Making advertising fun: Fight For Kisses

You know you work with people who have a sense of humor when your boss sends you links like this. Enjoy.

How it ought to be for the most peaceful people on earth

An image of joy and peace (thanks to my colleague Steffen, who shared it with me a long time ago) as I am reading the sad news about the violence and pain inflicted onto Birmanian Buddhist monks, who must be among the most peaceful people on earth, in their fight for freedom and democracy.

Beta testers wanted

Well, I should say “tasters”, not “testers”. And it’s not really a beta anymore – although traditional Modena balsamic vinegar takes years and years to ripen, I think we can safely say we’re out of beta by now. Our barrels (durmast oak, chestnut, acacia, ash, and cherry wood) have been working their magic and the stuff that comes out the small end of the line is liquid brown gold.

If you’d like to come see us in Modena, this trade show on the first weekend of October is a great time. Everybody who’s anybody in balsamic vinegar will be there, and your taste buds will have the time of their life. Other interesting exhibitors, at least judging from names and locations, will be: Osteria Caserma Guelfa & Nudo e Crudo, Vinaigre del Condado de Huelva, Consejo Regulador Vinagre de Jerez, Vinaigrerie La Guinelle, Pars Yeema Biotechnologist Co., Wuhan Polytechnic University, and the College of Food Science and Technology of Huazhong Agriculture University.

Finally, a few words on the show’s visual identity. The model is good-looking and the product is appealingly shown on a chunk of Parmesan (although fans believe that dunking, not sprinkling, is the recommended tasting solution for traditional balsamic and Parmesan). But it feels like we’ve seen this advertising trick (show model’s mouth, hide model’s eyes) a gazillion times before. Creatives, some more creativity next time, please.

How the Web is not happening in Italy

I have always been amazed by LinkedIn stats about my network. Why?

Because I have lived by now for the past 12 years in Italy, after coming back from California. Granted, I always worked in fairly international environments, so about 50% of my direct (first-degree) contacts are in Italy, and the other half is abroad.

But when I look at the total people I could theoretically reach (up to the third degree), it’s a completely different picture. The top five locations (see upper right corner in the screen shot) are all in the US and UK. Paris has also been part of the top five in the past. Italy, not really.

What does this mean? It means that my non-Italian contacts have many more contacts, and their contacts have more contacts in turn, then my Italian contacts. Which does not, I think, reflect what happens in real life: Italians are strong and talented networkers, and much if not most business gets done through networking. Yet, it seems to be less of a priority for my Italian contacts to track their contacts through a platform like LinkedIn. Maybe it’s because we don’t move around so much: if we hardly ever lose track of each other, then “getting back in touch” is less important. Other explanations are welcome.

I am also often amused by the other two network profile boxes – add a colleague in Netherlands, and the Netherlands becomes the fastest growing location; link up with a friend in Finland, and Finland shoots up the ranking. Hey, and should I ever go to Daytona Beach, I can probably go out for drinks with someone. But what’s not amusing is that New York, San Francisco/Silicon Valley, and London are in the fastest growing most of the time – I feel like a character caught in the wrong spot in a Richard Florida book. No Italian location (not even the Milan area, where most of my Italian contacts are) ever gets to the fastest growing. Maybe it’s good that I don’t often link with one of those “power networkers” who suddenly double my Milanese network in a single burst – networks should be built slowly and patiently. But I can’t help thinking that the humble microcosm of my LinkedIn contacts is a mere reflection of how the Web is not growing in Italy.

Using conceptual art to sell handbags: did they ask John Baldessari, or did they just do it?

This ad appears in women’s magazines today. It promotes leather goods by a manufacturer in Fano, Italy. Anybody who is even remotely familiar with the conceptual art of the last forty years will recognize the imprint of the artist John Baldessari.
So the question is: did they think it was a cool look and just pay homage to it? Or was Baldessari himself involved or informed in any way? and if so, why not acknowledge it?

Happiness is 5 million users

More celebration and goodies (screensaver) here.

“What about the Internet?” “Oh, we did the whole parental-control schmear, but Kevin cracked it in a day.”

Yesterday I talked about Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I recommend even more now that I’ve finished it. About a third into the book, Eva recalls her civil trial for parental negligence:

“You see,” I proceeded, “by the time he was eleven or twelve, this was all too late. The no-gun rules, the computer codes… Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn’t just naive, it’s a vanity. We want to be able to tell ourselves what good parents we are, that we’re doing our best. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have let Kevin play with whatever he wanted; he liked little enough. And I’d have ditched the TV rules, the G-rated videos. They only made us look foolish. They underscored our powerlessness, and they provoked his contempt.”

