Tagged: subliminal
Subliminal XVI: My Life in Subliminals
“When one comes to the ultra-modern profession of advertising, responded Schliemann, – the science of persuading people to buy what they do not want, – he is in the very center of the ghastly charnel-house of capitalist destructiveness, and he scarcely knows which of a dozen horrors to point out first.” (Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906)
“Today’s superstars [superstar companies] are using modern science to push advertising into areas that have not been tried before, raising difficult ethical questions about what ‘free choice’ means in a capitalist economy.” (The Economist, September 17th-23rd 2016)
What these “areas that have not been tried before” are, is not to be gathered, however, from that issue of The Economist. They seem to discover advertising only today, more than a hundred years after Upton Sinclair talked of it as “the very center of the ghastly charnel-house of capitalist destructiveness.” Still, it is with this admission – by a fierce mouthpiece of capitalism – of the reality of some strange “science” at the service of advertising, “raising difficult ethical questions…in a capitalist economy,” that we are proud to introduce our new cases of subliminal junk.
Cases 103-108 are taken from Harvard Business Review, September 2016.
……………Case 103 BASF Bestiality
Case 103
103-2
103-3
The model, a swarthy, scruffy, unshaven man seems to come out of a film on the Mexican Revolution. After having conquered tierra y libertad, he now enjoys the fruits of his labor on a land of his own, gazing with touching emotion at gorgeous sweet peppers he holds in his hands – his own peppers.
A table is set on the left side of the advert, with a salad bowl and a glass of what looks more like grenadine syrup than wine. After seeing this ad, for one thing BASF poisons will be associated in your mind with luxurious green goods, and poor but dignified campesinos.
Then there is a subliminal embed in the glass of grenadine, which I have outlined. A naked woman is sitting on her knees. Her head is tilting back as a big dog sniffs her pussy; she expects him to lick her genitals. As the dog wears a necklace, it is probably her own pet dog, which she acquired to satisfy her lust in this way. This is bestiality.
……………Case 104 Stanford Business School of SEX
Case 104
104-2
This one for a top Ivy League university, and more specifically for its executive education department. The main character in the show, the man on the right, has a somewhat disheveled and thoroughly scruffy look about him – the very look that is abhorrent to all corporate organizations throughout the world. This, however, is good selling pitch, meaning: Take a break from the horrendous monotonousness of your dreary corporate life by enrolling to our program and be for a couple of days, or weeks, the bum you dream to be.
But the ad promises more than that. On picture 104-2 I have drawn a straight line to show what the man is looking at, namely the woman’s breast. Looking at her breast and grasping invisible objects in the air… First watch, then touch; he already has his hands in position, all it takes now is a 90-degree turn.
The woman is smiling at him, encouragingly. Besides, she could not escape his grasping if she wanted, because she is manacled. Her hands are tied together exactly like manacled hands, and her watch wrist provides the clear suggestion of manacles.
The man is thinking so hard about sexual acts with the woman that he is projecting laser penises from his brain (picture 104-2). One is just leaving his skull. A second one, very bright, is bolting toward her face. Below that one, a third penis, very fat, is about to reach her on the nose, where she will have to handle it to her mouth, I guess.
The third character is the loser you do not want to be. If you look carefully, he seems quite depressed. At first glance, you may think he is looking at and listening to the other guy, but in fact he just stares into space, brewing over the failure of his life. To the very hardcore sex action that is going to take place he will remain spectator merely; he is so much of a loser that he cannot even have enough spite to be willing to prevent it. As he sits quite close to the woman, she may be his girlfriend; but his luck with her is over. You can’t be a loser and keep your sweetheart when the Stanford boy comes in.
