Worst Food Commercial of all Time

There are many bad commercials out there. All ads for drugs are atrocious. Car commercials are usually annoying. Anything intended to "help around the house" are damn-near always horrifically sexist and borderline false advertising. But in the world of food, there is one commercial that stands out as stunningly bad. A commercial so God-awful, it made me want to MURDER people when I first saw it.

That this... this, thing was a conscious creation of a large group of people makes me wonder if they were all, in fact, evil Satan worshipers. After they took every annoying, precocious kid from advertising history and extracted their DNA, they injected it into the womb of Mephistopheles, who, nine months later, birthed a clot of black bile, sludge, and cynical hatred made manifest from which this child rose, looking like Carrie at the end of the prom scene. It takes the most annoying aspects of every "It's Shake n' Bake, and I helped!" commercial since the product's creation and distills it down into 30 seconds of sheer advertising horror.

They then played this commercial during EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK ON EVERY CHANNEL ON THE PLANET FOR OVER A YEAR.

Behold, the Welch's Makes Your Lips Smack television commercial, circa 1999.

America, Diets, And The Expensive Lunch

Christopher Wanjek, one of my favorite medical writers on the internet, has posted an article about the recent research linking diet soda consumption and an increased risk for strokes. He repeats a sentiment from various food and diet writers who are complaining that "the health police" are telling the world that they can't drink diet sodas. Obviously, this is delivered in a derisive way, implying that the health police, whoever they are, are telling us that we can't eat or drink anything.

First off, if any of the health police had been previously saying that diet soda was alright, they were idiots. I can't think of a single doctor or dietitian who would say that drinking any kind of soda is recommended. As a treat, yes, but nothing more. Just because diet soda doesn't have any calories in it doesn't mean that it doesn't have other stuff in it, as Wanjek points out in his article.

I find this typically symptomatic of the American perspective on, well, life. We are on a constant quest for fun, while trying to avoid paying for it. We are, in essence, on a quest for a free lunch. This philosophy manifests itself no stronger than in diet. We consume diet gimmicks and exercise equipment in amounts unseen anywhere else in the Western world.

For example, there is something distinctly American about the Atkins diet; just the idea that we can be thin by eating lots of meat! Don't pay any mind to all of the other countries that can't even afford meat. Or the fact that most dietary scientists say that eating the meat-rich diet of an American would be impossible for the entire planet.

No, we want to eat candy for dinner. We want to exercise without actually doing any exercise. That exercise one really blows my mind. What do you think exercise is? It's moving your body! You can't move your body without moving!

The absolute pinnacle of that quest were those batshit crazy electric belts that supposedly jolted your muscles into moving. Don't prefer some insane exercise gimmick? Don't worry! There are diet products that will make it seem like you're exercising all the time, even when you're sitting in front of the TV, which is apparently the American dream.

Even I, super genius, fell for one of these gimmicks about ten years ago. I was young and stupid, and ever since high school had ended, I was starting to put on pounds. So I tried a product called, subtly, Ripped Fuel. It's still available now, but at the time it was using ephedra, which has famously since been taken off of the shelves. Probably a good thing, since I took one-sixth the dose, pegged a temp of over 103, had a racing heart, and didn't sleep for two days.

Um... healthy.

The ephedra actually did something, though! But eating something that simply burns fat is inherently unhealthy, so it got banned! Shocker, it worked by the only mechanism that a pill could possibly burn fat, by raising your body temperature. Which can prove lethal, as it did for many sports stars.

But the banning of ephedra didn't stop the diet companies from producing billions of pills of other total nonsense. They are the very definition of snake oil. And all of the commercials say, somewhere, in very small text, that the results seen are rare and can only be achieved with changes to diet and exercise. But the rest of the commercial makes damn sure to make it seem like you'll see those results with the pill alone. You will NEVER BE THIN BY SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR TV AND SWILLING BACK SODA!

I'm not saying that a life of leisure and food is immoral or bad, I'm saying that only a moron could possibly think that they will ever achieve results with these stupid products, sold on TV, at one in the morning. And America is fucking filled to overflowing with morons (See P.T. Barnum, even though he apparently never said it). You can choose either a lean, muscular body, and exercise regularly and eat well; or you can have a soft body and small muscles but enjoy leisure and fatty food. You cannot have both.

