Translated material
Sergey Kuznetsov. NasNet: issue 27
Project: nineties
(More details about the project - here )
Keywords: Buddhism, Christianity, summer holidays
One day Belov and Krasnov were relaxing at sea. Krasnov talked about Aleister Crowley, listened to Current 93 , talked about Anton La Vey and the movie Starship Troopers . Belov smoked ganja with him, swam in the sea, flirted with girls and read the Tibetan Book of the Dead. One fine day he noticed that an Orthodox cross was hanging on Krasnov’s chest.
- Why is that cross hanging there? - he asked playfully.
“I’m baptized,” Krasnov answered very seriously and added indignantly: “What did you think, did you hang it for fun?”
“Well,” Belov said, confused, “everything can be expected from you.”
Two years have passed. Belov and Krasnov again found themselves in the same place, and one fine day Krasnov noticed that on Belov’s neck there was a round thing hanging on a ribbon with the image of something resembling a steering wheel.
- What is this hanging on yours? - he asked.
“This is the so-called “wheel of teaching”, in Sanskrit - dharmachakra,” Belov explained.
- Are you a Buddhist?
- What did you think, did you hang it for fun? - Krasnov answered, experiencing the joy of recognizing the moment - almost convex.
* * *
And you, too, send your story about the nineties.
Name
Internet
The other day, on the subscription sheet of the Academy. Edita Piekha , I took part in a lively discussion about banners. Despite the fact that the content of the discussion was indecently reminiscent of all those discussions on this topic that had been going on four years ago, it excited me - most likely because the situation had changed.
Three years ago, banners for the Art-Teneta competition were discussed. Someone (if I'm not confusing, Leonid Delitsyn and Dmitry Gusev) suggested advertising the competition with phrases from the winning works and/or discussions about them. As a result, a banner appeared : “For this, you should be sterilized on the spot” (Verbitsky’s phrase, if my intuition does not deceive me). Then passions were boiling on the Tenet subscription sheet - is it acceptable to advertise a literary competition with such a banner, even if its click-through rate is so high? As a result, the banner was removed and - moreover - it was removed from the page www.art.spb.ru/konkurs/banners . The only curious thing left there was the banner “In the beginning there was the Word, only then - Porn.” Very clickable, by the way.
(detailed plot summary with banner
“You should be sterilized on the spot for this!”)
Several fragments from the discussion are worthy of quotation - especially since, on the one hand, this is already part of history, and on the other, the Tenet sheet at some point seemed to be posted on the web and, therefore, can be considered open. In addition, information should be free, and no one said anything criminal.
So, the first point of view was voiced by Roman Leibov, who wrote:
Ja kak raz dumal ob etom. I podumal tak - a na xrena nam orientirovat'sja na kommercheskoe naduvalovo? Ponjatno, chto esli goluju teten'ku narisovat' i napisat' freeXXXrated, budut clickat' eshche sil'nee. No potom zhe budut uxodit', pljujas' i obzyvajas'. Kogda rech' idet o business-delax, tam dejstvitel'no ljuboj sluchajnyj posetitel' vazhen, especially, esli operariruesh' bol'shimi chislami. A v nashem skorbnom dele... ja dumaju te 4, kotorye po moim fantikam prishli, bolee/menee znali, chego zhdat'.
(I’m saving the transliteration for color - old-timers, in theory, should experience nostalgia, and those who came later should experience anthropological curiosity.)
Delitsyn responded to Leibov’s letter, as usual, with a long text, in which the most expressive was the following paragraph about the French classicist Corneille and his tragedy about Nero:
Yes, esli ya budu reklamirovat' sochinenia Kornelia, ya, vozmozhno, napishu na bannere "on iznasiloval trup svoej materi". A ne "on punktual'no vyderzhival 14 slogov v stroke". Therefore, what is it?
The living classic Dmitry Manin, whom I met a week ago on the same “Tenet” business, spoke more succinctly, but just as expressively:
Reklamnyj transparant ne dolzhen vyderzhivat' kritiku. On dolzhen privlekat' vnimanie.
All this, let me remind you, was three years ago. As a result, the “Art-Tenet” competition was won by “Low Aerobatics” (which was quite consistent with the radicalism of the phrase “you should be castrated for this”), “Art-Lito” was formed, and “Teneta” again became simply “Tenet”. From the point of application of the forces and interests of “the entire Runet,” which was the competition at the time of its inception, it turned into a normal literary competition - that is, into something that interests literature lovers, and not just everyone. The times of literary centricity are over (they were just over in 1998 - the scandal with Shiryanov was the last sign... if so, of course, one can say). The forces and interests of the Runet are applied in various other places - including in various academies (under the patronage of one of them, by the way, “Tenet” now exists). Academy named after Edita Piekha is the funniest of all. Once I wrote “parody” - and immediately received a spanking: they say, we have a serious academy, how can you, Academician Kuznetsov, write like that? With this in mind, I will continue the phrase “the most fun, although, of course, serious.” And on her subscription sheet they suddenly began to discuss some kind of advertising banner from Lenta.Ru... It was argued that it was vulgar and outrageous. His text was cited as evidence: “The daughter recognized her mother after 20 years.” Or something like that - anyone can check it out in the archive of the academic subscription list .
Passions have boiled over again - is it possible to make a banner that is too clickable? Is Manin right when he wrote that an advertising slogan “should not withstand criticism,” but should attract attention?
Comparing these two discussions, you once again understand what has changed in three years. In 1997, it was about a literary competition. In 2000 - about the news feed. In the old days - about free work; Now - about a commercial project.
And I, as a journalist and participant in many commercial journalistic projects, want to say that this is a fundamental change. Because luring with the banner “He fucked his dead mother” to the text of Corneille’s tragedy is a little stupid, since (here Leibov is right) no one who comes through this banner will read it. But you can attract someone to a 2 KB news article with a similar phrase: the article will most likely be read, and even if not, traffic will increase. Which is not so important for Corneille, but vital for a commercial project.
But is it good to lure in with a banner that leads the reader into, so to speak, stylistic deception? In my opinion, it’s not bad, or at least interesting. Since only on the Internet you can make a vulgar headline in a respectable newspaper - the headline (more precisely, the slogan on the banner) lives its own separate life, and does not hang on top of the article. You can, of course, remember Baudrillard here - but it’s better to remember Mirza Babayev , who, back in the days of Zhurnal.Ru, made the project “The Circulation of Simulacra” .
In fact, the hidden theme of the discussion is the question of man. Purists who condemn banners (“they should be castrated for this” or “a human head was found in the stomach of a catfish”) believe that tabloids are alien to the nature of the “decent” (intelligent, smart, worthy - underline as appropriate) reader. Verbitsky and Delitsyn, on the contrary, think that all people are the same - that is, like themselves, they love to read about why Nero fucked his mother’s corpse. And since they themselves are good people, there is nothing wrong with being interested in such exciting topics. And that means they can (and should) be used in advertising.
With slight regret I must admit that I think so too. Yes, even the most sophisticated intellectual clicks on the banner “In the beginning was the Word, only then - Porn” - which, by the way, serves as indirect confirmation of the opposite: it seems that porn was actually in the beginning of everything.
Places
As I already wrote some time ago, now I also work at Weekend.ru . Today a new design was launched there. It's better than the old one, but it's also far from perfect. For example, it is impossible to understand who wrote which articles. And therefore, here is a list of my most successful reviews: