Rebellion Against Good Production

I recently saw a movie called Until The Light Takes Us. It’s a documentary (available for streaming on NetFlix) about the Norwegian Black Metal scene, and in it they interview this guy named Varg Vikernes, who is among the founding members of this movement. He was in prison at the time of the interview for some stuff he did that maybe some people would think wasn’t very nice or whatever. But he’s out now, so hide under your bed or something.

Anyway, the part of the movie that really stood out for me was when Vikernes was talking about when he recorded his first Burzum album (his band/project is called Burzum, and I believe he plays everything in it). He said that he asked the recording engineer to give him the worst microphone they had for him to sing into, because he wanted to have it sound as bad as possible, and this was because he was rebelling against “good production” values. This idea of wanting your stuff to sound bad on purpose is interesting, because most people don’t actually want to do that. But listen to your old 1980s American hardcore records, like Henry Rollins’s first band State of Alert, and that sounds like crap, but it’s also great! And if it sounded like it was produced well, it might have taken the rawness away from it. In any case, I am somewhat sympathetic to Vikernes’s aim for low production value, although, I think that it may be better to mix it shitty than to record it shitty, but whatever. (You never know, someday you might want to re-release it for snobby audiophiles or something.)

So this got me thinking, if he really wanted to rebel against “good production”, he could have gone completely whole hog on this idea. He just used a terrible microphone, but as far as I know, he still used it to record into a decent multi-track recorder. If he really wanted to rebel against good production, he could have gone a lot further! Like, for example, he could have used an old Ronco “Mr. Microphone”, and then used the other crappy mic to record whatever came out of the transistor radio the Mr. Microphone was playing through. Or else he could have played his music into an old telephone, and then had it connect to someone’s old Dictaphone tape answering machine over the phone lines, and just record it on that old crappy answering machine. Or even worse, what he could have done would have been to play it into one of those old “brick” cell-phones from the 1980s, and then have the guy on the other end of the phone put it on speakerphone, and then record it into a boom-box across the room. Then he could take that recording, play it back on a lame old tape Dictaphone, and then record it into the multi-track recorder that way, but through the worst microphone the guy had. Now that’s what I’d call rebellion against “good production”!

IBM Doctor Print Ad

Okay, look at this:

http://graphicdesign.about.com/od/inspiration/ig/IBM-Print-Ad-Campaign/Now-Every-Doctor-Knows-You-Personally.htm

Um, don’t let your kids see this, or you’ll never get them to go to the doctor ever again!

But seriously, doesn’t this look like an evil clown, or Stephen Colbert made-up as the Joker (that Batman foe) for an extra-evil Halloween episode of Children’s Hospital or something? This may have seemed like a good idea in your head, Mr. Graphic Designer, but once you saw it, didn’t you say: “Um, maybe not.”?

But who knows, perhaps this is some unholy alliance between IBM and the Insane Clown Posse. Now that’s an ad campaign I could get behind! (But I doubt they’d sell much stuff that way, either.)

Paul Revere and Sarah Palin

Okay, so now the liberal press is going after Sarah Palin again just because she didn’t get the Paul Revere story right or whatever. Hey, we all know what’s going on here, right: this is a Hollywood plot to trick her into making a fool of herself again! Sure it is!

Don’t try to tell me that there’s no Hollywood Paul Revere movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger rides a horse-shaped Harley chopper with a laser-cannon on it to go melt all the redcoats who tried to take away Americans’ guns, or that Mel Gibson never rode that fire-breathing Godzilla car-crunch-a-saurus from the monster truck rallies out into Boston Harbor to crush the British warships to splinters while Americans went and hid all their guns so the government couldn’t take them away! You know there’s a movie like that! Maybe only Sarah Palin has seen it, but that’s just because it’s obviously part of a liberal Hollywood plot to make her look bad!

But seriously, after seeing those movies, what would you remember really happened? Hollywood always exaggerates everything in their historical movies to try to make them interesting. If history is so great, then why did all of you always fall asleep in history class in high school? Don’t have an answer for that so fast, now do you? So, then, is it fair to expect Sarah Palin to know history stuff when you didn’t care about it either?

