Due to not preparing or knowing how to deal with such low light, I was forced to make it look like some artistic stab at editing in order just to make these dudes visible. Hopefully, such video will improve as I do more of them.
I have plans to keep recording KTXT shows, if not other Lubbock shows in general.
I consider myself a pretty jaded person a lot of times. But I continue to be inspired by the imagination of Fox News. The only way to describe it is with adjectives that are themselves full of profanity - completely fucking mindboggling, brainfuckling, batshit crazy. Then again, I guess this next video/story is Bill O'Reilly finally elaborating on the "Homosexual Agenda" the far right always throws out. (Apparently it's to beat the shit out of people.)
The guest, Rod "Almost a Great Pornstar Name" Wheeler, quite ominously calls it a "National Underground Network" of lesbian deviants. Does he honestly mean to suggest that they are really that organized? A Network? A Crew? Like, a Legion?
Do they meet in the Hall of Doom, located beneath an anonymous swamp and devise plans with a Lex Lutherian lesbian leader? Do they have a five-point plan for the homosexualization of all good Christian children by the Spring of '08? Do they count Cheetah amongst their ranks, the cat-suit-wearing arch nemesis of Wonder Woman?
I, for one, find this news not so much threatening, a sign of a ruined culture full of feelings of disenfranchisement, or really, a cause for concern in the least bit, but instead...
Hot. That's right, America. Lesbians. Marauding bands of them assaulting innocent heterosexual men minding their own business. And if not men, they're assaulting other ladies, which also sounds pretty hot.
I consider this to be a great, great sign for the look and feel of the future apocalypse. I always imagined a sort of Mad Maxian future on the way anyway, but from the looks of things, the vast American wasteland of the dystopian future is looking a whooole lot sexier. Mr. Rod Wheeler didn't mention it, but I've heard rumor that the Lesbian Legion of Doom members dress in those big, awesome shoulder pads with spikes on them and have crazy mohawks.
Maybe I can join and observe them like Hunter S. Thompson did with the Hell's Angels. Except, you know, hot lesbians.
Honestly, didn't that news clip feel staged? I think both Bill and Rod just wish this story were true. And I guess it also helps to keep peoples' thoughts off the fact that the death toll for the past three months in Iraq - 329 - is the deadliest quarter for U.S. troops in Iraq since the war began in March 2003.
If there were only hot lesbian insurgents in Iraq, perhaps O'Reilly would talk about it.
I found a job in Austin, and essentially, I could have my first day of work on July 9. That being said, I continue to look for other things, especially considering the doubts I have with the one I've found.
The job is with Texas Campaign for the Environment, a non-profit activist group, and I would basically be a canvasser. I would go door-to-door talking to people about the organization and health/environmental issues, and I would gather signatures, contributions to letter campaigns, and of course, financial contributions.
The last item there actually comes with certain required goals, and not meeting them means you may not get your full paycheck.
But even that may not explain my feelings of hesitation.
It may be the thought that I would have to take myself far too seriously and be bound to a memorized script.
I understand that in order to optimize the organization's reach and effectiveness, they train their workers to stick to a script, a script that has understandably undergone years (TCE Founded in 1991) of crafting, fine-tuning, editing and compacting into a tight message for maximum efficiency in minimum time. But I don't know if I would care to stick to it. We'll see. They are mailing it and other information to me so I can make a more informed decision in the following days.
I'm probably just making excuses. I'm sure the job would be better than some of the abominations I've found. And I can get behind the organization/my employer on a personal level. I mean, I wouldn't be working for a Corporate Multinational Globo-Chem-Pharma-No-Bid-Government-Contracting-Military-Industrial-
Complex-Bureau-Dept.-of-Greed. That's kinda nice.
Really though,
I'm just tired of looking for a job. (I realize I'm not alone in these feelings, and I am also aware I'm not entitled to any special sympathy just because I've written about it; I just need a brief reprieve from the soul-crushing drudgery of online jobhunting)
Apparently, I'm just going to have to get rich the old fashioned way.
Marrying a rich woman.
Hmmm...
