Rami Tabello of IllegalSigns.ca and I are organizing a workshop to help New Yorkers fight illegal advertising in New York. Rami is coming down from Toronto just for this workshop, and it's a unique opportunity. I know Stay Free! readers are interested in this kind of thing, hope to see you there.
The details: Activists estimate that half the billboards in New York City are
illegal. Between fudged permits, lack of enforcement, and millions in
profit, outdoor advertising has become a corporate black market that
wont flinch at breaking laws to get your attention. On July 1st, the Anti-Advertising Agency and Rami Tabello of IllegalSigns.ca
will give a free workshop teaching you how to identify illegal
advertising and get it taken down. You will leave this workshop
equipped to have illegal signs removed in your neighborhood.
Canadian activist group IllegalSigns.ca is responsible for the
removal over 100 illegal billboards in the City of Toronto and will
reveal how the billboard industry gets away with breaking the law and
what New Yorkers can do to stop it.
Adult Education: A Useless Lecture Series - "Babies and American Industry" Tuesday, May 6, 2008 - 8 pm (doors at 7:30)
Union Hall in Park Slope
702 Union St. @ 5th Ave
$5 cover
At Adult Education, each month is devoted to a given theme, and 4-5 speakers will address some aspect of that theme using visual aids.
| Pamela Paul, “Baby Gear Your Mother Didn’t Have”
| Daniel Radosh,"Marketing to Christian Kids or The Secret Identity of Bibleman”
| Charles Star, “A Short List of the Worst Children’s Toys Ever”
| Gary Drevitch, “How Princesses and Pokemon Conquered America”
| Susan Gregory Thomas, “Barbie Goes Vertical: How the Marketing Industry Brands Infants and Toddlers”
DANIEL RADOSH is author of the new bookRapture Ready!:
Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. He is a
frequent contributor to The New Yorker and a contributing editor at The
Week magazine. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications,
including The New York Times, Playboy, Esquire, and GQ. In the early
1990s, Radosh was a staff writer and editor at Spy magazine.
PAMELA PAUL is the author of Parenting, Inc.: How We Are Sold on $800
Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches,
Toddler Couture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers—and What It Means for Our
Children. She writes for Time magazine and the New York Times Book
Review, and is the author of two previous books, Pornified and The
Starter Marriage. She and her family live in Harlem.
GARY DREVITCH produces the parenting Web site Freelance Dad,
contributes to magazines like Parents and Jewish Living, and writes
non-fiction books for children. He is also the senior editor of
grandparents.com. A father of three, he has become part of the Pokemon problem, and now seeks its solution.
SUSAN GREGORY THOMAS is an investigative journalist and broadcaster and the author of Buy Buy Baby: How Consumer Culture Manipulates Parents and Harms Young Minds.
Formerly a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report and co-host of
public television’s Digital Duo, she has also written for Time, the
Washington Post, Glamour, and elsewhere. She has two children, seven
and four years old.
CHARLES STAR is a sometimes lawyer, sometimes comic, and host of Adult Ed. But he is mostly known for his excellent cat.
Plug alert: I am going to be interviewed at 5PM today on "The Blog Bunker" at
INDIE TALK 110 on behalf of Stay Free!
A quick too-late-to-matter Google search shows that the host is Joe Salzone, a twentysomething conservative and Paulite. As it happens, I'm reading Ira Glass's New Kings of Non-Fiction, specifically, Host, David Foster Wallace's essay on conservative talk radio. I'm a little wary about being forced onto the defensive but I figure I can hold my own.
In any event, I'll be talking into a microphone that will disperse my thoughts into the ether and I'll do my best to entertain.
UPDATE: The taping was fun, the host is not confrontational and I think it went well, even if I was a little stiff.The show will be rebroadcast tonight at 11PM. If anyone listens, feedback would be nice. Here is my own feedback to myself: "Be funnier."
Carrie and I are hosting another session of our lecture series Adult Education tonight in Park Slope at Union Hall. Tonight's lecture, Trash and the City, has some great topics and actual bona fide experts!
