Monday, September 30, 2002 :::
The Illusive Minority
Watching football on Sunday is an education in American culture. If you read Nosebleed on a regular basis you have no doubt figured out that I draw quite a bit of my observational firepower from commercials. And this makes perfect sense. The idea of a commercial is to entice a consumer to buy a product they a) don’t know about but need/want it, b) know about but don’t know they need/want it, or, and usually, c) know about, know they don’t want/need it, but some slick graphics, techno soundtrack, and members of the opposite sex in revealing clothing woos them to rush out and buy it…sometimes on attractive terms of credit.
Given this goal, it would stand to reason that the best setting for this type of message would be either the life that we know everyone (targeted demographic) lives, or the life everyone (targeted demographic) wishes they lived. Basic stuff, isn’t it? When you’re selling minivans, you show suburbia ripe with young couples and young children doing all the things that young suburban families do. When you are selling toilet bowl cleaner or diapers you show housewives with dirty toilets and babies that look as if they have dirt asses. It’s all nice and neat where product A appeals in both function and feature to Consumer A and so on and so forth up the alphabet of products and buyer groups. Then along comes the beer companies.
A lot of people drink beer…millions and millions by my precise and mathematically flawless count. They are both men and women. They are every height, weight, shape, color, religious denomination, sexual orientation, and ethnicity not to mention differences in preference, consumption frequency and consumption volume. This is a very broad demographic indeed. So with a target demographic of so conglomerated a consumer base, why the hell do 90% of all beer commercials feature young and beautiful people doing things of considerable interest to a heart-pumping music track? There are ugly people who drink beer. There are old people who drink beer. And God knows that there are boring people who drink beer. But for some reason, every time an ad company goes into a meeting to pitch a campaign it goes something like this:
Beer Executive:What sort of fresh ideas you got?
Ad Executive: Well…picture this. Hot girls in skimpy outfits…
Beer Executive:Right….
Ad Executive: and some semi-muscular guys engaging in youthful play…snow mobiles and hot tubs could be involved.
Beer Executive:Good, I’m with you…
Ad Executive: And there’s a band…a motley gang of tattooed hooligans with amplified guitars and ski caps.
Beer Executive:What else….
Ad Executive: That’s it….and they all have your product in their hands or in - what we call in the industry- “suggestive proximity”
Beer Executive:Wow! You guys are geniuses…
Somewhere, though, I’m sure they exist. This is not just some orchestrated 30-second fiction resulting from in-depth consumer analysis, grueling casting calls, and intricate set design. Somewhere in the world there are sects of young, good-looking, sexed-up, beer-drinking party hounds that have their own soundtrack and never ever wear a full compliment of clothing. They might exists in your very town…unless your town happens to be overrun with average looking worker drones with a few extra pounds covered by clothes that are hopeless out of style. But I am sure it exists, this illusive minority of excess privilege where the party is always set to full speed and the beer is always cold. Maybe I have to drink 6 beers a day to find them and 12 beers a day to be them. Maybe not…
::: posted by Mike at 3:26 PM
Tuesday, September 24, 2002 :::
Knowing When A Game Is A Game.
I don't think I do enough to express the joy I feel when I watch Mexican Television. There are few things that I enjoy more. Here’s why:
The passion, fire, and volume of the Mexican Actress is that of every woman I have ever dated, but with twice the cleavage, three times the salsa music, and (even thought I do not speak a word of Spanish) many times the comprehension. I know when lust is lust, when a fight is a fight, and when a game is a game. That is more than I can say for any relationship I have ever been party to. This includes my marriage where something like vacuuming the carpet is not a household chore...it is a proclamation of my love and respect for my wife, her feelings, and her place in my life.
::: posted by Mike at 8:57 AM
Tuesday, September 10, 2002 :::
The Ugly Brochure.
Angola is a country roughly twice the size of Texas that is located in Southern Africa, bordering the South Atlantic Ocean, between Namibia and Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has been in a perpetual state of warfare for the better part of 25 years.
The above represents the whole of my knowledge about Angola without the benefit of research. These are just things I have picked up over the years. It occurred to me however that I have almost never seen or heard anything about the country where the country’s name was not preceded by the word war-torn. Reporters have never said “…insurgent forces of rebel armies in Angola,” or “…economic disarray in southern African states, such as Angola,” without adding the modifier of war-torn.
So it occurs to me that I don’t know too much about Africa or the conditions of the African states. I know that AIDS has reached pandemic levels. I know there are “war lords” that are the ruling body in many areas. I have a friend named Foziah who is from Kenya who has given me some insights and taught me Hujambo is “hello” in Swahili. But that rounds out the bulk of my knowledge of modern Africa. And because of what I read and hear about Africa, and places like Angola, I am not likely to visit anytime soon.
