Culture, jammed

I've seen this image doing the rounds on Twitter lately, and garnering quite a few "WTAF?" comments. 

It's a picture of a rather raddled looking woman in a dressing gown in a kitchen, with a glass of Smirnoff vodka (the bottle is on the table) and the caption "Every Morning's a Smirnoff Morning."

It's presented on Twitter as a real ad which common sense should tell you Smirnoff would never do. A reverse image search (through Tineye or Google images) would...eventually, after some patience, tell you where it's from.  Most of the hits are people laughing about the Bad Old Days or saying one version or another of "Jeez! Promoting alcoholism. Nowadays relegated to the bin along with tobacco and sexism in advertising. How did they every thing this was a good idea is beyond me!" 

Only one hit on the first couple of pages gives its actual provenance. The "ad" is a piece of "culture jamming" from the early 90's, a fake ad from Adbusters.  The mention is in an LA Times Op Ed from 1992, and does not include the matching picture, only a description. 

Culture jamming. A new dance fad? No, the new dissent in America.
How does it work? Simple. Take a commercial message and turn it against itself. Sabotage advertising, sabotage television.
Just as the entertainment-consumption complex filched America's most cherished images, language and values, so now culture jammers use the same tactics to obstruct their adversaries' ideology. To defend culture jamming as a First Amendment freedom is to support an insurgent idea--and that's precisely what these new radicals want.
Their strategy is to meet the enemy on its own turf. They take space on billboards, in magazine ad slots and on commercial television--they even distribute T-shirts--to plant critical messages in the style of the targeted offenders. Some examples:
* Magazine ad of a riderless horse in a cemetery with the caption "Marlboro Country."
* Billboard ad showing a bedraggled woman sitting at a breakfast table with a glass of vodka in hand. The caption: "Every morning's a Smirnoff morning." [...]

Another source a bit harder to find, Culture Jamming in the Carnival, gives an exact reference for the image:

ADBUSTERS Q., Winter 1989 ­90, at inside cover. Consider another such example: an advertising photo of a high­ gloss and expensive coffin with the caption "Absolute Silence" and the subtext "The birthdays, the graduation, the wedding day ... we were there to toast them all. So from one great spirit to another, here's to the most enduring ritual of all." 

And so there you have it. It's a splash page at Adbusters, a magazine I never bought but often eagerly read in one of those bookshops that had racks upon racks of magazines and a cafe, so you could read the magazines without buying them. Younger people don't remember those because they all went bust in the oughties for some unknowable reason. Adbusters itself is still going strong.

Adbusters' aim - to get people to think about consumer culture, by any means necessary - was admirable and still is, though of course, since it's not possible to do anything about consumer culture it's very irritating.  However, the current air of mild disbelief about this "ad" - were the Bad Old Days really that bad? I guess so! - reveals that the persistence of the memes outside their intended context simply shores up the status quo. Culture is now so distorted, and 'truth' is now so kaleidoscopic that this "ad" becomes just another brick in the wall. Culture jamming just jammed the culture tighter into place.

"Ad"dendum September 12, 2021.

With regard to the comment posted below, the so-called ad is from Adbusters Quarterly 1989-1990, vol1 issue 2.  There is a reference to it in The Death of Discourse by Ronald Collins and David Skover, 2005:

(Edit: link has been updated.) There's a second reference to it in Contested images: the politics and poetics of appropriation by Michael Alan Glassco (thesis), 2012 at the University of Iowa:

(I guess the Skover book is derived from the webpage I quoted above.)

Porn, violence against women and racing hearts

The porn industry's newspaper of record, the LA Times, has a piece on yep, how the internet is killing the porn industry. The easy availability of pirated material and the increasing amounts of free, amateur porn is cutting into one of LA county's biggest industries.

That must suck - so to speak - as music, film and writing are major LA industries and have all been hit heavily by the new paradigm, and now porn, a huge employer around here, is going the same way.