What are my chances?
And besides being rich, she is improving her reading suggestions.
(Faulkner? Touche, Harpo Productions. But what about the latest Nicholas Spark's offering? ...No?)
Instead of job hunting, I've been thinking I could maybe make a video resume with me doing cool Patrick Swayze-Roadhouse shit mixed in with some state-of-the-art, multimedia tomfoolery and some friends providing inspiring testimonials about how I saved Christmas, went to school, joined the army, slam-dunked, went to camp, and also, Rode Again.
Wait, that last part may have been Ernest's career filmography, not actually anything to do with me. Sorry Jim Varney.
Anyway, then I could put it on youtube and wait til' the offers from Hollywood, Bollywood, Dollywood and James Woods come pouring in. Followed shortly by of course, the money.
Stay tuned for said video resume...
Without even adding buffer posts between this post and the previous, I decided to address the media's current narrative fascination, the Paris Hilton Story - another meaningless sensation I have wavered between adamantly ignoring and briefly railing against, as recently as the previous post. So yeah, I recognize the hypocrisy. So I do regret adding another chunk of the Internet to this nonsense, but I'm hoping it's a better chunk of nonsense than others, a chunk of commentary on nonsense, if you will.
Originally I had planned to post the most recent CNN story about Hilton followed by a quote from Henry David Thoreau and then leave it at that.
Here's Thoreau, around 1854, in regard to all the hoopla over increased communications technology, and how he predicted it would mostly be a harbinger of world-wide trivialities and technology for the sake of technology.
From Walden:
"We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
While discussing the situation with a friend of mine at the bar yesterday, he told me that he kind of felt sorry for her. In a way, I agree with his sentiment - she certainly has more attention paid to her than she may or may not desire, and no one can say how much of this being in the spotlight all her life has led to her (awful) personality. I understand that it's also not fair to judge celebrities, anyone you don't know - except, most talk of her and other celebrities as if they know them. So, I'm aware of that argument - that she gets shit on by people who don't know her.
And here's my rebuttal: If I did get to know her, I'm 99% sure that I would find her completely unbearable - the kind of idiot sorority girl at Texas Tech that never learns to avoid actions with negative, often financial, consequences, shrugging it off with a mention of how their dad will pay for it.
I'm also aware that I may be projecting personal aggression toward the idiots I have to deal with, on to a celebrity, on to Paris Hilton. She basically helps me feel better, in a vengeful sort of way, because she serves as a symbol of idiocy, the complete embodiment of the awful personality traits I despise in people in my own life.
So, in that regard, she is a tragic figure. A sort of pop-culture Atlas, bearing the weight of a world of grievances accrued by the frustrated common man, castrated and incapable of exacting his fantasized revenge. She's a symbol. And so when she wails "Mom, Mom. It's not right," as she's led out of the courtoom, we, (hmm, or is it just me?) feel a twinge of satisfaction. We feel that finally, justice has been served.
I have another social theory that attempts to explain the success of reality shows about the rich and famous, but that too may be a projection of mine. I'll go into more at a later date, but suffice to say that seeing rich people do stupid shit and commit morally questionable acts justifies middle-class Americans' class warrior attitudes, that rich people are in fact no better than anyone else - they just have more money. But it's not quite developed, so I probably should not have even mentioned it. Ah well.
But if you are tired of reading about Paris Hilton, and you damn well should be, I can confidently say that it's going to require responsiblity on the part of both the media, and ourselves. Individual responsibility in the form of refraining from reading that shit. Don't click the story. Web masters can follow that, and the most visited stories move up on the Web site and become the head story. Which is preposterous considering the other news out there. So next time you're tempted to read that story, take the initiative to read something about the Alberto Gonzales tomfoolery, policy positions of the less publicized presidential candidates, or, ANTHING that would promote democracy's most important necessity - an informed citizenry.
All right then - I'm removing my badge of moral superiority now - I'm just going to lay it down on top of my stack of US Weeklys for a minute.
