Another Queer Jewish Buddhist

Conde Nast is destroying the planet

I subscribe to a number of CN pubs. Five I can think of off hand -- The New Yorker, Wired, CN Traveler, Vanity Fair and CN Portfolio. That's a lot of paper, but I like the writing and am happy to support good writing, political analysis and get information on things I like. But remember, I am in direct marketing.  And mailing lists — and mail merge/purge — are basics in this business. Imagine my surprise and dismay when I received in the last month each one of these magazines with the same supplement — Movies Rock. Each with the cover customized to say: A special supplement to...insert magazine name here.

In other words, I got the same magazine five times. That's a whole lot of wasted paper. And this isn't the first time CN has done this with a supplement. Do you think that they could somehow get the technology together to know that I subscribe to all these mags and don't need the same supplement five times?

And when you consider how many people are at least dual subscribers, well, Conde Nast has clearly cut down a swath of the Amazon today to overly promote bad Bill Murray vehicles all in the name of advertising. Kinda sucks. So Mr. Newhouse, get your IT people on the line today and figure it out. This is pretty basic stuff you know. And you're pissing people off.

Playing With It: Flaunting Queer Humor and Stereotypes in Advertising

Love it. The website is fun too. Sometimes advertising can indeed be playful in surprising ways. Oh, and if you think the media buy in Vanity Fair is safe, check out the billboard on MetroNorth:

Sunday Morning Cartoon: Our Road of No Return / Anime Yaoi

Yet another reason why I love Japan. When I lived there, there were a couple of TV shows with queer characters. There was Stop Hibari Kun, about the cross dressing son of a yakuza and his crush on another boy in school. And Patariro, about an odd little king and his chief spy, who loves another male spy. Cartoons all. This however isn't the kind of comedy that those were -- this is real romance. Enjoy.

Debu-Sen: Gay Sumo Advertising Take 3

Okay, this is beginning to become an interestingly odd phenomenon. This is the third ad in the last year to feature sumo wrestlers in either a gay context or in cross-gender costume. Clearly there is some fetishization going on out there in the world. All the more interesting to me is that on a daily basis, about 5% of my daily hits are from people on search engines looking up the term "gay sumo." What's up with that? If you haven't seen the previous ads, you can find them here and here.

Not one to argue with reality, and since I have found yet another ad that plays with the image of sumo wrestlers and sexuality/cross-gender costume, I present this print ad for Swatch watches. You will note that the branding and product are particularly subtle in this ad, as opposed to the image itself. What it means however, I can not say. Either from a cultural/sexual fascination with these Japanese athletes or from a conceptual reason for their use in this ad. Perhaps it was explained or discussed at the recent awards given out by the Commercial Closet, which cited this ad in its nominees for the year.

Waiting for Battlestar Galactica...and Razor

So Razor, a side story in the BSG saga will be broadcast on Friday after a long hiatus. When I got hooked on BSG it had been a long time since I had been so captured by a television show that I had to be home to see it when it was on cause I just couldn't wait. It had been a long time since I was hooked by a science fiction TV show (and we're going back to the original season of Star Trek). So when I read the review in today's Time Out for Razor I was filled with trepidation:

Caine press-ganged civilians and had disobedient officers executed in front of the crew, while her prisoners were subject to institutionalized rape and torture. Caine, we learn here, is a lesbian...but she isn't judged for her sexuality — Razor definitively proves that BSG is set in a society where sexual preference is a nonissue.

Well. I am relieved. Ahem. Sorry, but when the only queer character in 3 years of episodes is evil, well, maybe the world of the colonies doesn't judge sexuality, but television viewers in 21st Century America do. And based on what I read in Time Out, Caine is yet another version of the evil queer stereotype. I await the broadcast Friday with teeth gritted.

Mr. Whipple and Senator Larry Craig...

