Ad company sues blogger

Warren Kramer Paino Advertising of New York City has decided to sue a blogger who commented negatively on the PR campaign they had been hired to do for tourism for the state of Maine. Personally I can't see how putting forth your own personal view that a particular campaign is a waste of tax-payer's money or badly put together constitutes defamation - it is comment and individual opinion, which are protected by free speech. Are WKPA trying to say that no individual is allowed to say anything about a company or a local government campaign which those bodies may not approve of? On that basis that would mean if any of us commented on, say the fact that Edinburgh City Council ripping up the historic High Street to resurface it only a couple of years after spending vast sums to redo it and now having to do it all over again because they got it wrong showed gross incompetence and financial mis-management of public funds would have to worry about being sued by the council or the sub-contractors who made such an arse of the job in the first place.

Oh dear, perhaps it means I can't comment on the most recent McDonald's TV advert in the UK. The one which features a small child running manically about everywhere with his parents constantly shouting "slow down" to the little tyke. This goes on for the whole ad until they go to McDonald's and the kid is asked what he wants with his Happy Meal and he is befuddled, unable to make a decision and told to "hurry up". I guess now I can't comment that it would be possible to interpret this advert in a way contrary to the company's preferred reading - that perhaps you could read this advert as showing the child is manically hyperactive throughout because his parents feed him a diet of high-sugar fast food and the reason the only time he slows down is when asked a question is because this diet makes his body hyperactive but provides few nutrients necessary for cognitive development, so the child cannot reach a decision when asked because his brain isn't developing due to poor diet.

Of course, I'd hate to be sued by a certain burger company which has been know to issue more than the occasional writ for expressing my own personal reading of that text. Fortunately I know as someone with an honours degree in communcation studies that alternative interpretations against the preferred reading of a text is a well-known phenomenon in academic studies and can use that as precedent to defend my opinion (that came in handy last year when my then employers said I had used a mass medium to defame them - I explained what a mass medium was in academic terms and then added I had a degree in this sort of thing and they could contact my old tutors to find out they were wrong and I was right. I enjoyed that).

Then again, I shouldn't have to since it is my opinion and I, like everyone else, including Lance Dutson, am entitled to express my opinion. And as Neil Gaiman points out, regardless of how the company feels, it should have realised that the negative publicity it would attract by suing a blogger for expressing his views would not only harm their image more than his opinions were perceived to but draw far more attention to his blog than before - in fact as Neil points out if you Google the company now their website comes down well below many other sites discussing the case! Sounds a little familiar to a certain bookstore a year and a half back who complained a certain blogger was destroying their public reputation on a blog only a few people had ever heard of and only succeeded in then having those writings and opinions they disapproved of beamed around the planet in numerous languages.

Since several companies have had this experience now you'd think they would start to try something different, but for a company which supposedly deals with the selling of images and desires to people, such as this advertising agency, not to understand how much damage they can do to their own image... Well, I don't want them suing me so I won't say it smacks of incompetence, but if I were a client I would now look at them and think do these guys really know anything about managing image online when they do this???

As a nice commentary on this here is a cool alternative advertising image for Main Tourism which one of his chums made up:

50 Best book to movie adaptations

The Guardian ran an article listing the result of their panel who selected their 50 best book to movie adaptations. There are some very good films in there, including a few of my favourites, several SF titles and, most remarkably, they picked a graphic novel as well, although since it is Frank Miller's Sin City it is really several books. I was pretty pleased to see this being picked - it was like a few months ago when Time magazine selected some of the best English-language novels since the late 20s and included Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore's Watchmen. Comics and graphic novels are becoming almost respectable :-). Inspired by this my colleagues and I whipped up a special Sin City page on the new FPI main site and I had the overwhelming urge to post a big blog piece on the FPI blogs, so I gave in to it.

Jet City MP3s

In a cool follow-up to my post the other day about my mate Paul and his band the Jet City Rednecks cutting an EP over the holiday weekend he's sent me this link to the pure volume site which has three hard-rockin' tracks you can listen to. Sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll. Well, beats cuppa tea'n'digestive'n'easy listening...

No comment - yet

You may recall about a month ago on a post about the huge threat to civil liberties posed by the Blair government's ill-advised push on biometric ID cards which they wish to impose on British citizens (how such a scheme is going to work across many government minsitries and departments as well as police and local government when the folk most repsonsible for it at the Home Office have clearly shown they can't even talk to their own departments is beyond me). As part of the blog I posted a copy of the letter I emailed to my MP, Alistair Darling, who is a government minister who strongly supports the scheme. A couple of days later I received an acknowledgment from one of his assistants and an assurance of a response shortly. Several weeks later and still no reply. Perhaps he is busy helping is cabinet colleagues with damage control.

Buster!

