After months of planning and loading and carting and unloading it comes down to me, sitting on my new deck, smoking a cigar. Tomorrow is the last load. My shop space, my precious man-cave of the last five years, is almost empty. A few bikes to move tomorrow and it will be done. And not a mark left in the passing, pardon the pun.
It is the same story with my former domicile. I have disappeared without a trace. I guess there is something to be said for passing away so swiftly and with such little notice. There is eternity before one and eternity after one yet we are consumed with the briefest of moments when we strut and fret our hour upon the stage.
Tomorrow maybe I will paddle around Blake Island for the first time. New waters and all of that, after, of course, I unpack that last load.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Day # 281 Simpler Stuff
As a conversational aside, The Kid asked me when I would "be able to watch the news again". I asked him if everyone was starting to position themselves for the 2012 elections and he confirmed that this was the case. I told him that after the year of the experiment was over, I was not at all sure I would resume news consumption. He said he saw my point, clearly illustrated by the possibility of a year plus of Barbara Bachman.
We had just returned from a refreshing four days outside of the United States, communing with our brothers and sisters to the North. We spent the week in West Vancouver, "West Van" to the locals, where diversity is the byword and even stodgy bank branches have pride flags displayed in their windows. It is a neighborhood that is safe and comfortable for gay and lesbian couples to walk hand in hand down the street without a sideways glance from any of the other tourists. While I am sure not everything is as rosy as it appeared, it was four days without a hater in sight. Nice, that. And a good example for The Kid.
In our little suite of rooms, we had an enormous TV with 50 channels of nothing. One channel of nothing was constantly extolling the virtues of the program "Mad Men", which, as almost everyone but me knows, is about the funny shenanigans of ad men on Madison Avenue in the salad days of the new advertising. It is the early 1960's and the times, they are a changin', particularly when it comes to how the Mad Men are going to sell things to their fellow Americans.
Recalling my previous blog post, I listed the first of four eras of modern capitalism :
1) Post World War II -- The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961
A simpler time, the period between the end of The War and the advent of the Mad Men. Some would argue that this period is more accurately bracketed by the end of Korean Conflict on the earlier end but I vote for WW II. After the Big One, American industry quickly converted war production to post-war product production. The Baby Boom was on, Baby, and those that survived the war wanted washing machines, fully electric kitchens and suburban homes to put them in. Unlike England, with its years of post-war rationing, or Japan and Germany with their flattened metropolises, American was ready and able to flood the markets with new products for consumers.
In this simpler time, cigarettes did not kill you, modern life was going to get better and better, and the things you could buy were going to help that process along. All of those modern appliances were going to make life easier, cleaner and more elegant. Manufacturers hired ad men to sell their new products to the new consumers and the way they did that was to tout the benefits of the gizmo they were selling.
This was the era of the Brand "X" comparative ads. There was the happy housewife using the better product. Unlike modern ads which sell lifestyles, sex and health, almost without a product in sight, the advertisements of the 1950's pitched the thing itself. No proper house would use a Brand "X" gas range for cooking when the new Westinghouse electric range was so much better. The gleaming new whats-it was prominently featured with the smiling missus standing near by, eyes shining with wonder at the beauty of the new time-saver.
This was the era of the pitch, the idea that you should buy our stuff because its better stuff than the other stuff. Image was not the primary selling tool. While there is no doubt that the housewives using the good stuff were happier and prettier that the drudges stuck with the Brand "X" crap. the focus of the ad was still the product itself. The idea of selling an image or a lifestyle in and of itself, with product to follow, had not come to the fore yet.
The idea of image in sales was there. W. R. Hearst spoke the truth when he said "Show me a magazine cover with a pretty girl, a baby and a dog and I'll show you a magazine that sells," but fully incorporating that concept into selling a lifestyle would come later. It would be the advent of Madison Avenue in the early 1960's, coupled with a deeper understanding of the psychology of consumers, that would bring about the next era of advertising and capitalism, at least in the theory according to Crash.
