Friday, February 28, 2003 :::
Yet another Reality TV Rant.
I long for a return to the days of formula television sitcoms with recycled punchlines and homogenized shtick and desperately melodramatic shows about girl lawyers and bad boy doctors. I know I hated it then, I know I called television a wasteland of hacks who failed to become the All-American novelist, but God I miss those days.
These days TV is too real, and I am not using real as the root to reality. I am using real as a synonym for ugly. Here’s the truth kids, like it or not, real people are ugly. Real people are vain, vapid, and vulgar. Real people are a breathing ensemble of text-book psychological defects accessorized with the occasional personality disorder. Real people- like the ones we work with, the ones we sleep with, the ones used to know but now are just glad to be free of them- are all breathtaking catastrophes making the same mistakes with the same good intentions, telling the same lie, and dying the same death. That is what is so damn great about television and movies…they are not fucking real!
It will take awhile to return to the bad old days of television. The primetime train wreck and human-derailment is far from grinding to a bloody and total stop. We are due a few more brides and bachelors, another throng of pop stars and wannabe actors, and I am sure we haven’t see the last of people who will ingest disgusting animal parts for the promise of a quick buck. So for now, we are stuck with them. Until the short attention span of our nation’s watching public finally gets bored watching people do the things today that tomorrow will require therapy, the collective programming schedule of the networks is set.
But I leave you with this…If you watch it, please enjoy it. Watch every episode, every commercial, and when it is all done talk about it with your friends, priests, and morning talk show hosts. But for Christ’s sake don’t bitch about it. Don’t waste away hours of your life watching emotionally defective people search for true love, or eat goat testicles, or sing disco songs off key only to turn around and bitch about it. The networks are giving you what you want. The very least you can do is shut your mouth, buy the products advertised, and cease in having an opinion of your very own.
::: posted by Mike at 3:43 PM
And another thing...
Since we are on the subject of obligatory blessings from total strangers for very unremarkable deeds, can you explain why every transient homeless guy with access to a Sharpie and a rectangular piece of cardboard thinks that his odds of getting some cash out of me dramatically improve just because he signs off his message of help and need with the painfully obvious "God Bless"? Does the average panhandler really think that a two word reminder about God, the accountability to our fellow man, and the practice of selfless acts is going to inspire the spirit of roadside giving? It doesn't matter where you go in this country, wherever there is an intersection, an interstate highway, and a steady flow of middle-class commuters, there will be a guy with a fucking sign trying to separate you from your cash using the oldest marketing ploy in history- religion- to send you on a wallet-emptying guilt trip.
::: posted by Mike at 3:42 PM
Friday, February 21, 2003 :::
Love In An Elevator
Either the idea of quick satisfaction and sex with strangers appeals to people in my age group, or advertisers are just running out of ideas to sell products.
While flipping through the cables channels from my hotel room in Richmond Virginia this week, I saw the same commercial for Michelob Light 5 or 6 times where a young, attractive couple go from flirting glances to sex in the elevator in about as long as it takes most people to clean the lint trap in their clothes dryer. These kids moved fast. Of course you didn’t actually see the sex, just the rumpled clothing and the tangled just-fucked hairdos of the two as they exit the elevator into the hotel bar where they order a Michelob and then go their separate ways. No relationships, no commitments, just the exchange a few floors worth of 98.7-degree lust and body fluids.
This reminded me of the other commercial they still run occasionally for AXE deodorants where the stereotypical accountant or software engineer nerd uses this body spray and when a pretty girl gets on the elevator she gives him “I’m going to screw you until your eyes sink into your skull and the balls of your femurs break off in you hip sockets” look. As with the Michelob commercial you don’t actually see the sex here either, but you do see her straighten her dress down around her supple and recently throttled body. The sex, as with most advertising, is in the assumption. That’s how advertising works, by stopping just short of saying that if you shell out the cash for the product you will get extreme results.
I have gotten used to the regular usage of thematic concepts in advertising. Women in tampon ads usually engage in activities that show off how free and mobile they are even with half a bail of cotton placed strategically in their crotch. Prescription drugs for depression or anxiety show people having more fun than passengers on a strip-sex-free-ecstasy/Viagra sailing of the Love Boat. And we all know that someone taking an allergy medicine should be able to windsurf on fields of wheat without so much as a sniffle. So I have gotten used to these themes. But a theme is different than reused situation. Saying hot people will spontaneously screw you if you use a particular product is a theme I can understand, but localizing it to elevators shows a lack or creative skills and effort.
