• This Sesame Street parody of Mad Men that Kiel Phegley posted made me wonder how many of the puppet skits on the show I never fully comprehended growing up, given my relative media isolation at the time. Also, they actually call him Mr. Draper and not some knockoff name. Should I not be surprised about that?
• Liu Bolin‘s photography artwork is completely mesmerizing. He paints himself to camouflage with each given background and his personal story behind the work is worth a read.
• Eleanor Barkhorn at The Atlantic had this post about McDonald’s and Pepsi’s marketing campaigns surrounding China’s 60th birthday. The “choice of a new generation” defined by making your own decisions and breaking from the pack in the 1980s in the U.S. now appears to be the choice of “the Mao generation,” defined by collectively aligned authoritarianism. Yay advertising. I guess the lesson here is that Pepsi is intended to represent different things to different people. It’s all capitalism in the end behind the scenes though.
Here’s a vintage 1985 ad for comparison:
• Known comics blogger Johanna Draper Carlson alerted me to a story over Twitter today about new legal requirements for review copy disclosures by bloggers. I think I’ve already cited the one book Rickey sent me in a not totally professional capacity just to be safe, and no one sends me free stuff anyway, so I’m probably not going to be be hit hard by this. But wow, I think back to my days as an alt-weekly editor, and there were giant stacks of books and cd’s there that did and did not get reviewed. This may create some steep time commitments for writers who don’t have the money and time to send stuff back if they’re going to make full disclosures.