Michael Widner's blog

Fox News, Obama, Osama, and the Analysis of Gaffes

Michael Widner — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Screenshot of FoxNews.com via Salon

After the stunning news that Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the news outlets are scrambling for different things to say about the event and its coverage. One meme that has begun cropping up fits with the existing narrative about the Republican bias of Fox News. For instance, Salon displayed the screenshot of the Fox website under the headline, "Fox News congratulates Bush for bin Laden".

Natasha Lennard notes that the Fox site featured an image of President Bush, but none of Obama. While I think the images in this screenshot don't go quite as far as Lennard claims, they certainly demonstrate the importance of visual rhetoric and a careful attention to what images an individual or organization chooses to foreground. We could easily call this screenshot a visual gaffe.

Indeed, sites across the Internet are constructing a narrative about Fox News that implies not only conservative bias, but a subconscious equation of Obama with Osama. A typo in the news scroll for a local Fox affiliate is receiving the most attention:

Image via The Huffington Post

Holding up Fox for ridicule while imputing a conscious (or perhaps subconscious) maliciousness to the mistake, a HuffPo writer snarkily remarks, "You know, we had almost forgotten how similar the names of our commander-in-chief and our #1 enemy happen to be. Thank you, Fox, for providing us with this helpful reminder!" An update to the original post links to another gaffe, this time verbal rather than visual. There's even a video on YouTube in which Fox reporter Geraldo Rivera claims "Obama is dead" before correcting himself.

The narrative these images allow Salon and HuffPo to advance is that not only is Fox News a biased media outlet promoting conservative views, but also that hatred of Obama runs so deeply there that it comes out as Freudian slips and subtle choices about page layout. Of course, while several of these mistakes appear on local affiliates, not the cable network channel, the fact that Fox News has provided a place for discussions such as the one featured below make such narratives easily believable to many people:

Image via BuzzFeed

One blogger, for example, calls Fox News a "horrible disgrace" based, it seems, entirely upon the Fox 40 mistaken news ticker. Fox 40, for its part, provided more a rebuttal than an apology in which it noted the ease with which typos can crop up while substantiating its claims with screenshots from 2 different ABC sites:

Screenshots via Fox40.com

Since, however, there's no existing narrative about ABC's bias, I suspect we won't see their mistakes or those from any other networks making the rounds nearly as regularly as the Fox News gaffes (except on Failblog).

What I find particularly interesting about these intepretations is that they show visual analysis "in the wild" so to speak, the importance of ethos to interpretation, and the way images taken almost entirely out of context can provide such apparently persuasive support to banal conspiracy theories. These arguments assume that everything we see from a news outlet (particularly one with a reputation like Fox's) is indicative of central control and deep antipathy towards President Obama. The images thus reinforce and perpetuate a narrative even though human error can far more easily account for the mistakes.

Fast Food Morality

Michael Widner — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Image via Fast Food FAILS Ads vs Reality

Appetizing, right? This image comes from one of several websites devoted to examining the differences between fast food as-advertised and as-is. These sites make the same argument: the ads promise fresh, attractive food, but what you get when you buy it fulfills the worst fears of the fast-food consumer. These photographs are the equivalent of showing how images of cover models are photoshopped for magazines. They imply that the companies who push such disappointing food are dishonest cheats.

The distortions of ads ties into a larger complex of concerns surrounding the marketing and consumption of fast food. San Fransisco, for instance, recently banned McDonald's from selling its Happy Meals to protect children ("Won't somebody think of the children?") from the pernicious effects of the toy-waving, high calorie junk food. The toy always rides on other heavily-marketed children's fare, mostly movies. The accumulated force is, many argue, too much for kids or parents to withstand. The child-consumer, like the adult duped by unrealistic ads, is a mindless, uncritical consumer of media and food, drawn in by doodads, bright colors, and that clown. Our mission, then, should be to teach the young how to parse marketing.

