29 December 2005

Is it live, or is it stealth marketing?

I was browsing NYC's Craigslist, and came upon this. Who the hell is Charles McCarthy, and why does he need my help? It aroused my curiosity, so much so that I found myself getting sucked deeper and deeper into this story of a loser who so desperately wanted to work on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim (and here I am, doing their marketing for them like a dunce -- but I guess I am sort of a fan. It's some of the most creative stuff on television right now, but geez, how hard is it to climb to the top of that pile?) And not only did I read several pages of this guy's blog, but I wound up signing his freakin' petition! (I don't know why it showed up twice!)

In the comments section, I wrote: "See, here's the thing -- the guy's already working for you. He's advertising adult swim all over the place. why, I bet there's people who hadn't even heard of adult swim that need to check it out just because they need to see why this dude needs to work there so friggin' bad. the man just wants to be paid. what do you have to lose? he's so desperate to work there, he'll probably do it for next to nothing!"

I hit post. And then. It. Hit. Me.

I had just been so succesfully, so brilliantly stealth marketed that I had actually enjoyed it. It was advertising as entertainment. While trying to figure out if this loser was for real, (and I am about 97% sure the answer to that is no) I was laughing my ass off at the goofiness of it all.

And I still don't know for sure: was it brilliant stealth marketing? Or is this guy really a loser begging for a cool job? Or is he just someone doing his own brilliant little art project?

It's a little creepy. But a little funny, too. I'm not sure if I've been violated or entertained.

And this after having to pay nine bucks to watch freakin' commercials in a movie theater tonight.

No, you do not have permission to colonize my brain.

26 December 2005

Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables

Well, I went to Urban Outfitters for the first time today.

Heather was in town to buy a wedding dress, (with very specific, un-weddingy requirements, and to cover a growing pregnant belly) and we headed towards Cherry Creek. We are NOT Cherry Creek kind of girls, but the hip maternity shops are there, so that's what we tried. After a lovely happy hour meal at Hapa, we wandered towards Urban Outfitters where Heather had earlier spotted a likely candidate.

While a quick glance at my mode of dress might identify me as an "aging hipster" (or bag lady, if you prefer), I've never really had enough money to truly qualify in hipster-dom. So much of being a hipster has to do with purchased accoutrements, as though one might adorn oneself in a chosen identity that has no bearing on any actual personality traits or individuality. Urban Outfitters is the high church of rich-kid hipsterdom, bestowing the "look" of being, for lack of a better word, "alternative" without having to actually dirty oneself achieving said look. The pre-ripped jeans, the pre-faded and obscurely referenced t-shirt, the pre-creased trucker hat -- these are the marks of today's ironic urban hipster, who fails to see the irony in paying exorbitant sums for the afore-mentioned wear and tear. The entire point seems to be to emulate the thrift-store look that is pioneered by poor kids with individualized tastes, while at the same time making a status symbol out of the specificity of the look. It's not enough to have a pair of jeans with holes in them after all -- they must be the right jeans, with the right holes. Last season's holes just won't do. An entirely new set of holey jeans must be purchased, and god forbid you do any physical labor in those jeans that might make any untoward holes in un-cool places.

And not only are the clothes expensive, but they're cheaply made and don't seem to come in any size but ruthlessly skinny. And some of the things for the home are again, rip-offs of easily found vintage items that populate thrift stores coast to coast. Worst of all, they mock the very idea of the handmade, by emulating the artists & designers in the recent craft movement with cheap Chinese knock-offs utilizing a quaintly sanitized unevenness, as though the designation of "hand made" is merely a set of pre-planned irregularities meant to mimic an amateur crudeness.

When I first walked in, I was dazzled -- why, there are "cool" things in a mall store! They even had the Gorillaz vinyl figurines I've been drooling over at Plastic Chapel! But after a few minutes of consumerist dazzle, I realized that most of the crap in there is merely recycled ideas and cheap Chinese labor. Within ten minutes the romance was over.

