Images of our times

Today’s post : some cool pictures from this day and age.

Like this gem : the people at uber-hipster site Free Williamsburg decided they agreed with that one Hasidic newspaper’s decision to remove all sexually suggestive images from that famous picture of all the higher up in the White House watching the Osama Bin Laden takedown.

I mean, I saw the original picture, and I could not help myself, all that suggestive sexuality was making me think all kind of unholy thoughts.

Obviously, there’s only one solution.

Phew, that's so much better.

What a relief!

Seriously, sometimes something is so perfectly absurd that the perfect response is simply to do the opposite, without comment or clarification, and just let the image speak for itself.

Funny how said Hasidic paper used extremely modern technology (modern Photoshop, which is MAGICAL) to enforce an absurdly old-fashioned idea about the nature of women and sexuality. When your rag is afraid to have any pictures of women, period, you have got yourself some serious issues there, boychik. You just know female-denying homosocial misogyny has reached a dangerous level when the men are so afraid of the women that they don’t even want to see them.

The less actual power women have, the harder they press their informal power, and the more they raise sons who are terrified of said female informal power, and make even more restrictive rules… it’s a cycle.

On the world of art, commentary, and crudely drawn wangs.

I love you, cock drawing dude!

You can probably more or less figure this out from context, but for the record, what happened here was that this wall had the quite excellent graffiti art by three groovy artists on it (as depicted in the top image) for years, and then someone , right out of the blue and without telling anyone, not even the artists, decided to paint over it with that really lame beige shit.

The bottom image, therefore, is one anonymous person’s commentary on this crime against art. Bravo, anonymous commenter! Sure, they will just paint over your statement too, but the point was made.

I think that every time they paint over some graffiti on that wall, more local taggers should get together to put something still more obscene on that wall.

Bet they run out of beige paint before the taggers run out of dirty ideas.

Next up, a crude stick cartoon of someone who walked right into it.

Oooh, RADICAL BURN!

Walked into that one at full speed with your eyes open, dude.

Of course, the parallel is not perfect, because most porn videos don’t have a host who is purportedly trying to teach you how to have better sex yourself.

Could be interesting, though, I mean…. a sexual education porno tape done in the style of a cooking show. A bright-faced and perky young thing telling you what sex position you will be trying that day, giving you the list of toys and tools you will need, giving you homey Martha Stewart style tips about how you can make your own dildo-handled whip at home with just a few common household items. Episodes with cutesy titles like “Everyone’s Going Anal!” or “Showing You The Ropes (And Whips, and Leather”. How just a few sprays of whipped cream in the right places can really make your evening special.

“And here’s one I prepared earlier. ” And then, wang.

You know, I am pretty sure that would be a very popular show with the ladies. But who would put it on their network? It would be labeled porn and only dirty old men would end up seeing it.

Idea for a web series, maybe?

And one last thing, a video clip this time, but in my defense, it’s impressively visual.

Being textually biased, I love this whole new trend of making this typographical animations. And by taking the art form into a 3D environment, I think the author of this clip has upped the stakes. I quite like the visual effect, and find the whole thing very interesting and a worthy experiment.

Plus I love the Donnie Darko version of Mad World.

It has technical flaws, though. The big one is that the image is just not centred properly. That’s a very serious flaw when your entire piece requires people to read rapidly changing, moving text. If you are going to only give people a split second to read the words, the words have to help as much as possible, and expecting us to seek then read in that situation is too much.

Still, a very cool innovation in the art form, in my opinion.

One thought on “Images of our times

  1. Presumably the person whose wall that is believed for some reason that they should have the freedom to choose what goes on their wall.

Comments are closed.