California Copy Chimp

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen In Peace

2011-12-29T15:02:00.000-08:00

When I set out for a brief walk on that unseasonably warm Thursday afternoon just before Christmas, I had no idea I was about to discover a disturbing new trend in yard decorations.

I strolled through a small park just down the street from my office building in San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco, and found myself in a middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes. On nearly every lawn lay the crumpled forms of Santas, snowmen, teddy bears and elves. It took me a while to realize that these sad tableaux, which resembled some holiday version of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre that had mown down the season's favorite icons with machine gun fire, were simply inflatable decorations, their compressors shut off during the daylight hours.

The company I work for does a healthy business in what it calls inflatable decor items, selling giant blow-up haunted houses in October and giant Easter Bunnies in April. But it had never occurred to me before that for most of the day these pressurized plastic figures would have so opposite an effect, lying unfestively together on the grass like victims of the Manson family.

Springtime for Transvestites

2011-12-25T12:49:00.000-08:00

Many years ago there was a highly improbable television sitcom called Bosom Buddies. The premise was that two best friends vie for the same job at an advertising agency and decide, because women are paid half as much, they'll try to pass as women and split the position and its salary.

Like the much more entertaining Some Like It Hot, you never really bought the idea of the cross-dressing actors as women and had to suspend disbelief that the female co-stars didn't see the five o'clock shadows and Adam's apples under the pancake makeup. But the show had an appealing young cast and ran long enough to launch Tom Hanks' career, despite the fact that Peter Scolari was the better actor. While his former bosom buddy went on to a prestigious film career that included numerous Oscar wins, Scolari stumbled along in sitcom runs like Newhart and currently hawks an erectile dysfunction medication on radio spots. The poor guy was even cast as the dad in the short-lived television version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

As if to prove that network television executives are never too ashamed to resuscitate a tired idea that was lucky to succeed the first time around, ABC has green-lighted a sitcom called Work It. So low-brow and mouthing-breathing an effort it makes Bosom Buddies seem like an Ingmar Bergman film, this reboot of the cross-dressing buddies in the workplace concept has angered transgender groups and makes me wonder if there isn't some bottom-line Springtime for Hitler principle at play here, where the producers make a fortune if they attempt a series that is certain to fail. The promo poster says it all, I guess, but can the gay porno version be far behind?

Elf Orgy

2011-12-22T10:17:00.000-08:00

First, I can't be the only one who hears -- more than once! -- "Orgy Wonderland" being sung by the elves in this Samsung Galaxy commercial, instead of "4G." Is it just an aural trick, or a deliberate subconscious subversion? You decide.

Second, it might have seemed fresh back in 1939 to cast dwarves as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, but hasn't the practice of outfitting them as Santa's elves gone on a bit too long? Or are there union halls somewhere in the porny depths of the San Fernando Valley filled with smoking, poker-playing Little People waiting for their annual casting calls? The Will Farrell movie Elf was innovative enough to employ children as elves and that's just one of the things that contributed to its freshness ("These toilets are ginormous!"). Let's start casting dwarves as doctors, cops and sit-com stars, shall we?

Let Your Bundles Do the Walking

2011-12-17T13:38:00.000-08:00

If I have to live in a world where every third person on the freeway is making love to his cell phone and Kardashians tweet, do I still have to also receive new phone books every year?

It's a long-standing annual ritual, the delivery of the white and yellow pages. And if you live in an apartment building, every December a stack of plastic bags containing those fat books is dumped at your doorstep -- a stack that pretty much remains there all month, because when's the last time you looked something up in a phone book? It couldn't be more anachronistic if every year a truck backed up to my lobby door and unloaded a pile of sun dials.

Could we end the madness? And while we're at it, let's do something about those Kardashians.

Oh, Little Town of Hollywood

2011-11-25T22:12:00.000-08:00

The suspension of disbelief is integral to many entertaining film classics. To fully enjoy them, you have to relinquish your logical mind and accept that a tornado can transport a farmhouse over the rainbow, a department store Santa could be the real Kris Kringle, or a myopic wizard could win a school championship riding a broom.

But there are certain story lines that no unhinging of reason can account for, and one of them is Ice Age, a Mammoth Christmas Special. The Ice Age franchise of animated films, starring Ray Romano as a wooly mammoth grieving for his family and Denis Leary as his sabor-toothed sidekick, is an enjoyable series of films with a bold visual style depicting ancient landscapes and the flora and fauna found within them. The overriding premise, however, is that the action takes place in the last ice age, ten thousand years ago at the very least. Even the most ardent creationists agree that Christ, if he existed at all, was born 2,000 years ago -- meaning there could be no Christmas for our nomadic late-Pleistocene animal friends. None. Forget it. End of Christmas special.

Taking One for the Gipper

2011-11-10T11:00:00.000-08:00

There's a chilling scene in the 2008 film Doubt in which Meryl Streep's terrifying Sister Alonysius, who may or may not have evidence of the parish priest's pedastery, confronts the mother of the boy in question. Surprisingly the woman, played with a world-weary resignation by the amazing actress Viola Davis, responds that at least a white person of influence is paying attention to her child -- and maybe that will somehow lead to a way out of the ghetto.

Somehow I think there's a similar attitude at play in the snowballing Penn State "abuse" scandal. ("Abuse" itself is a carefully measured word in the context of so horrific a revelation -- it's really an ongoing culture of child rape that was sustained for decades.) Obviously sexual predators like Jerry Sandusky select their victims for their extreme vulnerability -- in his case, he actually created a "charity" that would supply him with a pool of likely victims for years, and what could be more calculating than that? And while head coach Joe Paterno could have put a stop to Sandusky's preying decades ago, he was more concerned about preserving Penn State's football standing than the dignity and sanity of the dozens of boys whose rapes he could have prevented.

Though the boys concerned very likely lacked traditional families or parental guidance, there are so many involved that some of them must have had somewhat intact families with older siblings, grandparents, or at least relationships with teachers and clergy. How many of those adults knew what was happening, and chose not to jeopardize the sacrosanct culture of college football?

Paterno, who is as culpable here as the rapist himself, has been forced out after six decades of who knows how much damage he's inflicted through his incompetence, and that's a very good thing. But a raped ten-year-old is a pretty hard thing to miss. Who else kept quiet for the preservation of a meaningless ball game?

"Threesomes for $600, Alex?"

2011-11-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

People have often suggested I try out for Jeopardy! but believe me, I'm not that smart. I basically know a little about everything and nothing, really, about anything. In fact, one of my biggest fears is to find myself up against some intellectual powerhouse with a quick trigger finger and have to slink home without even making it to Final Jeopardy.

So last night when I was watching Jeopardy! and saw this response, I felt a shudder of recognition that, if I ever found myself under the bright lights of the Jeopardy! set, something very similar would happen to me.

Put That S**t On Everything

2011-11-01T20:05:00.000-07:00

I've often called out advertisers for needless vulgarity -- especially when hawking consumer goods, like toilet tissue and feminine products, that in gentler times were sold by only hinting at their obvious uses.

But I love the approach Frank's Red Hot Sauce has chosen to promote its product on radio and TV. For over 80 years, Frank's has been a rather staid contender for the hot sauce market share, a very distant second to Tabasco. Taking a gamble on a complete image overhaul, parent company Reckitt Benckiser embarked on an ambitious brand makeover.

The resulting tagline, usually delivered by some supposedly genteel elderly person proclaiming "I put that [bleep] on everything!" is a brilliant stroke of advertising genius -- one that speaks to the ubiquitous nature of the product by encouraging the consumer to try it in multiple, non-traditional ways. Ideally, that's exactly what you want to get across with a consumer good like a sauce or condiment. Kudos to Frank's -- and its agency, MVBMS Euro RSCG in New York -- for accomplishing this key business objective in a funny, memorable way entirely appropriate to the brand and category.

Steve's Ball and Chain

2011-10-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I posted the 2011 winner of Consumerist's Worst Ad in America, the odious Luv's diaper ad with its celebration of infant excrement. Another ad under consideration was this 30-second spot for AT&T, which mires the viewer so deeply in marital strife it's easy to forget the offer and find yourself worrying about poor "Steve's" domestic woes.

I suppose the wife's assumption -- while she angrily spritzes the plants in her little greenhouse -- that the family plan Steve committed them to will add to their financial burden, is meant to underscore the point that the plan is actually free. But her quickness to jump on the poor guy ("Where's that money coming from, Steve??!!") for his fiscal incompetence gives you a glimpse into an unenviable marriage to a bitter harridan. If only she had married John Clark.

Worst Ad in America

2011-10-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

When the Consumerist website asked readers to choose the worst television ad in America, there was no shortage of contenders. I was pretty certain the Summer's Eve campaign would be the winner, since its spots featured talking vaginas speaking in the stereotypical accents of black, Asian, and Hispanic women. Kudos, in other words, for being both vulgar and racist.

The winner, though, is equally revolting: a Luv's disposable diaper ad in which babies compete in a sort of Olympic shitfest for the fullest diaper.

I've known enough new parents to understand that they tend to cope with the exhausting prospect of childcare by finding some humor in the constant stream of baby poop, spit-up, and urine. But the commercial actually shows the babies inflating their diapers with feces and speaks to the specter of diaper "blowout." Call me old-fashioned but there's nothing cute or amusing about explosive elimination.

There was a time when brand spokesmen like Charmin's Mr. Whipple and commercials for women's sanitary products needed only to allude to the uses of their offerings. That allowed them to focus on other issues, like convenience and comfort and cost in the context of an ongoing concept, without veering into the scatological. Now that ads revel in feminine napkins displaying red dots of menstrual blood, while bears crapping in the woods are concerned about toilet paper shreds adhering to their fur, the mystery and magic of advertising are in the toilet, too.

Not a People Person

2011-10-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

A high-concept television spot is a tough sell. The idea has to be so bullet-proof that the viewer gets the point immediately, but even if it is, the client needs to be convinced its customers don't need to be pandered to. So in the case of this "People Person" commercial for Prius, Toyota must have simply put its faith in Saatchi & Saatchi's reputation for brand leadership. Blindly, it would seem.

It's a strange approach to a very significant announcement: that Prius now offers four slightly different models -- one for each type of person. The spots start off with a "human" comprised of a dozen or so contortionists clinging together to form a grossly suggested humanoid face and its body parts. Despite the upbeat jingle ("Got To Be Free" by the Kinks), the effect is so monstrous that small children all over America must be cowering in corners whenever the spot runs -- and I'm not saying that just because of my irrational fear of monkeys dressed in clothes. I'd be offput if I saw this trick performed at the Cirque du Soleil, but in the context of a car ad you might encounter ten times a night it's eerily frightening.

Then, once the interlocked gymnasts uncouple and are revealed to be different types of consumers, the idea that there's a car model for each of their needs comes through. But why were they all jumbled together as one "person" in the first place? It's the line of cars that are a family, not the people.

I suspect that this was a case where a creative director wanted to utilize what he thought was a cool effect, and shoehorned it into a marketing message. It doesn't work, it's inordinately creepy, and if I'd been planning to buy a Prius, I'm certainly not going to now.

Petty Bureaucrats

2011-10-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

In one episode of the animated Comedy Central series South Park, Eric Cartman's delusions of grandeur morph into the misconception that he's a highway patrol officer. As he peddles his Big Wheel down the Colorado highway in mirrored sunglasses, he demands that everyone he encounters "Respect Mah Authori-tah!"

The idea of how easily a tiny bit of power snowballs into petty authority run amok was driven home to me recently during a Saturday hike with my friend Carol. It was a beautiful Indian Summer afternoon, and we had arranged to do a seven-mile loop on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. As the trail we were on led higher up the mountain, we crossed into land owned or managed by the Water District Authority, one of those shadowy agencies that governs -- what ...forests? Alpine lakes? I'm really not sure. But as we walked along a fire road with spectacular views of Richardson Bay and the towers of San Francisco in the distance, Carol suddenly realized that she had left the dog's leash in the car -- and dogs are required to be on leashes on all Water District fire roads.

"That's alright," I reassured her, "we're not likely to run into any rangers up here."

Which meant that immediately a large white truck containing two Water District "rangers" came around the bend and stopped where we stood. A fat man with white hair and a brown uniform of some kind got out and immediately asked Carol for her information. Inexplicably, she gave her real address but not her correct last name or date of birth (I later told her that if you're going to lie about your birthdate, use it as an opportunity to shave a few years off your age, not add them).

The ranger said he'd check her name against a list, and if she'd been warned before, she'd receive a $200 fine. He also told us that we needed to return the way we'd come, but since we'd still be walking on the fire road for a distance he would give us a rope to use for the dog.

"Well, since I'll have a leash, can't we just keep going in this direction until we connect with the trail?" Carol asked, quite reasonably.

The man shook his head. "Oh no. Because then there would be no consequences for your actions," he said solemnly.

"So this is a morality lesson, then," I said, amazed that an elderly man in a cheap brown uniform in the middle of a forest had taken it upon himself to issue a life lesson to two middle-aged adults. He looked at us like he was considering some additional punishment but got back in his truck with his fellow "ranger" and drove off the way we'd come.

That's when it struck me that we didn't have to obey him, and could continue the loop we'd planned. Pulling the dog along by the makeshift leash, we scurried up the road until we got to our trail and made our way down the mountain.

Noah's Lark

2011-08-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in Kentucky (where else?) on 800 rolling acres of farmland, plans are being put into place for a $155 million religious theme park called the Ark Encounter.

The showpiece among such cherished biblical icons as the Tower of Babel will be a full-scale model of Noah’s Ark. “The message here,” says project manager Mike Zovath, “is, God’s word is true. There’s a lot of doubt: ‘Could Noah have built a boat this big, could he have put all the animals on the boat?’ Those are questions people all over the country ask.”

What people, I wonder, are asking this? Not people like me, who dismissed the story of Noah's ark as an engaging but unlikely parable some time during childhood. And certainly not, on the other end of the belief spectrum, people like presidential hopeful Michelle Bachmann, who takes the Bible as the spoken word of God and who’s given her life over to Jesus – along with a chance at the White House. I suppose that makes sense, because Bachmann hasn’t demonstrated an affinity for facts of any kind. Stumping in Waterloo, Iowa, she said she was glad to be appearing in the hometown of American film legend John Wayne – when actually it had been the home of scary clown serial killer John Wayne Gacey, who tortured and murdered 33 young men and boys. Yesterday at a rally she opened with a birthday wish for Elvis Presley, and the crowd shouted back that it was actually the anniversary of his death. And then there’s her husband Marcus’ occupation: a flaming repressed homosexual in a shocking pink polo shirt, he runs a Minnesota practice that “prays the gay away” and inflicts untold psychological damage on men forced by society to “go straight.”

Bachmann will be right on board with the Ark project, which Zovath says will feature “old world” details like wooden pegs instead of nails, straight-sawed timbers and two to four thousand stuffed or animatronic animals – all to "demonstrate" that Noah’s ark was an historic reality.

“When you get to walk through the boat and see how big this thing really was, and how many cages were there, and how much room there was for food and water…our hope is people start seeing that this is plausible,” Zovath explained.

Given that there are perhaps 50 million different species of mammals, reptiles, birds and insects, and that Creationists don’t believe any of Noah’s saved creatures could have evolved into our current animal kingdom, a bunch of cages filling a barge will serve only the tiniest, most uninquiring of minds. (Let’s not even try to consider a primative environment that could serve the climactic needs of both penguins and tigers, while preventing the latter from eating the former.)

But expect more cramped, backward insights like these if Bachmann ever actually makes it to the Oval Office, because these days even an atrocity like that is entirely possible. After all, she manages to make a self-serving nut job like Sarah Palin look stable. As Zovath says, “The ark is…really not about creation-evolution, it’s about the authority of the Bible starting with the ark account in Genesis.”

In other words, the Islamic fundamentalists we’ve been warring with for the last decade are not necessarily the biggest threat to our freedoms or way of life.

Getting Jacked

2011-07-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

Here's a revelation: the older a man gets, the more he turns into Jack Lemmon in The Out of Towners (forget about the horrible remake with Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn). Or maybe Spencer Tracy, in his last film role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, when going out for a simple ice cream cone turns into a near-calamity.

What I mean is that simple tasks that you never gave a second thought to suddenly become fraught with obstacles and obfuscation, turning you into the penultimate existential everyman.

Case in point: last week I was filling my gas tank at a station near my home -- Twin Peaks Petroleum, actually, located at 598 Portola Drive. I go there only because it's nearby, and I'm a creature of habit. I knew that my tank was fairly empty but also was aware that there had to be at least a half-gallon of gas left. Imagine my surprise when the dial on the pump rolled over to 10.065 gallons -- because my 2008 Honda Fit holds only ten gallons of gas.

Thinking there must be an error and not having time to fully deal with the issue, I resolved to check this out on my next fill-up. So during the past week I paid careful attention to my mileage, noting that, because I'd been driving mostly freeway miles, I was getting close to 30 mpg and would get 300 miles to the tank. The gas tank light is supposed to go on when there's one gallon left but seems to be actived at about one-and-a-half gallons, so when it turned on at 246 miles, I drove an additional 20 miles, knowing there was at least a gallon left. I returned to Twin Peaks Petroleum and the same pump I'd used last week, where the dial indicated 10.222 gallons (see photographic evidence).

In the past three years I've filled that tank more than 100 times, and even when I've pressed my luck and had only a few molecules of fuel left, it never exceeded ten gallons at any of the dozens of stations I've visited. So I went in to the cashier's office, where I explained to a young Middle-Eastern man that this was the second time in a week this had happened at his station. How did he explain this?

"Maybe you have a leak," he said, looking sheepish and guilty.

"Yeah, maybe the extra gas is in the back seat," I said. "Maybe I'm out here making Molotov cocktails."

I asked to see the manager and was told that the owner was not present. The cashier dutifully wrote down my cell phone number on my receipt and promised that the owner would call me. "Yes, I'd really like to hear what he has to say for himself," I said, "because anyone who fills up with that pump is getting screwed out of about $4 every time. And who knows if the other pumps are miscalibrated, too."

Of course the owner never called me back. But I did file a claim with the California Department of Weights and Measures. Isn't that what Jack Lemmon would have done?

Jingle Jangle Junkies

2011-07-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

My downstairs neighbors Tristan and Elle
(I know, but let's get past that) are the kind of young couple I really admire -- they sign a rental agreement and then just do whatever the hell they want with their apartment. They've ripped out the cheap sixties-era pasteboard shelving, installed lighting that activates when you trip the sensors, put in metallic splashback tiles, replaced the nightmarish kitchen linoleum with terracotta tile, and painted an entire room in black chalkboard paint so Tristan can cover the walls with formulas and theorums that have something to do with whatever it is he does for a living. I even heard his footsteps on the roof the other night when he was installing some sort of antenna up there. Sure, they'll never get their deposit back, but in the meantime they're getting the most out of their living space.

So I was talking to someone at one of their cocktail parties one Saturday evening and overheard something that made me like them even more. "What did you say about wind chimes?" I asked Elle over the jumbled noise of music and voices.

"I hate them," she said, then proceeded to tell us how a neighbor had hung a particularly jangly set of chimes on a nearby balcony. "Is there anything more intrusive in a crowded neighborhood like this? I put a note on her car that said 'Please take them down,' and she tore it up and put it on my car."

As a lifelong foe of the imbecilic wind chimes, I could appreciate Elle's dilemma. Sure, if you live in the wilds of the Santa Cruz mountains and you enjoy listening to a metallic cacophony that sounds like the onset of a schizophrenic episode, hang your wind chimes and your Native American dream catchers and your silk-screened gecko banners to your heart's content. But when you live in a densely populated hillside neighborhood in the middle of San Francisco, the wind chime that soothes your simple, babylike mind as you drool your way to sleep is the aural toothache of a hundred neighbors.

"So what did you do?"

"I put a hundred dollar bill in an envelope and slid it under her door. The chimes came down that same day."

Who says kids today don't know how to get things done?

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

2011-07-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

I've never had much interest in watching frat boys attach baby alligators to their nipples or detonate Port-O-Potties, so I was only marginally aware of the key players in the Jackass franchise. So when a more obscure cast member named Ryan Dunn --whose most infamous prank, apparently, was cramming a toy automobile up his colon -- fatally crashed his Porsche at an alcohol-fueled 130 mph and claimed the life of his 30-year-old passenger, Zachary Hartwell, it reminded me of a few other people who were unfortunate enough to become cultural footnotes simply because they hitched their wagons to an unstable star.

Late one hot evening in August of 1969, an 18-year-old boy named Steven Parent stopped to visit a casual friend who worked as a caretaker at an estate in the hills above Los Angeles. As he was about to activate the electronic gate to leave the property, he encountered a man who slashed at him with a Bowie knife, cutting the band of his wristwatch, and who then shot him four times in the face and chest. He'd had the incredibly bad luck to stop by the same night as the Manson family, who proceeded to viciously murder eight-months-pregnant actress Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski, and three others. Parent wasn't carrying identification, so he was initially listed as homocide victim "John Doe" while the vastly more famous victims became part of a media storm. Parent's father, a contractor, complained that his son's murder was treated as an uninteresting detail in the deaths of a prominent actress, a Folger's coffee heiress and a celebrity hairdresser who was the inspiration for Warren Beatty's character in Shampoo.

