June CommQuote

Here in Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a wonderful physical description of advertising--in the process of being created, in this case, on a billboard. At first I was disoriented because James Tansey's thoughts are elsewhere (welcome to Virginia Woolf) and suddenly the circus literally unfolds. He's on a walk with Mrs. Ramsay:

...He felt many things, something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons which he could not give. He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable of anything and saw himself--but what was she looking at? At a man pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening red and blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals, lions, tigers...Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read out how it...'will visit this town.' It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like that - his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago.

"Let us all go!" she cried, moving on, as if all those riders and horses had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity. 

"Let's go," he said, repeating her word, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince. "Let's all go to the circus."  
--p. 11, Harcourt edition, 1955

August CommQuote

Bob Garfield of On the Media interviewed Vinicius Galvao, a reporter for Folha de Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest newspaper, about the city's recent ban on outdoor advertising.

"Bob Garfield: I've seen photos of the city, and it's amazing to see this sprawling metropolis completely devoid of signage, completely devoid of logos and bright lights and so forth. What did Sao Paulo look like up until the ban took place?

Vinicius Galvao: Sao Paulo's a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You couldn't even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it's amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. For example, there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw it before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area....It's weird, because you get lost...you don't have any references anymore...My reference was a big Panasonic billboard. But now my reference is art deco building that was covered..."
--excerted from Adbusters (September/October, 2007)