mushinnoshin

Goldni and Aunt B have some thoughtful posts about the omnipresent sexism (if not outright misogyny) in last night’s superbowl ads.

I don’t have anything to add really, but did have a minor disagreement with Aunt B on one tangential item:

I mean, I thought the Google ad was cute, but it seemed like a masterpiece because it was a respite from the “Women suck and they’re ruining you. Only our product can make you more manly.” bombardment.

The disagreement being that I thought the Google ad was a masterpiece on its own without regard to the shittyness of the rest of the ads. (Which is really to say I just wanted to post about the Google ad and this was a convenient segue to do so :)

I really did think it was brilliant — maybe the best superbowl ad since that iconic one from Apple so many years ago. It was simple, thoughtful, intelligent, and emotional — and with that tag line “Keep Searching”, it was even deeply existential.

I’m no marketer, but it seems to this layman that an entire ad showing nothing but the branded product doing what the product does has got to be the gold standard, at least when it can be done this clearly and effectively, and especially when the product is shown profoundly helping the user shape the very fundamentals of his life.

But more interesting to me, and this goes to the bit about it being existential — it made a provocative observation about the human condition, how we *are* all searching. We’re searching for love, for happiness, for acceptance, for fulfillment, and for billions of things unique to the individuals doing the searching.

And back to the marketing aspect, Google just humbly accepted its place as the quiet little tool helping us answer our queries in ways never before possible, and not until recently even imaginable. Without a hint of arrogance they reminded us of just how immense a cultural revolution we’ve seen in the last 10 to 15 years or so, and how they’ve become the focal point through which we find and experience so much of that revolution.

That’s some powerful shit. And they did it without actors, celebrities, dialog — hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t even use a camera, just captured it right from the desktop. In this they made a commentary, even if unintentional, about the elemental superiority of substance over style and function over form (the same commentary they began making the day they launched with their simple, no-nonsense prompt).

And then there’s something beautiful in knowing that they didn’t have to do it, it wasn’t part of some well-plotted marketing scheme — they just put it up there because they could, because they felt like participating in the cultural event that superbowl ads have become. And they used a piece they’d already released into the tubes.

It just worked on so many levels. It might be cliche to say it, but this thing wasn’t just an ad, it really was a work of art. Performance art, even.

so here we go;

sorry I haven’t written much here lately. I have no greater excuse than simply not having been in the right frame of mind.

Well. Don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’m here. And it’s Saturday night, after Christmas. It’s been a decent one. Thursday with the dad, brother, and brother’s family, at Granny’s house, which Dad has now inherited. I think I hit a home run with the Fart Machine I gave my nephew. And another, with a most politically incorrect documentary in which the esteemed civil libertarian boundary-pusher Larry C. Flynt chronicles the accomplishments and exploits of an Alaskan pin-up queen gone rogue. We’ll leave the rest to your imagination or google-fu.

Saturday, pizza, party, and presents with the sister and her husband, which rocked. Never doubt the badassedness of four fresh diced jalapeños and a smattering of mushrooms taking a Digiorno to the next level, especially when you wash it down with a steady flow of a brew-kit bitter and a back supply of the same brew-kit’s dark ale. We backed the food with the Mr. Hankey’s Chrismas Classics dvd, and the beer with Weird Al’s videos dvd, which culminated in the main event of Christmas at Ground Zero. Then to the living room for presents, with Koyaanisqatsi muted, just for the visual, and the TSO playing on on the PC/stereo. Good Times. As far as the gift, my & my sister and I have this long running calendar gag, and I won’t bore you with the details but I think I rocked it this year.

So then today I guess is xmas for me. Cleaned up from the party, then spent the day in lazy, beer-sipping play and exploration. I finally opened up the School of Rock dvd that’s been sitting on my coffee table for months. I can’t tell you how much I love the hell out of that movie. It’s stupid, it’s sappy, but goddamn it it rocks and I love it. Of course I’ve seen it too many hundred thousand times on TBS, so I didn’t need to watch it, but watched it with the commentary from Jack Black and the director, then went back and just watched the “one hell of a rock show” chapter. Man, for a stupid movie song, they nailed it. Just enough Yes, Kiss, Bowie, and Floyd all mixed up and dished out over a plate of AC/DC — fuck yeah. And yes, I fucking cry every time when Turkey Sub struts up to the mike and belts out loud and clear how happy she is to be who she is in a glorious declaration. And though I’ve got my issues with the keyboard kid — I would have liked to have seen a little less Rick Wakeman, a little more Ray Manerik with a helping of Jon Lord (that just would have been more rock and roll to me) — I understand better after the commentary that yeah, Wakeman was probably the perfect archetype given the actor/pianist’s true to life classical upbringing and utter unfamiliarity with rock. And even still I did always like the somewhat-Wakemanesque, but almost more Come Sail Away-era-Denis DeYoung sounding portamento-drenched monotimbral solo he does there. My kinda shit, actually.