Here's another one that's just as tragic. Imagine your good friend phones you and insists you meet this incredibly amusing painter she's having an affair with, so you decide to go out to Long Island for a fun weekend of mild bohemian mayhem. The next thing you know you're standing up in the back seat of a 1950 Oldsmobile with a monstrously drunk Jackson Pollock at the wheel, screaming to be let out of the car. That's what happened to poor Edith Metzger, a 25-year-old woman who had managed to escape Nazi Germany but couldn't elude the self-indulgence of a mid-century art star and enfant terrible. The car flipped, crushing her and killing Pollock, while her friend Ruth Kligman survived (she died just last year, 54 years after the tragedy). Thanks a lot, tortured artist.

As for Ryan Dunn, the joke goes: Ryan Dunn died the way he lived -- with car parts up his rectum.

Too soon?

Oh Pioneer (Wife)!

2011-05-06T12:28:00.000-07:00

Considering how much time I spend in front of a computer, I'm always amazed to be sideswiped by a cultural trend that everyone else seems to already know about.

It was only this week that I started hearing about "the Pioneer Woman" Ree Drummond, whose blog about life as a ranch wife in Oklahoma has transformed her into a one-woman revenue stream, and now she's everywhere. She's whipping up pasta dishes on The Today Show, signing copies of her cookbook in bookstores across America, and her story has been optioned for a film in which she will be portrayed by none other than Reese Witherspoon's pointy chin. There's even a lengthy profile of her in this week's New Yorker.

Drummond's back story is that she supposedly dumped the emptiness of a media career in L.A. for the purity and simplicity of life as a wife to her "Marlboro Man" cowboy husband and mother to four children. Over 4 million unique visitors frequent her site, http://www.thepioneerwoman.com/, which she reluctantly admits generated "a solid million dollars" for her last year. Plus the Drummond family she married into is one of the largest landowners in the nation; her ranch is over 20,000 acres -- or two-thirds the size of San Francisco.

So clearly, the following that checks in regularly for updates on her time-saving recipes and to view her luridly-Photoshopped photography efforts are expecting to hear from a housewife facing their same issues of budget-crunching and time management. What they get instead is a marketing barrage from a woman whose kitchen is the size of a basketball court and who just launched a children's book about her basset hound.

When I first looked at her web site (the subhead of which reads, and I am not kidding, "Plowing through life in the country, one calf nut at a time"), I certainly didn't get the impression that this was the blog of a woman celebrating her rural life. Far from it -- it's the desperate activity of a woman drowning in the tedium of domestic farm life and trying not to go insane. The content jostles for your attention: there are sections on cooking, photography, home schooling (the hallmark of the anti-social paranoid), some pretty tame "confessions" so visiting moms can get the sense that Ree, too is struggling with the day-to-day challenges of motherhood, and even contests to keep readers coming back for merchandise awards.

The more recent posts outline Drummond's cross-country book tour, which begs the question: at what point does the Pioneer Wife's lifestyle become so elevated that it's no longer relevant to her fan base?

Obama Yo Mama

2011-05-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

The news that Osama bin Laden has been killed puts to rest a full decade of unresolved blood lust and retribution following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. It should even give President Obama's administration some much-needed cred on the world stage, given that he accomplished what Bush swore to do but left dangling, like the ending of that children's book about the goats he was reading the day of the attacks. Yet somehow the right wing will try to wrestle this success away from the president; just take a look at the news crawl on Fox News last night when the announcement was made.

Don't kid yourself into believing "OBAMA BIN LADEN DEAD" is a typo. It's emblematic of the childish schoolyard antics that Fox news pundits engage in every day, the type that add nothing of value to the dialog and serve to link the president with our most despised enemy, even when the news is that he's responsible for putting that enemy out of commission. It's like when that bleached cadaver Ann Coulter called John Edwards a "fag" simply to demean his run for office. John Edwards may be many things -- a philanderer, a callous husband, a lousy father, and a public figure with shocklingly poor judgment -- but a homosexual he is not. I'd wager his career would be in better shape if he were.

It seems that every few administrations, when a Democractic leader inherits the mess a Republican president leaves behind on his way out of the Oval office, we spend all our energy defusing the lies and snipes of the Coulters and Palins and Cheneys, somehow never hitting back. Then suddenly it's too late, and we're in for another four or eight years of Republican puffery and obfuscation. It would be nice if now we could put the suspicions about Obama's loyalties and citizenship behind us, and actually accomplish something at a time when people desperately need jobs, social programs, and health care.

Heaven Is for Suckers

2011-04-21T15:59:00.000-07:00

I can't think of a better example of the infantilization of theological thought than the current bestseller Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo. (Note: Burpo's coauthor, Lynn Vincent, ghostwrote Sarah Palin's recent Going Rogue, making this her second bestseller in a row.)

The unfortunately named Burpo is a small-town Nebraska pastor whose four-year-old son Colton, after being clinically "dead" for three minutes following an undiagnosed ruptured appendix, claimed to have visited Heaven -- and met not only his long-dead great-grandfather and miscarried sister but Jesus Himself.

Burpo's contention is that Colton can be taken at his word because he's never been prompted in any way. But let's be real: the boy's father is a pastor. And he's attended Sunday school, where he very likely was implanted with the traditional imagery of floating white clouds and Jesus on a throne, stigmata wounds and all. Plus any child in any household absorbs all sorts of information without anyone intending it, including tidbits of family lore and recent sorrows like the loss of a baby sibling.

Burpo's most frequently applied argument for the authenticity of Colton's claims is that the child reported seeing his earthbound father during the period that he was "dead." But it's not like he spotted his dad buying a lottery ticket at the 7/11 or having sex in a Chevy Impala with one of his parishoners. He reported that during the three minutes when he could not be revived, he saw Burpo praying. What else would he have been doing -- or would claim to have been doing?

It's been said that the popularly accepted perception of Heaven as a place of pillowy clouds accessed through a golden gate, populated by angels in white smocks and shining halos, originated with just one Negro Spiritual film from the 1920s, then cascaded through the public consciousness in the century since. So it doesn't surprise me that little Colton Burpo(!) saw that same juvenile version of it while in a physical state where many people have claimed to experience out-of-body sensations. That said, it also doesn't surprise me that Heaven Is for Real placed number one on the New York Times Bestseller List -- it's exactly what most people expect and are willing to hear, and better still, the message seems untainted by adult intervention because it, supposedly, comes from the mouth of a child. It's just depressing that we as a people don't demand more of our exploration of our existence, and that human thought hasn't kept pace with our physical evolution as a species.

Family Jewels

2011-04-14T16:38:00.000-07:00

How do you stay relevant if you're an aging, unemployed famewhore? If you're Frederick Prinz von Anhalt, the eighth husband of nonagenarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, you keep coming up with evermore absurd pronouncements before your far more famous wife finally shuffles off to her reward.

The latest scheme of Prinz von Anhalt (that's his last name, though how he acquired it is up for discussion) is to make his 94-year-old wife "a new mother" in order to continue the Gabor name. It seems Gabor's two sisters, Eva and Magda, both deceased, neglected to have children. And though she herself did manage to produce a daughter now just three years younger than her current husband, that offspring goes by her father's last name of Hilton -- and is understandably appalled at the thought of her dying mother becoming a new mom.

In one of his frequent photo-op events, Von Anhalt made a "deposit" at a fertility clinic yesterday, and apparently plans to use donor eggs and, of course, a donor womb (spelunking for either within his wife's current physiology is, of course, out of the question, even in an era where women well into their 60s are surrogate mothers). So how would such a baby be a continuation of the Gabor line? It wouldn't, because it would have no relation to the actress. He may as well adopt a child and name it Gabor, but that wouldn't allow him to incorporate his alleged virility into the mix.

This is the man who, in 2007, claimed he was mugged by a group of wanton young women who stripped him of his clothes and left him naked and, supposedly, sated in his Rolls Royce. According to Prinz von Anhalt, his assailants bound him and placed him in handcuffs, yet he managed to call the authorities on a cellular phone. Los Angeles police found him completely naked approximately one hour later. No handcuffs were found at the scene. The culprits reportedly drove away in a Chrysler convertible.

More recently, Prinz von Anhalt claimed he'd had an affair with the late Anna Nicole Smith, and that he was the biological father of her daughter. There's absolutely no evidence that he even knew Smith, let alone had any opportunity to have even the most brief liaison. And no more was heard of his claim to be the girl's father.

So don't count on any little Zsa Zsas any time soon.

Tempest in a Toenail Polish Bottle

2011-04-12T12:13:00.000-07:00

Here's what you should remember about advertising: so much planning, reworking, and second-guessing goes into the process that almost no marketing effort sees the light of day without extensive consideration of its impact. And that includes the buzz or controversy it may generate.

That applies to this J. Crew email ad, in which a mother named Jenna (who happens to be J. Crew's Creative Director) enjoys quality time with her young son by painting his toenails neon pink.

The expected backwash of outrage was immediate, and originated exactly where you would expect it to: in the conservative wingnut backwater that is Fox News.

"This is a dramatic example of the way our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity," wrote psychiatrist Keith Ablow in a FoxNews.com health column. Media Research Center's Erin Brown piled onto the shock wagon, calling the ad "blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children." (Note: I'm sure Ablow didn't mean to use the word trappings, but after all, isn't that what they are?)

I'll stick my neck out on this and say there's no reason we shouldn't celebrate transgendered children if that's what they are. What's the alternative -- shame them, or drive them to suicide? The nuns at my mother's Catholic school forced her to become right-handed when she was clearly inclined to use her left and that alone may have made her the shamelessly unsentimental and volatile 83-year-old her six children have been traumatized by for their entire lives, so let's be careful how we interfere with the innate tendencies of children, okay? But there's nothing transgendered about little Beckett, right down to his pink toenails.

You can bet that the business minds at J. Crew had lengthy internal discussions about the effect a simple ad like this would have on the marketplace and the media -- including how the howling nabobs would emerge from the woodwork. And they were right: the cries of outrage come from people who worry more about traditional gender roles than how those same children, and their children and grandchildren, will be impacted by the cost of three simultaneous wars as their educational, health and social needs are ignored in lieu of bombs, tanks and troops.

UPDATE, April 14:

Jon Stewart's take on this controversy captures the full absurdity of the situation:

The Daily Show
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Pie Filling

2011-04-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

When I first heard that the classic James M. Cain story Mildred Pierce was being remade as a five-part HBO mini-series, my first thought, like a lot of people's, was why bother. The original film version's plucky heroine was so firmly associated with Joan Crawford's stalwart interpretation of the titular character it seemed nothing could compare with its noirish perfection.

But having just read the source material, I understand why another pass was called for. Unlike the film, which was released in 1945, Cain's novella takes place in the early years of the Depression, when the hopelessness of a woman abandoned with two young daughters, and the narrow field of options open to her, are far more palpable. So instead of being the story of a stoic entrepreneur riding the surge of war-era prosperity, it's one of a desperate woman rising above a landscape of global impovershment.

There's a deeply carnal element to the story that couldn't be depicted in the Crawford film, and that too adds texture to Mildred's feverish hunger for success, especially as depicted by Kate Winslet in the new series. But there's an added subtext of sexual obsession between Mildred and her now adult daughter, the cruel and calculating Veda, that comes through in the book as well. It's not at all the story of a mother sacrificing everything for her daughter's chances, it's one of a mother who idolizes and, yes, sexualizes her wicked daughter to the exclusion of all else -- even her younger child.

If you go back to director Todd Haynes' past films, from his first effort in 1987, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (enacted with disfigured Barbie dolls), to the popular Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven, which hinged on a chaste friendship between a white suburban housewife and a black gardener, you'll quickly see that he's not a subtle technician. His choices are very deliberate and they get your attention. In the new series, when one of the thirties-era roadsters bustles down a street and emits a huge plume of exhaust, you know that was an intentional effect; he's reminding us that the few vintage cars we see now from that period are maintained to current environmental standards, not those of eight decades ago.

More importantly, when the Pierces' fortunes begin to improve and Milded is able to hire the maid Letty, I was surprised to see that the actress cast in the role was white and was perhaps instructed to be something of an Okie.

That makes some historical sense, I suppose, because the Los Angeles area of the day was infused with Dust-Bowl evacuees eager for any kind of work. But the wonderful black actress Butterfly McQueen, who had the role (named Lottie) in the film was so entrenched in my mind in that part that I went back to the novel to see how she was depicted there and, yes, it only says that Mildred engaged "a girl named Letty" for various household tasks. I still think Cain intended her to be black, and have to feel that Haynes made a politically-correct decision that revises a history we find unsavory today. But if we can revisit the national tragedy that was the Great Depression, shouldn't we also accurately reference the status of blacks within society during that period? Having next read the novella that Double Indemnity was based on, my suspicion that Cain equated a hired-help "girl" with an African-American maid is confirmed; there's extensive reference to protagonist Walter Huff's Filipino houseboy but the young man is never once mentioned by name.

Regardless of your thoughts on the new series, I strongly endorse reading the original novel. The prose is rich and muscular, providing us with a masterfully direct depiction of an era in American history that's both alien to us and, due to recent economic events, strangely familiar, peopled with vivid characters and settings that leap off the page.

Two-and-a-Half Mein Kampf

2011-03-10T16:13:00.000-08:00

Let's face it, despite Charlie Sheen's epic meltdown, CBS isn't going to scrap Two-and-a-Half Men. Say what you will about this low-brow, highly scatological sitcom, it's a deeply entrenched, long-running series on a failing network with few other hits, and it generates tons of revenue.

So obviously they'll try every means possible to continue it, short of bringing back Sheen, because even in Hollywood you can't tie a nice bow on a stream of anti-Semitic epithets and pretend it never happened. They'll have to replace Sheen with a similar hard-drinking, womanizing sleazeball character -- a cousin or some other extended family member who can stumble out of the woodwork and be introduced into the setting without too much suspended disbelief. It's a time-honored way of getting a few more years out of a wheezy sitcom, like when Sandy Duncan replaced Valerie Harper years ago because of her salary demands. That show was actually called Valerie's Family and it still didn't stand in the way of killing off the main character in a convenient auto wreck.

Actors like John Stamos and Rob Lowe have been mentioned as possible bad-boy replacements, but Stamos is too likeable and Lowe is contractually bound to another series. If CBS were really on their game, there's only one replacement to consider for Sheen: Mel Gibson.

Think about it: you've already got a show that panders to the lowest mouth-breathing element of the television-watching public, one that's featured an underage character constantly exposed to sleazy adult situations since early boyhood and whose puberty we have been forced to observe. It's a PG-13-rated version of Sheen's lifestyle, served up to the viewing public like luke-warm porn. Why not go all the way, and capitalize on Gibson's volatile persona, put him in that beach house with the fat, sardonic maid and the milquetoast brother and the withering Beverly Hills social X-ray of a mother and just let him go at it about the Jews and the Muslims and Hollywood sugar tits and cops and...I think you get the picture. It'll be ratings gold, because there's nothing America loves more than a spectacular flameout. Let's frame this one in the perfect incendiary setting and be done with it.

All the News that Flits

2011-03-02T17:08:00.000-08:00

If you have any doubt that the newspaper as a medium is dead, just pick up a copy of the San Francisco Chronicle.

At about three-quarters the size format of a normal paper, it's so wispy it hardly qualifies as a pamphlet. It contains so little content -- and by that I mean paper material, because let's not even talk about the articles picked up from other news feeds -- that it would take at least two to provide enough kindling to build a decent fireplace blaze.

But there's another aspect to the demise of the modern urban newspaper. Like most publications, the Chronicle has an online version: the S.F. Gate. You'd be right to expect that this is simply the evolution of journalism in the 21st century, and that the paper's web site is the inevitable electronic descendent of what you once found in news racks all across the Bay Area. But you'd be wrong.

That's because the demands of constantly updating a web site to accommodate breaking news and developing stories have transformed this once iconic paper -- one held as the gold standard when I attended Journalism school in the 1970s -- into little more than a content mill. And a sloppy, hastily slapped-together one at that.

Take a look at this little gem, from today's S.F. Gate: Iconic kisses -- it purports to list the top iconic kisses in human culture. The first image from a Greek vase is misidentified as a man who kisses his wife when he "comes home from work" to see if she has spent the day knocking back ouzo, when actually it depicts Spartan love between a grown man and a boy. That's almost beside the point, though: just about anyone could rattle off a list of iconic kisses: Prince Charles and Princess Diana at their storybook wedding, Bette Davis and George Brent in Dark Victory, Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss at the Last Supper, even Adrian Brody smooching Halley Berry at the Oscars. But some unknown screen kiss from 1896? Do they even know what the word iconic means?

This kind of lazy content milling can be seen on a daily basis on sites like CNN.net, where teams of content generators spew "articles" like The 7 Things to Never Say at a Job Interview or Islands to See Before You Die.

As someone who once started each day with a cup of coffee and a fresh newspaper, I'd made the adjustment, some time ago, that online news was simply Newspaper 2.0. But it was just today, stupidly, that it really hit me that the eradication of physical newspapers has set in motion an unexpectedly complete dumbing down of the remaining local news culture. What's left?

Advertising to Die For

2011-02-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

One of the most shocking events of the late 20th century was the Jonestown massacre, when more than 900 men, women and children -- many of them from the San Francisco Bay area -- were made to ingest cyanide by People's Temple cult leader Jim Jones. News photos showing rows of bodies bloating in the Guyanese sun etched an indelible image on the collective consciousness, a testament to the horror and waste a delusional theocrat can inflict on impressionable people seeking meaning in their lives.

The incident was so impactful that to this day people in corporate America make reference to whether or not someone has "drunk the Kool-Aid" -- in other words, whether they've appropriately aligned themselves with the ethos of their particular corporate "cult." Never mind that the cyanide dosages were delivered in a fruit drink called Flavoraid, it's always been remembered as the more popular Kool-Aid brand.

So when the Hacienda Mexican food chain recently put up billboards in its hometown of South Bend, Indiana that claimed "WE'RE LIKE A CULT WITH BETTER KOOL-AID," some people were understandably outraged (and not because of the inexpertly-applied punctuation). You could argue that in the 33 years since the horrifying event -- the single-largest loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster event until 9/11 -- the sands of time have eroded the specifics of the event to the point that Hacienda was referencing only the general concept of the cult, just as we now speak of drinking Kool-Aid in a general way without full awareness of the phrase's origin. But that extra "TO DIE FOR" shatters that argument. There's absolutely no way this outdoor advertising references anything but the Jonestown massacre. That makes it one of the most shockingly insensitive and irresponsible ads I've ever seen.

I'll Pass on the Edamame, Thanks

2011-02-18T15:16:00.000-08:00

I've written before about my inexplicable nausea at the sight of apes in human clothing, a condition that dates back to the Red Rose Tea commercials of my youth. Since medical punditry has yet to name this condition, I've decided to christen it Simian Sartoriosis. Well, the Kayabuki sushi restaurant, located in a town north of Tokyo, has significantly upped the ante by tossing another of my phobias into the mix. They've hired two monkeys as waiters -- is there no Board of Health in Japan? -- and not only dressed them in women's clothes but made them wear scary female masks. Welcome to Simian Sartoriosis Chuckyanus.

Royal Flush

2010-12-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

I have to admit I got some pleasure out of seeing this photo of Prince Charles and Camilla reacting to the recent student demonstrations in London, once the violence was directed at their noble personages firsthand. When a breach in police security lines piled a phalanx of protesters around the privileged twosome's Rolls Royce as they headed to the theatre, the shock suddenly registered on their Stonehenge-like countenances. Reports claim the students rocked the car and shouted "off with their heads" while someone even poked Camilla in the ribs with a stick, as though assessing the old horsewoman the way she might inspect a pony's fetlocks. I wonder if it was the first time either of them, in their well-sheltered lives, had been truly frightened.

The fact that these two are living out their storied lives together now, and may soon be king and something very close to queen, seems unfair. When the prince selected the 19-year-old Diana Spencer for his bride 30 years ago, she was naive enough to think she was marrying for love. The reality was that she'd been chosen for her virginity, fertility, and a lineage that went back many centuries. She was simply a brood mare to the royal family, and it wasn't long before she realized her specific role and the fact that her husband had never ended his relationship with the older woman. By the time she finally extracted herself from the family and began to define herself it was already too late.

Knowing the fate that would befall Diana, it's hard to watch this early interview when the engagement was announced. Seeing the prince caress her one finger, as though that represents affection to him, is quite sad. Worse still, though, is what comes after the 7-minute mark, when he is asked if they're in love. "Whatever 'in love' means," he responds.

Understandably, there's a lot of speculation as to whether a similar fate will befall Kate Middleton, the fiancee of Diana's son Prince William. It seemed a bad omen to use Diana's engagement ring to start this marriage, but maybe that's just superstition. Certainly the press will follow their every move, but the couple has already had a lengthy courtship and are both 28, on a more even footing even though Kate is considered a commoner. Let's hope that in this case history doesn't repeat itself.

