The Cynical Hearts of Wieden and Kennedy

I remember the moment when I decided that I was never going to buy another pair of Levis Jeans. It was not, as you would expect, a midlife crisis style epiphany when I suddenly realised that I wasn't a kid anymore but a man who should be wearing cords or slacks or whatever it is that men wear. No, it was nothing like that, it was when I saw Levi's 'America' ad which had a series of images celebrating America over a scratchy recording of Walt Whitman reading his poem America that also, er, celebrates America. What got me upset was the hypocrisy of this because the ad came only a year or two after Levis closed down its last plant making jeans in America. That's the play isn't it? Move your stitching factories to sweatshops overseas, hike the prices and then hire a cool ad agency whose job it is to fool the public into thinking that nothing has changed. Wrangler, that sponsor of rodeos and bull riding and stock car races, also makes none of its jeans in America. But these great companies do.
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The Levis ad was made by Wieden and Kennedy who are also responsible for the Microsoft Ads and the Nike commercials among many others. (Mr Wieden came up with the "just do it" tag line which is enough cultural vandalism for one lifetime.) The Levis America ad is part of a new campaign for Levis called Go Forth which targets young wannabe individuals. I saw the latest commercial in this campaign in the cinema before The Ides of March (above, right). This ad has already generated some controversy. It was banned in the UK following last August's riots and nutcase/political commentator Glenn Beck saw it and said he wants to boycott Levis in protest because it will cause youth rebellion or something. The ad is a reading - by a Native American actor - of the Charles Bukowski poem The Laughing Heart. I can't believe that Bukowski would have been happy to see his poem used in this context and the idea that somehow the meaning of life can be enhanced or discovered through a pair of trousers made in a third world sweat shop surely doesn't convince even the naivest of the Millennium generation, does it?
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In the second youtube clip I've uploaded Adam Curtis explains where some of this cynical advertising stuff came from on the Jarvis Cocker Radio show.

Meet The New Boss...Same As The Old Boss

In a new, wide ranging, somewhat scattershot, not entirely convincing, but always compelling documentary Adam Curtis argues that the idea of the ecosystem is bogus. Along the way we get a glimpse into why the hippie communes failed and a look into the future of the Arab Spring (which is probably going to be an Arab winter). Watch it soon before the BBC deletes this YouTube account.

Bin Laden and Bonanza

I havent been the biggest fan of Adam Curtis over the years but I thought this little doc was quite arresting: its a pop culture history of the 60s (more of a collage really) and in this section it contains some interesting information about Osama Bin Laden, Charles Manson and the TV show Bonanza.



One thing Curtis could have mentioned was the Chinese cook on Bonanza, Hop Sing, played by Victor Sen Yung. After Bonanza ended Sen Yung was in a real life skyjacking on a Pacific South West Airlines flight and was shot in the back by the FBI during the rescue mission. He survived until 1980 when he unfortunately died from carbon monoxide poisoning during the making of clay pots at his home kiln.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion - The Adam Curtis Edition

Adam Curtis is spoken of in hushed tones as some kind of prophet or seer dispensing truth to a few wise acolytes from a windswept, er, studio in the BBC . He makes documentaries and this one in particular, The Trap, has been recommended to me by several people. The uploader on YouTube feels that its contents are so dangerous that it is bound to be taken down soon by Google, the CIA, the US Government and possibly David Icke's lizard beings who run the universe. It is an "analysis" of Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty" and explains how Berlin's idea of "negative freedom" now shapes the modern world.
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Its certainly a visually arresting TV show but my God it is shallow undergraduate stuff and it is quite amazing to me that anyone can regard this as somehow "news". You study Isaiah Berlin's Two Concepts of Liberty in your very first week in a contemporary political philosophy course and then you spend the next year or so reading all the detailed criticisms of Berlin's view. Berlin was wrong Curtis says in the dramatic big reveal at the end of his show. Oh yeah, which way wrong? The way Ronald Dworkin says he was wrong or the way Robert Nozick says he was wrong or the way Alasdair MacIntyre says he was wrong or the way Charles Taylor says he was wrong? Berlin is merely a starting point for the whole communitarian/liberal debate that has been raging in philosophy since the late 60's. It's staggering that Curtis seems to be unaware of all of this. It gets him into embarrassing trouble: for Curtis to say that the idea of "positive liberty" has been "hidden and forgotten" (or perhaps, duh, duh, duh, suppressed) is absolute rubbish. Has he had read any philosophy book or paper written in the last 40 years? Now that Marxism is toast this is all that political philosophy departments ever argue about. Entire conferences, books, etc. etc. have raged on the idea of positive versus negative liberty. The very first philosophy tutorial I ever had was on Michael Sandel's criticisms of John Rawls's book length treatment of Berlin.
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Ironically Curtis is part of the problem that he claims to be worried about in his other documentaries - i.e. the dumbing down of TV. He's clearly spent a lot of time in the BBC archives finding footage and music for his programmes, but that time might more profitably have been spent in a library. The Trap is very thin gruel indeed, containing big exaggerated theses, no counter examples and no nuance; it proves what Neil Postman said two decades ago: TV is a medium for communicating images not ideas.
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If you are interested in the whole concept of positive and negative liberty and the role of freedom in a democracy (from the left and right and from all places in between) check out these books as a starting point:

Friedrich Hayek - The Road To Serfdom
Karl Popper - The Open Society and its Enemies
Two Concepts of Liberty - Isaiah Berlin
A Theory of Justice - John Rawls
Taking Rights Seriously - Ronald Dworkin
Anarchy, State and Utopia - Robert Nozick
Sources of the Self - Charles Taylor
After Virtue - Alasdair MacIntyre

Incidentally I'm going to pitch an idea to the BBC for a TV show called Charles Darwin The Hidden Prophet which will be an analysis of this unknown nineteenth century biologist and the conspiracy of silence about him and his controversial ideas.