24 October 2020

Billboards in the News

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have threatened to sue the Lincoln Project, if the anti-Trump Republicans do not remove two huge billboards from Times Square in New York City, in which they accuse the senior White House advisers of showing “indifference” to Americans suffering and dying under Covid-19. The Lincoln Project is staffed by Republican operatives who are supporting Joe Biden. With its billboards in Times Square, a stone’s throw from Trump Tower, it seems the Lincoln Project may have succeeded in distracting the president’s daughter and son-in-law. Ivanka Trump'’s gesture on the billboard appears to be taken from a controversial picture, tweeted in July, in which she promoted Goya black beans.



Oprah Winfrey Commissions 26 Billboards Demanding Arrests In Breonna Taylor's Killing
O, The Oprah Magazine has commissioned 26 billboards calling for the arrest of the police officers involved in the killing of Breonna Taylor to be placed across Louisville, Ky. The billboard artwork uses the cover image of the September issue of O Magazine, which marks the first time in the publication's 20-year run that Oprah Winfrey has not been on the cover. Taylor was killed by Louisville Metro Police on March 13 when at around 1 a.m., officers executing a "no-knock" warrant stormed her apartment where she and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, were sleeping. Walker, a licensed gun owner, believed the officers were intruders and fired at them, striking one officer in the leg. Police shot back, hitting Taylor eight times, killing her.


Billboard in San Francisco in Glen Park
In this now prolonged COVID environment, Debt is not being forgiven and interest on money is still ticking exponentially. The legal clauses of foreclosure, seizure, and eviction are real, and are used proactively as a God given Lender right. The Rule of Law favors Debt, even in the times of Jesus.



Ocasio-Cortez Hits Back After Times Square Billboard Blaming Her for Amazon
21 Feb 2019
After a right-wing lobby group unveiled a billboard in New York City's Time Square on Wednesday blaming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alone for the decision by retail and technology giant Amazon to "take its ball and go home" by pulling the plug on its planned HQ2 project in nearby Long Island City, it was pretty clear what was going to happen next. Ocasio-Cortez didn't demure. She shot back: “Few things effectively communicate the power we’ve built in fighting dark money & anti-worker policies like billionaire-funded groups blowing tons of cash on wack billboards (this one is funded by the Mercers). (PS fact that it’s in Times Sq tells you this isn’t for/by NYers.)”



The real-life Three Billboards stunts
01 March 2018
An American street artist has become the latest party to co-opt the signage featured in Oscar-nominated drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The artist - known as Sabo - covered three Los Angeles billboards with red tarpaulins accusing the entertainment industry of covering up child abuse. One billboard read: "And the Oscar for biggest p[a]edophile goes to...", while another claimed: "We all knew." The stunt is the latest in a number of protests inspired by the billboards featured in Martin McDonagh's award-winning film. In Miami, meanwhile, mobile billboards were deployed to urge Florida senator Marco Rubio to sanction gun reform in the wake of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.





Anti-Trump billboard in Arizona prompts death threats against artist
20 Mar 2017
Karen Fiorito was commissioned by a company for the local arts in Phoenix to create the billboard. The Santa Monica-based artist earned a master’s degree in arts from Arizona State University. Since the Trump billboard went up Friday, the 25-year-old artist said she has received both positive and negative feedback, including a few death threats. The dollar swastikas, she said, represent “corporate power and greed and how our society has become all about money and corporatism.”




'Incredibly Creepy' Billboards to Track Behavior of Passers-By
29 Feb 2016
Billboards across the country will soon begin to spy on the behavior of passers-by and sell that data to advertisers. Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, which owns tens of thousands of billboards nationwide, is on Monday announcing plans to use people's cell phones to allow its billboards to track the behavior of everyone who walks or drives past the ads. The marketing behemoth is partnering with AT&T and other companies that track human behavior to collect data on viewers' activity, which advertisers could then use to create hyper-targeted ads—similar to how websites track visitors through their browsers and sell that data to online marketers. Facial-recognition technology is also increasingly used by advertisers to track behavior in public spaces. In Germany, the Astra beer brand recently created an automated billboard that noted when women walked past. The billboard approximated the women’s age, then played one of several prerecorded ads to match.

Giant ads for Verizon, Super Bowl are illegal, S.F. says
27 Jan 2016
Two large banners advertising Super Bowl 50 and Verizon Wireless recently installed on the Four Embarcadero building in San Francisco will shrink substantially following the threat of a lawsuit from the city attorney's office, officials said today. The banners, which cover most of the building on two sides, can be seen towering over the Super Bowl City fan village area now taking shape at Justin Herman Plaza. In a letter dated Jan. 25, City Attorney Dennis Herrera said his office has received complaints about the signs, which violate a city law passed by voters in 2002 that prohibits any new general advertising signs in San Francisco. The letter said the signs need to be removed by 5 p.m. on Thursday or the city would file a lawsuit and seek a temporary restraining order and fines.

