7517: John Mayer Salutes Black History Month…?

From Salon…

This week in crazy: John Mayer
The guitarist’s music has always been an easy punch line. This time it was his mouth that caused all the pain

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Last month, John Mayer appeared to be dabbling in crazy when he told Rolling Stone he was looking for “the Joshua Tree of vaginas” and recalibrated the universal TMI meter with his digressions on masturbation. But this week, Mr. Lite FM Waiting on the World to Change indisputably proved his mettle as the King of All Batshit.

In a Playboy interview with Rob Tannenbaum, Mayer let loose with a now-infamous litany of wackadoo—most notably boasting that “Black people love me” before clarifying the meaning of “hood pass” as truly a “nigger pass”—and then going on to describe his fondness for white chicks by saying, “My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock.”

Oh. No. He. Didn’t.

The reaction to Mayer was swift and unsurprisingly negative. I think my favorite was the Jezebel commenter who described him as a “guano faucet.” But for those who still need it explained, there’s a difference between copping to certain sexual attractions and being glib about racism.

Yet even without the whopping sensitivity fail of comparing any portion of oneself to the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan—seriously, are you kidding me? -- the entire interview is a gold mine of lunacy.

Mayer on the Internet: “There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed.”

On friendship: “One of my best friends is Jewish beyond all Jews.”

On race: “What is being black? It’s making the most of your life, not taking a single moment for granted.”

On actress Kerry Washington: “She’s superhot, and she’s also white-girl crazy. Kerry Washington would break your heart like a white girl. Just all of a sudden she’d be like, ‘Yeah, I sucked his dick. Whatever.’”

On maturity: “I can’t change the fact that I need to be 32 … I want to dance. I want to get on an airplane and be like a ninja. I want to be an explorer. I want to be like ‘The Bourne Identity.’ I don’t want to pet dogs in the kitchen.”

On equality: “When women are whorish, they’re owning their sexuality. When men are whorish, they’re disgusting beasts.”

On Jessica Simpson: “It was like napalm, sexual napalm.”

On love: “I hate other men. When I’m fucking you, I’m trying to fuck every man who’s ever fucked you, but in his ass, so you’ll say, ‘No one’s ever done that to me in bed.’”

On celebrity blogger Perez Hilton: “I grabbed him and gave him the dirtiest, tongue-iest kiss I have ever put on anybody—almost as if I hated fags.”

On fame: “A platinum record is not going to wash your ass for you.”

The defense could rest right here, but it wasn’t over.

After a few million people went a little apoplectic over the whole thing, Mayer then took to his favorite medium, Twitter, to hashtag it out in the court of public opinion. “Re: using the ‘N word’ in an interview: I am sorry that I used the word,” he wrote. “And it’s such a shame that I did because the point I was trying to make was in the exact opposite spirit of the word itself. It was arrogant of me to think I could intellectualize using it.”

Here’s a tip for future interviews: Avoid using “nigger” and “David Duke” in the same train of thought.

Mayer also spoke out at a Nashville concert on Wednesday about how, in his quest to be “clever” (a word he uses, over the course of seven minutes, well over a dozen times), he became mired in “arrogance.” He should have “just given that up and played the guitar,” he explains. Describing himself as “a possible future grown-up” and sounding a little choked-up, Mayer’s aw-shucksy apologia seems to imply that this whole train wreck was just a case of “playing the media game” gone awry—thereby earning him all kinds of bonus cluelessness cred. I can’t vouch for his body being a wonderland, but John Mayer, your brain is definitely a freak show.

7516: Hanging With Gawker.

One more point regarding Alan Wolk’s Twitter perspective. At Gawker, the column was referenced alongside an image of someone being hanged. Nice.

7515: BHM 2010—Starlight.

Show The Love and Cast The Vote.

7514: Doug Eaves Is Back.

The ever insightful and eloquent Doug Eaves left a lengthy response at Essay 7496. Check it out.

7513: Cultural Cluelessness Tweets And Twit.

Old friend Alan Wolk of The Toad Stool appears to have stepped in his own stool by posting a perspective on “Thug Life” and Twitter. If Wolk sought to honor Black History Month, he would have been better off saluting minority inventors. The comments left at Advertising Age seem downright polite compared to the barbs hurled via Gawker. One might actually think Wolk hatched his notions after huddling with Marian “I discovered wiggers” Salzman.

7512: BHM 2010—Macy’s.

Looks like Macy’s just took a fashion catalog photo and repurposed it for a BHM ad.

7511: Mehri Salutes Black History Month…?