Getting the Scoop

2010-12-10T14:24:00.000-08:00

Journalism is in a sad state when you're more likely to get breaking news from a check-out stand tabloid than the New York Times. But more and more, gossip rags like The National Enquirer, which once featured front-page stories on Bat Boy or Nostrodamus' predictions of world annihilation, are scooping their more esteemed colleagues in the Fourth Estate.

That was the case with the sad news that Motown legend Aretha Franklin is suffering from -- and most likely dying from -- pancreatic cancer. While other news agencies were gingerly approaching the subject of the singer's recent hospitalization, the Enquirer wasn't afraid to make the announcement -- just as it did with the revelation of John Edwards' affair and paternity issues involving his videographer.

Fortunately, you can still count on wide-ranging journalistic takes on current events and celebrity news. Case in point: two side-by-side publications currently on the new stands:

Kut the Kards

2010-11-30T15:29:00.000-08:00

Perhaps there’s hope for humanity, and the world isn’t composed entirely of idiots after all.

I’m referring to the epic failure of the Kardashian Kard, a prepaid debit card introduced earlier this month by the monumentally untalented Kardashian sisters of E! Network fame.

Before it was pulled, only 250 of the cards – or “Kards” – were purchased, meaning that even the financially unsophisticated target audience who supposedly aspires to emulate the lives of luxury, extravagance and unflinching exhibitionism that are the creed of Kim, Kourtney and Khloe weren’t biting. (And what is with prolifically-breeding nut job reality show families, like the Duggars of 19 and Counting, and their penchant for naming all of their children with the same first consonant?)

Complaints of egregious fees caused banking officials to look into the matter, quickly resulting in outcry from regulating agencies like the Consumers Union and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. Aside from having to prepay the card to use it, cardholders could have racked up an additional $100 in annual fees on top of charges to cancel the card, add money to it, withdraw funds from an ATM, or even speak to a phone representative.

The family’s provenance doesn’t exactly inspire fiscal responsibility, considering its fame was launched by a graphic sex tape leaked by oldest sister Kim. Or that these spoiled, sniping young women are the offspring of O.J. Simpson’s pal Robert Kardashion, who may have helped to discard the bloody clothing and weapon used in the murder of Simpson's wife Nicole and Ron Goldman. Or that these girls have made a very profitable career out of horrifying their wizened stepfather, former Olympic athlete Bruce Jenner, with their general vulgarity, shallow consumerism and tacky public hookups.

It’s almost like a biblical pronouncement, and for once the money lenders were swept out of the temple. What next, Kardashians?

A Grizzly Scenario

2010-11-17T17:14:00.000-08:00

One of the most ludicrous pieces of delusional nonsense I've read lately comes from a conservative columnist named S.E. Cupp. Attempting to analyze the woefully unprepared former governor's supposed popularity, she writes:

The reason Palin has become such a lightening rod, a kingmaker and a punching bag, a celebrity and a power player, is simple. It's because she's so gosh darn happy.

(A kingmaker? What does that even mean?)

You only have to see Palin speak to detect the thin veneer of upbeat boosterism that frames every inane utterance. She trowels on the soccer mom platitudes, playing up to her image as a woman of the people; it was the mannered falseness of her delivery that Tina Fey isolated and satirized so successfully.

This is not a woman who is happy, regardless of how "flippin' fun" she says all those calculated family outings on her reality series are. As a Vanity Fair profile recently illustrated, the town of Wasilla, Alaska is littered with the rubble of citizens and former friends so burned by Palin's self-serving machinations that most will only speak to the media anonymously for fear of retribution. Her own staff has had to advise her to back off on her attempts to eviscerate her online critics, and her handlers, during her candidacy for Vice President, soon realized she was a hot-headed horror-show that even the most experienced spin team couldn't sculpt into something that resembled a viable candidate.

Former future son-in-law Levi Johnston, who had unlimited access to the Palin household, described her as a negligent, abusive wife and mother who issued draconian chores to her children, sparred constantly with and threatened to divorce her supposedly perfect husband Todd, and referred to her own Down's Syndrome child as "the retard."

Here's more of Ms. Cupp's tragic misdiagnosis of the situation:

"...nothing raises the ire of cynical liberals more than a happy-go-lucky, totally unburdened, freethinking and self-assured conservative woman who has everything she wants and then some. And without anyone's help."

Here's how I would amend that blurb:

"Nothing sickens liberals more than yet another inexperienced failed politician being groomed to become another puppet of the far right."

No wonder we're cynical.

Stop Being Crazy

2010-11-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

I’ve got news for you: you’re not that crazy. How do I know? If you were among the small percentage of the population currently wandering the streets in tattered ballet slippers pushing a baby stroller filled with colored Easter eggs shaped from your own excrement, you probably wouldn’t be reading this with anything close to comprehension. I’d even wager that the poopy-pushing nut job yodeling outside your local Starbucks isn’t nearly as insane he would like you and society at large to believe. He stops speaking in tongues long enough to open the door for you in expectation of a tip, doesn't he?

There’s no denying that life is difficult. Or that the chaos and confusion of the modern world exists way out of proportion to the ability of our marginally-evolved brains to process and absorb it. Recent advances in our technologically-enhanced culture may already be rewiring the way we process information and formulate thought, so that very soon the average person will have difficulty locating a hamburger joint around the corner without consulting the ubiquitous hand-held device downloading signals from orbiting global positioning satellites. Our elected officials don't seem to have our best interests at heart, and big business makes a show of ecological awareness while befouling our air and water. And, as a rapidly growing population teems across the imaginary borders of our tiny blue planet, it’s natural to be a bit anxious about the subsequent distribution of our dwindling resources in the face of inevitable warfare and climate change. But does that justify succumbing to the seduction of medication and mediation, succumbing to an industry for which society had no need just a few generations ago?

What would you say fuels your neurosis, your psychosis? Financial worries during a time of economic uncertainty? A parent that never loved you? The fear of dying alone? The inability to find fulfilling work? Unhappy childhood experiences, followed by an adulthood that has been less than satisfying? I’ve just described the human condition, and there has to be a better way to navigate it than for us to collectively shell out billions of dollars to supposed practitioners that will only pretend to listen to our woes without supplying any applicable answers and trick us into “feeling better” by dosing us with complex combinations of pharmaceuticals.

At this exact moment, there are thousands of relocated Somalian refugee families thriving in the once-abandoned industrial cities of northern New England. Are they filling the waiting rooms of the local psychologists and therapists to sob and obsess about the civil war that displaced them, the ethnic cleansing efforts that drove them from their ancestral homes onto the sleet-frozen streets of Lewiston, Maine to serve as taxi drivers and kitchen crews? Not generally. Like any of us who have survived torture and turmoil, they have nightmares, they exhibit caution in strange surroundings, and they apply themselves to make the most of the current situation in which they find themselves. What about the young Chinese and Indian adults who work seven days a week and must pay, out of their meager earnings, to reside in squalid factory dormitories owned by American retailers, so that our overweight, over-indulged children can slink off to school with $6 backpacks? Do they doubt their self-worth, and trouble themselves into a state of emotional instability because of their circumstances? No, they seize the opportunity to provide for their poverty-stricken families back in their villages and home provinces, and embrace the one afternoon they have off each week to date, dance, and dream of better things to come.

The simple fact is that throughout history people have persevered because they must. Cultural mass-insanity is a by-product of a leisure culture, one with enough time on its hands to feel sorry for itself, to indulge in weakness and childishness, and, worse, to allow itself to become so insecure it seeks solace in false cures and foolish promises. In short: suck it up. Life is hard. And you can stop being crazy now.

Half-Baked Alaska

2010-11-15T11:51:00.000-08:00

It's hard to image what, exactly, the intention could be behind the new reality series Sarah Palin's Alaska.

If she really has presidential aspirations -- and we know she does -- then why give us this intimate little glimpse into the Palin household? My guess is that the reasons are two-fold: first, she simply can't resist the revenue that her celebrity began generating just two years ago when John McCain tapped her as his vice presidential running mate. This is the woman, after all, who walked away from her role as governor of her supposedly beloved home state in mid-term -- a position that pays a paltry $125,000 a year. She's managed to rake in an estimated $12 to $15 million so far.

The second is that it provides an opportunity to project a carefully-controlled portrait of the Palin family. We see Sarah exposing her brood to the natural wonders of the Yukon -- not missing an opportunity to compare the local wildlife with her own "grizzly mama" persona, even though they were actually watching Alaskan brown bears. And we see her being the firm and attentive mom she'd like us to believe she is, telling daughter Willow that no boys are allowed upstairs in their home. Nice touch, considering that with daughter Bristol one definitely got through the gate.

What you won't see on Palin's reality program, however, is a heart-warming interaction between Sarah and her husband Todd. He coordinates the fishing trips and glacier hikes like some hired hand, but there's no sense of marital happiness here, because that kind of connection can't be scripted. She even has him build a hastily-constructed 14-foot-tall fence to block the view of the writer next door who Sarah says is working on a "hit piece" about her.

And the most appalling thing about the show? It was the biggest series premier in TLC's history, with over 5 million viewers.

Cover Up Your Sheep

2010-11-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

If anyone needed proof that the American public is still complacent enough to accept even the most ludicrous spin from authorities about disturbing topics, here it is.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But it's pretty obvious to even the most casual observer that the so-called Mystery Missile seen ascending into the sky just off the coast of Southern California the other evening was not a plane. Yet today news web sites and newspapers across the country are proclaiming "MYSTERY SOLVED."

Even Ambassador Robert Ellsworth, the former Deputy Secretary of Defense who evaluated the footage, never considered that it might be a jet or plane. "It's definitely a big missile," he says, and attempts to determine just what type. Jets don't shoot into the stratosphere at right angles to the earth. And viewed from more than 35 miles away, they appear to hang in the sky despite traveling near the speed of sound -- they certainly don't tear through the atmosphere like an Apollo rocket heading for orbit. They also don't emit broad fantail plumes that track their entire course.

Take a look at the news footage.

What's really shocking about this incident isn't that NORAD and the Pentagon deny any knowledge of what had to be some sort of missile test or, God forbid, an accident or demonstration of might from a foreign nation with a submarine parked just off our shores. What's horrifying is the lack of public concern, the lethargy of our elected officials to find out the truth, and the lack of investigation by the press.

Right, it was just a plane. And I have a big orange bridge I can sell you cheap.

Orange You Thrilled?

2010-11-08T17:57:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I worked in an office with a woman named Doris. Doris had been an affluent Marin County housewife whose doctor husband abandoned her for a younger woman -- which is why, at the age of 45, Doris found herself bitterly typing, in her hunt and peck manner, documents in a landscape architect's office. I suppose it goes without saying that she'd supported him through medical school.

This was back in the days when people still smoked in the workplace, and Doris smoked a lot. Our boss expressed concern for the company's new word processing system, imploring Doris to smoke outside because the particulates in cigaret smoke would certainly clog the equipment's processors. Doris would barely look up during these lectures, but when he left her to enter his large inner office she'd very purposefully blow a lungful of smoke straight into her computer's innards.

One day someone made the mistake of commenting to Doris about the sudden winning streak of a local sports team. Doris took a huge toke on her cigaret and blew a plume into the man's face. "I wouldn't give a rat's ass about it if they played it pantsless in Jello," she replied.

I felt a bit like Doris during the recent World Series, which saw the San Francisco Giants winning for the first time in 56 years. City Hall and Coit Tower were bathed in orange light in tribute to the team's jersey color, homemade fireworks twisted into the sky above the Mission, and the entire city erupted into a cacophony of blaring sirens, honking horns, and hooting fans. A million people attended the parade that pushed its way through downtown. And yet I cared not a particle for this achievement, and had no desire to be a part of this celebration. Why? I simply can't relate, or imagine what it would feel like to care.

I only have to hear that familiar tone of the announcer describing the action on the field, overlayed with the drone of the crowd, to be yanked back to those childhood days when my father would monopolize the living room -- and our one TV at the time -- to watch endless baseball games. I cared about them then as much as I do now.

I know that times are grim, and people will seize any opportunity to express joy and communal happiness. But all through the excitement I kept thinking that if all that energy had been expended toward something that really mattered -- Global Warming, say, or the slaying of horrifying politcal dragons like gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, or even heartfelt causes that I oppose -- it would have to be more satisfying and worthwhile.

Last weekend I asked my 86-year-old father if he had followed the World Series on television. Dementia is rapidly closing in on him -- "they tell me I saw a bob cat," he said, as though the sighting happened to someone else -- and he sadly said he didn't think so. Days later, I can still see the orange-lit dome of City Hall glowering like a sunburned nose in the middle of the city's face. But the carbon levels are still rising, civil liberties are still disappearing into the ether, and the homeless are still pushing their carts through the Civic Center in its rosy glow.

22 Pounds of Flesh

2010-11-08T17:40:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted, and the reason is simple: I've been recovering from extensive oral surgery since October 5th.

I love how the periodontist's office glossed over the seriousness of the recovery process. Basically, they hand you a brochure that chirps, "some people find that they can actually resume their regular routine the very next day!" Right, if their routine consists of writhing on the floor in intense pain in a Vicodin-induced frenzy while cursing the periodontal industry.

One thing they forgot to mention, for instance, was that the procedure would expose the roots of half my teeth, making it impossible to ingest any substance that was even the tiniest bit above or below room temperature. And I had been told that my paltry insurance would at least cover $1400 of the $8200 I paid toward the doctor's master bedroom suite spa or next European vacation. That turned out to be more like $800.

So, it's pretty much over now, and things are returning to normal, or as normal as anything can really be these days. And though I wouldn't have minded losing a few pounds, 22 pounds was a bit much. I'll try blogging more regularly, if only for my own sanity, and see how that goes.

Vampires Really Do Suck

2010-09-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

When you thread your way up the southern coast of Oregon, you eventually come to a small seaside town called Gold Beach. The village itself isn't much, just a strip of motels and restaurants and the odd business that caters to West Coast sensibilities, like surfing supplies and doggie cupcakes.

But nestled against the unspoiled sand dunes and the impossibly wide beach is a place called Ireland's Rustic Lodges. The sign on the road proclaims that it's World Famous, and it stood out to such a degree from all the cookie-cutter motels on my recent trip north that I did a U-turn and checked in. The rooms are knotty-pine with vaulted ceilings, and they promise you all the firewood you can burn in the enormous stone hearth. Burn it I did, though the night was warm and still, and I fell asleep to the sound of the surf dragging across the sand.

In the morning I went down to take advantage of the complimentary breakfast room, and found it filled with a group of eight or so young people. From my vantage point it's impossible to gauge the age of youngsters these days but I'd guess they were college freshmen, falling somewhere between the classifications of hipster doofus and nerd, with the sort of self-possessed confidence that young people have today. They seemed to have some sort of shared purpose or direction, and though I was concerned that they would turn out to be members of a church group or, worse, chastity pledges, I began to talk to them. The reality was worse: they were on a self-guided tour of filming locations for the Twilight movie franchise.

"Wasn't that filmed in Washington state?" I asked, deliberately trying to rain on their parade.

"Oh, no," replied one boy in skinny black jeans and heavy black-framed glasses. "People think the location shots were all done in Washington. But a lot of it was filmed here in Oregon. Some scenes were even filmed nearby," he added in what I'm sure he thought was a tantalizing tone.

"So, what do you do when you get to one of these sites?" I asked, suddenly remembering being stopped on a street in San Francisco years ago by a New Jersey couple looking for Mrs. Doubtfire's house. "You know it's a movie, right?" I had said uncharitably before continuing my morning run.

The kids exchanged glances -- they were humoring me. "Sometimes we take digital pictures of ourselves where the characters were," a pretty brunette girl explained patiently. "And sometimes we just, you know...take it in."

Someone's bagel popped out of a toaster with a sad twang. "So you guys are really into this Twilight stuff, huh?" I said. "Why do you think it appeals to you so much?"

The only fat girl, her blondish hair dyed in chunks of blue and vermillion, answered almost tearfully. "He just loves her so much!" she exclaimed, color rushing to her wide, oily cheeks.

"What other books do you read?" I asked.

"We were really into Harry Potter," a skinny blond boy with a pierced eyebrow responded. "But that's, like, over." Big surprise, I thought. During the Harry Potter heyday, there were endless articles about how the series had driven kids back to reading. But if you asked those same kids what else they were reading, the answer was that they were rereading Harry Potter.

"You know, there are so many great books to read," I ventured. "Especially if you're drawn to the idea of obsessive love. Have you ever read D.H. Lawrence, or Jane Austen? Or how about Madame Bovary, by Flaubert, or even The Collector, by John Fowler? Most of them have even been turned into some really great films."

The kids looked at me blankly; the pretty brunette was texting someone on her iPhone. Only the fat girl answered me. "Are they about vampires?"

I went back to my lodge and started packing up the car.

Humanity's Oldest Argument

2010-09-20T16:33:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when my mother and I were discussing my abandoned Catholicism, she said, "You know, there are no atheists in foxholes." Meaning, I guess, that when faced with the certainty of impending death most people turn back to religion.

That's why I have such respect for author and journalist Christopher Hitchens on what has been designated "Everybody Pray for Hitchens Day." Stricken with esophageal cancer and wracked by chemotherapy, the 62-year-old atheist, when asked about the religious movement arranged for his benefit through viral online networking, said, "I shall not be participating."

The fact that Hitchens is sticking to his guns in the face of the ultimate challenge is heartening to an atheist like me. It's a public display of a philosophical stance that gets very little exposure in a world where politicians invoke God at every opportunity and even our currency kowtows to the divine deity.

Hitchens says that the people praying for him today break down into three distinct groups: those who see his cancer diagnosis as vindication that he has displeased God with his outspoken anti-theism, those who want him to "see the light" and join their particular religious faith, and those who are asking God to heal him to demonstrate the Almighty's, well, might.

Hitchens told the Associate Press that he intends to stand by his atheistic views to the end, and would like to be recalled as one of those "who are attempting to uphold reason and science against superstition."

"This is a very long, long, long story," he said. "It's humanity's oldest argument. If I played a small part in keeping it going that would be enough for me."

I'm not going to be praying for Christopher Hitchens today. But I wish him the best, and sincerely appreciate his sage words on this most volatile of topics -- and how he's still fighting his final battle from that foxhole.

Cheating Death

2010-09-14T22:01:00.000-07:00

How we each deal with adversity and the grim realities of what it means to be human says so much about who we are as individuals. Take the case of two public figures who revealed this summer that they are both "battling," as they say, cancer: noted author and journalist Christopher Hitchens and actor Michael Douglas, both in their sixties, who suffer from similar afflictions.

Douglas, the offspring of Hollywood royalty, grew up in privilege that surely boosted his rise up the ladder of success, starting with a prominent role on TV's The Streets of San Francisco in the 1970s. Now suffering from advanced stage 4 throat cancer, he trumpets "I'll beat this!" in 30-point type from the cover of People magazine. Hitchens, on the other hand, an avowed anti-theist who's the product of a hardscrabble English military upbringing, continues to write eloquent, realistic observations about facing the death that his metastic esophageal cancer, which has spread to his lungs and lymph nodes, seems to indicate is inescapable.

Douglas' upbeat outlook strikes me as narcissistic and foolish, a product of what writer Barbara Ehrenreich brands "bright-sided positive thinking." Having received a cancer diagnosis herself, she defied the self-help thinking and infantilized therapy that steers disease management and derails a patient's ability to come to terms with terminal illness. It's in keeping with the self-image of a celebrity like Douglas, who has been in the public eye since birth, to think that he can overcome what is essentially a death sentence, and consistent with the outlook of the contemporary medical industry to let terminally ill people believe that they can continuously bang their heads against the bulkhead of mortality and somehow break through. There's also a tang of hypocrisy around Douglas' fervency. Douglas is a lifelong smoker, party hound, and self-admitted compulsive sex addict who just this year used his celebrity status to mitigate the sentencing of his adult son for dealing methamphetamine. Google "Catherine Zeta Jones smoking" and you'll come across a gallery of images showing the actor's wife smoking cigarets in the advanced stages of pregnancy.

Hitchens, whose body of work has been both provocative and prodigious, makes no qualms about his own lifelong abuses of the flesh, and that's just one more layer of introspection he adds to his pragmatism about his illness. Yes, the writer is currently enduring the requisite rounds of chemo for the sake of his wife and children, but he's also contemplating the abyss with the same eloquence and realism that he's used to broach such topics as Islamic radicalism, Mother Teresa's messianic adulation, and waterboarding. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, he even evaluates online postings from supposed Christians who say his cancer is God's retribution for the blaspheming he conducted with his now afflicted throat.

Death will always be an inevitable outcome for every living being. It amazes me that at this stage of human development so many of us still cling to the childish fantasies that keep us from making the grand exit with a degree of dignity that reflects our development and learnings as a species.

Stressed to The Nines

2010-09-13T18:58:00.000-07:00

These days, corporations try to appear actively engaged in making the world a better place. But so often their attempts are simply wrong-headed and neglect to take human nature into consideration.

