Frank Buckles and Raymond Bernard.

Frank Buckles, the oldest living World War I American soldier died yesterday at the age of 110 in his home in Charles Town, W. Va. You can read his obituary from "The New York Times" here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/us/01buckles.html?hp

While I was reading Buckles' obituary I remembered one of the most powerful pieces of anti-war film I've ever seen, from "Wooden Crosses" by Raymond Bernard. You can see it on the video here, starting at about 1:15 in.

The Art of Persuasion.

The Weekend Wall Street Journal, that intelligent but cheerily fascist newspaper, had an interesting article about propaganda in the 20th Century. I'm cutting and pasting the entire thing here because WSJ firewalls prevent the riff-raff from seeing the paper.

"Human beings have long used art to try to influence one another. The new book "Propaganda Prints: A History of Art in the Service of Social and Political Change" by Colin Moore (A&C Black/Bloomsbury Academic & Professional) surveys the field, from ancient Sumeria to the present.

The Roman emperor Augustus issued coins emblazoned with messages like "Peace and Victory." And Benjamin Franklin created his famous "Join or Die" woodcut of a severed snake in 1754 to plead for colonial unity.

Propaganda from the 20th century spans a wide range of world-changing events, from China's Cultural Revolution to the Cold War. Here is a look at some of the book's posters from the conflicts and public campaigns of the past hundred years."

Here's a selection of prints printed in the article.

1975.

After I got out of high school there was nothing I wanted to do less than start college right away. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in learning, in getting my degree and in getting an education, I had just had too much of people, too much of the incestuousness of the town I grew up in. In short, I needed to get out and be by myself before I filed myself into a dorm room at Columbia in New York City.

I was lucky in a way in that when I graduated from high school I was just 17, the youngest in my class by a good half a year. My relative youth made it so I could bum around a year before college and still enter as just an 18 year old. I deferred my admission, took $1,500 I had saved from various jobs and chores I did out of the bank and against the imprecations of my parents hit the road.

My idea was to walk across the country, from New York to San Francisco and to see what trouble I could get into along the way. The way I figured it all out was pretty simple. I could walk 30 miles a day without too much strain—that’s 10 hours of walking at a moderate pace of three miles an hour. I reckoned I’d have to walk 150 days to make it out west. 4,500 miles of meandering to cover what would be 2,700 miles on a straight line. I was very analytical about everything.

I loaded a big hiker’s backpack with a tent, some blue jeans and other sundry stuff and set out to become a hobo. I was a big kid, just about two-inches higher than six-feet and pushing 200-pounds so I didn’t worry much about being mugged or gang-raped, but to be on the safe side I carried a fairly assertive knife in my pocket and had a 9-inch serrated scuba knife strapped onto my right shin.

The day I started out it rained. My parents urged me to wait a day until the weather cleared but I was too itchy to get going—to get away from them, from where I had lived, away from my friends. To get away from everything. To that end, the rain was enriching. I welcomed it like presents on a Christmas morning. It soaked me and cleansed me. It washed the crap of suburban New York off me, off of my clothes. It washed away the pettiness of grade-school gossip. It washed away fear and conformity. The rarefied dust of private school life squeezed out of my canvas sneakers with wat’ry every step. I didn't know where I was going but I knew I was well on my way.

IQ. Increasing and decreasing.

One of the things we in advertising are meant to be adept in is multitasking. Our holding-company-dictated lives have divvied up our time-sheeted days into 15 minute increments. We don't even get--there's no time for one--a mental intermezzo between tasks. We are meant to flit from one to another, like flies on various piles of shit.

Once I heard a guy from the MIT Media Lab speak. His name was Dr. Michael Hawley and he had a lot to say. The thing I remember most vividly is this quotation that I've carried with me since I heard it back in 1999.

"A different perspective is worth 100 points of IQ."

Today I ran across the datum below from the "Latham's Quarterly," a magazine wholly worth your attention.



10 IQ points is a lot of points. If you're an average brain, it probably leaves you functioning at high-dimwit levels. If you're already a dimwit, you might wind up thinking like a bonehead. If you're already a bonehead, a 10 point decrease might leave you acting like a numskull.

Hipster Haiku.

Through the summer heat
He had on his woolen hat.
In cold rain, hatless.

Anyone can't do it.

