Category: etc.

I Think He Said The Secretary Of The Utah Correctional Association Is Near.

Oh my heck, if you read the Washington Post’s article on black folk in Utah, be sure you read it to the end. I love my people and all, but seriously, it is time to wake up:

When [Rodger] Griffin [an African American HR administrator who moved to Utah from Delaware] was voted secretary of the Utah Correctional Association, the 300 people casting ballots did not lay eyes on him until he rose, expecting the applause showered on every other winner asked to stand. What greeted him instead was “exactly” the silence Cleavon Little encounters in “Blazing Saddles,” when his character, the black sheriff, enters a small Western town.
“I’ve had so many weird experiences like that,” said Griffin. “I went to San Francisco, and people didn’t stare at me. And it made me very uncomfortable, because everyone always stares at me.”

A Different State of Race Relations

Introducing The Suck Cola Registry



The Suck Cola Registry # SC0005, originally uploaded by gregorg.

In 1996, I went to some weird little Internet expo at the New York Coliseum. The folks from Suck.com were there, and I got this bottle of Suck Classic Cola. It was my first piece of WWW swag [no one really said “dotcom” yet in 1996 who didn’t work for Time Magazine.]
I know of one other bottle. At least until he quit, it was on the bookshelf in a friend’s office at Time Warner [which, ironically, was built on the site of the NY Coliseum]. Except for three <3-hour periods when I moved, and this morning when it dropped on my foot, mine has been in my refrigerator since 1996. 1996 was the year Suck memorialized Coca Cola’s beautiful utter failure of Gen X marketing, OK Soda by calling for OK fans to send them cans, promotional materials, even vending machines.
It is in that spirit, but without a bunch of old Coke bottles coming to me, that I hereby inaugurate The Suck Cola Registry, a virtual gathering of all the world’s remaining bottles of Suck Cola.
If you have a bottle or know of a bottle of Suck Cola, please add it to the Registry. by providing the following data:
Cola Owner
Cola Photo [jpg or URL]
Cola Location [i.e., city/state/country, not “in a box in my storage unit”]
After your Cola information is reviewed and validated, you will be issued a Suck Cola Registry Number. I have designated my bottle SC0005, having reserved the first four Registry Numbers, SC0001-SC0004, for Suck.com co-founders Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman. Thank you.
Related: 10 OK Soda cans [empty] in various designs and excellent condition, currently $1 on eBay

Karl Lagerfeld Has A Posse, Duh

P1050990.JPG, originally uploaded by mordechai der yid.

which includes a Diet Coke butler [via andy]

[2023 update: Mr Mort posted these c. 2008 photos on instagram on the occasion of the Met’s Costume Institute show. I remembered blogging about the Diet Coke butler (because ofc), and noticed that the flickr embed code was not working anymore, though the direct link is still active. So I updated the pics, and left the link.]

Victoria’s Secrets Laid Bare

Cintra Wilson’s takedown of Victoria’s Secret in the NYT’s Critical Shopper column is more fun than a runwayful of pouty supermodels:

“Dream Angels,” according to Victoria’s propaganda, is America’s No. 1 fragrance, which makes sense in an obese nation with no self-control: it smells like an alcoholic Twinkie. In any case, shiny his and her gift boxes are an eyebrow-raising $69.

The lists of the beauty product names read like the erotic poetry of the loneliest admin in the office, a size-doesn’t-matter Ikea of sex fantasy–minus the meatballs.
Chug-a-Lugging Aphrodisiacs [nyt]

Continue reading “Victoria’s Secrets Laid Bare”

1600 For Men: Presidential Prestige Bath Products For Men

1600formen_prod.jpg
There’s nothing I can say that isn’t already said by the licensee:

We are pleased to introduce you to 1600 for Men®- Formulated with the finest of ingredients including naturally derived botanicals and skin enriching vitamins. 1600 for Men™ is produced in small batches, packaged and labeled with simple elegance and bears the most significant mark of the free world-The Presidential Seal of the United States.
From fine cologne to moisturizing body wash to fabulous Kits on the Go this line of products was created to please the senses on every level. Our 1600 for Men® signature scent is crisp, cool and masculine created for “The Man” of the house.

