How To Sing The Blues

by Lame Mango Washington
(attributed to Memphis Earlene Gray with help from Uncle Plunky,
revisions by Little Blind Patti D., Dr. Stevie Franklin and Mad Dog
Harry Webber)

The American Advertising Federation (AAF) has announced the recipients of the 2007 Diversity Achievement and Mosaic Awards, which honor companies who have demonstrated multicultural excellence in advertising. The awards will be presented in conjunction with AAF District Two and will be celebrated at an awards luncheon on September 26, 2007, at the New York Athletic Club as part of Advertising Week New York.

Since I've always thought of diversity in advertising as a monumental oximoron on par with Military Intelligence, and since this particular award ceremony seems to all be focused upon Tom Burrell, Clients of Burrell, owners of Burrell and past employees and employers of Tom Burrell I thought it would be appropriate to provide instructional material for everybody else who is not in one of the categories above to express their dismay.

1. Most Blues begin, "Woke up this morning" or "Since my women
left me."

2. " I got a good woman" is a bad way to begin the Blues, 'less
you stick something nasty in the next line, like " I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town," or " I got a good woman but she doin' six to nine for sellin' crack."

3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat
it. Then find something that rhymes ... sort of: "Got a good woman
-with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like Margaret Thatcher-
and she weigh 500 pound."

4. The Blues are not about choice. You stuck in a ditch, you stuck
in a ditch; ain't no way out.

Or, you took a job in Silicon Valley, you got no place to live, you pitch a tent in the park. You ain't homeless, you just inventive.

5. Blues cars: Chevys and Cadillacs and broken-down trucks. Blues don't travel in Volvos, BMWs, or Sport Utility Vehicles. Most
Blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train.

Jet aircraft an' state-sponsored motor pools ain't even in the
running. Walkin' plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So does
fixin' to die.

Your stock options bein' under water don't give you the right to sing the blues. Your stock comin' off restriction and you ain't got the money to pay the tax man do give you the right to sing the blues.

6. Teenagers can't sing the Blues unless they go to Public School in California. Adults sing the Blues. In Blues, " adulthood" means being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.

Recieving Spam on your e-mail server don't qualify you as havin' the right to sing the blues. Eatin' Spam cold out the can does.

7. Blues can take place in New York City but not in Hawaii or any
place in Canada. Hard times in St. Paul or Tucson is just
depression.Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are (is) still the best places to have the Blues.

You cannot have the blues in any place that don't get rain or whose name ends in Valley, Vista or Pointe spelt wif an "e"..

8. A man with male pattern baldness ain't the blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is. Breaking your leg cuz you skiing is not the blues. Breaking your leg cuz an alligator be chomping on it is. Anybody with a job whats name is in initials like CEO, COO, CTO or CFO got no right to sing the blues. Anybody with the title CMO do got the right to sing the blues.

Anybody bein' chased by somebody with initials in they name like IRS, FBI, CIA or LAPD gots every right to sing the blues.

9. You can't have no Blues in an office or a shopping mall. The
lighting is all wrong. Go outside to the parking lot or sit by the
dumpster and you good.

If you really want to experience the blues, tear up your
commutation ticket on the MTA, METRA, MetroLink or CalTrain and try to 'splain to the conductor 'bout how it's yo' God givin' right to be ridin' the rails so's you can relate to the call of the open road.

10. Good places for the Blues:
a. highway
b. jailhouse
c. empty bed
d. bottom of a whiskey glass
e. freightyard
f. highway underpass
g. any bar that don't sell imported beer on tap

Bad places:
a. Ashrams
b. gallery openings
c. Ivy League institutions
d. golf courses
e. Any dotcom company conference room
f. A Gulfstream VI
g. A Republican Fundraiser

11. No one will believe it's the Blues if you wear a suit, less
you happen to be an old ethnic person, and you slept in it or the suit had several previous owners and came to you with a bullethole in the back.

12. Do you have the right to sing the Blues? Yes, if:
a. you're older than dirt
b. you're blind
c. you shot a man in Memphis
d. you can't be satisfied
e. you lost your job before your relocation check cleared.
f. your boss just got "rightsized" and you're worst enemy
is in line for his job.
g. you live in San Francisco but you work for minimum wage.

No, if:
a. you have all your teeth
b. you were once blind but now can see
c. the man in Memphis lived.
d. you have a 401k, retirement plan or trust fund.
e. you have an online broker.
f. you have a union healthcare plan.