I will be hosting the following lectures:
| Gertrude Berg: "Experiments in autonomous trash collection" | Benjamin Miller: "Your Waste From Space: Looking Down at New York's Garbage Footprint" | Michael Mandiberg: "10 Things I've Learned About Staten Island" | Robin Nagle: "Lost at Sea: The Quiet Terrors of Trash, Then & Now"
You can read their bios after the jump.
Adult Education: Trash and the City Union Hall April 8, 2008 702 Union St. @ 5th Avenue (Park Slope) $5 Doors open at 7:30
We were psyched to receive a screening copy of We Are Wizards, a documentary about Harry Potter-inspired pop music, websites, and other fan creations. (View trailer here.)
In the film, kiddies gather in libraries and auditoriums to hear fellow 7-year-olds and their elders sing songs from the perspective of characters from the Potter pantheon: Harry and the Potters (natch), Draco and the Malfoys, the Whomping Willows. Who knew that "Wizard rock" constituted an entire genre? We also get to see Brad Neely, creator of our beloved Wizard People, Dear Reader discuss his version of the first Harry Potter movie. And a young activist who led a charge against HP merchandise after Warner Brothers started threatening fans with lawsuits.
Granted, the movie isn't perfect. It's poorly edited, lacks a story arc or coherent thesis, and leans too heavily on visual effects and background music to give it an air of self-importance. To the extent that there is a story arc, it is that Warner Brothers has
come around to the idea that fan art is a good thing, but if that is
the case, the filmmakers lose major points for their cowardly failure to include Harry Potter movie excerpts or imagery. How can directory Josh Koury spend so much time on Brad Neely's Potter commentary without actually showing the work in question? Perhaps if he had consulted the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use or one of the recent documentaries about copyright, he'd realize how much he's gutting his own movie.
Nonetheless, We Are Wizards is entertaining and eye-opening. It's one thing to read about Harry Potter devotees, and another thing entirely to see all these kids in action. In the end, the movie is a handy record that documents how works of popular culture frequently inspire others to create.
Congratulations to me, as I spotted the worst attempt at branding in the history of locally produced television commercials.
The shot below comes from a TV commercial for Ruby Weston Manor, an assisted-living facility in East New York.
And the photo can't begin to convey the creepily serene voice that invited us to send our loved ones to stay with good ol' Al (once good ol' Al had come to stay).
UPDATE: Time Out NY named Adult Ed the "Best of the Day" in the About Town section, and The Onion A.V. Club called Adult Education "both informative and thoroughly entertaining."
--------------------------------
Our second Adult Education show is coming up this Tuesday. The topic this time: Animals and Sin.
For those new to our series, Adult Ed is our new monthly lecture series devoted to making useless knowledge somewhat less useless. Each month is devoted to a given theme, and 4 speakers will address some aspect of that theme using visual aids.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 Union Hall in Park Slope 702 Union St. @ 5th Ave 8 pm - $5
Tonight's lineup:
Mikki Halpin: Sexual Violence in the Domestic Pug Jeffrey Kastner: A Brief History of Animals on Trial Carrie McLaren: The Legacy of W. N. Kellogg's The Ape and the Child Charles Star: The Quest to Develop Kosher Bacon
Daniel Radosh was scheduled to speak but, alas, had to go out of town. He will be missed. Stay Free's own Charles Star will be presenting his talk in his stead (along with sharing his notes on masturbation, sodomy, necrophilia, and group sex in the animal kingdom).
Narrated by Naomi Klein, the film features interviews with Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig, Illegal Art Show curator Carrie McLaren, Negativland’s Mark Hosler, [and] UVA media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan....among many others. This 53-minute documentary will be preceded by selections from Negativland’s new DVD, Our Favorite Things, and it will be followed by a Q&A with Freedom of Expression® author and director Kembrew McLeod and co-producer Jeremy Smith.
