Dear weekend awaiters, This is the second installment of a new Lazy Scholar feature, pairing news items with historical archives. • Slate‘s TV Club is diligently following and debating the new season of Mad Men. If you haven’t watched (is that possible?), it’s a 60s scholar’s dream, with carefully reconstructed interior design, fashion, and, yes, [...]
Archive for the ‘advertising’ Category
Old News: Advertising, Globetrotting, Fishing
Posted in advertising, african-americans, periodicals, photography, television, tagged advertising, eat pray love, louisa may alcott, mad men, northampton, oil spill, Smith College on August 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Corsets and Cross-dressing, or the Joys of Theater
Posted in advertising, photography, theater, tagged Guys and Dolls, Joseph Jefferson, Julian Eltinge on April 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Dear Prodigy pioneers, This week and next, the undergrad dorm where I’m a resident tutor is putting on their annual musical—this year Guys and Dolls. And complete Carrie Bradshawesque narcissist that I am, that got me thinking back to my own theatrical past, specifically trying out for my high school’s production of Guys and Dolls [...]
Thrills of the Open Road
Posted in advertising, cars, commerce, leisure, tagged car catalogs on April 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
To the spring-attired, I never imagined myself an auto enthusiast. In fact, for years, I had nightmares about losing control of my car on the parkway, and wasn’t sure if I should interpret them as a Final Destination-ish prophecy of my own demise or a mere anxiety dream. Yet after driving 3000 miles through Southwestern [...]
Good Bye, Leaven!
Posted in advertising, african-americans, food, holidays, Jews, religion, video on March 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
To the domestically-inclined, Break out your horseradish everybody! Passover is officially here, bringing with it gefilte fish, chocolate-covered matzo, brisket, and all the other healthy treats you’ve come to associate with the feast of the unleavened bread. In truth, perverse as it might sound, I do look forward to Passover every year, I suppose because [...]
The Kitsch of Christmas Past
Posted in advertising, domesticity, holidays, television, video on December 22, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Dear New Years TV marathon viewers, If you wondering when your local cafe, supermarket, and shopping mall would stop playing “Santa Baby,” rest assured: Christmas is almost here! Though my own family is Jewish, the holiday still holds so many sweet memories for me: the evening I gathered all the ornaments given to my mother [...]
Foxy Brown and Aunt Jemima, Exposed
Posted in advertising, cartoons, commercialism, food, visual culture, tagged aunt jemima, foxy brown on December 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
O pioneers of the digital frontier, Anyone who’s watched Spike Lee’s sometimes brilliant, sometimes obvious 2000 film Bamboozled, Ferris State University’s Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia might feel eerily familiar—the docile, self-sacrificing”mammy,” the lazy, stealing, and insatiable “coon” (on the left). Less familiar to some readers may be the sexually virile “Jezebel” stereotype, embodied, [...]
Healthcare and Cooties
Posted in advertising, illness, medicine, visual culture, tagged healthcare on December 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Dear Snuggie™ advocates, I spent much of Friday flexing my would-be public intellectual muscles at a lively and illuminating roundtable discussion on the healthcare crisis (media coverage, the public option, the Stupak amendment) organized by Harvard’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality department. Yet as Jill Lepore’s recent Talk of the Town plainly shows, healthcare has been an ongoing [...]
AIDS Artwork and Activism
Posted in advertising, illness, LGBT, photography, politics, visual culture, tagged ACT UP, AIDS, World AIDS day on November 30, 2009 | 3 Comments »
To those of you blaming tryptophan for your Monday morning lag, Tomorrow, December 1, marks World AIDS Day, which seems like a good moment to point to some online resources about the history of the illness, its impact, and the art and activisim it inspired. The Carpenter Center here at Harvard has organized an extraordinary [...]
The Wonders of Coffee
Posted in advertising, commerce, commercialism, domesticity, economics, food, leisure, shopping, video, visual culture on November 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
To students seldom awake before ten, Like many scholars, I’ve relied on coffee as a lifeline for most of my academic career. By senior year of high school, I was already bringing a plastic mug full of instant Maxwell House (terrible, I know) to class. In college, I even considered footnoting the local convenience store [...]
Wheelchairs and Weddings
Posted in advertising, disability studies, film, television, visual culture on November 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
To my fellow homebodies, If you, like me, have found yourself reluctantly addicted to FOX’s high school dramedy Glee, then you know that this week’s episode shined its bemused spotlight the show’s wheelchair-riding, background singing Artie Abrams. The character has raised the ire of some disability advocates because he’s played by a nondisabled actor. But what [...]
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