Next: The deployment of Madison Avenue
We had just returned from a refreshing four days outside of the United States, communing with our brothers and sisters to the North. We spent the week in West Vancouver, "West Van" to the locals, where diversity is the byword and even stodgy bank branches have pride flags displayed in their windows. It is a neighborhood that is safe and comfortable for gay and lesbian couples to walk hand in hand down the street without a sideways glance from any of the other tourists. While I am sure not everything is as rosy as it appeared, it was four days without a hater in sight. Nice, that. And a good example for The Kid.
In our little suite of rooms, we had an enormous TV with 50 channels of nothing. One channel of nothing was constantly extolling the virtues of the program "Mad Men", which, as almost everyone but me knows, is about the funny shenanigans of ad men on Madison Avenue in the salad days of the new advertising. It is the early 1960's and the times, they are a changin', particularly when it comes to how the Mad Men are going to sell things to their fellow Americans.
Recalling my previous blog post, I listed the first of four eras of modern capitalism :
1) Post World War II -- The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961
A simpler time, the period between the end of The War and the advent of the Mad Men. Some would argue that this period is more accurately bracketed by the end of Korean Conflict on the earlier end but I vote for WW II. After the Big One, American industry quickly converted war production to post-war product production. The Baby Boom was on, Baby, and those that survived the war wanted washing machines, fully electric kitchens and suburban homes to put them in. Unlike England, with its years of post-war rationing, or Japan and Germany with their flattened metropolises, American was ready and able to flood the markets with new products for consumers.
In this simpler time, cigarettes did not kill you, modern life was going to get better and better, and the things you could buy were going to help that process along. All of those modern appliances were going to make life easier, cleaner and more elegant. Manufacturers hired ad men to sell their new products to the new consumers and the way they did that was to tout the benefits of the gizmo they were selling.
This was the era of the Brand "X" comparative ads. There was the happy housewife using the better product. Unlike modern ads which sell lifestyles, sex and health, almost without a product in sight, the advertisements of the 1950's pitched the thing itself. No proper house would use a Brand "X" gas range for cooking when the new Westinghouse electric range was so much better. The gleaming new whats-it was prominently featured with the smiling missus standing near by, eyes shining with wonder at the beauty of the new time-saver.
This was the era of the pitch, the idea that you should buy our stuff because its better stuff than the other stuff. Image was not the primary selling tool. While there is no doubt that the housewives using the good stuff were happier and prettier that the drudges stuck with the Brand "X" crap. the focus of the ad was still the product itself. The idea of selling an image or a lifestyle in and of itself, with product to follow, had not come to the fore yet.
The idea of image in sales was there. W. R. Hearst spoke the truth when he said "Show me a magazine cover with a pretty girl, a baby and a dog and I'll show you a magazine that sells," but fully incorporating that concept into selling a lifestyle would come later. It would be the advent of Madison Avenue in the early 1960's, coupled with a deeper understanding of the psychology of consumers, that would bring about the next era of advertising and capitalism, at least in the theory according to Crash.
Next: The deployment of Madison Avenue
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Day # 272 Balance and Checks
In the Film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, Tyler Durden addresses the assembled members of the fight club, thusly:
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
I am starting to look at my next topic in the manner of the beginning of Fight Club. The movie is one long flash-back, leaping backwards from the penultimate scene in the high rise windows. In the continuing saga of movie education for my giant Kid, we watched Fight Club last night. Once again, I watched the twin themes of the disease of consumerism, the 'Ikea Nesting" virus, and the masculine poverty of generations of men raised by women, intertwine and stagger to a cathartic end.
So, we begin at the present for the briefest of moments. Are corporations, lost in their own greed and insular culture, eating themselves from the inside? Cracks open in the gleaming chrome facades of the corporate culture as giant but inoffensive modernist sculptures are trucked away from recently locked doors at the headquarters of failed behemoths of business. Washington Mutual Bank, Enron, Lehman Brothers and General Motors are just a few of the houses of cards that have tumbled recently. Is the structure of Capitalism rotting from within?
