Thought That Came Unbidden

I saw a bumper sticker once that read thusly:

Theater is art.
Film is life.
Television is furniture.

Whether these assumptions are true or not I don’t know. I know very little about theater and what I do know has, more than likely, been transferred to film as some point. And while it is true that film often reflects life quite well, because of production time lines film is always behind current culture.

No, it is television that shows a culture’s true face; television with its short production times, its news and “reality” programming, and, most importantly, with its advertisements. It is the advertisements that make me wonder about humanity’s capacity for things that just don’t quite make sense.

I’ve noticed a certain inherent cognitive dissonance in some advertisements lately. Some of it is linguistic: take as your example McDonald’s “Dollar” Menu. Advertisements for this abound touting the number of items, the bountiful goodness of McDonald’s food (1,090 calories; 55g fat (18g saturated; 10g transfat); 95mg cholesterol; 1,500mg sodium (only 62% of your RDA; 144g carbohydrates; 10g dietary fiber; 34g protein in a QP with cheese, large fries, and a medium iced tea), and just how fun it is to eat. Amid all this advertising no one seems to notice the flagrant linguistic abuse: of the 13 items on the “Dollar” menu nearly 40% (5 of 13) are priced at $1.50. So, just how is it a “dollar” menu? Last time I checked that extra $.50 was the difference between a small popcorn and a medium bucket and for sure no one is going to give me the larger size if I don’t pony up the dough.

Granted, pricing is based on people’s perceptions. It’s unclear which retailer started the $.95 and $.99 pricing trend but it’s certain that it works on psychology; after all $9.95 really is less than $10, just not by as much as the brain will trick us into believing.

Then there are the, for lack of more eloquent phrasing, the “what the hell were they thinking?” moments that have been brought to me lately by advertising.

A mild example of this comes from KFC. Formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken (that was before the rebranding), commercials for this fine establishment have been running for the past several weeks, each touting the chain’s food as a way to have a “real meal” during the busy holiday season. Let’s overlook the subtle racism promoted by fact that the commercials they’re running here always feature a majority African American cast; we’ll call it “target marketing” instead (DC, after all, boasts a population that is nearly 60% Black). The cognitive dissonance comes from the fact that every single variation of these commercials runs to the tune of Lynyrd Skynard’s Sweet Home Alabama which is a song that does nothing but praise the virtues of a completely different state than the one that spawned the chain it is being used to promote. An even more flagrant example, though, comes from a piece of corporate feel-good marketing.

Cisco, maker of super-fine network backbone equipment, things like routers and switches and firewalls that get all my alpha geek friends wet, has been running ad campaigns (in DC at least) touting how its products will help build the global village. Kids in east Asia video conference with kids in the U.S. in a staring contest; a little girl in some European looking central city square makes corrections to an entry on Wikipedia via her hand-held computing device. Kids some place in what looks like south Asia, India perhaps, view a three-dimensional model of the planet with cutaways for the different layers. And all of this happens to a very well edited version of The Who’s Teenage Wasteland. Did the advertising agency really think that we wouldn’t recognize the tune, or did they count on their target market recognizing the tune and associating it with good memories and thus associating Cisco’s products with good memories?

Perhaps the marketers are counting on us not really paying attention, on us being flooded with way too much information to give these sorts of things any real thought. Perhaps they just don’t matter and I’m letting my curmudgeon streak show.

Or perhaps our advertising is proof that we really are, as a species, getting dumber by the second. I certainly hope not but it will be interesting to watch over the next couple of decades as Gen-Y ages and Madison Avenue tries to figure out how to use the Seattle Sound to sell coffee and cars and luxury goods.

Cross posted to Amphetameme.org

I’m sitting in the dark as I type this, the radiation from the laptop’s screen illuminating my face like a fascimile of the original campfire. Except, that’s something of a lie because it isn’t truly dark. I am basking in the glow of the lights strung in the windows. Big fat bulbs in primary colors make a light like no other behind the blinds, a light that is the Christmas that they try so hard to sell us. It is the way Christmas is supposed to be, soft and comforting and bringing a little brightness to a dark world.

Except, the lights don’t have anything to do with Christmas. Nothing at all.

In the places in the world distant from the equator this time of the year, the time between the autumnal equinox in September and the winter solstice in December, the world goes first gray and then black. The long, slow transition from bright sun to night that characterizes summer in northerly latitudes doesn’t exist. There is no evening; no sky streaked with gold and orange for you to search hopefully for the mythical flash of green. Darkness falls with the nearly literal cartoon thud becoming all encompassing dead of night with a shocking swiftness. It is as if the sun itself is tired of being here and only illuminates us for as brief a period as possible, just enough to give those folks in the south a little darkness and relief from sticky summer heat.

The lights we put up this time of year have nothing to do with the Christian spirit; indeed, a close, knowledgeable reading of the seminal Christian text leads only to the logical conclusion that Jesus was probably born sometime in the late spring (after all, what sort of incompetant shepard takes his sheep far from home to graze in the dead of winter?)

No, the celebrations in November and December (both Christian and non-Christian alike) are about the returning of the light, about the literal lighting a candle to drive away the darkness. They are about renewal, and, at its base, that very human desire to celebrate the fact that we are not dead yet.

So here I sit in the glow of these colorful, shining lights counting the minutes until the balance between daylight and darkness where I live starts to shift back toward sunshine. Sitting under these lights makes me believe that good things are still possible. Maybe it’s a trick of the mind or of nostalgia. Or maybe it’s something more basic and human than that.

Whatever the case may be, I wouldn’t trade this feeling for the world.

We’ll…I made it. December 1st and I’ve done 30 blog entries in 30 days (technically not true: I did 31 in 30 days but one of them was a little shorty).

National Blog Posting Month was very rewarding in some ways, though having done both I’d say not as rewarding as National Novel Writing Month. After all, with WriMo you, theoretically, end up with something you can polish up and try to get published; with PoMo you end up with the satisfaction of having done it, hopefully some new readers, and a disturbing itch to sit down and write a blog entry every day.

In some ways, though, for me that disturbing itch was the point. Writing is equal parts art, craft, desire, and habit, and I know no people better at “habiting” themselves out of their desire than writers. Blocked, don’t have time, if I had a year I’d write a novel…all of these things are what WriMo and PoMo seek to conquer because the desire, the drive to write will embrace the habit like a long lost friend creating a fire hot enough to burn anything it touches.

I promised myself that when I started NaBloPoMo that I would focus outward, that I would take the time to reconnect with the world around me; figure out what was and is going on “out there” and get my head out of my proverbial. And if nothing else came of the PoMo experiment, this is enough for me. And it is a trend I hope to continue, perhaps not daily as I’d like to make some room for writing of other types but definitely on a regularly scheduled basis.

Now, I’m going to do my tour of the other PoMoers and see if I can find some interesting things to read that I didn’t get to last month. Oh, and another thing: look for a redesign here soon. Yes, I’ve been playing and I think it will be an improvement.

Don’t try to put an entire medium sized bag of M&Ms in the dispenser again…it breaks the dispenser and makes it really hard to get to the candy.

I was poking about Slate this morning because, well, I can and they often amuse me with their liberal slant snarkiness. In crusing the Today’s Pictures feature (um…pretty leaves) I scrolled down to see what was on the page and got an advertisement in Flash to purchase the DVD of Reds. It went something like this:

Words draw on the screen the white over black: What do you think this war is about?

Pause to let the viewer read + Fade Out

Words draw on the screen red over black: Profits

Pause to let the viewer read + Fade Out

Fade in, red over black: Reds, more relevant than ever.

Buy it on DVD blah, blah, blah.

Truthfully, I was impressed by the assumption of stupidity of the audience by the creators of this ad: is there anyone out there who really believes that any war ever fought on a national scale has ever been about anything but money?

True, they may not have been as baldly about money as the current U.S. cluster in Iraq is (can we say no-bid contracts? I bet we can.) but land, the ability to tax a conquered people, access to crops for trading purposes…it’s all just money in disguise.

It makes me wonder how, for a species that is supposedly at the top of the global food chain, we are so easily duped.