From Advertising Age…

Cyrus Mehri Filing EEOC Charges Against Advertising Companies
Move Seen As Next Step Toward Class-Action Lawsuit

By Kunur Patel

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Cyrus Mehri is one step closer to bringing a class-action suit against the ad industry for racial discrimination.

The civil rights lawyer told Advertising Age he is filing charges against ad companies with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. From here, the EEOC will investigate the charges of discrimination against agencies where the plaintiffs have been employed or applied for jobs. All filings are confidential; Mr. Mehri would not disclose the number of individuals, their identities or accused companies.

Considering the nature of the industry, it’s likely that both the holding companies and their individual agencies are being named.

In a statement, holding company Interpublic Group of Cos. said, “Diversity and inclusion will continue to be a significant priority for IPG. Our industry-leading [diversity and inclusion] programs are resulting in progress against this important business goal and we remain open to further dialogue with Mr. Mehri, though we are unaware of any developments relating to the EEOC.”

Representatives from holding companies WPP, Publicis Groupe and Omnicom Group did not respond before deadline.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mehri is free to continue building his class-action suit, regardless of the outcome of the federal agency’s inquiry, which could take months if not longer.

This development comes more than one year after Mr. Mehri and the NAACP announced the Madison Avenue Project, a report to lay the foundation for a class-action suit against the ad industry. The report found that ad agencies are guilty of “pervasive racial discrimination,” including black employees earning only 80% of the salaries of comparable white employees.

Since then, Mr. Mehri and his firm, Mehri & Skalet, have been investigating claims of race discrimination and interviewing potential plaintiffs.

“From my point of view, things are going at a good pace,” he said. “It’s a long road that has to happen person by person, piece by piece. The wheels are moving in the direction of something happening.”

At this point, Mr. Mehri sees two potential outcomes: a class-action suit or settlements between the agencies and individuals. But that will take time.

To compare, Mr. Mehri’s “Women on Wall Street” gender discrimination case against financial institutions took more than two years between the EEOC filing and the eventual settlement. Mehri & Skalet specializes in class-action cases—among the most notable was a suit against Texaco. In that 1990s case, a Texaco exec was famously caught on tape saying, “All the black jelly beans seem to be glued to the bottom of the bag.”

For the Madison Avenue Project, some industry vets worry that finding a similar “big smoking gun” will be tricky.

“It’s a very difficult thing to do, because bias is hard to prove,” said Hadji Williams, blogger and author of “Knock the Hustle.” “[The ad industry] is an at-will industry. It doesn’t have unions or hiring codes or contract bidding processes that they have to adhere by.”

“Everybody knows there are biases, but until you find a memo about a standard practice or someone on tape higher-up at an agency, it will be hard to prove,” he said.

7510: BHM 2010—Florida Tourism.

OK, it’s not really a BHM ad, but the month would not be complete without saluting the hardest-working man in Black advertising.

7509: BHM 2010—Regions And Morgan Keegan.

Celebrate Black History Month— with a small-business loan.

7508: Representing Black Advertising.

From the February 2010 issue of The Source.

7507: BHM 2010—The Source.

The February issue of The Source makes reference to Black History Month in the lower left corner of its cover, but there are zero BHM ads inside.

7506: Heart’s Not In The Right Place.

Do you really want to trust your cardiovascular health to an advertiser who illustrates the heart on the right (i.e., wrong) side of the chest?

7505: BHM 2010—AT&T.

AT&T salutes BHM with its 28Days promotion. Counting the days for this one to end.

7504: BHM Reflections.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Comic: Black History Month time to reflect on sacrifices

By Maudlyne Ihejirika

We interviewed a broad spectrum of Chicagoans and prominent visitors on what Black History Month means to them and whether it’s still relevant in 2010.

Here are the thoughts of comedian and radio personality George Willborn, 43, a product of Chicago public schools—best known for his 10 years on WVAZ-FM (V103) and stand-ups on BET, HBO, TV One and Comedy Central—who is keynoting a Men Motivating Men event for young black males today at Malcolm X College.

Willborn said:

“It’s a month of reflection on a lot of blood, sweat and tears, and sacrifices made long before I was thought of. It reminds me I have a great deal of responsibility, not just during the month of February, but each day of my life as a black man, to do the best I can to instill good qualities in my children and make sure we don’t forget.

“Regardless of whether it’s in the shortest month or the longest month, it’s totally necessary and wonderful to acknowledge those men and women who gave so much to get us here, and whose contributions to this society are often ignored.

“It’s probably even more important than ever, as our dropout rates continue to rise; our black children continue to kill each other; the black family continues to separate; and black fathers continue to go to jail and fall victim to the prisons of drugs and gang violence.