The roots of all this "alternative, hipster" style are firmly planted in the dirt of punk rock, the grungy, DIY aesthetic that I came to flourish in. And I catch a whiff of the cranky old lady in me when I think, "By God, when I was a kid we didn't have no Hot Topic! We cut our own hair, died it with kool-aid and teased it into liberty spikes with Extra-Super-Hold blue-haired Aqua Net! We made our own clothes, altered thrift store finds, pierced whatever we could think to pierce with a needle, some cork, and a shot of whiskey. And not any Knob Creek or fancy shit like that -- we drank Mad Dog, not Appletinis. And we liked it like that!" And while my particular version of trudging 8 miles to school in the snow may be less traditional, it's not just mistrust of the under-30 set or a version of "those-kids-today". It's deeper than that.

Because it boiled down to self-expression, a forging of one's individual, personal style. Yeah, there were more than enough Mods with targets on their trench-coats and mohawked boys with the stereotypical A-for-Anarchy emblazoned on their backs -- not everyone succeeded at the task of being an individual. But it took true creativity to fashion this look from thrift-store-finds and hand-me-downs, especially in a cowtown in the mid-80's. Punk was dead by the time it reached Denver, but we breathed it in like a life-force anyway, channeling our rage and energy into bands and 'zines and fashion that got us beat up and spit upon.

We couldn't buy our identities, because that store didn't exist. (Although some among us began to open those stores -- Imi Jimi, Fashion Disaster, Fashionation -- a couple of which are still open to this day.) When I see some young kid walking down the street in his twee little mohawk and Hot Topic gear, it makes me a little sad. Sad that he's not forging his own way, just regurgitating hand-made ideas of twenty-plus years ago and listening to bands that broke up before he was born. But only a little sad. The rest of me wants to kick him in the groin and laugh my ass off, because that's punk, baby. You think you're a rebel, bitch?

At his age, it would never occur to me to try to replicate the styles of the older generation. I hated hippies -- there's no way I would have been caught dead imitating one, aside from the occasional acid trip. And any over-coiffed rich kid with expensive gear was called a poseur, derided and sneered at for their lack of imagination. Mostly, I think these misguided kids are missing out -- they aren't participating in creating the culture of their own generation, but simply cutting and pasting an identity onto themselves that they think people find shocking, different. But it's little more than a uniform, about as shocking as nurse shoes or polyester tunics.

Punk is dead. And individuality is on life support.

Anarchy, anyone?

24 December 2005

Wonka Redux

Something else occurred to me since writing this last night.

While this culture of victimhood didn't spring to life in the ashes of 9-11, it certainly fell into heavy play at that time. "Why do they hate us?" "For our Freedoms", was the inane rallying cry from Bush & Co.

No. They don't hate us for our freedoms. They may be jealous of them, but as our government chips away at them bit by bit our "freedoms" are less enviable, anyway. They hate us for good reasons, reasons that we can't be bothered to try to understand because we're too blinded by our pitiful victimhood. Reasons that may seem unfair or trivial to us -- but real reasons, nonetheless, and not too petty to want to kill us for.

Maybe if Ward Churchill hadn't been such an inflammatory dunce, he might have gotten this point across more eloquently. But then again, no one wants to listen to this sort of talk -- it's branded as Un-American by the unthinking. I guess it's easy to think you're right if you never question whether or not you are.

It doesn't matter if we agree with the other sides reasons for hating us or wanting to kill us -- what matters is that we at least make the honest attempt to understand them, for only then can we have a dialogue.

I know why they hate us, and I have trouble blaming them or disagreeing. Not because I hate America -- rather the opposite, because I love us enough to want us to be better. They hate us for our arrogance. They hate us for our greed. They hate us for our exportation of smarmy pop culture laden with soft-core sluttiness that offends their religious sensibilities. (True, they're buying it, but they hate us for making it ubiquitous.) They hate us because we use more than our fair share of the world's resources, and cause more than our fair share of the world's pollution, yet refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol. They hate us because we're hypocrites. They hate us because we lie. They hate us because we exploit. And now, they hate us because we torture.

And while I won't go so far as to say they're wrong, I'm also squeamish about going as far as hatred. A more apt description of how I feel about my countrymen might be a deep-seated disappointment, a sick feeling that we aren't being the best we could be. I'm disappointed in my fellow Americans -- that we so blindly follow without questioning, that we rarely look deeper than the sound bite, that we're being wimps about demanding accountability from our leaders, not to mention the electoral system that is meant to choose those leaders. I'm disappointed that I live in a country that helped invent modern-day democracy, yet holds so many citizens who refuse to participate in it, whether through ignorance, or complacency, or sheer stupidity.

