Word wizards

If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's to never second-guess one's creative instincts. 

About a six weeks ago, I was reviewing a campaign one of my copywriters had written for a summer Outdoor Living promotion. It featured patio furniture meant to transform the customer's outdoor spaces into pleasant warm-weather entertainment areas.

"Can't we have a little more fun with this headline?" I asked, looking at the rather flat line she'd written.

"The truth is these chairs are not all that special," she answered. "We don't want to over-promise anything."

Believing that retail should always be aspirational, I thought for a second. "I know, what if we did a short, punchy headline that was a play on words. Something like 'Lounge wizards.' Because they're simple, affordable ways of making your patio or deck into a nice place to hang out."

"I don't know," she said, "Will people get that it's a play on 'lounge lizards'? Maybe that's too archaic a term."

If there's a way to get me to back down on a creative concept, it's to call out that my personal demographic may not be in touch with a modern mindset. I let her run with the more literal headline she'd chosen and forgot about it until I was having lunch at a Japanese noodle house in Vancouver about a week later. I opened the local newspaper to the Home Decorating section and saw this headline anchoring the section on patio furniture.

Lesson learned: listen to your instincts. 

Dodging a Solar Bullet

In just the last 20 or so years, we've become so technology-dependent that it's hard to imagine life without WiFi hot spots, GPS and smartphones that shape and inform our every action and interaction. What would happen if someone pulled the plug?

In July 2012, we almost got a chance to find out. A massive coronal ejection surged up from the surface of the sun, shooting a pulse of plasma straight into earth's path. Luckily, it was an indirect hit, because it would have knocked our entire satellite grid out of commission for months or years and fried every transformer on that side of the earth. In a world where people can't disengage from their phones long enough to eat dinner or drive to the corner, it would have been the equivalent of an electronics nuclear winter. 

We only have to look to the Carrington Event, a solar storm in 1859 that may not even have been as strong, to see how close we came to disaster. Throughout North America and Europe telegraphs, the nascent telecommunications system of the day, failed spectacularly, in some cases giving operators severe electric shocks and throwing sparks from pylons. Aurorae lit skies the world over to such an extent that gold miners in the Rockies, believing it was dawn, started making breakfast in the middle of the night. People in the northeastern U.S. were said to read newspapers by the Northern Lights, which dropped as far south as Hawaii and Cuba. Our atmosphere was so charged that even telegraphs that were unplugged from their power source continued to send and receive messages.

It's hard to even imagine the chaos and disruption an event of this magnitude inflict on our modern world. But why am I a little disappointed that it didn't actually happen?

Some Contents May Have Shifted During Flight and May Contain Sharks

In the eighth season of the acclaimed comedy series Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Elaine Benes tries to convince a date to see a frothy, light-weight comedy called Sack Lunch instead of the oppressively pretentious The English Patient. "So do you think they got shrunk down, or is it just a giant sack?" she asks. The date marches off to see the more acclaimed film, and Elaine enjoys a good low-brow movie wallow by herself. 

There's something wonderful about fully surrendering to a low-concept film, as I was thinking last night when I saw a trailer for Let's Be Cops. Yes, I definitely would have spent a little more effort on that title. And while on the surface it seems as mouth-breathing and misogynistic as a lot of the usual summer fare aimed at the all-powerful teenaged boy demographic, it really is a fun idea -- who wouldn't want the power and excitement that comes with a police uniform and a black and white cruiser?

To pile on the irony, the film's trailer ran during the premier of the brilliantly titled Sharknado 2: The Second One -- in case you didn't get that it's a sequel, they told you twice. It's a cheesy follow-up to last year's SyFy hit, and it serves up an entire gallery of guest stars: Kelly Osborne as a violet-haired flight attendant whose head is consumed by a shark in mid-flight; Judd Hirsch, who starred on the series Taxi 35 years ago, driving a taxi through a shark storm; and Robert Hayes, who played the reluctant pilot who saves the day in the '80s comedy Airplane!, to name just a few. The premise has something to do with climate change prompting an increase in tornadoes; why they suck up multitudes of sharks and deposit them in mid-town Manhattan is never quite clear. 

In a world of 24-hour news feeds and a constant barrage of reality pinging at us from all our devices, I think we could all benefit from kicking off our shoes and relaxing with a nice, empty Sack Lunch or Sharknado. Personally, I think the family was shrunk down to sack lunch size. 

Please Don't Fling Your Soiled Panties

Several years ago I described how the Charmin toilet tissue brand had veered from its decades-long track of discreet, jovial advertising to feature a marketing campaign that essentially answered, quite unnecessarily, the question of whether a bear shits in the woods. 

Now Kotex has launched a campaign that features the dissatisfied women of the world flinging their dirty undergarments into the street -- panties that have been soiled by substandard feminine hygiene products. 

