Wednesday, July 25, 2007

It will not be televised

A billboard in Hollywood, posted above a rundown strip club on La Brea Avenue (just south of Sunset Boulevard), featured a tight shot of a woman's bare midriff, with the appearance of perspiration (as though in the midst of dancing).

The text obscuring the woman's alluringly sweaty belly button: the URL for a website. Websites? On a billboard? As crazy as it seems, I do think more billboards should feature those now; they do seem more likely for someone driving to be able to remember than the digits of a telephone number.

The name of the site: rhythmandverse.com, where "spoken word meets music." Ah, of course--what else would one associate with women's body parts? And not the mouth that speaks or the whole body to dance to the music, but just the abdomen area. They'd hit that nail on the proverbial head.

Perusing the site itself reveals a lot of photos of a male, not showing his mid-section, who may be the poet, maybe not. Reading the "about" page, touting how "Rhythm and Verse is an entirely new style of poetry. ...[It] was created to revolutionize the way poetry, and spoken word is received."

(It's so revolutionary that they don't even need to proofread the copy on their site to make sure their compound sentences are complete.)

Hmm. Putting poetry and dance music together. You'd think someone would have done that previously. Heck, it seems like there should be a single-word term for that in our lexicon. It strikes me as an idea that was certainly overdue, and I think Barry White needs to jump on this.

They are entirely too humble about their other groundbreaking action: Using a sexually charged image of a woman's body part that has nothing to do with them or what they're promoting as part of the marketing of their product. They invented sexist appropriation of the female form as an effective means of getting the attention of motorists passing by at high speeds.

Genius. I think this will catch on. The world will never be the same.

1 comment:

So, what do you think?