entity) with limited financial funds taking out one or two ads against companies with six or seven figure ad budgets plastering every bus stop, bus, billboard, and sidewalk all across the country? Whether you believe this is fair or not, it’s indisputable that moneyed corporations and their ideas, if they can be called that, dominate our culture visually.

There is no comparable action by individual to counter such a mass of visual input, and I have to say I’ve become sympathetic to her way of working even if I also feel for the owners of the properties that she defaces, who have to clean it up.

Maybe there should be a required balance of ads and PSAs in public, just like how a certain number of radio frequencies or TV stations are reserved for non-commercial stations. Even so, it is rather David vs Goliath. I loved Hulu at the very beginning before the bigger advertisers bought in. The ads were all PSAs for good causes. If our public spaces where filled with a different kind of image, would our society would have different values or priorities?

Anthony Karen

I’d been sitting on this post for a long time, but recently, in that same Flickr group, we began discussing Anthony Karen’s photoessay (Aryan Outfitters) on the seamstress who produces robes for the Klan, and some people seemed to think that photos like those are implicitly sympathetic to their subjects. In my mind, anyone familliar with any photojournalism would know that this is not true. Yet there are some people who think that it’s bad to depict the perspective of the morally marginal. But I suppose this goes beyond photography – think Humbert Humbert and Nabokov, or, more recently, exhibitions of propaganda art.

To me, these two issues are tightly related. My theory is that our mass overexposure to advertising is training many of us to read all visuals like ads. If it’s shown, it must be promotion, and our intellectual reaction is to judge whether we want to buy (into) it or not. I don’t think this is happening on a conscious level any more.

Lately I’ve been reading books about art and commerce, as well as on luxury branding, so this problem seems huge to me. Is it? Or do we really develop a true immunity to ads with repeated exposure? I guess the more pointed question is whether consumerism is virtually entirely visuals-driven, and if this means anti-consumerist campaigns should be aimed at changing behavior or at combatting the influx of consumer visuals.

Fusion: A Found Album

A couple of years ago, someone at KZSU found an album of promo and snapshots, song lists and expenses, from the ’80s, of a cover band called Fusion. I’ve finally gotten some scans up for fun. Take a look for some big hair and tight pants.

Turns out I’ll be going to China a little earlier than expected, which means, unfortunately, I’ll miss Bob Dylan in Monterey this August because travel plans changed, but in anticipation I had been reading the Essential Interviews, and came upon this, in an interview with Nora Ephron in ’65:

Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums. Have you ever been in a museum? Museums are cemetaries. Paintings should be on the walls of restaurants, in dime stores, in gas stations, in men’s rooms. Great paintings should be where people hang out. The only thing where it’s happening is on radio and records, that’s where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay half a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime. Music is the only thing that’s in tune with what’s happening. It’s not in book form, it’s not on the stage. All this art they’ve been talking about is nonexistent. It just remains on the shelf. It doesn’t make anyone happier. Just think how many people would really feel great if they could see a Picasso in their daily diner. It’s not the bomb that has to go, man, it’s the museums.

Hmmm.

When men dressed in pink and hopped like bunnies…