It’s an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World.
Before….
If you’ll allow me: A Rant:
An iconic Milwaukee building. The tallest in Wisconsin, making news when it opened in 1973 because it surpassed the height of the City Hall. Designed by one of the premiere American architecture firms, Skidmore, Owens and Merrill, the First Wisconsin Center is a paragon of the International Style—clean rectilinear geometry with a whimsical diagonal flourish at the top, bottom and one-third of the way up the facade.
….After
If you’ve been to downtown Milwaukee in the last two decades, you might know where I’m going with this. In 1999, because of some corporate buying and selling, the building became a billboard of sorts, displaying a corporate logo on all four sides of the upper floors.
I’m not sure how many people make financial decisions based on the logo they happen to see atop a 40-story building, but the U.S. Bank folks must think there’s some bottom-line value in a looming presence over the Milwaukee skyline. The Milwaukee Journal’s architecture critic—the late great Whitney Gould—called it “corporate schlock.” If you’re a lover of great architecture, it’s hard to argue with that. But it also shouldn’t be a surprise.
Like a frog in a pot slowly brought to simmer then boil, we’ve had our world stealthily saturated with corporate emblems. And unlike the frog, there’s really nowhere to jump.
Scan the skyline of any midsize American city (architecture forward cities like Chicago and New York are general exceptions), and you will see assorted logos for insurance companies, banks, corporations, and law firms. Lower your eyes and scan your fellow pedestrians and you’ll spy a parade of ad copy and slogans streaming by on t-shirts, shoes, tote bags, and baseball caps.
At NBA games, uniforms are adorned with the ubiquitous “Swoosh” along with other corporate graphics. Ditto soccer. Baseball has held out for now, but attending a game these days means subjecting yourself to any number of between-inning promotions and advertising on every conceivable surface, including the grass. And while football and baseball uniforms remain ad-free, these games take place in venues like Crypto.com Arena, Paycom Center, Gillette Stadium and Caesar’s Superdome.
Don Draper may have chucked his Brooks Brothers and joined a commune, but his 21st-century ilk are hard at it, finding new ways to parade us past the latest in unscented laundry detergents and eco-friendly mattresses. We’re not all glued to Cronkite and Lucy and the Beaver every night, so spread the ad wealth! Even as I write this, Kelly Clarkson and Jason Tatum are lurking in the next browser window, ready to sing the praises of Wayfair furnishings and Subway’s gooey sandwiches.
But please Madison Avenue, spend your billions adorning spaces I tend to avoid. Pay off TikTok influencers or buy product placements in the latest Marvel movies (new Old Spice scent: “Indelible Hulk”?). Instead of saturating the city with personal injury ads, let’s move the lawyers to their own red-light districts—where pin-striped attorneys can stand on street-side balconies and shout “One Call, That’s All” to passers-by.
In 2022, the world spent $865 billion creating and buying media advertising. So, ad folks, I’ll save you a few bucks:
I’m good.
I wouldn’t go to Subway if Steph Curry himself invited me out for lunch. I stop for a McDonald’s cheeseburger and fries a few times a year and I enjoy that. But even the hippest ad spot isn’t going to make me stop more often. If I want to try a new beer, I’ll ask my trusted bartender. I suspect there might be a few other folks like me out there. So, who knows? Maybe you can take it easy for a while. I hear some guy named Draper is peacefully grooving on the West Coast. I’m sure he’d be happy to tell you about some career alternatives.
Road Trip: The Kohler Art Preserve
An hour north of Milwaukee, the Art Preserve is dedicated to sustaining and storing Artist-Built Environments from around the world, work by those once called “Outsider Artists.” Remarkably, the museum holds the entire life work of several artists. It’s a strange, inspiring and beautiful place to spend an afternoon. Click on the images to expand and credit the artist.
Good Old Mr. B.
I’m only a few chapters in to Jennifer Homans’ long awaited biography of George Balanchine, the legendary dance-maker who founded the New York City Ballet. But it’s already a captivating look at how his life defined his artistry. Writing about Georgi’s pre-revolution childhood in St. Petersburg, for example, Homans offers penetrating insight into the core sources of Balanchine’s choreography:
He didn't recall the overcrowding and filth in the streets, the sewage dumped into cesspools in back alleyways, and the rickety wooden carts that arrived by night to collect the rotting and stinking refuse. Or the large signs in menacing red letters in public places warning against the drinking water, as cholera and TB outbreaks routinely swept the city. He was too young to fully register the mounting unrest and violence, the strikes and protests, the seemingly random attacks--bombs, assassination attempts, gunshots—launched by anarchists, Black Hundreds, and extremist factions on the left and right, some in the pay of the czar's secret police. . . .
Balanchine may not have known, but children absorb their surroundings, and the deteriorating atmosphere of St. Petersburg was silently imprinted like a menacing drumbeat onto his "Oh yes, we were very happy" early years. And as he separated the memories out over the course of his life, like wheat from chaff, all that was good and warm and childhood seemed to slide onto the imperial side of the ledger, and all that was violent, anguished, and upsetting piled up in a heap around the dark incidents that eventually led to the most inescapable disruptions of all: war and revolution. But his light-suffused memories stayed with him; they were the jewels he would sew into the hem of his mind and carry with him out of Russia. He had to remember them because no one else would. He took no family with him, and he had no relations to tell him the stories of his life, so he developed the habit of holding it all inside. And if these memories, so carefully and baletically constructed in his mind, have a whiff of romance and untruth, what matter? He was building his repertory, and who else was there to say otherwise?
Those “jewels” of memory were undoubtedly at the root of one of his best-loved ballets, Jewels, which opens the 75th anniversary season of the New York City Ballet next month.
Robbie Fulks
Robbie Fulks.
A Chicago fixture for several decades, Robbie Fulks has been off my radar for a while, so it was wonderful to see him close out the Musical Monday’s series at Milwaukee’s Lake Park on a pristine August night. Sharing the stage with mandolin player Don Stiernberg, he had ample chance to display his finger-picking prowess, tell great stories, and sing songs by turns sweet and acerbic. Think Loudon Wainwright with guitar chops. Tom Waits with a twang instead of a growl. Or any of the great Chicago folk musicians—Steve Goodman, Tom Paxton, Jim Post—with a bit more vinegar and tabasco, and you might have a sense of his musical footprint. If you don’t know him, start a playlist and tune in. To get you started, click here for a “Longhair Bluegrass,” a witty bit of autobiographical storytelling from his latest CD, Bluegrass Vacation.
Madison’s Chazen Museum
Photo by Bryce Richter
A few months ago, I had a chance to meet the Chazen Art Museum’s curators to find out more about their engaging and wide-ranging collection. The fruits of my conversations and meanderings are in print now in the Fall issue of UW-Madison’s alumni magazine, On Wisconsin. Through the magic of digital communication, you can read it here.
I’ll be relaxing and relishing the last gasp of summer next week, so The Friday Five will return on September 15th.
Have a good two weeks.