It used to be if you wanted to shoot a movie or print a poster or, even, take a picture, you used to have to know a lot of stuff.

If you were printing a poster, you had to have had some training in type. You'd have to know about fonts and leading and other stuff.

Most of these skills were crafts and took time and money to master. So, if you weren't really serious about the craft you dropped off along the way. Maybe you took up ping-pong or something. You decided printing wasn't for you.

Today, any fool with a camera and a Mac can make a movie and usually does. Worse, some of these fools with cameras and Macs are good salespeople. So they go to clients and say, "Why pay "X" for a web video, I can shoot the same thing for 80 cents." Often clients believe that blather and take the bait.

I'll be really blunt about this. 99.999% of everything that's shot is crap. For every video on YouTube that goes viral there are 27 of a dimwitted college student playing Stanley Kowalski for some college drama class. Crap.

Yeah, I'll concede that a lot of production is fat and bloated. And costs can probably be cut. But a lot of costs come in the form of insurance that you, the client, aren't going to get absolute garbage--or if your concept is absolute garbage at least it will be good-looking, well-produced garbage.

This is the era of pundits proclaiming that anyone can make a movie, a commercial, can be a politician. No.

Anyone can't do it.

Progress.

The penny at the bottom of the urinal on the 3rd Floor is gone.

Approval stamps.

A couple days ago I wrote a post about an Approval Stamp I had bought from JWT/Atlanta who auctioned it off.

I have to say, the stamp is a fine thing. You can stamp a clean sheet of paper with force and it makes a nice inky imprint. Stamping is also a bit of a physical release.

To that end, I noticed there is space for only nine approvals on my stamp. That got me wondering, what would a 21st Century Approval Stamp look like?

Below is my rendition:

Miracle Blight.

There's a new blight on our culture perpetrated by Kraft's Miracle Whip and the fine folks at McGarry-Bowen. The commercial, which isn't bad if you posit that people care about Miracle Whip enough to discuss it, recognizes that Miracle Whip is polarizing. You either love it or hate it and the spot urges people to "take a side." You can see the commercial here: http://www.mediabistro.com/agencyspy/mcgarrybowen-sparks-lovehate-debate-for-miracle-whip_b14668

The commercial features two celebrities, only one of whom I recognized, James Carville. The other celebrity is, I'm told, from the cable TV show "Jersey Shore" which I have yet to watch and his name is Pauly D. In an effort to keep my fingers on the pulse of pop (or pimp) culture I decided to look up Pauly D and see what he's done to achieve his celebrity status.

So far all I can find out about him is that he's one of Rhode Island's most well-known DJ's and he keeps a tanning bed in his home. That and he has an unusual haircut, as do I.

In searching for Pauly D's bio I also found some background on someone called D Pauly. He is a French-born marine biologist, well-known for his work in studying human impacts on global fisheries. He is a professor and the project leader of the Sea Around Us Project at the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia.

I don't know how he feels about mayonnaise.

My start in advertising.

When I was about four-years-old I was all straight blonde hair and big blue eyes. I was the all-American white boy; I was cute as a bug's ear. Naturally, my parents thought they should capitalize on my looks and propel me on to stardom.

The first spot I appeared in was for a cereal that's since gone belly-up. It was by Nabisco and called Team flakes, since it was a 'teaming' of wheat, rice, corn and oats in every flake.

On the surface my job was pretty simple. I had to take a big, milky spoonful of flakes and look at the camera and smile my best all-American boy smile.

The only hitch was they didn't refresh the cereal between takes. And by take three or four, those four teamed up grains were a soggy mess. It was all I could do not to gag.

The next spot I was in was for a cereal called 40% Bran, also by Nabisco. Here I was the littlest in a group of seven or eight boys and girls. The lead boy, not me, had to swing a baseball bat and then we all had to cheer.

I remember the wardrobe girl, she would probably be about 80 now, propped me with a bright green woolen baseball cap. In the New York Yankee steeped world I lived in, this hat was quite a novelty. I remember being sad when I lost it.

After that, my parents had to make a decision for me, anyway that was the way they saw it. I could either grow up and be a stage kid, that is get in a lot of commercials and miss a lot of school, or I could grow up normal, as it were.

They stopped taking me to auditions. And I went back to Mrs. Welch's first grade.

I did have to join SAG and AFTRA, however. And my Social Security income record reports that I made almost $3,000 in 1962.