I've long been fascinated by how scientific looking visuals (molecules, grids, graphs, technologically advanced machinery, etc.) are used in advertising to communicate the appearance of truth on a subliminal level. With my forthcoming suite of artwork (Perfect Defect 3) dealing specifically with how this plays out before our eyes everyday, I've been paying special attention to print and television advertising for pharmaceuticals and items that appeal to aging people wishing to improve their health (or the appearance of youth and good health). "Snake oil" or miracle cures have been around for a long time, but with pseudo-science now better than ever at pulling the wool over our eyes, it's become harder for us to determine which products we should approach with skepticism. A recent Google search of "Science in Advertising," revealed this fascinating essay below at LabLit.com - the culture of science in fiction & fact, an awesome site that's definitely worth a visit. While the following essay may not deal with the visual aspects of advertising, it does focus on yet another way that the corporate merchants and "clever advertising types exploit the feelings of helplessness many people have when confronted by scientific claims." LEFT: Wayne Edson Bryan and Doug Brown, Liven Up Yoself - Rastas Foo's Positive Vibration Oil, 1991, four-color printed image reproduced as a quarter page advertisement in May/June 1991 edition of Museum & Arts Washington Magazine to promote an art exhibition by Rastas Foo. Essay 12 October 2008
Clinically unproven
On the misuse of science in advertising
- Stephen Leacock
Of course, “clinically proven” should only be used for products that have undergone a full clinical trial. There are strict guidelines for conducting clinical trials to ensure that the results are meaningful. If the guidelines are not followed, the results are likely to be untrustworthy.
In a recent case, the “clinically proven” tag was used in advertising for RoC Complete Lift Cream, and this got its manufacturers, Johnson and Johnson, into deep water. Complete Lift Cream is a snip at £18 for a 50ml pot and is sold to make the skin look lifted and firmer, to “rediscover a younger looking you”. The advertisement showed the face of a woman holding a tape measure and a pot of the Complete Lift Cream with the claim: “measurable lift in just 8 weeks”.
A second scientific ploy used in advertising is to say that the product contains a special chemical. No one will know what this is but it increases the mystique attached to the product. The accompanying text for the RoC Complete Lift advertisement stated that the product “contains patented THPE which re-tightens and firms the facial contours by contracting skin cells...Clinically proven to work in just 8 weeks of use”.
Bafflingly, however, the small print below the advertisement contained the statement “It has not been proven to have a physical lift effect”. This was added, I believe, to show that the effects of the cream, if any, were not long-lasting but it ended up negating everything the advertisement claimed.
Following two complaints from members of the public, the Advertising Standards Authority requested the advertisement be withdrawn as they said it was misleading and the claims could not be substantiated. Johnson and Johnson said that the product had been tested in a clinical trial. The Advertising Standards Authority examined the trial and concluded that it had not been carried out properly as no objective data had been recorded and only one person was rating the effects and this was a Johnson and Johnson employee. The advertisement was withdrawn.
The story was run in several papers, including the Daily Mail where one sceptical reader suggested that if you want to tighten your skin, then rub raw egg white on it and let it dry! It also reminded me of the story I read about the model Twiggy who won’t do any filming before noon nowadays as she has to wait for her face to “lift” – which it apparently does naturally.
I came across another example of the use of pseudo-science to add gloss to a product when I was in France recently. I was wandering around a supermarket and I noticed that some of the fruit juice on sale has semi-scientific messages on the carton. For example the pineapple juice said “contains fibre – for inner comfort” and there was a mixture of apple, grape, cranberry, blackcurrant and blackberry juices with a message “contains antioxidants – to help in the struggle against cellular ageing”. This sounds good, but does it really mean anything?
There is a widespread belief that antioxidants can counteract various deleterious processes in the body including ageing, heart disease and cancer. You see this in the popular press and one of the outcomes of this belief is the huge consumption of antioxidant supplements. But is there any evidence that antioxidants really have these beneficial effects? This has been addressed by the Cochrane Collaboration (an independent foundation) who analysed the results of a number of trials of antioxidant supplements and concluded that far from being beneficial, most of them had no effect and some of them might actually be harmful. So, based on the evidence, antioxidant supplements do not have beneficial effects.
This is all terribly confusing and to use these marketing tactics plays upon some of our deep insecurities. There is huge pressure in Western society for women to appear young and beautiful and the Complete Lift Cream takes advantage of that. We also want to live long lives untroubled by illness and this makes us easy prey for those who talk about the benefits of antioxidants.