Picture of a McDonald's Happy Meal via "The War on Happiness: Leave Happy Meals Alone", The Atlantic

Screenshot of happymeal.com

Instead, we shame them. As other viz bloggers have noted (see Bodies of Evidence, Bodies vs Behavior: The Problems with Childhood Obesity Campaigns, and Lee Price and Exposed Eating), conversations about eating and ways to combat obesity often impute some moral defect to the subjects because of their bodies. The obese, such arguments go, blindly follow the dictates of ads and yet also rational agents whom we should blame for their unhealthy bodies. Even if PSAs don't verbally blame and shame the child, images of fat kids are held up for warning and mockery. Commentary often vocally does blame the parents for their moral failings and poor parenting.

Image via McDonalds Sued Over Happy Meals

The sarcasm from the Mitchieville blog encapsulates this judgement:

McDonald’s really does make it hard to say no to my legitimate children. I’ve tried feeding them food straight from the fridge, but apparently kids’ don’t like ice cubes and mustard for dinner. So then my kids’ catch a McDonald’s commercial on the tube – the same tube they had been watching for 10 straight hours – and they start up with their blathering nonsense about how they would love a hamburger and fries.

Parents who give in to their childrens' demands for Happy Meals are the same neglectful parents who plop their tots in front of the tv 10 hours a day, yet another moral failure.

The link between body and morality is not limited to children and fast food, however, as the Christian Diet movement shows:

Globe cover via Miss Plump Universenet

Several recent books imply that obesity is not only unhealthy, but a sin (e.g., Dieting for God and I Prayed Myself Slim). The correspondence between body and soul is easy and clear. If you do good works (i.e., eat healthy and exercise), your body will reflect it. If you sin by giving in to the deceiver and overeat, your "crime" will out as fat.

But like the habits these ideologies attack, the equivalence of body with soul is temporarily satisfying, ultimately unhealthy, and too convenient.

Visualizing the Economy and the Rhetoric of Infographics

Michael Widner — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

via Mother Jones, "It's the Inequality, Stupid"

Infographics can provide visual drama and emotional impact to otherwise incomprehensible and dry numbers. As Ladysquire's recent post on The 12 States of America demonstrates, they can be particularly good at capturing income inequality. The image from Mother Jones above is another nice example of the striking disparity among Americans' perception of wealth distribution, what they wish it were, and what it actually is. Americans clearly desire an equitable distribution that, while allowing for the accumulation of great wealth, nevertheless lifts all boats. Yet the sad reality is not only different from what the population wants and believes it to be, but is also a difference not just of degree, but nearly of kind.

via Mother Jones, "It's the Inequality, Stupid"

Another rhetorically useful element of such infographics is the multiple perspectives on similar data. The yellow circle of the top 0.01% income group barely fits on the page, itself a design choice intended to comment on disparity by imputing excess and greed to the wealthiest.

via Slate, "The Great Divergence in Pictures: A Visual Guide to Income Inequality"

Slate's similarly focused visual guide represents each percentage of the population with a figure of a human, a choice that makes it all the more dramatic.

Screenshot of New York Times, "Obama's 2012 Budget Proposal"

This interactive map (click through link above to interact) of President Obama's proposed 2012 budget makes it immediately clear that the potential cuts to the budget have pale in comparison to the overall costs and, even, increases in spending. Moreover, many of the cuts would disproportiately affect the most vulnerable.

The polished simplicity of each of these and many related infographics serves multiple purposes. The data become not only more compelling, but also less likely to be questioned. While I don't doubt their accuracy, these infographics nevertheless leave little, if any, room for interpretation. Unlike a prose description of context and motivation, the images present bare facts and a single perspective. Although I happen to agree with the implicit arguments for more equitable income distribution these charts make, I also recognize that they make it nearly impossible to arrive at any conclusion other than the intended one of unjust inequality.

The Impermanent Art of Graffiti

Michael Widner — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Graffiti by Banksy, Image via Holy Taco

As many of Banksy's works show, graffiti can convey social commentary. For example, the painting above, which shows a city worker sandblasting the famous Lascaux cave paintings just as he would modern day graffiti, wittily laments the blindness of local governments to public art.