Freedom of Expression Screening and Q&A Free and Open to the Public (bring ID if non-NYU) Thursday, January 31, 2008, 9:00pm NYU’s Courant Institute
Room #109 251 Mercer Street b/w Bleecker and W. 4th
From page 10 of this week's Time Out: a nifty feature on Stay Free's new lecture series, Adult Ed! (Major thanks to Jason Torchinsky for helping coming up with the syllabus.)
A gentle reminder that the debut of our new event series, Adult Education, is just around the corner: Tuesday, Jan. 22, at Union Hall in Park Slope (Union at 5th Ave.), at 8 pm. The topic for the evening is Microgenre. Hope you can make it!
Firebrand, a media company based in New York, launched the all-commercials-all-the-time show on the ION network (in L.A. on KPXN-TV Channel 30) late Monday with hopes of getting young people to view advertising: as entertainment, not an annoyance. ... The show, called "Firebrand," airs weeknights at 11. On both the show and its sister website, commercial jockeys called CJs introduce the mostly 30-second spots, which are selected by "commercial curators."
The article didn't put it this way, but using advertisements as entertainment (as opposed to merely making ads entertaining) appears to be something of a trend. Also, me crying at my desk is now something of a trend.
And they'll be even jumpier after they get the coffee
In what may go down as the worst idea ever, the Rancho Cordova police have started pulling over random drivers who are not breaking the law to give them $5 Starbucks gift cards — all under the guise of spreading 'Christmas spirit.'
It sounds like one of the Improv Everywhere pranks that starts out with good intentions and ends up creeping out the person being 'given a good time.' Just wait until a guy with a trunk full of pot stomps on the gas when he sees a cop on his tail, setting off a
dangerous high-speed chase. Merry Christmas!
Stay Free! is pleased to announce the launch of Adult Education, a monthly series at Union Hall in Park Slope. Each program will feature 4 or 5 speakers presenting brief lectures that use visuals of one stripe or another (kind of like "show and tell" for grown-ups). Each show will have a theme and each lecture will tie in loosely to that theme. Stay Free!'s own Charles Star will host.
To be kept abreast of forthcoming themes and events, see our MySpace and Facebook pages. Here's what we've got so far:
"MICRO-GENRE" Tues., January 22, 2008 Union Hall (Union & 5th St., Park Slope), 8 pm
On YouTube, there are scores of toddler's expressions after sucking on
lemons. Entire groups of flickr photos are organized around photos of
people wearing sweatshirts, photos of painted trains, photos of body
hair. You could fill a small bookshelf with fake children's memoirs. In
this show, we discuss several examples of what we're calling
"micro-genres."
Liz Clayton: The Architecture of Converted Fast-Food Restaurants Paul Lukas: On Elevator World, American Jails, and other obscure trade magazines Heidi Cody: First National Icons: Native Americans in Grocery Brands Jim Hanas: On meta-tourism: photos of tourists taking photos Russell Scholl: On TV Commercials for Personal Hygiene Products
ANIMALS & SIN Tues., February 12, 2008 Union Hall (Union & 5th St., Park Slope), 8 pm
This will be the first in our series of "hybrid" themes, where we
combine two dissonant topics and ask writers to come up with a lecture
that somehow manages to incorporate both.
Daniel Radosh: The Quest to Develop Kosher Bacon Mikki Halpin: Sexual Violence in the Domestic Pug Jeffrey Kastner: A Brief History of Animals on Trial Carrie McLaren: Animal Hoarding as Social Ill: Beware the Cat Lady
An acquaintance, Dave Zweig, recently told me about an idea of his to protest the Rockefeller Tree. He writes, "Since I was kid it's been driving me nuts that they kill a majestic 60+ yr old tree every year for one month of entertainment."
Alas, his plan for a web site and petition is as of yet unrealized, but I think you all may appreciate his placeholder in the mean time.
The Wall Street Journal had a story on Friday about presidential candidates using "neuroscience" to test voters' reactions to certain issues and messages. Market researchers have been doing this for several decades, of course; it's only recently that campaigns have had enough money to spend spare tens of thousands on brain scans.