You can actually hear people yelling in the background of the MSNBC newsroom. Also, ironically, you have to watch an ad before you watch this clip. So truly, the American Media Problem in a nutshell:
Watch
True news is that which informs its citizenry in order to enable them to keep their freedoms. I'm still not sure how watching "Shore Leave" Hilton cry informs me with knowledge to know what my government is doing and how I can be a responsible citizen. You know what? Fuck you MSNBC.
No comment.
Next -
Neat!
What the hell? What is the relationship between the duck and the bullfighter dude?
You can find a bevy of old timey advertisements here.
So, we made the adventure to Big Lots! this weekend. I like how they add the exclamation to the name, not really sure why, but I do. In fact, I think I am going to add an exclamation to everything I write. Anyway, on to Big Lots!...
I have never been to this domain that is Big Lots! However, we went for a purpose. Our good friend mentioned a certain product we needed to investigate. The product: Rap Snacks. I know we just showed you the pictures in our last blog, but these are worth another look. We purchased two bags of each:
Yes. Believe your eyes. You are seeing Lil' Romeo and Dirt McGirt. aka Ol' Dirty Bastard and Big Baby Jesus and several others that will probably blow you away - see the rest here.
Now before I get into the "legendary" rap snacks, I want to touch a little more on Big Lots!..
First off, from now on, I am dropping the exclamation. I don't feel Big Lots deserves it.
Like I said, I have never been into a Big Lots. But after walking around I was slightly impressed. I mean it was a fairly big store (I wouldn't expect less from a store names big lots). They had quite a wide array of products, from groceries to electronics to furniture. I mean fuck, they even have bedroom furniture. I was slightly impressed. Now I really didn't look closely at most of the merchandise. I did look at the furniture, mainly since I am looking for a small side table/coffee table for my room. I was surprised about the prices. They seemed high for a store that is supposed to be a big value market. After being approached by a sales associate, I was informed that all of their furniture is "old." I questioned this. Old furniture? It was then explained that by "old" they mean from a few styles/seasons ago. Basically it was back stock from furniture makers. Now, that doesn't really matter to me. But I figured if it was "old" then it shouldn't cost so much. This tainted my desire to buy something...anything. It definitely gave me a reason to no longer include the exclamation when referencing Big Lots. I began to wander around the store to find Josh. While browsing I noticed that most of the other merchandise was cheap or very outdated looking.
Now, on to the Rap Snacks. There isn't much to say about them. It is a line of chips that feature various "Rap/Hip-Hop superstars." I put that in quotes simply because Dirt McGirt as the only superstar featured on Rap Snacks. If you really want to know more, you can read all about Rap Snacks here.
I would like to point out that some of the flavor names are fucking ridiculous. I mean the flavor featuring Lil' Romeo is "Bar-b-quin with my Honey." I mean, who the fuck is Lil' Romeo and why does he get a name like that? ODB's chips...simply sour cream and onion. WHAT THE FUCK!!!! The legendary member of Wu tang gets sour cream and onion? This was an outrage. Oh, you may have to Google Rap Snacks further to get more info. The Dirt McGirt chips aren't listed on rapsnacks.com. Another notable fact is the positive slogans listed on the front of each bag. Slogans like "Stay in School" and "Think Responsibly."
So after we found the Rap Snacks we found a few other things and then left. Our purchases: white chocolate M&Ms, Rap Snacks, chocolate and vanilla Oreos (with everything is Spanish), green tea, generic caramel frappuccino drinks. After trying all of our purchases, we concluded three things. 1) the white chocolate M&Ms were the only good thing bought. 2) Big Lots is a place where products go to die! and 3) RAP SNACKS FUCKING SUCK COMPLETE ASS!!!! They are even more terrible than most of the rappers they feature. I do not recommend them to anyone. No matter what "state of mind" you are in. I wouldn't even give these to starving people in...well, where ever people are starving. That's how bad they are! Do not eat these unless you want to feel sick the next morning.
Oh and on a side note, I took some pictures today while helping some photo students. I will post them tomorrow after some minor editing. Thank you.
Picked these up at Big Lots after a friend informed me of their tragic existence:
And the true mindblower:
Rob and I bought two of each - one to eat, one to save for posterity's sake. Like a collector's item.