…………….Case 105 Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science of SEX
Case 105
The copy reads: “What did one doctor discover during the Ebola crisis? Herself.” And she is looking fondly at one of the above men’s bum. You see her looking at the top of the world, at the stars, you say she is a mature woman with dreams (read greedy ambition) determined to fulfill them and to become one of the worthies of this world. Which amounts – follow the straight line I draw – to finding a man with nicely-shaped buttocks. She looks at the only one whose presence is primarily marked by his conspicuous buttocks. And if you enroll at Rosalind, this is precisely what you will find at last. They promise. If you are already married, then you will find the man with whom to cuckold your husband at last. Promised.
……………Case 106 Harvard Business School of Hot SEX
Case 106
“Great leaders never stop evolving.” I would never have imagined that great leaders look like that. The man on the left is just ridiculous, with half-cooked Chinese noodles dangling from his hand. The man in the middle is a juggler: there is a small cake in equilibrium on top of his coffee cup. Jugglery is the specialty of circus clowns and was formerly that of court jesters and buffoons. The lady is actually running: only the tip of her right foot touches the ground, perhaps it does not even touch it – a movement she could not make if she were walking (the other foot has been cropped out of the picture so you can imagine it does not touch the ground either). Her overcoat almost seems to have fallen from her right shoulder (you need to look at it with attention to find out that both her shoulders are still covered), it does not cover the right side of her chest, and anyway she looks quite unkempt. Her right hand lies on a jacket button, which she may be opening, in the process of taking off the jacket. Her eyes are closed and she smiles, her face turned in the men’s direction. She is in a state of sexual arousal or even in an act of solitary sex. Expecting more (in her never-ending evolving), she is running in her haste to reach the place of the three’s sexual rendezvous, and such is her lustful haste that she is undressing while running. Harvard Business School: last chance of hot sex for desperate cases.
……………Case 107 Laugh & Suck
Case 107
A funny cartoon, and it is signed SUCK.
……………Case 108 Bottega Veneta SEX
& a nice SEX embed for good measure. (You don’t even have to enlarge the pics to see it perfectly.)
Case 108
108-2
108-3
……………Complements: My Life in Subliminals
Subliminals have been a major influence on my musical tastes. The first cassette tape I bought in my life was an album by band INXS, after seeing their clip Need You Tonight (1987) a couple of times on TV. Then, the first laser disc I bought was an album by band Simply Red, after seeing a couple of times on TV their clip Something Got Me Started (1991). Both were successful bands in my teens. Retrieving their clips on YouTube recently, I found the following.
Need You Tonight
The singer’s leather jacket, near the zipper, on the chest, sports the letters SEX, in chrome or something like that, vertically. The “embed” is not particularly hard to detect, and if I remember well I had detected it before buying the album. Even though, among the various subliminal techniques used in the film The Exorcist (1973), exposed by Wilson Bryan Key in Media Sexploitation (1976), there are flash images of a ghastly face; as the filmmakers themselves explained, some people see these images consciously, others do not (in this way they intended to dismiss the idea that the technique is subliminal). It could be the same with the SEX here. If you’re not really watching the clip but rather listening to it while doing something else (as occurs with TV viewing, which is often done together with another activity), the letters on the jacket may escape your conscious attention. Be that as it may, let’s say the SEX on the jacket is not subliminal at all but obvious. This is still a case of using the written word as a way to “sex up” the show. As it seems, it is hot to sport the word SEX on one’s jacket. (Or is it cool, rather?)
To see if that would elicit reaction, I dropped a comment on YouTube in the form of a question: “Is it the word SEX I read on his jacket?” No reaction so far. I hope I haven’t spoilt the fans’ pleasure with an indiscreet remark.
Something Got Me Started
From 2:20 to 2:34 (instrumental part) one hears a faint female voice speaking in the background. However, what that voice says is not to be got at all. Here is the best example I have found so far of a subliminal technique in music/on TV: the voice can be heard, by attentive listeners, but the words never. And I bought the disc. The sequence occurs after a female voice has whispered “I really love you,” to which the singer reacts with an “Ooooh” of arousal. Both songs, by the way, make supraliminal use of whispers (“Come over here” at the beginning of Need You Tonight) – already the conscious content is highly eroticized in both cases.