What can be done? Not much I fear. This sort of thing will continue to occur and pseudo-scientific messages will be used to sell cosmetics and food. But we can try to be watchful for these claims. It is unlikely that a cream will lift your face so don’t be taken in. At least the Advertising Standards Authority is there to help in these cases.
Several newspapers derided Johnson and Johnson over this advertisement and ran critical pieces. Despite this, the same papers are happy to run crass science stories on a regular basis. Underlying all of this is the poor knowledge of science in the general population. This causes people to react with fear and awe when presented with science and makes them easy prey for the advertisers.
Related information:
Editor's note: A distinction should probably be drawn between food and drink that naturally contains antioxidants, and pills and supplements containing these compounds. There are many food scientists studying the link between consumption of antioxidants and human health who do indeed believe that antioxidant-rich foods have proven benefits to health, and a large number of peer-reviewed papers are published in the literature each month on the topic. So the jury is still out on whether consumption of antioxidant-containing food and drink (as opposed to supplements) is good for you – to lump them in with bogus facelift creams might be a bit premature.
White Lab Coats Don't Lie
A Dream Realized
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Subliminal Rape is releasing a fourth and perhaps final album: Macro, a harbinger of the next evolutionary step in electronic music and the newest mutated strains of techno. Featuring artwork by Jay Hixson and Wayne Edson Bryan, Macro is available beginning July 7th through Myopic Media, as well as digital distribution on iTunes and Amazon.com.
Macro showcases exceptionally smooth grooves sandwiching mind melting glitchy techno and experimental compositions with harmonics that vibrate your cerebral cortex like an interstellar octopus sucking on your brain. Reactions from testing on small children and local DJ's has been astounding. "I'd steal it from the internet," says an world renown DJ specializing in minimal and tech-house. Beta testing by music teachers received this analysis from elementary students: "This composer uses raindrops and a modern beat, plus tin cans. It is cool, fun and full of rhythms." - anonymous 5th Grader. A second grade student correctly identified that the album featured the fourth dimensional sounds of time-traveling "Jello cubes bouncing."
Subliminal Rape is the craft of Jay Hixson, a former music conservatory student, composer, producer, award-winning graphic designer and artist. Consistently pushing the boundaries of electronic music by abusing obsolesent music software: Subliminal Rape embodies and satirizes the contradictions, hype and hypocrisy of mass media and pop culture. With musical inspiration ranging from Autechre, Bach and Coil to the likes of Skinny Puppy, Frankie Bones and Einsturzende Neubauten: Subliminal Rape is at once smooth, brutal and full of raw emotion.
Already receiving a warm reception from music fans after a debut on extlabs radio, Macro is set to overload the arsenal of DJs and mutate the brainwaves of audiences everywhere.
For more information, promo requests, interviews or other inquiries please contact:
Myopic Media
3110 Mount Vernon Ave. #1110
Alexandria, VA 22305
contact@myopicmedia.com
www.myopicmedia.com
Perfect Defect Celebrity Personified
In case you hadn't heard, Michael Jackson Died.
I'm telling you now, cause I thought you'd appreciate being in the loop.
A Perfect Defect Freakshow for a Perfect Defect World
I don't think that there has been (or will ever be) another celebrity that seems so conspicuously screwed up. He wore his self-loathing for everyone to see. He indulged in self-mutilation in a quest for perfection. A ground-breaker, multi-millionaire, Peter Pan, junkie, gender and race bender, pedophile and master showman ... he was the paradoxical product of too much and not enough.I actually heard someone say on TV that "Wacko Jacko" was the most famous person in the world! I also heard that he was planning a big comeback. Does death qualify? Clearly, he's never been more popular.
Will we ever feel so comforted by our normalcy in comparison again?
The Manchurian Primate
Can something positive come out of a negative? I'd like to think so.
Purrfect Defect: CooloCat's Top Ten Ways to Succeed in Business Without Really Working
10. Focus all of your time and attention on hugging the cartoon management boss and tell them what they want to hear, regardless if it's true or not.
9. Frequently complain that you're so busy making people smile and being cute that you have no time for breaks, in spite of the fact that you are taking dozens of breaks everyday.