Business managers for ... two of the industry's biggest stars, said their clients were using their celebrity to make money in other ways, like dancing in exotic clubs and licensing their name to sex toys and lingerie."The economy has forced us to look in other directions such as tangible goods," said Evan Seinfeld

Where have I heard that word "tangible" from a musician desperate to get some paying product out to customers in this day of free, pirated music? Oh, yeah. Jack White.

LA Times article Tough Times in the Porn Industry here.

At the gym yesterday (listening to English Freakbeat volume 3) I chose a non-Fox TV to run endlessly towards, and ended up watching some dreadful police procedural where the cynical cops in their incident rooms had 24 hours to find a bad guy before a missing woman was raped and carved up by some freak. (I'm not a lip-reader - the subtitles were on.) The profiler explained why the bad guy hated women so much. His mother must have been violent and controlling. Not his father? asks one of the cops. No, to hate women that much, he must have had an evil mother, said the profiler.

I thought blaming women for violence against women had gone out in like, the seventies, but I guess I was too optimistic. Here it was dropped casually into a TV show like everybody knows it's true. If women would just shape up and be nice to men, there wouldn't be any violence against women. Hear that, sisters? Get with the program.

Gunman was bitter over women article here.

An American SF writer tells of his deadly brush with socialized medicine and its attendant Death Panels, rationing and weeks-long waiting lists. His heart started racing while he was in Canada, so he went to a cardiac hospital with an ER. The evil, socialist result? He had the full battery of expensive tests done immediately, was given an all-clear, received lifestyle and stress counseling, and was handed a bill for $480 (because he was not a Canadian citizen), which he paid. Sounds awful and I hope we don't end up with this scary Nazi scheme in our God-given country.

Tobias Buckell's unanticipated personal encounter with the Canadian health system here.

I didn't know we had birds

The LA Times has an article called The Rigors of Life Unplugged.

It discusses an experiment to have high school kids turn off their television, iPods, cellphones, Blackberry's and computers for a week, and includes soundbite interviews of the unlucky class mates. Being the Luddite LA Times of course, it takes the tack that internet access is an addiction, the kids "had no idea just how sick [they were]" and presents the whole deal as though it was a much needed bout of Cold Turkey. The kids are on the strong stuff, and only tough love from a real down-to-earth newspaper can save them from themselves. They even slip up at one point and call it a 'media fast". A media fast? Did they also ask the class to give up their paper LA Times? Why do I suspect they didn't, hmm?

Without Evil Tech to find work for their idle hands to do, the kids, as we used to do, Made Their Own Fun. One cleaned his room. One read an entire Harry Potter book.

Without her headphones blocking out the real world, Flor Salvador heard strange chirping sounds."I didn't know we had birds!" she wrote in her journal.

I didn't know she had birds either. I bought the re-release of The Kills' first album, and I've been listening to that. I guess I missed them.

I found the LA Times article, not through reading the LA Times though actually, LA Times, if you're reading this, I did try to read my paper copy of the LA Times at lunch today but was interrupted by someone who wanted to talk about zombies and the Archie McPhee catalogue – obviously he Makes His Own Fun – and didn't get to this article.

John Scalzi picked up the article. Here's Scalzi's commenters' takes on it.

When thinking about the girl who didn't know she had birds, the comments briefly morphed into "what the real world looks like", and brought up one woman who had never seen leaves – until she got glasses and realized the big fuzzy blob was actually a tree covered in separate green leaves. That struck a chord with me. (Interesting that there isn't a visual metaphor equivalent to "strike a chord" – I wonder why music gets the honors there?)

I was very short-sighted as a kid. Nobody noticed, of course, and I certainly didn't, particularly as things are weird when you're growing up. For instance, all your teeth fall out, and you don't even panic, and then some more grow behind them and you think this is all perfectly natural. So everything going fuzzy was just something that happens. Anyway, when I couldn't see the blackboard any more, the teachers sent me for glasses.

When I first saw the stars, I cried.

