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HAMBURGLR
Kate Digilio is an Art Director who lives in Portland, OR.

elsewhere

    For in the quest to render brands visible, interesting, meaningful and memorable, there are many, many more ways to accomplish this than solely through storytelling. A man jumps out of a very high balloon. A girl falls off a treadmill. A man in nothing but a towel responds in realtime to people’s tweets. Fans tip their hats in thanks and respect and the hat can be bought. People control the flightpath of a plane through the power of thought. We need not tell a story for the consumer to tell a story. And indeed sometimes just making something useful, or beautiful is enough. So we might do well to remember that ‘advertising’ is derived from the Latin advertere meaning “turn toward,” (from ad- “toward”and vertere “to turn”). We are in the business of turning gaze and attention.
    “The World Beyond ‘Storytelling’” by Martin Weigel
    #martin weigel#advertising

    “Hapsburg Lippp” – Everything Everything

    It’s taken me a few days to really digest Get to Heaven, the latest from the UK’s Everything Everything. It’s complex, dark, and wonderfully pop, acknowledging a reality with the Western obsession with terrorism, processed food, the cyclical navel-gazing of a jaded public, increasingly useless system of puppet politicians and the greatest economic disparity the world has ever known.

    The band’s played at all of this before. Both Man Alive (2010) and _Arc_ (2013) played in similar territories. “Hiawatha Doomed,” comes specifically to mind, with lyrics like “Drop the iPod / Save the Village” and “Jesus we knew just who we were.” But Get to Heaven gets even more pointed. The band remarked that they almost named the album Gimme the Gun, after the refrain from the album’s stand out “Zero Pharaoh.” I don’t think Get to Heaven is hopeless so much as it is galvanizing. There’s power in the light that overpowers complacency. 

    So why post “Hapsburg Lippp”? It’s not even my favorite track off the album — it’s hard to really choose but I think this is — but the beats are so clearly Yeezus inspired, borrowing from Kanye’s lead gives a powerful drive to this bonus track. The first half of the song is pop, almost romantic and heavy, like a honey trap. And lured into that sexy hook, the second half hits you with the corporeal pitfalls of the inbred privileged before what I believe is an actual call to revolution.

    “If all the bells in all the lands are waiting for a toll / Why don’t we raise our guillotine?” Chilling. Amazing.

    #album review#everything everything#get to heaven#new music#music
    Information can be ‘empty calories,’ like a phone book, or it can be downright 'poisonous,’ like a Superbowl halftime show, a Madonna video or footage of a man blowing his brains out. The right kinds of poison can get you high and help you have fun, but it’s getting you high because it’s fucking with you, it’s killing you, and if you don't occasionally eat real story food—a dramatic game of football where your favorite team wins, a meaningful conversation with friends you trust, a good book, a good movie, a good TV show, witnessing a life being saved at the public pool—you are going to wither away and die, psychologically, spiritually and socially speaking.
    Dan Harmon, “Story Structure 106″
    #dan harmon#storytelling#writing#culture
    ‘Why do you think every chef says his favorite food is roast chicken, or oysters, or a steak?’ he asked. So much complexity makes simplicity appealing. Spending your days trying to one-up your own palate is exhausting. Stepping away from the wood-grilled matsutake mushrooms with nasturtium agrodolce, and towards an uncomplicated hunk of meat is the gastronomic equivalent of collapsing into your bed at the end of a long day.

    It’s true that ribeyes and oysters and even pizza and tacos share a soothing simplicity, but nothing is more nothing than a chicken tender. A roast chicken has a certain dinner-party elegance to it, and you know at least the sketch of an origin story for your pizza or your taco—but a chicken tender is a chicken tender is a chicken tender. Some restaurants might try to gussy them up, gently carve each tender from the breast of a bird that lived a happy life and lovingly dust them in a custom spice blend, but a true chicken tender comes out of a five-hundred-count freezer bag. They come from nowhere in particular—when you eat them, you could be anywhere.

