The 2016 presidential hopefuls are on mobile platforms like Brown on Williamson. Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, WhatsApp – WhatsEver.
But it’s not always pretty. Case in point: Hillary Clinton’s baptism by Snapchat this week.
The call:
The response:
Yikes.
And there’s lots more where that came from.
The moral of the story?
Damned if we know. But it’s probably not good.
From our neverending Language Police blotter
As always, the hardworking staff is on the differently clichéd beat like Brown on Williamson. And the past several months have provided a myriad of mangled phrases.
Call the roll:
• Back in November, David Mark, co-author of Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs & Washington Handshakes with Chuck McCutcheon, did an NPR interview in which he said this:
“San Francisco values” is a code hand for extreme liberal views supposedly prevalent in the Northern California City.
Not to get technical about it, but “San Francisco values” is either shorthand for extreme liberal views or a code word for them. Pick one.
• In a January Boston Herald piece about new Massachusetts Treasurer Deb Goldberg’s transition team’s including a lawyer who was part of a sweetheart Boston Red Sox real estate deal that led to a state Inspector General investigation, one local chinstroker said:
Someone new to office like her, you want everyone to think you are as clean as the driven snow . . .
Actually, you want to be pure as the driven snow, or clean as a whistle. Pick one.
• In March, NBC News noted that during GOP presidential campaigning in New Hampshire, “[Wisconsin governor] Scott Walker mostly bunkered down in private meetings.” Hunkered down, maybe.
(An NPR piece around the same time has a pie maker saying on Pi Day that after taking care of her customers, “I’m going to hanker down with some pie.” See above.)
• An April Boston Herald piece about a Boston 2024 ballot question had one proponent saying, “Voters are smart and they can tell when someone is trying to pull something over on them.”
Except . . . you put something over on someone, or pull something off. Right?
• In June on NPR’s All Things Considered, a correspondent noted about a leak of Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change that “the leaker probably wants to blow the wind out of the Pope’s sails.”
Yeah, but . . . you take the wind out of someone’s sails, or – more vehemently – blow them out of the water. Probably the former, yeah?
• Also in June on an NPR show, an international-affairs thumbsucker called Ayatollah Khamenei’s bluster over the Iran nuclear deal “par for the game.” Of course, in a cliché-impaired culture, that’s par for the course.
• MSNBC reported in June that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal “argued his record – stopping the migration out of the Bayou State after Hurricane Katrina, slashing the number of state employees and upgrading the state’s credit rating – stands for itself.”
Well, maybe it speaks for itself. Or stands on its own. You decide.
• And, finally, this headline ran last month on the website Monday Note:
Why Nikkei Paid Top Money For The FT
Actually, Nikkei either paid top dollar for the Financial Times, or paid big money.
Not to get technical about it.
Bernie & Phyl’s, which for a long time ran the most cringeworthy television spots in the history of New England advertising, now has a hotshot New York ad agency – DeVito/Verdi – and a smart, funny TV campaign that features old-time videoclips with funky new narratives.
Representative sample:
But – as you might notice above – DeVito/Verdi has labeled the campaign on YouTube Bernie & Phyl’s Furntiure, which yields virtually nothing and makes it a monumental effort to actually see the spots.
Hey, New York wiseguys:
Wise up, eh?
From our endless series
Funny how often these ads appear in the Saturday New York Times, which has the cheapest advertising rates for the week.
Regardless . . . from Saturday’s Grey Lady:
Nuts to Obama graf:
The ad is a testimonial from Samuel Marder, Transnistria Survivor and author of Devils Among Angels.
But the ad was “organized, produced, and paid for by Howard Jonas and The World Values Network.”
So who is Howard Jonas, you might reasonably ask.
Here is Howard Jonas.
And here is the World Values Network.
Draw your own conclusions.
Leave it to the New York Times to say cow, see cow.
From Jessica Bennett’s Page One piece in the Sunday Styles Section:
Cursed With a Death Stare
The Internet meme known as RBF points to the perils of the serious female face at rest.
I didn’t think much about it at the time: I was appearing in a short television segment and had quickly brushed my hair, then slapped on some concealer. I figured my glasses would cover the circles under my eyes.
Only later did I behold what I looked like — and it was terrifying. It wasn’t that I was disheveled; it was the actual face that looked back at me in the frozen screen shot.
My mouth curled slightly downward, my brows were furrowed, my lips were a little pursed. My eyes aimed forward in a deadpan stare. I looked simultaneously bored, mad and skeptical. I was basically saying to the newscaster: Die.
In that moment, I joined the ranks of a tribe of women who suffer from the scourge known as “resting bitch face” or, increasingly, just RBF.
The RBF lineup above features, from left, Kristen Stewart, January Jones, and Victoria Beckham.
Fabulously, when you go to the story’s jump page, there’s this:
That’s beautiful, isn’t it?
(Tip o’ the pixel to the Missus)
Much-maligned Boston City Hall Plaza has been getting some good press lately, especially in the Boston Globe, for efforts to spruce/lively it up.
And now Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s relentless red-brick-revival is garnering national recognition, via the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Kamp.
Boston’s Maligned City Hall Plaza Gets a Makeover
BOSTON—On a recent sweltering weekday, three young women did something unusual outside the imposing, concrete City Hall building here: They took a seat.