I recently stayed at The Nines, "A Luxury Collection Hotel" in Portland, Oregon. I'm not sure if "luxury collection" means it's one in a collection of hotels or if one collects luxury there, but it's definitely a posh facility, seven or eight stories wrapped around a central atrium, all perched on top of the downtown Macy's in the heart of Pioneer Square. There is, of course, the requisite rooftop bar with outdoor terraces offering sweeping views of the city, along with several trendy restaurants frequented by Portland's most festively tattooed scruffy young things. The rooms are elaborately draped and carpeted, with 42-inch LED TVs, sea foam green velvet sofas, flocked wallpaper and marble bathrooms. And on each night stand is a card that reads:

MAKE A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

Please note that all bedding including the duvet is cleaned prior to every arrival. We will make your bed each day. In an effort to further increase our sustainability practices at The Nines, we have also removed the top sheet of the bed. If you would prefer to have atop sheet during your stay, please contact our guest services...."

It's hard to believe that not having to launder an extra sheet per room is going to make a huge impact as to whether the Greenland Ice Shelf crashes into the sea or not, especially if the hotel has to launder or dry clean the duvet every night instead. Plus, what I quickly discovered is that when a hotel bed has no top sheet or even a light blanket, you only have the heavy down comforter as cover. So I did what I'm sure most other guests do: turn the thermostat down to 60 so the room will be chilly enough that you could hang meat in there and you'll actually need a down comforter. And what does that do but light another match under the cauldron of Global Warming?

It's great that companies like Starwood Hotels and Resorts, which owns and operates The Nines, are thinking about sustainability. But when those practices have no real-world practicality, it's simply greenwashing: the tendency for modern companies to spew the expected earth-friendly rhetoric without implementing anything that's at all likely to make "a world of difference."

And, on a separate note: as a compulsive ironer, I appreciated having a steam iron stored in the bedroom closet of my luxury suite. But could I maybe have an ironing board, too?

The Six Signs That Your Company Is Going Under

2010-09-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

With the economy still in the tank, you can expect lots more businesses to fail. Having worked at ad agencies large and small -- and keep in mind that agencies are the first businesses to reflect the health of the economy and, consequently, to go out of business -- I've seen the signs that the shop is about to be shuttered. So here are some tips on evaluating the health of your employer.

Stage 1: Perks you've taken for granted, like bottled water, suddenly disappear. Better dust off your resume; something's gone seriously wrong.

Stage 2: Your receptionist is suddenly let go. When management decides that visitors, clients and vendors no longer need to be greeted by a friendly face, you'd better update that resume.

Stage 3: They no longer provide free coffee. Start sending out those resumes and network with all your LinkedIn connections, because they've stopped caring about your creature comforts and productivity.

Stage 4: Key management personnel suddenly start jumping ship. The writing's on the wall. Take the office gossip to lunch to find out what he/she knows. But nowhere too fancy -- you've got to start being frugal.

Stage 5: Instead of your usual holiday bonus, you're handed a crisp $100 bill. You're fucked. If you don't get out now, you'll find yourself right in the middle of:

Stage 6: Your office furniture is being repossessed. Nothing says "it's over" like a burly guy in overalls wheeling away your desk.

Cheap Shots

2010-08-31T16:25:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, conservative columnist Debra Saunders slammed President Obama for being photographed during his Martha's Vineyard vacation riding a bicycle while wearing a helmet.

Granted, the pose and the helmet did make him look something of a dork. But imagine the firestorm of public outcry that would have erupted if he were photographed without a helmet -- you'd hear criticism ranging from his obligation to serve as a role model to children all the way to his responsibility of protecting the brain that holds the codes that trigger nuclear attack.

This is a familiar tactic of the GOP, to besmirch the masculinity of a Democratic politician or candidate. It wasn't so long ago that the abhorrent Ann Coulter called former Senator and presidential hopeful John Edwards a "faggot." (This was before the revelation that an affair with an aide had resulted in an illegitimate child.) Coulter, who inexplicably makes morning show TV appearances attired in a cocktail mini as though she were some sort of Beltway hooker, eventually retracted, saying she hadn't meant Edwards was gay, she was just using the word as a schoolyard taunt. Right. This is the same woman who once stated that she found Dick Cheney's crooked corporate raider leer "sexy," so it's obvious that it's power, not sex appeal, that floats her boat.

Oddly, the same people who are so quick to paint Democratic leaders as friends of Dorothy make a practice of branding female leaders like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer as "bitches." What successful women in politics or, for that matter, the business world haven't been recipients of that charge?

Sarah Palin is the casebook pro at this maneuver, sneering at peers who actually read newspapers and don't shoot wolves from pontoon planes. It's like the Republicans are the fat redheaded bullies of the schoolyard calling out rude names at the smart kids, and the Democrats' response is always to just tuck their books under their arms and head for French lab.

It's not like I want to see the President of the United States harpooning whales like Soviet Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (as it turns out, he was only assisting scientists in obtaining skin samples, a fact that conservatives like Saunders omit when comparing the two world leaders). But it would be helpful to his image, and to the political future of our country, if he used his intelligence and charm to rebuke criticism in a way that was more forceful and self-assured. Bullies don't deserve kid glove treatment.

Standing On the Wrong Side of History

2010-08-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

Exactly who does gay marriage harm?

The proponents of California's Proposition 8 have spent at least $40 million defending their perception of marriage, with more than half of that funding originating from out-of-state sources, including the Church of Latter-day Saints -- commonly known as Mormons -- who seem to think that polygamy and child marriage are just swell.

Since one of the most long-standing condemnations of the gay lifestyle has been the perception that gays are wildly promiscuous, shouldn't society as a whole welcome a shift to committed marriages? And at a time when home foreclosures are at their highest in history, shouldn't communities embrace the emergence of solid, generally two-income citizens contributing to their tax bases? And what about all those children orphaned by the endless civil unrest and upheaval in our world -- what would be better for them than to be adoped by two solvent same-sex adults able to provide them with a loving and stable home?

It's a complete fiction to insist on a family model headed by a mother and a father when the reality is that more than 13 million American families are single-parent, with 80% of those headed by a female. (It's even higher in the U.K. and Australia.) Of the supposedly "normal" families I can think of, it's hard to summon up an example of one where the extraction of at least one of those traditional parents wouldn't have resulted in fewer neurotic, ruined adults populating the waiting rooms of America's therapists.

I think the movement to oppose gay marriage really comes down to one simple thing: people who perceive themselves as "haves" love to deny a basic right to the people they perceive as "others." It was the same when pograms annihilated entire villages of Polish Jews in the 19th century, or when Irishmen were denied entry to New York bars at the turn of the 20th century, or when interracial couples were harrassed during the 1960s. Gay marriage is inevitable and affirms our progress, however slow and halting, as a species. Who really wants to stand on the wrong side of history?

Good Grief

2010-08-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday night, a 32-year-old man leapt to his death in full view of the concert audience at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, an affluent suburb south of San Francisco.

I'm sure concertgoers in the ampitheater were shocked and horrified to be witnessing a violent death during what should have been a pleasant summer evening of musical entertainment -- the man's body plummeted to the stage inches from where Irish musician Glen Hansard, of a band called Swell Season, was performing. But this morning KFOG radio reported that the concert venue had deployed grief counselors to work with ticket holders who'd witnessed the tragedy.

A few years ago, an unfortunate accident claimed the life of a young coworker at about the same time a couple of other unrelated deaths occurred within my company, triggering a team of grief counselors to descend on our corporate campus to initiate rounds of group therapy sessions. In the one I attended, a young designer -- oddly, he was 32, the same age as last week's suicide -- struggled to express his feelings to the therapist. "All this death lately, it just makes me feel like nothing's safe," he said. "It makes me feel like the universe is just this random chaos where anything can happen." Gee, you think?

It speaks volumes about the protective bubble most Americans reside within, where occasional exposure to life's grim realities necessitates a flurry of soothing therapies and navel gazing. There are places on this planet where toddlers are rounded up like cattle so their arms can be hacked off with machetes, where bombs go off daily in crowded marketplaces killing babies and old women, where women and girls are gang raped for being of the caste or tribe not currently in power. On last night's news there was a report of an attack on a hotel in Mumbai where dozens of people were murdered by a mob, including, inexplicably, the hotel's shoe shine boy.

Maybe it's because I helplessly watched so many friends in the bloom of youth die horribly protracted, pointless deaths during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that death can come at any time, with no rhyme or reason. Isn't that what life is all about, really? To have a bunch of spoiled Americans whining that a simple reality the rest of the world copes with on a moment-to-moment basis makes them feel threatened and afraid strikes me as the height of arrogance and self-indulgence. I'd even go so far as to say that if we approached death a bit more realistically we'd enact social reforms to ensure the care and comfort of our elderly, and perhaps be less likely to inflict death so cavalierly on the far-flung people of our world.

Tweet Misery

2010-08-19T10:38:00.000-07:00

Imagine how much sooner the Hollywood studio system would have collapsed if stars back in the day had had the option of Tweeting or writing on each other's Facebook walls.

For most of the 20th century it took a barrage of lawyers, publicists and press agents working overtime to keep stars like Errol Flynn and Charlie Chaplin out of the papers or jail, and even then the peccadilloes of these film legends still landed them in constant trouble. But at least there was a mechanism in place to protect movie stars from themselves.

Now celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Courtney Love are only too eager to air their sordid family laundry and minimal grasp of the basics of grammar in a medium that exposes their rants to millions of people in real time.

If Marilyn Monroe had been able to Tweet about her relationships with the Kennedy brothers, her life might have had an entirely different outcome -- or it might have ended even sooner. I can imagine her posting her current mood online the way people do today, but in her case she'd select something like "slutty/suicidal."

Take a look at just a fragment of Ms. Love's Tweets about her ongoing custody battles for Frances Bean, her daughter with rock legend Curt Cobain. It's sad to see a woman cut off from her child (who just turned 18 this week) and trying to rationalize the mess to herself and her indifferent daughter, but is this the forum for such jumbled, personal emotion?

i shouldve hooked up in some loveless marriage to a powerful hedgefund guy then youd be safe, im sorry i didnt. for your sake.i love you.

im done, you arent dumb you know what youve done what youve sold i couldnt shelter you from them i suppose its my fault, im so sorry bean. x

and im sure her dog., everyone else has a fucking agenda , that chantel if i see her shes a goner thats for dammed sure. grosspig≥poisonkids

with that that kid s=mustr ee somne accountability or shes going to believe thier insanity narcissism and lies, one human loves her truly ME

at her most vulnerable and feed her uttter bullshit based ona FORGED forensically proven to be FORGED operating agreement, so well have fun

she a little baby; sheltered to SOME degree, phony cop raids, seeing her mother cuffed for no reason other than i found out and theyGRABHER

The wall that once kept us from seeing that celebrities are as misguided and fallible as we are has been eroded, and in its place is a 24-hour gossip cycle that makes them seem as mundane as the rest of us. It makes me nostalgic for the days when movie magazines told us the stars were different from us, even if we never really believed it.

Chewing the Fat

2010-08-17T11:50:00.000-07:00

When I was a little kid growing up in Maine, I loved reading the full-page advertisements in the Sunday Parade magazine for a diet supplement with the unfortunate brand name of AYDS. Each one was a testimonial -- a time-honored advertising format that's particularly effective when the product you're selling claims transformative properties -- from a formerly overweight man or woman who had lost 100 pounds or more simply by nibbling a chocolate-flavored appetite suppressant. It was wonderfully satisfying to read about people finally overcoming their life-long weight disability, allowing them at last to become the active, attractive person they'd always known was buried under all that blubber.

Of course, in the early '80s, the product underwent a name change due to the emergence of the AIDS pandemic, which could also be counted on for a swift, dramatic weight loss followed by an untimely demise.

Which brings me to the ongoing series of commercials for Jenny Craig. Granted, the weight-loss food system has had its spokesperson problems of late. For one thing, it probably wasn't the wisest choice to pick Kirstie Alley as the "face" of Jenny Craig given her butter addiction.
So when she was replaced by the young actress Sara Rue, I wondered about the career implications of being a performer known primarily as a chunky comedic actor who suddenly drops 50 pounds. Yes, she looks great, and who wants to be fat? But when casting directors are saying "I need a funny, overweight girl for this part" they'll no longer be calling Ms. Rue, who now looks like a million pretty young women clamoring for parts in L.A.

Don't get me wrong, Rue is a likable young woman and at 31 she's already had an enviable career in show business that speaks to her obvious talents. I wish her the best. But when veteran actress Valerie Bertinelli was brought out of semi-retirement by Jenny Craig, the point was to use the product to restore her to the slim television personality we remembered from sitcoms and made-for-TV movies. She promptly lost 40 pounds and revived her career with a lead role on Hot In Cleveland, and that in itself is a great testament to the effectiveness of the product line. But Rue's lifelong weight problem was in a way her personal brand, and now it's completely altered. The challenge will be if her innate talent can bring her the success her quickly identifiable physique once did.

The same goes for the remarkably talented Jennifer Hudson. She's only been on the scene a few years, and we learned to associate her amazing singing voice with her heavy stature. Even her Academy Award-winning performance in Dream Girls was based on her ability to inhabit that character's size and the limitations it imposed. Now that she's slimmed down, she's less identifiable, and somehow more ordinary. That's the risk of adjusting any brand, be it personal or product, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out for both of these talented young performers.

Imagine if Jenny's new spokesman Jason Alexander continues to pare down. Does anyone really want to see a skinny George Costanza?

Cathy Gets Erased At Last

2010-08-12T14:23:00.000-07:00

The news that Cathy comic strip creator Cathy Guisewite is finally putting down her pen after 34 years couldn't have been more welcome.

Though Guisewite's artistic ability never improved an iota in over three decades, when it first appeared in 1976 the strip apparently resonated with the growing population of single women struggling with career and dating. Cathy was a somewhat blearier Mary Tyler Moore, obsessing about her weight, her boss, and her on-again-off-again boyfriend Irving. Formless and somehow indistinct (she had no nose except in profile), she was a more neurotic but less succinct Zippy, who managed to get his point across in only one panel. Cathy is the kind of strip people read for its reassuring sameness, like Marmaduke or Dennis the Menace or The Family Circus, whose maestro Bil Keane has been content to run the same tiresome gags for nearly fifty years. Guisewite's schtick managed to endure for so long (there have been about 30 books of Cathy collections) that eventually she had to succumb to a slowly advancing story arc, finally marrying off the aging single to Irving in 2005 and letting them both settle down with two appropriately politically-correct shelter dogs.

Lots of strips run their course, like Lynn Johnston's far more realistic For Better or For Worse, which started just a few years later than Cathy. Johnston's characters aged naturally, with the children becoming adults and having children of their own, the pets dying, and the parents experiencing mid-life crises. But when she decided to end her long-term endeavor, Johnston did something inexplicably self-indulgent: she started over, zapping the kids back to toddlerhood and turning the couple back into young marrieds. It was a bizarre move, like someone not just paging through their old photo albums but actually reanimating all those old memories. I personally have no interest in revisiting these characters for a second go-round, unless this time she plans to kill them all off in a series of unfortunate accidents.

There are, of course, comic strips that were so consistently well-drawn and finely-conceived that their early demise is still regrettable years later -- or, to use Cathy's trademark catch phrase: Aaaack! I could read Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes all day, even if it focused only on the suicidal snow people that Calvin sacrificed on his enlightened, TV-depriving parents' lawn to embarrass them in front of the whole neighborhood. The character's stasis as a precocious six-year-old could easily have continued for fifty more years because it was so thought-provoking, variant, and entertaining. The panel artwork could be pastorally pretty when Calvin and his stuffed tiger played in their close-knit suburban world, or sweepingly majestic when he explored the far reaches of the galaxy as Spaceman Spiff. Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County was similarly imaginative and intelligent, though far more topical. Both men knew when to close shop, leaving us wanting more, and I'd even venture that the ability to pull the trigger on a long-running cherished project might be more of a male trait.

So I'll give Guisewite props not exactly for knowing when to quit -- she should have folded Cathy's shaky tent a good 15 years ago -- but for choosing to focus on her family and parents at a pivotal time in her life. After decades of wide syndication and marketing tie-ins, I'm sure she can afford it. Perhaps she'll even find time for a drawing lesson or two.

Please Stow Your Anger In An Upright Position

2010-08-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

America has a new folk hero, and his name is Steven Slater.

Anyone who has traveled extensively for business in the last few years can identify with the plight of the JetBlue flight attendant who yesterday "went ballistic," as first reports of the incident claimed. But imagine being responsible for the safety and comfort of 100 self-entitled, ill-mannered slobs and their unruly children, and having a passenger actually call you a "motherfucker" for insisting that he obey Federal Aviation regulations?

On every flight there are always several passengers who insist on getting their enormous bags out of the overhead compartments before the pilot has turned off the seat belt sign. If you're a frequent business traveler sitting in the rear of the plane you've learned to relax and just let them lumber out with their rolling coffin-sized carry-ons. Not long ago I boarded a Denver-bound flight that had originated in Honolulu and found myself sitting next to a hugely obese woman holding a crate of pineapples on what we'll call her lap. "You know," I finally said, "you can buy perfectly good pineapples in any supermarket." You can imagine what her response was.

You can expect Steven Slater's story to get a lot of play because we can all relate to reaching the boiling point on a job and doing something dramatic and perhaps even career-ending -- most of us just don't have an emergency chute at our disposal so we can slide away as an exhilarating punctuation to our take-this-job-and-shove it statement. In Mr. Slater's case he may face federal charges that could result in seven years in prison, but I predict he'll soon be making the rounds of late-night and morning talk shows as something of a media sensation. I can already see him dishing with the girls on The View. Math skills, though, apparently aren't a requirement for flight attendants -- I don't understand what he meant by "there's goes 28 years" when he's currently only 39, unless he practiced for his airborne career by serving peanuts and drinks to his G.I. Joes and Barbies when he was eleven. So far I've only seen video of him doing a smirking perp walk in handcuffs, but if he has any stage presence at all he may have launched an entirely new career in television. I certainly hope so.

If you have a story to share of your own spectacular on-the-job melt-down, please use the Comments section below to post it.

Disappearing Act

2010-08-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

When the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in April, it set in motion a litany of lies: first that the crude oil entering the Gulf of Mexico would have a negligible impact on the ecology, followed by weeks of vastly underestimating the quantity of oil being emitted, unchecked, into the sea. Even the underwater images from BP's control center proved to be doctored. Never mind that the accident, which killed and maimed dozens of workers, happened in the first place because of safety regulations that were ignored and alarms that were dismantled.

Now BP tells us that the more than 200 million gallons of oil have "disappeared." The miles of reddish tarry tendrils that were being tracked from space have miraculously dissolved, they tell us, so now we can go back to worrying about Castro's prediction of nuclear annihilation and the possibility that Sarah Palin will be the next Republican presidential candidate.

The disgraced oil conglomerate's explanation would be risible if it wasn't just flat-out insulting. By this point we should have learned not to believe any magical thinking encouraged by their public relations machine. The reality of the situation is far more dire: unprocessed crude oil, unlike the substances normally released by oil tanker incidents like the Exxon Valdez accident, has an entirely different composition and physical properties than treated crude. So instead of merely dissipating and disappearing, the thick blankets of oil have sunk far below the surface, creating unimaginably vast oxygen-deprived kill zones that will have a much more profound impact on ocean life and the food chain than the floating lakes of oil that coated and killed so much surface life already.

Why are we so willing to accept corporate lies? Because we're so used to hearing them, for one thing. But mainly because ignoring a truth so impactful and long-reaching is so much easier in the short run than confronting the horrific reality.

Money Changes Everything

2010-08-03T16:46:00.000-07:00

It's hard to imagine now, but when Bill and Hillary Clinton were originally installed in Washington on the heels of the first administration in the disastrous Bush dynasty, they crackled with a home-spun authenticity that hadn't been seen since the days of President Carter. They were the original egalitarians, fresh from Arkansas, a state most of us couldn't have picked out on a map, and to prove it their first task was a failed attempt to revamp the health care system. That's probably when they began to realize that the American political system was bigger than both of them.

That was a long time -- and a lot of money -- ago. Despite their extensive and costly legal battles over the years, the Clintons are what most former presidential families find themselves to be if by some thin chance they didn't start out that way: millionaires. So it's been interesting to see how this formerly plebian couple, who were married in 1975 at a friend's home in the unassuming college town of Fayetteville, have handled their daughter Chelsea's wedding in this new-found, to-the-manor-born style. To her own ceremony Hillary claims to have worn a "lace-and-muslin Victorian dress I had found shopping with my mother the night before," while in photos of the event Bill is wearing a spotted tie most definitely not of a designer label. He even spent his wedding night bailing his young brother-in-law out of jail on a DUI charge.

But, as they say, money changes everything. The idealistic, frizzy-haired, post-hippie couple who embarked on the rough road of marriage together 35 years ago sprung for a wedding last weekend that cost a reported $3 million. There was the $11,000 gluten-free wedding cake, Vera Wang gowns for all eleven bridesmaids (and two specially-designed VW gowns for the bride), and this time Hillary didn't settle for a last-minute rumble-sale grab -- she wore an Oscar de la Renta ensemble befitting her new Brahmin status. Bill apparently took his father-of-the-bride role so seriously he went on a crash diet and successfully lost 20 pounds.