Here as well I left a comment on YouTube: “From 2:20 to 2:34 one hears a faint female voice speaking, if you listen carefully. Can someone tell me what she says?” No answer so far. If you’re a sound engineer and intrigued by this too, please contact me because I am ready to pay for having these occult words deciphered.
October 2016
Subliminal XV: From Dubai to the Planet Mars
Travel diaries from 29 Aug to 2 Sep 2016, Dubai & Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Views from the Burj Khalifa (555m)
……………Vulgar Pillow Talk at the Radisson
In my room at the Radisson Blu Hotel, this qibla sticker on a bedside table. Part of the sticker’s was torn away, as if someone had attempted to remove the sticker from the table with his or her nails.
On the same table a placard invites customers to specify their needs as to their pillows. A most gracious attention. But then it comes under the head “Pillow Talk,” a vulgar, tasteless double entendre. I say tasteless because on school playgrounds, when a pun is so self-speaking and flat, to make it is considered shamefully humorless. Taste is knowing not to make ludicrous double entendres, and that is what marketing people are badly lacking. A world in which marketing has become ubiquitous would be a suffocating quagmire of bad taste.
As appears in the second picture, the qibla points toward “Pillow Talk.” Subliminal blasphemy! Again, in religious and sacred matters, taste implies not to utter (in any fashion) double entendres, associating sacredness with profanity. Carelessness is not congruent with taste nor with faith, and it should be sanctioned, for otherwise every wicked individual could cover and excuse his wickedness by carelessness.
My friend X is wont to say, “A ban on bad taste is long overdue. By which I also mean banning the US from the world.” Truly, when one sees Emirati citizens, dressed in their dignified traditional dishdashas (males) and abayas (females), beside American tourists in tee-shirts and shorts and thongs and herds, one’s taste is so shocked by the contrast that one is moved to call the American tourist an aesthetic pollution.
As you know by now that my friend X is a man of wits, he also said once: “Western women are sluts, and I talk from experience.”
A last word on my hotel room. Hotel Information said: “A copy of the Holy Quran is placed in all rooms.” I searched for my copy but could not find it (room 312). Perhaps the same person that tried to scratch the qibla sticker took the Quran away?
(Note. I blackened the upper right part of the first picture and in the nect picture, below, to conceal reflections of light. The sticker’s rim as it was can be seen on the other picture.)
…………….Inside World’s Largest Mall
The picture above is taken from the Dubai Mall Guide, which I picked up in the mall (it was not handed to me), and presents the Mall’s “courtesy policy.” The first sign asks customers to “wear respectful clothing,” and especially that “shoulders and knees should be covered.” The second sign shows a man and a woman holding hands, and the comment reads: “No kissing or overt display of affection in the mall.”
It is only after leaving the mall, leafing through the guide afterward, that I was made aware of this courtesy policy, so I guess most tourists do not know these regulations more than I did when I first strolled through the mall. I came back the next day (to see the dancing fountains show) and tried to see whether these rules were followed. I did not carefully look at the clothes, in fact – but I am certain that most tourists wore shorts –, concentrating on couples’ behavior. I saw a couple (tourists or resident foreigners) holding hands, without being disturbed, and even another one (tourists or resident foreigners) holding each other by the waist, without being disturbed either. After that, I stopped focusing my attention on that point because I thought that was enough evidence that the courtesy rules were not applied. Yet I must say that I had expected to see more couples holding hands and that it took a little time to spot these two pairs, despite the large crowds. Moreover, the pair holding each other by the waist were walking at an unusually fast pace, as if these people were fearing some reaction; it may have been some kind of provocation on their part.