13. Blues is not a matter of color. It's a matter of bad luck.
Tiger Woods cannot sing the blues. Gary Coleman could. Ugly white people also got a leg up on the blues. All Jewish people have the right to sing the blues unless they changed their last name to pass as Goyim.

14. If you ask for water and Baby give you gasoline, it's the
Blues. Other acceptable Blues beverages are:
a. wine
b. whiskey or bourbon
c. muddy water
d. black coffee
e. Dr Pepper

The following are NOT Blues beverages:
a. mixed drinks
b. kosher wine
c. Snapple
d. sparkling water
e. any beverage that had to pass through customs

15. If it occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it's a Blues
death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So is the electric chair, substance abuse, and dying
lonely on a broken down cot.

You can't have a Blues death if you die during a tennis match or getting liposuction. Howsomevever, you can die a blues
death if you run a dotcom with a burn rate of a million a month or more and you take out your entire ad agency, vc firm and consultancy before turning the 9mm on yourself.

You cannot die a blues death if your business partner throw your ass out a fifth floor window and impail you on the pitchfork of the statue of Neptune out front. You can if she fine as wine and you broke as a joke.

16. Some Blues names for women:
a. Sadie
b. Big Mama
c. Bessie
d. Fat River Dumpling
e. Little Maybell
f. any women's name followed by May or Lee

17. Some Blues names for men:
a. Joe
b. Willie
c. Little Willie
d. Big Willie
f. Any man's name proceeded by Howlin' or Mack Daddy

18. Persons with names like Sierra, Sequoia, Auburn, and Rainbow can't sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis, unless they last name ends in a vowl.

19. Make your own Blues name (starter kit):
a. name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Lame, etc.)
b. first name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime,
Kiwi,etc.)
c. last name of President (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.)
For example, Blind Lime Jefferson, or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore, etc.
(Well, maybe not "Kiwi.")

20. I don't care how tragic your life: if you own a computer or
have access to the Internet, you cannot sing the blues. You best destroy your computer by fire or a spilled bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, or get out a shotgun and blast your modem into scrap plastic. In otherwords, if you can get MadisonAveNew you
ain't got no right to sing the blues.

Now, act like you know.

Stay strong.

SUBVERTising:
Madison Avenue Goes StealthMode.

Part 2 of an upcoming book
by Harry Webber

Organized activists were accused or having defaced thousands of the poster ads that lined the Paris Metro walls, launching an unprecedented campaign to put an end to what they claimed was the relentless invasion of public space by big business.

Inspired by Canadian Naomi Klein's book, 'No Logo', which had become the manfesto of anti-globalist gen X coffee shop activists from Seattle to Stockholm -- the “Toasters” were done with being mass-injected ad messaging 24/7 and 360 degrees.

"I feel like I've been taken hostage by advertising, and this is the only way I can make my voice heard." said 34-year-old Alexandre Baret, one of 62 activists being sued for damages by angered authorities who launched a one million euro (US$1,22 million) lawsuit against the protesters.

“We are not terrorists, we are not vandals, but there is no legal way of fighting back”, he claimed on national television. The next night tens of thousands of teens took to the Metro with spray cans and markers. “TOAST” was scrawled across every single metro poster in Paris by dawn.

Brand-smashing had been a key componant of the anti-globalisation movement that staged explosive protests back in 1999 at the World Trade Summit in Seattle.

The TOAST movement saw hundreds of people charged in Paris for vandalism. Lawyers and organizers claimed that their protest was the biggest and most successful anti-ad campaign up to that point and credited themselves with lighting the match that blew up the global advertising industry.

About 10,000 young students and artists, as well as housewives and middle-aged engineers from the Paris suburbs, staged the next metro raid in November. As a result more than 1200 people were arrested. Their lawyers,told the press that there is was official body behind the movement although an anti-advertising Web site "Stopub" provided intricate details of each raid.

Philosopher and teacher Vincent Cespedes, wrote several books ont the impact of advertising on young people during this period. He claimed that an average Parisian is exposed to 2,500 ads a day, and that this feeds the negative emotions of greed, alienation and depression.

Cespedes claimed that in France, unlike in other European countries such as Britain, there was no strict code for advertisers, only a watchdog that rarely intervened.

