box vox

Buckfast Blowback

Photo by Kieran Dodds via: The New York Times

Some packaging-related content in an article in today’s New York Times...

Paralleling Russia’s battles with alcoholism—(see: Soviet Anti-Alcohol Campaign)—Scotland’s drinking problems are prompting legislation to try and curb alcohol consumption and its attendant bad behavior.

Unfortunately for Buckfast, the popularity of its caffeine-fortified “tonic wine” (with consumers in this market) also makes it a prominent symbol of a social problem.

...the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them)...

Legislation to curb drinking is of particular interest here in Scotland’s old industrial heartland, or the “Buckfast Belt,” where Buckfast is considered a regional favorite. The drink is so ubiquitous in this working-class town, not far from Glasgow, that some people call it Coatbridge Table Wine (others call it “loopy juice,” or, adding their own twist as they channel Travis Bickle, “Who’re you lookin’ at?” wine.) Buckfast is no newcomer to the market, having become popular in the first half of the 20th century, when it was prescribed by doctors for down-in-the-dumps miners and sold in drugstores.

One person’s helpful mood improver, though, is another’s worryingly effective stimulant. The drink is 15 percent alcohol by volume, a bit stronger than most wines. Also, each 750 milliliter bottle contains as much caffeine as eight cans of Coke.

For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle
By Sarah Lyall, NY Times, February 3, 2010

Interesting that—(like Vimto)—Buckfast began life as a health tonic. Sometime (when there’s time) boxvox must do a round-up of other contemporary products that began as Victorian patent medicines. (Like Coke, for instance.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

As Seen on TV

Blister-pack/clamshell wrap rage is old news, but Larry David manages to give it a terrifying new geopolitical spin when (in Season 7, Episode 2 of Curb Your Enthusiasm) he asks, “What am I, Mohammed Atta, I gotta get a box cutter?”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Groppers

From Mankatt’s Flickr Photostream: a Roche Advertisement from the January 26, 1976 issue of Advertising Age (or maybe it was from Food Product Development Magazine). Either way, it illustrates another reason why an existing package might acquire an added graphic burst.

Roche, with the tagline, “The food improvers,” sought to promote their vitamin additives by suggesting that a product with flagging sales would benefit from a graphic burst with a product claim such as, “Now Fortified with 8 Essential Vitamins.”

I believe that “Groppers” is a fictional product because it seems doubtful that any of Roche’s clients would have wanted to be portrayed as the poster boy for declining sales.

The “how to claim a heath benefit” aspect of this ad also seems pertinent to the recent dialing down of the Smart Choice Program, now under scrutiny from the FDA. (The Smart Choice Program had provided manufacturers with voluntary nutritional guidelines, under which the children’s cereals with the highest sugar content, for example, were somehow able to claim a health benefit.)

(A close up of the Groppers boxes, after the fold...)

Art & Politics of Prescription Pill Bottles

Got an email from MoveOn.org that included this tiny photo of wheelbarrows full of prescription pill bottles. It’s a good example of how packaging can be used as a political symbol. Really, I guess it’s a symbol of health care (or consumption of health care), but in the sense that health care has become a politicized issue, I figure these prescription pill bottles are also a political symbol. There are supposed to be 20,000 of them and each one contains a written message (a message in a bottle) in support of Dawn Smith who has been denied coverage by CIGNA for treatment of her brain tumor. I was surprised not to be able to find other, larger photos of this image. Quantity is powerful and, had it been up to me, I might have wanted to make more of this image. (The video posted yesterday now seems to be doing this.)

On the other hand, maybe 20,000 pill bottles is not really “on point” for their message since Dawn is being denied medical treatment. Mass quantities of pill bottles might tend to suggest the opposite. So many pill bottles implies a prolonged, ongoing treatment of a chronic illness or condition. The pills that you must take for the rest of your life—in order to go on living. And wheelbarrows full of prescription pill bottles, perhaps, speak more to drug company profits—(rather than to insurance company profits).

Another thing that inevitably comes to mind (when you see huge amounts empty packaging) is consumer waste. I’ve written before about my own negative feelings as a consumer of diabetic supplies. Every time I use up another small canister of test strips (or other diabetic supply that I will presumably be using every day for the foreseeable future)—I feel a certain remorse about the packaging waste. Considering Dawn Smith’s situation, I know that I should count myself lucky that my health insurance continues to pay for my medicine and supplies. And yet glimpsing the cost that my insurance company actually shells out for all these supplies, never fails to give me anxiety about how much longer it might continue to do so. It doesn’t strike me as sustainable.

