Language
Pizza Huh and Bucksstar Coffee
Here’s a fun Wall Street Journal piece on shanzai culture in China:
Shanzhai, which literally means “mountain fortress” and implies banditry and lack of state control, refers to China’s vast array of name-brand knockoffs. Shanzhai versions of Apple Inc.‘s iPhone, for example, include the HiPhone, the SciPhone and the deliberately misspelled citrus-themed iOrgane.
There’s more.
Recently, the definition of shanzhai has expanded. On China’s Internet, blogs, bulletin boards and news sites carry photos of automobiles jerry-rigged to run on railroad tracks (“shanzhai trains”), fluffy dogs trimmed and dyed to look like the national mascot (“shanzhai pandas”) and models of the Beijing Olympic Games’ National Stadium made out of sticks (“shanzhai Bird’s Nest”).
And finally, a sort of storefront Las Vegas. Instead of faux Paris…
A property developer in Nanjing, hoping to lure business and buzz, set up storefront facades with logos such as “Haagon-Bozs,” “Pizza Huh,” “Bucksstar Coffee,” “KFG” and “McDnoald’s.” Images of what became known as “Shanzhai Street” spread rapidly online.
This reminds me of the semester I spent in Bangladesh with my classmate Dan. For weeks we’d heard legends of a Domino’s Pizza somewhere in Dhaka. Domino’s! So finally, we made the trek and discovered not Domino’s, but… Dominous. Same red-and-blue livery; crucial extra vowel. It clearly had nothing to do with the U.S. Domino’s—except for the suggestion that the owner of Dominous (who came to greet us at our table) may once have worked at one.
I love the shanzai vibe. There’s a certain Robin Hood spirit to it: the noble, resourceful, slightly wacky rogue.
Animanifestos
I like this neologism from Chris Coldewey: He calls the short, type-heavy, idea-rich videos that are used, more and more, to explain products and services “animanifestos.” Here’s one example.
As one of those people who often likes title sequences better than the movies they introduce, I like this trend a lot. It’s also very Rise of the Image, Fall of the Word—except (of course) the word isn’t falling out of the picture, it’s falling in to the video frame. Words spinning and dancing, bumping up into pictures, emphasizing (or contradicting!) the voice-over track… mmm, good stuff. More animanifestos, please.
To answer one question Chris poses in his post: This kind of animation is still mostly done in Adobe After Effects, but I think the field is wide-open for something more mass-market. Some new iMovie to After Effects’ Final Cut Pro. Prezi could grow to meet this need, if they made the tool a lot more flexible—so it was built for making media, not just giving presentations.
Simultaneous translation
Slate has a neat piece about simultaneous translation at the United Nations. I’m fascinated by translation, especially in super-high-stakes situations—nuclear treaty negotiations, for instance. It’s these supremely powerful dudes (mostly dudes) bargaining over matters existential, and yet, wow, those translators have a lot of power.
I gave a presentation at an advertising conference in Paris, and not only was I simultaneously translated into French—my translator was a woman! I realize this is totally normal, but it felt like a really low-key kind of cross-dressing. The presentation was—you will not find this surprising—all about the future, and full of invented neologisms. I said hi to my translator afterwards. She laughed and shook her head: “That was hard!”