Now, I grew up in Lexington Mass as a young kid, I’ve been to Boston before, and I have a collection of authentic Paul Revere silver stuff, so I have the right to forgive her more than any of you, and I do so gladly. (But mostly because I know she’ll give us all an even better doozie later on!) So come on: don’t nail her too hard for these little mistakes, or she’ll never step into the big ones later! After all, maybe she was just being metaphorical for poetical license, and you’re all too artistically-challenged to appreciate it!

By the way, I watched that quote of hers happen live on TV, and I knew there would be all this outcry about it, so I thought of something: Maybe Sarah Palin needs her own personal Paul Revere to warn her: “The liberals are coming, the liberals are coming!”

Anyway, here’s the story, so lap it up you picky, persnickety Palin pounders!:

http://beta.news.yahoo.com/blogs/upshot/palin-flubs-explanation-paul-revere-ride-215549982.html

Breakfast Cereal

A dumb article today claims America no longer loves the usual suspects of breakfast cereals. Um, duh; yes they do: they just don’t want to pay the over-inflated price to get the brand names in this economic recession, silly!

Everywhere I go, people all have corn flakes, Cheerio’s-style “o”-things, etc. But now they’re all made by Trader Joe’s or whatever. Look, all you have to do is walk down the cereal aisle to realize how much more expensive the big brand names are than the competition. That was all fine when the competition sucked, but now there are places like Trader Joe’s, and they make stuff that’s at least as good for lots less. So if you want to sell your crappy cereal, charge less for it, silly! The world is changing, and you’ve got to change with it, unless you want to go under!

Here’s the article. (But it’s wrong, because it’s only measuring the sales of brand names, and not the type of cereal itself.):

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/112856/breakfast-cereals-declining-popularity-247

Cat Sitting with Mariner's Catch

I used to dislike cats growing up, since I had a big dog. Our Rottweiler was always up for games, and it just seemed like cats were always annoyed, coy and snobby (or lazy). But I met a cat in 2000 that changed my mind about cats forever, and now I like them (mostly. There are still lame cats, though.). So you know what that means: I get to cat sit for my sister’s three (count ‘em: 3!) cats whenever they go away anywhere! Yay!

Actually, I really like their cats, and they have DirecTV HD, while I just have a lame cable system that I won’t mention because it has so many problems (but it starts with a “C”, and it ends with a “harter”). So anyway, I really like these cats, but they are funny creatures. One is very social, and the others are scaredy-cats. (Now I understand how the expression “scaredy-cat” came to be.) So you know that means just one thing especially: one is always first to the food when I do the feeding, while the others hide until I leave. Now, this can be nice, but it can also lead to much frustration and bemusement.

Now, since I like these cats, I want them to be happy, even if 66.6% of them are always running away from me. So I happened to notice that they snub most cat food flavors, but they seem to love any fish-related cat food (well, Friskies, anyway). So I told my sister, who answered the call by getting hundreds of cans of all that rotten-smelling fish-offal stuff. So then they’d be happy, right? Well, no, as it turns out, they like most of the awful rotting fish stuff, except for one kind: something called “Mariner’s Catch”. And there’s a lot of that right now.

“Mariner’s Catch” sounds like fish, doesn’t it? I would have thought it was fish, but it’s pink in color, and the cats don’t like it. The one extra-social cat sits around waiting for the food once she hears their food bowls clink in the sink. (She/they all hear it even if it makes no sound at all and they’re upstairs with the TV blaring. Maybe they’re psychic! In which case the military must learn how to use them as a weapon!) In any case, when I leave out the “Mariner’s Catch”, this main cat walks over, sniffs it, makes a “yucky” grimace, and then she turns around and looks at me with the kind of expression you’d expect to see on a CNN reporter who just caught Michele Bachmann in a bad mistake about the US Constitution, like that we all have the right to graft a bear’s arms onto us or something. But you know, just because it’s called “Mariner’s Catch”, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s got fish in it, right? I mean, it sounds like a guy out in a boat on the ocean catching fish, but what if what really happened is that he caught a bunch of corpses in his net from a sunk cruise liner or something? I’ll bet he’d make more money on cat food than he would by telling the Coast Guard. So maybe that’s why it’s pink. After all, Soylent Green is not naturally green; they dye it so environmentalists will approve of it.

More Oil Industry Ads

Anyone who has watched TV in the US recently surely has seen that 45-55-year-old blonde woman in black clothes walking towards the camera and heaping compliments on the oil industry. I used to wonder why they would have chosen such a, shall we say, “middle-aged” woman to shill for the oil industry, but I think I have it figured out now: they know they can’t reach young people, so they’re trying to win over the older people!

Oh, and I almost forgot: they have given up on women too; that’s why there’s just this one woman in the ads, and no David Hasselhoff.

So here’s my theory on this spokeswoman choice: they are looking for what is known (by me) as “the Sarah Palin effect”. Yes, that’s when you get a middle-aged attractive woman who is shilling for big business and oil stuff to melt the hearts of older conservative men. Then they will fall in love, and then they’ll go out and do ideological battle for the petroleum cartel. You see, the oil industry realizes that young people are a lost cause: they’ll have to grow up in a polluted world, and they’re all into renewable energy and other hippie stuff. That’s why it’s no use trying to talk to them, and so they got a spokeswoman who is more like their mom. Or their cute aunt. Or whatever. These women will only connect with their dads, but guess what dad can do? He hands out the allowance. He pays for college. He gets them a car when they’re 16 (or not). But you get the idea. (Please forget for the moment that many more women are currently working than men, and that a lot more men are currently unemployed, okay? Thanks.) So if the oil companies can win the dads over, then the dads can use that leverage to browbeat their young liberal kids into listening to oil company propaganda every time they want something.

Sound like a good idea? No? Well, as far as the information war is concerned, it’s about all they’ve got. So I guess it’s better than nothing, from their perspective.

Chevron Renewable Energy Ads

There are a couple of split-screen ads I’ve seen for Chevron that have some woman on the right side of the screen, and some man on the left side. The women are basically saying how we need renewable energy and stuff, and there’s got to be a way to make it work, etc., and the men are saying stuff that’s obviously from a script. Actually, what am I saying here? They’re both obviously reading from a script or else an oil company wouldn’t dare put them in an ad. But never mind that part. Anyway, they have this situation where there are two people on a split screen, and they’re both saying basically the same type of thing, since they’re both actors who are paid to learn and then deliver the contents of a script; but ladies first!

Now, look; I’m going to give you my unvarnished take on what these ads said to me, but I have to say in (sort of) fairness to Chevron, it looks like they have made a bunch more ads with lots of different combinations of people. The only problem with giving them credit for this is that I’ve never seen them on television! I only found out about them while searching YouTube for the ads I wanted to talk about, which are the only ones I’ve ever seen on TV! So there’s a disclaimer for that issue. But for real, if you make a bunch of ads, but only show a couple that fit the same pattern, don’t get mad when people pigeon-hole them, as it’s your own fault!

Okay, so here’s the deal. Both of their ads currently playing on TV have some Asian-looking woman on one side of the screen, and a white man on the other side of the screen. And the women start speaking first, with the men chiming in afterwards. And then it turns out from the little subtitles identifying them that the women are a teacher, and a web designer, respectively, and the men both work for Chevron. So the women say that we’ve got to have renewable energy for our children’s future, yadda yadda, and the men reassure them that they’ve got it covered, so no worries.

So this is what this says to me: Chevron seems to be saying this: women (especially Asians) are always whiny and demandy with unreasonably stupid liberal hippie shit about energy, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s why it’s lucky we have (white) men working here to take care of it all! Plus, they can talk these crazy ladies down from all their feminine anxiety crap with all of our Chevron clean energy double-talk. Yay, men! (Have white men ever led you astray before? I mean, after the year 2008, that is. Because who wants to just live in the past anyway? I mean, right?)

Now, I’m not saying this is what Chevron intended to be saying, but based upon the ads they’ve run from the ones they’ve made for this campaign, that’s what it says to me. But I’m a jerk anyway, so what do you expect? I think they were thinking: “Hey, lets run the ads with the cute chicks!” And they are cute. But it’s also obvious that they were chosen for their non-white look. So then to have them being reassured by white men just brings out exactly the opposite of what they wanted to be sensitive to in the first place! Doesn’t it? I don’t know; maybe it’s just me.

Here’s one example of the ads I’m talking about, but if you live in the United States, you must have seen the other one too:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Chevron?gclid=CJOH4tCHvKQCFc9L5QodVV071A#p/f/7/ujR9K0cFNBE