So yes, fame and fortune are corrupting, and it's tough to resist the siren call that lures you to the shoals of comfort and entitlement. I'm not sure why, but somehow I still expected the Clintons to set a slightly less ostentatious example to the world, especially at a time of struggle and need for so many. Perhaps I'm still naive; even Sarah Palin, that aw-shucks people's-choice populist from Alaska, has managed to amass a $15 million fortune since she was nominated for the vice presidency just two years ago. Although that doesn't surprise me at all.

On the Avenue

2010-07-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

A "Shouts & Murmurs" parody in the current issue of the New Yorker toys with the idea of how different Mad Men would be if it were set in the present day of Tweets and online marketing tactics.

Of course the brilliance of the AMC television series is how masterfully the era of the early 1960s has been recreated. Right down to the period wristwatches and ash trays brimming with cigaret butts, the show's careful stylization mirrors the look and feel of movies that actually were shot that long ago, like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Billy Wilder's The Apartment, or the film version of the Broadway hit How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Unlike the early-60s advertising-themed sitcom Bewitched, the admen of Mad Men take on real clients like Lucky Strike cigarets, the Volkswagen Beetle, and Kodak. It anchors the work element of the series in a real-world dynamic; we know those products and expect the creatives at Sterling Cooper, or now Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, to apply their marketing expertise in a way that contributes to the success we associate with those winning brands.

What really makes the show work for me, though, is the enigma at its heart: the protagnonist is himself a fabrication no more authentic than a cigaret brand's claim that its smokers would rather fight than switch. Jon Hamm's Don Draper had to fashion himself out of whole cloth before he could create marketing campaigns for Madison Avenue's toughest clients; with an identity stolen from the battlefields of the Korean War he truly is a hollow man, an empty shell down to his core -- the perfect thing to be when you're using smoke and mirrors to get the public to choose one product over another.

Like any series that spans the Sixties, we expect to be awarded glimpses of changing social mores. Peggy Olsen goes from ignored secretary to competent copywriter; Paul Kinsey dates interracially and opposes Southern segregation, and an ad exec named Kurt casually declares his homosexuality, though a main closeted character, Sal Romano, seems to have been written out of the show. I worry that if the series continues much further into the decade, we'll be marched through the usual litany of flower children and Stonewall, but I have faith that the show's creators will do this evolution justice by showing it in context. I just don't want to have to see Don Draper in a Nehru jacket.

If I have any complaint about Mad Men it's that the show isn't sordid enough. People go on at length about what a different world it was, what with all the workplace drinking and casual office affairs, but have they ever worked at an ad agency? It was just a couple of years ago that I worked at a major San Francisco agency where a person pushing a drinks trolley would stop by your desk in the afternoon so that you could order the adult beverage of your choice, and beer coolers stocked with the latest microbrews hummed in every office. I arrived at work one morning to find the producer of a project I was in charge of dancing in the lobby in Kabuki whiteface that turned out to be cocaine, then discovered that $30,000 of post-production budget had gone up the noses of her crew. So if anything, the show could get a little wilder and smuttier.

One last note: I've seen a lot online lately about what a supposedly bad mother Betty Draper is. I give the show's producers kudos for accurately depicting motherhood in that era. After all, this was decades before a child's day was sectioned out into playdate appointments and he or she could be tracked electronically like migrating elk. Back then pregnant women took tranquilizers, smoked cigarets and drank martinis. I'm reminded of my own hugely pregnant mother's reaction when, some time around 1962, I ran screaming into the house with a huge gash torn into my knee. "Oh, stop it," she said, before returning to her soap operas. "You're not going to die." At least she didn't smoke.

Besides, does anyone ever point out that Don Draper isn't exactly Robert Young?

Night Visitors

2010-07-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

How do you encapsulate the concept of something as simple, but ethereal, as a good night's rest? Well, if you're a pharmaceutical giant like Sepracor, Inc., you lock a creative team in a room and have them brainstorm product names that sound peaceful, reassuring, and safe. But when they emerge with a name like Lunesta as their recommendation, you should probably send them back in for another round. It sounds to me like the mad aunt your grandparents locked up in the attic back in the Eisenhower administration.

The commercials miss as badly as the product name, mostly because the drug's effectiveness has been embodied by a ghostly, glowing butterfly that steals into its victims' bedrooms under cover of darkness. First it uses its six spidery legs to loosen the chains of insomia that surround the fitfull sleeper; as they fall to the floor they dissolve into ashy dust. Hey, I just vacuumed in there. Then the little invader flutters to the bed and draws the covers up to the sleeper's chin.

I don't know about you, but I don't find it particularly comforting to have a radioactive holometabolous insect tucking me into my drug-induced coma. In fact, I'm far more likely to have the kind of reaction depicted in this parody:

Moscow On Madison

2010-07-23T16:27:00.000-07:00

I love a high-concept ad campaign. You just don't see it much any more, and to some degree I'd say that's because marketers these days don't have much imagination. And, in an era when economics tend to hinder risk-taking, it's great to see an ad that hinges on a gimmick, and this 30-second spot for DIRECTV almost works. DIRECTV was one of the worst clients of my entire career, completely unwilling to listen to the professional recommendations of its creative agency, so I'm surprised someone talked them into being this entertaining. Perhaps it's just a reflection of how desperate they are now that they've lost a huge part of their market share to Comcast.

In the realm of cable television providers, I tend to think of DIRECTV as way behind the curve, much like Blockbuster Video was five or six years ago -- too late to the table when it came to industry innovations that should have been part of their developmental road map: movie downloads, streaming video and mobile apps. In fact I'm always a little startled when I see a Blockbuster store sitting forlornly in some suburban strip mall. Who still orders home videos this way?

So give DIRECTV props for at least trying to be creative. And for tossing in that special effect at the end -- it's a sort of coda to a commercial that uses, of all things, a Russian mafia billionaire as its spokesperson. And the girl in the middle on the sofa? She should get some sort of award for her perfect portrayal of very jaded, very bored arm candy.

On the Lohan

2010-07-18T21:48:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase the lyrics of a number from The Sound of Music, how do you solve a problem like Lindsay Lohan? She's like that fairly smart girl in high school who insisted on besmirching her reputation by hanging out in the smoking area with the stoners and greasers. But because of the fast-moving times we live in, she's had to step up her skank game to make more of an impact.

First, I refuse to believe that she lives in such an insulated bubble that she was unaware of what she was doing when she attended her sentencing wearing an obscenity shellacked onto her fingernails. Even the most wild-eyed axe murderer knows to dress as innocently as Shirley Temple on your court date -- and if she doesn't, her lawyer will certainly advise her to err on the side of caution with her sartorial choices.

No, I think it's entirely in keeping with the attitude of a young starlet who once told some young men she'd inadvertently kidnapped on the Pacific Coast Highway that "celebrities can get away with anything." She was driving 100 miles an hour in an apparent state of narcotic intoxication at the time. She's attempted and quit rehab three times in the last three years, had half a dozen car accidents including hit-and-runs, didn't bother to attend court-mandated substance abuse meetings, was hours late for the hearings she did make, violated her probation, set off her alcohol-detecting SCRAM anklet numerous times, and conveniently "lost" her passport in Cannes when she was due back in an L.A. court. Her behavior was so unprofessional on the set of the instantly forgettable comedy Georgia Rule that director Garry Marshall gave her a rare dressing down that even impressed film veteran Jane Fonda. No, the nail polish was a direct "fuck you" to the judge and the system, and the real question is why her lawyer didn't choose to protect her from her own arrogance. Perhaps Shawn Chapman Holley had had enough by that point, since she quickly dropped her celebrity client immediately following the sentencing. And Lindsay's reaction at receiving a 90-day sentence -- of which she'll probably serve about two weeks -- was priceless. "Are you kidding me?" she shrieked at her attorney.

You'd think that her mother would rein Lindsay in, if only to protect her only meal ticket (since the second daughter is, as an old friend of mine used to say, no oil painting), but Dina Lohan is a notoriously delusional stage mother from hell, even agreeing to a lucrative reality show that invaded her home without being able to feature the only child of hers anyone might want to watch. The father, too, has made his own cottage industry out of professing love and concern for his daughter, while slipping once again into a circus of tabloid staples -- jail sentences, Larry King Live appearances, and endless, endless twittering.

As I've said before (Train Wrecks), the career arc of the downward-spiraling starlet has gotten shorter and shorter. I've already seen poster art portraying her as Deep Throat porn queen Linda Lovelace in a film that has yet to be made -- and most likely never will be. You have to ask yourself why this young actress, unlike contemporary Natalie Portman or classic star Natalie Wood, who both made smooth transitions from child roles to mature ones -- equates growing up on film with vulgarity and bad taste, and if her jail sentence, which begins this week, will serve as a wake-up call. I'm thinking it won't.

Incoming!

2010-07-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

Now that the Gulf Oil Spill seems to be capped (and pressure tests are now being conducted to determine if the "hole" will stay "plugged," as Malia Obama so cutely requested at the start of this nightmare), we only have to worry about the 184 million gallons of crude sloshing around in the sea. What should a pessimist like me be concerned about next?

Well, I just happened to glance at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Near Earth Object website, which I've written about before. And guess what: on October 30th, an asteroid as large as half a mile in diameter is going to whiz by the earth at a speed of 25.35 kilometers a second, missing (we hope) our planet by about one million miles.

That's a near-collision by celestial standards, and I'm suprised we haven't heard anything about it yet since the event is less than three months away. As a student of human nature, I'll be interested in whether the usual religious panic sets in, as happened in 1997 when the comet Hale-Bopp blazed across the sky and prompted 37 members of the Heaven's Gate cult to commit suicide. The challenge this time will be whether doomsday cultists can come up with a mythology as wild as the last one, which involved mandatory black-and-white Nikes and self-castration.

Crude Awakening

2010-07-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

It would be a monumental understatement to say that the environmental tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico is of Biblical proportions. Quite unlike the Great Flood, which supposedly washed the land clean of sin, the unstaunched flow of oil marks us all as complicit in our relentless reliance on petroleum.

Soon after the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded on April 20th, killing 11 workers and injuring 17, British Petroleum claimed the environmental impact to the Gulf would be "minimal at most." They also claimed the escaping oil was not more than 2,000 gallons a day, which in itself sounds pretty alarming.

If you live long enough, as I have, you'll witness any number of man-made disasters whose consequences are initially downplayed when your gut tells you otherwise: the Agent Orange contamination of our own troops in Viet Nam, the radioactive explosions at Chernoble and Three Mile Island, and even the attack on the World Trade Center, which still claims the lives of emergency and police personnel exposed to asbestos and other carcinogens following the collapse of the towers. And let's not forget the worst industrial tragedy prior to this, the Union Carbide gas disaster that killed at least 15,000 people in India in 1984, and which still contaminates the groundwater millions of people there rely on today. The story is always the same: a PR flack delivers a tight-lipped reassurance that there's nothing to worry about, and then the grim facts uncoil. In the case of the spill -- which isn't a spill at all, since a "spill" would be an incident with a starting point and an end, and, consequently, a point where a realistic clean-up program could begin -- the admitted volume of the release grew each day, until finally BP settled on the figure of 600,000 gallons, or 20,000 barrels, of oil a day -- for 85 days so far. For all we know it may be more.

Though the horrifying event has held its place in the daily news, it still seems more like a massive unpleasantness we'd like to ignore, like a drunk at a party who's vomited on the carpet. I don't pretend to know anything about the subject of environmental disaster, but here are some questions that come to mind -- questions that I haven't heard anyone try to address:

1. What's the real problem with capping the well?
I understand that the opening of the well is on the ocean floor, a mile beneath the surface, and that working under so much water pressure is incredibly difficult, requiring robotic equipment. But I've also heard that the pipe is ruptured beneath the ocean floor, meaning that a cap won't staunch the flow of oil because the source of the problem isn't reachable.

2. What's happening with the methane?
One of the most prominent features of any oil well I've ever seen, at land or sea, is a huge torch of flame burning off the methane and other gaseous by-products that accompany oil extraction. Is the methane from this well simply bubbling up through the water into the atmosphere? How does this contribute to greenhouse gasses, and does it present a danger to sea life and humans living along the Gulf?

3. Isn't this different from a tanker spill?
The Exxon Valdez incident involved processed oil product. This oil is crude, unprocessed raw petroleum, mixed with varying degrees of other substances. How does this affect its dispersement, and our ability to remove it from our beaches and waterways?

4. How does it affect bird migration?
A huge percentage of migrating birds stop in the Gulf and its many bayous and mangrove swamps on their way south each year. How many of them will never return once they stumble unknowingly into the thick gooey morass that awaits them this year? Will this be the "Silent Spring" Rachel Carson warned us about nearly forty years ago?

5. Won't the oil end up pretty much everywhere worldwide?
At the beginning of the disaster, the authorities seemed to feel that the event was local in nature, with oil and tar likely to wash up on the shores of Louisiana alone. So far it's expanded to affect all five Gulf states, and it's still spreading out from its source. Won't the oil find its way around Florida and enter the Gulf Stream, taking it up the Eastern Seaboard and toward Northern Europe?

There are other questions as well that are yet to be answered, questions about the vulnerability of the oceanic life cycle, and whether the oil -- or the highly-toxic dispersant chemicals -- as some people have reported, is somehow making its way into the evaporation cycle and falling as contaminated rain throughout the Southeast. The simple fact is that an incident that would have had sickeningly far-reaching effects after its first week is now nearing the end of its third month, and I can't see photos of volunteers attempting to clean the beaches without feeling how futile it is, since the oil will just keep coming. With so much talk recently about our planet's sustainability having reached a tipping point, it's easy to believe that we may have at last passed that point of no return.

Mad Mel

2010-07-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

In February I wrote a post about the apologist culture we live in, where celebrities like Tiger Woods attempt to repair the damage they've inflicted to their reputations -- and their revenue-generating personal brands -- with rote statements that lack sincerity and reflect no remorse.

Now the latest "leaked" tapes showcasing Mel Gibson's epic racism and misogyny -- which may result in criminal charges stemming from physical assault and death threats against Oksana Grigorieva, his former girlfriend and mother of his eighth child -- take this familiar game to a whole new level. Previously, when Gibson was arrested on a DUI charge and hurled anti-Semitic epithets at his arresting officer, the excuse was made that he was drunk and not in control of his actions. That may be true, but alcohol loosens inhibititions, it doesn't fabricate racism or sexism where none exists.

Anyone who has heard the latest tapes, delivered in that very familiar voice, comes away with a sense of his bullying, self-righteous anger. I know very little about Grigorieva, and wouldn't doubt at all that she may be a manipulative bimbo taking advantage of a tremendously wealthy, fading sex symbol well past his prime. But even Hollywood's most conniving golddigger doesn't deserve to be threatened with being buried in a rose garden, and a supposed family man who has already reared seven children with his, I would imagine, long-suffering wife of 30 years cannot be forgiven for striking the mother of his latest baby while the child is in her arms. I mean, he broke the woman's teeth -- that's no love tap.

The silence from the Gibson family itself is a deafening statement of its own. He has six sons and one daughter, most of whom are young adults, and the fact that none of them has stepped up to defend him -- or to even agree with his accuser -- speaks volumes. It makes you wonder what kind of pressure cooker they've been living in all these years, and what price they've paid for their silence.

My prediction is that this episode isn't over by any means. Gibson is obviously too much of a hot-headed, pompous jerk, so accustomed to the special treatment reserved for the ultra elite, to let his ego back down. Who else wouldn't concern himself, in this techological age, with the likelihood that his rants would be recorded and released on television and the Internet? No, this is headed for a blow-out of O.J. Simpson/Phil Spector proportions. And isn't the public hungry for a new crime trial of the new century?

The news that the William Morris Agency has dropped Gibson as a client is laughable; he needs no representation. One of the richest men in Hollywood due to his decades as an A-list performer, along with an extensive Southern California real estate investment strategy, plus the hundreds of millions of dollars his The Passion of the Christ earned alone, he can pretty much initiate any pet project he pleases. The question is whether he'll ever be able to fill a theater again.

7/16/10 UPDATE:
Robyn Gibson has issued a statement saying that in their 28 years of marriage, her husband never subjected her or their seven children to physical violence. The terseness and careful wording of this announcement, along with its very late-in-the-game appearance, has lawyer-prompted damage control written all over it; it seems to leave the door open for eventual revelations of emotional abuse. And those seven kids, most of whom are young adults? Still not a peep of support or condemnation.

This Masquerade

2010-07-06T16:46:00.000-07:00

The rock music landscape is littered with the bones of lives cut short and massive potential unreached. One of the saddest is that of singer Karen Carpenter, who died at 32 in 1983 of a heart attack resulting from years of anorexia nervosa.

The plight of this lost superstar has become somewhat relevant again after all these years because of a new biography called Little Girl Blue by Randy L. Schmidt. I haven't read it yet but I wonder if there is any new ore to be mined from this particular patch of pop history: we know about the monstrous mother, the controlling brother, the brief marriage, and the pain and longing that are so evident throughout her substantial song book. The bio includes a foreward by Karen's close friend Dionne Warwick, so it seems somewhat authorized, though I'm sure her brother had no part in it.

Karen's story is particularly sad because she exhibited such tremendous raw talent right from the start, and could have had a long and luminous career. A tom-boyish drummer reluctant to be the focus of attention, she was thrust in front of her drum set and instantly revealed herself to be a natural song stylist, putting her unmistakable stamp on every song she touched, though she never had a single singing lesson. For nearly all of her career she was the victim of her brother Richard's peculiar artistry; he'd always been the golden musician in the family who got all the accolades and awards. Believing that the multiple-track overlay recording style he'd devised was the defining Carpenters sound, he rarely allowed her to showcase her full, bass vocals without piling on the orchestrations and echo chamber effects. Even some of her best work is marred by gerunds with dropped "g's," as though he couldn't decide if he was marketing a country star like Dolly Parton. By the end of their partnership she was reduced to providing the vocals for disco-themed numbers and inexcusable dreck like Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. Two of her covers of ballads, however, are relatively untampered-with: Desperado and Don't Cry for Me Argentina, where the purity of her voice is used to its full advantage.

When Karen finally escaped her brother's influence it was only because she was in New York fighting the condition for which she would soon become the poster child. She made one solo album that wasn't released until many years after her death, but the song choices are questionable and her talent really doesn't come through on most of the cuts.

She worked with many other industry veterans, but because of the duo's squeaky clean image, they tended to be linked with fossils like Andy Williams and Bing Crosby. There remains one stunning artifact, though: a duet between Karen and jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald from a 1980 television special.

You can see how skeletally thin Karen is in this clip, yet her voice if anything is richer and more beautifully modulated; Ella was 63 and looks as though she's incapable of standing up (her legs would eventually be amputated), but she was still able to tap into that amazing voice, and would live until 1996 when her diabetes finally got the better of her. She'd had a bumpy life as well, an illegitimate child who'd been abused by her stepfather, found herself homeless and worked as a "lookout" in a whore house. Once she'd finally made a name for herself, Ella spent decades bouncing from one record label to another, a victim of her own incomparable talent, which no one seemed able to market appropriately. But seeing these two natural talents from such different musical eras blend their unique instruments together is a wonderful thing. It's too bad that they were both so poorly managed during their careers.

Monkeying Around

2010-07-04T19:39:00.000-07:00

One of the most commonly shared fears is that of Coulrophobia, the terror of clowns. It's not difficult to see why so many people share this phobia: the hideously distorted features, the makeup that makes human teeth look jaundiced, the way we're thrust into their nightmarish faces as small children. I once was invited to the usually marvelously innovative Cirque du Soleil and was horrified to learn the entire evening's theme involved supposedly darling French Canadian clowns falling through holes and mopping up slowly diminishing circles of light. I was nauseous for days.

There's apparently no name for a much worse phobia I've had since infancy: the fear of animals dressed as people. It's not so much a fear as a deep-seated, swooning revulsion, and it first became evident because of a commercial that used to run in the early 60s and which, upon viewing again this week thanks to my cruelly unempathetic brother, who sent me an email containing a Youtube link with the subject line "Sweet Dreams," still has the ability to make me shudder. My parents used to have to peel me off the ceiling for the unspeakable terror it generated in me.

It's an ad for Red Rose Tea, a brand that still exists and which now allows people to collect small tokens in animal shapes. The commercial ran just prior to the Ed Sullivan variety hour on Sunday nights, and it shows a jazz band of chimpanzees -- in clothes -- playing assorted instruments while dancing and slapping themselves to an overlay of voices screaming the brand name. Aside from still horrifying me it also strikes me now as more than a bit racist; jazz musicians depicted as out-of-control apes and baffoons.

I don't know why a tea of all products would choose this line of promotion; perhaps they were just trying to climb onto the emerging rock group bandwagon and make their product more current. I've embedded the spot below. Watch it yourself and see if it doesn't invoke epilepsy.

