Dear Violet,

how do you know you are not paste!

I mean, these guys* are paste. But still.


*do you like my Exposed Structure Bauhaus-style hyperlinking?

A bunch of different kinds of update.

A what does Seth Stevenson Look Like Update - I google-imaged Seth Stevenson but all I got were stills from the commercials he's reviewed. Which is like thirty different kinds of post-post modern. In my mind he is now a chimera with the faces of the Mac ad guy, the BK king and a bowl of soup from Malaysia.

A what does Violet Do Instead of Playing With The Dog Update - I read this post on this obscure little blog I found. It is by a "No Nym," not by the main blogger who is some professor chick? Or something? Here's what happens:

This blogger-academic types says, I found a job that does not crush my babies in to paste and my getting perspective on what I WANT as opposed to what grad school told me I want helped with that. Everybody normal is all yay, then everybody crazy is all, why did you even have babies if you didn't want them to be crushed into paste, because I mean, there are plenty of us academics out here who would be totally willing to crush our babies into paste for the right job, and you are just wasting everyone's time and gumming up the works but not with baby paste which is actually good for the works.

Observations and Commentary:

Uno) I am the child of one and a half normal academics, one half Indiana Jones and zero stay at home parents. I totally did not turn out being paste.* Sometimes, we ate lots of mac and cheese because no one had time to cook anything else, but sometimes we also went to the zoo or played Candyland. This is all, I think, more about parents – and parents’ marriages – then about babies, who tend to grown up into dysfunctional nuthats like the rest of us no matter what, though they do need to be fed and not beaten, no matter what. Parents want to feel good about what they are doing for their children, but a lot of jobbsers count on encouraging feelings of inadequacy that ripple throughout an employee’s existence. I think it is supposed to be motivating. **

Dos) However, I kind of sympathize with the crazy people, because whenever anyone talks about their own experience, I read that as a criticism of mine to the extent it differs. And I guess, if someone" had peed in your coffee that morning, you could read the post as a little bit of The Secret-Style you are the engineer of your own destiny think happy thoughts blah zee. He could have gotten only one of those job offers, or none at all, and then there would be no happy story about how he told the fancy robber baron school that no way no how was their steel mill getting built on his pristine farm, nuh uh. But. There would still be a story there about how there is a whole lot of weird professional dogma that got all put up in our brainpiece and it’s a liberating exercise to reject it, even if it’s still just you in your hovel rejecting.

Tres) I am really, really curious about bringing up family stuff being a no-no in interviews, causing bad reactions in hiring committees and the like, only because I hear about it often and from people whose perception of their own experiences I trust, and I’ve seen what seem like its effects on the broad social level and in my own brainpeice, but my actual experience with jobs/schools etc. has been v. much the opposite. I’m literally incapable about being anything but totally candid about my personal life, because I have a huge huge mouth and am obsessed with myself, and will have been talking to total strangers (whom I need to impress because they own my job) about my reproductive decision making within thirty seconds of meeting them. I applied for a very staid-sounding scholarship at Big Shot Professional School for Big Shot Profession and it was all corporate corporate corporate, and one of the interviewers, who was wearing cufflinks and everything was chatting to me about his granddaughter, and I was literally like, “I’ll have to get started on kids in school, because I want like thirty.” I got the scholarship. And that is one example out of many. My theory is that corporate types in cufflinks find me a charming breath of fresh air because I am and they are like, let’s give our money to the flighty girl with the runs in her stocking and see what enchanting indiscretions she commits with it, and that if I were someone who were more like them or didn’t have runs in my stockings, the dissonance between my persona and my family concerns would make them all who does she think she is? Or maybz, because I know Goodman Beekeeper is all babies all the time, and I know I can count on him to hold that shit down no matter what, I don't display any anxiety when talking about this and that works in my favor? Or maybe I have just dealt with awesome people so far?

*My brother, on the other hand, starved to death during MLA ’89.

** The academics of whom I am the child, upon hearing that I was considering applying to X-Subject PhD programs were like, so, what about nursing school? And then all their friends revealed a secret desire to have gone to nursing school. And these are some people who have totally won the professor game. Meanwhile, my friends in nursing school really like it. I am not going to school for X-Subject.

Things Mark Knopfler Left Out of That Funny Song

On Philadephia:

Sandwiches are good, but are better in Chicago. This is no poor reflection on Philadelphia, however. You can not hope to touch a place called Mr. Beef. And am I even allowed to talk if my fave Philly sandwich was not a cheesesteak at all, but rather the roasted pork at Tony Luke's?

