Stupid Ads – Chinatown Ed. + Newspaper Dig

Fish. Barrel.

Found at Canal and Mulberry.

Folks really need to think about where they place their ads.  This one, in the middle of Chinatown only makes a little bit of sense because it happens to be overrun with tourists, but it still seems a bit ham-fisted.

Leaving the Ikea Good-Bad debate aside, we can agree the company aims for a pricey demographic – which, to the degree that it remains a working class immigrant community, Chinatown doesn’t really offer.  In fact, with an average income around 20-25k a year, “weaning yourself off takeout Chinese” would take roughly a tenth of a Chinatown resident’s yearly income. That also assumes they have access to housing they can remodel, which probably isn’t true considering rising rents and vast illegal housing set-ups in the first place.

Second – “Chinese delivery” I’m not even sure what to make of this line.  But considering the location in the middle of a historic Chinese enclave, it might have been better to dodge the ethnic-food bullet entirely and just kept it at ‘delivery.’  I don’t know why ‘Chinese’ has become the quintessential delivery-greasy-pathetic food of note, but I’m pretty sure the reasons aren’t exactly complementary.

Speaking of fish in barrels:

I forgot these “no sharing used newspapers’ bins existed.

Bins in Grand Central.

Attention newspapers: when your business model relies on preventing sharing between your readers, prepare for the end.

Stupid Women-Hating Ads in New York

I swear, walking around New York with a camera in your pocket is an enlightening experience.  More absurd ads to share with the world:

FIRST: Stupid Liquor Ads!

Originally, I planned to critique the Absolut ad along with the one to the right, but I figure the “In an Absolut World” pitch fails pretty much on its face without any comment, so I’ll just move on.  The second ad is from Cabana Cachaca, a Brazilian rum company trying to introduce ‘cachaca’ liquor into the American market.  Apparently, they decided the right way to do this was via American Apparel style pornographic imagery – this time with a promise of “uncensored photos, footage, and more’ at their stupid over-Flashed website.  They follow through on their promise to be sure, but lord knows why anyone seeking out ‘uncensored’ anything on the internet would go to a liquor company’s website, and not, say, Google Image search.

As for the ‘censored’ photo on the street, pretty much nothing is left to the imagination.  The “Brazilian” pun gets some play, and everything does look somewhat… bare in the photo.  I still don’t know why nipples are so damned titillating they must be hidden, despite near total exposure otherwise.  (regarding Janet Jackson I’m still confused – the nipple didn’t do anything really, it just sort of… was there.  That’s all there really is to it.)  I think this ad proves that puritanical-censorship approaches to sexuality fail by making the censored bits all the more interesting – potentially for the worse.  Instead of a comfortable, sensible relationship to our nipples, we have a hypersexualized ad for alcohol, with all the really bad things that entails.

Second!  Not really an ad but infuriating still!

I mean, this is old-hat, but these damned things have been wheatpasted all over Lower Manhattan and they frustrate me to no end.  Basically, the most important strategy of the pro-life movement involves instilling doubt in the ability of women to make self-determined choices about their pregnancies, masking their real intention (compulsory pregnancy) behind a humanistic mask of regretful women.  This kind of bullshit inspires the use of waiting periods and the forced viewing of near meaningless sonograms.

Sadly, the pro-choice left hasn’t really marshaled a powerful image to counter this type of inanity – the most prominent visual image of a bloody coathanger kinda conveys the message, but I prefer something along the lines of the Manhattan Mini Storage ads, which force you to look in a women’s face when talking about the right to choose.  We need to remember what is at stake first and foremost: not a theoretical life, but real people.  Women’s empowerment is always the answer.

I too blame the patriarchy.

Big City Triathalon

That’s right I did the Tri – and not one jellyfish (except in Chinatown, where it appears you can buy anything, including by-the-pound invertebrates). I am now a champion of the big city transit triathalon, biking, walking and subway-ing in the past 24 hours, in all different parts of the city.  Each form of transportation has its special charms, revealing and concealing different parts of the urban environment, for better or worse.  

I won’t write about cars or buses.  I don’t ride the bus.  Perhaps I should.  I find them tedious for some reason.  As for cars: I hate them.  I believe anything that makes driving a car more difficult, expensive or frustrating is inherently good.  

Bike:

Bike. Clowns. New York. from Mandibergs Flickr photostream.

 In many ways, still the bottom of the transit totem-pole.  Plagued by street-space, parking and respect problems all around, I find that in my bike-heavy phases (summer, spring), I tend to see the city as a collected grouping of interesting places buttressed by asphalt war zones.  

For example: today, riding across the Brooklyn Bridge, I was yelled at by a pedestrian (who was standing in the bike lane) after I almost hit him.  After telling him to move, he screamed “YOU’RE IN THE BIKE LANE!”  Well, no shit.  This I feel epitomizes my experience riding: stupid people endanger me, then pretend its my fault and express their idiotic conclusions by yelling (or honking) at me.  

Anyways, as I was saying.  Peddling through the mild chaos, I generally keep focused on where I’m going (because lord knows what will end up in front of me if I don’t), and don’t take time to experience the world passing me by.  Thus, I come to see the city as comprised of destinations and departures divided by roadway, rather than as the 3-dimensional congested plot of humanity it more likely is, filled with the quirks and dangers that implies.  Lines and dots, lines and dots.  

Subway:

 

I call bullshit. from Arimoore's flickr photostream.

 

 

Always a difficult subject for me.  It doesn’t help that the MTA regularly acts like they hate their customers, raising fares while lying about infrastructure improvements those fares should pay for (though, admittedly, MTA has been put in this position by a total failure by both federal and state authorities).  

(BTW, does the J train always sound like death?  I could have sworn I heard the sounds of parts just falling off that motherfucker, and it kinda scared me.  Dig the Williamsburg fly-over coming into Brooklyn though.) 

Subways drastically reshape the city.  The MTA subway map epitomizes the experience of riding the subway – an over-emphasis on Manhattan, the relegation of other boroughs to the spokes of a wheel, and the creation of giant no-man lands, unserviced by the iron horse.  The subway/train system sometimes seems like an example of a technology that cripples, attaching people to a transit system that ultimately attaches itself to so little of the city

And its disorienting.  You step out of the subway and have no idea where you are often – the spaces between have been eliminated.  The only interaction in passing occurs between other people, who won’t recognize you and in many cases try to avoid your glances.  The subway creates a city of destinations as well, but more-so framed by dead space, rather than the war zone.  

 

Walking:

Walking encouraged. from Joelogans flickr photostream

Walking is perhaps the quintessential New York experience.  Today I took a stroll off the Marcy J stop around 11.30 at night – perhaps making me a candidate for some random street violence, the latest quintessential Williamsburg experience.  

I’ve been walking through the city more than usual for the last few days because a good friend is visiting me from out of town.  I miss walking – I do most of it in the winter, when the ice scares me off my bike (still a warm-winter southerner at heart), and the weather doesn’t afford me a chance to wander as much as I should.  In fact, wandering, along with awe, defines New York, and big cities in general.  Whether as the classic urban flaneur, or through Situationist psychogeographic meanderings, walking reveals the city in its purest form – as a dense, human environment careening off itself into the height and darkness of vertical building.  As you walk, you get a sense of the order in the off-hand randomness, and really understand them as 3-D spaces, with the to-and-fro becoming just as important as the destination

I like cities, because you can never see all of them at once.  The time it takes to understand them by traveling through them, and in that time they change you.  

Why I Hate NYU Buses

The right idea. From RichPompetti’s Flickr

NYU: even more corporate than corporations! Today when I saw that The Daily News reported that Ikea lets the hoi polloi snag rides on their corporate buses, I thought of that other private bus fleet belching its way through the city: the NYU Bus system, which runs willy nilly throughout Lower Manhattan and the eastern side of the borough. On any given weekday during the school year, you find a half dozen of the big ol’ purple things clogging up Broadway at Washington Place, and a scattered few idling nearby (often on Lafayette just below 4th). However, unlike the Ikea buses, these are reserved exclusively for NYU students – everyone must show an official NYU ID to board, no excuses.

Community members and some students hate NYU Bus system for a pretty good reason – New York City has a perfectly serviceable public transportation system that goes where NYU buses do, and running a parallel system take revenue from MTA, all the while appropriating space from the public on the streets. Considering that NYU already avoids paying property tax for its $8 billion real estate empire, and the whole bus thing just looks like another way to mooch off the city while pretending to contribute something back. Literally, this is an absurd prospect: NYU, a private university, leases to a private company (you can see the name on the sides of the different buses) to run their bus system that the public cannot access, using public roads and funneling revenue out of public transportation. Neat – NYU has managed to outstrip a multinational big box chain for self interested bullshit.

An NYU Bus Running Someone Over. From tommaync’s flickr.

Net Activism – Another Flip-Flop

I don't know what this means, but I think it has to do with my post. from hugovk's flickr

OK, so here’s a little foot in mouth: in my earlier post about net activism and the Obama I was perhaps overzealous in dismissing some of the potential relevance of net/blog activism.

This article from the New York Sun on the education blog Eduwonkette makes me reconsider some of my initial thoughts.

