Refreshed by a certain extremism
May. 3rd, 2007 02:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusUrgh, I've spent the day writing about "viral marketing" (also known as astroturfing, sock puppetry, stealth marketing, shilling, product placement, vlog-flogging etc) for Wired and am thoroughly minded to say -- with a great sweep of the hand -- "Away with the lot of this stuff!" (Which was also very much the vibe of yesterday's anti-capitalist Mayday celebrations in Kreuzberg, by the way.)
I've also been watching the big French presidential debate, and finding it disappointingly mealy-mouthed, as both candidates made a rush for centre ground. The candidate of the left spent much of her time praising entrepreneurs, promising to check immigration "on a case-by-case basis" and saying that Turkey's admission to the EU should be delayed and "thought about very carefully". I still hope Ceres wins on Sunday, naturally, but... how boring!
For truly red-blooded, unapologetic socialism -- the socialism of the future, according to British Army futurologists -- you have to travel to South America, where red presidents Chavez and Morales are happily -- and popularly -- re-nationalizing telecoms and energy companies in Venezuela and Bolivia.
Or how about Brazil, where the Sao Paolo government recently banned all billboards -- the "delete all option", as the International Herald Tribune calls it, conjuring images of other satisfyingly Draconian legislation like China's one child policy and Arnold Schwarzenegger's zero emissions target for California.
"The billboards were very very very ugly and for sure nothing besides visual pollution," my Sao Paolo spy (an art student at the university) tells me, when I suggest that Tokyo would be diminished by the removal of its neons and signs. "Tokyo seems to have a diverse homogeneity (it sounds paradoxical, but I hope you get it)... here everything was alike but there was no homogeneity... It wasn't nice at all. Now it's still ugly, but at least people are invited to think again about facades and advertising... Maybe it can turn into something better... Sometimes we need some radical decisions here."
"A rare victory of the public interest over private, order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, and cleanliness over trash," is how weekly newsmagazine Veja greeted the decision. "For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost."
And it's true that you can't see any billboards whatsoever in the Sao Paolo pictured in CSS's Let's Make Love video. Not because they weren't there -- the video was shot last year -- but because they obviously didn't add anything aesthetically to the city's skyline or enhance its sexy young ambassadors. Now all we need to do is make cities as car-free as this video suggests Sao Paolo's freeways might be!
While we're in Brazil, being refreshed by a certain extremism, here's an extremely refreshing video of a re-enactment of a performance piece by Tropicália artist Hélio Oiticica. It's called Parangolés:
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I've also been watching the big French presidential debate, and finding it disappointingly mealy-mouthed, as both candidates made a rush for centre ground. The candidate of the left spent much of her time praising entrepreneurs, promising to check immigration "on a case-by-case basis" and saying that Turkey's admission to the EU should be delayed and "thought about very carefully". I still hope Ceres wins on Sunday, naturally, but... how boring!
For truly red-blooded, unapologetic socialism -- the socialism of the future, according to British Army futurologists -- you have to travel to South America, where red presidents Chavez and Morales are happily -- and popularly -- re-nationalizing telecoms and energy companies in Venezuela and Bolivia.
Or how about Brazil, where the Sao Paolo government recently banned all billboards -- the "delete all option", as the International Herald Tribune calls it, conjuring images of other satisfyingly Draconian legislation like China's one child policy and Arnold Schwarzenegger's zero emissions target for California.
"The billboards were very very very ugly and for sure nothing besides visual pollution," my Sao Paolo spy (an art student at the university) tells me, when I suggest that Tokyo would be diminished by the removal of its neons and signs. "Tokyo seems to have a diverse homogeneity (it sounds paradoxical, but I hope you get it)... here everything was alike but there was no homogeneity... It wasn't nice at all. Now it's still ugly, but at least people are invited to think again about facades and advertising... Maybe it can turn into something better... Sometimes we need some radical decisions here."
"A rare victory of the public interest over private, order over disorder, aesthetics over ugliness, and cleanliness over trash," is how weekly newsmagazine Veja greeted the decision. "For once in life, all that is accustomed to coming out on top in Brazil has lost."
And it's true that you can't see any billboards whatsoever in the Sao Paolo pictured in CSS's Let's Make Love video. Not because they weren't there -- the video was shot last year -- but because they obviously didn't add anything aesthetically to the city's skyline or enhance its sexy young ambassadors. Now all we need to do is make cities as car-free as this video suggests Sao Paolo's freeways might be!
While we're in Brazil, being refreshed by a certain extremism, here's an extremely refreshing video of a re-enactment of a performance piece by Tropicália artist Hélio Oiticica. It's called Parangolés:
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