On left: “Corporate DNA” a helix shaped sculpture by Ron Jones; on right: Rocky Stroup’s “Borrowed Time (13 Years of Pill Poppin’)”

Jean Shin’s “Chemical Balance”

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Tempest in an Acorn-Shaped Teapot

Acorn brand vending machine photo and ascending price decals from Crow River Trading

Check out this oblique segue: In our previous post we discovered Cynthia Von Buhler’s reliquary prize capsules & vending machine. Her capsules were of the round type but there are also acorn-shaped capsules, as well as a brand of vending machine called “Acorn” made by Oak Manufacturing.

...and speaking of things, acorn: how about all that self-righteous, Republican indignation about that other, more newsworthy Acorn?

The recent Borat-style ‘sting’ by James O’Keefe has put Acorn —(Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now)— on the defensive in the media, but unlike Sacha Baron Cohen, who, as Borat or as Brüno, sought to expose the prejudices of individuals, O’Keefe and his backers have something more grandiose in mind. His YouTube prank videos of a few guileless Acorn workers, have been packaged presented as if they were an indictment of the entire organization as a whole. O’keefe has created a sufficiently prurient sound bite to scare off Acorn’s funding & support and putting its CEO and Chief Organizer, Bertha Lewis onto a mainstream media hot seat.

I met Bertha Lewis when she was a fellow homesteader in the same building in the South Bronx. Living there (and then fighting to remain there) was, for me, just an instinctive response to the 1980s escalation of rents in Manhattan. For Bertha, however, it became more than that. Yes, she too needed an affordable place to live, but it was through her dedication to the various shared struggles of tenants in that building—(rebuilding a collapsed courtyard, unclogging the building’s sewer, securing legal representation in housing court, etc.)— that, I believe, she came to really embrace “housing rights” as a core principle.

Ms. Lewis and her friends moved into the building in 1983 and fixed it up, paying rent to a man who claimed to be the landlord. After two years, they found out they had “been snookered,” Ms. Lewis said. The city tried to oust the occupants as squatters but they resisted, forming a tenants’ association and winning in court. Ms. Lewis became their spokeswoman, reaching out to reporters and persuading William M. Kunstler to take on the case. “I was just trying to save my home,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about organizing. You just learn this stuff, and I learned the hard way.”

New York Times, March 14, 2001

Eventually my wife and I gave up and we left the space that we had worked so hard to fix up, while Bertha and others stayed on to fight the good fight. We were delighted when we learned that she had become head of Acorn and I remember hearing her on NPR warning about predatory lending practices years before all those sub-prime mortgages, bundled into “toxic assets” brought down the entire world’s financial system.

I cringed in 1989 when President Bush (senior) invoked his “thousand points of light” rhetoric, citing volunteerism as a better alternative to any humane or humanitarian government-run assistance. Knowing myself well enough to know that I am not and never have been a “point of light,” it strikes me as horribly ironic, that Bertha Lewis should be now scapegoated by the right wing. Here is the one person I know who actually does exhibit the “volunteer spirit” that the metaphor was supposedly meant to inspire. What if they were to succeed in crushing Acorn? Who would they like to have step up and help poor people? Big government?

See what Rachel Maddow has to say about the Acorn controversy:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

(See Bertha Lewis on The Colbert Report and some acorn-related packaging, after the fold...)

S.O.S at the 1959 Kitchen Debate

In the OP-Ed section today’s NY Times, William Safire has a fascinating account of how he came to take the iconic photo of Nixon & Khrushchev discussing the kitchen of the “typical American home” in the 1959 exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Awesome product placement for S.O.S (and for future Russian leader, Leonid Brezhnev, as well). Some excerpts:

I was in that kitchen, not because I then had anything to do with Nixon, the exhibition’s official host, but as a young press agent for the American company that built the house. The exhibit was designed to show Russians that free enterprise produced goods that made life better for average Americans...

Nixon: “I want to show you this kitchen. It’s like those of houses in California. See that built-in washing machine?”

Khrushchev: “We have such things.”

Nixon: “What we want to do is make more easy the life of our housewives.”

Khrushchev: “We do not have the capitalist attitude toward women.”

... Because the Russian press had derided the American claim that the house was affordable to workers — calling it “a Taj Mahal” — Nixon noted that this house cost $14,000, and a government-guaranteed veterans mortgage made it possible for a steelworker earning $3 an hour to buy it for $100 a month. Khrushchev was sarcastic: “We have peasants who also can afford to spend $14,000 for a house.”