I probably would be more upset about this practice if I thought it worked. As it stands now, the whole thing smacks of snake oil. But it's worth pausing to consider what's going on here, aside from the colossal waste of money: these presidential candidates are essentially trying to read voters' minds.
Most Americans know that electoral politics here is a joke, that presidential candidates live and die by polls. But brain testing and the public's ho-hum response suggests is that even the pretense of having integrity is scarcely necessary. Now that is terrifying.
It's been a while since we checked in on the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, but I would feel remiss in not pointing out the new round of criticism its getting.
If you haven't seen them, the Dove commercials are as genius as they are insidious (see Onslaught and Evolution, for instance). As the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood pointed out last month, Dove is owned by Unilever, which also produces Axe body spray and other personal hygiene products. So while the makers of Dove attack advertising that exploits female bodies, they're producing scores of those ads at the very same time. The Axe campaign, however, is particularly obnoxious. As media literacy consultant Bob McCannon has said:
In all my years of doing school workshops, I have never seen anything like the reaction of middle and high school kids. Almost ALL (no exaggeration) know the words to the Axe song, "Bom Chicka Wah Wah," by heart and sing it immediately and enthusiastically with the video, and most of them have been to the Axe "spanking vixens" site.
Now someone has re-edited Dove's latest commercial—replacing bikini bunnies from generic sources with those from Axe commercials—to call attention to Unilever's hypocrisy. See A Message from Unilever. With luck, word will get around to all of those middle and high school teachers using the Dove spots as media literacy. The real lesson here is not that Dove supports "real beauty" but that corporations will say anything—even ostensibly critical things—to sell their crap.
My New Favorite Thing: The “Blog” of “Unneccessary” Quotation Marks
I was just walking by a sign yesterday thinking, "there has to be a site that collects all these instances of mis-used quotation marks." It only took one day to stumble on it accidentally.
The more you look at the site, the more your sarcastic inner-reader voice emerges, and the funnier they become.
In my continuing effort to start projects with little hope of breaking even, I've started a new blog: Hawthorne Street. This one is focused on my neighborhood (Prospect Lefferts Gardens in Brooklyn), as well as old-house restoration tips. I'll also be writing out urban issues there (transit, public space, architecture), since that stuff doesn't really seem to fit here.
We live in a two-family building and get piles of catalogs addressed to people I've never heard of. But this website, Catalog Choice, makes getting off catalog mailing lists easy, even when the catalogs aren't addressed to you personally. (The only catch is that you need to type in the "customer number"—so you can't do do it from memory.)
Newsflash: kids today are self-absorbed, lazy little pricks. That's what we learned on this recent 60 Minutes episode. There have been a number of news articles on this topic: how twentysomething "millennials" raised on a diet of warm fuzzies and relentless self-esteem building are a disaster in the workplace, needing constant praise and attention. 60 Minutes focuses on how U.S-based corporations are coping by reframing old-school Successories-style motivation with new gimmicks like "wacky" in-office parades, award certificates, and free handjobs.
A Wall Street Journal columnist blames twentysomething narcissism on Mr. Rogers (unfair!), Boomer-style permissive parenting (getting warmer), and the gospel of self-esteem (warmer still). What the press reports seem to miss, however, is the fact that this is the first generation of children raised in an environment of unabashed marketing. In 1980, corporate lobbying managed to get Congress to abolish the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate advertising to kids. With no watchdog in sight, an entire industry developed to market directly to kids. Full-length commercials began masquerading as TV cartoons. Channel One launched its in-school advertising "news" network. And junk food marketing skyrocketed. The most common message of marketing to tweens and teens is this: your parents are idiots, your teachers are dull, you're so much cooler than everyone else. But we understand you and know what you want. Product!
What may be bad news for the pampered white kids featured in the segment, though, should be good news for America's immigrants. Based on this segment, I'd say immigrants who've brought over a strong work ethic will have a great shot at out-achieving the coddled elites, once employers stop instinctively hiring rich whites. Let's hear it for class war!
