Archives for 2008

So here we are on the last day of 2008. Resolutions will be made – quit smoking, lose weight, find love, make more money, save more money – and broken in the next few days by people all over the globe. And while I’ve got my own list of resolutions for 2009 this is more about what I’d like out of pop culture and advertising in the coming year.

1) Stop trying to use “change” to sell me products
Women’s magazines fascinate me. They’re basically advertisements with a sprinkling of content usually about improving yourself for “him” by buying the products around the article. As sniffers of trends, though, they can’t be beat.

The current issue of Vogue features Ann Hathaway, not exactly your standard enhanced beauty, on the cover along with a big banner headline reading “Change! Yes, you can” and the first item on the list: dress cheap & chic (aka: buy more stuff!)

Awesome, Vogue editors! You’ve sensed that people want change, that they’re tired of the status quo, but don’t you think trying to tap in to that desire for change to sell us makeup and shoes and handbags and clothing is just a wee bit cynical? How about using that energy for something positive instead, like helping women become more independent and confident? Radical, I know.

2) Enough with the reflexive, compulsory heterosexuality
The Washington Post has a pretty lame comics page. Not surprising since the comics page is possibly the second or third most contentious page in the paper and comics page editors are notoriously conservative. No chance the Post will ever run Mikhaela Reed (too political) or xkcd (too sarcastic and math-y) but there’s a big difference between being edgy and being regressive.

“Baby Blues” follows the daily life of a white, suburban family; Mom, Dad, three kids. Fairly stereotypical in and of itself but last Sunday’s cartoon really stuck it to me. I know that in the past few years the term “babe” has come to apply to both sexes but it’s largely something that applies to females. Now you tell me, is the heterosexuality in this cartoon really necessary? What could it have been like orientation neutral? (check the first panel, second row).

(Of course, this doesn’t get by the whole uber-creepiness of imposing sexuality on a character that is supposed to be about seven years old but I digress.) Maybe the joke at the end doesn’t work if you remove the heterosexuality (eeewww…girls are gross!) but that just gets back to that uber-creepy thing again.

It’s not just the comics, though, that are guilty of this kind of reflexive, exclusionary heterosexuality. Next time you’re reading an article directed at women, particularly if the subject is relationships, mentally substitute spouse or partner for boyfriend or husband and see if it changes the essential meaning of the piece. It won’t but making that change for publication would be an easy way to include all women regardless of their sexual orientation.

3) More fiction, fewer “memoirs”
Yet another “memoir” centered in the Holocaust has been discredited. That makes two Holocaust memoirs, two “outsider” memoirs, and one addiction memoir in the past five years to have been published, hyped, and knocked off the pedestal. Are publishers really not getting enough decent fiction submissions that they think the only way to make people buy books is to peddle them as true-life stories? Really? Seriously?

4) Stop peddling addiction as entertainment
Yes, I’m talking to you VH1. Regardless of whether you believe addiction is the result of bad choices, genetic predisposition, or a disease, it’s not entertaining. Watching people detox – the seizures, the vomiting, the random episodes of anger – and then watching them try to figure out how the hell they got to the fucked up place they’re in is only illuminating in a culture that actually makes people take responsibility for their actions, something that’s key to recovery and sobriety but not such a big part of American popular culture (big hint: just saying “I’m sorry” isn’t taking responsibility).

5) Start treating us like we’re smart, ’cause we’re smarter than you think
There’s a reason people are watching more basic cable and less network television: the quality of the programming is better. Yes, we can keep track of multiple characters that have multiple dimensions. We can to follow serial plot lines without tons of filler or reminders. Plot twists interest us, they keep us coming back for more. Look at it this way, if we don’t come back all that ad space will go to waste.

Just a few of my wishes for popular culture in the upcoming year.

Product Recalls
Wednesday, December 24, 2008; Page D01

Holiday Decorations

DETAILS: Hallmark Cards is recalling about 7,000 snowman snow globes, made in China and sold at its Gold Crown stores nationwide in October and November.