Did you know Bahama Breeze is very popular with touring bands? I was promised walls of frozen drink machines, however, and there were only like four.

Blades of Glory is really good. The argument that it borders on homophobic is totally bunk, and I say this as a huge homophobe. No, but seriously.

No, but seriously seriously, I mean how can you expect funny movies about figure skating to have time left over for making fun of anything but figure skating?

Dear rusty,

J'arrive! I didn't see you here.

A Bro is Born Every Minute

There's an article on Slate about Crispin Porter & Bogusky and the Burger King etc. commercials. I guess I could embed a commercial here, but I don't believe in visuals.

I read this article, because it is by Seth Stevenson, and I have a conflicted and compelling relationship with him in my mind, and also because if there is one thing I am interested in, it is commercials on the TV. Also, because during the five minutes I thought I might work in advertising and was reading the relevant trades, Alex Bogusky came up a lot so I felt smart for recognizing his name and also I vaguely remember thinking someone needed to call his mother and tell her that he was not acting very nice.

The article explores wtf is up with the agency relentlessly relying on a tired Bro experience, i.e., eat of this burger my son and basically you will be the king of a tribe of strippers with machetes, haha, do you see the kitsch value there, but anyway that's implicitly, explicitly you will just be eating a burger.

Observations and Commentary:

a)Seth's problem with the ads were that they weren't funny, weren't ever funny, and weren't really funny because they promoted and spoke unequivocally to the creepy, boorish masculinity of Bros, and that was not a good thing. My take is a little different. I actually thought those King (that is not obno slang for Burger King, I am talking about the ads with the weird guy in the full-head king mask) ads were amazing, way back when. Like, it takes somenads to sell burgers via creeping people the fuck out. I don't know, because I only eat amazing Neptune Diner burgers* but if I were going to eat fast food, sure, I'd eat Burger King, based solely on how much I liked those early King ads.** Unless I lived in California because blah blah In n Out blah blah blah.

a1)There are no more free rides on the Bro humor paradigm train. Because, in part, of Crispy Porter, Bro humor has been a part of non-Bro culture long enough that to have any effect presently, it needs to be funny in a way that transcends, and it takes a pretty deft hand to exploit Bro conventions without relying on them to be the joke. Even the most skilled can eff it up, see below. Obviously I am using a definition of Bro humor than encompasses basically everything.

Funny,*** meanwhile, not that funny.
Funny, meanwhile, meh.

a2)I, me personally and I, me representative of everyone are both kind of tired of mean ads, if only because it's very perplexing to be assaulted by your very own television to
which you have been so kind. AHHHHH CAR SO FAST IT HATEFUCKS YOUR WIFE AND EATS YOUR DOG AHHHHH. Um, no thanks...

b)I feel like this article exhibits a sort of painful irony, in that I've always considered Seth Stevenson Slate's resident Bro. He sounds cute though, I bet he is cute. I am totally going to google image him later.

3)Also, me and Seth Stevenson fly through time. The first BK ad I saw after reading this article was one with actual bros drawing on each other's faces and taping each other to chairs. For analysis, refer to paradigm train leaving station, above.

*No link to reviews because I could not find one that did justice to the giant stained glass Neptune in the back.

**I am the ideal consumer, I buy products for which I am totally aware I have neither need not desire because I liked the ad - this is a conscious part of my decision making process, and one for which I make no apologies. If we could bottle my brain, we would make a lot of money. Unf, it is stuck in my head, impoverishing me.

***The funniest part is the commenters insisting that THIS IS NOT EITHER Tarantino's directorial debut.

Dear Violet,

Where you at?

So how about some light blog-style calisthenics?
Let's reach into a hat and pull out thirteen songs:

1. "Kensington Castle" - Robert Pollard
   
2. "Kasimir S. Pulaski Day" - Big Black
   
3. "You Shook Me" - Jeff Beck
   
4. "The Game" [acoustic demo] - Echo & The Bunnymen
   
5. "If You Could Save Yourself (You'd Save Us All)" - Ween
6. "Emotional Retard" - Pink Grease
7. "Philosophy Of The World" - The Shaggs
8. "Love" - Morgen
   
9. "When A Man Loves A Woman" - Karen Dalton
10. "Sullivan's Social Club" - The Fiery Furnaces
11. "Polly" - The Kinks
12. "Marshall" - DNA
13. "Goin' Back" - The Byrds

This year on Roman Polanski Day I watched Repulsion, which did not make me want to sleep with Catherine Deneuve.