Even with the wildest advances in science, you will likely never be able to have both. Genetic science would have to develop a human that stores no fat, and has muscles that grow regardless of exercise levels. That simply cannot be a stable organism. I can only assume that a person like that would grow and look great, until they literally explode at age thirty-five.

Regardless of what advertising tells you, there is no free lunch. You wanna' know how I lost fifty pounds? I'll tell you for free. I started eating more fruit and vegetables and exercised every day. It was easy. So easy, in fact, it's apparently really hard.

Penn & Teller did an excellent episode of Bullshit! about food around the world, and the disconnection between America, where we're all fat, and Africa, where they're all starving to death.

Beware of cat power: Criterion unleashes Obayashi's Hausu on DVD and Blu-ray

When Japanese movie studio Toho asked Obayashi Nobuhiko to give them something like Jaws (1975), Obayashi asked his 10-year-old daughter Chigumi for advice. She thought all Japanese movies were boring, so her dad urged her to offer a remedy. The ball got rolling with Chigumi’s assertion that it would be pretty freaky if her reflection in the mirror attacked her. “I always discuss important matters with the children,” Obayashi claims, and Hausu (77), the product of this collaboration, indeed represents an exceedingly rare marriage of cross-generational sensibilities. It’s a fantasy film as seen from the perspective of a child, yet it’s imbued with the larger mythological-psychotronic-experimentalist scope of an adult with a background in advertising. It’s aggressively playful, enamored with optical tricks and with soundscapes and repeated musical themes that seem culled from Godard and blaxploitation. It’s oblivious to generic orientation—okay, it’s oblivious to many forms of orientation, yet it also has a perfectly coherent narrative through-line with roots in the Western Gothic tradition, Japanese ghost stories, and Hansel and Gretel. You could call it a cautionary tale, but then you’d just have to look out for everything. Especially cats. And watermelons.

Hausu is the Japanese appropriation of the English word House. The former sounds vaguely more menacing to me, maybe because of that extra syllable, maybe because of the pleasing weirdness of hearing a familiar word mispronounced, but Criterion has emblazoned their terrific new DVD and Blu-ray packages with the latter term, perhaps in the hope that potential viewers will intuit that, as David Lynch once said, there’s just something inherently scary about a house. Whatever you want to call it, Obayashi’s fevered debut feature follows seven teenage girls with seven smurfy names as they travel to the countryside for their summer vacation and wind up at the house of a wheelchair-bound spinster. Before they arrive, the sky is always glowing warm and soft like some hazy dream you can’t pull away from, perhaps built on crude memories of Technicolor musicals. Once they’re installed in the titular dwelling, the world turns crepuscular and shadowy, and malice becomes boundless. Futons and pianos eat people. Cats’ eyes shimmer as though sending cryptic signals from the abyss. Heads emerge from wells and bite asses. Everything is deadly, yet these girls just wanna have fun. Dismemberment is scary, but who said death can’t be like ice cream? The realm of Hausu is one of relentless colour and geometrical flourish, the screen always being divided by walls, doors, corners, irises, and literal fissures in the filmic image that remind you of how very dry and adult Peter Greenaway’s formal noodling can be. It’s a realm of trapdoors and illusion, of cornball effects executed with verve, of preposterous panty-clad derring-do, of music and morbid delight, a realm where every childish suspicion about adults is wholly confirmed and then some. Western audiences may struggle to interpret this perverse, seemingly contradictory mash-up of fear and frolicking as something terribly exotic and coded in the Japanese culture, but you could also just think of it as a far more imaginative version of this thing we call Halloween.