The antagonism between government and graffiti artists is understandable; we cannot expect government officials to determine what is art and what is vandalism. At the same time, graffiti is public art to be encouraged, not suppressed. The longstanding criminality of the form makes it ideal for subsersive and counter-cultural messages. Even so, alongside simple, unappealing tags or wall-sized, astoundingly intricate paintings of pseudonyms, graffiti that bears an explicit message stands out. While Banksy's skillful works transmit these messages with a vigorous and unique style that accounts for much of his popularity, this type of work is seen elsewhere.

I discover such didactic art throughout Austin. The guiding philosophy rejects consumerism and conformity. I came across two particularly nice examples yesterday, while walking along the Pfluger pedestrian bridge over Town Lake:

"Breathe" is a call for mindfulness and focus within a series of images seemingly unconnected by anything other than style and color. "Robots" playfully suggests that we already act like robots without realizing it.

As Nate Kreuter notes in his post on graffiti, a key element is the audacity of the artist. Painting this train bridge surely counts as daring. A KXAN news report about the water rescue required for a tagger who jumped from it after being caught in broad daylight exemplifies the dangers. The reporter calls the artist a "graffiti vandal" and notes his bongos were also found; she thus makes it clear that this individual and, by extension, the art form in which he was engaged, is deviant and deserving of mockery.

But note the height of the bridge from which he jumped:

Why would someone take such a risk to create public art that many consider mere vandalism, art that the city will surely blast away within weeks if not days? The transitory nature of this form has led websites like Art Crimes to try and preserve via photographs the various pieces, including some in Austin. Here are two paintings by the same artist (Gomer) in the same place:

"Gomer" images via Art Crimes

The impermanence of the medium is, itself, part of the meaning. Not only must we reflect on the formal characteristics and the explicit or implicit messages, but also the effort put forth by an artist who knows the work will disappear. The result is an anonymous, altruistic art that momentarily beautifies and provokes before its inevitable destruction.

Create, Skate, and Destroy: Architecture in Motion

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 12:30:00 +0000

Rodney Torres, 50-50 through Love Sculpture, image from Quartersnacks

Street skaters love architecture. Few people other than architects notice or appreciate the designs in concrete, marble, metal, and brick that comprise a city, but seen through a skater's eyes, lines of movement appear everywhere. Ledges, stairs, hand rails, and even (or especially) smooth concrete and marble elicit a joyful recognition of possibilities. Rather than an agglomeration of static structures, the city becomes an invitation to motion; the skater desires contact with the hard surfaces of the urban environment. Assemblage of body, board, and buildings: a intimate becoming, in love with (the) concrete.

Fred Gall, bluntslide, image from chrome ball incident

Gall slides across a wax-blackened stair rather than stepping up or down the set, reflecting a dramatic shift in perspective:

Streetskaters are the other great horde of architectural fetishists. The fetish is slightly different in aspect but not in intensity. Perspectivally, architects are generally schooled to gaze upward, and cultivate an awe of form. Skateboarders remain at eye-level, street-level, on the plane of human actions. Architects strive to behold totalities; skaters fixate, on smaller parts— they look closer, at details and textures and otherwise unremarkable typologies. Skaters are the sensualists, the kinesthetic lovers of space and form. (Skateboarding, Action, and Architecture)

Eric Koston (Skater of the Year 2006), 50-50, image from chrome ball incident

A very long, round handrail with multiple kinks requires precise balance that can distinguish and respond to every nuance of the metal:

Skateboarding lets you experience buildings not as a set of objects, designed by architects, but as a set of spatial experiences. By this I mean that moving around on a skateboard makes you consider buildings and landscapes as a set of opportunities to skate, you are constantly sizing up banks, ledges, curves, curbs and so on for their ability to be skated upon. So there is this initial process of interrogation, looking at architecture differently, working out whether it can be skated or not. And then there is the actual engagement with the architecture, using the skateboard and your body in relation to the physicality of the building, and here one appreciates architecture differently again, this time as a direct sensual engagement, less to do with the mind and more to do the living body that we all possess. (Skateboarding vs Architecture)

Image from chrome ball incident

[Skateboarding] addresses the physical architecture of the modern city, yet responds not with another object but with a dynamic presence.... It produces space, but also time and the self. Skateboarding is constantly repressed and legislated against, but counters not through negative destruction but through creativity and production of desires.... It requires a tool (the skateboard), but absorbs that tool into the body. It involves great effort, but produces no commodity ready for exchange. It is highly visual, but refutes the reduction of activity solely to the spectacle of the image. (Iain Borden, Skateboarding, Space, and the City: Architecture and the Body, p. 1.)