As I turn this over in my head I keep coming up with distinct corporate "eras" for lack of a better term. While the periods of time I am going to list could be broken down many ways or subdivided ever smaller, compartmentalizing some of the last fifty years is helping me to develop a different perspective on capitalism as I experience it today.
Mark's most certainly flawed list of the epochs of modern Capitalism goes like this:
1) Post World War II -- The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961
2) Corporations deploy Madison Avenue -- While advertising was certainly a force prior to the the early1960's, this, to me is the beginning of the paradigm shift from selling a product to selling a life-style that requires a product to be complete
3) Omnipotence -- During the 1960's and 1970's corporations become more and more monolithic and omnipotent, the guiding hand behind the scenes. Howard Beale rants and rails against the modern corporation in the 1976 film "Network" and is killed for his trouble. The nightmare vision of of a world controlled by a cabal of corporations rather than individual governments comes to the fore.
4) Interior Decay -- Somewhere along the way, US Corporations stop building products and the US economy shifts to a service economy. Manufacturing jobs begin to disappear and Wall Street becomes a place where money is moved for the sake of moving money in ever increasing spirals of greed. This is our time.
Looking back at each of these periods is going to be the current work. While the US credit rating falters and talking head pundits scream at each other, I think that my time will be better spent trying to understand the context. Could the work of the self-grasping and greedy corporate and Wall Street magnates bring down that which all of the demonstrations and boycotts of the last forty years could not? Stay tuned.
"Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
I am starting to look at my next topic in the manner of the beginning of Fight Club. The movie is one long flash-back, leaping backwards from the penultimate scene in the high rise windows. In the continuing saga of movie education for my giant Kid, we watched Fight Club last night. Once again, I watched the twin themes of the disease of consumerism, the 'Ikea Nesting" virus, and the masculine poverty of generations of men raised by women, intertwine and stagger to a cathartic end.
So, we begin at the present for the briefest of moments. Are corporations, lost in their own greed and insular culture, eating themselves from the inside? Cracks open in the gleaming chrome facades of the corporate culture as giant but inoffensive modernist sculptures are trucked away from recently locked doors at the headquarters of failed behemoths of business. Washington Mutual Bank, Enron, Lehman Brothers and General Motors are just a few of the houses of cards that have tumbled recently. Is the structure of Capitalism rotting from within?
As I turn this over in my head I keep coming up with distinct corporate "eras" for lack of a better term. While the periods of time I am going to list could be broken down many ways or subdivided ever smaller, compartmentalizing some of the last fifty years is helping me to develop a different perspective on capitalism as I experience it today.
Mark's most certainly flawed list of the epochs of modern Capitalism goes like this:
1) Post World War II -- The rise of modern Corporations until Eisenhower's farewell speech of 1961
2) Corporations deploy Madison Avenue -- While advertising was certainly a force prior to the the early1960's, this, to me is the beginning of the paradigm shift from selling a product to selling a life-style that requires a product to be complete
3) Omnipotence -- During the 1960's and 1970's corporations become more and more monolithic and omnipotent, the guiding hand behind the scenes. Howard Beale rants and rails against the modern corporation in the 1976 film "Network" and is killed for his trouble. The nightmare vision of of a world controlled by a cabal of corporations rather than individual governments comes to the fore.
4) Interior Decay -- Somewhere along the way, US Corporations stop building products and the US economy shifts to a service economy. Manufacturing jobs begin to disappear and Wall Street becomes a place where money is moved for the sake of moving money in ever increasing spirals of greed. This is our time.
Looking back at each of these periods is going to be the current work. While the US credit rating falters and talking head pundits scream at each other, I think that my time will be better spent trying to understand the context. Could the work of the self-grasping and greedy corporate and Wall Street magnates bring down that which all of the demonstrations and boycotts of the last forty years could not? Stay tuned.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Day # 271 Cannibalism
It seems to me that the combination of greed and a lack of leadership will end up doing the job that generations of revolutionaries and gadflies could not do, namely, un-make capitalism.