Generously included in Criterion’s package and equally worth checking out is Emotion (66) Obayashi’s 40-minute piece about a girl from the seaside who travels far from home, makes a friend, and enters a secret world of sadomasochistic romance. A love triangle emerges, and parents are again not to be trusted. There’s no synch-sound, so the great American-born Japanese film scholar Donald Richie provides the English narration, which often seems slightly different in meaning from the Japanese narration, for which we’re given subtitles. Never one to use a stylistic trope once if he can use it 50 times, Obayashi is crazy for flash-cuts here, and is surely even more deeply under the spell of Godard in this use of on-screen text and his determination to push continuity to its outer limits while maintaining the minimum requirements for a forward-moving story. And there’s dancing! The images are often beautiful, and yes, fraught with dizzy emotion. At one point a title card appears that reads: NOW THE STORY DESCENDS INTO A RUINOUS ABYSS WITH VIOLENT MUSIC, which doesn’t exactly signal a radical shift in tone. There’s also a dream sequence that’s only marginally more bizarre than the rest of the movie. Like Hausu, it’s all kind of exhausting, but this sort of blind and wild adventure is bound to wear anyone out, so think of it as a work-out, and watch it before bed. Your brain will rest better afterwards.

Fussy.

Who's brilliant idea was this? Huh?! Who's? Show yourself!

I don't care if you think that you might be able to make a few bucks selling this to some idiotic market for a few years before the novelty wears off and you stop. A line has to be drawn somewhere. At SOME POINT, the damage done to the soul of mankind by your product must be taken into account. Like those individual slices of peanut butter and jelly.

No fuss? What?! When the fuck did frosting become a fussy endeavor?! I don't understand what terrible inconvenience that Pillsbury is alleviating afflicts households across America to such a great degree as to require a Goddamn aerosol frosting can.

Mark my words, the ONLY people out there who will benefit greatly from this no-fuss form of frosting dispensing are stoners who now finally have something to go with their aerosol cheese and whipped cream. Fuckin' hell.

Giant Steps

The titles or authors I can’t recall, the content only barely, but the photos in my elementary school’s surprisingly bountiful selection of Bigfoot books spring back into memory as though only days, rather than decades, have passed. The thing lived on the peripheries of the visible, so naturally it was the images that really mattered. The elusiveness of the creature could not have seemed more carefully designed. The iconic, infinitely reproduced stills from the 1967 Roger Patterson film, sensuously grainy, as though the creature’s fur were mottled with blur, and that pose, looking back over its shoulder like a wounded lover bidding a dramatic farewell, fascinated me like it did millions of other kids, and, I guess, almost as many adults. Bigfoot was already so perfect, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to alter its allure by trying to prove its existence, or by, most appallingly, trying to hunt it down and kill it. Bigfoot—or Sasquatch, to use the more noble-sounding and proudly Canadian term—would only ever be Bigfoot so long as it remained in the shadows, off the grid, never quite seen by prying eyes.

Author Joshua Blu Buhs

Much to the chagrin of those determined to usher the creature into the annals of legitimate science, Bigfoot lends himself quite nicely to being placed within the universal myth of the wild man, a potent symbol of our primal conscience. If he does exist, would Bigfoot be the product of nature, or would be some manifestation of the collective unconscious, a shared desire to believe that something almost human could persevere uncorrupted by the domesticating and soul-deadening effects of civilization, a Frankenstein’s monster built not of disparate body parts but of fragments from our vast cultural swamp? Such questions, however ridiculous the subject matter might seem to some, can yield complex and revealing answers, and I can’t imagine anyone providing better ones that Joshua Blu Buhs does in his engrossing read Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend (The University of Chicago Press, $34.95). The book is a biography of a figure whose existence is extremely dubious at best—and Buhs, while remaining respectful of true believers, makes clear from the outset that he’s not among them—and is thus in essence a biography of the conditions under which this figure was cultivated and came to thrive. Buhs tells a great story by weaving together a multitude of interrelated stories taking place over two continents and the better part of a century. There are countless terrific anecdotes: the man who shot Bigfoot and listened to him tell his life story as he lay dying; a guy being abducted by a Bigfoot and held captive in a cave with an entire Bigfoot family, the implication being that he was destined to become the boyfriend of Bigfoot’s daughter; Jimmy Stewart agreeing to smuggle a Yeti paw from Nepal to England. Bigfoot spawned a lot of things, among them great stories, heated arguments, and a hugely profitable industry. But along the way he also spawned a community of misfits, some passionate and articulate, some cynical, some cracked. The story of their formation is one of the book’s highlights.