Most of all, I'm disappointed in myself. For you see, I haven't taken to the streets yet, either. What's my excuse?

23 December 2005

Willy Wonka and the Government Accounting Office

I'm sitting here, recovering from whatever flu-ish hell I've been plunged into, and watching Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory -- the first one. I'm mentally comparing it with kids movies of late, and finding a message that our entire culture has heard far too little of, lately -- that of personal responsibility.

Would that movie even be believable today? The Gloomp family lawyer would have reached the fudge room before Wonka finished whistling. The media would have been screaming about how poor little Veruca Salt, little white rich girl, was horribly traumautized and put in terrible danger by the horrible Wonka Corp. And the Oompa Loompas would have most likely been kept in their homeland and exploited for pennies on the dollar, Vermicious Knids be damned.

But in the technicolor childhood dream, even the Oompa Loompas know enough to blame the parents for their neglect. And Charlie Bucket knows he did wrong by stealing the Fizzy Lifting drink -- there's no spin, no excuses, just a sorrowful apology and a surrenduring of his Gobstopper.

What happened to those values?

When we have a "president" who has commited countless impeachable offenses and an administration who peddles lies and spin like it's soft-core porn to pre-pubescent boys, where does personal responsibility come in? I'm desperate to hear someone -- ANYONE -- in the public realm stand up and say, "Yeah -- I FUCKED UP". No WMD? "Oops -- my bad." Commited treason by revealing the identity of a CIA agent? Anyone?

But it's not just the administration -- our entire culture appears to have decided to live by this set of tragic rules. We've embraced victimhood as a national identity, relenquishing any and all responsibility for our own actions. Everything can be justified away, no one ever has to admit to a single failing. Slip and fall? It's someone else's fault -- find out who and sue them! For when you're eternally the victim, then nothing is your fault. Of course, that also means that the solution lies just out of reach as well. For if it's never your fault, then how can you muster the responsibility for change?

And sadly, the results of this excessive litigiousness has led us to the hot button issue of tort reform, which on the surface, thanks to all the news reports we've been fed about silly lawsuits, seems like an almost good idea, at least in sound-bite form. But that's the problem -- all of this is always in sound-bite form. Everyone loves to cite the case of the McDonald's drive-through coffee spill, as though all lawsuits of an individual against a big corporation are over equally minor matters. Yet, huge corporations in America are routinely harming individuals -- and then fighting like stray dogs over any scrap of settlement money. The tobacco companies are but the tip of the iceberg -- the drug companies are continuously finding their way into the news via criminal carelessness. Even someplace as relatively scandal-free as Home Depot has somehow managed to keep it's benign reputation while routinely killing it's customers.

Personal responsibility requires access to informed choice, if it can truly be said a choice is being made at all. If you grew up in the time of tobacco warnings on packaging, then it can be said that you were given the opportunity for an informed choice. However, if you were raised during the days of Ronald Reagan hawking smokes for their health benefits -- well, you have a legitimate gripe, because you were lied to, and your consent was ultimately compromised. Likewise, if you voted to go to war based on lies you were told and intelligence that had been spun like frothy veils of sugar, one might give you the benefit of the doubt. However, one also might ask why those lies were believed, when the rest of the world managed to see through them for the cotton candy fluff that they were.

Even the organization meant to keep our government accountable, the Government Accounting Office (GAO), seems to be rather relaxed in it's responsibilities. For in September of this year, they released a report that essentially says that it's entirely possible, maybe even probable, that the voting fraud and irregularities in the 2004 elections means that Bush is not actually our president. Is the media reporting this? Hardly. Are Americans taking to the streets, demanding accountability? Are you kidding? The XBox 360 just came out! Dude, Chill!

"So shines a good deed in a weary world".

22 December 2005

sniffle. snurk. hack.

Sick as a dog right now, and have been since Monday. Well, actually Sunday night, when the cashier at Big Lots was kind enough to share her unspecified disease by coughing directly in my face. I was out trying to do a bit of Christmas shopping, finally, with the hideous craziness of this year behind me at last. I felt the rasp in the back of my throat by the time I reached home.

I've been taking everything possible, and yet I'm still sick -- how can this be? I'm taking Coldsnap (swear by it, usually!), Zicam, some new thing called Umcka that my Mom said works, and of course, the usual roster of anti-histimines, cough medicines, and vitamins. With this regimen, I should be as healthy as the proverbial horse. Giddy-up.

