I know that Tarantino/Rodriguez double bill release has done complete justice to the genre in terms of the marketing it has done in the theatres. But has anyone seen the classy website for the film?

The word “exploitation” itself is an old show business term for publicizing shows and motion pictures. “Exploitation films” are those whose success relied not on the quality of their content, but on the ability of audiences to be drawn in by the advertising of the film (for example, a common device used by the more notorious exploitation films is to advertise the banning of a film in a certain country).

Ephraim Katz, author of The Film Encyclopedia, has defined exploitation as:

Films made with little or no attention to quality or artistic merit but with an eye to a quick profit, usually via high-pressure sales and promotion techniques emphasizing some sensational aspect of the product

Given the above definition, I wonder if I could classify the entire of Bollywood 80s as Indian version of the “Exploitation” film genre. Check out the posters, for instance (yeah, you can even buy em!).

Found this outstanding photograph of Dali that appeared in the cover of Life.

Link forwarded by a friend.

“The play by Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old English major, was submitted last year as part of a short story writing class. Entitled “Richard McBeef,” Cho’s bizarre play features a 13-year-old boy who accuses his stepfather of pedophilia and murdering his father. A copy of the killer’s play can be found below. The teenager talks of killing the older man and, at one point, the child’s mother brandishes a chain saw at the stepfather. The play ends with the man striking the child with “a deadly blow.”

Needless to say, the writing is worth reading only as a peek into the mind of a troubled man. Mostly, its a cathartic outburst of the writer against something.

From Wikipedia

“While it may be simplistic to assume a straightforward “profile”, the study did find certain similarities among the perpetrators. “The researchers found that killers do not ’snap’. They plan. They acquire weapons. They tell others what they are planning. These children take a long, considered, public path toward violence.”^[6] Princeton’s Katherine Newman points out that, far from being “loners”, the perpetrators are “joiners” whose attempts at social integration fail, that they let their thinking and even their plans be known, sometimes frequently over long periods of times. The shootings seem as though an attempt to adjust their social standing and image, from “loser” to “master of violence.”

Million dollar question is, are we going to see any change in US gun laws? I doubt it. Its like what my friend says — first they dig a hole, and then they try to fill it, and then they dig it again, and so on…!

Insane.

“

MIT Advertising Lab blogs about SS+K, the agency working on a unique game concept that requires collective audience participation.

“Several theaters in LA, Philly and NY will be equipped with a camera that tracks the motion of the entire audience. Projected on the screen will be a modified version of the NewsBreaker game and a faint mirror image of the audience in the background.

When the audience leans their bodies to the left in their seats, the paddle on the bottom will react with their movement and move to the left. When the ball makes it way towards the right, they will all have to collectively lean to the right to keep the ball in play, and so on. Like NewsBreaker, many of the bricks will have msnbc.com headlines (via RSS) embedded in them, that fall as the bricks are destroyed.”

Note: Newsbreaker is a tile game where bricks become news items.

A few hundred years ago, the idea of having a “conversation through pressing some buttons” would have sounded alien-ish. When IM clients started spring up a few years ago, most people couldn’t believe that users would actually type in their thoughts into a text box, and communicate with someone they knew. Over the last few years, IM (in its many different incarnations), has emerged as the chief communicating metaphor for a generation of IT savvy corporates. Is it a manifestation of man’s need to connect in a severely fragmented universe?

Almost as a parallel development, the notion of “worker’s union” vanished from the tech industry, although most other industries in India still have to deal with it. In its pristine form, the worker’s union used to look after the benefit and well-being of the labour force as a bonafide entity. However, they brought in their own unspoken baggage, so their disappearance was considered a good thing. However, alongside, the employees work hours started climbing steadily. There came to be an unspoken rule that the 40 hours mentioned in most offer letters was just to keep the beaureucrats happy, and that reality was quite the opposite.

A colleague recently joked — when a human being spends 80% of his waking hours at work, does his sexual and emotional being seep into his professional one? Does he become unduly “touch-feely” about his work? Is that something the behavioral analysts (read, psychiatrists) should worry about? Do the cliched childhood traumas manifest themself in some way at workplace?

I wonder.

Another colleague has the habit of calling mergers and acquisitions, marriages. “If we get married to X Inc… if Y divorces with us, we will have…”. Heh.

Perhaps we are seeing the emergence of the Corposexuals? Asexual humans whose primary relationships are in their workplace. Relationships where the dynamics emerge from workplace roles. A relationship that’s fast replacing all others in its intensity and devotion — marriages, families, everything.

Chanced upon this gem while I was searching for the existence of the word Corposexual. More on that in the next post.

From ADs of the World. Absolutely positively brilliant!