Yesterday, I could have lived on a lonely bluff overlooking the ocean. I’d have made tea or coffee. I’d have turned all the lights off. I’d have taken all my clothes off. And I’d sit there, drinking coffee, watching the darkness, listening to the winds howl and tear the surf apart. And I’d have been in my element. Alone with the words of air and water resonating within me. And happy.
Monthly Archives: March 2002
Advertising is us
Advertising.
It seems to be one of those things that everyone accepts as inevitable and ubiquitous. It’s another reason why I feel like a stranger in a strange land. Each time I see advertising encroach on yet a new area of life, I feel again like I wasn’t meant to be here.
I don’t know how old I was when I first realised this. I used to watch my friend and her sister play Little League baseball, and every fence was covered with a banner ad. They detracted from the sunny skies, surrounding trees, and comforting air of settling evening. At least they did have a small-town feel — Al’s Auto Parts, Surf Pizzeria.
It hit home more when I was still interested in what seemed to be such simple things as the Rose Bowl Parade, the Orange Bowl game, etc. One day, I woke up, and it was something like the Sunkist Orange Bowl. (Today, we don’t even have anything that relevant — it’s the Nokia Sugar Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl. College football, which must earn revenues in the millions if not billions through attendance, television, and sweatshirt sales, had decided it couldn’t scrape by without corporate sponsorships. Now I wonder how many of us do remember when bowl games were simply the Cotton Bowl and SBC were just three letters of the alphabet. Not only does no one remember, corporate sponsorships have become so common that no one cares. If I mentioned this to anyone, I’m sure they would look at me like I was being my weird INFP self again and say, “What’s the big deal?” After all, these are people used to see irreplaceable fossil fuel wasted on airplanes flying over baseball games touting local radio stations.
Then, in what seemed an advertising-related move, the Olympics, an ancient tradition of amateur sports, convinced itself that it was okay for professional athletes earning millions of dollars to compete. It robbed the Olympics of its spirit, suspense, and glory. Now it is another schlock sports event, right up there with pro wrestling — loud, blaring, brightly lit, and utterly lacking in any interest. I just don’t care whether these pros win a medal or whether our pros are better than the Russian pros. I haven’t watched the Olympics since the early 1980s. And from the reports I’ve read, I haven’t missed anything other than bickering and lots and lots of advertising — skiers with clothes covered in sponsor logos and athletes prominently gulping Gatorade while the cameras are on them.
TV shows became noticeably shorter — so much so that whole scenes needed to be cut from Star Trek original episodes for syndication. When I saw them again in their entirety, I discovered how much was missing — and how easy it was not to notice because, after all, one expects 15 minutes of advertising every hour.
I got cable television rather later than most (this was an issue in Chicago). I had always thought that, because you were paying a monthly fee for cable, there would be no advertising. Wrong. There’s no advertising (just promotions) on the “premium” channels that you pay even more for. But there are as many or even more commercials on basic cable (for which you also pay) than there were on vanilla network TV. On some shows, ads break in every five or so minutes.
Then, at the grocery store, in my case, a local coop, i.e., not a chain, coupon dispensers began appearing. How tempting to buy the cereal for which a coupon is handy rather than the one you actually wanted. Lately, they’ve been putting colorful commercial appliqués on the tile floor. After all, you shouldn’t be allowed to look down without receiving a message.
Of course, there’s the Internet. Web hosts tout themselves as “free” — as long as you agree to (a) hitting your visitors with annoying popup and banner advertising and (b) signing over your rights to the content. And, of course, these hosts, like Yahoo!/Geocities (or was it Geocities/Yahoo!) have millions of happy customers who don’t perceive having ads forced down their visitors’ throat as “paying.” You can get a “free” version of Eudora, as long as you are willing to watch “small” ads. Most people who opt for this don’t see viewing ads as “paying.” I guess I do. For me, it’s paying too high a price — and encouraging more of the same.
I haven’t gone to the movies lately, but I learned a month ago that you can buy advertising space at the local cinema before the previews begin. A captive audience, each of whom has paid perhaps $8 for the privilege, is forced to sit through an array of ads before they can see what they really came for. I asked a friend about it, and she said she and her husband resent it. But what can you do?