The cinematic treasure that is the Edinburgh Filmhouse, where I must have spent half my student days (but it was a media course so it counted as research, not bunking off, honest), is paying tribute to one of the funniest and most inventive film-makers in cinema history and also one of my personal favourites: Buster Keaton.



I've loved Keaton's silent films since I was a boy - it was clear to me even then that the people who drew the Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry cartoons that I loved had grown up inspired by people like Keaton. I preferred him to Chaplin and rated him up there with the early film comedians like Harold Lloyd and good old Laurel and Hardy. As I got older I came to admire the incredible craft he put into these movies from the very early days of cinema, when men in boater hats turned hand-cranked cameras, and the astonishing stunts he would perform. The fact there were few effects, that most of this was done for real (like the building falling on him in Steamboat Bill Jr) is amazing - cinema has since staged some incredible stunt sequences and yet most of today's stunfolks would still tip their hat to Buster as he performed his stunts, all with his trademark deadpan face.

The Filmhouse is showing The General (with the famous scene where an old Western train goes over a wooden bridge which collapses under it - and like most Keaton stunts this is done for real, no model work here! A real train under steam on a collapsing bridge!) and a number of shorts starting this Friday. I am so there!


Slither

On a more contemporary filmic note though, if you love hoary old creature features, especially those wonderfully hokey 50s ones, then catch Slither. It is a pure B movie horror-SF film which knows what it is and revels in it, drawing on the Blob, Romero, Heinlein and numerous other flicks, like Tremors or Eight Legged Freaks, mixing gross-out scenes with sick humour. Add in Firefly and Buffy's Nathan Fillion with his deadpan expression and voice (he must be a Keaton fan too!) as the local police chief fighting the alien menace which arrives in a meteor to infect a small Southern US town in the time honoured fashion. If you prefer a genuinely creepy horror though, check out Silent Hill - it is one of those rare things, a computer game to movie adaptation which is actually good. It mostly avoids splatter and goes for creepy, brooding Southern Gothic atmosphere, with disturbing imagery, although some of that is clearly drawn from early Clive Barker.

Bashing the Bible comic style

A couple of weeks ago writer, Boing Boing favourite and media commentator Douglas Rushkoff kindly wrote a few lines about his current comic series (due to be collected as a graphic novel this June from DC) Testament: Adekah for the FPI blog in which he said he was treating the Bible as "open source code". Well, Doug has just posted a much longer piece on his own site about the comic and also his views on religion in general - it is very interesting stuff and bound to annoy some people, especially in the US where he no doubt has people already annoyed at the comic to begin with. But then most of them probably won't do anything as radical as reading it before condeming it, so who cares what they say. This may damn your immortal soul but it may also lead you to a damned cool graphic novel.

Actually this summer looks like being a good month for mature graphic novels titles. Along with Testament another DC title I am eager to read - especially after reading what Neil Gaiman had to say about it on his blog recently - is Can't Get None, a very unusual angle on 9-11 following a man whose business goes belly-up right before the twin towers are hit, his shattered view of life echoing that of the nation and world. It is a very unusual style as well, mostly captions and pictures rather than dialogue bubbles. According to Neil:

"The combination of image and text has a weird, cumulative effect, a sort of literary synesthesia that gave me the same kind of oneiric reading sensation I normally only associate with novels by, say, Thomas Pynchon or Steve Erickson. I don't think that CAN'T GET NO reinvents the graphic novel – it feels more like Rick is rediscovering the power of the "story in pictures" as he goes, taking everything he knows about comics, everything he learned about dreams doing the Rarebit Fiend comics, and making something new and moving and, as I said, utterly strange."

Along with the last of the post-Palomar Luba books coming from the great Gilbert Hernandez (of Love & Rockets fame) this summer is looking good. If you are someone who normally doesn't read comics because you assume they are all only about superheroes then try checking these out. Or if you are a girl and assume all comics are for boys check out Hernandez, or check out In the Hands of Boys from Melody Nadia Shickley, a Xeric award winner which is picking up some good word-of-mouth. Melody also wrote a short piece about her work for the FPI site here so you can see what she has to say about it in her own words.

Rockin' and rollin'

My mate and colleague Paul and his crew in the rockin' Jet City Rednecks spent the recent bank holiday weekend in the studio cutting their EP White Trash Noise. I heard some of the results today and they were terrific. Okay, obviously I am biased since he's my mate, but I really did enjoy these tracks - it was a deliberate move on their part to make a solid, old-fashioned heavy cock-rock sound with a 70s/early 80s feel (sometimes the guitars reminded me of Thin Lizzy, which isn't a bad thing if you like rock) singing about drinkin' and shaggin' and other important things in life. They were all toe-tapping, head-boppin' tracks to happily rock out to and they are now available on the EP via the group's website. Leicester's answer to rock'n'roll white trailer trash will also be live again in July.