Yes, the Stay Free! Book Club just finished a meeting - my book was Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity. The book has since come up my conversations so much that I wish I had a box of them to hand out to everyone I know. Anne Elizabeth Moore holds the magnifying glass to a string of peculiar events from the past few years, such as Nike's copycat Minor Threat poster, Axe commissioned graffiti in Chicago, and Toyota's rubbing elbows with craft communities to promote the Yaris. All are examples of marketing towards "indie culture," cultures that have been established, more or less, in opposition to corporate culture. Not only have major corporations targeted these various groups, but they've successfully recruited crafters, graffiti artists, and punks to participate in or even create the campaigns.
Anne Elizabeth Moore was interviewed on Murketing last week. Also, I'm proud to be speaking with Moore and Josh MacPhee on November 14th at Ad Hoc Arts in Brooklyn. Come on out...
7pm Wednesday November 14
Ad Hoc Arts (49 Bogart Street Unit 1G, Buzzer 22) Brooklyn. Near the Morgan Ave L.
It's free.
Just finished Susan Gregory Thomas's book Buy Buy Baby and thought I'd take the opportunity to recommend it highly. Though I like to think of myself as well-read when it comes to kids and consumer culture, I found the book illuminating and engaging, with a journalist's sense of balance... in the end, though, it all comes down to choice anecdotes, and Thomas delivers with plenty of scary examples of the depths that marketers go to in order to brainwash the infant set.
A couple of personal favorites:
The Gepetto Group, a marketing firm that target kids from age 0, hosts an annual scavenger hunt at Walt Disney World. This isn't your typical party game, though—the "items" being hunted are kids. Participants—budding marketing pros—spend the day observing toddlers and their moms as an exercise in "kid immersion."
Though some participants feel uncomfortable with the exercise at first, they come to see it as harmless, even beneficial. Rachel Geller, chief strategic officer of the Gepetto Group, reassured participants in the 2005 scavenger hunt by stating, " It's good for kids to learn how to manipulate (people)—that's how you get ahead in this world."
WonderGroup, a kid-targeting firm, created the "Millennium Mom Segmentation Model" to rank moms by permissiveness. According to the model about 40 percent of moms are one of three groups of "permissives;" the other 60 percent are divided into three "restrictive" segments. The R3S segment, for example, has a "low response to kid requests," is the "most educated" group and has a "family focus." At a talk.... President of WonderGroup described the R3S mom as "the evil twin sister of P3... and, dare I say...a bitch?"
Not that Thomas allows all the blame to fall squarely on the shoulders of the marketers. Much of the book focuses on baby television and on the self-centered logic of gen x moms who have embraced it. Far from representing an enlightened elite, educated and affluent moms are some of the biggest chumps of all. As Thomas points out, a common marketing strategy is to first target this "class" group so that the product trickles down to the "mass" group with an educational halo. This, basically, is what happened with Baby Einstein and its ilk—a potentially harmful class of goods that parents have uncritically embraced.
Anyway, there's a lot of good stuff here, but I'll save a couple of other items for future posts.
I haven't been blogging much lately for the usual reasons, but also because Jason and I are working on a Stay Free! book. The book will be published by Farrar, Straus and Girioux and some of it will have appeared in the magazine in one form or another. We're working on new material in order to flesh out a thesis of sorts. We haven't agreed on a title yet, but it's going to be about how consumer culture is toxic, makes people stupid, and gets us to believe that bad things are good for us. If all goes according to plan, it'll be out in 2009.
My second bit of news to report is that we're going to be starting a monthly event series — tentatively called "Adult Education" — in early 2008. Each show will feature four speakers lecturing on an aspect of a chosen theme.... kinda like (we hope) the Little Gray Book series, but with pictures and more of a "social studies" than literary bent. I haven't yet sought a venue, so if anyone knows of a good bar that would appreciate such an event, let me know. (It should be easily accessible by subway in either Manhattan or Brooklyn, and have a performance space that fits about 100 onlookers.)