::: posted by Mike at 9:57 AM
Wednesday, February 19, 2003 :::
What’s God Got To Do With It?
or
The Theocratic Milkshake
or
Dragging Christ Through The Chocolate Cream Pie
When I sat down to write this post I couldn’t decide on an appropriate title. This concerned me because the titles of these posts are the headlines, they are the teaser, they are the thing that will make someone sit down and invest a moment or two of their time to read the baseless and largely uneducated rants of a guy who just pretends to have something worth listening to. So the fact that this single event from the other day didn’t hit me in face with a all-encompassing, interesting, and invigorating title made me think that maybe I shouldn’t waste my time or yours. But, as you can see, I went against my little voice and wrote it anyway and included all three titles as my way of cluing you into the fact that when you read Societal Nosebleed, you are reading a second-rate web journal rather than Pulitzer Prize winning commentary.
The other day my buddy Miller and I went to lunch. We went and had a burger at Clyde’s Old Fashion Hamburgers in Lewisville where we ate double cheeseburgers and bitched about contradictions that make up our working lives. As always, lunch was good. But afterwards, on the way back to the office, I deluded myself into thinking that I was a decent person who deserved some type of reward. I am not the “washing the feet of the impoverished” kind of guy but I’m still not the “practicing the dark arts to give my enemies colon cancer” guy either, which makes me, at the very least, eligible for a Chocolate Cream Pie Shake from Sonic.
This is as simple a transaction as can be performed. Hit the button, place an order for said Chocolate Cream Pie Shake, when it arrives give them $2.14, and leave two bucks poorer, but feeling like you got something far better by comparison to you silly money and that you just pulled the biggest con of all time. It has worked this way for as long as Sonic has been in business.
As you would imagine, the transaction didn’t go quite so smoothly. If it had, I would have gone back to work with my Chocolate Cream Pie Shake and that would be it. This was not the normal transaction as described above. This one was soured and all because some guy, some ultra-Christian, some There-Before-The-Grace-Of-God-Cheeseburgers-And-Blended-Milkshakes-Go-I decided it would be a good idea to interject Christ into the transaction.
Tell me…what does God have to do with my milkshake? With all the other things that you would expect the master deity of all creation to be worried about, why do you think this guy decided that it would be an reasonable thing to do to have God take a moment to bless me and protect me from the ills of this shit scary world where there are as many ways to die as there are kisses in Hershey, Pennsylvania just because I gave him $2.14 for a fucking milkshake??? With all the babies being killed in gang crossfire, all the tensions in the Middle East over disputed homelands; the military build up in Iraq, the rock-n-roll dictator in North Korea who wants his own brand of nukes, the erosive effects of class warfare; the proliferation of anti-everything extremists, and the popularity of Joe Millionaire, don’t you think that God has a few more important things to do than bless some guy who buys a milkshake just because some jerk-off in an apron with a lifetime membership in “Young Life” or the “Young Christians for a Better American Without Topless Bars and Urges That Make My Penis A Bad Little Boy” calls out “God Bless You” for every half-assed occasion that doesn’t even register as a blip on the radar of human compassion and kindness…things truly un-blessworthy? Why drag Christ right through the center of my milkshake just because someone thinks they need to tidy up my spiritual space?
Ok…that’s done. God Bless You for reading Societal Nosebleed. Please come again.
::: posted by Mike at 11:39 AM
Friday, February 07, 2003 :::
CORPORATE WILDLIFE: Referenda Seinfelda.
This member of the corporate community is a member of the “hanger” family of conversationalist. It is parasitic in nature and only attaches itself to the conversations around it using one tool: The Seinfeld Reference.
Referenda Seinfelda has seen every episode of Seinfeld. It knows them front to back and has extensively catalogued them for applicability to life and business situations. Referenda Seinfelda makes no attempt to share its own thoughts and feelings on a given subject it only acquiesces to the superior wisdom and lessons of the prophets George, Kramer, Elaine, and Jerry. There is no situation that cannot be tied back to a Seinfeld episode, no instance - no matter how complex or challenging- that cannot be cross-related to the show. A true Referenda Seinfelda will not relent until it can reduce and compartmentalize all the actions and conversational elements in a given setting to a Seinfeld reference.
WARNING: Referenda Seinfelda will assume that you are as familiar with the content and lessons of the show as it is, perhaps chiding you for “not getting it”.
Common Segues Include:
* “Doesn’t that remind you of the time George…”
* “Remember when Kramer…”
* “That almost as funny as when Jerry…”
and the most annoying song of the Referenda Seinfelda:
“Did you see the Seinfeld where…”
::: posted by Mike at 11:44 AM
