go forth

Just came across these absolutely amazing spots created by Wieden+Kennedy for Levi's. The audio of both of them are actual recordings of Walt Whitman's "O Pioneers!" and "America". It portrays America in a way I hadn't seen any brand do before. It's classic, rebel, young, old, diverse and blue eyed, all at once. Beautifully done.

"Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistol? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger, We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship, Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost, Pioneers! O pioneers!

We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, Pioneers! O pioneers"

"America
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love..."

perfection

[via]

pop surreal

Beautiful work by illustrator/art director Rafael Silveira. Some of his fine art and comissioned pieces can also be seen on his Flickr.

killing us softly

"Jean Kilbourne's pioneering work helped develop and popularize the study of gender representation in advertising. Her award-winning Killing us Softly films have influenced millions of college and high school students across two generations and on an international scale. In this important new film, Kilbourne reviews if and how the image of women in advertising has changed over the last 20 years."

word

[via]

cultural literacy and the "i'm a PC" campaign

Here are some excerpts of a brilliant post by one of my favorites, Grant McCracken, on the Mac vs. PC phenomenon.



Our culture has long been predicated in a simple distinction between the mainstream and the avant garde. This construction helped us understand the bourgeoisie as a group of people committed to convention and la doxa. They are, so the stereotype tells us, nervous nellies who are most reluctant ever to depart from their slavish conformity. Thank God, says the stereotype, for the avant-garde. These are risk takers who care nothing for convention or materialism, who bravely throw their personal comfort and safety to the winds in pursuit of artistic truth and social justice. (...)

Sometime in the 1990s, something happened. Our two-part system exploded. Now in the place of an inside mainstream and an outside avant garde, there was a great fragmentation. The mainstream lost its ability to police the tastes and believes and behavior of most people. The avant-garde lost its ability to control the restless, experimental margin. Both hegemonies lost their coercive power. (...) In the place of our founding duality, there were many groups who deferred neither to the center or the margin They simply went their own way. Yes, of course, they could hear the impatient scolding that came from center and edge, but, no, they weren't much interested. They were now prepared to go their own way. Respectable? Who cared? Hip? Who cared? The distinction was dead. (...)

What I did not see was that there was a cultural opportunity. I did not see it, at least, until Crispin Porter + Bogusky rolled out there "I am a PC" spot. But of course. Why didn't I think of that! There was a third position, created by the great cultural flowering of the 1990s. If Apple was avant garde, the path was clear for Windows to be the new alternative to the alternative. It could step out of the old contest that left it a clueless and bumbling mainstream play. It could embrace the great cultural efflorescence that emerged of the1990s and make itself a brand too concerned with real difference to care about merely hip difference. It could embrace real diversity instead of the single, predictable difference that comes from being cool. It could embrace authenticity instead of a pose. (...)

This is what cultural literacy is good for.

advertising fear

Sadly, these are not hair-control products. Though now I'm afraid that iPods and Virgin Mobile phones will electrocute me.

[via]

“Hello George”

Must have cost a small fortune, but this is a beautiful example of how to step outside that lame beaten track of auto ads. Rendered in Maya. Music: "Ageless Beauty" by Stars. The name “Hello George” is a reference to George Jetson.



via the always tuned Carlos Merigo of Brainstorm #9.

PS3, you have failed men and penises from all over the world

I just saw this over at Dear Jane, and I'm still speechless. This just might be the most disturbing, weirdest, worst miscalculated ad EVER in history of mankind. Waaaaaay worse than this.


Now, check this out: IT'S A THUMB! A SMALL, TINY THUMB! LIKE IN FINGER. BUT FOR A PENIS. What the fuck! (click on the image if you're brave enough to see it larger)



Playboy forever?? "Yea not with a thumb for a penis you're not."


Jane says it best: "Seriously what MALE would EVER buy a PS3 after seeing this ad? They only way we could emasculate men more is by showing a Lorena Bobbitt in action. Did these guys even consider their target market when they created this ad? Who thought it would be a good idea to show a man with a small thumb for a penis?"

dude

"This study hasn't been done, I wouldn't think, but it would be very interesting to know the 10 words with this linguistic versatility. Can anything be more versatile than "Dude." Hard to imagine. But what are, for instance, the top ten? I think "wow" would make this list. I find myself using it lots of ways. I am sure there is an intellectual somewhere who takes this to me a measure of our decline as a civilization, but then if you are an intellectual everything, with the possible exception of an outbreak of Mozart festivals, is precisely this. Happily, it is the anthropologists job to observe, not judge."

via This Blog Sits at the
Intersection of Anthropology and Economics, one of my favorite blogs.

remember this?

absolutely G-E-N-I-U-S

Get it?

go burn a bra. NOW.