Batfort

Style reveals substance

Category: Rhetoric & Aesthetics (page 6 of 7)

The inevitable changes at British Vogue

Vox Day, of all people, brought the regime change at British Vogue to my attention once again. Edward Enninful is purging white girls from the payroll (quelle surprise). On the one hand, it’s immensely satisfying to watch the predictable world of fashion “journalism” get shaken up in such a big way. On the other hand, I don’t have a lot of faith that British Vogue will continue to create beautiful, compelling content. Not that I’ve been reading many fashion magazines lately; I made myself stop reading them a while back because they didn’t contribute anything to my life.

But that doesn’t stop me from binging on digital fashion content every now and again. To that end, searching for a citation for my newly-updated my About page, I found myself down the rabbit hole of short fashion documentaries on YouTube. Some of the things that stand out to me in fashion documentaries never make their way online, which frustrates me. (What I’m realizing is that’s where I should act, instead of merely complaining about it.)

Anyhow, look! Enninful makes an appearance in The September Issue (a documentary about American Vogue), getting coached on assertiveness by Grace Coddington. Looks like that training paid off.

 

In another decision to hire a non-old non-white person to run a fashion magazine, Eva Chen became the youngest editor-in-chief of a Conde Nast publication when she was appointed to run Lucky magazine in 2013. However, Lucky didn’t last much longer (and it was kind of boring, tbh–I wanted to like it, but it always felt more like a catalog than a magazine).

Wintour brought in Chen in 2013 to bring Lucky into the digital age. Chen was young, highly visible through her social media presence, and brought an approachable cool factor to the magazine. She took a high-low approach, featuring unknown fashion bloggers in the magazine’s pages while recruiting expensive, upscale stylists like Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele and legendary photographers like Patrick Demarchelier.

That upgrade came at a cost. The pages were beautiful, but some say that the price points alienated readers who were used to more affordable clothes they could grab off the racks. The publication still slumped in circulation and newsstand sales were even worse. The turnaround flagged.

“It was too late, and she wasn’t given a chance, given a dead animal,” a source from Lucky magazine said in defense of Chen on the condition of anonymity.

Now, I really liked Chen’s work when she wrote for Teen Vogue back in the day. But it’s clear that, despite being hired on to a sinking ship, her decisions contributed to the fall of Lucky instead of turning them around. She brought the Vogue-style aspirational mindset to a magazine that most people bought for an anti-Vogue outlook. Not a winning combination.

Maybe that was all her. Maybe that was her being overly influenced by Anna Wintour, since she’s young and didn’t have Grace Coddington’s tough skin (Coddington was known for standing up to Wintour).

Maybe it’s because Chen have the savvy that Wintour does. Anna Wintour cultivates glamour in her job. Chen goes out of her way to be the “everygirl.”

Compare and contrast:

The sunglasses. Pre-selected questions that carefully cultivate her image as a patron of the arts, not merely a fashion girl. Cameos that reinforce her exalted status.

Now, Chen has somewhat of a disadvantage because this video is produced by Forbes rather than Conde Nast (which has a major stake in making Anna Wintour look good). However, Chen herself goes out of her way to try to “break the fashion industry stereotypes.” She focuses on approachability, rather than Wintour, who focuses on aspiration.

 

Like Eva Chen, it is interesting to note that Enninful falls on the approachable end of the fashion spectrum. We’ll see how things shake out at British Vogue.

Videoshopping the Steven Bannon Interview

Usually, when we think of retouching an image, we think of a photographer or retouch artist using photoshop to alter a still image. Turns out video isn’t exempt.

Peter Duke explains how the 60 Minutes crew altered footage of Steve Bannon:

I noticed the red eyes when I was watching clips of the interview last night, and figured something like this was going on. I don’t know much about color correction, but the way that Peter can estimate the amount of correction that’s happening based of the shade of Charlie Rose’s shirt is impressive. Makes me want to learn more about color.

Once I was talking with my brother about fake news, and his philosophy is now “show me the video.” Not the talking heads, not an article reporting on it, but the honest-to-gosh raw footage.