It's assumed that any animal in human clothing is by definition adorable. Cats in clothes don't seem to bother me (though it bothers them), but dogs dressed as people certainly do. There's a series of film shorts that was popular in the 1940s that shows various breeds of dogs wearing suits and dresses in human situations and it has nearly the effect that clothed monkeys do. My take on why people put apes in clothes is that it's utilitarian. Monkeys are a bit too much like us but somehow not quite enough; no one wants to be confronted by their engorged nether regions, and clothing would have to inhibit their constant masturbation and feces-flinging. But a pinafore on an ape is still window dressing on a wild animal, and we should remember that woman in New Jersey who now has no face or eyes or hands because she consorted with a monkey who was allowed to eat lobster and wear jeans.

Put a Lid On It

2010-06-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

I'm always a little relieved when some fad sweeps through the culture without requiring my involvement. I might not be able to avoid the ripples that radiate in my direction, but I don't have the need or desire to get wet. It's a bit like the Macarena craze of the mid-90s; you knew it was out there somewhere but you didn't have to do a thing about it.

The Twilight saga is one such fad. With the current release of the third film in the series, it's pretty clear the latest incarnation of the stalwart vampire genre is holding on strong. But really, it's such an anemic franchise, if you'll forgive the pun, so chaste and yearning and unconsummated, that it's hard to believe the legions of Twitwards, as one blogger calls them, still find it so enthralling, especially after such prolonged teasing and foreplay. The phenomenon is comparable to the fervor ignited by generations of androgynous pop stars, from Davy Jones to David Cassidy to Justin Bieber -- they function as idols of worship for tweens because their boyish appeal is so non-threatening. And middle-aged wives aren't being unfaithful to their husbands if they're supporting an entertainment figure who looks like he should be mowing the lawn. The only difference is that the current craze reflects the particular aesthetic of our day: the latest round of unobtainable vampires and werewolves have abs you could crack walnuts on.

I'm old enough to remember a vampire craze that now seems largely forgotten. It was a daytime occult soap opera called Dark Shadows, and its very unlikely super star was a former stage actor from Canada named Jonathan Frid, already well into his 40s at the start of the show's run in 1966. The premise involved an 18th-century vampire named Barnabas Collins who appears at the spooky seaside family estate of his extended cousins and stirs up an ongoing supernatural saga. Like the current vampire franchise it involved the search for a lost love, the loneliness of immortality, and the quest for normalcy. My best friend and I would run home from Catholic school to catch the show every week day, which, now that I think about it, may have constituted a form of blasphemy to the dour Sisters of St. Joseph who ruled us with an iron, knuckle-cracking yard stick.

We loved the show because it was set in Maine, where we lived in a small town, and because it served up a never-ending parade of werewolves, ghosts and ghouls. The series contained enough time travel and parallel universes to rival Lost, and the production values were so clumsy that you often glimpsed a technician walking through a crypt or a boom microphone dangling above Barnabas' coffin. Still, many performers who appeared on Dark Shadows went on to far greater success, such as Kate Jackson, who got her start on the program.

Yet the show became so popular that Frid became a cultural icon. His haggard, not-very-handsome face, with its trademark five-pointed bangs (decades before Bart Simpson debuted his own pointy 'do) looked out from dozens of magazines each week for years. There were even full-length feature films to syphon off more lucre from a very willing public.

The unique conundrum of the vampire has been an enduring entertainment platform for a century now. I think that's because a story about being different will always have an audience, especially for adolescents struggling with the universal truths of growing up. For Jonathan Frid the full flush of fame eventually faded and he found himself typecast as a fanged night wanderer with a wolf's head walking stick. But ever the trouper, at 85 he still makes personal appearances and receives a steady flow of fan mail that long ago ebbed into something closer to a trickle.
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Necropolis Now

2010-06-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

Just south of San Francisco there's a town where the dead far outnumber the living. It's called Colma, and it's a necropolis -- isn't it great that such an archaic word can have a modern application? -- of about 1,600 people and more than 1.5 million corpses.

There are at least 18 cemeteries in Colma, and they serve virtually every denomination. There's a Greek Orthodox cemetery, several Chinese cemeteries, a Jewish cemetery, a Korean cemetery, and several military cemeteries where the lines of slim white markers march off endlessly into the distance. But to me the most interesting graveyard in Colma isn't for people at all. Butted up against a crowded Chinese cemetery, it's called Pet's Rest (the copywriter in me would prefer Pets' Rest), and it's reserved exclusively for animals who are lovingly immortalized by their owners.

I find this type of graveyard interesting because of the complex span of human emotions it showcases. First of all, a tombstone is a challenging messaging vehicle. It has to communicate the significance of the person (or pet) who lies beneath, especially since everyone and everything eventually dies. It has to approximate some sense of loss and longing. And, usually, it gives testimony to the mourner's religious beliefs -- most often the hope that, through the benevolence of whatever belief system, the loved one and the one left behind will one day be reunited.

It's both charming and a little frightening that so many people not only insist on believing in an afterlife, but also shape that belief to include the elements that give them added comfort. Like, for example, the hope that they will one day be reunited with their bunnies. I have no doubt at all that Buttercup and Nutmeg were exceptional rabbits; in fact, Buttercup managed to create an indelible impact on the Miles family in just two years. That's one impressive bunny rabbit.

But it's also fascinating that humans are not only able to maintain their religious faith, but somehow manage to project it onto their pets. Was Sheebah actually Jewish? I can't help seeing a rather intellectual house cat with a yarmelke and side curls. And am I wrong, or don't most Jews not believe in the concept of Heaven? Again, this cat must have been truly exceptional for the Schers to have bent the rules for her. But they thought enough of her to purchase and inscribe a large and expensive granite memorial, etched with not one but two Stars of David. Perhaps the fact that Sheebah went to her reward on Yom Kippur was enough to convince them of her orthodox status.

Now, as a long-time advertising marketer, I'm a big believer in customer service, which usually, whether you're an IT consultant or an insurance salesman, consists of simply protecting the customer from himself. Stone is a pretty unforgiving medium, so I would think that avoiding mistakes would be a huge part of the service stone masons and funeral memorial personnel provide. That's why I'm struggling with how this stone ever saw the light of day, since of course that "your" should be "you're." Poor little Sunshine Reimonenq, destined to an eternity of well-meaning but inexpertly applied homage.

These memorials can be incredibly evocative, though. Who wouldn't want to have known Stoney, who probably tripped over his own ears and had a deafening bark? I want to know what he did that was particularly funny. For 16 years he obviously brought a lot of quality to the lives of his family, who thought so much of him they didn't even bother to include their own names in his permanent eulogy. And the paw print design motif seems especially appropriate for this particular dog. You look at this stone and you feel the family's pain at Stoney's loss, and maybe begin to understand why they hope to see him again in the afterlife.

Pet's Rest is full of other hints about the legacy of these great, fondly remembered pets. It's impossible to tell if Puddles was a dog or a cat or a wombat, but he plied his trade with his owners for seven whole years. The orange placed on his grave suggests his owners were Chinese or Thai (I checked to make sure there wasn't an orange tree on the grounds), and when you consider that he's been dead and gone for 26 years it makes you wonder about the devotion he inspired. I imagine an elderly Chinese man slipping on his windbreaker and calling out to his wife, "Honey, I'm just going to run down and put an orange on Puddles' grave." That must have been one fine wombat.

It's hard enough to imagine what the alien civilizations who eventually come across the smoking ruins of our world will think about our endless obsession with eternity. But perhaps when they see the devotion and care we gave to the animals that gave us warmth and comfort, they'll consider us in a slightly more positive light than as the creatures who so stupidly destroyed their own planet.

Please Don't Squeeze the Indelicate Metaphor

2010-06-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

Creating advertising for certain intimate products isn't easy. You want to communicate the key benefits of your client's offering that can't be matched by the competition and, generally, you don't want to veer into oversharing or unpleasantness. So you focus on areas like dependability, or greater absorption, or enjoyably pleasant scents, or supreme softness. One of the most long-running and successful campaigns, Charmin bathroom tissue, carefully walked this line for decades. The spots ran from 1964 to 1985 and cast a familiar character actor named Dick Wilson as a slightly high-strung grocery manager named George Whipple. In over 500 spots, Mr. Whipple, as he was known, politely admonished customers to refrain from squeezing the Charmin. But the product was so soft and inviting that he usually couldn't hold back from squeezing it himself, much to his embarrassment. That itself was a testament to the product's quality.

During his heyday Wilson worked only 12 days a year filming the spots, netting $300,000 annually. The commercials were so successful, and became such a part of the advertising landscape, that the phrase "Please don't squeeze the Charmin" was forged as part of the American lexicon, and in the late '70s surveys placed the brand spokesman third as the most recognized man in the country (number one was Jimmy Carter).

A brand pedigree like this might explain why I so despise the current crop of Charmin ads. They depict a family of supposedly adorable animated bears, and certain trees in their forest apparently serve as ursine latrines, since their branches function as toilet paper dispensers. It's like the entire concept hinges on the rhetorical question, "Does a bear shit in the woods?" Apparently they do, and they wipe their bottoms with what was once America's brand of choice. There's even a new spot that focuses on a shameful bruin elimination problem that's only now coming to light: the issue of toilet tissue that "leaves behind" pieces of the paper in baby bear's fur. A narrator playfully scolds that, "you'll never pass inspection that way," making me wonder exactly who is in charge of inspecting America's rear end for foreign materials. Mr. Whipple would be passed out face-first in the persimmons from horror.

Charmin's advertising legacy was so established in the firmament of 20th century successes alongside indelible characters like Mr. Clean and Josephine the Plumber that it's a sacrilege to bring their marketing efforts to the level of anal detritus, however cute the bears are. And let's not even consider the prospect of 600-pound mammals defecating in the forest and what products might need to be called into play to tidy up. Obviously Mr. Whipple couldn't have gone on squeezing the Charmin forever -- the company brought him back briefly in 1999, and Wilson died in 2007 at the age of 91 -- but a little brainstorming might have come up with a more appropriate update to the company's long-term messaging strategy.

Last Acts

2010-06-15T22:59:00.000-07:00

The resurgence of Betty White's career is satisfying to witness. But the truth is she never stopped working or faded away. She's been a continuous presence on television since its inception, making her debut in 1949, and on radio long before that. You can watch her as a young woman in her own series Life With Elizabeth beginning in 1952, frozen forever at age 30 in the cinched dresses of the period, then chart her progress through the decade to a surprising appearance as a U.S. Senator in 1962's Advise & Consent, with a pit stop on Password, where she married the host. Then come the iconic comedic characters, the man-hungry Happy Homemaker Sue Ann Nivens, followed by her polar opposite, the dizzy simpleton Rose Nylund. and when she's not on TV, she's making films. I still remember watching her feed cows to the giant alligator in Lake Placid when I saw it in the theatre (don't ask) and how the audience gasped when she called the sheriff "Fuck Meat." It's around that time that her crusty, self-deprecating humor really blossomed and bloomed, but she's continued to test her mettle in television series like Ally McBeal and Boston Legal, right up to her recent Facebook-fueled Saturday Night Live guest host gig. And tomorrow she launches yet another series, with the let's-hope-it's-better-than-it-looks TV Land Network premier of Hot In Cleveland.

With so much exposure, I hope that she doesn't degrade her brand -- because face it, Betty White's career right now is at a defining apex that it took 70 years to reach -- the way another enjoyable actress did about 25 years ago. After a long and distinguished career as a character actress on stage and film, and even as a screenwriter, Ruth Gordon came into her own in a similar way, already well into her 60s. Riding the success of Rosemary's Baby, Harold & Maude and a few other notable screen credits, she became a hot commodity. Soon everywhere you looked she was twinkling and mugging her dried apple doll pixie face across the screen, playing everything from Carlton the Doorman's mother on Rhoda to making weakly-conceived guest appearances on Newhart, Taxi, and The Love Boat. Her characters were always eccentric and manic but ultimately wise from their years of hardscrabble living; there was always a message to impart before she left you too soon, much the way her most memorable character did when she took the poison tablets, on Maude's 80th birthday.

Betty White is nearly 89, but I hope she has many more years of triumph and success. Unlike Ms. Gordon and some others, hers might be an image so familiar and edgy and likable that it's impervious to the tarnish of overexposure. We'll see.

Let's Build Something Together

2010-06-10T15:58:00.000-07:00

In the brand training classes that I conduct for recent hires at my company, I talk about how the best brands are aspirational. The example I've been using is Lowe's, though there are many others that manage to embody a company's unique brand personality while speaking to the bond they promise to make with the customer. In the case of Lowe's I always tell the class somewhat dramatically that, as a long-time copywriter, their tagline practically brings tears to my eyes. That's because it not only manages to reference their brand purpose (providing you with the tools, products and guidance to create something that will improve your home) but it speaks to the ongoing relationship they hope to forge with their satisfied customer. And they manage to accomplish all that with just four fairly simple words -- something that's not at all easy to do.

Another beautifully-worded brand tagline is New York Life's. It's crafted to speak to the specific nature of insurance, so the messaging is slightly more oblique -- "the company you keep" could refer to your family and its protection, or even as a slight admonishment to develop relationships with vendors or carriers that are above-board and trustworthy. And, more directly, it's a testament to the enduring customer satisfaction they'll deliver -- the service they'll bring you will make you so brand-loyal that you'll never stray to another provider. Again, all this is accomplished with just four short, punchy words.

Sometimes, though, an errant punctuation mark can derail the effectiveness -- and innate beauty -- of an entire brand promise. Take, for example, Craftsman tools. Craftsman has been wildly promiscuous when it comes to taglines, having tried on and discarded a number of them, sort of like Julia Roberts' Pretty Woman gone wild in a dress shop with Richard Gere's Titanium Card. As recently as 2007 they announced that their tagline was "There's a Craftsman in all of us," which, while being somewhat aspirational in terms of reassuring the public at large that we're all capable of being handy around the house, becomes vaguely obscene when interpreted another way. That may be why it recently changed to "Trust. In your hands." Again, four carefully-chosen words. While it definitely speaks to the integrity of the tool you're depending on to accomplish the task at hand, the double meaning that successful taglines depend on for maximum impact has been unnecessarily eliminated. I'm hugely bothered by that first period. "Trust in your hands" would still reference the quality of their products, but the line would then also serve as a prompt to believe in your own ability to become a craftsman. It brings tears to my eyes, alright, but not in a good way.

The Balcony Is Empty

2010-06-07T11:08:00.000-07:00

After last Sunday's mysterious apparition of a fully-frocked priest performing what looked like a Mass on a neighboring apartment balcony, I promised to check this week to see if it was a weekly ritual. Well, unless it took place early in the morning -- I stayed late at a friend's birthday party the night before and didn't get up until 10 -- there was no ceremony this weekend. The balcony still contained no pulpit and no hanging incense censer, though there are still some wooden church pews out there.

Perhaps the priest only ventures out on warm Sundays, like one of those figures that emerges from the little doors in a cuckoo clock when the atmospheric conditions are right. I prefer to think that he doesn't live there at all, but had been summoned to perform a one-time ritual. Perhaps the walls had started to seep blood or bulge with the trapped souls of disco-era Hustle dancers, or the building itself had been constructed over an ancient Mewok burial ground, and the priest had been contracted by the Vatican to perform a one-time exorcism -- and clean up the pea soup.

Horny Christian Singles Want To Date You

2010-06-04T15:38:00.000-07:00

It suprises me that this late in the game 85% of Internet traffic still consists of spam email. I emptied the bulk folder of my Yahoo! account about three days ago but currently it contains more than 330 of them.

Many of these emails are fairly innocuous solicitations for printer toner, insurance, car loans, credit cards, stock purchases (including, somewhat strangely in light of the environmental health of the Gulf of Mexico, crude oil trading), used cars, and online education, along with various products from pet food to frozen burritos. Then there are the inevitable politically-oriented ones ("Don't Vote for Mini-Meg!" reads one subject line), which always increase in number as we approach a primary election. My favorite is one I've gotten multiple times, its subject line announcing "This Is Why You're Fat!" I haven't clicked on it to find out the answer. Then there are multitudes of penis enlargement offers, along with enticements from the naughty above-mentioned Christians and their fellow Asian Mail Order Brides, Swinging Singles, and Sexy Housewives.

Probably what bothers me most about spam, aside from having to delete it or worry about the malicious codes they may contain in terms of viruses, worms and spyware, is that it violates the primary directive of modern marketing: these efforts are not targeted to consumers likely to purchase their wares. I don't have a pet, need more insurance, or eat frozen burritos. And I wouldn't touch a sexy Christian with a ten-foot pole, let alone with a medically-enhanced penis. The thinking, if you can call it that, behind these massive email blasts is that the medium is so cheap to use it allows you to carpet-bomb the Internet, ensuring a profit from the handful of people likely to respond to your promotion. And, of course, you should never send a marketing promotion to someone who hasn't chosen to "opt in" to your messaging.

Laws have been put into place that come down hard on spammers whose emails originate in the United States and certain other countries -- they can be fined $1,000 for every instance. Unfortunately, spammers operate out of unregulated countries like Brazil and Sri Lanka, and little can be done to curtail the tide.

But it's amazing that even the foreign bank account inheritance scam is still in operation -- I get about five a week. Is there anybody in the world still naive enough to transmit funds to Nigeria?

Yonda Lies The Castle of My Fodda

2010-06-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

In his recent New Yorker review of the Jake Gyllenhaal epic Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, film critic David Denby decried the application of what he called "Oxford English" to films depicting the ancient world.

I actually have more of a problem with the trend of video games being translated into films -- it used to be the other way around until the wildly successful Lara Croft franchise -- than with filmmakers finding a unified voice for their ancient or mythological characters. There's always going to be a lack of dimension in a universe built out of an electronic game; by definition the characters start out flattened and dull and struggle to take form within the medium of film. But perhaps that's meaningless to an audience willing to shell out ten bucks for any extension of a game that's become an integral part of their lives. I don't know -- I stopped playing video games when Millipede disappeared from bars.

But since the introduction of Talkies in the late 1920s, historical pictures have supplied their ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians with crisp, theatrically British accents. At least it gives us all a neutral platform from which to absorb the story. Imagine, for example, if the gladiators in the Coliseum spoke in some mishmash of modern-day Italian: "I'm-a gonna get you with-a my sword, you!"

Worse still would be to have the actors state their lines in flat American tones or regional dialects. That actually happened in one very notable film that will forever live in infamy, the excruciatingly bad Tony Curtis vehicle from 1952, Son of Ali Baba. Rounding a bend in the road in Crusades-era Persia, the former Bernie Schwartz cried out in his unmistakably Bronx intonation, "Yonda lies the castle of my fodda!" Somehow he wasn't laughed off the screen. He even got the girl -- Janet Leigh -- and managed to remain married to her for eleven whole years.

The Priest on the Balcony

2010-05-31T11:26:00.000-07:00

Every neighborhood has its mysteries. There's always the house with all the late-night traffic that might be a drug den or a bordello. The bungalow with the tattered curtains and a warning sign to solicitors. The apartment where the poodle never stops barking. Even in the small New England town where I grew up, we had strange village characters, like the woman we called the Duck Lady, who would stop every five steps on her nightly walk to check the bottom of her feet for dog poo.

My own neighborhood, high above San Francisco, is a mix of expensive single-family homes and jumbles of apartment buildings crowding the steep hillsides. There are families, singles, young people and old, straight and gay. It's relatively quiet, except when the fog sweeps over Twin Peaks and the win rattles in the metal chimneys, the way it's doing right now, at noon on Memorial Day.

Balconies and terraces are an integral part of this vertical living; people hang their bicycles outside because their apartments are so small, or work out on them for the fresh air. There are barbecues and elaborate plantings, and children playing games in what passes for their "yard." So I was a little taken aback yesterday morning when I happened to glance out my bedroom window to a building across the street and saw what appeared to be a priest, dressed in a black cassock, saying Mass.

At first I thought it was some sort of residual Catholic vision. The street is very wide, with two lanes on my side and a steep central median thick with evergreen trees and jade, and a narrow parking lot on the other side. It took the zoom feature of my camera to get a closer inspection, which indicated a balding man in his 30s or 40s, with an actual pulpit mounted with a cross, going through the motions of the service. There was no one else in evidence, but I did notice there was what appeared to be a church pew on his balcony as well.

I have no explanation for this. Could he be a priest in training practicing for his audition with the Monsignor? Or an excommunicated one who can't let go of the Sunday morning ritual? Or is there some subset of sexual fetishes that involves priest drag? I may never know. But I'll be watching next Sunday to see if he's there again...and hopefully he won't be incorporating any altar boys into his act.

The Mystery of the Tennis Ball and the Walker

2010-05-24T15:46:00.000-07:00

You've seen them shuffling along hospital corridors and waiting in line at the drug store. Bent, elderly people leaning heavily on their walkers. And usually, for some mysterious reason, those walkers are affixed with slit, lime-green tennis balls.

Which would lead one to assume there's something inherently flawed about the design of the walker as we know it. If they work better or are somehow safer with tennis balls jammed on their ends, why don't their manufacturers just make them with tennis ball-like fixtures at the bottoms?