Stories of mothers and sons: two evil children, an object of too much love, and a boy genius

Recently I seemed to be reading a lot of father-and-son stories, from John Fante to Stephen King, books that delved into the mixture of guilt, regret, and disappointment inherent in such relationships. Then I realized two things. First, there are also a lot of mother-and-son stories out there. Second, they don’t meddle with complex or secondary emotions: they’re about stark and unmitigated love, or about equally strong and unmitigated hate.

In the hate category, I am awed by Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, the beautifully written story of travel writer and entrepreneur Eva Khatchadourian and of how her life is destroyed by the birth of a child, Kevin, who turns out to be inscrutably mean. It reminded me most of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, where Ben’s congenital malice, even if doctors say there’s nothing wrong with him, ends up destroying his family. Of course, there are several differences between the two stories: Ben is, as the title says, the fifth child in a large and previously happy family, while Kevin is the first-born, followed only years later by angelic little sister Celia. And while Ben, being English, ends up joining a gang of juvenile delinquents, Kevin, living in suburban New Jersey, finds himself enjoying a fleeting notoriety in jail for killing seven classmates, a teacher and a cafeteria worker in a quasi-Columbine-style high school massacre. Yet, in spite of telling two different stories, at the core of both novels are the devastating hate that the son vomits on the world around him, and the helplessness of his mother, or really any mother similarly cursed with evil offspring.

In the love category, here are two books about children brought up by single mothers as a vast educational project: Loverboy by Victoria Redel and The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. Redel’s book, written in a rather minimalistic prose of short and luminous chapters, is about the obsessive love of a mother for her little boy, Paul, and her desire to protect him from the outside world: but while Paul always remains a bit out of focus, his mother’s compulsive behaviors and lies are laid out in a fast escalation to the not-so-surprise ending.

DeWitt’s wonderfully eccentric story, about depressed but linguistically gifted mother Sibylla and her child prodigy Ludo, is vastly more charming: Ludo starts playing the piano at three, reading Ancient Greek at four, and goes on to Hebrew, Japanese, Old Norse, Inuit, and advanced mathematics. Oh, and he is also an insightful film critic, particularly fond of watching and rewatching Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, which Sibylla provides to compensate for the lack of male role models in Ludo’s life. In his teens, he sets out (in spite of Sibylla’s opposition) to look for his father, methodically testing one by one all the men who might unknowingly have fathered him. Among these four books, this is the quirkiest, and if you like the outpour of erudition you’ll find it quite enjoyable.

(In reviewing The Last Samurai, a critic wrote that Helen DeWitt “seems to have written this book as if her life depended on it“: three years later, DeWitt appears to have planned and attempted suicide. She has since then moved to Berlin and written another book, Your Name Here, with the Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. As far as I can tell, she seems to be hanging in there. You can even get two of her short stories by sending her five bucks via PayPal, which I am thinking of doing just now).

Gerhard Richter and his amazing stained glass window for the Cologne cathedral

This is the stunning glass window commissioned by the authorities of the 13th-century Cologne cathedral to artist Gerhard Richter (read more about the technical background on Wired, also the source for the image; more pictures in the photo gallery on Der Spiegel). The original window had been destroyed in World War II and replaced in the 1950s by a nearly transparent piece of glass.

Cardinal Joachim Meisner has been critical of this work, and reportedly would have preferred a more traditionally figurative subject, for example with representations of saints or 20th century martyrs. He also apparently told a local newspaper that Richter’s window seemed more fit for a mosque. He did not show up for the unveiling of the work.

In centuries past, the church has always been a very smart investor in two commodities: real estate and art. The Catholic church in particular is one of the largest real estate owners worldwide – and, like it or not, the steward of a large chunk of the West’s artistic heritage. And the point is that, before it becomes heritage, all art is contemporary. The Sistine Chapel was scandalously weird too, once upon a time.

Smart mosque builders will be sure to follow the Cardinal’s advice and commission contemporary artists and architects to contribute their work. (A non-religious building, the Parisian Institut du Monde Arabe, designed by Jean Nouvel and Architecture-studio and opened in 1987, comes to mind as a trailblazer among academic and scientific institutions).

Christian churches have long entrenched themselves into their well-defended corner of contemporary cultural discourse, mounting their periodic attacks on the spectrum of modernity from scientific evidence (Creation Museums? please) to reproductive rights (see the nonsensical law governing IVF in Italy). If they can re-engage in a wider discussion with society mediated by contemporary art, which they have not done in a long time (except for the occasional private chapel by a modern master and a flurry of work by second-rate artists), that is not a bad step.

Same blog, new theme: it’s still me

I had been concerned for a while with readability, especially for my longer posts, under the previous theme (or template, or skin, or whatever these things are called). I have no patience for tweaking CSS stylesheets, so I just picked from what was available among basic WordPress options and have now switched from Andreas09 to Garland (as a side note, I still find WordPress much clunkier and less forgiving than Blogger, even if many swear by it). Hope you find this new look easier on the eye.