Then, a few weeks ago, I got on the elevator at work to be confronted by a little screen that displays, in color, news clips, market ups and downs, weather, etc. — again, to a captive audience that has few other ways to get to the 37th floor. This must have been our building management’s brilliant idea — I wonder what their take of the action is? It’s hard to avert your eyes (although they did conveniently place them at an average man’s eye level rather than a compromise between an average man’s and an average woman’s — perhaps a telling circumstance itself. The thing itself is run by a company called Captivate.com. “In the elevator and on the Web.” News, Features, Shopping, Services. You can guess which is the most important.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I rarely pay attention to ads. The last one that sticks in my mind was for Nestle’s white chocolate, which featured a surreal Maxfield Parrish-like setting and a Eurythmics-style jingle, “Sweet dreams you can’t resist.” I suspect most people do pay more attention, especially children and teenagers; after all, what kid hasn’t hankered after Nikes or Reeboks or Calvin Kleins, not based on quality, functionality, price, or other worthwhile factors, but based only on the “name.” Not name as in a history of value, like, say, John Deere to a farmer, but “name” as in, “That’s what cool people like Michael Jordan wears.” You don’t have to produce a good product any more — you just have to be savvy about marketing it. There’s no doubt we could sell coal to Newcastle. And this isn’t something I’m proud of.
Meanwhile, you won’t find Captivate.com on my computer; you will find all commercial mail tossed unopened into my trash. I am trying to clean up my act to become a commercial-free zone.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
And, yes, I am once again yearning for simpler times. When you could watch a bowl game without having “FedEx” pounded into your brain.
Welcome to the American way. Propaganda through advertising. Sheer brilliance.
This diary entry brought to you by the letters D and S and the numbers 4 and 0.
End of the trail
Reading A Walk in the Woods (Bill Bryson), I’m saddened when I realise that not only will I never know the North American forest as it once was, but I never had the opportunity, even when I was a child; it was already being spoilt by imported insects and fungus and the American dream of commercial property on every acre. I wonder when we as individuals began to think our 70–80 years of life on Earth is more important than millions of years of growth and beauty. Bryson says there is no more American chestnut, then discusses the other trees that are fading fast. The view from Shenandoah National Park is murky with pollution (something I have seen). More and more people are making demands on this tiny strip of dying wonder. And they bring everything to it that they have at home — RVs full of conveniences, televisions, stereos, computers, whatnot. Is that necessary? Why? What is so frightening about self-reliance? What is so terrifying about peace and introspection?
I remember what it was like to be in the woods alone at night, one with God and a starry universe and a unique feeling of magic.
Vaguely.
It’s fading.
I fear never capturing that feeling again.
Worse, I fear that fewer and fewer people will understand that feeling until there is no one left who does.
That malls and parking lots will be the only magic left.
I hope I am long dead by then.
Or maybe it is too late.
Brrr
Cold day.
Cold wind.
Cold sky.
Cold heart.
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf
2002
Deliverance
I’m reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, and he mentions Clayton, Georgia, and Billy Redden, who appeared in the film adaptation of Deliverance.
I saw Deliverance only a few years ago, when my cousin’s daughter lived in a converted hunting cabin in Pennsylvania. This seemed appropriate a venue from an aesthetic/ambiance viewpoint — somewhat remote (well, in the woods and a bit of an uphill driveway off the road, with a steep hillside looming immediately off the living room picture window, waiting for a hard or a long rain to have an excuse to knock the house down the rest of the hill into the road).
Not being a fan of suspenseful or violent movies, I couldn’t comfortably sit through it without closing my eyes, wandering to the kitchen, the bathroom, etc. This fit in perfectly with the ambiance of the occasion — it was over the Christmas holidays, and my cousin, his wife, his daughter, her husband, his hound dog (a beagle), and miscellaneous other furry friends were ambling among all the rooms in the same manner I was, so I didn’t stick out too much like the proverbial sore thumb, well, except for constantly saying, “I can’t take suspenseful or violent movies, so I can’t watch this . . .” Deliverance was in the VCR because my cousin’s son-in-law had gotten it as a gift.
Like many, I was struck by the boy who appeared to play the banjo in the “Dueling Banjos” scene. “Appeared” because not only could he not play the banjo, but he could not fake playing the banjo; apparently, there’s another kid’s arm in the sleeve faking the playing.
The face that you don’t forget when you see Deliverance belonged to a backward boy of fifteen named Billy Redden, who had the role of a retarded banjo player. The thin-lidded eyes and simple grin are haunting on film, and they were just as disturbing to see on the set.
