BEFORMED

With the break in the middle and the like I’m putting everything in Week 5 from now on. It removes the limitations of what I talk about, too.

I found a list of tutorials. Tutorials for beauty retouching and fashion photo manipulation. There were 70 of them. 70 independent tutorials to make skin clearer, tummies more tucked and people less “ugly”.

70. I don’t want to link to this aggregation of content; you can find it through Google; because to be honest it makes me feel a little bit ill. Designers are far more implicit in body image issues than we care to think about.

If you think that it’s not as bad as I’m making out, watch the video on this page, or take a quick look at the before and after image.

I’m starting to feel like social responsibility is a far bigger topic that I give it credit for.

This is the first time I’ve really seen the new Harpic ad. It came to me as I finally made the visual link between an ad and the theory without it being pointed out to me directly.

The neighbours are coming over. I have to clean. It’s the neighbours. The heads of the Parent Teacher Association, your boss, an old family friend who is known to gossip. Whichever neighbour it is you unreasonably fear will judge you on your house.

The battle begins.

This ad has one of the most blood-curdling string-heavy classical scores I’ve ever heard. Really listen to that ad when you watch it. Ignore the badly dubbed voices. Just the music in the context of the ad and the fact it’s about making your bog look spectacular.

I’ve never wanted to clean a toilet so much in my life.

But I feel a little weird jumping forward in time sans lectures. So when I’m back at the ‘versity it’ll be week 5.

Anyone seen the new Pure Blonde ad?

Ayran Beer anyone?

Croc Dundee was on a few nights ago. I’m going to Australia tomorrow. I realised how brilliant that film would be for analysis. I’m going to do a practice essay on it when I get back from Oz.

I’ve said it on here, so now I can’t get out of doing it.

Carn Bazza, lesgogit a beer.

It’s OK to lose. That’s what the guy in the glasses on the television says. It’s fine not to win.

Sorry if that sounds smarmy; because I agree entirely. It’s often from loss that greatness comes.

Loss is a playground, and improvement is waiting to push you on the swing. You know the one that looks like a rubber nappy and has a belt on it. The one you haven’t been able to squeeze in since you were about 4. The one that is really creepy and strange in retrospect when you consider the form and the material used to make it. Imagine in that in my size now.

But giving us a little pat on the back for being the little-country-that-almost-could-but-not-quite?

A little pat on the back, and a little invitation to partake in New Zealand’s 4th best chocolate. An ad campaign that could potentially make it the best chocolate. I’d love to see that ad make itself redunant.

We are taken by the sticky and chocolate coated hands guided through the parade of the world’s most successful losers. So it’s ok to lose. It’s good to lose. Moro helps you lose, eat chocolate and yet somehow remain the winner.

I saw that ad in the middle of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. 49 minutes of infomercial for a craggy-faced smug adulterer who swears far too much. I have no issue with the word fuck, but not as a catch-phrase in the world’s worst kitcom. Kitchen comedy.

Moro tells us it’s ok to be fourth, getting fatter and closer to sciatica while ignoring conversation and hygiene. Because you’re watching a hero. A man who has changed people’s lives. You ignore the fact that they cut a weeks worth of footage down to less than an hours worth of ‘look at everything I can do’ because it’s convenient to do so. If you were made to sit and watch the entire week in real time you’d be bored by the second hour.

Despite my ill-feeling for reality TV. I do love TV as a medium for communication. I need a break from the feeling that there’s nothing more real about Big Brother than there is about Home and Away.

Thanks to the Persuaders, my guilty pleasure is dead.

While I was writing this

An ad for “Basshunter” and their new album was just on. I’ve very quickly remembered why I have little or no tolerance for pop music.

What better to do than listen to the Decemberists and read about Freud’s Theory of Art and Creativity on a Tuesday night. I don’t intent do disseminate it all here; it would be pointless to simply re-word what is essentially an entire book.

However the part i found most interesting came early on in the piece – essentially a working backwards. From the artwork, the external result he had the intention of working backwards with a view to ending up with an internal picture. To ‘see’ what was going on inside the mind of the artist at the time.

There’s nothing worse than the word free in conjuction with the gylph *. It sets me on edge. Because I know that free, doesn’t really mean free. It means free if you buy something, provide your contact details or give away your first born child.

Something that is free, and will come in handy for anyone who likes to read their news, or articles in general on the web. A very nifty little tool by arc90, a web firm, called Readability. Basically just add Readability as a bookmark in Safari / Firefox / any browser that has a Bookmark Toolbar, click it when you’re on a web page with typography that makes your eyes scream and voila. You’re CSS settings will be applied to the main text content, making it a joy to read.

* readers may purchase Sam Wieck (hereby referred to as Author) a tall soy latte from Starbucks. Author does not support or endorse Starbucks, but does need 15 more coffee stamps to attain his free tumbler.

I don’t need the latest, greatest camera to define beauty. It’s good to know that photographers from the 1880s are still whooping the pants off of many modern photographers.

Up until just this second every part of me felt that getting a good quality camera was going to be the key to getting good quality photographs. I’m a victim of my own gullibility. Or more rightly. My wallet is. That said I still drool over the Canon 5D like a fool.

They throw words like megapixels around without much care for any actual explanation. The simple fact is; as evidenced by this delightful image, that megapixels really mean nothing. If Mona Lisa had an arse for a face, would there be a portrait of her? Let alone a famous one. The subject contains the meaning.

Sometimes the title grabs you. This is once instance. I go through periods where I won’t see a movie for 6 months then spend the next 31 days watching at least 2-3 a week. If I could develop some consistency it would be a nice habit. The problem of course being that I’d be spending a lot of time watching movies. I guess I could stand to spare some of the time I spend watching TV shows I’ve already seen.

One face, many uses

Something I really want to talk about is stock photography – not individually posed models for advertising specific products – but the smiling lady on the telephone you see on every single website advertising something for ‘100% free’ or that very equal mix of ethnicity and gender on every American companies homepage.

Maddox, self-professed pirate and owner of the conspicuously titled ‘Best Page in the Universe’ has beaten me to all the funniest observations, as only Maddox can.

But is there something more sinister, something almost numbing about seeing the same, or very similar, people in the same, or very similar, poses on website after website.

She is a modern, young professional. She likes her nondescript job that requires formal attire. She is empowered. She is an individual. She looks straight at the camera, at you. She is not your subservient. She is not trying to seduce you. She is an equal. But a friendly, welcoming and attractive equal. She could become your best friend. Or your lover. But we still have no idea who she is.

We may think we do. We may interpret from the way she has been posed, the scene in which she stands, and the context in which she is used. We are given the opportunity to make a connection with her. Sub-consciously we very probably do make a connection. We tell her what she is. And she becomes that instantly. She is everything we want her to be.

She is all of those things before we even consider the most basic thing that would allow us to truly connect with her. She is all of those things before we know her name. We will never know her name. That arrangement of letters we spend our lives answering to. But even without this; we trust her. We discuss our purchases with her. We might tell her things our closest friends don’t even know. Because this is what we’re accustomed to.

This man is humbling. By that I mean, he makes me feel like a lazy dunce for looking but never seeing. And he dresses like a lady killer.

To be perfectly honest I am not quite sure what to think and how to feel about it. Providing that it is true, I think I’d feel over-joyed deception and prankery on such a great scale, and performed in such a visually magnificent way makes me smile. It makes a South Australian artist hiding fellatio in a Coke poster seem like child’s play. Entertaining child’s play all the same.