That’s a good start, but as we can clearly see here, video footage is also really easy to alter. There are structural alterations through editing, selective start and end times to cut off certain events from the feed. There are sonic edits, where you drop-in or dub in the wrong words, or splice together a new phrase from different phonetic sounds. And then there are visual spins like this one, where the editor goes out of his way to misrepresent the subject with bad lighting, color correction, or what have you. Frankly, with a sit-down interview, you could also achieve similar results with hot lights (done to Alex Jones), a mic too close, bad makeup, horrible clothing choices, or similar tricks.

This simple explanation by Peter Duke has me starting to think about critically evaluating all the video I watch, not just the photos I look at or the news stories I read. Every piece of information must be run through the bias-filter.

Video alone isn’t enough to get us at the truth of a matter. It’s certainly better than the written word or a still image for some things — like bare, on the ground reporting — but video cannot address ideas or abstract thoughts as well as the written word. Nor can it be as iconic as that perfect still image that visually encapsulates the ideas in a scene. And it’s just as susceptible to bias as other types of media.

The reassurance I needed

I must confess that I was predisposed to like this press conference because I listened to commentary before I listened to it. Thank God SOMEONE in this country has a measured reaction.

Forcing the Fake Media to cover infrastructure before he’ll engage about the issue that they want to talk about, lambasting them while he does so…this is the Trump that we all voted for.

God bless this man.

James Damore and the Neverending Meme War

When I first heard that the guy who wrote the Google Memo was fired, I was not surprised. I work in a very similar psychological environment; if I ever hinted that I thought facts like that were true, I would immediately become a pariah.

I read people speculating about his motives and his plan.

“He knows what he’s doing — he totally knew he would get fired”

“Such a poor sacrificial lamb — he clearly had no idea this would happen”

“He wrote an open letter for other companies to hire him for upper management”

At this point, I became worried for him. It was becoming clearer and clearer that he’s not an alt-right scrapper, but a niceguy nerd with an unwavering commitment to the facts. I thought he might get eaten alive.

I’m not worried anymore.

via Peter Duke

James Damore, whether he likes it or not, is going to become a figurehead for the fight against ingrained leftist groupthink in the workplace. And it’s very clear that he has some heavy hitters on his side.

Already, he has some weapons-grade memetic photographs out, courtesy of our friend Peter Duke.

His brand-new Twitter handle is @Fired4Truth, a punchy battlecry that sums up his symbolic martyrdom. It’s the 30 second elevator speech version of him — “Who are you again?” “I’m the guy who got fired from Google because I told the truth.”

Some of his first post-firing conversations online were with Jordan B Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, both solidly committed to reason and evidence.

Wesearchr is taking care of his fundraising. (And I suspect Chuck C Johnson is behind his Twitter and periscope dealings, as well.)

Cernovich has started referring to the battle against the “Diversity Industrial Complex.”

Even congressman Dana Rohrabacher is stirring the waters of Twitter on this issue.

I hope James is ready for his crash course in memetic warfare. It’s clear from his memo that he’s a very logical guy; now we see if an intelligent coder can learn how rhetoric works.

This is shaping up to be a very interesting next set of battles in the meme war. We’ve moved from the streets of Berkeley to the boardrooms of Mountain View.

Pepe for Kids

I’m going to completely ignore the Antifa/Alt-Right riot that happened in my city over the weekend and talk about something that literally nobody has an objection to: children’s books.

Oh wait.

There are plenty of left-leaning children’s books that I find offensive and propagandic, and I’m sure they feel the same about this one.

Straight from the subreddit that caused Bernie Bros to stay up all night frothing at the mouth, we have The Adventures of Pepe and Pede. A heartwarming tale, I’m sure, of friendship, law and order, and hopefully a really big wall.