An advertising icon has passed...and is noted on any number of queer blogs (JMG to start) because of the queer subtext of the character. Mr. Whipple was undeniably queer, a Franklin Pangborn of fussiness who was hated roundly as annoying by not only the general public, but by his own creators at Benton and Bowles, as told in the classic on how to create good adveritising "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This:"

"I was assigned to assassinate Mr. Whipple. Some of New York's best hit teams before me had tried and failed. The agency that created him was determined to kill him."

Nevertheless, the campaign ran for 21 years because "Charmin may not have been popular advertising, but it was number one in sales." Which goes back to a discussion yesterday on JMG about the advertising for British Tourism in Belgium. But I digress....so what's the connection between Whipple and Senator Craig? The analysis is right there in the NY Times obituary:

"In hundreds of maligned but effective television commercials, running from 1964 to 1985, the punch line was the Mr. Whipple himself secretly squeezed the product..."

Just like a closeted Republican with homosexual desires, Whipple told other people what not to do, then guiltily did it himself. And got caught again and again. It's a pattern we are all familiar with, though many people close there eyes to it and live in denial. Culturally Whipple blows the whistle: we all know.

On another note, the nature of a "queer" ad spokesman selling soft toilet paper has the less than conscious communication that who better to tell you what's good to put against your butthole than a gay man? 

Of course, the actor who played Whipple was straight. But the character? We all know. It's the open secret out there for all to see on Capitol HIll.

Naked Tenors Singing: yet another reason to be an opera queen

This guy is way hotter than Steve Reeves' Hercules for my money. It could almost get me to the opera. Except that I was more in the Lou Reed camp, when he sang: 

I don't like opera and I don't like ballet
And new-waves French movies, they just drive me away
I guess I'm just dumb, 'cause I knows I ain't smart
But deep down inside, I got a rock and roll heart
Yeah, yeah, yeah, deep down inside I got a rock and roll heart

Then again, I never saw an opera with a hot naked man singing in it. Clearly not a role for the late Pavarotti.

Sunday Morning Cartoon: Gay Cowboys in "Tumbleweed Town"

This ain't Brokeback Mountain. And I never played with my toy cowboys like this. Clearly a failure of the imagination on my part. Click on the image and see how Todd the Tonka cowboy finds true love...

Anti War Demonstrations Then And Now

This evening as I was leaving my office I came across a small anti-war demonstration on East 40th Street. I stood and listened to the woman who was speaking to the small crowd without the benefit of a loudspeaker. I listened for a while but had a depressing sense of deja vu, remembering similar demonstrations against the Viet Nam War. Of course, in the late 60s I was young and naive enough to believe that street demonstrations by tens of thousands of people would help end the war. And to a degree it did — the very fact that on an ongoing basis more and more people of all walks of life, not just students, were showing up in Washington or on Wall Street — the eventual growth of a mass movement helped shorten the war. But the speeches were appalling to listen to. People with little connection to reality yelling slogans that were tired in the 60s. And that's what I heard on East 40th Street Friday evening. The organization behind it, World Can't Wait, is not the kind of group I want to be connected to — anything with Gore Vidal on the board just reeks to me.

Mind you, I believe Bush and Cheney have committed impeachable crimes, and war crimes they should be prosecuted for. Not like I don't agree with these people on that. And I wish that there were tens of thousands in the streets on an ongoing basis protesting just about everything this government is doing. But somehow I feel that today something else is called for. The tactics of the 60s don't make sense today. And the kind of semi-incoherent talk I heard from the speaker does not inspire confidence. I don't know what is called for though. There certainly is power to thousands in the streets that simply going online does not create. The street is public, though increasingly without media coverage it feels as though if there a demonstration in NYC and the media doesn't cover it, did it really happen?

I don't have answers to these questions. With a craven Democratic party, unwilling to call the administration out on its treasonous acts, I find myself uncertain what the correct course of action is. And I'm open to all well reasoned suggestions from those who read here.

Sexy bears in advertising