Goodbye Kitty
Since we last checked in with Kitty, things unfortunately have only gotten worse. She now is wandering the streets in a daze, begging for "loose love" to feed her "cheerful habit." She's lost a lot of weight and started muttering to herself while twitching erratically.Y Her now hourly OCD'ish licking, grooming and coughing up fur balls has escalated to new levels of neurosis! YYY Poor Kitty!!! YYYYY Occasionally, with her Hello Squeegee in hand, she's even been seen spitting on cars at red lights, then offering to clean their windshields for "goodness sake"!YYYYYYYYYYY It all started when "Silly Sanrio" asked "that Dooshibag" CooloCat to join the cast of lovable cartoon characters. "I had to shay goobye to 'eem," Kitty exclaims with several blinking tics and a cute but urgent squeaky mumble reminiscent of Tourette Syndrome.Y
Assholes of Nature: Opportunistic Organisms
A: It all depends on how you look at things...
While I'm in no way advocating for giving up on human kindness, consideration, empathy and politeness, I mention the above because I also am constantly frustrated when decent people are taken advantage of by opportunistic individuals. Unfortunately, just as in nature, people that have a sympathetic and loving instinct can easily be preyed upon, as they posses a vulnerability to exploit.
Q: Should success, conquest, superiority and survival be somehow tied to the concept of perfection in our perceptions?
Opportunistic organisms commonly refer to animals and plants that tolerate variable environmental conditions and food sources. Some opportunistic species can thrive on almost any available nutrient source: omnivorous rats, bears, and raccoons are all opportunistic feeders. Many opportunists flourish under varied environmental conditions: the common house sparrow (Passer domesticus) can survive both in the warm, humid climate of Florida and in the cold, dry conditions of a Midwestern winter. Aquatic opportunists, often aggressive fish species, fast-spreading plankton, and water plants, frequently tolerate fluctuations in water salinity as well as temperature.LEFT: Jaded Search, 1998, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 23" x 31"
A secondary use of the term "opportunistic" signifies species that can quickly take advantage of favorable conditions when they arise. Such species can postpone reproduction, or even remain dormant, until appropriate temperatures, moisture availability, or food sources make growth and reproduction possible. Some springtime-breeding lizards in Australian deserts, for example, can spend months or years in a juvenile form, but when temperatures are right and a rare rainfall makes food available, no matter what time of year, they quickly mature and produce young while water is still available. More familiar opportunists are viruses and bacteria that reside in the human body. Often such organisms will remain undetected with a healthy host for a long time. But when the host's immune system becomes weak, resident viruses and bacteria seize an opportunity to grow and spread. Thus people suffering from malnutrition, exhaustion, or a prolonged illness are especially vulnerable to common opportunistic diseases such as the common cold or pneumonia.
Adaptable and prolific reproductive strategies usually characterize opportunistic organisms. While some plants can reproduced only when pollinated by a specific, rare insect and many animals can breed only in certain conditions and at a precise time of year, opportunistic species often reproduce at any time of year or under almost any conditions. House mice (Mus musculus) are extremely opportunistic breeders: they can produce sizeable litters at any time of year. Opportunistic feeding aids their ability to breed year round; these mice can nourish their young with almost any available vegetable matter, fresh or dry.
Because of their adaptability, opportunistic organisms commonly tolerate severe environmental disturbances. Fire, floods, drought, and pollution disturb or even eliminate plants and animals that require stable conditions and have specialized nutrient sources. Fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium), an opportunist that readily takes advantage of bare ground and open sunlight, spreads quickly after land is cleared by fire or by human disturbance. Because they tolerate, or even thrive, in disturbed environments, many opportunists flourish around human settlements, actively expanding their ranges as human activity disrupts the habitat of more sensitive animals and plants. Opportunists are especially visible where chemical pollutants contaminate habitat. In such conditions overall species diversity usually declines, but the population of certain opportunistic species may increase as competition from more sensitive or specialized species is eliminated.
Because they are tolerant, prolific, and hardy, many opportunistic organisms, including the house fly, the house mouse, and the dandelion, are considered pests. Where they occur naturally and have natural limits to their spread, however, opportunists play important environmental roles. By quickly colonizing bare ground, fireweed and opportunistic grasses help prevent erosion. Cottonwood trees (Populus spp.), highly opportunistic propagators, are among the few trees able to spread into arid regions, providing shade and nesting places along stream channels in deserts and dry plains. Some opportunists that are highly tolerant of pollution are now considered indicators of otherwise undetected chemical spills. In such hard-to-observe environments as the sea floor, sudden population explosions among certain bottom-dwelling marine mollusks, plankton, and other invertebrates have been used to identify petrochemical spills around drilling platforms and shipping lanes.