Skyscraper Billboard SF


Targeting racist trolls by putting their comments on billboards
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-34945756
30 Nov 2015

Brazilians who post racist abuse online may see their words blown up and pasted onto billboards near their houses. The campaign is called "Virtual racism, real consequences" and it's backed by Criola, a civil rights organization run by Afro-Brazilian women. The group collects comments from Facebook or Twitter and uses geolocation tools to find out where the people who have posted them live. They then buy billboard space nearby and post the comments in huge letters, although names and photos are pixelated.





Billboard art show confronts Missouri drivers head-on
31 May 2015
SOMEWHERE ON INTERSTATE 70, Missouri — Those who spend a lot of time on I-70 can confirm that it’s easy to let your mind drift while driving this 250-mile stretch of Missouri. Missouri has five times the national average number of billboards: about 15,000 billboards. Cars, food, porn, Jesus — everything is advertised on the giant structures. Thus the “I-70 Sign Show” was born. Funded by the University of Missouri, the show displays critical art pieces on a billboards. The pieces are meant to challenge and critique the political, social and commercial noise that confronts drivers. The “I-70 Sign Show” piece that got the most feedback, New York artist Mel Bochner’s piece, simply reads, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”


Obscene image shown on hacked US billboard
21 May 2015
Hackers have managed to make a huge video billboard in Atlanta display an obscene image favored by internet pranksters. It prompted calls to police, and soon after, the billboard's owner cut off its power supply. The hack came after a security researcher warned the company, which runs thousands of the video billboards, that they were vulnerable to attack. The FBI and Homeland Security are now investigating the hack. The billboard is owned by US electric-sign giant Yesco, which runs thousands of similar billboards across America. Other signs in other states are also believed to have had their images changed at the same time. A group calling itself the Assange Shuffle Collective claimed responsibility for the attack, in a discussion on social news site Reddit.

Google rents world's biggest digital billboard in Times Square
19 Nov 2014
Google has become the first company to rent to the world's largest and most expensive digital billboard in Times Square, New York. The billboard is eight stories high and is estimated to cost $2.5m (£1.6m) to hire for four weeks. The screen, which is the size of a football field, is mounted on the side of the Marriot Marquis hotel. Around 300,000 pedestrians are estimated to pass by the billboard every day.


Dangling dummies shock Las Vegas commuters
08 Mar 2012
Mannequins hanging from nooses on two Las Vegas billboards Wednesday were part of an apparent publicity stunt that led to dozens of calls from drivers on their morning commute, the Nevada Highway Patrol said. The dummies were dressed in business suits and hung from signs reading "Dying for work" and "Hope you're happy Wall St." It wasn't immediately clear who was behind the stunt. Both highways are some of the most highly traveled roadways during commuter hours.



17 Jul 2012
The Brandalism project saw 25 artists from 8 countries coming together for the biggest subvertising campaign in UK history.  Over five days a team of guerilla installers travelled to Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol and London and put up artworks that seeks to confront the ad industry and take back our visual landscapes.

Gallery Page




2010 AZ Billboard
On the way to the Grand Canyon for a family vacation in summer of 2010, we passed through Kingman, Arizona on the old Route 66. Pictured is a billboard promoting the governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, “doing the job the feds won’t do” with the ‘o’ in ‘won’t’ depicting the Obama symbol. Using a popular WWII poster, a much younger Jan Brewer is pictured as Rosie the Riveter. “Doing the job the feds won’t do” is in reference to Arizona’s controversial immigration policy regarding the protection of its borders. Whether one agrees with Arizona’s immigration policy or not, Governor Jan Brewer's billboard demonstrates that billboards still play a key role in the promotion of a public opinion.