“What accounts for Bigfoot’s popularity?” Buhs asks. Perhaps it is that the possibility of its existence “was evidence that the world was not yet fully explored, that there was still room for man to test his mettle, to touch the really real behind the false front of consumer goods and scientific arrogance.” This angle, of modern man—and we are talking mostly about males here—alienated by an intellectualized, feminized, materialistic or reductive culture lies at the heart of Buhs’ thesis. The men who made Bigfoot what he is were mostly white, working-class and rural, loggers, hunters, small town reporters, disgruntled scientists and more than a few outright con men, Patterson, as most reports attest, being one of them. Following the emergence of sensational Yeti reports in the Himalayas, sightings of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest and of Sasquatch in British Columbia, as well as reports of traces of the creature, such as hair, feces and, most famously, footprints, began to accumulate in the 1950s, leading to an explosion of Bigfoot related material in the 60s, the overwhelming majority of it turning up in magazines devoted to a blend of traditional masculine interests and the paranormal. As Buhs traces the development of Bigfoot iconography a compelling case is built around the creature fulfilling a deep need, becoming a figure of authenticity in a world where so much of what constitutes daily life is composed of the overtly phony, and mass produced.

Yet from almost the very beginning Bigfoot seemed ready to be co-opted. The creature represented a tireless resistance against consumerism within the very culture in which consumerism was born, yet this same creature was all too adaptable not only to the dictates of literature and movies, but to New Age ideologues and people trying to sell more Canadian Club and Kokanee—like a good many backwoodsmen, Bigfoot, it seems, is a heavy drinker. He would with time become safe, cuddly, a best friend to the Hendersons. He would be the poster monster for environmentalists, and a sort of prototype for the teachings of Iron John and Women Who Run With the Wolves. The creature has never been captured, but he has been stuffed with fire-repellant materials and can be frequently found enjoying a wild ride at Disneyland. By taking a closer look at the cultural history, Buhs suggests that with the demise of the primitive Bigfoot and the ascendance of the new, hip, fully tamed one, we can trace some sort of gradual surrender to the unstoppable juggernaut of modern artificiality. The stalwarts, meanwhile, have not given up their vigil. The creature may still be out there, immune to polluted streams and deforestation, smacking his feet into some soft earth as a way to say “I was here,” and laughing at us as he returns to his cave to watch free cable.

PureVia is PureCrap

I've seen this ad poking around for the artificial sweetener du jour, PureVia. Also known as Reb A, this chemical is in a sense natural. It is extracted from a plant with water, and the resulting slurry is about 50% Reb A. The sweetener is extracted through crystallization and "other" techniques.

Still, I love the marketing direction. "It's NATURAL." Same tack that Splenda took. "It tastes like sugar because it's made from sugar." Fuck you, it tastes like sugar. All of the marketing dollars in the world, and whether it's made from sugar or extracted from a plant, it all tastes like ass. Aspartame, Saccharin, Splenda, and now PureVia all taste the same. They're chemically different, and made differently, but they all taste the same. It's absurd to say they taste like sugar, because if that was the case we'd have a free lunch. Coca-Cola would stop using sugar, cakes would have one-half the calories, the sun would always shine and eternal happiness would descend upon the globe.

But we don't have that. We have a bunch of molecules that have the same, nasty, aspartamey aftertaste. I tried the new Tropicana Trop 50 low-calorie OJ. It said naturally sweetened. Silly me. I assumed that meant, I dunno, fruit juice... from fruit. Poured a glass, and there it was, nastiness. Pure, unadulterated nastiness. The most disgusting orange juice I've ever had the displeasure of drinking. At the time, I was unaware of Reb A, and stupidly thinking that there was no artificial sweetener in it, its presence on the ingredient list was written off with my original hypothesis of the drinks genesis.

Namely, I figured that they reduced the calories by removing some of the sugar, and using some chemical to reduce the bitter and sour flavors in the remaining solution. Thus resulting in a low-calorie drink that simply tasted like watered-down OJ. No such luck. I'm not kidding when I say that simply watering down your own OJ to create a low-calorie drink would taste significantly better. It's annoying that they can say naturally sweetened with Reb A, since it really is a plant extract, because now they basically use that as a lie, attempting to pass off stuff that tastes like ass as stuff that does not taste like ass.