Except for the TSA Toiletry Travel Kit, everything in the 1600 for Men collection is a “power” product. And except for the Presidential Power Robe, all the products are “powerfully presented”:

  • Power Shave Basket, powerfully presented in our sturdy metal bucket
  • Power Shower Basket, powerfully presented in our sturdy metal basket
  • Power Lotion, powerfully presented in our unique, bell-shaped bottle
  • Power Aftershave, powerfully presented in a clear glass bottle with a brushed silver cap and sprayer
  • Power Body Powder, powerfully presented in a kraft paper shaker with an easy twist applicator
  • Power Glycerin Soap Set, powerfully presented in a set of three individually wrapped bars
  • Power Muscle Soak, powerfully presented in a wide-mouth jar for easy dispensing
  • Power Wash, powerfully presented in our unique bell-shaped bottle
  • “Kit On The Go” with Power Lotion & Power Wash, powerfully presented in our sturdy vinyl bag with snap closures
  • Sink-Side Set with Power Lotion & Power Wash, powerfully presented in our unique bell-shaped bottle[s]…set into a custom-crafted chrome holder
  • Power Wash, powerfully presented in our “Boston Round” bottle with ease of use flip top cap
  • Exfoliating Power Scrub, powerfully presented in our “Boston Round” bottle
  • Power Shave Crème [note: not Cream. or Creme], powerfully presented in our wide mouth jar allowing for ease of use
  • Power Pre-Shave, powerfully presented in our “Boston Round” bottle
  • Power Shave Balm, powerfully presented in our “Boston Round” bottle
  • Power Shave “Kit On The Go”, powerfully presented in our sturdy vinyl bag with snap closures
  • TSA Toiletry Travel Kit, powerfully presented in our sturdy vinyl bag with zipper closure.
  • Presidential Power Robe
    The deal for 1600 for Men was apparently arranged last year by the Secret Service’s licensing agent in California. 15% of retail sales goes to charities and families of Secret Service personnel. 1600 for Men is available online and in The White House Gift Shop at the National Press Club building in Washington DC.

    • La France n’est pas amusee at UnterGunther

    You don’t need to read French to get the gist of the Le Monde headline about how government prosecutors’ thrown-together case against UnterGunther for secretly restoring a 150-yo clock in the Pantheon is doing: “la patrie… très énervée”
    Four members of the group were charged with damaging a gate while entering the Pantheon–with a Japanese TV crew in tow, who caught the whole thing on tape [and probably in HD to boot.]
    Honestly, if I ever wrote a courtroom drama with the prosecutor saying, “On se croirait un peu dans un jeu de rôle, avec des chevaliers. Vous devez cesser de jouer !” [“It feels like a role-play, with knights. You should stop playing!”] I’d fire myself. And yet, there it is.
    Aux intrus, la patrie… très énervée [lemonde.fr, also Google translation]
    11/26 update: UK coverage of the case: ‘Cultural guerrillas’ cleared of lawbreaking over secret workshop in Pantheon [guardian uk, thanks lazar]
    Previous coverage of UnterGunther and l’UX exploits on greg.org

    Street And Gangland Rhythms 1959 Field Recording

    gangland_rhythms.jpg
    Ho-ly Mackerel, this is incredible.
    Street and Gangland Rhythms: Beats and Improvisations by Six Boys in Trouble is a 1959 urban field recording LP from Folkways Records, a pioneer in folk music, field recording, and world music.
    A rare record dealer has an original LP edition on eBay right now, “stone mint and in the shrink,” but Smithsonian Folkways also publishes most of the company’s archives either digitally or on CD.
    Buy the mp3 download on Amazon for $8.99.
    Check out a couple of extended samples at Show and Tell Music or at Smithsonian Global Sound [via storkbitesman]