Allison Baldwin and two co-workers from a nearby advertising firm were relaxing in plastic Adirondack chairs next to a lush, fake lawn, all installed as part of Boston’s latest effort to rejuvenate one of the nation’s most maligned public spaces. Built during the midcentury heyday of bulldozer-oriented urban renewal, the City Hall Plaza is a largely empty, more than 200,000-square-foot expanse of red bricks wrapping partially around the city’s headquarters.
The nonprofit Project for Public Spaces includes the plaza in its “hall of shame,” calling it “one of the most disappointing places in America.”
Now maybe not so much.
Interestingly, the Journal piece fails to mention the paper’s own Ada Louise Huxtable, one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of Boston’s Brutalist Boondoggle.
Regardless, good news for a town that could really use it, yeah?
Well the Missus and I trundled down to Calderwood Pavilion in the South End last night to catch the Company One Theatre production of Colossal and man, it was moving – in virtually every sense of the word.
Andrew Hinderaker’s play is the story of a young man named Mike who foregoes a career as a dancer to become a college football player, and then becomes a paraplegic.
The lights burn bright. The smell of turf hangs thickly in the air. The crowd erupts in thunderous applause. The beauty and brutality of football seduce Mike to stray from the path his father had mapped out for him, but when a snap decision results in a career-ending injury, Mike must tackle the past and make peace with the man he dreamed he would be.
The production is all about the intersection of choreography and athleticism, dance and football. And the cast is uniformly terrific.
Special mention to Marlon Shepard
and Alex Molina
for depicting the two Mikes in totally riveting performances.
The choreography of Tommy Neblett, the direction of Summer L. Williams (who also directed Intimate Apparel at the Lyric Stage Company of Boston earlier this year), the scenic and production design of Kathryn Lieber – are all spot-on in this crushingly effective production.
Don’t just take our word – here’s Joel Brown’s Boston Globe review.
And here are audience reviews.
The production runs through August 15. Do yourself a favor and catch it.
From our long-running Jason Gay Ol’ Time series
The five-ring monte game that Store 2024 ran in Boston this past year has, mercifully, come to an end.
And Boston native Jason Gay gave it a proper burial in his Wall Street Journal column yesterday.
Boston Says ‘Nope’ to 2024 Games
Boston didn’t want the Summer Olympics. OK, that is not totally accurate: Some Bostonians were excited for the city to host the Summer Games in 2024, just not enough of them to, you know, give the idea popular momentum. Boston never became gripped with Olympic fever, not even close. It mostly acted like the Olympics were a two-week canoe trip with their in-laws that they would get stuck paying for.
As someone who grew up a few miles outside the city, I’m not totally surprised. Every time I read a story about the Boston Olympics, I kept imagining my late father pacing around the kitchen with a coffee mug, complaining about Olympic budgets and especially Olympic traffic, nine years in advance. People in Boston are really cuckoo about traffic. My dad made it his life’s mission to avoid Boston traffic; he liked to leave for the Logan Airport 13 years in advance of the flight; around the Fourth of July weekend he would wake up in the middle of the night screaming about gridlock on Cape Cod. I won’t even mention parking. Boston parking could actually have been an Olympic event.
Not that Gay wouldn’t have loved to cover the Boston 2024 Olympics: “I am an unabashed fan of the Games, and besides, my co-workers would have been crammed into a discount highway motel eating vending machine sandwiches while I was at my mom’s house sleeping in my childhood bed and eating blueberry pancakes. What wasn’t to like?”
What wasn’t to like, of course, was Boston residents being on the hook for millions of dollars to host a millionairepalooza.
So goodbye Wherever Velodrome, goodbye VIPissYouOff lanes, goodbye John (Go) Fish.
And – oh, yes – good riddance to you all.
Well the Missus and I trundled downtown yesterday to catch the Handel + Haydn 
Society’s performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 at the Boston Globe/WGBH Summer Arts Weekend and, say, it . . . swelled.
Thanks to the incomparable Brian O’Donovan and No Other, we had excellent seats for the stirring performance that featured:
Ian Watson, conductor
Period Instrument Orchestra and Chorus
Harvard Summer Chorus
Vocal Arts Program Choruses
Joélle Harvey, soprano
Margaret Lias, mezzo-soprano
Stefan Reed, tenor
Andrew Garland, baritone
The concert ended with a fabulous “Ode to Joy” that had the crowd on its feet. A memorable event indeed.
From there we moseyed over to the South End’s Calderwood Pavilion for a table reading of Mia Chung’s new play Catch As Catch Can, part of the Huntington Theatre Company’s
2015 Summer Workshops, “a two-week new work retreat culminating in public readings of the plays in development.” (Chung, a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, is also the author of You for Me for You, This Exquisite Corpse, Skin in the Game, an adaptation of The Orphan of Zhao, and We Spend Our Lives.)
Catch As Catch Can, we can report, is developing quite nicely. The play is funny, tricky, and engaging. And the actors who read it were outstanding in dual roles: Marianna Bassham, who played a father and daughter; Denny Dale Bess who played a mother and son; and Matthew Boston, who also played a mother and son. Director John Steber did a fine job of bringing the whole effort together.
Last but certainly not least, both of the events above were free. Our thanks to all involved.
The latest in our long-running series
Yesterday’s New York Times featured yet another ad from Zionista Michael Steinhardt, whose previous Times ad (along with his various associations – see here and here) we dutifully noted last month.
His current foray:
Drives him nuts graf:
This time around, Steinhardt has teamed up with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of The World Values Network.
We’re not sure what that means, but we’re sure it means something.
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