Signs of odd times.
Tuesday, February 6th, 2007
We’ve just completed (well, mostly completed) a move of our entire ragtag fleet of websites…this one, my business, Sam’s, James’s, Leslie’s, Bill’s, the works. Maybe it’s a tribute to the quality of the hosting company we picked, maybe it’s a tribute to my willingness to stay up late and try to puzzle out the mysteries of ssh and public key authentication…but things have gone smoothly and we’re now in the land of Textdrive. I hear it’s a hip neighborhood; I hope it’s not too hip for our crowd.
Meanwhile, the reaction of some in Atlanta to how some in Boston freaked out teaches me a few things about generations and perspective. My first reaction was “geez, how idiotic can you be to do something like this in such paranoid times?” I shook my head and listened for the sound of Time Warner vice presidents being ejected from Techwood Drive windows. (By the way, I never think of [adult swim] or any of those channels as being ‘Turner’ channels anymore since there’s no Ted connected to them, nohow. And yet all the coverage described the execs as from ‘Turner Broadcasting.’)
But after a while of seeing the foomfah rage on, I began to see it in a slightly different light (heh)…less “what were they (the marketing weasels) thinking” than “boy, do they understand their target audience. They (the audience) wants to see the rules broken, convention flaunted. This generation doesn’t protest the sins of our government by standing up and saying “This is wrong.” They do it by punking (punk’d-ing?) the authorities. They do it in ways that would delight, well, hey, the yippies. The ghost of Jerry Rubin is smiling (in digital LEDs) and giving the finger.
Does the world change a whit? Well, [adult swim]’s market share goes up, I spose.
UPDATE: The resumé of one of the Bostonian guerrila marketers. Art major, Final Cut, Mac guy. Well, of course! the Boston Herald reports:
[Peter] Berdovsky is a freelance video jockey and got hooked up with the New York company Interference Inc. through connections in the video industry, Rich said.
“He’s just a really good guy,” said his friend Jeffrey Woodsin. “I think it’s been blown out of proportion.”Woodin said Berdovsky, the outgoing singer with the band Superfiction, would not want to cause mass panic. He said the pictures of his arrest were shocking.
“Here’s my friend being arrested as part of a bomb scare. I thought ‘There’s got to be a mistake.’ I’m worried for Peter. I’m worried that he’s going to end up with legal repercussions when really it’s the company,” Woodin said. “He was legally hired by the company to do this.”Berdovsky’s biological father passed away years ago and his mother still lives in Belarus, Rich said. Rich says Berdovsky is in the United States as a political refugee from the authoritarian government of Belarus.
And the Boston Globe reported “an advertising executive at Interference Marketing Inc. instructed Peter Berdovsky to keep quiet while police scrambled across the metropolitan area responding to a series of bomb scares…”
In another era, in the movie version of this incident, Faye Dunaway would have been running Interference.