First, some nuance: Eduwonkette is an anonymously written blog piggybacking a major print publication’s website (Education Week, a regular serial for the k-12 educators set). They write as an expert (savant?), to a specific audience and to a specific purpose. This is an effort clearly directed at a single, narrow goal. It is not a citizen’s movement.

Posts such as this one (about the policies of a particular New York Department of Education admin) play rhetorical and political hardball, instead of sermonizing on the righteousness of webroots democracy in action (as many netizens are aught to do). The anonymous blogger names names and doesn’t hesitate to play up beefs with individuals, as long as sound theoretical evidence supports those beefs.

The point is this: blogging can take an activist bent when working with a specific audience that has a good chance of reading and understanding the shit someone puts online. It allows for a blogger (and maybe a group of bloggers – I like the blog Crooked Timber for higher ed in this case, or the blog Daily Gotham for NYC Democratic politics – though it sways a bit more towards the overzealous netizen style that I find a bit silly) to wield power within a particular bureaucratic environment, influencing specific people on particular policies.

Blogging can target the personalized nature of bureaucracy (those who get ahead do it by knowing the right people), because it allows anonymity and personalization. In the same way that Perez Hilton stages takedowns of celebrities he doesn’t like, certain bloggers in the right environment can stage takedowns of the folks that wield power in that environment. It provides an alternative to bureaucracy by giving folks at the top of the pile something to fear.

The DoE example in this case shows that a blog, persuasively written and widely distributed, produces an alternative point of power that weighs against the otherwise unchecked authority of bureaucratic higher-ups. Regular folks get shit done because Eduwonkette writes about it – that’s an important thing.

But it’s not the only thing that matters. (To the Obama-folks: just keep posting, maybe something will change! Or maybe not.)

Photopost: Stupid Ads in New York

NYPD’s Recruiting Ad, on the 1 train

The above ad reads “MYNYPD is a 75% crime reduction in 15 years. That’s a job resume we can all be proud of.” Saw this on the subway heading out to Brooklyn last night. The NYPD attempt at new media relevance is sort of laughable, as if sticking a “MY-” in front of the name would suddenly convince people that the NYPD isn’t a vast, corrupt bureaucracy that regards its new recruits as something between shit and dirt. The ads plastered an entire side of the train – other images lauded new-recruit pay raises (to ’still not very good’ pay); the others were un-memorable “build your resume!” type appeals.

The crime reduction figure is misleading, and arrogant. Of course they don’t tell you about the increase in the prison population occurring in the same period, and the assertion that crime reduction resulted from NYPD policy alone seems misleading as well.

In Prospect Park

I passed this last night walking near Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and it could be the least appealing ad I’ve ever seen.

First, the image: the girl looks like she’s been force-fed barbecue for days, and is losing her will to live. Looking into her oversized face on the street was somewhere between shocking and terrifying, and does nothing to encourage anyone to consider buying ‘BBQ’ in the ‘Prospect Park you didn’t know.’

Second, the text: “Don’t just make BBQ… Buy BBQ‘ Good thing this ad is here for those hungry Park Slopers looking for their next meaty treat. Now, I thought ads like this were supposed to convince you buying shit was a good idea – this one seems to assume you already want to buy yer BBQ, but just can’t quite figure out how to. “I just love spending money, but if only I knew where to do it…”

I have no idea how anyone could have even thought this was a good idea even conceptually, but somehow it made it onto the streets of Brooklyn as a finished product.

Shoutout to Copyranter for fostering my appreciation for shitty New York advertising.

Police Harassment of Peddle Pushers

… Not just for Critical Mass anymore.

Riding through Central Park last Thursday, I happened across a case of overzealous policing that has come to define New York. I witnessed 5 pedicabbers, part of an industry already stressed by city regulation, receive some undue police attention from the NYC parks department. I was riding the big loop through the park near Strawberry Fields when a parks SUV pulled in the wrong direction on to the loop, taking up the center lane.

An officer stepped out into the road, and began yelling.

First, she yelled at a rider who was stopped behind someone dropping off passengers on the right side of the road. She told him to identify himself, and he pulled out both his regular ID and pedicab license. She handed off the rider to her partner in the driver’s seat, who began writing a ticket.

At this point, I was a few feet behind the car, and figured something was up, so I pulled up onto the sidewalk next to the rider. The first thing I heard was the officer in the SUV asking for the rider’s address.

“DON’T LIE!” the first officer yelled. The rider, who I later found out was named Stas, spoke with a heavy Russian accent, trying to defend himself. “I’m not lying, I just moved here!” he replied. The ticket writing went on. At this point, I pulled out my camera phone, as the first officer stepped back into the road to yell down other riders.