DEFECT: The transparent globes at the center of the snowman-shaped knickknacks can magnify the intensity of sunlight passing through the glass, causing nearby objects to catch on fire. The company said it has received two reports of the globes causing surrounding objects to ignite.

WHAT TO DO: The globes can be returned for a full refund. For more information, call 800-425-5627.

SOURCE: Associated Press/The Washington Post

Consider the idea that even though they are both based on natural, observable phenomena, the calendar and the clock are arbitrary. It is true that the seasons change, Spring turns to Summer, Summer to Fall, Fall to Winter, and around again to Spring, but what reason is there for some months to have 30 days, some to have 31, and poor, maligned February to have but 28 (and sometimes 29)? On a natural calendar would it not make more sense for each “month” to have 28 days? There are at least two observable reasons for that number to make the basis of the month.

And what of the clock? Why 24 hours in a day? Why 60 minutes in an hour? It’s clear that the sun progresses across the Earth in an observable pattern and that in our desire to categorize we call one part of that progression something (day) and the other part something else (night), but why apply that number to it? There is no basis human physiognomy for the number 60; a normal human has 10 fingers and 10 toes, so why not the number 10 or the number 20? Every answer I’ve found for the question about the clock is truly a non-answer – because the ancient Sumerians traded money in a basis of 60; because the Earth is divided into latitudes and longitudes that are measured in minutes and seconds. This last one amuses me the most with its backwards order of things.

But even though the calendar and the clock are arbitrary, they allow us to predict with modest regularity things that happen every year, things that when we were small and cold and mostly naked creatures in all likelihood scared us almost to death. Indeed, without astronomy to tell us that in areas where there are seasons yes, the sun will indeed come back and the Earth will warm up again, we developed rituals as humans are wont to do.

The noise, the laughter, the gathering of the community close to drive out all those things that have been breeding and hiding in the dark corners that have only gotten darker since harvest time. Blood on snow for the unlucky bastard who got a bean in his dinner, the necessary sacrifice to make the sun rise again. And because we are human, because we inherently recognize, even if we insist with vigor the contrary, that we don’t control everything in our world, we invented a god for whom these rituals must be done.

But then we got wise and discovered astronomy, and physics, and horticulture, and that the same patterns keep repeating. The day will get shorter, to a point, and then start getting longer without fail, without question, it always does. Yet…the part of us that never grew up, the part that pushed us to progress from the frightened mammal in the cave to the civilized people behind wavy glass whose homes were lit by modern gas lamps, to the species that dared leave the planet to explore, the part of us that kept us whole and safe in those dark, cave-bound times still believes that we must do what is necessary or things just will not happen.

Old gods do new jobs. Blood on the snow becomes the red velvet suit trimmed in white fur. Cacophony to drive away that which lurks in the shadows becomes carols about silver bells and sleigh rides. Huddling for warmth and to make the fear just a little bit less sharp becomes the open house and a moderately acceptable $9 bottle of wine and oh look, they have a cheese ball again this year.

Tomorrow “day” will be 2 seconds longer than today; the data prove it.

The one that matters is that second to last one, length of visible light. The rest is measured against our arbitrary clock and our arbitrary calendar.

In four days kids in the Northern Hemisphere will wake up to presents left by Santa, stockings filled with trinkets and things wished for and perhaps needed, plates with cookie crumbs and glasses slimed with the remains of milk downed hours ago prove the elf showed up and did his job. They will wake up on a day with more visible light than the one before and the one before that.

Old gods do new jobs.

“Three days a week should be a snap after a month of steady blogging,” thought I. “It’s the Christmas season and there is much to mock, many hypocrisies to tickle my already overstimulated sense of righteous outrage, and much to be said about human nature. How could I possibly have a dearth of material?”

It’s not so much the dearth of material as a dearth of motivation. I’m beginning to think that our ursine friends have it right about this time of year. Sleep. Rest. Recharge. And when the sun comes back in 3 days get up and start fresh.