Last Thursday, I stopped by The Change You Want To See Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to hear Stewart Ewen speak about “Symbols, Branding, and Persuasion”. Stewart has written many books on media and politics, one of them being PR! A Social History of Spin.
Though I haven’t read this specific book, I was familiar with the BBC series “loosely” based on it titled The Century of The Self. In The Century of The Self, director Adam Curtis draws connections between the history of political power and execution, propaganda, and Freudian psychoanalysis (amongst other things).
And while Mr. Ewen clearly wanted to remove Freudian connotation from his own work (he was much more interested in theorists Bernés and Gustave Le Bon), the topics at hand were equally heavy and entertaining. Case in point, at the end of his lecture Mr. Ewen played the opening from the popular children’s show Bob The Builder. All I can say is, what does the message remind you of? (By the way, I apologize if the theme song gets stuck in your head for at least the next couple of days.)
Check out some of the other programming at The Change You Want To See Gallery: here.
I’ve been looking to some of my favorite blogs for inspiration on posting format, and therefore, I’ve realized that short and sweet is a good rule of thumb. So I’m taking a page out of Alex Ross’s blog (figuratively speaking): The Rest Is Noise, and writing a short list of things that have been influencing my work and thoughts. Oh… And speaking of work, stay tuned for some new compositions and a design collaboration with my friend Paul from Fridgebuzzz Electronics (early October).
Reading:
Malcolm Gladwell “Outliers”
Listening:
Yo La Tengo “Popular Songs”
Lee Fields “My World”
Watching:
Mad Men Season 3
That’s all I got for now. Thanks for following me.
Hello and welcome to my blog. For those who don’t know me, I’m Kevin Siwoff (in case you forget, you can just look at the top of the page and find the big bold type). I’m a musician, composer, engineer, designer of sorts.
For the past few months I’ve been working with a small team to put together a website containing my creative portfolio. In the next week or so kevinsiwoff.com will be unveiled to the world and everyone will get to see the product of our hard work. But for now, I present to you a piece of the puzzle: the blog. I play, write, and record music, but I also have a background in electronics and web design. kevinsiwoff.com will focus more on my musical and sound works, but here in the blog, I’ll delve into my other work too. In the blog I’ll highlight collaborations with my friends/colleagues, post pictures, comment on happenings in arts, media, and technology, and basically do whatever I feel like doing.
If you like my style, subscribe to the blog with RSS. If you’re on twitter, subscribe to my feed @KJSWaffle. If you like something I say or something I write, post a comment below. Thanks for reading. Things are about to get exciting!
![Kevin Siwoff [dot] com](http://kevinsiwoff.com/blog/wp-content/themes/inove/img/KS_logo.gif){kind=logo}