The time-lapse image above is from a chrome ball incident post focused not on a single skater, but on a single spot. Skaters constantly seek out new spots or attempt new tricks at old spots. The ever-changing urban landscape offers opportunity one week, only to take it away the next. Some spots become legendary:

The History of Hubba Hideout

But these legends will eventually be destroyed. Skating highlights not only the possibilities of motion through space, but also the transitory nature of the most seemingly permanent of fixtures. The city is a localized phoenix; spots are constantly destroyed and created.

Supra team riders at Lego Land, Austin DIY skate spot, image from Lunchbox Party

Something as simple as concrete slabs leaning against one another can become a hidden pleasure garden. Not content to skate only what the governments and corporations build, skaters also take it upon themselves to rework their spaces with DIY projects (Portland's Burnside skate park is the grandfather of them all) like Austin's Lego Land (above) or the now destroyed Alien Pod (below). Skaters become architects of the local, the temporary. The knowledge that the landscape always changes demands an urgency. Tomorrow might be too late:

Alien Pod (RIP), Austin DIY skate spot, image from Concrete Disciples

Where Children Sleep - James Mollison's Diptychs

Michael Widner — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:37:26 +0000

All images by James Mollison, in Where Children Sleep, downloaded from VisualNews.com

This photograph is part of James Mollison's book Where Children Sleep, which features 56 similar diptychs and is, as Mollison states, an attempt to engage with children's rights via an inclusive vision of the diversity of places children sleep. Mollison intended the book for children aged 9-13. He states that he wanted to photograph each child away from where he or she sleeps and in front of a neutral background to show them "as equals, just as children." The variety of sleeping places (the simple inability to write "bedrooms" is, itself, telling) are, Mollison notes, "inscribed with the children's material and cultural circumstances."

I can easily imagine multiple pedagogical uses for these arresting photographs. For the target audience, what better way to get children to contemplate socioeconomic diversity than through comparison with something they no doubt have never given much though to? By grounding the lesson in something as intimate as where one sleeps, with the attendant expression of identity common to bedrooms, the photographs carry great emotional power. There are examples of excess and predominantly one-note identities:

There are also images of povery like the opening image for this post:

Although Mollison notes that he wants the children to stand as equals before the neutral background, I'm not convinced he succeeds. The traces of their material and cultural embeddedness are never fully erased. Clothes, tools, bags, jewelry, and other accoutrements invariably mark each child. Rather than a shocking discongruity, the two images in each diptych seem, for the most part, to fit. Each child appears removed from her or his environment, but not essentially separate from it. Does this visual continuity between child and sleeping place represent a failure on the artist's part or the impossibility of the task?

Lolita's Legs and Cover Images

Michael Widner — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Movie poster from Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of the novel Lolita

Having just finished teaching Lolita again, I find myself thinking about representations of Dolores Haze and of the novel. While my classroom discussions often revolve around how Humbert Humbert depicts her character, I'm interested here in the related issue of how publishers (and movie producers) metonymically depict the work through the image of a girl.

Some potentially NSFW images after the break.

The poster for Kubrick's movie is probably the most famous image of Lolita: red, heart-shaped sunglasses, red lollipop, red lips, and red title. (The image is appropriate: H.H. first sees Dolores Haze sunbathing and wearing sunglasses in a garden; he calls her the reincarnation of his childhood Riviera love.) The poster girl is a seductive stand-in for the movie.We assume Humbert Humbert's gaze and breathe her "nymphean evil" as she manipulates the gentle, shy European professor.