Be that as it may, the text under the sign does not say that it is forbidden to hold hands, but that it is forbidden to “kiss” and “overtly display one’s affection,” whatever the latter might mean. The sign with the pair holding hands may be merely a kind of graphic euphemism, a mild way to represent what is not allowed, but the gesture thus represented may be per se not prohibited. This interpretation may sound farfetched, yet if one bans pornography one will not publish this policy by showing hardcore sex in a TV screen, even crossed by a red line, will they?
*
From the Dubai Mall Guide, on page “Fashion – Children,” I found these boutiques, among others: Armani Junior, Burberry Children, Cacharel–Kidspace, Dolce & Gabbana Kids, Gucci Kids, Monsoon Kids, Ralph Lauren Kids, River Island Kids, Roberto Cavalli Junior, Tommy Hilfiger Kids… Ah, you thought you could make do with dressing your children with Petit Bateau, but it’s over! (Anyway, for the Petit Bateau boutique, it’s 2d floor, F6.)
*
On page “Fashion – Arabic,” these boutiques with good old Arab names: Bon Chic, L’Amour, Les Foulards, Monte Bianco…
*
First floor, K6, “multi-brand fashion and lifestyle stores based in Dubai,” the brand S*UCE (tel quel!) – a name that French tourists are not likely to forget.
…………….Subject Chewing Gum
In Dubai I realized chewing gum is a nonsubject for Western media and politics.
This little sign from Dubai metro can teach us a lot about the meanders of international trade. For I made an internet search and found that such a policy was first adopted in Singapore in order to prevent the defacements and damages committed by gum-chewers sticking their gummy refuse anywhere they find convenient. To that effect, Singapore even prohibited gum import. But that was overlooking the US’s stand on the matter, for which chewing gum remains as vital an export good as it is strategic. Under their pressure Singapore had to accept a compromise, according to which the country accepts to import… therapeutic chewing gum. And so it is that now Singapore physicians are entitled to prescribe chewing gum to their patients.
What Singapore got in exchange, I do not know, but I am in favor of banning chewing gum, which makes extremely costly waste, in France too, if only to compel the US to negotiate on a sounder basis with us.
……………Emirates Mars Mission
Excerpts from Mission to Mars: The Emirates Mars Mission and Mars Hope (2015), copyright by The Executive Office of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
“The behaviour of water in Mars’ highly volatile desert environment is of particular interest to the UAE as a desert nation.”
“Today, almost all of our understanding of climate comes from scientific studies of the atmosphere here on Earth. Mars is a valuable laboratory for atmosphere science because conditions there are very different. The insights and data we gain from understanding the Martian climate will add new dimensions to human knowledge about how atmospheres work.”
“Recent research has found evidence of human habitation as long as 125,000 years ago [in the peninsula] and it is now believed that modern humans moved out of Africa to the rest of the world through Arabia. … These early humans would likely have inhabited – and travelled through – an Arabian peninsula that was cooler and wetter than it is now, with a land bridge linking Arabia and Africa through modern-day Yemen.”
“An enormous amount of work is taking place to coordinate and foster cooperation between the world’s leading space capable nations, and the UAE’s membership of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) is part of that work.” (p. 65) Yet on the ISECG’s website the membership list (as of 2016: 14 space agencies) does not include the UAE. UAE’s agency must have associate member status or something like that.
And, from a poem by Sheikh Al Maktoum, this elegant testimony of the Sheikh’s social Darwinism: “This ever-spinning universe cannot stand still / or look back at those slipping behind. / It has always been so impelled, / positive energy being the source of its life.”
(There exists a collection of Sheikh Al Maktoum’s poetry translated into English, which preface is by Paulo Coelho. When I bought Mission to Mars at Kinokuniya bookshop, Dubai Mall, one of Coelho’s books was on display by the cashier’s desk.)
……………Sharjah Art Museum (متحف الشارقة الفنون)
Sabra and Shatila (صبرا وشاتيلا) (1984), by Bashir Sinwar (بشير سنوار)
florent boucharel rAd-Free 