“It’s relevant too, because the media continues its stereotypical portrayals of black people and black culture, and we need to counter that for our children, not just recognizing the athletes and entertainers, but the everyday men and women.

“I stress to my two children every day how important it is to respect themselves. My son must know that it’s nice to be able to bounce a ball, but someone died for him to be able to go into a library.”

7503: Mad Men Racism Redux.

Can’t help but think that this writer from guardian.co.uk ripped off was inspired by Latoya Peterson.

It’s still a Mad Men world
The hit TV show may make us think we’ve come a long way since the 60s, but it distorts history and trivialises discrimination

Melissa Witkowski

Mad Men is hailed as a nuanced, incisive portrait of the changing landscape of advertising and society in the 1960s, but its depiction of the workplace it is an attractive fantasy that creates an illusion of distance between our past and our present.

It accomplishes this trick through the erasure of real accomplishments by women and people of colour of the era, and by downplaying the institutional and systemic oppression in favour of presenting easier (and more salacious) targets such as sexual harassment and racist banter as the biggest obstacles facing women and people of colour in the workplace. These obstacles were real, but the excessive focus on them trivialises real struggles and achievements by ignoring other, more calculated barriers to entry in the workplace that still exist today. These trivialities replace the glass ceiling with intentionally titillating visions of nylon stocking, and industry apartheid with casual racist mockery. Furthermore, the show frames examples of racism, for instance, in such a way as to flatter its audience. The expected, self-congratulatory response is: “Look how far we’ve come!”

In Mad Men’s second series, which takes place in 1962, Roger Sterling gossips to Don Draper that he’s “heard BBDO hired a coloured kid”. This sudden demotion might have come as a surprise to Clarence Holte, a black man who, a decade earlier had been hired by BBDO in 1952 as a copywriter, with a great deal of publicity, and by 1962 was an accounts executive. Or perhaps the line referred to Georg Olden, who served as art director for BBDO from 1960 to 1963. The show doesn’t see fit to tell us, nor is it ever mentioned again. Successful people of colour like Holte and Olden have no representatives in the world of Mad Men, which is content to let their stories unfold off-screen at other, clearly much more interesting, ad agencies.

Similarly, Mad Men’s depiction of women in the workplace may have surface verisimilitude, but it doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. Madison Avenue in the early 1960s was not as bereft of women as Mad Men would have us believe. Jean Wade Rindlaub was the vice president of BBDO from 1946 to 1963 and one of the most influential people in advertising. Jane Trahey founded Trahey Advertising Inc. in 1960. Helen Gurley Brown, of Sex and the Single Girl fame, was one of the most highly paid copywriters in the early 1960s. Mary Wells Lawrence started her career as a copywriter in 1953, and by the end of the 1960s she was the most highly paid ad executive in the world. And Caroline Robinson Jones, a black woman, made the leap from secretary to copywriter at J Walter Thompson in 1963; by 1977 she was the vice president of BBDO. Each of these remarkable women overcame entrenched prejudice and misogyny to rise in their careers; Jones, for example, recalled later that she had to teach herself everything, receiving no support from her colleagues. Mad Men neither mentions these real women nor constructs any fictional equivalents; nor does Peggy, the show’s lone female copywriter, reflect the sheer determination and drive that any of them displayed.

Instead, the show asks us to believe that Peggy, Mad Men’s mousy secretary turned mousy copywriter who had no advertising ambitions at the time, attained her position simply by making a clever pun to the right male superior at the right time. He promptly recognises her talent and puts her on an account. The show strongly implies that no woman had ever been a copywriter at Sterling Cooper prior to Peggy, but the circumstances of her promotion imply that this was merely because no woman had ever happened to sound talented in front of a man before. Peggy rarely struggles to be taken seriously by clients or co-workers, and in the second series even obtains a coveted office merely by having the audacity to ask for one. In Peggy’s story, Mad Men implies that women’s success only occurred at the discretion of men, a prize to be bestowed from on high for good behaviour. Surely Jones and her counterparts would have been insulted!

By ignoring the successes and struggles of women and people of colour in advertising in the 1960s, Mad Men obscures the fact that we are not much further along than we were then. The advertising world is still largely controlled by white men (with white women making greater strides in increased presence than black men and women), and the exceptions are still ultimately outliers, if somewhat greater in number.

Mad Men may be lauded for scratching at the dark underbelly of society in the 1960s, but its scratches are surface deep. Perhaps because if it dug any deeper, the audience would see their own reflections staring back at them.

7502: BHM 2010—Craigslist.

This actual craigslist ad is seeking “something clever” for BHM. Um, how about spotlighting Black inventors. Or Black kids. Or declaring, “Black history is American history.” Or a multicultural montage.

