Category: Thoughts

We’d be interested in knowing more about the 1.8 percent of historians who regard this presidency as a success.

A stork delivers a baby, struggling through waves and storms and deserts, pausing only to fight wolves to make it safely to suburbia, and then is really let down that the baby grows up to be a functionary in a gloomy office. Message: Are you living up to your potential? If not, use our website to find a new job. Oh, crap. Are you crying at an advertisement again? Yeah, that’s always embarrassing.

The ad leaves me with more questions than answers. I mean, is it a good idea to make your potential customers feel really horrible about themselves? Why would the stork stop to fight wolves, when it could just fly around them? Can birds really experience disappointment, and if so, would they communicate that emotion with facial expressions while looking at you through rain-streaked glass? How long do storks live, anyway? Has anyone actually found a job on Monster? (Seriously, as far as I can tell, that website is useful if you are a company that has a candidate to fill a job opening, but needs to pretend to advertise the job to avoid legal troubles.) Ads Of The Weird isn’t convinced it’s a great ad either, especially given the quality of a lot of the jobs on the site.

Oh dear. 3D Printers have learned to self-replicate and NKOTB has reunited. Surely the second coming is at hand! Market self-regulation will make planes fall from the sky and sinners will have to use poorly-designed web pages to figure out what happened. Ol’ John McCain seems to think so, anyway.

On the other hand, given man’s inhumanity to man, maybe a good scourge and tribulation might not be an entirely bad thing.

NewTeeVee says my work-blog at TV With MeeVee is a “corporate blog worth reading.”

Rob Walker’s “Buying In: The Secret Dialog Between What We Buy And Who We Are” might not seem, at first, to have much in common with a book about Celine Dion. But when that book is “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste,” by Carl Wilson, it really does.

“Buying In” is about the ways that people assign meaning to consumer objects and use them to define themselves – and whether the phenomenon of consumerist identity is a good thing. “Let’s Talk About Love” is about Celine Dion, yes, but it’s about the ways that people assign meaning to Celine Dion, and what those meanings are, and whether any one of them is universally correct.

Celine Dion is widely disliked but also widely loved. Schmaltzy, kitschy, commercial and soulless? Beautiful, pure, and filled with love? Both? It wouldn’t hurt to have a chapter about her in “Buying In,” right next to the discussion of skateboard culture and the rise of Timberland work boots among hip-hop fans.

At different points and en route to different destinations, both books make the same point: People want to be regarded as individuals and also they want to feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves. Various kinds of consumer behavior sate those apparently contradictory needs, often at the same time. I tend to think of it as sort of a tribal behavior: I’m a skateboarder, not a preppie. I listen to Neko Case, not Celine Dion. You get the idea.

One of Wilson’s point major points is that regardless of her actual merits, Celine Dion comes in for a lot more criticism than she would otherwise, because people want to distinguish themselves from people they see as being Celine fans. He covers a lot of ground getting there: The philosophy of aesthetics and taste the evolution of contemporary pop music from 19th century music halls, the origins of pop-music criticism, the Quebecoise culture that formed the background for Celine’s rise to popularity, and more. But ultimately, he’s just trying to step back and give Celine a listen and see what it is that other people love about her. He doesn’t quite manage to like the material himself, but he at least gains some understanding for the tribe of Celine.

Meanwhile, Walker’s interest is the way marketers try to get people to buy things, and whether they have any idea why people actually are buying what they do. He, too, covers a lot of ground: BzzAgent and the Word Of Mouth Marketing association, case studies of Scion and Red Bull and skateboarder culture, the history of advertising and the belief that “kids today are immune to advertising,” which seems to have been in effect since at least the 1900s. The ongoing focus, though, is the way that buyers determine the meaning of what they buy at least as much as sellers do. He talks about how brands like Timberland and Pabst have been the beneficiaries of consumer-driven rebranding that’s turned them into consumable meaning, and how they’ve played along with it rather than resist it. And he talks about how Red Bull and Scion have latched on to existing communities to try and build themselves credibility with different groups.

There are plenty of great anecdotes and at least a couple lessons anyone in sales, marketing, or product development should learn, but he’s got one big point at the end. He says that products may symbolize individuation and community, but they don’t create them. The goal of marketing (or murketing, as Walker calls the latest devious and confusing marketing techniques) is to convince people that a product will provide those emotional needs. But it can’t.

Walker doesn’t think it’s possible or necessary for people to stop imbuing consumer objects with meaning, but he wants people to be aware of how and why they do it, and to understand that a symbolic purchase isn’t a substitute for actually having your own identity or being part of a community.