My favorite things about the packaging are the positive messages on the front.
Lil Romeo reminds us to "Stay in school," and Dirt McGirt suggests we "Think Responsibly." Thanks dudes!
But let me tell you...
They're fucking awful. The flavoring on them is decent but not enough to cover up the fundamental shittiness of the potatoes from whence they must have come. The potato farmer who contributed to this abomination of a product should be taken out back and shot.
If you had given me a million guesses as to who would one day appear on a food product, I would never have guessed any member of Wu-Tang Clan, much less Old Dirty Bastard/Big Baby Jesus/Dirt McGirt.
And while I'm aware of the fact that "Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothin to fuck with," I'm pretty sure even Dirt McGirt would allow this product to be, you know, fucked with.
Oh, and look, I realize I should not be surprised to discover disappointment in a purchase from Big Lots. It's the store where products go to die.
I decided to transcribe from Douglas Rushkoff's book, Coercion, a significant passage that enlightened me, and I believe it will feel familiar to many people I know, and with many people with whom I've discussed advertising, generational ennui, etc.
I've taken the liberty of adding images and commentary (added parenthetically) in order to break up the rather long excerpt, because while our senses and attention spans are used to such lengths within the bindings of books, I believe Internet reading lends itself to brevity, abbreviations and blurbs. Medium is the message, right?
Oh, and I made bold some of my favorite sentences and whatnot.
From Coercion:
Media-savvy television viewers pride themselves on their ability to watch programming from the safe distance of their own ironic detachment. Young people delight in watching "Melrose Place" in groups so they can make fun of the characters and their values by talking back to the screen throughout the show. Others turn to shows like "Beavis and Butthead," whose characters' constant commentary on the MTV videos they watch serves as built-in distancing device. (Consider also Mystery Science Theater) The wisecracks keep the audience emotionally removed from the seductive charms of the images on the screen.
In addition to using icons, marketers have come to recognize the way irony makes a wary viewer feel safe, and now they regularly employ irony in the commercials targeted at these more difficult demographic groups. "Wink" advertising acknowledges the cynical stance of resistant viewers: Sprite commercials satirize the values espoused by "cool" brands, sometimes even parodying their competitors' obvious image-based tactics, and then go on to insist, "Image is nothing. Thirst is everything." A brand of shoes called Simple developed a magazine campaign with the copy "Advertisement: blah blah blah...name of company."
(In Hebrew!)
By letting the audience in on the hollowness of the marketing process, advertisers hope to be rewarded by the appreciative viewer. Energizer batteries launched a television campaign where a fake commercial for another product would be interrupted by the pink bunny marching across the screen. The audience was rescued from the bad commercial by the battery company's tiny mascot. The message: The Energizer bunny can keep going, even in a world of relentless hype.
Of course marketers haven't really surrendered anything. What's really going on here is a new style of marketing through exclusivity. Advertisers know that their relationship prides itself on being able to deconstruct and understand the coercive tactics of television commercials. By winking at the audience, the advertiser is acknowledging that there's someone special out there - someone smart enough not to be fooled by the traditional tricks of the influence professional. If you're smart enough to get the joke, then you're smart enough to know or buy our product.
Like all advertisements, these self-conscious commercials help the viewer define his own identity. The strategy is not as overt as showing Michael Jordan in a pair of Nikes so that young athletes will identify with their hero. Instead, a person's notion of "self" is defined by how sophisticated he feels in relation to the images on his TV set. If he has grown up deluged by coercive advertising and expended effort to break free, then he will identify himself as a media-savvy individual. Wink advertising gives him a chance to confirm his own intelligence.
In the advertising wars between long-distance carriers, underdog MCI attempted to show how they were friendly and perky, especially compared to industry leader AT&T. A beautiful young operator mischeviously whispered to us that AT&T doesn't want their customers to hear about MCI's low rates, or their discount Friends & Family plan. She ridiculed AT&T's ads begging people to "come home," and implied that they revealed Ma Bell's desperation. AT&T fought back with their own ads, highlighting the coercive nature of MCI's marketing: that people were fooled into writing lists of their friends and relatives so that MCI could make annoying phone calls trying to enlist them. The advertisements were no longer about quality or service. They were about the advertising campaigns themselves.