I ended up getting more and more short-sighted of course, and eventually, after many years of increasingly thick glasses and more years of contacts, I had RK (radial keratotomy), and suddenly I could see my feet when I got out of bed in the morning. (Among other things.) Of course, when I saw the stars with my naked eyes for the first time, I cried, again. This time the crying hurt more because I'd just had RK, which involves slicing your eyeball open with a razor.

Seeing the real world - if there is such a thing, ultimately – is rare even in places without technology. It's perfectly possible to never look outside because the model of the universe in your own head is more satisfying than the one that is actually draped all over the dirt outdoors. I believe many people prefer the company of their thoughts to the "Look! A patch of grass!" school of going for bracing walks in the country air.

Never seeing the world, of course, will eventually lead to a bad case of Third Artist Syndrome. TAS was, I believe, coined by Jo Walton and refers to the progression of artistic expression. The first artist goes paints from life. The second artist copies the first artist, and is often more technically adept, having grown up with the techniques. The third artist only copies the second artist. Nowadays, I suppose, the third artist simply samples/ctrl-c_ctrl-v's the second artist.

The first artist paints what's there. The second artist paints the same things because that's what the first artist did. The third artist is "playing with the furniture in the doll's house". His art is not related to life, but involves moving around elements that are traditionally present.

I remember reading an interview with, I think, the head of Studio Ghibli. He was finding it hard to get animators, or at least animators he liked. All the applicants were great animators. They'd watched lots and lots and lots of anime and were very good at it. But he didn't want someone who knew all the anime techniques. He wanted someone who had observed real life and could draw it. Had any of the applicants ever actually seen a fire burning? No.

The way to get over Third Artist Syndrome is to go back to basics, paint or draw from life, become a first artist.

Beyond the Beyond discusses an article in the New Statesman that claims technophilia has led to a kind of third artist depletion of morale. In Parasitically Paralyzed by Digital Technology. Cultural Exhaustion Sets In Bruce Sterling quotes from the New Statesman article:

"Those of us who grew up in the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s became accustomed to rapid changes in popular culture. Theorists of future shock such as Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan plausibly claimed that our nervous systems were themselves sped up by these developments, which were driven by the development and proliferation of technologies. Popular artefacts were marked with a technological signature that dated them quite precisely: new technology was clearly audible and visible, so that it would be practically impossible, say, to confuse a film or a record from the early 1960s with one from even half a decade later. The current decade, however, has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration. A thought experiment makes the point. Imagine going back 15 years in time to play records from the latest dance genres – dubstep, or funky, for example – to a fan of jungle. One can only conclude that they would have been stunned – not by how much things had changed, but by how little things have moved on. Something like jungle was scarcely imaginable in 1989, but dubstep or funky, while by no means pastiches, sound like extrapolations from the matrix of sounds established a decade and a half ago. Needless to say, it is not that technology has ceased developing. What has happened, however, is that technology has been decalibrated from cultural form."

That decalibration is not just from cultural form, however, but from the roots of the culture itself. Music is further down the road than most things – way back in the eighties my favorite band was called Pop Will Eat Itself – but it's affecting the cartoonists too, and I suppose the LA Times is expecting (or 'calling for', as the newspapers say) an imminent Grey Goo of the Mind, when there's nothing to do but rearrange the furniture in the doll's house, endlessly, like a Philip K Dick character off his rails. I doubt that'll happen. It's easy to get to be a first artist again. You can go outside right now and hear the birds.


"Look! A patch of grass!" © Ivor Cutler. Do yourself a favor, stay in and put Ivor on the mp3 player. You owe it to yourself.

Wrongness, Bambi and Hubris

The Greeks had a word for this but I don't remember what it is. Hubris?

Two recent news stories in the LA Times about a pornography trial. The first one was headlined
Trial will see hours of hard-core fetish pornography and ran on June 8th 2008.

Ira Isaacs, a filmmaker whose films feature bestiality and defecation, says he has the right to produce art under the 1st amendment. The U.S. Department of Justice says the material is obscene.

For jurors to determine whether Isaacs' work is obscene, they will view hours of hard-core pornography so degrading that in one film, an actress cries throughout, prosecutors said in court papers. (LA Times)

So, a jury is going to have to watch hours and hours of his stuff to see if it has any literary, scientific or artistic value. Poor jury; I'm pro-pornography usually but from the verbal sketch of Ira Isaacs in the paper I think I'd be ready to strangle laughing boy after the first fifteen minutes. Anyway, justice and all that stuff. On with the porn show.

But wait, what's this paragraph?

His involvement in the case may be a stroke of luck for Isaacs. That is because Kozinski is seen as a staunch defender of free speech. When he learned that there were filters banning pornography and other materials from computers in the appeals court's Pasadena offices, he led a successful effort to have the filters removed."I did some rabble-rousing about it," Kozinski said in a brief interview last week. (LA Times)

The judge was angry over not being able to see porn in his office? Well, I thought, I can see that. We all have to do "research" on our cases. I know I do, though it usually involves insisting on having work access to sites with pictures of rock stars. Filters are a notoriously blunt instrument and block access to all kinds of legit sites.

An article, also in the LA Times, a few days later, cleared up any misconceptions I may have had over that paragraph. Its headline was Judge Alex Kozinski recuses himself from obscenity trial and it ran on June 14th 2008.

On Wednesday, Kozinski suspended the trial of Hollywood filmmaker Ira Isaacs to allow the prosecutor to explore what he saw as "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."
Many of the items on the website, some of which the judge said he received and sent via e-mail, are intended to be crudely humorous. Among other items were a photo of two nude women painted to look like cows, a video of an encounter between a half-dressed man and a sexually aroused farm animal, a striptease slide show featuring a transsexual, a series of photos of women's crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear and a step-by-step pictorial of a woman shaving her pubic hair. (LA Times)

Hahaha. Pwned, as they say these days. If he was emailing/uploading that kind of thing, I guess he really didn't want filters on his web access.

Looking at the list of crap allegedly on the judge's website, I do believe his story that this was "stored"material that had been "emailed" to him, some of which was "uploaded by accident".

People do, and I'm not being sarcastic here, email me stuff like this all the time. Email forwards are a pestilence, a sort of infection that you can't help getting and you almost can't help passing on. There's two major kinds, as far as I can see – the funny/sick/sexual kind and the recipes, prayers and 'aren't-men-stupid' kind. The first kind is usually just called "wrongness" and seems to be sent in the same spirit small boys encourage other small boys to eat worms. The second type is sent to encourage sisterhood, and goes by the name "Bambi Mail".

I guess the judge is more of a small boy than a sister.

PS Dear Judge, I have some great Wrongness forwards if you send me your email address.

Stonehenge mystery fails to deepen

The Stonehenge mystery I alluded to yesterday failed to deepen today.

In a shattering expose, my local paper, the LA Times (I've mentioned it before) had an article on the contwoversy.

The article is called Stonehenge Mystery Hinges on Unusual Stones, and reads in part:

But the recent realization that the site contained stones from mountains 250 miles away in Wales shed new light on Stonehenge's origins. [1]

This adds to what I was talking about yesterday. You can't make Stonehenge sexier by obfuscating what is and isn't known about it, unless you are one of the thousands of self-published lunatics whose nightmare tomes I had the misfortune to browse at the LA Times sponsored LA Festival of Books last week. The facts and the real mysteries are sexy enough.

I don't know exactly when this "recent realization" came to light, but it wasn't less than six years ago, which the wording of the article doesn't actually say but strongly implies. I took out the oldest history book I still have on my shelf, Jaquetta Hawkes' The Atlas of Early Man, dated 1976, and it says: "Within the main structure were subsidiary stones of around 4 tons weight. These were imported with immense labour from Prescelly, 132 miles (220km) away in Wales."