In both cases, we’ve got an examination of our unexamined consumer preferences turning out to be moral choices – and often not very good moral choices. Both books remind us to look carefully at what we consume, and whether we consume it at all, and how we position that consumption as a signal to other people.

Barry Crimmins sure is doing some great work:

“I’d much rather lose a campaign than lose a war.” — John McCain
“How about both?” — Barry Crimmins

McCain’s emergency appeal to boys who are more afraid of losing than anything else in the world speaks to every clown who ever got in a fist fight at a slow-pitch softball game. The United States has already lost a lot more than a war it never should have started in the first place. Thanks to America’s growing police state, we have lost our civil liberties. Thanks to America’s practices of torture, illegal detention and extraordinary rendition, America has lost whatever good name it had in the world. Thanks to America’s two-term fascist moron president, America has become an international punch-line. Thanks to the low, low prices of politicians, the American government has become a subsidiary of heartless, bloodless corporate scum. And thanks to that, the American military has become Hessians in service of that scum. Under the phony cover of “globalization” America’s economic backbone has been filleted and shipped in sharp shards for use in impaling peasant populi around the world. This country is broke, it’s infrastructure is busted and its health in the exact same condition as the ethics of the insurance and pharmaceutical racketeers who value profiteering more than life. Why exactly should I give a shit WHEN we officially lose a war that was a lost cause the second it became a viable option?

A boat in a harbor is safe, but that is not what boats are for.

The American gulag differs from the Soviet system in two ways: we don’t use forced labor and have fewer prisoners. But it’s still an unaccountable system of political imprisonment. Add in the overcrowded criminal justice system – one percent of the US population, if I’m not mistaken, many of them nonviolent drug offenders – and we’ve got something history will regard as monstrous. See also: 5 Things You Should Know About Crack.

Dr. King was a radical. Everyone should read The Vietnam Speech. Also worth reading: The National Review’s 1959 coverage of King’s speeches. It’s amazing that a magazine that vile still exists today. But then, I guess that as late as 1983, John McCain voted against MLK day as a national holiday (see Jack And Jill Politics for details on McCain’s civil rights idiocy) and he’s still employed, too.

Print Liberation is selling Barack Obama shirts that don’t actually send any money to Barack Obama. Is this helpful? It feels sleazy to me. They are pretty shirts though.

Conspiracy theorists are going to love the alternate economic data from Shadow Stats. It’s got things like more sophisticated inflation metrics and unemployment figures that include discouraged workers. And yes, all their figures are more pessimistic than the official figures.

I made a joke about it over at MeeVee but I’m beginning to think that the latest anti-drug ads from The Meth Project are really a sign that we need a new movement in horror film, back to the sixties and seventies drug-exploitation movies, only with all the cinematic sophistication that we’ve developed over the years. The torture-porn thing is gross, misogynistic, and no longer shocking. Just watch the first anti-meth ad, the one with the shower scene (at right). Yes, it’s got the traditional horror plot of a sweet defenseless girl doing something bad and getting into trouble, but more importantly it brings in what I hope will be this decade’s horror theme: She is her own monster.

Look at “I Am Legend” – or, at least, look at “I Am Legend” as it was written, without the tacked-on happy ending: The zombie vampire monsters are human and have their own society, and don’t understand why Will Smith is hunting them and capturing them and killing them. He’s the monster. We’re the monsters and we’ve created ourselves as such. That’s what I want to see from horror movies. Instead we get “Saw III.” Blech.

Here’s my plot: Nice kids fall in with a bad crowd, take lots of drugs and gradually become psychotic. Insert any kind of terrifying hallucination you like; the protagonists won’t know which ones are real. Definitely have a scene in which someone is actually covered in bugs because they live in filth, but refuses to brush them off because they think they’re just hallucinating. As in “Requiem For A Dream,” everyone else should have a parallel drug problem, but one which allows them to function in society. Functional alcoholics, wake-and-bake burnouts, whatever, so long as they manage to hold down jobs and preserve a semblance of normality, while the tweakers get into identity theft and then forget which stolen persona they’ve adopted is actually theirs. Basically the drug is a metaphor for the horrible scabrous monster that lives inside all of us. When you apply for ONDCP grant money to defray production costs, tell them that the horrible scabrous monster that lives inside all of us is a metaphor for drug abuse.

The LAT steps up to the plate to ask “Seriously, why do you keep making jokes about prison rape?“