Archive for February, 2005
Mad Ave. vs. the intellectuals
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Todays blog is taking a little longer than usual.
In the meantime, please look at this Miller Lite ad. If it wasnt broadcast during the Super Bowl proceedings, it should have been. This is the Madison Avenue we saw so little of yesterday in the era of “wardrobe malfunction induced conservatism.
Go to www.preventtasteloss.com here
Click on “Take a Peek
Click on “TV ads
Click on “Foosball
There is a second “unreleased ad here that is worth checking out.
Now, please, go back to “Take a Peek
This time click on “Behind the Scenes
Click on “Author
Finally, Mad. Ave gives as good as it gets.
Debbie Millman’s new show launches today
Posted by: | CommentsDebbie Millman is launching Design Matters on Voice of America. Heres a description of the show:
Design Matters with Debbie Millman is an opinionated and provocative internet talk radio show airing on the Voice America Radio Network. The show combines a stimulating point of view about graphic design, branding and cultural anthropology. In a business world dependent on change, design is one of the few differentiators left.
Explore the challenging and compelling canvas of todays design world with Debbie Millman and her weekly guests live every Friday from 3-4pm Eastern Standard Time. It will repeat Saturday at noon.
Tune in to listen: www.business.voiceamerica.com
Call in live [Friday's only], toll free: 866-233-7861.
Trend watch: Great Rooms again
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I am just back from a week of ethnographies in Toronto. Very interesting. Without betraying the interests of the client, I can offer a little more detail on the “Great Room” on which I posted several weeks ago.
The great room is fast becoming the idee fixe of the middle class home. People are opening the kitchen into a kind of family room, sometimes colonizing the dining room and/or the living room in the process.
The actual formality of speech, dress, meal time, and interaction has been going down in Western societies since the Victorian high water mark. To be sure, there have been several rear guard actions, with Martha Stewart and others fighting the good fight. But, in most households, formal living and dining rooms are archeological remainders. (They are actually sometimes roped off and removed from service, as Joan Kron demonstrated.) This means that living and dining rooms have been consumed more space and budget than they deserved. In a sense, the great room was merely an idea who’s time had come. (And for those of us inclined to marvel at how fast and responsive we have become as a dynamic culture, and I am one of these, the lag time here is something to think upon.)
But the great room is also a way of contending with our growing time poverty. Every one in the family is working harder, out of the home and in the home. We had to steal time from somewhere and we took it from the family meal. (Many families regard the Sunday, or Friday, dinner as an event long since passed.) The meant that the family was now spending less time together. Meal time was, after all, the highest quality time spend together. (Most families are not clear whether watching TV together counts.)
The great room is useful here too. It’s a “big box” that allows everyone to pursue disparate activities int the same place at the same time. They may only be in shouting distance of one another, but they are still in some sense together.
The great room is driven both by a need to recapture space for family use, and to create a “commons” for a group of people that is otherwise heterogeneous and potentially dispersive.
Does anybody know anybody who would be prepared to do a “back of the envelope” calculation of how many construction and furnishing dollars this trend has set in train?
References
McCracken, Grant. 2004. On Great Rooms. Here.
Johnny Carson: we knew you too well
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It must be my world class head cold but I am feeling a little cranky about the celebrity culture at the moment. We are hyperbolically saying good bye to Johnny Carson.
Stanley of the Times appears both to criticize and participate in the trend:
Mr. Carson, whose death on Jan. 23 was treated in newscasts with the same consequence as a major space launch or a presidential address, was a little like John F. Kennedy or Toscanini: a matchless exemplar who spawned legions of irritating imitations.
“Matchless exemplar? I remember thinking that Johnny Carson wasnt very bright or very well informed. He used to say “I did not know that as if there was something winning or clever about not have a clue.
If there was one person who made it “ok to conduct oneself in mid-century American conversation with not a whit of wit or knowledge, it was Johnny Carson. If there is one person responsible for the fact that no one on late night television can conduct an interview to save their lives, its Johnny Carson.
And thats a lot to answer for. Carson was an important creator of contemporary culture, let us give him that. But he was not without flaws and these live on.
References
Stanley, Alessandra. 2005. Carsons Long Late-Night Shadow. New York Times. February 2, 2005, p. E1, E10.
60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
Posted by: | CommentsI am 5 days late acknowledging the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp commemorated at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau site on January 27, 2005. (For my money, we don’t use blogging for memorial purposes often enough…despite the fact that it is particularly well suited. What’s better: hundreds standing around a memorial or thousands writing about the event for which it stands?)
According to the Auschwitz Birkenau museum and memorial website:
From 1940 to 1945, the Nazis deported over a million Jews, almost 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and over 10,000 prisoners of other nationalities to Auschwitz. The overwhelming majority of them died in the camp.
On January 27, 1945, soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front, under the command of Field Marshall Ivan Konev, reached Oświęcim.
As it turned out, on the 27th I was reading Dark Star by Alan Furst. This is historical fiction and I cant vouch for its accuracy. But I can say it gave me a feeling for this historical moment.
Pretty much at random, I selected the following passage from Furst’s novel. I reproduce it here not to endorse its content, but to give you an idea of Fursts talent and the usefulness of Dark Star as a window on the Holocaust.
The background:
Szara is the books hero, a Russian journalist and member of the Communist party. In this passage, we find Szara being spirited across the country side by a driver (the operative). Szara has just survived Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Nazi youth destroyed 101 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish businesses, humiliated Jews in the street, killing 91 of them, and sent some 26,000 people to concentration camps. Kristallnacht is regarded by some as the beginning of the Holocaust.
The quote:
The operative was no Jew. From his accent Szara guessed he might have origins in Byelorussia, where pogroms had been a way of life for centuries, but the events of 10 November had enraged him. And he swore. His thick hands gripped the wheel in fury and his face was read as a beet and he simple never stopped swearing. Long, foul, vicious Russian curses, the language of a land where the persecutors had always, somehow, remained just beyond the reach of the persecuted, which left you bad words and little else. Eventually, as a gray dawn lightened Berlin and ash drifted gently down on the immaculate streets, they reach the Adlon
By then the operative had said it all, virtually without repeating himself, having covered Hitler, Himmler, Goring, and Heydrich, Nazis, Germans one and all, their wives and children, their grandparents and forebears back to the Teutonic tribes, the weisswurst and hartoffel, dachshunds and schnauzers, pigs and geese, and the very earth upon which Germany stood: urged to sow its fucking self with salt and burn fallow for eternity.
I recommend the rest of Dark Star.
References
Birkenau museum and memorial website here
More on Kristallnacht here
Furst, Alan. 1991. Dark Star. New York: Random House.
More on Furst here