There's no free lunch, people. If you don't want the calories of soda, drink water. And if you have diabetes... I feel so, so bad for you.

Oh, and if you want to hear how fucking natural Splenda is, read the way it's "made from sugar."

It is manufactured by the selective chlorination of sucrose (table sugar), which converts three of the hydroxyl groups to chlorides. The selective chlorination is achieved by selective protection of the primary alcohol groups followed by acetylation and then deprotection of the primary alcohol groups. The partially acetylated sugar is then chlorinated with a chlorinating agent such as phosphorus oxychloride, followed by deprotection of the ester to give sucralose.

It's interesting that Splenda, even though it's made from sugar, doesn't allow manufacturers to claim "natural sweetener" like Reb A. Oh yeah. Splenda really is JUST LIKE SUGAR. Just like I'm the queen of England.

UPDATE: I have found what might be the most authoritative overview of Reb-A derived sweeteners Truvia and PureVia.

Truvia and PureVia Part 1– A Window to the Past or the Future?
Truvia and PureVia Part 2- The Science Behind the Sweeteners
Truvia and PureVia Part -: The Controversy of Stevia

What struck me about the whole mess is the intense focus of the marketing on how natural this garbage is. Look at the logos, BOTH of them implement a leaf image in the same damned way. Both are "light" and "earthy." Or look at the company that's "making" PureVia, The Whole Earth Sweetener Company. The company was built from the ground up to be Earthy and organic. It's a freaking shell company built solely to market PureVia. From their website's About Us section, "Our job is to grow and produce 100% naturally sweetened products." And by that, they mean shill 100% Reb-A crap.

Oooooooooh, this chaps my ass so much. The marketers have been waiting for years, foaming at the mouth, to be able to market this swill as natural. Scientific studies about the sweetener are of poor quality and most were funded by the sweetener companies in hope of pushing it through to the public. Even worse, some of the reports were published in Elsevier journals! I seriously doubt there's anything dangerous about the shit, but it's still shit. And both PureVia and Truvia, which are loaded with chemicals other than Reb-A, are barely natural. How dare they call this natural, and wrap it up in graphics of leaves, Earth, and happy little organic yuppies.

As the Nutrition Wonderland story explains, the clusterfuck with the FDA and the "research" being funded by all of the companies making the product, we have Truvia and PureVia because of a huge financial push by the companies we should least trust. I'm no conspiracy theorist and I seriously doubt this stuff is incredibly dangerous, but the fact of the matter is that this is NOT natural and still tastes terrible. Saying that a product is "NATURALLY SWEETENED!" with Reb-A borders on being a lie. It is technically true, and I suppose if you are worried about possible negative effects from other sweeteners, and you are incredibly gullible, then the marketing might work on you. It does not work on me. All it does is piss me off. I don't need their natural sweetener, because I've already found a better one. It's called sugar, and I think it's swell.

The constant gardener: Being There on DVD

Going back to its opening scenes, especially as they read in the novel, Being There submits itself as perhaps our most acute modern take on Plato’s allegory of the cave. Before the death of his employer, Chance (Peter Sellers) spent his whole life confined within the high walls of an affluent mansion, meeting few others, tending the old man’s garden, and experiencing the external world entirely through the shadow play of television. The catch to this spin on the allegory is that liberation from his cave doesn’t necessarily enlighten Chance but rather leads to inspired farce, one with the distinctive blend of affection and dismay for American life that marks the perspective of the observant outsider, which is exactly what the late Polish-born writer Jerzy Kosinski was.