And because, sex is used to sell almost anything from holidays to handbags, in Paris, many campaigns are started by feminist groups that write graffiti over naked breasts and buttocks emblazoned onto metro walls and street-side billboards across the City of Light.

"Advertising, particularly in France, totally warps the image young people have of women," said Cespedes.
"One of my pupils said the other day he reckoned white women were all whores because they'd sleep with you for a yoghurt."

The press fanned the flames by claiming the movement was a sign that French youth has recovered its zest for politics, rekindling memories of student riots in 1968 and more recently of protests over anti-immigrant leader Jean-Marie Le Pen's success in finishing second in the 2002 presidential election.

After several expensive court battles many of the anti-advertising factions found legitimate outlets as "associations". The status of association dates back to a French law passed on

.

What Matters To Me:

Real-Time Dime.

I used to have a friend that I would type to on IM for hours on end. She would get so pissed off with me because she would get finger cramps responding when it would be just as easy for meto pick up the phone.

When I did finally start picking up the phone I found myself with four digit cell phone bills. But there are some people that you just have to talk to or maintain contact with because they are just that important in your life.

Of course these days if I get an eMail from this person, I treat it like a UFO sighting and a phone call is strained if it lasts longer than 60 seconds. That's how the ties that bind us tend to go.

Angela Glenn told me about a conversation she had with her step-son who goes to school in San Diego and never reads his eMail because he says it is too slow. He'd rather FaceBook his friends because the real-time lag is closer to real-time.

I get eMail from all over the world and the lag time is about 30 seconds. Not fast enough?

I read the other day that young lovers in Japan are so obsessed with text messaging their signif others that they
are generally in contact from the time they wake up until bed-time, exchanging as many as 12,000 text messages over the course of an 18 hour day.

This obsession with being connected is really becomming obsessive. Yes, there are people I think of every waking hour, but luckily they hate my guts so my phone bill doesn't require bridge financing. But other than that one hater, I can't imagine an entire rolodex of friends that require constant Twitter updates, text emoticons and IM sentence scraps. Am I out of touch being so out of touch?

July 1901 and can be given to any non-profit organisation involved in either social work, education or culture. There were more than 800,000 associations with over 20 million members (for a total population of just under 60 million), and resourcest of more than 50 billion euros at the time of the first outbreaks.
One of the biggest anti-advertising associations at that point was "Résistance à l'Agression Publicitaire or RAP.

Its self-proclaimed objective was "to help us understand that advertising tactics aim to condition us as both consumers and citizens, and to fight against these human, social, and environmental nuisances" They didn’t stop there: within the perspective of humanism and democracy, they were also committed to a "consciousness-raising campaign, especially among the youth who should be allowed to develop the critical mind required to fulfil their future role as autonomous citizens".

Reuters reported: “However, though members of RAP have been involved in the numerous métro raids since last October, the association has been quick to point out that they were indeed acting as autonomous citizens, i.e., independently of their allegiance to the organisation. One may wonder why an organisation with such high humanistic aims has been so quick to deny any direct involvement with these actions whilst all the time reporting each event, raid, and demonstration of intent very favourably. The suspense will be short.”

And where was the advertising industry when these seeds of destruction were being sewn. Well French ad giant Publicis was right in the middle of it. The main forum for the proliferation of information concerning the early anti-advertising movement was the"Stopub website, which began calling upon non-violent acts of defiance against “the devil which fuels the cult of the Self, the merchandisation of the world, and the privatisation of the public sphere.”

Métrobus, the Publiicis owned company that was in charge of advertising in the métro,took the bull by the horns and undertook a John Doe lawsuit. Right after they announced the suite, a second call to arms was openly posted on the internet.Publiicis went after the cooperative internet service provider that was hosting the Stopub website, The agency claimed that the small ISP, owed them 10,000 euros for every day that passed without them releasing the names of those who had registered the troublesome website. More gasoline for the fire.
PopMatters.com a popular arts and music website of the times posted:

“RAP also found themselves in the firing line but were soon sidelined because of their apparent non-committal stance. Another 600 or so militants turned up for the second day of action on 7th November, and this time the media coverage was such that by the third get-together on 28th November, nearly 1,000 people turned up at the different meeting points, only to be confronted with several coach-loads of CRS (the French riot police, famous for its lack of nuance). Before anything happened, 276 arrests were made though all were later released with no charges being pressed. This worked as somewhat of a deterrent with the number of militants down to 500 for the pre-Christmas spray-paint spree on 19 December. Perhaps a bigger deterrent was the court action undertaken by Métrobus during the second half of January. They sued 62 people for just under one million euros worth of damages.