    “On Chicken Tenders,” by Helen Rosner for Guernica

    • This whole piece reminds me of what Andy Warhol once said about Coca-Cola:

    What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

    #isms#food#helen rosner#andy warhol
    Winehouse saw a fair share of criticism for appropriating black musical traditions, some of it less callous than the Salon piece. However, looking back from a post-Miley Cyrus vantage point, it seems we didn’t know how good we had it. Winehouse wasn’t just singing soul; she knew what the fuck she was doing. Her diction, syntax, and cadence are the result of careful, devoted listening — again, to rap, dub, and ‘90s pop as much as to Phil Spector comps, the Shangri-Las, and four decades of soul and R&B — rather than a few in-studio rehearsals. She wrote all her material, so when she complains during ’Me & Mr. Jones’, ‘What kind of fuckery is this? You made me miss the Slick Rick gig!’, you can be sure that’s not some hired songwriter trying to lend Winehouse some black street cred. Disdain positively pours out of the side of Winehouse mouth when she snarls that line; this guy made her miss a Slick Rick gig, and she’s pissed about it because, evidently, she loves Slick Rick. I believe it, just as I trust that she really did think of Sammy Davis, Jr. as her ‘best black Jew.’ This is one of the many things that made Winehouse stand out from the pack even when imitators began to appear. Someone like the long-forgotten Duffy, for example, sounds on her sole hit 'Mercy’ like she’s been trained in how to sing soul. The crackling vinyl vintage of her intonation is a little put-on, a little mannered. When Winehouse sang soul, it sounded like her own voice, erupting from dark and turbulent depths. If it wasn’t original, it was still fresh, it was still funky, it was still distinctive. And it was uncompromising — just like her persona.
    “Everyone Thinks I’m On The Mend: On Amy Winehouse, Four Years After Her Death,” by Samuel Catlin for Pretty Much Amazing
    #amy winehouse#music#samuel catlin

    This Mortal Coil, shot by Tim Prebble, March 2013

    “The tide was coming in, so I wandered back along the beach, not really thinking about anything until I nearly stood on a bumble bee. My first thought was, what the hell is a bumble bee doing at the beach? I took a closer look and realised it had come here to die.

    I felt a bit sorry for the dying bumble bee, its wings were occasionally flickering & it was obviously damaged & dehydrated.. I started to wonder if all bees travel to the ocean to skip off this mortal coil… Anyway I decided to shoot some video of this poor bee, so I set my s100 down on the sand & hit record… Never turn your back on the ocean.”

    — [x]

    #tim prebble#video art#mortality

    Grayson Perry: I think that the art world benefits from the digital natives, too, because they want a live experience – to go to an art gallery, to be in the presence of an object. I think it goes right back to relics and idols. We learned how to look at art from religion. [The German art historian] Hans Belting thought our whole idea of “fine art” started about 1400, when objects weren’t just seen as religious artifacts any more and started to be appreciated as works themselves.

    Brian Eno: I think one of the big sources of confusion in any discussion about art is the difference between “intrinsic” value and conferred value. Nearly all art criticism is based on the idea that there’s such a thing as intrinsic value –

    Perry: No, I would disagree with that. I think beauty’s a constructed notion, and it’s co-created in the same way as conferred value. It goes back to that idea of looking at something as fine art: why does everyone think “that is a lovely thing”? Because they’ve been conditioned to do so. Different cultures have different ideas of what is beautiful. I’ve never been to China, but whenever I see Chinese art there’s something about their sense of colour, composition, texture, that for me is always slightly off – and I’m thinking, why don’t I just dive into that artwork and completely love it? It’s because I grew up as a westerner and we were completely separate We might as well have been on the moon for most of history.

    Eno: Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we’ve been having with painting. There’s no way of looking at art as though you hadn’t seen art before.

    — “Brian Eno and Grayson Perry on how the internet taught us we are all perverts,” NewStatesman 2013

    #brian eno#grayson perry#art#technology#music
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