Kosinski’s eponymous novella was published in 1970, a sharp if unusually slight work from a period marked by dark, at times positively gruesome novels, including The Painted Bird, Kosinski’s controversial 1965 semi-autobiographical chronicle of an abandoned child’s harrowing survival during World War II. As directed by Hal Ashby, the 1979 film, adapted with surprising fidelity by Kosinski himself, is leisurely, almost whimsical, and, thanks largely to Sellers’ sublimely restrained central performance—his penultimate—it’s also very funny. Chance, who due to a misunderstanding adopts the name Chauncey Gardiner, resembles a permanently sedated child. His mind is placid. He can only convey ideas through gardening metaphors, can only understand human behaviour when it echoes televised simulations. Yet, thanks to outrageous fortune, Chance befriends a wealthy, dying financier (Melvyn Douglas), influences the American President (Jack Warden), arouses the friendship of the Soviet ambassador (Richard Basehart), inflames the passions of a fetching society woman (Shirley MacLaine), and becomes a sensation, a celebrity without a past.

Being There, especially when seen in the wake of the Bush administration, speaks to the adoration of naïveté that can imperil American political discourse. Yet despite the dangers he represents, Chance himself is never rendered as anything more than benignly vacuous, an inoffensive, (literally) impotent blank, a man whose homespun wisdom and pop cultural breeding disguises what finally feels like an alien entity, no more of this world than Benjamin Button or Truman Burbank. He could have easily a creation of Philip K. Dick's. Chance’s TV-derived approximation of humanness is a satirical reflection on reflection itself, the reflection of the world through a sentimental, infantilized, implicitly racist and commercially dictated mirror. So Being There also functions as a documentary on what everybody was watching 30 years ago—remember Cheech and Chong’s star-laden ‘Basketball Jones’?

Despite a bit of unevenness—the scenes of the President in bed with the first lady feel, oddly enough, like a bad sitcom—I think Being There holds up well, and that it will continue to look different for each successive generation. And, along with his appearance in Reds, it remains one of the very few traces of Kosinski’s strange, unusual presence in the movies. 

Look At Ray's Big Meat

Ray gets all the attention. And poor Angus just can't find a girlfriend.

In all honesty, the number of dirty jokes I could make from this are almost limitless.
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Million Dollar Ad Budget Put to Good Use

A new Starbucks opened in my home town of North Kingstown. I'm actually kind of happy it did, because sometimes, I just feel like a Starbucks latte and coffe cake. Regardless, it's got quite a battle ahead of it. North Kingstown has one of the best cafes in the state, Updike's Newtowne, which pretty well thrashes the 'Bucks in quality of coffee used.

Regardless, Starbucks let their presence be known with one hell of a roar. Kind of like listening to a lion that's wearing a clown outfit. Yep, these signs just bleed professionalism.

Weightless words: devices, choices, and the future of reading

Introducing Kindle™

The following, abridged text was authored by The Amazon Kindle Team: “Three years ago, we set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle…

“Thanks to electronic paper, a revolutionary new display technology, reading Kindle’s screen is as sharp and natural as reading ink on paper—and nothing like the strain and glare of a computer screen …you can be anywhere, think of a book, and get it in one minute… Newspaper subscriptions are delivered wirelessly each morning. Most magazines arrive before they hit newsstands. Haven’t read the book for tomorrow night’s book club? …Kindle delivers your spontaneous reading choices on demand.

“Kindle’s paperback size and expandable memory let you travel light with your library. With the freedom to download what you want, when you want, we hope you’ll never again find yourself stuck without a great read.”

The Illusion of Choice

I think it’s fair to say that I’m not a technophobe. Technological advancements fill me with as much wonder and excitement as they do trepidation. As a freelance writer, these days, without the internet I’d need a new profession, which is problematic since I seem to possess no other skills. And, need I add, you're reading this on a blog.

To be sure, I am by some standards a dinosaur. I covet vinyl –its weight, texture, bottom-rich sound, visual beauty, the decisive pleasure of dropping the needle– and when at home listen to it almost to exclusion of other formats. I go to the movies to sit in the dark with strangers as often as possible. I own the rather morbidly named Magic Bullet (are we meant to ponder the mysteries of the JFK assassination while we whip up our smoothies?), but I grind my pepper with mortar and pestle for no other reason than I have a really cool mortar and pestle and these smooth, well-crafted objects feel good when gripped in my hands. I’ve never downloaded a song or a movie from the internet, above all because it seems the most boring way possible to discover something new, removing all the pleasure of finding.