... originally slugged “the Sokolniki summit” but Harrison was willing to change that slug-line to the equally alliterative “kitchen conference” at my plea (my client was the house builder, not Nixon and certainly not the Russian park).

... A few hours after the kitchen conference, at our ambassador’s residence, I was introduced to Nixon, who showed his grasp of capitalism’s priorities by commenting, “We really put your kitchen on the map, didn’t we?”

William Safire NY Times
The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen
NY Times, July 23, 2009

Funny how “modern conveniences” and consumer packaged goods figured into the idealogical debates of that period...

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Radioactive Gag Gift Packaging

The last chapter of Jerry Jankowski’s book, Shelf Space (modern package design, 1945-1960), is about “gag gifts.” These are usually conceptual affairs, in the sense that—(although the gag may be sort of dumb)—as a product, it’s little more than an idea contained in the package. One product featured in this “canned laughter” section of Jankowski’s book is a can of “Genuine Los Angeles Smog.” (See photos below)

From The Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection, this can of “Original Canned Radiation” is obviously the same basic concept. Selling an empty can of air as a sort of rueful attempt at finding humor in the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

“Canned Radiation” from Three Mile Island produced  by Brenster Enterprises of Etters Pennsylvania.

This was probably the most popular souvenir associated with the accident at Three Mile Island.

The six suggested uses indicated on the label were:

1. Remove label and tell your enemy its laughing gas.
2. Energy free night light (illuminates in darkness).
3. Mix with cold cream for that radiant beauty.
4. Instant male sterilization (sniff twice daily).
5. Use as a room air freshener.
6. Toothpaste recipe: mix 3 to 1 ratio with basking soda, for ever glowing smile.

ORAU Health Physics Historical Instrumentation Museum Collection

The funny thing is, several of those bulleted points above are ideas that have actually been tried in the past for serious, non-gag products. (See: Radioactive Packaging)

Nice smog can from eBay, circa 1968 (“Buy It Now” price : $49.95)

(A different label design for “Genuine Los Angeles Smog,” after the fold...)

Gun-Shaped Bottles

Gun-shaped Hijos de Villa Tequila bottle: the lower photo (above) is from Eddie Quinones’s Flickr Photostream

The gun-shaped Hijos de Villa Tequila bottle was getting a lot of attention online last year. Old news from Johnny-come-lately, Box Vox, right? I know, but looking into it now, I’m a little surprised at how many other gun-shaped, glass bottles there are to be found. Some of which are even older.

These two gun-shaped candy bottles are from Ruby Lane. (Vintage packaging from the days when kids were encouraged to play with guns.)

Although I’ve touched on the topic of bottles as a weapon—(think: barroom brawl)—I hadn’t considered “weapons” to be one of the fundamental packaging metaphors. (See: Packaging as Metaphor) I don’t know, maybe I missed something...  “In the battle of the brands, packaging is a weapon.” or “The package is a not-so-secret, deadly weapon with which to annihilate the competition.” (Or something like that.)

Pistola Bucanero "Mocambo" 1821—a buccaneer-pistol-shaped rum bottle (Note: gun-shaped bottles are one of those packages that, themselves, require packaging.)

(More gun-shaped bottles, after the jump...)

Another baby found in a Timberland shoe box

Baby shoe box photos from KidsDesignerWear-UK. (This is not the box in which the baby girl was found in Hempstead, and is only shown here for illustration purposes & for flat-footed irony.)

Yep. This is the second time I’m quoting a Daily News story about a baby in a Timberland box. (The earlier story was from September of 2007. See: Packaging and Moral Turpitude.) 

The girl was less than a day old when she was discovered by a man who heard a noise and peeked inside a Timberland work boots box around 9 p.m. Sunday in Hempstead, L.I.

Baby, less than a day old, found in shoebox in lobby of Long Island apartment building
The NY Daily News, 6/22/09

And from the NY Post:

A newborn baby girl was found alive in a Timberland shoebox in the entrance to a Long Island apartment building, police said today...

A breathing hole had been cut in the middle of the lid.

NEWBORN ABANDONED IN LI BUILDING
The NY Post, 6/22/09

Poor Timberland. Some news reports just say “shoe box,” but most of the reportage makes a point of including this key, brand-name detail. Is this just to give the story verisimilitude?  Or is it a commentary on the mother’s values? As if to say: “Look, she can afford to buy expensive Timberland boots, but she can’t afford to take care of her child.”