It's possible the LA Times is being ironic - after all, when something's as old as Stonehenge, 32 years ago is really still "recent". But I don't think so. I think they're manufacturing a controversy, a storm in what is really such a small teapot it would be lost in a doll's house.

Or they got confused because Prescelly in Wales is now spelled Preseli. Maybe they really think it's a new theory of the bluestones' origins.

[1] Yes, the singular subject with plural verb "the realization...shed light" is in the original text.

Why googling is more than just creepy part II

In Why Googling is more than just creepy, I took objection to a columnist saying that Googling a celebrity was 'worse' (more obsessive) than throwing rocks over their home's wall and leaving.

She said,
After all, Googling John Cusack turns up close to 3 million search results. We know that reading every one of them is less potentially dangerous than loitering outside someone's gate, but who's more obsessed -- the person who spends countless hours wading through Web entries or the person who tosses a bag of letters, rocks and screwdrivers over the fence and calls it a day?


I said,
Um, nobody reads three million of them, of only for the reason that there aren't three million unique ones. Clearly she's never even thought about how this all works. I'm sure she has a researcher who looks up all the facts she needs to know for her purposes. [I mean "if" only, of course.]

I had some spare time today, so I checked. As she says, Googling "John Cusack" returns a statement that there are "about 3,000,000" results. If you actually page through those results, there are 826 that Google considers unique (and not all of them are, but for the sake of argument let's assume they are), and for the rest it says, "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 826 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

It's still a long time to spend on John Cusack, but I think my understanding of Google is slightly better than Meghan Daum's. In that case, maybe I should start telling people what to do with their spare time.

LA Times (again): Why Googling is more than just creepy.

What is it with the LA Times and the internet? Just a month ago I wrote a post about their strange fear that the internet might lead to people who dislike each other saying bad things about each other. (Behavior which ought to be BANNED, of course.)

Yesterday, the Op-Ed columnist Meghan Daum wrote an article Are you a stalker too? : How Facebook, MySpace and Google have changed and spread its practice. (That's the subtitle. I didn't write that second bit myself.)

So, looking at people's Facebook profiles is equated with stalking? Is she mad or something? No, it isn't the same. People put their Facebook profiles on-line so you can look them up, Meghan. It's no more stalking than reading an ad about a new car is the equivalent of industrial espionage. One is a creepy crime, the other is an everyday act of normal people. Get a grip, LA Times!

I am, of course, talking about the kind of stalking that involves not restraining orders but Internet search engines. It is often referred to as cyber-stalking, Web-stalking or Google-stalking. It usually means just typing someone's name in a search box and uncovering such juicy bits as his finish time in a 10K charity run or an article about strategic brand management that he wrote for a company newsletter in 2005.

Well, if that's all it means then … then I should panic?

This is how we've come to live in a world where average citizens have random and often inappropriate information about [other people].

Yes, it's shameful how far we've sunk, knowing other people's 10K times. I weep for my country. By the way, if I read my co-worker's 10K time in the local newspaper (which happens to the be the LA Times) is that stalking as well, or is that all right? I gotta ask.

Having her cake and eating it too, she then mumbles a bit about "cyber stalking" not actually being violent enough to deserve the name. Then in a rousing finish, she takes that back and hits us with the big one. Reading Google hits is at least as bad as throwing rocks:

After all, Googling John Cusack turns up close to 3 million search results. We know that reading every one of them is less potentially dangerous than loitering outside someone's gate, but who's more obsessed -- the person who spends countless hours wading through Web entries or the person who tosses a bag of letters, rocks and screwdrivers over the fence and calls it a day?

Um, nobody reads three million of them, of only for the reason that there aren't three million unique ones. Clearly she's never even thought about how this all works. I'm sure she has a researcher who looks up all the facts she needs to know for her purposes. (Though I think she gave him the day off yesterday.) But even if I did read every web comment about a celebrity – and I think I have, with at least one group and at least one actor – I would call that "fandom". Whereas, if I went to the group's, or actor's, house and threw a bag of implements over the wall, I'd call that very, very strange, probably criminal, behavior.