Had an awesome dinner (yellow saffron rice, with red onions, fresh jalapeños, and mushrooms, well seasoned and sautéed with a Morningstar Veggie Italian Sausage, if you give a damn), then put on Naqoyqatsi, another dvd I’ve owned for a while but been waiting for the right time to watch. Except that I still haven’t watched it, I’ve just been listening as I typed this post. Well, it *is* Glass, it needs at least one listen by itself without the visual.

And it just ended. Guess I should grab another beer and watch it for real this time.

Man, Netflix is getting really specific. The first “category” on my homepage is now “Dark Tortured-Genius Dramas”.

On a similar track, I’ve always been annoyed that they only give us 5 stars to rate with, no half stars, etc, and usually when I go to rate one I’m thinking, “well this one’s really a 3.5″, etc… Well it’s almost getting creepy how often their “Average of raters like you” — which does do half-stars — matches how I would have rated had they let me.

And while I’m talking Netflix — I haven’t decided if I like their connection widget I’ve been playing with that posts my ratings to facebook. Or rather I do like it for the ones I want to post, especially now that they’ve added the ability to comment, but I don’t like that it posts everything I rate. And not just the ones I’ve just rented, it posts *everything* you rate. So when they give you a page of recommendations and you go through rating all the ones you’ve already seen it posts those too. I do watch a lot of movies, but not as many as it makes it seem. Seems like it would be simple to add a “don’t post this one” to the little dialog that pops up asking for your comment.

Somehow I had not until now gotten around to watching Spike Lee’s excellent biography of Malcolm X. Meanwhile, a few weeks ago I saw the Ken Burns PBS documentary on Thomas Jefferson. Together the two films suggest an interesting comparison of the two men, as regards their curiously intersecting natures as great flawed heroes.

We see Jefferson, the eloquent and passionate advocate for equality, liberty, and justice, who penned arguably our country’s greatest creed in the opening of our Declaration of Independence, who yet was a slaveholder, and a racist who believed African-Americans to be genetically inferior. Though, to his credit he was an abolitionist, just one who knew the day had not yet come to cross that bridge.

Then we have Malcolm X, the eloquent and passionate advocate of a long oppressed people, who quoted those lines from Jefferson as he fought for equality, liberty, and justice for his brothers while challenging and inspiring them to raise themselves up to their own worth, who yet was a separatist, a racist who charged each individual white person with the sins of the collective. Though, to his credit, he repudiated these views in later life after witnessing brotherhood in Mecca.

I don’t know, I don’t really have a strong point to make here, I’m just feeling that between the two we find some sort of karmic balance, as if by taking the two together we can erase what was wrong with each and magnify that which was right. And also in their shared complexity we catch a uniquely singular portrait of the best and worst of this nation’s soul.

W00t! yeah, Man on Wire won Best Documentary!!!!!!!

OK, I’m not really that excited. Fellow nominee Trouble the Water would have made me just as happy. These are just the only nominated flicks I saw besides The Dark Knight, and I just wanted to fit in with all the cool kids talking about the awards.

• I’m really hoping Al Franken pulls this one out. Because he’s good enough, and smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like him. OK OK I know I already made that joke. Shut up.
• Awesome major victories in the War on the War on Drugs with Massachusetts essentially decriminalizing small possession (ehh… still a $100 fine… not perfect, but still a victory), and Michigan becomes the 13th state to approve medicinal use.
• On the one hand, the TN legislature going red scares and depresses me. The last thing we need is for this state to become more backwards, intolerant, and misogynistic. On the other hand, few elected Tennessee Democrats are worth a damn, and maybe the TNDP needs to hit the wilderness just like the national GOP. But I may have to think about moving to Massachusetts.
• A mighty Nelson Muntz style “Ha-Ha” on Kurita losing to Barnes. I never really cared about her vote on the Wilder issue, actually even thought she was right. But on the issues she’s the sort of nanny-stater that I want Democrats to move away from, and Barnes seems like one of the better ones. Let’s hope the Republican speaker shows enough class not to politicize that seat further and throw him out. I’m not going to hold my breath.
• Keeping our fingers crossed for gay marriage in California. Jeers to the bigots in Florida and Arizona, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Not quite sure what to make of McCain’s appearance on SNL:

It was funny, certainly, and McCain definitely brings back his likable side. But what strikes me — by appearing with Tina Fey, and allowing her to do the whole “going rogue” bit and all — he seems to be basically admitting what has so far been a back-door whisper about the internal fissure in the campaign, throwing Palin under the bus in the process, and … well, sort of seeming to concede the race.

Eh, I don’t know, I don’t want to over analyze. It just seemed a lot more like the sketch you expect a week after the election, as the candidate tries to humbly restore his public image, rather than one fitting for the weekend prior, when the candidate is not supposed to yet admit the mess that has been made.

Of course maybe it’s all just his mavericky way of using reverse psychology and lowered expectations.