Wink advertisements very often borrow imagery from another company's advertisements as a way of eliciting viewer approval. After Lexus made the ball bearing famous by rolling it seductively over the precision engineered lines of its luxury sedan, Nissan did the same thing in their ad to demonstrate how a much less expensive car could exhibit the same qualities. BMW sought to rise above the whole affair, demonstrating their car's unmatched turning radius by putting the whole vehicle through the same tight turns as the ball bearing went through in the other brands' meaningless test. Finally, in an erreverent spoof of the automobile advertising wars, Roy Rogers rolled a ball bearing around the edge of a roast beef sandwich. Get it? Wink wink.
In a similar campaign, Levi's made fun of Calvin Klein's heroin-chic, ultra-skinny supermodels. The company pictured healthy models wearing Levi's under the caption, "Our models can beat up their models."
As the techniques of self-consciousness and parody become more recognizable and, accordingly, less effective, advertisers have been forced to go yet a step further, taking the media reflexivity of advertising into the realm of the nonsensical. It's as if by overwhelming us with irony, they hope to blow out the circuits we use to make critical judgments.
The Diesel jeans company ran a series of billboard and magazine ads designed to critique the whole discipline of advertising. One showed a sexy but downtrodden young couple, dressed in stylish jeans and arguing with each other in what looked like the messy, 1960s-era kitchen of a dysfunctional white-trash family. The ad meant to reaveal the illusory quality of the hip retor fashion exploited by other advertisers. Diesel would not try to convince anyone that those were the "good old days." We were meant to identify with the proposition that the enlightened values of the sixties, as represented by the media, are a crock. But the meaning is never made explicit. Another Diesel campaign consisted of advertisements which themselves were photos of garish billboards placed in ridiculous locations. One showed a sexy young couple, dressed in Diesel jeans, in an advertisement for an imported brand of ice cream. The billboard, however, was pictured in a dirty, crowded neighborhood filled with poor Communist Chinese workers.
(At bottom of ad: "protest, support and act..." But for what? I briefly visited diesel.com, but quickly had to leave before I became enraged. They had, of course, something about global warming and how they were "Global Warming Ready." Ok, I thought, that's good. But again, how are they ready? The answer: With scantily-clad Asian women. Obviously! Take that Al Gore! I knew something was missing from An Inconvenient Truth - hot sluts. See, there's a huge image of a sexy couple cooling off on top of a skyscraper while beneath them, water from what apparently are melted glaciers, has risen to nearly half the height of the city's other buildings. Oh, and the hot babe is pouring water into the dude's mouth, while his shirt is unbuttoned to help him cool off. So, despite the apocalyptic tableau in the ad, we're relieved to discover that in order to combat drastic climate change, we need not practice restraint in energy use or encourage creative technology solutions. Instead, we just have to be sexy enough to be comfortable with taking our shirt off, and charming enough to attract an aesthetically pleasing mate to pour water over our body.)
Benetton and The Body Shop ran similar ads, but at least theirs made some sense. One Benetton campaign pictured Queen Elizabeth as a black woman and Michael Jackson as a caucasion to comment on racial prejudice. A series of Body Shop ads featuring giant photos of marijuana leaves, presumably to call attention to drug and agriculture laws. These are appeals to a target market that feels hip for agreeing with the sentiments expressed and for grasping the underlying logic. There is, indeed, something to "get."
We are supposed to believe that Diesel's ads also make sociopolitical statements, but we never know quite what they are. In fact, the ads work in a highly sophisticated disassociative way: They make us feel as tense and uneasy as we do after a good scary story - but we refuse to admit to our anxiety lest we reveal we are not media-savvy enough to get the joke. The campaign is designed to lead the audience to the conclusion that they understand the ironic gesture, while the irony is left intentionally unclear. No one is meant to get the joke. In that moment of conufusion - like the car buyer subjected to dissociative hypnotic technique - the consumer absorbs the image within the image: two sexy kids in Diesel jeans. Thinking of yourself as hip enough to "get" it - no matter what "it" may be - means being susceptible to lying to yourself, and to being programmed as a result.