Cover image of Lolita, Random House, 1997

Browse a local book store and this edition is the one we often find (replete with the infamous Vanity Fair quote). From under a pleated skirt a girl's thin, bare legs bow inward in a demure, childish pose. Like the sliver of eyes peering over sunglasses and the red lips, here again we find a double metonymy (or, for purists, a synecdochal metonymy). The young girl's legs represent Lolita's sexual desirability as well as the novel itself. There's no indication of H.H.'s role, his complex mind, or his linguistic acrobatics.

We see the leg motif repeatedly in Lolita covers:

1970s NL Omega, Amsterdam

1991 POL Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warsaw

1995 GB Penguin, London

2001 FR Gallimard (Du monde entier), Paris

2007 POL Muza, Warszawa

All images and publisher information from Covering Lolita

Inhabiting a spectrum of sexuality from the demure to the frankly erotic, each of these images situates desire in a girl's legs. Sometimes she is seductress, at other times innocent prey. This visual motif for illicit desire, however, comes not from the novel. While H.H. does describe Dolly's limbs, he does so in the course of the many anatomical meditations that explore her entire body and which even express a desire to turn her inside out and see her lungs and heart. Indeed, if we might say there are body parts he fetishizes, they would be either armpits or hips, not legs. It is primarily the adult women, with their "thick thighs," whose legs the narrator notices most often.

2000 TAI Xian Jue, Taipei

2005 JAP Shinchosha (PB), Tokyo

Images and publisher information from Covering Lolita

The prevalence, then, of a girl's legs as synecdoche for Lolita-the-girl and metonym for Lolita-the- novel must come from elsewhere. Maybe the publishing houses are simply turning to images that seemed to work well for their predecessors, which appears to be the case for the two above. But these images carry meaning beyond a publisher's reliance on visual cliché. Legs easily differentiate woman from girl and are provocative yet still tame enough not to offend. They simultaneously embody sex and innocence while fragmenting a girl's body into fetishized object.

Still, all these covers leave me dissatisfied. The novel's focus is less the girl than the man who desires and abducts her. H.H.'s eloquently ambiguous narration spends more time conveying his variable moods and rationalizations than describing Dolores Haze. In one respect, however, the images correspond to the contents they cover; H.H. betrays little interest in Lolita as anything other than a desirable body that he catalogues in meticulous detail, piece by piece. Her mind remains a mystery, even though it might contain "a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate" forever forbidden him.

A fairly recent design contest, prompted by the Covering Lolita exhibit, attempted to address this bias toward lollipops and legs. John Bertram, the contest's sponsor, writes:

Nabokov’s work is masterful in its clarity and overflows with powerful and finely-wrought imagery and yet so few of the covers attempt to capture any of this richness, and many of them are merely absurd, or banal or a laughable combination of both.

Here's the winner of the contest:

Image by Lyuba Haleva of Bulgaria

Bertram likes this image because "it really gets at the poetry of the novel. Humbert is transported by Lolita, so the wings are an intriguing choice. Whether they represent Lolita and Annabel Leigh or Lolita the fantasy and Lolita the real person I have no idea. Somehow it all feels right to me and very inspired, and although the typeface is anachronistic and suggests to me a classic European novel, it seems to work.” I have to agree. Unlike the vast majority of extant covers, this one not only blurs fantasy and reality (another prevalent theme of the novel), but also shows the narrator, a figure who is far more central than the girl(s) he desires. The girls are appropriately nymph-like rather than realistic; we see H.H. only in silhouette and as through a veil. His "slippery self" eludes us as it does his own narrative, yet remains indispensable.

War Games - Isao Hashimoto

Michael Widner — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:30:00 +0000

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto

Originally created in 2003 by the Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, "1945-1998" maps all 2053 nuclear explosions during that period.

A Wired article from the time quotes Hashimoto as saying he wanted to show "the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." The increasing pace of tests culminates in a global frenzy of explosions. Each nation's tests have a different color and sound associated with them. The effect is oddly beautiful and reminiscent of an early video game. Even the counters for each nation look like scores.