    UnterGunther: French Urban Explorers Sneak Into Pantheon For A Year, Repair 150-yo Clock

    paris_pantheon_dome.jpg Leviathan_Pantheon.jpg
    l: Pantheon r: Pantheon w/Ernesto Neto’s 2006 installation, Leviathan Thot

    Wow, worlds collide, I feel like I’m in an Umberto Eco novel. At nights over the course of a year, a group of urban explorers in Paris who call themselves UnterGunther slipped into the Pantheon, the national mausoleum for French giants from Voltaire to Hugo to Marie Curie, and the site of Foucault’s original pendulum experiment. [yikes! I am!]

    untergunther_clock_tf1.jpg

    Once inside, they hid behind a wall of fake crates, and set to work restoring the movement of a massive clock, not working since the 1960’s, which they say had been neglected and left to rust into oblivion by the French government. The group enlisted a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to help on the project, which required fabricating several parts from scratch.
    On October 10 2006, they presented the restored clock to Bernard Jeannot, curator of the Pantheon, who was expressed his profound thanks on behalf of a grateful nation. HAHA, kidding. He was horrified and launched a criminal investigation into the repair of the clock.

    untergunther_tf1.jpg

    UnterGunther’s stated motives for these clandestine restorations–besides restoring things, of course–is to highlight “the incapacity of the French National Heritage administration, Monum, to preserve the heritage it is in charge of.” It’s a message that takes on unfortunate resonance with reports that drunken revelers recently broke into the Musee d’Orsay and punched a hole in a Monet–and then escaped unmolested by museum guards or police.
    In an interview last month with the Times of London, who should turn up as the spokesman for UnterGunther’s urban explorer network, l’UX, but that underground cinema guru himself, Lazar Kunstmann. Fascinating and disturbing and invigorating stuff.
    Unter Gunther’s report, english [urban-resources.net]
    UnterGunther’s home page, with media coverage, in french [ugwk.eu, images above via the TF1 news story, 19Jul07]
    Underground ‘terrorists’ with a mission to save city’s neglected heritage [timesonline.co.uk]
    Related: Meanwhile, Americans sneak into malls and have parties for a year
    Previously, Oct. 10, 2004 [!]: Exclusive: the greg.org interview with Lazar Kunstmann & La Mexicaine de Perforation
    Les Arenes de Chaillot subterranean cinematheque’s complete programme guide

    Gregger Stalker

    gawker_stalker_tripp.jpg
    So someone on Gawker thought they just saw Tripp Darling eating at 63rd & 5th?
    No way! That’s so funny! Because I thought I just saw the pantsless pothead professor from Animal House! But it wasn’t 63rd & Fifth; it was in Jed Clampett’s old place. Either way, dude’s looking O-L-D.
    Dirty_Sexy_Money_Cast.jpg

    Gawker Does Not Make $51 Million/Year

    People, please.
    So with 30 million page views x 4 units x $30/page ratecard, Gawker Media’s annual ad inventory is priced at $52 million retail.
    How much inventory do they sell? 50%? 70%? 40%?
    Every time you see a Gawker t-shirt button or a Gawker Artists or a Jalopnik banner, it’s an impression that didn’t sell. How often and when does that happen to you on a GM site?
    Consumerist’s editors recently bragged that no one’s ever bought an ad on the site, which turned out to be essentially true.
    So for the network as a whole, let’s say it’s 60%. MSRP: $31 million/yr.
    A 15% discount for walking in the door: $26 million.
    Discounts for buying up the entire page [i.e., the 3 biggest units, leaving the 4th button empty]: 20%? I don’t know. Say it happens half the time, so 10%. $23.4 million.
    Do these ads sell themselves? 15% commission, not including the tab at Balthazar: $20 million.
    Is $1.5mm/month possible? Sure, why not?
    But making $20 million while paying people $3000/month? Less than the chick at the Uniqlo store? Less than Chris Evans pays to have his backyard cleared? I doubt it. Gawker ain’t no…damn, what was the name of Calacanis’s blogging sweatshop again? I can’t even remember. WIN something? Never mind.
    A job at Gawker is a regular media job at a regular media company. Far be it from me to grope in the dark and overestimate the size of Denton’s nut, but he’s gotta be spending $5-6 mm a year.
    Nick’s right. When done professionally, blogging turns out to be a profitable, efficient media publishing platform, but Gawker is not clearing $51 million/year. You should still totally let him pick up the tab at Balthazar, though. And the real reason they keep hounding that Ferrari douchebag on Crosby street is because he’s parking in Denton’s AMG-spot.