Health Cigarettes

From Trinkets & Trash: Artifacts of the Tobacco Epidemic, “Medicinal, nontobacco cigarettes were sold under a wide variety of brands until about mid-century for asthma, catarrh, and hay fever.”

Reading an article in the business section of Monday’s NY Times (quoted below) reminded me of these earlier tobacco health claims (above).

Tobacco Regulation Is Expected to Face a Free-Speech Challenge
By Duff Wilson

The marketing and advertising restrictions in the tobacco law that Congress passed last week are likely to be challenged in court on free-speech grounds. But supporters of the legislation say they drafted the law carefully to comply with the First Amendment.

The law’s ban on outdoor advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds would effectively outlaw legal advertising in many cities, critics of the prohibition said. And restricting stores and many forms of print advertising to black-and-white text, as the law specifies, would interfere with legitimate communication to adults, tobacco companies and advertising groups said in letters to Congress and interviews over the last week.

The controversy, legal experts say, involves tension between the right of tobacco companies to communicate with adult smokers and the public interest in preventing young people from smoking...

Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, an advocacy group that was a leader in pushing for the law, said: “Frankly, the tobacco industry and the advertising industry have never heard of an advertising restriction that they thought was constitutional. In this case, great care was taken to permit black-and-white text advertising that permits them to communicate whatever truthful information they have.”

(For more about past tobacco advertising claims, see: Not a Cough in a Carload.)

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

Early Tobacco Packets

J.K. Föhl painting from The Encyclopedia of Ephemera

With the (soon-to-be-signed into law) “Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act” here in the US, and cigarette packaging poised for some changes, I thought it might be a good time to take a look back at the origins of tobacco packaging.

The earliest tobacco pack? Pretty much just a square of folded paper as in the painting above.

Early shopkeepers, if they wrapped their wares at all, did so only nominally. One 17th-century London tea-man’s advertisement suggests that the customer should come provided with ‘a convenient box’. Squares of paper, normally reserved for the most unmanageable of commodities, were the universal standby. In this way, for those who shopped without convenient boxes, the problem of wrapping such products as pins, needles, snuff, tobacco, ink powder, sago, and the like was solved.

With the rise of shopkeeping and the growth of competition, it was only a matter of time before the square of wrapping paper carried a distinguishing mark.

The Encyclopedia of Ephemera
 By Maurice Rickards, Michael Twyman, Sally De Beaumont, Amoret Tanner

As explained to me by Virginia Bartow, curator of the Arents Tobacco collection, tobacco “trade cards” (not to be confused with tobacco trading cards) served a multitude of purposes. An advertising flyer, a shipping label—(so that non-literate delivery men could match the graphics on the label to the sign hanging outside the tobacconist’s shop)—and an ad hoc package.

(More tobacco trade card packaging, after the fold...)

Value Pack

Tattfoo Tan

This is the 2009 edition of a group show I wrote about last year. This year the group has chosen the theme of “value” for reasons explained in their press release:

Because in these times,

—trillions worth of value in stocks, real estate and other possessions have disappeared like smoke into thin air

—the value of human life in many parts of the world seems to be next to nothing

—many see a crisis of values in our society

—questions are raised about the true value of art...

value is a concept which is especially appropriate for artistic exploration today.

That is what the artist group consisting of Debby Davis, Steve Foust, Tomas Ronse and Tattfoo Tan decided to do in their exhibition as part of this year’s Art by the Ferry Festival. The location, a closed pizza parlor at 70 Bay Street, Staten Island is quite consistent with the theme of the show.

The four artists approach this theme in different ways:

Debby Davis, an artist who processes things that make her uncomfortable—death, decay, violence, mortality—into palatable visuals, explores the value of home. Her work in this show draws on images from towns ravaged by the economic crisis.

Tomas Ronse is a recycling artist who finds beauty in what is thrown away. His collages and assemblages are quirky yet raise serious questions about the values of society.

Steve Foust’s work in this show is about receiving, holding and giving. Foust, who “draws with a saw”, sculpting sheets of wood, represents his sense of value by vessels with connecting channels.

Tattfoo Tan is a conceptual artist who seeks to engage his public in a collaborative practice so that art becomes a shared, ritualized experience. On each of the four days of the show, Tattfoo will create a different participatory event around a value-related theme.

Value Pack at Art by the Ferry
70 Bay Street, Staten Island, NY (map)
June 6, 7 and June 13, 14
11am – 6pm