But there is that possibility that Angola is the most wonderful place on the earth. It could be perfect climate, beautiful and tropical landscapes, populated by gentle and loving people who make hospitality there life’s mission. But I would never know because I will not go there. I won’t go because the word on the street is that it’s dangerous, and contaminated, and all the other things that the word war-torn implies. And who am I to second guess what the reporters tell me. They say it is a downtrodden hell hole infested with poverty. Why should I go searching for beauty in a place like that when I can walk the eroding beaches in Waikiki elbow to elbow with thousands of strangers who over-paid for the same vacation?
I know it is not the fault of the reporting media that Angola is treated like this. Common sense tells me that Angola is not the place of wonderment I described, but it does make me wonder about the words we use in tandem so much that they almost become meaningless without their unnecessary counterpart. How the words change the meaning or the perception of the meaning. How the words we continually associate with things eventually taint or mutate whatever that thing started out to be…
As for tourism in Angola I will say this. Poor Angola…never learned that you attract more bees with honey than armed conflict, civil insurgence, and volatile political regimes.
::: posted by Mike at 3:17 PM
Monday, September 09, 2002 :::
ABC's Secret Weapon Against Apathy On Foreign Policy: The Ex-girlfriend
There was some possibility early on, but I think it safe to assume the odds are slim that in my lifetime I will become a tyrannical dictator. I can see it though…a law of the land that is ruthless- a perverse and self-serving form of justice, my boundless sense of God-ordained rule, and an unforgiving and unyielding standard of loyalty. I can picture my palace, my armed guard, and the wealth and favor of my republic’s natural gifts used to serve my own fiendish ends. Not a bad brand of make-believe to help sail through the monotony of Quarterly Sales Analysis meetings. What a sweet, sweet dream. Then the foreign media trots out the ex-girlfriend and it all falls to shit.
ABCNEWS.COM is reporting the story of Saddam Hussein’s former mistress, now a defector living in secret and in fear for her life in the U.S. You can hear about her story, her mortal fear of Hussein, and her need for anonymity when she goes on live television being broadcasted to millions and millions of Americans.
Now I am not trying to defend Saddam’s right to privacy. If an ostensibly reputable news outfit like ABC thinks it a journalistically sound maneuver to broadcast to the American public that Saddam is a “Viagra-crazed sex-addict who loves watching a home theater double-feature consisting of The Godfather and video of his enemies being tortured,” then I am O.K. with that. I celebrate their right to determine what is newsworthy. And at a time when the current administration is campaigning like hell for permission to fight a pre-emptive war based largely on speculation and principle if the absolute best ABC can do is drudge up decades old pillow-talk as their contribution to the cause, then God bless those people. They are the news professionals I trust their ability to gauge the benefit of the stories they report.
This is a very tabloid-style move on the part of ABC, you have to admit. But I can almost see what made then stoop to this level. For weeks the Bush Administration has been dispatching their best and brightest to the Sunday talk show circuit armed with snazzy sound-byte rhetoric about the defense of freedom and circumventing Iraqi hostility but the American public just doesn’t seem to care. There is still no great call to arms and people seemed more likely to passionately discuss the upcoming season of the Sopranos than they are to demand the head Saddam, world opinion be damned. So ABC decided as the last ditch effort to get America’s attention that they would call in their secret weapon: The ex-girlfriend.
I have my share of ex-girlfriends, many of which are regular visitors to this site. I don’t mention them all that often and they don’t seem to want to e-mail me that often, so a very comfortable dissociation has occurred. But I can tell you that with the exception of one or two, depending on them as a credible source of information about my past behaviors, motivations, feelings, thoughts, or ideas would be a laughable misadventure for all involved. And even with the two whose perceptions I would deem trustworthy, I wouldn’t even consider their recollections to be accurate enough for dissemination on all public frequencies. That is the nature of the man/woman relationship. She left me for reasons that defy all legitimate reality and I left her because she was a narcissist with no accountability for her own actions. You see, polar opposite motivations for the exact same break-up!
They don’t write anymore and they don’t call anymore, but bet your ass if I was elevated to the status of dictatorial foreign power these girls would come out of the woodwork. Forget about my violations of human rights in an effort to cleanse my country of non-conformists, it would suddenly be all about how I only wanted to have sex during re-runs of $64,000 Pyramid and only when kittens were being mutilated in the next room. The storm of my malevolence would evaporate into partly cloudy skies of diluted threat.
Perhaps this is the intent of ABC. Maybe the attempts by the media to drum up support for a war they will make millions in ad revenue covering have fallen short to the point that Saddam Hussein has to be demoted from a death-manufacturing dictator to the mentally unstable ex-boyfriend. This is all just part of the devolution that must take place to demystify this figure that is busy plotting to kill your children hours before you have your first cup of coffee.
::: posted by Mike at 3:12 PM
Tuesday, September 03, 2002 :::
Space Remains Boy Band Free!
Somehow, before I had been awake for 7 hours today I heard 3 times that one of the N'SYNC boys had been expelled from the cosmonaut program of the Russian Space Agency!
Two Quick Points:
1) It saddened me that we live in a time where this constituents news that is worthy of repeated broadcast.
2) I am happy the Russians and doing their part to curtail the growing tonnage of bullshit drifting in space.
::: posted by Mike at 3:58 PM
