Uncle Sally's Brain Busters!

Uncle Sally is back in the building for some guest-blogging! Today, he's launching his new series of discordant verbo-visual pairings. Verbo-Visual--that'd be a good name for a branding company (I actually stole that term from the intro of Bo Bergstrom's Essentials of Visual Communication).

Down-market fragrances

Saw these all in Walgreen's. Doesn't Usher at least deserve to be sold at Macy's?

Backlash--The Undeclared War Against American Women

Thought about this book after reading an essay on The Feminine Mystique in The New Yorker this morning. I bought this book in '91 whilst a student at the hallowed halls of Diablo Valley College. I was a bit of a Dandy-fop to begin with; a typical costume draping my lithe, Sprockets-dancer frame featured an oversized, Generra aqua mock-turtleneck; a baggy pair of Marithé François Girbauds held up by a braided, brown leather Gap belt; and a water-resistant pair of Timberland wingtips which my friend labelled "Bitch-getters." With this book in my hands, my image as the ultimate fish-out-of-water--the 212-sophisticate amongst the CoCo County rubes--would be complete. Unfortunately, my countless sham readings of this book in the middle of the quadrangle never won me the progressive temptress for which I was angling.

I never read much of the book save the chapter on Fatal Attraction which was heavily publicized. Read dope, Guardian-UK-breakdown here:

"The backlash is not a conspiracy," she writes, "with a council dispatching agents from some central control room, nor are the people who serve its ends often aware of their role ... for the most part its workings are encoded and internalised, diffuse and chameleonic."

Faludi describes in forensic detail the mechanisms of the backlash against women: the myths of bra-burning, man shortages and barren wombs; the bad and biased reporting of shoddy social science; the plastic surgery and the ludicrous excesses of the cosmetic industry; the repackaging of the independent woman in Hollywood as exemplified by the extraordinary story of how, in pre-production, Fatal Attraction warped from a story about a single woman treated badly by a callous married man into the story of a crazed harridan seducing, then torturing a great family guy;

Does anyone remember the name of that Matthew Broderick movie where he lived in Manhattan and worked at a Dean & Deluca's and perpetrated the same fraud of pretending to read this book?

The world's first artisanally crafted blog

click to view full-size--blogger likes to shrink my images:

Combi Visuell

Sick-ass logo I ripped off from a line of Swedish encylopedias I saw used as props at IKEA. The original looked even nicer in a metallic gold which I couldn't reproduce:

Absolutely disgusting rebranding of NAMBLA

Can't believe these jokers are showing their faces again. The National Man Boy Love Association now calls themselves "Fondle." Take a look at that image--is that his arm or something else?