Apparently it's more complicated than that. Most walkers are made with rubber grips on the back legs, making them less likely to slip on slick surfaces. But their users find them too sticky, so elderly people -- or, I'm guessing from experience, their long-suffering middle-aged children -- add the butchered tennis balls to make them slide more easily on surfaces like linoleum and tile.

So my next question was: if walkers require this adjustment and the manufacturers of walkers aren't taking the cue to construct them differently, or at least provide features that can be swapped out to address different types of terrain, why isn't some enterprising entrepreneur stepping up to fill this marketing niche? I needn't have worried.

The Internet is alive with mutilated tennis balls just waiting to help grandma get to that quilting bee without breaking a hip. Walmart, for example, carries a product called the Drive Medical Deluxe Walker Rear Tennis Ball Glide, a set of two for just $37. But there are loads of other choices, some even displaying jubilant laughing faces because, after all, what's more fun-filled than being 80 years old and trying to maneuver yourself down a crowded city sidewalk propped up by some metal tubing and a couple of fuzzy guffawing lime-green orbs?

So, here we have a neat little case study of a product on the market that requires adaptation, and a seemingly endless number of manufacturers that have moved in to fill an obvious marketing need. I just have one more question: why do they still have to look like tennis balls?

The Underwhelming World of Disney

2010-05-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I worked at a small ad agency headquartered in Denver, but with creative offices here in San Francisco. Walt Disney World Resorts was one of our clients, and the challenge I faced as creative director was injecting their promotions with a level of excitement that matched the ravenous appetite for anything Disney that their executives seemed to think the public possessed.

One campaign, for example, invited visitors to vie for a chance to spend a night in Cinderella's castle. I struggled to see the appeal of this offer, or to put a spin on it attractive enough to get people to enter the contest. I could only imagine some poor soul lying awake in a sleeping bag behind the false facades and wallboard of the prop throneroom or mead hall, listening to the rustlings of mice most definitely not of the Mickey variety.

This all came to mind last night when I saw a commercial for this season's Disney promotion "Summer Nightastic!" It left me with a familiar sense of what a friend of mine used to call de ja view -- the feeling that you'd seen basically the same marketing campaign before, with little renewed effort. Nightastic -- really? That's the best the internal creative minds at Disney -- so notoriously hard to please when you're an agency hired to work with them -- could come up with? Here's how the program is described in the company's press release:

After the sun goes down, our Walt Disney World parks will light up the night with 'Summer Nightastic!'

That's pretty much what you can expect just about any night at any Disney venue: the Main Street Electrical Parade, the floats, the bobble-headed characters concealing sweaty, disillusioned actors, the anemic fireworks pulsing overhead.

You'd expect more from a company with a legacy as long and established as Disney, especially since their media arm still produces compelling entertainment content like the animated film How to Train Your Dragon.

Personally, I've never understood the appeal of the Disney theme parks, and it's not just because my friends and I were once escorted out of a tunnel beneath Anaheim's Disneyland Hotel in 1980 for smoking a joint -- early victims of video camera surveillance. In a world where even the average shopping mall is a complex blend of visual stimulation and artificial environments, I don't see the impact of a phony main street and year-round Christmas lighting. Yet I still know adults who love nothing more than a day with Goofy and Mickey -- perhaps just an attempt at reviving a happy childhood memory. To me the whole thing seems wheezy and hopelessly dated, a wholesome but impossibly bland source of distraction parents force on their children to offset the more frightening influences of modern life.

It may also be the unique nature of the theme park business that limits the robustness of the campaigns they can support. I also once worked on the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park business in an effort to increase summer membership. The challenge was that, with any theme park, membership is limited to the geographic area -- approximately a 50-mile radius -- surrounding the venue. It's a simple equation of how many people or families within driving distance are likely to attend often enough to make a membership cost-effective. Universal Studios Hollywood membership isn't cheap -- at the time of the campaign, about ten years ago, it was about $49 a person -- so I proposed cutting at least $5 off to drive up sales. The Universal executives shaved down the offer again and again, until we finally launched -- wait for it -- Free Lanyard Day. Yes, they ended up giving away those shoelace-like strings conventioneers wear around their necks to hold their badges. I tried to convince the powers that be at Universal that the target audience of lower-middle-class Hispanic families from East L.A. didn't even know what a lanyard was, let alone want one, but my cries fell on deaf ears. And so another theme park marketing effort bit the dust.

I doubt very much I'll be visiting any Disney parks this summer. But I certainly hope that, for those that do, their experience is totally Nightastic.

Pecking Order

2010-05-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

If there's one film that manages to pry into our psycho-sexual fears and stay wedged there, it's Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Social critic Camille Paglia was so intrigued by the film's subtext she wrote a scene-by-scene analysis of the movie over ten years ago, so any observations I can make will probably pale in comparison with her astute and scholarly decree.

On the surface, the film's impact relies on its conceptual conceit of a normally benign denizen of nature -- the birds of the air -- suddenly turning on mankind. While that's a surprising and formidable source of terror, the complex interplay of sexually-charged elements between the human characters is what's really unsettling.

The action takes place over just one weekend, so the events seem to be unspooling in something like real time. Tippi Hedren's spoiled heiress Melanie Daniels never even has a chance to change out of her sea foam green Chanel suit. Essentially, after a flirtatious encounter in a San Francisco pet shop (one that I actually used to frequent for cat food until its recent demise) Hedren's character purchases two love birds and drives them up to Rod Taylor's ranch in Bodega Bay, as a kind of prank. She's supposed to be a smug socialite, given to nude drunken escapades in Roman fountains, so this kind of caper is in keeping with her Paris Hiltonesque persona. Her arrival in the small fishing village with the pet birds in a cage seems to have angered the avian gods, perhaps because she dared besmirch true love by carelessly gifting love birds. Birds of all types start misbehaving, and she and Taylor's attraction grows against the backdrop of increasingly ferocious attacks.

Forget the pecking and dive-bombing sea gulls and ravens. The film's real perversity lies in Taylor's relationship with all the women in his life. Acting veteran Jessica Tandy, her patrician accent sorely out of place in rural Northern California, plays his needy, fearful widowed mother, threatened by the appearance of the cool blonde Hedren. Then there's his ex-girlfriend, the school teacher Annie Hayworth, played with a sultry resignation by Suzanne Pleshette, who ends up sharing her cottage with her far more sophisticated rival -- and getting pecked to death in her own front yard. And Veronica Cartwright, who would go on to scream-queen fame in such epics as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien, and The Witches of Eastwick, plays his little sister Cathy. There's more than a vague incestuous vibe between Taylor and his mother, who seems a bit too young, and his sister, who seems more like his daughter. It's these four females who are plucking and pulling at him, and though the film was based on a novella by Daphne du Maurier with the same title, I wonder if, in naming the film, the British Hitchcock wasn't making a reference to the derisive Cockney term for women -- birds.

My favorite scene is when Tandy, terrified by the latest fatal bird attack on a neighboring farmer, urges Hedren to go to the school to collect her daughter. While she waits impatiently on a bench smoking a cigaret, the monkey bars behind her fill up ominously with crows. Talk about your problems coming home to roost.

There was Internet chatter recently that the film was going to be remade with Naomi Watts in the Hedren role, but that project seems to have stalled. While it's intriguing to consider what today's CGI technology could do visually with the story -- Hitchcock had to nix the final scene he'd planned of the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds because it was too costly to create -- I somehow doubt the end result would approach the original's ability to get under, and stay under, the viewer's skin. I think it might even lay an egg.

Step Into My Parlor

2010-05-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

Readers of this blog know that I have nothing against violence in films. Some of the best films ever made wallow in gore and subject matter that take us far beyond our comfort levels. The finale of Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver is incredibly impactful and unnerving 35 years after its release, and during a recent viewing I was surprised at how graphic and inappropriate the interaction between Robert de Niro and Jodie Foster's 12-year-old prostitute seems now. But that's all in context with the story of a young cab driver so revolted by the filth and immorality of 70s-era New York that he launches a one-man assault to clean it up, managing to save a pre-teen runaway who's become its most iconic victim.

That's why I'm so amazed by the current trend of torture porn perpetuated by franchises like Saw and Hostel. There's a difference between whacking a zombie in the head with a shovel and slowly eviscerating a young woman bound to a chair, or chaining a man in a basement and giving him a choice between death and sawing off his own leg. What does it say about a culture that lends its enthusiastic support to a trend that celebrates the depraved dismemberment and murder of youth and beauty?

I first saw John Carpenter's Halloween in a London theatre in 1979 and was thrilled by the sudden, sweeping way death was dispensed to its teenaged victims. Of course back then there was still a morality equation in play; the popular kids having sex in their parents' bedrooms were the first to be impaled on the wall by a very large cleaver that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. But there wasn't this degenerate slathering over the act, this masturbatory Peeping Tom excitement celebrating the suffering and horror, no pitiful pleading to prolong the act. Just bam! and on to the next gory death. More recent film series, such as the Final Destination movies, let you savor the chain of events that lead to each character's demise -- the trail of leaking gasoline that will result in the inevitable explosion, the faulty window frame that will decapitate the unsuspecting victim going about his business -- but didn't draw out the pain and realization of what was happening. And ultimately the good girl, the Jamie Lee Curtis character who hadn't been doing a hoochie dance in her mother's bra and panties, found her inner courage and dispatched the boogie man. At least until the next sequel.

I'd even put films like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in this same league. It's not the story of Christ's redemption that is the focus of that film but how he's made to settle his debt to humanity, and each lash of the whip or thrust of the lance is played out with an old-school Catholic frenzy.

My theory to explain the popularity of this trend is that we live in what we perceive to be a serial killer world. Children can't play alone in their own yards, or walk to school as we did. Girls disappear from coffee shop parking lots and are discovered weeks later in swamps; children are seen on video surveillance footage skipping along a street one minute and are found packed in someone's discarded luggage the next. The shift in perspective went from one end of the spectrum to the other in a new sort of empowerment dynamic. We're no longer meant to identify with the victim, we're meant to identify with the killer. By putting ourselves in the killer's position, we bestow ourselves with the killer's power. But let's ask ourselves: is that power of any value to us?

Valuable films with R-rated content are still being made, like the incredible District 9, where monstrous amounts of gore and inhumanity are showcased, but those movies also house lessons about cultural perspective and our general humanity. But the tide has yet to turn. I'm constantly hearing about upcoming productions where the gross-out level and the inflicted torture and mutilation are being ramped up, like the abhorrent, soon-to-be-released Human Centipede film, which involves three individuals surgically sewn together, mouth to rear, for the further amusement of audiences and one extremely mad scientist. Perhaps the trend has run out of energy and has gone as far as it can, and Centipede will put a lid on the whole movement.

Commentators have wondered how sex and violence might influence viewers since the days of the Nickelodeon. That was when Indians were still falling off of horses and damsels were still being tied to railroad tracks. Now that we're capturing students and lopping off their unanesthetized body parts, I can only wonder to what degree we're truly desensitizing young audiences to mayhem and unrepentant violence, and how that reaction will next manifest itself.

Bombs Away

2010-05-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

When an actor's film career spans six decades, he's bound to end up in a couple of bombs. But in the case of film legend John Wayne, there's one movie where that was literally the case: 1956's The Conqueror.

I'm not talking about Duke Wayne uncomfortably miscast as Ghengis Khan, though that's the film's most obvious problem. It's unlikely that the Mongolian war lord was 6'4" or spoke in a western drawl, but director Dick Powell seemed to think slapping a Fu Man Chu mustache on America's most American of performers would transform him into a 12th-century Asian warrior. No, the film was shot in Utah just downwind of the Yucca Flat atomic testing range in Nevada. At least two of the blasts detonated during filming were three- and four-times the size of the explosion that leveled Hiroshima a decade earlier. Wayne was diagnosed with cancer in the early '60s and lost a lung to it in 1963, then battled the advancing condition until his death in 1979.

At least 50 members of the cast and crew subsequently died of one form of cancer or another, including director Powell, co-stars Agnes Moorehead and Susan Hayward, and Pedro Armendariz, who shot himself when he learned he had terminal cancer. Children of Wayne and Hayward who visited the set contracted various forms of cancer as well, as did more than 90 members of the film crew. The nearby town of St. George has seen cancer rates fly off the charts, and no one has ever assessed the damage the testing inflicted on the surrounding Native American community.

To make matters worse, tons of sand from the site were transported back to Hollywood for sound stage filming so the soil would match the location shots, exposing even more studio technicians and workers to intolerable levels of radiation.

The movie has become a camp classic, but as amusing as it is to watch a group of 20th Century Caucasian actors stumbling around completely recognizable Utah landmarks as though those yurts are really somewhere in outer Mongolia, it's sad to know what was happening. While the cameras were turning, America's most iconic flag-waving defender was being poisoned by the very military defense program he so staunchly supported.

Stagey-ness

2010-05-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

Woe to the real estate agent who encounters me at a cocktail party. For years I've been decrying the now nearly universal practice of "staging" homes and condos for sale. My San Francisco neighborhood features dozens of open houses each weekend, many of which have been on the market for some time at strikingly marked-down prices. But when I walk into these houses -- some of them pretty spectacular on their own in terms of architectural detail and staggering views of the city and Bay -- I'm immediately distracted by the staging.

The Real Estate Staging Association (RESA) claims that staged homes spend 78% less time on the market. To me that speaks more to the paucity of imagination of most home buyers than the effectiveness of rented sofas and dining room place settings that stare up vacantly from elaborately decorated tables.

Few things are more aspirational than an empty house. You walk through the stillness of the rooms and think about the families that were raised there, the tragedies and triumphs witnessed by that indifferent wainscoting. And if you're really considering living there yourself, you picture your own furniture in front of that hearth, your artwork on the walls, the pieces that you'd pick up somewhere to fill the empty corners. You decide which room would be your bedroom and which alcove you'd use as an office. It's inconceivable to me that I could be moved by some settee foisted on me by a staging company, or the ugly pampas grass thrusting out of a hideous vase or the Laura Ashley fabrics draping the windows.

There's a scene at the end of the classic 1947 film Miracle On 34th Street when Maureen O'Hara, John Payne and Natalie Wood, knowing that circumstances have united them and they'll now be a complete family, look at an empty house in the suburbs. It was a reflection of what was going on at the time, when post-war prosperity and want of a better life drove millions of middle class families out of the inner cities. The characters examine the vacant rooms with hope and expectation, on the virge of a new life together. It's the emptiness of the dwelling itself that they're about to fill with their potential as a family, and I don't think a couple of couches or throw rugs would have done as well to bind them together.

People have come to expect home staging, I guess, but only because it's become the norm in urban centers. Give me a clean, empty house ringing with footsteps of potential buyers peering into closets and cupboards, all considering the better life that could be lived within those walls.

The Corn Is High

2010-05-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

Nothing is quite so fascinating as an advertising spin being applied to a product so appallingly unhealthy that it's pretty much indefensible. Cigaret manufacturers tried this approach years ago by marketing versions of the product that were supposedly less deadly -- and soon dropped the attempt. The current series of television ads aimed at untarnishing the reputation of high fructose corn syrup -- a food additive now found in everything from catsup to soft drinks that's known to cause liver scarring, and which may be single-handedly responsible for the current societal epidemic of diabetes and morbid obesity -- tries valiantly but ineffectively to defend the insidious substance.

The spots usually start in some innocuous domestic setting, like a neighborhood barbecue. The health-conscious mom watches askance as her friend pours out for her children glasses of fruit juice laced with the toxic chemical brew. "Don't you care about your family?" she ventures. When the other woman pretends not to comprehend what she's referring to, she elaborates, "Well, you know what they say about high fructose corn syrup, don't you?" Barely able to contain her hostility, the friend challenges her to elaborate on her supposed high-handed position. "Like what? That it's made of corn, which is a completely natural substance? That it's totally safe in moderation?" Take that, anal-retentive hippie mom! But all we as viewers can think is that consuming this poison "in moderation" is virtually impossible, since it's managed to find its way into nearly every processed food. The real spots are not very different from this spoof, except for the intimidating drag queen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqIpAyHJ2ws

Then there's the creepy commercial for Crocs Lite. While I'm glad that Crocs have evolved their line beyond ugly, day-glow, hooflike footware worn only by celebrity chefs and Special Ed students, I'm not convinced this was the best way to convey the product's comfort and value. As a woman returns from a long day's work, two strangely menacing pink creatures lie in wait for her. They rush to greet her as she enters her apartment, bringing to mind the robotic toy soldiers in the futuristic thriller Bladerunner who greet their creator by announcing "Home again home again, diggety dig!" Instead of saluting and marching back out of the room, though, these round little entities seize the woman's feet and begin massaging and pummeling them. It's like she's being accosted by animated jelly beans.

Since I've scolded two different advertising efforts, it's only fair that I commend one. So: careful positioning of a product line is more important these days than ever. Marketers should always be asking themselves: what's the differentiating factor here? Why should customers with limited resources buy this product instead of a similar, less-expensive one? The series of TV spots for Pyrex gets it right. Each spot demonstrates that they've taken a time-honored, completely familiar utensil or item of kitchen ware and improved on it. So now you can get a cheese grater that measures the amount of cheese you're grating, or a whisk designed to serve as a spatula, too. Simple as it seems, they're demonstrating how they're bringing new value to customers, and that they're forward-thinking even when it comes to products that have been around so long one would assume they couldn't be modified for the better. A look at their clean, well-designed website shows that theirs is a well-integrated, multi-channel approach, and that they've introduced storage containers that not only resist staining but can safely be placed in the oven. Brilliant.

On an end note, I was half-listening to a commercial the other night that was promoting dryer sheets -- I wish the messaging had been strong enough for the brand to come across but I simply didn't notice. What I did notice, however, when the woman in the commercial whipped out the product, was that it completely resembled Towelie, the marijuana-addicted bath towel from Comedy Central's long-running South Park, horizontal stripes and all. Perhaps it would be more successful if they just called it Towelie -- and made a joke about using it when you're really wiped out.

UPDATE: I saw the spot again, and the brand is Purex.

Night Table Reading

2010-04-29T19:34:00.000-07:00

Deep within its perfumed pages, Vanity Fair magazine has a monthly feature that asks celebrities and various people of note what book currently resides on their night stand. You can believe, if you wish, that Renee Zellwegger slumbers in her oxygen chamber while verses by Rimbaud run through her squinty little brain, but I prefer to imagine the frantic poolside call to her publicist to find a volume weighty enough to lay claim to.

I usually have a few books going at a time, but lately I've been so busy with my job, various plans with friends, and a recent family crisis that it seems to have taken me forever just to get through Francine Prose's A Changed Man. It's a very engaging novel that examines subjects as wide-ranging as single parenthood, the Holocaust, and the Aryan supremecy movement. I'd stumbled across and really enjoyed an earlier book of Prose's, The Blue Angel, and read it on vacation in Maine last summer. It's a really captivating story about a dipsomaniac (dipsomaniacal?) Vermont college professor who hurtles into a very misguided affair with a student. Prose has the ability to tease out a story in a way that's both entertaining and relatable, and though you can see the sexual harrassment lawyers converging from nearly the start of the tale, as a reader you just need to see how she sketches in the awful culmination, like a tsunami breaking on a beach.

Determined to stock up on books to see me through the next few weeks, I made some notes when reading reviews in The New York Book Review, Atlantic, and some other magazines, and ordered a bunch through Amazon. These are what are now on my night table (or, actually, the coffee table in my den), and I hope to get started on them immediately. In no particular order:

Digging Up the Dead, by Michael Kammen. A person's reputation goes through many changes throughout the course of his life. But that's true after death, too. Historian Michael Kammen examines how personages throughout history, such as John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and Abraham Lincoln, have all been subjected to exhumations and reburials based on shifting assessments of their reputations, changing burial practices, and political upheavals. Sounds fascinating and macabre.

When I ordered Steven Spielberg's America, by Frederick Wasser, I expected it to focus on his uniquely American filmmaking perspective, particularly his introspective and questioning approach to middle-class complacency. The jacket notes promise me a "...fresh and provocative take on Spielberg in the context of globalization, rampant market capitalism, and the hardening socio-political landscape of the United States...." Okay, well, I'll read it anyway. Or maybe I'll skim it.

Pictures from an Institution, A Comedy, by Randall Jarell. I've been hearing about this book for many years. People whose opinion I value have told me it's a hilarious satire of campus politics and political correctness. The fact that it was first published over 50 years ago makes it all the more intriguing.

Animals Make Us Human, by Temple Grandin. Several years ago I enjoyed Grandin's bestseller Animals in Translation. Grandin is an autistic woman who compensated for her inability to bond with other humans by focusing solely on the minds and comforts of animals, even designing slaughterhouse mechanisms that reduce fear and anxiety among cattle about to get the axe. Her new book focuses on how we can better understand animals -- in this case, pets -- so that we can provide them the best and happiest lives "on their terms, not ours."

Survival City (adventures among the ruins of atomic America), by Tom Vanderbilt. Having lived under the shadow of nuclear annihilation my entire life, I'm eager to read Vanderbilt's book, which examines the legacies of the Cold War and the blueprints put into place to manage and perhaps even withstand the apocalypse we all once thought was inevitable.