I saw Trouble the Water tonight — excellent, deeply moving film. I think the tag line sums it up nicely –

It’s not about a hurricane… it’s about America

I mean just damn, what more can be said? Katrina showed us our worst and our best all at once, and they’ve captured it masterfully in this documentary centered around two survivors who camcorded their own documentary as the disaster hit.

On other subjects, I finally watched the debate when I got home from the flick. What’s striking me is all the pundits in the after talking about McCain “winning on points” and such, and I gotta say I just don’t see it. Sure, he dominated the agenda, and spent the whole night throwing punches — but if the punches don’t land, what have you got?

Which ties to a greater metaphor I think for the campaign as a whole. The chattering classes want a boxing match, and their adrenaline starts to pump whenever they see McCain throw a punch, and time after time they throw up their hands and groan in exasperation when Obama declines to punch back, afraid that he’s losing, never seeing the fight for what it is.

Look — I know we’d all love to see that jab to the chin that takes McCain to the mat, but the problem is, Obama can’t afford to pummel McCain. First for the minor reason that as a black man, he treads a fine line when showing aggression. Like it or not, right or wrong, there are a whole lot of subconscious fears about “the angry black man” that he can’t afford to engage. But even more importantly — to be the sort of leader he wants to be, to bring the country together in the way that we need, to make sure that come January 2009 he doesn’t have half the country bitterly engaged against him — he has to win this thing by being the bigger man, not the meaner one.

After the debates, just like during the Palin bounce, the pundits criticize him for failing to give them a boxing match. But Obama’s not a boxer — he’s a martial artist. Don’t waste energy on punches that won’t work. Block when you have to, but prefer tai sabake. Use your opponents movements against themselves, sometimes a mere inch worth of shifting is all it takes to send your opponent careening.

After 90 minutes of bluster, anger, and flailing strikes that never seem to land, McCain was exhausted, flustered, his knuckles bruised from striking the wall. And that’s why the polls tell us Obama won the match, no matter how many “points” Pat Buchanan thinks McCain won.

Sensei teaches us that the ideal fight is won with one single strike. I trust Obama to hit McCain with a solid, pinpoint blow to the solar plexus on November 4th.

Soooo…. yeah, sorry I missed the party at the saucer tonight. There was at least one person I’m sorta curious about meeting, but there was also one person I really didn’t want to run into, which I guess might have have washed out in the balance.. but then at least three or four of the people I always want to see couldn’t make it… so at the end of the day my agoraphobic tendencies won and I committed myself to a night of playing piano alone in the dark.

What? Don’t groan, don’t worry about it. It is what it is, I am who I am.

Of course I can only play so much piano, and I filled out most of the night with a Netflix contribution, watching the movie Primary Colors. And there were certainly some thoughts and lessons to be drawn that paralleled both the good and the bad of our current attempt to elect President Obama. Along those lines I had a number of bright comments that piled into my head as I watched, but at the end I was only left with the bits about how Stanton was “flawed but essentially decent”, and — well, I can’t find the exact quotes at the moment, but there was great bit about how the protagonist saw Stanton as a liar who agreed with him, even though he lied to get elected.

It’s hard to argue with that.

On a side note, if Hillary Clinton was half as good an actress as Emma Thompson, the world just might look very differently now. Though, hell, I’m almost convinced that if Hillary hadn’t let her ego and ambition pass on the chance to run in 2004, the world still might look very differently now.

Oh and I meant to add — Travolta’s performance as Bill Clinton (err… Stanton wink wink) — well I won’t go so far as to call it extraordinary or Oscar worthy or anything like that, but it was good enough I think to serve as something of an apology for most of the rest of his career :)

Just another brain dump…

• Dude, how did I make it some 13 years without having seen or heard of Mr. Show??? Funny funny stuff. I can see why Miss Lesley is so enamored with David Cross.
• Speaking of things I’ve recently Netflixed (if that’s not a verb yet, it should be), The Lives of Others was phenomenal. This is why I watch so many damn movies, because every now and then you’re lucky enough to stumble across something this powerful. In gratitude.
• Another great film I’ve recently seen is Notes on a Scandal — Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench really did a masterful job, and kept the film from ever dipping to its downside potential as a highbrow Single White Female.
• I was particularly intrigued by the Dench character’s obsession with class, calling the working class students “proles” and remarking with disdain on the Blanchett character’s “bourgeois bohemianism”. I don’t know that I grokked any great insight from this, I just found it interesting as the intersection of these two classes is such a recurring theme in my own life.
• In politics — well what can I say about John Edwards? A perfectly coiffed plastic politician, the Democratic answer to Mitt Romney, turns out to be a phony — and people are shocked? Good riddance I say. I think this is turning out to be a good year. With him down for the count and with the wind knocked out of Hillary, maybe we really are on the verge of seeing a great evolution in the Democratic party. Not holding my breath, just saying maybe.

And finally, rest in peace Mr. Hayes.

You’re daaaaaaamn right.