Zinzin

Archives for March 2012

Signs of the Apocalypse: The Roadside Church

Roadside Church signs composite

Accidental Mysteries has a story about photographer Stefan Hester’s photographs of Tom Fuller’s sign-saturated “religious environment” in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, that Mr. Fuller calls the “Roadside Church.”

I created the mash-up, above, from four of Stefan’s photos, just to highlight the obsessive textification of this religious environment. Be sure to check out the Accidental Mysteries post, not only for the photos, but for Stefan’s story about meeting Tom Fuller and encountering “Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product.”

The Wind Cries Mary by Jimi Hendrix (Sweden ’67)

Jimi Hendrix, with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell (The Jimi Hendrix Experience), perform “The Wind Cries Mary” in Stockholm, Sweden, May 24, 1967. The song, written by Hendrix and produced by Chas Chandler, had been released as the band’s third single just weeks before, on May 5, 1967.

Poetry is the bridge between the language of the universe and the universe of language

“Translation is an art of analogy, the art of finding correspondences. An art of shadows and echoes… Baudelaire said poetry is essentially analogy. The idea of universal correspondence comes from the idea that language is a microcosmos, a double of the universe. Between the language of the universe and the universe of language, there is a bridge, a link: poetry. The poet, says Baudelaire, is the translator.”
~Octavio Paz

Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules of Directing, and Authenticity

The Lake Erie scene from the great Jim Jarmusch film, Stranger Than Paradise, 1984. Jarmusch is one of the great independent directors of our time. Here is his Rule #5 from Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Rules, MovieMaker Magazine, published January 22, 2004:

Rule #5: Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”

Cold War Era Rocket Ship Playgrounds

Cold War Era Rocket Ship Playgrounds

Artist Lauren Orchowski created a very cool photographic series of Cold War era rocket-theme playground structures, named, naturally enough, Rocket Science. The photographs were taken with an 8 x 10 inch view camera between 2005 and 2008, all over the United States.

Kids: such structures come from a bygone era before playgrounds were scientifically designed and tested until they became impossible to hurt yourself on. In other words, they were dangerous, just like Cold War geopolitics. Duck and cover.

Krafting a failed name: Mondelez, or how not to do corporate rebranding

Kraft Foods is separating its higher-growth global snacking business unit from its North American grocery division, so it needs a name for the new company. The process Kraft used to get that new name, and the rationalization of the name, make a great example of what not to do in a naming process.

The “potential” new corporate brand name (pending shareholder approval vote on May 23), Mondelez International, is fraught with problems. As the New York Times DealBook blog mildly puts it (Kraft, ‘Mondelez’ and the Art of Corporate Rebranding), “The move highlights the potential complications that come with corporate rebranding, especially when a company decides to make up a name out of whole cloth.”

Potential complications is an understatement for the activity of launching a major company with a terrible name that nobody will remember. So how did a global giant like Kraft get into the position of adopting a weak, unmemorable and unpronounceable name for its new spinoff? They did it the old fashioned way — by (very large) committee: “Kraft said that the moniker came from submissions by more than 1,000 employees around the world, who suggested over 1,700 names.” For a company that makes food products from recipes, you’d think they might have noticed that democratizing the naming process like this is a recipe for disaster. For example, let’s say that we’re going to have a free ice cream day for our 1000-employee company. Everybody can have as much ice cream as they want, but we can only get one flavor, so we need to reach a consensus on which flavor to serve. Will it be Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey? No, it will be either vanilla or chocolate (oh wait, some people have chocolate allergies ) — ok, vanilla it is.

Once Kraft had a process in place to guarantee that the name squeezed out the end of their soft-serve branding machine would be vanilla, all that remained was the justification, and here it comes:

The winner: Mondelez, cobbled together from submissions from a North American employee and a European one. It’s a combination of “monde,” the Latin word for “world,” and “delez,” a made-up word meant to suggest “delicious.” Hence, “delicious world.”

“Cobbled together” is right. The problem is, real people inhabiting the real world would never encounter a name like Mondelez and feel the warm glow of entering a “delicious world.” And who says that the made-up “word” delez suggests “delicious”? You could make a better argument that it suggests “delays” or “deletes,” as in, “Food you can’t eats, so you should deletes. Don’t delay.” Pardon my pigeon Esperanto. Better yet, Mondelez sounds like a slang term for oral sex in Russian. Delicious world, indeed! But since they manufacture “snacks,” this connotation can only help improve brand recognition, at least among horny/hungry Russians. Score one for Kraft.