Hashimoto states that he chose lights and sounds to provide "equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier," yet the clear association with video games also invokes a chilling disconnect between form and content. While appreciating the abstract beauty of the map, we also consider the horror of mass destruction displayed in such a seemingly trivial form. It reminds me of another cautionary work in the war-as-video-game genre:

Meat is Murder, PETA is Porn

Michael Widner — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

Imogen Bailey; image from http://www.imogenbailey.com/peta.html

It's not news to say that PETA, in its quest to protect animals, regularly objectifies women in disturbing and disturbingly consistent ways. We've had a couple of posts on viz. already that discuss some of PETA's tactics, such as Posing for Your Eating Habits and the Girls-Gone-Wild parody examined in Ugh! Milk Gone Bad. I object to PETA's ads both for how they perpetuate some of the worst sexism and objectification and for how they are counterproductive; I am a PETA-hating vegetarian. But the trainwreck that is their media campaign is, at least, provocative, if nothing else (which, I suppose, is their "strategy"). Now, PETA has done it again with a new set of videos and pictures that connect eating vegetables to pornography, which they call the "Veggie Love Casting Session". Before we look at "Veggie Love," however, I thought I'd share a few salient images that demonstrate how it is a logical outgrowth of their previous work.

Warning: the rest of the images in this post are NSFW (Not Safe For Work).

All images from PETA.org

The message these images convey is simple: women are sexy animals. I suppose PETA wants us to treat animals with as much respect as we, as a society, treat women. Since, however, PETA seems perfectly fine with the sexual objectification of women and the insistence that they always be beautiful and naked, their message becomes incoherent. Indeed, the "Veggie Love" ads make clear PETA's alliance with the values and visual motifs of porn:

Veggie Love Casting Session screenshots from http://features.peta.org/casting-session/default.aspx

Playing on the designs of paid pornography websites, the PETA site promises "explicit casting footage" starring bikini-clad women (and one man) in the throes of passion... with their vegetables of choice. Visual allusions to fellatio recur throughout the images and videos. The message, again, is one equating vegetarianism with sex. It makes me wonder who the audience is. Since most of the celebrity spokespeople for PETA are women and most vegetarians are women (a 1992 report claims 68%), perhaps PETA is trying to induce more men to give up meat. Is PETA implicitly promising naked women to men who "go veg"?

Regardless, it's yet another sad entry in the hall of shame that is PETA. I sometimes wonder if the organization is funded by the meat industry. What better way to discredit vegetarianism and animal rights than to make their most outspoken proponents seem like sexist lunatics?

Super Bowl Car Commercials and the Uses of the Past

Michael Widner — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 02:21:03 +0000

Now that our national gladiatorial spectacle has ended, we turn to the obligatory analysis of the major media event. How many Packers can get injured in a single season? Why, exactly, are the Black Eyed Peas popular? And, most importantly, what about the commercials? Rather than discuss which ones are the funniest, depict the most animal cruelty, or objectify women the worst, I'd like to discuss what seems like an odd coincidence: many of the car commercials use different visions of the past to sell their product.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=47cff490-1225-4e91-97b3-579cdcccdc98" target="_new" title="">Mercedes: Diddy</a>

Mercedes: Diddy

In the Mercedes commercial, we see new car models joining the family. The commercial starts in a barn with an older model car. Its radio turns on and we hear Janis Joplin sing "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz". The setting, the scratchiness of the sound, and the song's throwback country style all make the song sound older than it really is, establishing a past in the country. Near the middle, around the 33 second mark, we see a futuristic car drive past something akin to a Model T prototype. Presumably both are Mercedes. These and several hundred other cars from many eras converge to welcome the 4 new models. Mercedes thus constructs a continuous history, an unbroken line of Diddy-endorsed quality and luxury, that continues with these new cars.

