Selling bags in my Chevy van
August 1st, 2008
A full-sized van with curtains drawn across every window might as well have a yellow Paedophile on Board sign at the back. Several park for hours at a time where Thompson Street meets Canal.
“Hey lady,” the tiny woman with a walkie-talkie bulging from her front pocket called to me. “You want handbag?”
They see me every day now. One afternoon a policeman showed me his dog’s picture on his camera phone, and now the van people give me the stink eye. But I didn’t care about the cop’s Shih Tzu, and I certainly don’t about the knockoff purse trade.
Popular brands hang along the hollowed out interior where tourists are brought in two or three at a time. The doors make that distinct scraping sound as they slide shut, usually leaving the husband or boyfriend standing outside unhappily. The give away is that he’s sometimes holding the old purse, the embarrassing old bag without a brand-name logo - but Made in China nonetheless.
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Trigger: New Counterfeiting Strategy @ Racked
Bomb It hits the TFF
May 1st, 2007
Tribeca Film Festival premiere
2007, USA
Bomb It was a labor of love for director and street art aficionado Jon Reiss. He traveled through five continents and captured hundreds of hours of footage. The result is a fascinating picture of graffiti from around the world.
The film explores the different motivations driving graffiti artists to “bomb”, or spray their designs, in public spaces. The common quality is that their work reflects the social and political climate of the cities where they live. Graf writers in New York City crave notoriety in an anonymous city. Tokyo street art signifies a step outside of the homogenous culture. At one point graffiti in Cape Town called for an end to apartheid. Now the focus is on aesthetic appeal and self-expression.
Across Los Angeles’ landscape of freeways and billboards, graffiti is the indication that life is not just about consumption. But there are those who are concerned about graffiti as an indicator of gang activity and neighborhood degeneration.
One of the most impressive moments in the film is an interview with Valerie Hill, the Graffiti Abatement Program Manager of T.A.G. (Totally Against Graffiti). T.A.G.’s purpose is to encourage children to reject graffiti and to report others who do it. Their method of persuasion?
“Students can get rewards for helping their schools reach the best record of reporting graffiti. T.A.G. sponsors provide participating schools with free pizza, cookies, fun park tickets and other powerful rewards for helping to clean up graffiti.”
Hill hopes that the program can help children to connect with brands, rather than with gangs and crime. For sponsors like Nestle, T.A.G. offers a brilliant opportunity to secure brand loyalty at an early age.
As childhood obesity rates continue to climb in the United States, discouraging graffiti with prizes of pizza and chocolate seems like a misguided solution. The T.A.G. program is effective in cleaning up the neighborhood. The problem is that the children may be too fat and lethargic to go play in it.