viz.

I just finished reading an article in The New Yorker about HBO's The Wire, a gritty drama set in the city of Baltimore. Each season the show focuses on a different aspect of the city, beginning with drug dealers on the streets and gradually moving outwards to include the labor unions at the docks, the politicans, and in its fifth and final season, the news and those who cover it. More often than not, the shows paints an image of the city that is grim and hopeless.

I live on a one way street so I’ve always viewed the “One Way” signs in my neighborhood as good information for motorists and visitors. They are excellent reminders to people that cars should only face east on Washington Street. But this altered image (actually from one block over on Madison Street, where cars travel west) reminds us that street signs are not merely about expressing information about traffic patterns; they are also the banal markers that inform us about the presence of the state’s authority.

Dove expertly uses visual rhetoric to combat the insidious forces of ... visual rhetoric.

Earlier this month, a Texas Tech fraternity found themselves victims of their school's solicitation section of the code of conduct. One of the students in the fraternity was selling t-shirts to raise school spirits for the A&M game. The shirts echoed the (strange) A&M motto "Gig 'Em!" with the more timely "Vick 'Em!" The back of the shirt had a football player wearing the number 7 (Vick's number) hanging the Aggie mascot Reveille by a rope:
Texas Tech halted the sale of the t-shirts; citing the code of conduct, the school said it doesn't allow the sale of material that is "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste." The student in question argued that he planned to donate part of the profits a local animal defense league because of "Animal Rights, stuff like that." I guess when it comes to obscenity, like Justice Stewart, those administers "know it when they see it."

Because the purpose of memorials is to represent and remember a person or event, they make arguments. Once there is representation, there is argument. It's also clear that memorials make arguments because people get very excited about how and where someone or something is represented. That’s why the rebuilding of the Twin Towers site is still being discussed. This sort of passionate argument about memorials is also seen in University of Texas at Austin's statue situation.

This poster is a political advertisement for the SVP (in English, the "Swiss People's Party"), a far-right political party in Switzerland that has made anti-immigration policies a centerpiece of its campaign in an upcoming election. The posters have been controversial: the tagline reads "to create security," and the image depicts three white sheep booting the black sheep from the swiss flag, presumably symbolic of Swiss territory.

I'm not quite sure how to write about this for Viz., but when I found out about it, I thought it was important to think about in terms of the limits, possibilities, and intimacies of visual rhetoric.

A tattoo artist in NYC recently wrote to Mod Blog about her first job drawing in the nipple and areola for a mastectomy patient. The entry, titled "Rx Tattoo," describes how a surgeon contacted the artist to supplement the work of reconstructive surgery.

When teaching a rhetoric course, I love to use the Apple Commercials to show my students an example of real-world ethos.

Earlier this week, my lunch was liberated from the refrigerator in the grad-student lounge. After I sent a gently scolding email to our listserve, my friend pointed me to passiveaggressivenotes.com, where readers submit exchanges between themselves and coworkers, roommates, and strangers when conflict arose. (more below the fold)