Hyundai Sonata: Don't Settle

The Hyundai Sonata commercial takes a slightly different approach. Rather than just cars, the emphasis is on technology of many sorts: bicycles, cell phones, portable music players, and video games, among others. A voice-over asks what the world would be like if we settled for the first thing that came along. Here the technological past intrudes upon the present to build a teleological narrative that places the Sonata as the ultimate goal. The visual contrast between the modern car and ancient technologies also implies a similar distance between the Sonata and other vehicles.

Chevy Volt: Make History

In this Chevy Volt ad, on the other hand, we have a history of technology defined by moments of brilliance. Rather than an antiquated past or a proud history, we see a series of great discoveries and inventions: electricity, the lightbulb, television, space flight, electric guitar amplifiers, and others. Chevy places their new electric car in the pantheon of technological inventions, giving us both a progress narrative and a muted teleology like the Hyundai and Mercedes commercials. Moreover, the Chevy spot seems to combine the sense of historical greatness of the Mercedes ad with the technological fetishism of the Hyundai one. History, Chevy tells us, is told through the great moments in technology.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=1fa2d8a2-2ed0-419a-b60c-d2c39014d912" target="_new" title="">BMW: Changes</a>

BMW: Changes

BMW, however, tells us that the past was dirty, inefficient, slow, and noisy. Their new diesel-powered vehicle represents cleanliness, speed, efficiency, and power. The noise is not a clanking, but a baritone engine hum. The dirty cars struggling along the streets and spewing thick, black smoke make the blue, immaculately polished sports car even more appealing. The car represents not continuous progress, but a clear break with the bad ol' days.

<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=f2db3bd3-0a4c-4681-ae0e-5d8897d5519e" target="_new" title="">Carmax.com: Gas Station</a>

Carmax.com: Gas Station

Unlike BMW, Carmax caricatures the Leave it to Beaver 1950s of unbearable cheerfulness and unrealistic levels of service. A modern driver pulls into a gas station and is suddenly barraged by attendants cleaning his windows, checking his oil, filling his tank. He assumes he's being attacked and runs off screaming. But, as the closing tag tells us, CarMax provides this type of service, informed by a nostalgic creation of the past. The clean-cut, uniformed, and smiling workers contrast with the paranoid, stressed, and unkempt modern driver. CarMax, the ad argues, returns us to a more wholesome time.

While these were certainly not always the best or most interesting of the Super Bowl commercials, the ties among them struck me. They almost all rely upon cliched visions of imagined pasts that fetishize technology. Is it the revolving door of automotive invention--a new model every year--that demands we abandon the obsolete while retaining what progress has been made? Are other products are so insistently linked to the past?

Criminal Photography

Michael Widner — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:04:55 +0000

(see image description below for credit)

Who is this dapper gentleman? Who was the photographer who composed this photo? And what is the subject waiting for?

We can assume he's waiting to be fingerprinted. This is a mugshot from the New South Wales Police in Sydney, Australia, taken probably sometime in the 1930s. It's part of the Justice & Police Museum collection,and held by Historic Houses Trust. The collection has, according to the HHT website, an estimated 130,000 images from between 1910 and 1960.

From Historic Houses Trust, Justice & Police Museum collection

Here we see Walter Smith, a man whose face has a lot of character. In the context of mugshots, we consider him a potentially dangerous fellow, but how much does the context influence our impressions of this man? The scars on his nose and chin, the deep lines in his forehead, the offset jaw, and the intense stare tell a story of a man with a hard life, one who has probably been in numerous fist fights, but possibly (if we didn't know he was under arrest here) just another hard-working man of the 30s. Neither of these photos, or the many other beautiful photographs seen here, fit the genre of a contemporary mugshot:

Mugshot from The Smoking Gun

Multimedia Children’s Literature and The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Michael Widner — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:19:50 +0000

Cover image of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Children’s literature is, practically by definition, a multimedia endeavor. The beloved works of Dr. Seuss, Elsa Holmelund Minarik, Roald Dahl, Frank Baum, and countless others have a drawing at least every few pages, if not on every page. But as the audience grows older and gains reading proficiency, the pictures slowly disappear, an indication that all but the simplest of stories can be told in words alone. The multimodal aspects of children’s literature are, then, little more than a helpful scaffold to engage children while building the skills necessary for reading.

But Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (winner of the 2008 Caldecott Medal) is a book of an entirely different order. Selznick describes it as “a novel in words and pictures.” Unlike most children’s novels, in which the art simply illustrates a scene already described in words, the pencil drawings in Selznick’s novel help tell the story.

Image Credit: Screenshots from Amazon.com preview of The Invention of Hugo Cabret

The novel opens with a preface that invites the audience to close their eyes and imagine themselves in a darkened movie theater, just before the curtains separate and the projector clatters to life. Set in 1930s Paris, the book invokes silent films. The drawings throughout are cross-hatched pencil and the page borders themselves look like the cards of text that added written dialogue to early movies. It opens with an extended sequence of pictures that, from a small, distant shot of the moon, grow to fill the page while moving in ever more closely until we see, in glimpses, the principal characters. It thus makes its allegiance to cinema clear early. Yet though the form relies heavily on multiple media in a way unlike most children’s literature, the novel draws on more than just drawings and words.

A combination of detective story, historical fiction, and coming-of-age narrative, the plot revolves around recently orphaned Hugo Cabret, his repair of an automaton of mysterious provenance, and a grumpy old man who runs a toy shop in a train station.

Maillardet's automaton, which inspired Selznick

The machine, like Maillardet's above, is in the figure of a seated person, holding a pen over a desk. Hugo, who has been living in a train station since his father died in a museum fire, becomes obsessed with the idea that his father has hidden a secret message in the automaton, which it will write out once he can repair it; he believes that message, further, will save his life. Having learned the art of horology (what a great word to find in children's fiction) from his father, Hugo is especially skilled at working with gears, springs, and the other mechanisms by which the automaton functions. Once he finally repairs it (he gets parts by stealing small mechanical toys from the toy booth), the machine, rather than writing a message, draws a picture: a scene from his father’s favorite movie, A Trip to the Moon.

The drawing bears a signature: G. Méliès. Part One, in which the mystery is the automaton and Hugo’s own history (which the narrator slowly reveals to us) ends with the discovery of this output; Part Two follows up by trying to discover why the old toy maker knows about the automaton and reacts so emotionally when he finds that Hugo carries a notebook with drawings of it. As we learn, Papa Georges, as his god-daughter calls him, is Georges Méliès, one of the early innovators of cinema, the automaton's inventor, a magician, and, by those who remember him, believed dead. Through Hugo’s efforts, the French Film Academy uncovers many of his films, all of which had been thought lost, and reintroduces Méliès and his fantasy-filled, revolutionary movies to the world, thereby giving him back his purpose, without which he was, in Hugo’s mind, like a broken machine. Fittingly, movie stills and sketches from the real works by Méliès also intersperse the pages, layering yet another visual medium onto the narrative.

A still from A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès

Hugo often thinks of his own mind as a machine of gears and springs. He sees the world as one large machine in which everything and everyone has a function. He has nightmares about broken clocks. He carries gears in his pockets. Machinery ticks through the novel, texturing the illustrations and the imagery, explaining Hugo’s mind, and linking the different parts of the novel. At the conclusion, we discover that, rather than an author, the book was produced by a fantastically complicated automaton that drew all the pictures and wrote all the words, a machine constructed by (who else?) the now adult Hugo Cabret, who has taken the name Professor Alcofrisbas, a recurrent character in Méliès’s films. Machines become, in other words, another medium through which the novel tells its story.

In weaving allusions to machines throughout the work and then concluding with the fantasy of a novel-producing machine, The Invention of Hugo Cabret requires us to consider not only words and pictures, but also the physical machinery of book production and the author as a machine. Recalling the drawing automaton Hugo repairs, the fantastic novel-writing machine inserts itself unavoidably into our visual imagination. Drawings, movies, and clockwork machines are all integral elements of the novel, taking it far beyond picture books. The cinematic aspects join the machinery of creation to create a work that is uniquely beautiful, densely textured, and experimental: traits rarely seen in literature for any age group.