My solo show “The Great Recession” at PNCA in Portland, OR is a little over one month out. The listing just appeared on the PNCA website. Now I just have to finish making the work! The biiiiig work is mostly done, but there are a number of smaller works that have to be made, or finished, or framed-just-so.

BTW, I am from PDX, so this is officially a homecoming…

Exciting!

This is 16 minutes long animated film of logos and and advertising characters produced by a serious 3D house in France, and nominated for an Oscar, but yet in dire threat of lawsuits for use of corporate logos. At least this is according to the blogs, which, are… well… contradictory. But it is a hell of a great 13 minutes. Great villains, chase scenes, and a surreal vision of contemporary corporate life. It helps if you know Los Angeles.

Great fun. Sad truths. Fantastical visions.

A site called Vintage Ad Browser has over 100,000 categorized advertisements from today all the way back to the 1840s. Categorized by type and date. A great resource for research. (tx @twhid)

Is there a word for the irrational and/or rational fear of becoming the target of direct marketers?

Advertisaphobia? Adverphobia? Adphobia? Ad-phobia?

Canal and Broadway. All you Chisel-tippers and KRINKers go after it.

I’ve noticed a new NYC microtrend of people wearing billowy checkered cotton scarfs around their necks. They remind me distinctly of Yasser Arafat’s Keffiyeh. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keffiyeh). Fashion can be pretty fascinating in its ability to absorb and appropriate otherness. So while we are at war with much of the Arab world, and Arab-Americans are feeling threatened and misunderstood enough that they have had to launch an advertising campaign in the subway, NYC consumerist fashionistas have appropriated the Keffiyeh. I wonder whether the wearers know what they are wearing, and whether they see it is some kind of statement, or just “cool.”

One: who owns the street sign posts

This morning I rode my bike to a not-so-close subway stop because I had to run into Manhattan for a meeting and make another meeting in Brooklyn right after that one. And I was late. I get to the station, find a street sign to lock up to, and the guy hawking the Daily News comes up to me yelling. He tells me that is his sign, and that he is going to lock up his newspaper rack AND stool to it, and I have to go find somewhere else. I tell him he doesn’t own the street sign and start locking up, and he says that if I do that he will simply lock his rack up around my bike and I will not be able to get it out. And I’m running late.

As I scuffled off around the corner to find another street sign on the next block my head was full of expletives, but now, sitting on the ferry to Staten Island I am a bit more calm about it, but I have nagging questions: who owns the space. Who has the right to lock what to signs. Are the rights of individuals different than those of corporations. What about corporations acting via pseudo-independent citizens like the Daily News guy. And what is the answer in principle, what is the law’s answer, and how wide is the gap?

Two: obeying the law like an obedient dog.

I ride the Staten Island ferry three times a week to teach at the College of Staten Island. Sometimes I am on bicycle (not as often this semester as I would like) and usually I have a backpack full of books, student papers and my daily rations for my excursion into the crypto-suburbs. Almost every time I pass through the threshold of security I am eyed by the man with the bomb dog. About half of the time he asks me to take my bag off and let his dog inspect it. But every time one of the bomb-dog-men tells me to take off my bag for inspection he says it as if I should already know that I was supposed to take it off for him.

Today I’m running late (its the theme for today) and I am trotting towards the door to the downstairs bikes-only segregated waiting area in my bike shoes (which means I can’t go very fast), and the man yells out “Hey! You!” and points at me. He is jogging over to me. He simply points to the ground. I’ve done this enough times that I have internalized this procedure. I remove my bag and put it on the floor. Take two steps back. You always have to step back from the bag — as if it is a bomb… The dog sniffs it for 10 seconds. Walks back to his master, and the master walks away.

It is amazing that I have been interpolated into the bomb-dog-man’s vocabulary of power. He calls out short commands, I stop, and respond. He points to the ground. I know what the command means, and do as commanded. I am an obedient, well disciplined dog in the dog master’s control society.

I guess there is a reason they call it Mafia Wars. Business Insider has broken a story about insurance company shills paying Facebook users into sending emails to their Congressional Representatives opposing health care reform.

This is interesting in the context of the Health Care debate (see the attempt to push Komen for the Cure to dump Leiberman’s lobbyist wife) but is more significant as a marker of the way that advertising and advocacy are creeping into places and forms where the information consumer does not expect them.

This is one more place to be on guard. And being on guard changes the place. I’m having nostalgic memories of surfing the web on Mosaic, circa 1994… but I know it is just nostalgia.

Here’s the full email. I put it out there in full, and then I will ruminate on why i wavered for two weeks on writing this post at all:

From: Jonathan Ciaccio Date: December 26, 2009 7:32:31 PM EST To: antiadvertisingagency.com Subject: New Blog Post Suggestion Dear owner of http://antiadvertisingagency.com, I’m the webmaster of http://www.sharethedamnroad.com. We came across your blog today and thought that you might want to know about a cycling jersey we are selling that is stirring up quite a buzz. The new jerseys at www.sharethedamnroad.com send a message to aggressive drivers. If you decide you want to write a little something about us for your blog, let us know and we will reciprocate a link back to you!! Best regards, Jonathan Ciaccio Cycling@ciaccioseo.com

So first problem: the guy writing the email is some hired gun SEO “webmaster” who is out fishing for pagerank. Not only is he a SEO, he is a SEO who hosts his domain at blogspot: http://ciaccioseo.blogspot.com/. His client’s site is way down in the search rankings for whatever keywords they are aiming for, and he wants a piece of our pagerank. It appears that his hired gun is doing a fine job as the site has thousands of links to it and a pagerank of 3/10 (which according to his payscale means the SEO is currently charging $250/month), so I’m not going to put in a link. On principle.

