“Brass Eye” (1997) - Drugs
Jesse Thorn was decent enough to hip me to the British comedy series “Brass Eye” on DVD.
Watch the clip. If you’ve got the jumpies, ➤➤ to 3:30 for the bit on “Schools Heightened Aversion Drug Therapy (S.H.A.D.T.)”. You will not regret it.
Validation is but a Google search away.
Having typed only “Garfield poster” before autocomplete added “osmosis” for me, as if by divination and demographic insight, I know that in my preteen classroom angst I am not alone.
Did you ever in your life so badly want to punch a poster?
Another shining example of autocomplete validation: “Jon Hamm je…” yielded “Jon Hamm jewish”. More on that later.
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Even in dirty campaigns such as this one, where half-truths, obfuscation and exaggeration abound (from both sides, mind you), when you challenge the voting public to judge your opponent by what is known of him, you show respect for your audience, your opponent, and the political process. When you do as the McCain campaign has done in these more dire of their campaign days—challenge your audience to judge your opponent by what is not known of him—you show a profound disrespect for humanity.
Let’s give a name to this meme, the implied answer to the question posed by the McCain campaign. Let’s call the meme “Obama is a terrorist” for simplicity’s sake. Of this I’m sure: the McCain campaign is run by smart people who wouldn’t be where they are were it otherwise. The McCain campaign knows that Barack Obama is not a terrorist nor a terrorist sympthaizer, that claims of his faith in and practice of Islam are without any legitimacy, that his ties with people whose past can be characterized as radical are based on nothing other than community building and never destruction. But the McCain campaign knows that there are fringe elements of its audience who don’t know this. And so they allow themselves the luxury of suggesting it by merely posing a question.
Granted, I believe that when McCain asks the question, “What don’t we know about Barack Obama?” his intentions are not to imply that Obama is a terrorist. On the contrary, I believe that McCain is decent enough to have been negatively surprised by the reaction his question received from an audience member in this clip from a rally in New Mexico last week. I believe that when McCain himself asks the question, he intends to simply convey the message that to many, the details of Barack Obama’s policies may be obscured by the magnetism of his personality (which, in itself, is a legitimate suggestion).
But the question, posed with a slightly different and increasingly common intonation, exploits that most dangerous of all human tendencies: to fear the unknown.
Let me be perfectly clear: challenging voters to judge a man based on the unknown is an outright appeal to ignorance.
UPDATE: This, via John Dickerson, is uplifting.
Digital Love in an Analogue Space
My first cell phone had a series of text message templates. They included such generally specific communique as “Be home soon” and “Where should we meet?”
Disturbingly, though, one template simply said, “I love you.” While the phrase may be the second most used in the English language (right behind “I think we should see other people,” luckily not an option on the phone) and while the letter “u” only appears once in the spelling, the many stages at the cell phone manufacturer needed for Text Template 8 to appear on my phone, the pure cynicism and reductionist thinking that led to a mass produced pre-typing of emotion, display the most Orwellian aspects of our increasingly wireless and nonverbal interactions.
Greeting cards have mass-produced sentiment for decades so maybe text messaging should be viewed in the same prism: distant, non-immediate communication. Except text messaging is, by nature, immediate and direct, right to your pocket past any barriers of rings or voicemail. When an impersonal emotional lexicon is used in a personal nature, a sad disconnect of message, medium, and person occurs, and we reduce ourselves even more to numbers in a spectrum.
“We’re the One!” ABC 1978-79 Season Promo (1978)
This is the climate when I was born.
Skip to the end for the cast of the entire ABC lineup really selling it in a rousing anthem to their network.
via Cynical-C
Grease for Peace
There’s a strong chance you’re young enough that you don’t know who Sha Na Na is. No shame, I’ll tell you - they were a 50s revival doo-wop act that gained popularity in the 70s, predated and even inspired Grease (1978), “Happy Days” and American Graffiti (1973). They played at Woodstock, for Christ’s sake. A piece I just read from Columbia College (where the group was born as The Kingsmen), explores a fascinating claim that Sha Na Na redefined the decade of the 50s, one in which the Beats dominated the subcultural landscape, as “The Fifties”, an era which would be quaintly recalled through a series of memory implants set to music and heavily favoring young miscreants called Greasers.
Crazy enough, the word Greasers wasn’t even around when the Greasers were. In their day, they were known as hoods or J.D.s (juvenile delinquents). Can you imagine if, in 20 years time, some pop act decided to revive the 20-aughts and singled out one of our prized subcultures—let’s pick the emo kids—and completely fabricated a name for them—let’s say Bangers—and not only did countless movies and TV shows appropriate the name (maybe you see the musical adaptation of the film Bangs (2026) on Broadway, but your own parents fondly remember their days in the aughts as Bangers? That’s some science fiction shit! Yet it happened to all of us.
My point is this: until I read the piece and revisited video from the wildly popular “Sha Na Na” TV show I now remember absorbing as a kid, I hadn’t realized that so much of my imago, my vision of masculinity, my ideals in style and hair product were defined by the group Sha Na Na. ”Bowser” in particular (the tall, skinny baritone in all black and high-waters) served as model of dress and demeanor for me. There was a good year in there it was rare to find me not flexing my muscles and striking a Bowser pose to win over a girl or a teacher. I bet it still works, even. Will research and report back.
UPDATE: You bet your sweet ass it does.
via Morning News
“I wish they would figure out a way to make these props look less aged. I sometimes feel like these characters are living in a retro museum instead of 1960s New York.
Mark Simonson rips apart meticulous anachronisms he finds in Mad Men. There’s no pleasing some people.
via Quipsologies
