More Harlem Street Art

This wall mural was painted to advertise the 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect, starring Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker, and Marlon Wayans. It was located on 124th Street, near Lenox Avenue.

Some Random Thoughts

Now that winter is here, the one good thing about it is I don't have to worry about a container of ice cream melting before I get home.

Is there an app for locating public restrooms in  New York City?

Maybe one day porn DVDs--gay, straight, and bisexual--will feature audio commentaries by the models and the directors and have behind-the-scenes footage. They already feature trailers. Also, will 3D porn movie theatres be the next craze?

Isaac Hayes and Lou Rawls began some songs with a long monologue. Shouldn't they be considered the first real rappers?

Have the people who call New York the world's greatest city been to every city in the world?  That's like a restaurant having a sign in the window that says "We Have The Best Hamburgers In Town." Have they eaten in every restaurant in town? How do they know?

When a pharmacy puts the word "Chemists" in their name, it sounds like they have test tubes and other lab equipment in a back room.

Mad Men, the dramatic television series about the advertising business in the 1950s and 1960s, during its seven-season run on AMC, took viewers back to a time when men knew how to dress: fedoras, three-piece suits, cuff links, and shoes, not Nike sneakers.

A Bargain Or A Scam?

Someone in the Bronx, New York, placed an ad on Facebook that offered for sale a 1995 Nissan Maxima. The price they wanted was $200. That raised a red flag. Why so cheap? (Other car ads were in the thousands of dollars.) For me such a low price meant that they were trying to get rid of a rattletrap that would probably cost the buyer more in upkeep expenses than the initial price.

As the saying goes, buyer beware.

A Street-Corner Escort Ad In Harlem

In Harlem, I've seen handbills attached to lampposts, mail boxes, storefront windows, and even on trees for a variety of reasons--to announce a death, to offer a reward for the return of a lost pet or wallet, steering people to employment opportunities or apartments for rent, etc. But I have never seen a handbill soliciting clients for an escort/massage service. This particular handbill was pasted to a lamppost at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 121st Street. The advertiser was a handsome young man named Jayson, age 19, of black/Puerto Rican heritage. At the bottom of the page was his phone number, in the 914 area code (presumably he was from Westchester County). His photo was at the top.

A few days after I saw Jayson's ad, someone--a homophobe, no doubt--came along and scratched out the phone number with a key or something sharp. This was in 2012. I recently checked that location. There is no trace of the handbill.

The closest  thing to this ad that I've seen was when I worked at the Mount Morris Baths in Harlem.
Some of the customers would write their name and phone number on the back of the door of the room they occupied.

Now that Harlem has become more gentrified and many more gays (and lesbians) are moving in (to the disapproval of the homophobic Atlah Church, down the street from where I saw the handbill), I expect to see more such advertising on lampposts, bus shelters, and on the side of buildings.

A Detachable Book Mark

I found a discarded copy of the April 2017 issue of the Reader's Digest. On the front cover was a detachable book mark (courtesy of Geico, the insurance company, with an ad for the company on the reverse side). The book mark listed selected stories in the issue and their page location, like "13 Things Pharmacists Won't Tell You," on page 124. I don't know if the Reader's Digest does this every month. If not, they should. It's an excellent idea because it offers a reader an alternative to dogearring a page. Other magazines of similar size should adopt this idea.

Note: Today is Earth Day and Record Store Day.

Ailey Dancers Are Body-Poets

Among the various sections and inserts in the November 6 [1988] Sunday New York Times was--to my absolute surprise and delight--a 20-page advertising supplement celebrating Alvin Ailey's 30 years of dance making.

Surrounding the text were color performance photos and quotes from Ailey himself. In the back of the book was a schedule of the 1988-89 season at City Center [in Manhattan]. This slick -looking fundraising vehicle is worth saving because in a nutshell it gives potential subscribers the history and philosophy of the Ailey organization.

However, I was a bit dismayed with the presence of full-page cigarette and whiskey ads. For a [dance] company that glorifies dancers as "body-poets," these ads are out of place. Why didn't dance-related ads appear in their place?

This item, from a dance column I wrote, was published in the New York Amsterdam News (ca. February 4, 1989).

The Career Student

There are three radio commercials for the job website bigapplehelpwanted.com. My favorite is the one in which a mother encourages her son, who has spent 16 years acquiring various college degrees, to look for a job. Some of the degrees, he tells her, "are B.S." She browses through the website and finds, to his dismay, an extremely esoteric job that fits one of his degrees. She rejoices by singing "Happy days are here again!" A very funny commercial.

Advertising's Persuasions

Keep this in mind when watching Mad Men: "The growth of national advertising (and the prosperity that fueled it) fostered a very specific sense of Americanism and patriotism--wholesome, moral, aspirational and conformist--a sliced white-bread and apple-pie view of the world. Those who did not fit this mold, or could not afford to, were branded as outcasts."--Lucy Moore, Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties (Overlook Press).

The End-Credit Squeeze

"A squeeze-back is the practice of literally squeezing the end credits of a program to one side of the screen in order to use the other side to promote an upcoming show. Squeeze-backs were invented by NBC in the early nineties as a way to keep people from channel hopping. By squeezing the credits over and using the remaining space to tease viewers with what was coming up next, they found they could retain them and prevent the habitual end-of-show channel hopping."--from The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture by Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant (Counterpoint, 2009).

I love to watch the end credits of a TV show or movie. Whenever the credits get squeezed, I get annoyed. The same people who do these squeeze-backs are probably the same ones who immediately stand up in a movie theatre and block my view of the end credits.
Shame on you, NBC, for inventing this practice. Thankfully I don't have to put up with those squeeze-backs on DVD, yet.

Mad Men And The Color Line

Michael Ross's theroot.com article, "The Other Mad Men" is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of black people in the advertising business .

Let's hope the producers of AMC's popular series, Mad Men, read it and decide to follow Ross's suggestion to put "some darker faces in the offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce."