The KFC Double Down makes me despair. Not because of the “sandwich” itself but because of the predictable reaction; in general, if you didn’t know that the thing was made of chicken, bacon, and processed cheese, you would get the impression that it was lovingly constructed from scorpions and poison. [. . .]
But which side in the war between soulless conglomerates and food puritans has irony on its side? KFC has literally rearranged the same ingredients that go into most every other grab-and-go entrée it serves, and gotten rid of the bread, which, guess what, might not be that good for you anyway. The sinister Elders of Tricon, who were surely lit unflatteringly from above in an austere modernist boardroom when they made the decision to create the Double Down, knew perfectly well that it would create panic and horror for no other reason than its configuration. The Double Down is, explicitly and unapologetically, a piece of food comedy.
And all the horrible people — for it seems virtually impossible to talk about food without being horrible — are reacting exactly as planned. The unapologetically paternalistic healthitarians, the grease-sweating Warcraft-playing fast-food reverse-snobs, the one-idea-in-their-whole-head theorists of food salvation, the paleos and the Pollanites, the narcissistic Nietzscheans who look at cheese as though it was about to go critical any second but will buy whatever’s new on the shelves at the GNC without so much as looking at the label . . . all the people, in short, who routinely insist on adulterating the pleasure of eating, and that includes, most of all, the types who’ve imbibed too much M.F.K. Fisher and who write pornographically about the “pleasure of eating” as if they were zooming a powerful camera in on an open mouth furiously masticating a mouthful of gnocchi.
Colby Cosh, “The Double Down: your move, America”, Macleans, 2010-04-20
April 20, 2010
QotD: Food porn and subversive humour
January 29, 2010
Australia’s film censors got bored, so decided to call attention to themselves
At least, that’s a sensible an interpretation as I can come up with for this lovely little policy change:
A reader writes, “Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. They banned mainstream pornography from showing women with A-cup breasts, apparently on the grounds that they encourage paedophilia, and in spite of the fact this is a normal breast size for many adult women. Presumably small breasted women taking photographs of themselves will now be guilty of creating simulated child pornography, to say nothing of the message this sends to women with modestly sized chests or those who favour them. Australia has also banned pornographic depictions of female ejaculation, a normal orgasmic sexual response in many women, with censors branding it as ‘abhorrent.'”
Hard to come up with a sensible explanation for this, you have to admit.
December 4, 2009
Debunking the porn-violence link
After giving up all hope of finding “uncontaminated” study subjects, a Quebec researcher concludes that the long standing claim that viewing pornography leads to violence and sexual crimes doesn’t appear to be true:
Lajeunesse, unable to find any smut-free young chaps, carried out a detailed study on 20 students who admitted having a fondness for filth. It seems that 90 per cent of all porn is viewed on the internet nowadays, at least in French Canada. Unsurprisingly single chaps watch spend about four times as much time looking at porn as those in committed relationships.
“Not one subject had a pathological sexuality. In fact, all of their sexual practices were quite conventional,” reports Lajeunesse.
“Pornography hasn’t changed their perception of women or their relationship … Those who could not live out their fantasy in real life with their partner simply set aside the fantasy … men don’t want their partner to look like a porn star,” he adds.
The study was funded by Canada’s Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur la Violence Familiale et la Violence Faite aux Femmes (CRI-VIFF, or the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Family Violence and Violence Against Women). However Lajeunesse firmly rejected the idea that goggling over naughty pics, vids etc leads men to mistreat the ladies they encounter in real life.
Amusingly, while putting this post up, my iTunes playlist offered up Rough Trade’s “Crimes of Passion”.
November 30, 2009
2012 Olympic logo not just ugly, but also cartoon porn
One of the least aesthetic Olympic logos ever devised may also be deemed pornographic:
Government zeal in pursuing anyone suspected of harbouring paedophilic tendencies may shortly rebound — with unintended consequences for the 2012 Olympic logo.
Earlier this month, the Coroners & Justice Bill 2009 received the Royal Assent. This Act was another of those portmanteau pieces of legislation for which the current government is famous, mixing up new regulations on the holding of inquests, driving offences, provocation in murder cases and, crucially, a new law making it a criminal offence to be found in possession of an indecent cartoon image of a child.
The horror facing the unpopular Olympics logo is that this is a strict liability offence. If an image is indecent, or held to be so by a jury, it is no good the Olympic Committee claiming that it was not intended as such.
Regular readers will be aware of the controversy that surrounded the current logo since the day it was launched. Critics were not impressed by the £400,000 that had allegedly been shelled out to creative consultancy Wolff Olins to come up with the design. However, it was the logo’s perceived suggestiveness — with many sniggering that it appeared to show Lisa Simpson performing an act of fellatio — that excited internet controversy.
You’ll not that I was careful not to show the offending logo, both for fear of prosecution and because it’s hideous:
[Perry de Havilland]: What does it look like to you? To me it is obvious: a collapsing structure of some sort, perhaps a building at the moment of demolition. The sense of downwards motion towards the bottom of the page is palpable.
Breathtaking. I mean what truly magnificent symbolism. The entire Olympic endeavour has been a massive looting spree with already grotesque cost over-runs (and it is only 2007), so surely something that conjures up images of collapse and disaster is really on the money . . . and speaking of money, at £400,000 (just under $800,000 USD) for the logo, it perfectly sums up the whole ‘Olympic Experience’ for London taxpayers. [. . .]
[James Lileks]: Seriously, what is the matter with people who come up with this? And what is the matter with the people who approved it? Ads that showed the logos have reportedly caused seizures among British epileptics, but I think this thing would make a fossilized femur bone suffer convulsive muscle spasms. If you can’t tell, it’s the year of the London games — 2012. I think it’s also meant to imply a human form — say, a discus thrower, or a runner bursting from the blocks. Whatever it is, it’s an aesthetic catastrophe, and would seem to indicate there’s no one around in the London Games who had the nerve to bark “rubbish, that; try again, and give me a proper logo with some bloody numbers.” I think there’s a point at which people lose the ability to pretend they have any sort of aesthetic criteria, and embrace whatever’s loud and ugly simply because loud and ugly is the style of the times. There’s always a fair amount of coin to be had for dissing the traditionalists, of course; I imagine that if someone submitted a logo with a flag or a bulldog they would have suffered a gentle sneer: still pining for the empire, eh, Smithson. Well, Kipling’s dead. Yes he is. Dig him up, you’ll find Posh Spice’s heel stuck in his heart, the coffin stuffed with I Heart Diana memorial teddy bears.