I'm not sick very often, and I get stir crazy easily. I keep making lists in my head each morning of the minor tasks I could accomplish while still "resting" as it were. But this time, I've been too sick to do anything but catch up on teevee (I fall asleep in the middle of nearly anything) and do a wee bit of knitting. I had all these grandiose ideas that I would use this down time to organize shit on my hard drive, make presents, and most of all, clean the house, which badly needs it. I did manage to gather the trash to go out and do a load of laundry, both tasks that left me exhausted, sweaty and panting by the time I was finished. I went to the store to buy vegetables this morning, and by the time I white-knuckled the shopping cart into line behind an obsequious white-haired lass that questioned every swipe of the cashier's hand, I was quivery. Driving home was very nearly terrifying, not helped by the fact that I saw two seperate accidents, both of them ugly. Well, actually, one of them was sort of funny -- some yuppie chick with a cell phone hermetically sealed to the side of her head managed to crash her ginormous, shiny, and quite new Expedition into a concrete pole in the parking lot. Gee, wonder how that happened? From the looks of it, it was totalled, wrapped, neatly around the pole like a pig in a blanket, and oddly enough, she didn't even look upset.

15 December 2005

Bully Boy

I was perusing Rants and Raves on Craigslist, where the topic of Columbine had reared it's head again. In one post, I read this:

In my eyes, Dyland Klebold and Eric Harris don't even deserve graves, as their memory is one that should be forgotten as quickly as possible.


Ever hear the phrase, "those that would forget the past are condemned to repeat it?"

First of all, saying they don't deserve graves is retarded -- as fucked up as their lives were, they were essentially children. Children who had been very, very let down by society. How many years did they cry for help before their personality disorders became entrenched? And what's more, as screwed up as their families were to NOT help them, it's difficult to believe that they weren't loved by someone. Graves are for the living, not for the dead.

And secondly, their graves should be MONUMENTS. Monuments to show what happens when people are treated unfairly, bullied, and abused. Monuments to show that you can only push so far before someone will snap. If everyone want to believe that these things happen in a vacuum, they'll only continue to happen again and again.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not in any way defending the actions of these two misguided young men. The entire episode is a tragedy, and while the initial reaction is shock and horror, it's important to remember that we, as a society, created that tragedy and continue to do it every day. Condemning the perpetrators and then hiding our heads in the sand solves nothing.

I was bullied mercilessly all the way through school, and what I was told by my parents, my teachers, and any other adult was to "ignore" the bulliers. Ignore them? Ignore someone who's spitting on you, punching you, tripping you, and abusing you? What the fuck good does that do? It was only when I began fighting back that I gained any sense of self-esteem, and lo and behold, it's also when I was labelled a "bad kid" and punished, regardless of who started it. In my case, I think the experiences made me a stronger person, although rich kids still make me cringe. But what of them? Those bullies went out into the world learning that you can treat people however you like with no consequences. The adults in our world failed us both. It took me years of therapy to come to terms with what was done to me in school, and for many of those years I was trying to convince the therapists that no, my parents didn't abuse me. They did something equally bad, they neglected my abuse at the hands of others, but it really was those others that caused my problems in the end.

Now that I work with kids, I see bullying for what it really is -- the bullier is the one crying for help, too. Kids bully to get attention, they bully because they feel insecure, they bully because they think that dominating someone else will make their world better somehow. The bulliers are the ones that are actually screwed up, but they, in turn, make the bullied screwed up too. And when you talk to their parents about the problems, the response is almost predictable -- disbelief that their little angel would ever do such a thing! Is it any wonder that these kids rarely get the help their screaming for?

I'm willing to bet that Klebold and Harris' problems started their first years in school, and continued ignored for enough years to turn them into sociopaths. The people to blame are every bit as much the ones who looked the other way, the ones who put a band-aid on a bullet-hole.

Every single one of us has seen someone bullied, whether as kids or as adults -- what have YOU done when you've witnessed these acts of aggression? I'm willing to bet that most of you have turned away, not wanting to get involved, minded your own business. If that's you, then go look in the mirror: the person staring back at you is as much the problem as the bully. If you really want there to be no more Klebold's or Harris', then do something about it. Stand up for someone else when they're being agressed by another. Wouldn't you want someone to do it for you?