Is she really suggesting differently? What is it with the LA Times and the internet?

Edit to add: See also part II.

Pitchfork and torches time!

You know those women who talk to other women through the stall dividers in women's restrooms? Well, they should be banned. Banned, banned, bannedity-banned. And because they should be banned, I want you to pay for policecritters to patrol women's restrooms and toss 'em in the pokey. Because women in women's restrooms say bad things about people, and that's bad. And I shouldn't have to put up with it. And if I shouldn't have to put up with it, it should be against the law.



The LA Times had an Op-Ed article on Saturday called Douse the online flamers which took something close to the above and ran with it. It's by Andrew Keen, author of Cult of the Amateur, which I haven't read but I'm sure I don't like. Apparently people are saying bad things about other people on teh intarwebs, so it should be banned. Not sure exactly what: the internet, people, badness. Something has to be banned. Oh, it's "anonymity", apparently. Needs to be banned. He begins by referencing some Web Creation Myth only he is privy to, "the innocent dawn of the Internet Age" when "the idea that we might all be anonymous on the Web promised infinite intellectual freedom. Unfortunately, however, that promise hasn't been realized."

It hasn't? Oh noes! Write a nice print book about it, Andrew! Oh, you already did.

The article goes on, "[t]oday, too many anonymous Internet users are posting hateful content about their neighbors, classmates and co-workers; today, online media is an increasingly shadowy, vertiginous environment in which it is becoming harder and harder to know other people's real identities."

Evidently, everybody but me is spending their time hatin' on each other. (And I'm not doing so well either.)

Like this: "the case of a couple of female Yale Law School students whose reputations have been eternally sullied on an online bulletin board called AutoAdmit by "Sleazy Z," "hitlerhitlerhitler," "The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah" and others. Having been publicly accused of lesbianism with the dean of admissions at Yale Law School, possessing "large false breasts" and indulging in exhibitionistic group sex, the two women filed an amended complaint...in...Court."

ZOMG! The internet has enabled rude people to be rude about people! Anonymously. And "eternally". Up until now there must never have been an avenue for expressing rudeness. Then the internet comes along and enables hate. Stupid internet. I knew there was something wrong with it.

Being accused by people called hitlerhitlerhitler of having unfeasibly large breasts must be an incredible burden, because of course, everyone on the planet is going to prefer siding with someone called hitlerhitlerhitler on the prestigious AutoAdmit bulletin board over siding with you.

He goes through two more cases. One, unfortunately, resulted in a suicide – it was a tiff between neighbors, a type of personal interaction that clearly was possible only after the invention of Internet Explorer 7 – and one was a fight on Yahoo. Have you ever been on Yahoo? Have you ever even heard of Yahoo? Don't see many hands up there. I have – I'm member of more than twenty Yahoo groups and we've had some knock-down-drag-out fights there, all of which would have been exactly the same, but much, much worse, if they'd been a fight at the Women's Institute, or the Church fete, or the school rummage sale. In fact, the major difference between a storm in a teapot and a storm in a Yahoo group is the wind speeds in a teapot are far higher.

After that thorough review of the hate coursing through the system of tubes we hold dear, he concludes, "these cases indicate that the U.S. Supreme Court soon might need to rethink the civic value of anonymous speech in the digital age. Today, when cowardly anonymity is souring Internet discourse, it really is hard to understand how anonymous speech is vital to a free society."

Yeah, freedom of speech sucks. Whose idea was it anyway? People only use it to hurt each other. Or they do nowadays. It's not clear from the article, but it looks like they didn't before the invention of the internet. Clearly punishing the internet is the way to go.

So what should we do about it, pundit? Apparently we should introduce "more legislation to punish anonymous sadists whose online lies are intended to wreck the reputations and mental health of innocent Americans."

Or alternatively, we could teach innocent Americans the rhyme about sticks and stones. Either way. Your call.