    Remembering Perv

    So for 15/20ths of my time on the elliptical machine yesterday, CNN was, in their words, “Remembering Merv”, all while apparently forgetting his sexual harassment and palimony suits or his closeted, right-wing conservative support of Reagan and his sudden lack of gabbiness when the subject of the then-emerging AIDS epidemic.
    Then in the car home, the second story on NPR–after the Tragic Loss of Merv–was one CNN didn’t even put in the crawl. It was a quote from the US’s Important Ally in the War Against Terror, Pervez Musharaff, who acknowledged that the Taliban was getting support from Pakistan’s tribal areas. And then he made all sorts of conciliatory, friendly remarks about helping them out, and bringing their well-meaning constituents to the table.
    Seriously. All we need now is to worry a bit more about Lizzie Grubman’s driving and the whereabouts of Chandra Levy, and we’re set.

    Comrades, Join Me In A Relentless Exposure Of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Despicable Tricks!

    antonioni_china_cover.jpg

    I only discovered the Chinese government’s published evisceration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary Chung Kuo – Cina after I thought I’d finished my Cabinet article on Scott Sforza. Jonathan wondered if Susan Sontag’s On Photography might have a relevant idea or two in it, so I broke out the old copy–and found Sontag’s discussion of Antonioni’s “extremely reactionary and despicable”…camera angles [!]. It made for a sweet, surprisingly symmetrical ending to the piece.
    Intrigued, I searched around for the full text of the 1974 Renmin Ribao Commentator pamphlet she quoted from, but it wasn’t online. So I ended up buying a copy, and scanning it in. It’s a fascinating read, and it should have been online long ago.
    While the North Korean government is known for bombastic turns of phrase, the Chinese under Madame Mao had a really rousing, articulate, no-holds-barred style of denouncing its enemies and whipping up its populace. Not that the internal political motives of the pamphlet are at all unclear; but it’s entertaining. Antonioni’s criminal techniques weren’t limited to camera placement; his cinematography, use of color and light, editing, and sound editing were all reactionary imperalist tools as well. I don’t know if this is where the Dogme folks got it, but the Gang of Four’s condemnation of non-diagetic sound is easily as vicious as anything Lars von Trier could come up with, and twice as funny.
    Anyway, the entire text is after the jump. The numbers in brackets are the page number/page breaks. If there are any typos or formatting errors, please let me know. Enjoy, comrades!

    Continue reading “Comrades, Join Me In A Relentless Exposure Of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Despicable Tricks!”

    Sorry, we got cut off. You were saying?

    From Theresa’s blog, The Wit of the Staircase:

    From the French phrase ‘esprit d’escalier,’ literally, it means ‘the wit of the staircase’, and usually refers to the perfect witty response you think up after the conversation or argument is ended. “Esprit d’escalier,” she replied. “Esprit d’escalier. The answer you cannot make, the pattern you cannot complete till aterwards it suddenly comes to you when it is too late.”

    But what if you didn’t know it was too late? What if you’re right in the middle of the conversation? What’s it called then?