{"id":33370,"date":"2014-01-18T17:47:04","date_gmt":"2014-01-18T16:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/?p=33370"},"modified":"2014-01-19T18:33:10","modified_gmt":"2014-01-19T17:33:10","slug":"frozen-chicken-train-wreck-laurence-hamburger-chopped-liver-press-and-ditto-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/?p=33370","title":{"rendered":"Frozen Chicken Train Wreck. Laurence Hamburger. Chopped Liver Press \/ Ditto Press."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"frozen_chicken_train_wreck_motto\"<\/a>\"frozen_chicken_train_wreck_motto2\"<\/a>\"frozen_chicken_train_wreck_motto3\"<\/a>\"frozen_chicken_train_wreck_motto4\"<\/a>\"frozen_chicken_train_wreck_motto5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These posters exist for a day. They are conceived in the newsrooms of our tabloid dailies \u2013 The Star, The Sun, The Times and others \u2013 in the late afternoon, as the paper is being put to bed. Just hours later they are visible along the roadside of every major arterial road in the city.
\nThese tabloid posters \u2013 candid and often outrageous epigrams of news \u2013 have been displayed along this road since the First Anglo-Boer War. They live momentarily in the minds of passing drivers and pedestrians, and by midnight they are already defunct.<\/p>\n

I began collecting South African tabloid posters in 2008 with no other purpose than to preserve them. I thought they were funny, clever and true. Composed in a local vernacular of shebeen English, these statements are part of the texture of our urban fabric; so familiar as to almost disappear. Loud and colourful, tough and sharp, replete with a droll wit and blunt gallows humour, their blatant iconoclasm and muscular use of language is invigorating and oddly reassuring. The newspapers themselves were not keeping an archive, and however ephemeral they might seem I thought there was a relevance in them that was not being recognised; something uniquely South African.<\/p>\n

Driving down Louis Botha Avenue, the rhythmic flash of passing headlines reads like a journalistic version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. It\u2019s an alternative history of the city, a tabloid summary of our age. Constructed from political sound-bites, public innuendos, colloquial bon-mots and hard, bitter truths, they read like an everyman\u2019s state of the nation address, full of comedy and antagonism.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are,\u201d as one of the copy editors remarked, \u201cthe perfect marriage of a corrupt society and a progressive constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n

– Laurence Hamburger<\/p>\n

Language: English
\nPages: 208
\nSize: 19 x 27 cm
\nBinding: Hardcover
\nISBN: 9780957161221<\/p>\n

49\u20ac
\nBuy it<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

These posters exist for a day. They are conceived in the newsrooms of our tabloid dailies \u2013 The Star, The Sun, The Times and others \u2013 in the late afternoon, as the paper is being put to bed. Just hours later they are visible along the roadside of every major arterial road in the city. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[3901,1307,3895],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33370"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33370"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33378,"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33370\/revisions\/33378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mottodistribution.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}