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Lennon and McCartney had better hair
By adamg on Thu, 02/01/2007 - 4:58pm
Jay Fitzgerald is getting fed up:
... The 'starving artists' are pulling out a 40-year-old Lennon-McCartney schtick of being flippant about, like, wow, everything, dude. Next it will be framed as a Police State vs. Oppressed Artists drama. The mere sight of them makes it tempting to overreact by shoving them on plane headed for Guantanamo. But ... but that's exactly what they'd want and so we shouldn't do it. Let's determine their motives first. If it was indeed misguided marketing, so be it. Let 'em go with a fine and free bar of soap. ...
OK, so now I'm watching Kate Merrill on Channel 4 whining:
It was probably the most useless and unusual press conference I have ever been to. ... Why they wasted everybody's talking about hair, we may never know the answer to that.
O RLY, Kate? So why did you stick around? Couldn't find anything original to report on? Maybe I should switch to AD GONE BAD on Channel 7.
Michael Gee fumes:
Their bad. Had the two simply committed another of the city's ever-increasing homicides, relatively few people would've given a damn. But give Tom Menino a chance to show off his cement head, by God, you're going to pay. ...
Auntie Scotch is set on edge watching Menino on national TV:
They way I see it, Tom is like a retarded younger brother - it's okay for ME to make fun of him, but if an outsider makes a crack I'm going to have to ask them to step outside.
Say, speaking of mayors, we haven't heard much from Joe Curtatone over in Somerville. We go now to Juniper Pearl, reporting live from Somerville:
... i thought moving to somerville was the best, most happy-making thing i'd ever done, but now somerville's mayor, joe curtatone, has climbed atop a soapbox all his very own to do his part in rousing the rabble. i find the level of public ire aimed at the network and the men who planted the ads perverse and somewhat baffling, and i would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt dismay and bewilderment at my homeland's eagerness to promote paranoia and irrational levels of fear and outrage. so here are some excerpts from mayor angry joe's announcements, and following those excerpts are my rebuttals. ...
Dan Kennedy manages to cool off while he's composing a post and decides, no, the pair don't need jail time (along with their corporate overlords at Turner).
Charlie on the MBTA says the whole thing is sobering because these two guys with weird poles managed to mount their mooninites in three dozen locations without anybody ever questioning them.
Walter Holland offers a compromise solution:
If Turner foots the bill for deploying the Bomb Squad, I'll pay for Menino and the Globe editorial board to go into therapy. It can only help.
Dave Alpert, who lived in Israel for a few years, says we could learn a thing or two from the no-nonsense way Israelis deal with suspicious items.
Ian explains:
One reason I wouldn't have panicked about Lite-Brites maybe being bombs is because, when I was a kid, my friends and I blew shit up. ...
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Comments
I'm sorry that Juniper Pearl
I'm sorry that Juniper Pearl is embarassed by the Somerville Mayor's reaction. However, I think that she might do well to think things through a bit before going into knee-jerk Blame the Police State mode.
First of all, how is one supposed to "quietly determine" if something is not a bomb? Poke at it and if it doesn't blow up, don't worry about it? (What's to say that if one of these items isn't a bomb, that maybe another one is?)
At one time, my agency was being targeted by an anti-psychiatry activist group, and were getting all sorts of bizarre threats phoned in. As a result, we now have all sorts of security measures in place. One can't afford not to in this day and age. In fact, maybe three months ago, something like five blocks (Cambridge Street from Inman Square to Webster Street) were cordoned off due to a bomb threat. Turned out to an empty, wrapped-up shoebox or something. One never knows, though.
Further, was talking to a friend of mine in Paris last night about was happening here vs. the Greenpeace stunt on the Eiffel Tower a day earlier. He said that Greenpeace called authorities beforehand to let them know what was going to happen, and used a clearly non-threatening item (a banner). Didn't stop the pranksters from being arrested, but it did minimize inconvenience/police response. The geniuses at work here in Boston could have done the same thing, but clearly didn't. As a result, all hell broke loose.
Finally: so, in other places (even here, to a certain extent), these lightboxes went unnoticed for some time. Does that mean the other cities are hipper and cooler, or does it mean that we allneed to be more observent? (The poster who talked about his experiences in Israel was spot on.)
You miss the entire point.
These kids who were arrested did not even create this campaign. They were just a couple of art school students hired by a small New York advertising agency called Interference Inc., who was in turn hired by Turner, who approved this campaign. These two young kids arrested were just a couple of errand boys. Granted, they've chosen to ride the wave of publicity for their own 15 minutes, but that hardly makes what they did criminal. The two most astounding things to me about all of this are:
1.) With all the media saturation of the event, so few people seem to have the slightest clue as to what actually happened. You write hypothetically, as if you haven't even yet seen the items they hung. They were basically custom "lite-brites" with a cartoon face on them, a little childs toy. From a distance, they somewhat resemble a small neon beer sign. Quick, let's shut down all the bars!
2.) The incredible misdirection of blame on the part of the authorities. So they've got a couple of college boys, one of whom looks a little scruffy, quick, let's string them up. They must be the responsible party to crucify. A little lip service is given to Turner, for whom this campaign was created, and you see almost no mention at all, what-so-ever of Interference Inc., the small New York agency that actually created the campaign.
I live in Manhattan. I understand about vigilence, but good grief. Go here:
http://www.GigantiCo.com
Aside from a brief paragraph of opining towards the end, and a call to action on these kids behalf, I've assembled more distilled facts in brevity in the first few paragraphs than any major new outlet's account I've seen yet. Get past the hyperbole, and look at what transpired. See who worked for who, who actually did what, and some pictures of the device in question.
You've got to be kidding me
How can anyone back these guys up? It would be one thing if these things were placed on billboards, but when you place devices like this underneath bridges, you're going to get in trouble. Plus, their blatant disregard for what happened yesterday was embarrasing to watch (not to mention highly unfunny). If that lawyer ever gets another client, I would be shocked.
Because they are the messengers
Hmmm. You must have grown up around here, right? Did it ever occur to you that these guys did us all a big honking favor by exposing a severe problem in greater Boston, no?
Other cities restrict access to critical infrastructure. They bring in folks who aren't appointed by politicians for their fundraising abilities and therefore aren't experts by Boston area standards, but are world leaders at knowing what bombs placed at what points could, say, bring down the Tobin on top of an LNG tanker or cripple critical infrastructure. THEN THEY MAKE IT NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO CLIMB UP THERE!
I stopped flying out of Logan Airport years before 9/11/01 because I knew that an airport that cannot even properly direct people around and through it and can't seem to keep toilet paper in the restrooms was an airport where all sorts of basic stuff was being overlooked. Arresting these artists is KILLING THE MESSENGER, a favorite sport in these parts when the incompetence of a medieval government structure heavily built on cronyism is exposed for all to see.
for your information: Peter
for your information:
Peter Berdovsky Legal Defense Fund
Law Office of Michael L. Rich
74 Newport Street
Arlington MA 02476
There is no defense fund.
Somebody, probably with good intentions, posted this same "Legal Defense Fund" information on my site:
http://www.GigantiCo.com
I've spoken to Michael L. Rich, the attorney for the two young men. He informed me personally that no such defense fund exists, and that there were no plans, at this time, to set one up. He kindly requested that I please remove his contact information from my site. It was posted identically to this posting here. I suspect by the same individual. You may wish to remove it from your site as well.
No finger for ABC News
Just watched Charlie Gibson introduce a piece on the situation. Over his shoulder was a large mooninite - only without an upraised finger.