The next part of this process train-wreck is to trot out the CEO to perform, as if on cue, the Name Announcement Song & Dance, which Kraft dutifully obliges. Here is the marketing robospeak attributed to Irene B. Rosenfeld, the chairman and CEO of the new company:

“For the new global snacks company, we wanted to find a new name that could serve as an umbrella for our iconic brands, reinforce the truly global nature of this business and build on our higher purpose – to ‘make today delicious.’ Mondelez perfectly captures the idea of a ‘delicious world’ and will serve as a solid foundation for the strong relationships we want to create with our consumers, customers, employees and shareholders.”

My question for Ms. Rosenfeld is, when was the last time you entered a “strong relationship” with a brand that had a name like Mondelez? Would you even remember its name a week later?

Perhaps a shareholder revolt will veto the Mondelez name on May 23, and send Kraft back to the drawing board (and brawling ward) with one more chance to do naming right. They need look no further than their own Nabisco brand cookie product, Oreo, for an example of an outstanding invented name that is warm, poetic, fun to say, memorable and meshes beautifully with the product it identifies. With the right process in place, Kraft could still pull off a winning brand, one that is less vanilla, and more Karamel Sutra. Then it really would be a Delicious World after all.

Visions Of Light

Visions Of Light, directed by Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, and Stuart Samuels, is an incredible documentary that focuses on the relationship of cinematographers to film directors and how they collaborate. Like many relationships, opposites often attract and hijinks enviably ensue. This film has it all: bruised, battered and crushed egos; rants; creative and irreconcilable differences; the pushing of the boundaries, patience, buttons and budgets; rubbing, friction and chafing; misunderstandings, miscues, mishaps and other accidents, happy or otherwise.

One of the most demonstrative examples of such misunderstandings can be seen in the clip above, beginning at 1:14. All of the various stages of creative collaboration or union are explored: The Enchantment Stage; The Power Struggle Stage; and finally, tragically, miraculously, The Fork in the Road Stage (as in, Stick a Fork in it it’s Done Stage). The film features interviews with a venerable “Who’s Who” of Directors of Photography. It has been twenty years since its release (1992), and in my opinion it is definitely ripe for a sequel. Rent it today it will change the way you see films forever.

Featured Directors of Photography:

  • Ernest R. Dickerson: The Brother from Another Planet
  • Michael Chapman: The Last Detail, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull
  • Allen Daviau: The Falcon and the Snowman, Fearless
  • Caleb Deschanel: Being There
  • Lisa Rinzler: Trees Lounge
  • Conrad L. Hall: American Beauty, Marathon Man, The Day of the Locust, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, In Cold Blood, Cool Hand Luke
  • William A. Fraker: Bullitt, Rosemary’s Baby, The Day of the Dolphin
  • John Bailey: Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Swimming to Cambodia
  • Néstor Almendros: Days of Heaven
  • Charles Rosher: The Onion Field
  • Vilmos Zsigmond: Deliverance, Scarecrow, The Sugarland Express, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, The Two Jakes, The Crossing Guard
  • Stephen H. Burum: The Outsiders, Rumble Fish, The Untouchables
  • Charles Lang: Some Like It Hot, The Magnificent Seven, Sabrina, The Big Heat
  • Sven Nykvist: Persona  Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, The Tenant, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Fanny and Alexander, Pretty Baby, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Crimes and Misdemeanors, New York Stories
  • Robert Wise: The Magnificent Ambersons, West Side Story, The Sand Pebbles
  • László Kovács: Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Paper Moon
  • James Wong Howe: The Thin Man, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Sweet Smell of Success, Hud
  • Haskell Wexler: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Faces, The Conversation, Matewan, Coming Home
  • Vittorio Storaro: The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, Apocalypse Now, Reds, One from the Heart

Song of the Kindertransport

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, which won the 2000 Academy Award for best documentary feature, is an amazing film. It tells the story of how roughly 10,000 Jewish children were able to leave Central Europe for safety in England in the months before World War II began, in what came to be known as the kindertransport.

The scene in the video below is especially beautiful and haunting. It depicts the moment when the first children are leaving by train for a strange land full of strangers who spoke a language they did not speak, with a song, Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär, sung by a child. Most of these child exiles, spared from the concentration camps, would never see their parents, family and friends again, who were not so lucky.

While recently watching the DVD, I was moved to replay this scene several times, and snapped photos of the paused screens showing the translated text of the song in subtitles over background footage of the train taking the children away. Composited together, they form a sad poem of this heartbreaking moment that defined the lives of these children.

Into the Arms of Strangers - Wenn Ich Ein Voglein war

Here is the text of the words of the song Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär from the translated subtitles, with repetitions derived from lines of the song that repeat across several different scenes, as depicted in the composite above:

If I am far from you
in my sleep
I am with you.

When I awake
When I awake
When I awake
When I awake
I am alone.

There’s not an hour in the night
when my heart is not awake
and thinking of you.

That you
thousands of times
thousands of times
gave me your heart.

I’m an Emotional Idiot So Get Away from Me, by Maggie Estep

“I’m an Emotional Idiot So Get Away from Me”
by Maggie Estep

I’m an emotional idiot
so get away from me.
I mean, come here.

Wait, no,
that’s too close,
give me some space
it’s a big country,
there’s plenty of room,
don’t sit so close to me.

Hey, where are you?
I haven’t seen you in days.
Whadya, having an affair?
Who is she?
Come on,
aren’t I enough for you?

God,
You’re so cold.
I never know what you’re thinking.
You’re not very affectionate.

I mean,
you’re clinging to me,
DON’T TOUCH ME,
what am I, your f—–g cat?
Don’t rub me like that.

Don’t you have anything better to do
than sit there fawning over me?

Don’t you have any interests?
Hobbies?
Sailing
Fly fishing
Archeology?

There’s an archeology expedition leaving tomorrow
why don’t you go?
I’ll loan you the money,
my money is your money.
My life is your life
my soul is yours
without you I’m nothing.

Move in with me
we’ll get a studio apartment together, save on rent,
well, wait, I mean, a one bedroom,
so we don’t get in each other’s hair or anything
or, well,

maybe a two bedroom
I’ll have my own bedroom,
it’s nothing personal
I just need to be alone sometimes,
you do understand,
don’t you?

Hey, why are you acting distant?

Where you going
Was it something I said?
What
What did I do?

I’m an emotional idiot
so get away from me.
I mean,
MARRY ME.

A poem from The United States of Poetry episode “Love and Sex.”
Copyright Washington Square Arts, 1995.

Let’s do it

Here is an excerpt from a wonderful NPR interview (‘How Creativity Works’: It’s All In Your Imagination) with Jonah Lehrer, author of “Imagine: How Creativity Works.” Lehrer and host Robert Siegel discuss the creative process and how great concepts often arrive in unusual packages.

On the creative processes that resulted in Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign: “This is a great story from Dan Wieden at Wieden+Kennedy, the very honored Portland ad firm. … He’d come up with seven videos for the new Nike ad campaign. … He knew these different videos which featured different sports needed a shared slogan. But he just couldn’t think of the slogan. … At some point during the day, somebody must’ve mentioned Norman Mailer to him. And so Norman Mailer was in the back of his head somewhere. It’s near midnight. His deadline’s approaching. He’s really, really frustrated at this point because he can’t come up with this damn slogan. And then suddenly he thinks of Norman Mailer. He remembers Norman Mailer wrote this book called The Executioner’s Song about Gary Gilmore. And he remembers Gary Gilmore’s last words right before he’s executed by a firing squad in Utah. His last words were, ‘Let’s do it.’

“And Dan Wieden thinks to himself, Geez, that’s pretty brave. That’s a pretty brave sentiment to have right before you die — to just get it over with. But he realizes ‘Let’s Do It’ isn’t quite right, so he tweaks one word. And there you get ‘Just Do It.’ … But that’s a perfect example of how, in a sense, that’s an old idea. It was a line in a Norman Mailer book, and he tweaked it ever so slightly. He substituted one word and came up with one of the most influential advertising slogans of the second half of the 20th century.”