Quick refresher for those of you who didn’t obsessively follow the “Can’t Stump the Trump” series on YouTube:

  • Pepe is the (friendly) cartoon frog adopted by Trump fans and the Alt-Right. Pepe is especially beloved because he was once retweeted by the God Emperor himself, and Pepe has ascended to the August Ranks of Hallowed Memetics by triggering his very own creator to disown and kill him in an attempt to reclaim his character. Didn’t work. We love Pepe.
  • Pede is short for “centipede,” a term of endearment on /r/The_Donald for other Trump supporters that spawned from the use of Knife Party’s song “Centipede” for the intro to most of the “Can’t Stump the Trump” videos.

“Cant’ Stump the Trump” itself provided the seed for a whole host of spinoffs of this syntax, such as “Can’t Barrage the Farage,” which is itself quite hilarious but also completely off-topic for this post.

Back on topic, but not really, I appreciate that the illustrator is from Eastern Europe, which is probably-not-but-I’m-going-to-pretend-it-is-anyway a nod to the #SlavRight.

Anyhow, the cover is adorable, and the back cover is as well. I like the mix of blocky watercolor shapes and the expanses of watercolor that let the the colors blend more naturally, or that show the brush strokes. The color palette is bright and fun, but avoids being obviously patriotic (RED WHITE AND BLUE, WHAT) or annoyingly young (RED YELLOW AND BLUE PRIMARY COLORS OBVIOUSLY KIDS LIKE THEM). It looks like a fun book, and the Right needs to have more fun.

Now that I’ve written so much of this post it seems somewhat silly that I’m posting about this book without having read it. Perhaps it will turn out to be absolutely schlock. At this point, however, it seems worth it to support any and all explicitly Trump or right-wing art endeavors, since there are so few of them.

It’s my blog I do what I want.

Deus Vult in the wild

Spotted: memes bleeding into real life, somewhere in Seattle.

Deus Vult. God wills it. One of the battle cries of the alt-west faction of the alt-right. Nearly inevitable, considering the amount of Islamic terrorism that takes place on Western soil. The jokes will surely happen; jury’s still out on an actual crusade.

What’s heartening to me about this photo is that 1. the graffiti doesn’t suck too badly, and that 2. its very existence means that there are people who are young and dumb enough to go out tagging (albeit in a designated tagging zone) but who are familiar with and like the concept enough to put it on a wall.

Leftists get so comfortable in their claimed territory–the cities–that they assume that none of their fellow city dwellers think out of lock-step with them. The alt-right is still fairly obscure, and Deus Vult even more so, but I hope that a few leftists walk by and get the shudders seeing a reminder that not everyone thinks like them. (And some of those people might be their neighbors–gasp!)

The Chalkening was a lot of fun, but Deus Vult gets a lot closer to the heart of the matter. Trump can’t, and won’t, fix our fallen world.

I also love how there is “pork” all over this wall. Reminds me of that joke–eating 2 strips of bacon every morning reduces your possibility of becoming a terrorist by 100%.

The most trusted name in news

Five years ago, the “greentext” aesthetic was associated with epic stories, usually with some sort of groan-inducing pun or twist at the end. Or else they were super gross.

If you had told me then that I would trust a greentext news update more than I would trust my local nightly news, I would have laughed.

Now? I’m loving my daily news bulletin from /pol/ News Forever.

Reading green text on a peach background is not the greatest experience in the world (and can you imagine what it’s like for red-green colorblind people??) but, to me, it’s now an indicator that what I’m reading is plausible-to-true. The types of graphics that we see on CNN, or the local nightly news, with the ticker bars on the bottom of the screen and the rotating concentric circles, those now are a visual cue for fake news.

I wonder if I’m more willing to trust the butt-ugly chopped-together aesthetic of greentext as a direct contrast to the slickness of the mainstream media’s visual presentation.

This would make sense, as the Drudge Report is also incredibly popular, and its aesthetic focuses on “just the facts, ma’am.”

Sometimes Drudge’s layout looks extra special. I particularly like this one from yesterday. Most of the photos are crisp and bold, and fit into an overall red-yellow-green color palette (one of my favorites, tbh). Obviously Matt Drudge isn’t in the business of making news pretty, but sometimes it turns out that way.

