These ads are powerful and disturbing. Some of them are selling ideas, some products. If the point of an ad is to get your attention, these are extremely effective.
Generally ads are designed to make you NOT think. These have a different intent entirely.
Marc can say what he wants about M.I.A.—we’re an anarchist collective here at Dangerous Minds—but I love her. if you ask me, her performance of latest single Born Free on The Late Show with David Letterman positively tore the roof off the sucker. I was absolutely blown away by what she did on that stage. And with Martin Rev of Suicide playing beside her? Playing his synth with his fist? We’re not worthy.
Kudos to M.I.A. for bringing Martin Rev out on to the stage with her. I found it sad how so few of the blogs, of all the many that wrote about this performance, even mentioned Martin! Kids! What’s the matter with kids these days?!?
The video mashups of The Kleptones, aka Eric Kleptone, are the sonic and visual equivalent of the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up technique: re-arranging images and music to create new meanings, subvert old modes of thinking, and refract propaganda through the lens of the artist’s eye.
The Kleptones is not so much a band, but an exercise in marketing.
Photomontage by Todd McNaught. Thanks, Todd!
I’ll cop out and leave it to our able Dangerous Minds readers to discern the meaning of the shared birth date of Benjamin the leading German Marxist philosopher (who would have been 108 years old), Derrida the French founder of deconstruction (80), and Curtis the lead singer of the century’s most existential pop band (54). If you went to a liberal arts college from 1980 onwards, you probably have your opinions about it.
And so, please enjoy some fragments of the lives of these auspicious birthday boys. Party hats & thinking caps ON!
[More after the jump!]
Three paragraphs, motherfucker, I give you just three paragraphs! The man is a god among men!
Ostensibly about a subject I hardly care about (George Steinbrenner, sports in general) only Matt Taibbi amongst American persons of letters, would cram the following skullfuck into an obituary. Say what you want about Jann Wenner, the man knows, and has always been a great recognizer of talent. And god bless him for paying Matt Taibbi (I’m assuming quite well) to write such amazing prose. MATT TAIBBi IS A DHARMA WARRIOR:
The mania for elegiac slobbering is one of the most disgusting things about this country, but you’ll never see a clearer example of America’s unique capacity for this sort of activity than this Steinbrenner business. When Bruce Springsteen dies, it won’t be appropriate to make jokes about millions of Americans fawning over a dead Boss. But in George “The Boss” Steinbrenner’s case, it fits perfectly, because Steinbrenner was in every conceivable way the prototypical office tyrant and the fact that he’s being uninterruptedly worshiped after his death by a nation of cubicle slaves tells you almost everything you need to know about the modern American psyche.
In no other country do people genuinely love their bosses the way Americans do. They’ll go home after 12 hard hours of capricious superiors peeing in their faces, and the very first thing they’ll do is call up some talk radio show and denounce the graduated income tax that gives them a break at their bosses’ expense. ...
They’ve got peoples’ heads so turned around in this country that this ring-around-the-collar self-flagellating terror at being thought of as poor and subordinate has people reflexively worshiping their bosses, to the point where George Steinbrenner—a workplace Caligula so stupid and self-centered that he could not be convinced George Constanza wasn’t named after him—is somehow thought of as cute and lovable. George Steinbrenner was not cute; he was the biggest fuckhead of his generation. Steinbrenner was the kind of guy who wouldn’t accept that two plus two equaled four if a parade of MIT professors proved it to him on a fifty-foot blackboard. And if you tried to point that out to him, he fired you in the middle of the night, which he thought was funny, except that you were feeding your kids with that money.
The Steinbrenner Slobituary (Rolling Stone)
For a person who makes her living constructing rap songs, M.I.A. is stunningly inarticulate in this video.
I’m waiting to hear from Vanilla Ice on global warming and Sir Mix-A-Lot on obesity in America.
Initially drawing in freehand and then using needles and bamboo tools to fill in detail and color, Horiyoshi III will spend years creating a tattoo for clients willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have their skin etched with one of his masterworks.
Johnnie Shand Kydd who shot this beautiful video for Nowness describes Horiyoshi’s work:
“They are called skin carvers [because the process involves] sharpened bamboo being pushed again and again into the skin, creating gradations like you would in a brush stroke on a painting. That’s where he shows himself as a great artist. Acting on impulse and creating harmony where there wasn’t beforehand.”
Below, Japanese master skin carver Horiyoshi III working his magic.
It’s safe to say we’re all scarred for life from seeing The Exorcist
In 1974 while THE EXORCIST was still playing in the theaters, my friends and I made a version of our own called THE DEMONIC POSSESSION. Originally the title was going to be MALEDICTION but we figured nobody would know what that is. Filmed in Pittsburgh, Pa and Atlanta, Ga, the film was made on SUPER 8 SOUND and runs 60 minutes. This is an excerpt. Miraculously the film was made without ANY parental censorship or supervision. A film by CLIFF CARSON Cinematography by BILL BURTON
Thanks Brian Ruryk !
Japanese television commercials are absolutely insane. This one combines urinating with geysers of blood in an effort to compel you to buy some tea. Can you imagine this ever appearing American TV? You gotta love the Japanese, they’re kooky.
I think this is absolutely great. Definitely mashup-magic of the day!
From Classy Hands:
Inspired by one of our favorite websites, /Film.com, which ran an article called “The Ferris Bueller Fight Club Theory” last year. The piece hypothesized that Cameron could have possibly imagined his whole Day Off, and that Ferris was actually his own Tyler Durden.
(via Daily What)