This spawned a support group called "Le Collectif des 62, its raison d'être to help raise enough cash so that the 62 in question could afford to hire their own defence lawyers. On the 29th April of this year, nine of those arrested were found guilty of vandalizing adverts in the métro and ordered to pay fines varying between 400 and 2,000 euros each. Though a far cry from the 900,000 or so euros Métrobus had initially claimed was owed them, their lawyers saw this as a victory. Naturellement.”

It was right after that when, the main aim of "Paysage de France an association whose agenda was to protect the environment — in the ecological sense — from non-green advertising methods began putting together envionmentalists and anti-advertising activists into powerful political coalitions.

Wider based groups such as that of"La Meute (the pack), the members of which are out to take action against what they perceive as sexist advertising brought with it the women’s movement. Though France has a reputation for being liberal when it comes to matters of sexuality and sexual behavior, anti-advertising lobbyists in general suddenly became highly vocal in the fight to combat the globalized objectification and commoditisation of gender. At this point the die was cast.

I had developed quite a following for MadisonAveNew.com in Europe and so I had made a point of trying to visit the continent at least once a year since 2006.

My usual modus operendi was to have my agent book three or four speaking engagements for advertising groups in London, Madrid, Paris and Frankfurt or Milan. This covered my transportation and lodgings and the fees afforded me the funds to indulge my passion for Brioni and Artioli.

But 2009 was completely different. The anti-advertising activists had disrupted a number of the Creative Awards galas the year before and it had a chilling effect on the events I had been booked for that year. In fact two of the events cancelled at the last moment, even though the fees had been paid and I was in town. I learned later that bomb threats had been received the night before and the venues were concerned for their own liability.

Of course nobody bothered to notify me, so I showed up at the London gig as contracted only to find a dark house and a group of really pissed off demonstrators with nobody to demonstrate against. Not to be out done they started torching parked cars and breaking every sheet of glass within sight.

Always looking for a good story, I chatted up a harmless looking rock thrower to see what I could learn as to why all the fuss. She said the demonstration was to show support for Hillary Clinton whose 2008 run for the Presidency had been derailed because of her stand against advertising to children. The breakfast food and toy lobbies had dug up some last minute dirty laundry on the Senator from New York and the conservative business press proceeded to burn her at the stake.

Declaring that advertisers were directing a ''barrage of materialistic marketing''
at young children, Senator Clinton had called on the federal government to ban commercials aimed at preschool children, and to prohibit advertising inside
public elementary schools. Her lead was immediately supported by both parent and teacher groups and supercharged her standings in the polls.

Mrs. Clinton, after a year of campaigning said the Federal Trade Commission should be authorized to ban advertising that it determined was intended for young children susceptible to manipulation. She also called for legislation that would prohibit the marketing of materials to children in elementary schools, as on book covers with advertisements. The soft drink companies went ballistic and huge amounts of pleged campaign funds dried up over night.

''Too many companies simply see our children as little cash cows that theycan exploit,'' Mrs. Clinton said oblivious to the impact this new line was having on her campaign finances.

On “Meet the Press” Sen. Clinton stated, ''We know that advertisers target the youngest of our children,'' she went on to say. ''Imagine. They are advertising to children who have not yet even reached kindergarten. They are trying to get these children to be influenced in what they want to buy and own.''

All across the globe anti-advertising forces championed her courage in standing up to Madison Avenue, even though she was the Senator from Manhattan.

Of course the former first lady offered little or no details as to how such ad-ban regulation might be accomplished. When questioned by the press on exactly how government would distinguish between an advertisement intended to influence adults and an ad intended to manipulate children. Mrs. Clinton's aides said that under her proposal, that determination would be left to the Federal Trade Commission.

The commission made a similar a proposal in 1978. Congress responded two years later by stripping its authority to issue such regulations, and Mrs. Clinton essentially
called for that authority to be restored. The next morning compromising photographs of Mrs. Clinton were leaked to Fox News. Six days later Mrs. Clinton
withdrew from the race citing health considerations and acute exaustion.

Next week: Mad As Sin, Avenue.