5 Comments

1. I looked at a couple of those commercials… what a riot! As if created by eager grad students in advertising, who want to make sure that their prof will see that they got the message. Over and over.

   The selling one, for the shopping center said something along the lines of “I go in,” I come out,” “I go in, I come out, but when I go in how well I do come out…”

   The commercial for the drink with all those wild Hungarians throwing the stuff down the hutch had lyrics that encouraged you to drink because all your daily troubles could go away when you grip the frosty glass….

   The one about the sausages was truly inane. A bunch of lyrics that listed the panoply of sausages to be had, from blood to liver, and how they perfect in every season.

   Comment by maria — September 26, 2006 #

2. In light of your swift reply, Maria, I felt compelled to click through to a couple of these commercials, of course!

   The third one (“Kifut?”) is a riot, too: I swear the voiceover guy keeps saying “echt modern,” which is German for “really modern” or “authentically modern,” or simply: “cool.” That’s a riot, given the Germans’ reputation for Deutschmark-bought (now Euro-bought) status. Geez, if you have enough money, of course you can afford Jil Sander! (And if you can’t, it’s your own look-out, in true German “fashion”!)

   I also like “Casco,” which I took to be about car insurance. …Reminded me of a car ride I took with a Hungarian boy from high school, albeit here in Victoria, BC back in the 70s. Ah…, wonder what ever happened to Gabor? Went off a cliff, no doubt…

   Now: is it the ninth one that YouTube labels “OTF?”? That one has to be saying “one out of ____”, as in “one out of 10 Hungarians suffers from athlete’s foot” or something like that. The thing that’s funny here is that the guy in the trench coat bears an uncanny resemblance to John Cleese in the Monty Python sketch where he plays a Hungarian tourist fallen victim to a bogus Hungarian-English dictionary publication. According to the dictionary, “I want to fondle your buttocks” is rendered as the English translation of “I want to buy XXX [cigarettes or something].” Proof positive that one out of ten bloggers remembers a silly TV episode when watching a silly TV ad whose language they don’t understand…

   Comment by yulelog — September 26, 2006 #

3. Speaking of TV… I let myself get sidetracked by one of the Hungarian commercials on the sidebar of the one I was watching (you know how YouTube sucks you in deeper and deeper, right?). Well, this one features a king who I swear is played by the same guy who plays “Mr. Hooter” (known for his connoisseur nose — he is a perfumier) on The Avengers’ episode How to Succeed (at Murder). The rallying call is “ruination to all men!”

   Heh.

   Comment by yulelog — September 26, 2006 #

4. We have a question that I think only you are qualified to answer and we would love to have your opinion. Are our modern cities, literally the planning and construction boom that has brought sprawl to every megalopolis creating a society more willing to change through violence?

   Thank you pointing us to We Make Money Not Art, this stuff is fascinating!

   Cheers!

   Cavalor Epthith
   Editor-in-Chief
   The Dis Brimstone-Daily Pitchfork

   Comment by Cavalor Epthith — September 28, 2006 #

5. Fascinating question, Cavalor, and one that I can’t answer off the cuff. I like cities, so I’m not inclined to blame the built environment for all social ills, although I don’t think that’s quite your question, anyway. You’re asking whether cities and sprawl have anything to do with creating a society willing to change through violence, which is a slightly different kettle of fish. That’s sort of like asking whether or not bad design, which creates tons of stress, is driving people to some sort of edge where they’re willing to punch their fist through someone else’s head. My answer to that is “yes and no,” insofar as bad design exacerbates stress, but that even stress is no excuse for bad manners or criminal behaviour.

   Bad design is at the heart of this. Negative externalities passed on to consumers/ citizens/ commuters are the economic manifestation of bad (and I mean that aesthetically and ethically) design (and economics), and those negative externalities are sprawl, massive traffic/commuter jams, absent LRT/ public transit; “nowheresville” suburbs, anomie, alienation; schools as factories, schools as big business, kids as hostages to the system; and so on, etc.

   Gangs, random violence, “droogs”: are those things “encouraged” by cities and sprawling suburbs? I don’t think so, at least I don’t want to think that it’s entirely the built (or any kind of) environment’s fault. Individual responsibility still counts for something, doesn’t it?

   Let’s see if my wonky HTML skills work in the WordPress comments board, here’s a go: take a listen to this CBC podcast of Theodore Dalrymple. He’s the British psychiatrist who has written Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses.

   What Dalrymple describes in the CBC podcast is, as the intro puts it, like something out of “A Clockwork Orange,” a society that has completely subsumed itself to victimology. I don’t know where you live when you’re on Terra, but there’s enough of that around in Canada, and in the UK it’s probably already a bit out of control (which I guess is a bit like “a little bit pregnant,” eh?, kind of an equivocation…). One of my sisters has a house in Hastings (UK)– she is anxious to sell it and she never wants to own property in the UK again. Why? She feels terrorised by one “bad egg” and his thug (“droog”?) friends, who keep the neighbourhood cowed, and she feels there’s no recourse to law or anything to get this person and his gang to “move on,” as it were. These creeps set the tone, and all she can do is sell out and hope to move on — to rent, perhaps, where it will be easy to pull up stakes and move on. Although she has called the cops on this asshole (at risk to herself), her neighbours haven’t. They don’t dare.

   Now, you think about that and ask yourself what that sort of mini-migration (owners selling out to become temporary renting tenants) does to a society in the larger picture, in terms of social stability? What would it mean for me and everyone to say: “I can’t put down stakes here, it’s not ‘safe'”? Hastings isn’t exactly a big city — it is sort of/ kind of a commuter satellite to London, but by no stretch of the imagination is it just a suburb, either. It’s a small city in its own right. If that’s the way of Hastings, then it seems pointless to blame megalopolises and their sprawling ‘burbs for the violence that’s permeating them.

   According to Dalmrymple in the podcast, it’s really a bigger question of social mores breaking down.

   And it’s a question of this damn victim ideology, where every single tic or maladjustment gets traced back to some childhood trauma or something. You know, I find this offensive. Think of all the children who have survived horrible slum conditions and/or abuse, but who manage still to grow up to “love their fellow man,” to help others, to be a shining example. Think of death- and concentration-camp survivors, who had more excuses than anyone to turn into murderous thugs, and who still maintained their humanity, their dignity, their beauty. Think of Nelson Mandela who endured decades in prison and faced a wife who “betrayed” him, but who managed to hold on to dignity — why?, how? Because it was “in him” or because he chose to? And if he could choose to, why do we make excuses over and over and over again for people who make bad choices? Are we idiots, or what?

   Comment by yulelog — September 28, 2006 #

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