It’ll be interesting to watch how the backlash against fake news also extends to the visual presentation of news. A sophisticated visual presentation doesn’t automatically mean that the content it contains is false, but it’s a lot easier to hide BS in a fancy container–there’s more distraction from what’s important.

The truth (or at the very least, the truth-as-you-see-it) needs very little varnishing to be effective.

Moochin’ the White House

I love this photo. It says so much.

Scaramucci perfectly framed by the door: symmetrical. The lines around his body are clean and strong, and square to the camera. Direct. Bold. His dark suit contrasts with the overexposed background. He breaks the symmetry with his body language, that stare at Priebus.

Thumbs tucked into his belt loops, like an old-west gunslinger ready to draw.

He’s wearing his badge.

There’s a new sheriff in town.

Priebus, on the other hand, he bleeds right into the background. His suit, white shirt, and tie make stripes that are an extension of the flag behind him. He’s turned to the side, away from the camera. His hand looks limp. And the couch is obscuring half his body; he is literally half the size of Scaramucci.

Even their hair tells a story. Scaramucci’s is robust and dark. Salt and pepper temples make some men look distinguished, but not Priebus.

Without saying a word, Scaramucci has established dominance over Priebus, and by extension, the entire GOP establishment. And since this photo has been all over twitter today (I think it scrolled past in my feed 3 times), he’s essentially marked his territory all over the Trump base.

You know it’s a beautifully communicative photograph when it transforms perfectly into a meme. Just add Pepe.

If this is the initial thesis statement for the Mooch-era White House, I think we’re in for a heckuva lot of fun.

Scaramucci has started out with a bang. I hope his follow-through is just as intense. (And with an endorsement from Nassim Taleb, I suspect it is.)

rite????

The photographer on our side

Hey! It’s not a total hitpiece! Various digs aside, there’s a decent article this week in the Failing New York Times about Peter Duke, a photographer who is sympathetic to the alt-right and alt-lite.

Duke believes in the primacy of visual culture, and most right-wing figures, he says, don’t take enough care to make themselves look good. Newt Gingrich, he tells me, is “disheveled”; Steve Bannon is a “schlub”; Trump’s hair is “problematic.” At the same time, he thinks left-leaning media outlets — which is to say, just about anything other than Breitbart News and The Drudge Report — go out of their way to present the right in a negative way.

To prove his point, Duke edited a photo of the author in the same way that news outlets do to right-wing people. The NYT conveniently left it out of the final article, but Duke helpfully posted it to twitter. 

Personally I kinda like the edited version better. Apparently I like people to look “ghoulish and depleted,” but I think it has more depth, and therefore more interest. Frankly, the author looks more interesting in Duke’s edited photo, and more like a standard-issue beta male in the “normal” one.

It is true, though, that most right-wing political figures don’t present themselves in a visually compelling way. Milo and Ann Coulter aside, most talking heads seems to think that their ideas will stand on their own merit, with no assistance needed from the ethos of the speaker.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t work that way.

“There’s this kind of, I think, phony idea that things are objective — when you push the button, that’s the objective reality, and I just don’t think that’s true,” Duke told me, not long ago, on our early evening walk along the bluffs. Duke sees photography as a kind of weapon in the culture wars, and in a way, it may be the perfect medium for a movement like the alt-right, which wants to refashion reality on its own terms. Pictures are, after all, factually malleable vessels that do not present reality as it is but suggest an alternative one as the photographer sees it.

This is the second time in the article that the author insists that the alt-right is creating alternative versions of things (which is true) because the alt-right’s version of reality isn’t true. This is completely false. The alt-right is more aligned with objective reality than the NYC liberal bubble, but to those (like the author) inside that bubble, it doesn’t feel that way.

A photograph can be a “lie that tells the truth,” or it can be 100% deception. Without sympathetic photographers, who know how to wield angles, light, composition and photoshop to our best advantage, the right wing, in any of its forms, is at a severe disadvantage. I’m glad we have Duke on our side. There is much to learn from him.

I must disagree with Duke slightly, though. I think Trump’s hair is genius.

But that is another post for another day.

Older posts Newer posts

© 2024 Batfort

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