For more information on opportunistic organisms, click here.
Tired of being the life of the party?
Mixed Emotions and Metaphors
Folks around these parts call me Old Ben. It's my job to worry about the princess and feed her cat while she is out gallivanting around the universe on regular adventures that take her light years away from home.
The royal feline in my temporary charge has a job too. He (we'll call him "Luke") fills my cave with hair and dander, claws the furniture to shreds and engorges himself with food until he pukes all over. Even Wookies are better behaved than this horrid little beast.
Just this evening, after falling asleep early on the couch from the total exhaustion of what seemed like the longest week of warding off constant Sith mind tricks, I awoke to find four huge wet piles of partially digested food distributed in every room of my increasingly humble abode. The force that flows through me registered a disturbance when I discovered each of them with my barefoot in the dark.
While I'm glad that Her Highness is out having fun in some distant part of the galaxy, I'm also thinking that maybe it's time to get R2 to send her a holographic message...
Save Obi-Wan!
Whatever happened to empathy?
When did watching stupid people do stupid things and suffering serious consequences become our primary form of entertainment?
When bad art is good art
Now that we can make a 'perfect' design with a few mouse clicks the industrialised world is hankering for 'imperfect' designs. Artist and composer David Byrne on the importance of bad art.
Appropriated from the June 2003 issue of Ode Magazine
Bad design is good design. And tasteful good design, likewise, is bad. Not good-bad, just bad-bad. Now that 'perfect' design is possible with the click of a mouse, the industrialised world has become nostalgic for 'imperfect' design. As computer aided everything takes over our lives we begin to realise, little by little, what is missing from the high-tech world. We realise that a crooked line sometimes has more soul than a perfectly straight one, and that a recording that has just the right amount of distortion, and colour added by ancient equipment is often preferable to a perfect copy. Woe unto us when the medical profession perfects their newest genetic and cloning techniques! We might actually realise that our imperfections are what make us human. It is one thing to perfect typography, eliminating stat machines, lead type, and typesetting houses, but quite another to assume to perfect the organism that actually creates and consumes that typography. The endpoint of a mechanistic worldview is a world machine.
The easier it becomes to produce perfection, in design, grammar, rhythm, and pitch, the more those who have the earliest and easiest access to that perfection want to abandon it. In a kind of reverse snobbism Web designers and trendy magazine editors use the latest software programs to imitate the work of anonymous designers and artists... They use high-end computers to imitate the work of people who can't even afford a computer. These unsung artists are the sources of inspiration for programs such as PhotoShop, Illustrator, Quark, or Pro Tools, but never in their lives have they had access to, or even dreamed of, these tools. Such pathetic heroes can barely draw a more or less realistic face or carry a tune, forget about having access to spellchecker or auto-kerning their type.
As true perfection appears on the horizon, as the fruits of the enlightenment and of centuries of scientific progress appear within grasp, we take a bite of the perfected tomato or a huge flawless strawberry and realise that something has been lost. Flava. Soul. Humour. Funk.
The nostalgia for the [imperfect] design… is a pathetic attempt by sophisticates like myself to recapture that lost soul. We think that by imitating the look of something 'real' we might actually become more real ourselves. But for most the Faustian bargain has already been made. We can never actually be the man or woman who draws the shoes or the tacos on the kiosk walls, but we have certainly learned to appreciate the person who draws them. We can experience that weird but typical 21st-century sensation - loving something and laughing at it at the same time. The sophisticated designer leans back in his or her Aeron chair and employs in his or her design a slightly altered version of one of these drawings. They may also employ a variation on some of this type, knowing full well that their audience, the educated and sophisticated consumer, will know that the designer actually can draw a face, a shoe, or a car perfectly, realistically, easily, possibly aided by some computer program or other. But by purposely using 'bad' type there is a knowing wink going on between producer and consumer. A conspiratorial pact that says 'I know I can do better than this and you know I can do better than this, but don't we both like this for some strange reason.' This conspiratorial tone allows the consumer to feel that they are part of an elite club - paradoxically, a club to which the original sign painter will never belong. And the reason that both designer and consumer like this look is because it denotes soulful content. It implies that the work has the soul and life that is missing from goods produced by multinational corporations.