Yet I was the first person I knew to buy an iPod. I run in the mornings and thrive on music to keep me going. I have an obsessive need to travel light, so I was totally jazzed about not having to fit a bulky wallet of 48 CDs into my backpack anymore. I took my iPod everywhere, all the time, and always on shuffle. I became a walking advertisement for the device, enthusiastically showing it to everyone I met.

Then, without ever thinking about it, something changed. I grew tired of the sterile exercise of shifting music from CDs to my computer. When preparing for a walk, I found myself actually wanting to consider what to listen to, to walk up to my collection, take a disc from the shelf, examine the cover, remind myself of the track listing, what the packaging had to tell me. On my iPod were hundreds of songs, available through a mere finger tap, a seemingly mind-boggling selection –but I wanted to make a choice. Lately, unless I’m going for a run, if I want to move through the city with music I use my discman. A teenager in a restaurant recently asked me what it was.

The principle behind the marketing of Kindle is choice, but the choice it offers is not unlike that of a big box bookstore: contained within are a lot of books, but nothing in particular. How do you choose something from the virtual “everything” on offer? For most of us, managing the babel of infinite choice is a journey dictated by advertising, by whoever has the most money to spend. Does it make me a Luddite that I want to leave my house, enter a public space inhabited by other people, browse, maybe read a random page, linger in the aisles, maybe talk to someone who might share or understand my interests, might direct me toward some unexpected title or even engage me in conversation about a book?

The Unbearable Lightness of the Virtualization of Everything

In Denys Arcand’s Days of Darkness, a problematic film, but one whose essential despair I find touching, the protagonist, a middle-aged family man and government employee, lives in a world where seemingly every pleasure has been compromised by a draconian conspiracy between labyrinthine bureaucracy and regulation, mindless consumerism, superficial status obsession, and technological distance. The protagonist’s only refuge lays in banal fantasy, yet in this sense he’s no different from his daughters, who when their not locked into some video game have their iPods constantly stuffed in their ears. Everyone around him is continually plugged into some electronic device that allows them to hover in a sort of fantasy realm, cut off from their immediate reality. It’s a comedy, incidentally.

Like other Arcand films, the philosophy guiding Days of Darkness reminded me of Milan Kundera, a writer with a peculiar gift for chronicling the uglification of the world. But the film’s final image made me think of John Berger’s writing, with its emphasis on attending to the sensual world. We see the protagonist sit down at a table, before him a large bowl of apples. Nearby a woman is canning preserves. The protagonist picks up an apple and begins to peel it, and the act yields a sort of quiet, modest revelation. We can smell the inner flesh of the fruit as its peel falls away, feel the spray of juice as the knife traverses its surface.

For the lover of reading (as opposed to a book-lover), Kindle promises an unprecedented freedom: wherever you are, a virtually fathomless selection awaits. Contrasting the dusty, bulky weight of libraries you’re offered perfect lightness, an entire literature cradled invisibly in the ether. It sounds like something out of science fiction –like a dream deal. As I write this I’m still amazed by the prospect and all it implies.

But what about that shed weight? What about the weight of a page, of a real book, with its margin notes and worn corners? What about the weight of an apple? The weight of a real baseball bat? The weight of a real body next to yours? I’m under no illusions that technological progress can be reversed, nor would I wish it so. Our relationship with technology is absolute, at least as old as the wheel, its path is carved deep into our destiny. But I also think, perhaps now more than ever, its worth considering every how and when to use that technology, to question whether we want to simply adopt every new development without considering what’s lost.

Uck!

I've been coming across ads for some liquor I've never heard of. It's called Canadian Club and they've been running the ad in a number of magazines. The basic idea, I guess, is that old men who were lascivious bastards when they were young, back in the 1960's, drank a lot of whiskey. What a great advertising message! What a great message! Skeezy men drink our whiskey! You should, too!

The other, equally disgusting direction, is that they directly reference "your" father. Your... father?! What the hell were they thinking when they decided to bring up images of good ol' dad banging everything with two legs while drunk?! This doesn't make me want to drink, it makes me want to obsessively shower.

UPDATE 4/2/2010: I found this great spoof ad that really turns the concept on its head.