It's hard to see how this creative direction ever got to see the light of day. Historically, products that dealt with bodily functions involving human waste or sexual activity focused on the high-level benefits to the customer without wallowing in the sordid facts. If the softness of a toilet paper brand was elevated as its key feature, you didn't have to elaborate where that softness would be applied. If a feminine hygiene product or baby diaper was said to be highly absorbent, there was no need to elaborate as to what substances needed to be absorbed. 

I give a solid "fail" to any effort that not only endorses littering our streets and byways with menstrual-encrusted undergarments but showcases women wearing them on their heads. Kotex, you can do better than this. 

The Chimp Returns

It's been almost exactly two years since I abandoned this blog. At the time, I felt I was somehow running out of subjects, or more likely I was experiencing a feeling of being overwhelmed by a world that evoked so much conflicting outrage and heartbreak.  

If anything, our tiny blue planet -- made so much more fragile by recent pronouncements that there are an almost infinite number of earthlike planets in our galaxy alone -- is seething with conflict and trauma like never before. Undeniable climate change, Ebola outbreaks, the missile strike and loss of another Malaysian jetliner, the Gaza warfare, hobby lobby dramas, and so much more, all promise an endless stream of human-driven conflict and content to react to and write about. 

And, after some interesting but, in the end, unsatisfactory forays into social media (one Twitter account as myself, and one masked within an unidentifiable persona), I realize that long-form writing is what I enjoy most. It doesn't matter how many followers I have, only that I have this free-form forum to espouse about out culture and its mystifying insistence on goose-stepping our species ever closer to oblivion. 

Please watch this space for more entries. 

Smoke & Mirrors

I just don't get Cindy Sherman.

For over 30 years, this woman has been producing conceptual photographs that feature herself elaborately costumed and made up to simulate what seem to be female archetypes of everything from brittle socialites to lovelorn spinsters. I've yet to hear a satisfactory explanation of her artistic intent, even from her; she says herself that hopefully her oeuvre is "seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised," but "I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff."

So what is it, then? Always using herself as her canvas, Sherman takes great pains to recreate the hairstyle and costume of whichever character she is trying to inhabit. But nearly every one has a stark, incongruous feature, like Kabuki white-face or heavy dabs of pancake, that calls it out as garish and inauthentic. Is that the point? It seems a thin artistic gimmick, yet it's one that garnered her $3.89 million in 2011 for one print called Untitled #96 (they're all called Untitled Something, as though she's as hesitant to make a clear statement about each work as she is to accurately describe the movement responsible for her tremendous success).

Here's how the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where her latest exhibit opens this weekend, sums up her work: One of the most influential artists of our time, Cindy Sherman creates provocative artworks that explore wide-ranging issues of identity and representation. "Artworks?"

The actress and impresario Tracey Ullman has been seamlessly unspooling and inhabiting similar characters for the past two decades and making all of them -- chain-smoking Hollywood hairdressers, trailer trash grandmothers, Jewish princesses from New Jersey -- walk, talk and entertain in a way that's impressive, moving and hilarious. That's a talent I can get behind.

Courting Disaster

Now that my civic duty has ended, I can finally make some observations about the experience.

• Television has permanently affected how judges behave. They all try to be funny, or dramatic, or, in the case of mine, Susan Dey.
• It's really quite a feat, on a morning when the temperature is a perfect 66 degrees, to maintain the climate of a public building at an equatorial level that replicates mid-day in Borneo. You could grow orchids in that court house, and train monkeys to harvest them.
• The defense attorney in this case did his client a real disservice. Elderly and theatrical, he affected a sort of Southern esquire Inherit the Wind persona of upswept grey hair and tightly-knotted bow tie. He was ill-prepared and relied on courtroom theatrics and smoke screens, and when he started the trial with a dissertation on the defendant's premature birth 32 years ago (quickly objected to by the prosecutor and sustained by the judge) we knew it was going to be a long haul to liberty. There were sidebars a-plenty.
• Some scientists are astute observers and some make you question their empirical wisdom. The victim in this case was a famous UCSF pathologist who was punched in the face for her iPhone. Her testimony was crisp, exact and clarifying. Her colleague who witnessed the incident had no sense of time (an act that must have taken five seconds was described as a minute-and-a-half long; the attacker, who was 6'2", was described as 5'2"). Let's find out what he's researching and assign that work to someone else before he blows up the city.
• Today's young prosecutors have terrific PowerPoint skills.
• The same terrifying, baggy-pantsed thug who would pop a cap in yo' ass on the street transforms into a charming gentleman once he enters the portals of Superior Court. "Excuse me, sir," one said to me, his gold dental grill flashing in the low-wattage institutional lighting as we snaked torward the metal detectors. "I believe you dropped this laundry ticket."
• When the victim is a woman, the defense will excuse all the female jurors they can because they're more likely to sympathize with a woman being attacked on the street.

So, that's over for another year. But since attorneys love nothing more than to populate their jury boxes with former Catholic altar boys like me, however lapsed, I'm sure I'll serve again.