Recession Rating- 1

Recession Rating. Number 1 December 2008.
A walk through the city centre on a Sunday December night. Its 6 o clock and a team of advertising workers ply their trade. Digital sandwich board backpacked men are handholding a compact video projector on a sturdy pole, willing jerky images on the open spaces between the plastic shopsigns in the increasingly rundown city centre. Burning battery power and reminding us of the eco positivism of a basic sandwich board slog they scan the facades for areas to ‘throw up’ a ponderous Heineken TV ad. Their hi tech tagging floating above the more solid markered tags left by Hazel and Laurens crew outside Ann Summers and Easons.
Quirky as it appeared, there seemed something desperate about this new brand projectionism. By their gait these drones appeared to be reenacting some scene from Blade Runner that didn’t make the final cut. The soundtrack to all this was the plaintive pitch of a inebriated man attempting to busk with the Celine Dion songbook. The battery powered team moved along Cruises St, eyed suspiciously by a couple of teenaged girls repping for Hazel and Laurens team. One of these two possibly the author of Cruises St reductionist graffiti classic ‘ Faggot Internet’.
We watch and take part in observing the images being constructed knowing that none of this unintentional street theatre emanated from a Limerick sensibility. A promotion company with a Heineken contract is laboriously ‘linking’ our city with the lager via Rugby sponsorship. Whatever their intention, the stuttering images that now shine between ‘Game’ and ‘HMV’ tonight became just another oversubscribed advertising vignette only adding to the visual overspill of the area. The TV ad features a story line set in the future where buried Rugby grounds are a remembered mythical place. However the quantifiable myth of an urban centre filled with hordes of Mc-Christmasised scarf clad disposable income couples in thrall to this Magic lantern show seems to be alive and well in a promotion companies mind space.
The audience here in Limerick for now, is a mix of beyond caring youth, hungover saturday night barflys calculating a sunday finish up and the singer who by now was interspersing his ballads with a plea for someone to understand him. Weary shoppers denied the opportunity for the cheaper ringroaded bargains resort instead to 'window shopping in town’ and blankly wonder should they be entertained with the sight of the video workers shadow play. They simultaneously absorb and reject the information realising that the exercise's disposable novelty factor overrides Heineken's message and its all a fuzzy blur. Christmas as a Phillip K Dick-ins fable as the drones operate in a city centre pockmarked with the new dereliction.
Sheened retail units built with ’rejuvenation’ tax breaks that will remain empty, begin now to register as blank screens for TV ads street peddled by a Beer corporation.
‘Welcome to the offworld colonies’ the lumbering floating video screen in Blade Runner optimistically implored, its cityscape a mass of redundant mobile advertising circling a leftover city without a centre. Blade Runner was fictionally set in the year 2019.

Paul Tarpey

Comments

[fustar]

Great post, Paul.

"Faggot Internet"? Best graff ever.

[Cool C]

I agree with post above whole heartedly Paul. Note to self .. 'Must read ALL articles on Cheebah , not just ones with 'Hip Hop' mentioned.
Having said that your colourfull references chopped in and out make for real 'cut n paste' style result, with Steinski precision with the scalpel.. Blade Runner chopped in beautifully. - Cool C

[BrianRS]

Well at least it's a temporary sign, if you ever travel to Texas you will see mile after mile of neon signs permanently parked in such quantities that they just merge into one another.

[Paddy Chadwick]

I wanted to see this sign, it is the best graff ever. I am only in Limerick for half a day.

My friend and I came from the States. We want to see the faggot Internet, but we couldn't find it. Is it gone?

Faggot Internet, where's my fuckin' sign?