But I’ll discuss: If you go to the site (by copying and pasting), you can see he is selling bike jerseys that say things like “DON’T RUN ME OVER!” and “DON’T HONK AT ME.” The word “Thanks” is emblazoned across the front in a mirror image, so drivers can read it from their rear view mirrors, but realistically it is virtually invisible to drivers unless you are sitting up in a victory pose. These are the creation of Phil Gaimon, a rising 24 year old racer and blogger for Bicycling magazine. He writes that it is about trying to:

finally experience the joy of having the last word. The goal is to convey messages of safety and cyclist’s rights, but there is an element of humor and frustration, which we feel cannot be denied in the cyclist/motorist relationship, so these jerseys are not for wimps

I’m not sure where Gaimon is training, but in my experience, this is just the wrong approach to communicating with cars and their drivers. I “train” on the streets of New York, which affords me the opportunity of actually speaking with cars at stoplights, because I can ride faster than traffic. I can have the last word. And I’ll be the first to admit this: I start out calm, but I don’t shy away from someone shouting at me. I love to try to have the last word. This is what the last word sounds like:

I knock on their window and politely tell the driver that they almost hit me, and they should watch out for cyclists, or I tell them that I can hear them coming and there is no need to honk; honking only scares me and could make me loose my balance momentarily and cause me to ride into their oncoming car: the exact thing they were (honestly) trying to prevent.

Then one of two things happens:

1. They are very quiet. They apologize, or say “oh, I didn’t realize that” and we all go on our way happily. This happens about 1/3 of the time. 1/3 of the time, our conversation makes riding a bicycle in NYC safer.

2. They get very loud. They tell me to fuck off, and it goes downhill from there. Sometimes it goes really far downhill really fast. Many times drivers have gotten out of their cars to physically assault me. (Advice, immediately ride against traffic.) One of those times, the driver got back in his car and hit me intentionally with his car. Not fun. He then stood over me and yelled at me in front of several witnesses. I got his plates, pressed charges, and he probably got a warning. Still, not fun.

So it becomes a question of what is the right message. I guess that is an advertising question. Or maybe a social marketing question. I think he is closest to the mark with his shirt that has an arrow pointing to the rider’s left and the words “3 FEET.”

What we need is rider education, driver education and more generally public education. But we also need riders who are not being smart asses about our public image. Just because they are not “wimps” doesn’t meant that the wearers of these jerseys are helping progress the overall image and presence of bicycling in this SUV focused country.

Instead of a funny jersey that is good for a few good quick laughs, I present three different ideas that brings the focus back from having the last word:

One: Transportation Alternatives has spent much of the last year and will spend much of the coming year focusing on bicyclist education. They published their Biking Rules street code guide, ran an enormously successful PSA campaign and massively sold out screening at BAM. They even got Bike Snob to be one of the judges. The point is that the biggest problem is bicyclists themselves: from angry pelotons in Central or Prospect Park cussing out joggers, to hipsters on track bikes without brakes running lights to delivery men riding against traffic, we need to be better citizens if we want to be treated as good citizens.

Bright Bike v2.0 from Michael Mandiberg on Vimeo.

Two: Passive visibility is a secret weapon. Of course you need to have your front and back headlights at night, but nothing stops a driver dead in their tracks like a fully visible bicycle. Case in point: I wrapped my entire bike in retroreflective vinyl. And then I wrapped my helmet too. There is nothing quite as awesome as watching a car see you in their headlights as they are crawling forward, about to make a turn across traffic, and stop abruptly. Seeing an entire bicyclist completely light up in their headlights shocks them into realizing there are other people out there using the roads too. After a year of people asking for it, I made DIY Kits. See the original video here.

Three: If you really want 3 feet, give yourself three feet! A couple of industrial designers came up with a design prototype for a rear mounted LED with a green laser that marks out a 6 foot wide bike lane around your bicycle. I guess it won’t help during the day, but after dark is when it really matters. And after dark no one will be able to read your jersey anyway.

This book is critically important for the arts. Far too few artists are sophisticated enough to be aware of the stealthily growing problem at hand: Corporate, cookie-cutter tools—and their manuals—that standardize and cramp creativity threaten to become the greatest shapers of late 20th & 21st century art, just as architecture’s greatest influence this past century has unfortunately been neither a renowned school of architecture, nor even a great architect, but the catalog of standardized options: door frames, windows, and other prefab parts, from which 99 percent of structures are now built. Artists will remain stuck with old patterns and limited options, unless we create viable open source alternatives and brilliant interventions like this book!

John S. Johnson
Chairman of the Pacific Foundation
Founder of the Screenwriters Colony, The Filmmakers Collaborative and Eyebeam, Art + Technology center

This is how I would describe the experience of reading Digital Foundations: I have learned to speak, say Swahili, because I’m hanging out with a lot of Somalians.  It takes me a few years maybe, but by now I’m pretty good at it. Then I come across this book, “How to speak Swahili” that goes over all the basics. And I’m like, whoa I’m glad I don’t have to learn Swahili all over again, this shit looks confusing, but this book makes it look so easy!  (big sigh of relief) Then I find some vocab I never even knew!  That will come in handy…

Xan Young
architect, Aedas LA

Xan Young, a friend and architect