In the 19th century, as the technology of photography became more and more ubiquitous, artists quickly abandoned 'realistic' portrait and landscape painting in droves. Why compete with a machine that can do it more quickly, easily, and inexpensively than you? In short order, they had to unlearn their drawing lessons and abandon their technique. They learned to draw like a child, like a 'primitive,' a lunatic, or an unschooled draftsman. The wanted to capture the soul, the feeling, the sensation that the camera missed. They made virtual African art, virtual primitive art, and eventually even virtual advertising art - a form which had often imitated those same fine arts in its own efforts. Sometimes artists incorporated all these virtual styles at the same time. They made high art that looked like it was made by people who didn't know what they were doing. Or were doing what they were doing for vastly different reasons.
In a search for realness they made expensive luxurious homes that look like factories, warehouses, or industrially mass-produced sheds. Eventually those who could draw, print, or letter by hand abandoned all such efforts and the art schools even stopped teaching them. 'Good' design was so easy even your software could do it! 'Bad' design took skill and soul. Or at least virtual soul.
In time artists and designers began collecting examples of this 'authentic' design as items of inspiration. Little icons. Little shrines to those less schooled than they. The studio walls would be filled with photographs and clippings of signs and buildings like these. Their own work was good, but this was the 'real' thing. Unschooled, uncorrupted, and mostly unpaid.
Sure it is funny, the clunky layout and the sloppy painting on most of these images, but everyone knows that like these images a taco on the street tastes better than one from Taco Bell. And there lies the key.
Street tacos actually are better. They feel better and smell better. They are less perfect, less clean (certainly), less high-tech, and there are no groovy advertising campaigns to back them up. But the quesadilla con flores that one can order (during the right season) on the street, with a cold cervesa or home made jamaica is something that the perfection of a chain can never approach.
Perfection, one must conclude, is not actually perfect at all. In fact, it is almost the complete opposite. Perfection is bad. But bad is good. But bad perfection is not good, only good bad is good. It's all very simple.
When one sees a sign or a structure like those featured here, one assumes naturally that one is going to receive personal attention from the vendor, imperfect maybe, but without the cold bureaucratic attitude that accompanies the products of the globalised world. For these are stores, buildings, graphics, and shops from before and in spite of the best efforts of globalisation. These merchants will give you honest work, as opposed to work broken down and compartmentalised by some foreign 'expert.' Woe to us a society managed by 'experts.'
If these works are authentic, real, true, human - what then are the works made using sophisticated software programs, elegantly designed and with beautiful tasteful graphics? Are they inauthentic because they are well done? Is perfection not also real? Is not the antiseptic globalised world just another kind of real? Isn't a false thing that everyone believes in then a real thing? And of course isn't it the real that many of these self-taught artists and sign makers aspire to? Aren't they just dying to be corrupted?
Well, it might all be a matter of semantics, but if one is to assume that "real" infers having some basis in life and living as we know it, then, yes, the products of globalisation are not, in fact, real. They are imitations of things that are real, which in fact the march of globalisation seeks to irradiate. They are cleaned up versions of these funky kiosks, mom and pop stores, imaginative works of architecture and signage. And the global wave would wash away all of these originals, and leave only their copies. A kind of pod people world. The ad campaigns and copy of the corporate products point at these places in their references to 'home cooked flavour' and ads featuring happy families, but they only refer to these places as icons, they don't actually contain that home cooked flavour. They aren't even a good simulation.
The new attitude expressed toward the crummy artefacts featured here is that they are evidence of the resistance of the real to the unreal. If the unreal at various points and places around the world manages to completely obliterate the real, as it has done in many parts of the industrialised countries, then the real itself will eventually become merely a memory, a quaint story, a picture in a book of something that no longer exists. Colonial Williamsburg, Main Street USA, or Warwick Castle. The real is unreal in many places because it is no longer there. I guess this book is an attempt to reintroduce it into the culture, admittedly in a foreign strain, but one must use what one has at hand if no other material is available.
The faster and greater the spread or globalisation, neo-liberalism, and multinational corporations, the greater the nostalgia for that which they replace. We must memorialise the anonymous artists in this book, and in others, because their work is in danger of disappearing. It is beautiful. It reminds us that underneath the slickness and the logos there are still human beings.
Go With the Flow?