Summer of Deliverance by Christopher Dickey
A short time later in the movie would appear a woman and child who were equally “disturbing” and underdeveloped. Then there are, of course, the two men who attack the Ned Beatty character.
My gut reaction was to think, “Oh, who would believe this — that this kind of thing existed in 1970s America?” I was a skeptic. I posted my doubts to a mailing list that happened to have a lifelong Georgian on it, and he told me that such people do indeed exist, especially in the northern part of the state, and nothing in the movie was an exaggeration.
I thought back to a young adult book I’d been given years ago named Christy by Catherine Marshall, about a young urban girl, living at perhaps turn of the century or a little after, who is drawn to the Appalachians to serve as a Christian missionary. It’s been years since I read it so I don’t remember details, but Christy is taken aback and unnerved by the poverty, ignorance, and backwardness she sees everywhere. The only person who can really understand her perspective and that of the local people is a Scots doctor who grew up in the area.
There is no such thing as sanitation, so typhoid is rampant. When babies are “tetchy,” the mother shakes them as a “cure” — often resulting in the baby’s death. Trepanning is high-tech surgery. There is an otherworldliness to Christy that is difficult to explain, just as there is an otherworldliness that comes across briefly in Deliverance. The awesome beauty of nature populated by people who are little evolved from ancestors hundreds of years ago — and who clearly suffer the result of generations of inbreeding.
I find this otherworldliness, for all its suffering, brutality, and primitivism, strangely haunting and fascinating. My mind, overwhelmed by urban and suburban sprawl, a mushrooming population, media saturation, the Internet, people and technology and information everywhere until I feel a desperate need to escape at any cost, cannot fathom that there are, or were in the 1970s at least, parts of the country where everything I feel crushed by barely exists.
I would love to see northern Georgia today. Somehow, I suspect I would find satellite and cable/digital TV, an onslaught of advertising, and even a computer or two. I would be disappointed.
You see, Deliverance (and Christy) are trips in time, to a past that we no longer remember or care about, when America was covered in forest and young and brutal and backwards. That time is past, but the snapshot may still be there, and that is surely a wonder.
Dream: Mustard
I was in another country, or at least it seemed to be another country, but I don’t remember any active participation in the dream — it was more like watching a movie. A person I thought might be famous was performing a frontal lobotomy on some hapless patient, a man. It involved sticking a clear tube into his head and looked terribly barbaric.
I could see the patient overnight, and he was suffering from some bizarre complication. For some reason, he started to swell badly. It apparently caused him a great deal of pain. He didn’t say anything, but somehow I knew he had decided to get revenge on the person (not clear even that he was a physician) who had performed the surgery for leaving him overnight without anyone to check on his condition. He seemed to feel a burning need for out-of-proportion, burning revenge.
His wife or a woman (nurse?) appeared in the morning, and by then the swelling was more or less gone, but he was still bent on revenge. I couldn’t tell when, where, or what form it would take. I was afraid it would be violent and bloody. I didn’t want to see it and tried to close my eyes, but I could still see everything. Every time something happened, like the “doctor” opening a car door, I thought, “This is it” and braced. At one point, he was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and his chair was pulled offstage and behind the curtain, and I thought, “This has to be it.” But it wasn’t. Not even sure that it wasn’t Carson who was pulled off.
This went on for what felt like forever, and I kept trying to wake up or redirect my thoughts, but couldn’t.
A second dream . . . This one involved a woman (which could have been me) driving a bus that was way behind schedule backward. This was because she’d been too busy making up for lost time that she was backing up (through quite a lot of terrain) to a restroom down the street, which made the handful of last passengers of the day scream. I’m not sure it was me, though, because it seemed to me I was trying to explain how bad the crowding on the bus because of the problems had been, but nobody quite believed me.
I was in a rural farm area (I think the bus was, too), and there was this odd thing — a silo-type thing that must have been miniature but at the same time wasn’t that one dipped into to get some especially good mustard, or maybe it was mayonnaise. Someone showed me and told me it was courtesy of someone and was very popular in the region. I could never figure out how to do it, and every time I tried to do it, I’d just find hair or something weird. It had the aura of magic, however.
I’m not sure how this figures in, but there was an old man celebrating his anniversary whose wife ripped the buttons off his orange shirt to prove he had hot sex (knowing that many would be skeptical or laugh), only, being very distracted, they never actually got around to it.