Illustrator for Black History Month

Date: 2010-02-05, 1:29PM CST
Reply to: job-hhhtn-1587535075@craigslist.org

We’re looking for an illustrator to help out with an illustration for our upcoming February newsletter. The size is 800 pixels wide x approximately 250 pixels high and the newsletter will celebrate Black History Month. Compensation is $150 plus credit linking to your portfolio on The Whole 9. Take a look at one of our previous newsletters by clicking here.

If something clever bubbles to mind for this theme, please get in touch with samples of your work, a link to your website, or you can create a portfolio at no cost and send us a link to that by clicking here.

If you already have a Whole 9 portfolio, perfect – just send us the link!

7501: Oh What A Feeling, Toyota.

A Toyota-sponsored banner trumpets, “Best Business Practices”—directly above the lead story featuring Toyota’s president apologizing for his company’s sloppiness.

7500: Boyz N The Web.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Gangs using Facebook, Twitter more often

Associated Press

LOS ANGELES—When a gang member was released from jail soon after his arrest for selling methamphetamine, friends and associates assumed he had cut a deal with authorities and become a police informant.

They sent a warning on Twitter that went like this: We have a snitch in our midst.

Unbeknownst to them, that tweet and the traffic it generated were being closely followed by investigators, who had been tracking the San Francisco Bay Area gang for months. Officials sat back and watched as others joined the conversation and left behind incriminating information.

Law enforcement officials say gangs are making greater use of Twitter and Facebook, where they sometimes post information that helps agents identify gang associates and learn more about their organizations.

“You find out about people you never would have known about before,” said Dean Johnston with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, which helps police investigate gangs. “You build this little tree of people.”

In the case involving the suspected informant, tweets alerted investigators to three other gang members who were ultimately arrested on drug charges.

Tech-savvy gangsters have long been at home in chatrooms and on Web sites like MySpace, but they appear to be gravitating toward Twitter and Facebook, where they can make threats, boast about crimes, share intelligence on rivals and network with people across the country.

“We are seeing a lot more of it,” Johnston said. “They will even go out and brag about doing shootings.”

In another California case involving a different gang, much of the information gathered by investigators came from members’ Facebook accounts. Authorities expect to make arrests in the coming months.

“Once you get into a Facebook group, it’s relatively easy,” Johnston said. “You have a rolling commentary.”

And gang members sometimes turn the tables, asking contacts across their extended networks for help identifying undercover police officers.

It’s hard to know exactly how many gang members are turning to Twitter and Facebook. Many police agencies are reluctant to discuss the phenomenon for fear of revealing their investigative techniques.

Capt. Walt Myer, director of the Riverside County regional gang task force, said gang activity often “mirrors general society. When any kind of new technology comes along, they are going to use it.”

Representatives from Twitter and Facebook say they regularly cooperate with police and supply information on account holders when presented with a search warrant. Neither company would discuss specifics.

Gang use of Twitter and Facebook still lags behind use of the much-older MySpace, which remains gang members’ online venue of choice.

The Crips, Bloods, Florencia 13, MS-13 and other gangs have long used MySpace to display potentially incriminating photos and videos of people holding guns and making hand gestures. They also post messages about rivals.

Last week, officials in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, announced the arrest of 50 people in a crackdown of a Latino gang they say was engaged in drug sales and hate crimes against black residents. Prosecutors say some of the evidence was pulled from MySpace and YouTube, including rap videos taunting police with violent messages.

While some members are wising up to the police attention such postings can bring, gang information remains publicly viewable online.

Dozens of Facebook accounts are dedicated to the deadly MS-13 gang, with followers from around the globe. At one site, a video displays pictures of dead members of the rival 18th Street gang, and some users have left disrespectful comments.

The toughest part about tracking someone on Twitter is finding the alias or screen name they are posting under. And many tweets are nonsensical or pointless, so cutting through the clutter can be difficult.

“It’s tricky,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy David Anguiano. “If you find out what they go by, you are good to go.”

Anguiano tracks the online activity of graffiti vandals—the so-called tagging crews that sometimes morph into gangs. They post tweets saying they are heading out to spray paint and sometimes post links to photographs of their work.

Often, they cannot resist bragging about their handiwork, and the electronic trail they leave is frequently used as evidence.

“They talk about it too much,” Anguiano said. “You want the fame so you’ve got to go out there and talk about it. That’s when your mouth gets you in trouble.”

7499: BHM 2010—AHBAI.

How will you celebrate Black History Month? I’m going to Disney World!

7498: Calling Dr. Obama.

Photoshop® makes anyone a creative director.