23 October 2020

Death Care Series


The aging baby boomers have been moving into retirement like a tsunami and have the potential to negatively impact economic growth, straining the economy. Certain sectors will boom, such as pharmaceuticals, caskets, and bingo games, but overall, old folks slow down. Perhaps this will be the boomers' final legacy, sending the economy into a tailspin by merely getting old. Now that's ironic. The Death Care industry is poised to grow with this tsunami of Baby Boomers; however, the last hurrah of the Baby Boomer generation could be to morph this pretentious and fragile industry by merely getting back to funeral basics. (Written pre-Covid)

The American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford, 1996, Excerpts, First Publication 1963

A brief look backwards establishes that there is no resemblance between the funeral practices of today and those of even seventy-five to one hundred years ago, and that there is nothing in the “history of Western civilization” to support the thesis of continuity and gradual development of funeral customs. On the contrary, the salient features of the contemporary American funeral [beautification of the corpse, metal casket and vault, banks of store-bought flowers, the ubiquitous offices of the “funeral director”] are all of very recent vintage in this country, and each has been methodically designed and tailored to extract maximum profit for the trade. Of all the changes in the funeral scene over the last decades, easily the most significant is the emergence of monopolies in what the trade is pleased to call the “death care” industry. Of the three publicly traded major players – Service Corporation International [SCI], the Loewen Group, and Stewart Enterprises – SCI, incorporated in 1984, is the undisputed giant.

10 May 2006, Form 10-Q
Over the long-term, we believe that our industry leadership, along with superior brand, reputation, financial strength and geographic reach, will result in expanded growth opportunities with the aging of the Baby Boom generation.




Embalming

Famous Preserved Bodies
19 August 2010
So much of travel is about coming face to face with history. And in some cases, that can be more literal than most. Here are six earlier humans who have been preserved – through accident or intent – for us to meet hundreds (and thousands) of years later.







First funeral held using ‘living coffin’ made of mushroom fibre
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/15/first-funeral-living-coffin-made-mushroom-fibre-netherlands?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
15 May 2020
After months of testing, the first funeral has taken place in the Netherlands using a fast-composting “living coffin” made of mycelium, the mat of fibers that forms the underground part of fungi. Mycelium is constantly looking for waste products – oil, plastic, metals, other pollutants – and converting them into nutrients for the environment. The process by which a human body in a traditional coffin becomes compost can often take a decade or more, slowed by the varnished wood and metals of the casket and synthetic clothing. A mycelium coffin will be absorbed back into the soil within a month or six weeks, actively contributing to the full decomposition of the body it contains and enriching the surrounding soil quality – all within a period of two to three years.

Washington state is first to allow human composting
21 May 2019
Governor Jay Inslee signed legislation Tuesday making Washington the first state to approve composting as an alternative to burying or cremating human remains. It allows licensed facilities to offer “natural organic reduction”, which turns a body, mixed with substances such as wood chips and straw, into about two wheelbarrows’ worth of soil in a span of several weeks. Loved ones are allowed to keep the soil to spread, just as they might spread the ashes of someone who has been cremated – or even use it to plant vegetables or a tree. Supporters say the method is an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation, which releases carbon dioxide and particulates into the air, and conventional burial, in which people are drained of their blood, pumped full of formaldehyde and other chemicals that can pollute groundwater, and placed in a nearly indestructible coffin, taking up land. https://www.recompose.life/

Washington could legalize composting of human remains
12 Mar 2019
Washington is now on the verge of becoming the first US state to legalize human composting, also known as “recomposition”. The legislation would allow facilities in the state to legally compost bodies in a licensed facility by breaking them down into nutrient-rich soil.  Like any animal body, humans contain a lot of protein and moisture. In order to help them quickly break down, they are placed in a vessel with oxygen and plant materials, such as wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. This combination also spurs microbial activity, which gets rid of any type of bacterium or virus on the body. The process typically takes about 30 days. Human composting would also be a much greener after-death option, as it uses one-eighth the energy of cremation, and for every person who picks it over cremation or burial, it will save over a metric ton of CO2.

The new death industry: funeral businesses that won’t exploit grief
08 Jan 2018
Death needn’t be as mysterious or expensive as it has become. That’s according to a new band of entrepreneurs who are aiming to challenge what they claim is the oppressive and sometimes exploitative industry that profits from our inevitable demise. Death, says Poppy Mardall, founder of Poppy’s Funerals, has “become a conveyor-belt experience”, with large funeral companies industrializing the process of caring for people’s bodies. What needs to change, she believes, “is the whole way a bereaved person is treated from the moment they get in touch”. It’s not so much about the industry modernizing, she says, “but reflecting on the levels of service an undertaker is able to offer, treating a person like an individual, trying to create an atmosphere that’s warm and comfortable, and without fear”. https://www.poppysfunerals.co.uk/

Wal-Mart starts selling coffins
30 Oct 2009
Prices range from a "Mom" or "Dad Remembered" steel coffin for $895 to a bronze model at $2,899. The retailer is allowing customers to plan ahead by paying for the caskets over 12 months for no interest. They can be dispatched within 48 hours. Catering for cradle-to-grave needs, Wal-Mart already sells everything from baby wear to engagement rings.






Artist: Paul Insect – Death by Consumerism