One Nation Underground. The Fallout shelter in American Culture, by Kenneth D. Rose. Are you seeing a theme here? Apparently this book traces the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, and even a symbol of plucky American adaptability.

Irving Thalberg. Boy Wonder To Producer Prince, by Mark A. Vieira. I love Hollywood lore, so I can't wait to dive into this thick tome. I know quite a lot about Thalberg already, particularly that he was instrumental in creating pioneering film masterpieces like Ben-Hur, Grand Hotel, and The Good Earth, and that he made stars of Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer, whom he married. I also know that he accomplished all that before dying at 37. I'm really looking forward to delving into the details of this man's life, and am fascinated that someone is able to piece it all together more than 70 years after the fact.

Renee, would you like to share?

Notes From the Grassy Knoll

2010-04-27T14:14:00.000-07:00

Take a look some time at the craigslist ads under "Marketing." If there are any jobs at all, the ones for creative positions now combine disciplines that once were mutually exclusive. They call for a copywriter who can design, or a designer who can write copy -- which, as anyone who has really worked in a creative environment knows, are opposing skill sets. While I've known one or two designers who can write copy I've encountered even fewer copywriters who can design -- they're simply different capabilities within the same realm, like a cake decorator and a butcher who work in the same kitchen. Sometimes the ads bundle in additional demands -- I've seen ads with copywriting requirements stipulating that applicants must be able to hoist 45 pounds. Perhaps that's so they can shoulder their bruised egos and broken dreams.

And because of the state of the economy -- advertising is the first to be hit when things go south, and the last to recover -- today's ads for copywriters tend to skew toward lower levels of qualification. Sure, there are lots of places where a junior copywriter is all that's needed, and giving up-and-coming creatives a chance to prove themselves is how the field has always replenished its ranks. But there's a lot to be said about applying the right level of talent to a task. I'll even give you an example.

For months I heard a radio commercial that seemed to get constant airplay, and yet I could never get past the first obstacle in the script to pay attention to the product pitch. I think it was about banking services, and as the narrator warbled something about better ways you could spend your time than worrying about your money, he mentioned "tumbling down grassy knolls." This is a great example of the importance of cultural and historical perspective. For anyone over the age of 45, the words "grassy" and "knoll" when joined reference only one thing: the assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963. The Warren Commission's report included endless mentions of spectators on the grassy knoll at Dealy Plaza in Dallas, the passing of the presidential convoy by the grassy knoll, the possibility of a second shooter behind the grassy knoll. There was even a Seinfeld episode that parodied this examination of trajectories and suspects. "Grassy knoll" is a culturally embedded phrase that's imprinted itself on the public consciousness, like "the second plane" and "the two towers." My guess is that some copywriter had a vague sense that those two words went together somehow, and the creative director, the account people, and the client all lacked that same ability to identify a cultural signifier of epic proportions. Talk about a tragically undeveloped sense of shared history.

It may sound like a small mistake, but it's emblematic of a field thrown out of whack by economic circumstances and the overwhelming influence of the online marketing channel, without the perspective to assess its creative output and no longer able to even match the right skills with the right job. It's definitely become incapable of projecting how its contribution fits into the culture on a grander scale, one that goes beyond the marketing objective. My feeling is that when everyone is so focused on whether a headline fits within the tiny frame of the computer screen, the message is likely to be obscured or impeded because nascent talents are no longer nurtured or mentored. That ripple effect erodes not only the creative product, but the effectiveness and accountability and impact of all the advertising channels for years to come -- along with the quality and satisfaction of working in a once-great industry.

They Loved It In Pomona

2010-04-26T13:30:00.000-07:00

I've written before about the curious experience of seeing a film you've watched dozens of times and suddenly coming away with a different impression. Last night Turner Classic Movies ran Sunset Boulevard, and though it's one of those films every movie lover knows by heart -- it would have been easy to title this blog entry something like "It's the Pictures That Got Small" -- I watched most of it again and was impressed by Gloria Swanson's performance as the faded film legend Norma Desmond, and by the structure of the film itself, which really is one of the first to attempt to provide a commentary on Hollywood's own history, which really, at that point, was not very long.

It must have been difficult for Swanson to play a role that so closely mirrored her own life as a once-beloved silent film actress, but by all reports she had a great sense of humor and a keen intelligence; she knew by embracing the role of a Hollywood icon who would never manage a comeback she was ensuring her own. Older actresses like Mae West and Pola Negri were approached for the part but their vanity about portraying a delusional recluse like Desmond ended up handing the role to Swanson. Mary Pickford was considered as well, but by that time she was Norma Desmond, and the script hit a bit too close to home. It's also important to remember that in 1950, when the film was released, a fifty-year-old woman was old; now actresses that age bare their bikini bodies on magazine covers (hello, Julia Louis-Dreyfus) but sixty years ago it was nearly impossible for a star to maintain the illusion of eternal youth.

What came across so clearly in this viewing is how trapped the protagonist of this film is -- even after his demise, since he's narrating it from his prone position face-down in a swimming pool. Broke, unemployed, and behind on his rent and car payments, William Holden's character agrees to rewrite Desmond's treatment of Salome -- a part she's decades too old for -- because he needs the money. Any writer can identify with that, and I can think of dozens of odious projects I took on for exactly that reason. But he's a virtual prisoner in Desmond's creaky old mansion, and the film makes it obvious, without being too indelicate, that sexually servicing the aging actress is part of the arrangement. Holden was about 31 when the movie was filmed, a little mature to be playing the part of the boy toy, but the casting is still far more appropriate than the role of the handsome drifter he would play five years later in William Inge's Picnic. In one scene following Desmond's suicide attempt his distaste is palpable as she enfolds him in her embrace like a very theatrical vampire. Anyone who has ever slept with someone they didn't really want to, because the relationship was over or for social, financial, or survival reasons, will relate to Holden's predicament. There's a great moment in a clothing boutique, when Desmond is selecting an entire wardrobe of suits and formal wear her lover can only don for her in the seclusion of her mansion. Holden is asked to choose between camel hair (pronounced "camel's hair" in this era for some reason) and another fiber. He says the camel hair will be fine, but the oily salesman, recognizing a gigolo when he sees one, whispers, "Why not get the better material if the old broad is paying for it?"

Director William Wilder also understood that to underscore the suffocating entrapment of the mansion he had to contrast it with dips into the real world. That's why it's so jarring when Holden's Joe Gillis escapes to the sock-hop antics of his young friends, who seem so fresh and innocent in comparison to the sordid shadow world of Norma Desmond's bridge games attended by a wax works of former silent screen stars. It's also always a jolt to see a young Jack Webb cavorting among all the others -- I seem to remember him even playing a saxophone, or am I projecting? For most people he's inseparable from the humorless detective Joe Friday, delivering his flat little wrap-ups on Dragnet to show the criminal element how stupid it is to tangle with the law.

The real question is why Swanson never took advantage of the momentum Sunset Boulevard provided her career. Apparently the roles she was offered after that were pale imitations of the Desmond character, and she'd already hit that mark. Perhaps she was smart enough to leave well enough alone, and be remembered best for that one defining part.

"Why, I Oughtta...."

2010-04-14T12:21:00.000-07:00

Comedy has its epochs. What was funny to audiences in, say, 1920 might bore us to death today. That's probably because humor is so reflective of the current events and circumstances that generated it and provide its backdrop. But some comedic pairings will always endure. Laurel and Hardy, for example, are still funny 80 years later because they established such indelible comedic archetypes: the put-upon straight man and the imbecilic man-child (a template revised by comedy teams like Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, and even Rowan and Martin). The physical comedy of their routines is flawlessly executed, and the pair is inherently likable whatever the context. Likewise, the Marx Brothers are still hilarious, though they're grounded in a world of ocean liners and dowagers that's so long-lost it seems like you're looking through a wormhole to an era centuries ago. The Three Stooges are literally hit and miss; you have to think seltzer bottles and eye pokes are amusing to get to the brief enjoyable bits, and there were enough third-Stooge replacements that you're bound to like one. Of course Lucille Ball's brand of physical comedy will always be funny; it's something about the willingness of a truly beautiful actress to immerse herself in awkward situations and gags, melded with the universality of domestic situations the audience can relate to easily.

But then we come to the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, so popular in the '40s and '50s. Were they ever funny? Their "Who's On First?" routine still endures, and it's the wordplay that's sustained it all this time. But their comedic dynamic was so dependent on Abbott relentlessly bullying the chubby, marginally more likable Costello that it's hard to watch. You can't imagine these two men being friends, the way you might convince yourself that other comedy teams were, or why they would have cast their lots together. In fact whatever chemistry held their act together was so tenuous they spent their entire career replaying the same few dependable routines, starting in radio in the 1930s right up through the end of their film and television careers in the mid-'50s. They didn't trust audiences to accept them with fresh material, and in the end the public tired of them, though they had a substantial run. Ironically, they were replaced by Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, a far more talented team they supposedly discovered who could each branch off and enjoy successful solo careers.

Abbott and Costello made just one good film, though, and when I was a little kid I was completely enchanted by it. It's called The Time of Their Lives, from 1946, and it's one of only two films they made together where they're not actually a team. Costello plays a New England tinker during the Revolutionary War who, along with a woman played by a pretty brunette actress named Elizabeth Reynolds, is branded a traitor. Their ghosts are cursed to remain near the well where their bodies were thrown after they were shot (a heavy premise for a comedy of the day) for supposedly being in league with Benedict Arnold, and when a group of people in the 20th century take over the adjacent farmhouse, they attempt to clear their names from beyond the ectoplasm. I think the premise fascinated me -- the fact that these two people were bound together for nearly 200 years in a strangely benign, asexual limbo. Best of all, it's the one film where Abbott is on the receiving end of the punishment for a change, as the ghostly and invisible Costello pulls gags on him from the great beyond. It's wonderfully satisfying when the two manage to clear their names and are released from their curse; they advance at last on the pearly gates of Heaven, which flash with electric light bulbs like a broadway theatre marquee.

Like many comedic teams, the two feuded constantly, and weren't even speaking during the making of this film. That only served to enhance the story of a wronged ghost harassing a bully, something enjoyable to watch after all those years of shouting and harranging. Costello died in his early 50s, and though Abbott lived for many more years, he simply performed the same routines with a series of comedic partners for the rest of his life, as if who was on first really didn't matter after all.

Worst Case Scenario (Not On My Watch)

2010-04-12T13:31:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else, actors have bills to pay. Which would have to explain why once-hot performers like Kelly McGillis and Eric Roberts turn up in the most god-awful made-for-television productions on the Syfy network. But why am I also seeing still-successful stage and film actors there, actors with the stature of Brian Dennehy and Dianne Wiest?

There are basically four genres of films on Syfy: the doomsday scenario (an asteroid hits the moon and chaos ensues on earth, solar flares threaten life on earth, an earthquake of 10 on the Richter scale threatens California), the mega monster flick (giant sharks, giant pirranhas, giant crocodiles, giant aardvarks), the almost doomsday scenario (a mega-cyclone is heading for Boston, seriously jeopardizing opening day at Fenway Park). The fourth is the pseudo-mythological monster film, where some amalgam of historic cultures (feudal England mixed with the Byzantine empire mixed with Octoberfest) struggles to overcome some colicky, CGI-engineered beast (Kraken, dragon, Cyclops).

This last type is where someone like Eric Roberts is most likely to turn up, playing a Roman general or perhaps even an emperor (meaning that instead of a horse he's issued a sedan chair so he can be carried into the action by slaves). You can tell by the way he slinks through each scene that it's not the Cyclops that's eating him alive, it's the realization that he once had a viable career and that his estranged sister Julia will never have to stoop as low for a pay check. The battles and confrontations with whatever monster is at hand are always the same: they result in a comical display of severed limbs pumping gallons of blood, like a Monty Python film without the self-awareness or the self-effacing humor.

You have to ask who Roberts offended to be cast into this filmatic purgatory, but actors like Kelly McGillis don't fare much better. An A-list star in the '80s with such credits to her name as Top Gun, Witness, and The Accused, I recently spotted her piloting a boat through a swamp with Supergator in hot pursuit. She performed the scene like a soccer mom who'd made a wrong turn on the expressway after band practice, mildly annoyed that jaws the size of a drawbridge had seized her boat by the stern.

So failure engenders necessity, and that might explain those two actors and their presence on Syfy. But last night I came home from a party and turned on the TV to see Brian Dennehy slumming in something called Category 6: Day of Destruction. In the first scene I saw, someone is explaining to him that the unthinkable has occurred, and two major hurricanes are about to converge over downtown Chicago (of course you have to forget that there's never been one hurricane in the midwest, let alone two, but this is the rare realm where facts will only weigh you down). This award-winning actor, who's received accolades for his performance in Death of a Salesman, manages not to snicker as he looks meaningfully off into the middle distance and utters, "It's the worst-case scenario we've been dreading." Now that's acting.

Later on, Wiest gets a chance to demonstrate that she's as much of a trouper as her esteemed colleague, bringing her unique brand of sturdy, matronly common sense to the situation, possibly as mayor, or was it the head of the weather bureau? It doesn't matter. One of her underlings (there are many underlings in these disaster films, as they serve to supply plot exposition and, at the same time, can be dispensed with in showy, graphic ways) lays out the situation for her, and reassures her that there wasn't any way she could have known in time to protect the public. "Yes," Wiest says, looking wistfully away in the same manner as Dennehy, "but they'll remember that it happened on my watch."

The reward for sitting through all this is a few seconds of second-tier special effects where Chicago is besieged by a veritable confetti storm of loose paper so it's obvious the characters are running around in a wind storm (wind being, after all, invisible). I've experienced several hurricanes and while I remember lots of traffic signs and shingles hurtling about I don't recall anyone emptying the contents of a Staples into the air. By the time three tornadoes sheared through the Miracle Mile I'd seriously lost interest and was ready for bed.

So my conclusion is that perhaps actors -- even the really employable, high-calibre ones -- are just like freelance writers: unable to turn down work of any kind, because you just never know when (or, in the case of Eric Roberts, if) the phone is going to ring again.

The Ad Roundup

2010-04-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

When crafting an advertising message, there are three things you can do (entertain, inform, and amuse) but one thing you must never do (distract). That's why the current 30-second spots for Panda Express really bother me. They're entirely dependent on the assumption that we the viewers are unanimously agreed that pandas are cute under any circumstances. Personally I don't see it, but maybe I'm too fully aware of the fact that they're actually vicious little bears that will tear you apart. Give me a koala bear any day, and has anyone ever noticed how much those look like the late San Francisco columnist Herb Caen?

Anyway, the commercial starts with two pandas sitting together on the ocean floor. One is wearing one of those diving bell-type suits with a metal helmet -- no air hose in evidence, by the way -- and the other has a mask and snorkel. Yes, they're talking pandas, but that's not what rubs me the wrong way. You simply can't breathe if the top of the snorkle is below the surface of the water. How hard would it have been to put him in a scuba outfit?

Okay, so as a viewer I've been asked to suspend my disbelief right from the get-go. Then we find out that the pandas are in the ocean to catch shrimp. I sometimes feel like a compendium of loose bits of useless data, but I was pretty sure that, like my friend the koala bear, pandas subsist mainly on eucalyptus leaves. So I looked it up, and yes, literally 99% of their diet is nothing more than those leaves. The rest -- 1 %, mind you -- is comprised of eggs, honey, insects and fish. So while it may be plausible that pandas would endanger themselves in the pursuit of shrimp, it's pretty unlikely, even in the fluid universe of television advertising. So I've been asked to suspend my disbelief a second time. You've lost me, Panda Express. Although to be honest I've never been in one of your restaurants.

Panda Express aside, fast food commercials can be very entertaining, even if, like me, you almost never venture into a McDonald's, Taco Bell, or KFC. But getting the viewer's attention is what it's all about, and I have to give Jack in the Box credit for not being afraid of taking a little bit of a risk, even if it serves to perpetuate the myth that heterosexual males are aroused by lesbian activity. Two of Jack's employees are describing their favorite sandwich, and he breaks the fourth wall and turns to the viewer to remark that this is the worst commercial he's ever been in. "Well," one of the women says, glancing at her coworker, "we could kiss." Good job, Jack in the Box.

Then we come to the current spate of Volkswagen commercials, which are more than just annoying; I fear they'll actually ignite suburban violence. The idea is based on the childhood game of punching the person next to you every time you spot a particular object. In my long ago youth we played a game called "cemetery," which meant someone would get hammered for as long as your dad's car passed a graveyard. In New England, where monuments to death festoon every corner, that could be several minutes. But the sound effects of the blows being delivered as various people spot different colored VWs sound like the sickening, penetrating thuds of Jake LaMotta being pummeled in Raging Bull, or the scene in Cabaret when Michael York is nearly beaten to death by a gang of Nazis. It's just not funny, and there's already quite enough violence in the world for my taste. They even managed to drag Stevie Wonder into this mess to make blind jokes at his expense. I might have looked at Volkswagens the next time I was shopping for cars but now I'm not going to. So there.

Finally, here's a really bad concept from a bank, usually one of the most cautious of advertisers (I can't tell you how many hours I've spent in my career arguing that Christmas trees that appear in Bank of America and Wells Fargo ads -- at Christmas -- weren't likely to offend Jewish customers, or skewing billboard images so that the models weren't too lily white, too Hispanic, or too black. I even had a client complain that the dad playing with his kids in a swimming pool, part of a home equity loan campaign, was "too hairy.") Chase is currently running radio spots that feature a Rod Serling sound-alike voice over, welcoming potential business banking customers to something called "The Chase Zone." I get that they're trying to say Chase's point of differentiation is to offer customers services other banks can't or don't. It's just that it's incredibly ill-conceived to portray their banking offerings as a weird, alternative universe where reality is suspended and anything can happen. I already get that type of service from Comcast, thanks. It sounds like my savings balance will suddenly disappear or turn into drachmas, or I'll open my checkbook and discover that the tree frogs printed on my checks have become murderous clowns. Fire your agency, Chase.

Why Words Matter

2010-04-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

I remarked in an earlier entry in this blog -- or maybe it's just something I whine about so continuously I've lost track -- that modern copywriting has been reduced to a bunch of people standing around a designer's computer screen complaining, "Why are there so many words? Do there have to be so many words? Nobody reads."

Well, if no one reads any more, it's precisely because of that disregard for the importance of the written word in communicating everything from traffic signage to online diaper discounts. In fact, the lack of usable real estate -- the frame within the screen -- available in online communication means that each word the copywriter has selected has been chosen for its precision of meaning in the context of the other words.

That's why it's nice to still encounter words that strobe with vibrant meaning. You plough into their substantial forms and savor the distinct flavors of their definitions, and before you realize it they've deposited their unique history and cultural evolution right in your lap.
Sure, there are words that, removed from their era, lose all relevancy. You only have to read an Edith Wharton novel to know that a brougham was a sort of horse-drawn carriage often used as a cab in the Manhattan of the late 19th century. Sources describe it as a four-wheeled, boxlike, closed carriage for two or four persons, having a driver's perch outside. To me that describes a stage coach as well, but I never heard anyone on Gunsmoke shout "The brougham's been held up!"

But there are some lovely, incredibly colorful and descriptive words that apply when simply nothing else will do. They need to be revived like ailing dowagers and sent back out onto the dance floor.

Popinjay: There's no better way to describe that attention-seeking slacker in your office, since it means a person given to vain, pretentious displays of importance and empty chatter. As in, "That popinjay Bob in Marketing took credit for our entire presentation."

Manque: My good friend Jean loves this word, and rightly so, as it means a sort of failed or inauthentic version of something real. As in, "Heidi is a creative director manque; she's never been remotely creative or managed to direct anything."

Martinet: There's a brittle, puppet-like quality to this word, which is perfect, since it describes unreasonable rigidness: someone who stubbornly adheres to methods or rules despite circumstances that may indicate a different course of action. As in, "That little martinet in HR insists I take Excel training in order to get my promotion."

Scuttlebutt: This wonderful word has archaic roots that are nautical in origin. While originally it had something to do with bailing water out of a ship's hold, it's somehow come to mean gossip...which seems an odd coincidence, since it's often used to convey office water cooler talk. As in, "What's the scuttlebutt on Security suddenly cleaning out Claudia's office?"

Bully pulpit: In a way a blog is a bully pulpit, because it provides a voice for someone in a context that isn't hugely impacted by others. Usually it's applied to politicians who take advantage of their position in office to force their agenda, but I tend to think of it as anyone who uses a position or ranking to steer discourse. As in, "Just because he's CMO, William doesn't have to use the annual meeting as a bully pulpit on how we should all switch to Priuses."

Scaramouche: If you're like me and sing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody at top volume in the car, then you've at least encountered this word. Basically, it refers to a lazy, posturing coward or theatrical buffoon. As in, "That scaramouche Johnson made a complete ass of himself at the All Hands meeting today."

It hasn't escaped my notice that I've applied all these words as workplace pejoratives. Maybe I'm still thinking about all those people constantly crowded around the computer, plugging at my carefully chosen words like ducks in a shooting gallery.