That's all coercion really is, after all: convincing a person to lie to himself by any means necessary. The stance of ironic detachment, while great for protecting ourselves from straightforward linear stories and associations, nonetheless makes us vulnerable to more sophisticated forms of influence. After a while, even a detached person begins to long for a sense of meaning or some value, any value, to accept completely and genuinely. In spite of their well-publicized cynicism, so-called Generation Xers reveal in numerous studies that they often feel lost and without purpose. Disillusioned with role models, the political process, and media hype, they are nonetheless seeing something to believe in.
(I am reminded here, of course, of Fight Club, and Tyler Durden's: "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.")
As people search for a sense of authenticity in their increasingly disconnected "virtual" experience, advertisers seize on the opportunity to help us delude ourselves into thinking we haven't really lost touch. A shrewd advertisement for an airphone service shows a businessman stuck on a jet flight while his young daugter dances in a recital at her elementary school. He has foregone his family obligations in the name of business. But in the airphone commercial, he calls his daughter from the plance after her recital, and, basked in golden light, she is as delighted to hear his telephonic voice as she would have been to see him in the flesh. The television viewer who is searching for meaning in his life will accept the faulty premise of the advertisement: that the airplane telephone can actually connect him with a life he has left behind.
The back-to-basics authenticity of such advertisements capitalizes on a growing sense that we are no longer in touch with who we really are. In the past, advertisers worked to generate this sense of disconnection. In the 1950s and 1960s, a marketer would present an image, personality, or story with which we were meant to identify, and then stretch that image in order to make us feel unworthy, to give us something to aspire to: The girl in the hair-color advertisement looks just like me - when I was twenty years younger and five shades less gray; the woman in the commercial has a dirty kitchen and noisy children just like me...but she is confident enough in her rug cleaner to throw a dinner party for her husband's business partners that night. The viewer identified with the character, only to be made to feel unworthy in comparison.
Today, however, a deep sense of disconnection and unworthiness is just the starting point for the detached viewer. As a result, the opposite effect takes place: We welcome the opportunity to let down our guard, even for a moment. Having grown to resent all the striving toward the ideals represented in commercials, we yearn to get off the treadmill of yearning altogether. We yearn not to yearn - to be still and content. To just be.
The newest approach to the antiyearning urge capitalizes on these feelings. The Calvin Klein CK Be perfume advertisements offer the media-fatigued sophisticate a chance to relax and literally "just be." Uniquely beautiful and detached-looking young people stare confidently into the lens. Beneath them are captions like "Be hot. Be cool. Just be." The slogans in companion ads all stress that people should have the ability to express their individuality and be who they really are. "CK Be fragrane is about who you are...it's about the freedom to express your individuality...it's about the freedom to be yourself."
The astonishing supposition of these ads is that the young audience for whom they are intended does not feel they already have permission to just be. Unlike the models in the advertisements, who appear to have earned their cool resolve by draining the life out of themselves through dedicated heroin abuse, the audience must expend effort to maintain a sense of self against the onslaught of commercials and other coercive messages. The CK Be ads suggest that if we just buy one thing - a single bottle of perfume - we can finally be who we really are with no further effort.
Like all of the image-based advertising that went before it, the CK campaign once again capitalizes on its audience's undetermined sense of self. A person who is striving not to strive is striving nonetheless - perhaps even more desperately than those who are simply yearning for a better lifestyle. Our aspiration toward a simpler, less taxing way of relating to the world around us makes us no less vulnerable to the suggestions of others on how best to get there. Being "in" is a booby prize, since it depends on a false and further self-defeating claim to exclusivity. The emergence of a protective, ironic stance, though temporarily immunizing, only contributes to our longing for ways to feel genuine and connected - and will likely turn out to be just one more chapter in the greater narrative of the history of advertising.
