Sherry Chandler

of the poster for Taxi to the Dark Side, from No Caption Needed:

There are two sides to the normalization of violence in the US. On the one hand, fictional protrayals of beatings, rape, torture, and murder are standard fare in the culture of popular entertainment (TV, film, video games). The viewing public is constantly rewarded for suspending disbelief and ethical revulsion about the conduct of violence; just play along and you get all the pleasures of the show. On the other hand, actual violence being perpetrated by the government is minimized, sanitized, or outright censored. Let it not be said that the MPAA does anything in half measures.

Here’s the poster in question:

According to Variety:

The MPAA has rejected the one-sheet for Alex Gibney’s documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” which traces the pattern of torture practice from Afghanistan’s Bagram prison to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay.

ThinkFilm opens the pic, which is on the Oscar shortlist of 15 docs, on Jan. 11.

The image in question is a news photo of two U.S. soldiers walking away from the camera with a hooded detainee between them.

An MPAA spokesman said: “We treat all films the same. Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration.”

Oh, how precious we hold the children. Unless they’re like this little boy:

The photo, from AP/Jean-Marc Bouju, is also featured at No Caption Needed.

Go and read that post and the Variety article about the MPAA’s history of censoring these images of hooded prisoners.

From the NYTimes:

This is the season of frenetic shopping, but for a devious few people it’s also the season of spirited shopdropping.

Otherwise known as reverse shoplifting, shopdropping involves surreptitiously putting things in stores, rather than illegally taking them out, and the motivations vary.

Devious is sort of an unfriendly word. Audacious might be better.

I know about shopdropping from the point of view of poets, who sometimes slip copies of their books into bookstores that otherwise refuse to stock unknown poets, or anybody much later than Walt Whitman. (And it is not, as the article states, just “self-published” poets who do this.) But this article highlights a wide range of strategic product placement.

One of the first reports of shopdropping was in 1989, when a group called the Barbie Liberation Organization sought to make a point about sexism in children’s toys by swapping the voice hardware of Barbie dolls with those in GI Joe figures before putting the dolls back on store shelves.

…

Ryan Watkins-Hughes, 28, a photographer from Brooklyn, teamed up with four other artists to shopdrop canned goods with altered labels at Whole Foods stores in New York City this week. “In the holidays, people get into this head-down, plow-through-the-shopping autopilot mode,” Mr. Watkins-Hughes said “‘I got to get a dress for Cindy, get a stereo for Uncle John, go buy canned goods for the charity drive and get back home.’”

“Warhol took the can into the gallery. We bring the art to the can,” he said, adding that the labels consisted of photographs of places he had traveled combined with the can’s original bar code so that people could still buy them.

“What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from that rushed stupor,” he said, pausing to add, “That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t it?”

If you’re an independent artist, you might find some marketing tips:

Self-published authors sneak their works into the “new releases” section, while personal trainers put their business cards into weight-loss books, and aspiring professional photographers make homemade cards — their Web site address included, of course — and covertly plant them into stationery-store racks.

“Everyone else is pushing their product, so why shouldn’t we?” said Jeff Eyrich, a producer for several independent bands, who puts stacks of his bands’ CDs — marked “free” — on music racks at Starbucks whenever the cashiers look away.

…

At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., local authors have been putting bookmarks advertising their own works in books on similar topics.

I sort of like that one. A nice bookmark is a bit of a gift and always handy. I tend to use whatever comes to hand — a bit of junk mail, a cash register slip. I would be pleased enough to find a bookmark provided for me. Though I’d be inclined to think the store put it there.

As for those shopdropped poetry collections, let me applaud Mac’s Backs:

At Mac’s Backs Paperbacks, a used bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves.

Mac’s Backs is a very poet-friendly independent book store. I’ve read there myself, with help from Jeff Hess. If you ever find yourself in Cleveland Heights, drop in and spend freely.