Hundreds of years ago, the land on which the pedestrian walkway at the brink of the falls and Table Rock now stands, formed part of the Falls and was covered with fast flowing water.
Men Seeking Women
I just came across this following anonymous post at best of craigslist, and in lieu of recent news about Philip Markoff, thought it both entertaining and appropriate to share it here. Enjoy!
LEFT: Monkey Face, 1998, enamel and varnish on birch plywood, 23" x 46"
Why I am not the perfect girl for you.
For a while now, I’ve been posting and hunting on Craigslist. I get bored at work a lot, and it seems to pass the time. Every guy on here seems to think that he is God’s gift to mankind (not even just the women…). Joe Schmoe posts on here looking for the brilliant, model, single, virgin, wealthy etc etc girl. Do you smell that? Cause its time to wake up and take a hugeeee whiff of that folgers.
Regardless, here’s some of my commentary. (Taken directly from posts in Men Seeking Women)
“I am hoping to find an athletic, fun loving white female…” Ok. Athletic? So, should I like be on a team or something? Do you want me to be able to kick your ass when we wrastle? Fun loving? No…I hate fun. Fun is the worst thing ever. You try to have fun with me and the consequences will be dire.
“looking for friend with beniftits” *sigh* Where do I start, young sir? There is a section dedicated solely to you getting your johnson stroked. Its called NSA! And what “beniftits” were you looking for? Perhaps some spelling/grammar lessons? I’d be happy to tutor you. Maybe I’m viewing this entirely the wrong way? Maybe you are in fact extremely clever and were using a play on words? Benef-tits? I think not.
“im 6'4" 270lbs blk straight teeth” Black straight teeth? Maybe you should spend your time at the dentist rather than Craigslist. Or, use a flippin comma.
“If you are fake, I have no time for you.” Sorry sugar. But honestly, you don’t want to see 99% of the women out there without a little fakeness. Otherwise you’d slit your wrists. Everyone fudges the truth a little. *ahem* “No honey! You don’t look fat in those jeans at all…” Would you rather me tell you what I REALLY think about you when you come up to me at *insert random bar name here*? I don’t think so. BTW, you have spinach in your teeth.
“I am looking for a woman who takes care of her self” I would hope that would be one of your requirements. I can’t see someone asking for a woman who doesn’t shower? Doesn’t buy clothing that fits? Doesn’t pay her bills? I’m confused.
“i want to look into your eyes and tell you how much more beautiful they are than the stars.” Weed and Craigslist ads do NOT mix! Stop making me vomit. Punch me in the face or something instead…Jeez.
“I am looking to meet some one special that would like to start as friends and build from there.” Really? Because I prefer marriage immediately. F this friends sh*t.
“I also want to get to meeting without 6 mos. of useless messeges” Would 5 months be ok? I’m not sure if I’ll be able to tell if you’re genuinely not a serial killer until then.
“im only five eight 130lbs so no big girls or bbws” I dub this the ‘no fatties’ clause. Don’t you know big girls is [sic] freaks!?!11?! And eww, 130? I think my 95yo grandmother weighs more than that.
“I am a spontaneous person so I like to do a variety of things” I chose to spend my day doing the same thing over and over and over again. Like washing my hands. It makes me feel better. INVISIBLE BUGS! For future reference: Spontaneous: happening or arising without apparent external cause (this does not mean you like doing a variety of things, loser).
“I'm 5'6'brown eyes,38 old,no child,but like.” Please press 1 for English. No child, but like. You are child-like? You like no child? You like children? Sorry, the subscription for my dumbass translator is expired.
“likes to be outdoors but does not mind stayin indoors sumtimes” Is that like, breathing or not breathing? I was under the impression that indoors and outdoors were the only two options that humans had. Again, confused.
“Not interested in …morally bankrupt women.” What if I’m just financially bankrupt?
Anyway, I’m ending my rant there. And, if I’ve pulled from your ad, and you’re offended…Get the hell over it. Take some criticism and maybe you’ll meet that 21 year old model virgin you’re so desperately seeking.
Neither and Both
This reads as if a quote from a Zen Master: "in the last resort nothing gained."
What I do, I do not wish blamed on Zen, though without my engagement with Zen (attendance at lecture by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, reading of the literature) I doubt whether I would have done what I have done. I am told that Alan Watts has questioned the relation between my work and Zen. I mention this in order to free Zen of any responsibility for my actions. I shall continue making them, however.