I have to ponder this a bit, but if I am not mistaken, the modern financial structure as I know it is eating itself from the inside out. It appears to be completely unsustainable and as such should collapse on itself.
The thought has been lurking around in my mind as I move both household and shop to the hinterlands across the water. Yeah, I've been busy and the blog has suffered. There will be much more to write about in the coming days.
I have to ponder this a bit, but if I am not mistaken, the modern financial structure as I know it is eating itself from the inside out. It appears to be completely unsustainable and as such should collapse on itself.
The thought has been lurking around in my mind as I move both household and shop to the hinterlands across the water. Yeah, I've been busy and the blog has suffered. There will be much more to write about in the coming days.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Day # 263 Grow your revolution.....
While we are about the business of knocking over the last upright bricks in the foundation of post-modern capitalism, another method of striking a blow occurs to me. How would you like to have some American Gothic sort of fun, maybe meet the neighbors, and in the process strike another blow? Easey-peasy.
Grow your own.
Well, you can do that too, and it will be striking a blow of a different sort. but what I actually meant was growing your own food. That's right, grow some food. Reclaim a little land, Sisters and Brothers, even if you dwell in the confines of the apartment block or the condo. Bring a bit of the earth back into cultivation. After all, its even an exhortation in the bible somewhere. Get some pots, fill 'em with dirt and grow some maters on your deck or balcony. If you want to get crazy, check the web for window gardens and grow some greens in recycled pop bottles. Dig up a section of that planter strip and grow squash, not grass.
Whatever way you choose to make with the free edibles, you are taking back a little control, even if its one pot at a time. First, each plant you grow throws a little precious oxygen back into the atmosphere for the collective to breathe. Second, with any luck you will get a few mouthfuls of real food out of the deal, something that did not come out of a food factory. And speaking of food factories, growing a bit of your own consumables means that you are consuming just a bit less of the pre-packaged processed pap that masquerades as modern delectable yumminess these days.
So in a soft and earth-mother sort of way, strike a blow against the food industry and grow a green thing or two. Make the rooftops sag a bit with fecundity and give the corporate farm owners a few bad dreams.
You can add a back-hand blow as well. If you can't quite find enough arable to feed the whole family, try to buy as much of your veg from your local farmer's market as you can. These are the folks that are selling the funny looking maters that aren't all the same and don't come in plastic wrap.
Hey, today it was a one-two punch of green-thumb-fu!! Rock the green world Boys and Girls.
Grow your own.
Well, you can do that too, and it will be striking a blow of a different sort. but what I actually meant was growing your own food. That's right, grow some food. Reclaim a little land, Sisters and Brothers, even if you dwell in the confines of the apartment block or the condo. Bring a bit of the earth back into cultivation. After all, its even an exhortation in the bible somewhere. Get some pots, fill 'em with dirt and grow some maters on your deck or balcony. If you want to get crazy, check the web for window gardens and grow some greens in recycled pop bottles. Dig up a section of that planter strip and grow squash, not grass.
Whatever way you choose to make with the free edibles, you are taking back a little control, even if its one pot at a time. First, each plant you grow throws a little precious oxygen back into the atmosphere for the collective to breathe. Second, with any luck you will get a few mouthfuls of real food out of the deal, something that did not come out of a food factory. And speaking of food factories, growing a bit of your own consumables means that you are consuming just a bit less of the pre-packaged processed pap that masquerades as modern delectable yumminess these days.
So in a soft and earth-mother sort of way, strike a blow against the food industry and grow a green thing or two. Make the rooftops sag a bit with fecundity and give the corporate farm owners a few bad dreams.
You can add a back-hand blow as well. If you can't quite find enough arable to feed the whole family, try to buy as much of your veg from your local farmer's market as you can. These are the folks that are selling the funny looking maters that aren't all the same and don't come in plastic wrap.
Hey, today it was a one-two punch of green-thumb-fu!! Rock the green world Boys and Girls.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Day # 262 Knowing
One of the blessings about not soaking up news via the radio or television is that in that silence, there is a merciful reprieve from the frenzy to sell me something.
I believe it is imperative to know, truly, as one know's one's own meaty bits, why broadcasting exists. Every single time a broadcasting device is turned on, its reason for being is to sell you something. Soup, soap, hope or an agenda, be assured that the people behind that broadcast are very clearly and methodically trying to sell you a bill of goods.
Examine the very word "broadcast". One way to interpret this word is to break it down into its component parts: "to cast" and "broadly". It is a broad net, indeed, that the media empires are casting. They are hoping that through sensationalism, drama or the undeniable appeal of "Fat People Crying", you will be so compelled to sit, riveted, to the small screen, that they will be able to insert their message into your brain. It is that message, for whatever product they are shilling, that is the real exchange.
This is not, friends and neighbors, limited to attempts to get you to purchase a boxy car driven by hamsters, a car that will make you so terminally hip that you will wonder how you lived without it. No, it is not just products that are poised in the chute, waiting for the next opening in your consumer queue. There are agendas to be marketed, outlooks and beliefs to be consumed. Even the esteemed purveyors of culture at PBS and NPR, no matter how much I love them, are in the selling game. Faux News and CNN are selling the fear. NPR and PBS are selling the antidote. But make no mistake, they are both selling.
This frenzy of commerce does not end with products or prevailing attitudes. Particularly during the newscasts, where the perceived viewing audience is of a certain age, the emphasis is on selling health and robust sex at later and later stages of life. This medication makes you micturate long and well while that pill will enable you to sit next to a gorgeous partner, each of you in your separate bathtubs. It is my guess separate bathtubs overlooking a beautiful lake are a powerful sexual allusion but I have to admit the significance of the thing plumb evades me.
When the switch is flipped or the dial is turned, the media springs forth to soothe, to entertain, to enlighten and inform. Smoke and mirrors, behind which are the inevitable sellers, probing, searching for an opening. They are fabricating the approach, the con that will bring you to open your wallet or pocketbook without even knowing that you are doing it. Later you will notice that you simply must have this or that because without it your life is a sere desert.
And flaccid as well.
I believe it is imperative to know, truly, as one know's one's own meaty bits, why broadcasting exists. Every single time a broadcasting device is turned on, its reason for being is to sell you something. Soup, soap, hope or an agenda, be assured that the people behind that broadcast are very clearly and methodically trying to sell you a bill of goods.
Examine the very word "broadcast". One way to interpret this word is to break it down into its component parts: "to cast" and "broadly". It is a broad net, indeed, that the media empires are casting. They are hoping that through sensationalism, drama or the undeniable appeal of "Fat People Crying", you will be so compelled to sit, riveted, to the small screen, that they will be able to insert their message into your brain. It is that message, for whatever product they are shilling, that is the real exchange.
This is not, friends and neighbors, limited to attempts to get you to purchase a boxy car driven by hamsters, a car that will make you so terminally hip that you will wonder how you lived without it. No, it is not just products that are poised in the chute, waiting for the next opening in your consumer queue. There are agendas to be marketed, outlooks and beliefs to be consumed. Even the esteemed purveyors of culture at PBS and NPR, no matter how much I love them, are in the selling game. Faux News and CNN are selling the fear. NPR and PBS are selling the antidote. But make no mistake, they are both selling.
This frenzy of commerce does not end with products or prevailing attitudes. Particularly during the newscasts, where the perceived viewing audience is of a certain age, the emphasis is on selling health and robust sex at later and later stages of life. This medication makes you micturate long and well while that pill will enable you to sit next to a gorgeous partner, each of you in your separate bathtubs. It is my guess separate bathtubs overlooking a beautiful lake are a powerful sexual allusion but I have to admit the significance of the thing plumb evades me.
When the switch is flipped or the dial is turned, the media springs forth to soothe, to entertain, to enlighten and inform. Smoke and mirrors, behind which are the inevitable sellers, probing, searching for an opening. They are fabricating the approach, the con that will bring you to open your wallet or pocketbook without even knowing that you are doing it. Later you will notice that you simply must have this or that because without it your life is a sere desert.
And flaccid as well.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)