Writer Jon Ronson, previously known to me for his segments on This American Life, has made a documentary series based on his book The Men Who Stare at Goats for the BBC called Crazy Rulers of the World. This story of the devotion of U.S. military resources to psychics, mentalists and other bullshittery is hilarious when it isn't downright terrifying.
A retired general - and former head of military intelligence - straight-facedly explains how he remains disappointed that he was unable to will himself to walk through walls. A guy who teaches ballet at a strip mall discusses his role in a project conducted by the PsyOps unit at Ft. Bragg to kill a goat with his mind. Of course, you stop laughing when you see how what began with the new age ideas of Jim Channon and the First Earth Battalion manual slowly devolved into the psychological torture techniques used in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
As I watched one serious (but clearly batshit-crazy) military man after another discuss "chakra points" and "remote viewing" I couldn't help but think that I liked it better when I thought our military was full of End Times Christians.
Google Video has all three parts: 123. It is so compelling that Carrie and I watched the whole thing while on vacation in Paris. Which we concede is pretty fucked up.
Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year. Friend-of-Stay Free!Heidi Cody considers this unacceptable. No time to make costumes. Should the parties have already happened or will they take place this weekend? No daylight trick-or-treating because the folks with the candy are still working.
But Heidi isn't one to let a problem go unsolved, so she has formed the Campaign for Halloween On the Weekend. She is proposing that the federal government move Halloween from October 31 to the Last Saturday in October so that we can avoid the blight of a mid-week holiday.
Speaking of pranks, while at the OpenLab I wrote some step-by-step instructions on how to mimic corporate and government signage on the site instructables. The guide outlines the most current methods to match fonts, colors, and layouts to make your new signs look as legitimate as possible. Combined with the Billboard Liberation Front's classic manual, the Art and Science of Billboard Improvement and some basic computer image and vector editing skills, anyone should be able to alter signs or create their own. All that's left is your own motivation and message.
DIY Budget Gallery
Imagine attending a great garage sale, art opening, and block party all on one city sidewalk. Between 2000-2005 I ran an outdoor guerilla art gallery in San Francisco, called the Budget Gallery where we would set up gallery style shows in high-traffic, "underutilized" public spaces like vacant lots and chain link fences. All the art was sold on the honor system and was generally very cheap. With a mailing list of over 700 people, they were very well attended by both followers of the gallery as well as passersby.
The Budget Gallery was always meant to be a sort of "open source franchise" and a how-to guide was well overdue. I was in an instruction writing mood, so I created DIY Budget Gallery - a wiki that explains how to organize these street-level art show/interventions. You can use the information to create a Budget Gallery, or piecemeal for a related project.
Boston Boots Musicians for Marketing Messages Boston's Subway, the T-Line, is bringing in audio "advertainment" into it's subway platforms and trains, and kicking out live musicians. And they want to know what you think about it.
Golden Gate Billboard Paul S. talks about using advertising dollars to pay for what taxes should -- and how it doesn't work.
Pay Phones Turned Mini-Billboards
With the saturation of cell phones, who uses pay phones in New York? Drug dealers and advertisers.
My last post on the Stay Free blog was over 2 months ago. Yikes. I have reappeared. This summer has been a busy one. I'll be posting more in the coming days but one of the things I did this summer was close all the McDonalds in Manhattan (with some help)...
Our prank is easily repeatable and the script and other resources are on my site under Ronald's Crisis..
P.S. I posted this on YouTube yesterday - my first video on YouTube - and within two hours got my favorite comment ever: "fake"
Rami Tabello of 
We were psyched to receive a screening copy of 
Yes, the Stay Free! Book Club just finished a meeting - my book was 
Just finished Susan Gregory Thomas's book 
and thought I'd take the opportunity to recommend it highly. Though I like to think of myself as well-read when it comes to kids and consumer culture, I found the book illuminating and engaging, with a journalist's sense of balance... in the end, though, it all comes down to choice anecdotes, and Thomas delivers with plenty of scary examples of the depths that marketers go to in order to brainwash the infant set.
Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year. Friend-of-Stay Free! 
